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With some sense of the relation between bare-bones content and fleshed-out content on the table, this chapter answers four important questions. First, why do we flesh out the contents of pictures in the way that we do? Second, what is the source of explicit non-commitment in fleshed-out content? Third, how and why do we flesh out pictures’ bare-bones contents consistently as we change the position from which we view pictures? And finally, anamorphic pictures challenge the answers offered to the first three questions, so how should the current account handle them? This completes the account of pictorial content and picture perception.

This chapter gives an analysis of the distinctive ontology of pictorial art. It is argued that the ‘twofoldness’ of pictorial art enables us to become conscious not only of imagination per se, but also of the specific characteristics which allow it to function as a necessary condition of experience. This is shown through a general theory of the transcendental significance of imagination, which further develops the theory broached in previous chapters. Arguments are then formulated to show that the images of visual art are based on stylistic interpretation, and that this exemplifies a distinctive relation between picturing on the one hand, and imagination and self-consciousness on the other.

Can a painting or photograph represent movement and the passage of time? A traditional distinction, due to G. E. Lessing, between the arts of time and the arts of space suggests not: a static image (one that does not itself change) can only represent a single instant of time. This idea was attacked by Ernst Gombrich in a very influential article which is the subject of this chapter. Notions of depiction and time perception are brought together in an attempt to understand how and what static images represent: moments or movements.

This chapter begins with an exposition and critique of Ernst Gombrich's illusionistic theory of the experience of realistic pictures. It then modulates to its main theme — a critical examination of Richard Wollheim's view of pictorial perception as a matter of seeing one thing in another — which is considered in both its early and late forms. Each of these forms is shown to be markedly deficient. The chapter then lays down guidelines for a correct theory and scouts a number of candidates. It concludes by articulating worries about Kendall Walton's ‘make-believe seeing’ conception of pictorial perception.

According to the symbol theory, pictures belong to systems which can be described as sets of designs referring to objects, types of objects, and properties. In this chapter, the challenge that pictures are not symbolic because they are not denotative is addressed. Gombrich characterizes the history of art as a progression from substitutive—that is, conceptual—pictures to illusionistic—that is, referential—ones. However, this explanation of the historical origins of depiction suffers from serious deficiencies. What makes the image a substitute is people’s cognitive stance towards it, as potentially manifest in what people do with it, which is frequently governed by social practices. The challenge posed in this chapter is that pictures are fictions and so do not denote anything. However, as this chapter illustrates, this challenge is considered erroneous and strongly contested by the author.

Two themes that lay the groundwork for the aspect-recognition theory are explored in this chapter. One is the distinctive nature of pictorial content. Perceptual and symbol theorists alike are frequently beguiled by a myth that pictorial content is essentially determinate or specific. This chapter refines Gombrich’s insight about pictures’ selectivity, and develops from it a way of describing and individuating the ‘aspects’ that pictures select. The second theme focuses on how pictorial systems differ from each other as well as from other representational systems. An account of pictorial content as aspectually structured is then examined. The author claims that by examining the aspectual differences between pictorial systems, this leads to a first step towards explaining their diversity.

Just as apprentice musicians were taught a repertory of music schemas, so apprentice artists had to learn a repertory of visual schemas. One of the most common of these was the “oval and cross,” used to sketch the human head. The oval gave the outline of the skull while the cross (with religious symbolism) merged a vertical line for the nose with a horizontal line for the eyes. There was often a second horizontal line for the mouth. Apprentice artists had to learn to sketch the oval and cross in relation to any position of the head. Similar schemas were learned for eyes, ears, noses, hair, torsos, hands, feet, clothing, and so forth. Drawing manuals from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries provided examples to be copied.

The sixth chapter argues that Panofsky forged a “third way” between the formalist and contextualist approaches of his art historical mentors, Wölfflin and Riegl. Influenced by Warburg’s early work, Panofsky’s methodology solidified around these scholars’ shared interests in symbols and drew on Hamburg’s combined resources: the library’s unique index of images, the Kunsthalle’s collection of local and modernist art, and the absence of an established and hierarchical department. To connect a particular insight with a more general principle, Panofsky and the Hamburg School promoted iconology—a holistic approach to analyzing images over time. While Ernst Gombrich would later criticize the cultural-historical assumption that art is representative of the Zeitgeist, this chapter argues that understanding Panofsky’s early work as a revision of Riegl’s notion of Kunstwollen and his engagement with Cassirer’s symbolic forms offers a more complete view of iconology’s origins.

The epilogue addresses the complicated legacy of Warburg’s reception and takes the Nachleben of the Warburg scholars as the object of their own analysis. While interest in Panofsky has declined, enthusiasm for Warburg continues to rise. Yet Warburg died in 1929 and did not have to revise his ideas in the wake of exile or World War II. Thus, this chapter argues that it is all the more important to historicize the divergent reception of these scholars and to correct the portraits for which the second generation of the Warburg School, in particular, Gombrich, is largely responsible. The reinvention of the Warburg school in exile reinforces the importance of context in analyzing their ideas.

As discussed in previous chapters, the main postulates outlined in the mission statements of these centers – in their imperative to build an institutional infrastructure for the art of the “open society,” which is to say “contemporary art” – amounted to an ideology of postsocialist artistic institutions and practices in the 1990s. But such statements were the fruit of various managerial-bureaucratic narratives woven in the Open Society Institute offices of New York and Budapest. The postsocialist or Soros contemporary had a clear managerial agenda, but it lacked an aesthetic or artistic program. This chapter examines a small segment of the vast ideological universe of new or neo-liberalism. It engages with the work of a few intellectuals who have left a deep impact not only on post-1989 reforms in Eastern Europe, but also on the world. The chapter looks into some of the ideas about art that were popular among a number of Central European intellectuals that were affiliated in some way or another with Karl Popper. Rather than consider their general social, scientific, and economic postulations – for which they have been celebrated by advocates of the free market, over the course of the past century – the chapter traces their artistic and aesthetic beliefs, seeking to comprehend the place of art in the ideological universe of Cold War liberalism. The chapter poses such questions as: What is the place of art in the “open society” that Soros, following Popper’s dream, decided to build in Eastern Europe?

This chapter illustrates the impossibility of musical cognition without memory. Cognition in music depends on the psychological process of preparing for what is to come by remembering what has already happened. Ernst Hans Gombrich has described this process as “forward matching,” whereby each new musical event is compared and contrasted to past ones. The ability to recognize repetition and variation is the key to cognition in music. It is an ability that requires the matching of new musical events with past ones. In contrast to the visual arts, music, like poetry, depends on memory, since scanning backward and forward in time is not possible. While poetry establishes meaning within the larger culture of language, music, unique among the arts, relies chiefly on self-reference to its own structures to establish meaning.

Throughout the 20^th century, cartoons relentlessly appeared in all sorts of newspapers, evidence of the immense cultural impact of illustrative satire long before the era of television. Many events were recorded in print, such as the Great War, the 1916 Easter Rising, women’s suffrage, the Second World War, and the Cold War. This chapter uses Gombrich’s ‘6 point filter’ for cartoon analysis to present both case studies and longer- term trends. Case studies include pioneering Irish satire in The Lepracaun, and British football cartoons used to present the perspectives of the working - class British soldier from 1914 to 1918. The authors analyse several trends over time, including increased ‘creative acerbity’, for instance during ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, through to a greater personalisation of issues and use of a celebrity approach, often as propaganda during the Cold War and Vietnam. Findings from the analysis of over a thousand images point to an increase in derivative amateur cartoons, which is construed as a democratic tool for expression.

This chapter sets out the ways in which driving may be seen as paradigmatic, as well as formative, of human thought by comparing the way in which the mind travels through time and space on its everyday cognitive journeys with the way in which drivers engage with the spatial and temporal landscapes through which they pass. To this end, it considers the association between driving and phenomenology – how driving can facilitate and promote phenomenological thought – along with other psychological and philosophical models (most notably W.H. Gombrich theory of ‘schema and correction’ and Henri Bergson on ‘déjà vu’) which allow for a rather more complex exchange of perception and memory in the driver’s consciousness. The chapter also outlines the author’s conceptualisation of individual car journeys as specific and non-reproducible events (i.e. the ‘driving-event’) and provides an overview of the recent work in the field of auto/mobilities scholarship to which the project speaks. In addition, the chapter addresses the book’s methodological standpoint and, in particular, what literary and other texts can contribute to auto/mobilities research that is not available by other means.

This chapter discusses how two Viennese scholars—Ernst Kris and E.H. Gombrich—worked in 1936 to complete a book manuscript. The manuscript explored the subject of caricature: the art of comic distortion and willful exaggeration, of irreverence and, according to its most serious practitioners, absolute fidelity to truth. Inspired by recent advances in psychology and by contemporary innovations in art, the two scholars approached caricature not as a low form of creativity or a debased mode of communication but as a distinctive psychological and cultural phenomenon with its own functions and evolution. They interpreted caricature as an ambitious psychological and artistic experiment, and their effort to grasp each aspect led them to employ theories and methods from both mental science and cultural history.

This chapter looks at how Kris' status as a convert to Catholicism temporarily provided him with professional and personal protection. His work abroad with international collectors, museum directors, and art patrons supplied a safety net beyond Austria if it became necessary. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art required an expert to catalog its cameo collection, it brought Kris to New York in 1929 to undertake the job. At the same time, Kris kept close track of deteriorating conditions in Austria and employed his contacts to find work abroad for his younger, Jewish colleagues. A liberal royalist in post-imperial Vienna, Kris remained convinced of the irreversible disintegration of Austrian political life. At his first meeting with Ernst Gombrich, he made sure that the young researcher understood fully the uncertainties attached to an art historical career in Vienna.

This chapter examines how Kris organized the Daumier exhibition from the spring of 1935 to the autumn of 1936—the period coinciding with the inception and rise of the Popular Front movement in France. Through Honoré Daumier, he and Gombrich moved beyond the psychology and theory of caricature to engage directly with its history. In the world of European galleries, the exhibition was unique: in continental Europe, Daumier's art appeared in no other place outside France during the 1930s. By displaying Daumier's work in Vienna at that moment, Kris and Gombrich attached their scholarly researches to the antifascist cause. The space for examining Daumier's artwork would allow the public to view a culture of republicanism and internationalism that was disappearing in Austria but that still survived beyond its borders.

This chapter recounts how, by the time of the Daumier exhibition, Kris no longer expected the Viennese art historical profession or the Austrian Church to offer any reliable protections. In bringing the French artist's work to his own city, he now identified himself intellectually and politically with a broad Popular Front movement. However, the French Légion d'Honneur justified the exhibition and encouraged Kris to continue the caricature project. Gombrich, who had assisted with the exhibition, would not present his work again to an Austrian audience for decades. His career and new family became firmly rooted elsewhere. Much later, when Gombrich described his ties to his original and adopted homes, he discarded national identifications, characterizing himself simply as a Central European working in England.