CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

When I was a graduate student in philosophy at Columbia University, I wrote my doctoral thesis in part about Ernst Gombrich. He very generously commented at some length on my description of his claims. Then, near the end of his life, I did for Artforum the last full interview of him. And so I now regret that I never asked him what always puzzled me, the significance of his astonishing early essay “Meditations on a Hobby Horse.” In that account, he describes in some detail the way that a child may treat a simple stick figure as if it were a hobby horse. No doubt, what interested Gombrich was the psycho-analytic roots of such symbolic play acting. After all, several of his early essays were written in collaboration with the analyst Ernst Kris. But he doesn’t in his later writings explain why this particular example so enchanted him. Or why he described it in a surprising way. “Picasso would turn from pottery to hobby horses,” he concludes, “one thing would be denied even to the greatest of contemporary artists: he could not make the hobby horse mean to us what it meant to its first creator. That way is barred by the angel with a flaming sword.” Why does he speak of an angel?

When starting in 1979 I began coming to Venice to look at artworks, the painting that first most interested me was Titian’s The Assumption (1516), which is in the Frari. Not a surprising choice, perhaps, because this large, prominent picture is very famous. It’s Titian’s breakthrough, the painting made his reputation early on. And so I read the literature on this work, taking particular note of its site-specific aspects, and learning that for a long time in the nineteenth-century it was removed from its........

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