It is unrivaled as an introduction to the subject of art, from the earliest cave paintings to the experimental art of today.

First published in 1950, it is the world's best-selling book on art, and it has been translated into 24 languages.

Gombrich, who served much of his career at the Warburg Institute in London, has written more than 20 books and won numerous awards, including the Goethe Prize for Achievement in Art and Culture.

And he is widely regarded as one of the greatest art historians of the second half of this century, and we are therefore very pleased to have him here.

Welcome.

Thank you very much.

This is an extraordinary book, as you well know, and as people have praised.

How did it come into being?

More or less by accident.

There are so many things in life.

It came into being because I had once had the commission to write the history of the world for children, when I was still in Vienna as a young man.

I wrote this, which happened to be a great success, and I was asked now to write the history of art for children.

My reply was that the history of art isn't for children.

But when they went on pressing me,

I said I could write it, but not for children.

And that is how this book roughly came into being, that I decided to make this attempt, and after a number of interruptions due to the war and other reasons,

I even tried to finish it.

Why do you think it's met with such acceptance?

I think, or I hope, it is because I don't try to give myself airs.

I don't try to make a mystery of things which are not a mystery, but I admit that there are mysteries which one needn't discuss because they are too obviously mysteries.

You also have said before, and correct me if I'm wrong, because the fact that it's said does not necessarily mean you said it, that the story of art makes a difference, that it is the story of art.

That is entirely true. I'm glad that you mentioned this.

The story in the sense that it is not just a chronicle of one thing after another.

There's a chronicle of fashion, for instance.

But the development of image-making is a story insofar as there is a story also behind the development of flying or other achievements of mankind insofar as people strove for certain aims and passed on their achievements to others.

And so there's a coherence in the story which one can tell as a chain of events which hangs together.

That seems to be what everybody seems to like so much about it.

It is, in fact.

What you have brought to bear is the connection and the unfolding story of art.

That's what I try to do, yes.

What about modern art?

Modern art is an interesting point in this respect because my story, in a certain sense, is a story of the conflict between two opposing problems or methods of representing the world which, in a simplified form, you can say you draw what you know or you draw what you actually see.

And I explained that the Egyptians drew, in that sense, what they knew rather than what they saw in front of them and that this development went as far as Impressionism where the principle of what was called the innocent eye, really looking at what you actually see, triumphed.

This happened at the end of the 19th century and the problem of the coming of what was to happen afterwards represents really the story of our century.

So when you ask what about modern art, modern art is confronted with a certain break in that chain and the search for very different solutions.

I try to explain in the book that one of the reasons for this break was that, in a sense, the theory which was underlying Impressionism is a little too simple.

We can never completely separate what we know from what we see and therefore the whole idea broke down and I should have added, and I did add in a later page, that photography had a lot to do with this too.

So the search for alternatives, what an artist, an image maker, can do was on and it still goes on all the time.

You have never been a great collector.

I've never been a great or a minor collector.

Or a minor collector. Why is that?

First of all, I never had a lot of money.

Well, that's a start, but I know good collectors who didn't start with a lot of money.

That is true. I have no possessive instincts.

I'm very happy when I see a great painting in a great gallery or museum and I don't feel, oh, I wish I would own that.

I'm very happy that it's there where it is.

To enjoy it in the museum.

Exactly.

Or the gallery. But you do have prints.

My father was a print collector and I own a number of pleasant prints and even quite valuable prints.

Let me take you back to Vienna.

Yes.

Your mother knew and was friends with

Gustav Mahler and also Sigmund Freud.

Yes.

She knew Sigmund Freud very well.

I wouldn't say that she was friends with Sigmund Freud.

That's right. And who was?

What did she tell you about them and what was their...

Well, she told me many things.

She said that Sigmund Freud was the best teller of Jewish jokes she had ever encountered.

And Mahler?

Mahler was a difficult man, as you know.

A man with a nervous tic and with great difficulties.

But she admired him very much as a person.

Music.

As a musician.

Did you grow up with a greater sense of music than painting?

Absolutely, yes. Certainly.

Music played a central part in my family and in our house.

You left Vienna.

That's right.

As the Nazis came to power in Germany and began to expand and went to London.

That's right.

How did you spend the war?

In a listening post of the British Broadcasting Corporation.

I listened for six years mainly to German propaganda broadcasts and translated them into English.

It was not a very thrilling work, but hard work.

And I learned a good deal of English in the process because if you have language lessons eight hours a day for six years, you have to learn it.

Were you the first person in London to know of Hitler's death?

Yes, so I always tell, and I'm pretty sure it's true.

I mean, I listened.

How did that happen?

What happened was that towards the very end of the war there was one of these announcements on the German wireless that stand by for an important announcement and it was pretty obvious that this had to do with Hitler.

And so I was called in as a more experienced listener and I had the idea that to make it as quickly as possible to pass on the news when it came,

I wrote on pieces of paper,

Hitler abdicates, Hitler dead, Hitler surrenders, and so on and so forth.

So when the voice came and said,

Our Fuhrer has fallen in the struggle against Bolshevism,

I pointed to the right piece of paper and they quickly rang up Downing Street.

To tell Churchill.

To tell Churchill.

Was Churchill asleep? What time of day was it?

I don't think he was asleep.

I think it was not far from lunchtime.

When did they play Wagner?

They didn't play, at that time, Wagner.

They played Bruckner.

They played a slow movement from one of Bruckner's symphonies which Bruckner had written to commemorate the death of Wagner.

And I recognized this fact and so I had an inkling what was coming.

Was there ever any interest on your part in becoming a musician with all the music that was part of your family?

No, certainly not. I lacked the talent.

You lacked the talent?

Yes, I think so.

And you were a professor at Oxford?

I was also a professor at Oxford.

And after the publication of this, what happened?

Well, I was invited to many places to give lectures or to teach and give seminars, and this I did very often in the United States but elsewhere as well.

And when were you knighted?

I think it was in 72, but I'm not quite sure.

You will have to look it up in the reference book.

Your favorite artist.

Who have...

I don't think I have a favorite artist.

You know, I don't give marks to artists.

I admire some artists tremendously, but when I then see the work of another,

I say, well, he's also wonderful.

But I admire, for instance, Velázquez enormously.

I admire Chardin enormously.

Artists, in other words, whose métier, whose painting is so totally marvelous in the way they put on paint on canvas that it is miraculous.

What is it, the quality that appeals to you in terms of putting paint on canvas?

Well, it is a matter of astonishing skill and experience of conjuring up with a few pieces of colored earth, as it were, the sight of, let us say, a drug or whatever it is.

Ever looked at a painting and cried?

No, never.

But you've certainly looked at a painting and smiled and looked at a painting and taken your imagination to...

You know, it's very interesting that you ask this question because Leonardo da Vinci was very interested in the effects of painting.

He said that nobody cries, but people laugh at paintings.

You think people don't cry?

I mean, that among the emotional rains that painting evokes, it is not sadness or...

Oh, yes.

Surely there are stories of Frederick the Great crying when he saw the painting of the death of color and so on.

There are such stories.

But I have never cried in front of a painting.

Do you have a favorite color?

No.

No.

No.

How about a favorite time in the history of art, the story of art, that you felt was the greatest flourishing of talent and inspiration and skill?

Well, it's not very original to say that the fifth century was an incredible time, a kind of landslide of new ideas and new methods which happened in this miraculous century together with the invention of the drama and the birth of modern philosophy and, if you like, modern science.

Do you... When you...

Do artist lives interest you?

Not excessively, no.

No.

The connection between the life lived and the art is not something...

No, naturally, if it is important for the understanding of the work, the life may interest me.

But on the whole, the life interests me as documents rather than as human documents.

I mean, there are exceptions, of course.

Who wouldn't be moved by the life of Van Gogh, for instance?

Yes.

Yes.

Did you say Van Gogh?

Yes.

Yes, that's what I thought.

Because of the pain and the fact...

It's an extraordinary human story, what he went through, and at the same time, the fact that when he died, at whatever mental condition he died, his work had not received any...

His work had hardly received any.

Hardly, yes.

There was somebody who wrote him up and said, this is a great master.

It was beginning, but he died too early.

Did he know it in his head?

No.

I don't know.

But, of course, he was constantly in touch with his brother who was, in fact, an art dealer and completely aware of what happened in the world of art.

Which is your favourite museum in the world today?

The favourite place?

I like best being in a small museum.

So the Frick is, for instance, a wonderful place.

The Mauritshuis is a wonderful place.

The Wallace Collection...

Why do you like small places?

Because I don't like to walk to large distances.

I get indigestion in a great museum.

Tell me about influences on you in terms of your own thinking about art.

What's influenced you and the life that you have lived?

Well, first of all,

I was a student of the University of Vienna and the university was very proud of representing the so-called Vienna School of Art History, which has a very remarkable ancestry.

There were some very great thinkers about art and names like Wallace Riegel or Max Dvorak and others.

My own teacher was a real master of the subject.

Who was that?

He was Julius von Schlosser.

He wrote the standard work on the literature of art, which is still in use.

Another was the archaeologist Emanuel Löwy, who was one of the first to propose this distinction of from knowing to seeing, which I made the armature of my book.

So I was much influenced by Emanuel Löwy's book on the imitation of nature and art which was published in 1900.

I knew him as a very old man, but I admired him very much.

When you look today at the influences on art, are you pleased, alarmed?

I'm sometimes alarmed and sometimes pleased.

When which?

When sensationalism takes over and some of the media and artists are tempted, as it were, to do something not because they feel like it, but because it will be a talking point,

I feel very much alarmed.

On the other hand, I know that there are many who are very sincerely striving, and those I admire.

I don't think that the influence on art at present by certain current theories like the cult of self-expression is a very healthy one.

Why not?

The word self-expression means much too little, really, to give an artist any guidance of what to do.

We all express ourselves all the time.