EH Gombrich's The Story of Art is the most popular art book of all time, having sold more than 7 million copies since it was first published in 1950. Reading it today, its success is not hard to fathom. Gombrich, an Austrian-born scholar who spent most of his working life in London after fleeing the Nazis, has a wonderfully plain, jargon-free style and the confidence to enter the minds of his subjects. His canter through art history is a sustained exercise in creative empathy as he asks us to imagine the aesthetic and technical problems facing the artists of different periods, before explaining how they went about solving them.
The book's clarity and purpose stem in part from an artful exclusion: Gombrich confines his discussion to a relatively small number of great works, all reproduced in the plate section, and avoids mentioning any others. This means that much is left out ("I have found no room for Hindu or Etruscan art") but it gives his narrative an appealing unity. For example, he suggests that the problems Cézanne attempted to solve in the late 19th century weren't so very different from those that Raphael and his contemporaries grappled with in the early 16th; in any case, both sets of difficulties went back to the ancient Egyptians. Art history, in Gombrich's hands, is thus ingeniously telescoped, although he does seem less sure-footed when it comes to the more outré experiments of the 20th century.
Phaidon's new soft cover edition is small enough to slip into a handbag or pocket, to be discreetly consulted while doing what Gombrich encourages - spending time among the works of art themselves.
