Art, perception and reality. Gombrich E.Kh., Hokhberg J., Black M.

In this book, dedicated to the nature of visual perception in art, the opinions of three outstanding scientists collided. The art critic Ernst Gombrich, drawing our attention to the problem of similarity, in particular in portraits and caricatures, concludes that we are. Unable to often describe the features of even the closest people, we can easily find similarities with empathy. Psychologist Julian Hokhberg gently contrasts this argument with his theory of canonical forms of the object, suggesting that we catch the similarity thanks to the “cognitive maps” or expectations that arise in the complex process of visual perception, when our eyes slide along the surface of the picture in a certain sequence already given. Finally, the philosopher Max Black, having subjected to conceptual analysis these and other approaches to visual perception, argues that to determine the conditions of artistic representation, there are neither sufficient nor necessary criteria, and concludes that artistic representation is a “cluster concept.”

The essays presented here are Talkhaimer's public lectures, read by the authors at the Johns Hopkins University Philosophy in the 1970s.