The Story of Art

The Library Essay

There Are Only Artists

E. H. Gombrich opens The Story of Art by declaring that there is really no such thing as Art, only artists, and the whole book keeps that promise, telling the story from cave painting to the moderns as a chain of individual people solving visible problems, each solution creating the next generation's difficulty. Written in 1950 in a spirit of address to the young reader, it explains without jargon and judges without snobbery.

No introduction to any subject has succeeded like it; through sixteen editions and some thirty languages it has sold in the millions and remains the book through which more people have entered art's history than any other. Gombrich, a Viennese scholar transplanted to London's Warburg Institute, wore the learning so lightly that readers seldom notice how much of it there is.