Webern and Berg were friends of his sister Dea, a violinist who became a member of the Busch Quartet.

His mother also played music with Arnold Schoenberg, although she complained that he wasn't very good at keeping time. Music became the greatest source of pleasure in Mr. His father was a respected lawyer and former classmate of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the librettist of ''Der Rosenkavalier.'' His mother, born Leonie Hock, was a pianist who knew Freud and Mahler she was a pupil of Anton Bruckner and at least once she turned pages for Brahms. ''Art and Illusion,'' ''The Sense of Order'' and ''Meditations on a Hobby Horse'' were among dozens of books he wrote, and, like ''The Story of Art,'' they helped reshape the study of visual culture during the second half of the last century.Įrnst Hans Josef Gombrich, who as an author went by the name E. ''I was never much concerned with it,'' he added, ''not entirely through a lack of interest, but because my work took me into very different directions.'' But mainstream art history - connoisseurship and attribution - he once said, was ''very much on the fringe of my formation.'' He taught students about the Medici, neo-Platonism and astrology. He was an authority on the Renaissance, a theorist of perception, a writer on the psychology of visual images, a wide-ranging cultural historian, a gadfly of modern art (which he stubbornly declined to understand), a knowledgeable lover of classical music and a teacher of generations of British scholars at Oxford, at the University of London and at the Warburg Institute in London, where he was director until his retirement in 1976. Gombrich wrote about nearly everything that interested him, which was nearly everything, from caricatures to psychology, from Raphael and Poussin to Schubert and Saul Steinberg - even about the behavior of white ants. ''The Story of Art'' sold millions of copies and was translated into 23 languages, including Turkish, Finnish, Chinese and Korean. Ernst Gombrich, an author of panoramic erudition and probably the world's best-known art historian thanks to his best-selling ''Story of Art,'' died on Saturday in London, where he had lived since moving from his native Vienna in 1936.

The story of art by eh gombrich