Art and Illusion; A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation: By Ernst H. Gombrich. (The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1956.) New York: Pantheon Books, Inc., 1960. 466 pp., 300 illus.

Over the years, psychoanalysis has produced a rich harvest of studies that link an artist's work to his specific history. Less often has psychoanalytic thinking been applied to the process of artistic creation as such or to the relation between an artist and his public. Gombrich's book is an important contribution to these questions. His avowed concern, 'why representation has a history', leads the author to the psychological aspects of image making and image reading, and beyond that to the nature of artistic creativity.

It is hard to do justice to a book so tremendously broad in scope and rich in content which also invites both continued research and continued speculation. Hence, this review will limit itself to a rather meager synopsis and, since the reviewer is neither an artist nor a historian, to such speculative thoughts as are germane to dynamic psychology.

Art is to tell a tale. Hence, like any other medium of communication, it needs a language understandable to the speaker and to the listener alike. Any language is based on a tradition which, to be sure, undergoes some change with the passage of time. But never