Ernst Gombrich

Carl and Leonie Gombrich remember their grandfather, the legendary Ernst Gombrich, author of the best selling art book of all time, the Story of Art. His Little History of the World, written for children in 1935, was recently published for the first time in the UK. Gombrich begins the book by acknowledging that history is first of all a story, the

transmission of experience between generations.

Leonie discusses his legacy with Robert Hughes who recently described Gombrich’s writing as unsurpassed and Carl reads some extracts. As Peter Conradi wrote:

 “Gombrich remains a tribal elder. He is, if Leonie consents to share him everybody’s grandfather.”

Monica Bohm-Duchen (MA Courtauld Institute) is a London-based freelance writer, lecturer & exhibition organizer. She has worked for the Tate Gallery, the National Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Courtauld Institute of Art; and contributed to magazines such as Flash Art, RA  Magazine, Art Monthly, Modern Painters, The Jewish Quarterly & Jewish Renaissance. She curated After Auschwitz: Responses to the Holocaust in Contemporary Art (1995) and co-curated Rubies and Rebels: Jewish Female Identity in Contemporary British Art (1996-7) and Life? or Theatre? The Work of Charlotte Salomon (1998). Books she has written include Understanding Modern Art (1991); Chagall (1998) and The Private Life of a Masterpiece (2001). Reading Charlotte Salomon, co-edited by her, has just been published by Cornell University Press, and she has recently been commissioned by Lund Humphries to write a monograph on Josef Herman.

Leonie Gombrich is her grandfather’s literary executor. She wrote the introduction for the recently published Little History.

Carl Gombrich, her brother, is an opera singer.

Andrew Graham- Dixon is a renowned art critic who has made many documentaries for BBC Television. He is currently the Sunday Telegraph's art critic. He won the BP Arts Journalism Award three years running and the Hawthornden Prize for art criticism. His books include In the Picture, Renaissance, the best-selling A History Of British Art and a highly acclaimed monograph on Howard Hodgkin. He also co-presents the Culture Show on BBC2.