Professor Richard Woodfield

In 1970 I signed up to work for a PhD with Ernst Gombrich at the Warburg Institute on eighteenth century art theory. My co-supervisor was Richard Wollheim at University College. As the two did not see eye to eye, I gave up and turned to publishing articles instead. In 1986 I rejoined Gombrich to work on the production of his Reflections on the History of Art and again in 1994 to work on The Essential Gombrich. I visited him fairly regularly from 1988 to 2000 for conversations about his work. In 2009 I founded the Journal of Art Historiography.

Prior to my retirement in 2005 I was School Research Professor for the Nottingham Trent School of Art and Design, where I am now Emeritus Professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory. In 2007 I was appointed Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Art History in the University of Glasgow. In 2011 I joined the University of Birmingham at the invitation of Professor Rampley.

I am currently working on a monograph provisionally titled 'Gombrich amongst the Anglophones', which is intended to set his work in its Viennese context. I am particularly interested in the development of sematology, first proposed by Heinrich Gomperz and then developed into a robust form of semiotics by Karl Bühler. In relation to that I am preoccupied with the work of the Vienna School of Art History, particularly with a series of problems formulated by Julius von Schlosser.

I have had a long-standing interest in eighteenth century English aesthetics and art theory and my most recent publication in that area was on the first English translation of Leonardo da Vinci’s Trattato della Pittura. My current interest focuses on the decline of magic and demonolatry (as discussed in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan) and connects to my interest in Gomperz and in Gombrich’s work with Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz on Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist.

I am responsible for the Gombrich Archive at www.gombrich.co.uk.