Part One: The Limits of Likeness
Part Two: Function and Form
Part Three: Beholder’s Share
Part Four: Invention and Discovery

Art and Illusion is a 4-volume set of artist’s books which are visual transcriptions built of images from the four charters of the book Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation by E. H. Gombrich. In 1957, the year of Jackson Pollock’s death E. H. Gombrich delivered his series of Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art and published in 1960 as Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. In Art and Illusion, Gombrich wanted to show that the history of representational art since the Renaissance was not a history of disciplined acts of copying-from-nature, but one of heroic acts of invention, comparable to, and inseparable from, the parallel growth of science around them in the same historical frame. For Gombrich the rise of abstract painting, which was in its heyday as he wrote, was a return of the irrational, a romantic against that rational humanistic tradition of representation—impressive in its achievements at the time, but essentially “primitivizing” and limiting in its expressive range and vision of the world. The abstract artist could say one thing, again and again.