The art historian Ernst H. (Hans Josef) Gombrich (1909–2001) published The Story of Art in 1950 with Phaidon Press. Gombrich already excelled as an author for young readers in Vienna. In 1936 he published Weltgeschichte von der Urzeit bis zur Gegenwart (Gombrich 1936), a world history, from the development of the solar system to the end of the First World War. It was not until 2005 that the English edition appeared as A Little History of the World, translated in large part by himself (Gombrich 2005). The Story of Art was also intended as a history of art for a young readership (Gombrich/Eribon 1993, 64), but developed into an international bestseller spanning generations.

The book is considered a comprehensive and accessible introduction to visual culture, and has been translated into many languages and reprinted numerous times – the ninth edition was published in 1959 and the eleventh in 1966. The book is structured chronologically and sketches art history from prehistory to the 20th century in 27 chapters. Especially in the first chapters, Gombrich devotes himself to early history of art in geographical breadth, writing about Islamic art and art from China. Then, from chapter 8 onwards, the focus is more on European artists and art, and in chapter 24 he opens up to art from the USA around 1900. The last chapter ends with “Experimental Art” and includes works by Henri Rousseau, Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso, but also pays tribute to Henry Moore, a contemporary British sculptor. In general, the rich number of illustrations is striking – 370 illustrations on 446 pages. The first sentences of the book became particularly famous: “There really is no such thing as art. There are only artists.” (Gombrich 1950, 5) With this, Gombrich committed himself to a history of art which understood art as a product of skill and creativity.

The Story of Art is not only an enduring and globally successful art history for a broad readership with over six million copies sold (Nyburg 2014, 93). The book is also the result of a collaboration in the emigrant milieu. First, there is the author himself: Ernst H. Gombrich grew up in an art-loving Jewish family in Vienna. Gombrich's mother Leonie Hock was a pianist, a pupil of Anton Bruckner and associated with composers such as Arnold Schönberg and Gustav Mahler. Ernst Gombrich studied art history in Vienna and received his doctorate under Julius von Schlosser with a thesis on the architect Giulio Romano (Gombrich/Eribon 1993, 40–42). With his fellow student Ernst Kris, Gombrich worked on the form and function of caricatures - research that both continued even in English exile (Kris/Gombrich 1940; Rose 2016). Gombrich came to London in 1936, where he worked at the Warburg Library, later the Warburg Institute, a research institution transferred from Hamburg to London in 1933, whose relocation was organised by Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing. During the war, Gombrich participated in monitoring German radio broadcasts for the BBC World Service (Gombrich/Eribon 1993, 58). From 1956 to 1976, Ernst Gombrich was director of the Warburg Institute; a biography published in numerous new editions in 1970 paid tribute to Aby Warburg, the founder of the Warburg Library of Cultural Studies in Hamburg (Gombrich 1970).

The Story of Art was published by Phaidon Verlag, founded in Vienna in 1923 by Béla Horovitz and Ludwig Goldscheider. A deal with the British Stanley Unwin, who “acquired” the publishing house, ensured that the publishers were not expropriated, but were able to re-establish and continue Phaidon in exile in London (Nyburg 2019, 117). In London, the Viennese programme was continued from 1939. Phaidon had published Jacob Burckhardt’s Rubens in Vienna as recently as 1938; in 1939, Phaidon’s London publishing house published Rodin by Sommerville Story; in 1941, Raphael by Wilhelm Suida was published; and in 1945, Philip Hendy’s Giovanni Bellini. After the Second World War, Phaidon published editions in various languages: John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy’s Sienese Quattrocento Painting also appeared in 1947, translated into in German as Quattrocento-Malerei in Siena. Grete Ring’s A Century of French Painting: 1400-1500 was also published simultaneously in a French edition in 1949. Grete Ring was an emigrant who had lived in London since 1938. The emigrant photographer and photo historian Helmut Gernsheim published his book Masterpieces of Victorian Photography (1951) with Phaidon, and Rudolf Wittkower, who emigrated from Germany, was also a Phaidon author: in 1955 he published his book Gian Lorenzo Bernini: the Sculptor of the Roman Baroque here. Phaidon was thus an art book publishing house run by emigrants which provided a publishing home for emigrant authors. Its own history, as well as that of other publishing houses founded by emigrants, such as Thames & Hudson, was the subject of the 2014 book Émigrés. The Transformation of Art Publishing in Britain by Anna Nyburg.