Full Name: Chipp, Herschel B.
Other Names:
- Herschel Browning Chipp
Gender: male
Date Born: 1913
Date Died: 1992
Place Born: New Hampton, Harrison, MO, USA
Place Died: San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA
Home Country/ies: United States
Subject Area(s): Cubist
Career(s): educators
Overview
Cubist scholar and University of California, Berkeley professor of Art, 1953-79. Chipp was born to George C. Chipp, an executive and Susie Browning (Chipp). He worked as a poster artist in Los Angeles between 1938-41. Chipp served in the U. S. Navy, 1941-45 with distinction, rising to lieutenant and awarded sixteen battle stars as well as the Presidential Unit Citation. In 1944 he married. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a B.A., in 1947, receiving an M.A., in 1948. He secured a Fulbright fellowship for graduate study at the University of Paris, Institute of Art and Archaeology, between 1951-52 before completing his Ph.D., at Columbia University in 1954. He was also a lecturer at Columbia, 1950-53. He joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, as an assistant professor in 1953. He was director of the College Art Association from 1960-64. That year, too, he accepted the position of acting director of the UC Berkeley art gallery. He was made full professor of art history in 1962. In 1965, Peter H. Selz replaced Chipp as director of the Gallery. Chipp was awarded a faculty research fellowship in Berkeley in 1967. In 1968, Chipp, together with his Selz and Joshua C. Taylor edited the first publication of primary source documents for art history, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics. He retired from Berkeley, emeritus, in 1979. In the 1990’s he joined Alan Wofsy to lead the “Picasso Project,” an initiative to issue a catalogue raisonnéof that artist’s work. He suffered a stroke in 1992 and died in a San Francisco hospital.
Selected Bibliography
edited, with Selz, Peter, and Taylor, Joshua. Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968; and Phillips, Laughlin, and Cafritz, Robert C. Georges Braque: the Late Paintings, 1940-1963. Washington, DC: Phillips Collection, 1982; and Richardson, Brenda. Jugendstil & Expressionism in German Posters. Berkeley : University of California, 1965; and Tusell, Javier. Picasso’s Guernica: History, Transformations, Meanings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988; [directed project] and Wofsy, Alan. Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture, 1885-1973: the Picasso Project. San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1995ff.
Sources
Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971,pp. 4, 69; [obituraries:] The New York Times, February 29, 1992, p. 30; Art in America 80 (April 1992): 182; Art News 91 (April 1992): 23; Clifton, L.A. Artweek 23 (February 27 1992): 9.
Archives
- Herschel Browning Chipp papers, 1964-1974, Archives of American Art. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/herschel-browning-chipp-papers-5688.
Contributors: Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen