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Crookshank, Anne Olivia

Image Credit: Photo ©Brendan Dempsey

Full Name: Crookshank, Anne Olivia

Other Names:

  • Anne Crookshank

Gender: female

Date Born: 03 January 1927

Date Died: 18 October 2016

Place Born: Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK

Home Country/ies: Ireland

Subject Area(s): Modern (style or period)

Career(s): art historians

Institution(s): Courtauld Insitute and Trinity College Dublin


Overview

Pioneering historian of Irish art and founder of the first art history university department in Ireland. Anne Crookshank was born on January 3, 1927, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She was the middle of three daughters of the geologist Henry Crookshank (1893-1972), who had served with the Dublin Fusiliers in the First World War, and Eileen Mary “Kitty” Somerville (Crookshank). She spent her first five years in India, where her father was engaged in geographical survey work, and was moved frequently in childhood thereafter, including time spent in Carlisle, London, and more. As a result of their constant relocation, Crookshank attended several schools, including a year in Alexandra College in Dublin, but she finished her secondary education in the Convent of the Sacred Heart of Mary, Carlisle, which she attended from 1941 to 1944.

Although she won a scholarship to Oxford, her father insisted she attend Trinity College Dublin instead, where the family had traditionally studied; she went to Trinity in 1945 to study History. This was a time when women were still relatively restricted by the university; later Crookshank recalled female students being obliged to leave the campus to use the toilet of a nearby hotel as there were no facilities for them in the university. At the end of her second year Crookshank was elected as a scholar. Scholars were entitled to attend Commons in the evening, but it was a male-only affair. In protest at her exclusion, Crookshank did not dine in Commons for the remainder of her life, even as a Fellow of the University.

She graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a BA in 1949. It was her history professor there, Theodore W. Moody (1907-1984), who first encouraged her interest in art history. She went on to pursue her master’s degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London; she wrote her thesis on the drawings of the English portrait painter George Romney under the supervision of Anthony Blunt, graduating in 1952. She began her professional career as a publications assistant at the Tate Gallery, before returning to the Courtauld as assistant Witt collection librarian from 1954 to 1957. In 1957 she was appointed Keeper of Art at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery (now the Ulster Museum). She used the position to build a contemporary art collection of international standing for the museum, a program publicly chided by conservative Belfast opinion. Simultaneously, she began the self-education in Irish art history that would define the rest of her career.

In 1966 Crookshank left Belfast for Dublin to found Ireland’s first university department dedicated to the history of art, at Trinity College, serving as its Director of Studies and later its first professor. Over five decades, she built the department into a program with hundreds of alumni and a personal reputation of confidence and respect among her colleagues.

Central to her scholarly legacy was a long collaboration with Desmond FitzGerald (1937-2011), the 29th  Knight of Glin, whom she met through the Irish Georgian Society. Their partnership began with the 1963 exhibition “Irish Houses and Landscapes” and produced the field’s foundational modern texts, including Painters of Ireland, c. 1660-1920, the first scholarly survey of Irish art since Walter Strickland’s (1850-1928) 1913 dictionary, and The Watercolours of Ireland, for which the pair won the CINOA Prize, an annual award given by the Confédération Internationale des Négociants en Œuvres d’Art, a multi-national federation of art dealers. Crookshank and FitzGerald’s shared research materials, the Crookshank-Glin collection of tens of thousands of reproduction images documenting more than a thousand Irish painters and sculptors, formed the basis of their publications and now form part of the library of the Irish Art Research Centre at Trinity.

Beyond her published scholarship, Crookshank helped build up Irish art and culture more broadly. She was one of the founders of the ROSC exhibitions of international modern art, and served on the Art Committee of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the boards of the National College of Art and Design and the Hugh Lane Gallery, and the Stamp Design Advisory Committee. She was elected a Fellow of Trinity College in 1978, a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1985, and an Honorary Member of the Royal Hibernian Academy that same year.

Crookshank never married. She died on October 18, 2016, in Milford, County Donegal, where she had settled after retiring.


Selected Bibliography

  • Irish Houses and Landscapes. Belfast: Ulster Museum, 1963.
  • Irish Portraits, 1660-1860. London: Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art, 1969.
  • Rosc ‘71: The Poetry of Vision; an International Exhibition of Modern Art from Outside Ireland and Viking Age Art. Dublin: Cahill, 1971.
  • Painters of Ireland, c. 1660-1920. 2nd ed. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1979.
  • Irish Art from 1600 to the Present Day. Dublin: Department of Foreign Affairs, 1979.
  • The Watercolours of Ireland: Works on Paper in Pencil, Pastel and Paint, c. 1600-1914. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1994.
  • Irish Watercolours and Drawings: Works on Paper, c. 1600-1914. New York: Abrams, 1994.
  • Masterpieces by Irish Artists, 1650-1860. London: Pyms Gallery, 2000.
  • Ireland’s Painters, 1600-1940. New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2002.

Sources



Contributors: Inaya Shafi


Citation

Inaya Shafi. "Crookshank, Anne Olivia." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/crookshanka/.


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Pioneering historian of Irish art and founder of first art history university department in Ireland.

Blegen, Elizabeth Pierce

Full Name: Blegen, Elizabeth Pierce

Other Names:

  • Elizabeth Denny Pierce
  • Libbie

Gender: female

Date Born: 26 June 1888

Date Died: 21 September 1966

Place Born: Allentown, Allegheny, PA, USA

Place Died: Athens, Region of Attica, Greece

Home Country/ies: Greece and United States

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), archaeology, and Classical

Career(s): art historians

Institution(s): American School of Classical Studies, Columbia University, and Vassar College


Overview

Art historian, archaeologist, and documenter of archaeological discoveries in Greece. Elizabeth Denny Pierce was born on June 26, 1888, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh area), to Flora McKnight (Pierce) (1858-1937) and William Lemmex Pierce (1860-1919).

Pierce did her undergraduate work at Vassar College from 1906 to 1920. In her freshman year at Vassar she met Ida Thallon [later Hill]  (1875-1954), a professor in the Department of Greek and Roman Studies who taught her Greek and Latin. Thallon would go on to largely influence her academic interests as well as her personal life: the two women formed a close and perhaps romantic partnership that endured for the rest of Pierce’s life. Pierce went on to obtain her MA in Latin from Vassar, with a thesis on the intellectual life of Gaius Asinius Pollio, a Roman consul and historian. From 1912 she pursued graduate study at Columbia University, attending courses with James Rignall Wheeler (1859-1918) and Clarence Hoffman Young (1866-1957) on Greek architecture and sculpture. She took many courses taught by the historian George Willis Botsford (1862-1917), who also served on her dissertation committee until his untimely death; she completed her doctorate there in 1922, on the same subject as her master’s thesis.

From 1915 to 1922 she taught art history at her alma mater, Vassar College, and simultaneously served as assistant curator of the college’s Art Gallery, then housed in Taylor Hall, a post she held for seven years under the department’s long-serving chair, Oliver Samuel Tonks (1874-1953). Vassar had integrated the display and teaching of original works and reproductions from its founding, considering fine art a manifestation of moral truth. Her mentors in the Vassar classics department included Grace Harriet Macurdy (1866-1946), Catherine Saunders (1872-1943), and the Roman-studies scholar Elizabeth Hazelton Haight (1872-1964). She spoke English and French and had a scholarly command of Latin.

A 1921 trip to Greece with Ida Thallon redirected her career toward archaeology: the following year she attended the annual program at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Between 1922 and 1924 she was offered several positions, including an internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art extended by Gisela M. A. Richter; although she declined the formal internship, she spent the spring of 1924 working with Richter at the Met. In the summer of 1924 she married fellow archaeologist Carl Blegen (1887-1971), a match that preserved her partnership with Ida Thallon: Thallon married Carl’s friend and colleague Bert Hodge Hill (1874-1958) in the same year, and the two couples subsequently shared a house in Athens. Elizabeth and Carl worked closely together for the remainder of her career: she excavated alongside him at Prosymna, Troy, and Pylos, and contributed to the publications resulting from these excavations, in addition to cataloguing finds. She also assisted Bert Hodge Hill’s excavations in Cyprus.

Even as her career turned toward field archaeology and, from 1925 to 1952, toward writing the “Newsletter from Greece” reports for the American Journal of Archaeology, her training as an art historian continued to inform her published work. Her 1922 article “A Roman Colony in the Alps: Aosta” and her 1942 essay “Recent Discoveries on Roman and Greek Art,” published in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, are both works of close visual and stylistic analysis rather than excavation reporting. This same connoisseurial habit surfaces repeatedly within her ostensibly archaeological “Newsletter” reports, where she consistently singles out sculpture and painted pottery for closer stylistic treatment than other classes of find.

She is also recorded as having lent objects of art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was a member of the American Philological Association.

Elizabeth Pierce Blegen died in Athens on September 21, 1966, and is buried in the Protestant section of the First Cemetery of Athens.


Selected Bibliography

  • “A Roman Man of Letters, Gaius Asinius Pollio.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1922.
  • “A Roman Colony in the Alps: Aosta.” Art and Archaeology 13 (1922): 83-90.
  • “A Daedalid in the Skimatari Museum.” American Journal of Archaeology 28 (1924): 267-75.
  • “Jewellery and Ornaments.” In Prosymna: The Helladic Settlement Preceding the Argive Heraeum, by Carl W. Blegen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937.
  • “Recent Discoveries on Roman and Greek Art.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts (November 1942): 63-76.
  • Review of Studies in Honor of Frederick W. Shipley by His Colleagues. American Journal of Archaeology 47 (1943): 360-61.
  • “Archaeological News: Classical Lands, Greece.” American Journal of Archaeology 55, no. 2 (April 1951): 157-66.

Sources



Contributors: Inaya Shafi


Citation

Inaya Shafi. "Blegen, Elizabeth Pierce." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/blegen-elizabeth-pierce/.


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Art historian, archaeologist, and documenter of archaeological discoveries in Greece.

Gross, Priva Baidaff

Image Credit: Photo: CUNY, Gross Scholarship

Full Name: Priva Baidaff Gross

Other Names:

  • Priva Gross
  • Priva Baidaff

Gender: female

Date Born: 19 June 1911

Date Died: 01 August 1990

Place Born: Wieliczka, Voivodeship, Lesser Poland

Home Country/ies: Poland and United States

Career(s): art historians

Institution(s): Queensborough Community College


Overview

Expanded the art history department of Queensborough Community College. Priva Baidaff was born in the outskirts of Krakow. Baidaff received her M.A. in art history there ca. 1933. She secured a position in the Muzeum Narodoew in Krakow as well as the Ethnographic Museum at the Wawel Castle. At the Ethnographic, she assisted the curator, the art historian and painter Tadeusz Seweryn (1894-1975) restoring objects from the collection. She published work in the prominent Polish journals Lud, Jantar, and AS: ilustrowany magazyn tygodniowy. She married the lawyer and sociologist Feliks Gross (1906-2006) in 1935. Now Priva Gross, she published a book on Polish folk art, Polskie malarstwo ludowe, in 1938. The following year Germany invaded Poland and the Gross’, both Jewish, fled to Vilnius, Lithuania, where the couple secured passage from the Japanese consulate to Japan and ultimately New York by the outbreak of World War II.

In New York she studied art history from New York University. She continued to write articles, now for Nowy Świat (The Polish Morning World) a Polish-language daily newspaper published in New York, and New Europe, as well as in art history. She joined the newly founded Queensborough Community College in the early 1960s as their professor of art history. There she grew the department to a faculty of twenty-five. By 1966 she chaired the College’s Art and Music department, publishing her second book on art history, Some Aspects of Medieval Church Architecture in Poland in 1967. When music and art separated into distinct departments in 1968, she chaired the department until 1974. At the same time, she directed the art museum of the College, holding that position until 1977. She travelled with her husband, now a distinguished anthropologist at the Graduate Center of Brooklyn College, to Wyoming where he researched the native American populations and was professor at the University of Wyoming.  She died in New York City in 1990 and buried in Valhalla cemetery, Westchester County, NY.


Selected Bibliography

  • Polskie malarstwo ludowe. Warsaw: Powszechny Uniw. Korespondencyjny: Związek Polskiego Nauczycielstwa Szkół Powszechnych, 1938.
  • Some Aspects of Medieval Church Architecture in Poland. New York, NY: Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, 1967.

Sources

  • [obituary] Bird, Thomas E. “Priva Baidaff Gross, (1911-1990).” The Polish Review
    36, no. 3 (1991): 377-378;
  • “Priva Gross, Art Professor, 79.” The New York Times. August 24, 1990, p B7


Contributors: Amalia Gay, Inaya Shafi, Lee Sorensen, and Mary Hodge


Citation

Amalia Gay, Inaya Shafi, Lee Sorensen, and Mary Hodge. "Gross, Priva Baidaff." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/gross-priva-baidaff/.


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Allen L. Josephine

Full Name: Allen L. Josephine

Other Names:

  • Josephine Lansing Allen
  • Josephine Allen
  • Mrs. H. D Allen

Date Born: 02 July 1893

Place Born: Cairo, Egypt

Career(s): art historians


Overview

European paintings curator. Josephine L. Allen served as an associate curator in the Department of Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as Associate Curator in Charge of Loans. Her work focused on European paintings, specifically British and Venetian art. She wrote Portrait Drawings by Copley and contributed to Capriccio by Canaletto along with Marjorie J. Milne, Albert Ten Eyck Gardner, Murray Pease, and William C. Hayes. She also published articles in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, including studies on William Morris Hunt and John La Farge (1936). At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she was involved in the management and documentation of loans and collections and identified the stolen painting “St. Thomas” in 1944.


Selected Bibliography

  • Allen, Josephine L. Portrait Drawings by Copley. New York: The Museum Press, 1939; (book)
  • Allen, Josephine L. Eminent Americans: A Picture Book. New York: The Museum Press, 1939; (book)
  • Allen, Josephine L., Marjorie J. Milne, Albert Ten Eyck Gardner, Murray Pease, and William C. Hayes. Capriccio by Canaletto. New York, 1946; (book)
  • Allen, Josephine L., and Elizabeth E. Gardner. European Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum. New York: Plantin Press, 1954; (book)
  • Allen, Josephine L. “Exhibition of the Work of John La Farge.” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (1936); (article)
  • Allen, Josephine L. “The Bathers by William Morris Hunt.” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (1936); (article)
  • Allen, Josephine L. “Portrait of a Patriot.” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin; (article)

Sources

Hutton, Ann Hawkes. Portrait of Patriotism. New York: Chilton Company, 1959; (book)


Archives

“News Release.” Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wednesday, January 19, 1949; (archival document)



Citation

"Allen L. Josephine." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/allenj1893/.


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Alexander, Christine A.

Full Name: Alexander, Christine Anne

Other Names:

  • Christine Alexander
  • Christine Anne Alexander
  • Christine A. Alexander

Gender: female

Date Born: 10 November 1893

Date Died: 24 December 1975

Home Country/ies: Italy and United States

Career(s): art historians and curators


Overview

Art historian and Museum Curator; Alexander completed her undergraduate studies at Maryville College in 1913, with a Bachelor of Arts in Greek and a minor in Classical Archaeology. She later received her Master’s degree in archaeology and comparative philology in 1915 from Cornell University, where she completed her thesis under Eugene Plumb Andrews (1866–1957), written largely in Greek. Following her time at the university, she worked during World War I in the British Field Service stationed in Alexandria and later worked with the American Consular Service in Romania.

Alexander joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1923, where she served under Gisela M.A. Richter. She succeeded Richter as Head of the Department of Greek and Roman Art in 1948 and was succeeded by Dietrich von Bothmer. Alexander remained in the position until her retirement in 1959. During her years, she was involved in the study, publication, and acquisition of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan art for the museum’s collection. Following her retirement, Alexander worked as an adviser to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

Alexander’s scholarship is recorded through museum publications and collaborative writing with other curators. She co-authored The Paintings from Boscotrecase (1962) with Peter von Blanckenhagen, which was later revised and republished as The Augustan Villa at Boscotrecase (1990). Alexander was responsible for much of the reconstruction of decorative wall systems discussed in the writing. She also authored several books, such as Aretine Relief Ware (1943), and Augustan Art: an Exhibition Commemorating the Bimillennium of the Birth of Augustus (1938).

In addition, Alexander contributed to interpretations of Roman wall paintings, including theories concerning lost literary sources for mythological panels. As a curator at the MET, she was deeply involved in the acquisition of important Etruscan objects, including black-figured amphorae, a Villanovan bronze cauldron, red-figure ceramics, bronzes, and a terracotta cinerary urn.

Consulted as an expert on classical items, Alexander had a recorded interaction with Missouri politician Charles H. Morgan (1842–1912) regarding the return of a stolen object from a Greek museum. She later died on December 24, 1975, leaving no immediate family behind.


Selected Bibliography

  • Jewelry: The Art of the Goldsmith in Classical Times as Illustrated in the Museum Collection. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1928.
  • and Richter, Gisela M. A. Augustan Art: An Exhibition Commemorating the Bimillennium of the Birth of Augustus. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1938.
  • Arretine Relief Ware. Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum: United States of America, fasc. 9. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, fasc. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1943.
  • and von Blanckenhagen, Peter Heinrich, and Georges Papadopulos. The Paintings from Boscotrecase. Heidelberg: F. H. Kerle, 1962.

Sources

  • “Christine Alexander, Curator of Greek Art at Met, Is Dead.” New York Times, December 27, 1975, 20.
  • De Puma, Richard, and Christopher Lightfoot. Etruscan Art in the Metropolitan Museum. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2013.
  • Vogeikoff-Brogan, Natalia. “Recalling a Museum Theft.” From the Archivist’s Notebook, April 21, 2022.
  • Weber, Paige Eileen. Temporality on the Roman Wall: A Re-evaluation and Virtual Reconstruction of Cubiculum 19 in the Villa at Boscotrecase. BA Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, 2023.

Archives

[Christine Alexander] Cornell Graduate School Files, Rare and Manuscript Collection



Citation

"Alexander, Christine A.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/alexanderc/.


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Art historian and Museum Curator; Alexander completed her undergraduate studies at Maryville College in 1913, with a Bachelor of Arts in Greek and a minor in Classical Archaeology. She later… Read More »Alexander, Christine A.

Antonova, Irina Aleksandrovna

Image Credit: Photograph: Valery Sharifulin/TASS

Full Name: Antonova, Irina Aleksandrovna

Other Names:

  • Irina Aleksandrovna Antonova
  • Ири́на Алекса́ндровна Анто́нова

Date Born: 20 March 1922

Date Died: 30 November 2020

Place Died: Moscow, Russia


Overview

Russian art historian, cultural administrator;  Director of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, 1961-2013. Antonova was born to Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Antonov, a trained electrician. As an early member of the Bolshevik party (joining 1906) he rose in the Soviet hierarchy, eventually a director of the Institute of Experimental Glass.  Her mother, Ida Mikhailovna Heifitz, was Lithuanian, educated as a singer but only found factory work. In 1929 he took Antonova and a half sister (from a liaison outside the marriage) to Berlin where he worked in the Soviet Embassy.  When Hitler assumed power, the three returned to Russia in 1933.  She entered the Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History (college) in 1940. The following year the Institute was incorporated into the Moscow State University, officially known as the M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University. She studied art history under some of the most prominent Soviet scholars, among them Boris Vipper (1888-1967).  However when war broke out with Germany, she and her mother trained to be nurses.  They fled as part of the evacuation of Moscow in 1940 and only returned in 1942. She continued her art-history studies and after graduating in 1945  was hired at the Pushkin Museum.

In 1947 she married a fellow art historian, Yevsei Rotenberg (1920-2011).

As a museum staffer, she witnessed in 1945 the arrival of art to the Pushkin that the Red Army had taken from Germany as war booty.  Included among these were the Schliemann discovery of the so-called Priam’s Treasury, and many masterpieces from Dresden. The retaining of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie collection became a post-war issue.  At first she publicly denied that the Dresden collections were held at all.  When that became untenable, she insisted the collection was reparations for Russia’s hardships of the War, insisting that the Soviet Union legally held them, exempting them from restitution. As Dresden was now located in East Germany, part of the Russian states, most of the collection was returned to the Dresden museum in 1955.  The Priam’s Treasure, taken from Berlin, was never returned.

Despite presiding over the museum during the most intense years of the Cold War, she opened up the Pushkin to the west, organizing shows both to the museum and lending works out to the west, many for the first time. In 1948 she oversaw the incorporation and distribution of the modern art collections expropriated by Stalin from collectors Sergei Shchokin (1854-1936)and Ivan Morozov (1871-1921).  She continued to work at the Pushkin researching and writing on Italian Renaissance and Early Modern painting.  Her research in provenance, attribution, and display methodology brought her to the attention of the culture minister under Khrushchev, Yekaterina Furtseva (1910-1974), who convinced him to name her director in 1961, significantly above other candidates.   Her new post made her one of the Soviet Union’s leading public intellectuals (Guardian).

As director, she had to navigate the politics of a Soviet museum. Her friendship with pianist Sviatoslav Richter (1915-1997) convinced him to form an international music festival in Moscow as he was doing in Paris at the Louvre. However, when she pushed for a comprehensive museum of western European art including the Shchokin and Morozov works, the powerful Hermitage director, Mikhail Piotrovsky (b. 1944), launched a public campaign against it. A multi-building complex, Piotrovsky argued, would diminish the Hermitage. Her accusation that those against it were Stalinist in their thinking led to culture ministry disapproval. She also attacked the government’s plan for an online “virtual museum”. Antonova was relieved of her directorship in 2013 and succeeded by Marina Loshak (b. 1955). A new position, called the Pushkin museum president, was created for her, though largely titular. Her husband died in 2011.  A nationalist even after her deposition, she publicly supported Russia’s invading of Ukraine.

She succumbed to COVID-19 complications and died near the end of 2020.


Selected Bibliography

Works published in Roman characters

  • and Voznesenskiĭ, Andreĭ, et al. Chagall Discovered : From Russian and Private Collections. New York: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates/Macmillan, 1988;
  • and Adaskina, N. L., Berlin Moskau, 1900-1950 = Moskva Berlin, 1900-1950; Munich/New York: Prestel, 1995;
  • and Tolstikov, Vladimir P;  Treister, Michail Yu, et. al. The Gold of Troy: Searching for Homer’s Fabled City. New York: Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts/H.N. Abrams,1996;
  • and Eyerman, Charlotte Nalle; Georgievskai︠a︡, E. B., Old Masters, Impressionists, and Moderns: French Masterworks from The State Pushkin Museum, Moscow.  New Haven: Yale University/Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2002;
  • La Peinture Francaise, Musée Pouchkine Moscou. Martigny, Switzerland: Fondation Pierre Gianadda, 2005.

Sources

  • [obituaries] “Irina Antonova obituary.”  The Guardian. Dec 10, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/dec/10/irina-antonova-obituary;
  • Braithwaite, Rodric. Moscow 1941: a City and Its People At War. New York: Knopf, 2006.



Citation

"Antonova, Irina Aleksandrovna." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/art-historian/antonovai/.


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Olmstead, Cleta

Image Credit: Cleta Olmstead augmented AI photo from Beaumont Enterprise (Beaumont, Texas), November 11, 1956: 25.

Full Name: Boughton, Cleta Margaret Olmstead

Other Names:

  • Cleta Olmstead Robbins
  • Cleta Olmstead Boughton
  • Cleta Robbins
  • Cleta Boughton

Gender: female

Date Born: 15 February 1915

Date Died: 15 JULY 1965

Place Born: Columbia, Missouri, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Career(s): art historians


Overview

Classicist and exponent of researching weather as a factor in the creation of art.  Olmstead’s father, an Assyriologist, was Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead (1880-1945) a Professor of Oriental (i.e., middle east) History at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Her mother was Cleta Ermine Payne (Olmstead) (1887-1981).  She was raised in Urbana, IL, and Chicago, cities where her father was faculty in academic institutions. She earned an A.B. from the University of Chicago (Phi Beta Kappa), continuing at Chicago for her A.M. Her thesis was titled Studies In The Stylistic Development Of Persian Achaemenid Art.  She travelled as a University of Chicago honorary Fellow of the American School of Oriental Research to Jerusalem, 1936-1937, where, with her family, Thomas Whittemore showed his newly discovered Hagia Sophia mosaics. Olmstead met fellow Chicago graduate student David O. Robbins (1915-1944) and were married in 1939, she becoming Cleta Olmstead Robbins.  She was awarded several additional grants, a Fellow as the American School of Classical Studies in Athens for 1937-1938, named a special scholar for the 1940-1941, ultimately as a Riegel Fellow, receiving a doctorate at Bryn Mawr College in 1942, under Rhys Carpenter.  Her dissertation topic was on chiton-dressed females in classical Greek art.  She taught at the University of Rochester, 1943-1949. In 1944 her husband became a war casualty in the South Pacific. She married a second time to William Boughton, before 1952.  She was appointed associate professor at Florida State University during the same period (1952) at the same time art editor for the Journal of Human Ecology. Now as Cleta Broughton, she assisted with the publication of her father’s book.  She moved with her husband to Beaumont, TX where her husband taught at Lamar State College of Technology (modern Lamar University). She died at age 50 in 1965. Her remains were cremated.

In addition to her interest as a classical-art scholar, Olmstead had a fundamental interest in the methodology and periodization of art history.  She authored articles on influence of climatic cycles upon art and aesthetics.  Her theory has not generally been accepted

 

Research assistance by Charlotte A. Holliman, Mary and John Gray Library, Special Collections and University Archives, Lamar University


Selected Bibliography

  • [M. A. thesis] Studies In The Stylistic Development Of Persian Achaemenid Art. A.M., University of Chicago, 1936;
  • [dissertation, as Cleta Olmstead Robbins]  Ionic Chiton Clad Maidens of the Fifth Century. Bryn Mawr, Bryn Mawr College, Diss., 1942.
  • “Greek lady from Persepolis.”  American Journal of Archaeology 54 (January 1950): 10-18,
  • “Seasonal Painting.”  Weather Forecasts, 1952, (Weather Science Foundation)
  • “Climatic Criticism.” College Art Journal 12, no. 1 (Autumn, 1952): 17-24;
  • “A Greek Lady from Persepolis.” American Journal of Archaeology  54, no. 1 (January/March 1950): 10-18;

Sources

  • Olmstead, A. T. “Year of Research in the Near East.” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 69, (February 1938): 21;
  • Olmstead, Cleta. “Vita.” Ionic Chiton Clad Maidens of The Fifth Century. Bryn Mawr College, Dissertation. 1942, pp. 113-114;
  • [author biography] College Art Journal 12, no. 1 (Autumn, 1952), p. 67;
  • “History of the American School 1939-1980- Appendices” American School of Classical Studies at Athens. https://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/archives/history-of-the-american-school-1939-1980-appendices
  • [Dr. Cleta Olmstead to Speak]. Beaumont Enterprise (Beaumont, Texas), November 11, 1956: 25.
  • Knafl, Anne. November 26 2025, personal correspondence;
  • Hagaman, Kristin Dec 1, 2025, personal correspondence.



Citation

"Olmstead, Cleta." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/art-historian/olmsteadc/.


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Toelken, Ernst

Image Credit: Stadtmuseum Berlin

Full Name: Toelken, Ernst Heinrich

Other Names:

  • Tölken, Ernst Heinrich

Gender: male

Date Born: 24 January 1798

Date Died: 26 January 1878

Place Born: Bremen, Germany

Career(s): art historians


Overview

Art historian, classicist and archaeologist; one of three early art historians to earn doctoral degrees and to hold university positions for teaching the history of art in Germany; second faculty to teach art history in Göttingen.

Toelken was the son of Heinrich Toelken, a Bremen businessman. The eldest of brothers, the sons were schooled at home.  After his father died, Toelken was raised by his grandfather, the businessman Ernst Trüper. Toelken attended schools in his home town, entering the Pädagogium in 1794, graduating in 1802 with honors. He studied French, English and Italian privately and taught himself ancient Greek.

Though admitted to the theological department of Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, casually known as Georgia Augusta, his interest changed to art. He travelled through Germany and Switzerland, making his notes in Latin. At Georgia Augusta his faculty included the mathematician Bernhard Thibaut ( 1775-1832) and the philosopher and aesthetician Johann Herbart (1776-1841), but not apparently the art historian there, Johann Dominik Fiorillo.  Toelken’s dissertation–his first–was in art history and granted in 1811. Toelken taught courses in both Göttingen and Berlin beginning the same year.  His 1814 habilitation, outlines of lectures on ancient mythology, and a manuscript history of religion of the Olympian Zeus, was granted. He left Göttingen in 1814, unable to find a permanent position there. He gained an appointment teaching art history at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University (modern Humboldt University) in Berlin in 1825 (Garberson says 1823), with University’s first art historian, Aloys Hirt. Some alternate slots in his course semesters were taught by the philosopher Georg F. W. Hegel (though not art history). He also taught at the Akademie der Künste for art students and beginning in 1832 (likely for income as lower professors were paid poorly. He was appointed vice-director of the Antiquarium, or Antiquities Collection at the Berlin Museum in 1832. Toelken made his reputation the same year when he doubted the authenticity of impressions of ancient gems owned by King of Prussia.  He was the first to doubt that the original gems were ancient, publishing on it.  In 1836, its director, Panofka returned after an extended leave.

 

By 1844 the department had exceeded the number of art historians at the University when newer scholars were applying for appointments. Toelken was one of two ordinary professors, the other being Gerhard, and three extraordinary professors, Panofka, Hotho, and Gustav Waagen.  He taught at a time of developing distinctions between art history and archaeology along with his contemporaries, Guhl and Kugler.  He taught extensively from the objects in the Antiquarium, i.e., from the object itself. Like his colleagues Hotho and Waagen, he focused little on training scholars (Garberson)

 

His students included Gerhard

 

‘’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’

Toelken’s subsequent research focused increasingly more to art history and less on classical studies (Garberson).  As a scholar he gained notoriety when he concluded that casts of gem settings in the royal collection were not, as was claimed by the owner of the originals, ancient.

 


Selected Bibliography

  • [dissertation:] Ankündigung und plan wissenschaflicher vorträge über die mythologie besonders der Griechen [etc.]. Göttingen: H. Dieterich, 1827
  • De phidiae jove olympio observationes. [published] Gottingae: Röwer, 1812;
  • edited, Rede bei der Gedächtnißfeier Rafaels, welche zu Berlin den 18ten April 1820 von den Akademien der Künste und des Gesanges und dem Künstlerverein begangen wurde. Berlin: Stettin In der Fr. Nicolaischen Buchhandlung, 1820;
  • and Milin, Aubin Louis A. L. and Schade, August Wilhelm. Millin’s Mythologische Gallerie Eine Sammlung von mehr als 750 antiken Denkmälern, Statuen, geschnittenen Steinen, Muenzen und Gemaelden, zur Erlaeuterung der Mythologie, der Symbolik und Kunstgeschichte der Alten;
    Berlin: Stettin Nicolai Berlin Schade, 1820;
  • and Minutoli, Heinrich, Freiherr von. Reise zum Tempel des jupiter Ammon:
    in der Libyschen Wüste, und nach Ober-Aegypten in den Jahren 1820 und 1821. Berlin: A. Rucker, 1824
  • [contributor] Berliner Kunst-Blatt. Berlin, 1828-1829;
  • Erklärendes Verzeichniss der antiken vertieft geschnittenen Steine der Königlich Preussischen Gemmensammlung. Berlin: Gedruckt in der Druckerei der Koniglichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1835;
  • Verzeichniss der antiken Denkmäler im Antiquarium des Königlichen Museums zu Berlin. Abth. [2], Erklärendes Verzeichniss der antiken vertieft geschnittenen Steine der Königlich Preussischen Gemmensammlung. Berlin : Königliche Akad. der Wiss., 1835;
  • and Boeckh, August. Über die Antigone des Sophokles und ihre Darstellung auf dem Kgl. Schloßtheater im neuen Palais bei Sanssouci: drei Abhandlungen.
    Berlin: Schroeder, 1842;
  • Königliche Museen: Leitfaden für die Sammlung antiker Metall-Arbeiten.  Berlin: Moeser und Kühn, 1850

Sources

Garberson, Eric. “Art history in the university Toelken, Hotho, Kugler.” Journal of Art Historiography 5 (2011): 1-89, http://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/garberson-toelken-kugler1.pdf




Citation

"Toelken, Ernst." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/art-historian/toelkene/.


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Guhl, Ernst Karl

Full Name: Guhl, Ernst Karl

Other Names:

  • Ernst Karl Guhl
  • E. K. Guhl

Gender: male

Date Born: 20 July 1818

Date Died: 20 August 1862

Place Born: Berlin, Germany

Place Died: Berlin, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Ancient European, Ancient Greek (culture or style), and Medieval (European)

Career(s): art historians

Institution(s): Freie Universität Berlin


Overview

First historian to write on female artists; early German art historian of the Berliner Schule der Kunstgeschichte. Guhl was born to Adam Wilhelm Guhl and Wilhelmine Caroline Gehricke. As an undergraduate at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität of Berlin, he studied philology and archaeology. Like other early art historians, Guhl travelled in Europe (principally in Italy), focusing on classical art and architecture. He served as a Privatdozent beginning in 1838 at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (now Humboldt University). He spent fifteen months in Italy doing self study, 1846-1847. His first book was his Habilitation, in 1848, Versuch über das Ionische Kapitäl. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der griechischen Architektur, a study on the development of Greek architectural capitals (largely Ionian). He began teaching in the summer 1848, course on the history of modern painting and a private course on ancient architecture.

His colleagues in Berlin were Toelken and Eduard Gerhard, (ordinarius) and, Theodor Panofka, Heinrich Hotho, and Gustav Waagen (extraordinarius). Guhl joined historians who were putting together reference books of art history in 1847.  The first, the Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, by Franz Kugler. Guhl’s Denkmäler der Kunst was a picture book intended to accompany Kugler’s work.  He was assigned to write all the descriptions.

Guhl was hired in a temporary capacity to teach at the Akademie der Kunst, a school for studio artists, in 1849.  He applied for extraordinary professorships in the University between 1851 and 1858. Together with Wilhelm Lübke he published Denkmäler der Kunst beginning in 1851, a survey of the monuments of art.  His appointment at the Akademie was made permanent in 1853. The following year began what became four study trips to London, Paris, Spain and Greece between 1854-1858.

He concluded his publishing career in 1858 writing the first examination of female artists and women’s roles in art, Die Frauen in der Kunstgeschichte. Elizabeth Ellet borrowed heavily from it (some say plagiarized), publishing Women Artists in All Ages and Countries the following year.  Guhl collaborated with the philologist Wilhelm Koner (1817-1887) on Das Leben der Griechen und Römer, a book for a general audience.  After a University-sponsored trip to Italy in 1861, he taught briefly at Berlin.  He succumbed to a brief illness and died at age 46.

Guhl was the only new instructor in the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Berlin, with a primary focus on the history of art to join the university until the later 1860s.  His scholarly contributions, particularly in classical antiquity, laid foundational groundwork for future generations of art historians. Guhl’s methodology was part of the so-called Berliner Schule der Kunstgeschichte (Berlin School of Art History). Their work emphasized documents and a disciplined research procedure at a time in which art history writing was largely anecdotal. His methodology changed with his Künstlerbriefe (Artists’ Letters) by examining biographical data–-and moving away from the “Berlin School” methodology. Using artists’ letters to construct biography is evident in the art-historian biographies by Herman Grimm, Carl Justi and Anton Springer. He held the position of professor and secretary at the Berlin Academy. His broad focus as a scholar was seen as problematic to the University.  Guhl applied for an Extraordinarius professorship four times, 1851, 1854, and twice in 1858. It may also have been the case that the discipline of art history was undeserving of that level of professorship.  Die Frauen in der Kunstgeschichte has been credited with the methodological turn to artist’s biographies (Garberson).


Selected Bibliography

  • Versuch über das Ionische Kapitäl. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der griechischen Architektur Berlin: G. Reimer, 1845).
  • Der Dom zu Köln. Seine Geschichte, Beschreibung und gegenwärtiger Zustand.  Stuttgart: Ebner & Seubert 1851.
  • Künstler-Briefe . 2 vols. Berlin: Trautwein, 1853, 1856.
  • and  Lübke, Wilhelm, and Voit, Johann Michael . Denkmäler der Kunst: zur Übersicht ihres Entwickelungsganges von den ersten künstlerischen Versuchen bis zu den Standpunkten der Gegenwart.Atlas zum Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte sowie der Geschichte der Baukunst von F. Kugler. Stuttgart: Ebner & Seubert, 1858; English, Kugler, Franz;  August von Voit;  Caspar,  Joseph; Lübke, Wilhelm; von Lützow, Karl Friedrich Arnold.  Monuments of Art: Showing its Development and Progress from the Earliest Artistic Attempts to the Present Period.  2 volumes. New York: E. Seitz, undated, 1880s.
  • Die Frauen in der Kunstgeschichte. Berlin: Guttentag 1858.
  • and Koner, W. Das Leben der Griechen und Römer nach antiken Bildwerken dargestellt Berlin: Weidmann, 1862,  English, The Life of The Greeks And Romans, Described from Antique Monuments.  New York: Appleton, 1876

Sources




Citation

"Guhl, Ernst Karl." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/guhle/.


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Ellet, Elizabeth Fries

Image Credit: Photo: Library of Congress

Full Name: Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet

Other Names:

  • Elizabeth Fries Lummis
  • E. F. Ellet

Gender: female

Date Born: 18 October 1818

Date Died: 03 June 1877

Place Born: Sodus Point, New York, USA

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): women (female humans)Women and women art historians

Career(s): authors


Overview

First person to publish a history of women artists in English.  Lummis’ parents were both from prestigious families. Her mother was Sarah Maxwell (1780–1849) and father William Nixon Lummis (1775–1833), a physician. Elizabeth Lummis attended Aurora Female Seminary in Aurora, New York, where she studied languages (French, German and Italian). At age 16, using her language skills, she published a translation of Euphemio of Messina by the writer Silvio Pellico (1789-1854).

Lumens saw her career in literature.  In 1835 she published her first book Poems, Translated and Original.  During this time she also met and married William Henry Ellet (1806–1859), a chemist in New York City. William secured a teaching job at South Carolina College,(today University of South Carolina) Columbia, South Carolina, in 1836. She continued her literary ambitions publishing an essay on and translations of the work of Friedrich Schiller. In 1839; Scenes in the Life of Joanna of Sicily, a history of female nobility; and a travelogue, Rambles about the Country in 1840. Her contributions appeared in American Monthly, the North American Review, the Southern Literary Messenger, and the Southern Quarterly Review.

Ellet departed from her husband in 1845, returning to New York City and literary society.  She was one of several women who purportedly had amorous intentions with Edgar Allan Poe, also in the city.  Her interest in women’s studies emerged as early as 1846 when she began researching unpublished primary documents for a book on women participating in the American Revolution. Though jointly researched by Rufus Wilmot Griswold (1815-1857) he was never acknowledged.  It appeared in two volumes in 1848 with a third volume (and another book) in 1850. Her husband joined her in New York, where he worked as a chemical consultant for the Manhattan Gas Company.  Elizabeth continued to publish works, including a 600-page encyclopedia of American home economics entitled The Practical Housekeeper in 1857.

In 1859 she issued Women Artists in All Ages and Countries, the first history of women artists in English.  She acknowledged in her preface that her work owed some debt to the German Die Frauen in die Kunstgeschichte by Ernest Guhl.  Her selection of artists began with Kora of Sicyon (650 BCE), then the Ottonian (German) dramatist Hroswitha (c. 935–973), following through to Hildegard of Bingen, Plautilla Nelli, Sabina Von Steinback, Margaretta van Eyck, Caterina Vigri, Marietta Tintoretto, Sofonisba Anguissola, Levina Teerlinc.  She also covers the  more contemporary Lavinia Fontana, Elisabetta Sirani, Artemisia Gentileschi, Luisa Roldán, Maria van Oosterwijck, Rachel Ruysch, Maria Sibylla Merian, Angelica Kauffman, Mary Moser, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Félicie de Fauveau, Rosa Bonheur, Emma Stebbins, and Harriet Hosmer.  Like most books on art of her time, it was without illustrations.

In 1857, Ellet succeeded Ann Sophia Stephens (1810-1886) as the editor of the New York Evening Express. Her husband died two years later in 1859. She continued to write. She converted to Catholicism and championed the causes of impoverished women. In 1877 she succumbed to Bright’s Disease in New York City and is buried with her husband at Green-Wood Cemetery,  Brooklyn.

Ellet was the first historian to write about women artists in English.  Her Women Artists In All Ages and Countries was written, as were he other books, for a popular audience. The book “marked an important event in the history of art and women’s studies” (Langer).  Sparrow noted in 1905 that Mrs. Ellet, as an historian, was addressing herself in her book to the question of women artists–reflecting and accepting the prejudices of her discipline at the time.  Her activism and feminism, in addition to her women’s-studies writing manifested itself in her intervention to the divorce case Griswold, her ghost partner, in 1852, who was divorcing his wife to marry another. Her feminism was inspired in part by Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1741–1796) and his On Improving the Status of Women (1795).  She raised the ire of the early woman art historian Mrs. Anna Jameson when Ellet defended Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting.


Selected Bibliography

  • The Women of the American Revolution. 3 vols. New York: Baker and Scribner, 1848 and 1850.
  • and Riker, John C., Pioneer Women of the West. New York: C. Scribner, 1852.
  • Summer Rambles in the West.  New York: J.C. Riker, 1853
  • The Practical Housekeeper. New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1857.
  • Women Artists in All Ages and Countries. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1859.
  • The Queens of American Society New York: C. Scribner, 1867.
  • Court Circles of the Republic. Hartford, CT: Hartford Pub. Co., 1869.

Sources

  • Jameson, Mrs Anna.  [review of Women Artists in All Ages], Monthly Review, № 151,
  • Sparrow, Walter, ed.  Women Painters of the World.  London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1905, p. 75.
  • Langer, Sandra L  “Reviews and Reviews.”  Woman’s Art Journal 1, no. 2 (Autumn, 1980 – Winter, 1981): 55–58.
  • Mattingly, Carol. “Legacy Profile: Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet (1818-1877).” Legacy 18, No. 1, (2001): 101-106.
  • Conrad, Susan Phinney. Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America, 1830-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Archives

  • Elizabeth Fries Ellet papers.  New York Public Library  https://archives.nypl.org/mss/9786 (Duyckinck, Ford, and Stauffer collections);
  • Yale University (Beinecke Library–Ellet papers);
  • Harvard University (Houghton Library—Ellet letters and
    Sparks manuscripts);
  • Boston Public Library (Griswold manuscripts) (also on microfilm at Duke
    University Library);
  • Library of Congress (Lewis Reeves Gibbes collection);
  • Connecticut Historical Society (Hoadley collection).


Citation

"Ellet, Elizabeth Fries." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/ellete/.


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