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Art Historians

McElroy, Guy C.

Full Name: McElroy, Guy Clinton

Other Names:

  • Guy McElroy

Gender: male

Date Born: 26 July 1948

Date Died: 31 May 1990

Place Born: Fairmont, Marion, WV, USA

Place Died: Washington, DC, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): African American, American (North American), and Black (general, race and ethnicity)

Career(s): art historians and curators

Institution(s): The Corcoran Gallery of Art and University of Maryland


Overview

Curator and historian of African-American art. McElroy was the son of Geraldine McElroy (1923-2010) an African-American seamstress, and spent his youth in Fairmont, West Virginia. In 1970, McElroy received a B.A. in art education from Fairmont State College in Fairmont, WV. From 1970 to 1971, he worked as an intern at the Cincinnati Art Museum researching and preparing a catalog essay for an exhibition of paintings by African American landscapist, Robert S. Duncanson (1821-1872). He earned a M.A. in art history from the University of Cincinnati in 1972, specializing in 19th century American and French art, with a thesis topic on Duncanson and his works. From 1972 to 1973, McElroy was Assistant Curator at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City. The next year he worked as assistant to the Media Director at Emerson College in Boston. While working as a Rockefeller Fellow in museum studies at the de Young Museum in San Francisco between 1974-1976, he earned a second M.A. in mass communication from Emerson College in 1975. The following year, McElroy began a doctoral degree in art history, with an initial focus on Dutch painting, and later on 19th century painting at the University of California, Berkeley. His graduate studies at Berkley ended in 1978 when he took a position as a curator, later to be assistant director, of the National Council of Negro Women’s Bethune Museum and Archives in Washington, D.C. (through 1988). During that time he again entered a doctoral program in art history at the University of Maryland. He continued his research interest in Dutch 17th-century art, branching into 20th century American and then African-American artwork.

While still at the Bethune, McElroy accepted a position as adjunct curator at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1986, which is where he made his most significant contribution to the art world. While studying the work of William Sydney Mount (1807-1868), he realized the need to examine the representation of African Americans in American art. The following year, however, McElroy was severely injured in an auto accident in New Mexico which left him a paraplegic, requiring a wheelchair for mobility. He nevertheless mounted the important exhibition, Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710-1940 with Corcoran chief curator Jane Livingston (b. 1944). This show, which received national attention, examined the ways in which American artists, both African American and European American, “reinforced a number of largely restrictive stereotypes of black identity,” as McElroy wrote in the catalog. In addition to his position as adjunct curator at the Corcoran, McElroy served in other capacities between 1988 and 1990. McElroy co-curated an exhibition in 1988 sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) on works of African-American artists from the Evans-Tibbs Collection. In addition to the catalog, Facing History…, McElroy published African-American Artists, 1880-1987: Selections from the Evans-Tibbs Collection, in 1989, as well as reviews of several other exhibitions.

Between November 1989 and February 1990 he held the position of Manager of Technical Information Services for the American Association of Museums. In 1990 he was an advisory panelist for the District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and Humanities. McElroy was also appointed by the Department of Art History at the University of Maryland as an Assistant Professor teaching American and African American art. This position was to have begun in September 1990, however, McElroy suffered a pulmonary embolism (age 41) and died shortly before then.


Selected Bibliography

  • and Powell, Richard, and Patton, Sharon. African-American Artists, 1880-1987: Selections from the Evans-Tibbs Collection. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution/University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1989;
  • Facing History: the Black Image in American Art, 1710-1940. San Francisco: Bedford Arts Publishers/Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1990.

Sources

  • [obituary:] Glueck, Grace. “Guy McElroy, Art Historian, 44; Organized Show on Black Images.” New York Times June 5, 1990, p. D30;
  • Guy C. McElroy papers, Sc MG 337, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library;
  • Kimmelman, Michael. “Black Images of the Past: Servile, Subhuman: Black Images of the Past.” New York Times, Jan 18, 1990, pp C21-C22.

Archives


Contributors: Alana J. Hyman


Citation

Alana J. Hyman. "McElroy, Guy C.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/mcelroyg/.


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Curator and historian of African-American art. McElroy was the son of Geraldine McElroy (1923-2010) an African-American seamstress, and spent his youth in Fairmont, West Virginia. In 1970, McElroy received a B.A. in art education from Fairmont Sta

McCoy, Esther

Full Name: McCoy, Esther

Other Names:

  • Esther McCoy

Gender: female

Date Born: 18 November 1904

Date Died: 30 December 1989

Place Born: AR, USA

Place Died: Santa Monica, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre) and sculpture (visual works)

Career(s): art critics


Overview

Architectural critic and historian. McCoy graduated from the University of Michigan, working as a freelance editor in New York. She joined the the city’s avant-garde literary circles working as a research assistant for the writerTheodore Dreiser (1871-1945). She moved to Paris, living there until the Depression forced her return. She settled in Key West, Florida, where she wrote short stories and a novel. In 1932 she moved to Santa Monica, CA, where she remained the rest of her life. She married Berkeley Tobey (d. 1962) in 1940. During the World War II she contributed to the war effort as a draftsman for Douglas Aircraft Corporation. Her experience there in design convinced her togo into architecture. The prejudice against women in the profession limited her to drafting positions, howver, one of which she took in the Hollywood office of the modernist architect Rudolf M. Schindler (1887-1953) in 1944. Through the firm she came in contact with many architects. She left Schindler’s employ in 1947 resolving to combine her interests in architecture and writing. She was a contributing editor to Art and Architecture between 1951 and 1957. McCoy published her first two books bothin 1960: Neutra and Five California Architects. The latter became her seminal work and helped create the climate that permitted California’s remarkable architecture of the 1970’s and 1980’s to flower (Goldberger, 1990). The New York architectural critic Paul Goldberger became one of her most ardent champions, writing the introduction to the 1975 reprint of Five California Architects. In 1985, she received the American Institute of Architects’ national honor award for excellence. A smoker, she died of emphysema at age 85 in her life-long Santa Monica home. “Almost single-handedly, [McCoy] awakened serious scholars to the extraordinary richness of California architecture;” she largely revived the reputation of Bernard Maybeck, Irving Gill, R. M. Schindler and Charles and Henry Greene from obscurity (Goldberger, 1975). She discovered that California was the place where the American dream fused more naturally and intensely with modernism (Goldberger, 1990).In her writing she argued that the Modern Movement developed in America at least as early as in Europe (Dictionary of Architecture). McCoy’s prose–like her personality, Goldberger quipped–was blunt and “matter-of-fact.” She wrote about an architect using art history, sociology, economics and biography.


Selected Bibliography

Five California Architects. New York: Reinhold, 1960; Richard Neutra. London: Mayflower, 1960; Guide to U.S. Architecture, 1940-1980. Santa Monica, Calif. : Arts + Architecture Press, 1982; The Second Generation . Salt Lake City : G.M. Smith, 1984; Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art/MIT Press, 1989; and Rosa, Joseph. A Constructed View: the Architectural Photography of Julius Shulman. New York: Rizzoli, 1994.


Sources

Venturi Robert, and Scott Brown, Denise. “Perspectives.” Progressive Architecture, lxxi/2 (Feb. 1990), pp.118-19; “McCoy, Esther” A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Curl, James Stevens, ed. Oxford University Press 2006; [obituary:] “Esther McCoy Is Dead Architecture Critic, 85.” New York Times December 31, 1989; Goldberger, Paul. ” Learning to Take California Seriously.” New York Times Sunday, January 14, 1990, p. 33.




Citation

"McCoy, Esther." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/mccoye/.


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Architectural critic and historian. McCoy graduated from the University of Michigan, working as a freelance editor in New York. She joined the the city’s avant-garde literary circles working as a research assistant for the writerTheodore Dreiser (

McCoubrey, John W.

Full Name: McCoubrey, John W.

Gender: male

Date Born: 1923

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): American (North American)

Career(s): educators


Overview

University of Pennsylvania faculty professor of art, Americanist. Students in his graduate seminars included Robert L. Herbert.


Selected Bibliography

American Tradition in Painting. New York: Braziller, 1963.


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, p. 104; Herbert, Robert L. David, Voltaire, ‘Brutus’ and the French Revolution: An Essay in Art and Politics. London: Allen Lane, 1972, mentioned; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 149.




Citation

"McCoubrey, John W.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/mccoubreyj/.


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University of Pennsylvania faculty professor of art, Americanist. Students in his graduate seminars included Robert L. Herbert.

McComb, Arthur K.

Full Name: McComb, Arthur K.

Other Names:

  • Arthur Kilgore McComb

Gender: male

Date Born: 1895

Date Died: 1968

Place Born: Paris, Île-de-France, France

Place Died: Boston, Suffolk, MA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Baroque


Overview

Professor of baroque art at Vassar and Harvard Universities; wrote an early history of baroque art in English. McComb’s father was the Reverend Samuel McComb (1864-1938), an Irish clergyman educated in Northern Ireland and at Oxford and Berlin. His mother (d. 1934) was Scottish. Samuel McComb was involved with an Episcopal movement known as the Emmanuel movement. The younger McComb attended a variety of middle and grammar schools: Hannover, Germany, private study of Latin in Paris, and the Rugby School (England) 1910 and 1912. When his father was assigned to a Boston church in 1906, McComb attended the Noble and Greenough School and Milton Academy in Massachusetts, preparing for Harvard University. He entered Harvard in 1914. Among his classmates and friends was the future author John Dos Passos (1896-1970). The two remained close their entire lives. They wrote for the Harvard Monthly, the undergraduate magazine. McComb and Dos Passos toured Europe before McComb graduated from Harvard in 1918. He began working on his M. A. at Harvard. He married Constance Atwood in 1923. In 1924 he published an article in the magazine jointly published by Princeton and Harvard, Art Studies, “The Life and Times of Francesco di Giorgio.” He worked for a year at the Metropolitan Museum of art before accepting a teaching appointment at Vassar in 1924. The following year his daughter (and later art historian), Pamela was born. McComb joined the faculty at Harvard in 1927. His Agnolo Bronzino: His Life and Works appeared in 1928, the first English-language dissertation on the topic. In 1929 his wife filed for divorce, citing infidelity. McComb organized the first exhibition of Italian baroque art in the United States the same year. In 1934 he published one of the first surveys of Baroque art, Baroque Painters of Italy, to enthusiastic reviews. Among his students included the future Harvard art historian Sydney Joseph Freedberg. In the 1930s, McComb adopted a pro-Fascist attitude toward Franco and Mussolini (thought not Hitler), which caused tension with many, included Dos Passos. Dapper and cultured, McComb conducted several love affairs without concealment. In 1939 McComb was denied tenured at Harvard, partly due, according Freedberg, to a reticence to ingratiate himself with powerful Harvard faculty such as Paul J. Sachs and his public philandering. McComb inherited his father’s estate, living without permanent occupation in Boston. In 1941 he moved to Gloucester, MA, and then Asheville, NC the following year. He secured Irish citizenship in 1943. McComb returned to Boston in 1944, ever more penurious. He lectured at various universities, authenticating paintings, and eventually selling his correspondence with Dos Passos in 1951. In the 1960s, he edited the letters of Bernard Berenson, whom he knew and had often visited in Florence, for Houghton Mifflin. He collapsed of a heart attack on a Boston street in 1968. His daughter was the art historian Pamela Askew.


Selected Bibliography

The Baroque Painters of Italy: an Introductory Historical Survey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1934; Agnolo Bronzino: His Life and Works. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928.


Sources

John Dos Passos’ Correspondence with Arthur K. McComb or “Learn to Sing the Carmagnole”. Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1991, pp. 1-15 and text; particularly notes 8-9, p. 308 (Freedberg assessment).




Citation

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Professor of baroque art at Vassar and Harvard Universities; wrote an early history of baroque art in English. McComb’s father was the Reverend Samuel McComb (1864-1938), an Irish clergyman educated in Northern Ireland and at Oxford and Berlin. Hi

McCaughey, Patrick

Full Name: McCaughey, Patrick

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: United States

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


Overview

modern iconographic scholar


Selected Bibliography

“Clyfford Still and the Gothic Imagination.” Artforum 8 (1970): 56-61.


Sources

KRG, 67 mentioned




Citation

"McCaughey, Patrick." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/mcaugheyp/.


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modern iconographic scholar

McAndrew, John

Full Name: McAndrew, John

Other Names:

  • John McAndrew

Gender: male

Date Born: 1904

Date Died: 1978

Place Born: New York, NY, USA

Place Died: Venice, Veneto, Italy

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre) and sculpture (visual works)

Career(s): curators


Overview

Architectural historian and museum curator. McAndrew graduated magna cum laude at Harvard University in 1924. He continued graduate studies at Harvard for three years, receiving his Master of Architecture diploma in 1941. He never sought a Ph. D.. McAndrew practiced architecture in the firm of Aymar Embury II for the another three years before studying in Mexico and Europe. During the late 1920s he met Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and Philip Johnson when those two were founding the architecture department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Between 1932 and 1937 McAndrew taught architectural history at Vassar College, delivering a course on domestic architecture at the Hartford Art School in 1935. In 1937, after lecturing at the Graduate School of Fine Arts, New York University, on modern architecture, he resigned to become curator of the Department of Architecture and Industrial Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. McAndrew mounted the MoMA show on the recently-completed Fallingwater house by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1938 and designed th sculture garden for the Museum. He spent the years of World War II as coordinator of inter-American affairs in Mexico. He became director of the Wellesley College art museum in 1947 which he served until 1957.

As director, he helped train a number of scholars, including Phyllis Pray Bober in museum work. In 1970 McAndrew founded and was first chairman of Save Venice Inc., a foundation devoted to restoring the art and buildings of Venice, Italy, because of its sinking. His Venetian Architecture of the Early Renaissance, a major survey of the unique architecture of the region, appeared poshumously in 1980. He was succeeded at the Save Venice, Inc. by his colleague, the Wellesley art historian Peter J. Fergusson, whose house garden McAndrew had also designed.


Selected Bibliography

edited. Guide to Modern Architecture, Northeast States. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1940; “Sant’Andrea della Certosa.” The Art Bulletin 51 (March 1969):15-28; “Die moderne amerikanische Kunst und Europa.” Werk 43 (February 1956): 52-59; The Open-air Churches of Sixteenth-century Mexico: Atrios, Posas, Open Chapels, and Other Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965; “Palazzo Rezzonico: a Study of its Architecture.” Apollo 105 (January 1977): 8-16; Venetian Architecture of the Early Renaissance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980.


Sources

“John McAndrew” [1937 press release, MoMA] http://www.moma.org/docs/press_archives/395/releases/MOMA_1937_0035.pdf?2010; Kinder, Terryl N. [Forward]. Perspectives for an Architecture of Solitude : Essays on Cistercians, Art and Architecture in Honour of Peter Fergusson. Turnhout: Brepols, 2004, p. vii; [obituary:] “John M’Andrew Dies, Founded Save Venice.” New York Times February 20, 1978, p. D7; Bober, Phyllis Pray. A Life of Learning. Charles Homer Haskins Lecture. New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1995, p. 14; Smith, Kathryn. The Show to End All Shows. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005, p. 29; ; Bacon, Mardges. John McAndrew’s Modernist Vision: from the Vassar College Art Library to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Hudson, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2018.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "McAndrew, John." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/mcandrewj/.


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Architectural historian and museum curator. McAndrew graduated magna cum laude at Harvard University in 1924. He continued graduate studies at Harvard for three years, receiving his Master of Architecture diploma in 1941. He never sought

Mazenod, Lucien

Full Name: Mazenod, Lucien

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown


Overview


Selected Bibliography

L’Art et les grandes civilisations. (editor)


Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 p. 377




Citation

"Mazenod, Lucien." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/mazenodl/.


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Mayor, A. Hyatt

Full Name: Mayor, A. Hyatt

Other Names:

  • Alpheus Hyatt Mayor

Gender: male

Date Born: 1901

Date Died: 1980

Place Born: Gloucester, Essex, MA, USA

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): prints (visual works)

Career(s): curators


Overview

Metropolitan Museum of Art Curator of Prints 1946-1966. Mayor was born to Alfred Goldsborough Mayor (1868-1922) and Harriet Hyatt (Mayor) (1868-1960). His father was a marine biologist and his grandfather and namesake the famous biologist Alpheus Hyatt (1838-1902) and his mother a sculptor. Mayor was born in the house which later became part of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. A maternal aunt and uncle were the wealthy art patrons Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973), also a sculptor, and Archer M. Huntington (1870-1955), founder of the Hispanic Society of America in 1904. Mayor received an A. B., from Princeton University in 1922. After teaching art history at Vassar for a year–he had only taken two art courses as an undergraduate–Mayor was awarded a Rhodes scholarship which allowed him take a second bachelor’s degree at Christ Church, College, Oxford University in 1926. Intent on being a literary scholar and novelist, he met the celebrated hostess Lady Ottoline Morell (1873-1938), with whom he wintered in Florence. In Italy visited the famous Harvard art historian Bernard Berenson. Between 1926-1927 he spent at the American School of Classical Studies. Returning to the United States, he lectured (on acting) at the School of the American Laboratory Theatre in New York City in 1928. There he met Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996) and worked on the literary magazine, Hound and Horn. In 1932 he left the School, married Virginia Sluder, and, desperately looking for an art job in the height of the Depression, he accepted an offer from William M. Ivins, Jr. to join the Department of Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In 1946 he succeeded Ivins as Curator in the department. His tenure as curator was marked by the acquisition of the celebrated print collection of the Prince of Leichtenstein in the late 1940s. The terms of the sale stipulated that the collection be sold en masse. Mayor arranged with the dealer Colnaghi to purchase the less-famous artists, ignoring the Rembrandts and Dürers, thereby making the sale possible and giving the Met first choice among the “reproductive prints” which were underappreciated at the time. Other items in the sale went to the British Museum through the efforts of Hugh Popham. In 1955 he succeeded his uncle as president of the Hispanic Society. In 1966 he retired emeritus. In his retirement years, Mayor worked on several long-standing art projects. One was the translation and reissue of the critical catalog of print catalog by the art historian Max Lehrs, Geschichte und kritischer Katalog des deutschen, niederländischen, und französichen Kupferstichs, 1908-1934. This appeared in 1969 as Late Gothic Engravings of Germany & the Netherlands. In the early 1970s, together with Anthony Blunt he edited the new illustrated edition of the wood engravings volumes (vols. 12-21) of Le peintre graveur, by Adam von Bartsch. He was president of the Hispanic Society of America, New York City, from 1955-80 and awarded a Boston Museum Award, 1971.Mayor presided over the Metropolitan’s Department of Prints during a period of development. Building on Ivins’ important acquisitions of the first half of the century, Museum staff characterized Mayor’s tenure as one of “filling in the valleys between Ivins’ mountain-top masterworks.” This was in no way a sleight; Mayor frequently purchased less sought after pieces from great print collections, as in the case of the Prince of Leichtenstein’s sale, artists who later reputations would validate Mayor’s critical judgment. In addition to adding to the museum’s holdings of engravings and woodblocks, he also sought to broaden the collection to include all aspects of printing: wine labels, mail-order catalogs, and perhaps the finest collection of cigarette insert-cards. Although an art historian in the connoisseur tradition, he conceived of prints, ironically for a museum curator, as popular forms of communication. His Prints and People: A Social History of Printed Pictures (1952) sets graphics in the context of social communication.


Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] A. Hyatt Mayor: Selected Writings and a Bibliography. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983; and Davis, Mark. American Art at the Century. New York: Century Association, 1977; and Noble, Joseph Veach. A Century of American Sculpture: Treasures from Brookgreen Gardens. New York: Abbeville Press, 1981; edited, Lehrs, Max. Late Gothic Engravings of Germany & the Netherlands: 682 copperplates from the “Kritischer Katalog.” New York: Dover Publications, 1969; Popular Prints of the Americas. New York: Crown Publishers, 1973; Prints & People: a Social History of Printed Pictures. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Princeton University Press, 1972; edited, with Blunt, Anthony. Bartsch, Adam von. Le Peintre graveur illustré: Illustrations to Adam Bartsch’s Le peintre graveur, Volumes XII-XXI. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971ff.; Giovanni Battista Piranesi. New York: H. Bittner, 1952. £9 copyright 2008 Dictionary of Art Historians, All rights reserved


Sources

“Museum Curator Refuses to ‘Rust’.” New York Times June 19, 1966. p. 71; Cummings, Paul. “An Interview with A. Hyatt Mayor.” Archives of American Art Journal 18, no. 4 (1978): 2-19; “A. Hyatt Mayor Abroad.” Archives of American Art Journal 32 no. 4. (1992): 2-18; [obituaries:] Glueck, Grace. “A. Hyatt Mayor, Former Curator of Prints at the Metropolitan, 78.” New York Times March 1, 1980, p. 26; Lynes, Russell. Art News 79 (Summer 1980): 121; Shaw, James Byam. The Burlington Magazine 122 (June 1980): 439; The Print Collector’s Newsletter 11 (May 1980): 48.




Citation

"Mayor, A. Hyatt." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/mayora/.


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Metropolitan Museum of Art Curator of Prints 1946-1966. Mayor was born to Alfred Goldsborough Mayor (1868-1922) and Harriet Hyatt (Mayor) (1868-1960). His father was a marine biologist and his grandfather and namesake the famous biologist Alpheus

Mayer, August Liebmann

Full Name: Mayer, August Liebmann

Gender: male

Date Born: 1885

Date Died: c. 1944

Place Born: Darmstadt, Hesse, Germany

Place Died: Auschwitz, Silesian Voivodeship, Poland

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): painting (visual works) and Spanish (culture or style)


Overview

Historian of Spanish art. Mayer’s parents were Jonas Mayer and Bertha Liebmann (Mayer). His father was a merchant in Darmstadt. Mayer attended the Neues Gymnasium in Darmstadt, graduating in 1904. He studied art history, archaeolog and Germanistik at the universities at Munich and Berlin. In 1907 he received his Ph.D. from Berlin, writing a dissertation on Jusepe Ribera under Heinrich Wölfflin. He published his thesis as a book the following year. After a year’s study travel, mostly in Spain, he took an unpaid position at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich which molted into a position as curator in 1914. During this time he research his habilitation, which allowed him to work as a Privatdozent. In 1920 he was appointed chief conservator and associate professor at the University in Munich. He habilitated the same year. A second edtion of his Ribera book appeared in 1923 as did his work on Goya. Liebmann’s works, including his travelogues on Spain, were published in English giving him a a high Anglo-American profile. With the Nazi’s accession to power in 1933, Mayer position at the Pinakothek was in jeopardy because he was a Jew. When the art historian Wilhelm Pinder in a Munich lecture, denounced over a 100 works in the Pinakothek collections as fakes, a swipe at Mayer’s curatation. Mayer was denounced as well by his students, including the later eminent art historians (and National Socialist sympathizers) Luitpold Dussler and Bernhard Degenhart. Mayer emigrated to France, working as the editor of the art journal Pantheon the same year and doing other writing. When France was overrun by the Nazis in 1940, Mayer fled to Cannes, France. However, he was arrested by the Gestapo, apparently during a sojour to Paris, and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943. He perished there in 1944.


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Jusepe da Ribera, Berlin, 1907, published, Leipzig, 1908; El Greco: eine Einführung in das Leben und Wirken des Domenico Theotocopuli, genannt El Greco. Munich: Delphin, 1911; Old Spain. New York: Brentano’s, 1921; Geschichte der spanischen Malerei. Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1922;  Francisco de Goya. Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1923, English, translated by Robert West (pseudonym).  London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1924;  D.T. El Greco. Berlin: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1931; Velazquez: a Catalogue Raisonné of the Pictures and Drawings. London: Faber and Faber, Limited 1936.


Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 445; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 258-9; Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 1, pp. 429-38; Fuhrmeister, Christian and Kienlechner, Susanne. “Gegenwart und Ahnung: Inwiefern war der Münchner Kunsthistoriker August Liebmann Mayer (1885-1944) ein Vorbild für die Figur des Martin Krüger in Lion Feuchtwangers Roman ‘Erfolg’ (1930)?.” in, Literatur in Bayern 24 no. 93 (September 2008): 32-44; Fuhrmeister, Christian and Kienlechner, Susanne. “Tatort Nizza: Kunstgeschichte zwischen Kunsthandel, Kunstraub und Verfolgung. Zur Vita von August Liebmann Mayer, mit einem Exkurs zu Bernhard Degenhart und Bemerkungen zu Erhard Göpel und Bruno Lohse.” in, Heftrig, Ruth, Peters, Olaf, and Schellewald, Barbara, eds. Kunstgeschichte im “Dritten Reich”:. Theorien, Methoden, Praktiken. Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2008 pp. 405-429; Posada Kubissa, Teresa. August L. Mayer y la pintura española: Ribera, Goya, El Greco, Velázquez.
Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2010.




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"Mayer, August Liebmann." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/mayera/.


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Historian of Spanish art. Mayer’s parents were Jonas Mayer and Bertha Liebmann (Mayer). His father was a merchant in Darmstadt. Mayer attended the Neues Gymnasium in Darmstadt, graduating in 1904. He studied art history, archaeolog and Germani

Maxwell, William Stirling, Sir

Full Name: Maxwell, William Stirling, Sir

Other Names:

  • né William Stirling

Gender: male

Date Born: 1818

Date Died: 1878

Place Born: Kirkintilloch, East Dunbartonshire, Scotland, UK

Place Died: Venice, Veneto, Italy

Home Country/ies: Scotland

Subject Area(s): photographs and Spanish (culture or style)

Career(s): art collectors


Overview

Historian of Spanish art and embelmata book collector; first art historian to use photo-reproduction in an art history book. Stirling was the son of Archibald Stirling of Keir and Cawder (1769-1847) and Elizabeth Maxwell (Stirling) (1793-1822), both among Scotland’s oldest families. He was born in Kirkintilloch, Scotland, UK, near Glasgow. He was educated privately at Pilton Rectory, Northamptonshire, and Cossington Rectory, Leicestershire, before attending Trinity College, Cambridge. He graduated in 1839, the same year making a grand tour with George Holland of Germany, Switzerland, France, and Italy. After a fail attempt as a tory seat in Perthshire in 1841, Stirling made a second tour, now including Spain and the Middle East. He received an M.A. from Cambridge in 1943. In 1846, Stirling published his mid-eastern experiences in Songs of the Holy Land. His Spanish travels–and Seville in particular–convinced him in early 1843 to write a history of Spanish art. Stirling made a second trip to Spain educating himself on Spanish art in collections there and in Britain. His Annals of the Artists of Spain appeared in 1848. Annals broke ground in several ways, particularly its chronological organization and groupings by ruling monarch. Stirling’s work was well received in Britain, though another art historian of Spanish art, Carl Nicolaus Heinrich Justi, ceased upon Stirling’s scant treatment of artistic technique. In 1852 Stirliing published The Cloister Life of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, a book about the emperor whose religious conviction led to his abdication to a monastery. The volume was his most popular in terms of sales and quickly appeared in German, Dutch, and Spanish. In 1855, Stirling re-edited the portions of the Annals Velazquez, producing a separate volume, Velazquez and his Works, adding a separate catalog of prints after his paintings. Although Justi’s longer study soon supplanted it, the book became a benchmark of the “monographic study” in art history publishing (Macartney). The book was serialized in its Spanish translation in the Gaceta de Madrid. German and French translations also followed, including catalog in the French edition written by Willem Bürger (Etienne-Joseph-Théophile Thoré). Around 1859 he completed the research for a two-volume Charles’ illegitimate son, Don John of Austria, or, Passages from the History of the Sixteenth Century, however, the work was only published posthumously in 1883. Between 1857 and 1859 Stirling worked to translate the Annals into Spanish, but publication never happened. He issued an extremely small print run (25 copies) of a fourth volume, employing a photo-reproductive process developed by William Fox Talbot called Talbotype, the first art history book to use photographs. Stirling’s father died in 1847, inheriting the estates of Keir and Cawder. He became a noted book collector, rehabbing a room in his estates as a cedar-lined library. His emblem book collection is now part of the Glasgow University Library. At the same time, Stirling began collecting art, particularly the Spanish art about which he wrote. These included the collections of Louis-Philippe (his Galerie Espagnole) and the Frank Hall Standish collection as well as works by El Greco and Goya prints. He was as interested in facsimile (copies) as originals, adding to the accusation that he was a weak connoisseur. His commitment to the photographic process (and slight allegiance to the original) resulted in facsimile prints books for popular consumption. These included Examples of the Engraved Portraiture of the Sixteenth Century (1872), Solyman the Magnificent Going to Mosque (1877), and the anatomical tables of Vesalius ( 1874). In 1852 Stirling was elected the Conservative MP for Perthshire and except for a loss in 1868 and re-instatement in 1874, held the office the rest of his life. As a government official, he served on the select committee on the fine arts in 1853 and later was named a trustee of all the major public art museums, National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and the British Museum. After the death of his uncle, Sir John Maxwell, Stirling succeeded him to the Pollok estate near Glasgow, becoming Sir William Stirling Maxwell in 1863. In 1865 he married Lady Anna Maria Leslie Melville; she was killed in a fire at Keir in 1874. Maxwell married a second time in 1877 to Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton, née Sheridan (1808-1877). However she, too, died later the same year. Early in 1878 Maxwell contracted a fever in Venice and died. He is buried in the Keir crypt at Lecropt kirk, a gothic revival church near Dunblane, Scotland. His art collection at Keir House as well as the estates were sold by his grandson. Remnants still remain at Pollok House, Glasgow. Maxwell was among the most important English-writer of Spanish art, a genre underappreciated for most of the nineteenth century. Modern scholars found his research extraordinary in scope and seriousness (Brown). His most famous work, the Annals organized the art in Spain around a broad social, cultural, and historical context, perhaps the first to the art of Velázquez and Murillo as cultural phenomenon and not simply unique, artistic genius. His personal art collection is remarked upon by Gustav Friedrich Waagen. His Goya proofs of the Disasters of War were acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and published by the prints curator Eleanor Sayre.


Selected Bibliography

[collected works:] The Works of Sir Wm. Stirling-Maxwell, Baronet. 6 vols. London: John C. Nimmo, 1891; Velazqvez and his Works. London: J. W. Parker and Son, 1855, [French, with Velazquez catalog by Thoré] Velazquez et ses œuvres. Paris: J. Renouard, 1865; The Cloister Life of the Emperor Charles the Fifth. London: J. W. Parker and Son, 1852; Annals of the Artists of Spain. 3 vols. London: J. Ollivier, 1848, [addendum] Talbotype Illustrations to the Annals of the Artists of Spain. London: s. n., 1847; Songs of the Holy Land. Edinburgh: privately printed, 1846 [first public issue, London: John Ollivier, 1848].


Sources

Waagen, Gustav. Galleries and Cabinets of Art in Great Britain. London: J. Murray, 1857, pp. 448-53; Black, Hester, and Weston, Dvid, eds., A Short title Catalogue of the Emblem Books and Related Works in the Stirling Maxwell Collection of Glasgow University Library Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press, 1988; Rowan, A. “Keir House, Perthshire, III.” Country Life 158 (1975): 506-10; Harris, Eveyln. “Sir William Stirling-Maxwell and the History of Spanish Art.” Apollo 79 (1964): 73-7; Macartney, Hilary. “Maxwell, Sir William Stirling, ninth baronet (1818-1878).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Brown, Jonathan. “Observations on the Historiography of Seventeenth-century Spanish Painting.” Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-century Spanish Painting. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978, pp. 3-18; [obituary:] The Times (London) January 17, 1878, p. 1?.




Citation

"Maxwell, William Stirling, Sir." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/maxwellw/.


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Historian of Spanish art and embelmata book collector; first art historian to use photo-reproduction in an art history book. Stirling was the son of Archibald Stirling of Keir and Cawder (1769-1847) and Elizabeth Maxwell (Stirling) (1793-1822), bo