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Mack, Gerstle

Full Name: Mack, Gerstle

Other Names:

  • Lewis Gerstle Mack

Gender: male

Date Born: 1894

Date Died: 1983

Place Born: San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): biography (general genre), French (culture or style), painting (visual works), Post-Impressionist, and realism (artistic form of expression)


Overview

Biographer of French Realist and Post-Impressionist artists. Mack’s parents were Adolph “Dick” Mack (1858-1948), a pharmacist and owner of a pharmacy, and Clara Gerstle (Mack) (1861-1909), daughter of the Lewis Gerstle, grocery magnate of San Francisco (Gerstle Park, Marin County). Mack attended the University of California before switching to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he received his B. A. in architecture in 1916. He worked as an architectural draftsman in New York until World War I was declared. After serving in the War, he returned to San Francisco where he again did architectural drawing and theater design production. In 1926 he left his architecture to travel to Spain where he made architectural measurements together with Thomas Gibson (1865-1941), producing a book on southern Spanish architecture in 1928. A companion volume for northern Spanish architecture appeared in 1930. Mack did extensive archival research in France, England and the United States on the artist Paul Cézanne, publishing a scholarly yet popular biography in 1935. This met with critical acclaim for its original archival research, standardizing the artist’s life. He followed this with a second biography on Henri Toulouse-Lautrec in 1938. Mack served in the military a second time during World War II, stationed in England with the office of Strategic Services. During this time, he published a history on the Panama Canal. After the war, Mack wrote a third biography of a French artist, Gustave Courbet, in 1951. He authored a book on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, of which he was a personal survivor, in 1981. Mack died in his Manhattan apartment at age 88. His papers, 1903-1974, are held at the University of California, Berkeley.Mack was the earliest full-length biographer of Cézanne in English. His biography began a series of scholarly English-language-authored biographies on the artist by John Rewald, Jack Lindsay and Linda Nochlin. Mack’s thoroughness as an archival researcher dispelled many stories about the artist, for example, that the artist’s family had descended from a Napoleonic officer and a black woman.


Selected Bibliography

[B. A. thesis:] A Hotel for a California Seaside Resort. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1916; and Gibson, Thomas. Architectural Details of Southern Spain: One Hundred Measured Drawings, One Hundred and Thirteen Photographs. New York: W. Helburn Inc., 1928; Architectural Details of Northern and Central Spain. New York: W. Helburn, Inc., 1930; Paul Cézanne. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1936, [copyright 1935]; Toulouse-Lautrec. London: J. Cape, 1938; Gustave Courbet. New York: Knopf, 1951.


Sources

Mack, Gerstle. Lewis and Hannah Gerstle. New York: Profile Press, 1953; “Gerstle Mack, 88, Author, Biographer and Historian.” New York Times February 17, 1983, p. D23.




Citation

"Mack, Gerstle." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/mackg/.


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Biographer of French Realist and Post-Impressionist artists. Mack’s parents were Adolph “Dick” Mack (1858-1948), a pharmacist and owner of a pharmacy, and Clara Gerstle (Mack) (1861-1909), daughter of the Lewis Gerstle, grocery magnate of San Fran

MacGregor, Neil

Full Name: MacGregor, Neil

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Career(s): art critics, directors (administrators), museum directors, and publishers


Overview

Editor of the Burlington Magazine and Director of the National Gallery, London, 1986, and British Museum-. He succeeded Michael Levey.






Citation

"MacGregor, Neil." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/macgregorn/.


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Editor of the Burlington Magazine and Director of the National Gallery, London, 1986, and British Museum-. He succeeded Michael Levey.

MacDougall, Elisabeth Blair

Full Name: MacDougall, Elisabeth Blair

Other Names:

  • née Elisabeth Blair

Gender: female

Date Born: 1925

Date Died: 2003

Place Born: Chicago, Cook, IL, USA

Place Died: Boston, Suffolk, MA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), gardens (open spaces), landscapes (representations), and sculpture (visual works)


Overview

Landscape architectural historian at Dumbarton Oaks, 1972-1988. Blair was raised in Colorado Springs, CO. She earned her B.A. from Vassar College in 1946 and an M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She married Gregory MacDougall, changing her name at that time (later divorced). Living in Boston during the 1960s and early 1970s, she served on the Cambridge Historical Commission, co-authoring volume two of the Cambridge Architectural Survey. She was later appointed chair of the newly formed Boston Landmarks Commission. In 1970 she earned her Ph.D. from Harvard writing on the topic of the development of the Roman Garden Style. Between 1972 and 1988, MacDougall served as director of the program of studies in Landscape Architecture at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University’s research center in Washington, D. C. John Dixon Hunt succeeded MacDougall upon her retirement in 1988. She was a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and a visiting associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She served as the Society of Architectural Historians president and vice president, and then editor of the society’s journal from 1984 to 1987. In her retirement, she researched architectural historiography. Her death was the result of pneumonia. MacDougall, known as Betty, helped transform the study of gardens into an academic discipline. She was one of the first scholars to use art-historical principles for the topic, analyzing the use of color and design in 16th- and 17th-century French and Italian gardens similar to way art historians study other painting of the period.


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] The Villa Mattei and the Development of the Roman Garden Style. Harvard University, 1970; edited. The Architectural Historian in America: a Symposium in Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of the Society of Architectural Historians. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1990; edited. Ancient Roman Villa Gardens. Tenth Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1987; and Miller, Naomi. Fons Sapientiae: Garden Fountains in Illustrated Books, Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1977; and Ettinghausen, Richard. The Islamic Garden. Fourth Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, 1976.


Sources

[obituary:] Washington Post. October 23, 2003 p. B 5; Elisabeth MacDougall, Pioneer in Formal Study of Gardens. Gewertz, Ken. Harvard Gazette October 23, 2003. http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/10.23/02-macdougall; Benes, Mirka. “A Tribute to Two Historians of Landscape Architecture: David R. Coffin (1918-2003) and Elisabeth B. MacDougall (1925-2003).” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63 no. 2 (June 2004): 248-54.




Citation

"MacDougall, Elisabeth Blair." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/macdougalle/.


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Landscape architectural historian at Dumbarton Oaks, 1972-1988. Blair was raised in Colorado Springs, CO. She earned her B.A. from Vassar College in 1946 and an M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She married Gregory MacDoug

MacDonald, William L., Jr.

Full Name: MacDonald, William L., Jr.

Other Names:

  • William L. MacDonald Jr.

Gender: male

Date Born: 12 July 1921

Date Died: 06 March 2010

Place Born: Putnam, Windham, CT, USA

Place Died: Washington, DC, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), Classical, Roman (ancient Italian culture or period), and sculpture (visual works)

Career(s): educators


Overview

Architectural historian of classical Rome, professor of art, Smith College, 1965-. MacDonald’s father was William Lloyd MacDonald, Sr., and his mother Susan E. Elrod (MacDonald). He served in World War II in the U.S. Army Air Forces, 1942-1945, rising to first lieutenant. Afterward, MacDonald entered Harvard University, receiving his A.B. in 1949. He began lecturing at:Boston Architectural Center in the history of architecture in 1950, continuing for his A.M.at Harvard. During that time he participated in the excavation of the mosaics at Hagia Sophia, organized by the Byzantine Institute, beginning in 1951, immediately after the death of its instigator, Thomas Whittemore. His master’s degree was awarded from Harvard in 1953. The same year he married Dale Ely. MacDonald taught at Wheaton College, Norton, MA, as an instructor of classics in 1953 while pursuing his Ph.D. After an American Academy in Rome fellowship, 1954-1956, he graduated in 1956, writing his dissertation on the Hippodrome structure in Byzantium. The same year he joined Yale University as an instructor, promoted to assistant professor in 1959. He published Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture in 1962 and the following year was made associate professor of history of art at Yale. His second book, The Architecture of the Roman Empire appeared in 1965. In what has been described as a “generational transition/bloodbath” in the department (Sears), MacDonald left along with several other younger scholars, including Spiro Konstantin Kostof. He joined Smith College, Northampton, MA, as professor of art in 1965 where he remained the rest of his career. Macdonald was appointed A. P. Brown Professor in 1974. He wrote several moving biographical entries on Whittemore, an important man-of-action for Byzantine art who had heretofore not been documented, beginning with a piece for the American Biographical Dictionary in 1974. He also authored the book, Northampton Massachusetts Architecture and Buildings, 1975. His Architecture of the Roman Empire was reissued as a 3-volume paperback set in the 1980s, part of the Yale Publications in the History of Art. It became the standard text for undergraduate courses for most of the second half of the twentieth century. United States


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] The Hippodrome at Constantinople. Harvard University, 1956; “The Uncovering of Byzantine Mosaics in Hagia Sophia,” Archaeology Summer 1951; Early Christian & Byzantine Architecture. New York: G. Braziller, 1962; and Stillwell, Richard. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976; The Architecture of the Roman Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965; Northampton, Massachusetts: Architecture & Buildings. Northampton, MA: Northampton Bicentennial Committee, 1975; The Pantheon: Design, Meaning, and Progeny. London: A. Lane, 1976; Piranesi’s Carceri: Sources of Invention. Northampton, MA: Smith College, 1979; Columns in the Collection of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. New York: The Museum, 1982; and Pinto, John A. Hadrian’s Villa and its Legacy New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.


Sources

Who’s Who in Writers, Editors & Poets. United States & Canada. 4th ed., 1992-1993. Highland Park, IL: December Press, 1992; Sears, Elizabeth. “The Art-Historical Work of Walter Cahn.” in Hourihane, Colum, ed. Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn. University Park, Pa: Penn State Press, 2008, p. 21, note 42.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "MacDonald, William L., Jr.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/macdonaldw/.


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Architectural historian of classical Rome, professor of art, Smith College, 1965-. MacDonald’s father was William Lloyd MacDonald, Sr., and his mother Susan E. Elrod (MacDonald). He served in World War II in the U.S. Army Air Forces, 1942-1945, ri

MacColl, D. S.

Full Name: MacColl, D. S.

Other Names:

  • D. S. MacColl

Gender: male

Date Born: 1859

Date Died: 1948

Place Born: Glasgow, Scotland, UK

Place Died: Hampstead, Camden, London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): British (modern), French (culture or style), Impressionist (style), and Modern (style or period)

Career(s): curators


Overview

Keeper of the Tate, 1907-1911 and Wallace Collection, 1911-1924; early British exponent of French Impressionism. MacColl was the son of the Reverend Dugald MacColl (1826-1882) and Janet Scott Mathieson (MacColl) (d. 1895). He was educated at Glasgow Academy (graduated in 1869), and between 1873 and 1876 at University College School, Hampstead. He entered University College, London in 1876 graduating with his MA in 1881. He joined Lincoln College, Oxford, that year, earning the Newdigate prize for poetry in 1882. Beginning in 1887 he took a study trip for art, travelling in Italy, Greece, Germany, Holland, and Belgium, returning in 1889. He met and reputedly proposed marriage to the early woman classical art scholar Jane Ellen Harrison. In England, MacColl studied art under Frederick Brown at the Westminster School of Art. This landed him a job as art critic to The Spectator between 1890 and 1896. At the 1893 launch of the Goupil Gallery, MacColl regularly exhibited there and at the New English Art Club. He and Harrison produced a collected work on vases, Greek Vase Paintings: a Selection of Examples in 1894. MacColl left criticism for the Spectator in 1896 to become art critic for the Saturday Review. The following year he married Andrée Adèle Désirée Jeanne Zabé (d. 1945). In 1902 MacColl wrote his Nineteenth Century Art, a survey of the painting the century before and one of the first to place French Impressionism in context. He gave Impressionism its first British show at the 1900 Glasgow Exhibition. In 1901 MacColl edited the Architectural Review (until 1905) as representative of the committee for literary direction. MacColl used his position to champion modern art and criticized conservative art acquitision. He publicly accused the executors of the the sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey estate of buying mediocre works for the Royal Academy, instead great works the will had demanded. His book, the Administration of the Chantrey Bequest 1904, lead to the acquisition of the work of artists P. Wilson Steer, William Rothenstein, and Muirhead Bone. In 1906 MacColl left the Saturday Review (succeeded by C. H. Collins Baker) to be keeper of the Tate Gallery. At the Tate, MacColl displayed many Turners never before seen, and established the Alfred Stevens room. MacColl received an LLD from Glasgow in 1907. Believing he had contracted tuberculosis, MacColl resigned in 1911 and moved to the warmer climate of Fiesole, Italy. Eventually convinced he did not have the disease, MacColl returned to London to become keeper of the Wallace Collection, succeeding Claude Phillips. MacColl was appointed a trustee of the Tate Gallery from 1917 (until 1927). In 1924 he resigned and was succeeded at the Wallace by Samuel James Camp. He received an honorary DLitt from Oxford in 1925 and was appointed a member of the British School at Rome the same year. Between 1925 and 1929 he was a member of the Royal Fine Arts Commission. MacColl began contributing to the Saturday Review in 1921, moving to the Week-End Review in 1930 when Gerald Barry, its editor, left as well. In 1931 MacColl published Confessions of a Keeper, his collected criticism and in 1940 his collected poetry. He continued to write artists’ biographies, and in 1945, his Life, Work and Setting of Philip Wilson Steer won the James Tait Black memorial prize. He died at his home in Hampstead and was cremated at Golders Green crematorium. MacColl’s early writings praised the modernist artists of French impressionists and the English followers. He frequently criticized the conservatism of the Royal Academy. It was largely through MacColl’s efforts that the National Art Collections Fund was founded in 1903. During the 1920s MacColl lobbied hard for the repair (instead of destruction) of John Rennie’s Waterloo Bridge, which had begun to collapse. Despite his efforts, the bridge was demolished.


Selected Bibliography

and Harrison, Jane Ellen. Greek Vase Paintings: a Selection of Examples. London: T. F. Unwin, 1894; Confessions of a Keeper and Other Papers. New York: Macmillan, 1931; [abridged version] What is Art? and Other Papers. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1940.


Sources

MacColl, Dugald S. “A Batch of Memories.” Week-End Review December 20, 1930; Grimsditch, H. B. and Upstone, Robert. “MacColl, Dugald Sutherland (1859-1948).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Borland, Maureen. D. S. MacColl. Harpenden, UK: Lennard Publishing, 1995.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "MacColl, D. S.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/maccolld/.


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Keeper of the Tate, 1907-1911 and Wallace Collection, 1911-1924; early British exponent of French Impressionism. MacColl was the son of the Reverend Dugald MacColl (1826-1882) and Janet Scott Mathieson (MacColl) (d. 1895). He was educated at Glasg

Lythgoe, Albert M.

Full Name: Lythgoe, Albert M.

Gender: male

Date Born: 1868

Date Died: 1934

Subject Area(s): Egyptian (ancient)


Overview

Founder of the departments of Egyptian art for both the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In 1905, while excavating for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in Egypt, he met William M. Laffan the collector and friend of the financier and collector J. P. Morgan (1837-1913). Morgan, chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s board of directors, was interested in forming an Egyptian Department similar to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Laffan’s approval of Lythgoe convinced Morgan to hire him away from Boston. In 1906 Lythgoe resigned from both his Harvard lectureship and the Boston Museum to become the first curator of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan. Lythgoe invited his former Harvard student, Herbert Eustis Winlock, to join the staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s expedition in Egypt. Winlock later rose through the ranks under Lythgoe, from assistant curator of Egyptian art Lythgoe spent the next ten years making extraordinary finds for the Met in Egypt. At the Metropolitan, Lythgoe hired the Oxford scholar Arthur C. Mace (1874-1928), Ambrose Lansing (1891-1959), and Charles Wilkinson, who later founded the Metropolitan’s Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. in 1907, Lythgoe and his staff excavated the pyramids at Lisht, in 1908 the Oasis of Kharga and in 1910 Luxor (Thebes), the seat of the XI Dynasty. Lythgoe’s friendship with millionaire Edward S. Harkness (1874-1940) brought donations from him and Henry Walters (1848-1931), then on the board of the Metropolitan and later founder of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. Winlock eventually succeeding Lythgoe as curator of Egyptian art when Lythgoe retired in 1929.



Sources

Tomkins, Calvin. Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2nd. ed. New York: Henry Holt, 1989, pp. 136-39.




Citation

"Lythgoe, Albert M.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/lythgoea/.


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Founder of the departments of Egyptian art for both the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In 1905, while excavating for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in Egypt, he met William M. Laffan

Lynton, Norbert Caspar Loewenstein

Full Name: Lynton, Norbert Caspar Loewenstein

Other Names:

  • Norbert Lynton

Gender: male

Date Born: 27 September 1927

Date Died: 30 October 2007

Place Born: Berlin, Germany

Place Died: Brighton, Brighton and Hove, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Career(s): educators


Overview

Modernist art historian and critic; Professor, University of Sussex, Brighton, 1976-1989. The son of a Jewish father, the Berlin publisher Paul Loewenstein (who took the name Lynton in 1944), and a Roman Catholic mother Amalie, Lynton’s family emigrated to London in 1935 as the Nazi’s power in Germany consolidated. When his father’s attempts at a dressmaking business in London failed, Lynton and his brothers were sent back to Germany to continue their education, but recalled in 1938 just as the Holocaust intensified. Lynton studied at Douai, the Benedictine school near Reading. He entered the University of London, Birkbeck College, the University’s night school for mature students, taking courses from Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner and assisting him with his Buildings of England series. It was Pevsner, who despite Lynton’s interest in music, convinced him to study art history at the Courtauld Institute. He married Janet Irving in 1949 (divorced in 1968). After graduating from the Courtauld, Lynton joined Leeds College of Art in 1951 as a lecturer in the School of Architecture and then the School of Art in 1955. Leeds was directed by Harry Thubron (1915-1985) and assisted by E. J. Victor Pasmore (1908-1998), Terry Frost (1915-2003) and Tom Hudson (1922-1997), all of who were modernizing art education under the principles of Herbert Read. Lynton learned under these revolutionizing educators. He soon moved his courses into teaching 20th-century art at summer school, the artist Bridget Riley was among his early students. In 1961 he was appointed Senior lecturer (and later head of the Department of Art and General Studies) at Chelsea School of Art, London. The same year he became London correspondent for the Art International (through 1966) and separated from his first wife to live with a former student, Sylvia Towning. He reviewed for Art News and Review, replacing Lawrence Alloway at Alloway’s suggestion, for Art International. When Patrick Heron (1920-1999) retired from art criticism at The Guardian, Lynton assumed his role in 1965, competing with the substantially methodologically different critics David Sylvester and John Berger (Times) In 1970 he relinquished both positions to become the Director of Exhibition for the Arts Council of Great Britain. There he mounted shows including “Art in Revolution: Soviet Art and Design since 1917” in 1971, “Pioneers of Modern Sculpture,” 1973 and, in 1974, “Edvard Munch” as well as a succession of contemporary one-person exhibitions by Lucian Freud, Diane Arbus, Morris Louis and Antoni Tàpies. Lynton invited Tate curator Ann Seymour to create the show “The New Art” for the Hayward, a project impossible at her own institution (Independent). His shows treating photography as an art form, unusual for the time in London, raised the profile of the Hayward. He resigned from the Art Council in 1975 after difficulties with its notoriously difficult chairman of the Art Panel, John Pope-Hennessy. After a year teaching at the Open University, Lynton joined the University of Sussex, Brighton as professor. From 1975 he also lectured as professor at the School for European Studies. Lynton wrote The Story of Modern Art in 1980 as an attempt to update The Story of Art by E. H. Gombrich. He acted as School for European Studies’ Dean between 1985 and 1988. in 1985 he was appointed a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, London, which he held until 1999. In 1987 he mounted the British Council Henry Moore exhibition in Delhi, India, and for the exhibition “Picturing People in Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong and Singapore” during 1989-1990 year. He retired from both Sussex (emeritus) and lecturing at the School for European Studies in 1989. His second marriage to Towning ended in 1989 when his affair with another woman became known (Telegraph). Another Henry Moore exhibition under his aegis was held between 1991 and 1992 in Leningrad, Moscow and Helsinki. Lynton’s book on Vladimir Tatlin was posthumously published in 2009. Lynton was not an infallible eye. He deplored late Picasso (in a famous review of the Grand Palais show in 1966), and later, Francis Bacon. His Story of Modern Art was criticized for ignoring new art historical approaches–social and feminist; he approached art from the point of view of the artist, largely formal values.


Selected Bibliography

Ben Nicholson. London : Phaidon Press, 1993; Henry Moore: the Human Dimension. London: HMF Enterprises for the Henry Moore Foundation in association with the British Council/Lund Humphries, 1991; The Story of Modern Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980; and Russell, John. William Scott. London : Thames & Hudson, 2004; and Langmuir, Erika. The Yale Dictionary of Art and Artists. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.


Sources

The Writers Directory 2005. Chicago: St. James Press. vol.1, p. 1051; “Professor Norbert Lynton” [Dept. of Art History hompage, University of Sussex.} http://www.sussex.ac.uk/arthistory/profile1664; [honorary awards announcement, University of Brighton, 17.07.2003] http://www.brighton.ac.uk/news/2003/030717honorarygrads.php?PageId=804; [obituaries:] “Professor Norbert Lynton, Prolific art critic who organised major exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery and taught at Sussex University.” Daily Telegraph [London] November 13, 2007, p. 27, “Professor Norbert Lynton, Art historian and critic who directed the Hayward Gallery in its heyday and later taught at Sussex.” Independent (London), November 7, 2007, p. 44, “Professor Norbert Lynton.” Times (London), November 6, 2007, p. 67.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Lynton, Norbert Caspar Loewenstein." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/lyntonn/.


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Modernist art historian and critic; Professor, University of Sussex, Brighton, 1976-1989. The son of a Jewish father, the Berlin publisher Paul Loewenstein (who took the name Lynton in 1944), and a Roman Catholic mother Amalie, Lynton’s family emi

Lynes, Russell, Jr.

Full Name: Lynes, Russell, Jr.

Other Names:

  • Russell Lynes Jr.

Gender: male

Date Born: 1910

Date Died: 1991

Place Born: Great Barrington, Berkshire, MA, USA

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): American (North American)

Career(s): art critics


Overview

President of the Archives of American Art and columnist for Art in America. Lynes was the son of an Episcopal minister, Joseph Russell Lynes and Adelaide Sparkman (Lynes). Lynes was raised in the Berkshires area of Massachusetts and later in New York. He attended Yale University, graduating in 1932. Initially he worked at a clerk at the publisher Harper & Brothers between 1932 and 1936. He married the art historian Mildred Akin in1934. He briefly took a position as director of publications at Vassar College in 1937 before working as an assistant school principal (1937-40) and principal 1940-44 at the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, PA. During World War II, he served in the pre-induction unit of the Army Service Forces (a civilian position) of the United States War Department, between 1942-44. Lynes began a long association with Harper’s magazine by writing the column “After Hours” and working as an assistant editor for the magazine, 1944-47. He rose to managing editor, 1947-67. Lynes also authored a feature in Art in America called “The State of Taste.” He was a founding member of the Archives of American Art in 1961, serving as its president from 1966-71. He was also a founding member of the Landmarks Preservation Commission of New York, serving between 1962-69. His Art-makers (1970) was a popular survey of 19th-century art production. In 1973 he published a history of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and in the 1980’s penned an monthly piece for Architectural Digest called “Russell Lynes Observes.” He died of heart failure in 1991 New York city. Lynes’ interest was in the social phenomenon of art. He wrote numerous books and articles on taste. His books on American taste and manners. In books such as Snobs, The Tastemakers, and Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow, were satirical and popular. Lynes criticized American conservative preferences in art and architecture along with a general ridicule of pretentious people.


Selected Bibliography

Good Old Modern: an Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Atheneum, 1973; The Art-makers of Nineteenth-century America. New York, Atheneum, 1970; Architecture in America: a Photographic History from the Colonial Period to the Present. New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1960; The Tastemakers. New York: Harper, 1954; More than Meets the Eye: the History and Collections of Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Design. New York: Smithsonian Institution, 1981.


Sources

Lynes, Russell. Good Old Modern: an Intimate Portrait of The Museum of Modern Art. New York: Atheneum, 1973, p. 493; Lynes, Russell. Life in the Slow Lane: Observations on Art, Architecture, Manners, and Other Such Spectator Sports. New York: HarperCollins, 1991; Confessions of a Dilettante. New York: Harper & Row, 1966; [obituary:] Severo, Richard. “Russell Lynes, 80, an Editor and Arbiter of Taste.” The New York Times, September 16, 1991.




Citation

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President of the Archives of American Art and columnist for Art in America. Lynes was the son of an Episcopal minister, Joseph Russell Lynes and Adelaide Sparkman (Lynes). Lynes was raised in the Berkshires area of Massachusetts and later

Lyna, Frédéric

Full Name: Lyna, Frédéric

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Belgium

Subject Area(s): manuscripts (documents)


Overview

Manuscripts scholar.


Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] “Bibliographie de Frédéric Lyna”: Miscellanea F. Lyna. Scriptorium 23. Ghent: E. Story-Scientia, 1969. pp. vii-x;


Sources

Hommage à Fre´de´ric Lyna. Ghent: E. Story-Scientia, 1979.




Citation

"Lyna, Frédéric." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/lynaf/.


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Manuscripts scholar.

Lützow, Karl F. A. von

Full Name: Lützow, Karl F. A. von

Other Names:

  • Carl F. A. Lützow

Gender: male

Date Born: 1832

Date Died: 1897

Place Born: Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany

Place Died: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Home Country/ies: Germany


Overview

Lützow and Wilhelm Lübke continued the Denkmäler der Kunst of August von Voit, which began as an atlas to the Handbuch der kunstgeschichte by Franz Kugler. The added the explanatory text. In 1871, Lützow was among the team of art historians (the others including Moritz Thausing, Alfred Woltmann, Adolf von Bayersdorfer, Friedrich Lippmann, Wilhelm Lübke, Bruno Meyer, Karl Woermann, G. Malsz and Wilhelm Bode) who convened in Dresden to determine which of two versions of Hans Holbein the younger’s Meyer Madonna was the autograph work. The so-called “Holbein convention,” one of the important events in nineteenth-century art history when many methodical approaches were employed to determined authenticity, concluded that the Darmstadt version was the original.


Selected Bibliography

Die Völker des Orients (Karl Schnasse, see that entry for full details). Volume I of Geschichte der Bildenden Kunst. 2nd ed. 8 vols. Stuttgart: Ebner & Seubert, 1866-79; and Guhl, Ernst, and Caspar, Josef, and Lübke, Wilhelm. Denkmäler der Kunst zur übersicht ihres Entwickelungsganges von den ersten künstlerischen Versuchen bis zu den Standpunkten der Gegenwart. (new, 2-volume edition). Verlag von Ebner & Seubert, 1858.


Sources

Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 254-6; Kultermann, Udo. The History of Art History. New York: Abaris, 1993, p. 145.




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"Lützow, Karl F. A. von." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/lutzowk/.


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Lützow and Wilhelm Lübke continued the Denkmäler der Kunst of August von Voit, which began as an atlas to the Handbuch der kunstgeschichte by Franz Kugler. The added the ex