Art Historians

Lilienfeld, Karl

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lilienfeld, Karl

Gender: male

Date Born: 1885

Date Died: 1966

Place Born: Leipzig, Saxony, Germany

Place Died: Cademario, Ticino, Switzerland

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Netherlandish and Northern Renaissance

Career(s): art dealers

Overview

Historian of Netherlandish art and gallery dealer. Lilienfeld studied at the universities of Leipzig and Halle and Berlin where he studied under Adolph Goldschmidt. He moved to the Hague where he worked as the assistant the eminent private art historian, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot in Amsterdam. He collaborated Hofstede on a revision of John Smith‘s 1829 Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters, known as the Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis. In 1911 he became the assistant director of the Royal Gallery in the Hague. His volumes for the Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis (volume 5) began appearing in 1912. He authored numerous entries for the Künstler-Lexikon of Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker. That same year Lilienfeld returned to Leipzig to head the modern art department of the Kunstverein (museum). In 1914 he published a monograph on the Netherlandish painter, Arent de Gelder: sein Leben und seine Kunst. The same year he assisted authoring the text for a catalog of the art collection of brewer Josef W. J. Cremer (1845-1938) with Hermann Voss. Following World War I he married Violette Lechesne. In 1926 he went to New York to lead the van Diemen Gallery. The Gallery represented Old Masters ranging from Frans Hals, Rubens to Tiepolo. Later he added French Impressionists. In 1930 he divorced, married Margarete Pohl and settled in New York permanently. The Gallery became Van Diemen Lilienfeld Galleries. His nephew, Horst Gerson, was also an art historian who studied under Cornelis Hofstede de Groot. [Published accounts that, Julia Lilienfeld Berg (1881-1970), wife of Bauhaus artist Lyonel Feininger, was his sister, are incorrect; they are not related].

Selected Bibliography

Arent de Gelder: sein Leben und seine Kunst. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1914; and Freise, Kurt, and Wichmann, Heinrich, eds. Rembrandts Handzeichnungen. 2 vols. Parchim i. Mecklenburg: H. Freise, 1912; Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts: nach dem Muster John Smith’s catalogue raisonné. vols 5, 6, 7. Esslingen am Neckar: Paul Neff Verlag, 1912, 1915,1918, English, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century: based on the Work of John Smith. vols 5, 6, 7. London: Macmillan, 1912, 1915,1918; and Voss, Hermann, and Winkler, Friedrich. Collection Geh[eime] Kommerzienrat [i.e., Josef Cremer, Dortmund]. s. l.: s. n., 1914.

Sources

“Dr. Karl Lilienfeld, 81, Dies: President of Galleries Here.” New York Times September 21, 1966, p. 47; Who Was Who in American Art 2 (1999): 2025; personal correspondence, Bettina Lilienfeld, March, 2009.

Ligorio, Pirro

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Ligorio, Pirro

Gender: male

Date Born: 1510

Date Died: 1583

Place Born: Naples, Campania, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

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

Institution(s): Court of Alphonse II

Overview

Architect; antiquario for Alphonse II; scholar of Rome; encyclopedic art history of classical world.

Selected Bibliography

Libro delli antichità. 1553

Sources

Bazin 79-80

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Architect; antiquario for Alphonse II; scholar of Rome; encyclopedic art history of classical world.

Lightbown, R. W.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lightbown, R. W.

Other Names:

Ronald William Lightbown

Gender: male

Date Born: 1932

Place Born: UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, Renaissance, and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Botticelli and Italian Renaissance sculpture scholar. Lightbown’s parents were Vincent Lightbown and Helen Anderson (Lightbown). Lightbown received an M.A from Cambridge University, joining the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as an assistant keeper in 1958. He married Mary Dorothy Webster, also an art historian, in 1962. He and John Pope-Hennessy wrote the catalog to sculpture for the V&A, issued in 1964. Lightbown rose to deputy keeper in 1973. He was a visiting fellow at Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI in 1974. Lightbown was made keeper of the library in 1976 and later Keeper of Metalwork. Lightbown published a magisterial two-volume study of Sandro Botticelli in 1978, one which established him as a documents scholar as well as a connoisseur. He followed with a patronage study of Donatello and a catalogue raisonné of Andrea Mantegna in 1986. In 1989, however, the V&A director Elizabeth Esteve-Coll instituted a restructuring of the museum for financial savings, consolidated the departments of ceramics, metalwork and sculpture, forcing the retirement of Lightbown and ceramics curator John Mallet, among others. A very public controversy ensued about the Museum saving money by force-retiring its departmental scholars. Lightbown’s scholarship is noted for its studies of patronage issues of the Renaissance.

Selected Bibliography

and Pope-Hennessy, John. Catalogue of Italian Sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum. 3 vols. London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1964; Introduction to An Essay towards an English School of Painting. London: Cornmarket Press, 1969; Sandro Botticelli. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978; Secular French Goldsmiths’ Work of the Middle Ages. London: Thames & Hudson, 1978; and Corbett, M. The Comely Frontspiece. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979; Donatello and Michelozzo: an Artistic Partnership and Its Patrons in the Early Renaissance. 2 vols. London: Harvey MIller, 1980; Mantegna: with a Complete Catalogue of Paintings, Drawings, and Prints. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986; Piero della Francesca. New York: Abbeville Press, 1992; Carlo Crivelli. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

Sources

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. 118; Pierce, Andrew. “Curators take their Leave from V & A; Victoria and Albert Museum.” Times (London), March 24 1989.

Liebreich, Aenne

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Liebreich, Aenne

Other Names:

Annette Liebreich

Gender: female

Date Born: 02 July 1899

Date Died: 1939-1940

Place Born: Bocholt, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

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

Home Country/ies: France and Germany

Subject Area(s): textile art (visual works)

Institution(s): Université de Paris (Sorbonne)

Overview

Assistant professor; specialist in medieval Burgundian sculpture, particularly Claus Sluter, as well as medieval painting and illumination and costume studies. Liebreich was born in Bocholt, Germany in 1899 to Max Liebreich, a manufacturer, and an undocumented mother. Liebreich earned her abitur in 1921. From 1921 to 1925 she studied art history, history, and archaeology in Munich, Berlin, and Bonn under Paul Clemen and Adolph Goldschmidt. Liebreich earned her doctorate in 1925 at Bonn under Clemen. From 1926 to 1927, she trained at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne, where she compiled the catalog of medieval miniatures and organized exhibitions in the Kupferstichkabinett. Liebreich became an assistant at the Art History Institute of the University of Kiel in 1927, working under Arthur Haseloff. Her work consisted of maintaining the library and photo and slide collection, preparing lectures, and supervising students. Her dissertation, Kostümgeschichtliche Studien zur kölnischen Malerei des 14. Jahrhunderts (Costume-Historical Studies on Cologne Painting of the 14th Century), was published in the Jahrbuch der Kunstwissenschaft in 1928. Liebreich, being Jewish, was dismissed from her position on June 30, 1933, for being “non-Aryan” under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. She subsequently emigrated and moved to France with the assistance of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (now the Council for At-Risk Academics). Her habilitation, a monograph on Claus Sluters, was scheduled for the 1933 summer term; however, it was obstructed by the Nazi racial laws. From 1933 to 1936, Liebreich worked at the medieval department of the Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie of the Sorbonne under Henri Focillon. Her work included research activity and lecturing on German Gothic architecture. Liebreich reworked her habilitation into a PhD thesis at the Université de Paris (Sorbonne) and earned another doctorate in 1936, financed by the Rockefeller Foundation. Her book Claus Sluter was published in 1936. Lacking a permanent appointment, she attempted to find new scholarly activity, including with the SPSL in London. She participated in the 16th Congrès de l’Association bourguignonne des sociétés savantes in June 1939 and in the International Congress of Art Historians in London in July 1939. Liebreich died by suicide in the winter of 1939–40.

Liebreich’s habilitation work on Claus Sluter was well-received by its readers, among them Martin Wackernagel and Karl Koetschau. Henri Focillon also praised her work on Burgundy and fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sculpture, in particular her analysis of the Calvaire de Champmol.

Selected Bibliography

“Der mittelrheinische Altar im Erzbischöflichen Museum zu Utrecht.” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 3, no. 4 (1927): 130–140;
[dissertation:] “Kostümgeschichtliche Studien zur kölnischen Malerei des 14. Jahrhunderts.” Bonn, 1910, published, Jahrbuch der Kunstwissenschaft 5 (1928): 65–104, 129–156;
and David, Henri: “Le calvaire de Champmol et l’art de Sluter.” Bulletin Monumental 92, no. 4 (1933): 419–467;
Claus Sluter. Brussels: Dietrich, 1936;
“L’Annonciation d’Aix-en-Provence.” Gazette des beaux-arts 19 (1938): 63–76.

Sources

Lange, Barbara. “Aenne Liebreich (1899–1939/40): Dr. phil. – Habilitation unerwünscht!” In Kunstgeschichte in Kiel: 100 Jahre Kunsthistorisches Institut der Christian-Albrechts-Universität, 1893-1993. Edited by Hans-Dieter Nägelke, 45–51. Kiel: Rektorat der Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 1994;
Lange, Barbara. “Aenne Liebreich: Facetten einer Hochschulkarriere in den zwanziger und dreißiger Jahren.” Kritische Berichte 22, no. 4 (1994): 22–34;
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. 424–26.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen and Lindsay Dial

Lieberman, Bill

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lieberman, William

Other Names:

Bill Lieberman
William S Lieberman
William Lieberman
William Slattery Lieberman

Gender: male

Date Born: 14 February 1924

Date Died: 31 May 2005

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): American (North American) and Modern (style or period)

Career(s): administrators, art historians, and curators

Institution(s): Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art

Overview

MoMA and Metropolitan Museum curator, major exponent of prints and modern art in general; founding member of the Print Council of America. Lieberman’s father, Max Lieberman (1893-1959), was a scholar of late medieval church history (Ph.D. Sorbonne), and his mother Bertha Slattery (Lieberman) (1897-1958), an Irish Catholic school teacher. His family had independent means; Lieberman was born in Paris when the family was living there. The family friends included Picasso, Matisse and Gertrude Stein (Meech). The Lieberman’s returned to the United States in the mid 1930s (Max had graduated from City College of New York) with hostilities in Europe growing (Max was of German-Jewish decent). William Lieberman attended the private Townsend Harris High School. He graduated from Swarthmore College with honors in English, and a minor in medieval history in 1943. As a gay man, he was not a candidate for military service as many men his age were during World War II. One of his mentors at Swarthmore, the poet W. H. Auden, recommended him to Monroe Wheeler (1899-1988), director of the Department of Exhibitions and Publications of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the same year, for a job.

Lieberman interned the summer (without pay) under Wheeler, before participating in the Harvard Fogg art museum course on museology. The course, Paul J. Sachs’ infamous ‘museum course’ taught the fundamentals of connoisseurship and museum studies for many future art historians. Lieberman also cited Harvard’s Jacob Rosenberg as inspiring his interest in prints (Castleman). Lieberman joined MoMA’s staff in 1945 as an assistant (officially, “secretary”) to its founding director, Alfred H. Barr. Jr. In 1949 he became director of the Museum’s new department of prints, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Print Room, within the Museum. He developed the Art Lending Service in which other museums could be lent a selection of graphics from MoMA. Lieberman experimented with the mass-market paperback publishing with Pablo Picasso: Blue and Rose Periods in 1954. One of the few monographs published outside the Museum appeared in 1956, Matisse: 50 Years of his Graphic Art. The same year assisted in founding The Print Council of America. MoMA’s print collection became an independent entity within the Museum in 1960 as Department of Drawings and Prints; Lieberman was appointed its curator.

In 1966, he was named that Department’s director. As director, he expanded the collection to include drawings. The following year he was appointed MoMA’s curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture. In that position, he mounted, among many exhibitions, the first retrospective exhibition of Jackson Pollocks’ work in 1967. By 1969 he was the director of the Painting and Sculpture department. When the Museum’s prints and drawings department split, Lieberman assumed the directorship of Prints in 1971. There he chose Bernice Rose of the Museum as his curator. Lieberman was part of a group, formed in 1972, to authenticate thousands of works by Pollock. The result was the four-volume catalogue raisonné published in 1978. In 1979, he left MoMA to become Chair of the Twentieth-Century Art Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His last show for the MoMA was ‘Art of the Twenties’. At the Metropolitan he was Jacques and Natasha Gelman Chairman of the Department of Twentieth-Century Art. He advised on modern art and continued his valuable connections with many in the art world. He died of cardiopulmonary arrest at his home in New York.

Lieberman not only organized numerous important exhibitions of prints, drawings, and paintings, but he was also a powerhouse in his ability to acquire gifts to those institutions. This included works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Joan Miró, and Henri Matisse. While at the Modern, he purchased the bulk of Gertrude Stein’s collection, which included over thirty-eight works by Picasso and Juan Gris. His personal works-on-paper collection included a substantial amount of Japanese prints, of which he was also an expert. During his long career in the museum world, he wrote dozens of articles and contributed to a wide variety of exhibition catalogs and books.

Selected Bibliography

Pablo Picasso: Blue and Rose Periods. Pocket Books, Inc (series) H. N. Abrams, 1954;
Matisse: 50 Years of his Graphic Art. New York: G. Braziller, 1956;
[numerous art exhibition catalogs for MoMA]
Pablo Picasso: Blue and Rose Periods. New York, H. N. Abrams, 1971;
and Eugene Victor Thaw, Lee Krasner, Francis V. O’Connor and Donald McKinney. Jackson Pollock: a Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works. 4 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978;
The Art of the Twenties. [exhibition catalog] Museum of Modern Art, 1979
The Nelson A. Rockefeller Collection: Masterpieces of Modern Art. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1981.

Sources

[obituaries] Glueck, Grace. “William Lieberman, 82, Prominent Curator, Dies.” New York Times, June 3, 2005;
Castleman, Riva. “William S. Lieberman.” Print Quarterly 22 no. 4 (December 2005): 460-461;

“The Beginnings of the Print Council of America.” in, Zigrosser, Carl. A World of Art and Museums. Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1975, pp. 294ff;
NYC LGBT Historic Sites. (website) https://www.nyclgbtsites.org/site/museum-of-modern-art/;
Meech, Julia. “William Slattery Lieberman (1923-2005): Curator and Collector.” Impressions: official publication of the Ukiyo-e Society of America 28 no. 3 (March 2006): 104-112.

Lichtwark, Alfred

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lichtwark, Alfred

Other Names:

"k", pseudonym

Gender: male

Date Born: 1852

Date Died: 1914

Place Born: Hamburg, Germany

Place Died: Hamburg, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): art theory

Overview

Art Historian and pedagogical reformer, founder of the “Experiential Art Appreciation” method of teaching. He was born in Reitbrook, Germany, which is part of present-day Hamburg, Germany. After graduating from the university, Lichtwark worked as a teacher. In 1878 he began attending the lectures of Justus Brinckmann who had founded the Hamburg Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe the year before. Brinckmann introduced Lichtwark to the Hamburg industrialist Call Kall. Kall came to consider Lichtwark his son and paid for Lichtwark to study art history under Anton Springer in Leipzig. Lichtwark moved to Berlin where Brinckmann got him a job in Berlin’s Kunstgewerbemuseum under Julius Lessing. Lichtwark travelled in the intellectual circles of Berlin, making the acquaintance of important art scholars, such as Herman Grimm and museum directors Woldemar von Seidlitz, Hugo von Tschudi, Richard Schöne and Wilhelm Bode. He wrote art reviews for various Berlin newspapers under the pseudonym “k”, beginning with the Nationalzeitung in 1881. When the city council of Hamburg mandated a director for their art museum, Lichtwark, native son and Berlin-experienced, was appointed Director of the Kunsthalle in 1886. He reatined the position he retained until his death. The same year he launched the Gesellschaft der Hamburger Kunstfreunde (Hamburg Commission of Friends of Art), a group to intended to nurture the training of artists. Lichtwark saw children’s art education as critical. In 1897 he initiated the “Child as Artist” (Das Kind als Künstler) exhibition, which provided a forum for his beliefs. Lichtwark built on the notion, popular throughout Europe at the time, to cultivate appreciation and production of art (and particularly crafts) by learning the techniques of production directly. A similar impulse occurred in England with William Morris’ Arts and Crafts Movement. Lichtwark’s ideas, known as Kunsterziehungsbewegung, resounded through art schools and museums, resulting in exhibitions appealing to children and non-art specialists. One of the neighborhood children who visited his home (the Villa Liebermann of Max Liebermann) was the future art historian Otto von Simson. Udo Kultermann sites Lichtwark among those Gründerzeit museum directors, along with Bode, Brinckmann, von Seidlitz, and Karl Woermann, as responsible for the formation of art history by virtue of their scholarship and interest in museum training. His lectures (along with those of Brinckmann) inspired the modernist art historian Rosa Schapire to become an art historian.

Selected Bibliography

übungenin der betrachtung von Kunstwerken. Dresden: G. Kühtmann, 1898; Julius Oldach: hamburgische Künstler. Hamburg: Kunsthalle, 1899.

Sources

Der Brockhaus: Enzyklopädie; J. Gebhard: A. Lichtwark u. die Kunsterziehungsbewegung in Hamburg (1947); Präffcke, Hans. Der Kunstbegriff Alfred Lichtwarks. Hildeshiem: G. Olms, 1986; Leppien, Helmut R. Kunst ins Leben: Alfred Lichtwarks Wirken für die Kunsthalle und Hamburg von 1886 bis 1914. Hamburg: Die Kunsthalle, 1987; Kultermann, Udo. The History of Art History. New York: Abaris, 1993, pp. 126-7, 138; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 239-42; Kay, Carolyn Helen. Art and the German Bourgeoisie: Alfred Lichtwark and Modern Painting in Hamburg, 1886-1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.

Licht, Fred

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Licht, Fred

Other Names:

Fred Stephen Licht

Gender: male

Date Born: 1928

Place Born: Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): museums (institutions), painting (visual works), restoration (process), and Spanish (culture or style)

Career(s): directors (administrators) and museum directors

Overview

Goya scholar and academic museum director; co-founder of the committee to rescue works of art ravaged by the floods in Florence in 1966. Licht’s father was Austrian, Arnold Berman Licht (b. 1889), a raincoat manufacturer working in the Amsterdam at the time of his son’s birth. He and his family lived in Berlin. As tensions against Jews mounted in Germany, Licht’s family left Berlin two weeks before Kristallnacht for Amsterdam. He fled again to Paris and in 1941 to Genoa, Italy. Denied entrance to the United States, Licht, alone, emigrated to Panama in 1941 at age 13 and then to New York. He attended Stuyvesant high school in the city and then, as a late teen, entered the University of Wisconsin, Madison, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1946. After receiving his B.A from Wisconsin in 1948, he continued graduate work at the University of Basel. His Ph.D. was awarded there in 1952 with a dissertation topic on Poussin. Licht lectured at Princeton University as an instructor in art history beginning the following year. He moved to Williams College, Williamstown, MA, appointed assistant professor of art history in 1958 (through 1961). While at Williams, he met an NYU a graduate student of Richard Krautheimer, Margarite “Meg” Meinecke (b. 1926), whom he married in 1959. Licht was awarded a Fulbright scholarship for 1961, researching in Italy. He remained in Italy a second year, moving to Venice where he met the expatriate collector Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979). Licht was hired to teach at a new, state-funded art school embedded at the Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota. However, the school folded the following year and he accepted the position of associate professor at Brown University, Providence, RI, in 1965. In November of the following year, the disastrous flood of the Arno River in Florence severely damaged important Renaissance art works of the city. Together with his wife and fellow Brown art professor Bates Lowry, Licht contacted art professionals across the United States to enlist support. Their efforts resulted in the establishment of the Committee to Rescue Italian Art (CRIA or “cry” in Italian), which grew to 65 chapters, raising $1.75 million. With Lowry’s departure to MoMA in 1968, Licht became head of art department at Brown. He and his family moved to Italy to oversee the CRIA program, directing Florida State University’s art study campus located in the Villa Fabricotti in Florence. Ever an exponent of modern art, Licht was appointed a member of board of trustees of Peggy Guggenheim Foundation in Venice in 1968. During these years in Europe, Licht began focusing on what would become his area of specialty, the interpretation of the work of the Spanish artist Francisco Goya. His first book on the artist appeared in 1970. Licht returned to the U.S. when Italy’s red brigade fostered anti-western sentiment. He was a visiting professor of art at Williams. A second Goya book, a collection of primary sources and historiographic excerpts, was issued in 1973. Licht taught at Florida State University between 1973 and 1978. Princeton University hired him, again, this time as director of its art museum with the rank of professor in 1978. One of his first decisions was the accept for Princeton George Segal’s ” Sacrifice of Isaac” sculpture, a memorial to the student slayings at Kent State, which the Ohio school had rejected. Licht’s monograph of Goya, Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art appeared in 1979. After Guggenheim’s death in 1979, Licht re-engaged with her museum in Venice. He became professor of art at Boston University in 1980. Concomitant with his Boston appointment, Licht was appointed curator of the Collezione Peggy Guggenheim. He retired Emeritus from Boston.

As an art historian, Licht’s approach to art is one of art as reflecting the spirit of an age (Geistesgeschichte), a methodology employed by an earlier generation of scholars, most notably Theodor Hetzer. His work on Goya was particularly well suited for the approach. Though not the first art historian to do so, Licht argued Goya’s place as the first truly modern artist. Students recalled him as a spell-binding lecturer.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Die Entwicklung der Landschaft in den Werken von Nicolas Poussin. Basel, 1952, published, Birkhauser, 1954; Sculpture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1967; Goya. L’Oeil, 1970; Goya in Perspective. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973; Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art. New York: Universe Books, 1979; and Satta, Antonello, and Ingersoll, Richard. Nivola: Sculpture. Milan: Jaca Book, 1991; and Weber, Nicholas Fox. Josef Ambers: Glass, Color, and Light. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1994; and Ashton, Dore. Pablo Picasso: L’atelier. Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 1996.

Sources

“U.S. Expert Sees Repair of Italian Art Taking 20 Years.” New York Times November 15, 1966, p. 3; Glueck, Grace. “Princeton Takes Sculpture Rejected at Kent State; The Impropriety of Violence Art With Contemporary Appeal.” New York Times November 18, 1978, p. 23; personal correspondence, Daniel Licht, July, 2009 and May, 2019.

Lewis, Samella

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lewis, Samella Sanders

Other Names:

Samella S. Lewis
Samella Sanders

Gender: female

Date Born: 27 February 1924

Place Born: New Orleans, Orleans, LA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Career(s): art historians, curators, and publishers

Institution(s): Scripps College

Overview

Curator and historian of African-American art; first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in art history. Lewis was a student at Dillard University in New Orleans, LA, and began her art career there under the tutelage of African-American sculptor and printmaker, Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012). At one of her instructor’s suggestions, Lewis transferred to Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia, where she earned her B.A. in art history in 1945. Lewis completed her graduate studies at Ohio State University, earning her M.A. degree in 1948. That same year she married Paul G. Lewis and moved to Los Angeles, where she taught at Cal State Long Beach while finishing her doctoral dissertation (1951).

As a practicing artist, she cultivated close relationships with several other African-American artists, including Romare Bearden (1914-1988). Lewis carefully documented her contact with artists through interviews, photographs, and manuscripts, creating a substantial archival resource for other scholars of African-American art. In 1953, she organized the first conference of African-American artists in the United States at Florida A & M University. Lewis moved to State University of New York, Plattsburg, in 1958, where she developed an interest in Asian arts, language, and culture. She traveled to Taiwan on a Fulbright fellowship, and upon her return she became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Lewis became a significant force in the art scene in Los Angeles over the next two decades, and her influence would spread to the rest of the country. In 1969 she became education coordinator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), an opportunity she pursued because she wanted to create new exhibition opportunities for African-American artists. She fought for the hiring of more African Americans by the museum, but after more than a year of constant conflict, she resigned. Before she left, however, she and other constituents founded a group called the Concerned Citizens for Black Art. They set up guidelines and made recommendations to the museum as to what they thought would be more appropriate educational programming. In order to publish Black Artists on Art (1969), a two-volume collection of black artists’ writings, Lewis also founded the first African-American owned art book publishing house, Contemporary Crafts.

As a curator, she organized the first solo exhibition of Betye Saar (b. 1926), and established three galleries in the Los Angeles area, where she also served as one of the founders of the Museum of Afro-American Art. In 1976, she supervised the publication of the scholarly journal, Black Art: An International Quarterly, which became the International Review of African-American Art (IRAAA) in 1984. Lewis became a professor of art history at Scripps College in Claremont, California, in 1970 where she became the first tenured African-American professor at the college. Lewis taught at Scripps until 1984 and now continues to write about, curate, and make art. Lewis was granted the Charles White Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993 and the UNICEF Award for the Visual Arts in 1995. In 2002, Scripps established the Samella Lewis Scholarship for African-American students based on scholastic achievement, excellence in character, leadership, and responsibility. In 2007, the college launched the Samella Lewis Contemporary Art Collection in her honor and with her assistance. She received the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association in 2021.

Selected Bibliography

and Begley, Mary. “Artist Keys Work to Black Experience.” Los Angeles Times, February 8, 1970;
interview by Mason, Karen Anne, African American Artists of Los Angeles, Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles. Transcript, Charles E. Young Research Library, Department of Special Collections, UCLA. March 1992;
with Kebede, Alitash, and Solis, Amando. Samella Lewis: More than Sixty Years of Collecting. Hampton, Va.: Hampton University Museum, 2006;
“Lewis-Clack Exhibit Art at Brockman.” Los Angeles Sentinel, May 15, 1969;
and Wilson, William. “New Volumes Mirror a Feeling of Uneasiness.” Los Angeles Times, December 7, 1969; African-American Art and Artists. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994;
The Art of Elizabeth Catlett, Claremont, CA: Hancraft Studios, 1984;
Black Artists on Art ed. Waddy, Ruth G., Los Angeles: Contemporary Crafts Publishers, 1969-1971;
and Cándida Smith, Richard, [interviewer] Image and belief : Samella Lewis, Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 1999.

Sources

and Julieanna L. Richardson [interviewer]. The HistoryMakers® Video Oral History Interview with Samella Lewis Chicago: The HistoryMakers, 2003-2004;

The International Review of African-American Art vol. 18, no. 1, 2001;
[transcript] Samella Lewis. Interviews with Art Historians, 1991-2002. Getty Research Institute, Malibu, CA;
Samella Lewis, Richmond Times Dispatch, February 1, 2002;
Keith, Naima J. “Samella Lewis,” Hammer Museum, https://hammer.ucla.edu/now-dig-this/artists/samella-lewis

Lévy, Ernst

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lévy, Ernst

Other Names:

Ernst Levy

Gender: male

Date Born: 1895

Date Died: 1981

Place Born: Basel, Basle-Town, Switzerland

Place Died: Morges, Vaud, Switzerland

Home Country/ies: Switzerland

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), French Gothic, Gothic (Medieval), and sculpture (visual works)

Career(s): musicians and pianists

Overview

Swiss composer and pianist who wrote an important treatise on the measurements of Chartres cathedral. Lévy studied in Basle and Paris under the virtuoso Raoul Pugno (1852-1914) and Egon Petri (1881-1962). Beginning in 1916, he taught at Basle Conservatory under the composer Hans Huber (1852-1921), with whom he also studied. When Huber fell ill in the following year, Lévy succeeded him. He moved to Paris in 1921, teaching and founding the Choeur Philharmonique in 1928. The Choeur was responsible for the first Parisian performances of Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem and Liszt’s oratorio Christus. At the outbreak of World War II, Lévy, a Jew, emigrated to the United States to escape the Nazi invasion of France. In the U.S. he concertized and taught, first at the New England Conservatory, and then at Bennington College and the University of Chicago. At Chicago, Lévy came into contact with the German art historian Otto von Simson. The two shared interests in theory, especially medieval. Lévy had studied the writings of Pythagoras and the mathematical similarities between musical scales and star distances explored by Keppler. In this connection, Lévy performed a detailed measurement of Chartres cathedral, whose proportions, he concluded were carefully planned, symbolism thoughtfully organized and “full of musicality.” Lévy joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also teaching at Brooklyn College, CUNY. Simson published Lévy’s measurements as an appendix to Simson’s book on Gothic cathedrals, the same year that Lévy published his findings separately at MIT. He retired in 1966 and returned to Switzerland. Lévy was an accomplished, if unique, pianist and composer whose work on Chartres was his only foray into architectural history. His treatise was superseded in 1961 by the research and measurements of Leonard Cox. Simson used Lévy’s findings as an appendix to his 1956 book The Gothic Cathedral. Despite Lévy’s request that his Chartres work not be used in Simson’s second edition, Simson wrote in that edition that all students of Chartres are in Lévy’s debt.

Selected Bibliography

[bibliography:] Hagmann, Peter, ed. Ernst Levy (1895-1981): Werkverzeichnis/liste des œuvres. Zürich: Schweizerisches Musik-Archiv, 1989; On the Proportions of the South Tower of Chartres Cathedral. Cambridge, MA: Department of Humanities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1956; Des rapports entre la musique et la socie´te´: suivi de Re´flexions. Neuchâtel. Switzerland: E´ditions de la Baconnière, acheve´ d’impr. 1979; and Levarie, Siegmund. A Dictionary of Musical Morphology. Henryville, PA: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1980; Connaissance harmonique [unpublished work, 1950s], English, A Theory of Harmony. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985.

Sources

Manildi, Donald. “Ernst Levy: Forgotten Genius.” http://www.marstonrecords.com/levy/levy_liner.htm; Levarie, Siegmund. “Lévy, Ernst.” Grove Music Online.

Levie, Simon H.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Levie, Simon H.

Other Names:

Simon Levie

Gender: male

Date Born: 1925

Home Country/ies: Netherlands

Overview

Director of the Rijksmuseum. Levie was one of the co-founders of the Rembrandt Research Project with Bob Haak, J. G. van Gelder, J. A. Emmens, Pieter J. J. van Thiel and Josua Bruyn.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Der Maler Daniele da Volterra, 1509-1566. University of Basel, 1952, revised and published under the same titles, Cologne: 1962; and Esmeijer, Anna Catharina, and Hoogewerff, Godefridus Johannes. Jan van Scorel. Utrecht: Centraal Museum, 1955;

Director of the Rijksmuseum. Levie was one of the co-founders of the Rembrandt Research Project with Bob Haak, J. G. van Gelder, J. A. Emmens, Pieter J. J. van Th

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