Art Historians

Levey, Michael, Sir

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Levey, Michael, Sir

Other Names:

Sir Michael Vincent Levey

Gender: male

Date Born: 1927

Date Died: 2008

Place Born: Wimbledon, London, England, UK

Place Died: Lincolnshire, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Ancient Italian, Early Western World, eighteenth century (dates CE), Italian (culture or style), Mediterranean (Early Western World), Venetian (Republic, culture or style), and Viennese

Institution(s): The National Gallery

Overview

Director of the National Gallery, London, 1973-1986; historian of 17th and 18th century art. Levey was born to devout Catholic parents, the Irishman O. L. H. Levey, a civil servant at the Air Ministry, and Britisher Gladys Mary Milestone (Levey). He attended a succession of Catholic boarding schools most notably the Oratory in Reading, where he demonstrated a strong religious faith. Levey was drafted into the Army in World War II, stationed initially in Egypt, rising to captain in the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, 1945-1948. As part of the Royal Education Corps, he was eventually demobilized with the rank of acting major general. Levey attended Exeter College, Oxford, studying under the Chaucer scholar Neville Coghill (1899-1980), obtaining a B.A. in 1950 after only two years. While assisting a girlfriend with her application to a keeper position at the National Gallery, London, he submitted one himself and was hired over her as an assistant keeper in 1951. At the Gallery, Levey served under assistant keeper Martin Davies, and with the other assistant (and legendary) keepers Cecil Gould, Neil MacLaren and Keeper William Pettigrew Gibson. In 1954 he married the novelist and critic Brigid Brophy (1929-1995). As assistant keeper he completed Museum’s catalogs of the 18th-century Italian school (1956), and the German school (1959). He delivered the 1962 Charlton Lecture on Tiepolo’s “Banquet of Cleopatra.” Cambridge University appointed him its Slade Professor of Fine Art, 1963-1964, whose lectures were published as the book Rococo to Revolution, 1966. Levey rose to deputy keeper the same year.

A commissioned volume for the Penguin (publishers) Style and Civilization series, The Early Renaissance, 1967, won the Hawthornden Prize, never previously awarded to a work of non-fiction. Levey was appointed keeper at the Gallery in 1968, the same year his art general-readership volume, History of Western Art, appeared. He delivered the Wrightsman Lectures, New York University also in 1968, published in 1971 as Painting at Court. Levey was appointed director of the National Gallery in 1973 over more senior colleagues, but after the Board’s unanimous first choice, Edmund Pillsbury. As director, Levey was a skilled administrator who, for example, allowed keepers to hang their own galleries. He created new galleries within the existing building, supporting the long and controversial planning of what became the Sainsbury Wing of the Museum. He also instituted a department of education for the museum. Acquisitions under his aegis included the Gallery’s first purchases of Klimt, Matisse and Picasso. Levey also authorized the cleaning of many paintings. In 1972 he and Wend von Kalnein wrote the volume in the Pelican History of Art on eighteenth-century French art. High Renaissance, another book for a general readership, appeared in 1975. In 1981 he delivered the Neurath Lecture, “The Painter Depicted,” and received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth. His wife was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1984. After publicly complaining about the low budget the Gallery had for acquisitions, Levey caught the attention of John Paul Getty II, who donated $25 million for acquisitions. He retired from the Gallery in 1986, stating a need to care for his declining wife. He was succeeded at the Gallery by Neil MacGregor, then the editor of The Burlington Magazine, after the American Edmund Pillsbury of the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth turned the position down. In retirement, Levey wrote Gianbatista Tiepolo: His Life and Art in 1987, which was awarded the Banister Fletcher Prize. Levey held the other Slade Professor of Fine Arts chair, at Oxford University, 1994-95. An updated version of his Pelican History of Art volume, solely on French eighteenth-century art, was issued by Yale University press. He died of a stroke late in 2008.

Levey commanded an excellent writing style and his works were accessible to the general reading public; he never was formally educated in art history. Understanding that a reputation in art history in the 20th century required constant publishing more than original scholarship, his name was constantly in print with novels, literature reviews and biographies. His art history, rooted in connoisseurship and formalism, reflected his admiration for Walter Pater, the subject of one of his many books. In the 1960’s, his Rococo to Revolution became a target for “New Art History” historians. In a 1967 open letter to Levey in the Burlington Magazine, Anita Brookner contrasted his methodology with the need for examining social and political aspects of art. His outspoken wife, highly anti-religious and a bisexual, presented a foil to his elegant demeanor. Levey’s directorship was one characterized by cultivation of internal staff rather than outside hires; his own advancement at the National Gallery was without competition.

Selected Bibliography

Painting in Eighteenth-Century Venice. London: Phaidon, 1959;
Rococo to Revolution: Major Trends in Eighteenth-century Painting. New York, Praeger, 1966;
The Eighteenth Century Italian Schools. London: National Gallery, 1956;
Painting at Court. London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1971;
and Kalnein, Wend von. Art and architecture of the Eighteenth Century in France. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1972;
Painting and Sculpture in France 1700-1789. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993;
The Chapel is on Fire: Reflections of Growing Up. London: Jonathan Cape, 2000.

Sources

[obituaries:] Grimes, Michael. “Sir Michael Levey, 81, Art Historian, is Dead.” New York Times January 3, 2008, p. A16;
“Sir Michael Levey, Director of the National Gallery and Talented Interpreter of Works of Art.” Times (London), December 31, 2008, p. 51;
Mullaly, Terence. “Sir Michael Levey: Leading figure in the British art world and former director of the National Gallery.” Guardian (London) December 30, 2008, p. 32.
[methodological discussion:] Brookner, Anita. “From Anita Brookner to Michael Levey–an Open Letter.” Burlington Magazine 109 (May 1967): 308-310; 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.120 mentioned;Gould, Cecil. “Michael Levey: A Tribute.” Apollo 124 (October 1986): 369 [no biographical information];
Levey, Michael. The Chapel is on Fire: Reflections of Growing Up. London: Jonathan Cape, 2000;
Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series 25: 276-7;

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Lethaby, W. R.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lethaby, W. R.

Other Names:

William Richard Lethaby

Gender: male

Date Born: 1857

Date Died: 1931

Place Born: Barnstaple, Devon, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Overview

One of the most influential architectural historians of the nineteenth century. Lethaby’s father was a gilder and lay preacher; the younger Lethaby was apprenticed in the building crafts as well. Lethaby became an assistant to the architect R. Norman Shaw (1831-1912) between 1879-90, completing his designs and influenced by Norman’s circle of the Art Workers’ Guild. The AWG was a reaction to historicism and the religious high Victorian Gothic style in favor of a more secular Arts-and-Crafts emphasis. Lethaby left Norman’s firm to work on commissions of his own in the 1880s. Around 1885 he became interested in how mystical forces affected architecture. He designed various objects with a lyric iconography (stained glass windows, books, etc.). In 1891 Lethaby published an anomalous book called Architecture, Mysticism and Myth in which he asserted that the various architectural styles were minor reflections of the major impetus of building: a belief in magic. In the broadest view, Lethaby was one of the first to acknowledge the cosmology of religion, myth and architecture. Regardless of his conclusions (and Lethaby himself later confessed he was glad the book had gone out of print), the book was the first to address architectural symbolism. In 1894 he published his first monograph on an individual building, The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople: a Study of Byzantine Building. Methodologically, the book combined the English Arts-and-Crafts approach with a French rationalist tradition, derived from Auguste Choisy and his L’art de bâtir chez les Byzantins (Watkin). Between 1894 and 1918 he acted as Art Inspector to the Technical Education Board of the London County Council. He continued to design original work in various media, producing watercolors, and building structures in a non-historic (though medieval in mindset) until 1902. After that, his efforts were devoted to writing. In 1901 Lethaby was appointed professor of Design and Ornament at the Royal College of Art, a position he held until 1918. He was appointed Surveyor of Westminster Abbey in1906 and used this position to publish a number of detailed surveys of the building. He also worked to reform and influence architectural education throughout Britain, setting up arts and crafts education in the London including the Central School of Arts and Crafts, which he helped found in1896 and for which he was Principal (1902 -1911). He co-founded the Design and Industries Association in 1915 and was a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. He espoused cleaning and conservation of buildings instead of the recreation of them, then considered “restoration” by many zealot architects. In 1927 he retired from the Westminster position. Lethaby’s later writings were inspired by the English translation of Formprobleme der Gotik by Wilhelm Worringer. Like Worringer, he urged a socially responsible architecture based upon the special requirements of the time by experiment. His students of art history included E. W. Tristram.

Lethaby’s writings were most influential on practicing architects of the 1930s. They encouraged architects to design in a manner reflecting modern values without the impersonal consequences of the Bauhaus. As a theorist, he asserted that using historical styles to build modern structures was incorrect because style was inseparable from the society that had produces it. Among architectural historians, Lethaby’s espousal of spiritual/societal values in architecture have a resonance in the Marxist writings of Manfredo Tafuri. His book, Mediaeval Art (1904) was one of the early required texts to be listed in the course catalog for the art history classes of Princeton University.

Selected Bibliography

Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth. London: Percival, 1892 [actually 1891]; The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople: a Study of Byzantine Building. London: Macmillan & Co., 1894; Form in Civilization: Collected Papers on Art and Labour. [s.l.]: Oxford University Press, 1922; Greek Buildings Represented by Fragments in the British Museum. London: B. T. Batsford, 1908; Londinium, Architecture and the Crafts. London: Duckworth,1923; Westminster Abbey and the Antiquities of the Coronation. London: Duckworth, 1911; Westminster Abbey & the King’s Craftsmen: a Study of Mediaeval Building. London: Duckworth & Co., 1906; Westminster Abbey Re-examined. London: Duckworth, 1925; and Schultz, Robert Weir, and Harvey, William. The Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. London: B.T. Batsford, 1910.

Sources

Watkin, David. The Rise of Architectural History. London: Architectural Press, 1980, pp. 87-93; Garnham, Trevor. Melsetter House: William Richard Lethaby. London: Phaidon, 1993; William Richard Lethaby: his life and work, 1857-1931. London: Architectural Press, 1986; Backmeyer, Sylvia, and Gronberg, Theresa. W. R. Lethaby, 1857-1931: Architecture, Design and Education. London: Lund Humphries, 1984; Ferriday, P. “W. R. Lethby.” in, Concerning Architecture: Essays on Architectural Writers and Writing presented to Nikolaus Pevsner. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 161-165.

Lester, C. Edwards

November 8, 2023July 26, 2024

Full Name: Lester, C. Edwards

Other Names:

Charles Edwards Lester

Gender: male

Date Born: 1815

Date Died: 1890

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): American (North American), biography (general genre), Colonial North American, colonialism, and colonization

Overview

Author of early American biography of artists. His book Artists of America, featured biographies of Washington Allston, Henry Inman, Benjamin West, Gilbert Charles Stuart, John Trumbull, James DeVeaux, Rembrandt Peale, Thomas Crawford. His work built on the early criticism of John Neal.

Selected Bibliography

The Artists of America: a Series of Biographical Sketches of American Artists: with Portraits and Designs on Steel. New York: Baker & Scribner, 1846.

Sources

Sears, Donald A. John Neal. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978, p. 116, mentioned.

Contributors: Yuhuan Zhang

Author of early American biography of artists. His book Artists of America, featured biographies of Washington Allston, Henry Inman, Benjamin West, Gilbert Charles Stuart, John Trumbull, James DeVeaux, Rembrandt Peale, Thomas Crawford. Hi

Lessing, Julius

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lessing, Julius

Gender: male

Date Born: 1843

Date Died: 1908

Home Country/ies: Germany

Overview

Kunstgewerbemuseum director in Berlin. Lessing hired the young Alfred Lichtwark to be his assistant even before Lichtwark had completed his Ph.D. In 1894 Lessing published his “Neue Wege” article in the journal Kunstgewerbeblatt, praising new materials in architecture. Lessing was a strong exponent of modern materials worthy of appreciation for themselves. His visits to the 1876 Philadelphia and 1889 Paris expositions impressed upon him the value of steel girders as harbingers of the new age and not, as the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, something to hic behind useless beaux-arts trappings.

Selected Bibliography

edited, Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums; nebst einer Auswahl seiner kleineren Schriften. Berlin, L. Heimann, 1870; Alt orientalische Teppichmuster, nach Bildern und Originalen des xv-xvi Jahrhunderts gezeichnet Berlin: E. Wasmuth 1877, English, Ancient Oriental Carpet Patterns after Pictures and Originals of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. London: H. Sotheran & Co., 1879; Was ist ein altes Kunstwerk werth? Vortrag gehalten in der Volkswirthschaftlichen gesellschaft zu Berlin am 14. Marz 1885. Berlin: Simion, 1885; “Neue Wege.” Kunstgewerbeblatt new series 6 (October 1894): 1-5; Die gewebe-Sammlung des K. Kunstgewerbe-museums, im amtlichen Auftrag. 11 vols. Berlin: E. Wasmuth a.-g., 1900.

Sources

Kay, Carolyn Helen. Art and the German Bourgeoisie: Alfred Lichtwark and Modern Painting in Hamburg, 1886-1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002, p. 13; Anderson, Sanford. “Modern Architecture and Industry: Peter Behrens and the AEG Factories.” in Hays, Michael K. ed. Oppositions Reader: Selected Readings from a Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture, 1973-1984. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998 p. 546, note 12.

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim

Other Names:

Gotthold Lessing

Gender: male

Date Born: 22 January 1729

Date Died: 15 February 1781

Place Born: Kamenz, Saxony, Germany

Place Died: Braunschweig, Lower Saxony, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): eighteenth century (dates CE) and Enlightenment (18th-century western movement)

Career(s): art critics

Overview

Enlightenment dramatist, critic and art writer; author of one of the most important 18th-century analysis of a Greek sculpture. Born in Kamenz, or Camenz, Upper Lusatia, Saxony, Germany Lessing’s father was a Lutheran clergy who educated his son personally during his early years. After Latin school in Kamenz, Lessing entered the school at St. Afra at Meissen at age twelve. He attended the University of Leipzig from 1746 to 1748 studying theology and the lectures in philology, archaeology and art of Johann Friedrich Christ and Johann August Ernesti (1707-1781). He moved to Berlin where he changed his course of study to medicine. Lessing became the literary critic for the Vossische Zeitung in 1751, a popular journal of Enlightenment ideas, which established himself as a writer. He brought out his first collected writings in 1753, Schriften, eventually running to six volumes by 1755. His Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend (1759-65), a series of critical essays written in the form of letters, emerged as an important art-critical work. In it, Lessing chastised the arts legislation of Joachim Christoph Gottsched (1700-1766), connecting him (unfairly) with Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) as part of rigid French classicism’s rules. Along with his friends, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86), the publisher Christoph Friedrich Nicolai (1733-1811) and writer (and Prussian officer) E. C. von Kleist (1715-1759), Lessing emphasized the free spirit of the artist as opposed to the Academie‘s constrictive regulations. Lessing traveled throughout the German states until 1760, when the Prussian general Friedrich Bogislav von Tauentzien (1710-1791) hired him as his secretary in Breslau (modern Wrocław, Poland). The General introduced him to Prussian society and Lessing built a large personal library. He left the general’s service in 1765 in hopes of finding another librarian position in Dresden or Berlin, but none was forthcoming. The following year he wrote one of his most important works for art history, Laokoön: oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie, which Lessing intended to be the first of a larger esthetic theory on the arts. He moved to Hamburg in 1767 where he tried to found a national theater for the German states. His play Minna von Barnhelm appeared in 1767, the first German comedy revolving around contemporary German life. His Hamburgische Dramaturgie his commentary on the performances of the National Theatre and a relentless campaign against Gottsched, appeared between 1767-9. It is the first modern handbook for the dramatist, establishing German drama with a unique identity. In 1770 while on his way to Italy, he accepted the librarian position to the Prince of Brunswick at Wolfenbüttel. There he wrote his six-volume Zur Geschichte und Literatur (On History and Literature) 1773-77. Only in Wolfenbüttel did Lessing marry, Eva Konig, the widow of a Hamburg merchant. In 1778 she died in childbirth. His later works included Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts of 1780. While on a trip to Brunswick in 1781 he died suddenly. Lessing’s Laokoön is the first counter argument to the dominant Enlightenment history of classical art, Gedanken uber die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der malerey und Bilderkunst by Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Choosing a relatively minor classical work, the Laokoön (Rome, Vatican, Museo Pio-Clementino), Lessing contested Winckelmann’s assertion that Laocoön’s gentle expression of pain was emblematic of Greek Stoicism, Winckelmann’s “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur,” insisting rather that the expression was due to the moment that the sculptor had chosen to represent. The larger issue for Lessing was that art and poetry were subject to different rules, not the same Ut pictura poesis argument as Winckelmann had asserted. Though little of this notion is original to Lessing, it was he who made it popular. The painter and art lecturer Henry Fuseli mentioned Lessing’s work in his arts lectures and the French archaeologist Antoine Quatremère de Quincy was influenced by him. Herder, however, ever at odds with Lessing, insisted on a separate theory for sculpture as a tactile art, distinct from visual art in his Plastik of 1778 (written in 1768-70). Lessing appears to adumbrate modern semiotics when he argues that the sign a specific medium can represent is limited to its mode. Laocoön (i.e., the man represented) cannot cry out because sculpture’s mode is the static marble: poetry or drama is the only one which can directly represent Laocoön’s pain. While reading a medieval treatise on painting, Schedula diversarum artium by the monk Theophilus, Lessing discovered the mention of the technique of oil painting. His 1774 essay, “Vom Alter der Oelmalerey aus dem Theophilus Presbyter,” (The Early History of Oil Painting in Theophilus Presbyter) successfully discredited the myth, popular since Giorgio Vasari, that Jan van Eyck had invented oil painting. Despite Lessing’s findings, acceptance of this myth died hard. Johann Dominico Fiorillo in his 1803 work on painting, über das Alter der ölmahlerey, still insisted on the Vasari story of Jan van Eyck as the inventor.

Selected Bibliography

Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend. 4 vols. Berlin: F. Nicolai, 1759-1766; Laokoon: oder, über die grenzen der mahlerey und poesie … Mit beyläufigen erläuterungen verschiedener punkte der alten kunstgeschichte. “Erster theil.” Berlin: C. F. Voss, 1766; Hamburgische Dramaturgie. 2 vols. Hamburg: J. H. Cramer (of Bremen), 1767-68; Zur Geschichte und Litteratur: aus dem Schätzen der Herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel. 6 vols. Braunschweig: Waysenhaus, 1773-1781; [oil painting comment] Vom Alter der Oelmalerey aus dem Theophilus Presbyter. Braunschweig: Waysenhauss, 1774; Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts. Berlin: C. F. Voss und Sohn, 1780.

Sources

May, Kurt. Lessings und Herders kunsttheoretische Gedanken in ihrem Zusammenhang. Berlin: E. Ebering, 1923; Gombrich. E. H. “Lessing.” Proceedings of the British Academy 43 (1957): 133-56; Allison, Henry E. Lessing and the Enlightenment: his Philosophy of Religion and its Relation to Eighteenth-century Thought. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966; Bieber, Margarete. Laocoon: The Influence of the Group Since its Rediscovery. 2nd ed. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967; Brown, F. Andrew. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. New York: Twayne, 1971; Ugrinsky, Alexej., ed. Lessing and the Enlightenment New York: Greenwood Press, 1986; Nisbet, H. B. “Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim.” Encyclopedia of Esthetics 3: 144-47; Albrecht, Wolfgang. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1997; [regarding Lessing’s comment on development of oil painting:] Pächt, Otto. Van Eyck and the Founders of Early Netherlandish Painting. London, Harvey Miller publishers, 1999, p. 12, and Brinkman, Pim. Het geheim van Van Eyck: aantekeningen bij de uitvinding van het olieverven. Zwolle: Waanders, 1993, pp. 121-133.

Leslie, Charles Robert

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Leslie, Charles Robert

Other Names:

Charles Robert Leslie

Gender: male

Date Born: 19 October 1794

Date Died: 05 May 1859

Place Born: Clerkenwell, Islington, London, England, UK

Place Died: St. John's Wood, London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): painting (visual works) and portraits

Overview

Genre and portrait painter; author of first book on John Constable and one on Joshua Reynolds. Leslie’s father was Robert Charles Leslie (d. 1804), a Philadelphia clockmaker who had moved to Longon, and his mother, Lydia Baker (Leslie) (1766/7-1824). The family returned to Philadelphia in 1799 where the younger Leslie was trained in art in New Jersey. He continued study at the University of Pennsylvania, still only age ten. After his father’s death, Leslie was apprenticed in 1808 to the Philadelphia publishing firm of Bradford and Inskeep. Samuel T. Bradford, a senior partner, saw to it Leslie studied in London, and in Bradford’s capacity as director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, that Leslie’s watercolors hung at the annual exhibition of 1811. Leslie studied with Benjamin West and Washington Allston in London with fellow art student Samuel F. B. Morse. He remained in London, marrying the British subject Harriet Honor Stone (1799-1879) in 1825. Leslie spent an unhappy year as a teacher in 1833-1834 in West Point, NY. He returned to England to witness and paint Queen Victoria’s coronation. Various small landscapes followed. After the death of his friend, the painter John Constable, Leslie collected materials and wrote the first biography on the painter, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable in 1843. A second edition appeared in 1845. Leslie was appointed professor of painting at the Royal Academy in 1847 (through 1852), publishing Handbook for Young Painters in 1854, his lectures there. As an art theorist, Leslie followed the precepts of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He had largely completed his autobiography and was at work on a biography of Reynolds when he died at his home in London in 1859. He is buried in Kensal Green cemetery, London. Leslie’s biography was completed in 1865, appearing as The Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Leslie’s work proved influential to the critic/art historian Edmond Duranty in Duranty’s early history of Impressionism, 1876.

Selected Bibliography

Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, esq., R.A., composed Chiefly of his Letters. London: J. Carpenter, 1843;

Sources

Taylor, Tom, ed. Autobiographical Recollections of the Late Charles Robert Leslie, R.A.. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1860; Dickson, H. E. “‘Selections from the Writings of John Neal (1793-1876).” Pennsylvania State Bulletin 37 (1943): 16; Green, E. B. Charles Robert Leslie. [unpublished dissertation] George Washington University, 1973; Evans, Dorinda. “Leslie, Charles Robert.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds with Notices of some of his Contemporaries. Taylor, Tom. London: John Murray, 1865.

Leroy, Jules

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Leroy, Jules

Gender: male

Date Born: 1903

Date Died: 1979

Place Born: Ablis, Île-de-France, Yvelines, France

Place Died: Chaptelat, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): Christianity, Coptic (culture or style), Coptic (Orthodox Christianity), Early Western World, Ethiopian (culture or style), iconography, illuminated manuscripts, manuscripts (documents), mural paintings (visual works), Near Eastern (Early Western World), painting (visual works), and Syriac Orthodox

Overview

Specialist in the iconography of Near Eastern illuminated manuscripts and wall painting. At age seventeen, Leroy became a monk with the Benedictines of Solemnes, who at that moment were in exile on the Island of Wight (United Kingdom) and returned to Solemnes in 1922. Between 1930 and 1933 he studied at the Pontificio Istituto Biblico in Rome, where he graduated in biblical studies. In 1934 he left the monastery and settled as a priest in Paris. The next twenty years he held several teaching positions, and he continued doing research. In 1939, in the course of his study of a Syriac literary manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale, he came across the richly illuminated Gospel manuscript Paris Syr. 33 (sixth or seventh century), which fascinated him and became the beginning of a lifelong commitment to the study of Syriac illuminated manuscripts. He embarked on a thorough study of all illuminated Syriac manuscripts kept in European libraries, beginning in Paris. After the war, in the years 1948-1952, he visited libraries in Italy and the United Kingdom, while the Berlin manuscripts were brought to Paris for consultation. In the meantime he studied under André Grabar at the école Pratique des Hautes études. In 1955 he graduated with an essay on the famous Rabbula Codex, preserved in Florence and dated to 586: L’illustration du manuscrit syriaque Plut. I, 56 de la Laurentienne. Introduced by Grabar to Henri Seyrig, the director of the Institut français d’archéologie in Beirut, and with a grant of the Centre de la Recherche Leroy traveled between 1954 and 1956 through Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Turkey, photographing and describing Syriac illuminated manuscripts, and complementing his earlier work in the European libraries. The result of twenty years of research was his 1964 publication, Les manuscrits syriaques à peintures conservés dans les bibliothèques d’Europe et d’Orient. In 1958 he published the impressions of his visits to the Near Eastern monasteries in a travel book, Moines et monastères du Proche-Orient. During a stay in Addis-Abeba, in 1959, as the director of the Department of Archeology of the Institut d’études et de Recherches d’éthiopie, Leroy became interested in Ethiopian manuscripts and wall painting. A number of innovative publications in a much neglected field followed, including his 1964 La pittura etiopica durante il Medioevo e sotto la dinastia di Gondar, which is a general outline of Christian painting in Ethiopia in the late Middle Ages and during the Gondar period (17th – 18th centuries). In 1967 the Egyptologist Serge Sauneron (1927-1976), the later director of the Institut français d’Archéologie orientale in Cairo, entrusted Leroy with the supervision of a new project on the Coptic wall paintings in the Egyptian desert of Esna. During an encounter several years earlier (1958) in Beirut, Sauneron had expressed his worries about the neglect of wall paintings in churches and monasteries in Egypt. The project aimed at the protection, conservation and documentation of wall paintings in Coptic churches and monasteries was conceived on that occasion. In 1975 the first volume of the series La peinture murale chez les Coptes appeared, Les peintures des couvents du desert d’Esna, covering the medieval wall paintings of the monasteries Deir al-Chohada and Deir al-Fakhoury. The 1971 and 1972 campaigns in two monasteries in the Wadi Natrun were published posthumously (in 1982) in a second volume, Les peintures des couvents du Ouadi Natroun. It deals with wall painting cycles in the Monastery of Macarius and in the Monastery of the Syrians (Deir al-Sourian). Leroy’s preoccupation with Coptic art was not limited to wall painting. He studied illuminated Coptic manuscripts as well. His 1974 catalog, Les manuscrits coptes et coptes-arabes illustrés, was intended as a follow up to his earlier study of the Syriac manuscripts. In the last years of his life, respectively in 1975 and 1977, Leroy again directed initial campaigns in two monasteries near the Red Sea, Saint Anthony and Saint Paul. After his death, these projects were continued and published by P. P. V. van Moorsel. Leroy was primarily interested in the iconographic description, the reproduction, and the documentation of Eastern Christian wall painting and manuscript illumination. His lifelong research, much of it carried out in collaboration with others, largely contributed to the preservation and to a better understanding of Christian art in the Middle East.

Selected Bibliography

[bibliography:] Coquin, René-Georges. Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale 80 (1980): vii-xv; Moines et monastères du Proche-Orient. Paris: Horizons de France, 1958, English, Monks and Monasteries of the Near East. London: G.G. Harrap 1963; La pittura etiopica durante il Medioevo e sotto la dinastia di Gondar. Milan: Electa Editrice, 1964, English translation, 1967; Les manuscrits syriaques à peintures conservés dans les bibliothèques d’Europe et d’Orient. Contribution à l’étude de l’iconographie des églises de langue syriaque. Paris: Librairie orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1964; Les manuscrits coptes et coptes-arabes illustrés. Paris: Librairie orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1974; Les peintures des couvents du desert d’Esna. (La peinture murale chez les Coptes, I) with the collaboration of B. Psiroukis and B. Lenthéric. Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale du Caire, 1975; Les peintures des couvents du Ouadi Natroun. (La peinture murale chez les Coptes, II) with the collaboration of B. Lenthéric, P.-H. Laferrière, H. Studer, é. Revault, B. Psiroukis, and J.-F. Gout. Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale du Caire, 1982. Our Organization: Mission & history

Sources

Coquin, René-Georges. “L’abbé Jules Leroy (1903-1979)” Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale 80 (1980): v-xv; Palmer, A. N. and Van Ginkel, J. “Leroy, Jules” Dictionary of Art 19 (1996), pp. 231-232; Van Moorsel, P. and Innemée K. “Brève histoire de la ‘Mission des peintures coptes'” in Van Moorsel, P. P. V. Called to Egypt: Collected Studies on Painting in Christian Egypt. Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 2000.

Contributors: Monique Daniels

Leroux, Leroux Smith

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Leroux, Leroux Smith

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: South Africa

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

Career(s): curators

Overview

Assistant keeper of the Tate Museum, London; involved in “Tate Affair.” Tate director John Rothenstein met Leroux on an excursion to South Africa in 1949. He hired Leroux in 1950. Leroux leaked accusations to the British press of Rothenstein’s maltreatment of Tate staff, misappropriation of funds, and purchasing pictures at inflated prices. Prevented from responding to these allegations because of a civil servant law, Rothenstein was subjected to scandal and humiliation. Joining the condemnation was the collector and art historian Douglas Cooper, an obstreperous personality who nevertheless represented a major British private collection of modern art. Rothenstein purportedly punched Cooper at an art reception and nearly lost his job. The British newspapers dubbed the incident the “Tate Affair.”

Selected Bibliography

Leroux published no works.

Sources

Brave Day, Hideous Night: [volume 2] Autobiography, 1939-1965. London: H. Hamilton, 1966, pp. 231-373.

Leroquais, Victor

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Leroquais, Victor

Gender: male

Date Born: 1875

Date Died: 1946

Place Born: Saint-Germain-de-Tallevende, Normandie, France

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

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): libraries (institutions) and manuscripts (documents)

Institution(s): Bibliothèque nationale de France

Overview

studied the manuscripts contained in the libraries of France

Selected Bibliography

Les Sacramentaires et les Missels. 4 vols. 1924.; Les Livres d’Heures. 6 vols. 1927-1943.; Les Bréviaires. 6 vols. 1934.; Les Pontificaux. 4 vols. 1937.; Les Psautiers. 3 vols. 16-940-1944.

Sources

Bazin 483

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

studied the manuscripts contained in the libraries of France

Lerner, Abram

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lerner, Abram

Other Names:

"Al" Lerner

Gender: male

Date Born: 1913

Date Died: 2007

Place Born: New York, NY, USA

Place Died: Canaan, Litchfield, CT, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): sculpture (visual works)

Overview

First director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1974-1984. Lerner was the son of Lower East Side Manhattan immigrants, Hyman Lerner, a garment presser, and Sarah Becker (Lerner), both originally from Russia. While a student at New York University in art history, he gained experience curating the annual student show. After graduation in 1935, Lerner worked as an apprentice muralist for the WPA (Works Progress Administration), part of Roosevelt’s New Deal program which included employment for artists and writers. In 1943 Lerner married Pauline Hanenberg (d. 2003). After World War II, hoping to supplement his painting career, Lerner took an assistant’s job at the A. C. A gallery in 1945 in Manhattan, painting in his spare time. There he met the art collector and uranium magnate/investor Joseph H. Hirshhorn (1899-1981). The two developed a strong friendship. Hirshhorn financed Lerner, who quit A.C.A. and traveled to Florence in 1955 to studying art in hopes of advancing his painting career. He returned to the U.S. and worked again selling art in another gallery, the Artists’ Gallery. Hirshhorn established his own foundation in 1956 and by 1957, Lerner was supervising the research, conservation and installation of the paintings and sculptures for it. The collector continued to acquire art for his 24-acre estate in Greenwich, CT, and Manhattan office, with Lerner, under the title of curator, managing it. Lerner also accompanied the collector on his whirl-wind acquisition jaunts, advising only his headstrong and brusque boss only slightly. Hirshhorn decided to create a public museum for his art, taking Lerner to England where an offer give land had come from Queen Elizabeth. In 1966, S. Dillon Ripley, (1913-2001) secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, organized a lunch with President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973) at the White House, convincing him to build and endow a modernist museum for the nation. Lerner supervised the transfer of the nearly 6,000 paintings and sculptures to the Hirshhorn Museum beginning in 1967. The Museum opened in 1974. Lerner became director of the museum overseeing the installation of newer donations by Hirshhorn. Hirshhorn died in 1981 leaving a $5 million-bequest and the remainder his collection to the museum. Lerner retired in 1984, succeeded by James T. Demetrion, moving to Southampton, NY. He resumed painting in retirement. He died of heart failure in a retirement community at age 94. Lerner owed his position as first director of a major art museum to his long-standing relationship with its founder, similar to the position of David Finley when the National Gallery was first founded. Unlike Finley, however, Lerner took an active role in the installations and shows. At first a Washington outsider, he was accepted by the greater art-administrational community. He wrote no works except those catalogs co-authored by art historians.

Selected Bibliography

and Nochlin, Linda. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1974.

Sources

Hyams, Barry. Hirshhorn, Medici from Brooklyn: a Biography. New York: Dutton, 1979, pp. 103, 128-129; [obituary:] Hevesi, Dennis. “Abram Lerner, First Director of the Hirshhorn Museum, Dies at 94.” New York Times November 9, 2007, p. 25.

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