Art Historians

Hofmann, Werner

November 8, 2023April 25, 2024

Full Name: Hofmann, Werner

Other Names:

Werner Hofmann

Gender: male

Date Born: 1928

Place Born: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): nineteenth century (dates CE) and twentieth century (dates CE)

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

Overview

Interdisciplinary historian of 19th- and 20th-century art, museum director. Hofmann was the son of Leopold Hofmann and Anna Visvader (Hofmann). He studied art history in Paris and Vienna, graduating from the University of Vienna. Between 1950-55, he worked as an assistant curator of the Albertina Museum in Vienna. In 1957 Hofmann took on fellow Vienna-school art historian Hans Sedlmayr in his review of Sedlmayr’s book Verlust der Mitte. The 23-year-old Hofmann decried Sedlmayr’s racist views (Sedlmayr had been associated with the Nazis in Vienna) as well as what he termed Sedlymayr’s “unscholarly speculation.” He was a guest lecturer at Barnard College in 1957. In 1960 Hofmann burst onto the international art-historical scene with his groundbreaking monograph on 19th-century European art, Das Irdische Paradies which was immediately translated into English as The Earthly Paradise. The work examined 19-th century art based on opposing themes of the art rather than a chronological treatment. In 1961 he was a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. In 1962 Hofmann became the founding director of the Museum of 20th Century Art (Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts) in Vienna, part of the Museum moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig. This was a normal advancement structure for a university position. However, an Austrian university position was not forthcoming, and Hofmann resigned from the Museum in 1969, moving to Germany as the director of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. Two of the major exhibitions Hofmann organized for the Kunsthalle included the 1975 Fueseli (shared with the Tate) and the 1980 exhibition on Goya, a subject which would continue to occupy Hofmann for many years. He was guest professor at Harvard University for the 1981-1982 academic year and at Columbia University, New York, as Meyer Schapiro Professor, in 1984. He remained at the Kunsthalle until his retirement to Director emeritus in 1990. The following year he lectured at New York University and at the University in Vienna. In 2003 Hofmann issued a monograph on Goya published simultaneously in German and English, Goya: vom Himmel durch die Welt zur Hölle (Goya: to Every Story there Belongs Another) and later a book on Degas. Das Irdische Paradies (The Earthly Paradise) remains a groundbreaking monument of western art historiography. Hofmann defined nineteenth-century art as contending with a series of opposing tensions (such as the “earthly paradise,” the “holy prostitute,” etc.). His work was highly interdisciplinary, drawing examples from music, philosophy and literature to elucidate what were in many cases well-known works of art in new ways. This non-linear, a-historical (but not anti-historical) view of art history influenced a generation of modernist art historians who viewed their art works thematically rather than as a series of style changes.

Selected Bibliography

Das Irdische Paradies: Kunst im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1960, English, Art in the Nineteenth Century. London: Faber & Faber, 1961, (British edtion), American edition, The Earthly Paradise: Art in the Nineteenth Century. New York: George Braziller, 1961; Grundlagen der modernen Kunst. Stuttgart: Kröner, 1966, English, Turning Points in Twentieth-Century Art: 1897-1917. New York: George Braziller, 1967; Gustav Klimt und die Wiener Jahrhundertwende. Salzburg: Verlag Galerie Welz, 1970, English, Gustav Klimt. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1972; Anhaltspunkte: Studien zur Kunst und Kunsttheorie. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989; Caricature from Leonardo to Picasso. London: John Calder, 1957; Goya: vom Himmel durch die Welt zur Hölle. Munich: Beck, 2003, English, Goya: to Every Story there Belongs Another. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003; Goya: das Zeitalter der Revolutionen, 1789-1830. Munich: Prestel, 1980; and Schiff, Gert. Johann Heinrich Füssli, 1741-1825. Munich: Prestel, 1974; Wie Deutsch ist die deutsche Kunst?: eine Streitschrift. Leipzig: E. A. Seeman, 1999; “Die geschichtliche Stellung von Daumiers graphischer Form”, in: Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 52 (1956): 147 ff.

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, pp. 81, 148; Belting, Hans. The End of the History of Art? 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 38; “Der Autor.” in, Hofmann, Werner. Anhaltspunkte: Studien zur Kunst und Kunsttheorie. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989, verso of title page; Zaunschirm, Thomas. “Wiener Noblesse: Werner Hofmann zum 70.” Kulturchronik 6 (1998): 4-5; International Who’s Who, 2005 ed., p. 792.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Hoffmann, Herbert

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Hoffmann, Herbert

Gender: male

Date Born: 1930

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): Classical

Institution(s): Antikensammlung

Overview

Classicist art historian.

Sources

[transcript] Herbert Hoffmann. Interviews with Art Historians, 1991-2002. Getty Research Institute, Malibu, CA.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Classicist art historian.

Hoffmann, Hans

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Hoffmann, Hans

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Subject Area(s): Baroque

Overview

student of Wölfflin; applied the term “Frühbaroque” to16th century Italian art to distinguished distinct moments in the baroque style

Selected Bibliography

Hochrenaissance, Manierismus, Frühbaroque der italianische Kunst der 16 Jahrhunderts. Zürich, 1938.

Sources

Bazin 186

student of Wölfflin; applied the term “Frühbaroque” to16th century Italian art to distinguished distinct moments in the baroque style

Hoffmann, Edith

November 8, 2023April 25, 2024

Full Name: Hoffmann, Edith

Other Names:

Edith Hoffmann

Gender: female

Date Born: 24 July 1907

Place Born: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Place Died: Jerusalem, Israel

Home Country/ies: Czechoslovakia

Subject Area(s): German (culture, style, period)

Institution(s): Burlington Magazine

Overview

Private scholar; editorial Secretary and Assistant Editor of the The Burlington Magazine, 1938-1950. Hoffmann was the daughter of the writer and Czech diplomat Camill (or Kamil) Hoffmann (1878-144) and his wife, Irma Oplatka (Hoffmann) (1883-1944). Irma’s father was an art writer and a friend of the Austrian Expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka. After attending elementary school in the suburban town of Hellerau bei Dresden, she graduated from the Auguste Victoria Girls’ School in Berlin in 1928. She studied archaeology and art history at the universities in Berlin (under Adolph Goldschmidt), in Vienna (under Julius Alwin von Schlosser) and in Munich under Wilhelm Pinder. Though a Jew, her doctoral dissertation was accepted by Pinder in 1934 (despite Pinder’s Nazi sympathies he allowed his Jewish students to complete their studies). Her dissertation topic was eighteenth-century German group portraits. The Nazis in full control of Germany since 1933, Hoffmann fled to Britain volunteering initially in the Print Room of the British Museum. Through the 1938 London exhibition, “Twentieth Century German Art,” a response to the ‘Entartete Kunst” show in Munich the year before, Hoffmann came into contact with the Burlington Magazine. She joined the magazine the following year as editorial secretary under editor Herbert Read. Read used the International Congress of the History of Art in an editorial to emphasize the magazine’s equality editorial policy, implicitly contrasting it with the German persecution. After war broke out, Hoffmann formed part of a group of refugees invited to contribute to the magazine under Read’s editorship and later under that of Tancred Borenius. In addition to British writers–young researchers such as John Pope-Hennessy or senior researchers such as Laurence Binyon and Campbell Dodgson–expatriate art historians such as E. H. Gombrich, Otto Kurz, Léo Van Puyvelde and Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner also contributed. Hoffmann ran the magazine during the hardships of restrictions: paper scarcity, fewer advertisers, and fewer foreign subscribers. Hoffmann became in effect the first woman to be in charge of the magazine (Pezzini). She married Eliezer Yapou (1908-1998) in 1940, a journalist and French lawyer born in the British mandate region of Palestine. After Borenius’ departure from the magazine in 1944, Ellis K. Waterhouse acted as editorial consultant and Hoffmann continued as Assistant Editor. Hoffmann was in charge of the total production of the magazine while Waterhouse’s contribution was limited to an advisory role of selecting articles–cursorily according to Hoffmann. She was officially promoted to Assistant Editor of the magazine in 1946. Hoffmann published the first monograph on Kokoschka in English in 1947, including essays by the artist himself. The same year Benedict Nicolson became editor of the magazine. Hoffmann left the magazine in 1950 to accompany her husband, now an Israeli diplomat, to various international postings, including Tel-Aviv, Brussels, New York and Jerusalem. She contributed entries to the Encyclopedia Hebraica beginning in 1953 (to 1965). In New York, she supplied monthly reviews and surveys of exhibitions for the Burlington Magazine, 1957-1958. She lectured in art history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1960-1961 and wrote art reviews for the magazine while in Paris, 1974-1975. In the 1990s she retired in Jerusalem where she died in 2016.

Hoffmann’s main research interest was modern art, principally German Expressionism and, in later years, Symbolism and its literary connections. It was, however, only in 1943 that an article–a book review–appeared under her full name, this in Kunsthistorische Studien. After the war she wrote reviews and articles presenting German Expressionism to the British public which had for some time viewed these artists as crude in some ways. Her total articles, reviews and criticism number over 150.

She is not related to another art historian with the same name, Edith Hoffmann (1888-1945) who worked at the Printroom of the Budapest Szépművészeti Múzeum and author of works on Dürer and Hungarian art.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Die Darstellung des Bürgers in der deutschen Malerei des 18. Jahrhunderts. Berlin, 1934; Kokoschka: Life and Work. London: Faber & Faber, 1947; “Notes on the Iconography of Félicien Rops.” Burlington Magazine 123 (April 1981): 204-218; “Rops: peintre de la femme moderne.” Burlington Magazine 126 (May 1984): 260-265.

Sources

Hoffmann, Edith. “The Magazine in War-Time.” Burlington Magazine (July 1986): 478-480; Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munchen: Saur, 1999, vol. 1, pp. 317-319; Pezzini, Barbara. “Edith Hoffmann.” Burlington Magazine Contributors; Yapou, Yonna [daughter], personal correspondence on Edith Hoffmann, January 2011, June 2019.

Contributors: Barbara Pezzini

Private scholar; editorial Secretary and Assistant Editor of the The Burlington Magazine, 1938-1950. Hoffmann was the daughter of the writer and Czech diplomat Camill (or Kamil) Hoffmann (1878-144) and his wife, Irma Oplatka (Hoffmann) (1

Hoff, Ursula

November 8, 2023April 25, 2024

Full Name: Hoff, Ursula

Gender: female

Date Born: 1909

Date Died: 2005

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): museums (institutions) and prints (visual works)

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

Overview

Curator of prints and assistant director, National Gallery of Victoria, Australia. Hoff was the daughter of Hans Hoff, a pharmaceuticals salesperson and Thusnelde Hoff. Hoff studied at the newly founded University of Hamburg under Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl. Her doctoral thesis was on “Rembrandt and England.” Her Jewish background made her persona non grata after Hitler’s rise in 1933. That year she emigrated with her family to Hampstead, London. She studied (and tutored) at Girton College, Cambridge. There she met the Danish religious scholar Greta Hort (1903-1967). Hoff worked at the Warburg Institute after Cambridge, where many of the Hamburg-school art historians had fled. As full-time positions were restricted to British subjects, Hoff researched at the Warburg for Karl Theodore Parker and Hugh Popham of the British Museum on 16th-century prints and drawings. At Hort’s suggestion, Hoff followed her to the University of Melbourne in 1939 where Hort had become the first principal of Women’s College (now University College). However, the director of the National Gallery of Victoria, J. S. McDonald refused employment for German Jewish refugees in his museum. In 1942, Daryl Lindsay was named director, and he appointed Hoff as assistant keeper (curator) of prints and drawings. As keeper, Hoff built the collection to the internationally-know collection it is today. She bought widely including a series of 600 etchings known as “the van Dyck Iconography,” works on paper by Albrecht Dürer, Rubens, Sasetta and the Caraccis. In 1946, a school of fine arts was founded at the University of Melbourne and Hoff became a part-time lecturer and eventually senior associate. In 1949, Hoff was made keeper of prints and drawings. In 1968 she became assistant director of the Gallery. As assistant director, she was in charge of producing the gallery’s permanent holdings catalogs. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1970 for her work as assistant director of the National Gallery of Victoria. After retiring in 1973, became an advisor to the Felton Bequest, the great endowment of Alfred Felton with a mandate to make the gallery what Hoff once described as “the only encyclopedic art collection in Australia”. She remained an advisor until 1983. From 1985 she was senior associate for fine arts at the University of Melbourne. Her papers are housed at Baillieu Library Special Collections, University of Melbourne.

Selected Bibliography

Charles I, Patron of Artists. London: W. Collins, 1942; Catalogue of European Paintings before Eighteen Hundred. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1961; and McCulloch, Alan, and Lindsay, Joan. Masterpieces of the National Gallery of Victoria. Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1949; and Davies, Martin. The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Brussels: Centre national de recherches Primitifs Flamands,1971.

Sources

Who’s Who in Australia 2001, p.877; Anderson, Jaynie. “Ursula Hoff: Intellectual Who left her Imprint.” The Australian January 20, 2005. p. 12; Palmer Bull, Sheridan. Intersections of Culture: European Influences in the Fine Arts, Melbourne, 1940-1960. Ph. D. thesis, University of Melbourne, 2001.

Hofer, Philip

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Hofer, Philip

Other Names:

Philip Hofer

Gender: male

Date Born: 1898

Date Died: 1984

Place Born: Cincinnati, Hamilton, OH, USA

Place Died: Cambridge, Middlesex, MA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): graphic arts and prints (visual works)

Career(s): art collectors, curators, and librarians

Overview

Harvard librarian, book collector and founder and first curator of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library. Hofer graduated from Harvard and spent a few years in business. He began collecting a wide variety of printed books in 1917. By 1933 he focused on illustrated and decorated books, thus entering into a serious study of book arts. He served as curator of the Spencer Collection of the New York Public Library. In 1934 he became the first assistant director of the Morgan Library in New York (to 1937). In 1938, the newly appointed librarian of Harvard University’s library, William Jackson, asked Hofer to head the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, the first such department in the country. Hofer spent the next forty years building one of the finest graphic-arts-in-the-book collection in the nation. The collection had strong fifteenth- and eighteenth-century Italian holdings, but also included groups as divergent as Chinese block prints and illuminated manuscripts. He also assembled a livres de peintres collection which began with Goya and ended with contemporary artists. In the capacity, he aided Henry P. Rossiter in 1951 in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s, acquisition of Goya’s “Disasters of War” proofs, previously owned by William Stirling Maxwell. In 1964 he began his Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts series of the collection with French 16th century books compiled with the help of his wife, Frances, Ruth Mortimer, and Jackson. A second series appeared in 1974. He was secretary of the Fogg Art Museum. In 1980 he retired emeritus. He was a trustee for the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.

Selected Bibliography

Some [Delacroix] Drawings and Lithographs for Goethe’s Faust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard College Library, Department of Printing & Graphic Arts, 1964; and Seznec, Jean, and Mongan, Elizabeth. Fragonard Drawings for Ariosto. New York: Pantheon Books, 1945; Baroque Book Illustration: a Short Survey from the Collection in the Department of Graphic Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951; Edward Lear. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962; Edward Lear as a Landscape Draughtsman. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967; Eighteenth-century Book Illustrations. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1956; and Mortimer, Ruth, and Jackson, William. A Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts. Harvard College Library. Deptartment of Printing and Graphic Arts. San Francisco: Wittenborn Art Books, 1964.

Sources

[obituary:] “Philip Hofer, 86, a Book Collector at Harvard.” New York Times November 12, 1984, p. B15; “Mr Philip Hofer.” The Times (London) November 22, 1984, p. 14.

Hoeltje, Georg

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Hoeltje, Georg Heinrich

Gender: male

Date Born: 16 March 1906

Date Died: 07 June 1996

Place Born: Duisburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany

Place Died: Hamburg, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Institution(s): Technische Hochschule Hannover

Overview

Hoeltje was born to Edmund Hoeltje, a professor and director of a mechanical engineering institute. His family moved from Hannover to Hagen and later Essen both where he attended schools. After graduation, Hoeltje studied art history at a variety of universities as was the tradition in Germany. He began at Rostock in 1924 under Max Hauttmann for one semester, then the Technische Hochschule in Hannover between 1924 and 1925, briefly at the University of Munich in 1925, and finally under Paul Frankl at the University of Halle (Saale) in 1926. His doctorate was granted at the Friedrichs-Universität Halle-Wittenberg in 1929 under Frankl, his dissertation titled Zeitliche und begriffliche Abgrenzung der Spätgotik innerhalb der Architektur von Deutschland, Frankreich und England (Temporal and conceptual outline of the late Gothic period within the architecture of Germany, France and England). He married a painter, Lilo Flues. He published mostly popular books at this time on art from commissioned series such as Deutsche Lande, Deutsche Kunst.

Between 1932 and 1939, he taught as a privatdozent at the Hochschule in Hannover . In 1932, his habilitation was accepted and published through the Hochschule, “Pläne zur Erweiterung der Stadt Hannover in der Zeit von den Befreiungskriegen bis zur Einführung der Eisenbah.“ (Hannover’s renewal plan from the wars of liberation to the introduction of the railroad). The Nazi assumption of power in Germany in 1933 made teaching modern art, which Hoeltje endorsed, difficult. His father, Edmund, was now the head of the city council of Görlitz, Germany, appointed by Nazi party members. In 1939, Georg Hoeltje became an associate professor at the Universität Bonn. Opposition from the Nazi government to his teaching and his likely persecution led to his emigration to Sao Paolo, Brazil in 1939. He remained there throughout World Wat II, finally returning to Germany in 1954.

He secured a lectureship at the Hochschule again and a full professorship the following year, the school anxious to fill positions with non-Nazi sympathizers. Among his later works were Bauherr und Baustil Bischof Bernward von Hildesheim und Abt Suger von St. Denis (The Master of Building and Style, Bischof Bernward von Hildesheim and Abbott Suger vof St. Denis). He lectured briefly in 1957 at the Werkakademie in Kassel. After retirement, Hoeltje continued to give lectures at the Hochschule.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:]Zeitliche und begriffliche Abgrenzung der Spätgotik innerhalb der Architektur von Deutschland, Frankreich und England Weimar: Druck von Straubing & Müller, 1930;
Hannover. (Deutsche Lande, Deutsche Kunst series) Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1931;
Schöne Plastik aus drei Epochen. Hannover: Kunstverein Hannover, 1931;
Pläne zur Erweiterung der Stadt Hannover von der Zeit der Befreiungskriege bis zur Einführung der Eisenbahn. Hannover, 1932;
Bauherr und Baustil Bischof Bernward von Hildesheim und Abt Suger von St. Denis. Hannover 1956;
Laves. Baumeister seiner Zeit. Hannover: Fackelträger-Verlag Schmidt-Küster, 1964;
Georg Ludwig Friedrich Laves. Hannover: Steinbock-Verlag, 1964;
Bauliche Aussage: gestern und heute.(Vortragsreihe der Niedersächsischen Landesregierung zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung in Niedersachsen, 49). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1973.

Sources

Kokkelink, Günther. ”Der Lehrer und Forscher: Eine Würdigung.” Festschrift für Georg Hoeltje. Hannover: Institut für Bau- und Kunstgeschichte Hannover, 1988, pp. 11-16;
Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertrieben Wissenschaftler

Contributors: Cassandra Klos, Lee Sorensen, and Zahra Hassan

Hodin, J. P.

November 8, 2023April 25, 2024

Full Name: Hodin, J. P.

Other Names:

J. P. Hodin

Gender: male

Date Born: 1905

Date Died: 1995

Place Born: Prague, Praha, Hlavní Město, Czech Republic

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: Czechoslovakia

Subject Area(s): English (culture or style) and Modern (style or period)

Career(s): art critics

Overview

Art critic and art historian; popularizer of modern art in England. He was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, which is present-day Prague, Czech Republic. Hodin’s father, Edouard David Hodin, was a German Jew working in Czechoslovakia as a photographer at the time of his son’s birth. His mother was Rose Klug (Hodin). At his father’s insistence, Hodin studied law at Charles University, Prague, graduating with a J.D., in 1924. He never practiced, however, entering the Art Academy of Dresden in 1931 and the Art Academy of Berlin studying art, 1932-1933. Hodin settled in Stockholm during World War II, joining the Czechoslovak Resistance there. His first books on art were published in Swedish. He then moved to London working as press attaché to the Norwegian government-in-exile. Following the war, Hodin returned to art and criticism. Hodin married [Doris] Pamela Simms in 1945 and began a study of art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, in 1946. He wrote his edition on the artist Edvard Munch in 1948, in Swedish, Edvard Munch: Nordens genius. Hodin developed a friendship with the expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka, who lived in London from 1938 to 1954. This led him on a career of writing on proto- and Expressionist artists. He met the artists Isaac Grunewald and Ludwig Meidner and wrote monographs on them as well. Hodin also brought to the attention of the British public Germanic artists such as Emil Nolde, Paul Klee and Max Beckmann and, to a lesser extent, Kurt Schwitters, Naum Garbo and Moholy-Nagy. Hodin was appointed the first director of studies and librarian of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1949. He continued to lecture, emphasizing in particular the artists outside France, which dominated British art sensibility. In 1954 he won the first international prize for art criticism at the Venice Biennale for his work on Surrealism and Francis Bacon. Hodin assumed co-editorship of the art periodical, Quadrum, in 1956, exploring the avant-garde movements in art. The same year, 1956, his work of esthetics, The Dilemma of Being Modern was published. Hodin and his wife, Pamela, lived in Cornwall, where she was raised. There he met the artists Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, both members of the St. Ives artists’ group. Hodin wrote studies of them, again, based upon first-hand information, Ben Nicholson: The Meaning of His Art, in 1957, and Barbara Hepworth in 1961. Hodin relinquished his Quadrum duties in 1966, issuing his Oskar Kokoschka: A Biography, one of six pieces he wrote about the artist, the same year. A second major esthetics treatment, Modern Art and the Modern Mind, appeared in 1972. He was made an honorary professor of Vienna University in 1975. At his death in 1995, his papers were given to the Tate Museum in London. Hodin’s methodology is an example of Geistesgeschichte the notion that an artist is a representative of the spirit of his age (Kleinbauer, 1970). Hodin’s biographical studies are characterized by a novelistic treatment of the artist’s character employing strong pyschology.

Selected Bibliography

Edvard Munch: Nordens genius. Stolkholm: Ljus, 1948, English, Edvard Munch. New York: Praeger 1972 ; The Dilemma of Being Modern: Essays on Art and Literature. London: 1956; Ben Nicholson: the Meaning of his Art. London: A. Tiranti, 1957; Barbara Hepworth. London: Lund Humphries, 1961; Oskar Kokoschka: The Artist and His Time: A Biographical Study. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1966; Modern Art and the Modern Mind. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University, 1972.

Sources

Kern, Walter. J. P. Hodin, European Critic: Essays. London: Cory, Adams and Mackay, 1965; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. “Geistesgeschichte and Art History.” Art Journal 30, no. 2 (Winter 1970-1971): 149;Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 98; 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. 154; [obituary:] “Josef Hodin.” Times (London) December 8, 1995.

Hodgkinson, Terence

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Hodgkinson, Terence

Other Names:

Terence William Ivan Hodgkinson

Gender: male

Date Born: 1913

Date Died: 1999

Place Born: Wells, Somerset, England, UK

Place Died: Islington, London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): sculpture (visual works)

Career(s): curators

Overview

Keeper (curator) of the Department of Sculpture, Victoria and Albert Museum, 1967-1974. Hodgkinson’s parents were Ivan Tattersall Hodgkinson and Kathryn Van Vleck Townsend (Hodgkinson), though he was raised by his paternal grandmother in Somerset, England. He attended Oundle School, a boarding school near Peterborough, England, and then entered Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1932 intent on a career in economics or politics. After graduation in 1935, he volunteered to work on the prints catalog for the Pepysian Library at Magdalene College, under the direction of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. This lead to an position assisting the newly arrived Warburg Institute scholar Rudolf Wittkower with German translations into English Through the Warburg, Hodgkinson met many of the German expatriate scholars temporarily or permanently teaching there. When World War II was finally declared, Hodgkinson was assigned to military intelligence, rising to the rank of major by 1943. During this time he met Hans Schneider (d. 1995), a Viennese Jew who had fled Nazism; the two became life partners. Immediately after the war, Hodgkinson joined the Department of Architecture and Sculpture at the Victorian and Albert Museum in 1946 as an Assistant Keeper (preparator), having studied sculpture since the 1930s. His first art history publication was an article in the Burlington Magazine on the topic of the same year. He rose through the administrative ranks at the V&A quickly, ultimately finding himself assistant to the director, Leigh Ashton in 1948. Ashton and Hodgkin worked to returned to the museum from wartime storage in Wales. The men used the opportunity to organize new displays according to historic periods and styles rather than by material as it had been. As Ashton became ever more incapacitated through alcoholism, Hodgkinson quietly took over his responsibilities and by the 1950s was for all intents and purposes running the museum. Ashton was forced to retire in 1955 and was succeeded by Trenchard Cox. After working in the same capacity for Cox, Hodgkinson returned to the department of architecture and sculpture in 1962 as assistant keeper under John Pope-Hennessy, with whom he had worked since 1946. The relationship between Pope-Hennessey and Hodgkinson was difficult: the two men were opposites in every way: one academically inclined, the other administrative, one and Italian expert, the other (Hodgkinson) French, one irascible and the other conciliatory. The fact that Hodgkinson had effectively been Pope-Hennessey’s superior during the Ashton tenure added to the tension. Hodgkinson was assigned to post-medieval English sculpture under Pope-Hennessey and in 1967, when Pope-Hennessey became V&A Director, Hodgkinson became sculpture Keeper. His acquisitions for the department included the sculpture by J.-A. Houdon, J.-B. Pigalle, and a statue of George Frederick Handel by Louis François Roubiliac, though many proposals were thwarted by John Pope-Hennessy. Hodgkinson was now an authority on sculpture, entirely through personal scholarship and hard-won museum work. Sculpture catalogs for the Frick Collection (1968, co-authored with Pope-Hennessey) and the Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor (1970) appeared. In 1975 was appointed to the executive committee of the National Art Collections Fund (to 1988), as well as the Museums and Galleries Commission (1981-88). In 1974 when Pope-Hennessy left for the British Museum, Hodgkinson was passed over as his replacement at the V&A. Hodgkinson resigned (retired) from the Museum to become the Director of the Wallace Collection in 1974. When Benedict Nicolson, editor of the Burlington Magazine died suddenly, Hodgkinson, then 61, became editor. The magazine was again grave financial difficulties (Roger Fry, had rescued it the first time in 1903); Hodgkinson rescued it to the degree that a special issue of the magazine was issued in his honor in 1982. In 1981 he joined the museums and galleries commission, eventually becoming a vice chairman. He also sat on the British art committees of National Art-Collections Fund, the Walpole Society, and the Samuel Courtauld Trust. He died at an Islington nursing home in London. Hodgkinson suggestion that Michael Baxandall should examine German wood carving in the V&A resulted in Baxandall’s Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (1980).

Selected Bibliography

and Pope-Hennessy, John, and Radcliffe, Anthony F. Sculpture: German, Netherlandish, French and British. volume 4 of, The Frick Collection: an Illustrated Catalogue. New York: The Frick Collection/Princeton University Press, 1970; English Medieval Alabasters. London: H.M.S.O., 1976; Sculpture [at the James A. de Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor]. Fribourg, Switzerland: National Trust/Office du livre, 1970.

Sources

Bayley, Stephen. “Vitrol & Ambition: It’s One of the World’s Great Museums [etc.].” The Independent (London), July 28, 2000, p. 1; [obituaries:] Mullaly, Terence. “Terence Hodgkinson, Museum Administrator who Shaped Reforms.” The Guardian (London), October 14, 1999, p. 24; Baker, Malcolm. “Terence Hodgkinson.” The Independent (London), October 13, 1999, p. 6.

Hocke, Gustav René

November 8, 2023April 25, 2024

Full Name: Hocke, Gustav René

Gender: male

Date Born: 1908

Date Died: 1985

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Mannerist (Renaissance-Baroque style), philology, and philosophical anthropology

Career(s): art critics and art historians

Overview

Journalist and art historian; employed Geistgeschichte mode in his philological and art-historical studies of Mannerism. Hocke studied in Bonn under the literary historian Ernst Robert Curtius (1886-1956) (whose grandfather was the archaeologist/art historian Ernst Curtius), under whom he wrote his dissertation in 1934. As a journalist for the Cologne newspaper, he observed of the rise of national socialism, and, as their correspondent in Italy, observed fascism there as well as the Roman underground. After the Second World War, he again worked again as a journalist in Italy. He published a novel, Der tanzende Gott (The Dancing God), in 1948. His interest in primary source documentation resulting in the following year’s publication of artist’s letters, Europäische Künstlerbriefe. In 1957 he published his Die Welt als Labyrinth his theory of the continual resurfacing of Manneristic tendenices in European art. The book was highly influential for subsequent art historians such as Jacques Bousquet. Throughout his writing, Hocke employs a Geistgeschichte approach to his art history. This was the belief that an art object reflects an artist’s personal expression, not a struggle between, for example, abstraction and naturalism. Geistgeschichte was most fully developed through the Vienna-school art historian Max Dvořák, whom Hocke seems to have used in his conception of the Italian Mannerists as a decline in form reflecting a decline in their spirit(uality).

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Lukrez in Frankreich von der Renaissance bis zur Revolution. Ph.D, Bonn, 1934, published, Cologne: Buchdruckerei dr. P. Kerschgens, 1935; Die Welt als Labyrinth: Manier und Manie in der europäischen Kunst. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957; Manierismus in der Literatur: Sprach-Alchimie und esoterische Kombinationskunst. Hamburg: Rowohlt 1959; Malerei der Gegenwart: der Neo-Manierismus: vom Surrealismus z. Meditation. Wiesbaden/Munich: Limes, 1975; and Weis, Helmut. Ernst Fuchs:das graphische Werk. Berlin: Jugend und Volk, 1967; Der tanzende Gott: Roman. Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1948; edited, Europäische Künstlerbriefe: Bekenntnisse zum Geist. Bad Salzig: K. Rauch, 1949.

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. 154; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 98; Bazin 189; Cheney, Liana De Girolami. “Preface.” Readings in Italian Mannerism. New York: Peter Lang, 1997, p. xxvii; Hocke, Gustav René. Das verschwundene Gesicht: ein Abenteuer in Italien. Leipzig: K. Rauch, 1939; Busch, Jutta, and Pauly, Albert. Hommage à Gustav René Hocke: die Welt als Labyrinth. Viersen: Verein für Heimatpflege, 1989; Hocke, Gustav Rene, and Haberland, Detlef. Im Schatten des Leviathan: Lebenserinnerungen 1908-1984. Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2004.

Journalist and art historian; employed Geistgeschichte mode in his philological and art-historical studies of Mannerism. Hocke studied in Bonn under the literary historian Ernst Robert Curtius (1886-1956) (whose grandfather was the archae

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