Art Historians

Hartt, Frederick

November 8, 2023April 24, 2024

**Image Credit:** Monuments Men and Women

Full Name: Hartt, Frederick

Other Names:

Frederick Hartt

Gender: male

Date Born: 1914

Date Died: 31 October 1991

Place Born: Boston, Suffolk, MA, USA

Place Died: Washington, DC, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Career(s): educators

Overview

University of Virginia professor and Michelangelo and Italian Renaissance scholar. Hart was raised in Boston, the son of Rollin Lynde Hartt and Jessie Clark Knight (Hartt). He received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1935. After spending a year at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, under Erwin Panofsky, 1935-1936, he took his M.A. from New York University in 1937. Between 1939 to 1941 Hartt was an instructor in the history of art at Bennett Junior College in Millbrook, New York and then an assistant and cataloger at the Yale Art Gallery (1941-1942). He married Margaret DeWitt Veeder in 1943. During World War II, he employed his knowledge of the Mediterranean as a photo interpreter, rank of first lieutenant, in the US Army Air Force, 1942-1946. As the war concluded, he helped repatriate art stored for safekeeping in villas in Italy as part of the so-called “Monuments Men” division. He later helped identify work looted by the Germans in Austrian monasteries and libraries. For this he won the Bronze Star, subsequently serving on the Board of directors of the American Committee for the Restoration Italian Monuments, 1946-1949. His war experiences later became his 1949 book, Florentine Art Under Fire. In 1946 Hartt returned to academics as a lecturer and acting director of the Art Museum at Smith College. Between 1948-1949 he was a lecturer on Fine Arts at New York University’s Washington Square College. He joined the art history faculty of Washington University in St. Louis in 1949 (to 1960). In 1950 he completed his dissertation, also from NYU, on Giulio Roman and the Palazzo del Te, written under Walter F. Friedländer and Richard Offner. He divorced in 1960, moving to The University of Pennsylvania the same year. He chaired the department there for the next five years, remaining there until 1967. When the Arno River flooded in Florence in 1966, damaging many works of art, Hartt was again summoned to evaluate and prioritize restoration efforts. He served for the rest of his life on the Committee to Rescue Italian Art. In 1967, he accepted the Paul Goodloe McIntire Professorship of the History of Art at the University of Virginia, remaining there for the remainder of his career. He was Chair of the UVA Department of Art, 1967-1976 and became emeritus faculty in 1984. Hartt also held visiting professorships at Harvard, Franklin and Marshall College and Baylor University, as well as being a consultant at the J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Art and Culture. He served on the boards of directors of the College Art Association of America and the American Committee for the Restoration of Italian Art. He died in a Washgington, D. C. hospital of a heart ailment. Hartt is perhaps best known among non-art scholars for his textbook survey of Renaissance art. He first published The History of Italian Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture in 1969. Like the History of Art textbook by Horst Woldemar Janson after which it was modeled, it presented major renaissance monuments and movements in a fashion compatible for classroom teaching. Revised numerous times, it has remained a staple of the introduction-to-renaissance-art class. Hartt also authored a general text on art history. His reputation as an art expert put him at the fore of a number of art controversies. He weighed in on the side of those approving of the Sistine ceiling cleaning in the 1980s (putting him at odds with James Beck and Alessandro Conti). In 1987, Hartt authenticated a plaster statue discovered by a Parisian dealer as that of Michelangelo’s, presenting his findings to the New York Academy of Sciences. When a London newspaper characterized his judgment as reckless and dishonest, Hartt sued. Although he won, the presiding judge agreed that Hartt had acted dishonorably in accepting a commission on the sale of the statue after his writings about it were published.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Giulio Romano and the Palazzo del Te. New York University, 1950; Florentine Art Under Fire. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1949; “Lignum Vitae in Medio Paradisi: The Stanza d’Eliodoro and the Sistine Ceiling.” Art Bulletin 32 (1950): 115-45; Sandro Botticelli. New York: Abrams, 1953; Giulio Romano. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958; “Power and the Individual in Mannerist Art.” In Millard Meiss et al, editors, Studies in Western Art. 4 vols., Acts of the Twentieth International Congress of the History of Art, 1961. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963. vol. II: Renaissance and Mannerism: 222-38; “Art and Freedom in Quattrocento Florence.” in Essays in Memory of Karl Lehmann: 114-31. Edited by Lucy F. Sandler. Locust Valley, NY: New York University, Institute of Fine Arts, 1964; History of Italian Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969; and Corti, Gino and Kennedy, Clarence. The Chapel of the Cardinal of Portugal, 1434-1459, at San Miniato in Florence Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964; Love in Baroque Art. New York: Published for the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University by J. J. Augustin, Locust Valley, NY, 1964; Michelangelo: the Complete Sculpture. New York, H.N. Abrams, 1968.

Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 83 cited; 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. 67 mentioned; “Professor awarded 7,500 Pounds in Libel Action, but is Criticised by Judge.” The Independent (London), December 7 1989, p. 3; [for Hartt’s contribution to the Sistine ceiling controversy, see] Petrie, Lee Kathryn. The Controversy Surrounding the Cleaning and Conservation of Michelangelo’s Frescoes on the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Master’s Thesis, Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario, 1995; Wallace, William. “Frederick Hartt: A Tribute.” in, Butler, Karen K. Frederick Hartt and American Abstraction in the 1950s: Building the Collection at Washington University in St. Louis. St. Louis: Mildred Lane Kempr Art Museum, 2012; [obituaries:] The Washington Post. November 1, 1991, p. D4; The New York Times. November 1, 1991, p. D18; Los Angeles Times, November 2, 1991, Part B; p. 6; “U.VA. Art Department Former Chairman Dies.” Richmond Times-Dispatch November 1, 1991.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Hartmann, Carl Sadakichi

November 8, 2023July 1, 2024

Full Name: Hartmann, Carl Sadakichi

Other Names:

Sadakichi

Gender: male

Date Born: 1867

Date Died: 1944

Place Born: Dejima, Toyama Prefecture, Japan

Place Died: St. Petersburg, Pinellas, FL, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): American (North American) and photographs

Career(s): art critics

Overview

Photography and art critic, author of a book on American art. Hartmann was the son a German father, Carl Herman Oscar Hartmann and a Japanese mother, Osada Hartmann. He was baptized a Christian in 1871. He and his older brother, Taru, were sent to live with an uncle, Ernst Hartmann, in Hamburg, Germany after the death of his mother. There Hartmann came into contact with the visual arts. He was educated privately before attending boarding school in Steinwaerden, Germany. Hartmann’s father remarried and, returning to Germany. sent the boy to the naval academy in Kiel, Germany, who ran away to Paris three months later. Hartmann emigrated to the United States in 1882 writing freelance for newspapers in Boston and New York. He became the secretary to poet Walt Whitman in 1884. learning much, but also fabricating an interview with the poet, publishing damaging remarks. After moving to Boston in 1887, Hartmann spent much of the 1887-1888 year in Europe. He returned to the U.S., this time New York and Greenwich Village in 1889 where, after an attempt of suicide, he met and married his hospital nurse, Elizabeth Blanche Walsh in 1891. His wife became a screen writer using the pseudonym Elizabeth Breuil. A trip to Paris resulted in the acquaintance of James McNeill Whistler, Claude Monet, and Stéphane Mallarmé. Hartmann founded the first of his short-lived art magazines, The Art Critic from Boston between 1893-1894 and became a naturalized citizen. By 1895 Hartmann was popular lecturer on art. As a columnist for Musical America, Hartmann asserted in 1895 that Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer were America’s greatest artists, views unorthodox at the time. He worked as a librarian for architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White in 1896 to support himself. Hartmann founded another briefly-lived art magazine, Art News (four issues) in 1897. He became staff writer for the Criterion in 1898 and met the photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz and Hartmann were mutual influences on each other (according to each). Stieglitz published Hartmann, then the better known of the two in Stieglitz’s magazine Camera Work beginning in 1898; Hartmann became the first professional photography critic, though he wrote under the name Sidney Allan. His photography criticism also appeared in Camera Notes, 1899-1901. His writing in Camera Work continued through 1908, and except for a brief falling out with Stieglitz, 1905-1906. Hartmann embarked on an art publishing career, his pieces on art criticism revised and published as A History of American Art, 1902. He edited Modern American Sculpture the same year. Under the pen name “Innocent De La Salle,” he published Japanese Art, in 1904. He toured, lecturing on photography from 1905 to 1910. Hartmann divorced in 1910, leaving five children from that marriage as well as a son from a liaison with the New England poet Anne Throop. Using the pseudonym Sidney Allan again, Hartmann turned to art instruction manuals, issuing Composition in Portraiture, in 1909 and Landscape and Figure Composition, in 1910 as well as a monograph on James McNeill Whistler the same year. He began living with the artist Lillian Bonham in an artist colony in Roycroft, New York. Before their relationship dissolved in 1916, Hartmann fathered another seven children. He moved to San Francisco in 1918 and later Los Angeles. His California lifestyle included the notorious wild parties with film stars such as John Barrymore (1882-1952) and W. C. Fields (1880-1946). He wrote briefly as a columnist for The Curtain (London), around 1920. Except for another period on the east cost of the U.S. in North Carolina and New Jersey, 1921-1923, he remained in California, living in Los Angeles and Beaumont. Hartmann appeared in the Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. silent film, “The Thief of Baghdad” in 1924. He revised his A History of American Art in 1934. Alcoholic and obscure, he moved to the Morongo Indian Reservation in Banning, CA, in 1938. When the United States entered World War II, he was put under FBI surveillance; an attempt to intern him and his family in a Japanese-Americans camp was unsuccessful. His final book, Strands and Ravelings of the Art Fabric, 1940, attacked abstractionism and surrealism. He died while visiting a daughter Florida in 1944. His papers are located in the Rivera Library, University of California, Riverside and at the Alfred Stieglitz Archive, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Hartmann is one of three pioneers, alongside Lorado Taft and Samuel Isham, who authored the first significant American art histories.Hartmann was an early and important exponent for photography as an art form. His criticism on American painting, however, was harsh, conservative, and limited a very few masters. Hartmann’s Bohemian lifestyle, seldom holding a job for long, resulted in a lack of specialization as an art expert, except, perhaps for photography. His writing style, a combination of high erudition and flippancy, made a steady American audience difficult, though in his early years he was well known. In later years many, including Stieglitz, shunned him as too reliant on them for handouts to keep his enterprises afloat. Remembered today for his poetry, he corresponded with Ezra Pound (1885-1972) (Pound’s Canto 80 of the 1948 Pisan Cantos was on Hartmann) and George Santayana (1863-1952) Racially Asian in appearance, he experience the prejudice many Eurasians did in fin-de-siecle America.

Selected Bibliography

An History of American Art. 2 vols. New York: Page, 1901; Shakespeare in Art. Boston: L.C. Page, 1901; edited, Modern American Sculpture. New York: Paul Wenzel Publishing, 1902; [as Innocent De La Salle] Japanese Art. New York: Page, 1904; [as Sidney Allan] Composition in Portraiture. New York: Edward L. Wilson, 1909; Landscape and Figure Composition. New York: Baker and Taylor, 1910; The Whistler Book: A Monograph of the Life and Position in Art of James McNeill Whistler Together with a Careful Study of His More Important Works. New York: Page, 1910; Lawton, Harry, and Knox, George, eds. The Valiant Knights of Daguerre: Selected Critical Essays on Photography and Profiles of Photographic Pioneers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

Sources

Fowler, Gene. Minutes of the Last Meeting. New York: Viking Press, 1954 [factual errors]; The Life and Times of Sadakichi Hartmann, 1867-1944. Riverside, CA: University of California, Riverside/Rubidoux Printing Co., 1970; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 p. 539

Hartlaub, Gustav

November 8, 2023April 24, 2024

Full Name: Hartlaub, Gustav

Other Names:

Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub

Gender: male

Date Born: 1884

Date Died: 1963

Place Born: Bremen, Germany

Place Died: Heidelberg, Saxony, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

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

Overview

Modernist art historian, coined the term “Neue Sachlichkeit” for the period of German art between the wars. Hartmann’s paternal family were long merchant-entrepeurs in Bremen. After graduating from the gymnasium in Bremen, he attended classes beginning in 1904 at the universities of Freiburg, Vienna, Munich (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Institut für Kunstgeschichte under Berthold Riehl) and eventually Göttingen. He wrote his disssertation at Göttingen under Robert Vischer on the topic of Sienese painting in the fifteenth century. After a travel year, he entered the Kunsthalle in Bremen as an assistant working in the prints collection, 1910-1913. His early scholarship focused on the Italian Renaissance. In 1913 Hartlaub was appointed a curator at the Mannheim Kunsthalle under Fritz Wichert. His research now moved to Romantic period Germany and the 20th century. Hartlaub was deputy director of the museum during the war years 1914 through 1919. In 1923 he succeeded Wichert as director. In 1923 Hartlaub began using the term “Neue Sachlichkeit” (New Objectivity) to distinguish non-Expressionist art in Germany. He set out to show the most modern artists. His 1924 exhibition, “Kubin und Klee” was followed by one on the German Expressionist Karl Schmidt Rottluff, 1925. In 1926 by a show of the title “Die neue Sachlichkeit” at the Kunsthalle, a show traveling to Chemnitz and Dresden through 1927. The art was avant-garde enough for some museum directors to ask for works to be omitted, as in the case of Schreiber Wiegand, in Chemnitz. During his tenure as director, Hartlaub hired Kurt Martin as part of the museum staff. Hartlaub actively purchased modern art by the Fauves, Expressionists and other modernist groups. The assumption of power by the Nazis in 1933 made Hartlaub an object of scorn for his support of modern art. The Mannheim museum became the first museum to have a Schandausstellung (Shame Exhibition) of modern art, preceeding the famous 1937 “Entartete Kunst” (degenerate art) show in Munich. At the Mannheim show, large photos of Hartlaub were paraded in the streets together with Chagall’s “Rabbi.” Hartlaub was dismissed the same year.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Siena im Quattrocento.Göttingen, 1909; Kunst und Religion: ein Versuch über die Möglichkeit neuer religiöser Kunst. Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1919; Die neue deutsche Graphik. Berlin: E. Reiss, 1920; Giorgiones Geheimnis: ein kunstgeschichtlicher Beitrag zur Mystik der Renaissance. Munich: Allgemeine Verlagsanstalt, 1925; edited, German edition. Amadou, Robert. Das Zwischenreich: vom Okkultismus zur Parapsychologie: Würdigung und Kritik der internationalen Forschung. Baden-Baden: Holle Verlag, 1957; Der Stein der Weisen: Wesen und Bildwelt der Alchemie. Munich: Prestel 1959.

Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 230; Hille, Karoline. “Mit heißen Herz und kuhlem Verstand: Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub und die Mannheimer Kunsthalle, 1913-1933.” in, Junge, Henricke, ed. Avantgarde und Publikum: zur Rezeption avantagardistischer Kunst in Deutschland, 1905-1933. Vienna: Böhler, 1992, pp. 129-130; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 149-52; 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. 261-66; Crockett, Dennis. German Post-Expressionism: The Art of the Great Disorder: 1918-1924. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 1999, pp. 1-3, 22.

Härtel, Wilhelm August, Ritter von

November 8, 2023April 24, 2024

Full Name: Härtel, Wilhelm August, Ritter von

Gender: male

Date Born: 1839

Date Died: 1907

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): Christianity and Early Christian

Overview

Professor and early Christian art scholar at University of Vienna. In 1895 Härtel co-published, Die Wiener Genesis, with his Vienna colleague Franz Wickhoff. Härtel undertook the description of the manuscript and of the Greek text, and Wickhoff that of the pictures.

Selected Bibliography

[series of articles on Wiener Genesis in]: Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhchsten Kaiserhauses 15-16 (Jahrgang 12-13) (1894-95), Beilage (supplement), [written in conjunction with Franz Wickhoff]; and Wickhoff, Franz. Die Wiener Genesis. Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1895; and Curtius, Georg. Kurzgefaszte griechische Schulgrammatik nach Curtius und v. Hartels Schulgrammatik. Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1907; Kritische versuche zur fünften dekade des Livius. Vienna: Tempsky, 1888 ; Lucifer von Cagliari und sein Latein. Vienna: s. n., 1885]; Lvciferi Calaritani Opvscvla. Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 14. Vindobonae: apvd C. Geroldi filivm, 1886.

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. 32.

Professor and early Christian art scholar at University of Vienna. In 1895 Härtel co-published, Die Wiener Genesis, with his Vienna colleague Franz Wickhoff. Härtel undertook the description of the manuscript and

Harshe, Robert B.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Harshe, Robert B.

Other Names:

Robert Bartholow Harshe

Gender: male

Date Born: 1879

Date Died: 1938

Place Born: Salisbury, Chariton, MO, USA

Place Died: Chicago, Cook, IL, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): museums (institutions)

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

Overview

Director, Art Institute of Chicago, 1921-38. Harshe was born to William and Emily Robinson (Harshe). After graduation from the University of Missouri in 1899, he further studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Student’s League in New York, the Colorossi Academy, Paris and the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. His media were etching and painting. In 1902 he began as a supervisor for manual arts in Columbus, Georgia, and then Instructor of Fine Arts at the University of Missouri and then assistant professor of Graphic Arts at Stanford University. In 1915 he was appointed director of the Oakland (California) Public Museum. The following year he became assistant director of the Carnegie Institute. He married Marie Fuller Read (1883-1953). In 1920 he was named associate director of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the following year, appointed director. Harshe’s tenure as director included the acquisition of Titian’s “Education of Cupid.” He was co-author of one of the first general histories of art, History of Art (1928) an English update of José Pijoán y Soteras‘s 1914 work. In 1933, Harshe, with the help of his assistant, Daniel Catton Rich, organized the art exhibition Century of Progress World’s fair in Chicago. Harshe circumvented the original plan to present America’s most favorite paintings (which would have highlighted the collections of New York more than Chicago) in favor of organizing and exclusively American-painting show (except for Whistler Portrait of the Artist’s Mother). He arranged a similar show for the Texas Centennial of 1936. At his sudden death at age 58, he was succeeded by Rich.Harshe was a visionary museum director who understood both the need for an expansive definition of art as well as a museum’s mission as a tastemaker. He refused to hang one of the Art Institute’s (and indeed, the nation’s) most popular paintings, “The Song of the Lark” by Jules Breton because of its conservative academic nature. Sensing Chicago’s need to become an important art center, he emphasized the impressionists and Post-impressionists at a time when they were less preferred. Yet he praised the cartoon art of Walt Disney for its high degree of fantasy.

Selected Bibliography

and Pijoán, José, and Roys, Ralph Loveland. History of Art. 3 vols. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928; A Reader’s Guide to Modern Art. San Francisco: The Wahlgreen company/Panama-Pacific International Exposition, 1914; and Rich, Daniel Catton. Handbook of the House, Formal Gardens and Fountains of Vizcaya: an Italian Palazzo in a Tropical Setting, Home of the late James Deering of Miami and Chicago. Chicago: s. n., 1934; and Bennett, James O’Donnell. A Layman Views the Art Institute’s Rare Paintings. Chicago: Chicago Tribune(?), 1931.

Sources

“Rober B. Harshe, Authority on Art, Head of Chicago Institute Is Dead–Arranged Show for Exposition in 1933.” New York Times January 12, 1938, p. 21; Who Was Who in American Art 2 (1999): 1474-75.

Harrison, Jane Ellen

November 8, 2023April 24, 2024

Full Name: Harrison, Jane Ellen

Other Names:

Jane Harrison

Gender: female

Date Born: 09 September 1850

Date Died: 05 April 1928

Place Born: Cottingham, East Riding of Yorkshire, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): archaeology, Classical, and feminism

Career(s): educators

Overview

Archaeologist and lecturer, Cambridge University; early feminist figure in classical studies. Harrison’s parents were Charles Harrison, a timber broker, and Elizabeth Hawksley Nelson (Harrison) (d. 1850). Her mother died shortly after she was born and the girl was educated by governesses at home and in 1868, the Ladies’ College Cheltenham, acquiring German, Greek and Latin before age 17. She entered Newnham College, Cambridge University in 1874, a recently establish college for women. Few women graduated from Newnham, however, and Cambridge offered women no actual degrees but rather certificates. Between 1880 and 1897 Harrison studied Greek art and archaeology at the British Museum under Charles T. Newton, visiting archaeological sites (but not doing excavations) and gaining expertise in Greek pottery. In the late 1880s she met, influenced–and perhaps had a relationship with–Eugénie Sellers Strong [later, Strong]. Harrison supported herself lecturing at the Museum, public schools [i.e., private boys’ schools] and in the British provinces to huge popular acclaim. She incorporated sound effects and lantern slides. Nearly 1600 people attended her Glasgow lecture on Athenian gravestones. She traveled to Italy and Germany, meeting the Prague scholar Wilhelm Klein. Klein introduced her to Wilhelm Dörpfeld who invited her to participate in his archaeological tours in Greece. Her early book The Odyssey in Art and Literature, a summary book without original observation, appeared in 1882. Harrison met the scholar D. S. MacColl, who purportedly proposed marriage to her. Though she declined, MacColl advised her against writing and lecturing in manner pandering to the public and Victorian aestheticism. She suffered a severe depression, studying Greek art more objectively to in part cure herself, particularly re-evaluating the more “primitive” eras of the art. Harrison’s visit to MacColl in Greece in 1888 left her with an interest in the cults that perpetuated Greek mythology. She concluded that the religion depicted in early Greek art was fundamentally different from the art and literature of the Greeks studied in contemporary Europe. Harrison began publishing in the periodical Oscar Wilde was editing, Woman’s World on “The Pictures of Sappho” in 1888. Harrison translated and updated Mythologie figurée de la Grèce (1883) by the French classical archaeologist Maxime Collignon in 1890 as Manual of Mythology in Relation to Greek Art, a work which gave serious consideration to early Greek art. The same year, she provided personal commentary to selections of Pausanias, Mythology & Monuments of Ancient Athens by Margaret Verrall. These two serious works garnered her membership in the Deutsche Archäologische Institut (German Archaeological Institute) and honorary degrees from the universities of Durham (1897) and Aberdeen (1895). By that time, Harrison’s anthropological approach to archaeolgoy was advocating the notion of ritual over myth, unaware, apparently, of similar conclusions by Scottish scholars James G. Frazer (1854-1941) and W. Robertson Smith (1846-1894) (Payne). She lost a bid for the Yates chair in 1894 to Ernest A. Gardner. Newnham College, however, appointed her a research Fellow in 1893. She and MacColl produced a collected work on vases, Greek Vase Paintings: a Selection of Examples in 1894. In 1899 Harrison published the first of three articles in the Journal of Hellenic Studies on Greek religion. A marriage to the scholar R. A. Neil was dashed when he died in 1901. Harrison began working with the former chair of Greek at Glasgow, Gilbert Murray (1866-1957), who lived near Cambridge and a (then) student Francis MacDonald Cornford (1874-1943). She became the central figure of the group known as the Ritualists. In 1903 her first book of truly original scholarship, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, appeared. The book made truly novel conclusions about the origin of Greek gods. Harrison became intellectually and emotionally close to Cornford; his marriage in 1909 caused her great stress. She replaced him with a friendship with Hope Mirrlees, whom Harrison referred to as “her spiritual daughter.” Another work on Greek relgion, Themis, was published in 1912. In 1920 Virginia Woolf cited Harrison her New Statesman refutation to Arnold Bennett and Desmond McCarthy’s accusation that women were inferior scholars. Harrison retired from Newnham in 1922, moving to Paris and living with Mirrlees. She and Mirrlees returned to London in 1925, publishing her memoirs by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s press, The Hogarth Press. She died three years later at her Bloomsbury home and is buried in St. Marylebone cemetery, East Finchley. Harrison is overall considered a historian of Greek religion, but viewed as a late Victorian, she is more an archaeologist as nearly all her work is founded on the study of visual images (Beard, 2002). Her writing in Woman’s World disseminated Hellenism to a popular and distinctly female readership. Through the journal, Harrison drew similarities between modern collegiate life and the female world that allowed Sappho to flourish questioning gender stereotypes by outlining the varied models of womanhood (Hurst). Methodologically, Harrison employed disparate and nacent disciplines such as anthropology and ethnography into classical studies. She was able to synthesize writers as divergent as Friedrich Nietzsche (Birth of Tragedy) and Emile Durkheim (his notion of the social origin of religion)–both of whom she acknowledged–into a personal theory (Phillips). Henri Bergson’s L’évolution créatrice, 1907, and the 1909 appearance of Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud were major later influences. Harrison herself served as a model for Virginia Woolf. The writer acknowledged Harrison in her diary, A Room of One’s Own, refering to her as “J–H–of Fernham [i.e., Newnham]” and after Harrison’s death in 1928 asserted she saw scholar’s ghost in the college’s gardens.

Sources

[sources on Harrison are legion, specifically:] Harrison, Jane Ellen. Reminiscences of a Student’s Life. London: Hogarth, 1925; Stewart, Jessie G. Jane Ellen Harrison: a Portrait from Letters. London: Merlin Press, 1959; Ackerman, Robert. “Jane Ellen Harrison: the Early Work.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 13 (1972): 209-230; Payne, Harry C. “Modernizing the Ancients: the Reconstruction of Ritual Drama, 1870-1920.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 122, no. 3 (June 9, 1978): 182-192; Maika, Patricia. Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts and Jane Harrison’s Con/spiracy. Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Research Press, 1987; Peacock, Sandra J. Jane Ellen Harrison: the Mask and the Self. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988 [unreliable]; Schlesier, Renate. “Jane Ellen Harrison, 1850-1928,” in, Classical Scholarship: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Briggs, Ward W., and Calder, William M., III, eds. New York: Garland Publishing, 1990, pp. 127-141; Phillips, K.J. “Jane Harrison and Modernism.” Journal of Modern Literature 17 no. 4 (Spring 1991): 465-476; Ackerman, Robert The Myth and Ritual School: J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists. New York: Garland, 1991; Carpentier, Martha Celeste. Ritual, Myth, and the Modernist Text: the Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998; The Makers of Classical Archaeology: A Reference Work. New York: Humanity Books, 2000 pp. 143-45; Beard, Mary. The Invention of Jane Harrison. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000; Robinson, Annabel. The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002; Beard, Mary. “Mrs. Arthur Strong, Morelli, and the Troopers of Cortés.” in, Donohue, A. A. and Fullerton, Mark D., eds. Ancient Art and its Historiography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 152-153; Hurst, Isobel. “Ancient and Modern Women in the Woman’s World.” Victorian Studies 52 no.1 (Autumn 2009): 42; “The Pictures of Sappho.” Woman’s World 1 (April 1888): 274-278; Myths of the Odyssey in Art and Literature. London: Rivingtons, 1882; translated and updated, Collignon, Maxime. Manual of Mythology in Relation to Greek Art. London: H. Grevel, 1890; [introductory essay and archæological commentary] in Verrall, Margaret, ed. Pausanias. Mythology & Monuments of Ancient Athens: Being a Translation of a Portion of the ‘Attica’ of Pausanias by Pausanias, fl. ca. 150-175. London: Macmillan, 1890; and MacColl, Dugald Sutherland. Greek Vase Paintings: a Selection of Examples. London: T.F. Unwin, 1894; Introductory Studies in Greek Art. New York: MacMillan, 1902; Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. 1903; Ancient Art and Ritual. New York, H. Holt, 1913; Reminiscences of a Student’s Life. London: Hogarth, 1925.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Harrison, Evelyn B.

November 8, 2023April 24, 2024

**Image Credit:** American School of Classical Studies

Full Name: Harrison, Evelyn B.

Other Names:

Evelyn Byrd Harrison

Gender: female

Date Born: 1920

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Classical

Overview

Classicist art historian at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Among Harrison’s collegial mentors was Edith Porada in the 1960’s. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1952. Harrison was part of the Archaeology Club, an informal group of classical art historians, whose ranks included Otto J. Brendel of Columbia University and his wife Maria, Homer Thompson (1906-2000) and his wife Dorothy Burr Thompson of the Institute for Advanced Study, Frances Follin Jones of the Princeton Art Gallery, and Dorothy Kent Hill of the Walters Gallery. She was named Edith Kitzmiller Professor Emerita and Adjunct Professor of Fine Arts at her retirement. In 1992 she was one of a group of scholars to comment on the authenticity of the Getty Museum’s disputed kouros.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Roman Portraits from the Athenian Agora. Columbia University, 1952, revised and published as, Portrait Sculpture. Princeton, N.J., American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1953; Archaic and Archaistic Sculpture. Princeton, NJ: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1965.

Sources

Ridgway, Brunhilde Sismondo. “The State of Research on Ancient Art.” Art Bulletin 68 (March 1986): 8, note 8. [transcript] Evelyn Harrison. Interviews with Art Historians, 1991-2002. Getty Research Institute, Malibu, CA.

Harris, Neil

November 8, 2023April 24, 2024

Full Name: Harris, Neil

Gender: male

Date Born: 1938

Place Born: Brooklyn, Cattaraugus, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): American (North American), art theory, and social history

Career(s): art historians and educators

Overview

University of Chicago social historian whose primary publications are on American art. Harris was raised in Brooklyn, NY, the son of Harold Harris and Irene Harris. After receiving an A. B. from Columbia University in 1958 he continued to Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, receiving a second B.A. in 1960. He returned to the U.S., completing a doctorate from Harvard University in 1965. He taught at Harvard first as an instructor and then assistant professor of history in 1965. His dissertation, written under Oscar Handlin (b.1915) was published the following year as the groundbreaking book, The Artist in American Society: the Formative Years, 1790-1860. A sociological examination of the view of art in American society, Harris’ research was drawn from written accounts of the time and not an art history. After his appointment to assistant professor at Harvard, Harris moved to the University of Chicago in 1969 as associate professor. He was the Boucher lecturer at Johns Hopkins University in 1971. He rose to (full) professor of history at Chicago in 1972. Harris moved on to other forms of American Kultur, most notably Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum, which appeared in 1973. Harris treated Barnum as a cultural force, much as emerging American artists, feeding the public’s sense of wonder and their appreciation of Barnum’s artistry. Harris lectured as a visiting professor at Yale University, Cardozo lecturer, in 1974. He was director of the National Humanities Institute, 1975-1977. Harris received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for the 1980-1981 year. He sat on the architecture advisory committee of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1982. In 1982, too, he was the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tandy lecturer. He chaired the department of history at the University of Chicago between 1985 and 1988. Though a social historian, Harris’s interest in the art object manifested itself with his participation in the 1989 exhibition at the Renwick Gallery, Washgington, D. C., “Masterworks of Louis Comfort Tiffany.” Harris’ 1990 book focused on the marketing of popular culture, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America, including shopping centers and parking garages. He became Preston and Sterling Morton Professor of History at Chicago in 1990. In 1991 he was appointed a Getty scholar. He mounted an exhibition for the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993 on the centennial of the Museum’s founding. Harris was an anomaly, a historian with academic appointments in history departments, writing principally on art and art’s role as a social force in history. His primary research interest was the role of the artist in American culture and society. In The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790-1860, Harris examined letters, memoirs, diaries, and European travel guides determining that American artists reformed the notion of art along moral terms to contrast it from foreign perceptions.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] The Artistic Enterprise in America, 1790-1860. Harvard, 1965, revised and published as, The Artist in American Society: the Formative Years, 1790-1860. New York: G. Braziller, 1966; “The Gilded Age Revisited: Boston and the Museum Movement,” American Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1962): 545-64; Humbug; the Art of P. T. Barnum. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973; and Duncan, Alastair , and Eidelberg, Martin. Masterworks of Louis Comfort Tiffany. New York: Abrams, 1989; Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990; Chicago’s Dream, a World’s Treasure: the Art Institute of Chicago, 1893-1993. Chicago: Art Institute, 1993; and Hebert, Robert and Druick, Douglas W. Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago/University of California Press, 2004.

Harris, Enriqueta

November 8, 2023April 24, 2024

Full Name: Harris, Enriqueta

Other Names:

Enriqueta Harris Frankfort

Gender: female

Date Born: 1910

Date Died: 2006

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Career(s): curators

Overview

Curator of the Photographic Collection at the Warburg, 1947-1970; Spanish painting scholar. Harris’ father was Lionel Harris, a British subject and Spanish art dealer and her mother, Enriqueta Rodriguez, a Spaniard who converted to Judaism to marry. Harris was raised in a Jewish home in Hampstead, England. She attended University College London, beginning in 1928 where she read (majored in) modern French and Italian. She was one of the first students to enroll in art history courses which had been introduced into the curriculum in her second year. Harris continued in art history, receiving her Ph.D. under Tancred Borenius in 1934. Her dissertation was on the followers of Goya. She returned to Spain to research the influence of Caravaggio on 17th-century Spanish painting. Harris intended on museum work, but almost no positions were available for women. Instead, she secured an appointment as a part-time lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art, which had recently opened its doors. The Spanish Civil War affected her greatly. She assisted Spanish refugee children to find places of refuge in England. She joined the Spanish section of the Ministry of Information to encourage Spain to remain neutral throughout World War II. In 1938 she published her first book, The Golden Age of Spanish Art. After the war’s end in 1945 she returned to work for the Courtauld Institute, which had subsumed the Warburg Institute and library, founded by Aby M. Warburg and moved after his death from Hamburg to London in 1933. Harris was put in charge of the vast photographic collection–a hallmark of Warburg research–in 1947. She remained in this position the rest of her career. At the Warburg, she met Henri Frankfort, its archaeologist/director, then married. Frankfort divorced his wife and married Harris, who was a strikingly beautiful woman (Kaufmann) in 1952. After only two years, however, Frankfort died unexpectedly. Though her appointment was as an image curator, Harris researched and published on Spanish art throughout her career, contributing to the Goya exhibition at the Royal Academy, London, in 1963, and publishing a monograph on Goya in 1969. She retired from the University in 1970. In 1982 she published a book on Velazquez. In later years she funded a lecture series at the University and fellowships at the Warburg Institute. Her work on Spanish painting was widely praised, especially in Spain, where it was awarded the Grand Cross of Queen Isabel the Catholic. Harris was noted for her discoveries concerning the artists’ lives successfully connecting it with the subject matter of particular paintings. One example was her identification of the figures of the courtiers surrounding the young prince in the painting Baltasar Carlos in the Riding School by Velazquez (Wallace Collection).

Sources

[mentioned] Bober, Phyllis Pray. A Life of Learning. Charles Homer Haskins Lecture. New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1995, p. 13; [obituary:] Kaufmann, Michael. “Enriqueta Harris Frankfort: Art historian who uncovered secrets of Velazquez and Goya.” The Guardian (London) May 16, 2006, p. 35;

Harris, Ann Sutherland

November 8, 2023April 24, 2024

Full Name: Harris, Ann Sutherland

Other Names:

Ann Sutherland Harris

Gender: female

Date Born: 1937

Place Born: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Baroque, feminism, and Modern (style or period)

Overview

Feminist art historian of the baroque and modern era art. Harris was the daughter of Sir Gordon B. B. M. Sutherland (1907-1980), a physicist, fellow and lecturer of Pembroke College and master of Emmanuel College. Her mother was Gunborg Wahlstrom (Lady Sutherland) (1910-2001), an artist originally from Sweden. Sutherland attended the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, graduating with first class honors in 1961. She achieved her Ph.D., from the same institution in 1965, writing her dissertation on Andrea Sacchi. She married the historian William V. Harris in 1965, joining the department of Art and Archeology, Columbia University the same year as an assistant professor. Between 1971-1973 she was Assistant Professor at Hunter College, City University of New York, then Associate Professor, Art Deptartment at the State University of New York at Albany. In 1971, too, she helped found the Women’s Caucus for Art of the College Art Association. After the 1972 meeting of the Association in San Francisco, she and fellow feminist art historian Linda Nochlin were commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to mount a show on important women artists. Harris served as president of the Women’s Caucus until 1974 when she was elected a member of the board of directors of CAA, 1975-1979. Nochlin’s and Harris’ show, Women Artists, 1550-1950 and book, 1976, became the cornerstone for feminist research in art history. In 1977 she accepted the Arthur Kittredge Watson Chair for Academic Affairs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which she held until 1981. After two years of research, first as a Senior Research Fellow at the National Endowment for the Humanities (1981-1982) and the Amon Carter Distinguished Visiting Professor of Art History, University of Texas at Arlington in 1982, Harris joined the University of Pittsburgh as the Mellon Professor of Art History. Her husband is Shepherd Professor of History at Columbia University and Director of the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean. Harris made the case in the first half of Women Artists: 1550-1950 (part two written by Nochlin) that the artwork of women between the middle ages and the French Revolution was seldom preserved and as a result their accomplishments little chronicled. Harris’ review of the festschrift for Walter Friedlaender in the Burlington Magazine brought an illuminating and caustic exchange between Denis Mahon and herself on a Poussin painting.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Andrea Sacchi, 1599-1661. Courtauld Institute, University of London, 1965; Selected Drawings of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. New York: Dover Publications, 1977; Andrea Sacchi: Complete Edition of the Paintings with a Critical Catalogue. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977; Landscape Painting in Rome, 1595-1675: a Loan Exhibition. New York, NY: R. L. Feigen Gallery, 1985; Women Artists, 1550-1950. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art/New York: Random House, 1976; Elizabeth Murray: Drawings, 1980-1986. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Art Gallery/New York: Harper and Row, 1986; and Schaar, Eckhard. Die Handzeichnungen von Andrea Sacchi und Carlo Maratta. Volume 1 of Kataloge des Kunstmuseums Düsseldorf: Handzeichnungen. Düsseldorf: Das Kunstmuseum, 1967; “In Honour of Walter Friedlaender.” Burlington Magazine 109 (January 1967): 36-9, reply, Mahon, Denis. “Poussin and his Patrons.” Burlington Magazine 109 (May 1967): 304 ff., [reply by Harris, p. 308].

Sources

Ann Southerland Harris Curriculum Vitae. http://www.pitt.edu/arthome/faculty/harris

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