Art Historians

Graves, Algernon

November 8, 2023April 19, 2024

Full Name: Graves, Algernon

Gender: male

Date Born: 1845

Date Died: 1922

Place Born: Pall Mall, London, England, UK

Place Died: Marylebone, City of Westminster, London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): documentaries (documents), documentary (general concept), and records (documents)

Overview

Art -sales and art-exhibition documenter. Graves was the son of Henry Graves (1806-1892) a publisher of prints, and Mary Squire (d. 1871). He studied German in Bonn, Germany (unsuccessfully, he would say) before joining his father’s company, Henry Graves & Co., which he eventually assumed ownership. In 1850, while confined following an injury, Graves hit upon the idea of an enumerative catalog of art exhibited in London, developed from his personal lists compiled for his other work assignments, and arranged alphabetically by artist. However, this remained an idea while Graves worked researching for catalogs of English painters that Graves & Company published, such as the Works of the Late Sir Edwin Landseer, 1875. By 1884 Graves published the first edition of his idea, A Dictionary of Artists who have Exhibited Works in the Principal London Exhibitions from 1760 to 1880. A second enlarged edition appeared in 1895. Graves married the daughter of a Manchester, England, art dealer, J. C. Grundy. When Grave’s father died in 1892, Graves took over the business. In 1899, Graves and William V. Cronin issued the first volume of their work on Sir Joshua Reynolds, which they sold by subscription. In 1900, a book on Sir Thomas Lawrence by Lord Gower (1845-1916) included a catalog by Graves. A third edition of the Dictionary of Artists was published in 1901. His son, Herbert Seymour Graves (d. 1898), assisted on later editions of the Dictionary of Artists. Graves used his notes, which totaled fifty volumes to create other books documenting individual institutions. Beginning in 1905, he issued the first volume of his Royal Academy of Arts: a Complete Dictionary of Contributors and their Work. A series on the Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1760-1791 [and the] Free Society of Artists, 1761-1783 appeared in 1907. The same year he retired from Graves & Co., and joined Thomas Agnew & Sons as a print authority. His index of the British Institution, 1806-1867 was published in 1908. Graves published a Summary of and Index to Waagen in 1912, an index of the paintings and owners listed in Treasures of Art in Great Britain (1854-7) of Gustav Friedrich Waagen. In 1913, Graves combined these into A Century of Loan Exhibitions, 1813-1912 (four volumes published through 1915). His Art Sales from Early in the Eighteenth Century to Early in the Twentieth Century was published between 1918 and 1921. In 1919, he married a second time to Madeline Lilian Sophia Wakeling Walker (b. 1871/2). He died at his home in Marylebone and is buried at Brompton cemetery, London. Graves created reference sources that began the modern discipline of provenance research. He used his researcher’s instinct to write original dictionaries based upon massive compilations. His sources were wide. In one instance he consulted a set of catalogs annotated by Horace Walpole (1717 – 1797) from the collection of Archibald Philip Primrose, the Earl of Rosebery (1847-1929); in another instance he tracked down the payment ledgers of Joshua Reynolds to Reynold’s descendants. He combed through all of the printed catalogs of Christie’s auction house. Graves’ catalog of Reynolds was highly influential in Graves’ time. Some art historians, such as Ellis K. Waterhouse, found fault with it (though admitting they were “sedulous”), but Graves himself never claimed to be an art historian. His works were widely consulted and owned by art scholars of his time. Imitations, such as George Reford’s Art Sales (1888), paled.

Selected Bibliography

Catalogue of the Works of the Late Sir Edwin Landseer, R. A. London: Messrs. Henry Graves & Co., 1875; A Dictionary of Artists who have Exhibited Works in the Principal London Exhibitions of Oil Paintings from 1760-1880. London: G. Bell, 1884; and Cronin, William Vine. A History of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds. 4 vols. London: Henry Graves and Co. 1899-1901; Gower, Ronald Sutherland. Sir Thomas Lawrence, with a Catalogue of the Artist’s Exhibited and Engraved Works. London: Goupil, J. Boussod, Manzi, Joyant, successors, 1900; The Royal Academy of Arts: a Complete Dictionary of Contributors and their Work from its Foundation in 1769 to 1904. 8 vols. London: H. Graves, 1905-06; The Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1760-1791 [and] the Free Society of Artists, 1761-1783: a Complete Dictionary of Contributors and their Work from the Foundation of the Societies to 1791. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1907; Summary of and Index to Waagen. London: A. Graves, 1912; A Century of Loan Exhibitions, 1813-1912. 5 vols. London: A. Graves, 1913-15; Art Sales from Early in the Eighteenth Century to Early in the Twentieth Century (Mostly old Master and Early English Pictures). 3 vols. London: A. Graves, 1918-21.

Sources

Graves, Algernon, and Cronin, William V. “Introduction.” A History of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds. 4 vols. 1899-1901; Graves, Algernon. Royal Academy Exhibitors. pp. vii-viii; Avery-Quash, Susanna. “Graves, Algernon.” Dictionary of National Biography; Waterhouse, Ellis K. “A Review of Reynolds.” Burlington Magazine 70, no. 408 (March 1937): 104; [obituary:] “Historian Of English Art: Death of Mr. A. Graves.” Times (London) February 7, 1922, p. 12.

Grautoff, Otto

November 8, 2023April 19, 2024

Full Name: Grautoff, Otto

Gender: male

Date Born: 1876

Date Died: 1937

Place Born: Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany

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

Home Country/ies: Germany

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

Overview

Poussin and French art scholar. In 1907 he published a guide to the art museums of Munich. His Exzentrische Liebes- und Künstlergeschichten, is a fictional account of artists. He published the second volume of Barockmalerei in den romanischen Ländern, which the young art historian Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner as issued the first. His book on Nicolas Poussin, published the same year as one by Walter F. Friedländer, largely overshadowed Friedländer’s in Germany.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Nicolas Poussins Jugendjahre. Bern, 1914; Die Entwickling der modernen Buchkunst in Deutschland. Leipzig: H. Seemann: 1901; and Waetzoldt, Wilhelm, and Barrès, Maurice, and Bartholomé, Albert. Kunstverwaltung in Frankreich und Deutschland im Urteil . . . sowie nach französischen Kammerberichten und deutschen Dokumenten. Bern: M. Drechsel, 1915; Nicolas Poussin: sein Werk und sein Leben. 2 vols. Munich: Georg Müller, 1914; Auguste Rodin. Leipzig: Velhagen & Klasing, 1908; Exzentrische Liebes- und Künstlergeschichten. Leipzig: L. Staackmann, 1907; Formzertrümmerung und Formaufbau in der bildenden Kunst: ein Versuch zur Deutung der Kunst unserer Zeit. Berlin: E. Wasmuth, 1919; Die Gemäldesammlungen Münchens: ein kunstgeschichtlicher Führer durch die Königliche ältere Pinakothek, das Königliche Maximilianeum, die Sammlung des Freiherrn von Lotzbeck, die Schackgalerie, die Königliche neuere Pinakothek. Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1907; Die neue Kunst. Berlin: K. Siegismund, 1921; Die Malerei im Barockzeitalter in Frankreich und Spanien. Volume 2 of Barockmalerei in den romanischen Ländern. Wildpark-Potsdam: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1928.

Sources

Bazin 374; 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. 239-42.

Poussin and French art scholar. In 1907 he published a guide to the art museums of Munich. His Exzentrische Liebes- und Künstlergeschichten, is a fictional account of artists. He published the second volume of Barockmalerei in den romanis

Gramberg, Werner

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Gramberg, Werner

Gender: male

Date Born: 1896

Date Died: 1985

Place Born: Lyck, Prussia

Place Died: Hamburg, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

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

Overview

Italian renaissance scholar

Selected Bibliography

0.Metzler

Sources

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. 237-8

Italian renaissance scholar

Graham, Maria Dundas

November 8, 2023April 19, 2024

Full Name: Calcott, Maria

Other Names:

Maria Callcott
Lady Callott

Gender: female

Date Born: 19 July 1785

Date Died: 21 November 1842

Place Born: Papcastle, Allerdale, Cumbria, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): English (language), feminism, French (culture or style), French Renaissance-Baroque styles, and painting (visual works)

Career(s): art historians

Overview

British author, illustrator, and polymath; wrote the first book in English on Poussin; early exponent of the so-called “Italian primitives”. Graham was born Maria Dundas as the eldest of four children to Rear-Admiral George Dundas, and Ann Thompson (Dundas) at Papcastle near Cockermouth in Cumberland,UK present-day Papcastle, Allerdale, Cumbria, UK. She attended the school at the Manor House in Drayton, near Oxford, where she cultivated her interests in learning botany, history, geography, English literature, and drawing. Through her father’s connections in Richmond and Edinburgh, she frequently socialized with a wide circle of painters and collectors––such as the painter Thomas Lawrence and poet Thomas Campbell––further deepening her interests in the fine arts. Dundas received artistic training from William Delamotte (1775-1863), who encouraged her to engage with works of English art theory at an early age.

In 1808, Dundas’s father was appointed to a commission in the navy in Bombay. She and her younger siblings accompanied her father in India. On the way to India, she met naval lieutenant Thomas Graham (d. 1822) whom she married in 1809. Together, they moved back to England in 1811 and she made her debut as a travel author when she published Journal of a Residence in India , followed soon afterward by Letters to India in the same year. The couple traveled to Italy and Malta in 1819 and remained there until 1820. During this time, Dundas, now Graham, published the first monograph in English on the works and study of Nicholas Poussin titled Memories of the Life of Nicholas Poussin and another travel book titled Three Months Passed in the Mountains East of Rome. The Poussin book did not overall receive positive reviews from critics during its subsequent years. As they sailed towards South America in 1822, her husband died of a fever. Now in Chile and recently widowed, she lived among the Chileans for a full year, documenting and illustrating their lives and history in great detail in her journal.

In 1827, Graham married the painter Augustus Wall Callcott (1779-1844). Together they embarked on a year-long honeymoon to Germany, the Austrian Empire, Italy, and France touring art galleries and churches. They sought out early works, meeting with curators and artists who were reputed as a “revolution in art.” Graham, now Callcott, took extensive notes on early Italian and Northern Renaissance masters, known as ”Primitives” by British art historians. During their travels, however, she ruptured a blood vessel upon contracting tuberculosis and became physically disabled. Though she could no longer travel, she was still able to write. During her limited recovery, Callcott revisited her earlier interests in the ‘Primitives’ with Descriptions of the Chapel of the Annunziata dell’Arena published privately in 1835 with engravings of the chapel by her husband. In this publication, Callcott’s appreciation of the “Primitive” Italian art is noted to be one of the first works to mark a revival of interest in these early Italian painters as well as the first attempt to record them in the face of their deterioration. Within the same year, she published a children’s history book titled Little Arthur’s History of England. It became her most famous book and was reprinted in numerous editions.

Callcott, who was deemed physically unable to travel for extended periods of time, worked towards an ambitious project of writing the history of European art. As her health gradually deteriorated, she was unable to fully complete her goal but nonetheless, published two volumes of Essays towards the History of Painting in 1836 and 1838. She described the origins of painting in Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, and Chaldean civilizations, discussing materials and techniques, further highlighting her thorough historical research. Distinct from the ‘scholarly’ perspectives of accredited art historians and critics, her work instead served as a popular guide to art for women. Callcott’s published Essays were a small fragment of the work she intended, but her untimely death in 1842, hastened by her disability, prevented completion.

Selected Bibliography

[as Maria Graham]. Journal of a Residence in India. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1812;
[as Maria Graham]. Letters on India. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814.
[as Maria Graham]. Memoirs of the Life of Nicholas Poussin.London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820;
[as Maria Callcott]. Three Months Passed in the Mountains East of Rome: During the Year 1819. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1820.
[as Lady Maria Callcott]. Description of the Chapel of the Annunziata dell’ Arena, or Giotto’s Chapel, in Padua. London: Privately printed for the author, by Thomas Brettell, Rupert Street, Haymarket, 1835;
[as M. C.]. Little Arthur’s History of England. 2 vols. London: J. Murray, 1835;
[as Lady Maria Callcott]. Essays Towards the History of Painting. London: Edward Moxon,1836, 1838;

Sources

Marchant, Anyda. “The Captain’s Widow: Maria Graham and the Independence of South America.” The Americas 20, no. 2 (1963): 127–42,
Collier, Carly, and Caroline Palmer. “Discovering Ancient and Modern Primitives: The Travel Journals of Maria Callcott, 1827–28.” The Volume of the Walpole Society 78 (2016): i–353;
Palmer, Caroline. “Maria, Lady Callcott (19 July 1785-21 November 1842).” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century no. 28 (2019), Gale Academic OneFile (accessed November 17, 2022).

Contributors: Doriz Concepcion

Graef, Botho

November 8, 2023April 19, 2024

Full Name: Graef, Botho

Gender: male

Date Born: 1857

Date Died: 1917

Place Born: Berlin, Germany

Place Died: Königstein im Taunus, Hesse, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), Antique, the, and Classical

Overview

Specialist in ancient Greek art, but also an early spokesperson for and interpreter of “die Brücke” movement. Friend of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the poet Stefan George. Graef was the son of the painter Gustav Graef. Professor of Archaeology at University of Jena 1904-1915.

Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 122-123; Wahl, Volker. “Botho Graef: der ‘leidenschafliche Wortführer der Jenaer Intellektuellen.” in, Junge, Henricke, ed. Avantgarde und Publikum: zur Rezeption avantagardistischer Kunst in Deutschland, 1905-1933. Vienna: Böhler, 1992, pp. 119-128.

Grabar, Oleg

November 8, 2023April 19, 2024

Full Name: Grabar, Oleg

Other Names:

Oleg Grabar

Gender: male

Date Born: 03 November 1929

Date Died: 08 January 2011

Place Born: Strasbourg, Grand Est, France

Place Died: Princeton, Mercer, NJ, USA

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): archaeology, Islam, and Islamic (culture or style)

Overview

Historian of Islamic art and archaeology; professor of art history at Harvard. Grabar’s father was the eminent Byzantinist André Grabar. The younger Grabar was raised in Strsbourg where his father was teaching art history. After attendance at various lycees in Paris, studied ancient history at the University of Paris. He moved with his family to the United States in 1948 when his father was appointed to Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard’s Byzantine studies center in Washgington, D. C. He married the following year. Grabar studied medieval history at Harvard University where he received his A. B. in 1950 and diplomas in medieval and modern history from Paris the same year. His A. M. and Ph.D. were awarded from Princeton in 1953, and 1955, respectively. His dissertation topic was on the ceremonial art at the Umayyad court. He attributed his interested in Islamic manuscripts to a Princeton course he attended under Kurt Weitzmann. He also received certificats de licence in ancient, medieval and modern history from the University of Paris in 1948 and 1950. Grabar was professor of art at the University of Michigan (1954-1969). During these years, Grabar, focused his work on the architecture of the seventh- and eighth-century Umayyad dynasty. In 1959 the Freer Gallery’s Department of Near Eastern Art curator, Richard Ettinghausen, approached him to co-author a single volume (!) on Islamic art for the prestigious Pelican History of Art series. Grabar agreed to write the sections on architecture and Ettinghausen on the fine arts. The project lagged, however, due partially because of the book’s scope and partially due to the commitments of the two authors. Beginning in 1964, he led the excavations of an early Islamic palace at Qasr al-Hayr East in Syria. Sponsored jointly by the Universities of Michigan and Harvard, the desert excavations northeast of Palmyra revealed a fortified residence, courtyards and mosque arrangement whose outer walls were almost three miles square. Grabar returned to teach at his alma mater after 1969. The results of the Qasr al-Hayr excavtion were published by Grabar and others as City in the Desert: Qasr al-Hayr East in 1978. The same year he published an introductory book on the Alhambra. Ettinghausen died in 1979 and Grabar completed the remaining portions of Pelican History assigned to Ettinghausen. In 1980, when the Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture chair was established, he became its first appointment. Two years later, with assistance from the Aga Khan program, he founded Muqarnas, a periodical for the study of Islamic art and architecture, and remained its editor for the next ten years. Ettinghausen and Grabar’s Pelican History finally appeared in 1987 as The Art and Architecture of Islam: 650-1250, the first of two volumes envisioned. However, Grabar relinquished rights to the second volume, which was completed by others in 1994. In 1989 Grabar delivered the A. W. Mellon lectures at the National Gallery of Art, entitled “Intermediary Demons, Toward a Theory of Ornament.” In 1990 he retired from Harvard, published Great Mosque of Isfahan and assumed a position of professor in the School of Historical Studies at Princeton. There he published the Mellon lectures as the book The Mediation of Ornament (1992). He died of heart failure at his Princeton home at age eighty-one. Grabar’s work led to subsequent new disciplines within Islamic studies. Through his influence and th oosef his students, the scope of Islamic art was broadened beyond the traditional limits. He “posed sweeping questions about the nature of Islamic art, seeking to discover the impulses that generated its specific forms and dynamics of growth” (Grimes).

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Muqarnas 10 (1993):i x-xiii; [collected essays:] Constructing the Study of Islamic Art. 4 vols. Burlington, VT: Ashgate/Variorum, 2005-2006; Islamic Art and Byzantium.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 18 (1964): 67-88; The Formation of Islamic Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973; The Alhambra. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978; The Art of the Book: Persian Miniatures from the Shahnameh [film]. Directed by Iraj Gorgin. Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities, 1980; The Illustrations of the Maqamat. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984; and Ettinghausen, Richard. The Art and Architecture of Islam: 650-1250. Pelican History of Art 51. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987; The Great Mosque of Isfahan. New York: New York University Press, 1990; The Mediation of Ornament. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992; The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996; and G. W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, eds. Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Post-classical World. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999; The Dome of the Rock. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006.

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. 89; 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. 147-8; Introduction. “Essays in Honor of Oleg Grabar: Contributed by his students.” Muqarnas 10 (1993): vii-ix; [transcript] Oleg Grabar. Interviews with Art Historians, 1991-2002. Getty Research Institute, Malibu, CA; Blair, Sheila S. “Preface.” The Art and Architecture of Islam: 1250-1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994, p. vii; The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 285; [obituaries:] Grimes, William. “Oleg Grabar, 81, Historian Who Studied Islamic Culture.” New York Times, January 13, 2011, p. A23.

Grabar, Igor

November 8, 2023April 19, 2024

Full Name: Grabar, Igor

Other Names:

Igor Grabar

Gender: male

Date Born: 1871

Date Died: 1960

Place Born: Budapest, Czechoslovakia

Place Died: Moscow, Russia

Home Country/ies: Russia

Subject Area(s): museums (institutions) and Russian (culture or style)

Career(s): art historians, authors, directors (administrators), museum directors, and painters (artists)

Overview

Writer, painter, museum director, and historian of Russian art and architecture. Grabar studied at the Academy of Arts at the University of St. Petersburg in 1894, and moved to Munich two years later. As an art student, he was affiliated with the Jugendstil movement, but returned to St. Petersburg in 1901. In 1913, he was appointed professor at the Academy of Arts and Director of the Tret’yakov Gallery in Moscow. Grabar supervised the restoration of Russian architecture and painting, publishing several articles on Russian art. His book, History of Russian Art (1910-15) became a foundational resource for the study of Russian art. In 1917, Grabar received a joint appointment as professor of art history at Moscow State University and as Director of the Scientific Research Institute of Art History at the Academy of Sciences, where he worked until his death in 1960. He is no relation to either André Grabar or Oleg Grabar.

Sources

Dictionary of Art

Contributors: LaNitra Michele Walker

Grabar, André

November 8, 2023April 19, 2024

**Image Credit:** Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts

Full Name: Grabar, André

Other Names:

André Grabar

Gender: male

Date Born: 1896

Date Died: 1990

Place Born: Kiev, Misto, Ukraine

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

Home Country/ies: Ukraine

Subject Area(s): archaeology, Byzantine (culture or style), and Medieval (European)

Overview

Archaeologist and historian of medieval and Byzantine art at the Collège de France. Grabar graduated from the lycée in Kiev in 1914, entering the University of St. Vladimir. He enrolled in the school of classical studies, which at that time included art history. In 1915 he moved to the university in Petrograd, studying under N. P. Kondakov, Dmitrii Vlas’evich Ainalov III
and Iakov Ivanovich Smirnov until the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. He characterized this period as the formative years that shaped his conception of iconography. Grabar completed his exams in Odessa in 1919 and left Russia in 1920 for Bulgaria. In Sofia, the director of the Archaeological Museum, Bogdan Filov (1883-1945), gave him a position inventorying the medieval monuments of Bulgaria. He labored on the project for three years in harsh field work. Grabar moved to Strasbourg, as a lecturer on the Russian language. In 1922, he settled permanently in France, marrying a Bulgarian medical student Julie Ivanova in 1923 (d. 1977). In Strasbourg he met the medievalist Paul Perdrizet (1870-1938), whom Grabar later described as his most influential colleague. Grabar attained the title maître de conférences at Strasbourg where he taught the history of art. In 1937 Gabriel Millet, the chair of Christian Archaeology at the école pratique des hautes études retired and proposed Grabar as his successor. Grabar moved to Paris, teaching there until 1966. After World War II, he published extensively on the cult of relics, and religious images during Iconoclasm. He founded Cahiers Archéologiques, editing it with Jean Hubert. Between 1946 and 1966 Grabar also held the chair of Art and Archaeology of Byzantium at the Collège de France, and in 1955 he was elected a member of the French Academy. He was a frequent participant in the Dumbarton Oaks symposia, chairing the 1950 one on “The Emperor and the Palace.” He and Carl Nordenfalk produced a two-volume set on early medieval painting, translated into English in 1957-1958, which became one of the most readable and trusted introductory sources on the topic. In 1961 he gave the A. W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. These later became the book, Christian Iconography: A Study of Its Origins (1968). As chair of Art and Archaeology of Byzantium at the école pratique, Grabar delivered Saturday lectures and travaux pratiques whose participants included the major medievalists in Paris (Sears). He lent credence to the pioneering and controversial work of the medievalist Percy Ernst Schramm. Despite being housebound and increasingly blind the last decade of his life, Grabar continued to publish, dictating articles which contain his last thoughts concerning Byzantine art. One of his two sons, Oleg Grabar, was also a medievalist art historian. The Johns Hopkins medievalist Henry Maguire (b. 1943) characterized Grabar’s methodology as synthetic, weaving theology, liturgy and political ideology into his studies of Byzantine art in contrast to the formalistic research of earlier historians. The renewed interest (and accessibility) in the art and monuments of eastern Europe after World War II helped Grabar’s work reach a vast scholarly audience, particularly in the United States which was undergoing a methodological shift. The role of the cult in the formation of Christian art; the interrelationship with the Islamic world with the west and general relations between East and West were the hallmarks of his scholarship. Grabar updated and reissued many of his monographs throughout his life.

Selected Bibliography

[collected articles and bibliography 1917-1968:] L’Art de la fin de l’Antiquité et du Moyen âge [etc.] 3 vols. Paris: Collège de France, 1968 [bibliography, pp. 1215-1223]; Boianskata tsurkva: arkhitektura–zhivopis’. Sofiia: Durzhavna pechatnitsa, 1924; La décoration byzantine. Paris: G. van Oest, 1928; Nordenfalk, Carl. La peinture religieuse en Bulgarie. Paris: P. Geuthner, 1928; L’art byzantin. Paris: Les éditions d’art et d’histoire, 1938; Martyrium: recherches sur le culte des reliques et l’art chrétien antique. 2 vols. Paris: Collège de France,1946; “Un médaillon en or provenant de Mersine en Cilicie.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 6 (1951): 25-49; Byzantine Painting: Historical and Critical Study. Geneva: Skira, 1953; La peinture byzantine: étude historique et critique. Geneva: Skira, 1953; “Un nouveau reliquaire de Saint Démétrios.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 8 (1954): 305-313; Early Medieval Painting from the Fourth to the Eleventh Century: Mosaics and Mural Painting. New York: Skira, 1957; and Nordenfalk, Carl. Le haut moyen âge, du quatrième au onzième siècle: Mosaïques et peintures murales. Geneva: Skira, 1957, English, Early Medieval Painting from the Fourth to the Eleventh Century. New York: Skira, 1957; L’iconoclasme byzantin: dossier archeologique. Paris: College de France, 1957; and Fourmont, Denise. Ampoules de Terre Sainte (Monza, Bobbio). Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1958; and Nordenfalk, Carl. La peinture romane du onzième au treizième siècle. Geneva: Skira, 1958, English, Romanesque Painting from the Eleventh to the Thirteenth Century. New York: Skira, 1958; and Chatzedakes, Manoles. Byzantine and Early Medieval Painting. New York: Viking Press, 1965; and Velmans, Tania. Gli affreschi della Chiesa di Sopocani. Milan: Fabbri, 1965; and Velmans, Tania. Mosaici e affreschi nella Kariye-Camii ad Istanbul. Milan: Fratelli FabbrI, 1965; L’âge d’or de Justinien, de la mort de Théodose à l’Islam. Paris: Gallimard, 1966, English, Byzantium: from the Death of Theodosius to the Rise of Islam. Arts of Mankind 10. London: Thames and Hudson, 1966, [U.S. version retitled as] The Golden Age of Justinian: from the Death of Theodosius to the rise of Islam. New York: Odyssey Press, 1967; Byzantium: Byzantine art in the Middle Ages. London: Methuen, 1966; Le Premier art chrétien (200-395). Paris: Gallimard, 1966, English, The Beginnings of Christian Art, 200-395. Arts of Mankind 9. London: Thames & Hudson, 1967; L’Art du Moyen âge en Europe orientale. Paris: A. Michel, 1968; Die mittelalterliche Kunst Osteuropas. Baden-Baden: Holle,1968; Christian Iconography: a Study of its Origins. A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1961. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968; Les manuscrits grecs enluminés de provenance italienne, IXe-XIe siècles. Paris: Klincksieck, 1972. Les origines de l’esthétique médiévale. Paris: Macula, 1992.

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, pp. 4, 66, 67 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. 70; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 205-206, 212-213; Maguire, Henry. “André Grabar: 1896-1990.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 45 (1991): xiii-xv; The Dictionary of Art; Sears, Elizabeth. “The Art-Historical Work of Walter Cahn.” in Hourihane, Colum, ed. Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn. University Park, Pa: Penn State Press, 2008, p. 21, note 40; .[obituary:] The Independent (London), October 9, 1990: 14.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Gowing, Lawrence, Sir

November 8, 2023April 19, 2024

**Image Credit:** National Portrait Gallery

Full Name: Gowing, Lawrence, Sir

Other Names:

Sir Lawrence Burnett Gowing

Gender: male

Date Born: 1918

Date Died: 1991

Place Born: Stoke Newington, Hackney, London, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Modern (style or period) and painting (visual works)

Career(s): artists (visual artists) and curators

Overview

Artist, curator and historian of modern art history. Gowing was born to Horace Gowing, a successful draper. His early years were spent at the Downs School at Colwall, Herefordshire. He was tutored in art first by Maurice Feild (1905-1988) and later by William Coldstream (1908-1987), the latter frequenting the school because of its unconventional English teacher, W. H. Auden. Gowing further attended Leighton Park School continuing to study under Coldstream and then at Coldstream’s Road School, where his fellow students included the painter/art historians Quentin Bell and Adrian Stokes. Gowing’s study of the literature of art history was largely self-taught. His paintings of the 1940s were subsequently collected in major museums, but like Stokes, his explorations of art would more and more become literary. During World War II, he was a conscientious objector, a product perhaps of his Quaker training. It was during this period as well that he began to write, first anonymously in the Notes of a Painter, published in John Lehmann’s Penguin New Writing. In the late 1940s, Gowing began to write books on art. At 29 he was made professor of Fine Arts at the University of Durham, a remarkable advance for someone without significant training or experiences. He remained at Durham between 1948-1958. While recovering from tuberculosis, Gowing wrote his most influential, Vermeer (1952). The same year he married the writer Julia Frances Strachey (1901-1979). He moved to the Chelsea School of Art, London, England, 1958-65. In 1953 he was appointed Trustee of Tate Gallery, (until 1960) and again 1961-64. Gowing left Chelsea in 1965 for two years as Keeper of British Art at the Tate Gallery (1965-67). He was not the administrator the Tate needed and although he expected to become the next director, the trustees passed him over. Important exhibitions at this time included the New York show “Turner: Imagination and Reality” (1966) one of the first where Turners were lent to America. Gowing was also responsible for the reinstallation of Turner’s work in the Tate in 1967. Unhappy at being passed over at the Tate, Gowing returned to teaching to become Professor of Fine Art at Leeds University. His marriage to Julia Strachey was dissolved in 1967 and the same year he married Jennifer Wallis. During those same years, (1961-91) he was trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, London. In 1975 he took the leadership of the Slade School within University College, London. “He walked into the interview and appointed himself,” one member quipped (Hilton). He presided over the Slade during the meager art funding years of the Thatcher government. In 1978 Gowing edited the three volumes of Adrian Stokes’ collected writings. Gowing was knighted in 1982. In 1985, retired from the Slade professorship, Gowing made a bid for President of the Royal Academy in London. Though recently knighted, he was not an academician and never received the appointment. He was appointed to an honorary curatorship of the Academy’s collections and its exhibition program. Toward the end of his career, was named curator for the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Phillips Collection in Washgington, D. C. Gowing had a pronounced stutter and accompanying speech impediment about which he was totally unselfconscious. His television appearances and personal style of black leather created an incongruous figure. Gowing’s book on Vermeer is considered his magnum opus. It illustrates best his “artist’s eye” approach to painting analysis. Great art, according to Gowing, was a balance between the human and imaginative experience and the intrinsic elements of observation. Gowing’s writing focuses on what he personally described as ”the pressure exerted by the presence of the real”.

Selected Bibliography

Paul Cézanne: the Basel Sketchbooks. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1988; Cézanne: the Early Years, 1859-1872. New York: Abrams, 1988; Matisse. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979; Vermeer. London: Faber and Faber, 1952; Turner: Imagination and Reality. New York: Doubleday, 1966.

Sources

[obituaries:] Hilton, Tim. The Guardian [London], February 8, 1991, Morphet, Richard. The Independent [London], February 7, 1991, p. 29, The Times [London], February 7, 1991.

Gould, Cecil

November 8, 2023April 19, 2024

**Image Credit:** Monuments Men and Women

Full Name: Gould, Cecil

Other Names:

Cecil Hilton Monk Gould

Gender: male

Date Born: 1918

Date Died: 1994

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Chard, Somerset, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Renaissance

Overview

Historian of Renaissance art and Deputy Director of the National Gallery, London, 1973-1978. Gould was the son of Admiralty Lieutenant-Commander Rupert Thomas Gould (1890-1948), well-known as a panelist of the BBC “Brains Trust” program during World War II, and Muriel Hilda Estall (Gould) (1894-1980). At age 9 his mother separated permanently from his pathologically compulsive father and Gould was raised by her. He attended Westminster School, learning German in Germany before returning to England to study at the Courtauld Institute in 1939. At the outbreak of Word War II, he joined the Royal Air Force serving in Europe and in the Middle East. He never completed his degree at the Institute. While still in uniform, he authored an article in 1945 with Anthony Blunt. After the War, Philip Hendy the new Director of the National Gallery, London, appointed Gould to Assistant Keeper there in 1946, initially in charge of administrative details. Gould published scholarly articles on French art, moderating toward Renaissance subjects when his museum duties moved him in that direction. His first major work, An Introduction to Italian Renaissance Painting appeared in 1957. Eventually, he was assigned to write the catalog of 16th-century Italian paintings which included entries on Raphael, Titian and Michelangelo, the successive volume to the one by his superior, Martin Davies. The first volume of the catalog appeared in 1959 and the second in 1962. That year, 1962, he was promoted to Deputy Keeper. France remained an interest of his, organizing the Arts Council exhibition on Corot, and writing a brief account of Napoleon’s looting of works of art for the Louvre, Trophy of Conquest, both in 1965. His Charlton Lectures at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 1964, were published in 1966 as Michelangelo: Battle of Cascina. He was promoted Keeper and Deputy Director in 1973 when Michael Levey was appointed Director. His Italian Renaissance catalog was updated and reissued in 1975, the same year as his book on Leonardo. He published a catalogue raisonné on the paintings of Correggio in 1976, the first serious treatment in forty years. Gould retired in 1978, retiring to a village in Somerset. A book on Bernini in France of that title appeared in 1981. Gould had a strong affection for opera and frequently attended Covent Garden and Glyndebourne. At the end of his life, with health declining, he was made a correspondant (foreign associate) of the Institut de France. He died at age 75. He completed a monograph on Parmigianino which was published shortly after his death. Gould was a meticulous scholar. His art histories considered the relationships between media, such as painting, sculpture and the other arts. He examined art through the lens of the broader culture, which he knew personally from extensive travel. He was, however, averse to methods much beyond connoisseurship. His major interest was in attribution and subject matter identification. The Dizionario biografico degli Italiani contains numerous entries by him. £7SI

Selected Bibliography

The Sixteenth-century Venetian School [of the National Gallery]. London: National Gallery, 1959; The Sixteenth-century Italian Schools: Excluding the Venetian [of the National Gallery]. London: National Gallery, 1962; Michelangelo: Battle of Cascina. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 1966; and Davies, Martin. French School: Early 19th Century, Impressionists, Post-Impressionists etc.[of the National Gallery]. London: National Gallery, 1970; Leonardo: the Artist and the Non-artist. London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1975; The Sixteenth-century Italian Schools [of the National Gallery]. London: National Gallery, 1975; The Paintings of Correggio. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976; Bernini in France: an Episode in Seventeenth-century History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982; Parmigianino. New York: Abbeville Press, 1994.

Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 515; [obituaries:] “Cecil Gould.” Times (London) April 26, 1994; Mullaly, Terrence. “Cecil Gould.” Independent (London), June 3, 1994, p. 28; Levey, Michael. “Cecil Gould (1918-94).” Burlington Magazine 136, no. 1097 (August 1994), p. 554.

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