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Goncourt, Edmond de

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Full Name: Goncourt, Edmond de

Other Names:

  • Edmond de Goncourt

Gender: male

Date Born: 26 May 1822

Date Died: 16 July 1896

Place Born: Nancy, Grand Est, France

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

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): eighteenth century (dates CE), French (culture or style), and nineteenth century (dates CE)

Career(s): art critics


Overview

Writer, art historian of the eighteenth-century art and art critic of contemporary nineteenth-century Paris together with his brother, Jules. Edmond de Goncourt and his brother, Jules, were born into minor aristocracy. Their father, Marc-Pierre Huot de Goncourt, (d. 1834) and their mother Annette-Cécile Guérin (de Goncourt) (d.1848) both died when the men were young. Their inherited wealth enabled the brothers to become artists without concern for their livelihood, relieving Edmond from a treasury clerk position so dismal that he entertained thoughts of suicide. The assembled a collection of eighteenth-century art, largely drawings and pastels, which were not popular at the time. Though throughout their lives they were self-indulgent pleasure-seekers, the brothers made their initial reputation as journalists. In 1851 the two began publishing a journal chronicling their art scene. The brothers were arrested in 1852 for quoting mildly erotic Renaissance verses in one of their articles. Their 1855 account of the Exposition Universelle, La peinture a l’Exposition de 1855, delineated one of their core critique values, writing that painting was “a daughter of the earth,” an art in which color, not line, was the core value. They were among the first to decry the dark history painting–espoused by the French Academy and which was the bulk of French official art–as a poor subject for painting. Landscapes and contemporary genre were the acme of modern painting for the Goncourt. They published essays on eighteenth-century artists intermittently in various periodicals. Beginning in 1856, the two published these essays in a collected series, called L’Art du XVIIIe siècle (ultimately 12 fascicles completed in 1875). It remains their most important book. Illustrated by Jules (and two my Edmond), the book was responsible for the revival (albeit Romantic) of the appreciation of the rococo as well as the working methods of French 18th-century artists from Watteau to Charles-Nicolas Cochin. The brothers wrote about all French artists of the eighteenth century, not just the famous. They, however, considered themselves novelists and wrote throughout their career. Their Germinie Lacerteux (1864), was based on the life of their servant, Rose, follows her thefts from the brothers to pay for after-hours orgies and trysts. It is considered among the early novels of French Realism devoted to working-class life. In 1867, their novel Manette Salomon appeared. The book, a narrative about the studio practice of contemporary artists, art students and their model, (it was originally to be titled L’atelier Langibout), was both original and modern in its treatment of psychology and contemporary life. The prix Goncourt was conceived by the brothers in the same year (1867) as the Académie Goncourt, a literary society of 10 members. The Goncourt’s art criticism focused on the Barbizon school. Edmond later wrote enthusiastically of Constable and Turner. They were not visionaries of the art of their own era and were relatively unimpressed with and sometimes critical of the Impressionists, except for Edmond’s praise of Degas’ originality. Their chief modern artist was the (now largely forgotten) artist Paul Gavarni (Sulpice Guillaume Chevalier, 1804-1866). When Jules died of a syphilis-related heart ailment in 1870, Edmond a homosexual, was devastated. He continued writing on his own completing the Gavarni book in 1873. In 1880, Edmond’s La Maison d’un artiste was published, a work that used the term “artist” interchangeably with “writer.” Goncourt met and fostered the career of the (later) important historian for Impressionism, Gustave Geffroy, in 1882. In 1885, Edmond began his literary salon, known as the genier for the sumptuous attic in which it was held. Edmond’s final works were on the Japanese artists Kitagawa Utamaro (1891) and Katsushika Hokusai (1896). The Académie Goncourt was established in 1903 through a bequest of Edmond. After Edmond’s death, the brothers’ importance waned until the second half of the 20th century when they were recognized as the leaders of much of modernism in French art writing and taste. The Goncourt Journal is an important primary source for Parisian literary and artistic life. The Goncourts’ ability to combine their knowledge of artistic life with compelling journalism (and publicity) resulted in their considerable influence on French taste in the second half of the 19th century. They “absorbed the Romanticism of the thirties and abandoned themselves feverishly to the realism, the meticulous modernism, of the fifties” (Ironsides). They early on sensed the lifeless academic nature of much of the work of Raphael, who was at the time perhaps the most valued artist of the nineteenth century. A major theme of the Goncourts was that of artistic technique, which they often referred to as ‘cuisine.” The two most important and continually referred to are colour and the fragment. Their writing intended to create the sensations of modern life and art through juxtaposed, and rearranged esthetic experiences. Such écriture artiste, which included intentionally inverted grammar and syntax as well as improvised vocabulary, most evident in L’Art du XVIIIe siècle greatly influenced later 19th-century poets and novelists such as Paul Verlaine and Emile Zola. In L’Art du XVIIIe siècle, the Goncourt as art historian, critic and artist unite. They were the first art writers to value the sketch (pencil and oil) and the fragment as stand-alone artworks, hallmarks of modern art a century later. They had a profound impact on French literature (both in the novel and in literary style in general) and particularly on later 19th-century taste. As critics of 19th-century art, their taste has not stood the test of time. They championed the work of the caricaturist and artist Paul Gavarni (Sulpice Guillaume Chevalier, 1804-1866).


Selected Bibliography

and Goncourt, Jules de, illustrators. Caylus, Anne Claude Philippe. Watteau: e´tude contenant quatre dessins grave´s à l’eauforte. Paris: E. Dentu, 1860; and Goncourt, Jules de. Portraits intimes du XVIIIe siècle: etudes nouvelles d’après les lettres autographes et les documents ine´dites. 2 vols. Paris: E. Dentu, 1857-8, [second edition revised and appearing thereafter as] L’art du XVIIIme siècle. 2 vols. Paris: A. Quantin, 1873-74; and Goncourt, Jules de. Journal des Goncourt: me´moires de la vie litte´raire. 9 vols. Paris: Ernest Flammarian, Fasquelle, 1872-1896, partially translated into English as, The Goncourt Journals, 1851-1870. London: Cassell, 1937; and Goncourt, Jules de. Germinie Lacerteux. Paris: Charpentier, 1864, English, Philadelphia: G. Barrie, 1897; and Goncourt, Jules de. Manette Salomon. 2 vols. Paris: Librairie internationale, 1867; La peinture a l’Exposition de 1855. Paris: E. Dentu, 1855; Maison d’un artiste. Paris: Ernest Flammarion. 1880; Outamaro, le peintre des maisons vertes. Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1891; Hokousaï. Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1896.


Sources

Sabatier, Pierre. l’Esthétique des Goncourt. Paris: Hachette, 1920; Fosca, François. Edmond et Jules de Goncourt. Paris: A. Michel, 1941; Ironside, Robin. “Introduction.” Goncourt, Edmond and Goncourt, Jules. French XVIII Century Painters. London: Phaidon Press, 1948, pp. ix-xi; Baldick, Robert. The Goncourts. London: Bowes & Bowes, 1960; Billy, André. The Goncourt Brothers. New York: Horizon Press, 1960; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 p. 194; Kultermann, Udo. The History of Art History. New York: Abaris, 1993, pp. 148-49; Brookner, Anita. The Genius of the Future: Studies in French Art Criticism (1971).




Citation

"Goncourt, Edmond de." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/goncourte/.


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Writer, art historian of the eighteenth-century art and art critic of contemporary nineteenth-century Paris together with his brother, Jules. Edmond de Goncourt and his brother, Jules, were born into minor aristocracy. The

Gomperz, Heinrich

Full Name: Gomperz, Heinrich

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Subject Area(s): art theory, psychoanalysis, and Vienna School


Overview

professor at the Viennese School; psychoanalytic method


Selected Bibliography

“über einige psychologiesche Voraussetzungen der naturalistischen Kunst,” in Beitrage zur (Münchener) Allgemeinen Zeitung. 1905.


Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 p. 319.




Citation

"Gomperz, Heinrich." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/gomperzh/.


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professor at the Viennese School; psychoanalytic method

Gómez Moreno, Manuel

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Full Name: Gómez Moreno, Manuel

Other Names:

  • Manuel Gómez Moreno

Gender: male

Date Born: 1870

Date Died: 1970

Place Born: Granada, Andalusia, Spain

Place Died: Madrid, Spain

Home Country/ies: Spain

Subject Area(s): archaeology and Spanish (culture or style)


Overview

Historian, archeologist, professor of art history; consolidated the reputation of Spanish art history within the country. His father, the descendant of a noble family which had established itself in Granada in the seventeenth century, was a painter and archeologist and a tireless traveler. On the trips they took together throughout Granada, the younger Gómez Moreno became familiar with Mozarabic art, (acquaintance which developed later in his seminal book Iglesias mozárabes: arte español de los siglos IX a XI, published in 1919 for the Center of Historical Studies); the art mudejar, and generally the monuments, decorations and sanctuaries which resulted from the numerous cultural exchanges throughout Spanish history since the Middle Ages between the Iberian and the Islamic cultures, between Christians and Muslims. Along with cultivating his passion for art, he also acquired an impressive archeological knowledge of the Iberian Peninsula. A different series of discoveries was occasioned by his long visit to Italy (1878-1880), where he accompanied his father as the latter was a pensioner of the Spanish Academy in Rome: he learned Italian, became acquainted with the archeological and artistic treasures of the city, toured Florence, Bologna, Venice, Verona, Milan and Genoa. Back in Spain, he was only sixteen when he published the first of what would become a long series of articles and books, an article about the Royal Chapel in Granada. Three years later, in 1889, he graduated from the University of Granada with a degree in philosophy and letters; as a student, he had collaborated with the Bulletin of the Artistic Center of Granada, where he organized cultural trips; this contributed to increasing his familiarity with monuments and buildings of interest in Granada, and provided the opportunity, upon graduation, to teach art and archeology at the Sacromonte Seminar and at the School of Arts and Professions. He moved to Madrid in 1898, closer to the intellectual circles, museums, libraries and art institutions of the capital; two years later, he was working with Juan Facundo Riaño (1829-1901), another art historian originally from Granada, who had invited him to participate in the ambitious project of a Catálogo Monumental de España (Monumental Catalog of Spain); thus Gómez Moreno wrote the catalog of Avila and Salamanca (1901-1902), Zamora (1903) and Léon (1906), always carrying his camera on his trips. An academic career combined with his passion for art: in 1913, the University of Madrid created for him the Chair of Arabic and Christian medieval archaeology ( which he held until 1934); in 1917, he became associated with the Royal Academy of History. The same year an English version of his Alhambra appeared under the aegis of the Hispanic Society of America. In 1924 he founded and co-edited of the journal Archivo Español de Arte y Arqueologia. More than three hundred issues were published as he directed it, mostly on Medieval and Renaissance art; along with it, his book Eagles of the Spanish Renaissance focused on the work of Bartolomé Ordóñez, Diego Silóe, Pedro Machuca, and Alonso Berruguete. In 1931, he directed the Academia de Bellas Artes in order to be able to work with Elías Tormo y Monzó, the minister of Public Instruction at the time, on projects in which they shared a mutual interest. He weathered the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and when the Franco government replaced the Center for Historical Studies by a series of institutes subserviant to the government, Gómez-Moreno retained their respect as well. His interest in the Iberian world remained, demonstrated by inaugural lecture to the Royal Academy of Spanish Language in 1942, “The Hispanic Languages.” Gómez-Moreno was a honorary president of the Institute of Art and Archeology Diego Velázquez, doctor honoris causa of the universities of Oxford, Glasgow and Granada; the March Foundation awarded him the prize for history. In 1962, he visited Granada for the last time. He died in Madrid in 1970. His daughter, María Elena, was also an art historian and wrote a biography of her father in 1970. His students included José Hernández Díaz and Enrique Lafuente Ferrari. Gómez-Moreno was among the most comprehensive historian of his time, writing on Spanish and Andalousian history and art history. He wrote on the whole of Spanish art, in addition to archeology (paleography, numismatics) and philology. He discovered and transcribe the (pre-Roman) Iberian alphabet and wrote an extensive study of the ethnological and philological aspects of them. Germain Bazin termed him “true founder of the school of art history in Spain.” CS


Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Gómez-Moreno, María Elena. Bibliografía de don Manuel Gómez Moreno: homenaje en el centenario de su nacimiento. Madrid: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 1970; Iglesias mozárabes; arte español de los siglos IX à XI. 2 vols. Madrid: Centro de estudios históricos, 1919; Las águilas del Renacimiento español: Bartolomé Ordóñez, Diego Silóee, Pedro Machuca, Alonso Berruguete,1517-1558. Madrid: Gráficas Uguina, 1941; Renaissance Sculpture in Spain. Florence: Pantheon, casa editrice, 1931; 2nd ed, with Gómez-Moreno, María Elena. The Golden Age of Spanish Sculpture. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society 1964; The Alhambra. 2 vols. Barcelona: Hijos de J. Thomas, 1917.


Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire d l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 440-441; “Un historien de l’art espagnol D. Manuel Gómez Moreno” in Information d’histoire de l’art. I, 1971, p. 28-30. Gran Enciclopedia de Andalucía. Ediciones Anel, S.A. Granada, 1979; Moreno Alonso, Manuel. Historia de Andalucía. Ed. Cajasur, Murcia, 1995.




Citation

"Gómez Moreno, Manuel." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/gomezmorenom/.


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Historian, archeologist, professor of art history; consolidated the reputation of Spanish art history within the country. His father, the descendant of a noble family which had established itself in Granada in the seventeenth century, was a painte

Gombrich, E. H.

Image Credit: wikipedia

Full Name: Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, Sir

Other Names:

  • Ernst Gombrich
  • Ernst H Gombrich

Gender: male

Date Born: 30 March 1909

Date Died: 03 November 2001

Place Born: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): art theory and psychology

Career(s): educators

Institution(s): University of London and Warburg Institute


Overview

University of London professor of art history, champion of psychological-approach to art. Gombrich grew up within one of the elite cultural circles of Vienna. His father, Karl Gombrich (1874-1950), was the vice-president of the Disciplinary Council of the Austrian Bar, and his mother, Leonie Hock (Gombrich) (1873-1968), was a pianist who had studied under the composer Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) and taught piano to Gustav Mahler’s sister. Gombrich himself was an accomplished cellist. The family had originally been Jewish but converted to Lutheranism at the turn of the 20th century. Gombrich himself never claimed any religious affiliation. As a child immediately after World War I, when starvation in Austria was widespread, he and his sister, Lisbeth (1907-1994), were sent by the Save the Children (organization) to live with families in Sweden for nine months in 1920. Returning to Vienna, Gombrich was attended the Theresianum secondary school where at age 14 he wrote an essay on the ways art appreciation had changed from Winckelmann to the present. His interest in art history affirmed, Gombrich entered the University of Vienna in 1928 where he studied under the so-called Vienna School art historians, Hans Tietze, Karl Maria Swoboda, and Julius von Schlosser, the latter with whom he wrote his dissertation was on the Mannerist architecture of Giulio Romano. Never happy to be the disciple of only one scholar, Gombrich also attended lectures by Josef Strzygowski, Schlosser’s egotistical arch rival, at the competing Wiener Institut in Vienna. Gombrich’s Viennese colleagues during this time also included Otto Kurz, who years later taught with Gombrich at the Warburg Institute.

While researching his dissertation on the Palazzo del Te in Mantua, he corresponded with a friend’s young daughter about his work. The publisher Walter Neurath (1903-1967) convinced him to turn this into a book of world history for children, Weltgeschichte für Kinder, 1936. Gombrich did this in part because the economy and anti-semitic government made an academic position difficult to find. He also occupied his time learning Chinese. Through Schlosser, Gombrich met the museum curator and psychoanalyst Ernst Kris. Together they authored a book on caricature (eventually published in a much abbreviated form in 1940). Kris introduced Gombrich to Fritz Saxl, the director of the Warburg Institute in London (where it had moved from Hamburg in 1933). Kris recommended Gombrich to the Warburg, who assigned him a two-year fellowship in 1936, assisting Gertrud Bing in preparing the papers of its founder, Aby M. Warburg for publication. The same year he married Ilse “Lonnie” Heller (1910-2006), a Czech concert pianist and pupil of the pianist Rudolf Serkin (1903-1991). The Holocaust fully under way, Gombrich assisted his parents to escape Vienna in 1938 shortly before the beginning of World War II. He moved to the newly-founded Courtauld Institute when the Warburg lost its temporary lodgings at Thames House. Between 1938 and 1939 he lectured weekly on Giorgio Vasari. With Kurz, he began collaborating on a book on iconography, which was never published because of the outbreak of the World War II. During the War, Gombrich worked intercepting and translating foreign radio broadcasts for the BBC at Evesham, England. He also published an essay on Poussin in The Burlington Magazine, maintaining his connections with the Warburg Institute, which had been incorporated by London University in 1944.

He returned to Warburg in 1946 as a senior research fellow named by Saxl. After Saxl’s death in 1948, Saxl’s successor, Henri Frankfort, appointed Gombrich a Lecturer at the Warburg (to 1954). Gombrich wrote his famous study of Botticelli’s Primavera, an essay associating the ideas of the Neoplatonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino with the Botticelli painting. After the War, he resumed his work editing Warburg’s papers. Phaidon Press founder Bela Horovitz (1898-1955) convinced him to rewrite a general textbook of art, akin to his Weltgeschichte which had he had begun in 1937. The result was The Story of Art (1950), ostensibly written for teenagers, but which had a huge impact on the general post-war populace. He was named the Slade Chair at Oxford University, 1950-1953, and Durning-Lawrence Professor at University College, London, 1956-1969. Gombrich always retained a position at the Warburg, Reader, between 1954-1956 and Special Lecturer from 1956-1959. In 1956, too, Gombrich delivered the Mellon lectures in Washgington, D. C., called “Art and Illusion.” This appeared in book form in 1960. Art and Illusion laid the framework for a psychological understanding of art to a wider public. He became director of the Warburg in 1959. As director, he reorganized the institute, encouraging its scholars, who now included Rudolf Wittkower, Hugo Buchthal and Kurz, to teach as well as research. He also launched a lecture series bringing in outside speakers. He was Visiting Professor of Fine Art at Harvard University in 1959, returning to be named Professor of the History of Classical Tradition at London University in 1959, which he held to 1976. Between 1961 and 1963 he was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge, and in 1967, became Lethaby Professor at the Royal College of Art, 1967-1968.

His collected essays on art appreciation, Meditations on a Hobby Horse appeared in 1968. Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, 1972, discussed the historical importance of forms of symbolism. Gombrich was appointed Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large, Cornell University, from 1970 to 1977. During that time he was knighted (1972) and delivered the Romanes Lecture at Oxford University, “Art History and the Social Sciences,” 1975. In 1979 he returned to questions of perception and representation in his Wrightsman Lectures, published as A Sense of Order, a collaboration with the neuropsychologist Richard Gregory. Gombrich was appointed a member of the Order of Merit in 1988. His students include Michael Podro and Michael Baxandall. His son, Richard Gombrich (b. 1937), was Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford University between 1976 and 2004.

Gombrich’s unique approach to art history began with his dissertation, written under Schlosser, on the Mannerist architect and painter Guilio Romano. Mannerism in the 1930s was considered a deliberate distortion of the ideals of the Renaissance (and often compared to the Expressionism of Germany in their century). Schlosser himself had written on it. Gombrich asserted that the eccentricities of Giulio’s Mannerist style, far from being degenerate, were employed for a patron eager for fashionable novelty. Throughout his career, Gombrich avoided using the prevailing methods of art history, connoisseurship and attribution, remarking that they were “very much on the fringe of [his] formation” (Kimmelman). He characterized most of art criticism as simply the critic’s emotional response to art. Parallels have been drawn between Gombrich’s melding of art history with psychology to that of the philosopher Karl Popper’s psychology and the history of science. Gombrich publicly claimed a debt to his friend, Popper, assisting Popper in the preparation of Popper’s manuscript of The Open Society and its Enemies,1945. Although Gombrich wrote about Picasso and modern artists, he had little affinity for contemporary art. His essay “The Vogue of Abstract Art” (reprinted in Meditations) denounced American action painting, as a “visual fad” supported by dealers rather than ideas. Elsewhere he wrote skeptically about Schoenberg’s 12-tone system.

Many of Gombrich’s theories on art were drawn from his rich life experiences. As radio translator of Nazi broadcasts during World War II, he frequently had to glean words from faint transmissions. Later, in Art and Illusion, he wrote that “you had to know what might be said in order to hear what was said.” This concept, which he called “making and matching,” was crucial, he claimed, to how people perceive images. His interpretation of Cubism criticized the movement as “the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture.” Gombrich was comfortable as an iconographer, identifying in the practice of iconology two currents: the neo-Platonic, mystical (e.g., Erwin Panofsky) and the Aristotelian, rhetorical function (code of signs) (Bazin). It was his survey, The Story of Art, however, that established Gombrich’s popular reputation. While most surveys had been little more than long lists of names, dates and discussions styles, Gombrich focused on the problems which artists at different periods had solved. Methodologically, he was particularly opposed to Marxist approaches to art (see Gombrich’s discussion of the approach in the entry on Arnold Hauser), Hegelian world views, or doctrines, such as Weltanschauung (Spirit of the Age”) that embraced cultural relativism or collectivizations of art. “We should not go off on a tangent but rather learn as much as we can about the painter’s craft,” he declared. Gombrich was a charismatic lecturer, surprising audiences with images from magazine advertisements or Saul Steinberg cartoons in between projections of paintings of Old Masters.

Not all of Gombrich’s writings have wholly been accepted. His assertion of a link between Renaissance art and the philosophical doctrines, stated in the Botticelli Primavera article, have been doubted, even later by Gombrich himself, in the introduction to Symbolic Images (1972). He insisted that Hegel’s work, not Winnckelmann’s, should be considered the beginning of art history.  Gombrich’s initial assignment at the Warburg Library in London was to ready Warburg’s papers for publication. He astutely realized that Warburg’s notes were not suitable for publication because of the juxtaposing way Warburg worked (see DoAH entry on Warburg) and Warburg’s inability to draw lucid conclusions. Gombrich used his study of Warburg to write an intellectual biography of Warburg (1970, 2nd ed., 1985), which is by far the best introduction to Warburg’s ideas.


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Giulio Romano als Architekt. University of Vienna, 1933; “Botticelli’s Mythologies.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtald Institutes 8 (1945): 7-60; “Review of Charles Morris’s Signs, Language and Behavior.” Art Bulletin 31 (1949): 68-73; The Story of Art. London: Phaidon Press, 1950; “The Renaissance Concept of Artistic Progress and Its Consequences.” Actes du XVIIme Congrès international d’Histoire de l’Art. The Hague, 1955; Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Bollingen Series, 35. A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 5. New York: Pantheon Books, 1961; Meditations on a Hobby Horse, and Other Essays on the Theory of Art. London: 1963 [First appearing in:] Aspects of Form: A Symposium on Form in Nature and Art. New York: 1951, 2nd ed. London: Lund Humphries, 1968; “Light, Form and texture in Fifteenth-Century Painting.” Journal of the Royal Institute of Art 112 (1964): 826-49; “Momemt and Movement in Art.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtald Institutes 27 (1964): 293-306; “Visual Discovery through Art.” Arts Magazine 40 (1965): 17-28; Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance. London: Phaidon, 1966; “From the Revival of Letters to the Reform of the Arts: Nicolo Niccoli and Filippo Brunelleschi,” in Essays Presented to Rudolf Wittkower on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday. 2 vols. London: 1967, II : 71-82; The Ideas of Progress and their Impact on Art. New York: Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture, 1971 [published in an expanded version in German as Kunst und Fortschritt: Wirkung und Wandlung einer Idee. Cologne: DuMont, 1978]; Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance. London: Phaidon, 1972; “Illusion and Art.” In Illusion in Nature and Art. London: Duckworth, 1973, pp. 193-243; The Heritage of Appelles: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance. Oxford: Phaidon, 1976; Means and Ends: Reflections on the History of Fresco Painting. London: Thames & Hudson, 1976; “The Leaven of Criticism in Renaissance Art.” In Art, Science, History of the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967: 3-42; “Kunstwissenschaft.” In Atlantisbuch der Kunst. Zürich: 1952: 653-64; Die Krise der Kulturgeschichte: Gedanken zum Wertproblem in den Geistes wissenschaften. Stuttgart: Klett-cotta, 1983; Jüdische Identität und jüdisches Schicksal: eine Diskussionsbemerkung. Vienna: Passagen-Verlag, 1997.


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. 63 cited, 72-3, 83, 102; 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. 94-96, 158; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 225-226; 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. 221-233; Gombrich, Ernst. “An Autobiographical Sketch.” The Essential Gombrich. London: Phaidon, 1996, pp. 21-36; [obituaries:] Frayling, Christopher. “In Memoriam: Ernst Gombrich.” The Observer [London]. November 11, 2001, p. 10; Irish Times November 10, 2001, p. 16; Kimmelman, Michael. “E. H. Gombrich, Author and Theorist Who Redefined the History of Art, Is Dead at 92.” New York Times November 8, 2001, p. 25; Daily Telegraph (London) November 6, 2001, p. 25; Jeffries, Stuart. The Guardian (London) November 6, 2001, p. 10; Hope, Charles. The Independent (London) November 6, 2001, p. 6; personal correspondence, Thomas Dacosta Kaufmann, Feb. 10, 2008.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Gombrich, E. H.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/gombriche/.


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University of London professor of art history, champion of psychological-approach to art. Gombrich grew up within one of the elite cultural circles of Vienna. His father, Karl Gombrich (1874-1950), was the vice-president of the Disciplinary Council o

Goldwater, Robert

Image Credit: Alchetron

Full Name: Goldwater, Robert

Other Names:

  • Robert John Goldwater

Gender: male

Date Born: 23 November 1907

Date Died: 26 March 1973

Place Born: New York, NY, USA

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): African (general, continental cultures), African sculpture styles, Bamana, Gur, indigenous art, Mande, Modern (style or period), Modernist, Oceanic, painting (visual works), primitivism (artistic concept), sculpture (visual works), Senufo (culture or style), Sudanese, tribal art, West African (general), and Western Sudanese

Career(s): art historians and publishers


Overview

Modernist art historian, pioneer African arts scholar and director, Museum of Primitive Art, 1957-63. Goldwater was the son of Sigismund S. Goldwater (1873-1942), an M.D. and visionary commissioner of Hospitals in New York under Mayor La Guardia. Goldwater attended Columbia University, receiving his B. A. in 1929. He moved to Harvard for his graduate work, receiving his M.A. in 1931. Goldwater was one of the early art history students to study modern art at Harvard, at the time an area not considered worthy of graduate research. He joined the teaching staff of New York University in 1934. Goldwater reviewed the first exhibition of African art by a museum, the show at MoMA in 1935, in the May issue of Parnassus, establishing his interest in the field of primitive art. His dissertation subject, on primitivism and modern art, was suggested by the Richard Offner, who was a specialist in the so-called Italian primitives. Goldwater was also one of the participants at the famous, informal gathering of art scholars organized by Meyer Schapiro around 1935 that included Lewis Mumford, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Erwin Panofsky, James Johnson Sweeney and the art gallery dealer Jerome Klein. He completed his dissertation under Offner in 1937, writing on the topic that would be his life’s major concentration, the relationship between the (then called) primitivist art (African and Oceanic art) and modern art. The following year a revised version of his thesis appeared as the book with the nearly imperceptible title change, Primitivism in Modern Painting. The work became a landmark text in charting the relationship between tribal arts and twentieth-century painting. That year, too, he married a French student of Ferdinand Leger, the artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) in Paris. In 1939 he accepted an appointment at Queens College, Brooklyn, NY, teaching art history there until 1956. He edited one of the first anthologies of artist’s statements with Marco Treves in 1945, Artists on Art. Goldwater became editor of The Magazine Art in 1948, accepting the first articles on Abstract Expressionists in the journal. In 1949 he co-curated a show at the Museum of Modern art with Director René d’Harnoncourt entitled Modern Art in Your Life. He translated the book of NYU professor Walter Friedlaender Von David bis Delacroix into English, making it a popular introductory text to early modern art period. In 1957 he returned to New York University as full professor of art history. That same year issued the volume in the Abrams “Library of Great Painters” series on Gauguin. It was also in 1957 that he became the first director of the Museum of Primitive Art, a museum founded by Nelson A. Rockefeller (1908-1979) and based on Rockefeller’s collection, housed in a building on West 54th. The new museum was highly innovative. Goldwater organized only the second exhibition of African art by a New York museum, launched in 1958 and derived entirely from private collections. In 1960 and 1964 Goldwater presented two shows, Bambara Sculpture from the West Sudan, and Senufo Sculpture from West Africa. He was Chairman of Student and Academic Affairs at the Institute of Fine Arts (NYU) from 1961 onward. In 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art approached Rockefeller to donate the contents of the Primitive museum to a new wing it planned, named in honor of Rockefeller’s son, Michael (1938-1961), who disappeared during an expedition in New Guinea in 1961. The Museum of Primitive Art planned its closing for 1974 and Goldwater oversaw the transfer of objects to the new Department of Primitive Art before his unexpected death at age 65 in 1973. He was succeeded at the Institute by Gert Schiff. His manuscript on the Symbolist movement was complete, but published posthumously as Symbolism. A separate library at the Metropolitan Museum, containing the Primitive Museum’s holdings, was established as the Robert Goldwater Library in his memory. The Michael Rockefeller wing was opened in 1982. Goldwater’s wife, Louise Bourgeois, became an important 20th-century surrealist and feminist sculptor. His students were the prominent feminist scholars of the next generation, Linda Nochlin, Lucy R. Lippard (M.A. only) and, until his death, Eunice Lipton.


Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] “Publications of Robert Goldwater (1907-1973).” Metropolitan Museum Journal 8 (1973):179-82; [dissertation:] Primitivism and Modern Painting. New York University, 1937; and Treves, Marco. Artists on Art: from the XIV to the XX Century. New York: Pantheon books, 1945; Bambara Sculpture from the Western Sudan. New York: New York University Publishers, 1960; translated, Friedlaender, Walter F. David to Delacroix. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952; and d’Harnoncourt, René. Modern Art in your Life. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949; Paul Gauguin. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1957; Primitivism in Modern Painting. New York: London, Harper & Brothers, 1938, expanded and reissued as, Primitivism in Modern Art. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986; Senufo Sculpture from West Africa. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1964; Space and Dream. New York: Walker, 1967; Symbolism. New York: Harper & Row, 1979; and Goossen, E. C., and Sandler, Irving. Three American Sculptors: Ferber, Hare, Lassaw. New York: Grove Press, 1959; What is Modern Sculpture? New York: Museum of Modern Art/New York Graphic Society, 1969.


Sources

“Louise Bourgeois Wed, Married in Paris Ceremony to R. J. Goldwater of This City.” New York Times October 9, 1938, p. 52; Goldwater, Robert. “Preface to the Revised Edition.” Primitivism in Modern Art. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986, pp. xv-xviii; Marquis, Alice Goldfarb. Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Missionary for the Modern. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989, p. 125; [obituaries:] Rosenblum, Robert. “Robert Goldwater 1907-1973.” Art Journal 32, No. 4. (Summer, 1973):484; Shirey, David L. “Robert Goldwater, Critic, Dies; Led Museum of Primitive Art; Praise From Colleague.” New York Times March 27, 1973, p. 50; Fry, Jacqueline. “Robert Goldwater: In Memoriam.” African Arts 7 no. 4 (Summer 1974): 70-1; Smyth, Craig Hugh. Marsyas 16 (1974): 2.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Goldwater, Robert." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/goldwaterr/.


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Modernist art historian, pioneer African arts scholar and director, Museum of Primitive Art, 1957-63. Goldwater was the son of Sigismund S. Goldwater (1873-1942), an M.D. and visionary commissioner of Hospitals in New York under Mayor La Guardia.

Goldscheider, Ludwig

Image Credit: Yashiro and Berenson: Art History between Japan and Italy

Full Name: Goldscheider, Ludwig

Gender: male

Date Born: 03 March 1896

Date Died: 26 June 1973

Place Born: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: Germany and United States


Overview

Art historian of Renaissance art and art-book publisher. Goldscheider was born to Wilhelm and Julie Itte Lifschitz (Goldscheider), both of Jewish descent. His father was a jeweler.  Goldscheider finished his Abitur in Vienna in 1914. From 1914 to 1918 he served in WWI as an officer in the Austrian army. After that, between 1919 and 1921, he studied art history in Vienna under the so-called second “Vienna School” art historians, Julius von Schlosser, and Max Dvorak. His first published work, onw of poetry, appeared in 1921.  In 1923 he received his doctorate supervised by Schlosser. Goldscheider co-founded along with Béla Horovitz (1898-1955) and Friedrich “Fritz” Ungar (d. 1988) the Phaidon-Verlages (Phaidon Publishing House) in Vienna in 1923.  The firm published editions of popular, inexpensive literature and art books. He also authored his own art- and poetry books during this time. Goldscheider bought the text of Jakob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in ltalien (Renaissance Culture in Italy) re-issuing it in an illustrated format in 1925 with an introduction by Wilhelm Waetzoldt. That reissued 1860 volume, under Goldscheider’s book design, brought the late Swiss scholar a wider reputation selling over 20,000 copies. Other seminal art-history texts Goldscheider’s Phaidon Verlag reprinted included Velazquez und sein Jahrhundert by Carl Justi and the biographical accounts of Michelangelo by Hermann Grimm, both in 1933. Other titles included Raphael (1934), and the book on Leonardo by Woldemar von Seidlitz (1935).However, the following year, 1938, Austria annexed itself to Nazi Germany and Goldscheider fled National Socialist persecution for England.  He remained in London the rest of his life.  In 1941 his partner, Muriel Breaks, bore him a son. His partner Unger emigrated to New York and founded the publishing house Fredrich Unger [Press] in New York.  The British publisher Sir Stanley Unwin (1884–1968) acquired Phaidon Verlag in Austria and transferred it to London, giving Horovitz and Goldscheider control of the publishing while his firm of Allen and Unwin marketed the titles with their own. Under Goldscheider’s tenure (1938-1973) the Press published numerous titles within art and art history.  Goldscheider commissioned some of the most eminent British art historians to publish with them, including Anthony Blunt, Kenneth Clark and  Ernst Gombrich among others. He himself published notable works from the Press on Michelangelo.  As an art scholar he eschewed publishing in journals until the 1950s.  He developed a close relationship with the artist Oskar Kokoschka publishing several books and an interview with the artist.  Goldscheider stepped down from directorship of Phaidon in 1973 because of illness and died the same year.  His papers are housed at the Getty Center, Malibu, CA.

 

Goldenscheider co-wrote monographs with major art historians, including Philip Hendy, Fritz Novotny, and Wilhelm Uhde.  As an author of art books through Phaidon, his books were always appreciated for their image quality when the scholarship was not unique (cf. Gombrich’s review of Etruscan Art in the Burlington Magazine).  Phaidon’s publishing set the standard for the so-called “coffee table” books of other publishers, most of which did not meet Goldscheider’s standards.


Selected Bibliography

  • Die Wiese. (Gedichte) Wien 1921
  • Zeitlose Kunst. Gegenwartsnahe Werke aus fernen Epochen. Wien 1934
  • 500 Selbstporträts von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Wien 1936
  • Art without epoch. London, New York 1937;
  • and Novotny, Fritz. lmpressionists. London, New York 1937
  • The paintings of Michelangelo. London, New York 1940. Franz.: Paris 1948
  • The sculptures of Michelangelo. London, New York 1940;
  • Etruscan sculpture. New York 1941
  • and Hendy, Philip. Giovanni Bellini. Oxford, London 1942
  • Leonardo da Vinci. Life and work. London 1943;
  • Jacob Burckhardt, The civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. New York 1944
  • and Uhde, Wilhelm. Vincent van Gogh. Oxford, London 1945;
  • Michelangelo drawings. London 1951;
  • “Michelangelo studies. II. Virtus et Voluptas.” Connoisseur 133 (1954): 147-149;
  • “El Greco’s Christ on the cross.” Connoisseur 134 (1954): 177-179;
  • The left arm of Michelangelo’s ‘Notte’. Annali 3 (1954): 241-242;
  • A colloquy between Oskar Kokoschka and Ludwig Goldscheider. New York 1963;
  • “Oskar Kokoschkas Bildnismalereien aus den letzten sieben Jahren. ” Die Kunst 63

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. 208-10.


Archives

Getty Research Library archives.  Ludwig Goldscheider Papers, 1911-1973,



Citation

"Goldscheider, Ludwig." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/goldscheiderl/.


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Educated by the second “Vienna School” of art historians, Julius Alwin von Schlosser was possibibly his diss advisor. 1938 emmigrated to London, 1938-73 co-founder, director, designer and editor of the Phaidon Press, Lond

Goldschmidt, Adolph

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Full Name: Goldschmidt, Adolph

Other Names:

  • Adolph David Goldschmidt

Gender: male

Date Born: 1863

Date Died: 1944

Place Born: Hamburg, Germany

Place Died: Basel, Basle-Town, Switzerland

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Medieval (European)

Institution(s): Universität Leipzig


Overview

Medievalist art historian, influential teacher to a generation of art historians and successor to Heinrich Wölfflin in Berlin. Goldschmidt was the eldest of seven children of wealthy Hamburg financier Martin Goldschmidt (1823-1903) and Louise Arnold (Goldschmidt) (1839-1919). He attended the Realgymnasium in Hamburg and then two years training in his father’s office for a career in banking. Traveling to London the following year to learn international banking, Goldschmidt spent much of his time drawing and painting, preparing himself for university studies in the natural sciences or art. Upon his return to Germany in 1884, he began studies at the university in Jena, transferring to Kiel in 1886 and finally to Leipzig, the few universities to offer a degree in art history. At Leipzig he studied under Anton Springer, completing his dissertation under him at the university in Lübeck on medieval painting and sculpture in 1889. Goldschmidt’s fellow art history students at Lübeck included Max J. Friedländer, Gustav Pauli and Paul Clemen, all of whom would become important art historians. After his dissertation, Goldschmidt traveled in Belgium, France, England and the Netherlands gathering material for his habilitation on the twelfth-century manuscript, the Albani Psalter. In France he me Wilhelm Vöge, the other major German medievalist of his generation and himself a recent Ph.D. He taught at Berlin as a Privatdozent, 1892-1903, the first medievalist to teach art history there. Although as a Privatdozent he could not officially supervise dissertations, he essentially did it anyway, inspiring the work of students Arthur Haseloff and Georg Swarzenski, both of whom also became prominent medievalists. In Berlin he met Heinrich Wölfflin who was teaching at the University; the two developed a strong friendship. As a researcher whose method was rooted in studying the object and its documents, Goldschmidt developed fast friendships with museum curators Wilhelm Bode and renewed his acquaintance with Bode’s curatorial assistant, Vöge. Goldschmidt was made Extraordinarius professor in Berlin in 1903. The following year accepted a call to establish a department of art history at the university in Halle and assume a rank of Ordinarius professor. The Halle years, 1904-1912, were spent developing the department and recruiting students. He supervised an astounding forty-two doctoral candidates at Halle, among whom included Hans Jantzen, Otto Homburger, Rudolf Oldenbourg, Ludwig Burchard, Werner Noack and Hermann Giesau. His Halle tenure also established the so-called Goldschmidt school of art history. Goldschmidt’s interest in art spanned all periods. In addition to supervising dissertations in baroque, renaissance and medieval topics, he took a strong interest in the contemporary arts of Halle and Thuringia, advocating purchase of contemporary art by the city. In 1908 he helped found the Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, the group responsible for a national inventory of monuments in Germany. When Wölfflin left Berlin in 1912 for the University in Munich, he arranged for his former colleague Goldschmidt to replace him. His position at Halle was filled by Wilhelm Waetzoldt, who had also studied under Goldschmidt. At Berlin, Goldschmidt expanded the Art History Institute there, supervising another fifty-four dissertations until his retirement in 1932. Among the eminent scholars who wrote their theses under Goldschmidt during the Berlin years were Ernst Gall, Alexander Dorner, Albert Boeckler, Alfred Neumeyer, Rudolf Wittkower, Erich Meyer, Ulrich Middeldorf, and Kurt Weitzmann. In addition, Goldschmidt supervised post-doctoral work of Erwin Panofsky, Hans Kauffmann and Walter Paatz. In 1914 Goldschmidt issued the first of his three inventories of medieval ivories in the western world, an art form whose objects were widely scattered and poorly documented. Goldschmidt’s profile among English-speaking scholars and collectors also rose. Scholarly exchanges between Harvard’s A. Kingsley Porter and Paul J. Sachs led to two sabbaticals teaching there, making him the first German art historian to visit the United States after World War I. These occurred in the 1927-1928 year and again in 1930-1931. In 1926 and 1932 he wrote two of the volumes for the corpus Richard Hamann was issuing on bronze doors. At the same time, Goldschmidt issued his two-volume examination of Carolingian and Ottonian manuscript illumination Die deutsche Buchmalerei. He retired in 1932. Goldschmidt was welcomed in the United States and through his friendship with Walter W. S. Cook returned again in 1936-1937 to teach at New York University. He also lectured at Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Wellesley College, the Morgan Library and Cleveland Museum of Art. He was instrumental in recommending a fellow German-Jewish art historian fleeing Nazi Germany, Jakob Rosenberg, to Harvard. The mounting Nazi pressure in Germany to dismiss Jews from positions of leadership hit Goldschmidt particularly hard. A patriotic German who had worked his life to elucidate the monuments of his own country, he resisted emigration until he was no longer permitted to use the university library. In 1939 he moved to Basel, Switzerland, with the aid of collector Robert von Hirsch (1883-1977) where he died in 1944. Goldschmidt was one of the founders of the modern study of medieval monuments, basing his method upon scientific observation and comparison of monuments from first-hand experience. Employing a methodology of iconography and formal analysis, he taught or inspired nearly all the major medievalists of the latter twentieth century. He railed against the prevalent metaphysical interpretation of art, and in particular the work of Wölfflin. Style and appearance were not, Goldschmidt insisted, the result of a predetermined impulse of the age in which they were created. Panofsky described Goldschmidt’s accomplishment as “the precise solution of precisely formulated problems and the study of monuments that was at once detailed and comprehensive.” His dedication to the genre of the corpus was indicative both of his level of scholarship and in his willingness to create tools for future generations. His work was refined later in the twentieth century by Kurt Weitzmann and Fritz Volbach.


Selected Bibliography

Lübecker Malerei und Plastik bis 1530. Lübeck: Nöhring, 1889; Die Kirchenthür des Heiligen Ambrosius im Mailand: ein Denkmal frühchristlicher Skulptur. Strassburg: Heitz, 1902; Die Albanipsalter in Hildesheim und seine Bezeihung zur symbolisch Kirchensculptur des XII. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Siemans, 1895; Das Evangeliar im Rathaus 20 Goslar. Berlin: Bard, 1910; Die Elfenbeinskulpturen aus Zeit der karolingischen und sächischen Kaiser, VIII.-VI. Jahrhundert. 4 vols. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1914-26; “Das Nachleben der antiken Formen im Mittelalter,” in axl, Fritz, ed. Vorträge der Bibliothek des Warburg Institutes. Leipzig: 1923; Die deutsche Bronzetüren des frühen Mittelalters. Marburg an der Lahn: 1926; Die deutsche Buchmalerei. Munich: Wolff, 1928, English, German Illumination. New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1928; and Weitzmann, Kurt. Die byzantinischen Elfenbeinskulpturen des X.-XIII. Jahrhunderts. 2 vols. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1930-34.


Sources

Heise, Carl Georg. Adolph Goldschmidt zum Gedächtnis, 1863-1944. Hamburg: Ernst Hauswedell, 1963; Dvorák, Max. Idealism and Naturalism in Gothic Art. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967, p. 198; [Panofsky estimation] Erwin Panofsky. “Wilhelm Vöge: A Biographical Memoir.” Art Journal 28 no. 1 (Fall 1968): 27-28; World Biographical Dictionary, 605; 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. 33 mentioned, 44 mentioned, 46 (and n. 94); Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 63 mentioned; Wölfflin, Heinrich. Heinrich Wölfflin, 1864-1945: Autobiographie, Tagebücher und Briefe. Joseph Ganter, ed. 2nd ed. Basel: Schwabe & Co., 1984, p. 491; Kauffmann, Hans. “Adolf Goldschmidt.” Neue Deutsche Biographie 6: 613-14; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 542; Weitzmann, Kurt. Adolph Goldschmidt und die Berliner Kunstgeschichte. Berlin: Kunsthistorisches Institut, Fachbereich Geschichtswissenschaften der Freien Universität Berlin, 1985; Dictionary of Art 12: 873; 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. 211-18; Brush, Kathryn. The Shaping of Art History: Wilhelm Vöge, Adolph Goldschmidt, and the Study of Medieval Art. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 125-127; Brush, Kathryn. “Adolf Goldschmidt (1863-1944)” in Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline. Volume 3. New York: Garland, 2000, pp. 245-58; Brands, Gunnar, and Dilly, Heinrich, eds. Adolph Goldschmidt (1863-1944): Normal Art History im 20 Jahrhundert. Weimar: VDG, 2007; [obituary:] Weitzmann, Kurt. “Adolph Goldschmidt.” College Art Journal 4 (1944): 47-50.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Goldschmidt, Adolph." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/goldschmidta/.


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Medievalist art historian, influential teacher to a generation of art historians and successor to Heinrich Wölfflin in Berlin. Goldschmidt was the eldest of seven children of wealthy Hamburg financier Martin Goldschmidt (1

Golding, John

Image Credit: Independent

Full Name: Golding, John

Other Names:

  • Harold John Golding

Gender: male

Date Born: 1929

Place Born: Hastings, East Sussex, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Career(s): art critics


Overview

Modernist art historian, critic and painter. Golding’s parents were Anglo-Mexican. He was raised in Mexico where his first experience of modern art was the painting of the Mexican muralists, particularly Orozco. Golding encountered the expatriate Surrealist community living in Mexico before World War II, including Benjamin Péret (1899-1959), Wolfgang Paalen (1907-1959) and Leonora Carrington (b. 1917). Golding attended the University of Toronto, making forays to New York and the Museum of Modern Art. After graduation he initially worked as a stage designer. He moved to London in 1951 for graduate study in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. The 1953 Paris Cubism show at the Musée d’Art Moderne convinced him to write on the topic. During research visits to MoMA, Golding met and interviewed Marcel Duchamp. About the same time, Golding met the esthetician and philosopher Richard Wollheim (1923-2003). Golding’s dissertation, on Cubism, written under Anthony Blunt and Douglas Cooper, was published as a book in 1957. While still a student at the Courtauld, Golding decided to be a painter as well. He worked in an abstract expressionist in style exhibiting widely throughout his career. He began teaching art history at the Courtauld Institute beginning in 1959. In 1962 he was given his first one-person (artist) show at Gallery One, London. In 1970 he and the Tate curator Christopher Green (b. 1943) organized “Leger and Purist Paris” at the Tate Gallery. The following year he joined the faculty of the Royal College of Art. He published the volume for the important Art in Context series on Marcel DuChamp’s Bride Stripped Bare in 1973. Golding was appointed the Slade Professor of Fine Art, Cambridge University in 1978. Golding and the historian (later professor at the London School of Economics) James Bysse Joll (1918-1994) were life partners for many years. In 1979, Golding urged Joll to give refuge to his former dissertation advisor (and Courtauld Institute colleague) Blunt when Blunt was exposed as having been a spy for the Soviet Union and homosexual. Golding mounted the landmark 1994 “Picasso: Painter/Sculptor” exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London. The show brought to light new Picasso works. His most recent book, Paths to the Absolute, was awarded the Mitchell Prize for the History of Art in 2002. Golding contributed as a reviewer and art critic to the New Statesman, The New York Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement of London. Golding avoided the new art histories, preferring the traditionalist’s faith in the trained eye (Kimmelman). His connoisseurship is of a high order. Typical of Golding’s style is the observation that Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon “continues to look completely different every time one confronts it,” or that Cubism was a “return to realism” in the sense that it avoided illusion to address the object itself. Golding was long associated with another British painter/art historian and Picasso specialist, Roland Penrose.


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Cubism: a History and an Analysis, 1907-1914. Courtauld Institute, 1957, published under the same title, New York: G. Wittenborn, 1959; [collected essays] Visions of the Modern. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994; and Bowness, Sophie, and Monod-Fontaine, Isabelle. Braque: the Late Works. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997; Paths to the Absolute: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000; Marcel Duchamp: The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. New York: Viking Press, 1973; edited, and Penrose, Roland. Picasso, in Retrospect. London: Elek, 1973; and Penrose, Roland, and Bozo, Dominique. Picasso’s Picassos: an Exhibition from the Musée Picasso, Paris. London: Hayward Gallery/Arts Council of Great Britain, 1981; and Green, Christopher. Leger and Purist Paris. London: Tate Gallery London, 1970; and Cowling, Elizabeth. Picasso: Sculptor/Painter. London: Tate Gallery, 1994.


Sources

Kimmelman, Michael. “Art for Everyone’s Sake.” New York Times June 26, 1994, p. 21; Calvocoressi, Richard. “John Golding.” Contemporary British Artists. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979, p. 132; Spalding, Frances. 20th Century Painters and Sculptors. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors Club, 1990, p. 208; Golding, John. “Introduction.” Visions of the Modern. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, pp. 7-10, and “From Mexico to Venice: Postscript: Interview with Richard Wollheim.” pp. 335-354.




Citation

"Golding, John." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/goldingj/.


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Modernist art historian, critic and painter. Golding’s parents were Anglo-Mexican. He was raised in Mexico where his first experience of modern art was the painting of the Mexican muralists, particularly Orozco. Golding encountered the expatriate

Goldberg, RoseLee

Image Credit: NYU

Full Name: Goldberg, RoseLee

Gender: female

Date Born: 1946

Place Born: Durban, KwaZulu/Natal, South Africa

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): performance art, performances (creative events), and time-based works

Career(s): art critics and curators

Institution(s): New York University


Overview

Historian, curator, and art critic; specialist in time arts (performance art). Goldberg was born in South Africa when the country was under apartheid rule. She studied political science and fine arts at University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg before matriculating to the University of London’s Courtauld Institute of Art, achieving an MA in art history in 1970.  Her thesis was titled Oskar Schlemmer and Bauhaus Performance. From 1972 to 1975, Goldberg was the director of the Royal College Art Gallery in London. She wrote for the magazine Studio International, principally responsible for special issues, Art/Architecture (1975) and Performance Art (1976).

Goldberg moved to New York in 1976 to teach at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. From 1978 to 1980, she acted as the curator of the Kitchen Center for Video, Music, Dance, and Performance in New York, presenting works by artists like Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, and Meredith Monk. She curated the first solo exhibitions of the artists Robert Longo, David Salle, and Cindy Sherman. She married furniture designer Dakota Jackson (b. 1949). In 1979, Goldberg published her historical survey of performance art Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present. In 1987, Goldberg joined the faculty of New York University. A second edition of Performance: Live appeared in 1988 as Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. As a contributor to the Museum of Modern Art show “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture” in 1990, Goldberg organized ‘Six Evenings of Performance.’ A book on Anderson, Laurie Anderson, a study of this artist’s life and work appeared in 2000. In 2001, Goldberg produced Shirin Neshat’s first live performance, Logic of the Birds. She founded an umbrella organization for performance art, Performa, in 2004, and New York’s first performance biennial. She founded Performa Magazine, an online magazine for contemporary performance.

In 2006, the French government named her Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. After her 2009 biennial, Goldberg published Performa 09: Back to Futurism, a documentation of these performances and the event as a whole. In 2010, Goldberg received the Agnes Gund Curatorial Award from the Independent Curators of International. She is also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Critics Fellowship and an Arts Council Publishing Award.

Goldberg brought the history of performance art into an established historic discipline.


Selected Bibliography

  • [master’s thesis] Oskar Schlemmer and Bauhaus Performance. MA, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1970;
  • Performance: Live Art since 1960. New York: Abrams, 1998;
  • Laurie Anderson. New York: Abrams, 2000;
  • Performa 09: Back to Futurism. Performa, 2011;
  • Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present. New York: Abrams, 1979.

Sources



Contributors: Kerry Rork


Citation

Kerry Rork. "Goldberg, RoseLee." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/goldbergr/.


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Historian, curator, and art critic; specialist in time arts (performance art). Goldberg was born in South Africa when the country was under apartheid rule. She studied political science and fine arts at University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesbur

Goffen, Rona

Image Credit: Art History Rutgers

Full Name: Goffen, Rona

Gender: female

Date Born: 1944

Date Died: 2004

Place Born: Brooklyn, Cattaraugus, NY, USA

Place Died: Princeton, Mercer, NJ, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Career(s): educators


Overview

Art historian of the Italian Renaissance and professor of art, Rutgers University, 1990-2004. Goffen was born to William and Stella Goffen. Her father was an attorney. She attended Mount Holyoke College, where she graduated, cum laude, in 1966. She continued her training at Columbia University, receiving her M.A. in 1968. While working on her Ph.D. at Columbia, she taught as a lecturer at Indiana University, 1971-73. She was a founding Fellow the Committee to Rescue Italian Art in 1970, headed by John McAndrew. In 1974 she completed her dissertation and was awarded her degree with distinction, in 1974. Goffen was appointed assistant professor of art history and archaeology at Princeton University in 1974. She was a visiting scholar at American Academy in Rome for 1976 and a fellow of American Council of Learned Societies, 1976-77, studying as a fellow at Villa I Tatti, Harvard University, 1976-77. In 1978 she moved to Duke University, Durham, NC, with the same rank. She was a visiting professor at Barnard College in 1980, returning to Duke where she was appointed associate professor. She chaired the Department of Art and Art History from 1983, and was promoted to professor in 1986. In 1986 she published her study, Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice. The book, which combined social and economic forces with painters individual methods, established her as an historian of the “new” art history. Between 1986-87 she was a fellow at the National Humanities Center, in the Research Triangle Park, NC. Her next book, Spirituality in Conflict: Saint Francis and Giotto’s Bardi Chapel (1988) earned praise for its attention to the piety and politics of the construction of the Franciscan church Santa Maria del Frari. She was a board member of the Renaissance Society of America between 1988-94 and served as co-editor of Renaissance Quarterly. In 1990 she left Duke for Rutgers University to become Chair of the Department of Art History, a position she held until 1996. In 1994 she published Giovanni Bellini, a definitive study of the artist. In the fall of 1997 Goffen served on the Board of Advisors of the Center for Advanced Study (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washgington, D. C., and as Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History at Williams College. Goffen turned to women’s issues in the renaissance with Titian’s Women in 1997, examining women as subjects in Titian painting. Her final book, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, appeared in 2002, examined the relationship between the three high renaissance artists. She died of cancer. Two books, Renaissance Women: Art and Life in Italy, 1300-1600 and Fathers of Invention: The Last Judgment: From Giotto to Michelangelo remained uncompleted at the time of her death. She lost a struggle with cancer in 2004. Goffen’s methodology was “her skill as a social historian reconstructing the conditions of patronage, gift giving and market pricing that affected Renaissance Venice.” (Gary Wills, commenting on her book, Renaissance Rivals).


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Icon and Vision: the Half-length Madonnas of Giovanni Bellini. Columbia University, 1974, partially published under the same title in The Art Bulletin 57 (December 1975): 487-518; Giovanni Bellini. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989; edited, and Tetel, Marcel, and Witt, Ronald G. Life and Death in Fifteenth-century Florence. Durham: Duke University Press, 1989; edited. Masaccio’s Trinity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998; Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice: Bellini, Titian, and the Franciscans. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986; Spirituality in Conflict: Saint Francis and Giotto’s Bardi Chapel. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988; edited. Titian’s “Venus of Urbino”. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997; Titian’s Women. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. “Bonaventuran Analysis of Correggio’s Madonna of St. Francis.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 103 (January 1984): 11-18; (the Rand lectures, to be published by the University of North Carolina Press).


Sources

[obituary:] Rutgers University Department of Art http://arthistory.rutgers.edu/faculty/bios/goffen/rg_obit1.php; Smith, Roberta. “Rona Goffen, 60, Art Historian and Teacher, Dies.” New York Times September 19, 2004, p. A31;




Citation

"Goffen, Rona." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/goffenr/.


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Art historian of the Italian Renaissance and professor of art, Rutgers University, 1990-2004. Goffen was born to William and Stella Goffen. Her father was an attorney. She attended Mount Holyoke College, where she graduated, cum laude, in