Art Historians

Gardner, Percy

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Gardner, Percy

Gender: male

Date Born: 1846

Date Died: 1937

Place Born: Hackney, London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style) and numismatics

Overview

Oxford historian of Greek art and numismatics. Gardner was the son of Thomas Gardner, a stockbroker, and Ann Pearse. Gardner graduated from Christ’s College Cambridge in 1865, after a unsuccessful attempt working at the stock exchange. He attended the City of London School until fifteen when he left to enter his father’s business. Gardner was unsuccessful, however, and entered Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1865. Much behind his classmates, he read philosophy on his own, obtaining ranks in classical studies (the classical tripos) and in the moral sciences in 1869. He was appointed an assistant in the department of coins and medals at the British Museum in 1871. Together with Reginald Stuart Poole and Barclay Vincent Head he wrote the first collections catalogs for Greek coins in British Museum (1876, 1877, 1879, and 1887). Gardner was awarded a fellowship at Christ’s Church in 1872. His enthusiasm for scholarship cost him his marriage to Agnes Reid (d. 1933), in 1874. Gardner’s interest in coinage was highly art-historical. His Numismatic Commentary on Pausanias co-authored with Friedrich Imhoof-Blumer (1838-1920) in 1887, demonstrated how the study of numismatics could aid the study of ancient sculpture. Gardner traveled to Greece in 1877 with the vase scholar Charles T. Newton to evaluate excavation of Mycenae at Olympia of Heinrich Schliemann. His observations, even today an important primary document for Schliemann scholarship, were published in The Academy 21 and 28 (April 1877). Upon his return, he championed the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, assuming the first editorship of the Journal of Hellenic Studies between 1879-1895. That same year, 1879, he was appointed to the Disney Chair of archaeology at Cambridge, which he held until 1886. His Types of Greek Coins appeared in1883, the first of the modern account of classical numismatics is still consulted today. Numismatic Commentary on Pausanias appeared in 1887. In 1887, too, Gardner move to Oxford University, elected to the recently established Lincoln and Merton professorship of classical archaeology. There, Gardner worked hard for the admission of archaeology as a discipline, something which came slowly given the University’s priority on teaching rather than research. Gardner’s privately-printed 1889 pamphlet, Classical Archaeology at Oxford related his frustrations in some detail. He established an archaeological library with Arthur J. Evans. His Oxford years saw the books that characterized him as an art historian, including A Manual of Greek Antiquities, co-written with Frank B. Jevons (1858-1936) in 1895, The Sculptured Tombs of Hellas in 1896, The Grammar of Greek Art in 1905 and A History of Ancient Coinage 700-300 B.C. in 1918. His Greek art book was republished in 1914 as The Principles of Greek Art, long a staple for students of the subject. A longer castigation of his university’s lethargy at becoming a research center for archaeology, Oxford at the Crossroads, was published in 1903. His final publishing years were given over to his Christian faith, beginning in 1899 with his treatise, Exploratio evangelica. After his retirement from Oxford in 1925, his final contribution to art history, New Chapters in Greek Art appeared in 1926. At Oxford, Gardner struggled to make research–and not pedagogy–the core of his efforts. He supervised the repairing the Arundel marbles in the University Galleries from clumsy earlier restorations, built an archaeological library, and assembled a collection of classical sculpture casts. He left the department of archaeology at the Ashmolean Museum with an international reputation for Greek-vase and Roman studies. He was, in the words of Martin Robertson, “largely responsible for introducing the study of Greet art in Oxford.” His most lasting contribution was the scholars he helped trained for succeeding generations, among them, J. D. Beazley, who succeeded him as Lincoln Chair in 1925. He also wisely advised Bernard Ashmole to pursue archaeology as opposed to classics (Honour Mods.), and thereby launching that scholar’s brilliant career. Gardner led the notion, vogue for his time, that Greek art of 600 B.C. to 300 B.C. was the acme of ancient achievement and that Roman art was but degenerate derivative. He brought historic rather than strictly aesthetic principles to the study of Greek art and feared the specialization of classical art studies, e.g., portraiture scholars. His books today are outdated because of newer finds, yet remain valid by their fine attention to detail and plain writing. Gardner’s genuine Christian devotion also led him to publish numerous books on the historical aspects of the church. Although benevolent to women students in his classes, he steadfastly fought against their full admission to the University. His youngest brother, Ernest A. Gardner, was also a classical scholar and art historian, and his sister, Alice Gardner, an historian.

Selected Bibliography

The Parthian Coinage. London: Trübner & Co., 1877; Catalogue of Greek Coins. Thessaly to Aetolia. London: The Trustees of the British Museum, 1883; Classical Archaeology at Oxford. Oxford: Horace Hart, 1889; New Chapters in Greek History, Historical Results of Recent Excavations in Greece and Asia Minor. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892; and Jevons, Frank Byron. A Manual of Greek Antiquities. London: Charles Griffin, 1895; Sculptured Tombs of Hellas. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1896; Oxford at the Crossroads: a Criticism of the Course of Litterae Humaniores in the University. London: A. and C. Black, 1903; A History of Ancient Coinage, 700-300 B.C. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1918; New Chapters in Greek Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926.

Sources

Dictionary of National Biography, 1931-1940 supplement, 306-308; Toynbee, J. M. C., Major, H. D. A., and Boardman, John. “Percy Gardener.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Gardner, Percy. Autobiographica. Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1933; Hill, G. “Percy Gardner, 1846-1937.” Publications of the British Academy 23 (1937): 459-469; Robertson, Martin. “Bernard Ashmole, 1894-1988.” Publications of the British Academy 75 (1989): 314; An Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1996, pp. 478-9; mentioned, Boardman, John. The History of Greek Vases. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001, pp 132.

Gardner, Paul

November 8, 2023April 18, 2024

**Image Credit:** National Portrait Gallery

Full Name: Gardner, Paul

Other Names:

Joseph Paul DeGrasse Gardner

Gender: male

Date Born: 1894

Date Died: 1972

Place Born: Somerville, Middlesex, MA, USA

Place Died: Lincoln, NM, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Overview

First director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1933-1953. Gardner received a B.A. from MIT and an M.A. in European history from George Washington University. He also studied ballet performance. Gardner entered Harvard University for his Ph.D., taking Paul J. Sachs museum course. While working on his dissertation, he was hired as an assistant to the University of Missouri trustees (the group mandated to establish the new Museum of art by the estate of William Rockhill Nelson) to set up the museum. Before taking on these duties, the board sent Gardner on a tour of Europe to study objects and their installation. Upon returning he assisted in the final arrangments for the Museum which was still under construction. Gardner was advanced to the director position, the museum’s first, in 1933. The same year he hired Otto Wittmann, Jr., to be his registrar, along with Philip C. Beam and Richard B. Freeman. The trustees also appointed Laurence Sickman to be the curator of Oriental art, upon Sickman’s return from his Harvard fellowship in 1935. Gardner made most of his acquisitions through an agent, Harold Woodbury Parsons. Gardner was drafted by the army in 1942 to fight in World War II. He rose to the rank of major, assigned to the Italian theater where he safeguarded art treasures. He resumed his duties as director in 1945. For the next eight years he worked to acquire works and continue the education program. Gardner retired from the Museum in 1953, succeeded by Sickman. He moved to New Mexico in retirement where he died twenty years later at his home near Lincoln, NM, “Los Olmos.”. He never completed his Ph.D.

Sources

Wolferman, Kristie C. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: Culture Comes to Kansas City. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1993, pp. 105-113; Will of Probate, Joseph Paul Gardner, Lincoln County, NM, no. 102, 1972; [transcript] Interview with Otto Wittmann, October 25, 1981. Archives of American Art, p. 4-5.

Gardner, Julian

November 8, 2023April 18, 2024

Full Name: Gardner, Julian

Other Names:

Julian Richard Gardner

Gender: male

Date Born: 06 May 1940

Place Born: Dumfries, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style), Medieval (European), and painting (visual works)

Overview

Scholar of Italina medieval art; Giotto specialist. Gardner’s parents were John Vincent and Jessie Lamb Walker (Gardner). Gardner graduated from Oxford University in 1961 with a B.A. He obtained a diploma in art history from the University of London in 1964. After a year as a Rivoira fellow in medieval archaeology at the British School at Rome, 1965-1966, he completed an M.A. from Oxford in 1966. He returned to the University of London, teaching as a lecturer at the University’s Courtauld Institute in 1966 while working on his dissertation. In 1967 he married Ann Margaret Stoves (d. 1968), who died the following year. His Ph.D. was granted from the University of London University in 1969 with a dissertation topic on papal patronage in medieval Italy. Gardner met and married fellow art history graduate student at the Courtauld, Christa Freiin Teuffel von Birkensee, in 1973. He continued to lecture at the Courtauld until 1974 when he was appointed Foundation professor history of art, Warwick University, Coventry, England, remaining there his career. He joined the editorial consultative committee of the Burlington Magazine in 1975. He was a Visiting research professor Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Rome, 1983 to 1985. Gardner published widely in periodicals but issued no monograph until the 1990s. Tomb and the Tiara: Curial Tomb Sculpture in Rome and Avignon in the Later Middle Ages appeared in 1992. The following year his early collected studies were published. In 1998 he lectured “Giotto in America (and elsewhere)” at the symposium at the National Gallery of Art, Washgington, D. C. He taught as distinguished visiting professor medieval studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2000. He became closely associated with Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti study center assisting in the convening of the internation conference “Arnolfo’s Moment” there on the era of Arnolfo di Cambio. His book on Giotto, Giotto and his Publics: Three Paradigms of Patronage was issued in 2011. In 2012 a festscrhift appeared in his honor.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] The Influence of Pope’s and Cardinal’s Patronage on the Introduction of the Gothic Style into Rome and the Surrounding Area, 1254-1305. University of London, 1969; The Tomb and the Tiara: Curial Tomb Sculpture in Rome and Avignon in the Later Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon Press/ New York: Oxford University Press, 1992; Patrons, Painters, and Saints: Studies in Medieval Italian Painting. Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1993; contributor, Italian Altarpieces, 1250-1550: Function and Design. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994; contributor, Giotto as a Historical and Literary Figure: Miscellaneous Specialized Studies. New York: Garland, 1998; “Giotto in America (and Elsewhere).” Italian Panel Painting of the Duecento and Trecento. Studies in the History of Art 61. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art/New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002; Arnolfo’s Moment: Acts of an International Conference, Florence, Villa I Tatti, May 26-27, 2005. Florence: L.S. Olschki, 2009; “French Patrons Abroad and at Home: 1260-1300,” in Rome Across Time and Space: Cultural Transmission and the Exchange of Ideas c. 500-1400. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 265-277; Giotto and his Publics: Three Paradigms of Patronage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Sources

“Introduction.” in, Bourdua, Louise, and Gibbs, Robert, eds. A Wider Trecento: Studies in 13th- and 14th-century European Art Presented to Julian Gardner. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2012.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Gardner, Helen

November 8, 2023April 18, 2024

**Image Credit:** The ArtInstitute of Chicago Library Archive

Full Name: Gardner, Helen

Gender: female

Date Born: 1878

Date Died: 1946

Place Born: Manchester, Hillsborough, NH, USA

Place Died: Chicago, Cook, IL, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): American (North American) and art history

Career(s): art historians and educators

Overview

Professor of art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and author of a standard history of art textbook. Gardner was the daughter of Charles Frederick Gardner, a tailor and Martha W. Cunningham. In 1891 the family moved to Chicago. Gardner attended Hyde Park High School before the University of Chicago. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa in, honors in Latin and Greek in 1901. She taught at Brooks Classical school in Chicago, serving as assistant principal (her sister was principal) between 1905 to 1910. In 1915 she returned to the University of Chicago where she was awarded a university fellowship in 1917. She studied art history achieving an A. M. in 1918. Her thesis was entitled “A Critical Chart of Florentine Painting of the Fifteenth Century.” Gardner continued to take art history courses until 1922. She never received a Ph.D. In 1919, she was appointed head of the photograph and slide collection at the Ryerson Libraries of the Art Institute of Chicago. She began lecturing in 1920 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in art history. Her initial course was an art survey. In 1922 she became a full-time lecturer at the school, developing an art history curriculum. In 1926 her Art Through the Ages: An introduction to Its History and Significance appeared, which she used in her courses. This innovative survey text brought her national recognition, and lectureships at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1927. The following year she lectured at her alma mater before returning to the SAIC. Gardner published an art appreciation text, Understanding the Arts in 1932, which was directed toward art educators. She was appointed full professor and the department chair in 1934. A second, expanded edition of Art Through the Ages appeared in 1936, and including section of modern art, which had been omitted in the earlier edition. In 1944 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and was forced to retire. Gardner completed the text for a third edition before she died of complications of bronchopneumonia in 1946. The third edition of Art Through the Ages appeared posthumously in 1948. Gardner planned a book on the arts of the Americas, including pre-Columbian and American-Indian arts which was never realized. Art Through the Ages became the primary text for American art history classes for the middle third of the twentieth century. It was only eclipsed in 1962 by History of Art by Horst Woldemar Janson. More than 260,000 copies were sold during her lifetime. Numerous editions and revisions were published until 1980. Gardner was a pioneer in incorporating non-western art into her survey; the first to incorporate non-Western art into a universal art survey (Errington). Later editions altered the structure of the original work, eliminating decorative and useful arts and the analysis of cultures, which had been Gardner’s forte.

Selected Bibliography

Sources

“Gardner, Helen.” American National Biography; Allen, Harold. “Helen Gardner: Quiet Rebel,” in, Stone, Lisa, and Zanzi, Jam. Sacred Spaces and Other Places: a Guide to Grottos and Sculptural Environments in the Upper Midwest. Chicago: School of the Art Institute of Chicago Press, 1993; Errington, Shelly. The Death of Authentic: Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, p. 53..

Gardner, Ernest A.

November 8, 2023April 18, 2024

Full Name: Gardner, Ernest A.

Other Names:

Ernest Arthur Gardner

Gender: male

Date Born: 1862

Date Died: 1939

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Maidenhead, Windsor and Maidenhead, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), archaeology, and Hellenic

Overview

Archaeologist, classical art historian and editor of the Journal of Hellenic Studies,1897-1932. Gardner was the son of Thomas Gardner and Ann Pearse. He studied initially at the City of London School under the Semitic scholar Edwin A. Abbott (1838-1926) and at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, beginning in 1880, graduating in 1884, and joining the college as a fellow from 1885 (to 1894). Beginning in 1885, he furthered the excavations at Naucratis (Egypt) for the Egypt Exploration Fund (1885-6), begun by Sir Flinders Petrie (1853-1942). This gained him entrance as the first student at the newly established British School at Athens under Francis Cranmer Penrose in 1886. Gardner’s earliest publications began with the chapters on the inscriptions of Naucratis I and Naucratis II appeared between 1886-1888. He was appointed the Craven student for Cambridge in 1887, which he held until 1890, studying in Athens with Oxford Craven fellow David Hogarth (1862-1927). In 1887, too, Gardner was appointed director of the British School, marrying Mary Wilson (d. 1936). The work of Cambridge historian Francis H. H. Guillemard (1852-1933) established the Cyprus Exploration Fund which sponsored the archaeological digs at Old Paphos and Salamis, Egypt, under Gardner, Hogarth and Monty James. With the renewal of his appointment as Director of the School, Gardner excavated Megalopolis in the Peloponnese. The School thrived under his direction, producing among its first students the archaeologist Sir John Myres (1869-1954) and the social anthropologist and mythologist Sir James Frazer (1854-1941). In 1895 he resigned his directorship, becoming Yates professor of archaeology at the University of London the following year. There Gardner founded a school of classical archaeology at University College. His first publication on art, a Handbook of Greek Sculpture, appeared in 1897,quickly becoming a standard. In 1897, too, Gardner became an editor for the Journal of Hellenic Studies, issuing his Catalogue of the Greek Vases in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge the same year. Ancient Athens was published in 1902. In 1905 he co-wrote the second volume of Introduction to Greek Epigraphy by Ernest Stewart Roberts (1847-1912) with Roberts. Another book on Greek sculpture, Six Greek Sculptors and Religion and Art in Ancient Greece both appeared in 1910. A revised and enlarged edition of Handbook of Greek Sculpture was issued in 1915. During World War I he was commissioned as a lieutenant-commander in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, serving as an intelligence officer in Greece between 1915 to 1917 and then in London until 1919. His final art history text, Art of Greece, appeared in 1925. In 1927 he became Yates lecturer at University College. He relinquished his editorship of the Journal of Hellenic Studies in 1932. In 1933, Gardner’s successful vademecum for Mediterranean travelers, Greece and the Aegean, was published. Gardner retired 1929 from his chair responsibilities, continuing to lecture until 1933. He died at his home in Maidenhead, Berkshire and is buried in Stubbings churchyard there. His students included Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler in whose memoirs Gardner appears. His brother was the Oxford art historian Percy Gardner. His papers are held at University College, London.

Selected Bibliography

The Art of Greece. London: “The Studio”, 1925; Excavations at Megalopolis, 1890-1891. London: Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, 1892; A Handbook of Greek Sculpture. New York: Macmillan, 1897; Poet and Artist in Greece. London: Duckworth, 1933; Religion and Art in Ancient Greece. London: Harper, 1910; Six Greek Sculptors. London: Duckworth, 1910; edited, Middleton, John H. Plans and Drawings of Athenian Buildings. London: Macmillan, 1900.

Sources

Toynbee, Jocelyn M. C. and Major, Henry D. A., revised Gill, David. “Gardner, Ernest Arthur (1862-1939).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Waterhouse, Helen. The British School at Athens: the First Hundred Years. London: Thames and Hudson, 1986; Wheeler, Mortimer. Still Digging New York:Dutton, 1956; Hawkes, J. Mortimer Wheeler: Adventurer in Archaeology. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982; [obituary:]

Archaeologist, classical art historian and editor of the Journal of Hellenic Studies,1897-1932. Gardner was the son of Thomas Gardner and Ann Pearse. He studied initially at the City of London School under the Semitic scholar Edwin A. Abb

Ganz, Paul

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Ganz, Paul

Gender: male

Date Born: 1872

Date Died: 1954

Place Born: Zürich, Switzerland

Place Died: Oberhofen, Bern, Switzerland

Home Country/ies: Switzerland

Overview

Holbein scholar and professor of art history at the University in Basel, 1909-. Ganz father was Rudolf Ganz (1848-1928) the portrait photographer. He studied at the Académie des beaux-arts in Brussels between 1890 and 1892 and then the history of art at the University in Zürich. His first appointment was at the Musée historique in Basel, 1900-1901, then a privatdozent 1901. Between 1902 and 1919 he was conservator of the public art collections (öffentliche Kunstsammlung). In 1909 Ganz was appointed professor of art history at the University in Basel. The following year he married Cécile Kern. In 1913 he founded the Jahrbuch für Kunst und Kunstpflege in der Schweiz, an annual. Ganz hired the new Ph.D. Joseph Gantner to be his assistant in 1920 at the University, who later became professor there. He became ordinarius in 1929. Ganz was part of the group founding the Archives suisses d’histoire de l’art. Ganz built a significant personal art collection, which included a Turner and a Tintoretto as well as works by the Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler. He reorganized the Society of Art History in Switzerland. In 1937 he made an extended trip to the United States, lecturing on Holbein and examining the considerable holdings in the country. He issued the catalogue raisonné on Holbein in 1950. Ganz was a member of the Pro Helvetia committee. His son, Paul Leonhard Ganz (1910-1976), was also an art historian and edited his father’s books after his death.Ganz specialized in the English émigré masters of his own country, Fuseli and Holbein. His catalogue raisonné was considered by the Holbein scholar John Rowlands in 1985 to be one of the three important catalogues on the artist.

Selected Bibliography

Meisterwerke der öffentlichen Kunstsammlung in Basel. Munich: F. Hanfstaengl, 1924; Die Zeichnungen Hans Heinrich Füsslis (Henry Fuseli). Bern: Urs Graf-Verlag, 1947, English, The Drawings of Henry Fuseli. New York: Chanticleer Press, 1949; Hans Holbein: die Gemälde. Basel: Birkhäuser, 1950, English, The Paintings of Hans Holbein London, Phaidon, 1950; and Ganz, Paul Leonhard. Geschichte der Kunst in der Schweiz von den Anfängen bis zur Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts. Basel: B. Schwabe 1960.

Sources

mentioned, Sitt, Martina, ed. Kunsthistoriker in eigener Sache: Zehn autobiographische Skizzen. Berlin: D. Reimer, 1990, pp. 140; Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/index.php, cite 1045; [obituary:] Werk 41 (November 1954): 270.

Gantner, Joseph

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Gantner, Joseph

Other Names:

Joseph Gantner

Gender: male

Date Born: 11 September 1896

Date Died: 07 April 1988

Place Born: Baden, Aargau, Switzerland

Place Died: Basel, Basle-Town, Switzerland

Home Country/ies: Switzerland

Subject Area(s): historiography, Medieval (European), and Renaissance

Overview

Professor (Ordinarius) of art history at the University of Basel, 1938-1967; Medieval and Renaissance scholar and art historiographer. Gantner’s father was Alfred Gantner (d. ca. 1943), a manager at the Baden, Switzerland, branch of the engineering firm Brown Boveri, and his mother Marie Wächter (Gantner), (d. 1944), a midwife. He attended the universities of Zürich, Basel, and Geneva before settling in 1915 at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität, Munich. Ganter studied the winter semester in Rome under Adolfo Venturi before completing his doctorate in 1920 under Heinrich Wölfflin. Wölfflin, another Swiss native, became a personal friend. Gantner’s dissertation topic was on the history of the reception of Michelangelo through the 19th century. His first major studies were on Michelangelo’s preliminary cartoons for the Sistine Chapel. He began as an assistant to Paul Ganz at the University of Basel. Between 1922-1923 he edited the Swiss art journal Das Werk. His Habilitationsschrift was completed in 1926, the same year he began work on a second doctorate (through 1928) at the university in Zürich. Gantner taught as a privatdozent in Zürich beginning in 1927 and editing Das Werk for a second term. Gantner moved to the newly-founded Kunstschule, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, the same year. In Frankfurt, he also edited the periodical Das neue Frankfurt. Gantner married the portrait photographer Maria Hanna Dreyfus (1907-2005) in Frankfurt in 1932. After the Nazi accession to power in Germany in 1933, he returned to Switzerland in order to protect his Jewish wife from persecution. He began publishing his monographic set Kunstgeschichte der Schweiz in 1936. Gantner completed his second Zürich dissertation in 1938. The same year he was appointed Professor of Art History at the University of Basel, a chair previously held by the most eminent Swiss art historians, who, in addition to Wölfflin, included Jacob Burckhardt and Benedetto Croce. In 1943 he founded the publication Basler Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte. From 1952, Gantner also edited the Zeitschrift für ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft with Heinrich Lützeler. He became Rektor of the University in 1954 and a member of the Kunstmuseum Basel (Basel Art Museum) Commission. In 1958 he published a book charting the reaction to Leonardo’s work, discerning four stages in the reception to the artist’s work in the years following Leonardo’s death. He retired from University in 1967, publishing now on Spanish art (including a major work on Goya) and the esthetician José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) until Gantner’s death at 91. Gantner was deeply influenced by the teaching and friendship of Wölfflin. His work also demonstrates an intellectual lineage to his Basel predecessors Burckhardt and Croce, and the French art historian Henri Focillon, particularly Focillon’s theoretical framework outline in The Life Forms of Art. He was not, however, a slavish imitator of any of them. His major study of Swiss art history is of lasting value, as is his writing on the particular to problems of the artistic imagination, specifically Leonardo and his emphasis on the “immaginario..

Selected Bibliography

[collected works and bibliography:] Das Bild des Herzens: über Vollendung u. Unvollendung in d. Kunst: Reden u. Aufsätze. Berlin: Mann, 1979 [bibliography, pp. 163-174]; [dissertation:] Michelangelo: Die Beurteilung seiner Kunst von Lionardo bis Goethe. Beiträge zu einer Ideengeschichte der Kunsthistoriographie. Ph.D., Munich, 1920; and Reinle, Adolf. Kunstgeschichte der Schweiz von den Anfängen bis zum Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. 4 vols. Frauenfeld: Huber, 1936-1962; Romanische Plastik: Inhalt und Form in der Kunst des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts. Vienna: A. Schroll, 1948; Schönheit und Grenzen der klassischen Form: Burckhardt, Croce, Wölfflin: Drei Vorträge. Vienna: A. Schroll, 1949; Rodin und Michelangelo. Vienna: A. Schroll, 1953; Leonardos Visionen von der Sintflut und vom Untergang der Welt: Geschichte einer Künstlerischen Idee. Bern: Francke, 1958; and Gerke, Friedrich. Das Unvollendete als künstlerische Form: Ein Symposium. Saarbrücken, Universität des Saarlandes, Philosophische Fakultät. Bern: 1959; and Pobé, Marcel. Gallia Romanica: die hohe Kunst der romanischen Epoche in Frankreich. Vienna: A. Schroll, 1955; English, The Glory of Romanesque Art. New York: Vanguard Press, 1956 [appearing in the United Kingdom as Romanesque Art in France]; and Gerke, Friedrich (papers). Das Unvollendete als künstlerische Form: Ein Symposium. Saarbrücken, Universität des Saarlandes, Philosophische Fakultät. Bern: 1959; Goya: der Künstler und seine Welt. Berlin: Mann, 1974.

Sources

Barasch, Moshe. “Gantner’s Theory of Prefiguration.” British Journal of Aesthetics 3 (April 1963): 148-156; Sitt, Martina, ed. Kunsthistoriker in eigener Sache: Zehn autobiographische Skizzen. Berlin: D. Reimer, 1990, pp. 132-166; Betthausen, Peter. “Joseph Gantner.” Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007, pp. 113-116; Hauser, Stephan E. “Basel und die Moderne.” Uni Nova: Wissenschaftsmagazin der Universität Basel 88 (May 2001): 11-15; personal correspondence, Alfred Gantner (nephew), Bristol, UK, September 2007; [obituaries:] Neue Züricher Zeitung, April 9, 1988, and, April 15, 1988; Haussherr, Reiner. Jahrbuch of Mainz Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur 1991, pp. 108-112.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Gamba, Carlo

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Gamba, Carlo

Gender: male

Date Born: 1870

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Italy

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

Career(s): art critics

Overview

Critic and Scholar of the Italian high renaissance. notes about Gamba’s opinions on Giotto appear in Richard Offner‘s annotated catalog of the 1937 Mostra Giottesca.

Selected Bibliography

Giotto. Rome: Instituto nazionale “L. U. C. E.”,1930; Giovanni Bellini. . Milan: U. Hoepli, 1937; La pittura di Michelangiolo; Novara: Instituo Geografico de Agostini, 1943; La scultura di Michelangiolo, Novara: Istituto geografico De Agostini, 1943.

Sources

[cited] Previtali, Giovanni. “The Periodization of Italian Art History.” History of Italian Art. vol. 2 Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994, p. 45, note 66; Ladis, Andrew. “The Unmaking of a Connoisseur.” in, Offner, Richard. A Discerning Eye: Essays on Early Italian Painting. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998, p,19, note 1;

Critic and Scholar of the Italian high renaissance. notes about Gamba’s opinions on Giotto appear in Richard Offner’s annotated catalog of the 1937 Mostra Giottesca.

Gallatin, A. E.

November 8, 2023April 18, 2024

Full Name: Gallatin, A. E.

Other Names:

Albert Eugene Gallatin

Gender: male

Date Born: 1881

Date Died: 1952

Place Born: Villanova, PA, USA

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Career(s): art collectors

Overview

Collector, art historian, and founder of the first museum gallery devoted exclusively to modern art in the U. S. Gallatin was born to wealth; his parents were Albert Horatio Gallatin, a chemistry professor at New York University, and Louisa Belford Ewing. His great grandfather, Albert Gallatin (1761-1849), had been Secretary of he Treasury of the United States under Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. After high school, Gallatin briefly studied between 1901-03 at University of the State of New York Law School. In 1902 he inherited the family banking and investment fortune, which set him on a career of art collecting and criticism. Gallatin became interested in art around 1910 when he began forming a collection of classical vases. His interests expanded to modern art during World War I. After the war, he made frequent trips to Paris, beginning in 1921 buy art from the major dealers there. Initially he donated works to the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1922. These museums, however, avoided the work of American artists. Gallatin actively bought work from the so-called Ash Can School in the United States. He used his position as trustee for New York University to establish the first museum in the U. S. dedicated solely to modern art, the Gallery of Living Art, located in South Study Hall that university. The gallery included works by Picasso, Braque, Gris, and Léger. Gallatin wrote the catalogs, which were issued between 1928 and 1940. In 1926 he co-published with the classicist/collector Joseph Clark Hoppin the first fascicule of the prestigious Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum for a United States collection. Between 1928 and 1933 works by Joan Miró, André Masson, Robert Delaunay, Piet Mondrian, and Jean Arp were added to his gallery, the first to enter a public collection in the U. S. Gallatin, however, ignored Expressionism, Futurism, and Dada, art styles with less formal theory attached to them. In 1936 Gallatin renamed his museum the “Museum of Living Art” with his purchase of Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921). Gallatin ceased his French buying trips in 1938 with the declaration of hostilities with Germany. Instead, he focused on American art. The later abstract expressionists Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning attributed their early development to the Museum of Living Art. The University closed the museum in 1943 and Gallatin moved the collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, donating it at his death in 1952.Gallatin wrote largely about the art he collected, some of it, for example, the Ash Can School, was little valued at the time he made his purchases. James Johnson Sweeney, later curator of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, praised Gallatin in 1931 for showing the widest range of cubism in America, which the fledging Museum of Modern Art, founded two years after Gallatin’s museum by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., would spend the next decade amassing a similar collection. Gallatin’s space at NYU is today Grey Art Gallery and Study Center.

Selected Bibliography

Museum of Living Art: A. E. Gallatin Collection. New York: New York University,1940; American Water-colourists. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1922; Art and the Great War. New York, E.P. Dutton & Company, 1919; Aubrey Beardsley’s Drawings: a Catalogue and a List of Criticisms. New York: Godfrey A. S. Wieners, 1903; Georges Braque: Essay and Bibliography. New York: Wittenborn and Company, 1943; edited. Of Art: Plato to Picasso, Aphorisms and Observations. New York: Wittenborn, 1963; Portraits of Whistler: a Critical Study and an Iconography. New York: J. Lane, 1918; Syracusan Dekadrachms of the Euainetos Type. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930; and Hoppin, Joseph. Corpus vasorum antiquorum. United States of America (fasc 1:). Hoppin and Gallatin Collections. Paris: Champion, 1926.

Sources

Stavitsky, Gail. “The A. E. Gallatin Collection: An Early Adventure in Modern Art,” Bulletin of the Philadelphia Museum of Art 89 (1994): 1-47; Stavitsky, Gail. The Development, Institutionalization, and Impact of the A. E. Gallatin Collection of Modern Art. Ph.D. New York University, 1990.

Gall, Ernst

November 8, 2023April 18, 2024

Full Name: Gall, Ernst

Gender: male

Date Born: 1888

Date Died: 1958

Place Born: Gdańsk, Pomeranian Voivodeship, Poland

Place Died: Munich, Bavaria, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

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

Overview

Medevialist architectural historian. He was born in Danzig, Prussia which is present-day Gdańsk, Poland. Gall initially studied law before switching to art history and studying in Grenoble, Paris and ultimately Berlin under Adolph Goldschmidt. He served in World War I, during which time his dissertation, Neiderrheinische und normännische Architektur in Zeitalter der Frühgotik, appeared as a book in 1915. His notion of Norman Romanesque influence on Gothic architecture was taken up by another young art historian, Jean Bony, in Bony’s dissertation. After the War, Gall took a position as a monuments conservator in Halle in 1920. Gall founded the Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte in 1923 and authored the volume in the Handbücher der Kunstgeschichte series on Gothic architecture in France and Germany, Die gotische Baukunst in Frankreich und Deutschland, in 1925. Beginning in 1930, he was the assistant to Paul Hübner in the government office of castles and gardens in Berlin (Verwaltung der Staatlichen Schlösser und Gärten in Berlin). The Gall merged the Jahrbuch with another art-historical periodical, the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte founded and still under the editorship of Wilhelm Waetzoldt. In 1934 Gall began a revision of the Handbuch der Deutschen Kunstdenkmäler by Georg Dehio planned for ten volumes. Gall remained in Berlin during World War II until the Soviets took control of East Berlin in 1945, when he resigned and move to the western (American) quarter of the city, becoming the head of the Art and Monuments. In 1946 he was named director of the Bavarian Castle commission. Gall became an editor for the Kunstchronik in 1948. He joined Ludwig H. Heydenreich in 1951 as an editor for the project of a general dictionary of art history, Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte, founded by Otto Schmitt in 1937. The following year he received the additional position of honorary professor for the history of architecture at the University of Munich. He revised the Handbücher der Kunstgeschichte volume in 1955. Gall continued his revisions for the Dehio volume, but his final volume was issued in 1956, still incomplete. Gall was methodologically a formalist. His dissertation was published the same year as the major manifesto of formalism, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Principles of Art History) by Heinrich Wölfflin, appeared. Gall’s use of the terms “calm” and “agitated” (Ruhevoll and Bewegte) for architecture correspond to Wölfflin’s categories of painterly and sculpture in the Principles (Fork).

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Neiderrheinische und normännische Architektur in Zeitalter der Frühgotik. Berlin, (published under the same title), 1915; [festschrift] Kühn, Margarete, and Grodecki, eds. Gedenkschrift Ernst Gall. Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1965; Die gotische Baukunst in Frankreich und Deutschland. Handbücher der Kunstgeschichte 2. Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Bierman, 1925; Dome und Klosterkirchen am Rhein. Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 1956, English, Cathedrals and Abbey Churches of the Rhine. New York: Abrams, 1963; “Niedersachsen und Westfalen.” and “Hessen-Nassau.” revisions of volumes 1 and 3 of, Dehio, Georg. Handbuch der deutschen Kunstdenkmäler. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1935ff; edited, with Schmitt, Otto, and Heydenreich, Ludwig. Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte. Stuttgart, J.B. Metzler, 1937ff.

Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 84, mentioned; 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. 46 mentioned, 48, 51 mentioned; Fork, Christiane. “Gall, Ernst.” Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 107-108; Heydenreich, Ludwig. “Ernst Gall.” Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte. volume 5. Stuttgart, J. B. Metzler, 1967, p. [ii]; [obituaries:] Kühn, Grete. “Ernst Gall 1888-1958.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 21 no. 2 (1958): 105-106.

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