Place Born: Dundrum, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, Ireland
Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK
Home Country/ies: Ireland
Overview
Director of the National Gallery in Dublin. Furlong was orphaned at nine years old and educated by Jesuits at Clongowes Wood. He attended University College, Dublin and his graduate studies were at Grenoble, Paris (the Sorbonne), Munich. He received his Ph.D. in Vienna writing on the topic of 10th and 11th century Anglo-Saxon manuscript illumination. As a student in Munich he observed Hitler’s 1923 abortive putsch. A homosexual, Furlong developed strong antipathies to Nazism. In 1936 he assisted the Jewish Viennese art historian Otto Pächt in escaping from Austria by issuing him an invitation to Ireland. Furlong obtained a position as an Assistant Keeper at the National Gallery, London in 1930, lecturing at the Tate and National Galleries. By 1935 he had been appointed Director of the National Gallery in Dublin, the youngest person to ever hold that position. With limited resources at the Irish museum, he nevertheless purchased major works of art, many, such as those by Gentileschi, Crespi and Castiglione, underappreciated at the time. Furlong had to contend with conservative trustees on the museum board who rejected paintings by Monet, Gauguin and Roualt. His involvement in the Lane Bequest brought him additional controversy. He remained at the Gallery for fifteen years, lecturing and writing. In addition, he performed examiners duties in art history at both Trinity College and University College Dublin. When trustees at the Gallery turned down Murillo’s Christ Healing at Bethesda, Furlong resigned in protest and moved to London in 1950. (The painting was subsequently purchased by the National Gallery, London). He lived there the remainder of his life with his partner, Rex Britcher.
Selected Bibliography
“The National Gallery of Ireland.” Studio 138 (August 1949): 33-43.
Sources
The Times (London), May 28 1987.
Citation
"Furlong, George Joseph." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/furlongg/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Director of the National Gallery in Dublin. Furlong was orphaned at nine years old and educated by Jesuits at Clongowes Wood. He attended University College, Dublin and his graduate studies were at Grenoble, Paris (the Sorbonne), Munich. He receiv
Modernist art historian and man of letters. Fülep was early interested in Cézanne and wrote positively about the painter in his native Hungary. In 1906 he early showed appreciation for Új Versek (New Verse), the first volume of experimental Hungarian poetry by Endre Ady. Fülep lived in Italy, chiefly in Florence, from 1907 to 1914, with a Paris visit and a brief stay in London. In Florence he studied under Benedetto Croce. He returned to Hungary when the First World War erupted in 1914, along with his countryman, the philosopher György Lukács (1885-1971) (who was in Heidelberg). Fülep was a member of the illustrious discussion group the Sonntagskreis (Sunday Circle) whose members included, in addition to Lukács, intellectuals such as the sociologist Karl Mannheim (1893-1947) and art historians Arnold Hauser, Frederick Antal, Johannes Wilde, and Charles de Tolnay. He and Tolnay developed a life-long friendship; Tolnay became greatly influenced by many of Fülep’s ideas. Fülep’s Magyar Mûvészet-európai mûvészet (Hungarian Art-European Art), a group of papers on art theory, was written during the war. It appeared in book form in 1919 (1923?). Fülep embarked upon a broad philosophy of art in the 1920s which he pursued the rest of his life. In 1927 Fülep chose the Presbyterian church in Zengővárkony, Baranya County, Hungary, for ministry. Together with the choirmaster, János Császár, they collected relics of the region. In 1930 Fülep won a Baumgartner prize for his writing and critical works. He used the prize money to build a small research library in the church. Fülep formed an intellectual and personal friendship with the classical scholar Károly (Karl) Kerényi (1897-1973). Kerényi was appointed a professor in Pécs in 1934. In 1947 he was appointed professor of art at Péter Pázmány University in Budapest and was elected a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. However, the mounting dictatorship brought him a despondency. Papers on Rembrandt and a lecture on Leonardo, unpublished, were mixed with scholarship on the Hungarian painters Tivadar Csontváry-Kosztka and Gyula Derkovits. Perhaps Fülep’s strongest contributions to art history was his influence on the Michelangelo and northern Renaissance scholar Charles de Tolnay. Tolnay published a paper on Cézanne in Hungarian in 1924 in which he cited the influence of Fülep’s 1906 and 1907 papers, arguing that Cézanne’s contribution to art was depiction of the fragmented world of modernity. His book Magyar Mûvészet-európai mûvészet examined painting, sculpture and architecture. Fülep was primarily interested in the relationship between national and European art, believing that only when national features of the art transcend to a universal (European) message do they become important. His major philosophy of art project remained unfinished at his death.
Selected Bibliography
[published correspondence:] Kner, Imre, ed. Fülep Lajos és Kner Imre levelezése. Gyula: Békés Megyei Levéltár, 1990; Magyar muvészet. Budapest: Athenaeum kiadása, 1923.
Sources
Lackó, Miklós. “The Truths of the Soul: From the Correspondence between Lajos Fülep, Charles de Tolnay and Karl Kerényi.” Hungarian Quarterly 40, no. 156 (Winter 1999): ; Németh, Lajos. Tudományos ülésszak Fülep Lajos születésének századik évfordulójára. Pécs: Baranya Megyei Múzeumok Igazgatósága, 1986.
Citation
"Fülep, Lajos." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/fulepl/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Modernist art historian and man of letters. Fülep was early interested in Cézanne and wrote positively about the painter in his native Hungary. In 1906 he early showed appreciation for Új Versek (New Verse), the first volume of experiment
Place Born: Offenbach, Rhineland Palatinate, Germany
Home Country/ies: Germany
Overview
Severely wounded in World War II. Originally trained as an architect, shifted to archaeology and art history. Scientific Assistant at the University of Göttingen 1957-1964. Killed in a car accident.
Selected Bibliography
“Zur Baugeschichte der Basilica Aemilia in republikanischer Zeit” Römische Mitteilungen 63 (1956): 14-25; “Zur Wanddekoration der Casa del Bell’Impluvio in Pompeji.” Archäologischer Anzeiger 1956: 9-30; “Varros Vogelhaus bei Casinum” Römische Mitteilungen 69 (1962): 96-105.
Sources
Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 321-322.
Citation
"Fuchs, Günter." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/fuchsg/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Severely wounded in World War II. Originally trained as an architect, shifted to archaeology and art history. Scientific Assistant at the University of Göttingen 1957-1964. Killed in a car accident.
Subject Area(s): French (culture or style) and painting (visual works)
Career(s): activists and art collectors
Overview
Political activist, cultural historian and Daumier scholar; art collector. Fuchs’ father was a shopkeeper. Early on the younger Fuchs developed socialist and Marxist political convictions. In 1886 he joined the outlawed political party Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei (the precursor of the modern SPD, Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands). Fuchs received a doctor of law degree and practiced as an attorney. In 1892 he became editor-in-chief of the satiric weekly Süddeutscher Postillon and later co-editor of the Leipziger Volkszeitung. His inflammatory articles in newspapers–one accusing the Kaiser of being a mass murder–resulted in periodic jail sentences. During his periods of confinement, Fuchs wrote various social histories utilizing images as one of his primary sources. The first of these was his Karikatur der europäischen Völker (Caricatures of European Peoples), 1901. He moved to Berlin that same year were he edited the socialist newspaper Vorwärts. The following year he began his magnum opus, an examination of moral practice, Sittengeschichte, eventually running to six volumes by 1912. While engaged in this series, he followed up his interest in caricatures with one devoted to the representation of women, Die Frau in der Karikatur, 1905 (3 vols). Another book documenting the stereotypical representations of Jews appeared in 1912. Fuchs traveled with the artist Max Slevogt to Egypt in 1914, shortly before the outbreak of World War I. He was a pacificist during the War. Lenin’s government put him in charge of prisoner exchange with Germany after the war; he was among the leaders of the German Comintern in Berlin in 1919. His interest in societal concerns in caricature led to a research interest in Daumier. Beginning in 1920, Fuchs published a catalogue raisonné on the artist in three volumes. He resigned from the party in 1929, following the expulsion of several stalwarts. At Hitler’s ascension to power in Germany in 1933, Fuchs moved to France. Fuchs was a Marxist and his interpretation of culture conforms to that theory.
Selected Bibliography
Illustrierte Sittengeschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. (3 vols.) Munich: Langen, 1909-1912; Die Karikatur der europäischen Völker vom Altertum bis zur Neuzeit. Berlin: Hofmann, 1901; Honoré Daumier: Lithographien. 3 vols. Munich: A. Langen, 1920-22; Der Maler Daumier, no. 283, Munich: Langen, 1930.
Sources
Benjamin, Walter. “Eduard Fuchs, der Sammler und der Historiker.” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 6 (1937): 346-381, English, “Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian.” Knut Tarnowski, translator. New German Critique, no. 5. (Spring 1975): 27-58; Huonker, Thomas. Revolution, Moral und Kunst: Eduard Fuchs, Leben und Werk. Zürich: Limmat-Verlag, 1985; Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern. 2nd ed. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1986, p. 130.
Citation
"Fuchs, Eduard." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/fuchse/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Political activist, cultural historian and Daumier scholar; art collector. Fuchs’ father was a shopkeeper. Early on the younger Fuchs developed socialist and Marxist political convictions. In 1886 he joined the outlawed political party Sozialistis
Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, and Renaissance
Career(s): art critics, art historians, and curators
Overview
Italian renaissance scholar, Bloomsbury art critic and curator of European painting, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1904-1910. Fry was born to Sir Edward Fry (1827-1918), a judge and Mariabella Hodgkin (Fry) (1833-1930) and raised in a Quaker household. Although headed for a career in science at Clifton College, Bristol, the lectures of J. H. Middleton, Slade Professor of Art, impressed Fry. Fry graduated from King’s College, Cambridge, with firsts in natural sciences, 1887 and 1888. Partially to please his father he dabbled in scientific areas while studying studio painting on the side. Entirely won over to art, he traveled to Italy in 1891 and studied studio painting at the Académie Julian, Paris in 1892. Returning to Italy and resolving to study art history, he read the works of Giovanni Morelli on connoisseurship and Walter Pater. His acquaintance with the scholar Bernard Berenson likely happened during this time. Fry soon established a reputation as a scholar of Italian art, lecturing on the subject for the Cambridge Extension Movement. Still painting, he met and married a fellow art student Helen Coombe (1864-1937) in 1896. Shortly thereafter Helen began exhibiting signs of mental illness, was hospitalized in 1899 but recovered somewhat. Fry’s articles from 1900 onwards in the Athenaeum led to a regular position writing art criticism. His first book on one of the Old Masters, Giovanni Bellini (1899) appeared at this time. Part of a group of English-speaking art experts, whose ranks included his friends Berenson and Herbert P. Horne, Fry used his influence to help found The Burlington Magazine in 1903. As an Italian Renaissance scholar, he sided with Berenson against R. Langton Douglas in the famous connoisseurship-vs.-documentary art history feuds. His first solo show of his painting was held at the Carfax Gallery in 1903. Failing to be appointed as Slade Professor at Oxford in 1904, Fry accepted an invitation from J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) to visit the United States and consider the position of Curator of European Painting of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although Fry hoped to succeed Edward John Poynter as Director of the National Gallery in London, which ironically became available immediately after Fry accepted the Metropolitan job, Fry took the New York position, succeeding George Henry Story. As Morgan’s hand-picked curator, Fry accompanied the multi-millionaire on buying trips to Europe, now with a title of “European Adviser.” Fry edited Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses, which appeared in 1905. This marked the last of his interest in the Old Masters. The same year Fry encountered Matthew Stewart Prichard, then a curator of classical antiquities at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, who exposed him to his Bergsonian view of museology, but also oriental and modern art. In 1906 Fry and Prichard met again, in Paris, where Prichard connected for Fry a relationship with Byzantine and modern art (Nelson, 161). Fry saw the work of Paul Cézanne for the first time the same year and from that moment, devoted his energies to modern art. The following year Fry persuaded the Metropolitan Museum Board to release him from his Curator position in favor of a title as “European advisor,” living in England. In 1910, however, a dispute with Morgan, who was Chairman of the Board of the Metropolitan, led to his dismissal. Fry’s wife was re-committed to an asylum.
Fry met the painter Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) and her husband, the critic Clive Bell (1881-1964), the same year, 1910, and emerged as a major figure in the circle of artists and writers known as the Bloomsbury group. The group, whose most famous member was the writer Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), was engaged in tradition-breaking practices; Fry and Vanessa Bell became lovers for the years 1911-1913. Fry opened the exhibition “Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries,” coining the term Post-Impressionist. England was not entirely prepared for the modernist sensibilities and Fry was denounced in the press, including the London Times. Fry took the criticism favorably and mounted a second show at Grafton Galleries in 1912, establishing for himself the reputation as the champion of modern art. Part of Fry’s devotion to modern art was the direct application, as Fry saw it, to common Arts and Crafts Movement form. He read papers on art at the Fabian Society and founded the Omega Workshops which manufactured quality-designed modernist objects. Young artists decorated furniture, designed fabrics, and pottery in the new Post-Impressionist style. Fry himself continued to paint, now in a looser decorative idiom. Wyndham Lewis was among the artists he employed at the Workshops. The First World War forced the collapse of the Omega project. In 1919 Fry forced both Lionel Cust and More Adey, both joint editors of the Burlington Magazine, out of the periodical after a bitter dispute. Fry achieved a fame as a art critic similar to John Ruskin half a century before with the 1920 publication of his collected essays from the Fabian Society and Burlington Magazine, titled Vision and Design. Fry and Vanessa Bell briefly had a second relationship in 1921. However, in 1925 he met Helen Maitland Anrep (1885-1965) at a party in Bell’s studio; Anrep left her husband and family to live with Fry the rest of his life.
Fry’s second collected essays, Transformations, appeared in 1926. Already, Fry was at work on his most thought-through book, Cézanne (1927). Both the first serious account of the artist’s life as well as the first to show the relation of Cézanne’s watercolors to his late oil painting, Fry established himself as a modernist art historian as well as a critic. After a second denial of a Slade Professorship at Oxford in 1927, Fry accepted a similar Slade Professor position at Cambridge in 1933. In his inaugural lectures for the Slade appointment, Art History as an Academic Study, Fry espoused a chronological approach to art. After the lecture on Greek art in the series, however, he sustained in a fall in 1934 and died of apparent heart failure connected to his trauma. The Slade lectures were published as Last Lectures in 1939.
Virginia Woolf wrote his biography, published in 1940, but largely confined herself to the public record out of deference to his relationship with her sister and her friend, Anrep. Fry’s clearest thoughts on art, according to Kenneth Clark, appeared in the introduction to Reynold’s Discourses. Fry and Clive Bell enjoyed mutual inspiration from one another. It was Bell’s 1914 polemic Art that introduced the concept of “significant form” to Fry, which would subsequently be more associated with Fry than Bell. In the essays of Vision and Design, Fry stated his case that all art could and should be appreciated principally by its “significant form.” To a public suspicious of complicated modernist theories and the notion of expertising, Fry’s viewer-approach dictum appealed to many. His books convinced a vast readership of the qualities of modern art. Fry criticized the German model of art scholarship in 1933 as seeing works of art “almost entirely from a chronological point of view, as coefficients of a time sequence, without reference to their aesthetic significance.” Fry’s populist approach to art became so pervasive that some thirty years later the German-American art historian Rudolf Wittkower decried it in his own lecture, “Art History as a Discipline.” He owed much to Morelli and Pater, the latter of whom he remarked in 1898, “makes so many mistakes about pictures; but the strange, and for a Morelli-ite disappointing, thing is that the net result is so very just.” (quoted, Ladis). His early monographs on Bellini and Veronese were the best writings on those artists of the time. Throughout his life, he continued to paint and always considered himself an artist as well as an art historian.
Selected Bibliography
[for a complete bibliography, see] Laing, Donald A. Roger Fry: an Annotated Bibliography of the Published Writings. New York: Garland Publishing, 1979; Vision and Design. London: 1920; The Artist and Psychoanalysis. London: L. and V. Woolf, 1924; Cezanne: A Study of his Development. London: 1927; “Seurat’s La Parade.” Burlington Magazine 55 (1929): 289-93 [“A Brilliant Essay” (Kleinbauer)]; Art-History as an Academic Study: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered in the Senate House. Cambridge: The University Press, 1933; Art and the Market: Roger Fry on Commerce in Art: Selected Writings. edited Craufurd D. Goodwin. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999; Letters of Roger Fry. New York: Random House, 1972.
Sources
[literature on Fry is legion, particularly, see] Woolf, Virginia. Roger Fry, a Biography. London: The Hogarth Press, 1940; Land, Berel. “Significance of Form: The Dillemma of Roger Fry’s Aesthetic.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 21 (1962): 167-76; Clark, Kenneth. “Roger Fry.” Dictionary of National Biography 1931-1940: 298-301; Bell, Quentin. Roger Fry: an Inaugural Lecture. Leeds, England: Leeds University Press, 1964; 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. 7; Falkenheim, Jacqueline V. Roger Fry and the Beginnings of Formalist Art Criticism. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1980; Spalding, Frances. Roger Fry: Art and Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 106 mentioned; Tomkins, Calvin. Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2nd. ed. New York: Henry Holt, 1989, pp. 103-110; 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. 11; Shone, Richard, and Beechey, James, and Morphet, Richard. The Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Universitiy Press, 1999; Elam, Caroline. “A More and More Important Work: Roger Fry and The Burlington Magazine.” Burlington Magazine 145, no. 1200 (March 2003): 142-152; Nelson, Robert. Hagia Sophia, 1850-1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, pp. 160-161; Gerzina, Gretchen. A Room of Their Own: the Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections. Ithaca, NY: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art/Cornell University Press, 2008.
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
Citation
Lee Sorensen. "Fry, Roger." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/fryr/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Italian renaissance scholar, Bloomsbury art critic and curator of European painting, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1904-1910. Fry was born to Sir Edward Fry (1827-1918), a judge and Mariabella Hodgkin (Fry) (1833-1930) and raised in a Quaker household.
Archaeologist, editor and early art history professor at Princeton 1886-1906. Frothingham was born to a wealthy Boston family. He studied languages in Rome between 1868 and 1881. In 1882 he began teaching Semitic languages at Johns Hopkins University. In 1883 he received his Ph.D., from Leipzig. He married Helen Bulkley Post. In 1885 Frothingham and Princeton’s first art history professor, Allan Marquand co-founded the American Journal of Archaeology, the organ of the newly founded Archaeological Institute of America, and Frothingham became its first editor. After lecturing at Princeton (then known as the College of New Jersey) as a visiting faculty in 1885, he moved to Princeton the following year to become professor (at the relatively young age of 31), teaching archaeology and art history, though he was neither paid from the regular funds nor considered faculty. Frothingham taught renaissance art-history, the first post-classical art classes at the College. In 1886 he gave the first graduate course in art history (and one of the first at the College). He and Marquand revised and rewrote the Bilder Atlas of Moritz Carrière as volume four of the Iconographic Encyclopedia in 1887. Around 1890 Frothingham and Marquand developed what would be major disagreements over the teaching of art, owing apparently to the overlap of the renaissance area in each other’s courses. He was also more willing to introduce new topics for the history of art than Marquand. Frothingham taught his renaissance course (which was largely medieval monuments) for the last time in 1892-93. During the 1890s, Frothingham was associate director of the American Academy in Rome, a position largely directing visitors and acting as an agent for American museums. In this capacity, he acquired twenty-nine Etruscan tomb groups excavated by Francesco Mancinelli in Narce as well as from other sites. As a professor of art at Princeton, he added courses such as “Subjects and Symbols in Early Christian Art,” the prototype to iconographic studies for which Princeton would later become famous. When Marquand returned from a year’s stint at the American School in Rome, he found that Frothingham was teaching a new course: Italian art of the middle ages. Marquand exercised one of the powers under his control: because all salaries of art historians were paid not from regular faculty lines, but from the Frederic Marquand Bequest over which Allan Marquand had complete control, Marquand simply stopped paying Frothingham’s salary mid-semester. An ugly situation was avoided when president Francis Landey Patton paid Frothingham for the rest of the semester out of discretionary lines. President Patton reconfigured Frothingham’s position to one of ancient art and archaeology (thereby becoming regular faculty), but no longer empowered to teach medieval art or be editor of the American Journal of Archaeology. Frothingham and Marquand co-wrote a text book in 1896, A Textbook of the History of Sculpture. Frothingham remained professor of ancient history and archaeology at Princeton until 1906, creating new and innovative courses, albeit within the proscriptions of his title. In 1903-04, however, his thinly-disguised medieval course, now lasting two full semesters, raised the ire of the university. His name disappeared from the faculty rolls the following year and though he remained in the city of Princeton the rest of his life, publishing as a private scholar, he never again taught courses. In the years after World War I, Frothingham studied the issues of immigrant populations in the United States, testifying at the Lusk hearings in Washington. Toward the end of his life, he traveled to Italy to understand Fascism. Like many during that era, he returned enamored of its accomplishments. He died of heart disease in a sanitarium in New York at age 65. Frothingham’s work shows an early and deep commitment to pedagogy and the dissemination of scholarship in a thoroughly American vein. Among the students who were inspired by his teaching was the later Princeton architectural historian Howard Crosby Butler.
Selected Bibliography
The Monuments of Christian Rome from Constantine to the Renaissance. New York: Macmillan, 1925; and Marquand, Allan. A Text-Book of the History of Sculpture. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896; and Sturgis, Russell. A History of Architecture. 4 vols. New York: The Baker & Taylor Company,1906-15; Architecture, Mythology, the Fine Arts, Technology. volume 4 of, Heck, Johann Georg and Baird, Spencer Fullerton. Iconographic Encyclopaedia of Science, Literature, and Art. New York: R. Garrigue, 1887.
Sources
de Puma, Richard Daniel. “Frothingham, Arthur Lincoln, Jr.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 1, p. 471; Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg. The Eye of the Tiger: the Founding and Development of the Department of Art and Archaeology, 1883-1923, Princeton University. Princeton, NJ: Department of Art and Archaeology and The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1983, pp. 14-18; [obituary:] A. L. Frothingham Dies in 65th Year.” New York Times July 29, 1923, p. S6.
Citation
"Frothingham, Arthur Lincoln, Jr.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/frothinghama/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Archaeologist, editor and early art history professor at Princeton 1886-1906. Frothingham was born to a wealthy Boston family. He studied languages in Rome between 1868 and 1881. In 1882 he began teaching Semitic languages at Johns Hopkins Univers
Subject Area(s): art criticism, Belgian (modern), Dutch (culture or style), seventeenth century (dates CE), and sixteenth century (dates CE)
Career(s): art critics
Overview
Painter; founder of the modern practice of art criticism and art historian who helped reassert the primacy of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch/Belgian masters. Fromentin’s father, Toussaint Fromentin-Dupeux (d. 1867), was a doctor and amateur painter (trained under Jean-Victor Bertin), and his mother, Jenny Billotte Fromentin-Dupeux, the daughter of a Naval administrator and regional councillor in La Rochelle. Fromentin excelled in Greek and Latin in school, receiving a bachelierre in 1838 in La Rochelle but remained at home for a year instead of going directly to college, writing poetry and translations of classical and foreign authors. In 1839 he began studying law in Paris, receiving baccalauréat en droit in 1841 and his licence (the second required law diploma) in 1843. When he failed the French bar exam, Fromentin switched to painting, studying under Jean-Charles-Joseph Rémond (1795-1875) and then Nicolas-Louis Cabat. His first important piece of criticism appeared as the Salon of 1845. Fromentin visited Algeria in 1846 and debuted as a painter in the Salon in 1847 with two Algerian scenes, subjects occupying his interests throughout his career. He returned to Algeria twice more in 1847 and 1852, exhibiting in between as an Orientalist at the 1850-1851 Salon. He married Marie Cavellet de Beaumont, the neice of his compatriot Armond du Mesnil, in 1852. Around the same time he began writing travel books drawing on his north-African experiences, Un Eté dans le Sahara in 1857, and Une Année dans le Sahel in 1859. He was recognized at the Salon of 1859 with a first-class medal and the Légion d’honneur. After 1860, his reputation as a painter secure–and only then able to fully leave his family’s financial support–Fromentin turned to writing in earnest. His 1863 novel Dominique (serialized first in 1862 in the Revue des Deux Mondes) remained a popular work in the French confessional style. The following year, he took on the powerful French Academy in a lecture, Une programme de critque, 1864. After failing to gain admission to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1867, he withdrew to summer residence at Saint-Maurice (near La Rochelle). He continued to paint Orientalist scenes and a series of centaur paintings in 1868, the latter generally depricated except for the critic Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Degas. Fromentin returned to Algerian-subject painting (and success with the critics) in the 1874 Salon. His health ever poor, Fromentin visited the Low Countries in 1875 for a respite and became deeply enamored with the early Dutch and Flemish masters. He wrote what has become on of the most important books of 19th-century art-history writing, Les Maîtres d’autrefois shortly before his death. Penned hurredly at the Saint-Maurice residence during the summer of 1875, he initially published it serially at the suggestion of Francois Buloz (1803-1877) in the Revue des Deux Mondes (January-March 1876) appearing in book form the same year. A sensitive and sympathetic account of these artists, the book was ground-breaking particularly because their work was under-appreciated in France at the time. His hopes that the book would garner the Académie des Beaux-Arts’ award were again dashed when the award went to Charles Blanc. Blanc used his postion as a member of the Académie to chide Fromentin as unsuited to judge art because he writing was too subtle (!). Fromentin exhibited once more at the Salon of 1876, contributing an anonymous criticism of the Salon to the Bibliothèque universelle et revue suisse in Lausanne. He contracted cutaneous anthrax (a malignant tumor) and died at Saint-Maurice, Paris, France, near La Rochelle, at age 56, while working on a re-write of Domnique. He is buried in the cemetery at Saint-Maurice. Fromentin conceived of art history as problems to be solved through the use of a variety of methods, though principally employing his knowledge of artistic techniques and strong visual analysis. He avoided overt methodological positions (Udo Kultermann termed him an “anti-methodical subjectivist” akin to Jacob Burckhardt). Fromentin’s comparatively sober analysis of art caused the art historian Mary Pittaluga to declare him the first modern art critic. Les Maîtres d’autrefois remains his most important work in art historiography. In it, Fromentin departed from typical French art criticism combining instead a more theoretical framework with profound technical sensitivity (color, space) and evaluative methods. Perhaps surprisingly, he was uninterested in most early Netherlandish art or Vermeer, reflecting the general attitude of the French art public. His chapters on the seventeenth-century masters Rubens (six alone), Rembrandt, and Jacob van Ruysdael, as well as sixteenth-century painters Jan and Hubert van Eyck and Hans Memling, focused on a detailed analysis of individual paintings to conclude the personalities of the men behind these paintings, a determinist approach borrowed from the philosophy of Hippolyte Taine. Modern critics have tended to see this work is more literary than art-historical (Sagnes). His account of the portraits of Rembrandt are among his finest writing. His popularization of art critique is characteristic of Gründerzeit impulse and the rising power of an educated middle class. Esthetically, he was largely opposed to the Impressionists, Edouard Manet for example, perhaps because of the challange they provided to his work painted work. In his own time, the art historian/critic Émile Michel remarked that “Fromentin first gave the example of an art critic who was himself a work of art.” In the twentieth century, Fromentin was positively re-evaluated by Jan Białostocki and Meyer Schapiro; eminent translators of his work included Henri van de Waal into Dutch. A manuscript version of a second Les Maitres d’autrefois is held at the municipal library at Versailles.
Selected Bibliography
Sagnes, Guy, ed. OEuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1984; Dominique. Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette et Cie, 1863, English, London: Howe, 1932; “Programme de critique” [manuscript], 1864; Les Maîtres d’autrefois: Belgique, Hollande. Paris: s.n., 1876, English, The Masters of Past Time: Dutch and Flemish Painting from Van Eyck to Rembrandt. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981.
Sources
Michel, Émile. Essais sur l’histoire de l’art. Paris: Société d’édition artistique 1900; Pittaluga, Mary. “Eugène Fromentin e le origine della moderne critica d’arte.” L’Arte 20/21 (1917/18); Gerson, Horst. “Editor’s Introduction.” Fromentin, Eugène. The Masters of Past Time: Dutch and Flemish Painting from Van Eyck to Rembrandt. London: Phaidon Press, 1948, pp. vii-xiii; Schapiro, Meyer. “Fromentin as a Critic.” Partisan Review 16 (January 1949): 25-51; Bialostocki, Jan. “Rembrandt and Posterity.” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 23 (1972): 131; “Man of Two Muses.” Apollo 110 (December 1979): 458-465; Kultermann, Udo. The History of Art History. New York: Abaris, 1993, pp.118-19; Thompson, James. “Fromentin, Eugène (-Samuel-Auguste).” Dictionary of Art; Mickel, Emanuel J. Eugène Fromentin. Boston: Twayne, 1981.
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
Citation
Lee Sorensen. "Fromentin, Eugène." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/fromentine/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Painter; founder of the modern practice of art criticism and art historian who helped reassert the primacy of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch/Belgian masters. Fromentin’s father, Toussaint Fromentin-Dupeux (d. 1867), was a doctor and amat
Private scholar, art dealer, and art critic; specialist in Italian paintings and drawings, especially Renaissance and Baroque; trained under the Vienna School scholars. Frohlich-Bume was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary which is present day Vienna, Austria to Ernst Bum, a lawyer and publisher, and an unknown mother. She attended a private girls’ school in Vienna and completed her Abitur in 1906 at the Ersten Staatsgymnasium in Graz. From 1906 to 1910 she studied art history, archaeology, and philosophy in Vienna under Max Dvořák, Franz Wickhoff, Julius Schlosser, and Josef Strzygowski. During this time, she collaborated on the Internationale Bibliographie der Kunstwissenschaft, edited by Otto Fröhlich (1873–1947), whom she would eventually marry. She edited volumes VI, VII, and VIII from 1907 to 1909. She earned her doctorate in 1910 from Vienna under Dvořák as her advisor. From 1912 onwards, she worked in her husband’s art trade. Her dissertation, Andrea Meldolla, genannt Schiavone (Andrea Meldolla, Called Schiavone), was published in the Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien in 1913. Her first book, Parmigianino und der Manierismus, was published in 1921. From 1923 to 1934, Frohlich-Bume worked in the Albertina’s Collection of Drawings and Prints in Vienna without official employment. Her book Ingres: sein Leben und sein Stil was published in 1924, receiving an English-language publication in 1926. She also worked with the director of the collection, Alfred Stix, to compile the catalog of Italian drawings. The first volume, Beschreibender Katalog der Handzeichnungen in der graphischen Sammlung Albertina. I.: Die Zeichnungen der Venezianischen Schule, was published in 1926. Frohlich-Bume also collaborated on the third volume, Beschreibender Katalog der Handzeichnungen in der graphische Sammlung Albertina. III.: Die Zeichnungen der toskanischen, umbrischen und römischen Schulen, published in 1932. During this time, she also had regular publications in journals. Following the Anschluss in 1938, Frohlich-Bume emigrated to England due to persecution because she was Jewish. From 1938 onwards she lived in London, working as an art dealer until 1947. During this time, she provided support and care for her ill husband until his death in 1947. Frohlich-Bume was naturalized in 1948, and began journalistic work for various magazines the same year. From 1954 onwards, she published numerous exhibition and auction reports for Weltkunst, primarily from London.
Selected Bibliography
[dissertation:] “Andrea Meldolla, genannt Schiavone.” Vienna, 1910, published, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 31 (1913): 138–220;
contributed: Internationale Bibliographie der Kunstwissenschaft. Berlin: Behr, 1907–1909, vol. VI–VIII;
Parmigianino und der Manierismus. Vienna: Anton Schroll & Co., 1921;
“Some Unknown Venetian Drawings in the Albertina.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 43, no. 244 (July 1923): 28–29;
Ingres: sein Leben und sein Stil. Vienna: Manz, 1924, English, Ingres, His Life & Art. London: Heinemann, 1926;
“Five Drawings for Titian’s Altarpiece of St. Peter Martyr.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 45, no. 261 (December 1924): 280–281;
“Some Unpublished Portraits by Parmigianino.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 46, no. 263 (February 1925): 87–89;
and Stix, Alfred: Beschreibender Katalog der Handzeichnungen in der graphischen Sammlung Albertina. I.: Die Zeichnungen der Venezianischen Schule. Vienna: A. Schroll, 1926;
“Two Drawings by Guardi in the Dresden Print-Room.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 49, no. 280 (July 1926): 31–32;
“Two Unpublished Sketches by Titian.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 51, no. 296 (November 1927): 228–229;
“An Unpublished Drawing by Giovanni Santi.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 53, no. 304 (July 1928): 43–44;
“Three Drawings by Palma Vecchio.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 55, no. 317 (August 1929): 81–82;
“A Rediscovered Work by Parmigianino.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 56, no. 326 (May 1930): 273–274;
“Two Unknown Portraits by Jacopo Bassano.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 60, no. 347 (February 1932): 88–91;
“Some Original Compositions by Francesco and Leandro Bassano.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 61, no. 354 (September 1932): 113–114;
and Stix, Alfred: Beschreibender Katalog der Handzeichnungen in der graphische Sammlung Albertina. III.: Die Zeichnungen der toskanischen, umbrischen und römischen Schulen. Vienna: Schroll, 1932;
“A Rediscovered Work by Paris Bordone.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 64, no. 375 (June 1934): 282–287;
“Unpublished Drawings by Parmigianino.” Old Master Drawings 9 (1935): 555–557;
“An Unknown Drawing by Raphael.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 67, no. 389 (August 1935): 88;
“Bozzetti and Modelletti of the Late Renaissance and the Baroque.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 70, no. 408 (March 1937): 133–134;
“A Design by Vittore Carpaccio.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 70, no. 408 (March 1937): 137;
“Bernardino Licinio: Sheet of Studies Showing Two Sketches for a Composition of a Gentleman With a Lady Making Music.” Old Master Drawings 12 (1937/38): 49–50;
“Notes on Some Works by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 72, no. 419 (February 1938): 82–87;
“A Rediscoverd Picture by Artemisia Gentileschi.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 77, no. 453 (November 1940): 169;
“Some Sketches by Jacopo Bassano.” The Burlington Magazine 90, no. 543 (June 1948): 169–170;
“An Unknown Portrait by Parmigianino.” The Burlington Magazine 91, no. 553 (April 1949): 110;
“Three Unknown Drawings for Famous Pictures.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 96, no. 44 (1954): 355–360;
“Some “Adorations” by Jacopo Bassano.” Apollo 65, no. 388 (1957): 212–217;
“Additions to a Corpus of Drawings of Parmigianino.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 100, no. 51 (1958): 9–14;
“Some Paintings by Pellegrini.” Apollo 69, no. 412 (1959): 188–191;
“An Unknown Portrait by Parmigianino.” Pantheon 18 (1960): 114–116;
“Five Unpublished Drawings by Parmigianino.” Pantheon 18 (1960): 236–241;
“Some Unpublished Drawings by Parmigianino.” Apollo 76, no. 9 (1962): 693–696.
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. 180–183.
Contributors: Lindsay Dial
Citation
Lindsay Dial. "Frohlich-Bume, Lili." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/frohlichbumel/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Private scholar, art dealer, and art critic; specialist in Italian paintings and drawings, especially Renaissance and Baroque; trained under the Vienna School scholars. Frohlich-Bume was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary which is present day Vienna, Au
Scholar of Romanesque art, selected works of art for Nazi confiscation to the Reich. Frodl received his Ph. D. in 1930 from the University at Graz where he studied under Hermann Egger and the classical art historian Rudolf Heberdey. He became a privatdozent studying architectural conservation at the Technical Hochschule, Graz. In 1936 he was appointed Head of Carinthian Monuments and Fine Arts Office, a unit for the conservation of buildings [Landeskonservator für Kärnten im Klagenfurt]. In December 1939 two decrees issued by the German government allowed for the confiscation of works of art from religious and private ownership in Poland. The Austrian government, now part of the Nazi empire, chose Frodl as the art historian to select which works of art were to be taken for Hitler’s projected art museum in Linz, Austria, and other “private” Nazi leader collections. He married Eva Kraft (b. 1916) who, beginning in 1942, supervised the photographic division of the historic preservation division in Vienna (she later became the art historian Eva Kraft-Frodl, dissertation 1976). The same year he wrote his habilitation at Graz and was appointed director of the Carinthian state museum [Landesmuseum Kärnten]. After the war, both she and Walter Frodl were dismissed from their positions by the new government (1945). Frodl was named professor of art history in 1948 at the Technische Hochschule in Graz, where he remained until 1959. In 1960 he became professor of art at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna. He authored an English-language volume with David Talbot Rice in 1964 on Austrian Romanesque wall painting. Somewhat ironically, in 1965, Frodl became president of the Austrian Federal Monument Office (Bundesdenkmalamt), succeeding Otto Demus, a similar position to the one he had held during the Nazi regime, this time charged to protect monuments from destruction. He continued to publish on the indigenous monuments in Austria, mostly Romanesque wall painting. Frodl retired from the Bundesdenkmalamt in 1970 and from the Hochschule in 1979. Charges surfaced in the 1980s that during his tenure at the Bundesdenkmalamt, he impeded the return of works of art now owned by Austrian government musuems which had been seized during the Nazi years to their rightful owners. These accusations, never disputed, also asserted that he was at least tacitly assisted by Erwin Thalhammer (b. 1916), then a government minister, who succeeded Frodl at the Bundesdenkmalamt. Frodl also served on the board for the Institute for Austrian Art Research Institut für österreichische Kunstforschung), where his wife worked from 1945. His son, Gerbert Frodl (b. 1940), was also an art historian and Director of the Austrian Gallery (Österreichischen Galerie), from which several Gustav Klimt paintings were repatriation to their former owners. Frodl was a well-respected Romanesque scholar who supervised numerous students. He was one of a number of Austrian art historians who effectively effaced his collaboration with the Nazis. His 1975 festschrift, for example, makes no mention of his complicity with the Third Reich in the theft of or forced-sale of works of art from Jews and others. Frodl was a well-respected Romanesque scholar who supervised numerous students. He was one of a number of Austrian art historians who effectively effaced his collaboration with the Nazis. His 1975 festschrift, for example, makes no mention of his complicity with the Third Reich in the theft of or forced-sale of works of art from Jews and others.
Selected Bibliography
[complete bibliography:] Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und Denkmalpflege: Walter Frodl zum 65. Geburtstag gewidmet. Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1975, pp. 219-226; and Rice, David Talbot. Austria: Mediaeval Wall Paintings. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society/UNESCO, 1964; Die gotische Wandmalerei in Kärnten. Klagenfurt: Joh. Leon, 1944; Idee und Verwirklichung: das Werden der staatlichen Denkmalpflege in Österreich. Vienna: Böhlau, 1988; and Macku, Anton. Die Kunstdenkmäler des politischen Bezirkes Klagenfurt: [Die Land Klagenfurt]. Klagenfurt: Kollitsch, 1932; Die romanische Wandmalerei in Kärnten. Klagenfurt: J. Leon, 1942.
Sources
Österreicher der Gegenwart: Lexikon schöpferischer und schaffender Zeitgenossen. Vienna: Österreichische Staatsdruckerei, 1951, p. 409; Decker, Andrew. “A Legacy of Shame.” Artnews 83 no. 10 (December 1984): 60; “Geschichte der Denkmalpflege in österreich.” http://www.bda.at/organisation/126/0/5780/texte/; Aslanapa, Oktay. Türkiye’de Avusturyali sanat tarihçileri ve sanatkârlar: özellikle Atatürk devri’nde [österreichische Kunsthistoriker und Künstler in der Türkei]. Beyoglu, Istanbul: Eren, 1993; österreich Lexikon. Vienna: Verlagsgemeinschaft österreich-Lexikon, 1995, vol. 1 p. 357 [birth date incorrect]; Who’s Who in Austria (1969-70), pp. ; [family information] Who’s Who in Austria (1996), pp. 182-183.
Citation
"Frodl, Walter." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/frodlw/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Scholar of Romanesque art, selected works of art for Nazi confiscation to the Reich. Frodl received his Ph. D. in 1930 from the University at Graz where he studied under Hermann Egger and the classical art historian
Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style) and Renaissance
Overview
Scholar of renaissance Italian art. A friend and disciple of Giovanni Morelli, he edited the final volume of Morelli’s collected works and wrote a brief biography of him in 1893.
Selected Bibliography
edited, Die Galerien zu Berlin, volume three of Morelli, Giovanni. Kunstkritische Studien über italienische Malerei. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1893.
Citation
"Frizzoni, Gustavo." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/frizzonig/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Scholar of renaissance Italian art. A friend and disciple of Giovanni Morelli, he edited the final volume of Morelli’s collected works and wrote a brief biography of him in 1893.
