Subject Area(s): archaeology, Medieval (European), and numismatics
Career(s): curators
Overview
Numismatist; archaeologist; Keeper of the department of British and Medieval Antiquities and ethnography, British Museum; assembled major collections for the British Museum, responsible for diversify British Museum Collections to non-West (Japanese) porcellains and other areas. He hired the medievalist and later keeper of the department, Ormonde M. Dalton in 1885.
Sources
A. W. Franks: Nineteenth-century Collecting and the British Museum. Marjorie Caygill and John Cherry, eds. London: British Museum Press, 1997. DNB vol. 22 (supplement) 665-668.
Citation
"Franks, Wollaston, Sir." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/franksa/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Numismatist; archaeologist; Keeper of the department of British and Medieval Antiquities and ethnography, British Museum; assembled major collections for the British Museum, responsible for diversify British Museum Collections to non-West (Japanes
Place Born: Prague, Praha, Hlavní Město, Czech Republic
Place Died: Princeton, Mercer, NJ, USA
Home Country/ies: Germany
Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), art theory, Medieval (European), and sculpture (visual works)
Institution(s): Institute for Advanced Study
Overview
Medievalist architectural historian and Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, scholar; important Kunstwissenschaft Gothic theorist. Frankl’s family stemmed from a line of Jewish scholars. His father a Prague businessman, was Carl Frankl and his mother Amalia von Wiener (Frankl). He was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, which is present-day Prague, Czech Republic. He attended to German Staats-Obergymnasium in Prague, graduating in 1896. Following a year’s service in the Austrian military at a Lieutenant’s rank in 1897, he entered the Technische Hochschule in Munich and then Berlin, graduating with a degree in (practicing) architecture in 1904. He married an artist, Elsa Johanna Herzberg in 1905, working as an architect. He returned school in 1908, studying philology, history and art history at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, the latter topic under Heinrich Wölfflin. Frankl’s dissertation advisor, however, was Berthold Riehl, founder of the Institut für Kunstgeschichte (Art History Institute) there. The topic was on fifteenth-century glass painting in southern Germany, accepted in 1910. Frankl remained at Munich as Wölfflin’s assistant (through 1913), who was now Riehl’s successor, writing his Habilitationschrift on developmental phases in architecture under Wölfflin. While this work employed Wölfflin’s theoretical structure of development (and was dedicated to the master), it rejected Wölfflin’s formalism.
Frankl worked as a privatdozent at Munich from 1914, exempt from military service in World War I because of an amputated arm, participating in the Handbuch der Kunstwissenschaft editions (under the editorship of Albert Brinckmann and Fritz Burger) beginning in 1916. In 1920 he was promoted to außerordentlicher (assistant) Professor at Munich, called the following year to become ordentlicher (full) Professor at Halle. It was there that Frankl turned to the topic of Gothic architecture, which would become his life’s work and fame. His 1924 contribution to Wölfflin’s festschrift–a seminal essay–theorized stylistic laws governing Gothic and Romanesque architecture. Two years later it was expanded into his book Baukunst des Mittelalters. In 1933 at the 13th International Congress of the History of Art, Stockholm, he traveled with a group of medievalists including Richard Hamann, Kenneth John Conant and Hans R. Hahnloser, lead by Johnny Roosval, to see the discovery of the only gothic church still with its wooden arch scaffolding remaining (Frankl, Gothic). That same year the Nazis assumed control of the German government forcing the dismissal of Jews from government positions, including academics. Frankl was terminated in 1934, returning to Munich were he lived in poverty. After a brief trip to Constantinople, he published his important theory of art-historical practice, Das System der Kunstwissenschaft issued in Czechoslovakia because works by Jewish authors were no longer permitted in Germany or Austria. The 1000-plus-page treatise is his most pure example of his Kunstwissenschaft notion, a systematic art history covering all principles in all forms from all periods. This book was among those the Nazi’s selected for their book burnings.
He traveled to the United States in 1938 but was prevented from returning because of illness. He was financially assisted in the U.S. by the German-American museum director Wilhelm Rheinhold Otto Valentiner. In 1940 Frankl was appointed a member of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton through the initiative of Princeton University professor Charles Rufus Morey and Institute of Advanced Study member (and fellow Nazi-refugee) Erwin Panofsky. Panofsky argued for the non-teaching IAS position because Frankl’s English was too poor to lecture in U.S. schools. Frankl spent much of his efforts at Princeton writing a book on the commentaries on the Gothic from that time to the present. After the War, Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner invited him to write the volume on Gothic architecture for his English-language survey series, the Pelican History of Art. In 1948 Frankl returned to Germany as a guest lecturer at the universities of Berlin and Halle and in the United States at Yale University. From 1951 onward he took as his assistant the wife of Princeton medievalist Kurt Weitzmann, Josepha Weitzmann-Fiedler (1904-2000). She helped him see the completion of his manuscript for the Gothic Architecture volume for the Pelican History of art, completed in German in 1956 and his Gothic literature study, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries, published in 1960. He finished reading the English translation of the manuscript of the Gothic Architecture volume the day before he died, at his desk, at the Institute, at age 83. A revision of his System der Kunstwissenschaft remained unfinished, but was later issued under Weitzmann-Fiedler’s direction in 1988 as Zu Fragen des Stills. His students in Halle included Richard Krautheimer, Georg Hoeltje and Ludwig Grote.
Frankl was one of the giants of Kunstwissenschaft (Crossley) as well as one of the last. This theoretical approach to art history had been practiced most profoundly by Vienna School historian Aloïs Riegl and Wölfflin. His Kunstwissenschaft writing consistently shows an interest in principles and categories–visual and intellectual–that control the viewer, the work of art and the conditions of its construction (Krautheimer). In Das System der Kunstwissenschaft Frankl demonstrated his ambition to create a comprehensive art history. Broken down into numerous categories (persons, things, places, time) and then into intricate substructures, (membrism, regularism, limitism, harmonism, etc.), the work constitutes “probably the most ambitious morphological and phenomenological study of the visual arts ever undertaken” (Crossley). He coined terms, such as “akyrism” to define the changing contexts and meanings of art, mostly clearly realized in his final article on Boucher’s 1752 painting “Girl on the Counch.” Frankl’s system was not always easy to follow, a fact about which Frankl himself worried. His emphasis on space as an analytic for architecture can be traced to the earlier pioneering work of Albert Brinckmann (Watkin). Frankl saw French Gothic architecture as a progressive style of the avante-garde, a laboratory of diverse ideas, in similar ways to the work of Jean Bony. (Crossley).
Selected Bibliography
[complete bibliography:] van der Osten, Gerd. “Paul Frankl 1878-1962.” Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch 24 (1962): 7-14;
[dissertation:] Beiträge zur Geschichte der süddeutschen Glasmalerei im 15. Jahrhundert. Munich, 1910, published, Strassburg: J.H.E. Heitz, 1912;
[habilitation:] Die Entwicklungsphasen der Neuren Baukunst. Munich/Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1914, published Leipzig: 1914, English: Principles of Architectural History: The Four Phases of Architectural Style, 1420-1900. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968;
“Der Beginn der Gotik und der allgemeine Problem des Stillgeninnes.” inFestschrift Heinrich Wölfflin: Beiträge zur Kunst- und Geistesgeschichte. Munich: H. Schmidt, 1924, expanded as, Baukunst des Mittelalters: die frühmittelalterliche und romanische Baukunst. Wildpark-Potsdam: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1926;
Das System der Kunstwissenschaft. Brunn, Czechoslovakia [and nominally Leipzig]: Rohrer, 1938, [shortened version by the author and Ullmann, Ernst.] Zu Fragen des Stils. Leipzig: E.A. Seemann, 1988;
The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960;
“Girl on a Couch.” in Meiss, Millard, ed. Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky. vol. 1. New York: New York University Press, 1961, pp. 138-152;
Gothic Architecture. Pelican History of Art. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962, appeared 1963.
Frankl, Paul. The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960, p. 15, n. 20;
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. 21 mentioned, 51 mentioned, 81 mentioned, 89 mentioned, 29 n. 59 (important);
Watkin, David. The Rise of Architectural History. London: Architectural Press, 1980 p. 12;
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. 22, 33, 122 mentioned; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 266, 287, 543;
Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 96-99;
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. 152-7;
[insightful historiographic essay:] Crossley, Paul. “Introduction: Frankl’s Text: Its Achievement and Significance.” Frankl, Paul and Crossley, Paul. Gothic Architecture. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 7-31;
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
Citation
Lee Sorensen. "Frankl, Paul." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/franklp/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Medievalist architectural historian and Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, scholar; important Kunstwissenschaft Gothic theorist. Frankl’s family stemmed from a line of Jewish scholars. His father a Prague businessman, was Carl Frankl
Subject Area(s): Abstract Expressionist and Expressionist (style)
Overview
Editor of the Art News during the critical years of Abstract Expressionism. Frankfurter was the son of Moritz Frankfurter and Freda Heyman (Frankfurter) of Chicago. He attended the Boy’s Latin School in Chicago followed by one year at Princeton University. He transferred to Humboldt University, Berlin, where he was awarded an undergraduate degree and graduate degree from the Institut für Kunstgeschichte (Institute for Art History). He worked for the esteemed historian of Renaissance art, Bernard Berenson, at the Villa I Tatti in Florence before returning to the United States. There he became art critic for the Studio International in 1927 in New York. In 1929 he became editor of the Antiquarian and later Fine Arts magazine (through 1934). After free-lancing as an art critic for two years, Frankfurter was named editor in 1936 of the Art News, America’s oldest art magazine. Under his leadership, he turned the journal into a seminal source for art information and criticism. Frankfurter formed part of the Executive Committee of the 1939 New York World’s Fair under Wilhelm Rheinhold Otto Valentiner. During World War II, he served as policy control chief for psychological warfare in the overseas division of the Office of War Information between 1942 until 1945. Frankfurter was awarded the Legion of Merit for his service. Following the War, he was director of the American pavilion at the 1948 Venice Biennale International Exposition, garnering the Order of Merit by the Italian government for this achievement. He advised numerous private collectors in acquisitions and served formally on the board of the Clark Art Museum, Williams College, Williamstown, MA. During the 1950s, when other art magazines were scoffing at the emerging artists of the New York School, he allowed his assistant editor, Thomas B. Hess to make the magazine a progressive voice for emerging art movements, particularly abstract expressionism. Frankfurter himself, however, was generally unenthusiastic of the movement. In emulation of the foreign art press for which he once wrote and with which his magazine was in some competition, Frankfurter recruited important art writers. Continental writers and art historians invited to write for the Art News included Director of the Musée national d’art moderne Jean Cassou, National Gallery directors Kenneth Clark and Philip Hendy, Victoria and Albert Museum Curator John Pope-Hennessy, French arts minister André Malraux, and the writer Cyril Connolly. Americans writers included the critic Henry McBride (1867-1962) (whom he rescued after McBride’s dismissal from the New York Sun), Harvard curator Agnes Mongan, Walter Pach, MoMA curator John Rewald, and the architectural critic Aline Saarinen (1914-1972). After the death of his second wife, Frankfurter married an assistant editor of the Art News, Eleanor C. Munro (b. 1928) in 1960, a woman 22-years younger than he, and daughter of the art historian/educator Thomas Munro. He was a signer to the 1961 letter to the New York Times, protesting the biased writing of its art critic, John Canaday, toward modern art. Frankfurter sold the magazine, of which he had controlling interest, to the Washington Post company in 1962. While in Jerusalem attending the opening of the Israel museum, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died. He was succeeded at Art News by Hess. He is buried in the Lutheran cemetery at Jerusalem. Frankfurter published few books and those he did were usually commemorative catalogs. His importance lies in his editorship of an art journal developing at the same time as the New York art scene itself. The French government made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor for his services to French art. Frankfurter campaigned for architectural preservation and quality; a particular cause was against demolition of historic buildings, especially when replaced by mediocre modernism. His celebrated fight with the New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (1888-1981) in 1954 over the New York Coliseum was well documented.
Selected Bibliography
and Valentiner, William. Masterpieces of Art: Exhibition at the New York World’s Fair, 1939. [official souvenir guide book] New York: Art News, 1939; and Dwight, H. G. Art Parade: Seeing the Past Forty years through Art News and the Frick Collection, New York. New York: The Art Foundation, Inc., 1943; Interpreting Masterpieces: Twenty-four Paintings from the Kress Collection. New York: Kress Art Foundation, 1952, [reprint from the 1952 Art News Annual 21].
Sources
[obituaries:] Art Journal 25 no. 1 (Fall 1965): 54; Hess, Thomas. “Editorial: Alfred Frankfurter, 1906-1965.” Art News 64 (Summer 1965): 25, 56; American Artist 29 (September 1965): 6; “Alfred M. Frankfurter, 59, Dies.” New York Times May 13, 1965, p. 37.
Citation
"Frankfurter, Alfred M.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/frankfurtera/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Editor of the Art News during the critical years of Abstract Expressionism. Frankfurter was the son of Moritz Frankfurter and Freda Heyman (Frankfurter) of Chicago. He attended the Boy’s Latin School in Chicago followed by one year at Pri
Subject Area(s): Antique, the, antiquities (object genre), and Preclassic
Overview
Professor of the History of Pre-Classical Antiquity at the University of London, 1949-1954. Frankfort was the eldest son of a Jewish mercantile family. Expected to inherit and run the family business, he was educated at the Hogere Burger School, a commercial high school, instead of the humanities-centered Barlaeus Gymnasium. Friends at the Barlaeus Gymnasium recognized his brilliance, however, and convinced his father to allow him to pursue a university career instead. Frankfurt studied initially Greek at the University of Amsterdam. There he met another ancientist student, Henriette “Jettie” Groenewegen, a year old than he. During World War I, he served in the Dutch army, 1914-18. After the war, Frankfort and Groenewegen became engaged in 1920. In 1921 Groenewegen was granted an M. A. in philosophy and Frankfort one in Netherlands Language and Literature, which included history. Frankfort and Groenewegen traveled to London before their marriage so that he could study with the Egyptian archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie (1853-1942). Frankfort was offered a position as Assistant in the British Museum’s Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in 1922, but it was rescinded when he declined to abandon his Dutch citizenship. In 1922 he made his first trip to the Near East as a member of Petrie’s expedition at Qau el-Kebir. Frankfort returned to London in 1923, married Groenewegen and completed his second M.A. the final day of that year. The two lived in Athens for the 1924-1925 academic year at the British School of Archaeology where he wrote his doctoral dissertation, published as his second book At age twenty-eight (1925) he was made director of excavations for the Egypt Exploration Society at Tell el-Amarna, Abydos, and Armant. Among his assistants was Thomas Whittemore, later archaeologist for Hagia Sophia. At Tell el-Amarna he exhumed the artifacts of the famous Ahkenaten. At Armant he exhumed the spectacular sacred bulls statuary. He received his Ph.D. from Leiden University. The success of these operations attracted the attention of James Breasted (1865-1935), who, in 1929 invited him to direct the Iraq excavations for the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, supported by John D. Rockefeller. These digs produced the foundational understanding of Mesopotamian cultures in relation to those of the Indus Valley. The four sites excavated included the Diyala River Basin as well as the Assyrian city of Khorsabad. Frankfort was a gifted organizer whose success in these excavations was as much a part of his ability to delegate as it was to interpret. In 1932 Frankfort was appointed to the chair of Research Professor of Oriental Archaeology at Chicago, but did not reside in the United States until 1937, owing to an Extraordinarius professorship he held at the University of Amsterdam those same years. During the same period (1932 onward) he also taught at the newly transplanted Warburg Institute (under the University of London after 1944) with Fritz Saxl. The Frankforts lived in Hampstead (London), the center of the British avant-garde. There they knew artists such as Barbara Hepworth and her husband, the artist Ben Nicholson. The effects of the Depression finally ended the Iraq Expedition in 1937. In 1938 the couple moved to a house overlooking the sea in Kimmeridge near Corfe Castle, Dorset. In 1939 Frankfort moved to Chicago full time as a professor at the University of Chicago. A series of speculative talks, suggested by his wife, was delivered as part of a public course in the Division of the Humanities of the University of Chicago on ancient human’s worldview. The lectures, given by the archaeologists John Albert Wilson (1899-1976), Thorkild Jacobsen (1904-1993) and William A. Irwin (1884-1967), resulted in the book Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East. Frankfort and his wife supplied the introduction, “Myth and Reality,” and a conclusion. American teaching meant diversity in lecturing. Frankfort once took a class to the Art Institute of Chicago for a Picasso exhibition in order to compare aspects of modern art with ancient. Frankfort was never comfortable with America, however, and in 1949 he returned to London to head the Warburg Institute, assuming the title Professor of Pre-Classical History of the University of London and heading the Warburg Institute, left vacant with the death of Saxl the year before. In 1952 he made his final trip to the east as a Guggenheim Fellow. At the Warburg, Frankfort met and fell in love with a younger and attractive Spanish scholar, Warburg’s photoarchivist, Enriqueta Harris. He divorced Henriette the same year and married Harris. Frankfort had completed the text for the volume on ancient non-classical art for the prestigious Pelican History of Art series when he died unexpectedly at home. The volume appeared posthumously. After his death he was succeeded at the Warburg Institute by Gertrud Bing. Frankfort’s excavations at Mesopotamia for the University of Chicago, 1929-1937 were some of the most important excavations of the era, adding significantly to the understanding of that era. His work at Diyala produced a stratified architectural sequence, which allowed the team to posit a chronological framework for early Mesopotamian art. Tablets were recorded with their find spots, for the first time, allowing Frankfort to draw a stylistic development of this category of objects such as the seals, spanning all of Mesopotamian art. Previously these had not been solidly classified since most objects had come either from unstratified excavations or the art market. His Kingship and the Gods underlined the relationship of near eastern religion as an expression of the integration of society with nature.
Selected Bibliography
[complete bibliography:] Vindenas, Johanne. “Bibliography of Henri Frankfort.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 14, no. 1 (January 1955): 4-13; The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient. Pelican History of Art 7. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1955; and Wilson, John A., and Jacobsen, Thorkild, and Irwin, William A., and Frankfort-Groenewegen, Henriette. Before Philosophy: the Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: an Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946; Cylinder Seals: a Documentary Essay on the Art and Religion of the Ancient Near East. London: Macmillan, 1939; and Lloyd, Seton, and Jacobsen, Thorkild, and Martiny, Günter. The Gimilsin Temple and the Palace of the Rulers at Tell Asmar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940; The Birth of Civilization in the Near East. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1951; and Pendlebury, John Devitt Stringfellow. The City of Akhenaten. Peet, T. Eric and Woolley, C. Leonard, eds. Part II. London/Boston: Offices of the Egypt Exploration Society, 1923ff.; and Loud, Gordon, and Jacobsen, Thorkild . “Excavations in the Palace and at a City Gate.” pt. 1 of, Khorsabad. The University of Chicago Oriental Institute Publications I, vol. 38-40. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1936ff.
Sources
Wilson, John A. American Philosophical Society Yearbook 1955: 439-442; Suter, Claudia E. “Henriette Antonia Groenewegen-Frankfort. http://www.brown.edu/Research/Breaking_Ground/bios/Groenewegen-Frankfort_Henriette%20Antonia.pdf, Brown Institute of Archaeology and the Ancient World; Gardiner, Margaret. Barbara Hepworth: A Memoir. Edinburgh: Salamander Press, 1982, pp. 26-27; Barbara Hepworth. A Pictorial Autobiography. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970, pp. 32; [obituary:] “Prof. H. Frankfort: The Culture Of Babylon And Egypt.” The Times (London) July 17, 1954, p. 8; [Henri Frankfort Memorial Issue]. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 14, no. 1, (January 1955).
Citation
"Frankfort, Henri." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/frankforth/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Professor of the History of Pre-Classical Antiquity at the University of London, 1949-1954. Frankfort was the eldest son of a Jewish mercantile family. Expected to inherit and run the family business, he was educated at the Hogere Burger School, a
Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, Renaissance, and sculpture (visual works)
Overview
Italian church architecture
Selected Bibliography
Benedetto Antelami architetto e scultore e l’arte del suo tempo. Milan: Milano Electa editrice, 1952.
Sources
Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 p. 263
Citation
"Francovich, Géza de." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/francovichg/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Archaeologist; discoverer of the “François Vase” (inv. 4209). François traveled widely as a young man. In 1825 he elected to excavate Etruscan sites, beginning with Cosa (until 1828) and then at Cortona in 1843. He also worked at digs in Volterra, Fiesole, Vetulonia, Populonia, Chiusi and Vulci. In 1844 François discovered black-figure vase fragments at Fonte Rotelle near Chiusi in the vicinity of several plundered tombs. The spectacular sherds immensely impressed the archaeologist Arcangelo Michele Migliarini (1779-1865), who encouraged François to search for more fragments. In 1845 François recovered five more pieces. The pieces were assembled by Vincenzo Monni and Giovan Gualberto Franceschi into a complete vase. The size and quality of the vase made it an immediate sensation. Leopoldo II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, purchased it for the Uffizi in 1846. Emil Braun, first secretary of the Archaeological Institute of Rome, was the first to published it. An additional piece was discovered and donated to the museum by Carlo Strozzi. François, who worked as the commissary of war for the Duke, had an abiding dream to found a museum comprising his finds. Together with the epigrapher A. Noël des Vergers (1805-1867) he created his own excavation society. He kept his finds in his home in Florence. When numerous attempts to found a public museum failed in Italy, he turned to the French government, also without success. In 1857 François made a second great find, an Etruscan painted tomb, now believed to be fourth century. Once again official interest in establishing a museum of his collection grew. François fell ill however and died the same year, never able to fulfill his dream. François lent his name to two important monuments in art history: the François Vase and François Tomb. A major monument in the history of Greek pottery, the François Vase is a large (66 cm) volute krater in a black-figure design, signed both by the potter, Ergotimos, and the painter, Kleitias. The Attic work has been dated to 570 B. C. In 1900, a disgruntled museum guard threw a stool at the case and smashed the François Vase to pieces (638!). It was restored in by Pietro Zei, incorporating the Strozzi fragment, but missing another piece which had been stolen. That piece was returned in 1904. A new reconstruction was performed in 1973. Today the krater is located in the Florence Archaeological Museum.
Selected Bibliography
[François left no published writing].
Sources
“François, Alessandro.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 1, pp. 461-62; “François Vase.” ibid, P. 463; Minto, Antonio. Il vaso François. Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1960; Materiali per servire alla storia del vaso François. Rome: Istituto poligrafico e zecca dello stato, 1981.
Citation
"François, Alessandro." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/francoisa/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Archaeologist; discoverer of the “François Vase” (inv. 4209). François traveled widely as a young man. In 1825 he elected to excavate Etruscan sites, beginning with Cosa (until 1828) and then at Cortona in 1843. He also worked at digs in Volterra,
Harvard professor and first curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. Francke took his Ph.D. in Munich in 1878 in medieval folklore and poetry. A friendship with Ephraim Emerton in Berlin in 1875 led to a letter of introduction to Harvard president Charles W. Eliot. He came to Harvard in 1884 as an instructor, assistant professor 1887 and professor in 1896. Throughout his career, Francke remained a literary historian. Between 1884 and 1916 he delivered university course lectures on German literature, art and thought. In 1903 he accepted the post of curator of the new Germanic Museum of the University, later to be renamed the Busch-Reisinger. He remained at that post until 1929. As curator, he focused much of his attention on procuring reproductions of German sculpture, as opposed to originals, in an effort to represent a complete view of German art development. The Kuno Francke Professorship of German Art and Culture, established at his retirement, is named for him.
Selected Bibliography
Glimpses of Modern German Culture. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1898;. Mantegna’s Triumph of Caesar in the Second Part of Faust. Boston: Harvard University Modern Language Department, 1892.
Sources
Busch-Reisinger Museum: History and Holdings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 1991, pp. 26-9.
Citation
"Francke, Kuno." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/franckek/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Harvard professor and first curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. Francke took his Ph.D. in Munich in 1878 in medieval folklore and poetry. A friendship with Ephraim Emerton in Berlin in 1875 led to a letter of introduction to Harvard president C
Franck-Oberaspach studied at the technische Hochschule in Stuttgart beginning in 1890. After his examinations in 1896, he entered Kaiser-Wilhelms Universität in Strassburg where he studied art history. His thesis, written under the classicist art historian Adolf Michaelis and the architectural historian and head of the Strassburger Institute Georg Dehio in 1898, was one of the first to examine the relationship between French medieval sculpture and German of the thirteenth century. He returned to the technische Hochschule in Stuttgart to write his habilitation, which appeared in 1907. His dissertation was influential for the work of Otto Schmitt.
Selected Bibliography
[dissertation:] Geschichte der deutschen Bildhauerkunst des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts mit besonderer Berücksichtigung ihres Verhaltnisses zur französischen Kunst. Kaiser-Wilhelms Universität zu Strassburg, 1898, partially published as, Der meister der Ecclesia und Synagoge am strassburger Münster: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Bildhauerkunst des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts in Deutschland, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung ihres Verhältnisses zur gleichzeitigen französischen Kunst. Dusseldorf: L. Schwann, 1901; [habilitation:] Künstlerschaft und Fabrikantentum im württembergischen Kunstgewerbeverein: Eine Abwehr von [. . .] Privatdozant der Kunstgeschichte an der Königlichen technischen Hochschule zu Stuttgart, Januar 1907. Stuttgart: Decker und Hardt, 1907; and Renard, Edmund. Die Kunstdenkmäler des Kreises Heinsberg. Dusseldorf: L. Schwann, 1906.
Sources
Sauerländer, Willibald. “Sculpture on Early Gothic Churches: The State of Research and Open Questions.” Gesta 9, No. 2, [“Papers on the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century Read at the Symposium Held in the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, May 14 and 15, 1969.”] (1970): 32-48; “Lebenslauf.” Der meister der Ecclesia und Synagoge am strassburger Münster: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Bildhauerkunst des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts in Deutschland, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung ihres Verhältnisses zur gleichzeitigen französischen Kunst. Dusseldorf: L. Schwann, 1903, p. i-ii.
Citation
"Franck-Oberaspach, Karl." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/frankoberaspachk/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Franck-Oberaspach studied at the technische Hochschule in Stuttgart beginning in 1890. After his examinations in 1896, he entered Kaiser-Wilhelms Universität in Strassburg where he studied art history. His thesis, written under the classicist art
Sociological art historian. Francastel’s father was Albert Francastel and his mother Isabelle ter Linden. Francastel initially studied literature at the Sorbonne under the French Hellenist Paul Mazon (1874-1955). Beginning in 1925, he worked for the architecture conservation department at the Palace of Versailles while researching his Ph.D. His thesis, which was published in 1930, was on the sculpture of Versailles. Francastel was appointed director of the Institut français in Warsaw, Poland in 1930. There he focused on the materialist theories of art history. He moved to Strasbourg as professor at the university of Strasbourg in 1936. At Strasbourg, he continued to concentrate on the social production of art, weaving a combination of political, religious and scientific history into his writing. Francastel changed research period to the 19th century, retaining his methodology. In 1937 he published l’Impressionnisme, les origines de la peinture moderne de Monet à Gauguin. His sociological thrust brought him to theorize particularly about space–cultural and physical–as an organizing principal in art. After World War II, Annales scholar Lucien Febvre (1878-1956) created the chair Professeur de sociologie de l’art (Professor of the Sociology of Art) at the l’école pratique des hautes études in 1948, appointing Francastel. Francastel’s books Art et Sociologie (1948) and Peinture et Société (1952) were both produced during this time. His seminar on modern architecture resulted in his most influential book, Art et Technique aux 19e et 20e siècles, 1956. The book challenged the standard architectural interpretation of the era, asserting most fundamentally that the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century did not create a cultural rupture in the art of the western world. The book departed with the dominant architectural historians such as Sigfied Giedeon, Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner and Bruno Zevi. After his death, an English translation was published as Art and Technology. His students at the école included the Marxist/El Greco scholar Nicos Hadjinicolaou. Francastel’s sociological approach is indebted to the work of émile Durkheim (1858-1917), particularly Durkheim’s studies of symbolic classification. Francastel disagreed with Marxist art historians such as Frederick Antal and others writing social histories of art, insisting that art is not simply an expression of class ideology, but rather is an operative system acting on society and society reciprocating (Tanner). Likewise, he discarded the “mystique of progress” concept of Lewis Mumford in which Mumford and others asserted that the development of the machine results in the greatest advancement of humankind. Henry-Russell Hitchcock and his view of “first generation” of modern architecture was anathema to Francastel. Francastel posited that architecture, sculpture and painting constituted specific forms of knowledge. He analyzed works according to their “plastic or aesthetic thought” manifested in these different figurative systems. His sociological framework differs as well from Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) and Bourdieu’s dynamic theory of art. His writing was full of contradictions and assertions that have not been adopted into mainstream architectural history; he termed Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture “Victorian,” denied the modernity in Henry Hobson Richardson’s architecture, and suggested more than a little chauvinistically that modernism was key to understanding Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (Bois). Among historians, his thought is most closely associated with Annales historians Febvre and Ferdinand Braudel (1902-1985). Historians of the Nouvelle Historie in France considered him a pioneer of the history of mentalities and of the “imaginary,” the organization of social space (Doyon). Michel Foucault condemned Francastel for a “totalizing vision” of history that allowed comparisons of the Eiffel tower with Cézanne. Within the field of art history, his theories have lingered but have neither become mainstream nor incorporated into other methodologies.
Selected Bibliography
[dissertatioin:] La sculpture de Versailles; essai sur les origines et l’évolution du gout français classique. Paris: A. Morancé, 1930; Girardon: biographie et catalogue critiques, l’œuvre complète de l’artiste. Paris: Les Beaux-arts, édition d’études et de documents, 1928; Art et Technique aux 19e et 20e siècles. Paris: éditions Denoël, 1956, English, Art & Technology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: Zone Books/MIT Press, 2000; Peinture et société: naissance et destruction d’un espace plastique, de la Renaissance au cubisme. Lyon, France: Audin, 1951 [in fact, 1952]; La Figure et le lieu, l’ordre visuel du Quattrocento. Paris: Gallimard, 1967, English, Medieval Painting. vol. 2 of 20,000 Years of World Painting. New York: Dell Pub. Co., 1967, [also appearing as an essay incorporated into the set,] Jaffé, Hans Ludwig C., and Kahane, P. P., eds. 20,000 Years of World Painting. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1967; Art & Technology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: Zone Books/MIT Press, 2000
Sources
Michel, J. “Lo strutturalismo nelle arti visuali, intervista a Pierre Francastel.” L’Architettura 14 (October 1968): 470-1; Sypher, Wylie, ed. Art History; an Anthology of Modern Criticism. Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1975, pp. 378-379; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 344; Doyon, Carol. “Francastel, Pierre (1900-1970).” A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing. vol. 1 D. R. Woolf, ed. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998, p. 326; Bois, Yve Alain. “Forward.” Francastel, Pierre. Art & Technology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: Zone Books/MIT Press, 2000, pp. 7-15 [n. b., Bois vigorously repudiates an earlier version of his essay, edited without his permission, appearing as, “Francastel’s Interdisciplinary History of Art.” Architectural Design (1981)]; Tanner, Jeremy. The Sociology of Art: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2003, p. 36, 211-212; [obituary:] Gállego, Julián. Goya no. 94 (January 1970): 259.
Citation
"Francastel, Pierre." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/francastelp/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Sociological art historian. Francastel’s father was Albert Francastel and his mother Isabelle ter Linden. Francastel initially studied literature at the Sorbonne under the French Hellenist Paul Mazon (1874-1955). Beginning in 1925, he worked for t
