Art Historians

Fraenger, Wilhelm

November 8, 2023April 14, 2024

Full Name: Fraenger, Wilhelm

Other Names:

Wilhelm August Ludwig Fraenger

Gender: male

Date Born: 1890

Date Died: 1964

Place Born: Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany

Place Died: Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): folk art (traditional art), folk tales, folklore (culture-related concept), literary studies, and literature (general genre)

Overview

Bosch scholar and folk literature specialist. Fraenger’s father was a judge and twice mayor of Erlangen, Emil Karl Hermann Fraenger; his mother was Wilhelmine Jacobine Fraenger. He entered the university in Heidelberg in 1910, beginning his art writing career with reviews of contemporary art shows for the Heidelberger Zeitung in 1912, including Alfred Kubin und Max Zachmann. Fraenger was awarded a prize by the University in 1913 for an essay, “Kunsttheorie des 17. Jahrhunderts und ihr Vertreter Arnold Houbraken,” on the art theory of the seventeenth century as manifested in the artist (and proto-art historian) Arnold Houbraken. He studied art history at Heidelberg beginning in 1915, serving as a volunteer in the reserve infantry during World War I. Fraenger joined the art history institute there (Kunsthistorischen Institut der Universität Heidelberg), receiving his doctorate in 1917 with a dissertation on the pictorial analysis of French Academy theorist Roland de Chambray Fréart (1606-1676), supervised by Carl Neumann. He founded the Heidelberg intellectual group “Die Gemeinschaft,” (the Community) in 1919 to counteract the elitism of academic treatment of the arts. Fraenger was initially interested in Mathias Grünewald and lectured on the artist during this time. He married Auguste “Gustel” Esslinger (1892-1979) in 1920. While lecturing on art, he met the artist Louise “Lulu” Darmstädter (later) Kayser-Darmstädter (1894-1983) with whom he exchanged an intimate life-long friendship. Fraenger’s strong interest in the study of folk culture began with the founding of the Jahrbuch für historische Volkskunde (historical ethnography yearbook), which he edited for the 1925-1926 year. He was hired at the Schloßbibliothek Mannheim as its library director in 1927. Though not Jewish, he was forced out of this position with the asumption of power by the Nazis in 1933 because of his progressivist views and his books burned. A book on Grünewald appeared in 1937 which was again opposed by the Nazis because of Fraenger’s interpretive approach to an artist the National Socialist’s consider “urdeutsch.” He worked as an artistic advisor for a Berlin theater company beginning in 1938 through 1943. After World War II he was briefly interned in a Soviet prison camp. After release, Fraenger joined the Communist Party and became involved in politics in what was declared East Germany. He was mayor of Brandenburg an der Havel between 1945 and 1947. During that time he acted as councilman for Education under its famous Communist mayor Fritz Lange (1898-1981). As educational councilman he established and led an adult education school in the city. Perhaps his best known book, his study on Hieronymus Bosch, was published in 1947. In it, Fraenger argued controvercially that Bosch’s most famous picture, the “Garden fo Earthly Delights” (Madrid), should not be read through Christian iconography, but rather as a social utopian statement. He was appointed director for the center for German folk studies (Institut für deutsche Volkskunde), part of the German Academy of Sciences (Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften or DAW) in Berlin in 1952. He helped found the literary and art journal and publishing house Castrum Peregrini with the Dutch painter Gisèle van Waterschoot van der Gracht (b. 1912) and Wolfgang Frommel (1902-1986) in 1950. He was named a professor at the Institute in 1955. After his death, a foundation was established in Potsdam for him in 1992. His papers are held at this institution, the Wilhelm Fraenger Gesellschaft administered by his wife and stepdaughter, Ingeborg Baier-Fraenger (1926-1994). In his book on Bosch, Fraenger constructed an explanation of the artist’s work based on his theory that Bosch belonged to a heretical group, the Adamites in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, which practiced many of the rites depicted in Bosch’s paintings. The theory remained controvercial and unaccepted by other Bosch scholars.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Baier-Fraenger, Ingeborg, ed. Der Kunsthistoriker Wilhelm Fraenger, 1890-1964: eine Sammlung von Erinnerungen mit der Gesamt-Bibliographie seiner Veröffentlichungen. Amsterdam: Castrum Peregrini Presse, 1994, pp. 101 ff.; [dissertation:] Die Bildanalysen des Roland Fréard de Chambray: der Versuch einer Rationalisierung der Kunstkritik in der französischen Kunstlehre des 17. Jahrhunderts. Heidelberg 1917; Matthias Grünewald in seinen Werken: ein physiognomischer Versuch. Berlin: Rembrandt 1936; Hieronymus Bosch: Das Tausendjährige Reich: Grundzüge einer Auslegung. Coburg: Winkler, 1947, English, The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch: Outlines of a New Interpretation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951; Die Hochzeit zu Kana: ein Dokument semitischer Gnosis bei Hieronymous Bosch. Berlin: 1950.

Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 6; [Fraenger’s theories on Bosch] Gibson, Walter S. “Letters to the Editor.” Art Bulletin 58, no. 1 (March 1976): 148-149; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. 2nd. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007, pp. 98-100; Weckel, Petra. Wilhelm Fraenger (1890-1964): ein subversiver Kulturwissenschaftler zwischen den Systemen. Potsdam : Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 2001; Wilelm Fraenger Gesellschaft [website] “Biographie.” http://www.fraenger.net/per_fraenger_start#oben.

Fox, Milton S

November 8, 2023April 14, 2024

Full Name: Fox, Milton S

Gender: male

Date Born: 1904

Date Died: 1971

Place Born: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): painting (visual works)

Career(s): art critics, artists (visual artists), and authors

Overview

Artist and arts editor for Harry N. Abrams publishers, wrote a 1972 volume on Renoir for the Great Ages of Art series. He trained as a painter at the Cleveland School of Art and later at the Adadémie Julian in Paris. He was invited to become “élève École des Beaux-arts” in 1926. Fox married fellow Adadémie Julian student Ruby Canfield in 1928. He returned to his alma mater in Cleveland to teach, then the Cleveland School of Architecture and Western Reserve University, where he received an M.A. Although a successful portrait painter in Cleveland and as a muralist (he painted two for the Cleveland Public Auditorium), his interest was always in writing. He joined the Education Department at the Cleveland Museum of Art, writing art reviews for the Cleveland News. After World War II was declared, he served as a camouflage painting instructor for the U.S. Civil Defense, 1942-1944. After the war, Fox left for Hollywood, writing scripts for movies and chairing the Education Committee of the Beverly Hills Institute of Modern Art. In 1950, Harry Abrams founded an art-book publishing company devoted to books which high-quality illustrations. Fox joined the New York firm as its Vice President and Editor-in-Chief. At Abrams, he edited most all of the firms books, many first published in other countries. In 1956 he edited a volume the Suite Vollard. Abrams’ brainchild, The Library of Great Painters, saw unusual fruition under Fox. Major art historians were commissioned to write significant though briefer essays on artists, accompanied by a series of fine-colored plates and one-page analysis of the work. This unusual format, modeled on a series by Phaidon resulted in important art histories including two by Meyer Schapiro (Cézanne and van Gogh), Bill Seitz (Monet), Walter F. Friedländer (Poussin), Bob Rosenblum (Ingres) and Robert Goldwater (Gauguin). Fox himself wrote the volume on Renoir in 1972. During this time Fox consulted on two NBC television programs on art, “The Museum Without Walls” and “The Louvre, Golden Prison.” Fox’s later years were overshadowed with serious heart troubles. He suffered a number of attacks, each time returning to work. He suffered a fatal attack at home at age sixty-seven. A memorial volume published in his memory comprised essays by the most important art historians of his era in 1974.

Selected Bibliography

Picasso for Vollard. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1956; Pierre Auguste Renoir. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1972.

Sources

Hartt, Frederick. “Milton S. Fox.” Art Studies for an Editor: 25 Essays in Memory of Milton S. Fox. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1975, [unpaginated]; [obituary:] “Milton S. Fox, Editor, Is Dead, Official of Art Book Company.” New York Times October 26, 1971, p. 44.

Fortum, C. Drury

November 8, 2023April 14, 2024

Full Name: Fortum, C. Drury

Other Names:

Charles Drury Edward Fortum

Gender: male

Date Born: 1820

Date Died: 1899

Place Born: Holloway, London, England, UK

Place Died: Great Stanmore, Harrow, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): catalogues raisonnés

Career(s): art collectors

Overview

Collector and art historian, author of collection catalogs of the South Kensington Museum (later Victoria and Albert); considered “second founder” of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Fortnum was the son of Charles Fortnum (1770-1860), a businessman, and Laetitia Stephens (1782-1853), his father’s second wife. The younger Fortum was educated privately due to concerns of poor health. He joined his father’s business briefly in London but hated commerce. In 1840 he emigrated to Australia where he adopted the middle name “Drury.” In Australian he shared a land grant in the new colony of South Australia with his half brother, Charles Stuart. His interests in the natural sciences led him to send back zoological specimens to the British Museum, some of which were given the species name “fortnumi.” Fortnum returned to England in 1845. He married his second cousin, Fanny Matilda Keats (1808-1890) in 1848. Keat’s wealth, her share of inheritance from the Fortnum & Mason business, allowed Fortnum to live as a collector and scholar of art. He and Fanny immediately began buying art during trips to Italy, including sculpture, bronzes, majolica, and jewelry. They were assisted by the curators of the British Museum Wollaston Franks, and John Charles Robinson of the South Kensington Museum (now Victoria and Albert Museum). In 1867 Robinson was dismissed from the Museum, Fortnum was made advisor on acquisitions (“Art Referee”), securing objects in England and Europe. In 1868 he became interested in rejuvenating the collections of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. He initially contacted John Henry Parker, keeper of the Ashmolean beginning in 1870. Fortnum wrote the catalogues for the South Kensington Museum which Robinson had originally been assigned. Fortnum’s first catalog was Descriptive Catalogue of the Maiolica, Hispano-Moresco, Persian, Damascus, and Rhodian Wares in the South Kensington Museum in 1873. Another, Descriptive Catalogue of the Bronzes of European Origin in the South Kensington Museum appeared in 1876. In 1884, Arthur J. Evans, the newly appointed keeper of the Ashmolean, renewed Fortum’s interest in the Ashmolean. Initially Fortum loaned portions of his collection, which later became a gift in 1888. The following year, Fortnum was appointed a ‘visitor’ of the Museum and named a trustee of the British Museum. After his wife’s death in 1890, he married Mary Fortnum (1822-1899), another second cousin, in 1891, endowing £310,000 to the Ashmolean with the stipulation that a new building be created for it adjoining the University Galleries. The Museum was moved in 1894 and its collections combined with the Randolph Gallery. Another South Kensington catalog, Maiolica, was published in 1896 and his own collection catalog of the same subject the following year. He also contributed articles to the journal Archaeologia. He died at the Hill House, Great Stanmore, Middlesex, which he and his first wife had bought in 1852. Fortnum left his remaining collections to Oxford, and porcelain to the British Museum. He is buried at Highgate cemetery. His writings show a the careful observation, meticulous data accumulation, and classificatory skill of a scientist; they remain landmarks in the study of their subjects.

Selected Bibliography

A Descriptive Catalogue of the Maiolica, Hispano-Moresco, Persian, Damascus, and Rhodian Wares, in the South Kensington Museum: with Historical Notices, Marks, & Monograms. London: Chapman & Hall, 1873; Maicolica: a Historical Treatise on the Earthenwares of Italy, with Marks and Monograms. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896; A Descriptive Catalogue of the Bronzes of European Origin in the South Kensington Museum. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode/Chapman and Hall, 1876.

Sources

Penny, Nicholas B. “The Fortnum Collection.” in Catalogue of European sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum, 1540 to the present day, volume 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, pp. xvii-xxx; Warren, Jeremy P. Renaissance Master Bronzes from the Ashmolean Museum. Oxford: the Ashmolean Museum, 1999; Wilson, Timothy. “Fortnum, Charles Drury.” Dictionary of National Biography

Forsyth, William

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Forsyth, William

Other Names:

William Holmes Forsyth

Gender: male

Date Born: 1907

Date Died: 2003

Place Born: Chicago, Cook, IL, USA

Place Died: Princeton, Mercer, NJ, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Medieval (European)

Career(s): curators

Overview

Curator of medieval art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Forsyth attended the Latin School in Chicago and the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, CT. He graduated from Princeton University in 1930 where he studied under Charles Rufus Morey. After some graduate courses in art history at Princeton, he worked the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a volunteer for the medieval collection in 1933. He joined as a full-time assistant in 1934 under curator (and later director) James Rorimer. He and Rorimer were the moving forces in establishing the Met’s satellite museum for medieval art, the Cloisters. John D. Rockefeller Jr. (1874-1960), had donated land in Fort Tryon Park and the parcel on the opposing bank of the Hudson to retain the view, to create a special medieval museum culled from objects at the Metropolitan and his own medieval collection. He also donated stones gathered in France and Spain. The most famous objects of Rockefeller’s were the six of the Unicorn Tapestries. Rorimer and Forsyth’s task was to reassemble these disparate parts (stones from five medieval monasteries and objects from the Romaneque and Gothic eras) into a building which appeared medieval but was in fact a modern museum. Rorimer led the project of the construction and installation, but Forsyth, as assistant curator (appointed 1937), assisted closely. In later years he recalled he and nine longshoremen juggling the piles of stones, fitting and refitting the pieces until they created the building. Forsyth spent 1937 in France researching the objects for the new museum’s catalog. He visited the Count de La Rochefoucauld, from whom Rockefeller had purchased the tapestries and learned that two remaining tapestries were being used as wall gaps in the estate. Forsyth bought the fragmented remaining two, “The Hunter Sounds the Capture of the Unicorn by the Maiden” and “The Maiden’s Companion Signals to the Hunters,” which reunited the tapestries into their original group. The Cloisters opened in 1938. In 1942 he married Agnes Mitchell (d. 1995) and was appointed associate curator. He was advanced to curator in 1968 and acting curator of the Cloisters when Thomas Hoving, then head, became the Met’s new director after Rorimer’s sudden death. The same year Hoving hired Florens Deuchler to be permanet head of the Cloisters. Forsyth’s book The Entombment of Christ: French Sculptures of the 15th and 16th Centuries appeared in 1970. He was elected emeritus curator in 1971 when he formally retired. The Pietà in French Late Gothic Sculpture: Regional Variations was published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1995.

Selected Bibliography

The Entombment of Christ: French Sculptures of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Harvard University Press, 1970; The Pietà in French late Gothic Sculpture: Regional Variations. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995; Mediaeval Sculptures of the Virgin and Child: a Picture Book. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art,1939; “Year 1200.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 28 (February 1970): 228-92; “Five Crucial People in the Building of the Cloisters.” in, Parker, Elizabeth C., and Shepard, Mary B. The Cloisters: Studies in Honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/International Center of Medieval Art, 1992, pp. 51-62.

Sources

Forsyth, William. “Five Crucial People in the Building of the Cloisters.” in, Parker, Elizabeth C., and Shepard, Mary B. The Cloisters: Studies in Honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/International Center of Medieval Art, 1992, pp. 51-62; [obituaries:] CAA News 28, no. 5 (September 2003); Saxon, Wolfgang. “William H. Forsyth, Met Curator, Dies at 96.” New York Times, May 21, 2003, p. 9.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Forsyth, Ilene H.

November 8, 2023April 14, 2024

Full Name: Forsyth, Ilene Eleanor Haering

Other Names:

Ilene Forsyth

Gender: female

Date Born: 1928

Place Born: Detroit, Wayne, MI, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Medieval (European)

Institution(s): University of Michigan

Overview

Medievalist art historian. Born Ilene Haering, she was the daughter of Austin F. Haering (1903-1975) and Eleanor Middleton (Haering) (1903-2002). She received her B. A. in English literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1950. Haering spent the following year in Europe where the mosaics of Ravenna, among other monuments, enticed her study art. She entered Columbia University’s graduate school, obtaining a master’s degree in 1955. She traveled through Europe, building a large photographic collection of monuments. The same year, 1955, she began lecturing at Barnard College while working on her Ph.D. at Columbia. A student tour with her Barnard class at the Metropolitan Museum of Art brought her in close contact with seated wooden Madonnas. She wrote her dissertation in 1960 on these medieval seated cult statues, under Meyer Schapiro, though given much latitude on her own. The same year, Haering married George H. Forsyth, Jr., then chair of the Art and Art History Department at Ann Arbor and considerably older than herself. She used her married name as her professional name thereafter. Forsyth was appointed an assistant professor at her alma mater, Michigan, in 1961, advancing to associate professor in 1968. In the 1970s, Forsyth focused on the twelfth-century church of Saint-Andoche in the village of Salieu. This led to a larger interest in Burgundian capitals and its sculpture in general. Two important articles of this time, “The Theme of Cockfighting in Burgundian Romanesque Sculpture,” and “The Ganymede Captial at Vézelay,” appeared at this time. In 1974 she was made full professor and received the Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association. She became a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1977 and a visiting lecturer at Harvard University in 1980 and the University of Pittsburgh in 1981. In 1984 Forsyth was named the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Art. A 1991 essay focused on the Sampson Monolith at the Duke University Museum of Art. She began assembling a project of a Rhône Valley monument destroyed during the French Revolution: the abbey of Saint-Martin in Savingy. In 1994 she authored an article demonstrating the transmission of Burgundian sources to those sculptors. She was again a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley in 1996. In 2002 she authored an article on Schapiro’s legacy for the study of Moissac.Forsyth’s sculptural studies of the 1970s show her departing from Schapiro’s notion that secular intrusion in Romanesque religious art are spontaneous individual fantasy. Instead, she used the depiction of a cockfight in a capital to demonstrate its wide-ranging implications of animals and a contemporary event in art. Dissertations supervised by Forsyth usually focused on a single monument or theme scrutinized through strong visual analysis (Sears).

Selected Bibliography

[selected bibliography:] Women Medievalists in the Academy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, pp. 855-856; [master’s thesis:] Narrative Order in Romanesque Sculpture. Columbia, 1955; [dissertation:] Cult Statues of the Madonna in the Early Middle Ages. Columbia,1960, revised and published as The Throne of Wisdom: Wood Sculptures of the Madonna in Romanesque France. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972; “Magi and Majesty: A Study of Romanesque Sculpture and Liturgical Drama.” Art Bulletin 50 (1968): 215-22.

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. 72 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, p. 87 cited; Forsyth, Ilene. “Historian of Art (1928- ).” in, Chance, Jane, ed. Women Medievalists in the Academy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, pp. 839-856; Sears, Elizabeth. “Dedication: Ilene H. Forsyth.” in, Sears, Elizabeth, and Thomas, Thelma K., eds. Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002, pp. xi-xvii.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Forsyth, George H., Jr.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Forsyth, George H., Jr.

Other Names:

George Howard Forsyth Jr.

Gender: male

Date Born: 1902

Date Died: 1991

Place Born: Highland Park, Lake, IL, USA

Place Died: Ann Arbor, Washtenaw, MI, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Overview

Architectural historian and Byzantinist. Forsyth’s father was George H. Forsyth and his mother Sarah Brockunier (Forsyth). He attended Princeton University, graduating in 1923. After than, Forsyth secured a Mediaeval Academy fellowship for the 1924-1925 year which earned him a master’s degree of fine arts at Princeton under Charles Rufus Morey in 1927. Forsyth married Eleanor Marquand (1897-1988) the same year, the daughter of Princeton’s Department of Art and Archaeology’s founder, Allan Marquand. The wedding was a large academic/society affair befitting the Marquand’s status; Forsyth’s best man was his Princeton colleague Albert M. Friend, Jr. In the 1920’s, Forsyth engaged in extensive archeological excavations. Between 1930 and 1936 he led groups which uncovered important religious relics in the ruins of the nine-century Church of St. Martin at Angers, France. He joined the faculty at Princeton, as an instructor in 1927, advancing to assistant professor of art and archaeology in 1931. During this time he also studied at the Institute for Advanced Study, New York University, (1935-36). In 1941 Forsyth was appointed chairman of the art history department at Michigan. During World War II, he served as a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve (1942-1945). After his divorce to his first wife, he married Mary Isom Hayes (d.1958) in 1942. He was director of College Art Association in 1949 and again in 1954. In 1955 he was awarded the Haskins Medal for outstanding distinction in medieval studies. The following year, a University of Michigan reconnaissance expedition under Forsyth’s direction embarked on a expeditionary trip to look for promising sites to excavate in the Near East. They settled on St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mt. Sinai, the Mount of Moses, the oldest existing Greek Orthodox monastery in the world. The Monastery’s art and architecture were so important that Forsyth and his team convinced the University of Michigan, Princeton University and the University of Alexandria to mount a combined documentation of the existing objects and buildings, since excavation was impossible for religious reasons. The Monastery and church contained some of the best examples of Byzantine religious art, manuscripts, as well as its architecture. Forsyth’s team was also responsible for saving the most important mosaic in the church. The team realized while photographing the transfiguration of Christ mosaic on scaffolding that the tessarae’s adhesion material had become detached from the vault of the apse and was loosely hanging. Restorers were able to reattach the mosaic, commissioned by Justinian the Great, because of Forsyth’s team’s discovery. The project continued under his direction during 1960, 1963, and 1965. He articles on Mount Sinai included articles to the popular press, National Geographic. Forsyth’s efforts resulted in the first large-scale, scientific drawings of the church and Monastery. While Chair of the department at Michigan, he married for a third time, a recent Columbia University art history Ph.D., in 1960, Ilene E. Haering (see, Ilene H. Forsyth), twenty-six years younger than himself. Forsyth was appointed director of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and his wife became an assistant professor in the department in 1961. In 1969 he returned to teaching as research professor of archeology. Fosyth retired emeritus in 1972. He died of an embolism in an Ann Arbor hospital in 1991. He is not related to the other C. R. Morey student and art historian, William Forsyth.

Selected Bibliography

The Church of St. Martin at Angers: the Architectural History of the Site from the Roman Empire to the French Revolution. The Excavations in Collaboration with William A. Campbell. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953; and Weitzmann, Kurt. The Monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai. Volume 1, The Church and Fortress of Justinian. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973. Volume 2, The Icons. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976; “The Monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai: The Church and Fortress of Justinian.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers XXII (1968): 1-19; “The Church of St. Martin at Angers: Roman, Merovingian, and Carolingian Constructions.” Antiquity 11 (December 1937): 400-408; “A Problem of Surveying in Mediaeval Architecture.” Archaeology 3 no. 2 (Summer 1950): 74-79; “Island of Faith in the Sinai Wilderness.” National Geographic (January 1964): 82-104; and Weitzmann, Kurt. “Saving the Sinai Mosaics.” Biblical Archaeology Review 4 no. 4 (November-December 1978): 16-31.

Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 61 mentioned; Sears, Elizabeth. “Dedication: Ilene H. Forsyth.” in, Sears, Elizabeth, and Thomas, Thelma K., eds. Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002, pp. xvi, note 5; “Monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai.” The Kelsey Online. http://www.umich.edu/kelseydb/Excavation/St_Catherine; “Eleanor Marquand Engaged to Marry, Daughter of Late Archaeologist to Wed George Howard Forsyth Jr.” New York Times December 6, 1926, p. 27; [obituary:] “George Forsyth, 89, Historian Who Led Archeological Digs.” New York Times January 29, 1991, p. B5.

Förster, Otto H.

November 8, 2023April 14, 2024

**Image Credit:** Judisches Museum Berlin

Full Name: Förster, Otto H.

Other Names:

Otto H. Förster

Gender: male

Date Born: 1894

Date Died: 1975

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style) and Renaissance

Overview

Director Wallraf-Richartz, and historian of Italian Renaissance Art. Förster wrote his dissertation under Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich. Förster became Director of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne in 1933. As a museum director under the Third Reich, he sold off works from the museum’s storage and acquired works from the forced sales of Jewish collections and from the occupied countries in exchange. At the end of World War II, Förster retired in 1946, but he resumed his position in 1957. In 1970 Foerster married the art historian Lotte Brand Foerster.

Selected Bibliography

monograph on Bramante

Sources

Wölfflin, Heinrich. Heinrich Wölfflin, 1864-1945: Autobiographie, Tagebücher und Briefe. Joseph Ganter, ed. Basel: Schwabe & Co., 1982, p. 499; Bazin 435

Forster, Georg

November 8, 2023April 14, 2024

Full Name: Forster, Georg

Gender: male

Date Born: 1754

Date Died: 1794

Home Country/ies: Germany

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

Overview

art and architectural historian; advocate of Taine’s theories of geographical determinism

Selected Bibliography

Die Kunst und der Zeitalter. 1789.

Sources

KGK, 122-23, Bazin 138

art and architectural historian; advocate of Taine’s theories of geographical determinism

Förster, Ernst

November 8, 2023April 14, 2024

Full Name: Förster, Ernst

Other Names:

Ernst Joachim Förster

Gender: male

Date Born: 1800

Date Died: 1885

Place Born: Münchengosserstädtt, Thuringia, Germany

Place Died: Munich, Bavaria, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): painting (visual works)

Overview

In 1852 he weighed in on the Hans Holbein Meyer Madonna controversy, praising the coherence of the Dresden version, which ultimately proved to be the copy.

Selected Bibliography

Beiträge zur neuern Kunstgeschichte. Leipzig, F.A. Brockhaus, 1835; Geschichte der deutschen Kunst. 5 vols. Leipzig: T.O. Weigel, 1851-1863. Denkmale deutscher Baukunst, Bildnerei und Malerei von Einführung des Christenthums bis auf die neueste Zeit. 12 vols. in 6. Leipzig: T. O. Weigel, 1855-69; Denkmale italienischer Malerei vom Verfall der Antike bis zum sechzehnten Jahrhundert. 4 vols. Leipzig: T. O. Weigel, 1870-82.

Sources

Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 92-94; Kultermann, Udo. The History of Art History. New York: Abaris, 1993, p. 146 [incorrectly referred to as “Hans Joachim Förster].

In 1852 he weighed in on the Hans Holbein Meyer Madonna controversy, praising the coherence of the Dresden version, which ultimately proved to be the copy.

Forssman, Erik

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Forssman, Erik

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Sweden

Institution(s): Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Dorisch, Ionische, Corinthish, Studien zur Kunst der 16 und 17 Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart, 1964

Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 p. 191

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

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