Place Born: Bermondsey, Southwark, London, England, UK
Place Died: Golders Green, Barnet, Greater London, England, UK
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Subject Area(s): museums (institutions) and prehistoric
Career(s): directors (administrators) and museum directors
Overview
Director, British Museum, 1936-1950, and scholar of the prehistoric era. Forsdyke was son of Frederick Palmer Forsdyke and Mary Eliza Sainsbury. He was educated at Christ’s Hospital and Keble College, Oxford, graduating in 1906. A scholar of classical studies, he joined the British Museum in 1908 as an assistant in the department of Greek and Roman Antiquities. In 1910 he married a forty-two-year-old widow (he was twenty-six) Frances Beatrice Mumford Gifford. Forsdyke worked closely with Arthur J. Evans, contributing to Evans’ work the Palace of Minos. He edited the Journal of Hellenic Studies between 1912 to 1923. He served in the Royal Artillery during World War I 1914-1919, in France, Macedonia, and Spain. After the war, his major work, a catalog of the Aegean pottery appeared in 1925. He and Henry Beauchamp Walters wrote three fascicules of Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum the same year. At the suggestion of Arthur J. Evans, he was sent to Crete to finish excavating the cemetery near Knossos in 1927. In 1932 he was made Keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities. As keeper, he dealt with Joseph Duveen (1869-1939), the difficult donor of the new wing to house the Elgin marbles. When George Francis Hill retired as Director and Principal Librarian in 1936, Forsdyke was appointed his replacement. The following year he was knighted. Duveen pressured some museum official to “clean” the marbles. Though Forsdyke discovered and prevented further damage, the incident hung over the museum and damaged his reputation. A similar “cleaning” had also occurred at the National Gallery. As tensions with Nazi Germany made it clear the war was inevitable, Forsdyke developed the evacuation plan for the treasures of the museum. His able administrative skills are credited with saving many of the museum’s objects during a time when labor, adequate storage and time were in low supply. The Duveen gallery and parts of the Library were destroyed in the Blitz. Following his first wife’s death in the 1930s, he married Anna Amadea Leonie Dea Gombrich (1905-1994) in 1942, the sister of E. H. Gombrich. After the war, Forsdyke invested heavily in microfilming the collection, not so much as a preservation tool, but as outreach to the broader scholarly community. He retired in 1951. He died at home of bronchitis exacerbated by heart disease. Neither a notable scholar nor an easy man to get along with, he is principally known for his war-time saving of the British Museum.
Selected Bibliography
and Walters, Henry Beauchamp, and Smith, Cecil Harcourt. A Catalogue of the Greek and Etruscan Vases in the British Museum. 4 vols. London: British Museum, 1925 ff.; Greece Before Homer: Ancient Chronology and Mythology. 1931 Annual Lecture on Aspects of Art, Henriette Hertz Trust of the British Academy. London: Max Parrish, 1956; Minoan Art. London: H. Milford, 1931; Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. Great Britain. British Museum, Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities. London: British Museum, 1925, fascicule 5; “Harvester Vase of Hagia Triada.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 17 (January 1954): 1-9; “Minos of Crete, the Chieftain Cup.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 15 (January 1952): 13-19.
Sources
[obituary:] Sir John Forsdyke Director of British Museum in War Time. The Times (London). December 8, 1979; p. 14.
Citation
"Forsdyke, John, Sir." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/forsdykej/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Director, British Museum, 1936-1950, and scholar of the prehistoric era. Forsdyke was son of Frederick Palmer Forsdyke and Mary Eliza Sainsbury. He was educated at Christ’s Hospital and Keble College, Oxford, graduating in 1906. A scholar of class
Career(s): art collectors, art critics, and publishers
Overview
Collector, art patronage scholar, director of the Burlington Magazine, 1952-1986. Ford was the son of Captain Richard Ford (1860-1940), a British army officer, and Rosamund Isabel Ramsden (1872-1911). He was descendant of the Irish dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816). His great-grandfather, Richard Ford (1796-1856), was a connoisseur and author of the important travel book on Spain, Handbook For Spain,1845. Born to wealth, Ford attended Eton and then Trinity College, Oxford, graduating in 1930 in modern history. Ford’s father inherited the large family art collection in 1917, amassed by Benjamin Booth and his grandfather, mentioned in Treasures of Art in Great Britain, 1854, by Gustav Friedrich Waagen. The younger Ford joined the National Art Collections Fund in 1927. In 1929 he received a legacy from his maternal grandfather and began buying art personally in anticipation of the larger collection which would one day be his. Initially, he purchased contemporary art works. These included works by Henry Moore, Toulouse-Lautrec, Fuseli, Ingres, and Michelangelo (a preparatory drawing of Risen Christ in Santa Maria sopra Minerva which he acquired in 1936). He joined the Burlington Fine Arts Club where he met the Society artist Charles Barrow Prescott (1870-1932), and connoisseur and director of Colnaghi gallery Jim Shaw. He married Joan Mary Vyvyan (b. 1910) a distant cousin, in 1937. He began publishing scholarly articles in 1939 with a piece on Ingres’s portrait drawings in the Burlington Magazine. Ford joined the British Army as a gunner in the Royal Artillery the same year, before the outbreak of World War II. At his father’s death in 1940, Ford inherited the family collection (possession the following year). In 1941 Ford transferred from artillery to army intelligence (MI9) and was ultimately in charge of the Brussels office. After the war, he returned and set about assiduously collecting, turning the family’s Wyndham Place home into a major London collection. Ford focused on Italian seicento and settecento pictures during these years, especially works by Cavallino, Cozza, and Batoni. His monograph, The Drawings of Richard Wilson was published in 1951. In 1952 he was made director of the Burlington Magazine, seeing the Magazine through the lean years following the War by supporting it personally and cajoling support from others. Ford was made a trustee of the National Gallery in1954. Beginning in the 1970s, he assembled material for a dictionary of gentlemen who made the grand tour to Rome and Italy. A series of six essays in a special number of Apollo in 1974 concentrated on British grand-tour patronage. In 1974, too, he joined the executive committee of the National Art Collections Fund–formed under Ford in order to place new art work in National Trust properties–and the following year became its chairman, which he held until 1980. The same year, 1974, he mounted the exhibition “Richard Ford in Spain” in London, to assist the National Art Collections Fund, writing the catalog with Denys Sutton and lending the artwork. He was knighted for his work in 1984. Ford resigned from the Burlington Magazine and become president of the Walpole Society in 1986. His dictionary appeared in 1997, under the auspices of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, written by John Ingamells, as A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701-1800, In 1998 a catalog of his collection was published in the publications of the Walpole Society. He died of a heart attack at his home in 1999.
Selected Bibliography
“Ingres’ Portrait Drawings of English People at Rome, 1806-1820.” Burlington Magazine 75 (July 1939): 2-13; The Drawings of Richard Wilson. London: Faber and Faber, 1951; “Six Notable English Patrons in Rome 1750-1800.” Apollo 99 (June 1974): 392-461; and Sutton, Denys. Richard Ford in Spain: a Loan Exhibition in Aid of the National Art-Collections Fund. London: Wildenstein, 1974; Ingamells, John. A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701-1800, Compiled from the Brinsley Ford Archive. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
Sources
Jackson-Stops, Gervase. “Sir Brinsley Ford [the Apollo Portrait series].” Apollo 125 (1987): 363-9; [obituaries:] The Times (London) May 7, 1999; Ireland, George. “Sir Brinsley Ford.” The Independent (London) May 8, 1999, p. 8; “Sir Brinsley Ford, He Applied a Fine Mind and a Fine Bank Balance to the Acquisition of Fine Art.” The Guardian (London), May 12, 1999, p. 18; Elam, Caroline. “Sir Brinsley Ford: a Tribute.” Burlington Magazine 141 no. 1155 (June 1999): 327.
Collector, art patronage scholar, director of the Burlington Magazine, 1952-1986. Ford was the son of Captain Richard Ford (1860-1940), a British army officer, and Rosamund Isabel Ramsden (1872-1911). He was descendant of the Irish dramat
Subject Area(s): American (North American) and Modern (style or period)
Overview
First director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Rieser moved to Hoboken, N. J., in 1886 with her family. After attending an evangelical boarding school for girls and teaching briefly at a business school, she became the private secretary for Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, heiress to the fortune amassed by Cornelius Vanderbilt. She married Willard Force, a dentist. Whitney, who sculpted and occasionally received commissions, was interested in displaying her collection of the work of the Eight (Whitney had bought four of the seven paintings sold during the original exhibition) and other modernist artists. She assigned Force to book a show of these modern artists at the notoriously conservative Colony Club. Whitney ceded more and more of art acquisition and exhibition to Force. In 1929 Whitney assigned Force to contact Edward Robinson, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to arrange a gift of Whitney’s collection. She was to offer Mrs. Whitney’s willingness to build an additional wing to house the pictures. Robinson, however, refused, and Force was directed by Whitney to develop a private avenue to display her work. Force managed the Whitney Studio, then the Whitney Studio Club, and the Whitney Studio Gallery. When the Whitney Museum was founded in 1930, (a year after the Abby Rockefeller’s similar venture of Museum of Modern Art under Alfred H. Barr, Jr, Force was made first director. Force hired a young art writer, Lloyd Goodrich to be her curator. Goodrich’s knowledge of the American art scene and Force’s administrative savvy created the preeminent American art museum in the country. When the American government mounted a touring show of German art ostensibly as war booty in 1946, she and Frick Collection director Frederick M. Clapp spearheaded a campaign to return the art to Germany. Before her death in 1948, the Whitney (under Goodrich’s guidance) had launched shows on Albert Pinkham Ryder, Robert Feke and Winslow Homer. A memorial exhibition was held in her honor at the Whitney the following year. Her papers are deposited at the Archives of the Whitney Museum. Force was untrained as an art historian. Her organizational skills, enthusiasm for modern art, and tenacity made her effective.
Selected Bibliography
Whitney Museum of American Art: Catalogue of the Collection. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1931; A Loan Exhibition of 19th Century Paintings from the Addison Gallery of American Art. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1933; An Exhibition of Contemporary American paintings from the Collection of the University of Arizona [by the Whitney Museum of Art and held at the] Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1943; Painting in France, 1939-1946. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1947.
Sources
Berman, Avis. Rebels on Eighth Street: Juliana Force and the Whitney Museum of American Art. New York: Atheneum, 1990.
Citation
"Force, Juliana R.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/forcej/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
First director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Rieser moved to Hoboken, N. J., in 1886 with her family. After attending an evangelical boarding school for girls and teaching briefly at a business school, she became the private secretary for
Harvard art historian and director of the Fogg Art Museum. Forbes was born into the quintessential Boston Brahmin family. His father, William Hathaway Forbes, organized the Bell Telephone Company with Alexander Graham Bell. His mother, Edith Emerson Forbes, was the daughter of the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. Forbes went to Milton Academy before attending Harvard University where the lectures of Charles Eliot Norton particularly inspired him, though he acknowledged that Norton ignored Egyptian and Asian and the medium of prints (Cohn). After graduation in 1895 he pursued postgraduate courses in a variety of areas including literature, history and music. In 1899, while traveling in Europe, he bought his first Italian masterwork, a painting then considered to be a Tintoretto. Norton’s son, Richard who was teaching in Rome, convinced Forbes to lend the picture to the Fogg Art Museum, which had opened in 1895. Forbes joined the Board of Trustees at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1903, a position he subsequently held for sixty years. The next year, he joined the visiting committee of the Fogg where he set about urging Harvard’s wealthy alumni to donate and loan their paintings to the Fogg. He married Margaret Laighton (1885-1966), a lighthouse keeper’s daughter, in 1907. In 1909 he was appointed director of the Fogg, where Forbes found the print room to be “the best thing in the building.” By 1912 the Fogg, under his direction, had gained so many important works, that it had to be renovated. A new building was constructed in 1927 to house the enlarged collections. Forbes was one of the first to experiment with X-ray analysis of art work. Forbes’ credo was that art history students had to study to object first hand. He called the Fogg a laboratory for art history. Forbes persuaded fellow alumnus Paul J. Sachs to give up the family banking business in favor of developing the Fogg. The two formed a powerful professional partnership of fundraising, collecting, and educating, leading Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell (1856 – 1943) to call them “exuberant mendicants, Siamese twins.” Forbes was appointed Martin A. Ryerson professor in the fine arts at Harvard in 1935. He retired from Harvard and the Fogg in 1944. Forbes pioneered many art history courses, among them his Methods and Processes of Italian Painting one of the first courses preparing students for art museum vocations.
Selected Bibliography
[Forbes wrote no books. His contributions to the works of others are as follows:] Introduction. Gettens, Rutherford J. Painting Materials, a Short Encyclopaedia. New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1942; edited, and John H. Finley, Jr. The Saturday Club: a Century Completed, 1920-1956. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958; [compiled by Laura M. Huntsinger under the direction of Forbes] Harvard Portraits: a Catalogue of Portrait Paintings at Harvard University. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936; Forward, Pratt, Frances, and Fizell, Becca. Encaustic, Materials and Methods. New York: Lear, 1949; “The Beginnings of hte Art Department and the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard.” Cambridge Historical Society Proceedings 27 (1941): 6-10.
Sources
Mongan, Agnes. Edward Waldo Forbes: Yankee Visionary. Fogg Art Museum, January-February, 1971; Gaddis, Eugene R. Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in America. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2000, pp.52-54; [obituary] New York Times March 12, 1969, p. 33; Cohn Marjorie. Francis Calley Gray and Art Collecting for America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 1986, pp. 263-264.
Citation
"Forbes, Edward Waldo." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/forbese/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Harvard art historian and director of the Fogg Art Museum. Forbes was born into the quintessential Boston Brahmin family. His father, William Hathaway Forbes, organized the Bell Telephone Company with Alexander Graham Bell. His mother, Edith Emers
Subject Area(s): Netherlandish and Northern Renaissance
Institution(s): Universität Hamburg
Overview
Netherlandish art scholar. Brand was born in Altona, Germany, which is present-day greater Hamburg, Germany. Brand was the daughter of Friedrich Wilhelm Brand (1875-1913), a ship owner, and Anna Majud (Brand) (1876-1943). She studied art history, archaeology and history between 1930-34 at the Technische Hochschule in Munich, at Heidelberg (where she attended the lectures of Martin Heidegger) and finally Hamburg. Brand one of a group of a Ph. D. students at the recently founded university in Hamburg studying under Erwin Panofsky, whose number also included William S. Heckscher, Horst Woldemar Janson, Walter W. Horn and Ursula Hoff. In addition to Panofsky, the faculty included Edgar Wind, medievalist Hans Liebeschütz, (1893-1976) and Charles de Tolnay. When all the Jewish faculty of this group were dismissed, Brand remained. A Christian of Jewish extraction, Brand was nevertheless pressured to leave Germany. She moved to Freiburg am Breisgau, writing her dissertation at the Albert-Ludwigs University under Kurt Bauch on the altarpiece of Stefan Lochner, in 1938. Brand worked as a volunteer at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum under Otto H. Foerster, who would become her second husband late in life. In 1941 she emigrated to the United States where she married Herbert L. Philip (b. 1909), a lawyer, who had emigrated to the United States the year before. In the United States, Brand got work as a jewelry designer in Providence, RI. Though well remunerated, she made “design research trips” to Germany after World War II in order to research at history. In 1955 she published the book on Hieronymus Bosch by the publisher Harry N. Abrams. She secured a Fulbright research stipend and in 1957 was a guest lecturer in the Netherlands, a position made possible by her former Hamburg student-colleague, Heckscher. She lectured at Bryn Mawr College in 1959 and then the New School for Social Research in New York. Another Hamburg student-friend, Janson, who now chair at New York University, gave Philip a position teaching survey courses. In 1960 she accepted an appointment at Queens College in Flushing, New York, advancing as associate professor in 1964 and full professor 1969. In 1970 Philip married Foerster, director of the Wallraff-Richartz Museum in Cologne. She became emeritus at Queens in 1980. Her undergraduate students at NYU included the (later) art historian Gary Schwartz. Heckscher described her as a “master scholar.”
Selected Bibliography
[complete bibliography:] Tribute to Lotte Brand Philip: Art Historian and Detective. New York: Abaris Books, 1985, p. 8; [dissertation:] Stefan Lochners Hochaltar von St. Katharinen zu Köln. Ph.D., Albert-Ludwigs Universität zu Freiburg im Breisgau, 1938, published, Hamburg: Druck A. Preilyper, 1938; Bosch. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1955; The Ghent Altarpiece and the Art of Jan van Eyck. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971; Das neu entdeckte Bildnis von Dürers Mutter. Nuremberg: Stadtgeschichtliche Museen Nürnberg, 1981.
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. 64-6: Contemporary Authors: 77-80: 147; Tribute to Lotte Brand Philip: Art Historian and Detective. New York: Abaris Books, 1985, pp. 9-13.
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
Citation
Lee Sorensen. "Foerster, Lotte Brand." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/foersterl/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Netherlandish art scholar. Brand was born in Altona, Germany, which is present-day greater Hamburg, Germany. Brand was the daughter of Friedrich Wilhelm Brand (1875-1913), a ship owner, and Anna Majud (Brand) (1876-1943). She studied art history,
Place Born: Dijon, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, France
Place Died: New Haven, New Haven, CT, USA
Home Country/ies: France
Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), art theory, Medieval (European), Romanesque, and sculpture (visual works)
Institution(s): Université de Paris (Sorbonne) and Yale University
Overview
Medievalist art historian, particularly the Romanesque, and theorist. Focillon’s father was the engraver and occasional salon reviewer Victor-Louis Focillon (1849-1918). The younger Focillon grew up amidst the artists Edouard Vuillard and Auguste Rodin and the early documenter of Impressionism, Gustave Geffroy. His early schooling was in Paris at the Lycée Charlemagne and Lycée Henri IV. As a young man he helped Geffroy write first volume of Geffroy’s series Les Musées d’Europe (The Museums of Europe) in 1900. Between 1901 and 1905 he studied philology at the école Normale Supérieure, graduating in 1906 agrégé ès lettres. His first teaching positions were at the Lycée of Bourges (1908-1910) and then the Lycée Chartres (1910-1913). Initially interested in the modern era, he received an appointment as professor of modern history at the University of Lyon concomitantly as director of the city’s Musée des Beaux-Arts. During these years he published on subjects ranging from Buddhist art to Benvenuto Cellini. His dissertation was on Piranesi, submitted to the Université de Paris in 1918. Focillon developed an strong interest in Romania and its culture. In 1923 he founded the l’Institut français de Bucarest. The following year, in a dramatic switch of field emphasis, Focillon succeeded Émile Mâle in 1924 as the chair of medieval archaeology at the Sorbonne, a fact Focillon attributed to his having taught in cities with great medieval churches as much as aNew York Timeshing else. The following year, he was appointed Professeur of the University’s new Institut d’Art et du Moyen Age. He remained interested in a variety of eras of art, though his teaching came to be focused on the medieval period. His years at the Sorbonne were among his most fruitful, writing major monographs on the medieval period and advising students who would become the next generation of outstanding medievalists. In 1931 his L’art des sculpteurs romans was published. This was followed in 1933 by essays in a work of various historians, La civilisation occidentale au moyen âge. In 1933, too, he began regular six-week teaching courses at Yale University, the alternate years taught by Marcel Aubert. The following year, 1934, he published his treatise on art, based heavily on his medieval art writings, La vie des formes. In 1938 his essays from La civilisation occidentale reappeared, revised and this time standing alone as, Art d’Occident, le moyen âge, roman et gothique (Art of the West in the Middle Ages). This same year he was elected to the chair of aesthetics and the history of art at the Collège de France and accepted a chair at Yale. Focillon was at Yale when World War II broke out in Europe in 1939 and witnessed, stateside, the occupation of France by the Nazis in 1940. That year he was named the first Senior Scholar at Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks in Washgington, D. C. After an long illness, he died mid-war at age 61 in the United States, his essays, Moyen âge, survivances et reveils, published the same year. Among his posthumous publications were his speeches on behalf of France’s freedom, Témoignage pour la France. His posthumous reputation rose in the 1963 with the translation of his book, Art of the West in the Middle Ages, an initiative fostered by the medievalist Jean Bony and Peter Kidson.
Focillon’s students were among the most illustrious art historians of the following generation. At the Sorbonne they included, in addition to Bony, André Chastel, Francoise Henry, Philippe Verdier, Louis Grodecki, Charles Sterling, and Jurgis Baltrušaitis II, who married Focillon’s daughter, Hélène. His Yale students included Sumner McKnight Crosby, Charles Seymour, Jr., was als Elizabeath Mendell and George Kubler. The strength of his lectures alone convinced the undergraduate James S. Ackerman to become an architectural historian; Robert Branner an ardent follower of his work. Focillon’s rhetorical delivery (he refused to speak any language othere than French) was legendary: eloquent and nearly literary in its tone. Focillon was the first important French art historian to incorporate Germanic art-historical method into the école des Chartes tradition of scholarship (Kidson). A formalist, his methodology employed a “cyclical development of forms” theory in the manner of Heinrich Wölfflin (Bazin) and Adolf von Hildebrand, an approach that has not, as a rule, stood the test of time. He attempted to establish formalist principles of interpretation based on what he called “pure visuality” (Life of Forms). His formalism is the antithesis of the analytic objectivity that dominates modern art historical writing. Distinct from Mâle, Focillon emphasized form over iconography or symbolism. Meyer Schapiro strenuously criticized Focillon for this methodology in Schapiro’s 1931 Art Bulletin article on Moissac. Focillon had famously defined the Romanesque as a style, so narrowly that he once warned that much of the Romanesque period art could not be called Romanesque. He saw architecture as the primary artistic impulse of the middle ages, a theme characteristic among French art historians of his time (cf. Mâle, whom he succeeded). The year 1000 was, according to him, the beginning of this period of building which gave evidence to Focillon’s theory, authoring a book with the same subject and title. Throughout his writing, he argued against the Hegelian dialectic in favor of what he called a layered art historical tradition. His particular interest in the Romanesque reflects this attitude as the beginning point of his “strata” of art history. Ironically, his infatuation with “spirit” as a motivating force in art is much akin to Hegel’s. His distaste of deterministic theories of art differs from Aloïs Riegl. The influence of Henri Bergson (1859-1941), especially in Focillon’s La vie des formes, has been noted by many, in print by Walter B. Cahn and Willibald Sauerländer (see André Chastel).
Selected Bibliography
[complete bibliography:] Bibliographie Henri Focillon. Compiled by Louis Grodecki. Yale Publications in the History of Art 15. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963; [dissertation:] Giovanni-Battista Piranesi 1720-1778: Thèse de doctorat. University of Paris, 1918, published, Paris: Laurens, 1918; La peinture au XIX siècle; la retour à l’antique, le romanticisme. Paris: Laurens, 1927; Le peinture aux XIX et XX siècles du réalisme à nos jours. Paris: Rénouard, 1928; L’art des sculpteurs romans; récherches sur l’histoire des formes. Paris: Leroux, 1931; and Pirenne, Henri, and Cohen, Gustave. La civilisation occidentale au moyen âge du XIe au milieu du XVe siècle. Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1933; Vie des Formes. Paris: Presses Universite de France, 1934, English, The Life of Forms in Art. Translated by C. B. Hogan and George Kubler. New York: Wittenborn, 1957; Art d’Occident, le moyen âge, roman et gothique. Paris: A. Colin, 1938, English, Art of the West in the Middle Ages. 2 vols. New York: Phaidon, 1963; Dumbarton Oaks inaugural lectures, November 2nd and 3d, 1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941; Moyen âge, survivances et reveils: études d’art et d’histoire. New York: Bretano’s, 1943; Témoignage pour la France. New York: Brentano’s, 1945; [and Goldscheider, Ludwig] Rembrandt; Paintings, Drawings, and Etchings. New York: Phaidon, 1960.
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. 21 mentioned, 41, 41 n. 81; 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. 43; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 178, 180, 169; Henri Focillon. Pour un temps (series). Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1986; Kidson, Peter. “Jean Bony (1908-1995).” Burlington Magazine 137, No. 1111 (October 1995): 688; Cahn, Walter.” Focillon’s Jongleur.” Art History 18 (September 1995):. 345-362; “Focillon, Henri.” Dictionary of Art 11: 233; Relire Focillon: cycle de conférences organisé au musée du Louvre par le Service culturel du 27 novembre au 18 décembre 1995 sous la direction de Matthias Waschek. Paris: Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, 1998 [see especially, Kubler, George. “L’enseignement d’Henri Focillon,”]; Cahn, Walter. “Henri Focillon.” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline. Volume 3: Philosophy and the Arts. Edited by Helen Damico. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000, p. 259-71; Cahn, Walter. “Schapiro and Focillon.” Gesta 41/42 (2002): 129-136, and correction Gesta 42 no. 1 (2003): 87; [obituaries:] Kubler, George. College Art Journal 4, no. 2 (January 1945): 71-74; “Henri Focillon, 61, A Yale Professor.” New York Times March 4, 1943, p.
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
Citation
Lee Sorensen. "Focillon, Henri." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/focillonh/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Medievalist art historian, particularly the Romanesque, and theorist. Focillon’s father was the engraver and occasional salon reviewer Victor-Louis Focillon (1849-1918). The younger Focillon grew up amidst the artists Edouard Vuillard and Auguste
Subject Area(s): American (North American) and Colonial North American
Career(s): art critics
Overview
Journalist and writer on early American art. Flexner was the son of Simon Flexner, a sixth-grade dropout who became a self-taught microbiologist, pathologist, director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York and discoverer of a cure for spinal meningitis. His mother was Helen Thomas [Flexner], a professor of English at Bryn Mawr whose sister was president of the College, and who, through various cousins’ marriages, was related to the philosopher Bertrand Russell and Bernard Berenson. It was Berenson who inspired Flexner’s interest in art history at an early age. Flexner graduated cum laude from Harvard in 1929 and joined the New York Herald Tribune as a reporter. He moved to the New York City Department of Health as an executive secretary in 1931. But the next year he quit to devote full energies to writing. Although untrained in art history, he gravitated to art subjects as part of his interest in writing about American history. In 1939 he published his America’s Old Masters, a book about colonial artists. A 1946 article on the American colonial artist Robert Feke in the Art Bulletin helped launch the brief but important art-historical career of Waldron Phoenix Belknap, Jr. The following year he began his History of American Painting series with the first volume, First Flowers of Our Wilderness. In 1950 he married Beatrice Hudson (d. 1998) a professional singer. Other popular biographies of American artists followed, including Gilbert Stuart. Called upon to write the popular Time-Life volume on Winslow Homer, he consulted Homer experts Bowdoin College scholar Philip C. Beam to assist him. He completed his history of American art in three volumes in 1962. Flexner began a popular biographical series on George Washington in the mid-1960s. Art historiographically, he helped publicize the nineteenth-century art historian Henry Theodore Tuckerman in a 1969 article on that author’s Book of Artists. His concluding volume in his Washington series, 1972, won the National Book Award for biography and a special Pulitzer Prize citation. This became a single-volume book, Washington: The Indispensable Man in 1974. He died at his New York home at age 95. Flexner admitted he wrote for a mass audience. “I do wish to communicate,” he said, “that separates me from most scholars.” In his 1996 autobiography, Maverick’s Progress, he voiced his suspicions that academia never accepted him because he lacked a doctorate. Reviewers applauded his style. His books were usually well researched and brought important basic information about American art history to a wider audience..
Selected Bibliography
America’s Old Masters: First Artists of the New World. New York: The Viking Press, 1939; “Robert Feke, active ca 1741-ca 1750.” The Art Bulletin 28 (September 1946): 197-202; History of American Painting, vol. 1, First Flowers of Our Wilderness. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947, vol. 2, The Light of Distant Skies, 1760-1835. New York: Harcourt, Brace 1954, vol. 3, That Wilder Image; the Painting of America’s Native School from Thomas Cole to Winslow Homer. Boston: Little, Brown 1962; John Singleton Copley. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948; Gilbert Stuart: a Great Life in Brief. New York: Knopf, 1955; Paintings on the Century’s Walls; an Address Delivered at the Monthly Meeting of the Century Association on March 7, 1963. New York: Century Association, 1963; A Short History of American Painting. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1950; The World of Winslow Homer, 1836-1910. New York: Time, Inc. 1966; “Tuckerman’s Book of the Artists.” The American Art Journal 1 no. 2 (Fall 1969): 53-7; The Double Adventure of John Singleton Copley, First Major Painter of the New World. Boston: Little, Brown 1969; Nineteenth Century American Painting. New York: Putnam 1970.
Sources
Flexner, James Thomas. Maverick’s Progress: An Autobiography. New York : Fordham University Press, 1996; [obituary:] Bernstein, Adam. “James Flexner Dies, Washington Biographer” Washington Post February 17, 2003, p. B4.
Citation
"Flexner, James Thomas." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/flexnerj/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Journalist and writer on early American art. Flexner was the son of Simon Flexner, a sixth-grade dropout who became a self-taught microbiologist, pathologist, director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York and discoverer of
Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre) and sculpture (visual works)
Overview
Architectural historian, wrote famous guide to architectural styles and periods. His father, also Banister Fletcher, was an architectural historian as well.
Selected Bibliography
Andrea Palladio: his Life and Works. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1902; The English Home. London: Methuen & Co. 1911; Influence of material on architecture. London, Batsford, 1897; and Fletcher, Banister (1833-1899) A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method. London: Athlone Press, University of London, 1896- [issued serially], first single-volume edition, London: B.T. Batsford and New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1897.
Citation
"Fletcher, Banister, Sir." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/fletcherb/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Architectural historian, wrote famous guide to architectural styles and periods. His father, also Banister Fletcher, was an architectural historian as well.
Place Born: Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland, England, UK
Place Died: Tofori, Italy
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Career(s): publishers
Overview
Self-trained art historian and editor; wrote major reference books in art history with Hugh Honour. Fleming’s father was a prominent solicitor in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Fleming himself initially attempted a career in painting, applying to Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) for an apprenticeship. His father persuaded him to attended Rugby and then Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read English. As a student he discovered Italy and traveling there to study the frescoes of Piero della Francesca in Arezzo. When World War II broke out, Fleming declared himself briefly a conscientious objector before joining the Intelligence Corps in Cairo, Egypt. In Cairo he examined the early 19th century fanciful architecture during his off hours, a style he named “Cairo Baroque.” His article on the subject was sent to the Architectural Review. At the encouragement of its editor, Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner, Fleming wrote more, including articles on Maltese churches and baroque sculpture and contemporary Italian painting (the latter for Penguin New Writing). The war years brought him in contact with art historian Ellis K. Waterhouse, then a colonel, though they did not get along, and expatriate German art historians such as Rudolf Wittkower. After the war, Fleming appeased his father by working as a solicitor with the John Hilton Advice bureau at Cambridge. In Cambridge Fleming met Hugh Honour, an undergraduate at St. Catharine’s College, who would become Fleming’s life partner. Though tied to his solicitor’s job, Fleming spent his holidays in Rome, at times the guest of the American art collector and curator Henry P. McIlhenny at the Villa Aurelia, owned by the American Academy. At his father’s death in 1953, Fleming quit his profession to become a freelance writer in Italy. For a while he acted as reader Percy Lubbock (1879-1965), a now blind British literati who lived in on the Gulf of Spezia, at Gli Scafari, the villa designed by the architect Cecil Pinsent (1884-1963). Through Lubbock, Fleming met the English-speaking expatriate community in Italy. These included Bernard Berenson and his entourage at Villa I Tatti. Honour joined Fleming permanently in Italy in 1954. Fleming wrote articles for The Connoisseur and other publications, demonstrating an extensive knowledge of primary sources. A commission from Country Life led Fleming to publish Scottish Country Houses, 1954, and the discovery of the Adam letters among the Clerk papers in Penicuik (Lothian, Scotland, later transferred to Register House in Edinburgh). These letters written by Robert and James Adam to their families from Italy would later become his great book on Adam. In 1957, Honour and Fleming moved from Lerici to Asolo, a town north of Venice, renting a house from the writer Freya Stark (1893-1993). There they met the publisher Allen Lane (1902-1970), the founder and chairman of Penguin Books, who was renting the adjacent Villa Bronson in Asolo. Lane commissioned the two men to oversee the most important series of short-subject art histories of the twentieth century. The Style and Civilisation and The Architect and Society and Art in Context. The two men were by now conversant with those historians who could produce serious yet brief introductory books to art history. Fleming’s book on Adam, Robert Adam and his Circle, a serious examination of the Scottish architect’s early years incorporating his letters, appeared in 1962. The same year Fleming and Honour moved to the hills above Lucca to the town of Tofori, purchasing the Villa Marchiò, where they remained the rest of their lives. There they had easy access to the library at the German Institute in Florence. For two months each winter they returned to England to research at the British Museum and Warburg Institute libraries. In 1966, they collaborated with Pevsner to produce The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture. Although Pevsner wrote about half of the first edition, the successive editions now nearly quadrupled in size, were the work of Honour and Fleming. Fleming’s interest in the history of collecting resulted in a series of articles beginning in 1973 under the title “Art Dealing and the Risorgimento.” The Penguin Dictionary of Decorative Arts appeared in 1977 as a collaborative effort, but the subject was widely known to be Honour’s more than Fleming’s. Honour and Fleming next collaborated on a single-volume art survey, appearing in 1982 as A World History of Art (Visual Arts: a History as it was published in the United States). Groundbreaking was its emphasis on Asian art at a time when standard histories focused on European. In 1991 Fleming and Honour produced the Venetian Hours of Henry James, Whistler and Sargent, an assemblage of experiences largely culled from their days with Lubbock, a Henry James disciple. Fleming’s final year was plagued by the great terror of art historians, blindness. He is buried in the cemetery of the parish church above his villa. Fleming’s research interest lay in the artistic relationship between Britain and Italy. It was the influence of Pevsner and Wittkower who shaped Fleming’s interest toward the then unfashionable topics of baroque sculpture and architecture. In his Robert Adam, Fleming broke with the provincial insular tradition of British architecture, examining Neoclassicism’s social and cultural implications as well as its artistic ones. The book further examined the relations between the Scottish connoisseurs and architects and their Italian influences in the early 18th century. Fleming’s ability to commission top scholars for the various Penguin publishing initiatives remains a lasting accomplishment. For the Architect and Society series, Fleming secured scholars as diverse as James S. Ackerman for Palladio, Hans Aurenhammer for Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, and George D. S. Henderson for Chartres; for the Style and Civilization series, John Kinder Gowran Shearman on Mannerism, John Boardman on pre-classical Greece, and Linda Nochlin on Realism. Most innovative of all, perhaps, was the Art in Context series, where authorities in the field were asked to write on a single work of art. This magisterial series included Robert L. Herbert writing on Jacques-Louis David’s Brutus, Ludwig H. Heydenreich on Leonardo’s Last Supper, and Reinhold Heller on Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
Selected Bibliography
“Cairo Baroque.” Architectural Review 97 (March 1945): 75-82; Robert Adam and his Circle in Edinburgh & Rome. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962; and Pevsner, Nikolaus, and Honour, Hugh. The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1966; edited, Architect and Society series, (beginning 1966), Style and Civilization series (beginning 1967) and Art in Context series, (beginning 1972); edited, with Honour, Hugh. Saxl, Fritz. A Heritage of Images: a Selection of Lectures. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970; “Art Dealing and the Risorgimento [part I].” The Burlington Magazine 115 (January 1973): 4-17, [part II] 121 (August 1979): 492-4ff., [part III] 121 (September 1979): 568-73ff.; A World History of Art. London: Macmillan Reference Books, 1982, [American title:] The Visual Arts: a History. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982; and Honour, Hugh. The Venetian Hours of Henry James, Whistler and Sargent. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991;
Sources
Lees-Milne, James. Prophesying Peace. London: Chatto and Windus, 1977; Lees-Milne, James. Caves of Ice. London: Chatto & Windus, 1983 [Lees-Milne contains errors in the Honour-Fleming collaboration process]; [obituaries:] Boucher, Bruce. The Independent (London), June 8, 2001, p. 6; “John Fleming, Writer on Art and Architecture.” The Times (London), June 4, 2001; Penny, Nicholas. “John Fleming, 1919-2001.” Burlington Magazine 143, no. 1184 (November 2001): 694-695.
Citation
"Fleming, John." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/flemingj/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Self-trained art historian and editor; wrote major reference books in art history with Hugh Honour. Fleming’s father was a prominent solicitor in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Fleming himself initially attempted a career in painting,
