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Wittmann, Otto, Jr.

Full Name: Wittmann, Otto, Jr.

Other Names:

  • Otto Wittmann

Gender: male

Date Born: 1911

Date Died: 2001

Place Born: Kansas City, Jackson, MO, USA

Place Died: Montecito, CA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Career(s): curators


Overview

Director of the Toledo Museum of Art, 1938-1978 and founding curator of the Getty museum collections. Wittmann was the son of Otto Wittmann, Sr., an auto parts distributor, and Beatrice Knox Billingsley (Wittmann). His mother died in the disastrous 1918 influenza epidemic. After attending private high school in Kansas City, he entered Harvard University in 1929. Wittmann’s first experience of art was in the drawing class of fine arts professor Arthur Pope (1880-1974) as no art museum yet existed in Kansas City. Befriended by the urbanite New Yorker Perry T. Rathbone, who himself had decided to become an art museum director, Wittmann and Rathbone toured the galleries of New York and Boston during their leisure. At Harvard, Wittmann enrolled in the French art history painting course of Paul J. Sachs. Wittmann and Rathbone organized exhibitions on Ben Shahn, Max Ernst and Walter Gropius for the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, an organization founded by undergraduates Eddie Warburg, John Walker III and Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996). After graduation in 1933–he and Rathbone turned the gallery over to John P. Coolidge–he joined the fledgling William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art (today, Nelson-Atkins Museum) in his native Kansas City, under director Paul Gardner and Harvard classmate Philip C. Beam. Lacking money for graduate school, Wittmann convinced Sachs to allow him participate in his famous “Museum course” as Sach’s assistant, though he never enrolled. This led to an appointment developing the museum of Louis F. and Charlotte Hyde in Glens Falls, NY (today the Hyde Museum) and a lectureship at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY. Before the outbreak of World War II, Wittmann was drafted into the U.S. army, working initially in personnel before transferring to the famous Art Looting Investigation Unit of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), under which the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section (“Monuments Men”) of the Seventh Army fell. He worked interviewing those responsible for the thefts and in the Munich Collecting Point office as well. While stationed in Washington, DC. he married Margaret “Miggy” Carlisle Hill (1914-1997) in 1945. After discharge from the war in 1946, Wittmann convinced Toledo (OH) Museum of Art president to create a position for him, working under director Blake-More Godwin as assistant director. Godwin recognized Wittmann’s connoisseurship trained under Sachs, and turned collecting at Toledo over to him. Wittmann acquired the spectacular “Crowning of St. Catherine” by Rubens in 1950 after the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Theodore Rousseau, Jr., turned it down as not authentic. He built classical collections with the assistance of (later) Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Dietrich von Bothmer and his sister-in-law, the archaeologist/art historian Emeline Hurd Hill Richardson. He advocated for federal support of the arts and was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to the first National Council on the Arts in 1964, a precursor to the National endowment of the Arts. Wittmann’s hires went on to become important museum people in their own right, including Katharine Caecelia Lee in 1968. The following year he hired Kurt T. Luckner to be curator the classical collection. Luckner’s enthusiasm and versatility brought about the glass gallery for the Museum. In 1973 Wittmann hired Roger Mandell as assistant director with the intention of him assuming the directorship when Wittmann turned 65. This happened in 1976. He moved to Los Angeles the same year as a consultant and trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He was hired in 1978 as a consultant to the Getty foundation, just as the Malibu museum was coming into the billion-dollar trust left by oil baron J. Paul Getty (1892-1976). Elected a trustee in 1979, he rose to acting chief curator in 1980, essentially in charge of the entire museum. Wittmann judiciously allayed fears from the art world that the Getty would drive up art prices and acquire every work of importance. He established and chaired the Getty’s acquisition committee carefully purchasing Greek and Roman antiquities, French decorative arts of the 17th and 18th centuries and European old masters, J. Paul Getty’s preferred areas. Wittmann helped recruit John Walsh, Jr., as museum director in 1983, retaining his acquisitions chair role until 1989 when named a trustee emeritus. Wittmann assembled two of the premier public art collections in the United States. During the halcyon years of art acquisitions, 1930s-1970s when prices were comparatively low and availability great, he assembled Toledo’s outstanding collection of masterworks, collecting in every area, including classical vases, Baroque painting, and modern sculpture. Perhaps as distinguished, he set the standard for the Getty museum as a responsible collector among other acquiring museums, laying the groundwork for the museum and the ultimate Getty Center complex today.


Selected Bibliography

“Harvard Postscript.” in, Smyth Craig Hugh, and Lukehart, Peter M., eds. The Early Years of Art History in the United States: Notes and Essays on Departments, Teaching, and Scholars. Princeton: Dept. of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, 1993, pp. 55-56.


Sources

“Wittmann of the Toledo Museum, Director for 18 Years, Retires.” New York Times January 18, 1977, p. 32; Duncan, Sally Anne. Otto Wittmann: Museum Man for all Seasons. Toledo, OH: Toledo Museum of Art, 2001; [transcript] Interview with Otto Wittmann, October 25, 1981. California History Project, Archives of American Art; [transcript] Smith, Richard Cándida, interviewer. Otto Wittmann: The Museum in the Creation of Community. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 1995; [obituary:] “Otto Wittmann, Ex-Museum Chief, 89.” New York Times July 28, 2001, p. C15; Oliver, Myrna. “Otto Wittmann, Helped Guide Getty.” Los Angeles Times July 26, 2001, p. B12; personal correspondence, John Wittmann, April 2009.




Citation

"Wittmann, Otto, Jr.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/wittmanno/.


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Director of the Toledo Museum of Art, 1938-1978 and founding curator of the Getty museum collections. Wittmann was the son of Otto Wittmann, Sr., an auto parts distributor, and Beatrice Knox Billingsley (Wittmann). His mother died in the disastrou

Wittkower, Rudolf

Full Name: Wittkower, Rudolf

Other Names:

  • Rudi Wittkower

Gender: male

Date Born: 22 June 1901

Date Died: 11 October 1971

Place Born: Berlin, Germany

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: Germany

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

Institution(s): Columbia University and Warburg Institute


Overview

Scholar of Italian baroque art. Seminal figure for the generation of art historians who matured during the second half of the 20th century. Because Wittkower’s father, Henry Wittkower (1865-1942), was British, the younger Wittkower held British citizenship his whole life despite having been born and raised in Germany. His mother was a German, Gertrude Ansbach (Wittkower) (1876-1965). After graduating from the humanistic Friedrichs Gymnasium in Berlin, Wittkower studied (practicing) architecture for a year in Berlin before deciding to changed to art history under Henrich Wölfflin in Munich. Wölfflin proved to be a very detached professor, and, unhappy with his teaching, Wittkower returned to Berlin to study under Adolph Goldschmidt. He completed his dissertation there on the subject of Domenico Morone. In 1923 he moved to Rome to assist Ernst Steinmann, director of the Herziana, with completion of the Michelangelo-Bibliographie 1510-1926. The same year he married Margot Holzmann (Margot Wittkower) who was to assist him with some of his later scholarship. In between, Wittkower contributed many entries for artists in the Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler (the so-called “Thieme-Becker”). He was elevated at the Biblioteca Herziana to a research fellow, remaining there until 1927. Wittkower returned to Berlin but continued his association with the Herziana, publishing in 1931 with Heinrich Friedrich Ferdinand Brauer a survey of drawings by Bernini. The publication put him at the fore of an ideological battle (both esthetically and politically) with the major Austrian art historian, Hans Sedlmayr. Sedlmayr criticized Wittkower in a published review, for belonging to neither of the two genres of art history that Sedlmayr found acceptable. The public exchange drew a distinction between Sedlmayer’s Gestaltungsprinzipien [abstract principles] approach to art history (as well as his anti-Jewish Nazi sympathies) and Wittkower’s approach. After briefly teaching as a Privatdozent at the Univeristy in Cologne in 1932-1933, Wittkower was forced to leave Germany–now fully under the control of the Nazis, whose laws forbade university positions to Jews–abandoning any habilitationschrift for the London and the Warburg Institute. In London he was founding co-editor of the Journal of the Warburg Institute (renamed in 1940 to The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes) in 1937, remaining at the Institute between 1934-1956. His position at the Institute allowed outside lecturing, such as his 1946 Courtauld Institute talks on the architecture of Vittone. Proof of his broad interests, when he first proposed the lectures to his host, Anthony Blunt, Blunt believed Wittkower joking and had invented the architect’s name. In 1948 the young Italian scholar Luigi Salerno studied with Wittkower on a Warburg fellowship. Wittkower began publishing his research, first begun as his intended habilitation in the 1930s, on Palladio and Alberti, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. These studies, expanded and broadened, were published in 1949 as his most significant book, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. Formal pedagogical duties also began that year when he was appointed to be Durning Lawrence professor at the Slade School of Art, although these were limited largely to advising dissertations. Wittkower’s dedication to drawings as a scholarly tool continued. He collaborated with several other eminent art historians to produce books on Sir Robert Mond’s collection (with Tancred Borenius), drawings of Poussin (with Anthony Blunt, from a manuscript of Walter Friedlaender). In 1952 he published a catalog of Carracci drawings from Windsor Castle. Wittkower was visiting professor of art history at Harvard University in 1954. This solidified a move to the United States, where he became chair of the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in 1956. In addition to lecturing at Columbia, Wittkower reorganized the Department, adding, among appointments, the first lecturer in Near Eastern art. Here, too, he wrote two of his most popular books, Art and Architecture in Italy: 1600-1750 (1958) and, in collaboration with his wife, Born Under Saturn (1963). Art and Architecture in Italy, volume 16 of the “Pelican History of Art” was (and remains) the publisher’s best-selling volume of the series. A magisterial synthesis of a period of vast artistic output, Wittkower updated it three times. It received the Bannister Fletcher Prize for architectural writing. Wittkower retired from Columbia in 1969 as Avalon Foundation Professor Emeritus of Art History. During his final years, he held the Kress Professorship at the National Gallery of Art and Slade Professor at Cambridge. He delivered the Charles T. Mathews lectures for 1971-1972 which appeared as the book Gothic vs. Classic: Architectural Projects in Seventeenth-century Italy. After his death he received Alice Davis Hitchcock Award in 1975.

He supervised many Ph.D. dissertations including Eduard F. Sekler (at the Warburg), D. Stephen Pepper and Colin Rowe. Another student also became a colleague of his at Columbia university, Howard Hibbard, whose methodology Hibbard closely reflected. His scholarly tradition was most clearly continued in the work of Joseph Connors. In terms of method, Wittkower certainly differed from Sedlmayr. Compared to Sedlmayr’s psychological-theoretic approach of the same material, Wittkower, in the words of Kenneth Clark, disposed of, “the hedonist, or purely aesthetic, theory of Renaissance architecture.” Not that Wittkower eschewed psychology (two of his books used this approach principally) rather, he preferred to allow documents to connect psychological patterns he used rather than vice versa. Like Goldschmidt, he discounted the Hegelian view of art history so common among German art historians of his and previous generations. Richard Krautheimer described Wittkower’s art history as one blending mathematics and philosophy, the religious and cultural climate with the interrelations of patron and artist. Even the Warburg scholar Fritz Saxl, who admitted in a 1934 letter that Wittkower’s ideas on the history of art were much different from his own, concluded that Wittkower’s “struggle for clear-shaped logical notions in art history has undoubted merits.” Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism remains his most influential writing, having immediately influenced works as disparate as Die Kunst der Renaissance in Italien (1953) by Walter Paatz, Ezra Ehrenkrantz’s The Modular Number Pattern (1956) and P. H. Scholfield’s The Theory of Proportion in Architecture (1958). The book, however caught the scorn of Roberto Pane who attacked Wittkower’s ideas at the Eighteenth International Congress of the History of Art (Venice) in 1956 (Wittkower, 1973). In 1961 Wittkower presented a paper at Winterthur, Delaware, on “Art History as a Discipline” which demonstrated his affinity for the work of Erwin Panofsky and decrying the extreme connoisseurship of Roger Fry. The esthetician Joseph Masheck insightfully contrasted Panofsky with Wittkower, both fellow Warburg Institute scholars: “Panofsky mainly pursued a history of illustrated concepts…that have taken roost…[in] datable objects.” Wittkower, on the other hand, he contended, is the “ultra-Warburgian,” not limited to the classical tradition but employing a cosmopolitan view of art.


Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Reynolds, Donald M. The Writings of Rudolf Wittkower: a Bibliography. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1989; [dissertation:] Domenico Morone, Francesco Morone, Girolamo dai Libri und Cavazzola: Stilkritische Analyse einer Veroneser Malegruppe der Renaissance. Berlin, 1923; [with E. Steinmann] Michelangelo Bibliographie, 1510-1926. Leipzig, 1927; [response to Sedlmayr’s review] “Zu Hans Sedlmayrs Besprechung von E. Coudenhove-Erthal: Carlo Fontana.” Kritische Berichte 4 (1930-32): 142-5; and Brauer, Heinrich. Die Zeichnungen des Gianlorenzo Bernini. Römische Forschungen der Bibliotheca Hertziana, 9-10. 2 vols. Berlin: Keller, 1931; “Michelangelo’s Biblioteca Laurenziana.” Art Bulletin 16 (1934): 123-218; “Carlo Rainaldi and the Roman Baroque.” Art Bulletin 19 (1937): 242-313; Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. Studies of the Warburg Institute: 19. London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1949; The Artist and the Liberal Arts. London: H. K. Lewis, 1952; “Individualism in Art and the Artists.” Journal of the history of Ideas 22 (1961): 291-302; “The Vissitudes of a Dynastic Monument: Bernini’s Equestrian Statue of Louis XIV.” Meiss, Millard, ed., De artibus opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky. 2 vols. New York: 1961, I: 497-553; and Wittkower, Margot. Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1963; “Santa Maria della Salute: Scenographic Architecture and the Venetian Baroque.” Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte 3 (1963): 31-54; “Imitation, Eclecticism, and Genius.” In Aspects of the Eighteenth Century ed., Earl R. Wasserman. Baltimore: 1965: 143-61; “Art History as a Discipline.” Winterthur Seminar on Museum Operation and Connoisseurship. Winterthur, DE: 1961: 55-69.; “Interpretation of Visual Symbols in the Arts.” In Studies in Communication, introduction by B. Ilfor Evans. London: 1955: 109-124; edited with Jaffe, Irma B. Baroque Art: the Jesuit Contribution. New York: Fordham University Press, 1972; Gothic vs. Classic: Architectural Projects in Seventeenth-century Italy. New York: G. Braziller 1974; Studies in the Italian Baroque. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1975; Allegories and the Migration of Symbols. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977; Idea and Image: Studies in the Italian Renaissance. London: Thames and Hudson, 1978.


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, pp. 71 mentioned, 81; 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. 4, 46 mentioned, 51 mentioned, 63 cited, 70 cited, 103 cited; Wittkower, Rudolf. “Preface.” Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. 4th ed. London: Academy, 1974, p. v; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire d l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 226, 435, 511; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007, pp. 512-515; Jennifer Montagu and Joseph Connors. “Rudolf Wittkower 1901-1971.” Introduction to Art and Architecture in Italy: 1600-1750. 6th edition, volume 1, Painting in Italy. Pelican History of Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, pp. ix-xv; Masheck, Joseph. “Rudolf Wittkower.” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics 4: 470-2; Southorn, Janet. Dictionary of Art 33: 285-6; Romano, Giovanni. Storie dell’arte: Toesca, Longhi, Wittkower, Previtali. Rome: Donzelli, 1998; Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 2, pp. 790-799; Rosand, David. “Rudolf Wittkower, 1901-1971.” Proceedings of the British Academy 90 (1995): 557-570; Rosand, David. “Making Art History at Columbia: Meyer Schapiro and Rudolf Wittkower.” Columbia Magazine (Fall 2003) http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Fall2003/witt.schapiro; [obituaries:] Hibbard, Howard. “Rudolf Wittkower.” Burlington Magazine 114 (1972): 173-77.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Wittkower, Rudolf." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/wittkowerr/.


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Scholar of Italian baroque art. Seminal figure for the generation of art historians who matured during the second half of the 20th century. Because Wittkower’s father, Henry Wittkower (1865-1942), was British, the younger Wittkower held British ci

Wittkower, Margot

Full Name: Wittkower, Margot

Other Names:

  • Margot Wittkower

Gender: female

Date Born: 1902

Date Died: 03 July 1995

Place Born: Berlin, Germany

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Baroque, decorative art (art genre), interior design, Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, and Renaissance


Overview

Interior designer and Italian Renaissance and Baroque specialist; wife of art historian Rudolf Wittkower. Holzmann met her future husband in Berlin in 1918 when she was just sixteen and he seventeen, but because of their young ages waited until 1923 to marry. Principally an artist, she established herself as an interior designer in Berlin. The couple, both Jewish, fled Nazi Germany in 1933 for London, where her husband was a British citizen by birthright. She continued her work there as a designer, specializing in apartment interiors and furniture design. Both husband and wife were drawn to neo-Palladian architecture. Margot carved the area out as a specialty. In 1963 and 1964 she co-wrote two works of artistic biography with her husband, Born Under Saturn and The Divine Michelangelo. It is the work she published in collaboration with her husband that is most significant today. Born Under Saturn (1963) and The Divine Michelangelo (1964) were both co-authored projects. She also assisted on the first posthumous edition of her husband’s volume in the Pelican History of Art series, The Art and Architecture of Italy 1600-1750 (1980) as well as smaller works.


Selected Bibliography

and Wittkower, Rudolf. Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1963; edited by, and Wittkower, Rudolf. The Divine Michelangelo: the Florentine Academy’s Homage on his Death in 1564. London: Phaidon Publishers, 1964; and Wittkower, Rudolf. Künstler Aussenseiter der Gesellschaft. Berlin, Kohlhmammer, 1965; edited, with Collins, George R. Wittkower, Rudolf. Gothic vs. Classic: Architectural Projects in Seventeenth-century Italy. New York: G. Braziller 1974.


Sources

New York Times, July 13, 1995, Section B, p. 12; Jennifer Montagu and Joseph Connors. “Rudolf Wittkower 1901-1971.” Introduction to Art and Architecture in Italy: 1600-1750. 6th edition, volume 1, Painting in Italy. Pelican History of Art. pp. ix.




Citation

"Wittkower, Margot." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/wittkowerm/.


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Interior designer and Italian Renaissance and Baroque specialist; wife of art historian Rudolf Wittkower. Holzmann met her future husband in Berlin in 1918 when she was just sixteen and he seventeen, but because of their

Witting, Felix

Full Name: Witting, Felix

Gender: male

Date Born: 1873

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Germany

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


Overview

Architectural historian.


Selected Bibliography

Die Anfänge christlicher Architektur: Gedanken über Wesen und Enstehung der christlichen Basilika. (Zur Kunstgeschichte des Auslandes 10). Strassburg: Heitz, 1902. Kirchenbauten der Auvergne. (Zur Kunstgeschichte des Auslandes 28). Strassburg: Heitz. 1904. Michelangelo und Beethoven. Strassburg: Heitz, 1916. Piero dei Franceschi: Eine Kunsthistorische Studie. Strassburg: Heitz, 1898. Von Kunst und Christentum: Plastik und Selbstgefühl. Strassburg: Heitz, 1903.Westfranzösische Kuppelkirchen. (Zur Kunstgeschichte ds Auslandes 19). Strassburg: Heitz, 1904.


Sources

DIN, 239 (unable to find information on him?)




Citation

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Architectural historian.

Witte, Fritz

Full Name: Witte, Fritz

Gender: male

Date Born: 1876

Date Died: 1937

Home Country/ies: Germany


Overview

Organized the Jahrtausundaustellung (millenial celebration) in Düsseldorf in 1925, where the young Hanns Swarzenski got his start.


Selected Bibliography

and Clemen, Paul, and Neu, Heinrich. Der Dom zu Köln. Düsseldorf: L. Schwann, 1937.





Citation

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Organized the Jahrtausundaustellung (millenial celebration) in Düsseldorf in 1925, where the young Hanns Swarzenski got his start.

Witt, Robert, Sir

Full Name: Witt, Robert, Sir

Other Names:

  • Sir Robert Witt

Gender: male

Date Born: 1872

Date Died: 1952

Place Born: Camberwell, Southwark, London, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): photographs

Career(s): art collectors


Overview

Creator of the research photographs collection of the University of London (“Witt Library”); art collector. Witt was the eldest son of Gustavus Andreas Witt (b. 1840) a wool dealer, and Johanna Frederiko Helene de Clermont (Witt). He attended Clifton College, Bristol, and New College, Oxford, graduating with a degree in history in 1894. He served in the British army and as a war correspondent (with Cecil Rhodes) seeing action during the Matabele (Ndebele) uprising of 1896. He returned to London, qualified as a solicitor (attorney) in 1897, where he spent his career rising to senior partner at the offices of Stephenson, Harwood, and Tatham. From the first, Witt maintained a strong interest in art. After marrying his classmate, Mary Helene Marten (1871-1952) in 1899, the two began collecting photographs of works of art. The Witts built their hobby into an enormous library of eventually 750,000 images. In 1902 he wrote his first art book, a primer on approaching art, How to Look at Pictures. In 1903 together with David Lindsay (Earl of Crawford and Balcarres) (1871-1940), Wallace Collection keeper Claude Phillips, the artist D. S. MacColl (1859-1948), and the art museum director Roger Fry, he founded the National Art Collections Fund. The fund, which raised money by subscription for the purchase of pictures, elected him its first honorary secretary, which he held until 1920. When the collector and director of the National Gallery, Dublin, Sir Hugh Lane (1875-1915), died in the sinking of the R.M.S. Lusitania in 1915–leaving conflicting will and codicil to the disposition of his excellent French Impressionist collection–Witt inveighed (futilely) to keep the Collection at the National Gallery, London, where the pictures had been placed on extended loan. Witt was named a trustee of the National Gallery in 1916, a position he held almost unbroken until 1940, and the Tate Gallery, the same year (1916) until 1931. In 1918 he was appointed C.B.E. in 1918. In 1920 he became chair of the Art Collections Fund, which grew into the most important fund-raising unit for art in Britain under Witt’s leadership. Witt’s library and picture collection were so important that he wrote a catalog of his collection in 1920 (supplement, 1925) concentrating on the artist’s represented. Inspired by his library, Helen Frick (1888-1984), daughter of the collector Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), set out to build a library for the Frick Collection in New York after Witt’s model. Like Witt, Frick wrote the catalog, assisted by Witt, for the Frick Art Reference Library. A similar catalog was written by the British-trained Japanese art historian Yukio Yashiro for the Tokyo Museum. He was knighted in 1922. During the 1930s, Witt was active in organizing the annual winter exhibitions of foreign art at Burlington House. The introduction to the Italian catalog of 1930 was written by him. In 1932 Witt, together with Samuel Courtauld (1876-1947) and Arthur Hamilton Lee (Viscount Lee of Fareham, 1868-1947) founded the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. He received an honorary D. Lit. from the University the following year. In 1942 he became an honorary fellow at his alma mater, New College. In 1944 Witt deeded his house at 32 Portman Square and vast image collection as a research library for the Courtauld Institute. He retired in 1945 because of ill health and was named president, the Fund’s first. The National Gallery, London, organized a special show in his honor featuring the art purchased under his direction of the Fund. He died at his Portman Square home at age 80. The library was moved to the institute at nearby 19 and 20 Portman Square. Also donated were his large collection of nearly 4000 old master drawings to the Institute as well. These included works by at that time lesser-known artists, including Guercino and Gainsborough. More than a collector, Witt saw the need to make art information available to scholars. His photographic archives were compiled at a time before art books were heavily illustrated or the advent of image databases.


Selected Bibliography

Dutch Art: an Illustrated Souvenir of the Exhibition of Dutch Art at Burlington House, London. London: Anglo-Batavian Society, 1929; How to Look at Pictures. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1929; and Cook, Herbert F. Illustrated Catalogue of Pictures by the Brothers Le Nain. London: Burlinton Fine Arts Club, 1910.


Sources

Dictionary of National Biography ; Troutman, Philip. Italian Old Master Drawings, Witt Collection, Courtauld Gallery. Wellington, New Zealand: National Gallery, 1973; [obituary:] “Sir Robert Witt.” The Times (London) Mar 27, 1952, p. 8.




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Creator of the research photographs collection of the University of London (“Witt Library”); art collector. Witt was the eldest son of Gustavus Andreas Witt (b. 1840) a wool dealer, and Johanna Frederiko Helene de Clermont (Witt). He attended Clif

With, Karl

Full Name: With, Karl

Gender: male

Date Born: 1891

Date Died: 1980

Place Born: Bremerhaven, Bremen, Germany

Place Died: Los Angeles, CA, USA

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Asian, Buddhism, East Asian, Japanese (culture or style), and sculpture (visual works)

Career(s): curators


Overview

East-Asianist art historian and museum curator, Strzygowski student, dismissed by Nazis, later taught at UCLA. After brief periods of study at Munich and Freiburg, With met and assisted Karl Ernst Osthaus, who later founded the Folkwang-Museum in Hagen, at the Museum für Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe in 1911. The next year he began studies with Josef Rudolf Thomas Strzygowski at the University of Vienna where he specialized in Asian art. His dissertation in 1918 was on Buddhist sculpture in Japan. He acted as director of the Folkwang Museum 1919-21 and as curator for the collection of Baron von der Heyt in Amsterdam 1920-23. In 1928 Konrad Adenauer, then mayor of Cologne, appointed him director of the Kunstgewerbe-Museum of that city. Dismissed from his post by the Nazis in 1933 and singled out in the infamous “Enartete Kunst” (Degenerate Art) exhibition of 1937 as a “literary pimp” of the degenerate forms of art, Baron von der Heydt once again hired him in 1936 to purchase Asian and African art in Ascona. In 1939 With emigrated to the U.S. where, with one exception, he spent the remainder of his life. During World War II With taught in Pasadena and at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina. In the first year afterward, he was director of the Modern Institute of Art in Beverly Hills. From 1950-62 he was professor of Art History at UCLA. With combined an interest in the value of common objects as art and a connoisseur’s approach to Asian art. His personal papers are at the Getty Research Institute for the Humanities.


Selected Bibliography

Karl With: Autobiography of Ideas : Lebenserinnerungen eines außergwöhnlichen Kunstgelehrten. Berlin: Gebruder Mann, 1997; Buddhistische Plastik in Japan bis in den Beginn des 8. Jahrhunderts n. Chr. 3rd ed. Wien: A. Schroll, 1922; Das Hohelied der Sonne; ein Buch vom Quell des Lebens. Berlin: Propyläen-verlag,1934. Java: brahmanische, budhistische und eigenlebige Architektur und Plastik auf Java. Geist, Kunst und Leben Asiens: 1. Hagen i. W.: Folkwang Verlag, G.M.B.H., 1920. –


Sources

Karl With: Autobiography of Ideas : Lebenserinnerungen eines außergwöhnlichen Kunstgelehrten. Berlin: Gebruder Mann, 1997, 17-23; Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 2, pp. 786-790.




Citation

"With, Karl." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/withk/.


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East-Asianist art historian and museum curator, Strzygowski student, dismissed by Nazis, later taught at UCLA. After brief periods of study at Munich and Freiburg, With met and assisted Karl Ernst Osthaus, who later founded

Wirth, Zdenek

Full Name: Wirth, Zdenek

Gender: male

Date Born: 1878

Date Died: 1961

Home Country/ies: Czechoslovakia


Overview

Student of Max Dvořák.



Sources

Rokyta, Hugo.”Max Dvora´k und seine Schule in den Böhmischen Ländern.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Kunst und Denkmalpflege 28 no. 3 (1974): 81-89.




Citation

"Wirth, Zdenek." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/wirthz/.


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Student of Max Dvořák.

Winter, Franz

Full Name: Winter, Franz

Gender: male

Date Born: 1861

Date Died: 1930

Place Born: Braunschweig, Lower Saxony, Germany

Place Died: Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), ancient Italian pottery styles, Antique, the, Classical, Roman (ancient Italian culture or period), Roman sculpture styles, sculpture (visual works), and statues


Overview

Specialist in ancient Greek and Roman art, particularly noted for his studies of single statues like the Belvedere Apollo. Professor at the University of Innsbruck (1899-1905), Graz (1905-1907), Strasbourg (1907-1912) and Bonn (1912-1928).



Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 142-143.




Citation

"Winter, Franz." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/winterf/.


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Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Specialist in ancient Greek and Roman art, particularly noted for his studies of single statues like the Belvedere Apollo. Professor at the University of Innsbruck (1899-1905), Graz (1905-1907), Strasbourg (1907-1912) and Bonn (1912-1928).

Winnefeld, Hermann

Full Name: Winnefeld, Hermann

Gender: male

Date Born: 1862

Date Died: 1918

Place Born: Überlingen, Baden, Germany

Place Died: Berlin, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), Antique, the, and Classical


Overview

Specialist in ancient Greece. Worked at the Kgl. Kunstsammlungen in Berlin most of his life, “Zweite Direktor” from 1907-1918. Winnefeld wrote his dissertation under Friedrich von Duhn in Berlin.


Selected Bibliography

Die Friese des groszen Altars. Berlin: Verlag von Georg Reimer, 1910.


Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 148-149.




Citation

"Winnefeld, Hermann." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/winnefeldh/.


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Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Specialist in ancient Greece. Worked at the Kgl. Kunstsammlungen in Berlin most of his life, “Zweite Direktor” from 1907-1918. Winnefeld wrote his dissertation under Friedrich von Duhn in Berlin.