Art Historians

Davies, Martin

November 8, 2023April 5, 2024

Full Name: Davies, Martin

Gender: male

Date Born: 1908

Date Died: 1975

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Netherlandish and Northern Renaissance

Overview

Netherlandish scholar, National Gallery, London, Director 1968-1973. Davies was the son of Ernest Davies (1873-1946), a sometime novelist. He received no specialized training in art, other than extended family trips to the continent, especially France, where he developed a love for French Gothic architecture. Davies attended Rugby and King’s College, Cambridge where he concentrated in Modern Languages. He joined the National Gallery as an attaché in 1932, rising to assistant Keeper in charge of Netherlandish and German paintings. He began to publish articles and short notices in the Burlington Magazine. Kenneth Clark was appointed director the following year and, from the first, Davies strongly disagreed with his policies; the pre-war years were therefore ones of frustration. Clark insisted on purchasing artwork directly, sometimes with little or no consultation of the curatorial staff. When Clark convinced the Trustees to purchase two purported Giorgiones without the Keepers even looking at them, Davies protested. His reprieve from infighting came when Gallery objects were transferred to Manod, near Blaenau Ffestiniog, Wales in anticipation of German bombing. Davies was essentially sole caretaker of the objects in Wales. At this he shone. With the War’s conclusion, Clark resigned the directorship (replaced by Philip Hendy) and Davies began authoring the first of his catalogs for the Museum, Early Netherlandish School, 1945 to replace those of 1929. Other painting school catalogs followed. In the post-War years, Davies eschewed the social and lecture circuit, but paid an interest in the Gallery Library, encouraging the collecting of guidebooks, auction catalogs and ephemera, unfortunately at the expense of monographs, for which he held little value (!). The sudden death of the Gallery’s picture keeper William Pettigrew Gibson in 1960 seemed noticeably to soften Davies; his succession to Gibson’s office refocused Davies into more of a cohesive colleague. When Hendy retired as Director, Davies succeeded him in 1968. Davies spent the few years of his directorship planning and implementing an addition to the Gallery building. The painting “Death of Actaeon” by Titian was acquired during his tenure after a successful public appeal in 1972. When a Roger van der Weyden was discovered, Davies acquired it for the Gallery, writing his only monograph on it in 1973. That same year he retired as Director, succeeded by Michael Levey. As a scholar, Davies brought healthy if extreme suspicion to the operation of the museum world. He was part of what Denys Sutton called the generation of museum scholars who emerged in the 1930s replacing “slapdash working methods” with skepticism for all but established fact. According to Clark, Davies doubted even the authenticity of the Giotto frescos in the Arena Chapel because they lacked documentation. Fundamentally conservative, Davies “placed under a Puritan ban” on the acquisition of Rococo art (Levey), though he purchased a Tintoretto for the Gallery during his tenure. His row with Clark was open and long-lasting. His successor, Levey, wrote that with Davies, “a good deal of caprice was displayed. [He possessed] strangely violent prejudices and a tartness veering at times towards the cruel…”. His catalogs of the Gallery were his major publishing venue and established him as a scholar. He was that brand of scholar/civil servant whose entire life was his job.

Selected Bibliography

The Early Netherlandish School. London: National Gallery, 1945; The Earlier Italian Schools. vols. London : National Gallery, 1951-; The National Gallery. 3 vols. Primitifs flamands. I, Corpus de la peinture des anciens Pays-Bas méridionaux au quinzième siècle. Antwerp: De Sikkel, 1953-1970; and Gould, Cecil. French School: Early 19th Century, Impressionists, Post-Impressionists etc. London: National Gallery, 1970; Rogier van der Weyden; an Essay, with a Critical Catalogue of Paintings Assigned to Him and to Robert Campin. London: Phaidon, 1972.

Sources

Clark, Kenneth. The Other Half: a Self Portrait. New York: Harper & Row, 1977, pp. 7-8; Secrest, Meryle. Kenneth Clark: a Biography. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1985, pp. 141-142; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 515; [obituaries:] Levey, Michael. “Sir Martin Davies.” Burlington Magazine 117, no. 872 (November 1975): 729-731; S[utton], D[enys]. “Sir Martin Davies.” Apollo 101 (May 1975): 417.

Dangibeaud, Charles

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Dangibeaud, Charles

Other Names:

Charles Dangibeaud

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): Medieval (European) and Romanesque

Overview

Medievalist and Romanesque scholar. Dangibeaud was part of the debate which took nationalistic overtones on the origin of the Romanesque. It had been launched by the American A. Kingsley Porter when he posited that pilgrimage and monastic reform explained the stylistic progress of the Romanesque, eminating not from France, but from Spain. The French academy rejected Porter’s thesis in favor of their regional hierarchy. The attack was led by Paul Deschamps who published the most virulent corrections (Maxwell) to Porter’s evidence. Dechamps was joined by François Deshoulières, Dangibeaud and Eugène Lefèvre-Pontalis who wrote essays attempting to defend the academy’s classification.

Sources

Maxwell, Robert. “Modern Origins of Romanesque Sculpture.” in, Rudolf, Conrad, ed. A Companion to Medieval Art : Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006, pp. 338-339.

Dana, John Cotton

November 8, 2023April 5, 2024

Full Name: Dana, John Cotton

Other Names:

John Cotton Dana

Gender: male

Date Born: 19 August 1856

Date Died: 21 July 1929

Place Born: Woodstock, Windsor, VT, USA

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): art theory, libraries (institutions), Modern (style or period), and museums (institutions)

Career(s): directors (administrators), librarians, and museum directors

Overview

Visionary modernist art museum director, Newark Museum, 1909-1929, and librarian theorist. Dana was born to Charles Dana, Jr. a general store manager, and Charitie Scott Loomis (Dana). In 1874, Dana entered Dartmouth College. He gained an A. B. in 1878 intent on becoming a lawyer, but a diagnosis of tuberculosis forced him to the drier climate of Colorado. Dana worked as a surveyor, part of the team who discovered the ruins of the Mesa River cliff dwellers in 1881. He returned to New York (state) and passed the bar exam in 1883, but ill health drove him again to Minnesota and then back to Colorado, selling real estate and again surveying. While a lay leader in the Unitarian church, he met and married Adine Rowena Waggener (1860-ca.1932) in 1888. Dana’s career as a librarian began after an article he wrote criticizing public education led to Dana’s appointment as the first librarian of Denver School District, the precursor of the Denver Public Library. His visionary library included picture files, reference shelves open to the public and a circulating picture collection (begun in 1891), primarily for children. In 1898 Dana returned to New England where he founded the Springfield, Massachusetts library system. Dana wanted to incorporate the city’s art and natural history museums into the library system, but met with stiff resistance from the wealthy private collector and curator of the art museum. He resigned in 1901 moving to the Free Public Library of Newark, New Jersey, the following year. Dana built the Newark library into one of the most successful urban public libraries in the United States, creating branches and specialized libraries, promoting the library vigorously. He also returned to his idea of running an art museum. In 1903 he mounted an exhibition of American art in the library, and by 1905 he had created a science museum on one floor of the library. Dana merged the museum into one for the arts as well, now called the Newark Museum in 1909, under the rubric of the Newark Museum Association, which he founded the same year. Dana’s main interest was industrial art and design. He personally built many of the display cases from his home carpentry shop. Dana established contact with the director of the Folkwang Museum in Germany, Karl Ernst Osthaus. The result was the 1912 show “Modern German Applied Arts,” a groundbreaking show of over 1,300 items by the Deutscher Werkbund, including metalwork and advertisements. A junior museum for children was established in 1913. Dana’s dogmatic lobbying for industrial design resulted in the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows of commercial products in 1917. During World War I Dana resisted much of the anti-German sentiments, refusing to remove German-authored books from library shelves. He hired the art historian Holger Cahill in 1921 to the staff of the Newark Museum, encouraged Cahill to organize shows on folk art, American primitives, and American folk sculpture. Dana declined honorary degrees from Dartmouth, Rutgers, and Princeton. In 1923, Dana spearheaded a touring show on Chinese art, one of the first in the country. Though Dana distained treasure-quality art, the wares of “archaeologists, excavators and importers,” as he put it, he invested in American artists. Years before larger American museums acquired indigenous artists, the Newark Museum owned paintings by John Sloan and Max Weber. By 1923, Dana’s health began to decline. The museum moved to separate quarters in 1926. Still energetic, he founded an apprenticeship program for display and museum curation, one of whose initial students was the later Museum of Modern Art curator Dorothy Miller. Dana hired Miller to assist with Cahill’s work in the Museum. In 1929, however Dana underwent an operation which resulted in a lingering infection. He collapsed the same year at Grand Central Station, NY, and died at an area hospital. Dana is buried in Woodstock, VT. His personal papers are contained at The Newark Public Library and the American Library Association Archives, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dana’s strong populist impulse made him a pre-cursor to modern art museum’s attention to broad public appeal. His theory of culture was derived more from the theory of Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) than art theorists. “Museums must advertise,” he wrote in a letter to the New York Times, an extreme notion at the time. His art museum–a term the Newark institution has never used–like his libraries, was devoted to show designs to educate local laborers. Dana believed in museum displays which re-enforced the object’s context, as opposed to the prevailing esthetic theories of installation (“the object as contemplative piece”) by curators such as Boston’s Benjamin Ives Gilman. A social progressive, he hoped to liberate the public from fashion obsolescence, espousing an American aesthetic of machine-style objects produced from the country’s industrial prowess. His legacy in museology is the acceptance of industrial design as part of American art museums. “Beauty,” he wrote elsewhere, “has no relation to age, rarity or price.” He was not a scholar and did no research on art.

Selected Bibliography

American Art: How it Can be Made to Flourish. Woodstock, VT: The Elm Tree Press, 1929.

Sources

Kingdon, Frank. John Cotton Dana: a Life. Newark: The Public Library and Museum, 1940; “John Cotton Dana and the Newark Museum.” Magazine of Art 37 (November 1944): 268-70ff.; Alexander, Edward P. “John Cotton Dana and the Newark Museum.” Museum Masters: their Museums and their Influence. Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local History, 1983; Manning, Martin J. “Dana, John Cotton.” American National Biography; Maffei, Nicolas. “John Cotton Dana and the Politics of Exhibiting Industrial Art in the U.S., 1909-1929.” Journal of Design History 13 no. 4 (2000): 301-17; Duncan, Carol. “Cotton Dana’s Progressive Museum.” in D’souza, Aruna, ed. Self and History: a Tribute to Linda Nochlin. London: Thames & Hudson, 2001, pp. 127-136; [obituary:] “John Cotton Dana Dies in 73d Year . . . ” New York Times July 22, 1929, p. 18.

Damisch, Hubert

November 8, 2023April 5, 2024

**Image Credit:** The Architect's Newspaper

Full Name: Damisch, Hubert

Gender: male

Date Born: 1928

Date Died: 2017

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): art theory and semiotics

Institution(s): Université de Paris (Sorbonne)

Overview

semiotic methodology of art history

Selected Bibliography

Théorie du Nuage. Pour une histoire de la peinture. 1972.

Sources

Bazin 353

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

semiotic methodology of art history

Dalton, Ormonde M.

November 8, 2023April 5, 2024

Full Name: Dalton, Ormonde M.

Other Names:

Ormonde Dalton

Gender: male

Date Born: 1866

Date Died: 1945

Place Born: Cardiff, Wales, UK

Place Died: Holford, Somerset, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Antique, the, antiquities (object genre), and Medieval (European)

Career(s): curators

Overview

Keeper of the British and Medieval Antiquities Department at the British Museum, 1921-1928. Dalton was the son of a solicitor, Thomas Masters Dalton, and Emily Mansford. He attended Harrow School winning a scholarship to New College, Oxford, graduating in the “classical moderations” (Classical studies) in 1886 and in literae humaniores in 1888. Dalton made a grand tour after school, France, Germany, Austria, studying under Josef Rudolf Thomas Strzygowski and India, and teaching for a year at the Abbotsholme School in Derbyshire, in 1884. The following year Dalton joined British Museum in the department of British and medieval antiquities led by its keeper, Wollaston Franks. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1895. He and Hercules Read published Antiquities from the City of Benin in 1899 and elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1899 subsequently serving on its council and boards. Dalton was promoted to first class assistant in 1901. Dalton’s initial focus in ethnology migrated to archaeology and he set about writting catalogs on the collections, beginning the same year with his Catalogue of Early Christian Antiquities. In 1903 he issed for the Museum the Guide to the Early Christian and Byzantine Antiquities and the Treasure of the Oxus, 1905, a collection which dated from the Franks years. In 1909 he rose to assistant (modern deputy) keeper, publishing the Catalogue of the Ivory Carvings of the Christian Era. In 1910 his second publication, Handbook to the Ethnographical Collections appeared, written with Thomas Athol Joyce. He oversaw the publication by the Byzantine Research and Publication Fund on several significant Byzantine churches, beginning with The Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem in 1910. In 1911 he issued his most important work, Byzantine Art and Archaeology a survey of Byzantine art in all areas except architecture. Dalton was pursuaded to write a series of articles in 1912 for the Burlington Magazine on the jewel collection of J. Pierpont Morgan, who still effectively controlled the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The series was introduced by Roger Fry, who had, by this time, had a falling out with Morgan. His Catalogue of the Engraved Gems of the Post-Classical Periods in the British Museum appeared mid-war, in 1915 along with a translated edition of the Letters of Sidonius the same year. During World War I, Dalton worked for the Admiralty, in the map making division, until he was struck by and car and seriously injured. During convalenscence, he wrote the third of three books published under the name W. Compton Leith, Domus doloris, in 1919 (the other two, Apologia diffidentis, 1908, and Sirenica, 1913). In 1921 the department was divided from its ceramics, ethnography, and oriental antiquities collections and Dalton was named keeper of the remaining department, named British and medieval antiquities.The future head of the British Museum, K. T. Kenrick was hired under his direction. He was elected FBA in 1922. In 1923 he and Hermann Justus Braunholtz translated the Josef Rudolf Thomas Strzygowski work Origin of Christian Church Art. Because Dalton’s earlier work omitted architecture, he wrote East Christian Art: a Survey, 1925, including all the arts. He retired to Bath in 1928. Dalton moved to a cottage in the Quantocks in 1940. He died at home, unmarried, in Holford, Somerset, in 1945. His Quantocks land was donated to the National Trust for its unspoiled beauty, the rest New College to found a research scholarship. His Catalogue of Early Christian Antiquities, like many of the early British Museum catalogs, functioned as standard works on the subject, owing to their scholarship and lack of other accessible publications in their areas (Myres). His 1911 survey Byzantine Art and Archaeology became one of the most important texts for the rising interest in Byzantine art history. It was eagerly discussed by the self-trained Byzantists Matthew Stewart Prichard and Thomas Whittemore.

Selected Bibliography

Catalogue of Early Christian Antiquities and Objects from the Christian East in the Department of British and Mediaeval Antiquities. London: Dept. of British and Mediaeval Antiquities and Ethnography, 1901; Catalogue of the Ivory Carvings of the Christian Era with Examples of Mohammedan Art and Carvings in Bone. London: Dept. of British and Mediaeval Antiquities and Ethnography, 1909; Byzantine Art and Archaeology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911; and Fry, Roger. “Byzantine Enamels in Mr. Pierpont Morgan’s Collection.” Burlington Magazine, [series of articles, April-August] 1912; translated, Sidonius Apollinaris, Saint. The Letters of Sidonius. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915; A Guide to the Early Christian and Byzantine Antiquities. London: British Museum. Dept. of British and Mediaeval Antiquities and Ethnography, 1921; translated, Strzygowski, Josef. Origin of Christian Church Art, New Facts and Principles of Research. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1923; East Christian Art: a Survey of the Monuments. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925; The History of the Franks. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927

Sources

Hill, G. “Ormonde Maddock Dalton, 1866-1945.” Proceedings of the British Academy 31 (1945): 357-73; Myres, J. L. and Pottle, Mark. “Dalton, Ormonde Maddock.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; 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. 23 mentioned.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Daix, Pierre

November 8, 2023April 5, 2024

Full Name: Daix, Pierre

Other Names:

Pierre Georges Daix

Gender: male

Date Born: 1922

Place Born: Ivry-sur-Seine, Île-de-France, France

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): Abstract Expressionist, Cubist, Expressionist (style), and Post-Impressionist

Overview

Picasso scholar, compiler of catalogue raisonné, and writer. Daix was the son of Martial Daix, a city civil servant, and Germaine Derbré (Daix). He attended the Lycée Henri IV in Paris, and then universities in Rennes and Paris, receiving a B. A. Daix joined the communist party in France and served in the French Resistance during World War II, and was decorated with the Commandeur de la Légion d´honneur, the Croix de guerre 1939-1945, and Médaille de la Résistance. Daix first met Picasso, a fellow member of the French Communist Party, in 1945. After the war he worked the Armaments Ministry of the second government of Charles de Gaulle, 1945-1947, under his communist colleague Charles Tillon (1897-1993). He was appointed editor of Lettres Françaises, the journal founded during the occupation, in 1948 which he held until 1972. Daix’s stalwart belief in Communism caused him to attack David Rousset (1912-1997), a survivor of Buchenwald who was now crusading against Stahlin’s Gulg camps, in the pages of the Lettres françaises in 1949. Rousset sued and won a judgment against Daix in 1951.Daix was Deputy Director of the journal Ce Soir between 1950 and 1953. During these year Daix published several novels. His friendship with Picasso blossomed. The artist gave him access to his personal collection of his art housed after 1961 at Picasso’s villa, Notre-Dame-de-Vie at Mougins. Daix’s first book on Picasso, 1964, fascinated the artist and Picasso began commenting on his works to Daix regularly.Now approaching the last period of his life, Picasso confided numerous biographical fact to Daix, identifying models, lovers and events in the painter’s life. Daix began compiling a catalogue raisonné of the early works of Picasso, published in 1966 together with Georges Boudaille. Daix contributed the years 1900, 1901, and 1906 to the catalogue. Daix was married a second time in 1967 to Françoise London. The same year, Daix published an article in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts which changed Picasso scholarship. Picasso had admitted to Daix that the major painting of the Blue Period, “La Vie,” (1904) contained the portrait of Picasso’s s friend, Casagemas. Daix’s article set off a spate of scholarship assessing the artist’s work as biography. Other non-art writing followed. After Picasso’s death in 1973, Daix issued an autobiography, J’ai cru au matin in 1976. Daix began a chronology of Picasso’s work when the artist’s notebooks were made available to him in 1977 for La vie de peintre de Pablo Picasso. His a catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s subsequent early years, Picasso, the Cubist Years, 1907-1916, appeared in 1979. He was adviser to the editor of the Quotidien de Paris from 1980 (to 1985). Daix concentrated on art publishing, issuing le Journal du cubisme, 1982, la Vie du peintre Edouard Manet, 1983, Picasso créateur. La vie intime et l’oeuvre, 1987. Diax became friends with the French historian Ferdinand Braudel, whom he subsequently wrote a monograph on. He participated in the 1988 “Demoiselles d’Avingon” exhibition at the Musee Picasso and the Picasso Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. His Picasso, trente ans après, 2003, won the prix Georges-Pompidou the same year. Another Picasso book was published in 2007. Daix’s scholarship on Picasso was essentially biography-as-art-history. Because of his closeness to Picasso, he was able to add to the knowledge of the artist’s work through ways that documents alone could not. Not until John Richardson thirty years later published his biographies of Picasso, also from first-hand knowledge, had such rich store of information been published. Daix’s account of Picasso’s blue period remains revisionist and critics found his later biographies overly anecdotal. Methodologically, Daix employed structuralist analysis of Claude Levi-Strauss, whom he acknowleged in the preface to his catalogues raisonnés. He did not incorporate post-Structuralist sensibilities, such as Ferdinand Saussure (Krauss).

Selected Bibliography

[collected essays:] Nouvelle critique et art moderne, essai. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968; “La Periode Bleue de Picasso et le suicide de Carlos Casagemas.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 69 (April 1967): 239-246; and Boudaille, Georges, and Rosselet, Joan. Picasso 1900-1906, catalogue raisonné de l’ouvre peinture. Neuchâtel/Paris: la Bibliothèque des arts, 1966, English, Picasso: the Blue and Rose Periods: a Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, 1900-1906. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society 1967; La vie de peintre de Pablo Picasso. Paris: Seuil, 1977; and Rosselet, Joan. Le cubisme de Picasso: catalogue raisonné de l’ouvre peint 1907-1916. Neuchâtel: Ides et Calendes, 1979, English, Picasso, the Cubist years, 1907-1916: a catalogue raisonné of the paintings and related works. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1979; Journal du cubisme. Geneva: A. Skira, 1982, English, Cubists and Cubism. New York: Rizzoli, 1982; Picasso créateur. La vie intime et l’oeuvre, 1987, English, revised, Picasso. Life and Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1993; Dictionnaire Picasso. Paris: R. Laffont, 1995; Braudel. Paris: Flammarion, 1995.

Sources

Rousset, David. Le procès concentrationnaire pour la vérité sur les camps: extraits des débats. Déclarations de David Rousset, plaidoirie de Théo Bernard, plaidoirie de Gérard Rosenthal. Paris: Éditions du Pavois, 1951; “Acknowledgements” and “Introduction.” Daix, Pierre. Picasso: Life and Art. New York: Icon Editions, 1993, pp. vii-xiii; Krauss, Rosalind “In the Name of Picasso.” October 16, no. 102 (Spring, 1981): 11, 14; Who’s Who in France (online); Daix, Pierre. Tout mon temps (mémoires, 2001).

Dacos, Nicole

November 8, 2023April 5, 2024

**Image Credit:** Historians of Netherlandish Art

Full Name: Dacos, Nicole

Gender: female

Date Born: 1938

Date Died: 2014

Home Country/ies: Belgium

Institution(s): Université Libre de Bruxelles

Overview

student of Germain Bazin at l’Université libre de Bruxelles; Renaissance; Roman art; influence of the paintings of the Domus Aurea on Renaissance images and ornament

Selected Bibliography

La découverte de la Domus Aurea et la formation des grotesques à la Renaissance. London: Warburg Institute, 1969.

Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 p. 228

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

student of Germain Bazin at l’Université libre de Bruxelles; Renaissance; Roman art; influence of the paintings of the Domus Aurea on Renaissance images and ornament

d’Harnoncourt, René

November 8, 2023April 5, 2024

**Image Credit:** National Portrait Gallery

Full Name: d'Harnoncourt, René

Other Names:

René D'Harnoncourt

Gender: male

Date Born: 17 May 1901

Date Died: 13 August 1968

Place Born: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Place Died: Long Island, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): Modern (style or period)

Institution(s): Museum of Modern Art

Overview

Director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1949-1967. d’Harnoncourt was born into a wealthy Viennese family, Count Hubert and Julie Mittrowsky d’Harnoncourt. The family moved to Graz, where he initially intended on a career as a chemist, studying at the university in Graz. He moved to the Technische Hochschule in Vienna in 1922, writing a thesis on creosote content in the coal of Yugoslavia, but without graduating. When the family fortuned declined after World War I, d’Harnoncourt moved to Mexico in 1925 to seek employment as a chemist. His personal interest in and talent for art caught the notice of various antiques dealers. By 1927 he was assembling a collection of folk arts, which traveled to the United States. The show, which opened in at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, in 1930, rocketed d’Harnoncourt to prominence, including a radio program of his own, “Art in America” (1933-1934). In 1932 he married Chicago fashion designer Sara Carr. Between 1934 and 1937 he taught at Sara Lawrence College and the New School for Social Research. In 1936 he was appointed an administrator in the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, part of the Department of the Interior. d’Harnoncourt mounted one of the first national exhibitions of native-American arts at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco in 1939. In 1944 he was appointed to the Museum of Modern Art, NY, to help with the duties of the recently dismissed (but not quite “fired”) founder of MoMA, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. D’Harnoncourt’s sensitivity to the situation (Barr was eventually reinstated as a curatorial advisor) and gentle personality allowed both men to function positively. D’Harnoncourt was an expert museum installer as well as collector. He mounted the shows “Henry Moore” (1946), “Gabo and Pevsner” (1948), in his capacity. In 1949 d’Harnoncourt was appointed Director of the Museum. Andrew Carnduff Ritchie was hired from the Albright Art Gallery to succeed him in his duties as paintings curator. Under his directorship, the Museum mounted the exhibitions “Lipschitz” (1954), “Seurat and Arp” (1958), “Picasso” (1967) and “Rodin” (1963). He nutured innovative curators such as Mildred Constantine, the first curator of graphic arts. He reached out to many New York artists, including major abstract expressionists, who had claimed that the museum had ignored their work in favor of European artists. d’Harnoncourt also served as art advisor and to the personal art collection of Nelson A. Rockefeller, serving as vice president for Rockefeller’s Museum of Primitive Art from its beginning in 1957. Like, Barr, too, d’Harnoncourt saw his mission to champion modern art to the greater public: when the American Legion magazine launched an attack against modern art in 1955, d’Harnoncourt issued an extended reply. Under his directorship, the East Wing of the museum (designed by Philip Johnson) was built in 1958. He retired in 1968 and was succeeded by Bates Lowry. Only a year after his retirement to Long Island, he was hit by a drunk driver and killed while walking. His daughter was the Director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Anne d’Harnoncourt and his nephew is the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt. His photographic collection from his years in Mexico comprises part of the Benson Latin American Collection, General Libraries, University of Texas at Austin.

d’Harnoncourt’s reputation as a museum curator and director was that of a sensitive installation designer and successful fundraiser. Assuming the Directorship in the years directly after the firing and (partial reinstating) of Barr, d’Harnoncourt handled these duties with aplomb and success. The New York Times once quipped of him that he could convince “patrons with old money to part with it for new art.”

Selected Bibliography

Mexican Arts. Portland, ME: The Southworth Press/American Federation of Arts, 1930; and Douglas, Frederic H. Indian Art of the United States. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1941; illustrated. Morrow, Elizabeth. The Painted Pig: a Mexican Picture Book. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1930; The Exposition of Mexican Art. Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1930; and Linton, Ralph, and Paul S. Wingert. Arts of the South Seas. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1946.

Sources

Liberman, William S. “Rene D’Harnoncourt 1901-1968.” New York Times August 25, 1968, p. D21; Glueck, Grace. “Tributes are Paid to D’Harnoncourt. Late Director of Museum of Modern Art Honored.” New York Times October 9, 1968, p. 47; René D’Harnoncourt, 1901-1968: a Tribute. [memorial service momento, Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art]. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1968; Lynes, Russell. Good Old Mondern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Mondern Art. New York: Athanaeum, 1973, pp. 264-283; ; Elligott, Michelle. René d’Harnoncourt and the Art of installation. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2018; [obitiuaries:] Selz, Peter. Art Journal 28:1 (Fall 1968): 60; “Rene d’Harnoncourt Dead at 67, Headed Museum of Modern Art.” The New York Times August 14, 1968, p. 43.

d’Harnoncourt, Anne

November 8, 2023April 5, 2024

Full Name: d'Harnoncourt, Anne

Other Names:

Anne Julie d'Harnoncourt

Gender: female

Date Born: 1943

Date Died: 2008

Place Born: Washington, DC, USA

Place Died: Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Overview

Ground-breaking female director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1982-2008. d’Harnoncourt was born to the Museum of Modern Art, director René d’Harnoncourt and fashion designer Sara Carr (d’Harnoncourt) (1904-2001). Raised in Manhattan, she met artists and museum professionals at an early age. d’Harnoncourt attended the Brearley School before entering Radcliffe, graduating in 1965 magna cum laude. She earned an MA from Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London in 1967 with a thesis on moral subject matter in Pre-Raphaelite and British 19th-century painting. While in London, she briefly worked for the Tate Gallery. d’Harnoncourt began her career in art history working at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as a curatorial assistant in the painting department. While there she worked with the early American Duchamp curator Walter C. Hopps. She moved to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1969 as curator of 20th-century art at the Art Institute of Chicago. At Chicago, she met assistant curator of European painting, Joseph H. Rishel, Jr. They married in 1971, rising to associate curator of 20th-century art at Chicago the same year. The following year she returned to Philadelphia as curator of 20th century art, in part to organize and mount the Marcel Duchamp a retrospective the following year, of which the Museum had spectacular holdings. She added to the Duchamp collection and archive at the Museum. In 1982 d’Harnoncourt was appointed director of the Museum, replacing Jean Sutherland Boggs the only woman to head a museum with an annual budget greater than $25 million and one of the youngest. She issued the volume on Duchamp for the important Documents of Twentieth Century Art series in 1983. As director, she orchestrated an immensely successful re-emergence of the Museum. In 1989, the Museum won an important court decision to integrate the John G. Johnson collection of European paintings–and the core of Philadelphia’s collection–into its overall holdings. The Museum had been previously required to keep Johnson’s painting separate, per his 1914 bequest. Armed with that decision, d’Harnoncourt set about a reinstallation and integration of its holdings, costing $12 million and requiring two capital campaigns. The first 1986 to 1993 raised $64 million. By the 1990s, d’Harnoncourt had turned down offers to direct the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery in Washington. She added the duties of chief executive to her Museum title in 1997, replacing Robert Montgomery Scott. She oversaw the Museum’s mounting of the Constantin Brancusi retrospective in 1995 and Paul Cézanne in 1996. A retrospective of the work of Barnett Newman was launched in 2002. A second capital campaign in 2001 netted $246 million for the Museum. Other notable works acquired under her tenure included those by Jasper Johns, Brice Marden, and Agnes Martin. Under her leadership, the Museum acquired an Art Deco building in the vicinity to accommodate works on paper and newer sculpture, Perelman Annex. A “collections director” of the first rank, she put together a funding package in 2006, to save the sale of Thomas Eakins’ most famous painting, ”The Gross Clinic,” keeping it in Philadelphia. She presided over plans for a $500 million expansion of the museum by architect Frank Gehry. Before the project could be started, she suffered cardiac arrest at her home at age 64, where she died. She was the cousin of the orchestra conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt (b. 1929). In contrast to the bombastic American museum directors of the late 20th century, d’Harnoncourt was considered by her colleagues as old school, a scholar who rose through the ranks to become director. After Boggs’ failure to raise money and the profile at the Philadelphia, d’Harnoncourt did both, though she despaired that the early success of her Cézanne show (800,000 visitors) raised expectations hard to equal.

Selected Bibliography

and Hopps, Walter. “étant donnés: 1 0 la chute d’eau, 2 0 le gaz d’éclairage: Reflections on a New Work by Marcel Duchamp.” Bulletin [of the] Philadelphia Museum of Art 14, no. 299-300 (1969); edited. Marcel Duchamp: a Retrospective. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973; Futurism and the International Avant Garde. Phildelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1980; edited. Duchamp, Marcel. Notes. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983.

Sources

“Philadelphia Museum Ready To Pick Miss d’Harnoncourt.” New York Times May 27, 1982, p. C19; [obituaries:] Grimes, William. “Anne d’Harnoncourt, First Woman To Lead Major Museum, Dies at 64,” New York Times June 3, 2008, p.8, Dobrin, Peter. “Anne d’Harnoncourt, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 64.” Philadelphia Inquirer June 3, 2008, p. A1.

D’Ancona, Paolo

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: D'Ancona, Paolo

Gender: male

Date Born: 1878

Date Died: 1963

Place Born: Pisa, Tuscany, Italy

Place Died: Milan, Lombardy, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Career(s): educators

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Chair in art history at the University of Milan; student of A. Venturi in Rome

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