Art Historians

Cook, Walter W. S.

November 8, 2023April 5, 2024

**Image Credit:** Zeitschrift des Deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft 53/53

Full Name: Cook, Walter W. S.

Other Names:

Walter William Spencer Cook

Gender: male

Date Born: 1888

Date Died: 1962

Place Born: Orange, Franklin, MA, USA

Place Died: North Atlantic Ocean

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Medieval (European), Spanish (culture or style), and Spanish Medieval styles

Overview

Historian of medieval Spanish art, founding director of the Institute of Fine Art at New York University and leading figure in bringing German art historians and their style of art history to the United States. Cook was born to William Jeremiah Cook and Jan Macreal (Cook). He attended Phillips Academy before entering Harvard University. He served in the American Expeditionary Force, 1917-19 during World War I. Cook spent the years 1920-1924 working on his doctorate at Harvard and nine months conducting research in Spain and France a a fellow of the Archaeological Institute of America, 1920-1921. He spent the academic year 1922-1923 researching at Princeton University. His dissertation was on Catalonian panel painting in the Romanesque period written under Chandler R. Post. Cook kept particularly close ties with Charles Rufus Morey at Princeton and Harvard’s Paul J. Sachs. Cook was already acting in an unofficial for Harvard’s Fogg art museums during his summers in Europe. While a student in Europe, he familiarized himself with nearly all the centers of art historical scholarship, making contact that would later prove useful for both those scholars and Cook. He joined the faculty at New York University in 1926. Cook continued to spend six months each year in Europe as a research fellow for Spanish art of the College Art Association. He was professor of art, New York University from 1932 to 1953. In 1932, Cook separated the graduate program from the undergraduate department from Washington Square, initially housing the program in a brownstone at the corner of 83rd and Madison Avenue and later at the Paul Warburg estate at 17 East 80th Street before its final home in the Duke mansion at 1 East 78th Street. Cook stated, “You may spend your money on a museum, but we are going to move right next door to a museum [the Metropolitan Museum of Art], and let them buy our works of art, while we spent it on the professors and get the best there are.” He used his position as the director of the new graduate center to “acquire” some of the most eminent art historians who were fleeing Hitler’s Germany. These included Erwin Panofsky, who settled at Princeton after NYU, Walter Friedlaender, Karl Leo Heinrich Lehmann, Martin Weinberger, Adolph Goldschmidt, Otto Homburger, Marcel Aubert, Henri Focillon, and Alfred Salmony. Some, like Aubert and Focillon went to other institutions and others, such as Panofsky, continued to teach at NYU even after his appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1935. Cook once quipped, “Hitler is my best friend. He shakes the trees and I gather the apples.” Other scholars whom he sponsored or wrote enthusiastic endorsements of included Adolf Katzenellenbogen and Hans Huth. In 1950 he and José Gudiol issued Pintura e imagineria románicas for the important Ars Hispaniae series, one of only two English-speaking scholars author a volume in the set (the other being George Kubler). He continued as director of the Institute until 1951. At his retirement in 1953, a special exhibition was held in his honor at the Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art. He died at sea on the ocean liner Leonardo da Vinci returning home from Genoa. Together with A. Kingsley Porter, Walter Muir Whitehill and Georgiana Goddard King, and his mentor, Post, Cook constituted an early “New England School” of American interest in Spanish Romaneque studies. His classroom technique was to use a large number of slides in a lecture, sometimes to the student’s bewilderment (Cahn). Cook’s posthumous reputation is largely for his hand in developing the Institute of Fine Arts into the graduate center it is today. Founded by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1835, Cook transformed it into a center for the training of scholars in the field of art history to enter the curatorial, teaching and academic fields. James S. Ackerman wrote that “Cook an indifferent and unproductive scholar and teacher, though his contribution to art history in America was eminent in a different way — he grasped the opportunity to bring to NYU the finest of German scholars expelled by the Nazis, and subseqently to invite for short gigs Wittkower, Panofsky, Baltrusaitis, Lotz and other outstanding historians. He was said to have gone down to ships arriving from Europe to meet prospective faculty as they descended the gangplank.” His efforts in providing safe haven for historians fleeing Germany were his lasting contribution. Died on board ship in the Atlantic.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation] Romanesque Panel Painting in Catalonia. Harvard University, 1924; The Stucco Altar-frontals of Catalonia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1924; and Gudiol, José. Pintura e imagineria románicas. Madrid: Editorial Plus-Ultra, 1950; La pintura mural románica en Cataluña. Madrid: Instituto Diego Velázquez del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1956; La pintura románica sobre tabla en Cataluña. Madrid: Instituto Diego Velázquez, del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1960.

Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 543-544; Boehm, Barbara Drake. “Harry Bober (1915-1988).” Gesta 28, No. 1. (1989): 103; Brush, Kathryn. “The Unshaken Tree: Walter W. S. Cook on German Kunstwissenschaft in 1924.” Zeitschrift des deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft 52/53 (1998/99): 24-51; Cahn, Walter. “Romanesque Art, Then and Now: A Personal Reminiscence.” in Hourihane, Colum, ed. Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn. University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2008, p. 33; James S. Ackermann, personal correspondence, February 2011; [obituaries:] Iniguez, D.A., et. al., “Walter W. S. Cook.” Art News 61 (November 1962) p. 27; Iniguez, D.A., et. al., Art Journal 22 no. 3 (Spring 1963): 167; “Dr. Walter Cook, Art Expert, Dies; Retired Professor at N.Y.U.” New York Times September 22, 1962, p. 25.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Cook, Robert Manuel

November 8, 2023April 5, 2024

Full Name: Cook, Robert Manuel

Gender: male

Date Born: 1909

Date Died: 2000

Place Born: Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, UK

Place Died: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): ancient, archaeology, ceramic ware (visual works), and pottery (visual works)

Overview

Cambridge University archaeologist and pottery scholar. Cook was the son of the Rev Charles Robert Cook and Mary Manuel (Cook). He was educated first at Marlborough and then Clare College, Cambridge, where he studied under Arthur Bernard Cook (1868-1952, no relation) and the numismatist/connoisseur Charles Theodore Seltman. He was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Classics at Manchester University in 1934. Cook began his professional career by studying Fikellura vases, inspired by the recent studies regional style pottery such as that of Corinthian pottery by then Director of the British School of Athens, Humfry Payne, Necrocorinthia, and the work of Edward Arthur Lane on Laconian ware. He began studying Clazomenian painted sarcophagi, in 1935, which appeared as a monograph only in 1981. He supplemented his lecturing with language teaching as Sub-warden of St. Anselm’s Hall, 1936-1938. During World War II, he was assigned a civil servant role in the war effort, ensuring wartime industrial regulations were met. He rose to Lecturer at Manchester in 1938. The same year he married Kathleen Porter (d. 1979). Together they traveled around Greece, later co-authoring the book Southern Greece: an Archaeological Guide (1968). When the Laurence Reader in Classical Archaeology, Cambridge University, Arnold Walter Lawrence was promoted, Cook succeeded him in 1945. He authored fascicule 8 for the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum set on the British Museum in 1954. As a lecturer, he did not believe in teaching survey-courses if an adequate textbook existed. Feeling the lack of one for classical vases, Cook wrote the handbook Greek Painted Pottery, published in 1960. It became the standard manual for Greek pottery for many years. In 1962 he succeeded J. M. C. Toynbee as Laurence Professor in Classical Archaeology. In their vintage Alvis car, Cook and his wife continued European travel, establishing close contact with German archaeologists, (he a full member of the German Archaeological Institute, DAI). He continued to teach until 1976, succeeded by Anthony Snodgrass. Cook chaired the Managing Committee of the British School at Athens between 1983 and 1987. His final book, East Greek Pottery (written with Pierre Dupont), appeared in 1998. His younger brother, John Manuel Cook (1910-1994), was also an archaeologist and classical pottery scholar of the proto-attic. Cook specialized in the classification of ancient East Greek pottery. As a scholar, Cook was accurate and incorruptible (Spivey). He was known for ascribing practical reasons to artistic practice. Cook’s sense of humor was famous. A hardened pipe-smoker, he insisted nicotine protected lungs from infection. Cook’s principle of nonconformity was infamous as well. He disparaged the Cambridge perquisites system as “Snotty” and dons who embraced it as “idle.” He personally admitted to illicitly emptying an Etruscan tomb.

Selected Bibliography

Bildlexikon zur Topographie Istanbuls : Byzantion, Konstantinupolis, Istanbul bis zum Beginn d. 17. Jh.. Tubingen: Wasmuth, 1977; and Gerkan, Armin von. Das Theater von Epidauros. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1961; Burgen des Kreuzritter. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1966, English, Castles of the Crusaders. London: Thames & Hudson,1966. Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. Great Britain 13. British Museum. Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities 8. London: The British Museum, 1954; Greek Painted Pottery. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1960; and Cook, Kathleen. Southern Greece, an Archaeological Guide, Attica, Delphi and the Peloponnese. New York: Praeger, 1968; Clazomenian Sarcophagi. Mainz: von Zabern, 1981; and Dupont, Pierre. East Greek Pottery. London: Routledge, 1998.

Sources

[obituaries:] Schirmer, Wolfgang. “Wolfgang Müller-Wiener.” Architectura 21 no. 1 (1991): 1-2; Koenigs, W. “In Memoriam Wolfgang Müller-Wiener 17.5.1923 – 25.3.1991.” Istanbuler Mitteilungen 41 (1991): 13-16.

Cook, Herbert, Sir

November 8, 2023April 5, 2024

Full Name: Cook, Herbert, Sir

Other Names:

Sir Herbert Frederick Cook

Gender: male

Date Born: 1868

Date Died: 1939

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Institution(s): Burlington Magazine

Overview

British scholar, known for establishing, with Georg Gronau, the date for Titian’s birth.

Sources

Witt, Robert. “Dr. Georg Gronau Art Historian And Critic Our Florence Correspondent.” The Times (London) December 30, 1937 p. 12.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

British scholar, known for establishing, with Georg Gronau, the date for Titian’s birth.

Conze, Alexander

November 8, 2023April 5, 2024

Full Name: Conze, Alexander

Other Names:

Alexander Christian Leopold Conze

Gender: male

Date Born: 1831

Date Died: 1914

Place Born: Hanover, Germany

Place Died: Berlin, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Anatolian (culture or style), ancient, Ancient Greek (culture or style), antiquities (object genre), Early Western World, Greek sculpture styles, Near Eastern (Early Western World), Pergamene (culture or style), and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Director of antique sculpture at Berlin Museum 1877-1887; brought Pergamon altar to Berlin. Conze was the son of a cavalry officer. He initially studied law at the university in Göttingen before changing to classics. His dissertation was written under Eduard Gerhard in Berlin in 1855. Conze made trips to Paris and London and was particularly inspired by the Elgin Marbles. He was appointed Professor (Extraordinarius) at University of Halle in 1863, moving to the University of Vienna in 1869 (through 1877). In Vienna he founded the archaeological-epigraphical department. Beginning in 1873, Conze devoted efforts to excavating Samothrace with the intention of revealing the entire site, but his duties at Vienna prevented this. In 1877 Richard Schöne, who had replaced Conze at Halle, lobbied for Conze appointment as Director of the antique sculpture collection at the Berlin Museum (to 1887). Conze followed the somewhat disappointing tenure of Karl Bötticher (1806-1889). In 1887 Conze resigned his position at the museum to become secretary (director) of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI). As secretary-general he was instrumental in reorienting the DAI toward the needs and to serve the glory of the German Empire (as opposed to international scholarship). He also founded the Roman-Germanic Commission in Frankfurt am Main. He joined Wilhelm Dörpfeld and Carl Humann in the excavation of Pergamon beginning in 1878 (to 1886, second dig 1900-02). At Pergamon, Conze realized his ambition of finding an entire city. The most significant of his finds, the great Pergamon altar, is now in the Berlin Museum. Beginning in 1893, he launched the publication of a corpus on Attic grave stele, Die attischen Grabreliefs (to 1911) as well as Melian vases, Melische Tongefässe in 1902. His students included the Vienna-school art historian Franz Wickhoff.A specialist in ancient Greek art, Conze helped to redefine 19th-century archaeology away from a humanistic and aestheticizing study of ancient art works and toward a technical science of painstaking historical reconstruction. He was one of the first to promote “big archaeology” (large scale, highly organized digs). Conze preferred making new finds rather than studying existing objects. His most spectacular find, the Pergamon Altar, one of the most important complete Hellenistic finds in archaeology, failed to bring Conze the recognition he deserved or hoped for. The cost of the reports was extreme and the altar, despite it’s art-historical significance, was less important politically than had been expected. In the twentieth century, the altar languished in East Germany after World War II, where it was difficult for visitors to enjoy.

Selected Bibliography

Melische Thongefäße. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1862; “Zur Geschichte der Anfänge griechischer Kunst.”, in: Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien (Phil.-Hist. Kl) 64, 1870: 505-534; 73 (1873) 221-250; Archaeologische untersuchungen auf Samothrake. Vienna: C. Gerold’s Sohn, 1875-80; Beiträge zur Geschichte der griechischen Plastik. Halle: Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1869; Die ergebnisse der ausgrabungen zu Pergamon, 1880-1881. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1882; Wiener Vorlegeblätter für archaeologische übungen [serial]. Vienna: A. Hölder, 1869-1891; and Michaelis, Adolf, and Postolakas, Achilleus. Die attischen Grabreliefs. Berlin: W. Spemann, 1893-1922; Reise auf den Inseln des Thrakischen Meeres. Hannover: C. Rümpler, 1860; Reise auf der Insel Lesbos. Hannover: C. Rümpler, 1865.

Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 59-60; Suzanne L. Marchand. Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996: 97-103; Calder, William. “Conze, Alexander Christian Leopold.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 1, p. 324.

Conway, Martin

November 8, 2023April 5, 2024

Full Name: Conway, Martin

Other Names:

Sir William Martin Conway

Gender: male

Date Born: 1856

Date Died: 1937

Place Born: Rochester, Medway, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Netherlandish and Northern Renaissance

Career(s): art collectors

Overview

Historian of Netherlandish art, art collector; mountaineer and adventurer; first chair of art history in Britain. Conway’s father was William Conway, a vicar in Rochester, Kent, and later rector of St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster, and his mother Elizabeth Martin (Conway). After attending Repton School he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1875 studying history. He was already an avid mountaineer, climbing the Alps during college recesses; he was elected to the Alpine Club in 1877. At Cambridge, he met Henry Bradshaw, the university librarian, who instilled an interest in printed books and their illustrations. Bradshaw funded Conway to pursue this interest, allowing Conway to travel in order to research a book on Netherlandish woodcuts. He received a B.A. in 1879 and continued for a Master’s Degree. In 1881 he published his first book, on climbing the Zermatt, which initiated the Conway and Coolidge’s Climbers’ Guides series, under the editorship of William A. B. Coolidge (1850-1926). He graduated in 1882 and began lecturing as an extension lecturer at Cambridge. Conway early proposed to Rose Shakespear, but never married her. In 1883, while in Italy visiting art museums, he met Conway met Katrina Lambard, an heiress (her father had founded the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, and her stepfather was the former editor/owner of the New York World, Manton Mable). He married Lambard in New York in 1884 and moved to London, publishing his Woodcutters of the Netherlands in the Fifteenth Century the same year. Woodcutters was an extremely well-researched tome that set him on a career of Dutch art-book writing. Conway resigned his extension lecturership in 1885 upon his appointment as Roscoe professor of art at University College, Liverpool. At Liverpool, he published lesser books on British painting and early Flemish artists and Dürer. Characteristic of the era, he also organized several conferences on art’s influence on industry. Conway resigned teaching in 1888 and returned to London as a man of leisure, joining the Savile Club and lecturing. Together with his family Conway traveled for nine months in the Near East, publishing a book on ancient art as the result of his experiences. The Conways began collecting art as Katrina’s endowments increased. During the 1890s Conway was largely engaged in exploring. He led a large-scale mountaineering expedition to the Karakoram Himalayas in 1892, supported by his father-in-law, surveying and ascending Pioneer Peak on Baltoro Kangri, 6890 meters, perhaps an altitude record at the time (Hansen). He published a book on his Karakoram experience in 1894 and another on the Alps, The Alps from End to End, in 1895. These books were highly popular and he was knighted in 1895. The following year he surveyed in Spitsbergen, an Arctic-circle island, and, in 1898 made trips to Bolivia to climb Illimani and Aconcagua in Argentina where he purchased land rights in rubber and mining, which added to his fortune in later years. Returning to England again, Conway was appointed the Slade professor of fine arts at Cambridge in 1901. He wrote books on Tuscan art, the Van Eycks, and Giorgione, serving as president of the Alpine Club from 1902 to 1904. He resigned the Slade professorship in 1904, moving to Allington Castle, near Maidstone, which he and Katrina restored. Now a celebrity, he was awarded the Founders Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1905 and gratis accommodations at Swiss resorts from travel agents and hoteliers. In 1914, Conway wrote a book of his collecting exploits, The Sport of Collecting. Toward the end of the First World War, Conway was appointed director-general of the Imperial War Museum in 1917, an honorary post, but toured the Western Front during the final year collecting artifacts. Conway was awarded honorary Litterarum Doctor degrees from the universities at Durham and Manchester in 1919. In 1931 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Conway of Allington. He once again traveled, to the middle east and then to Soviet Russia where he was granted access to the art collections confiscated by the Bolsheviks. His Art Treasures in Soviet Russia, published in 1925, was the result of that experience. Conway was appointed a trustee of the Wallace Collection in 1916 and the National Portrait Gallery. He amassed a huge collection photographs of art and architecture during his lifetime. Conway presented this 100,000+ image collection to the Courtauld Institute of Art, today known as the Conway Library, Somerset House, joined with the photographic collection of Robert Witt to become the The Witt and Conway Libraries at the Courtauld. In 1924, the sixty-eight-year old Conway began an affair with Monica Hadow, a 24-year-old divorcee. Hadow remarried in 1930 and his own wife died in 1933. The following year he married Iva Christian, widow of Reginald Lawson, of Saltwood Castle, Kent. Conway died at a nursing home in London four years later. In 1966 the medievalist Joan Evans published a biography of the Conway family. Conway’s book, Early Flemish Artists and their Predecessor on the Lower Rhine (1887) was one of the early required texts to be listed in the course catalog for the art history classes of Princeton University. Max J. Friedländer, in the introduction to his Early Netherlandish Painting, cited Conway’s The Van Eycks and Their Followers (1921) as the first work to “seriously tackle the task of writing about early Netherlandish painting in [a] connected sequence…” As a climber, Conway, named romantically a number of mountain peaks, Wellenkuppe, Windjoch, and Dent du Requin.

Selected Bibliography

The Zermatt Pocket-book: a Guide-book to the Pennine Alps, from the Simplon to Arolla: Intended for the Use of Mountaineers. London: E. Stanford, 1881; The Van Eycks and their Followers. London: J. Murray,1921; Art Treasures in Soviet Russia. London: E. Arnold & Co., 1925; Giorgione, a New Study of his Art as a Landscape Painter. London: E. Benn, 1929; The Woodcutters of the Netherlands in the Fifteenth Century. 3 vols. Cambridge: University press, 1884.

Sources

[autobiographies:] Mountain Memories: a Pilgrimage of Romance. London: Cassell & Co., 1920, Episodes in a Varied Life. London: Country Life, 1932, and A Pilgrim’s Quest for the Divine. London: F. Muller, 1936; Friedländer, Max J. “Foreward.” Early Netherlandish Painting. vol. 1. Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1967, p. 17; Hansen, Peter H. “Conway, (William) Martin, Baron Conway of Allington (1856-1937).” Dictionary of National Biography; Evans, Joan. The Conways: a History of Three Generations. London: Museum Press, 1966; Stansky, Peter. “Art, Industry, and the Aspirations of William Martin Conway.” Victorian Studies 19 no. 4 (1976): 465-484; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 508 [identifies him as “Cosway”]; [obituaries:] The Times (London) April 20, 1937); Evans, Joan. “Lord Conway of Allington.” Burlington Magazine 70, no. 411 (June 1937): 300, 303.

Constantine, Mildred

November 8, 2023April 5, 2024

Full Name: Constantine, Mildred

Other Names:

Mildred Constantine Bettelheim

Gender: female

Date Born: 1913

Date Died: 2008

Place Born: Brooklyn, Cattaraugus, NY, USA

Place Died: Nyack, Rockland, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): graphic design, information artifacts, Modern (style or period), and posters

Career(s): curators

Institution(s): Museum of Modern Art

Overview

Curator of graphic design and poster collections of the Museum of Modern Art, 1943-1970. After high school Constantine joined the College Art Association in 1930 as an editorial assistant on the journal Parnassus. She subsequently received a B.A. and M.A. from New York University. Later she attended the graduate school of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City. Constantine joined the Committee Against War and Fascism and traveled to Mexico in 1936 where she discovered how Latin and Central American groups employed graphics to engage populist sentiment. In 1937 she joined the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, a United States government agency. There she met René d’Harnoncourt, later director at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She organized a comprehensive Latin American poster collection displayed at the Library of Congress and today part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection.She married Ralph Bettelheim (-1993), though she retained her maiden name professionally. She joined the Museum of Modern Art’s architecture and design department in 1943 founded by Philip Johnson who returned to the department later and under whom she served. D’Harnoncourt, who assumed the directorship of MoMA in 1944, nutured Constantine’s devotion to graphic arts. At MoMA, she mounted the museum’s first exhibitions of art devoted to causes intended to spread awareness of specific social issues, including ”Polio Posters” (1948). Constatinte raised objects of design art, which she called ”fugitive material,” to a level of museum interest. The exhibitions, ”Olivetti: Design in Industry” in 1952 was followed by ”signs in the Street” in 1954 and ”Lettering by Hand” in 1962. She mounted solo exhibitions for the commercial and graphic designers such as Alvin Lustig (1915-1955), Bruno Munari (1907-1998), Tadanori Yokoo (b. 1936) and Massimo Vignelli (b. 1931) and others. In 1968 she mounted exhibition, ”Word and Image,” which showcased the Museum’s major 20th-century posters collection. Constantine adopted the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam)’s system of hanging posters rather than rolling them in tubes. Ms. Constantine also developed what she called the Ephemera Collection, letterheads, business cards, etc. collected by the German typographer Jan Tschichold. Constantine wrote scholarly books on subjects like Art Nouveau (in 1959) and Contemporary Package Design (in 1959). Constantine left the Modern in 1971 to independently consult and produce exhibitions, writing books on photography and decorative arts. In 1974, together with Alan Fern, she wrote Revolutionary Soviet Film Posters. The same year Constantine wrote Tina Modotti: A Fragile Life, the first biography of the actress and photographer. She curated the textile exhibitions ”Frontiers in Fiber: The Americans” in 1988 and ”small Works in Fiber,” 2002, together with Jack Lenor Larson. A history of fiber in art remained incomplete at the time of her death. She died of heart failure at age 95. Her daughter, Judith Bettelheim, was also an art historian.

Sources

[obituary:] Heller, Steven. “Mildred Constantine, 95, MoMA Curator, Is Dead.” New York Times, December 14, 2008 p. 42

Constable, W. G.

November 8, 2023April 5, 2024

Full Name: Constable, W. G.

Other Names:

William George Constable

Gender: male

Date Born: 1887

Date Died: 1976

Place Born: Derby, Derbyshire, England, UK

Place Died: Cambridge, Middlesex, MA, USA

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Career(s): curators

Overview

First director of the Courtauld Institute and museum curator. Constable attended Derby school, where his father was headmaster, and St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he studied law. He was admitted to the Bar in 1914. As a soldier in the First World War he suffered a near-death experience in 1917 (briefly buried alive by an explosion) and during his recuperation resolved to study the arts. He enrolled at the Slade School of of art where he met the critic George Augustus Moore. Unsatisfied with his skills as a painter, Constable began lecturing to groups at the Wallace Collection. He subsequently wrote criticism for the New Statesman and the Saturday Review. He joined the National Gallery in 1923, rising to Assistant Director in just eight years. He married Olivia Roberts in 1926. His first monograph, on John Flaxman, appeared in 1927. When in 1930 the University of London began implementing its plan to establish an art history institute with Samuel Courtauld’s collection, Constable was approached by Arthur Hamilton Lee (Viscount Lee of Fareham, 1868-1947) to be its first director, a position he accepted. Anticipating the Institute’s opening the following year, he set about developing a program of art history. Since no art history degree program existed in British universities, Constable had no English models from which to draw. He accomplished his goal instead by bringing together the leading connoisseurs and historians of the day as lecturers. These included T. D. Kendrick, Kenneth Clark, Ellis K. Waterhouse, Campbell Dodgson, Hugh Popham and Jim Shaw. Constable’s work was aided by the flight of many first-rate art historians from Nazi oppression. When the Warburg Institute was moved from Hamburg to London, Rudolf Wittkower and Walter F. Friedländer were added to the list of lecturers. The Warburg under the direction of Fritz Saxl, remained a separate institution from the Courtauld. Constable succeed Roger Fry as Slade professor of fine arts at Cambridge in 1935. However, mounting disagreements at the Courtauld arose over academic issues and administrative ones, among them, the syllabus of the Courtauld. Constable, always a scholar–sometimes at the cost of politics–resigned both positions in 1937 rather than compromise over pressure from above. Lord Lee replaced him with T. S. R. Boase, a scholar conspicuously less connected with the art establishment. Constable’s resignation effectively shut him out of several key art-history positions in England. Ultimately he moved to the United States, taking the position of curator of painting at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1938. He remained in the United States the rest of his life, holding the curatorship in Boston until 1957. During that time he wrote numerous catalogs for the museum. In 1962 his major work appeared, a two-volume catalogue raisoné on Canaletto. He encouraged a Canaletto amateur scholar, J. G. Links to assist in his second edition of the book in 1976. A retiring personality, he preferred to be known as “W. G.” He is distantly related to the painter, John Constable (1776-1837). Constable’s art history focused on connoisseurship. His 1938 book Art History and Connoisseurship is a reflection on the discipline based upon that method.

Selected Bibliography

Art Collecting in the United States of America; an Outline of a History. London: Nelson, 1964; Canaletto: Giovanni Antonio Canal, 1697-1768. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962; John Flaxman, 1755-1826. London: University of London Press, 1927; The Painter’s Workshop. London: Oxford University Press, 1954; Richard Wilson. London: Routledge & Paul, 1953.

Sources

Links, J. G. “G. W. Constable.” Burlington Magazine 118 (May 1976): 311-12; Pignatti, Terisio. Arte Veneta 30 (1976) 277-278; Dictionary of National Biography, 1971-1980, pp.171-2.

Connors, Joseph

November 8, 2023April 5, 2024

Full Name: Connors, Joseph

Other Names:

Joseph Connors

Gender: male

Date Born: 05 February 1945

Place Born: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), Baroque, Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, Renaissance, and sculpture (visual works)

Career(s): educators

Overview

Borromini and Italian Renaissance and Baroque architecture scholar, Professor, Columbia and Harvard Universities. Connors attended Jesuit Regis High School in Manhattan studying classical languages. He graduated from Boston College with an A. B. in 1966. He received a second B. A. from Clare College, Cambridge University on a Marshall Scholarship in 1968. There the lectures of Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner convinced him to become an art historian. At Clare, too, he met a Univeristy of Paris student studying English literature, Françoise Moison. The two married in 1969. Connors returned to Boston, teaching at the Boston Latin [high] School (alma mater of Bernard Berenson). He entered Harvard University for graduate work. Connors taught as an instructor at Harvard, 1974-1975 before joining the University of Chicago as an instructor in 1975. His Ph.D was awarded in 1978 on the thesis topic of the Casa Filippini, Rome under the supervision of James S. Ackerman. In only three years he was promoted to associate (tenured) professor at the University of Chicago in 1978. The Frank Lloyd Wright architectural monument, Robie House, located on the grounds of the University, was the subject of his first book, somewhat surprisingly since Connors was a Baroque scholar. In 1980 Connors returned to baroque Rome as a topic to publish Borromini and the Roman Oratory, receiving high acclaim. The same year, the new chair of the Columbia University department of art, Howard Hibbard, appointed Connors to associate professor of the faculty of art there. Connors advanced to full professor at Columbia in 1982. His Borromini book was awarded the Krautheimer Medal in 1984, a prize named for the architectural historian Richard Krautheimer. Connors accepted the director position of the American Academy in Rome in 1988, continuing to teach at Columbia until 2002. A large article, “Alliance and Enmity in Roman Baroque Urbanism,” 1989, was his next book-length publication (it was issued as a book in the Italian translation of 2005). Connors edited and issued a guidebook based on a Columbia University manuscript, “Description de Rome moderne” generally ascribed to Lievin Cruyl (ca. 1640-1720) as Specchio di Roma barocca: una guida inedita del XVII secolo, assisted by his former student, Louise Rice. In 1992 he was named Director of Villa I Tatti, the Renaissance research center housed in the former home of Berenson. He was succeded at the American Academy by Caroline Bruzelius (b. 1951). His paper, delivered at a joint conference of the British Museum and the Warburg Institute resulted in the 1992 essay, “Virtuoso Architecture in Cassiano’s Rome.” Together with Jennifer Montagu, Connors wrote an historiographical introduction on Rudolf Wittkower to the new edition of Wittkower’s Pelican History of Art on baroque Rome. In 2002 he assumed the directorship of Villa I Tatti, Harvard’s Renaissance research center near Florence, Italy, succeeding Craig Hugh Smyth. As director he founded the Craig Hugh Smyth Fellowship, expandingI Tatti’s library building and lecture space, and establishing the book series I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History. His wife acted as Coordinator of Cultural Affairs at the center. He retired from I Tatti in 2010, succeeded by Lino Pertile, returning to Harvard College to teach. Borromini and the Roman Oratory focuses on how the architect design his buildings to the musical needs of his patrons, the followers of San Filippo Neri and the new urbanism of the baroque. “Alliance and Enmity in Roman Baroque Urbanism,” was a major treatice on the change in urban space by the huge building programs–frequently expropriating property–of Roman churches and convents. This research was based upon extensive archival combing of numerous Italian licenze. “Virtuoso Architecture in Cassiano’s Rome” traced late Roman baroque architecture through the sesnibility of the curiosity cabinet. Connors’ intellectual lineage can be traced directly from Wittkower through Hibbard (Israëls/Waldman), demonstrated by his editing and introduction to two of Wittkower’s books (as well as possession of some of Wittkower’s treasured items from his personal library). He was a frequent contributor to book reviews in the New York Review of Books.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] The Casa dei Filippini in Rome. Harvard University, 1978;Borromini and the Roman oratory : style and society. New York: Architectural History Foundation/Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980; The Robie House of Frank Lloyd Wright. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984; “Alliance and Enmity in Roman Baroque Urbanism.” Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana 25 (1989), 207-294;edited. Cruyl,Lievin. Specchio di Roma barocca: una guida inedita del XVII secolo. Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 1991; “Virtuoso Architecture in Cassiano’s Rome.” in Jenkins, Ian, ed., Cassiano Dal Pozzo’s Paper Museum. vol. 2. London: Olivetti, 1992, 23-40; introduction. Borromini, Francesco. Opus architectonicum. Milan: Il polifilo, 1998; edited and introduction, with Montagu, Jennifer. Wittower, Rudolf. Art and architecture in Italy, 1600-1750. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

Sources

Israëls, Machtelt, and Waldman, Louis Alexander. “Introduction.” Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors: Toward a Festschrift. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2010.

Conisbee, Philip

November 8, 2023April 5, 2024

**Image Credit:** Antiques and the Arts Weekly

Full Name: Conisbee, Philip

Other Names:

Philip Conisbee

Gender: male

Date Born: 03 January 1946

Date Died: 16 January 2008

Place Born: Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK

Place Died: Georgetown, Washington, DC, USA

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Career(s): curators

Overview

Senior curator of European paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 1998-2008. Conisbee was the son of Paul Conisbee. Though born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Conisbee grew up in London. He attended St. Dunstan’s college, Catford before entering the Courtauld Institute, London. He received a B.A. in the history of European art in 1968 and worked on a dissertation on the painter Claude-Joseph Vernet, which he never completed. After part-time academic positions at the University of Reading and the University of London, he accepted a lectureship at Leicester University in 1971 (through 1986). His first exhibition, organized at Kenwood House, Hampstead, north London, 1976 was on Vernet. From 1978 until 1986, he taught a seminar annually on 18th- and 19th-century French art at the University of Cambridge. In 1985 he traveled to the United States as a visiting fellow at the Yale Center for British Art. He moved to America permanently the following year, joining the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, as an associate curator of French paintings. He married Susan Baer. In 1988, Alexander Powell III, then director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, lured Conisbee to California where the same year Conisbee mounted a Guido Reni show. Other exhibitions at LACMA included “The Golden Age of Danish Painting,” in 1993. When Powell moved to Washington in 1992 to head the National Gallery of Art, he called Conisbee to join him the following year. Conisbee, who had divorced, remarried the same year to the classicist and museum programs director Faya Causey, a former wife of the art historian Jiří K. Frel, and became a US citizen in 1994. His “Georges de La Tour and His World,” opened at the NGA in 1996. He was promoted to senior curator in 1998. The exhibition “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs,” which he mounted the same year drew crowds of almost half a million. Other high-profile shows he organized included “The Age of Watteau, Chardin and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting,” and “Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch,” both of 1999. In 2004 he was appointed a Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur (France). Conisbee and the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence, mounted “Cézanne in Provence” in 2006, another major draw for both museums. He co-authored of a book on Leon Kossoff’s drawings at the National Gallery in London in 2007. His work on a catalog of the permanent collection of French paintings from the 16th to 18th centuries at the NGA remained incomplete at the time of his death. He died at his home at age 62 of complications of lung cancer.

Selected Bibliography

Painting in Eighteenth-century France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981; Chardin. Lewisberg, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 1985; Cézanne in Provence. Washington DC: National Gallery of Art/Yale University Press, 2006.

Sources

[obituaries:] [assertions numerous obituaries that Conisbee was awarded a Ph.D. in obituaries are incorrect] Cropper, Elizabeth. “Philip Conisbee: British Art Historian at Home in America.” Guardian (London) March 13, 2008, p. 28; Johnson, Ken. “Philip Conisbee, 62, National Gallery Curator.” New York Times, January 25, 2008 p. C9; Schudel, Matt. “Philip Conisbee; National Gallery Curator.” Washington Post, January 19, 2008 p. B05; Rand, Richard. “Philip Conisbee (1946-2008).” Burlington Magazine 150 (May 2008): 329.

Condivi, Ascanio

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Condivi, Ascanio

Gender: male

Date Born: 1525

Date Died: 1574

Place Born: Ripatransone, Ascoli Piceno, Marches, Italy

Place Died: Ripatransone, Ascoli Piceno, Marches, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

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

Overview

Painter and purported author of an early and generally reliable biography of Michelangelo in 1553. Condivi came from a merchant family in Ripatransone where he was raised. He attended school there for five years beginning in 1537. He moved to Rome around 1545, where he met the senior Michelangelo and entered his workshop. During the same time that Giorgio Vasari wrote his first edition of his Le vite de più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori (Lives of the Artists), 1550, Condivi determined to write a biography solely of Michelangelo. This became his Vita di Michelagnolo Buonarroti, which appeared in 1553. Scholars today believe Michelangelo virtually dictated the entire text to Condivi (Gilbert). After a rich biography, Condivi ends with a series of anecdotes to illustrate the notion of respect that Michelangelo achieved in his own time. Vasari used Condivi’s Vita to rewrite and correct the account that had appeared his own book for a second edition of 1568. In one extant edition of Condivi’s book, an acquaintance clearly close to Michelangelo corrects some facts, giving us an account of the artist as well as recounting Condivi’s difficulty in separating the myths from the truth of the artist already with many legends around him. In 1554 Condivi married the niece of Annibale Caro (1507-1566), a friend of Michelangelo; possibly Annibale may have been the true author of the Condivi’s Vita. Condivi returned to painting in his home in Ripatransone in 1554. As an artist, Condivi had “an appalling degree of incompetence” (Wilde), even when Michelangelo assisted him. A Virgin and Child with Saints (after a cartoon by Michelangelo) is today housed at the Casa Buonarroti, Florence and a fresco is at the church of San Savio in Ripatransone. He died as the result of an accident in 1574.Condivi’s Vita contests the biography in the first edition of Vasari, including Michelangelo’s arrogance and homosexuality. Condivi’s contrived genealogy, though doubted by all scholars, attests to his closeness to Michelangelo, who, like Michelangelo, was self-conscious of his own illegitimacy. His omission of the artist’s training, both in Ghirlandaio’s studio and his contact with Bramante, continues the contemporary aura of Michelangelo as the complete, i.e., self-contained, genius. However, the one autograph letter known of Condivi shows a writer of significant inarticulation. The Vita‘s high literary qualities has suggested to some that the work was written or co-authored by Caro (Wilde). A promised edition of Michelangelo’s poetry by Condivi apparently never materialized.

Selected Bibliography

Vita di Michelagnolo Buonarroti. Rome: A. Blado,1553, English, Wohl, Helmut, ed. The Life of Michelangelo. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976.

Sources

Hauschke, Sven. “Condivi, Ascanio.” Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon 20: 500-501; Kultermann, Udo. Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte: Der Weg einer Wissenschaft. 2nd ed. Frankfurt am Main and Vienna: Ullstein, 1981, pp. 34-5; Gilbert, Creighton E. “Introduction.” The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti: Based on Studies in the Archives of the Buonarroti Family at Florence. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, p. xi; Wilde, Johannes. “Michelangelo, Vasari and Condivi.” Michelangelo: Six Lectures. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, pp. 1-16.

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