Art Historians

Brown, J. Carter

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

**Image Credit:** Academy of Achievement

Full Name: Brown, J. Carter

Other Names:

John Carter Brown

Gender: male

Date Born: 1934

Date Died: 2002

Place Born: Providence, RI, USA

Place Died: Boston, Suffolk, MA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Overview

Third director of the National Gallery of Art, Washgington, D. C. Brown was descended from a long, distinguished family line beginning in 1638 in Rhode Island and for whose family Brown University is named. Brown’s father, John Nicholas Brown (1900-1979), was one of the wealthiest men in America and his mother, Anne Kinsolving, a musician and music critic. John Nicholas Brown attended the famous connoisseurship classes of Paul J. Sachs at Harvard classes with John Walker III, another future National Gallery of Art director and J. Carter Brown’s predecessor. J. Carter Brown attended an Arizona boarding school beginning at age nine, graduating to Groton in Massachusetts and then the Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, England, before entering Harvard University in 1952. Brown was thoroughly an art devotee by this time, decorating his college room with a Cezanne watercolor and a Matisse drawing. After receiving a B. A. and M.B.A. from Harvard he, elected to spend a year with the Harvard-trained art historian Bernard Berenson at Villa I Tatti, Florence. Brown pursued a Ph.D., at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York. In 1961 John Walker III, who knew Brown as a child from summers on Long Island, gave him a job as his personal assistant at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, where Walker was now director. In 1967 anticipating his own retirement, Walker put Brown in charge of the I. M. Pei-designed East Building expansion. In 1969, Walker retired and Brown was named Director. Brown married Constance Mellon Byers, a relative of Paul Mellon, Chairman of the Gallery’s Board of Trustees and a major donor, in 1971. They divorced in 1973. He later married Pamela Braga Drexel in 1976 in Westminster Abbey, London. As director, Brown set as his task to bring larger crowds into the nation’s museum. The 1976 exhibition “Treasures of Tutankhamun,” which he brought from the British Museum set the tone for subsequent shows which would attempt to catch the general public’s attention as well as the traditional art-goer’s. In this, he had a celebrated rivalry with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s director, Thomas Hoving, who also vied for blockbuster exhibitions. Among Hoving’s and Brown’s many disputes was with the show “The Splendor of Dresden: Five Centuries of Art Collecting” (1978). While Brown waited for the State department to normalize relations with the (then) East German government, Hoving negotiated directly and stole the show from the National Gallery. Only after Brown met with the Metropolitan Museum Board members C. Douglas Dillon and David Rockefeller did the museums agree to share the show. Other blockbuster shows at the National Gallery followed: “Rodin Rediscovered” (1981), “El Greco of Toledo” (1982) and “Impressionism to Early Modern Painting from the USSR” (1986). In 1987, Browne staged an exhibition of Andrew Wyeth’s “Helga” paintings, which drew criticism because, unlike earlier artists, Wyeth lacked the degree of importance within the art community. Criticism heighten when Wyeth’s wife implied during the opening that Helga was, in fact, her husband’s mistress. Undaunted, the Gallery resumed it’s pace, featuring “Japan: The Shaping of Daimyo Culture” (1988), “The Art of Paul Gauguin” (1989); and “Titian: Prince of Painters” (1990). But in 1990, the Gallery’s exhibition of the collection of Emil Buhrle, a Swiss industrialist who supplied weapons to the Nazis, again caused a furor. Brown’s marriage to his second wife ended in 1991. The next year, Brown mounted “Circa 1492: The Art of Exploration,” to mark the 500th anniversary of the official discovery of America. He unexpectedly announced his retirement after the exhibition, aged just 57. He was succeed by his former executive curator, then director of the Los Angelels County Museum of Art, Alexander Powell III. Brown’s retirement was marked by a particularly important event. As the continuing head the Commission on Fine Arts for Congress, he oversaw the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial and the commissioning a 21-year-old architecture student, Maya Lin. The work caused controversy because of its minimalist design. Brown rallied to the cause and prevailed in establishing one of the most moving war memorials in the world. Brown died of pulmonary failure after treatment for multiple myeloma, a terminal blood cancer. At his death he was engaged to Anne Hawley, director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Brown brought the “blockbuster”-style exhibition to the National Gallery of Art. He hired noted exhibition designers Gaillard F. “Gil” Ravenel and Mark Leithauser, to produce opulent spaces, crediting their work as crucial to the gallery’s success. Employees complained that his interest in mass appeal overshadowed other areas of the museum: conservation, education, the research center and library. He was frequently referred to as the “populist patrician” within Washington. In this he was a strong contrast to his predecessor, Walker, whom he concertedly ignored after his retirement. Michael Kimmelman’s obituary in the New York Times termed him an “unlikely figure to champion mass culture, with which he was eternally fascinated but sometimes charmingly unfamiliar.” Critics often seized on his uneven taste in exhibitions; the critic Robert Hughes acerbically referred to the “The Treasure Houses of Britain” (1985) show, one that picked through the great private homes of the England, as “Brideshead Redecorated.”

Selected Bibliography

Federal Buildings in Context: the Role of Design Review. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1995; Rings: Five Passions in World Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams/High Museum, 1996; and Whiteley, Jerry, and Garti, Ann Marie, and Walker, John. [videodisc] The National Gallery of Art. New York: Videodisc Pub., 1983; and Van der Marck, Jan. In Quest of Excellence: Civic Pride, Patronage, Connoisseurship. Miami: Center for the Fine Arts, 1984.

Sources

[obituaries:] “J. Carter Brown.” The Times [London], June 20, 2002; Kimmelman, Michael. “Carter Brown, 67, Is Dead; Transformed Museum World.” The New York Times June 19, 2002, p. 1;

Brown, Gerard Baldwin

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

**Image Credit:** National Galleries Scotland

Full Name: Brown, Gerard Baldwin

Gender: male

Date Born: 1849

Date Died: 1932

Place Born: Kennington, Lambeth, London, England, UK

Place Died: Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

Home Country/ies: Scotland

Subject Area(s): monuments, preservation (function), and protection (maintenance function)

Career(s): educators

Overview

First Watson Gordon chair of fine art at Edinburgh University (first chair of fine arts in the British Isles) 1880-1930; early monuments preservationist. Brown’s father was a minister, James Baldwin Brown (1820-1884) and his mother, Elizabeth Leifchild (Brown). His uncle was the sculptor Henry Leifchild (1823-1884). After attending Uppingham School, he earned a scholarship to Oriel College, Oxford, in 1869. He graduated with a degrees in classics in 1871 and literae humaniores (humanities) in 1873. Brown was appointed to a fellowship (teaching position) at Brasenose College, Oxford, the following year, where he met Walter Pater, also lecturing at Brasenose. However, in 1877 he left academia to study (studio) painting at the National Art Training School in South Kensington (today the Royal College of Art). In 1880 Brown was named the first chair in fine arts in the British lands, the Watson Gordon chair of fine art at Edinburgh University. He rented an apartment near the British Museum, marrying Maude Annie Terrell (d. 1931), a fellow artist, in 1882. Brown lectured mostly on Greek art in Edinburgh, at the time, the only art era considered worthy enough for academic study for undergraduates. However, his personal interests were in medieval ecclesiastical art. He published From schola to cathedral: a study of early Christian architecture and its relation to the life of the church in 1886. His article “The origin of Roman imperial architecture” was initially read as a paper at the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1889. Beginning in 1903, Brown published what would be his most important contribution to art history, his six-volume Arts in Early England. His The Fine Arts appeared in 1891 and went through numerous editions. Brown’s 1905 book The Care of Ancient Monuments was responsible for a royal commission to inventory ancient Scottish monuments in 1908, which Brown participated in. His book William Hogarth was published in 1905 and a similar treatment of Rembrandt was issued by Brown in 1907. In between continuing his volumes of Arts in Early England, he also wrote The Arts and Crafts of our Teutonic Forefathers (1910), and The Art of the Cave Dweller in 1928. Many of Brown’s book were illustrated by his wife. Brown was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1924. He died at his home in Edinburgh and was cremated. At the time of his death, he was working on the final volume Arts in Early England, which was completed by Eric Hyde (Lord Sexton), in 1937. Brown’s art-historical method was connoisseurship combined with an artist’s fascination of craftsmanship. His work was largely outdated at his death by more rigorous historical treatments. His raising of concern in preservation of ancient monuments is his greatest accomplishment to art history.

Sources

Macdonald, G. “Gerard Baldwin Brown, 1849-1932.” Proceedings of the British Academy 21 (1935): 375-84; The Times (London) 14 July 1932

Brown, Blanche R.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Blanche Rachel Levine Brown

Other Names:

née Blanche Rachel Levine

Gender: female

Date Born: 1915

Place Born: Boston, Suffolk, MA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Classical

Career(s): curators

Institution(s): Metropolitan Museum of Art and New York University

Overview

Classicist and curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1942-1967. Levine was the daughter of Samuel Levine and Bertha Nanes (Levine). She attended Wayne University (the modern Wayne State University) between 1932 and 1934 before switching to New York University. She graduated with a B. F. A in 1936, continuing for her master’s degree at the university’s Institute of Fine Arts with a thesis on Greek painted grave stelai, written under Karl Leo Heinrich Lehmann in 1938. She married the art historian Milton W. Brown the same year. She taught as an instructor at Vassar College and Hunter College during these years. In 1941, she and her husband, a nascent Americanist, bought a car and toured the United States seeking out American art for his upcoming book. Returning to New York, she joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, as a lecturer in 1942 while her husband and other museums staff served in the military. Assigned to the ancient collection, she worked closely with the Yale paleographer C Bradford Welles (1901-1969). Under the curator of Greek and Roman Art, Gisela M. A. Richter, she studied the collections carefully. She continued to work on her Ph.D. at the NYU on the collection of the Ptolomaic grave stelai at the Museum. Richter and museum director Francis Henry Taylor funded additional research in Egypt and Italy. Her degree was granted in 1967, her dissertation, Ptolemaic Paintings and Mosaics and the the Alexandrian Style published by the American Institute of Archaeology. The dissertation was supervised by Peter von Blanckenhagen and her readers included the distinguished classical-subject art historians Dorothy Burr Thompson and Dietrich von Bothmer. She had been appointed an associate professor at New York University in 1966, advancing to professor of art in 1973. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977.

Selected Bibliography

[master’s thesis:] Greek Painted Grave Stelai, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, 1938 (unpublished); “The Correlation of Literature and the Fine Arts.”
College Art Journal, 9, no. 2 (Winter, 1949-1950): 176-180; [dissertation:] Ptolemaic Paintings and Mosaics and the the Alexandrian Style. New York University, 1967, publsihed, Cambridge, MA: Archaeological Institute of America/Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1967; Anticlassicism in Greek Sculpture of the Fourth Century B.C. New York: New York University Press/Archaeological Institute of America/College Art Association of America, 1973;

Sources

John S. Guggenheim Fellows https://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/blanche-r-brown/

Broude, Norma

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Broude, Norma

Other Names:

Norma Broude

Gender: female

Date Born: 01 May 1941

Place Born: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): feminism and nineteenth century (dates CE)

Overview

Feminist art historian of nineteenth-century art. Broude’s parents were Jack Freedman and Cecile Goldman (Freedman). Freedman graduated from Hunter College, City University of New York in 1962 with an A. B. The same year she married Ronald Broude. Freedman, now Broude, continued on to Columbia University, using a Woodrow Wilson fellowship for the 1962-1963 year to write her M.A. in 1964. She wrote her dissertation under Theodore Reff on the proto-impressionist painters of Italy, the Macchiailoli, in 1967. After a year teaching as an instructor at Connecticut College, New London, CT, 1966-1967, Broude held a visiting assistant professorship at Oberlin College, Ohio, 1969-1970 and taught one semester at Vassar College, 1971, before returning to Columbia University as an assistant professor of art history in 1972. She joined the American University, Washgington, D. C., as an assistant professor in 1975. During this time Broude was elected to the Board of the College Art Association for the 1974-1978 term. She rose to associate professor of art history in 1977 and divorced in 1978. She was voted to a second term on the CAA board 1980-1983. American University appointed her full professor in 1978. During this time, Broude continued to be an outspoken voice for feminism. In 1980 when the conservative art critic Hilton Kramer (b. 1928) suggested that feminism eroded standards of greatness in art, Broude defiantly (and famously) wrote that the standards needed to change. Broude received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for the 1981-1982 year. Beginning in 1982, she collaborated with American University Renaissance art professor Mary D. Garrard (b. 1937), on a group of edited the collection of feminist essays, the first Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany. The book collected the pioneering feminist essays of the 1970s, including Broude’s, canonizng (for better and worse) these essays into the core statements on feminist art history. A revised version of her dissertation appeared in 1987. In 1991 Broude issued Impressionism: A Feminist Reading: The Gendering of Art, Science, and Nature in the Nineteenth Century. A second set of essays co-edited with Garrard, The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History was published in 1992. As a series editor for Rizzoli books, she personally wrote volumes on Georges Seurat and Edgar Degas in 1992 and 1993 respectively. A third co-edited work with Garrard, The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact was issued in 1994. Broude was a leading and vocal exponent of feminism. Feminism and Art History became a textbook for the teaching of an art history which incorporated women. She frequently found herself arguing this position on the pages of various scholar art publications, most often the Art Bulletin. Other feminists, for example Eunice Lipton, lamented her categories of masculine/feminine for art interpretation have been heavy handed. Indeed, Broude was characterized in 1987 as part of the “first generation” feminist art historian who worked within existing methodologies rather than adopting newer deconstructive ones (Gouma-Peterson and Mathews), an assertaion Broude disputed in a rejoinder. Broude held celebrated disagreements with the nineteenth-century-subject scholar Albert Boime.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] The Macchiailoli: Academcism and Modernism in Nineteenth Century Italian Painting. Columbia, 1967, published, Yale University Press, 1987; edited. Seurat in Perspective. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978; and Garrard, Mary, and Gouma-Peterson, Thalia, and Mathews, Patricia. “An Exchange on the Feminist Critique of Art History.” Art Bulletin 71 (March 1989):124-127; edited, with Garrard, Mary. Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany. New York: Harper & Row, 1982; Impressionism: a Feminist Reading: the Gendering of Art, Science, and Nature in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Rizzoli, 1991; edited, with Garrard, Mary. The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History. New York: IconEditions, 1992;

Sources

Gouma-Peterson, Thalia, and Mathews, Patricia. “The Feminist Critique of Art History.” Art Bulletin 69, no. 3 (September 1987): ; and Garrard, Mary, and Gouma-Peterson, Thalia, and Mathews, Patricia. “An Exchange on the Feminist Critique of Art History.” Art Bulletin 71 (March 1989):124-127; McCauley, Anne. “Review: State of the Art History.” Women’s Review of Books 10, no. 5 (February 1993): 8-9; Lipton, Eunice. “Feminism and Impressionism.” Art Journal 51, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 99-101, 103;

Brookner, Anita

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Brookner, Anita

Gender: female

Date Born: 16 July 1936

Date Died: 10 March 2016

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Chelsea, Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): eighteenth century (dates CE), French (culture or style), nineteenth century (dates CE), and painting (visual works)

Institution(s): Courtauld Institute

Overview

Historian of 18th and 19th century French painting. Brookner was born to Newson Bruckner, a Polish immigrant, and Maude Schiska (Bruckner), a British singer whose grandfather was originally from Warsaw, Poland. Fearful of the German-sounding last name, her mother changed their family name to Brookner as World War II began. Although secular Jews, the Brookners took in Jewish refugees fleeing the Germans during the 1930s and World War II. Brookner attended a private school, the James Allen’s Girls’ School. She received her B.A. from King’s College, University of London. Brookner entered the Courtauld Institute of Art where she obtained both her MA and Ph.D, the latter an expansion of the former on the painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze. In 1950 she was awarded a scholarship from the French government to the École du Louvre where she principally lived while writing her dissertation, supervised by Anthony Blunt, the Courtald’s director. She supported herself though numerous book- and exhibition reviews and translating both Italian and French books into English.

She began her teaching career as a lecturer on French art and culture at the University of Reading between 1959 and 1964. Returning to the Courtauld as a lecturer, which she never left. Brookner later became the first woman to be named to the Slade Professorship at Cambridge University teaching the academic year of 1967-1968. During that time she published a highly critical assessment on Michael Levey recent book as a letter in the Burlington Magazine (1967). In it, Brookner outlined the divergent methodologies between Levey’s conservative formalism and what in some senses could be called the New Art History. The following year she issued the first of her monographic examinations of French painters, with Watteau. A group of essays, first delivered as her Slade school address, appeared as The Genius of the Future: Studies in French Art and Criticism, published in 1971. Greuze: the Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-century Phenomenon followed in 1972, particularly well received by scholars. Brookner was raised to the rank of Reader (professor) at the Courtauld in 1977. A final work on a French painter, Jacques-Louis David, was published by her in 1980.

Brookner’s writing abandoned art history for the moment in favor of novel writing. Her 1981 A Start in Life, vaguely chartered the issues in her life. Her 1984 Hotel du Lac received the Booker Prize for that year. Though she continued to teach at the Courtauld, she devoted herself to novels over the next twenty years. She learned, only from a book on Blunt’s spy activity published in 1987, that she had been used as a courier by Blunt, although by that time under British government control (Wright). She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1990. Her final book of art history was launched in 2000, Romanticism and its Discontents, some essays from her Genius of the Future studies and additional critics. Her last novel was published in 2009, Strangers: a Novel. She died in London at age 87.

Anita Brookner presented a maverick’s view of art history while remaining in its mainstream. Early on she lamented, “the increasing stylelessness of writings on art history.” She frequently argued for art historians to avoid using art history to explain history, but rather to use history to explain art history. She deplored writing with a bias for some periods and antipathy for others, as her letter to Levey pointed out.

Selected Bibliography

translated, Crespelle, Jean Pau. The Fauves. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1962;
J.A. Dominique Ingres. Paulton, Nr, Bristol, England:: Purnell, 1965;”From Anita Brookner to Michael Levey–an Open Letter.” Burlington Magazine 109 (May 1967): 308-310; Watteau. London: Hamlyn, 1968 [8 pages];
The Genius of the Future: Studies in French Art and Criticism (1971)
Greuze: the Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-century Phenomenon. London: Elek, 1972;
Jacques-Louis David. London: Chatto & Windus, 1980;
and Mullins, Edwin. Great Paintings. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981
Romanticism and its Discontents. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000;novels
A Start in Life. London: Cape, 1981 [American edition] Debut. New York: Linden Press, 1981;
Hotel du Lac. London: Cape, 1984;
Strangers: a Novel. London: Fig Tree, 2009[and others}

Sources

[obituary:] Ward-Jackson, Philip. “Anita Brookner (1928-2016).” Burlington Magazine 158, no. 1359 (June 2016): 460-461;
Wright, Peter and Greengrass, Paul. Spycatcher: the Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer. New York, NY: Dell, 1988, p. 264;
Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. 17 Vols. Gale Research, 1998;
Malcolm, Cheryl Alexander. Understanding Anita Brookner. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2002
Valman, Nadia. Jewish Women Writers in Britain. Detroit : Wayne State University Press, 2014.

Broneer, Oscar

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Broneer, Oscar

Other Names:

Oscar Theodore Broneer

Gender: male

Date Born: 1894

Date Died: 1992

Place Born: Backebo, Sweden

Place Died: Corinth, Crete, Peloponnese, Greece

Home Country/ies: Sweden

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), architecture (object genre), and sculpture (visual works)

Career(s): educators

Overview

Architectural historian of ancient Greece, field archaeologist and University of Chicago professor; discovered the Sanctuary of Poseidon in Isthmia. Broneer was the youngest son of a Swedish farmer. As a child he labored on the family farm until age 18 when he and his brother left for the United States in 1913. He initially planned to remain in the U. S. only long enough to earn money return to Sweden and start a successful life. After a few years, Broneer attended Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois, now planning a career in the seminary. After college, he attended the University of California-Berkeley where he achieved his master’s degree in a year, continuing at Berkeley for his Ph. D. Broneer left Berkeley in 1927 to teach archaeology at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, focusing on the Roman Odeum at Corinth. In 1931 he received his Ph.D. from Berkeley writing on the topic of the Odeum. His research centered on terracotta lamps, ultimately realized in the first systematic typology of these ancient lamps. He served as acting director of the American School from 1940 to 1952. While in Athens, he excavated some of the Greek ruins for the University of Chicago, now a professor of archaeology and classical languages of that institution since 1948. In 1952, on the very first day of the dig, Broneer discovered the steps of what turned out to be the temple of Poseidon, the final of the four great Panhellenic shrines devoted to the Isthmian games. The others, at Olympia, Delphi and Nemea, had previously been discovered and excavated. He subsequently became the field director for the Isthmia site, remaining in charge of the dig until 1967. He conducted systematic excavations of the central plateau which revealed the temple, altar, surrounding buildings, and a Roman hero shrine. He also cleared the theatre, two caves used for dining, and two stadia used for the Isthmian Games. Broneer trained many of the next generation of archaeologists, including William B. Dinsmoor, Jr. In 1976, Elizabeth Gebhard succeeded Broneer as director of the University of Chicago. The American Academy in Rome established the Oscar Broneer Fellowship to assist young scholars of classical antiquity. He died of heart failure at his home in the ancient city of Corinth at age 97.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] The Odeum. Cambridge, MA: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Harvard University Press, 1932; and Blegen, Carl, and Stillwell, Richard, and Bellinger, Alfred R. Acrocorinth: Excavations in 1926. Cambridge, MA: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Harvard university press, 1930; The “Armed Aphrodite” on Acrocorinth and the Aphrodite of Capua. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1930; The South Stoa and its Roman Successors. Princeton, N.J. : American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1954; Temple of Poseidon. Princeton, N.J., American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1971; Terracotta Lamps. Cambridge, MA: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Harvard University Press, 1930; Topography and Architecture. Princeton, NJ: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1973.

Sources

[obituary:] “Oscar Broneer, 97 Archeologist Who Found Ancient Greek Shrine.” New York Times February 27, 1992, p. B7.

Brøndsted, P. O.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Brøndsted, P. O.

Other Names:

Peter Oluf Brøndsted

Gender: male

Date Born: 1780

Date Died: 1842

Place Born: Fruering Praestegaard, Jutland, Denmark

Place Died: Copenhagen, Hovedstaden, Denmark

Home Country/ies: Denmark

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), archaeology, ceramic ware (visual works), Classical, Greek pottery styles, and pottery (visual works)

Overview

Archaeologist, museum administrator and early scholar of Greek sculpture and vases. Brøndsted’s parents were Christian Brøndsted (1742-1823), a minister, and Mette Augusta Pedersen (1758-1832). He studied theology at the university in Copenhagen, graduating in 1802 and additional years studying philology at the same institution, for which he was awarded a gold medal in 1804. Through his friend, the philologist Georg H. C. Koës (1782-1811), he met Koës’ sister, Frederikke, whom Brøndsted became engagued. Brøndsted spent the years 1808-09 in Paris with Koës, preparing for a visit to Greece, their lifelong ambition. In 1809 the two traveled to Rome, then occupied by Napoleon, where they met the painter Jakob Linkh (1786-1841), the archaeologist and art historian Carl Haller von Hallerstein, and Baron Otto Magnus von Stackelberg (1787-1837). Together, this group made their way to Greece, their unifying ambition being to write a scholarly topographic and culture description of the country. In 1810 they settled in Athens, where the by Lord Byron, and the architect and architectural historian C. R. Cockerell and his companion John Foster (1887-1846), the latter two joining the group. Brøndsted left for Constantinople with Koës and Stackelberg while Haller, Linckh, Cockerell and Foster excavated the Temple of Athena at Aegina. Koës died of pneumonia in Athens (age 29). In the winter of 1811-12, Brøndsted excavated the sanctuary of Apollo at Kartheia at Keos with Linckh. He returned to Denmark in 1813 by way of Germany. In Copenhagen he was appointed extraordinarius (professor) in philology at the university. He married Frederikke, but she died at the birth of their third child. Brøndsted returned to Rome by 1819, he helped buy antiquities for the Danish king. His account of his trip and scholarship of the Parthenon began appearing in simultaneous German and French editions, beginning in 1825, with an English version planned but never published. A version in his native Danish appeared in 1844; the projected rest of the volumes were never completed. In 1831 his lecture given to the Royal Society of Literature was translated and published in French. In 1832 he became the director of the Møntkabinettet (Coins and Medals collection) in Copenhagen as well as ordinarius professor of philology and archaeology. In this year, too, his Brief Description of Thirty-two Ancient Greek Painted Vases appeared. In 1836 he was invited to become a member of the Society of Dilettanti in London, who published his The Bronzes of Siris. In 1842, at age sixty-one, he was thrown from a horse and died from those injuries.Brøndsted was the first Danish scholar to visit Greece for intellectual reasons. His gift for languages allowed his writing to be known within his lifetime in France, Germany and England.

Selected Bibliography

A Brief Description of Thirty-two Ancient Greek Painted Vases, Lately Found in Excavations Made at Vulci, in the Roman Territory, by Mr. Campanari, and Now Exhibited by Him in London. London: A. J. Valpy, 1832; The Bronzes of Siris Now in the British Museum: an Archaeological Essay. London: Society of Dilettanti/W. Nicol, 1836; Reisen und Untersuchungen in Griechenland, nebst Darstellung und Erklärung vieler neuentdeckten Denkmäler griechischen Styls, und einer kritischen übersicht aller Unternehmungen dieser Art, von Pausanias bis auf unsere Zeiten. 2 vols. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1826-30, Danish, Reise i Graekenland i aarene 1810-1813, udg. af N.B. Dorph. Copenhagen: Samfundet til den danske literaturs fremme, 1844; Me´moire sur les vases panathe´naïques: adresse´, en forme de lettre à M. W. R. Hamilton. Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1833; Interviews with Ali Pacha. Isager, Jacob, ed. Athens: Danish Institute at Athens, 1999.

Sources

Breve fra P. O. Brøndsted (1801-33). Clausen, Julius, and Rist, P. F, eds. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, Nordisk forlag, 1926; Christiansen, Jette. The Rediscovery of Greece: Denmark and Greece in the 19th Century. Copenhagen: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, 2000; Gertz, M. “Brøndsted, Peter Oluf.” Dansk biografisk Lexikon. vol. 3. pp-208-215; Isager, Jacob. “P. O. Brøndsted and Greece.” in, Brøndsted, Peter Oluf. Interviews with Ali Pacha. Athens: Danish Institute at Athens, 1999, pp. 13-23.

Brommer, Frank

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Brommer, Frank

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), architecture (object genre), Greek sculpture styles, and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Major scholar of the Parthenon sculpture; associated with the Nazi years of the DAI. During the years when the DAI (Deutsches Archäologisches Institut) in Athens was under Nazi control, he served there under Walther Wrede. He received his Ph.D., from the University of Munich. In 1956 he edited the Corpus vasorum antiquorum volumes of the holdings at the Schloss Fasanerie, Adolphseck. Beginning in 1963, Brommer undertook a systematic publication of the entire Parthenon sculpture. These appeared as Der Parthenonfries (1963), Die Skulpturen der Parthenon-Giebel (1963), and Die Metopen des Parthenon (1967). A summary volume was published in German and English in 1979.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Satyroi. University of Munich; Published as, Satyroi. Würzburg: K. Triltsch, 1937; Die Giebel des Parthenon: eine Einführung. Mainz: P. von Zabern, 1959; Die Metopen des Parthenon: Katalog und Untersuchung. 2 vols. Mainz: von Zabern, 1967; Herakles; die zwölf Taten des Helden in antiker Kunst und Literatur. Münster: Böhlau, 1953, English, Heracles: the Twelve Labors of the Hero in Ancient Art and Literature. New Rochelle, NY: A. D. Caratzas, 1986; Der Parthenonfries: Katalog und Untersuchung. 2 vols. Mainz: von Zabern, 1963; Der Gott Vulkan auf provinzialrömischen Reliefs. Cologne: Böhlau-Verlag, 1973; Die Skulpturen der Parthenon-Giebel. Katalog und Untersuchung. 2 vols. Mainz: P. v. Zabern, 1963; Die Parthenon-Skulpturen: Metopen, Fries, Giebel, Kultbild. Mainz am Rhein: von Zabern, 1979, English, The Sculptures of the Parthenon: Metopes, Frieze, Pediments, Cult-statue. London: Thames and Hudson, 1979; Vasenlisten zur griechischen Heldensage; Herakles, Theseus, Aigeus, Erechtheus, Erichthonios, Kekrops, Kodros, Perseus, Bellerophon, Meleager, Peleus. Marburg/Lahn: N.G. Elwert, 1956. ; Corpus vasorum antiquorum. Deutschland. Schloss Fasanerie (Adolphseck). 1956-1959. vols. 11, 16; Anekdoten und Aussprüche von deutschen Archäologen. Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1979.

Sources

Ridgway, Brunhilde Sismondo. “The State of Research on Ancient Art,” Art Bulletin 68 (March 1986): 9; “German Archaeological Institute — Athens.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 1, pp. 495; Brommer, Frank. Anekdoten und Aussprüche von deutschen Archäologen. Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1979.

Brom, Gerard Bartel

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Brom, Gerard Bartel

Gender: male

Date Born: 1882

Date Died: 1959

Place Born: Utrecht, Netherlands

Place Died: Nijmegen, Gelderland, Netherlands

Home Country/ies: Netherlands

Subject Area(s): aesthetics

Overview

Professor of aesthetics and art history (1923-1946) at Nijmegen University. Brom was named after his father, Gerard Bartholomeus Brom, a blacksmith of liturgical objects, who had died before Brom jr. was born. His elder brother, Jan Hendrik, took over his father’s firm. Brom, who was raised in a Catholic family, attended the Gymnasium of the Bisschoppelijk College in Roermond. After graduation he began medical studies in 1899 at Utrecht University, but a year later switched to Dutch language and literature. Following his graduation in 1905, he obtained his doctoral degree in 1907 with a dissertation on the Dutch writer and poet Joost van den Vondel, Vondels bekering (Vondel’s Conversion). In the same year he married Willemina Jacoba Struik. Until 1920 Brom occupied several teaching positions in high schools in the Netherlands, in Maastricht, Haarlem, and, after a two year stay in Italy, in Apeldoorn and Nijmegen, respectively. In 1916 he was one of the founders of De Beiaard, a Roman Catholic periodical, which Brom used to advocate for the emancipation of the Roman Catholics in the Netherlands. His moralistic views on the education of youth isolated him from his students and even aroused controversies. Convinced of the need for a Catholic university, Brom took an active part in the creation of the Catholic University in Nijmegen (1923), at which he soon was appointed extraordinarius professor of aesthetics and art history. In 1926 he obtained a full professorship. Brom first interest was literature, but his hope to become a professor in that field was not fulfilled until 1946. His writings on art history belie a predilection for cultural history (including literature) based upon stylistic periods and viewed through Catholicism. In 1926 he published a two-volume book, Romantiek en Katholicisme in Nederland, the first part of which was devoted to art. The following year, Hollandse schilders en schrijvers in de vorige eeuw (Dutch Painters and Writers in the Past Century) appeared. In 1933 he published a volume on the revival of sacred art in the Catholic Netherlands, Herleving van de kerkelijke kunst in katholiek Nederland. In addition to his writings on art he published on subjects mostly in relation with Roman Catholicism. In 1940 he was elected member of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen. Brom’s broad approach attracted students from different faculties. His own students were overwhelmed by Brom’s vast knowledge; however, he was successful in encouraging many of them to complete their studies with a dissertation. In 1946, after 23 years, Brom eventually gave up his position as art history professor to be appointed professor of Dutch and general literature at the same university. Frits van der Meer succeeded Brom as extraordinarius professor of Early Christian and Mediaeval art. In 1947 Brom’s former student J. J. Tikkanen obtained the position of extraordinarius professor of Aesthetics and the art history of the New Era. In 1952, Brom retired and moved with his wife to Wychen. Brom’s art history was a manifestation of cultural history, interpreted through a heavy lens of Rome Catholic doctrine. For Brom, spiritual meaning and iconography dominated interpretation, rather than aspects of style. His works today are seldom consulted.

Sources

Rogier, L. J. Herdenking van Gerard Brom. Jaarboek der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1959-1960, p. 345; Smits, K. Gerard Brom. in Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde te leiden 1960-1961. Leiden, 1961, pp. 42-49; Van Schaik, A. H. M. in Nederlands Biografisch Woordenboek 2, Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1985, pp. 68-71; Brom, G. Een katholiek leven: autobiografische aantekeningen, bezorgd door Pail Luykx en Jan Roes. Baarn: Arbor, 1987; Kroon, Theo J. Gerard Brom (literator en historicus). s.l., s.n. [1989?]; Kusters, Wouter. Gerard Brom. in Brabers, Jan and others, eds, Nijmeegse Gezichten. Vijfenzeventig Jaar Katholieke Universiteit. Nijmegen: Uitgeverij KU Nijmegen, 1998, pp. 30-39, 262.

Contributors: Monique Daniels

Brockwell, Maurice

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Brockwell, Maurice

Other Names:

Maurice Walter Brockwell

Gender: male

Date Born: 1869

Date Died: 1958

Place Born: Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Flemish (culture or style) and Northern Renaissance

Career(s): curators

Overview

Curator of the Cook Collection, Doughty House and Flemish art scholar. Brockwell was the son of the Reverend Cannon J. C. Brockwell of Sheffield Cathedral. He was educated at St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir School and Hurstpierpoint (preparatory school). He traveled widely in Europe, after which he secured a position with Charles Holroyd, Director of the National Gallery, rewriting official catalog entries. He also wrote a book for the Board of Trustees on the NGA’s Lewis bequest. He moved to Florence where he became the librarian at the Villa I Tatti and assistant to Bernard Berenson, then the leading scholar of the Italian Renaissance. In 1902, he married Mary Ellen Macnaughlen (d. 1952). Brockwell began article publishing, principally in the Atheneum, in 1906. He returned to England and compiled catalogs for the first of two Grafton Galleries shows under Roger Fry, the 1911 Old Masters. He met and became the collaborator of the aging William Henry James Weale, the seminal documentary scholar of Hubert and Jan van Eyck. He and Weale revised Weale’s 1908 book on the van Eyck in 1912, making many pronouncements–including the famous assertion that the National Gallery’s Arnolfini portrait is in fact a wedding document. Brockwell spoke the following year when the King of Belgium unveiled the Ghent altarpiece the following year. He also wrote a second catalog for the Grafton Galleries 1913 Spanish Painting exhibition. In the months before the outbreak of World War I, Brockwell compiled more than 200 brief biographies of artists for the German-language Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler, edited by Felix Becker and Ulrich Thieme. He traveled to the United States in 1917, remaining until 1920, writing the exhibition catalog for the American War Relief show (together with Osvald Sirén) and then the Italian collection for Philadelphia Museum of Art. Brockwell also provided art research for the American collectors J. P. Morgan (1837-1913) and Joseph E. Widener (1871-1943). He lectured widely in the U. S., writing the book Erasmus: Humanist and Painter there. In 1920 he returned to England were he accepted the position of curator of the Cook Collection, Doughty House, Richmond, Surrey. He continued his sideline of cataloging, traveling twice again to the U.S. to document private collections. In 1927 he was selected to organize the Royal Academy Exhibition of Flemish and Belgian Art, collaborating on the catalog, with scholars Martin Conway, Tancred Borenius, Campbell Dodgson, and A. F. Kendrick held at Burlington House. The van Eyck continued to fascinate him, though his judgments seemed to lead him ever farther from the mainstream. He denied the existence of Hubert van Eyck, a debate aligning himself with Émile Renders and against Erwin Panofsky. In 1952 he wrote the book Pseudo-Arnolfini Portrait, suggesting that the famous oil in the National Gallery was in fact a portrait of Jan van Eyck and his wife. Two years later he issued his own volume on their research, The Van Eyck Problem.Brockwell avoided esthetic judgments or analysis, preferring to focused on a factual approach to the history of art (Times). A dynamic and somewhat theatrical lecturer, he spoke without the use of notes. He vociferously castigated earlier authors in his field for sloppy scholarship and the tendency to accept if not downright fabricate stories about the painters. Perhaps because of a lack of a broad education, he was frequently blind intellectual arguments on art. As early as 1917, he convinced himself he had discovered a painting by Desiderius Erasmus in the St. Louis collection of Edward A. Faust. His theories on the van Eyck are largely interesting footnotes to the history of art history.

Selected Bibliography

The National Gallery: Lewis Bequest. London: George Allen & Sons, 1909; A Catalogue of an Exhibition of Old Masters in Aid of the National Art-Collections Fund. London: P. L. Warner/the Medici Society Ltd., 1911; and Sirén, Osvald. Catalogue of a Loan Exhibition of Italian Primitives: in Aid of the American War Relief. New York: F. Kleinberger Galleries, 1917; Erasmus: Humanist and Painter: a Study of a Triptych in a Private Collection. New York: Privately Printed, 1918; and Conway, William Martin, and Borenius, Tancred, and Dodgson, Campbell, and Kendrick, A. F. Catalogue of the Loan Exhibition of Flemish & Belgian Art, Burlington House, London, 1927. London, Country Life, ltd./The Anglo-Belgian Union, 1927; “Hubert van Eyck: A Myth.” Connoisseur 92 (August 1933): 109-110; The Pseudo-Arnolfini Portrait: a Case of Mistaken Identity. London: Chatto & Windus, 1952; The Van Eyck Problem. London: Chatto & Windus, 1954.

Sources

[obituary:] “Mr. Maurice Brockwell: a Devoted Student of Painting.” The Times (London) December 8, 1958. p. 15; addendum, Roe, F. Gordon. “Mr. Maurice Brockwell.” The Times (London) December 12, 1958, p. 15; Bedaux, Jan Baptist. “The Reality of Symbols: The Question of Disguised Symbolism in Jan van Eyck’s “Arnolfini Portrait.” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 16, no. 1 (1986): 5, note 1.

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