Art Historians

Wilde, Johannes

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Wilde, Johannes

Other Names:

Johannes Wilde

Gender: male

Date Born: 1891

Date Died: 1970

Place Born: Budapest, Czechoslovakia

Place Died: Dulwich, Southwark, London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, and Renaissance

Institution(s): Courtauld Institute

Overview

Michelangelo scholar and Deputy Director of the Courtauld Institute, professor 1950-58. Wilde was raised in Hungary. His parents were Richard Wilde (1840-1912) and Rosalie Somjágy (Wilde) (1854-1928). He attended the State Gymnasium in Budapest before the University of Budapest, 1909-1913 where he studied art, archaeology and philosophy, then one semester at the University of Freiburg before settling at the University of Vienna, 1915-1917. In Vienna he studied under Vienna-school scholar Max Dvořák, with whom he wrote his doctorate in 1918 on early Italian etching. Since 1914 he had been a volunteer at the department of prints at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. In 1918 he was promoted to Assistant Curator at the Museum. There he was a member of the so-called Budapest Sunday Circle (Budapester Sonntagskreis) whose members included Frederick Antal, Arnold Hauser and Charles de Tolnay. In 1922 he moved permanently to Vienna where he was an assistant at the Gemäldegalerie of the Kunsthistorischen Museums, under the direction of the talented Gustav Glück. In Vienna he collaborated with Karl Maria Swoboda in editing the collected works of Dvořák. In 1923 he became Assistant Keeper, then Keeper of the Gemäldegalerie, where he was an early exponent of the use of x-rays for painting conservation. He became an Austrian citizen in 1928. In 1930 Wilde married the art historian Julia Gyárfás (d. 1970). Although Wilde was Roman Catholic, his Jewish wife was in jeopardy when the Nazis rose to power in 1933. The couple left for Holland in 1939 and then, as guests of Kenneth Clark went to Aberystwyth, Wales, to consult for his former student, Antoine Seilern on his collection. Wilde also assisted in cataloging the pictures of the National Gallery, where the London paintings were stored for safekeeping. Wilde was asked by the Keeper of Prints and Drawings Hugh Popham of the British Museum to write a catalog of old master drawings at Windsor Castle in 1939. When World War II broke out, the Wilde’s were interned and deported to an alien camp in Canada for the years 1940-1941, erroneously charged with signaling enemy submarines. They returned to England in 1941 where Wilde resumed his work on the Windsor Castle catalog. At the same time he began lecturing at the Courtauld Institute. He became a Reader in the History of Art there in 1947. The following year he advanced to Deputy Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art which he held until 1958. He was professor of History of Art beginning in 1950. He became emeritus in 1958. His students included John Kinder Gowran Shearman and Eve Borsook.

Wilde published comparatively little and never allowed his lectures to be printed in his lifetime (his Michelangelo lectures appeared in 1978). Early on he was influenced by the work of the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), especially evident in Wilde’s empirical approach to studying the object (Shearman). Wilde’s scholarship on Michelangelo is some of his finest, his Windsor Castle collection catalog dispelled many myths about the artist. Wilde was an equal authority on Venetian art, a reputation he had already built during his years at the Gemäldegalerie in Vienna.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Die Anfange der italienischen Radierung. University of Vienna, 1918; “The Hall of the Great Council of Florence.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 7 (1944): 65-81; Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte: Studien zur abendländischen Kunstentwicklung. Munich: R. Piper, 1924; Geschichte der italienischen Kunst im zeitalter der Renaissance; Akademische Vorlesungen von Max Dvorák. Munich: R. Piper, 1926-27; edited, with Karl M. Swoboda, [works of Max Dvorák:] Das Rätsel der Kunst der Brüder van Eyck. Munich: R. Piper, 1925, and Popham, A. E. The Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle. London: Phaidon Press, 1949; Michelangelo’s “Victory”. New York: Oxford University Press, 1954; Venetian Art from Bellini to Titian. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974; Michelangelo: Six Lectures. Oxford Studies in the History of Art and Architecture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Sources

Clark, Kenneth. “Johannes Wilde.” Burlington Magazine 103 (June 1961): 205; 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. 87 cited; Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 2, pp. 767-773; [obituaries:] “Johannes Wilde Art Historian and Teacher.” The Times (London) September 15, 1970; p. 12; Hirst, Michael. Burlington Magazine 113 (March 1971): 155-7; Blunt, Anthony. Master Drawings 9 no. 2 (Summer 1971): 173-4; Shearman, John. “Johannes Wilde (1891-1970).” Akten des XXV. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte, Wien, 1983. Vienna: Böhlau, 1984, pp. 91-98.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Wilde, Eduard Leon Louis, de

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Wilde, Eduard Leon Louis, de

Other Names:

Eduard de Wilde

Gender: male

Date Born: 1919

Date Died: 2005

Place Born: Nijmegen, Gelderland, Netherlands

Place Died: Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

Home Country/ies: Netherlands

Overview

Director Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, 1946-1963; director Stedelijk museum Amsterdam (1963-1985). De Wilde attended high school at the Nijmegen Canisiuscolllege. After graduation he studied Law at Nijmegen University. He also trained to become a painter at the Amsterdam Rijksakademie. In September 1945 he joined the Stichting Nederlands Kunstbezit, which was assigned the task of recovering artworks stolen by the Nazis during World War II and returning them to their rightful owners. In 1946 De Wilde was appointed director of the Municipal Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. His exhibition program focused on international modern art. In the years of post-war reconstruction, De Wilde was also able to begin building up the museum collection with works of Dutch expressionism and De Stijl. From 1951 onwards he acquired paintings by Kokoschka, Kandinsky, Chagall, Picasso, Léger, Braque, and others. The controversial purchase, in 1954, of Picasso’s very expensive “Femme en vert,” from 1909, led to fierce public resistance. De Wilde also collected contemporary works by French painters, including Dubuffet. Another favorite was the Dutch epressionist Karel Appel. In 1963 De Wilde was appointed director of the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam, where he succeeded Willem Jacob Henri Berend Sandberg. Unlike Sandberg, De Wilde’s acquisition policy focused on contemporary painting from the 1960s onward. Besides an impressive exhibition program of international contemporary art, De Wilde acquired works of European artists, such as Appel, Baselitz, Dubuffet, Van Elk, Fontana, Kiefer, Klein, Long and Manzoni. An exceptional acquisition was the 1952 collage, “La perruche et la sirène”, by Matisse. American contemporary artworks by Kelly, De Kooning, Mangold, Nauman, Newman, Serra, and Tuttle became another substantial part of the collection. Willem de Kooning, whose 1963 “Rosy-fingered Dawn at Louse Point” was purchased in 1964, was De Wilde’s personal friend. In 1968 a major retrospective of De Kooning was held at the Stedelijk Museum. De Wilde regularly visited the artist in his studio in Springs, Long Island. De Kooning donated thirteen bronze sculptures to the Stedelijk. His painting “Morning, The Springs” was added to the collection in 1983, on the occasion of another solo exhibition, “Willem de Kooning. The North Atlantic Light 1960-1983”. During De Wilde’s tenure the museum went through a period of reorganization. In 1970 a research and documentation department was created. The van Gogh collection left the museum in 1973 to be housed in the new Van Gogh Museum. Wilde’s farewell exhibition, “La Grande Parade”, presented a panoramic view of painting from 1940 to the 1980s. Works of 40 prominent painters of that era were displayed in confrontation with each other. “La Grande Parade” gained national and international acclaim, but De Wilde’s selective choice of art works, as well as his subjective vision on painting, was criticized in the press. After his retirement, de Wilde remained active in the art scene. He organized a traveling Karel Appel exhibition in Japan, and, as a board member, he was involved in the creation of the Tilburg De Pont museum of contemporary art. In 1999 The Van Abbemuseum showed the artworks acquired by De Wilde between 1946 and 1963. De Wilde died in 2005. Two years later, the De Pont museum remembered him with an exhibition on Willem de Kooning. De Wilde’s authoritative judgments and subjective vision as a connoisseur have been criticized, but he was one of the most important directors of the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum (Van Adrichem).

Selected Bibliography

[exhibition catalog Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam] and Van Grevenstein, Alexander and Schampers, Karel. La Grande Parade. Hoogtepunten van de schilderkunst na 1940/Highlights in Painting after 1940. Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1984.

Sources

Wesseling, J. Art News 83 (November 1984): 153-154; Shone, Richard Burlington Magazine 127 (May 1985): 321-322; Mercillon, Henri. “Edy de Wilde. Interrogations et réflexions sur la gestion des musées d’art contemporain” Connaissance des Arts 400 (June 1985): 60-65; [obituaries:] Van Adrichem, Jan. “Edy de Wilde. Oud-musemdirecteur overleden” Stedelijk Museum Bulletin 6 (2005); Blotkamp, C. H. “In memoriam Edy de Wilde, 1919-2005” Bulletin Vereniging Rembrandt 16 (2006): 31-32; New York Times (November 25, 2005); Van Ouwerkerk, Jacqueline “Spraakmakende museumdirecteur. In Memoriam Edy de Wilde (1919-2005)” 8Weekly (December 5, 2005); Pingen, R. Jong Holland 22 (1, 2006): 42-44.

Contributors: Monique Daniels

Wight, Frederick Stallknecht Van Buren

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Wight, Frederick Stallknecht Van Buren

Other Names:

"Bill"

Gender: male

Date Born: 1902

Date Died: 1986

Place Born: Brooklyn, Cattaraugus, NY, USA

Place Died: Los Angeles, CA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Modern (style or period) and museums (institutions)

Career(s): artists (visual artists), authors, directors (administrators), gallerists, and museum directors

Overview

Artist, Professor of Modern art and Director, UCLA Art Galleries. Wight’s parents were Carol Van Buren Wight (b. 1875) a professor of classics at Johns Hopkins University, and Alice Stallknecht (Wight), an artist. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 1923, traveling to France to study painting at the Academie Julien, 1923-1925, as well as elsewhere in Europe. He married Joan Bingham in 1936. Wight began writing novels, South (1935), The Chronicle of Aaron Kane (1936) and Youth in Trust (1937). During World War II, Wight served in the U.S. Naval Reserves, 1942-1945, rising to a lieutenant commander. He participated in the Normandy landing, later transferring to the O.S.S., (Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency), stationed in London, Paris, and Wiesbaden. After discharge in 1945, he entered Harvard University for an M.A. in museology, taking the famous “museums course” under Paul J. Sachs and studying with Jakob Rosenberg. He curated the exhibition for the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, “Milestones of American Painting in Our Century,” wrting the catalog in 1949. Despite the catalog’s introduction written by Lloyd Goodrich, curator of the Whitney and an exponent of modernist art, the show was termed by Life magazine as a salvo against modern art. The article focused in part on the Institute’s name change from “Modern” to “Contemporary Art.” The article met with a firestorm of protest by major art museum directors, denying that Wight’s show was an attempt to revise modernism. Wight was appointed associate director of the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, under James S. Plaut, in 1950. By 1953 he had been appointed professor of art and director of the UCLA Galleries. As a lecture-professor, he taught the history of modern art. The following year he wrote the volume on Goya form the Abrams (publisher) Great Art of the Age series, one of the few books he wrote not functioning as an exhibition catalog. In 1963 he chaired the Art Department of UCLA (to 1966). While director of the UCLA Galleries, he assembled shows on Lionel Feininger, Arthur Dove, Sheeler, Marin, Graves, Hoffman, Modigliani, Picasso, Lipschitz, Stuart Davis, Matisse, Bingham, Arp, Marcks, Archipenko, Oldenburg, MacDonald-Wright, George Rickey, and June Wayne. As a professor of art, he painted and exhibited his entire life. He retired in 1972 and the art galleries at the University were renamed the Frederick S. Wight Art Galleries in his honor. His book The Potent Image: Art in the Western World from Cave Paintings to the 1970’s was issued in 1976. He died at age 84. Speakers at this memorial service in 1987 included the artists Richard Diebenkorn, William Brice. Wight built university’s art collection into one of national prominence, turning the UCLA Art Galleries into a central player in the development of Southern California as a major region for modern art exhibition and production. In particular, the development of the sculpture garden at UCLA, later named the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden after the University’s president was largely due to his skills as both a director and cultural leader. Wight had a very peculiar way of lecturing. “His habit of breaking up sentences with a string of ah-ah-ah-ahs would have been annoying except you knew he was building up to aesthetic punch lines that were either startlingly revealing or very funny” (Wilson). He was not a research scholar; his books on art approached their subject from vantage point of an artist.

Selected Bibliography

Milestones of American Painting in Our Century. New York: Chanticleer Press, 1949; Hyman Bloom. Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1954; Goya (Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes). New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1954; Arthur G. Dove. Berkeley:,University of California Press, 1958.

Sources

“Revolt in Boston.” Life February 21, 1949, pp. 84-89; reply “Revolt in Boston.” Life April 25, 1949, p. 22; Wilson, William. “Frederick S. Wight: Painterly Punch Lines.” Los Angeles Times August 3, 1986, p. T91; University of California, Berkeley, “Calisphere: In Memoriam for 1986” [website] http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb767nb3z6&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00126&toc.depth=1&toc.id=&brand=calisphere; [obituraries:] Folkart, Burt. A. “Built Prized Campus Collection – UCLA Art Professor Wight Dies.” Los Angeles Times July 29, 1986

Wiegand, Theodor

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Wiegand, Theodor

Gender: male

Date Born: 1864

Date Died: 1936

Place Born: Bendorf am Rhein, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany

Place Died: Berlin, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Anatolian (culture or style), Ancient Greek (culture or style), Antique, the, archaeology, Classical, Early Western World, Greek sculpture styles, Near Eastern (Early Western World), Pergamene (culture or style), and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Specialist in ancient Greek art and sculpture, and active archaeologist in Asia Minor, particularly at the Pergamon site. Wiegand excavated sites in Asia Minor with Hubert Knackfuss. Director of the antiquity section of the Prussian Museum in Berlin, 1911-1931. His students include Gerda Bruns.

Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 154-155.

Wiegand, Schreiber

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Wiegand, Schreiber

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Germany

Overview

Director of the Kunsthütte in Chemnitz (greater Dresden) in the 1920s. A conservative, he questioned the inclusion of German Expressionist artists in the traveling “Die neue Sachlichkeit” show originating from the Mannheim Kunsthalle, organized by Gustav Hartlaub. Wiegand felt the works in question were Bolshvistic. His requesting that these works be eliminated was an early example of politcal art censorship in Germany which climaxed with the Nazi attacks on modern in in 1933-1937.

Sources

Barron, Stephanie. “Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany,”in Barron, Stephanie, ed. Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991, p. 8.

Wiebenson, Dora

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Wiebenson, Dora

Other Names:

Dora Louise Wiebenson

Gender: female

Date Born: 1926

Place Born: Cleveland, Cuyahoga, OH, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Overview

Architectural historian. Wiebenson was the daughter of a building contractor, Edward Ralph Wiebenson, and his wife Jeannette Rodier (Wiebenson). After graduating from Vassar College with an A. B. in 1946 she entered Harvard University, securing a second Bachelor’s degree in Architecture in 1951. She moved to New York where she worked as a designer and draftsperson in various architectural offices in New York City between 1951 and 1958. That year she was awarded an A.M. from New York University, continuing for her doctorate. While working on her Ph. D., she acted as an independent architectural consultant in New York City. She wrote her dissertation under Walter F. Friedländer on the history of the Greek revival in architecture, receiving her Ph.D. in 1964. She edited the Institute of Fine Art’s periodical, Marsyas for 1965 (issues 1962-1964). She was appointed a lecturer in architecture at Columbia University in 1966. Wiebenson moved to the University of Maryland, College Park as an associate professor in 1968. She published a revised version of her Ph.D. thesis in 1969 as Sources of Greek Revival Architecture. In 1972 he accepted the position of professor of architectural history at University of Virginia, Charlottesville. She was director of the Society of Architectural Historians between 1974 and 1977. She was promoted to professor of architectural history and chair of division in 1977. The following year, her book on landscape architecture in France, The Picturesque Garden in France, appeared. She retired from the University in 1992. A Dora Wiebenson Graduate Student Prize was begun in 1999 by the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) in her honor.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Stuart and Revett’s ‘Antiquities of Athens’: the Influence of Archaeological Publications on the Neoclassical Concept of Hellenism. New York University, 1964; Sources of Greek Revival Architecture. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969; The Picturesque Garden in France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.

Wickhoff, Franz

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Wickhoff, Franz

Gender: male

Date Born: 07 May 1853

Date Died: 06 April 1909

Place Born: Steyr, Oberösterreich, Austria

Place Died: Venice, Veneto, Italy

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): Early Christian, Roman (ancient Italian culture or period), and Vienna School

Overview

Art historian of the Roman and early Christian period; founding member of the so-called first “Vienna School” of art history. Wickhoff was a student of archaeologist Alexander Conze and Moriz Thausing at the University of Vienna and the historian Theodor von Sickel (1826-1908), the latter the founder of historical “diplomatics,” the method for determining the authenticity of documents. In 1879 Wickhoff was appointed inspector at the Kunstgewerbe-Museum under Thausing. He met Giovanni Morelli, whose connoisseurship method of determining authenticity by identifying characteristic details of an individual artist Wickhoff took to new levels. Beginning in 1882 Wickhoff taught art history in Vienna as a professor, retaining his position at the museum. In 1895 he co-published his most important publication, Die Wiener Genesis, with Wilhelm August Härtel. Wickhoff was responsible for the analysis of the images and the extended introduction of the book, which constituted a discussion of the evolution of Roman art from Augustus to Constantine, and Härtel the description of the manuscript. Wickoff valued the illusionism that Roman art mastered, especially in portraiture, and the technique of continuous narrative, at a time when Roman art was not thought of as worthy of study. The same year, 1895, he resigned from the Kunstgewerbe-Museum and was succeed by Aloïs Riegl. Wickhoff’s influence was enhanced when Genesis was translated into English by Eugénie Sellers Strong and his theories spread among the British and American scholarly communities. In 1898 Wickhoff took as his assistant the young Max Dvořák, who would later join the faculty of the University as part of the “Vienna school” of art historians. Wickhoff severely criticized the early publications on Byzantine and Roman art of Josef Rudolf Thomas Strzygowski, as being poorly researched and thought out. Although others in the University, among them Riegl, who was now a professor there, had similar sentiments, it was Wickhoff’s attack on Strzygowski that would lead to political retributions after Wickhoff’s death. In 1905 he began a project as principal editor to publish the illuminated manuscripts in Austria, the Beschreibendes Verzeichnis der illuminierten Handschriften in Österreich, which continued after his death. In later years Wickhoff took up painting and writing literature, completing an unfinished novel of Goethe and amassing a vast personal library. A life-long bachelor, he was able to devote his entire life to the arts. His students, in addition to Dvořák, included Gustav Glück, Walter F. Friedländer, Wilhelm Reinhold Walter Koehler, Hans Tietze and (later “second Vienna School”) art historian Julius Alwin von Schlosser, who termed himself Wickhoff’s “Urschüler.” Wickhoff died in Venice and is buried on the island cemetery of San Michele. Wickhoff was succeeded by Strzygowski in a retaliative move, probably orchestrated by the Archduke, which continued the feud and bifurcated art teaching [see entries on Strzygowski and Schlosser]. Though Thausing established the “Vienna School” of art history, Wickhoff is consider the school’s true founder. His method joined archaeology, philosophy and connoisseurship into art history. His first interest was renaissance art and its relationship to the classical era. He was greatly influenced by Morelli, advancing Morelli’s techniques and defending him publicly at a time with museum directors such as Wilhelm Bode and Max J. Friedländer were attacking him. Morelli, who hated academic scholars generally, found less fault with Wickhoff than any of those who pursued his method. A scholar of Zeitgeist in art, Wickhoff considered that the art in the age of Titus had reached the acme of illusionism, a level, he contended, that would not be matched again until Velázquez. Most important, Wickhoff viewed Roman art not as a decadent reworking of the Greek tradition, which the 19th century had wholesale adopted from Johann Joachim Winckelmann, but as a worthy epoch unto itself with its own criteria of excellence. His work rehabilitated the study of early Christian art, outlining its unique narrative principles and elevating it to its own aesthetic. He criticized the periodization of art history, which he characterized as artificial to the works themselves, and the positivism of the 19th century which only appreciated art that appeared to progress technically. He was among the first to deplore the linear view of art history, which, he pointed out, served nothing more than the illusion that the art of the present day was the best. Wickhoff’s appreciation of Impressionism and, in Vienna the work of Gustav Klimt, at a time when it was not customary among the art-history community, was consistent with these ideals. His early recognition that the iron architecture of train stations and bridges was the bellwether of the modern age was years before architectural theory (Kultermann). Were that not enough, Wickhoff is also one of the founders of art history as the study of material cultures of all countries. His essay, “über die historische Einheitlichkeit der gesamten Kunstentwicklung,” (1898) and an article for the arts-and-crafts journal Die Jugend emphasized the value of studying non-western cultures and objects.

Selected Bibliography

[collected works:] Die Schriften Franz Wickhoffs. Edited by Max Dvorák. 3 vols. Berlin: Meyer & Jessen, 1912-74; and Härtel, Wilhelm Ritter von. Die Wiener Genesis. Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen der allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 15-16. Vienna: F. Temsky, 1895, English, Roman Art: Some of Its Principles and Their Application to Early Christian Painting. Translated by Mrs. S. Arthur Strong. London: Heinemann, 1900; [one of the editors for] Beschreibendes Verzeichnis der illuminierten Handschriften in Österreich. 8 vols. Leipzig: K. W. Hiersemann, 1905-1938; “Die Bilder weiblicher Halbfiguren aus der Zeit und Umgebung Franz I. von Frankreich,” Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses. 22, no. 5 (1901): 221-245; [edited and life of Romano] Dollmayr, Hermann. Giulio Romano und das classische Alterthum. Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1901; [completed ending] Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Goethes Pandora mit einem Schluss von Franz Wickhoff. Vienna: Gesselschaft für vervielfältigende Kunst, 1932; “Ueber die Zeit des Guido von Siena.” Mittheilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung 10 no. 2 (1889): 244-286.

Sources

Dvořák, Max. “Franz Wickhoff.” Biographisches Jahrbuch für Altertunskunde 14 (1912): , reprinted in Dvořák. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kunstgeschichte. Ed. (posthumous) by K. M. Swoboda and Johannes Wilde. Munich: Piper, 1929: 299-314; Kircher, Paul. Deutsche Kunsthistoriker seit der Jahrhundertwende. Dissertation, Göttingen, 1948, pp. 43-47; Dvořák, Max. Idealism and Naturalism in Gothic Art. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967, pp. 236-7; Brendel, Otto. Prolegomena to the Study of Roman Art, Expanded from “Prolegomena to a Book on Roman Art”. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979, pp. 25-41; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 32; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire d l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 156-158; German Essays on Art History. Gert Schiff, ed. New York: Continuum, 1988, pp. xlii-xlv, 282; Kultermann, Udo. The History of Art History. New York: Abaris, 1993, pp. 160-161; Williams, Shellie, “Franz Wickhoff.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, pp. 1192-93; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 466-68; Bianchi Bandinelli, Ranuccio. “Wickhoff, Franz.” Enciclopedia dell’arte antica, classica e orientale 7: 1218-1219.

Wichert, Fritz

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Wichert, Fritz

Gender: male

Date Born: 1878

Date Died: 1951

Place Born: Kastel bei Mainz, Hesse, Germany

Place Died: Kampen auf Sylt, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): German (culture, style, period) and Modern (style or period)

Overview

Director of the Kunsthalle, Mannheim; early exponent of modern art in Germany. Wichert attended various gymnasiums in Prussian cities where his father, Friedrich Wichert, was stationed as an officer in the Prussian military, together with his mother was Fanny Klumpp (Wichert). After receiving an abitur from the Wiesbaden Realgymnasium in 1899, studied art history and Philosophy at Freiburg, Basel (under Heinrich Alfred Schmid), Berlin and eventually again at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg, where he was awarded his Ph.D. in 1907. His dissertation, written under Heinrich Wölfflin, was on the topic of representation in medieval Italian art. Wichert joined the Städtische Galerie under its director, Georg Swarzenski. He married a Dutch woman, Margarete Brouwer (d. 1921) in 1908. Wichert contributed reviews to the Frankfurter Zeitung as well. In 1909 he became director of the Kunsthalle in Mannheim, Germany where he set about purchasing French and German art of the 19th and 20th century. Among his famous purchases was the Manet painting “The Execution of Maximilian.” He hired the young Gustav Hartlaub as a curator in 1913. The two mounted many epoch-making exhibitions of modern art and founding an association for art (Freien Bundes zur Einbürgerung der Bildenden Kunst). After the death of his first wife, he married a woman of English/Jewish extraction, Margarete Wetzlar-Coit in 1922. The following year he was called to be director of the Städelschule in Frankfurt, the art school for the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, succeeded at Mannheim by Hartlaub. Wichert transformed the school into the most important arts-and-crafts technical school in Germany (Wendland). Between 1924 and 1930 he was involved with historic preservation for Wiesbaden. With the Nazi’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, Wichert was denounced as a Bolshevik sympathizer for his modern art preferences. Pressures because of his wife’s Jewish background (her father was a baptized British Jew) forced her and his daughter to flee to England. Wichert allowed her to divorce him and assume the name Wickham in order to spare them anti-German prejudice. Wichert himself retired to Keiten auf Sylt in 1934. After the war, Wichert was elected mayor of Kampen auf Sylt. His two marriages resulted in six children.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Darstellung und Wirklichkeit: Ausgewählte Antikenaufnahmen als Spiegel des Sehens. Empfindens und Gestaltens in zwei Jahrhunderten italienischer Kunst. Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg im Breisgrau, 1907, published, Freiburg: Poppen, 1907; [excerpts:] Howoldt, Jenns E., ed. Fritz Wichert. Mannheim: Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim, 1978.

Sources

Wölfflin, Heinrich. Heinrich Wölfflin, 1864-1945: Autobiographie, Tagebücher und Briefe. Joseph Ganter, ed. Basel: Schwabe & Co., 1982, p. 495; Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 2, pp. 762-764; Fath, Manfred, ed. Kunst für alle! der Nachlass Fritz Wichert Stadtarchiv Mannheim [CD]. Mannheim: Brandt, 2003

Whittemore, Thomas

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Whittemore, Thomas

Other Names:

Thomas Whittemore

Gender: male

Date Born: 1871

Date Died: 1950

Place Born: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK

Place Died: Washington, DC, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), Byzantine (culture or style), Egyptian (ancient), Egyptology, Medieval (European), mosaics (visual works), and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Harvard Byzantinist and Egyptologist; discoverer of important mosaics at Hagia Sophia. Whittemore was the son of Joseph Whittemore, a prosperous dealer in real estate and insurance, and Elizabeth St. Clair (Whittemore). His grandfather and namesake was Thomas Whittemore (1800-1861), the famous Cambridge (MA) Universalist minister. Whittemore graduated from Tufts College in Massachusetts in 1894 with a bachelor’s degree in English. He remained at his alma mater teaching English for several years and taking graduate courses at Harvard through 1898. Beginning in 1902, he gave lectures on ancient and medieval art, which became solely art history by 1906. Whittemore met the charismatic art cognoscenti Matthew Stewart Prichard during Prichard’s brief tenure in the Museum of Fine Art, Boston. Prichard became the single strongest influence on Whittemore’s career. He introduced Whittemore to the work of Henri Matisse and Matisse and Whittemore became life-long friends. Prichard also appears to have ignited Whittemore’s interest in Byzantine art. Whittemore taught the Columbia University summer school of 1908 teaching English and art history. He and Prichard were again together in Paris in 1910 where he nursed Prichard through a long convalescence. In 1911 Whittemore left Tufts and became the American representative for the (British) Egyptian Exploration Fund, participating in the archaeological digs at Abydos and Balabish under Henri Frankfort. At the outbreak of World War I, he joined the French Red Cross, assisting Russian refugees fleeing German advancement. The plight of Russian refugees and expatriates would be a lifetime passion for him. He spent 1916 in Boston assisting the “Refugees in Russia” committee chaired by Elizabeth Carrington Read Cram (1874-1943), wife of architect Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942). He returned to Asia Minor to assist with relief work, returning to his interest in the Byzantine era. Whittemore taught art history at New York University between 1927 and 1929 at the rank of assistant professor. He contributed an essay in the 1929 volume edited by Frankfort, The Mural Painting of El-‘Amarneh. The following year, he established the Byzantine Institute in Boston with a research center in Paris and field office in Istanbul, drawing upon his inheritance for funding. While establishing a research library in his Paris office, he settled upon the idea of uncovering the Christian mosaics of the Hagia Sophia church (Ayasofya Müzesi) which had been covered over in 1849 by the initial restorers, the architects Gaspare Trajano Fossati (1809-1883) and Giuseppe Fossati (1822-1891) at the request of the sultan. He convinced Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (ca.1881-1938), the founder and president of the Turkish Republic, to allow him to uncover the mosaics in the (then) mosque beginning in 1931. Working during times of non-worship, Whittemore and two British mosaicists, Albert Lye and Robert Gregory, uncovered fragments of sixteen mosaic figures in the vault southwest of the gallery. In 1934 the Turkish Government made the Hagia Sophia into a secular museum and he could work more regularly. Over the next eighteen years, Whittemore revealed portraits of Emperor Leo VI (ca. 900 A.D.), Constantine the Great and Justinian II (995), Empress Zoë and Constantine IX (1042), John II Comnenus, Empress Irene, and their son, Alexius (early 12th century). Whittemore returned to the U.S. in the winter months (when it was too cold to work) to raise money for his project among the wealthy of Boston, emphasizing the Christian nature of its subject. Personally possessing a large collection Byzantine coins, Whittemore was made keeper of Harvard’s Byzantine coin collection in 1933. The same year his reports of his Hagia Sophia findings began publication, written by others including Prichard, but directed and from the evidence of Whittemore. Harvard named him a resesarch fellow in Byzantine art in 1938. The same year Whittemore hired a British sculptor and church restorer Ernest J. W. Hawkins as a technical advisor to the Hagia Sophia project. Hawkins cleaned the mosaics of the Deësis, the imperial portraits, and the saints on the north tympanum wall of the nave, emerging as a scholar in his own right. Whittemore continued working on the Hagia Sophia wall project through through World War II. He retired to honorary status from Harvard in 1942. In 1948, Paul A. Underwood, professor at Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, a research center run by Harvard University outside Washington DC, collaborated with the Institute in sponsoring a program for restoration of two other churches in Istanbul, the Chora (Kariye Camii) and the Theotokos Pammakaristos (Fetiye Camii). Whittemore’s efforts became a subject for the popular press; articles on him appeared in Time magazine in 1947 and Life magazine in 1950 with photos by Dimitri Kessel (1902-1995). In 1950, aged 79, while traveling to the Office of John Foster Dulles (1888-1959), then an advisor to the Secretary of State in Washtington, DC, Whittemore suffered a heart attack and died. He is buried Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, MA. His restoration work in Instanbul was continued by Underwood. Dumarton Oaks gradually assumed control of the Institute’s projects; the Institute’s library was merged into the École des Langues Orientales Vivantes in Paris, Bibliothèque Byzantine, Fonds Thomas Whittemore. Whittemore was likely a homosexual and never married. Though the Boston Herald declared him “the most important Byzantinist of [his] century,” Whittemore was more a catalyst for research and documenting-excavator than a scholar. As an achaeologist, he was careful to conserve his monuments and not “restore” them, i.e., not reconstruct or make them more attractive than the present state they were in. He saw to it his work was documented in casts and photography. His project trained other scholars and led to the 1937 architectural survey of the Hagia Sophia of William Emerson (1873-1957) and Robert L. Van Nice. His personality, at times abrupt and other times charming, attracted numerous literary portraits. A character modeled on Whittemore’s type, Professor Darchivio, appears in Edith Wharton‘s novel Glimpses of the Moon (1922); in Graham Greene’s “Convoy to West Africa,” (The Mint, no. 1 1946) where he is “X”; Evelyn Waugh recounted him as “Professor W.” in Waugh’s piece on the coronation of Haile Selassie. He also appears in Donald Downes The Scarlet Thread (1953) and Lord Kinross’ Europa Minor (1956). An intensely private person who left no personal papers or diaries, his personal correspondence remains part of his French library. A 1937 drawing of him exists by Henri Matisse.

Selected Bibliography

“The Minor Arts.” [typescript of a lecture] 1906, Isabella Steward Gardner Museum; “The Rebirth of Religion in Russia.” National Geographic November 1918; contributor, Frankfort, Henri, ed. The Mural Painting of El-‘Amarneh. London: The Egypt Exploration Society, 1929; text by Whittemore and others, [series] The Mosaics of St. Sophia at Istanbul: Preliminary Report on the Year’s Work, 1931-1932: The Mosaics of the Narthex. Paris: Byzantine Institute of America, printed by J. Johnson at the Oxford University Press, 1933, . . . Second Preliminary Report, Work Done in 1933 and 1934: the Mosaics of the Southern Vestibule, 1936, . . . Third Preliminary Report, Work Done in 1935-1938: the Imperial Portraits of the South Gallery, 1942, . . . Fourth Preliminary Report: Work Done in 1934-1938: the Deesis Panel of the South Gallery, 1952.

Sources

Collège de France, Bibliothèque Byzantine, Fonds Thomas Whittemore; “Saint Sophia: The Uncovering of the Mosaics Our Constantinople Correspondent.” Manchester Guardian December 11, 1933, p. 7; “Thomas Whittemore has been chipping away plaster walls off for 14 years.” Time January 27, 1947; Life December 25, 1950; MacDonald, William L. “The Uncovering of Byzantine Mosaics in Hagia Sophia,” Archaeology 4 no. 2 (Summer 1951): 89-103; Vryonis, Speros, Jr. “An Attic Hoard of Byzantine Gold Coins (668-741) from the Thomas Whittemore Collection and the Numismatic Evidence for the Urban History of Byzantium.” in Vryonis, Speros, Jr. Byzantium: its Internal History and Relations with the Muslim World: Collected Studies. London: Variorum Reprints 1971; MacDonald, William L. “Thomas Whittemore.” Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 4 (1974): 890-891; MacDonald, William L. “Whittemore, Thomas.” Dictionary of Art 33: 151-152; Labrusse, Rémi, and Podzemskaia, Nadia. ” Naissance d’une vocation: Aux sources de la carrière byzantine de Thomas Whittemore.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 54 (2000): 43-69; “Unveiling the Mosaics: Thomas Whittemore and his American Patrons.” chapter 7 of Nelson, Robert. Hagia Sophia, 1850-1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, pp. 155-166; [obituaries:] “Prof. Whittemore of Harvard Dead, Noted Archaeologist, Expert in Byzantine Era, Discovered Mosaics in Turkey Taught at Several Colleges.” New York Times June 9, 1950, p. 23; “Mr. Thomas Whittemore.” Times (London) June 9, 1950, p. 8; Boston Herald June 13, 1950; Isis 41, no. 3/4 (December 1950): 303; Forbes, E. W. Archaeology Autumn 1950; Lemerle, Paul. Byzantion 21 (1951): 281-283.

Whitley, William Thomas

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Whitley, William Thomas

Gender: male

Date Born: 1858

Date Died: 1942

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

Place Died: Farnborough, Bromley, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): British (modern)

Overview

Amateur art historian and authority on British artists. Whitley was son of William Whitley, a fabrics dyer, Mary Gilday (Whitley). After private education he joined his father’s business, though his real interests were to be a painter. Between 1887 and 1900 he exhibited landscapes and other works at the Royal Academy. In 1888 he married Mary Alford (1854/5-1931). Whitley began writing articles on British art in the Morning Post. More serious pieces also appeared in the Burlington Magazine, The Studio, and The Connoisseur. In 1915 he published his first monograph, Thomas Gainsborough. The success of this led to Artists and their Friends in England, 1700-1799 in 1928. Art in England, 1800-1820 appeared the same year, and, in 1930, Art in England, 1821-1837. He returned to artistic biography with Gilbert Stuart in 1932, and Thomas Heaphy (1933). Together with Ellis K. Waterhouse he curated an exhibition of British artists for the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1932. Although Whitley was awarded a civil pension for art-historical work, he died destitute in a county hospital. Artists and their Friends in England, 1700-1799 included contemporary newspaper articles and other documentary information of the artists. Although highly anecdotal, the book was an early one to look at contemporary documents of eighteenth century artists.

Selected Bibliography

and Waterhouse, Ellis, and Adams, C. K. Catalogue of an exhibition of the works of some neglected English masters, c.1750-c.1830 : [exhibition] Burlington Fine Arts Club. London : Priv. print. for The Club, 1932; Thomas Gainsborough. London, Smith, Elder & co., 1915; Art in England, 1800-1820. Cambridge, [England] : The University Press, 1928; Gilbert Stuart. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932; Artists and their Friends in England, 1700-1799. London/Boston: The Medici Society, 1928; An Eighteenth-century Art Chronicler: Sir Henry Bate Dudley, bart. Walpole Society 13 (1925).

Sources

Woodall, Mary. “Whitley, William Thomas.” Dictionary of National Biography; [obituary:] The Times (London) November 21, 1942, p. 6.

« Previous
1
…
21
22
23
24
25
…
252
Next »

Art Historians

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

General Citation

License

Sponsored by

General Citation

License

Sponsored by