Skip to content

Art Historians

Boase, T. S. R.

Full Name: Boase, T. S. R.

Other Names:

  • Thomas Sherrer Ross Boase

Gender: male

Date Born: 1898

Date Died: 1974

Place Born: Dundee, Scotland, UK

Place Died: Wimbledon, London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Christianity, Crusader (style), and Medieval (European)


Overview

Second director of the Courtauld Institute and scholar of the art of the Crusades. Boase was the son of Charles Millet Boase, a bleaching mill manager at near Dundee and Anne Malcolm Sherrer Ross. He attended Rugby School from 1912. A prize given for an essay on Lorenzo de’ Medici led to a scholarship at Magdalen College, Oxford. At Oxford he studied under the historian Francis Fortescue Urquhart (1868-1934), known as “Sligger,” whose method can be seen in Boase’s own work. Between 1917 and 1919 he served in World War I in the Oxford and Buckinghamshire light infantry, assigned to the front lines at St. Quentin and Cambrai, France, and awarded the Military Cross. ” Returning to Oxford, he studied modern history at Magdalen, receiving his degree in 1921, and advancing to a fellowship (teaching position) at Hertford College in 1922. One of his students was the future author Evelyn Waugh. A 1930 exhibition of Italian art at the Royal Academy awakened a love of Renaissance art. He became friends with the mounters of the exhibition, Kenneth Clark and Lord Balniel (David Lindsay, the future Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, 1900-1975). He also came into contact, likely through Clark and Balniel, with another British noble with art interests, Arthur Hamilton Lee (Viscount Lee of Fareham, 1868-1947). Boase’s initial publications were in history, a book on Boniface VIII in 1933, and another on Francis of Assisi in 1936. In 1937, W. G. Constable the founding director of the Courtauld Institute, resigned in a furor over the direction the Institute was taking, Boase was appointed to replace him. It was Boase’s lack on connection with the formal art-scholarship community that made him appealing to Lord Lee. Boase was concomitantly appointed to a chair in the history of art at the University of London, a position exacerbating his lack of a record of art-historical scholarship. The appointment was disparaged in an editorial by Herbert Read in the Burlington Magazine. What Boase lacked in formal art scholarship, he made up for in his understanding of educational systems. His connections with various international commissions, all working to relieve the plight of persecuted scholars under Nazi Germany, allowed him to continue the relationship with the Warburg Library and Institute, especially Fritz Saxl, which was eventually incorporated into the Courtauld in 1944. Boase changed the Courtauld’s admission policy to allow only the most serious students and modified the syllabus so that it encouraged detailed study of subject areas in as opposed to generalist training. Boase was close to Anthony Blunt, who would succeed him as director. The two shared living quarters in the Courtauld building, the famous Robert Adam structure at 22 Portman Square (they were both homosexuals). Boase himself contributed an article, “The Arts in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem” to the new combined organ of the two institutions, Journal of the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes in 1939. During World War II, he worked at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley, and later in Cairo. He met the actress Edith Margaret “Peggy” Ashcroft (1907-1991) during this time who became a lifelong friend. In 1945 returned to the Courtauld. In 1947, however, he accepted the presidency of his alma mater, Magdalen College, but not before successfully recommending Christopher Hohler as lecturer and Johannes Wilde as Reader to the Courtauld’s successor, Anthony Blunt. Blunt characterized Boase’s Courtauld administration as successfully convincing the University of London that the discipline of art history was worthy of both an undergraduate and post-graduate degree. In 1947, too, Boase was appointed a trustee of both the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He completed the manuscript for the volume on art and architecture of the crusader states, edited by Ken Setten (the delayed set published only posthumously in 1977). He became trustee of the British Museum in 1950. During this time he edited the Oxford History of English Art, writing the volume English Art, 1100-1216 in 1953, which began as the Waynflete lectures at Oxford. He was appointed vice-chancellor of the university for two years (1958-1960). While there he published the second volume in the Oxford History of English Art series, English Art, 1800-1870 in 1959. The book, focusing on Victorian art, examined a style still-disparaged in the mid-twentieth century. He was awarded a DCL from Oxford in 1960 and elected a fellow of the British Academy the following year. Castles and Churches of the Crusader Kingdom appeared in 1967. Ill health led to his retirement from Magdalen in 1968. In retirement, he wrote Kingdoms and Strongholds of the Crusades in 1971. In 1972 he delivered the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art, Washgington, D. C., which were published as his study on Vasari in 1979. He also wrote many entries for Hanns Hammelmann’s Illustrators in eighteenth-century England (1975). Boase died of cancer in the home he shared with his sister in 1974. Posthumously studies included an essay for a history of the Cilician kingdom of Armenia, 1978, as well as the Vasari lectures. Boase’s few students include the art historian Larry Ayres, who achieved his B. Litt at Oxford under Boase. Boase’s importance for art history was in his studies of Crusades art and architecture. Jaroslav Folda described his work as “the first general survey of Crusader monuments throughout the Levant.” In general, he devoted his time administration and service and his art histories are predominantly surveys, albeit serious ones, drawing upon the acknowledged research of fellow scholars and his previously published articles. His tenure at the Courtauld enlarged both the library and the staff and placed it on more respected academic grounding. Boase was portrayed in C. W. Crocker’s book Far From Humanism as the character of “the professor.”


Selected Bibliography

Edited, The Oxford History of Art. 10 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949, wrote, English Art, 1100-1216. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953, and English Art, 1800-1870. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959; Boniface VIII. London: Constable, 1933; Giorgio Vasari: the Man and the Book. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979; Castles and Churches of the Crusading Kingdom. London: Oxford University Press, 1967; edited and completed, Hammelmann, Hanns. Book Illustrators in Eighteenth-century England. New Haven, CT: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (London)/Yale University Press, 1975.


Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 510; Stoye, John. Dictionary of National Biography; Alexander, Jonathan J. G. “Thomas Sherrer Ross Boase, 1898-1974.” Proceedings of the British Academy 101 (1998): 353-362; Boase, Thomas S. R. [unpublished memoir], Magdalen College, Oxford University archives; Folda, Jaroslav “Introduction.” Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 12-14; Carter, Miranda. Anthony Blunt: His Lives. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2001, pp. 216, 219-220; [obituaries:] Zarnecki, George. “T. S. R. Boase.” Burlington Magazine 117, no. 873 (December 1975): 809; “Dr. T. S. R. Boase, Former President of Magdalen College, Oxford.” The Times (London) April 15, 1974, p. 8; [a particularly warm addendum] Blunt, Anthony. “Dr. T. S. R. Boase.” The Times (London) April 20, 1974, p. 14.




Citation

"Boase, T. S. R.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/boaset/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Second director of the Courtauld Institute and scholar of the art of the Crusades. Boase was the son of Charles Millet Boase, a bleaching mill manager at near Dundee and Anne Malcolm Sherrer Ross. He attended Rugby School from 1912. A prize given

Boas, George

Image Credit: John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

Full Name: Boas, George

Gender: male

Date Born: 28 August 1891

Date Died: 17 March 1980

Place Born: Providence, RI, USA

Place Died: Baltimore, Baltimore Independent City, MD, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Career(s): art critics

Institution(s): Johns Hopkins University


Overview

Philosopher and historian of ideas scholar; wrote early social histories of art. Boas was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the fifth of seven children of Herman Boas and Sarah Eisenberg (Boas). He attended Classical High School in Providence, RI, where his early interest in Greek and Latin grew. After graduation, Boas studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design under Henry Hunt Clark (b. 1875) and transferred to study English at Brown University, where he completed his B.A. and M.A. in 1913. He studied under the philosopher Josiah Royce (1855-1916) and received his second M.A. from Harvard University in 1915. Spending a further year at Columbia University, Boas then began teaching Forensic Logic and earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. His dissertation was titled An Analysis of Certain Theories of Truth, with the preface dated April 1917. During WWI, he volunteered for the U.S. army assigned to France and obtained the rank of Lieutenant. Upon demobilization, he returned to the University of California at Berkeley. He was then invited by historian Arthur O. Lovejoy (1873-1962) in 1921 to be a historian of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. The same year Boas married the sculptor Simone Brangier (1895-1981). In 1923, he co-founded the History of Ideas Club with Lovejoy, through which his studies on the history of philosophical conceptions influenced fellow scholars. His earliest foray into art writing came with his translation of Clemenceau’s book on Monet, 1930. He edited a book of essays on Courbet in 1938. As the U.S. entered WWII, Boas enlisted and was sent to England and Brussels. Serving as Commander in the Naval Reserve, he then became the ranking naval officer at Eisenhower’s Supreme Allied Headquarters. After Germany’s surrender, Boas was appointed to Belgium where he identified and ascertained artworks confiscated by the Germans. His contribution led to the return of a looted altarpiece by Jan van Eyck to the Cathedral of Ghent. Upon his return to Johns Hopkins University, he wrote one of the early works on social art history (Kleinbauer), discussing the reception of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa through the ages, in his 1950 book in criticism, Wingless Pegasus. He retired as an Emeritus professor in 1957. Boas settled down at Cherry Hill Farm, Baldwin, MD, and continued to be a dedicated scholar until his death in 1980.


Selected Bibliography

  • An Analysis of Certain Theories of Truth. Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1921;
  • French Philosophies of the Romantic Period. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1925;
  • The Major Traditions of European Philosophy. New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1929 [eissued as The Adventures of Human Thought;
  • translator, Clemenceau, George Eugène Benjamin, Claude Monet, the Water Lilies. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1930;
  • and Lovejoy, A. O., Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935;
  • “The Mona Lisa in the History of Taste,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1940;
  • Essays on Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages. New York: Octagon Books, 1948, 1966;
  • Wingless Pegasus, a handbook for critics. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1950;
  • Dominant Themes of Modern Philosophy, History. New York: Ronald Press Company, 1957;
  • The Inquiring Mind. La Salle, IL: Open Court Pub. Co., 1959;
  • Rationalism in Greek Philosophy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1961;
  • The Heaven of Invention. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1962;
  • The History of Ideas. New York: Scribner, 1969;

Sources

  • Gombrich, E. G. “In Memory of George Boas,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 42, no. 2 (1981): 335–354;
  • Hull, Richard T. “The American Philosophical Association Centennial Series,” The American Philosophical Association Centennial Series, 2013, 75–77;
  • 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, 89;
  • Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, 122;
  • Wiener, Philip P. “In Memoriam: George Boas (1891-1980),” Journal of the History of Ideas, 41, no. 3 (1980): 453–456.

Archives


Contributors: LaNitra Michele Walker, Lee Sorensen, and Siyu Chen


Citation

LaNitra Michele Walker, Lee Sorensen, and Siyu Chen. "Boas, George." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/boasg/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Philosopher and historian of ideas scholar; wrote early social histories of art. Boas was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the fifth of seven children of Herman Boas and Sarah Eisenberg (Boas). He attended Classical High School in Providence, RI,

Boas, Franz

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Full Name: Boas, Franz

Gender: male

Date Born: 1858

Date Died: 1942

Place Born: Minden, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): anthropology, indigenous art, indigenous people, and Native American

Career(s): educators


Overview

Columbia University anthropologist who wrote an early text on indigenous art forms. Boas was the son of Meier Boas and Sophie Meyer (Boas). He attended Bonn, Heidelberg, and Kiel universities studying physics, mathematics, and geography, the latter under the distinguished Theobald Fischer. Boas obtained his doctorate in physics at the University of Kiel in 1881. A non-religious Jew, he was fascinated by the theories of geographical determinism in Europe at the time. In 1883 he traveled to Baffin Island in the Northwest Territories (later Canada) making the observation that culture more than geographic situations determined indigenous art forms. Boas lived in New York (1885) before returning to Germany where he was appointed a privatdozent in geography at the University of Berlin. In 1887 he married Marie Krackowizer and became an assistant editor of Science Magazine in New York. The following year he began field studies on the area which would occupy him for much of his life, the Northwest Indian tribes. Between 1888-1892 he taught at Clark University. In 1891 he became an American citizen. The next year he was named curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1895. However, he was fired because of a personality dispute. In 1899 he was appointed a full professor of anthropology at Columbia University. Around 1900 Boas first put his mature ideas of folk art forth. Denying that abstracted animal forms of Inuit and African art were a degeneration of realistic representation, he hypothesized hunting peoples emphasized the important parts of an animal rather than represent it in linear perspective. Boas used his first-hand anti-semitic experiences to challenge racial and geographic theories for human accomplishment. Speaking in 1906 at Atlanta University, he decried American discrimination toward blacks as akin to Jewish prejudice. Boas developed an interest in folk traditions, editing the Journal of American Folklore from 1908 to 1925. As an anthropologist, Boas is best known for this 1911 book, The Mind of Primitive Man. Here he argued no racial group is genetically “pure” fending off warnings that immigrant would degrade the United States into a “mongrel nation.” Countering a prevailing notion in the United States that immigrants would pollute the American gene pool, Boas published a 1912 paper, “Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants,” in American Anthropologist which outlined immigrant populations changed as much with diet and surroundings as other groups. His opposition to U.S. participation in the war against his German homeland put his Columbia job in jeopardy. In the mid-1920s, Boas researched his book on the art of indigenous cultures, Primitive Art, appearing in 1927. In it, Boas underscored that differences between the art of the “primitive artist” and western art were due to the constraints imposed by culture rather than any lack of ability. In 1928, Boas’ Anthropology and Modern Life urged social scientists to be cautious of easy racial theories and be more investigative. As fascist Germany embraced the very racial theories Boas strove against, Nazis burned his books in 1933 at Kiel, where he had received his doctorate. However, he never forgot the racial laws in his adopted homeland. He retired in 1936. In a 1938 article in the Nation, he scorned the patriotism and nationalism in both Germany and the United States as “the herd instinct in man.” Boas suffered a heart attack at a faculty luncheon at Columbia in 1942. Boas’ students became the leading generation of anthropologists of the next generation, including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir, Zora Neale Hurston, Leslie Spier, Jules Henry, and Ashley Montagu. Boas was hostile to sweeping theories of human nature and society. According to “evolutionary” theories, human society evolved in stages and the so-called “primitive” peoples were therefore viewed as having been retarded in these stages. Boas disagreed strongly. He also took on the hypotheses of the Freudians, who traced the structure of modern society to prehistoric Oedipal guilt. In denying economic determinism, he took on most of the country. But his strengths were his weaknesses, many viewed him as incapable to arrive at conclusions that his immense data sets should have allowed. The art of the north-west coast, for example, was the attempt of the hunter/artist to represent as many characteristics of an animal as possible without regard to distortion of the image. An animal split down the middle and flattened depicting both side of a two-dimensional medium was more important than illustionistic representation. In this sense, his view of art is akin to that of Aloïs Riegl for Roman art.


Selected Bibliography

Facial Paintings of the Indians of northern British Columbia. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1898; Primitive Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927.


Sources

Moore, Jerry D. Visions of Culture: an Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists. 2nd ed. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press, 2004; Cole, Douglas. Franz Boas: the Early Years, 1859-1906. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999; Jonaitis, Aldona, ed. A Wealth of Thought: Franz Boas on Native American Art. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995; Sypher, Wylie, ed. “Franz Boas: Primitive Art.” Art History: an Anthology of Modern Criticism. New York: Vintage Books, 1963, pp. 3-25.


Archives


Contributors: Emily Crockett, LaNitra Michele Walker, and Lee Sorensen


Citation

Emily Crockett, LaNitra Michele Walker, and Lee Sorensen. "Boas, Franz." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/boasf/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Columbia University anthropologist who wrote an early text on indigenous art forms. Boas was the son of Meier Boas and Sophie Meyer (Boas). He attended Bonn, Heidelberg, and Kiel universities studying physics, mathematics, and geography, the latte

Boardman, John, Sir

Image Credit: Books to the Ceiling

Full Name: Boardman, John, Sir

Other Names:

  • Sir John Boardman

Gender: male

Date Born: 1927

Place Born: Ilford, Redbridge, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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


Overview

Classical art historian, specialist in Greek pottery. Boardman was born to Frederick Archibald Boardman and Clara Wells (Boardman). He graduated from Magdalene College, Cambridge with a B. A. in 1948. He served in the Intelligence Corps, British Army, 1950-52, rising to second lieutenant. In 1951 he was awarded an M.A. (his highest degree) from Cambridge in 1951. The following year he married Sheila Joan Lyndon Stanford. Boardman was named assistant director at the British School at Athens, Athens, in1952. He participated in the excavations at Chios, 1953-55. In 1955 he left to become the assistant keeper (curator) at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University. He was named reader in Classical Archaeology at Oxford in 1959. He was named a fellow (subwarden) at Merton College in 1963. Boardman worked on a second dig at Tocra, Libya for the 1964-65 season. He was Visiting professor, Columbia University, in 1965. Boardman was named a British Academy fellow beginning in 1969. In 1978 he became Lincoln College Fellow and Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art. He named professor of ancient history, Royal Academy of Arts, in 1990. In 1994 Boardman became professor emeritus at Oxford.


Selected Bibliography

The Archaeology of Nostalgia: How the Greeks Re-created their Mythical Past. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003; Archaic Greek Gems: Schools and Artists in the Sixth and Early Fifth Centuries B.C. London: Thames & Hudson, 1968; Athenian Black Figure Vases: a Handbook. London: Thames and Hudson, 1974; Athenian Red Figure Vases: the Archaic Period: a Handbook. London: Thames and Hudson, 1975; and Vollenweider, Marie-Louise. Catalogue of the Engraved Gems and Finger Rings [in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford]. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978ff.; The Diffusion of Classical Art in Antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994; and La Rocca, Eugenio. Eros in Greece. London: J. Murray, 1978; The Great God Pan: the Survival of an Image. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998; edited, Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae: (LIMC). 8 vols. (16 parts) Zürich: Artemis Verlag, 1981-1999; edited. and Griffin, Jasper, and Murray, Oswyn. The Oxford History of the Classical World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986; Pre-classical: from Crete to Archaic Greece. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967; The Parthenon and its Sculptures. London: Thames and Hudson, 1985; and Doerig, Jose, and Fuchs, Werner and Hirmer, Max. Die griechische Kunst. Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 1966, English, Greek Art and Architecture. New York: Abrams, 1967, [British title:] The Art and Architecture of Ancient Greece. London: Thames & Hudson, 1967.


Sources

[transcript] John Boardman. Interviews with Art Historians, 1991-2002. Getty Research Institute, Malibu, CA.




Citation

"Boardman, John, Sir." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/boardmanj/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Classical art historian, specialist in Greek pottery. Boardman was born to Frederick Archibald Boardman and Clara Wells (Boardman). He graduated from Magdalene College, Cambridge with a B. A. in 1948. He served in the Intelligence Corps, British A

Blunt, Wilfrid

Image Credit: Curtis Brown

Full Name: Blunt, Wilfrid

Other Names:

  • Wilfrid Blunt

Gender: male

Date Born: 1901

Date Died: 1987

Place Born: Ham, Richmond upon Thames, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Guildford, Surrey, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Career(s): curators


Overview

Art teacher, author and curator of the Watts Museum near Guildford. Blunt was born to Arthur Stanley Vaughan Blunt (1870-1929), an Anglican minister and Hilda Master (Blunt) (1880-1969). His father was the chaplain to the British Embassy in Paris. As his younger brothers did, Blunt received a scholarship to Marlborough College where he studied between 1914 and 1920. Blunt’s conservative views toward modern art were already in place. When Roger Fry mounted the first post-impressionist show at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1910, Blunt wrote of the paintings by Manet and Cézanne that they were “works of idleness and impotent stupidity, a pornographic show.” After a year at Worcester College, Oxford, he switched to the Atelier Moderne in Paris to become an artist. By the following year he was an engraving student at the Royal College of Art, London where he received an associates degree in 1923. At the College, he was befriended by Sir William Rothenstein. Blunt joined Haileybury College, Hertfordshire, as its art instructor (art master) in 1923. He spent the year 1933 on leave training as a concert singer in Italy and Germany, but pursued singing only avocationally. Europe broadened his cultural outlook enough that returning to a provincial boys school was not longer rewarding. Blunt researched and published on the architect William Wilkins (1778-1865), who had designed the buildings of Haileybury in 1806, publishing his Haileybury Buildings privately in 1938. The previous year, a family connection got him a position of second drawing master at Eton College. By this time, 1937, Blunt was opening up about his homosexuality. In 1950 Blunt wrote his most acclaimed book, The Art of Botanical Illustration together with the botonist William T. Stearn (1911-2001), for which he was awarded the Veitch Gold Medal from the Royal Horticultural Society. Stearn became one of Blunt’s close friends. At Eton Blunt encouraged italic handwriting, publishing the book Sweet Roman Hand on the subject in 1952. Blunt retired from Eton in 1959 and joined the Watts Gallery (Museum) in Compton, near Guildford, Surrey as a curator. Blunt took up writing, largely biographies, as a past time. Among his art-related biographies were The Dream King, of Ludwig II of Bavaria, (1970). Stearn and Blunt further collaborated on Captain Cook’s Florilegium (1973) and The Australian Flower Paintings of Ferdinand Bauer (1976). In 1976 he published Splendours of Islam, an art travelogue. When Blunt retired from the Gallery in 1983, he was allowed to live in the curator’s house until his death. He died of cancer four years later. His brothers were Christopher Evelyn Blunt (1904-1987), a noted numismatist, and Anthony Blunt the eminent art historian (and spy).


Selected Bibliography

Splendors of Islam. New York: Viking Press, 1976; and Petzet, Michael. The Dream King: Ludwig II of Bavaria. London: Hamilton, 1970.


Sources

[autobiographies:] Married to a Single Life: an Autobiography, 1901-1938. Wilton, Salisbury, Wiltshire: M. Russell, 1983, and Slow on the Feather: Further Autobiography, 1938-1959. Salisbury: Michael Russell, 1986; Stearn, William T. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Canfield, Cass. The Incredible Pierpont Morgan. New York: Harper & Row, 1974, p. 132; [obituaries:] The Times (London) January 12, 1987; The Independent January 13, 1987; Daily Telegraph January 11, 1987.




Citation

"Blunt, Wilfrid." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/bluntw/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Art teacher, author and curator of the Watts Museum near Guildford. Blunt was born to Arthur Stanley Vaughan Blunt (1870-1929), an Anglican minister and Hilda Master (Blunt) (1880-1969). His father was the chaplain to the British Embassy in Paris.

Blunt, Anthony

Image Credit: The British Academy

Full Name: Blunt, Anthony

Other Names:

  • Anthony Blunt

Gender: male

Date Born: 1907

Date Died: 1983

Place Born: Bournemouth, Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Career(s): educators


Overview

Historian of French and Italian art; Warburg Institute professor; director of the Courtauld Institute; Soviet spy. Blunt was born to minor privilege, his father, Arthur Stanley Vaughan Blunt (1870-1929), the chaplain to the British Embassy in Paris. His mother was Hilda Master Blunt (1880-1969). From early on, he gained an appreciation for French art and architecture. Like his brothers would, Blunt received a scholarship to Marlborough College. His first position, upon graduating from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1930, was as art critic for the (London) Spectator. In 1932 he was elected a fellow of the College, largely on the strength of his dissertation on artistic theory of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In his early newspaper reviews, he championed modern art. But ever more steadily persuaded by Marxism, he recanted his views by 1934 and staunchly wrote against it. It was during this period that he was recruited by the Soviet agent Guy Burgess. During the 1936-1937 academic year he resigned his fellowship at Cambridge to be a reader in the History of Art at the University of London and, in 1939, Deputy Director (and Reader) at the Courtauld Institute. Blunt shared living quarters in the Courtauld building, the famous Robert Adam stucture at 22 Portman Square with the director, T. S. R. Boase. In 1940 he joined the British counter-intelligence unit MI5, remaining in London with the unit throughout the war. It was during this period that Blunt is suspected of divulging important secrets to the Soviets while maintaining and outstanding scholarly career. The same year he published a portion of his dissertation as Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450-1600, still the finest introduction to the topic. The next year, in addition to many articles in the Warburg Journal, Blunt issued a book on the French architect Francois Mansart. Blunt left MI5 in 1945 and accepted appointment as surveyor of the King’s Pictures. He maintained this appointment until 1972. In 1947 he succeeded Boase as Director of the Courtauld Institute and professor at the University of London. At Boase’s suggestion, Blunt hired two of the Courtauld’s most famous (and radically different from Blunt) scholars, Christopher Hohler as lecturer and Johannes Wilde as Readers. The 1950s saw the completion of a volume of the Pelican History of Art series and an ever broadening stream of scholarship on Nicolas Poussin. He was knighted in 1956. Blunt wrote the catalog for the seminal Poussin exhibition at the Louvre in 1960. At the Courtauld, Blunt advanced George Zarnecki to be his deputy director in 1961. By the early 1960s, however, his spying secret was beginning to unravel. Forced by information uncovered by the United States FBI, Blunt signed a secret confession admitting to activities of treason. At nearly the same time, his comprehensive catalogue raisonné on Poussin appeared (1966) and Blunt was awarded an honorary fellowship at Trinity College the next year. Blunt lived quietly in the 1970s, turning his scholarly attentions to the rococo in several major monographs. He retired from director in 1974. However, in 1979 his complicity with the Soviets broke to the public, along with the disclosure of his homosexuality. Scandal resulted and he was stripped of both his knighthood and fellowship at Trinity. While at work on a book of Pietro da Cortona, Blunt unexpectedly died at his London flat. Blunt’s brothers were Wilfrid Blunt, also an art historian, and Christopher Evelyn Blunt (1904-1987), a noted numismatist. Dissertations supervised by Blunt include the one on Cubism by John Golding, and ones on 19th-century French art by Lee Johnson, and Phoebe Pool. The Cortona book was completed by Jörg Martin Merz in 2008. Blunt’s life was an astonishing combination of eminent art history and long-standing espionage. His scholarship on the Baroque remains among the finest in the English language. His opinions on Poussin were so respected that even the French deferred to his judgment for the 1960 Poussin show. The Louvre show spawned a professional rivalry with the other British Poussin scholar, Denis Mahon, fomented in Blunt’s rejection of Mahon’s re-dating of Poussin’s Roman work, exchanged publicly in the 1960 issues of the Burlington Magazine. Together with Mahon, and the less scholarly writers Sacheverell Reresby Sitwell and Tancred Borenius, they brought Poussin to popularity in Britiain.


Selected Bibliography

“El Greco’s ‘Dream of Phillip II’ “: An Allegory of the Holy League.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 3 (1939-40): 58-69; Artistic Theory in Italy: 1450-1600. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940; François Mansart and the Origins of French Classical Architecture. London: The Warburg Institute, 1941; The Art and Architecture in France: 1500-1700. (Pelican History of Art, 4) Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1953; “The Precieux and French Art.” in Fritz Saxl, 1890-1948: A Volume of Memorial Essays. Ed. Donald J. Gordon. London: 1957: 326-38;Philibert de l’Orme. London: 1958. The Art of William Blake. New York: Columbia University Press, 1959; The Paintings of Nicolas Poussin: Critical Catalogue. London: Phaidon, 1966; Nicolas Poussin. (Bollingen series 35, 7) (A.W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts, 1958) New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1967; Picasso’s ‘Guernica’. London: Oxford University Press, 1969; Neapolitan Baroque & Rococo Architecture. London: A. Zwemmer, 1975; andMerz, Jörg Martin. Pietro da Cortona and Roman Baroque Architecture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.


Sources

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. 4, 51 mentioned, 68 cited, 70 cited, 83 cited, 88 cited; Bazin 519-518; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 90 mentioned; Dictionary of Art 4: 182; Dictionary of National Biography, 1981-85: 41-43; Ellis Waterhouse. Introduction to Studies in Renaissance & Baroque Art Presented to Anthony Blunt on his 60th Birthday. London: Phaidon, 1967. Penrose, Barrie. Conspiracy of Silence: The Secret Life of Anthony Blunt. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987; Carter, Miranda. Anthony Blunt: His Lives. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2001.


Archives


Contributors: Emily Crockett, LaNitra Michele Walker, and Lee Sorensen


Citation

Emily Crockett, LaNitra Michele Walker, and Lee Sorensen. "Blunt, Anthony." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/blunta/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Historian of French and Italian art; Warburg Institute professor; director of the Courtauld Institute; Soviet spy. Blunt was born to minor privilege, his father, Arthur Stanley Vaughan Blunt (1870-1929), the chaplain to the British Embassy in Pari

Blümner, Hugo

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Full Name: Blümner, Hugo

Gender: male

Date Born: 1844

Date Died: 1919

Place Born: Berlin, Germany

Place Died: Zürich, Switzerland

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): archaeology and Classical


Overview

Classical archaeologist, art historian and successor to Karl Dilthey as professor at the University of Zürich, 1887-1919. Born the son of a policeman, Blümner studied archaeology at the University in Bonn under Otto Jahn, whose philology deeply influenced him. He taught initially at Breslau and Königsberg. In 1887 he succeeded Karl Dilthey as professor of classics at the university in Zürich. His most influential art-historical book appeared beginning in 1874 on the useful (or industrial) arts of Greece and Rome, Technologie und Terminologie der Gewerbe und Künste bei Griechen und Römern. In it, Blümner organized massive archaeological evidence on vases and other objects. He also wrote linguistic works on Pausanias (1896) and even a book on the metaphorical language of Otto von Bismarck. His examination of the private lives of the Greeks is an important work demonstrating both his deep knowledge of antiquity and powerful skills of analysis.


Selected Bibliography

Technologie und Terminologie der Gewerbe und Künste bei den Griechen und Römern, 4 vols in 3. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1875-1887; Die gewerbliche Thätigkeit der Völker des klassischen Alterthums. Preisschriften, Fürstlich Jablonowski’sche Gesellschaft zu Leipzig, number 15, 1869; Leben und Sitten der Griechen. Leipzig:G. Freytag, 1887, English, The Home Life of the Ancient Greeks. London: Cassell and Company, 1893.


Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 86-87;Calder, William. “Blümner, Hugo.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 1, p. 164.




Citation

"Blümner, Hugo." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/blumnerh/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Classical archaeologist, art historian and successor to Karl Dilthey as professor at the University of Zürich, 1887-1919. Born the son of a policeman, Blümner studied archaeology at the University in Bonn under Otto Jahn, whos

Blümel, Carl

Image Credit: Antike Welt (2003)

Full Name: Blümel, Carl

Gender: male

Date Born: 1893

Date Died: 1976

Place Born: Berlin, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

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


Overview

Specialist in ancient Greek and Roman art. Curator (1929-1935) and Professor (1935-39, 1944-61) at the Berlin Museum. Director of the antiquities collection at the Berlin Museum 1947-1961, Blümel was responsible for rebuilding the collection on the Museumsinsel (in East Berlin) after the war.


Selected Bibliography

Griechische Bildhauerarbeit. Ergänzungsheft 11. Jahrbusc des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1927. Der Hermes eines Praxiteles. 1948. Antike Kunstwerke. 1953. Phidiasische Reliefs und Parthenon-fries. 1957. Complete bibliography of Blümel was published in FuB 18, 1977, 219 ff.


Sources

KRG, 42; Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 260-261.




Citation

"Blümel, Carl." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/blumelc/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Specialist in ancient Greek and Roman art. Curator (1929-1935) and Professor (1935-39, 1944-61) at the Berlin Museum. Director of the antiquities collection at the Berlin Museum 1947-1961, Blümel was responsible for rebuilding the collection on th

Blum, Shirley

Full Name: Blum, Shirley

Other Names:

  • Shirley Blum

Gender: female

Date Born: 1932

Place Born: Petaluma, Sonoma, CA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Modern (style or period) and Northern Renaissance

Institution(s): State University of New York at Purchase


Overview


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] A Study of Fifteenth Century Netherlandish Triptychs. University of California, Los Angeles, 1964; and Coplands, John. Jawlensky and the Serial Image. University of California, Irvine, Art Gallery, 1966; Early Netherlandish Triptychs: A Study in Patronage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969; “The National Vietnam War Memorial,” Arts Magazine 49, (December. 1984): 124-28; and Delehanty, Suzanne. The Window in Twentieth-century Art. Purchase, NY: Neuberger Museum, State University of New York at Purchase, 1986; moderator, The Cool School, Morgan Neville, director. Arthouse Films, 2007.


Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 119; Nelson, Steffie. “Rebirth of the Cool.” Swindle no. 12, http://swindlemagazine.com/issue12/the-ferus-gallery; Klein, John. “The Dispersal of the Modernist Series.” Oxford Art Journal 21, no. 1 (1998): 132; McKenna, Kristine; Neville, Morgan. The Ferus Gallery. Steidl/Edition7L, 2008; personal correspondence, May 2009.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Blum, Shirley." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/blums/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Bluemel, Carl

Full Name: Bluemel, Carl

Other Names:

  • Carl Blümel

Gender: male

Date Born: 1893

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): ancient and Ancient Greek (culture or style)


Overview

Director of the Berlin State Museum and early examiner of material used by ancient Greeks. Bluemel weighed in on the controversial authenticity case of the Metropolitan bronze horse. The antiquities procurer John Marshall (1862-1928) had acquired a small bronze horse in 1923 for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1967, the museum’s financial director, Joseph V. Noble, and the curator in the Department of Greek and Roman Art, Dietrich von Bothmer, announced that the bronze was a forgery based upon stylistic grounds and gamma ray testing. Bluemel, however doubted their findings along with the curator of Greek and Roman Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Cornelius C. Vermeule III. When more sophisticated technical tests were performed, the work was proven to indeed have been 2000-4000 years old.


Selected Bibliography

Griechische Bildhauerarbeit. Ergänzungsheft 11. Jahrbusc des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1927.


Sources

KRG, 42; Tomkins, Calvin. Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2nd. ed. New York: Henry Holt, 1989, p. 133.




Citation

"Bluemel, Carl." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/bluemelc/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Director of the Berlin State Museum and early examiner of material used by ancient Greeks. Bluemel weighed in on the controversial authenticity case of the Metropolitan bronze horse. The antiquities procurer John Marshall (1862-1928) had acquired