Art Historians

Behne, Adolf

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Behne, Adolf

Gender: male

Date Born: 1885

Date Died: 1948

Place Born: Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany

Place Died: Berlin, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

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

Overview

Architectural social-art theorist and historian. Behne was the son of architect Carl Behne. At age one, his family moved to Berlin where he grew up in the Centralviehhof district. After graduation from the local Gymnasium, he attended the Hochschule in Berlin-Charlottenburg intending on a career in architecture. In 1907 he switch to art history, studying at the Friedrich-Wilhelm Universität. After research in Italy in 1911, he completed his dissertation (granted in 1913), Der Inkrustationsstil in der Toskana (The Incrusted Style of Tuscany). His teachers included Heinrich Wölfflin and the philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel (1858-1918). He joined the faculty of the Hochschule and, as significant, began teaching in the adult education program, the Volkshochschule, part of a growing impetus to educate the populous outside the traditional academic system, the Volksbildungsbewegung. In his articles and lectures Behne urged the study of art for the less privileged classes of society. He was closely associated with Friedrich Naumann (1860-1919) and socialist journal Die Hilfe. In 1913 he married Elfriede Schneider, whom he met at a mathematics club at the university. Behne belonged to a group known as the Choriner Kreis (Chorin Circle), whose members included Max Beckmann and the architect Bruno Taut (1880-1938). Behne was one of the early writers to produce articles on the architect Peter Behrens (1868-1940) and Taut. Behne’s articles also appeared in the progressive journals Der Sturm, Dei Weltbühne, Sozialistische Monatshefte and Das neue Frankfurt. In 1915 Behne produced his first book, Zur neuen Kunst, a major treatise on modern art and particularly the nascent movement of German Expressionism. Behne’s 1917 essay “Das reproduktive Zeitalter” appears to anticipate the better-known (and later) theories on mass-produced images of Walter Benjamin (Bletter). He also wrote on the relatively new medium of the film. Like many intellectuals, Behne also embraced the First World War and its ideals for Germany. In 1919 he founded and headed the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Dialogue for Art) with Taut, Walter Gropius, Julius Meier-Graefe, Karl Ernst Osthaus, Wilhelm Worringer and others, a group that lasted until 1921. The group turned their attention toward experimental Soviet art of the era. He visited Russia in 1923, co-founding the Society of the Friends of the New Russia and participating in the first German art exposition in the Soviet Union. He was also the correspondent of the British magazine The Studio. During the same time he Behne remained highly interested in the functional structure of Architecture. In 1925 he published Der moderne Zweckbau (The Modern Functional Building, English translation, 1996), part of the series Die Baukunst, edited by Dagobert Frey. Zweckbau elucidated the many ideologies behind European modernism of the 1920s, such as Functionalism, Rationalism, etc. In 1929 he became the editor of the magazine Das neue Berlin which brought him familiarity with social artists such as Heinrich Zille. Behne’s Socialist thought apolitical stance was criticized by some. He himself engaged with Paul Westheim in questioning the museum policies of Ludwig Justi as too German-centric. Behne remained in Germany during the Nazi era, where he published books in Potsdam the series Kunst der Gegenwart. After the war Behne was recruited by the painter Karl Hofer to be professor at the newly reopened Hochschule für bildende Künste in Berlin. Behne summarized his findings on art, art history and the methods in the preface of the catalog of the 150 years exposition of social developing art in 1947. His lecturing included a book Entartete Kunst, an exposé of Nazi propaganda and defamation of the modern movement. Der moderne Zweckbau sets the contexts for modernist polemics of architecture. Unlike later theorists such as Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, and to a lesser extent Gropius, who all saw modern architecture as a “style” ( i.e., the International Style), Behne emphasized functional building as a set of ideologies. Der moderne Zweckbau draws on modernist architectural traditions from across the genres of the early twentieth century. Behne also criticized the heavy-handed socialist art of John Heartfield as being too political. For Behne, art had to appeal to the masses through psychology and not through the political straightjacket of propaganda.

Selected Bibliography

In Stein und Erz: Meisterwerke deutscher Plastik von Theoderich bis Maximilian. Berlin: Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft,1940; Das politische Plakat. Charlottenburg: Verlag “Das Plakat,” 1919; Entartete Kunst. Berlin: C. Habel, 1947; Die Wiederkehr der Kunst. Berlin: K. Wolff, 1919; Moderne Zweckbau. Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1926, English, The Modern Functional Building. Santa Monica, CA: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1996.

Sources

Bletter, Rosemarie Haag. “Forward.” Behne, Adolf. The Modern Functional Building. Santa Monica, CA: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1996, pp. 1, 4-8; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. 2nd. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007, pp. 21-23; Stonard, Jean Paul. Art and National Reconstruction in Germany 1945-55. Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 2004, p. 258.

Beger, Lorenz

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Beger, Lorenz

Gender: male

Date Born: 1653

Date Died: 1705

Place Born: Heidelberg, Saxony, Germany

Place Died: Berlin, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Classical

Career(s): librarians

Overview

Librarian and scholar of classical art. He served as librarian for Prince Karl Ludwig von der Pfalz from 1675 as well as conservator for the prince’s collection of coins and medals. In 1685, Berger began publishing these in his Thesaurus ex Thesauro Palatino Selectus. The arrangement of the gems was according to era (rulers), mythological subject. Bronze sculpture was also included in his publications. In 1693 Berger was appointed librarian of the coin, art and artifact collection of Frederick I of Prussia in Berlin. During this tenure, Berger acquired for the king the collection of Giovanni Pietro Bellori. Berger wrote proto-art histories on mythological themes appearing in art, including those on Meleager and the Trojan War. His greatest accomplishment in this area was his Thesaurus Brandenburgicus selectus (1696-1701). The work, considered by many to be the most important German work on classical art before Winckelmann, helped establish Berlin as a major art center for classical works.

Selected Bibliography

Thesaurus Brandenburgicus selectus, sive, Gemmarum et numismatum Graecorum in Cimeliarchio electoraii Brandenburgico: elegantiorum series: commentario illustratae. 2 vols. Coloniae Marchicae: Typis et impensis electoralibus, excudit Ulrichus Liebpert, 1696-1701; Thesaurus ex thesauro palatino selectus: sive, Gemmarum et numismatum qvae in electorali cimeliarchio continentvr elegantiorum aere expressa, et convenienti commentario illvstrata dispositio. Heidelberg: typis Philippi Delborn, 1685; Meleagrides et ætolia, ex numismate kypie[omega]n apud goltzium: interspersis Marmoribus quibusdam, de Meleagri interitu, & apri calydonii venatione : in lucem vindicatæ. Brandengerg: Typ. U. Liebpertus, 1696; Regum et imperatorum Romanorum numismata. Brandenberg: Ulrici Liebperti, 1700.

Sources

“Berger, Lorenz.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, pp. 137-8; Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988, pp. 1-2.

Beets, Nicolaas

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Beets, Nicolaas

Gender: male

Date Born: 1878

Date Died: 1963

Place Born: Jakarta, Indonesia

Place Died: Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

Home Country/ies: Indonesia

Subject Area(s): graphic arts, museums (institutions), painting (visual works), and prints (visual works)

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

Overview

Assistant-director of the Print Room of the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum (1913-1920); specialist in early Dutch graphic art and painting; art seller. Beets was born in Batavia, Indonesia which is present-day Jakarta. He was the only child of Dirk Beets and Clara Johanna van de Poll, and the grandson of the Dutch writer and poet Nicolaas Beets (1814-1903). He was raised in Batavia, then the capital of the Netherlands Indies. At the age of eight, he was sent to his mother’s family in The Netherlands, in Driebergen. Later, he moved to Utrecht, where he attended the Gymnasium, living in the house of grandfather Beets and his aunts Ada and Aleid. He subsequently studied Law at Utrecht University. In 1903, he married Gerardina Maria van Regteren Altena. After having finished his law study, in 1904, he decided to dedicate his life to art, and in that same year, he was admitted to the Amsterdam Print Room as a volunteer. In 1907 he obtained a regular position as an assistant, under the direction of Ernst Wilhelm Moes. By that time he already had began publishing a series of articles on the Antwerp painter Dirck Jacobsz Vellert in Onze Kunst. A number of contributions on his favorite painter, Lucas van Leyden, and other sixteenth-century Leiden artists soon appeared in various periodicals, including the Bulletin Nederlandse Oudheidkundige Bond and Oud Holland. He also did innovative research on drawings of Albrecht Dürer. In 1913 he wrote a monograph on Lucas van Leyden, published in French, Lucas de Leyde (Collections des Grands Artistes des Pays-Bas). In that same year, Beets obtained the position of assistant director. For the exhibition on early Dutch painting and sculpture, held in Utrecht in 1913, he wrote the catalog of drawings. He continued publishing on sixteenth-century artists in Oud Holland and foreign periodicals, even after he left the print room in 1920. He then set up his own art business, from 1946 onward in association with S. J. Fontein. He regularly traveled to Paris, London, and other major cities. In 1935, he wrote a contribution on Dutch painting in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Kunstgeschiedenis der Nederlanden, edited by H. E. Van Gelder. In 1940 a Dutch monograph on Lucas van Leyden appeared in the Palet series. He remained active in the art market for the rest of his life. Beets was a self-made art historian. From 1907 onward, the Leiden and Utrecht universities offered a regular curriculum in art history. By that time, Beets already had found his way to the Amsterdam Print Room. His 1913 essay on Lucas van Leyden is evidence of his critical scholarship. Using connoisseurship he described and analyzed the oeuvre of this artist, which was kept in numerous museums and collections all over the world. I. Q. van Regteren Altena did not hesitate to compare Beets with Max J. Friedländer, though he admitted that Beets’ innovative research occasionally had a speculative character, and that his contributions sometimes were questionable.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Van Regteren Altena, I.Q. Lijst van geschriften in Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde te Leiden 1964-1965; Lucas de Leyde. Brussels: van Oest, 1913; De Nederlandse schilderkunst der XVe en van het begin der XVIe eeuw in Van Gelder, H. E. ed. Kunstgeschiedenis der Nederlanden. Utrecht: W. De Haan, 1936; Lucas van Leyden. Amsterdam: H. J. W. Becht, 1940.

Sources

Van Regteren Altena, I.Q. Nicolaas Beets Oud Holland 78 (1963): 85-86; and in Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde te Leiden 1964-1965: 40-48.

Beenken, Hermann Theodor

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Beenken, Hermann Theodor

Gender: male

Date Born: 1896

Date Died: 1952

Place Born: Bremen, Germany

Place Died: Madrid, Spain

Home Country/ies: Germany

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

Overview

Historian of medieval and Renaissance art; among the key group of German art historians to recast the conception of the middle ages in their scholarship. The son of a salesman, Beenken studied in Freiburg and Munich, the latter where he wrote his dissertation under Heinrich Wölfflin on the topic of Enlightenment sculpture, Die allgemeine Gestaltungsproblem in der Baukunst des deutschen Klassizismus (1920). Afterward he turned his attention toward German sculpture of the Middle Ages. His habilitation Die Rottweiler: eine deutsche Bildhauerschule des 14. Jahrhunderts was written in Leipzig under Wilhelm Pinder in 1922. In 1924 he published Romanische Skulptur in Deutschland (11. und 12. Jahrhundert) his epic on Romanesque sculpture. An anticipated volume on the thirteenth century never appeared. A stipend at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence in 1925 allowed him to research Florentine architecture of the 11th century, as well as Masaccio, the brothers van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. The youngest lecturer in Leipzig (1927-1948), closely allied with Professors Leo Bruhn (1884-1957) and Theodor Hetzer he was made Ordinarius in 1932. In the mid-1930s, Beenken and Erwin Panofsky entered into a celebrated debate between the methods of connoisseurship and iconography as the most reliable way of interpretation and to determine authenticity. The battleground was the Ghent Altarpiece and the opening salvos came when Panofsky attacked Beenken’s 1933 analysis of the van Eyck work. The controversy ranged in print (see bibliography, below) until 1938. Beenken returned to medieval art with his book Meister von Naumburg in 1939. At the same time, Beenken’s research turned increasing to 19th-Century art, but his reputation in this area was thwarted by events. In 1943-1944 he finished a work on conception of buildings in the German Romantic era, Schöpferische Bauideen der deutschen Romantik, but was not published until 1952. His Das neunzehnte Jahrhundert in der deutschen Kunst (German Art and the Nineteenth Century), 1944, was overshadowed by the World War II and afterward by Hans Sedlmayr‘s conceptual book Verlust der Mitte of 1948. After the war, he moved to the Technical College of Aachen in 1949. He died during a study abroad in 1952. A portion of his archive is at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. Beenken ranks among the great German medievalists, whose members include Pinder, Richard Hamann, Panofsky, and Hans Jantzen. His heritage was that of the early art historians, such as Aloïs Riegl, Wölfflin and August Schmarsow, who used stylistic analysis to find spiritual meanings in art. He believed the “cultural sciences” could produce an overall historical image. In a memorial volume for the Harvard medievalist A. Kingsley Porter, Beenken argued for an internal logic of meaning derived from the shape of artworks. He expanded the term “style,” connecting it to peoples and cultures. Initially Beenken hoped that National Socialism would solve this problems that Capitalism and individualism had created for post-medieval art and society. However, Beenken later stated openly his hopes for Germany’s defeat; as victors, he declared, the Nazis would have been irresponsible.

Selected Bibliography

[Ghent Altarpiece debate:] (Beenken) “Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Genter Altars, Hubert und Jan van Eyck.” Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch (1933-34): 176-132.; (Beenken) “The Ghent van Eyck Re-examined.” Burlington Magazine 63 (1933): 64-72; (Panofsky) “The Friedsam Annunciation and the Problem of the Ghent Altarpiece.” Art Bulletin 18 (1935): 432-73; (Beenken) “Der Stand des Hubert van Eyck Problems: Fragen um den genter Altar.” Oud Holland 53 no. 1 (1936): 7-33; (Beenken) “The Annunciation of Petrus Cristus in the Metropolitan Museum and the Problem of Hubert van Eyck.” Art Bulletin 19 (June 1937): 220-41, (reply by Erwin Panofsky) “Once More the Friedsam Annunciation and the Problem of the Ghent Altarpiece.” Art Bulletin 20 (December 1938): 419-42; [other Beenken literature:] “Portrait of Perugino by Raphael.” The Burlington Magazine 66 (March 1935): 142; Romanische Skulptur in Deutschland (11. und 12. Jahrhundert). Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1924; Bildwerke des bamberger Doms aus dem 13. Jahrhundert. Leipzig: H. Schmidt & C. Günther, 1934; Hubert und Jan van Eyck. Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1941; Der Meister von Naumburg. Berlin: Rembrandt-Verlag, 1939; Das neunzehnte Jahrhundert in der deutschen Kunst: Aufgaben und Gehalte Versuch einer Rechenschaft. Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1944; Schöpferische Bauideen der deutschen Romantik. Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1952.

Sources

Wölfflin, Heinrich. Heinrich Wölfflin, 1864-1945: Autobiographie, Tagebücher und Briefe. Joseph Ganter, ed. Basel: Schwabe & Co., 1982, p. 489; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. 2nd. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007, pp. 18-2.

Beckwith, John

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Beckwith, John

Other Names:

John Gordon Beckwith

Gender: male

Date Born: 1918

Date Died: 1991

Place Born: Whitby, North Yorkshire, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Career(s): curators

Overview

Byzantinist and curator in the Department of Architecture and Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum 1948-1979. At age two Beckwith’s mother died and his father, John Frederick Beckwith, abandoned him. His father lived anonymously in London’s East end only discovered by Beckwith in his father’s final years. Beckwith was raised by his paternal grandmother in Whitby, North Yorkshire, until she died in Beckwith’s teens. Since Beckwith was Roman Catholic, he qualified for and was awarded a scholarship at Ampleforth College, a private Catholic boarding school also in Yorkshire. He entered Exeter College, Oxford University, where he read (majored in) History. Britain’s entry into World War II interrupted his studies. He joined the Royal Army infantry (Duke of Wellington’s regiment) and was severely wounded during the Normandy invasion, sustaining a permanent injury to his right hand. His brother was killed in action. After the war, Beckwith returned to Oxford where a friendship with the historian Gervase Mathew (1905-1976) instilled in him an interest in Byzantium and the lectures of expatriate Oxford art historian Otto Pächt in medieval art. Other close university friends included the future editor of Apollo, Denys Sutton, and future Byzantinist Ralph Pinder Wilson. A gifted linguist, he considered a career in the diplomatic corps, but a growing interest in art led to an appointment as Assistant Keeper in the Textiles Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1948. Beckwith remained at the V&A his entire career. He embarked upon a project cataloging the collection of Coptic textiles at the Museum, becoming an acknowledged expert in the field. In 1955 he moved to the Department of Architecture and Sculpture–without finishing his textiles catalog–under John Pope-Hennessy. Sculpture henceforth became his main topic of research and writing. He was appointed Deputy Keeper of the Department in 1958. A 1960 introduction to the Museum’s collection of Hispano-Moresque carvings, Caskets from Cordoba was notable. The first of two popular surveys, The Art of Constantinople, appeared in 1961. The comparative popularity of this book on imperial Byzantine art led to his broader 1964 introduction, Early Medieval Art. Another show of his authorship, the Art of Charlemagne in Aachen, a Council of Europe exhibition mounted in Aachen in 1965. The following year he acquired his most important work for the Museum, an ivory Anglo-Saxon reliquary cross. Visiting appointments included on at Harvard University’s Fogg Museum and Dumbarton Oaks. His first significant show on Byzantine art was mounted the same year. Beckwith, by his own admission, matured at the Museum through the collegial exchange with other V&A scholars, both senior and junior, who, in addition to Pope-Hennessy, included Terence Hodgkinson, and Michael Baxandall. Taking inspiration from the former V&A director, Leigh Ashton, he brought new, visually appealing exhibition techniques to the Museum. Beckwith’s ability to summarize art history led to the commissioning of one in the second set of commissions of the Pelican History of Art series (begun in the 1950s) under the direction of Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner. Early Christian and Byzantine Art, first issued in 1970, brought him a wider international audience. The sumptuous Ivory Carvings in Early Medieval England in 1972 remains his most important original work of scholarship. At the suggestion of the art historian (and Museum advisory board member) Kenneth Clark, it became an exhibition at the Victorian and Albert. In 1974 Beckwith was named Keeper, succeeding Hodgkinson. He spent the 1978-1979 year as Slade Professor [of art] at Oxford, before retiring in 1979. In retirement, Beckwith found his meager pension and loss of the museum limelight hard. He fell into depression and, like his estranged father, lived a life of reclusion in the London apartment of his former mentor, Pächt. Beckwith the museum curator was a showman, designing appealing exhibitions and placing objects contextually rather than by genre. Beckwith the art historian synthesized a great deal of knowledge into his writing, especially the religious and historical events. He was not an innovator (Runciman) nor have subsequent art histories built upon his scholarship. His attributions were often controversial, particularly those in Ivory Carvings in Early Medieval England. Beckwith’s method focused on the history of style and of patronage; he was known for vivid description of works of art (Kaufman). He never achieved a Ph.D. Together with Kurt Weitzmann and Fritz Volbach, he refined the canonical work of the great Adolph Goldschmidt in a series of detailed articles and monographs (Times).

Selected Bibliography

The Andrews Diptych. London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1958; Caskets from Cordoba. London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1960; The Art of Constantinople: an Introduction to Byzantine Art 330-1453. London: Phaidon, 1961 ; Early Christian and Byzantine Art. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. Ivory Carvings in Early Medieval England. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1972.

Sources

[obituaries:] “John Beckwith.” Times (London), February 27, 1991; Kaufman, Michael. “East and West in Ivory Carvings: Obituary of John Beckwith.” Guardian (London), February 25, 1991; Scarisbrick, Diana. Independent (London), February 25, 1991, p. 14; Runciman, Steven. “John Beckwith.” Burlington Magazine 133, no. 1058 (May 1991): 314-315

Becker, Felix

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Becker, Felix

Gender: male

Date Born: 27 September 1864

Date Died: 28 October 1928

Place Born: Sondershausen, Thuringia, Germany

Place Died: Leipzig, Saxony, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): biography (general genre)

Career(s): art historians and biographers

Overview

Co-editor of the magisterial dictionary of artists, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler. Becker studied art history in Bonn and in Leipzig as the assistant to August Schmarsow. He and Ulrich Thieme began work on a comprehensive dictionary of artists, architects and decorators in 1898. The first volume appeared in 1907. Becker withdrew from the project in 1910 because of ill health. Ironically Thieme preceded him in death in 1922 and the editorship was assumed by Hans Vollmer who saw the immense project to completion. Vollmer continued the initiative for a twentieth-century set, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler des XX. Jahrhunderts published between 1953 and 1962. A re-edition of the work began in 1983 in Leipzig, but the poor quality of this (published in the Communist DDR); resulted in the project’s revision and complete re-editing as the Saur Allgemeines Künstler-Lexikon, its successor.

Selected Bibliography

Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart: unter Mitwirkung von 300 Fachgelehrten des In- und Auslandes. 37 vols. Leipzig : E. A. Seemann, 1907-1950. ____ 0 – Metzler

Sources

Fork, Christiane. “Thieme, Ulrich.” Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. 2nd. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007, pp. 434-436.

Co-editor of the magisterial dictionary of artists, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler. Becker studied art history in Bonn and in Leipzig as the assistant to August Schmarsow. He and Ul

Beck, James

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Beck, James

Other Names:

James Beck

Gender: male

Date Born: 1930

Date Died: 2007

Place Born: New Rochelle, Westchester, NY, USA

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Career(s): art critics and educators

Overview

Columbia University professor of art history for Italian Renaissance; critic of vigorous art restoration. Beck was the son of Samuel Beck, a businessman, and Margaret Weisz (Beck). He studied history, political science and painting at Oberlin, graduating with a B. A. in 1952. He continued study in studio art at New York University, gaining his master’s degree in studio in 1954, and then studied at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence with the hopes of becoming a painter. There he met and married Darma Tercinod in 1956. He worked as a factory working in Woodstock, NY, 1956-1958 before teaching studio art and art history at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, 1958-1959 and the Arizona State University, Tempe, assistant professor of art through 1961. He entered Columbia University studying art history. Though Beck wrote his dissertation under Rudolf Wittkower, he was greatly influenced by the work of the Michelangelo scholar Charles de Tolnay, a Columbia visiting scholar. His thesis on Jacopo della Quercia was accepted for his Ph.D. in 1963; he was immediately appointed Assistant Professor at Columbia (1964) where he remained his entire career. After a Herodotus Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 1967, Beck became Associate Professor in 1969 and full professor in 1972. A Guggenheim Fellowship, 1973-1974, preceded his chairing Columbia’s Department of Art History and Archaeology from 1975 and 1981. A survey, Italian Renaissance Painting appeared in 1981. His next book, Doors of the Florentine Baptistery, 1985, met with critical acclaim. The 1986 cleaning of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, funded by Japanese television, alarmed him and a number of other art historians greatly. Beck publicly charged that the glue removed by the restorers was not a 17th-century addition as they thought, but part of Michelangelo’s practice. He further asserted the brightness of the cleaned fresco had effaced the shading of some of the figures and exposed the surface to modern pollution. Beck continued his criticism of Italian art restoration, decrying the 1990 restoration of the effigy of Ilaria del Carretto by Jacopo della Quercia (Lucca cathedral) to reporters from Il Tirreno (Livorno) and La Nazione (Florence), and later to La Stampa (Turin) and Il Giornale del-l’arte (Alessandria). The restorer launched a libel suit against Beck (carrying a three-year prison sentence), conviction of which Beck escaped by the narrowest of margins. In 1991 he published a catalogue raisonné on Jacopo della Quercia. The following year he founded ArtWatch International in New York, which monitors art restoration projects and destructive conservation practices. In 1993, Beck published an account of his legal battles over art restoration, Art Restoration: the Culture, the Business and the Scandal, co-written by his colleague Michael Daley. A lay text, Three Worlds of Michelangelo was issued in 1999. Beck published From Duccio to Raphael: Connoisseurship in Crisis, a book questioning the attribution of Raphael to the Madonna of the Pinks, National Gallery, and of Duccio’s attribution to the Stoclet Duccio (“Duccio Madonna”) to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He died of lung cancer in New York. His pupils included Lynn Catterson and Mark Zucker. Beck was an outspoken critic of aggressive restoration and art-market pressure to over-attribute Renaissance art. He wrote articles doubting the attribution of Raphael as the painter of Portrait of Pope Julius II, (National Gallery, London). His attack on the cleaning of the Giotto frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, included calling them a “Walt Disney version” of the master. When John Kinder Gowran Shearman wrote to the mayor of Padua, claiming that Beck’s opposition to the cleanings were “presumptuous” and “ignorant,” Beck threatened a legal suit. Later, after Kathleen Weil-Garris declared a small marble statue in New York the work of Michelangelo, Beck led the descent, along with other scholars, asserting the work to be 19th century. For all this, he suffered vicious professional abuse and ostracism within the New York’s art-world. However, some scholars such as Warburg Institute Director Charles Hope later wrote that Beck persuaded them that the Sistine’s cleaning was damaging.

Selected Bibliography

Dissertation: Jacopo della Quercia’s portal of San Petronio in Bologna. 2 vols. Columbia University, 1963; edited, Taccola, Mariano. Liber tertius de ingeneis ac edifitiis non usitatis. Milano: Il Polifilo, 1969; Jacopo della Quercia e il portale di San Petronio a Bologna: Ricerche storiche, documentarie e iconografiche. Bologna: Alfa 1970; edited, Raphael Before Rome. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1986; Jacopo della Quercia.[catalogue raisonné] 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991; (with Michael Daly Art Restoration: the Culture, the Business and the Scandal. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993; Raphael. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1994.

Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 416; Rosenbaum, Lee “Michelangelo/not Michelangelo: Possible Michelangelo Statue Discovered by Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt.” Art in America 84 (April 1996): 31; Who’s Who in American Art 22 (1997-98); [reference to Beck’s lawsuit with Shearman:] Masters, Christopher. “John Shearman: Art Historian who Conveyed the Excitement of the Renaissance.” The Guardian [London], September 6, 2003, p. 25; [obituaries:]”Professor James Beck, Scholar of Renaissance Painting and Sculpture who Spoke out Against Damaging Restoration Practices.” Independent (London), June 8, 2007, Cotter, Holland. ” James Beck, 77, Art Scholar And Critic of Conservation.” New York Times, May 29, 2007, p. 17, “Professor James Beck.” Times (London), May 29, 2007, p. 50.

Becatti, Giovanni

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Becatti, Giovanni

Gender: male

Date Born: 1912

Date Died: 1973

Place Born: Siena, Siena, Tuscany, Italy

Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): Classical

Overview

Art historian of classical art. Educated at the University of Rome under Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, Becatti was appointed to the Superintendency of Ostia in 1938 at a time when Mussolini sped up excavations in order to showcase them at the (unrealized) International Exposition in Rome. Becatti altered his publishing interests from Etruscan subjects to Roman Ostia as a result. He also contributed the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum volume on the museums of Duomo di Orvieto, Museo civico di Spoleto, Museo comunale di Terni, and the Museo comunale di Bettona. After the war, Becatti moved to chair the department at the University of Milan in 1953. He succeeded Bianchi Bandinelli in his positions both in Florence (1957) and the university in Rome (1964). Becatti continued to publish on and excavate Ostia throughout his career. He retired from teaching in 1969. He succeeded the editorship of the prestigious Enciclopedia dell’Arte Antica (1958-1966), also from Bianchi Bandinelli. He was a visiting professor in the United States at Princeton University and the University of Chicago. His studies of jewelry (Oreficerie antiche, 1955) are among his most frequently consulted. Becatti and Hans Jucker were among the first to trace the dependence of late Republican and early Roman Imperial art on Greek models.

Selected Bibliography

[collected articles:] Kosmos, studi sul mondo classico. Rome: Bretschneider, 1987;L’arte dell’età classica. Florence: Sansoni, 1971, English: The Art of Ancient Greece and Rome: from the Rise of Greece to the Fall of Rome. London: Thames and Hudson, 1968; L’arte romana. Milan: Garzanti, 1962; La colonna coclide istoriata; problemi storici, iconografici, stilistici. Studi e materiali del Museo dell’Impero romano 6. Rome: Bretschneider, 1960; Meidias: un manierista antico. Florence: Sansoni,1947; Oreficerie antiche dalle minoiche alle barbariche. Rome: Istituto poligrafico dello Stato, 1955; Corpus vasorum antiquorum. Italia. Musei comunali umbri. Rome: Libreria dello Stato, 1940.

Sources

Serra Ridgway, F. R. “Giovanni Becatti.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, p. 136; Brilliant, Richard. “Introduction.” Roman Art: from the Republic to Constantine. New York: Phaidon, 1974, p. 16, mentioned.

Beazley, J. D.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Beazley, J. D.

Other Names:

Sir John Davidson Beazley

Gender: male

Date Born: 1885

Date Died: 1970

Place Born: Glasgow, Scotland, UK

Place Died: Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Overview

Classical archaeologist; created the major index of Greek black-figure and red-figure pottery based on artistic styles. Beazley’s father was Mark John Murray Beazley (d. 1940), a London interior designer and Mary Catherine Davidson (Beazley) (d. 1918). After attending King Edward VI School, Southampton, he entered Christ’s Hospital and Balliol College, Oxford, where he was “much involved” (Boardman) with the poet James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915). Flecker wrote poetry dedicated to Beazley and the two enjoyed an aesthete lifestyle similar to their fellow Oxford student, Oscar Wilde. Another Oxford classmate, T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) (1888-1935), thought Beazley had the makings of a finer poet than scholar. However, Beazley was a brilliant scholar, taking firsts in classical moderations (1905) and literae humaniores (1907). He spent a year at the British School at Athens, under Richard McGillivray Dawkins (1871-1955), before returning to Oxford in 1908 as a student and tutor in classics at Christ Church. There he taught and inspired many students, among others Bernard Ashmole. Articles by Beazley on red-figure painters began appearing in 1910; his first on the Berlin Painter was published in 1911. During World War I, Beazley served in naval intelligence in London. In 1918 he published his book Attic Red-Figure Vases in American Museums which included a history of the genre and the artists’ works in the text. Beazley married Marie Bloomfield (d. 1967) in 1919, the widow of David Ezra, a casualty of the First World War. The domineering Marie took over all practical matters of his life, allowing Beazley to study Greek art completely. She also became an able photographer to assist his documentation of the objects. In 1925 Beazley succeeded Percy Gardner, who had trained him in Greek art, as Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Oxford. In that year, too, he published the first edition of what would be his major contribution to classical archaeology, in German, Attische Vasenmaler des rotfigurigen Stils, a categorical list of red-figure artist and their relationship to other artists. Throughout his career, Beazley would update these lists in newer editions. As a teacher, Beazley was famous for poetic flights, reading choruses of Aeschylus or Euripides to give the mood of a work of art. In 1927, the first of the Oxford fascicles for the Corpus vasorum antiquorum appeared. A second Oxford Corpus vasorum antiquorum was begun in 1931 written with E. R. Price and his former (and arguably his best) student, Humfry Payne. That same year he began publishing the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Attic Vase-Paintings in Boston with Lacey D. Caskey, a project that lasted until 1963. In 1932 he and Ashmole co-authored the survey volume Greek Sculpture and Painting. The English edition of his 1925 book of red-figure painters, Attic Red-figure Vase-painters, appeared in 1942. He was knighted in 1949. Beazley wrote his corollary book on black-figure painting, Attic Black-figure Vase-painters, in 1956. He retired from the Lincoln chair at Oxford the same year and was succeeded by Ashmole. The final version of his red-figure book appeared in 1963 as a three-volume work. In 1965 his personal archive was purchased by the University and, after his death, installed in the Ashmolean Museum as the “Beazley Archives.” He continued to write and update his volumes on Greek pottery the remainder of his life. Beazley’s increasing deafness in his final years isolated him from colleagues. He moved into the Holywell Hotel after Marie’s death in 1967. He died in Oxford in 1970. Beazley’s students numbered nearly all the important English-speaking vase specialists of the next generation as well as many other scholars. These included, among early students, Joan Evans, and V. Gordon Childe (1892-1957). Later students, in addition to Ashmole and Payne, included Dietrich von Bothmer and A. D. Trendall. Beazley considered the German scholars Adolf Furtwängler, Paul Hartwig and Friedrich Hauser his intellectual mentors. However, Beazley’s method was different from theirs. Using an approach first developed by Giovanni Morelli to attribute the specific “hands” (style) to specific artists, he looked at the sweep of classical pottery–major and minor pieces–to construct a history of workshops and artists in ancient Athens. His predecessor at Oxford, Gardner, purportedly distrusted the technique. The degree to which Beazley’s connoisseurship owes its origins to Morelli or Furtwängler has been debated. John Boardman postulates that it was Beazley’s friend and colleague at Cambridge, Andrew Gow (1886-1986), who introduced him fully to Morellian methods. Beazley had certainly read Furtwängler’s writings on Greek sculpture which used Morelli’s methods. An early review of Beazley’s Lewes House Gems (1920), anonymous but known to have been written by Gow, refers to the Morellian technique. Beazley’s earliest work on the Kleophrades Painter clearly owes its inspiration to Paul Hartwig (Oakley). Beazley used photographs, rather than published drawings, to construct his attributions of painters. He also drew many of the images personally for his archive. His articles first appeared (after an uncharacteristic piece devoted solely to iconography in 1908) in the Journal of Hellenic Studies in 1910 on individual red-figure painters. They form the beginning point for his classical pottery study. Although his books on Attic red- and black-figure painters are primarily lists, Beazley supplemented these by many articles on the stylistic analysis of the artists he classified. He was little interested in iconography. Critics of his method point out that much of his findings are based on his conjectural hypothesis of Attic workshops and schools.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography to 1950:] A List of the Published Writings of John Davidson Beazley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951; Attic Red-figured Vases in American Museums. (Red-Figured Vases in American Museums series). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918; Attische Vasenmaler des rotfigurigen Stils. Tübingen: Mohr, 1925, English, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1942, 2nd ed. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963; Attic Black-Figure: a Sketch by J. D. Beazley. (Annual lecture on aspects of art, Henriette Hertz Trust of the British Academy, 1928). London: H. Milford 1928; Der berliner Maler. Berlin-Wilmersdorf: H. Keller, 1930, English, The Berlin Painter. Mainz: Verlag P. von Zabern, 1974; and Ashmole, Bernard. Greek Sculpture & Painting to the End of the Hellenistic Period. Cambridge, Eng.: The University Press, 1932; Attic White Lekythoi. (Charlton Lectures on Art, 1937). London: Oxford University Press, 1938; Potter and Painter in Ancient Athens. (From the Proceedings of the British academy, 30). London: G. Cumberledge, 1946; Etruscan Vase-Painting. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947; The Development of Attic Black-Figure. (Sather Classical Lectures, 24). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951; Attic Black-Figure Vase Painters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956; Select Exhibition of Sir John and Lady Beazley’s Gifts to the Ashmolean Museum, 1912-1966. London: Oxford University Press/Ashmolean Museum, 1967; Greek Vases: Lectures by J. D. Beazley. Kurtz, D. C., ed. New York : Oxford University Press, 1989.

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. 46, mentioned; Dictionary of National Biography 1961-1970: 84-86; Kurtz, Donna, ed. Beazley and Oxford. Oxford: Oxford University Committee for Archaeology, 1985; [Beasley’s teaching style:] Barron, J. P. “Bernard Ashmole: Marble and the Greeks.” The Guardian (London), March 2, 1988; Calder, William. “Beazley, Sir John Davidson.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 1, pp. 135-6; Medwid, Linda M. The Makers of Classical Archaeology: A Reference Work. New York: Humanity Books, 2000 pp. 31-33; Boardman, John. The History of Greek Vases. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001, pp. 131-133; Rouet, Philippe. Approaches to the Study of Attic Vases: Beazley and Pottier. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; Oakley, John Howard. “Approaches to the Study of Attic Vases: Beazley and Pottier (review).” American Journal of Philology 124, no. 2 (2003): 307; Beazley Archive: http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/Pottery/Script/SirJB.htm; [obituaries:] The Times [London], May 7, 1970; von Bothmer, Dietrich. Oxford Magazine June 12 1970.

Beam, Philip C.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Beam, Philip C.

Other Names:

Philip Conway Beam

Gender: male

Date Born: 1910

Date Died: 2005

Place Born: Dallas, TX, USA

Place Died: Lewiston, Androscoggin, ME, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Overview

Winslow Homer scholar and professor of art, Bowdoin College, 1936-1978. Beam’s parents were Millard Filmore Beam and Georgia Bettye Avera (Beam). He graduated from Harvard University, cum laude in 1933, joining the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art (later Nelson-Atkins Museum) in Kansas City, MO, the same year, under Paul Gardner, and working with Otto Wittmann, Jr. Beam was appointed professor at the Kansas City Art Institute as well. He traveled to London receiving a Certificate of the Courtauld Institute in 1936. In 1936, too, he joined Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME, as curator of the art collections and instructor in the department of art and met Charles L. Homer, the nephew of the American artist Winslow Homer. This began a career interest in the artist. He rose to museum director of Bowdoin’s art museum, the youngest in art museum director the nation, at age 28, in 1939. The same year he married Frances Merriman. Beam resumed graduate work at Harvard, achieving an M.A. in 1943 and PhD. in 1944, writing his dissertation on Homer. As Professor Beam, he was a member of the Board of Governors of the Portland Art Museum from 1945 to 1950. He was named (full) professor of art in 1949, chairing the department of art from that year until until 1978. He chaired the Maine State Art Commission between 1951 and 1952. In 1958 he received the named chair of Henry Johnson Professor of Art and Archaeology. During these years, Beam modernized and expanded Bowdoin’s art facilities. His first book, after contributing to several reference works, was The Language of Art in 1958. The Art of John Sloan appeared in 1962. His Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck was published in 1966. He relinquished his director duties in 1964. Beam consulted on the popular Time-Life books The World of Winslow Homer, 1966, and The World of John Singleton Copley, 1968. He was appointed curator of the museum’s Winslow Homer collection in 1967. Another Homer monograph appeared in 1975. In 1976 Beam lectured in Tokyo in connection with an exhibition of works by Homer from Bowdoin’s museum. His Winslow Homer’s Magazine Engravings appeared in 1979. Beam retired emeritus in 1982, stepping down as Winslow Homer collection in 1983. He died at the age of 95. United States.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Winslow Homer. Harvard University, 1944; The Language of Art. New York: Ronald Press Co., 1958; Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck. Boston, Little, Brown, 1966; consulted, Flexner, James Thomas. The World of Winslow Homer, 1836-1910. New York: Time, inc. 1966; Winslow Homer in the 1890s : Prout’s Neck Observed: Essays. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1990.

Sources

[obituary:] “Philip Beam Memorial Service.” Bowdoin College Campus News (online) March 07, 2006 http://www.bowdoin.us/news/archives/1bowdoincampus/002969.shtml

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