Art Historians

Ware, William R.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Ware, William R.

Other Names:

William Robert Ware

Gender: male

Date Born: 1832

Date Died: 1915

Place Born: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United States

Institution(s): Columbia University

Overview

His book, The American Vignola (4th ed., 1905) was one of the early required texts to be listed in the course catalog for the art history classes of Princeton University.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

His book, The American Vignola (4th ed., 1905) was one of the early required texts to be listed in the course catalog for the art history classes of Princeton University.

Ward, Clarence

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Ward, Clarence

Gender: male

Date Born: 1884

Date Died: 1973

Place Born: Brooklyn, Cattaraugus, NY, USA

Place Died: Oberlin, Lorain, OH, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Overview

Architectural historian, architect and museum director at Oberlin College. Ward was the son of the infamous investment swindler Ferdinand Ward (1851-1925) and Ella Champion Green (Ward) (1852-1890). His father was sentenced to Sing Sing prison in 1885 when Ward was one. The two were estranged; after his mother’s death when Ward was six, Ward inherited the estate. His father attempted to gain control of the Ward’s trust after his release in 1895, kidnapped the boy at one point and later sued him as an adult, all to no avail. The younger Ward attended Putnam, NY, high school and received all his post-secondary degrees from Princeton University, his A.B., in 1905, M.A. in 1906, and his Ph.D. in 1914. He married Helen Eshbaugh (1885-1976) in 1907. While still a student at Princeton he published a brief survey on gothic architecture in 1914. Between 1908 to 1916 he taught architecture at Rutgers University, eventually rising to associate professor and also served as a lecturer in architecture at Princeton the same years. Ward’s dissertation on ecclesiastical church vaulting was written under Allan Marquand and published the following year in Princeton Monographs in Art and Archaeology under the title Medieval Church Vaulting. In 1916, he was appointed professor at Oberlin College, where he was the only doctoral-degreed Art Historian. That year he taught seven courses covering a broad array of art history, but his passion remained Medieval and American architecture. Sensing a need for the specialized documentation for art, Ward founded Oberlin’s Art Library the following year. Acting as its arts administrator, he built the collection up to 25,000 volumes by the 1950s. He later became Chair of Oberlin’s Art Department. Ward hired distinguish art historians to fill his department. Under his leadership, the program attained a national reputation and attracted other well-known professors such as Wolfgang Stechow and Ellen H. Johnson. The same year as the library’s founding, Ward assumed the directorship of the newly-founded art museum at Oberlin College which he held until 1949. As director he played a large role in building its art collection. The supporters he cultivated included the great Ohio art patrons such as the collector Elisabeth Severance Allen Prentiss (1865-1944), after whose late husband, Dr Dudley Peter Allen (1852-1915), the museum was named, and Mr. R. T. Miller, Jr. By the mid 1940s, it was known as one of the finest college museums west of the Alleghenies. Ward was also a practicing architect. He designed multiple private homes as well public spaces, specializing in rebuilding churches. Among his projects are the Oberlin College President’s House (the Samuel R. Williams house, Forest Street), the interior decorations of the 1932 Noah Hall, features of the Oberlin College Hales Gymnasium, the 1937 wing addition to the Allen Memorial Art Museum, and the East Oberlin Community Church, where he served as minister for multiple years. Ward remained at Oberlin College for thirty-three years before his retirement in 1947. In 1950, Oberlin College presented Ward with the Distinguished Alumni Award. His son, Ferdinand Champion Ward (1910-2007), a lawyer, was the divisor of the MacArthur Foundation “genius” Award.

Ward published very little and his reputation as an art historian is largely as a teaching professor and founder/administrator of the art institutions at Oberlin College. He taught the history of architecture from his personal travels and research. He was a strong supporter of the Society of Architectural Historians. With the assistance of the Oberlin photographer Arthur Princehorn (1904-2001) Ward photographed medieval churches in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. These are today the Clarence Ward Archive at the National Gallery of Art Library. His birthday is annually celebrated at the Oberlin Library he founded.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Mediaeval Church Vaulting, Princeton University, published, Princeton Monographs in Art and Archaeology 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1915, https://archive.org/details/mediaevalchurchv00warduoft

Sources

Stechow, Wolfgang, and Edward Capps. “Dedication.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 7, no. 3, ser. 4, (July 1948): 2–3;
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. 67, cited;
Ward, Geoffrey C. A Disposition to be Rich: How a Small-town Pastor’s Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street crash, and Made Himself the Best-hated Man in the United States. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012;
Prior, Barbara Q. “The Annual Clarence Ward Birthday Party and Student Exhibition.” Oberlin College Libraries, 11 June 2015, http://www2.oberlin.edu/library/art/TheAnnualClarenceWardBirthdayPartyandStudentExhibition.html;

Ward-Perkins, J. B.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Ward-Perkins, J. B.

Other Names:

John Bryan Ward-Perkins

Gender: male

Date Born: 1912

Date Died: 1981

Place Born: Bromley, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Cirencester, Gloucestershire, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): ancient, archaeology, architecture (object genre), Classical, and sculpture (visual works)

Career(s): directors (administrators)

Overview

Classical architectural historian and archaeologist; Director, British School in Rome. Ward-Perkins was the eldest son of Bryan Ward-Perkins, a civil servant in India, and Winifred Mary Hickman [Ward-Perkins]. The younger Ward-Perkins attended the Winchester School and New College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1934. He was awarded the Craven traveling fellowship at Magadalen College, which he used to study archaeology in Britain and France. Between 1936-39 he was Assistant under Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler (1890-1976) at the London Museum. He wrote an important catalog of the collection during that time. He was also involved in a Roman villa excavation near Welwyn Garden City. In 1939 he accepted the Chair of Archaeology at the Royal University of Malta. The advent of World War II curtailed this position after only six months. He enlisted in the British Royal Artillery where he participated in the Allied invasion. Ward-Perkins was assigned to North Africa to protect the sites of Leptis Magna and Sabratha. There he gained an intimate knowledge of Tripolitania, the Roman ruins. He was appointed director of the Allied sub-commission for monuments and fine arts in Italy. He married Margaret Sheilah Long in 1943. In 1946 Ward-Perkins accepted the position of Director of the British School at Rome. He maintained an interest in North Africa, largely because excavation work in Italy was still impossible. When peninsular excavations could resume, Ward-Perkins secured aerial photographs from RAF reconnaissance of Italy, in order to map out excavations better. He remained at the British School in Rome until his retirement in 1974. In the 1950’s his interest particularly in the technical aspects of Roman building resulted in The Shrine of St. Peter and the Vatican Excavations, 1956, and David Talbot Rice‘s The Great Palace of the Byzantine Emperors, 1958. In 1963 Ward-Perkins revived the stalled publication project Corpus signorum imperii Romani, a corpus of Roman sculpture held throughout the world. He held various guest professorships, including New York University (1957) and Rhind Lecturer (Edinburgh), 1960. In 1970 he wrote the Roman section of the prestigious Pelican History of Art volume on Etruscan and Roman architecture, co-authored with Axel Boëthius. His portion of the text was expanded and reissued as a stand-alone volume the year of his death. His students at the British School at Athens included Roger Ling. Ward-Perkins’ major interests were in the materials of ancient art and city topography. He wrote major works on city planning in classical Greece and Rome and the historical topography of Veii. He also reinitiated the project to map the Roman Empire, Tabula imperrii romani, which had begun in 1928 but had drawn to a standstill. He was a seminal figure in the founding of the Association for Classical Archaeology, and the issuing of its bibliographic organ, Fasti Archaeologici. His use of field surveys to study land use patterns and identification of marble types in Roman building and sculptures changed the discipline of Roman archaeology.

Selected Bibliography

and Boëthius, Axel. Etruscan and Roman Architecture. Pelican History of Art. Baltimore: Penguin, 1970.; 2nd ed.: Roman Imperial Architecture. New York: Penguin Books, 1981; David Talbot Rice, ed. The Great Palace of the Byzantine Emperors. Second Report. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1958: 52-104; “The Italian Element in Late Roman and Early Medieval Architecture.” Proceedings of the British Academy 23 (1947): 163-94; and Reynolds, Joyce Maire. The Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania. Rome: British School at Rome, 1952; and Toynbee, J. M. C. The Shrine of St. Peter and the Vatican Excavations. New York: Longmans, Green, 1956; The Art of the Severan Age in the Light of Tripolitanian Discoveries. Proceedings of the British Academy 37. London: British Academy, 1953; Cities of Ancient Greece and Italy: Planning in Classical Antiquity. New York: G. Braziller, 1974; Landscape and History in Central Italy. 2nd J.L. Myres Memorial Lecture. Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1965; Marble in Antiquity : Collected Papers of J.B. Ward-Perkins. Archaeological Monographs of the British School at Rome 6. London: British School at Rome, 1992; Studies in Roman and Early Christian Architecture. London: Pindar Press, 1994; “A Carved Marble Fragment at Riom (Puy-de-Dome) and the Chronology of the Aquitanian Sarcophagi.” Antiquaries Journal 40 (January-April 1960): 25-34; “Nero’s Golden House.” Antiquity 30 (December 1956): 209-219; “The Hunting Baths at Lepcis Magna.” Archaeologia 93 (1949): 165-195.

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, pp. 39, 22 n. 41; Medwid, Linda M. The Makers of Classical Archaeology: A Reference Work. New York: Humanity Books, 2000 pp. 304-6; Dictionary of National Biography 1981-85: 411-12; Ridgway, David. “John Bryan Ward-Perkins.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, p. 1185; [obituaries:] Reynolds, J. “John Bryan Ward-Perkins, CMG, CBE, FBA.” Papers of the British School at Rome 48 (1980): xiii-xvii. [methodological comments:] Wharton, Annabel. “Rereading Martyrium: the Modernist and Postmodernist Texts.” Gesta 29 no. 1 (1990): 3-7.

Warburg, Eddie

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Warburg, Eddie

Other Names:

Eddie Warburg

Gender: male

Date Born: 1908

Date Died: 1992

Place Born: White Plains, Westchester, NY, USA

Place Died: Norwalk, Fairfield, CT, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Career(s): educators

Overview

Philanthropist and benefactor of the arts; nephew of art historian Aby M. Warburg; briefly taught art history at Bryn Mawr. Warburg was the youngest of five children of philanthropist Felix Warbug (1871-1937), a partner in the investment firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company and brother of the German art historian Aby M. Warburg. His mother was Frieda Schiff (Warburg) (1876-1958), the only daughter of merchant banker and financier Jacob H. Schiff (1847-1920). Warburg grew up on Fifth Avenue in New York City (today the building is the Jewish Museum) and attended Middlesex School in Concord, MA. He entered Harvard University, graduating in 1930. While at Harvard he attended the famous art history and museum courses led by Paul J. Sachs and Edward Waldo Forbes. As a student at Harvard, Warburg acquired a blue-period Picasso and works by Paul Klee and Ernst Barlach which he had bought directly from the artists in their studios on tour in Europe. Together with classmates Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996) and John Walker III, he formed the Harvard Society of Contemporary Art in 1929 which exhibited works by artists as Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, and the more controversial David Siqueiros, Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. The HSCA also gave early exposure to Alexander Calder, Walker Evans and Bauhaus architects. Six months before graduating, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., tapped Warburg to be on the advisory committee of the fledgling Museum of Modern Art. Warburg served on its board of trustees between 1932 to 1958. He was also a trustee and organizer of the Museum’s film library. After college, Warburg taught briefly at Bryn Mawr during the depression under Department head Georgiana King. Warburg’s wealth meant he didn’t need the salary and offered King to work for free. Worried that this would be a bad precedent for the profession of art historians, King and Warburg worked out a deal where Warburg would be paid, but write a check back to the university for the full amount (Saunders). Warburg was responsible for giving fellow Harvard alumnus Philip Johnson his first commission, an International-style design for Warburg’s apartment in which to hang his modern art. After teaching at Bryn Mawr, Warburg returned to New York, where he co-founded the American Ballet with Kirstein. Warburg funded much of the American Ballet on his own; it was on Warburg’s estate that George Balanchine’s first ballet created in American was performed. Warburg continued his activity as an art collector, acquiring works by Picasso, Matisse, Hopper, O’Keeffe, Lachaise, Klee, Miro, Brancusi and Calder. Many of these were later donated to the Museum of Modern Art and other museums. In 1939 he married Mary Whelan Prue Currier, a fashion editor for Vogue. Shortly before America’s entrance into World War II, he assisted in bringing refugee artists Leger, Miro and Chagall to the United States. He supported German art historians fleeing Nazism, including Heinrich Schwarz. During the war itself, Warburg enlisted in the army as a private (later rising to captain) and was part of the shoring-up forces in Normandy shortly after D-day. He was awarded the Bronze Star and the governments of Belgium and Italy decorated him for his work with the displaced persons. After the war, Warburg continued his leading charitable agencies. He was a member of the New York State Board of Regents between 1958 to 1975. From 1971 to 1974, he was vice director for public affairs of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, becoming honorary trustee from 1983 until his death. In 1981 Warburg published his only work, a privately printed biography of Sydney S. Spivack (1907-1969). In retirement he lived in Wilton, CT. He died of heart failure in a Norwalk, CT, hospital. Except for thecourses he taught at Bryn Mawr, Warburg could not be considered an art historian. He published nothing in the field. His wealth and more importantly his taste enabled him to “make happen” some of the most important art events in the United States.

Selected Bibliography

Spiv. s.l: s.n [privately printed], 1981.

Sources

Weber, Nicholas Fox. Patron Saints: Five Rebels who Opened America to a New Art 1928-1943. New York: Knopf, 1992; Saunders, Susanna Terrell. “Georgiana Goddard King (1871-1939): Educator and Pioneer in Medieval Spanish Art.” in Women as Interpreters of the Visual Arts, 1820-1979. Sherman, Claire Richter and Holcomb, Adele M., eds. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981, p. 218; [obituaries:] Pace, Eric. “Edward Warburg, Philanthropist And Patron of the Arts, Dies at 84.” New York Times September 22, 1992, p B9; The Guardian (London), October 5, 1992, p. 33.

Warburg, Aby M.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Warburg, Aby M.

Other Names:

Aby M. Warburg

Gender: male

Date Born: 1866

Date Died: 1929

Place Born: Hamburg, Germany

Place Died: Hamburg, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): art theory, mythologies (religious concept), myths, psychological concepts, and psychology

Overview

Founder of the Warburg Institute (now part of the University of London) and theorist of a mytho-psychological form of art history. Warburg grew up the eldest son in a wealthy devoutly Jewish banking family. His father Moritz Warburg, hoped his son would take over as a banker as did his mother Charlotte Oppenheimer (Warburg). Warburg developed Typhoid fever at age seven and remained in delicate health thereafter. At age thirteen he made a pact with his brother to sell his birthright provided his brother would keep him in books. Though Warburg pursued art, his family fortune allowed him to remain independently wealthy his whole life. He attended the University in Bonn, studying religion/philosophy under Hermann Usener (1834-1905) and history under Karl Lamprecht, who himself had written art history, and taking courses with the art historians Carl Justi and Henry Thode. Justi was too rigid for him and Thode too society-conscious and chummy to consider working with for a Ph.D. For his graduate work, Warburg studied at various universities–as was the standard model for the humanities in Germany–Bonn and Munich. In 1889 he was one of eight students in the Florentine experiment of August Schmarsow to create a German research institute there. Warburg settled on Strasbourg and a younger art historian, Hubert Janitschek. His 1891 dissertation on Botticelli, written under Janitschek, employed one of the notions that would occupy him his entire life: the transmission of antique iconography in other cultures, in this case the Renaissance. He moved to Berlin to study medicine, an interest fed by his study of psychology in art. But psychology led to anthropology and in 1895 he visited the territories of the southwestern United States in order to observe Navaho and Pueblo native-American traditions.

Returning to Germany, he married the artist Mary Hertz in 1897. During this time, Warburg became ever more interested in how science and pseudo-science effected knowledge and its visual representation. In an effort to find a relation between astrology and emergence of natural science, he began to collect rare books on the zodiac and representations of the human body. These he added to his vast personal library, which he had begun in 1886. In 1907, Warburg published a key study on Francesco Sassetti’s burial chapel at Santa Maria Novella in Florence. He again emphasized the Renaissance adopting Classical visual conventions to convey emotion and sympathy. In 1909 he moved his book collection to a house in Hamburg with the intent of creating a research library. Warburg hired the young art historians Wilhelm Waeztoldt between 1909-1911 and then Fritz Saxl, beginning in 1913, to manage the library and its objects. The following year Warburg discussed turning it into a research institute, but Germany’s entry into World War I the same year delayed it. At age forty-eight, Warburg was too old to fight. However, the war drew his interests toward propaganda literature, principally the German renaissance prints of Dürer and pamphlets of Martin Luther. He visited the British Renaissance scholar Herbert P. Horne in 1915 in Siena. In 1918 he developed severe mental illness requiring hospitalization. In 1922 Warburg hired a young Ph.D., Gertrud Bing, to be his new librarian (and later personal assistant). He had recovered sufficiently by 1923 to deliver a lecture on the ‘Serpent Ritual’ of the Navajo.

The next year, Saxl assisted in launching Warburg’s library as a research center, called Die kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW). The Library officially opened in 1926. In the final years of his life, Warburg became preoccupied with the role memory played in civilization. This fascination resulted in an image atlas, called Mnemosyne, consisting of forty large canvases to which almost 1000 images were affixed. Warburg chose the format in order to graphically represent the relationships between images. Groups of representations under categories such as pathos, human sacrifice, redemption, and Oriental astrology were juxtaposed to each other in order to define them, not by word as much as through contrast. Among the categories was one Warburg had created himself, the Nympha, the image of a young woman with a swirling garment. After his death, the library continued to operate. The ascension of the Nazi’s to power in Germany in 1933 made existence for the library, named for a Jew, very difficult. Saxl fled to London with the Library that year. Initially the library was housed in the basement of Thames House. Later it was incorporated as the Warburg Institute into the University of London in 1944. Shortly before and after the war, E. H. Gombrich was given the job of organizing Warburg’s papers into publishable form. Warburg’s method juxtaposed diverse images and material in order to illuminate classical mythology and symbolism in post-classical art. Warburg, however, had difficulty drawing conclusions in any definitive way. Gombrich realized that Warburg’s notes were not suitable for publication and abandoned the project. In 1970, Gombrich published an intellectual biography of Warburg which remains by far the best introduction to Warburg’s ideas (2nd ed., 1986).The New York home of his brother, Paul Warburg (1868-1932), near the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was the first home for the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University.

Methodologically, Warburg’s early years show him under the spell of Jacob Burckhardt. In the late nineteenth century, Burckhardt and others framed the Renaissance as a period when the modern individual had emerged from the values of the middle ages. The counter argument, advanced by art historians such as Thode, show Christianity playing a vital role. Warburg adopted Burckhardt’s premise, but viewed the Renaissance as a transitional era (a key concept to Warburg), rather than his mentor’s positivist belief of a Renaissance as cultural whole. His interest in the transmission of classical antiquity into newer eras may have been sparked by the first chapter of the 1867 Bilder aus der neueren Kunstgeschichte by Anton Springer which addressed the continued influence of antiquity in the middle ages. The psychological evocations of the classical symbolism were a focus of much of Warburg’s work. The term Pathosformel, or a form evoking Pathos, appears often in his research. He viewed his own time period similar to that of the Renaissance as a era of jarring cultural transition. Warburg viewed nearly all graphic representation at the subject for study. His cultural collections included playing cards, postal stamps, posters, newspaper illustrations and photographs. His work was so broadly cultural that it may not be correct to consider him an art historian. He certainly opposed the stylistic and autonomous approaches to art history which Heinrich Wölfflin and Vienna School historians such as Aloïs Riegl had come to dominate in the field. His use of unorthodox sources and highly individual research (e.g,. that Dionysian antiquity transmitted into Early Modern Europe via interest in the occult (Bazin 215)) attracted scholars who sought to reinvent the discipline themselves. These included, Erwin Panofsky, E. H. Gombrich who wrote a biography of Warburg, Ernst Cassirer, Gertrud Bing, Edgar Wind and of course Saxl himself.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography] Aby M. Warburg-Bibliographie 1866 bis 1995: Werk und Wirkung: mit Annotationen. Wuttke, Dieter, ed. Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1998;
Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Gertrud Bing. 2 vols. Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1932;
Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen. Baden-Baden: Verlag V. Koerner, 1979;

Sources

Saxl, Fritz. “Rinascimento dell’Antichità. Studien zu den Arbeiten A. Warburgs.” Reporitorium für Kunstwissenschaft 43 (1922):220-272;
Wind, Edgar. “Warburg’s Begriff der Kulturwissenschaft und seine Bedeutung für ästhetik.” Zeitschrift für ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 25 (Beilagehaft) (1931): 163-79;
Saxl, Fritz. “Three ‘Florentines:’ Herbert Horne, Aby Warburg, Jacques Mesnil.” Lectures, vol. 1 (1957): 331-344;
Heckscher, William S. “The Genesis of Iconology.” In Stil und überlieferung in der Kunst des Abendlandes. (Akten des XXI. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte), Bonn, 1964 [c.1967] 3: 239-62;
Bing, Gertrud, “A. M. Warburg.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965);
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, pp. 61 mentioned, 64-5, 82, 92, 64 n. 147;
Mnemosyne: Beitr. zum 50. Todestag von Aby M. Warburg. Berger, Klaus, and Füssel, Stephan, eds. Gratia 7. Göttingen: Gratia-Verlag, 1979;
Warnke, Martin, Hofmann, Werner, and Georg Syamken, Georg. Die Menschenrechte des Auges: über Aby Warburg. Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1980;
Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, pp. 76-78, 118;
Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire d l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 215;
Gombrich, Ernst H. Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986;
German Essays on Art History. Gert Schiff, ed. New York: Continuum, 1988, pp. lvi-lxi, 281;
Cassierer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art and History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989;
Photographs at the Frontier: Aby Warburg in America, 1895-1896. Edited by Benedetta Cestelli Guidi and Nicholas Mann. London: Merrell Holbertson Publishers, in association with the Warburg Institute, 1998;
Haynes, Deborah J. “Aby Warburg.” Dictionary of Art;
Photographs at the Frontier: Aby Warburg in America, 1895-1896. London: Merrell Holbertson, for the Warburg Institute, 1998;
Forster, Kurt W. “Introduction.” The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999, pp. 1-75;
Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 452-456;
Woodfield, Richard. Art History as Cultural History: Warburg’s Projects. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2001; Aby M. Warburg-Bibliographie 1866 bis 1995: Werk und Wirkung: mit Annotationen. Wuttke, Dieter, ed. Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1998;
Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Gertrud Bing. 2 vols. Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1932;
Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen. Baden-Baden: Verlag V. Koerner, 1979;
Heidnisch-antike weissagung in wort und bild zu Luthers zeiten. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1920;
Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike: Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Geschichte der europäischen Renaissance. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1932, English: The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance. David Britt, trans. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999;
“Italienische Kunst und internationale Astrologie im Palazzo Schifano zu Ferrera.” Paper read at the 10th annual International Congress of Art History. In L’Italia e l’arte straniera. Atti del X Congresso Internazionale di Storia dell’arte, 1912. Rome: Unione editrice, 1912;
“Bildniskunst und florentinisches Bürgertum.” (1902). [also appears in Gesammelte Schriften]; Warburg aus Briefen: Kommentare zu den Kopierbüchern der Jahre 1905-1918. Diers, Michael, ed. Schriften des Warburg-Archivs im Kunstgeschichtlichen Seminar der Universität Hamburg 2. Weinheim: VCH, 1991;
Kleine Schriften des Warburg Institute London und des Warburg Archivs im Warburg Haus Hamburg [serial]. Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1998- ;
Ausreiten der Ecken : die Aby Warburg – Fritz Saxl Korrespondenz, 1910 bis 1919. McEwan, Dorothea, ed. Kleine Schriften des Warburg Institute London und des Warburg Archivs im Warburg Haus Hamburg, part 1. Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1998;
La rinascità del paganesimo antico; contributi alla storia della cultura. Pensiero storico 49. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1966; Levine, Emily J., Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013;
Gaier, Martin. Kunstforschung, Fotografie und Kunsthandel um 1900: Gustav Ludwigs Korrespondenzen mit Wilhelm Bode, Aby Warburg und anderen. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2021.

Walzel, Oskar

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Walzel, Oskar

Gender: male

Date Born: 1864

Date Died: 1944

Place Born: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Place Died: Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Home Country/ies: Austria

Institution(s): Mills College, New York University, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Universität zu Köln, and Vassar College

Overview

Dissertation: Wechselseitige Erhellung der Künste. Berlin, 1917.

Selected Bibliography

Wechselseitige Erhellung der Künste. Berlin: 1917.

Sources

Dilly, 28, 30

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Dissertation: Wechselseitige Erhellung der Künste. Berlin, 1917.

Walters, Henry Beauchamp

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Walters, Henry Beauchamp

Gender: male

Date Born: 1867

Date Died: 1944

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): ancient, Ancient Greek (culture or style), Antique, the, antiquities (object genre), Classical, and Roman (ancient Italian culture or period)

Career(s): curators

Overview

Keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum.

Selected Bibliography

and Smith, Cecil Harcourt, and Forsdyke, E. John. A Catalogue of the Greek and Etruscan Vases in the British Museum. 4 vols. London: British Museum, 1925 ff.;

Keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum.

Walter, Otto

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Walter, Otto

Gender: male

Date Born: 1882

Date Died: 1965

Place Born: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Place Died: Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria

Home Country/ies: Austria

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

Overview

Specialist in ancient Greek art, particularly the art and architecture of Athens. Director of the Austrian Archaeological Institute (österreichisches archäologische Institut, öAI) in Athens, 1921-1938. Because of monetary restrictions, also served in diplomatic corps as Austrian Consul General in Athens 1923-1933. Named second secretary of the German Archaeological Institute in Athens in 1938 following the German takeover of Austria. Honorary Professor at the University of Vienna, 1945-1948, Professor at the University of Innsbruck 1948-1951, Professor at the University of Vienna 1951-1953.

Selected Bibliography

Beschreibung des Reliefs in kleinen Akropolismuseum, 1923 Die Reliefs aus dem Heiligtum der Echeliden in Neu-Phaleron, in: AEphem 1937, 97ff. Der Parthenonfundamente und das Delphische Orakel, in: AnzWien 89, 1952, 97ff. Zur Tyrannenmördergruppe, in öJh 40, 1953, 126 ff.

Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 214-215.

Walsh, John, Jr.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Walsh, John, Jr.

Other Names:

John Joseph Walsh Jr.

Gender: male

Date Born: 1937

Place Born: Mason City, WA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Overview

Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1983-2000. His father was John Joseph Walsh, Sr., (b. 1909). Walsh graduated from Yale University in 1961. He continued to graduate school at Columbia University, studying baroque art under Julius S. Held. Walsh became a lecturer and curatorial assistant for the Frick Collection in New York, 1966-1968. He spent a year researching his dissertation at the University in Leiden. Walsh was appointed associate curator at the Metropolitan Museum of art in 1968. He advanced to curator of European Painting at the met, teaching at Barnard and Columbia beginning in 1970 (through 1977). His Ph.D. was granted in 1971. However, in 1975, Walsh resigned from the Museum (along with another curator, Anthony M. Clark) to protest the rocky administration of its director, Thomas Hoving. Walsh joined the staff of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1977 as the Mrs. R. W. Baker curator of paintings. He was a visiting professor of art at Harvard, 1979. In 1982, the estate of J. Paul Getty (1892-1976) was finally settled, endowing a heretofore meager art museum with more than a billion dollars. Walsh was appointed the first post-settlement director of the Getty Museum, declining an offer to be the MFA’s director. In his capacity as director, he oversaw moving the Getty from the smaller Getty building (Getty Villa) in Pacific Palisades, CA, to the massive Richard Meier complex in Brentwood (Los Angeles), CA. He launched a massive campaign of buying works of art, establishing the Getty’s reputation for paying top dollar for art, and reorganizing the museum structure, including recommending a department of drawings, under George R. Goldner (b. 1943) as curator. As the Getty’s director, Walsh found himself at odds again with Hoving, who had been fired from the Met and was now editor of the magazine Connoisseur. Hoving used this monthly vehicle to criticize acquisitions of the Getty, most notably, the Aphrodite statue, which Hoving claimed was stolen from Italy. Though Walsh continued to condone a policy of not investigating provenance as director, the major blame was cast upon the antiquities curator, Marion True (the statue was returned to Italy in 2007). Walsh also dealt with the apparent feud between the Museum and Getty’s heir, John Paul Getty II, who frequently financially supported British efforts keep British-owned masterpieces from being acquired by the American Getty Museum. Walsh published a book on a Getty painting, Jan Steen: The Drawing Lesson, in 1996. He retired from the Getty in 2000 as Director Emeritus, succeeded by Deborah Gribbon. Thereafter Walsh was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and taught at Yale.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Jan and Julius Porcellis: Dutch Marine Painters. Columbia University, 1971; and Gribbon, Deborah Ann. The J. Paul Getty Museum and its Collections: a Museum for the New Century. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1997; and Schneider, Cynthia P. A Mirror of Nature: Dutch Paintings from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Edward William Carter. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1981; Jan Steen: The Drawing Lesson. Malibu, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996; edited. Bill Viola: the Passions. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum/National Gallery, London, 2003.

Sources

Kimmelman, Michael. “The World’s Richest Museum.” New York Times, October 23, 1988, Section 6, p. 32; Graham, Caroline. “The Getty’s John Walsh–after the Graces.” Art Newspaper 6 (July/August 1995): 16-18; D’Arcy, David. “Valedictory Thoughts from John Walsh, Retiring Director of the Getty Art Newspaper 11 no. 107 (October 2000): 12; “About the Contributors.” Oud Holland 120 no 1-2 (2007): 200.

Waller, François Gérard

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Waller, François Gérard

Other Names:

François Gérard Waller

Gender: male

Date Born: 04 June 1867

Date Died: 23 November 1934

Place Born: Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

Place Died: Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

Home Country/ies: Netherlands

Subject Area(s): biography (general genre), Dutch (culture or style), engravings (prints), and prints (visual works)

Career(s): art collectors

Overview

Biographer of Dutch engravers; collector; maecenas. Waller was the eldest son of Meindert Johannes Waller and Maria Elisabeth Adolphine Waller-Schill. Both his parents were socially and culturally engaged citizens of Amsterdam. His father was a member of the firm Testas en Waller. The young Waller attended the Gymnasium, first in Amsterdam and later in Arnhem. During a mountain-climbing expedition in 1886, Weller nearly froze to death on the Matterhorn. The resulting lung damage impaired his health for the rest of his life. After his graduation, in 1888, he enrolled at Leiden University in the Faculty of Law. He was, however, much more attracted to art, and in 1891 he became a member of the Société d’Archéologie de Bruxelles. In 1896 he went to Paris to study art history at the École des Chartes. In the same year he returned to Amsterdam, where he obtained a voluntary position at the Amsterdam Rijksprentenkabinet under Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, the former deputy director of the Mauritshuis. Waller subsequently moved to The Hague following his appointment, in February 1897, as deputy director of the Mauritshuis. The director of the Mauritshuis, the cantankerous Abraham Bredius, felt Waller’s appointment politically motivated, at the cost of Bredius’ own choice, Frits Marcus. Bredius proffered his resignation (the first of multiple times). The ever-petty Bredius made the next three years nearly impossible for Waller to cooperate with him. Bredius impugned that Waller drank on the job, was not interested in art and was surreptitiously plotting with Bredius’ other nemesis, Victor Eugène Louis de Stuers, head of the Department of Arts and Sciences of the Ministry of the Interior. None was borne out by the facts. In addition to his position in the Mauritshuis Waller was appointed director of the Leiden University Print room, where he reorganized the collection, set up a collection of reproductions, and acquired a number of drawings of distinctive Dutch artists. In 1898 Waller applied for the position of director of the Amsterdam Rijksprentenkabinet, as the successor of Hofstede de Groot but the position was returned to Johan Philip van der Kellen a former director of the Amsterdam Rijksprentenkabinet. In collaboration with the latter, Waller started compiling a biographical dictionary of Dutch engravers. In 1900 Waller left his difficult situation in the Mauritshuis, succeeded by Wilhelm Martin. Five years later Waller had to resign from his post in the Leiden Print room, due to his declining health. He returned to Amsterdam, where he, in 1906, became a partner in the family firm of Testas en Waller. He worked ther until 1917. He continued working on his biographical dictionary of engravers for the next five years, searching archives and writing to contemporary artists. By the early 1920s his health had deteriorated so that he abandoned the project. Waller built up several collections of art historical interest. He donated most of his collections, including his ex-libris collection (1913) and his Netherlands popular prints collection (1923) to the Rijksprentenkabinet. He also bequeathed his large collection of Dutch prints as well as several drawings to this institution. Waller designated the state of the Netherlands as his sole heir. His assets were made into the F. G. Waller Fund. The proceeds of the fund were to be used every year by the Rijksprentenkabinet, mainly for the acquisition of prints by Dutch artists. The trustees of the fund were also charged with the dictionary of engravers, Waller’s life-long work, which they entrusted to W. R. Juynboll, who revised and prepared it for publication in 1938, Biographisch Woordenboek van Noord Nederlandsche Graveurs. In 1936, according to the wish of Waller, his catalog of his collection of Dutch and Flemish popular books, from 1500 up to 1830, was prepared for publication by Emma Dronckers.

Selected Bibliography

F. G. Waller. Biographisch Woordenboek van Noord Nederlandsche Graveurs. Uitgegeven door de beheerders van het Waller Fonds en bewerkt door Dr. W. R. Juynboll. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1938; Dronkers, E. Verzameling F. G. Waller. Catalogus van Nederlandsche en Vlaamsche populaire boeken. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1936.

Sources

“Abraham Bredius, A Biography.” Museum Bredius (website) http://www.museumbredius.nl/biography.htm; Staring, A. “Levensbericht van den Schrijver” in Biographisch Woordenboek van Noord Nederlandsche Graveurs. Uitgegeven door de beheerders van het Waller Fonds en bewerkt door Dr. W. R. Juynboll. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1938; De Hoop-Scheffer, D. “F. G. Waller 1867-1934” Het Rijksmuseum 1808-1958. Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 6 (1958): 91; Niemeijer, J. W. “Het Rijksprentenkabinet en F. G. Waller” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 32,3 (1984): 111-117; Heijbroek, J. F. “François Gérard Waller (1867-1934), kunstkenner en collectioneur” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 32,3 (1984): 118-135; Ekkart, R. E. O. “De collectie exlibris” (Bookplates) Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 32,3 (1984): 136-140; Heijbroek, J. F. “De collectie volksprenten” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 32,3 (1984): 146-151 (English Summaries by Patricia Wardle, pp. 146-151); [obituaries:] Staring, A. “François Gerard Waller” Levensberichten van de Maatschappij der Nederlandsche Letterkunde te Leiden, Jaarboek 1934-1935, pp. 201-206; B[rugmans], H. “François Gérard Waller” Maandblad Amstelodamum 23 (1936): 7.

Contributors: Monique Daniels

« Previous
1
…
27
28
29
30
31
…
252
Next »

Art Historians

Overview

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Archives

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

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

General Citation

License

Sponsored by

General Citation

License

Sponsored by