Art Historians

Taracena, Blas

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Taracena, Blas

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Spain

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

Career(s): art historians

Overview

Author of the second volume in the important Ars Hispaniae series (1947).

Selected Bibliography

and Schlunk, Helmut, and Batlle Huguet, Pedro. Arte Romano, Arte paleocristiano,Arte Visigodo. Arte Asturiano. Madrid: Editorial Plus-Ultra [1947]

Author of the second volume in the important Ars Hispaniae series (1947).

Taine, Hippolyte

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Taine, Hippolyte

Other Names:

Hippolyte Taine

Gender: male

Date Born: 1828

Date Died: 1893

Place Born: Vouziers, Grand Est, France

Place Died: Paris, Île-de-France, France

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): philosophy

Career(s): art critics, educators, and philosophers

Overview

Philosopher, literary and art critic; first chair in the history of art at the école des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Taine began as a lycée teacher at Toulon and Nevers, France. His refusal to sign an allegiance oath to the new President of France, after the 1851 coup d’état forced his dismissal. Taine completed his dissertation in 1853 on Lafontaine, Essai sur les fables de La Fontaine. In 1855, his Voyage aux eaux des Pyénées appeared. His Histoire de la littérature anglaise appeared in 1864. Student revolts to the teaching of art history and esthetics by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts resulted in Taine’s appointment to the position in 1864 by Victor Duruy (1811-1894), the famous reformist Minister of Education under Napoleon III. Taine’s lectures to students and scholars were deeply inspiring. His courses wove documents and his personal insights from his museums and travels which had recently come to light. Taine lectured in themes encompassing five-year spands, beginning with Italy, then the Netherlands and finally Greece. This course was repeated until his retirement in 1884. He was succeeded by Eugène Müntz. In 1882 he published his lectures as the Philosophie de l’art, rising to be the most distinguished French historian of the late 19th century. As an historian, his most important work, a history of the ancien égime and the French Revolution, Les Origines de la France contemporaine, was written between 1876 and 1893. His art writings affected an entire generation of artists and art scholars, including André Michel, Eugène Fromentin.and Reynaldo dos Santos. Among his anti-positivist detractors were his successor at the École des Beaux-Arts, Müntz, and Carl Nicolaus Heinrich Justi. He was a classmate of art historian and biographer Léon Lagrange Taine ‘s methodology was positivist (the concept that history is ever-improving) and determinist. He replaced the highly subjective, personalized account of art with a scientific model, one that he had employed for literary criticism beginning in the 1850s. For Taine, environment, social conditions and to a lesser extent race were the three essential determinants for artistic production. He praised the Italian Renaissance painters, emphasizing their imagination as their predominant “racial” characteristic. Lumping Dutch and German painters together, Taine praised those artists’ positive outlook as critical to their resultant art. The arts were, for Taine, documents of history, a view he shared closely with his German counterpart, Karl Julius Ferdinand Schnaase. Taine could reproduce the facts of an historical situation in excruciating detail, which he considered part of a scientific approach to his topic. Discounting the commonly viewed 19th-century role of the genius, Taine argued for sensitivity for the geographical, social and environmental-historical context. The role of the art critic was to first form a picture of the conditions in which the creative process of each artist took place and then come to an opinion.

Selected Bibliography

Philosophie de l’art: leçons professées à l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Paris and New York: 1865.

Sources

Kultermann, Udo. Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte: Der Weg einer Wissenschaft. 2nd ed. Frankfurt am Main and Vienna: Ullstein, 1981, pp. 188-9; 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. 81-2, 91; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 137, 468; Dictionary of Art.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Tafuri, Manfredo

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Tafuri, Manfredo

Other Names:

Manfredo Tafuri

Gender: male

Date Born: 04 November 1935

Date Died: 10 February 1994

Place Born: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Place Died: Venice, Veneto, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), Marxism, Modern (style or period), Renaissance, and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Marxist architectural historian of the Renaissance and modern era; architectural theorist. Tafuri was born to Simmaco Tafuri and Elena Trevi (Tafuri). His father was an engineer. He studied architecture at the Scuola Superiore di Architettura at Rome (now within the University of Rome La Sapienza). As a student, he campaigned against such figures as Enrico del Debbio (1891-1973) and Saverio Muratori (1910-1973) advocating for curriculum change to include urban planning and architectural history. Tafuri attended courses by, among others, Giulio Carlo Argan, who was appointed chair of art history at Rome in 1959–the year of Tafuri’s graduation–and the Marxist philosopher Galvano della Volpe (1895-1968). Tafuri supported the student actions that resulted in the reformist appointments of Luigi Piccinato (1899-1983), Ludovico Quaroni (1911-1987) and Bruno Zevi to the faculty in 1963 and 1964. He taught as an assistant to Quaroni, maintaining an architectural practice (in the Architetti e Urbanisti Associati) and supporting the ‘counter-school’ Associazione Studenti e Architetti. In the mid-1960s, Tafuri moved from practicing architecture to architectural history, initially teaching at the Politecnico di Milano as an assistant to Ernesto Nathan Rogers (1909-1969), 1964-1966, and in Palermo in 1966-1968 (where Cesare Brandi was also a professor). Tafuri wrote a small monograph on Quaroni and another on Japanese modernism in 1964. Early essays appeared in Quaderni dell’Istituto di storia dell’architettura, edited by Vicenzo Fasolo (1885-1969), Casabella-continua, Comunità of Adriano Olivetti (1901-1960), and the journal of Italia nostra. He married Guiseppina Rapisarda in 1966 and published his first major historical monograph, L’Architettura del manierismo nel ‘500 europeo, which secured him an appointment in Venice at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia in 1968. He remained at the Istituto his professional career. In 1968, too, he wrote the first of two books which would secure his reputation. Teorie e storia dell’architettura focused on the architectural historian’s responsibility to change architecture fundamentally, chiding the deficiencies of architects as historians. It also predicted the failure of modernism (drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940), citing modern architecture’s complicity with capitalism. The book was criticized by Zevi and Paolo Portoghesi, both architect/historians, who disputed in particular the mission of architectural historians to shape contemporary architecture. After a monograph on Florentine culture, L’Architettura dell’Umanesimo, 1969, the second of his broad Marxist salvos, Progetto e Utopia, appeared in 1973, a historical assessment of architecture’s relationship with capitalist development since the eighteenth century. Tafuri’s innovative book subjects continued with La città americana and Via Giulia (a book of a Roman street) in 1973, the latter with Luigi Salerno and Luigi Spezzaferro, and regularly contributed to the American journal Oppositions as well as the European journals Casabella, Domus, and L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui. Though he ran for political office in Rome, his political associations remained informal, especially after the mid-1970s. Tafuri’s interest increasingly moved to the French historiographical tradition (from the Annales School to the histories of technique of Michel Foucault, 1926-1984). In 1976, Tafuri transitioned the Istituto di Storia dell’Architettura at IUAV into a critical entity, the Dipartimento di Analisi, Critica e Storia dell’Architettura. Appointed Chair of the Istituto di storia dell’architettura at IUAV, Tafuri hired politically active architects, historians and philosophers whose research and writing projects were akin to Tafuri’s. These included Cacciari, Giorgio Ciucci (b. 1939), Francesco Dal Co (b. 1945), Marco De Michelis (b. 1945) and Mario Manieri Elia (1929-2011). Together with Georges Teyssot (b. 1946) and Cacciari, Tafuri invited Foucault to Venice in 1978 for a series of discussions, published as Il dispositivo Foucault, 1978. He again reorganized the Istituto again in 1982 as the Dipartimento di Storia dell’Architettura, shifting emphasis from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the early modern period. His essays from the 1960s and 1970s were collected as La sfera e il labirinto in 1980. Tafuri’s only volume in the the Microstoria series edited by Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi, on the Venetian church of San Francesco della Vigna, La chiesa di S. Francesco della vigna nella Venezia was co-authored by Antonio Foscari in 1983. Venezia e il rinascimento appeared in 1985 followed by a broad and polemical assessment of Italy’s architectural history since the end of World War Two, Storia dell’architettura italiana, 1944-85, 1986, in which he castigated those architects who had ensured a the trajectory from post-war ineffectuality to postmodern frivolity, particularly Carlo Aymonino and Carlo Scarpa. The work came under criticism by Aldo Rossi. An essay on Peter Eisenman was published in Eisenman’s book of essays, Houses of Cards, 1987. Tafuri’s masterwork on this period, Ricerca del rinascimento (1992) revisited the Renaissance foundations of modern architecture, addressing architecture as an institution, tradition and technique. In his final years, Tafuri became a champion for architectural conservation carried out by trained architects. He succeeded in halting the plans for Renzo Piano to modernize the environs of Palladio’s Basilica in Vincenza and was involved in the restoration of Giulio Romano’s Palazzo Te. Tafuri was one of the first professional (academic) architectural historians in Italy. His opinions, always strongly argued, have been criticized for being uneven, perhaps a result of his constant revision of them. For example, he praised Le Corbusier’s architecture in Algiers, but despaired Corbusier’s Chandigarh work. He claimed regret in later years at the haste in which he wrote his first book, L’Architettura del manierismo nel ‘500 europeo. As the head of the so-called Venice School of architectural history, he exerted a substantial influence over generations of architects, historians and theorists in Italy, Europe and North America. Tafuri’s Teorie e storia dell’architettura, stands as “a pointed assessment of historical knowledge in architecture that positioned the architectural historian as an agent of institutional and political change” (Leach). Progetto e Utopia, was a more pointed Marxist historical assessment of architecture’s relationship with capitalist development since the eighteenth century. As a theorist, he saw capitalist production and consumption eroding values, not stabilizing them, and hence the modern era was not able to create a context of belief in which architecture could flower. Tafuri insisted there was no difference between criticism and history–that the tools and tasks (relative to contemporary architectural culture) remained constant as distance from the subject moved in time. As a Renaissance scholar, he was called to write essays on the retrospective exhibitions of Raphael (1984), Giulio Romano (1989) and Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1993). Tafuri accused his critics, Zevi and Portughese, as performing “operative” (or instrumental) architectural criticism, i.e., using their agendas as practicing architects to frame the history of architecture, anathema to his own “critical” position. He instead suggested that architectural criticism and history should be considered the same thing, and that practicing architects abandon criticism. The controversy distilled to the means by which architectural historians could positively affect the work of architects. Tafuri polemically held there should be no difference between criticism and history. Some of Tafuri’s notions may have been drawn from the 1891 book, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth by W. R. Lethaby. In addition to influences by Foucault, Volpe, Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), Tafuri’s work shows the effect of the circles in which he operated in Venice and Rome, including the German-language scholarship of the Biblioteca Hertziana’s Renaissance specialists.

Selected Bibliography

Ludovico Quaroni e lo sviluppo dell’architettura moderna in Italia. Florence: Edizioni di comunità, 1964; L’architettura del manierismo nel cinquecento europeo. Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1966; Teorie e storia dell’architettura. Bari: Laterza, 1967, English, Theories and History of Architecture. New York: Harper & Row, 1980; Jacopo Sansovino e l’architettura del ‘500 a Venezia. Padua: Marsilio, 1969; and Passeri, Alfredo, Piva, Paolo. Vienna rossa: la politica residenziale nella Vienna socialista, 1919-1933. Milan: Electa, 1980; and Ciucci, Giorgio, and Dal Co, Francesco, and Manieri-Elia, Mario. La città americana dalla Guerra civile al New Deal, Bari: Laterza, 1973, English, The American City from the Civil War to the New Deal. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979; and Salerno, Luigi, and Spezzaferro, Luigi. Via Giulia. Una utopia urbanistica del ‘500, with Rome: Casa editrice stabilimento Aristide Staderini, 1973; Sfera e il labirinto. Turin: G. Einaudi, 1980, English, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987; and Foscari, Antonio. L’armonia e i conflitti. La chiesa di S. Francesco della vigna nella Venezia del ‘500. Turin: Einaudi, 1983; and Frommel, Christoph Luitpold, and Ray, Stefhano. Raffaello architetto. Milan: Electa, 1984; “Renovatio urbis”: Venezia nell’età di Andrea Gritti (1523-1538). Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1984; Venezia e il Rinascimento: religione, scienza, architettura. Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1985; Storia dell’architettura italiana, 1944-1985. Turin: G. Einaudi, 1986, English, History of Italian Architecture, 1944-1985. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989; essay, in Eisenmann, Peter et al. House of Cards. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987; and Gombrich, Ernst H. Giulio Romano. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998; Ricerca del rinascimento: Principi, città, architettura. Turin: Einaudi, 1992. English, Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architecture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.

Sources

[transcript] Manfredo Tafuri. La storia come progetto = History as Project: Manfredo Tafuri. Getty Research Institute, Malibu, CA, 1993; Sherer, Daniel. “Tafuri’s Renaissance: Architecture, Representation, Transgression.” Assemblage no. 28 (December 1995): 34-45; Hartoonian, Gevork. “Beyond Historicism: Manfredo Tafuri’s Flight.” Art Criticism 17 no. 2 (2002): 28-40; Leach, Andrew. Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History. Ghent: A&S, 2007; Vidler, Anthony. “Renaissance Modernism: Manfredo Tafuri.” in Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008, pp. 156-189; [obituary:] Ackermann, James S. “The Historical Project of Manfredo Tafuri.” Casabella 619-620, (January-February, 1995): 165-7; Ackerman, James S. “In Memoriam: Manfredo Tafuri, 1935-1994.” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53, No. 2 (June 1994): 137-138; Muschamp, Herbert. “Nocturne for the Marxist of Venice.” New York Times May 8, 1994, p. 37.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Taft, Lorado

November 8, 2023July 1, 2024

Full Name: Taft, Lorado

Other Names:

Lorado Zadoc Taft

Gender: male

Date Born: 1860

Date Died: 1936

Place Born: Elmwood, Peoria, IL, USA

Place Died: Chicago, Cook, IL, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): sculpture (visual works)

Career(s): educators

Overview

Sculptor and art lecturer at the University of Chicago and Art Institute; wrote a history of sculpture in the United States. Taft was descended from the Massachusetts Tafts, who had arrived in American in 1675. His father, Don Carlos Taft (1827-1907), was professor of geology at the University of Illinois, (then known as Illinois Industrial University). Lorado Taft studied art informally by a faculty friend of the family. Taft graduated from the University in 1879, gained an M.A. the following year, and continued study in art at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Augustin A. Dumont, J. M. B. Bonnassieux, and Jules Thomas. He returned to Chicago in 1886 where he set up a studio as a sculptor and began lecturing at the Art Institute of Chicago art school. He married Carrie Bartlett of Boston, however she died in childbirth the following year. Taft’s sculptural work, including commissions for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, gained him fame as an artist. in 1896 he married a cousin of his first wife, Ada Bartlett.

In 1903, Taft published History of American Sculpture, the country’s first serious history of American plastic arts. This followed a vigorous lecture circuit and courses at the new University of Chicago. Taft also moved his studio to the Midway, the former rides space of the 1893 World’s Fair, across from the University of Chicago. In 1909 he was elected to the National Academy of Design. He was a member of the National Fine Arts Commission 1925-29. He suffered a paralytic stroke and died following a subsequent heart attack. Taft had planned a special museum for “comparative art,” but his endowment was so small that the plan could not be realized. Taft’s sister, Zulime, was married to the novelist Hamlin Garland (1860-1940). Taft referred to himself as an “art missionary.” He strove in his books, both on the history of art and art appreciation, to make the American public “less casual” about their arts. Taft’s sculpture was conservative, beaux-arts tradition. But his writing is valued for the championing of the form of sculpture–if not modernist sculpture of Europe–on American soil. Taft is one of three pioneers, alongside Samuel Isham and Sadakichi Hartmann, who authored the first significant American art histories.

Selected Bibliography

The History of American Sculpture. New York: Macmillan, 1903; The Appreciation of Sculpture. Chicago: American Library Association, 1927; Modern Tendencies in Sculpture. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago/University of Chicago press, 1924; Casts of Great Sculpture. Pasadena, CA: Esto Pub. Co., 1934.

Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire d l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 p. 539; Weller, Allen Stuart. Lorado in Paris: the Letters of Lorado Taft: 1880-1885. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985; Williams, Lewis W. “Taft, Lorado Zadoc (1860-1936).” Biography in Dictionary of American Biography, Supplements 1-2: To 1940; Taft, Ada Bartlett. Lorado Taft: Sculptor and Citizen. Chicago: privately printed, 1946, and Williams,Lewis W. Lorado Taft: American Sculptor and Art Missionary. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1958; [obituary:] “Lorado Taft Dies: Leading Sculptor.” New York Times October 31, 1936, p. 19.

Szeemann, Harald

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Szeemann, Harald

Gender: male

Date Born: 1933

Date Died: 2005

Home Country/ies: Switzerland

Overview

Sources

Heinich, Nathalie. Harald Szeemann: un cas singulier: entretien. Paris: L’Echoppe, 1995; Müller, Hans-Joachim. Harald Szeemann: Exhibition Maker. Osfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2006; Ammann, Jean Christophe,and Theewen, Gerhard. Obsession Collection: Gespräche und Texte über das Sammeln von und mit Jean Christophe Ammann [und] Harald Szeemann. Cologne: Odeon, 1994.

Szarkowski, John

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Szarkowski, John

Other Names:

Thaddeus John Szarkowski

Gender: male

Date Born: 18 December 1925

Date Died: 07 July 2007

Place Born: Ashland, WI, USA

Place Died: Pittsfield, Berkshire, MA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): photographs

Overview

Historian of Photography and photographer. Szarkowski’s father Julius, was an assistant postmaster in Ashland, WI; his mother was Rose Woychik (Szarkowski). The young Szarkowski began working with a camera at age eleven and by high school was an skilled photographer. He entered the University of Wisconsin, Madison, but when World War II was declared, was drafted into the military. He graduated in 1948 [New York Times says 1947] with a degree in art history where he secured a job as photographer for the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, MN. He taught photography in Buffalo, NY in 1950 before joining the University of Minnesota in 1951 as an instructor in photography. He left the museum for the first of his two Guggenheim grants in 1953. During these years he photographed architecture in Chicago, principally that of Louis Sullivan, whose work was underappreciated at the time. He published a book, The Idea of Louis Sullivan, in 1956. A second early book, The Face of Minnesota, 1958 received national exposure by the television personality Dave Garroway on his morning talk show, Today. The book became a New York Times best-seller for several weeks, one of the few photography books to do so. Szarkowski secured a second Guggenheim grant for 1962. Shortly thereafter he was offered a job, age thirty-seven, to succeed Edward J. Steichen as director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He married Jill Anson (1933-2007), an architect, in 1963 in New York. At MoMA, Szarkowski widened the breadth of photography exhibited launching exhibitions that secured the medium a place as art. Among them was his 1967 exhibition “New Documents,” which brought to international attention the work of three relatively unknown photographers, Gary Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus. His 1976 exhibition of William Eggleston heaped criticism on Szarkowski (from Ansel Adams, among others) because the photographer worked from 35 millimeters slides and in color, considered amateur and commercial formats. His show “Mirrors and Windows,” 1978, portrayed photography into two groups, documentary images and those primarily of interpretive sphere. Szarkowski became increasingly conservative in later years, disliking photography-based art and Post-Modernism. He mounted a final show, “Photography Until Now,” which examined how technological development changed the look of photographs. He retired in 1991 as director emeritus, succeeded by Peter Galassi. His photography was given a 2005/2006 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and MoMA. Szarkowski’s wife died in 2006 and he suffered a stroke and died the folowing year at age eighty-one. John Szarkowski “almost single-handedly elevated photography’s status…to that of a fine art.” (Gefter). He abandoned his predecessors’ approach–the lofty themes of art that Steichen has posited and the art-historical approach of Beaumont Newhall for a formalist view akin to Clement Greenberg (Grundberg). “He illustrated how the creative issues, such as subject selection, vantage, and frame, were similar whether the camera was wielded by a journeyman, a Sunday hobbyist, or an artist” (

Selected Bibliography

The Idea of Louis Sullivan. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1956; The Face of Minnesota. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1958; Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art. New York: MoMA/ New York Graphic Society, 1973.; William Eggleston’s Guide. New York: Museum of Modern Art/MIT Press, 1976; The Work of Atget. 4 vols. New York: Museum of Modern Art/New York Graphic Society, 1981-1985; and Stieglitz, Alfred. Alfred Stieglitz at Lake George, 1995; New York: Museum of Modern Art/H.N. Abrams, 1995; Atget. New York: Museum of Modern Art/Calloway, 2000; and Phillips, Sandra S.John Szarkowski: Photographs. New York: Bulfinch Press, 2005; [exhibition catalogs] The Photographer & the American Landscape. New York: Museum of Modern Art/Doubleday, 1963; The Photographer’s Eye. New York: Museum of Modern Art/Doubleday, 1966; Walker Evans. New York: Museum of Modern Art/New York Graphic Society, 1971; Mirrors & Windows: American Photography Since 1960. New York: Museum of Modern Art/New York Graphic Society, 1978; Irving Penn. New York: Museum of Modern Art/New York Graphic Society Books, 1984; Photography Until Now. New York: Museum of Modern Art/Bulfinch Press, 1989; Ansel Adams at 100. Boston: Little, Brown/San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2001.

Sources

Hambourg). But Szarkowski defined photography largely as what the indivdual photographer could create soley through the lense of the natural world.. Works of the photographer Cindy Sherman, for example, were only acquired by MoMA after his retirement. Hambourg, Maria Morris. “Master of the Medium: Maria Morris Hambourg on John Szarkowski (1925-2007).” Artforum International 46 no.2 (2007): 81ff.; [obituaries:] Gefter, Philp. “John Szarkowski, Curator of Photography, Dies at 81.” New York Times, July 9, 2007; Grundberg, Andy. “John Szarkowski 1925-2007.” Art in America 95 no. 8 (September 2007): 37

Sypher, Wylie

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Sypher, Wylie

Other Names:

Feltus Wylie Sypher

Gender: male

Date Born: 1905

Date Died: 1987

Place Born: Mt. Kisco, NY, USA

Place Died: Hackettstown, Warren, NJ, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): art history and literary studies

Career(s): art historians, educators, and historiographers

Overview

Professor of English and writer on art history. Sypher was born to Harry Wylie Sypher and Martha Berry (Sypher). He graduated from Amherst College in 1927, continuing for two master’s degrees, the first from Tufts University, in 1929 and, after marrying Lucy Johnston the same year, pursued a second from Harvard University in 1932. He joined Simmons College, Boston, as an instructor beginning in 1929. Sypher was awarded his Ph.D., from Harvard in 1937. At Simmons, Sypher advanced through the ranks, being promoted to assistant professor in 1936, and associate professor, 1941 and professor of English in 1945. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1949-50, and again in 1958-59. In 1963 Sypher wrote his groundbreaking anthology of art history, Art History: An Anthology of Modern Criticism. Together with that of German Readings in the History and Theory of Fine Arts by Margarete Bieber in 1946, it was one of the first anthologies of art-historical literature published in the United States and the first with full English translations. In 1966 he was named alumnae professor of English. He received a Litt.D., from Middlebury College, 1969, retiring from Simmons professor emeritus in 1973. After retirement he was awarded L.H.D.’s from Simmons College, 1973, and Amherst College, 1977. Throughout his life, Sypher wrote on the history of art in addition to literature, often combining both. Sypher viewed art history and criticism as essentially the same thing. Defining style as the essence of an art form, Sypher’s works trace art as it modulates formally without perceptible effect from social forces.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] The Antislavery Movement to 1800 in English Literature, Exclusive of the Periodical. Harvard, 1937; edited, Art History: an Anthology of Modern Criticism. New York: Vintage Books, 1963; Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature, 1400-1700. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955; Loss of Self in Modern Literature and Art. New York: Random House 1962.

Sources

[obituary:] “Wylie Sypher, 81, Taught English at Simmons College for 50 Years.” Boston Globe August 18, 1987, p. 13.

Symonds, John Addington

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Symonds, John Addington

Gender: male

Date Born: 1840

Date Died: 1893

Place Born: Bristol, England, UK

Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): art theory, biography (general genre), Gay studies, homosexuality, LGBTQ+, Queer studies, Queer theory, Renaissance, sexual identity, sexuality, and sexualityQueer studies

Career(s): art historians, biographers, and theorists

Overview

Author of a popular renaissance history and an influential Michelangelo biography; early gay studies writer. Symonds was the son of John Addington Symonds, M.D., (1807-1871) a socially prominent British physician and Harriet Sykes (1808/9-1844). After his mother’s death he was raised by a strict aunt. His father instilled in him a love for Greek and Italian art, who himself studied these humanities two hours daily. Symonds entered the Harrow School in 1854, where his homosexual awakening led to a relationship with a fellow student, Willie Dyer, in 1858. Symonds entered Balliol College, Oxford, in 1858, meeting there the classicists Benjamin Jowett (1817-93) and John Conington (1825-69). Like Jowett, Symonds became a master at an Oxford collection, Magdalen, for the1862-3 year. There, his essay “The Renaissance” won the Chancellor’s Prize. When Symonds fell ill with a variety of illnesses, including an eye inflammation, a diagnosis of sexual repression was made; the cure prescribed, ironically was marriage. More physical and mental illnesses ensued, including pulmonary disease. Symonds made an extended trip to Belgium, Germany, Austria, France, Italy between 1860 to 1863 to to recover his health. In Switzerland he met another British subject, Janet Catherine North (1837-1913), sister of the botanical artist Marianne North (1830-1890), whom he married in 1864. Symonds entered law school in 1865 but was diagnosed with tuberculosis (and another nervous breakdown) in 1868. He secured a position lecturing on Greek art at Clifton College in 1869 and began another affair with Clifton student Norman Moor, whom he took to Italy and Switzerland. He also lectured in art at Society for Higher Education for Women. Sketches in Italy and Greece (1874) and the first volume of his history of the Italian renaissance, Renaissance in Italy: the Age of the Despots (1875) appeared in succession. His father died in 1871 and the Symonds, now in control of his family fortune in rail investments, moved to the manner. The second and third volumes of his renaissance history, The Revival of Learning, and The Fine Arts both appeared in 1877. In 1877, too, Symonds set out for Egypt but got only as far as Davos, Switzerland. In 1881 be built a permanent home there, Am Hof. In Davos he met among others Robert Louis Stevenson also convalescing from tuberculosis. During spring and fall, Symonds and his family spent in Venice at Ca’ Torresella owned by Horatio Forbes Brown (1854-1926). In 1881 he met a gondolier, Angelo Fusato (1857-1923) who became his final life partner, though Angelo, with Symonds’ help, married the woman who had borne Fusato two sons. In 1883, Symonds published the first history of homosexuality in English, Problem in Greek Ethics, written in 1873. His translation of Michelangelo’s poetry, The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti appeared in 1878. At the suggestion of his publisher, John C. Nimmo, he translated The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, published in 1888. A collection of essays, Essays: Speculative and Suggestive (1890), included “On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Art and Literature,” a discussion of biological and cultural evolutionary stages of birth, acme and decline. Another Symonds’s essay “Landscape” traced the subject from the Classical to the baroque. His own biography A Problem in Modern Ethics appeared in 1891 as well as articles on renaissance figures for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The success of the Cellini biography lead Nimmo publishers to commission a biography of Michelangelo. Symonds spent months sifting through the Florentine archives in order to write his Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, which appeared shortly before his death. The same year he commission Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) to co-write a book on “Sexual inversion” (homosexuality) in 1892. While lecturing in Rome in April 1893 he caught pneumonia and died. He is buried in the protestant cemetery in Roma near Shelley’s grave. Ellis and Symond’s investigation of homosexuality first appeared in German as Das konträre Geschlechtsgefühl in 1896 and then in English as Sexual Inversion (1897), though suppressed. It was reissued as Studies in the Psychology of Sex, volume one, Sexual Inversion now only with Ellis’ name, at the insistence of Brown. Symonds’ children included the later nursing pioneer Dame Katharine Furse (1875-1952). Symonds’ biography of Michelangelo was widely read at the time; it immediately superseded the other early documentary biography of the artist by Herman Grimm, also available in English. Symonds revealed in his Michelangelo biography that the Buonarroti archives altered the artist’s poems and letters in their publication to hide his homosexuality. Symonds’ translation of both Michelangelo’s sonnets and Cellini’s autobiography are his most durable works. Much of his writing, as in The Age of the Despots, belies a Hegelian conception of history. The volume on The Fine Arts praises renaissance painting but disparages its architecture as remaining medieval in spirit. To Symonds, renaissance painting harmonized pagan and Christian traditions, emphasizing the humanity of both spiritual beliefs. Symonds’ renaissance, siding with Jacob Burckhardt, emphasized the secular nature over Christian superstition. This set him at odds with the other popular prevailing notion, that of John Ruskin and the idea of Christian progress. Implicit in Symonds’ particular history of art is the notion of sexual liberation (Norton). Symonds’ initial posthumous reputation was clouded by the biography written of him by Brown likely rendered unrecognizable by Edmund Gosse. Further damage was done when the London Library, who inherited Symonds’ personal papers, burned everything except the Brown biography, under orders of Gosse and Charles Hagberg Wright, the librarian.

Selected Bibliography

Renaissance in Italy. 7 vols. London: Smith, Elder, 1875-86; Essays Speculative and Suggestive. 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, limited, 1890; Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti: Based on Studies in the Archives of the Buonarroti Family in Florence. 2 vols. London: J. C. Nimmo, 1892; The Life of Benvenuto Cellini. 2 vols. London: John C. Nimmo, 1888.

Sources

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. 146 mentioned; 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. 91; Norton, Rictor. “Symonds, John Addington.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Gilbert, Creighton E. “Introduction.” The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti: Based on Studies in the Archives of the Buonarroti Family at Florence. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, pp. ix-xxv; Grosskurth, Phyllis, ed. Symonds, John Addington. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds. New York: Random House, 1984.

Sylvestre, Théophile

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Sylvestre, Théophile

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: France

Overview

work on the Romantics

Selected Bibliography

Les Artistes vivants. 1853-1856.

work on the Romantics

Sylvester, David

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Sylvester, David

Other Names:

David Sylvester

Gender: male

Date Born: 21 September 1924

Date Died: 19 June 2001

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Surrealist

Career(s): art critics

Overview

Magritte scholar; art critic, exhibition organizer. Sylvester was the son of Philip Sylvester a fish-merchant-cum-silver dealer, and Sybil Rosen (Sylvester). Sylvester was raised a devout Jew but suffered from anti-semitic sigmatism in his private schooling. Thrown out of his home for contemplating Roman Catholicism in his teens, he entered University College School in central London, but was expelled for truancy. He learned to be an art writer while writing copy for George Orwell at Tribune newspaper from 1942 to 1945 supporting himself by dealing in silver. In 1947 he left for Paris rather than major in Moral Sciences at Cambridge. There he met the French artistic community, including Leger, Masson, Brancusi and Giacometti. He read and became influenced by the philosophy of Sir Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989). In 1948 he delivered broadcasts for the BBC on art and artists, working as the private secretary of Henry Moore and closely associating with Francis Bacon in 1949. He married Pamela Bidden in 1950 (later divorced). He curated the 1951 exhibitions of sculpture of Moore, now a personal friend, as well as drawings by Alberto Giacometti, both at the Tate Gallery. The Moore exhibition began a celebrated debate with the historian and critic John Berger which lasted through much of the 1950s. Sylvester espoused his approach through Encounter and Berger via The New Statesman. Sylvester defended art on the grounds of individual experience in contrast to Berger’s socio-political approach. Sylvester was a visiting lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art between 1953 and 1957. He mounted an exhibition of Stanley Spencer in 1954. In 1960 he visited New York at the invitation of the United States State Department. There Sylvester discovered the art of Jasper Johns, de Kooning, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. He expounded the New York School in a series of BBC radio programs upon his return to England. Sylvester was appointed a trustee of the Tate Gallery in 1967 (to 1969). During this same time he served as a visiting scholar at Swarthmore College in the United States. Other exhibitions he headed included René Magritte in 1969, Robert Morris and Henri Laurens, both 1971, “Joan Miro Bronzes,” 1972, Willem de Kooning in 1977, and “Dada and Surrealism Reviewed” (1977). He resigned as chairman from the Arts Panel and was appointed CBE both 1983. He joined the acquisitions committee of the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris in 1984, remaining until 1996. An exhibition of late Picasso works was launched in 1988. Though Sylvester had no formal degree in art, he set about co-authoring what became a five-volume catalogue raisonné on the work of Magritte, issuing it beginning in 1992 with Sarah Whitfield. In 1993 Sylvester organized an exhibition of Sir Francis Bacon, as Britain’s contribution to the Venice Biennale. He was awarded the Biennale’s Golden Lion Award, never before bestowed on a critic. His Interviews with Francis Bacon appeared in several editions. Looking Back on Francis Bacon was followed by Looking at Giacometti in 1994. He jointly curated the large exhibition of Willem de Kooning painting in London and in Washgington, D. C., 1994-1995. In 1995 he was made a Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters in France. He was an Honorary Academician in the Royal Academy in London. Sylvester became a trustee of the Henry Moore Foundation in 1996. About Modern Art which included elements of autobiography, appeared the same year. In 2000 he organized a major Francis Bacon exhibition for Paris, traveling to Munich and Dublin and was awarded Britain’s Hawthornden Prize for art criticism. He died of colon cancer in London. A book of interviews with American artists, including Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, de Kooning and Richard Serra remained unfinished at his death. Sylvester had a daughter with English novelist Shena Mackay (b. 1944). The Tate Modern held a posthumous exhibition of his work “Looking at Modern Art: In Memory of David Sylvester” in 2004. Sylvester followed Ayer’s philosophy, insisting on the primacy of direct encounters with works of art. His willingness to encounter every work of art as a new experiment and to arrive at new conclusions marked him, “as the most important English heir to Roger Fry in 20th-century art criticism.” (Green). Although endorsing the non-objective art of Donald Judd and Barnet Newman, he was the champion of figurative art. He decried Berger’s championship of “Social Realism” and the artists such Marxist critics were forced to ignore: Giacometti, Masson, Picasso, Moore, Sutherland, and, most importantly for Sylvester Francis Bacon. Though his debate with Berger never produced a victor, his espousal of the personal interpetation of art prepared the way for the British art-going public for American Abstract Expressionism.

Selected Bibliography

[collected writings:] About Modern Art. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001; Henry Moore. New York: F. A. Praeger, 1968; Francis Bacon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1975; and Whitfield, Sarah. René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné. 5 vols. Houston: Menil Foundation, 1992- ; and Prather, Marla, and Shiff, Richard. Willem de Kooning: Paintings. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1994; edited, Looking Back at Francis Bacon. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000.

Sources

Sylvester, David. “Curriculum Vitae.” About Modern Art. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001, p. 11; Russell, John. “David Sylvester, 76, Art Critic Who Championed Modernism.” New York Times, June 20, 2001 p. 21; Green, Christopher. “David Sylvester.” Independent (London), June 25, 2001, p. 6.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

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