Art Historians

Sterling, Charles

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Sterling, Charles

Other Names:

Charles Jacques, pseudonym

Gender: male

Date Born: 1901

Date Died: 1991

Place Born: Warsaw, Masovian Voivodeship, Poland

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

Home Country/ies: Poland

Subject Area(s): fifteenth century (dates CE), French (culture or style), and painting (visual works)

Career(s): curators and educators

Overview

Louvre curator of painting and major scholar of French 15th-century art; New York University professor. Sterling was born to a Jewish family in Poland of Scottish decent. He studied law in Poland and was admitted to the bar as a lawyer. His uncle, who owned one of the most successful galleries in Warsaw, instilled an interest in art in him. Sterling married and moved to Paris in 1925 determined now to be an art historian. He studied at the Ecole du Louvre under Gaston Brière and at the Sorbonne under Henri Focillon, who he considered his master. His initial area of study during these years was 16th-century Netherlandish landscape painting. After concluding his studies in 1928, he joined the Louvre Museum in the Département des Peintures in 1929 under Paul Jamot assignrd to assist René Huyghe in a new edition of Huyghe’s Delacroix catalog. He was soon put in charge of producing all the Louvre’s catalogs. His research focus necessarily changed to French painting. Under Jamot and Huyghe, he researched catalogs for the Louvre exhibitions, including Degas, 1931 and Chassériau, 1933. He became a French citizen in 1934. That year he and Jamot mounted the exhibition at the Orangerie, Peintres de la éalité en France au XViie siècle. The exhibition caused a re-evaluation of French 17th-century painting, revealing Georges de la Tour as major figure and bringing to fore the work of the Le Nain, among others. Further catalogs included Art Italien, Cézanne, and Rubens et son temps, all 1936. Around 1937, Sterling began an interest in the so-called French Primitives, which was to result in his life’s work. The first of his two serious surveys on the topic appeared in 1938 as La peinture française: les primitifs. When Paris fell to the Nazi’s in 1940, Jews such as himself were forbidden by law to hold official positions in France. Despite the Polish consulate in Marseilles offering to certify his as “Aryan,” Sterling declined the deceit in solidarity with other Jews. The second volume in his primitives research appeared in 1941, published under a pseudonym to hide his Jewish heritage. He eventually fled to the United States where he was attached to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through the auspices of the director, Francis Henry Taylor. As a curator, he once convinced the colorful mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia (1882-1947), who happened to be attending a Met acquisitions meeting, to vote for the acquisition of a Francois Clouet painting simply because the subject had been a mayor. Sterling wrote the three-volume catalog of the French paintings for the Met and taught his first classes in art history. He returned to the Louvre in 1945, but remained partially on the Met staff until 1955. The Orangerie exhibition Natur Morte in 1952 led to his seminal book on the genre of still lives in art. Sterling was asked by Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner to write a volume in the Pelican History of Art series on 15th-century European art outside Great Britain and Italy. He mounted the Louvre Poussin retrospective with Anthony Blunt in 1960. Sterling retired from the Louvre in 1968, accepting an appointment to teach at New York University at the Institute of Fine Arts the following year. An interview was filmed with him for French television in 1989 (released 1991). He died after a long illness at age 89. At his death he bequeathed his 12,155 books and 38,000 photographs to the Département. His text for the Pelican volume was substantially complete, but never published. Following his death, the Louvre mounted an exhibition, “Homage to Charles Sterling” to commemorate the numerous important paintings in the museum which his scholarship had advanced. Sterling undertook the first art historical analysis of French painting of the late Middle Ages. Using the method of connoisseurship developed by Giovanni Morelli, he mapped pictures by particular traits of the artist and then matched these to documented artists. He put artist’s names to many of the great late-medieval paintings in the Louvre, such as Enguerrand Quarton, the painter of the spectacular “Avignon Pieta,” and Jean Hey for the Maitre de Moulins, a major artist of the 1480’s. Establishing the output for the many anonymous French Primitives and codifying their artistic personality (characteristics of the individual artist) placed Sterling a a par to what Bernard Berenson did for Italy or Max J. Friedländer for the Low Countries (Laclotte). His Peintres de la éalité en France au XViie siècle with its bibliography and notes, became a hallmark for exhibition catalogs (reprinted in toto in 2006). His method, like his colleague and friend Roberto Longhi, was in part to compare photographs of details to corroborate art-historical conclusions. “Sterling pioneered the study of still life as an autonomous mode of painting that could take a high rank on its own merits” (Russell).

Selected Bibliography

[bibliography to 1973:] Études d’art français offerts à Charles Sterling Châtelet, Albert, and Reynaud, Nicole. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1975, pp. 13-22; La peinture française: les primitifs. Paris: Librairie Floury, 1938; [under the pseudonym, Charles Jacques:] Les Peintres du Moyen Age. Paris, 1941; La nature morte de l’antiquité à nos jours. Paris: P. Tisné, 1952, English, rev. ed. Still Life Painting from Antiquity to the Present Time. New York, Universe Books, 1959; A Catalogue of French Paintings [at the Metropolitan Museum of Art]. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Harvard University Press, 1955-1967; La peinture médiévale à Paris: 1300-1500. 2 vols. Paris: Bibliothèque des Arts, 1987ff.

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. 42; 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. 43 mentioned; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 485-486; Orangerie, 1934: les “peintres de la éalité”: Exposition au musée de l’Orangerie, Paris. Paris: éunion des musées nationaux, 2006; [obituaries:] Laclotte, Michel. “Charles Sterling.” Burlington Magazine 133, no. 1057 (Apr., 1991): 252; Russell, John. “The Louvre Honors A Patron Saint Of French Painting.” New York Times May 17, 1992, section 2, p. 29; Wildenstein, Daniel. Gazette des Beaux-Arts ser6 no. 117 (April 1991): [“Chronique des arts”] 26; Chatelet, Albert. Bulletin Monumental 150 no. 1 (1992): 49-54; Scott, Barbara. “Homage to Charles Stirling [sic].” Apollo 136 (July 1992): 50-1; Charles Sterling: un cahasseur dans la nuit médiévale [film]. Richard Copans, director, 1991; Haskell, Francis. The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 137ff.

Stephens, Frederic George

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Stephens, Frederic George

Gender: male

Date Born: 1827

Date Died: 1907

Place Born: Aberdeen, Scotland, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): biography (general genre) and British (modern)

Career(s): art critics

Overview

Athenaeum art critic and biographer of British artists. Stephens was born to Septimus Stephens of Aberdeen and Ann Cooke (Stephens)(?) and raised in Lambeth. Because of an accident in1837, Stephens was physically disabled and educated privately. He later attended University College School, London. In 1844 he entered the Royal Academy [of art] Schools where he met John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt. He became part of their Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, often serving as a model for their pictures (Millais’s Ferdinand Lured by Ariel,1849, Ford Madox Brown’s Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet 1856). His discouragement at his own artistic talent convinced him to destroy his paintings and change careers to art history. Using his intimate knowledge of the Brotherhood artists and his lucid writing style, he publicized their aims to a frequently bewildered public. He joined the Athenaeum as its art critic also writing freelance for other art-historical publications on the continent and the United States. During this time he was deeply under the influence of Dante Gabriele Rosetti, whom he allowed to write reviews of his own work under Stephen’s name. Stephen’s first work of art history, Normandy: its Gothic Architecture and History was published in 1865, and a history of Netherlandish art, titled Flemish Relics, appeared the following year. That year, too, 1866, Stephens married Rebecca Clara Dalton (1833/4-1916). Monographs on Edwin Landseer in 1869 and William Mulready in 1867 followed. Stephens began writing a nearly hundred-piece series for the Athenaeum in 1873 on British collecting, treating major collections and small collectors together. Under the direction of George William Reid, he published the first four volumes of the 10-volume series on British caricature for the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings, from 1870 onward. For a long time he was associated with the Grosvenor Gallery (1877-1890), writing contributions for their catalogs. In 1875, Stephens’ tone changed, describing himself more as an art historian than a critic in his Flemish and French Pictures with Notes Concerning the Painters and their Works, 1875. He left the Brotherhood in 1882 at Rosetti’s death and began to publish more balanced accounts of their work. He criticized William Holman Hunt’s Triumph of the Innocents 1885 for the mixing of hyper-realism and fantasy. [Hunt issued a diatribe against the critic in the second edition of Hunt’s Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 1914]. Stephens contributed essays on art for H. D. Traill’s Social England: a Record of the Progress of the People (six vols., 1893-7) placing Pre-Raphaelitism within a continuum of British art. This countered a prevailing notion, propagated by the Brotherhood themselves, of springing uniquely from a pallid past. A work on Lawrence Alma-Tadema by Stephens appeared in 1895. His review of the posthumous exhibition of Millais in 1898 took the painter to task for poorly thought-out works. Stephens’ conservative views toward modern art–he loathed Impressionism–resulted a departure as art critic from the Athenaeum in 1901, a tenure of forty years. He was replaced by Roger Fry. He died at home in 1907 and is buried in Brompton cemetery. His collection of graphics and books was auctioned in 1916 at Fosters, following Rebecca’s death. His criticism was part of the 19th-century British literature encouraging middle-class art patronage and the growing Victorian interest for contemporary art. His anti-elitism led him to champion the greats of British graphics, Thomas Rowlandson, Thomas Bewick, and George Cruikshank. His survey of British collecting in the Athenaeum placed major collectors next to modest ones.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Macleod, Dianne Sachko. “F. G. Stephens: Pre-Raphaelite Critic and Art Historian.” Burlington Magazine 128 (June 1986): 398-406; Laurence Alma Tadema, R.A.: A Sketch of his Life and Work. London: s. n., 1895; Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Division I. Political and Personal Satires. 4 vols. London: British Museum. Department of Prints and Drawings, 1870 ff.; Exhibition of the Works of Sir Anthony van Dyck. London: Grosvenor Gallery/H. Good and Son, 1887; Normandy: its Gothic Architecture & History . . . in Rouen, Caen, Mantes, Bayeux & Falaise: a Sketch. London:. A. W. Bennett, 1865; “Beata Beatrix, by Dante G.Rossetti.” Portfolio 22 (1891):45-47; Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London : Seeley and Co, 1894; Flemish Relics: Architectural, Legendary, and Pictorial, as Connected with Public Buildings in Belgium. London: A. W. Bennett, 1866; Memoirs of Sir Edwin Landseer: a Sketch of the Life of the Artist. London : George Bell, 1874.

Sources

Macleod, Dianne Sachko. “F. G. Stephens: Pre-Raphaelite Critic and Art Historian.” Burlington Magazine 128 (June 1986): 398-406; Macleod, Dianne Sachko. “Stephens, Frederic George (1827-1907).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004; Macleod, Dianne Sachko. “Mid-Victorian Patronage of the Arts: F. G. Stephens’s ‘The Private Collections of England.'” Burlington Magazine 128 (August 1986): 597-607; J. B. Manson. Frederic George Stephens and the Pre-Raphaelite Brothers. London: privately printed, 1920; The Athenaeum no. 4142 (16 March 1907): 329.

Athenaeum art critic and biographer of British artists. Stephens was born to Septimus Stephens of Aberdeen and Ann Cooke (Stephens)(?) and raised in Lambeth. Because of an accident in1837, Stephens was physically disabled and educated pri

Stendhal

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Stendhal

Other Names:

Marie-Henri Beyle

Gender: male

Date Born: 1783

Date Died: 1842

Place Born: Grenoble, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France

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

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style) and painting (visual works)

Career(s): art critics

Overview

Author and government official; wrote art criticism and a history of Italian painting. Stendhal attended his school years in Grenoble, where he was raised. A chance school prize of the book éflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture (1719) by Jean-Baptiste Dubos set him on a career in art writing. In 1799 he moved to Paris, his official home for the rest of his life. In Paris he studied art with Jean-Baptiste Regnault, though he seems never to have been intent on a career in painting. He entered the Ministry of War in 1800 to earn his living in an administrative career. After a visit to Italy the same year, he determined to spend as much time there as his government positions would allow. In 1810 in job briefly involved inventorying the national collections, then huge because of Napoleon’s conquests. The same year he wrote his first “review” of the Salon of 1810–a letter to a friend. Stendhal returned to Italy in 1811, researching his history of Italian painting. It appeared in 1817 as Histoire de la peinture en Italie. The work had a strong effect on a number of romantic artists, especially Eugène Delacroix. He began reviewing the Parisian Salons, the official exhibition of paintings by the French Academy in 1824, which was serialized into 17 parts. Though his Salon reviewing was short, and none of the others as lengthy as the 1824. Stendhal approved of the painting of Horace Vernet, yet approached romantics, such as Delacroix, with reserve. His dictum, that the best art was that which brought the most pleasure to the most people, initially found Delacroix wanting. He changed his stance, approving of Delacroix over Vernet, by 1828. In 1840 Stendhal collaborated with the painter Abraham Constantin (1785-1855) to publish Idées italiennes sur quelques tableaux célèbres. The work, part travelogue, part guidebook, part technical treatise, added architecture to the list of objects he considered. L’Histoire de la peinture en Italie was neither a work of scholarship nor vision. In fact, Stendhal borrowed unscrupulously from other art historians whom he failed to cite. L’Histoire like much of the postivistic art histories charts Italian art as ever ascending to the acme of Michelangelo. It remains important, particularly for Romanticism, for its call to painting to energy and vitality, which neo-classicism had for the most part lost. Stendhal believed that art appreciation was not a matter for the mind so much as a matter of the heart. His writing fueled the public appetite and believe that it could be as much the harbinger of art history as official taste. E. J. Delécluze termed it disparagingly as “the Koran of the so-called Romantic artists”. His Salon reviews were important for the influence they exerted on writers and critics including Charles Baudelaire. Stendhal decried what he saw as the pedantry of many connoisseurs. Despite his accomplishments he referred to himself as a “simple amateur”.

Selected Bibliography

[collected edition] Voyages en Italie illustés par les peintres du romantisme. 3 vols. Paris: Selliers, 2002.

Sources

Fernandez, Dominique. Le musée idéal de Stendhal. Paris: Stock, 1995; Berthier, Philippe. Stendhal et ses peintres italiens. Geneva: Droz, 1977; Wakefield, David. “Stendhal and Delécluze at the Salon of 1824.” in, The Artist and the Writer in France: Essays in Honour of Jean Seznec. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, pp. 76-85; Lilley, E. D. “Stendhal.” Dictionary of Art.

Steinweg, Klara

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Steinweg, Klara

Gender: female

Date Born: 1903

Date Died: 1972

Place Born: Westphalia, Germany

Place Died: Westphalia, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

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

Career(s): art collectors

Overview

Historian of Italian renaissance; collaborator with Richard Offner on the Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting. Steinweg studied at various German universities as was common for scholars at that time, beginning in 1922 attending classes under Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich, Adolph Goldschmidt in Berlin, and by 1925 settling at Göttingen where she wrote her dissertation under Georg Vitzthum von Eckstädt. Her dissertation topic, on Andrea Orcagna, was published in 1929. Steinweg met New York University scholar Richard Offner during this time. After her degree, she became a volunteer assistant at the Dresden Gallery where her initial interest was in 18th-century Venetian art. She wrote the catalog for the “modern” collection in Dresden and contributed the articles on G. A. Pellegrini and D. Zanetti for the Allgemeine Künstlerlexikon (Thieme-Becker). In 1930 Offner offered her a position as his assistant in Europe on his forthcoming corpus of Florentine Painting, the Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting. Steinweg agreed, moving to Berlin. Already the first four volumes of the Corpus were in production and, although she made alterations to these volumes, her work began in earnest with volume five. In Berlin, Steinweg was responsible for the discovery of many fourteenth-century paintings in German private collections. In 1935 she moved to Florence to work on the project there with Offner at the project’s headquarters in Offner’s Tuscan home. The same year Werner Cohn joined the Corpus. When World War II was declared, Steinweg returned to Germany, where she remained until the surrender. For the next twenty years she worked almost exclusively on the project until Offner’s death in 1965. The project was then moved to the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence and Steinweg appointed official co-author, carrying on the work alone at the request of the Institute of Fine Arts. This entailed filing pictures and her research in the various files of the Corpus for publication at some date. Such a procedure forced her to watch as other scholars published pictures long known to her with similar findings. She published little outside the Corpus in her lifetime, largely material that was outside the parameters of the project. The Corpus has continued under Miklós Boskovits and Mina Gregori. After her death, two numbers of the Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz were published as a festschrift in her memory in 1973. Steinweg was a conventional art historian for her era: her interest, bordering on devotion, was to the work itself and the history of artists and their immediate situation (Hueck). She focused on the historical documents and stylistic criticism for her method (Quellengeschichte and stilkritische Untersuchungen).

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] “Bibliographie von Klara Steinweg.” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 17 no.2-3 (1973): 371-372; [dissertation:] Andrea Orcagna: quellengeschichtliche und stilkritische Untersuchung. Göttingen, 1929, published, Strassburg: J. H. E. Heitz, 1929; Katalog der modernen Galerie [of the] Staatliche Gemäldegalerie zu Dresden. Dresden: W. und B. v. Baensch Stiftung, 1930; A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting. New York: Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1930-1972.

Sources

Ladis, Andrew. “The Unmaking of a Connoisseur.” in, Offner, Richard. A Discerning Eye: Essays on Early Italian Painting. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998, p.17; [obituary:] Hueck, Irene. “Klara Steinweg.” Burlington Magazine 115, No. 843 (June 1973): 397.

Steinmann, Ernst

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Steinmann, Ernst

Gender: male

Date Born: 1866

Date Died: 1934

Home Country/ies: Germany

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

Overview

Michelangelo scholar, founder and director of the Biblioteca Herziana, Rome.

Selected Bibliography

[Edited] Die Portraitdarstellungen des Michelangelo. Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1913; and Wittkower, Rudolf. Michelangelo bibliographie: 1510-1926. Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1927; Das geheimnis der Medicigraeber Michel Angelos. Leipzig: K. W. Hiersemann, 1907; and Maurenbrecher, Wolf. Die Aufzeichnungen des Michelangelo Buonarroti im Britischen Museum in London und im Verm’chtnis Ernst Steinmann in Rom. Leipzig: H. Keller, 1938.

Sources

mentioned, Jennifer Montagu and Joseph Connors. “Rudolf Wittkower 1901-1971.” Introduction to Art and Architecture in Italy: 1600-1750. 6th edition, volume 1, Painting in Italy. Pelican History of Art. pp. ix.

Michelangelo scholar, founder and director of the Biblioteca Herziana, Rome.

Steinitz, Kate Trauman

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Steinitz, Kate Trauman

Other Names:

Fanny Elisabeth Käthe Steinitz|Annette C. Nobody

Gender: female

Date Born: 02 August 1889

Date Died: 07 April 1975

Place Born: Bytom, Silesian Voivodeship, Poland

Place Died: Los Angeles, CA, USA

Home Country/ies: Germany and United States

Career(s): curators

Institution(s): Leibniz Universität Hannover, Pomona College, and University of California Los Angeles

Overview

Artist, art critic, librarian, and university lecturer who specialized in avant-garde and Dada art and the works of Leonardo da Vinci. Kate Trauman was born in Beuthen, Germany (present day Bytom, Poland) in 1889 to Arnold Trauman (d. 1910) and Magdalena Mannheimer (Trauman). From 1911-1913, Steinitz studied fine arts at the studios in Paris with Käthe Kollwitz and Lovis Corinth and various art studios in Berlin from 1912-1914. She married Ernst Steinitz, MD, also from Beuthen, (1881-1942), in 1913. In 1918, she moved from Berlin to Hannover. There, she worked on multiple expressionist exhibitions and assumed a central role in the emerging avant-garde art scene in Hannover with her husband. While maintaining such a pivotal role in the arts scene, she studied art history at Leibniz Universität Hannover from 1923-1930. Through her involvement in the Kestner Society, she made contacts with many of the avant-garde artists of 1920s Germany. She became particularly close with managers of the modern art society, Alexander Dorner and Justus Bier. She kindled a close friendship with Kurt Schwitters, the two eventually becoming lovers; the pair went on to collaborate on a series of children’s books, which included Der Hahnepeter, Das Märchen vom Paradies, and Die Scheuche. She founded her own publishing house in Hanover called Apos and & Merz, which would become known for its avant-garde typography. Steinitz wrote for different Hannover newspapers and magazines under the pseudonym Annette C. Nobody. In 1933, her Jewish husband was dismissed from his position of hospital physician owing to his “non-Aryan” descent and the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.” Similarly, she was targeted by the German government, persecuted on “racial” grounds and for her active involvement in the Hannoverian avant-garde arts scene. She was accused of “cultural Bolshevism” and banned from publishing in 1935. Not long thereafter in 1936, she and her husband emigrated to the United States. Upon arrival in New York, she began design work for magazine and book covers and translation work in order to support her family. At the 1940 World’s Fair in New York, she was the Chairwoman of the “Art of New Americans” section. After her husband’s death in 1942, she moved to Los Angeles in search of more steady employment opportunities. In 1945, she became the personal librarian of Dr. Elmer Belt (1893-1980), a collector of books on Leonardo da Vinci. Expanding his library, Steinitz completed his collection of literature on Leonardo. She remained in close contact with German artists who had emigrated to the United States, and after her time with Dr. Belt, she became an art history lecturer at Pomona College.

Her time in Hannover was quite possibly the most consequential period of her life, where she not only raised a family, but also advanced the emerging avant-garde arts scene, created her own publishing company, and wrote a series of children’s books alongside her business partner Kurt Schwitters. She also wrote over 150 articles for German newspapers and magazines. She valued so greatly the times she was able to work with other German artists, and that is the principle reason she stayed so well in contact with them in the United States. Her vast knowledge and experiences were shared with the viewers of her art and writings, and eventually in the final stage of her life, with her art history students at Pomona College.

Selected Bibliography

and Schwitters, Kurt. Der Hahnepeter. Hannover 1924;
aand Schwitters, Kurt. Die Märchen vom Paradies. Hannover 1924;
and Schwitters, Kurt und van Doesburg, Theodore. Die Scheuche. Hannover, 1925;
and Archer, Margot. Manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci. Their history with a description of the manuscripts editions in facsimile. Los Angeles: Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana, 1948;
“A reconstruction of Leonardo da Vinci’s revolving stage.”Art Quarterly 12 (1949): 325-338;
“Poussin illustrator of Leonardo da Vinci and the problem of replicas in Poussin’s Studio.” Art Quarterly 16 (1953): 40-55;
”Leonardo da Vinci signs his name. Seven signatures of Leonardo da Vinci in Codex Atlanticus.” Raccolta Vinciana 17 (1954): 151-156;
Kurt Schwitters: Erinnerungen aus den Jahren 1918-30. Zürich 1963;
”The Leonardo drawings at Weimar.” Raccolta Vinciana 20 (1964): 339-349;
Paolo Galluzzi, ed. “Leonardo architetto teatrale e organizzatore di feste.” Leonardo da Vinci. Letture vinciane I-XII (1960-1972). Florence, 1974, pp. 249-274

Sources

Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 2, pp. 661-664.

Contributors: Paul Kamer

Steingräber, Erich

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Steingräber, Erich

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Director of the Germanic National Museum, Nuremberg; sculpture specialist.

Steinberg, Leo

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Steinberg, Leo

Other Names:

Leo Steinberg

Gender: male

Date Born: 09 July 1920

Date Died: 13 March 2011

Place Born: Moscow, Russia

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Overview

Michelangelo- and modernist art historian; Benjamin Franklin professor of art at University of Pennsylvania, 1975-1991. Steinberg was born in Moscow of German-Jewish parents (his mother was Anyuta Esselson [Steinberg], 1890-1954) and his father, Isaac Nachman Steinberg (1888-1957), government figure and lawyer in revolutionary Russia. Lenin appointed Steinberg’s father commissar of justice. His idealism, (he wanted to abolish the prison system, for example) forced the family into exile in Berlin, where the younger Steinberg grew up. After the rise of the Nazis in Germany, the family moved to London where Steinberg studied (studio) painting and sculpture at the Slade School in London from 1936 to 1940. After World War II he immigrated to New York working initially as a freelance writer and translator (including a holocaust account, Ashes and Fire, 1947). He also taught drawing at the Parsons School of Design. He studied art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, under Richard Krautheimer and Wolfgang Lotz, receiving his Ph.D., in 1960. His dissertation, written under Lotz, was on Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. In 1962 he an art editor for Life magazine married Dorothy Seiberling (later divorced). Between 1962-1975 Steinberg taught art history and life drawing at Hunter College, the City University of New York. He and Milton W. Brown developed the curriculum for the City University’s graduate program in art history, instituted in 1971. During this time he began buying prints, which developed into one of the finest Italian Renaissance and Mannerist graphics collections in private hands. His collection also included many modern masters, another a research interest of Steinberg’s. From 1969 to 1971, he was a board member of the College Art Association. Steinberg largely confined himself to articles (as opposed to books) for most of his early career. In 1972, he wrote two of the articles for which he is best known, neither of which was on a Renaissance topic. The first, “Reflections on the State of Art Criticism,” which attacked traditional art criticism (see below), and a (re)analysis of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, entitled “The Philosophical Brothel.” The latter article, which situated the viewer as a patron in a house of prostitution and intellectually as a participant of the pivot of Cubism, brought a storm of criticism (among groups as disparate as feminists and formalists) as well as widespread acceptance. In 1972, too, Steinberg also co-founded the art history department of the graduate center at CUNY. His collected essays, Other Criteria was published the same year. In 1975 he was named Benjamin Franklin Professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Also in 1975, Steinberg wrote his first monograph, Michelangelo’s Last Paintings. In 1982, he delivered the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washgington, D. C., titled, “The Burden of Michelangelo’s Painting.” The following year, Steinberg published another “blockbuster” re-evaluation of a traditional genre: the sexual representation of the infant Christ. A storm of controversy again ensued and the article (it required the entire issue of October magazine) appeared in book form the same year. In 1983 Steinberg was received a literature award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the first art historian to win this distinction. He won the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Criticism in 1984 and was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1986. Before his retirement in 1991, he taught a semester as the Meyer Schapiro Chair at Columbia University in New York. During the 1995-1996 academic year, he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. A 1996 visiting faculty position at the University of Texas, Austin resulted in Steinberg’s donation in 2002 of his more than 3,200 prints assembled over four decades. It was valued at $3.5 million. A historiographic book on the popularity of Leonardo’s Last Supper, Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper, appeared in 2001. Steinberg was a resident scholar at the American Academy in Rome and the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica, CA. Steinberg followed no methodological school, remaining a respected maverick in the art history community, and one of the scrappiest. His essay “Reflections on the State of Art Criticism” in Artforum attacked purely formalist criticism in favor of a pluralistic interpretation (which included formal analysis) as well as emotional response, and a contextualization of the object historically. His paradigm became highly influential in the subsequent decades. Steinberg’s study of the sexual representations of Christ in Renaissance art was a Freudian/textual critique, was admired for its originality but not wholly embraced by the art-historical community. E. H. Gombrich, speaking of Steinberg’s 1975 book Michelangelo’s Last Paintings, chided him for unprovable meanings, writing, ”He has produced a book to be reckoned with, but a dangerous model to follow.” His collected essays Other Criteria, mostly on contemporary art, demonstrate his combination of powerful observation and documentary scrutiny which made his writing unique. Feminists such as Carol Duncan attacked his view as being exclusionary to a female gaze. His celebrated disagreement with Museum of Modern Art Director William S. Rubin over the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” interpretation was covered in the pages of Art in America in the late 1970s. Steinberg’s writing was lampooned, not very insightfully, by Tom Wolfe in his book The Painted Word (1975).

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: a Study in Multiple Form and Architectural Symbolism. New York University, 1960, slightly revised and published, New York: Garland, 1977; translated, Pat, Jacob. Ashes and Fire. New York: International Universities Press, 1947; “The Twin Prongs of Art Criticism.” Sewanee Review 60 no. 3 (Summer 1952): 418-444; “Bible-age Relics and Jewish Art: The Metropolitan Museum’s Archeological Exhibition.” Commentary 16 no. 2 (August 1953): 164-166; “The Eye is a Part of the Mind.” Partisan Review 20 no. 2 (March/April 1953): 194-212; “Professor Janson’s Donatello.” Arts Magazine 32 (June 1958): 41-43ff; Jasper Johns. New York: G. Wittenborn, 1963; “The Metaphors of Love and Birth in Michelangelo’s Pietàs.” Studies in Erotic Art. New York: Basic Books 1970, pp. 231-284; “The Philosophical Brothel.” Art News 71 (September 1971): 20-29, part II (October 1972) [this version disowned by Steinberg in favor of the reissued and enlarged essay in:] October 44 (Spring 1988): 3-74; Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-century Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972; Michelangelo’s Last Paintings: the Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter in the Cappella Paolina, Vatican Palace. London: Phaidon, 1975; “Michelangelo and the Doctors.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 56 (1982): 543-553; “The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion.” October 25 (Summer 1983): 1-222; The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983; “Who’s Who in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam: a Chronology of the Picture’s Reluctant Self-revelation.” Art Bulletin 74 (December 1992): 552-566; Encounters with Rauschenberg: (a Lavishly Illustrated Lecture). Houston: Menil Collection/ Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000; Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper. New York: Zone Books, 2001;[Demoiselles d’Avignon controversy:] “Resisting Cezanne: Picasso’s Three Women.” Art in America 66 (November 1978): 114-33, [appendix to “Resisting Cezanne” article by Steinberg:] “Polemical Part.” Art in America 67 (March 1979):114-27, [reply by Rubin, William S. “Pablo and Georges and Leo and Bill.” Art in America 67 (March 1979): 128-47]; see also Duncan, Carol. “The MoMA’s Hot Momas.” Art Journal 48 (Summer 1989): 171-178, [Steinberg’s and Duncan’s replies] “Letters.” Art Journal 49 (Summer 1990): 207.

Sources

“History of Art @ UPENN: Faculty.” http://www.arthistory.upenn.edu/faculty/steinberg; Siegel, Katy. “March 1972.” Artforum International 40 no. 7 (March 2002): 48; Florman, Lisa. “The Difference Experience Makes in ‘The Philosophical Brothel’.” Art Bulletin 85 no. 4 (December 2003): 769-83; Carrier, David. “Erwin Panofsky, Leo Steinberg, David Carrier: the Problem of Objectivity in Art Historical Interpretation.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47 (Fall 1989): 333-47; [transcript] Leo Steinberg. Interviews with Art Historians, 1991-2002. Getty Research Institute, Malibu, CA; [obituary:] Johnson, Ken, and Slotnik, Daniel E. “Leo Steinberg, Vivid Writer and Bold Thinker in Art History, Is Dead at 90.” New York Times, March 15, 2011 p. B 19,

Steichen, Edward J.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Steichen, Edward J.

Other Names:

Edward Steichen

Gender: male

Date Born: 27 March 1879

Date Died: 25 March 1973

Place Born: Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Place Died: West Redding, Fairfield, CT, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): photographs

Overview

Photographer and second director of the Photography Department, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Steichen emigrated with his family, Jean Pierre and Marie Steichen, to the United States from Luxembourg in 1881. He grew up in Hancock, MI, where his father was a copper miner and then in Milwaukee, WI when the family moved again. Steichen attended public schools only until age 15 developing a interest in both art and photography. As an apprentice at a Milwaukee lithography company, he honed his skills. The photographer Clarence H. White (1871-1925) discovered his work an introduced him to the important photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) in New York who bought three of his photographs. Steichen went to Paris to study at the Académie Julian exhibiting in London and Paris in 1900. He and Stieglitz co-founded the New York “Photo-secession Group” and he contributed to Steiglitz’s magazine, Camera Work. He continued to paint, supporting himself as a studio portrait photographer, marrying Clara E Smith in 1903. His first book of photographs, The Steichen Book was published by Camera Work in 1906. Steichen’s apartment in New York was rented by Steiglitz in 1905 for exhibitions, known as Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (group), later as the famous “291,” the street address. The gallery, which showed works of all media, gave initial US exhibitions to works of Cézanne, Matisse and Rodin. Steichen returned to Paris in 1906 to paint, connecting with the expatriot artistic community of Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) and her brother Leo Stein (1872-1947). The Steins introduced Steichen to the art world with which they were familiar; his famous photo of August Rodin dates from this time. His Paris reputation convinced Steiglitz to show his work at 291. World War I forced Steichen to returned to the U.S. The war brought to a head differing political and aesthetic views of Stieglitz (a pacifist) and Steichen and the two parted association. Steichen joined the army Signal Corps in 1917 but was moved to the photographic division of the Army Expeditionary Forces Air Service where he was commander of the division. He left the army in 1919 and experimented with photographic processes he learn in the war. Steichen’s wife divorced him in 1921, claiming infidelity. At 43, he married a twenty-eight-year-old actress, Dana Desboro Glover (1894-1957) in 1922, abandoning painting permanently. In 1923 he was appointed Chief of Photography for Condé Nast Publications, producing work for Vanity Fair, Vogue and the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. He ceased working commercially in 1938 to experiment with new film formats. At the outbreak of World War II, Steichen oversaw naval combat photography. He secured his first photography show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1942, “Road to Victory,” with texts by the poet Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), his sister’s husband. A second show, similarly aimed at the war effort, “Power in the Pacific” was launched in 1945. While the then Museum’s director of photography, Beaumont Newhall, was lecturing at Black Mountain College, Black Mountain, NC, arrangements were made with Steichen to head the department without Newhall’s knowledge. Newhall resigned upon hearing the news. As director of MoMA’s photography department, Steichen mounted numerous exhibitions and purchased photographs for the Museum. His 1955 “The Family of Man” exhibition brought notoriety to the Museum and himself. The show toured throughout the world and the exhibition catalog became a book that remained in separate print for many years afterward. His second wife died in 1957, and at 80 years old, he married a twenty-seven-year-old copywriter, Joanna Taub (1933-2010), in 1960. A 1961 retrospective of Steichen’s work at MoMA concluded with the naming of the department of photography after him. Steichen retired 1962 and was succeeded by John Szarkowski. He died in the Connecticut home he had designed after an extended illness. His wife donated Steichen’s negatives to the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY in 1979. “The Family of Man” show in many ways summed Steichen’s approach to photographic curation. A collection of over 500 photos by disparate photographers worldwide, it focused on the evocative and documentary nature of photography..

Selected Bibliography

A Llife in Photography. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1963; The Family of Man, the Greatest Photographic Exhibition of all Time–503 Pictures from 68 Countries. New York: Museum of Modern Art/Maco Magazine Corp., 1955.

Sources

Steichen, Edward. A Llife in Photography. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963; Sandeen, Eric J. Picturing an Exhibition: the Family of Man and 1950s America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995; Steichen, Joanna T. Steichen’s Legacy: Photographs, 1895-1973. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000; Brandow, Todd. Edward Steichen: Lives in Photography. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007; [obituaries:] Whitman, Alden. “Edward Steichen Is Dead at 93.” New York Times March 26, 1973 p. 81; “Edward Steichen.” Camera [British journal] 52 (June 1973): 43; Szarkowski, John.. Studio International 185 (May 1973): 243.

Steenhoff, Willem

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Steenhoff, Willem

Other Names:

Wilhelmus Johannes Steenhoff

Gender: male

Date Born: 1863

Date Died: 1932

Place Born: Utrecht, Netherlands

Place Died: Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

Home Country/ies: Netherlands

Subject Area(s): painting (visual works)

Career(s): art critics

Overview

Art critic; deputy director Department of painting at the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum; early Van Gogh promoter. Steenhoff was the son of Wouter Steenhoff, a blacksmith, and Agatha van Dijk. At age fourteen, the young Steenhoff became an employee at a cigar factory in his hometown Utrecht. He preferred painting and drawing to factory work. In the 1880s he enrolled at the Amsterdam Academy, on the advice of David van der Kellen, the director of the Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst (1883-1895). In 1886 he moved to Brussels, where he made a number of paintings and etchings, returning to Amsterdam the same year where he again attended the Academy until 1888. A year later, he married Cornelia Wilhelmina van der Kellen (d. 1945), van der Kellen’s daughter. The couple moved to Terneuzen, in the Dutch province of Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, and later to Belgium. In 1892 they returned to Amsterdam, where Steenhoff continued working as an artis and contributing art reviews for the Catholic daily Het Centrum and articles for De Nieuwe Gids. One, in 1899, was an article on the Dutch early seventeenth-century painter and etcher Hercules Segers, for which he had been in contact with David van der Kellen’s brother, Johan Philip van der Kellen, director of the Amsterdam Printroom. On advice of the latter Steenhoff successfully applied in 1899 for an assistantship at the Rijksmuseum Department of painting. He continued writing articles and he became a regular contributor to the weekly De Amsterdammer. In 1905 he was appointed deputy-director of the department of painting, under B. W. F. van Riemsdijk (1850-1942), chief director of the Rijksmuseum since 1897, and director of the department of painting since 1901. Steenhoff’s museum career was marked by his strong predilection for modern and contemporary painters, especially Van Gogh and Cézanne. After he had spent his first years in the museum rearranging the collection and writing a new catalog, which was published in 1903, Steenhoff focused on broadening the modern art collection. He obtained for his department three loans of Van Gogh paintings from Jo Van Gogh-Bonger, the widow of Van Gogh’s brother, and her new husband, Johan Cohen Gosschalk, with whom he collaborated for the Van Gogh exhibition held in the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam in 1905. Steenhoff was a strong defender of Van Gogh’s art. In 1906 the collection of Cornelis Hoogendijk (1866-1911), which included sixteen Van Goghs and 32 Cézannes, was housed in the Rijksmuseum. In 1909, when the new Drucker Wing opened, built for the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Drucker, a small room was dedicated to the “ultra moderns”, especially to Van Gogh and Cézanne. Steenhoff, who had preferred a bigger display of the “ultra moderns”, continued to focus on contemporary art and the promotion of young artists. In 1914 he became an art critic for De Nieuwe Amsterdammer. In 1917, Steenhoff was successful in acquiring loans from the art collector H. P. Bremmer (1871-1956) and from Jo van Gogh-Bonger. Steenhoff devoted a few rooms to the “ultra moderns”, and in one room he displayed the Cézannes of the Hoogendijk collection. The new display was received with great acclaim, but there was also criticism. In 1920, however, Steenhoff’s dream to realize a modern art department with a strong presence of the “ultra moderns” was shattered when the Cézannes and the paintings of the loan of Jo van Gogh were withdrawn. F. Schmidt-Degener, the new director-in-chief since 1921, introduced a different acquisition policy. This meant further removal of the “ultra moderns”. In 1922 Steenhoff married Coba Snethlage, with whom he already had a son, born in 1907. In 1924, Schmidt-Degener dismissed Steenhoff as deputy director and the couple moved to The Hague where Steenhoff was appointed director of the Mesdag Museum, named after the Dutch painter and collector Hendrik Willem Mesdag (1831-1915). In the Mesdag museum Steenhoff cataloged the paintings and drawings and rehung the display. In 1926 he organized a Van Gogh exhibition. The heirs of Mesdag, however, objected to any change in the museum and forced Steenhoff to return the installation to its original situation. He retired in 1928, and, after the death of his daughter, Coba left him for retirement in a convent. In 1930, Steenhoff again was actively involved in a Van Gogh exhibition, held in the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum. In the biographical introduction of the catalog, Steenhoff focuses on the characteristics of Van Gogh’s work and life as the expression of his vision as a human being and an artist. After a family visit to South Africa in 1932, he died. Steenhoff described art criticims in an interveiw as a learning experience in looking at art more wholly and sharply. It was his goal to urge his audience to learn about art through that same process, although he stated that the public must be aware that criticism is unable to grasp the full essence of art as the revelation of beauty and truth. He was not universally accepting of modern art; a 1911 article in De Amsterdammer criticized cubism, as exhibited by the Moderne Kunstkring in the Stedelijk Museum.

Selected Bibliography

[bibliography:] “Voorlopige bibliografie W. J. Steenhoff” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 39 no. 2 (1991): 232-249; Nederlandsche schilderkunst in het Rijksmuseum. 3 vols. Amsterdam: Maatschappij voor goede en goedkoope lectuur, 1912-1920; Hercules Seghers. Amsterdam: 1924; Catalogus Vincent van Gogh: Werken uit de verzameling van Ir. V. W. van Gogh, in bruikleen afgestaan aan de gemeente Amsterdam. Amsterdam: Stadsdrukkerij, 1931.

Sources

Wiessing, H. P. L. “W. J. Steenhoff” Elseviers Geïllustreerd Maandschrift 43 no. 85 (1933): 361-369; Wiessing, H. P. L. Bewegend portret. Levensherinneringen. Amsterdam: Moussault’s Uitgeverij, 1960, pp. 248-250; Heijbroek, J. F. and [in collaboration with] Henkels, Herbert. “Het Rijksmuseum voor Moderne kunst van Willem Steenhoff. Werkelijkheid of utopie?” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 39 no. (1991): 163-255; Van Adrichem, Jan. “Heenwijzingen naar niet vermoede uitzichten” De Groene Amsterdammer (Jubileum/2007, June 26 2007).

Contributors: Monique Daniels

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