Art Historians

Shammout, Ismail

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Shammout, Ismail

Gender: male

Date Born: 1930

Place Born: Lod, Central District, Israel

Home Country/ies: Palestine

Subject Area(s): painting (visual works)

Overview

Painter and art historian. He was born in Lod, also known as Lydda, Palestine, which is present day Israel. The first Palestinian to enroll in the College of Fine Arts in Cairo. Studied at the Accademia di Belle Arte in Rome. Painted subjects demonstrating how Palestinians dealt with the loss of their homeland.

Selected Bibliography

Art in Palestine. Kuwait City, 1989.

Sources

The Dictionary of Art

Seznec, Jean

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Seznec, Jean

Other Names:

Jean Seznec

Gender: male

Date Born: 1905

Date Died: 1983

Place Born: Morlaix, Brittany, France

Place Died: Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, UK

Home Country/ies: France

Overview

French historian of art and literature. Seznec’s parents were both schoolteachers. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure. In 1929 became a fellow at the Académie de France in Rome, studying under Émile Mâle, whose methodology he revered. He lectured at Cambridge University between 1930-33 in French literature before accepting a position at the Lycéen Thiers in Marseilles in 1934. He joined the French Institute in Florence as an assistant director, becoming director in 1938. At the entrance of France in World War II, Seznec returned home to fight as an infantry officer in the French army. In 1940, he published La Survivance des dieux antiques, an intellectual tour-de-force tracing how medieval and renaissance artists represented classical mythology according to their understanding. Seznec was influenced by the work of Warburg scholars Fritz Saxl, Erwin Panofsky and Aby M. Warburg himself. Seznec expanded the scope of their work, writing a broad view of the transmission of classical representation in Western Art. He was awarded the Prix Fould from the Academies des Inscriptions et des Belles Lettres in for the work in 1948. Seznec had accepted a position at Harvard University after the war in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures; he was made chair of that department in 1949. There, too, he identified a group of Fragonard drawings, editing a catalog with Elizabeth Mongan and Philip Hofer, which became an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art. In 1950 he was named Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at Oxford University, succeeding Gustav Rudler (1872-1957) remaining until 1972. His second marriage in 1954 was to Simone Lee. At Oxford he held a special affinity with the first chair of art history, Edgar Wind, a fellow Warburgian. In 1957, Seznec, together with Jean Adhémar began issuing their four-volume edition of Denis Diderot’s Paris Salon criticism, which Diderot had written between 1759-81. Seznec the literary scholar and Adhémar the prints specialist assembled a critical text of Diderot and the images about which he wrote. The work, largely an effort of careful assemblage and commentary, transformed eighteenth-century scholarship by providing a reliable primary source for scholars and students. His son, Alain Seznec, was a professor at Cornell University. Seznec and André Chastel, whom he influenced, were the first French scholars to incorporate methodologies of the Warburg Institute into the art history of France.

Selected Bibliography

La survivance des dieux antiques; essai sur le rôle de la tradition mythologique dans l’humanisme et dans l’art de la Renaissance. London: Warburg Institute, 1940, English, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: the Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art. New York: Pantheon Books, 1953; Mongan, Elizabeth, and Hofer, Philip. Fragonard Drawings for Ariosto. New York: Pantheon Books, 1945; Essais sur Diderot et l’Antiquité. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957; edited, and Adhémar, Jean. Diderot, Denis. Salons. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957-1966, 2nd ed. 3 vols. 1975-1983.

Sources

Adhémar, Jean. “A Personal Postscript.” The Artist and the Writer in France: Essays in Honor of Jean Seznec. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, pp. 173-77; John, Richard. “Jean Seznec.” Dictionary of Art; [obituaries:] “Professor Jean Seznec.” The Times (London) Nov 22, 1983, p. 14; Levi, A. H. T., and Haskell, Francis. “Jean Joseph Seznec.” Proceedings of the Brit.ish Academy 73 (1987): 643-56.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Seymour, Charles, Jr.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Seymour, Charles, Jr.

Gender: male

Date Born: 1912

Date Died: 1977

Place Born: New Haven, New Haven, CT, USA

Place Died: New Haven, New Haven, CT, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Renaissance and sculpture (visual works)

Career(s): educators

Overview

National Gallery of Art curator and Yale University professor of art history; renaissance and sculpture specialist. Seymour’s paternal family comprised many Yale faculty. His father was Charles Seymour (1885-1963), president of Yale 1937-1950. The younger Seymour attended the Choate School and a year at King’s College, Cambridge University, before entering Yale in the class of 1935. At Yale he studied under Marcel Aubert and particularly Henri Focillon. Seymour and fellow student (and future Yale art history faculty Sumner McKnight Crosby) continued study in Paris in 1934 at the Ecole des Chartres and Sorbonne. He returned to Yale to complete his Ph.D. in 1938, writing his dissertation on the cathedral of Notre-Dame of Noyon. The work was selected as the inaugural volume in the Yale History of Art series.

While an instructor at Yale, Seymour was part of a group (also including Focillon) urging Seymour’s father to create a department of the History of Art (capable of issuing undergraduate degrees) instead of the solely graduate discipline it had been. Seymour joined the new National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. as curator of sculpture in 1939; the following year Yale’s History of Art department was created. During World War II, Seymour served in army intelligence, 1942-1945. After the war he returned to Washington as assistant chief curator. In 1949 he left the Gallery to return to his alma mater as associate professor. He was succeeded at the Gallery by Perry Cott. In 1954 he was appointed full professor. The following year Yale initiated the Directed Studies program for art history. Seymour was one of the principal faculty here, using his museum experience to frame the course on examining works of art first hand. In 1966 Seymour published the volume on Italian sculpture for the prestigious Pelican History of Art series. He was also instrumental in creating the conservation laboratory at the Yale University Art Gallery. He died at age 65.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Notre Dame of Noyon in the Twelfth Century. Yale University, 1938, published as, Notre-Dame of Noyon in the Twelfth Century; a Study in the Early Development of Gothic Architecture. Yale Historical Publications: History of Art 1. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939;
Tradition and Experiment in Modern Sculpture. Washington, DC: American University Press, 1949;
Michelangelo’s David: A Search for Identity. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburgh Press,1967;
Sculpture in Italy: 1400-1500. Pelican History of Art 26. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966;
Early Italian Paintings in the Yale University Art Gallery: a Catalogue. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery/Yale University Press, 1970;
The Sculpture of Verrocchio. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1971.

Sources

[obituaries:] Crosby, Sumner M. Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 37 no. 1 (Fall 1978): 7;
“Charles Seymour Jr. of Yale, 65, Authority on History of Italian Art.” New York Times April 9, 1977. p. 17;
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.15, 89 (cited).

Sewter, A. C.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Sewter, A. C.

Other Names:

A. C. Sewter

Gender: male

Date Born: 1912

Date Died: 1983

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Overview

Critic, curator and lecturer. Sewter’s father was a painting conservator. The younger Sewter studied at the London School of Economics, Courtauld Institute and Manchester University. In 1935 he was appointed Arts Assistant at the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery where he remained until 1939. At Leicester Sewter was responsible for a progressive acquisition policy, which emphasised the purchase of contemporary British and European art including German. In those years he also began to write for the Burlington Magazine. His object-based approach and forward-thinking views on art undoubtedly helped him to secure the job of Editor at the Burlington Magazine in November 1939, when then editor Herbert Read left for the ill-fated project of founding a museum of contemporary art in London. Only 27 at the time, Sewter continued the line of scholarship established by Read, publishing articles by Erwin Panofsky, Kenneth Clark, Paul Ganz, Frederick Antal and many others. Britain’s entry into the Second World War made editing an art magazine difficult. With the increasing intensity of the conflict, Sewter left London for his native Midlands; in 1940 he was appointed Assistant Director of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts. Sewter’s short editorship gave attention to museums and exhibitions from the north of England. He wrote on works and exhibitions from Leicester, Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool and the whole of the Midlands. At a time when the international scope of the Burlington Magazine was inevitably to be restricted by the War, Sewter widened considerably its horizon within the national collections. He continued to contribute articles and reviews to the Burlington Magazine until he retired. After being on war service from 1942 to 1946, Sewter went back to the Barber Institute, acting as Art Adviser to Leicester Gallery Museum and Art Gallery, 1948-1949. In 1949 he became Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester, where he remained until 1973. In 1952 he published a re-edition of Merrifield’s Art of Fresco Painting by Mary Philadelphia Merrifield. He was also adviser on Prints for the Whitworth Art Gallery (Manchester), and a founder member of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Manchester. His most acclaimed work, Stained Glass of William Morris and his Circle, appeared in 1974, sponsored by the Paul Mellon Center for British Art at Yale University. Sewer was a collector too and in the course of the 1960s he donated works of art to the National Portrait Gallery, Manchester City Art Gallery and Whitworth Art Gallery. The extent and scope of his art collection has yet to be uncovered. A manuscript on the life of William Artaud (1763-1823), written in 1951, was never published. Sewter had a strong object-based approach to works of art. For Sewter as for Read, however, formalism was the starting point to developing a wider analysis. For instance, Sewter’s ‘Four English Illustrative Pictures’ of March 1939 is a study of four works by Gilpin and Zoffany where the formal analysis and attribution of the paintings is joined to the analysis of Gilpin and Zoffany’s literary sources, Jonathan Swift and David Garrick. Sewter was a thorough scholar and a prolific writer, not only did he write some fifty contributions for the Burlington Magazine, he also wrote for Apollo, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, The Connoisseur, Art Quarterly, Museum Journal and the Listener. In the course of the 1950s he wrote over sixty newspaper articles on art and exhibitions for the Manchester Guardian as their art critic. Barbara Pezzini

Selected Bibliography

Glyn Philpot. London: Batsford, 1951; A lecture on the relationship between painting and architecture in Renaissance and modern times, delivered to the Manchester Society of Architects, 13th February, 1951. London: A. Tiranti, 1952; revised, Merrifield, Maria Philadelphia. The art of fresco painting, as practised by the old Italian and Spanish masters, with a preliminary inquiry into the nature of the colours used in fresco painting. London: Alec Tiranti, 1952; The new London situation: an exhibition of paintings by Bernard Cohen, Peter Coviello, John Hoyland, John Plumb, Peter Stroud, William Turnbull. Manchester, Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1962; Modern British Woodcuts and Wood Engravings in the Collection of the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. Manchester: Whitworth Art Gallery, 1962; The surrealist paintings and drawings of Sam Haile. Manchester Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1967; and White, D. Maxwell. I disegni di G.B. Piazzetta nella Biblioteca reale di Torino. ) Rome: Istituto poligrafico dello Stato, 1969; Baroque and Rococo Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1972; The Stained Glass of William Morris and his Circle. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.

Sources

Read, Herbert. “To the Readers of the Burlington Magazine.” Burlington Magazine (November 1939): 179; Sewter, A. C. “Four English Illustrative Pictures.” Burlington Magazine (March 1939): 122-127; “Albert Charles Sewter.” Who’s Who in Art, 1949-1950, p. 406.

Séroux d’Agincourt, Jean-Baptiste

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Séroux d'Agincourt, Jean-Baptiste

Other Names:

Jean-Baptiste-Louis-Georges Séroux d'Agincourt

Gender: male

Date Born: 1730

Date Died: 1814

Place Born: France

Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): ancient and Medieval (European)

Career(s): art collectors

Overview

Collector and historian of ancient and medieval art. Séroux befriended artists and collectors who frequented the salon of Marie-Therese Geoffrin, including Denis Diederot, Jean-Honore Fragonard, and Francois Boucher. He was influenced by the school of Anne Claude Philippe Caylus and Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774). Between 1779 to 1789, Séroux attempted to complete an encyclopedic book recording the history of art from antiquity to the Italian Renaissance, but publication was delayed by the French Revolution. The book was completed and published posthumously in 1823 by T.-B. Éméric-David. The work remained influential well into the 19th century. Melchior Boisserée used Séroux’s work as an example for his own work.

Selected Bibliography

and Dufourny, Léon; Emeric-David, Toussaint-Bernard; Feuillet, Laurent François; La Salle, Achille Étienne Gigault de. Histoire de l’art part les monuments depuis sa décadence au IVe siècle jusqu’à son renouvellement au XVIe siècle. 6 vols. Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1811-1820.

Sources

Kultermann, Udo. Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte: Der Weg einer Wissenschaft. Vienna and Düsseldorf: Econ, 1966. 2nd ed., p. 152; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 87-8; The Dictionary of Art.

Semrau, Max

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Semrau, Max

Gender: male

Date Born: 1859

Date Died: 1928

Place Died: Breslau, Lower Silesian Voivodeship, Poland

Home Country/ies: Germany

Career(s): publishers

Overview

Professor of art history at the university in Breslau; took over editorship of the Lübke Grundriss der Kunstgeschichte series in 1899.

Selected Bibliography

[habilitation:] [habilitation:] Bertoldo di Giovanni: ein beitrag zur geschichte der Donatelloschule. Breslau: S. Schottlaender, 1891 (?); and Lübke, Wilhelm von. Grundriss der Kunstgeschichte. 12th edition. Stuttgart: Paul Neff Verlag, 1899- ; Venedig. Stuttgart: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1905; Donatellos Kanzeln in S. Lorenzo: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der italienischen Plastik im XV. Jahrhundert. Breslau: S. Schottlaender, 1891; “Nikolaus Goldmann.” In, Schwarzer, Otfried, ed. Schlesische Lebensbilder, vol. 3, Schlesier des siebzehnten bis neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. Breslau: W. G. Korn, 1928, p. 60; “Zu Nikolaus Goldmanns Leben und Schriften.” Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft 9 no. 10 (1916): 349-361; “Zu Nikolaus Goldmanns Leben und Schriften. Fortsetzung.” Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft 9 no.12 (1916): 463-473; “Goldmann, Nikolaus.” Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart 14, p. 340; “Zum Gedächtnis Philipp Otto Runges.” Pommersche Jahrbücher 11 (1910): 219-264.

Sources

Schliesen und Ahnenforschung (database). http://www.schlesien-ahnenforschung.de

Professor of art history at the university in Breslau; took over editorship of the Lübke Grundriss der Kunstgeschichte series in 1899.

Semper, Hans

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Semper, Hans

Gender: male

Date Born: 1845

Date Died: 1920

Home Country/ies: Austria

Career(s): educators

Overview

University of Vienna scholar.

Selected Bibliography

Donatello, seine Zeit und Schule. Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1875.

University of Vienna scholar.

Semper, Gottfried

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Semper, Gottfried

Gender: male

Date Born: 1803

Date Died: 1879

Place Born: Hamburg, Germany

Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: Germany

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

Overview

Architect and architectural historian; developed ideas about technology, architecture and art history. Semper was born in Altona, Germany, which is present-day greater Hamburg, Germany. He was the son of Christian Gottfried Semper, a business owner and stock trader, and Johanna Maria Paap (Semper). He attended the University of Göttingen beginning in 1823 studying mathematics, a life-long passion. In 1825, he enrolled in an architecture course at the Akademie in Munich taught by the architect Friedrich von Gärtner (1792-1847). The following year he studied in Paris under Franz Christian Gau (1790-1854), though employed as a hydraulic engineer. In Paris, he was fascinated by the discussions of the work of Jacques-Ignace Hittorff and hid finding on the polychromy in ancient buildings. Semper left Paris in 1830 (after the July Revolution) for Greece. Together with Jules Goury (1803-1834) and Eduard Metzger (1807-1880), Semper concluded that Greek architecture had been painted, which he published in 1834 as Vorläufige Bemerkungen. Semper declared that polychromy for architecture was esthetically important and the norm for most historic building types through the medieval. He began to receive architectural commissions at this time, the first of which was Villa Donner, Altona, near Hamburg. At Gau’s recommendation, Semper was appointed professor of architecture at the Akademie in Dresden in 1834. There, he instituted a program in architectural history. Assigned to reform the architectural school, Semper recommended the integration of practical and theoretical work and replacing the course structure with an atelier-style experience, what is today the modern architectural school arrangement. Semper’s1838 design for the Dresden Hoftheater–promoted by Karl Friedrich Schinkel–demonstrated Semper’s theoretic belief of integrating a building into the environment. The Hoftheater itself was completed in 1841, becoming Semper’s masterpiece. Other Renaissance-Revival style building followed, such as the Dresden Synagogue (1840, destroyed by the Nazis in 1938) and the Dresden museum. The publisher Eduard Vieweg (1797-1869) commissioned Semper to write a comparative theory of architecture, which was to be known as Vergleichende Baulehre. Semper’s siding with the revolutionaries in the German revolution (among whom as also Richard Wagner, Semper’s close friend)–in Dresden, 1849–forced him to flee to Paris. Lack of work caused Semper to move again London in 1850, taking up writing, and designing the Canadian, Egyptian, Danish and Swedish exhibits at the London Great Exhibition of 1851. The exhibition effected Semper fundamentally. He abandoned the project for the Vergleichende Baulehre, conceiving architecture through the artifacts of living akin to those on display at the Exhibition. In England, Henry Cole (1808-1882), the director of the newly formed Department of Practical Art, (later the Victoria and Albert Museum) appointed Semper professor of architecture. Semper published an article in the Journal of Design on building materials. This became the basis of his 1852 book Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst. A booklet the following year, über die bleieren Schleudergeschosse der Alten, demonstrated that, rather than strictly angular, the Greeks calculated trajectories of their architecture to make them visually appealing. Semper moved to Zürich in 1855 as professor of architecture, teaching along side art historians such as Wilhelm Lübke. Some commissions followed, but his influence was a great as his commissions, notably on Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth Festspielhaus by Otto Brückwald (1841-1917). Semper began publishing his book of architectural theory, Der Stil, in 1860. Based upon research during his time in Paris and his experience with the Great Exhibition, the book theorized that the progress in architecture–or any discipline–meant emulating natural science. Using an taxonomical approach akin to the naturalist Baron George Cuvier (1769-1832), Semper set out to determine the “laws” of all architecture by examining eleven modes of building, beginning with domestic. Semper concluded what he called a Bekleidungstheorie (theory of dressing), deducing that the roof. In 1869 Semper moved to Vienna to supervise construction of his design for public buildings there, including the Burgtheater, the Kunsthistorische Museum and Naturhistorische Museum and one wing of the Neue Burg. Other Semper designs for Vienna were abandoned or finished in a Baroque-style after Semper’s death. During a trip to Italy, he suffered a recurrence of his asthma and then kidney failure. He died in Rome and is buried in the protestant cemetery there. As an architectural historian and architect, Semper brought Renaissance architecture into serious appreciation. Previous art historians, such as Franz Kugler, in his Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, disdainfully mentioned the period as an architectural style. By the 1860s, Jacob Burckhardt had brought the period into historic vogue. Semper advocated the concept that “form is determined by materials,” derived from the partially-completed volumes of Der Stil. However, Semper also asserted that social, economic and climatic conditions as essential to style, driven by the free will of creative humans. Since these were to have been addressed in the third, never-written volume, Semper was criticized for subscribing to a purely materialistic approach. The mathematical analogy in his discussion of style was exaggerated in the English version of his book (edited by his son). Aloïs Riegl attacked Semper’s “deterministic core” in 1901 (Mallgrave). His theoretical influence included Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) (who praised Semper at the successor to Goethe for his exploration of the “inner structure of art”) and the work of Heinrich Wölfflin, (who quoted Semper liberally in his dissertation). Wagner remembered Semper as an iconoclast who brought arguments (and occasionally fisticuffs) to any social gathering with his “peculiar habit of contradicting everyone flatly.”

Selected Bibliography

Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst. Braunschweig:1852, English, Architecture and Civilization. London, 1853; Der Stil in technischen und tektonishen Künsten. 2 vols. Munich: 1861, 1863; “Practical Art in Metals and Hard Metals: On Collections, their History, etc.” Journal of Design 6 (1851): 112ff.

Sources

Quitzsch, Heinz. Die ästhetischen Anschauungen Gottfried Sempers. Berlin: 1962; Ettlinger, Leopold D. “On Science, Industry and Art: Some Theories of Gottfried Semper.” Architectural Review 86 (July 1964): 57-60; 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, 20; Kultermann, Udo. Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte: Der Weg einer Wissenschaft. 2nd ed. Frankfurt am Main and Vienna: Ullstein, 1981, pp. 190-2; Mallgrave, Harry Francis. Gottfried Semper: Architect of the Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996, esp. pp. 355-381; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 135-6; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 384-386.

Selz, Peter H.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Selz, Peter H.

Other Names:

Peter Selz

Gender: male

Date Born: 1919

Place Born: Munich, Bavaria, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Expressionist (style), German (culture, style, period), and German Expressionist (movement)

Institution(s): Museum of Modern Art

Overview

Art historian of German Expressionism and Professor of Art History, University of California, Berkeley,1965-1988. Selz was the son of Eugene Selz and Edith Drey (Selz). Of Jewish parentage, he fled Nazi Germany with his family arriving in the United States in 1936. Selz attended Columbia University for the 1937-38 year. He also established a connection with Alfred Stieglitz, a distant relative, who introduced him to many New York and European expatriate artists. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army in Office of Strategic Services from 1941 until 1946. He became a naturalized citizen in 1942. After the War, he married the writer Thalia Cheronis (b. 1925) in 1948. Selz attended the University of Chicago, where he received his A. M., in 1949. Awarded a Fulbright grant for University of Paris and Ecole de Louvre, he spent a year in Paris, 1949-1950. Returning to Chicago, he taught as an instructor while completing his Ph.D. on a topic suggested by the department chair, Ulrich Middeldorf German Expressionism. A second Fulbright grant was awarded to him to study at the Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire in 1953. His dissertation on German Expressionism, written under Joshua C. Taylor in 1954, was one of the first from an English-language institution. During these same years he headed the education department at Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, (to 1955). In 1955 he moved to Pomona College, Claremont, CA, to chair the art department and be director of the art gallery. He served as a member of board of directors for the College Art Association 1958-1964. Selz became the curator of department of painting and sculpture exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1958. At the Modern, his exhibitions included the infamous 1960 Jean Tinguely “Homage to New York,” a sculpture that destroyed itself (and started a fire) in the sculpture garden of the Museum. He also launched important retrospectives, including the first Rodin retrospective in the United States and a comprehensive exhibition of Alberto Giacometti’s work in 1965. That year he was called to University of California, Berkeley to found that university’s art museum. He was first director 1965-1973, concomitantly teaching as professor of art history, 1965-1988. He divorced his first wife in 1965. A second CAA board appointment was 1966-1971. Selz was awarded the Order of Merit from Federal Republic of Germany in 1967 for his study of German Expressionism. Together with his mentor, Taylor, and his colleague at Berkeley, Herschel B. Chipp, he co-edited the first collected essays on American primary source theories of modern art in 1968. He was appointed a member of the advisory council of the Archives of American Art in 1971. For the 1972-1973 year he was a senior fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities. He taught as Zaks Professor, Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1976. In 1983 he married Carole Schemmerling. Selz was a visiting professor at the City University of New York in 1987. In 1988 he was named emeritus at Berkeley. From 1993 he served on the acquisitions committee, Museums of Fine Arts, San Francisco. His students included Kristine Stiles (b. 1947). As an art historian, Selz was one of the first to examine German Expressionism not as a series of stylistic changes (formalism), but as motivated by the politics of the time. His interest in art as a political phenomenon never altered. Selz was fortunate enough to interview many of the German Expressionist artists or their widows in the 1950s while they were still alive. His reputation as an academic was diminished for his reputation as a womanizer, female students were advised to avoid his office hours (Karlstrom).

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] German Expressionist Painting from its Inception to the First World War. University of Chicago, Ph.D., 1954, revised and published as, German Expressionist Painting. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1957; Art in a Turbulent Era. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Press, 1985; Art in Our Times: A Pictorial History. New York: Abrams, 1981; Emil Nolde. New York: Museum of Modern Art/Doubleday, 1963; Alberto Giacometti. New York: Museum of Modern Art, New York/Art Institute of Chicago/Doubleday,1965; Beyond the Mainstream: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Art. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997; and Brüschweiler, Jura, and Hattis, Phyllis, and Wyler, Eva. Ferdinand Hodler. Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1972; and Rickey, George. Directions in Kinetic Sculpture. Berkeley: University Art Museum [and] the Committee for Arts and Lectures, University of California, 1966; and Chipp, Hershel B., and Taylor, Joshua. Theories of Modern Art: a Source Book by Artists and Critics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.

Sources

Who’s Who in American Art 22 (1997-98): ; “Peter (Howard) Selz,” Contemporary Authors; Selz, Peter. “Beyond the Mainstream: Fifty years of Curating Modern and Contemporary Art.” lecture delivered at Duke University, September 10, 2004; Karlstrom, Paul J. Peter Selz: Sketches of a Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012;.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Selz, Jean

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Selz, Jean

Gender: unknown

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Subject Area(s): Modern (style or period)

Overview

Author of surveys of modern artists.

Selected Bibliography

Odilon Redon. Paris: Flammarion, 1971. English, Odilon Redon. New York: Crown Publishers, 1971; Art nouveau: peintures. Paris: F. Hazan, 1971, English, Art Nouveau Paintings. New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1971; E. Boudin. Paris: Flammarion, 1982, English, E. Boudin. New York: Crown Publishers, 1982.

Author of surveys of modern artists.

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