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Selvatico, Marchese Pietro

Full Name: Selvatico, Marchese Pietro

Other Names:

  • Pietro Selvatico Estense

Gender: male

Date Born: 1803

Date Died: 1880

Place Born: Padua, Veneto, Italy

Place Died: Padua, Veneto, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): Gothic (Medieval) and Italian (culture or style)

Career(s): art historians


Overview

One of the most important writers in mid-19th-century Italy on Gothic art and architecture. His first published research described the history of Paduan architecture. He challenged the contemporary views on aesthetics that were based on the ideas of the Classicists. In his later work, Selvatico studied the art and architecture of Venice particularly its eastern and western influences. He eventually became the Director of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice from 1850-57. Selvatico’s spent the latter part of his life trying to reform teaching methods in the Italian academy. Selvatico’s writings show the influence of the spiritual and Romantic art writer Alexis-François Rio.



Sources

Dictionary of Art.




Citation

"Selvatico, Marchese Pietro." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/selvaticop/.


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One of the most important writers in mid-19th-century Italy on Gothic art and architecture. His first published research described the history of Paduan architecture. He challenged the contemporary views on aesthetics that were based on the ideas

Seltman, Charles Theodore

Full Name: Seltman, Charles Theodore

Other Names:

  • Charles T. Seltman

Gender: male

Date Born: 1886

Date Died: 1957

Place Born: Paddington, City of Westminster, London, England, UK

Place Died: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Classical and numismatics


Overview

Cambridge University numismatist and classical scholar. Seltman’s father was Ernest John Seltman who instilled in the younger Seltman an enthusiasm for ancient Greece and Greek numismatics. Seltman was educated at Berkhamsted School. During World War I he served with the Suffolk Regiment in France. He married Isabel Dane (d. 1935) in 1917. He entered Queen’s College, Cambridge, the following year, graduating with honors in Classical archaeology in 1922. Seltman continued study at the British School in Athens for the 1922-1923 session under the directorship of Alan J. B. Wace (1879-1957). He earning a Master’s Degree in 1925 under Sir William Ridgeway (1853-1926) and Arthur Bernard Cook (1868-1952). In 1926 he was appointed lecturer at Queen’s College. That same year he facilitated the sale of the “Minoan goddess” to the Fitzwilliam Museum for its new prehistoric gallery, created by Winifred Lamb. However, its genuineness was questioned, and Seltman’s motives came under question. He participated in the Johns Hopkins expedition to Olynthus in 1928. He moved to the United States in 1929 where he was the Norton lecturer at the American Archaeological Institute, 1929-1930 and the Charles Beebe Martin lecturer at Oberlin College in 1931, lectures which later appeared at the book Attic Vase-Painting. He was elected a Fellow at Queen’s College in 1933. After his wife’s death in 1935, he took up residence in the college, hosting students in the evenings for events and conversation. He became librarian for Queen’s College in 1936. While lecturing at the Collège de France in 1940, he was nearly trapped at the Nazi invasion. Seltman returned to England and mounted the first to two exhibitions for the Royal Academy on classical art in 1942. The following year he was featured on the September 20th, 1943 cover of Life magazine. A second Greek art show, this one at the Burlington House, occurred in 1946, which Otto Demus called “easily the most important exhibition of this kind for many years.” The following year he published the volume on Greek art for the Cambridge Ancient History series. In 1948, Seltman wrote his most innovative–if controversial–book, Approach to Greek Art. In it, he argued that sculpture, the dominant medium for understanding classical art, should be avoided because it was created by assistants interpreting the works of masters. Instead, he placed the paradigm of classical art research, contending that those art forms manifesting “celature” (the direct hands of the artist on the work), were the beginning point to evaluate the period’s art. In later years, he chose to write ever more popular treatments of classical art, giving in to a personal wit and an impulse to entertain. His popular articles, largely for the periodicals History Today, for example, were modestly researched and occasionally containing factual errors (Rose). In 1953, Seltman published an essay in the Studio, “Art and Society.” In it, he asserted his generally conservative view that authoritarian societies produce abstract art, but where freedom is allowed, concrete (verisimilitude) representation occurs. One of his last works, Women in Antiquity, 1956, was, according to a London Times reviewer, “witty, biased, and irresponsible.” After his death, it became an example of male-centered view of classical art history, perhaps somewhat unfairly. Though Seltman’s late book was chauvinist, he elsewhere exposed that women in ancient Greece were emancipated than later western society allowed, a loss of freedom which, he wrote, was deplorable. Methodologically, Seltman employed a literal literary model to analyze Greek art directly quoting from the categories for poetry and prose by Samuel Alexander (1859-1938). Unlike other scholars using a literary-criticism paradigm, principally German scholars, Seltman’s model was rigid, creating an artificial dichotomy (Kleinbauer). Seltman posited that Greek art, much the same as he saw literature, began as “poetry” and led to “prose.” The use of these antithetical categories in art history can be traced to Wilhelm Worringer, and the theory about when artists as representative of their era choose to abstract or represent objects concretely. His conclusion that society has historically produced more abstract art than realistic (in “Art and Society”) remains disputable.


Selected Bibliography

The Temple Coins of Olympia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921; Attic Vase-Painting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933; and Chittenden, Jacqueline. Greek Art: a Commemorative Catalogue of an Exhibition Held in 1946 at the Royal Academy, Burlington House, London. London: Faber and Faber, 1947; Cambridge Ancient History: Greek Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947; Approach to Greek Art. London & New York: Studio Publications,1948; Women in Antiquity. London: Pan Books, 1956.


Sources

Rose, H. J. [Review of] Riot in Ephesus. Classical Review [New Series] 9, no. 3 (December 1959): 291-292; 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. 8-9, 30 n. 64; Gill, David W. J. “Seltman, Charles Theodore (1886-1957).” The Dictionary of British Classicists. vol. 3 Robert B. Todd, ed. Bristol, England: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004, p. 882-883; Butcher, K. and Gill, David W. J. “The Director, the Dealer, the Goddess and her Champions: the Acquisition of the Fitzwilliam Goddess.” American Journal of Archaeology 97 (1993): 383-401; [obituary:] “Dr. C. T. Seltman.” Times (London) June 29, 1957, p. 8.




Citation

"Seltman, Charles Theodore." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/seltmanc/.


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Cambridge University numismatist and classical scholar. Seltman’s father was Ernest John Seltman who instilled in the younger Seltman an enthusiasm for ancient Greece and Greek numismatics. Seltman was educated at Berkhamsted School. During World

Sekler, Eduard F.

Full Name: Sekler, Eduard F.

Other Names:

  • Eduard Sekler

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Place Born: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Home Country/ies: Austria

Institution(s): Harvard University


Overview

Sekler was born in Vienna to Eduard and Elisabeth Sekler, both of whom were actors. He studied architecture at the Technische Universität Wien (Vienna University of Technology), graduating with distinction in 1945, working as a practicing architect in the city beginning in 1946. He moved to London under a British Council Fellowship entering the School of Planning and Regional Research, London. In London, Sekler worked under Rudolf Wittkower Warburg Institute, Univeristy of London. Sekeler’s wrote a dissertation on the evolution of the staircase in British architecture, granted by the Warburg in 1948. As a Fullbright Fellow, he travelled to the United States in 1953. In 1954 Josep Lluis Sert dean of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, invited Sekler to lecture there. Sekler began lecturing at Harvard’s design school in 1955 as a visiting professor, advancing to associate professor in 1956. His work led to the publication of Wren and his Place in European Architecture in 1956, the first serious attempt to explore the influences on that British architect. He married a Harvard graduate student in art history Mary Patricia May. At Harvard, Walter Gropius the previous head of the architecture department (Graduate School of Design between 1938 and 1952) being a vigorous Bauhaus modernist, had eliminated architectural history courses from the School. His successor, Josep Lluis Sert (1902-1983) appointed Sekler to counter that. In 1960, Sekler was made full professor at the architecture school. During these years, Sekler reversed the anti-historical the tradition of the School by eliminating courses and building an architectural-history library. He was assisted in this by another part-time faculty at the GSD–formerly full faculty at Harvard–Sigfried Giedion. Giedion’s view of architectural history, however, was that all periods and styles were the road to the ultimate goal, modernism (Hoffman). Sekler, in his courses, took a more diverse view. As a lecturer, he instilled an enthusiasm for architectural history, including, for example, Cistercian architecture, kindling an enthusiasm in one student later to become an eminent Cistercian architectural historian, Peter J. Fergusson. In 1962, Sekler was appointed coordinator of studies at the newly-built Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard. CCVA. 

After visiting Kathmandu in 1962, Sekler joined efforts to preserve the cultural and architectural heritage of Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley. He assisted UNESCO in plans to protect the valley’s heritage from development. He combined his interest in architectural history and the work of his countryman, Josef Hoffmann in several works, beginning with one on the Stoclet Hous in 1967. He became director of the CCVA in 1968, overseeing the Le Corbusier-designed building, the only building designed by Le Corbusier in the United States. Sekler co-founded the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) with Albert Szabo.Sekler taught in proximity to Harvard’s eminent historian of medieval architecture, Kenneth John Conant. When Sert, along with Albert Szabo founded the university’s Visual and Environmental Studies department in 1968, Sekler was added to the faculty. He continued his interest in Nepal preservation, founding the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust in 1990. Sekler’s primary appointment at Harvard remained in the Graduate School of Design, training practicing architects in architectural history. From 1970 onwards he was chosen to advise on many historic preservation projects in the United States and Austria. He founded the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust (KVPT) in 1990, serving as an honorary member of its board of directors. He retired as Osgood Hooker emeritus professor of visual art and emeritus professor of architecture. A festschrift edited by Alexander von Hoffman, Form, Modernism, and History: Essays in Honor of Eduard F. Sekler. He died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

His pioneering book, Wren and his Place in European Architecture, effectively explored the architect’s continental sources (Summerson). He “devoted his professional career to securing a place for history in contemporary architecture.” (Hoffman). In contrast to Conant’s approach to medieval history at Harvard, “the form of Cistercian monasteries became clear through an examination of the daily functions of monastic life [for Sekler]” (Weese).


Selected Bibliography

[bibliography:] Sekler, Mary Patricia May. “Bibliography of Eduard Franz Sekler.” Form, Modernism, and History: Essays in Honor of Eduard F. Sekler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design/Harvard Unversity Press, 1996, pp 233-240; [dissertation:] The Development of the British Staircase. University of London, 1948; Wren and his Place in European Architecture. New York: Macmillan, 1956; “The Stocklet House by Josef Hoffmann” in Essays in the History of Architecture Presented to Rudolf Wittkower, pp. 228-244;  London, 1967; Le Corbusier at Work: the Genesis of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978; Josef Hoffmann, das architektonische Werk: Monographie und Werkverzeichnis. Vienna: Residenz Verlag, 1982, English, Josef Hoffmann: the Architectural Work: Monograph and Catalogue of Works. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985; Yearning for Beauty: the Wiener Werkstätte and the Stoclet House. Vienna: MAK/Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2006.


Sources

[mentioned] Summerson, John. “Margaret Dickens Whinney, 1894-1975.” Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982): 641; Fergusson, Peter. “Acknowledgements.” Architecture of Solitude: Cistercian Abbeys in Twelfth-Century England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984, p. xxii; Form, Modernism, and History: Essays in Honor of Eduard F. Sekler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design/Harvard Unversity Press, 1996, specifically, Hoffman, Alexander von. “Seeking a Place for History: An Introduction.” pp. ix-xi, McCue, Gerald. “The Dedicated Teacher: [A] Conversation.” pp. 225-228, Weese, Ben. “What I Learned at Harvard.” pp 219-221; [transcript] Richard Cándida Smith, interviewer.  Spirit and project: Eduard F. Sekler. Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Trust, 1995,  https://archive.org/details/spiritprojectedu00sekl; Times (London) Higher Education Supplement obituary, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/people/obituary-eduard-sekler-1920-2017;  Harvard Gazette. “Eduard Sekler, Carpenter Center’s Inaugural Director, Dead at 96.” https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/05/eduard-sekler-carpenter-centers-inaugural-director-dead-at-96/.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Sekler, Eduard F.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/seklere/.


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Sekler was born in Vienna to Eduard and Elisabeth Sekler, both of whom were actors. He studied architecture at the Technische Universität Wien (Vienna University of Technology), graduating with distinction in 1945, working as a practicing architec

Seitz, Bill

Full Name: Seitz, Bill

Other Names:

  • William Seitz

Gender: male

Date Born: 1914

Date Died: 1974

Place Born: Buffalo, Erie, NY, USA

Place Died: Charlottesville, VA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Modern (style or period), painting (visual works), and sculpture (visual works)

Career(s): curators


Overview

First professor of modern art history at Princeton University; curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1960-70. Seitz began his career as an artist, studying at Albright Art School, the Art Institute of Buffalo. He married fellow artist Irma J. Siegelman in 1938. Seitz worked for the Federal Artists Project during the Depression and as a draftsman for a rubber company in Buffalo before earning a BFA from the University of Buffalo in 1948. He taught at the university there and the state teacher’s college until 1949. He spent a year in Europe before attending Princeton University the next year where he held a one-person show in the Art Museum. Although enrolled in the MFA program, Seitz was already lobbying to be allowed to study abstract expressionism, then a current movement in the art world. Princeton Dept. of Art and Archaeology Chair E. Baldwin Smith queried Princeton alumnus (and founder of the Museum of Modern Art, New York) Alfred H. Barr, Jr., on the suitability of this as a subject for academic study and of Seitz’s proposal. The famous exchange of letters is now in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art. Much of the Princeton faculty remained divided on Seitz and the subject, but eventually Seitz succeeded and, in 1955, completed the first dissertation on Abstract Expressionism. He was immediately appointed to the Princeton faculty as critic in residence and assistant professor. Seitz became a rallying point for students of the “new art”–both painters and those in art history. He founded the first non-credit painting studio at Princeton, where he advised painting students, among whom were Frank Stella. Seitz also instituted the first artist-in-residence program at Princeton. In 1960 Seitz, always known as “Bill,” became Curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art. Here his seminal exhibitions, “The Art of Assemblage” and “The Responsive Eye” brought to the fore genres of art lesser known modern art to the public. Twenty years later Hilton Kramer referred to Seitz’s inaugural Monet retrospective, “Claude Monet: Season and Moments,” as the “the great Monet show.” Seitz also mounted exhibitions of artists as disparate as Mark Tobey, Hans Hofmann and Edward Hopper. He rose rapidly in the modern art world. Between 1965-1970 he was Professor of Fine Arts at Brandeis University and director of the Rose Art Museum there. He organized the United States exhibition at the Ninth Biennial in Sao Paulo (1967) and the Seventh Biennial of Canadian Painting (1968). In 1970 he became the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, taking the year 1972-73 as the Kress Professor at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. At age 60 he contracted cancer and died at a Charlottesville hospital. As an art historian, Seitz was able to bridge the world of museums and academics, of practicing (studio) art and art history. He brought to modern art history the visual analysis of the painter’s eye, often using a technical explanation of a work as a key to its intellectual content. He was responsible for raising the study of contemporary art to an academic discipline. His early and continued espousal of the work of Stella–recommending him for Oberlin’s “Three Young Americans” show in 1958 and at the Museum of Modern Art (“Responsive Eye,” 1965)–were essential for that artist’s career.


Selected Bibliography

Claude Monet: Seasons and Moments. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Los Angeles County Museum, 1960; and Goodrich, Lloyd. São Paulo 9, United States of America: Edward Hopper [and] Environment U.S.A: 1957-1967. Washington, DC: National Collection of Fine Arts/Smithsonian Institution Press, 1967; Arshile Gorky: Paintings, Drawings, Studies. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1962; The Art of Assemblage. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961; What is Impressionism? Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1973; Price, Marla, ed. Art in the Age of Aquarius: 1955-1970. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.


Sources

A Continued Story: Alfred H. Barr Jr. Princeton University, and William C. Seitz.” Archives of American Art Journal 21, no. 3 (1981): 8-13; Rewald, John. “The William C. Seitz Collection.” Art Journal 37, no. 1 (Autumn, 1977): 49-50; Guberman, Sidney. Frank Stella: an Ilustrated Biography. New York: Rizzoli International, 1995; [obituary:] “William C. Seitz, Art Scholar, Dies; Ex-Curator at the Modern Taught at Princeton Critic in Residence Became Associate Curator.” New York Times October 28, 1974, p. 34.




Citation

"Seitz, Bill." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/seitzw/.


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First professor of modern art history at Princeton University; curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1960-70. Seitz began his career as an artist, studying at Albright Art School, the Art I

Seilern, Antoine, Count

Full Name: Seilern, Antoine, Count

Other Names:

  • Antoine Count Seilern und Aspang

Gender: male

Date Born: 1901

Date Died: 1978

Place Born: Farnham, Surrey, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: Austria

Career(s): art collectors


Overview

Collector and art historian. Seilern was the son of Count Carl Seilern und Aspang (1866-1940) and Antoinette Woerishoffer (Seilern und Aspang) (1875-1901). His mother, who was American by birth, died shortly after his birth. Seilern was raised by his grandmother in New York and Vienna, enjoying dual citizenship of Austria and England. At the end of World War I, however, he renounced his Austrian citizenship. Seilern graduated from the Realgymnasium in Vienna in 1920 continuing on to the Wiener Handelsakademie (1920-1921 where he likely met another future art historian, Fritz Grossmann) and then, beginning in 1922, at the Technische Hochschule, studying for the engineering certificate, (though 1924). Seiler briefly worked in lumber harvesting companies in Yugoslavia and finance in Vienna. His friend the art collector Count Karl Lanckoronski, encouraged Seilern to collect as well. In 1931 a vast inheritance from his grandmother ensured his life leisure. Between 1930 and 1933 he made a world tour, lingering in Africa for big-game hunting. In 1933, a family friend and art historian Count Karl Wilczek recommended Seilern for private study with Johannes Wilde. Seilern enrolled at Vienna University studying under Karl Maria Swoboda, Julius Alwin von Schlosser, and Hans Sedlmayr. Seiler’s collecting had blossomed on a grand scale, advised by Ludwig Burchard and Wilde. His Rubens’ paintings included “Landscape by Moonlight” (onced owned by Sir Joshua Reynolds), numerous Rubens’s drawings and modelli, and Tiepolos. Seilern completed his Ph.D. in 1939 with a dissertation on the Venetian influences on Rubens’s ceiling paintings. Seiler’s (sole) British citizenship and the annexation of Austria by the Nazi’s the year before, both enabled and forced Seilern to return to England in 1939 together with his considerable art and book collection. In England he provided financial support to


Selected Bibliography

Flemish Paintings & Drawings at 56 Princes Gate, London SW 7. London: Shenval Press, 1955; Italian Paintings and Drawings at 56 Princes Gate, London SW 7. London: Shenval Press, 1959; Paintings and Drawings of Continental Schools Other than Flemish and Italian at 56 Princes Gate London, SW7. London: Shenval Press, 1961; Recent Acquisitions at 56 Princes Gate, London SW7. London: Shenval Press, 1971.estate: Early Chinese Ceramics, Archaic Bronzes, Paintings and Works of Art: the Property of the Estate of the Late Count Antoine Seilern, sold by Order of Beneficiaries. London: Christie’s, 1982.


Sources

Ludwig Münz another Austrian art historian fleeing Hitler. Wilde, who’s wife was Jewish, was also in peril. Seilern made arrangements for Wilde’s books to be shipped as Wilde struggled to leave himself. He and Wilde, who had been sponsored by Kenneth Clark, reunited in Aberystwyth, Wales. During World War II, Seilern enlisted in the British army volunteering for the disasterous Russo-Finnish campaign of 1940. He escaped occupied Norway completing the War as a German interpreter. At the height of the War, Seilern made one of his finest acquisitions, “The Entombment with Donor and the Resurrection” by the Master of Flémalle, which he purchased in 1942 as a work attributed to Adriaen Isenbrandt. After the War, Seilern lived in South Kensington, London, (and a farm near Chesham, Buckinghamshire), building his collection. His drawings included those by [Giovanni] Bellini, Brueghel, Dürer, Hugo van der Goes, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Watteau, Degas, Picasso, and Cézanne, and even Chinese bronzes. His friend and mentor, Wilde, now deputy director of the Courtauld Institute, convinced him to leave the bulk of his paintings to the Courtauld Institute. Other works went to the National Gallery, London, and the British Museum, and, like the Courtauld bequest, completely annonymously. These included Bernardo Daddi’s “Virgin and Child with Saints,” 1338, (purchased 1956). Seilern’s anonymous gifts are referred to simply in those museums as coming from the “Prince’s Gate Collection.” Beginning in 1955 Seilern published a catalogue of his collection with the assistance of Grossmann. The seven-volume work was completed in 1971. He died of heart disease at age 56 and was buried in Frensham churchyard, the place of his birth. He was later exhumed and re-interred at the family vault at Aspang, Austria, south of Vienna. His archives were placed at the Courtauld Institute. “Count Seilern’s Flemish Paintings and Drawings.” Burlington Magazine 97 (December 1955): 396-8; Levey, Michael. “Count Seilern’s Italian Pictures and Drawings.” Burlington Magazine102 (March 1960): 122-3; Braham, Helen. “Introduction.” in, The Princes Gate Collection. London: Courtauld Institute Galleries, 1981, pp. vii-xv; Farr, Dennis “Seilern und Aspang, Count Antoine Edward (1901-1978).” Oxford Dictionary of American Biography; [obituary:] Shaw, James Byam. “Count Antoine Seilern (1901-78).” The Burlington Magazine 120 (November 1978): 760-2; Blunt, Anthony F. “Antoine Seilern: Connoisseur in the Grand Tradition.” Apollo 109 (January 1979): 10-23.




Citation

"Seilern, Antoine, Count." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/seilerundaspanga/.


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Collector and art historian. Seilern was the son of Count Carl Seilern und Aspang (1866-1940) and Antoinette Woerishoffer (Seilern und Aspang) (1875-1901). His mother, who was American by birth, died shortly after his birth. Seilern was raised by

Seidlitz, Woldemar von

Full Name: Seidlitz, Woldemar von

Gender: male

Date Born: 1850

Date Died: 1922

Place Born: St. Petersburg, Russia

Place Died: Dresden, Saxony, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany


Overview

Museum director at Dresden. He collaborated with Georg Gronau on Leonardo scholarship.

Udo Kultermann sites Seidlitz among those Gründerzeit museum directors, along with Wilhelm Bode, Alfred Lichtwark, Justus Brinckmann, and Karl Woermann, as responsible for the formation of art history by virtue of their scholarship and interest in museum training.



Sources

Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 382-4; Kultermann, Udo. The History of Art History. New York: Abaris, 1993, pp. 138.




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"Seidlitz, Woldemar von." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/seidlitzw/.


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Museum director at Dresden. He collaborated with Georg Gronau on Leonardo scholarship.Udo Kultermann sites Seidlitz among those Gründerzeit museum directors, along with Wilh

Seidel, Linda

Full Name: Seidel, Linda

Other Names:

  • Linda Seidel

Gender: female

Date Born: 1939

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Romanesque

Career(s): educators


Overview

University of Chicago Romanesque scholar. Seidel attended Barnard College where she received her B.A. in French literature. She continued at Radcliffe College for her Master’s degree. A 1962-1963 Sachs Research fellowship assisted her in completing her Ph. D. in art history from Harvard University in 1965, written under Frederick B. Deknatel. While working on her Ph.D. she came into contact with Columbia University medievalist Meyer Schapiro. She married a research and medical school faculty Michael R. Field (b. 1933). Seidel taught at Harvard in the department of art, the school of architecture, and the Fogg Art Museum. During this time, she produced an important article, a chapter from her dissertation, “A Romantic Forgery: The Romanesque ‘Portal’ of Saint-Étienne in Toulouse,” in 1968. The article overturned much accepted French scholarship, proving that one of the traditional monuments in Romanesque architecture was, in fact, a nineteenth-century composite. In 1977 she and her husband joined the faculty at the University of Chicago. Seidel and Yale art historian Walter B. Cahn edited the scholarly inventory of Romanesque sculpture in American Collections, beginning in 1979. Her book Songs of Glory: the Romanesque Façades of Aquitaine appeared in 1981. In 1984 she published the second of her “pioneering” articles (Caviness), “Salome and the Canons” in Women’s Studies, approaching the medieval reception theory from the point of view of one empowered group. She participated in a symposium organized to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House which is located on the University of Chicago campus. She was named the first Hanna Holborn Gray Professor in Art History at Chicago and awarded a Burlington Northern Distinguished Graduate Teaching Award in 1990. Seidel broke with her medieval-area to write an historiographical monograph on the history Jan van Eyck’s most famous work, Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait: Stories of an Icon in 1993. She received the Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor Emerita award in History. In 1996 She won the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Continuing her interest in pedogy and historiography, she issued Looking to Learn: Visual Pedagogy at the University of Chicago together with Katherine Taylor in 1998. She retired from the University in 2004. A symposium in her honor was held in New York in 2011. Her students included Madeline Harrison Caviness.


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Romanesque Sculpture from the Cathedral of Saint-Etienne, Toulouse. 2 vols. Harvard University, 1965, published under the same title, New York: Garland, 1977; “A Romantic Forgery: The Romanesque “Portal” of Saint-Étienne in Toulouse.” Art Bulletin 50, no. 1 (March 1968): 33-42; and Cahn, Walter. Romanesque Sculpture in American Collections. New York : B. Franklin, 1979ff.; Songs of Glory: the Romanesque Façades of Aquitaine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981; “Salome and the Canons.” Women’s Studies 11 (1984): 29-66; edited, and Bolon, Carol, and Nelson, Robert S. The Nature of Frank Lloyd Wright. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988; Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait: Stories of an Icon. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993; and Taylor, Katherine. Looking to Learn: Visual Pedagogy at the University of Chicago. Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 1998; Legends in Limestone: Lazarus, Gislebertus, and the Cathedral of Autun. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999; edited, Schapiro, Meyer. Romanesque Architectural Sculpture. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2006.


Sources

“Linda Seidel.” University of Chicago Department of Art History (website) http://humanities.uchicago.edu/depts/art/faculty_staff/seidel.shtml ; Seidel, Linda. “A Romantic Forgery: The Romanesque ‘Portal’ of Saint-Étienne in Toulouse.” Art Bulletin 50, no. 1 (March 1968): 33, asterisked note; Caviness, Madeline Harrison.”Reception of Images by Medieval Viewers.” in, Rudolf, Conrad, ed. A Companion to Medieval Art : Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006, p 72.




Citation

"Seidel, Linda." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/seidell/.


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University of Chicago Romanesque scholar. Seidel attended Barnard College where she received her B.A. in French literature. She continued at Radcliffe College for her Master’s degree. A 1962-1963 Sachs Research fellowship assisted her in completin

Seesselberg, Friedrich

Full Name: Seesselberg, Friedrich

Gender: male

Date Born: 1861

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Germany

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


Overview

architectural history


Selected Bibliography

Die früh-mittelalterliche Kunst der germanischen Völker : unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der skandinavischen Baukunst in ethnologisch-anthropologischer Begründung. Berlin: E. Wasmuth, 1897.


Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 p. 289




Citation

"Seesselberg, Friedrich." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/seesselbergf/.


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architectural history

Sedlmayr, Hans

Full Name: Sedlmayr, Hans

Other Names:

  • Hans Sedlmayr

Gender: male

Date Born: 1896

Date Died: 1984

Place Born: Hornstein, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

Place Died: Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria

Home Country/ies: Austria

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


Overview

Art historian of the so-called “New” or “Second” Vienna School group, known for his work on medieval and Baroque architecture. Sedlmayr studied architecture at Vienna’s Technische Hochschule between 1918-1920. Thereafter he studied art history at the University of Vienna under Max Dvořák until Dvořák’s death in 1921, and then under Dvořák’s successor, Julius Alwin von Schlosser. His 1925 dissertation, written under Schlosser, was on the Austrian baroque architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach. Sedlmayr and fellow student, Otto Pächt vigorously established the tenets of their new art history. In 1931 Sedlmayr published a theoretic manifesto, “Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft” (Toward a Rigorous Study of Art). Sedlmayr rejected what he saw as the empirical minutia of art history: attribution, patronage and social history, and iconography. Instead, he posited an interpretative technique claimed to discern the aesthetic intent of the work. This he contended was the key to learning the art’s relationship to society and its importance in the world. Together with Pächt, they published their theoretically-based pieces in two issues of their own journal, Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen. In 1932 Sedlmayr joined the Nazi party in Austria (when it was still illegal to do so) and well before other art historians felt pressured to do so in order to retain their teaching positions. Sedlmayr received his habitation in 1933 on the topic of Brueghel at the Technische Hochschule. As a rising scholar at the Hochschule, Sedlmayr used a book review to attack another emerging scholar, Rudolf Wittkower and Wittkower’s traditional but excellent methodology. This famous exchange set the stage for a contrast of political and methodological views. Sedlmayr accepted a position as Schlosser’s assistant, eventually succeeding him in that position (as Ordinarius) in 1936. He remained at the University in Vienna while Jewish colleagues such as his friend Pächt, lost their teaching positions due to Nazi persecution. Sedlmayr’s writings were less imbued with Nazi rhetoric than others who continued teaching under the Reich, but his participation was great enough that at the end of World War II he was forced to relinquish his chair in art history at the Allied occupation in 1945. He was succeeded in Vienna by Karl Norbert Julius Oettinger. However, the OSS did not prosecute Sedlmayr and he moved to Bavaria. There he published one of his most well-known later monographs, Verlust der Mitte (Loss of the Center) (1948). From 1946 to 1954 Sedlmayr was a member of the editorial staff of Wort und Wahrheit (Word and Truth), a Catholic Church affiliated magazine, and one of its figureheads; his name still so connected with Nazism that he published in the magazine under the pseudonym Hans Schwarz. He also published in the Catholic weekly newspaper, Die Furche (the Furrow) using the pseudonym Ernst Hermann. Sedlmayr continued with his view of cultural pessimism with his first post-war book of art history on the genesis of the Gothic cathedral, Die Entstehung der Kathedrale, appearing in 1950. In 1951, Sedlmayr succeeded Hans Jantzen at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich as (full) professor, a chair once held by Heinrich Wölfflin and Wilhelm Pinder. A devout Roman Catholic and anti-modernist, Sedlmayr continued to teach and write. His German essays appeared in English in 1957, followed by a monograph on methodology, Kunst und Wahrheit (Art and Truth) in 1958. In 1964 he returned to Austria, succeeded in Munich by Wolfgang Braunfels, to teach in Salzburg where he remained until 1969. Sedlmayr supported the preservation of the old town in Salzburg, stressing the importance of studying art in its historical and social context. In his later years he published increasingly on modern art. A street is named after him in Munich. Sedlmayr’s methodology employs and modifies the Kunstwollen concept of Aloïs Riegl, the notion that the inner intent of the work of art can be known and objectified. His 1929 edited essays of Riegl begin with a discussion of “the quintessential teaching of Riegl.” Sedlmayr used the earlier Vienna scholar’s concepts to create a (for him) more scientific approach to art, Kunstwissenschaft. Though Sedlmayr (and the other second Vienna School historians) attempted to apply a less-subjective approach to art history, Meyer Schapiro pointed out in 1936 that their approach is no more empirical than earlier historians. One of the “scientific” tools Sedlmayr (and Pächt) used was Gestalt psychology, particularly from the writings of Max Wertheimer (1880-1943). With Sedlmayr, the study of the individual work of art takes primacy. Through it and related works, verifiable patterns or principles can be discerned by the art historian, he claimed, much like a scientist makes discoveries. Schapiro, attacking this method as “ill-founded,” summarized the early Sedlmayr as “relatively poor in positive historical conclusions, and rich in ingenious, but unverified insights and in vague assertions.” Sedlmayr’s notion that an age expresses itself through a style, giving artistically formed objects the quality of historical documents, is most clear in his book on Gothic architecture, Entstehung der Kathedrale, in which he asserts the architectural choices made by Gothic cathedral builders demonstrate their desire to create a heavenly Jerusalem on earth. This moved away from the traditional approach of seeing middle-ages churches through their technical innovations to a platonic notion that medieval architecutre was theology in stone. Postivist in approach, Sedlmayr created an idealistic Heavenly Jerusalem as an ideal goal for the medieval architect, contrasting it with the confused result of most medieval architecture ( Böker). Both he and Otto von Simson conceived of the Gothic church as a mystical Gesamtkunstwerk, a totality of all artistic media, whose meaning had to be derrived from experiencing the building as a whole, as opposed to scholars who sought to disect a building to interpret its iconographic parts (Crossley). Sedlmayr’s theoretical work on modern art, Verlust der Mitte was criticized by much of the newly emerging left-wing scholarship. His scholarly detractors included Kurt Badt, whose collected essays on Vermeer includes the subtitle, “eine Streitschrift gegen Hans Sedlmayr” (an Argument against Hans Sedlmayr), and Schapiro. His espousal of Nazi doctrine while professor during the Third Reich remains an area of dispute. Jonathan Petropoulos points out that his use of Rieglian concepts of “purity” and “pure forms” had special implications for Nazi theory. Friedrich Stadler argued that Sedlmayr’s unfortunate slogan- – Verlust der Mitte (loss of the center) – is basically the structural reaction to what is still referred to as “degenerate,- in the same sense in which the Nazis used this term– OSS researchers were never able to prove that he was the “Hans Seidlmayr” who authored the inflammatory book Streifzüge durch altbayerisches Brauchtum (Adrift among Antiquated Bavarian Customs) of 1938. Sedlmayr enjoyed one of the highest profiles an art historian could during the Third Reich, the period in which at least nominal Nazi party allegiance was required, and yet his post-war reputation effectively obliterated his National Socialist involvement. A 1996 biographical sketch by Schniewind-Michel, for example, never mentions his association.


Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Piel, Friedrich, and Schmidt, Gerhard. Hans Sedlmayr: 1896-1984: Verzeichnis seiner Schriften. Salzburg: Mäander, 1996; [dissertation:] Fischer von Erlach der Àltere. Vienna, 1925, published, Munich: R. Piper, 1925; [habilitation:] “Die ‘Macchia’ Bruegels.” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen n.s. 8 (1934): 137-60, English, “Bruegel’s Macchia (1934),” in White, Christopher, ed. The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s. New York: Zone Books, 2000, pp. 323-376; edited and essay by, and Swoboda, Karl M. [Alois Riegl:] Gesammelte Aufsätze. Augsburg-Wien: Dr. B. Filser, 1929; “Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft.” Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen 1 (1931): 7-13; [essay against Wittkower’s methodology] “Geschichte und Kunstgeschichte.” Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Instituts für Geschichtsforschung 50 (1936): 185-99; Die Säkularisation der Hölle: Geschichte eines Kunst-Motivs als Indizienprozeß,- Wort und Wahrheit, 1947, pp. 663-676; Die Entstehung der Kathedrale. Zürich: Atlantis, 1950; Verlust der Mitte: die bildende Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit. Salzburg: O. Müller, 1951, [copyrighted 1948], English, Art in Crisis, the Lost Center. London: Hollis & Carter, 1957; Die Entstehung der Kathedrale. Zürich: Atlantis Verlag, 1950; Kunst und Wahrheit: zur Theorie und Methode der Kunstgeschichte. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1958.


Sources

[addressing Sedlmayr’s methodology] Wittkower, Rudolf. “Zu Hans Sedlmayrs Besprechung von E. Coudenhove-Erthal: Carlo Fontana.” Kritische Berichte 4 (1930-32): 142-5; Schapiro, Meyer. “The New Viennese School.” Review of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen II. Art Bulletin 18 no. 2 (June 1936): 258-262; Schniewind-Michel, Petra. Dictionary of Art 28: 350; Fleck, Robert. Avantgarde in Wien: die Geschichte der Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Wien 1954-1982. Vienna: Löcker, 1982, pp. 399-403; Schneider, Norbert. “Hans Sedlmayr.” Altmeister moderner Kunstgeschichte. Heinrich Dilly, editor. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1990, pp. 266, 267-288; Stadler, Friedrich. The Emigration and Exile of Austrian Intellectuals,- in Stadler, Friedrich and Weibel, Peter, eds. The Cultural Exodus from Austria. New York: Springer, 1995, pp. 14-26; Wood, Christopher. “Introduction.” in, Pächt, Otto. The Practice of Art History: Reflections on Method. New York: Harvey Miller, 1999, p. 10; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 378-81; Montagu, Jennifer, and Connors, Joseph. “Rudolf Wittkower 1901-1971.” [Introduction to] Art and Architecture in Italy: 1600-1750. 6th edition, volume 1, Painting in Italy. Pelican History of Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, pp. ix, xi; Crossley, Paul. “The Gothic church as a Gesamtkunstwerk and the notion of ‘artistic integration’ in Gothic architecture.” [sect xvi of] “Introduction: Frankl’s Text: Its Achievement and Significance.” Frankl, Paul and Crossley, Paul. Gothic Architecture. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 24, 27-28; Petropoulos, Jonathan. The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 169, 204; Böker, Hans Josef. “Afterward.” in Bandmann, Günter. Early Medieval Architecture as Bearer of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, p. 251; Kimball, Roger. “Introduction.” in, Sedlmayr, Hans. Art in Crisis: the Lost Center. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006, pp. i-xxiii.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Sedlmayr, Hans." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/sedlmayrh/.


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Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Art historian of the so-called “New” or “Second” Vienna School group, known for his work on medieval and Baroque architecture. Sedlmayr studied architecture at Vienna’s Technische Hochschule between 1918-1920. Thereafter he studied art history at

Scully, Vincent, Jr.

Full Name: Scully, Vincent, Jr.

Other Names:

  • Vincent Joseph Scully Jr.

Gender: male

Date Born: 1920

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

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Career(s): educators


Overview

Yale architectural historian. Scully was born to a modest family in New Haven, a city in which he remained his entire life. After graduating from high school at 15, he entered Yale University with a scholarship in 1936. At Yale, the lectures of Chauncey B. Tinker (1876-1963) caught his interest and he began graduate work in English. He quit after only one semester (citing a distain for the New Criticism that had gripped academic English departments). After failing to make the Army Flying Cadets, he joined the U. S. Marines in 1941 where he saw action in both the Mediterranean and Pacific theaters. He married Nancy Keith, a Wellesley art history student in 1942. After discharge in 1946, Scully returned to Yale and to art history. He was influenced by the French-school art historians at Yale (in contrast to the Germanic art historians at the other Ivy Leagues of Harvard and NYU), particularly Henri Focillon and Marcel Aubert. Scully was advised by George Heard Hamilton to write on the Hudson River School painters. Scully, however, had been deeply moved by the book Rhode Island Architecture by Henry-Russell Hitchcock. Hitchcock, who was teaching at Wesleyan University near Yale, agreed to be Scully’s Ph.D. advisor, which took Scully a mere three-and-a-half years to complete. Scully taught the large undergraduate survey of art history at Yale during the 1947-1948 year during the sabbatical of Carroll L. V. Meeks with fellow graduate student James S. Ackerman. He also began a life-long friendship with the architect Louis Kahn (1901-1974) in 1947, who had come to teach at Yale. Hitchcock introduced Scully to Frank Lloyd Wright who designed a house for Scully (never built). Scully was immediately appointed to the History of Art faculty upon his graduation from Yale in 1949. The first chapter of his dissertation appeared in the Art Bulletin as “Romantic Rationalism.” Scully was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 1950 to study gothic architecture in France, deferred for a year, by which time his interests had changed to Greek architecture. At Yale, Scully’s powerful position pushed out younger architectural faculty, such as William H. Jordy, who moved to Brown. Scully spent 1955 in Greece researching a book on the topic. Throughout these years, he developed a strong appreciation for Wright and a growing distaste for the Bauhaus architects. Around this time he became interested in Jungian archetypes, applying the term to architecture. He was also one of the first to realize the “neoclassical” impulses in the work of Mies van der Rohe, relating them to Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism by Rudolf Wittkower. He received tenured at Yale in 1956. By the late 1950s, Scully published portions of what would become a standard in the field of modern building, Modern Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy (1961). The same year he was appointed full professor. The following year, his research on Greek architecture was published as The Earth, the Temple and the Gods. The influence of Le Corbusier (specifically his Vers une architecture, 1923) was particularly apparent. Perhaps for that reason, the monograph was poorly received by the classicist community. Characterized as “a fabrication of a modern mind to suit a modern interpretation,” (Homer Thompson, Princeton), Scully never again attempted a book on classical architecture, despite another research trip to Greece in 1962-1963. Scully’s disenchantment with International-style architecture was evident in his 1963 article criticizing the Gropius-designed Pan Am building in New York, “Death of a Street.” However, he found himself defending modern architecture in a print debate with Norman Mailer in the Architectural Forum titled “Mailer vs. Scully” (1964). Around this time he began championing the young architect Robert Venturi (b. 1925). Scully’s introduction to Venturi’s 1966 Complexity and Contradiction is widely acknowledged to have solidified both Venturi’s and Scully’s careers (Levine). He went so far as to claim Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was second only to Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture (1923). Scully increasingly seemed to adopt much of Mailer’s arguments about the blandness and totalitarian implications of modern architecture. In 1965 Scully divorced his wife and married Marian LaFollette Wohl. Scully’s American Architecture and Urbanism (1969) was essentially a rewrite of his Modern Architecture incorporating1960s architecture (including the late work of Kahn) and emphasizing the American Beaux-arts tradition. Scully completed research on his book of southwest architecture by 1969, but Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance did not appear until 1975. In the interim, The Shingle Style Today, or the Historian’s Revenge appeared. During this time Scully was master of Morse College, Yale, from 1969 until 1975. He spent the 1972-1973 year as a Fellow for the National Endowment for the Humanities in Switzerland and France. He divorced his second wife in 1978 and married the art historian Catherine Lynn in 1980. A major New Yorker profile was also written on Scully the same year. Scully remained teaching at Yale until he reached the mandatory 70-years in 1990. In retirement he taught at the University of Miami with Lynn. The years of the 1990s brought his Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade (1991), a critique, in part, of modern architecture’s failure to harmonize with the fabric of cities. His students included Spiro Konstantin Kostof. Scully was a champion of the “other modernism” in architecture, the non-International school of architecture in the twentieth century. His books on Wright, Venturi and indigenous American architecture opened architectural theory from dry formalism to psychological and archetypal analysis. Scully’s Shingle Style (1974) credited Venturi, Charles H. Moore, and their students as the true successors of Le Corbusier, opposing the 1972 book Five Architects, which attributed the lineage to Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves. Scully’s later work shows the influence of Harold Bloom (b. 1930), the conservative Yale literary historian, whose Freudian framework (as opposed to Scully’s earlier use of Jung) he may have adopted from Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence (1973). The Wall Street Journal architecture critic (and former architecture critic of The New York Times), Ada Louise Huxtable, wrote that Scully and Cornell University professor Colin Rowe were the most influential architectural historians of their time. These two academicians inspired the two great schools of post-modern architecture. Rowe’s, known as “the Whites” because of their preoccupation with formal purity and the absence of color in their designs included Richard Meier, Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey and John Hejduk. Scully’s group, “the Grays,” rallied around populist notions and the writing of Venturi, included Charles H. Moore and Robert A. M. Stern. Scully never published in the critical/theoretical architecture publications, (e.g., Eisenman’s Oppositions). Many found fault with his brusque dismissal of modernist architecture. Jordy criticized him (and by extension, Venturi), citing the “non-human realms of weather, minerals, plants, [and]…existences of all sorts” as more important than semiotic/Freudian impulses.


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] The Cottage Style: (An Organic Development in Later 19th Century Wooden Domestic Architecture in the Eastern United States). Ph.D., Yale University, 1949, abridged and published under the title, The Shingle Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955, 2nd ed., The Shingle Style and the Stick Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971; The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962; “Introduction.” Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: Museum of Modern Art/ New York Graphic Society,1966; American Architecture and Urbanism. New York: Praeger,1969; and Downing, Antoinette Forrester. The Architectural Heritage of Newport, Rhode Island, 1640-1915. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952; Architecture: the Natural and the Manmade. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991; The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962; Frank Lloyd Wright. New York: G. Braziller, 1960; Louis I. Kahn. New York: G. Braziller, 1962; Modern Architecture: the Architecture of Democracy. New York: G. Braziller, 1961; Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance. New York: Viking Press, 1975; The Shingle Style Today: or, The Historian’s Revenge. New York: G. Braziller, 1974; and Trager, Philip, and Cevese, Renato, and Graves, Michael. The Villas of Palladio. Boston: Little, Brown, 1986; “Mailer vs. Scully.” Architectural Forum 120 (April 1964): 96-7; “Romantic Rationalism and the Expression of Structure in Wood: Downing, Wheeler, Gardner, and the ‘stick Style,’ 1840-1876.” Art Bulletin 35 (June 1953): 121-42.


Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, pp. 6, 51 mentioned, 103-4; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, pp. 123-4; Levine, Neil. “Vincent Scully: A Biographical Sketch.” Scully, Vincent. Modern Architecture and Other Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003, pp. 12-33; Stevenson, James. “Profiles [Vincent Scully]: What Seas What Shores.” New Yorker February 18, 1980, 43-48 ff.; [regarding Scully and Jordy] Jackson, Neil. “The Duckman Proves Triumphant.” Building Design, July 22, 2005, p. 20.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Scully, Vincent, Jr.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/scullyv/.


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Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Yale architectural historian. Scully was born to a modest family in New Haven, a city in which he remained his entire life. After graduating from high school at 15, he entered Yale University with a scholarship in 1936. At Yale, the lectures of Ch