Art Historians

Rumpf, Andreas

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Rumpf, Andreas

Gender: male

Date Born: 1890

Date Died: 1966

Place Born: Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany

Place Died: Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), Antique, the, ceramic ware (visual works), Classical, mural paintings (visual works), painting (visual works), pottery (visual works), Roman (ancient Italian culture or period), vase, and vase paintings (visual works)

Overview

Specialist in ancient Greek and Roman art, particularly vase painting and Greek wall painting. Rumpf was the son of the artist Fritz Rumpf. Rumpf was editor of the influential Griechische und römische Kunst (1932, part of the Einleitung in der Altertumswissenschaft series). Professor at the University of Cologne (Institut für Klassische Archëologie) (1928-1960). Upon his retirement in 1960 he was succeeded at the University at Cologne by Heinz Kähler.

Selected Bibliography

Classical and Post-Classical Greek Painting, in: JHS 67, 1947, 10 ff.; Griechische und Römische Kunst. 1932; Diligentissime mulieries pinxit, in: JdI 49, 1934, 6 ff.; Malerei und Zeichnung, in: HdArch IV (I) 1953.

Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 252-253.

Specialist in ancient Greek and Roman art, particularly vase painting and Greek wall painting. Rumpf was the son of the artist Fritz Rumpf. Rumpf was editor of the influential Griechische und römische Kunst (1932, part of the Einleitu

Rumohr, Karl Friedrich von

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Rumohr, Karl Friedrich von

Other Names:

Karl Friedrich von Rumohr

Gender: male

Date Born: 1785

Date Died: 1843

Place Born: Reinhardsgrimma, Saxony, Germany

Place Died: Dresden, Saxony, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): documentaries (documents), documentary (general concept), and Modern (style or period)

Overview

Founder of modern art history (history based on documentary study); key member of the Berlin school of art history. Rumohr was born to Henning von Rumohr (1722-1804) and belonged to a noble Holstein family. His inheritance enabled him to pursue his art-historical interests without the constraints of employment. After attending the Gymnasium in Holzminden, Rumohr entered the university in Göttingen, focusing on foreign-languages and studying under Johann Dominico Fiorillo. Rumohr’s dedication to documentary sources likely derived from the influence of another scholar, the historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776-1831). He made his first journey to Italy by 1804 with artists Franz and Johannes Riepenhausen and Ludwig Tieck Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853). He returned to Hamburg in 1806 studying art and learning painting. In 1815, Rumohr returned to the notion of a society of art scholars. He met Goethe during an extended visit to Weimar. A second trip, lasting the years 1816 to 1821, was influential for the prominent expatriate German community he met there, including the Nazarene artists, and the art historian Gustav Friedrich Waagen. He scoured Italian archives during his stay in the country, pouring through the archives of Rome, Florence, Milan, Siena, Perugia and Mantua. Like many art authors, Rumohr began his critical analysis of Italian art with Giorgio Vasari. He initially planned only to produce a German translation (and commentary) of the Vite, but his ever-increasing familiarity with the documentary sources of Italian art made him realize how little of Vasari could be accepted. He returned to Hamburg via Munich in 1821 where he was active in the artistic community there and publishing a book on cooking. In 1825 moved to Berlin where he published the results of his art-historical research, his Italienischen Forschungen, (Italian Investigations) in 1827. The Forschungen focus on medieval Italian painting and Raphael, because he viewed the era after 1530 as a period of decline in renaissance painting. It was probably Rumohr’s attitude that influenced both the Nazarenes and the English Pre-Raphaelites to come to the same conclusions. In Berlin, Rumohr was tapped by the Prussian government to advise them on a comprehensive public museum of art. The return of art work from Napoleon’s museum had re-ignited the notion of an art museum in Berlin akin to the great institutions in Munich, Dresden and Vienna. For years, Aloys Hirt then a curator of the Kaiser’s pictures had pressed for such a museum. But Hirt was a bureaucrat, not an historian. His vision for the museum was little more than a warehouse of the collection (though he did press for hanging pictures by school and era rather than subject). Rumohr and Waagen understood that the impetus for a public collection of art was first esthetic and then historic. Rumohr disagreed bitterly with Hirt and their rivalry eventually forced Hirt’s resignation. Rumohr was considered to lead the new museum, but was turned down by the crown in favor of Waagen. However, Rumohr may have in fact preferred the decision. He returned to Italy for the years 1828-1829, and then again in 1837, increasingly devoting time to agricultural studies and cooking. He moved to Gut Rothenhausen in 1835. In 1838 the young Giovanni Morelli, the establisher of connoisseurship, met Rumohr, greatly influencing Morelli’s work. After a final trip to Italy in 1841, Rumohr retired to another of his estates in Lübeck, Rothenhausen, in 1842. He died the following year, his friend Gottfried Semper designed a monument for him. His art collection was auctioned in 1846. Rumohr’s Italienische Forschungen was among the first art histories to be constructed through the use of written primary source documents, culled from Italian archives, the hallmark of modern art-historical scholarship. Eschewing the classical-art centered view of art history, Rumohr strove for a more objective art history. The twentieth-century documentary scholar Julius Alwin von Schlosser described him as the founder of modern art research. An anti-romantic (and anti-Hegelian), Rumohr’s way of thinking developed a critical opposition with that of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (he early on disagreed with Winckelmann’s analysis of Castor and Pollux statue). He asserted that nature was the primary source for the analysis of art history, attempting to free art history from the prevailing romantic-era literary/aesthetic ties. During his lifetime, Rumohr was not primarily known for his art writing. An eccentric and noted gourmet, his 1822 cookbook on simplified cuisine, Geist der Kochkunst (Spirit of the Cooking Arts) was written under the pseudonym of his servant. An 1834 book on etiquette, Schule der Höflichkeit, and his rhymed fable verses the following year, Kynalopekomachia: Der Hunde Fuchsenstreit were both popular successes. A witty raconteur, sketches of him show up in the memoirs of Count Adolf von Schack (1815-1894), Pauline Gotter Schelling (1786-1854), and Karl von Lorck. Goethe characterized him as a profound cognoscenti of Italian art. Hegel mentioned him in his work ästhetik of 1835. Wilhelm von Humboldt argued that Italienischen Forschungen was the first art historical work written in a historical and spiritual sense. Historians who were directly affected by Rumohr’s methodology, in addition to Waagen, included Heinrich Gustav Hotho, Karl Julius Ferdinand Schnaase, Friedrich Kugler, (the “Berlin School”) and in the twentieth century, Viennese scholar, Schlosser. Beyond those 19th-century scholars and literati, it is unclear how far his influence carried during his time. Rumohr and the other members of the Berlin school of art history made the greatest contribution to the writing of art history in the next century.

Selected Bibliography

König, Joseph. [pseudonym] Geist der Kochkunst. Stuttgardt: Cotta, 1822; Italienische Forschungen, 3 vols in 1. Berlin: Nicolai’sche Buchhandlung, 1827-31, updated edition with introduction by Schlosser, Julius. Italienische Forschungen. Frankfurt a.M.: Frankfurter verlags-Anstalt, 1920; Ursprung der Besitzlosigkeit des Colonen im neueren Toscana: aus den Urkunden. Hamburg: Perthes und Besser, 1830; Schule der Höflichkeit: für Alt und Jung. Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1834; Kynalopekomachia: Der Hunde Fuchsenstreit. Lübeck: v. Rohden, 1835; Untersuchung der Gründe für die Annahme : dass Maso di Finiguerra Erfinder des Handgriffes sei, gestochene Metallplatten auf genetztes Papier abzudrucken. Leipzig: R. Weigel, 1841; introduction, Rio, Alexis-François, and De Boni, Filippo. Della poesia cristiana nelle sue forme. Venice: Co’ tipi del Gondoliere, 1841.

Sources

Schultz, Heinrich Wilhelm. Karl Friedrich von Rumohr: Sein Leben und seine Schriften. Leipzig: 1844; Schlosser, Julius von. “Carl Friedrich von Rumohr als Begründer der neueren Kunstforschung,” In, Schlosser, Julius, ed. Rumohr, Karl Friedrich. Italienische Forschungen. Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurter Verlag-Anstalt, 1920, pp. v-xxxviii; Kultermann, Udo. Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte: Der Weg einer Wissenschaft. Frankfurt am Main and Vienna: Ullstein, 1981, pp. 155, 161-164; 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. 44, 44 n. 87; Waetzoldt, Wilhelm. Deutsche Kunsthistoriker vom Sandrart bis Justi. vol. 2. Leipzig: E. A. Seeman, 1924, pp. 292-318; German Essays on Art History. Gert Schiff, ed. New York: Continuum, 1988, pp. xxvii-xxx, 281; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 332-35; Müller-Tamm, Pia. Rumohrs “Haushalt der Kunst” : zu einem kunsttheoretischen Werk der Goethe-Zeit. Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1991; Schwarzer, Mitchell. “Origins of the Art History Survey Text.” Art Journal 54 (Fall 1995): 24.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Rubin, William S.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Rubin, William S.

Other Names:

William Stanley Rubin

Gender: male

Date Born: 1927

Date Died: 2006

Place Born: Brooklyn, Cattaraugus, NY, USA

Place Died: Pound Ridge, Westchester, NY

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Overview

Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, 1973-1988. Rubin was the son of Mack and Beatrice Rubin. His father was a self-made textile merchant and factory owner. Rubin grew up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, attending the Fieldston School, serving as captain of the football team in his senior year. At Fieldston Rubin met Victor D’Amico, director of education at the Museum of Modern Art. Rubin volunteered at the museum working on special projects under D’Amico. He entered Columbia University, but joined the military during World War II to serve in the American occupation forces in Europe. His B. A. from Columbia in 1949 was in Italian language and literature. He spent a year at the University of Paris planning a career as a concert conductor. Rubin instead returned to Columbia to pursue an advance degree in history. At Columbia, a course under the medievalist Rosa Schapire, whose other research interest was the New York School, caused Rubin to switch to art history. After securing his M. A. in 1952, Rubin taught at Sarah Lawrence beginning in Bronxville, NY, and the City University of New York (1960-1967). He was an editor for Art International, collecting art in his spare time. Rubin bought the new Abstract Expressionist art of Jasper Johns and Frank Stella. His dissertation, granted from Columbia in 1959, was on modern ecclesiastic art. During this time, too, Rubin strengthened his friendship with Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the founder and “Director of Collections” at the Museum of Modern Art, inviting Barr to lecture at Sarah Lawrence. Barr invited Rubin to mount an exhibition of Andé Masson art at MoMA. Rubin’s skill led to an appointment as curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture in 1967. Rubin’s close connection with the art dealer Sidney Janis (1896-1989), both as a collector and art historian, resulted in Janis and his wife’s donation of their five Mondrians to the Museum. Part of Rubin’s mandate was to build in the area of Abstract Expressionist art which Barr had largely ignored. He swapped another work with Janis to acquire Jackson Pollock’s “One: Number 31, 1950” and convinced the art dealer Ben Heller (b. 1925) to donate Barnett Newman’s 1950-51 “Vir Heroicus Sublimis.” In 1968 Rubin mounted ”Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage.” By 1969 Rubin was chief curator of painting and sculpture. He was named Director of the department in 1973. During his tenure at the Modern, Rubin acquired Picasso’s ”Charnel House” (1944-45), Miro’s ”Birth of the World” (1925) and two 1950’s cutouts by Matisse, ”Memory of Oceania” and ”The Swimming Pool.” His most famous acquisition was Picasso’s ”Guitar,” 1912-13, a metal-construction sculpture, which Picasso gave outright from his own collection after Rubin offered to trade a Cézanne. Rubin donated to the museum David Smith’s ”Australia,” 1951, a work from his own collection. Rubin’s most celebrated scholarly exhibition was “Cézanne: the Late Work” in 1978. Rubin engaged in a public disagreement with University of Pennsylvania scholar Leo Steinberg over Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, an exchange covered in the pages of Art in America between 1978-1979. A large Picasso retrospective was held in 1980, also to the acclaim of critics. MoMA expanded in 1984 and Rubin was able to mount larger shows. The infamous ”Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,” was organized with his handpicked assistant, J. Kirk Varnedoe. Pairing modern artworks with examples of the African and Oceanic art that had influenced them, the show emphasized formalism at the expense of the larger context both modern and non-western art had developed. The exhibition set off a debate between Thomas McEvilley who had negatively reviewed the show in Artforum. Rubin retired in 1988 but continued to organize exhibitions. “Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism” was launched in 1989 and “Picasso’s Portraits” in 1996. Critics despaired that Rubin would mount a show organized around Picasso’s womanizing. In 1994, Rubin asserted that the numerous paintings and drawings of Picasso in the1920’s were of the American socialite Sara Murphy and are not depictions of Picasso’s wife at the time, Olga. As Director emeritus, Rubin lived his last days in his loft off Broadway and in a home in Pound Ridge, NY, where he died. Rubin was a controversial figure. An egotist who married four times, he brokered art-world power usually to the benefit of MoMa collections. He continued the museum’s practice of selling off art works considered less-important or redundant by the staff in order to finance newer acquisitions. Rubin, however, began the practice of sealed-bid auction from dealers to increased revenue. His exhibitions built on the largely formalist and historically linear history of art established by Barr. Critics of Rubin and the Museum accused both of being unreceptive to new art and obsessed with the Museum’s place in the history of art. His painting and sculpture installations followed the Barr cannon of emphasizing masterpieces, great artists and French painting.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy. Columbia University, 1959, published in an abbreviated version, New York: Columbia University Press, 1961; “Pollock as Jungian Illustrator: The Limits of Psychological Criticism.” Art in America 67 (November 1979): 104-23, and Art in America 67 (December 1979): 72-91; and Reff, Theodore. Cézanne: the Late Work: Essays. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977; Dada, Surrealism, and their Heritage. New York: Museum of Modern Art,1968; and Seckel, Héléne, and Cousins, Judith. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. New York: The Museum of Modern Art,1994; Pablo Picasso, a Retrospective. New York: Museum of Modern Art,1980; “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. 2 vols. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984; [“Primitivism” exhibition exchange:] McEvilley, Thomas. “Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief.” Artforum 23 (November 1984): 54-61; “Pablo and Georges and Leo and Bill.” Art in America 67 (March 1979): 128-47 [reply to] Steinberg, Leo. “Resisting Cezanne: Picasso’s Three Women.” Art in America 66 (November 1978): 114-33 and “Polemical Part.” Art in America 67 (March 1979):114-27.

Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 103; D’souza, Aruna. “Biography Becomes Form: William Rubin, Pablo Picasso, and the Subject of Art History.” Word & Image 18 no. 2 (April/June 2002): 126-36; Tomkins, Calvin. “Profiles: Sharpening the Eye.” New Yorker 61 no. 37 (November 4, 1985): ; [obituaries:] Smith, Roberta. “William Rubin, 78, Curator Who Transformed MoMA’s Collection and Identity, Dies.” New York Times January 24, 2006, p. B 7; “William Rubin.” The Times (London) January 27, 2006, p. 68.

Rubensohn, Otto

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Rubensohn, Otto

Gender: male

Date Born: 1867

Date Died: 1964

Place Born: Kassel, Hesse, Germany

Place Died: Höchenschwand, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), Antique, the, and Classical

Overview

Specialist in ancient Greek art.

Selected Bibliography

Das Delion von Paros, 1962. Gesamtdarstellung der Geschichte und Kunstgeschichte von Paros. RE XVIII 4 (1949) 1781 ff.

Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 166-167.

Specialist in ancient Greek art.

Rowley, George

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Rowley, George

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Subject Area(s): East Asian

Overview

The father of Princeton University’s studies in Far Eastern art (Rensselaer W. Lee). Began his career at Bryn Mawr under Georgiana Goddard King. Taught at Columbia university. Charles Parkhurst, consider Rowley,”one of the great, perhaps somewhat unheralded teachers at Princeton.”

Sources

[Lee quotation:] Leitch, Alexander. A Princeton Companion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1978; mentioned, Interview with Charles Parkhurst Pennington, Buck, interviewer. Archives of American Art. Washington, DC October 27, 1982, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/parkhu82.htm.

The father of Princeton University’s studies in Far Eastern art (Rensselaer W. Lee). Began his career at Bryn Mawr under Georgiana Goddard King. Taught at Columbia university. Charles

Rowland, Benjamin, Jr.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Rowland, Benjamin, Jr.

Gender: male

Date Born: 1904

Date Died: 1972

Place Born: Overbrook, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Place Died: Cambridge, Middlesex, MA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Afghan (Central Asian style), Asian, Buddhism, Chinese (culture or style), East Asian, iconology, Indian (South Asian), Japanese (culture or style), mural paintings (visual works), Pakistani, and South Asian

Career(s): artists (visual artists)

Overview

Historian of South Asian art and Harvard Professor. Rowland attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. The remainder of his degrees and teaching were exclusively at Harvard University. He was granted his B.S. in 1928 and Ph.D. only two years later, in 1930. His dissertation, on the 15th-century Catalonian painter Jaume Huguet was written under Chandler R. Post and published in 1932. From 1930-41 he served as tutor at Harvard. During this time Post became interested in Asian arts and began to study Chinese and Japanese languages. He also established a friendship with the Boston curator Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy. In 1932-33 he was a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, where he traveled to Kyoto and Tokyo, taking forays to Beijing and New Delhi. In 1936-37 he traveled to India, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) researching a book on Buddhist wall painting. It was published in 1938 as The Wall-Paintings of India, Central Asia & Ceylon. It was while exploring the temple remains in Afghanistan and the Gandhara district of West Pakistan that he became fascinated with the influence of Greco-Roman art on Buddhist sculpture. This became the topic on which he built his reputation as a scholar. In 1941 he was both appointed associate professor and married Lucy Thomas. During World War II her served as communications officer in the Navy in Washgington, D. C., 1942-45. He was appointed full professor in 1950, succeeding Langdon Warner in responsibility for the Asian collections of the Fogg Museum. In 1953 his published the Pelican History of Art volume on India. The following year, he wrote a modest textbook for a cross-cultural course at Harvard, Art in East and West. The little book, like his Pelican volume, became a basic introduction for students of west art to the sensibilities of Asian esthetics and arts. Rowland, also a skilled watercolorist, exhibited his personal art work in many galleries at this time. In 1960 he was appointed Gleason Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard and in 1970 served UNESCO as the United States delegate to the Kushan Congress in Kabul. Although Rowland’s work was principally in (East) Indian art, he taught a wide variety of courses, most notably in American art where his students included Barbara J. Novak, Jules Prown, Theodore Stebbins, Jr., John Wilmerding, William I. Homer, and William Gerdts. Rowland was also a collector of South Asian art; he eventually donated his collection to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Rowland, like his contemporary Osvald Sirén, worked during a time in art history when scholars of western art could change fields to Asian art and, through personal instruction, become a major scholar in that field. Methodologically, Rowland worked in a connoisseurship/evolutionary styles continuum central to Asian scholarship of that era. He also addressed issues of patronage and iconology. Unlike his colleague at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, he did not embrace a mystical appreciation of South Asian art. Rowland, like his fellow Asianist, Warner, was noted for a disdain of “academic professionalism” which included committee work as well as the notion that professors should be narrow specialists or even considered “experts”.

Selected Bibliography

The Art and Architecture of India: Buddhist, Hindu, Jain. (Pelican History of Art). 1st ed. Baltimore: Penguin Book,1953; Art in East and West: An Introduction through Comparisons. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954; The Classical Tradition in Western Art. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1963; Jaume Huguet: A Study of Late Gothic Painting in Catalonia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932; The Wall-Paintings of India, Central Asia & Ceylon: A Comparative Study. [Introductory essay on the nature of Buddhist art by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, with a foreword by A. Townshend Johnson]. Boston: Merrymount Press, 1938.

Sources

William Gerdts. “A Personal Re-collection” For Beauty and For Truth. Amherst, MA: Mead Art Museum, 1998, p. 13; The Dictionary of Art; Obituary, Artibus Asiae, 35 (1973):. 371-3; Coolidge, John, et al. “Benjamin Rowland, Jr.” Fogg Art Museum Annual Report, 1972-74: 29-32.

Rowe, Colin

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Rowe, Colin

Other Names:

Colin Rowe

Gender: male

Date Born: 27 March 1920

Date Died: 05 November 1999

Place Born: Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England, UK

Place Died: Arlington, Northhampton, VA, USA

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Overview

Architect and architectural historian. Rowe the son of a schoolmaster from Bolton-upon-Dearne in south Yorkshire. He attended school at Wath-upon-Dearne earning a scholarship to Liverpool University in 1939 where he studied architecture. He joined the army in World War II assigned to Parachute Regiment in 1942 but was discharged in 1944 after a back injury. Rowe graduated in 1946, entering the Warburg Institute in London to study the history of architecture under Rudolf Wittkower. His first essay, “The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa” appeared in the Architectural Review, 1947. In it he compared Palladio’s Villa Foscari (the malcontenta of c. 1550-1560) to Le Corbusier’s 1927 Villa Stein at Garches, France, finding similar principles in both. He wrote his thesis under Wittkower on the theoretical drawings of Inigo Jones. He returned to teach at Liverpool, where his students included Robert Maxwell and James Stirling. Rowe received a Smith-Mundt/Fulbright Scholarship to study at Yale University under Henry-Russell Hitchcock. He became an American citizen in 1984. He toured the United States afterward, working as an architect before joining the school of architecture at the University of Texas at Austin in 1953. He allied himself with other young faculty out to change the curriculum, who corporately referred to themselves the Texas Rangers. The group’s members rankled UT traditionalists on the faculty and were eventually fired en masse in 1956. Rowe found positions at Cooper Union, New York, and at Cornell University before Sir Leslie Martin invited him to join the Cambridge University School of Architecture in 1958. His students included Peter Eisenman. Rowe employed a formalist approach to architectural analysis during these years, attracting architectural students who hoped to return to aesthetic issues in an age of poorly-practiced International-style modernism. Rowe found Cambridge exasperating (Maxwell) and in 1962 returned to the United States as Professor of Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design at Cornell University. At Cornell he focused on urban theory, examining the interface between city form and architecture and social intercourse. His The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa appeared as a book in 1976. He lived in the Palazzo Massimi while running the Rome program for Cornell. A long friendship resulted with the New York architect Judy de Maio. He published Collage City with Fred Koetter in 1978, his major thesis on urban interaction which first introduced the concept of “bricolage” (Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of adopting a methodology to fit a topic) to urban theory. He was named Andrew Dickson White Professor in Architecture 1985, becoming Emeritus in 1990. He received the Royal Institute of British Architecture’s Gold Medal in 1995, only the second scholar of the twentieth century. In retirement, Rowe wrote Architecture of Good Intentions, a cautionary analysis of architectural discourse. He moved to Washgington, D. C., in 1994. His collected essays, As I Was Saying, appeared in 1995. A book on Renaissance architecture remained uncompleted at his death at a Washington area hospital of a stroke at age 79. It was completed by Leon Satkowski in 2002. Rowe revolutionized the teaching of architectural design in the United States through an appreciation of its heritage, the dynamic quality of its early settlements and the American revitalization of the classical. He praised in particular the city of Lockhart, Texas. Rowe’s research passion was Italian Mannerism and its inherent contradictions; he frequently lived in Italy as a result. His Mathematics of the Ideal Villa challenged the view that modern architecture represented a fundamental break with history by showing an intellectual lineage between Renaissance and modern. Although not an proponent of modernism, Rowe exhorted his American students to recapture the delight of avant-garde European buildings of the early decades of the twentieth century. His writing and lecturing style was conversational tone, clearly documented in his essays in As I Was Saying. Rowe’s Collage City prefigures the postmodernist theory (Guardian). “Rowe’s significance largely revolved around the issue of formalism. Should visual and spatial forms be seen as architecture’s irreducible essence, or does form represent only one layer in a set of values that includes psychological meaning, social intention, political ideology and other human factors at work in the urban whole?” (Muschamp). The Wall Street Journal and former The New York Times architecture critic, Ada Louise Huxtable, wrote that Rowe and Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully, Jr., were the two most influential 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 Robert Venturi, included Charles H. Moore and Robert A. M. Stern.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] The Theoretical Drawings of Inigo Jones: Their Sources and Scope. Warburg Institute, University of London, 19; The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976; and Koetter, Fred. Collage City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978; As I Was Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996; and Satkowski, Leon. Italian Architecture of the 16th Century. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.

Sources

Vidler, Anthony. “Mannerist Modernism: Colin Rowe.” in Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008, pp. 60-104; [obituaries:] Maxwell, Robert. “Colin Rowe.” Independent (London), December 8, 1999, p. 6; Guardian (London), November 18, 1999, p. 26, Muschamp, Herbert. “Colin Rowe, Architecture Professor, Dies at 79.” New York Times, November 8, 1999, p. B 10.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Rovinsky, Dmitry Aleksandrovich

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Rovinsky, Dmitry Aleksandrovich

Other Names:

Dmitriĭ Aleksandrovich Rovinskiĭ

Gender: male

Date Born: 1824

Date Died: 1895

Place Born: Moscow, Russia

Place Died: Bad Wildungen, Hesse, Germany

Home Country/ies: Russia

Subject Area(s): engravings (prints), graphic arts, prints (visual works), and Russian (culture or style)

Career(s): art collectors

Overview

Historian and collector of Russian graphic arts and engravings. After receiving his law degree in 1844, Rovisky began to publish articles on the Academy of Art during the reign of Catherine II and the Russian school of icon painting. His work on Russian engravers won him the Uvarov Prize in 1864, and he was elected to the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1870. After spending 25 years researching Russian popular prints, Rovinsky published an illustrated work that highlighted prints from his own collection, and placed them in their social and cultural context of 17th-19th century Russia. The St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences named Rovinsky an honorary member in 1883. After his death in 1895, Rovinsky’s engravings and prints were sent to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and the Rumianstev Museum and Library in Moscow. The professor of Art History at Utrecht University, J. G. van Gelder, described Rovinsky’s work as one of the praiseworthy graphic studies of Netherlandish of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Sources

The Dictionary of Art ; van Gelder, Jan G. [Forward.] Hollstein, F. W. H. Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, ca 1450-1700. vol. 1. Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, 1949, p. [i].

Rousseau, Theodore, Jr.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Rousseau, Theodore, Jr.

Gender: male

Date Born: 1912

Date Died: 1973

Place Born: Freeport, Nassau, NY, USA

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): European

Career(s): curators

Overview

Vice Director and curator of European Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art. From the first, Rousseau lived a privileged life. His father was Theodore Rousseau, Sr., (1881-1953), a Savannah [Georgia]-born former newspaperman turned director of the Paris branch of Guaranty Trust Company; his mother was Marta de Fremery (Rousseau) (d. 1931). Rousseau himself was educated at Eton, the Sorbonne and eventually Harvard University. While at Harvard, he met and married a dancer-showgirl, Virginia Franck. In the 1930s he traveled in Europe, researching art. He was appointed assistant curator of paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washgington, D. C. During World War II he joined the Navy, serving in comparative safety in Naval intelligence as the assistant attache to the American Ambassador to Portugal and Spain. He was later transferred to the Art Looting Investigation Unit of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) where he interviewed those responsible for the theft of art for Nazi Germany. His OSS colleagues included the S. Lane Faison, Jr., future chair of the Art Department at Williams College. He joined the Metropolitan Museum in 1946 as an associate curator, succeeding Harry B. Wehle as curator of paintings at age 36 in 1948. At the Met, Rousseau almost immediately started controversy. As chief curator under director James Rorimer–also a key figure in war reparation–Rousseau hung old masterworks next to contemporary ones, disregarding chronology for esthetic appreciation.

However, his acquisitions included some of the most famous at the Museum today: Georges de la Tour’s “Fortune Teller,” in 1960, Rembrandt’s “Aristotle contemplating the Bust of Homer,” 1961, and Monet’s “Terrace at Sainte Addresse,” in 1967, and Velázquez’ “Juan de Pareja,” in 1971. Rousseau also made collecting errors, chief among which was his passing on the acquisition of a Peter Paul Rubens “Saint Catherine Crowned” because he did not believe it authentic. His suggestion that Toledo Museum of Art director Otto Wittmann, Jr., purchase it resulted in one of Toledo’s greatest masterpiece acquisitions. Rousseau’s social connections resulted in a number of significant gifts to the Museum. After Rorimer developed a donation relationship with Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876-1967), Rousseau took over 212 picture gift from after her death with the intention of selling most of it, unbeknownst to the donor. Rousseau authorized the sale of most of the pieces from de Groot gift, a Dounier Rousseau and very nearly the van Gogh, in 1972, despite de Groot’s written intention that unwanted works go to other museums. This controversial decision, made with the approval of director Thomas Hoving, led New York Attorney General Louis J. Lefkowitz (1904-1996) to investigate the action in 1973. Hoving elevated Rousseau to Vice Director to lend support to Hoving’s own brash style of museum direction. Rousseau’s diagnosis of cancer in the early 1970s led to an early retirement and a Board of Trustees appointment, the first curator ever to be appointed. He was never able to fill that role, however. He died at age 61 the day before his retirement. He is not related to other Rousseau’s of French art or literature.

Rousseau’s tenure was marred mostly during the time he served under Hoving. The lack of transparency of the de Groot collection sales, at unusually low prices led to accusations that Rousseau took kickbacks (Gross). Rousseau saw no reason for museums to refrain from collection works looted by the Nazis; he consorted with the Nazi dealer Bruno Lhose (1911–2007) in the 1960s. Uninterested in research, he admitted a disdain for academic-style curation, preferring to mount shows emphasizing visual enjoyment. His connoisseurship was questioned by at least the dealer Eugene Thaw (1927-2018) (Cordova).

Selected Bibliography

The Picture Galleries. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1954;
Juan de Pareja by Diego Velázquez: an Appreciation of the Portrait. [30-page pamphlet containing other essays by Everett Fahy and Hubert von Sonnenburg].New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, l972;

Sources

[obituaries:] Lichtenstein, Grace. “Theodore Rousseau Dies at 61, Vice Director of Met Museum.” New York Times January 2, 1974, p. 40;
Salinger, Margaretta M., and Bean, Jacob. “Theodore Rousseau, 1912-1974.” [Letters to the Editor] New York Times
Gross, Michael. Rogues’ Gallery: the Secret History of the Moguls and the Money that Made the Metropolitan Museum. New York: Broadway Books, 2009, pp. 353ff.;
Gammon, Martin. Deaccessioning and its Discontents: a Critical History. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018, pp. 204, 214-217;
Cordova, Ruben. “Deaccessioning at the Met: From Scandal to Plein-Air Bonanza to Collection ‘Care’.” Glasstire. December 14, 2021,https://glasstire.com/2021/12/14/deaccessioning-at-the-met-from-scandal-to-plein-air-bonanza-to-collection-care/

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Rothenstein, John

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Rothenstein, John

Other Names:

John Knewstub Maurice Rothenstein

Gender: male

Date Born: 1901

Date Died: 1992

Place Born: Kensington, Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Overview

Director of the Tate Gallery (1938-64). Rothenstein was the son of the painter Sir William Rothenstein (1872-1945) and Alice Mary Rothenstein (1869-1955). He was educated at Bedales School (1913-19) and Worcester College, Oxford (entering 1920, graduated 1923) and University College London. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1926. His initial publications were The Portrait Drawings of William Rothenstein in 1926 and a monograph on Eric Gill in 1927. After teaching art history at American universities (University of Kentucky, 1927, and University of Pittsburgh, 1928) he married the American Elizabeth Kennard Whittington (b. 1905). Rothenstein returned to England to run art galleries (Leeds and Sheffield). He received a doctorate in art history from University College, London, in 1931. His thesis was later published as Nineteenth-Century Painting: a Study in Conflict in 1932. In 1938 he assumed the directorship of the Tate, his father was a trustee, succeeding J. B. Manson, who had resigned. The Tate was suffering from chaotic installation practices and an ill-defined relationship with the National Gallery, of which it was still a part. Rothenstein is credited with exhuming the many Turner paintings from storage and bringing them back to popular appeal. As the second world war approached, Rothenstein found safe haven for the Tate holdings, fortunately, as one bomb in the Battle of London hit the empty building squarely. Rothenstein himself took a lecture tour of North America in 1939/1940, which appeared to many, including his own father, as an attempt to escape the war. After the war Rothenstein mounted a series of highly publicized exhibitions of major works of art, many from German and Austrian museums. He worked with the newly established Arts Council of Great Britain (formerly Burlington House). However, Rothenstein as a director was a person of limited taste. His autobiographies make clear his distaste for both European art in general and the work of the Bloomsbury group. At a time when public interest in these works was rising, and values still modest, Rothenstein clearly lacked the qualities for his job. When staff discontent rose, his tenure suddenly broke into national scandal. It began with the Tate’s unscrupulous assistant keeper, a man Rothenstein had hired himself, named Leroux Smith Leroux. Leroux leaked accusations to the British press of Rothenstein’s maltreatment of Tate staff, misappropriation of funds, and purchasing pictures at inflated prices. Prevented from responding to these allegations because of a civil servant law, Rothenstein was subjected to scandal and humiliation. Joining the condemnation was the collector and art historian Douglas Cooper, an obstreperous personality who nevertheless represented a major British private collection of modern art. Rothenstein for his part, was clearing avoiding non-British such as Cubist masters. After Rothenstein threw a punch at Cooper during an art reception, the Trustees of the Tate seriously discussed dismissing their director. Eventually, Rothenstein was essentially exonerated of the charges. But the newspaper publicity of “Tate Affair” as it was known, left his reputation tarnished. Rothenstein’s concentrated his writing and research on British artists and introductory works on Victorian and twentieth-century British art. His three-volume Modern English Painters,1952-74, brought the newer, albeit conservative English artists to worthy public attention. After his retirement from the Tate in 1964, Rothenstein lectured widely, including Fordham University, New York (1967-8), Agnes Scott College, Atlanta (1969-70), Brooklyn College, New York (1971-2), and the University of California, Irvine (1973). His 1996 entry on his father, the painter William Rothenstein, in the Dictionary of Art makes no mention of himself. He died after succumming to senility of bronchopneumonia at his home in Oxfordshire. His brother was Sir [William] Michael Francis Rothenstein (1908-1993), a printmaker.

Selected Bibliography

Summer’s Lease: Being Volume One of an Autobiography. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1965; Brave Day, Hideous Night: Autobiography, 1939-1965. London: H. Hamilton, 1966; Time’s Thievish Progress: Autobiography [volume 3]. London: Cassell, 1970; An introduction to English painting. London: Cassell,1965; Modern English painters. 3 vols. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1952-1974; A Brief History of the Tate Gallery: with a Selection of Paintings and Sculpture. London: Pitkin, 1964; The Portrait Drawings of William Rothenstein, 1889-1925. London: Chapman & Hall, ltd., 1926; British Art Since 1900: an Anthology. London: Phaidon Press, 1962.

Sources

Contemporary Authors, NR 1: 555-6; [autobiographies:] Summer’s Lease: Being Volume One of an Autobiography. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1965; Brave Day, Hideous Night: [volume 2] Autobiography, 1939-1965 London: H. Hamilton, 1966; Time’s Thievish Progress: Autobiography [volume 3]. London: Cassell, 1970; London: H. Hamilton, 1966; [obituary:] The Times (London), February 28, 1992.

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