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Portoghesi, Paolo

Full Name: Portoghesi, Paolo

Gender: male

Date Born: 1931

Place Born: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

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


Overview

Early Post-modern architect; architectural historian and Borromini scholar. Portoghesi described himself as having been born “in the shadow of Borromini’s San Ivo” (Steinberg) and hence much of his professional life as an architectural historian revolved around this architect. He entered the University of Rome, writing articles on Borromini in 1953 through 1955 and also a booklet on Borromini’s monuments in the Lateran Basilica I monumenti borrominiani della Basilica Lateranense the same year. Portoghesi graduated with a degree in architecture in 1957 and in the history of art in 1958. In 1959 he was appointed Professor at the school of advanced studies in the study and restoration of monuments. As an architect, Portoghesi designed in a neo-Baroque style, first exemplified in 1959 in the Casa Baldi (Via Flaminia, Rome). Making use of the traditional tufa material of ancient homes, he worked to relate his buildings to their contexts, both social and physical. The following year, 1960, he published a work on the eighteenth-century architect Bernardo Antonio Vitone, “Metodo e poesia nell’architettura di B. A. Vittone” (“Method and poetry in the architecture of B.A. Vittone”). He began teaching a course on architectural criticism at the University in 1961. Portoghesi and Bruno Zevi edited a festschrift for Giulio Carlo Argan in 1964, Michelangelo Architetto. That year, too, Portoghesi published his book Borromini nella cultura europea (“Borromini in European Culture”) and launched an architectural practice with Vittorio Gigliotti near Porta Pinciana in Rome. His commissions of this era included the Casa Andreis (1964-1967). He was appointed professor of the history of public architecture in Baroque Rome in 1966. A critical edition of Leon Battista Alberti: l’architettura and a second work on Vittone, Bernardo Vittone, un architetto tra Illuminismo e Rococò (“Bernardo Vittone, an architect between the Enlightenment and the Rococo”) were published. Portoghesi was appointed professor of History of Architecture at Milan Polytechnic in 1966 as well. The following year Portoghesi published his important Borromini, Architettura come linguaggio which was translated in English as The Rome of Borromini: Architecture as Language. In 1968 he became dean of the Faculty of Architecture of Milan Polytechnic, issuing L’Eclettismo a Roma (“Eclecticism in Rome”) and Editor-in-chief of the Dizionario di Architettura e Urbanistica or “DAU”. Another important architectural commission with Gigliotti, Casa Papanice, was completed 1969-1970. In 1976, Portoghesi’s most outstanding commission, the mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre in Rome was dedicated. He was appointed professor of architecture at the University of Milan the same year, where he taught until 1980. He next headed the architecture section at the Venice Biennial. That year, too, 1980, he accepted a professorship in architectural history at the University of Rome and published Dopo l’architettura moderna (“After modern architecture”). In 1982 Portoghesi became Professor of History of Architecture at Rome University. He accepted the Editor-in-chief position of Materia magazine in 1990. Portoghesi was named full professor of Urban Planning at “La Sapienza,” University in Rome in 1995. A 1974 manifesto, Le inibizioni dell’architettura moderna outlined his practicing architectural theory as a “system of places”. With Zevi, he promoted a modernists who, in their architecture, related their work to its environment, (e.g., Victor Horta and Frank Lloyd Wright). He was a founder of the first international exhibition of Post-modernist architecture (Venice Biennale,1980). Like many post-modern architects, he design furnishings of his buildings. He engaged in a celebrated debate (along with Zevi) countering the criticisms of Manfredo Tafuri on the purposes of architectural history.


Selected Bibliography

I monumenti borrominiani della Basilica Lateranense. Rome: Istituto de storia dell’architetura, Facoltà di architettura, Università di Roma, 1955; Metodi di progettazione nella storia dell’architettura. Rome : s.n., 1960; Borromini nella cultura europea. Roma: Officina Edizione, 1964; “La Biblioteca laurenziana.” in, Argan, Giulio Carlo, et al. Michelangiolo architetto. Turin: Einaudi, 1964; Disegni di Francesco Borromini. Rome: De Luca, 1967, English, Borromini. London: Thames & Hudson, 1968; Borromini: Architettura come linguaggio. Milan: Electa, 1967, English, The Rome of Borromini: Architecture as Language. New York: G. Braziller, 1968; Roma barocca: storia di una civiltà architettonica. Rome: C. Bestetti, 1967; and Borsi, Franco. Victor Horta. Rome: Edizioni del Tritone, 1969; and Gigliotti, Vittorio, and Mousawi, Sami. La Moschea di Roma/The Mosque in Rome. Palermo: Alloro Editrice, 1993; Roma del Rinascimento. 2 vols. Milan: Electa, 1971; and Moschini, Francesco. Progetti e disegni, 1949-1979/Projects and Drawings, 1949-1979 [of Paolo Portoghesi]. Florence: Centro Di, 1979; and Scarpa, Carlo. Cemetery Brion-Vega, S. Vito, Treviso, Italy, 1970-72. Tokyo: A. D. A. Edita, 1979; Aldo Rossi: the Sketchbooks 1990-1997. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000; and Tabarrini, Marisa. Storia di San Carlino alle Quattro Fontane. Rome: Newton & Compton, 2001.


Sources

Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Alla ricerca dell’architettura perduta: le opere di Paolo Portoghesi, Vittorio Gigliotti, 1959-1975/On the Search for Lost Architecture: the Works of Paolo Portoghesi, Vittorio Gigliotti, 1959-1975. Rome: Officina, 1975; note, Steinberg, Leo. “Introduction.” Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: a Study in Multiple Form and Architectural Symbolism. New York: Garland, 1977, p. xxii; Norberg-Schulz, Christian. “Paolo Portoghesi.” Dictionary of Art 25: 272-273; Bonis, A. de. “Interview: Aldo Rossi and Paolo Portoghesi.” Architectural Design (London) 52 no. 1/2 (1982): 13-19. [internet site] http://www.floornature.com/articoli/articolo.php?id=64&sez=6&lang=en.




Citation

"Portoghesi, Paolo." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/portoghesip/.


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Early Post-modern architect; architectural historian and Borromini scholar. Portoghesi described himself as having been born “in the shadow of Borromini’s San Ivo” (Steinberg) and hence much of his professional life as an architectural historian r

Porter, James A.

Full Name: Porter, James Amos

Other Names:

  • James Porter

Gender: male

Date Born: 22 December 1905

Date Died: 28 February 1970

Place Born: Baltimore, Baltimore Independent City, MD, USA

Place Died: Washington, DC, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): African American, American (North American), Black (general, race and ethnicity), Colonial North American, Harlem Renaissance, Modern (style or period), and Zimbabwean

Career(s): art historians and educators

Institution(s): Howard University


Overview

Art professor and early specialist of African-American art, museum director, and visual artist. Porter was the son of African-American couple John Porter and Lydia Peck Porter. His father was a Christian minister and his mother a schoolteacher. Porter attended public schools in Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D. C., before graduating cum laude with a B.S. in art from Howard University in 1927. He was immediately hired as an instructor of drawing and painting in Howard’s art department. Porter received recognition from the Harmon Foundation for his portraits, exhibiting his work both at Howard and Hampton Universities. During his educational pursuits, he met Dorothy Louise Burnett [Dorothy Porter], a librarian at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library, where he did research. On December 27, 1929, Porter and Burnett married and together they had one child, Constance Porter Uzelac (1939-2012) who went on to become a scholar of African American history. This union was personally and professionally important to Porter, as Dorothy provided bibliographic information critical to his investigations. In the same year he began attending The Art Students League of New York, then led by Dimitri Romanovsky (1887-1971) and George Bridgeman (1864-1943). Porter’s written work in art history began appearing in 1931 with the article, “Versatile Interests of the Early Negro Artist,” in Art in America. In 1935, he traveled to Paris to study medieval archaeology at the L’Institut d’art et d’archéologie, Sorbonne through a fellowship from the Scholarship Institute of International Education, and grants from the College Art Association and the Rockefeller Foundation. He was awarded a certificat de présence from L’Institut d’art et d’archéologie, Sorbonne in 1935. Porter authored “Four Problems in the History of Negro Art,” published in 1942, in the Journal of Negro History which outlined the difficulties in documenting African American art. These included the unrecorded work of handicrafts and fine arts by African-Americans before 1820, the black artist’s relation to the white American society, the decline in production among black artists between 1870 and 1890, and the role of the African-American artist in the so-called “New Negro Movement” of 1900-1920. After completing his M.A. at the Fine Arts Graduate Center at New York University, Porter began writing his book, Modern Negro Art, which was published in 1943. The book described the history of African-American art from its beginnings to the mid-twentieth century, and included discussions of contemporary artists such as Archibald Motley (1891-1981) and Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000). Between 1945 and 1946, Porter traveled to Cuba and Haiti to study Caribbean and Latin American art, which he discovered had a significant relationship to African art and architecture. The art materials he collected during his tour led to the creation of Latin American art and African art and architecture curricula at Howard University.

In 1953, he was appointed head of Howard University’s Art Department, as well as its Art Gallery. As director, his profile at Howard was instrumental in adding the university to the list of those receiving renaissance and baroque art from the Kress collection at its disbursement in 1961. Porter received research grants from the Belgian Ministry of Education in 1955 to study Belgian art (the Belgium-American Art Seminar), and studied Mexican fresco murals at the Instituto Allende in Guanajuato, Mexico. He was a UNESCO delegate at the Conference on Africa held in Boston in 1961 and a member of the Arts Council of Washington, D.C. between 1961 and 1963. The Washington Evening Star awarded him a Faculty Research grant in 1963, allowing him to spend a year on sabbatical studying art in Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Togo, and Senegal. In March 1965, Porter was named one of “America’s most outstanding men of the arts” by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, at the National Gallery of Art, in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the National Gallery. Towards the end of the 1960s, Porter was diagnosed with cancer and became seriously ill. Despite this, he traveled to Rhodesia to chair a conference on Zimbabwean culture and, in 1970, one week before his death, he chaired a conference on African American artists. His second book, The Black Artist, was never completed.

Porter was the first scholar to provide a systematic, critical analysis of African American artists and their works. Porter disagreed with scholars and critics, including  W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, over the role of abstraction in modern African-American art, praising artists who used traditional methods of figural representation over those who used abstract figures. He was also a significant mentor and professor to a long list of artists including, David C. Driskell, Sylvia Snowden (b. 1942), and Mildred Thompson (1936-2003). The James A. Porter Gallery of African-American Art at the Howard University Gallery was dedicated in his honor in 1970. In 1990 the Department of Art at Howard created the annual James A. Porter Inaugural Colloquium on African-American Art.


Selected Bibliography

  • Modern Negro Art, New York: Dryden Press, 1943;
  • Laura Wheeler Waring: An Appreciational Study. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Gallery of Art, 1949;
  • “Negro Art on Review.” American Magazine of Art 27, January 1934; Introduction. “The Art of Charles White: An Appreciation.” Images of Dignity: The Drawings of Charles White. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1967;
  • “Four Problems in the History of Negro Art,” Journal of Negro History 27, no. 1, pp. 9-36, January 1942;
  • “Versatile Interests of the Early Negro Artist: A Neglected Chapter of American Art History,” Art in America and Elsewhere 24, pp. 16-27, no. 1, January 1936;
  • Ten Afro-American artists of the Nineteenth century. Washington: Gallery of Art, Howard University, 1967.
  •  

Sources

  • [obituary:] Art Journal 29 (1970): 295-296. James A. Porter, Artist and Art Historian: The Memory of the Legacy. Washington, DC: Howard University Gallery of Art,1992;
  • “James A. Porter Chronology, compiled by Constance Porter Uzelac.” Modern Negro Art. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1992;
  • Uzelac, Constance Porter. “Porter, James.” American National Biography;
  • Uzelac, Constance Porter. “DOROTHY PORTER WESLEY (1905-1995)” BlackPast, 20 January 2010;
  • James A. Porter Inaugural Colloquium on African-American Art [conference announcement]. Howard University, 1990;
  • Davis, Donald F., “James Porter of Howard: Artist, Writer.” Journal of Negro History 70 (1985): 89-91;
  • Brown, Arthur C. III, “James A. Porter: The Father of African-American Art History,” The Baltimore Renaissance, January 20, 2015, https://thelyfe.wordpress.com/2015/01/20/james-a-porter-the-father-of-african-american-art-history/;
  • Meyer, Beth Anne, “James A. Porter December 22, 1905-February 28, 1970,” The Black Renaissance in Washington, June 20, 2003, http://dclibrarylabs.org/blkren/bios/porterja.html;
  • “James Amos Porter, American (1905-1970),” RoGallery, https://rogallery.com/artists/james-amos-porter/.

Archives

  • James A. Porter papers, 1867-2009, in Dorothy Porter Wesley papers, Emory University, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/8zs6d

Contributors: Alana J. Hyman and LaNitra Michele Walker


Citation

Alana J. Hyman and LaNitra Michele Walker. "Porter, James A.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/porterj/.


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Art professor and early specialist of African-American art, museum director, and visual artist. Porter was the son of African-American couple John Porter and Lydia Peck Porter. His father was a Christian minister and his mother a schoolteacher. Po

Porter, A. Kingsley

Full Name: Porter, A. Kingsley

Other Names:

  • Arthur Kingsley Porter

Gender: male

Date Born: 1883

Date Died: c. 1933

Place Born: Stamford, Fairfield, CT, USA

Place Died: Inishbofin, County Galway, Ireland

Home Country/ies: United States

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


Overview

Harvard medievalist architectural historian; first American scholar of the Romaneque to achieve international recognition. Porter was the third son of banker Timothy Hopkins Porter and mother Maria Louisa Hoyt, herself from a patrician Connecticut family. His mother died when he was eight. Porter attended the Browning School in New York and then entered Yale University. His father died during his freshman year. The following year, 1902, Porter’s remaining brother (the middle brother had died during college) underwent a serious operation and long recovery. Burdened, perhaps, with these unusual family misfortunes and the prospects of his own frail health, Porter reputedly had a mystical conversion in Coutances Cathedral, France, after his graduation from Yale in 1904. Giving up the law career he had initially studied for, he entered Columbia University School of Architecture. He soon altered his plans from a career in beaux-arts (practicing) architecture to the study of architectural history. Porter spent the following years traveling in Europe, researching and photographing medieval buildings. The result was a general book on the development of architecture of the middle ages, Medieval Architecture (1909) and The Construction of Lombard and Gothic Vaults (1911). He married Lucy Bryant Wallace, a prominent New Yorker who subsequently managed most of his life and his photographic material. Shortly before World War I, Porter published his four-volume Lombard Architecture, arguing for the primacy of Rome as the source of medieval architecture, a thesis originally developed by Giovanni Teresio Rivoira. The book rocketed Porter to international acclaim. He accepted a lectureship at Yale in 1915, working toward a BFA at the same time. An outspoken exponent for the undergraduate study of art history, he offered the university a half million dollars to establish a faculty of art history for the college, which the university declined. He received the degree in 1917 and was promoted to assistant professor. In 1918 he left Yale to lead architectural preservation efforts by the French government caused by war damage. In France he met Harvard art historian Bernard Berenson; the two traveled together and became fast friends. In 1920 Porter returned to the United States and joined Harvard’s faculty in the Fine Arts Department. However, in 1923 took a leave to teach at the Sorbonne in Paris. The same year as his Sorbonne lectures, his most famous and controversial work, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads was published. The ten-volume work (nine volumes are plates) argued, 1) a new chronology of Romanesque sculpture in Burgundy and, more revolutionary, 2) that medieval sculptural influences, like medieval poetry, knew no nationality borders but were fluid like the pilgrims who travelled to Santiago de Compostela. The latter theory directly challenged the views of Émile Mâle and the primacy of the Languedoc region as the center of twelfth century style. The appearance of Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads and Porter’s conclusion based upon his multidisciplinary method attracted much criticism. Porter spent the next years, 1924-1925, as Hyde lecturer at various French universities and a visiting professor in Spain. He returned to Harvard in 1925 to hold the newly created William Dorr Boardman chair [of art history]. Porter and his wife lived in poet James Russell Lowell’s former Cambridge home, Eood, where they entertained frequently. There he struck a friendship with a young Columbia University medieval art history student, Meyer Schapiro, offering Schapiro to study under him. In 1927 he received an honorary doctor of letters degree from the University of Marburg. His earlier lectures at the Sorbonne appeared as Spanish Romanesque Sculpture in 1928. Porter began an intense interest in Celtic cultures, spending summers of the 1930s in Ireland, often with the statesman and poet George William Russell (1867-1935). Porter owned a small castle there known as Glenveagh, County Donegal, where he stayed, as well as a fisherman’s house on the small island of Bofin off the northern coast. His last work, The Crosses and Culture of Ireland (1931) was based upon lectures delivered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Porter acknowledged in the preface the help of the next generation of scholars, among them Schapiro. A politically conservative Boston Brahmin, he resigned from Harvard and left the United States, largely because of New Deal policies of Franklin Roosevelt. While at his Bofin Island retreat, Porter disappeared on July 8th, 1933, and was presumed drowned, although his body was never found. Glenveagh, his mansion in Ireland, was purchased in 1937 by the Philadelphia art collector, curator, and former student Henry P. McIlhenny. Porter’s Cambridge home was willed to the University and after his wife’s death became the President’s home. His illustrious students included Cluny scholar Kenneth John Conant, whose archeological work substantiated Porter’s earlier Burgundian dating, Walter Muir Whitehill, who developed Porter’s ideas of the importance of Spanish sculpture over a predominantly French model, and McIlhenny, a collector and curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Though modestly educated in comparison to other art and architectural historians of his day, Porter remains an important scholar. He early on focused on patronage in medieval architecture. He discounted the then prevalent notion of an English contribution to Gothic architecture by tracing the transmission of Italian influences through Germany and France. Always fascinated with the Lombard region, he hypothesized (after Auguste Choisy) that the early adoption of the Gothic vault there was because of a scarcity of wood needed to build the more common Romanesque groin and barrel vault. An outspoken proponent of the discipline of art history, his Beyond Architecture (1918) argued for early instruction, even to the middle-school level. His Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads (1923) examined Romanesque art in its entirety in Europe, a novel idea for the time (Cahn). Among other findings in the book, Porter conclusively redated the Cluny choir capitals from the accepted French dating of the twelfth century to the eleventh. His theory that sculptural traditions traveled like medieval epics and that they were not limited to regional and church authorities brought a storm of contemporary criticism to Porter. His theories were ultimately embraced by later French scholars such as Marcel Aubert. Porter’s championing Spanish art as a key component in the development of the Romanesque, and his arguing against the primacy of archaeology for dating, resulted in a view of eleventh- and twelfth-century art largely adopted today (Seidel, 2000). Kathryn Brush cites Porter as the first American art historian to “pioneer long-term exchanges with German Kunstwissenschaft following the [World War I] armistice.” Walter B. Cahn noted, however, that Porter’s effort to provide a methodology free of national or parochial passions produced only very mixed results. His view of Lombardy as the source of the Gothic is today largely discredited (Ehresmann). Porter’s emphasis on Spanish studies led to what could be considered a school of interest in the topic. His admirers and colleagues included, in addition to students Whitehill and Conant, Georgiana Goddard King and her studies in pre-Romanesque Spanish churches and Mudéjar art, Walter W. S. Cook, and Porter’s colleague Chandler R. Post. Disappears in 1933.


Selected Bibliography

The Crosses and Culture of Ireland. London: Oxford University Press, 1931; Lombard Architecture. 4 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1915-17; Romanesque Sculpture of Pilgrimage Roads. 10 vols. Boston, 1923; Spanish Romanesque Sculpture. Firenze Pantheon casa editrice, 1928; “The Rise of Romanesque Sculpture.” American Journal of Archaeology 22(1918): 399-427; “Les débuts de la sculpture romane.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 15 (1919): 47-60; “Spain or Toulouse? and Other Questions.” Art Bulletin 7 (1924): 4.


Sources

Jahn, Johannes, ed. Die Kunstwissenschaft der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen. Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1924, vol.1. pp. 77-93; Porter, Lucy K. ‘A. Kingsley Porter.’ in Medieval Studies in Memory of A. Kingsley Porter. vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939, pp. xi-xv; 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, mentioned pp. 39, 49, 85; 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. 125 mentioned; Nercessian, Nora. “In Desperate Defiance: A Modern Predicametn for Medieval Art.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 7-8 (Spring/Autumn 1984): 137-146; Ehresmann, Donald L. Architecture: A Bibliographic Guide to Basic Reference Works, Histories and Handbooks. Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1984, nos. 533, 535; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 258-260, 544-545; The Dictionary of Art; Seidel, Linda. “The Scholar and the Studio: A. Kingsley Porter and the Study of Medieval Architecture in the Decade Before the War.” in The Architectural Historian in America: A Symposium in Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Founding of the Society of Architectural Historians. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1990, pp. 145-58; Mann, Janice. “Romantic Identity, Nationalism, and the Understanding of the Advent of Romanesque Art in Christian Spain.” Gesta 36 no. 2 (1997): 156-64; Brush, Kathryn. “The Unshaken Tree: Walter W. S. Cook on German Kunstwissenschaft in 1924.” Zeitschrift des deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft 52/53 (1998/99): 28; Crow, Thomas E. “The Intelligence of Art.” The Intelligence of Art. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999, pp. 6-10; Seidel, Linda. “Arthur Kingsley Porter (1883-1933)” in Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline. Volume 3. New York: Garland, 2000, pp. 273-86; Petro, Pamela. The Slow Breath of Stone: a Romanesque Love Story. New York: Fourth Estate, 2005; Cahn, Walter. “Romanesque Art, Then and Now: A Personal Reminiscence.” in Hourihane, Colum, ed. Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn. University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2008, pp. 32-33.



Contributors: LaNitra Michele Walker


Citation

LaNitra Michele Walker. "Porter, A. Kingsley." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/portera/.


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Harvard medievalist architectural historian; first American scholar of the Romaneque to achieve international recognition. Porter was the third son of banker Timothy Hopkins Porter and mother Maria Louisa Hoyt, herself from a patrician Connecticut

Portalis, Roger

Full Name: Portalis, Roger (Baron)

Other Names:

  • Le baron Roger Portalis
  • Roger-Melchior Portalis

Gender: male

Date Born: 22 January 1841

Date Died: February 1939

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

Place Died: Thielle-Wavre, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Home Country/ies: France

Career(s): art collectors


Overview

Art historian of eighteenth-century French engraving, painting, and book illustration; author of the first monograph Fragonard and co-author, Les Graveurs français du XVIIIe siècle. Before beginning his career as a scholar, Portalis studied painting with Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin (1809-1864), drawing and painting with Henri Regnault (1843-1871), and etching with Maxime Lalanne (1827-1886). From 1880 to 1902, Portalis regularly contributed articles to the art periodical the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. He was a founding member of the Société des amis des livres, created in 1874, and elected as a member to the Société des Bibliophiles français in 1882. Portalis also took part in the Central Union of the Decorative Arts, an organization formed in 1882 to institutionalize the craft arts in the French Third Republic.

Portalis’s three-volume series composed with fellow bibliophile  Henri Beraldir, Les Graveurs français du XVIIIe siècle (vol. 1, vol. 2, vol. 3), was one of the earliest catalogues raisonnés dedicated to eighteenth-century engravers (Silverman). This multivolume dictionary is notable for its systematic presentation of over four hundred figures, with each entry providing a critique of the engraver’s “greatest hits” (Raux). Along with texts like Les Dessinateurs d’illustrations au XVIIIe siècle (vol. 1, vol. 2), Les graveurs franç/ais reflects the late-nineteenth century fascination with art of the previous century, an interest led by Portalis’s contemporaries, the brothers  Edmond and  Jules de Goncourt (Raux). This is likewise the case for Portalis’s comprehensive book, Honoré Fragonard, sa vie et son oeuvre (1889). Although the Goncourt had published a piece on Fragonard in 1865, Portalis’s was a more rigorously researched and organized study, achieving in effect what Sophie Raux has called the first “scientific” monograph on the artist. Honoré Fragonard, sa vie et son oeuvre provides information on patronage, a catalog of 210 plate reproductions of the artist’s oeuvre, and an appendix of supporting documents. In addition to this seminal work, Portalis wrote on Fragonard’s contemporaries, like the portratists Claude-Jean-Baptiste Hoin (1750-1817) (1900), Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749-1803) (1901), and Henry-Pierre Danloux (1753-1809) (1910).

Parts of the Baron’s own collection of eighteenth-century painting and works on paper were auctioned off on four occasions during his lifetime, and in 1913 during his posthumous estate sale.


Selected Bibliography


Sources

  • Béraldi, Henri. Les Graveurs du XIXe siècle: guide de l’amateur d’estampes modernes. Volume 11. Paris: L. Conquet, 1891, p. 31;
  • Jones, Mary Sheriff. The ‘Portraits de fantasie’ of J.-H. Fragonard: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Art and Theory.  PhD diss. University of Delaware, 1981;
  • Lugt, Frits. “No. 2232. Portalis, Roger.” Les Marques de Collections de Dessins & d’Estampes, p. 418. Amsterdam: Vereenigde Drukkerijen, 1921;
  • Raux, Sophie. “PORTALIS, Roger (baron).” Dictionnaire critique des historiens de l’art. Institut national d’histoire de l’art. Last updated November 25, 2008;
  • Schroder, Anne L. “Fragonard’s Later Career: The Contes et Nouvelles and the Progress of Love Revisited.” The Art Bulletin (2011): 157, 169;
  • Silverman, Deborah. Art Nouveau in Fin-de-siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, p. 143;
  • “Rapports sur les prix de 1904.” Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences, arts et belles-lettres de Dijon. Fourth series, volume 10. Dijon: Nourry, 1906, p. 2-6.

Archives

  • Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Estampes et de la photographie. Marcellin Desboutin (1823-1902). [Portrait of Le baron Portalis.] Engraving. 1884. (notice: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10524791v.);
  • Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits. 2 Letters to Pierre de Nolhac. Collection of Pierre de Nolhac. NAF 28364 (1-16). Boxes 12-15 (Correspondence). Box 14 (Letters received: M-P). (notice: https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc99912j/cd0e4235.); Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Jacques Doucet Collections. (Archives 028) Roger Portalis Collection (6 boxes) Box 1: Personal papers, work notes, documentation. Boxes 2-6: Work notes, documentation (notice: https://agorha.inha.fr/inhaprod/ark:/54721/0056597.)
    (Archives 123, 01, 03) Correspondence with Antonin Danloux (notice: https://agorha.inha.fr/inhaprod/ark:/54721/0056477.);
  • [Auction Catalogs of Portalis Collection:]
  • Delestre, Maurice and M. Clément. Catalogue de vignettes de l’école française du XVIIIe siècle d’après Fragonard pour les contes de Lafontaine [La Fontaine] en épreuves d’eau-forte et avant la lettre, Moreau, Eisen, Cochin, etc., livres et dessins [de la collection du Baron Roger Portalis], dont la vente… aura lieu Hôtel des commissaires-priseurs, rue Drouot… le lundi 14 juin 1880… Paris: Drouot, 1880;
  • Delestre, Maurice and M. Clément. Catalogue de dessins anciens principalement des XVIe et XVIIe siècles relatifs à l’orfèvrerie et à l’ornement et environ 4000 dessins qui seront vendus par lots, provenant de la collection du marquis T…., de Naples, dont la vente… aura lieu Hôtel des commissaires-priseurs, rue Drouot… les mardi 13 et mercredi 14 mai 1884… Paris: Drouot, 1884;
  • Chevallier, Paul and Jules-Eugène Féral. Catalogue de dessins anciens principalement des maîtres français du XVIIIe siècle… le tout formant la collection de M. le baron de R. P. [Portalis], dont la vente aura lieu Hôtel Drouot… le lundi 14 mars 1887… Paris: Drouot, 1887; Lair-Dubreuil, F. and Loys Delteil. Catalogue des dessins et estampes anciens et modernes principalement de l’école française du XVIIIe siècle composant la collection de M. le baron Roger Portalis: dont la vente aura lieu à Paris, Hôtel Drouot…, les jeudi 2 et vendredi 3 février 1911…. Paris: Drouot, 1911;
  • Boudin, Me E., Jules-Eugène Féral, Loys Delteil, and M. R. Blée. Catalogue des tableaux anciens et modernes…, pastels, dessins, gravures, objets d’art…, meubles et sièges anciens et de style… dépendant de la succession de monsieur le baron Roger Portalis…. Paris: Drouot, 1913.


    • Contributors: Yasemin Altun and Zahra Hassan


Citation

Yasemin Altun and Zahra Hassan. "Portalis, Roger." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/portalisr/.


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Art historian of eighteenth-century French engraving, painting, and book illustration; author of the first monograph Fragonard and co-author, Les Graveurs français du XVIIIe siècle. Before beginning his career as a scholar, Portalis studied

Porcher, Jean

Full Name: Porcher, Jean

Gender: male

Date Born: 1892

Date Died: 1966

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): French (culture or style) and manuscripts (documents)

Career(s): librarians


Overview

Historian of French illuminated manuscripts and librarian, Bibliothèque Nationale. After completing his studies at the école des Chartes, Porcher joined the Bibliothèque Nationale. By publishing books on illuminated manuscripts, Porcher encouraged scholars to study them in an art historical context. He became the Conservateur en Chef of the manuscripts department in 1944, where his work focused solely on illuminated manuscripts. Porcher acquired several manuscripts from the Rothschild family and the Comte Guy de Boisrouvray, increasing the amount of material available for art historical research. He established the practice of photographing the manuscripts, preserving them and making them more accessible to researchers. In 1954 and 1955, Porcher curated two exhibitions that displayed illuminated manuscripts from French libraries. The results of his research for the two exhibitions culminated in a survey of French manuscript painting in 1959, which was later translated into Italian, German, Swedish, and English. He and Anselme Dimier (1898-1975) published L’art cistercien, France, a survey on the art of the period, in 1962. In 1967 and 1968 Porcher collaborated with Jean Hubert and Fritz Volbach in the “Arts of Mankind” survey series on early medieval art. As a manuscripts scholar, Porcher was significantly more interested in the images than the text, a criticism gently lodged against him in reviews of his work. Erwin Panofsky wrote a homage praising Porcher’s relaxing of the bureaucratic regulations for scholars during his tenure at the Bibliothèque. Porcher published numerous facsimile editions of the manuscripts in the Bibliothèque Nationale.


Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] “Bibliographie de Jean Porcher.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 62 (July 1963): 13-16; and Hubert, Jean, and Volbach, Wolfgang Fritz. Europe des invasions. Paris: Gallimard, 1967, English, Europe of the Invasions. New York: G. Braziller, 1969 [British edition translated as Europe in the Dark Ages]; and Hubert, Jean, and Volbach, Wolfgang Fritz. Empire carolingien. Paris: Gallimard, 1968, English, The Carolingian Renaissance. New York, G. Braziller, 1970; Chefs-d’œuvre de l’enluminure française du 15e siècle. Paris: éditions Nomis, 1950’s?, English, Medieval French Miniatures. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1960; Les très riches Heures du duc de Berry, Musée Condé à Chantilly. Paris: Les éditions Nomis, 1950; and Dimier, Anselme. L’art cistercien, France. La Pierre-qui-Vire (Yonne): Zodiaque, 1962.


Sources

[bibliography:] Panofsky, Erwin. “Homage to Jean Porcher.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 62 (July 1963): 11-12; Cain, Julian. “Jean Porcher conservateur en chef du cabinet des manuscrits.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 62 (July 1963): 171-175; Morgan, Nigel. “Porcher, Jean.” The Dictionary of Art 25: 248.




Citation

"Porcher, Jean." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/porcherj/.


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Historian of French illuminated manuscripts and librarian, Bibliothèque Nationale. After completing his studies at the école des Chartes, Porcher joined the Bibliothèque Nationale. By publishing books on illuminated manuscripts, Porcher encouraged

Porada, Edith

Full Name: Porada, Edith

Gender: female

Date Born: 1912

Date Died: 1994

Place Born: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Place Died: Honolulu, HI, USA

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): archaeology

Career(s): educators


Overview

Columbia University art historian and archeologist. Porada was born to a wealthy family and educated privately in Vienna and at the family estate, Hagengut, near Mariazell, Austria. She graduated from the Realreform Gymnasium Luithlen in 1930. Though initially interested in Minoan culture, she switched to near Eastern civilization because of the promise of discoveries yet to me made. Porada pursued her Ph.D. at the University of Vienna under the maverick art historian Josef Rudolf Thomas Strzygowski and, after his retirement, under the Ethnologist Robert Heine-Geldern (1885-1968) and the Sumerian scholar Viktor Christian (1885-1963). Her dissertation, accepted in 1935, was on glyptic art of the Old Akkadian period. At the advice of A. Leo Oppenheim (1904-1974), then at the Oriental Institute in Vienna, she moved to Paris to study the seals at the Louvre. In 1938 she emigrated to the United States where she worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the seals of Assurnasirapal II, part of the collection of the Museum’s first director, Luigi Palma di Cesnola. She was a staff member of the Museum, 1944-1945. She lectured widely around the United States. She became a U. S. citizen in 1944. The archaeologist Hetty Goldman (1881-1972) suggested Porada also study the cylinder seals at the Morgan Library. This resulted in her important publication, Mesopotamian Art in Cylinder Seals of the Pierpont Morgan Library, 1947. She was a lecturer at New York University in 1949. After a Guggenheim fellowship to Iran, she accepted a teaching position in the art department at Queens College, Brooklyn in 1950. Despite no formal training in art history, she taught Western art courses in addition to archaeology. In 1958, Columbia University art history department chair Rudolf Wittkower, as part of his initiative to build a high-profile department, invited her to join the faculty. She developed a particular intellectual bond with the department’s classicist, Evelyn B. Harrison. She conducted her seminars in the basement of the Morgan, surrounded by her seal casts, being named honorary curator of seals and tablets at the Morgan in 1956. She was promoted to full professor in 1963. Between 1970 and 1973, she organized and directed Columbia’s excavations on the Phlamoudhi plain in northeastern Cyprus. The excavation discovered a sanctuary of the Hellenistic period which helped prove the close commercial ties between Cyprus and the Greek islands in the late Bronze Age, ca. 1500 B.C. Porada was named Arthur Lehman professor in 1973. In 1977 she received the Gold Medal for outstanding service from the Archaeological Institute of America. Columbia University established an Edith Porada professorship of ancient Near Eastern art history and archeology in 1983 with a $1 million gift. Porada was named professor emerita of art history and archeology in 1984. In retirement she held regular graduate seminars at the Morgan and sat on the Board of Visitors to both the Sackler and Freer Galleries. She died at age 81. She lived much of her life with her father and friend, the socialite, Adeline Hathaway “Happy” Weekes Scully (d.1979). Porada’s scholarship followed the tradition set by the Orientalists Anton Moortgat (1897-1977), whom she nevertheless disagreed with, and Henri Frankfort.


Selected Bibliography

[bibliography:] “Edith Porada–Publications” Monsters and Demons in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds: Papers Presented in Honor of Edith Porada. Mainz on Rhine: P. von Zabern, 1987, pp. 6-11; and Dyson, C. H. and Wilkinson, C. K. Alt-Iran: die Kunst in vorislamischer Zeit. Baden-Baden: Holle, 1962, English, The Art of Ancient Iran; Pre-Islamic Cultures. New York: Crown Publishers, 1965; Mesopotamian Art in Cylinder Seals of the Pierpont Morgan Library. New York: Morgan Library, 1947.


Sources

[obituaries:] “Edith Porada, 81, Dies; Columbia Art Historian.” New York Times, March 26, 1994, p. 8; Pittman, Holly. “Edith Porada, 1912-1994.” American Journal of Archaeology 99, no. 1 (January 1995): 143-146; Lawton, Thomas. “Dr. Edith Porada August 22, 1912-March 24, 1994.” Artibus Asiae 54, no. 3/4 (1994): 376-377




Citation

"Porada, Edith." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/poradae/.


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Columbia University art historian and archeologist. Porada was born to a wealthy family and educated privately in Vienna and at the family estate, Hagengut, near Mariazell, Austria. She graduated from the Realreform Gymnasium Luithlen in 1930. Tho

Popham, Hugh

Full Name: Popham, Hugh

Other Names:

  • Hugh Popham

Gender: male

Date Born: 22 March 1889

Date Died: 08 December 1970

Place Born: Plymouth, Plymouth, City of, England, UK

Place Died: Islington, London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Career(s): curators


Overview

British Museum Keeper of Prints and Drawings; scholar of Italian art. Popham was son of Arthur Frederick Popham, a failed architect who worked in the bookbinding division of the Doves Press, and Florence Radford Popham. Both parents were connected to the draper’s firm of Popham and Radford, Plymouth. Popham’s parents both had died by 1908. He was educated at Dulwich College and University College, London before being sent to King’s College, Cambridge, by his guardian, where he graduated with a second-class in classics in 1911. He was friends with many of the Bloomsbury Group at this time, though not ostensibly one himself. In 1912 he joined the British Museum’s department of Prints and Drawings, under the direction of Campbell Dodgson. The same year he married Brynhild Olivier (1886/7-1935). With the outbreak of World War I, Popham joined the Royal Naval Air Service, transferring later to the Royal Flying Corps, as the air force was known at that time. Returning to the museum after the war, Popham was assigned to write the volume of the catalog of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Dutch and Flemish drawings collection, a series begun by Arthur Mayger Hind. In 1926 Popham married the divorcée Rosalind Baynes (1891/2-1973) a cousin of his first wife. Another study of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Dutch and Flemish drawing appeared that same year, Drawings of the Early Flemish School, a handbook on the topic. Popham comprised part of an illustrious staff at the Print Department, which, aside from Dodgson, Hind and Parker, also included Laurence Binyon and Arthur Waley. With Parker, too, he assisted founding and editing the magazine Old Master Drawings (1926-1940). During these years, his catalogs, first for the exhibition of Italian drawings at the Royal Academy (1930, published 1931) and the Fitzroy Fenwick collection (1935) marked his scholarship in the Italian idiom. He was made Deputy Keeper in 1933. After cataloging the collections of T. Fitzroy Fenwick and the Burlington House collection, he assisted in moving the collections of the Museum to safekeeping during the Blitzkrieg bombings of World War II. There in Aberystwath, he worked with Frederick Antal, Philip Pouncey and Johannes Wilde. He succeeded Hind as the Keeper of the Print Room in 1945. He published his magisterial Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci the same year. Popham was instrumental in securing choice prints from the Liechtenstein Collection for the British Museum when the collection came on the market through Colnaghi’s. He collaborated with Wilde in the catalog of the Italian drawings for Windsor Castle (1949). In 1954 Popham retired and embarked on essentially another entire career of cataloging print collections for major auction houses and scholars. He succeeded Adolph Paul Oppé (1878-1957) as European adviser to the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, for drawings acquisitions. His catalog of European drawings (except British) in the Ottawa collection, appeared in 1965. In 1955 he was made an honorary fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. These included de Pass Collection of the Truro Musem, 1957, the Skippe collection (for Christie’s auction house), 1958, and pieces from the Chatsworth Collection that toured the United States 1962-63. He completed the catalogue raisonné of Parmigianino drawings, which his 1953 monograph had laid the groundwork, before his death. His work on the drawings of Holkham Hall was published in the 1980s by Christopher Lloyd. One daughter, Anne, married the art writer Quentin Bell. Popham is known for establishing the canon of the Emilian school of drawings, Parmigianino and Correggio which were not popular in the English-speaking world. As an expert cataloger, his knowledge extended far beyond but included the collections of the British Museum, Windsor, Chatsworth, Holkham, Christ Church, and Oxford.


Selected Bibliography

[edited] Old Master Drawings: a Quarterly Magazine for Students and Collectors. London: B. T Batsford, 1926-40; Royal Academy of Arts (Great Britain). Italian Drawings Exhibited at the Royal Academy, Burlington House, London, 1930. London: The Oxford University Press, 1931; The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1945; and Wilde, Johannes. Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle. London: Phaidon, 1949; Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. Volume I: The 14th and 15th Centuries, with Philip Pouncey. London: Trustees of the Britisk Museum, 1950; Selected Drawings from Windsor Castle: Raphael and Michelangelo. London: Phaidon Press, 1954; Correggio’s Drawings. London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1957;Catalogue of the Drawings of Parmigianino. 3 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press for the Pierpont Morgan Library, 1971; and Lloyd, Christopher. Old Master Drawings at Holkham Hall. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.


Sources

Garnett, David. The Golden Echo. New York: Harcourt, Brace 1954; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 435; Kemp, Martin. “Introduction.” Popham, A. E. The drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. 2nd ed. London: Pimlico, 1994; Shaw, James Byam, and Lloyd, Christopher, rev. “Popham, Arthur Ewart [Hugh] (1889-1970).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford; [obituaries] Shaw, James Byam. “Arthur Ewart Popham (1889-1970).” Burlington Magazine 113, No. 815. (February 1971): 97-98; “Mr A. E. Popham: Authority on Old Master Drawings.” The Times [London] December 9, 1970, p. 12.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Popham, Hugh." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/pophama/.


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British Museum Keeper of Prints and Drawings; scholar of Italian art. Popham was son of Arthur Frederick Popham, a failed architect who worked in the bookbinding division of the Doves Press, and Florence Radford Popham. Both parents were connected

Pope, John Alexander

Full Name: Pope, John Alexander

Gender: male

Date Born: 1906

Date Died: 1982

Place Born: Detroit, Wayne, MI, USA

Place Died: Washington, DC, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): ceramic ware (visual works), Chinese (culture or style), Early Modern Japanese, East Asian, Edo (Japanese period), Japanese (culture or style), Japanese ceramics styles, Ming (culture, period, and styles), porcelain (visual works), pottery (visual works), vase, vase paintings (visual works), and Yüan (dynastic styles and period)


Overview

Museum director and historian of Chinese and Japanese art. Pope received a Ph.D. in Chinese studies and Fine Arts from Harvard University in 1955. He also studied European collections of Chinese art at the Courtald Institute of Art in London, and the Harvard-Yenching Institute. After spending three years as a lecturer of Chinese art at Columbia University, Pope was hired as a research associate at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washgington, D. C., and was appointed its director in 1962. He published several books, articles, and exhibition catalogs on Chinese blue- and-white vase painting, and worked to develop the museum’s collections of blue-and-white porcelain from the Yuan (1279-1368) and Ming (1368-1644) periods. Pope also expanded the Freer’s collection of Japanese porcelain produced during the Edo (1600-1868) period. In the last decade of his life, Pope worked as a research curator of Far Eastern art from 1971 until his death in 1982.



Sources

The Dictionary of Art



Contributors: LaNitra Michele Walker


Citation

LaNitra Michele Walker. "Pope, John Alexander." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/popej/.


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Museum director and historian of Chinese and Japanese art. Pope received a Ph.D. in Chinese studies and Fine Arts from Harvard University in 1955. He also studied European collections of Chinese art at the Courtald Institute of Art in London, and

Pope, Arthur Upham

Full Name: Pope, Arthur Upham

Gender: male

Date Born: 1881

Date Died: 1969

Place Born: Phenix, RI, USA

Place Died: Shiraz, Fārs, Iran

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): archaeology and Persian (culture)


Overview

Archaeologist and historian of Persian art. Pope was the son of a Baptist minister, Louis Atherton Pope and his mother, Imogene Titus Pope. He graduated from Brown University in 1904, remaining on the faculty to teach philosophy. He married Bertha Clark, later the author Bertha Damon, in 1905. Pope attended graduate school at Brown, Cornell and Harvard, taught the University of California 1910-1917. After his divorce to Clark, he married fellow Persianist art historian, Phyllis Ackerman, in 1920. In 1923, Pope was appointed director of the San Francisco Museum. Two years later, he went to Iran to complete research and serve as an art advisor to the Iranian government. He organized an exhibition and the First International Congress on Persian Art in Philadelphia in 1926. In 1928 he founded the American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology (later the American Institute for Iranian Art and Archaeology and ultimately the Asia Institute) in New York city and incorporated 1930 in New York. He traveled around the world giving lectures and curating exhibitions of Persian art. In 1930, he edited the Survey of Persian Art. In 1934 he hired the budding Islamicist Richard Ettinghausen. The Institute became the Asia Society in 1947. During this time he supported himself by consulting on Persian art acquisitions. He reliquished his duties in 1953 (succeeded by James Landis) to devote himself to research and writing. Her served on the Council for Soviet-American Friendship board during World War II (1943-1949). However, as the cold war heighted afterward, Pope was interrogated by the Subversive Activities Control Board in 1954 The International Association of Iranian Art elected him president in 1960. He and his wife settled in Itran. He suffered a heart attack and died in 1969. His request to be buried in Isfahan, Iran was supplemented with the Shah’s order to erect a special mausoleum for Pope. In art literature, Pope is sometimes confused with the Harvard fine arts instructor, Arthur Pope (1880-1974).


Selected Bibliography

An Introduction to Persian Art Since the Seventh century A D.. London: P. Davies, 1930; and Ackerman, Phyllis. A Survey of Persian Art from Prehistoric Times to the Present. 6 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1938-58; Masterpieces of Persian Art.; New York: The Dryden Press 1945; Persian Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 1965;. Persian Architecture: the Triumph of Form and Color. New York, G. Braziller, 1965; Introducing Persian Architecture Tehran: Soroush Press, 1976.


Sources

The Dictionary of Art 25: 234; [obituary:] “Arthur Pope, 88, Expert on Iran, Leading Authority on Old Persian Culture, Dies.” New York Times September 4, 1969 p. 47.




Citation

"Pope, Arthur Upham." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/popea/.


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Archaeologist and historian of Persian art. Pope was the son of a Baptist minister, Louis Atherton Pope and his mother, Imogene Titus Pope. He graduated from Brown University in 1904, remaining on the faculty to teach philosophy. He married Bertha

Pope-Hennessy, John, Sir

Full Name: Pope-Hennessy, John, Sir

Other Names:

  • Sir John Pope-Hennessy

Gender: male

Date Born: 13 December 1913

Date Died: 31 October 1994

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Florence, Tuscany, Italy

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Renaissance

Career(s): curators


Overview

Director of the both the Victoria & Albert and British Museums, London and curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; scholar of Italian art and major proponent of connoisseurship in art history. Born to an upper-middle class family; his grandfather and namesake, John Pope-Hennessy (1834-1891) had been a minor Conservative member of Parliament and later a successful colonial governor of Hong Kong. His father, Maj. Gen. [Ladislaus Herbert] Richard Pope-Hennessy (1875-1942), was a career officer and his mother, Dame Una Birch (Pope-Hennessy) (1876-1949), a noted writer. The younger Pope-Hennessy lived in Washgington, D. C., as a child when his father held a post as military attaché at the British Embassy there. He was educated at Downside Abbey (Somerset) and then Balliol College, Oxford, where he met Kenneth Clark, then at the Ashmolean. As a young man, he witnessed morning discourses on the Bergsonian-style aesthetics of enigmatic Matthew Stewart Prichard at the Gargoyle Club. Pope-Hennessy spent the 1935-1936 year touring Europe. He met Bernard Berenson, though the two did not initially get along. Herbert Read, then editor of the Burlington Magazine, encouraged Pope-Hennessy to write reviews and “Recent Research” pieces for the magazine in 1936.

Pope-Hennessy applied to a position at the National Gallery the same year, but was turned down. In 1937 his book on Giovanni di Paolo appeared (dedicated to Clark). In 1938 Pope-Hennessy had secured a position in the Department of Engraving, Illustration and Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. His second monograph, on the Siennese artist, Sassetta, appeared in 1939. During World War II, Pope-Hennessy worked for the Air Ministry as part of the national defense. Returning to Europe in 1944, he was one of the first British to report (in print) on recent work of Matisse and Picasso in the Salon d’Automne in liberated Paris. After the war, he requested a transfer in the V&A to the department of Sculpture, hoping for a larger profile than he had been able to establish in the print division. The writings of Jenö Lányi, especially on Donatello, helped him develop the acumen for this new medium within his field. Pope-Hennessy set about rewriting the catalog of sculpture previous issued by Eric Maclagan and Margaret Longhurst. The assuming of the editorship of the Burlington Magazine by Benedict Nicolson (from Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner) in 1947 started a celebrated row between Nicolson and Pope-Hennessy. Pope-Hennessy was on both the editorial board and consultative board of the magazine, and let his criticisms of Nicolson be known. Nicolson ultimately prevailed and retained his editorship; Pope-Hennessy ceased to contribute to the magazine.

He was appointed Keeper to the Department of Sculpture in 1954. By that time, he was already good friends with the high-profile New York collectors Jayne and Charles Wrightsman. The first volume of Pope-Hennessy’s introduction to Italian sculpture, on the Gothic, appeared in 1955. That same year he was a visiting professor at Yale University. The retirement of Leigh Ashton in 1955 led to speculation that Pope-Hennessy should succeed, but the position was given to Trenchard Cox. Pope-Hennessy’s interest in small bronze statuettes resulted in the 1961-1962 show in Florence and Amsterdam. He taught at Williams College during the same academic year (1962-1963). He delivered the Mellon Lectures in Washgington, D. C. in 1963. His tenure at the V&A included the acquisition of Bernini’s Neptune and Triton (1620) and Giambologna’s Samson Slaying a Philistine (1561-2). In 1964 the new catalog of the V&A Italian sculpture collection appeared. That year he published his commissioned work on the Kress Collection of Italian bronzes. One result of this was the further commission to write the catalog to the Frick Collection’s (New York) fine holdings in bronze statuettes in 1966 (appeared in in 1970). In 1965 he delivered the Wrightsman lectures at New York University. Pope-Hennessy succeeded Cox as the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1967. The following year he was purportedly offered the directorship of the National Gallery, a job more suited to him, but he declined. His tenure at the V&A was marked by strong support of staff research and plans for new 20th-century galleries and a reinstallation of the Indian and Far Eastern collections, the latter two unfulfilled by his successors.

In 1974 he retired from the V&A, and was replaced by the 38-year-old director of the (British) National Portrait Gallery, Roy C. Strong. Pope-Hennessy succeeded Lord Wolfenden of Westcott (1906-1985) as director of the British Museum the same year. The British Museum was a vastly different enterprise and he never felt his successes forthcoming. When his brother James, (1916-1974), also a homosexual, was beaten to death by a lover in 1974, Pope-Hennessy looked for a change in life venue. This came in 1977 when Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving lured him to New York to be “Consultative Chairman” to the Department of European Painting. At the same time Pope-Hennessy jointly held a professorship at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. At the Met, he rehung the entire European painting collection and instituted a more informative labeling system. His acquisitions included Rubens’ Self-portrait with Helene Fourment and their Son, Peter (1630s) and Guercino’s Blinding of Sampson (1619), both gifts of the Wrightsmans. He hired a young art historian, Walter Liedtke, who became at the museum one of the eminent curators.  In those years he authored monographs on individual sculptors, including Luca della Robbia, 1980, Cellini, 1985, and Donatello in 1993. The latter two were in biographical form, but are, in fact, full studies of the artists. Although never wealthy, in the 1980s he sold two personal pictures, Domenichino’s Christ Carrying The Cross to the Getty Museum for $750,000, a work he had paid £38 for in 1946, and Annibale Carraci’s Vision of St. Francis to the National Gallery of Canada for £100,000, which he had originally purchased for £28. In New York, Pope-Hennessy met Michael Mallon, a young scholar attending Pope-Hennessy’s Frick lectures. Pope-Hennessy secured him an internship at the Metropolitan and Mallon became Pope-Hennessy’s life partner. The two retired to Florence in 1986. He was succeeded at the Metropolitan by Everett Fahy, Jr. Pope-Hennessy died in Florence at age 80 from complications from a liver ailment. He is buried in the Cimitero Evangelico degli Allori in Galluzzo, a suburb of Florence. His art collection from his Florence home was sold for £1.03 million at Christie’s, New York, in 1996.

Pope-Hennessy did not have, nor did he ever apparently seek, formal training in art history. The hallmark of his methodology was connoisseurship. His important rewriting of the V&A catalog, which focused more on provenance and aspect of the sculpture than previous catalogs had, relied on material supplied by R. W. Lightbown. His introduction to Italian Sculpture was in fact the critical catalog to the V&A’s collection many had hoped his revisions would be (Radcliffe). His legacy to the dual worlds of academic and museum art history was to emphasize the importance of the object and eschew rank speculation as much as possible. Pope-Hennessy possessed a particularly difficult personality. Those who respected him termed him “abrasive,” “unrealistic” and “impatient.” The difficult relationship at the V&A with the curator of sculpture Terrence Hodgkinson is well documented. His caustic opinions of fellow art historians, both in print and verbal, are both legion and famous. He was unaccountably hard on Lightbown whose assistance on the 1964 V&A sculpture catalog was considerable; acerbic toward the work of Leo Planiscig, one of his few forerunners in the field of sculpture, and “unremittingly hostile” (Fenton) toward the American sculpture historian Charles Seymour, Jr. Pope-Hennessy’s aristocratic upbringing, which opened many doors among art museum officials and collectors, accounted in large part for his success as a museum curator and director. His universal nickname, a mixture of respect and the autocratic fear he instilled, was “The Pope.” The last director of the V&A who could could allow himself to be concerned only with scholarship issues, no one reportedly dared ask him when the roof was reported leaking, to have it fixed. His brother was the British royal family biographer and documentarian James Pope-Hennessy (1916-1974).

 


Selected Bibliography

Sienese Quattrocento Painting. Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1947; The Drawings of Domenichino in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle. London: Phaidon Press, 1948; Fra Angelico. New York: Phaidon/Garden City Books, 1952; An Introduction to Italian Sculpture. 3 vols. New York: Phaidon: 1955-63; and Lightbown, Ronald. Catalogue of Italian Sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum. 3 vols. London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1964; The Portrait in the Renaissance. New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1966; The Study and Criticism of Italian Sculpture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980; Luca della Robbia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980; Cellini. New York: Abbeville Press, 1985; Italian Paintings. volume 1 of, The Robert Lehman Collection [Metropolitan Museum of Art]. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Princeton University Press, 1986; Learning to Look. New York: Doubleday, 1991; The Piero della Francesca Trail. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992; On Artists and Art Historians: Selected Book Reviews of John Pope-Hennessy. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1994.


Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 67 cited; [correspondence:] Peter Quennell, ed.  Pope-Hennessy, James. A Lonely Business: a Self-portrait of James Pope-Hennessy. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981; 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. 50-51; Pope-Hennessy, John. Learning to Look. New York: Doubleday, 1991; Bayley, Stephen. “Vitrol & Ambition: It’s One of the World’s Great Museums [etc.].” Independent (London), July 28, 2000, p. 1; [obituaries:] C.M.E., and Radcliffe, Anthony, and Christiansen, Keith. “John Pope-Hennessy (1913-94).” The Burlington Magazine 137, no. 1102 (January 1995): 34-37; Wilson, David. “Mandarin of the Museums.” The Guardian (London), November 2, 1994, p. T17; Boucher, Bruce. The Independent (London), November 2, 1994, p. 14; Fenton, James. “More of a Sleuth than a Mandarin.” Independent (London). November 7, 1994, p. 16; The Times (London), November 2, 1994; Russell, John. “Sir John Pope-Hennessy, 80, Art Expert, Dies.” The New York Times, November 1, 1994, p. 8.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Pope-Hennessy, John, Sir." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/popehennessyj/.


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Director of the both the Victoria & Albert and British Museums, London and curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; scholar of Italian art and major proponent of connoisseurship in art history. Born to an upper-middle class family;