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Abbott, Jere

Image Credit: Bowdoin

Full Name: Abbott, Jere

Gender: male

Date Born: 1897

Date Died: 1982

Place Born: Dexter, Penobscot, ME, USA

Place Died: Dexter, Penobscot, ME, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): American (North American) and Modern (style or period)


Overview

Americanist art historian; first associate director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Abbott was born to Arthur Abbott and Flora Parkman (Abbott). After attending Dexter High School, Abbott graduated from Bowdin College with a bachelor’s degree in science and attended graduate school at Harvard University in physics. At Harvard he met Alfred H. Barr, Jr., who would become the first director of the Museum of Modern Art. Barr and Abbott spent time in Paris studying art. Barr appointed Abbott to be his first associate director, taking care of much of the day-to-day operations of the museum. In 1932 Abbott accepted a position as Director, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts where he remained until 1946. As director, Abbott was instrumental in acquiring modernist works such as Picasso’s cubist Table, Guitar, and Bottle (1919) as he had done for the Museum of Modern Art. He was adjunct faculty at Smith and taught courses in art history. He was a fellow of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. After his retirement from Smith, Abbott moved to his hometown of Dexter, Maine, where his family operated the Amos Abbott Woolen Manufacturing Company. Abbott served as the treasurer for the Company. At his death, Abbott left a $4.3-million acquisition fund to the Colby College Museum of Art.


Selected Bibliography

Lautrec-Redon. Tenth Loan Exhibition. February 1-March 2, 1931. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1931.


Sources

Kantor, Sybil Gordon. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002; Marquis, Alice Goldfarb. Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Missionary for the Modern. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989; [obituaries:] New York Times July 22, 1982, p. D 19.


Archives


Contributors: Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen


Citation

Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen. "Abbott, Jere." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/abbottj/.


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Americanist art historian; first associate director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Abbott was born to Arthur Abbott and Flora Parkman (Abbott). After attending Dexter High School, Abbott graduated from Bowdin College with a bachelor’s degre

Archer-Straw, Petrine

Image Credit: PetrineArcher.com

Full Name: Archer-Straw, Petrine

Other Names:

  • Petrine Archer
  • P.A. Straw
  • P. Archer-Straw
  • Pet Archer-Straw

Gender: female

Date Born: 26 December 1956

Date Died: 05 December 2012

Place Born: Birmingham, West Midlands, England, UK

Place Died: Mona, Jamaica

Home Country/ies: Jamaica and United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Afro-Caribbean (style and culture), avant-garde, Black (general, race and ethnicity), Caribbean, Jamaican, and Modern (style or period)

Institution(s): Courtauld Institute and Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts


Overview

Historian of art, educator, and curator who specialized in art of the Caribbean.

Born in Great Britain to Jamaican parents, Archer-Straw attended the University of the West Indies in 1975 and completed her B.A. in Theology, History, and Sociology in 1978. She also trained in visual arts at the Jamaica School of Art from 1979 to 1982, receiving a diploma in painting. She went on to receive a M.Phil in Cultural History (1983-87). She later gained her M.A. and PhD (study in Negrophilia)  in Art History from the Courtauld Institute at the University of London, where she subsequently taught between 1994 and 1995.

After receiving her doctorate in 1994 she worked as a consultant for a number of institutions in the Caribbean and Great Britain including the Royal Academy, London where she was coordinating editor for the exhibition and publication Africa the Art of a Continent (1995). Archer-Straw assisted curator and editor Tom Phillips (b. 1937) on the book specifically, consisting of over 600 pages that document the continent, including ancient Egypt and Nubia, North and Northwestern Africa as well as the sub-Saharan region. In 1990 Archer-Straw published Jamaican Art, the first book of its kind. The book was co-authored with editor-in-chief of Jamaica Journal and Caribbean Quarterly Kim Robinson-Walcott (b. 1956), in addition to a foreword by curator of the National Gallery of Jamaica, David Boxer (b. 1946). She chronicled for the first time the evolution of Jamaican art, highlighting key artists in the nation’s history, like well-known sculptor Edna Manley (1900-1987), but also David Pottinger (1911-2007), Cecil Baugh (1908-2005), and Carl Abrahams (1913-2005). Her essays emphasize the distinctive and diverse nature of Jamaican art, despite its inherent connections to the European art scene, especially within the United Kingdom. In 2000, Archer-Straw was also the editor and curator of Fifty Year: Fifty Artists, an exhibition and publication in commemoration of a 50-year milestone in the development of fine art training in Jamaica, for the School of Visual Arts (Jamaica). Archer-Straw wrote two essays for the book, the first an introduction about the College’s history and the second an examination of the development of its fine arts programs. Fifty years-Fifty Artists demonstrated the significant progression in fine arts teaching since the Jamaica School of Arts and Crafts received its charter back in the 1950s under the guidance of its founder, Edna Manley. Archer-Straw became famous for her 2000 publication of Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s, which discusses Europeans fetishization and passion for Black culture with the mass exodus of African-American artists, writers, and musicians following WWI.

Archer-Straw worked with the National Gallery of Jamaica where she had been a visiting curator member of the Board of Directors from 2000 until her death. She was a consultant for the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas where she spearheaded the development of the gallery’s curatorial policies following its establishment until 2002. Between 2002 and 2004, she worked with the School of Visual Arts in Jamaica where she designed the college’s first degree program in Art History. She was also arts editor and a consistent writer for the Jamaica Journal, a quarterly for the sciences and arts, published by the Institute of Jamaica. Her articles primarily focus on historical themes of the African diaspora and artistic connections across the Atlantic.

In her final years, she co-curated the online exhibition About Face: Revisiting Jamaica’s First Exhibition in Europe with Claudia Hucke, Senior Lecturer in Art History at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, in Kingston, Jamaica. Archer-Straw died unexpectedly, aged 55, as the result of a sickle-cell crisis.

Most of Petrine’s curatorial work focused on Jamaica and Jamaican artists. Her exhibitions included: New World Imagery: Contemporary Jamaican Art (South Bank Centre and National Touring Exhibitions, 1995), Photos and Phantasms: Harry Johnston’s Photographs of the Caribbean (Royal Geographical Society, London, 1998), and Back to Black (Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2005), which she co-curated with Richard Powell and David A Bailey.


Selected Bibliography

  • [dissertation:] Negrophilia: Paris in the 1920’s. A Study of the Artistic Interest in and Appropriation of Negro Cultural Forms in Paris During that Period. University of London, 1994;
  • Back to Black: Art, Cinema and the Racial Imaginary. Whitechapel Gallery: London, 2005;
  • Past, Present and Personal; The Dawn Davies Collection. National Art Gallery of The Bahamas: Nassau, 2004;
  • One Man’s Vision; The D’Aguilar Collection. National Art Gallery of The Bahamas: Nassau, 2003;
  • Creolite and Creolization, Documenta 11- Platform 3, kessel, 2002;
  • Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s, Thames & Hudson: London, 2000;
  • Fifty Years – Fifty Artists (Ed) Ian Randle Publishers: Kingston, 2000;
  • Photos and Phantasms: Harry Johnston’s Photographs of the Caribbean, London: The British Council, 1998;
  • New World Imagery: Contemporary Jamaican Art London: National Touring Exhibitions, 1995;
  • Africa: The Art of a Continent (Ed) Royal Academy, London: Prestel Verlag, 1995;
  • Home and Away: Seven Jamaican Artists London: The Arts Council, 1994;
  • Jamaican Art: An Overview 1922 – 1982, Kingston Publishers, 1989.

Sources


Archives

“Petrine Archer.” n.d. https://petrinearcher.com/


Contributors: Alana J. Hyman


Citation

Alana J. Hyman. "Archer-Straw, Petrine." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/archer-strawp/.


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Historian of art, educator, and curator who specialized in art of the Caribbean. Born in Great Britain to Jamaican parents, Archer-Straw attended the University of the West Indies in 1975 and completed her B.A. in Theology, History, and Sociology in

Accascina, Maria

Full Name: Accascina, Maria

Gender: female

Date Born: 28 August 1898

Date Died: 31 August 1979

Place Born: Naples, Campania, Italy

Place Died: Palermo, Palermo, Sicily, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): decorative art (art genre) and Italian (culture or style)

Institution(s): Liceo Umberto, National Museum of Palermo, and R. School of Specialization in History of Medieval and Modern Art (Sapienza University of Rome)


Overview

Art Historian and scholar of Sicilian art and decorative arts, Director, Museo Nazionale di Messina (1949-1966). Maria Accascina was born in Naples in 1898 to a family originally from Palermo. Accascina moved to her family’s city, Palermo, to study Literature. After graduation she went to the Regia Scuola di Perfezionamento in Storia dell’Arte Medievale e Moderna dell’Università di Roma. At this time, she studied under Adolfo Venturi who assisted her with her thesis on medieval goldsmithing. This thesis led Accascina to her well-known research of decorative Sicilian art from the medieval to modern to contemporary periods. During this time she began teaching History of Art at the Umberto high school in Palermo. In 1927 she was hired by the Royal Administration of Fine Arts where she was in charge of Regia Commissariato per la tutela degli oggetti d’arte della Sicilia. In 1928 she was commissioned to take charge of the Medieval and Modern section of the National Museum of Palermo. Her charge over the National Museum of Palermo inspired new publications of museology including:”L’organizzazione dell’oreficeria al Museo Nazionale di Palermo” and “Il riordino della Galleria del Museo Nazionale di Palermo.” both published in Bolletino d’Arte, of which she was an author under the Ministry of Public Education, between 1929 and 1930.

After her work at the  Museo Nazionale di Palermo (National Museum of Palermo), she went on to teach at the Universities of Rome, Cagliari and Messina. During the years of Italian fascism, 1934 and 1941, she was an art critic for the “Giornale di Sicilia.” Her art writing has been said to stand out due to her poetic intonations and her commitment to the protection of art history. Accascina wrote to Mussolini during World War, arguing for the protection of goldsmith work, to which she dedicated much of her life work. Her articles in the Giornale di Sicilia focused on the works of various exhibitions. She later wrote in Giglio di Roccia in 1937 and Bulletin of Art in 1938. She also wrote entries for the Enciclopedia Cattolica  and La Enciclopedia Italiana (“Treccani”).

In 1937 she was inaugurated to the Exhibition of Sacred Art in the Madonie, which drew attention to the art of unknown Sicilian masters. Her articles in later years focused on Sicilian art, including her 1938 article on Sicilian textile and 1938 article “Italianità dell’arte siciliana.” Accascina was an advocate for the educational function of art and the importance of defending and protecting Sicilian artistic heritage.

In 1949, she moved to Messina to manage the National Museum of Messina. She stayed here until 1966. Her mission was to redesign the National Museum, which was damaged by the bombings of the Second World War. The Minister of Public Education Gaetano Martino (1900-1967) inaugurated the refurbished Museum on June 7, 1954. She remained dedicated to the museum and its educational purpose. According to Sofia Cuccia, who organized the scholar’s works, stated that Accascina was committed to the enhancement of historical and artistic heritage (Critical History). After World War II, she took an active role in the Sicilian Committee for the recovery of funds for the restoration of works damaged by the war.

Accascina participated in a collaboration in the Mostra di opere d’arte bizantine at the Royal Palace of Palermo. A year later, she participated in Congrès international d’histore du costume held at Palazzo Grassi in Venice. In 1953 she organized an art exhibition in Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome called Nella vita del Sud Italia. In 1958 she created an exhibition of unpublished works of art in Messina. Her lecture on Three Unpublished by Rinaldo Bonanno became published by the Proceedings of the Peloritana Academy of Messina in 1965.

In 1969, she delivered lectures on Sicilian artistic civilization in the United States, specifically at Rockefeller Foundation in New York, at Yale University, and at Harvard University. Her studies of Sicilian silverware led to The Sicilian Goldsmith’s from the 12th to the 19th century which was published in 1974 and remains important. In 1976, she published Trademarks of the gold and silverware of Sicily for Sicula Bank of Trapani. One of the projects she was never able to complete was writing the complete history of art in Sicily, whose various volumes would cover the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque, and all the way to the Contemporary age. She died in 1979 in Palermo. The Center  of Decorative Arts in Italy OADI) is named after Accascina and a street in Palermo, the Via Maria Accascina.


Selected Bibliography

  • Glorie Italiane alla Mostra Nazionale del Tessile. 1938;
  • Italianità dell’arte siciliana. 1938;
  • Ottocento siciliano.1939;
  • X mostra sindacale. Arte della guerra.1941;
  • Giacomo Li Varchi.1957;
  • Antichità Viva1962;
  • L’oreficeria siciliana dal XII al XIX secolo.1974;
  • Marchi dell’oro e dell’argento di Sicilia.1976;

Sources

  • Admin. “La Figura Di Maria Accascina.” OADI, March 28, 2013. http://www.oadi.it/la-figura-di-maria-accascina/;
  • Concetta Di Natale, Maria  Maria Accascina e il Giornale di Sicilia: cultura tra critica e cronache. volume 2 1938-1942. Caltanissetta: S. Sciascia, 2007;
  • Maria Accascina art historian: the method, the results, in Critical history and protection of art in the twentieth century. A Sicilian experience compared to the national debate, proceedings of the International Study Conference in honor of Maria Accascina (Palermo-Erice 14-17 June 2006) , edited by MC Di Natale, Caltanissetta 2007;

Archives

Comune di Palermo Concetta Di Natale, Maria Maria Accascina e il Giornale di Sicilia (cultura tra critica e cronache). 2 vols. 1938-1942. Caltanissetta: S. Sciascia, 2006-2007.


Contributors: Arden Schraff


Citation

Arden Schraff. "Accascina, Maria." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/accascinam/.


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Art Historian and scholar of Sicilian art and decorative arts, Director, Museo Nazionale di Messina (1949-1966). Maria Accascina was born in Naples in 1898 to a family originally from Palermo. Accascina moved to her family’s city, Palermo, to stud

Avery, Myrtilla

Image Credit: Taylor & Francis Online

Full Name: Avery, Myrtilla

Gender: female

Date Born: 1869

Date Died: 1959

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Medieval (European)

Career(s): educators


Overview

Medieval art scholar and chair of Department of Art, Wellesley College; influential in1920s-30s. Avery graduated from Wellesley in 1891 majoring in Greek. She taught Greek and Latin briefly before moving to the University of the State of New York, Albany. She was employed in the library system at Albany, organizing the first traveling library and working on a bachelors in library science which she received in 1895. While a librarian organizing pictures for schools and clubs, she became interested in art. She worked as assistant to the director of the University until 1913, when she received a Master of Arts degree from Wellesley. Avery began teaching at her alma mater and working on a Ph.D. in art history at Radcliffe College. In 1915 she introduced the first art history classes at Wellesley, then open only to seniors. With Art Department chair Alice Van Vechten Brown, she reorganized the museum, instituting some of the earliest courses for curators in the country. She received her Ph.D. from Radcliffe in 1927. In 1929 she became Chair of the Art Department and director of the Farnsworth Museum at Wellesley. The next year, at the advice of her medievalist colleagues at Princeton and New York University, she hired Sirarpie Der Nersessian to teach courses in Byzantine art, a visionary move at the time. Avery retired in 1937 (succeeded by Der Nersessian) and settled in New York.



Sources

  • [obituary]. New York Times April 5, 1959;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. 63;
  • 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. 58;
  • p. 86; “Five at Wellesley will Leave Staff.” New York Times June 13, 1937, p. 42;
  • “The Alexandrian Style at Santa Maria Antiqua, Rome.” Art Bulletin 7 (1925): 131-49;
  • The Exultet Rolls of South Italy. 2 vols. Published for the Department of Art and Archaeology of Princeton University. Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1936.



Citation

"Avery, Myrtilla." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/averym/.


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Medieval art scholar and chair of Department of Art, Wellesley College; influential in1920s-30s. Avery graduated from Wellesley in 1891 majoring in Greek. She taught Greek and Latin briefly before moving to the University of the State of New York,

Azcárate, José María de

Full Name: Azcárate, José María de

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Spain

Subject Area(s): art history and Spanish (culture or style)

Career(s): art historians


Overview

Author of the thirteenth volume in the important Ars Hispaniae series (1949).


Selected Bibliography

Escultura del siglo xvi. Madrid: Editorial Plus-Ultra, 1958.





Citation

"Azcárate, José María de." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/azcaratej/.


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Author of the thirteenth volume in the important Ars Hispaniae series (1949).

Avery, Charles

Full Name: Avery, Charles

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): sculpture (visual works)


Overview

Deputy Keeper of the Department of Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1966-1979; Director of Christie’s, 1979-1990. In 1980 he curated the “European Terracottas from the Arthur M. Sackler Collection” show for the National Gallery of Art in Washgington, D. C. He delivered the William D. Finlay Lecture at the National Gallery of Ireland in 2001.


Selected Bibliography

[collected essays:] Studies in Italian Sculpture. London: Pindar, 2001; Donatello: an Introduction. New York: IconEditions, 1994; and Radcliffe, Anthony. Giambologna, 1529-1608: Sculptor to the Medici: an Exhibition Organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978; Giambologna: the Complete Sculpture. Mt. Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell, 1987; and Laing, Alastair. Finger Prints of the Artist: European Terra-cotta Sculpture from the Arthur M. Sackler Collections. Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Foundation/Harvard University Press, 1981; Donatello: catalogo completo delle opere. Florence: Cantini, 1991; Bernini: Genius of the Baroque. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1997.





Citation

"Avery, Charles." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/averyc/.


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Deputy Keeper of the Department of Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1966-1979; Director of Christie’s, 1979-1990. In 1980 he curated the “European Terracottas from the Arthur M. Sackler Collection” show for the National Gallery of Art

Austin, A. Everett, Jr.

Image Credit: Goodwin Geneaology

Full Name: Austin, A. Everett, Jr.

Other Names:

  • Arthur Everett Austin, Jr.

Gender: male

Date Born: 1900

Date Died: 1957

Place Born: Brookline, Norfolk, MA, USA

Place Died: Hartford, CT, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): American (North American) and Modern (style or period)


Overview

Director of the Wadsworth Atheneum, early exponent of modern art in America. Austin was born to wealthy Boston parents, his father was a research, Arthur Everett Austin, Sr.(1861-1938) and his mother, Laura Ann Etnier (Austin) (1864-1944), who was herself independently wealthy. Raised essentially by his mother, Austin attended local grammar schools and visited Europe as a child. Never a good student, he entered Harvard but was asked to leave because of poor grades. At the suggestion of faculty who took a liking to him, participated in the archaeological digs of George Andrew Reisner (1867-1942) in Egypt and the Sudan beginning in 1922. This reinvigorated his love for art objects and he returned to Harvard in 1924 to complete his degree. Austin had attracted the attention of Fogg Museum director Edward Waldo Forbes and Harvard art historian professor Paul J. Sachs. In 1925 Austin took on part-time duties at the Fogg, demonstrating techniques in Forbes’ conservation classes. During this period he developed friendships with fellow students who would one day form a coterie of cultural intelligencia, including the architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, art historian Agnes Rindge Claflin, composer Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) and ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996). Through Hitchcock, Austin also met architect Philip Johnson. All of these were to assist Austin in later years. In 1927, Forbes put forth Austin for the director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. The Athenaeum board, chaired by Charles A. Goodwin, was highly conservative and Austin, a bi-sexual and modern art devotee, not prepared to acquiesce to them. He married Goodwin’s niece, Helen Goodwin (1898-1986), and taught the first art history courses at Trinity College, Hartford. Although continually at odds with the board, Austin began acquiring old masters and contemporary art works that today comprise the finest pieces of the Atheneum. He gave Edward Hopper his first single-artist museum exhibition in 1928 and Hartford native Milton Avery’s first museum show in 1930. He purchased Bernardo Strozzi’s Saint Catherine (1610-15) and a Le Nain landscape in 1931. An important Piero di Cosimo of 1490 was purchased the following year. In 1934 Greuze’s Indolence (1756) and Degas’ Double Portrait of the Painter’s Cousins (1865-8) were acquired. The museum’s large Caravaggio Ecstasy of St. Francis (1594) was bought in 1943 along with Gauguin’s Portrait of Meyer de Haan (1889-90). Other masterworks purchased included de Chirico, Ernst, Picasso, Miró, Balthus (the first by an American Museum), Dalí and Rubens (the latter’s Portrait of the Archduke Ferdinand, 1635). Nearly all of these acquisitions were made over the objection of the board for reasons of cost or subject matter. In 1934 alone he mounted Picasso’s first American museum retrospective (before MoMA’s) and organized the first performance of Gertrud Stein’s and Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts, featuring an all-black cast. Austin’s interests turned more and more theatre. He performed magic shows at the museum and, as a fundraiser, staged ever-more elaborate balls. All this was at the cost of scholarship and financial propriety. Much of the text for his exhibition catalogs was hastily written by Hitchcock; his office littered with overdue bills by dealers. By 1938 Austin, always known as “Chick,” had withdrawn from his family to live with a male partner. In 1943, while most of the country endured the somber hardships of World War II, Austin used the Athenaeum’s theater to stage and star in John Ford’s Jacobean tragedy, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1627). The play about incest and murder resulted in Austin’s dismissal at the Hartford museum. Again, Edward Waldo Forbes secured a job for him. In 1946 Austin accepted the directorship of the Ringling Museum [of Art] in Sarasota, Florida. At the Ringling, he opened the late John Ringling’s private home as a museum, developed a conservation program badly needed for the baroque pictures there, and, in 1952, moved and installed an Italian rococo theater. However the politics of running a state-owned art museum embroiled him in a various disputes, including a high-profile investigation by the Miami Herald. A heavy smoker, Austin contracted lung cancer in 1956. He returned to his family in Hartford where he died the following year at age 57. He was succeeded at Sarasota by Kenneth Donahue. Austin’s sense of quality in picture acquisition, more than his meager writings, made him an important art historian. Although aided in his purchases by dealers such as Julian Levey and the Wildenstein Gallery, Austin appears to have largely made the selections, especially of modern art, on his own.


Selected Bibliography

[posthumous writing] A. Everett Austin, Jr.: a Director’s Taste and Achievement. Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1958.


Sources

Weber, Nicholas Fox. Patron Saints: Five Rebels who Opened America to a New Art 1928-1943. New York: Knopf, 1992; Gaddis, Eugene R. Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in America. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2000; Gaddis, Eugene R. “Chick Austin: The Ringmaster at the Museum.” Images from the World Between: The Circus in 20th Century American Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001, pp. 149-160.




Citation

"Austin, A. Everett, Jr.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/austine/.


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Director of the Wadsworth Atheneum, early exponent of modern art in America. Austin was born to wealthy Boston parents, his father was a research, Arthur Everett Austin, Sr.(1861-1938) and his mother, Laura Ann Etnier (Austin) (1864-1944), who was

Aurenhammer, Hans

Full Name: Aurenhammer, Hans

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): Caribbean, Central American, and South American

Institution(s): Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte


Overview

Iconographic approach.


Selected Bibliography

Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie. Vienna: Hollonek, 1959-


Sources

KMP, 56 mentioned; EWA 7:769ff “Iconography”; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 p. 380



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

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


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Iconographic approach.

Auerbach, Erna

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Full Name: Auerbach, Erna

Gender: female

Date Born: 1897

Date Died: 1975

Place Born: Frankfurt am Main, Hesse, Germany

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: Germany

Career(s): artists (visual artists)


Overview

Artist and art historian. Auerbach grew up in an educated Jewish family in Frankfurt. Her mother was the painter, Emma Kehrmann (1867-1958). She studied art history between 1917-24 at the universities in Frankfurt, Bonn and Munich, under Rudolf Kautzsch and Heinrich Wölfflin. Her 1925 Frankfurt dissertation, under Kautzsch, focused on 16th-century German portraiture in Franken, Schwaben and Bavaria. She taught at Frankfurter Volksbildungsheim (1925-33). Between 1928-30 she attended classes in painting at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Frankfurt and private classes with Willi Baumeister (1889-1955). As an artist, she exhibited her paintings at various art exhibitions in Germany. In 1933 she emigrated to England where she continued to exhibit her artwork. During World War II, she participated in was service in the Woman’s Voluntary Service. When a bomb destroyed her studio, she resolved to return to art history. She lectured at various London colleges (Crosby Hall, Westfield College). Between 1945-49 she resumed study at the Courtauld Institute in London under Sir Henry Hake (1892-1951), the director of the National Portrait Gallery. She wrote a second Ph.D. dissertation in 1949 on English portraiture and patronage in the 16th century. From 1947-75 she was a visiting lecturer at the Polytechnic Institute in London. In addition, she lectured at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (1970-75) and National Gallery of Art as well as other institutions. She published on Tudor-era portraits and manuscripts in journals such as the Burlington Magazine, Apollo and The Connoisseur. Her archives are at Skinners Library, City University, London.


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation]: Die Deutsche Bildnismalerei im 16. Jh. in Franken, Schwaben und Bayern. Frankfurt, 1923-26; [2nd disssertation]: The English Patronage of Art from ca. 1520-1590, London, 1949; Tudor Artists: a Study of Painters in the Royal Service and of Portraiture on Illuminated Documents from the Accession of Henry VIII to the Death of Elizabeth I. London: Athlone, 1954; Nicolas Hilliard. London: Routledge and Paul, 1961.


Sources

Ulrike Wendland, Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. München: Saur, 1999, vol. 1, 14-16; Christine Rohrschneider, “Erna Auerbach,” in Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon, 5. Munich and Leipzig: Saur, 1992, pp. 617-18; Dictonary of British Artists 1880-1940, ed. by J. Johnson and A. Greutzner, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1976, p. 33; Gabriele Hofner-Kulenkamp, Kunsthistorikerinnen in Exil (Manuscript, Hamburg, 1991). Obituariey: Times (London), June 27, 1975.




Citation

"Auerbach, Erna." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/auerbache/.


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Artist and art historian. Auerbach grew up in an educated Jewish family in Frankfurt. Her mother was the painter, Emma Kehrmann (1867-1958). She studied art history between 1917-24 at the universities in Frankfurt, Bonn and Munich, under

Arnheim, Rudolf

Image Credit: Open Library

Full Name: Arnheim, Rudolf

Other Names:

  • Rudolf Julius Arnheim

Gender: male

Date Born: 1904

Date Died: 2007

Place Born: Berlin, Germany

Place Died: Ann Arbor, Washtenaw, MI, USA

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): art history, art theory, perception, philosophy, and psychology

Career(s): philosophers


Overview

Philosopher of perception and art; used Gestalt psychology for his art-historical studies. Arnheim was the son of Georg Arnheim (1867-1944), a piano factory owner, and Betty Gutherz (Arnheim) (1879-1966). He was raised in Berlin, attending the Herdergymnasium (Abitur 1923). His parents intended him to assume the family business, but beginning in 1923 Arnheim, studied art and music history, philosophy and psychology at the University of Berlin with Gestalt-based scholars Wolfgang Köhler (1887-1967) and Kurt Lewin (1890-1947). His Ph.D. dissertation was supervised by the eminent theorist Max Wertheimer (1880-1943) in 1928. Arnheim became friends and was greatly influenced by the private art historian Kurt Badt; his sister, Helen “Leni” Arnheim (1906-1973) married Badt. Arnheim pursued his interests in the arts through the editorship of Die Weltbuhne, a leftist magazine of politics and culture, publishing articles on film, art and architecture. This led him to develop his theories of the primacy of perception in art appreciation, linking it with the heretofore separated function of mental cognition. His investigations included music and film (he was one of the first to publish a book on the artistic aspects of the silent film in 1932). Arnheim married Annette Siecke (1920-2000), sixteen years his junior. While interviewing the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) on the radio, she prophetically warned him, “As long as the Jews are film critics, I’ll never have a success.” Hitler’s rise in Germany meant the Arnheims had to flee Jewish persecution, initially to Rome. He spent five years as associate editor for a League of Nations cultural publication. During that time, 1937, the couple gave sanctuary to a young art historian also fleeing persecution in Germany, Paul Laport. Laport, recently divorced, and Arnheim’s wife began an affair which resulted in a child by Laport. Arnheim divorced his wife and she later married Laport.  After Mussolini allied himself with Hitler, Arnheim again fled. He traveled to England working as a translator for the BBC. In 1940 he immigrated to the United States. He lectured at the New School for Social Research (influencing, among others, the first American Africanist Roy Sieber) and then Columbia University, working as a researcher involved with the habits of radio listeners. Arnheim was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the 1942-1943 year. He began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in 1943, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1946. Arnheim married a second time to Mary Frame (1918-1999), a librarian, in 1953. He published his best known work, Art and Visual Perception, a theory of graphic understanding, in 1954. In 1962, Arnheim wrote a work of true art history, Picasso’s Guernica: The Genesis of a Painting. In it, he traces the elements of the famous Picasso work and how they combine to create the meaning generally accepted today. Arnheim was appointed to Harvard University, Carpenter Center of Visual Arts, in 1968. He retired from Harvard in 1974, emeritus professor of the psychology of art. He continued as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan retiring a second time in 1984. At age 102 he contracted pneumonia at his Ann Arbor retirement community and died.

Methodologically, Arnheim was fascinated by the perceptual structures in appreciating art. His investigations in the preliminary sketches for Picasso’s Guernica, among other works, helped establish a revised view of art interpretation for many art historians. His pioneering notion of “Visual thinking,” the idea that vision itself is the primary modality for thought, is the driving force behind his books. His views on art harken to the empiricist philosophy of John Locke (1632-1704), who asserted that knowledge of the world is an objective sensory experience. Arnheim’s view was criticized by, among others, the literary philosopher Richard Rorty (1931-2007) (who ironically died the day before Arnheim).


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Experimentall-psychologische Untersuchungen zum Ausdrucksproblem. Berlin, 1928; Film als Kunst. 1932; Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954; Picasso’s Guernica: The Genesis of a Painting. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962; Visual Thinking. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969; Toward a Psychology of Art: Collected Essays. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966; Dynamics of Architectural Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977; The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. ___ 0.Metzler


Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 100; 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. 74; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 320; “Visual Thinking: On Rudolf Arnheim,” [issue] Salmagundi 78-9 (Spring-Summer 1988): 43-143; The Dictionary of Art 2: 476-7; “A Maverick in Art History,” The Split and the Structure: Twenty-Eight Essays. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, pp. 104-110, [methodological recollections]; Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 1, pp. 7-14; [obituaries:] Fox, Margalit. “Rudolf Arnheim, 102, Psychologist and Scholar of Art and Ideas.” New York Times, June 14, 2007 p. 29; Bernstein, Adam. “Rudolf Arnheim, Studied Art-Perception Links.” Washington Post, June 13, 2007, p. B06.


Archives


Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Arnheim, Rudolf." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/arnheimr/.


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Philosopher of perception and art; used Gestalt psychology for his art-historical studies. Arnheim was the son of Georg Arnheim (1867-1944), a piano factory owner, and Betty Gutherz (Arnheim) (1879-1966). He was raised in Berlin, attending the Her