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Bartsch, Adam von

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Bartsch, Adam von

Other Names:

Adam von Bartsch

Gender: male

Date Born: 1757

Date Died: 1821

Place Born: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Place Died: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): catalogues raisonnés and prints (visual works)

Career(s): curators

Overview

Museum curator; author of first modern comprehensive catalog of prints, Le Peintre-graveur. Bartsch was the son of a court official of Prince Starhemberg of Austria. He studied academic subjects at the University in Vienna and then drawing and engraving at Viennese Academy of Arts (Kupferstecherakademie) under Jacob Schmuzer (1733-1811). From 1777-1781 he worked in the Imperial Library, cataloging books. Between 1783-4 he was sent to Paris with the print collection’s registrar, Paul Strattmann, to acquire the print collection of the Johann Anton de Peters (1725-1795). Though this attempt was unsuccessful (it was snapped up by the Bibliothèque Royale in Paris) Bartsch learned the art of analyzing prints quickly and first hand. He used his time in Paris to study other print collections, and was successful in purchasing twenty-one Rembrandt prints from Pierre-François Basan (1723-1797). In 1784 Bartsch was in Brussels, where he met the art dealer Domenico Artaria (1765-1823) and further to the Netherlands. Returning to Vienna, Bartsch received his first commission for a catalogue raisonné of prints, that of the collection of Charles Antoine Joseph, Prince de Ligne (1759-1792). Ligne’s death in one of the first battles of the Franco-Austrian war meant Bartsch’s catalog was in fact an auction catalog (it was published in 1794). In it, Bartsch set out the organizing principles of what would be his famous later work, Le Peintre graveur. In 1791 he was appointed curator of the imperial print collection by its director, Gottfried, Baron van Swieten (1734-1803). Bartsch purchased prints, mostly Italian and German ofthe 15th- and 16th-centuries, including those by Marcantonio Raimondi, Heinrich Aldegrever, Wenceslas Hollar, Rembrandt van Rijn, Jacque Callot and Claude Lorrain. The Imperial collection expanded nearly 20-fold under his direction. Bartsch was elected to the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts in 1792. In 1794 was named adviser to Albert, Duke of Saxe-Teschen, on his drawings collection. In 1795 Bartsch embarked upon a series of artist’s oeuvre catalogs, beginning with the prints of Antoni Waterloo (1610-1690). Catalogs of the prints of Guido Reni and his pupils, (1795), Rembrandt (1797) and Lucas van Leyden (1798) followed. When the woodblocks commissioned by Emperor Maximilian I celebrating the achievements of his reign were discovered in a monastery, Bartsch set about reprinting them. This series, beginning with Der Triumphzug Kaiser Maximilians I (135 woodcuts, 1796), Die Ehrenpforte (1799), Der Weisskunig (1799) and Die Heiligen aus der Sipp-, Mag- und Schwägerschaft des Kaisers Maximilian I gained him a great reputation. But Bartsch’s greatest achievement lay yet before him. Beginning in 1803, he issued his systematic catalog of major graphic artists, Le Peintre-graveur. In 1812 he was knighted for his work and in 1816 placed in charge of the print collection. Bartsch continued to issue his catalog, completing the final volume of the 21-volume set in 1821, the year of his death. To Bartsch, the term peintres graveur was assigned only to highest graphic works. As opposed to those engravers who merely copied other works, Bartsch viewed the “painter engravers” as artists with originality and technical accomplishment. Bartsch summarized his findings in a collector’s manual entitled Anleitung zur Kupferstichkunde, also published in 1821. His son Ritter Friedrich Joseph Adam von Bartsch, followed him in office of the collection of the Imperial library and was also a knighted as art historian. Bartsch’s classification of prints draws heavily from the lists and annotations made by Pierre-Jean Mariette, fils (1694-1774) the son of the Parisian art dealer and the compiler of print collection of Prince Eugene of Savoy. Mariette’s classification, which included an index of prints, was divided by art periods and artists (in alphabetical sequence) to create a finding aid to the imperial collection. Bartsch’s Peintre-graveur used this classification schema, organizing more than 500 artists by country and school. Each entry was subdivided by subject-matter. He added brief descriptions of the print for easier identification as well as differences in states, and rarity. To help distinguish fakes, illustrations were provided. Bartsch’s work became the first modern print oeuvre catalog in that his systemization depended upon no particular collection or theme. It was intended for collectors, connoisseurs and historians to further scholarship. Following his death, other corpora followed, in some cases addressing artist who were thought not to be peintre-graveurs, such as the 1829 catalog of Maarten van Heemskerck by the librarian Thomas Kerrich (1748-1828). Additional contributors to the Le Peintre-graveur included Joseph Heller.

Selected Bibliography

Le Peintre-graveur. 21 vols. Vienna: J. V. Degen, 1803-21; revised and reissued as The Illustrated Bartsch. Walter Strauss, editor. New York: Abaris, 1978- ; Anleitung zur Kupferstichkunde. Vienna: J. B. Wallishausser, 1821, English: Concerning the Administration of the Collection of Prints of the Imperial Court Library in Vienna. New York: Abaris, 1982; Catalogue raisonné de toutes les estampes qui forment l’œuvre de Rembrandt et ceux de ses principaux imitateurs. Vienna: A. Blumauer, 1797.

Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 382; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. 2nd. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007, pp. 9-10; Suffield, Laura. “Adam von Bartsch.” Dictionary of Art; Koschatzky, Walter. “Adam von Bartsch: An Introduction to his Life and Work.” The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 1, pt. 1. New York: Abaris, 1978, pp. vii-xvii; Rieger, R. “Bartsch, Johann Adam.” Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: die bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker. vol. 7. Munich: K.G. Saur, 1993, pp. 313-14; Stix, Alfred, ed. “Pariser Briefe des Adam Bartsch aus dem Jahre 1784.” Festschrift für Max J. Friedländer: Zum 60. Geburtstag. Leipzig: E. A. Seemann 1927, pp. 312-351.

Contributors: HB and Lee Sorensen

Museum curator; author of first modern comprehensive catalog of prints, Le Peintre-graveur. Bartsch was the son of a court official of Prince Starhemberg of Austria. He studied academic subjects at the University in Vienna and then drawin

Barthel, Gustav

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Barthel, Gustav

Gender: male

Date Born: 1903

Date Died: 1972

Home Country/ies: Germany

Overview

Director of the Städtische Kunstsammlungen Breslau (Municipal Art Collections Breslau) and Nazi art ideologue. After the German attack on Poland in 1939, Barthel collaborated with the head Nazi art plundering in Poland, Kajetan Mühlmann to write Nazi-ideological books on Polish culture, making the argument that Poland was really part of Germany. During the Third Reich years, Barthel participated in art looting in Poland and co-authored the catalogue “Secured Works of Art in the General Government” that listed cultural assets that had been confiscated in Poland. He took advantage of his relationships to Jewish private collectors to acquire their works inexpensively. Barthel’s Polish art histories, justifying the looting of Polish art treasures and Germany’s conquering Poland fell into a larger movement in German art literature, most notably the book by Dagobert Frey on Krakau, 1941, where Frey decline to identify Cracow as a Polish city.

Selected Bibliography

andMühlmann, Kajetan. Sichergestellte Kunstwerke im Generalgouvernement [printed by andMühlmann?], 1940?; andMühlmann, Kajetan. Krakau: Hauptstadt der deutschen Generalgouvernements Polen: Gestalt und künstlerische Leistung einer deutschen Stadt im Osten. Breslau: Korn Verlag, 1940.

Sources

“Raub und Resitution” Jüdisches Museum Berlin (exhibition webpage) http://www.jmberlin.de/raub-und-restitution/en/home.php

Barr, Alfred H., Jr.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Barr, Alfred H., Jr.

Other Names:

Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr.

Gender: male

Date Born: 1902

Date Died: 1981

Place Born: Detroit, Wayne, MI, USA

Place Died: Salisbury, Litchfield, CT, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Modern (style or period) and museums (institutions)

Career(s): directors (administrators), founders (originators), and museum directors

Overview

Founder, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Barr was the son of a Presbyterian minister, Alfred Hamilton Barr, Sr., and a homemaker Annie Elizabeth Wilson (Barr). The family moved to Baltimore where Barr was raised. His childhood friends included Edward Stauffer King, later director of the Walters Art Gallery. Barr graduated at age 16 (valedictorian) from high school and entered Princeton University in 1918. At that the same year he read Henry Adam’s Mont Saint Michel and Chartres influencing him toward art history. At Princeton he selected art history as his major in 1920, the year Allan Marquand, the department founder, retired. Barr’s classes included the 1920 medieval course by Charles Rufus Morey, and the Italian renaissance and modern classes of Frank Jewett Mather, Jr. His fellow undergraduate art history students included Millard Meiss. After graduating (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1922, Barr received his A. M. in 1923 and began teaching at Vassar College while pursuing his Ph.D. at Harvard. His students at Vassar included the later Art Institute of Chicago curator Katharine Kuh. Barr made his first trip to Europe in 1924. At Harvard, he studied with Paul J. Sachs in Sach’s legendary art museum course. In 1925 Barr taught at Princeton and in 1926-1927 at Wellesley (Wellesley’s first modern art course). His students at Wellesley included Helen M. Franc, who would later work under him at the Museum of Modern Art. Barr curated the first modern-art exhibition at Harvard’s Fogg art museum under Sachs. Vanity Fair magazine published his requirements for entrance into his art class the same year. At Harvard, Barr met fellow art student Jere Abbott and the two spent much time in Paris studying art. In 1927 Barr visited the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, and witnessed modernism firsthand. In 1928, when Sachs was asked to recommend a student to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (1874-1948) to direct a new museum for modern art, Sachs chose Barr. Rockefeller’s board of directors included Duncan Phillips (1886-1966) and A. Conger Goodyear (1877-1964). Barr met fellow Harvard classmate Philip Johnson in 1929 who would be a personal advisor in later years. Shortly after the stock market crash in 1929, Barr opened the first exhibition of the new museum in the 12th floor of the Heckscher building. Barr appointed Abbott to be his associate director and Abbott took care of much of the day-to-day operations of the museum. But a mysterious falling out between Abbott (who was a homosexual) and Barr (or the Board of directors) took place, and Abbott left the Museum. In 1932 Barr married Margaret “Marga” Scolari-Fitzmaurice (d. 1987), an Italian-born art historian studying at New York University on a fellowship, in 1930. In 1931 for an exhibition on modern architecture, Barr coined the term “international style” to describe the movement, a show curated by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Johnson. In 1932 Johnson funded the new department of architecture and became its first curator. Barr was in Germany in 1932 and witnessed the Nazi closing of art galleries. In 1933 he wrote on behalf of Erwin Panofsky‘s appointment to the Courtauld Institute and in 1934 at Panofsky’s suggestion, sponsored Panofsky’s student Horst Woldemar Janson. During these years Barr’s main job was to advise the trustees of the museum on their personal art purchases; the museum spent only $1000 on art purchases the first six years of its existence. In 1935 Barr was one of those invited to the famous, informal gathering of art scholars organized by Meyer Schapiro that included Robert Goldwater, the dealer Jerome Klein, Panofsky and Lewis Mumford. That year he hired Beaumont Newhall to be curator of photography and Iris Barry (1895-1969) to establish the first film library to part of a museum. In 1939 the first of Barr’s panegyrics to Picasso appeared: Picasso: Forty Years of his Art. The same year, a critique of Barr’s approach to Cubism was published by the Columbia art historian Meyer Schapiro. In 1943 Steven Clark, a conservative, became chairman of the Board of the MoMA. Disputes with Barr erupted and Clark fired him. The popular legend, told years later, that Barr retired to the library, refusing to leave, however, is not true. Barr was a poor administrator and procrastinator; his long-awaited history of modern art never appeared. The same year James Thrall Soby was appointed assistant director, and a special position created for Barr (his salary cut to $6000/year). In 1944 the Museum appointed René d’Harnoncourt as its director. d’Harnoncourt’s sensitivity to the situation with Barr and gentle personality allowed both men to function positively. Barr remained true to the artists whom he championed. In 1944, during the height of World War II, Piet Mondrian when died in New York, Barr arranged for his funeral. In 1946, Picasso: Fifty Years of his Art appeared by Barr. Though he had left Harvard for the Museum without completing his dissertation, Barr submitted the Picasso book in 1947 and through special arrangement, Harvard awarded him a Ph.D. Barr assumed the title of “Director of Collections” that year, returning to his old office, and his salary changed to $10,000. In 1949 Princeton awarded him an honorary doctorate. Barr’s MoMA focused on European modern art; the Guggenheim gave the first exhibitions to Pollock, Rothko (whose work Barr never purchase), and Baziotes. Even in the 1960s, Barr declined to purchase Pop art, refusing a work at one point in order to buy a twelfth Leger. In 1948, the position of the MoMA vis-a-vis the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other museums brought an agreement that MoMa would sell its works to the Met for $191,000 in order for it to constantly house only truly modern art. By 1951 the deal had dissolved and in 1953 MoMA Board chairman John Hay “Jock” Whitney (1904-1982) confirmed that the MoMA would not pass on works to other museums. In 1951 Barr published his extended catalog and book, Matisse: His Art and his Public, written during the time he was without a museum appointment. The book was a standard in Matisse studies for many years. Barr was approached during this time to write the volume on modern art for the Pelican History of Art series, but he declined. The volumes in the series were later divided into European and American art, written by Kurt Badt and John Wilmerding. Barr officially retired from the Museum in 1967. In the years after his retirement, Alzheimer’s disease set in. In 1975 he was committed to a nursing home. He died at the Salisbury, CT facility in 1981. Barr was the great publicizers of modern art for the American Public, the major catalyst for public-acceptance of modern art in America. Hired initially by the wealthy New York art collecting elite to validate their tastes by creating a museum for their art, he acted as their advisor and procurer of art during the early years when the Museum bought almost no art at all. Much has been written about the “eye” of Barr, (i.e., his ability to identify the highest quality work of art). The works he selected for the museum and its benefactors (many of which were eventually donated to the the Museum) formed the canon of modern art history. But his blindnesses to other art movements were equally glaring. The Museum was late to purchase the work of the New York abstract expressionists even though they lived and exhibited in the shadow of the museum. As a museum director, he instituted aggressive advertising campaigns for the museum at a time when few other art museums did, insisting that exhibition catalogs be accessible both financially and intellectually to the public. He was not a scholar. His histories of modern art and artists are largely drawn from personal experience (though he spoke neither French nor German) and from questionnaires mailed to the artists (such as Matisse). His concept of art history was a construct of “isms” linked in a linear fashion. Meyer Schapiro’s famous critic of Barr’s theory in 1937 accused him of explaining the rise of abstract art “independent of historical conditions.” Yet Kuh, recalling his lectures at Vassar, cited him as an inspirational force because he wove social history into his lectures. Barr avoided employing theories from other disciplines, such as Freudian analysis for example, in art history. The respect Barr commanded in a largely conservative art world is best summed in the fact that he was the only historian to write on the subject of modern art for the Gazette des Beaux Arts in the 1940s.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Picasso: Fifty Years of his Art. Harvard University, 1947; Matisse: his Art and his Public. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1951; What is Modern Painting? Introductory Series to the Modern Arts, 2. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943; Cubism and Abstract Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936; and Cahill, Holger. Art in America; a Complete Survey. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1935; and Cahill, Holger. Art in America in Modern Times. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1934; Eighth Loan Exhibition: Corot, Daumier. New York: Plandome Press, 1930; Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1936; German Painting and Sculpture. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1931; Modern Works of Art. New York: The Museum of Modern Art; W.W. Norton & Company, 1934 [fifth anniversary exhibition]; Picasso: Forty Years of his Art. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1939; Picasso: Fifty years of his Art. [revision of “Forty Years of His Art,” above] New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1946; Art in Our Time: an Exhibition to Celebrate the Tenth Anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art and the Opening of its New Building, Held at the Time of the New York World’s Fair. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1939.

Sources

“Nature of Abstract Art.” Marxist Quarterly 1 (1937): 77-98 [the critique of Alfred Barr’s Cubism]; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, pp. 89-90; 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. 69; Marquis, Alice Goldfarb. Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Missionary for the Modern. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989; Kantor, Sybil Gordon. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002; Kuh, Katherine. My Love Affair with Modern Art: Behind the Scenes with a Legendary Curator. New York: Arcade, 2006, p. xvii.

Baroni, Costantino

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Baroni, Costantino

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), documentary (general concept), and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Documentary architectural historian

Selected Bibliography

Documenti per la storia dell’architettura a Milano nel Rinascimento e nel Barocco. 2 vols. Florence: Sansoni, 1940-68.

Sources

mentioned, Ackerman, James S. “In Memoriam: Manfredo Tafuri, 1935-1994.” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53, No. 2 (Jun., 1994): 137.

Documentary architectural historian

Barocchi, Paola

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Barocchi, Paola

Gender: female

Date Born: 02 April 1927

Date Died: 25 May 2016

Place Born: Florence, Tuscany, Italy

Place Died: Florence, Tuscany, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): nineteenth century (dates CE) and twentieth century (dates CE)

Career(s): art historians

Institution(s): Scuola Normale di Pisa

Overview

First female professor at La Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa; known for publishing an authoritative monograph on Giorgio Vasari’s Lives. Barocchi grew up spending time in her family’s goldsmith shop in Florence, Italy, near the Ponte Vecchio, which she admitted helped refine her aesthetic sense of experiencing the world as a visual field (Passerini). She later studied art history as an undergraduate at the Università degli Studi di Firenze (University of Florence) producing a thesis in 1949 on Rosso Fiorentino under the Romanesque and Renaissance scholar Mario Salmi Through this mentorship with Salmi and freshly inspired by her thesis, Barocchi published her first book in 1950 on a critique of Mannerism and its influence on Fiorentino’s work. This work began again the academic discourse on Mannerism, which had been disparaged during the fascist rule in Italy.

During her time at the University of Florence, Barocchi adopted the writing style and method of another one of her professors, Roberto Longhi, who taught her to call attention to the artist’s intent rather than simply providing formal analysis (Levi). She employed this methodology in later work, beginning with her appointment at the Università degli Studi di Lecce (modern, Università del Salento) in 1960, producing her most notable work: Vasari Pittore. This edition published in 1964 was lauded for its in-depth review of Vasari’s work by including a substantial analytical index filled with context to Vasari’s vocabulary as well as providing a fresh perspective on Vasari’s drawings by revealing the roles his assistants had with his art. She began a revised, extended edition in 1966 (through 1997) with Rosanna Bettarin (1938-2012), which included a “commento secolare” demonstrating her dedication to Longhi’s methodology. These two Vasari texts are considered her magna opera.

Barocchi was appointed in 1968 to the first chair of History of Art Criticism making her the first female professor at La Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa where she remained until her retirement in 2002. There, she established her own publishing house (Studio per edizioni scelte, or SPES) in 1974 as well as publishing and editing Scritti d’arte Cinquecento from 1971-1977 which organized the “scritti” by theme making the work much more comprehensive than her Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento published from 1960-1962. She additionally published Il Carteggio di Michaelangelo as her next project from 1965-1983, where she revisited Michaelangelo’s work. The Carteggio is known for its penetrating look into Michaelangelo both as a man and an artist by analyzing his personal letters.

At the beginning of her career, [Bernard Berenson] cautioned Barocchi to “be careful, because you will have a lot of pants that will try to cut your way” (Passerini). While Barocchi entered a discipline that could be exclusive and competitive in nature especially towards women as Berenson warned, she remained committed throughout her career to creating a transparent work environment by teaching and sharing her knowledge with future art historians in part by creating her own research center, Centro di Ricerche Informatiche per i Beni Culturali (CRIBECU) at La Scuola Normale that dealt with processing historical documents digitally. This work eventually led Barocchi, after retiring, to engage with the lexicon of art history in a contemporary way by founding the Associazione Memofonte in 2006 with occasional help from her brother-in-law, Giovanni Nencioni (1911-2008). The foundation not only made her personal collection of digitized material available through new technology for future students but also attempted to introduce them to the often unapproachable terminology of art criticism. Barocchi worked on this project until her death in 2016.

Selected Bibliography

Il Rosso Fiorentino. Rome: Gismondi,1950;
Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento: fra Manierismo e Controriforma. 3 vols. Bari: G. Laterza, 1960-1962;
Vasari Pittore. (Collana d’arte del Club del libro, 9). Milano, Edizioni per Il Club del libro, 1964;
and Bettarini, Rosanna. Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori: nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568. 9 vols. Florence: Sansoni, 1966-1997;
Il Carteggio di Michelangelo.Florence: S.P.E.S, 1979;

Sources

[obituaries:] Levi, Donata. “Paola Barocchi (1927–2016).” The Burlington Magazine 158, no. 1364 (2016): 900–901;
“Trattati D’arte Del Cinquecento Vol. 1.” Internet Archive. Laterza & Figli, January 1, 1960;
Millon, Henry A. [review of] “Mostra del Barocco Piemontese exhibition catalogue by Vittorio Viale and others.” The Art Bulletin 47, no. 2 (June 1965): p.303;
W. V. [Walter Vitzthum] [review of] Michelangelo, Carteggio indiretto. Master Drawings 3, no.1 (1965): 54–105;
Passerini, Luisa. “La Conoscenza Dell’Esperienze Figurative: Paola Barocchi.” Internet Archive.;
Bull, George. [book review of] “Michelangelo, Carteggio indiretto.”, in Renaissance Studies 11, no. 3 (1997): 299–302;

Barber, Leila Cook

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Barber, Leila Cook

Gender: female

Date Born: 1903

Date Died: 1984

Place Born: Chicago, Cook, IL, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style), painting (visual works), and Renaissance

Overview

Vassar faculty member from 1931 to 1968 known for lectures on 14th and 15th century Italian painters; led Vassar College wartime defense program during WWII. Barber was raised in Chicago, IL. She graduated with a B.A. from Bryn Mawr in philosophy and psychology while she studying under famed medievalist and art historian Georgiana Goddard King. She received an M.A. in art history from Radcliffe in medieval sculpture and Renaissance painting, continuing graduate work at Radcliffe until 1931. In that year, Barber joined the Vassar Art Department as their third art historian. While working on her dissertation thesis in 1936, Barber was stranded during the bombing of Granada, Spain at the time of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. She was later evacuated to Cadiz along with 3 other women. Barber served on numerous arts organizations, including the Renaissance Society of America, College Art Association of America, and the Friends of Vassar Art Gallery and Barrett House. She taught a variety of courses at Vassar College, her best known being ‘Tuscan Painting of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century.’ During years of World War II, Barber promoted a three year art history program at Vassar to encourage students to go into graduate work. Throughout the war, she also served as the chairman of the Key Center for Information and the Emergency Committee. In 1947, at the Arts Action meeting, she, along with many art historians and artists, signed a letter to President Truman and Secretary Marshall to protest the cancellation of the American painting tour in South America and Europe. Barber chaired the art department at Vassar betwee 1965 to 1968, retiring in 1968. She remained very involved in campus affairs until her death in 1984. She also supported local arts in Poughkeepsie, New York. She became the first member of the Bardavon Film Society and supported the League of Women Voters. Upon her retirement,Vassar College had an exhibit in their art gallery titled “The Italian Renaissance,” hoping to show the expanse of her studies. Using donations from educational institutions and museums, Vassar showcased drawings, prints, manuscripts, and books from the Renaissance. She died in 1984 and is buried in Edgartown, Massachusetts. In recent years, the Weitzel-Barber Art Travel Prize, an endowment that would send current Vassar students in art history and studio art to study around the world, was started in her honor.

Sources

Burgess, L. A. “Advancing american art” and its afterlife.” Ph. D. thesis, 2010;
“The History of Art at Vassar College – 150 Years, Vassar’s Sesquicentennial – Vassar College.” Vassar College 150th Anniversary, 150.vassar.edu/histories/art/index.html;
“The Italian Renaissance : prints, drawings, miniatures, books : May 2 to June 9, 1968. Askew, Pamela, et al. “Libraries.” Barber, Lelia, [Unknown]-1984 — Memorial Minute | Vassar College Digital Library, Online Collection Published by Vassar College Libraries, Poughkeepsie, N.Y., digitallibrary.vassar.edu/islandora/object/vassar%3A32335#page/1/mode/1up;
Times-Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana), August 12, 1936: 1;
“Vassar Chronology.” 1968, May 2. Eleanor Dodge Barton ’38, Chairman of the Art Department at Sweet Briar College, Lectured on “Alessandro Algardi: A Case History of a Seventeenth Century Sculptor.” – A Documentary Chronicle of Vassar College, chronology.vassar.edu/records/1968/1968-05-02-barge-lecture.html;
“Return from Spain.” New York Times (1936, Aug 21);
Askew, Pamela, et al. “Libraries.” Barber, Lelia, [Unknown]-1984 — Memorial Minute | Vassar College Digital Library, 1984, digitallibrary.vassar.edu/islandora/object/vassar%3A32335#page/1/mode/1up;
“Leila Cook Barber.” Find A Grave, 17 July 2017, www.findagrave.com/memorial/181445338/leila-cook-barber.

Contributors: Kerry Rork

Barasch, Moshe

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Barasch, Moshe

Gender: male

Date Born: 1920

Date Died: 2004

Place Born: Ukraine

Place Died: Jerusalem, Israel

Home Country/ies: Romania

Overview

Barasch was born to Menachem and Gusta Barasch in Czernowitz, Romania, (present day Ukraine) once an important center of Jewish culture. His father was a Zionist who introduced his son to the tradition of Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. The young Barasch showed himself to have substantial art talent. By age 13, he had already exhibited his drawings and paintings in Czernowitz, Prague, Budapest and Boston, which he visited. He wrote daily in his notebooks, one of which was a diary. As a member of the Haggana, the Jewish military organization later to become the Israeli army, he used his artistic skills to forge passports for fleeing Jews. He married Berta Gandelman in 1942, emigrating to Israel in January 1948 where he fought for the country’s independence, proclaimed in May of that year. He joined the Teacher’s College in 1949. Barasch was completely self-educated in the history of art, but his study included extended visits to the Warburg Institute in London and Princeton, under Erwin Panofsky. In 1958 he founded the Department of the History of Art, including the art library and slide collection, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Barasch was appointed a senior lecturer in 1961, becoming head of the department in 1964. He served as a Member, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, 1967-68. Barasch was Senior Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Univ. Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (“I Tatti”), Florence, in 1969. He was appointed Jack Cotton Professor of the History of Art and Chair of of Institute of Fine and Performing Arts, Hebrew University in 1971, which he held until 1975, intermittently acting as a Visiting Professor and Research Associate at New York University between 1970-79. He was Senior Fellow at Cornell University’s Society for Humanities in 1981 and the same year Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Pennsylvania State University. In 1982 he taught as a visiting professor at the Freie Universität, Berlin. He published the first edition of his collected documents on the history of art theory in 1985. Between 1986-88 he taught at Yale University. In 1987 he published his Giotto and the Language of Gesture, major contribution to the literature on that artist. He became emeritus in 1988. In 1996 he was the recipient of the Israel Prize, and elected corresponding member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. Barasch was the first Israeli art historian to attain worldwide recognition, lecturing widely at institutions in Europe and the United States (Freedman). His methodology closely follows that of the early Warburg tradition rooted in the relationship of objects rather than periodized art history. Barasch was particularly influenced by Jacob Burckhardt and Arnaldo Momigliano, reading their works every year. The book that made the deepest impression on him was Panofsky’s Idea: A Concept in Art Theory. His topics ranged from late antiquity, the Middle Ages, to the Renaissance. His lectures and books, many of which were written in Hebrew, helped to develop the art historical terminology in that language and drew attention to many of the themes that were to attract scholars in the humanities. Three generations of Israelis grew up on the books he wrote, edited. He was also instrumental in having important art history texts translated into Hebrew. Francis Peters’ 1985 book on Jerusalem was dedicated to him and his wife.

Selected Bibliography

Blindness: the History of a Mental Image in Western Thought. New York: Routledge, 2001; The Language of Art: Studies in Interpretation. New York: New York University Press, 1997; Imago hominis: Studies in the Language of Art. Vienna : IRSA, 1991, and New York: New York University Press, 1994; Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea. New York: New York University Press, 1992; Theories of Art: from Plato to Winckelmann. New York: New York University Press, 1985, updated and revised as, Modern Theories of Art. 2 vols. New York : New York University Press, 1989-1998; Giotto and the Language of Gesture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987; Light and Color in the Italian Renaissance Theory of Art. New York: New York University Press, 1978; Gestures of Despair in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art. New York: New York University Press, 1976; Crusader Figural Sculpture in the Holy Land: Twelfth Century Examples from Acre, Nazareth and Belvoir Castle. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971.

Sources

Freedman, Luba. “Thinking in Images: In memoriam Moshe Barasch.” Artibus et Historiae 52 (2005): 9-12; [interview] Uj Kelet (1934): 305-306; Assmann, Jan. “Introduction.” In Assmann, Jan and Albert Baumgarten, eds. Representation in Religion: Studies in Honor of Moshe Barasch. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000, pp. ix-xvii

Banti, Luisa

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Banti, Luisa

Gender: female

Date Born: 1894

Date Died: 1978

Place Born: Florence, Tuscany, Italy

Place Died: Florence, Tuscany, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

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

Overview

Etruscan specialist. Banti worked at the Vatican Library between 1930 and 1940 and on the excavations at Crete before her appointment to the University of Rome in the history of religions. In 1948 she was appointed chair of archaeology at the University of Pavia, moving two years later to Florence to teach Etruscan studies, 1950-65 [Archivio biografico italiano states 1954-74]. She also lectured at various American universities during this time. In 1965 she became director of the Istituto di Studi Etruschi, which she held until 1972. In 1968 she published a monograph on the Etruscans (published in English in 1973 as Etruscan Cities and Their Culture). Although largely a technical archaeological report, the first chapters provided one of the best overviews of Etruscan art at the time. Her library of some 930 volumes was left to the l’Università di Firenze.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Studi in onore di Luisa Banti. “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, 1964, pp. xi-xvii; Il mondo degli etruschi. Rome: A cura dell’Ente per la diffusione e l’educazione storica, 1968, English, Etruscan Cities and Their Culture. Erika Bizzarri, trans. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973; and Pernier, Luigi. Il palazzo minoico di Fest: scavi e studi della Missione archeologica italiana a Creta dal 1900 al 1950. 2 vols. Rome: Libreria dello stato, 1935-51; Exhibition of Works of Art Recovered from Germany. Morey, Sara T., trans. Rome: Istituto poligrafico dello Stato, 1947; “Myth in Pre-Classical Art.” American Journal of Archaeology 58 (1954): 307-310.

Sources

Serra Ridgway, F. R. “Luisa Banti.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, p. 116; Archivio biografico italiano 2. Munich: K. G. Saur, 1992-1994, fiche 36, entries 107-109.

Banham, Reyner

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Banham, Reyner

Other Names:

Reyner Banham

Gender: male

Date Born: 02 March 1922

Date Died: 18 March 1988

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): architectural theory, architecture (object genre), art theory, Modern (style or period), and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Maverick architectural theorist and historian; modernism and pop-culture revisionist. Banham’s parents were Percy Banham, a gas engineer, and Violet Reyner (Banham). The younger Banham was educated at King Edward VI School, Norwich, UK. Too young to join the military during World War II, he worked as an engine fitter at the Bristol Aeroplane Company. Banham entered the Courtauld Institute of London University in 1945 to study art history. He married Mary Mullett the following year. During this time he wrote criticism on contemporary architecture for The Architectural Review and other journals. As a critic, he particularly espoused modernist architecture. Banham wrote his thesis under Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner at the Warburg, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age which appeared as a book in 1960. His topic focused on Expressionism and Futurism’s contribution to architecture, but it became the definitive text throughout the world on the modern movement in architecture (Lyall). In 1959 Banham was hired to the permanent staff of The Architectural Review. He began lecturing at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College, London in 1960, rising to senior lecturer in 1964. Banham’s revisionist stance on Modern architecture influenced the Independent Group (IG), a loose association of artists, architects and historians (e.g., Lawrence Alloway) connected with the London-based Institute of Contemporary Art. In 1966 his book on modernist architecture, The New Brutalism appeared. He championed the 1960s futurism of the Archigram group. Banham rose to professor of the history of architecture in 1969. At the same time, Banham had found a Lebensberuf in appreciating Los Angeles, California. His seminal Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies appeared in 1971. The following year he produced the film, Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles. followed. The success of Theory and Design and Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment, particularly in the United States, brought Banham an offer to teach there in 1976. He accepted the chair of the department of design studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. By 1980, he had been named professor of art history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In California he was a member of Architect-Selection Panel for the J. Paul Getty Trust, which, in 1984, selected Richard Meier to design the museum in Santa Monica, CA. He joined the faculty of New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts as Sheldon H. Solow Professor of the History of Architecture in 1988, but never taught. Bonham was diagnosed with cancer the same year and returned to England where he died at age 66. His students included Charles Jencks. Banham was known for “a propensity for a vigorous and often destructive criticism” (Times, London). His appreciation for proto-Pop and Conceptual art resulted in the IG’s fascination of the same. Banham’s work revised the 1940s history of the Modern Movement, including that of his mentor, Pevsner, which he saw as “a nice, tidy propagandist’s firmament, ordered by a cosmology so simple as to be almost simple-minded.” He was among the first architectural historians to “give the same degree of attention to the architecture of the everyday landscape that scholars give to monuments and cathedrals, and he was particularly entranced with the American cityscape” (Goldberger).

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. Warburg Institute, 1958, published, London: Architectural Press, 1960; Guide to Modern Architecture. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1962; The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1969; Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies. New York: Harper & Row, 1971; The Aspen Papers: Twenty Years of Design Theory from the International Design Conference in Aspen. (New York: Praeger, 1974; Age of the Masters: a Personal View of Modern Architecture. New York: Harper & Row, 1975; Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past. New York: Harper and Row, 1976; A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture, 1900-1925. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986; A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Sources

Whiteley, Nigel. Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002; Mumford, Eric. “Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future.” Architectural Record, May 1, 2004, p.71; Vidler, Anthony. “Futurist Modernism: Reyner Banham.” in Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008, pp. 106-155; [obituaries:] “Professor Reyner Banham.” Times (London), March 22 1988; Lyall, Sutherland. “Reyner Banham: Apostle of built hi-tech.” Guardian (London), March 21, 1988; Goldberger, Paul. “Reyner Banham, Architectural Critic, Dies at 66.” New York Times, March 22, 1988, p.B 5

Bandmann, Günter

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Bandmann, Günter

Other Names:

Günter Bandmann

Gender: male

Date Born: 10 September 1917

Date Died: 24 February 1975

Place Born: Duisburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany

Place Died: Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

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

Overview

Medievalist architectural historian whose influential book on architectural type significance and reception influenced post-war generation of medievalists. Bandmann grew up in Essen. He studied art history at the University in Cologne, inspired by the modern art which had been at the Folkwang Museum there until purged by the Nazis in 1933. Bandmann’s dissertation written under Hans Kauffmann in 1942 focused on the abbey church of Essen-Werden. The work steered clear of ideology (which could have to have been consistent with Nazi doctrine), examining instead the reasons why specific facades (Westwerk) and nave forms were selected in early architecture. This approach spurred his interest in intellectual meanings of historic form (Metzler). While seeking a position still during World War II, Bandmann produced a small guide on the architecture of Cologne, Die Kölner Rheinfront in 1944. After the War, Bandmann emerged as a theorist of the post-Reich era historians at the first Schloss Brühl (Cologne) conference of art historians in 1948 and a second at Schloss Nymphenburg in 1949. He was named an Assistant at the University of Bonn and then Privatdozent in 1949. At Bonn Bandmann published his habilitationsschrift, the groundbreaking Mittelalterliche Architektur als Bedeutungsträger (Medieval Architecture as a Bearer of Meaning), a work which would become a classic in the field. The work took aim at the dual predominant traditions of architectural history that asserted architecture’s form was largely determined by its use (“Form follows Function”) and architectural significance as primarily read formally through its sculptures or images. Instead, Bandmann focused on a reception theory for architecture contemporary with its construction. The controversial work divided the German architectural-history community, with either strong embrace or derision (Böker). Bandmann was advanced to außerordentlicher Professor (associate professor) in Bonn in 1955. His strong interest in the principles of art and theoretical problems of history led Bandmann to write an innovative entry on German double chapels in 1953. He was named Professor at Tübingen in 1965 to the chair formerly occupied by Herbert von Einem. He broadened his analysis to nineteenth-century interpretations of the Gothic and even a book on Picasso’s Guernica. Perhaps his most famous work, an encyclopedia of architectural iconography, Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie was begun in 1968. Bandmann weighed into the battles raging with the student uprisings at German universities in 1968, coming out against their urgings for revision of the curriculum and interpreting contemporary political issues into the cannon of architectural history. He died suddenly at age 57, preceding many of those who taught him. His Tübingen students included Wolfgang Kemp (b.1946). Bandmann drew on the historical circumstances and social factors (Zeitmächten) of the middle ages to create a new criteria for architectural history, most influentially seen in his Mittelalterliche Architektur als Bedeutungsträger. Building upon the 1942 article of Richard Krautheimer, “Introduction to an Iconology of Medieval Architecture,” Bandmann’s book challenged architectural methodology by denying the prevailing German Formalist approach of architectural historians–of which Wilhelm Pinder was the major exponent–who analyzed buildings through a theory of stylistic development of form and space. Instead, he examined the transmission of building types from late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages, arguing against a constructional explanation in favor of one based on the intellectual meaning of the form Böker). For Bandmann, architecture itself did not “live” as the common metaphor went, rather it was the people who at different times used architecture differently that made a building alive. Artistic originality was not a valued goal in the middle ages, he argued, rather symbolic and historical form were the principal ways of understanding medieval architecture. Bandmann disparage overlaying modern architectural sensibilities to medieval form, criticizing those historians who did not consider the events and mindsets that took place within the architecture and society that helped build it. Although clearly drawing from the work of Hans Gerhard Evers and Hans Sedlmayr he diverged from the latter’s postivisitc view of an ideal medieval church form. Bandmann’s opposition to traditional architectural history created enemies, particularly the historians Kurt Bauch and Martin Gosebruch. The book became, in the words of Hans Josef Böker, “the single most influential book on methodological approaches in medieval architectural history–at least in Germany,” despite seldom being cited. The fullest result of his work was only later realized by his pupil, Kemp.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Kunst als Bedeutungsträger: Gedenkschrift für Günter Bandmann. Berlin: Mann, 1978, pp. 573-586; [dissertation:] Die Werdener Abteikirche (1256-1275): Studie zum Ausgang der staufischen Baukunst am Niederrhein. Cologne, 1942, published, Bonn: R. Habelt, 1953; Die Kölner Rheinfront. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1944; [habilitation:] Mittelalterliche Architektur als Bedeutungsträger. Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1951, English, Early Medieval Architecture as Bearer of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005; “Doppelkapelle, Doppelkirche.” Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte 3 (1952): 196-215; Melancholie und Musik: ikonographische Studien. Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1960; Picasso: Les demoiselles d’Avignon. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1965; Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie. 8 vols. Rome: Herder, 1968-1976.

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; 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. 71 mentioned; Böker, Hans Josef. “Afterward.” in Bandmann, Günter. Early Medieval Architecture as Bearer of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, pp. 249-255; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. 2nd. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007, pp. 6-9; [obituaries:] Urban, Günter. “Günter Bandmann.” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 37 (1975): 7-10; Münster 28 (June 1975): 180-181.

Contributors: HB and Lee Sorensen

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