Subject Area(s): Romanesque and sculpture (visual works)
Career(s): art critics
Overview
contemporary critic of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc; helped develop a chronology for Romanesque sculpture
Sources
Bazin 280; Cahn, Walter. “Henri Focillon.” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline. Volume 3: Philosophy and the Arts. Edited by Helen Damico. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 2110. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000, p. 265, mentioned.
Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), Antique, the, and Classical
Overview
Specialist in classical Greek and Roman art. Bruns was active in the Pergamon excavation at the request of Theodor Wiegand and after a long sickness, a volunteer scientific assistant at museums in Kassel and Braunschweig (1935-1939). She returned to Berlin in 1939 to work in the service of the Antiquities collection in the State Museum of Berlin, rising to the position of Curator in October 1945. Referent in the deutsches archäologisches Institute (German Archaeological Institute, or DAI) 1947-, from 1953 affiliated with the University of Freiburg (im.Breisgau) and from 1958 resident at the DAI in Rome.
Selected Bibliography
“Der Obelisk und seine Basis auf dem Hippodrom zu Konstantinopel” Ist Forsch VII (1935); and Wolters, Paul. Das Kabirenheiligtum bei Theben I. 1940; “Staatskameen des 4. Jahrhunderts nach Christi Geburt” 104.BWPr (1948); “Das mantuanische Onyxgefäß” Kunsthefte des Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museums Braunschweig 5 (1950).
Sources
Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 295-296.
Citation
"Bruns, Gerda." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/brunsg/.
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Specialist in classical Greek and Roman art. Bruns was active in the Pergamon excavation at the request of Theodor Wiegand and after a long sickness, a volunteer scientific assistant at museums in Kassel and Braunschweig (1
Subject Area(s): ancient, Ancient Greek (culture or style), and Classical
Overview
Early and important art historian of ancient Greek art. Professor at Munich University, 1865-1894 and director of the Glyptothek. Born the son of a minister, Brunn attended the University of Bonn studying archaeology and philology under Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker and Friedrich Ritschl (1806-1876). His dissertation was on the dating of Greek artists before Alexander. In 1843 he joined the Deutsche Archäologische Institut (German Archaeological Institute or “DAI”) in Rome under Emil Braun. He also made the acquaintance of Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903) and performed epigraphical work in the field for Ritschl. His study of the Farnese Hera appeared in 1846 and in 1853, the first volume of his major study on Greek art, Geischichte der griechischen Künstler appeared. The same year a received an appointment in Bonn, but remained unhappy. In 1857 he returned to Rome as the DAI’s second secretary (Braun had been the first), under Wilhelm Henzen (1816-1887). In 1865 he accepted the chair in archaeology at the University in Munich, he was the first scholar to occupy it, which he held until his death. Brunn authored a guide to the Glyptothek in Munich in 1868; by 1888 he was appointed its director. That year, too, he founded the Denkmäler griechischer und römischer Skulptur in historischer Anordung with the scholar-turned-publisher Friedrich Bruckmann, a series of 1500 plates. In 1891 a second, serially published, set of portraits began, the Griechische und römische Porträts. Brunn’s collecting for the Glyptothek made it a center for the study of classical sculpture, amplified by the significant casts collection. In 1893 he began publishing a second multi-volume study of Greek art, Griechische Kunstgeschichte. Although two volumes appeared, it remained unfinished at the time of his death. He never made a trip to Greece. Brunn’s most famous student was Heinrich Wölfflin; other eminent students included Walther Amelung, Paul Arndt, Josef Rudolf Thomas Strzygowski, Adolf Fürtwangler, who succeeded him in Munich, and Julius Langbehn; his lectures at the DAI inspired the work of Edoardo Brizio. His casts collection at the Glyptothek was destroyed in 1944. Brunn was a pioneer in the transition from aesthetic/artistic appreciation to scientific delineation of artistic style. Brunn’s lifelong work was “to trace the translation of mythological characters into the “language” of artistic form and to pave the way for the elaboration of a historical sequence of forms drawn directly from the monuments.” (Marchand). The epochal Geischichte der griechischen Künstler established the chronology of Greek art history. His Denkmäler griechischer und römischer Skulptur in historischer Anordung publicized important momuments. Brunn elevated Hellenistic art to a serious appreciation among scholars. He pioneered the method of determining date and source of sculptural fragments through a rigorous analysis of the representation of anatomic detail. He emphasized Anschauung (visual study) as a mode of understanding critical for education in the secondary school system. This method produced more dramatic results in the hands of his pupil, Fürtwangler, who employed it to develop a history of Greek vase painters. Brunn never forgot his mentor’s (Welcker) Totalitätsideal, the belief that specialists could not adequately make judgments about a discipline. His preferred articles to books; his Kleine Schriften remains an important collection. Brunn’s dissertation yielded two oft-quoted thoughts which are core to Brunn’s methodology: “sine philologiae lumine caecutire archaeologiam” (without the light of philology, archaeology is blind), and “in critica arte malo errare via et ratione, quam sine ratione verum invenire” (in scholarship, I prefer to err rationally than to discover truth intuitively).
Selected Bibliography
Geschichte der griechischen Künstler. 2 vols. Braunschweig: C.A.Schwetschke & Sohn, 1853 and 1859; “über die Grundverschiedenheit im Bildungsprincip der griechischen und ägyptischen Kunst,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 10 (1856): 158-159; “Archäologische Miscellen,” Sitzungsberichte der Königlichen Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse 2 (1872): 533; Bulle, Heinrich, ed., Heinrich Brunn’s Kleine Schriften. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1898-1906; Griechische Götterideale in ihren Formen erläutert. Munich: Verlagsanstalt für Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1893; Griechische Kunstgeschichte. Vol. 1: Die Anfänge und die älteste decorative Kunst. Munich: Bruckmann, 1893; Vol. 2: [edited by Adam Flasch.] Die archaische Kunst. Nachgelassene Theile. Munich: Bruckmann, 1897; and Lau, G. Theodor. Die griechischen Vasen: ihr Formen- und Decorationssystem. 2 vols. Leipzig: Seeman, 1877; and Bruckmann, Friedrich. Denkmäler griechischer und römischer Sculptur. Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1888-1900; and Arndt, Paul, et al. Griechische und römische Porträts. Munich: F. Bruckmann a.-G. 1891-1900; Beschreibung der Glyptothek König Ludwig’s I. zu München. Munich: T. Ackermann, 1868; Uber die kunstgeschichtliche Stellung der pergamenischen Gigantomachie. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1884.
Sources
Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988, pp 47-48; Suzanne L. Marchand. Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996, pp.: 109-110, 143-144; Adolf Furtwangler. “Heinrich von Brunn” in, Geist und Gestalt: Biographische Beiträge zur Geschichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften vornehmlich im zweiten Jahrhundert ihres Bestehens. vol. 1, Munich: Beck, 1959; Calder, William. “Brunn, Heinrich von.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 1, pp. 202-03.
Citation
"Brunn, Enrico." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/brunnh/.
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Early and important art historian of ancient Greek art. Professor at Munich University, 1865-1894 and director of the Glyptothek. Born the son of a minister, Brunn attended the University of Bonn studying archaeology and philology under
[mentioned:] Keller, Harald. “Vorwort.” Miscellanea Bibliothecae Hertzianae zu Ehren von Leo Bruhns, Franz Graf Wolff Metternich [und] Ludwig Schudt. Munich: A. Schroll, 1961, p. [i].
Citation
"Bruhns, Leo." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/bruhnsl/.
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Modernist art historian; partner with Claes Oldenburg in artworks, 1977-2009. Bruggen’s father was a medical doctor who held weekly salons for writers and painters at their home where she and her siblings participated. She studied art history at the Rijks University of Groningen, earning a graduate degree in 1967. Bruggen joined the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam the same year as a curator. She worked with conceptual artists Doug Wheeler, Larry Bell, Jan Dibbets and Ger van Elk, marrying around this time. While installing a traveling exhibition in New York, she met the Swedish-American pop artist Claes Oldenburg in 1970. Returning to the Netherlands, she was appointed professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Enschede. After a divorce, she and Oldenburg, also now divorced, collaborated in 1976 on a 41-foot “Trowel I” on the grounds of the Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands, which she insisted be colored differently. Her relationship with Oldenburg grew into what the artist termed “a unity of opposites;” they were married in 1977. The first piece they created collaboratively was the 1981 “Flashlight,” an outdoor sculpture at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Thereafter they considered their work collaborative, though museum curators did not always jointly credit her. As an art historian she assisted in selecting artists for Documenta 7, the 1982 international contemporary art exhibition. Bruggen contributed articles to Artforum magazine between 1983 and 1988 as an art critic. She and Oldenburg lived in New York with alternate homes in Los Angeles and Beaumont-sur-Deme, in the Loire Valley of France. A book on Frank Gehry and Oldenburg appeared in 1987. In 1993 she became a U.S. citizen. Bruggen was senior critic in the sculpture department at Yale University School of Art for the 1996-1997 academic year. A monograph on Bruce Naumann was published in 2002. While in the fabrication stages of the work of art “Tumbling Tacks,” giant thumb tacks sculpture designed for a Norwegian Kistefos Sculpture Park in rural Oslo, she died at her Los Angeles home of metastatic breast cancer. Bruggen’s understanding of how Oldenburg’s art fit into a history of modern art helped shape his large-scale pieces. Her systematic and conceptual thinking gained Oldenburg important public commissions. As an art historian of modern artists, she was known for a hard, fact-driven approach to looking at an artist’s oeuvre.
Selected Bibliography
Il Corso del coltello = The Course of the Knife. [project and performance by] Claes Oldenburg, Coosje van Bruggen, Frank O. Gehry. New York: Rizzoli, 1987; Bruce Nauman. New York: Rizzoli, 1988; John Baldessari. New York: Rizzoli, 1990;. Frank O Gehry: Guggenheim Museum. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1997; Bruce Nauman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002; Robert Whitman: Turning. New York: PaceWildenstein, 2007.
Sources
[obituaries:] Muchnic, Suzanne. “Coosje van Bruggen, 1942-2009; Art Historian Teamed with Sculptor Spouse.” Los Angeles Times January 13, 2009, p. B8; Kino, Carol. “Coosje van Bruggen, Pop Sculptor, Is Dead at 66.” New York Times January 14, 2009, p. B10.
Archives
Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen Archives [In Process], Getty Research Institute.
Contributors: Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen
Citation
Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen. "Bruggen, Coosje, van." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/bruggenc/.
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Modernist art historian; partner with Claes Oldenburg in artworks, 1977-2009. Bruggen’s father was a medical doctor who held weekly salons for writers and painters at their home where she and her siblings participated. She studied art history at t
Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), Antique, the, Classical, and funerary art
Overview
Specialist in Greek funerary art. Leader of the excavation project of the “Cemetery of Eridanos” next to the Hagia Triada in Athens, 1907-1930.
Sources
Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 144-145.
Citation
"Brueckner, Alfred." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/bruecknera/.
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Classical art scholar and founder of the influential art publishing firm, F. Bruckmann. Bruckmann founded the publishing company F. Bruckmann in Frankfurt in 1858 as a “Verlag für Kunst und Wissenschaft” (Press for art and the sciences). Five years later the company moved to Munich in 1863. Bruckmann’s knowledge of both art historians and artists gave him an entre into the field. In 1888 he co-founded the Denkmäler griechischer und römischer Skulptur in historischer Anordung with University of Munich art historian Enrico Brunn.
Classical art scholar and founder of the influential art publishing firm, F. Bruckmann. Bruckmann founded the publishing company F. Bruckmann in Frankfurt in 1858 as a “Verlag für Kunst und Wissenschaft” (Press for art and the sciences). Five year
Place Born: Streatham, Lambeth, London, England, UK
Place Died: Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Subject Area(s): Medieval (European)
Overview
Medievalist at the British Museum, principal scholar of the Sutton Hoo find. Bruce-Mitford was born to the writer and geographer/vulcanologist Charles Eustace Bruce-Mitford (1875-1919), and Beatrice Jean (1873-1956). Bruce-Mitford attended Hertford College, Oxford, as a Baring scholar studying history and graduating in 1936. He began work on a second bachelor’s degree in literature, studying fourteenth-century English art under the British Museum manuscript historian Robin Flower (1881-1946). Through his work with Flower, Bruce-Mitford was named an assistant keeper on a temporary basis at the Ashmolean Museum in 1938. The same year, he transferred to the British Museum, abandoning his efforts for an art degree to become assistant keeper of the department of British and medieval antiquities under Thomas D. Kendrick. The Museum immediately sent him to the Little Woodbury excavation under the direction of Gerhard Bersu (1889-1964). In 1939 he carried out an excavation of a medieval village at Seacourt (near Oxford), the first medieval excavation in Britain to employ modern scholarly archaeological method. During World War II, he served in the Royal Signal Corps of Essex, London, and Yorkshire. He married Kathleen Dent (b. 1916) in 1941, returning to the museum in 1945. His post-war duties increased to include earlier medieval art. Among these new responsibilities was the curation of the Sutton Hoo objects, a royal grave site discovered in 1939 but hidden for safe-keeping during the war. Bruce-Mitford had the objects restored (many were fragmentary at their discovery) and displayed beginning in 1947. He published an initial guide The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial: a Provisional Guide the same year while at the same time compiling a more complete catalog on the objects with an assembled team. Starting in 1949 he excavated the Saxon-era site of Mawgan Porth on the coast of Cornwall (published posthumously in 1997). He was appointed keeper of both earlier and later medieval departments at the British Museum in 1954. In 1955 he excavated the chapter house graves at Lincoln Cathedral. His two major facsimiles, the Codex Lindisfarnensis and the Codex Amiatinus also appeared in the mid 1950s. During this time he separated from his wife. As a curator, Bruce-Mitford made many acquisitions; two spectacular ones were the 1958 purchase of the Rothschild Lycurgus cup, a fourth-century BC glass, and the Ilbert clock and watch collection. In 1960 the Sutton Hoo team moved to its Montague Street location. He and Thomas Hoving, then curator of the Cloisters Museum (a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY), competed to acquire the twelfth-century Bury St. Edmunds ivory cross in 1963. Hoving eventually secured the rare item, partially through Hoving’s intrigue and partially because the British Museum would not permit acquisition of an art object with an undisclosed provenance. In 1969 Bruce-Mitford formed a new department, Prehistoric and Romano-British antiquities, continuing to head both British and Medieval Antiquities (now renamed the Department of Mediaeval and Later Antiquities), and this new department. He divorced in 1972 and remarried his Sutton Hoo research assistant, Marilyn Roberta Luscombe (b. 1945), thirty-one years younger than he. Volume one of Bruce-Mitford’s scholarly Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial appeared in 1975, (volume two in 1978, and three in 1983). The same year he relinquished the duties of keeper of the Mediaeval and Later Antiquities Department to become Research Keeper. He retired from the British Museum in 1977 and was succeeded by Neil Stratford. He taught as Slade professor of fine art at Cambridge and as professorial fellow of Emmanuel College for the 1978-1979 year. In 1984 he divorced and consequentially sold his vast personal library living with friends. He married a third time to an Oxford classmate Margaret Edna Adams (1916-2002) in 1988. He spent his retirement researching A Corpus of Late Celtic hanging bowls, AD 400-800, which he had begun writing after the war. Though physically active to the end (he had been snorkelling off the Great Barrier Reef before his death) Bruce-Mitford suffered a heart attack in 1994 after a long history of heart problems. He is buried in the cemetery at St. Mary the Virgin, Bampton. His brother was the archaeologist Terence Bruce-Mitford (1905-1978). Although Bruce-Mitford did not discover Sutton Hoo (except for post excavation work 1965-1968), he was responsible for both publicizing it and providing the scholarly documentation for which they are associated. His analysis of the Lindisfarne Gospels formed the basis of studies of that important manuscript. He assisted in establishing the National Reference Collection of dated mediaeval pottery. A strong personality, he “often got into difficulties, some of them avoidable.” (Biddle).
Selected Bibliography
The Sutton Hoo Ship-burial, a Provisional Guide. London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1947; and Clark, J. G. D. Recent Archaeological Excavations in Britain, Selected Excavations 1939-1955. London: Routledge & Paul, 1956; and Ashbee, Paul. The Sutton Hoo Ship-burial. 3 vols. London: British Museum Publications, 1975-1983; and Taylor, Robin, ed. Mawgan Porth: a Settlement of the Late Saxon Period on the North Cornish Coast: Excavations 1949-52, 1954, and 1974. London: English Heritage, 1997; [facsimiles:] Evangeliorum quattuor Codex Lindisfarnensis; Musei Britannici Codex Cottonianus Nero D. IV permissione Musei Britannici totius codicis similitudo expressa. 2 vols. Lausanne: Urs Graf, 1956-60; The Art of the Codex Amiatinus. Jarrow: Parish of Jarrow, 1968.
Sources
Biddle, Martin. “Mitford, Rupert Leo Scott Bruce-.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; personal correspondence Marilyn Bruce-Mitford December 2009; [obituaries:] Mullaly, Terence. “Keeper of the Death Ship.” The Guardian (London), April 5, 1994, p. 19; Cramp, Rosemary. “Rupert Bruce-Mitford.” The Independent (London), March 23, 1994, p. 14;Pace, Eric. “Rupert Bruce-Mitford Dies at 79, Expert on Saxon Ruin in England.” New York Times, March 18, 1994, p.B8 [academic degrees incorrect].
Citation
"Bruce-Mitford, Rupert Leo Scott." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/brucemitfordr/.
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Medievalist at the British Museum, principal scholar of the Sutton Hoo find. Bruce-Mitford was born to the writer and geographer/vulcanologist Charles Eustace Bruce-Mitford (1875-1919), and Beatrice Jean (1873-1956). Bruce-Mitford attended Hertfor
First director of both the Los Angeles Museum of Art and the Kimball Art Museum, Fort Worth. Brown’s parents were Percy Melville Brown and Hazel Wyatte Brown. His father, an importer, took him on buying trips to South America where the younger Brown gained an appreciation for art. Brown graduated from Bucknell University in 1940, continuing for a master’s degree in art history at the Institute for Fine Art, New York University. He married for the first time in 1941. The outbreak of World War II caused Brown to enlist in the U.S. Navy. After discharge in 1946, Brown entered Harvard University, securing his M.A. in 1947. He worked as a teaching assistant while pursuing his Ph.D. and, in 1949, as a research scholar and lecturer at the Frick Collection in New York. His Ph.D., awarded in 1952 was on Camile Pissaro. Brown continued to lecture at the Frick until 1954 when, after a year as visiting professor at Harvard, he was hired as chief curator for the Los Angeles County museum of History, Science and Art in 1955. City leaders planned to split the art collection into a separate art museum. Led by business magnate and art collector Norton Simon (1907-1993), Brown and Simon developed plans for the future museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Brown also advised Simon in his person collection (today the Norton Simon Museum). The fledgling museum mounted a Renior show n 1955 and van Gogh show in 1958. Brown became the Museum’s first director in 1962.
He hired Kenneth Donahue, then director of the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota, FL, to be his assistant director in 1964. He married a second time, to his secretary, Jane Hoag. Hoag subsequently contracted polio and used a wheelchair for the remainder of her life. Brown found himself disagreeing more and more with the Museum board, particularly on the choice of architects: pushing for Mies van der Rohe as a world-class designer while Board members insisted on a local architect, William Perera. Partially because of the ill-defined roles of the Board in the new museum, members continued to discount Brown’s opinion. Shortly after the 1966 opening of the Perera-designed building, Brown resigned, accepting a call from the Kimball Foundation of Fort Worth, Texas. He was succeeded at LACMA by Donahue.
The Foundation had inherited the art collection of Kay Kimball, a Fort Worth businessman, and mandate to build a first-class art museum in Fort Worth. Brown hired the high-profile but quixotic architect Louis Kahn to design the building. The result was a building that is considered one of Kahn’s finest works and an important hallmark in museum architecture. The Kimball collection, however, consisted largely of English portraiture. Brown judiciously acquired a wide variety of works representative of western art, including Picasso’s “Man with a Pipe,” a twelfth-century Avignon wall painting, a Duccio altarpiece, and an enthroned Khmer Buddha. He was awarded an honorary degree from Bucknell in 1967. He died of a heart attack at age 63. He was succeeded at the Kimball by Edmund Pillsbury. Brown exerted influence as a founding director on two major American art museums. A man of short stature but engaging personality, Norton Simon called Brown “my first teacher in the art world,” (Glueck). As a director, he maintained a positive rapport with his staff, including the lowest level workers (Ferguson).
Selected Bibliography
[dissertation:] The Color Technique of Camille Pissarro. Harvard University, 1952;
Sources
[transcript] Ferguson, Cecil. African-American Artists of Los Angeles: Cecil Fergerson.Los Angeles: Department of Special Collections University of California, Los Angeles, pp. 103, 127; Muchnic, Suzanne. Odd Man In: Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998; [obituary:] Glueck, Grace. “Richard Fargo Brown Dead at 63, Led Ft. Worth’s Kimbell Museum.” New York Times November 7, 1979, p. B7.
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
Citation
Lee Sorensen. "Brown, Richard." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/brownr/.
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First director of both the Los Angeles Museum of Art and the Kimball Art Museum, Fort Worth. Brown’s parents were Percy Melville Brown and Hazel Wyatte Brown. His father, an importer, took him on buying trips to South America where the younger Bro
Marxist-methodology Americanist art historian. Brown’s father was Samuel Brown and his mother Celia Hamilton (Brown), Jewish grocers owners in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. He studied art privately under painter and printmaker Louis Lozowick (1892-1973) before attending New York University where he graduated with a B.A. 1932, intent on becoming a public school teacher. He continued at NYU for his M.A., studying under Walter Friedlaender, Erwin Panofsky and Meyer Schapiro. His intent was to study American art, however, NYU gave no courses were given in that area. Walter W. S. Cook of the Institute encouraged him to continue an interest. After a summer at the Courtauld Institute, London, funded by a Carnegie Scholarship in 1935 and a summer at University of Brussels in 1937, he completed a master’s thesis, his French Revolutionary Painting, which he published the following year. He continued study at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum between 1938 and 1939 in the museum course of Paul J. Sachs. He married the classical art scholar and fellow IFA student Blanche R. Levine in 1938. In 1940 he received a Fogg Museum Fellowship for Modern art. Together with his new wife, the pair bought at car and toured United States museums across the country, studying American art. He served in the U. S. army during World War II in Italy in the 85th Infantry Division beginning in 1943, later reassigned to the Army’s news paper Stars and Stripes, in the Rome office. He remained in the army until 1946 where he was decorated with the bronze star. After the war, he joined Brooklyn College (today Brooklyn College of the City University of New York) as an instructor in the art department in 1946. The College was undergoing a reorganization by the Chechen-born British architect Serge Chermayeff (1900-1996) along the lines of an American Bauhaus. Brown continued at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, His Ph. D. at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, in 1949, was titled “American Art from the Armory Show to the Depression.” That same year he advanced to assistant professor at Brooklyn College, then associate professor in 1956 and professor from 1960 until 1970. His 1959 research was sponsored by the Bollingen Foundation. In 1962 while researching his book on the Armory show, Brown learned the the Archives of American Art in Detroit had just acquired an important set of documents. After spending a week with the material, Brown became so enamored with the Archives that he joined, first as a member and later as chairman in 1967. In 1963 he masterminded the remounting of the Armory Show in the exact location on its fiftieth anniversary. He participated a radio broadcast with Marcel DuChamp reviewing the original exhibition. He was responsible for interesting the collector Joseph Hirshhorn in the work of David Smith. Brown also worked with others to establish the doctoral program in art history at the College, instituted in 1971 under a curriculum designed by himself and Leo Steinberg. He chaired the art department between 1964 and 1971. In 1974 he and Louise A. Parks curated the Jacob Lawrence show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1979 his American Art to 1900 and the 1972 book American Art of the Twentieth Century by Sam Hunter were combined into American Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Decorative Arts, Photography. He was City University of New York resident professor from 1979 until 1991. He retired professor emeritus from CUNY in 1979 (succeeded by Morris Dorsky) and became a senior fellow at Williams College Art Museum until 1993. Between 1983 and 1987 he participated as senior fellow on the Maurice Prendergast catalogue raisonné at Williams College. Brown was a Samuel H. Kress professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art, Washgington, D. C., for the1989-1990 year. An introduction to a monograph on the artist Jack Levine, also a personal friend, appeared in 1990. Brown was deeply affected by the political Marxism of the 1930s in the United States and was one of the early exponents of its application to art history. His interest in the1913 Amory show and other American art events as well as his devotion to a documentary history of art were indicative of this belief. His dissertation and later book on American art between 1913 and the 1930s was the first scholarly treatment of that period of art. He maintained a social-history interest in all of his art writing. He and his wife, Blanche, amassed a superb collection of art nouveau and Tiffany objects, posters and furniture.
Selected Bibliography
[dissertation:] American Art from the Armory Show to the Depression. New York University, 1949; The Painting of the French Revolution. New York: Critics Group, 1938; American Painting, 1913-1929. New York: New York University, 1952; American painting, from the Armory show to the depressioN. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955; The Story of the Armory Show. Greenwich, CT: Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation/New York Graphic Society, 1963; and Parks, Louise A. Jacob Lawrence. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1974; History of American Art to 1900. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977, combined with Sam Hunter’s Art of the Twentieth Century as, American Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Decorative Arts, Photography. New York: Abrams, 1979.
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. 80; [obituaries:] “Milton Brown 1911-1998: Appreciation.” Archives of American Art Journal 37, no. 1/2 (1997): 64; Gerdts, William. “Milton Brown (1911-1998): A Tribute.” American Art 12, no. 2 (Summer, 1998): 74-77.
Marxist-methodology Americanist art historian. Brown’s father was Samuel Brown and his mother Celia Hamilton (Brown), Jewish grocers owners in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. He studied art privately under painter and printmaker Louis Lozowick (1892-1973)
