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Camón Aznar, José

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Camón Aznar, José

Gender: male

Date Born: 04 October 1898

Date Died: 14 May 1979

Place Born: Zaragoza, Aragon, Spain

Place Died: Madrid, Spain

Home Country/ies: Spain

Subject Area(s): Renaissance, Spanish (culture or style), and Spanish Renaissance-Baroque styles

Institution(s): Complutense University of Madrid, Universidad de Salamanca, and Universidad de Zaragoza

Overview

Professor, museum director, founder of Goya. José Camón Aznar received his bachelor’s degree from the Escuelas Pias de Zaragoza, where his uncle, Reverend Desiderio Aznar, and his brother, Angel Aznar, were professors. He then graduated from the University of Zaragoza with a law degree. There he studied under Spanish writer Domingo Miral y Lopez (1872-1942) and Andres Jimenez Soler (1869- 1938). In 1927, he became the Chair of the Teoría de la literatura y de las artes (Theory of Literature and Arts) department at the University of Salamanca. It was there he befriended Spanish essayist Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936). He remained in Salamanca until 1939, when he left to work at the University of Zaragoza as an Art History professor. In 1940, he shared his critical point of view in El arte desde su esencia (Art from its Essence) though it was met with some controversy in Spain. Beginning in 1940 he began writing in the Tercera de ABC (the third page and most read page of ABC, a daily national Spanish newspaper) and published more than 500 articles throughout his career. In 1943, he became the Chair of Medieval Christan and Byzantine Art at the University of Madrid and later became a Dean of Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. He founded the art magazine Revista de Ideas Esteticas (Magazine of Aesthetics Ideas) in 1943. During these years he published Dominico Greco (1950) and “Los Disparates” de Goya y sus dibujos preparatorios (1951). In 1951, he founded and became the first director of the Lazaro Galdiano Foundation Museum in Madrid. Because of the reforms introduced by Aznar and the inauguration of new exhibition spaces, the Lazaro Museum became one of the most highly regarded museums in Madrid (Iñiguez). Working with the foundation, he created the review Goya (1954) which was published by the museum. He founded and was the president of the first association of Spanish critics, La Asociación Española de Críticos de Arte (Spanish Association of Art Critics) in 1961. He published an extensive account of Picasso in Picasso y el cubismo (1956). He compiled miscellaneous articles from his works in ABC in more extensive publications like Las artes y los dias (The Artes and the Days) (1965). In 1973, he was awarded his third Premio Nacional de Literatura (National Literature Prize). A couple of years before his death he wrote an autobiography titled José Camón Aznar: perfil autobiográfico (1984) .Months after his death, the Museo e Instituto de Humanidades Camón Aznar (Museum and Institute of Humanities Camón Aznar) was inaugurated in his birth town.

Aznar’s reflections, essays on art and its theory, and critiques of art and its aesthetics were critical in reviving the art scene in postwar Madrid. Throughout these works, rather than cataloguing miniscule details of artists and their respective works, he approached the critique of art as a literary interpretation of artistic pieces from all periods (Lorente). He refused to establish chronological or methodological boundaries between history of art and its aesthetics. His articles covered topics from prehistoric paintings, to modern skyscrapers, to Spanish contemporary art, as he tackled the historiography of art. He wrote extensively on Spanish artists including Picasso, Velazquez, and the Renaissance painter Pedro Berruguete (1450-1504). Aznar explained that his intent was to convey the personality of the artist while sharing his own commentary. Because his works were so widely read, they encouraged the general public to more broadly consider both aesthetic reflection and artistic criticism.

Aznar lived during the Francoist regime. In his youth, Aznar expressed liberal, republican ideologies––he was a member of the Juventud Aragonesista and was a candidate for Salamanca for the Partido Radical. Prior to Franco, the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios (The Board for Advanced Studies) enabled Aznar and his colleagues to be well acquainted with foreign art history publications. While Franco disbanded the board in 1938, Anzar remained rather silent about his political ideologies throughout the duration of Franco’s regime. He was even named a representative to the Academias en las Cortes (Francoist Court). He then shifted to accept the democratic monarchy which emerged after Franco.

Selected Bibliography

El arte desde su esencia. Zaragoza: Espasa-Calpe, 1940;
“Los Disparates” de Goya y sus dibujos preparatorios. Barcelona, 1951;
Dominico Greco. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1950;
Las artes y los días. Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1965;
Picasso y el cubismo. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1956;
José Camón Aznar: perfil autobiográfico. Zaragoza: Museo e Instituto “Camón Aznar,” 1984;

Sources

Alfeo, María Victoria Gómez and Fernando García Rodríguez. 2008. “José Camón Aznar:
Documentación De La Crítica De Arte En La “Tercera De ABC” Documentación De Las Ciencias De La Información 31: 67-104;
Alzuria, Gonzalo Pasamar, and Ignacio Peiró Martín. Diccionario Akal de Historiadores españoles contemporáneos. Ediciones AKAL, 2002;
Angulo Iñiguez, Diego. “José Camón Aznar.” Archivo Español de Arte; Madrid 52, no. 206 (April 1, 1979): 279–280;
Camón Aznar, José. “Camón Aznar.” José Camón Aznar: perfil autobiográfico. Zaragoza: Museo e Instituto “Camón Aznar,” 1984;
Canosa, Paloma Alarcó. “José Camón Aznar” Oxford Art Online.
J. A. Gaya Nuño: Historia de la crítica de arte en España: Sus monumentos y artes, su naturaleza historia (Madrid, 1975);
Lomba Fuentes, Joaquín. El Pensamiento de Camón Aznar. [Zaragoza], 1984;
Lorente, Jesús Pedro Lorente. “Camón Aznar como crítico y presidente fundador de la AECA.” AACADigital: Revista de la Asociación Aragonesa de Críticos de Arte, no. 18 (2012): 6–15;
Pardo Canalis, Enrique. “Necrología del Excmo. Sr. D. José Camón Aznar.” Academia; Madrid 2, no. 48 (Spring 1979): 3;
Cook, Walter W. S. Review of Review of La arquitectura plateresca, by José Camón Aznar. The Art Bulletin 28, no. 4 (1946): 281–83. a href=”https://doi.org/10.2307/3047091 target=”blank”>https://doi.org/10.2307/3047091.

Contributors: Denise Shkurovich

Professor, museum director, founder of Goya. José Camón Aznar received his bachelor’s degree from the Escuelas Pias de Zaragoza, where his uncle, Reverend Desiderio Aznar, and his brother, Angel Aznar, were professors. He then graduated f

Camille, Michael

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Camille, Michael

Gender: male

Date Born: 1958

Date Died: 2002

Place Born: Keighley, Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, UK

Place Died: Chicago, Cook, IL, USA

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Medieval (European)

Career(s): educators

Overview

Medievalist art historian, University of Chicago professor 1989-2002. Camille was the son of Marcel and Mavis Camille, a working-class couple in Yorkshire. A brilliant child, he was noticed by an English teacher at a time when England was loosening up its thinking of who could be college material. Though no one from this school had gone to Cambridge in fifty years or had any idea of which college to apply to, Camille was accepted to Peterhouse College, Cambridge, elected Andrew Perne Scholar in art history and Research Fellow at Clare Hall, eventually graduating with first class with honors in Art History and English in 1980. He continued for his M.A. in 1982 and a Ph.D. in Art History in 1985, working with George D. S. Henderson on medieval art, Jean Michel Massing, and informally on critical theory under Norman Bryson. The same year he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago and published a ground-breaking article, “Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy.” in the journal Art History. The following year, 1986, he met Stuart Michaels, Assistant Director and Lecturer in the Committee on Gender Studies at the University who became his life partner. Camille received a Getty Foundation travel grant in 1988. In 1989 he published a second seminal article, “Visual Signs of the Sacred Page” in the journal Word & Image. In that article, Camille used the Vienna Bible moralise´e as an example, demonstrating that medieval illumination was as much about ideological manipulation of symbols of power as it was with the meaning of the Bible. That year, too, his first book, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in the Medieval Art, examining the representation of Christianity’s Other,” pagans, Jews, and homosexuals, was published. It was followed by Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art in 1992. Image on the Edge demonstrated Camille’s assertion that the art of the Middle Ages was not a somber expression of social unity and transcendent order. Rather, it was rooted in the conflicted life of the body with all its somatic as well as spiritual possibilities. He also served as visiting directeur d’etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin for the 1992-1993 year. Indicative of his humor and historiographic interest was his 1994 essay on the influence of the Columbia Medievalist Meyer Schapiro, “How New York Stole the Idea of Romanesque Art,” a play on the famous book by the modernist art historian Serge Guilbaut. In 1996, Camille published an introductory volume, Glorious Visions: Gothic Art a provocative survey alternative to more conventional surveys of the gothic. The same year, Camille was interviewed by National Public Radio’s Ira Glass on the program “This American Life.” The two visited a medieval theme park in Illinois where actors presented a rather camp view of the middle ages for recreation. Camille ignored the many inaccuracies to point out the similar spirit of the event to the historic age. In 1996, too, he published, Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator, examining the images of the Black Death. His book Medieval Art of Love,1997, was followed by Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England, his last book published in his lifetime, in 1998. In 2000, Camille joined the Guggenheim project, “Signs and Streetlife in Medieval France,” examining urban streets, wooden houses, secular structures heretofore not considered part of the medieval studies. Camille had just completed a book on the nineteenth-century redecorations of Notre Dame cathedral, The Gargoyles of Notre Dame: Medievalism And The Monsters of Modernity, when he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He died at age 44. Another manuscript, Stones of Sodom, a multi-volume study of medieval homosexuality through art, remained incomplete.Camille’s interest was in medieval daily life as discerned through its material culture. His Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator took an insignificant artist and documented his work without exalting him. “His projects were always based on a visual body of work, a group of images that struck him as having something in common but with a connection that had been overlooked. Other scholars would see some huge monument as a whole, with the relationship of all the parts assumed; he would look at groups of little figures on separate structures and discover the minute gestures that drew these otherwise isolated things together. (Seidel). He demonstrated a way of reading the work of an artist that owed a lot to literary history and biography. It was more narrative than traditional art history has been—I think it upset a number of art historians because it was so literary in what it said about that particular painter, it wasn’t just about drapery, (Carruthers). Camille argued that that the marginal spaces were controlled “mayhem,” of “intentional misreading,” demonstrating class antagonism between aristocratic and clerical contributions, the text, and the marginalia illustrations, produced by the largely lower class artisans, including women. His work owed much to the writing of Michel Foucault (1926-1984), Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), and Victor Witter Turner (1920-1983), a loose Marxist approach to image theory. His article Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy, argued that to understand medieval images of the twelfth century, one had to understand Europe’s communications revolution, from “orality to literacy,” a shift in which the manuscript played a critical role. The Gothic Idol challenged the work of Émile Mâle and in particular his Gothic Image. Mâle viewed the gothic cathedrals through the great texts of medieval thought, using literary works as the principal tool in interpreting medieval art, and turning the sculpture into texts of a kind as well. Camille denied that images reflected these texts but rather commented on them, changing and occasionally subverting their meaning. Camille cited the medieval debates about when imagery was idolatrous and when allowable. How an image functioned was key to Camille’s approach.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Boeye, Kerry. “A Bibliography of the Writings of Michael Camille.” Gesta 41 no. 1 (2002): 141-144; Gothic Art: Glorious Visions. New York : Harry N. Abrams, 1996; The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; Image on the Edge: the Margins of Medieval Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992; Master of Death: the Lifeless art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996; The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire. New York : Abrams, 1998; Mirror in Parchment : the Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998; “How New York Stole the Idea of Romanesque Art’: Medieval, Modern and Postmodern in Meyer Schapiro.” Oxford Art Journal 17 no. 1 (1994): 65-75; “Art History in the Past and Future of Medieval Studies.” in, Van Engen, John H., ed. The Past and Future of Medieval Studies. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994, pp. 362-382; “Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy.” Art History 8, no.1 (1985): 26-49; “Visual Signs of the Sacred Page: Books in the Bible Moralise´e.” Word & Image 5, no. 1, (January-March 1989): 111-130.

Sources

[obituaries:] Alexander, Jonathan. “Michael Camille (1958-2002).” Burlington Magazine 144 (November 2002): 695; Nelson, Robert S., and Seidel, Linda. “Michael Camille: A Memorial.” Gesta 41 no. 1, no. 2 (2002): 137-9; Seidel, Linda, and Carruthers, Mary. University of Chicago News Office, May 1, 2002 (http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/02/020501.camille.shtml); The University of Chicago Chronicle21 no. 15 (May 9, 2002); CAA News http://www.collegeart.org/caa/news/2002/July/peopleinthenews; Nelson, Robert S. “Michael Camille: Scholar who Introduced a Series of Fresh Interpretations of the Art of the Middle Ages.” The Guardian (London), Thursday May 16, 2002, p. 20; “Michael Camille.” The Times (London), June 5, 2002.

Calvi, Girolamo-Luigi

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Calvi, Girolamo-Luigi

Gender: male

Date Born: 1791

Date Died: 1872

Place Born: Milan, Lombardy, Italy

Place Died: Milan, Lombardy, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): catalogues raisonnés, Italian (culture or style), and Milanese

Overview

Author of Notizie sulla vita, 1859-1869, the first great history of Milanese art of the 14th to the 16th century; largely established the canon of early Milanese artists.

Calabrese, Omar

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Calabrese, Omar

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): art theory and semiotics

Institution(s): Università degli Studi di Siena

Overview

semiotics and art history

Selected Bibliography

Le arti figurative e il linguaggio. Florence, 1977.

Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 p. 348

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

semiotics and art history

Cahn, Walter B.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Cahn, Walter B.

Other Names:

Walter Cahn

Gender: male

Date Born: 1933

Place Born: Karlsruhe, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Medieval (European)

Overview

Medievalist and professor of the History of Art, Yale University. Cahn’s father, Otto Cahn, owned a cigar factory in Lingenfeld, Germany; his mother was Frieda Cahn. His family’s synagogue in Karlsruhe was torched on Kristallnacht, 1938, and the family deported by the Nazi’s to a detention camp at Gurs, France in 1940. When the family was relocated to a second camp in Rivesaltes (Pyrénées-Orientales), Cahn and his brother were smuggled to Moissac, France, and settled under the éclaireurs Israelites de France. He learned French to better assimilate into the Nazi-occupied country. After liberation, he attended the local lycée, pursusing the cycle classique track. An American aunt and uncle brought him to the Brooklyn in 1948 were he learned English and attended public schools (P.S. 138 and the School of Industrial Art). Cahn entered the Pratt Institute intent on becoming an artist in 1952, receiving a B.F.A. in 1956. He served in the U. S. army as a Medical Corpsman between 1956 and 1958 in Washgington, D. C., returning to graduate work, this time in art history at Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 1958. Cahn studied medieval architecture under Richard Krautheimer, but ultimately aligned himself with the medievalist Harry Bober. He wrote his Master’s thesis at Bober’s urging in 1960 on wooden statues of the Virgin and their relationship to stone renderings. The same year he married Annabelle Simon. Continuing for his Ph.D., at the Institute, he took courses under Otto Pächt and further courses with Meyer Shapiro at Columbia University. Cahn secured a Fulbright scholarship for Paris to research his thesis on the Souvingy Bible in Moulins. In Paris, Cahn made contacts with Jean Porcher, head of the department of manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale, Francis Salet of the Musée de Cluny, participating in trips led by Louis Grodecki and the Saturday lectures of André Grabar, known as the travaux pratiques at the École pratique des hautes études. Still researching his dissertation, Cahn taught as a senior lecturer in art history at Ravensbourne College of Art, Bromley, Kent, England, between 1963-1965. He returned to Yale University as an instructor, 1965-1967, remaining teaching at Yale his entire career. Cahn discovered a medieval manuscript, the so-called Murphy Haggadah, in a Yale library in 1965, which would later be important in repartion. In 1967 he completed his dissertation on Romanesque manuscript illumination under Bober and immediately was appointed assistant professor at Yale and chair of the department. He rose to associate professor the following year, 1968. The senior medievalist at Yale, Sumner McKnight Crosby, appointed Cahn the secretary of the ICMA (International Center of Medieval Art) and editor of the Center’s journal, Gesta. Cahn’s monograph on the wooden Romanesque doors at Auvergne, part of the College Art Association’s Monographs on Archaeology and Fine Arts, appeared in 1974. He rose to (full) professor of the history of art in 1976. Together with University of Chicago medievalist Linda Seidel he issued a scholarly inventory of Romanesque sculpture held in the United States in 1979. In 1985, Cahn’s discovered “Murphy Haggadah” was determined by James Marrow and a graduate student to have been owned by Baron James A. de Rothschild, and stolen during World War II. It was returned to the family by Yale. Cahn was Director of International Center of Medieval Art. His students included Elizabeth Sears and Jill Meredith. Cahn published medieval Judaism as a means to gauge cultural property (Sears). As an art historiographer, he wrote much on the Yale University medievalist Henri Focillon.

Selected Bibliography

{complete bibliography:] Sears, Elizabeth. ” A Bibliography of the Writings of Walter Cahn.” in Hourihane, Colum, ed. Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn. University Park, Pa: Penn State Press, 2008, pp.24-30; [dissertation:] The Souvigny Bible: A Study in Romanesque Manuscript Illumination. New York University, 1967; Masterpieces: Chapters on the History of an Idea. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979; “Review of Meyer Schapiro, The Parma Idlefonsus.” Art Bulletin 49 (1967): 72-75; Romanesque Bible Illumination. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982; and Seidel, Linda. Romanesque Sculpture in American Collections. 2 vols. New York : B. Franklin, 1979ff.; The Romanesque Wooden Doors of Auvergne. New York: New York University Press/College Art Association of America, 1974; and Vermeule, Cornelius, and Hadley, Rollin van N. Sculpture in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Boston Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1977; “Schapiro and Focillon.” Gesta 41/42 (2002): 129-136; personal correspondence September 2010.

Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, pp. 12, 107; personal correspondence, July 2008 [birth place incorrect in Contemporary Authors]; Sears, Elizabeth. “The Art-Historical Work of Walter Cahn.” pp. 13-23, and Cahn, Walter. “Romanesque Art, Then and Now: A Personal Reminiscence.” pp. 31-39, in Hourihane, Colum, ed. Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn. University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2008, [full list of dissertations advised, p. 22, note 45].

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Cahn, Herbert

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Cahn, Herbert

Other Names:

Herbert Adolph Cahn

Gender: male

Date Born: 1915

Date Died: 2002

Place Born: Frankfurt am Main, Hesse, Germany

Place Died: Basel, Basle-Town, Switzerland

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Classical, coins (money), and numismatics

Career(s): art dealers

Overview

Classical numismatist, professor of classical art and art and coin dealer. Cahn’s father was a numismatics dealer, Ludwig Cahn, and his mother Johanna Neuberger (Cahn). As a boy he assisted in compiling the sales catalogs for his father’s firm. He studied classical archaeology and philology at the Universität Frankfurt under Ernst Langlotz. With the Nazi rise to power in Germany, Cahn, who was a Jew, emigrated to Switzerland in 1933 and continued his studies at Basle. His brother, Erich B. Cahn (1913-1993), also emigrated, establishing a coin dealership there the same year; the brothers began a long association together. Herbert Cahn received his doctorate in 1940 under Ernst Pfuhl, writing on the coinage of Naxos. In 1942 the brother’s Basle firm became Münzen und Medaillen AG, (Coins and Medals, Inc.) growing into one of the most important dealerships in antique coins in the world. The firm also dealt in classical art. Cahn published his dissertation in 1944 as Die Münzen der sizilischen Stadt Naxos. In 1949 he became a Swiss citizen and married Mathilde Vögeli. Between1949 and 1964 he edited the first of two important numismatist journals, Schweizer Münzblätter. He, the University of Basel classical art historian Karl Schefold, and German archaeologist Otto Rubensohn (1867-1964) founded the Vereinigung der Freunde antiker Kunst or Societé des Amis de l’Art Antique and its journal Antike Kunst in 1956. In 1960 he helped curate the important exhibition, “Meisterwerke griechischer Kunst” which formed the basis for the creation of the Antikenmuseum in Basle in 1966. The previous year, 1965, he had been appointed to a lectureship at the university at Heidelberg. He published an important book on the coins of Knidos for the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in 1970. The following year he was appointed honorary professor at Heidelberg (through 1986). In 1981 he edited the second numismatics journal, Schweizerischen Numismatischen Rundschau (through 1987). In 1983 he moved to teach at the university at Freiburg. Cahn formed his own classical art and coin business, H. A. C. Kunst der Antike in 1988.Cahn’s work in the English-speaking world is best known through his exhibition catalogs co-published and co-sponsored through André Emmerich Gallery. Cahn most important publications are his two monographs on Greek coinage, of Naxos (his dissertation) and of Knidos (1970). His vision of numismatics was as part of the larger history of classical art.

Selected Bibliography

[published bibliographies:] Biucchi, Carmen. “Schriftenverzeichnis Herbert A. Cahn, 1929 – 1974.” Cahn, Herbert. Herbert A. Cahn: Kleine Schriften zur Münzkunde und Archäologie. Basel: 1975, pp. 8-14, and “Bibliographie Herbert A. Cahn, 1975-1984.” Antike Kunst 28 (1985): 5-6, and “Bibliographie Herbert A. Cahn, 1985 – 1995.” Antike Kunst 38 (1995): 66-67, Voegtli, Hans. “Bibliographie Herbert A. Cahn, 1995-2002.” Antike Kunst 46 (2003): 4; [published dissertation:] Die Münzen der sizilischen Stadt Naxos: ein Beitrag zur Kunstgeschichte des griechischen Westens. Basel: Birkhäuser, 1944; and Hoffmann, Herbert. Collecting Greek Antiquities. New York: C. N. Potter 1971; Knidos; die Münzen des sechsten und des fünften Jahrhunderts v. Chr. Berlin: Deutsches Archäologisches Institut/de Gruyter, 1970; Alföldi-Rosenbaum, Elisabeth, and Kaufmann-Heinimann, Annemarie. Der Spätrömische Silberschatz von Kaiseraugst. 2 vols. Derendingen: Habegger, 1984; Early Art in Greece: the Cycladic, Mionan, Mycenaean, and Geometric Periods, 3000-700 B.C.. New York: André Emmerich Gallery, 1965; [art collection:] Cambitoglou, Alexander, and Chamay, Jacques, Bottini, Brenno. Céramique de Grande Grèce : la collection de fragments Herbert A. Cahn. Zürich: Akanthus, [for the Geneva Musée d’art et d’histoire] 1997; Griechische Vasenfragmente der Sammlung Herbert A. Cahn, Basel Hannover: Kestner-Museum, 1993.

Sources

“Herbert Cahn.” Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, http://hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D31421.php; Willers, Dietrich. Herbert A. Cahn achtzigjahrig, Karl Schefold neunzigjahrig. Antike Kunst 38 no. 2 (1995):. 63-64, [obituaries:] Wartenberg, Ute. “Herbert A. Cahn, 1915-2002.” American Numismatic Society Magazine 1, no. 2 (2002): 33; Wartenberg, Ute. “Herbert A. Cahn, 1915-2002.” The Celator 16, no. 9 (2002): 32; Lezzi-Hafter, Adrienne. “Zum Gedenken an Herbert Cahn, 1915-2002.” Antike Kunst 46 (2003): 3.

Cahill, Holger

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Cahill, Holger

Other Names:

né Sveinn Kristjan Bjarnarson

Gender: male

Date Born: 1887

Date Died: 1960

Place Born: Skagaströnd, Sveitarfélagið Skagaströnd, Iceland

Place Died: Stockbridge, Berkshire, MA, USA

Home Country/ies: Iceland

Subject Area(s): American (North American), Central American, and folk art (traditional art)

Career(s): curators

Overview

Art museum curator; authority on the folk art of the United States and the arts of Central America; director of the arts division of the WPA. Cahill was born to Bjorn Jonsson and Vigdis Bjarndottir in Iceland but moved with his family shortly after birth to Canada and then North Dakota, USA. Domestic violence and illness broke his family apart and Cahill spent most of his early years working and living in various situations and orphanages in Canada and the United States. After working in jobs as disparate as cattle driver and insurance salesman in the Midwest, he moved to New York just before the outbreak of World War I. Taking courses at New York University in journalism, he eventually landed jobs as the editor of the Scarsdale Inquirer and the Bronxville Review in Westchester County, New York. At that time, he changed his name to Holger Cahill. In 1919 he married Katherine Gridley. While writing publicity for the Society of Independent Artists, he met artist John Sloan and subsequently many of the painters comprising The Eight, Robert Henri, George Bellows, Max Weber, etc. Cahill joined the staff of the Newark Museum in 1921, a leading museum in the exhibition of modern art. The Museum’s director, John Cotton Dana, encouraged Cahill to organize shows on folk art, American primitives, and American folk sculpture. At the Museum, Cahill met a young curatorial assistant, Dorothy Miller. Cahill divorced his wife in 1927. After Dana’s death in 1929, Cahill left the Newark Museum, but curated shows in 1930 and 1931. During this period he met Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the director of the newly formed Museum of Modern Art in New York. The following year he served as acting director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curating the exhibition American Folk Art: Art of the Common Man 1750-1900, and a show of American paintings and sculpture from 1862 to 1932. In 1933 he launched “American Sources of Modern Art,” an exhibition which examined the ancient art of Mexico, Peru, and Central America and its influence on Gauguin, the Fauvists and Cubists, and contemporary Latin American muralists. Cahill’s work for MoMA established him solidly as a historian of modern art. In 1934 he directed the first Municipal Art Exhibition of New York and, together with Barr, co-edited the major Art in America in Modern Times catalog for the Museum. The text for this exhibition was transcribed and broadcast on a series of radio programs, supported by the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. The Depression in full swing, Cahill was recruited to help organize the artist’s relief program for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), addressing the needs of some 40,000 painters, sculptors, musicians, writers and theatre people. In Washgington, D. C., his administrative skills were put to good use. Cahill became the director of the Federal Art Project in 1935, distributing funds to jobless painters, sculptors, graphic artists, craftsmen, and art teachers. In 1938, he married Miller, who was now Barr’s assistant at MoMA and later the curator of paintings and sculpture. Cahill moved back to New York when the Federal Art Project ended in 1943. Although he wrote some articles on art, his efforts were hampered by illnesses and a heart attack in 1947. Several novels appeared during this period, as well as a taped memoir for the Columbia University Oral History Project. He was at work on another novel, The Stone Dreamer, the result of a Guggenheim Fellowship at the time of his death. Cahill’s experience as a novelist and interest in social history carry over to his art history. His catalog of folk art emphasizes communal utilitarian traditions of this art, much of which was anonymous. Deliberately blunting the traditional distinctions between fine art and folk art, he outlines the visual and historic relationship between folk art and modern art. His directorship of the Federal Art Project established art centers across the United States and produced an index of American design. His papers were deposited in the New York Public Library and the Archives of American Art.

Selected Bibliography

American Folk Art; the Art of the Common Man in America, 1750-1900. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1932; and Barr, Alfred H., Jr. Art in America: a Complete Survey. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1935; and Barr, Alfred H., Jr. Art in America in Modern Times. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1934; Max Weber. New York: The Downtown Gallery, 1930; George O. ‘Pop’ Hart: Twenty-Four Selections from His Work. New York: The Downtown Gallery, 1928. American Sources of Modern Art. New York: W.W. Norton, 1933; and Gauthier, Maximilien, and Cassou, Jean, abd Miller, Dorothy C. Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America; in collaboration with the Grenoble Museum. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1938; A Museum in Action, presenting the Museum’s Activities: Catalogue of an Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture from the Museum’s Collections. Newark, NJ: The Newark Museum, 1944; several novels.

Sources

Holger Cahill papers, 1907-1983, New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division; Marquis, Alice Goldfarb. Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Missionary for the Modern. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989, [various], including p. 139; Jeffers, Wendy. “Holger Cahill and American Art.” Archives of American Art Journal 31 no. 4 (1991): 2-11.

Cahier, Charles

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Cahier, Charles

Other Names:

Charles Cahier

Gender: male

Date Born: 1807

Date Died: 1882

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

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

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): decorative art (art genre), French (culture or style), French Medieval styles, iconography, Medieval (European), and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

French iconographer of medieval sculpture and decorative arts. Cahier studied at the College of Saint-Acheul. He joined the Jesuit order, ordained as priest, in 1824. Cahier lectured at the Jesuit colleges in Paris, Brieg (in the Swiss Canton of Wallis), Turin, and in Belgium at Brugalette. In the pre-photography days, Cahier began “collecting” medieval monuments, noting their location and iconography with the idea of documenting the Christian (i. e., Roman Catholic) faith via art of the middle ages. Around 1840 he and another Jesuit, Father Arthur Martin (1801-1856) began organizing the material Cahier had collected for publication. Martin was an excellent draftman; he provided the numerous drawings necessary to publish an art book. In 1841 they began issuing their first folio, a book on the thirteenth-century stained glass of the cathedral at Bourges, Monographie de la cathédrale de Bourges, première partie. Vitraux du XIIIe siècle (continuing through 1844). Their analysis was quickly subsumed in famous artistic hagiography by Louis Jean Gue´nebault (1789-1878) Dictionnaire iconographique des figures, le´gendes et actes des saints of 1850. In 1848 the pair began to publish Mélanges d’archéologie, d’histoire, et de littérature (to 1859) a treatise on decorative arts and furnishings of the Carolingian and Romanesque era. Caractéristiques des saints dans l’art populaire, a treatment of the most popular saints in French culture, was issued in 1867. The first volume of their Noveaux mélanges d’archéologie, d’histoire, et de littérature sur le moyen-âge was published in 1874. Martin had died by then and Cahier provided a touching memoir of his colleague. His specialty topic the people’s calendar, common local practices connected with the liturgical life, was collected in his “Calendrier populaire du temps passé” was published in the Revue de l’art chrétien in 1878. Cahier was first and foremost a priest writing about “the age of Faith” as he saw the middle ages. He was broadly versed in medieval myths and customs, especially the “people’s calendar.” His documentation, classification, and interpretation of the widespread medieval minor arts encompassed France, Belgium, and Germany. However, he ignored style, careful dating and the other basics of art history. His writing style, with its numerous asides and diatribes, was closer to the generation before his own. Cahier formed part of the group of prominent19th-century medieval iconographers whose ranks included Adolphe Napoléon Didron. Émile Mâle wrote that “No one in the nineteenth century knew the art of the Middle Ages better than Father Cahier.” Mâle characterized Cahier’s works as solid learning marred, unfortunately by their polemical tone and artificial style.

Selected Bibliography

and Martin, Arthur. Nouveaux mélanges d’archéologie, d’histoire et de littérature sur le Moyen Age, par les auteurs de la Monographie des vitraux de Bourges. 4 vols. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1874-77; Monographie de la cathédrale de Bourges, Première partie. Vitraux du XIIIe siècle. Paris: Poussielgue-Rusand, 1841; Caractéristiques des saints dan l’art populaire. Paris: Librairie Poussielgue Frères, 1867; Mélanges d’archéologie, d’histoire et de littérature, rédigés ou recueillis. 4 vols. Paris: Mme Ve Poussielgue-Rusand, 1847-1856.

Sources

“Preface.” Religious Art in France: the Thirteenth Century: a Study of Medieval Iconography and its Sources. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984, p. viii; Catholic Encyclopedia 3 (1908); Polybiblion: Revue bibliographique universelle. I, Paris: Aux bureaux de la revue, 1868, pp. 264-65.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Cabrol, Fernand

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Cabrol, Fernand

Gender: male

Date Born: 1855

Date Died: 1933

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): iconography and Medieval (European)

Overview

French compiler of encyclopedia of medieval iconography

Selected Bibliography

Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie. 15 vols. Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1907-53.

Sources

KRG, 60

French compiler of encyclopedia of medieval iconography

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