Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), Islam, Islamic (culture or style), Islamic architectural styles, Islamic World, The, and sculpture (visual works)
Institution(s): American University in Cairo
Overview
historian of Muslim architecture
Selected Bibliography
Early Muslim Architecture: Umayvads, early Abbasids and Tulunids. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932-40. 2nd ed. of volume 1, 1969.The Muslim Architecture of Egypt. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952-9.
Sources
KMP, 50 mentioned
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
Citation
Lee Sorensen. "Creswell, Keppel Archibald Cameron." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/creswellk/.
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Subject Area(s): Romanesque and sculpture (visual works)
Overview
Romanesque sculpture scholar.
Selected Bibliography
and Crichton, Elsie Robertson. Nicola Pisano and the Revival of Sculpture in Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938; Romanesque Sculpture in Italy. London: Routledge and Paul, 1954.
Citation
"Crichton, George H.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/crichtong/.
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Place Died: Brussels, Brussels-Capital Region, Belgium
Home Country/ies: Belgium
Subject Area(s): ancient and decorative art (art genre)
Career(s): curators
Overview
Curator of ancient decorative arts at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels. Crick studied art history and archaeology with Marcel Laurent at the university of Liège. In 1919, she obtained her doctoral degree with a dissertation on Romanesque art in the valley of the Meuse river. After her studies, she created the catalogs of the drawings (1919) and the engravings (1920) in the collections of the city of Liège. In 1920, she published a monograph on the drawings of Lambert Lombard, who lived in Liège between 1505 and 1566. In 1921, she was attached to the Royal museums of Art and History in Brussels, where she paid most attention to the tapestry collection, earlier under the responsibility of Joseph Destrée. In 1931, she obtained the position of assistant curator. An innovative researcher, she became a renowned expert in the field of tapestry. In 1935, she successfully contributed to the presentation of the collection of the museum in the exhibition Cinq siècles d’Art. In 1936, she succeeded Laurent as the curator of ancient decorative arts, which position she held until her retirement in 1956. The Royal Academy for Sciences, Letters and Arts of Belgium awarded her with the Edmond Marchal-prize for the period 1933-1937. In 1938, she contributed to L’Art en Belgique, edited by Paul Fierens and re edited in 1945 and 1956, with a survey of the history of decorative arts, including a chapter on metalwork, flourishing in the valley of the Meuse during the Middle Ages, and three essays on Belgian tapestry, from the 14th up to the 18th century. In 1954, the Royal Academy of Archaeology of Belgium published her study on a series of ten tapestries, who were recently acquired by the museum, representing the biblical history of Jacob: La Tenture de l’Histoire de Jacob d’après Bernard van Orley. Her critical catalog of the collection of the tapestries from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century appeared in 1956. Crick also played a major role as the secretary of the Bulletin of the museum. Her publications, more than hundred, include studies on the tapestries decorating the Town Hall in Brussels, the palace of the Prince-Bishop in Liège, and the Wawel Royal Castle in Krakow (Poland). She was active in various institutions, since 1937 as a member of the Royal Academy of Archaeology of Belgium, and in the Royal Society for Archaeology in Brussels, which she presided in 1949. She was chosen as honorary president of the Interuniversity Centre for the History of Flemish tapestry, founded and directed by Jozef Duverger in Gent. She presided as well the international conference on tapestry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, under the auspices of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts in 1959. Her contribution to this conference was on the Brussels tapestries representing the Metamorphoses of Ovid. At that time, she was already ill; she died in 1963.
Selected Bibliography
[for a complete list, see] De Borchgrave d’Altena, Joseph. Bulletin des Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire/ Bulletin van de Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis. 4e series 29 (1957): 127-130; Lambert Lombard. Turnhout, 1920; Les Tapisseries de l’Hôtel de Ville de Bruxelles. Antwerp, 1944; De Tapijtwerken in het Stadhuis te Brussel. Antwerp/Utrecht, 1944; La Tenture de l’Histoire de Jacob d’après Bernard van Orley. Antwerp, 1954; Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire de Bruxelles. Catalogue des Tapisseries (XIVe au XVIIIe siècles). 1956; Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis te Brussel. Catalogus van de Wandtapijten (XIVe tot XVIIIe eeuw). Translated by Ghislaine Derveaux-Van Ussel. 1956.
Sources
De Borchgrave d’Altena, Joseph. “Madame Crick-Kuntziger, conservateur honoraire.” Bulletin des Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire/ Bulletin van de Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis. 4e series 29 (1957): 126-130; Squilbeck, J. “Mme Lucien Crick, née Marthe Kuntziger, Liège 2 avril 1891 – Bruxelles 30 mai 1963.” Bulletin des Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire/ Bulletin van de Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis. 4e series 35 (1963) 135-137; Calberg, Marguerite. “Marthe Crick-Kuntziger (Liège 1891 – Bruxelles 1963).” Revue Belge d’Archéologie et d’Histoire de l’Art/Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Oudheidkunde en Kunstgeschiedenis. 35 (1966): 112-115; Marcus-de Groot, Yvette. ” ‘Geen mooier studievak voor een vrouw dan de kunstgeschiedenis’. Vrouwelijke kunsthistorici en hun aandeel in de traditie.” In Van der Stighelen Katlijne and Westen, Mirjam (eds.) Elck zijn Waerom. Gent: Ludion, 1999: 102-113; Marcus-de Groot, Yvette. Kunsthistorische vrouwen van weleer. De eerste generatie in Nederland vóór 1921. Hilversum: Verloren, 2003, pp. 170-172.
Contributors: Monique Daniels
Citation
Monique Daniels. "Crick-Kuntziger, Marthe." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/crickkuntzigerm/.
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Curator of ancient decorative arts at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels. Crick studied art history and archaeology with Marcel Laurent at the university of Liège. In 1919, she obtained her doctoral degree wit
Place Born: Pescasseroli, L'Aquila, Abruzzi, Italy
Place Died: Naples, Campania, Italy
Home Country/ies: Italy
Subject Area(s): aesthetics
Overview
Historian and important esthetician for art history. Croce was born to Pasquale Croce and Luisa Siparia, a wealthy land-owning couple and raised in a Roman Catholic boarding school. At age sixteen in 1883 he and his family were buried in their home in Ischia during the Casamicciola earthquake of only he and his brother survived. He lived with an uncle in Rome, the politician Silvio Spaventa (1822-1893), who introduced him to art, intellectuals and politics. After briefly attending the University of Rome studying law, he quit college settling in Naples in 1886. Able to live on his inheritance, he traveled and read. Reading the work of Gianbattista Vico (1668-1744) led him to consider the nature of art and history, and eventually to philosophy. The fundamental questions of history, whether history as a process was an art or a science, engaged him. In 1893-1894 lectures at the Academia Pontiniana in Naples, he concluded, against the prevailing German historians Johann Gustav Droysen (1808-1884) and Ernst Bernheim (1850-1942), that it was more an art since it depended on how individuals interpreted events. Croce published this in 1896 as Il concetto della storia nelle sue relazioni col concetto dell’arte (the idea of history and its relationship to the idea of art). During this time he met the philosopher Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944). Gentile’s philosophy was another of the early great influences on Croce’s scholarship. The writing of the art historian Robert Vischer, especially his Kunstgeschichte und Humanismus: Beiträge zur Klärung (1880), which made a plea for melding the disciplines of philosophy and art history, also influenced Croce. Croce’s reading lead to his 1902 book on esthetics, Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale. Among other assertions, Croce wrote that those who interpret art, critics, viewers, etc., discern the meaning of the work of art only by inserting themselves in the artist’s original situation, by what he termed reenacting the artistic impulse of “intuition.” In later writing, Croce modified his idea of artistic intuition, terming it “lyrical” intuition and later even “cosmic”. The ideas of Estetica occupied him in one form or another the rest of his life. In 1903 Croce and Gentile founded the periodical La critica which became an important literary magazine of the era. He published other works on esthetics, including La poesia. A book on Hegel appeared in 1907. Croce always took an interest in Italian politics. He was early on impressed with the principles of Marxism, but never embraced communism. In 1910 he was elected a senator in the Italian parliament. Croce’s clearest theory of art appeared in his 1912 lecture at the inauguration of the Rice Institute in Houston, Texas. Published in 1913 as Breviario di estetica (the Essence of Aesthetic) and in 1915 in English as “The Breviary of Aesthetic,” it was there that he made the famous claim of the primacy of art over science or metaphysics, contending that art edifies. He married Adele Rossi in 1914. As a member of the Italian parliament, he vigorously opposed Italy’s entrance into World War I. Though this made him unpopular at the time, after Italy’s defeat, he was held in high esteem. Croce was appointed the Minister of Education in 1920 under prime minister Giovanni Giolitti. When the Fascists took power, Croce left the Education Ministry in 1921. He declined Mussolini’s offer to rejoin it in 1924. The following year, Croce read a paper in Zürich using the concept of the baroque, subsequently published in a German translation as Der Begriff des Barock. die Gegenreformation. zwei Essays. It was a vehement protest of the current German theories of the baroque as an emerging area of art worth studying. Croce argued for the term’s original meaning, that of baroque ugliness. The essay appeared in the original Italian version in nearly an identical form as chapters 1 and 2 of Storia dell’ Età barocca in Italia in 1929. However, by then, Croce tempered his view, describing Giambattista as an artist very much to his taste. He broke with Gentile (who considered himself the “philosopher of fascism”) continuing to oppose Benito Mussolini. Croce was too well-respected world-wide and too distant in Naples) for he dictator to arrest. After Mussolini’s demise in 1943, Croce worked to assemble a new republican post-war government. Croce was responsible for rescuing the magnificent art library of the German center for classical research, the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (or DAI) which had been seized by the Italians during the war, eventually turning it over to Walther Amelung. He was the Italian Liberal Party president between 1943 and 1947. In 1946 he became a Constituent Assembly member. He founded a center for the study of Italian history in Naples, the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici in 1947. After his retirement the same year, Croce was named a Senator of the Republic of Italy. He died of influenza at age 86 at his home. Early on, Croce developed a large personal library which was the basis for much of his writing. It was bequeathed to the Istituto. His daughter, Elena Craveri Croce (b. 1915), translated many important German art texts (including Vischer essays) into Italian. Though Croce’s early career was art-historical, he was not an art historian in the strict definition of the term. His writings on art theory and his historical research were highly influential on his generation of art historians. His foundational theory from the German Idealists, Fichte, Hegel, etc., found acceptance with the art-historical practice emerging as a formal discipline in German-speaking countries. In Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale, Croce asserted that objects are esthetically interpreted though human “intuitions” or “representations” which give the otherwise neutral objects meaning. Understanding literature, visual arts and music are all acts of “intuition,” Croce insisted, which make them intelligible from the other sensations to which humans are subjected. Croce’s assertion that artistic importance had little to do with beauty–that a painting of an ugly person could be a fine painting–allowed art historians to accept many artifacts previous deemed unworthy of study as still important for the history of art. His most succinct comments on the history of art are included in Section 4 of Croce’s Brevary of Art (1912), “Criticism and the History of Art.” The British esthetician R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943) admired his work, translated his autobiography, and brought Croce’s ideas to the English speaking world. In the United States, Croce’s thought was popularized by the book Art as Experience (1934), by John Dewey (1859-1952). Croce’s concept of “organic unity” found adherents in the United States in African-American art critic and Columbia University professor Joel E. Spingarn (1875-1939). Personally, he maintained close intellectual friendships with, among others, leader of the so-called second Vienna School of art history, Julius Alwin von Schlosser, who translated his Baroque essays into German, as well as with Adolfo Venturi, his son, Lionello Venturi and Roberto Pane; his writing was crucial to the work of many other art historians, including Giulio Carlo Argan, Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti and Roberto Longhi.
Selected Bibliography
[works pertinent to art history] Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale: teoria e storia. Milan: Remo Sandron, 1902 [volume 1 of his Filosofia come scienza dello spirito], English, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic. London: Macmillan and Co., 1909 [this translation includes the lecture on “Pure Intuition and the Lyrical Nature of Art,” delivered by Croce at the International Congress of Philosophy at Heidelberg, pp. 371-403], and more recently issued as, The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992 [includes the essays, “Taste and the Reproduction of art,” and “The History of Art and Literature.”]; La critica e la storia delle arti figurative: questioni di metodo. Bari: Gius. Laterza, 1934; Storia della età barocca in Italia: pensiero-poesia e letteratura vita morale. Bari: Gius. Laterza, 1929, German [chapters 1 and 2], Der Begriff des Barock. Die Gegenreformation: zwei Essays. Translated by Julius von Schlosser. Zürich: Rascher, 1925; Breviario di estetica: quattro lezioni. Bari: G. Laterza e figli, 1913 1912, English, “The Breviary of Aesthetic.” The Rice Institute Pamphlet (Houston, TX) 2 no. 4. (1915): 223-310, elsewhere translated as, Guide to Aesthetics. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965; Il concetto della storia nelle sue relazioni col concetto dell’arte. Rome: é. Loescher, 1896.
Sources
Carr, Herbert Wildon. The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce: the Problem of Art and History. London: Macmillan, 1917; Croce, Benedetto. Contributo alla critica di me stesso. Bari: G. Laterza, 2nd ed. 1945, English (first ed.), An Autobiography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927; Orsini, Gian N. G. Benedetto Croce: Philosopher of Art and Literary Critic. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961; Brown, Merle Elliot. Neo-Idealistic Aesthetics: Croce-Gentile-Collingwood. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966; Moss, M. E. Benedetto Croce Reconsidered: Truth and Error in Theories of Art, Literature, and History. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987; Lyas, Colin. “Benedetto Croce.” Encyclopedia of Esthetics 1: 474-476; Piccolomini, Manfredi. “Benedetto Croce.” European Writers; the Twentieth Century 8: 311-329; Willette, Thomas. “È stata opera di critica onesta, liberale, italiana: Benedetto Croce and Napoli Nobilissima (1892-1906),” in, D’Amico, Jack, and Trafton, Dain A., and Verdicchio, Massimo, eds. The Legacy of Benedetto Croce: Contemporary Critical Views. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999, pp. 52-87.
Historian and important esthetician for art history. Croce was born to Pasquale Croce and Luisa Siparia, a wealthy land-owning couple and raised in a Roman Catholic boarding school. At age sixteen in 1883 he and his family were buried in their hom
Medievalist architectural historian; principle scholar of St-Denis and chair of the Department of Art History, Yale University, 1947-1953. Crosby attended Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts before entering Yale University. At Yale the lectures of Marcel Aubert and Henri Focillon persuaded him to study art history. As a graduate student, he became fascinated with the abbey church of Saint-Denis, both as a school of manuscript illumination and as the birthplace of the gothic art form. It was a subject which would occupy his research energies the rest of his life. His studies included time at the Ecole des Chartres. He married Sarah Rathbone Townsend, in 1935. His Ph. D.1937 thesis from Yale, written under Focillon, reviewed the twelfth-century church and investigated the early plans of the crypt and stylistic differences of the capitals. The following year Crosby began excavating the Parisian site, convinced by medieval tests of the existence of earlier buildings. Changing from instructor (since 1936) to assistant professor at (1941) at Yale, he continued to do exhaustive archival research and excavation in the 1930’s and 40’s. The result was his 1942 book on St-Denis, The Abbey of St.-Denis, 475-1122, one of the most accurate plans of a medieval monument ever created. World War II prevented further research in France and Crosby acted as Special Advisor to the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas. Between 1944-45 he advised the U.S. Department of State on the Restitution of Cultural Materials. Excavations resumed in 1947 (he was now an associate professor) and Crosby discovered what came to be known as the “Crosby bas-relief.” He would study this for the next twenty-five years. In 1947, too, he assumed chair of the department of Art (until 1953). In 1948 Crosby invited fellow Focillon-student Louis Grodecki to be the first Focillon Fellow at Yale. The French government awarded him the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor for his achievements in 1950. In 1952 was named full professor. Crosby served as a director for the new International Center of Romanesque Art in 1956. The same he year took on Otto von Simson in a review of Simson’s The Gothic Cathedral which drew a heated response from Simson. His dedication to teaching was reflected in 1959 by his re-editing the 4th edition of Art Through the Ages, begun by Helen Gardner. In the 1960’s, Crosby focused on a theory that two stone mason masters were responsible for the church as Abbot Suger, publishing these findings throughout that decade. After reorganization to the International Center of Medieval Art in 1966, he became that organization’s president, appointing his young Yale medievalist colleague, Walter B. Cahn, as secretary. In 1968, his scholar interest moved to the problems of the sculpture of the west facade of Suger’s church. He once again chaired the department of Art (1962-65). In 1972 he published the result of his twenty-five year study on the bas-relief, The Apostle Bas-relief at Saint-Denis. His 1973 book on the Saint-Denis church (with Pamela Blum) focused on identifying the 19th-century “restorations” of the church from the original carving. He retired Emeritus from Yale in 1978. By this time it was clear that his subsequent research on St-Denis had made his 1942 monograph outdated. He completed his revision to The Abbey of St.-Denis shortly before succumbing to a stroke in 1982. A Sumner McKnight Crosby Fellowship was established in his honor. His papers are held at the Yale University Library and at the The Cloisters Library and Archives, Metropolitan Museum of Art. His students included Robert Branner and Caroline Bruzelius (b. 1949). Crosby focused essentially on only one monument in art history, the abbey church of St. Denis, where gothic architecture was born.
In Crosby’s view, the inception of the Gothic style at Saint-Denis stemmed from the governing principle of unity which brought about a new synthesis. That unifying concept, informing and integrating the architecture, sculpture, stained glass, mosaics and designs for precious objects, resulted in absolute clarity of form and expression. Three articles written in 1963, 1965, and 1966 explored the influences that converged at Saint-Denis under [Abbot] Suger’s patronage and gave birth to the new style. (Blum and Hayward)
Crosby doubted Suger was the single creative intelligence behind Saint-Denis, as conventional wisdom maintained. Crosby posited the existence of skilled masons as designators of the sophisticated designs of the church. Crosby’s narrow focus as an art historian was criticized by others in the discipline (Simson).
Selected Bibliography
[dissertation:] The Abbey of St. Denis in the XII Century: A Study of the Historical Backgrounds and of Problems Relating to the XII Century Church (Saint Denis, Twelfth Century, France). Yale University, 1937; The Abbey of St.-Denis, 475-1122. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942, 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987; (edited) Gardner, Helen. Art Through the Ages. 4th edition. New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1959; (edited) études d’art médiéval offertes à Louis Grodecki. Paris: Ophrys, 1981; The Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis in the Time of Abbot Suger (1122-1151). New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1981; The Apostle Bas-relief at Saint-Denis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.
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. 52, mentioned; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 275; [transcript] “Otto von Simson, interviewed by Richard Cándida Smith.” Art History Oral Documentation Project. Getty Research Institute, Malibu, CA, p. 75; [obituaries:] Blum, Pamela Z., and Hayward, Jane. “Necrology: Sumner McKnight Crosby (1909-1982).” Gesta 22 no. 1 (1983): 93-95; “Sumner Crosby, 73, Medieval Art Expert, was Yale Professor.” New York Times November 19, 1982; section B p. 8; Blum, Pamela Z.. Apollo 118 (September 1983):. 276; Kubler, George. Gesta 22 no. 1 (1983): 93-5.
Medievalist architectural historian; principle scholar of St-Denis and chair of the Department of Art History, Yale University, 1947-1953. Crosby attended Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts before entering Yale University. At Yale the lectur
Subject Area(s): iconography, Medieval (European), and nineteenth century (dates CE)
Overview
Iconographer,The Abbé Crosnier formed part of the serious interest in medieval iconography of the 19th-century together with Adolphe Napoléon Didron and father Charles Cahier.
Selected Bibliography
Iconographie chretienne, ou, étude des sculptures, peintures, etc., qu’on rencontre sur les monuments religieux du moyen-âge. Paris: Derache, 1848; Monographie de la cathe´drale de Nevers. Nevers: Morel, 1854.
Citation
"Crosnier, Augustin-Joseph, Abbé." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/crosniera/.
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Iconographer,The Abbé Crosnier formed part of the serious interest in medieval iconography of the 19th-century together with Adolphe Napoléon Didron and father Charles Cahier.
Chairman of the committee of Slavic Languages and Literature at Harvard College; Slavic church expert. Samuel Cross was born on July 1st, 1891, in Westerly, Rhode Island. Cross graduated from Harvard College in 1912 with an A.B. degree in classics, summa cum laude. Cross then pursued a PhD from the same institution. During his time as a Harvard PhD student, Cross spent a year as an exchange student at the University of St. Petersburg Leningrad during pre-revolutionary Russia, giving Cross firsthand experience in the USSR. Cross’s PhD was conferred in 1916.
Following his studies, Cross served in the U.S. army and the American Commission between 1917-1920, during the latter half of World War I. After his military service, Cross worked both as a lecturer on European trade and economics at Georgetown University and chief of the U.S. Department of Commerce in Europe from 1925-1926.
In 1927, Cross returned to Harvard to work across several language departments. Cross was the Chairman of the Germanic Languages and Literature department from 1930 to 1939. Cross delivered a series of public lectures at the Fogg Museum at Harvard University in the fall of 1933, and established the concentration in Slavic Languages and Literatures. These were published after his death at Medieval Russian Churches (1949), edited by Kenneth John Conant. Cross also maintained a long editorial relationship with Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, beginning with his appointment as an Assistant Managing Editor in 1929. He penned several articles for Speculum, including Yaroslav the Wise in the Norse tradition in 1929 and Notes on King Alfred’s North: Osti, Este in 1931. In 1936, Cross climbed to the role of the Editor of Speculum.
In 1942, at the height of World War II, Cross interpreted a conversation between President Roosevelt and Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov (1890-1986), a Soviet politician and diplomat during a White House conference. Cross wrote for and directed the Speculum until his sudden death by heart attack on October 14th, 1946. Leonid I. Strakhovsky (1898-1963), a colleague of Cross on The American Slavic and East European Review, wrote that Cross’s “neverending labors in promoting and advancing Slavic Studies in America for a better world understanding will not have been in vain.”
Notes on King Alfred’s North: Osti, Este. Speculum 6 (April): 296–99. 1931. doi:10.2307/2848364.
Yaroslav the Wise in the Norse Tradition. Speculum 4 (April): 177–97.1929. doi:10.2307/2847951.
Sources
Blake, Robert P. “SAMUEL HAZZARD CROSS (1891-1946).” Byzantion 18 (1946): 348–52. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44168638.
“History | Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures.” https://slavic.fas.harvard.edu/pages/history-slavic-languages-and-literatures-harvard-university.
“Slavic Scholar Samuel Cross Dies Suddenly” The Harvard Crimson https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1946/10/15/slavic-scholar-samuel-cross-dies-suddenly/.
Strakhovsky, Leonid I. “In Memoriam: Samuel Hazzard Cross.” American Slavic and East European Review 5, no. 3/4 (1946). http://www.jstor.org/stable/2492082.
Chairman of the committee of Slavic Languages and Literature at Harvard College; Slavic church expert. In 1942, at the height of World War II, Cross interpreted a conversation between President Roosevelt and Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov (1890-1986), a Soviet politician and diplomat during a White House conference.
Subject Area(s): art history, art theory, deconstruction (theory), eighteenth century (dates CE), French (culture or style), Marxism, and semiotics
Overview
Historian of 18th-century French art and prime exponent of the “New Art History” in the United States. Crow was raised in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. As a teenager, he moved with his family to San Diego, California in 1961. He entered Pomona College, Pomona, CA, graduating with a B. A. graduating magna cum laude in 1969. He continued graduate work at the University of California, Los Angeles with an M.A. in 1975 and Ph.D. in 1978. His classmates included another Marxist-approach art student and later art historian, Serge Guilbaut. Crow’s dissertation, written under the Marxist-methodology art historians T. J. Clark and O. K. Werckmeister, was on the reception of Jacque-Louis David’s “Oath of the Horatii” (1784). The dissertation took aim at the traditional interpretation of David’s pre-revolutionary work by art historians such as Bob Rosenblum and Hugh Honour who had argued that the work was not seen as supporting the French Revolution. His approach to the topic and tenacity set his career on a course of controversy. He joined the faculty of the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA, as an instructor in its Critical Studies program in 1977. He married the horticulturist Catherine Phillips. The following year he was hired by the University of Chicago as assistant professor of history of art. After only two years, Crow moved to Princeton University as assistant professor of art and archaeology in 1980. In 1985 he published his Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris for which he won the Eric Mitchell Prize for the best initial publication in art history from the College Art Association. Despite this honor and the book’s general acclaim, Crow’s approach was too extreme for Princeton; his outspoken views of traditional connoisseurship-style art history rankled many. His tenure bid at Princeton was denied in a controversial decision. In rejecting Crow’s tenure, Princeton department of Art and Archaeology chair William A. P. Childs (b. 1942) wrote that Crow’s book, the prime consideration for tenure, was “too lopsided and did not give sufficient consideration to the art or art historical aspects” of the subject. The decision caused another Princeton art historian, John Kinder Gowran Shearman to relinquish his position in favor of teaching at Harvard. Crow was immediately hired at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, as associate professor in their art history department and concomitantly Michigan Society of Fellows senior fellow. He held a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for the 1988-1989 year. Crow moved to Sussex, England and the University of Sussex as professor of history of art and chairman of department in 1990. He was called to Yale University in 1996 as Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art, appointed as department chairman the following year. The same year he published Modern Art in the Common Culture an examination of the connection between modern art and mass culture. In 2000 Crow was appointed director of the Getty Research Institute and professor at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, replacing Salvatore Settis. He lectured as the Phyllis Wattis Distinguished Lecturer at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2001. Crow served at the Getty until 2007 when he joined the faculty at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, as the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art. He was succeeded at the Getty by Thomas W. Gaehtgens. Crow’s methodology followed the controversial, quasi-Marxist direction mostly notably practiced by his mentor, Clark. Crow’s approach follows less exclusively on class issues, looking at issues of social context and reception as key determinents in an object’s meaning. In the twenty-first century, Crow began writing directly on art historiography.
Selected Bibliography
[dissertation:] Jacques-Louis David’s ‘Oath of the Horatii’: Painting and Pre-Revolutionary Radicalism in France. University of California, Los Angeles, 1978; Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985; Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995; Modern Art in the Common Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996; The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996; The Intelligence of Art. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999; “Marx to Sharks: The Art-Historical ’80s.” Artforum 41 no. 8 (2003): 45, 47-8, 51-2; “The Practice of Art History in America.” Daedalus (Spring 2006).”
Sources
Day, Sara.” Art History’s New Warrior Breed.” Art International no. 6 (Spring 1989): 78-89; Glueck, Grace. “Clashing Views Reshape Art History, When Art Historians Put the Picture in a Social Frame Revising Art History.” New York Times December 20, 1987, Section H, p. 1; “Thomas Crow Named Director of Getty Research Institute.” [press release] Getty Institute, February 14, 2000 http://www.getty.edu/news/press/leaders/crow; “Thomas Crow Comes to NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts As Professor of Modern Art.” [press release] New York University October 24, 2006 http://www.nyu.edu/public.affairs/releases/detail/1281
Citation
"Crow, Thomas E.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/crowt/.
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Historian of 18th-century French art and prime exponent of the “New Art History” in the United States. Crow was raised in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. As a teenager, he moved with his family to San Diego, California in 1961. He entered Pomona
Subject Area(s): art history, English (language), Flemish (culture or style), Italian (culture or style), and painting (visual works)
Career(s): art historians and translators
Institution(s): London Illustrated News
Overview
Co-author with G. B. Cavalcaselle of one of the first modern English-language art histories. Crowe was born to the historian Eyre Evans Crowe (1799-1868). He studied painting with Jean-Louis Baptiste Hubert and Jules Coignet (1798-1860) in the early 1840s in France. He served as a political correspondent for the Morning Chronicle and the Daily News in 1843, providing illustrations and text for the journal. In 1847 a chance meeting with artist and connoisseur G. B. Cavalcaselle led to a fast friendship based on art interests. When Cavalcaselle fled to London as a political exile, they lived in the same house in 1852. This proximity resulted in a collaborative effort of the first modern art histories in the English language. Crowe returned to war reporting, covering the Crimean War for the London Illustrated News in 1856, but the following year, the first of their art history ventures, The Early Flemish Painters, appeared in 1857. Crowe continued to cover news stories, such as the Indian “Sepoy” mutiny for the Times (London) in 1857. In 1860 he began a distinguished career as a diplomat as British consul general for Saxony. Translations (with corrections) of Early Flemish Painters appeared in French (1862), German (1875) and Italian (1899). Crowe and Cavalcaselle continued their collaborations, issuing the first volume of A New History of Painting in Italy (it was in three volumes) in 1864. Their A History of Painting in North Italy appeared in 1871, followed by Crowe’s reassignment the following year as consul for Westphalia and the Rhine provinces. Crowe and Cavalcaselle produced two artists biographies, one on Titian (1877) and another on Raphael in 1882. From 1880 forward Crowe acted as the British commercial attaché for Berlin and Vienna. After 1882 he resided in Paris as a commercial attaché for the whole of Europe. The combined publishing efforts of Crowe and Cavalcasselle resulted in some of the earliest and best scholarly surveys in the history of art. As a journalist and native English speaker, Crowe did all of the writing for the books. Cavalcaselle provided a knowledge of art and documents. Their art histories were the first written in English to make use of documentary evidence and research, rather than the hearsay mythology of much of 19th-century art writing. Their books went into numerous editions and are still considered an important part of the literature of art history. The popularity of their books was such that they were issued in German and Italian editions. In 1874 Crowe translated another groundbreaking art history, Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte (1842) by Franz Kugler with revisions by Gustav Friedrich Waagen. Crow’s technical analysis of painting was also groundbreaking. During the height of the debate between authentic versions of Holbein Meyer Madonna, he determined that the Dresden version’s binding medium of the pigment could not have been from Holbein’s era, soundly negating numerous art historians (Herman Grimm, and Julius Hübner) who had based their opinions on stylistic grounds. Their works were far from faultless. Numerous errors quoted from other scholars and incorporated in the first edition of Early Flemish Painters resulted in Alexandre Joseph Pinchart revising the work for the French edition of 1862 (and incorporated in the second English edition). The line engravings were so poor (mechanical reproduction of art did not yet exist) that they are almost unrecognizable to the original (Lane). The German edition was edited by the eminent German scholar Anton Springer.
Selected Bibliography
[all the following written in conjunction with: Cavalcaselle, Giovanni Battista.] The Early Flemish Painters: Notices of their Lives and Works. London, J. Murray, 1857, French, and Pinchart, Alexandre, and Ruelens, Charles. Les anciens peintres flamands: Leur vie et leurs oeuvres. 2 vols. Brussels: F. Heussner, 1862, German, Springer, Anton, ed. Geschichte der altniederländischen Malerei. Leipzig: Hirtzl, 1875; Italian, Storia dell’antica pittura fiamminga. Florence: Le Monnier, 1899; A New History of Painting in Italy from the Second to the Sixteenth Century. 3 vols. London: J. Murray, 1864, Italian, Storia della pittura in Italia dal secolo II al secolo XVI. 11 vols. Florence: Le Monnier, 1885-1908; [revised and translated:] Kugler, Franz, and Waagen, Gustav Friedrich. Handbook of Painting: the German, Flemish and Dutch Schools: Based on the Handbook of Kugler, Remodelled by the Late Dr. Waagen. 2 vols. London: J. Murray 1874; and Springer, Anton. Geschichte der altniederlaendischen Malerei. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1875; Titian: His Life and Times, with Some Account of His Family. 2 vols. London: J. Murray, 1877; Raphael: His Life and Works, with Particular Reference to Recently Discovered Records, and an Exhaustive Study of Extant Drawings and Pictures. 2 vols. London: J. Murray, 1882-1885.
Sources
Crowe, Joseph A. Reminiscences of Thirty-five Years of My Life. London: J. Murray, 1895; 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. 44 (and n. 88-89); Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 236; Lane, Barbara G. “Introduction: The Problem of Two Rogiers.” Flemish Painting Outside Bruges, 1400-1500: An Annotated Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986, p. 2; Kultermann, Udo. The History of Art History. New York: Abaris, 1993, p. 148; Concise Dictionary of National Biography I: 304; Oxford Dictionary of Art. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 143; Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon 22, pp. 454-55;
Co-author with G. B. Cavalcaselle of one of the first modern English-language art histories. Crowe was born to the historian Eyre Evans Crowe (1799-1868). He studied painting with Jean-Louis Baptiste Hubert and Jules C
