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Coolidge, John P.

Image Credit: Harvard

Full Name: Coolidge, John P.

Other Names:

  • John Coolidge

Gender: male

Date Born: 1913

Date Died: 1995

Place Born: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK

Place Died: Cambridge, Middlesex, MA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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


Overview

Architectural historian and Director of the Fogg Art Museum, 1948-1972. Coolidge’s family was closely associated with Harvard University and Boston. His father, Julian Lowell Coolidge (1873-1954) was a mathematics professor at Harvard and first master of Lowell House, Harvard, and an uncle, Archibald Cary Coolidge (1866-1928), Professor of History (1908-1928) at Harvard College and the first Director of the Harvard University Library (1910-1928), Harvard. The Coolidge’s were related to Thomas Jefferson and the Lowell families of Cambridge, including the poet James Russell Lowell (1819-1891). John P. Coolidge attended Harvard, taking over the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, a student-run gallery founded by Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996), Eddie Warburg and John Walker III, from graduating art-history students Otto Wittmann, Jr., and Perry T. Rathbone. He received a B. A. from Harvard in 1935 marrying Mary Elizabeth “Polly” Welch (1912-2003) the same year. His intent was to become an architect; the 1932 “International Style” exhibition on modernist architecture, launched by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson had fired his enthusiasm for contemporary architecture. Coolidge moved to New York in order to study architecture at Columbia University, however, he switched to architectural history believing he lacked talent for design. He entered New York University in 1936 in order to study with the newly arrived émigrés from Nazi Germany that NYU had hired. These included Erwin Panofsky and Karl Leo Heinrich Lehmann as well as his ultimate dissertation advisors, Walter Friedlaender and Richard Krautheimer. In 1940 he participated in the founding of the Society of Architectural Historians, initiated by Kenneth John Conant and was its first vice president. In 1942 Coolidge published the research for his master’s degree in a unique examination of a factory town-architecture, both industrial and residential, Mill and Mansion: a Study of Architecture and Society in Lowell, Massachusetts. The book was such a strong social history that Columbia University Press published it in their series “Studies in American Culture.” Coolidge’s dissertation topic was on Giacomo Barozzi, Il Vignola. A seminal article on Vignola and the architect’s contribution to the Villa Giulia and St. Peters, appeared in 1943. His dissertation was nearly complete when he joined the U. S. Navy during World War II, initially as an ensign. He was posted in communications in Washgington, D. C., and London. He was discharged in 1946, taught at the University of Pennsylvania until his dissertation was accepted in 1947. He was appointed an Assistant Professor in the department of Fine Arts at Harvard in 1947 and in the following year was named Associate Professor and director of Harvard’s Art Museums. As director of the Fogg Art Museum, he built the art collections, particularly in Islamic and modern. The same year, 1948, he was named a trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 1955 he was promoted to full professor. Coolidge continued the Fogg’s tradition of the museum as a laboratory for curatorial studies, begun under Paul J. Sachs. He retired from the Fogg as William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts, Emeritus, in 1972, presiding as president of the MFA, Boston, 1973-1975. In his later years, Coolidge tackled art museum architecture, Patrons and Architects, again, examining how buildings affect the environment for which they exist in his 1989 book. An art history, Gustave Doré’s London, appeared in 1992. His funeral was held in the 1760 Christ Church, Cambridge, MA, a building by Peter Harrison (1716-1775) which Coolidge had studied and about which he had written. He was known to roller skate between train trips on his Princeton, N. J. to New commutes. The John Coolidge Objects Laboratory at the Harvard Museums is named in his memory. Nicholas Adams characterized Coolidge as an architectural historian striving for a cohesive analytic for architecture, one which would honestly evaluate what Coolidge considered the “wearisome pageant of rivals” with genuine architectural innovation. He avoided an architecture that was typological or regional in its method. He eschewed architectural biography in favor of a history that examined social and economic factors. As a museum director, Coolidge notably added the first modernist works to the Fogg, including the first Morris Louis.


Selected Bibliography

“The Vill Giulia: A Study of Central Italian Architecture in the Mid-Sixteenth Century.” Art Bulletin 25 (1943): 177-225; Mill and Mansion: a Study of Architecture and Society in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1820-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1942; Patrons and Architects: Designing Art Museums in the Twentieth Century. Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum, 1989; Gustave Doré’s London: A Study of the City in the Age of Confidence, 1848-1873. Dublin, NH: William L. Bauhan, 1992.


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. 51 mentioned; [transcript] Coolidge, John. The Modern Sensibility at the Fogg Art Museum: Interviews with Art Historians, 1991-2002. Malibu, CA: UCLA Oral History Program/Getty Research Institute, 1993; “A Foggy Final.” Time January 26, 1962, p. ; [obituaries:] Adams, Nicholas. “John P. Coolidge, Architectural Historian.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 54 no. 4 (December 1995): 400-401, 511; Ackerman, James S., and Cuno, James, and Jaffe, Arthur, and Levine, Neil, and Slive, Seymour. “Memorial Minute: John P. Coolidge.” Harvard Gazette [online] http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/1996/11.21/MemorialMinuteJ.


Archives


Contributors: Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen


Citation

Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen. "Coolidge, John P.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/coolidgej/.


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Architectural historian and Director of the Fogg Art Museum, 1948-1972. Coolidge’s family was closely associated with Harvard University and Boston. His father, Julian Lowell Coolidge (1873-1954) was a mathematics professor at Harvard and first ma

Coomaraswamy, Ananda Kentish

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Full Name: Coomaraswamy, Ananda Kentish

Gender: male

Date Born: 1877

Date Died: 1947

Place Born: Columbo, Sri Lanka

Place Died: Needham, Norfolk, MA, USA

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Asian, Indian (South Asian), Punjabi (Indian culture and style), South Asian, and Sri Lankan

Career(s): art collectors and curators


Overview

Early and influential curator and collector of South Asian art in United States. Coomaraswamy’s father was a lawyer and native of Ceylon and his mother was British. His father died when Coomaraswamy was two and the family moved to England. He obtained Bachelor of Science degree in Botany and Geology from University College, London, along with the prevailing anti-modernist Pre-Raphaelite esthetics of John Ruskin. He returned to Ceylon in 1903 to be the Director of Mineralogical Survey of Ceylon. There he witnessed first-hand the effects that British colonial rule and industrialization had on the indigenous arts and crafts of the region. Coomaraswamy founded the Ceylon Social Reforms Society and edited the Ceylon National Review. Shortly after leaving Ceylon for England in 1907, he published his first book on art, Medieval Sinhalese Art (1908) printed at the Kelmscott Press of William Morris. Coomaraswamy turned his attention to India, publishing The Indian Craftsman in 1909, a work paralleling the late Arts-and-Crafts interest in England. That same year, his Essays in National Idealism also appeared, outlining his concern for Indian statehood. Coomaraswamy continued to travel between England and India during the years 1909-13, spending the majority of the time in Calcutta. There he became convinced that the prevailing Western idea of Greek art as an influence to Indian sculpture was essentially wrong. He argued a de-emphasizing of Gandharan sculpture in Indian art history in favor of Swadeshi works, the latter art which blossomed centuries after Greek influence. This thesis was most clearly stated in Art and Swadeshi of 1911. Coomaraswamy began personally collecting South Asian art, participating in the newly founded Indian Society of Oriental Art, and collecting Indian drawings and paintings for the 1910 United Provinces Exhibition held in Allahabad. In 1916, his first highly influential book, Rajput Painting, appeared. One of the first works in English to classify and construct a history of Rajasthan Punjab painting, it including iconographic and religious treatments of the subjects as well. Coomaraswamy urged Indian officials to create a national art museum in Varanasi and even offered his art collection to India. By 1916 his disillusionment with the idea, together with his profile as a scholar in the West, led to accept an offer by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to add his collection to their already significant holdings of Asian art. Coomaraswamy moved with the collection to Boston, to become Keeper (curator) of the Museum’s new Indian Section. He held this position for the rest of his life. Free to research and publish exclusively on South Asian art, Coomaraswamy issued broadly cultural books on Indian art. The Mirror of Gesture (1917) and The Dance of Shiva (1918) showed the interdependence of Indian music and dance on that country’s art. Beginning in 1923, Coomaraswamy produced in serial components the Catalogue of the Indian Collection in the Museum of Fine Arts. Though nominally a catalog of the collection, the work was a rich scholarly survey of the art of India. Before its completion in 1930, his other survey, The History of Indian and Indonesian Art appeared in 1927. Coomaraswamy also produced an important essay on Mathuran art, “The Origin of the Buddha Image” (1927), and a two-volume iconographic treatment of Vedic myth in Indian art, Yakss (1928-31) during his years as curator. For the American reading public, however, his late collected essays, Transformation of Nature in Art of 1934 represented the breadth of his thought. Elements of Buddhist Iconography, an analysis of Buddhist symbolism appeared in 1935. Toward the end of his life, two essays on museology appeared. “What is the Use of Art, Anyway?”, 1937, was published in the 1941 Why Exhibit Works of Art?. Coomaraswamy died before he could fulfill a life-long desire to return to free state of India.Coomaraswamy’s writings on South Asian art formed the principal Western conception of the field for most of the twentieth century. He early on championed an aesthetic revaluation of Indian art motivated in part by a utopian rural concept of South Asia that was distinct from a material, industrial West. In later years, Coomaraswamy focused on iconography, in part with a disillusionment with nationalist ideologies of his early years. His early writings established the Hindu tradition of painting, particularly miniature painting, contrasting them from secular court-style painting of the Mughal dynasties while his later work argued successfully for the art of Mathura as core to an India renaissance within its own art history.


Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Crouch, James S. A Bibliography of Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 2002; Yaksas: a Bhakti Cult. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1928; Hinduism and Buddhism. New York: Philosophical Library, 1943; Bronzes from Ceylon, Chiefly in the Colombo Museum, Ceylon, Colombo Museum. Ceylon: Colombo Museum, 1914; Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism. New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1916; The Dance of Šiva: Fourteen Indian Essays. New York: Sunwise Turn, 1918; Elements of Buddhist Iconography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935; History of Indian and Indonesian Art. New York: E Weyhe, 1927; Is Art a Superstition or a Way of Life? [A] Lecture Given at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Newport, RI.: J. Stevens, 1937; “The Origin of the Buddha Image.” Art Bulletin 9 (1927): 287-328; “Mediaeval Aesthetic.” Art Bulletin 17 (March 1935): 31-47; La sculpture de Bodhgaya. Paris: Les éditions d’art et d’histoire, 1935; The Transformation of Nature in Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934; Višvakarma: Examples of Indian Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Handicraft. London: Messrs. Luzac, 1914; Catalogue of the Indian Collections in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1923-1930.


Sources

Thakurta, Tapati Guha. “Coomaraswamy, Ananda Kentish.” Dictionary of Art ; Bagchee, Moni. Ananda Coomaraswamy: a Study. Varanasi: Bharata Manisha, 1977; Bharatha Iyer, K. Art and Thought, Issued in Honour of Dr. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday. London: Messrs. Luzac, 1947; Lipsey, Roger. Coomaraswamy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977, vol. 3. “His Life and Work.”


Archives


Contributors: Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen


Citation

Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen. "Coomaraswamy, Ananda Kentish." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/coomaraswamya/.


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Early and influential curator and collector of South Asian art in United States. Coomaraswamy’s father was a lawyer and native of Ceylon and his mother was British. His father died when Coomaraswamy was two and the family moved to England. He obta

Cooper, Douglas

Image Credit: National Portrait Gallery

Full Name: Cooper, Douglas

Other Names:

  • Douglas Cooper

Gender: male

Date Born: 20 February 1911

Date Died: 01 April 1984

Place Born: Chelsea, Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Cubist

Career(s): art collectors and art critics


Overview

Art historian, critic and collector, principally of Cubism. Cooper was born to a wealthy family who had made their fortune in Australia generations before. His father, Arthur Hamilton Cooper, was a career military officer, a captain in the Essex regiment and his mother was Mabel Alice Smith-Marriott. Cooper attended the Repton School, Derbyshire, before entering Trinity College, Cambridge. He graduated in 1930 with degrees in French and German. He next briefly attended the Sorbonne in Paris and the University of Freiburg, studying art history at both. By 1932 Cooper had resolved to devote a significant part of his inheritance (as much as one-third) to collecting art, particularly the Cubist artists Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and Fernand Léger. This cooincided with a depreciation of the market value of Cubism in the 1930s; Cooper subsequently sold other portions of his non-Cubist collection to buy more, ultimately amassing one of the finest private Cubist collections in Europe, a collection which was essentially complete by 1945 (Kosinski). Cooper possessed an obstreperous personality and throughout his adult life cultivated quarrels as much as friends; he had what can only be termed flexible literary ethics. Daniel Catton Rich exposed Cooper of plagiarizing Rich’s book on Douanier Rousseau (1942), in an article Cooper wrote on the artist in the Burlington Magazine. After Cooper’s caustic review of a book on Seurat by John Rewald in 1944, Rewald noticed similar parallels between his disparaged book and Cooper’s subsequent 1946 Georges Seurat: Une baignade. Though the matter was settled without official acknowledgement, Cooper had to admit culpability. During the second world war Cooper joined the army, working first as an ambulence driver and later in the Royal Air Force intelligence, using his significant language skills and finally, from 1944 to 1946 as deputy director of the monuments and fine arts branch of the Allied Control Commission for Germany, interviewing captured Nazi cultural figures, including Berlin Museum Director Otto Kümmel. By 1948, Cooper, a homosexual, had established an abode in London living with Basil Mackenzie, Lord Amulree (1900-1983), a noted physician (Lord). While with Amulree, he met John Richardson, an art historian, and the two paired to become life partners for fifteen years. In 1949 Cooper and Richardson found a dilapidated country château, Châteaude Castille in Argilliers, département Gard, France, which he moved into along with his art. There he lived the life of a connoisseur collector, a frequent stop of art cognoscenti. Cooper made use of his personal acquaintance of artists–most notably Picasso and Leger– to write monographs on contemporary artists. Meanwhile, the importance of his collection began to be clear. The French minister of culture became so jealous of Cooper’s collection he refuse to allow the collection to leave France without Cooper donating some paintings to country. His life-long animosity toward his native England caused him many rows with institutions there. He was a frequent contributor to the Burlington Magazine (writing under the pseudonym ‘Douglas Lord’ as he was at one time or another a shareholder or on the board of directors), though he perpetually called for the resignation of Benedict Nicolson, the magazine’s editor. In 1950 he was involved in a very public attempt to oust the Tate Gallery director John Rothenstein from his position. Cooper’s criticism of the extremely conservative collecting policies of Rothenstein were valid. However, his letters in the newspaper became so nasty that at one point the diminutive Rothenstein punched Cooper at an art reception. Although the Tate director was never removed, the Trustees made Cooper a member to partly ensure broader collection policies. Though Cooper was friends with (and champions of) both Picasso and Graham Sutherland, in later years he disparaged portions of their output. In 1954 Cooper wrote the catalog for the art collection of the industrialist/art collector Samuel Courtauld. In later years, he broke his friendship with even Picasso, attacking the artist’s work shortly after his death in a review of Picasso’s late work. Cooper was appointed a lecturer at the Courtauld Institute during this time. He was Slade professor of fine art at Oxford for the 1957-1958 year. In 1961 he was in residence at Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA, as the Flexner professor. He issued a monograph on Cubism based upon his research and experience The Cubist Epoch in 1971. The following year he adopted the 35-year-old William Augustine McCarty as his son. Cooper died at the Royal Free Hospital, Camden, London. The Cubist art historian John Golding wrote his dissertation under Cooper. Methodologically, Cooper seldom diverged from the formalism common among insular historians of art before the war. Much of this is because he relied upon his immense personal knowledge of the artists about whom he wrote. His most valuable contribution to the literature of art is his catalogue raisonné of Juan Gris. His monograph on Cubism is his most famous publication. His papers are held at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, Los Angeles.


Selected Bibliography

[war experiences] and C. Denis Freeman. The Road to Bordeaux. New York: Harper, 1941; Georges Seurat: Une baignade, Asnières, in the Tate gallery, London. London: P. Lund Humphries & Company Ltd, 1946; Fernand Léger et le nouvel espace.London: Lund Humphries, 1949; Pablo Picasso: les déjeuners. Paris: Cercle d’Art, 1962; Picasso, théâtre. Paris: Éditions Cercle d’art, 1967, English, Picasso Theatre. New York: Abrams, 1968; The Cubist Epoch. New York: Phaidon, 1971; with Margaret Potter. Juan Gris: catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint. Paris: Berggruen, 1977.


Sources

The Dictionary of Art 7: 797; Richardson, John. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice:A Decade of Picasso, Provence, and Douglas Cooper. New York: Knopf, 1999; Shone, Richard. “Douglas Cooper: Unpublished Letters to the Editor.” The Burlington Magazine 128, No. 1000. (July 1986): 481-483; Kosinski, Dorothy. “Cooper [Arthur William] Douglas.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Lord, James. Picasso and Dora. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993, pp. 66, 91.


Archives


Contributors: Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen


Citation

Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen. "Cooper, Douglas." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/cooperd/.


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Art historian, critic and collector, principally of Cubism. Cooper was born to a wealthy family who had made their fortune in Australia generations before. His father, Arthur Hamilton Cooper, was a career military officer, a captain in the Essex r

Coor, Gertrude Marianne Achenbach

Full Name: Coor, Gertrude Marianne Achenbach

Other Names:

  • Gertrude Marianne Achenbach

Gender: female

Date Born: 1915

Date Died: 1962

Place Born: Frankfurt am Main, Hesse, Germany

Place Died: Princeton, Mercer, NJ, USA

Home Country/ies: Germany

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


Overview

Scholar of Italian painting. Her father was a lawyer and her mother a painter and concert pianist. After receiving the highest honors of her Abiturum from the Gymnasium under which she studied, she won a scholarship which enabled her to spend a year at Wells College, Aurora, NY. She returned to Germany only to find Nazi control of her selected university, Munich, too much to for a Jew such as herself to tolerate. She moved to Perugia in 1935 only to find the same political hatred there. She stayed with friends at the University in Cardiff, Wales, before securing a scholarship via the Institute for International Education to attend Bryn Mawr in 1938. She received US citizenship the same year. Without an undergraduate degree, Achenbach was permitted to begin graduate work, achieving an M.A. in 1940. In 1945 Charles Rufus Morey offered Achenbach a position with the Index of Christian Art at Princeton. She worked there while writing her dissertation at the Institute of Fine Art at New York University under Richard Offner. An photograph often used in art historiographic texts of the post-war faculty of the Institute is a picture of her Ph.D. defense. Achenbach married a Princeton physicist, Thomas Coor in 1946. She received her Ph.D. in 1948 on a topic of Coppo di Marcovaldo. The years 1948-50 were spent with her husband in London where she was informally attached to the Warburg Institute. Returning to Princeton, the Coors settled permanently with Gertrude again working at the Index of Christian Art and teaching courses at Rutgers University in 1958 and 1959. She accepted a research assistant position under Millard Meiss at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton in 1959. In 1961 her book on Neroccio de’ Landi appeared. As a woman in the 1950s married to a university professor, she was expected to keep house and run the other domestic activities in addition to whatever scholarship she wanted to pursue. Coor purportedly worked sixteen hours every day on her research in addition to her wife duties. Coor was a consultant for the Kress Collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She was at work on a book on the evolution of the Sienese altarpiece when she contracted a terminal illness and died at 47.


Selected Bibliography

Neroccio de’ Landi, 1447-1500. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961. “Notes on Six Parts of Two Dismembered Sienese Altarpieces.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 65 (March 1965)” 129-36; “Contributions to the Study of Ugolino di Nerio’s Art.” Art Bulletin 37 (September 1955): 153-65; “Painting of St. Lucy in the Walters Art Gallery and Some Closely Related Representations.” The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 18 (1955): 78-90; “Earliest Italian Representation of the Coronation of the Virgin.” Burlington Magazine 99 (October 1957): 328-32; “Coppo di Marcovaldo: his Art in Relation to the Art of his Time.” Marsyas 5 (1947-1949): 1-21; “Iconography of Tobias and the Angel in Florentine Painting of the Renaissance.” Marsyas 3 (1943-1945): 71-86; “Early Italian Tabernacle in the Possession of the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 25 (March 1944): 129-52.0.Metzler


Sources

Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 1, pp. 105-7; [obituaries:] Lee, Rensselaer W. “Gertrude Achenbach Coor, 1915-1962.” Art Journal 22 no. 4 (Summer 1963): 246; “Mrs. Thomas Coor, Art Historian, 47.” New York Times September 10, 1962, p. 29.




Citation

"Coor, Gertrude Marianne Achenbach." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/coorg/.


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Scholar of Italian painting. Her father was a lawyer and her mother a painter and concert pianist. After receiving the highest honors of her Abiturum from the Gymnasium under which she studied, she won a scholarship which enabled her to spend a ye

Corbett, P. E.

Full Name: Corbett, P. E.

Other Names:

  • Peter Edgar Corbett

Gender: male

Date Born: 1920

Date Died: 1992

Place Born: Preston, Hertfordshire, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): archaeology and Classical


Overview

Yates Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology at University College London,1961-1982. Corbett attended the Bedford School and then St. John’s College, Oxford on a scholarship. During World War II he joined Royal Artillery but transferred to the RAF were he flew the two-man Mosquito (de Havilland 98) fighter planes. Corbett married Albertha Yates in 1944 (d. 1961). Following the war, Corbett was appointed Thomas Whitcombe Greene Scholar and Macmillan Student of British School at Athens in 1947. He left Athens in 1949 to become Assistant Keeper in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum, hired by Bernard Ashmole. Ashmole had assembled a department with, among others, Reynold Alleyne Higgins and D. E. Strong. Corbett was among those assigned to return the Museum’s objects to display (from their war-time hiding) and redesign the Duveen Gallery, which had been destroyed in the war. Corbett wrote The Sculpture of the Parthenon in 959 based upon these experiences. Although small and issued in the popular King Penguin series, the book assembles scholarly literature and personal insight into a lucid read. During this time, too, he took over labeling the vast study collection of Greek vase into what he called “a library of Greek mythology.” Corbett devoted much of his scholarly effort to recreating the frieze of the temple of Apollo at Bassae, in Arcadia. He studied objects in the Museum as well as on site together with G. U. S. Corbett (no relation) at the British School. In 1961 Corbett was appointed professor at University College London, resigning from the Museum. He developed the bachelor’s degree in archaeology, combining a full Classics degree with a full course in Archaeology. After the death of his first wife from cancer, he married the scholar of the renaissance Margery Martin in 1962. He was named President of the Society for Promotion of Hellenic Studies in 1980 (to 1983). He retired from the University of London in 1982.


Selected Bibliography

The Sculpture of the Parthenon. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1959; and Birchall, Ann. Greek Gods and heroes: Guide and Catalogue. London: British Museum, 1969; “Aeon epi Aeonidei.” Hesperia 28, no. 1 (January March 1949): 104-107; “A Vase by the Altamura Painter.” British Museum Quarterly 24, no. 3-4 (1962): 97-99.


Sources

[obituary:] Barron, John. “Professor Peter Corbett.” The Independent (London) September 15, 1992, p. 17.




Citation

"Corbett, P. E.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/corbettp/.


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Yates Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology at University College London,1961-1982. Corbett attended the Bedford School and then St. John’s College, Oxford on a scholarship. During World War II he joined Royal Artillery but transferred to the

Coremans, Paul

Image Credit: Bestor

Full Name: Coremans, Paul

Gender: male

Date Born: 1908

Date Died: 1965

Place Born: Borgerhout, Antwerpen, Flanders, Belgium

Place Died: Noorden, South Holland, Netherlands

Home Country/ies: Belgium

Subject Area(s): conservation (discipline) and conservation (process)


Overview

Director of the Royal Institute for the Study and Conservation of Belgium’s Artistic Heritage, in Brussels. Coremans studied at the Free University of Brussels (Faculty of Sciences). In 1932, he obtained his doctorate in analytical chemistry with a dissertation: Sur le déplacement des électrolytes adsorbés. In 1934, he was invited by Jean Capart, Egyptologist and chief curator of the Brussels Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire/Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis (Royal Museums of Art and History), to set up a laboratory and to reorganize the photographic documentation. During his first years, he spent most of his time on questions of authenticity as well as on the state of preservation of Egyptian works of art in the museum. In 1935, he published an article on air conditioning in museums: Le conditionnement de l’air dans les musées. In 1937, along with Capart, he made his first trip to the United States as a C.R.B. Special Advanced Fellow of the Belgian American Educational Foundation. At Harvard University, he visited the laboratory of the Fogg Art Museum, directed by Rutherford J. Gettens (1900-1974). During World War II, Capart asked Coremans to set up a campaign to photograph monuments and works of art all over Belgium. Many young men were involved in the project, which provided them the opportunity to escape mandatory employment by the Nazis. After the war, Coremans was active in the repatriation of stolen art from Germany. The safety of art treasures in times of war became a concern in Europe and all over the world. Coremans discussed this matter in particular with F.I.G. Rawlins (1895-1969) and Harold J. Plenderleith (1898-1997), who were the heads of the conservation laboratories of the National Gallery and the British Museum respectively. In 1946, Coremans published a handbook on this subject: La protection scientifique des œuvres d’art en temps de guerre. He dedicated himself to the protection and conservation of art treasures as a consultant of UNESCO and as an active member of the International Council of Museums (Icom). Along with Rawlins, Plenderleith and with the Fogg Art Museum chemist George Stout, he played a major role in the foundation, in 1950, of the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (IIC). He also contributed to the creation, on the initiative of UNESCO, of the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (the so-called Rome Centre). In 1948, the Brussels documentation center and the laboratory were founded as an independent institution, Archives centrales iconographiques d’art national et le Laboratoire central des musées de Belgique/Centraal Iconografisch Archief voor Nationale Kunst en het Centraal Laboratorium der Belgische Musea (ACL), headed by Coremans (since 1957, Institut Royal du Patrimoine Artistique/Koninklijk Instituut voor het Kunstpatrimonium, Royal Institute for the Study and Conservation of Belgium’s Artistic Heritage). In 1948, Coremans obtained a teaching position in art techniques at the Higher Institute for Art History and Archaeology at Ghent State University. Prior to this appointment, he made a second trip to the United States during which he conducted seminars at a number of American institutions, including Harvard University, Simmons College (Boston), Oxford School at Hartford, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. He also emerged as an authority in forged Vermeers by Han van Meegeren (1889-1947) initially discovered in the 1930s. His publication: Van Meegeren’s Faked Vermeers and de Hooghs: A Scientific Examination appeared in 1949. Coremans had a particular interest in the scientific documentation of the paintings of the Flemish Primitives. Along with Jacques Lavalleye, he founded, in 1949, the Centre national de recherches Primitifs flamands/Nationaal Centrum voor de Studie van de Vlaamse Primitieven. In 1951, the famous Ghent Polyptych of the Van Eycks, the Adoration of the Lamb, was restored in the Brussels laboratory, under the supervision of a national and an international advisory committee. His findings were published as L’Agneau mystique au laboratoire. Examen et traitement (1953) in the Contributions à l’étude des Primitifs flamands. In this year, Coremans conducted a series of seminars on the restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece in the United States, at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University and at Oberlin College in Ohio. This trip was again sponsored by the Belgian American Educational Foundation. This foundation acted as one of the organizers of the Belgian Art Seminar summer university courses in Belgium, to which Coremans contributed from 1951 to 1955, and of the Art Conservation Symposium in Brussels in 1963, in which Coremans was also involved. In 1962, the Royal Institute for the Study and Conservation of Belgium’s Artistic Heritage moved to a new building where, in collaboration with Ghent State University, courses on scientific research and conservation of the artistic heritage were offered to conservators and technicians, selected from different countries. Coremans died prematurely at the age of 57. He was internationally recognized as a promoter of the care for the world’s artistic heritage, a field which he helped to develop and to which he contributed with his innovative work.  His students included Roger H. Marijnissen,, with whom he later became disaffected.


Selected Bibliography

For a complete list, see: Hommage à Paul Coremans/Hulde aan Paul Coremans (1908-1965) Bulletin de l’Institut royal du Patrimoine artistique/Bulletin van het Koninklijk Instituut voor het Kunstpatrimonium 8 (1965): 82-97; Sur le déplacement des électrolytes adsorbés. Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1932; Le conditionnement de l’air dans les musées Bulletin des Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, 3e série, 7 (1935): 146-148; La protection scientifique des œuvres d’art en temps de guerre. L’expérience européenne pendant les années 1939 à 1945. Brussels: Laboratoire central des Musées de Belgique, 1946. (Appeared also in Dutch); Van Meegeren’s Faked Vermeers and de Hooghs. A Scientific Examination. Amsterdam: J.M. Meulenhoff, 1949; L’Agneau mystique au laboratoire. Examen et traitement. Antwerp: De Sikkel, 1953.


Sources

Bazin, Germain Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986: 503-504; Hommage à Paul Coremans/Hulde aan Paul Coremans (1908-1965) Bulletin de l’Institut royal du Patrimoine artistique/Bulletin van het Koninklijk Instituut voor het Kunstpatrimonium 8 (1965): 9-113 (with articles of various authors, including Lavalleye, J. Biographie: 9-19; Lorentz, Stanislaw La personnalité internanionale: 41-44; Pauwels, Henri De professor: 47-52); Wehlte, K Prof. Dr. Paul Coremans Mahltechnik 71 (1965): 88-89; Die Weltkunst 35 (1965): 578; Plenderleith, H.J.; Rivière G.H.; Rawlins, I Studies in Conservation 10 (1965): 132-133; Roberts-Jones, Ph. Bulletin des Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique 14 (1965): 225-226; Richardson, E.P. Recent Publications in the Field of Art. In Memoriam: Paul Coremans (1908-1965) The Art Quarterly 29 (1966): 89-91; Boletim do Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisboa V/3-4 (1969): 2; Goya 69 (1965): 198; Werner, A.E. Museums Association 5/6 (September 1965): 39; Keck, Caroline K. Salute to Paul Coremans Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 30, 1 (1991): 1-2; Miscellanea in memoriam Paul Coremans 1908-1965. Bulletin de l’Institut royal du Patrimoine artistique/Bulletin van het Koninklijk Instituut voor het Kunstpatrimonium 15 (1975); Masschelein-Kleiner, Liliane. “L’Institut Royal du Patrimone Artistique, Cinquante Ans au Service Oeuvres d’Art.” Revue Belge d’Archéolgie et d’Histoire de l’Art 66 (1997): 175-200; Brinkman, Pim. “L’agneau Mystique au Laboratoire: het onderzoek van het Gentse altaarstuk.” Het geheim van Van Eyck: aantekeningen bij de uitvinding van het olieverven. Zwolle: Waanders, 1993, pp. 200-205.



Contributors: Monique Daniels


Citation

Monique Daniels. "Coremans, Paul." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/coremansp/.


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Director of the Royal Institute for the Study and Conservation of Belgium’s Artistic Heritage, in Brussels. Coremans studied at the Free University of Brussels (Faculty of Sciences). In 1932, he obtained his doctorate in analytical chemis

Cormack, Robin

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Full Name: Cormack, Robin

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Byzantine (culture or style) and Medieval (European)

Career(s): educators


Overview

Courtauld Institute Byzantinist. Cormack entered the Courtauld initially to study empirical positivism in art history. He studied with Anthony Blunt, Johannes Wilde, John Kinder Gowran Shearman, George Zarnecki, Peter Kidson, and Christopher Hohler, and, at the Warburg Institute, Hugo Buchthal. His dissertation was written under Cyril A. Mango.


Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] “Bibliography of Robin Cormack’s Published Works.” Eastmond, Anthony, and James, Liz, eds. Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium: Studies Presented to Robin Cormack. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003, pp. xxi-xxviii; Writing in Gold: Byzantine Society and its Icons. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985; Byzantine Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000; and Paskaleva-Kabadaieva, Kostadinka Georgieva. Icons from Bulgaria from the 9th to the 19th Centuries: an Exhibition Presented by the Scottish Arts Council and the Peoples’s Republic of Bulgaria in Association with the Visiting Arts Unit. Edinburgh: Scottish Arts Council, 1978; and Jeffreys, Elizabeth. Through the Looking Glass: Byzantium through British Eyes: Papers from the Twenty-ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, London, March 1995. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate/Varorium, 2000.


Sources

Elsner, Ja?. “Robin Cormack.” in, Eastmond, Anthony, and James, Liz, eds. Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium: Studies Presented to Robin Cormack. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003, pp. xvii-xxviii.




Citation

"Cormack, Robin." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/cormackr/.


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Courtauld Institute Byzantinist. Cormack entered the Courtauld initially to study empirical positivism in art history. He studied with Anthony Blunt, Johannes Wilde, John Kinder Gowr

Cornelius, Charles O.

Full Name: Cornelius, Charles O.

Other Names:

  • Charles Over Cornelius

Gender: male

Date Born: 1890

Date Died: 1937

Place Born: Sewickley, Allegheny, PA, USA

Place Died: Irvington-on-Hudson, Westchester, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): decorative arts (discipline) and furniture

Career(s): curators


Overview

First curator of furniture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Cornelius graduated from Princeton University in 1913. Cornelius received a B. S. from MIT in 1916. He entered the architectural practice of Frank A. Colby, New York, the same year. In 1917, Cornelius was hired by the principal enthusiast of furniture at the museum, Richard Townley Haines Halsey (1865-1942), a museum trustee after 1914 and chairman of the committee on American Decorative Arts. He became assistant curator in 1918. In 1922, Cornelius co-wrote Furniture Masterpieces of Duncan Phyfe with other collectors. Together with Halsey, he published the first handbook to the furniture collection in 1924, which had many subsequent editions. He was appointed associate curator of American art in 1925. In 1932 he married Louise Russell.


Selected Bibliography

Early American Furniture. New York: The Century co.,1926; and Rowland, Stanley J., and Halsey, R. T. Haines. Furniture Masterpieces of Duncan Phyfe. Garden City, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Doubleday, Page & Company, 1922; and Payson, William Farquhar. Mahogany, Antique and Modern: a Study of its History and Use in the Decorative Arts. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1926; A Handbook of the American Wing [of the Metropolitan Museum of Art]. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1924.


Sources

Tomkins, Calvin. Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970, p. 199; [obituary:] “Charles Cornelius, Art Expert.” New York Times July 15, 1937, p. 19.


Archives


Contributors: Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen


Citation

Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen. "Cornelius, Charles O.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/corneliusc/.


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First curator of furniture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Cornelius graduated from Princeton University in 1913. Cornelius received a B. S. from MIT in 1916. He entered the architectural practice of Frank A. Colby, New York, the same

Cornelius, Paul

Full Name: Cornelius, Paul

Gender: male

Date Born: 1868

Date Died: 1945


Overview

first student to receive Ph. D. from Heinrich Wölfflin in Basel.



Sources

Wölfflin, Heinrich. Heinrich Wölfflin, 1864-1945: Autobiographie, Tagebücher und Briefe. Joseph Ganter, ed. Basel: Schwabe & Co., 1982, p. 490.




Citation

"Cornelius, Paul." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/corneliusp/.


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first student to receive Ph. D. from Heinrich Wölfflin in Basel.

Condit, Carl W.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Full Name: Condit, Carl W.

Other Names:

  • Carl Condit

Gender: male

Date Born: 29 September 1914

Date Died: 04 January 1997

Place Born: Cincinnati, Hamilton, OH, USA

Place Died: Evanston, Cook, IL, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): American (North American), architecture (object genre), and sculpture (visual works)


Overview

Americanist architectural historian of the skyscraper. Condit was the son of Arthur Thomas and Gertrude Pletz (Condit). His father was employed as a teacher in Cincinnati. After attending Walnut Hills High School in the city he entered Purdue University in Indiana studying Mechanical Engineering. He graduated with a BS in that subject in 1936. Condit’s interests were stronger in the humanities, however and he returned to Cincinnati and the University there to study English literature. He awarded his A. M. in 1939 and his Ph.D. in 1941. His dissertation topic was on Geoffrey Chaucer. While working on his graduate degrees he taught English at Cincinnati University. With the outbreak of World War II, Condit taught in the U.S. Army War Production School, Cincinnati, as a civilian instructor in mathematics and mechanics, 1941-1942. He was thereafter appointed at the instructor level mathematics at the University, 1942-1944, marrying Isabel Marian Campbell, then employed as a teacher, in 1943. Condit worked for the New York Central Railroad in Cincinnati as an assistant design engineer in the building department, 1944-1945. At the conclusion of the War, he taught as an instructor of English at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 1945-1946. His first tenure-track appointment was a Carnegie Institute of Technology (modern Carnegie-Mellon University), Pittsburgh, PA, as assistant professor in the humanities and social sciences in 1946. He rose to associate professor in 1947. By this time, Condit’s interest was on the phenomenon of the skyscraper’s roll in modern architecture. While a postdoctoral fellow University of Wisconsin for the 1951-1952 academic year, Condit issued his book on architecture, The Rise of the Skyscraper. He followed this with American Building Art: the Nineteenth Century in 1960, a book on the origins of American architecture. In 1964 Condit wrote his most important book, The Chicago School of Architecture: A History of Commercial and Public Buildings in the Chicago Area, 1875 to 1925, examing the phenomenon of a city rebuilding itself (from the fire) into a specific genre of modern architecture. The book, however, somewhat overstated the contribution of Chicago the development of modern architecture. He was appointed full professor in 1966. In 1972 he returned to Northwestern as Professor of History, Art and Urban Affairs. Condit was named a member of advisory council, Smithsonian Institution, 1973-1978. In later years he admitted the prominence he’d given to Chicago in The Chicago School of Architecture had been too great. To counter this, he authored a book with New York University professor of architecture Sarah Landau, Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865-1913 in 1996. Condit died after a brief illness at age 82. Condit had no formal training in architecture or architectural history. His architectural histories adopted a structural-view of building and social history. The Chicago School of Architecture was the first to term the architecture of the Chicago Loop a school. He characterized the big windows and steel framework construction as the beginning of modern architecture. But the book failed to take into account the advances in skyscraper architecture in New York. American Building became a staple of architectural history classes, frequently used a the textbook.


Selected Bibliography

The Rise of the Skyscraper. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952; American Building Art: the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960; The Chicago School of Architecture: A History of Commercial and Public Buildings in the Chicago area, 1875 to 1925.Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1964; American Building: Materials and Techniques from the First Settlements to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968; and Landau, Sarah Bradford. Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865-1913. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.


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. 40 mentioned; Bey, Lee. “Architecture Expert leaves Towering Legacy.” Chicago Sun-Times January 12, 1997 p. 65; [obituaries:] Landau, Sarah Bradford. “Carl Wilbur Condit.” Society of Architectural Historians Newsletter 41 no. 4 (August 1997): 5; Vogel, Robert. “Carl W. Condit.” Society for Industrial Archeology Newsletter 26 no.1 (Spring 1997): 9-11; “Carl W. Condit, NU Professor.” Chicago Sun-Times January 9, 1997, p. 57.


Archives


Contributors: Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen


Citation

Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen. "Condit, Carl W.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/conditc/.


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Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Americanist architectural historian of the skyscraper. Condit was the son of Arthur Thomas and Gertrude Pletz (Condit). His father was employed as a teacher in Cincinnati. After attending Walnut Hills High School in the city he entered Purdue Univ