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Dana, John Cotton

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Full Name: Dana, John Cotton

Other Names:

  • John Cotton Dana

Gender: male

Date Born: 19 August 1856

Date Died: 21 July 1929

Place Born: Woodstock, Windsor, VT, USA

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): art theory, libraries (institutions), Modern (style or period), and museums (institutions)

Career(s): directors (administrators), librarians, and museum directors


Overview

Visionary modernist art museum director, Newark Museum, 1909-1929, and librarian theorist. Dana was born to Charles Dana, Jr. a general store manager, and Charitie Scott Loomis (Dana). In 1874, Dana entered Dartmouth College. He gained an A. B. in 1878 intent on becoming a lawyer, but a diagnosis of tuberculosis forced him to the drier climate of Colorado. Dana worked as a surveyor, part of the team who discovered the ruins of the Mesa River cliff dwellers in 1881. He returned to New York (state) and passed the bar exam in 1883, but ill health drove him again to Minnesota and then back to Colorado, selling real estate and again surveying. While a lay leader in the Unitarian church, he met and married Adine Rowena Waggener (1860-ca.1932) in 1888. Dana’s career as a librarian began after an article he wrote criticizing public education led to Dana’s appointment as the first librarian of Denver School District, the precursor of the Denver Public Library. His visionary library included picture files, reference shelves open to the public and a circulating picture collection (begun in 1891), primarily for children. In 1898 Dana returned to New England where he founded the Springfield, Massachusetts library system. Dana wanted to incorporate the city’s art and natural history museums into the library system, but met with stiff resistance from the wealthy private collector and curator of the art museum. He resigned in 1901 moving to the Free Public Library of Newark, New Jersey, the following year. Dana built the Newark library into one of the most successful urban public libraries in the United States, creating branches and specialized libraries, promoting the library vigorously. He also returned to his idea of running an art museum. In 1903 he mounted an exhibition of American art in the library, and by 1905 he had created a science museum on one floor of the library. Dana merged the museum into one for the arts as well, now called the Newark Museum in 1909, under the rubric of the Newark Museum Association, which he founded the same year. Dana’s main interest was industrial art and design. He personally built many of the display cases from his home carpentry shop. Dana established contact with the director of the Folkwang Museum in Germany, Karl Ernst Osthaus. The result was the 1912 show “Modern German Applied Arts,” a groundbreaking show of over 1,300 items by the Deutscher Werkbund, including metalwork and advertisements. A junior museum for children was established in 1913. Dana’s dogmatic lobbying for industrial design resulted in the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows of commercial products in 1917. During World War I Dana resisted much of the anti-German sentiments, refusing to remove German-authored books from library shelves. He hired the art historian Holger Cahill in 1921 to the staff of the Newark Museum, encouraged Cahill to organize shows on folk art, American primitives, and American folk sculpture. Dana declined honorary degrees from Dartmouth, Rutgers, and Princeton. In 1923, Dana spearheaded a touring show on Chinese art, one of the first in the country. Though Dana distained treasure-quality art, the wares of “archaeologists, excavators and importers,” as he put it, he invested in American artists. Years before larger American museums acquired indigenous artists, the Newark Museum owned paintings by John Sloan and Max Weber. By 1923, Dana’s health began to decline. The museum moved to separate quarters in 1926. Still energetic, he founded an apprenticeship program for display and museum curation, one of whose initial students was the later Museum of Modern Art curator Dorothy Miller. Dana hired Miller to assist with Cahill’s work in the Museum. In 1929, however Dana underwent an operation which resulted in a lingering infection. He collapsed the same year at Grand Central Station, NY, and died at an area hospital. Dana is buried in Woodstock, VT. His personal papers are contained at The Newark Public Library and the American Library Association Archives, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dana’s strong populist impulse made him a pre-cursor to modern art museum’s attention to broad public appeal. His theory of culture was derived more from the theory of Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) than art theorists. “Museums must advertise,” he wrote in a letter to the New York Times, an extreme notion at the time. His art museum–a term the Newark institution has never used–like his libraries, was devoted to show designs to educate local laborers. Dana believed in museum displays which re-enforced the object’s context, as opposed to the prevailing esthetic theories of installation (“the object as contemplative piece”) by curators such as Boston’s Benjamin Ives Gilman. A social progressive, he hoped to liberate the public from fashion obsolescence, espousing an American aesthetic of machine-style objects produced from the country’s industrial prowess. His legacy in museology is the acceptance of industrial design as part of American art museums. “Beauty,” he wrote elsewhere, “has no relation to age, rarity or price.” He was not a scholar and did no research on art.


Selected Bibliography

American Art: How it Can be Made to Flourish. Woodstock, VT: The Elm Tree Press, 1929.


Sources

Kingdon, Frank. John Cotton Dana: a Life. Newark: The Public Library and Museum, 1940; “John Cotton Dana and the Newark Museum.” Magazine of Art 37 (November 1944): 268-70ff.; Alexander, Edward P. “John Cotton Dana and the Newark Museum.” Museum Masters: their Museums and their Influence. Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local History, 1983; Manning, Martin J. “Dana, John Cotton.” American National Biography; Maffei, Nicolas. “John Cotton Dana and the Politics of Exhibiting Industrial Art in the U.S., 1909-1929.” Journal of Design History 13 no. 4 (2000): 301-17; Duncan, Carol. “Cotton Dana’s Progressive Museum.” in D’souza, Aruna, ed. Self and History: a Tribute to Linda Nochlin. London: Thames & Hudson, 2001, pp. 127-136; [obituary:] “John Cotton Dana Dies in 73d Year . . . ” New York Times July 22, 1929, p. 18.


Archives


Contributors: Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen


Citation

Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen. "Dana, John Cotton." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/danaj/.


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Visionary modernist art museum director, Newark Museum, 1909-1929, and librarian theorist. Dana was born to Charles Dana, Jr. a general store manager, and Charitie Scott Loomis (Dana). In 1874, Dana entered Dartmouth College. He gained an A. B. in

D’Ancona, Paolo

Full Name: D'Ancona, Paolo

Gender: male

Date Born: 1878

Date Died: 1963

Place Born: Pisa, Tuscany, Italy

Place Died: Milan, Lombardy, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Career(s): educators


Overview

Chair in art history at the University of Milan; student of A. Venturi in Rome



Sources

Bazin 420


Archives


Contributors: Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen


Citation

Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen. "D’Ancona, Paolo." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/danconap/.


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Chair in art history at the University of Milan; student of A. Venturi in Rome

D’Ancona, Mirella Levi

Full Name: D'Ancona, Mirella Levi

Gender: female

Date Born: 1919

Date Died: 2014

Place Born: Florence, Tuscany, Italy

Place Died: Florence, Tuscany, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): iconography

Institution(s): City University of New York


Overview

iconography


Selected Bibliography

The Iconography of the Immaculate Conception in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance. New York: 1957.; The garden of the Renaissance: botanical symbolism in Italian painting. Firenze: L. S. Olschki, 1977.


Sources

KMP, 67 cited; Bazin 432



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "D’Ancona, Mirella Levi." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/danconam/.


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iconography

d’Harnoncourt, Anne

Image Credit: The New York Times

Full Name: d'Harnoncourt, Anne

Other Names:

  • Anne Julie d'Harnoncourt

Gender: female

Date Born: 1943

Date Died: 2008

Place Born: Washington, DC, USA

Place Died: Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States


Overview

Ground-breaking female director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1982-2008. d’Harnoncourt was born to the Museum of Modern Art, director René d’Harnoncourt and fashion designer Sara Carr (d’Harnoncourt) (1904-2001). Raised in Manhattan, she met artists and museum professionals at an early age. d’Harnoncourt attended the Brearley School before entering Radcliffe, graduating in 1965 magna cum laude. She earned an MA from Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London in 1967 with a thesis on moral subject matter in Pre-Raphaelite and British 19th-century painting. While in London, she briefly worked for the Tate Gallery. d’Harnoncourt began her career in art history working at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as a curatorial assistant in the painting department. While there she worked with the early American Duchamp curator Walter C. Hopps. She moved to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1969 as curator of 20th-century art at the Art Institute of Chicago. At Chicago, she met assistant curator of European painting, Joseph H. Rishel, Jr. They married in 1971, rising to associate curator of 20th-century art at Chicago the same year. The following year she returned to Philadelphia as curator of 20th century art, in part to organize and mount the Marcel Duchamp a retrospective the following year, of which the Museum had spectacular holdings. She added to the Duchamp collection and archive at the Museum. In 1982 d’Harnoncourt was appointed director of the Museum, replacing Jean Sutherland Boggs the only woman to head a museum with an annual budget greater than $25 million and one of the youngest. She issued the volume on Duchamp for the important Documents of Twentieth Century Art series in 1983. As director, she orchestrated an immensely successful re-emergence of the Museum. In 1989, the Museum won an important court decision to integrate the John G. Johnson collection of European paintings–and the core of Philadelphia’s collection–into its overall holdings. The Museum had been previously required to keep Johnson’s painting separate, per his 1914 bequest. Armed with that decision, d’Harnoncourt set about a reinstallation and integration of its holdings, costing $12 million and requiring two capital campaigns. The first 1986 to 1993 raised $64 million. By the 1990s, d’Harnoncourt had turned down offers to direct the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery in Washington. She added the duties of chief executive to her Museum title in 1997, replacing Robert Montgomery Scott. She oversaw the Museum’s mounting of the Constantin Brancusi retrospective in 1995 and Paul Cézanne in 1996. A retrospective of the work of Barnett Newman was launched in 2002. A second capital campaign in 2001 netted $246 million for the Museum. Other notable works acquired under her tenure included those by Jasper Johns, Brice Marden, and Agnes Martin. Under her leadership, the Museum acquired an Art Deco building in the vicinity to accommodate works on paper and newer sculpture, Perelman Annex. A “collections director” of the first rank, she put together a funding package in 2006, to save the sale of Thomas Eakins’ most famous painting, ”The Gross Clinic,” keeping it in Philadelphia. She presided over plans for a $500 million expansion of the museum by architect Frank Gehry. Before the project could be started, she suffered cardiac arrest at her home at age 64, where she died. She was the cousin of the orchestra conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt (b. 1929). In contrast to the bombastic American museum directors of the late 20th century, d’Harnoncourt was considered by her colleagues as old school, a scholar who rose through the ranks to become director. After Boggs’ failure to raise money and the profile at the Philadelphia, d’Harnoncourt did both, though she despaired that the early success of her Cézanne show (800,000 visitors) raised expectations hard to equal.


Selected Bibliography

and Hopps, Walter. “étant donnés: 1 0 la chute d’eau, 2 0 le gaz d’éclairage: Reflections on a New Work by Marcel Duchamp.” Bulletin [of the] Philadelphia Museum of Art 14, no. 299-300 (1969); edited. Marcel Duchamp: a Retrospective. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973; Futurism and the International Avant Garde. Phildelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1980; edited. Duchamp, Marcel. Notes. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983.


Sources

“Philadelphia Museum Ready To Pick Miss d’Harnoncourt.” New York Times May 27, 1982, p. C19; [obituaries:] Grimes, William. “Anne d’Harnoncourt, First Woman To Lead Major Museum, Dies at 64,” New York Times June 3, 2008, p.8, Dobrin, Peter. “Anne d’Harnoncourt, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 64.” Philadelphia Inquirer June 3, 2008, p. A1.


Archives


Contributors: Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen


Citation

Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen. "d’Harnoncourt, Anne." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/dharnoncourta/.


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Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Ground-breaking female director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1982-2008. d’Harnoncourt was born to the Museum of Modern Art, director René d’Harnoncourt and fashion designer Sara Carr (d’Harnoncourt) (1904-2001). Rai

d’Harnoncourt, René

Image Credit: National Portrait Gallery

Full Name: d'Harnoncourt, René

Other Names:

  • René D'Harnoncourt

Gender: male

Date Born: 17 May 1901

Date Died: 13 August 1968

Place Born: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Place Died: Long Island, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): Modern (style or period)

Institution(s): Museum of Modern Art


Overview

Director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1949-1967. d’Harnoncourt was born into a wealthy Viennese family, Count Hubert and Julie Mittrowsky d’Harnoncourt. The family moved to Graz, where he initially intended on a career as a chemist, studying at the university in Graz. He moved to the Technische Hochschule in Vienna in 1922, writing a thesis on creosote content in the coal of Yugoslavia, but without graduating. When the family fortuned declined after World War I, d’Harnoncourt moved to Mexico in 1925 to seek employment as a chemist. His personal interest in and talent for art caught the notice of various antiques dealers. By 1927 he was assembling a collection of folk arts, which traveled to the United States. The show, which opened in at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, in 1930, rocketed d’Harnoncourt to prominence, including a radio program of his own, “Art in America” (1933-1934). In 1932 he married Chicago fashion designer Sara Carr. Between 1934 and 1937 he taught at Sara Lawrence College and the New School for Social Research. In 1936 he was appointed an administrator in the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, part of the Department of the Interior. d’Harnoncourt mounted one of the first national exhibitions of native-American arts at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco in 1939. In 1944 he was appointed to the Museum of Modern Art, NY, to help with the duties of the recently dismissed (but not quite “fired”) founder of MoMA, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. D’Harnoncourt’s sensitivity to the situation (Barr was eventually reinstated as a curatorial advisor) and gentle personality allowed both men to function positively. D’Harnoncourt was an expert museum installer as well as collector. He mounted the shows “Henry Moore” (1946), “Gabo and Pevsner” (1948), in his capacity. In 1949 d’Harnoncourt was appointed Director of the Museum. Andrew Carnduff Ritchie was hired from the Albright Art Gallery to succeed him in his duties as paintings curator. Under his directorship, the Museum mounted the exhibitions “Lipschitz” (1954), “Seurat and Arp” (1958), “Picasso” (1967) and “Rodin” (1963). He nutured innovative curators such as Mildred Constantine, the first curator of graphic arts. He reached out to many New York artists, including major abstract expressionists, who had claimed that the museum had ignored their work in favor of European artists. d’Harnoncourt also served as art advisor and to the personal art collection of Nelson A. Rockefeller, serving as vice president for Rockefeller’s Museum of Primitive Art from its beginning in 1957. Like, Barr, too, d’Harnoncourt saw his mission to champion modern art to the greater public: when the American Legion magazine launched an attack against modern art in 1955, d’Harnoncourt issued an extended reply. Under his directorship, the East Wing of the museum (designed by Philip Johnson) was built in 1958. He retired in 1968 and was succeeded by Bates Lowry. Only a year after his retirement to Long Island, he was hit by a drunk driver and killed while walking. His daughter was the Director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Anne d’Harnoncourt and his nephew is the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt. His photographic collection from his years in Mexico comprises part of the Benson Latin American Collection, General Libraries, University of Texas at Austin.

d’Harnoncourt’s reputation as a museum curator and director was that of a sensitive installation designer and successful fundraiser. Assuming the Directorship in the years directly after the firing and (partial reinstating) of Barr, d’Harnoncourt handled these duties with aplomb and success. The New York Times once quipped of him that he could convince “patrons with old money to part with it for new art.”


Selected Bibliography

Mexican Arts. Portland, ME: The Southworth Press/American Federation of Arts, 1930; and Douglas, Frederic H. Indian Art of the United States. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1941; illustrated. Morrow, Elizabeth. The Painted Pig: a Mexican Picture Book. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1930; The Exposition of Mexican Art. Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1930; and Linton, Ralph, and Paul S. Wingert. Arts of the South Seas. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1946.


Sources

Liberman, William S. “Rene D’Harnoncourt 1901-1968.” New York Times August 25, 1968, p. D21; Glueck, Grace. “Tributes are Paid to D’Harnoncourt. Late Director of Museum of Modern Art Honored.” New York Times October 9, 1968, p. 47; René D’Harnoncourt, 1901-1968: a Tribute. [memorial service momento, Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art]. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1968; Lynes, Russell. Good Old Mondern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Mondern Art. New York: Athanaeum, 1973, pp. 264-283; ; Elligott, Michelle. René d’Harnoncourt and the Art of installation.  New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2018; [obitiuaries:] Selz, Peter. Art Journal 28:1 (Fall 1968): 60; “Rene d’Harnoncourt Dead at 67, Headed Museum of Modern Art.” The New York Times August 14, 1968, p. 43.


Archives


Contributors: Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen


Citation

Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen. "d’Harnoncourt, René." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/dharnoncourtr/.


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Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1949-1967. d’Harnoncourt was born into a wealthy Viennese family, Count Hubert and Julie Mittrowsky d’Harnoncourt. The family moved to Graz, where he initially intended on a career as a chemist, studyin