F

Frankfort, Henri

November 8, 2023April 14, 2024

Full Name: Frankfort, Henri

Other Names:

Henri Frankfort

Gender: male

Date Born: 1897

Date Died: 1954

Place Born: Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: Netherlands

Subject Area(s): Antique, the, antiquities (object genre), and Preclassic

Overview

Professor of the History of Pre-Classical Antiquity at the University of London, 1949-1954. Frankfort was the eldest son of a Jewish mercantile family. Expected to inherit and run the family business, he was educated at the Hogere Burger School, a commercial high school, instead of the humanities-centered Barlaeus Gymnasium. Friends at the Barlaeus Gymnasium recognized his brilliance, however, and convinced his father to allow him to pursue a university career instead. Frankfurt studied initially Greek at the University of Amsterdam. There he met another ancientist student, Henriette “Jettie” Groenewegen, a year old than he. During World War I, he served in the Dutch army, 1914-18. After the war, Frankfort and Groenewegen became engaged in 1920. In 1921 Groenewegen was granted an M. A. in philosophy and Frankfort one in Netherlands Language and Literature, which included history. Frankfort and Groenewegen traveled to London before their marriage so that he could study with the Egyptian archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie (1853-1942). Frankfort was offered a position as Assistant in the British Museum’s Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in 1922, but it was rescinded when he declined to abandon his Dutch citizenship. In 1922 he made his first trip to the Near East as a member of Petrie’s expedition at Qau el-Kebir. Frankfort returned to London in 1923, married Groenewegen and completed his second M.A. the final day of that year. The two lived in Athens for the 1924-1925 academic year at the British School of Archaeology where he wrote his doctoral dissertation, published as his second book At age twenty-eight (1925) he was made director of excavations for the Egypt Exploration Society at Tell el-Amarna, Abydos, and Armant. Among his assistants was Thomas Whittemore, later archaeologist for Hagia Sophia. At Tell el-Amarna he exhumed the artifacts of the famous Ahkenaten. At Armant he exhumed the spectacular sacred bulls statuary. He received his Ph.D. from Leiden University. The success of these operations attracted the attention of James Breasted (1865-1935), who, in 1929 invited him to direct the Iraq excavations for the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, supported by John D. Rockefeller. These digs produced the foundational understanding of Mesopotamian cultures in relation to those of the Indus Valley. The four sites excavated included the Diyala River Basin as well as the Assyrian city of Khorsabad. Frankfort was a gifted organizer whose success in these excavations was as much a part of his ability to delegate as it was to interpret. In 1932 Frankfort was appointed to the chair of Research Professor of Oriental Archaeology at Chicago, but did not reside in the United States until 1937, owing to an Extraordinarius professorship he held at the University of Amsterdam those same years. During the same period (1932 onward) he also taught at the newly transplanted Warburg Institute (under the University of London after 1944) with Fritz Saxl. The Frankforts lived in Hampstead (London), the center of the British avant-garde. There they knew artists such as Barbara Hepworth and her husband, the artist Ben Nicholson. The effects of the Depression finally ended the Iraq Expedition in 1937. In 1938 the couple moved to a house overlooking the sea in Kimmeridge near Corfe Castle, Dorset. In 1939 Frankfort moved to Chicago full time as a professor at the University of Chicago. A series of speculative talks, suggested by his wife, was delivered as part of a public course in the Division of the Humanities of the University of Chicago on ancient human’s worldview. The lectures, given by the archaeologists John Albert Wilson (1899-1976), Thorkild Jacobsen (1904-1993) and William A. Irwin (1884-1967), resulted in the book Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East. Frankfort and his wife supplied the introduction, “Myth and Reality,” and a conclusion. American teaching meant diversity in lecturing. Frankfort once took a class to the Art Institute of Chicago for a Picasso exhibition in order to compare aspects of modern art with ancient. Frankfort was never comfortable with America, however, and in 1949 he returned to London to head the Warburg Institute, assuming the title Professor of Pre-Classical History of the University of London and heading the Warburg Institute, left vacant with the death of Saxl the year before. In 1952 he made his final trip to the east as a Guggenheim Fellow. At the Warburg, Frankfort met and fell in love with a younger and attractive Spanish scholar, Warburg’s photoarchivist, Enriqueta Harris. He divorced Henriette the same year and married Harris. Frankfort had completed the text for the volume on ancient non-classical art for the prestigious Pelican History of Art series when he died unexpectedly at home. The volume appeared posthumously. After his death he was succeeded at the Warburg Institute by Gertrud Bing. Frankfort’s excavations at Mesopotamia for the University of Chicago, 1929-1937 were some of the most important excavations of the era, adding significantly to the understanding of that era. His work at Diyala produced a stratified architectural sequence, which allowed the team to posit a chronological framework for early Mesopotamian art. Tablets were recorded with their find spots, for the first time, allowing Frankfort to draw a stylistic development of this category of objects such as the seals, spanning all of Mesopotamian art. Previously these had not been solidly classified since most objects had come either from unstratified excavations or the art market. His Kingship and the Gods underlined the relationship of near eastern religion as an expression of the integration of society with nature.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Vindenas, Johanne. “Bibliography of Henri Frankfort.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 14, no. 1 (January 1955): 4-13; The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient. Pelican History of Art 7. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1955; and Wilson, John A., and Jacobsen, Thorkild, and Irwin, William A., and Frankfort-Groenewegen, Henriette. Before Philosophy: the Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: an Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946; Cylinder Seals: a Documentary Essay on the Art and Religion of the Ancient Near East. London: Macmillan, 1939; and Lloyd, Seton, and Jacobsen, Thorkild, and Martiny, Günter. The Gimilsin Temple and the Palace of the Rulers at Tell Asmar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940; The Birth of Civilization in the Near East. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1951; and Pendlebury, John Devitt Stringfellow. The City of Akhenaten. Peet, T. Eric and Woolley, C. Leonard, eds. Part II. London/Boston: Offices of the Egypt Exploration Society, 1923ff.; and Loud, Gordon, and Jacobsen, Thorkild . “Excavations in the Palace and at a City Gate.” pt. 1 of, Khorsabad. The University of Chicago Oriental Institute Publications I, vol. 38-40. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1936ff.

Sources

Wilson, John A. American Philosophical Society Yearbook 1955: 439-442; Suter, Claudia E. “Henriette Antonia Groenewegen-Frankfort. http://www.brown.edu/Research/Breaking_Ground/bios/Groenewegen-Frankfort_Henriette%20Antonia.pdf, Brown Institute of Archaeology and the Ancient World; Gardiner, Margaret. Barbara Hepworth: A Memoir. Edinburgh: Salamander Press, 1982, pp. 26-27; Barbara Hepworth. A Pictorial Autobiography. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970, pp. 32; [obituary:] “Prof. H. Frankfort: The Culture Of Babylon And Egypt.” The Times (London) July 17, 1954, p. 8; [Henri Frankfort Memorial Issue]. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 14, no. 1, (January 1955).

Frankfurter, Alfred M.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Frankfurter, Alfred M.

Other Names:

Alfred Moritz Frankfurter

Gender: male

Date Born: 1906

Date Died: 1965

Place Born: Chicago, Cook, IL, USA

Place Died: Jerusalem, Israel

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Abstract Expressionist and Expressionist (style)

Overview

Editor of the Art News during the critical years of Abstract Expressionism. Frankfurter was the son of Moritz Frankfurter and Freda Heyman (Frankfurter) of Chicago. He attended the Boy’s Latin School in Chicago followed by one year at Princeton University. He transferred to Humboldt University, Berlin, where he was awarded an undergraduate degree and graduate degree from the Institut für Kunstgeschichte (Institute for Art History). He worked for the esteemed historian of Renaissance art, Bernard Berenson, at the Villa I Tatti in Florence before returning to the United States. There he became art critic for the Studio International in 1927 in New York. In 1929 he became editor of the Antiquarian and later Fine Arts magazine (through 1934). After free-lancing as an art critic for two years, Frankfurter was named editor in 1936 of the Art News, America’s oldest art magazine. Under his leadership, he turned the journal into a seminal source for art information and criticism. Frankfurter formed part of the Executive Committee of the 1939 New York World’s Fair under Wilhelm Rheinhold Otto Valentiner. During World War II, he served as policy control chief for psychological warfare in the overseas division of the Office of War Information between 1942 until 1945. Frankfurter was awarded the Legion of Merit for his service. Following the War, he was director of the American pavilion at the 1948 Venice Biennale International Exposition, garnering the Order of Merit by the Italian government for this achievement. He advised numerous private collectors in acquisitions and served formally on the board of the Clark Art Museum, Williams College, Williamstown, MA. During the 1950s, when other art magazines were scoffing at the emerging artists of the New York School, he allowed his assistant editor, Thomas B. Hess to make the magazine a progressive voice for emerging art movements, particularly abstract expressionism. Frankfurter himself, however, was generally unenthusiastic of the movement. In emulation of the foreign art press for which he once wrote and with which his magazine was in some competition, Frankfurter recruited important art writers. Continental writers and art historians invited to write for the Art News included Director of the Musée national d’art moderne Jean Cassou, National Gallery directors Kenneth Clark and Philip Hendy, Victoria and Albert Museum Curator John Pope-Hennessy, French arts minister André Malraux, and the writer Cyril Connolly. Americans writers included the critic Henry McBride (1867-1962) (whom he rescued after McBride’s dismissal from the New York Sun), Harvard curator Agnes Mongan, Walter Pach, MoMA curator John Rewald, and the architectural critic Aline Saarinen (1914-1972). After the death of his second wife, Frankfurter married an assistant editor of the Art News, Eleanor C. Munro (b. 1928) in 1960, a woman 22-years younger than he, and daughter of the art historian/educator Thomas Munro. He was a signer to the 1961 letter to the New York Times, protesting the biased writing of its art critic, John Canaday, toward modern art. Frankfurter sold the magazine, of which he had controlling interest, to the Washington Post company in 1962. While in Jerusalem attending the opening of the Israel museum, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died. He was succeeded at Art News by Hess. He is buried in the Lutheran cemetery at Jerusalem. Frankfurter published few books and those he did were usually commemorative catalogs. His importance lies in his editorship of an art journal developing at the same time as the New York art scene itself. The French government made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor for his services to French art. Frankfurter campaigned for architectural preservation and quality; a particular cause was against demolition of historic buildings, especially when replaced by mediocre modernism. His celebrated fight with the New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (1888-1981) in 1954 over the New York Coliseum was well documented.

Selected Bibliography

and Valentiner, William. Masterpieces of Art: Exhibition at the New York World’s Fair, 1939. [official souvenir guide book] New York: Art News, 1939; and Dwight, H. G. Art Parade: Seeing the Past Forty years through Art News and the Frick Collection, New York. New York: The Art Foundation, Inc., 1943; Interpreting Masterpieces: Twenty-four Paintings from the Kress Collection. New York: Kress Art Foundation, 1952, [reprint from the 1952 Art News Annual 21].

Sources

[obituaries:] Art Journal 25 no. 1 (Fall 1965): 54; Hess, Thomas. “Editorial: Alfred Frankfurter, 1906-1965.” Art News 64 (Summer 1965): 25, 56; American Artist 29 (September 1965): 6; “Alfred M. Frankfurter, 59, Dies.” New York Times May 13, 1965, p. 37.

Editor of the Art News during the critical years of Abstract Expressionism. Frankfurter was the son of Moritz Frankfurter and Freda Heyman (Frankfurter) of Chicago. He attended the Boy’s Latin School in Chicago followed by one year at Pri

Ford, Brinsley, Sir

November 8, 2023April 14, 2024

**Image Credit:** National Portrait Gallery

Full Name: Ford, Brinsley, Sir

Other Names:

Sir Richard Brinsley Ford

Gender: male

Date Born: 1908

Date Died: 1999

Place Born: Petworth, West Sussex, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): patronage

Career(s): art collectors, art critics, and publishers

Overview

Collector, art patronage scholar, director of the Burlington Magazine, 1952-1986. Ford was the son of Captain Richard Ford (1860-1940), a British army officer, and Rosamund Isabel Ramsden (1872-1911). He was descendant of the Irish dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816). His great-grandfather, Richard Ford (1796-1856), was a connoisseur and author of the important travel book on Spain, Handbook For Spain,1845. Born to wealth, Ford attended Eton and then Trinity College, Oxford, graduating in 1930 in modern history. Ford’s father inherited the large family art collection in 1917, amassed by Benjamin Booth and his grandfather, mentioned in Treasures of Art in Great Britain, 1854, by Gustav Friedrich Waagen. The younger Ford joined the National Art Collections Fund in 1927. In 1929 he received a legacy from his maternal grandfather and began buying art personally in anticipation of the larger collection which would one day be his. Initially, he purchased contemporary art works. These included works by Henry Moore, Toulouse-Lautrec, Fuseli, Ingres, and Michelangelo (a preparatory drawing of Risen Christ in Santa Maria sopra Minerva which he acquired in 1936). He joined the Burlington Fine Arts Club where he met the Society artist Charles Barrow Prescott (1870-1932), and connoisseur and director of Colnaghi gallery Jim Shaw. He married Joan Mary Vyvyan (b. 1910) a distant cousin, in 1937. He began publishing scholarly articles in 1939 with a piece on Ingres’s portrait drawings in the Burlington Magazine. Ford joined the British Army as a gunner in the Royal Artillery the same year, before the outbreak of World War II. At his father’s death in 1940, Ford inherited the family collection (possession the following year). In 1941 Ford transferred from artillery to army intelligence (MI9) and was ultimately in charge of the Brussels office. After the war, he returned and set about assiduously collecting, turning the family’s Wyndham Place home into a major London collection. Ford focused on Italian seicento and settecento pictures during these years, especially works by Cavallino, Cozza, and Batoni. His monograph, The Drawings of Richard Wilson was published in 1951. In 1952 he was made director of the Burlington Magazine, seeing the Magazine through the lean years following the War by supporting it personally and cajoling support from others. Ford was made a trustee of the National Gallery in1954. Beginning in the 1970s, he assembled material for a dictionary of gentlemen who made the grand tour to Rome and Italy. A series of six essays in a special number of Apollo in 1974 concentrated on British grand-tour patronage. In 1974, too, he joined the executive committee of the National Art Collections Fund–formed under Ford in order to place new art work in National Trust properties–and the following year became its chairman, which he held until 1980. The same year, 1974, he mounted the exhibition “Richard Ford in Spain” in London, to assist the National Art Collections Fund, writing the catalog with Denys Sutton and lending the artwork. He was knighted for his work in 1984. Ford resigned from the Burlington Magazine and become president of the Walpole Society in 1986. His dictionary appeared in 1997, under the auspices of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, written by John Ingamells, as A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701-1800, In 1998 a catalog of his collection was published in the publications of the Walpole Society. He died of a heart attack at his home in 1999.

Selected Bibliography

“Ingres’ Portrait Drawings of English People at Rome, 1806-1820.” Burlington Magazine 75 (July 1939): 2-13; The Drawings of Richard Wilson. London: Faber and Faber, 1951; “Six Notable English Patrons in Rome 1750-1800.” Apollo 99 (June 1974): 392-461; and Sutton, Denys. Richard Ford in Spain: a Loan Exhibition in Aid of the National Art-Collections Fund. London: Wildenstein, 1974; Ingamells, John. A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701-1800, Compiled from the Brinsley Ford Archive. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

Sources

Jackson-Stops, Gervase. “Sir Brinsley Ford [the Apollo Portrait series].” Apollo 125 (1987): 363-9; [obituaries:] The Times (London) May 7, 1999; Ireland, George. “Sir Brinsley Ford.” The Independent (London) May 8, 1999, p. 8; “Sir Brinsley Ford, He Applied a Fine Mind and a Fine Bank Balance to the Acquisition of Fine Art.” The Guardian (London), May 12, 1999, p. 18; Elam, Caroline. “Sir Brinsley Ford: a Tribute.” Burlington Magazine 141 no. 1155 (June 1999): 327.

Forsdyke, John, Sir

November 8, 2023April 14, 2024

Full Name: Forsdyke, John, Sir

Other Names:

Sir Edgar John Forsdyke

Gender: male

Date Born: 1883

Date Died: 1979

Place Born: Bermondsey, Southwark, London, England, UK

Place Died: Golders Green, Barnet, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): museums (institutions) and prehistoric

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

Overview

Director, British Museum, 1936-1950, and scholar of the prehistoric era. Forsdyke was son of Frederick Palmer Forsdyke and Mary Eliza Sainsbury. He was educated at Christ’s Hospital and Keble College, Oxford, graduating in 1906. A scholar of classical studies, he joined the British Museum in 1908 as an assistant in the department of Greek and Roman Antiquities. In 1910 he married a forty-two-year-old widow (he was twenty-six) Frances Beatrice Mumford Gifford. Forsdyke worked closely with Arthur J. Evans, contributing to Evans’ work the Palace of Minos. He edited the Journal of Hellenic Studies between 1912 to 1923. He served in the Royal Artillery during World War I 1914-1919, in France, Macedonia, and Spain. After the war, his major work, a catalog of the Aegean pottery appeared in 1925. He and Henry Beauchamp Walters wrote three fascicules of Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum the same year. At the suggestion of Arthur J. Evans, he was sent to Crete to finish excavating the cemetery near Knossos in 1927. In 1932 he was made Keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities. As keeper, he dealt with Joseph Duveen (1869-1939), the difficult donor of the new wing to house the Elgin marbles. When George Francis Hill retired as Director and Principal Librarian in 1936, Forsdyke was appointed his replacement. The following year he was knighted. Duveen pressured some museum official to “clean” the marbles. Though Forsdyke discovered and prevented further damage, the incident hung over the museum and damaged his reputation. A similar “cleaning” had also occurred at the National Gallery. As tensions with Nazi Germany made it clear the war was inevitable, Forsdyke developed the evacuation plan for the treasures of the museum. His able administrative skills are credited with saving many of the museum’s objects during a time when labor, adequate storage and time were in low supply. The Duveen gallery and parts of the Library were destroyed in the Blitz. Following his first wife’s death in the 1930s, he married Anna Amadea Leonie Dea Gombrich (1905-1994) in 1942, the sister of E. H. Gombrich. After the war, Forsdyke invested heavily in microfilming the collection, not so much as a preservation tool, but as outreach to the broader scholarly community. He retired in 1951. He died at home of bronchitis exacerbated by heart disease. Neither a notable scholar nor an easy man to get along with, he is principally known for his war-time saving of the British Museum.

Selected Bibliography

and Walters, Henry Beauchamp, and Smith, Cecil Harcourt. A Catalogue of the Greek and Etruscan Vases in the British Museum. 4 vols. London: British Museum, 1925 ff.; Greece Before Homer: Ancient Chronology and Mythology. 1931 Annual Lecture on Aspects of Art, Henriette Hertz Trust of the British Academy. London: Max Parrish, 1956; Minoan Art. London: H. Milford, 1931; Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. Great Britain. British Museum, Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities. London: British Museum, 1925, fascicule 5; “Harvester Vase of Hagia Triada.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 17 (January 1954): 1-9; “Minos of Crete, the Chieftain Cup.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 15 (January 1952): 13-19.

Sources

[obituary:] Sir John Forsdyke Director of British Museum in War Time. The Times (London). December 8, 1979; p. 14.

Forssman, Erik

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Forssman, Erik

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Sweden

Institution(s): Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Dorisch, Ionische, Corinthish, Studien zur Kunst der 16 und 17 Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart, 1964

Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 p. 191

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Förster, Ernst

November 8, 2023April 14, 2024

Full Name: Förster, Ernst

Other Names:

Ernst Joachim Förster

Gender: male

Date Born: 1800

Date Died: 1885

Place Born: Münchengosserstädtt, Thuringia, Germany

Place Died: Munich, Bavaria, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): painting (visual works)

Overview

In 1852 he weighed in on the Hans Holbein Meyer Madonna controversy, praising the coherence of the Dresden version, which ultimately proved to be the copy.

Selected Bibliography

Beiträge zur neuern Kunstgeschichte. Leipzig, F.A. Brockhaus, 1835; Geschichte der deutschen Kunst. 5 vols. Leipzig: T.O. Weigel, 1851-1863. Denkmale deutscher Baukunst, Bildnerei und Malerei von Einführung des Christenthums bis auf die neueste Zeit. 12 vols. in 6. Leipzig: T. O. Weigel, 1855-69; Denkmale italienischer Malerei vom Verfall der Antike bis zum sechzehnten Jahrhundert. 4 vols. Leipzig: T. O. Weigel, 1870-82.

Sources

Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 92-94; Kultermann, Udo. The History of Art History. New York: Abaris, 1993, p. 146 [incorrectly referred to as “Hans Joachim Förster].

In 1852 he weighed in on the Hans Holbein Meyer Madonna controversy, praising the coherence of the Dresden version, which ultimately proved to be the copy.

Forster, Georg

November 8, 2023April 14, 2024

Full Name: Forster, Georg

Gender: male

Date Born: 1754

Date Died: 1794

Home Country/ies: Germany

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

Overview

art and architectural historian; advocate of Taine’s theories of geographical determinism

Selected Bibliography

Die Kunst und der Zeitalter. 1789.

Sources

KGK, 122-23, Bazin 138

art and architectural historian; advocate of Taine’s theories of geographical determinism

Förster, Otto H.

November 8, 2023April 14, 2024

**Image Credit:** Judisches Museum Berlin

Full Name: Förster, Otto H.

Other Names:

Otto H. Förster

Gender: male

Date Born: 1894

Date Died: 1975

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style) and Renaissance

Overview

Director Wallraf-Richartz, and historian of Italian Renaissance Art. Förster wrote his dissertation under Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich. Förster became Director of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne in 1933. As a museum director under the Third Reich, he sold off works from the museum’s storage and acquired works from the forced sales of Jewish collections and from the occupied countries in exchange. At the end of World War II, Förster retired in 1946, but he resumed his position in 1957. In 1970 Foerster married the art historian Lotte Brand Foerster.

Selected Bibliography

monograph on Bramante

Sources

Wölfflin, Heinrich. Heinrich Wölfflin, 1864-1945: Autobiographie, Tagebücher und Briefe. Joseph Ganter, ed. Basel: Schwabe & Co., 1982, p. 499; Bazin 435

Forsyth, George H., Jr.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Forsyth, George H., Jr.

Other Names:

George Howard Forsyth Jr.

Gender: male

Date Born: 1902

Date Died: 1991

Place Born: Highland Park, Lake, IL, USA

Place Died: Ann Arbor, Washtenaw, MI, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), Byzantine (culture or style), Medieval (European), and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Architectural historian and Byzantinist. Forsyth’s father was George H. Forsyth and his mother Sarah Brockunier (Forsyth). He attended Princeton University, graduating in 1923. After than, Forsyth secured a Mediaeval Academy fellowship for the 1924-1925 year which earned him a master’s degree of fine arts at Princeton under Charles Rufus Morey in 1927. Forsyth married Eleanor Marquand (1897-1988) the same year, the daughter of Princeton’s Department of Art and Archaeology’s founder, Allan Marquand. The wedding was a large academic/society affair befitting the Marquand’s status; Forsyth’s best man was his Princeton colleague Albert M. Friend, Jr. In the 1920’s, Forsyth engaged in extensive archeological excavations. Between 1930 and 1936 he led groups which uncovered important religious relics in the ruins of the nine-century Church of St. Martin at Angers, France. He joined the faculty at Princeton, as an instructor in 1927, advancing to assistant professor of art and archaeology in 1931. During this time he also studied at the Institute for Advanced Study, New York University, (1935-36). In 1941 Forsyth was appointed chairman of the art history department at Michigan. During World War II, he served as a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve (1942-1945). After his divorce to his first wife, he married Mary Isom Hayes (d.1958) in 1942. He was director of College Art Association in 1949 and again in 1954. In 1955 he was awarded the Haskins Medal for outstanding distinction in medieval studies. The following year, a University of Michigan reconnaissance expedition under Forsyth’s direction embarked on a expeditionary trip to look for promising sites to excavate in the Near East. They settled on St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mt. Sinai, the Mount of Moses, the oldest existing Greek Orthodox monastery in the world. The Monastery’s art and architecture were so important that Forsyth and his team convinced the University of Michigan, Princeton University and the University of Alexandria to mount a combined documentation of the existing objects and buildings, since excavation was impossible for religious reasons. The Monastery and church contained some of the best examples of Byzantine religious art, manuscripts, as well as its architecture. Forsyth’s team was also responsible for saving the most important mosaic in the church. The team realized while photographing the transfiguration of Christ mosaic on scaffolding that the tessarae’s adhesion material had become detached from the vault of the apse and was loosely hanging. Restorers were able to reattach the mosaic, commissioned by Justinian the Great, because of Forsyth’s team’s discovery. The project continued under his direction during 1960, 1963, and 1965. He articles on Mount Sinai included articles to the popular press, National Geographic. Forsyth’s efforts resulted in the first large-scale, scientific drawings of the church and Monastery. While Chair of the department at Michigan, he married for a third time, a recent Columbia University art history Ph.D., in 1960, Ilene E. Haering (see, Ilene H. Forsyth), twenty-six years younger than himself. Forsyth was appointed director of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and his wife became an assistant professor in the department in 1961. In 1969 he returned to teaching as research professor of archeology. Fosyth retired emeritus in 1972. He died of an embolism in an Ann Arbor hospital in 1991. He is not related to the other C. R. Morey student and art historian, William Forsyth.

Selected Bibliography

The Church of St. Martin at Angers: the Architectural History of the Site from the Roman Empire to the French Revolution. The Excavations in Collaboration with William A. Campbell. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953; and Weitzmann, Kurt. The Monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai. Volume 1, The Church and Fortress of Justinian. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973. Volume 2, The Icons. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976; “The Monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai: The Church and Fortress of Justinian.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers XXII (1968): 1-19; “The Church of St. Martin at Angers: Roman, Merovingian, and Carolingian Constructions.” Antiquity 11 (December 1937): 400-408; “A Problem of Surveying in Mediaeval Architecture.” Archaeology 3 no. 2 (Summer 1950): 74-79; “Island of Faith in the Sinai Wilderness.” National Geographic (January 1964): 82-104; and Weitzmann, Kurt. “Saving the Sinai Mosaics.” Biblical Archaeology Review 4 no. 4 (November-December 1978): 16-31.

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. 61 mentioned; Sears, Elizabeth. “Dedication: Ilene H. Forsyth.” in, Sears, Elizabeth, and Thomas, Thelma K., eds. Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002, pp. xvi, note 5; “Monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai.” The Kelsey Online. http://www.umich.edu/kelseydb/Excavation/St_Catherine; “Eleanor Marquand Engaged to Marry, Daughter of Late Archaeologist to Wed George Howard Forsyth Jr.” New York Times December 6, 1926, p. 27; [obituary:] “George Forsyth, 89, Historian Who Led Archeological Digs.” New York Times January 29, 1991, p. B5.

Forsyth, Ilene H.

November 8, 2023April 14, 2024

Full Name: Forsyth, Ilene Eleanor Haering

Other Names:

Ilene Forsyth

Gender: female

Date Born: 1928

Place Born: Detroit, Wayne, MI, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Medieval (European)

Institution(s): University of Michigan

Overview

Medievalist art historian. Born Ilene Haering, she was the daughter of Austin F. Haering (1903-1975) and Eleanor Middleton (Haering) (1903-2002). She received her B. A. in English literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1950. Haering spent the following year in Europe where the mosaics of Ravenna, among other monuments, enticed her study art. She entered Columbia University’s graduate school, obtaining a master’s degree in 1955. She traveled through Europe, building a large photographic collection of monuments. The same year, 1955, she began lecturing at Barnard College while working on her Ph.D. at Columbia. A student tour with her Barnard class at the Metropolitan Museum of Art brought her in close contact with seated wooden Madonnas. She wrote her dissertation in 1960 on these medieval seated cult statues, under Meyer Schapiro, though given much latitude on her own. The same year, Haering married George H. Forsyth, Jr., then chair of the Art and Art History Department at Ann Arbor and considerably older than herself. She used her married name as her professional name thereafter. Forsyth was appointed an assistant professor at her alma mater, Michigan, in 1961, advancing to associate professor in 1968. In the 1970s, Forsyth focused on the twelfth-century church of Saint-Andoche in the village of Salieu. This led to a larger interest in Burgundian capitals and its sculpture in general. Two important articles of this time, “The Theme of Cockfighting in Burgundian Romanesque Sculpture,” and “The Ganymede Captial at Vézelay,” appeared at this time. In 1974 she was made full professor and received the Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association. She became a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1977 and a visiting lecturer at Harvard University in 1980 and the University of Pittsburgh in 1981. In 1984 Forsyth was named the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Art. A 1991 essay focused on the Sampson Monolith at the Duke University Museum of Art. She began assembling a project of a Rhône Valley monument destroyed during the French Revolution: the abbey of Saint-Martin in Savingy. In 1994 she authored an article demonstrating the transmission of Burgundian sources to those sculptors. She was again a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley in 1996. In 2002 she authored an article on Schapiro’s legacy for the study of Moissac.Forsyth’s sculptural studies of the 1970s show her departing from Schapiro’s notion that secular intrusion in Romanesque religious art are spontaneous individual fantasy. Instead, she used the depiction of a cockfight in a capital to demonstrate its wide-ranging implications of animals and a contemporary event in art. Dissertations supervised by Forsyth usually focused on a single monument or theme scrutinized through strong visual analysis (Sears).

Selected Bibliography

[selected bibliography:] Women Medievalists in the Academy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, pp. 855-856; [master’s thesis:] Narrative Order in Romanesque Sculpture. Columbia, 1955; [dissertation:] Cult Statues of the Madonna in the Early Middle Ages. Columbia,1960, revised and published as The Throne of Wisdom: Wood Sculptures of the Madonna in Romanesque France. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972; “Magi and Majesty: A Study of Romanesque Sculpture and Liturgical Drama.” Art Bulletin 50 (1968): 215-22.

Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 72 mentioned; 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. 87 cited; Forsyth, Ilene. “Historian of Art (1928- ).” in, Chance, Jane, ed. Women Medievalists in the Academy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, pp. 839-856; Sears, Elizabeth. “Dedication: Ilene H. Forsyth.” in, Sears, Elizabeth, and Thomas, Thelma K., eds. Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002, pp. xi-xvii.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

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