Curator of medieval art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Forsyth attended the Latin School in Chicago and the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, CT. He graduated from Princeton University in 1930 where he studied under Charles Rufus Morey. After some graduate courses in art history at Princeton, he worked the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a volunteer for the medieval collection in 1933. He joined as a full-time assistant in 1934 under curator (and later director) James Rorimer. He and Rorimer were the moving forces in establishing the Met’s satellite museum for medieval art, the Cloisters. John D. Rockefeller Jr. (1874-1960), had donated land in Fort Tryon Park and the parcel on the opposing bank of the Hudson to retain the view, to create a special medieval museum culled from objects at the Metropolitan and his own medieval collection. He also donated stones gathered in France and Spain. The most famous objects of Rockefeller’s were the six of the Unicorn Tapestries. Rorimer and Forsyth’s task was to reassemble these disparate parts (stones from five medieval monasteries and objects from the Romaneque and Gothic eras) into a building which appeared medieval but was in fact a modern museum. Rorimer led the project of the construction and installation, but Forsyth, as assistant curator (appointed 1937), assisted closely. In later years he recalled he and nine longshoremen juggling the piles of stones, fitting and refitting the pieces until they created the building. Forsyth spent 1937 in France researching the objects for the new museum’s catalog. He visited the Count de La Rochefoucauld, from whom Rockefeller had purchased the tapestries and learned that two remaining tapestries were being used as wall gaps in the estate. Forsyth bought the fragmented remaining two, “The Hunter Sounds the Capture of the Unicorn by the Maiden” and “The Maiden’s Companion Signals to the Hunters,” which reunited the tapestries into their original group. The Cloisters opened in 1938. In 1942 he married Agnes Mitchell (d. 1995) and was appointed associate curator. He was advanced to curator in 1968 and acting curator of the Cloisters when Thomas Hoving, then head, became the Met’s new director after Rorimer’s sudden death. The same year Hoving hired Florens Deuchler to be permanet head of the Cloisters. Forsyth’s book The Entombment of Christ: French Sculptures of the 15th and 16th Centuries appeared in 1970. He was elected emeritus curator in 1971 when he formally retired. The Pietà in French Late Gothic Sculpture: Regional Variations was published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1995.
Selected Bibliography
The Entombment of Christ: French Sculptures of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Harvard University Press, 1970; The Pietà in French late Gothic Sculpture: Regional Variations. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995; Mediaeval Sculptures of the Virgin and Child: a Picture Book. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art,1939; “Year 1200.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 28 (February 1970): 228-92; “Five Crucial People in the Building of the Cloisters.” in, Parker, Elizabeth C., and Shepard, Mary B. The Cloisters: Studies in Honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/International Center of Medieval Art, 1992, pp. 51-62.
Sources
Forsyth, William. “Five Crucial People in the Building of the Cloisters.” in, Parker, Elizabeth C., and Shepard, Mary B. The Cloisters: Studies in Honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/International Center of Medieval Art, 1992, pp. 51-62; [obituaries:] CAA News 28, no. 5 (September 2003); Saxon, Wolfgang. “William H. Forsyth, Met Curator, Dies at 96.” New York Times, May 21, 2003, p. 9.
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
Citation
Lee Sorensen. "Forsyth, William." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/forsythw/.
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Curator of medieval art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Forsyth attended the Latin School in Chicago and the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, CT. He graduated from Princeton University in 1930 where he studied under Ch
Place Died: Great Stanmore, Harrow, Greater London, England, UK
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Subject Area(s): catalogues raisonnés
Career(s): art collectors
Overview
Collector and art historian, author of collection catalogs of the South Kensington Museum (later Victoria and Albert); considered “second founder” of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Fortnum was the son of Charles Fortnum (1770-1860), a businessman, and Laetitia Stephens (1782-1853), his father’s second wife. The younger Fortum was educated privately due to concerns of poor health. He joined his father’s business briefly in London but hated commerce. In 1840 he emigrated to Australia where he adopted the middle name “Drury.” In Australian he shared a land grant in the new colony of South Australia with his half brother, Charles Stuart. His interests in the natural sciences led him to send back zoological specimens to the British Museum, some of which were given the species name “fortnumi.” Fortnum returned to England in 1845. He married his second cousin, Fanny Matilda Keats (1808-1890) in 1848. Keat’s wealth, her share of inheritance from the Fortnum & Mason business, allowed Fortnum to live as a collector and scholar of art. He and Fanny immediately began buying art during trips to Italy, including sculpture, bronzes, majolica, and jewelry. They were assisted by the curators of the British Museum Wollaston Franks, and John Charles Robinson of the South Kensington Museum (now Victoria and Albert Museum). In 1867 Robinson was dismissed from the Museum, Fortnum was made advisor on acquisitions (“Art Referee”), securing objects in England and Europe. In 1868 he became interested in rejuvenating the collections of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. He initially contacted John Henry Parker, keeper of the Ashmolean beginning in 1870. Fortnum wrote the catalogues for the South Kensington Museum which Robinson had originally been assigned. Fortnum’s first catalog was Descriptive Catalogue of the Maiolica, Hispano-Moresco, Persian, Damascus, and Rhodian Wares in the South Kensington Museum in 1873. Another, Descriptive Catalogue of the Bronzes of European Origin in the South Kensington Museum appeared in 1876. In 1884, Arthur J. Evans, the newly appointed keeper of the Ashmolean, renewed Fortum’s interest in the Ashmolean. Initially Fortum loaned portions of his collection, which later became a gift in 1888. The following year, Fortnum was appointed a ‘visitor’ of the Museum and named a trustee of the British Museum. After his wife’s death in 1890, he married Mary Fortnum (1822-1899), another second cousin, in 1891, endowing £310,000 to the Ashmolean with the stipulation that a new building be created for it adjoining the University Galleries. The Museum was moved in 1894 and its collections combined with the Randolph Gallery. Another South Kensington catalog, Maiolica, was published in 1896 and his own collection catalog of the same subject the following year. He also contributed articles to the journal Archaeologia. He died at the Hill House, Great Stanmore, Middlesex, which he and his first wife had bought in 1852. Fortnum left his remaining collections to Oxford, and porcelain to the British Museum. He is buried at Highgate cemetery. His writings show a the careful observation, meticulous data accumulation, and classificatory skill of a scientist; they remain landmarks in the study of their subjects.
Selected Bibliography
A Descriptive Catalogue of the Maiolica, Hispano-Moresco, Persian, Damascus, and Rhodian Wares, in the South Kensington Museum: with Historical Notices, Marks, & Monograms. London: Chapman & Hall, 1873; Maicolica: a Historical Treatise on the Earthenwares of Italy, with Marks and Monograms. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896; A Descriptive Catalogue of the Bronzes of European Origin in the South Kensington Museum. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode/Chapman and Hall, 1876.
Sources
Penny, Nicholas B. “The Fortnum Collection.” in Catalogue of European sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum, 1540 to the present day, volume 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, pp. xvii-xxx; Warren, Jeremy P. Renaissance Master Bronzes from the Ashmolean Museum. Oxford: the Ashmolean Museum, 1999; Wilson, Timothy. “Fortnum, Charles Drury.” Dictionary of National Biography
Citation
"Fortum, C. Drury." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/fortnumc/.
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Collector and art historian, author of collection catalogs of the South Kensington Museum (later Victoria and Albert); considered “second founder” of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Fortnum was the son of Charles Fortnum (1770-1860), a businessman,
Subject Area(s): Netherlandish, Northern Renaissance, and painting (visual works)
Overview
Cranach and northern Renaissance scholar. He published the facsimile book of the fifteenth-century engraver Adam von Fulda, Ein ser andechtig cristenlich buchlein, in 1914.
Selected Bibliography
Cranachstudien. Leipzig: K. W. Hiersemann, 1900; edited, Adam, von Fulda. Ein ser andechtig cristenlich buchlein, mit 8 holzschnitten von Lucas Cranach. Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1914.
Citation
"Flechsig, Eduard." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/flechsige/.
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Cranach and northern Renaissance scholar. He published the facsimile book of the fifteenth-century engraver Adam von Fulda, Ein ser andechtig cristenlich buchlein, in 1914.
Caspar David Friedrich und die deutsche Nachwelt: Aspekte zum Verhältnis von Mensch und Natur in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Essays by I. Fleischer, R. Mattausch, B. Hinz, et al. Edited by W. Hofmann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974.
Sources
KRG, 139 mentioned
Citation
"Fleischer, Inge." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/fleischeri/.
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Place Born: Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland, England, UK
Place Died: Tofori, Italy
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Career(s): publishers
Overview
Self-trained art historian and editor; wrote major reference books in art history with Hugh Honour. Fleming’s father was a prominent solicitor in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Fleming himself initially attempted a career in painting, applying to Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) for an apprenticeship. His father persuaded him to attended Rugby and then Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read English. As a student he discovered Italy and traveling there to study the frescoes of Piero della Francesca in Arezzo. When World War II broke out, Fleming declared himself briefly a conscientious objector before joining the Intelligence Corps in Cairo, Egypt. In Cairo he examined the early 19th century fanciful architecture during his off hours, a style he named “Cairo Baroque.” His article on the subject was sent to the Architectural Review. At the encouragement of its editor, Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner, Fleming wrote more, including articles on Maltese churches and baroque sculpture and contemporary Italian painting (the latter for Penguin New Writing). The war years brought him in contact with art historian Ellis K. Waterhouse, then a colonel, though they did not get along, and expatriate German art historians such as Rudolf Wittkower. After the war, Fleming appeased his father by working as a solicitor with the John Hilton Advice bureau at Cambridge. In Cambridge Fleming met Hugh Honour, an undergraduate at St. Catharine’s College, who would become Fleming’s life partner. Though tied to his solicitor’s job, Fleming spent his holidays in Rome, at times the guest of the American art collector and curator Henry P. McIlhenny at the Villa Aurelia, owned by the American Academy. At his father’s death in 1953, Fleming quit his profession to become a freelance writer in Italy. For a while he acted as reader Percy Lubbock (1879-1965), a now blind British literati who lived in on the Gulf of Spezia, at Gli Scafari, the villa designed by the architect Cecil Pinsent (1884-1963). Through Lubbock, Fleming met the English-speaking expatriate community in Italy. These included Bernard Berenson and his entourage at Villa I Tatti. Honour joined Fleming permanently in Italy in 1954. Fleming wrote articles for The Connoisseur and other publications, demonstrating an extensive knowledge of primary sources. A commission from Country Life led Fleming to publish Scottish Country Houses, 1954, and the discovery of the Adam letters among the Clerk papers in Penicuik (Lothian, Scotland, later transferred to Register House in Edinburgh). These letters written by Robert and James Adam to their families from Italy would later become his great book on Adam. In 1957, Honour and Fleming moved from Lerici to Asolo, a town north of Venice, renting a house from the writer Freya Stark (1893-1993). There they met the publisher Allen Lane (1902-1970), the founder and chairman of Penguin Books, who was renting the adjacent Villa Bronson in Asolo. Lane commissioned the two men to oversee the most important series of short-subject art histories of the twentieth century. The Style and Civilisation and The Architect and Society and Art in Context. The two men were by now conversant with those historians who could produce serious yet brief introductory books to art history. Fleming’s book on Adam, Robert Adam and his Circle, a serious examination of the Scottish architect’s early years incorporating his letters, appeared in 1962. The same year Fleming and Honour moved to the hills above Lucca to the town of Tofori, purchasing the Villa Marchiò, where they remained the rest of their lives. There they had easy access to the library at the German Institute in Florence. For two months each winter they returned to England to research at the British Museum and Warburg Institute libraries. In 1966, they collaborated with Pevsner to produce The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture. Although Pevsner wrote about half of the first edition, the successive editions now nearly quadrupled in size, were the work of Honour and Fleming. Fleming’s interest in the history of collecting resulted in a series of articles beginning in 1973 under the title “Art Dealing and the Risorgimento.” The Penguin Dictionary of Decorative Arts appeared in 1977 as a collaborative effort, but the subject was widely known to be Honour’s more than Fleming’s. Honour and Fleming next collaborated on a single-volume art survey, appearing in 1982 as A World History of Art (Visual Arts: a History as it was published in the United States). Groundbreaking was its emphasis on Asian art at a time when standard histories focused on European. In 1991 Fleming and Honour produced the Venetian Hours of Henry James, Whistler and Sargent, an assemblage of experiences largely culled from their days with Lubbock, a Henry James disciple. Fleming’s final year was plagued by the great terror of art historians, blindness. He is buried in the cemetery of the parish church above his villa. Fleming’s research interest lay in the artistic relationship between Britain and Italy. It was the influence of Pevsner and Wittkower who shaped Fleming’s interest toward the then unfashionable topics of baroque sculpture and architecture. In his Robert Adam, Fleming broke with the provincial insular tradition of British architecture, examining Neoclassicism’s social and cultural implications as well as its artistic ones. The book further examined the relations between the Scottish connoisseurs and architects and their Italian influences in the early 18th century. Fleming’s ability to commission top scholars for the various Penguin publishing initiatives remains a lasting accomplishment. For the Architect and Society series, Fleming secured scholars as diverse as James S. Ackerman for Palladio, Hans Aurenhammer for Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, and George D. S. Henderson for Chartres; for the Style and Civilization series, John Kinder Gowran Shearman on Mannerism, John Boardman on pre-classical Greece, and Linda Nochlin on Realism. Most innovative of all, perhaps, was the Art in Context series, where authorities in the field were asked to write on a single work of art. This magisterial series included Robert L. Herbert writing on Jacques-Louis David’s Brutus, Ludwig H. Heydenreich on Leonardo’s Last Supper, and Reinhold Heller on Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
Selected Bibliography
“Cairo Baroque.” Architectural Review 97 (March 1945): 75-82; Robert Adam and his Circle in Edinburgh & Rome. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962; and Pevsner, Nikolaus, and Honour, Hugh. The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1966; edited, Architect and Society series, (beginning 1966), Style and Civilization series (beginning 1967) and Art in Context series, (beginning 1972); edited, with Honour, Hugh. Saxl, Fritz. A Heritage of Images: a Selection of Lectures. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970; “Art Dealing and the Risorgimento [part I].” The Burlington Magazine 115 (January 1973): 4-17, [part II] 121 (August 1979): 492-4ff., [part III] 121 (September 1979): 568-73ff.; A World History of Art. London: Macmillan Reference Books, 1982, [American title:] The Visual Arts: a History. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982; and Honour, Hugh. The Venetian Hours of Henry James, Whistler and Sargent. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991;
Sources
Lees-Milne, James. Prophesying Peace. London: Chatto and Windus, 1977; Lees-Milne, James. Caves of Ice. London: Chatto & Windus, 1983 [Lees-Milne contains errors in the Honour-Fleming collaboration process]; [obituaries:] Boucher, Bruce. The Independent (London), June 8, 2001, p. 6; “John Fleming, Writer on Art and Architecture.” The Times (London), June 4, 2001; Penny, Nicholas. “John Fleming, 1919-2001.” Burlington Magazine 143, no. 1184 (November 2001): 694-695.
Citation
"Fleming, John." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/flemingj/.
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Self-trained art historian and editor; wrote major reference books in art history with Hugh Honour. Fleming’s father was a prominent solicitor in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Fleming himself initially attempted a career in painting,
Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre) and sculpture (visual works)
Overview
Architectural historian, wrote famous guide to architectural styles and periods. His father, also Banister Fletcher, was an architectural historian as well.
Selected Bibliography
Andrea Palladio: his Life and Works. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1902; The English Home. London: Methuen & Co. 1911; Influence of material on architecture. London, Batsford, 1897; and Fletcher, Banister (1833-1899) A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method. London: Athlone Press, University of London, 1896- [issued serially], first single-volume edition, London: B.T. Batsford and New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1897.
Citation
"Fletcher, Banister, Sir." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/fletcherb/.
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Architectural historian, wrote famous guide to architectural styles and periods. His father, also Banister Fletcher, was an architectural historian as well.
Subject Area(s): American (North American) and Colonial North American
Career(s): art critics
Overview
Journalist and writer on early American art. Flexner was the son of Simon Flexner, a sixth-grade dropout who became a self-taught microbiologist, pathologist, director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York and discoverer of a cure for spinal meningitis. His mother was Helen Thomas [Flexner], a professor of English at Bryn Mawr whose sister was president of the College, and who, through various cousins’ marriages, was related to the philosopher Bertrand Russell and Bernard Berenson. It was Berenson who inspired Flexner’s interest in art history at an early age. Flexner graduated cum laude from Harvard in 1929 and joined the New York Herald Tribune as a reporter. He moved to the New York City Department of Health as an executive secretary in 1931. But the next year he quit to devote full energies to writing. Although untrained in art history, he gravitated to art subjects as part of his interest in writing about American history. In 1939 he published his America’s Old Masters, a book about colonial artists. A 1946 article on the American colonial artist Robert Feke in the Art Bulletin helped launch the brief but important art-historical career of Waldron Phoenix Belknap, Jr. The following year he began his History of American Painting series with the first volume, First Flowers of Our Wilderness. In 1950 he married Beatrice Hudson (d. 1998) a professional singer. Other popular biographies of American artists followed, including Gilbert Stuart. Called upon to write the popular Time-Life volume on Winslow Homer, he consulted Homer experts Bowdoin College scholar Philip C. Beam to assist him. He completed his history of American art in three volumes in 1962. Flexner began a popular biographical series on George Washington in the mid-1960s. Art historiographically, he helped publicize the nineteenth-century art historian Henry Theodore Tuckerman in a 1969 article on that author’s Book of Artists. His concluding volume in his Washington series, 1972, won the National Book Award for biography and a special Pulitzer Prize citation. This became a single-volume book, Washington: The Indispensable Man in 1974. He died at his New York home at age 95. Flexner admitted he wrote for a mass audience. “I do wish to communicate,” he said, “that separates me from most scholars.” In his 1996 autobiography, Maverick’s Progress, he voiced his suspicions that academia never accepted him because he lacked a doctorate. Reviewers applauded his style. His books were usually well researched and brought important basic information about American art history to a wider audience..
Selected Bibliography
America’s Old Masters: First Artists of the New World. New York: The Viking Press, 1939; “Robert Feke, active ca 1741-ca 1750.” The Art Bulletin 28 (September 1946): 197-202; History of American Painting, vol. 1, First Flowers of Our Wilderness. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947, vol. 2, The Light of Distant Skies, 1760-1835. New York: Harcourt, Brace 1954, vol. 3, That Wilder Image; the Painting of America’s Native School from Thomas Cole to Winslow Homer. Boston: Little, Brown 1962; John Singleton Copley. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948; Gilbert Stuart: a Great Life in Brief. New York: Knopf, 1955; Paintings on the Century’s Walls; an Address Delivered at the Monthly Meeting of the Century Association on March 7, 1963. New York: Century Association, 1963; A Short History of American Painting. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1950; The World of Winslow Homer, 1836-1910. New York: Time, Inc. 1966; “Tuckerman’s Book of the Artists.” The American Art Journal 1 no. 2 (Fall 1969): 53-7; The Double Adventure of John Singleton Copley, First Major Painter of the New World. Boston: Little, Brown 1969; Nineteenth Century American Painting. New York: Putnam 1970.
Sources
Flexner, James Thomas. Maverick’s Progress: An Autobiography. New York : Fordham University Press, 1996; [obituary:] Bernstein, Adam. “James Flexner Dies, Washington Biographer” Washington Post February 17, 2003, p. B4.
Citation
"Flexner, James Thomas." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/flexnerj/.
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Journalist and writer on early American art. Flexner was the son of Simon Flexner, a sixth-grade dropout who became a self-taught microbiologist, pathologist, director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York and discoverer of
Place Born: Dijon, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, France
Place Died: New Haven, New Haven, CT, USA
Home Country/ies: France
Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), art theory, Medieval (European), Romanesque, and sculpture (visual works)
Institution(s): Université de Paris (Sorbonne) and Yale University
Overview
Medievalist art historian, particularly the Romanesque, and theorist. Focillon’s father was the engraver and occasional salon reviewer Victor-Louis Focillon (1849-1918). The younger Focillon grew up amidst the artists Edouard Vuillard and Auguste Rodin and the early documenter of Impressionism, Gustave Geffroy. His early schooling was in Paris at the Lycée Charlemagne and Lycée Henri IV. As a young man he helped Geffroy write first volume of Geffroy’s series Les Musées d’Europe (The Museums of Europe) in 1900. Between 1901 and 1905 he studied philology at the école Normale Supérieure, graduating in 1906 agrégé ès lettres. His first teaching positions were at the Lycée of Bourges (1908-1910) and then the Lycée Chartres (1910-1913). Initially interested in the modern era, he received an appointment as professor of modern history at the University of Lyon concomitantly as director of the city’s Musée des Beaux-Arts. During these years he published on subjects ranging from Buddhist art to Benvenuto Cellini. His dissertation was on Piranesi, submitted to the Université de Paris in 1918. Focillon developed an strong interest in Romania and its culture. In 1923 he founded the l’Institut français de Bucarest. The following year, in a dramatic switch of field emphasis, Focillon succeeded Émile Mâle in 1924 as the chair of medieval archaeology at the Sorbonne, a fact Focillon attributed to his having taught in cities with great medieval churches as much as aNew York Timeshing else. The following year, he was appointed Professeur of the University’s new Institut d’Art et du Moyen Age. He remained interested in a variety of eras of art, though his teaching came to be focused on the medieval period. His years at the Sorbonne were among his most fruitful, writing major monographs on the medieval period and advising students who would become the next generation of outstanding medievalists. In 1931 his L’art des sculpteurs romans was published. This was followed in 1933 by essays in a work of various historians, La civilisation occidentale au moyen âge. In 1933, too, he began regular six-week teaching courses at Yale University, the alternate years taught by Marcel Aubert. The following year, 1934, he published his treatise on art, based heavily on his medieval art writings, La vie des formes. In 1938 his essays from La civilisation occidentale reappeared, revised and this time standing alone as, Art d’Occident, le moyen âge, roman et gothique (Art of the West in the Middle Ages). This same year he was elected to the chair of aesthetics and the history of art at the Collège de France and accepted a chair at Yale. Focillon was at Yale when World War II broke out in Europe in 1939 and witnessed, stateside, the occupation of France by the Nazis in 1940. That year he was named the first Senior Scholar at Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks in Washgington, D. C. After an long illness, he died mid-war at age 61 in the United States, his essays, Moyen âge, survivances et reveils, published the same year. Among his posthumous publications were his speeches on behalf of France’s freedom, Témoignage pour la France. His posthumous reputation rose in the 1963 with the translation of his book, Art of the West in the Middle Ages, an initiative fostered by the medievalist Jean Bony and Peter Kidson.
Focillon’s students were among the most illustrious art historians of the following generation. At the Sorbonne they included, in addition to Bony, André Chastel, Francoise Henry, Philippe Verdier, Louis Grodecki, Charles Sterling, and Jurgis Baltrušaitis II, who married Focillon’s daughter, Hélène. His Yale students included Sumner McKnight Crosby, Charles Seymour, Jr., was als Elizabeath Mendell and George Kubler. The strength of his lectures alone convinced the undergraduate James S. Ackerman to become an architectural historian; Robert Branner an ardent follower of his work. Focillon’s rhetorical delivery (he refused to speak any language othere than French) was legendary: eloquent and nearly literary in its tone. Focillon was the first important French art historian to incorporate Germanic art-historical method into the école des Chartes tradition of scholarship (Kidson). A formalist, his methodology employed a “cyclical development of forms” theory in the manner of Heinrich Wölfflin (Bazin) and Adolf von Hildebrand, an approach that has not, as a rule, stood the test of time. He attempted to establish formalist principles of interpretation based on what he called “pure visuality” (Life of Forms). His formalism is the antithesis of the analytic objectivity that dominates modern art historical writing. Distinct from Mâle, Focillon emphasized form over iconography or symbolism. Meyer Schapiro strenuously criticized Focillon for this methodology in Schapiro’s 1931 Art Bulletin article on Moissac. Focillon had famously defined the Romanesque as a style, so narrowly that he once warned that much of the Romanesque period art could not be called Romanesque. He saw architecture as the primary artistic impulse of the middle ages, a theme characteristic among French art historians of his time (cf. Mâle, whom he succeeded). The year 1000 was, according to him, the beginning of this period of building which gave evidence to Focillon’s theory, authoring a book with the same subject and title. Throughout his writing, he argued against the Hegelian dialectic in favor of what he called a layered art historical tradition. His particular interest in the Romanesque reflects this attitude as the beginning point of his “strata” of art history. Ironically, his infatuation with “spirit” as a motivating force in art is much akin to Hegel’s. His distaste of deterministic theories of art differs from Aloïs Riegl. The influence of Henri Bergson (1859-1941), especially in Focillon’s La vie des formes, has been noted by many, in print by Walter B. Cahn and Willibald Sauerländer (see André Chastel).
Selected Bibliography
[complete bibliography:] Bibliographie Henri Focillon. Compiled by Louis Grodecki. Yale Publications in the History of Art 15. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963; [dissertation:] Giovanni-Battista Piranesi 1720-1778: Thèse de doctorat. University of Paris, 1918, published, Paris: Laurens, 1918; La peinture au XIX siècle; la retour à l’antique, le romanticisme. Paris: Laurens, 1927; Le peinture aux XIX et XX siècles du réalisme à nos jours. Paris: Rénouard, 1928; L’art des sculpteurs romans; récherches sur l’histoire des formes. Paris: Leroux, 1931; and Pirenne, Henri, and Cohen, Gustave. La civilisation occidentale au moyen âge du XIe au milieu du XVe siècle. Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1933; Vie des Formes. Paris: Presses Universite de France, 1934, English, The Life of Forms in Art. Translated by C. B. Hogan and George Kubler. New York: Wittenborn, 1957; Art d’Occident, le moyen âge, roman et gothique. Paris: A. Colin, 1938, English, Art of the West in the Middle Ages. 2 vols. New York: Phaidon, 1963; Dumbarton Oaks inaugural lectures, November 2nd and 3d, 1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941; Moyen âge, survivances et reveils: études d’art et d’histoire. New York: Bretano’s, 1943; Témoignage pour la France. New York: Brentano’s, 1945; [and Goldscheider, Ludwig] Rembrandt; Paintings, Drawings, and Etchings. New York: Phaidon, 1960.
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. 21 mentioned, 41, 41 n. 81; 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. 43; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 178, 180, 169; Henri Focillon. Pour un temps (series). Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1986; Kidson, Peter. “Jean Bony (1908-1995).” Burlington Magazine 137, No. 1111 (October 1995): 688; Cahn, Walter.” Focillon’s Jongleur.” Art History 18 (September 1995):. 345-362; “Focillon, Henri.” Dictionary of Art 11: 233; Relire Focillon: cycle de conférences organisé au musée du Louvre par le Service culturel du 27 novembre au 18 décembre 1995 sous la direction de Matthias Waschek. Paris: Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, 1998 [see especially, Kubler, George. “L’enseignement d’Henri Focillon,”]; Cahn, Walter. “Henri Focillon.” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline. Volume 3: Philosophy and the Arts. Edited by Helen Damico. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000, p. 259-71; Cahn, Walter. “Schapiro and Focillon.” Gesta 41/42 (2002): 129-136, and correction Gesta 42 no. 1 (2003): 87; [obituaries:] Kubler, George. College Art Journal 4, no. 2 (January 1945): 71-74; “Henri Focillon, 61, A Yale Professor.” New York Times March 4, 1943, p.
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
Citation
Lee Sorensen. "Focillon, Henri." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/focillonh/.
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Medievalist art historian, particularly the Romanesque, and theorist. Focillon’s father was the engraver and occasional salon reviewer Victor-Louis Focillon (1849-1918). The younger Focillon grew up amidst the artists Edouard Vuillard and Auguste
Subject Area(s): Netherlandish and Northern Renaissance
Institution(s): Universität Hamburg
Overview
Netherlandish art scholar. Brand was born in Altona, Germany, which is present-day greater Hamburg, Germany. Brand was the daughter of Friedrich Wilhelm Brand (1875-1913), a ship owner, and Anna Majud (Brand) (1876-1943). She studied art history, archaeology and history between 1930-34 at the Technische Hochschule in Munich, at Heidelberg (where she attended the lectures of Martin Heidegger) and finally Hamburg. Brand one of a group of a Ph. D. students at the recently founded university in Hamburg studying under Erwin Panofsky, whose number also included William S. Heckscher, Horst Woldemar Janson, Walter W. Horn and Ursula Hoff. In addition to Panofsky, the faculty included Edgar Wind, medievalist Hans Liebeschütz, (1893-1976) and Charles de Tolnay. When all the Jewish faculty of this group were dismissed, Brand remained. A Christian of Jewish extraction, Brand was nevertheless pressured to leave Germany. She moved to Freiburg am Breisgau, writing her dissertation at the Albert-Ludwigs University under Kurt Bauch on the altarpiece of Stefan Lochner, in 1938. Brand worked as a volunteer at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum under Otto H. Foerster, who would become her second husband late in life. In 1941 she emigrated to the United States where she married Herbert L. Philip (b. 1909), a lawyer, who had emigrated to the United States the year before. In the United States, Brand got work as a jewelry designer in Providence, RI. Though well remunerated, she made “design research trips” to Germany after World War II in order to research at history. In 1955 she published the book on Hieronymus Bosch by the publisher Harry N. Abrams. She secured a Fulbright research stipend and in 1957 was a guest lecturer in the Netherlands, a position made possible by her former Hamburg student-colleague, Heckscher. She lectured at Bryn Mawr College in 1959 and then the New School for Social Research in New York. Another Hamburg student-friend, Janson, who now chair at New York University, gave Philip a position teaching survey courses. In 1960 she accepted an appointment at Queens College in Flushing, New York, advancing as associate professor in 1964 and full professor 1969. In 1970 Philip married Foerster, director of the Wallraff-Richartz Museum in Cologne. She became emeritus at Queens in 1980. Her undergraduate students at NYU included the (later) art historian Gary Schwartz. Heckscher described her as a “master scholar.”
Selected Bibliography
[complete bibliography:] Tribute to Lotte Brand Philip: Art Historian and Detective. New York: Abaris Books, 1985, p. 8; [dissertation:] Stefan Lochners Hochaltar von St. Katharinen zu Köln. Ph.D., Albert-Ludwigs Universität zu Freiburg im Breisgau, 1938, published, Hamburg: Druck A. Preilyper, 1938; Bosch. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1955; The Ghent Altarpiece and the Art of Jan van Eyck. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971; Das neu entdeckte Bildnis von Dürers Mutter. Nuremberg: Stadtgeschichtliche Museen Nürnberg, 1981.
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. 64-6: Contemporary Authors: 77-80: 147; Tribute to Lotte Brand Philip: Art Historian and Detective. New York: Abaris Books, 1985, pp. 9-13.
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
Citation
Lee Sorensen. "Foerster, Lotte Brand." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/foersterl/.
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Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Netherlandish art scholar. Brand was born in Altona, Germany, which is present-day greater Hamburg, Germany. Brand was the daughter of Friedrich Wilhelm Brand (1875-1913), a ship owner, and Anna Majud (Brand) (1876-1943). She studied art history,
