Place Born: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Subject Area(s): Baroque, feminism, and Modern (style or period)
Overview
Feminist art historian of the baroque and modern era art. Harris was the daughter of Sir Gordon B. B. M. Sutherland (1907-1980), a physicist, fellow and lecturer of Pembroke College and master of Emmanuel College. Her mother was Gunborg Wahlstrom (Lady Sutherland) (1910-2001), an artist originally from Sweden. Sutherland attended the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, graduating with first class honors in 1961. She achieved her Ph.D., from the same institution in 1965, writing her dissertation on Andrea Sacchi. She married the historian William V. Harris in 1965, joining the department of Art and Archeology, Columbia University the same year as an assistant professor. Between 1971-1973 she was Assistant Professor at Hunter College, City University of New York, then Associate Professor, Art Deptartment at the State University of New York at Albany. In 1971, too, she helped found the Women’s Caucus for Art of the College Art Association. After the 1972 meeting of the Association in San Francisco, she and fellow feminist art historian Linda Nochlin were commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to mount a show on important women artists. Harris served as president of the Women’s Caucus until 1974 when she was elected a member of the board of directors of CAA, 1975-1979. Nochlin’s and Harris’ show, Women Artists, 1550-1950 and book, 1976, became the cornerstone for feminist research in art history. In 1977 she accepted the Arthur Kittredge Watson Chair for Academic Affairs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which she held until 1981. After two years of research, first as a Senior Research Fellow at the National Endowment for the Humanities (1981-1982) and the Amon Carter Distinguished Visiting Professor of Art History, University of Texas at Arlington in 1982, Harris joined the University of Pittsburgh as the Mellon Professor of Art History. Her husband is Shepherd Professor of History at Columbia University and Director of the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean. Harris made the case in the first half of Women Artists: 1550-1950 (part two written by Nochlin) that the artwork of women between the middle ages and the French Revolution was seldom preserved and as a result their accomplishments little chronicled. Harris’ review of the festschrift for Walter Friedlaender in the Burlington Magazine brought an illuminating and caustic exchange between Denis Mahon and herself on a Poussin painting.
Selected Bibliography
[dissertation:] Andrea Sacchi, 1599-1661. Courtauld Institute, University of London, 1965; Selected Drawings of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. New York: Dover Publications, 1977; Andrea Sacchi: Complete Edition of the Paintings with a Critical Catalogue. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977; Landscape Painting in Rome, 1595-1675: a Loan Exhibition. New York, NY: R. L. Feigen Gallery, 1985; Women Artists, 1550-1950. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art/New York: Random House, 1976; Elizabeth Murray: Drawings, 1980-1986. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Art Gallery/New York: Harper and Row, 1986; and Schaar, Eckhard. Die Handzeichnungen von Andrea Sacchi und Carlo Maratta. Volume 1 of Kataloge des Kunstmuseums Düsseldorf: Handzeichnungen. Düsseldorf: Das Kunstmuseum, 1967; “In Honour of Walter Friedlaender.” Burlington Magazine 109 (January 1967): 36-9, reply, Mahon, Denis. “Poussin and his Patrons.” Burlington Magazine 109 (May 1967): 304 ff., [reply by Harris, p. 308].
Sources
Ann Southerland Harris Curriculum Vitae. http://www.pitt.edu/arthome/faculty/harris
Citation
"Harris, Ann Sutherland." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/harrisa/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Feminist art historian of the baroque and modern era art. Harris was the daughter of Sir Gordon B. B. M. Sutherland (1907-1980), a physicist, fellow and lecturer of Pembroke College and master of Emmanuel College. Her mother was Gunborg Wahlstrom
Subject Area(s): painting (visual works), photographs, and Spanish (culture or style)
Career(s): curators
Overview
Curator of the Photographic Collection at the Warburg, 1947-1970; Spanish painting scholar. Harris’ father was Lionel Harris, a British subject and Spanish art dealer and her mother, Enriqueta Rodriguez, a Spaniard who converted to Judaism to marry. Harris was raised in a Jewish home in Hampstead, England. She attended University College London, beginning in 1928 where she read (majored in) modern French and Italian. She was one of the first students to enroll in art history courses which had been introduced into the curriculum in her second year. Harris continued in art history, receiving her Ph.D. under Tancred Borenius in 1934. Her dissertation was on the followers of Goya. She returned to Spain to research the influence of Caravaggio on 17th-century Spanish painting. Harris intended on museum work, but almost no positions were available for women. Instead, she secured an appointment as a part-time lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art, which had recently opened its doors. The Spanish Civil War affected her greatly. She assisted Spanish refugee children to find places of refuge in England. She joined the Spanish section of the Ministry of Information to encourage Spain to remain neutral throughout World War II. In 1938 she published her first book, The Golden Age of Spanish Art. After the war’s end in 1945 she returned to work for the Courtauld Institute, which had subsumed the Warburg Institute and library, founded by Aby M. Warburg and moved after his death from Hamburg to London in 1933. Harris was put in charge of the vast photographic collection–a hallmark of Warburg research–in 1947. She remained in this position the rest of her career. At the Warburg, she met Henri Frankfort, its archaeologist/director, then married. Frankfort divorced his wife and married Harris, who was a strikingly beautiful woman (Kaufmann) in 1952. After only two years, however, Frankfort died unexpectedly. Though her appointment was as an image curator, Harris researched and published on Spanish art throughout her career, contributing to the Goya exhibition at the Royal Academy, London, in 1963, and publishing a monograph on Goya in 1969. She retired from the University in 1970. In 1982 she published a book on Velazquez. In later years she funded a lecture series at the University and fellowships at the Warburg Institute. Her work on Spanish painting was widely praised, especially in Spain, where it was awarded the Grand Cross of Queen Isabel the Catholic. Harris was noted for her discoveries concerning the artists’ lives successfully connecting it with the subject matter of particular paintings. One example was her identification of the figures of the courtiers surrounding the young prince in the painting Baltasar Carlos in the Riding School by Velazquez (Wallace Collection).
Sources
[mentioned] Bober, Phyllis Pray. A Life of Learning. Charles Homer Haskins Lecture. New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1995, p. 13; [obituary:] Kaufmann, Michael. “Enriqueta Harris Frankfort: Art historian who uncovered secrets of Velazquez and Goya.” The Guardian (London) May 16, 2006, p. 35;
Citation
"Harris, Enriqueta." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/harrise/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Curator of the Photographic Collection at the Warburg, 1947-1970; Spanish painting scholar. Harris’ father was Lionel Harris, a British subject and Spanish art dealer and her mother, Enriqueta Rodriguez, a Spaniard who converted to Judaism to marr
Subject Area(s): American (North American), art theory, and social history
Career(s): art historians and educators
Overview
University of Chicago social historian whose primary publications are on American art. Harris was raised in Brooklyn, NY, the son of Harold Harris and Irene Harris. After receiving an A. B. from Columbia University in 1958 he continued to Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, receiving a second B.A. in 1960. He returned to the U.S., completing a doctorate from Harvard University in 1965. He taught at Harvard first as an instructor and then assistant professor of history in 1965. His dissertation, written under Oscar Handlin (b.1915) was published the following year as the groundbreaking book, The Artist in American Society: the Formative Years, 1790-1860. A sociological examination of the view of art in American society, Harris’ research was drawn from written accounts of the time and not an art history. After his appointment to assistant professor at Harvard, Harris moved to the University of Chicago in 1969 as associate professor. He was the Boucher lecturer at Johns Hopkins University in 1971. He rose to (full) professor of history at Chicago in 1972. Harris moved on to other forms of American Kultur, most notably Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum, which appeared in 1973. Harris treated Barnum as a cultural force, much as emerging American artists, feeding the public’s sense of wonder and their appreciation of Barnum’s artistry. Harris lectured as a visiting professor at Yale University, Cardozo lecturer, in 1974. He was director of the National Humanities Institute, 1975-1977. Harris received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for the 1980-1981 year. He sat on the architecture advisory committee of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1982. In 1982, too, he was the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tandy lecturer. He chaired the department of history at the University of Chicago between 1985 and 1988. Though a social historian, Harris’s interest in the art object manifested itself with his participation in the 1989 exhibition at the Renwick Gallery, Washgington, D. C., “Masterworks of Louis Comfort Tiffany.” Harris’ 1990 book focused on the marketing of popular culture, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America, including shopping centers and parking garages. He became Preston and Sterling Morton Professor of History at Chicago in 1990. In 1991 he was appointed a Getty scholar. He mounted an exhibition for the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993 on the centennial of the Museum’s founding. Harris was an anomaly, a historian with academic appointments in history departments, writing principally on art and art’s role as a social force in history. His primary research interest was the role of the artist in American culture and society. In The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790-1860, Harris examined letters, memoirs, diaries, and European travel guides determining that American artists reformed the notion of art along moral terms to contrast it from foreign perceptions.
Selected Bibliography
[dissertation:] The Artistic Enterprise in America, 1790-1860. Harvard, 1965, revised and published as, The Artist in American Society: the Formative Years, 1790-1860. New York: G. Braziller, 1966; “The Gilded Age Revisited: Boston and the Museum Movement,” American Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1962): 545-64; Humbug; the Art of P. T. Barnum. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973; and Duncan, Alastair , and Eidelberg, Martin. Masterworks of Louis Comfort Tiffany. New York: Abrams, 1989; Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990; Chicago’s Dream, a World’s Treasure: the Art Institute of Chicago, 1893-1993. Chicago: Art Institute, 1993; and Hebert, Robert and Druick, Douglas W. Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago/University of California Press, 2004.
Citation
"Harris, Neil." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/harrisn/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
University of Chicago social historian whose primary publications are on American art. Harris was raised in Brooklyn, NY, the son of Harold Harris and Irene Harris. After receiving an A. B. from Columbia University in 1958 he continued to Cambridg
Classicist art historian at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Among Harrison’s collegial mentors was Edith Porada in the 1960’s. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1952. Harrison was part of the Archaeology Club, an informal group of classical art historians, whose ranks included Otto J. Brendel of Columbia University and his wife Maria, Homer Thompson (1906-2000) and his wife Dorothy Burr Thompson of the Institute for Advanced Study, Frances Follin Jones of the Princeton Art Gallery, and Dorothy Kent Hill of the Walters Gallery. She was named Edith Kitzmiller Professor Emerita and Adjunct Professor of Fine Arts at her retirement. In 1992 she was one of a group of scholars to comment on the authenticity of the Getty Museum’s disputed kouros.
Selected Bibliography
[dissertation:] Roman Portraits from the Athenian Agora. Columbia University, 1952, revised and published as, Portrait Sculpture. Princeton, N.J., American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1953; Archaic and Archaistic Sculpture. Princeton, NJ: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1965.
Sources
Ridgway, Brunhilde Sismondo. “The State of Research on Ancient Art.” Art Bulletin 68 (March 1986): 8, note 8. [transcript] Evelyn Harrison. Interviews with Art Historians, 1991-2002. Getty Research Institute, Malibu, CA.
Citation
"Harrison, Evelyn B.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/harrisone/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Classicist art historian at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Among Harrison’s collegial mentors was Edith Porada in the 1960’s. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1952. Harrison was part of th
Place Born: Cottingham, East Riding of Yorkshire, England, UK
Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Subject Area(s): archaeology, Classical, and feminism
Career(s): educators
Overview
Archaeologist and lecturer, Cambridge University; early feminist figure in classical studies. Harrison’s parents were Charles Harrison, a timber broker, and Elizabeth Hawksley Nelson (Harrison) (d. 1850). Her mother died shortly after she was born and the girl was educated by governesses at home and in 1868, the Ladies’ College Cheltenham, acquiring German, Greek and Latin before age 17. She entered Newnham College, Cambridge University in 1874, a recently establish college for women. Few women graduated from Newnham, however, and Cambridge offered women no actual degrees but rather certificates. Between 1880 and 1897 Harrison studied Greek art and archaeology at the British Museum under Charles T. Newton, visiting archaeological sites (but not doing excavations) and gaining expertise in Greek pottery. In the late 1880s she met, influenced–and perhaps had a relationship with–Eugénie Sellers Strong [later, Strong]. Harrison supported herself lecturing at the Museum, public schools [i.e., private boys’ schools] and in the British provinces to huge popular acclaim. She incorporated sound effects and lantern slides. Nearly 1600 people attended her Glasgow lecture on Athenian gravestones. She traveled to Italy and Germany, meeting the Prague scholar Wilhelm Klein. Klein introduced her to Wilhelm Dörpfeld who invited her to participate in his archaeological tours in Greece. Her early book The Odyssey in Art and Literature, a summary book without original observation, appeared in 1882. Harrison met the scholar D. S. MacColl, who purportedly proposed marriage to her. Though she declined, MacColl advised her against writing and lecturing in manner pandering to the public and Victorian aestheticism. She suffered a severe depression, studying Greek art more objectively to in part cure herself, particularly re-evaluating the more “primitive” eras of the art. Harrison’s visit to MacColl in Greece in 1888 left her with an interest in the cults that perpetuated Greek mythology. She concluded that the religion depicted in early Greek art was fundamentally different from the art and literature of the Greeks studied in contemporary Europe. Harrison began publishing in the periodical Oscar Wilde was editing, Woman’s World on “The Pictures of Sappho” in 1888. Harrison translated and updated Mythologie figurée de la Grèce (1883) by the French classical archaeologist Maxime Collignon in 1890 as Manual of Mythology in Relation to Greek Art, a work which gave serious consideration to early Greek art. The same year, she provided personal commentary to selections of Pausanias, Mythology & Monuments of Ancient Athens by Margaret Verrall. These two serious works garnered her membership in the Deutsche Archäologische Institut (German Archaeological Institute) and honorary degrees from the universities of Durham (1897) and Aberdeen (1895). By that time, Harrison’s anthropological approach to archaeolgoy was advocating the notion of ritual over myth, unaware, apparently, of similar conclusions by Scottish scholars James G. Frazer (1854-1941) and W. Robertson Smith (1846-1894) (Payne). She lost a bid for the Yates chair in 1894 to Ernest A. Gardner. Newnham College, however, appointed her a research Fellow in 1893. She and MacColl produced a collected work on vases, Greek Vase Paintings: a Selection of Examples in 1894. In 1899 Harrison published the first of three articles in the Journal of Hellenic Studies on Greek religion. A marriage to the scholar R. A. Neil was dashed when he died in 1901. Harrison began working with the former chair of Greek at Glasgow, Gilbert Murray (1866-1957), who lived near Cambridge and a (then) student Francis MacDonald Cornford (1874-1943). She became the central figure of the group known as the Ritualists. In 1903 her first book of truly original scholarship, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, appeared. The book made truly novel conclusions about the origin of Greek gods. Harrison became intellectually and emotionally close to Cornford; his marriage in 1909 caused her great stress. She replaced him with a friendship with Hope Mirrlees, whom Harrison referred to as “her spiritual daughter.” Another work on Greek relgion, Themis, was published in 1912. In 1920 Virginia Woolf cited Harrison her New Statesman refutation to Arnold Bennett and Desmond McCarthy’s accusation that women were inferior scholars. Harrison retired from Newnham in 1922, moving to Paris and living with Mirrlees. She and Mirrlees returned to London in 1925, publishing her memoirs by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s press, The Hogarth Press. She died three years later at her Bloomsbury home and is buried in St. Marylebone cemetery, East Finchley. Harrison is overall considered a historian of Greek religion, but viewed as a late Victorian, she is more an archaeologist as nearly all her work is founded on the study of visual images (Beard, 2002). Her writing in Woman’s World disseminated Hellenism to a popular and distinctly female readership. Through the journal, Harrison drew similarities between modern collegiate life and the female world that allowed Sappho to flourish questioning gender stereotypes by outlining the varied models of womanhood (Hurst). Methodologically, Harrison employed disparate and nacent disciplines such as anthropology and ethnography into classical studies. She was able to synthesize writers as divergent as Friedrich Nietzsche (Birth of Tragedy) and Emile Durkheim (his notion of the social origin of religion)–both of whom she acknowledged–into a personal theory (Phillips). Henri Bergson’s L’évolution créatrice, 1907, and the 1909 appearance of Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud were major later influences. Harrison herself served as a model for Virginia Woolf. The writer acknowledged Harrison in her diary, A Room of One’s Own, refering to her as “J–H–of Fernham [i.e., Newnham]” and after Harrison’s death in 1928 asserted she saw scholar’s ghost in the college’s gardens.
Sources
[sources on Harrison are legion, specifically:] Harrison, Jane Ellen. Reminiscences of a Student’s Life. London: Hogarth, 1925; Stewart, Jessie G. Jane Ellen Harrison: a Portrait from Letters. London: Merlin Press, 1959; Ackerman, Robert. “Jane Ellen Harrison: the Early Work.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 13 (1972): 209-230; Payne, Harry C. “Modernizing the Ancients: the Reconstruction of Ritual Drama, 1870-1920.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 122, no. 3 (June 9, 1978): 182-192; Maika, Patricia. Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts and Jane Harrison’s Con/spiracy. Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Research Press, 1987; Peacock, Sandra J. Jane Ellen Harrison: the Mask and the Self. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988 [unreliable]; Schlesier, Renate. “Jane Ellen Harrison, 1850-1928,” in, Classical Scholarship: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Briggs, Ward W., and Calder, William M., III, eds. New York: Garland Publishing, 1990, pp. 127-141; Phillips, K.J. “Jane Harrison and Modernism.” Journal of Modern Literature 17 no. 4 (Spring 1991): 465-476; Ackerman, Robert The Myth and Ritual School: J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists. New York: Garland, 1991; Carpentier, Martha Celeste. Ritual, Myth, and the Modernist Text: the Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998; The Makers of Classical Archaeology: A Reference Work. New York: Humanity Books, 2000 pp. 143-45; Beard, Mary. The Invention of Jane Harrison. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000; Robinson, Annabel. The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002; Beard, Mary. “Mrs. Arthur Strong, Morelli, and the Troopers of Cortés.” in, Donohue, A. A. and Fullerton, Mark D., eds. Ancient Art and its Historiography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 152-153; Hurst, Isobel. “Ancient and Modern Women in the Woman’s World.” Victorian Studies 52 no.1 (Autumn 2009): 42; “The Pictures of Sappho.” Woman’s World 1 (April 1888): 274-278; Myths of the Odyssey in Art and Literature. London: Rivingtons, 1882; translated and updated, Collignon, Maxime. Manual of Mythology in Relation to Greek Art. London: H. Grevel, 1890; [introductory essay and archæological commentary] in Verrall, Margaret, ed. Pausanias. Mythology & Monuments of Ancient Athens: Being a Translation of a Portion of the ‘Attica’ of Pausanias by Pausanias, fl. ca. 150-175. London: Macmillan, 1890; and MacColl, Dugald Sutherland. Greek Vase Paintings: a Selection of Examples. London: T.F. Unwin, 1894; Introductory Studies in Greek Art. New York: MacMillan, 1902; Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. 1903; Ancient Art and Ritual. New York, H. Holt, 1913; Reminiscences of a Student’s Life. London: Hogarth, 1925.
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
Citation
Lee Sorensen. "Harrison, Jane Ellen." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/harrisonj/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Archaeologist and lecturer, Cambridge University; early feminist figure in classical studies. Harrison’s parents were Charles Harrison, a timber broker, and Elizabeth Hawksley Nelson (Harrison) (d. 1850). Her mother died shortly after she was born
Career(s): directors (administrators) and museum directors
Overview
Director, Art Institute of Chicago, 1921-38. Harshe was born to William and Emily Robinson (Harshe). After graduation from the University of Missouri in 1899, he further studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Student’s League in New York, the Colorossi Academy, Paris and the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. His media were etching and painting. In 1902 he began as a supervisor for manual arts in Columbus, Georgia, and then Instructor of Fine Arts at the University of Missouri and then assistant professor of Graphic Arts at Stanford University. In 1915 he was appointed director of the Oakland (California) Public Museum. The following year he became assistant director of the Carnegie Institute. He married Marie Fuller Read (1883-1953). In 1920 he was named associate director of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the following year, appointed director. Harshe’s tenure as director included the acquisition of Titian’s “Education of Cupid.” He was co-author of one of the first general histories of art, History of Art (1928) an English update of José Pijoán y Soteras‘s 1914 work. In 1933, Harshe, with the help of his assistant, Daniel Catton Rich, organized the art exhibition Century of Progress World’s fair in Chicago. Harshe circumvented the original plan to present America’s most favorite paintings (which would have highlighted the collections of New York more than Chicago) in favor of organizing and exclusively American-painting show (except for Whistler Portrait of the Artist’s Mother). He arranged a similar show for the Texas Centennial of 1936. At his sudden death at age 58, he was succeeded by Rich.Harshe was a visionary museum director who understood both the need for an expansive definition of art as well as a museum’s mission as a tastemaker. He refused to hang one of the Art Institute’s (and indeed, the nation’s) most popular paintings, “The Song of the Lark” by Jules Breton because of its conservative academic nature. Sensing Chicago’s need to become an important art center, he emphasized the impressionists and Post-impressionists at a time when they were less preferred. Yet he praised the cartoon art of Walt Disney for its high degree of fantasy.
Selected Bibliography
and Pijoán, José, and Roys, Ralph Loveland. History of Art. 3 vols. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928; A Reader’s Guide to Modern Art. San Francisco: The Wahlgreen company/Panama-Pacific International Exposition, 1914; and Rich, Daniel Catton. Handbook of the House, Formal Gardens and Fountains of Vizcaya: an Italian Palazzo in a Tropical Setting, Home of the late James Deering of Miami and Chicago. Chicago: s. n., 1934; and Bennett, James O’Donnell. A Layman Views the Art Institute’s Rare Paintings. Chicago: Chicago Tribune(?), 1931.
Sources
“Rober B. Harshe, Authority on Art, Head of Chicago Institute Is Dead–Arranged Show for Exposition in 1933.” New York Times January 12, 1938, p. 21; Who Was Who in American Art 2 (1999): 1474-75.
Citation
"Harshe, Robert B.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/harsher/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Director, Art Institute of Chicago, 1921-38. Harshe was born to William and Emily Robinson (Harshe). After graduation from the University of Missouri in 1899, he further studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Student’s League in New
Professor and early Christian art scholar at University of Vienna. In 1895 Härtel co-published, Die Wiener Genesis, with his Vienna colleague Franz Wickhoff. Härtel undertook the description of the manuscript and of the Greek text, and Wickhoff that of the pictures.
Selected Bibliography
[series of articles on Wiener Genesis in]: Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhchsten Kaiserhauses 15-16 (Jahrgang 12-13) (1894-95), Beilage (supplement), [written in conjunction with Franz Wickhoff]; and Wickhoff, Franz. Die Wiener Genesis. Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1895; and Curtius, Georg. Kurzgefaszte griechische Schulgrammatik nach Curtius und v. Hartels Schulgrammatik. Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1907; Kritische versuche zur fünften dekade des Livius. Vienna: Tempsky, 1888 ; Lucifer von Cagliari und sein Latein. Vienna: s. n., 1885]; Lvciferi Calaritani Opvscvla. Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 14. Vindobonae: apvd C. Geroldi filivm, 1886.
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. 32.
Citation
"Härtel, Wilhelm August, Ritter von." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/hartelw/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Professor and early Christian art scholar at University of Vienna. In 1895 Härtel co-published, Die Wiener Genesis, with his Vienna colleague Franz Wickhoff. Härtel undertook the description of the manuscript and
Modernist art historian, coined the term “Neue Sachlichkeit” for the period of German art between the wars. Hartmann’s paternal family were long merchant-entrepeurs in Bremen. After graduating from the gymnasium in Bremen, he attended classes beginning in 1904 at the universities of Freiburg, Vienna, Munich (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Institut für Kunstgeschichte under Berthold Riehl) and eventually Göttingen. He wrote his disssertation at Göttingen under Robert Vischer on the topic of Sienese painting in the fifteenth century. After a travel year, he entered the Kunsthalle in Bremen as an assistant working in the prints collection, 1910-1913. His early scholarship focused on the Italian Renaissance. In 1913 Hartlaub was appointed a curator at the Mannheim Kunsthalle under Fritz Wichert. His research now moved to Romantic period Germany and the 20th century. Hartlaub was deputy director of the museum during the war years 1914 through 1919. In 1923 he succeeded Wichert as director. In 1923 Hartlaub began using the term “Neue Sachlichkeit” (New Objectivity) to distinguish non-Expressionist art in Germany. He set out to show the most modern artists. His 1924 exhibition, “Kubin und Klee” was followed by one on the German Expressionist Karl Schmidt Rottluff, 1925. In 1926 by a show of the title “Die neue Sachlichkeit” at the Kunsthalle, a show traveling to Chemnitz and Dresden through 1927. The art was avant-garde enough for some museum directors to ask for works to be omitted, as in the case of Schreiber Wiegand, in Chemnitz. During his tenure as director, Hartlaub hired Kurt Martin as part of the museum staff. Hartlaub actively purchased modern art by the Fauves, Expressionists and other modernist groups. The assumption of power by the Nazis in 1933 made Hartlaub an object of scorn for his support of modern art. The Mannheim museum became the first museum to have a Schandausstellung (Shame Exhibition) of modern art, preceeding the famous 1937 “Entartete Kunst” (degenerate art) show in Munich. At the Mannheim show, large photos of Hartlaub were paraded in the streets together with Chagall’s “Rabbi.” Hartlaub was dismissed the same year.
Selected Bibliography
[dissertation:] Siena im Quattrocento.Göttingen, 1909; Kunst und Religion: ein Versuch über die Möglichkeit neuer religiöser Kunst. Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1919; Die neue deutsche Graphik. Berlin: E. Reiss, 1920; Giorgiones Geheimnis: ein kunstgeschichtlicher Beitrag zur Mystik der Renaissance. Munich: Allgemeine Verlagsanstalt, 1925; edited, German edition. Amadou, Robert. Das Zwischenreich: vom Okkultismus zur Parapsychologie: Würdigung und Kritik der internationalen Forschung. Baden-Baden: Holle Verlag, 1957; Der Stein der Weisen: Wesen und Bildwelt der Alchemie. Munich: Prestel 1959.
Sources
Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 230; Hille, Karoline. “Mit heißen Herz und kuhlem Verstand: Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub und die Mannheimer Kunsthalle, 1913-1933.” in, Junge, Henricke, ed. Avantgarde und Publikum: zur Rezeption avantagardistischer Kunst in Deutschland, 1905-1933. Vienna: Böhler, 1992, pp. 129-130; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 149-52; 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. 261-66; Crockett, Dennis. German Post-Expressionism: The Art of the Great Disorder: 1918-1924. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 1999, pp. 1-3, 22.
Citation
"Hartlaub, Gustav." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/hartlaubg/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Modernist art historian, coined the term “Neue Sachlichkeit” for the period of German art between the wars. Hartmann’s paternal family were long merchant-entrepeurs in Bremen. After graduating from the gymnasium in Bremen, he attended classes begi
Full Name: Hammacher, Abraham Marie Wilhelmus Jacobus
Other Names:
"Bram"
Gender: male
Date Born: 1897
Date Died: 2002
Place Born: Middelburg, South Holland, Netherlands
Place Died: Abano Terme, Padova, Veneto, Italy
Home Country/ies: Netherlands
Subject Area(s): Dutch (culture or style)
Career(s): art critics
Overview
Art critic; museum director (1947-1963); professor of art history (1952-1968); Van Gogh expert. Hammacher grew up in Middelburg as a sensitive child with strong affinities for music, literature, and painting. He played the violin, painted and drew. In 1917, after graduating from high school, he went to Utrecht to study law, with a view to becoming an attorney, like his uncle and grandfather. One year later, however, he changed his mind and started writing on literature and art. His first contributions in the newspaper the Utrechts Dagblad (UD) mark the beginning of his career as an art critic. The editor in chief of the UD, Pierre Henri Ritter jr. (1882-1962), offered Hammacher a regular position in 1920 where he remained until 1927. He also began publishing articles in various periodicals. In 1926, he married Anna Sophia Hooft Graafland (d. 1956). In the same year he became an art critic for the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (NRC). In 1935 he joined the editorial board of Elsevier’s Geïllustreerd Maandschrift, in which periodical he frequently published. Between 1923 and 1945 he worked in the Dutch postal services (PTT). His first studies on art history appeared in the 1930s, including a monograph on Romanesque sculpture, Vorm en Geest der Romaansche Beeldhouwkunst (1936). During World War II he published Amsterdamsche impressionisten en hun kring (1941), which won the 1941-43 Wijnaendts-Francken prize, awarded in 1947. Between 1945 and 1947, Hammacher headed the Department of Fine Arts of the Ministry of Education, Arts and Science. In 1947 he was invited to become director of the Rijksmuseum Kröller Müller in Otterlo. One of his major concerns was the completion of the museum complex, designed by the Belgian architect, Henri van de Velde (1863-1957). The new wing of the building, begun during the war, had remained unfinished. Under Van de Velde’s supervision, this part of the museum, which included a sculpture gallery, was completed in 1953. Hammacher’s comprehensive study on Van de Velde, De wereld van Henry van de Velde (The World of Henry van de Velde), which appeared in 1967, reveals his great admiration for this many-sided artist. In the same period, Hammacher’s interest in modern sculpture led to important acquisitions, with an emphasis on international artists. He also broadened the museum collection with African and Oceanic art. Acquisitions of two works of the English sculptor Barbara Hepworth in 1953, led to a life-long friendship with this artist. In the same year he also visited and befriended the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY. In 1957, he married the Belgian art historian Renilde van den Brande. A major event in his career was the opening, in 1961, of the sculpture garden of the Kröller-Müller museum, illustrating the evolution of modern sculpture. His growing expertise in this field is reflected in a number of publications, including monographs on Hepworth (1958), Lipchitz (1960), Marino Marini (1969), and others. The Evolution of Modern Sculpture. Tradition and Innovation, one of his major studies, appeared in 1969. The impressive Van Gogh collection of the museum was another challenge for Hammacher. At age 16, he had read the 1914 publication of Van Gogh’s letters, Vincent van Gogh. Brieven aan zijn Broeder. As the director of the Kröller-Müller, he was instrumental in the organization of a number of Van Gogh exhibits all over the world. The 1949-50 shows in New York and Chicago won great acclaim, as well as the 1958-59 exhibitions in Japan. In his own museum he changed the display of the paintings. In 1948 his first Van Gogh monograph appeared in the Palet series. Between 1952 and 1963 he combined his many tasks as museum director with an extraordinarius professorship of art history at the Technische Hogeschool of Delft (now Technische Universiteit Delft, University of Technology). On the initiative of J. G. van Gelder, Utrecht University granted him a doctorate honoris causa in 1958. In 1963, Hammacher became full professor at Delft University and retired from the Kröller Müller. He retired from this position in 1968. Hammacher kept traveling and publishing in the many years that followed. He was the chairman of the editorial team of the third revised 1970 edition of the Van Gogh catalog by J.-B. de la Faille, The Works of Vincent van Gogh. His Paintings and Drawings. Hammacher also contributed to this edition with “Van Gogh and the Words”, a survey on Van Gogh reception of 80 years. Hammacher and Renilde retired to Brussels in 1978. In 1982 a documentary biography on Van Gogh followed, which he co-authored with his wife. A remarkable work is his 1981 Phantoms of the Imagination: Fantasy in Art and Literature from Blake to Dali. He added a new chapter on contemporary sculpture(1960s-1980s) of his 1969 sculpture book, retitling it as Modern Sculpture. Tradition and Innovation, 1988. In 1994 he wrote a study on Georges Seurat, Silhouet van Seurat. On his hundredth birthday in 1997, the Kröller-Müller Museum honored its former director with an exhibition on four Spanish sculptors: Picasso, González, Miró, and Chillida. While traveling in Italy, he died at age 104. His son, Arno Hammacher (b. 1927) was a photographer. Hammacher’s publications demonstrate his broad interests in Dutch and international art. Inspired by his readings of Sigmund Freud and others, he saw the subconscious as a key to the creation of works of art. In Phantoms of the Imagination, Hammacher explored dreams, vision, and surreal imagination as psychic experiences of writers and artists. Generally Hammacher used a formalistic approach on visual art; his study on modern sculpture focuses on the stylistic and spatial aspects of art works. He was one of the art historians who accepted Abraham Bredius and the authentication of the Vermeer Christ at Emmaus, actually painted by forger Han van Meegeren (1889-1947).
Selected Bibliography
[for a complete bibliography, including his UD and NRC articles, see] “Publicaties A. M. Hammacher” in De Ruiter, Peter. A. M. Hammacher: Kunst als levensessentie. Baarn: de Prom, 2000, pp. 521-582; Vorm en Geest der Romaansche Beeldhouwkunst. Amsterdam: De Spieghel, 1936; Amsterdamsche impressionisten en hun kring. Amsterdam: J. M. Meulenhoff, 1941; Jacques Lipchitz; his Sculpture. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1960; Barbara Hepworth. London: A. Zwemmer, 1959; Le monde de Henry van de Velde. Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, 1967; Marino Marini. Sculpture Painting Drawing. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1970; “Van Gogh and the Words” in de la Faille, J.-B. The Works of Vincent van Gogh. His Paintings and Drawings. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff International, 1970, pp. 9-37; The Evolution of Modern Sculpture. Tradition and Innovation. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1969, [enlarged edition:] Modern Sculpture. Tradition and Innovation. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1988; Phantoms of the Imagination. Fantasy in Art and Literature from Blake to Dali. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1981; and Hammacher, Renilde. Van Gogh, a documentary Biography. New York: Macmillan, 1982; Silhouet van Seurat. Otterlo: Kröller-Müller Museum, 1994.
Sources
Van Gelder, J. G. “A.M. Hammacher en zijn geschriften” in Bibliografie der geschriften van prof. dr. A. M. Hammacher. Otterlo, 1963, pp. 7-16; De Gruyter, W. Jos. “Een persoonlijke herinnering” in Bibliografie der geschriften van prof. dr. A. M. Hammacher. Otterlo, 1963, pp. 17-22; De Standaard, 26 April 2002; Il Giornale dell’arte, 24 June 2002; De Ruiter, Peter. A. M. Hammacher: Kunst als levensessentie. Baarn: de Prom, 2000 [with a list of additional biographical literature on p. 584].
Contributors: Monique Daniels
Citation
Monique Daniels. "Hammacher, Abraham Marie Wilhelmus Jacobus." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/hammachera/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Art critic; museum director (1947-1963); professor of art history (1952-1968); Van Gogh expert. Hammacher grew up in Middelburg as a sensitive child with strong affinities for music, literature, and painting. He played the violin, painted and drew
University of Innsbruck professor of art. Among students who benefitted from his lectures were Emil Kaufmann. Part of the Nazi ideology of the 1930s.
Selected Bibliography
Die Entwicklung der Barocken Deckenmalerei in Tirol. Studien zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte. Strassburg: Heitz, 1912; Der Bildhauer Alexander Colin von Mecheln. Vienna: E. Hölzel, 1922; Albin Egger-Lienz: ein Buch für das deutsche Volk. Innsbruck: Deutscher Alpenverlag 1938; Franz von Defregger. Innsbruck: Deutscher Alpenverlag, 1940; Kunstgeschichte der Stadt Innsbruck. Innsbruck: Tyrolia-Verlag 1952
Sources
Festschrift zu Ehren Prof. Dr. Heinrich Hammer’s. Innsbruck: Wagner, 1947.
Citation
"Hammer, Heinrich." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/hammerh/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
