K

Kraus, Theodor

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Kraus, Theodor

Gender: male

Date Born: 1919

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): archaeology

Overview

Director of the DAI or German archaeological Institute in Rome 1978-1984; with Bernard Andreae, he authored the volume on ancient Rome for the second edition of the Propyläen Kunstgeschichte. He wrote his habilitation in Heidelberg in 1960. Under his directorship, the Systematic Catalog, evolved from the first subject catalog of the library by August Mau between 1900 and 1902, was published. Mau’s catalog was updated in 1925 by Eugen von Mercklin and Friedrich Matz (1890-1974) and printed in an edition published in Rome and Berlin, 1914-1932.

Selected Bibliography

[Habilitation:] Hekate; Studien zu Wesen und Bild der Göttin in Kleinasien und Griechenland. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1960; Pompeji und Herculaneum: Antlitz u. Schicksal zweier antiker Städte. Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1973, English, Pompeii and Herculaneum: the Living Cities of the Dead. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1975; Die Ranken der Ara Pacis: ein Beitrag zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der augusteischen Ornamentik. Berlin: G. Mann, 1953; and Andreae, Bernard. Das römische Weltreich. Propyläen Kunstgeschichte 2. Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1967; edited. Systematischer Katalog [of the] Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Römische Abteilung, Bibliothek. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1969; Die Aphrodite von Knidos. Bremen: W. Dorn, 1957; edited. 150-Jahr-Feier Deutsches Archaologisches Institut Rom. Mainz: von Zabern 1982.

Director of the DAI or German archaeological Institute in Rome 1978-1984; with Bernard Andreae, he authored the volume on ancient Rome for the second edition of the Propyläen Kunstgeschichte. He wrote his habilitat

Krauss, Friedrich

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Krauss, Friedrich

Gender: male

Date Born: 1900

Date Died: 1977

Place Born: Riga, Latvia

Place Died: Munich, Bavaria, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): ancient, Ancient Greek (culture or style), Antique, the, architecture (object genre), Classical, and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Specialist in ancient Greek architecture, particularly connected with the excavations and archictecture at Paestum. Originally trained as an engineer, he returned to school at the age of 27 to study ancient architecture. Taught as dozent at the Technical University of Munich, 1934-1938, called back to a professor’s chair in 1946 as the successor to Herbert Knackfuss. After 1945, concerned primarily with questions of architectural restoration in post-war Munich, particularly the Alten Pinakothek.

Selected Bibliography

Temenos für den Herrscherkult. AvP IX, 1937. [with R. Herbig] Der korinthisch-dorische Tempel am Forum von Paestum. DAA VIII, 1939. Heraion alla foce del Sele. vol. 1, 1951. Heraion alla foce del Sele. vol. 2, 1954. “Der Entwurf des Grundrisses,” Festschrift C. Weickert. 1955. 99ff. “Die Säulen des Zeustempels von Olympia,” Robert Boehringer. Eine Freundesgabe. 1957, 365 ff.

Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 280-282; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 222-25.

Krauss, Rosalind E.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Krauss, Rosalind E.

Other Names:

Rosalind Epstein Krauss

Gender: female

Date Born: 1940

Place Born: Washington, DC, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Overview

Hunter College and Columbia University professor; art critic; co-founder of October magazine. Krauss was the daughter of Matthew M. Epstein and Bertha Luber (Epstein); her father was an attorney. Krauss attended Wellesley College, receiving her B.A. in 1962; the same year she married the architect Richard I. Krauss. She moved to Harvard University where she was awarded an A. M. the following year. After two years as an instructor at Wellesley College (1965-1967), she joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1967 as an associate professor of art history (through 1971). Krauss began writing criticism for Artforum in 1966. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1969, writing her dissertation on the work of the sculptor David Smith. She rose to full professor at MIT. During the same years she was a contributing editor of Artforum (1971-1975). In 1971 she divorced and published her first book, an expanded version of her thesis, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith. Krauss was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in 1971 as well. She won the Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., Award for Criticism from the College Art Association in 1972 moving to Princeton University as a lecturer and director of visual arts program (through 1974). The following year, 1975, she joined Hunter College of City University of New York as an associate professor. In 1975 she left Artforum to help found (and be the first editor of) October magazine. She was also professor of the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), 1977-1992. Krauss completed the catalogue raisonné on David Smith in 1977. Krauss rose through the ranks at Hunter College to full professor (and distinguished professor) through 1992. She was a fellow at CASVA (Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts) at the National Gallery of Art in Washgington, D. C., for the 1981-1982 year. She spent the 1983-1984 year as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Her collect essays, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths appeared in 1985. In 1992 she was appointed Columbia University’s Meyer Schapiro professor of modern art and theory in the Department of Art History and Archaeology. Krauss built a reputation for feminist, deconstructionist, and psychoanalytic methodology in the 1970s and 1980s, focusing particularly on masculine aesthetics and contemporary artists responses to it. She drew inspiration in the 1980s from the essays and critical theory of Georges Bataille (1897-1962), writing a newer history of modern art which opposed the formalistic style of analysis of Clement Greenberg. Krauss used Bataille’s notion of informe in her essays on a “critical dictionary” appearing in the journal Documents. Her 1997 Formless: A User’s Guide, co-written with Yves-Alain Bois, and a later essay on Louise Bourgeois again employed informe in art-historical analysis.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] The Sculpture of David Smith. Harvard, 1969; Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971; and Rowell, Margit. Joan Miro: Magnetic Fields. New York: Guggenheim Foundation, 1972; Line as Language: Six Artists Draw. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Museum, 1974; and Hunter, Sam, and Tucker, Marcia. Critical Perspectives in American Art: An Exhibition. Amherst: Fine Arts Center Gallery, University of Massachusetts/Amherst Art Gallery,1976; The Sculpture of David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné. New York: Garland, 1977; Passages in Modern Sculpture. New York: Viking, 1977; The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985; and Livingston, Jane. L’amour fou: Photography and Surrealism. New York: Abbeville Press, 1985; Richard Serra: Sculpture. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1986; Beverly Pepper: Sculpture in Place. New York: Abbeville Press, 1986.

Sources

“Rosalind E. Krauss.” Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974. Newman, Amy, ed. New York: Soho Press, 2000, pp. 475-476; Carrier, David. Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: from Formalism to Beyond Postmodernism. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002; Siedell, Daniel A. “Rosalind Krauss, David Carrier, and Philosophical Art Criticism.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 38 no. 2 (Summer 2004): 95-105; Shane, Robert R. “From Formalism to Informe and Back Again: Rosalind Krauss’s Use of Bataille.” Art Criticism 17 no. 2 (2002): 70-88.

Hunter College and Columbia University professor; art critic; co-founder of October magazine. Krauss was the daughter of Matthew M. Epstein and Bertha Luber (Epstein); her father was an attorney. Krauss attended Wellesley College, receivi

Krautheimer-Hess, Trude

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Krautheimer-Hess, Trude

Other Names:

Trude Krautheimer-Hess

Gender: female

Date Born: 1902

Date Died: 1987

Place Born: Erfurt, Thuringia, Germany

Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: Germany

Career(s): art collectors

Overview

Private scholar and collector. Trude Hess was born to a wealthy manufacturing family. At 22, she married the promising art historian Richard Krautheimer. She studied art history at the universities in Jena, Frankfurt and Berlin, graduating in 1928 under the supervision of Adolph Goldschmidt and Rudolf Kautzsch. Her dissertation, Die figurale Plastik der Ostlombardei von 1100 bis 1178, was published in the Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft the same year. She assisted her husband in research in Rome and elsewhere until the two were forced to emigrate because of religious persecution of Jews. In 1935 they moved to the United States where Richard taught art history first in Louisville, Kentucky and then at Vassar. In 1942 she volunteered for war service in the American Red Cross. For most of the 1950s she was actively involved researching Lorenzo Ghiberti, which resulted in the book of the same title, co-authored with her husband published in 1956. Throughout the 1940’s and 50’s she published articles in the Art Bulletin and Burlington Magazine. By the 1960’s, Krautheimer had amassed a personal collection of Italian master drawings and was known in New York art circles as a connoisseur of distinction. The collection was distinctly hers, not her husband’s. The collection was exhibited at the Duke University Art Museum in 1966. The Romanesque scholar Walter B. Cahn consider Krautheimer-Hess outstanding for her studies of north Italian sculpture.

Selected Bibliography

and Krautheimer, Richard. Lorenzo Ghiberti. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956. revised editions, 1970, 1982; Italian Master Drawings from the Collection of Mrs. Richard Krautheimer. Durham, NC: The Gallery, Dept. of Art, Duke University, 1966; “Original Porta dei Mesi at Ferrara and the art of Niccolo.” Art Bulletin 26 (September 1944): 152-74; “Excavations at San Lorenzo f.l.m. in Rome, 1957.” American Journal of Archaeology 62 (October 1958): 379-82; “Sheet of Sketches by Guido Reni.” Burlington Magazine 104 (November 1962): 384-7, 500; “More Ghibertia.” Art Bulletin 46 (September 1964): 307-21. 0.Metzler

Sources

Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 1, pp. 386-87; telephone conversation, Barry Hannegan, Pittsburgh, Sept. 28, 2001; Cahn, Walter. “Romanesque Art, Then and Now: A Personal Reminiscence.” in Hourihane, Colum, ed. Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn. University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2008, p. 34.

Krautheimer, Richard

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Krautheimer, Richard

Gender: male

Date Born: 06 July 1897

Date Died: 01 November 1994

Place Born: Fürth, Franconia, Germany

Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: Germany

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

Overview

Byzantinist and baroque scholar, architectural historian; Director of Institute of Fine Art, New York University. Krautheimer was the son of Nathan Krautheimer (1854-1910) and Martha Landman (Krautheimer) (1875-1967). His cousin was Ernst Kitzinger who also became an eminent medievalist art historian. As a young man, Krautheimer enlisted in the (German) army in the First World War and saw serious war service (1916-1918). Between 1919-1923 he studied initially at the university in Jura and then successively at the universities in Munich, Berlin, and Marburg under faculty who included Heinrich Wölfflin, Adolph Goldschmidt and Werner Weisbach. He briefly worked on the state inventory of Churches for Erfurt (Inventarisierung der Erfurter Kirchen für die Preussische Denkmalpflege) during this time as well. In 1924 he married Trude Krautheimer-Hess who subsequently also studied art history and became a noted scholar and collector herself. His dissertation was completed in Halle under Paul Frankl in 1925 with the title Die Kirchen der Bettelorden in Deutschland (1240-1340). Frankl remained a strong influence to Krautheimer’s work throughout his life. It was Krautheimer who later introduced Frankl’s work to a United States readership (Sauerländer). In 1927 he completed his habilitation under Richard Hamann in Marburg-Wittenberg. The same year, while researching at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, Krautheimer developed the idea for a handbook of Roman churches with a colleague, Rudolf Wittkower. This later to became the Corpus Basilicarum. In 1928 he accepted a privatdozent teaching position at Marburg. Except for studies-in-residence at the Hertziana (1930/31, 1932/33) he remained at Marburg. The momentous year 1933 saw Krautheimer’s first volume of the Corpus Basilicarum Christianarum Romae, a scholarly inventory and documentation of the early Christian churches in Rome eventually running five volumes. The set, however, would not be completed until 1977. That same year, 1933, the Krautheimers fled Nazi persecution, leaving Germany for good. Between 1933-1935 Krautheimer worked on the Corpus in Rome, working a day job that had been offered by Frankl’s son in that city. The ever-declining political situation for Jews in Axis-alliance countries compelled the Krautheimers to emigrate to the United States. Krautheimer initially found a position at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, a university he purportedly had never heard of. At his request, Louisville hired another fleeing art historian, Krautheimer’s friend from school days, Justus Bier. Krautheimer moved to Vassar College in 1937 at the request of Vassar’s Art Department chair, Agnes Rindge Claflin. With the United State’s entrance into the Second World War, Krautheimer and his wife became naturalized citizens and Richard volunteered for duty as a senior research analyst for the Office of Strategic Services for the years 1942-1944. Here he analyzed aerial photographs of Rome to assist in the protection of historic buildings during bombing. While still at Vassar, he taught (with lecturer status) at New York University (1938-1949). In 1942, Krautheimer published an influential article, “The Carolingian Revival of Early Christian Architecture,” in the Art Bulletin postulating a conceptual frame for medieval architecture as an intellectual “copy” or pastiche of venerable structures. He moved to NYU permanently in 1952 as the Jayne Wrightsman Professor of Fine Arts. The early 1950s were devoted to researching his one monograph on an artist, Lorenzo Ghiberti, published jointly with his wife in 1956. Krautheimer next engaged in what he considered his most difficult book to research and write: the survey volume on early Christian architecture for the Pelican History of Art series. The manuscript was completed in 1963 and published two years later. The volume is considered to be one of the finest syntheses of late antique/early medieval architecture ever published and brought Krautheimer his widest readership. He revised and reissued the work twice, in 1975 and 1979. After a second book on Ghiberti in 1971, Krautheimer retired from NYU as Samuel F. B. Morse Professor Emeritus and returned to Rome. Wolfgang Lotz, friend and fellow architectural historian, offered him a residence at the Bibliotheca Hertziana. There, Krautheimer completed his long-standing research on the Corpus Basilicarum. In these final years he set to work writing two of his most synthetic and lyrical works on art history. Rome: Profile of a City (1980) and The Rome of Alexander VII (1985) combined social history, vast breadth of archival knowledge and insightful architectural history into single volumes. In both cases, Krautheimer selected comparatively neglected periods in Roman history to offer a compelling narrative of the interaction of public works and patronage. While assisting friends with plans for his 100th birthday, Krauthiemer died at 97 at the Palazzo Zuccari. He is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome with his wife. In terms of art-historical approach, the systematizing methodology of Krautheimer’s mentor, Frankl, “never left Krautheimer” according to Willibald Sauerländer. In his teaching, he preferred Frankl’s older German survey of the Romanesque to the Pelican History of Art survey by Kenneth John Conant, which he disparaged (Sears). As a medievalist, he emphasized German and eastern-European works, presenting a different Middle Ages from that of the predominantly Francophone American-teaching-medievalists, A. Kingsley Porter and Henri Focillon (Sears). Krautheimer’s conception of the medieval found new adherents after World War II among Marxist and Marxist-influenced historians, particularly in Germany. The modernist view of medieval architecture, one centered around the study of St-Denis and an intellectual overlay of the theories of Pseudo-Dionysius (Hans Sedlmayr, Erwin Panofsky, Otto von Simson), had been countered by Krautheimer’s 1942 article on the church as ‘copy.’ In it, he argued that medieval architects built churches as ‘copies’ of venerable archetypal structures. “By linking symbolism with the perceptions of the medieval onlooker, Krautheimer found a way of understanding the loose associations between form and meaning in the Middle Ages, and relating meaning to tradition and patrimonial intention” (Crossley). Hans-Joachim Kunst, in particular adapted this notion to a Marxist social history as the “archictectural quotation.” Krautheimer’s many students at New York University included Howard Saalman, Leo Steinberg, Frances Huemer, Marvin Trachtenberg, Thomas F. S. J. Mathews, Meg (Meinecke) Licht (b. 1926), and James S. Ackerman.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Die Kirchen der Bettelorden in Deutschland, 1240-1340. Cologne, 1925; [habilitation:] Mittelalterliche Synagogen. Marburg-Wittenberg, 1927; “Introduction to an Iconography of Medieval Architecture.” Journal of the Courtald and Warburg Institutes 5 (1942): 1-33, reprinted in: Studies in Early Christian, Medieval and Renaissance Art. New York: New York University Press, 1969.; Rome: Profile of a City, 312-1308. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980; “Sancta Maria Rotunda.” Arte del Primo millennio, Atti del II convegno per lo studio dell’arte dell’alto medio evo tenuto presso l’Universita di Pavia nel settembre 1950. Edited by Edoardo Arslan. Turin: 1953: 21-7; and Krautheimer-Hess, Trude. Lorenzo Ghiberti. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956; “Mensa-coemeterium-martyium.” Cahiers archeologiques 11 (1960): 15-40; “The Carolingian Revival of Early Christian Architecture.” Art Bulletin 24 (1942): 1-38. [reprinted in a slightly revised version in] Studies in Early Christian, Medieval and Renaissance Art (above): 203-56; “Riflessioni sull’architettura paleocristiana.” In Atti del VI Congresso Internationale di Archeologia Cristiana, Ravena 23-30 settembre 1962. Studi di Antichità Christiana 26. Vatican City: 1965, pp. 567-79; Ghiberti’s Bronze Doors. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971; Corpus Basilicarum Christianarum Romae: The Early Christian Basilicas of Rome (IV-IX Centuries). Vatican City: Pontificio istituto di archeologia cristiana, 1937-1977; Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture. Pelican History of Art: 24. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965; Mittelalterliche Synagogen. Berlin: Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt, 1927; The Rome of Alexander VII, 1655-1667. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985; Three Christian Capitals: Topography and Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983; Zur venezianischen Trecentoplastik. Marburg an der Lahn: Verlag des Kunstgeschichtlichen Seminars der Universität Marburg an der Lahn, 1926-1935; Opicinus de Canistris; Weltbild und Bekenntnisse eines avignonesischen Klerikers des 14. Jahrhunderts. London: The Warburg Institute, 1936.

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, pp. 69-70 good discussion of methodology; 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. 18 mentioned, pp. 66 (method discussed), pp. 70, 81, 87 cited, 92 [his method of Carolingian art research discussed]; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 435, 542; [acts of symposium appraising the work of Richard Krautheimer:] Kliemann, Julian-Matthias, ed. In memoriam Richard Krautheimer: relazioni della giornata di studi, Roma, 20 febbraio 1995, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Salla dell’Ercole. Rome: Bibliotheca Hertziana, 1997; 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. 377-86; Trachtenberg, Marvin. “On Richard Krautheimer’s ‘Flirtation’ with Italian Renaissance Architecture.” Preface, Rome: Profile of a City, 312-1308. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000; Crossley, Paul. “Meaning and Mileau.” [sect xix of] “Introduction: Frankl’s Text: Its Achievement and Significance.” Frankl, Paul and Crossley, Paul. Gothic Architecture. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 28; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007, pp. 244-247; Sears, Elizabeth. “The Art-Historical Work of Walter Cahn.” in Hourihane, Colum, ed. Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn. University Park, Pa: Penn State Press, 2008, p. 20, note 30; [obituary:] Sauerländer, Willibald. “Richard Krautheimer: 1897-1994” Burlington Magazine 137 (February 1995): 119-20.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Kreis, Friedrich

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Kreis, Friedrich

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Overview

Dissertation: Der kunstgeschichtliche Gegenstand. Ein Beitrag zur Deutung des Stilbegriffs. Stuttgart, 1928.

Selected Bibliography

Der kunstgeschichtliche Gegenstand. Ein Beitrag zur Deutung des Stilbegriffs. Stuttgart: 1928.

Sources

Dilly, 27

Dissertation: Der kunstgeschichtliche Gegenstand. Ein Beitrag zur Deutung des Stilbegriffs. Stuttgart, 1928.

Krens, Thomas

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Krens, Thomas

Other Names:

Thomas Krens

Gender: male

Date Born: 1946

Place Born: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Overview

Director of the Guggenheim (Museum) Foundation, 1988-2008. Krens entered Williams College, Williamstown, MA, initially studying economics and then political science. After receiving his B.A. from Williams in 1969, he played basketball in Europe. He returned to the U.S. and received a master’s degree in studio art from the State University of New York (SUNY), Albany in 1971, joining his alma mater, Williams in 1972 as an adjunct faculty in the printmaking department, later becoming assistant professor. Krens directed the artist in residence program at Williams between 1976 and 1980. He was named the director of the Museum of Art, Williams College, in 1981. Instead of pursing a Ph.D., Krens worked on an M.B.A. from Yale University, which was awarded in 1984. He embarked upon a career in major museum management, first consulting for the redesign of the Brooklyn [Art] Museum in 1984. Krens developed the idea of using an abandoned factory in Massachusetts for a Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MOCA), funded by the state with private donations of cash and art to maintain it. The success of this project led to his appointment as consultant for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1986. Krens’ assignment was to revitalize the famous museum whose attendance and finances were dwindling in the face of the highly competitive New York art museum scene. Two year later, Krens was appointed director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which oversaw The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, SoHo, succeeding Thomas M. Messer. Williams College renewed his adjunct professor status the same year, 1988, which he held until 1991. 1989 was an eventful year for Krens. Austrian art agencies asked him to participate on the creation of a collaborative museum project with the Guggenheim. Though the project never materialized, Krens used the idea of a satellite museum to develop what would be the hallmark of his tenure with the Museum: a branch Guggenheim system sponsored by corporations, as a way to increase the museum profile and revenues. Krens also negotiated a gift of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings the same year from the widow of Justin K. Thannhauser (1892-1976) and acquired the Panza di Biumo collection of Minimalist art. He also was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by his alma mater, SUNY Albany. By 1991 Krens had negotiated a unique partnership with the Basque, Spain, regional government for a Guggenheim branch (they contributed $20 million). He commissioned the maverick architect Frank Gehry, to design the Guggenheim branch in Bilbao, Spain, a derelict mining town. In New York, Krens’ oversaw a major restoration to the Frank Lloyd Wright building in 1992–the innovative building structure was cracking–adding to it a ten-story tower designed by Gwathmey Siegel. His Guggenheim Bilbao opened in 1997 and was a huge success, both in terms of museum attendance and profits. Other Guggenheim ventures followed, such as the Deutsche Guggenheim, designed by Richard Gluckman, situated at Unter den Linden, Berlin, with Deutsche Bank the same year. He oversaw the commissions of major artworks by Jeff Koons, James Rosenquist, Rachel Whiteread and Gerhard Richter at Deutsche Guggenheim which later became part of the Guggenheim’s collection. Krens launched retrospectives of major artists such as Richard Prince and Matthew Barney. To widen attendance, Krens mounted the1998 “Art of the Motorcycle” exhibition. In perhaps Kren’s most audacious move, the Guggenheim went into partnership with the Russian State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, to open the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, in a Rem Koolhaas building in Las Vegas in 2001, closing the Guggenheim’s SoHo branch. After 9/11, however, Krens’ skills began to decline. The Museum lost 60% of its visitors and the museum laid off 20% of its staff. The museum’s library had been dissolved years before. Some board members, notably the foundation’s biggest benefactor, the Cleveland car insurance billionaire Peter B. Lewis (b. 1933), asserted in 2005 that Krens was spending too much money on the satellite museums at the cost of the foundation’s flagship museum in New York. Krens prevailed and Lewis resigned from the board, depriving the museum of its most generous donor. Partially as a result of this, the Foundation removed Krens from director duties of the museum, appointing deputy director Lisa Dennison as director of the Manhattan museum. He resigned from directing the foundation in 2008. Krens was both a celebrated and criticized museum director. Attendance at the Guggenheim Museum more than doubled during his directorship to 900,000 and the Foundation’s endowment increased to $118 million. However his approach was always more that of a business person than an art historian. To raise $30 million to purchase minimalist art, he auctioned one each of the Museum’s Modigliani, Kandinsky and Chagall without offering them to other institutions. Others chided him for pandering to the commercial community, such as mounting a Guggenheim show featuring Armani suits, underwritten by the fashion house itself. Others accused Krens of turning the Museum into a franchise-brand for export. However, in the wake of Krens’ success, the Tate in Britain, the Louvre in France and even MoMA in New York followed Krens’ Guggenheim example with remote museum expansions and brand-logo development. Perhaps unavoidably, Krens developed a rivalry–notoriously nasty and public–with the director of the other major modern art museum in New York, MoMA’s Glenn D. Lowry. As Krens’ most public critic, Lowry stated “The Guggenheim has focused its energies on becoming an entertainment center and appears to be no longer interested in or committed to the idea, ideas and the art that gave birth to the museum at its founding.”

Selected Bibliography

edited [all following], Drutt, Matthew. The Art of the Motorcycle. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998.

Sources

Glueck, Grace. “Thinking Big at the Guggenheim. Thomas Krens Brings His Big Vision to the Guggenheim.” New York Times May 29, 1988, p. H1; Norman, Geraldine. “Art Without Gallery Hang-ups: The Visionary Ideas of Thomas Krens.” Independent (London), April 14, 1991, p. 12; “Alumni Clash at Top of Art World.” Williams Record [online archive] November 15, 2006, http://www.williamsrecord.com/wr/?section=arts&view=article&id=8369; “Guggenheims master of the art of global branding steps down as museum director.” Guardian (London) February 29, 2008, p. 21.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Kris, Ernst

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Kris, Ernst

Other Names:

Ernst Kris

Gender: male

Date Born: 1900

Date Died: 1957

Place Born: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): art theory, engravings (prints), gems (worked stones), goldwork (visual works), metal, metalwork (visual works), metalworking, prints (visual works), Renaissance, and Vienna School

Overview

Second-Vienna-School authority on Renaissance gold work and engraved gems; a psychoanalyst who employed psychoanalytical approach to art history. Kris was the son of Leopold Kris, a lawyer, and Rosa Schick (Kris). Because a War coal shortage forced his Gymnasium (district 13) to reduce school hours, Kris heard his first college-level art history courses during mornings. After graduating in 1918, he entered the University of Vienna studying art history, archaeology and psychology. After an initial examination under Max Dvořák in 1919, he studied with Julius Alwin von Schlosser. Both Dvořák and Schlosser were key historians of the so-called second Vienna school of art history. Kris was a spectacular student under Schlosser, whom Kris recalled Schlosser as saying he was mein Urschüler (student most akin to him). In 1922, Kris wrote his dissertation under Schlosser, examining the interrelationship between renaissance art and science within two renaissance craftsmen, Bernhard Palissy (1510-1590) and Wenzel Jamnitzer (1507-1785). He joined the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna the same year as an unpaid assistant. In 1927 Kris was appointed a curator of sculpture and applied arts and married Marianne Rie, a physician and psychoanalyst, the daughter of Sigmund Freud’s physician, Oskar Rie (1863-1931). As a result, Kris became fascinated by psychological approaches to art. In 1928 he published his Meister und Meisterwerke der Steinschneidekunst in der italienischen Renaissance a major contribution to the history of engraved gems. During this time he met another important Schlosser student, E. H. Gombrich. Kris’ scholarship and close friendship with the director of sculpture, Leo Planiscig made him an international authority in renaissance metal arts. He and Paniscig rehung the Hapsburg collection of the Kunsthistorisches according to chronology and patronage, rather than my medium as it had been. Kris delivered two papers on the busts of sculptor Franz-Xavier Messerschmidt using psychoanalytic approaches, one for art historians and another for psychoanalysts. While still working on the catalog of the goldwork for the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Kris became an editor of Imago: Zeitschrift für Psychoanalytische Psychologie, a journal of applied psychoanalysis in 1933. He also began studying medicine and practiced psychoanalysis on his own. Kris reconnected with Gombrich, jointly researching caricature and facial expression in art (published in a abbreviated form in 1940). Kris also initiated a research project on the myth of the artist with Otto Kurz. As the alliance between Hitler’s Germany and Austria grew ever stronger, it was Kris who recommended Gombrich for a position at the Warburg Library, now in a temporary home in London, which Kurz would also later flee. Kris emigrated to England in 1938 as a psychoanalyst and later working for the British government as a translator of German radio broadcasts (as Gombrich did, too.) By 1940 Kris had secured a position at the New School for Social Research in New York. In America Kris researched and wrote principally on psychoanalysis. He published various articles on child psychology and was a visiting professor at Yale University School of Medicine. In 1952 he published Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art his last foray into art. A life-long heavy cigarette smoker, he suffered a second and fatal heart attack in 1957. He was cremated and his ashes scattered on his Connecticut property. His 1934 co-authored work on artistic myth was translated into English in 1979 as Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist. Kris was described in an essay by Gombrich as the uomo universale. He was devoted to the teachings of Freud, whom he had known personally. Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art makes no pretense at popularizing Freud’s theories into art, which have in the hands of other historians become simple-minded extensions of Freud’s theories.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Die Verwendung des Naturabgusses bei Wenzel Jamnitzer und Bernhard Palissy. University of Vienna, 1922, published as, “Der ‘stil Rustique.'” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien. Neue Folge I, 1926: 137-208; Meister and Meisterwerke der Steinschneidekunst in der italienischen Renaissance. Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1929; and Kurz, Otto. Die Legende vom Künstler: ein geschichtlicher Versuch. Vienna: Krystall-Verlag, 1934, English, Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist: An Historical Experiment. Revised by Otto Kurz. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979; Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art. New York: International University Press, 1952.

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. 71; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 89 mentioned, 93; Gombrich, Ernst. “The Study of Art and the Study of Man: Reminiscences of Collaboration with Ernst Kris.” Tributes: Interpreters of our Cultural Tradition. Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984, pp. 220-233; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 327; 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. 387-92.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Koltonski, Aleksander

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Koltonski, Aleksander

Other Names:

Aleksander Koltonski

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Poland

Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, and Renaissance

Overview

Giotto scholar; notes about Koltanski’s opinions appear in Richard Offner‘s annotated catalog of the 1937 Mostra Giottesca.

Selected Bibliography

St. Francis of Assisi and Giotto: Art on the Altar of Faith. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1926.

Sources

Ladis, Andrew. “The Unmaking of a Connoisseur.” in, Offner, Richard. A Discerning Eye: Essays on Early Italian Painting. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998, p,19, note 1 (Offner wrote as “Khvoskinsky”);

Giotto scholar; notes about Koltanski’s opinions appear in Richard Offner’s annotated catalog of the 1937 Mostra Giottesca.

Kondakov, Nikodim Pavlovich

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Kondakov, Nikodim Pavlovich

Other Names:

N. P. Kondakov

Gender: male

Date Born: 1844

Date Died: 1925

Place Born: Khalan, Amur Oblast, Russia

Place Died: Prague, Praha, Hlavní Město, Czech Republic

Home Country/ies: Russia

Subject Area(s): Byzantine (culture or style), iconography, Medieval (European), and Modern (style or period)

Overview

Byzantinist art historian and founder of modern art method for Byzantine studies primarily through iconography. He was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, which is present-day Prague, Czech Republic. Kondakov attended Moscow University under Fedor Ivanovich Buslayev (1818-1897) between 1861 and 1865. He taught at the University of Odessa (1870-1888) spending summers traveling and researching Byzantine art. His first book, published in 1877 on Greek manuscript illumination, employed his characteristic approach to Byzantine art of envisioning a stylistic evolution through mapped on an artistic ideal. In 1888 Kondakov moved to St. Petersburg to teach at the university there. During this time, Kondakov began compiling material for the first art history of pre-Mongolian Russian art. He collaborated with Saloman Reinach in Antiquités de la Russie méridionale of 1891. His lectures greatly influenced among others, the future art historian Michael Ivanovitch Rostovtzeff. Between 1900-1917 he lectured at the Academy of Art in Petrograd continuing his concentration in Russian art. Students attending his lectures at this time included André Grabar. After the Bolshevik revolution he emigrated in 1920 to Prague where he taught at that university. After his death in 1925, his works found publication in translation before they appeared in his native Russian, such as the important The Russian Icon, 1927. His students included Dmitrii Vlas’evich Ainalov III. Kondakov established modern Byzantine art history. He organized a massive amount of Russian art, much of it largely unknown, employing iconographic principles to their study. Icons were cultural artifacts to Kondakov as much as art objects; his work places them in a historical background. He organized art by region or “common tendency” from which he portrayed an entire epoch. Kondakov’s importance was in the accumulation of knowledge about Byzantine and Russian art. His works are still a starting point for scholarship.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Kondakov, N. P. Vospominaniia i dumy. Moscow: Indrik, 2002, pp. 359-377; Histoire de l’art byzantin, considéré principalement dans les miniatures, par N. Kondakoff. éd. française originale, publiée par l’auteur, sur la traduction de M. Trawinski. 2 vols. Paris, 1886-1891; Russkiia drevnosti v pamiatnikakh iskusstva. 6 vols. St. Petersburg: A. Benke, 1889-1891; and Reinach, Saloman. Antiquités de la Russie méridionale. Paris: E. Leroux, 1891; Pamiatniki khristianskago iskusstva na Afonie. St. Petersburg: Izd. Imp. Akademii nauk, 1902; Ikonografiia gospoda boga i spasa nashego Iisusa Khrista. St. Petersburg: Tovarischestvo R. Golike i A. Vil’borg, 1905; Ikonografiia Bogomateri. 2 vols. St. Petersburg: Typografia Imperatorskoi Akademiia Nauk, 1914-15; The Russian Icon. Oxford: The Clarendon press, 1927.

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. 61; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 201; Dictionary of Art 18: 215-16; Kondakov, N. P. Vospominaniia i dumy. Moscow: Indrik, 2002; “Kondakov, Nikodim Pavlovich.” Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’. St. Petersburg: I. A. Efron, vol. 15, 1895: 927.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

« Previous
1
2
3
4
5
6
…
12
Next »

K

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

General Citation

License

Sponsored by

General Citation

License

Sponsored by