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Kendrick, T. D.

Full Name: Kendrick, T. D.

Other Names:

  • T. D. Kendrick

Gender: male

Date Born: 1895

Date Died: 1979

Place Born: Handsworth, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, UK

Place Died: Dorchester, Dorset, England UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Anglo-Saxon (culture or style)


Overview

Historian of Anglo-Saxon art, Keeper and later Director of the British Museum (1950-59). Kendrick was the son of Thomas Henry Kendrick, a manufacturer and Frances Susan Downing (Kendrick). After his father’s death in 1902 his mother married Prebendary Sowter in 1905. Kendrick attended the Charterhouse School and a year at Oriel College, Oxford, before the outbreak of World War I. He joined the Warwickshire army regiment in 1914, rising to captain. He was wounded in action in France. Resuming his studies at Oxford in 1918, he graduated with a degree in anthropology in 1919 and an MA in the same subject in 1920. Kendrick began a BS, studying the megaliths of the Channel Islands in the manner of his mentor, the anthropologist Robert Ranulph Marett (1866-1943). Armed with this research experience, he was appointed an assistant in the British and Medieval Antiquities Department at the British Museum under the direction of Ormonde M. Dalton in 1922. Kendrick married the pianist Ellen Martha Kiek (1898/9-1955) in 1922. Kendrick published The Axe Age (1925) and The Druids in 1927. He became assistant keeper in 1928, the same year volume one of his book on the Archaeology of the Channel Isles appeared. The appointment of a prehistorian Charles F. C. Hawkes (1905-1992) to the department likely suggested the Kendrick the need to be an expert for the Museum elsewhere. When R. A. Smith of the medieval dept. retired, Kendrick schooled himself in Anglo-Saxon and Viking eras. His A History of the Vikings appeared in 1930. At the request of W. G. Constable, he lectured at the newly founded Courtauld Institute. He helped a number of refugees from Nazi Germany find refuge and employment during the 1930s, including the young medievalist Ernst Kitzinger in 1935. In 1938 he published Anglo-Saxon Art and was made keeper of the British and Medieval Antiquities Department. As Keeper, Kendrick hired the young Rupert Leo Scott Bruce-Mitford, whom he wisely entrusted to curate and document the Sutton Hoo treasures, discovered in 1939. Kendrick’s Late Saxon and Viking Art appeared in 1949, a monograph much influenced by Francis Wormald. He was appointed director of the British Museum and principal librarian in 1950. Kendrick was created KCB in 1951. After his first wife’s death in 1955, Kendrick married again in 1957 to Katharine Elizabeth Wrigley (1903/4-1980). He retired in 1959 and was succeeded by Frank Chalton Francis (1901-1988), the Museum’s Keeper of Printed Books. A semi-autobiographical novel, Great Love for Icarus, was published in 1962. He moved to Dorset, and died at Dorchester in 1979. He is not related to the Victoria and Albert Museum textile scholar A. F. Kendrick. As a curator and director, Kendrick instituted modern curatorial practices. However he was a strong advocate of “cleaning” objects under his care. This was consistent with the thinking of the time (see Roger P. Hinks, and the overcleaning of the Elgin Marbles), but resulted in numerous bronze artifacts in particular in his department being overcleaned. Unimpressed with contemporary trends in taste, Kendrick was successful in achieving both the conservation of and recognition for Victorian art, generally derided at the time, along with the assistance of the painter John Piper (1903-1992), the writer and broadcaster John Betjeman (1906-1984), and others.


Selected Bibliography

Anglo-Saxon art to A.D. 900. London: Methuen & Co., 1938; The Druids, a Study in Keltic Prehistory. New York: R.V. Coleman, 1927; Great Love for Icarus. London: Methuen, 1962; Late Saxon and Viking Art. London: Methuen, 1949; The Archaeology of the Channel Islands. 2 vols. London: Methuen & Co., 1928-1938.


Sources

[involvement in Coutauld Institute] Links, J. G. “G. W. Constable.” Burlington Magazine 118 (May 1976): 311-12; Mitchell, John. “Ernst Kitzinger: Great historian of early Christian art” The Guardian (London), January 29, 2003, p. 26; Wilson, David M. “Kendrick, Thomas Downing.” Dictionary of National Biography; [obituaries:] “Sir Thomas Kendrick Keeper of British Museum.” The Times (London) November 23, 1979; p. 7.




Citation

"Kendrick, T. D.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/kendrickt/.


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Historian of Anglo-Saxon art, Keeper and later Director of the British Museum (1950-59). Kendrick was the son of Thomas Henry Kendrick, a manufacturer and Frances Susan Downing (Kendrick). After his father’s death in 1902 his mother married Preben

Kennedy, Clarence

Full Name: Kennedy, Clarence

Other Names:

  • Clarence Kennedy

Gender: male

Date Born: 04 September 1892

Date Died: 29 July 1972

Place Born: Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Place Died: Northampton, Hampshire, MA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): photographs and sculpture (visual works)


Overview

Historian of quattrocento sculpture at Smith College, 1916-1960, and art photographer. Kennedy was the son of Clarence Kennedy (1854-1908), a Philadelphia lawyer, and Jennie May McClintock (Kennedy) (1867-1943). He received his B.S. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1914 in architecture and his M.A in architecture the following year. He entered Harvard University for graduate work in 1916, joining Smith College, Northampton, MA, as a lecturer in architecture and art history in 1917. As a Charles Eliot Norton Fellow of Harvard University, 1920-1921,.he studied at American School of Classical Studies, Athens, where he became fascinated with photo documentation of monuments in which the School was engaged. In Athens he received special instruction on cleaning sculpture from the archaeologist Franz Studniczka. At Smith he met a Radcliffe graduate teaching economics, Ruth Wedgwood Doggett, daughter of the President of Springfield College, Springfield, MA, Laurence L. Doggett (1864-1957). They married in 1921 in London, the same year Kennedy was made Assistant Professor at Smith. His photographs were early published in an article by Fern Rusk Shapley in a 1922 article of the Art Bulletin. Kennedy received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1924 with a dissertation topic on the optics of Greek sculpture. He was appointed Director of division of graduate studies in Europe in 1925 at Smith. During these same years he photographed the art collections for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Frick and Weidner collections. Beginning in 1928, Kennedy published an ultimately 7-volume series of photographic portfolios, Studies in the History and Criticism of Sculpture, assisted in some cases by the American School and initially co-published with the Carnegie Corporation of New York. An eighth volume was abandoned for publication but the photos circulated. He was promoted to (full) Professor of art at Smith in 1930. He reliquished his graduate studies directorship in 1932, teaching as a visiting professor of fine arts, New York University the same year. His interest in photography led him to Edwin Land (1909-1991), then at Land-Wheelwright Laboratories and later co-founder of the Polaroid Corporation. Kennedy was appointed Annual Professor, Toledo Museum of Art, for 1938-1939. He experimented with the Meriden Gravure Company in photographs for his wife’s book on Baldovinetti in 1938, the text of which he printed personally with his own Cantina press. In 1940 his photographs were exhibited at the Golden Gate Expositon, San Francisco. During World War II, as the allies advanced through Italy, Kennedy was asked by the U.S. army Allied Bomber Command “Monuments and Fine Arts Commission” to list monuments, art treasures and architecture in central Italy under the auspicies of the American Council of Learned Societies to protect cultural treasures in war areas in 1943. With Edwin Land’s company, he helped developed the vectograph system, using polarized light to create stereographic topographical images of war terrain. After the war, he chaired the Smith Art Department, 1952-1954. Land established an art fund in his (and his wife’s) honor at Smith. Kennedy retired emeritus from Smith in 1960 to be Resident Art Historian at American Academy in Rome, first term, 1960-1961. In 1964 he published some of his earlier photographs with text by Frederick Hartt and Gino Corti as The Chapel of the Cardinal of Portugal. He died of a heart attack at his Northampton home at age 79. His papers are housed at Harvard University.

Kennedy was the quintessential scholar-photographer. At a time when art historians such as A. Kingsley Porter were beginning to make their own images as part of their research, Kennedy brought the technique to the level of an art form. He taught his students photography as part of their studies.


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Light and Shade and the Point of View in the Study of Greek Sculpture. Harvard University, 1924;Studies in the History and Criticism of Sculpture (series): vol. 2 The tomb of Carlo Marsuppini, 1928, vol. 3 Certain Portrait Sculptures of the Quattrocento, 1928, vol. 4 The Treasury of the Siphnians at Delphi, 1929, vol. 5 The Tabernacle of the Sacrament, 1929, vol. 6 The Magdalen and Sculptures in Relief, 1929, (all) Northampton, MA: Smith College, vol. 7 and Weismann, Elizabeth Wilder. The Unfinished Monument by Andrea del Verrocchio to the Cardinal Niccolo Forteguerri at Pistoia. Florence: Tyszkiewicz, 1932, [prepared but never published vol.8:] The Tomb by Antonio Rossellino for the Cardinal of Portugal, 1933; [photographs] Hartt, Frederick, and Corti, Gino. The Chapel of the Cardinal of Portugal, 1434-1459, at San Miniato in Florence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964.


Sources

The Pennsylvania Gazette 19 no. 33 (June 24, 1921): 962; Clarence Kennedy: an Exhibition of his Photographs Organized by the Museum Seminar. Northampton, MA: Smith College Museum of Art, 1967; McGavin, Laurie. Clarence Kennedy: Scholar-photographer: an Essay. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1980; Swenson, Christine. The Experience of Sculptural Form: Photographs by Clarence Kennedy. Detroit, MI: The Detroit Institute of Arts, The Albert and Pegy de Salle Gallery of Photography, 1987; Falk, Peter Hastings, ed. Who Was Who in American Art. 400 Years of Artists in America. 2nd ed. Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1999; Clarence Kennedy Papers and Photographs, 1921-1958. Harvard University Library. http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/fal00006; [obituary:] “Dr. Kennedy Dies, Art Historian, 79, Ex-Professor at Smith Also Photographed Sculptures.” New York Times. July 31, 1972, p. 30; Middeldorf, Ulrich. “Clarence Kennedy: 1892-1972.” Art Journal 32 no. 3 (Spring 1973): 372, 374.




Citation

"Kennedy, Clarence." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/kennedyc/.


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Historian of quattrocento sculpture at Smith College, 1916-1960, and art photographer. Kennedy was the son of Clarence Kennedy (1854-1908), a Philadelphia lawyer, and Jennie May McClintock (Kennedy) (1867-1943). He received his B.S. from

Kessler, Harry Klemens Ulrich, Graf von

Full Name: Kessler, Harry Klemens Ulrich, Graf von

Other Names:

  • Graf Harry von Kessler

Gender: male

Date Born: 1868

Date Died: 1937

Place Born: Paris, Île-de-France, France

Place Died: Lyon, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): French (culture or style) and nineteenth century (dates CE)


Overview

German aristocrat and cultural advisor and scholar of French 19th-century art, author of several art books. Kessler’s father was a wealthy international businessman and Hamburg banker, Adolf Wilhelm Kessler, and his mother, the Anglo-Irish Alice Baroness (Gräfin ) Blosse-Lynch (1844-1919). He was educated in Paris and England until he was fourteen. His family traveled in the highest of circles to which the young Kessler was exposed. Kaiser Wilhelm I (1797-1888) was attracted to his mother and speculation persisted that the Kaiser was Kessler’s true father. Field Marshall (and effective head of state) Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) was another family friend. Kessler attended the Johanneum in Hamburg before studying law and art history in Bonn and Leipzig. His art studies in Leipzig were under Anton Springer until Springer died in 1891. Kessler graduated that same year with a law degree from Leipzig, intent on foreign service work. He published articles in the contemporary art journal Pan, founded by Julius Meier-Graefe. Kessler was Director Weimar’s city museum and acted as its cultural advisor to the grand duke of Saxe-Weimar. He met the young art nouveau architect and designer from Berlin, Henry van de Velde (1863-1957). Edvard Munch painted his portrait. Kessler was a member of the German delegation to sign the Treaty of Versailles after World War I. His liberal attitudes toward modern art attracted the malice of the Nazi regime and he was forced to flee. His papers are owned by the Marquis de Brion.


Selected Bibliography

[forward to the second German edition of,] Craig, Edward Gordon. Die Kunst des Theaters. Berlin und Leipzig: Hermann Seemann Nachfolger, 1905′ Impressionisten: die Begründer der modernen Malerei in ihren Hauptwerken. Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1908; Maillol. Berlin: Galerie Flechtheim, 1928, English, Maillol. London: London County Council Central School of Arts and Crafts, 1930. and Blasberg, Cornelia, and Schuster, Gerhard, eds. Künstler und Nationen: Aufsätze und Reden 1899-1933. Volume 2 of his Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988.


Sources

Kultermann, Udo. The History of Art History. New York: Abaris, 1993, p. 120; Newman, L. M., ed. Craig, Edward Gordon. The Correspondence of Edward Gordon Craig and Count Harry Kessler, 1903-1937. London: W. S. Maney/Modern Humanities Research Association and the Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London, 1995; Grupp, Peter. Harry Graf Kessler 1868-1937: eine Biographie. Munich: Beck, 1995; Stenzel, Burkhard. Harry Graf Kessler: ein Leben zwischen Kultur und Politik. Weimar: Böhlau, 1995; Fiedler, Theodore. “Weimar contra Berlin: Harry Graf Kessler and the Politics of Modernism.” in, Forster-Hahn, Françoise, ed. Imagining Modern German Culture, 1889-1910. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art/University Press of New England, 1996; Neumann, Gerhard, and Schnitzler, Günter, eds. Harry Graf Kessler: ein Wegbereiter der Moderne. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1997; Buruma, Ian. Berlin in Lights: the Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1918-1937. New York: Grove Press, 1999; Easton, Laird McLeod. The Red Count: the Life and Times of Harry Kessler. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.




Citation

"Kessler, Harry Klemens Ulrich, Graf von." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/kesslerhk/.


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German aristocrat and cultural advisor and scholar of French 19th-century art, author of several art books. Kessler’s father was a wealthy international businessman and Hamburg banker, Adolf Wilhelm Kessler, and his mother, the Anglo-Irish Alice B

Kessler, Herbert L.

Full Name: Kessler, Herbert L.

Other Names:

  • Herbert Leon Kessler

Gender: male

Date Born: 1941

Place Born: Chicago, Cook, IL, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Medieval (European)


Overview

Medievalist. Kessler was the son of Ben Kessler and Bertha Kessler. He attended the University of Chicago, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with an A. B. in 1961. He continued graduate work at Princeton University as a Woodrow Wilson fellow for the 1961-1962 receiving an M.F.A., in 1963. He pursued his dissertation as a Dumbarton Oaks junior fellow, 1964-1965. His Ph.D. was awarded in 1965 with a thesis on ninth-century Bible illustration written under the eminent Byzantinist, Kurt Weitzmann. Kessler returned to his alma mater, Chicago, in 1965 as an assistant professor, rising to associate professor in 1968. He studied at the Institute of Advanced Studies fellow, Princeton, for the 1969-1970 year and as a Guggenheim fellowship, 1972-1973, before an appointment as (full) professor of art history at Chicago in 1973 and chair of department of art. In 1976, Kessler moved to Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore,, as professor of art history and chairman of department. He married the writer Johanna Zacharias the same year. In 1977, he was a contributor to Weitzmann’s exhibition “The Age of Spirituality” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1984, Kessler became Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (to 1998). He was again at Dumbarton Oaks, this time as a senior fellow, for the academic year 1980-1986. Kessler was made a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 1991. He held a guest professorship at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Florence, for the 1996-1997 year. He returned to Hopkins as the first James Barclay Knapp Dean, 1998-1999 of the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. Kessler’s career was marred, however, when he was suddenly placed on sabbatical leave in 1999 at Johns Hopkins for a serious university infraction which was never disclosed. He assumed a visiting professorship at Harvard University for the 2000-2001 year, returning to Hopkins to teach the following year. His students included Robert Nelson. Kessler was Weitzmann’s outstanding student. He was selected to edit his master’s compilation of essays and collaborated with him on two important books, much the same as Weitzmann had been the outstanding student and collaborator of his mentor, Adolph Goldschmidt.


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] The Sources and the Construction of the Genesis, Exodus, Majestas, and Apocalypse Frontispiece illustration in the Ninth-Century Touronian Bibles. Princeton University, 1965, revision, The Illustrated Bible from Tours. Studies in Manuscript Illumination, 7. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977; French and Flemish Illuminated Manuscripts in Chicago Collections. Chicago: Newberry Library, 1969; edited, Kurt Weitzmann. Studies in Classical and Byzantine Manuscript Illumination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971; edited, with Simpson, M. S. Pictorial Narrative in Antiquity and the Middle Ages [theme issue]. Studies in the History of Art 16 (1985); and Weitzmann, Kurt. The Cotton Genesis: British Library Codex Cotton Otho B. VI. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986; and Weitzmann, Kurt. The Frescoes of the Dura Synagogue and Christian Art. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1990; Studies in Pictorial Narrative. London: Pindar Press, 1994; and Dutton, Paul E. The Poetry and Paintings of the First Bible of Charles the Bold. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997; and Zacharias, Johanna. Rome 1300: On the Path of the Pilgrim. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000; Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.


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, mentioned, p. 64; Hill, Michael. “Hopkins Dean Leaves School Post Abruptly.” The Sun (Baltimore, MD), December 1, 1999, p. 1B; “Herbert Leon Kessler Curriculum Vitae.”http://arthist.jhu.edu/Faculty_CV/Kesslercv6-16-09.pdf.




Citation

"Kessler, Herbert L.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/kesslerhl/.


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Medievalist. Kessler was the son of Ben Kessler and Bertha Kessler. He attended the University of Chicago, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with an A. B. in 1961. He continued graduate work at Princeton University as a Woodrow Wilson fellow for the 1961-

Kestner, August

Full Name: Kestner, August

Other Names:

  • Georg August Christian Kestner

Gender: male

Date Born: 1777

Date Died: 1853

Place Born: Hanover, Germany

Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: Germany

Career(s): art collectors


Overview

Collector and early art historian. Kestner was the son of a Hannoverian government official, Johann Christian Kestner and Charlotte Buff (Kestner). Kestner studied law in Göttingen between 1796 and 1769. As a student, he also attended the classes of the classicist Christian Gottlob Heyne and Johann Dominico Fiorillo. He served as an examining judge in Hannover immediately after graduation. He toured Italy between 1808-9 and, in 1811, visited the famous “museum” created by Boisserée brothers, Sulpiz Boisserée and Melchior Boisserée in Heidelberg. Kestner was appointed an envoy of the Hannoverian king to Rome in 1817 where he spent most of the rest of his life. He met fellow northern European classical scholars, including Theodor S. Panofka, Eduard Gerhard, and Otto von Stackelberg (1787-1837) with whom he formed a group known as the Roman Hyperboreans’ Association (Hyperboreisch-römische Gesellschaft) in 1822. In 1825 he was named the chargé d’affaires. In Rome he published his first book of criticism in 1818, anonymously, called über die Nachahmung in der Malerei criticizing the art stance of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and his art historian colleague, Johann Heinrich Meyer. Kestner was a founding member of the Deutsche Bibliothek in 1821. In Rome he remained in close contact with the expatriate artists who, in addition to Stackelberg, included Friedrich Overbeck (1789-1869). Perhaps most importantly, Kestner was founding member and long-time officer of the Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica, later named Deutsches Archäologische Institut or DAI, the scholarly body for classical research in Italy in 1829. He first served as General Secretary from 1838 onward. In 1843 Kestner authored Wem gehört die Kunst? In 1843 he was promoted to ambassador to Naples for Hannover and a member of the Accademia di San Luca. Kestner was made Vice-President of the DAI in 1844. He was made a member of the Deutscher Künstlerverein (Rome) in 1846. His collected studies on all the arts appeared in 1850 as Römische Studien. After Kestner’s death his collections, including Italian paintings and Egyptian sculpture and artifacts passed over to his nephew, Herrmann Kestner (1810-1890), who shortly before his death donated some to the Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum in Hannover and established the Kestner-Museum in 1889.Throughout his life, Kestner wrote for the Allgemeine Zeitung and Die Kunstblatt. His writing is important for the value it places on the burgeoning romantic view of art, in opposition to the cold classicism much of Germany still espoused.


Selected Bibliography

Römische Studien. Berlin: Decker, 1850; edited, Goethe und Werther: Briefe Goethe’s, meistens aus seiner Jugendzeit, mit erläuternden Dokumenten. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’scher, 1854; über die Nachahmung in der Malerei. Frankfurt: [s. n.], 1818; Wem gehört die Kunst? s.l.: s.n., 1843.


Sources

“Geschichte des Kestner-Museums.” http://www.hannover.de/deutsch/kultur/museen/mus_mus/mus_all/kestner/vorst/kes_ges.htm; Mlasowsky, Alexander. Herrscher und Mensch: Römische Marmorbildnisse in Hannover. Hannover: Kestner-Museum, 1992; Aschoff, Hans-Georg. Auf den Spuren von August Kestner. Hannover: Kestner-Museum, 2004;




Citation

"Kestner, August." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/kestnera/.


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Collector and early art historian. Kestner was the son of a Hannoverian government official, Johann Christian Kestner and Charlotte Buff (Kestner). Kestner studied law in Göttingen between 1796 and 1769. As a student, he also attended the classes

Kidson, Peter

Full Name: Kidson, Peter

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Medieval (European)

Career(s): educators


Overview

Courtuald Institute of Art medievalist.


Selected Bibliography

and Murray, Peter. A history of English Architecture. New York: Arco Pub. Co., 1963; The Medieval World. London: Hamlyn, 1967; Sculpture at Chartres. London: A. Tiranti, 1958; edited, and Cannon, Joanna. Lincoln: Angel Choir. London: Harvey Miller /Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1978.





Citation

"Kidson, Peter." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/kidsonp/.


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Courtuald Institute of Art medievalist.

Kimball, Fiske

Full Name: Kimball, Fiske

Other Names:

  • Sidney Fiske Kimball

Gender: male

Date Born: 1888

Date Died: 1955

Place Born: Newton, Middlesex, MA, USA

Place Died: Munich, Bavaria, Germany

Home Country/ies: United States

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


Overview

Architectural historian, Director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Chair of the Department of Art, University of Virginia. Kimball’s father was Edwin Fiske Kimball, a teacher, and mother Ellen Leora Ripley (Kimball). He was raised in the Boston area and received both his BA and MA in architecture from Harvard, 1909 and 1912, respectively. After a year of teaching architecture at the University of Illinois (1912-13), he moved to the University of Michigan to teach and complete his Ph.D. At Michigan Kimball produced two books. The first, Thomas Jefferson, Architect, appeared in 1916. Kimball set out to write a general history of architecture, seeking out the expertise of Harvard University professor George Harold Edgell to assist with the medieval chapters. The book, A History of Architecture, 1918, was a landmark in that it included Baroque architecture as a period worth studying, one of the first in the English-speaking world. Kimball married Marie Goebel in 1913. Keeping his hand in architectural planning as well, Kimball designed the Scottwood subdivision in Ann Arbor. In 1919 he was appointed head of the Department of Art and Architecture at the University of Virginia. There, in addition to his teaching responsibilities, he acted as supervising architect for the University’s building programs. He designed the Memorial Gymnasium, the building for faculty housing, and the McIntire Amphitheater. He also designed a home for himself, built along Jeffersonian esthetics, called Shack Mountain. Kimball’s national reputation grew rapidly. After a series of architectural history lectures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he accepted a position at New York University in 1922 to create the graduate program at the Institute of Fine Arts. His appointments at NYU included the core historians who established the pre-German expatriate reputation of the school, among whom was Richard Offner. He left academe in 1925 to become the director of the Pennsylvania Museum of art (now the Philadelphia Museum of Art). Vacationing in Europe, he became interested in French architecture. His 1943 books The Creation of the Rococo astounded scholars by asserting that British sources influenced the French rococo style, as opposed to the reverse. This assertion has not been accepted. Kimball proved to be a skilled administrator for Philadelphia. He oversaw the building of the new museum, seeing to it that it included period rooms. Collections added during his years included the works from Thomas Eakins’ studio, the Gallatin modern sculpture and painting collection and the Walter Arensberg collection of Pre-Columbian art. Although known for his bombastic and even at times bullying style, he managed to raise many private funds for the museum, known as the “Greek Garage” to locals, even after the crash of the stock market in 1929. He successfully handled the public reaction to the purchase for what was then a great deal of money for Cézanne large canvas, The Bathers, bought during the height of the Depression. He retired from the Museum in 1955 and was succeeded by Henri Marceau. Kimball suffered a heart attack in Ravenna, Italy while collecting material for a book, and died in a Munich hospital where he had been taken.Kimball represents a genre of man-of-action art historian/administrator that came to be during the first half of the 20the century. In an America eager for–but wary of–cultural sophistication, Kimball developed museums and university departments which would become the leading institutions of their times and later. His books were innovative, if today no longer read. Kimball’s History of Architecture marks a step toward the ‘rehabilitation of Baroque architecture’ in the thinking of architectural historians (Wohl). Denying the prevalent view that the Baroque was the decline phase of a biomorphic rise/acme/degeneration analogy of style, Edgell and Kimball contented, “is is understood that the material must not be forced into conformity with any other misleading analogy.”


Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography] Bibliography of the Works of Fiske Kimball. Compiled by Mary Kane. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1959; Thomas Jefferson, Architect; Original Designs in the Collection of Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, Junior. Boston: Printed for private distribution at the Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1916; American Architecture. New York, The Bobbs-Merrill Company 1928; Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Beginnings of Architectural and Engineering Practice in America. Ann Arbor, Mich., n.p., 1917. The Creation of the Rococo. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1943. Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic. New York, C. Scribner’s Sons, 1922. Great Paintings in America: One Hundred and One Masterpieces in Color, selected and interpreted by Fiske Kimball and Lionello Venturi. New York, Coward-McCann 1948; and Edgell, George Harold . A History of Architecture. New York: Harper & Brothers 1918; The Life Portraits of Jefferson and their Replicas. Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1944; Mr. Samuel McIntire: Carver, the Architect of Salem. Portland, ME: The Essex Institute of Salem [MA], 1940.


Sources

Roberts, George, and Roberts, Mary. Triumph on Fairmount: Fiske Kimball and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1959; Panofsky, Erwin. “The History of Art.” In The Cultural Migration: The European Scholar in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953 , p. 88, mentioned; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 51 mentioned; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 195, 511; mentioned, Wohl, Helmut. “Robert Chester Smith and the History of Art in the United States.” in, Sala, Dalton, and Tamen, Pedro, et al. Robert C. Smith, 1912-1975: A investigação na História de Arte/ Research in History of Art. Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2000, p. 24; website: http://www.lib.virginia.edu/dic/exhib/fiske/




Citation

"Kimball, Fiske." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/kimballf/.


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Architectural historian, Director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Chair of the Department of Art, University of Virginia. Kimball’s father was Edwin Fiske Kimball, a teacher, and mother Ellen Leora Ripley (Kimball). He was raised in the Bost

King, Edward Stauffer

Full Name: King, Edward Stauffer

Gender: male

Date Born: 1900

Date Died: 1995

Place Born: Princeton, Merce, NJ, USA

Place Died: Princeton, Mercer, NJ, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): museums (institutions)

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


Overview

Director, Walters Art Gallery 1931-66. As a child in Baltimore, King grew up with Alfred H. Barr, Jr., later founder of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He married Tatiana Galitzine (1909-1993) in Philadelphia, 1932.


Selected Bibliography

The Greek Tradition in Painting: Paintings from Themes Derived from Classical Antiquity. The Greek Tradition in Painting and the Minor Arts. Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Gallery, 1939; and Ross, Marvin C. Catalogue of the American Works of Art: including French Medals Made for America in the Walters Art Gallery. Baltimore: Trustees of the Gallery, 1956.





Citation

"King, Edward Stauffer." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/kinge/.


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Director, Walters Art Gallery 1931-66. As a child in Baltimore, King grew up with Alfred H. Barr, Jr., later founder of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He married Tatiana Galitzine (1909-1993) in Philadelphia, 1932.

Kaufmann, Edgard, Jr.

Full Name: Kaufmann, Edgard, Jr.

Gender: male

Date Born: 1910

Date Died: 1989

Place Born: Pittsburgh, Allegheny, PA, USA

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), Modern (style or period), and sculpture (visual works)

Career(s): educators


Overview

Columbia University architectural historian, Frank Lloyd Wright scholar. Kaufmann was born to parents who were both heirs to a department store fortune. At age 10, his parents took him on a year tour of Europe, developing in him his taste for art. Kaufmann declined to attend college, preferring to study painting and architecture in Vienna and Florence and department store design in Germany. This constituted his only formal education. He moved to New York in his early twenties to become a painter. In 1934 he entered the Taliesin studio of Frank Lloyd Wright at Spring Green, Wisconsin. Although he remained there only one year, Wright’s work so impressed his father that the elder Kaufmann commissioned the architect to design their summer home. Perhaps, today, the most famous building by Wright, the commission also renewed the architect’s flagging reputation. In 1935, Kaufmann returned to Pittsburgh to run a department in the family business, but this, also, lasted briefly. When the Museum of Modern Art installed a photo exhibit of Fallingwater, the wealthy foundering Kaufmann was offered a job at MoMA by its director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Kaufmann’s resources and enthusiasm for modern art made him an ideal choice for Barr, who’s mission was to develop taste for modern art among potential MoMA patrons. The following years, Kaufmann assumed a position of personal assistant to Barr, accompanying him on buying trips to Mexico and Cuba when World War II precluded european travel. Thoroughly under Barr’s spell, Kaufmann contributed unrestictedly to Barr’s art funds. During World War II, he served in photo-intelligence in Austrailia. Afterward he returned to New York. When the senior Kaufmann died in 1955, his son inhabited Fallingwater for eight years. In 1963 he donated the house and surrounding woods to the Western Pennsylvania Land Conservancy. The same year he was appointed adjunct professor of Art History at Columbia University, a position he held until 1980. In 1970, he organized the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition, The Rise of American Architecture, the catalog of which remains an important contribution to architectural history. Among Kaufmann’s many benevolences included money for Alvar Aalto to design a room for the United Nations, major support for the Architectural History Foundation, and the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed office of his father to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Kaufmann published comparatively little. His writings draw largely on his personal experience with architects and knowledge of art as opposed to archival research. His contribution lies in promoting modernist- designed useful objects as works of art.


Selected Bibliography

Taliesin drawings; recent architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, selected from his drawings. New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1952; and Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, and Scully, Vincent. The Rise of an American architecture. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Praeger, 1970; Introductions to modern design: What is modern design? What is modern interior design? New York: Museum of Modern Art, Arno Press, 1969; Fallingwater, a Frank Lloyd Wright country house. New York: Abbeville Press, 1986; 9 commentaries on Frank Lloyd Wright. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.


Sources

New York Times, August 6, 1989, Section 2, p. 29; The Independent (London), August 7, 1989, p. 10; The Daily Telegraph, August 9, 1989, p. 15; Marquis, Alice Goldfarb. Alfred H. Barr, Jr: Missionary for the Modern. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989, pp.




Citation

"Kaufmann, Edgard, Jr.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/kaufmannej/.


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Columbia University architectural historian, Frank Lloyd Wright scholar. Kaufmann was born to parents who were both heirs to a department store fortune. At age 10, his parents took him on a year tour of Europe, developing in him his taste for art.

Kaufmann, Emil

Full Name: Kaufmann, Emil

Gender: male

Date Born: 1891

Date Died: 1953

Place Born: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Place Died: Cheyenne, Laramie, WY, USA

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), French (culture or style), revolutions, and sculpture (visual works)


Overview

Ledoux and French Revolutionary architecture scholar. Kaufmann was the son of Max Kaufmann (d. 1902), businessman, and Friederike Baumwald (Kaufmann) (b. 1862). He was raised in Vienna, attending the Maximiliansgymnasium, 9th region of the city (IX Bezirk) along with the future Warburg School art historian Fritz Saxl. He received his Abitur in 1909 and entered the Exportakademie (literally, Export Academy), studying trade through 1911. Beginning in 1913 he attended lectures in the humanities at the Universities of Innsbruck and Vienna. At Innsbruck he studied art history under Heinrich Hammer, at Vienna archaeology with Emanuel Löwy, general history under Ludwig Pastor (1854-1928), and art history under Hans Semper and the Vienna School masters Max Dvořák and his students Julius Alwin von Schlosser and Hans Tietze. He also attended the competing school of art history at the University of Vienna run by Josef Rudolf Thomas Strzygowski and M. Dreger. Kaufmann fought as a soldier in World War I and attending school intermittently because of illness. He received his Ph.D. in 1920, writing his dissertation under Dvořák on the development of the architecture of Ledoux and classicism. After graduation Kaufmann could find no work as an art historian. He earned a living as a bank employee in Vienna, continuing his art-history research on the side. In 1933, Kaufmann published a monograph on Ledoux (the first full-length one) Von Ledoux bis Le Courbusier. The work was in fact a polemic on the development of modern architecture from 1770 to 1920. This sweeping thesis found many opponents. Most famously Meyer Schapiro, who found it simplistic, and the conservative Vienna-School Hans Sedlmayr (Schapiro’s nemesis) who found it a symptom of the pathology of modernism (Verlust der Mitte). He published numerous articles and dictionary entries (the Thieme-Becker lexikon ones on Ledoux and Marmorek). He lectured at the Urania museum, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe and Austrian radio. Significant articles on Ledoux and the architect Boullée (the latter in English) were also published. With the annexation of Austria by the Nazi’s, Kaufmann, a Jew, emigrated to the United States. With little means of support, he lived penuriously, continuing to research French architecture, “the only reward was his satisfaction in revealing hidden aspects in the history of architecture and in scholarly work well done” (Schapiro). He was a Fellow at the Research School of the University of Southern California in 1941. He moved to the eastern United States were he lectured at Princeton, Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago. While lecturing, Kaufmann worked on his book on revolutionary architecture. Kaufmann received grants from the American Philosophical Society and a Fulbright. He died in Wyoming while traveling to Los Angeles before his magnum opus could be completed. It was published posthumously in 1955. Some of his papers are at the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. Kaufmann brought the theories and work of the innovative architects prior to and of the French Revolution to modern scholarship. Using largely formal analysis and theoretical writings to exact social-historical significance, he created what Germain Bazin termed the “hétéronome” Baroque. Like his contemporary Pierre Francastel, Kaufmann has been accused of writing Franco-centric architectural histories (Bois). Erwin Panofsky wrote at the time of his immigration the the U.S. that he was the only person in his field of neo-classical architectural theory. Kaufmann’s use of the Kantian notions of autonomy and modernism influenced the work of later critics, historians and architects such as Philip Johnson in the 1940s, Colin Rowe in the 1950s and Aldo Rossi (1931-1997) in the 1950s and 1960s (Vidler, 2002).


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Die Entwürfe des Architekten Ledoux und die Àsthetik des Klassizismus. Vienna, 1920, partially published in several venues as, 1) “Die Architekturtheorie der französischen Klassik und des Klassizismus.” Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 44 (1924) , 2) “Architektonisch Entwurfe aus der Zeit dere fanzosischen Revolution.” Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst 64 (1929) , 3) “Die Stadt des Architekten Ledoux: Zur Erkenntnis der autonomen Architektur.” Kunstwissenschaftlichen Forschungen 2 (1933); Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier: Ursprung und Entwicklung der Autonomen Architektur. Vienna: Passer, 1933; “Etienne-Louis Boullée.” Art Bulletin 21 (September 1939): 212-27; Three Revolutionary Architects Boullée, Ledoux and Lequeu. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1952; Architecture in the Age of Reason: Baroque and Post-Baroque in England, Italy, and France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955.


Sources

“Biographical Note.” American Society of Architectural Historians Journal 3 no. 3 (July 1943): 12; Teyssot, Georges. “Emil Kaufmann and the Architecture of Reason: Klassizismus and ‘Revolutionary Architecture’.” Oppositions 13 (Summer, 1978): 47-74; Watkin, David. The Rise of Architectural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 180; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 p. 198-199; 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. 51 mentioned; Teyssot, Georges. “Neoclassic and Autonomous Architecture: the Formalism of Emil Kaufmann.” Architectural Design (London) 51 no. 6/7 (1981): 24-29; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 208-210; 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. 360-362; Bois, Yve Alain. “Forward.” Francastel, Pierre. Art & Technology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: Zone Books/MIT Press, 2000, p. 13; Vidler, Anthony. “The Ledoux Effect: Emil Kaufmann and the Claims of Kantian Autonomy.” [Mining Autonomy issue] Perspecta 33 (2002): 16-29; Damisch, Hubert. “Ledoux with Kant.” Perspecta 33 (2002): 10-15;Vidler, Anthony. “Neoclassical Modernism: Emil Kaufmann.” in Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008, pp.16-59; [obituary:] Schapiro, Meyer. “Emil Kaufmann (1891-1953).” College Art Journal 13, no. 2 (Winter, 1954): 144.




Citation

"Kaufmann, Emil." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/kaufmanne/.


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Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Ledoux and French Revolutionary architecture scholar. Kaufmann was the son of Max Kaufmann (d. 1902), businessman, and Friederike Baumwald (Kaufmann) (b. 1862). He was raised in Vienna, attending the Maximiliansgymnasium, 9th region of the city (I