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Müller, Theodor

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Müller, Theodor

Gender: male

Date Born: 1905

Date Died: 1996

Place Died: Munich, Bavaria, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Northern Renaissance, Renaissance, and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Post-World War II museum director and author of the Pelican History of Art volume on northern renaissance sculpture. Müller studied art history between 1923 and 1928 in Germany under such luminaries as Adolph Goldschmidt in Berlin, Heinrich Wölfflin in Zürich, and Wilhelm Pinder in Munich. In 1928 he received his doctorate with a dissertation on the Gothic sculpture of the Tyrol. He joined the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum (Bavarian National Museum) in Munich the same year as an intern, remaining at that sole institution his entire life. His dissertation was published in 1935. From then until 1939 he researched late medieval sculpture, especially in Slovakia, Transylvania and Poland. He became an authority on the work of Veit Stoss. He remained at the Museum throughout the Nazi years in Germany. After World War II, perhaps because of the German-centric ideology imbued in the art-historical German writing before the war, Müller broadened his view to sculpture of France and the Netherlands. Together with the director of the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg, Erich Steingräber, he wrote a pioneering study on “email en ronde-bosse” around 1400. Together with Adolf Feulner, he authored the second volume of the Deutsche Kunstgeschichte, Geschichte der deutschen Plastik, 1953 He contributed to the festschrift of Wilhelm Pinder. In 1966 he wrote the volume in the distinguished Pelican History of Art series, commissioned by Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner, Sculpture in the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Spain: 1400 to 1500. Unlike some in the series, it was not a work of brilliance, but did set out in an order the disparate work of the period. Müller retired in 1968 from the Museum.Methodologically, Müller’s connoisseurship and economy of language owed more the Goldschmidt than to Pinder. Müller’s major political accomplishment was to rehabilitate German art history after the Nazi years (Sauerländer).

Selected Bibliography

Die Bildwerke in Holz und Stein von der Mitte des XV. bis gegen Mitte des XVI. Jahrhundertsand. section 2 of Die Bildwerke des Bayerischen Nationalmuseums. Augsburg: B. Filser, 1924ff.; Feulner, Adolf. Geschichte der deutschen Plastik. Deutsche Kunstgeschichte 2. Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1953; and Steingräber, Erich. “Die französische Goldplastik um 1400.” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 5 no. 3 (1954); Sculpture in the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Spain: 1400 to 1500. Pelican History of Art 25. Baltimore: Penguin, 1966;

Sources

Sauerländer, Willibald. “Theodor Müller, 1905-96.” Burlington Magazine 139, no. 1127 (1997): 109.

Post-World War II museum director and author of the Pelican History of Art volume on northern renaissance sculpture. Müller studied art history between 1923 and 1928 in Germany under such luminaries as Adolph Golds

Müller, Valentin

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Müller, Valentin

Gender: male

Date Born: 1889

Date Died: 1945

Place Born: Berlin, Germany

Place Died: Bryn Mawr, Delaware, PA, USA

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): ancient, Ancient Greek (culture or style), Classical, Near Eastern (Early Western World), and Roman (ancient Italian culture or period)

Institution(s): Bryn Mawr College

Overview

Specialist in ancient Greek and Roman art, particularly the near eastern influences on early Greece. Privatdozent (tutor, 1923-1929) then a.o. Professor (1929-1931) at the University of Berlin. Professor at Bryn Mawr College (U.S.) 1931-1945.

Selected Bibliography

Der Polos, die griechische Götterkrone. 1915. Frühe Plastik in Griechenland und Vorderasien. Ihre Typenbildung von der neolithischen bis in die griechisch-archaische Zeit (rund 3000 bis 600 v. Chr.). Augsburg, 1929.

Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 244-245.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Mumford, Lewis

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Mumford, Lewis

Gender: male

Date Born: 1895

Date Died: 1990

Place Born: Flushing, Queens, NY, USA

Place Died: Amenia, Dutchhess, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Career(s): art critics

Overview

Architectural theorist, historian and art critic. Mumford was conceived out of marriage by a man he never knew, a New York lawyer only referred to later as “J. W.” His mother, a German immigrant named Elvina Conrad Baron had married a Britisher named John Mumford well before the younger Mumford’s birth, but he marriage was annulled. As a child, Mumford walked the streets of New York with his grandfather, making notes and learning Manhattan first hand. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1912. In 1913 he published his first article in Forum magazine and began taking courses at the City College of New York based upon interest rather than a specific degree. In 1915 he discovered the writings of the Scottish biologist and urban planner Patrick Geddes, perhaps the single-most influential person in his life. Mumford’s plans for a Ph.D. in philosophy were dashed by a diagnosis with tuberculosis. He never completed a degree. He joined the navy in 1918 to serve in World War I where he was assigned as a radio electrician. After discharge in 1919 he was made associate editor of The Dial, a modernist literary magazine, continuing courses at the New School for Social Research where the social economist Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) impressed him. Mumford married Sophia Wittenberg, whom he had met at the Dial, in 1921. By 1924, his first book on architecture, Sticks and Stones, and one of the first histories of American architecture, appeared. Critical of the beaux-arts tradition in architecture, the book argued for an indigenous American style. The following year he emerged as the major intellectual force in the founding of the Regional Planning Association of American (RPAA), setting forth the ideas of other RPAA members such as the town planners Clarence Stein (1883-1977) and Henry Wright (1878-1936), all of whom were centered around the garden city idea of the British theorist Ebenezer Howard (1850 – 1928). Mumford and his wife lived in Sunnyside, Queens, in the Sunnyside Gardens housing complex with communal gardens designed by Stein and Wright between 1925 and 1936 in order to live the life they espoused. In 1929 he published a study of Herman Melville which revived interested in that American author; he also accepted a part-time visiting professorship at Dartmouth College (to 1935). Mumford began writing two art columns for the New Yorker magazine in 1931, “Sky Line” (on architecture) and the more occasional “The Art Galleries” on art. The same year Mumford published The Brown Decades, a journalistic summary of the work of the architects Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Mumford lectured at the New School for Social Research between 1931 (through 1935). He received the first of three Guggenheim Fellowships in 1932 (others being 1938 and 1956). The mid-1930s found him occasionally as one of the participants at the famous, informal gathering of art historians organized by Meyer Schapiro whose membership included Robert Goldwater, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Erwin Panofsky, James Johnson Sweeney and the art gallery dealer Jerome Klein. Mumford helped organized the important 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, along with Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson on the International Style of modern architecture. He and Sophia settled in Dutchess County, NY, in 1936. In 1938, The Culture of Cities was published and became a clarion for members of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal advocating green-city structure. Time magazine featured him on a 1938 cover, and, also that year, Mumford wrote an article advocating military suppression of Hitler, far ahead mainstream America. By 1940 Mumford had withdrawn his support for this brand of modernism and instead became a critic, especially of Le Corbusier’s his technological fetishism and his notion of “Cité Radieuse,” favoring instead smaller-scale town planning. Mumford worked closely with the architectural theorist Frederic J. Osborn (1885-1978). Shortly before World War II, Mumford delivered the Dancy Lectures at Alabama College, published in 1941 as The South in Architecture. He moved to California in 1942 to join faculty of Stanford University design new humanities program. He resigned from Stanford in 1944 and returned to New York where he learned his son, Geddes, had been killed in action. After World War II, the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association of Great Britain and the New Towns movement adopted many of Mumford’s thoughts. His “Sky Line” column in the New Yorker decried the ever-broadening urban roads and the “dormitory” mentality of the suburbs. In 1951 he began an association with the University of Pennsylvania as a visiting professor (through 1961). In the 1950s, he led a public battle against the powerful New York Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (1888-1981) culminating in a 1958 campaign against Robert Moses’ plan to make Manhattan more accessible by car by building a roadway through Washington Square Park. Mumford published perhaps his most important book, The City in History, in 1961, the same year he held a visiting professorship at University of California, Berkeley. He ceased his columns for the New Yorker in 1963; the following year President Lyndon Johnson awarded Mumford the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1970, Mumford published his clearest summation of the dystopia modern life tempted humanity, The Myth of the Machine, a book which, among other things, questioned the usefulness of the massive World Trade Center. Mumford wrote his autobiography in 1982. He received the National Medal of Arts in 1986. In 1988, the State University of New York’s University at Albany endowed the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research in his honor. Mumford died at his home in 1990 and was cremated. His papers are housed at the Van Pelt Library of The University of Pennsylvania. Mumford was not and never claimed to be a scholar. His books, some historical and all visionary, examine technology’s effects on creative humanity. His readership was the informed lay audience. The City in History is a study of civilization using material culture and urban design history. Intellectually, he began from Progressivist ideas and a long-standing Romantic radicalism tradition of the nineteenth century, espousing a notion that leisure and work should be combined in the same principles of art and architecture. His view of artistic production owes much to the writing of John Ruskin, especially Ruskin’s lauding of craft ideals and suspicion of laissez-faire capitalism. Mumford’s ideals were used prominently in the 1932 Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition on the modernist “International Style” launched by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson. However, Mumford rejected International-style modernism shortly before World War II in favor of a smaller and more humane architecture and urban planning. He always supported a functionalistic approach to building, derived from the writings of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, even though he was critical of some of their theory. He was a tireless critic of Jane Jacobs and her urban revitalization theories of street life revitalization through random and spontaneous commercial growth. His ideas were rejected by the sociological architectural historian Pierre Francastel, especially Mumford’s “mystique of progress,” as relying too much on the effects of the machine age, but praised and espoused by the critic and historian Ada Louise Huxtable.

Selected Bibliography

[principle architectural works:] Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization. New York: 1924; The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America, 1865-1895. New York: 1931; The South in Architecture. New York: 1941; The City in History: its Origins, its Transformations, and its Prospects. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961.

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. 11; Marquis, Alice Goldfarb. Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Missionary for the Modern. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989, p. 125; Blake, Casey. “Mumford, Lewis.” Dictionary of Art 22: 282-283; Blake, Casey Nelson. Beloved Community: the Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, & Lewis Mumford. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990; Miller, Donald L. Lewis Mumford, a Life. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1989; Mumford, Lewis. Sketches from Life: the Autobiography of Lewis Mumford: the Early Years. New York: Dial Press, 1982; Wojtowicz, Robert. “Lewis Mumford: The Architectural Critic as Historian.” in, MacDougall, Elisabeth Blair, ed. The Architectural Historian in America: a Symposium in Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of the Society of Architectural Historians. Studies in the History of Art 35. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1990. Symposium papers / Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. pp. 237-249.

Mündler, Otto

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Mündler, Otto

Gender: male

Date Born: 1811

Date Died: 1870

Place Born: Kempten, Bavaria, Germany

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

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style) and painting (visual works)

Career(s): art dealers

Overview

Dealer and historian of Italian and Old Master paintings. Mündler studied languages at Munich and Erlangen Universities. He decided to move to Paris to become an art dealer in 1835, and developed close friendships with prominent members of the European art community of the 1840’s, including Giovanni Morelli, Emmanuel Sano, and Ralph Nicholson Wornum. In 1850, he published his first essay on old Master paintings in the Louvre, proving his ability to conduct art-historical research and exposing him as a major critic of the Louvre’s administrative policies. He questioned the research of Fédéric Villot, the Director of the Louvre, pointing out the errors in the catalog that he published in 1849. Mündler, like Morelli, believed that the best approach to understanding art was through the method of connoisseurship. He collected the signatures and monograms of painters in order to compile a dictionary that he never completed. Mündler’s previous training in religious studies allowed him to make detailed and insightful observations about religious images. In 1855, Charles Lock Eastlake, the first Director of the National Gallery in London, appointed him as a traveling agent for the National Gallery in London, allowing him to travel throughout Europe to investigate new acquisitions. The written record of his contact with dealers, painters, and their provenances became a handbook of useful information for collectors and museum directors. Between 1855-57 Eastlake and Mündler acquired 59 painting from Italy, 1 from The Hague and 23 in England. The somewhat unfair criticisms of the collector Lord Elcho (1818-1914, the future 10th earl of Wemyss), led to Mündler’s dismissal in 1858 and the elimination of his position. He returned to Paris to work as an art dealer and advisor to German museums. He wrote several museum catalogs in the last years of his life, including one of the Galleria Sabauda in Turin for Giovanni Morelli and Giuseppe Molteni, and a catalogue of the Louvre. In 1869, Mündler published a revised edition of the attributions of Jacob Burckhardt‘s Cicerone, which Morelli used as a template for his 1893 publication Kunstkritische Studien.

Selected Bibliography

Die Galerie zu Cassel in ihren Meisterwerken. Nach den Originalgemälden radirt. Leipzig: A.E. Seemann, 1870; Beiträge zu Jacob Burckhardt’s Cicerone. Abtheilung: Malerei. Leipzig: A.E. Seemann, 1870; Essai d’une analyse critique de la notice des tableaux italiens du Musée du Louvre : accompagné d’observations et de documents relatifs à ces mêmes tableaux. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1850.

Sources

Dowd, Carol Togneri, ed. The Travel Diaries of Otto Mündler: 1855-1858. Walpole Society [publications] 51. London: Walpole Society, 1985; Anderson, Jaynie. “Mündler, Otto.” The Dictionary of Art; Borenius, Tancred. “Eastlake’s Travelling Agent for the National Gallery.” Burlington Magazine 83 (1943): 211-16.

Contributors: LaNitra Michele Walker

Munhall, Edgar

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Munhall, Edgar

Gender: male

Date Born: 1933

Date Died: 2016

Place Born: Pittsburgh, Allegheny, PA, USA

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): eighteenth century (dates CE)

Institution(s): The Frick Collection

Overview

art historian of the 18th century

Selected Bibliography

“Greuze and the Protestant Spirit.” Art Quarterly 27 (1964): 1-23.

Sources

KMP, 85

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

art historian of the 18th century

Munro, Thomas

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Munro, Thomas

Gender: male

Date Born: 1897

Date Died: 1974

Place Born: Omaha, Douglas, NE, USA

Place Died: Omaha, Douglas, NE, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Career(s): educators

Overview

Museum educator and art historian at Cleveland Museum of Art. Munro’s father, Alexander Allen Munro (1856-1909), was a school administrator; his mother was Mary Spaulding (Munro). Munro attended to Amherst College between 1912-1915 but received his B. A. from Columbia University in 1916. After receiving his Master’s Degree in 1917, he joined the army in World War I, rising to the rank of sergeant with the psychological services of the Medical Corps. After discharge he returned to Columbia where he was an instructor in the Philosophy Department, 1918-1924, gaining his Ph. D in 1920. In 1924 Munro was hired by the capricious collector of modernist art, Albert Barnes (1872-1951) to be assistant educational director of the Barnes Foundation. Munro. Barnes’ anti-historical approach to art fit Munro’s aesthetic-style notion of art appreciation. During this same period, 1924-1927 he was visiting professor of modern art at the University of Pennsylvania. He married Lucille Nadler in 1925. Between 1928-1931 Munro taught on the philosophy faculty at Rutgers University. With the Parisian collector and art dealer, Paul Guillaume(1891-1934), he published an early book on African art, Primitive Negro Sculpture, in 1926. It was during this time, too, that Munro published his Scientific Method in æsthetics (1928), which set forth his positivist view of art criticism. In 1931 Munro accepted the positions which would eventually lead to his high-profile in the art world: a joint appointment as curator of education for the Cleveland Museum of Art and professor of art history at Case Western Reserve University. His hire at Cleveland was facilitated by the Museum’s energetic new director, William M. Milliken. In 1945 the American Society of Aesthetics, which Munro had helped form in 1942 took over the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and Munro became its editor. The academic year 1949-1950 Munro was a visiting professor in esthetics at the Sorbonne, Paris. In Cleveland, Munro used his appointments at the two institutions to publish his two most singular books: The Arts and their Interrelations (1949), a book about the creative process through its various forms, and Evolution in the Arts, and Other Theories of Culture History (1963), an insightful and early art historiography. In 1967 he retired from both positions, retaining emeritus status at Case until his death in 1974. The Cleveland Museum of Art established the Thomas Munro Memorial lectures in 1985. His daughter, Eleanor C. Munro (b. 1928), was an associated editor of Art News and also an art writer. Munro was influenced by the philosophy and educational theories of John Dewey (1859-1952). A positivist, like Dewey, his art history hinges on the notion of progression in art. Like other intellectual art history movements–the so-called second Vienna School of art history, for example–he believed he had developed a “scientific method” of art historical inquiry. Unlike the Vienna School, which Munro doubted objectifiable patterns of intent; his model was “broadly experimental and empirical,” seeking analysis from history and psychological studies. As a museum educator, Munro opposed explaining art as the self-expression of the artist. Instead he argued for a more disciplined model emphasizing the creative, historical, critical, and aesthetic considerations. Evolution in the Arts shows Munro ahead of his time. The book is the first English-language monograph to look at the discipline of art history and its theoretic roots. A work of scholarship and personal conviction, it has been unjustly ignored by the modern trend of historiography.

Selected Bibliography

and Guillaume, Paul. Primitive Negro Sculpture. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1926; Scientific Method in æsthetics. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1928; The Arts and their Interrelations. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1949; Art Education: Its Philosophy and Psychology; Selected Essays. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956; and Read, Herbert. The Creative Arts in American Education: The Interrelation of the Arts in Secondary Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960; Evolution in the Arts, and Other Theories of Culture History. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, and H. N. Abrams, 1963; Oriental Aesthetics. Cleveland: Press of Western Reserve University, 1965; Form and Style in the Arts: an Introduction to Aesthetic Morphology. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970.

Sources

Munro, Eleanor. Memoir of a Modernist’s Daughter. New York: Viking, 1988; Dictionary of the Avant-gardes. Richard Kostelanetz, ed. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 432-33; Osborne, Harold. “Museums and Their Functions.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 19, no. 2 (1985): 41-51 [excellent discussion of Munro’s theories in museum education]; [obituaries:] Hungerland, Helmut. “Thomas Munro.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 no. 1 (Fall 1974): 4-6.

Moreau, Jacques

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Moreau, Jacques

Gender: male

Date Born: 1918

Date Died: 1961

Home Country/ies: Belgium

Institution(s): Universität Heidelberg

Overview

He co-founded with Heinz Kähler the Monumenta Artis Romanae book series.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Scripta minora. Walter Schmitthenner, ed. Heidelberg: C. Winter, Universitätsverlag, 1964, pp. 306-312; Das Trierer Kornmarktmosaik. Monumenta artis Romanae 2. Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1960; Die Welt der Kelten. Stuttgart: G. Kilpper, 1958; and Diehl, Ernst. Inscriptiones, Latinae Christianae veteres. 3 vols. Berlin: Apud Weidmannos, 1924-

Sources

Ridgway, David. Kähler, Heinz. Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 1, p. 628 [incorrectly identifies him as “Jean Morear”].

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

He co-founded with Heinz Kähler the Monumenta Artis Romanae book series.

Morelli, Giovanni

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Morelli, Giovanni

Other Names:

Giovanni Morelli

Gender: male

Date Born: 1816

Date Died: 1891

Place Born: Verona, Veneto, Italy

Place Died: Bergamo, Lombardia, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

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

Overview

Italian patriot and art historian; developer of a method of connoisseurship which identified attribution via minute characteristics of artists. Morelli was born to a protestant family, a minority in Italy (originally of French Huguenot decent). Raised in Bergamo, he attended the (Swiss) Kantonschule at Aarau between 1826 and 1832. From 1833-1838 he studied medicine at the universities of Munich and Erlangen because of the Italian proscription against protestants in universities. His study of anatomy and human observation assisted him in forming his conclusions in later years regarding connoisseurship. Morelli graduated in medicine under the anatomist Ignaz Döllinger (1770-1841), but never practiced. His early interest in iconography appeared in a mock iconographical study, under the pseudonym Nicholas Schäffer in 1836. A second parody on the aesthetic approach to art was published in 1839, again under the Schäffer pseudonym, Das Miasma Diabolicum. Morelli traveled to Berlin in 1838 where he me naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), the artists Karl Blechen (1802-1872), Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853), the architect Wilhelm Stier (1799-1856), but most importantly, the art historians Karl Friedrich von Rumohr and Berlin Museum director Gustav Friedrich Waagen. That same year he was instrumental in assisting the geological morphology of the Swiss geologist, Louis Agassiz (1807-1873). Until 1840, Morelli lived in Paris, where he gave up science for good and met the dealer Otto Mündler. It was Mündler who gave Morelli his first introduction to art connoisseurship. Morelli returned to Italy in 1840, embracing his birth country and acting as a conduit for the intellectual traditions of the north. He translated Johann Pieter Eckermann’s conversations with Goethe (though never published) and Friedrich Schelling’s lectures on his aesthetics in 1845 and on Dante in 1858. Morelli served in the Risorgimento of Italy in the 1860s, becoming a Senator in unified Italy in 1873. He chaired many commissions in the new government on art, most important were the ones enacting legislation forbidding export of art treasures from Italy and the standardization of conservation practices in Italian museums, the latter with restorers Luigi Cavenaghi (1844-1918) and Giovanni Secco-Suardo (1798-1873). Perhaps through his previous connections with Mündler, who had worked for the National Gallery in London and now sold them pictures, he met British collectors in Milan, including Charles Lock Eastlake, Sir James Hudson (1810-1885), British ambassador at Turin, and the amateur archaeologist Austen Henry Layard. Morelli acquired pictures for Layard and was among the first to whom he taught his technique of connoisseurship. Only after age sixty did Morelli published his famous methodology of art history. It first appeared as a series of articles in the Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst beginning in 1876 and later as book in 1880. His treatise, Die Werke italienischer Meister, was written in German under the pseudonym “Ivan Lermolieff” (a Russian-ized anagram of the Italian form his name). The work is a dialogue between an Italian master scholar (Schwarze) and his Russian pupil, Lermolieff, ostensibly the author of the book. Their topics were the major paintings in the galleries of Rome, Dresden, and Berlin. Eric Fernie points that the conversational organization of the book allowed Morelli to criticize contemporary approaches and individual scholar’s opinions on art. The book contested may accepted attributions. The two personalities discuss works with the Italian often reattributing the work, and the Russian providing supporting evidence (a drawing, for example he knows) as well popular responses. In this way, Morelli could criticize a work of art without ever declaring it a fake. Morelli followed this with a series of articles on Raphael, appearing between 1881 and 1882. His collected writings, Kunstkritische Studien, edited by himself, were published beginning in 1890. The same year he met the young Bernard Berenson, who became perhaps the most important exponent of Morelli’s method. Morelli provided letters of introduction to many sacristans to allow Berenson to examine works of art for his later, famous books. Morelli died before the third volume of his critical studies appeared; the volume was subsequently edited by Gustavo Frizzoni. His immediate influence was on Frizzoni as well as the art historians Jean Paul Richter, Adolfo Venturi, Berenson, and Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes. In 1893, Richter’s wife translated Die Werke italienischer Meister into English. Morelli’s connoisseurship employing identification of the “hands” of an artist–both literally and in the figurative sense of the characteristics of representation–was immensely popular for a group of art historians who immediately followed his generation. Scholars as different as J. D. Beazley, Berenson and Julius Alwin von Schlosser used his technique directly to establish their own reputations (Schlosser wrote effusively of his meeting with Morelli, arranged by Franz Wickhoff). This technique, frequently termed “scientific” art history in the 19th and early 20th-century, contrasted with documentary and scholars who viewed art history as a historical phenomenon, such as Joseph Archer Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle. His scientific classification drew from his time with Döllinger and the French comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832). Morelli’s conversancy with German academics allowed him to debate the issues of art history on their terms. His approach to renaissance art contrasts that of, for example, Wilhelm Bode, director of the Berlin Musuem, whose art history was heavily theoretical. Freud used Morelli’s method in his 1914 study of Michelangelo’s Moses and an aspect of the approach found favor with Edgar Wind in a 1963 essay. Morelli’s reattributions though wide-ranging, largely met with acceptance. Overall, Morelli possessed a strong anti-intellectualism. He was completely against written art histories, noting that, “the history of art can only be studied properly before the works of art themselves. Books are apt to warp a man’s judgment.” For Morelli, “the only true record [of art history] is the work of art itself,” writing elsewhere that the “art historian will gradually disappear, [and that would be] no great loss either.” His anti-academicism was visited on even Wickhoff, head of the so-called Vienna school of art history, whom he accused of taking the vocation of art history too lightly.

Selected Bibliography

“Die Galerien Roms: ein kritischer Versuch von Iwan Lermolieff.” I. “Die Galerie Borghese: Aus dem Russischen übersetzt von Dr Johannes Schwarze, mit Illustrationen.” Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst 9 (1874): 1-11, 73-81, 171-8, 249-53; Part II, 10 (1875): 97-106, 207-11, 264-73, 329-34, Part III, 11 (1876): 132-7, 168-73; Die Werke italienischer Meister in den Galerien von München, Dresden und Berlin: Ein kritischer Versuch [von Ivan Lermolieff, aus dem Russischen übersetzt von Dr Johannes Schwarze]. Leipzig: E. A. Seemann,1880, English, Italian Masters in German Galleries: A Critical Essay on the Italian Pictures in the Galleries of Munich, Dresden and Berlin. Translated by Mrs. Louise M. Richter. London: Bell and Sons, 1893; Kunstkritische Studien über italienische Malerei. 3 vols. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1890-93, [individual volumes are:] I. Die Galerien Borghese und Doria Panfili in Rom. 1890, II. Die Galerien zu München und Dresden. 1891, III. Die Galerien zu Berlin. 1893, English, Italian Painters: Critical Studies of Their Works. Translated by Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes. 2 vols. London: J. Murray, 1893.

Sources

[the literature on Morelli is legion, but includes] [biographical study on Morelli by Gustav Frizzoni] Die Galerien zu Berlin. vol. 3 of Morelli, Giovanni. Kunstkritische Studien über italienische Malerei. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1893; [regarding Schlosser’s meeting with Morelli] Schlosser, Julius von. “Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte.” Mitteilungen des österreichischen Instituts für Geschforschungen 13 no. 2 (1934): 145ff; Wind, Edgar. “Critique of Connoisseurship.” Art and Anarchy London: 1963, pp. 32-51, 139-53; Dvorák, Max. Idealism and Naturalism in Gothic Art. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967, p. 215; 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. 45 (and n. 92); Wollheim, Richard. “Giovanni Morelli and the Origins of Scientific Connoisseurship.” In On Art and Mind: Essays and Lectures. London: Allen Lane, 1973; Pope-Hennessy, John. “Connoisseurship.” The Study and Criticism of Italian Sculpture. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980, pp. 11-38; Kultermann, Udo. Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte: Der Weg einer Wissenschaft. 2nd ed. Frankfurt am Main and Vienna: Ullstein, 1981, pp. 192-9; 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. 48; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 234-235; German Essays on Art History. Gert Schiff, ed. New York: Continuum, 1988, p. xlil, mentioned; [conference proceedings] Agosti, Giacomo, and Manca, Maria Elisabetta, et al. Giovanni Morelli e la cultura dei conoscitori: atti del convegno internazionale, Bergamo, 4-7 giugno 1987. Bergamo: P. Lubrina, 1993; Pope-Hennessy, John. “Morelli and Richter.” On Artists and Art Historians: Selected Book Reviews of John Pope-Hennessy. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1994, pp. 327-29; Fernie, Eric. Art History and its Methods. London: Phaidon Press, 1995, pp.103 -115; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 275-7; Anderson, Jaynie. “Morelli, Giovanni.” Dictionary of Art; Anderson, Jaynie. Collecting Connoisseurship and the Art Market in Risorgimento Italy: Giovanni Morelli’s Letters to Giovanni Melli and Pietro Zavaritt (1866-1872). Venice: Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti, 1999.

Morey, Charles Rufus

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Morey, Charles Rufus

Other Names:

Charles Rufus Morey

Gender: male

Date Born: 1877

Date Died: 1955

Place Born: Hastings, Barry, MI, USA

Place Died: Princeton, Mercer, NJ, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Medieval (European)

Career(s): educators

Overview

Princeton professor; medievalist; founder of Index to Christian Art. Morey graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Michigan in 1899. He received his Master’s Degree there in Classics the following year followed by a three- year fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies in Rome. In 1905 he published his first article, “The Christian Sarcophagus in S. Maria Antiqua”. Morey joined Princeton University in 1903 as an instructor in Classics and a teacher at the Princeton Preparatory School for Boys. However, Allan Marquand, founder and Chair of the Department of Art and Archaeology, invited him to transfer to that department in 1906. Thus began a thirty-nine year career in art history at Princeton. Morey was a founding member of the College Art Association. His interest in medieval iconography led him to create an image collection in 1917 of late antique, early Christian-era and medieval works of art. This soon grew into the Index of Christian Art, a cataloged collection of photographs. In 1918 he was appointed Professor at Princeton. He never pursued a Ph.D. With the support of Marquand, who was largely classical and Renaissance-era focused, Morey began hiring his medievalist students into department positions to raise the profile of the division. The first was Albert M. Friend in 1921. Morey join the editorial board of the College Art Association, the first of two times he would sit on the board, in 1922 (through 1939) acting as a principal fundraiser for it. His groundbreaking study, Sources in Mediaeval Style appeared in 1924, a work which Erwin Panofsky described as startling art historians as Kepler’s work was to astronomers. Marquand’s death in 1924 resulted in Morey’s appointment as chair of the department the following year; he remained there for twenty years. He convinced Ernest DeWald, a former student, to return as associate professor in 1925. Another medievalist student, W. Frederick Stohlman, joined the department under Morey in 1929. The same year, Morey began a project cataloging the collection of the Museo Cristiano, part of the Vatican library, personally authoring the first section on ivories, and assigning other volumes to Stohlman and other Princeton colleagues. Morey was a dedicated researcher and spent much of his effort in building libraries and indexes for art historians. His 1932 pamphlet on scholarly library planning, called the “Laboratory-Library,” attempted to rethink research process all together by combining faculty offices and student space. Morey’s ideas were implemented in both the Firestone Library (Princeton’s main library) and the Department of Art and Archaeology’s own Marquand Library. He was also responsible in placing humanists at the private Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which had been founded in 1930 for mathematicians and theoretical physicists. In 1933, Morey turned the directorship of the Index over to his student, Helen M. Woodruff. Morey added another medievalist graduate student to the department, Donald Drew Egbert who had been lecturing since 1929, as assistant professor in 1935. The same year he appointed the German refugee Kurt Weitzmann, who, despite having written a book strongly disagreeing with an early Morey work, was warmly received. Morey’s first volume of the Vatican Library catalog, translated into Italian by the wife of the Museum of Modern Art’s director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Margaret S. Barr (1901-1986), appeared in 1936. In 1938 Morey was named Marquand Chair of Art and Archaeology. Throughout his career, he traveled to Rome to work with collections and catalogs at the Vatican. Morey was responsible for establishing the Antioch archaeological excavation of Daphne. Two important later books of Morey appeared the same year, 1942. The first, Early Christian Art and the second, Medieval Art, both underscored his tenet, that the development of medieval style was determined by three traditions: Hellenistic naturalism, Latin realism, and “Celto-Germanic dynamism.” In 1945, after the ravages of World War II, Morey resigned his Chair at Princeton to become the first Cultural Attaché to the American Embassy in Rome, assisted by Stohlman. Weitzmann succeeded him as department chair. He was active in repatriating looted works of art. Understanding the need to protect the spectacular scholarly libraries in Italy–which happened to be German–he formed a “holding company,” called the International Union of the Archaeological and Historical Institutes of Rome, to save the contents of both the Hertziana and the Deutsches Archëologisches Institut (DAI) in Rome. During this time he was also Acting Director of the American Academy 1945-1947. He was married to Sara Francis Tupper. Morey’s legacy to art history was two-fold: the establishment of the Index of Christian Art and his many students who became major scholars: Walter W. S. Cook, Glanville Downey, George H. Forsyth, Jr., William Forsyth, Harald Ingholt, Andrew S. Keck, Clark D. Lamberton, E. Parker Lesley, Jack Martin, Carl D. Sheppard, Jr. Joseph C. Sloane, Albert M. Friend, J. Carson Webster, and David Robbins Coffin. Morey’s appointments of DeWald, Stohlman, Weitzmann, and Egbert built Princeton into a powerhouse of medieval scholarship. Panofsky wrote that the history of art now holds an undisputed place in American institutions was particularly the due to Morey. His writings, though groundbreaking at the time, proved less enduring than others of his generation and his dating of medieval objects superseded by later scholarship.

Selected Bibliography

[extensive bibliography:] Martin, John Rupert. Art Bulletin 32 (1950): 345-359 (see additions, in the Panofsky obituary, p. 485); edited, Catalogo del Museo sacro della Biblioteca apostolica vaticana, pubblicato per ordine della Santità di Pio papa XI a cura della direzione. 3 vols. Vatican City: Biblioteca apostolica vaticana, 1936ff.; Early Christian Art: Outline of the Evolution of Style and Iconography in Sculpture and Painting from Antiquity to the Eighth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942. 2nd ed., 1953; Medieval Art. New York: W. W. Norton, 1942; and Jones, Leslie W. The Miniatures of the Manuscripts of Terence Prior to the Thirteenth Century. Illuminated Manuscripts of the Middle Ages, vols. 1-2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1930-31. “Sources of Medieval Style.” Art Bulletin 7 (1924): 35-58. [This early piece shows his method development.] “The Byzantine Renaissance.” Speculum 14 (1939): 139-159.

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. 62-3; Woodruff, Helen. The Index of Christian Art at Princeton University. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942; Panofsky, Erwin. “The History of Art.” In The Cultural Migration: The European Scholar in America. Introduction by W. Rex Crawford, 82-111, p. 87 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.24 mentioned, 57, 81 mentioned; Hourihane, Colum. “They Stand on his Shoulders: Morey, Iconography, and the Index of Christian Art.” Insights and Interpretations: Studies in Celebrations of the Eighty-fifth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art. Princeton, NJ: Index of Christian Art/Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. 3-16; [obituaries:] Panofsky, Erwin. “Charles Rufus Morey.” American Philosophical Society Year Book (1955): 482-91; Lee, Rensselaer. “Charles Rufus Morey: 1877-1955.” Art Bulletin 37 (December 1955): iii-vii; New York Times August 30, 1955, p. 27.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Princeton professor; medievalist; founder of Index to Christian Art. Morey graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Michigan in 1899. He received his Master’s Degree there in Classics the following year followed by a three- year fe

Moses, Elisabeth

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Moses, Elisabeth Caroline

Other Names:

Elizabeth Moses

Gender: female

Date Born: 14 January 1894

Date Died: 21 December 1957

Place Born: Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Place Died: San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): decorative art (art genre)

Career(s): curators

Institution(s): de Young Museum and Kunstgewerbemuseum Cologne

Overview

Useful arts and modernist art historian. Elisabeth Moses was born in 1893 in Cologne, Germany. Her father, Dr. Salli Moses was an otolaryngologist in private hospital practice in Cologne. Her mother, Luise “Lucie” Rothschild (Moses), worked on board of the Cologne Association of Jewish nurses. Elizabeth Moses began her studies at the unique Humanistisches Mädchengymnasium am Marienplatz (humanistic girls’ high school) in Cologne, a manifestation of the women’s movement there. A classmate was the later art historian Luise Straus. Both women studied art history in at the university at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Cologne lacking a university at the time. Moses added archaeology, philosophy and architecture as minors. There, she wrote her dissertation, Pflanzendarstellungen in der deutschen Kunst des 14.15. Jahrhunderts (“Depiction of Plants in German Art of the 14th15th Century) under Paul Clemen. After obtaining her graduate degree, she travelled extensively, an option owing to the wealth of her parents. She joined the Kunstgewerbe-Museum der Stadt Köln in 1919. The Museum’s newly hired director, Karl Schäfer, was in the process of reorganizing the collection.. Moses’ art sensibilities resulted in the hanging of the collection more complimentary to each other. In addition, she took over A chance lecture there on Gauguin, van Gogh and Cezanne inspired her to research and lecture on modern art. In 1925, at the millennial celebration of the city of Cologne she was appointed co-curator of Judaica section with the rabbi and historian Adolf Kober (1879-1958). That same year, Moses also worked in the collection of Textiles and Porcelain of the -Museum. Her specialty in northern renaissance art brought her to an appointment in the Old Paintings division in the prestigious Wallraf-Richartz Museum, also in Cologne. The Jewish special pavilion at the International Pressa in 1928 gave Moses the forum to establish the legacy of Jewish art to the greater art of the Rheinland and Cologne. The following year,1929, however, she was accused of having an affair (unsittlich verhältnis) with Schäfer and she was dismissed. The hearing that followed eventually found her innocent and reinstated her at the Museum. Schäfer, often the center of controversy, was dismissed and replaced by Karl With. Under With she once again was in charge of a rehanging of the collection, choosing this time to group the object thematically rather than chronologically. Together with the historian Edith Wurmbach (1900-1980) they mounted a show on clothing fashion.

In 1933, with the Nazis in control of the government, she was dismissed from her position, deemed a “non-Aryan”. The following year the Gestapo of Cologne moved next door to where her family lived. She emigrated first to Italy and from there to the United States the following year in 1934. Her family followed in 1937.

The same year, she accepted the role of curator of the decorative arts department at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco under director Walter Heil. At the museum, she reorganized the decorative arts section and led a number of temporary exhibitions including “Design in ’49” and 1957’s “Designer Craftsmen of the West.” During her time in the museum, she returned to Judaica with the exhibition “Jewish Ceremonial Objects and Items of Historical Interest.” Moses died in 1957 after a long illness.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Pflanzendarstellungen in der deutschen Kunst des 14./15. Jahrhunderts: Ihre Form und ihre Bedeutung Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn 1921, partially published, Zeitschrift für christliche Kunst 34 (1921): 157–165;
Der Schirm: kulturhistorische Studie. Cologne: Firma Hieronymus Eck, 1924;
“Caspar Benedikt Beckenkamp (1747–1828)”. Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch/Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 2 (1925): 44–77;
“Brauchen wir Museen?” Festschrift zur Feier des 25 jährigen Bestehens der gymnasialen Studienanstalt in Köln Cologne: DuMont, 1928, pp. 69-77;
and Kober, Adolf. “Jüdische Kult- und Kunstdenkmäler in den Rheinlanden.” Zeitschrift des Rheinischen Vereins für Denkmalpflege und Heimatschutz. 24 (1931): 99–201;
“California Museum Metamorphosis.” Art News. 36 (1937): 12-13;
Three Centuries of European and American Domestic Silver. San Francisco: De Young Museum, 1938;
“A Gothic Sculpture of the Madonna and Child.” Pacific Art Review. 1 no. 1 (1941): 25-29;
“A Dutch Armory of the 17th Century.” Pacific Art Review. 33-36;
“Two Dresses, Two Eras.” Pacific Art Review 2 (1941): 32-35.

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. 421-4;
Wachten, Johannes. “Elisabeth Caroline Moses, 1894–1957.” Association of European Jewish Museums (AEJM) https://www.aejm.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Bio-Elisabeth-Caroline-Moses-Wachten.pdf;
“Elisabeth Moses.” FrauenGeschichtsWiki. http://wiki.frauengeschichtsverein.de/index.php?title=Elisabeth_Moses.

Contributors: Sofia Silvosa

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