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Priest, Alan

Full Name: Priest, Alan

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): art theory, Gothic (Medieval), and Medieval (European)

Career(s): clergy


Overview

Priest continued and refined the analysis of Wilhelm Vöge. His essay on the masters of the west facade of Chartres cathedral, 1923, follow A. Kingsley Porter was the first important venture into the history of Gothic sculpture [in the United States] (Branner).


Selected Bibliography

“The Masters of the West Facade at Chartres.” Art Studies 1 (1923).


Sources

“Alan Priest.” Chartres Cathedral: Norton Critical Studies in Art History.New York: W. W. Norton, 1969, p. 149.




Citation

"Priest, Alan." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/priesta/.


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Priest continued and refined the analysis of Wilhelm Vöge. His essay on the masters of the west facade of Chartres cathedral, 1923, follow A. Kingsley Porter was the first important venture into the hist

Prime, William Cowper

Full Name: Prime, William Cowper

Gender: male

Date Born: 1825

Date Died: 1905

Place Born: Cambridge, Washington, NY, USA

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Career(s): educators


Overview

Princeton University (“College of New Jersey”) art historian. Prime was the son of Nathaniel Scudder Prime, a Presbyterian minister and headmaster of Washington Academy, Cambridge, NY, and Julia Ann Jermain (Prime). The family moved to Sing Sing (now Ossining, NY), where Nathaniel directed the Mount Pleasant Academy. The younger Prime graduated with a law degree from Princeton (then known as the College of New Jersey) in 1843. He practiced as an attorney in New York City, 1843-53. In 1851 he married Mary Trumbull of Stonington, CT. During the Civil War, when the New York Journal of Commerce was closed down in 1861 for treasonous reporting (“disloyal conduct”), David Marvin Stone, persuaded Prime to edit the paper and hold the concomitant presidency of the Associated Press. Prime was responsible for concluding the news association war of 1866, a rift between east and west newspapers. He left the paper and AP presidency in 1869, retaining significant holdings in the newspaper. Prime’s first books were on his extensive travels, with titles such as Boat Life in Egypt and Nubia (1857), Tent Life in the Holy Land (1857), and I Go A-fishing (1873). Throughout his career, Prime had amassed various collections. He initially focused on coins, the on to early illustrated books and medieval woodcuts. Together with his wife they collected old porcelain. Prime published Coins, Medals and Seals in 1861, and Pottery and Porcelain in1878. Prime was an early exponent of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He both a trustee and vice-president of the Museum. In 1882, Prime announced he was willing to donate his porcelain collect to the College of New Jersey. Prime’s interest in establishing an art department at Princeton led him and McClellan to author a pamphlet for the university, The Establishment of a Department of Art Instruction. The pamphlet suggested that an art department should make no distinction between high and low art. In 1883, Princeton established a department of art (but no building), and Prime and Allan Marquand were made full professors. In 1884 he became a professor of the history of art and gave his first classes in 1885. However, even though his name appeared in catalogs, Prime stopped giving lectures only a few years later, perhaps because the College has lost interest in housing his porcelain collection. In his later years he acted as literary executor to McClellan.


Selected Bibliography

Passio Christi. Die kleine Passion. The Little Passion of Albert Durer Reproduced in Fac-simile. New York: J. W. Bouten, 1868; Pottery and Porcelain of All Times and Nations, with Tables of Factory and Artists’ marks for the Use of Collectors. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1878.


Sources

Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg. The Eye of the Tiger: The Founding and Development of the Department of Art and Archaeology, 1883-1923, Princeton University. Princeton, NJ: Department of Art and Archaeology and Art Museum, 1983, p. 10; Rosewater, Victor. “Prime, William Cowper.” Dictionary of American Biography. New York: C. Scribner’s sons, 1928-1936; Prime, William Cowper. Later years. New York, Harper & brothers, 1854.




Citation

"Prime, William Cowper." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/primew/.


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Princeton University (“College of New Jersey”) art historian. Prime was the son of Nathaniel Scudder Prime, a Presbyterian minister and headmaster of Washington Academy, Cambridge, NY, and Julia Ann Jermain (Prime). The family moved to Sing Sing (

Porter, James A.

Full Name: Porter, James Amos

Other Names:

  • James Porter

Gender: male

Date Born: 22 December 1905

Date Died: 28 February 1970

Place Born: Baltimore, Baltimore Independent City, MD, USA

Place Died: Washington, DC, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): African American, American (North American), Black (general, race and ethnicity), Colonial North American, Harlem Renaissance, Modern (style or period), and Zimbabwean

Career(s): art historians and educators

Institution(s): Howard University


Overview

Art professor and early specialist of African-American art, museum director, and visual artist. Porter was the son of African-American couple John Porter and Lydia Peck Porter. His father was a Christian minister and his mother a schoolteacher. Porter attended public schools in Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D. C., before graduating cum laude with a B.S. in art from Howard University in 1927. He was immediately hired as an instructor of drawing and painting in Howard’s art department. Porter received recognition from the Harmon Foundation for his portraits, exhibiting his work both at Howard and Hampton Universities. During his educational pursuits, he met Dorothy Louise Burnett [Dorothy Porter], a librarian at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library, where he did research. On December 27, 1929, Porter and Burnett married and together they had one child, Constance Porter Uzelac (1939-2012) who went on to become a scholar of African American history. This union was personally and professionally important to Porter, as Dorothy provided bibliographic information critical to his investigations. In the same year he began attending The Art Students League of New York, then led by Dimitri Romanovsky (1887-1971) and George Bridgeman (1864-1943). Porter’s written work in art history began appearing in 1931 with the article, “Versatile Interests of the Early Negro Artist,” in Art in America. In 1935, he traveled to Paris to study medieval archaeology at the L’Institut d’art et d’archéologie, Sorbonne through a fellowship from the Scholarship Institute of International Education, and grants from the College Art Association and the Rockefeller Foundation. He was awarded a certificat de présence from L’Institut d’art et d’archéologie, Sorbonne in 1935. Porter authored “Four Problems in the History of Negro Art,” published in 1942, in the Journal of Negro History which outlined the difficulties in documenting African American art. These included the unrecorded work of handicrafts and fine arts by African-Americans before 1820, the black artist’s relation to the white American society, the decline in production among black artists between 1870 and 1890, and the role of the African-American artist in the so-called “New Negro Movement” of 1900-1920. After completing his M.A. at the Fine Arts Graduate Center at New York University, Porter began writing his book, Modern Negro Art, which was published in 1943. The book described the history of African-American art from its beginnings to the mid-twentieth century, and included discussions of contemporary artists such as Archibald Motley (1891-1981) and Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000). Between 1945 and 1946, Porter traveled to Cuba and Haiti to study Caribbean and Latin American art, which he discovered had a significant relationship to African art and architecture. The art materials he collected during his tour led to the creation of Latin American art and African art and architecture curricula at Howard University.

In 1953, he was appointed head of Howard University’s Art Department, as well as its Art Gallery. As director, his profile at Howard was instrumental in adding the university to the list of those receiving renaissance and baroque art from the Kress collection at its disbursement in 1961. Porter received research grants from the Belgian Ministry of Education in 1955 to study Belgian art (the Belgium-American Art Seminar), and studied Mexican fresco murals at the Instituto Allende in Guanajuato, Mexico. He was a UNESCO delegate at the Conference on Africa held in Boston in 1961 and a member of the Arts Council of Washington, D.C. between 1961 and 1963. The Washington Evening Star awarded him a Faculty Research grant in 1963, allowing him to spend a year on sabbatical studying art in Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Togo, and Senegal. In March 1965, Porter was named one of “America’s most outstanding men of the arts” by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, at the National Gallery of Art, in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the National Gallery. Towards the end of the 1960s, Porter was diagnosed with cancer and became seriously ill. Despite this, he traveled to Rhodesia to chair a conference on Zimbabwean culture and, in 1970, one week before his death, he chaired a conference on African American artists. His second book, The Black Artist, was never completed.

Porter was the first scholar to provide a systematic, critical analysis of African American artists and their works. Porter disagreed with scholars and critics, including  W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, over the role of abstraction in modern African-American art, praising artists who used traditional methods of figural representation over those who used abstract figures. He was also a significant mentor and professor to a long list of artists including, David C. Driskell, Sylvia Snowden (b. 1942), and Mildred Thompson (1936-2003). The James A. Porter Gallery of African-American Art at the Howard University Gallery was dedicated in his honor in 1970. In 1990 the Department of Art at Howard created the annual James A. Porter Inaugural Colloquium on African-American Art.


Selected Bibliography

  • Modern Negro Art, New York: Dryden Press, 1943;
  • Laura Wheeler Waring: An Appreciational Study. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Gallery of Art, 1949;
  • “Negro Art on Review.” American Magazine of Art 27, January 1934; Introduction. “The Art of Charles White: An Appreciation.” Images of Dignity: The Drawings of Charles White. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1967;
  • “Four Problems in the History of Negro Art,” Journal of Negro History 27, no. 1, pp. 9-36, January 1942;
  • “Versatile Interests of the Early Negro Artist: A Neglected Chapter of American Art History,” Art in America and Elsewhere 24, pp. 16-27, no. 1, January 1936;
  • Ten Afro-American artists of the Nineteenth century. Washington: Gallery of Art, Howard University, 1967.
  •  

Sources

  • [obituary:] Art Journal 29 (1970): 295-296. James A. Porter, Artist and Art Historian: The Memory of the Legacy. Washington, DC: Howard University Gallery of Art,1992;
  • “James A. Porter Chronology, compiled by Constance Porter Uzelac.” Modern Negro Art. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1992;
  • Uzelac, Constance Porter. “Porter, James.” American National Biography;
  • Uzelac, Constance Porter. “DOROTHY PORTER WESLEY (1905-1995)” BlackPast, 20 January 2010;
  • James A. Porter Inaugural Colloquium on African-American Art [conference announcement]. Howard University, 1990;
  • Davis, Donald F., “James Porter of Howard: Artist, Writer.” Journal of Negro History 70 (1985): 89-91;
  • Brown, Arthur C. III, “James A. Porter: The Father of African-American Art History,” The Baltimore Renaissance, January 20, 2015, https://thelyfe.wordpress.com/2015/01/20/james-a-porter-the-father-of-african-american-art-history/;
  • Meyer, Beth Anne, “James A. Porter December 22, 1905-February 28, 1970,” The Black Renaissance in Washington, June 20, 2003, http://dclibrarylabs.org/blkren/bios/porterja.html;
  • “James Amos Porter, American (1905-1970),” RoGallery, https://rogallery.com/artists/james-amos-porter/.

Archives

  • James A. Porter papers, 1867-2009, in Dorothy Porter Wesley papers, Emory University, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/8zs6d

Contributors: Alana J. Hyman and LaNitra Michele Walker


Citation

Alana J. Hyman and LaNitra Michele Walker. "Porter, James A.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/porterj/.


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Art professor and early specialist of African-American art, museum director, and visual artist. Porter was the son of African-American couple John Porter and Lydia Peck Porter. His father was a Christian minister and his mother a schoolteacher. Po

Portoghesi, Paolo

Full Name: Portoghesi, Paolo

Gender: male

Date Born: 1931

Place Born: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

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


Overview

Early Post-modern architect; architectural historian and Borromini scholar. Portoghesi described himself as having been born “in the shadow of Borromini’s San Ivo” (Steinberg) and hence much of his professional life as an architectural historian revolved around this architect. He entered the University of Rome, writing articles on Borromini in 1953 through 1955 and also a booklet on Borromini’s monuments in the Lateran Basilica I monumenti borrominiani della Basilica Lateranense the same year. Portoghesi graduated with a degree in architecture in 1957 and in the history of art in 1958. In 1959 he was appointed Professor at the school of advanced studies in the study and restoration of monuments. As an architect, Portoghesi designed in a neo-Baroque style, first exemplified in 1959 in the Casa Baldi (Via Flaminia, Rome). Making use of the traditional tufa material of ancient homes, he worked to relate his buildings to their contexts, both social and physical. The following year, 1960, he published a work on the eighteenth-century architect Bernardo Antonio Vitone, “Metodo e poesia nell’architettura di B. A. Vittone” (“Method and poetry in the architecture of B.A. Vittone”). He began teaching a course on architectural criticism at the University in 1961. Portoghesi and Bruno Zevi edited a festschrift for Giulio Carlo Argan in 1964, Michelangelo Architetto. That year, too, Portoghesi published his book Borromini nella cultura europea (“Borromini in European Culture”) and launched an architectural practice with Vittorio Gigliotti near Porta Pinciana in Rome. His commissions of this era included the Casa Andreis (1964-1967). He was appointed professor of the history of public architecture in Baroque Rome in 1966. A critical edition of Leon Battista Alberti: l’architettura and a second work on Vittone, Bernardo Vittone, un architetto tra Illuminismo e Rococò (“Bernardo Vittone, an architect between the Enlightenment and the Rococo”) were published. Portoghesi was appointed professor of History of Architecture at Milan Polytechnic in 1966 as well. The following year Portoghesi published his important Borromini, Architettura come linguaggio which was translated in English as The Rome of Borromini: Architecture as Language. In 1968 he became dean of the Faculty of Architecture of Milan Polytechnic, issuing L’Eclettismo a Roma (“Eclecticism in Rome”) and Editor-in-chief of the Dizionario di Architettura e Urbanistica or “DAU”. Another important architectural commission with Gigliotti, Casa Papanice, was completed 1969-1970. In 1976, Portoghesi’s most outstanding commission, the mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre in Rome was dedicated. He was appointed professor of architecture at the University of Milan the same year, where he taught until 1980. He next headed the architecture section at the Venice Biennial. That year, too, 1980, he accepted a professorship in architectural history at the University of Rome and published Dopo l’architettura moderna (“After modern architecture”). In 1982 Portoghesi became Professor of History of Architecture at Rome University. He accepted the Editor-in-chief position of Materia magazine in 1990. Portoghesi was named full professor of Urban Planning at “La Sapienza,” University in Rome in 1995. A 1974 manifesto, Le inibizioni dell’architettura moderna outlined his practicing architectural theory as a “system of places”. With Zevi, he promoted a modernists who, in their architecture, related their work to its environment, (e.g., Victor Horta and Frank Lloyd Wright). He was a founder of the first international exhibition of Post-modernist architecture (Venice Biennale,1980). Like many post-modern architects, he design furnishings of his buildings. He engaged in a celebrated debate (along with Zevi) countering the criticisms of Manfredo Tafuri on the purposes of architectural history.


Selected Bibliography

I monumenti borrominiani della Basilica Lateranense. Rome: Istituto de storia dell’architetura, Facoltà di architettura, Università di Roma, 1955; Metodi di progettazione nella storia dell’architettura. Rome : s.n., 1960; Borromini nella cultura europea. Roma: Officina Edizione, 1964; “La Biblioteca laurenziana.” in, Argan, Giulio Carlo, et al. Michelangiolo architetto. Turin: Einaudi, 1964; Disegni di Francesco Borromini. Rome: De Luca, 1967, English, Borromini. London: Thames & Hudson, 1968; Borromini: Architettura come linguaggio. Milan: Electa, 1967, English, The Rome of Borromini: Architecture as Language. New York: G. Braziller, 1968; Roma barocca: storia di una civiltà architettonica. Rome: C. Bestetti, 1967; and Borsi, Franco. Victor Horta. Rome: Edizioni del Tritone, 1969; and Gigliotti, Vittorio, and Mousawi, Sami. La Moschea di Roma/The Mosque in Rome. Palermo: Alloro Editrice, 1993; Roma del Rinascimento. 2 vols. Milan: Electa, 1971; and Moschini, Francesco. Progetti e disegni, 1949-1979/Projects and Drawings, 1949-1979 [of Paolo Portoghesi]. Florence: Centro Di, 1979; and Scarpa, Carlo. Cemetery Brion-Vega, S. Vito, Treviso, Italy, 1970-72. Tokyo: A. D. A. Edita, 1979; Aldo Rossi: the Sketchbooks 1990-1997. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000; and Tabarrini, Marisa. Storia di San Carlino alle Quattro Fontane. Rome: Newton & Compton, 2001.


Sources

Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Alla ricerca dell’architettura perduta: le opere di Paolo Portoghesi, Vittorio Gigliotti, 1959-1975/On the Search for Lost Architecture: the Works of Paolo Portoghesi, Vittorio Gigliotti, 1959-1975. Rome: Officina, 1975; note, Steinberg, Leo. “Introduction.” Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: a Study in Multiple Form and Architectural Symbolism. New York: Garland, 1977, p. xxii; Norberg-Schulz, Christian. “Paolo Portoghesi.” Dictionary of Art 25: 272-273; Bonis, A. de. “Interview: Aldo Rossi and Paolo Portoghesi.” Architectural Design (London) 52 no. 1/2 (1982): 13-19. [internet site] http://www.floornature.com/articoli/articolo.php?id=64&sez=6&lang=en.




Citation

"Portoghesi, Paolo." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/portoghesip/.


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Early Post-modern architect; architectural historian and Borromini scholar. Portoghesi described himself as having been born “in the shadow of Borromini’s San Ivo” (Steinberg) and hence much of his professional life as an architectural historian r

Posner, Donald

Full Name: Posner, Donald

Other Names:

  • Donald Posner

Gender: male

Date Born: 1931

Date Died: 2005

Place Born: New York, NY, USA

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): museums (institutions)

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


Overview

Carracci scholar; Ailsa Mellon Bruce Professor of Fine Arts and deputy director, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1983-2002. Posner graduated from Queens College Phi Beta Kappa in 1956, writing his M.A. at Harvard University in 1957. He completed his dissertation at New York University in 1962 under Walter F. Friedländer on the topic of Annibale Carracci and immediately joined the faculty. He married fellow graduate student in art history Kathleen Weil-Garris the same year (later divorced). Posner was editor-in-Chief of the Art Bulletin between 1968-71 and art historian in residence, American Academy in Rome, 1968-1969. He revised and published his dissertation on Annibale Carracci in 1971. The following year he won the Charles Rufus Morey Award for Most Distinguished Work of Art Historical Scholarship from the College Art Association. In 1973 Posner wrote the volume on Watteau for the important Art in Context series of Viking Press. He was a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton in 1976. For the academic year 1978-79 he was appointed acting Director for Academic Affairs at the Institute of Fine Arts. He was named Deputy Director, Institute of Fine Arts, N. Y. U., in 1983, remaining until 2002 Posner was Chairman of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board from 1991- 1994.


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] The Roman Style of Annibale Carracci and His School. New York University, 1962; Annibale Carracci: A Study in the Reform of Italian Painting around 1590. 2 vols. London: Phaidon Press, 1971; and Held, Julius. 17th and 18th Century Art: Baroque Painting, Sculpture, Architecture. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1972; Watteau: A Lady at her Toilet. New York: The Penguin Press/Viking, 1973; Antoine Watteau. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984.


Sources

IFA Faculty Directory Donald Posner. http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/fineart/ifa/faculty/posner.htm; [condolence announcement:] The New York Times August 17, 2005, p. 16.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Posner, Donald." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/posnerd/.


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Carracci scholar; Ailsa Mellon Bruce Professor of Fine Arts and deputy director, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1983-2002. Posner graduated from Queens College Phi Beta Kappa in 1956, writing his M.A. at Harvard University in 1957. H

Posse, Hans

Full Name: Posse, Hans

Other Names:

  • Hans Posse

Gender: male

Date Born: 1879

Date Died: 1942

Place Born: Dresden, Saxony, Germany

Place Died: Dresden, Saxony, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany


Overview

Director of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie (1913-1942) and Nazi administrator in charge of the depository of looted art during the Reich years. Posse’s father was a respected archivist in Dresden. The younger Posse joined the Dresden gallery, the state gallery of Saxony in 1910 and became director in 1913. He issued an updated edition of the Dresden holdings catalog of Karl Woermann. From the first as director, he showed a special callousness toward returning loaned pictures. During World War I, Raphael’s “Portrait of a Youth” (Czartoryski Collection of the National Gallery, Warsaw, Poland) was moved to Dresden for safekeeping. After the war, Posse delayed returning the picture until 1920. When the Nazi’s gained power in Germany, Posse was briefly removed from office for anti-Nazi sentiments and having acquired art they considered “degenerate,” i.e., modern. He was reinstated by Hitler personally in 1939 and placed in charge of creating a museum in Linz, Austria, for the Führer. The project was referred to as the “Sonderauftrag” (special commission). The same year, Posse confiscated the collection of the Rothschild brothers, Alphonse Mayer Rothschild (1878-1942) and Louis Rothschild (1882-1955). Assisted by the Kunsthistorisches director, Ludwig von Baldass, plunderers took thousands of objects from the long-time Jewish Vienese residents. The treasures were taken to the Hofburg palace, the Nazis’ Zentraldepot for confiscated art. Lesser pieces went to Viennese museums, including the Kunsthistorisches, while much of the decorative arts, mainly porcelains, were auctioned at the state-owned Dorotheum. Posse was aided in his art thefts by the unscrupulous Berlin dealer Karl Haberstock (1878-1956). After the invasion of Holland, Posse moved to the The Hague as Referent für Sonderfragen (Adviser on “Special Questions”). With the aid of the Seyss-Inquart government, Posse’s office forced the purchase of major portions of the collection of Fritz Mannheimer (1890-1939) in 1944, including “The Jewish Doctor” by Rembrandt. The Fürherbefehl directive authorized Posse to “make decisions on the Führer’s behalf” for works of art discovered throughout the Reich. By 1941, Posse’s mission was aligned with the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) confiscations. Posse acquired Vermeer’s “The Artist in His Studio,” then in the hands of the Czernin family of Vienna, in1940, through the intervention of Reichsleiter Baldur von Schirach (1907-1974) after accusations of unpaid taxes to the family failed. Posse added three other Rembrandts to the Linz Collection, in addition to Watteau’s “La Danse” from Potsdam, the Corsini Memling portrait, and Rubens’ “Ganymede.” 21,000 objects were seized in France alone, of which the Linz collection took all but the 700–the others earmarked for the collection of Hermann Göring, another Nazi official collecting stolen art. Other specialists who advise Posse included Friedrich Wolffhardt (1899-?), a captain in the SS, who handled rare books and manuscripts; Fritz Dworschak, an Austrian Nazi party loyal, in charge of coins and medal collections; and Hans Reger, an architect from Munich to document the objects in photographs. Posse also hired a personal assistant, Robert Oertel, an Italian paintings scholar, to keep the records. Posse contracted cancer of the tongue and died in 1942. His funeral was attended by many ranking Nazis; Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), the minister of propaganda, read the eulogy. He was succeeded, both at the Dresden Gemäldegalerie and the Führermuseum in 1943 by Hermann Voss. As the Allies moved into Europe in 1944, the art was moved to the Altaussee salt mines near Salzburg for safe keeping. After capture in 1945, the American 42nd Division army authorized the Austrian government to handle restitution. However, the Rothschilds were coerced to leave many works already in Austrian museums, including the eleven paintings to Kunsthistorisches, thirty works on paper to the Albertina, forty-three to the Museum of Applied Art, and eight works to the Belvedere Gallery. The Austrian government only returned works to the Rothschild heirs in 1999. Despite his complicity in assembling a Nazi art collection (Posse acquired over 2500 objects in three years), Posse disagreed so strongly with the Nazi view of modern art that it forced him into early retirement. As a scholar, he updated several excellent catalogs for the Dresden gallery.


Selected Bibliography

Catalogue of the Pictures in the Royal Gallery at Dresden. 8th ed. Dresden: Wilhelm und Bertha v. Baensch Stiftung, 1912; and Jähnig, Karl Wilhelm. Die staatliche Gemäldegalerie zu Dresden: vollständiges beschreibendes Verzeichnis der älteren Gemälde, herausgegeben im Auftrage des Ministeriums für Volksbildung. Dresden: W. und B. v. BaenschStiftung, 1929ff.; Die Gemäldegalerie des Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum. Vollständiger beschreibender Katalog mit Abbildungen … Im Auftrag der Generalverwaltung der K. Museen. 2 vols. Berlin: J. Bard, 1909-1911; “Lucas Cranachs Katharinenaltar in der dresdner Galerie.” Pantheon 18 (August 1936): 243-249.


Sources

Kaufman, Jason. “The Rothschild Affair: A Test of Austria’s Conscience.” Wall Street Journal, July 6, 1999, p. A13; Wałek, Janusz. “The Czartoryski ‘Portrait of a Youth’ by Raphael.” Artibus et Historiae 12, no. 24. (1991): 204-206; http://schikelgruber.net/rapebis; Dictionary of German Biography 8: 47; Plaut, James Sachs. “Hitler’s Capital.” The Atlantic 178 (October 1946): 73-78; Plaut, James Sachs. “Loot for the Master Race.” The Atlantic 178 (September 1946): 57-63; Harclerode, Peter, and Pittaway, Brendan. The Lost Masters: World War II and the Looting of Europe’s Treasurehouses. New York: Welcome Rain Publishers, 2000, pp. 8-18; Office of Strategic Services. Art Looting Investigation Unit. Consolidated Interrogation Report no. 4: “Chief Personalities of the Linz Commission: The Directorate.” pp. 18-19. (PRO T 209 29); Petropoulous, Jonathan. The Faustian Bargan: The Art World in Nazi Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 191.




Citation

"Posse, Hans." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/posseh/.


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Director of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie (1913-1942) and Nazi administrator in charge of the depository of looted art during the Reich years. Posse’s father was a respected archivist in Dresden. The younger Posse joined the Dresden gallery, the stat

Post, Chandler R.

Full Name: Post, Chandler R.

Other Names:

  • Chandler Rathfon Post

Gender: male

Date Born: 1881

Date Died: 1959

Place Born: Detroit, Wayne, MI, USA

Place Died: Foxboro, Norfolk, MA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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


Overview

Historian of Spanish and Italian renaissance art; early art history professor at Harvard. Post was born to William R. Post and Anne M. Rathfon (Post). He graduated from the University [grammar] School in Detroit and then attended Harvard University, graduating with a B.A. in Spanish literature in 1904. His classmates included Franklin Roosevelt and Hispanic scholar Hayward Keniston (1883-1970). He spent the academic year 1904-5 at the American School in Athens working on his master’s thesis on Greek literature. His Harvard master’s thesis was granted in 1906. Post then began teaching as an instructor of English, French, Italian and Greek and fine arts at his alma mater, and working on his doctorate. His dissertation in Romance literature, written under Jeremiah D. M. Ford (1873-1958), was completed in 1909 on the topic of Dante’s influence on Castilian allegory. That same year, Post suggested Harvard’s first specialized course on Italian art to Department Head, Arthur Upham Pope. During those years, Post made the friendship of Boston collector Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924). Though his first published article (1909) was in art history, his article publications of these years focused on literature, the most notable of which, “The Dramatic Art of Sophocles” appeared in 1912. The same year he was named professor of Greek and Fine Arts. In World War I, Post served as assistant to the military attaché at the United States Embassy in Rome 1917-1919. The Italian government made him Chevalier of the Order of St. Maurice and St. Lazarus in 1918. Returning to academic life after the war, Post continued to alternate his Harvard courses between the Departments of Classics and Fine Arts. His Fine Arts course 9A “Art and Culture of Italy in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance” was a pioneering synthesis of art, religion and history. He was appointed associate professor in 1920. In 1921, Post published his History of European and American Sculpture, one of the early surveys of the medium in America. In 1923 he was promoted to full professor. Post co-wrote with George Henry Chase A History of Sculpture in 1924, but was already at that time working on his magnum opus, The History of Spanish Painting (12 vols.), which appeared beginning in 1930. Post spent much of the 1930’s hunting for obscure paintings in Spain to complete his corpus. He was made William Dorr Boardman professor of Fine Arts in 1934, holding the position as emeritus after 1950 when he retired. In 1953 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan. He was at work on the final volumes of his History of Spanish Painting at the time of his death. The History was completed by a former student Harold E. Wethey. His students, in addition to Wethey, included Benjamin Rowland, Jr., Martin S. Soria, and Walter W. S. Cook. Together with A. Kingsley Porter, Walter Muir Whitehill and Georgiana Goddard King, Cook, Post constituted an early “New England School” of American interest in Spanish Romaneque studies. The Romanesque scholar Walter B. Cahn termed Post’s History of Spanish Painting “now scarcely readable.” As a lecturer, one student, Otto Wittmann, Jr., recalled him lecturing completely from memory, seldom writing information down. “His tests were all factual tests…that’s all he cared about.”


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Castillian Allegory of the Fifteenth Century, with Especial Reference to the Influence of Dante. Harvard University, 1909, published as Mediaeval Spanish Allegory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1915; and Wethey, Harold E. A History of Spanish Painting. 14 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930-66; A History of European and American Sculpture from the Early Christian Period to the Present Day. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1921; and Chase, George Henry, 1874-1952. A History of Sculpture. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1925.


Sources

Panofsky, Erwin. “The History of Art.” In The Cultural Migration: The European Scholar in America. Introduction by W. Rex Crawford, 82-111. 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. 47 mentioned; The Dictionary of Art; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 444; Wethey, Harold E. “Chandler Rathfon Post.” A History of Spanish Painting volume 14. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966, pp. xi-xiii; [transcript] Smith, Richard Cándida, interviewer. Otto Wittmann: The Museum in the Creation of Community. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 1995, p. 22-23; Cahn, Walter. “Romanesque Art, Then and Now: A Personal Reminiscence.” in Hourihane, Colum, ed. Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn. University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2008, p. 33; [obituaries:] New York Times. November 4, 1959, p. 35; Rowland, Benjamin, Hurley, John H., and Freedberg, Sydney J. “Chandler R. Post.” Art Journal 20 no. 1 (Fall 1960): 26.




Citation

"Post, Chandler R.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/postc/.


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Historian of Spanish and Italian renaissance art; early art history professor at Harvard. Post was born to William R. Post and Anne M. Rathfon (Post). He graduated from the University [grammar] School in Detroit and then attended Harvard Universit

Pottier, Edmond

Full Name: Pottier, Edmond

Other Names:

  • Edmond Pottier

Gender: male

Date Born: 1855

Date Died: 1934

Place Born: Sarrebruck, France

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

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), ceramic ware (visual works), pottery (visual works), and vase


Overview

Scholar of Greek vases.



Sources

Medwid, Linda M. The Makers of Classical Archaeology: A Reference Work. New York: Humanity Books, 2000 pp. 247-248; Rouet, Philippe. Approaches to the Study of Attic Vases: Beazley and Pottier. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.




Citation

"Pottier, Edmond." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/pottierf/.


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Scholar of Greek vases.

Poulsen, Frederik

Full Name: Poulsen, Frederik

Other Names:

  • Poul Frederik Sigfred Poulsen

Gender: male

Date Born: 1876

Date Died: 1950

Place Born: Dalsgaard, Denmark

Home Country/ies: Denmark

Subject Area(s): archaeology


Overview

Archaeologist. museum director and specialist in classical iconography. Poulsen studied at the university in Göttingen under Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848-1931). He moved to Munich were he equally impressed Adolf Furtwängler. Between 1905-7 he studied under the auspices of the l’Ecole Française d’Athèness, concentrating on pottery from the Dipylon. Poulsen accepted the position of assistant at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen in 1910. Using colored drawings of Etruscan tomb paintings originally commissioned by the industrialist Carl C. H. Jacobsen (1842-1914) the 1890s, Poulsen authored Etruscan Tomb Paintings in 1922. He began publishing on classical portraiture with his Greek and Roman Portraits in English Country Homes of 1923. He was appointed director of the Glyptotek in 1926. In 1931 his major work on classical iconography, Iconographic Studies in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek was published. His participation in excavations included those at Delphi and Kalydon, the latter resulting in the publication Das Heroon von Kalydon, 1934, with Konstantinos Rhomaios (b. 1874) and the architect Ejnar Dyggve (1887-1961). His general catalog of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek of 1940 remains a source of scholarship for the works in that museum.


Selected Bibliography

and Dyggve, Ejnar and Rhomaios, Konstaninos. Das Heroon von Kalydon. Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard, 1934; and Rhomaios, Konstantinos. Aus einer alten Etruskerstadt. Copenhagen: A.F. Høst & Søn, 1927; Iconographic studies in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek. Copenhagen: s.n., 1931; Glimpses of Roman Culture. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1950; Etruscan Tomb Paintings: their Subjects and Significance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922; Delphi. London: Gyldendal, 1920; Greek and Roman Portraits in English Country Houses. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923.


Sources

Poulsen, Frederik. Travels & Sketches. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1923; “Poulsen, Poul Frederik Sigfred.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 2, pp. 926-7.




Citation

"Poulsen, Frederik." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/poulsenf/.


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Archaeologist. museum director and specialist in classical iconography. Poulsen studied at the university in Göttingen under Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848-1931). He moved to Munich were he equally impressed Adolf

Pouncey, Philip

Full Name: Pouncey, Philip

Other Names:

  • Philip Michael Rivers Pouncey

Gender: male

Date Born: 1910

Date Died: 1990

Place Born: Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, England, UK

Place Died: Kensington, Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Career(s): curators


Overview

Curator and historian of Italian drawings. Pouncy was the son of Reverend George Ernest Pouncey, a banker who had taken clerical vows, Madeline Mary Roberts (Pouncy). He attended Marlborough College and Queens’ College, Cambridge. After viewing the 1930 “Italian Art, 1200-1900” exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, he decided to pursue art after college. He graduated in1931 and volunteered at the Fitzwilliam Museum from 1931-1933, making short trips to Italy in between. He was appointed as an assistant keeper in the National Gallery in London in 1934, where he remained until 1939. In 1937 he married Myril Gros, the daughter of a French army officer. He wrote the catalogs for the fourteenth-century Italian paintings, all published after he left the Gallery. In 1939 he move with the objects from the National Gallery to safekeeping in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, Wales. At Aberystwyth his duties included editing the existing catalog of early Italian paintings, and supervising the management of the National Gallery collection, which was transferred from London during World War II. While working in Aberystwyth, Pouncey was closely associated with the assistant curator of the Print Room for the British Museum, Hugh Popham. The prints from this collection had also been moved to Aberystwyth. Popham, Johannes Wilde and Frederick Antal who were also assigned to Aberystwyth, would discuss the collection with Pouncey. He completed his war service working for the Intelligence Unit of the Foreign Office (Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park). After the war, his familiarity with the Print collection at the British Museum, led to an appointment there, collaborating with Popham (officially now) on cataloging the Italian drawings. These volumes appeared in 1950, 1962 (in collaboration with John Arthur Gere) and in 1983. Pouncy was named deputy keeper in 1954, however the keepership was never offered. In 1966 he joined Sothebys as a director while continuing to work on his catalogs. His only monograph, a 15-page Italian essay on Lorenzo Lotto’s drawings, Lotto disegnatore,1965, described the relationship between Lotto’s paintings and his drawings. From 1966 until his retirement in 1983, Pouncey served as a director at Sotheby’s, and as an advisor to the Uffizi, Louvre, Fitzwilliam, and Victoria and Albert Museums. In 1975 Pouncey was elected a fellow of the British Academy and an honorary keeper of Italian drawings of the British Museum. A loan exhibition of his (re)attributions was held on his 75th birthday at the Museum. A daughter, Francoise, married Marco Chiarini, director of the Galleria Palatina (Palazzo Pitti). Pouncey was greatly influenced by the classic Crowe and Cavalcaselle History of Italian Renaissance Art, whose own approach was similarly untheoretical and connoisseurship based. His review of the 1964 Italian edition of Bernard Berenson‘s The Drawings of the Florentine Painters remains part of his significant writings.


Selected Bibliography

  • Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. 3 vols. in 7. London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1950-1983, specifically, vols 1 & 2 Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum;
  • and Popham, A. E. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries; vols 3 & 4, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum;
  • and Gere, J. A. Raphael and his Circle; 5 & 6, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum;
  • [only Popham] Artists Working in Parma in the Sixteenth Century, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum;
  • vol 7 [Wilde, Johannes] Michelangelo and his Studio; vols 8 & 9, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum;
  • and Gere, J. A., and Wood, Rosalind. Artists Working in Rome, c. 1550 to c. 1640; “Review of I disegni dei pittori fiorentini, by Bernard Berenson.” Master Drawings 2, no. 3 (1964): 278-93.

Sources

  • The Dictionary of Art; Gere, J. A. “Pouncey, Philip Michael Rivers (1910-1990).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.


Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Pouncey, Philip." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/pounceyp/.


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Curator and historian of Italian drawings. Pouncy was the son of Reverend George Ernest Pouncey, a banker who had taken clerical vows, Madeline Mary Roberts (Pouncy). He attended Marlborough College and Queens’ College, Cambridge. After viewing th