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Sarfatti, Margherita

Full Name: Margherita Sarfatti

Other Names:

  • Margherita Grassini

Gender: female

Date Born: 1886

Date Died: 1961

Place Born: Venice, Veneto, Italy

Place Died: Cavallasca, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): Futurist, Italian (culture or style), and Modern (style or period)

Career(s): art critics


Overview

Art-critic and art historian, exponent of the early Italian Futurists and unofficial cultural arbiter during the early years of Italian Fascism.  Sarfatti was born Margherita Grassini. Her father was a government lawyer and businessman, Amedeo Grassini (1848-1908), and he mother Emma Levi (Grassini) (1850-1900). The young Sarfatti was privately (and secularly) tutored at home; one tutor the secretary-general of the newly founded Venice Biennale, Antonio Fradeletto (1858-1930). It was Fradeletto who introduced her to a socialism that would last her lifetime, through the writings of John Ruskin.  Through her father’s illustrious circle of friends–the Venetian state was some of the most respecting of Jews in all Europe–she met Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto (1835-1914), later Pope Pius X.   She married Cesare Sarfatti (1867-1924), a Jewish lawyer from Padua at age 18. Their honeymoon in Paris exposed her to Cézanne and Toulouse-Lautrec, enthusiasms that preceded Italian tastes. Moving to Milan in 1902 they became culturally active, hosting salons where, among others, the Futurist artists met.  Beginning in 1908, she wrote as art critic for the Socialist Party newspaper Avanti! forwarding a theme of bringing art to the masses. Here she highlighted the work of the Italian Futurists.  While attending the salons of the Russian socialist Anna Kuliscioff (1857-1925) she met Benito Mussolini in 1912, then a socialist activist and editor of the weekly Lotta di classe (The Class Struggle) published in Forli, Italy. The two became intermittent lovers. The populist initiatives of artists such as Giacomo Balla and the sculptor/illustrator Duilio Cambelotti came in for her praise in a 1912 article.  She abandoned the Futurists when their works followed the Cubist style. Boccioni’s non-Futurist portrait of Busoni in 1916, brought her approval as a “return to order.” Her favorite among these artists was Mario Sironi. Her eldest son, Roberto, enlisted in World War I and was killed at Monte Baldo in 1918. Sarfatti and Mussolini now edited Avanti!; the two left the Socialist Party in 1917 to contribute to Popolo d’Italia and later editing Mussolini’s periodical Gerarchia. Between 1922, when Mussolini became dictator, and 1929 Sarfatti was the closest woman to him, his wife remaining in Milan.  When Sarfatti’s husband died in 1924 she was free to author a highly propagandistic biography of Mussolini which appeared first in English in 1925 as The Life of Benito Mussolini.  The importance of the subject and Sarfatti’s familiarity with him rocketed her fame. Her art- and literary salons became the most important in Italy. Attempts to champion the moderate artists of  and Novecento Italiano as the ideal of fascism met with scorn on both the left and right and by 1929 Mussolini distanced himself from her and the movement. She continued to publish on art, bringing a fascist point of view to modernism. Segni, colori e luci: note d’arte appeared the same year and Storia della pittura moderna in 1930. Artists closest to her, the painter Mario Sironi and the architect Giuseppe Terragni, solid Fascists were prominent in the 1932 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution). Sarfatti toured the US in 1934 as a public relations gesture for the dictator including a meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt. Italy’s alliance with Nazi Germany required the government to adopt laws excluding Jews in 1938. Sarfatti, who, expecting this, had converted to Catholicism in the late 1920s, was still compelled to flee Italy, first for Paris, then Argentina and later Uruguay. There she wrote for the newspaper El Diario of Montevideo and published a book on Giorgioni, Giorgione: el pintor misterio in 1944. After the war she returned to Italy in 1947 and to art though she increasingly led a life of solitude.    She died at the villa di Cavallasca in 1961. Her papers are housed at the Archivio del ‘900, Mart (Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto), Rovereto, Italy.

Though “greedy, calculating, thirsty for power, arrogant, opinionated, and self-centered” (Cannistraro and Sullivan), no other woman achieved a comparable position in the Italian art world in the twentieth century (Lyttelton). Sarfatti’s intelligence is evidenced by her appreciation for Ruskin’s for his singular mind–not the traditional view of a devotee of Venential gothic–but rather as an anti-orthodoxy exponent of artists like J.W. M. Turner.  Neither a strict social realist like both the socialist and Fascist regimes under which she wrote, she held that the moral and educative functions of art had to be clear for the masses. To Sarfatti only a modern art could address this spirit. These included fin-de-siècle avant-garde movements such as the Viennese Secession, Symbolism and Italian Divisionism were acceptable and the early paintings of the Futurists, though never Cubism. Her championing of the primacy of Italian art was always in distinction to French. Israel Zangwill’s story “Chad Gadya” is a moderately fictionalized portrait of the Grassini family.  Sarfatti’s portrait appears with her daughter, Fiammetta, in frescoes by Guido Cadorin the (now) Grand Hotel Palace. In 1999 she was portrayed by Susan Saradon in a fictitious story, Cradle Will Rock.

 


Selected Bibliography

The Life of Benito Mussolini,  New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company,1925; Segni, colori e luci: note d’arte. Bologna: N. Zanichelli, 1925; Storia della pittura moderna. Rome: P. Cremonese, 1930;  Giorgione: el pintor misterio. Buenos Aires: Poseidón, 1944; Acqua passata. San Casciano: F. Cappelli, 1955;  My Fault: Mussolini as I Knew Him. New York: Enigma Books, 2014.


Sources

Longhetti, A. “La collezione Sarfatti—Una vita in una raccolta,” in Arte svelata: collezionismo privato a Como dall’Ottocento a oggi, Luciano Caramel, ed. Milan: Mazzotta, 1987, pp. 105–106; Lyttelton, Adrian. “Mussolini’s Femme Fatale.”  Review of II Duce’s Other Woman.  New York Review of Books July 15, 1993; Cannistraro, Philip, and Brian R. Sullivan. Il Duce’s Other Woman: The Untold Story of Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini’s Jewish Mistress, New York: Morrow, 1992; Bacchetta, P., and Power, Margaret. Right-wing Women: from Conservatives to Extremists Around the World.  New York : Routledge, 2002; Urso, Simona. Margherita Sarfatti. Dal mito del Dux al mito americano,Venice: Marsilio, 2003; Wieland, Karin. Die Geliebte des Duce. Das Leben der Margherita Sarfatti und die Erfindung des Faschismus, Munich: Hanser, 2004; Gutman, Daniel. El amor judío de Mussolini: Margherita Sarfatti, del fascismo al exilio. Buenos Aires: Lumiere, 2006; Liffran, Françoise. Margherita Sarfatti: l’égérie du Duce: biographie. Paris: Seuil, 2009.




Citation

"Sarfatti, Margherita." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/sarfattim/.


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Art-critic and art historian, exponent of the early Italian Futurists and unofficial cultural arbiter during the early years of Italian Fascism.  Sarfatti was born Margherita Grassini. Her father was a government lawyer and businessman, Amedeo Gra

Smith, Bernard

Full Name: Smith, Bernard

Gender: male

Date Born: 1916

Date Died: 2011

Place Born: Sydney, Australia

Home Country/ies: Australia

Institution(s): University of Melbourne


Overview

Smith’s parents were Charles Smith and Rose Anne Tierney (Smith).  

Smith graduated from the University of Sydney in 1934. The following year he began teaching painting at the NSW Department of Education. By 1940 he had given up the idea of teaching painting for art history. That year he also joined the Communist Party, beginning a bitter opposition to Australia’s participation in World War II. He married Kate Challis (d.1989) in 1941. In 1944 was appointed an education officer for the Art Gallery of NSW country art exhibitions. His first book, one on Australian art, Place, Taste and Tradition, appeared in 1945. He continued to teach until 1948 when he was awarded a scholarship for the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, University of London, studying there 1949-1951. His realization of what totalitarian-style communism was in eastern Europe resulted in his leaving the Communist party upon his return Australia where resumed his position at the Art Gallery. The following year Smith recieved a research scholarship at the newly-established Australian National University. He completed his doctorate there. Smith was appointed a lecturer University of Melbourne’s Fine Arts Department in 1955, advancing to senior lecturer. Smith formed a group of seven painters, calling themselved the Antipodeans to exhibit their work in 1959. He wrote as the art critic for Melbourne newspaper,  The Age, 1963-1966. The following year Smith and his wife moved to Sydney, appointed founding Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney. Bitter disputes toward the end of his career resulted in his retirement in 1977. Following a return to Melbourne Smith became the president of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, which he held until 1980. He also held a professorial fellow position in the department of Art History at the University of Melbourne. After Smith’s first wife died, he married Margaret Forster in 1995.

Smith employed Marxist ideology in his teaching and writing.


Selected Bibliography

European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768-1850; a Study in the History of Art and Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960; Modernism’s History: a Study in Twentieth-century Art and Ideas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.


Sources

Beilharz, Peter. Imaging the Antipodes: Culture, Theory, and the Visual in the Work of Bernard Smith. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997; Palmer, Sheridan.  Hegel’s Owl: The Life of Bernard Smith.  Sydney: Power Publications, 2016; [obituaries] Beilharz, Peter. “Bernard Smith 1916-2011 Marxism and Politics.” Art Monthly Australasia, Issue 250 (June 2012): 68.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Smith, Bernard." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/smithb/.


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Smith’s parents were Charles Smith and Rose Anne Tierney (Smith).  Smith graduated from the University of Sydney in 1934. The following year he began teaching painting at the NSW Department of Education. By 1940 he had given up the idea of

Storck, Willy F.

Full Name: Willy F. Storck

Other Names:

  • Willy Storck

Gender: male

Date Born: 1889

Date Died: 1927

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): German (culture, style, period), German Medieval styles, Medieval (European), and Northern European Medieval styles


Overview

Director of the Karlsruher Kunsthalle (Art Gallery). When hospitalized in 1925, his assistant Hans Curjel temporarily replaced him.





Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Storck, Willy F.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/storckw/.


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Director of the Karlsruher Kunsthalle (Art Gallery). When hospitalized in 1925, his assistant Hans Curjel temporarily replaced him.

Sandberg-Vavalà, Evelyn

Full Name: Sandberg-Vavalà, Evelyn May Graham

Other Names:

  • Evelyn Sandberg Vavalà
  • Evelyn May Graham Sandberg
  • Evelyn Kendrew

Gender: female

Date Born: 1888

Date Died: 08 September 1961

Place Died: Florence, Tuscany, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy and United Kingdom

Institution(s): Uffizi Museum


Overview

Historian of Italian Renaissance art, particularly of religious iconography. Born Evelyn May Graham Sandberg, she was born in 1888 to Reverend George Alfred Sandberg (1848~1910), a Clerk of the Holy Orders; her mother, Annie (1858-1894), died when she was six. She studied geography and geomorphology at the Society of Oxford Home-Students— now St. Anne’s College— before teaching geography at a girls’ grammar school starting in 1912. She then married climatologist Wilfrid Kendrew (1884-1962), who was likely her teacher prior, with whom she had one son, John Kendrew (1917-1997). Sandberg and her husband were ill-suited for each other had a tumultuous relationship. After she attempted to leave for Italy with her son in 1921, the two divorced. Sandberg then moved to Italy by herself, retaining minimal contact with her son until he was 15, becoming close thereafter. In the aftermath, Sandberg held a distaste for England, specifically the academic community which she believed to be pretentious and exclusionary.

After moving to Florence, she took on the nom de plume of Sandberg-Vavalà, taking the surname of a Yugoslavian military officer that she was romantically involved with and perhaps married to, and began studying art history with Bernard Berenson while she worked at the Uffizi gallery as a tutor. Her first major publication was La pittura veronese del trecento e del primo quattrocento, 1926, which focused on so-called primitive art from Verona and has been described as a pioneer text for the topic. Under the advice of Berenson, her next work, 1929’s La croce dipinta italiana, centered on the study of Italian painted crosses and was called “her most important work” by her friend and important British art historian, John Pope-Hennessy (1919-1994), who hailed it “as in the literal sense, [a] definitive” exploration of the topic. After this piece, she transitioned to studying dugento painting and the iconography of the Virgin and Child before the surmounting tensions of World War II forced her to move back to England from 1940-1944.

While in England, she took a break from studying art history and dedicated her time to organizing the Oxford University Gramophone Society. This was the only period of her life after taking on her nom de plume where she solely used Sandberg. When she moved back to Florence, ever-present financial problems prevented her from continuously publishing, but she was able to publish multiple successful, shorter books such as Uffizi Studies (1948) and Studies in Florentine Churches (1959).

Throughout her academic career, Sandberg-Vavalà also wrote articles for The Art Bulletin and Burlington Magazine and worked as a guide and tutor at the Uffizi gallery. In one of her notable articles, she christened the Master of San Torpé and compiled his work in 1937. Pope-Hennessy recalled her as a “remarkable teacher—fragments of conversation from thirty years ago still hang about one’s ears as one goes into the Baroncelli Chapel now— but a woman of exceptional courage, integrity, and warmth, and there was not one of her pupils who did not, imperceptibly, become her friend.” She often brought students to her home, extending friendship and creating a community among those at the Uffizi. Her notable students included the art historians Henry Clifford (1904-1974) and Marvin Eisenberg (1922-2016). During her years teaching, she compiled an expansive photographic archive of around 25,000 files that attempted to document all known gothic and renaissance paintings in Italy that she bequest to the Cini Foundation after her death, with some of her collection ending up in the Federico Zeri’s Bologna archive and at Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence.

Prior to her death from lung disease in 1961, she converted to Catholicism and was cared for by nuns until her death. She was buried in Tuscany. A year after her death, her son, John Kendrew (1917-1997) won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Max Perutz for determining the atomic structure of proteins.

Pope-Hennessey, Hugh Honour (who wrote her obituary in London Times), and Eugene Thaw (2007 interview) all recall Sandberg-Vavalà as an initially cold but caring, friendly woman who was well known for her ardent love of Italian culture and her idiosyncratic eccentricity. They all regarded her as a respected and impressive scholar who was a well-known and widely liked character in Florence. Several sources have confused her with Evelyn Marini, another female British expatriate writing on Italian Renaissance art at roughly the same time and who signed her name simply “Evelyn”.


Selected Bibliography

  • La pittura veronese del trecento e del primo quattrocento. Verona: La tipografica Veronese. 1926.
  • La croce dipinta italiana e l’iconografia della passione. Roma: Multigrafica editrice. 1929.
  • Studies in the Florentine churches Part I, Part I. Florence: Leo S. Olschki. 1959.
  • Uffizi studies: The development of the Florentine School of painting. Firenze: Olschki. 1948.

Sources


Archives


Contributors: Lee Sorensen and Malynda Wollert


Citation

Lee Sorensen and Malynda Wollert. "Sandberg-Vavalà, Evelyn." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/vavalae/.


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Historian of Italian Renaissance art, particularly of religious iconography. Born Evelyn May Graham Sandberg, she was born in 1888 to Reverend George Alfred Sandberg (1848~1910), a Clerk of the Holy Orders; her mother, Annie (1858-1894), died when sh

Swindler, Mary Hamilton

Full Name: Swindler, Mary Hamilton

Gender: female

Date Born: 1884

Date Died: 1967

Place Born: Bloomington, Monroe, IN, USA

Place Died: Haverford, Lower Merion Township, Montgomery, PA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): ancient and Classical

Institution(s): Bryn Mawr College


Overview

Classical art scholar and professor at Bryn Mawr; wrote an early important survey of ancient art. Swindler was born to Harrison T. Swindler and Ida M. Hamilton (Swindler). She received her bachelor’s from Indiana University in 1905 and her Master’s in 1906. She then worked as a scholar and then a fellow in Greek at Bryn Mawr College from 1906-1909. achieved early recognition through a 1909 article identifying a pot as by the Penthesilea Painter. A Mary E. Garrett European Fellowship for the 1909-1910 academic year allowed her to study at the University of Berlin and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. She received her Ph. D. from Bryn Mawr in 1912, after which she joined the faculty of the college. Her dissertation focused on the Cretan cults of Apollo. After fifteen years or research, Swindler published her most notable work, Ancient Painting: From the Earliest Times to the Period of Christian Art, in 1929. She was awarded a full professor position at Bryn Mawr in 1931. From 1934 to 1938, she was a major figure in Bryn Mawr’s excavations in Tarsus in Cilicia, Turkey. The excavations lasted until 1949, jointly performed by Harvard University and the Archaeological Institute of America under fellow Bryn Mawr archaeologist Hetty Goldman (1881-1972). In 1940, Swindler founded Bryn Mawr’s Ella Riegel Memorial Museum. From 1932 to 1946, she edited. as Editor-in-Chief, the American Journal of Archaeology, the first woman to hold that position, and “is credited with bringing the journal to maturity and making it a truly international publication.” (Bryn Mawr) The Journal itself, described her award as having “won the admiration of archaeologists on both sides of the water.” After she retired from her editorship, she was named Norton Lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America, named for Charles Eliot Norton. Swindler retired from Bryn Mawr in 1949 but continued to teach, research, and work in archaeological sites. After her retirement from Bryn Mawr, she accepted visiting professor and curator positions from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, and Bryn Mawr. The American Association of University Women gave her it’s annual achievement award in 1952. She was honored by the American Council of Learned Societies in 1959. Her students include Dorothy Burr Thompson.

 

 

Ancient Painting was the first survey-style work to treat all of ancient art, from Paleolithic cave painting to the late antique (“early Christian art”). It became a standard for the classroom and ushered in the genre writing of that subject. As the editor of the AJA, she had major influence over the development of archaeology in the United States (Medwid).

 

 


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Cretan Elements in the Cults and Ritual of Apollo. [published] Bryn Mawr, PA: Bryn Mawr Press, 1913, https://archive.org/details/cretanelementsi00swingoog/page/n4 ; Ancient painting: from the earliest times to the period of Christian art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929.


Sources

[obituary:] “Mary H. Swindler, Archaeologist, 83.” New York Times Jan 18, 1967; D[orthy B[urr] T[hompson]. “Mary Hamilton Swindler.” American Journal of Archaeology 54, no. 4 (1950): 291-90. doi:10.2307/501001; Medwid, Linda M. The Makers of Classical Archaeology: A Reference Work. New York: Humanity Books, 2000 pp. 285-6 “Mary Hamilton Swindler.” Marquis Who’s Who (TM), a Reed Reference Publishing Company. Accessed April 09, 2019. http://search.marquiswhoswho.com/profile/200011054618;  “Mary Hamilton Swindler.” Breaking Ground, Breaking Tradition. Accessed April 09, 2019. http://www.brynmawr.edu/library/exhibits/BreakingGround/newera.html.



Contributors: Arial Hart


Citation

Arial Hart. "Swindler, Mary Hamilton." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/swindlerm/.


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Classical art scholar and professor at Bryn Mawr; wrote an early important survey of ancient art. Swindler was born to Harrison T. Swindler and Ida M. Hamilton (Swindler). She received her bachelor’s from Indiana University in 1905 and her Master’

Swoboda, Karl Maria

Full Name: Swoboda, Karl Maria

Gender: male

Date Born: 1889

Date Died: 1977

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

Place Died: Rekawinkel, Niederösterreich, Austria

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): structuralism

Career(s): educators


Overview

Student of Aloïs Riegl; early application of structuralism to art historical interpretation Swoboda had been Max Dvořák assistant and lecturer from 1930. He was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, which is present-day Prague, Czech Republic. In 1934 he joined the faculty at the German University of Prague. At the end of World War II, Swoboda was appointed full professor at the university in Vienna in 1946. Swoboda researched late antique and early medieval architecture (‘ Roman and romanische palaces ‘, 1918) as well as the romanesque painting. Swoboda worked to reconcile the Viennese camps of Strzygowski’s Wiener Institut and Schlosser’s. “comparative art research” and the non-European art (‘ contacts of the Christian abendlaendischen art with that Islam ‘, 1952). In 1962 as a final act before he retired, Swoboda moved Institute into the main building at the Ring Strasse. Swoboda’s Viennese art historians included Ludwig von Baldass, who also at the museum, Otto Benesch, and Fritz Novotny. Institut became 1945 provisionally by Wladimir Sas-Zaloziecky (1896-1959; 1935-39 professor in Lemberg, starting from 1940 ao. Professor in Vienna) led, a specialist for Eastern European and Byzantine history of art, starting from 1949 professor in Graz. one appointed. Swoboda’s haughtiness was infamous. While Dvořák’s assistant, he accepted the dissertations of both Frederick Antal and Richard Offner on the same day, ridiculing Offner’s slender volume in comparison to Antal’s. Dvořák countered Swoboda’s criticism with the comment that Offner should publish his (Smyth).


Selected Bibliography

“Klassiche Zug in der Kunst der Prager deutschen dombaumeisters Peter Parler” Zeitschrift für Sudetendeutsche Geschichte, 1938; “Problems of the iconography of late antique and early mediaeval palaces.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 20 (May 1961): 78-89;


Sources

Dilly 21, Bazin 163, 286, 347; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 407-9; Rokyta, Hugo.”Max Dvora´k und seine Schule in den Böhmischen Ländern.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Kunst und Denkmalpflege 28 no. 3 (1974): 81-89; [obituaries:] Schmidt, Gerhard. “Karl Maria Swoboda.” Kunstchronik 30 no.12 (December 1977): 546-549; Smyth, Craig Hugh. “Glimpses of Richard Offner.” in, Offner, Richard. A Discerning Eye: Essays on Early Italian Painting. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998, p. 41.




Citation

"Swoboda, Karl Maria." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/swobodak/.


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Student of Aloïs Riegl; early application of structuralism to art historical interpretation Swoboda had been Max Dvořák assistant and lecturer from 1930. He was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, which is

Sylvester, David

Full Name: Sylvester, David

Other Names:

  • David Sylvester

Gender: male

Date Born: 21 September 1924

Date Died: 19 June 2001

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Surrealist

Career(s): art critics


Overview

Magritte scholar; art critic, exhibition organizer. Sylvester was the son of Philip Sylvester a fish-merchant-cum-silver dealer, and Sybil Rosen (Sylvester). Sylvester was raised a devout Jew but suffered from anti-semitic sigmatism in his private schooling. Thrown out of his home for contemplating Roman Catholicism in his teens, he entered University College School in central London, but was expelled for truancy. He learned to be an art writer while writing copy for George Orwell at Tribune newspaper from 1942 to 1945 supporting himself by dealing in silver. In 1947 he left for Paris rather than major in Moral Sciences at Cambridge. There he met the French artistic community, including Leger, Masson, Brancusi and Giacometti. He read and became influenced by the philosophy of Sir Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989). In 1948 he delivered broadcasts for the BBC on art and artists, working as the private secretary of Henry Moore and closely associating with Francis Bacon in 1949. He married Pamela Bidden in 1950 (later divorced). He curated the 1951 exhibitions of sculpture of Moore, now a personal friend, as well as drawings by Alberto Giacometti, both at the Tate Gallery. The Moore exhibition began a celebrated debate with the historian and critic John Berger which lasted through much of the 1950s. Sylvester espoused his approach through Encounter and Berger via The New Statesman. Sylvester defended art on the grounds of individual experience in contrast to Berger’s socio-political approach. Sylvester was a visiting lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art between 1953 and 1957. He mounted an exhibition of Stanley Spencer in 1954. In 1960 he visited New York at the invitation of the United States State Department. There Sylvester discovered the art of Jasper Johns, de Kooning, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. He expounded the New York School in a series of BBC radio programs upon his return to England. Sylvester was appointed a trustee of the Tate Gallery in 1967 (to 1969). During this same time he served as a visiting scholar at Swarthmore College in the United States. Other exhibitions he headed included René Magritte in 1969, Robert Morris and Henri Laurens, both 1971, “Joan Miro Bronzes,” 1972, Willem de Kooning in 1977, and “Dada and Surrealism Reviewed” (1977). He resigned as chairman from the Arts Panel and was appointed CBE both 1983. He joined the acquisitions committee of the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris in 1984, remaining until 1996. An exhibition of late Picasso works was launched in 1988. Though Sylvester had no formal degree in art, he set about co-authoring what became a five-volume catalogue raisonné on the work of Magritte, issuing it beginning in 1992 with Sarah Whitfield. In 1993 Sylvester organized an exhibition of Sir Francis Bacon, as Britain’s contribution to the Venice Biennale. He was awarded the Biennale’s Golden Lion Award, never before bestowed on a critic. His Interviews with Francis Bacon appeared in several editions. Looking Back on Francis Bacon was followed by Looking at Giacometti in 1994. He jointly curated the large exhibition of Willem de Kooning painting in London and in Washgington, D. C., 1994-1995. In 1995 he was made a Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters in France. He was an Honorary Academician in the Royal Academy in London. Sylvester became a trustee of the Henry Moore Foundation in 1996. About Modern Art which included elements of autobiography, appeared the same year. In 2000 he organized a major Francis Bacon exhibition for Paris, traveling to Munich and Dublin and was awarded Britain’s Hawthornden Prize for art criticism. He died of colon cancer in London. A book of interviews with American artists, including Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, de Kooning and Richard Serra remained unfinished at his death. Sylvester had a daughter with English novelist Shena Mackay (b. 1944). The Tate Modern held a posthumous exhibition of his work “Looking at Modern Art: In Memory of David Sylvester” in 2004. Sylvester followed Ayer’s philosophy, insisting on the primacy of direct encounters with works of art. His willingness to encounter every work of art as a new experiment and to arrive at new conclusions marked him, “as the most important English heir to Roger Fry in 20th-century art criticism.” (Green). Although endorsing the non-objective art of Donald Judd and Barnet Newman, he was the champion of figurative art. He decried Berger’s championship of “Social Realism” and the artists such Marxist critics were forced to ignore: Giacometti, Masson, Picasso, Moore, Sutherland, and, most importantly for Sylvester Francis Bacon. Though his debate with Berger never produced a victor, his espousal of the personal interpetation of art prepared the way for the British art-going public for American Abstract Expressionism.


Selected Bibliography

[collected writings:] About Modern Art. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001; Henry Moore. New York: F. A. Praeger, 1968; Francis Bacon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1975; and Whitfield, Sarah. René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné. 5 vols. Houston: Menil Foundation, 1992- ; and Prather, Marla, and Shiff, Richard. Willem de Kooning: Paintings. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1994; edited, Looking Back at Francis Bacon. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000.


Sources

Sylvester, David. “Curriculum Vitae.” About Modern Art. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001, p. 11; Russell, John. “David Sylvester, 76, Art Critic Who Championed Modernism.” New York Times, June 20, 2001 p. 21; Green, Christopher. “David Sylvester.” Independent (London), June 25, 2001, p. 6.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Sylvester, David." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/sylvesterd/.


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Magritte scholar; art critic, exhibition organizer. Sylvester was the son of Philip Sylvester a fish-merchant-cum-silver dealer, and Sybil Rosen (Sylvester). Sylvester was raised a devout Jew but suffered from anti-semitic sigmatism in his private

Sylvestre, Théophile

Full Name: Sylvestre, Théophile

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: France


Overview

work on the Romantics


Selected Bibliography

Les Artistes vivants. 1853-1856.





Citation

"Sylvestre, Théophile." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/sylvestret/.


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work on the Romantics

Symonds, John Addington

Full Name: Symonds, John Addington

Gender: male

Date Born: 1840

Date Died: 1893

Place Born: Bristol, England, UK

Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): art theory, biography (general genre), Gay studies, homosexuality, LGBTQ+, Queer studies, Queer theory, Renaissance, sexual identity, sexuality, and sexualityQueer studies

Career(s): art historians, biographers, and theorists


Overview

Author of a popular renaissance history and an influential Michelangelo biography; early gay studies writer. Symonds was the son of John Addington Symonds, M.D., (1807-1871) a socially prominent British physician and Harriet Sykes (1808/9-1844). After his mother’s death he was raised by a strict aunt. His father instilled in him a love for Greek and Italian art, who himself studied these humanities two hours daily. Symonds entered the Harrow School in 1854, where his homosexual awakening led to a relationship with a fellow student, Willie Dyer, in 1858. Symonds entered Balliol College, Oxford, in 1858, meeting there the classicists Benjamin Jowett (1817-93) and John Conington (1825-69). Like Jowett, Symonds became a master at an Oxford collection, Magdalen, for the1862-3 year. There, his essay “The Renaissance” won the Chancellor’s Prize. When Symonds fell ill with a variety of illnesses, including an eye inflammation, a diagnosis of sexual repression was made; the cure prescribed, ironically was marriage. More physical and mental illnesses ensued, including pulmonary disease. Symonds made an extended trip to Belgium, Germany, Austria, France, Italy between 1860 to 1863 to to recover his health. In Switzerland he met another British subject, Janet Catherine North (1837-1913), sister of the botanical artist Marianne North (1830-1890), whom he married in 1864. Symonds entered law school in 1865 but was diagnosed with tuberculosis (and another nervous breakdown) in 1868. He secured a position lecturing on Greek art at Clifton College in 1869 and began another affair with Clifton student Norman Moor, whom he took to Italy and Switzerland. He also lectured in art at Society for Higher Education for Women. Sketches in Italy and Greece (1874) and the first volume of his history of the Italian renaissance, Renaissance in Italy: the Age of the Despots (1875) appeared in succession. His father died in 1871 and the Symonds, now in control of his family fortune in rail investments, moved to the manner. The second and third volumes of his renaissance history, The Revival of Learning, and The Fine Arts both appeared in 1877. In 1877, too, Symonds set out for Egypt but got only as far as Davos, Switzerland. In 1881 be built a permanent home there, Am Hof. In Davos he met among others Robert Louis Stevenson also convalescing from tuberculosis. During spring and fall, Symonds and his family spent in Venice at Ca’ Torresella owned by Horatio Forbes Brown (1854-1926). In 1881 he met a gondolier, Angelo Fusato (1857-1923) who became his final life partner, though Angelo, with Symonds’ help, married the woman who had borne Fusato two sons. In 1883, Symonds published the first history of homosexuality in English, Problem in Greek Ethics, written in 1873. His translation of Michelangelo’s poetry, The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti appeared in 1878. At the suggestion of his publisher, John C. Nimmo, he translated The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, published in 1888. A collection of essays, Essays: Speculative and Suggestive (1890), included “On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Art and Literature,” a discussion of biological and cultural evolutionary stages of birth, acme and decline. Another Symonds’s essay “Landscape” traced the subject from the Classical to the baroque. His own biography A Problem in Modern Ethics appeared in 1891 as well as articles on renaissance figures for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The success of the Cellini biography lead Nimmo publishers to commission a biography of Michelangelo. Symonds spent months sifting through the Florentine archives in order to write his Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, which appeared shortly before his death. The same year he commission Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) to co-write a book on “Sexual inversion” (homosexuality) in 1892. While lecturing in Rome in April 1893 he caught pneumonia and died. He is buried in the protestant cemetery in Roma near Shelley’s grave. Ellis and Symond’s investigation of homosexuality first appeared in German as Das konträre Geschlechtsgefühl in 1896 and then in English as Sexual Inversion (1897), though suppressed. It was reissued as Studies in the Psychology of Sex, volume one, Sexual Inversion now only with Ellis’ name, at the insistence of Brown. Symonds’ children included the later nursing pioneer Dame Katharine Furse (1875-1952). Symonds’ biography of Michelangelo was widely read at the time; it immediately superseded the other early documentary biography of the artist by Herman Grimm, also available in English. Symonds revealed in his Michelangelo biography that the Buonarroti archives altered the artist’s poems and letters in their publication to hide his homosexuality. Symonds’ translation of both Michelangelo’s sonnets and Cellini’s autobiography are his most durable works. Much of his writing, as in The Age of the Despots, belies a Hegelian conception of history. The volume on The Fine Arts praises renaissance painting but disparages its architecture as remaining medieval in spirit. To Symonds, renaissance painting harmonized pagan and Christian traditions, emphasizing the humanity of both spiritual beliefs. Symonds’ renaissance, siding with Jacob Burckhardt, emphasized the secular nature over Christian superstition. This set him at odds with the other popular prevailing notion, that of John Ruskin and the idea of Christian progress. Implicit in Symonds’ particular history of art is the notion of sexual liberation (Norton). Symonds’ initial posthumous reputation was clouded by the biography written of him by Brown likely rendered unrecognizable by Edmund Gosse. Further damage was done when the London Library, who inherited Symonds’ personal papers, burned everything except the Brown biography, under orders of Gosse and Charles Hagberg Wright, the librarian.


Selected Bibliography

Renaissance in Italy. 7 vols. London: Smith, Elder, 1875-86; Essays Speculative and Suggestive. 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, limited, 1890; Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti: Based on Studies in the Archives of the Buonarroti Family in Florence. 2 vols. London: J. C. Nimmo, 1892; The Life of Benvenuto Cellini. 2 vols. London: John C. Nimmo, 1888.


Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 146 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. 91; Norton, Rictor. “Symonds, John Addington.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Gilbert, Creighton E. “Introduction.” The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti: Based on Studies in the Archives of the Buonarroti Family at Florence. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, pp. ix-xxv; Grosskurth, Phyllis, ed. Symonds, John Addington. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds. New York: Random House, 1984.




Citation

"Symonds, John Addington." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/symondsj/.


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Author of a popular renaissance history and an influential Michelangelo biography; early gay studies writer. Symonds was the son of John Addington Symonds, M.D., (1807-1871) a socially prominent British physician and Harriet Sykes (1808/9-1844). A

Sypher, Wylie

Full Name: Sypher, Wylie

Other Names:

  • Feltus Wylie Sypher

Gender: male

Date Born: 1905

Date Died: 1987

Place Born: Mt. Kisco, NY, USA

Place Died: Hackettstown, Warren, NJ, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): art history and literary studies

Career(s): art historians, educators, and historiographers


Overview

Professor of English and writer on art history. Sypher was born to Harry Wylie Sypher and Martha Berry (Sypher). He graduated from Amherst College in 1927, continuing for two master’s degrees, the first from Tufts University, in 1929 and, after marrying Lucy Johnston the same year, pursued a second from Harvard University in 1932. He joined Simmons College, Boston, as an instructor beginning in 1929. Sypher was awarded his Ph.D., from Harvard in 1937. At Simmons, Sypher advanced through the ranks, being promoted to assistant professor in 1936, and associate professor, 1941 and professor of English in 1945. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1949-50, and again in 1958-59. In 1963 Sypher wrote his groundbreaking anthology of art history, Art History: An Anthology of Modern Criticism. Together with that of German Readings in the History and Theory of Fine Arts by Margarete Bieber in 1946, it was one of the first anthologies of art-historical literature published in the United States and the first with full English translations. In 1966 he was named alumnae professor of English. He received a Litt.D., from Middlebury College, 1969, retiring from Simmons professor emeritus in 1973. After retirement he was awarded L.H.D.’s from Simmons College, 1973, and Amherst College, 1977. Throughout his life, Sypher wrote on the history of art in addition to literature, often combining both. Sypher viewed art history and criticism as essentially the same thing. Defining style as the essence of an art form, Sypher’s works trace art as it modulates formally without perceptible effect from social forces.


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] The Antislavery Movement to 1800 in English Literature, Exclusive of the Periodical. Harvard, 1937; edited, Art History: an Anthology of Modern Criticism. New York: Vintage Books, 1963; Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature, 1400-1700. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955; Loss of Self in Modern Literature and Art. New York: Random House 1962.


Sources

[obituary:] “Wylie Sypher, 81, Taught English at Simmons College for 50 Years.” Boston Globe August 18, 1987, p. 13.




Citation

"Sypher, Wylie." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/sypherw/.


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Professor of English and writer on art history. Sypher was born to Harry Wylie Sypher and Martha Berry (Sypher). He graduated from Amherst College in 1927, continuing for two master’s degrees, the first from Tufts University, in 1929 and, after ma