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Szarkowski, John

Full Name: Szarkowski, John

Other Names:

  • Thaddeus John Szarkowski

Gender: male

Date Born: 18 December 1925

Date Died: 07 July 2007

Place Born: Ashland, WI, USA

Place Died: Pittsfield, Berkshire, MA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): photographs


Overview

Historian of Photography and photographer. Szarkowski’s father Julius, was an assistant postmaster in Ashland, WI; his mother was Rose Woychik (Szarkowski). The young Szarkowski began working with a camera at age eleven and by high school was an skilled photographer. He entered the University of Wisconsin, Madison, but when World War II was declared, was drafted into the military. He graduated in 1948 [New York Times says 1947] with a degree in art history where he secured a job as photographer for the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, MN. He taught photography in Buffalo, NY in 1950 before joining the University of Minnesota in 1951 as an instructor in photography. He left the museum for the first of his two Guggenheim grants in 1953. During these years he photographed architecture in Chicago, principally that of Louis Sullivan, whose work was underappreciated at the time. He published a book, The Idea of Louis Sullivan, in 1956. A second early book, The Face of Minnesota, 1958 received national exposure by the television personality Dave Garroway on his morning talk show, Today. The book became a New York Times best-seller for several weeks, one of the few photography books to do so. Szarkowski secured a second Guggenheim grant for 1962. Shortly thereafter he was offered a job, age thirty-seven, to succeed Edward J. Steichen as director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He married Jill Anson (1933-2007), an architect, in 1963 in New York. At MoMA, Szarkowski widened the breadth of photography exhibited launching exhibitions that secured the medium a place as art. Among them was his 1967 exhibition “New Documents,” which brought to international attention the work of three relatively unknown photographers, Gary Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus. His 1976 exhibition of William Eggleston heaped criticism on Szarkowski (from Ansel Adams, among others) because the photographer worked from 35 millimeters slides and in color, considered amateur and commercial formats. His show “Mirrors and Windows,” 1978, portrayed photography into two groups, documentary images and those primarily of interpretive sphere. Szarkowski became increasingly conservative in later years, disliking photography-based art and Post-Modernism. He mounted a final show, “Photography Until Now,” which examined how technological development changed the look of photographs. He retired in 1991 as director emeritus, succeeded by Peter Galassi. His photography was given a 2005/2006 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and MoMA. Szarkowski’s wife died in 2006 and he suffered a stroke and died the folowing year at age eighty-one. John Szarkowski “almost single-handedly elevated photography’s status…to that of a fine art.” (Gefter). He abandoned his predecessors’ approach–the lofty themes of art that Steichen has posited and the art-historical approach of Beaumont Newhall for a formalist view akin to Clement Greenberg (Grundberg). “He illustrated how the creative issues, such as subject selection, vantage, and frame, were similar whether the camera was wielded by a journeyman, a Sunday hobbyist, or an artist” (


Selected Bibliography

The Idea of Louis Sullivan. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1956; The Face of Minnesota. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1958; Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art. New York: MoMA/ New York Graphic Society, 1973.; William Eggleston’s Guide. New York: Museum of Modern Art/MIT Press, 1976; The Work of Atget. 4 vols. New York: Museum of Modern Art/New York Graphic Society, 1981-1985; and Stieglitz, Alfred. Alfred Stieglitz at Lake George, 1995; New York: Museum of Modern Art/H.N. Abrams, 1995; Atget. New York: Museum of Modern Art/Calloway, 2000; and Phillips, Sandra S.John Szarkowski: Photographs. New York: Bulfinch Press, 2005; [exhibition catalogs] The Photographer & the American Landscape. New York: Museum of Modern Art/Doubleday, 1963; The Photographer’s Eye. New York: Museum of Modern Art/Doubleday, 1966; Walker Evans. New York: Museum of Modern Art/New York Graphic Society, 1971; Mirrors & Windows: American Photography Since 1960. New York: Museum of Modern Art/New York Graphic Society, 1978; Irving Penn. New York: Museum of Modern Art/New York Graphic Society Books, 1984; Photography Until Now. New York: Museum of Modern Art/Bulfinch Press, 1989; Ansel Adams at 100. Boston: Little, Brown/San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2001.


Sources

Hambourg). But Szarkowski defined photography largely as what the indivdual photographer could create soley through the lense of the natural world.. Works of the photographer Cindy Sherman, for example, were only acquired by MoMA after his retirement. Hambourg, Maria Morris. “Master of the Medium: Maria Morris Hambourg on John Szarkowski (1925-2007).” Artforum International 46 no.2 (2007): 81ff.; [obituaries:] Gefter, Philp. “John Szarkowski, Curator of Photography, Dies at 81.” New York Times, July 9, 2007; Grundberg, Andy. “John Szarkowski 1925-2007.” Art in America 95 no. 8 (September 2007): 37




Citation

"Szarkowski, John." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/szarkowskij/.


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Historian of Photography and photographer. Szarkowski’s father Julius, was an assistant postmaster in Ashland, WI; his mother was Rose Woychik (Szarkowski). The young Szarkowski began working with a camera at age eleven and by high school was an s

Szeemann, Harald

Full Name: Szeemann, Harald

Gender: male

Date Born: 1933

Date Died: 2005

Home Country/ies: Switzerland


Overview



Sources

Heinich, Nathalie. Harald Szeemann: un cas singulier: entretien. Paris: L’Echoppe, 1995; Müller, Hans-Joachim. Harald Szeemann: Exhibition Maker. Osfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2006; Ammann, Jean Christophe,and Theewen, Gerhard. Obsession Collection: Gespräche und Texte über das Sammeln von und mit Jean Christophe Ammann [und] Harald Szeemann. Cologne: Odeon, 1994.




Citation

"Szeemann, Harald." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/szeemannh/.


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Suida, William

Full Name: Suida, William

Other Names:

  • William Suida

Gender: male

Date Born: 24 April 1877

Date Died: 29 October 1959

Place Born: Neunkirchen, Niederösterreich, Austria

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: Austria

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


Overview

Kress Foundation art historian; Italian renaissance specialist. Suida was born to Albert Suida and Betha von Heim, his mother a descendant of Richard Wagner. His uncle was the art historian Henry Thode. After attending a Gymnasium in Vienna, he studied art history in Vienna under Aloïs Riegl and Franz Wickhoff, in Leipzig and finally Heidelberg under Thode with whom he wrote his dissertation in 1899. It was published the following year. Between 1902-04 he was an assistant at the Deutsches Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, the model for Italian research institutes, where he researched the book for his habilitation. He qualified with a 1905 monograph on Florentine painting. He taught as a Privatdozent in Vienna and for the academic year 1909-10 at the Technische Hochschule in Graz, Austria. Beginning in 1911 was appointed a professor of art history at the university in Graz, and managed the picture gallery (Bildergalerie) of the Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz. During World War I he fought as a captain. Between 1934-38 he was on leave teaching at various schools in Austria and Italy, but with the annexation of Austria by the Nazis in 1939, he emigrated first to England and then to the United States. In 1947 he found a position as Head of the department of art-historical research at the Kress Foundation, advising on art purchases for Samuel Kress and later helping to disperse the collection to museums across the United States. His daughter Bertina Suida (d. 1992) studied art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts where she met fellow art history student Robert Manning. They married and the elder Suida gave his son-in-law a position as curator for the Kress collection. Bertina was a curator at the Chrysler Collection. William and his children amassed large personal collections of Baroque art. Suida was an expert in Lombard art and only slightly less Venetian. At his death in 1959, his collection passed to his children. The combined art collection was donated to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin, in1999, as the Suida-Manning Collection.


Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Studies in the History of Art, Dedicated to William E. Suida on his Eightieth Birthday. London: Phaidon Press/Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 1959, pp. 395-402; [dissertation:] Die Genredarstellungen Albrecht Dürers. Heidelberg, 1899, published, Strassburg: J. H. E. Heitz, 1900; [habilitation:] Florentinische Maler um die Mitte des XIV. Jahrhunderts. Strassburg: Heitz, 1905; The Samuel H. Kress collection: Brooks Memorial Art Gallery. Memphis, TN: Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, 1958; and Suida, Bertina. Luca Cambiaso: la vita e le opere. Milan: Ceschina, 1957; Raphael. New York: Oxford University Press,1941; The Samuel H. Kress Collection at the University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona, 1957; and Hofer, Hans, and Wright, Herbert. Aspects on Austrian Art and Music. Washington, DC: s.n, 1944; Bramante pittore e il Bramantino. Milan: Ceschina, 1953; Genua. Leipzig: Seemann, 1906; Leonardo und sein Kreis. Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1929; Tizian. Leipzig: Orell Füssli,1933.


Sources

Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 2, pp. 672-677; [obituaries:] Morassi, Antonio. William Suida. Burlington Magazine 102, no. 689 (August 1960):371; “William E. Suida, Art Historian, 82, Curator of Research for Kress Foundation Dies-Studied Italian Masters.” New York Times October 30, 1959, p. 27.




Citation

"Suida, William." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/suidaw/.


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Kress Foundation art historian; Italian renaissance specialist. Suida was born to Albert Suida and Betha von Heim, his mother a descendant of Richard Wagner. His uncle was the art historian Henry Thode. After attending a Gymn

Sulze, Heinrich

Full Name: Sulze, Heinrich

Gender: male

Date Born: 1888

Date Died: 1958

Place Born: Leipzig, Saxony, Germany

Place Died: Dresden, Saxony, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): ancient, Ancient Greek (culture or style), architecture (object genre), gardens (open spaces), Roman (ancient Italian culture or period), and sculpture (visual works)


Overview

Archictectural historian and specialist in the garden architecture of ancient Greece and Rome. Affiliated with the Technical University of Dresden (1921-1945). Much of his original work (research notes, manuscripts, and drawings) was destroyed in the firebombing of Dresden in 1945. After 1945, Sulze worked less on scholarship in order to concentrate on the architectural rebuilding of Dresden.


Selected Bibliography

and K. Müller. Archäologische Schriften: Die Architektur der Burg und des Palastes Tiryns III. (1930; “Das dorische Kapitell der Burg von Tiryns,” in: AA 1936, 14ff; “Der Decumanus Maximus des ältesten Pompeji,” in: FuF 17, 1941, 377 ff.


Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 242-243.




Citation

"Sulze, Heinrich." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/sulzeh/.


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Archictectural historian and specialist in the garden architecture of ancient Greece and Rome. Affiliated with the Technical University of Dresden (1921-1945). Much of his original work (research notes, manuscripts, and drawings) was destroyed in

Summerson, John Newenham

Full Name: Summerson, John Newenham

Other Names:

  • John Summerson

Gender: male

Date Born: 1904

Date Died: 1992

Place Born: Darlington, Darlington, England, UK

Place Died: Eton Villas, Camden, London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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


Overview

Architectural Historian and keeper of the Soane Museum, 1945-1984. Summerson’s father was Samuel James Summerson (d. 1907) and mother Dorothea Worth Newenham (d. 1963). His grandfather, Thomas Summerson was director of the steel foundry in Darlington responsible for the first public railway in England. After his father’s death when he was three, his moved frequently in England and Europe. He attended school at Riber Castle, Derbyshire, before the Harrow School beginning in 1918. Here he became an outstanding organist. He considered a career as a professional organist before changing to architecture. He entered the Bartlett School, University College, London in 1922, under Albert Richardson. After a succession of architectural assistant positions and a teaching post at the College of Art, Edinburgh for the 1929-1930 year, he traveled throughout Europe and Russia, examining architecture. Upon his return to England, he joined the Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS). Summerson struck out on his own in 1934, leaving a living arrangement with his mother and writing for the Architect and Building News as an assistant editor until 1941. During this time he wrote a biography of Nash, whose drawings he had discovered in a print shop in 1932, published in 1935. In 1937 Summerson published the first of his characteristic essays rethinking traditional architecture, “The Tyranny of Intellect: A Study of the Mind of Sir Christopher Wren in Relation to the Thought of his Time.” The following year he married Elizabeth Alison Hepworth (d. 1991), a dancer and sister of the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. Summerson began research for a history of Georgian architecture in London. He lectured on the topic in 1939 at the Courtauld Institute. However, World War II prevented publishing these. Summerson joined the National Buildings Record in 1941, an initiative founded an attempt to document structures before they were destroyed by bombing. Although his title was assistant director under Walter Godfrey (1891-1986), the Record was effectively Summerson’s own project. When Arthur T. Bolton, the keeper of the John Soane Museum, died in 1945, Summerson was appointed his successor. Only then did he abandon hopes of concertizing. His book on Georgian London appeared in 1946. As director of the Soane Museum, Summerson skillfully changed the museum’s funding to governmental while retaining its board of trustees. He moved to the Chalk Farm area in north London with his family in 1949, the same year his book Heavenly Mansions, appeared. In the early 1950s, Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner contracted with Summerson to write the volume on Architecture in Britain, 1550-1850 for the Pelican History of Art series. It appeared in 1953. Summerson was knighted in 1958. His interest in architecture spanned the entire range, at times his enthusiasm for modern architecture at cross-purposes with historic conservation. In 1961 he was part of a group supporting a new building in Dublin. Summerson wrote his popular architectural primer, The Classical Language of Architecture in 1964. A catalog on the architect John Thorpe was issued as volume 40 of the journal of the Walpole Society in 1966. In 1968 the Soane Museum purchased the adjacent property, also designed by Soane, and the Museum expanded. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Summerson began a protracted affair with the artist Nancy Culliford Sharp Spender (1909-2001), the estranged wife of the artist William Coldstream and widow of the war hero Michael Spender (brother of the poet Stephen Spender). In 1976 Summerson published the first of his two books covering royal architecture between 1485-1660, known as the History of the King’s Works edited under Howard Montagu Colvin. He rewrote his earlier Nash biography completely, publishing it as Life and Work of John Nash Architect in 1980. Summerson retired from the Museum in 1984. He supported demolishing a Georgian building in favor of designed by Mies van de Rohe in 1984. He retired from the museum the same year. In 1988 he again backed raising traditional buildings (Victorian era) in London in favor of replacing them with a modernist building by James Stirling. These modernist beliefs rankled many among his architectural history friends. His collected essays, The Unromantic Castle (1990) ranged from analysis of minor architects such as an essay on Thorpe to pieces on the (second) design for St. Paul’s Cathedral by Christopher Wren. His wife Lady Summerson, died in 1991 and the following year, his body ravaged by Parkinson’s disease, Summerson himself died. He left an uncompleted and unpublished autobiography. Summerson’s long curatorship at the Soane Museum transformed the quaint though stodgy institution into a specialty museum of international stature. As an architectural historian, he changed British architectural history from the hobby of architects to an academic discipline. His impressive research skills and judgment were acquired without formal education in the subject. Instead, he learned from the German expatriate architectural historians (Pevsner among others). He read Karl Marx and believed in materialism’s determining artistic form. He admired Lewis Namier, H. S. Goodheart-Rendel, and Robert Byron. His book Georgian London examined landownership and building regulations as much as stylistic development to write a new kind of architectural history. The architectural historian Howard Montagu Colvin, however, found this Summerson book, which he revised in 2001, so factually carelessness. His Pelican History of Art volume set British architecture in the larger context of European architecture, demonstrating that English architects employed pattern books and continental theory as opposed to the notion–expounded by Reginald T. Blomfield and others, that Insular architecture sprang from individual inspiration. Deborah Howard noted that Summerson, like academically trained art historians of his time, believed that a clear, “coherent line of stylistic development could and should be traced based on the artistic authority of certain key figures and their buildings.” David Watkin notes that Summerson was one of the first architectural historians who did not wish to see the historic styles he studied designed by modern architects.


Selected Bibliography

[selected bibliography:] The Country Seat: Studies in the History of the British Country House Presented to Sir John Summerson. London: Allen Lane, 1970; [collected essays:] Heavenly Mansions and Other Essays on Architecture. London: Cresset Press, 1949 (includes “The Tyranny of Intellect” essay), and, The Unromantic Castle and Other Essays. London: Thames and Hudson, 1990; John Nash, Architect to King George IV. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1935, fundamentally rewritten as, The Life and Work of John Nash, Architect. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980; and Richards, James Maude. The Bombed Buildings of Britain: a Record of Architectural Casualties: 1940-41. Cheam, Surrey: The Architectural Press, 1942; Georgian London. New York: C. Scribner, 1945 [not available until 1946]; The Classical Language of Architecture. Cambridge, MA: M. I. T. Press, 1963; Architecture in Britain, 1530 to 1830. London: Penguin Books, 1954; The Architecture of Victorian London. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976; Colvin, Howard Montagu, ed. The History of King’s Works: 1485-1660, (Part I). London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1976, and The History of King’s Works: 1485-1660, (Part II) . London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1982.


Sources

Watkin, David. The Rise of Architectural History. London: The Architectural Press, 1983, p. 131; Summerson, John. 50 Years of the National Buildings Record, 1941-1991. London: Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, 1991; Wilson, Colin St. John. Architectural Reflections: Studies in the Philosophy and Practice of Architecture. Boston: Butterworth Architecture, 1992, pp. 26, 87-94, 152-155; [methodology] Howard, Deborah. “Lotz’s Text: Its Achievement and Significance.” in Lotz, Wolfgang. Architecture in Italy: 1500-1600. Pelican History of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. p, 2; Summerson and Hitchcock: Centenary Essays on Architectural Historiography. New Haven, CT: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale Center for British Art /Yale University Press, 2006; [obituaries:]. Middleton, Robin. Casabella 57 (June 1993): 54-5; Middleton, Robin. “John Summerson.” Burlington Magazine 135 (April 1993): 277-9; RIBA Journal 100 (February 1993): 63.




Citation

"Summerson, John Newenham." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/summersonj/.


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Architectural Historian and keeper of the Soane Museum, 1945-1984. Summerson’s father was Samuel James Summerson (d. 1907) and mother Dorothea Worth Newenham (d. 1963). His grandfather, Thomas Summerson was director of the steel foundry in Darling

Supino, Igino Benvenuto

Full Name: Supino, Igino Benvenuto

Gender: male

Date Born: 1858

Date Died: 1940

Place Born: Pisa, Tuscany, Italy

Place Died: Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

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


Overview

Renaissance scholar; Università di Bologna professor of art history from 1907 to 1933.






Citation

"Supino, Igino Benvenuto." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/supinoi/.


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Renaissance scholar; Università di Bologna professor of art history from 1907 to 1933.

Sutton, Denys

Full Name: Sutton, Denys

Other Names:

  • Denys Miller Sutton

Gender: male

Date Born: 1917

Date Died: 1991

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Career(s): art critics and publishers


Overview

Editor of Apollo magazine (1962-87) and exhibition organizer. His father was Edmund Miller Sutton and mother Dulcie Laura Wheeler (Sutton). Sutton attended Exeter College, Oxford, where he received a B.A., and B.Litt. and where he made the lifelong friendship with classmate and Byzantinist John Beckwith. In 1940 he married Sonja Kilbansky (later divorced). During World War II he worked in the Foreign Office Research Department, London, England, between 1940-46. In 1946 he was appointed secretary of the International Commission for Restitution of Cultural Material and in 1948 the fine arts specialist, United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Sutton was a visiting lecturer at Yale University in 1949 during which time he wrote a seminal essay for Horizon magazine (London) on modern American painting. He became the art sales correspondent and a book reviewer for the Daily Telegraph newspaper. He served as art critic for the Financial Times and Country Life. In 1952 he married Gertrud Koebke-Knudson (also later divorced). A third marriage to Cynthia Sassoon occurred in 1960. In 1962 the management of the Financial Times appointed Sutton the editor of Apollo, a scholarly but foundering art-history journal, then under the new ownership of the Financial Times. During his years as editor, he rejuvenated the magazine’s reputation as a serious journal for art-historical research and collecting. His witty if sharp editorials and “theme issues” brought the magazine back to profitability. The intellectual work of the art historian/collector Denis Mahon was largely established through the pages of Apollo during Sutton’s tenure. Sutton also translated a volume by Jean Adhémar on the Spanish painter Francisco Goya. Sutton developed throat cancer in 1973, yet continued to publish and edit the magazine, relearning to speak after radical throat surgery. He retired as editor of Apollo in 1986 to publish the biography, Degas: The Man and the Work the same year. He died of melanoma at age 73. As editor and sometimes nearly sole contributor to issues of Apollo, Sutton found a voice for the English-speaking cultural and collecting community. His instigation of whole issues devoted to individual museums, art historians (in the case of R. Langton Douglas) and collections broadened the magazine’s readership, rivaling Britain’s other mainstream art history (and some would say “art establishment”) organ, the Burlington Magazine. Sutton also built a reputation as an art exhibition organizer. His “France in the Eighteenth Century” show at the Royal Academy in 1968 were a blend of scholarship and connoisseurship. He authored biographies of Rodin, Whistler and Sickert and edited the letters of Roger Fry. Sutton was a frequent contributor to the Gazette des Beaux-Arts and a corresponding member of the Institut de France and a chevalier of the Legion of Honor. The historian, collector, and director of the Burlington Magazine, Brinsley Ford wrote a moving tribute to him in Apollo.


Selected Bibliography

[series of issues devoted R. Langton Douglas:] Apollo 109 (April 1979): 248-315 ff. [see Douglas entry for complete list]; American Painting. London: Avalon Press, 1948; Antoine Watteau: Les charmes de la vie, the Music Party, in the Wallace Collection, London. London: P. Lund, Humphries, 1946; Edgar Degas: Life and Work. New York: Rizzoli, 1986; James McNeill Whistler: Paintings, Etchings, Pastels & Watercolours. London: Phaidon Press, 1966; edited. Fry, Roger. Letters of Roger Fry. New York: Random House, 1972; Triumphant Satyr: the World of Auguste Rodin. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1966.


Sources

[obituaries:] “Exacting Editor and Connoisseur.” The Guardian (London), January 29, 1991; Russell, John. “Denys Sutton, 73, an Art Critic, Editor and Curator of Exhibitions.” New York Times February 1, 1991, p.19; Mullaly, Terence. The Independent (London), January 29, 1991, p. 25; Ford, R. Brinsley “Denys Sutton, Editor of Apollo, 1962-1987: a Tribute.” Apollo 125 (March 1987): 157-8.




Citation

"Sutton, Denys." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/suttond/.


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Editor of Apollo magazine (1962-87) and exhibition organizer. His father was Edmund Miller Sutton and mother Dulcie Laura Wheeler (Sutton). Sutton attended Exeter College, Oxford, where he received a B.A., and B.Litt. and where he made th

Swarzenski, Georg

Full Name: Swarzenski, Georg

Gender: male

Date Born: 1876

Date Died: 1957

Place Born: Dresden, Saxony, Germany

Place Died: Brookline, Norfolk, MA, USA

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Medieval (European) and Modern (style or period)

Career(s): curators


Overview

Medievalist and modernist; Director of Frankfurt art museums and later a Museum of Fine Art, Boston acquisitions curator, 1939-1957. Swarzenski’s father was Adolf Hanns Swarzenski, a prosperous Dresden merchant originally of Jewish origin, and his mother, Auguste Beck (Swarzenski). In 1896 graduated with a degree in law from Heidelberg. He married Ella Perec-Wilcynska, [name sometimes appearing as Pertz-Wilcynska] in 1899, turning his attention to art history. Swarzenski studied art under the great medievalist Adolph Goldschmidt in Berlin and in Heidelberg under Henry Thode, gaining his second degree in 1901. His dissertation was on the Regensburg school of manuscript illumination of the tenth and eleventh centuries. He initially worked as an assistant at the research assistant at the Berlin Museums where he likely habilitated in 1903, when he was designation a privatdozent. After a year as an assistant at the Kunsthistorischen Institut in Florence, he returned to Berlin as an assistant for the Kunstgewerbemuseum (“useful arts” museum). In 1906 he was appointed director of the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt, a privately endowed and operated art museum, which Thode had at one time directed. Seeing the need to acquire more art than the Städelsches could afford, Swarzenski convinced the city of Frankfurt to found its own, publicly funded art museum, the Städtische Galerie, (municipal gallery) to buy works, under Swarzenski’s direction, to complement the Städelsches holdings. The Städtische collection grew to include works by the Impressionists (Monet) and Post-Impressionists (Cézanne and van Gogh) and later by Picasso, Munch, Ensor and Die Brücke artists and others of German Expressionism, some of whom taught at the Kunstinstitut. He hired the fledgling art historian Fritz Wichert to assist him. In 1909 Swarzenski opened a combined museum, though still distinct in terms of collections, which he jointly directed with the Liebieghaus sculpture museum. He married a second time in 1916, to Marie Mössinger. The following year, he contributed essays on modern art for the important survey, Handbuch der Kunstwissenschaft. Together with his assistant, the art historian Alfred Wolters, he founded the Städel Jahrbuch beginning in 1921 (which they co-edited through 1936). About this time, he began a liaison with Calola Netter, whom he installed in the museum as his intern. A double portrait of his wife and mistress was painted by Max Beckmann in 1923. Swarzenski was gifted museum innovator. He organized period rooms for decorative arts in his museums. Between 1925-1931 he held musical concerts in the rooms, one of the first directors to do so. His knowledge of the art market brought many masterworks to his museums. He was also of sufficient means that he could afford to donate pictures to the museum personally; the famous van Gogh portrait of Dr. Gachet was one of these. Swarzenski wrote columns in the local newspaper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, communicating his interests and the museums’ needs to the German and greater European public. In 1928 Swarzenski was appointed Director-General of all Frankfurt museums. He used his new position to purchase a significant part of the large Sigmaringen collection. The museum’s Kunstgewerbemuseum, also rose to prominence under Swarzenski’s direction. As a director somewhat ahead of his time, he mounted an early “blockbuster” show, a display of goldsmithing work, known as the Welfenschatz, which attracted huge crowds from the region. The rise of the Nazis to power in 1933 put Swarzenski into direct conflict with their ideas of art. Forced to remove many works of modernist art from the museums walls because of their “degenerate” designation by the Nazis–and distrusted for his Jewish background–Swarzenski ultimately resigned in 1938 and fled to United States. Many of the modernist works he acquired, including his personal donation of the Dr. Gachet, were deaccessioned and sold. In the United States, he lectured at Institute for Advance Studies, Princeton, N. J., for the 1938-1939 year before Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Director George Harold Edgell offered him a position to build the medieval area of the collection. His 1940 Boston exhibition, “Arts of the Middle Ages: 1000-1400,” marked Boston as a center of interest in the middle ages. He retired in 1956 and was succeeded by his son, Hanns Swarzenski who also distinguished himself at Boston as an art historian.


Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Goetz, Oswald, ed. Essays in Honor of Georg Swarzenski. Chicago: Henry Regnery/Berlin: Verlag Gebr. Mann, 1951, pp. 261-267; [dissertation:] Die Regensburger Buchmalerei des X. und XI. Jahrhunderts: Studien zur Geschichte der deutschen Malerei des frühen Mittelalters. Heidelberg, 1901, published as volume one in the series, Denkmäler der süddeutschen Malerei des frühen Mittelalters, Leipzig: Karl W. Hiersemann; and Burger, Fritz, and Grisebach, August. Die Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. Handbuch der Kunstwissenschaft. 2 vols. Berlin-Neubabelsberg: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion,1917ff.; Nicolo Pisano. Frankfurt am Main: Iris-verlag, 1926; Die Salzburger Malerei von den ersten Anfängen bis zur Blütezeit des romanischen Stils: Studen zur Geschichte der deutschen Malerei und Handschriftenkunde des Millelalters. 2 vols. Leipzig: K. W. Hiersemann,1908-13; and Falke, Otto von, and Schmidt, Robert. Der Welfenschatz. Der Reliquienschatz des Braunschweiger Domes aus dem Besitze des herzoglichen Hauses Braunschweig-Lüneburg. Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, 1930.


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. 46 mentioned; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 403-5; Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 2, pp. 677-683; “Georg Swarzenski: Growth of the Medieval and Renaissance Collections During his Association with the Museum.” Bulletin [of the] Museum of Fine Arts Boston 55 no. 301-302 (Autumn-Winter 1957): 1-119; McClintock, Kathryn. “‘Arts of the Middle Ages’ and the Swarzenskis.” in Smith, Elizabeth Bradford, and McClintock, Kathryn, and Rottne, R. Aaron, eds. Medieval Art in America: Patterns of Collecting, 1800-1940. University Park, PA: Palmer Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania State University, 1996; [obituaries:] Schilling, Edmund. “Georg Swarzenski.” Burlington Magazine 100, no. 664 (July 1958): 251-252; “Georg Swarzenski, Museum Director.” New York Times June 16, 1957, p. 84; Rossiter, Henry P. Art Quarterly 20 no. 3 (Autumn 1957): 328.




Citation

"Swarzenski, Georg." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/swarzenskig/.


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Medievalist and modernist; Director of Frankfurt art museums and later a Museum of Fine Art, Boston acquisitions curator, 1939-1957. Swarzenski’s father was Adolf Hanns Swarzenski, a prosperous Dresden merchant originally of Jewish origin, and his

Swarzenski, Hanns

Full Name: Swarzenski, Hanns

Other Names:

  • Hanns Peter Swarzenski

Gender: male

Date Born: 1903

Date Died: 1985

Place Born: Charlottenburg, Berlin, Germany

Place Died: Wilzhofen, Bavaria, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): decorative art (art genre), Medieval (European), and sculpture (visual works)

Career(s): curators


Overview

Medievalist; Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,1956-1973. Swarzenski grew up in Frankfurt, Germany, where his father, Georg Swarzenski was the director of the Städelsches Kunstinstitut (museum) and the Liebieghaus sculpture museum. His mother was Ella Perec-Wilcynska, [name sometimes appearing as Pertz-Wilcynska]. As a young man he met the German Expressionist artist Max Beckmann who taught at the Städelsches school. He studied art history at Freiburg under Walter F. Friedländer, in Berlin, under Adolph Goldschmidt, under whom his father had also studied, and from whom he likely honed his connoisseurship skills. While pursuing his dissertation, he participated in the Jahrtausundaustellung (millenial celebration) in Düsseldorf in 1925 under Fritz Witte. The exhibition gave him early and unusual experience with manuscripts and medieval art. He received his Ph.D. from the University in Bonn in 1927 with a dissertation on medieval German book illumination under Paul Clemen. He became a fellow of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. He was awarded a travel grant to study as a Fellow at the Fogg Museum, Harvard University in 1928. He returned to Berlin and worked at the state art museums there as a stagiaire. In Berlin, Swarzenski kept abreast of all the arts, becoming acquainted with the Bauhaus and Brücke masters Mies van der Rohe, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Gerhard Marcks and Andreas Feininger. In 1936 he published his major work, Die lateinischen illuminierten Handschriften des XIII. Jahrhunderts. He used the modest honorarium he was paid for the book to buy a Beckmann painting. He left Nazi-controlled Germany in 1938–although a Protestant Christian he was from a Jewish background–accepting an offer to assist Erwin Panofsky at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. His father resigned and followed a short while later. At the Institute, Swarzenski published his book on the Berthold Missal. He became acting curator of sculpture at the National Gallery of Art in Washgington, D. C. in 1943 (many museum personnel were in the war). Upon their return in 1946 he lost his position. In 1948 he was offered a position as a Research fellow in Medieval art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where his father also held that status. In 1948 year he wrote a forward to a catalog on his friend, Beckmann, in the first American retrospective of his art in St. Louis, MO. Between 1950-1956 he periodically lectured at the Warburg Institute in London. He married Brigitte Horney, an actress, in 1953. The same year he published his important Monuments of Romanesque Art, still a handbook for the period. He succeeded his father as Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture in the Museum in 1956, appointed by director Perry T. Rathbone, whom he had known since Rathbone’s days in St. Louis. Among Swarzenski’s acquisitions during the Boston years were two works rejected as forgeries by other museums, the Lombard Virgin and Child, acquired in 1959, and an Ile-de-France Virgin and Child, both ca. 1200. In the early 1960s, Swarzenski identified a large 12th-century ivory cross offered to the Museum by a private seller. When he and Rathbone determined the Museum could not afford the treasure, it was referred to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas Hoving who ultimately acquired it as the (now famous) Cloister’s Cross. Hoving neglected to mention in his memoirs Swarzenski’s contribution. As a curator for all European sculpture, Swarzenski also purchased works by Giacometti, Calder, Brancusi and Henry Moore for the Museum. A 1972 festschrift contained artwork commissioned by both Beckmann and Calder. In 1973 he retired to a home in Wilzhofen, Oberbayern, Germany, where he died in 1985. Swarzenski’s Monuments of Romanesque Art remains a characteristic work. It lacks extensive comment on the objects in favor of allowing the works to speak for themselves. Walter B. Cahn speculated that Swarzensky was equally uncomfortably with public oratory. A trained connoisseur in the postivistic vein of Goldschmidt, Swarzenski remained a true art historian rather than like so many German medievalists, an iconographer. His personal art collection, which, in addition to Beckmann, extended to Paul Klee and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, was made possible by art dealers who sold him these works modestly in exchange for Museum patronage of medieval works (Rathbone).


Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Hacker, I. “Bibliographie Hanns Swarzenski.” Intuition und Kunstwissenschaft: Festschrift für Hanns Swarzenski zum 70. Geburtstag. Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1973, pp. 599-604; [dissertation:] Beiträge zur Niederrheinischen Buchmalerei in der übergangzeit vom romanischen zur gothischen Stil. Bonn, 1927; Vorgotische Miniaturen: die ersten Jahrhunderte deutscher Malerei. Königstein im Taunus: K. R. Langewiesche, 1931; Die lateinischen illuminierten Handschriften des XIII. Jahrhunderts in den Ländern an Rhein, Main und Donau. 2 vols. Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1936; Monuments of Romanesque Art, the Art of Church Treasures in North-Western Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954.


Sources

McClintock, Kathryn. “‘Arts of the Middle Ages’ and the Swarzenskis.” in Smith, Elizabeth Bradford, and McClintock, Kathryn, and Rottne, R. Aaron, eds. Medieval Art in America: Patterns of Collecting, 1800-1940. University Park, PA: Palmer Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania State University, 1996; Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 2, pp. 683-689; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 405-7; 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. 36; [obituaries:] Sauerlander, Willibald. “Hanns Swarzenski.” Burlington Magazine 127, no. 992 (November 1985): 804 and 807; Rathbone, Perry. “Hanns Swarzenski (1903-1985).” Gesta 24 no. 2 (1985): 175-176 [numerous factual errors].




Citation

"Swarzenski, Hanns." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/swarzenskih/.


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Medievalist; Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,1956-1973. Swarzenski grew up in Frankfurt, Germany, where his father, Georg Swarzenski was the director of the Städelsches Kunstin

Sweeney, James Johnson

Full Name: Sweeney, James Johnson

Gender: male

Date Born: 1900

Date Died: 1986

Place Born: Brooklyn, Cattaraugus, NY, USA

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Career(s): curators


Overview

Curator of the Museum of Modern Art 1935-46 and director of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1952-60. Sweeney was the son of a prosperous importer of laces and textiles whose family had come from Donegal, Ireland. He attended officers’ training school in Louisville, KY, during World War I. He earned a B.A. degree at Georgetown University in Washgington, D. C. In college he was a guard on the football team and, as a graduate student in literature at Cambridge University played on the rugby team. He was champion a shot-putter at both schools. Sweeney was an editor of the Paris literary magazine Transition, assisting James Joyce in editing the manuscript of Joyce’s ”Work in Progress.” In 1935 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., appointed Sweeney to be a curator of his new Museum of Modern Art. Sweeney commissioned the photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975) to photograph 477 African art works for the exhibition, “African Negro Art,” which opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1935. The show comprised 603 sculptures and textiles from public and private collections in Europe and the United States and was the largest presentation of African sculpture in an American art museum, seconded only by an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1923. Between 1935 and 1946, he served as director of the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Other shows he organized included the memorial exhibition of the works of Piet Mondrian. Sweeney resigned when a change in administrative structure abridged his authority. In 1952, he was appointed director of the Guggenheim Museum, after the dismissal of the founding director Hildegard Rebay von Ehrenwiesen. He served as director during the construction of Frank Lloyd Wright building. Together with the approval of Board President Harry Guggenheim (1890-1970), Soloman Guggenheim’s son, he changed Rebay’s narrow focus of the museum’s ”nonobjective” art by launching shows and purchasing works of other modernists and younger European and American artists. Aline Saarinen, art critic for The New York Times, characterized his tenure as having ”symbolically as well as literally swept the place clean,” painting the walls white, removing pictures from distracting frames and replacing the second-rate pictures of Rudolf Bauer and Rebay herself with first-rank modernist works heretofore kept in storage at the museum. Sweeney, however, disliked the Wright building, which he believed did not show pictures to best advantage. Although he devised a method of hanging pictures using rods projecting from the walls, he always asserted Wright’s museum was an architectural showpiece rather than one for the art. When Harry Guggenheim asked for a more popular educational approach to the public, Sweeney resigned. He was appointed director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in 1961. In Houston he acquired ancient Greek and New Guinea sculptures as well as those by Rodin and Calder. Sweeney once organized a 16-ton Olmec head he had spotted half buried in a Mexican jungle to come to Houston as part of a show of Mexican art he had organized. However Sweeney once again left over trustee interference with his running of the museum. Sweeney served in the early 1970’s as art adviser and chairman of the executive committee at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.


Selected Bibliography

and Gallatin, A. E., and Hélion, Jean. Gallery of Living Art: A. E. Gallatin Collection. New York: Gallery of Living art, 1933; African Negro Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1935; African Folktales & Sculpture. New York: Pantheon Books, 1952; Paul Klee. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1941; and Daix, Pierre. Pierre Soulages. Neuchâtel, Switzerland: Ides et Calendes, 1991; Sam Francis. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1967; and Sartre, Jean Paul. Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations. Paris: Galerie Louis Caré, 1946; Henry Moore. In Collaboration with the Art institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946; Joan Miro. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1941; Plastic Redirections in 20th Century Painting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934.


Sources

Glueck, Grace. “James Johnson Sweeney Dies, Art Critic and Museum Head.” New York Times April 15, 1986, p. 8.




Citation

"Sweeney, James Johnson." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/sweeneyj/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Curator of the Museum of Modern Art 1935-46 and director of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1952-60. Sweeney was the son of a prosperous importer of laces and textiles whose family had come from Donegal, Ireland. He attended officers’ training sc