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Sims, Lowery Stokes

March 1, 2024March 29, 2024

Full Name: Stokes, Lowery Sims

Other Names:

Lowery Stokes Sims
Lowery Sims

Gender: female

Date Born: 13 February 1949

Place Born: Washington, DC, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): African (general, continental cultures), African American, Contemporary (style of art), Latin American, Modern (style or period), and Native American

Career(s): administrators, art critics, authors, curators, directors (administrators), museum directors, and researchers

Institution(s): Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Arts and Design, and The Studio Museum in Harlem

Overview

First African American curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1972-1999, Executive Director and President of the Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC. Sims was born in Washington, DC and grew up in Kew Gardens, Queens, NY, attending Queens College from 1966-1970, where she discovered and majored in art history. Following this, she attended Johns Hopkins University, where she completed a master’s thesis on African architecture in 1972. After graduating, she was hired at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as an assistant museum educator for the Community Programs Department and eventually became the first African-American curator at the Met for the 20th Century Art Department.

While working there, she began to work on her Ph.D thesis, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982, under Robert Pincus-Witten at the City University of New York from 1980-1995. She worked additionally as a guest curator at many alternative museums, and later claimed these exhibits as the reason she was awarded the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism by the College Art Association in 1991. That same year, she published her book Stuart Davis: American Painter based on the eponymous exhibit she co-curated with Bill Agee. Another of her major exhibits, [“Richard Pousette-Dart, 1916-1992” 1997-1998], was notable in promoting a previously overlooked artist; her book of the same name, cowritten with Stephen Polcari, was published in 1997. During her tenure, she curated over forty exhibits at the Met, focusing on including overlooked white male artists, women artists, and artists of color throughout her career as a participant in the feminist and black artists movement.

In 2000, she started working at the Studio Museum in Harlem as the executive director, where she placed emphasis on educational programs as well as curation and was responsible for securing funding for the gallery. While working there, her Ph.D thesis was published with the University of Texas Press in 2002, seven years after she completed her degree, and Sims was named to the selection jury of the World Trade Center Memorial in 2003-2004.

Wanting to reduce her administrational duties, she was named president of the museum in 2005, leaving the directorship to Thelma Golden, and primarily worked on special projects and research while she began serving a two-year term as the chair of the Cultural Institutions Group of New York City. Sims arranged work as an adjunct curator at the museum and began to turn toward academia, teaching as a visiting professor Hunter College, Queens College (2005, 2006), and at Cornell University, where she was nominated to serve as the A.D. White Professor-at-Large (2005-2010). After leaving the Studio Museum in 2007, she also served as a fellow at the Clark Art Institute and Visiting Scholar at the University of Minnesota.

While teaching at the University of Minnesota and at Queens College, Sims began working as a curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York (MAD). At the MAD, she helped co-curate several exhibits on African-American and African art before becoming curator emerita in 2015. She was also the Distinguished Professor in the Art Department at the University of California at Irvine in 2014.

In 2018, the New York University Institute of Fine Arts appointed her to the Kirk Varnadoe Visiting Professorship, and she served as a visiting professor in 2019 and 2020. Sims now works as an independent curator, art historian, guest lecturer.

Selected Bibliography

[Dissertation] Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982. Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 1995, published, Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. 1995;
Stuart Davis: American Painter. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1991.
Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.), Rewald, S., Lieberman, W. S., & American Federation of Arts. Still Life: The Object in American Art, 1915-1995: Selections from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Rizzoli. 1996.
Romare Bearden. New York, N.Y.: Rizzoli Publications. 1993.
Polcari, S. Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992). New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1997;
[ed.] Fritz Scholder: Indian Not Indian. Washington, DC, and New York, NY: Smithsonian Institution and New York, N.Y.: Prestel. 2008;
Ramírez, M. C., Rangel, G., Rivas, J., Basha, R., Pope, N. L., Lopes, F., … Museum of Arts and Design (New York, N.Y.). New Territories: Laboratories for Design, Craft and Art in Latin America. 2014.
Carr, D., & Museum of Fine Arts. Common Wealth: Art by African Americans in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Boston: MFA Publications. 2015.
Sims, Patterson. Joyce J. Scott: Harriet Tubman and Other Truths. Hamilton, New Jersey: Grounds for Sculpture. 2018.

Sources

Admin. “Lowery Stokes Sims.” UCI Claire Trevor School of the Arts. https://art.arts.uci.edu/lowery-stokes-sims.
Carroll, Angela N. “Sisters in the Struggle: Leslie King Hammond and Lowery Stokes Sims.” BmoreArt, February 1, 2021. https://bmoreart.com/2021/02/sisters-in-the-struggle-leslie-king-hammond-and-lowery-stokes-sims.html.
Richards, Judith, and Lowery Stokes Sims. Oral history interview with Lowery Stokes Sims, 2010 July 15-22. Smithsonian Archives of American Art, 2010.
Sims, Lowery. Institute of Empathy: Saya Woolfalk (Real Art Ways: Publisher, 2011)
Sims, Lowery. “Lowery Sims.” https://www.linkedin.com/in/lowery-sims-2b255422/

Surtees, Virginia

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Surtees, Virginia

Other Names:

Virginia Bell, Lady Clarke, Virginia Craig

Gender: female

Date Born: 09 January 1917

Date Died: 22 September 2017

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Pre-Raphaelite

Career(s): art historians

Institution(s): Victoria and Albert Museum

Overview

Art historian and leading scholar of the Pre-Raphaelite art movement; produced the definitive reference book for Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Born Virginia Bell in London to Bertha Bell (1891–1974) and Edward Bell (1882–1924). Her father, a Harvard graduate and friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt, was appointed chargé d’affaires of the U.S. in Beijing in 1922. Therefore, Virginia and her older sister Evangeline (1914-1995) spent their early childhood in China. After Edward’s early death in 1924, Virginia’s mother remarried a British diplomat, Sir James Dodds (1861–1935), a Britisher, who was posted by England to Tokyo in 1937. Surtees married Henry Ashley Clarke (1903–1994), a colleague of her stepfather at the British Embassy in Tokyo. After the couple moved back to London in the early 1950s, Surtees spent three years at the Victoria and Albert Museum working on Gabrielle Enthoven’s theater collection, also known as “the theatrical encyclopedia.” Surtees bought a Rosetti painting Rosa Triplex in 1951 for just £285. Her husband was appointed to Rome and while there she met and had an affair with David Leonard Craig (1914–1996). She and Clarke divorced and married Craig in 1960. She divorced Craig in 1962, moving back to London, taking her maternal grandfather’s surname, Surtees, in order to inherit Mainsforth Hall, a country house in County Durham. Surtees began her Dante Gabriel Rossetti collection when her grandmother, the daughter of the artist’s model Louisa Ruth Herbert (1831–1921), bequeathed her many of the artist’s works. Free to pursue her interest while living on her own, Surtees spent ten years compiling a complete catalogue raisonné of Rossetti with assistance from art historian John Gere. The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) was published in 1971 in two volumes and dedicated to Sir Sydney Cockerell, who supported Surtees’s accomplishment of this arduous task. She published Sublime and Instructive, in 1972, collecting the letters between John Ruskin and the artist Louisa Waterford (1818–1891). In 1973, Surtees curated the first modern retrospective of Rossetti at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The exhibition included paintings, drawings, and watercolors that reintroduced Rossetti as an artist to the public who had hitherto only known him as a poet. In 1991, Surtees curated an exhibition of Rossetti’s portraits of his wife, Elizabeth Siddal (1829–1862), at the Ashmolean Museum. She never married again living in one of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods, South Kensington, until she entered a nursing home in 2014 and died in 2017.

As a prolific writer, Surtees published over a dozen of biographies, memoirs, and collected letters. For example, a book on Charlotte Canning, Lady-In-Waiting to Queen Victoria (1817-1861) in 1975. Surtees possessed a substantial collection of Rossetti’s work, the most important of which was auctioned at Christie’s in 2014. Her painting Rosa Triplex, which she purchased in 1951 for £285, sold for for £902,500. The rest of her collections were given to the British Museum, the Bristol City Art Gallery, the Ashmolean Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the Bristol City Museum.

Surtees was an amateur historian, and the first draft of Surtees’ catalogue raisonné required considerable editorial effort from the Oxford University Press and John Gere. Nevertheless, the book was warmly received and praised as indispensable for a full exploration of the nature and significance of Rossetti’s art and “the first catalogue raisonné devoted to the work of an English painter of the period.” Surtees’ meticulous archival research resulted in the publication of collected letters and biographies based entirely on primary sources (Ormond).

Selected Bibliography

The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882): A Catalogue Raisonné. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971;
ed., Sublime & Instructive; Letters from John Ruskin to Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford, Anna Blunden and Ellen Heaton. London: Joseph, 1972;
Charlotte Canning: Lady-In-Waiting to Queen Victoria and Wife of the First Viceroy of India 1817-1861. London: J. Murray, c1975;
Rossetti’s portraits of Elizabeth Siddal: a Catalogue of the Drawings and Watercolours. Aldershot [England]: Scolar Press, in association with Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1991.

Sources

Dorment, Richard. “Virginia Surtees Obituary.” The Guardian. 5 Dec 2017;
——. “Surtees [née Bell], Virginia (1917–2017), Art Historian and Biographer.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 14 Jan 2021;
Greene, Michael. “The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882): A Catalogue Raisonné.” The Georgia Review, 27, p. 601–605. 1973;
Ormond, Richard. “The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882): A Catalogue Raisonné.” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 120, no. 5185, p. 45. 1971;
Reynolds, Graham. “The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1828-1882 at Catalogue Raisonne.” Apollo: The International Magazine of Art & Antiques, 95, p. 70. Jan 1972;
Roberts Keith. “Virginia Surtees (1917-2017).” The Burlington Magazine. Feb 2018.

Schulz, Juergen

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Schulz, Juergen

Other Names:

Jürgen Schulz

Gender: male

Date Born: 18 August 1927

Date Died: 23 November 2014

Place Born: Kiel, Schleswig Holstein, Germany

Place Died: Providence, RI, USA

Home Country/ies: Germany and United States

Institution(s): Brown University and University of California Berkeley

Overview

Architectural historian, principally of Venice. Schulz’s parents were Johannes Martin Askan Schulz, an engineer and and Ilse Lebenbaum Hiller. When the Nazi Reich assumed power in Germany the six-year-old Schulz, whose maternal grandparents were Jewish, was prevented from ever attending a Gymnasium because of the racial laws, which was the route to a university education. In 1938 his mother moved with Schulz and his brother to Berkeley, California, where the art historian Walter W. Horn, a friend of hers, helped them settle. Schulz attended Berkeley public schools, and then the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a degree in engineering. He was drafted into and served in the postwar United States Army serving as a sergeant, 1945-1948. He joined the San Francisco Chronicle in 1950 as a reporter, then moving to London as a copy editor United Press International, between 1952-1953. He enrolled in 1953 at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. At the Courtauld he studied with Anthony Blunt writing his dissertation in 1958 under Johannes Wilde on the topic of Venetian painted ceilings in the Renaissance. Schulz served in Berkeley’s art department, beginning as an instructor, then named associate curator of Renaissance art in 1964 at the Berkeley art museum, and eventually (full) professor of art. He was active in the rescuing of artworks in Florence during the flooding of the Arno river in 1966. He published a revised version of his dissertation in 1968. The same year Brown University selected him to join their art department as chair. At Brown he set about building the department, including dramatic faculty hires He sparred with the architect Philip Johnson on the new List Art Center being designed during Johnson’s Brutalist phase for the school. Schulz widened his scholarship to the material culture of Venice in general. He married Anne Markham, also an art historian, around this time. Schulz compiled a catalog of the printed images of the city in 1970, as much, he said as a reference work for scholars than a stand-alone monograph. One of the images, the Jacopo de’ Barbari’s view of Venice of 1500, became the focus of a 1978 Art Bulletin article, one that was hailed for its contextual reading of the map. The article was one of the first in art history to use what today is known as geo-rectification, although Schulz’ work was done without the aid of computers. He next turned his attention to pre-Gothic palaces of Venice, publishing articles in 1982 and culminating in his 2004 book, The New Palaces of Medieval Venice. Beginning in 1984 he was a member on the scientific council of the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura “Andrea Palladio” at Vicenza. Schulz retired in 1995 as the Andrea K. Rosenthal Professor Emeritus. He was awarded a Kress Professorship at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts (CASVA) for the 2000–2001 year. He died of a stroke in 2014.

Schulz’ scholarship usually followed a form of, A) catalog of the objects, B) contemporary evidence, and C) the concomitant historiography. He broadly viewed art, and particularly Venetian projects as phenomena, with world connections, never uniquely local achievements. His study of the de Barbari map, “pioneered fundamentally new ways to interpret images of this kind, ways that have had a profound influence not only on the treatment of maps and views by art historians but also on the way historians of cartography view their material.” (Friedman). Schulz’ technique was to focus attention not on the topographical content of the map but rather its iconography.

Selected Bibliography

{dissertation] Venetian Painted Ceilings of the Renaissance. University of London,1968;
“Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 24 no. 3 (September 1967): 458
Venetian Painted Ceilings of the Renaissance. Berkeley, University of California Press,1968
“Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views, and Moralized Geography before the Year 1500,” Art Bulletin 60, no. 3 (1978), 425–74;
The New Palaces of Medieval Venice. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.

Sources

[obituaries:]

Friedman, David. “Juergen Schulz (1927–2014).” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 74, no. 3 (September 2015): 281-284;
“Obituary: Juergen Schulz.” SAH Newsletter, December 1, 2014, https://www.sah.org/publications-and-research/sah-newsletter/sah-newsletter-ind/2014/12/01/obituary-juergen-schulz;
Who’s Who in American Art 2005-2006. 26th ed. p. 1142.

“Juergen Schulz.” Prabook World Biography. https://prabook.com/web/juergen.schulz/312258

Schaefer, Karl

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Schaefer, Karl

Other Names:

Karl Schäfer

Gender: male

Date Born: 03 March 1870

Date Died: 16 December 1942

Place Born: Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

Place Died: Munich, Bavaria, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Overview

Art historian and controversial museum director in Lübeck and Cologne. Dismissed from the Kunstgewerbe-Museum, Cologne for having an affair a museum curator, Elizabeth Moses, who was later exonerated. He was replaced in Cologne by by Karl With.

Simon, Walter Augustus

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Simon, Walter Augustus, Jr.

Other Names:

Walter A. Simon
W.A. Simon

Gender: male

Date Born: 18 June 1916

Date Died: 28 August 1979

Place Born: Brooklyn, Cattaraugus, NY, USA

Place Died: Richmond, VA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): African (general, continental cultures), African American, African diaspora, Ancient African, Black (general, race and ethnicity), Ceylonese, Cubist, Harlem Renaissance, Islam, Islamic (culture or style), Nubian (culture or style), South Asian, Sri Lankan, and Sudanese

Institution(s): New York University and Virginia Union University

Overview

Historian of art, professor in art education and visual artist. Born in 1916 to Gay Crichton (1855-1966) and Walter Augustus Simon Sr., Simon Jr. grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. Despite the racism prevalent in schools at this time, Simon received an unconventionally thorough education for an African-American, which would serve as a solid foundation for his love of administration in higher education. He attended the School of Fine and Applied Arts at the Pratt Institute, receiving a certificate in commercial design in 1936.In 1939, Simon also trained at the National Academy of Design in New York City for a certificate in fine arts. He married Virginia Spottswood Simon on March 20th, 1941 in Washington, D.C., right before leaving to serve in WWII in the U.S. Army from 1941-1945. After the end of the war, from September 1948 to June 1949, Simon began his career as an instructor in the art department at Georgia State College (modern: Savannah State College) organizing the department of art education and serving as chairman of the curriculum committee. Between 1949 and 1961 Simon was a professor in the Art Education Department at Virginia State College (1949-1953) and at New Jersey State College (1953-61). Simon also served as the Chairman of the Art Education Department at Atlanta University, now Clark Atlanta University, in Atlanta, Georgia in the summers between 1949 and 1951. Simon completed his B.S. in Art Education in 1948 followed by an MS in Art Education in 1950 and finally his PhD in Education in 1961, all at New York University. His doctoral dissertation, entitled, “Henry O. Tanner – A Study of the Development of an American Negro Artist: 1859-1937,” is an extensive analysis of an Tanner, an American artist and the first African-American painter to gain international acclaim. Tanner moved to Paris, France, in 1891 to study painting and continued to reside there after his success in French artistic circles, which was something that would heavily influence Simon’s own aims as a visual artist to work on an international scale.

In 1961, Simon moved to Cairo, Egypt where he became an attache for the American Embassy there and served as the director of the Embassy’s special educational program for African-American students in Cairo. In 1966, Simon was appointed attache for the American Embassy in Colombo, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) until 1968 when he was transferred to the American Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan where he was in charge of the Fulbright Program, the United States Information Service libraries, and served as a liaison to Kabul University and chairman of the U.S. educational foundation. In 1971 he became a professor of art history at Bloomsburg State College, Bloomsburg Pennsylvania as well as their Director of the Educational Opportunity Program until 1977. The fall of 1977, Simon was appointed Charles W. Florence Distinguished professor of art history at Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia. Simon joined the NAACP in September of 1978, and wrote for The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1910 by W. E. B. Du Bois. Throughout his teaching career, Simon lectured on Ceylonese art, the arts of Nubia, Islamic art, Picasso and Cubism, and the Harlem Renaissance, speaking to his highly varied range of interests and life experiences. Simon died in August 1979 after complications following a kidney transplant operation earlier that year. He left behind an incomplete autobiography that he worked on over the span of 5 years until his death, describing his background in detail until World War II (now housed in the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives at Emory University).

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Henry O. Tanner – a Study of the Development of an American Negro Artist: 1859-1937. New York University, 1961.

Sources

Walter Augustus Simon and Virginia Spottswood Simon family papers, Emory University Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. https://findingaids.library.emory.edu/documents/simon1057/;
Reddick, L. D. “Walter Simon: The Socialization of an American Negro Artist.” Phylon (1940-1956) 15, no. 4 (1954): 373–92. https://doi.org/10.2307/272850.

Sedlmaier, Richard

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Sedlmaier, Richard

Date Born: 10 August 1890

Date Died: 01 June 1963

Overview

Sedlmaier’s students included Werner Goldschmidt and Walter Nathan.

Scheyer, Ernst

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Scheyer, Ernst

Gender: male

Date Born: 03 July 1900

Date Died: 04 December 1985

Place Born: Wrocław, Poland

Place Died: Detroit, Wayne, MI, USA

Home Country/ies: Germany

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

Institution(s): Detroit Institute of Arts and Wayne State University

Overview

Ernst Scheyer was born in Breslau, which is present-day Wrocław, Poland. His parents were Norbert Scheyer (1869-1932), a lumber wholesaler and Martha Beuthner (Scheyer) (1882-1943), both Jewish. After graduating from the St Elisabeth-Gymnasium in Breslau in 1919 he attended the universities in Breslau and Freiburg studying law, economics and philosophy, receiving doctor rerum politicarum (political science) in 1922. After two years of travel, he returned to graduate school, moving between the universities of Heidelberg and Cologne studying art history, sociology and ethnology, 1924-1926. Scheyer received a second Ph.D. from Cologne in art history in 1926, writing a dissertation under Albert Brinckmann. His thesis topic was Chinoiserie in silk design between the 17th-18th centuries. A fellow student of his in Cologne was the wife of the artist Max Ernst, the art historian Luise Straus-Ernst. Scheyer secured a position as research assistant at the Städtisches Museum in Cologne in 1929. The following year he became research assistant at the Silesian Museum of Decorative Arts in Breslau under its director, Erwin Hintze. While there he organized a large exhibition of the sculptural work of the novelist Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946) which toured to Berlin. He lectured at the Kunstakademie in Breslau, co-editing the Schlesischen Monatshefte. Through the art historian Franz Landesberger, he met Hauptmann. The assumption of power by the Nazi party in 1933 resulted in his dismissal because of his Judaism (“Law on the Restoration of Professional Civil Service”). He emigrated to the Netherlands working in the modern division of the Goudstikker commercial art gallery in Amsterdam and lecturing in art history at the New School of Art in Amsterdam. There he met other emigrants to the Netherlands, Klaus and Erika Mann, the literary critic Rudolf Kayser and Dutch Artists and art critics. His research work during that time, 1934-1935, focused on the influence of William Morris on the art in Europe. On the recommendation of Hauptmann, he traveled to England in 1935 as well, hoping to complete the book on Morris. He married Eveline Hanna Rodriguez Pereira (1911-2006), a Dutch pianist, also in 1935. He moved to the United States in 1936. The assistance of Detroit Institute of Arts director, Wilhelm Rheinhold Otto Valentiner, an expatriate art historian from an earlier period, secured him a research fellow position at the museum in 1938. The same year he declared himself Unitarian. In 1943 he learned that his mother had perished in a concentration camp. After the war he was deputy editor of Art Criticism beginning in 1950. He lectured at the museum until 1956 when he was appointed professor of art at Wayne State University in Detroit. He consulted at the Department of Graphics in the museum from 1966 and named honorary curator in 1968. He retired from the university in 1971.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] “Bibliography of Ernst Scheyer.” in, Scheyer, Ernst. The Circle of Henry Adams. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970, pp. 289-298;
[dissertation: ] Chinoiserien auf den Seidengeweben des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Cologne, 1926, published Oldenburg 1928;
Die Kölner Bortenweberei des Mittelalters. Augsburg: Dr. Benno Filser Verlag, 1932;
Zweihundert Jahre Breslauer Stadttheater. Breslau; Korn, 1932;
“Drawings by Correggio.” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 15 (1935); “Drawings and miniatures.” Detroit Institute of Arts, 1936;
“Baroque painting.” Detroit Institute of Arts, 1937; “Alessandro Magnasco.” Apollo 28 (1938);
“Portraits of the brothers van Ostade.” Art Quarterly 2 (1939);
“Comments on plates.” William J Bossenbrook; Rolf Johannesen, eds. Foundations of Civilization. Boston: D.C. Heath, 1939-1944;
“Drawings of the French revolution and the Empire.” Art Quarterly 4 (1942); “Frederic Bazille and the beginnings of French lmpressionism.” Art Quarterly 5 (1942);
“Far Eastem art and French Impressionism.” Art Quarterly 6 (1943): 117-144;
“Chinoiserie. Japonism.” Encyclopedia of the Arts. New York 1946;
“Goethe and the visual arts.” Art Quarterly 12 (1949): 227-256;
“Baroque painting in Germany and Austria.” Artforum 20 (1960);
“A drawing attributed to Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini.” Pantheon. 18 (1960);
“Das Problem der modernen amerikanischen Kunst.” Die Insel Hamburger Künstlerclub Almanach. 1960;
Die Kunstakademie Breslau und Oskar Moll. Würzburg: Holzner, 1961.

Sources

Scheyer, Ernst. Geistiges Leben in der Emigration. Jahrbuch. der Schlesischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Univ. zu Breslau. 5, 1960, pp. 271-295;
Grundmann, Günther. “Professor Dr. Ernst Scheyer, Detroit, 75 Jahre.” Ernst Scheyer, Eugen Spiro, Clara Sachs, eds. Beiträge zur neueren schlesischen Kunstgeschichte. Munich: Delp, 1977;
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. 605-610.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Schmidt, Gerhard

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Schmidt, Gerhard

Gender: male

Date Born: 11 May 1924

Date Died: 03 April 2010

Place Born: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Place Died: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): Medieval (European)

Institution(s): Universität Wien

Overview

Professor of art history, University of Vienna. Schmidt parents were a doctor (father) and a school teacher (mother). He served the Nazi Reich as a soldier in the Second World war and was interned in an American POW camp. Released after the war, he entered the University in Vienna to study medicine. The next year he switched to art history. He received his doctorate in art history in 1951, his dissertation topic was on French relief sculpture. His habilitation followed in 1959 with the title Die Armenbibeln des XIV. Jahrhunderts (Armenian Bibles of the Fourteenth Century). He was appointed ordentlich Professor in 1962. He was elected a corresponding member of the philosphical-historical division of the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften in 1972. Schmidt was granted emeritus status in 1992). After his 2010 he was buried in the Heiligenstädter Friedhof in Vienna. His students include Alessandra Comini.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Straus-Ernst, Luise

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Straus-Ernst, Luise

Gender: female

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Place Born: Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Place Died: Auschwitz, Silesian Voivodeship, Poland

Home Country/ies: Germany

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

Overview

Straus was born to a middle-class Jewish family. She married Max Ernst in 1918. Her husband soon began an affair with Gala Eluard (who later married Salvador Dali). The couple divorced and she continued with her art history career, caring as well for their son. The ascension of the Nazis to Germany in 1933 caused Straus to flee to Paris where she remained and later had a comfortable life in the countryside. She sent her son to London in 1938. After France’s fall to the Nazis in 1940 Jews were again being arrested there. Straus attempted to leave France herself. In 1943, after 2 years of moving from Paris and the South of France to Drancy, under increasing threat and aware that she was watched, Luise Straus-Ernst was finally captured. In June 1944 she was deported on the next-to-last train to Auschwitz where she was executed.

Sources

Straus-Ernst, Louise. Richter, Marilyn and Marietta Schmitz-Esser, trans. The First Wife’s Tale: a Memoir by Louise Straus-Ernst, Art historian, Critic, Journalist, Intimate of Europe’s Avant-garde Artists in the 1920s and 30s. New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2004.

Spencer, Harold

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Spencer, Harold Edward

Other Names:

Spence

Gender: male

Date Born: 1920

Date Died: 2016

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): American (North American)

Institution(s): University of Connecticut

Overview

Americanist professor of art history at the University of Connecticut. Spencer was born in Corning, NY, and initially educated in a one-room schoolhouse. After high school, he studied (studio) art at the Art Student’s League in New York City. He joined the merchant marine at the onset of World War II serving as a navigation officer stationed in California. There he met the art editor of The Oak Leaf, a publication of the U.S. Naval Supply Center in Oakland, Editha Mary Hayes (1921-2010). He married her in 1947. After the War, Spencer attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his B.A. and M. A. in art history. His Ph.D. in art history was granted from Harvard Univeristy in 1968. Initially he taught art and art history initially at Blackburn College (Carlinville, IL). There he edited a survey (reader) of significant art-history articles, Readings in Art History, 1969. He moved to teach at Occidental College, Los Angeles. He joined the University of Connecticut where he remained the rest of his career. He participated in the founding of Weir Farm Trust and National Historic Site dedicated to American painting serving as a director on its board. Spencer was also a painter exhibiting works in galleries and museums. After retirement in 2001, he moved to Paso Robles, California, where he practiced art full time as part of the Studios on the Park, an arts cooperative.

Spencer’s reader in art history was among the first to frame the discipline around methodological lines in an English text-book. His work was followed in 1971 but the somewhat fuller Modern Perspectives in Western Art History by W. Eugene Kleinbauer, Jr.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Augustus Earle: A Study of Early Nineteenth Century Travel-art and its Place in English Landscape and Genre Traditions. Harvard University, 1968;

Sources

“Harold E. Spencer.” Hartford (CT) Courant March 13, 2016, https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/hartfordcourant/obituary.aspx?n=harold-spencer&pid=178035664; Laddon, Anne. “Harold Spencer Obituary” Studio on the Park Artist’s Blog, http://www.studiosonthepark.org/artists/artists-blog.php?post_id=210

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

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