Full Name: Victor, Karl
Gender: male
Date Born: unknown
Date Died: unknown
Subject Area(s): Baroque, divinity (doctrinal concept), and seventeenth century (dates CE)
Studied the origins of the Baroque as an expression of absolutism.
Das Zeitalter der Barock. 1928.
Bazin 185
Studied the origins of the Baroque as an expression of absolutism.
Full Name: Vey, Horst
Gender: male
Date Born: unknown
Date Died: unknown
Home Country/ies: Germany
Subject Area(s): Baroque, Flemish (culture or style), Netherlandish Renaissance-Baroque styles, and painting (visual works)
Van Dyck scholar; director of the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, 1973-. In 1969 he published together with Gert von der Osten the Pelican History of Art volume on Dutch and German renaissance painting. He succeeded Jan Lauts as director of the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe in 1973.
and Irmgard Hiller, Irmgard, and Falk, Tilman. Katalog der deutschen und niederländischen Gemälde bis 1550 (mit Ausnahme der Kölner Malerei) im Wallraf-Richartz-Museum und im Kunstgewerbemuseum der Stadt Köln. Cologne: Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, 1969; and Kesting, Annamaria. Katalog der niederländischen Gemälde von 1550 bis 1800 im Wallraf-Richartz-Museum und im öffentlichen Besitz der Stadt Köln. Cologne: Wallraf-Richartz-Museum,1967; and Osten, Gert von der. Painting and Sculpture in Germany and the Netherlands, 1500 to 1600. Pelican History of Art 31. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969; Die Zeichnungen Anton van Dycks. 2 vols. Brussels: Verlag Arcade, 1962-67.
Van Dyck scholar; director of the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, 1973-. In 1969 he published together with Gert von der Osten the Pelican History of Art volume on Dutch and German renaissance painting. He succeeded Jan L
Full Name: Verneilh, Félix Joseph de, Comte
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 21 October 1820
Date Died: 28 September 1864
Place Born: Puyraseau, Dordogne, France
Place Died: Périgueux, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France
Home Country/ies: France
Subject Area(s): archaeology and Medieval (European)
French archaeologist, inspecteur divisionnaire de la Société française d’archéologie, historian and medievalist art historian. Verneilh was the son of the politician Baron Jean Joseph de Verneilh-Puyraseau (1756-1839). In 1851 Verneilh published L’architecture byzantine en France: Saint-Front de Périgueux et les églises à coupoles de l’Aquitaine, a work which ignited controversy by drawing attention away from Western classical models for medieval architecture and instead suggestion Byzantine models. In 1854 Verneilh wrote a paper on the identity of the meaning of the eight bas-reliefs on the outer lateral faces of the Martyrs’ Portal of the south transept of Notre Dame de Paris. The identity of these sculptures had never been solved, various attributions being to the life of St. Stephen or an unnamed miracle of the Virgin. Verneilh, however, doubted religious iconography, suggesting that the figures represented contrasting morality behaviors of the university students. The paper was rejected by the editor of the Annales Archéologique Adolphe Napoléon Didron as too far-fetched (Kraus). When in another writing Verneilh suggested that Limoge work was influenced by German modles, he was charged with being unpatriotic, “There is only one archeology; every country cannot have its own.” He died at his chateau at age 43. After Didron’s death in 1867, the Annales Archéologique published his interpretation of the Notre Dame bas-relief which ignited controversy again. Émile Mâle in his L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France sided with Didron in rejecting the theory outright in 1898. Verneilh’s L’architecture byzantine en France was groundbreaking. Though Alexandre-Albert Lenoir and Ludovic Vitet had suggested models other than the classical architecture were the inspiration for medieval architecture in the 1830s, Verneilh’s book suggested a direct link (Stamp). He arged that the domed churches of Périgord département (modern Dordogne), were directly inspired from Byzantine architecture through the model of St. Mark’s in Venice. In 1967 the art historian Henry Kraus posited that Verneilh’s sharp break from traditional art-historical scholarship–advancing a secular subject for the relief sculpture instead of religious–branded his theory outlandish to mainstream scholarship, despite Verneilh being a respected scholar. Summarily rejected in the 19th century, his interpretation has prevailed (Kraus).
La cathédrale de Cologne; étude archéologique. Paris: Librairie archéologique de Victor Didron, 1848; Des influences byzantines: lettres à M. Vitet, de l’Académie Française. Paris: Didron, 1855; L’architecture byzantine en France: Saint-Front de Périgueux et les églises à coupoles de l’Aquitaine. Paris: V. Didron, 1851; L’Art du Moyen Âge et les causes de sa décadence, d’après M. Renan. Paris: V. Didron, 1862; [German sources debate:] “Les Émaux français et les émaux étrangers, mémoire en réponse à M. le comte F. de Lasteyrie, lu à la séance de la Société archéologique de Limoges, le 28 novembre 1862.” Bulletin Monumental (1863); Quast, Ferdinand von. “Les emaux d’Allemagne et les emaux Limousins.” Bulletin Monumental 26 (1867):109-130, 205-231; “Les bas-reliefs des l’université à Notre-Dame de Paris.” Annales Archéologique 22 (1869): 96-106.
Daubige, Charles. “Inauguration du buste de M. Félix de Verneilh, au musée de Périgueux, le 29 novembre 1866.” Le Périgord 1867; Arbellot, François. “Félix de Verneilh, notice biographique.” la Société archéologique en historique du Limousin [dans sa séance du 25 juillet 1865]. Limoges: impr. de Chapoulaud, 1865; Kraus, Henry. The Living Theatre of Medieval Art. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1967, pp. 3-5; Andrieu, Jules. “Verneilh-Puyraseau, Félix de.” Bibliographie générale de l’Agenais et des parties du Condomois et du Bazadais. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969 (originally:)Paris, 1886-1891; Stamp, Gavin. “In Search of the Byzantine: George Gilbert Scott’s Diary of an Architectural Tour in France in 1862.” Architectural History 46 (2003): 198; [obituary:] “Mort de M. Félix de Verneilh, inspecteur divisionnaire de la Société française d’archéologie.” Bulletin Monumental 10 (1864): 757-758; Des Moulins, Charles. “Nécrologie de M. Félix de Verneilh-Puyraseau. ” La Guienne (Bordeaux) October 12 1864.
French archaeologist, inspecteur divisionnaire de la Société française d’archéologie, historian and medievalist art historian. Verneilh was the son of the politician Baron Jean Joseph de Verneilh-Puyraseau (1756-1839). In 1851 Verneilh published <
Full Name: Vermeulen, Frans Andé Jozef
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 1883
Date Died: 1961
Home Country/ies: Netherlands
Vermeulen studied art history at Utrecht University under Willem Vogelsang. From 1920 onward, he began his research in architectural history. At the same time, he was employed at the Rijksbureau voor de Monumentenzorg, an organization responsible for the description and conservation of monuments. His tasks included the description of monuments of the Tielerwaard, in the province of Gelderland. In 1938, he obtained his doctoral degree with a dissertation on classicist-baroque architecture in The Netherlands, Bouwmeesters der Klassicistische Barok in Nederland. Between 1928 and 1941, his three-volume handbook on the history of architecture in The Netherlands appeared, Handboek tot de geschiedenis der Nederlandsche bouwkunst. This informative work was based on innovative research. The delayed third volume, published in 1941, abruptly ends in the beginning of the eighteenth century. The publisher, Wouter Nijhoff (1866-1947), very dissatisfied at not getting copy in time, notified the readers that this part also would be the last one. He probably had other reasons as well to finish with Vermeulen. During World War II, Vermeulen became an active supporter of the Nazis and as a result neglected much of his work. In 1942, he quit the Rijksbureau and accepted a leading position at the ‘Afdeeling voor Kultureele Propaganda’, a section of the ‘Departement van Volksvoorlichting en Kunsten’. In 1944, he fled to Germany. After the liberation, he was interned as a Nazi collaborator in The Netherlands for more than two years. The Rijksbureau voor de Monumentenzorg prepared his description of the monuments of the Tielerwaard for publication (1946). Vermeulen’s race related theories on style reveal his sympathy for National Socialism. This already is apparent in some sections of his Handboek, and, more outspokenly, in his 1942 publication on the new Adolf Hitler-style in German architecture.
[dissertation:] Bouwmeesters der Klassicistische Barok in Nederland. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1938; Handboek tot de geschiedenis der Nederlandsche bouwkunst. 3 vols. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1928-1941; [reviewed] Henkel, M.D. Oud Holland 46 (1929): 142-145 and Oud Holland 49 (1932) 237-239; “De nieuwe Duitsche bouwkunst als uitdrukking der Duitsche wereld beschouwing” De Schouw (1942): 20-30; Geïllustreerde beschrijving van de monumenten van geschiedenis en kunst. De provincie Gelderland, 1ste stuk: Het kwartier van Nijmegen, de Bommeler- en de Tielerwaard. Tweede aflevering: de Tielerwaard. The Hague: 1946.
Van Laanen, Dirk. “Aangehouden zorg: Rijksdiensten voor de monumenten 1939-1947” in Monumenten en oorlogstijd. Jaarboek Monumentenzorg 1995. Zwolle: Waanders, 1995: 16; De Vries, Aart. “‘Kulturfreundlich’ of ‘Kulturfeindlich’: het lot van monumenten in oorlogstijd” in Monumenten en oorlogstijd. Jaarboek Monumentenzorg 1995. Zwolle: Waanders, 1995: 231; Bosman, Lex. “De geschiedenis van de Nederlandse architectuurgeschiedenis: middeleeuwse bouwkunst” in Hecht, Peter; Hoogenboom, Annemieke, and Stolwijk, Chris, eds., Kunstgeschiedenis in Nederland. Negen opstellen. Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1998, pp. 70, 73-76, 80-82;
Vermeulen studied art history at Utrecht University under Willem Vogelsang. From 1920 onward, he began his research in architectural history. At the same time, he was employed at the Rijksbureau voor de Monumentenzorg, an
Full Name: Vermeule, Cornelius C., III
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 1925
Date Died: 2008
Place Born: Queenstown, Ireland
Place Died: Cambridge, Middlesex, MA, USA
Home Country/ies: United States
Subject Area(s): Classical
Career(s): curators
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, curator of classical art, 1957-1996. Vermeule’s grandfather was Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule I (1859-1950), a prominent civil engineer for New Jersey and New York. His father was Colonel Cornelius Vermeule II (1896-1943) director of the New Jersey Public Works Administration, and his mother was Catherine Comstock (Vermeule). The younger Vermeule began collecting ancient coins–a lifelong interest–as a boy in 1934 in England. Vermeule entered Harvard in 1943 but the suicide of his father and onset of World War II caused him to join the Army. He was trained in Japanese and sent to the Pacific Theater and remained in Japan after the war as a language expert, rising to the rank of captain. He graduated from Harvard University in 1947 with an A. B. and an A. M. in 1951 where he was a student of George M. A. Hanfmann. His Ph.D. was granted at the University of London in 1953 while he worked as an assistant for Sir John Soane’s Museum cataloging its Greek and Roman antiquities. He returned to the United States in 1953 to teach at the University of Michigan as a professor of Fine Arts until 1955. That year he moved to Bryn Mawr College as Professor of archaeology, teaching there until 1957 when was appointed curator of classical collections for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He married a Bryn Mawr graduate student, Emily Dickinson Townsend (1928-2001) the same year. He established the coin room at Harvard’s Fogg art museum (under Hanfmann). While at the Museum, Vermeule was also a Lecturer in fine arts at Smith College between 1960-64. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1969. When the Museum’s director, Perry T. Rathbone was relieved of his duties during the 1970 centennial celebration because of the acquisition of a stolen Raphael, Vermeule assumed the acting directorship. It was during his time as director that the Museum purchased an important work, Cézanne’s last self-portrait. For the 1973-1974 academic year Vermeule was a visiting faculty at Yale University. In 1978 he received an appointment at Boston College. Vermeule’s tenure as curator was marked by the acquisition of two large vases portraying the fall of Troy and the death of Agamemnon, a Roman portrait of an old man, and a Minoan gold double ax. He retired in 1996 and was succeeded by John Herrmann. His wife also taught and wrote in the area of classical art history. Curators who trained under Vermeule include Marion True and Carlos Picon. Vermeule was independently wealthy; his retirement was done in part so that his salary could keep others on staff during budget cuts. A highly eccentric man, his numerous gifts to the Department were sometimes disguised under pseudonyms, “Wentworth Bunsen” and “Sir Northwold Nuffler.” Vermeule suffered a stroke in 2008 and died at age 83. Vermeule’s acquisitions of classical objects during his later years as curator Classical Art Department were overshadowed by accusations of unethical practice. He and the Museum were accused of obtaining more than 60 Greek and Roman antiquities from illegally excavated sites smuggled out of their home country. In 1984 he advised the billionaire William I. Koch to buy an unusual collection of classical coins, despite warnings from a Swiss bank that the coins were stolen from Turkey. Koch was later forced to return the coins in 1999. Vermeule bought the upper half of a classical statue of Hercules which the Turkish government claimed was part of a figure in Antalya Museum, Turkey. Despite increasing standards by the museum community not to buy works of questionable provenance, Vermeule continued to collect aggressively, especially from a dealer of “unclear provenances”, Robert Hecht. Under Vermeule’s direction the Museum acquired in 1987, 1989, and 1991, three South Italian vases. The 1993 Museum book, Vase Painting in Italy, caused controversy through its admission that these Apulian vases were acquired despite a lack of provenance. As a scholar, Vermeule was unusually prolific for a museum curator. His writing concentrated on the continuity of Greek to Roman to Late Antique culture in the Mediterranean.
Art and Archaeology of Antiquity. 4 vols. London: Pindar Press, 2001-2003; [as Isao Tsukinabe] Old Bodrum. Somerset Society, 1964; A Bibliography of Applied Numismatics in the Fields of Greek and Roman Archaeology and the Fine Arts. London: Spink, 1956; and Neuerburg, Norman, and Lattimore, Helen. Catalogue of the Ancient Art in the J. Paul Getty Museum: the Larger Statuary, Wall Paintings and Mosaics. Malibu, CA: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1973; European Art and the Classical Past. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964; The Cult Images of Imperial Rome. Rome: Bretschneider, 1987; Greek Sculpture and Roman Taste: the Purpose and Setting of Graeco-Roman Art in Italy and the Greek Imperial East. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1977; Numismatic Art in America: Aesthetics of the United States Coinage. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1971; and Brauer, Amy. Stone Sculptures: the Greek, Roman, and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums. Cambridge, MA: The Museums, 1990; The Goddess Roma in the Art of the Roman Empire. Cambridge, MA: Spink, 1959; “Aphrodisiaca: Satyr, Maenad and Eros: a Romano-Hellenistic Marble Group of the Third Century A.D. in Boston.” Essays in Memory of Karl Lehmann. New York: Institute of Fine Arts,, 1964. pp. 359-374.
Robinson, Walter V. “New MFA Link Seen to Looted Artifacts.” Boston Globe December 27, 1998, p. 1; Temin, Christine. “A Not-So-Classic Curator.” Boston Globe September 10, 1995, p. 16; “Former PWA Chief Found Dead on Ferry, Apparently a Suicide.” New York Times August 8, 1943, p. 32; [obituary:] Martin, Douglas. “Cornelius C. Vermeule III, a Curator of Classical Antiquities, Is Dead at 83.” New York Times December 9, 2008
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, curator of classical art, 1957-1996. Vermeule’s grandfather was Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule I (1859-1950), a prominent civil engineer for New Jersey and New York. His father was Colonel Cornelius Vermeule II (1896-1943
Full Name: Verdier, Philippe
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 1912
Place Born: Lambersart, Hauts-de-France, France
Home Country/ies: France
Institution(s): Univeristy of Montrèal
Focillon student.
Art and the Courts: France and England from 1259 to 1328. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada.1972; Le couronnement de la Vierge: les origines et les premiers développements d’un thème iconographique. Montreal: Institut d’études médiévales, 1980; Catalogue of the Painted Enamels of the Renaissance. Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery, 1967; Russian Art: Icons and Decorative Arts from the Origin to the Twentieth Century; a selection . . . in Observance of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Opening of the Walters Art Gallery. Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery, 1959.
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
Focillon student.
Full Name: Venturi, Lionello
Gender: male
Date Born: 25 April 1885
Date Died: 14 August 1961
Place Born: Modena, Emilia-Romagna, Italy
Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy
Home Country/ies: Italy
Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, and Renaissance
Career(s): art historians
Professor of art history, University of Turin; specialist in Italian Renaissance, late 19th and early 20th century painting. Venturi was the son of Adolfo Venturi. In 1918 became friends with the business magnate and art collector. Riccardo Gualino (1879-1964). Gualino astutely advised him to buy work by Amedeo Modigliani, which Venturi later organized a retrospective exhibition after the artist’s death. The following year, 1919, Venturi was appointed to the University of Turin at age thirty-four, almost unheard of for a major Italian university. Among his first students was Mary Pittaluga, who wrote her ground-breaking thesis on Eugène Fromentin under Venturi. Like his father, the younger Venturi was much influenced by Heinrich Wölfflin; he early expounded on the works and concepts of that art historian in an article “Gli schemi del Wölfflin,” in the journal L’Esame (1922). While in Turin he became an exponent for the modernist Turin artist group, Gruppo di Sei. Venturi succeeded his father in art history at Sapienza University of Rome in 1931. The same year the Mussolini government required loyalty oaths of all faculty, which Venturi refused. Forced to leave the University he moved to Paris until the advent of the Vichy government. Venturi relocated to New York. There he wrote probably the first history of art criticism, History of Art Criticism, in 1936; an Italian version could only appear after the war. He held visiting professorships at Johns Hopkins University; University of Mexico (1942); and was associated with the école Libre des Hautes études (1943). After the defeat of Mussolini, he returned to become the chair in Art History at the University of Rome in 1945. Together with his sister, Rosabianca Skira-Venturi (1916-1999), he published the three-volume Italian Painting between 1950-1952. He retired from the University in 1955, delivering the Bampton Lectures at Columbia University the same year. HIs son, Franco Venturi (1914-1994), was also an art historian.
Venturi was influenced, like his father, by the esthetics of Benedetto Croce, and the art historians Alois Riegl and Wölfflin. His lasting claim to popular art history may not have been anything he wrote. His edited 1951 book, Italian Painting: the Renaissance, was the first appearance of the subsequently famous Sistine ceiling detail of Adam and God’s fingers touching.
Professor of art history, University of Turin; specialist in Italian Renaissance, late 19th and early 20th century painting. Venturi was the son of Adolfo Venturi. In 1918 became friends with the business magnate and art col
Full Name: Venturi, Adolfo
Gender: male
Date Born: 1856
Date Died: 1941
Place Born: Modena, Emilia-Romagna, Italy
Place Died: Santa Margherita Ligure, Genova, Italy
Home Country/ies: Italy
Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style), Medieval (European), and Modern (style or period)
Historian of Italian art and pioneer of the modern school of art history in Italy (Bazin 419); chair in Medieval and Modern Art at the University of Rome (1896-1931). Venturi was the son of Gaetano Venturi and Maria Barbieri (Venturi). He took courses at the academy and technical school in Modena, largely teaching himself classical history through access of the excellent library of G. B. Toesca. Acting as a private tutor, he saved enough money to attend the Institute of advanced studies in Florence. He studied the monuments in Florence and then Bologna, Venice, and ultimately Milan. In 1878 he was appointed curator at the Galleria Estense in Modena. Venturi used his position to scour the Emilian archives, grounding himself in what was now his career of art history. In 1888 he was appointed general inspector of the Belle Arti at the Ministry of Public Instruction in Rome. There he revitalized the rather traditional institution. He instituted the first formal training on treatment of works of art as well as the outline for the development of a catalog of the national artistic heritage. In 1896 requested a faculty appointment as chair in Medieval and Modern Art at the University of Rome where he instituted courses on modern art. As professor of art, he was particularly influenced by Benedetto Croce‘s aesthetics, especially Croce’s the emphasis the individual in history. In the United States, Venturi weighed in on a celebrated authenticity debate of a version of a purported Leonardo painting, La Bella Ferroniere, owned by a Kansas City couple. Venturi’ defended the opinion of Sir Josef Duveen, then being sued by the Mrs. Hahn, that the painting was a low copy. The incident provoked Hahn’s husband into writing The Rape of La Belle (1946). Venturi remained at the University until his retirement in 1931. With Count Dominico Gnoli (1838-1915), Ventrui founded the journal, Archivio storico d’arte (after 1901, L’Arte) in 1888, editing it until 1940. He succeeded Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) as a member of the Paris Institute in 1901. His son, Lionello Venturi was also an art historian. His students included the Venetianist Giuseppe Fiocco. His unfinished twenty-five volume Storia dell’arte italiana (History of Italian Art), spanning early Christian art to the 16th century established a truly Italian art history, freeing it from dependence on foreign scholars. Methodologically, Venturi employed a conoisseurship-style to his art history. In the depression era of the United States in the 1930, his monograph was selected for translation by workers of the Works Project Administration (never published) in 1939.
La Madonna: Svolgimenyo artistico delle rappresentazzioni dell Vergine. Milan: 1900.; Storia dell’arte italiana. 25 vols. Milan: Hopeli, 1901-1938, abridged English version, A Short History of Italian Art. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926; and unpublished English translation by John Rodighierro and [the] assistance of Illinois WPA Project 30275. Chicago: s.n., 1939 [MS Art Institute of Chicago], Exhibition of Pictures, Drawings & Photographs of Works of the School of Ferrara-Bologna, 1440-1540. London: Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1894; Luca Signorelli interprete di Dante. Florence: F. Le Monnier, 1921; Pisanello. Rome: Palombi, 1939; Paolo Veronese: per il IV centenario dalla nascita. Milan: U. Hoepli, 1928; preface. Gibellino Krasceninnicowa, Maria. Il Beccafumi. Siena: Istituto communale d’arte e di storia, 1933; Il museo e la galleria Borghese. Rome: Società laziale, 1893; La pittura del Quattrocento nell’Emilia and La pittura del Quattrocento nell’alta Italia. English, North Italian Painting of the Quattrocento. 2 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931; Piero della Francesca. Florence: G. & P. Alinari, 1922; The Madonna: a Pictorial Representation of the Life and Death of the Mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ by the Painters and Sculptors [etc.]. London: Burns & Oates, 1902; Exhibition of Italian Art, 1200-1900. [exhibition catalog] London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1930; La galleria Crespi in Milano: note e raffronti. Milan: V. Hoepli, 1900; L’Arte a San Girolamo. Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1924.
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, pp. 47, 67 cited; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 149, 419-420; [obituaries:] “Adolfo Venturi, 84, an Art Authority.” New York Times June 11, 1941, p. 21.
Historian of Italian art and pioneer of the modern school of art history in Italy (Bazin 419); chair in Medieval and Modern Art at the University of Rome (1896-1931). Venturi was the son of Gaetano Venturi and Maria Barbieri (Venturi). He took cou
Full Name: Vauxcelles, Louis
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 01 January 1870
Date Died: 1943
Place Born: Paris, Île-de-France, France
Home Country/ies: France
Subject Area(s): Cubist, Fauvre, Modern (style or period), and twentieth century (dates CE)
Career(s): art critics
Art critic of the early 20th-century modernist art movements; coiner of the terms “Fauvism” and “Cubism”. Vauxcelles started writing art criticism in the 1890s, rising to a major figure (and today, documenter) of the art world in Paris. In a 1905 review, Vauxcelles disparagingly described the proto-expressionist French painters around Andre Darin and Henri Matisse, whose work was exhibited among classical sculpture, as “Donatello parmi les fauves” (a Donatello amongst wild beasts). The term “les fauves” (wild beasts) became the epithet for the movement. Likewise in 1908 he described the work of Braque as “bizarre cubiques” (bizarre cubes). Vauxcelles’ description of their work as ‘full of little cubes’, again became the moniker for the style, though neither Braque nor Picasso adopted it. Conscious of his fame in naming French art styles, he mocking ascribed the early work of Ferdinand Léger, who employed a variation of Cubism in his work, as “Tubism” in 1911. His criticism for the journals Excelsior, Gil Blas and Le Carnet de la semaine (under the name Pinturicchio), made him among the most popular critics by 1914. He was appointed to the executive committee of the Salon d’Automne. In 1916 he founded his own review, Le Carnet des artistes, backed by Albert Dubarry, the publisher of Le Carnet de la semaine in which Vauxcelles continued to write. He launched a higher-profile periodical, L’Amour de l’art, editing it between 1920 and 1923. When Braque returned to a style of clearer representation after World War I, one that diverged more from Picasso, Vauxcelles conceded that the artist’s work deserved a place in the tradition of French painting. Despite his derision of Cubism and related avant-garde styles, Vauxcelles stance as an anti-academic painting and sculpture never wavered. Throughout his writing, Vauxcelles valued modern artists who demonstrated individualist, ‘progressivist’ traditions in art, contrasting academic painters with their rules and traditions. He chided the emergence of Cubism as a return to a theoretic, rule-bound art as French academic painting was. He had no appreciation for strongly-abstract art. Among his other truisms, Vauxcelles observed that “art critics age badly.”
and Fontainas, André, and Gromort, Georges, and Mourey, Gabriel. Histoire générale de l’art français de la Révolution à nos jours. 3 vols. Paris: Librairie de France, 1923-25,
Gee, Malcolm. Dealers, Critics and Collectors of Modern Painting. New York: Garland Pub., 1981, pp. 101-53; Green, Christopher. Cubism and its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French art, 1916-1928. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987, pp. 121-218
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
Art critic of the early 20th-century modernist art movements; coiner of the terms “Fauvism” and “Cubism”. Vauxcelles started writing art criticism in the 1890s, rising to a major figure (and today, documenter) of the art world in Paris. In a 1905
Full Name: Vasconcelos, Joaquim de
Gender: male
Date Born: 1849
Date Died: 1936
Home Country/ies: Portugal
Subject Area(s): ceramic ware (visual works), ceramics (object genre), metal, metalwork (visual works), metalworking, Portuguese (culture or style), pottery (visual works), Renaissance, and silverwork
Historian of Portuguese art; Renaissance; Portuguese silverwork and ceramics.
Historia do Ourivesaria e Joalharia. 2 vols. Porto, 1882.; Toreutica. Porto, 1904.; Ceramica. 1883-1884.
Bazin 448
Historian of Portuguese art; Renaissance; Portuguese silverwork and ceramics.