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Watson, Francis John Bagott, Sir

Full Name: Watson, Francis John Bagott, Sir

Gender: male

Date Born: 1907

Date Died: 1992

Place Born: Dudley, West Midlands, England, UK

Place Died: Wiltshire, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): decorative arts (art genre) and furniture

Career(s): curators


Overview

Curator and later director of the Wallace Collection, 1937-74; authority on furniture. Watson was the son of Hugh Watson, a school principal (headmaster) and Ellen Marian Bagott (Watson). He attended Dudley grammar school and Shrewsbury School, before entering St. John’s College, Cambridge University, graduating in 1929 in mathematics and English. After graduating he traveled in France and Italy, returning to join Brentano’s publishing house in 1929 until it closed, and the following year the Harold Shaylor publishing firm. In 1934 he accepted the position of registrar at the fledgling Courtauld Institute of Art where his duties included operating the slide-projector. Working for the Courtauld gained him an appreciation for the history of art. He also met numerous art historians, including most significantly Charles F. Bell, the retired Keeper of fine arts collection at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Bell would leave his personal library to Watson). When James G. Mann resigned from the Courtauld to be Director of the Wallace Collection, London, he offered Watson a position as assistant. At the Wallace, Watson began compiling the catalog of furniture (published 1956) and wrote an article on Thomas Patch between 1939-1940. During World War II her served in the Admiralty. He married an eccentric cat fancier Mary “Jane” Rosalie Gray (1904-1969) in 1941. At the end of the war, he returned to the Wallace in 1945. In 1947 he became deputy surveyor of the royal collection of works of art. His first monograph, on Canaletto appeared in 1949. In 1963 Watson succeeded Mann as director of the Wallace Collection, and promotion to surveyor of the queen’s works of art. His monographs on Fragonard and Tiepolo appeared in 1966 and 1967, respectively. A five-volume catalog of the Charles Wrightsman collection began appearing in 1966 (through 1973). He was Slade professor of fine art at Oxford for the 1969-1970 academic year. The following year he was named chairman of the Walpole Society (through 1976). In 1973 he was knighted. Watson retired from both his positions the following year, remaining as an advisor to the Royal Collection. In 1969, after the death of his wife, Watson adopted a son, Ch’eng Huan, whom the two had known as a Cambridge law student from China. In his retirement he consulted for a number of institutions, including the J. Paul Getty Museum. His adopted son, became a distinguish lawyer in Hong Kong, purchasing a home in Wiltshire for Watson, where Watson died in 1992. Watson was a principal advisor to the collection of Charles and Jayne Wrightsman, whose collection was ultimately given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His interest in conservation led to workshops on furniture and armor conservation. His knowledge eighteenth-century art included not only the literature and history of the period but economic and social history as well. A fastidious raconteur, he and toured the British and later American society circles.


Selected Bibliography

Canaletto. London: New York: P. Elek, 1949; Eighteenth Century Venice: an Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. London: Shenval Press, 1951; Furniture [in the] Wallace Collection. London: Wallace Collection, Hertford House, 1956; Louis XVI Furniture. London: Alec Tiranti, 1960; The Wrightsman Collection. 5 vols. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/New York Graphic Society, 1966-1973; Jean-Honore´ Fragonard. Milan: Fabbri, 1966; Giambattista Tiepolo. London: Knowledge Publications, 1967; Chinese Porcelains in European Mounts. New York: China House Gallery, China Institute in America, 1980.


Sources

Walker, John. Self-portrait with Donors: Confessions of an Art Collector. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974, pp. 270-77; Howard, Jeremy. “Looking After the Crockery . . . Sir Francis Watson’s Last Interview.” Apollo 137 (January 1993): 3-5; Warren, Jeremy. “Watson, Sir Francis John Bagott (1907-1992).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004; [obituaries:] de Bellaigue, Geoffrey. “Francis John Bagott Watson.” Proceedings of the British Academy 84 (1994): 565-77; Ford, Brinsley. “Sir Francis Watson.” The Independent (London), October 5, 1992, p. 17; The Times (London) September 29,1992; Ingamells, John. “Francis Watson: Connoisseur of the Collection.” The Guardian (London), October 2, 1992, p. 35; De Bellaigue, Geoffrey. Burlington Magazine 134 (1992): 811.




Citation

"Watson, Francis John Bagott, Sir." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/watsonf/.


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Curator and later director of the Wallace Collection, 1937-74; authority on furniture. Watson was the son of Hugh Watson, a school principal (headmaster) and Ellen Marian Bagott (Watson). He attended Dudley grammar school and Shrewsbury School, be

Walker, John, III

Full Name: Walker, John, III

Other Names:

  • "Johnnie Walker"

Gender: male

Date Born: 24 December 1906

Date Died: 16 October 1995

Place Born: Pittsburgh, Allegheny, PA, USA

Place Died: Amberley, Gloucestershire, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United States

Career(s): curators


Overview

First chief curator and second director of the National Gallery of Art, Washgington, D. C. Walker was born to a wealthy Pittsburgh industrialist family, Hay Walker III (d. 1925) and Rebekah Friend (Walker), whose fortune, like that of the Fricks and Mellons, came from iron ore and steel. His parents divorced early and Walker lived with his mother. At age 13, he contracted polio and was confined to a wheel chair for many years. Because of this, he frequently visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and gained a love of paintings. He attended Harvard University, where his coursework included the museum and connoisseurship classes of Paul J. Sachs. In his junior year, 1928, he helped found the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art together with fellow students Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996) and Eddie Warburg, which sponsored exhibitions of contemporary artists in rented rooms. These included Thomas Hart Benton, Edward Hopper, George Bellows and Alexander Calder. After graduating from Harvard summa cum laude in 1930, Walker continued study with Bernard Berenson for three years at Villa I Tatti, where the two developed a lasting friendship. In 1935 Walker was appointed professor in charge of fine arts at the American Academy in Rome. There he met and married Margaret Gwendolyn Mary “Margie” Drummond (d.1987), the eldest daughter of the British ambassador and the 16th Earl of Perth. While in Rome, too, he completed the negotiations with Berenson to cede his villa to Harvard as a study center after Berenson’s death. During this time in Italy, Walker learned of plans by art patron Andrew Mellon (1855-1937) to create a national art gallery in Washgington, D. C., on the mall. Walker wrote Mellon’s son, Paul (1907-1999), who had been a childhood friend of Walker in Pittsburgh, asking for a position in the new museum. Walker came to the gallery temporarily in 1938 to supervise construction when Andrew Mellon and the museum architect, John Russell Pope (1874-1937), died within 24 hours of one another. One of three members of the building committee, he was largely responsible for the inner appearance of the gallery. In January 1939 he was appointed chief curator under first director David Finley. When World War II was declared, Walker’s physical limitations prevented him from participating in war activity, but he went to Europe in 1945 to help identify looted works of art by the Nazis. As chief curator, Walker devoted himself to the NGA, installing the acquisitions from the Mellon gifts (some which had recently been acquired from the Hermitage in Russia) and encouraging other donations. Walker succeeded Finley as director in 1956, beating out the Gallery’s secretary and legal council, Huntington Cairns (1904-1985). Walker’s friendship with Jacqueline Kennedy helped solidify the 1963 loan exhibition of the Mona Lisa to the National Gallery, on loan to President John F. Kennedy and the American people, from the French government. Throughout the years, Walker strengthen donor relationships with the Mellon family (Paul and his sister, Ailsa Mellon Bruce,1901-1969) and Joseph E. Widener (1872-1943), as well as creating new ones with Armand Hammer (1898-1990), and Lessing J. Rosenwald (1891-1979). His frustrations and ultimate success dealing with Chester Dale (1883-1962), a quixotic stockbroker and collector of magnificent 19th- and early-20th-century French paintings were outlined in his 1974 book Self-Portrait with Donors. Walker’s many spectacular acquisitions included Rembrandt’s Aristotle with the Bust of Homer, Fragonard’s La Liseuse, El Greco’s Laocoon, and the Ginevra de’ Benci by Leonardo da Vinci bought in 1967 from the Prince of Liechtenstein. He made the selections from the Samuel Kress collection of Renaissance art bequest. Walker was also responsible for the planning of the gallery’s east building expansion, designed by architect I M Pei and completed in 1978. In 1961, Walker took as his personal assistant the 25-year-old J. Carter Brown, whose father, John Nicholas Brown (1900-1979), had been a fellow student with Walker’s in Sachs’ classes. Brown succeeded Walker in 1969 as Director and Walker assumed the title Director Emeritus. Walker and his wife settled in Sussex, in Amberley (near Arundel), England, and Fishers Island, New York, spending winters in Florida. In his retirement he authored monographs on James McNeill Whistler and John Constable. Walker was one of the few major museum directors with a strong career in art history (as opposed to politics, as his predecessor had, or development, from which many modern directors are drawn). His writings on art drew the praise from Berenson, who was his principal mentor. Walker displayed Berenson’s attitude that museums’ successes lay in the quality of it collections as much as crowd pleasing. He took a conservative stance on cleaning of pictures, regarding aggressive cleaning as an act of vandalism. He was also forthright about his duty to curry favor for donations. ”In the United States,” he wrote in his autobiography, ”it is axiomatic that the undertaker and the museum director arrive almost simultaneously.’


Selected Bibliography

Self-Portrait with Donors: Confessions of an Art Collector. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974; Bellini and Titian at Ferrara. A Study of Styles and Taste. London: Phaidon Press,1956; and Cain, J. Frederick. The Armand Hammer Collection: Five Centuries of Masterpieces. New York: Abrams, 1980; and Cairns, Huntington. Masterpieces of Painting from the National Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art/Random House, 1945; Great American Paintings from Smibert to Bellows, 1729-1924. London: Oxford University Press, 1943; James McNeill Whistler. New York: H. N. Abrams/National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1987; John Constable. New York: Abrams, 1978; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. New York: H. N. Abrams,1963 [and subsequent eds.]; Joseph Mallord William Turner. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1976.


Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 122, mentioned; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 229; Walker, John A. Self-Portrait with Donors: Confessions of an Art Collector. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974; Weber, Nicholas Fox. Patron Saints: Five Rebels who Opened America to a New Art: 1928-1943. New York: Knopf, 1992; [obituaries:] Lowe, Ian. The Independent [London], October 28, 1995, p. 14; Powell, Earl A. “John Walker, A Washington love affair with great art.” The Guardian [London], October 20, 1995, p.18; The Times [London], October 19, 1995; Smith, Roberta. “John Walker, Washington Curator, Dies at 88.” The New York Times October 17, 1995, p. D25.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Walker, John, III." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/walkerj/.


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First chief curator and second director of the National Gallery of Art, Washgington, D. C. Walker was born to a wealthy Pittsburgh industrialist family, Hay Walker III (d. 1925) and Rebekah Friend (Walker), whose fortune, like that of the Fricks a

Wallen, Burr E.

Full Name: Wallen, Burr E.

Other Names:

  • Burr E. Wallen

Gender: male

Date Born: 1941

Date Died: 24 September 1991

Place Died: Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): painting (visual works) and Renaissance


Overview

Northern Renaissance painting specialist, professor of art, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1976-1991. Wallen was raised in Mt. Vernon, New York. He graduated from Princeton Univeresity in 1963 where the mentorship of professor Robert A. Koch greatly influenced him. He continued with a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and other awards at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. His master’s degree was granted in 1965. Wallen was awarded a curatorial fellowship at the National Gallery of Art to complete his dissertation on the topic of Jan Sander van Hemessen. He received a doctorate in 1976 and immediately was appointed faculty at UCSB in 1976. In 1981 wrote the catalog, The Cubist Print, for the exhibition of the same name at the National Gallery in Washgington, D. C. He was promoted to associate professor in 1982. A revised version of his thesis on Hemessen was published in 1983. Wallen rose to professor in 1991. He died at his home after a long illness. A second book, Bosch and Vainglory: The Forgotten Deadly Sin near completion at the time of his death, was never published. His students included Hans van Miegroet. Wallen was noted for his research on the history of prints of all ages, particularly the etchings of Canaletto, Sonia Delaunay, and Picasso. His Cubist Print catalog remains one of the major discussions of the genre.


Selected Bibliography

[master’s thesis:] A Majolica Service for Isabella d’Este. New York University, Institute of Fine Arts, 1966; [dissertation:] Hemessen: Style and Iconography. New York University, 1976; and Stein, Donna. The Cubist Print. Santa Barbara: University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1981; Jan van Hemessen: an Antwerp Painter between Reform and counter-reform. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983.


Sources

Ayres, Larry M. “Burr E. Wallen – Santa Barbara.” University of California: In Memoriam, 1993 http://texts.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb0h4n99rb&chunk.id=div00082&brand=calisphere&doc.view=entire_text .




Citation

"Wallen, Burr E.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/wallenb/.


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Northern Renaissance painting specialist, professor of art, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1976-1991. Wallen was raised in Mt. Vernon, New York. He graduated from Princeton Univeresity in 1963 where the mentorship of professor

Waller, François Gérard

Full Name: Waller, François Gérard

Other Names:

  • François Gérard Waller

Gender: male

Date Born: 04 June 1867

Date Died: 23 November 1934

Place Born: Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

Place Died: Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

Home Country/ies: Netherlands

Subject Area(s): biography (general genre), Dutch (culture or style), engravings (prints), and prints (visual works)

Career(s): art collectors


Overview

Biographer of Dutch engravers; collector; maecenas. Waller was the eldest son of Meindert Johannes Waller and Maria Elisabeth Adolphine Waller-Schill. Both his parents were socially and culturally engaged citizens of Amsterdam. His father was a member of the firm Testas en Waller. The young Waller attended the Gymnasium, first in Amsterdam and later in Arnhem. During a mountain-climbing expedition in 1886, Weller nearly froze to death on the Matterhorn. The resulting lung damage impaired his health for the rest of his life. After his graduation, in 1888, he enrolled at Leiden University in the Faculty of Law. He was, however, much more attracted to art, and in 1891 he became a member of the Société d’Archéologie de Bruxelles. In 1896 he went to Paris to study art history at the École des Chartes. In the same year he returned to Amsterdam, where he obtained a voluntary position at the Amsterdam Rijksprentenkabinet under Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, the former deputy director of the Mauritshuis. Waller subsequently moved to The Hague following his appointment, in February 1897, as deputy director of the Mauritshuis. The director of the Mauritshuis, the cantankerous Abraham Bredius, felt Waller’s appointment politically motivated, at the cost of Bredius’ own choice, Frits Marcus. Bredius proffered his resignation (the first of multiple times). The ever-petty Bredius made the next three years nearly impossible for Waller to cooperate with him. Bredius impugned that Waller drank on the job, was not interested in art and was surreptitiously plotting with Bredius’ other nemesis, Victor Eugène Louis de Stuers, head of the Department of Arts and Sciences of the Ministry of the Interior. None was borne out by the facts. In addition to his position in the Mauritshuis Waller was appointed director of the Leiden University Print room, where he reorganized the collection, set up a collection of reproductions, and acquired a number of drawings of distinctive Dutch artists. In 1898 Waller applied for the position of director of the Amsterdam Rijksprentenkabinet, as the successor of Hofstede de Groot but the position was returned to Johan Philip van der Kellen a former director of the Amsterdam Rijksprentenkabinet. In collaboration with the latter, Waller started compiling a biographical dictionary of Dutch engravers. In 1900 Waller left his difficult situation in the Mauritshuis, succeeded by Wilhelm Martin. Five years later Waller had to resign from his post in the Leiden Print room, due to his declining health. He returned to Amsterdam, where he, in 1906, became a partner in the family firm of Testas en Waller. He worked ther until 1917. He continued working on his biographical dictionary of engravers for the next five years, searching archives and writing to contemporary artists. By the early 1920s his health had deteriorated so that he abandoned the project. Waller built up several collections of art historical interest. He donated most of his collections, including his ex-libris collection (1913) and his Netherlands popular prints collection (1923) to the Rijksprentenkabinet. He also bequeathed his large collection of Dutch prints as well as several drawings to this institution. Waller designated the state of the Netherlands as his sole heir. His assets were made into the F. G. Waller Fund. The proceeds of the fund were to be used every year by the Rijksprentenkabinet, mainly for the acquisition of prints by Dutch artists. The trustees of the fund were also charged with the dictionary of engravers, Waller’s life-long work, which they entrusted to W. R. Juynboll, who revised and prepared it for publication in 1938, Biographisch Woordenboek van Noord Nederlandsche Graveurs. In 1936, according to the wish of Waller, his catalog of his collection of Dutch and Flemish popular books, from 1500 up to 1830, was prepared for publication by Emma Dronckers.


Selected Bibliography

F. G. Waller. Biographisch Woordenboek van Noord Nederlandsche Graveurs. Uitgegeven door de beheerders van het Waller Fonds en bewerkt door Dr. W. R. Juynboll. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1938; Dronkers, E. Verzameling F. G. Waller. Catalogus van Nederlandsche en Vlaamsche populaire boeken. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1936.


Sources

“Abraham Bredius, A Biography.” Museum Bredius (website) http://www.museumbredius.nl/biography.htm; Staring, A. “Levensbericht van den Schrijver” in Biographisch Woordenboek van Noord Nederlandsche Graveurs. Uitgegeven door de beheerders van het Waller Fonds en bewerkt door Dr. W. R. Juynboll. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1938; De Hoop-Scheffer, D. “F. G. Waller 1867-1934” Het Rijksmuseum 1808-1958. Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 6 (1958): 91; Niemeijer, J. W. “Het Rijksprentenkabinet en F. G. Waller” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 32,3 (1984): 111-117; Heijbroek, J. F. “François Gérard Waller (1867-1934), kunstkenner en collectioneur” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 32,3 (1984): 118-135; Ekkart, R. E. O. “De collectie exlibris” (Bookplates) Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 32,3 (1984): 136-140; Heijbroek, J. F. “De collectie volksprenten” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 32,3 (1984): 146-151 (English Summaries by Patricia Wardle, pp. 146-151); [obituaries:] Staring, A. “François Gerard Waller” Levensberichten van de Maatschappij der Nederlandsche Letterkunde te Leiden, Jaarboek 1934-1935, pp. 201-206; B[rugmans], H. “François Gérard Waller” Maandblad Amstelodamum 23 (1936): 7.



Contributors: Monique Daniels


Citation

Monique Daniels. "Waller, François Gérard." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/wallerf/.


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Biographer of Dutch engravers; collector; maecenas. Waller was the eldest son of Meindert Johannes Waller and Maria Elisabeth Adolphine Waller-Schill. Both his parents were socially and culturally engaged citizens of Amsterdam. His father was a me

Walsh, John, Jr.

Full Name: Walsh, John, Jr.

Other Names:

  • John Joseph Walsh Jr.

Gender: male

Date Born: 1937

Place Born: Mason City, WA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States


Overview

Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1983-2000. His father was John Joseph Walsh, Sr., (b. 1909). Walsh graduated from Yale University in 1961. He continued to graduate school at Columbia University, studying baroque art under Julius S. Held. Walsh became a lecturer and curatorial assistant for the Frick Collection in New York, 1966-1968. He spent a year researching his dissertation at the University in Leiden. Walsh was appointed associate curator at the Metropolitan Museum of art in 1968. He advanced to curator of European Painting at the met, teaching at Barnard and Columbia beginning in 1970 (through 1977). His Ph.D. was granted in 1971. However, in 1975, Walsh resigned from the Museum (along with another curator, Anthony M. Clark) to protest the rocky administration of its director, Thomas Hoving. Walsh joined the staff of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1977 as the Mrs. R. W. Baker curator of paintings. He was a visiting professor of art at Harvard, 1979. In 1982, the estate of J. Paul Getty (1892-1976) was finally settled, endowing a heretofore meager art museum with more than a billion dollars. Walsh was appointed the first post-settlement director of the Getty Museum, declining an offer to be the MFA’s director. In his capacity as director, he oversaw moving the Getty from the smaller Getty building (Getty Villa) in Pacific Palisades, CA, to the massive Richard Meier complex in Brentwood (Los Angeles), CA. He launched a massive campaign of buying works of art, establishing the Getty’s reputation for paying top dollar for art, and reorganizing the museum structure, including recommending a department of drawings, under George R. Goldner (b. 1943) as curator. As the Getty’s director, Walsh found himself at odds again with Hoving, who had been fired from the Met and was now editor of the magazine Connoisseur. Hoving used this monthly vehicle to criticize acquisitions of the Getty, most notably, the Aphrodite statue, which Hoving claimed was stolen from Italy. Though Walsh continued to condone a policy of not investigating provenance as director, the major blame was cast upon the antiquities curator, Marion True (the statue was returned to Italy in 2007). Walsh also dealt with the apparent feud between the Museum and Getty’s heir, John Paul Getty II, who frequently financially supported British efforts keep British-owned masterpieces from being acquired by the American Getty Museum. Walsh published a book on a Getty painting, Jan Steen: The Drawing Lesson, in 1996. He retired from the Getty in 2000 as Director Emeritus, succeeded by Deborah Gribbon. Thereafter Walsh was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and taught at Yale.


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Jan and Julius Porcellis: Dutch Marine Painters. Columbia University, 1971; and Gribbon, Deborah Ann. The J. Paul Getty Museum and its Collections: a Museum for the New Century. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1997; and Schneider, Cynthia P. A Mirror of Nature: Dutch Paintings from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Edward William Carter. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1981; Jan Steen: The Drawing Lesson. Malibu, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996; edited. Bill Viola: the Passions. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum/National Gallery, London, 2003.


Sources

Kimmelman, Michael. “The World’s Richest Museum.” New York Times, October 23, 1988, Section 6, p. 32; Graham, Caroline. “The Getty’s John Walsh–after the Graces.” Art Newspaper 6 (July/August 1995): 16-18; D’Arcy, David. “Valedictory Thoughts from John Walsh, Retiring Director of the Getty Art Newspaper 11 no. 107 (October 2000): 12; “About the Contributors.” Oud Holland 120 no 1-2 (2007): 200.




Citation

"Walsh, John, Jr.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/walshj/.


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Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1983-2000. His father was John Joseph Walsh, Sr., (b. 1909). Walsh graduated from Yale University in 1961. He continued to graduate school at Columbia University, studying baroque art under Ju

Walter, Otto

Full Name: Walter, Otto

Gender: male

Date Born: 1882

Date Died: 1965

Place Born: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Place Died: Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): ancient, Ancient Greek (culture or style), Antique, the, architecture (object genre), Classical, and sculpture (visual works)


Overview

Specialist in ancient Greek art, particularly the art and architecture of Athens. Director of the Austrian Archaeological Institute (österreichisches archäologische Institut, öAI) in Athens, 1921-1938. Because of monetary restrictions, also served in diplomatic corps as Austrian Consul General in Athens 1923-1933. Named second secretary of the German Archaeological Institute in Athens in 1938 following the German takeover of Austria. Honorary Professor at the University of Vienna, 1945-1948, Professor at the University of Innsbruck 1948-1951, Professor at the University of Vienna 1951-1953.


Selected Bibliography

Beschreibung des Reliefs in kleinen Akropolismuseum, 1923 Die Reliefs aus dem Heiligtum der Echeliden in Neu-Phaleron, in: AEphem 1937, 97ff. Der Parthenonfundamente und das Delphische Orakel, in: AnzWien 89, 1952, 97ff. Zur Tyrannenmördergruppe, in öJh 40, 1953, 126 ff.


Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 214-215.




Citation

"Walter, Otto." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/waltero/.


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Specialist in ancient Greek art, particularly the art and architecture of Athens. Director of the Austrian Archaeological Institute (österreichisches archäologische Institut, öAI) in Athens, 1921-1938. Because of monetary restrictions, also served

Walters, Henry Beauchamp

Full Name: Walters, Henry Beauchamp

Gender: male

Date Born: 1867

Date Died: 1944

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): ancient, Ancient Greek (culture or style), Antique, the, antiquities (object genre), Classical, and Roman (ancient Italian culture or period)

Career(s): curators


Overview

Keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum.


Selected Bibliography

and Smith, Cecil Harcourt, and Forsdyke, E. John. A Catalogue of the Greek and Etruscan Vases in the British Museum. 4 vols. London: British Museum, 1925 ff.;





Citation

"Walters, Henry Beauchamp." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/waltersh/.


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Keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum.

Walzel, Oskar

Full Name: Walzel, Oskar

Gender: male

Date Born: 1864

Date Died: 1944

Place Born: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Place Died: Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Home Country/ies: Austria

Institution(s): Mills College, New York University, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Universität zu Köln, and Vassar College


Overview

Dissertation: Wechselseitige Erhellung der Künste. Berlin, 1917.


Selected Bibliography

Wechselseitige Erhellung der Künste. Berlin: 1917.


Sources

Dilly, 28, 30



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Walzel, Oskar." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/walzelo/.


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Dissertation: Wechselseitige Erhellung der Künste. Berlin, 1917.

Warburg, Aby M.

Full Name: Warburg, Aby M.

Other Names:

  • Aby M. Warburg

Gender: male

Date Born: 1866

Date Died: 1929

Place Born: Hamburg, Germany

Place Died: Hamburg, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): art theory, mythologies (religious concept), myths, psychological concepts, and psychology


Overview

Founder of the Warburg Institute (now part of the University of London) and theorist of a mytho-psychological form of art history. Warburg grew up the eldest son in a wealthy devoutly Jewish banking family. His father Moritz Warburg, hoped his son would take over as a banker as did his mother Charlotte Oppenheimer (Warburg). Warburg developed Typhoid fever at age seven and remained in delicate health thereafter. At age thirteen he made a pact with his brother to sell his birthright provided his brother would keep him in books. Though Warburg pursued art, his family fortune allowed him to remain independently wealthy his whole life. He attended the University in Bonn, studying religion/philosophy under Hermann Usener (1834-1905) and history under Karl Lamprecht, who himself had written art history, and taking courses with the art historians Carl Justi and Henry Thode. Justi was too rigid for him and Thode too society-conscious and chummy to consider working with for a Ph.D. For his graduate work, Warburg studied at various universities–as was the standard model for the humanities in Germany–Bonn and Munich. In 1889 he was one of eight students in the Florentine experiment of August Schmarsow to create a German research institute there. Warburg settled on Strasbourg and a younger art historian, Hubert Janitschek. His 1891 dissertation on Botticelli, written under Janitschek, employed one of the notions that would occupy him his entire life: the transmission of antique iconography in other cultures, in this case the Renaissance. He moved to Berlin to study medicine, an interest fed by his study of psychology in art. But psychology led to anthropology and in 1895 he visited the territories of the southwestern United States in order to observe Navaho and Pueblo native-American traditions.

Returning to Germany, he married the artist Mary Hertz in 1897. During this time, Warburg became ever more interested in how science and pseudo-science effected knowledge and its visual representation. In an effort to find a relation between astrology and emergence of natural science, he began to collect rare books on the zodiac and representations of the human body. These he added to his vast personal library, which he had begun in 1886. In 1907, Warburg published a key study on Francesco Sassetti’s burial chapel at Santa Maria Novella in Florence. He again emphasized the Renaissance adopting Classical visual conventions to convey emotion and sympathy. In 1909 he moved his book collection to a house in Hamburg with the intent of creating a research library. Warburg hired the young art historians Wilhelm Waeztoldt between 1909-1911 and then Fritz Saxl, beginning in 1913, to manage the library and its objects. The following year Warburg discussed turning it into a research institute, but Germany’s entry into World War I the same year delayed it. At age forty-eight, Warburg was too old to fight. However, the war drew his interests toward propaganda literature, principally the German renaissance prints of Dürer and pamphlets of Martin Luther. He visited the British Renaissance scholar Herbert P. Horne in 1915 in Siena. In 1918 he developed severe mental illness requiring hospitalization. In 1922 Warburg hired a young Ph.D., Gertrud Bing, to be his new librarian (and later personal assistant). He had recovered sufficiently by 1923 to deliver a lecture on the ‘Serpent Ritual’ of the Navajo.

The next year, Saxl assisted in launching Warburg’s library as a research center, called Die kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW). The Library officially opened in 1926. In the final years of his life, Warburg became preoccupied with the role memory played in civilization. This fascination resulted in an image atlas, called Mnemosyne, consisting of forty large canvases to which almost 1000 images were affixed. Warburg chose the format in order to graphically represent the relationships between images. Groups of representations under categories such as pathos, human sacrifice, redemption, and Oriental astrology were juxtaposed to each other in order to define them, not by word as much as through contrast. Among the categories was one Warburg had created himself, the Nympha, the image of a young woman with a swirling garment. After his death, the library continued to operate. The ascension of the Nazi’s to power in Germany in 1933 made existence for the library, named for a Jew, very difficult. Saxl fled to London with the Library that year. Initially the library was housed in the basement of Thames House. Later it was incorporated as the Warburg Institute into the University of London in 1944. Shortly before and after the war, E. H. Gombrich was given the job of organizing Warburg’s papers into publishable form. Warburg’s method juxtaposed diverse images and material in order to illuminate classical mythology and symbolism in post-classical art. Warburg, however, had difficulty drawing conclusions in any definitive way. Gombrich realized that Warburg’s notes were not suitable for publication and abandoned the project. In 1970, Gombrich published an intellectual biography of Warburg which remains by far the best introduction to Warburg’s ideas (2nd ed., 1986).The New York home of his brother, Paul Warburg (1868-1932), near the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was the first home for the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University.

Methodologically, Warburg’s early years show him under the spell of Jacob Burckhardt. In the late nineteenth century, Burckhardt and others framed the Renaissance as a period when the modern individual had emerged from the values of the middle ages. The counter argument, advanced by art historians such as Thode, show Christianity playing a vital role. Warburg adopted Burckhardt’s premise, but viewed the Renaissance as a transitional era (a key concept to Warburg), rather than his mentor’s positivist belief of a Renaissance as cultural whole. His interest in the transmission of classical antiquity into newer eras may have been sparked by the first chapter of the 1867 Bilder aus der neueren Kunstgeschichte by Anton Springer which addressed the continued influence of antiquity in the middle ages. The psychological evocations of the classical symbolism were a focus of much of Warburg’s work. The term Pathosformel, or a form evoking Pathos, appears often in his research. He viewed his own time period similar to that of the Renaissance as a era of jarring cultural transition. Warburg viewed nearly all graphic representation at the subject for study. His cultural collections included playing cards, postal stamps, posters, newspaper illustrations and photographs. His work was so broadly cultural that it may not be correct to consider him an art historian. He certainly opposed the stylistic and autonomous approaches to art history which Heinrich Wölfflin and Vienna School historians such as Aloïs Riegl had come to dominate in the field. His use of unorthodox sources and highly individual research (e.g,. that Dionysian antiquity transmitted into Early Modern Europe via interest in the occult (Bazin 215)) attracted scholars who sought to reinvent the discipline themselves. These included, Erwin Panofsky, E. H. Gombrich who wrote a biography of Warburg, Ernst Cassirer, Gertrud Bing, Edgar Wind and of course Saxl himself.

 


Selected Bibliography

  • [complete bibliography] Aby M. Warburg-Bibliographie 1866 bis 1995: Werk und Wirkung: mit Annotationen. Wuttke, Dieter, ed. Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1998; 
  • Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Gertrud Bing. 2 vols. Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1932; 
  • Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen. Baden-Baden: Verlag V. Koerner, 1979;

Sources

  • Saxl, Fritz. “Rinascimento dell’Antichità. Studien zu den Arbeiten A. Warburgs.” Reporitorium für Kunstwissenschaft 43 (1922):220-272;
  • Wind, Edgar. “Warburg’s Begriff der Kulturwissenschaft und seine Bedeutung für ästhetik.” Zeitschrift für ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 25 (Beilagehaft) (1931): 163-79;
  • Saxl, Fritz. “Three ‘Florentines:’ Herbert Horne, Aby Warburg, Jacques Mesnil.” Lectures, vol. 1 (1957): 331-344;
  • Heckscher, William S. “The Genesis of Iconology.” In Stil und überlieferung in der Kunst des Abendlandes. (Akten des XXI. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte), Bonn, 1964 [c.1967] 3: 239-62;
  • Bing, Gertrud, “A. M. Warburg.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965);
  • 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. 61 mentioned, 64-5, 82, 92, 64 n. 147;
  • Mnemosyne: Beitr. zum 50. Todestag von Aby M. Warburg. Berger, Klaus, and Füssel, Stephan, eds. Gratia 7. Göttingen: Gratia-Verlag, 1979;
  • Warnke, Martin, Hofmann, Werner, and Georg Syamken, Georg. Die Menschenrechte des Auges: über Aby Warburg. Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1980;
  • Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, pp. 76-78, 118;
  • Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire d l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 215;
  • Gombrich, Ernst H. Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986;
  • German Essays on Art History. Gert Schiff, ed. New York: Continuum, 1988, pp. lvi-lxi, 281;
  • Cassierer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art and History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989;
  • Photographs at the Frontier: Aby Warburg in America, 1895-1896. Edited by Benedetta Cestelli Guidi and Nicholas Mann. London: Merrell Holbertson Publishers, in association with the Warburg Institute, 1998;
  • Haynes, Deborah J. “Aby Warburg.” Dictionary of Art;
  • Photographs at the Frontier: Aby Warburg in America, 1895-1896. London: Merrell Holbertson, for the Warburg Institute, 1998;
  • Forster, Kurt W. “Introduction.” The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999, pp. 1-75;
  • Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 452-456;
  • Woodfield, Richard. Art History as Cultural History: Warburg’s Projects. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2001; Aby M. Warburg-Bibliographie 1866 bis 1995: Werk und Wirkung: mit Annotationen. Wuttke, Dieter, ed. Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1998;
  • Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Gertrud Bing. 2 vols. Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1932;
  • Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen. Baden-Baden: Verlag V. Koerner, 1979;
  • Heidnisch-antike weissagung in wort und bild zu Luthers zeiten. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1920;
  • Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike: Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Geschichte der europäischen Renaissance. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1932, English: The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance. David Britt, trans. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999;
  • “Italienische Kunst und internationale Astrologie im Palazzo Schifano zu Ferrera.” Paper read at the 10th annual International Congress of Art History. In L’Italia e l’arte straniera. Atti del X Congresso Internazionale di Storia dell’arte, 1912. Rome: Unione editrice, 1912;
  • “Bildniskunst und florentinisches Bürgertum.” (1902). [also appears in Gesammelte Schriften]; Warburg aus Briefen: Kommentare zu den Kopierbüchern der Jahre 1905-1918. Diers, Michael, ed. Schriften des Warburg-Archivs im Kunstgeschichtlichen Seminar der Universität Hamburg 2. Weinheim: VCH, 1991;
  • Kleine Schriften des Warburg Institute London und des Warburg Archivs im Warburg Haus Hamburg [serial]. Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1998- ;
  • Ausreiten der Ecken : die Aby Warburg – Fritz Saxl Korrespondenz, 1910 bis 1919. McEwan, Dorothea, ed. Kleine Schriften des Warburg Institute London und des Warburg Archivs im Warburg Haus Hamburg, part 1. Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1998;
  • La rinascità del paganesimo antico; contributi alla storia della cultura. Pensiero storico 49. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1966; Levine, Emily J., Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013; 
  • Gaier, Martin. Kunstforschung, Fotografie und Kunsthandel um 1900: Gustav Ludwigs Korrespondenzen mit Wilhelm Bode, Aby Warburg und anderen. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2021.



Citation

"Warburg, Aby M.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/warburga/.


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Founder of the Warburg Institute (now part of the University of London) and theorist of a mytho-psychological form of art history. Warburg grew up the eldest son in a wealthy devoutly Jewish banking family. His father Moritz Warburg, hoped his son

Warburg, Eddie

Full Name: Warburg, Eddie

Other Names:

  • Eddie Warburg

Gender: male

Date Born: 1908

Date Died: 1992

Place Born: White Plains, Westchester, NY, USA

Place Died: Norwalk, Fairfield, CT, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Career(s): educators


Overview

Philanthropist and benefactor of the arts; nephew of art historian Aby M. Warburg; briefly taught art history at Bryn Mawr. Warburg was the youngest of five children of philanthropist Felix Warbug (1871-1937), a partner in the investment firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company and brother of the German art historian Aby M. Warburg. His mother was Frieda Schiff (Warburg) (1876-1958), the only daughter of merchant banker and financier Jacob H. Schiff (1847-1920). Warburg grew up on Fifth Avenue in New York City (today the building is the Jewish Museum) and attended Middlesex School in Concord, MA. He entered Harvard University, graduating in 1930. While at Harvard he attended the famous art history and museum courses led by Paul J. Sachs and Edward Waldo Forbes. As a student at Harvard, Warburg acquired a blue-period Picasso and works by Paul Klee and Ernst Barlach which he had bought directly from the artists in their studios on tour in Europe. Together with classmates Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996) and John Walker III, he formed the Harvard Society of Contemporary Art in 1929 which exhibited works by artists as Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, and the more controversial David Siqueiros, Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. The HSCA also gave early exposure to Alexander Calder, Walker Evans and Bauhaus architects. Six months before graduating, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., tapped Warburg to be on the advisory committee of the fledgling Museum of Modern Art. Warburg served on its board of trustees between 1932 to 1958. He was also a trustee and organizer of the Museum’s film library. After college, Warburg taught briefly at Bryn Mawr during the depression under Department head Georgiana King. Warburg’s wealth meant he didn’t need the salary and offered King to work for free. Worried that this would be a bad precedent for the profession of art historians, King and Warburg worked out a deal where Warburg would be paid, but write a check back to the university for the full amount (Saunders). Warburg was responsible for giving fellow Harvard alumnus Philip Johnson his first commission, an International-style design for Warburg’s apartment in which to hang his modern art. After teaching at Bryn Mawr, Warburg returned to New York, where he co-founded the American Ballet with Kirstein. Warburg funded much of the American Ballet on his own; it was on Warburg’s estate that George Balanchine’s first ballet created in American was performed. Warburg continued his activity as an art collector, acquiring works by Picasso, Matisse, Hopper, O’Keeffe, Lachaise, Klee, Miro, Brancusi and Calder. Many of these were later donated to the Museum of Modern Art and other museums. In 1939 he married Mary Whelan Prue Currier, a fashion editor for Vogue. Shortly before America’s entrance into World War II, he assisted in bringing refugee artists Leger, Miro and Chagall to the United States. He supported German art historians fleeing Nazism, including Heinrich Schwarz. During the war itself, Warburg enlisted in the army as a private (later rising to captain) and was part of the shoring-up forces in Normandy shortly after D-day. He was awarded the Bronze Star and the governments of Belgium and Italy decorated him for his work with the displaced persons. After the war, Warburg continued his leading charitable agencies. He was a member of the New York State Board of Regents between 1958 to 1975. From 1971 to 1974, he was vice director for public affairs of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, becoming honorary trustee from 1983 until his death. In 1981 Warburg published his only work, a privately printed biography of Sydney S. Spivack (1907-1969). In retirement he lived in Wilton, CT. He died of heart failure in a Norwalk, CT, hospital. Except for thecourses he taught at Bryn Mawr, Warburg could not be considered an art historian. He published nothing in the field. His wealth and more importantly his taste enabled him to “make happen” some of the most important art events in the United States.


Selected Bibliography

Spiv. s.l: s.n [privately printed], 1981.


Sources

Weber, Nicholas Fox. Patron Saints: Five Rebels who Opened America to a New Art 1928-1943. New York: Knopf, 1992; Saunders, Susanna Terrell. “Georgiana Goddard King (1871-1939): Educator and Pioneer in Medieval Spanish Art.” in Women as Interpreters of the Visual Arts, 1820-1979. Sherman, Claire Richter and Holcomb, Adele M., eds. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981, p. 218; [obituaries:] Pace, Eric. “Edward Warburg, Philanthropist And Patron of the Arts, Dies at 84.” New York Times September 22, 1992, p B9; The Guardian (London), October 5, 1992, p. 33.




Citation

"Warburg, Eddie." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/warburge/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Philanthropist and benefactor of the arts; nephew of art historian Aby M. Warburg; briefly taught art history at Bryn Mawr. Warburg was the youngest of five children of philanthropist Felix Warbug (1871-1937), a partner in