Skip to content

W

Wittkower, Rudolf

Full Name: Wittkower, Rudolf

Other Names:

  • Rudi Wittkower

Gender: male

Date Born: 22 June 1901

Date Died: 11 October 1971

Place Born: Berlin, Germany

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: Germany

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

Institution(s): Columbia University and Warburg Institute


Overview

Scholar of Italian baroque art. Seminal figure for the generation of art historians who matured during the second half of the 20th century. Because Wittkower’s father, Henry Wittkower (1865-1942), was British, the younger Wittkower held British citizenship his whole life despite having been born and raised in Germany. His mother was a German, Gertrude Ansbach (Wittkower) (1876-1965). After graduating from the humanistic Friedrichs Gymnasium in Berlin, Wittkower studied (practicing) architecture for a year in Berlin before deciding to changed to art history under Henrich Wölfflin in Munich. Wölfflin proved to be a very detached professor, and, unhappy with his teaching, Wittkower returned to Berlin to study under Adolph Goldschmidt. He completed his dissertation there on the subject of Domenico Morone. In 1923 he moved to Rome to assist Ernst Steinmann, director of the Herziana, with completion of the Michelangelo-Bibliographie 1510-1926. The same year he married Margot Holzmann (Margot Wittkower) who was to assist him with some of his later scholarship. In between, Wittkower contributed many entries for artists in the Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler (the so-called “Thieme-Becker”). He was elevated at the Biblioteca Herziana to a research fellow, remaining there until 1927. Wittkower returned to Berlin but continued his association with the Herziana, publishing in 1931 with Heinrich Friedrich Ferdinand Brauer a survey of drawings by Bernini. The publication put him at the fore of an ideological battle (both esthetically and politically) with the major Austrian art historian, Hans Sedlmayr. Sedlmayr criticized Wittkower in a published review, for belonging to neither of the two genres of art history that Sedlmayr found acceptable. The public exchange drew a distinction between Sedlmayer’s Gestaltungsprinzipien [abstract principles] approach to art history (as well as his anti-Jewish Nazi sympathies) and Wittkower’s approach. After briefly teaching as a Privatdozent at the Univeristy in Cologne in 1932-1933, Wittkower was forced to leave Germany–now fully under the control of the Nazis, whose laws forbade university positions to Jews–abandoning any habilitationschrift for the London and the Warburg Institute. In London he was founding co-editor of the Journal of the Warburg Institute (renamed in 1940 to The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes) in 1937, remaining at the Institute between 1934-1956. His position at the Institute allowed outside lecturing, such as his 1946 Courtauld Institute talks on the architecture of Vittone. Proof of his broad interests, when he first proposed the lectures to his host, Anthony Blunt, Blunt believed Wittkower joking and had invented the architect’s name. In 1948 the young Italian scholar Luigi Salerno studied with Wittkower on a Warburg fellowship. Wittkower began publishing his research, first begun as his intended habilitation in the 1930s, on Palladio and Alberti, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. These studies, expanded and broadened, were published in 1949 as his most significant book, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. Formal pedagogical duties also began that year when he was appointed to be Durning Lawrence professor at the Slade School of Art, although these were limited largely to advising dissertations. Wittkower’s dedication to drawings as a scholarly tool continued. He collaborated with several other eminent art historians to produce books on Sir Robert Mond’s collection (with Tancred Borenius), drawings of Poussin (with Anthony Blunt, from a manuscript of Walter Friedlaender). In 1952 he published a catalog of Carracci drawings from Windsor Castle. Wittkower was visiting professor of art history at Harvard University in 1954. This solidified a move to the United States, where he became chair of the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in 1956. In addition to lecturing at Columbia, Wittkower reorganized the Department, adding, among appointments, the first lecturer in Near Eastern art. Here, too, he wrote two of his most popular books, Art and Architecture in Italy: 1600-1750 (1958) and, in collaboration with his wife, Born Under Saturn (1963). Art and Architecture in Italy, volume 16 of the “Pelican History of Art” was (and remains) the publisher’s best-selling volume of the series. A magisterial synthesis of a period of vast artistic output, Wittkower updated it three times. It received the Bannister Fletcher Prize for architectural writing. Wittkower retired from Columbia in 1969 as Avalon Foundation Professor Emeritus of Art History. During his final years, he held the Kress Professorship at the National Gallery of Art and Slade Professor at Cambridge. He delivered the Charles T. Mathews lectures for 1971-1972 which appeared as the book Gothic vs. Classic: Architectural Projects in Seventeenth-century Italy. After his death he received Alice Davis Hitchcock Award in 1975.

He supervised many Ph.D. dissertations including Eduard F. Sekler (at the Warburg), D. Stephen Pepper and Colin Rowe. Another student also became a colleague of his at Columbia university, Howard Hibbard, whose methodology Hibbard closely reflected. His scholarly tradition was most clearly continued in the work of Joseph Connors. In terms of method, Wittkower certainly differed from Sedlmayr. Compared to Sedlmayr’s psychological-theoretic approach of the same material, Wittkower, in the words of Kenneth Clark, disposed of, “the hedonist, or purely aesthetic, theory of Renaissance architecture.” Not that Wittkower eschewed psychology (two of his books used this approach principally) rather, he preferred to allow documents to connect psychological patterns he used rather than vice versa. Like Goldschmidt, he discounted the Hegelian view of art history so common among German art historians of his and previous generations. Richard Krautheimer described Wittkower’s art history as one blending mathematics and philosophy, the religious and cultural climate with the interrelations of patron and artist. Even the Warburg scholar Fritz Saxl, who admitted in a 1934 letter that Wittkower’s ideas on the history of art were much different from his own, concluded that Wittkower’s “struggle for clear-shaped logical notions in art history has undoubted merits.” Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism remains his most influential writing, having immediately influenced works as disparate as Die Kunst der Renaissance in Italien (1953) by Walter Paatz, Ezra Ehrenkrantz’s The Modular Number Pattern (1956) and P. H. Scholfield’s The Theory of Proportion in Architecture (1958). The book, however caught the scorn of Roberto Pane who attacked Wittkower’s ideas at the Eighteenth International Congress of the History of Art (Venice) in 1956 (Wittkower, 1973). In 1961 Wittkower presented a paper at Winterthur, Delaware, on “Art History as a Discipline” which demonstrated his affinity for the work of Erwin Panofsky and decrying the extreme connoisseurship of Roger Fry. The esthetician Joseph Masheck insightfully contrasted Panofsky with Wittkower, both fellow Warburg Institute scholars: “Panofsky mainly pursued a history of illustrated concepts…that have taken roost…[in] datable objects.” Wittkower, on the other hand, he contended, is the “ultra-Warburgian,” not limited to the classical tradition but employing a cosmopolitan view of art.


Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Reynolds, Donald M. The Writings of Rudolf Wittkower: a Bibliography. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1989; [dissertation:] Domenico Morone, Francesco Morone, Girolamo dai Libri und Cavazzola: Stilkritische Analyse einer Veroneser Malegruppe der Renaissance. Berlin, 1923; [with E. Steinmann] Michelangelo Bibliographie, 1510-1926. Leipzig, 1927; [response to Sedlmayr’s review] “Zu Hans Sedlmayrs Besprechung von E. Coudenhove-Erthal: Carlo Fontana.” Kritische Berichte 4 (1930-32): 142-5; and Brauer, Heinrich. Die Zeichnungen des Gianlorenzo Bernini. Römische Forschungen der Bibliotheca Hertziana, 9-10. 2 vols. Berlin: Keller, 1931; “Michelangelo’s Biblioteca Laurenziana.” Art Bulletin 16 (1934): 123-218; “Carlo Rainaldi and the Roman Baroque.” Art Bulletin 19 (1937): 242-313; Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. Studies of the Warburg Institute: 19. London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1949; The Artist and the Liberal Arts. London: H. K. Lewis, 1952; “Individualism in Art and the Artists.” Journal of the history of Ideas 22 (1961): 291-302; “The Vissitudes of a Dynastic Monument: Bernini’s Equestrian Statue of Louis XIV.” Meiss, Millard, ed., De artibus opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky. 2 vols. New York: 1961, I: 497-553; and Wittkower, Margot. Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1963; “Santa Maria della Salute: Scenographic Architecture and the Venetian Baroque.” Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte 3 (1963): 31-54; “Imitation, Eclecticism, and Genius.” In Aspects of the Eighteenth Century ed., Earl R. Wasserman. Baltimore: 1965: 143-61; “Art History as a Discipline.” Winterthur Seminar on Museum Operation and Connoisseurship. Winterthur, DE: 1961: 55-69.; “Interpretation of Visual Symbols in the Arts.” In Studies in Communication, introduction by B. Ilfor Evans. London: 1955: 109-124; edited with Jaffe, Irma B. Baroque Art: the Jesuit Contribution. New York: Fordham University Press, 1972; Gothic vs. Classic: Architectural Projects in Seventeenth-century Italy. New York: G. Braziller 1974; Studies in the Italian Baroque. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1975; Allegories and the Migration of Symbols. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977; Idea and Image: Studies in the Italian Renaissance. London: Thames and Hudson, 1978.


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, pp. 71 mentioned, 81; 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. 4, 46 mentioned, 51 mentioned, 63 cited, 70 cited, 103 cited; Wittkower, Rudolf. “Preface.” Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. 4th ed. London: Academy, 1974, p. v; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire d l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 226, 435, 511; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007, pp. 512-515; Jennifer Montagu and Joseph Connors. “Rudolf Wittkower 1901-1971.” Introduction to Art and Architecture in Italy: 1600-1750. 6th edition, volume 1, Painting in Italy. Pelican History of Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, pp. ix-xv; Masheck, Joseph. “Rudolf Wittkower.” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics 4: 470-2; Southorn, Janet. Dictionary of Art 33: 285-6; Romano, Giovanni. Storie dell’arte: Toesca, Longhi, Wittkower, Previtali. Rome: Donzelli, 1998; 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. 790-799; Rosand, David. “Rudolf Wittkower, 1901-1971.” Proceedings of the British Academy 90 (1995): 557-570; Rosand, David. “Making Art History at Columbia: Meyer Schapiro and Rudolf Wittkower.” Columbia Magazine (Fall 2003) http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Fall2003/witt.schapiro; [obituaries:] Hibbard, Howard. “Rudolf Wittkower.” Burlington Magazine 114 (1972): 173-77.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Wittkower, Rudolf." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/wittkowerr/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Scholar of Italian baroque art. Seminal figure for the generation of art historians who matured during the second half of the 20th century. Because Wittkower’s father, Henry Wittkower (1865-1942), was British, the younger Wittkower held British ci

Willis, Frederick Charles

Full Name: Willis, Frederick Charles

Other Names:

  • Friedrich Carl Willis

Gender: male

Date Born: 1883

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): biography (general genre)

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

Institution(s): Universitäten Halle


Overview

Assisted in editing the magisterial dictionary of artists, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler.


Selected Bibliography

Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart: unter Mitwirkung von 300 Fachgelehrten des In- und Auslandes. 37 vols. Leipzig : E. A. Seemann, 1907-1950.




Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Willis, Frederick Charles." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/willisf/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Assisted in editing the magisterial dictionary of artists, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler.

Willis, Robert

Full Name: Willis, Robert

Gender: male

Date Born: 1800

Date Died: 1875

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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


Overview

Father of the monographic treatment of architecture; architectural historian and Cambridge professor of engineering. Willis’ father, Robert Darling Willis (1760-1821), was the royal physician during George III’s insanity and a Cambridge professor. The man never married the mother(s) of his children and Willis’ is unknown. As a child, he demonstrated a facility with mechanics and, after private tutoring, entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1821. He received his B. A. in 1826 and M.A. In 1829. Ordained a priest at Ely in 1827, he worked at Downing College in the 1830s. A member of the Cambridge Philosophical [i.e., scientific] Society, the group’s topics encompassed building construction, including medieval arches. As a scientist and inventor, he investigated topics such as human vowel sounds (1828-1832) and the possibility of talking machines. Willis was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1830. His inventions included one for projecting images (1830), and a “tabuloscriptive engine” (1837) which made graphs from number tables. He married Mary Anne Humfrey (1803/4-1870?), daughter of an architecture and later mayor of Cambridge, in 1832. Willis toured France, Italy, and Germany with his wife between 1832 and 1833. Inspired by his fellow Cambridge Philosophical Society friend, William Whewell, and Whewell’s book Architectural Notes on German Churches (1830), Willis published Remarks on the Architecture of the Middle Ages, Especially of Italy (1835). In it, he argued, that the Gothic was an evolutionary assembly of architectural peculiarities from previous ages and regions. Willis’ work brought the Gothic style to serious attention; Willis was made an honorary member of the British Institute of Architects in 1835. The same year Willis lectured at the Cambridge Philosophical Society on Gothic architecture, tracery, and vault construction, adding Greek and Egyptian buildings the next year. Inheritance from his uncle allowed him to cease lecturing and study architecture full time. He designed and built neo-Gothic elements in buildings and advised on restorations. Though the Gothic demanded to see weight supported, he wrote, the actual support did not need to coincide with apparent support. He was appointed Jacksonian professor of natural and experimental philosophy in 1837. Willis was a captivating and popular lecturer. His Principles of Mechanism appeared in 1841 which became a standard text for engineering students and amateurs. Willis was a consultant on cases of safety and engineering education in Britain. Willis published on medieval vaults in 1842, showing how medieval masons had set out vaults of vast complexity. The result was epoch-making work (Pevsner). He published on the flamboyant style of French late Gothic architecture in 1842. Willis joined the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, who, in 1844, published his discussion of medieval architectural nomenclature, eventually incorporated into the fifth edition of Parker’s Glossary of Gothic Architecture, 1850. A monograph on the church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem (1849), was written without ever visiting it. When Jean-Baptiste Lassus published Villard de Honnecourt’s thirteenth-century pattern book in 1851, Willis issued an annotated facsimile following year. Willis was a juror for the 1851 Exhibition. In 1853 he joined the new Metropolitan School of Science (Royal School of Mines) as a lecturer in mechanics, one of whose students was Karl Marx. In 1855 h was vice-president of the Paris Universal Exhibition. Public on-site lectures of English cathedrals led to published architectural histories of Winchester, 1846, York, 1848, Norwich, 1847, Salisbury 1849, Oxford, 1850, Wells, 1851, Chichester, 1861 (though written, 1853), Canterbury, 1855, Gloucester, 1860, Peterborough, 1861, Worcester, 1862–receiving the British Architects’ royal gold medal, 1863, Rochester, 1863, Lichfield, 1864, and a combined Sherborne Minster and Glastonbury Abbey, 1866. Much of Willis’ time and energy went into the redesign of Cambridge, which only saw fruition beginning in 1865. This likely prevented him from completing his architectural history of Cambridge University. His Rede lecture of 1861 on a Senate House in Cambridge, indicated progress on the book. A second edition of Principles of Mechanism, 1870, and the death of his wife prevented his will to write more. Beginning in the 1870s his health declined and a bronchitis took his life at Cambridge home, the oldest professor in the university (Marsden). His nephew, John Willis Clark, took over his uncle’s notes, devoting more than a decade to turn them into the four-volume The Architectural History of the University of Cambridge, and of the Colleges of Cambridge and Eton which appeared in 1886. Willis founded the architectural monograph, the “biography of a building,” which remains one of the most flourishing categories of medieval architecture (Crossley). Willis’ posthumously published Architectural History of the University of Cambridge,1886, solved the archaeological problems of the buildings by “absolute mastery of the documentation” (Independent). His Remarks of 1835 was considered a pioneering work by its second edition in 1870, “balancing clear and precise description with measured gestures towards general theory” (Marsden). His strong documentary method greatly influenced the architectural historian Howard Montagu Colvin, who revered him. Colvin’s six-volume History of the King’s Works (1963-1982) owed much to Willis’s approach. Though friends with John Ruskin, Ruskin disparaged the CPS’s structural approach to architectural history. However, Willis’ 1835 Remarks on the Architecture of the Middle Ages, especially of Italy, clearly influenced Ruskin’s architectural writing. His knowledge of ancient architectural practice and an excellent command of medieval Latin allowed him to compile data, bibliographies and develop chronologies. Free of Romantic preconceptions he approached architectural history like a mechanism to create systematic knowledge of medieval construction. Willis was not a social historian and except for his work on Christchurch, Canterbury, 1869, seldom incorporated monastic life or a building’s daily use as a functional component into his writing. Compared to his contemporary, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, his work is less functionalist, focusing on mechanical and geometrical aspects of medieval building.


Selected Bibliography

and Clark, John Willis. The Architectural History of the University of Cambridge, and of the Colleges of Cambridge and Eton. 4 vols. Cambridge: University Press, 1886.


Sources

Hewison, Robert. “‘Ruskin, John (1819-1900).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Crossley, Paul. “Introduction: Frankl’s Text: Its Achievement and Significance.” Frankl, Paul and Crossley, Paul. Gothic Architecture. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 23-24; Hewlings, Richard. [obituary of Howard Colvin] “Architectural Historian whose Biographical Dictionaries Laid a Foundation for all Other Scholars in his Field .” Independent (London), January 1, 2008, p. 34;Marsden, Ben. “Robert Willis.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.




Citation

"Willis, Robert." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/willisr/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Father of the monographic treatment of architecture; architectural historian and Cambridge professor of engineering. Willis’ father, Robert Darling Willis (1760-1821), was the royal physician during George III’s insanity and a Cambridge professor.

Willrich, Wolfgang

Full Name: Willrich, Wolfgang

Gender: male

Date Born: 1897

Date Died: 1948

Place Born: Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany

Place Died: Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Entartete Kunst and National Socialism

Career(s): art critics and artists (visual artists)


Overview

Artist and art writer; organized Nazi “Degenerate Art” exhibition 1937. Willrich’s father, Hugo Willrich (1867-1950), was a professor of Hellenistic studies at the gymnasium in Göttingen. Willrich himself studied studio art in Berlin at the Kunsthochschule between 1915-16. Already strongly conservative because of his father’s traditional Prussian views, the younger Willrich resisted the new art styles being taught there. The first World Ward cut short his art training. Willrich served in the 251st infantry regiment in 1916 seeing action at the eastern front. He was captured and interned in a Orleans prisoner-of-war camp. In 1920 Willrich resumed his art studies, this time at the Academy in Dresden under Richard Mueller, Georg Luehring and the anatomist Hermann Dittrich. He studied at Dresden until 1924, when he made a tour of northern art cities. He moved to Berlin where the newly empowered Nazi government gave him a position in the Ministry of Culture. However, a former association with General Ludendorf cast dispersions on him and he was forced to leave the post. A chance encounter with the head of the state agricultural farms, R. Walther Daré gained him a commission portraying German peasants of Nordic physiognomy. He ironically he gained disfavor with local Nazi Party leaders over his conception of “Nordic”. He continued to document these “racial types” under the direction of the NSDP’s Chief racial anthropologist Walter Gross (1904-?). The Office of Racial Politics of the Nazi Party disseminated these as posters and post cards. Despite his affinity with the ideals of the Nazis, Willrich declined offers to join the party or be named an honorary SS member by Heinrich Himmler, fearing a loss of artistic autonomy. By this time, Willrich had become associated with Klaus Graf von Baudissin, who had taken over the Folkwang Museum in Essen after the dismissal of Karl Ernst Osthaus. Willrich began his book publication career by publishing in 1935 some collected drawings, titled Bauerntum als Heger deutschen Blutes (Peasantry as the Keeper of German Blood). The publisher was the Nazi house organ, “Blood and Soil” press. By the late 1930’s, Willrich’s conception of acceptable art was so narrow, that he considered degenerate any art other than that representing heroic verisimilitude. In 1937 Walter Hansen (b. 1934), Graf von Baudissin and Willrich assisted in organizing the now famous Munich exhibition known as Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst). Willrich’s own book on the subject, a scathing diatribe against modern art, called Säuberung des Kunsttempels (Cleansing of the Temples of Art) appeared at the same time. He generally considered the Nazi party too gentle on the “cultural bolshivism” of modern art, and brought on himself the antagonism of many Nazi officials, including Eberhard Hanfstaengl, the director of the Berlin Museum. In 1939 he published a book representing more of his drawings of racial “perfection,” titled Des edlen ewiges Reich (the Noble, Eternal of the Empire). In 1941 the National Socialist Cultural Authority presented an exhibition of his work called “Race and Nation”. Throughout the World War II, Willrich accompanied the German army and navy, sketching portraits (including Rommel) and submarine crews. In 1944 the Office of High Command for the Army assigned him to illustrate and write a book called “That’s Why the German Soldier Fought.” Germany’s defeat forced publication after the war in Buenos Aires in 1949. Much of his art was destroyed during and after the war. He was taken prisoner by American soliders in Göttingen where he had fled. Sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Normandy after the war, he sketched portraits of American soldiers to make some money. He returned to his family in Göttingen where died of cancer at age 51. Säuberung des Kunsttempels, more so in some respects than even Goebbels’ exhibition catalog for the Entartete Kunst exhibition, represents the Nazi vilification of modern art. Willrich approached modern art from the point of view of the artist, not the political theorist. Instead of making copious comparisons with famous works of German art from the renaissance, Willrich attacks abstraction on its own terms. “Modern” art to him lacked beauty and could be traced, according to Willrich, back to Communist ideas and African art, both of which he considered counter to the cannons of art.


Selected Bibliography

Säuberung des Kunsttempels: eine kunstpolitische Kampfschrift zur Gesundung deutscher Kunst im Geiste nordischer Art. Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1937; Des Reiches Soldaten. Berlin: Verlag Grenze und Ausland, 1943; Des edlen ewiges Reich. Berlin: Verlag Grenze und Ausland, 1939; and Just, Oskar, illustrations. Daré, R. Walther. Nordisches Bludtserbe im süddeutschen Bauerntum. Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1938-39.


Sources

“Wolfgang Willrich” http://www.wolfgangwillrich.de/biogr.htm; Hopfner, Wielant. “Wolfgang Willrich: Der Zeichner unserer Menschenart” http://www.nordzeit.de/willr.htm; Mayer, Dietmar. “Die Seite für Willrich – Sammler!” http://dm-hp.de/infen.htm; Davidson, Mortimer G. Kunst in Deutschland, 1933-1945: eine wissenschaftliche Enzyklopädie der Kunst im Dritten Reich. Tübingen: Grabert, 1988.




Citation

"Willrich, Wolfgang." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/willrichw/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Artist and art writer; organized Nazi “Degenerate Art” exhibition 1937. Willrich’s father, Hugo Willrich (1867-1950), was a professor of Hellenistic studies at the gymnasium in Göttingen. Willrich himself studied studio art in Berlin at the Kunsth

Wilmerding, John

Full Name: Wilmerding, John

Other Names:

  • John Currie Wilmerding

Gender: male

Date Born: 1938

Place Born: Boston, Suffolk, MA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): American (North American)

Career(s): art collectors and curators


Overview

Collector and curator of American art; senior curator from 1977 to 1983 at the National Gallery of Art, Washgington, D. C., and deputy director from 1983 to 1988. Wilmerding’s great-grandparents, Henry Osborne Havemeyer (1847-1907) and Louisine Waldron Elder (Havemeyer) (1855-1929), [Havemeyer’s second wife] were high-profile collectors of European and oriental art which they bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A daughter of the Havemeyers, Electra Havemeyer Webb (1889-1960), a collector of American folk art and sculpture, was Wilmerding’s grandmother. His parents were banker John Currie Wilmerding (1911-1965) and Lila Vanderbilt Webb (Wilmerding). Wilmerding attended Harvard, receiving his A. B. in 1960, his masters in 1961 and his Ph.D., in 1965. In the 1970s, Wilmerding was commissioned to author one of the later volumes in the prestigious Pelican History of Art series on American Art (1976), a volume originally offered to Alfred H. Barr, Jr., to write, but Barr declined. In 1977 Wilmerding was appointed curator of American Art, which he held in a senior capacity until 1983. That year he was appointed to deputy director of the Gallery, which he held until 1988. Wilmerding is currently the Christopher Binyon Sarofim Professor of American Art, Princeton University. He is also a visiting curator in the department of American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was named trustee emeritus of the Shelburne Museum in Vermont (where his grandmother’s collection is principally housed). He is a member of the boards of trustees of the Guggenheim Museum, New York and the College of the Atlantic in Maine. He is currently on advisory boards or committees for Smithsonian Studies in American Art, the Archives of American Art, Harvard University Art Museums. He serves on the Committee for the Preservation of the White House.


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] A History of American Marine Painting up to the Age of Steam. Harvard, 1965; American Art. Pelican History of Art 40. New York: Penguin Books, 1976.


Sources

American Masters from Bingham to Eakins: The John Wilmerding Collection.




Citation

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


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Collector and curator of American art; senior curator from 1977 to 1983 at the National Gallery of Art, Washgington, D. C., and deputy director from 1983 to 1988. Wilmerding’s great-grandparents, Henry Osborne Havemeyer (1847-1907) and Louisine Wa

Wilpert, Josef

Full Name: Wilpert, Josef

Gender: male

Date Born: 1857

Date Died: 1944

Place Born: Eiglau, Upper Silesia

Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Christianity and Early Christian


Overview

Scholar of early Christian art.


Selected Bibliography

Erlebnisse und Ereignisse im Dienste der christlichen Archäologie: Rückblick auf eine fünfundvierzigjahrige wissenschaftlich Tätigkeit in Rom. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1930; Fracto panis: Die älteste Darstellung des eucharistischen Opfers in der ‘Capella Greca’. Freiburg im Breisgau-St. Louis (MO): Herder, 1895. Die gottgeweihten Jungfrau in den ersten Jahrhunderten der Kirche. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1892. Die Katakombengemälde und ihre alten Copien: Eine ikonographische Studie. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1891. Rom sottoranea: Le pittura delle catacombe Romane. 2 vols. Rome: 1903. Die römischen Mosaiken und Malereien der kirchlichen Bauten vom IV. bis VIII. Jahrhundert. 2nd ed. 4 vols. Freiburg im Breisgau: 1917. (1st ed. 1916, Freiburg: Herder). I Sarcofagi der kirchlichen Bauten vom IV. bis VIII. Jahrhundert. 4 vols. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1903. (Precursor to Die römischen . . . above).


Sources

KRG, 61; DIN, 237; Kirsch, J. P. “Josef Wilpert und die heutige Katakombenforschung.” Hochland (Munich) 7 Jahrgang. 1910: .; Raitz von Frentz, E. Freiherr von. “Josef Wilpert.” Kölner Zeitung no. 81, 1944.; KMP, 46 mentioned; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 468-70.




Citation

"Wilpert, Josef." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/wilpfertj/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Scholar of early Christian art.

Wilson, Juliet

Full Name: Wilson, Juliet

Other Names:

  • Juliet Wilson–Bareau

Gender: female

Date Born: 1935

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Institution(s): University of Oxford


Overview


Selected Bibliography

with Pierre Gassier, Goya, sa vie, son, oeuvre. London, 1971


Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire d l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 p. 443



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Wilson, Juliet." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/wilsonj/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Wilson, Ralph Pinder

Full Name: Wilson, Ralph Pinder

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Byzantine (culture or style) and Medieval (European)

Institution(s): British Institute of Afghan Studies in Kabul


Overview

Byzantinist. At Oxford he made the friendship with John Beckwith.





Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Wilson, Ralph Pinder." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/wilsonr/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Byzantinist. At Oxford he made the friendship with John Beckwith.

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim

Full Name: Winckelmann, Johann Joachim

Gender: male

Date Born: 1717

Date Died: 1768

Place Born: Stendal, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany

Place Died: Trieste, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy

Home Country/ies: Germany


Overview

One of the founders of the modern discipline of art history. Winckelmann was able to overcome immense difficulties of poverty to gain wide-spread success and influence as an influential art historian and esthetician. Born the son of Martin Winckelmann, a poor shoemaker, and Anna Maria Meyer (Winckelmann), the daughter of a weaver, Winckelmann attended a gymnasium at Berlin and school at Salzwedel, Germany, before the university in Halle, in 1738. There he heard the lectures on esthetics of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762). Intending next on a career in medicine, Winckelmann completed classes at Jena beginning in 1740, but was too poor to continue. He spent 1743 to 1748 as a private tutor in Magdeburg and then five unhappy years as an associate rector of a school at Seehausen in the Altmark. Eventually he secured a position as the librarian for Heinrich, Graf von Bünau (1697-1762), a wealthy amateur scholar engaged in writing a history of the Roman emperors. This position gave Winckelmann access not only to the count’s superb library but also access to the artistic center of Dresden where the Saxon electors had amassed an extensive collection of art. Winckelmann met the artist Adam Friedrich Oeser (1717-1799) whose artistic temperament would later influence Goethe. He left the count’s service in 1754 and moved to Dresden where he secured the patronage from the Saxon court to finance a study trip to Rome in 1755. There he published his famous Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Mahlerey und Bilderkunst (Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works), 1755. The work made Winckelmann famous. It was reprinted several times and translated into French and English, the latter translated by the Swiss/British painter Henry Fuseli. Winckelmann’s stipend only allowed him two years stay in Italy, but the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) altered his plans. To supplement his small pension in Rome, Winckelmann landed a series of Papal appointments, first as librarian to Alberico Cardinal Archinto (1698-1758), the papal secretary of state. When Archinto died, he became librarian to Cardinal Albani, one of the great connoisseurs of the eighteenth century. By now Winckelmann’s homosexuality, which had never been much repressed, was out in the open. His affairs included that of the artist Franz Stauder, a pupil of Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1779) whom he roomed with briefly, and a young Florentine named Nicoló Castellani. By 1763, Winckelmann was the prefect of antiquities (Prefetto delle Antichità) of the Vatican, a position once held by Raphael himself and associated with the Vatican library. Winckelmann devoted himself to studying the texts, visiting the ancient monuments of Rome and its private collections, and guiding visitors around the environs. In this capacity he met many of the aristocratic and artistic personages of Europe. These included Mengs, whose paintings became the medium through which Winkelmann’s ideas were realized, and Angelika Kaufmann, who painted his portrait. At 45 Winckelmann fell in love with a young nobleman, Friedrich von Berg, and dedicated to him Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen (1763). In 1768 Winckelmann traveled to Vienna, where he was received by the Empress Maria Theresa. On his way back to Rome, he was murdered in a hotel by a man named Francesco Arcangeli where Winckelmann was showing coins presented by Maria Theresa. He is buried in the cemetery of the cathedral of St. Giusto at Trieste. Winckelmann’s Gedanken uber die Nachahmung der Greischiechen Werke of 1755 had a major influence on esthetics and art histories. In addition to being one of the impetuses for Neoclassicism, his writings anchored Greek art in a prototypical schema which future histories of art would mimic. His important art-historical essays on the Belvedere Toro and Apollo Belvedere (1759), and the frescoes at Herculaneum (1762 and 1764–some of the earliest discussions of the topic) are serious art essays. His Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of Ancient Art, 1764), the effort of seven years’ research, founds the periodization of a linear conception of art history. It contrasted the thematic, i.e., non-historical treatment of classical art popular in the eighteenth century, for example, in the work of Bernard de Montfaucon (L’Antiquité expliquée). Winckelmann’s style was that of an outspoken taste-maker. He detested the Baroque, and even found the classicists of the seventeenth-century insipid. His allegiance to Raphael and to the art of his contemporary and friend Mengs remained supreme. He considered Meng’s Parnassus superior to Reni’s Aurora. Domenichino’s art, which Winckelmann considered was closer to the ancients more than any other follower of the Carracci, never achieved the purity of Raphael in drawing the nude. Many of Winckelmann assertions, for example, that Greek art was the stimulus for the High Renaissance, were the result of his own feelings for the art rather than hard scholarship. Winckelmann’s situating Greek art as the cornerstone to Western artistic creation inspired artists and historians alike to view modern art as a compiling of a tradition. Such a conclusion is all the more admirable when one considers that many of his assessments of Greek art were based upon inferior copies or medals. The esthetician Gotthold Ephraim Lessing based much of his ideas of his Laokoon (1766) on Winckelmann’s writing on Greek art.


Selected Bibliography

Gedanken uber die Nachahmung der Greischiechen Werke in der malerey und Bilderkunst. Dresden: Im Verlag der Waltherischen Handlung, 1755; English, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks: with Instructions for the Connoisseur, and an Essay on Grace in Works of Art. London: “Printed for the translator” [Henry Fuseli], and sold by A. Millar, 1765; Sendschreiben von den herculanischen Entdeckungen : an den hochgebohrnen Herrn Heinrich Reichsgrafen von Brühl. Dresden: Verlegts George Conrad Walther, 1762, English: Critical Account of the Situation and Destruction by the First Eruptions of Mount Vesuvius, of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabia; the Late Discovery of their Remains; the Subterraneous Works Carried on in Them; and the Books, Domestick Utensils, and Other Remarkable Greek and Roman Antiquities thereby Happily Recovered; the Form and Connection of the Ancient Characters being Faithfully Preserved, in a Letter, (originally in German) to Count Bruhl, of Saxony. London: Printed for T. Carnan and F. Newbery, jun., 1771; Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums. Dresden: Waltherischen Hof-Buchhandlung, 1764-1767, English, The History of Ancient Art. 4 vols. Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1849-1873; Anmerkungen über die Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums. Dresden : In der Waltherischen Hof-Buchhandlung, 1762; Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen in der Kunst, und dem Unterrichte in derselben. Dresden: In der Waltherischen Buchhandlung, 1763; Ausgewählte Briefe. Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1925.


Sources

[the literature on Winckelmann is voluminous; consult the bibliographies of these major commentaries for a full list]. Justi, Carl. Winckelmann: sein Leben, Seine Werke und sein Zeitgenossen. 3 vols. Leipzig: F. C. W. Vogel, 1866-72; 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. 24-5; Hatfield, Henry C. Winckelmann and His German Critics, 1755-1781. New York: 1943; Potts, Alex. Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994; German Essays on Art History. Gert Schiff, ed. New York: Continuum, 1988, pp. xii-xvi, 282; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 98-103; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 470-74; Barasch, Moshe. Modern Theories of Art. Volume 1. From Winckelmann to Baudelaire. New York: New York University Press, 1989.




Citation

"Winckelmann, Johann Joachim." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/winckelmannj/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

One of the founders of the modern discipline of art history. Winckelmann was able to overcome immense difficulties of poverty to gain wide-spread success and influence as an influential art historian and esthetician. Born the son of Martin Winckel

Wind, Edgar

Full Name: Wind, Edgar

Other Names:

  • Edgar Wind

Gender: male

Date Born: 14 May 1900

Date Died: 12 September 1971

Place Born: Berlin, Germany

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): iconography and Renaissance


Overview

Iconologist specializing in the Renaissance era; and interdisciplinary art historian; first professor of art history at Oxford University. Wind was the second son of Maurice Delmar Wind (d. 1914), an Argentinian businessman of Russian Jewish ancestry, and Laura Szilard (d. 1947), a Romanian who, through marriage was related to the art historian Henri Focillon. Wind learned classical languages along with French, English, and his native German at the Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule, a humanistisches Gymnasium in Charlottenburg. He jointly studied philosophy and art history at various German-language universities: three semesters in Berlin under Adolph Goldschmidt, one in Freiburg with Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and Vienna with Max Dvořák, Julius Alwin von Schlosser, and Josef Rudolf Thomas Strzygowski. In 1920 he moved to the new university in Hamburg (begun in 1919) where he was the first student to write a dissertation under Erwin Panofsky, then a 28-year-old privatdozent; his dissertation was also supervised by the philosopher/art historian Ernst Cassirer. His topic was on art-historical method. To escape the economic depression gripping Germany, Wind traveled to New York in 1924, initially staying with a cousin. He was appointed Graham Kenan Fellow in philosophy at the University of North Carolina, teaching there 1925-1927. Returning to Hamburg, Wind took a job as a research assistant at the Warburg Library, and wrote his habilitation under Cassirer in philosophy, employing the philosophy of Charles Sanders Pierce (1839-1914), whose work he had read in America. Wind’s initial methodological influence had been that of Cassirer through Panofsky, but his close personal relationship with Aby M. Warburg brought him nearer to the “cultural history” approach of Warburg as well as the work of Pierce. Wind became a privatdozent at Hamburg, 1930-1933. With the advent of Nazism in Germany, Wind, a Jew, played a key role in moving the Warburg library to London along with himself and, with Rudolf Wittkower, founded the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute in 1937. He himself was forced to emingrate because of his religious heritage. Throughout the second World War, Wind taught at universities in the United States, first as a temporary facult at New York University, 1940-1942 and then at the University of Chicago, 1942-1944 under President Robert Manard Hutchins. This was during the time of Huchin’s great reforms at Chicago where schools were formed around “committee” of interdisciplinary pursuit and Wind’s method mirrored Hutchin’s idea. However Wind proved a lightning rod for the president’s model and the art historian left for Smith College 1944 where he remained until 1955. It was during this time that he married Margaret Kellner in 1942. In 1954 Wind was asked to deliver the Chichele Lectures at All Souls College, Oxford, on the topic “Art and Scholarship under Julius II.” These resulted in a 1955 appointment as the first Professorship of art history at Oxford (under the Faculty of Modern History). Wind delivered public lectures (his lecturing style was noted by nearly everyone as enthralling), inspiring among other the artist Ronald B. Kitaj (1932-2007) who was studying at the Ruskin School. In 1960 Wind delivered radio lectures for the BBC, the Reith lectures, which later became his book Art and Anarchy. His Oxford colleagues had difficulty appreciating Wind’s philosophical propensities, his adulation of Cassirer and the post-Hegelians (McConica). At Oxford he garnered the support of the classicist Richard Livingstone (1880-1960) (soon to be president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford) the medievalist Ernest Jacob (1894-1971), Chichele chair for medieval history at All Souls College, and the classicist C. Maurice Bowra (1898-1971) of Wadham College. Among art historians, Wind also enjoyed the friendship of Jean Seznec, who occupied the Marshall Foch Chair for French literature at All Souls College. Wind retired emeritus from Oxford in 1967.

Though Wind was considered a classicist and Renaissance expert, he staunchly defended modern art, unlike many of his colleagues. Wind’s name is most closely connected with his research in allegory and the use of pagan mythology during the 15th-16th centuries and his book of essays on the topic, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance. In Art and Anarchy, Wind argued that the height of art’s powers to portray an idea had occurred in the Renaissance. The Romantic era’s distrust that knowledge interfered with imagination had destroyed the acumen in modern viewers. Wind fits no traditional academic classification and is one of the prime examples of the intellectual tradition of Warburg’s blend of mythological/psychological approach to art history. One of his students, William S. Heckscher, referred to Wind as a “magician” for his brilliance as an art historian. His papers are housed at Oxford. Wind’s paper are held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation] ästhetischer und kunstwissenschaftlicher Gegenstand: ein Beitrag zur Methodologie der Kunstgeschichte. Hamburg, 1922. Partially reprinted as: “Zur systematik der künstlerischen Probleme.” Zeitschrift für ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 18 (1924): 438-86. and 25 (1931): 163-68 [Beilageheft]; [habilitationschrift] Das experiment und die metaphysik; zur auflösung der kosmologischen antinomien. Tübingen: Mohr, 1934; Bellini’s Feast of the Gods: A Stidy in Venetian Humanism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948; “The Revolution of History Painting.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 2 (1938-9): 116-27; Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. London: Faber & Faber, 1958; Art and Anarchy. London: 1963; “Michelangelo’s Prophets and Sibyls.” Proceedings of the British Academy 51 (1965): 47-84; Giorgione’s Tempesta with Comments on Giorgione’s Poetic Allegories. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969; Hume and the Heroic Portrait: Studies in Eighteenth-century Imagery. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986; The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo: the Sistine Ceiling. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.  Papers, “Edgar Wind Papers”  Bodleian Library, University of Oxford http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/online/modern/wind/wind.html


Sources

Eisler, Colin. “Kunstgeschichte American Style: A Study in Migration.” In The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America: 1930-1960. Edited by Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1969, p. 618; 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. 63, 34 n. 72, 45 n. 90, 63 n. 1445; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 78; Gilbert, Creighton.”Edgar Wind as Man and Thinker” New Criterion 3 no. 2 (October 1984): 36-41; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire d l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 227;  Lloyd-Jones, Hugh. “Biographical memoir.” in, The Eloquence of Symbol: Studies in Humanist Art. Rev. ed., Oxford: Clarendon, 1993; James McConica. “Edgar Winds Oxforder Jahre” in Edgar Wind: Kunsthistoriker und Philosoph. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998, pp. 3-9;  Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 474-477; The Dictionary of Art 33: 242-3; 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. 774-779; Sears, Elizabeth. “Edgar Wind on Michelangelo.” in, Wind, Edgar. The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo: the Sistine Ceiling. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; Kitaj, Ronald B. Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter: Autobiography.  Munich: Schirmer Mosel, 2017; Thomas, Ben. “Edgard Wind, a Brief Biography.” https://kar.kent.ac.uk/55959/1/Ben 20Thomas 20Edgar 20Wind.pdf;  [obituary:] “Edgar Wind Dies: Art Historian.” New York Times. September 18, 1971, p. 32.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Wind, Edgar." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/winde/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Iconologist specializing in the Renaissance era; and interdisciplinary art historian; first professor of art history at Oxford University. Wind was the second son of Maurice Delmar Wind (d. 1914), an Argentinian businessman of Russian Jewish ances