Full Name: White, William
Gender: male
Date Born: unknown
Date Died: unknown
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre) and sculpture (visual works)
Architectural historian.
Thompson, Paul. “The Writings of William White.” in, Concerning Architecture: Essays on Architectural Writers and Writing presented to Nikolaus Pevsner. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 226-237.
Architectural historian.
Full Name: Whitehill, Walter Muir
Gender: male
Date Born: 1905
Date Died: 1978
Place Born: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK
Place Died: Boston, Suffolk, MA, USA
Home Country/ies: United States
Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), Medieval (European), sculpture (visual works), and Spanish (culture or style)
Career(s): librarians
American Medievalist of Spanish architecture and Americanist; Librarian and Director of the Boston Athenaeum. Whitehill’s parents were Walter Muir Whitehill, an Episcopal minister, and Florence Marion Williams (Whitehill). He entered Harvard University, receiving his A.B. in 1926, and continuing for his A.M., awarded in 1929. Whitehill married Jane Revere Coolidge, a descendant of Thomas Jefferson, in 1930, leaving for Europe the same year to continue his studies. He wrote his dissertation under the eminent American Romanesque scholar A. Kingsley Porter at the University of London, receiving his Ph.D. in 1934. He remained in Europe until 1936, immersed in Spanish architectural history research in Spain. He returned to the United States in 1936 to become assistant director of the Peabody Museum of Salem, Salem, MA. In 1941 Whitehill published a revised version of his dissertation, Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, founding the American Neptune: A Quarterly Journal of Maritime History. By this time Whitehill switched interests to American art. During World War II, Whitehill served in the Naval Reserve, assigned to active duty from 1942-1946 and discharged with the rank of commander. After the war, he joined the Boston Athenaeum, the private library, as director and librarian in 1946, which he held until his retirement in 1973. Whitehill was appointed a member of faculty of Harvard University associated with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in 1951 and a lecturer in history for the 1956-1957 year. Whitehill became a champion of architectural preservation in Boston. In 1961 he succeeded in saving the Old Corner Bookstore. Whitehill maintained a country house in Starksboro, VT, where he and his wife entertained in a gentlemanly manner. He became a Trustee of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 1965 he published a survey, The Arts in Early American History. A two-volume centenary history of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, appeared in 1970. Whitehill retired from the Athenaeum in 1973, publishing his Boston Prints and Printmakers the same year. In retirement, he issued an architectural work, Palladio in America. One of his final acts was helping to preserve the Quincy Market area in Boston in 1976. He suffered a stroke and died at age 72. He is buried on the grounds of Monticello, Jefferson’s home, in accordance to Jefferson’s will regarding Jefferson’s descendants. His papers are held at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Though Whitehill’s publishing career focused on Bostoniana, his work on Spanish medieval art represents the earliest American interest in the subject. He, Porter, Georgiana Goddard King, Walter W. S. Cook, Kenneth John Conant [the Cluny scholar’s dissertation on the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela) and Chandler R. Post formed something of a “New England School” in Spanish art (Cahn).
[dissertation:] Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century, University of London, 1936, published, London: Oxford University Press, 1941; Boston Public Library: A Centenary History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956; The Arts in Early American History. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1965; The Many Faces of Monticello: Address at Monticello, 13 April, 1964. Charlottesville, VA: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1965; Dumbarton Oaks: the History of a Georgetown House and Garden, 1800-1966. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967; Cabinet of Curiosities: Five Episodes in the Evolution of American Museums. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1967; Museum of Fine Arts Boston: A Centennial History. 2 vols. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1970; Boston Statues. Barre, MA: Barre, 1970; and Hutchings, Sinclair H., eds. Boston Prints and Printmakers. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1973; and Nichols, Frederick. Palladio in America. Milan: Electa, 1976. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: a Centennial History. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1970; Palladio in America. Milan: Electa, 1976.
“Preface.” Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century. reprint ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1968; Garrett, Wendell D. “Walter Muir Whitehill.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Third Series 90, (1978): 131-139; Cahn, Walter. “Romanesque Art, Then and Now: A Personal Reminiscence.” in Hourihane, Colum, ed. Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn. University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2008, p. 33; [obituary:] Thomas, Robert M. Jr. “Walter Muir Whitehill Dies at 72, A Leading Boston Preservationist.” New York Times March 6, 1978, p. D7.
American Medievalist of Spanish architecture and Americanist; Librarian and Director of the Boston Athenaeum. Whitehill’s parents were Walter Muir Whitehill, an Episcopal minister, and Florence Marion Williams (Whitehill). He entered Harvard Unive
Full Name: Welcker, Friedrich Gottlieb
Gender: male
Date Born: 1784
Date Died: 1868
Place Born: Grünberg, Hesse, Germany
Place Died: Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Home Country/ies: Germany
Subject Area(s): archaeology and philology
Professor of Philology and Archaeology, and director of the Academic Museum of Art at Bonn University, 1819-1854. Friend and protegé of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Welcker was an exponent of Totalitätsideal the notion that one needs to know everything about a discipline in order to conclude aNew York Timeshing about it. His students included Otto Benndorf, Johannes Overbeck, Ernst Curtius (briefly) and Enrico Brunn.
revised: Müller, Karl Otfried. Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst. Breslau: J. Max, 1848, English: Ancient Art and its Remains: or, a Manual of the Archaeology of Art. John Leitch, trans. London : H. Bohn, 1852; Kleine Schriften. 5 vols. Bonn: E. Weber, 1844-1867 and vol. 5, Elberfeld: R. L. Friedrichs; Zum verzeichniss der alten künstler. Frankfurt a.M.: s.n., 1848; Das Akademische kunstmuseum zu Bonn. Bonn: E. Weber, 1827; Die Borstellungen der Giebelfelder und Metopen an dem Tempel zu Delphi. s.l.:s.n, 18?? (Harvard University copy).
Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 18-19; Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker: Werk und Wirkung. Calder, William M., ed. Stuttgart: F. Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden, 1986; Calder, William, III. “Friedrich Welcker.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, p. 1189.
Professor of Philology and Archaeology, and director of the Academic Museum of Art at Bonn University, 1819-1854. Friend and protegé of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Welcker was an exponent of Totalitätsideal the notion that one needs to
Full Name: Werckmeister, O. K.
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 26 April 1934
Date Died: 09 June 2023
Home Country/ies: Germany
Subject Area(s): art theory, Marxism, and Medieval (European)
Medievalist and Marxist-methodology art historian at Northwestern and UCLA. Werckmeister’s father, Karl Werckmeister, was an art dealer and his mother, Rose Petzold (Werckmeister) an artist. He married Maria Eugenia Lacarra in 1965. Werckmeister received his Ph.D. from the Ph.D. in 1958 from the Freie Universität in Berlin. He spent his early career researching and publishing on Romanesque manuscript illuminations (and their book covers). In 1971 he moved to the United States, joining the University of California, Los Angeles, as professor of art history. In the United States, as in Germany, he strongly expoused a Marxist approach to art history, examining class ideology as a driving force to artistic creation. This was perhaps most clearly demonstrated in his 1976 essay, “The Political Ideology of the Bayeux Tapestry.” The same year, Werckmeister became a founding member of Caucus for Marxism and Art of the College Art Association. The Caucus session delivered papers by other prominent Marxist art historians, including T. J. Clark, Lee Baxandall, Serge Guilbaut. He was named a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial fellow for the 1981-1982 year. He divorced his wife in 1983. In 1984 he moved to Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, to become Mary Jane Crowe Distinguished Professor of Art History. He held a fellowship at Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, 1986-1987. He participated on the dissertatin committees of Serge Guilbaut and Thomas E. Crow. His students included and Jane Welch Williams.
Der Deckel des Codex aureus von St. Emmeram: Ein Goldschmiedewerk des 9. Jahrhunderts. Verlag Heitz, 1963; Die Bilder der drei Propheten in der Biblia Hispalense. F. H. Kerle Verlag, 1963; Three Problems of Tradition in Pre-Carolingian Figure Style: From Visigothic to Insular Illumination. Hodges Figgis, 1963; Irisch-northumbrische Buchmalerei des 8. Jahrhunderts und monastische Spiritualität. de Gruyter, 1967; Ende der Aesthetik. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1971; “Marxismus und Abstractione.” Kunstchronik 25 (1972): 308-10 [abstract of an address given at the German Art History Day in Constance, 1972]; “Kunstgescichte al Divination.” reprinted in Ideologie und Kunst bei Marx und andere Essays. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1974, pp. 64-78; The Political Ideology of the Bayeux Tapestry. Estratto dagli Studi Medievali, Spoleto: Centro italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 3rd series 17 no. 2, (1976): 535-595; “Marxism and Art History” [session of the College Art Association of America annual meeting February 2, 1976, Chicago]. unpublished manuscript of the papers; [review of Meyer Schapiro’s Romanesque Art] Art Quarterly 2 (Spring 1979): 211-18; The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989; edited, with Rumold, Rainer. The Ideological Crisis of Expressionism: The Literary and Artistic German War Colony in Belgium, 1914-1918. Camden House, 1990; Zitadellenkultur:die schöne Kunst des Untergangs in der Kultur der achtziger Jahre. Munich: C. Hanser, 1989, English, Citadel Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; Linke Ikonen: Benjamin, Eisenstein, Picasso nach dem Fall des Kommunismus Munich: C. Hanser, 1997, English, Icons Of The Left: Benjamin And Eisenstein, Picasso and Kafka After The Fall Of Communism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Dilly, 46-48;
Medievalist and Marxist-methodology art historian at Northwestern and UCLA. Werckmeister’s father, Karl Werckmeister, was an art dealer and his mother, Rose Petzold (Werckmeister) an artist. He married Maria Eugenia Lacarra in 1965. Werckmeister rece
Full Name: Werner, Alfred
Gender: male
Date Born: 1911
Date Died: 1979
Home Country/ies: United States
Utrillo scholar, wrote the volume on the artist for the Abrams Great Art of the Ages series.
Degas Pastels. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1968; Maurice Utrillo. New York, H. N. Abrams, 1969; [provided commentaries to the plates of] Lipchitz, Jacques. Amedeo Modigliani. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1969.
Utrillo scholar, wrote the volume on the artist for the Abrams Great Art of the Ages series.
Full Name: Wernert, Emil
Gender: male
Date Born: unknown
Date Died: unknown
Early critic of Nazi art policy.
L’art dans le IIIe Reich: une tentative d’esthétique dirigée. Paris: Centre d’études de politique étrangère, 1936.
KRG, 128; KMP, 88 cited
Early critic of Nazi art policy.
Full Name: Wescher, Hertha
Other Names:
Gender: female
Date Born: 1899
Date Died: 03 March 1971
Place Born: Krefeld, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Place Died: Paris, Île-de-France, France
Home Country/ies: Germany
Subject Area(s): Modern (style or period)
Career(s): art critics
Scholar of modernist art, authority on collage, art critic. Kauert’s parents were Heinrich Kauert, a merchant, and Maria Jentges (Kauert). She attended the Lyceum and was tutored privately, receiving her abitur in 1917 in Bonn. She immediately began studying art history, history and archaeology at the Universities of Heidelberg, Munich (under Heinrich Wölfflin) and Freiburg. In Munich, she made close friendships with many who would become important art historians, including Wölfflin students Franz Roh, Hans Curjel, Siegried Giedion, and Carola Giedion-Welcker. This group–all modern art enthusiasts–instilled a passion for modern art in her as well. At Freiburg Kauert studied under Hans Jantzen. She met and married the Jantzen student Paul Wescher in 1923, adopting his surname professionally. She received her Ph.D. in Freiburg (almost certainly under Jantzen) in 1924, writing her dissertation on the 16th-century painter Sebastian Dayg. After graduation, her husband secured a position at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (State Museum in Berlin) and she volunteered at the graphics division there as well, working under Max J. Friedländer. Through Friedländer she secured a position with the scholar assembling the Peter Paul Rubens catalogue raisonné, Ludwig Burchard. Wescher became involved in the comtemporary art scene in Berlin, both through Roh, Curt Glaser, Curjel and the artist László Moholy-Nagy. Strong supporters of the Weimar Republic and the Bauhaus school of architecture, she and her husband’s views were directly opposed to the conservative art ideology of national socialism. With the accession to power of Hitler in 1933 the couple moved to Paris. Wescher worked as a journalist and, between 1936-1937, as a correspondent for the English art magazine Axis. She helped organize the Freier Künstlerbund, among whose members were the art historians Sabine Spiro and Paul Westheim. With France’s entrance into World War II, she was interned in 1940. She and her husband fled to Switzerland in 1942, settling in Basle. At the conclusion of the war, she separated from her husband, returning to Paris in 1945. Wescher wrote freelance articles and in the early 1950s for Art d’Aujourd’hui. In 1953 she helped found the journal Cimaise. Among her topics at this time were collage. Wescher wrote a major monograph on the art form in 1968, Die Collage. She died of a heart attack at age 72. Wescher’s career eclipsed that of her husband’s, prinicipally through her specialty in the relatively unpublished area of collage. She became an authority on it and an early exponent of non-figurative art. The New York Times termed her book on collage “a definitive summing up on that major technique in [the] 20th century.” She and the Museum of Modern Art’s Bill Seitz (through his 1961 show and book Art of Assemblage) were the two main theorist until the late 20th century.
[dissertation:] Sebastian Dayg: Beiträge zur Geschichte der fränkisch-schwäbischen Malerei im 16. Jahrhundert. Freiburg, 1924, unpublished; Picasso : papiers collés. Paris: F. Hazan, 1960. English, Picasso: papiers colles. Methuen, 1960; Die Collage: Geschichte eines künstlerischen Ausdrucksmittels. Cologne: DuMont Schauberg 1968, English, Collage. New York, Abrams 1971.
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. 753-755; [obituaries:] Curjel, Hans. Werk 58 (June 1971): 424; Das Kunstwerk 24 (May 1971): 21, 77; Curjel, Hans. L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui no. 154 (February 1971): v; “Dr. Herta Wescher, Authority on Art.” New York Times March 5, 1971, p. 39.
Scholar of modernist art, authority on collage, art critic. Kauert’s parents were Heinrich Kauert, a merchant, and Maria Jentges (Kauert). She attended the Lyceum and was tutored privately, receiving her abitur in 1917 in Bonn. She immediately beg
Full Name: Wescher, Paul
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 21 March 1896
Date Died: 03 September 1974
Place Born: Hohentwiel, Hegau, Baden-Württemberg, Germany [Wendland states Welschingen, Baden]
Place Died: Pacific Palisades, CA, USA
Home Country/ies: Germany
Museum director of early J. Paul Getty Museum, 1953-1959. Wescher was the son of Paul Wescher, M.D., and Elsa Mez (Wescher). He attended a humanites Gymnasium in Freiburg, volunteering for World War I (fighting in field artillery) where he received his abitur in 1918. After the war studied art history, archaeology and literature in Freiburg and Munich beginning in 1919. Wescher studied under the major art historians of the time, including Heinrich Wölfflin, Paul Frankl and August Liembann Mayer, in Munich and then at Freibrug under Walter F. Friedländer and Hans Jantzen. He completed his dissertation under Jantzen in 1923 writing on an aspect of manuscript illumination before the fourteenth century. The same year he married a fellow art historian Hertha Wescher. Wescher initially worked as a volunteer at the Augustiner-Museum in Freiburg, 1919-1921 before securing a job as a curatorial assistant at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (State Museum in Berlin), 1924-1927, where his wife also volunteered. In 1927 he was appointed to the graphics collection cataloging Flemmish drawings, publishing a catalog, Beschreibendes Verzeichnis der Miniaturen Handschriften in 1931. His strong objection to Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 resulted in his leaving Germany on political grounds in 1934, moving to Paris. There he researched and worked as an art dealer through 1939. He moved to Campione am Lugano, Switzerland that year as a private scholar and teacher, writing books (most notibly, one on Renaissance Merchants) and as a commissioned author for the Basel publisher Holbein-Verlag. The couple divorced around this time. He published a major monograph on the French Renaissance painter Jean Fouquet, Jean Fouquet und seine Zeit in 1945. After the war, Wescher’s career would be inextricably connected to his friend, the former Detroit Institute of Art director Wilhelm Rheinhold Otto Valentiner. Valentiner had the Detroit Institute of Arts hire Wescher as a research associate at the Museum and Wescher immigrated to the United States in 1948. Wescher followed Valentiner as an assistant to Valentiner’s postions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. There, Wescher was picked in 1953 to be the director of the art collection the Oklahoma billionaire J. Paul Getty (1892-1976) was assembling in Santa Monica, CA. The collection at that time amounted to mostly second-rate baroque artists because of Getty’s unwillingness to pay high prices for art, but a spectacular collection of French decorative art. He remarried again (Mary Wescher). He resigned from the Getty in 1959, working as a private researcher, curating exhibitions in the U.S., most notably, at the North Carolina Museum of Art under James B. Byrnes (where Valentiner had been its first director) and at the New Orleans Museum of Art. He died at his California home in 1974. His research on the art-thefts of Napoleon was published posthumously in 1976. Wescher was a scholar of Flemmish art though his principle book publication were in other areas. His book on Jean Fouquet was termed definitive by the Burlington Magazine. He was among the generation of “discovery art historians,” whose numbers included Wilhelm Bode, Max J. Friedländer, and Friedrich Winkler, scholars who through stylistic analysis compiled oeuvre catalogs of artists establishing a body of work (Otten).
[complete bibliography:] Otten, Frank. “Bibliographie Paul Wescher.” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kunst. Cologne: Böhlau, 1979, pp. 233-236; [dissertation:] Die Anfänge der alttestamentarischen Bilderfolge in der westlichen Buchmalerei und ihre Dekorationssysteme bis rund 1300. Frieburg, 1924 (unpublished); [collected essays:] Otten, Frank, ed. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kunst. Cologne: Böhlau, 1979, [complete bibliography] pp. 233-236; Beschreibendes Verzeichnis der Miniaturen Handschriften und Einzelblätter des Kupferstichkabinetts der Staatlichen Museen, Berlin. Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1931; Großkaufleute der Renaissance: in Biographien und Bildnissen. Frankfurt am Main: Prestel, 1940; Jean Fouquet und seine Zeit. Basel: Holbein-Verlag, 1945, English, Jean Fouquet and his Time. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947; La prima Idea: die Entwicklung der Ölskizze von Tintoretto bis Picasso. Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1960; Kunstraub unter Napoleon. Berlin: Mann, 1976.[Art collection] The Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Paul Wescher. La Jolla: Art Center in La Jolla, 1958.
Otten, Frank. “Vorwort.” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kunst. Cologne: Böhlau, 1979, pp. ix-x; 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. 756-760; [obituaries:] “Paul Wescher.” Burlington Magazine 117, no. 862 (January 1975): 51-52; Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (1974): 184.
Museum director of early J. Paul Getty Museum, 1953-1959. Wescher was the son of Paul Wescher, M.D., and Elsa Mez (Wescher). He attended a humanites Gymnasium in Freiburg, volunteering for World War I (fighting in field artillery) where he receive
Full Name: Wessem, Jan Nicolas, van
Gender: male
Date Born: 1922
Date Died: 1993
Place Born: Sittard, Limburg, Netherlands
Place Died: Laren, Gelderland, Netherlands
Home Country/ies: Netherlands
Subject Area(s): aesthetics
Director of the Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden, 1953-1967; professor of art history and esthetics at the Rijksacademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, 1967-1982. Van Wessem grew up in the province of Limburg, in the southern part of the Netherlands. During World War II, after graduation from Gymnasium (high school), Van Wessem went into hiding. Following the liberation of the southern part of the country, in September 1944, he became liaison-officer in the Guards Armored Division of the British Army. Shortly after the liberation of the rest of the country (May 1945), he left active service and enrolled at Nijmegen University to study art history. After obtaining his B.A. he continued his study at Utrecht University under J. G. van Gelder, where he graduated in 1952. His M. A. thesis was on the Leiden painter Lucas van Leyden. In June 1953 he obtained the position of Director of the Municipal Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden. In 1956 he successfully organized the exhibition on Rembrandt and his pupils, “Rembrandt als leermeester”. In 1960 and 1966 respectively he held shows of the Leiden born painters Jan van Goyen and Gabriël Metsu. Van Wessem also paid attention to the work of contemporary artists, including the members of the Leiden association Ars Aemula Naturae. In 1960 he organized an exhibition of figurative drawings of nine local artists. In 1964, he published an overview of Dutch graphic art after 1945: Grafiek. Nederlandse grafiek na negentienvijfenveertig. Another field of interest was medals. Between 1959 and 1969 he served as the president of the Vereniging van Penningkunst (Medal Association). In 1967 Van Wessem accepted a professorship at the Amsterdam Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten, as the successor of Frithjof W. S. van Thienen. He quit his position in the Lakenhal and moved to the village of Laren. His inaugural lecture was titled: Creatie en reflectie. In the early 1970s he in addition obtained the position of director.Van Wessem was an enthusiastic and inventive teacher. The first years he regularly traveled with his students to Italy. Later he organized a yearly three week stay in the Dutch Institute in Florence. In 1973, the Italian prime-minister Aldo Moro granted Van Wessem a reward for his active promotion of Italian culture in the Netherlands. Another favorite country was the United Kingdom. Van Wessem gave guest lectures in Cambridge, London (Warburg Institute) and at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. In Laren he played a prominent role in the Singer Museum Laren where he was involved in the organization of art exhibitions, strongly defending artists who mastered traditional craftsmanship. For many years, between 1975 and 1992, he held a teaching position at the Nederlandse Film en Televisie Academie in Amsterdam, where he attracted many students. In 1988, as an active contributor to the jubilee exhibition of the Vereniging van Penningkunst, he published Nederlandse Penningkunst, his last major publication. He underwent serious surgery in 1990 and died three years later. Van Wessem highly valued craftsmanship in art and desparaged modern art where that was less evident. In 1960, his outspoken preference for representative art was criticized by Leiden artists and galleries who disapproved his rather conservative attitude regarding new developments in the art scene
[bibligraphy:] “Voornaamste geschriften” in Moerman, Ingrid W. L. “Jan Nicolas van Wessem” Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde, 1994, 168; Negen Leidse tekenaars. Leiden: Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal, 1960; Grafiek. Nederlandse grafiek na negentienvijfenveertig. Hilversum: De Boer, 1964; Jan Sluijters. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1966; Creatie en reflectie. (Inaugural lecture Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, 1967); Nederlandse Penningkunst. The Hague: SDU, 1988.
Moerman, Ingrid W. L. “Jan Nicolas van Wessem” Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde, 1994: 161-168;
Contributors: Monique Daniels
Director of the Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden, 1953-1967; professor of art history and esthetics at the Rijksacademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, 1967-1982. Van Wessem grew up in the province of Limburg, in the southern part of the Netherlan
Full Name: Westheim, Paul
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 07 August 1886
Date Died: 21 December 1963
Place Born: Eschwege, Hesse, Germany
Place Died: Berlin, Germany
Home Country/ies: Germany
Subject Area(s): Expressionist (style), German (culture, style, period), and German Expressionist (movement)
Early German Expressionism exponent, Kokoschka scholar and art publisher. Westheim was raised in a family of Jewish merchants. After abandoning this career track around 1903, he joined the liberal newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung working on the feuilleton (arts) section. Westheim studied art history at the Technische Universität Darmstadt and then, in 1906, at the University in Berlin Heinrich Wölfflin. In Berlin he made the acquaintance of Theodor Heuss (1884-1963) a liberal political writer and later the first post-war chancellor of Germany, who had also studied art history as a student. Westheim’s perceptive art criticism gained him articles in German art journals, from 1909 in Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration and in 1911 in Die Kunst. He was appointed editor of the progressivist art journal Die Kunstblatt beginning in 1917. The following year he wrote a monograph on Oskar Kokoschka, the first biography of that Austrian Expressionist. His personal acquaintance with the major artists of modernism allowed him to build a considerable modern art collection. A book on Wilhelm Lehmbruck was published in 1922. The rise of the Nazis in 1933 forced him to flee to Paris and abandon his position at Die Kunstblatt, leaving his art collection with a modernist art dealer, Charlotte Weidler (1895-1983). His German citizenship was stripped from him in 1935. In France he wrote for German-language newspapers Pariser Tageblatt (through 1936), the Pariser Tageszeitung (1936-1940) and edited the Freie Kunst und Literatur (Free Fine Arts and Literature). He participated in expatriate artists’ groups including the Kollektive deutscher Künstler (Collective of German artists) whose members counted the exiled artists Max Ernst, Otto Freundlich and Gert Wollheim and the Freier Künstlerbund, among whose members were the art historians Sabine Spiro and Hertha Wescher. Despite his exile status, Westheim was considered an enemy alien in France at the beginning of the war and was interned. Shunted from camp to camp (five in all) he later referred to this as his “Tour de France.” As France fell to the Germans, he escaped his internment camp in 1941, fleeing France through the ERC (Emergency Rescue Committee). From Marseille he moved to Spain, Portugal and ultimately Mexico. His eyesight failing, he met a widow, the translator Mariana Frenk (1898-2004), through the auspices of the Heinrich-Heine-club in Mexico City and the two became a pair. In Mexico, he joined Menorah, founded in 1938, an association of German Jews, with such activists as the editor Paul Mayer (1889-1970) and the actor Charles Rooner (d. 1954). In Mexico Westheim studied and wrote on Pre-Columbian, Mesoamerican and modern Mexican art. He gained an admiration among his adopted countrymen. After the war, he was denied re-immigration to either part of the reorganized Germany (East or West). Westheim wrote to Weidler asking for his collection, but Weidler contended it had been destroyed. He remained in Mexico, gaining Mexican citizenship in 1954. He married Fenk in 1959. During a 1963 trip to Berlin to honor his work in Expressionism, he died. Weidler, in fact, still possessed most of Westheim’s art collection and began selling it after his death.
Die Welt als Vorstellung, ein Weg zur Kunstanschauung. Potsdam/Berlin: G. Kiepenheuer, 1918; Oskar Kokoschka: das Werk Kokoschkas in 62 Abbildungen. Potsdam-Berlin: G. Kiepenheuer, 1918; Wilhelm Lehmbruck. Potsdam: G. Kiepenheurer, 1922; Architektonik des plastischen. Berlin: E. Wasmuth, 1923; Rassenschande: Novelle. Paris: Éditions du Phénix, 1935; Ideas fundamentales del arte prehispánico en México. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1957; The Sculpture of Ancient Mexico/La escultura del México antiguo. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963.
Holz, Keith. “Scenes from Exile in Western Europe.” in Barron, Stephanie, ed. Exiles+Emigrés: the fFight of European Artists from Hitler. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997, pp. 46-47, 50; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007, pp. 495-497; Patka, Marcus G. Zu Nahe der Sonne: Deutsche Schriftsteller im Exil in Mexiko. Berlin: Aufbau, 1999; Müller, Melissa, and Tatzkow, Monika. Verlorene Bilder, verlorene Leben: Jüdische Sammler und was aus ihren Kunstwerken wurde. Munich: Elisabeth-Sandmann-Verlag, 2008; Müller, Melissa. Lost Lives, Lost Art: Jewish Collectors, Nazi Art Theft, and the Quest for Justice. New York: Vendome Press, 2010; “Grosz Heirs file suit against MoMA for artworks unlawfully taken during Nazi Era.” Looted Art: The Central Registry for Information on Looted Cultural Property 1933-1945. http://www.lootedart.com/news.php?r=NL44IE274541.
Early German Expressionism exponent, Kokoschka scholar and art publisher. Westheim was raised in a family of Jewish merchants. After abandoning this career track around 1903, he joined the liberal newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung working on