Full Name: Priva Baidaff Gross
Other Names:
- Priva Gross
- Priva Baidaff
Gender: female
Date Born: 19 June 1911
Date Died: 01 August 1990
Place Born: Wieliczka, Voivodeship, Lesser Poland
Home Country/ies: Poland and United States
Career(s): art historians
Institution(s): Queensborough Community College
Overview
Expanded the art history department of Queensborough Community College. Priva Baidaff was born in the outskirts of Krakow. Baidaff received her M.A. in art history there ca. 1933. She secured a position in the Muzeum Narodoew in Krakow as well as the Ethnographic Museum at the Wawel Castle. At the Ethnographic, she assisted the curator, the art historian and painter Tadeusz Seweryn (1894-1975) restoring objects from the collection. She published work in the prominent Polish journals Lud, Jantar, and AS: ilustrowany magazyn tygodniowy. She married the lawyer and sociologist Feliks Gross (1906-2006) in 1935. Now Priva Gross, she published a book on Polish folk art, Polskie malarstwo ludowe, in 1938. The following year Germany invaded Poland and the Gross’, both Jewish, fled to Vilnius, Lithuania, where the couple secured passage from the Japanese consulate to Japan and ultimately New York by the outbreak of World War II.
In New York she studied art history from New York University. She continued to write articles, now for Nowy Świat (The Polish Morning World) a Polish-language daily newspaper published in New York, and New Europe, as well as in art history. She joined the newly founded Queensborough Community College in the early 1960s as their professor of art history. There she grew the department to a faculty of twenty-five. By 1966 she chaired the College’s Art and Music department, publishing her second book on art history, Some Aspects of Medieval Church Architecture in Poland in 1967. When music and art separated into distinct departments in 1968, she chaired the department until 1974. At the same time, she directed the art museum of the College, holding that position until 1977. She travelled with her husband, now a distinguished anthropologist at the Graduate Center of Brooklyn College, to Wyoming where he researched the native American populations and was professor at the University of Wyoming. She died in New York City in 1990 and buried in Valhalla cemetery, Westchester County, NY.
Selected Bibliography
- Polskie malarstwo ludowe. Warsaw: Powszechny Uniw. Korespondencyjny: Związek Polskiego Nauczycielstwa Szkół Powszechnych, 1938.
- Some Aspects of Medieval Church Architecture in Poland. New York, NY: Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, 1967.
Sources
- [obituary] Bird, Thomas E. “Priva Baidaff Gross, (1911-1990).” The Polish Review
36, no. 3 (1991): 377-378; - “Priva Gross, Art Professor, 79.” The New York Times. August 24, 1990, p B7
Contributors: Amalia Gay, Inaya Shafi, Lee Sorensen, and Mary Hodge