Joachim, Harold

Full Name: Joachim, Harold

Gender: male

Date Born: 1909

Date Died: 24 November 1983

Place Born: Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany

Place Died: Chicago, Cook, IL, USA

Home Country/ies: Germany and United States

Subject Area(s): drawings (visual works) and prints (visual works)

Career(s): curators

Institution(s): Art Institute of Chicago

Overview

Museum curator at the Art Institute of Chicago; specialist in drawings, particularly Italian and French of the 17th and 18th centuries. Joachim was born in Göttingen in 1909 to Dr. Johannes Joachim, a librarian, and Else Gensel; his grandfather was the noted violinist Joseph Joachim. Joachim attended school at a classical Gymnasium in Göttingen, completing his abitur in 1927. He studied art history, archaeology, history, musicology, and philosophy in Göttingen, Berlin, and Leipzig; his teachers included Leo Bruhns, Georg Vitzthum von Eckstädt, Hermann Theodor Beenken, Theodor Hetzer, Hans Kauffmann, Nikolaus Pevsner, and Wolfgang Stechow. Joachim completed his dissertation, Die Stiftskirche zu Königslutter: ein Beitrag zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte des 12. Jahrhunderts (The Collegiate Church at Königslutter: a Contribution to German Art History of the 12th Century), at Leipzig in 1935 under Bruhns; it was published in Göttingen in the same year. In 1938, Joachim emigrated from Germany to the USA, presumably due to persecution on the basis of his Jewish parentage. From 1940 to 1941 he worked as an assistant at the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts of the Harvard Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Joachim served in the U.S. Army from 1940 to 1945, and was naturalized in 1944. In 1946 he began his career in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago as a research assistant under director Carl Schniewind, later becoming assistant curator. Joachim left briefly in 1956 to serve as curator of the Print Department of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He returned to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1958 as curator of the Department of Prints and Drawings, where he remained until 1973. Under his direction, the collection underwent substantial expansion; he also served as the co-editor of Museum Studies.

Joachim was noted for his connoisseurship and breadth of expertise. He acquired over 10,000 prints and drawings for the Art Institute of Chicago during his tenure, and was greatly influential on fellow collectors and curators. Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann wrote that he “set national and worldwide standards that will be observed for a long time to come”, signifying his reach and influence.

Selected Bibliography

• [dissertation:] Die Stiftskirche zu Königslutter: ein Beitrag zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte des 12. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: Dieterichsche Universitäts-Buchdruckerei, 1935;
• “Three Drawings by Rembrandt.” Art Institute of Chicago Quarterly 48, no. 1 (February 1954): 11–12;
• “Three Lithographs by Toulouse-Lautrec.” Minneapolis Institute of Arts Bulletin 46 (1957): 14–16;
• “Blindman’s Buff: A Triptych by Max Beckmann.” Minneapolis Institute of Arts Bulletin 47, no. 1 (1958): 1–13;
• Paul Klee: Etchings and Lithographs. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1970;
• The Helen Regenstein Collection of European Drawings. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1974;
• and McCullagh, Suzanne Folds. Dessins français de l’Art Institute de Chicago de Watteau à Picasso. Paris: Secrétariat d’État à la culture, Éditions des Musés nationaux, 1976;
• and Olsen, Sandra Haller. French Drawings and Sketchbooks of the Eighteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977;
• and McCullagh, Suzanne Folds. Italian Drawings in the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979;
• and McCullagh, Suzanne Folds. Italian Drawings of the 15th, 16th and 17th Centuries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979;
• and McCullagh, Suzanne Folds, and Sandra Haller Olsen. Italian Drawings of the 18th and 19th Centuries and Spanish Drawings of the 17th Through 19th Centuries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Sources

• Tedeschi, Martha, Esther Sparks, and Suzanne Folds McCullagh. Great Drawings from the Art Institute of Chicago: The Harold Joachim Years, 1958–1983. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1985;
• Goldschmidt, Lucien. “Harold Joachim (1909–1983).” Print Collector’s Newsletter 14, no. 6 (1984): 196–7;
• Haverkamp-Begemann, Egbert. “Harold Joachim (1909–1983): An Appreciation.” Museum Studies 12 (1985): 4–7;
• Scholz, Janos, Suzanne Folds McCullagh, Andrew Robison, Alice Adam, Jack Beal, Eleanor A. Sayre, Esther Sparks, Agnes Mongan, Elizabeth Mongan, and Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann. “Harold Joachim (1909–1983).” Drawing 5, no. 6 (1984): 131–5;
• Shestack, Alan. “Harold Joachim.” Burlington Magazine 126 (1984): 290;
• Cummings, Paul. “Interview: Harold Joachim Talks With Paul Cummings.” Drawing 1, no. 3 (1979): 59–63;
• Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 1, pp. 338–40.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen and Lindsay Dial