Early friend and exponent of German Expressionist artists, taught art history at the Bauhaus. He was born in Karlsbad, Bohemia, which is present-day Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic. Adler was born to Therese (née Hirsch) and Mortiz Adler, both of Jewish descent. Adler’s father was a theater critic and socialist. Adler lived in Munich from 1917 onward, where he wrote his dissertation at that university the same year.  His topic was the early development of the woodcut. In Munich he became familiar with the Blauen Reiter artists group and for whom he worked.

Expert in the German Art of the Middles Ages. Baum studied art history at the universities of Munich, Berlin and Tübingen, where he worked under Karl Voll and Heinrich Wölfflin. He completed his dissertation in Tübingen in 1905 on the churches of the architect Heinrich Schickhardt (1558-1634) under Konrad von Lange. Baum wrote his habilitation under Heinrich Weizsäcker in Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart.

Collector and romantic-era historian of German medieval art.

Museum director and scholar of Romanesque and 19^th-century German sculpture. Bloch was the son of a Berlin book publisher, Peter Bloch and mother Charlotte Streckenbach (Bloch). He attended the Gymnasium in Steglitz, graduating in 1943. Despite having a Jewish background, Bloch joined the German army. He was wounded in battle and taken as a prisoner of war, remaining in a Belgian POW camp (working in the mines) until 1948.

Collector and collaborator on catalogs of German and Netherlandish paintings with his brother Sulpiz. Melchior came from an old wealthy family who hoped he would become a scientist and his older brother, Sulpiz Boisserée, run the family business. The two were raised during the Napoleonic occupation of Cologne. Through his friend Johann B. Bertram he and Sulpiz became interested in art and especially that of the medieval era, a period well represented by the so-called Cologne school of painting, though much under appreciated.

Artist and professor of art history at the Universities of Heidelberg, Strasbourg, and Munich; exponent of 20th-century art and founder of the modern art-historical encyclopedia. Burger was the son of a banker. He started architectural studies in 1896 in Munich, but cut them short for enrollment in the military the following year. From 1900 onward, he studied art history in Heidelberg. The new art movement of Darmstadt became the subject of his first publication in 1902. He married the daughter of the Heidelberg classicist Friedrich von Duhn the same year.

Museum director, exponent of German Expressionism, especially  August Macke. Cohen was born in 1880 to Helene and Friedrich Cohen. His father was a book publisher in Bonn, Germany. Cohen graduated from the Städtisches Progymnasium mit Oberrealschule in 1898, and the following year began the study of ancient languages.

Scholar of fin-de-siècle Germanic art and music; Southern Methodist University professor of art history. Alessandra Comini was born in Winona, Minnesota to Eleanor Frances (“Megan”) Laird (Comini), a writer, and Raiberto Comini, a hotel-and- business owner in Geneva, Ibiza (island) and London, in 1934.

Lecturer, art critic and art writer of the Weimar Republic. Deri was the son of Ignatz Deutsch (1844-1929), a lawyer and writer, and Therese Pollak (Deutsch). The family changed their surname to “Deri” after a conversion to Christianity from Judaism. After graduating from the Akademisches Gymnasium in Vienna in 1897 he studied mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg, 1897-1901.  In 1901 he switched to art history in nearby Berlin and then Vienna and Halle.

Historian of German and Flemish drawings, Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum. Dodgson came from a middle-class investment family, distantly related to Lewis Carroll (née Charles Lutwidge Dodgson). He attended Winchester and then New College, Oxford, where he read in Classics and Theology. His intention to be ordained changed after college (perhaps because of his realization of latent homosexuality). Dodgson assisted Oscar Wilde's friend Lord Alfred Douglas at Oxford, spending a well-documented weekend with Wild and Douglas at Babbacombe near Torquay.

Historian of German 18th/19th-century art; methodological theorist. The son of a military officer, von Einem demonstrated an interest in art from high school. After studying law, he turned to art history in 1923, studying at Göttingen, Berlin and Munich. In 1928, he completed his dissertation under Georg Vitzthum von Eckstädt. Einem worked in the Field Museum in Hannover until 1936. His 1935 habilitationschrift was written under the classicist Carl Fernow and Wilhelm Waetzoldt in Halle and Göttingen.

Early writer on modern art in Germany; first to discus African art in aestheric terms and one of the first to connect it to Cubism. Einstein's father was Daniel Einstein (1847-1899), a rabbi, Hebrew teacher and cantor. His mother was Sophie Lichtenstein (Einstein) (b. 1860). In 1888 the family moved to Karlsruhe, where the younger Einstein initially studied Banking. Between 1904-1908 he attended the philosophy lectures of Georg Simmel (1858-1918) at the University of Berlin and art historical lectures of Heinrich Wölfflin.

Film and painting historian of German Expressionism. Eisner's father was Hugo Eisner (1856-1924), a textile exporter and magistrate, and her mother Margarethe Feodora Aron (1866-1942). She was raised in a prosperous middle-class Jewish family living in near the Zoo quarter of Berlin.

Curator at the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt; exponent of Expressionism; primarily focused on works of the painting collection and prints and drawings department. Freund was born in Nußloch, Grand Duchy of Baden [modern Baden-Württemberg], Germany, to Max Freund (1857–1933), a cigar manufacturer, and Auguste Weisenburger (1860–1898). He attended school at the Ludwig-Georgs-Gymnasium in Darmstadt, completing his Abitur in 1900. Freund initially studied law in Heidelberg and Berlin, as well as modern philology and anthropology in Munich and Freiburg.

Painter and Royal Academy teacher; translator of German art histories and art historian. Fuseli, born Heinrich Füssli, was one of eighteen children (five living to adulthood) born to Johann Caspar Füssli (1706-1782), in later life a city clerk, and his wife, Anna Elisabeth Waser (Füssli) (1714-1759). His father devoted his life to art, painting portraits, writing on art and collecting master drawings and prints.

Architectural historian; German Neo-Classicism. Giedion was born to Johann and Bertha Jacobs Giedion. He received his Ph.D. in art history under Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich. Giedion was appointed professor at the university in Zürich. He left Switzerland shortly before World War II to be the Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry in 1938 at Harvard University. His Norton lectures for 1938-1939 became his most famous book, Space, Time and Architecture: the Growth of a New Tradition.

wrote essays on German architecture

Director, Essener Kunstmuseum 1909-1922, major exhibitor of German Expressionism. Between 1891 and 1896 Gosebruch studied philology in Munich, Geneva and Berlin. He taught as a private tutor until 1903 when he joined the the Essen museum as an unpaid assistant. During the same time he studied art history in Paris and Berlin, the latter venue under Heinrich Wölfflin. After a second undergraduate degree in art history in 1906, he was appointed in 1909 Director of Essen art museums, a diverse art collection.

German Expressionist documentary scholar. Grisebach was the son of Jena professor of philosophy, Eberhard Grisebach (1880-1945), whose art connections laid the groundwork for his son's interests. His father was a second cousin of the art historian August Grisebach and personal friends with the artists Ferdinand Hodler (who became Lothar's Godfather) and Edvard Munch. The senior Grisebach organized art exhibitions for Kunstverein Jena, where he met and befriended the German Expressionist (Brücke) artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

Museum director for the Hamburger Kunsthalle; notable advocate and collector of German modernist works. Heise was born in Hamburg, Germany as the only child of upper middle-class merchant Francis Julius Heise and Helene Kaemmerer (Heise). He attended the private secondary school of Dr. August Bieber until age 15, when he then moved to the Staatliche Oberrealschule in Uhlenhorst.

Cranach scholar and early 19th-century writing on German renaissance art. Heller was the first to publish, albeit in excerpt, the biographical writing of Johannes Neudörfer on Nuremberg artists, Nachrichten von Künstlern und Werkleuten of 1547. He was a later contributor to the Le Peintre-graveur of Adam von Bartsch.

Musuem Director of German Expressionism

Private scholar; editorial Secretary and Assistant Editor of the The Burlington Magazine, 1938-1950. Hoffmann was the daughter of the writer and Czech diplomat Camill (or Kamil) Hoffmann (1878-144) and his wife, Irma Oplatka (Hoffmann) (1883-1944). Irma’s father was an art writer and a friend of the Austrian Expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka. After attending elementary school in the suburban town of Hellerau bei Dresden, she graduated from the Auguste Victoria Girls' School in Berlin in 1928.

Art professor instrumental in the establishment of modernist art history in Germany after World War II. Imdahl studied both (studio) painting and art history, archaeology and Germanistik beginning in 1945 at the University of Münster. His painting skills were good enough to win him the Blevin-Davis Prize in 1950. A year later he wrote his dissertation on the treatment of color in late Carolingian book illustration ("Farbenprobleme spätkarolingischer Buchmalerei") under Werner Hager.

Early German curator, developed some of the principal collections which later became the National Gallery in Berlin.