Full Name: Weil-Garris, Kathleen
Other Names:
- Kathleen Weil-Garris Posner
Gender: female
Date Born: 1934
Place Born: Châtellerault, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Subject Area(s): Renaissance
Overview
Scholar of the Renaissance and Professor of Fine Arts, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1965-. Weil-Garris was the daughter of Kurt Herrmann Weil (1896-1992), an aviation engineer and professor and Charlotte Garris Weil. She attended Vassar College, receiving her B. A. in 1956, spent a year studying in Bonn, Germany, before completing her M. A. from Radcliffe in 1958. She entered the Ph.D. program at Harvard University, where she met and married fellow graduate student Donald Posner in 1962 (later divorced), joining the department of Fine Arts, New York University in the following year where her husband also had an appointment. She wrote a 1965 dissertation at Harvard on sixteenth-century Italian sculpture. She rose through the ranks at NYU, associate professor in 1967 and full professor in 1973. In 1976 she produced a film with architectural historian James S. Ackerman, Looking for Renaissance Rome. Between 1977-1981 she was editor and chief of the Art Bulletin of the College Art Association. She married Werner Brandt in 1983. Weil-Garris was a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), Washington DC, in 1985. In 1995, while attending an exhibition on sculpture in New York, Weil-Garris Brandt pronounced a small marble statue of a boy owned by the French embassy in New York to be the work of Michelangelo. Subsequent scholarship has not been able to validate her pronouncement. Leo Steinberg bluntly rejected the attribution, citing its many anatomical oddities, while James Beck suggested it was a 19th century work. She was Slade Professor at Oxford University in 1998.
Selected Bibliography
[disssertation:] The Santa Casa di Loreto: Problems in Italian Sixteenth-Century Sculpture. Harvard University, 1965; “Michelangelo Lost and Found?” Burlington Magazine (1996); “Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Roma, marzo 1990,” volume 3 of, Michelangelo, la Cappella Sistina: documentazione e interpretazioni. Novara, Italy: Istituto geografico De Agostini, 1994; The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The Representation of Architecture. 1993; Leonardo and Central Italian Art, 1515-1550. New York: New York University Press/College Art Association of America, 1974; “Cloister, Court and City square.” Gesta 12 no. 1-2 (1973): 123-32; “Comments on the Medici chapel and Pontormo’s lunette at Poggio a Caiano.” Burlington Magazine 115 (October 1973): 640-49; “Twenty-five Questions About Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling.” Apollo 126 (December 1987): 392-400; and Ackerman, James. Looking for Renaissance Rome [videorecording]. New York: Fogg Fine Arts Films, 1976.
Sources
Faculty of Arts and Sciences, NYU http://www.finsvc.duke.edu/finsvc/payroll/deptbw.txt ; Rosenbaum, Lee “Michelangelo/not Michelangelo: Possible Michelangelo Statue Discovered by Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt.” Art in America 84 (April 1996): 31.
Contributors: Lee Sorensen