American, 20th century, male.
Born 2 September 1911, in Charlotte (North Carolina); died 12 March 1988, in New York.
Painter (including gouache), watercolourist, lithographer, screen printer, engraver, collage artist, newspaper cartoonist, illustrator, art theorist. Religious subjects, figure compositions, local figures. Humorous cartoons, frontispieces, stage sets...
French, 19th – 20th century, male.
Born 16 January 1834, in Mirabeau, Provence; died 28 December 1912, in Brignoles, Provence.
Painter, writer. Religious subjects.
Jules Marie Béguin was ordained in 1857, and became a canon in 1902. That same year, he published a book on St Mary Magdalene. He left a corpus of over 400 paintings in a number of churches in Provence including Cuers, Camps-la-Source, Puget-sur-Argens....
(b Berlin, Aug 18, 1911; d Cambridge, MA, Sept 6, 2006).
German historian of antiquity and the Middle Ages, active also in Italy and America. Bloch was trained at the University of Berlin under the historian of ancient Greece Werner Jaeger, art historian Gerhart Rodenwaldt and medievalist Erich Caspar from 1930 until 1933, when the rise of National Socialism convinced him to move to Rome. There he received his tesi di laurea in ancient history in 1935 and his diploma di perfezionamento in 1937. He then participated in the excavations at Ostia, Rome’s ancient port, which was an important site in the revival of Italian archaeology under Fascism. At the outbreak of World War II, he immigrated to the USA, and began his teaching career in 1941 at Harvard University’s Department of Classics, where he remained until his retirement in 1982. His experience of totalitarianism shaped both his personal and professional beliefs.
Bloch applied a deep knowledge of epigraphy, history and material culture, art history, literary and archival sources to his research and he had a propensity for uncovering the significance of new or neglected evidence. One such area was Roman history. His first publications, on ancient Rome’s brick stamps (many of which he discovered ...
(b Berlin, Aug 11, 1909; d London, Nov 10, 1996).
German scholar of Byzantine, East Christian and European illuminated manuscripts. He took his degree in 1933 at the University of Hamburg in the heady community of the Warburg Library (later Institute) under the tutelage of Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl. Immigrating with the Warburg staff and library to London in 1934, he served from 1940 to 1949 as the Institute’s Librarian and from 1944 to 1965 as Lecturer, Reader and then Professor of Byzantine art at the University of London. In 1965 he came to the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, becoming in 1970 the first Ailsa Mellon Bruce Professor. He retired in 1975 to London, where he died in 1996.
Buchthal is best known for his Miniature Painting in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (1957), which laid the foundation for the now well-established art-historical field of Crusader studies. It exemplifies both his originality and the methods that made his scholarship so durable. Fundamental among these were his holistic approach to manuscripts, giving as much attention to ornament, liturgical usage, text traditions, palaeography and apparatus as to miniatures, and his relentlessly keen visual analysis. Aided by a powerful memory, he worked from original monuments, developing exceptional acuity in dissecting the formal components of their images. Mobilized in his dissertation, published in ...
[CESCM]
French organization founded in Poitiers in 1953. The Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale (CECSM) is affiliated with the Université de Poitiers, the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), and the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication. The founders, among them historian Edmond-René Labande and art historian René Crozet, began CESCM as a month-long interdisciplinary study of medieval civilization, inviting foreign students to participate. CESCM has since developed into a permanent organization but maintains the international and interdisciplinary focus of its founders.
CESCM continues to hold its formative summer session, known as ‘Les Semaines d’études médiévales’, and invites advanced graduate students of all nationalities. The summer session spans two weeks and includes sessions on a variety of topics, each conducted by a member or affiliate of CESCM. CESCM supports collaborative research groups and regularly holds colloquia attended by the international scholarly community.
Since 1958 CECSM has published ...
(b Vienna, Oct 22, 1878; d Hamburg, July 30, 1960).
Austrian printmaker, painter, decorative artist and writer. He studied painting with Christian Griepenkerl (1839–1916) at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna (1894–9). From 1899 to 1900 he renovated the Patronatskirche of Emperor Francis Joseph in Radmer an dem Hasel, decorating it with frescoes. At the same time he received his first illustration commissions from the publishers Gerlach & Wiedling in Vienna. From 1900 he was a member of the Vienna Secession (see Secession, §3). In 1902 he became an assistant tutor in draughtsmanship at the Kunstgewerbeschule (now Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst) in Vienna, and in 1905 he took over a class in painting and draughtsmanship, being one of Oskar Kokoschka’s first teachers.
In Autumn 1905 Czeschka joined the Wiener Werkstätte. Under their auspices he produced jewellery, fabrics, wallpaper, enamelled pictures and furniture, and repoussé work and glass windows for the Palais Stoclet, Brussels (...
(b Paris, Oct 23, 1889; d Dec 1950)
French historian. He entered the Dominican Order in 1910 and studied at Paris, Rome and Fribourg. Extreme deafness resulting from service in World War I forced him to leave the Order in 1925 and he became a priest in the diocese of Versailles. He was the editor of Bulletin Thomiste 1924–8, and his early studies were on the works of Thomas Aquinas. In the manuscripts of Aquinas he frequently found marginal notes, which he realized related to provisions on the production of texts found in medieval university statutes (see Manuscript, §I). These covered the official examination and approval of exemplars of texts needed for study, which were to be hired out for copying by the university stationers. These official exemplars were divided into small gatherings of peciae (‘pieces’; generally of four leaves), which could be hired out one at a time to professional scribes or students, thus facilitating the multiplication of the texts, since several people could be copying different parts of an exemplar at the same time. Destrez realized that the notes that he had found were made by scribes indicating in their copies the beginning or end of the ...
American, 20th century, male.
Born 7 June 1931, in Eatonton (Georgia).
Painter, draughtsman (including ink), collage artist, print artist, sculptor, collector, art historian. Religious subjects, figures, portraits, figure compositions, scenes with figures, landscapes. Designs for stained glass.
David C. Driskell earned a BFA at Howard University in ...
(b Budapest, July 4, 1928; d Budapest, May 22, 1986).
Hungarian architect, sculptor, conceptual and performance artist, teacher, theorist and film maker. He came from a Jewish–Christian family, many of whom were killed during World War II. In 1947 he began training as a sculptor at the College of Fine Arts in Budapest, but he left and continued his studies in the studio of Dezső Birman Bokros (1889–1965), before training as an architect from 1947 to 1951 at the Technical University in Budapest. During the 1950s and early 1960s he worked as an architect and began experimenting with painting and graphic art, as well as writing poems and short stories. During this period he became acquainted with such artists as Dezső Korniss, László Latner and, most importantly, Béla Kondor and Sándor Altorjai (1933–79), with whom he began a lifelong friendship. In 1959 and 1963 he also enrolled at the Budapest College of Theatre and Film Arts but was advised to leave both times....
(b Granada, Feb 21, 1870; d Madrid, June 7, 1970).
Spanish art historian. He was the son of a professor of art history and attended the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Rome at an early age. On his return he published articles on Arab and Christian art and prepared catalogues of the monuments of Ávila, Zamora, León and Salamanca, placing them in their historical context. At the same time, he studied Visigothic, Mozarabic, Romanesque and Hispano-Arabic art. He was appointed professor of Arab art at Madrid University in 1913 and collaborated with Elías Tormo y Monzó in the Centro de Estudios Históricos, founding the review Archivo Español de Arte y Arqueología in 1925. Leopoldo Torres Balbás, Elie Lambert and Diego Angulo Iñiguez trained with him. In 1951 he published Arte árabe hasta los Almohades in the series Ars Hispaniae. Outstanding among his publications are Escultura greco-romana (1912), Arquitectura Tartesiana and Las águilas del renacimiento español (1941). Gómez Moreno was interested in ancient Iberian inscriptions and established the ...
(b Christiania [now Oslo], May 10, 1876; d Oslo, Feb 20, 1959).
Norwegian architect, urban planner and writer. After preliminary training at the Royal School of Design in Christiania, he was educated as an architect in Berlin (1898), Stockholm (1900) and Champaign, IL (1906). He worked in the USA and in England until 1911, starting his own practice in Christiania in 1912. In 1918 he was appointed Director of the Municipal Housing Office of Christiania, and from 1926 to 1947 he acted as the city’s Chief Planning Officer. Hals began in a ‘romantic’ vein with his buildings for the English-inspired Ullevål Garden City (1915–22), Oslo, laid out by Paul Oscar Hoff (1875–1942), but he soon became an accomplished neo-classicist. Hegermanns plass (1919) is an octagonal open space surrounded by thinly plastered brick blocks of flats. Classical pilasters set off the corner angles, but National Romanticism is suggested by the steep roofs and the colonnettes between the arched openings. The neo-classicism of the two blocks of flats at Hans Nielsen Hauges gate 32 and 34 (...
Spanish, 19th – 20th century, male.
Born 1865, in Barcelona; died 1915.
Painter, art critic. Religious subjects, genre scenes, landscapes.
Sebastián Junyent Sans studied at the academy of fine arts in Barcelona. As well as a painter, he was art critic of the review Youth ( ...
Spanish, 19th – 20th century, male.
Born 1859, in Cordova; died 1922.
Painter, writer. Religious subjects, genre scenes, portraits, urban landscapes, fruit.
Rafael Ramírez exhibited in Cordova in 1874, Jaén in 1878 and at the Exposición Nacional de Bellas Artes in Madrid in 1895. He painted scenes of daily life, picturesque views of Spanish towns, portraits, still-lifes, flowers and fruit. Noted works include ...
(b Dresden, Jan 7, 1847; d Lugano, Aug 25, 1937).
German art historian, collector and dealer. The son of a Lutheran clergyman, he first studied theology at Leipzig but while travelling in Italy in 1869 became interested in early Christian archaeology, in which field he determined to continue. His first publications were on the sources of Byzantine art history and the mosaics of Ravenna. In 1876 he met Giovanni Morelli, whose disciple he became. Their lengthy correspondence constitutes an important source for the early history of connoisseurship. Richter published a short biography of Leonardo in 1880, then a series of articles in the Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst and finally his edition of the Literary Works of Leonardo (1883), the work that established his reputation as a scholar. This was the first scholarly edition of Leonardo’s writings, illustrated, moreover, with a selection of mostly authentic drawings at a time when books on Leonardo were normally illustrated by his pupils’ works....
German, 20th century, male.
Born 19 August 1886, in Blasewitz, near Dresden; died 1966, in Hamburg.
Painter, engraver, director, writer. Religious subjects, figures.
Lothar Schreyer studied history of art and law in Heidelberg, Berlin and Leipzig. In 1910 he became a doctor of law. From ...
(b Budapest, 1927; d Paris, 2008).
Art historian and scholar of Jewish and Christian art, active in France. Known as the ‘grande dame’ of Jewish art, Sed-Rajna came to Paris in 1948. She became Director of the Hebraic Section of the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and then taught at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and at the Institut d’Etudes Juives of the Université Libre in Brussels. In 1976 she founded with Bezalel Narkiss the Jerusalem Index of Jewish Art and became President of the European Association for Jewish Studies. She published six pioneering books and numerous articles, scrutinizing the role played by the artistic heritage of the Jewish people.
In all her works the visual expression of the Jewish tradition was envisioned in the larger framework of the history of arts. Her immense knowledge of both texts and images led her to publish in ...
(b Modum, March 12, 1854; d Eggedal, Jan 19, 1924).
Norwegian painter and writer. After a year at Johan Fredrik Eckersberg’s painting school and the Royal School of Drawing and Art in Christiania (now Oslo), Skredsvig studied in Copenhagen (1870–74), first as a pupil of Vilhelm Kyhn and later at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Besides landscapes, his main interest was animal painting. In 1874–5 he studied in Paris, in museums and with Léon Bonnat. From 1875 to 1879 he worked in Munich, where among others he was influenced by Arnold Böcklin. Skredsvig painted landscapes based on sketches made in Norway but using German models, as in Evening in the Mountains (1878, priv. col.; replica, 1882, Bergen, Billedgal.), a typical studio work in its smooth finish and use of local colour.
Returning to Paris in 1879 Skredsvig again studied briefly under Bonnat and others. Works from this period such as Unloading Snow by the Seine (...
Slovene, 20th century, male.
Born 1883, in Ljubljana.
Painter, print artist, graphic artist, illustrator, art writer. Religious subjects, portraits, landscapes.
Hinko Smerekar studied in Vienna and Munich. He illustrated popular fiction and designed cartoons.
(b Spetsai, Sept 20, 1888; d Athens, Jan 25, 1963).
Greek archaeologist and art historian. Although he originally studied theology, Soteriou devoted his life to Early Christian and Byzantine archaeology, which he studied at the universities of Leipzig, Berlin and Vienna from 1909. He was appointed Inspector General of Byzantine Antiquities at Athens in 1915 and Director of the Byzantine Museum at Athens in 1923. Under his leadership the museum grew into an international centre of Byzantine architectural and archaeological studies.
From 1928 to 1951 he was Professor of Christian archaeology and palaeography at the National Capodistrian University of Athens. He was elected to membership of the Athens Academy in 1926 and held its presidency in 1941; he was also a member of many learned societies both in Greece and abroad. In 1957 he was presented with the prestigious Grand Prix G. Schlumberger for Byzantine studies by the Académie Française.
Soteriou brought to light many previously little- or unknown monuments, as in his excavations (...
Belgian, 20th century, male.
Born 5 July 1886, in Lier (Antwerp); died 1947.
Painter, illustrator, poet. Religious subjects, figures, market scenes, landscapes.
Felix Timmermans illustrated his own books in the style of Bruegel the Elder.
Antwerp, 23 Oct 1973: Christ Before Pontius Pilate (gouache...
