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Article

Alberdingk Thijm, Josephus Albertus  

(b Amsterdam, Aug 13, 1820; d Amsterdam, March 17, 1889).

Dutch writer, critic and collector. He was raised in a cultivated and artistic merchant family but preferred writing to commerce. In addition to serving as an editor of the Volksalmanak voor Nederlandsche Katholieken, he published the Dietsche Warande. His lifelong advocacy of Roman Catholic emancipation is reflected in many of his short stories (written under the pseudonym Pauwels Foreestier) concerning Catholic life in 17th-century Holland. In 1876 he was appointed professor of aesthetics and the history of art at the Rijksacademie voor Beeldenden Kunsten, Amsterdam. An architectural preservationist and an important critic of the art and architecture of his time, he asserted that art should serve a religious function, as it had during the Middle Ages. It should be social, idealistic and transcendental. In his ideal society the arts would form a harmonious unit under the heading of architecture. His brother-in-law P. J. H. Cuypers was the leading Dutch architect of the day, whose career was assisted by Alberdingk Thijm’s advocacy of Gothic Revivalism in architecture. Alberdingk Thijm was particularly opposed to the painters of the Barbizon and Hague schools, whose work he considered to have no underlying purpose. Rather, he preferred the Düsseldorf school, which displayed a knowledge of history and literature. His large collections reflected his philosophical orientation. His numerous 17th and 18th-century Dutch paintings, mostly by minor masters, represented all the genres. He also owned a large collection of drawings and prints, as well as books, manuscripts and religious art from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, which included a Gothic ciborium, a Byzantine crucifix and embroideries on silk, which were dispersed at auction after his death (Amsterdam, Muller, ...

Article

Baillet de Saint-Julien, Louis-Guillaume, Baron  

E. D. Lilley

(fl 1748–73).

French critic and poet . He was one of the earliest Salon critics, publishing between 1748 and 1757 his commentaries on the exhibitions of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture—often anonymously, because of harsh censorship. An abiding principle in his sometimes contradictory stance is that artists should base their work on nature rather than slavishly following Classical antiquity or the Old Masters: in this he sided with his immediate precursor, the Abbé Jean-Bernard Le Blanc, against the founder of French art criticism, Etienne La Font de Saint-Yenne. He believed that critics should develop an understanding of artists’ techniques and problems, here anticipating Denis Diderot and parting company with Le Blanc. He devoted as much attention to developing a critical methodology, often by attacking fellow critics, as to analysing works of art on exhibition; in this he was typical of his time. He particularly admired Jean-Siméon Chardin, Maurice-Quentin de Latour, Claude-Joseph Vernet and Jean-Baptiste Oudry, none of them an exponent of history painting, the genre that stood highest in the traditional academic hierarchy. He became increasingly ready to criticize adversely, but his comments on individual works tend to be banal, whether he is praising or blaming. He praised the efforts of the Direction des Bâtiments du Roi (the French government’s arts administration) to promote the visual arts through regular exhibitions and generous commissions, and he exhorted wealthy individuals similarly to provide worthwhile work for artists....

Article

Beshkov, Il’ya  

Mariana Katzarova

(b Dolni Dŭbnik, nr Pleven, July 24, 1901; d Sofia, Jan 23, 1958).

Bulgarian cartoonist, illustrator, draughtsman, painter, teacher, editor and critic. In 1926 he studied painting at the Academy of Art, Sofia, and although he was later known for his paintings, he achieved greater fame as a political and social cartoonist and newspaper and magazine illustrator. His early cartoons are courageous commentaries on political events in Bulgaria from 1925 to 1934, wittily satirizing the monarchy and dictatorships. He also mocked the machinations of the various bourgeois political parties as they fought for power. Among his most celebrated cartoons are the Kidnapping of the Constitution and the Tsar’s Family, published in the Sofia newspapers Zemedelsko Zname and Sturetz, as well as Suvremennik and other left-wing publications. He also illustrated the series Spanish Chronicle (1936). In 1940 he began freelancing for the anti-Fascist satirical newspaper Sturshel (Sofia) and in 1941 became its editor. During World War II he executed many political cartoons opposing Fascism and Nazism (e.g. ...

Article

Brooker, Bertram  

Joyce Zemans

(Richard)

(b Croydon, London, March 31, 1888; d Toronto, March 21, 1955).

Canadian painter, critic and writer of English birth. He emigrated in 1905 to Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. In 1921 he moved to Toronto to work as an editor and publisher. He is best known as a pioneer of abstract painting in Canada. His show (1927) at Toronto’s Arts & Letters Club was the first solo exhibition of abstract art by a Canadian artist. His early work is characterized by the bold non-objective imagery seen in the complex Sounds Assembling (1928; Winnipeg, A.G.). After 1930 he reassessed his artistic direction: he turned first to figurative imagery (e.g. Torso, 1937; Ottawa, N.G.) and then looking to Cubism he re-examined the nature of abstraction in his painting, without returning to the non-objectivity of his earlier work. Between 1926 and 1930 Brooker wrote ‘The Seven Arts’, a syndicated column of art criticism for the Southam Press. In addition, he edited The Yearbook of the Arts in Canada...

Article

Browne, Alexander  

David Rodgers

(fl 1660–83)

English miniature painter, writer, printmaker and print publisher. In 1665 he taught limning to Elizabeth Pepys, wife of Samuel Pepys, probably on the recommendation of Pepys’s superior, Sir William Penn, whose daughter he had previously taught. Pepys, finding Browne over-familiar, terminated the acquaintance the following year. In 1669 Browne published Ars Pictoria, or an Academy Treating of Drawing, Painting, Limning and Etching, with 31 plates etched by himself after Old Master painters. It was published with Browne’s portrait by Jacob Huysmans, engraved by Arnold de Jode (b 1638; fl 1658–66), as its frontispiece. Six years later Browne added An Appendix to the Art of Painting in Miniture [sic] or Limning, etc and in 1677 published A Commodious Drawing Book with 40 plates after modern masters. In 1683, according to Horace Walpole, Browne obtained a 14-year patent to publish 100 mezzotint prints from works by Anthony van Dyck and ...

Article

Bukharin, Nikolay  

Sergey Kuznetsov

(Ivanovich)

(b Moscow, Oct 9, 1888; d Moscow, March 15, 1938).

Russian politician and theorist. He was editor of the Communist Party newspaper Pravda from the 1917 Revolution and took over as the main theoretician of the Comintern (Communist International) after Lenin’s death in 1924. He was interested in art as both a political means and as an amateur artist (an exhibition of his paintings was held in the Tret’yakov Gallery, Moscow, in 1935–6). Before the 1920s he subscribed to Aleksandr Bogdanov’s ideas concerning proletarian art, which he viewed as a cultural form arising during the transition from Capitalism to Communism. However, he disagreed with the Proletkul’t’s desire for independence from the Party, and in Proletarian Revolution and Culture (1923) he abandoned his earlier, more radical ideas and posited the creation of the proletariat as new agents of culture—living machines with a Communist ideology, by whom artists and writers belonging to the old bourgeois social order would be ousted. Bukharin is recognized as the author of the Central Committee decree on the Party policy on literature in ...

Article

Camera Work  

Judith Zilczer

Journal devoted to photography that was published from 1903 to 1917. Camera Work evolved from a quarterly journal of photography to become one of the most ground-breaking and influential periodicals in American cultural history. Founded in January 1903 by photographer Alfred Stieglitz as the official publication of the Photo-Secession, the journal originally promoted the cause of photography as a fine art. As Stieglitz, its editor and publisher, expanded the journal’s scope to include essays on aesthetics, literature, criticism and modern art, Camera Work fueled intellectual discourse in early 20th-century America.

Camera Work mirrored the aesthetic philosophy of its founder Alfred Stieglitz. The journal resulted from his decade-long campaign to broaden and professionalize American photography. Serving for three years as editor of American Amateur Photographer (1893–6), Stieglitz championed the expressive potential of photography and advocated expanded exhibition opportunities comparable to those available in European photographic salons. In 1897, when the Society of Amateur Photographers merged with the New York Camera Club, Stieglitz convinced the enlarged organization to replace their modest leaflet with a more substantial quarterly journal, Camera Notes, which he edited until ...

Article

Campbell, Colen  

T. P. Connor

(b 1676; d London, ?Sept 13, 1729).

Scottish architect and writer. He was the key propagandist for the Palladian revival in early 18th-century England (see Palladianism). First as an architectural publisher and then as an architect, he did as much as any contemporary to determine the lines of development of secular architecture for a generation.

Campbell was a nephew of Sir Hugh Campbell of Cawdor, Nairnshire, and his first career was as an advocate in Edinburgh, where he began to establish a reputation at the outset of the 18th century. Between c. 1708 and 1712 Campbell abandoned his legal practice to begin a career as an architect in London. By December 1708 he was in London hoping to become Master of the [Royal] Works in Scotland. This post, then unpaid, was currently held by James Smith, an architect by whom Campbell was to be significantly influenced. It is known that Campbell had been abroad before ...

Article

Cesariano [Ciserano], Cesare  

Francesco Paolo Fiore

(b 1476–8; d Milan, 1543).

Italian architect, theorist and painter. He was active mainly in Milan and is famous for publishing the first Italian translation, with commentary and illustrations, of Vitruvius (1521). The brief autobiography that this contains is also the principal source of information regarding Cesariano’s own life, education and aims.

Cesariano’s date of birth has been disputed, but it is now thought to be 1476–8, following the documentation from the time of his father’s death in 1482. In 1482 Cesariano was introduced to the court of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, where he came into contact with courtiers and artists and met Bramante, whom he named as his chief teacher. He doubtless observed the preparatory phases and building of S Maria presso S Satiro, the only work by Bramante in Milan to which he refers specifically in his commentary on Vitruvius. He could not have followed Bramante’s subsequent career, for he was forced to leave his home town ...

Article

Daret, Pierre  

(b Paris, c. 1604; d Laluque, Landes, March 29, 1678).

French painter, engraver and print publisher. Although it was as a painter that he was received (reçu) in 1663 by the Académie Royale, it is as an engraver that he is now remembered. His earliest known print is dated 1630, and he later made many plates, particularly reproductive engravings after his contemporaries Jacques Blanchard and Claude Vignon. He was one of Simon Vouet’s best interpreters, and Vouet himself commissioned from him at least 11 plates after his own paintings. Daret’s most important projects were the engraving of plates for and the publication of M. de Gomberville’s La Doctrine des moeurs (Paris, 1646) and the monumental collection of over 100 portraits in the Tableaux historiques où sont gravez les illustres français et estrangiers (Paris, 1652). His translation of Vasari’s life of Raphael, Abrégé de la vie de Raphael Sansio d’Urbin (Paris, 1651), is celebrated as the first monograph on an artist published in France....

Article

De arte illuminandi  

A. Wallert

Medieval treatise and the most important source on the techniques of manuscript illumination (see Manual, manuscript). The manuscript (Naples, Bib. N., MS. XII.E.27) has no title or signature and was entitled De arte illuminandi by its first editor, Demetrio Salazaro. Containing recipes for the making, preparation and mixing of pigments and colorants, it is a simple and well-organized manual, clearly composed for teaching the illuminator’s craft. It describes consecutively the colours, gold, the temperas and various applications. Unlike most other medieval technical sources, De arte illuminandi is not a compilation of earlier treatises. The manuscript was probably written in southern Italy and dates from the end of the 14th century. No other copies of this text are known.

D. Salazaro: L’arte de la miniatura nel secolo XIV (Naples, 1877)A. Lecoy de la Marche: L’Art d’enluminer (Paris, 1890)D. V. Thompson and G. H. Hamilton: An Anonymous Fourteenth-century Treatise, ‘De arte illuminandi’: The Technique of Manuscript Illumination...

Article

De Zayas, Marius  

Henry Adams

(b Veracruz, Mar 13, 1880; d Stamford, CT, Jan 10, 1961).

Mexican illustrator, writer, gallery owner, and publisher, active in the USA. He was the son of a wealthy Mexican lawyer and publisher. De Zayas started his career as an artist by providing drawings for his father’s newspaper in Veracruz. In 1906 he moved on to Mexico City’s leading newspaper, El Diario, but a year later, after the ascension of the dictator Porfirio Diaz, whom the newspaper had opposed, he fled to the USA. There he landed a position making caricatures for the New York Evening World. Shortly after his arrival in the USA, he came into contact with Alfred Stieglitz, who staged solo shows of De Zayas’s caricatures at his gallery Gallery 291 in 1909 and 1910, both of which proved to be huge popular successes.

In 1910 De Zayas traveled to Paris, where he stayed almost a year, scouting out adventurous forms of modern art for Stieglitz, notably the cubist work of Picasso and African sculpture. On his return, equipped with knowledge of European modern art and inspired by the work of the French modernist ...

Article

Gantner, Joseph  

Hanspeter Landolt

(b Baden, Switzerland, Sept 11, 1896; d Basle, April 7, 1988).

Swiss art historian, teacher and editor. In 1920 he received his doctorate under Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich, and in 1921–2 he travelled with Wölfflin in Italy. Gantner was editor of the periodical Werk (1923–7), and he lectured at the university of Zurich (1926–8). He also edited Neue Frankfurt (1927–32) and lectured at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Frankfurt am Main. Until 1932 he was engaged in writing about modern architecture, architectural theory and urban development, having established his hallmark of systematic analysis of art historical material and an emphasis on philosophical considerations. He again lectured at the university of Zurich (1933–8) and began to concentrate his research on medieval art history. From 1938 to 1967 he was Chairman of the Department of Art History at the university of Basel and, from 1954, its Director. After 1950 the question of artistic fantasy and its means of expression became his major concern: his theory of the ...

Article

Goldscheider, Ludwig  

Valerie Holman

(b Vienna, June 3, 1896; d London, June 27, 1973).

British writer and publisher of Austrian birth. He studied literature, Classics and art history at the University of Vienna. He began his career as a poet, and in 1923 he joined his schoolfriend Bela Horovitz in founding in Vienna the publishing house Phaidon Verlag, where he played a major role not only in publishing but also in editing and translating the literary texts that were the firm’s original specialization. Goldscheider was also responsible for the distinctive design of text pages, the selection of typefaces and of black-and-white photographs and the choice of colour plates, whose reproduction he supervised personally. His association with Phaidon lasted 50 years, and he played a leading role in the development of the illustrated art book.

In the early 1930s Phaidon produced large editions of the works of the great European scholars and historiographers, with illustrations chosen by Goldscheider; among these were new editions of Theodor Mommsen’s ...

Article

Gourmont, Remy de  

(b Bazoches-en-Houlme, Orne, April 4, 1858; d Paris, Sept 27, 1915).

French writer and draughtsman. He came from a family that had, in the 15th and 16th centuries, produced many notable painters, engravers and publishers, including Jean de Gourmont the elder and the younger. Though he had from an early age wanted to become a writer, he entered the university at Caen in 1876 to study law. He graduated in 1879 and in 1881 started working at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where he published many articles, populist books and a novel, Merlette (Paris, 1886). At the Bibliothèque Nationale he met the writer Villiers de l’Isle Adam, who became a close friend and introduced him to Joris-Karl Huysman in 1889. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé was another of his associates at this time. In 1890 he was one of the co-founders of the journal Mercure de France together with Albert Aurier, Jules Renard (1864–1910) and others. He was a regular contributor and his article ‘Le Joujou patriotisme’ (...

Article

Guilmard, Désiré  

Sarah Medlam

(fl 1839; d Paris, c. 1889).

French publisher and furniture designer. He was an important disseminator of historical and contemporary designs in 19th-century France. After 1839 he published a constant stream of lithograph designs for furniture, both his own designs and illustrations of the products of commercial firms, which provide an important source for the study of furniture of the period. His chief work was the journal Le Garde-meuble ancien et moderne, which he edited from 1844 to 1882. After 1846 he also published a supplement, L’Ameublement et l’utilité, which soon merged with the parent publication: lithographic designs of seat furniture, case furniture and hangings were reproduced, aimed at both tradesmen and clients. The plates also include general views of interiors and plans of furniture layouts, which give a comprehensive view of the development of styles. Guilmard produced albums recording the furniture shown at the Expositions Universelles of 1844, 1849 and 1855 in Paris and a long series of albums showing designs for particular types of furniture, woodwork fittings or upholstery. He was an important figure in the developing study of historical ornament and design: as early as ...

Article

Hastings, Hubert de Cronin  

J. M. Richards

(b London, July 18, 1902; d Bedham, Surrey, Oct 20, 1986).

English architectural editor, publisher and writer. He studied architecture at the Bartlett School, University of London, and art at the Slade School, London, and in 1926 he joined the Architectural Press, of which his father was proprietor. In 1927–32 and 1935–7 he was editor of the Architectural Review, transforming it from a staid, academic magazine to one notable for its adventurous policies and original use of photographs and typography, which strongly influenced English magazine production. He was also editor of the Architects’ Journal (1932–7) and a founder-member of the English modern architecture MARS Group (1933). In 1937 he left London for Sussex, where he farmed, but he remained chairman of the Architectural Press until his retirement in 1973 and retained a dominating influence over the conduct and policies of the company’s publications. His special interests were planning and land use, about which he promoted influential features in the ...

Article

Hegemann, Werner  

Günther Kühne

(Manfred Maria Ellis)

(b Mannheim, June 15, 1881; d New York, Apr 12, 1936).

German urban planner, writer and editor. He studied urban planning, art history and economics in Berlin, Munich, Paris and Strasbourg, and at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. He took a doctorate in political science at Munich in 1908. His travels made him aware from an early date of the importance of social issues in urban planning. He organized planning exhibitions in Boston (1909), Berlin (1910) and elsewhere, and he published his conclusions in an influential two-volume work, Der Städtebau (1911–13), which led directly to the formation of Berlin’s municipal structure, the Zweckverband Gross-Berlin, in 1912; in 1920 this became the Einheitsgemeinde Gross-Berlin, an organization that survived until the division of the city in 1948. From 1913 to the end of World War I, Hegemann was in the USA, working both as a teacher and as a planner. Back in Germany, from 1924 to 1933...

Article

Hess, Thomas B.  

David M. Sokol

(b Rye, NY, July 14, 1920; d New York, July 13, 1978).

American writer and art critic. After graduating from Yale University, New Haven, CT, and starting a career as a writer, he worked as an associate editor of ARTnews (1946–50). He also acted as a managing editor from 1950 to 1965 and as an executive editor from 1965 to 1972. From 1972 until his death he was art critic of the newly founded New York Magazine, also writing freelance for other magazines and journals, including Saturday Review, Encounter, New York Times and Museum Journal.

Hess served as a major critic and tastemaker, with particular interest in and impact on the acceptance of Abstract Expressionism; he wrote books and catalogues for MOMA, New York. He was a major supporter of Willem de Kooning, the subject of his first monograph and of a major exhibition organized by Hess at MOMA in 1968. Hess was also active in several arts organizations and was president of the Longview Foundation in Longview, Texas....

Article

International Center of Medieval Art  

Nancy Wu

Scholarly organization in New York dedicated to the promotion and study of medieval art. In 1956 the International Center of Romanesque Art (ICRA) was founded in New York as the US committee of the Centre international d’Etudes romanes (CIER). Renamed in 1966 as the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA), it has been headquartered at The Cloisters in New York City since 1969. From its early focus on French Romanesque art, ICMA has evolved into an important scholarly association advocating and promoting the study of European art, including the Mediterranean and Slavic regions, from c. ad 300 to c. 1500.

ICMA publishes Gesta, a biannual and the only journal in English dedicated to medieval art; a newsletter (three times a year), a series of censuses of medieval sculpture in American public collections and other monographs on medieval titles. Since 1998 ICMA has maintained an active website offering digital resources (e.g. International Census of Doctoral Dissertations in Medieval Art, ...