Source: https://arthistory-test.uchicago.edu/about/history/faculty
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 09:14:54+00:00

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The faculty who founded and developed the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago have also had a profound impact on the field of Art History at large. Here are some of the luminaries who have shaped the Department, presented in texts researched and written by former and current PhD students.
Emerson Howland Swift served on the faculty of the University’s newly created Department of Art between 1922 and 1926. Trained as a classical archaeologist (BA in Classics, Williams College in 1912, PhD in Classical Archaeology, Princeton University in 1921), Swift began to pursue an interest in art history during the years he spent conducting field work in Greece (1912-1915); after a 1913 trip to Istanbul, Swift's writings increasingly focused on Byzantine art.
Swift's impact on the field of Byzantine art remains significant. He was among the major proponents of the theory that Early Christian thought and art were fundamentally derived from Roman predecessors and that the formal characteristics that defined Byzantine art originated in formal and stylistic tropes intrinsic to Italy. Swift’s theory about formal and stylistic origins of Early Christian art stood in opposition to the views of a number of other prominent Byzantinists of the early 20th century, most notably the work of Josef Strzygowski and Charles Rufus Morey, who asserted that the sources of Late Antique Christian works could be traced to western Asian precedents.
In 1924, Swift, previously a member of the faculty of the University of Michigan, was hired by Walter Sargent as Assistant Professor of the History of Art at the University of Chicago, and he taught courses focusing on Renaissance architecture and sculpture during his time at the University. Due to his disagreement with Walter Sargent’s teaching-oriented departmental policies, Swift left the University in 1926. Swift was appointed Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Columbia University, where he taught from 1926 until his retirement in 1957.
Roman Sources for Christian Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1951.
Hagia Sophia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940.
“A Group of Roman Imperial Portraits at Corinth.” American Journal of Archaeology 25, 1921.
Frank Bigelow Tarbell earned a bachelors degree from Yale University in 1873 and a PhD from the same institution in 1879, both in Classics. He remained at Yale as an assistant professor in Greek until 1887. Between 1889 and 1893 he spent time teaching at Harvard College and at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens as both director and secretary. He joined the University of Chicago in 1893 as assistant professor of Greek, and then as professor of Classical Archaeology.
Tarbell offered some of the University’s first courses in art, including “Introduction to Classical Archaeology”, “Greek Mythology in Art”, and “Greek Life from the Monuments.” He also taught courses in Greek and Logic. Although he was by training a classicist, Tarbell became the first chair of the Department of Art History when it was formed in 1902 by renaming the Department of Archaeology. At that time, the Art History faculty consisted only of himself and one other instructor. He was the first to urge that the University put aside funds to form its own collection of reproductions and original works of art for study, though this did not occur during his lifetime.
Tarbell retired from the University of Chicago in 1918, and passed away in 1920.
De Cou, Herbert Fletcher, and Frank Bigelow Tarbell. Antiquities from Boscoreale in Field Museum of Natural History. Anthropological Series ; v. 7, No. 4. Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1912.
Tarbell, Frank Bigelow, ed. The Philippics of Demosthenes; Boston: Gin & Company, 1890.
Tarbell, Frank Bigelow. The Direction of Writing on Attic Vases. Vol. 1, no. 3. Chicago. University. Studies in Classical Philology ; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1895.
Tarbell, Frank Bigelow. A History of Greek Art, with an Introductory Chapter on Art in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Macmillan’s Standard Library. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1896.
James Henry Breasted joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Department of Semitic Languages and Literatures in 1894. He became a full Professor of Egyptology and Oriental History in 1905 and had appointments in the Divinity School, the Department of Archaeology, the later Department of the History of Art, the Department of General Literature, and the Department of History before being promoted to Chair of the Department of Semitic Languages and Literatures in 1915. Breasted studied with the founding president of the University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper, at Yale University before completing his studies at the University of Berlin in 1894, becoming the first American to receive a PhD in Egyptology. Breasted’s wide scholarship and important archeological excavations captured the popular imagination and transformed the study of ancient Near-Eastern civilizations with his concept of the “fertile crescent” that spanned from ancient Egypt to Phoenicia, Assyria, and Mesopotamia. Among his many scholarly, introductory, and reference texts, Breasted published a comprehensive five-volume Ancient Records of Egypt (1906), which translated into English the most important known Egyptian historical texts. His 1905-06 and 1906-07 photographic and epigraphic surveys of Egypt recorded many tombs and temples along the Nile that helped lay the groundwork for our understanding of ancient Egyptian civilization. Breasted’s Oriental Forerunners of Byzantine Painting: First-Century Wall Paintings from the Fortress of Dura on the Middle Euphrates (1924), the first book published on the frescoes of Dura Europos, opened a major field of study by positing the site as a key link between the art of the East and West. Breasted’s later book Dawn of Conscience (1933) that linked the origins of Hebrew thought to ancient Egypt was also an important influence for Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1938). After becoming the director of the University of Chicago’s Haskell Oriental Museum in 1894, Breasted secured funding from John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1919 to found the Oriental Institute in its permanent headquarters at the University of Chicago. Today, the Institute remains a leading center of ancient Near Eastern Studies with a vast collection of rare artifacts, photographs, excavation records, and publications that build on the foundations set by Breasted’s research, teaching, and stewardship.
James Henry Breasted, A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905).
Ancient Records of Egypt: Historical Documents from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest, collected, edited, and translated, with Commentary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1906–07).
A History of the Ancient Egyptians (New York Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908).
Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt: Lectures delivered on the Morse Foundation at Union Theological Seminary (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912).
Ancient Times — A History of the Early World (Boston: The Athenæum Press, 1916).
Survey of the Ancient World. Boston: The Athenæum Press. 1919.
Oriental Forerunners of Byzantine Painting: First-Century Wall Paintings from the Fortress of Dura on the Middle Euphrates (Chicago: University of Chicago Oriental Institute Publications, 1924).
The Dawn of Conscience (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933).
Edward Francis Rothschild joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Department of Art as an instructor in 1925 upon receiving his MA from Columbia University and became an Assistant Professor of the History of Art in 1929. A member of the University Board of Museums in 1928, Rothschild was named acting Chair of the Department of Art in 1931. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1934. Rothschild, whose research specialized in Gothic art and modern painting, gave numerous public lectures on the history of ancient through modern art, expressionism, and abstraction at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the College Art Association. As part of a series of books published for the Renaissance Society, Studies of Meaning in Art, Rothschild’s foundational book The Meaning of Unintelligibility in Modern Art (1934) introduced a broad public to key approaches to understanding contemporary currents in modern art through the lenses of individualism, revolution, and dematerialization. The series, edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and playwright Thornton Wilder, became widely known for its clarity and breadth that introduced a variety of readers to essential tools for the understanding and appreciation of modern art. The other two books in the series included Plastic Redirections in Twentieth-Century Painting (1934) by James Johnson Sweeney, who became the first director of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1953 and Seurat and the Evolution of La Grande Jatte (1935) by Daniel Catton Rich, a University of Chicago alumnus who became the director of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1938. Rothschild’s untimely death in 1937 at the age of 33 tragically cut short his burgeoning career.
John Shapley (BA University of Missouri 1912, MA Princeton University 1913, PhD University of Vienna 1914) was appointed to a position as Professor and Chair of the Department of Art at the University of Chicago in 1929. Diverging from his predecessor Walter Sargent’s focus on the integration of practice with historical and theoretical approaches to art, Shapley sought to make the University a stronghold for historical scholarship.
From 1923 - 1938, Shapley served as the fourth President of the College Art Association, an organization he played an instrumental role in founding; he was also the editor of Parnassus and The Art Bulletin at the time of his appointment to the University's Department of Art and, notably, helped to support the production of The Art Bulletin during the Great Depression through his own financial contributions. Within his own field of expertise, Shapley served as a founding member and eventual president of the Byzantine Institute.
Shapley worked throughout his career to make the study of art history accessible to a broader audience, collaborating with the Carnegie Corporation in the 1920s to select some 2,000 images and 200 books that would serve as the foundation for the Corporation’s effort to provide the materials necessary for art historical research to high schools and colleges in the United States. The Carnegie “sets,” as these collections of images and texts are known, helped to integrate the modern discipline of art history into secondary school curricula throughout the United States. His wife, the curator Fern Rusk Shapley worked with Bernard Berenson to prepare Berenson's Drawings of the Florentine Painter; Shapley arranged for an affordable new printing of the work, making the massive three volume set widely available to art students for the first time.
“The Analysis of Beauty,” The Bulletin of the College Art Association of America 1, 1918.
“Another Sidamara Sarcophagus.” The Art Bulletin 5, 1923.
“A Lost Cartoon for Leonardo’s Madonna with St. Anne.’ The Art Bulletin 7, 1925.
with Fern Rusk Shapley. Comparisons in Art: A Companion to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. New York: Doubleday, 1959.
Sargent joined the University’s School of Education as professor of drawing and education in 1909. The second president of the College Art Association, from 1914–1915, he was an influential proponent of a nationwide movement that sought to reform artistic education in the United States. A theorist, pedagogue, and landscape painter, he promoted instruction in art and aesthetic appreciation as an integral part of children’s intellectual development. For Sargent, art was the counterpart to rational scientific thinking and of comparable importance. The program and ideals of education he devised were based in equal measure on psychology, aesthetics, and the history of art, as well as on an emphasis on drawing, creative expression, and cultivation of taste. Sargent’s commitment to contemporary society lead him to a particular concern with modern art. In 1924, fifteen years after his initial appointment at the University, he became professor and the first chair of the newly created Department of Art. In the next three years before his death he implemented his educational programs, transforming the department’s traditional academic orientation into a center of the study and practice of art and a home to artists, designers, art instructors, and art historians alike. Sargent’s ideal of the integration of theory and practice, high and low art, the history of art and contemporary artistic expression shaped the Department of Art for the next half-century. He is the author of several influential textbooks and studies, most significant of which are The enjoyment and use of color (1923) and How children learn to draw (1916). Instruction in art in the United States (19198) lays out programmatic guidelines for the education of children and university students, published by the Bureau of Education of the Department of the Interior.
Sargent, Walter. Modelling in Public Schools. Boston: J. L. Hammett Company, 1909.
Sargent, Walter. Fine and Industrial Arts in Elementary Schools. Boston: Ginn and company, 1912.
Sargent, Walter, and Elizabeth Miller Lobingier. How Children Learn to Draw. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1916.
Sargent, Walter. Instruction in Art in the United States. Vol. 1918, no. 43. Bulletin / Dept. of the Interior, Bureau of Education ; Washington: G.P.O., 1919.
Sargent, Walter. The Enjoyment and Use of Color. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1923.
George Haydn Huntley became an Assistant Professor of Art History and Departmental Counselor at the University of Chicago in 1938. He arrived at the University of Chicago from the University of Washington, Saint Louis, where he accepted his first position in 1932 before completing his PhD at Harvard University in 1933. He later served as an Associate Professor and Professor of Art at Northwestern University from 1946 until his retirement in 1973. Huntley’s research addressed the Italian Renaissance and traced stylistic developments from the eighteenth- to nineteenth-centuries. In 1946, his College Art Journal article “In Defense of Ornament” sparked a lively scholarly debate on shifting attitudes towards decoration in historical and modern design. His other important works include a book-length monographic study of the Italian renaissance sculpture, Andrea Sansovino, Sculptor and Architect of the Italian Renaissance (1935). In 1942, Huntley became the editor of the College Art Journal. During his two years as editor, he tailored the content of the journal to address the interests of teaching art at the university level with topics such as introductory art history surveys, the use of color film, and museum education along with articles on modern art and aesthetics. Active in the profession throughout his career, Huntley served as on the Board of Directors of the College Art Association from 1945-1946 before becoming Vice-President from 1947-49. He headed the Newberry Library Conference in 1955 and served as President of the Midwest College Art Conference.
George Haydn Huntley, Andrea Sansovino, Sculptor and Architect of the Italian Renaissance (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1971).
Joining the Department of Art in 1935, Ludwig Bachhofer was one of the first refugees from Nazi Germany to secure faculty appointments at the University of Chicago. Bachhofer belonged to the early generation of art historians in the West who dedicated their entire careers to the study of Asian art. He wrote widely on topics such as Japanese woodblock prints, Indian sculpture, Buddhist art, and Chinese bronzes. Many of Bachhofer’s publications were in German, but his A Short History of Chinese Art (1946) was written in English and became an important introductory text for many students of Chinese art.
The only student of Heinrich Wölfflin at the University of Munich whose doctoral work was concentrated solely on Asian art, Bachhofer’s formalist training made him particularly devoted to the history of stylistic development in Asian art. Following his mentor, he was interested in a dualistic approach of comparative analysis between the art of Europe and that of East Asia, beyond their cultural and historical differences. Bachhofer was perhaps one of the first art historians to employ Wöfflin’s principles for contrasting the formal qualities of Renaissance and Baroque art to that of Asian art, and he was also particularly interested in exploring Erwin Panofsky’s study of perspective in his own analysis of the development of pictorial space in Chinese painting.
Although he never studied East Asian languages nor had the opportunity to travel to the East, his devotion to the study of the stylistic development in Asian art enlightened a generation of eminent historians in the field. Bachhofer’s students include Max Loehr, former professor of Asian art at Harvard University, who had studied with him in Munich, and Harrie Vanderstappen, who studied with Bachhofer at the University of Chicago and later succeeded him there.
“Die Raumdarstellung in der Chinesischen Marlerei des ersten Jahrtausends n.Chr.,” Müncher Jahrbuch der Bildenen Kunst 8 (1931): 193-242.
Ulrich A. Middeldorf was a German scholar of Renaissance art and history who emigrated to the United States in 1935. His scholarship spans the late medieval period to the Renaissance with a focus on 15th century Italian sculpture. While many of his contemporaries were focusing on monographic projects, Middeldorf spent his career publishing articles and catalogues on a great variety of objects, including stucco reliefs and paintings by unknown artists. His object-centered methodology emphasized artwork over artist. As a student in Berlin, he worked with the famed art historian Heinrich Wölfflin [1864-1945]. Middeldorf was hired at the University of Chicago in 1935 during an effort to recruit strong humanities scholars. John Shapley, the art history department’s Chair at the time, hired Middeldorf initially on a one year contract, but he quickly recognized the junior scholar’s talent and secured the funds to retain him as a tenured professor. Middeldorf later took over Shapley’s position as Department Chair and remained at the University of Chicago until 1953. He left to accept a directorship at the Kunshistorisches Institut in Florence, where he remained until the end of his career. Middeldorf’s Chicago years marked an exciting moment in the University’s history, particularly for the art history department, which included at the time such notable scholars as Edgar Wind and Otto von Simson. In Chicago, Middeldorf also worked actively to establish connections between the University and the city at large. He was named honorary curator at the Art Institute of Chicago and helped develop plans for the museum and the university to build a joint Center for Art Studies on Michigan Avenue. This project was never realized. In the 1940’s, Middeldorf also held a position on the board of directors at the South Side Community Art Center, a historic Bronzeville institution dedicated to the education and advancement of African American artists based in Chicago. Middeldorf died at the age of 81 in Florence.
Chicago (1907-1951) Vol. 38, No. 1 (1944): 6-10.
Middeldorf, Ulrich. Raphael’s Drawings (New York: H. Bittner & Co., 1945).
Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, Vol. 23, No. 3 (1979): 297–312.
Middeldorf, Ulrich. “Filarete?” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, Vol.17, No.1 (1973): 75–86.
The famed symbologist Edgar Wind has the distinction of being Erwin Panofsky’s first dissertator; his dissertation, written on art historical methodology, was closely supervised by Ernst Cassirer as well. Wind also took classes with the Vienna School’s Max Dvorak, Julius Von Schlosser, and Josef Strzygowski. He additionally had a great interest in philosophy and studied the discipline under the likes of Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl. In 1924, fleeing the post-War economic depression plaguing Europe, Berlin-born Edgar Wind traveled to the United States and was granted the Graham Kenan Fellowship to teach Philosophy at the University of North Carolina. Here, Wind was first exposed to the semiotic philosophy of Charles Sanders Pierce.
When Wind returned to Europe, he became a research assistant at the Warburg Library, which was then in Hamburg. There, like many of his generation, Wind came under the spell of Aby Warburg, with whom he not only founded the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute in 1937, but also collaborated to transfer the library to London from Germany, where it had been more vulnerable to Nazi destruction.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, Wind fled Europe once again to the United States. He first held a teaching position at The Institute of Fine Arts in New York and then spent two years on the Committee for Social Thought at The University of Chicago. At Chicago he was responsible for a substantial memorandum that discussed how art history and aesthetics could and should be integrated into the department’s official program. Wind then moved to Smith College, where he taught for eleven years, before becoming Oxford’s first art history professor in 1955.
Wind’s first book, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance, was a Warburgian explanation of the symbolic and iconological nature of Renaissance art, which he maintained could only be understood through the Neo-Platonic philosophy of Marsilio Ficino. Wind proposed that Christian and pagan symbolism were intertwined in the Renaissance, and that in order to fully understand—and thus, for Wind, to enjoy—Renaissance art, one had to be conversant in both symbolic vocabularies. In this work, the influence of the Vienna School is evident in its Riegelian assertion that art expressed ideas located in all areas of human creation. Pagan Mysteries is especially noted for its much-esteemed interpretation of Botticelli’s cryptic painting, La Primavera, and Wind’s undisputed identification of the figures therein.
Wind’s BBC radio lecture series Art and Anarchy, published in a volume by the same name, asserted that over time viewers had become desensitized to the subversive and visceral effects of art. Although this alienation from the work allowed for more pure scholarly analysis, it also rendered the work impotent. As an intervention, Wind suggested that art had to be discovered by both man’s intellectual and emotional capacities. Perhaps because of this belief, Wind championed the merits of contemporary art, believing that its tendency to be sometimes ostentatious and shocking was a reaction to viewer apathy.
Wind, E. (1964). Art and anarchy. New York: Knopf.
Edmund Giesbert, a German-born painter and illustrator, taught in the Department of Art at the University of Chicago starting in 1927. Before arriving at the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute where he also taught classes, Giesbert was trained at the Vienna Academy and the Art Institute of Chicago. He became known for combining Impressionist and Expressionist styles in his boldly colored paintings, prints, and book illustrations. His work appeared in local and international annual exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago including The International Water Color Exhibition and The Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity in the 1920s and 1930s. On campus, he was featured in the 1939 exhibition Edmund Giesbert: Drawings and Paintings at the Renaissance Society where he also hosted gallery talks and free sketch classes for students. In addition to teaching, Giesbert actively participated in exhibitions and public lectures in Chicago and won the Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Prize awarded by the Committee on Painting and Sculpture of the Art Institute of Chicago for Uphill in 1929. His paintings can be found in Chicago collections, including a 1932 portrait of University of Chicago Anatomy Professor Robert R. Bensley commissioned by the University Board of Trustees. Giesbert’s book illustrations also appeared in widely used educational texts in the 1930s and 1940s such as Peter Hagboldt and F. W. Kaufmann’s Basic German Reader (1943) and Louis H. Limper’s adapted and edited edition of Alphonse Daudet’s 1868 memoir Le Petit Chose (1934).
“Robert R. Bensley,” The University Record XIII 3 (July 1932), 192-4.
Francis H. Dowley is a Professor Emeritus in the Art History Department at the University of Chicago. He received his BA from Princeton University in 1936, his MA in Philosophy, also from Princeton University (1941), and his PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago (1955). Dowley’s work focused on French Baroque art, and he was specifically interested in making visible understudied aspects of the Baroque period. Dowley spent his entire career at the University of Chicago and became a full professor in 1974.
Dowley was an active member in multiple international and American art history organizations, including the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, the College Art Association of America, and La Société de l’Histoire de l’Art français. Dowley published extensively on French art, but preferred to write articles and essays rather than books. Several of his well-known pieces include “Thoughts on Poussin, time, and narrative: The Israelites gathering manna in the desert” and “The Iconography of Poussin's Painting Representing Diana and Endymion.” His work was highly regarded for its creative, unique approach to French art that remained innovative throughout his career. Dowley passed away in 2003 in Chicago. At the time of his death he was a Professor Emeritus in the Art History Department. Dowley was known for his dedication to the University of Chicago and his students.
Dowley, Francis H. "The Iconography of Poussin's Painting Representing Diana and Endymion." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973): 305-18.
Dowley, Francis H. "Thoughts on Poussin, Time, and Narrative: The Israelites Gathering Manna in the Desert." Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 25, no. 4 (1997): 329-48.
Schonwald, John. “Historian of French Art Francis H. Dowley, 1915-2003.” The University of Chicago News Office. December 17, 2003. http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/03/031217.dowley.shtml.
Unknown. “Dowley, Francis (Hotham) ‘Frank.’” Dictionary of Art Historians. https://dictionaryofarthistorians.org/dowleyf.htm.
Medieval art historian Margaret Rickert served on the University of Chicago faculty between 1938-1954. Primarily known for her contributions to English manuscript studies and the study of English medieval art more broadly, she also worked as a code breaker during World War II and contributed to a long-running research project devoted to the life and work of the medieval poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, undertaken by her sister Edith Rickert (herself a member of the University's English Department).
Born in 1888 in LaGrange, Illinois, Margaret Rickert was one of two daughters to Francis E. Rickert and Josephine Newburgh (Rickert). She graduated from Grinell College (Iowa) in 1910 and initially pursued a career as a high school principal in Greene, Iowa until a trip to Europe in 1914 piqued Rickert’s interest in art history and prompted her to apply for a job in the photographic department of the Ryerson Library at the Art Institute of Chicago, which she began in 1922. During a subsequent trip to Europe, she assisted her sister, Edith Rickert, by researching medieval manuscripts containing texts of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Soon thereafter, Margaret Rickert made research a full-time pursuit when, in Italy, she assisted Mary Berenson, wife of the Renaissance scholar Bernard Berenson, in revising his Italian Painters of the Renaissance (eventually published in 1930). Berenson’s commitment to stylistic formal analysis seems to have had a strong influence on Rickert’s own writing.
Returning to the United States in 1928, Rickert first earned an MA in Art History at the University of Chicago (1933) and then a doctorate (1938); she was then immediately hired by the University. Upon the United States' entry into WWII, Margaret Rickert took a brief hiatus from academic work: relocating to Washington, D.C., she worked for the Army Signal Corps as a code breaker. She retired from the University of Chicago in 1953, but briefly returned to teaching between 1958-60. Following a massive flood in Florence in 1966, Rickert went to Italy to help restore damaged artworks. Sadly, she soon thereafter suffered a stroke and had to return to Grinell, where she died in 1973.
Rickert's doctoral thesis, which was eventually published as The Reconstructed Carmelite Missal: An English Manuscript of the Late XIV Century in the British Museum (1952) was a rigorous, yet highly experimental and daring reconstruction of a manuscript that was likely the first illuminated Carmelite missal produced in England, but which survived only as an overwhelming profusion of small fragments pasted into a scrapbook by a previous owner’s three children (the children has spelled out their names with the manuscript's illuminated initials). Rickert's meticulous, innovative reconstruction was a true feat of method and scholarly creativity, a major contribution not only to medieval art history, but also to manuscript studies more broadly. Rickert's other publications of note include La Miniature Anglaise and Painting in Britain: The Middle Ages, a volume in the Pelican History of Art series which earned Rickert the distinction at the time of being the first American and the only female to author a volume in the original series.
Rickert, Margaret. Papers, Boxes 1-8. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
------ A New Method of Analysis Applied to the Study of Manuscript Illumination. A.M., University of Chicago, 1933.
------ “The Reconstruction and Study of an English Carmelite Missal.” Chicago, 1938, published as The Reconstructed Carmelite Missal: an English Manuscript of the Late XIV Century in the British Museum (Additional 29704-5, 44892). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952.
------ “The Reconstruction of an English Carmelite Missal,” Speculum 16:1. January, 1941, pp. 92-102.
------ Painting in Britain: the Middle Ages. Pelican History of Art 5. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books 1954.
------ La miniature anglaise. 2 vols. Milan: Electa Editrice, 1959-61; and Dean, Mabel, and McIntosh, Helen, Manly, John Matthews (editor).
Born into a prosperous family of philosophers, scientists, and statesmen, Otto Georg von Simson fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1945. Appointed to the Committee on Social Thought, he occasionally taught classes in the Department of Art. He was promoted to the rank of full professor in 1951, served as the committee’s Executive Secretary, edited Measure: A Critical Journal and, in 1946, helped found the Committee for Aid to German and Austrian Scholars. While at the university he published articles on Gothic architecture and Netherlandish painting, as well as two important books: Sacred Fortress: Byzantine Art and Statecraft in Ravenna (1948) and The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order (1956). Both texts attempted to place medieval works in the context of their time, attending to elements of liturgical, political, and intellectual history. The latter contributed to the understanding of medieval light mysticism and argued the significance of St-Denis, alongside seminal works by Hans Sedlmayr and Erwin Panofsky. Although controversial it remains widely read, and new editions of both texts were printed by Princeton University Press. Von Simson worked hard to place émigré scholars in Western institutions and helped broker the Frankfurt-University of Chicago Exchange program. He left the university in 1957 to teach in Frankfurt; his letters and diaries express a deep sense of obligation to post-war Germany, an obligation he met by taking a position in the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs and later serving as the German delegate to UNESCO. An obituary in Der Spiegel noted his life-long fondness for Berlin, and the city commemorated him by christening Otto-von-Simson-Straße.
A key figure in the field of Roman sculpture and wall painting, von Blanckenhagen was part of the wave of postwar refugee scholars who invigorated the study of art history in the United States. He earned his doctorate at the University of Munich in 1936 but faced increasing discrimination in Germany thanks to his Latvian citizenship. At the instigation of Otto von Simson, he left his position as docent at the University of Marburg to take a visiting professorship at the University of Chicago between 1947 and 1949. He was appointed a professor for the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Art in 1950, where he served for a decade punctuated by a visiting appointment at Harvard University in 1957. He spent most of his career at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, where he died as the Robert Lehman Professor Emeritus of Fine Arts. A legenday lecturer, von Blanckenhagen is best known for a seminal series of books and articles on Roman painting, including the Odyssey landscapes and the villa at Boscotrecase. He received the Gold Medal of the Archaeological Institute of America in 1982.
Rosenthal joined the faculty of the department of art history at the University of Chicago in 1954, after completing his doctorate in art history at New York University in 1953. His dissertation on the Cathedral of Granada, Spain was turned into a monograph and published in 1961. In 1963, he received a Guggenheim grant, which culminated in two studies published in 1964: an Art Bulletin essay on the proportions of Michelangelo’s Moses sculpture for the tomb of Julius II and an article on the antique architectural models used in Bramante’s Tempietto. His scholarship is noted for his focus on the diffusion of style during the Renaissance in Europe and his careful scrutiny of form and architectural drawings. Today, his investigation of the transmission of Cinquecento forms to Northern European and Iberian courts remains a foundation for contemporary considerations of geography in the history of Renaissance art. Although his model spotlighted Italy, it opened the door to the study of the Renaissance as a trans-Atlantic phenomenon. Rosenthal authored a number of studies on the art and architecture of Renaissance Europe, particularly Spain, which include: “The Image of Roman Architecture in Renaissance Spain” (1958); The Cathedral of Granada: A Study in the Spanish Renaissance (1961); “Michelangelo's Moses, dal di sotto in su” (1964); “The Antecedents of Bramante’s Tempietto” (1964); “Plus Ultra, Non plus Ultra, and the Columnar Device of Emperor Charles V” (1971); “The Diffusion of the Italian Renaissance Style in Western European Art” (1978); The Palace of Charles V in Granada (1985). The “Earl Rosenthal Papers” are housed at the University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center.
Rosenthal, Earl E. “The Image of Roman Architecture in Renaissance Spain.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1958): 329-346.
______. The Cathedral of Granada: A Study in the Spanish Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961.
______. “Michelangelo's Moses, dal di sotto in su.” Art Bulletin 46 (1964): 544-50.
______. “The Antecedents of Bramante’s Tempietto.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 23, no. 2 (1964): 55-74.
______. “Plus Ultra, Non plus Ultra, and the Columnar Device of Emperor Charles V.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 34 (1971): 204-28.
______. “The Diffusion of the Italian Renaissance Style in Western European Art.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 9, no. 4 (1978): 33-45.
______. The Palace of Charles V in Granada. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
The Rev. Henricus “Harrie” A. Vanderstappen was professor of Chinese and Asian art history at the University of Chicago from 1959 to 1991. A life­long member of the Society of the Divine Word, a Roman Catholic missionary order, he was ordained as a priest in 1945 in the Netherlands. Assigned to missionary work in Beijing in 1947, he began to study Chinese art and culture first­hand and taught at Fu Jen University, associating important Sinologists until 1949. He received an M.A. in Art History in 1951 and a Ph.D. in 1955 from the University of Chicago studying with one of the greatest of the first generation of Asian art historians, Ludwig Bachhofer. Vanderstappen’s doctoral work on court painters of the Early Ming was one of the first works on Chinese art in the West that integrated in-depth research with original Chinese sources and examined the significance of Chinese institutional systems and art patronage.
After teaching in Frankfurt, Germany and Nagoya, Japan, Vanderstappen was offered a position at the University as Prof. Bachhofer’s successor and taught generations of graduate students how to visually analyze art, stressing the importance of “visual-based methodologies”, such as detailed brushwork analysis, which he considered to be the starting point for understanding Chinese painting and its stylistic development. His connoisseurship of art was significant in the building of the core collection of East Asian art at the Smart Museum of Art.
Vanderstappen was an associate editor of the influential Sinological journal Monumenta Serica between 1958 and 1992, and also published renowned works on Chinese painting and sculpture, as well as a comprehensive book length bibliography of Western scholarship on Chinese art and archaeology. Prof. Vanderstappen is remembered at the University for his excellence in teaching. He received the College Art Association of America’s Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award in 1985, and in 1987, he received the University’s Burlington Northern Distinguished Teaching Award. In 1996, as a gift from one of his former students, Roger E. Covey created the Harrie Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professorship.
Joshua C. Taylor joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1949 while pursuing his PhD at Princeton University, which he received in 1956. Before arriving at Chicago, Taylor attended the Museum Art School in Portland and received a B.A. and M.A. from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. During his time at the University of Chicago, Taylor won the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1956 and became a Professor of Art History in the Department of Art in 1960. Taylor served as the William Rainey Harper Chair of Art History in 1963.
Taylor’s versatile scholarship addressed nineteenth and twentieth-century painting, especially American and Italian, and art theory. In William Page, the American Titan (1957), the first book-length study of the painter, Taylor drew from unpublished sources to provide insight into the works themselves and into nineteenth-century artistic circles in New York, Boston, and Rome. His 1961 catalogue Futurism for a Museum of Modern Art exhibition helped to call public and scholarly attention to pre-war Italian art. Theories of Modern Art, co-edited with his former student, Peter Selz and with Herschel Chipp, was one of the first substantial, scholarly compilations of letters, manifestos, notes, and interviews from this period, offering a key resource of primary sources for teaching and research. Drawn upon his experiences of teaching undergraduates in the College at the University of Chicago, Taylor’s most popular and widely used book to this day is Learning to Look: A Handbook for the Visual Arts (1957), which introduces readers to artistic techniques and methodological approaches in the visual arts. Taylor was a founding member of the editorial board of Critical Inquiry in 1974, the year he left the University. During his final years of teaching the University of Chicago, Taylor was Director of the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution (formerly named the National Collection of Fine Arts) from 1970-1981. The Joshua C. Taylor Fellowship now supports pre-doctoral and postdoctoral work with advisors at this museum.
Joshua C. Taylor, Learning to Look: a Handbook for the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).
–––––, Futurism (New York: Museum of Modern Art/Doubleday, 1961).
–––––, and Chipp, Hershel B., and Selz, Peter (Theories of Modern Art: a Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).
–––––, and Fink, Lois Marie (Academy: the Academic Tradition in American Art: an Exhibition Organized on the Occasion of the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the National Academy of Design, 1825-1975 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1975).
–––––, and Cawelti, John G. America as Art (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press for the National Collection of Fine Arts, 1976).
–––––, Nineteenth-century Theories of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Maser was first a graduate student at the University of Chicago and obtained his PhD in art history in 1957, for which he studied the baroque art of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. About this he would later say: "I have hoped to enrich the literature on art and art history […] on periods either little-known or little-studied in America today. This has been, perhaps, my main motivation, and has led me into such abstruse areas of research as Baroque and Rococo Florentine art, the Baroque art of Central Europe, and the decorative arts of the Baroque period. Such was the lack of interest in English-speaking countries at the time I wrote them that two of my three major books were in Italian and a number of my articles in German." His commitment to the art of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was acknowledged with the Austrian Cross of Honor in Science and Art, First Class in 1974.
His professional career took off at the University of Kansas in 1953, first as a lecturer, and then in quick succession as assistant and associate professor of art. He also served as the director of the institution’s art museum, an activity he would return to later as the founding director of what is now known as the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. He returned to Chicago in 1961 to become a professor of Art History and immediately, for three years, also the chair of the department. During his tenure he also became professor of Germanic studies. He held the University museum position from 1972 to 1983.
It was in his double role a respected scholar, and a museum manager and curator that Maser was perhaps most important to the institution, but also to the field of art history at large. He took a broad view of what kinds of art a university art museum should collect and show. At the same time, he also understood art history not just as a cerebral pursuit, but as a profession with many facets that he worked tirelessly to promote, not least in the legendary dinner parties he and his wife Inge held regularly, invoking the atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna.
Gian Domenico Ferretti (Collana Pisana). Marchi and Bertoli, Firenze, 1968, 200pp., 170 ill., 14 color plates.
Baroque Cartouches. New York, Dover Press, 1969. Introduction (1968).
Classical Ornament of the Eighteenth Century. New York, Dover Press, 1970. Introduction (1969).
Baroque and Pictorial Imagery. The 1758-60 Hertel Edition of Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia. New York, Dover Press, 1971. Introduction, translations and 200 commentaries on the plates (1969), 250pp text, 200 ill.
Drawings by Johann Michael Rottmayr (1654-1730). The David and Alfred Smart Gallery, The University of Chicago, 1980. Foreword, text and 81 commentaries on the plates. 50pp text, 81 ill., 8 color plates.
German and Austrian Paintings of the Eighteenth Century. Exhibition Catalogue of the Museum of Art, University of Kansas, April 15 to May 30, 1956, pp. 3-8, Introduction.
An Introduction to Nineteenth Century French Bronze Sculpture. Exhibition Catalogue of the David and Alfred Smart Gallery, The University of Chicago, March-May 1977, Foreword.
Eleanor Greenhill received her BA from Texas Tech University in 1934, her MA in Comparative Medieval Literature from Columbia University in 1945, and her PhD in the History of Art at the University of Munich in 1959. Greenhill was a Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago from 1959 to the late-1960s. In the 1960s she moved to the University of Texas at Austin, where she held the Ashbel Smith Professorship in Art History. Greenhill retired in 1985, but remained close to the University of Texas. In 1988 the University of Texas Department of Art and Art History announced the start of the Eleanor Greenhill Symposium. The Symposium is an annual graduate student symposium that shares graduate student research to the broad university community, and is in the spirit of Greenhill’s collegiality.
Greenhill’s work focused on medieval French Gothic manuscripts, and she published several works in both English and German on this topic. She also worked on issues of speculation, Christian life and imagery, and symbolism within Christian art. In 1974 she published Dictionary of Art, which laid out major artists, themes, symbols, and periods in the history of Western art. Her work solidified her status as one of the seminal figures in modern art history.
Briscoe Center for American History. “A Guide to the Eleanor S. Greenhill Papers, 1967-1983.” The University of Texas at Austin. http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utcah/03827/03827-P.html.
Department of Art and Art History. “Special Programs: Eleanor Greenhill Symposium.” The University of Texas at Austin. http://art.utexas.edu/about/special-programs/conferences/greenhill-symposium.
Greenhill, Eleanor Simmons. Dictionary of Art. New York: Dell Pub. Co. (1974).
Greenhill, Eleanor Simmons. Die Geistigen Voraussetzungen Der Bilderreihe Des Speculum Virginum: Versuch Einer Deutung. Münster, Westf.: Aschendorff (1962).
Greenhill, Eleanor Simmons. Die Stellung Der Handschrift British Museum Arundel 44 [vierundvierzig] in Der Überlieferung Des Speculum Virginum. München: Hueber (1966).
Herbert L. Kessler is a medievalist whose expertise ranges from Western Europe to Byzantium. A Chicago native, Kessler received his B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1961. Over the course of four years, he completed M.F.A and Ph.D. degrees at Princeton University. Kessler's dissertation, supervised by renowned Byzantinist Kurt Weitzmann, investigated ninth-century illuminated bibles and culminated in Kessler’s first book The Illustrated Bibles from Tours (1977) In it, Kessler focuses on four illuminated bibles, arguing that their visual similarities derive from a common prototype which he works to reconstruct.
Kessler’s scholarship, by and large, has explored the status of medieval images. A philological approach to visual sources, inherited in part from Weitzmann’s ‘picture criticism’, directed works like The Illustrated Bibles from Tours (1977) and The Frescoes of the Dura Synagogue & Christian Art (1990). Later publications such as Rome 1300: On the Path of the Pilgrim (2000) shifted focus towards reconstructing experiences as well as sources. In Seeing Medieval Art (2004) and Spiritual Seeing (2000) Kessler tackled a central question to the discipline— how does art render the invisible visible?—from many angles.
Over the course of his long and fruitful career, Kessler has contributed to numerous edited volumes, symposia, and museum exhibitions. He maintains a career-long relationship with the Dumbarton Oaks research library and collection in Washington, D.C., where he conducted first research as a Junior Fellow between 1964 and 1965.
In 1965, Kessler returned to his alma mater, The University of Chicago, as an Assistant Professor in the Art History Department. He was promoted to Full Professor in 1973 and for the next three years served as Chair of the Department, a position which overlapped in 1975 with an appointment as University Director of Fine Arts. In 1976, Kessler accepted a position in the History of Art Department at Johns Hopkins University where today he is Professor Emeritus.
Kessler, Herbert L. The Illuminated Bibles from Tours. (Studies in Manuscript Illumination). (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).
Kessler, Herbert L. & Weitzmann, Kurt. The Frescoes of the Dura Synagogue and Christian Art (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1990).
Kessler, Herbert L. & Zacharias, Johanna. Rome 1300: On the Path of the Pilgrim (New Haven, C.T.: Yale University Press, 2000).
Kessler, Herbert L.. Seeing Medieval Art. (Rethinking the Middle Ages, 1) (Peterborough, Ont.. & Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2004).
Jacques Marc de Caso taught at the University of Chicago from 1962-1965. He studied at the Freie Universität in Berlin and received his PhD in 1962 from Yale University, completing his dissertation on the history of French sculpture from Neoclassicism through Auguste Rodin. A renowned specialist of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art known for his illuminating analysis of the theory and criticism of sculpture, painting, and drawing, de Caso has published widely. His books address many French Neoclassical and Romantic artists including David d’Angers, Théodore Géricault, Auguste Rodin, Théophile Bra, and James Pradier. In 1965, De Caso joined the faculty of the Department of Art and History of Art at the University of California Berkeley, where he is now Professor Emeritus of the History of Art. In addition to receiving a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1972, de Caso was an invited Professor at Harvard University from 1975-1976. While at Harvard, de Caso collaborated with Jeanne Wasserman on a key exhibition on serial sculptures at the Fogg Art Museum, Metamorphoses in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture (1975-1976). As an invited professor at the Collège de France in Paris from 1981-1982, he delivered a series of acclaimed public lectures entitled “David d’Angers et la sculpture de la generation romantique” [David d’Angers and the Sculpture of the Romantic Generation”]. Among his many publications, his important works include David d’Angers: Sculptural Communication in the Age of Romanticism (1992) and The Drawing Speaks: Théophile Bra, Works 1826-1855 (1997).
De Caso, David D’Angers: Sculptural Communication in the Age of Romanticism, trans. Dorothy Johnson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
––––––, Sang d’encre: Théophile Bra (1797 - 1863), un illuminé romantique : dessins inédits de la Bibliothèque Municipale de Douai (Paris: Musée de la Vie Romantique, 2007).
John Rewald was on the faculty of the Department of Art at the University of Chicago from 1963 to 1971. He is widely considered a foundational scholar of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Rewald studied with Erwin Panofsky at the University of Hamburg, attended the University of Frankfurt, and intending to work on medieval art, went to France where he eventually completed a doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne on Cézanne and Émile Zola. At the outbreak of the War, Rewald was briefly interned as an enemy alien in France. Rewald arrived in the U.S. in 1941 with the help of Alfred Barr, then director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Rewald’s interest in locating primary sources established a solid foundation for his scholarship that drew upon documents and interviews with late artists’ family members and dealers; his work continues to provide valuable resources for students and scholars of the nineteenth-century. In addition to curating key Impressionist exhibitions at MoMA, where he was appointed a trustee in 1983, Rewald was instrumental in saving Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence, which he helped transform into the still extant public museum, the Atelier Cézanne. His publications include the internationally renowned seminal texts The History of Impressionism (1946) and The History of Post-Impressionism, as well as thoroughly documented volumes on Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Pierre Bonnard, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, Camille Pissarro and Aristide Maillol. Rewald worked on two catalogue raisonné projects: Paul Cézanne: The Watercolors: A Catalogue Raisonné with Adrien Chapuis in 1983 and The Paintings of Paul Cézanne: A Catalogue Raisonné with Walter Feilchenfeldt and Jayne Warman (1996). While at the University of Chicago, Rewald lectured widely and organized an exhibition of one of the largest collections of approximately 100 of Edgar Degas’s etchings with fellow professor in the Department of Art, Paul Moses. Rewald’s papers are now held in the archives at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C..
–––––, Cézanne and America: Dealers, Collectors, Artists and Critics: 1891-1921. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Robert Lorentz Scranton was born 13 June 1912 in Alliance, Ohio. He earned his undergraduate degree in his hometown at Mount Union College, and then attended the University of Chicago to study the walls of Ancient Greece for both his Master’s Degree (1934) and doctorate (1939). Scranton was a fellow at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens during his doctoral studies (1934-38) and returned for post-doctoral studies (1946-47) as well. During this time, Scranton worked mainly on the excavation of the fortifications of the Athenian Pnyx. Between fellowships, Scranton taught at Illinois College (1940) and Vassar College (1940-1946). In 1947, Scranton accepted a teaching post at Emory University, but returned to the School in Athens for the 1949 excavation of Corinth. Scranton later performed additional field work in Kourion, Kenchreai, Cyprus, and Yugoslavia. This work was supported by The University of Chicago, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies, among others.
In 1961, Scranton left Emory for a professorship at The University of Chicago in classical art and archaeology. Scranton served as chair of the Art Department from 1969 to 1973. In 1977, he retired from the University of Chicago and moved to Decatur, Georgia, where he taught classes at both Emory University and Agnes Scott College. On 31 January 1993, Scranton died from complications due to pneumonia.
Scranton published over a dozen books and twenty-seven articles on issues related to ancient and medieval Greece and its environs His text book, Greek Architecture, which was published in 1962, was reprinted as recently as 2012.
Since 1999, Scranton has been honored yearly by the Archaeological Institute of America through its annual Robert L. Scranton Lectureship.
Scranton, Robert. 2012. Greek architecture. Whitefish, MT: Literary Licensing.
David and Alfred Smart Gallery, and Robert Scranton. 1976. Earth, water, fire: Classical Mediterranean ceramics. March 31 - May 3.
Scranton, Robert. 1967. Scranton, Robert L. The architecture of the sanctuary of Apollo Hylates at Kourion.
Scranton, Robert. 1957. Mediaeval architecture in the central area of Corinth. Princeton, N.J.: American School of Classical Studies at Athens.
Scranton, Robert. 1941. Greek walls, by Robert Lorentz Scranton ... Published for the American school of classical studies at Athens. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Clement Edson Armi is an American art historian who specializes in Romanesque and Gothic architecture and sculpture, and more recently, twentieth-century commercial design. He was born on 6 February 1946 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to parents Edgar Leo Armi and Emita Dember Armi. He studied Art History at Columbia College, Columbia University, where he earned his BA in 1967, followed by his Master’s degree, and in 1973, his PhD. His doctoral studies were supported by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation where he was a fellow from 1970 to 1972.
The University of Chicago was Armi’s first teaching post, where he joined the faculty in 1974. Armi stayed in Hyde Park until 1977, when he was offered an associate professorship at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In 1980, Armi published his first book, Saint-Philibert at Tournus and Wall Systems of First Romanesque Architecture, followed only three years later by a second book, Masons and Sculptors in Renaissance Burgundy. Both texts focused on Romanesque construction methods. Armi then produced a number of publications on twentieth-century car design. In 1991, he married Mary Elizabeth Spear, and a year later the couple moved to Santa Barbara where Armi joined the faculty of the University of California, where he remains today.
Armi, Clement Edson. 2012. Design and construction in Romanesque architecture first Romanesque architecture and the pointed arch in Burgandy and Northern Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
---1994. The "headmaster" of Chartres and the origins of "Gothic" sculpture. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press.
--1988. The art of American car design: the profession and personalities : not simple like Simon. University Park u.a, Pennsylvania State Univ. Pr.
-- 1983. Masons and sculptors in Romanesque Burgundy Text. Text. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Harold Rosenberg, a philosopher and critic who was one of the most vocal supporters of the American Abstract Expressionist movement, served on the faculty of the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought as a Professor of Art and Social Thought from 1966 until 1978. Rosenberg was trained as a lawyer at St. Lawrence University in Brooklyn in 1927, but often described himself as self-educated at the New York Public Library. As a prolific leftist art critic, thinker, and poet, Rosenberg became most well known for his phrase, “action painting” that challenged fellow critic Clement Greenberg’s aesthetic formalist reading of Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline. Rosenberg emphasized painters’ existential expressive gestures in which the canvas serves as “an arena in which to act” in his canonical 1952 Art News article “The American Action Painters,” later reprinted in his 1959 collected volume The Tradition of the New. His text was one of the first to group the Abstract Expressionists into a cohesive group of practitioners for the American public. His foundational work also had a notable impact on later performance and Fluxus artists such as Allan Kaprow who adapted the terminology of action painting to his multi-media performances.
Before arriving at the University of Chicago, Rosenberg contributed to literary, arts, and public publications and programs. Rosenberg became interested in abstraction while working in the Mural Division of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1933 where he would meet de Kooning and would later serve as an art editor for the American Guide Series from 1938-1942. While many of his early writings for small leftist magazines such as The Partisan Review reached a limited audience, Rosenberg became widely known to the American public as an art critic for The New Yorker from 1967-1978 while teaching at the University of Chicago. Rosenberg was awarded the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Criticism from the College Art Association in 1964. Rosenberg’s papers can be found at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and with his wife May Tabak’s papers at the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C..
Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1959).
———, The Anxious Object: Art Today and its Audience (New York: Horizon Press, 1964).
———, Act and the Actor: Making the Self (New York: World Pub. Co. 1970).
———, De Kooning (New York: Abrams 1974).
———. Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
Joseph Connors joined the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago in 1975, where he taught classes on Italian Renaissance and Baroque architecture until 1980. He became an assistant professor in 1978, the same year he received his PhD from Harvard University with a dissertation on Francesco Borromini’s Oratorio dei Filippini in Rome. Prior to his doctoral studies at Harvard and his appointment at Chicago, Connors earned an A.B. from Boston College in 1966, and a second B.A. in 1968 as a Marshall Scholar at Clare College, Cambridge University. Since 2002, he has been a professor of Renaissance and Baroque architecture in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard.
In 1980, Connors was appointed as an associate professor of art history at Columbia University. He became a full professor in 1982, and remained there until joining the faculty at Harvard. During his time at Columbia, his courses covered topics ranging from Renaissance and Baroque urban planning and gardens, to the relationship between reading and architecture in early modern libraries, and classical idioms in architecture. In 2001, he won the university’s President’s Award for Outstanding Teaching.
Connors has maintained an equally dedicated commitment to research, publishing widely on seventeenth-century Rome. His first book, Borromini and the Roman Oratory: Style and Society, won the 1984 Krautheimer Medal, a prize awarded for distinguished scholarship in the history of architecture, named after the famed scholar Richard Krautheimer. Also in 1984, Connors published The Robie House of Frank Lloyd Wright, a book project he began while at the University of Chicago, where the famous Wright building is located.
Two important administrative positions punctuated Connors’s active teaching and research as a foremost specialist in early modern Rome. He served as Director of the American Academy in Rome from 1988 to 1992, then as Director of the Villa I Tatti in Florence from 2002 to 2010. Since then, Connors has focused on undergraduate teaching at Harvard, where he offers courses on the history of Rome, the Vatican, and architectural landmarks worldwide.
Borromini and the Roman Oratory: Style and Society, New York and Cambridge, Mass.: The Architectural History Foundation and M.I.T. Press, 1980. Italian Translation, Einaudi, 1989.
“Virgilio Spada’s Defence of Borromini,” The Burlington Magazine, 131, 1989, pp. 75-90.
“Ars Tornandi: Baroque Architecture and the Lathe,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 53, 1990, pp. 217-36.
“S. Ivo alla Sapienza: The First Three Minutes,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 55, 1996, pp. 38-57.
“Borromini, Hagia Sophia and S. Vitale,” Architectural Studies in Memory of Richard Krautheimer, ed. Cecil Striker, Mainz am Rhein, 1996, pp. 43-48.
Piranesi and the Campus Martius: The Missing Corso: Topography and Archaeology in Eighteenth-Century Rome, Unione Internazionale degli Istituti di Archeologia Storia e Storia dell’Arte in Roma (Conferenze dell’Unione, 21), with preface by Walter Geerts and introduction by Louise Rice, Milan: Jaca Book, 2011.
“Giovanni Battista Falda and Lieven Cruyl: Rivalry between Printmakers and Publishers in the Mapping of Rome,” in Piante di Roma dal Rinascimento ai catasti, ed. Mario Bevilacqua and Marcello Fagiolo, Rome: Artemide, 2012, pp. 218-31.
“The Berenson Collection: A Guide,” in I Tatti Studies, 19.2, 2016, pp. 235-55.
Dr. Kathleen J Shelton was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1946. Shelton earned her BA from Smith College followed by two Master’s degrees as well as her doctorate at Columbia University where, from 1970-73, she was also appointed to the faculty as a lecturer in art and archaeology. In 1975, Shelton, then ABD (all-but-dissertation) joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, becoming an assistant professor in 1977. A year later, she completed her dissertation, “The Esquiline Treasure: Its Art and Historical Position.” In 1983, the same year that she won the College Art Association’s coveted Porter Prize for best original article in the field of Art History, Shelton was promoted to associate professor. From 1985 to 1988, she served as the Dean of the Humanities Division followed by a year as Chair of the Art Department. Shelton then took a year’s leave and, after a long battle with cancer, passed away in 1990 at the age of forty-three.
Shelton’s dissertation became the basis of her 1981 book, The Esquiline Treasure. This important revisionist history focused on luxury objects in a horde of silver treasures found on the Esquiline Hill, which are now located in the British Museum. Shelton demonstrated that these objects were created several decades earlier than traditionally believed, a discovery that shed new light on civic and religious life in the late Roman/ Early Christian world. Although controversial at the time, much of Shelton’s research on the treasure was confirmed posthumously by Ronald T. Ridley, and the British Museum continues to accept her earlier dating.
Despite the brevity of her life, Shelton published widely on issues related to the art of Late Antiquity, including work on consular diptychs as well as continued research on the Esquiline Treasure.
The Esquiline Treasure: Its Art and Historical Position. Columbia University, 1978.
"The Esquiline Treasure: the Nature of the Evidence." American Journal of Archaeology 89 (January 1985): 147-55.
"Roman aristocrats, Christian commissions : the Carrand diptych." Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 29 (1986): 166-180.
"Roman Aristocrats, Christian Commissions: the Carrand diptych." Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 29 (1986): 166-180.
"The Esquiline Treasure: the Nature of the Evidence." American Journal of Archaeology 89 no.1 (Jan 1985): 147-155.
"The Consular Muse of Flavius Constantius." Art Bulletin 65 no. 1 (March 1983): 7-23.
"The Diptych of the Young Office Holder." Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum Münster 25 (1982): 132-171.
"Imperial Tyches." Gesta 18 no. 1 (1979): 27-38.
Linda Seidel joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1977 after earning a BA from Barnard College (1959), an MA from Radcliffe, and a PhD at Harvard University (1965) under the supervision of Frederick Deknatel and the unofficial guidance of Meyer Schapiro. At the University of Chicago, Seidel was named inaugural Hannah Holborn Gray Professor in Art History.
A specialist in European medieval art, Seidel has made important contributions to the study of Romanesque sculpture, northern European Renaissance painting, and critical methodologies. Romanesque Sculpture from the Cathedral of St-Etienne, Toulouse (1977) offered a radical reappraisal of the cathedral's sculpture as a nineteenth-century invention, overturning a century of scholarship. Songs of Glory: The Romanesque Façades of Aquitaine (1981) examined the ornamentation of small churches built in southwest France during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, importantly connecting analyses of form, content, and patronage. Her study of Jan van Eyck’s so-called Arnolfini Portrait (1993) brought a multiplicity of interpretive modes to the much-studied painting. Legends in Limestone: Lazarus, Gislebertus, and the Cathedral of Autun (1999) challenged long established narratives concerning artistry and authorship in medieval architectural sculpture. Significant early career encounters with Erwin Panofsky and Schapiro helped to animate Seidel’s interest in the critical writing of art history, and in 2006, she edited Schapiro’s Charles Eliot Norton Lectures on Romanesque architectural sculpture for publication.
During her tenure at the University of Chicago, Seidel won numerous awards for teaching and research, frequently collaborating both with her colleagues in the department and the Smart Museum of Art. Notably, her interrogation of visual pedagogy resulted in the exhibition and accompanying catalogue Looking to Learn: Visual Pedagogy at the University of Chicago (a collaborative venture with Katherine Fischer Taylor). Seidel retired in 2004, and currently serves as Hanna Holborn Gray Professor Emerita of Art History.
Seidel, Linda. “On Telling Tales.” The Art Bulletin 76.4 (December 1994): 581-83.
Reinhold Heller was born in 1940 in Fulda, Germany. Heller earned both his Master’s degree and PhD in Art History and Comparative Literature from Indiana University, Bloomington, which he attended from1963 to 1968. His dissertation focused on the art of Norwegian artist Edward Munch. Heller then joined the Fine Arts faculty at the University of Pittsburgh as an assistant professor. The following year, he was the first person to win the René d’Harncourt Fellowship at the Lillie P. Bliss International Study Center of the Museum of Modern Art. Heller left Pittsburgh in 1978 to join the faculties of Art History and Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. He remained on the faculty for over thirty years, until he retired in 2008. Heller is now an emeritus professor of both of his former departments.
Heller’s scholarship focuses on the intersection of social and psychological worlds. He published his first book, Edvard Munch: The Scream in 1973, which proved to be a seminal work in Munch Studies. He followed this with his 1984 monograph, Munch: His Life and His Work in 1984. In addition to scholarship on the Norwegian artist, Heller has published widely on all areas of German Art, from Symbolism, to Nazi art, to German Expressionism. In 1987 he authored Hildegard Auer: A Yearning for Art, and, in 2002, he curated the show “Confronting Identities in German Art: Myths, Reactions, Reflections” at the Smart Museum of Art, and also authored its eponymous catalogue. In the exhibition and the text, Heller explored the question: what does it mean to be German? Heller also curated the Neue Galerie’s 2010 show, “The Birth of Expressionism: Brücke in Dresden and Berling 1905-1913. This was the first major exhibition in the United States to focus on these experimental German artists. Heller was the visiting fellow in the history of nineteenth-century art at the Van Gogh Museum 2015.
Two and One: The Print in Germany 1945-2000. Wellesley, Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, (Oct. - Dec. 2003).
"Der Blaue Reiter," in Encyclopedia of German Literature, eds. Matthias Konzett. (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2000).
"Expressionism's Utopian Vision: Observations on the Allen Memorial Art Museum Collection of German Expressionist Art:" in Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin, (Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio. Spring 2000).
"Erich Heckel" and "Gabriele Münter", in Magdalena Moeller, eds. Die grossen Expressionisten - Meisterwerke und Künstlerleben. (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 2000,) pp. 14-37 and 176-197.
"Contexts for Michael Morgner/ Beziehungen zu Michael Morgner," in Michael Morgner - Figur + Metapher. Werkverzeichnis der Druckgraphik, eds. Klaus Werner, (Leipzig: Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst and Faber & Faber, 2000,) pp. 41-46.
Richard Shiff is currently the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and the Director of the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas (1989 to present). Shiff works on modern and contemporary art and has published extensively on late-nineteenth to twentieth-century aesthetic practices. He received his BA from Harvard University (1965) and was a Special Student in Fine Arts at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1966). Shiff received his MA from Yale University in 1969, and then completed his PhD in the History of Art at Yale in 1973. After receiving his PhD, Shiff went to the University of Chicago, where he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art, the Committee on Art and Design, and the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities (1974 to 1978).
Shiff has published extensively on modern art and criticism, and his work has been praised for its innovation and the implications of his work beyond the field of modern art. Shiff has received numerous distinguished awards to support his work, including: the College Art Association’s award for Distinguished Teaching of Art History (2010), a Getty Senior Research Grant (1996 to 1997), and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1985 to 1986). He was also a National Humanities Center Fellow in the spring of 1986 and a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania (1979 to 1980).
Shiff, Richard. “Dr. Richard Shiff: Curriculum Vitae.” Department of Art and Art History, The University of Texas at Austin. http://art.utexas.edu/about/people/richard-shiff.
Shiff, Richard. Between Sense and de Kooning. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (2011).
The University of Chicago Press Books. “About the Author, Richard Shiff. The University of Chicago Press. http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/author/S/R/au5626830.html.
Robert S. Nelson taught art history at the University of Chicago between 1977-2005. He began at the U of C as an Instructor and eventually held the title of Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and History of Culture before becoming Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in 2005. A graduate of Rice University (BA, 1969) and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts (MA, 1973 and PhD, 1978), Nelson is currently the Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art at Yale University.
A specialist in Byzantine art, Nelson has published widely. His books include Later Byzantine Painting: Art, Agency, and Appreciation (2007), Hagia Sophia 1850-1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument (2004), Theodore Hagiopetrites, A Late Byzantine Scribe and Illuminator (1991), and The Iconography of Preface and Miniature in the Byzantine Gospel Book (1980). More recently, he co-edited with Derek Krueger The New Testament in Byzantium (2016). Nelson also curated with Kristen Collins the exhibition Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai at the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2006-2007 and served as a consultant for the exhibition Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2004.
Beyond the field of Byzantine art, Nelson has edited several volumes that engage other areas within art history. He co-edited The Nature of Frank Lloyd Wright (1988) with Carol Radcliffe Bolon and Linda Seidel, and in 1996 he co-edited Critical Terms for Art History with Richard Shiff. In 2000, he independently edited Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, and with Margaret Olin he co-edited Monument and Memory Made and Unmade (2003). He has also collaborated with James Carder on the online publication of the Bliss-Tyler letters at Dumbarton Oaks (2008).
Nelson has been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Center for the Advanced Study of Visual Art, the J. Paul Getty Research Institute for Art History and the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, to name only a few.
Later Byzantine Painting: Art, Agency, and Appreciation, a volume of previously published articles, with introduction and commentary. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2007.
Hagia Sophia 1850-1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Theodore Hagiopetrites, A Late Byzantine Scribe and Illuminator, Vienna: Oesterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1991.
The Iconography of Preface and Miniature in the Byzantine Gospel Book. Monographs on Archaeology and the Fine Arts of the College Art Association of America, no. XXXVI, New York, 1980.
Thomas Crow joined the University of Chicago faculty as an Assistant Professor of the History of Art from 1978-1980. Crow received his PhD in Art History from the University of California Los Angeles in 1978. Crow’s vast scholarship on eighteenth-century French art through modern art in the twentieth-century uncovers intricately intertwined connections between artistic production and its surrounding social dynamics. Following his appointment at the University of Chicago, Crow was an Assistant Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University from 1980-1986, an Associate Professor of the History of Art at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor from 1986-1990, and Professor and Chair of the History of Art at the University of Sussex from 1990-1996. He became the Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art at Yale University in 1996 and served as Department Chair from 1997-2000. Crow was the director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and Professor of the History of Art at the University of Southern California from 2000-2007 before he accepted his current position as Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art and Associate Provost for the Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. In 1985 his Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris won the College Art Association Eric Mitchell Prize for the best first book in art history. His other key texts that address the intersections of art, society, and politics include The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent (1996), Modern Art in the Common Culture (1996), The Intelligence of Art (1999), and his most recent, The Long March of Pop: Art, Design, and Music, 1930–1995 (2015). Crow’s many honors include the 1987 College Art Association Charles Rufus Morey Prize, a 1988-1989 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and a 2014-2015 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship. Crow was a Fall 2014 Michael Holly Fellow at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and is a contributing editor to Art Forum.
Anne Burkus-Chasson earned her Bachelor’s in Art History and Studio Art from Oberlin College in 1974. She then attended the University of California Berkeley, where she received her Master’s in Art History in 1977, followed by her PhD in 1987. Her graduate studies were supported by a fellowship at Kyoto University, the Louise W. Hackney Fellowship for the Study of Chinese Painting from the American Oriental Society, a dissertation fellowship from the Association of American University Women, the Henry Haskell Graduate Fund of Oberlin College, and an internship in the Department of Oriental Art at the Yale University Art Gallery. Burkus joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1988 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art, where she remained until 1993. During this time, she was also awarded a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art and Humanities, and was subsequently honored with the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize from the College Art Association for her article, “Elegant or Common? Chen Hongshou’s Birthday Presentation Pictures and His Professional Status.” After a position as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at Stanford University, Burkus joined the faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She remains there today, as Associate Professor of Art History and East Asian Languages and Cultures.
Burkus has published numerous articles, book chapters, and catalogue essays on painting and woodblock-printed books from the late Ming Dynasty, specifically examining self-representation, the word-image relationship, optics, and materiality. In 2010, the Harvard Asia Center published her first book, Through a Forest of Chancellors: Fugitive Histories in Liu Yuan’s Lingyan ge, an Illustrated Book from Seventeenth-Century Suzhou. Burkus is the 2017-18 Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Her current book project is entitled, "Engaging Artifice: Chen Hongshou (1598/99-1652) and the Illustrated Book."
Through a Forest of Chancellors: Fugitive Histories in Liu Yuan’s Lingyan ge, an Illustrated Book from Seventeenth-Century Suzhou (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010).
--“An Introductory Study of Chen Hongshou,” annotated translation of Kohara Hironobu’s “Chin Kôju shiron, jo,” 2 pts., Oriental Art 32, 4 (Winter 1986-87): 398-410; 33, 1 (Spring 1987): 67-83.
--“Elegant or Common? Chen Hongshou’s Birthday Presentation Pictures and His Professional Status,” Art Bulletin 76, 2 (June 1994): 227-300.
--“Chen Hongshou,” biographical article in The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner (London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd.; Grove’s Dictionaries, Inc., 1996), vol. 6, pp. 541-44.
--“‘Clouds and Mists That Emanate and Sink Away’: Shitao’s Waterfall on Mount Lu and Practices of Observation in the Seventeenth Century,” Art History 19, 2 (June 1996): 168-90.
--“‘Yun yan chu mo’: Shitao Lushan guan bu tu he shiqi shiji de guancha fangshi,” Meishu yanjiu (Art Research) (Central Art Academy, Beijing) 90, 2 (May 1998): 51-52, 61-64. Abridged translation into Chinese of “‘Clouds and Mists’,” Art History 19, 2 (June 1996): 168-90, by Hsü Hui-lan et al., with editorial supervision of the author.
--“Between Representations: The Historical and the Visionary in Chen Hongshou’s Yaji,” Art Bulletin 4, 2 (June 2002): 315-33.
--“Like Not Like: Writing Portraits in The Peony Pavilion,” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture (Duke University Press), special issue ed. Shang Wei, 2, 1 (September 2015): 134-72.
Barbara Maria Stafford was born in Vienna in 1941. Stafford earned her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University, majoring in continental philosophy and comparative literature. She followed this with a year of Philosophy at the Sorbonne. After this sojourn, Stafford returned to Northwestern University for a Master’s in Art History and a subsequent doctorate in the subject from the University of Chicago. Her studies were supported by a fellowship from the American Association of University Women at the Warburg Institute in London. There, she came under the mentorship of Ernst Gombrich, who supervised her dissertation. Her first teaching post was in 1969 as assistant professor at the National College of Education. She left this position for Loyola University Chicago, but only a year later moved to the University of Delaware where she remained for almost a decade. In 1981, she joined the University of Chicago faculty as a full professor, earning in 1995 the title of William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor, which she held until her retirement in 2010. She was a member of the University of Chicago Society of Fellows from 2001 to 2007. She continues to teach as a distinguished visiting professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and is an emerita professor of the University of Chicago.
Stafford has published extensively on issues relating to technologies of visual representation from Early Modernity to the digital world, focusing heavily on performance and the embodiment of human experience. This was evident in her 2002 Getty exhibition and catalogue, "Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen," which won the Katharine Kyes Leab & Daniel J. Leab American Book Prizes Current Exhibition Award in 2003. Her recent work investigates the ways in which neuroscience can be used as an art historical tool.
Stafford has been the recipient of numerous accolades, including honorary degrees from multiple international universities. She additionally received prestigious fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim, The Getty Research Institute, The University of Melbourne, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, USC Los Angeles, and SUNY Buffalo. Her book awards include the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Clifford Prize, the CAA Millard Meiss Publication Award, the Gottschalk Prize, The Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize, and the Thomas N. Bonner Award.
--A Field Guide to a BNew Metafield: Bridging the Humanities-Neuroscience Divide. University of Chicago Press, 2011.
--Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images. University of Chicago Press, 2007.
--Visual Analogy: Consiousness as the Art of Connecting. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1999.
--Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760-1840. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1984.
--Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1991.
--Good Looking. Essays on the Virtue of Images. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996.
Ira Mark is a specialist in Greek and Roman art, having earned his PhD in 1979 from New York University in a join program between the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Classics. Mark’s dissertation investigated the cult of Athena Nike on the Acropolis. His research was supported in 1970 with a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship, and subsequently a Fulbright Scholarship in 1974. The latter prize was used to spend a year as a Regular Member at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, where he remained until 1978 with the support of the school and the Archaeological Institute of America. There, he was involved in excavations of at Corinth and, with NYU, at the Sanctuary of the Great Gods in Samothrace.
Immediately following, he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. He was appointed in the Department of Art as well as Classical Languages and Literatures; he also served on the Committee in the Ancient Mediterranean World. He remained at the university until 1990, attaining the rank of Associate Professor. During this time, his research was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Mark received a second fellowship from CASVA in 1995. Dr. Mark is currently an Associate Member of the Seminar on Classical Civilization at Columbia University in New York City.
1993. The Sanctuary of Athena Nike in Athens: architectural stages and chronology. Princeton, N.J.: American School of Classical Studies at Athens.
Nike and the cult of Athena Nike on the Akropolis. New York Univ., Diss., 1979.
Michael Camille specialized in Gothic art of England and France. He was born on 6 March, 1958 in Keighley, Yorkshire and trained at Cambridge. There, he studied both English and Art History, earning his degree with first class honors in 1980 followed by his doctorate in 1985. Upon completing his PhD, Camille joined the faculty of the University of Chicago where he was eventually awarded a named chair by the Art History Department, the Mary L. Block Professor of Art and the College. Throughout the 1990s, Camille held guest lectureships at Northwestern University, The University of Michigan, and UCLA-Berkeley.
Camille’s seminal article, “Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy,” appeared in Art History in 1985, bringing him immediate scholarly attention. Subsequent articles showed his mastery of post-structuralist theory, which he used a lens to analyze word-image relationships in the Middle Ages and beyond. In 1989, Camille published The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art. This text focused on representations of the “other” in Medieval art and offered an important revisionist history of the function of the image in the Middle Ages. This was followed by Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art, which explored the subversive power of marginal images. His award-winning Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator followed in 1996, a text that analyzed not only the production of imagery but also its cessation in the time of the Black Death. Significantly, he contextualized the plague of the Middle Ages against the AIDS crisis of the late-twentieth century. A similar blending of the Medieval and Modern worlds was evident in his next book, Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrel Psalter and the Making of Medieval England. Here, he showed how the world pictured within the manuscript was a construction of its patron, and as such “imagined” scenes of fantastical beasts and mundane laborers shared an ideological function.
Camille was the recipient of a number of prestigious fellowships, including a Getty Foundation fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was also the guest director of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Camille was an active member of university life at Chicago, serving on the boards of the University of Chicago Press from 1993 to 1997 and the task force on undergraduate education. He also co -founded the university’s Lesbian and Gay Studies project.
Camille died tragically young, succumbing to brain cancer on 29 April 2002 at only forty-four years old. He had spent his entire career at the University of Chicago.
1989. The Gothic idol ideology and image-making in medieval art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1992. Image on the edge: the margins of medieval art. Cambridge (Mass): Harvard University Press.
1996. Master of death: the lifeless art of Pierre Remiet, illuminator. London: Yale University Press.
1998. Mirror in Parchment: the Puttrel Psalter and the Making of Medieval England. London: Reaktion Book.
Born in 1943, Dr. Helsinger’s work investigates the interrelationship between literature and the visual arts. Helsinger was Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard University where she earned her BA in 1965, studying History, English, and French. This was followed by both her Master’s from Columbia in 1967 and her PhD in 1973, written in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature. Her dissertation was supported by a Fulbright Scholarship and a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship. Dr. Helsinger joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1972, first in the English Literature Department (1972-1998), with eventual appointments in both the Art History Department (1994-2013), and the Department of Visual Arts (2009-2013). She chaired the English Department from 1998 to 2005, the Department of Visual Arts from 2009 to 2011, and was faculty vice-chair of the Smart Museum Governing Board from 1988 to 2013. Dr. Helsinger is also one of the co-founders of the Center for Gender Studies.
Dr. Helsinger’s prolific output of books and articles has focused on topics ranging from art and social criticism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the writings of the Pre-Raphaelites William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rosetti as a mode of investigating literary and material culture in late-nineteenth-century Britain. Her research has been supported by a number of prestigious fellowships, including ones from the National Humanities Center, the ACLS, the Chicago Humanities Institute, the Guggenheim Museum of Art, the Yale Center for British Art, and the American Philosophical Society. Her most recent book, Poetry and Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain, was published in 2015, and she also authored a catalogue The “Writing” of Modern Life: The Etching Revival in France, Britain, and the United States, 1850-1940, in conjunction with an exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art, which she curated. She continues to teach courses at the university as a Professor Emerita.
Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain, University of Virginia Press, 2015. The “Writing” of Modern Life: The Etching Revival in France, Britain, and the United States, 1850-1940 (edited and contributed title essay), University of Chicago Press for The Smart Museum, November, 2008.
Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Yale University Press, 2008.
Rural Scenes and National Representation, Britain 1815-1850, Princeton University Press, 1997.
Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder, Harvard University Press, 1982.
The Woman Question. Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837-1883 (co-authored with Robin Sheets and William Veeder), 3 vols., Garland, 1983, and University of Chicago Press, 1989.
“Conversing in Verse,” ELH, forthcoming 2017.
“Swinburne's Balladry,” Victorian Poetry (special issue on ballads), 2017.
Poem into Song,” New Literary History (special issue on Song) Spring 2016.
“'How They Met Themselves': Dante, Rossetti, and the Visualizing Imagination,” Dialoge – Spiegelungen - Transformationen, ed. Sebastian Schütze and Maria Antonietta Terzoli (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2016), pp. 243-60.
“Pre-Raphaelite Poetry,” for Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism, ed. Joanne Parker, Corinna Wagner, and Nick Groom, forthcoming 2017.
“Inviting the Indoors Out: Gardens and Other Arts,” in Disciples of Flora: Gardens in History and Culture, ed. Judith Page, Victoria Pagán, and Bridgitte Weltman-Aron, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015.
“Fictions of Time: On Aging, Teaching, and Mining,” Victorian Studies, 2015.
“A Vestibule of Song: Morris and Burne-Jones in Chicago,” Journal of the William Morris Society, 2015.
“Pre-Raphaelitism,” for Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature. Dino Franca Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Linda K. Hughes, eds., 2015.
“Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” for Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, second edition. Ed. Michael Kelly, 2014.
“Lyric Poetry and the Event of Poems, 1870,” BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. www.branchcollective.org. 2012.
“Aesthetics,” The New Cambridge History of Victorian Literature, ed. Kate Flint, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
“The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” and “Pre-Raphaelitism,” Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, eds. Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.
“Telling Time: Song's Rhythms in Morris's Late Work,” William Morris and Social Change, ed. Michelle Weinroth and Paul LeDuc Browne, Queens-McGill University Press, 2014.
“Song’s Fictions,” in Year’s Work in English Studies (Special issue on Victorian Literature and the Arts, ed. Stefano Evangelista and Catherine Maxwell), 2010.
“Grieving Images: Elegy and the Visual Arts,” in Oxford Handbook to the Elegy, ed. Karen Weisman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Dr. Eugene Yuejin Wang was born in Jiangsu, China, and earned both his Bachelors and Masters’ of Arts from Fudan University in Shanghai (1983 and 1986, respectively). Wang then came to the US, earning another Masters in 1990 from Harvard University, followed by his PhD from the same institution in 1997. Wang’s dissertation research was supported by the 1995-96 Ittleson Fellowship in non-Western art from the Center for Advanced Studies in Visual Arts (CASVA) of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, of which he is now an advisory board member. Immediately after this, Wang spent one year teaching in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago before returning to his alma mater, Harvard, for a position on the faculty. In 2005, Wang was named the Abby Aldrich Rockefellow Professor of Asian Art.
Wang has published over thirty articles on topics relating to Buddhist art from the ancient, to the Medieval, to the contemporary world. Dr. Wang is also the editor of the 2004 Encyclopedia of Buddhism and a member of the editorial board of The Art Bulletin. His 2005, Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China, received the Professor Nichijin Sakamoto memorial Academic Acheivement Award from Rissho University in Japan. In the text, Wang argues that the body of visual art related to the Lotus Sutra is derived not from the sutra’s text but rather from religious, historical, cultural, and political sources.
Among Wang’s many other prestigious awards are a Guggenheim fellowship, a Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from American Council of Learned Societies, and post-doctoral grant from the Getty Foundation.
2005. Shaping the lotus sutra: buddhist visual culture in medieval china. Seattle: University Of Washington Press.
2005. "Mirror, Moon, and Memory in Eighth-Century China: From Dragon Pond to Lunar Palace". Cleveland Studies in the History of Art. 9: 42-67.
2003. "Tope and topos: the Leifeng pagoda and the discourse of the demonic". Writing and Materiality in China. 488-552.
2015. "Why was there no chinese painting of Marco Polo?" The Itineraries of Art / Edited by Karin Gludovatz, Juliane Noth, Joachim Rees.
1998. "Transformation in 'Heterotopia': The Longhu Ta and Its Relief Sculptures". Orientations. 29 (6): 32.
Gloria Pinney began working at the University of Chicago in 1993 with a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. She was a professor in both the Department of Art History and of Classical Languages and Literatures. Before coming to the University of Chicago she was the Doreen Canaday Spitzer Professor of Classical Studies at Bryn Mawr College. Pinney originally studied at the Universita degli Studi di Roma and the Scuola Nazionale di Archeologia, before she received her PhD at the University of Cincinnati (1976).
Pinney worked on classical Greek and Roman art, which she often examined from an interdisciplinary perspective. Her 2002 book Figures of Speech: Men and Maidens in Ancient Greece won the James R. Wiseman Book Award in 2004. This seminal piece was lauded for its subtle examination of the idea of “myth” and the “possibilities and limits” of representation in the ancient world. This work, as well as many of her other texts, was published both in English and Italian, and have reached broad, international audiences.
Pinney left the University of Chicago in 1998 and joined the faculty at Harvard as a Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art. She retired in 2003 and is now an Emerita professor in Harvard’s Department of Classics. Between 2011 and 2012 she was a Phi Betta Kappa visiting scholar and gave lectures on classics and archaeology across the US.
Archaeological Institute of America. “Gloria Ferrari Pinney— 2004 James R. Wiseman Book Award.” Archaeological Institute of America. www.archaeological.org/gloriaferraripinney.
Harvard University. “Gloria Pinney: Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art, Emerita.” Harvard University Department of the Classics. https://scholar.harvard.edu/pinney.
Pinney, Gloria. Figures of Speech: Men and Maidens in Ancient Greece. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2002).
Unknown. “New Faculty Members Announced.” The University of Chicago Chronicle. (Chicago, IL). September 30, 1993. http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/930930/faculty.shtml.
Homi Bhabha arrived at the University of Chicago in 1995 as a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the Department of Art History. Bhabha received his BA from the University of Bombay (1970) and his MPhil, MA, and DPhil from Christ Church, Oxford University (1990). Bhabha remained at the University of Chicago for seven years before leaving for Harvard University in 2002. At Harvard he is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English, the Director of the Humanities Center, and the Senior Advisor on the Humanities to Harvard’s President and Provost.
Bhabha works on issues of aesthetics, cosmopolitanism, colonialism, diasporas, global connections, and post-colonialism. He is currently doing research and teaching on the works of Joseph Conrad, Walter Benjamin, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, V.S. Naipaul, and J.M. Coetzee. Bhabha currently has three forthcoming book projects in the works, which are currently titled On Art, A Global Measure, and The Right to Narrate.
His book The Location of Culture, originally published in 1994, was reprinted as a Routledge Classic in 2004. The text is often described as a classical theoretical text that breaks down boundaries between time and space. Bhabha’s work has redefined the fields of colonial and postcolonial studies and continues to influence scholars to this day.
Harvard University. “Homi Bhabha.” Department of English. www.english.fas.harvard.edu/.
Harvard University. “Director: Homi Bhabha.” Humanities Center at Harvard University. https://www.fas.harvard.edu/~humcentr/about/homi.shtml.
Unknown. “Rethinking Experiences of Countries with Colonial Pasts.” The University of Chicago Chronicle. (Chicago, Il). Februrary 16, 1995. http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/950216/bhabha.shtml.
Professor Ingrid Rowland received her B.A. in Classics from Pomona College in 1974. She received both her M.A. (1976) and Ph.D. (1980) in Greek Literature and Classical Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College. Although her graduate education focused on Classical Greece, Professor Rowland’s interests have expanded to include the art, architecture and history of the Etruscan, Renaissance, and Baroque periods, and she is an often-cited expert in architectural theory of the classical and early modern periods.
Her publications reflect these wide-ranging interests. She has published many books, including The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome (1998), Giordano Bruno, Philosopher/Heretic (2008), From Pompeii: the Afterlife of a Roman Town (2015), along with numerous articles in scholarly journals and edited volumes. Professor Rowland has described her own maker-oriented art historical method as “interpreting what artists and architects wanted to say and then writing books in response…It gives the artists a voice again.” In addition to her many academic works, Rowland is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books.
Rowland has held teaching positions at Saint Mary’s College, UCLA, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, the American Academy in Rome, and the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture in Rome, where she currently holds a joint appointment with the Department of History. She has also held fellowships at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, the Villa I Tatti in Florence, and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002.
During her time in the Art History Department at the University of Chicago between 1990 and 2001, she taught courses on the art of the ancient, Renaissance, and Baroque periods, as well as comparative literature, ancient civilizations and literature. In 1994 she received the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. She also curated the Special Collections exhibition “The Ecstatic Journey: Athenasius Kircher in Baroque Rome” (2000) and the Smart Museum exhibition “The Place of the Antique in Early Modern Europe” (1999-2000).
Rowland, Ingrid D. From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014.
———. Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
———. The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
———. The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Kimberly Rorschach earned her undergraduate degree in Art History from Brandeis University in 1978. Subsequently, she enrolled at Yale University, where she received a Master’s in 1980 and PhD in 1985, which was supported by a Fulbright Scholarship. Rorschach then accepted a position as curator at the Rosenbach Museum and Library. In 1993, Rorschach became the coordinating curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A year later, she joined the staff at the University of Chicago as the director of the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, where she remained for just short of a decade. During this time, she also curated the show, "Marie Laurencin: Portraits and Visions," for the Katonah Museum of Art. In 2004, Rorschach founded and became director of the Nasher Museum at Duke University. Formerly known as the Duke University Museum of Art, the institution’s collection had been previously housed in a science building. Through Rorschach’s leadership, the permanent collection was transferred to a 66,000-square-foot building and attendance increased from 10,000 to 130,000 visitors per year. While in residence at Duke, she sat on the Council on the Arts, chaired the Art Advisory Committee, and taught courses on museum practices. In 2012, Rorschach became the director of the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), where she remains today. The same year, she served as the president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, and international organization that represents over 200 museums.
Rorschach has curated many exhibitions that focus on the art and gardens of Europe. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, she presented the exhibition, “The Human Figure 1800-1950: Selections from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.” At the Nasher, she curated the international show, “The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-1918,” with the participation of Tate Britain and the Guggenheim Venice. She was also responsible for the 2008 exhibition with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, “El Greco to Velázquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III,” which was recognized by The Wall Street Journal as a top-10 show that year.
--2004. Smart collecting: acquisitions 1990-2004 : celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. Chicago, Ill: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, the University of Chicago.
-- 1998. "[Rezension von:] Roberts, Jane; Roberts, Jane: Royal landscape : the gardens and parks of Windsor. - New Haven : Yale Univ. Press: 1997". The Burlington Magazine / Ed. Benedict Nicolson. 694-695.
-- 1988. Blake to Beardsley: the artist as illustrator. Philadelphia: Rosenbach Museum & Library.
-- 1985. "Fragonard and Gravelot at the Rosenbach Museum et Library". Apollo. 418-419.
Teri Edelstein was born 23 June 1951 in Johnstown, PA. From the University of Pennsylvania, she earned her BA (1972), MA (1977) and PhD (1979) on “The Social Theme in Victorian Painting.” During her doctoral research, she lectured at the University of Guelph in Ontario and, upon completion of her degree, spent two years as the assistant director of academic programs at the Yale Center for British Art where she also lectured in Art History. In 1983, she became the Director of the Skinner Museum at Mount Holyoke College and joined the faculty of the Art Department. At the Skinner, she curated exhibitions on Berthe Morisot, Donald Cooper, Minerva J. Chapman, and American women printmakers. Edelstein additionally earned a certificate in Business Administration from New York University in 1984. In 1990, she was appointed director of the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and became a senior lecturer in the Art History Department. After eight years, Edelstein accepted the position of Deputy Director of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1999, Edelstein has been the president of Teri J. Edelstein Museum Strategies.
Edelstein has served on the advisory board for Chicago Sculpture, the Museum Loan Network (Knight and Pew Foundations), and the Board of Trustees of the American Federation of the Arts. She has also been active in the College Art Association, serving for several years on both the Committee for Intellectual Property and the Committee for Museums.
-- 2010. Art for all: British posters for transport. New Haven, CT.: Yale Center for British Art.
-- 2000. Berthe Morisot: the forgotten Impressionist. Amherst, Mass: Sawmill River Productions.
-- 1997. The Art Institute of Chicago: the essential guide. Chicago, Ill: The Institute.
-- Edelstein, Teri J., and Michael Camille. 1992. Imagining an Irish past: the Celtic revival, 1840-1940. Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art.
-- 1993. Chicago's dream, a world's treasure: the Art Institute of Chicago, 1893-1993. Chicago, IL: The Institute.
-- 1990. Perspectives on Morisot. New York: Hudson Hills Press.
Thomas Cummins joined the faculty of the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago in 1991, advancing to full professor before departing for Harvard University in 2002. During his tenure at the University of Chicago, Cummins served as director of the University’s Center for Latin American Studies (1998-2001). Today he serves as the Dumbarton Oaks Professor of the History of Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Cummins is a specialist in the art and architecture of pre-Columbian and colonial Latin America, and has published on topics including pre-Columbian figurines and ritual vessels, codices, colonial town planning, miraculous images, and alphabetic and visual literacy. Cummins’s scholarship is noted for its focus on the ways pictorial images and scripts constitute systems of knowledge in the pre-Hispanic world, as well their confrontation and translation into European and Christian systems of representation during the colonial period. His PhD dissertation focused on the painted quero vessels used in ancient Inca rituals (UCLA, 1988), which culminated in a 2002 monograph, Toasts with the Inca: Andean Abstraction and Colonial Images on Quero Vessels (Spanish translation, 2004). In addition to numerous influential articles, other books include Native Traditions in the Postconquest World, coedited with Elizabeth Boone (1998); The Getty Murúa: Essays on the Making of Martín de Murúa’s “Historia General del Piru,” coedited with Barbara Anderson (2008); Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes (2012), with coauthor Joanne Rappaport, which received both the Modern Language Association’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for outstanding book in the field of Latin American and Spanish literature and culture and the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award for outstanding book in the social sciences and humanities. In 2011, Cummins was awarded La Orden “El Mérito por Servicios Distinguidos” en el Grado de Gran Cruz by the Republic of Peru for his academic service.
Thomas B.F. Cummins. Toasts with the Inca: Andean Abstraction and Colonial Images on Quero Vessels. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.
Boone, Elizabeth Hill and Tom Cummins. Native Traditions in the Postconquest World: A Symposium At Dumbarton Oaks, 2nd Through 4th October 1992. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1998.
Cummins, Tom and Barbara Anderson. The Getty Murúa: Essays On the Making of Martín De Murúa's Historia General Del Piru, J. Paul Getty Museum Ms. Ludwig XIII 16. Los Angeles: Published by the Getty Research Institute, 2008.
Rappaport, Joanne and Tom Cummins. Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.

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