by Jon Lackman | 5 October 2010 | Museums
Opening tomorrow: an exhibition organized by German doctoral students tracing the lives of “20 Jewish art historians who had links with Munich,” such as Richard Krautheimer, Ernst Kitzinger, Kurt Badt, Ruth Kraemer, Lili Heinemann, and Rudolf Berliner. The catalogue is available in German and English (pdf). Some excerpts:
Several came to Munich to study and attended lectures given by professors Heinrich Wölfflin and Wilhelm Pinder … They all shared the same fate of having to leave their Heimat after the National Socialists seized power. In foreign exile, they faced the challenge of having to build up a new existence. After World War II, some returned to Germany while others chose to remain in the countries where they had settled …
As varied as the direction their lives took and their religious and cultural indentities were the areas of interest researched by the art historians. It is noticeable how the majority of them focussed on western, Christian art history … Karl Schwarz, Theodor Harburger, and Richard Krautheimer—although only at the outset of his academic career—were exceptions, whose interest was largely to be found in Jewish art, as was that of Richard Bernheimer, who devoted his study to East Asian and Oriental art, among other areas.
For a bit more information on the show, see this notice from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. For more information on Jewish art historians in Munich and Jewish art historians generally, the Dictionary of Art Historians is an excellent resource. See for example the entries on August Mayer, Paul Frankl, and Rosa Schapire. Also see the 1999 volume Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, edited by Catherine M. Soussloff.
