by Jon Lackman | 24 April 2008 | Uncategorized
We read in The Times of London that art historian Michael Podro “died of cancer on March 28, 2008″:
Michael Podro was one of a handful of pioneers who transformed art history, here and abroad, into an ambitious humanities discipline comparable with philosophy, literature and history … In 1956, under the joint supervision of [Ernst] Gombrich and the philosopher Richard Wollheim, Podro began a PhD on the 19th-century German neo-Kantian theorist of art, Konrad Fiedler. In 1959 he renounced painting to concentrate on art history. He obtained his PhD in 1961 …
Podro’s three finely honed books manifest his educational commitments. Central to The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand (1972) is Schiller’s account of the way that the drive to play engages with our experience of works of art. In excess, reason and sensory experience can be constraining influences, whereas play and the arts provide us with a sense of freedom unfettered by practical concerns. Ten years later Podro gave this insight a historical dimension in The Critical Historians of Art (1982), his most influential book, which earned him an international following. Podro’s key idea is that art is a form of thought … Podro made art historians aware of the philosophical underpinning of the German tradition, which did not offer a systematic methodology so much as models for how to attend to the complexity of thought embodied in art … In Depiction (1998) Podro turned to some of his favourite artists: Donatello, Titian, Rembrandt, Hogarth and Chardin. A major idea concerns the ways in which the spectator can use the imagination playfully to achieve an orientation to the image. His approach is always ingenious and often produces highly original insights into the artistic process …
Podro was a highly convivial man; the department resounded with laughter, as did the train home from Colchester to London, often to the consternation of other passengers. His approach to academic life was collaborative. He generously read and commented perceptively on drafts of books and articles written by colleagues, at Essex and beyond, whose careers he also nurtured. He worked closely with Michael Baxandall, author of Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, whom he met at the Warburg when they were research students in the late 1950s.
The Independent writes that he “helped generations of students and fellow art historians to think widely and deeply about the subject of art, provoking them with frequently opaque, but often quixotically inspirational ideas about the practice of art.”
The Guardian writes that “Podro was someone whose belief in the life of the mind ran very deep. Art for him was special because it had a real hold on us at the level of common, shared experience, not as something inherently esoteric.”
