James S. Ackerman REMEMBRANCES Born: Nov. 8, 1919, San Francisco, CA. 4 children. B.A., Yale, 1941; M.A. (1947), Ph. D. (1952), New York University James Sloss Ackerman Memorial Contemplation: Opening music by Tony Ackerman WELCOME Karl Sevareid REFLECTIONS Joseph Connors John Pinto Cammy Brothers Homa Farjadi Guido Beltramini Anne Ackerman Jesse Ackerman Kubi Ackerman Tim Sawyer Jill Slosburg-Ackerman CLOSING Karl Sevareid Celebration: Closing music by Tony Ackerman i Reception Following in the Lobby Contributions in memory of James Ackerman can be made to Friends of the Community Learning Center 5 Western Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139 The family would like to express their gratitude to the Department of History of Art and Architecture for their assistance in organizing this gathering. ii CHAPTER 1 Memorial Speakers James Sloss Ackerman Memorial Service at Harvard Univesity 2017 14 02 Joseph Connors Jill has asked me to talk about Jim in the context of the Fine Arts department of his day. Jim, a Californian educated by French emigré scholars at Yale and Ger- man emigrés in New York, went to the American Academy in 1948 to write what became a famous thesis on Bramante and the Vatican palace. In the late 1950s Harvard had considered hiring the great Germans, Rudolf Wittkower and Rich- ard Krautheimer, but decided not to, thus condemning New York to be the center of Baroque studies and medieval architecture for decades. Jim was ready, after less than a decade at Berkeley, with volume one of Michelangelo just out, when Har- vard decided to redeem its mistakes and start off with a new generation. He ar- rived in 1961. Volume two of Michelangelo (the catalogue that still amazes archi- tectural historians) came out in 1964 and Palladio in 1965. I came fresh off the boat (the liner United States, in fact) in 1969. The Harvard professors of the sixties and seventies now seem ancient history but many had an unconventional side, sometimes a streak of rebellion. Most were self-taught. Frederick Deknatel, who was a professor before he was a classroom, 3 moved from Spanish Gothic to Munch and shaped a new generation in the nine- teenth century (like Michael Fried). Benjamin Rowland journeyed from Gothic Catalonia through the Khyber Pass to Bamiyan, Gandhara and the arts of India laying the groundwork for John Rosenfield, one of Jim’s closest colleagues and his consultant when writing on the Jain temple at Ranakpur. John Coolidge, scion of a New England dynasty going back to the time of Bulfinch, son of a Harvard house master, threw class consciousness overboard to study the mills of industrial New England before winding up as director of the Fogg. George Hanfmann brought Prussian order to the excavations of Sardis. Ernst Kitzinger delved deep into the mysteries of the icon. I thought of them as the old lions. There was a lion- ess too, just one, but majestic: Agnes Mongan, curator and eventually director of the Fogg, who told us, in her aristocratic voice, wearing the pin given her by her friend Calder, that we were joining the Fogg family, a clan with strict rules but also the potential of lasting affections. Jim and two other youngsters taught early modern (though they would never have called it that). Jim alternated with Seymour Slive in teaching the Renaissance-to-modern half of Fine Arts 13, that phenomenal success in general education still remembered fondly by thousands of Harvard graduates. For Renais- sance painting Harvard in its wisdom went Berensonian and called Sydney Freed- berg from Wellesley. Jim and Sydney were studied opposites in method, values, and voice. It was not easy to navigate between these shifting tectonic plates. My most vivid memory of the two of them in action together dates from the morning of my oral exams. I stood outside the little room on the second floor of the Fogg waiting nervously. Jim and Sydney arrived but the room was not yet un- locked. We passed the time looking down into the courtyard where a giant crane was removing the German rococo statues of the Four Seasons that had graced the space since its construction. The new director of the museum, the first called from outside the Fogg family, wanted to bring in a new broom and this was his first, highly controversial, move. It sparked a dialogue between my professors. “What do 4 you think of this?” they mutually asked. Jim said that since he was always in favor of the New he was all for it. Sydney said that since he systematically opposed inno- vation in all its forms he was quite against it. Then they turned to me and asked, “What do you think?” The orals went rapidly downhill from there. Jim really did embrace the New. Categorically. He was the one who pushed for new appointments, new fields, new approaches, like Islamic art or the social his- tory of nineteenth-century art. He welcomed the new in daily life. (I have the dis- tinct memory of first having heard about recycling from Jim.) It was new for a pro- fessor to make a film on the Renaissance. New, really unheard of, for a professor to question the premises and values of a field that seemed to be going great guns, even if such questioning was destined to be painful. Jim welcomed the new in dis- sertations. Medieval urban planning, Quattrocento painting (Sydney only allowed Cinquecento), Baroque Rome, earthquake-wracked Sicily, Spain, modern architec- ture and many more. We were a motely lot but Jim took us on. Italy then was much farther away than India or China is today and so the rela- tion of advisor/advisee was stretched thinner. We did not meet up for most of the two years I was in Rome and never spoke on the phone, (You could not get a tele- phone in Italy without a contact high in the Communist Party.) The lifeline was something few of you have ever heard of: the aerogram. This wisp of thin blue pa- per let you type a few hundred words on your little Olivetti. You then folded it origami-like, licked and sealed it, and dropped off at the Vatican Post Office (un- thinkable to use the Italian PO). The replies took a few weeks but you savored them. Jim was wonderful in aerograms. There was advice, there was gossip, there was the high class but warm informality that so defined him. They weighed a tenth of an ounce but kept you going for weeks. The last few years were difficult for Jim – such an athletic man confined to a wheelchair – but I for one am very grateful that he had them. It was a chance to see at every visit the loving care that Jill lavished on him. The conversations we 5 had in my visits were the best we ever had. Sharper than ever, he could sense when colleagues were not faring well. He was gracious enough to say he enjoyed seeing my photographs of Italy or India. We turned over every page of his last book when the proofs came, and when he got to the end, he wanted to start over again. There’s a void now where Jim was. A wise and caring person, but also what I think of as a moral force, is gone. Joseph Connors 6 I first met Jim in the fall of 1966, when, following the disastrous flooding of the Arno in Florence, he was helping to organize The Committee to Rescue Ital- ian Art. I was invited to a meeting by the postcard you see here. At the time, I was a freshman considering majoring in what was then called Fine Arts. Little did I re- alize that this encounter would lead to a relationship that would embrace my un- dergraduate and graduate study, and shape my academic career. In due course, Jim became my undergraduate tutor. I recall writing a series of papers on local buildings, including the Swedenborgian church on the corner of Quincy and Kirkland streets, and the Palladian Gulf station many will remember standing at the intersection of Mass. Ave. and Harvard Street. These written exer- cises reflected Jim’s view of architecture as an emphatically social art. He saw – and presented – architecture contextually, as a medium serving the practical needs of society as well as expressing its values and aspirations. Jim’s concern to look be- yond questions of style, connoisseurship, and attribution felt very fresh, particu- larly in the context of the Fogg in the mid-1960s. His interests encompassed aristo- cratic houses and New England barns, urbanism and military architecture, con- struction and process, as well as result. As a writer, Jim had an extraordinary ability to satisfy the expectations of spe- cialists while making his work accessible to a more general public. He wrote beauti- fully and provided a standard towards which we aimed as students and, indeed, to- wards which we continue to aim. He brought the same standards to bear on his students’ work. No art historical jargon escaped his red pencil. In his own publica- tions, Jim never mystified the language of architecture. His limpid prose has the clarity of Palladio’s illustrations, which accounts in no small measure for his wide influence, especially in Italy. Jim’s belief that academic life should not be isolated from the larger world and that art historians should be engaged with the present spoke with particular force to us in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Thanks in large part to the influx of government funding, the history of art was no longer the preserve of a privileged 7 few.