April 2003 Newsletter and Review of Books Online
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historians of netherlandish art NEWSLETTER Dedicated to the Study of Netherlandish, German and Franco-Flemish Art and Architecture, 1350-1750 Vol. 20, No. 1 www.hnanews.org April 2003 Willem van Tetrode (c.1525-1580), Hercules Pomarius, 1562-67. Bronze, h. 39.1 cm. The Hearn Family Trust, New York. Exh. Willem van Tetrode: Bronze Sculptures of the Renaissance, The Frick Collection, New York, June 24 – September 7, 2003. HNA Newsletter, Vol. 20, No. 1, April 2003 1 From the President In Memoriam Greetings from Amsterdam, where I have been enjoying my winter/spring sabbatical. It was a winter of vast cultural riches and nearly constant sunshine – oh yes, and some serious research. February snow in New York prevented me from attending the annual Board meeting of the Historians of Netherlandish Art – at least in bodily form – though I did attend orally through the technological miracle of a conference call. Among other matters, the Board decided to initiate an HNA listserve. Those of you with email addresses will soon receive the first message, announcing the April 2003 Newsletter and Review of Books online. Thereafter everyone will be able to use this listserve to get help with research or with pedagogical questions, and to share information about publications, conferences, job openings – about anything, in fact, related to the interests of our organization. (Too much mail already? You can also UNsubscribe!) April will also see the arrival at our website (www.hnanews.org) of the promised Bibliography of Recent Articles, gathered from a list of 68 journals and yearbooks at the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie. By accessing this Bibliography in the Members Only area, you will find dozens of articles categorized first by period and place, then by medium, e.g. Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: Paintings, Prints, Drawings, as well as a section on Museums, Collecting, and the Art Market. The Bibliography will be refreshed in November 2003, when the present one will be archived. We thank Adriaan Waiboer for compiling it and Board members Eric Jan Sluijter and Marten Jan Bok for assisting him. You can help Adriaan by emailing him the citation for your next published article at: [email protected]. New, too, on the website will be guidelines for writing book reviews and for submitting applications for HNA grants. Julius S. Held We will soon install a program to track hits to various sections at (1905-2002) the site. We hope to find that you are using the website more and Julius S. Held, born April 15, 1905 in Mosbach, Germany, more frequently for links to libraries, to research facilities, and to passed away in Bennington, Vermont, on December 22, 2002. Best photographic services, as well as for the Membership Directory and known for his sensitive essays on Rembrandt (collected 1969 and much more. Although the site is now “finished,” we welcome your revised 1991, Princeton University Press) and the definitive study comments for improving it. What would make it more lively and of Rubens’s oil sketches (Princeton University Press 1980), he also compelling? Photos? Cartoons? wrote authoritatively on Dürer, Van Dyck, Jordaens, and other artists. A selection of his articles was edited by A.W. Lowenthal, If you have forgotten your password to the Members Only D. Rosand, and J. Walsh, Jr., Rubens and His Circle (Princeton section, please phone or email Kristin Belkin at 732-937-8394 or University Press, 1982; with a bibliography to that year). He [email protected]. And please remember to capitalize the first letter studied at Heidelberg, Berlin, Vienna and Freiburg, where he of the artist’s name in the password. earned the PhD summa cum laude (1930, renewed 1980) for his dissertation on Dürer in the Netherlands. Julius’s interests were wide ranging, and from 1958, he helped Finally, a word about our next international gathering. For 2005 form the painting collection of the Museo de Arte, Ponce, Puerto or 2006 we are considering the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Rico. Among the many national and international honors he Studies, University of Maryland, in conjunction with the National received are these: Mitchell Prize of 2000, for lifetime achieve- Gallery, Washington. Given the excellent facilities at both of these ment; Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1994; two institutions, and the wealth of museums and collections in the DC Annual Lectures in his honor at the Graduate Program, Williams area, we are hoping to develop a very attractive conference. College-Clark Art Institute; scholarships in his name at Barnard College and Columbia University; Pfalzgraf Otto Plakette, Mosbach, Germany, 1990; Award for Outstanding Achievement, May peace return. Art Dealers Association of America, 1980; Honorary Director, Best wishes, College Art Association, 1975; Officier de L’Ordre de la Couronne, Alison Kettering, appointed by King Baudouin, Belgium, 1974. Beside these illustrious distinctions, his honorary membership in HNA might pale somewhat, but it was one close to his heart. In 1997, a lecture hall at Barnard College was dedicated to him. A large portion of his drawing collection is at the National 2 HNA Newsletter, Vol. 20, No. 1, April 2003 Gallery of Art, Washington, and his rare books are at the Clark Art and delegation. Initially it was the Dutch masters who attracted Institute. His professional papers are at the Getty Research him, and, by extension, among the Flemings Jacob Jordaens, with Institute, Los Angeles, and his family papers are on deposit at the his cheerful “earthiness”. Rubens he came to respect through a Leo Baeck Institute, New York. His wife, Ingrid-Märta Pettersson process of familiarisation which brought a gradual appreciation of (d. 1986), was a painting conservator and worked at the New-York the artist’s achievement; in particular, Held admired the way in Historical Society. which (unlike Jordaens, whom he judged rather harshly in this Julius Held’s career began at the Staatliche Museen, Berlin, respect) Rubens never ceased to advance and to develop, retaining 1931-33, and, when forced to leave Germany, he emigrated to the an enthusiastic engagement with the process of painting right up to United States in 1934. From 1937 to 1970, he taught at Barnard the end of his life. It is significant then that in his two great books College and Columbia University, and also held appointments at on the artist, Rubens. Selected Drawings and then The Oil Sketches New York University, Yale University, Bryn Mawr College, of Peter Paul Rubens Held should have chosen to present Rubens Institute for Advanced Study, University of Pittsburgh, and through the evidence of his working methods, through the drawings Williams College. In 1988, Julius returned to Mosbach, for the and preliminary oil sketches which came straight from the master’s ceremony installing a plaque commemorating the Jewish citizens hand. of the town, on the site of the synagogue which had been destroyed From his earliest experiences as an art historian, working with on Kristallnacht 1938. In 1994, he gave a lecture “The Holocaust Max Friedländer in Berlin, Held’s enquiries centered on individual from a Distance,” which detailed his experiences of the 1930s and works of art and depended on contact with them; general questions 1940s. and hypotheses were inspired by specific cases. These might lead Dedicated to his students and the discipline of teaching, Julius him into areas he would never otherwise have ventured to write on: was a powerful guide in the seminar room. From sometimes dull psychology and mental instability, for example, when the discovery slides (occasionally in black-and-white), he elicited revelatory of an angry outburst against Rubens inscribed by the engraver insights into the expressiveness of pen and brush by Rubens or Lucas Vorsterman on a sketch in The Hermitage suddenly shed Rembrandt. His dry humor and kindness won him affection from light on a mysterious story of an attempt on Rubens’s life. When students and colleagues. He integrated the study of original art circumstances exiled Held from the riches of the European works with their making and meaning, and occasionally, with his museums he had known, he set himself to make the most of the own collections. From his library of books with Rubens’s title- material that was available around him. This resulted, for Rubens, pages, he directed students in putting on an exhibition and writing a in the important catalogue of works by him in public and private catalogue (Williamstown 1977). His advice to his students as collections in America which appeared in 1947 (as Rubens in novice collectors was astute: acquire what pleases you, but bear in America) with an introductory apologia by J.-A. Goris – a text mind that drawings by major artists of gruesome martyrdoms might which shows the extent to which Rubens was perceived as be more affordable than scenes more agreeable to contemplate. problematic at the time, especially in an American context; here Goris points out too that Held has already done much to promote In his lectures and publications, Held emphasized the understanding of the artist and his work. humanity of artists and their subjects. Even as he evoked Rubens’s tenderness toward Helene Fourment and her children, he uncovered Rubens in America was also a kind of belated tribute to the Lucas Vorsterman’s murderous impulse toward the artist. In artist on the tercentenary of his death. In 1940, the planned Rubens discussing the drawings, etchings and paintings of Rembrandt, he commemoration in Antwerp had been taken over by the occupying interpreted sight, speech, and touch as foremost themes; thus, he force – manipulated to Germanic “cultural” purposes and a racist clarified the meaning of Rembrandt’s images of Tobit, Jacob ideology.