German art historian
Willibald Sauerländer (29 February 1924 in Bad Waldsee, Württemberg, Germany – 18 April 2018 in Munich, Germany) was a German art historian specializing in Medieval French sculpture. From 1970 to 1989, he was director of the prestigious Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich.
Life and work.
The son of a late-Impressionist painter who disliked art historians, Sauerländer grew up in a house with works of old and modern art. Notwithstanding, he began studying art history in 1946, at a time when Munich was in ruins, the intellectual situation extremely truncated, and the center of everything the study of medieval art, in a curious kind of secular, "aesthetic mystical" spiritualism, which he did not like. He had his main focus on medieval sculpture and architecture with a strong focus on France, Nicolas Poussin, and the French 18th century, but at the same time he opposed Hans Sedlmayr for his reactionary fundamentalist views. He received his Ph.D. in art history at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich in 1953 under Hans Jantzen.
After leaving university, he went to Paris for five years. During their early Paris years Sauerländer and his wife guided tourists and they worked in the Bibliothèque Nationale and at the "Institut de l'Histoire de l'Art" in order to gain their life. He also taught German at a French lycée. Early on, the personal friendship and scholarship of Louis Grodecki was formative to his art historical methodology. From 1959 to 1961, he taught art history in Paris, and in 1961 in Princeton, NJ at the Institute for Advanced Study. During this first phase in the United States, he met Meyer Schapiro and became a friend of the German émigrés Erwin Panofsky, Walter Friedländer and Richard Krautheimer.
From 1961 to 1962 he lectured as an assistant professor at the University of Marburg and from 1962 to 1970 he was professor of art history at the University of Freiburg, where he utilized the photographic collection of its great medievalist, Wilhelm Vöge. From 1963 to 1965 and 1969 to 1970 he was also a visiting professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. There he developed an interest in Pop Art, particularly in the works of Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol. In 1970, after having published his best known book on "Gothic Sculpture in France" (English edition, 1971), he was appointed director at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich. In 1973 he was elected member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In the 1970s he read Marc Bloch and had contacts with Georges Duby and closure with Jacques Le Goff, which essentially changed his work. In the 1980s he held several visiting appointments in France and the US, including the College de France, Paris; University of Wisconsin, Madison; Harvard University; and the University of California, Berkeley. In 1989 he retired from the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte. In 1991 he presented the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. He is a friend of Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Director of the Getty Research Institute. He was a reviewer for the doctoral dissertation of E. Wayne Craven.
Sauerländer is known for having rewritten the history of early French Gothic Sculpture. In his historiographic writing, he characterized post-World War II art history in Munich as "would-be Positivism," citing a shift toward empiricism and positivism. He also thinks that photography seems to be more interesting than other fields of modern art and has a special interest in the photographic work of August Sander, Thomas Struth, Thomas Demand and Andreas Gursky.
Photographs by Willibald Sauerländer are held at the Conway Library in the Courtauld, London, and are being digitised.
References.
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