The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (512 page)

(1875–1942)
. American sculptor, patron, and collector, the founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She was the daughter of Cornelius II Vanderbilt , an immensely wealthy railroad magnate and turned seriously to art after her marriage to Harry Payne Whitney , a financier and world-class polo player, in 1896. Her training as a sculptor included periods at the
Art Students League
and in Paris, where she knew
Rodin
. She won several major commissions, notably for monuments commemorating the First World War, including the Washington Heights War Memorial, New York (1921). Her style was traditional, but she was sympathetic towards progressive art and is much more important as a patron than as an artist. In 1907 she opened her New York studio as an exhibition space for young artists, and in 1914 she put her patronage on a more formal basis when she bought the house adjoining her studio, converted it into galleries, and opened it as the Whitney Studio; later she founded a series of organizations in New York with the same aim of helping young artists—the Friends of Young Artists (1915), the Whitney Studio Club (1918), and the Whitney Studio Galleries (1928). In 1929 she offered to donate her own collection of about 500 American paintings, sculptures, and drawings to the
Metropolitan Museum
, New York, but the gift was turned down. Consequently in 1930 she announced the founding of the Whitney Museum of American Art and it opened the following year at 10 West 8th Street in a group of converted brownstone buildings. In 1954 the museum moved to a new building at 22 West 54th Street on land provided by the
Museum of Modern Art
, and in 1966 to its present home—a spectacular building designed for it by Marcel Breuer at 945 Madison Avenue. The museum now has the largest and finest collection of 20th-cent. American art in the world, as well as a good representation from earlier periods. Every other year it holds the Whitney Biennial, a major showcase for work by living artists. Mrs Whitney donated funds to many other good causes, artistic and otherwise, but she was ‘a woman of modest disposition who carried out her public activities quietly’ (
Dictionary of American Biography
).

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1806–65)
. Belgian painter, one of the great eccentrics in the history of art. He painted enormous religious, historical, and allegorical canvases in a staggeringly bombastic and almost dementedly melodramatic style and he thought that he had surpassed the masterpieces of his models—
Michelangelo
and
Rubens
. The Belgian government built him a special studio in Brussels (now the Wiertz Museum) to produce these bizarre (and often macabre and erotic) works, and he said they were painted for honour and his portraits for bread.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(d. 1684)
. Dutch landscape painter, active first in his native Haarlem, then from 1660 in Amsterdam, where he also ran an inn. He specialized in landscapes with dunes and sandy roads, inspired by the countryside around Haarlem—unpretentious, naturalistic views that were favourites with collectors in the 17th and 18th cents. The figures in his paintings were evidently always painted by other artists, among them
Wouwerman
. He, too, was an excellent painter of dunescapes and it is uncertain if one influenced the other. Wijnants was prolific and his work is in many public collections. Adriaen van de
Velde
was his pupil and
Gainsborough
was among the artists he influenced.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1891–1970)
. Hungarian-born art historian who became an Austrian citizen in 1928 and a British citizen in 1947. From 1923 to 1938 he was on the staff of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and he gained an international reputation with his work on the Italian (particularly the Venetian) paintings there. He made many contributions to the attribution and dating of pictures, and one of his most important achievements was the systematic use of X-rays not only as a tool for discovering the physical condition of a painting but also as a guide to the individual artist's creative process. Following the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, Wilde resigned from the Kunsthistorisches Museum and moved to England. From 1948 to 1958 he taught at the
Courtauld
Institute, where he was an inspirational figure—Kenneth
Clark
described him as ‘the most beloved and influential teacher of art history of his time’. Wilde published comparatively little, and as Anthony
Blunt
wrote ‘his wisdom was mainly dispensed in lectures, supervisions and private conversation’. During his life-time only two of his major contributions appeared in book form in English, both on
Michelangelo's
drawings—in the catalogue of the 15th- and 16th-cent. drawings at Windsor Castle (1949, with A. E. Popham ) and in his catalogue of Michelangelo's drawings in the
British Museum
(1953). In these two works, which demonstrate his keen sensibility as well as his great learning, Wilde effectively reversed the ‘revisionist’ tendency whereby many genuine drawings by Michelangelo had been rejected. After his death, two collections of lectures were published:
Venetian Art from Bellini to Titian
(1974) and
Michelangelo
(1978).

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(
c.
1586–1653)
. Flemish landscape painter born in Antwerp, where he became a master in 1604. He is best known for painting landscape backgrounds for
Rubens
and for many artists in his circle, but his finest independent work—
Winter Landscape with a Hunter
(Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, 1624)—shows he was an accomplished master in his own right.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search