Alice Hard

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alice Mühsam (born Alice Freymark December 22, 1889 in Berlin ; died February 26, 1968 in Spring Valley ) was a German-Austrian-American art historian.

Life

Alice Freymark was the daughter of the banker Isidor Freymark (died 1912), a director at the Disconto-Gesellschaft , and Lina Hirschfeld (died 1922), who came from a wealthy banking family. Freymark received music lessons from Conrad Ansorge, among others . She briefly studied at the State University of Music . In 1911 she married the Viennese lawyer and journalist Kurt Mühsam , who had been posted to Berlin as a correspondent for the Wiener Neue Freie Presse . They had three children: Ruth Marton (1912), Gerd Muehsam (1913) and Helmut Victor Muhsam (1914), and one of the nannies they employed was for a time the poet Gertrud Kolmar . Alice Mühsam received Austrian-Hungarian citizenship with her marriage.

In addition to raising children, Mühsam wrote music reviews for various newspapers, including Der Collector , Berliner Börsen-Zeitung , Westberliner Zeitung (Grunewald-Zeitung), Neue Berliner Zeitung - Das 8 Uhr Abend-Blatt and signals for the musical world . From 1918 to 1922 she was a permanent music editor for the Neue Berliner Zeitung - Das 12-Uhr Blatt . She also placed her essays, book reviews, exhibition reviews and auction reports in other Berlin newspapers.

In 1929 she began studying art history and archeology at Berlin University after she had passed an external high school diploma. Kurt Mühsam died in a traffic accident in 1931 when the three children were still in training. Mühsam had her husband's art collection auctioned in 1932. She received her doctorate in 1936 with the dissertation The Attic grave reliefs in Roman times under Gerhart Rodenwaldt .

As a Jew, she was only allowed to give lectures on art history in marginalized Jewish cultural institutions. After the outbreak of war in Europe, her daughter Ruth, who emigrated to the USA in 1937, managed to get her and her daughter Gerd an affidavit , possibly with the help of Erich Maria Remarque . The son emigrated to Palestine via Switzerland .

Hardly arrived in the USA in January 1940 and received a scholarship to retrain as a restorer at the Brooklyn Museum , but after that she couldn't find a job, but managed to get by as a cleaner and nanny until 1945. After that, she was able to make a living from working as a freelance restorer and tutor for students at Columbia University and the Mannes School of Music . In 1956 she published a translation of her German dissertation under the title Attic Grave Reliefs from the Roman Period in the publishing house of the American University of Beirut .

Fonts (selection)

  • Attic Grave Reliefs from the Roman Period , in: Berytus, American University of Beirut, 10, 1956, pp. 51-114
  • Heinrich Wöfflin: The Senses of Form in Art: a Comparative Psychological Study . Translation Norma A. Shatan, Alice Muehsam, New York: Chelsea, 1958
  • German readings II: A brief survey of art from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, for students of German and fine arts. With vocabulary . New York: Wittenborn, 1959 (Volume I by Margarete Bieber )
  • Coin and temple: a study of the architectural representation on ancient Jewish coins . Leeds: Leeds University Oriental Society, 1966

literature

  • Mühsam, Alice , in: Ulrike Wendland: Biographical manual of German-speaking art historians in exile. Life and work of the scientists persecuted and expelled under National Socialism . Munich: Saur, 1999, ISBN 3-598-11339-0 , pp. 447f.
  • Margarete Bieber : Alice Muehsam , in: Art Journal , 27, 1967/68, p. 398
  • Peter Burke : Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge, 1500-2000 . Waltham, Massachusetts: Brandeis University Press, 2017 ISBN 9781512600384

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Hard, Alice
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Austrian-American art historian
DATE OF BIRTH December 22, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH February 26, 1968
Place of death Spring Valley (New York)