Diether Thimme

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Diether Thimme , also Dieter Thimme , completely Diether Ernst Karl Bernhard Thimme (born November 4, 1910 in Hanover , † May 25, 1978 in Bloomington (Indiana) ) was a German-American classical archaeologist and art historian .

Life

Diether Thimme was the eldest son of the historian Friedrich Thimme and his wife Emma, ​​geb. Gerlach. The archaeologist Jürgen Thimme (1917–2010) and the historian Annelise Thimme (1918–2005) were his younger siblings.

After graduating from high school in 1929, Thimme studied law at the universities of Grenoble , Berlin and Göttingen . In 1935 he passed his first legal exam , but did not start his legal clerkship and emigrated to Greece . Here he studied classical archeology . On March 21, 1939, he married the American sculptor Katherine Thayer Hobson-Kraus (1889–1982) in Athens, the divorced wife of his Göttingen international law teacher Herbert Kraus . This enabled him to travel to the United States before the outbreak of World War II . From 1940 to 1946 he studied at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University , especially with Karl Lehmann, who also emigrated from Germany . From 1943 he supported the Committee on the Protection of Cultural Treasures in War Areas of the American Council of Learned Societies , which was founded in January 1943 and was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation , as a volunteer assistant . The committee was based in the library of the Frick Collection and compiled maps and lists of endangered works of art in Europe for the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section . In 1946 he graduated with an MFA in art history. In 1948 he received US citizenship.

Thimme received his first lectureship in 1947 at Michigan State University . In 1949, he came as an associate professor at the Wellesley College . In the 1950s he headed its art department. In 1960 he was appointed to Indiana University Bloomington , first as a visiting associate professor , then from 1964 as a full professor ( full professorship with tenure ). In the summer months from 1963 to 1968 Thimme participated in the US excavation campaigns in Kenchreai . In 1968/69 he spent a sabbatical in Athens. A product of this time was the edition of the Parthenon drawings by Jacques Carrey , created together with Theodore Bowie . From 1975 to 1978 Thimme was involved in the documentation and processing of the finds from Kenchreai and the establishment of the Kenchreai department in the Isthmia Museum . In Bloomington, Thimme took care of the expansion of the university's own collections of the Indiana University Art Museum (now the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University ), among other things through the purchase of the collection of the New York economist Vladimir Simkhovitch (1874-1959) by Indiana University. In addition to the collections on classical antiquity, he was particularly interested in the collection of copperplate engravings, etchings and woodcuts. Made possible by a generous purchase budget, he was able to build a collection of over 2000 works for the museum. He also had an important private collection. Thimme was a member of the Archaeological Institute of America .

In 1968 Thimme married the archaeologist Danae Hadjilazaro (* 1938 in London; † April 4, 1998), who then became curator and associate director of the Indiana University Art Museum in Bloomington . In 1998 she donated the complete series Small Worlds by Wassily Kandinsky as well as a work by Hans Hartung from Diether Thimme's collection .

Publications (selection)

literature

  • Thimme, Diether , in: Herbert A. Strauss , Werner Röder (eds.): Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933–1945. Volume 2: The Arts, Sciences, and Literature Berlin: De Gruyter Saur 1983, p. 1163 doi : 10.1515 / 9783110970272

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical stations essentially according to the Memorial Resolution , Indiana University Bloomington Faculty Council Circular B35-1979, accessed on May 15, 2020.
  2. ^ Report of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas. Washington, DC: US ​​Government Printing Office 1946, p. 162
  3. ↑ https://www.monumentsmenfoundation.org/other-resources , monumentsmenfoundation.org, accessed on May 15, 2020
  4. ^ Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art
  5. ^ In Memoriam , in: AIC News. Newsletter of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works 1998, p. 67.
  6. ↑ Small Worlds VII , Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, accessed May 15, 2020.
  7. ^ Eskenazi Museum of Art Provenance Project , accessed May 15, 2020.


personal data
SURNAME Thimme, Diether
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Thimme, Dieter; Thimme, Diether Ernst Karl Bernhard (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American classical archaeologist and art historian
DATE OF BIRTH November 4, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Hanover
DATE OF DEATH May 25, 1978
Place of death Bloomington (Indiana)