Francis Donald Klingender

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Francis Donald Klingender (* 1907 in Goslar ; † July 9, 1955 in Manchester ) was a British sociologist and art historian . Klingender was considered a Marxist and formerly a representative of art sociology in the English-speaking world.

life and work

Francis Klingers's father, Louis Henry Weston Klingender , was a Liverpool- born animal painter who learned his trade from 1881 in Düsseldorf from the animal and hunting painter Carl Friedrich Deiker and practiced it there until the beginning of the 1890s. His mother was Florence Hoette († 1944), the daughter of Düsseldorf alderman Theodor Emil Friedrich Hoette (1831-1917) and his British wife Emily, née Scelton (1835-1917). After the wedding in 1894, the Klingeners moved to Kronberg im Taunus , where the father belonged to the Kronberg painters' colony . In 1902 they moved to Goslar in the Harz Mountains , where Francis Klingender was born in 1907 and grew up in Georgenberg . Sounder was asthmatic and in poor health all his life.

With the outbreak of the First World War , his father was temporarily interned under suspicion of espionage for England and taken to a camp near Berlin. Francis Klingender attended high school in Goslar , which he graduated from high school in 1925. On May 28, 1926, he moved to London .

In October 1928 his parents followed him to England. The father's pictures, which have since gone out of fashion, could hardly be sold there either, so that the son alone contributed to the living. He worked in an advertising agency during the day and attended the London School of Economics and Political Science in the evening , where he focused on sociology. After graduating from college in 1930, he took part until 1932 in the social research project New Survey of London Life and Labor (NSLLL) launched by Sir Hubert Llewellyn Smith (1864-1945) , which aimed to identify changes in the living conditions of the working class since the pioneering work by Charles Booth 40 years earlier.

Klingender completed his dissertation on the life of the London workforce in 1934 and published his Condition of Clerical Labor in Britain in 1935 . His unpopular views made it difficult for him to find academic employment. He gave private lessons and became a member of the Executive Committee of the Artists' International Association (AIA).

John Grierson commissioned him to examine the financial structure of the British film industry. His book Money Behind the Screen was published in 1937 and was controversial among critics.

From the early 1930s, if not earlier, Klingender was an active member of the British Communist Party. Nevertheless, there were health reasons why he was not called up for military service in 1939; during the war he studied the effects of the industrial revolution on the fine arts in England. As a result, he published in 1947 Art and the Industrial Revolution ("Art and the Industrial Revolution"). The following year, Goya appeared in the Democratic Tradition , another work he had already started researching during the war.

From 1948 Klingender came as a lecturer in sociology at the University of Hull , where he focused on British labor law issues. Here he met Winifred Margaret Kaye, whom he married in 1951. Although he also published on iconography , altarpieces and paleolithic art in 1953 and 1954 , shortly before his death he completed the manuscript for Animals in Art and Thought , which he regarded as his main work and which was posthumously carried out by the wife of Art historian Friedrich Antal was published.

In 1955, Francis Klingender died of an asthma attack at the age of only 48.

Klingender was also an art collector, his collection of political caricatures and satirical art was posthumously partially bought up by the British Museum. 1968 revised and edited Sir Arthur Elton (1906–1973) Klingener's Art and Industrial Revolution and republished it.

Bibliography (selection)

  • The Black-coated Worker in London , 1934 (dissertation).
  • Condition of Clerical Labor in Britain , 1935.
  • Money Behind the Screen , 1937.
  • Marxism and Modern Art: An approach to social realism , 1943 ( available online )
  • Art and Industrial Revolution , 1947.
  • Goya in the democratic tradition , 1948.
    • deutsch Goya and the democratic tradition of Spain.
  • Animals in art and thought , 1955.

literature

  • Grant Pooke: Francis Klingender 1907-1955: A Marxist Art Historian Out of Time.
  • Arthur Elton: Francis Donald Klingender 1907-1955. In: Art and Industrial Revolution. Augustus M. Kelley Verlag, New York, 1968, pp. Vii-xi.
  • Obituary: Dr. FD sounder. The Times (London) July 12, 1955, page 11 and addendum by JSH Dr. FD sounder . The Times (London), Jul 18, 1955, 11.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Friedrich Schaarschmidt : On the history of Düsseldorf art, especially in the XIX. Century . Art Association for the Rhineland and Westphalia , Verlag August Bagel, Düsseldorf 1902, p. 347, ( online )
  2. ^ New Survey of London Life and Labor, 1929–1931 , object data sheet in the discover.ukdataservice.uk portal , accessed on November 21, 2017
  3. ↑ List of hits for Klingender in the britishmuseum.org portal , accessed on November 21, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Sounder, Francis Donald
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British sociologist and art historian
DATE OF BIRTH 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Goslar
DATE OF DEATH July 9, 1955
Place of death Manchester