Fritz Schiff (art historian)

Fritz Schiff (born June 21, 1891 in Berlin ; died October 23, 1964 in Haifa ) was a German-Israeli art historian.

Life

Fritz Schiff was a son of the businessman Berthold Schiff and Anna Baschwitz. Schiff attended a humanistic grammar school and did an apprenticeship in industry from 1908 after graduating from high school. From 1912 to 1914 he did an apprenticeship in the second hand bookshop Loescher in Rome . From 1914 to 1918 Schiff was an officer in the First World War. Schiff worked for the Zionist magazine Jüdische Rundschau from 1918 to 1920 . From 1919 he studied art history, archeology and philosophy in Berlin, Halle and Munich and received his doctorate in Halle in 1922 with a dissertation on Pietro Cavallini and the Italian painting of the 13th century under Paul Frankl . Schiff married the natural scientist Hilda Wolfsohn in 1923, who fled to Palestine in 1937 and worked as a teacher in Jerusalem and as a librarian at the Technion in Haifa. They had a daughter.

Schiff worked alternately and intermittently in the book trade and as a teacher and lecturer for art history at the Reimann School , the Humboldt Academy , the Jewish Adult Education Center , the Volksbühne and the Marxist Workers' School (MASCH). As a freelance art critic, he wrote for Die Welt am Abend , Berliner Zeitung , Vossische Zeitung , Eulenspiegel and for newspapers in the workers' press. He was involved in the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists (ARBKD).

As a non-Aryan, these activities were forbidden to him after power was handed over to the National Socialists in 1933. Schiff fled to Paris and got by as a tour guide. In 1936 he emigrated to Palestine , where he first learned Hebrew. From 1937 he was a teacher of art history at the New Bezalel School of Applied Arts in Jerusalem . He also worked from 1939 as curator at the Jewish National Museum Bezalel and later became its director's deputy, Mordechai Narkiss . In 1955 he founded and directed the Haifa Museum of Art . From 1960 to 1964 he was also director of a Museum of Ancient Art in Haifa. He was government representative for the Israeli participation in international art exhibitions in Brussels, Venice and Paris and was a representative at the Symposium of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in The Hague in 1962 .

Fonts (selection)

• Pietro Cavallini  ; Contributions to the history of the transition from the medieval epoch to the Renaissance in the Italian monumental painting of Ducento . [Typescript]. Halle, Phil. Diss. V. Feb. 14, 1923
• The great illusions of humanity . Jena, 1932
• Athena Parthenos, the vision of Phidias . (Plate 1. 2). In: Ancient Art; 16, 1 (1973), pp. 4-44 ISSN  0003-5688

literature

• Schiff, Fritz , 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. 610-612
• Schiff, Fritz , in: Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Eds.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945. Volume 2.2. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 1031

Web links

• Literature by and about Fritz Schiff (art historian) in the bibliographic database WorldCat . Unadjusted stocks.