George Zarnecki

George Zarnecki (* as Jerzy Zarnecki September 12, 1915 in Stara Osota , Ukraine ; † September 8, 2008 in London ) was a British art historian. He was a specialist in Romanesque (specifically Romanesque sculptures in Great Britain) at the Courtauld Institute of Art .

Life

Zarnecki was the son of a railway engineer (originally a Polish Jew who converted to Catholicism) and a Russian woman. Zarnecki studied art history in Krakow , graduating in 1938. He was briefly an assistant at the University of Krakow before he fled to Bucharest with his parents during the German invasion of Poland. He went on to Italy and France, where he joined the French army as a Polish volunteer and received the Croix de Guerre in 1940. He became a prisoner of war, was able to flee to Spain and in 1943 went to England, where he joined the Polish army in exile. In 1945 he married. Through Anthony Blunt he came to the Courtauld Institute, where he was in charge of the photographic archive and where he received his doctorate in English Romanesque under Fritz Saxl in 1950 (Regional Schools of English Sculpture in the Twelfth Century). In 1959 he became a reader at the University of London, to which the Courtauld Institute was affiliated. In 1961 he became deputy director of the Courtauld Institute (under Anthony Blunt) and in 1963 professor. When Blunt gave up the management of the institute in 1974, he did not apply for the successor because he wanted to devote himself to research (under Blunt, a large part of the administrative work fell to him). In 1982 he retired.

In 1960/61 he was visiting professor at Oxford (Slade Professor of Fine Art) and in 1966 at the Institute for Advanced Study . In 1984 he organized an exhibition on Romanesque art in England at the Hayward Gallery.

In 1968 he became a Fellow of the British Academy . In 1970 he became CBE . He was a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences .

Fonts

• Romanesque , Bels style history , 1970
• English Romanesque Sculpture, 1066-1140 . London: A. Tiranti, 1951 (based on his dissertation)
• English Romanesque Sculpture, 1140-1210 . London: A. Tiranti, 1953 * English Romanesque Lead Sculpture: Lead Fonts of the Twelfth Century . New York: Philosophical Library, 1957
• The Early Sculpture of Ely Cathedral . London: A. Tiranti. 1958
• with Denis Grivot: Gislebertus: Sculptor of Autun . New York: Orion Press, 1961
• The Monastic Achievement . New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972
• Romanesque Art . New York: Universe Books, 1971
• Art of the Medieval World: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, the Sacred Arts . New York: HN Abrams, 1975.

literature

• Wolfeboro (editor): Romanesque and Gothic: Essays for George Zarnecki. Boydell Press, 1987
• Paul Crossley: George Zarnecki, 1915-2008 . In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy . tape 12 , 2013, p. 435–450 ( online [PDF; accessed August 2, 2017]).

Web links

• Dictionary of Art Historians
• Literature by and about George Zarnecki in the catalog of the German National Library