Gerd Muehsam

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Gerd Muehsam , also Gerd Mühsam (born March 30, 1913 in Berlin ; died December 14, 1979 in New York City ) was an Austro-American musicologist and librarian.

Life

Gerd Mühsam was a daughter of the film critic Kurt Mühsam and the art historian Alice Freymark , her sister Ruth Marton became an actress and writer, her brother Helmut Victor Muhsam a demographer. She attended the Fürstin Bismarck School in Berlin-Charlottenburg and received private piano lessons. In 1932 she began studying philology at Berlin University. After the summer semester of 1933 she had to break off her studies in Berlin because of her non-Aryan origins and went to Vienna, where she studied musicology and art history.

Anton von Webern was among her teachers . In 1937 she received her doctorate with a dissertation on Sigismund Thalberg . After Austria's annexation in February 1938, she was only allowed to give private music lessons there to non-Aryans .

In 1940 she managed to emigrate to the United States, where she took an exam to become a librarian at Case Western Reserve University in 1942 . She got a position at the East Cleveland Public Library and oversaw the photo collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art . In 1944 she received US citizenship. From 1945 to 1965 she worked as an art librarian at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art . She conducted seminars on philosophy and music at the Cooper Union Adult Teaching Department (1961–1967) and the Cooper Union School of Engineering. She then spent two years as senior art librarian at the Donnell Library of New York Public .

Muehsam went to Queens College, City University of New York in 1967 , where she became an assistant professor and then an associate professor and headed the Paul Klapper Library. Her seminars in art theory and music theory were part of the Adult Collegiate Education (ACE) program. She also gave introductions to bibliographies of art and music literature.

Muehsam was a member of various library organizations, including the American Library Association (ALA), the Special Libraries Association (SLA), the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS), the College Art Association of America, the American Society for Aesthetics, and the Library Association of the City University of New York (LACUNY). Since 1969 she was a member of the library advisory board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art .

In 1980, ARLIS donated a Gerd Muehsam Award to commemorate them, and the competition for the scholarship was still held in 2020.

Fonts (selection)

  • Sigismud Thalberg as a piano composer . Vienna, Univ., Diss., 1937 OBV , permalink; Xerocopy , catalog card Uni Marburg
  • D. Edzard . New York, H. Bittner, 1948
  • French Painters and Paintings from the Fourteenth Century to Post-Impressionism . New York: Hungarian, 1970
  • Guide to Basic Information Sources in the Visual Arts . Santa Barbara, Calif. : J. Norton Publishers / ABC-Clio, 1978

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mühsam, Gerd , in: Jewish students at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin 1933 to 1938, at HU Berlin
  2. ↑ Gerd Muehsam Award , at ARLIS / NA
personal data
SURNAME Muehsam, Gerd
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Difficult, Gerd
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austro-American musicologist and librarian
DATE OF BIRTH March 30, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH December 14, 1979
Place of death New York City