Harold E. Wethey

Harold Edwin Wethey (* 1902 in Port Byron , New York , † September 22, 1984 in Ann Arbor ) was an American art historian and professor of art history. The focus of his work was on Italian art and the baroque in Spain.

Life

Harold Edwin Wethey was born in Port Byron , New York in 1902 . His father was Charles Edwin Wethey, his mother was Flora Keck. He received his first degree in Romance languages from Cornell University in 1923 . He then continued his studies at Harvard University . There he received his Master of Arts in 1931 and his doctorate in art history in 1935 . He wrote his dissertation with Chandler R. Post . In it Harold Wethey dealt with Gil de Siloe and his school. In 1936 he published this work in a revised version as his first book. In 1934 Wethey received his first teaching position at Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania , where he received an junior professorship in 1936. In 1938 Wethey became an assistant professor of art history at Washington University in St. Louis . From 1940 to 1972 Harold Wethey was Professor of Art History at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor . His students included Victor Miesel , Marilyn Stokstad , Robert Enggass and Michael Stoughton , among others .

During his time at the University of Michigan, Harold Wethey was visiting professor at the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán in San Miguel de Tucumán in 1943 . This stay was supported by the United States Department of State . In 1944 and 1945, Wethey received a Rockefeller scholarship. In 1946 he was appointed professor. Two years later he married Alice Luella Sunderland. Harold Wethey published the book Colonial Architecture and Sculpture of Peru in 1949 , which earned him the attention of experts. The Hispanic Society of America awarded him the Sculpture Medal in 1952 for his research in the field. With his book Alonso Cano: Painter, Sculptor, Architect , published in 1955 , Wethey became one of the most important English-speaking researchers in the field of Spanish art. This book contained a catalog of the works of Alonso Cano . In general, Harold Wethey saw catalogs of works as one of the key points of art-historical work relating to an artist. He spent the years 1958 and 1959 in Rome thanks to the Fulbright program . After the death of his mentor Chandler R. Post, he completed his work. In 1959 he published the last two volumes of The History of Spanish Painting . During this time, Wethey also worked on El Greco's catalog raisonné , which he published a second time in 1968, this time only in Spanish. He laid down very strict requirements for the divorce of hands and thus came up with a significantly lower number of works by El Greco compared to other catalogs. He also insisted that he only became an artist in Italy and that there was therefore no Cretan work phase. He also defended this position while the majority of art historians had already opened up to this topic. Wethey's attributions to El Greco were generally accepted. In the last years of his life, Harold Wethey was mainly concerned with Titian , for whom he also presented a catalog raisonné that replaced the 1877 catalog by Joseph Archer Crowe .

literature

• Beat Wismer, Michael Scholz-Hänsel (Ed.): El Greco and the modern. Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2012, ISBN 978-3-7757-3326-7 .

Web links

• Harold E. Wethey at dictionaryofarthistorians.org.