Henri Lehmann (archaeologist)

Henri Lehmann (born as Heinz Lehmann March 14, 1905 in Charlottenburg ; died August 3, 1991 in Paris ) was a German-French American scholar .

Life

Heinz Lehmann was a son of Georg Lehmann (1867–1940) and Frida Model (1879–1960). He attended the Bismarck-Gymnasium and the Joachim-Friedrich-Gymnasium in Berlin and from 1923 studied art history in Freiburg im Breisgau, Vienna and Frankfurt am Main. He received his doctorate in 1928 with a dissertation on Lombard sculpture under Rudolf Kautzsch in Frankfurt. Lehmann then worked as a research assistant at the state museums in Berlin. In 1933 he worked at a Berlin auction house and was firsthand witnessed by the boycott of Jews by the German mob. He then emigrated to France in April 1933.

Lehmann became an employee at the Musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris and worked in the American department. He received French citizenship in 1938 and was enlisted in 1939 when the Second World War broke out. With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation , he went on an ethnographic research trip to Colombia in 1941 and was able to stay there until the end of the war. He made anthropological and linguistic studies among the Guambiano-Kokonuko Indians and the Kwaikers and made archaeological excavations in southwest Colombia. In 1942 he laid the organizational basis for the archaeological collection of the Universidad del Cauca .

After returning to France in 1946, he became head of the America department of the Musée de l'Homme . In 1961 he married the journalist Suzanne Montigny (1903–). Lehmann did research on pre-Columbian culture and led four ethnographic-archaeological expeditions to Guatemala between 1953 and 1967 and dug in the Maya fortress in Mixco Viejo . In 1960 he became vice director of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle and received the title of professor in 1968. In 1971/72 he went back to Colombia as a consultant for Unesco .

Fonts (selection)

• Lombard sculpture in the last third of the 15th century . Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt, Berlin 1928
• Les civilizations précolombiennes . (= Que sais-je?, Volume 567). Paris 1953.
• Les céramiques précolombiennes . Paris 1959.
• Guide to the Ruins of Mixco Viejo . Translation into English Andrew McIntyre, Edwin Kuh. Guatemala: Piedra Santa, 1968.

literature

• Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945 . Volume 2, 2. KG Saur, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 702.
• Marie-France Fauvet-Berthelot: Henri Lehmann (1905-1991) . In: Journal de la société des américanistes 78, 1992, pp. 179–185 (with list of publications).
• Ulrike Wendland: Biographical handbook of German-speaking art historians in exile. Life and work of the scientists persecuted and expelled under National Socialism . KG Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11339-0 , pp. 421-424 (with list of publications).

Web links

• Literature by and about Lehmann, Henri in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Lehmann, Henri in the bibliographic database WorldCat