Henri Stern

Henri Stern (born Heinrich Stern , born November 13, 1902 in Munich , † September 4, 1988 in Paris ) was a Franco-German art historian and archaeologist . He is best known for his research on the history of the mosaic .

Life

Heinrich Stern came from a Jewish family in Munich, his father Max Stern († 1940) was a doctor. After graduating from high school in Munich in 1921, he studied art history in Heidelberg , Leipzig and Munich from 1922 . In 1929 he received his doctorate with Wilhelm Pinder in Munich with a thesis on baroque sculpture in Munich. In 1930/31 he worked as a research assistant at the Residenz Museum in Munich as assistant to the director Friedrich Hermann Hofmann and created the catalog for the treasury of the Residenz . From 1931 he was a research assistant at the Bavarian National Museum and was entrusted with cataloging the pewter tools . From January 1933 he was an assistant at the Kunstgewerbemuseum Frankfurt and was dismissed on March 27, 1933 as a “non-Aryan” even before the law to restore the civil service was passed. He then emigrated to Paris in April 1933. Here he found work at the Musée d'Ethnographie in 1933/34 and began researching Byzantine mosaics at the École pratique des hautes études with Gabriel Millet (1867–1953). In 1938 he became a French citizen and received a research grant from the Center national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). Planned excavations in Syria and Transjordan could no longer take place due to the outbreak of war. In 1939/40 he served as a soldier in the French army. He survived the German occupation in France underground.

From August 1944, Henri Stern worked again at the CNRS and turned to the study of late antiquity and in particular the Roman, late antique and medieval mosaic. He drafted the plan for an international corpus of Roman mosaics (for France Recueil général des mosaïques de la Gaule , 1957ff.), Founded the Colloque international d'étude de la mosaïque antique in 1963 and the Association internationale pour l'étude de mosaïque antique in 1964 (AIEMA), of which he remained Secretary General until 1984. He also taught the history of the mosaic at the École pratique des hautes études.

Publications (selection)

• with Friedrich Hermann Hofmann: Guide through the treasury of the Munich residence . Munich 1931.
• Munich baroque sculpture from 1660–1720 . In: Münchner Jahrbuch NF 9, 1932, pp. 162–210 (dissertation).
• Le calendrier de 354. Etude sur son texte et ses illustrations . Geuthner, Paris 1953.
• Les mosaïques de la grande mosquee de Cordoue (= Madrid Researches 11). De Gruyter, Berlin 1976, ISBN 3-11-002126-9 .

literature

• Mosaïque. Récueil d'hommages to Henri Stern . Paris 1983 (pp. 7-12 list of publications).
• Xavier Barral i Altet: Henri Stern . In: Cahiers de civilization médiévale 33, 1990, pp. 97-99 ( digitized version ).
• Ulrike Wendland: Biographical handbook of German-speaking art historians in exile. Life and work of the scientists persecuted and expelled under National Socialism. Part 2: L – Z. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11339-0 , pp. 664-666.
• Jean-Pierre Darmon: Henri Stern (1902–1988) . In: Gunnar Brands, Martin Maischberger (Hrsg.): Lebensbilder. Classical archaeologists and National Socialism . Volume 2, Verlag Marie Leidorf, Rahden / Westfalen 2016, ISBN 978-3-86757-394-8 , pp. 383-389.