Hermann Goetz (art historian)

Hermann Goetz (born July 17, 1898 in Karlsruhe , † July 8, 1976 in Heidelberg ) was a German art historian whose specialty was Indian art .

Life

Goetz was the son of the artist and director of the Badische Landeskunstschule in Karlsruhe Hermann Goetz and attended the Realgymnasium in Munich. He studied art history at the University of Munich and received his doctorate in 1923 on the court costumes of the Great Mughal Empire . From 1926 to 1931 he was an assistant at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. From 1931 to 1935 he was at the Kern Institute for Indian Archeology and History at the University of Leiden . During this time he made a name for himself through publications on Indian art history, including the Jahangir album in the Berlin State Library.

He came to India in 1936 with a travel grant from the Kern Institute to study the art and history of Punjab and the Himalayan border region. The result was a publication on early wooden temples in Chamba and miniature paintings. Even after the end of the scholarship, he stayed in the country to study Indian art and earned his living by teaching assignments at various universities, giving lectures, and writing and journalistic work (newspaper correspondent until 1938). He documented important works of architecture and art with his camera and published a monograph on art in the Principality of Bikaner . In 1940 he became director of the Museum of Maharajah Sayaji Rao Gaekwad III (1863-1939) von Baroda as the successor to Ernst Cohn-Wiener , who was director from 1934, but left India for health reasons.

Goetz modernized the presentation of the museum, founded in 1895, and also acquired works by more recent Indian and Western artists working in India for the museum. In 1943 he founded the Bulletin of the Baroda Museum and became an honorary professor at the University of Baroda . After retiring in 1953, he became director of the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi , which opened in 1954 with an exhibition of contemporary Indian sculptors. In 1955 he returned to Germany, but was again in India in 1958 at the invitation of the Maharajah of Baroda to set up the Maharaja Fateh Singh Museum . In 1961 he became an honorary professor at the newly founded South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University , where he taught until his death in 1976.

Hermann Kulke is one of his students in Heidelberg .

Fonts

• India: five millennia of Indian art, art of the world , Holle Verlag 1959
  • English edition: India, five thousand years of Indian Art, New York, McGraw Hill 1959
• History of India, Kohlhammer 1962
• Poems from the Indian love mysticism of the Middle Ages, Leipzig, Verlag Asia Major 1925
• The position of the Indian chronicles in the context of Indian history, Munich-Neubiberg 1925
• with Ernst Kühnel : Indian book paintings from the Jahángîr album of the Berlin State Library, Munich: Scarabaeus Verlag 1924 (English edition London 1926)
• Atlas of images on the cultural history of India in the Great Mughal period; the material culture of everyday life, its roots, layers, changes and relationships with other peoples, depicted on the basis of Indian miniature painting and other sources, Berlin: Reimer 1930
• Epochs of Indian Culture, Leipzig: KW Hiersemann 1929
• History of Indian miniature painting, Berlin, De Gruyter 1934
• The crisis of Indian civilization in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the genesis of Indo-Muslim civilization, The University of Calcutta 1938
• Commonwealth of Tomorrow, Allahabad 1944
• Art and Architecture of Bikaner State, Oxford 1950
• The early wooden temples of Chamba, Leiden: Brill 1955
• Maharaja Fatesingh Museum, Baroda , Baroda 1961
• Studies in the history and art of Kashmir and the Indian Himalaya, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 1969
• Studies in the history, religion and art of classical and mediaeval India, Wiesbaden: Steiner 1974 (editor Hermann Kulke)
• Mira Bai: her life and times, Bombay 1966
• Rajput art and architecture, Wiesbaden: Steiner 1978 (editors Jyotindra Jain, Jutta Jain-Neubauer)
• The Indian and Persian miniature paintings in the Rijks-prentenkabinet (Rijksmuseum) Amsterdam, Amsterdam 1958

literature

• Entry in: The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture
• Julie F. Codell: Ironies of mimicry. The art collection of Sayaji Rao III Gaekward, Maharaja of Baroda, and the cultural politics of early modern India. In: Journal of History of Collections , Volume 15, 2003, No. 1
• Hermann Kulke: Life and Work of Hermann Goetz. In: Joachim Deppert (Ed.): India and the West. Proceedings of a seminar dedicated to the memory of Hermann Goetz , New Delhi 1983

Web links

• Hermann Goetz, A Pioneer in the Museum Movement in England, German Embassy India