John Michael Montias

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John Michael Montias (born October 3, 1928 in Paris , † July 26, 2005 in Branford (Connecticut) ) was an economist and art historian . He taught at Yale University and edited various books on central government economics in various Eastern European countries before devoting himself to the economic history of the Dutch Golden Age from the mid-1970s . He received particular attention for his research results on Jan Vermeer .

family

Montias was born to Santiago Montias and his wife Giselle (née de la Maisoneuve) in 1928 in France. His parents were Jewish and sent him to the USA at the beginning of the Second World War to protect him from possible persecution by the German occupation forces. In Buffalo , in the US state of New York , he attended a boarding school, was baptized later and became a member of the Episcopal Church . In 1950 he married Marie Agnes Urbaniak. From this marriage a son was born.

Scientific career

Montias studied economics at Columbia University in New York . He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1947 and graduated with a Master of Arts in 1950 . From 1954 to 1956 he served in the US Army .

He then devoted himself to his doctoral thesis, which he completed in 1958 with a Ph. D. with the dissertation Producers Prices in a Centralized Economy on the economic system in Eastern Bloc countries . In the same year, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Economics at Yale University . He stayed at this university throughout his professional career. In addition to teaching economics, Montias published various analyzes of central government economics in Eastern Europe in the 1960s and 1970s . This includes studies on the situation in individual countries such as Central planning in Poland from 1962 and Economic development in communist Romania from 1967 as well as the overview work Structure of Economic Systems from 1977.

In 1977 he founded the journal Journal of Comparative Economics .

Art research

Montias has also been interested in art history since his studies. His focus here was on Dutch painting of the Golden Age . Jan Vermeer was one of his favorite artists . At Yale University, the art historian Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann encouraged him to write a comparative study of Dutch painters' guilds. Montias began this work in 1975 in the USA and devoted himself to researching the primary sources in the local city archive in Delft , the Netherlands . Initially without any knowledge of Dutch, he learned the Dutch language of the 16th and 17th centuries as an autodidact. In 1978 he went to the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) to study the national economy of the Dutch Republic of the 17th century and its effects on the art market. As a result of his research, his book Artists and artisans in Delft: a socio-economic study of the seventeenth century was published in 1982 . In this widely acclaimed publication, he clarified the connection between economic history and cultural developments. Here he examined how the forces of supply and demand contributed to artistic production. Using statistical data from the 17th century, Montias was able to reconstruct the art market and showed that art was a commodity that could be commercialized at this time.

His pioneering work in researching archive materials also yielded a great deal of previously unknown information about individual artists. In particular for Jan Vermeer - about whose life little was known - Montias found numerous pieces of evidence that helped to complete the artist's biography. On this subject he published Vermeer and his milieu: a web of social history in 1989 . Building on this, he devoted himself to researching the art market in the Netherlands from the 15th to 17th centuries. Century, which was published in 1996 in his French mother tongue under the title Le marché de l'art aux Pays Bas, 15ième-17ième siècles . This was supplemented by his investigation of Dutch art collections from this period, which he published together with John Loughman under the title Public and Private Spaces: Works of Art in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Houses .

Publications

  • Institutional Changes in the Postwar Economy of Poland (together with Wladyslaw Jozef Stankiewicz). Free Europe Committee, New York 1955.
  • Producers' prices in a centralized economy: The Polish Experience . Columbia University, Ann Arbor 1958/1960.
  • Central planning in Poland . Yale University Press, New Haven 1962 / Greenwood, Westport 1974 ISBN 0-8371-7560-7 .
  • On the consistency and efficiency of central plans . Economic Growth Center, New Haven 1963.
  • Unbalanced growth in Romania . Yale University, New Haven, Conn. 1963.
  • Background an origins of the Rumanian dispute with Comecon . Yale University, New Haven, Conn. 1964.
  • Rumania's foreign trade in the postwar period . Yale University, New Haven, Conn. 1966.
  • Economic nationalism in Eastern Europe: forty years of continutity and change . Yale University, New Haven, Conn. 1966.
  • Economic development in communist Romania . The MIT Press, Cambridge Ma. 1967.
  • Socialist industrialization and trade in machinery products: an analysis based on the experience of Bulgaria, Poland and Rumania . Yale University, New Haven, Conn. 1968.
  • Modernization in communist countries: some questions of methodology . Yale University, New Haven, Conn. 1973.
  • The structure of the economic system . Yale University Press, New Haven 1976, ISBN 0-300-01833-9 .
  • East European integration and East-West trade (publisher Paul Marer). Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1980, ISBN 0-253-16865-1 .
  • Artists and artisans in Delft: a socio-economic study of the 17th century . Princeton University Press, Princeton 1982, ISBN 0-691-03986-0 .
  • Vermeer (together with Gilles Aillaud, Albert Blankert). Hazan, Paris 1986, English edition at Rizolli, New York 1988.
  • Vermeer and his milieu: a web of social history . Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton 1989, ISBN 0-691-04051-6 .
  • Comparative economics (together with Avner Ben-Ner and Egon Neuberger). Harwood Academic Publications, Chur 1994, ISBN 3-7186-5451-2 .
  • Le marché de l'art aux Pays-Bas: (XVe - XVIIe siècles) . Flammarion, Paris 1996, ISBN 2-08-012147-2 .
  • Public and private spaces: works of art in seventeenth-century Dutch houses (together with John Loughman). Waanders, Zwolle 2000, ISBN 90-400-9444-6 .
  • Art at auction in 17th century Amsterdam . Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2002, ISBN 90-5356-591-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Journal of Comparative Economics Editorial Board. Retrieved November 25, 2011 .
personal data
SURNAME Montias, John Michael
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French economist and art historian
DATE OF BIRTH October 3, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH July 26, 2005
Place of death Branford (Connecticut)