Julius hero

Julius Samuel Held (born April 15, 1905 in Mosbach , † December 22, 2002 in Bennington , Vermont ) was a German-American art historian . His specialty were Dutch artists, especially Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt .

Life

Held came from a Jewish merchant family from Mosbach. His father died young in 1919 from a kidney disease that he contracted as a soldier in the First World War; his widow continued to run the family-owned Mosbach department store Held until her own early death in 1926. Julius, who had already started to study art history, classical archeology and history in 1923, then joined the inherited company with his sister, but was unable to prove himself as a businessman and soon returned to the university to continue his studies. He studied in Heidelberg , Berlin , Vienna and Freiburg . He received his PhD in 1930 on Dürer atHans Jantzen in Freiburg. In 1934 he fled as a Jew before the Nazi regime in Germany and emigrated to the United States . In 1936 he married the Swedish restorer Ingrid-Märta Petterssen and in 1938 his daughter Anna Held Audette was born, who later became a painter.

From 1937 to 1970 Held taught art history mainly at Barnard College and Columbia University , but also at New York University , Yale University , the University of Pittsburgh and Williams College . He received the title of full professor in 1954. As advisor to the governor of Puerto Rico , he managed to put together the most important art collection in the Caribbean . In his retirement he continued to teach as a visiting professor in Williamstown, Massachusetts , both at Williams College and at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute ("The Clark").

In 1984 he donated 200 pieces from his 1,000-piece collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington . In 1994 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1992 as a corresponding member of the British Academy . In old age his attention returned a. back to his hometown Mosbach, where he made a decisive contribution to the erection of a memorial for the November pogroms of 1938 in which his home synagogue was destroyed. After his death, a highly regarded obituary appeared in the New York Times .

Fonts

• Dürer's effect on Dutch art of his time , (dissertation, 1930)
• Reflections on Seventeenth Century Dutch Painting , Parnassus 11 (February 1939), pp. 16-18.
• Debunking Rembrandt's Legend: New York's Great Loan Show at Wildenstein's : In: Art News 48 (February 1950): 20-24.
• Peter Paul Rubens , New York: HN Abrams, (1953)
• Alteration and Mutilation of Works of art , Durham: Duke University Press, (1963)
• Notes on Jacob Jordaens . In: Oud Holland 80, 2, 1965, pp. 112-122.
• Rubens's Glynde sketch and the installation of the Whitehall ceiling. In: Burlington Magazine 806, 1970, pp. 274-281.
• Baroque Painting, Sculpture, Architecture , New York: HN Abrams (1971)
• Rembrandt's Aristotle and Other Rembrandt Studies , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, (1969).
• On the Date and Function of Some Allegorical Sketches by Rubens , Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 38 (1975), pp. 218-233.
• Rembrandt's Juno . In: Apollo 105 (June 1977) pp. 478-485
• The oil sketches of Peter Paul Rubens: a critical catalog (= Kress Foundation studies in the history of European art Volume 7), 2 volumes., Princeton, NJ (1980)
• Rembrandt Studies , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991

literature

• Ulrike Wendland: Biographical handbook of German-speaking art historians in exile. Life and work of the scientists persecuted and expelled under National Socialism. Part 1: A – K. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11339-0 , pp. 284-289.

Web links

• Literature by and about Julius Held in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography
• Biography in the "Dictionary of Art Historians"
• Obituary for Julius Held by Stephanie Cash and David Ebony
• A lecture by Hero with personal memories of the time of the Third Reich
• Guide to the Julius S. Held Family Collection Archives about the Held family at the Leo Baeck Institute, New York, New York, USA.
• Julius S. Held Papers Archives at the Getty Institute

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hans happes: department store hero. In: Mosbacher Jahresheft 19, Mosbach 2009, pp. 176–179.
2. ↑ Julius S. Held and “The Clark”  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed June 9, 2020 .