Karl With

Karl With (born June 22, 1891 in Bremerhaven , † December 18, 1980 in Los Angeles , California , USA ) was a German art historian , writer , museum director and art professor .

Life

Karl Eberhard With studied at the universities of Freiburg, Munich, Paris and Vienna with a focus on East Asian art. In 1918 he did his doctorate under Josef Strzygowski on Buddhist sculpture in Japan and then worked as a freelancer in Amsterdam , where he set up and cataloged the Yi Yuan collection of the banker Eduard Freiherr von der Heydt .

From 1919 to 1921 he was director of the Folkwang Museum in Hagen . This was followed by a visiting professorship at the University of Bonn.

In 1925 the Lord Mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, brought him to his Cologne factory schools as a professor of art history . In 1928 With became director of the Cologne Museum of Applied Art and from 1931 - in a double function - as the successor to Professor Richard Riemerschmid, he was also acting director of the Cologne factory schools.

With was a member of the Deutscher Werkbund and in 1929 organized the exhibition " Treasures from Cologne Museums " and " The Growing Apartment " at the Cologne Exhibition Center . Karl With was very friendly with a number of contemporary artists: e. B. with Jan Thorn-Prikker (who moved from the Düsseldorf Art Academy to Cologne to the Werkschulen), with Emil Nolde , Paul Klee and Käthe Kollwitz .

Defamed by the Nazis as a "pimp of degenerate art ", he was dismissed from all municipal offices in 1933. He then went to Berlin, where he worked as a freelancer for Ullstein Verlag . In 1936, Freiherr von der Heydt brought him to the Ascona artists' colony in Switzerland and supported him until he emigrated to the USA in 1939.

There he moved from New York to San Francisco, taught at the art colleges in Pasadena and Carolina and became director of the Modern Institute of Art in Beverly Hills .

Appointed professor in 1950, he taught at UCLA (the University of Los Angeles ) until his retirement in 1962 , where he set up the Institute of Fine Arts. In the 1970s he worked as an art critic for various newspapers. He died of liver cancer in LA at the old age of 89

With's estate is held at the Getty Research Institute.

Fonts (selection)

• Jizo (a poem to a Buddhist sculpture), ed. published by Yi-Yuan, Amsterdam. Published in Germany by Folkwang-Verlag, Hagen iW; the 2nd edition 1922 in the publishing house of Galerie Flechtheim, Berlin.
• Java. Brahmanic, Buddhist and idiosyncratic architecture and sculpture on Java. (= Spirit, Art and Life of Asia. Published in conjunction with the Institute for Indian Research Hagen i. W. by Karl With , Volume I), Folkwang Verlag, Hagen i. W. 1920.
• Japanese architecture . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1921 ( Library of Art History 10)
• The Japanese sculpture, sculptures of the Museum for East Asian Art of the City of Cologne. , II Berlin 1923.
• Marc Chargall . (Young Art 35) Leipzig 1923.
• The Karl-Ernst-Osthaus-Bund , its internal authorization and its tasks, monographs of German cities , Hagen, 1928.
• New building of the city. Building Department Cologne . in: Die Form , 4, 1929, pp. 535-543
• Autobiography of ideas: Memoirs of an Extraordinary Art Scholar . Roland Jaeger (Ed.) With the collaboration of Gerda Becker-With, Verlag Gebr. Mann, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-7861-1977-5
• Pictorial works from East and South Asia from the Yi Yuan [di Eduard von der Heydt] collection. With accompanying text by K. With. Cover u. Endpaper based on a design by Georg Baus. Basel: Schwabe, 1924 (The volume shows sculptures such as sculptures, steles and reliefs divided into three main groups: cult of the dead and ancestor worship, religious images of Buddhism and the official state cult as well as images belonging to popular belief of the later period.)
• Japanese living . Article by Karl With. published in: Deutsche Bauzeitung (DBZ), issue 11, March 1937 , vol. 71, pp. 185–188. Based on the book The Lesson of Japanese architecture by Jiro Harada , which was published at the time, With remembers his trip to Japan 25 years ago and reports on his experiences.

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 2: L – Z. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11339-0 , pp. 786-790.

Web links

• Entry in the Dictionary of Art Historians
• Literature by and about Karl With in the catalog of the German National Library