Klaus Berger (art historian)

Klaus Berger (born March 24, 1901 in Berlin ; † February 13, 2000 in Paris ) was an art historian , librarian and professor. His focus was on researching 19th century French art.

Live and act

Berger was the eldest son of the teacher and German-French translator Rudolf Berger (1866-1935) and the teacher Margarete Müller (1876-1967). He studied in Munich, Berlin, Heidelberg and Göttingen with Heinrich Wölfflin , Adolph Goldschmidt , Georg Graf Vitzthum von Eckstädt and Paul Frankl . With the phenomenologist Moritz Geiger he received his doctorate in 1925 in Göttingen in the subject of aesthetics on the methodology of Wölfflin. From 1926 to 1928 he worked with Fritz Saxl at the Aby Warburg library in Hamburg. In 1929 Berger married the painter Editha Wendt (1899–1937). Between 1929 and 1933, after a shortened legal clerkship, he worked as a councilor for the city library in Berlin, taught at the municipal adult education center in Greater Berlin and was involved in adult education. After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, the Social Democrat lost his job and fled to France, where he earned the bare minimum for survival with jobs for many years. Sporadically he served the Nobel Prize winner Charles Richet as secretary, he edited newly arrived cards from the Library of Congress for the Bibliothèque nationale de France , gave lectures at the Free German University of Paris and worked as a tour guide. In 1939 he was interned in various camps. a. in Le Vernet . In the same year he was granted German citizenship as well as his academic degree as Dr. phil. denied. In 1941 he managed to emigrate to the USA. In the same year he married Margret Robinson, b. Edgewater (1909-1973). Between 1943 and 1945 he taught art history at Northwestern University, Evanston. In 1945/46 he gave courses at the University of the American Army in Biarritz, France and served as Monuments and Fine Arts Officer of the American Military Government ( OMGUS ) in Bavaria. From 1947 to 1970 Berger taught art history at the University of Kansas at Lawrence. After his retirement he returned to Paris, his adopted home France. Berger is an honorary member of the Association of German Art Historians . - Award: Chevalier de L'Ordre des Palms Académique.

Fonts

• The problem of development in modern art history. First part: Wölfflin's conception of form and its surroundings . Dissertation, Ms .; Excerpt from: Yearbook of the Philosophical Faculty Göttingen . 1924, pp. 1-12.
• Géricault. Drawings and Watercolors . Bittner, Recklinghausen 1946.
• as editor: French Master Drawings of the Nineteenth Century . Harper, New York 1950.
• Géricault and his work . Schroll, Vienna 1952 (English translation: Géricault and His Work . University of Kansas Pres, Lawrence 1955)
• Odilon Redon. Imagination and colors . DuMont Schauberg, Cologne 1964 (English translation: Odilon Redon. Fantasy and Color ). Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1964.
• 19th century style structures . In: Journal for Aesthetics and General Art History . NS 12, 1967, pp. 192–203 [Festschrift Joseph Gantner].
• Japonism in Western Painting 1860–1920 . Prestel, Munich 1980 (English translation: Japonisme in Western Painting from Whistler to Matisse . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1992)
• (Transl.) Moritz Geiger : The Significance of Art. A Phenomenological Approach to Aesthetics . Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, Lanham 1986 (translation by M. Geiger: The meaning of art. Approaches to a material value aesthetics )

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. 39-42.
• Hélène Roussel, Bienvenue monieur Berger !, in: Exilés en France, Souvenirs d'antfascistes allemands emigrés (1933–1945), Paris 1982, pp. 103–120.
• Michael Diers, Das modern sein, On the death of the art historian Klaus Berger, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 25, 2000, No. 47, p. 44.

Web links

• Literature by and about Klaus Berger in the catalog of the German National Library
• Article in the Dictionary of Art Historians