Osvald Sirén

Osvald Sirén (born April 6, 1879 in Helsingfors ; † June 12, 1966 in Lidingö ) was an internationally active Swedish art historian and university professor of Finnish origin. He taught at Stockholm University and headed a department at the National Museum in Stockholm . His main research interests were Italian painting and East Asian art, particularly the time of the Ming and Qing dynasties in China .

Origin and education

Sirén was the son of Bruno Sirén , an assessor, and Sigrid Leopold . From 1897 he studied art history at the Kaiser Alexander University in Helsinki with Johan Jakob Tikkanen (1857–1930). In his doctoral thesis in 1900 he dealt with the life and work of the Swedish painter Pehr Hilleström the Elder .

Life as a scientist

In the following years Sirén dealt with the Italian painting of the Renaissance and the early Italian masters of the 13th and 14th centuries. He met Bernard Berenson , whose suggestions helped him to further develop his own research methodology.

In 1908 Sirén became the first professor of art history at Stockholm University. In the 1910s he got to know Chinese art through Denman W. Ross in Boston . He taught at both Harvard and Yale University (1916–1917). In 1917 and 1918 he made his first trip to Japan , in 1922 and 1923 he stayed for a long time in China, where he began to systematically record, photograph and collect the art of the country. In 1924 and 1925 he was a curator at the Musée Guimet in Paris . From 1926 he headed the painting and sculpture department at the Stockholm National Museum; he held this position until his retirement in 1944.

marriage

Sirén married twice: in 1903 the dentist Maria Myhrman (1876–1925), daughter of an office manager, and in 1925 the editor Rose Félice Charlotte Thérèse Carbonel (1893–1976), daughter of a lieutenant. He was general secretary of the Scandinavian Theosophical Society from 1938 to 1948 and was interested in Zen Buddhism and astrology . Sirén died in 1966. His private collection is kept in the Östasiatiska Museet in Stockholm.

Fonts (selection)

Sirén's scientific publications in journals include over four hundred articles and contributions. He wrote numerous books in different languages:

• Giottino and his position in contemporary Florentine painting(Leipzig 1908)
• Leonardo da Vinci. Hans lefnadsöden, bildverk ... (Stockholm 1911; English 1916)
• The gyllene paviljongen. Minnen och studier från Japan (Stockholm 1919)
• Essentials in art (London 1920)
• The walls and gardens of Beijing (London 1924)
• Les palais impériaux de Pékin (Paris, Brussels 1926; English 1926)
• Studies on Chinese sculpture of the post-Tang period (Berlin 1927)
• A history of early Chinese painting (London 1938)
• Kinas trädgårdar och vad de betytt för 1700-talets Europe , 2 parts (Stockholm 1948–1950; English 1949–1950)
• Chinese painting. Leading masters and principles (London, New York 1956–1958)

In addition, Sirén also wrote two books of poetry:

• Accord (1902)
• Still hours in nature (1913)

literature

• Régine Thiriez : Barbarian lens. Western photographers of the Qianlong emperor's European palaces . Gordon and Breach , Amsterdam 1998, ISBN 90-5700-519-0 , pp. 113-114, 171 note 19, 20.
• Minna Törmä : Sirén, Osvald , In: Svenskt biografiskt lexikon , edited by Åsa Karlsson . Volume 32. Stockholm 2006, pp. 266-273 ( digitized version ).
• Minna Törmä : Sirén, Osvald . In: Biografiskt lexikon för Finland . Volume 4. Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland , Helsinki; Atlantis, Stockholm, 2011, ISBN 978-951-583-236-8 , pp. 1453-1454 ( digitized version ).

Web links

• Siren, Osvald. In: Dictionary of art historians