Walter Horn (art historian)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Walter William Horn naturalized 1943

Walter William Horn (born January 18, 1908 in Waldangelloch ; died December 26, 1995 in Berkeley ) was a German-American art historian.

Life

Walter Horn was a son of the pastor Karl Horn and Mathilde Peters, his older brother Rudolf Horn became an archaeologist in Germany. Horn attended school in Heidelberg and studied art history in Heidelberg, Berlin and Hamburg. He received his doctorate in 1933 with a dissertation on the facade of the Saint-Gilles abbey church under Erwin Panofsky in Hamburg. Horn went to the Art History Institute in Florence as a research assistant and never returned to Germany because of opposition to National Socialism.

In 1938 Horn emigrated to the USA, where he found employment at the University of California, Berkeley , first as a visiting lecturer, in 1939 as an assistant professor, and from 1940 as an associate professor. He married Ann Binkley Rand, in 1949 he was married to the doctor Alberta West Parker, they had three children. Horn became a US citizen and soldier in the US Army in 1943 and was deployed in occupied Germany in the United States Army Intelligence Center of the Third Army in 1945/46 . He belonged with the rank of lieutenant to the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section and was involved in the investigation of the hiding place of the imperial regalia in Nuremberg in July 1945 . At the beginning of 1946 he tracked down Helmut von Hummel (1910–2012), the personal secretary of the NSDAP party chancellery leader Martin Bormann , in Mondsee and persuaded him to return historical gold coins from the property of Austrian and Czechoslovak monasteries worth $ 2 million, which he had hidden in the safe of the Archdiocese of Salzburg .

Horn worked from 1948 again as a university professor at the University of California at Berkeley. In the McCarthy era , Horn was forced to perform the Loyalty Oath due to his family situation. From 1957 to 1960 he was chairman of the department and from 1964 to 1968 he was director of the College Art Association. Horn got help from the architect Ernest Born to work on the St. Gallen monastery plan and got him enthusiastic about the history of architecture. Horn was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972, he was editor of California Studies in the History of Art .

Fonts (selection)

  • The Façade of St. Gilles: An Inquiry into the Question of the Influence of Antiquity in 12th Century Art in Southern France . Hamburg, 1937
  • The Florentine Baptistery . Announcements from the Art History Institute in Florence. December 1938, pp. 99-151
  • Romanesque Churches in Florence . Art Bulletin 25 (1943): pp. 112-321
  • On the Origins of the Medieval Bay System . Journal of the Society of American Historians 17 (1958): pp. 2-23
  • On the Author of the Plan to the Monastic Reform Movement . in Johannes Duft (Ed.): Studies on the St. Gall monastery plan . St. Gallen: Fehr, 1962
  • with Ernest Born: The Barns of the Abbey of Beaulieu at its Granges of Great Coxwell and Beaulieu St Leonards . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965
  • with Ernest Born : The Plan of St. Gall. A Study of the Architecture and Economy of, and Life in a Paradigmatic Carolingian Monastery. 3 volumes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979

literature

  • Horn, Walter William , in: Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945 . Volume 2.1. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 540
  • Horn, Walter , in: Ulrike Wendland: Biographical handbook of German-speaking art historians in exile. Life and work of the scientists persecuted and expelled under National Socialism . Munich: Saur, 1999, ISBN 3-598-11339-0 , pp. 324-326
  • W. Eugene Kleinbauer, Ruth Mellinkoff, James Marrow: Memoir of Walter W. Horn , in: Speculum, July 1996, p. 800ff.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Rihoko Ueno: Recovering Gold and Regalia: a monument Man investigates ., Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution. April 11, 2014
  2. ^ Nancy K. Innis: Lessons from the Controversy over the Loyalty Oath at the University of California . Minerva, vol. 30, no. 3 (September 1992), pp. 337-365
  3. ^ Nicholas Olsberg: Architects and artists: the work of Ernest and Esther Born . San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 2015 ISBN 978-0-9819597-7-1
personal data
SURNAME Horn, Walter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Horn, Walter William; Horn, Walter W.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American art historian
DATE OF BIRTH January 18, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Forest fishing hole
DATE OF DEATH December 26, 1995
Place of death Berkeley