Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner

Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner , in the USA William R. Valentiner , (born May 2, 1880 in Karlsruhe , † September 6, 1958 in New York ) was a German-American art historian and museum director.

Life

Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner was a son of the astronomer Karl Wilhelm Valentiner , who was head of the Karlsruhe observatory at the time of his birth . His mother Anna Isis Elisabeth, b. Lepsius (1848-1919), was the daughter of the Egyptologist Carl Richard Lepsius . The physicist Siegfried Valentiner was his brother; Elisabeth Paatz (1900–1991), b. Valentiner, the wife of art historian Walter Paatz , was his cousin.

He studied art history at the University of Heidelberg , especially with Henry Thode , and received his doctorate here in 1904 with a dissertation on Rembrandt . He deepened his studies in the Netherlands with Cornelis Hofstede de Groot and with Abraham Bredius as his assistant at the Gemäldegalerie in The Hague . From 1906 he assisted Wilhelm von Bode at the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum and at the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin .

At the end of 1907, on Bode's recommendation, he was appointed curator of the arts and crafts department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and arrived in New York on March 28, 1908. In 1909 he organized the department with Dutch paintings from American collections as part of the Hudson - Fulton Exhibition . The show was a sensational success and, with 200,000 visitors in five weeks, is now considered the first blockbuster exhibition of the 20th century. In 1913 he founded Art in America magazine .

At the beginning of the First World War he returned to Germany. As a war volunteer , he initially served in the Bavarian Replacement Field Artillery Regiment and from the end of 1915 at the newly established War Press Office of the Supreme Army Command in Berlin under Erhard Deutelmoser . On August 10, 1915, he was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class, after having received the Baden Karl Friedrich Military Merit Medal in silver on June 29, 1915 .

Detroit Institute of Arts (Director Valentiner 1924–1945)

After the end of the war, Valentiner worked on the Art Labor Council , where he advocated a reorientation of museum policy. At the same time he turned to modern art and wrote monographs on Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Georg Kolbe . In 1921 he returned to the USA and initially advised museums on art buying. In 1923 he and Ferdinand Möller organized an exhibition of German contemporary art in the Anderson Galleries in New York . From 1924 he was director of the Detroit Institute of Arts . Under his direction, the commission went to Diego Rivera for his monumental wall painting in the museum, on the lower right corner of which he can be seen together with Edsel Ford . In 1935 Valentiner became a US citizen.

After he retired in Detroit in 1945 due to an age restriction, he worked at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 1946 to 1954 , where he organized a highly regarded Leonardo da Vinci exhibition with Käte Steinitz in 1949 , and briefly at the J. Paul Getty Museum . In 1955 he became the founding director of the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, North Carolina . In 1958 he showed the first exhibition of works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in North America.

Fonts

• Rembrandt and his surroundings. Heitz & Mündel, Strasbourg 1905. (= dissertation) digitized
• Rembrandt in Latin School. In: Yearbook of the Prussian Art Collections 27 (1906).
• with Wilhelm von Bode: Rembrandt. 1907.
• with Wilhelm von Bode: hand drawings of old Dutch genre painters. Berlin 1907. Digitized
• From Dutch art. Cashier, Berlin 1914.

English edition: The Art of the Low Countries. Doubleday, Page & Co., Garden City, NY 1914. Digitized

• Times of art and religion. Grote, Berlin 1919.
• Redesign of the museums in line with the new era. Grote, Berlin 1919.
• Schmidt-Rottluff. Klinkhardt & Biermann, Leipzig 1920.
• Georg Kolbe. Kurt Wolff, Leipzig 1922.
• Frans Hals , the master's painting in 322 illustrations. Second, revised edition, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt Stuttgart, Berlin / Leipzig 1923. Digitized

Commons : Frans Hals catalog raisonné, 1923  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

• Rembrandt: Recovered Paintings, 1910–1922, in 128 illustrations. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1923. Digitized
• Nicolaes Maes. German publishing company, Stuttgart 1924.
• Pieter de Hooch. The master's painting in 180 illustrations; with an appendix on the genre painters around Pieter de Hooch and the art of Hendrik van der Burch. German publishing company, Stuttgart / Berlin / Leipzig 1929.
• Jacques Louis David and the French Revolution . Sherman, New York 1929.
• Frans Hals paintings in America. 1936.
• Leonardo da Vinci. Loan exhibition. 1452–1519 , exh. Cat., Los Angeles County Museum, June 3 – July 17, 1949, arr. v. WR Valentiner et al., Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles 1949.
• Studies of Italian Renaissance sculpture . Phaidon Press, London 1950.
• The Bamberg Rider. Studies of Mediaeval German sculpture. Zeitlin & Ver Brugge, Los Angeles 1956.
• Rembrandt and Spinoza. A study of the spiritual conflicts in seventeenth-century Holland . Phaidon Press, London 1957.

literature

• Margaret Stars: Passionate Eye. The Life of William R. Valentiner. Wayne State Univ. Press 1979, ISBN 978-0814316313 .
• Valentiner, Wilhelm (Reinhold Otto). In: Rudolf Vierhaus (Ed.): German Biographical Encyclopedia. Volume 10: Thies - Zymalkowski. De Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 2008, ISBN 978-3-598-25040-8 , p. 216.

Web links

Wikisource: Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner  - Sources and full texts

Commons : Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Books and articles by Valentin in the Heidelberg University Library
• Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner papers, 1860-1974
• Downloadable books by Valentiner , Internet Archive
• Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner in the Dictionary of Art Historians

Individual evidence

1. ^ New York, Passenger Lists, 1820–1957 , accessed on Ancestry.com on November 8, 2013.
2. ^ Rembrandt in America: William Valentiner. (No longer available online.) In: www.unctv.org. Archived from the original on September 13, 2015 ; accessed on September 1, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ^ Bavarian Main State Archives, Munich; Department IV War Archives. War Tribe Rolls, 1914–1918; Volume: 13598. War log: Vol. 2. Quoted from the digitized copy at Ancestry.com.
4. ↑ Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry Murals. (No longer available online.) In: www.bridgemanimages.com. Archived from the original on September 2, 2015 ; accessed on September 1, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.