Wolfgang Pfeiffer (art historian)

Wolfgang Pfeiffer (* 1912 in Dresden ; † October 28, 2003 in Itanhaém , Brazil ) was a German-Brazilian art historian and non-fiction author.

life and work

Wolfgang Pfeiffer grew up in Meißen , where his father Max Adolf Pfeiffer was the general director of the Meißen porcelain factory . Pfeiffer studied art history in Munich and wrote his first art-historical treatise. In 1941 he received his doctorate. During the Second World War he worked for the protection of art in occupied France and was taken prisoner by the Americans towards the end of the war.

In 1948 he emigrated to Brazil with his sister Ulrike Pfeiffer. There he worked at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) and coordinated the 4th Biennale in 1957. In the early 1970s, Pfeiffer and three other art historians with a doctorate were offered a professorship at the University of São Paulo to set up the art history course, which was new for Brazil. In 1978 he took over the management of the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM) for four years . Pfeiffer published numerous art catalogs. In 1970 he founded the advisory board of the Goethe Institute in São Paulo, to which he was a member for ten years.

Publications (selection)

• Brazil. Peoples and cultures between the Amazon and the Atlantic . 3. Edition. DuMont, Cologne 1991, ISBN 3-7701-1434-5 .
• Artistas alemães eo Brasil = German artists and Brazil . Empresa das Artes, Projetos e Edições Artísticas, São Paulo 1996, ISBN 85-85628-21-9 .

literature

• Martina Merklinger: The São Paulo Biennale. Cultural exchange between Brazil and the young Federal Republic of Germany (1949–1954) . Transcript, Bielefeld 2013, ISBN 978-3-8376-2279-9 .

Web links

• Newspaper report on letters
• Homenagem a Wolfgang Pfeiffer - Bienal de São Paulo
• Overview of the exhibitions curated or judged by him , website of the Enciclopédia Itaú Cultural