Christopher Wood (art historian)

Last updated

Christopher S. Wood (born June 7, 1961) is an American art historian. He is a professor in the Department of German at New York University. [1]

Contents

Early life and education

Wood is the son of Gordon S. Wood, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the early American republic and University professor emeritus at Brown University. His sister, Amy Wood, is a professor of history at Illinois State University. [2]

Wood was raised in Barrington, Rhode Island, attending Barrington High School. He earned an A.B. in history and literature at Harvard University, completing an honors thesis on Henry Fielding in 1983. [3] After a year on a Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst fellowship at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany, he returned to Harvard and in 1992 received a PhD in fine arts. His dissertation, [4] supervised by Henri Zerner, considered the landscape drawings, prints and paintings of Albrecht Altdorfer. From 1989 to 1992, he was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. [5]

Career

From 1992 to 2014, Wood rose, incrementally, from assistant professor to Carnegie Professor in the History of Art at Yale University. [6] In 2014, he joined the German studies department at New York University.

Wood has also held visiting appointments at the University of California, Berkeley (1997); Vassar College, as Belle Ribicoff Distinguished Visiting Scholar, 2001; and Hebrew University, Jerusalem (2007).

From 1999 to 2002, he was book review editor of the journal of the College Art Association, the Art Bulletin . His review of Hans Belting's Bild-Anthropologie, in Art Bulletin 86 (June 2004): 370–73, was selected as one of 38 texts for inclusion in the Art Bulletin Centennial Anthology 1911–2011. In 2019 he published A History of Art History (Princeton University Press, September 2019). [7]

Research

Based on his dissertation, Wood's first book, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (Reaktion and Chicago, 1993), was a monograph on the sixteenth-century German painter who created the first pure landscape paintings in the European tradition. This book was reissued with a new Afterword in 2014. [8] Wood has published many articles on the art and culture of the German late Middle Ages and Renaissance, including essays on Albrecht Dürer and Albrecht Altdorfer; on drawings; on the cult of images and Reformation iconoclasm; on ex votos; and on early archeological scholarship. He has also written on Italian artists including Piero della Francesca, Raphael, and Dosso Dossi.

In 2000 Wood published an anthology of translated writings by Viennese art historians of the early twentieth century, with an introductory essay: The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (ZONE Books). His work on the history of the discipline of art history and its meaning within modernity includes articles on Alois Riegl, Josef Strzygowski, Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, Otto Pächt, Ernst Gombrich, and Michael Baxandall. He has translated the treatise Perspective as Symbolic Form by Panofsky.

Another aspect of his research concerns the coordination of art and history. Early archeological studies, archaism, and typology are the main themes of his Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago, 2008), which was awarded the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship. [9] Anachronic Renaissance , co-authored with Alexander Nagel (ZONE, 2010), has been widely reviewed. The French translation (Renaissance anachroniste, Les Presses du Réel) by Françoise Jaouen was awarded the Prix de la traduction of the Salon du livre et de la revue d'art at the Festival de l'histoire de l'art, Fontainebleau, June 2013. [10] Italian (Quodlibet) and Spanish (Akal) translations are in press.

Honors

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Albrecht Dürer</span> German painter, printmaker and theorist (1471–1528)

Albrecht Dürer, sometimes spelled in English as Durer, was a German painter, printmaker, and theorist of the German Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg, Dürer established his reputation and influence across Europe in his twenties due to his high-quality woodcut prints. He was in contact with the major Italian artists of his time, including Raphael, Giovanni Bellini, and Leonardo da Vinci, and from 1512 was patronized by Emperor Maximilian I.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Albrecht Altdorfer</span> German painter, engraver and architect

Albrecht Altdorfer was a German painter, engraver and architect of the Renaissance working in Regensburg, Bavaria. Along with Lucas Cranach the Elder and Wolf Huber he is regarded to be the main representative of the Danube School, setting biblical and historical subjects against landscape backgrounds of expressive colours. He is remarkable as one of the first artists to take an interest in landscape as an independent subject. As an artist also making small intricate engravings he is seen to belong to the Nuremberg Little Masters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Spence</span> Canadian-American economist

Andrew Michael Spence is a Canadian-American economist and Nobel laureate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erwin Panofsky</span> German art historian

Erwin Panofsky was a German-Jewish art historian, whose academic career was pursued mostly in the U.S. after the rise of the Nazi regime.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Heinrich Wölfflin</span> Swiss German art historian

Heinrich Wölfflin was a Swiss art historian, esthetician and educator, whose objective classifying principles were influential in the development of formal analysis in art history in the early 20th century. He taught at Basel, Berlin and Munich in the generation that saw German art history's rise to pre-eminence. His three most important books, still consulted, are Renaissance und Barock (1888), Die Klassische Kunst, and Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alte Pinakothek</span> Art museum in Munich, Germany

The Alte Pinakothek is an art museum located in the Kunstareal area in Munich, Germany. It is one of the oldest galleries in the world and houses a significant collection of Old Master paintings. The name Alte (Old) Pinakothek refers to the time period covered by the collection—from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. The Neue Pinakothek, re-built in 1981, covers nineteenth-century art, and Pinakothek der Moderne, opened in 2002, exhibits modern art. All three galleries are part of the Bavarian State Painting Collections, an organization of the Free state of Bavaria.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joachim Patinir</span> 16th-century Flemish painter

Joachim Patinir, also called Patenier, was a Flemish Renaissance painter of history and landscape subjects. He was Flemish, from the area of modern Wallonia, but worked in Antwerp, then the centre of the art market in the Low Countries. Patinir was a pioneer of landscape as an independent genre and he was the first Flemish painter to regard himself primarily as a landscape painter. He effectively invented the world landscape, a distinct style of panoramic northern Renaissance landscapes which is Patinir's important contribution to Western art. His work marks an important stage in the development of the representation of perspective in landscape painting.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pief Panofsky</span> American physicist

Wolfgang Kurt Hermann "Pief" Panofsky, was a German-American physicist who won many awards including the National Medal of Science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">German Renaissance</span> Renaissance in Germany

The German Renaissance, part of the Northern Renaissance, was a cultural and artistic movement that spread among German thinkers in the 15th and 16th centuries, which developed from the Italian Renaissance. Many areas of the arts and sciences were influenced, notably by the spread of Renaissance humanism to the various German states and principalities. There were many advances made in the fields of architecture, the arts, and the sciences. Germany produced two developments that were to dominate the 16th century all over Europe: printing and the Protestant Reformation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James S. Ackerman</span> American architectural historian (1919–2016)

James Sloss Ackerman was an American architectural historian, a major scholar of Michelangelo's architecture, of Palladio and of Italian Renaissance architectural theory.

<i>Melencolia I</i> 1514 engraving by Albrecht Dürer

Melencolia I is a large 1514 engraving by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer. Its central subject is an enigmatic and gloomy winged female figure thought to be a personification of melancholia – melancholy. Holding her head in her hand, she stares past the busy scene in front of her. The area is strewn with symbols and tools associated with craft and carpentry, including an hourglass, weighing scales, a hand plane, a claw hammer, and a saw. Other objects relate to alchemy, geometry or numerology. Behind the figure is a structure with an embedded magic square, and a ladder leading beyond the frame. The sky contains a rainbow, a comet or planet, and a bat-like creature bearing the text that has become the print's title.

<i>The Battle of Alexander at Issus</i> Painting by Albrecht Altdorfer

The Battle of Alexander at Issus is a 1529 oil painting by the German artist Albrecht Altdorfer, a pioneer of landscape art and a founding member of the Danube school. The painting portrays the 333 BC Battle of Issus, in which Alexander the Great secured a decisive victory over Darius III of Persia and gained crucial leverage in his campaign against the Persian Empire. The painting is widely regarded as Altdorfer's masterpiece, and is one of the most famous examples of the type of Renaissance landscape painting known as the world landscape, which here reaches an unprecedented grandeur.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph Koerner</span> American art historian (born 1958)

Joseph Leo Koerner is an American art historian and filmmaker. He is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Art and Architecture and Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Since 2008 he has also been Senior Fellow at the Harvard's Society of Fellows.

Otto Pächt was an Austrian art historian and one of the representatives of the second wave of the Vienna School of Art History. He mostly wrote on the medieval and Renaissance art of Europe. An exile from the Nazis, he taught in England and United States, before returning to Austria in 1963.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harry Bober</span> American art historian

Harry Bober (1915–1988) was an American art historian, a university professor, and a writer. He was the first Avalon Professor of the Humanities a New York University (NYU). He wrote and edited several books and published numerous articles on the art, architecture and historiography of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance period.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gauvin Alexander Bailey</span> American art historian

Gauvin Alexander Bailey is an American-Canadian author and art historian. He is Professor and Alfred and Isabel Bader Chair in Southern Baroque Art at Queen's University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">World landscape</span> Type of composition in Western painting

The world landscape, a translation of the German Weltlandschaft, is a type of composition in Western painting showing an imaginary panoramic landscape seen from an elevated viewpoint that includes mountains and lowlands, water, and buildings. The subject of each painting is usually a Biblical or historical narrative, but the figures comprising this narrative element are dwarfed by their surroundings.

James E. Snyder (1928–1990) was an American art historian, specializing in Northern Renaissance art. His Northern Renaissance Art of 1985 was a standard textbook on the subject for several decades, with a posthumous revised edition in 2005, revised by Larry Silver and Henry Luttikhuizen, being somewhat replaced by Jeffrey Chipps Smith's The Northern Renaissance of 2004. Snyder taught at Bryn Mawr College from 1964 until his retirement in 1989. He died of liver disease in August 1990, aged 62.

Walter William Spencer Cook, also known as Walter W. S. Cook in citation was an American art historian and professor. He specialized in Spanish Medieval art history. He was an emeritus professor from New York University and he helped found the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. He had a prominent role in introducing eminent German art historians to the United States.

References

  1. ↑ "Administration/Staff". NYU . Retrieved 13 June 2017.
  2. ↑ Amy Wood. Department of History. Illinois State University 2019. Retrieved Feb. 4, 2019
  3. ↑ Christopher Stewart Wood. "Henry Fielding and Eighteenth-century English Society: The Making of an Augustan Pessimist." A.B. thesis, Harvard University, 1983.
  4. ↑ Christopher Stewart Wood. "The Independent Landscapes of Albrecht Altdorfer." PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1993.
  5. ↑ Directory of Current and Former Senior and Junior Fellows. Cambridge, Mass.: Society of Fellows. 2011.
  6. ↑ "Christopher Wood designated the Carnegie Professor of the History of Art". Yale. 23 January 2014. Retrieved 13 June 2017.
  7. ↑ Wood, Christopher S. (September 3, 2019). A History of Art History. Princeton University Press. ISBN   978-0-691-15652-1.
  8. ↑ Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape. The University of Chicago Press . Retrieved 13 June 2017.
  9. ↑ "Humanities Book Prize Archives". Texas A&M University . Retrieved 13 June 2017.
  10. ↑ "Salon du livre et de la revue d'art". Festival de l'histoire de l'art. Retrieved 13 June 2017.
  11. ↑ "Christopher S. Wood". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved 13 June 2017.
  12. ↑ "Christopher S. Wood". The American Academy in Berlin. Retrieved 14 July 2017.
  13. ↑ "Christopher Stewart Wood". Institute for Advanced Study. Retrieved 13 June 2017.
  14. ↑ "Fellow - Christopher S. Wood". IFK. Retrieved 13 June 2017.
  15. ↑ "American Academy of Arts and Sciences Elects Five NYU Faculty as 2016 Fellows". NYU. Retrieved 13 June 2017.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.