Julius Held, Times of London obit
Hyfler/Rosner
German-born art historian renowned for his work in America on
Rembrandt and Rubens
JULIUS HELD was one of the great art historians of the 20th
century. He came from the generation of gifted Jews who fled west from
Nazism, a compatriot of Wittkower, Gombrich and Panofsky. His detailed
studies of Rembrandt and Rubens are a tribute as much to his humanism, and
the German prewar society that nurtured it, as to his scholarship.
He was born in 1905 in Mosbach, Germany, not far from Heidelberg
where he was later a university student. Further studies in Berlin
introduced him to the works of Rembrandt in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum,
where in 1931 he became an assistant to Max Friedlaender.
He subsequently continued his art history training in Vienna. A
visit to Dutch relations in 1923 opened his eyes to the physical and
intellectual delights of the Netherlands. Among the former were seeing the
sea for the first time and eating roast-beef sandwiches. Of more influence
on his subsquent career were the paintings of the Mauritshuis and the
Rijksmuseum.
Held's love of Flemish art arrived a little later, on a visit to
Antwerp when he was writing his dissertation on the influence of Albrecht
Dürer on Netherlandish painting. The visit contributed not only to a
doctorate in art history from the University of Freiberg but also to a
lifelong engagement with the art of Rubens.
Held's status as a Jew forced him to leave Berlin in 1934,
although he returned briefly, at some considerable risk, to persuade his
future wife, Ingrid-Maerta Pettersson, to join him in the United States.
There he became a lecturer at New York University, moving in 1937 to Barnard
College, a women's liberal arts college affiliated to Columbia University,
where he taught until 1971.
He was demanding of his students but gave much in return. In
1968, in the midst of the student unrest, he wrote in the foreword to his
book Rembrandt Studies that he was dedicating the volume to them. He was
reminding his students that, despite their understandable social and
political concerns at a moment when "the very functions and goals of
traditional scholarship are being questioned", art history remained
important.
Foremost among his Rubens publications are the meticulous
catalogues of the Selected Drawings (1959, published by Phaidon, before he
was taken up by Princeton University Press) and the Oil Sketches of Peter
Paul Rubens (1980) as well as the collected essays published for his 75th
birthday in 1982 as Rubens and his Circle. This last volume, published again
by Princeton, was edited by three of his students.
A key to Held's philosophy of art being integral to life appears
in the foreword to his Rembrandt Studies (1991), where he wrote that as he
composed the essays he "was searching for more than the formal and
intellectual organisation of the works discussed, was also trying to see if
by analysing these works they could open up a path to the thoughts and
emotions which consciously or unconsciously had guided the hand of their
maker".
Held's classical education not only allowed him quickly to
master the English language, but also gave him insights into the subject
matter of Rembrandt and Rubens. It richly informed the scholarship in
Rembrandt's Aristotle and other Rembrandt Studies (1969). Yet Held's
analysis of "Aristotle contemplating the Bust of Homer" is equally striking
for the personal insight that connected Homer's blindness with Rembrandt's
father's loss of sight.
Held was not part of the Rembrandt Research Project which set
out to determine the authenticity of Rembrandt paintings and drawings, and
he remained unconvinced by the controversial demotion of the Frick's Polish
Rider from Rembrandt to not-Rembrandt. He was unashamed to be a connoisseur
in an age when that skill was progressively debased. Without it he could not
have sifted the oil sketches of Rubens as skilfully as he did.
He had a major triumph in that field in 1970 with the
publication of an article in the Burlington Magazine pointing out that five
of the nine large canvases by Rubens on the ceiling of the Banqueting House
in Whitehall had been incorrectly installed and needed to be turned around
by 180 degrees, which was duly done a few years later.
In the 1950s Held was asked by Luis Ferre, the Governor of
Puerto Rico, if he would advise him on the purchase of works for a new art
museum in Ponce. Held was responsible for many high- quality acquisitions,
particularly in the field of Baroque and pre-Raphaelite painting, creating
the finest collection of European art in the Caribbean. Although there are
works by Rubens, Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Velazquez and Rodin, Lord Leighton'
s Flaming June is undoubtedly the best known.
Held also collected paintings and drawings for himself, many of
which he gave on long-term loan to museums in America. In 1984, 202 out of
his collection of 1,000 Old Master and modern drawings, ranging from Rubens
to Schiele and Eakins, went permanently to the National Gallery of Art in
Washington.
Among Held's many honours were the Pfalzgraf Otto Plakette of
Mosbach, an honorary citizenship, awarded to him in 1990 and in which he
took much pleasure. He had returned to the town in the 1970s to find a car
park on the site of the synagogue which had been burnt down on Kristallnacht
1938. It was through his efforts that a memorial to the Jews of Mosbach
replaced the cars in 1988.
On retirement, Held and his wife moved to a farm in Bennington,
Vermont. He became affiliated to the Clark Art Institute and Williams
College in Massachusetts, curating the exhibition Rubens and the Book at the
former in 1977 and holding a visiting professorship at the latter until
1981. Trim and athletic, he rode a bicycle into his nineties and was a keen
supporter of the tennis player Steffi Graf, who was born near Mosbach.
His wife, the Swedish art conservator Ingrid-Marta Pettersson,
died in 1986. He is survived by his son and daughter.
Julius Held, art historian, was born on April 15, 1905. He died
on December 22, 2002, aged 97.
