Julius Held, Art Historian And Expert On Rembrandt And Rubens, 97

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Julius Held, an art historian renowned for his studies in 16th- and
17th-century Dutch and Flemish art and a longtime professor of art
history at Barnard College, died on December 22, 2002, at his home in
Bennington, Vermont, at the age of 97.

Dr. Held was one of the last surviving members of an immensely
influential generation of German-trained art historians, including Erwin
Panofsky, Max Friedlander and Millard Meiss. He was recognized for his
expertise on Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Dyke, and his scholarship was
noted for a wide-ranging approach that included the study of social
history, analysis of iconography and exacting connoisseurship.

Dr. Held was frequently consulted by institutions and individuals
seeking to determine the authenticity of old master artworks. His
two-volume study "The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens" (Princeton
University Press, 1980) is considered a landmark in a field where
questions of authorship are especially difficult to sort out because of
the involvement of assistants in the productions of artists' workshops.

Other books by Dr. Held include "Rubens, Selected Drawings," a
two-volume work published by Phaidon in London in 1959; "Rembrandt's
`Aristotle' and Other Rembrandt Studies" (Princeton University Press,
1969); and, with Donald Posner, "17th- and 18th-Century Art: Baroque
Painting, Sculpture and Architecture" (Prentice Hall, 1971). Dr. Held
also published scores of articles in important periodicals like The Art
Bulletin and The Art Quarterly.

Julius Samuel Held was born in Mosbach, Germany, on April 15, 1905. He
attended the Universities of Heidelberg, Berlin and Vienna and, in 1930
received a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Freiburg for a
dissertation discussing the influence of Albrecht Dürer on Netherlandish
painting. He served an apprenticeship in art restoration as well.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, he was compelled to leave his job
at the Berlin Museum, and in 1934 he emigrated to the United States,
where he started out as a lecturer at New York University. He became a
lecturer at Barnard College in 1937 and a full professor in 1954.

He continued teaching at Barnard until his retirement in 1971, when he
and his wife, the former Ingrid-Marta Pettersson, an art conservator who
died in 1986, moved to Bennington. Dr. Held became a visiting professor
at Williams College, retiring in 1981.