Kermit S. Champa; Art Historian
Hyfler/Rosner
BYLINE: By KATHRYN SHATTUCK NY Times
Kermit Swiler Champa, a professor of art and architecture at
Brown University whose impassioned lectures inspired several
generations of historians and curators, died on July 22 at
his home in Providence, R.I. He was 64.
The cause was lung cancer, said his wife, Judith Tolnick.
A specialist in modernism and 19th-century French painting,
Mr. Champa drew his love for music into his theories about
art, which he considered intimately connected aesthetic
forms, and found links between, say, Renoir and French
Wagnerism, and Mondrian and boogie-woogie. In ''The Rise of
Landscape Painting in France: Corot to Monet'' (Abrams,
1991), he used symphonic music as a backdrop for the
philosophical and intellectual importance of landscape
painting. '''Masterpiece' Studies: Manet, Zola, Van Gogh and
Monet'' (Penn State, 1994) investigated the interrelatedness
of music, art and literature on advanced French painting in
the 1880's. At his death he was revising his latest book,
''The Slang of Aestheticism: The Anglo-American Color-Music
Project, 1898-1950.''
As a boy near Lancaster, Pa., Mr. Champa sold his cherished
collection of Lionel trains so that he could buy a trombone.
He wanted to become a performer, and in his freshman year at
Yale, where he studied art in hopes of teaching it, he
traveled to Europe as a member of the marching band. He
earned a bachelor's degree in art history from Yale in 1960
and a doctorate from Harvard in 1965. After returning to
Yale as an assistant professor of art history, he joined the
faculty of Brown in 1970, where he became a full professor
in 1974.
A formalist whose early mentors included the Harvard art
historian and the art critic Clement Greenberg, Mr. Champa
later increasingly investigated the role of popular culture
in interpreting the artists he studied.
''He was a formalist in the sense of being very concerned
with aesthetic issues in painting, rather than political or
social subject matter, and of course, that kind of writing
about art endeared him to a lot of painters because that's
how painters talk about each other's works,'' Hilton Kramer,
the art critic of The New York Observer and a longtime
acquaintance of Mr. Champa's, said in a telephone interview.
''But he was very much open to change and innovation and I
think that openness was one of the reasons he was so
successful as a teacher.''
Mr. Champa's lectures drew legions of students, who poured
out into the aisles. An exhilarating speaker, he had been
named in 1975 by Esquire magazine as one of the 10 ''sexiest
professors in America.''
''For his graduate students, Champa was the eminence grise,
himself that great work of art: intimidating and private and
connective at once,'' writes James Panero, a former student,
in the forthcoming September issue of The New Criterion.
''His relationships with students transcended the usual
chitchat (sometimes awkwardly so) and went right to the
heart of the matter. Everything you needed to know could be
found in Courbet, Meier-Graefe, Baudelaire and Wagner.
Meeting adjourned.''
In 1995 Mr. Champa was named the Andrea V. Rosenthal
professor in the history of art and architecture.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons,
Russell, of San Francisco, and Anthony, of Providence; a
daughter, Sarah, of London and Providence; and his father,
Valentino A. Champa of Lancaster, Pa.; and his stepmother,
Helen Conner Champa.