Walter Ferdinand Friedlaender

Background

He was born in Berlin, Germany. Little is known about his parents or early life.

Education

He studied Indology under W"sslin at the University of Berlin, from which he received a Ph. D. in Sanskrit in 1898.

His doctoral dissertation was on the Mahabharata, an Indian epic poem. During the early 1900's, he became interested in the rapidly developing discipline of art history. From 1907 to 1911 he studied in Rome as a staff member of the Prussian Historical Institute.

In 1912 he published a monograph on the Casino of Pope Pius IV. Soon afterward, Friedlaender began what would become his lifelong study of the paintings of the seventeenth-century French artist Nicolas Poussin.

Career

From 1912 to 1914, Friedlaender lived in Paris, where he wrote Nicolas Poussin (1914), the first of several books on the subject. He then returned to Germany, where he joined the art history faculty of Freiburg University, his academic home from 1914 to 1933.

Friedlaender, inspired by Alois Riegl's sympathetic studies of late Roman art, began to explore Italian mannerism, a sixteenth-century style that art historians, following Bernard Berenson, disparaged as an affected and exaggerated imitation of Michelangelo's generation.

In 1914, Friedlaender challenged this assessment in his inaugural address, "The Anticlassical Style, " at Freiburg University.

Friedlaender subsequently distinguished between an initial phase of mannerism (1520 - 1550), dominated by the Florentine painters Rosso, Pontormo, and Parmigianino, who rejected the High Renaissance classical norms, and a second period (1550 - 1600), when Lodovico Carracci, Cigoli, and Caravaggio brought about a return to simplicity, objectivity, and truth to nature.

Friedlaender alluded to this phase's return to the foundations of the Renaissance as the "grandfather law, " whereby a generation of reformers disregarded the teachings of their parents and adopted instead the norms of their grandparents. Friedlaender, who also served as acting director of the Freiburg Kunsthistorische Institut, taught and published with prolific regularity.

Though Poussin continued to dominate Friedlaender's studies, he wrote with erudition on Claude Lorrain, Carracci, and Rubens.

In 1933, anticipating his upcoming retirement from the university, his students gathered papers for a festschrift for him.

Nazi officials banned publication of the essays in honor of a Jewish scholar, dismissed Friedlaender from the Freiburg University faculty--one year short of retirement--and expelled him from Germany.

In July 1935, Friedlaender, assisted by a grant from the Committee in Aid to Displaced German Scholars, immigrated to the United States.

He was appointed lecturer in art history at the University of Pennsylvania that same month. The following autumn, Friedlaender was appointed to the faculty of New York University. The university's nascent Institute of Fine Arts, then known as the Graduate Center, selected him as a visiting professor along with Karl Lehmann.

The institute's scholars included Henri Focillon, Marcel Aubert, Erwin Panofsky (Friedlaender's former student), Adolph Goldschmidt, and Richard Ettinghausen. Walter Cook, the founder of the institute, commented, "Hitler shakes the trees, and I pick up the apples. "

Their collective endeavors greatly advanced America's reputation in art history. For his part, Friedlaender established the institute's reputation in baroque art. Friedlaender defined scholarly fulfillment as "the conquest of provinces. "

At the age of sixty-three, beset by failing eyesight and hearing, illnesses, financial worries, and displacement from his homeland, he embarked on a second art-history career. Friedlaender's publications continued unabated with major works on Poussin (several in collaboration with Anthony Blunt and Rudolf Wittkower), on Caravaggio, and on David and Delacroix.

Students and colleagues recall his professionalism, generosity, and unfailing gregariousness.

Friedlaender's enthusiastic mentorship informed the early studies of the American art historians John Coolidge, Jane Costello, Creighton Gilbert, Robert Goldwater, Frederick Hartt, and Donald Posner.

At the time of his death, Friedlaender was working on a festschrift essay dedicated to a colleague. Friedlaender's contribution to the collection was called "Exemplum Virtutis, " a theme that much concerned him.

Achievements

• In 1960, Friedlaender organized a major Poussin exhibit at the Louvre. In 1963 he was honored with an international festschrift. That same year, he was elected honorary senator of the University of Freiburg, and he lectured there while publishing a final volume on Poussin (1966). He completed a monograph on Titian just days before his death in New York City.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism in Italian Painting (Interpretations in Art)

    (Here are presented two essays by one of the pioneers in t...)

  • Introduction to Social Welfare

    (This book has hardback covers.Ex-library,With usual stamp...)

  • David to Delacroix

Views

Quotations: He faced adversities with good-humored stoicism, saying, "I never stick my nose in my own business. "

He argued that sixteenth-century painting was "not merely a conjunction between Renaissance and Baroque, but an independent age of style, autonomous and most meaningful. "

Personality

Though Friedlaender, a naturalized American citizen, was fluent in several languages, his heavy German accent permeated all his spoken words and was gently mocked by students and professors as "Friedlaenderese. "

Interests

• His interests included music, literature, travel, and most especially his students.

• Music & Bands

  For his part, Friedlaender established the institute's reputation in baroque art.

Connections

Little is known about his parents or early life.