John Rewald

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John Rewald (May 12, 1912 – February 2, 1994) was a German-born American art historian, scholar of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Paul Cézanne.

[edit] Biography

Scholar of Impressionism and Cézanne, Rewald wrote the first scholarly synthesis of Impressionism in the English language. Rewald's father was Bruno Albert Rewald (b. 1885), a chemist, and mother Paula Feinstein (Rewald) (1880-1964) a dentist. He was educated at the Lichtwark School in Hamburg, receiving his Abitur in 1931. He spent the years 1931-36 studying art history at various universities, including Hamburg under Erwin Panofsky (q.v.) and Fritz Saxl (q.v.), and Frankfurt. Rewald entered the Sorbonne in 1932, ostensibly for a year's study, but after Hitler's rise the following year in Germany, he was compelled to remain in France as an exile. While rambling through France visiting the rural cathedrals, Rewald met fellow German Leo Marchutz, a painter who was searching out the landscapes of Paul Cézanne's work. Rewald and Marchutz joined forces, Rewald photographing the landscapes used in Cézanne's pictures. (These photographs became the shots for Rewald's book on Post-Impressionism). At the Sorbonne, he convinced Henri Focillon (q.v.) to allow him to write his dissertation on Cézanne, an artist considered too recent to be a subject of study. Rewald's dissertation, Cézanne et Zola, addressed the friendship between the two creative personalities. Between 1936-41 he worked as a journalist for various newspapers writing art criticism. He married Estelle Haimovici in 1939. When France declared war on Germany, he was interned in 1939 as an enemy alien--despite being Jewish--before emigrating to the United States in 1941. He was awarded the Prix Charles Blanc in 1940 for his dissertation, in absentia. In New York, where Museum of Modern Art Director Alfred Barr (q.v.) had sponsored Rewald's immigration, Rewald initially found work at Weyhe's Book Shop and in 1942 for the War Department as a French interpreter. Beginning in 1943, he consulted for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organizing exhibitions for it and other museums, and researching his magnum opus, History of Impressionism. Rewald had shown Barr a mass of unpublished Cézanne correspondence that Rewald had collected for his dissertation in France. Barr asked his former professor Paul J. Sachs (q.v.) at Harvard to convince their press to published them. But Harvard University Press turned him down. Rewald, again at Barr's insistence, tried and failed to obtain a Guggenheim fellowship. Ultimately, Barr persuaded the New York branch of the Durand-Ruel Gallery to make a tax-free contribution to the Museum, which Barr gave to Rewald to complete the History of Impressionism, published in 1946. During the rest of his life, Rewald revised and republished it in five editions. After a divorce from his first wife, he married Alice Leglise-Bellony in 1956. Rewald was a visiting professor at Princeton University between 1961 and 1964. He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1964, remaining until 1971. In 1971 he became part of the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York as distinguished professor of art history. In 1977 he organized the highly important Cézanne: The Late Work exhibition at MoMA with William Rubin (q.v.). He spent the year 1979 as the A. W. Mellon Lecturer, National Gallery of Art. Rewald retired from CUNY in 1984. In 1986 Rewald was awarded the Mitchell Prize for his dissertation on Cézanne and Zola, which appeared in English as Cezanne: A Biography. He was instrumental in creating a foundation to buy Cézanne's studio and turn it into a museum. He died of congrestive heart failure at age 81. A street in Aix-en-Provence, where Cézanne lived and worked, is named after him. His son, Paul Rewald, who was a vice president of Sotheby Parke Bernet, died of cancer at age 32 in 1976. His daughter, Sabine Rewald, is a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Rewald's scholarship, most exemplified in his histories of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, is the highly documented, nearly day-by-day account of the movement. His work, when compared to other treatments of the subjects, is shorter on analysis, but remains the authoritative source for dates and chronology of late-nineteenth century French art. A connoisseur-historian at odds with heavily psychological interpretations, he was a vocal critic, along with the critic John Canady (q.v.), of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's selling of some of its important paintings in the early 1970s under Thomas Hoving (q.v.). Throughout his career, he advised John Hay Whitney and Paul Mellon on both purchases to their private collections and donations to art galleries.

[From: www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/rewaldj.htm. See below under 'External links'.]

[edit] Bibliography

Cézanne et Zola, 1936
Paul Cézanne correspondance, 1937
Georges Seurat, 1943
Camille Pissarro: Lettres à son fils Lucien Pissarro, 1943
History of Impressionism, 1946
History of Post-Impressionism: From van Gogh to Gauguin, 1956; revised edition: Secker & Warburg, London 1978
The Paintings of Paul Cézanne: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1996; in collaboration with Walter Feilchenfeldt and Jayne Warman