Wilhelm Pinder

File:Wilhelm Pinder (Kunsthistoriker).jpg

Wilhelm Pinder, 1910's

Georg Maximilian Wilhelm Pinder (25 June 1878 – 13 May 1947) was a German art historian.

Pinder was a university lecturer in Darmstadt, Strasbourg, Breslau, Leipzig, Munich and Berlin. His teaching and research work focused especially on German art and architecture and their place in the development of European art.

Biography

Wilhelm Pinder was born in Kassel in 1878, the son of Eduard Pinder (1836–1890) and his wife Elisabeth Kunze. His father was director at the Museum Fridericianum. Pinder had the daughters of the painter Johann Friedrich August Tischbein as great-grandmothers. His grandfather Moritz Pinder was a numismatist and librarian at the Royal Library in Berlin.

Wilhelm Pinder went to the Friedrichsgymnasium in Kassel and studied first law (1896–1897), then archaeology and art history at the universities of Göttingen, Berlin, Munich and Leipzig. In 1896 he became a member of the fraternity Alemannia Göttingen. He received his doctorate in 1903 with August Schmarsow in Leipzig with a thesis on Romanesque interiors in Normandy. After his habilitation in 1905, he became a private lecturer at the University of Würzburg, later he completed his military service and was an assistant in Leipzig for a year.

In 1911, he became a full professor of art history at the Technical University of Darmstadt, succeeding Rudolf Kautzsch. On September 30, 1916, he moved to the University of Breslau for one year and in 1918 to the University of Strasbourg for another year, following his military service during World War I. From 1919, he taught again in Breslau. From 1920 to 1927, he headed the Institute of Art History at the University of Leipzig, turning down offers of professorships in Göttingen and Vienna. This was followed by a chair at the Institute of Art History at the University of Munich and, from 1935, at the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin (after he had rejected a call to Berlin as late as 1931).

During the National Socialist era, Pinder paid enthusiastic homage to the regime. In turn, the government showed its gratitude by appointing him to the most prestigious art history chair in Germany, that at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, and by admitting him to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. The fact that he did not become a party member in June 1933, despite his application for admission, was due to a coincidence.

On November 11, 1933, Pinder was one of the speakers at the event for the Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State. In this speech, he stated: "This is politics from morality, this is politics from the heart, from an almost religious underground". He concluded his speech with the sentence: "...every German has to go, everyone is responsible, so that our people may do its duty before its Führer and stand before history." He struck similar notes in the preface to his Kunst der deutschen Kaiserzeit ("Art of the German Imperial Era") of 1935, which was addressed to a broader lay public: "German history, including that of art, is currently being rewritten. This is inevitable and only to be wished for."

He regarded the East of Europe as the natural habitat of the German people, which, "often shapelessly undulating new European territory," had "never seen a German majority, but also never any culture other than the German". He regarded the struggle for "the reconquest of the eastern residences abandoned (and taken by Slavs) by our Germanic ancestors" in the early Middle Ages as a historical German mission on behalf of Europe.

In a contribution to a Festschrift for Hitler's 50th birthday, he praised art history as racial history. He further wrote in the Festschrift: "The departure of Jewish art scholars from research and teaching frees them from the danger of overly conceptual thinking, the direction of which — as foreign to the essence of our art as it is to that of our science — could be an obstacle to the impact of purely German research". An assessment from the Rosenberg office dated September 11, 1942, stated, "can be deployed."

Later, however, Pinder's public criticism of National Socialist cultural and academic policies brought him into conflict with individual regime offices on several occasions, culminating in an attack against him by the SS journal Das Schwarze Korps in 1940. During World War II, Pinder was "assigned" by the Foreign Office to give lectures in friendly or occupied foreign countries.

Pinder was a member of the Wednesday Society in Berlin, which included critics of the regime.

Due to his National Socialist past, he was suspended after the war and was no longer given a chair. Shortly before his death, he received a research assignment on German art around 1800. In the spring of 1946, he was temporarily detained by the British due to a case of mistaken identity.

In the GDR, Pinder's speeches from the period, Reden aus der Zeit (1934), were placed on the list of literature to be censored and eliminated.

In the Federal Republic, Pinder's works were reprinted unchanged and without any distancing from editors until well into the 1950s. His true role during the war period era was not seen more critically until the reappraisal of National Socialist influences and currents in German art scholarship beginning in 1990.

Writings

Pinder's fame began with the illustrated books he published since 1910 in the series of "Blue Books" (German Cathedrals of the Middle Ages, German Baroque, Rembrandt's Self-Portraits, etc.), which made him known far beyond professional circles. He was co-editor of the Kritische Berichte (1927–1938), chairman of the Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft (1933–1945) and belonged to several academies.

Thematically, he dealt almost exclusively with German art and advocated a national conception of art history in which the "spirit of the people" was to manifest itself and which, according to Pinder, was also to strengthen national self-confidence. From the mid-1920s, he also advocated a biologically inspired generational theory, mediating between biographically oriented art history and overarching epochal representation, of the coexistence of different artists in one epoch as an expression of a "non-simultaneity of the simultaneous." His investigations into medieval sculpture led to a reassessment of 14th-century art with an influence on Expressionism.

He supervised the dissertations of some of the most prominent art historians of the next generations: his doctoral students included Theodor Hetzer, Ernst Kitzinger, Nikolaus Pevsner, Hermann Beenken, Wolfgang Hermann, Elizabeth Gilmore Holt (1905–1987), Hans Vogel, Florentine Mütherich, Bernhard Degenhart, Erhard Göpel, Edith Hoffmann, Alexander Freiherr von Reitzenstein, Josef Adolf Schmoll called Eisenwerth, Carl Lamb and Otto von Simson. Heinz Rudolf Rosemann (1930) and Hans Gerhard Evers (1932), both later professors of art history at the Technical University of Darmstadt , habilitated at his chair in Munich.

In 1922 he was elected a full member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities and in 1927 of the Bavarian Academy; from 1937 he was a corresponding member. The Prussian Academy of Sciences elected him as its member in 1937.

Works

• Einleitende Voruntersuchung zu einer Rhythmik romanischer Innenräume in der Normandie (1904)
• Deutsche Dome des Mittelalters (1910; several updated editions until 1969, 26th ed.)
• Mittelalterliche Plastik Würzburgs: Versuch einer lokalen Entwickelungsgeschichte vom Ende des 13. bis zum Anfang des 15. (1911)
• Deutscher Barock: Die großen Baumeister des 18. Jahrhunderts (1912; 14th and last edition 1965)
• Deutsche Burgen und feste Schlösser (1913; numerous modified editions until 1968)
• Bürgerbauten deutscher Vergangenheit (1914; numerous modified editions until 1957)
• Die Pièta (1922)
• Die deutsche Plastik vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zum Ende der Renaissance (1924–1929)
• Die deutsche Plastik des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts (1925)
• Der Deutsche Park. Vornehmlich des 18. Jahrhunderts (1925; 3rd and last ed., 1938)
• Der Naumburger Dom und seine Bildwerke, aufgenommen von Walter Hege, beschrieben von Wilhelm Pinder (1925; 8 editions until 1943, new edition 1952 under the title Der Naumburger Dom und der Meister seiner Bildwerke)
• Das Problem der Generation in der Kunstgeschichte Europas (1926; reprinted in 1949)
• Der Bamberger Dom und seine Bildwerke (1927)
• Goethe und die bildende Kunst (1933)
• "Was ist deutsch an der deutschen Kunst ? Zu der Schrift von K. K. Eberlein," Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, Vol. 2 (1933), 405–07.
• Deutsche Barockplastik (1933)
• Reden aus der Zeit (1934)
• "Vom Wikingertum unserer Kultur im Spiegel der neueren deutschen Kunstentwicklung," Forschungen und Fortschritte, Vol. 10 (1934), 178–230.
• Deutsche Kunstgeschichte: Eine Auswahl ihrer schönsten Werke, by Wolfgang Graf von Rothkirch, with a preface by Wilhelm Pinder (1934), 5–6.
• Der Kölner Dom (1934)
• "Architektur als Moral, Dresden". In: Heinrich Wölfflin, Festschrift zum siebzigsten Geburtstage (1935). 145–51.
• Vom Wesen und Werden deutscher Formen, Vol. 1: Die Kunst der deutschen Kaiserzeit bis zum Ende der staufischen Klassik (1935)
• Die Bildwerke des Naumburger Doms (1937)
• Georg Kolbe: Werke der letzten Jahre. Mit Betrachtungen über Kolbes Plastik (1937)
• Vom Wesen und Werden deutscher Formen, Vol. 2: Die Kunst der ersten Bürgerzeit bis zur Mitte des 15. Jahrhunderts (1937)
• Gesammelte Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1907–1935 (1938)
• Deutsche Burgen und Schlösser (1938)
• "Deutsche Kunstgeschichte." In: Wilhelm Pinder and Alfred Stange, eds., Deutsche Wissenschaft: Arbeit und Aufgabe. Dem Führer und Reichskanzler legt die deutsche Wissenschaft zu seinem 50. Geburtstag Rechenschaft ab über ihre Arbeit im Rahmen der ihr gestellten Aufgabe (1939)
• Vom Wesen und Werden deutscher Formen, Vol. 3: Die deutsche Kunst der Dürerzeit (1939)
• Deutscher Barock: die grossen Baumeister des 18. Jahrhunderts (1940)
• Deutsche Wasserburgen (1940; 8th and last edition 1968)
• Vom Wesen und Werden deutscher Formen, Vol. 4: Holbein der Jüngere und das Ende der altdeutschen Kunst (1940)
• "Sonderleistungen der deutschen Kunst: Festvortrag," Jahrbuch der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1942), 121–33.
• Rembrandts Selbstbildnisse (1943; 3rd and last edition 1956)
• "Vom Strahlungsbereich der deutschen Kunst," Forschungen und Fortschritte, Vol. 19 (1944)
• Sonderleistungen der deutschen Kunst (1944)
• Von den Künsten und der Kunst (1948)

References

• Magdalena Bushart, "Pinder, Georg Maximilian Wilhelm". In: Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB). 20. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, 2001, pp. 448–50.
• Magdalena Bushart, "Dienstreisen in Zeiten des Krieges. Wilhelm Pinder als Kulturbotschafter des Deutschen Reiches." In: Magdalena Bushart, Agnieszka Gasior, Alena Janatkova (eds.), Kunstgeschichte in den besetzten Gebieten 1939–1945. Böhlau, 2016, pp. 185–210.
• Heinrich Dilly, Deutsche Kunsthistoriker 1933–1945. DKV, München/Berlin, 1988.
• Max Dvorák, Idealism and Naturalism in Gothic Art. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967.
• Sabine Fastert, "Pluralismus statt Einheit. Die Rezeption von Wilhelm Pinders Generationenmodell nach 1945." In: Nikola Doll, Ruth Heftrig, Olaf Peters, Ulrich Rehm (eds.), Kunstgeschichte nach 1945. Kontinuität und Neubeginn in Deutschland. Köln 2006, pp. 51–65.
• Marlite Halbertsma, Wilhelm Pinder und die Deutsche Kunstgeschichte. Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft: Worms, 1992.
• Richard Hamann, "Nachruf auf Wilhelm Pinder. Berlin 1950." In: Jahrbuch der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. 1946–1949. 213–16.
• Jutta Held, "Kunstgeschichte im 'Dritten Reich': Wilhelm Pinder und Hans Jantzen an der Münchner Universität." In: Jutta Held (ed.), Kunstgeschichte an den Universitäten im Nationalsozialismus. Göttingen, 2003, pp. 17–59.
• Udo Kultermann, Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte. Prestel Verlag, 1996.
• Daniela Stöppel, "Wilhelm Pinder." In: Ulrich Pfisterer (ed.), Klassiker der Kunstgeschichte, Vol 2, Becksche Reihe, 2008, pp. 7–20.

External links

• Pinder, Wilhelm at Dictionary of Art Historians
• Works by Wilhelm Pinder at German National Library
• Works by Wilhelm Pinder at Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek