Erwin Panofsky

Teaching in United States

Panofsky has already expressed interest in visiting America as early as 1929 on his correspondence with Fritz Saxl, and in 1930, he was invited by New York University (NYU) to serve as a Visiting Professor by recommendation from Goldschmidt . At that time, NYU's College of Fine Arts, which would later become the Institute of Fine Arts, was in the process of establishing America's first graduate department for art-historical research. By his participation, he helped Richard Offner and Walter William Spencer Cook to shape the department. Then, Panofsky was scheduled to teach during the Fall term of 1931-32, offering graduate-level courses along with a series of public lectures, all delivered in English.

During this first visit, Panofsky immersed himself in the scholarly environment of the East Coast, strengthening and expanding his American connections. He reconnected with Paul Sachs at Harvard delivering a lecture at the Fogg Museum. Panofsky had previously met Sachs in 1927 when Sachs visited Hamburg to inspect Aby Warburg’s Institute. He also visited Charles Rufus Morey, Alfred Barr, William J. Ivins and was introduced by Edward Warburg to a wealthy New York elite. Panofsky usually gave lectures at weekly salons hosted by Josephine Porter Boardman Crane which acquainted him with prominent figures such as the Rockefellers and the Straus family of Macy’s Department Store. This network will be beneficial when he later lost his position in Hamburg.

Following the success of his initial visit, Panofsky was considered for a return to the College of Fine Arts at NYU the following year. He managed to secure two additional twelve-week lecture courses for the spring of 1933 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Upon his return to America, Panofsky worked as an itinerant art historian, delivering lectures across the East Coast. With Adolf Hitler's appointment as Chancellor shortly after his arrival in New York, Panofsky expressed to Margaret Scolari Barr his relief at being in America, rather than witnessing the political crisis in Germany.

Although initially allowed to spend alternate terms in Hamburg and New York City, Panofsky’s appointment in Hamburg was terminated in 1933 after the Nazis came to power. This dismissal was due to his Jewish background. Panofsky faced limited employment opportunities outside of Germany, and the College of Fine Arts, due to a lack of funds, had not planned to invite him back after his spring lectureship. Cook could only offer Panofsky a single lecture course for the following year. With no immediate job prospects in America, Panofsky returned to his family in Hamburg, where conditions remained relatively safe at the time. Without teaching duties, he concentrated on his research and traveled to Belgium and France, including a visit to Henri Focillon, to explore future employment possibilities. Panofsky returned to New York in January 1934 to fulfill a temporary commitment to Cook and NYU, while Dora and their two young sons stayed in Hamburg.

Overwhelmed by his teaching and administrative duties at NYU, Panofsky lamented the lack of time for his own research and the prioritization of monetary concerns over scholarly pursuits. He expressed frustration to Margaret Barr about his extensive workload, including organizing syllabi, correcting test papers, and conducting numerous lectures and consultations. Although he appreciated Walter Cook's efforts in securing his position, he was critical of Cook's scholarly status and uncomfortable relying on financial support from New York's high society. Panofsky's dissatisfaction was further highlighted in a letter to Gertrud Bing, where he criticized the use of his seminar for NYU's publicity without his consent. Panofsky's first choice after 1933 was not to settle in America but to secure a position with the Warburg Library in London, which aligned to his humanistic expertise. Despite his efforts, those involved with the Library decided to help more disadvantaged exiled scholars.

His early visits to United States were financially motivated, as his NYU salary sustained his family’s rent in Hamburg. He disclosed this reason to Walter Friedländer. In a letter to Margaret Barr, he criticized American life as culturally “sterile” and critiqued U.S. academia: while he praised some Princeton graduate students, he derided NYU students as “stupid and ignorant.” During his 1934 return to NYU, his lectures were simplified for a paying public audience, leaving him feeling like a “workhorse.” NYU and Princeton University collaborated to provide him with paid work for two years. Cook secure a two-year Visiting Professorship for Panofsky at NYU in the fall of 1934 with a salary of $6000, while Morey arranged housing and schooling for Panofsky's family in Princeton in exchange for his teaching in the Department of Art and Archaeology. By this point, Panofsky had resolved never to return to Germany and was committed to establishing a permanent life in the United States.He finally secured a permanent position at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in April 1935. The IAS, founded by Abraham Flexner in 1930, was unique in its mission to emphasize research and advanced teaching without the burden of administrative duties or introductory teaching responsibilities, which aligned with Panofsky's needs. Panofsky was recommended for a faculty position by Morey. Flexner offered Panofsky a generous salary of $10,000, allowing him to continue his collaboration with Morey at Princeton and utilize Morey's established Index of Christian Art.In 1935, he was awarded Honorary Doctorate by Utrecht University.

Because of his appointment to the IAS, NYU was able to hire Friedländer and Karl Lehmann Friedländer and Karl Lehmann. While in this position, he was traveling to Europe to research Flemish and fifteenth-century German painting and working with Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars. He helped find work for displaced scholars— such as Richard G. Salomon, Ernst Kapp, Hans Baron and Kurt Wolff—by providing references and assisting with their CVs. He also gave temporary memberships at the IAS to Georg Swarzenski and Charles de Tolnay. Despite Panofsky's efforts to secure placements for his colleagues, he aware of the challenges posed by the ongoing Great Depression in America. Universities struggled with financial constraints and a lack of available jobs where the academic programs relied on rapidly decreasing temporary outside donations, leaving institutions like the College of Fine Arts unable to accommodate the large number of displaced art historians by 1937. In 1938, he relocated from the house arranged by Morey to a new residence on Battle Road in Princeton.In the same year, Panofsky started working on his book The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline as part of the Spencer Trask Lectures at 'The Meaning of the Humanities' symposium, held in Princeton at the invitation of the French philosopher Theodore Meyer Greene. Around that same time, he was preparing his book Studies in Iconology: Humanist Themes in the Art of the Renaissance for his 1937 Mary Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College, at the invitation of Marion Edwards Park.

He was part of the Kahler-Kreis American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the British Academy by geting Fellow of the British Academy. In 1954 he became foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1962 he received the Haskins Medal of The Medieval Academy of America. In 1947–1948 Panofsky was the Charles Eliot Norton professor at Harvard University; the lectures later became Early Netherlandish Painting.

He became particularly well known for his studies of symbols and iconography in art. First in a 1934 article, then in his Early Netherlandish Painting (1953), Panofsky was the first to interpret Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait (1934) as not only a depiction of a wedding ceremony, but also a visual contract testifying to the act of marriage. Panofsky identifies a plethora of hidden symbols that all point to the sacrament of marriage. In recent years, this conclusion has been challenged, but Panofsky's work with what he called "hidden" or "disguised" symbolism is still very much influential in the study and understanding of Northern Renaissance art. Similarly, in his monograph on Dürer, Panofsky gives lengthy "symbolic" analyses of the prints Knight, Death, and the Devil and Melencolia I, the former based on Erasmus's Handbook of a Christian Knight.

Panofsky was known to be a friend with physicists Wolfgang Pauli and Albert Einstein. His younger son, Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky, became a renowned physicist who specialized in particle accelerators. His elder son, Hans A. Panofsky, was "an atmospheric scientist who taught at Pennsylvania State University for 30 years and who was credited with several advances in the study of meteorology". As Wolfgang Panofsky related, his father used to call his sons "meine beiden Klempner" ("my two plumbers"). William S. Heckscher was a student, fellow emigre, and close friend. In 1973 he was succeeded at Princeton by Irving Lavin. Erwin Panofsky has been recognized as both a "highly distinguished" professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, and in Jeffrey Chipps' biography of the subject as "the most influential art historian of the twentieth century". In 1999, the new "Panofsky Lane", in that Institute's faculty housing complex, was named in his honor.

Iconology

Panofsky was the most eminent representative of iconology, a method of studying the history of art created by Aby Warburg and his disciples at the Warburg Institute in Hamburg. There, a personal and professional friendship linked him to Fritz Saxl in collaboration with whom he produced a large part of his work.

Three strata of subject matter or meaning

In his book Studies in Iconology, first published in 1939, he details his idea of three levels of art-historical understanding:

• Primary or natural subject matter: The most basic level of understanding, this stratum consists of perception of the work's pure form. Take, for example, a painting of the Last Supper. If we stopped at this first stratum, such a picture could only be perceived as a painting of 13 men seated at a table. This first level is the most basic understanding of a work, devoid of any added cultural knowledge.
• Secondary or conventional subject matter (iconography): This stratum goes a step further and brings to the comparison of cultural and iconographic knowledge. For example, a Western viewer would understand that the painting of 13 men around a table would represent the Last Supper. Similarly, a representation of a haloed man with a lion could be interpreted as a depiction of St. Mark.
• Tertiary or intrinsic meaning or content (iconology): This level takes into account personal, technical, and cultural history into the understanding of a work. It looks at art not as an isolated incident, but as the product of an historical environment. Working in this stratum, the art historian can ask questions like "why did the artist choose to represent The Last Supper in this way?" or "Why was St. Mark such an important saint to the patron of this work?" Essentially, this last stratum is a synthesis; it is the art historian asking "what does it all mean?"

For Panofsky, it was important to consider all three strata as one examines Renaissance art. Irving Lavin says "it was this insistence on, and search for, meaning — especially in places where no one suspected there was any — that led Panofsky to understand art, as no previous historian had, as an intellectual endeavor on a par with the traditional liberal arts."

The method of iconology, which had developed following Erwin Panofsky, has been critically discussed since the mid-1950s, in part also strongly (Otto Pächt, Svetlana Alpers). However, among the critics, no one has found a model of interpretation that could completely replace that of Panofsky.

As regards the interpretation of Christian art, that Panofsky researched throughout his life, the iconographic interest in texts as possible sources remains important, because the meaning of Christian images and architecture is closely linked to the content of biblical, liturgical and theological texts, which were usually considered authoritative by most patrons, artists and viewers.

Style and the Film Medium

In his 1936 essay "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures", republished by Lavin in 1995 (Three Essays on Style), Panofsky seeks to describe the visual symptoms endemic" to the medium of film.

Legacy

In 1993 Joan Hart wrote that, "Erwin Panofsky is the most influential art historian of the twentieth century." In 2016 Stephen Mack wrote that, "Whether one agrees or disagrees with him, Panofsky is the one art historian who all others must confront, even now, almost 50 years since his death."

In 2016, the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (Central Institute for Art History) in Munich founded the "Panofsky-Professur" (Panofsky Professorship). The first professors have been Victor Stoichita (2016), Gauvin Alexander Bailey (2017), Caroline van Eck (2018), and Olivier Bonfait (2019). His work has greatly influenced the theory of taste developed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in books such as The Rules of Art and Distinction. In particular, Bourdieu first adapted his notion of habitus from Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, having earlier translated the work into French.