1. In 1873, Norton, who maintained an extensive correspondence with John Ruskin (1819-1900), was appointed Harvard’s first lecturer in fine arts (art history). In 1879, he founded the Archaeological Institute of America, from which sprang the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (1881) and the American Academy in Rome (1895). See Bradley, John Lewis and Ousby, Ian, The correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar

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2. Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg, The eye of the tiger: the founding and development of the Department of Art and Archaeology, 1883-1923, Princeton University (Princeton, NJ: Department of Art and Archaeology and the Art Museum, Princeton University, 1983).Google Scholar

3. Crow, Thomas, ‘The practice of art history in America,’ Daedalus 135 (Spring 2006): 70–90.Google Scholar

4. Ibid., 76.Google Scholar

5. Announcement of courses, 1923-1924,’ IFA Library Archives.Google Scholar

6. Bober, Harry, ‘The gothic tower and the stork club,’ Arts and sciences: ideas, issues, and people in the university world (Spring 1962): 1–8;Google Scholar

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Panofsky, Erwin, ‘Three decades of art history in the United States,’ epilogue to Meaning in the visual arts: papers in and on art history, reprint ed., 368–395 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955; London: Peregrine Books, 1970).Google Scholar

(First published as ‘The history of art,’ in The cultural migration: the European scholar in America, ed. Crawford, W. Rex, 82–111 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953);CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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7. Eisler, Colin, ‘Kunstgeschichte American style,’ in The intellectual migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960, 544–629 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 629. Eisler lists 77 ‘European scholars, most of whom came to the United States in the 1930s to escape Fascist oppression and have continued their art historical studies in this country’.Google Scholar

8. Krautheimer, Richard, ‘“And gladly did he learn and gladly teach,”’ in Rome: tradition, innovation and renewal: a Canadian international art history conference, 8-13 June 1987, in honour of Richard Krautheimer on the occasion of his 90th birthday and Leonard Boyle O.P., Prefect of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 93–126 (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1991).Google Scholar

9. Eisler, Kunstgeschichte, 567.Google Scholar

10. Sears, Elizabeth, ‘Edgar Wind on Michelangelo,’ in The religious symbolism of Michelangelo: the Sistine Ceiling, xvii–xl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).Google Scholar

11. Wind’s personal library collection is now housed at Oxford’s Sackler Library. His papers are in the Bodleian.Google Scholar

12. Prud’homme, Alex, ‘The biggest, and the best?,’ Art News 89 (February 1990): 124–129.Google Scholar

13. Michels, Karen, ‘Bastion europäischer Kunstgeschichte: das Institute of Fine Arts der New York University,’ in Transplantierte Kunstwissenschaft: deutschsprächige Kunstgeschichte im amerikanischen Exil, 54–63 (Berlin: Akademie, 1999).Google Scholar

14. Prud’homme, Biggest, 126.Google Scholar

15. Bober, Harry, ‘The gothic tower and the stork club,’ Arts and sciences: ideas, issues, and people in the university world (Spring 1962): 4.Google Scholar

16. At the time of writing, plans are underway to appoint an archivist to survey these materials and make recommendations regarding their organization and preservation.Google Scholar

17. Krautheimer, Gladly 107.Google Scholar

18. Harry Bober, Gothic, 2.Google Scholar

19. The name ‘Institute of Fine Arts’ came later-but that is another story.Google Scholar

20. Donnell, Edna Bowden, ‘Persian costumes of the Safavid Renaissance’ (MA thesis, Institute of Fine Arts, 1924).Google Scholar

21. There is a bitter irony in the fact that also in 1933, many of Offner’s future colleagues were deprived of their academic and curatorial positions in Germany. Perhaps in anticipation of such a development, it was Meiss himself who suggested that Offner invite Panofsky to the IFA in 1931 (Eisler, Kunstgeschichte, 558).Google Scholar

22. Meiss, Miliard, ‘The problem of Francesco Traini’ (PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, 1933);CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Meyers, Bernard, ‘St. George and the Dragon’ (PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, 1933).Google Scholar

23. Bayrd Still, Office of University Archives, NYU, letter to Joan Leibovitz, Director’s Assistant, Institute of Fine Arts, 24 May 1983, University Archives, NYU.Google Scholar

24. The undergraduate art history programme, now known as the Department of Art History, remained at Washington Square. It has its own small library, formed around the personal library collection of Panofsky student Horst W. (Peter) Janson (1913-1982; IFA 1950-1982). The NYU component teaching the practising arts likewise remained at the Square.Google Scholar

25. Eisler, Kunstgeschichte, 572.Google Scholar

26. The building is based on the Hôtel Labottière in Bordeaux (1770-1773), where it still stands. The architect was Étienne Laclotte, about whom little is otherwise known.Google Scholar

27. The supervising architect, Julian Abele (pronounced ‘able’), was the first African American to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Architecture. Abele also worked with Trumbauer on Harvard’s Weidner Library, and on Philadelphia’s Museum of Art (Tifft, Susan E., ‘Out of the shadows,’ Smithsonian 35 (February 2005): 101–106).Google Scholar

28. Harry Bober, Gothic, 8. The Duke House was valued at $1.6 million. The furnishings, many of which were left in the building, were valued at $600,000.Google Scholar

29. The IFA’s funding situation during this period was atrocious. Astoundingly, Panofsky’s salary ‘was pieced together out of more than two dozen sources, from foundations to individual contributions of fifty dollars or less’ (Bober, Gothic, 6).Google Scholar

30. In 1982, the library of New York’s Museum of Primitive Art (of which Goldwater was the first director) was transferred to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, and named the Robert Goldwater Library.Google Scholar

31. Panofsky, Erwin, ‘Three decades of art history in the United States,’ epilogue to Meaning in the visual arts: papers in ana on art history, reprint ed., 368–395 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955; London: Peregrine Books, 1970), 374-375.Google Scholar

32. ‘Annual report 1941,’ Institute of Fine Arts Library Archives. Some of these faculty libraries ultimately passed to the IFA, in particular Walter Cook’s large collection, and the Friedlaender Source Collection. The Cook collections also contained offprints grouped according to specific topic; these seem to have been bound together and, since only the first item in each binding was catalogued, many pertinent bibliographical sources ‘disappeared’.Google Scholar

33. ‘Annual report 1940,’ IFA Library Archives.Google Scholar

34. Bober, Phyllis Pray and Rubinstein, Ruth, Renaissance artists & antique sculpture: a handbook of sources (London: Harvey Miller; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

35. ‘With the Institute supplying the ‘basic reference library’, it is assumed that for more specialized research the faculty and students will avail themselves of the splendid facilities offered by [New York’s other art libraries] - as well as the myriad libraries of specialized societies, museums and institutions within the city’ (‘Annual report 1965,’ IFA Library Archives). Linda Nochlin, for example, well remembers studying within this framework, especially at the Frick Art Reference Library. Others tended to gravitate towards the Metropolitan Museum of Art Library which, for a number of years, opened on Tuesday evenings to accommodate IFA students.Google Scholar

36. Harry Bober, Gothic, 1.Google Scholar

37. Since this type of course material was used in continental Europe (in Italy, for example, they were known as dispense), the natural assumption is that they were an émigré import. Course materials for Cook, Offner and Riefstahl, however, date back to 1928. All three, of course, had close connections with Europe, so the inspiration may have come from there anyway.Google Scholar

38. Janson, H. W., History of art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1962).Google Scholar

39. ‘Annual report 1972-1973,’ IFA Library Archives.Google Scholar

40. Markowitz, Arnold and Samuel, Evelyn, Acquisitions policy - Institute of Fine Arts Library - working draft,’ 1974, IFA Library Archives.Google Scholar

41. ‘New York University Institute of Fine Arts: how do you re-use a jewel box?’ Architectural record 164 (August 1978): 107-112.Google Scholar

42. Prud’homme, Biggest, 127.Google Scholar

43. Understandably, Doris Duke was far from pleased by the rearrangement. Although the entire area in which the Duke House is situated is landmarked (listed), legal constraints in the interest of preservation are confined to building exteriors.Google Scholar

44. All art history/archaeology students are required to take classes at the Conservation Center; in addition to the Conservation Diploma, all conservation students must complete the IFA art history/archaeology MA.Google Scholar

45. AATA began life as the IIC abstracts and the first five volumes were published by the International Institute for the Conservation of Museum Objects (London, 1955-1965). In 1966, publishing was transferred to the IFA where, although a new title was used, the original numbering sequence was maintained (hence AATA begins with vol. 6). Subsequently, publication responsibility moved to the Getty, where it is currently produced in conjunction with the IIC and ICCROM (International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, Rome), http://aata.getty.edu/nps/.Google Scholar

46. Curiously, the course listings for the post-1966 period do not indicate that any classes were taught specifically on the flood. (Titles of the conservation classes tend, however, to be extremely generic.)Google Scholar

47. Books on ancient Egypt, for example, were shifted to the inhospitable sub-basement until flooding and a carbon monoxide poisoning incident rendered this untenable. They and some other items were then moved to the grand entrance hall, with the result that an intimidating wall of IFA PhD dissertations and MA theses greeted visitors and reminded the community daily of its antecedents.Google Scholar

48. Johnson was joined in the project by Richard Foster (d. 2002), who went on to redesign the IFA’s library space.Google Scholar

49. In 2007, a long-requested delivery service between Bobst and the IFA will begin and the need for duplication may be reduced.Google Scholar

50. Robert Rosenblum (1927-2006; IFA 1966-2006), it should be noted, had been teaching modern art since 1967, when he gave a seminar on Picasso. His interests, however, were always extremely diversified and additional faculty members in the area were clearly needed.Google Scholar

IFA faculty and their courses, 1922-present: http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/fineart/ifa/curriculum/courses.htm. Google Scholar

Completed dissertations, 1933- present: http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/fineart/ifa/research/dissertations.htm. Google Scholar

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