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Revision as of 06:35, 10 January 2010
The art historian Joseph Gantner was born in Baden, Canton Aargau, Switzerland on 11 September 1896, and died on Thursday 7 April 1988, aged 91. His parents were Alfred Gantner and Marie Gantner née Wächter. In 1932 Joseph Gantner married Maria Dreyfus: they had two daughters, Vera and Isabel. Gantner’s studies took him to Munich, Zurich, Basel, Geneva and Rome. In 1920 he completed a doctorate in Munich under Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945); his Habilitationsschrift was completed in 1926. From 1922 or 1923 to 1927 he was Editor of the periodical Das Werk and later also of Das neue Frankfurt, when from 1927 to 1932 Gantner taught at the Kunstakademie, Frankfurt-am-Main. He returned to Switzerland in 1933 when the Nazi menace began to increase. From 1926 – 28 and then again from 1933 – 38, he worked on a Ph. D. from the University of Zurich. In 1938 at the age of 42 he was appointed Professor of Art History at the University of Basel, and remained there until retirement in 1967. In 1954 he was Rektor of the University and that same year became a member of the Basel Art Museum Commission. In 1943 he founded the Basler Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte. From 1953, Gantner edited the Zeirtschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. His portrait was painted by Augusto Giacometti, a second cousin of Alberto Giacometti, and is now in the possession of his daughter Vera.
Gantner was deeply influenced by his teacher, Heinrich Wölfflin (professor at Basel 1893-1901), who became a close personal friend, and by his predecessors Jacob Burckhardt (Professor at Basel 1844-1893) and Benedetto Croce – but he was not a slavish imitator of any of them. He was also responsive to the attitudes of the French theorist of art history, Henri Focillon (1881 – 1943) as expressed in his influential treatise The Life Forms of Art. Gantner’s first major studies were on Michelangelo’s preliminary cartoons for the Sistine Chapel. Leonardo then became a new focus of his interest. He discerned four stages in the reception of Leonardo since his death. After completing a major study of Swiss art history, he turned his attention in particular to problems of the artistic imagination. Here, Leonardo figured again, with his emphasis on the ‘immaginario.’
Sources
Death notice, Neue Zurcher Zeitung, 9.4.1988
Obituary, NZZ, 15.4.88
Obituary (Dr. Reiner Haussherr), Jahrbuch 1991 of Mainz Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, pp. 108-112
Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz
Full Gantner bibliography in J. Gantner: Das Bild des Herzens