William Ivins Jr.
William Mills Ivins Jr. (1881–1961) was curator of the department of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from its founding in 1916 until 1946, when he was succeeded by A. Hyatt Mayor.
The son of William Mills Ivins Sr. (1851–1915), a public utility lawyer who had been the 1905 Republican candidate for Mayor of New York City, Ivins studied at Harvard College and the University of Munich before graduating in law from Columbia University in 1907.
After nine years' legal practice, he was asked to take on the conservation and interpretation of the Met's print collection. He built up the remarkable collections that can be seen there today, and he wrote many prefaces to exhibition catalogues, as well as other, occasional pieces which were later collected and published. His best-known book is Prints and Visual Communication[1] (MIT Press, 1969, ISBN 0-262-59002-6 (first published 1953 by Harvard University Press)), and his How Prints Look (1943, revised edition 1987) remains in print.
He was influential on Philip Hofer, curator of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library at Harvard University.[2]
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ William M. Ivins, Jr (1953). Prints And Visual Communication. Universal Digital Library. Harvard University Press.
- ^ Duroselle-Melish, Caroline. “Containers of Ideas”: The Collection of Printmaking Artifacts of Philip Hofer." Harvard Library Bulletin 24 (Spring 2013): 45-65.
External links
[edit]
- 1881 births
- 1961 deaths
- American art critics
- American art curators
- Harvard College alumni
- Columbia Law School alumni
- American art historians
- 20th-century American historians
- 20th-century American male writers
- Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich alumni
- American male non-fiction writers
- Members of the Men's League