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Walter W. S. Cook, by Craig Hugh Smith
Art Journal © 1963 College Art Association, Inc.
Published by College Art Association
©2000-2007 JSTOR
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HName: Cook, Walter W[illiam] S[pencer]
DateBorn: 1888
Placeborn: Orange, MA
Datedied: 1962
Placedied: North Atlantic sea [on board ship]
HDescrip: Historian of medieval Spanish art, founding director of the Institute of Fine Art at New York University and leading figure in bringing German art historians and their style of art history to the United States. Cook was born to William Jeremiah Cook and Jan Macreal (Cook). He attended Phillips Academy before entering Harvard University. He served in the American Expeditionary Force, 1917-19 during World War I. Cook spent the years 1920-1924 working on his doctorate at Harvard and nine months conducting research in Spain and France a a fellow of the Archaeological Institute of America, 1920-21. He spent the academic year 1922-23 researching at Princeton University. His dissertation was on Catalonian panel painting in the Romanesque period written under Chandler R. Post (q.v.). Cook kept particularly close ties with Charles Rufus Morey (q.v.) at Princeton and Harvard's Paul J. Sachs (q.v.). Cook was already acting in an unofficial for Harvard's Fogg art museums during his summers in Europe. While a student in Europe, he familiarized himself with nearly all the centers of art historical scholarship, making contact that would later prove useful for both those scholars and Cook. He joined the faculty at New York University in 1926. Cook continued to spend six months each year in Europe as a research fellow for Spanish art of the College Art Association. He was professor of art, New York University from 1932 to 1953. In 1932, Cook separated the graduate program from the undergraduate department from Washington Square, initially housing the program in a brownstone at the corner of 83rd and Madison Avenue and later at the Paul Warburg estate at 17 East 80th Street before its final home in the Duke mansion at 1 East 78th Street. Cook stated, "You may spend your money on a museum, but we are going to move right next door to a museum [the Metropolitan Museum of Art], and let them buy our works of art, while we spent it on the professors and get the best there are." He did just that. Cook used his position as the director of the new graduate center to "acquire" some of the most eminent art historians who were fleeing Hitler's Germany. These included Erwin Panofsky (q.v.), who settled at Princeton after NYU, Walter Friedlaender (q.v.), Karl Lehmann (q.v.), Martin Weinberger (q.v.) Adolph Goldschmidt (q.v.), Otto Homburger (q.v.), Marcel Aubert (q.v.), Henri Focillon (q.v.), and Alfred Salmony (q.v.). Some, like Aubert and Focillon went to other institutions and others, such as Panofsky, continued to teach at NYU even after his appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1935. Cook once quipped, "Hitler is my best friend. He shakes the trees and I gather the apples." In 1950 he and José Gudiol (q.v.) issued Pintura e imagineria románicas for the important Ars Hispaniae series, one of only two English-speaking scholars author a volume in the set (the other being George Kubler, q.v.). He continued as director of the Institute until 1951. At his retirement in 1953, a special exhibition was held in his honor at the Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art. He died at sea on the ocean liner Leonardo da Vinci returning home from Genoa.
Cook was a scholar of Spanish art. His posthumous reputation is largely for his hand in developing the Institute of Fine Arts into the graduate center it is today. Founded by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1835, Cook transformed it into a center for the training of scholars in the field of art history to enter the curatorial, teaching and academic fields.
HCountry: United States
HBiography: Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l'histoire de l'art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 543-544; Brush, Kathryn. "The Unshaken Tree: Walter W. S. Cook on German Kunstwissenschaft in 1924." Zeitschrift des deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft 52/53 (1998/99): 24-51. [obituaries:] Iniguez, D.A., et. al., "Walter W. S. Cook." Art News 61 (November 1962) p. 27; Iniguez, D.A., et. al., Art Journal 22 no. 3 (Spring 1963): 167; "Dr. Walter Cook, Art Expert, Dies; Retired Professor at N.Y.U." New York Times September 22, 1962, p. 25; Boehm, Barbara Drake. "Harry Bober (1915-1988)." Gesta 28, No. 1. (1989): 103.
HBibliography: [dissertation] Romanesque Panel Painting in Catalonia. Harvard University, 1924; The Stucco altar-frontals of Catalonia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1924; La pintura románica sobre tabla en Cataluña. Madrid: Instituto Diego Velázquez, del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1960; and Gudiol, José. Pintura e imagineria románicas. Madrid: Editorial Plus-Ultra,1950; La pintura mural románica en Cataluña. Madrid: Instituto Diego Velázquez del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1956. |
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