HName: Montias, J[ohn] Michael

DateBorn: 1928

Placeborn: Paris

Datedied: 2005

Placedied: Branford, CT

HDescrip: Vermeer scholar and Yale University economist. Montias was raised in Paris by parents of Jewish extraction, Santiago Montias and Giselle ("Robin") de la Maisoneuve (Montias). As Germany invaded France during World War II, he was sent alone to a boarding school in Buffalo, New York. In Buffalo he was baptized Episcopal. He volunteered as a teenager at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery Library in Buffalo where he discovered the sumptuous volume on Rembrandt by Wilhelm von Bode (q.v.). He married wife Marie Agnes Urbaniak in 1950. Montias attended Columbia University in New York receiving his B. A. in 1947. He continued at Columbia receiving his M.A. in 1950. He served in the U.S. Army, 1954-56. As a doctoral student, he considered writing his Ph.D. in art economics, but ultimately he wrote on Soviet-block economic, accepted in 1958. He was appointed assistant professor of Economics at Yale University the same year. He remained at Yale his entire career. His work as an economist focused on centrally planned Soviet bloc countries such as Poland (1962) and Romania (1967). His Structure of Economic Systems was published in 1976. During this time he also began a concomitant interest in the economics of Dutch Republic of the 17th century and its effects on the art market. His research was stimulated by his colleague in the art department of Yale, Egbert Haverkamp Begemann (q.v.). Montias wrote a comparative study of Dutch painters' guilds. Although he knew no Dutch, he won a 1975 grant to write a comparative study of Dutch art guilds. He researched the Delft city archives were he found rich primary sources for the city’s artist's guild system. In 1982 this resulted in his book, Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century. Montias continued in this vein, publishing articles on the assembling of private Dutch collections, art dealers, artist's productivity, and cause/effect of market demands on artistic style. A full-length biography of Vermeer, titled Vermeer and his Milieu, was published in 1989. In 1996 his Le marché de l’art aux Pays Bas, 15ième-17ième siècles, a synopsis of his research written in his native French appeared. Public and Private Spaces: Works of Art in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Houses a work appearing in 2000 was co-written with John Loughman. His study of auctions held by the Amsterdam Orphans’ Court between 1597-1638, Art at Auction in 17th-Century Amsterdam, appeared in 2002, well after his diagnosis of cancer. The database of Amsterdam inventories and auction results he compiled was donated to the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD) in The Hague and transferred to the Frick Art Library in New York. The database designated as “Montias I” is a transcription of each document and can be searched by inventory number, owner name, inventory date, and by single or combined keywords. The database designated as “Montias II” contains a record for each work of art inventoried in the documents. He died of melanoma.

Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century was a ground-breaking book in the history of art. Taking the approach that art was a tradable commodity, Montias analyzed the forces of supply and demand contributing to their production. It examined how artists and craftsworkers developed their commission. Like an economics book it was filled with tables and statistical data. Like humanities scholarship, it was augmented with contemporary accounts. This use of surviving documentation on 17th-century Dutch art and society had not previously been mined. His archival research skills were responsible for the discovery of previously unknown information on individual artists, notably Johannes Vermeer, whose work was used (often uncited) in the explosion of interest in the artist in the early 21st century.

HCountry: United States

HBiography: [obituaries:] Times (London) August 16, 2005; Shattuck, Kathryn. "John Montias, 76, Scholar Of Economics and of Art." New York Times August 1, 2005, p. 13.

HBibliography: [dissertation:] Producers: Prices in a Centralized Economy: The Polish Experience. Columbia University, 1958; Art at Auction in 17th Century Amsterdam. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002; and Loughman, John. Public and Private Spaces: Works of Art in Seventeenth-century Dutch Houses. Zwolle: Waanders, 2000; "Sovereign Consumer: the Adaptation of Works of Art to Demand in the Netherlands in the Early Modern Period." in, Bevers, Ton, ed. Artists, Dealers, Consumers: on the Social World of Art. Hilversum: Verloren, 1994; Vermeer and his Milieu: a Web of Social History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989; and Aillaud, Gilles, and Blankert, Albert. Vermeer. Paris: Hazan, 1986, English, Aillaud, Gilles, and Blankert, Albert. Vermeer. New York: Rizzoli, 1988; Artists and Artisans in Delft: a Socio-economic Study of the Seventeenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982; The Structure of Economic Systems. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976; Central Planning in Poland. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962; and Stankiewicz, W. J. Institutional Changes in the Postwar Economy of Poland. New York: Mid-European Studies Center, Free Europe Committee, 1955.