Slive, Seymour

Date born: 1920

Place Born: Chicago, IL

Date died:

Place died:

Rembrandt scholar and Director, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1975-. Slive was born to  Daniel Slive and Sonia Rapoport (Slive). He attended the University of Chicago for all his degrees, gaining his A.B., in 1943. He served in the Naval Reserve during World War II and in active duty in the Pacific Theater, 1942-1946. In 1946 he married Zoya Gregorevna Sandomirsky.  He wrote his dissertation under Ulrich Middeldorf in 1952.  His initial teaching positions were at Oberlin College, 1950-1951 and Pomona College, Claremont, CA, where he was assistant professor of art and chair of department, 1952-1954. His dissertation appeared as the book, Rembrandt and His Critics, 1630-1730 in 1953.  In 1954 he joined the faculty at Harvard University, advancing to associate professor in 1957 and professor of fine arts in 1961. Slive and his Harvard colleague Jakob Rosenberg and Delft University professor E. H. ter Kuile were commissioned by Nikolaus Pevsner to write the Pelican History of Art volume for Dutch art and architecture, which appeared in 1966. In 1973 Slive was appointed Gleason Professor of Fine Arts.  He chaired the department of Fine Arts 1968-1971. Slive began issuing his catalogue raissoné on Frans Hals in 1970, published under the auspices of the Kress Foundation.  He was Slade Professor at Oxford University, 1972-1973.  In 1975 he was appointed Director of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard. Among his accomplishments as director were the founding of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum to house Harvard's collections of ancient, Asian, Islamic, and later Indian art. In October 1989, Slive and Christopher Brown, deputy keeper at the National Gallery, London, mounted the first comprehensive exhibition of Frans Hals' work outside the Netherlands, at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Slive reissued the Pelican History volume on Dutch painting, now exclusively on that medium and under his sole authorship. In 2001 he set out his second catalogue raissoné on a Dutch master, Jacob van Ruisdael. Slive's students included Ann Jensen Adams, Alice Davies, Susan Kuretsky, William Robinson, Frank Robinson, Walter S. Gibson and Arthur Wheelock.

Although a specialist himself, Slive encouraged broad knowledge among his students, remarking on occasion that "only donkeys have fields." His methodology was strongly that of connoisseurship--as opposed to iconography prevalent in Dutch art-historical scholarship--and he frequently admonished iconographers for over-interpretation of pictorial symbolism. Perhaps for that reason, his Pelican History on Dutch art volume gave scant attention to (and came under criticism for glossing over) the Dutch Mannerists such as Goltzius and Bloemaert (Leidtke). His reissue of the book in 1995 found competition as a university text with the shorter and less connoisseurship-driven works by Madlyn Millner Kahr, Svetlana Alpers, and Mariët Westermann. Slive also retained a strong appreciation for reception theory, noting in his dissertation and book that, ultimate understanding of the formal stylistic elements of an artist's oeuvre is impossible without knowing how it was viewed by his contemporaries. This belief strongly influence Donald Kuspit (quoted from Kuspit's 1971 dissertation). Slive was the first American-trained art historian to specialize in the history of Netherlands Baroque art. LS

Home Country: United States

Sources: Kleinbauer, W. Eugene.  Modern Perspectives in Western Art History:  An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts.  New York:  Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 48 mentioned; University of Chicago Alumni Association page, http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/030529/alumni-award.shtml; Liedtke, Walter.  "The Study of Dutch Art in America." Artibus et Historiae 21, no. 41 (2000): 207-220.

Bibliography: [bibliography to 1995:] Shop Talk: Studies in Honor of Seymour Slive: Presented on his Seventy-fifth Birthday. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 1995, pp.17-21; [dissertation:] Rembrandt and His Critics, 1630-1730.  University of Chicago, 1952, published as same, Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1953; Jacob van Ruisdael: a Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, Drawings, and Etchings.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001;  and Rosenberg, Jakob. Dutch Art and Architecture: 1600 to 1800.  Pelican History of Art 7.  Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966, revised, ed., (solely Slive) Dutch Painting 1600-1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995; Frans Hals. Munich: Prestel, 1989;  Jacob van Ruisdael. New York: Abbeville Press, 1981; Frans Hals. 3 vols. London: Phaidon, 1970-74.

Subject's name: Seymour Slive