October 17, 2016

Edgar Munhall (March 14, 1933 to October 17, 2016) was an American art historian and the first Curator of The Frick Collection, a museum housed in what had been the Frick family home. Munhall's Artforum obit sketches his background:

....Born in Pittsburgh in 1933. Munhall earned his Bachelor’s degree in art history from Yale University in 1955. He received his Master’s degree from New York University before returning to Yale for his Ph.D.

From 1959 to 1965, he served as assistant curator of prints and drawings at the Yale University Art Gallery and taught art history. He joined the Frick Collection as its first curator in 1965. Previously, the role of curator was the responsibility of the director of the institution, which was founded in 1935. During Munhall’s tenure at the museum he worked under five directors. He was responsible for acquisitions, publications, conservation, lectures, and exhibitions.

.......His New York Times obituary characterized the Frick:

....The building, a three-story 1914 Beaux-Arts limestone jewel box, is one of the great former private residences of the Gilded Age surviving on Fifth Avenue, at 70th Street......

And Munhall:

As chief curator, working under five museum directors, Dr. Munhall was responsible for acquisitions, publications, conservation, lectures, gallery exhibitions and the catalogs accompanying them. The Frick’s holdings now include about 1,100 works, overseen by a curatorial staff numbering more than two dozen......

Mr. Munhall wrote prolifically: articles for art journals and other publications as well as catalogs for some of the more than 30 exhibitions he organized, many of which opened at the Frick....

His assessment of art could be highly discerning. In 1982, writing in The Times, he reviewed the work of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, whom he described as perhaps the finest woman painter of 18th-century France and a friend of Queen Marie Antoinette’s.

“In addition to her subtle psychological response to her subjects,” he wrote, “Madame Le Brun possessed, more than any male painter could, an understanding of and a physical response to the folds of a velvet robe, the weight of a string of pearls, or the gleam of an emerald ring.”

Considering her portrait of Marie Antoinette, he observed: “As caught by Madame Le Brun, the Queen’s famous posture infuses her image with the solidity of a basalt column, against which the arch of her chair-back and the gracious gesture of the hands move like fronds. Obviously enthralled by her royal subject, the artist treated her unfortunate features like the finest plastic surgeon and painted her lace and gauze in a manner so ethereal as to seem scarcely human.”....

A work by Le Brun he does not mention but which bolsters his thesis is this one:




This is the only cat I found Le Brun painted, though she did dogs, too.