March 13, 1931

Michael Podro, (March 13, 1931 to March 28, 2008) was born to Jewish immigrants, in London. His father was " a noted Judaic scholar who collaborated with Robert Graves on the Nazarene Gospel Restored (1953)." At the time of his son's birth, his father had a press cuttings agency, an interesting and now outmoded occupation. Our information for this post comes from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article on our subject.

 Podro read English at Jesus College, Cambridge.  Podro's interest in painting led to a professorship at the University of Essex where his background in art history and the philosophy of art enabled him to make the department a "beacon of philosophically informed art history." According to our source:

[His] students were struck by the sense of urgency he brought to his seminars on Kant's Critique of Judgement, Hegel's Lectures on Fine Art, or Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind. These texts were of more than academic interest to him; he understood them as models of a more fully human way of being in the world, intellectually, bodily, and emotionally."

We read in the same article:

The dissemination of Podro's research was also accomplished through the publication of three books. His first, The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand (1972), was an analysis of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century philosophical and psychological theories of art that later informed the most ambitious art historical writing in German. His next and most important book, The Critical Historians of Art (1982), surveyed the work of those art historians. The book revived interest in the founders of art history as a discipline and demonstrated how philosophical ideas about the nature of beauty, knowledge, and morality could have purchase in writing about art. The overarching aim of the book was to show how a sense of the artist's freedom in constructing a work of art came to be seen as a means of achieving an ethical, inward sense of composure. In this way the role of the work of art became one of overcoming our ordinary relations with the world.

.... In his third and final book, Depiction (1998), Podro wrote about artists who had preoccupied him throughout his career, Donatello, Rembrandt, Chardin, and Hogarth, always attending carefully to the works while also bringing to bear his theoretical concerns. ....

It is this last volume where we notice his discussion of a Chardin work: "Ray," (1728) which features a cat in a kitchen with fish. Podro:

[H]ow feelings are lodged within painting...is something we come to imagine through the painting's complexity. It is a central characteristic of such complexity that we cannot make fully focal what emerges most powerfully....The sense of violence in the subject ...is surely responded to openly in the wit and delicacy of the painting. The painting is in dialogue with its subject, its suggestiveness the product of tact, not repression.

Michael Podro " was a trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1987 to 1996 during a period of some upheaval. .... and appointed CBE in 2001."