Erwin Panofsky's Legacy

Photo from the Lotte Jacobi Archives Courtesy of the University of New Hampshire

The founder of the modern academic subject of iconology, Panofsky left a legacy both through his writings and through the work of those who learned from him. Through his writings and teachings, Panofsky inspired generations of art historians, countless numbers of whom studied with him. Many of them went on to occupy distinguished positions in the field.

Among the significant figures who studied with Panofsky was H. W. Janson, who wrote the influential textbook History of Art, familiar to most college students who have taken an introductory art history course. Others who worked with Panofsky held leading positions in the field, including James Henry Breasted, Jr., Director of the Los Angeles County Museum; John P. Coolidge, Director of the Fogg Art Museum; Richard Ettinghausen, Chief Curator of the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution and Consultative Chairman of the Islamic Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Ludwig Heydenreich, Director of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich; Carl Nordenfalk, Director of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm; Hanns Swarzenski, Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and Francis Wormald, Director of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London.

Panofsky instilled a love of diverse subjects in those who knew him. His passions were music, especially that of Mozart, on whose compositions he was a connoisseur, and belletristic literature. He loved above all the novels of Jean Paul, Honoré de Balzac, and Theodor Fontane, as well as the poetry of Eduard Mörike and the nonsensical verses of Christian Morgenstern. He knew many lines of Dante, Shakespeare, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe by heart. For relaxation at bedtime, he indulged in the detective stories of Georges Simenon (in French, of course), since besides his native German and English, Panofsky was fluent in Latin, French, and Italian.

He examined motion pictures in an entirely new way. Of the cinema, he said, "It was not an artistic urge that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new technique; it was a technical invention that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new art."

Panofsky by Philip Pearlstein Institute for Advanced Study

He had a prominent role in helping to gain support for the establishment of a film department at the Museum of Modern Art in 1934. Two years later, Panofsky delivered a lecture on film at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it was covered by the New York Herald Tribune for its "seemingly unprecedented and rather astonishing cultural legitimation of the cinema" as art. The lecture was published as an essay, "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures," which originally appeared in the Princeton University, Department of Art and Archaeology, Bulletin (1936). This was the earliest treatment of the subject by a serious scholar in art history, and probably Panofsky's most reprinted work.

"The death at 75 of Erwin Panofsky . . . marks not only the passing of one of the greatest art historians, but also that of probably the last humanist," said art historian Henri Van De Waal. "He possessed an admirable quality, rare among great men: he could listen. It is probably to this quality that can be attributed the remarkable fact that after his death each of his friends thought he had known the real Panofsky."

Not only have almost all of Panofsky's pre-emigration works in German by now been translated into English, but also, conversely, most of his later English writings appeared in German. In addition, numerous books and articles by Panofsky have been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Greek, Czech, Hungarian, Slovenian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Danish, Finnish, Swedish, Hebrew, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. As of 2008, his known editions, reprints, and foreign translations number well more than 300, of which more than half were published posthumously, with requests continuing to come in from throughout the world. Panofsky's range of influence has been felt in the areas of film, social history, and many other areas beyond art history.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Panofsky's birth and celebrate the breadth of his influence, Irving Lavin organized a symposium and publication, Meaning in the Visual Arts: View from the Outside. For the frontispiece, he persuaded painter Philip Pearlstein, a fellow student at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts, to paint a portrait of their teacher. Pearlstein and Lavin were present in the audience at New York University when Panofsky presented Early Netherlandish Painting, its Origins and Character in its final draft in a series of 15 lectures. Working from a photograph that happened to show Panofsky in an appropriately Early Netherlandish pose, Pearlstein produced the painting that now hangs in the Historical Studies/Social Science Library at the Institute.