Affiliation:
1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Publisher
University of California Press
Subject
History,Visual Arts and Performing Arts,Architecture
Reference24 articles.
1. I would like to thank the following friends and colleagues who have written about their experiences of Ackerman for this essay; I regret that I have not been able to include more of their words in the text: Jill Slosburg-Ackerman, Anne Ackerman, Daniel Abramson, Nicholas Adams, Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Guido Beltramini, Kathleen Brandt, Horst Bredekamp, Cammy Brothers, Giorgio Ciucci, Joseph Connors, William Curtis, Sam Edgerton, Homa Farjadi, Francesco Paolo Fiore, Alice Friedman, Marcia Hall, Rab Hatfield, Andree Hayum, David Karmon, Thomas D. Kaufman, Rosalind Krauss, Phyllis Lambert, Irving Lavin, Ralph Lieberman, Myra Rosenfeld Little, Joanna Woods Marsden, Sarah McPhee, John Pinto, Brenda Preyer, Natasha Staller, Stephen Tobriner, David Van Zanten, and Rochelle Ziskin. Sources for the life and thought of Jim Ackerman include the following. An extended interview with Ackerman conducted by Joel Gardner in 1994 as part of the Oral History Project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities is available online at the UCLA Library, Digital Collections, http://oralhistory.library.ucla.edu/viewTextFile.do?itemId=29985&fileSeq=6&xsl=null (accessed 10 July 2017). For published interviews, see Nicholas Adams, “Conversazione con James S. Ackerman,” Casabella 693 (Oct. 2001), 84–87; “ ‘A Way Must Be Found to Broaden Our Perspective’: James Ackerman in Conversation with Cammy Brothers,” Art Bulletin 94, no. 3 (Sept. 2012), 362–67. An excellent assessment of the significance of Ackerman's work by Kathleen Brandt and Richard Krautheimer was published as “Xenion: A Bread and Butter Letter” in the first collection of Ackerman's essays, Distance Points: Essays in Theory and Renaissance Art and Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), ix–xxi. The texts read at the memorial event for Ackerman at Harvard University, plus “remembrances” sent by students and friends, are available online: “James S. Ackerman: Remembrances,” http://haa.fas.harvard.edu/files/hoart/files/jsa_reduced.pdf (accessed 10 July 2017).
2. James S. Ackerman, Origins, Invention, Revision: Studying the History of Art and Architecture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016).
3. Ackerman was enormously influenced by his thesis adviser, Richard Krautheimer. In the memorial essay he wrote on Krautheimer for this journal, Ackerman attributes many of the most distinctive aspects of his own scholarship to Krautheimer's example: “What Richard taught me was to seek out surprises and affections, work hard, and get the facts straight. He would not have claimed that following those precepts would make for good art history; they would have to be given meaning by imaginative interpretation, a matter of innate ability that could be encouraged but not be taught or learned.…Richard's unspoken disposition in the study of the arts of the past was toward what could be called contextualism: the interpretation of the arts in the light of the intellectual-theological culture that produced them.” James S. Ackerman, in Nicholas Adams, James S. Ackerman, Pamela Askew, Phyllis Lambert, John Coolidge, and Craig Hugh Smyth, “In Memoriam: Richard Krautheimer (1897–1994),” JSAH 54, no. 1 (Mar. 1995), 6. The mutual affection between the two men was lifelong. At an event for Krautheimer at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in the late 1980s, attended by many of his distinguished graduates, it was Ackerman who brought the aging Krautheimer into the hall.
4. He filled time between assignments making watercolors that recorded the landscapes of his war in North Africa and Italy. A sampling of these paintings appears in James S. Ackerman, “The Liberation of Mantua and Other Unintended Consequences of My Military Service during World War II,” in Origins, Invention, Revision, 43–56.
5. James S. Ackerman, “ ‘Ars sine Scientia nihil est’: Gothic Theory of Architecture at the Cathedral of Milan,” Art Bulletin 31, no. 2 (June 1949), 84–111.