University of California: In Memoriam, 1996
Walter Horn, History of Art: Berkeley
| 1908-1995 | |
| Professor of Art History, Emeritus |
With Walter Horn's passing on December 26, 1995, at age 87, the University of California lost a steadfast friend. He was one of Berkeley's best-loved and most influential teachers and one of this university's most effective leaders. He was also a leading authority on vernacular and monastic timber architecture of the Middle Ages.
The son and grandson of Lutheran ministers, he was born on January 18, 1908, in the rural German town of Waldangelloch. After high school in nearby Heidelberg, he studied art history at the universities of Heidelberg, Berlin, and then Hamburg, where he earned his doctorate with Erwin Panofsky. He then went to Florence, where as research associate at the Kunsthistorisches Institut, he completed two important studies. Das Florentiner Baptisterium (1938), a carefully observed analysis of the fabric and ornamentation of this building, established new criteria for its dating. Romanesque Churches in Florence: A Study of their Chronology and Stylistic Development (1943) examined San Miniato al Monte's masonry techniques and construction as well as the concept and system of bay division and changing proportions in these early medieval churches. Over the next four decades, he continued to explore the ways in which classical and northern architectural concepts intersect and are spatially articulated.
In 1938, invited by Berkeley's Worth Ryder, whom Horn had met at Bernard Berenson's villa I Tatti, and encouraged by Panofsky, who was by then at New York University, Horn emigrated to the United States. He began his career at Berkeley as lecturer in the art department. A year later he received a permanent appointment, becoming the first art historian in the University of California system.
Horn became a naturalized citizen in 1943. From 1943 to 1946 he served in the U.S. Army, finishing the war in France as a captain under
Back in Berkeley by 1948, Horn resumed his position. His research focused on medieval vernacular architecture. His most important article, “On the Origins of the Medieval Bay System,” in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of 1958, proposes that bay-divided medieval churches derived from the long halls and three-aisled barns of transalpine medieval Northern Europe; here he published examples showing these churches' similarity with the volumes, elevations, plans, and construction techniques of vernacular buildings as old as 1200 B.C.
During a twenty-year collaboration, Horn and Ernest Born (1898-1992) of the American Institute of Art and emeritus of the Department of Architecture, Berkeley, co-authored nine articles on medieval barns and market halls in England and France. Their first book, The Barns of the Abbey of Beaulieu at Its Granges of Great Coxwell & Beaulieu-St-Leonards. University of California Press, 1965, a study of two large English thirteenth-century Cistercian tithe barns, shows that these buildings belonged to a centuries-old type that might vary in size and utility but followed the common plan of a bay-divided nave flanked by two aisles.
Horn identified the early bay-divided, aisled, timber structures of Northern Europe as a multipurpose Germanic building type. He proposed that it survives in the guest and service buildings of the ninth-century Plan of St. Gall, the only complete architectural scheme of a Benedictine monastic community known from that era. In 1979 he and Born published The Plan of St. Gall: A Study of the Architecture & Economy of, and Life in, a Paradigmatic Carolingian Monastery, University of California Press. Horn's eloquent text and Born's hundreds of plans, elevations, and perspective views provide brilliant and convincing architectural reconstructions and thus a vivid insight into the culture of Carolingian Europe. The three-volume study, praised as a monument of scholarship, received twelve book awards for scholarship, bookmaking, and typography as well as great international acclaim; it established a new standard for university press publications.
Horn viewed the Plan of St. Gall as only one facet of his extensive study of the three-aisled timber hall of Northern Europe, which he continued
It is difficult to overstate Horn's contributions to the University of California. From 1948 on, as a member of Berkeley's art department, he developed its library and slide collection, established the Ph.D. program for art history, and several times served as department chair. Teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses, Horn proved an eloquent and inspiring lecturer. In 1971 he oversaw the establishment at Berkeley of an independent History of Art Department.
For over thirty years, Horn selflessly devoted his time and seemingly limitless energies to university service on literally dozens of academic and administrative committees. Berkeley's presidents and chancellors called on his wisdom and experience in developing the university's libraries, humanities and language curriculums, in planning and construction of the University Art Museum, and in implementing the overall campus plan. In the 1950s and 1960s he was instrumental in preserving Strawberry Creek as an open stream. Mindful of nature's influence during his idyllic rural boyhood, he believed that daily experience of a natural landscape was of far greater value to students than any convenience to be gained by channeling and covering it. As a member of the Committee on Outdoor Art, Horn advocated placing sculptor Sterling Calder's Dryad in Faculty Glade and other sculptures in various campus settings. His unshakable confidence that they would not be vandalized remains entirely justified.
Also active in his profession, Horn was a director on the boards of the College Art Association from 1950 to 1954 and 1965 to 1968, and of the Society of Architectural Historians from 1965 to 1968. Over the years he also served on their various committees. He founded and was general editor (1961-87) of the University of California Press's series California Studies in the History of Art, which was established to provide promising younger scholars a means of publishing their work. In 1965 Horn obtained a Samuel H. Kress Foundation Grant of $100,000 to improve design and printing of these books. It was the largest subvention the foundation had ever granted for publications. Twenty-six books of the series were published under Horn's direction. He also had a long and productive association with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, serving on the board of directors of the Patrons of Art and Music in 1961 and from 1965 to 1969, on committees for exhibitions and acquisition, and also on the board of trustees of the Fine Arts Museums.
Horn earned many university and international honors during his long career. He was named All-University Faculty Lecturer in 1962 and Humanities Research Lecturer in 1964. The Council of Europe asked him to present research for and to supervise construction of a three-dimensional model of the buildings of the Plan of St. Gall, which was commissioned for its tenth exhibition, Charlemagne (1965), and asked him as well to present a lecture on the guest and service buildings of the Plan. He was invited to deliver the Mathews Lectures at Columbia University (1969). In 1972 he was made a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and also was named UC Faculty Research Lecturer. He was named Robert G. Sproul Associate and elected Berkeley Fellow; on his retirement in 1974, he received the Berkeley Citation. In 1981 he was named Fellow of the Medieval Academy, and in 1982, on the opening of an international exhibition about the Plan of St. Gall, Horn and Ernest Born received Institutional Honors from the American Institute of Architects for their work; Horn was the first non-architect to be so honored.
Horn's last publication, The Forgotten Hermitage of Skellig Michael, University of California Press, 1990, co-authored with Jenny White Marshall and Grellan D. Rourke, is the first systematic architectural study of the sixth- to eighth-century solitary monastic site on the south peak of this Irish offshore island. He returned many times to this remote hermitage high above the open Atlantic. Here, toward the end of his life, this dynamic, urbane, cultured, and gregarious man found contemplation and solitude. The example of his teaching and scholarship, his many contributions to this university, and the unfailing warmth of his friendship and kindness will long endure in the memories and in the lives of his family, his many friends and students, and in the institution he so profoundly cherished.
He is survived by his wife Alberta; by a son, Michael of Chicago; two daughters, Rebecca Horn of Salt Lake City and Robin Reid of Bend, Oregon; and a grandson, Matthew Horn of San Anselmo.
Courtesy of University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/info
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb0z09n6nn&brand=calisphere
Title: 1996, University of California: In Memoriam
By: University of California (System) Academic Senate, Author
Date: 1996
Contributing Institution: University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/info
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