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August 2016

Vol. 158 / No. 1361

Obituary: George Knox (1922–2015)

By Bernard Aikema

by BERNARD AIKEMA

 

GEORGE KNOX, who died in Vancouver on 28th September 2015 at the venerable age of ninety-three,was a colourful personality, a real character, as his many friends and colleagues used to say. As a scholar, his name is forever linked to the study of Venetian eighteenth-century drawing and painting. In fact, together with Michael Levey (his doctoral supervisor), George discovered and revealed the Venetian settecento to the Anglo-American public and, in a sense, to the non-Italian world at large. It is largely due to these two scholars that the study and appreciation of the Indian summer of Venetian art has become mainstream, and not just the hobby of a few collectors, Italian connoisseurs and eccentric German scholars such as Max Goering and Hermann Voss.

 

Born in London on 1st January 1922, George Knox studied at the Courtauld Institute, where he received his BA degree in 1950. His MA thesis (1954), which he discussed with Johannes Wilde, was on Giambattista Tiepolo’s drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum. George’s path in art history was set: Tiepolo’s draughtmanship would be a prime concern for the rest of his professional life. His first major publication was an elaboration of the thesis, and a milestone in the study of Venetian settecento drawings. Tiepolo Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum was published in 1960, with a revised edition appearing in 1975. In writing a catalogue, he once stated to the present author, he considered himself to be an editor, treating the artworks just as a philologist would edit a text: the V. & A. catalogue is a perfect example of this approach. Without eschewing problems of attribution, the author concentrated on registering the relation of the various sheets to finished works by Tiepolo, both paintings and prints, and on reconstructing the provenance and the original composition of the albums in which the drawings were kept. The result set the standard for the study of Tiepolo drawings.

 

Questions of authorship were certainly a problem with another large group of Tiepolo drawings, first studied by George in his doctoral thesis (1968). These sheets are all drawn in black or red chalk, and are related to painted works by both Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo. George held strong views on these drawings, especially those connected to painted works by Giambattista dating from the 1740s and 1750s (the Scalzi ceiling, the frescos in Würzburg etc.). Reconstructing Giambattista’s working methods, he concluded that they were for the most part preparatory drawings, a conclusion that was first presented in the important exhibition catalogue on the Tiepolo drawings in Würzburg and Stuttgart compiled by Knox together with Christel Thiem in 1970 (Graphische Sammlung, Stuttgart), and further developed in the monumental two-volume publication Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo: A Study and Catalogue Raisonné of the Chalk Drawings (1980). It should be said that George’s views on the subject did not go unchallenged, but it is thanks to his efforts that the fundamental question concerning the role of drawings in the workshop has become such an important topic in Tiepolo studies. Problems of provenance and function played a central role in another landmark publication: the catalogue of the show Tiepolo: A Bicentenary Exhibition 1770–1970, organised by the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge MA to commemorate the bicentenary of Giambattista’s death. For many years, this catalogue has remained the standard volume on Tiepolo’s draughtsmanship.

 

Meanwhile, George had moved to Canada, taking on a professorship at Queen’s University, Kingston (1969–70), before moving to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he found his second home. He took Canadian citizenship, and from 1970 until his retirement in 1987, George was professor at UBC, serving as head of the Department of Fine Arts until 1979. Knox’s scholarly production did not diminish over the years. On the contrary, a stream of articles, reviews, catalogues and other contributions, mainly on the Tiepolo family, appeared from the early 1960s right up to the first years of the third millennium. Many of his often pioneering essays appeared in this Magazine, such as ‘G.B. Tiepolo and the Ceiling of the Scalzi’ (1968), ‘G.B. Tiepolo: The Dating of the Scherzi di Fantasia and the Capricci’ (1972) – another intricate problem on which he held strong views – and ‘Giambattista Tiepolo: Queen Zenobia and Ca’ Zenobio: “una delle prime sue fatture”’ (1979). The last article bears testimony to George’s interest in history and mythological painting on a monumental scale. Among his publications on this topic, we might mention his study on the Tasso cycles by Giambattista Tiepolo and Gianantonio Guardi published in 1978 in Museum Studies: The Art Institute of Chicago, or, to cite one of his last studies, his contribution to Klara Garas’s Festschrift, Ex Fumis Lucem, on the late seventeenth-century history paintings for Ca’ Corner in Venice (1999). George’s planned book on monumental decorations in Venetian settecento palaces was never realised.

 

George’s research on settecento art was not limited to Tiepolo. He never published much on view painting, but other Venetian figuristi whose work he studied include Giambattista Piazzetta, to whom he dedicated two remarkable catalogues in conjunction with exhibitions in Washington and Venice (1983) and a monograph (1992), and Gianantonio Pellegrini, on whom he also wrote a monograph (1995), the first book-length publication ever dedicated to the artist.

 

Towards the end of his career, George returned to the Tiepolos, specifically to Domenico, whose spirited drawings appealed to his own, mildly ironic stance on life. Together with Adelheid Gealt he produced two beautiful volumes on Domenico (1986 and 2005). And his last word on Tiepolo drawings was again an overview, A Panorama of Tiepolo Drawing (2008); this volume presented 105 drawings, many of them previously unknown, as a broad panorama, and yet ‘perhaps not so much a distant view of the lofty peaks of the achievement of Giambattista, which have so often been described, but a more intimate view of some of the hidden valleys’.

 

George Knox was a major figure in Venetian studies, but a mere description of his intellectual and academic achievements would fail to do justice to his personality. He carried his immense knowledge of settecento art lightly (friends remarked jokingly they never saw him reading an art history book, yet he was aware of every new publication). George was refreshingly unconventional, humorous, a warm friend and a generous colleague. And he was a great family man, indeed a patriarch: he and his wife, Patricia, had six children, seventeen grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren.