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IN MEMORIAM
IN MEMORIAM
Harvey Stahl
Professor of Medieval Art
Berkeley
1941—2002
Harvey Stahl, a leading historian of French Gothic art and culture and an inspiring teacher at the University of California, Berkeley for more than two decades, died on June 22, 2002, of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis ("Lou Gehrig's disease"). An outgoing and supportive colleague, former department chair, and enthusiastic mentor, he is greatly missed.
Born to immigrant parents in Dallas, Texas, Harvey received his B.A. from Tulane University in 1964 and his Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University in 1974, where he completed his dissertation under the direction of a leading scholar of Byzantine painting and its influence in the West, Hugo Buchthal. In 1983, Harvey and other students of Buchtal organized Buchtal's essays in a still-standard survey of the art of the Mediterranean world from A.D. 100 to A.D. 1400.
Drawn to the close study of original works of art, Harvey began his professional career as an assistant curator at the Department of Medieval Art of the Metropolitan Museum and The Cloisters in New York, working also in the Metropolitan's Educational Department. In early adjunct appointments at Cooper Union and the Parsons School of Design, Harvey taught students of art and design, refining his lifelong interest in the links between artistic practice and expression, and between aesthetic and historical forms. Harvey taught at Manhattanville College from 1973 until his move to Berkeley in 1980. In more than two decades at Berkeley, he taught a full range of courses on the history of manuscript illumination, Romanesque, Gothic and Later Byzantine art, focusing upon painting, stained glass, metalwork, ivory, and architecture. Harvey opened students' eyes to the complexly layered meanings of works of medieval art. He encouraged them to study the ideals and values expressed in works of art and to appreciate the aesthetic resources artists employed to give shape and resonance to these concerns. Among the professional honors he received were a Fulbright Fellowship for study in Paris and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Harvey's research focused particularly on the thirteenth century French court, spanning such subjects as royal iconography, pictorial narrative, Latin Crusader culture, and women's visual experience in the High Middle Ages. He published important articles on Old Testament illustration during the reign of St. Louis, narrative structure in Gothic ivories, the human qualities of the Hildesheim bronze doors, and an innovative image of the Heavenly Elect in a Cambrai Book of Hours. But his chief passion was the great St. Louis Psalter in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, on which he became the world's expert.
This psalter belonged to King Louis IX of France and was produced between 1254, when Louis returned from his crusade, and his death in 1270. The text is preceded by 78 remarkable miniatures illustrating Old Testament figures from Genesis to Kings, and including beautiful images of King David at prayer – the history of the Jews interpreted in Christian terms of virtue. Harvey wanted to understand how the crusading French king and his painter – steeped in Western Latin Christian culture – understood Old Testament Jewish history in the light of their own religious politics and their recent experiences with the Near Eastern "infidel."
As one of the foremost historians of Latin Crusader culture, Harvey pursued the question of what is now called "multiculturalism," his visionary conception of which has influenced many younger scholars. Harvey's insight that cross-cultural and cross-religious communication and conflict remains one of the great questions of our own age as well as of the Middle Ages, and that it requires the greatest care, tact, and knowledge to understand, might well be his most lasting legacy. On a different level, the St. Louis Psalter is closely related to the so-called Isabella Psalter in Cambridge, England, produced in the same workshop for a female member of the royal family; Harvey was one of the first to address the issue of women's visual experience in the Middle Ages. Finally, both psalters echo contemporary styles in sculpture, such as the south portals at Notre Dame de Paris, and in part because of his deep experience with medieval book design, Harvey also did pioneering work on problems of storytelling in medieval sculpture. His work combines the best of earlier twentieth century art history and the innovative rethinking of visual culture launched by his own generation of art historians. To use the phrase of the famous medievalist Otto Pächt, Harvey had the ability to "listen with his eyes."
At the time of his death, Harvey had nearly finished his magnum opus on the St. Louis Psalter. As was apparent from his recent lectures at national and international conferences, his goal in this study was nothing less than to redefine scholarly thinking about high medieval book illumination. His students and colleagues will now see it through the press.
But Harvey also characteristically combined his highly specialized research with a broad vision of the discipline of art history as a whole. Invited in 1985 to organize the annual meeting of the College Art Association (CAA) of America in Los Angeles, he fundamentally rethought the purposes and shape of the Association's annual conference. Substituting sessions and panels focused on current and emerging problems (historical, disciplinary, and methodological) for the ad hoc research papers that had dominated earlier annual meetings, he drew leading scholars from sister disciplines, as well as European colleagues, to participate. The result was electrifying, doing more to energize the discipline of art history in America and to nudge it toward much-needed critical reflection, than any other initiative before or after. All subsequent CAA conferences (and those of many of other similar organizations) have emulated and built upon the innovations Harvey introduced at Los Angeles, and his achievement there underlies important changes that emerged in the editorial policies of some of our leading academic journals. Predictably, this meeting is still known to many of us as "Harvey's CAA."
Harvey was a loving and devoted husband and father to three sons. He was a founding member of Berkeley's Congregation Netivot Shalom, and contributed significantly to its spirit and vitality. Human warmth pervaded his family and social life and all his activities as a thinker and scholar. He was taken from us at the height of his powers by a cruel and debilitating disease: he is mourned and warmly remembered by his beloved family, colleagues, students and friends.
Whitney Davis
James Marrow
Andrew Stewart