Michelle Kamhi
  • Home
  • About MMK
    • Biography
    • Key Publications by MMK
    • Media/News
  • Who Says That’s Art?
    • About the Book
    • Contents
    • Introductory Chapter
    • Images of Works Cited
    • Review Excerpts
    • What Readers Say
    • Artworld Myths Debunked
    • Honors
    • Supporters
    • Where to Buy Who Says That’s Art?
  • Bucking the Artworld
    • About the Book
    • Preface
    • Images of Works Cited
    • Reviews
    • Publicity
  • Blog
  • Other Work
    • On Art Education
    • What Art Is
    • Aristos
  • Contact
  • Search

Subscribe to Blog

Remembering Howard McP. Davis

October 20, 2020 / Michelle Kamhi / Art History, Contemporary art / 8 Comments

Print This Post Print This Post

Howard Davis

Howard McP. Davis (1918-1994)

In early March, as New York was beginning to descend into its long, grim Covid-19 lockdown, I was unexpectedly cheered by a remarkable bit of art-related news. Columbia University announced the creation of the Howard McP. Davis Professorship of Art History.

What made this news especially remarkable was that Davis had died more than a quarter century ago, and had retired from teaching in 1988. Yet the impression he had made on a former student was so indelible that these many years later that student was moved to honor him by an anonymous gift to the university to establish an endowed professorship in his name.

The news was also remarkable for me personally, because I too am one of Professor Davis’s former students. As noted in the Preface to What Art Is, his “introduction to the humanistic values of the art of the Italian Renaissance was a transforming experience” for me. He was also one of the mentors I had in mind when I dedicated Bucking the Artworld Tide “In grateful memory of the teachers who believed in me.” I should have added “and whom I learned from.”

What I Learned from Him

As a teacher, Professor Davis was vastly different in style from Vincent Scully, an architectural historian who became legendary at Yale for his charismatically flashy teaching of an introductory course on Western art to generations of undergraduates.1 Unlike Scully, Davis was no showman. Tall, thin, and ascetic-looking, he had a deliberate, soft-spoken manner in keeping with his physical mien. What he communicated above all was a deep seriousness—a sense that the art he talked about mattered profoundly because of the human values it powerfully embodied.

My first contact with Professor Davis was as a student in his course on Italian Renaissance Painting in the 1960 summer session at Columbia. I had returned the year before from a post-collegiate year in Paris (having majored in Geology at Barnard, I had gone to Paris as a Fulbright scholar, to study vertebrate paleontology, not art), and was just beginning to indulge an interest in the fine arts that had germinated abroad. I still have my complete set of notes from that course. As they testify, Davis’s discussion of Giotto’s great cycle of frescoes for the Arena Chapel in Padua was especially memorable for its clarity and insight. Through in-depth formal analysis of the paintings, he demonstrated the brilliance of mind and depth of feeling involved in the creation of this early Renaissance work. And as he helped us to see, Giotto was concerned less with miracles and dogma per se than with the nature of the human relationships in each event. Giotto’s purpose, Davis made clear, was to show “the human significance of the sacred legend.” In that, we learned, Giotto was a precursor of all that was to come in the Italian Renaissance.

“I’m anxious to make the students feel the quality of these things,” Davis told the New York Times in an interview before his retirement. “I’d like to feel that I’ve . . . contributed something to the way they feel about works of art, something lasting that has come out of the courses.” In that, he surely succeeded with me, as with countless others.

In the fall of 1960, I moved from New York to Boston with my first husband, who was joining a research group at Massachusetts General Hospital. Taking a day job doing editorial work at Houghton Mifflin Publishing, I began attending art history classes at night, and on returning to New York four years later, resolved to pursue an M.A. in art history. Because I was employed full time as an editor at Columbia University Press, I enrolled at Hunter College, which (unlike Columbia) offered a full complement of evening and weekend courses.

As I would soon discover, Hunter was a hotbed of modernism,2 for which I felt no affinity. But my good fortune was that Professor Davis was an adjunct there. I was therefore lucky enough not only to take his course on Northern Renaissance Painting but to have him as my thesis adviser for a study on Piero della Francesca’s great diptych of Federico da Montefeltro and his wife, Battista Sforza. As I wrote in the Preface of that thesis, his lectures on Renaissance painting had been my first introduction to the discipline of art history and his “discernment and sensibility have ever since served as an example.”

Confronting the Dystopian Artworld

On earning my M.A. in 1970, I faced with dismay an artworld that struck me as a mockery of all Professor Davis had stood for and that had inspired me to enter the field of art history. In place of emotionally meaningful imagery, the contemporary art scene was awash in Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop art—work ranging from the incomprehensible to the utterly banal. Unable to reconcile it with the art I loved, and unwilling to pretend that I could, I shelved my art history diploma and turned to other, very different work.3

Not until nearly fifteen years later—when I met my second husband, Louis Torres—was I introduced to a theory of art that made sense of my rejection of what had come to pass as art in contemporary culture. Only then did I return to serious study of the arts. And soon after, I began writing for Aristos, the little journal Lou had founded in 1982.

A visit to an exhibition at the Morgan Library together not long after we had met resulted in a chance encounter with Professor Davis, whom I had not seen since completing my M.A. work. To my great astonishment and delight, he not only remembered me but commented to Lou on the subject and quality of my thesis. He then alluded to the fact that I hadn’t pursued a Ph.D., by adding “the good ones never go on,” or words to that effect. I was bowled over, as I had had no idea that he regarded me as in any way exceptional. It also suggested a kinship between us, because he had never obtained a Ph.D. (although, unlike me, he had pursued doctoral studies). His words have buoyed me through a difficult path as a contrarian.

When Professor Davis died a decade later, I attended the memorial service for him in St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia. A nobody among the notable art historians he had nurtured, I sat in mute awe at the service, feeling I had not yet lived up to the promise his words of praise had implied.

One of the eminent art historians who studied with Professor Davis was Laurie Schneider Adams [more]. Extraordinarily prolific, she made impressive contributions to the field of Italian Renaissance studies, among other wide-ranging accomplishments—in addition to teaching art history at John Jay College for more than four decades. My modest achievements pale in comparison.

As I only recently discovered, Adams dedicated her widely used survey Art across Time to the memory of both Professor Davis and Rudolf Wittkower—another outstanding art historian who taught at Columbia, where she had obtained her Ph.D. In view of that connection, her account of twentieth-century art in that volume, as in her History of Western Art, is to my mind truly astonishing.

Like other leading art historians, Adams in those volumes uncritically embraces every anti-traditional invention since the early twentieth century, however baffling, bizarre, or banal—along with every cockeyed idea spouted by the inventors to justify their unprecedented work. In so doing, she either ignored or was untroubled by the radical respects in which such work had deliberately flouted the humanistic and aesthetic values emphasized by Professors Davis and Wittkower—the very values that had presumably inspired her to engage in art history. What an egregious irony!

For my very different account of the modern artworld, see “Art History Gone Amuck,” and “The Lamentable Politicization of Art.”

Were Howard Davis alive today, I can’t help but wonder whose account he would regard as truest to the values he held dear.

Notes

  1. See Heather Mac Donald’s account of Scully in “Yale against Western Art,” Quillette, February 13, 2020. ↩
  2. Hunter College’s history of promoting modernism is well documented in Howard Singerman et al., Robert Motherwell and the New York School at Hunter, published in connection with an exhibition with the same title at the college in 2015. ↩
  3. See “Sampling of Previous Work” appended here. ↩
"Art History Gone Amuck", Arena Chapel - Padua, Art across Time, Columbia University, Giotto, Howard McP. Davis, Hunter College, Italian Renaissance painting, Laurie Schneider Adams, Piero della Francesca, Rudolf Wittkower

8 comments on “Remembering Howard McP. Davis”

  1. Alison McParlin Davis says:
    May 2, 2021 at 3:21 am

    Thank you for the lovely and touching piece about my father, Professor Howard McParlin Davis.

    Were he still alive today, I’m sure he would very much appreciate your kind words.

    Most sincerely,
    Alison McParlin Davis

    Reply
    • Michelle Kamhi says:
      May 2, 2021 at 11:31 am

      I am so glad you saw it, Alison. Thanks very much for writing!

      Reply
      • Alison McParlin Davis says:
        May 14, 2021 at 11:48 pm

        ✨✨

        Reply
  2. Charles Gabler says:
    November 1, 2020 at 5:43 pm

    Would that we all had the experience of an inspirational teacher along the way, one that fosters an inflection point in one’s career or life-long interests or values. I happen to share Michelle’s views on what art is and wish more of it could reach a wider audience.

    Reply
  3. Barbara Phillips says:
    October 21, 2020 at 1:49 am

    I too wish I had had the opportunity to study with Professor Davis. However, I was delighted to read your scholarly article. Thank you.

    Reply
  4. ~ Nona says:
    October 20, 2020 at 5:24 pm

    A wonderful — and highly readable — tribute. It makes me wish I had been in one of Professor Davis’s classes.

    Thank you for writing it.

    Reply
  5. Frank Cooper says:
    October 20, 2020 at 3:05 pm

    The good fellow now has two well-deserved honors – the professorship and this article.

    So pleased to learn of his excellence.

    Reply
  6. William Conger says:
    October 20, 2020 at 2:57 pm

    This is an inspiring tribute to Howard McP. Davis entwined with your own scholarly development. I wish you hadn’t used every nasty adjective to denounce Professor Adams’ views.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Search

Subscribe via Email

Enter your email address to receive notice of new posts.

Return to Blog

About ‘For Piero’s Sake’

Who was Piero, and why was this title chosen? Read here.

Recent Posts

  • Debunking Jasper Johns
  • Delving into an Incomparable Work of Renaissance Portraiture
  • Lessons on Education from Books Our Children Read
  • Revisiting Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini “Wedding” Portrait
  • Remembering Howard McP. Davis

Share This Website

Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Linkedin
Email this to someone
email

Archives

  • January 2022
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • June 2020
  • January 2020
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • October 2018
  • August 2018
  • June 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • November 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • March 2017
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • August 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014

{*} ©2022 Michelle Kamhi :: Site by KPFdigital :: Admin Login