German Art Historian Appointed Visiting Art History Professor at Williams College

Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Oct. 10, 2001 – Williams College has announced the appointment of Michael F. Zimmermann as the Robert Sterling Clark visiting Professor of Art History for the 2001-2002 academic year. A native of Germany, Zimmermann has taught in Berlin, Florence, Prague, Augsburg, and Paris-Nanterre. He is deputy director of the Zentralinstitute fuer Kunstgeschichte in Munich, considered to house one of the best art historical libraries worldwide. This is his first professorship in America.

Previously, he was a fellow in the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica, and a visiting member of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. during the spring of 1994.

Zimmermann’s specialties include French Impressionism, Italian early modern art, the History of the Illustrated Press and the avant-garde movements. He has published a monograph about the French painter Georges Seurat, and recently has finished the manuscript of a forthcoming book about the media system of the arts in Italy from 1859 (a year crucial for nation building) to 1900.

He has edited or co-edited books on topics such as the history of the museums in Berlin, political painting from the 18th to the early 20th century, the painters of Barbizon (Art of Nature and Nature of Art) and the artistic exchange between France and Germany. He has published essays and review articles in catalogues, collective publications, art history magazines, and yearbooks, including the German “Kunstchronik” (Chronicle of Art), and “Passagen,” the yearbook of the recently founded German Center of Art History in Paris, but also articles in newspapers such as the Neue Züricher Zeitung (Switzerland) and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

As elected secretary of the Association of German Art Historians, he has organized two national congresses about art history in east Germany and in eastern Europe (1994), and about the “staging” of the art work (1997).

In 1998, Zimmermann was invited to decorate the Munich-Gern subway station, and he made a mural-collage of historical texts and photographs from the turn of the century, when the area was first urbanized as a residential suburb for artists.

Zimmermann studied in Cologne, Germany, where he received his M.A. in 1983, as well as Rome, Italy and Paris, France, where he attended the Université de Paris-Sorbonne for three years. He received his Ph.D. in 1985 from the University of Cologne. He is a teaching faculty member of the Free University in Berlin.

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Published October 10, 2001