To bridge this blog with the project’s microblog on Twitter (@SchapiroArchive), I have started a new follow with the hashtag #ObscureArtHistorian.

This follow is dedicated to those art historians that are not as famously known as others. The follow is also an homage to one of the most useful on-line art historical reference resources, The Dictionary of Art Historians.

Maintained by Duke University and managed by Lee Sorensen, the Dictionary is a phenomenal listing of art historians that have shaped the discipline. Each entry not only includes standard birth place and date ranges, but a well written biography.
According to their website:

The Dictionary of Art Historians began in the fall of 1986 by indexing the historians cited in Eugene Kleinbauer’s Research Guide to the History of Western Art (1982) and his Modern Perspectives in Western Art History (1971), neither of which possessed an extensive index. Heinrich Dilly’s Kunstgeschichte als Institution (1979) and some of Kultermann’s Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte (1966), [the latter then only available in German] were added. The project remained dormant for a few years in card file format. In the interim, a myriad of art historiographies appeared or were reprinted. In 1996, a student input the card project into an electronic form.

As I come across art historians Meyer Schapiro was acquainted with, I’ll post a follow with a link to that historians biography from the Dictionary of Art Historians. In doing so, I hope to shed light on individual art historians that have worked towards cultivating new thoughts and ideas on art history.

For those who may be perplexed by all this Twitter-talk, hashtag’ s are a “community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets.” You can follow hashtags at websites like #hashtags.

So follow me on Twitter as I delve into the world of art history and encounter art historians who have forged the discipline’s path.