MONTIAS, John Michael 1928-2005

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born October 3, 1928, in Paris, France; died of complications from melanoma July 26, 2005, in Branford, CT. Economist, educator, and author. Montias was a Yale University economist who gained particular attention for his studies of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer and for his research into the economics influencing art auctions in the Netherlands. The son of Jewish parents living in France, he fled the country in 1940 just before the Nazi invasion and ended up in New York City. Here he discovered the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, where he became enamored by the Dutch masters of the Renaissance. He attended Columbia University for his undergraduate and graduate studies and, after serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, completed his Ph.D. in economics in 1958. Montias then joined the Yale faculty as an assistant professor. He specialized in the study of Eastern European economies, taking several trips during the cold war to the Eastern Bloc, where he was tailed by government agents who suspected he was a spy for the West; at one point, he was even forced to leave Hungary. As an economist, Montias was part of a growing movement called the Annales school, which emphasized the importance of ordinary people and events over the influences of world leaders and large-scale events such as wars and economic depressions. By the late 1970s, however, the economist began to focus on the world of art, resurrecting his childhood interest in Dutch painting and the life of Vermeer. Traveling to the Netherlands for his research, he first wrote a study on seventeenth-century Dutch art guilds, Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century (1982). Next, he cowrote Vermeer, Albert Blankert (1988) and authored Vermeer and His Milieu: A Web of Social History (1989). The latter book reveals a number of previously unknown facts about the artist and his family, including how Vermeer fathered thirteen children and died impoverished at forty-three. Montias then focused on the economics of art markets in Renaissance Netherlands, publishing Artists, Dealers, Consumers: On the Social World of Art (1994), Public and Private Spaces: Works of Art in 17th-Century Dutch Houses (2000), and Art at Auction in 17th-Century Amsterdam (2003), the last written with John Loughman.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

New York Times, August 1, 2005, p. A13.

Times (London, England), August 16, 2005, p. 47.

ONLINE

Yale University Web site, http://www.yale.edu/ (December 8, 2005).