ETTINGHAUSEN, RICHARD

ETTINGHAUSEN, RICHARD (1906–1979), historian of Islamic art. Ettinghausen was born in Germany and studied in Frankfurt, where he received his doctorate in Islamic studies in 1931, from which time he devoted himself to the study of, and research into, Islamic art. In 1934 he immigrated to the United States. His extensive contributions to Islamic art were in academic teaching, museum activities, and scholarly publications. From 1934 to 1937 he was research associate of the American Institute of Persian Art and Archaeology and from 1938 to 1949 he taught Islamic art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 1944, he also began to work in the Near Eastern Section of the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian Institution, where he acted as head curator from 1961 to 1967. Continuing to combine university and museum work, he taught at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University from 1961, was appointed Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Islamic Art in 1967, and consultative chairman of the Islamic Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1969, at the same time acting as trustee of various galleries and museums, such as the Phillips Gallery and the Textile Museum, Washington, and was the main promoter of the L.A. Mayer Memorial Institute, dedicated to Islamic art, opened in 1974 in Jerusalem.

He was the author of numerous scholarly publications, covering a very wide range of subjects, but particularly studies dedicated to Islamic painting. These are again extremely varied with much attention paid to Persian, Turkish, Muslim, Indian, and of course Arab, painting. They include studies in Muslim iconography – The Unicorn (1950), Paintings of the Sultans and Emperors of India in American Collections (1961), Persian Paintings in the Bernard Berenson Collection (1961), and Arab Painting (1962). He initiated and organized many exhibitions which dealt with problems of Islamic art for which he compiled the catalogs. He was the editor of Ars Islamica, the first periodical dedicated to Islamic arts (1938–50); he then became a member of the editorial board of Ars Orientalis (1954–67), as well as of Artibus Asiae; he was co-editor of Kunst des Orients.

[Miriam Rosen-Ayalon]