Woldemar von Seidlitz, 1850-1922
Nationality: German
Date of Birth: 1850
Identity:
Woldemar von Seidlitz (sometimes called de Seidlitz), was an art historian and director of the Royal Collections, Dresden.
Life:
Von Seidlitz was the author of many works including Der Entwicklung der moderne Malerei ('The development of Modern Painting') (1897) in which he argued his theories that colour began with Delacroix and ended with Bastien-Lepage, and of Gedankenmalerei (philosophical painting), that a Pre-Raphaelite neo-idealism was manifest in the work of Klinger, Böcklin, Stück and Ludwig von Hofmann.
He also published a catalogue of Rembrandt etchings (Rembrandt's Radierungen, Leipzig, 1894) and a history of the Japanese woodcut (Geschichte des Japanischen Farbenholzschnittes, Dresden, 1897).
In 1897, he approached the Paris dealer Samuel Bing about contributing designs to the 1897 Dresden International Exhibition.
JW seems to have met him in the early 1890s through the author and editor Charles Ephrussi (#05405). Probably as a result, an important collection of JW's prints were acquired by the Dresden gallery.
Bibliography:
Jensen, Robert, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, Princeton, New Jersey, 1994; WorldCat, http://newfirstsearch.uk.oclc.org (accessed 12 August 2004).