Cuttler, Charles D[avid]

Date born: 1913

Place Born: Cleveland, OH

Date died: 2008

Place died: New York, NY

Scholar of the norther Renaissance in art. Professor of Art History, University of Iowa. Cuttler was born to Morris Joseph Cuttler and Nettie Wolff (Cuttler). After attending Ohio State University where he received a B.F.A. in 1935 and M.A., 1937. He was awarded a Carnegie fellowship to study at the University of Paris, 1937. He initially joined the University of Colorado, Boulder, as an instructor in art history in 1938, and a fellow at University of Brussels under the Belgian American Educational Foundation in 1939. Cuttler left his Colorado teaching post in 1940 on the eve of World War II to work as a designer for several defence engineering firms in Detroit, MI. He married Mary Cecilia Fuller in 1941 (later divorced). After World War II, Cuttler returned to art history, teaching as an assistant professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing, MI, beginning in 1947. He entered the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University for a doctorate in art history. Cuttler studied under the eminent German expatriate art historians who made the Institute famous in the years immediately after the war, including Martin Weinberger, Walter Friedländer and Erwin Panofsky. His Ph.D. was granted in 1952. He joined the faculty at Indiana University as Assistant professor teaching summers, 1952 and 1953. Cuttler was called to the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA as an associate professor in 1957. Cuttler published an article in the Art Bulletin in 1957 on Hieronymous Bosch's "Temptation of St. Anthony" (Lisbon); it remains the basic study on that work (Snyder). He rose to (full) professor of art history at Iowa in 1965, researching in Brussels the following year as a senior Fulbright fellow. He remarried to Betty Monroe. In 1968 Cuttler published one of the first surveys in the English language on northern Renaissance art (the earlier one by Otto Benesch, was a translation from German). He retired from Iowa in 1983. He died in New York city after a lengthy illness. His final book, Hieronymus Bosch: Late Work, appeared posthumously in 2011. His papers are held at the University of Iowa special collections library.

Home Country:  United States

Sources:   Synder, James, ed. Bosch in Perspective. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973, p. 166; [obituary:] "Charles Cuttler." Iowa City Gazette April 23, 2008, p. 4B.

Bibliography: [master's thesis:] Flemish Painting Techniques. Ohio State University, 1937; [dissertation:] The Temptations of Saint Anthony in Art: from Earliest Times to the First Quarter of the XVI Century. New York University, 1952; Northern Painting from Pucelle to Bruegel Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Centuries. New York Holt: Rinehart and Winston 1968; Hieronymus Bosch: Late Work. London: Pindar Press, 2011.

Subject's name: Charles D. Cuttler