Wittkower, Margot, née Holzmann

Date born: 1902

Place born:  Berlin, Germany

Date died:  July 3, 1995

Place died:  New York, NY

Interior designer and Italian Renaissance and Baroque specialist;  wife of art historian Rudolf Wittkower.  Holzmann met her future husband in Berlin in 1918 when she was just sixteen and he seventeen, but because of their young ages waited until 1923 to marry.  Principally an artist, she established herself as an interior designer in Berlin.  The couple, both Jewish, fled Nazi Germany in 1933 for London, where her husband was a British citizen by birthright. She continued her work there as a designer, specializing in apartment interiors and furniture design. Both husband and wife were drawn to neo-Palladian architecture.  Margot carved the area out as a specialty. In 1963 and 1964 she co-wrote two works of artistic biography with her husband, Born Under Saturn and The Divine Michelangelo.

It is the work she published in collaboration with her husband that is most significant today.  Born Under Saturn (1963) and The Divine Michelangelo (1964) were both co-authored projects.  She also assisted on the first posthumous edition of her husband's volume in the Pelican History of Art series, The Art and Architecture of Italy 1600-1750 (1980) as well as smaller works.

Home Country:  Germany/United Kingdom/United States

Sources:  New York Times, July 13, 1995, Section B, p. 12;  Jennifer Montagu and Joseph Connors.  "Rudolf Wittkower 1901-1971."  Introduction to Art and Architecture in Italy:  1600-1750. 6th edition, volume 1, Painting in Italy.  Pelican History of Art.  pp. ix.

Bibliography:  and Wittkower, Rudolf.  Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1963;   edited by, and Wittkower, Rudolf.  The Divine Michelangelo:  the Florentine Academy's Homage on his Death in 1564. London: Phaidon Publishers, 1964; and Wittkower, Rudolf. Künstler Aussenseiter der Gesellschaft.  Berlin, Kohlhmammer, 1965; edited, with Collins, George R. Wittkower, Rudolf. Gothic vs. Classic: Architectural Projects in Seventeenth-century Italy. New York: G. Braziller 1974.

Subject's name: Margot Holzmann Wittkower; Margot Wittkower