Kurt Badt

Kurt Badt (March 3, 1890 in Berlin − November 22, 1973 in Überlingen) was a German art historian.

The son of a Berlin banker, Badt studied art history and philosophy first at the universities of Berlin and Munich and then in Freiburg, where he was a student of Wilhelm Vöge. Among his fellow students was the young Erwin Panofsky. Badt completed his doctoral dissertation on Andrea Solario in 1914. He started his career as an assistant at the Kunsthalle Bremen, but most of his life he was an independent scholar teaching privately, as his family was wealthy and he did not need an academic job in order to earn a living. According to Alfons Rosenberg, he lived the life of a Renaissance humanist. In 1939 he left Germany gaining a research position at the newly founded Warburg Institute in London. He returned to Germany in 1950, where he became a German citizen in 1952 and helped to reorganize the university system. His writings include studies on Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Eugène Delacroix, Nicolas Poussin, Jan Vermeer, John Constable, Paul Cézanne, Raphael, Vincent van Gogh, Paolo Veronese, Ernst Barlach and attacks on the methodology of the "second Vienna school" of art history dominated by Hans Sedlmayr. He considered "masterpieces" to be the only works of art worth studying.

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