Willibald Sauerländer

Willibald Sauerländer (*February 29, 1924 in Bad Waldsee, Württemberg, Germany) is a German art historian specializing in Medieval French sculpture. From 1970 to 1989, he was director of the prestigious Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich.

The son of a late-Impressionist painter who disliked art historians, Sauerländer grew up in a house with works of old and modern art. Notwithstanding, he began studying art history in 1946, at a time when Munich was in ruins, the intellectual situation extremely truncated, and the center of everything the study of medieval art, in a curious kind of secular, "aesthetic mystical" spiritualism, which he did not like. He had his main focus on medieval sculpture and architecture with a strong focus on France, Nicolas Poussin, and the French 18th century, but at the same time he opposed Hans Sedlmayr for his reactionary fundamentalist views. He received his Ph.D. in art history at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich in 1953 under Hans Jantzen.

After leaving university, he went to Paris for five years. During their early Paris years Sauerländer and his wife guided tourists and they worked in the Bibliothèque Nationale and at the Institut de l'Histoire de l'Art in order to gain their life. He also taught German at a French lycée. Early on, the personal friendship and scholarship of Louis Grodecki was formative to his art historical methodology. From 1959 to 1961, he taught art history in Paris, and in 1961 in Princeton, NJ at the Institute for Advanced Study. During this first phase in the United States, he met Meyer Schapiro and became a friend of the German émigrés Erwin Panofsky, Walter Friedländer and Richard Krautheimer.

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