No pedagogic considerations are necessary to make us do justice
to the great men who led
the classic movement. The furious strife
between Realism and Classicism is at an end. We have dropped our
battle-cries and have learnt to see something more in these
people than impersonal professors. They were above all guardians
of culture, who worked a kind of cure upon neglected aesthetic
instincts. They not only took over an ancient form, renewing and
transforming it in a highly original manner; they received and
renewed the sense of form itself.

—Julius Meier-Graefe,
Modern Art

Kermit S. Champa, the Andrea V. Rosenthal Professor of the
History of Art and Architecture at Brown University, died
on July 22, 2004, age 64. An early contributor to
The New Criterion,
Champa specialized in the history of modernism and
nineteenth-century French painting. Believing in the
Gesamtkunstwerk, or the “absolute aesthetic fullness of art”
(in his words), he considered classical music to be intimately tied to modernist
form. Lighted water fountains and mysticism found their way into
his mix. At Brown, where had been a full professor since 1974,
he challenged many students—myself included—with these
theories.
He also
provided a beacon for art historians
in the post-formalist flood and a tonic for the trends
of the day. All the while, through serious
scholarship, he illuminated new ways of looking at great works of
art.

Champa himself, intensely private, was often a
mystery to others. Champa’s wife, Judith Tolnick, and father,
Valentino Anthony, have helped me in reconstructing some of his
formative development.

In his youth in rural Pennsylvania, Champa
made a fateful decision.
He sold a beloved collection of Lionel trains
and bought a trombone. This trombone found him a place in the
high-school band and orchestra of Lancaster. It
also earned him a spot as a student conductor. Always a
lover of music, Champa became a performer. But he continued to match his
performances with listening. He was an early audiophile
and kept an interest in audio technology: He delighted in
his first record player; he built up a sizable classical music
collection; he designed a listening system for a family friend. In
high school, he pursued photography, Latin, advanced German,
physics, and calculus. Outside of class,
he ran
his own recording-studio experiments.

At
the end of high school, Champa’s abilities in math and science
earned him acceptance to MIT. He turned down this offer
and chose Yale and its Directed Studies
program, where he was awarded a scholarship and work-study.
It was here, under the influence of Vincent Scully, that
Champa determined to study art with the intention of teaching it.
He graduated in three years. He traveled
to Europe his Freshman year by playing
his trombone in the
Yale Marching Band.

Visual art became
Champa’s profession. Music remained his obsession. In the
history of art department at Harvard University,
where he earned his doctorate in 1965, Champa encountered the
personalities that have dominated the field of
art history up to the present day: Kenworth Moffett, Rosalind
Krauss, and Michael Fried among them. His close mentors included
Frederick Deknatel and Clement Greenberg—under their
guidance, his doctoral dissertation, “The Genesis of
Impressionism,” became Studies in Early Impressionism (1973;
1985), one of his first major books.

From
his earliest published work, Champa set about to understand the
history of modernism through the influence of classical music.
He focused on France in
the second half of the nineteenth century. In an
essay for The New Criterion titled “Renoir in Boston,”

(December 1985), Champa demonstrated how illuminating this mode
of investigation could be—he gave Courbet a similar treatment
in The Rise of Landscape Painting in France (1991).

In that essay for New Criterion,
Champa located Renoir within the context of French Wagnerism.
He plotted Renoir’s itinerary through Wagnerist circles,
documenting Renoir’s early friendship with the arch-Wagnerist
painter Fantin-Latour, his meeting with Wagner in Italy in 1882
(Renoir’s subsequent portrait of Wagner illustrated Adolphe
Jullien’s 1886 study of the composer),
and Renoir’s
plans to attend Bayreuth in 1896. Champa wrote that Renoir’s
intimate interest in music led him to paint on
two levels, “leaving the form serious and the literal content as
loose or sentimental as it wants to be.”

Champa concluded:

Whether one is convinced of the absolute force of Wagner’s
example on Renoir’s painting, the issue of a musical model in
interpreting Renoir’s particular achievement seems pressing
nonetheless. Certainly no artist before or after made such
musical pictures, which is to say pictures that achieve their
finish so routinely with a graphic, coloristic cadence and

nothing more. In a landscape like Wargemont of 1879 (Toledo and
shown in Boston) or a figure piece like the Clown of 1909
(Paris and shown in Boston), there is an aesthetically consistent
ambition to suspend colored form in a confidently abstract,
self-sufficient (hence musical) way. The calls of Gautier, Baudelaire,
and, finally, Pater for all arts to pursue the expressively free
conditions of music fell on no ears more willing to listen than
Renoir’s—and on no talent better equipped to respond. In Boston,
there is, then, much to “hear” as well as to see.

Champa’s theories were rooted in form. He also cared about how art was
received by a rarified audience. In his article on Renoir,
for example, Champa wrote that “for the less cultured viewer, the
subject seems sensuously enriched by its luxurious, coloristic
ambience. For the cultured viewer, the subject simply names the
typology of formal arrangement that the painting begins from, or
perhaps ends with.”

Such statements set Champa against the grain
in the new art history—a discipline that
changed radically in the 1970s.
Champa
was saddened by the turn of events.
In “Masterpiece” Studies (1994), his
most personal book, he wrote: “Sociological,
political, and psychological analyses, because of their
presumed basis in solid written documentation, have
increasingly come to dominate the study of what is arguably the
most art-full of all moments in the history of Western painting:
the period from the mid-1870s to the mid-1890s in France.” For
someone who was dedicated to understanding painting on its own
terms, Champa could not envision operating without the native
tools of his discipline. “With the firm belief that great works
of art constitute a very special category of work … the
present author risks being seen as a politically incorrect
intellectual elitist. So be it.”

In the prologue to “Masterpiece” Studies, Champa further
explained:

My truly trendy colleagues … find my Rise [of Landscape
Painting] text, and the present one, insufficiently in step, a
judgment, I suspect, colored in no small way by my having written
for The New Criterion, and perhaps even worse, continuing to
read it publicly.

Champa bore such burdens with style.
The rewards of his studies were found throughout
his life and work. His lectures, written out longhand
on legal pads
(due to a malformed hand, he could not type),
became some of the more inspiring talks on
art one could imagine.
At the lectern, this band leader from Lancaster became Courbet in his

Studio and Wagner at Bayreuth. In 1975,
Esquire magazine voted Champa one of the ten “sexiest
professors in America.” He routinely packed the
lecture hall at the Philip Johnson bunker, Brown’s art building,
with students spilling into the aisles. He did not deny the mysteries and
essential characteristics of the great works of art.
He encouraged many
undergraduates to pursue graduate work in art history. When the
studies of one of his more promising undergraduates, Andrea V.
Rosenthal, were cut short by terrorists in the 1988
bombing of Pan Am flight 103, Andrea’s parents endowed a chair in
the department. Champa, her advisor, became its
recipient.

For his graduate students,
Champa was the éminence grise, himself that great work of art:
intimidating and private and connective at once. His
relationships with students transcended the usual chit-chat
(sometimes awkwardly so) and went right to the heart of the
matter. Everything you needed to know could be found in Courbet,
Meier-Graefe, Baudelaire, and Wagner. Meeting adjourned.

For years Champa disregarded pressures from
Brown to develop a more politically correct,
identity-based department.
Instead, he created an oasis for art history based on a love for form and an abiding interest
in the key documents of the discipline. The xerox machine was not
the principal tool of scholarship, nor were the latest dispatches
from the Art Bulletin bound into “course-packs.”

Rather than Marx, Lacan, Derrida, and
Foucault, Champa’s primary insights came out of Tchaikovsky, Puccini, Wagner, Mahler, and
Richard Strauss. His seminars often began by depositing a
number of foxed, multi-volumed hardcovers on the seminar table
in a cloud of musty soot: Meier-Graefe, Richard Muther,
Théodore Duret, Camille Mauclair, André Fontainas, and
Louis Vauxcelles. On another day it might
be Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Willard Huntington Wright, Albert Barnes,
and Clement Greenberg. His instructions: read, discuss. Exit
Champa. Certainly, the task was daunting. Graduate students
quivered. A stray student typically transferred to another, more
sensible class like “Race, Religion and Identity in the Arts of Spain
and the Americas.” To his own students, however, this was
art history that knew no comparison. Champa knew it, too. He began
“Masterpiece” Studies with this telling quote from
Heinrich Wölfflin:

There is a conception of art history which sees nothing more in
art than a “translation of life” (Taine) into pictorial terms,
and which attempts to interpret every style as an expression of
the prevailing mood of the age. Who would wish to deny that this
is a fruitful way of looking at the matter? Yet it takes us only
so far—as far, one might say, as the point at which art begins.

For many, art began with Kermit Champa. A
Champa
Festschrift has been prepared by
David Ogawa and Deborah Johnson, former students, for a November release by Peter
Lang. A fund exclusively for graduate travel has also been
established in Champa’s name (for information, contact Gift
Accounting, Brown University, Box 1877, Providence, Rhode Island, 02912).

In the months before his death, Champa was re-reading Mme. Blavatsky, Annie
Besant, William James, and revising his manuscript on the color
music—lights and sounds produced by keyboard—of the English
painter and teacher A. Wallace Rimington.
I wish he could
have lived to publish it, just as I wish I could have seen through
my own graduate study with him. I envied those students who
were present for his famed seminars. During the course of one, for
example, he arranged a séance.
For these rich interests, freely shared, everyone adored him.

A memorial service for Kermit Champa will be held at 3:00 p.m. on
October 2, 2004, in Sayles Hall, Brown University.