How art history’s 1969 doctoral class helped redefine the scholarship of American sculpture and women artists

Editor’s note: This story was written by Roberta K. Tarbell, Professor Emerita of Art History at Rutgers University-Camden; Visiting Scholar, Center for American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Adjunct Professor of Art History, Winterthur Museum/University of Delaware, Preservation Studies Doctoral Program.

In 1969, eight students pursued their doctoral dissertations on American sculpture at the University of Delaware, with Wayne Craven serving as their advisor: 

• Marjorie P. Balge: William Ordway Partridge (1861–1930): American Art Critic and Sculptor
• George Gurney (1939–2022): Olin Levi Warner (1844–1896): A Catalogue Raisonné of His Sculpture and Graphic Works
• Joan M. Marter: Alexander Calder: The Formative Years
• Eric Scott McCready: The Nebraska State Capitol: its Design, Background, and Influence [Lee Lawrie, sculptor]
• Michael Richman (1943–2025): The Early Career of Daniel Chester French, 1869–1891
• Lewis Inman Sharp: A Catalogue of the Works of the American Sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward, 1830–1910
• Pamela H. Simpson (1946–2011): The Sculpture of Charles Grafly
• Roberta K. Tarbell: Catalogue Raisonné of William Zorach’s Carved Sculpture

Three dissertations were catalogues raisonnés because such foundational documents were important in a new field of scholarship. Kate H. Stevenson joined the group and wrote her M.A. thesis on the American sculptor Herbert Adams. A dozen additional doctoral students focused on American painting or architecture. 

This influx of so many doctoral students is especially remarkable because art history, with the benefit of a founding gift from the Unidel Foundation, had just become an independent department at UD in 1966. William I. Homer, the first chair, and Craven were joined by George Bishop Tatum, historian of Philadelphia architecture.

A global center for American art

UD was the only university worldwide that had three specialists in the history of American art. Doctoral students also studied or worked with Winterthur Museum’s curators and faculty in its M.A. Program in Early American Culture and its incipient M.S. Program in Art Conservation.

John Stephens Crawford also arrived in 1969 with a doctoral degree from Harvard University in Classical archaeology. At 26 he was closer to the age of the students and joined them for social and research events. He attended Craven’s seminar on American sculpture and published articles connecting ancient and American sculpture.

Because Craven brokered gifts to UD of collections of bronze sculptures from the Gorham Corporation, and sculpture and works on paper from the George Gray Barnard family, and Homer facilitated gifts to the Delaware Art Museum, students had ample opportunities to work directly with objects. Connoisseurship was a key component of the approach to art history. 

One way the cohort was mutually supportive was the box that held files for each student in the art history office, where research notes pertinent to others’ areas of interest could be shared. All contributed to the Index of American Sculpture (after 1982 part of the online database Smithsonian Inventory of American Sculpture), which Craven had started as he researched Sculpture in America (1968).

In April 1972, Craven’s sculpture students organized “Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture,” the first of decades of American art symposia. The presentations were published in the American Art Journal (1972).

The UD cohort of sculpture historians published museum catalogues, books and essays about American sculpture. Notable are Marter’s role as editor of The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art (2011), for which Simpson oversaw sculpture. Marter, Donna J. Hassler, and Thayer Tolles (M.A. UD) wrote American Sculpture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 2: A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born between 1865 and 1885 (2000).

From 1972 to 1989, Sharp worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he became curator of American art and the first administrator of the new American Wing. He left to become director of the Denver Art Museum, a position he held for 20 years.

In 1972, Gurney started at the National Collection of Fine Arts (today the Smithsonian American Art Museum), remaining there to become the first curator of sculpture (1985 to 2011). Tarbell assessed the sculpture collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in preparation for its 50th-anniversary exhibition, The Figurative Tradition and American Art, which she co-curated with Pat Hills in 1980.

Pioneering women and feminist scholarship

This study of American sculpture parallelled the upsurging feminist movement. It is remarkable that half of the sculpture students were women who throughout their careers rediscovered women artists for exhibition and publication.

Marter has edited Woman’s Art Journal since 2005. Marter, Simpson and Tarbell taught courses on women artists. Simpson, the first female tenure-track professor and the first female professor to receive an endowed chair at Washington and Lee University, played a critical role in that university's transition to coeducation in 1985. 

This unique group of scholars who wrote their dissertations on American sculpture came together in 1969 and continued to foster the publication, exhibition and collection of American sculptors throughout their careers.