Richard E. Spear Papers | Oberlin College Archives

Title: Richard E. Spear Papers

ID: RG 30/305

Extent: 9.71 Linear Feet

Arrangement

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Administrative/Biographical History

Richard E. Spear, born in Michigan City, Indiana in 1940, began his distinguished academic career in Oberlin College’s art history department in 1964. He was educated at the University of Chicago (B.A., 1961) and Princeton University (M.F.A, 1963; Ph.D., 1965). In 1965 he married Greek sculptor Athena Tacha, who had received an M.A. in art history from Oberlin College. In 1963 she received her Ph.D. in aesthetics from the Sorbonne in Paris, and then returned to Oberlin as an assistant curator at the college’s Allen Memorial Art Museum.

Richard Spear achieved the rank of full professor at Oberlin College in 1975 as a scholar of Italian Baroque art. For the Cleveland Museum of Art he organized the international loan show Caravaggio and his Followers in 1971. From 1972 to 1983 he served as Director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum. He was appointed the Mildred Jay Professor of Art History in 1983. He continued to teach at Oberlin until his retirement in 2000.

In 1983-84, Spear was Distinguished Visiting Professor at George Washington University, and held the Harn Eminent Scholar Chair at the University of Florida, Gainesville, in 1997-98. Since 1998, he has been Distinguished Visiting and Affiliated Research Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Spear was Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin from 1985-88 and is the recipient of many awards, including a postdoctoral Fulbright-Hays to Italy, the Daria Borghese gold medal for the best book of the year on a Roman subject, and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art, the National Humanities Center, and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations.

Spear’s primary field of research is seventeenth-century European art, especially Italian painting. His numerous publications have focused on Caravaggio and the school of Carracci; he wrote the standard catalogue raisonne on Domenichino (Yale, 1982), and a book on Guido Reni, The “Divine” Guido: Religion, Sex, Money and Art in the World of Guido Reni (Yale, 1997). Spear’s current research focuses on economic art history and on the European paintings in the museum in Mumbai, India.

Richard Spear and Athena Tacha live in Washington, D.C. In 2019 they donated a large group of their collected works of art to the Allen Memorial Art Museum.

Sources Consulted

Oberlin College Archives

Richard E. Spear faculty file (RG 28).

Richard E. Spear Papers case file.

Author: Anne Cuyler Salsich

Subjects (links to similar collections)

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Scope and Contents:

The Richard E. Spear Papers document his career as an art historian, scholar, and professor at Oberlin College and Conservatory, and his work as the former Director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum. The bulk of the collection is made up of published writings, course materials, lectures, speeches, and professional correspondence. These materials span Spear’s career as an art historian, beginning with his undergraduate education in the late 1950s and ending in 2018, eighteen years after his retirement. A large amount of the collection concerns Domenichino, Caravaggio, Guido Reni, and other Renaissance and Baroque artists. The collection also contains documents related to Spear’s time as Director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum and as Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin. Few documents or photographs within the collection inform about Spear’s personal life outside of his career, with the exception of one scrapbook, which documents Spear’s life as a young person during the early to late-1950s.

Included in the collection is correspondence with Venturi, Scott and Associates regarding the architecture firm’s designs for the Seattle Art Museum, the National Gallery in London, the Lewis Thomas Laboratory at Princeton University, and their 1985 Architectural Firm Award from The American Institute of Architects. Much of the correspondence relates to Spear’s research on Domenichino, which resulted in the publication of Domenichino (1982). The collection also contains professional files related to the Allen Memorial Art Museum’s addition by Venturi and Rauch, museum acquisitions, policies, programming, and changes in leadership. Records concerning the Department of Art at Oberlin College discuss the Baldwin Seminars and reports. Writings comprise the bulk of the collection. Of interest to researchers are Spear’s published articles on Claude Lorrain, Artemisia Gentileschi, Antoine Dubost, Giovanni Battista Viola, Nicolas Poussin, Anthony van Dyck, Bolognese painting, and an article on the art market during the 17^th century. Among the numerous articles are writings about blockbuster exhibitions and the popularity of Old Master painters.

SERIES DESCRIPTIONS

Series 1. Biographical Files, 1953-1959 (1.66 l.f.)

Consists of a scrapbook documenting Richard Spear’s teen years from 1953 to 1959. The scrapbook contains photographs of Spear and his travels, as well as concert and event programs, newspaper clippings, and award certificates.

Series 2. Correspondence, 1966-2011, 2013-2017, n.d. (1.25 l.f.)

This series contains personal and professional correspondence to and from Richard Spear. The series is divided into two subseries: Subseries 1. Name Files and Subseries 2. Subject Files. The correspondence includes letters congratulating Spear on his various achievements and professional correspondence concerning his publications, research, and lectures. Subseries 2. Subject Files contains Spear’s correspondence with colleges and universities, professional organizations, museums, newspapers, magazines, auction houses, and publishers.

Series 3. Student and Teaching Materials, 1961-2000, 2002, n.d. (1.83 l.f.)

Comprises three subseries. Subseries 1. Course Materials includes lecture notes from Spear’s art history courses and seminars concerning ancient architecture and sculpture, Medieval painting and sculpture, Baroque and Renaissance Art, Caravaggio, and several other topics. Subseries 2. Notebooks contains Spear’s class notes from his graduate studies at Princeton University from 1961-62. Subseries 3. Gradebooks contains grades from classes Spear taught and is restricted.

Series 4. Professional Files, 1965-1996,1999-2008, n.d. (0.75 l.f.)

The materials in this series consist of documents and correspondence related to Richard Spear’s career as an art historian and professor. Included in this series are materials related to his tenure as Director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Chairman of the Department of Art at Oberlin College, and his work as the Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin, as well as information about grants and fellowships he received, professional organizations, and his political campaign for the Oberlin City Council in 1973.

Series 5. Writings, 1958-60, 1962-76, 1978-1980, 1982-2018, n.d. (3.18 l.f.)

Consists of two subseries: Subseries 1. Published Writings and Subseries 2. Other Writings. Published Writings comprises journal articles, book reviews, auction and exhibition catalogs, and exhibit reviews that Spear wrote over the course of his career. These include articles concerning Caravaggio, Domenichino, Guido Reni, and Artemisia Gentileschi. Also included are his notes related to the publication of Caravaggio and His Followers (1971), Domenichino (1982), and Painting for Profit: The Economic Lives of Seventeenth-century Italian Painters (2010). Subseries 2. Other Writings contains student papers written by Spear while he was a graduate student at Princeton University from 1961 to 1963.

Series 6. Lectures and Speeches, 1978-1989, 1991-1994, 1996-2001, 2003-2005, 2007, 2009-2011, 2013, 2015-2016, 2018, n.d. (1.04 l.f.)

This series consists of transcripts and notes from lectures and speeches given by Spear between 1978 and 2018. Many of these materials relate to Spear’s research on Domenichino, Guido Reni, Caravaggio, Poussin, Renaissance and Baroque Art. The series also includes presentations he made as Director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum.

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