Richard E. Spear Papers

Collection

Identifier: RG 30-305

Staff Only

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 Masters".

Dates

Creation: 1953 - 2018
Other: Date acquired: 1998 August 6

Conditions Governing Access

Grade books restricted as noted on inventory.

Biographical Sketch

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 (BA, 1961) and Princeton University (MFA, 1963; PhD, 1965). In 1965 he married Greek sculptor Athena Tacha, who had received an MA in art history from Oberlin College. In 1963 she received her PhD 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 1983-1984, 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.

Note written by Anne Cuyler Salsich.

Extent

9.71 Linear Feet

Language of Materials

English

Additional Description

Method of Acquisition

The first lot of Richard Spear’s papers, comprising teaching materials, was transferred from Athena Tacha in 1998. A much larger donation of teaching and professional materials from Spear himself was received in September 2019.