REMEMBERING JAMES AND DARMA BECK

This year, students, colleagues and friends will gather to pay homage to Professor James Beck and his wife, Darma. The couple touched many lives, and today’s speakers celebrate their vision of art and life.

James Beck was born in New Rochelle, New York in 1930. After graduating from Oberlin College in 1952 he began to study painting, first at New York University and then at the Academia di Belle Arti in Florence. After stints teaching in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Arizona State University, he returned to New York and went to Columbia to obtain his doctorate. He wrote his dissertation on the sculpture of Jacopo della Quercia under the supervision of Rudolf Wittkower, receiving his PhD in 1963. By 1972 he was Professor of Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture at Columbia and spent the remainder of his career there.

An art historian specializing in the Italian Renaissance, Beck was known for his disparagement of many high-profile restorations and reattribution of artworks, which led to his founding ArtWatch International in 1992 to campaign against irresponsible practices in the art world. He was especially critical of the restoration of Jacopo’s effigy of Ilaria del Carretto in Lucca Cathedral, the cleaning of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes, and the attribution of the Stroganoff Madonna to Duccio.

In 1993, with Michael Daley, British journalist, sculptor, illustrator, and UK Director of ArtWatch, Professor Beck co-authored Art Restoration: The Culture, the Business and the Scandal, “…inquiring into the social, cultural, and increasingly commercial factors that underlie the spate of restorations that have produced what amounts to a restoration establishment with its own networks, priorities, and interests.”

In 1955, during his student days in Florence, he met his future wife, Darma Tercinod, while on vacation in Paris. She was a native of Aosta, Italy, and grew up to be an elementary school teacher. They married in April of 1956. In 1971, the Becks moved to Scarsdale where she began working at Casa Italiana as administrative assistant to the director, arranging events and developing the Italian cinema program. In addition, she worked with Giovanni Sartori, a political scientist for whom she translated texts, and assisted Professor Maristella Lorch with her Continuing Education program.
The husband and wife spent their summers in Italy, where Jim could pursue research and Darma could spend time with her family. In 1989 they bought a house in Tuscany where they spent half of May, June, and July each year. James and Darma Beck both died in May of 2007. (more)

Each year, the Symposium honors Professor Rudolf Wittkower, whose work and spirit of collaborative inquiry became not only, as Professor Beck noted, “a standard for the finest art historical scholarship of the entire 20th century,” but also for the third millennium.

The Monuments Conservancy will also take the opportunity to present the ninth annual Perennial Wisdom Award, given to each of the symposium’s participants and people whose work perpetuates the beliefs, habits, and ties that are the foundations of a moral and stable society.

Founded in 1991 by Donald M. Reynolds on the 20th anniversary of Rudolf Wittkower’s death, these events are made possible through the generosity of the late Samuel Dorsky and the Dorsky Foundation.

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