(Q19766219)
Statements
1907
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1978
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12 August 1978
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July 1945
January 1946
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In mid-1945 Ritchie was selected by the Roberts Commission to assist the MFAA with restitution of objects looted from Austria. Taking a leave of absence from the Albright Gallery, he travelled to Vienna, where he served at Headquarters of United States Forces in Austria (USFA) alongside Monuments Men Lt. Col. Ernest T. DeWald, Lt. Cdr. Perry Cott, and Lt. Frederick Hartt. In November he was selected as the successor to Monuments Man Maj. L. Bancel LaFarge as Chief of the MFAA Section for the United States Forces, European Theater (USFET) in Austria. As the representative of the USFA at the Munich Central Collecting Point, some of his most memorable accomplishments include personally escorting Jan Vermeer’s The Artist’s Studio (“the Czernin Vermeer”) to Vienna in a private railroad car, and accompanying the Holy Roman regalia from Nuremberg to Vienna on board a C-47 transport plane. (English)
1942
January 1949
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In the years following his return to the United States, Ritchie served in influential positions at some of America’s most prominent cultural institutions. After departing the Albright Gallery in 1949, he became Director of the Painting and Sculpture Department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1957 he succeeded former Monuments Man Lamont Moore as Director of the Yale University Art Gallery. His most notable acquisition was that of Paul Mellon’s impressive collection of British art, which he used as the basis for a new museum, the Yale Center for British Studies (today, the Yale Center for British Art). In addition to commissioning famed architect Louis Kahn for the museum’s innovative building, Ritchie continued to expand the collection. In 1970 he was the first American citizen given an honorary Ph.D. from the Royal College of Arts in London. Following his retirement from Yale in 1971, he spent one year as Robert Sterling Clark Professor of Art History at Williams College in Massachusetts. (English)
Identifiers
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