Anita Brookner - Infinite Women

Born: 16 July 1936, United Kingdom
Died: 10 March 2016
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Anita Bruckner

This biography is shared from The Dictionary of Art Historians, part of the Duke Digital Art History and Visual Culture Research Lab, in line with the Creative Commons licensing. See below for full attribution.

Historian of 18th and 19th century French painting. Brookner was born to Newson Bruckner, a Polish immigrant, and Maude Schiska (Bruckner), a British singer whose grandfather was originally from Warsaw, Poland. Fearful of the German-sounding last name, her mother changed their family name to Brookner as World War II began. Although secular Jews, the Brookners took in Jewish refugees fleeing the Germans during the 1930s and World War II. Brookner attended a private school, the James Allen’s Girls’ School. She received her B.A. from King’s College, University of London. Brookner entered the Courtauld Institute of Art where she obtained both her MA and Ph.D, the latter an expansion of the former on the painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze. In 1950 she was awarded a scholarship from the French government to the École du Louvre where she principally lived while writing her dissertation, supervised by Anthony Blunt, the Courtald’s director. She supported herself though numerous book- and exhibition reviews and translating both Italian and French books into English.
She began her teaching career as a lecturer on French art and culture at the University of Reading between 1959 and 1964. Returning to the Courtauld as a lecturer, which she never left. Brookner later became the first woman to be named to the Slade Professorship at Cambridge University teaching the academic year of 1967-1968. During that time she published a highly critical assessment on Michael Levey recent book as a letter in the Burlington Magazine (1967). In it, Brookner outlined the divergent methodologies between Levey’s conservative formalism and what in some senses could be called the New Art History. The following year she issued the first of her monographic examinations of French painters, with Watteau. A group of essays, first delivered as her Slade school address, appeared as The Genius of the Future: Studies in French Art and Criticism, published in 1971. Greuze: the Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-century Phenomenon followed in 1972, particularly well received by scholars. Brookner was raised to the rank of Reader (professor) at the Courtauld in 1977. A final work on a French painter, Jacques-Louis David, was published by her in 1980.
Brookner’s writing abandoned art history for the moment in favor of novel writing. Her 1981 A Start in Life, vaguely chartered the issues in her life. Her 1984 Hotel du Lac received the Booker Prize for that year. Though she continued to teach at the Courtauld, she devoted herself to novels over the next twenty years. She learned, only from a book on Blunt’s spy activity published in 1987, that she had been used as a courier by Blunt, although by that time under British government control (Wright). She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1990. Her final book of art history was launched in 2000, Romanticism and its Discontents, some essays from her Genius of the Future studies and additional critics. Her last novel was published in 2009, Strangers: a Novel. She died in London at age 87.
Anita Brookner presented a maverick’s view of art history while remaining in its mainstream. Early on she lamented, “the increasing stylelessness of writings on art history.” She frequently argued for art historians to avoid using art history to explain history, but rather to use history to explain art history. She deplored writing with a bias for some periods and antipathy for others, as her letter to Levey pointed out.