Professor James Beck

James Beck, art historian: born New Rochelle, New York 14 May 1930; Instructor in Art History, Columbia University 1961-64, Assistant Professor 1964-69, Associate Professor 1969-72, Professor of Art History 1972-2007, Chairman, Department of Art History and Archaeology 1975-81; President, ArtWatch International 1992-2007; married (one son, one daughter); died New York 26 May 2007.

James Beck, art historian and scholar of Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture, was a larger than life character. He came to public attention as a result of his openly and fearlessly speaking his mind - something uncommon in the art world - on the contentious question of the restoration of works of art. In 1992 he founded ArtWatch International in New York, to monitor art restoration projects and campaign against injurious restoration or conservation practices. Further branches of ArtWatch followed in Britain and Italy.

In 1991 Beck had been cited for criminal defamation by the restorer of the effigy in Lucca Cathedral of Ilaria del Carretto by Jacopo della Quercia, a sculptor on whom Beck was the world authority. On 24 July 1990 he had been induced to look at the restored figure by an American sculptor, who brought along reporters from Il Tirreno of Livorno and La Nazione of Florence, who recorded Beck's indignant reaction. Further interviews appeared in La Stampa of Turin and Il Giornale dell'arte published in Alessandria, with the result that Beck had to answer suits in four different courts. The penalty provided was up to three years in prison, yet Beck decided to fight rather than compromise, only winning after coming perilously near to being convicted.

The young John Ruskin, another fearlessly independent and trenchant voice, had fallen in love with the Ilaria and coincidentally became a pioneer in the anti-scrape movement. In The Stones of Venice (1851-53) he described the cleaning of paintings as "incipient destruction" and restoring them as "total destruction." (With his penchant for putting "his tusk in" in a manner very akin to Beck's, unsurprisingly he too landed in the courts on a charge of libel.) Attacks on restorers have been longstanding. In Ruskin's day picture restorers were mainly painters with little knowledge of chemistry, whereas today they are mainly scientists untrained in art. Significantly, Beck began his career as a painting student in New York and Florence before he became an art historian.

Beck and other critics complained that restoration robs works of art of their three-dimensional quality through the diminution of the contrast between light and dark, and that the Renaissance artist sought to create that quality by shading, which restorers mistakenly remove as a later accretion, or by relying on the process of time. Beck recalled that an old marble carver at Pietrasanta showed him how sculptors would leave grooves very roughly chiselled, thus providing places where dirt would collect, to give the effect of light and shade, of which the Ilaria was purged by the restorer.

With Michael Daley, Director of ArtWatch UK, Beck wrote Art Restoration: the culture, the business and the scandal (1993), which dealt also with the restoration of Masaccio's frescoes in Florence, of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling and the restoration controversies at the National Gallery, London.

As a champion of rights (of works of art rather than of men) James Beck liked to recall that he was born within a few hundred yards of the New York house of Thomas Paine. He graduated in 1952 from Oberlin College, where he studied history, political science and painting. He received a master's degree in studio art at New York University in 1954, and then studied at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence.

After receiving his PhD in 1963 from Columbia University, he remained there at the Department of Art History and Archaeology for the rest of his career. He had studied for his doctoral dissertation on Jacopo della Quercia under Rudolf Wittkower, and the department included other luminaries such as Julius Held and Meyer Schapiro. Beck's monograph Jacopo della Quercia was published by Columbia University Press in two volumes in 1991.

An energetic and forceful researcher, writer and lecturer, he published many other studies, some compilations of documents, as those for della Quercia and Masaccio, and some works for the educated layman on Michelangelo, Raphael and others. His survey Italian Renaissance Painting was published in 1981 and in an expanded version in 1999.

His last book, From Duccio to Raphael: connoisseurship in crisis, appeared shortly before his death and was as forceful and challenging as any. This questions the attribution to Raphael of The Madonna of the Pinks and of the Stoclet Duccio (or the Duccio Madonna) to Duccio, works acquired in 2004 by, respectively, the National Gallery in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He had earlier written articles casting doubt on the attribution to Raphael of the National Gallery's version of Portrait of Pope Julius II, and to Michelangelo of a figure of Cupid that turned up in New York. The rights of the work of art and of the artist as ever came before the amour propre of his fellow professionals.

Beck was appointed Commendatore di Merito della Repubblica Italiana in 1992. For his 75th birthday a Festschrift, Watching Art, was edited by two of his pupils, Lynn Catterson and Mark Zucker.

Selby Whittingham