Valentiner, William

Valentiner, William (b Karlsruhe, 2 May 1880; d New York, 6 Sept. 1958).
German-American art historian, one of the foremost connoisseurs of Dutch painting, on which he published numerous books. From 1906 to 1908 he worked at the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, Berlin, under Bode, then moved to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where one of his innovations was to ban the attendants from smoking cigars while they were on duty. He stayed there until 1914, then served in the German army in the First World War. At this time he knew various German Expressionist artists, notably Schmidt-Rottluff, and helped to promote their work in the USA. In 1921 he began working at the Detroit Institute of Arts, of which he was director from 1924 to 1945 and where he commissioned murals from Diego Rivera. He was then director of the County Museum of Art in Los Angeles (1946–54) and the first director of the North Carolina Museum at Raleigh (1955–8). He also founded the Art Quarterly (1938), a leading scholarly journal.