DESPITE being named by Esquire magazine in 1975 as one of the “ten sexiest professors in America”, Kermit S. Champa remained something of an éminence grise of American art history. He was, however, an immensely popular lecturer at Brown University, Rhode Island, in which he was Professor of Art and Architecture from 1974, able to rely on packed houses unmatched by anyone else on the faculty, as well as to a wider public at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate Gallery and elsewhere.
More significantly, he inspired generations of students with his own burning enthusiasm for French Impressionism and American Modernism. He wrote elegantly and readably on his subjects of special expertise, believing in maintaining traditional standards of “literary” writing on art as practised by Baudelaire and Meier-Graefe.
In some of his books, such as The Rise of Landscape Painting in France, he appeared to be concerned exclusively with visual art, but even there his violon d’Ingres lurked in the background: throughout his life his musical interests (and talents) were always closely intertwined with his art studies, so that for him the history of landscape painting in France was closely paralleled by the contemporary evolution of symphonic form.
Similarly, he wrote extensively on fin-de-siècle attempts at practical synaesthesia, lining up sounds with colours, and his last book, which he was revising at the time of his death, is The Slang of Aestheticism: The Anglo-American Color-Music Project 1898-1950. And in general he was interested in the connections between disparate things, writing eloquently on the relations between Zola and Manet, Monet and Van Gogh, or between Monet and Bazille.
But the musical connection was clearly long established in his thought. From early childhood he had musical ambitions: it is recorded that he made the supreme sacrifice for a boy of his generation by selling his treasured collection of Lionel toy trains in order to buy a trombone. He became a performer of some skill, to his own intense satisfaction, touring Europe as a member of the university’s marching band while in his freshman year at Yale.
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All the same, the subject he was actually reading was art history.
His intention was always to teach it. He graduated from Yale with a BA in 1960, and gained a doctorate from Harvard in 1965, after which he returned to Yale as an assistant professor of art history. In 1970 he joined the art history faculty of Brown University, and in 1974 became a full professor there. In 1995 he was named the Andrea V. Rosenthal Professor in the History of Art and Architecture, a chair endowed in memory of one of his pupils who had died in the Lockerbie air disaster. He retained this position until his death, after a prolonged battle with cancer.
It was perhaps inevitable, with interests which embraced music and literature as well as the visual arts, that Champa should have been interested also in cinema, which was regularly included in his teaching schedules. This led to a major controversy in 1989, when he planned to show D.W. Griffith’s silent classic Birth of a Nation in the context of one of his courses. The screening never happened, owing to some passionate objections to the showing of such an unarguably racist work.
Champa stoutly maintained that it should be shown as an example of film art, and that its showing no more implied endorsement of the views it contained than showing Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will would imply approval of Nazism. Though he lost the argument at the time, he was quietly satisfied when, two years later, the film was shown without complaint in a film festival accompanying the Public Affairs Conference at Brown.
Champa is survived by his wife Judith Tolnick Champa, director of the Fine Arts Centre Galleries at the University of Rhode Island, and two sons and a daughter.
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Kermit S. Champa, art historian, was born on August 20 1939. He died on July 22 2004, aged 64.