Kuno Francke Chair of German Art and Culture is Established

An endowment of $150,000 has been given to the University to found a chair of German Art and Culture, to be known as the Kuno Francke Professorship. The chair is named in honor of Kuno Francke, the founder and honorary curator of the Germanic Museum, now emeritus professor of German Culture. No incumbent has been named for the current academic year.

The purpose of the donors is expressed in a statement that they gave the fund "in the belief that the artistic development of a given nation in architecture, sculpture, and painting should be studied as an integral part of national life, closely allied to social conditions, intellectual tendencies, and literary movements."

Ten Donors

There were ten donors to the fund, Julius Rosenwald of Chicago gave $50,000 toward the foundation of the chair. Henry Goldman '78 subscribed $40,000, and Felix Warburg of New York City subscribed $25,000. The other donors included C. J. Liebman '98, of New York; Theodore Battenhausen of New York; J. F. Schoellkopf of Buffalo, N. Y; Julius Goldman of New York City;, P. M. Warburg of New York City; F. A. O. Schwarz '24; and Henry Schwarz '29, both of Greenwich, Connecticut.

Similar to Norton Chair

The duties of the Kuno Francke Professorship will be of the same general nature as those of the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry, the only other chair in the University that seeks to correlate the culture of a large field. The holder of the Chair of Poetry is at freedom to discuss any of the seven liberal arts, music and fine arts as well as verse, being considered poetry in the broader sense.

Correlate Culture

Like the Norton Chair, the Kuno Francke Professorship will have, for a few years at least, guest professors as annual incumbents. It is the desire of the donors, however, that a man will be finally secured to combine the knowledge of the various branches of Tentonic Cultures. Instead of presenting merely one aspect of the subject, a permanent recipent of the Kuno Francke Professorship would have to be able to give students the benefit of understanding of German history. German art, and German literature. It was the unusual ability of Professor Francke to so correlate the whole of German culture which first inspired the donors of the endowment to perpetrate his work in this field.