Anne Hollander, Scholar of Style dies at 83
NICOLE BENGIVENO / THE NEW YORK TIMES
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
JULY 8, 2014

Anne Hollander, a historian who helped elevate the study of art and dress by revealing the often striking relationships between the two, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 83.

The cause was cancer, said her husband, the philosopher Thomas Nagel.

“The art of dressing is the art we all practice,” Ms. Hollander liked to say.

In her deeply researched books and essays, she argued that clothing revealed far more than it concealed — about art, about perceptions of the body and ourselves — and her interests spanned centuries and mediums. She detected emotional energy in the flow of fabric in paintings by Tintoretto, illusions of femininity beneath what she called “the extravagant-vamp tradition” of golden-era Hollywood movies, and power in the sometimes misleading lines of a men’s suit.

“With the help of nearly imperceptible padding, curved seams, discreet darts and steam pressing, the rough coat of dull cloth was gradually refined into an exquisitely balanced garment that fitted smoothly without wrinkles and buttoned without strain to clothe what appeared to be the torso of a Greek athlete,” she wrote in her 1994 book, “Sex and Suits.”

Ms. Hollander, an independent scholar, was never on the faculty of a university. Her formal education ended in 1952 with a bachelor’s degree in art history, but she spent the rest of her life in a kind of self-guided graduate school, one unrestricted by traditional boundaries of academia. She could date paintings by looking at how the fold of a fabric was depicted.

She did not start writing regularly until the 1970s, but she went on to publish scores of essays and reviews, organize a prominent museum exhibition and write several books. Her first, “Seeing Through Clothes” (1978), guided readers through centuries of dress and costume as they were depicted in art. It was deeply influential with its analysis of how clothing had been portrayed by artists.

“It was Anne’s brilliance to see that in fact it wasn’t just the clothes that were changing, but that it was the ideal of the nude body that was changing,” Holly Brubach, the writer on style and fashion, who knew Ms. Hollander for more than two decades, said in an interview on Tuesday. “So she basically stripped the clothes off the bodies.”

In 2002 Ms. Hollander helped organize an exhibition at the National Gallery in London, “Fabric of Vision: Dress and Drapery in Painting,” for which she also wrote the catalog. The show was organized into nine sections, each of which looked at how dress and drapery related to the society of their day.

“Surprisingly, perhaps, Ms. Hollander does not focus on the changing techniques used by painters to show fabric,” Alan Riding wrote in The New York Times in 2002. “Rather, her interest is in the expressive role of painted clothing, how it acts like an orchestra whose function is to draw attention to the soloist. Here, the soloist is usually a face or a body.”

Anne Helen Loesser was born on Oct. 16, 1930, in Cleveland, the only child of the pianist and music historian Arthur Loesser and the former Jean Bassett, an artist who taught her daughter to sew and make clothing. She received a degree in art history from Barnard College in 1952. The next year she married the poet John Hollander. Their marriage ended in divorce.

In addition to Mr. Nagel, whom she married in 1979 and who is now an emeritus professor of philosophy and law at New York University, her survivors include two daughters from her marriage to Mr. Hollander, Martha and Elizabeth, and three grandchildren.

Ms. Hollander was a fellow of the N.Y.U. New York Institute for the Humanities and served for a time in the 1990s as president of the PEN American Center. Her other books include “Moving Pictures” (1989), about the role of film in fashion and art, and “Feeding the Eye” (2000), a wide-ranging collection of essays. In 2005 she wrote the text for “Woman in the Mirror,” a collection of photographs by Richard Avedon.

Many younger writers give Ms. Hollander credit for helping change how fashion and clothing are written about and studied.

“It had this taint of a women’s-page subject,” said Judith Thurman, who writes about fashion for The New Yorker, “and she just refused that and insisted that it’s a subject of universal importance.”

Mr. Nagel said his wife was particularly attuned to her own appearance.

“It was a matter of great attention,” he said. “She thought it was an art.”

She believed, Mr. Nagel added, that people should be concerned with how they look from all angles: “She thought you should always use the double mirror before you leave the house.”

© 2014 The New York Times Company
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