John Maxwell Jacobus saw the world and its many cultures from a broad perspective.
He was a student of the moving parts around him, taking time to fully understand nuances before developing a comprehensive perspective. Art history, music and architecture were his specialties, but Jacobus’ talent was in seeing connections among them — and the broader world — hiding in plain sight. In the end, both were more fully understood than when he found them. His work gives future scholars a chance to pick up right where he left off.
Jacobus, a life-long scholar, Guggenheim Fellow, long-time Hanover resident and Leon E. Williams professor of art history at Dartmouth College for 30 years, passed away of a heart attack on July 10. He was 89.
“Jake was a keen observer,” said Edward Carroll, Jacobus’ son-in-law and lecturer in Dartmouth’s department of music. “With all of this musical background, he didn’t play an instrument. With all of this expertise in modern art, he never picked up a paint brush. … His great skill was as an observer that could tie connections between art and architecture and music, and bring that to his lecture.”
Jacobus was born on Sept. 15, 1927 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., to Louise Rayland, an undersecretary for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and John Jacobus Sr., a doctor. It was there that he discovered a love for music, painting, opera, culture and his own knack for recognizing the ties that bind them together.
“His father was an amateur pianist, of notable skill. He was taken to the Metropolitan Opera at a young age and learned to love the opera,” said Jacobus’ daughter, Jacqueline Jacobus, of Hanover. “He was always bent in that direction. His aesthetic was kind of molded by his family.”
Following a short stint with the Merchant Marines, Jacobus began his studies. He received his undergraduate degree from Hamilton (N.Y.) College in 1952, and received his master’s degree from Yale University in 1954. He was awarded a Fulbright scholarship that same year, and subsequently earned his doctorate in art history in 1956 for a study of Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, a French architect famous for his restoration of such medieval buildings as Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.
Jacobus arrived at Dartmouth in 1969 after teaching stops at Princeton University, the University of California-Berkeley, Smith College and Indiana University.
It was during this time that he began to contribute to the art history and architecture world, publishing his first work on American architect Philip Johnson in 1962.
“He was intellectually curious,” said James McGarrell, an accomplished painter and Newbury, Vt., resident who met Jacobus at Indiana and reconnected with him during his artist-in-residence stint at Dartmouth. “He was just a man of the world.”
Jacobus’ ability to draw connections among art and architecture and the culture they responded to was evident in his final project, a study of opera houses that went unfinished.
“It went beyond the building or the splendor of the building, but how did the building react and interact with the singers, the musicians, the audience, and how did it interact with the city or town,” Jacqueline Jacobus said. “Beyond the structure and its history and who built it, how did it impact the music it was providing?”
Jacobus was well known for his study published in 1972 on the work of Henri Matisse, the French painter and sculptor, and a study of mid-century architecture in his book Twentieth-Century Architecture: The Middle Years, 1940-65. But perhaps his most accomplished work was an art history textbook entitled Modern Art, co-written with Princeton art history professor Sam Hunter.
The text remains essential reading in collegiate art history classes, going through several editions and revisions since its first publication in 1976.
Modern Art’s success stems from the ability of Jacobus and Hunter to understand art as a reaction to the world.
“The modern work of art, then, can be best understood on two levels, as a model of a world that is utterly real since it is the product of artistic intelligence responding to medium,” the authors wrote. “And, at the same time, as a wholly imaginary creation, since it is also invented and, in that sense, entirely surrounded by the mind of its creator.”
In 1979, ART News magazine asked a dozen current artists to write a blurb on modern art, what it means and ways to identify it. Christo and Jeanne-Claude, an artistic pair best known for wrapping Germany’s Reichstag in polypropylene fabric, responded by wrapping the Modern Art textbook. Jacobus received one of 20 wrapped textbooks in the mail, and it became something of a treasured item.
“Being my father, he kept the packaging it came in,” Jacqueline said.
For Jacobus, art was something to be studied and understood; he had limited experience in creating art himself.
“He was a very universal and witty man who would do experiments in the age of Andy Warhol,” McGarrell said. “I remember once, he tried to run some trivial bit of art writing with a drawing through the early copiers, in the 1960s. He then made copies of the copies just to see how they would deteriorate.
“He was one of the art historians who hung out a lot with artists,” he added. “He was interested in transformation, what would happen on an experimental basis.”
Jim Jordan, a former art history professor at Dartmouth who retired in 2012, worked closely with Jacobus.
“Jake was an indefatigable traveler,” said Jordan, who began teaching at Dartmouth in 1980. “He had wonderful slides and stories and gave talks about his travels to the Far East, India and Nepal. They were largely tours of the art history. … He was very devoted.”
Traveling to Jacobus was a byproduct of his passion to study things up close. He traveled the world for opera and art, often experiencing the same opera performances repeatedly to study the differences between actors and venues.
Jacqueline Jacobus said she remembers spending a lot of time in museums growing up, learning to take in only a few important pieces of art at any museum, although that could still transform the visit into an all-day affair.
But Jacobus’ thoroughness with art was what made his studies so broad and his conclusions so all-encompassing.
“I learned a lot about teaching from him,” Jordan said. “It was unusual; he seemed to be a spontaneous lecturer. He rarely used notes. He didn’t need to. He just remembered everything.”
Josh Weinreb can be reached at jweinreb@vnews.com or 603-727-3306.