12 Facts About Irving Lavin

Irving Lavin was an art historian of Late Antique, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and Modern painting, sculpture, and architecture.

Irving Lavin was born in St Louis, Missouri, the son of Isadore Lavin and Jenny Shuff.

At the invitation of Bertrand Russell, Lavin went to Cambridge University to become his tutee.

Irving Lavin served in the US Army from 1955 to 1957 as Assistant for the Human Resources Research Office, Continental Army Command at Fort Monroe, Virginia, Specialist Second Class.

Between 1957 and 1959, Irving Lavin was a Senior Fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Center in Washington, DC, where he wrote a major study of "The Hunting Mosaics of Antioch and Their Sources: A Study of Compositional Principles in the Development of Early Mediaeval Style".

Irving Lavin's success became noteworthy early on: his publications won the College Art Association's prestigious Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for Scholars under 40 on three occasions, so often, in fact, the paradigm for the prize was changed.

Irving Lavin was appointed in 1973 as Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, to the chair previously held by Erwin Panofsky and Millard Meiss.

From that position, Irving Lavin contributed to many aspects of art history's position in America.

Irving Lavin broadened the emphasis of scholarship from its long-held tightly Eurocentric attention, to include for the first time in the memberships at the Institute, on the board of the Comite International d'Histoire de l'Art, and in the programs of meetings of the College Art Association, specialists in the fields of African art, the art of Mexico and South America, India, and the Far East.

In 2019, Irving Lavin was posthumously named Grand'Ufficiale dell'Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana.

Irving Lavin communicated easily with practicing artists and was close friends with George Segal, Mel Bochner, and Frank Stella, and traveled with and wrote about Frank O Gehry.

Irving Lavin's last publication was an article on "The Silence of David by Gianlorenzo Bernini," which will be published posthumously in the periodical Artibus et Historiae in spring 2019.