Honorary Graduates

Orations and responses

Professor Michael Podro

Oration given on 14 July 2000

Chancellor, the Senate of the University has resolved that the degree of Doctor of the University be conferred upon Professor Michael Isaac Podro.

They say that when Michael Podro entered almost any restaurant or bar in Florence, usually at the head of a phalanx of his students, the proprietor would advance on him, arms wide, beaming with pleasure, and exclaiming “Ah! Il professore!”  It was not so much the prospect of custom that produced this effect, but rather the knowledge that here was someone who loved and admired the history, culture and art of that superb city.  It was an enthusiasm that was passed on to generations of students, and not a few of his academic colleagues (one of whom, a creative writer of repute, wrote a splendid poem in tribute, entitled “A Walk Around Florence”  for Michael Podro).

Another colleague, from the Department of Literature, on one of those visits was struck by the way that Michael Podro coaxed appreciation of the works of art being studied out of his audience.  He was like a conductor, he says, with word and expression and gesture encouraging us to look and see and comprehend.

It is perhaps in that word “look” that the essence of Michael Podro’s approach to art lies.  In an age where we are almost assaulted by images, advertising, cinema, television, illustrations in newspapers and magazines, it is all too easy to let one’s eye glide over the page or screen without truly understanding what it is we are looking at.  It was not so when Raphael and Rembrandt, or even Hogarth and Chardin, were painting.  Much of Michael Podro’s scholarship has been devoted to encouraging people to look at and to see art, and above all, to think about what they are looking at.

Michael Podro’s qualifications for assuming this task are exemplary.  After taking a degree in English Literature at Cambridge and a doctorate at University College, London (one of his supervisors was the eminent philosopher A. J. Ayer), he joined Camberwell School of Art and Crafts as head of the Department of Art History.  Then, in 1967, he moved to the Warburg Institute of the University of London as Lecturer in the Philosophy of Art.  Somewhere along the way, he found time to attend the Slade School of Art, where he learned to draw (in other words, his experience became practical as well as theoretical).

The four years Michael Podro spent at the Warburg were critical to his intellectual and academic development.

Aby Warburg was a German art historian who, from 1905, built up a library in Hamburg dedicated to preserving the classical heritage of Western culture. In 1919, the library became part of the new University of Hamburg, but in 1934 (a momentous, menacing year in German and European history), four years after Warburg’s death, it was moved to England and became the Warburg Institute of the University of London.*

The director of the Warburg when Michael Podro taught there was Ernest Gombrich, probably the greatest art historian of the last half-century, whose approach to art ranged from the aesthetic to psycho-analysis.  Gombrich was capable of writing high quality popular works, such as his The Story of Art, to books of an extremely high intellectual level, such as his Art and Illusion.  Working so close to Gombrich, Michael Podro felt encouraged to develop his own polymathic approach to art history and theory.  But it was, perhaps, only when he came to Essex in 1969 that he was able to expand fully his manifold talents in a cross-disciplinary milieu (for Essex at that time was dedicated to inter-disciplinary, comparative study).

Michael Podro was not the founder of the Department of Art History & Theory at Essex, but he it was who took it in hand and gave it purpose, leadership and direction, as his colleagues are all too ready to testify. Under his gentle, but determined tutelage, it became a department where teaching was always paramount. That it also stimulated scholars to produce distinguished publications in a variety of fields of art is testimony to the creative atmosphere that he engendered.

It used to be a joke in the University that the Department of Art History held its departmental meetings (and not a few seminars) on the 8.30 a.m. train out of Liverpool Street, so successfully did many of its members manage to evade the University’s residence ruling that then existed.  But that never affected the quality of its work, nor the very high standard of pastoral care that it gave to its students. However, there is a wry, doubtless unintended, humour in the title Kitaj gave to one of his paintings : Jewish rider in railway train - for Michael Podro was friends with several of the leading artists of the London School - Freud, Frank Auerback, Kitaj - for whom he was often the subject of their art.

Although Michael Podro’s title when he was awarded a chair at Essex in 1973 was Professor of Art History & Theory, it could just as easily have included the word “philosophy” as the title of one of his most influential books - The Manifold in Perception: From Kant to Hildebrand - suggests.  Today, the study of the philosophy of art has been adopted in numerous academic institutions.  Michael Podro was a pioneer in that field and it was under his guidance that the Department at Essex came to be recognised world-wide as a centre for the study of the philosophy of art. Indeed, so highly regarded is Michael Podro by the international community of philosophers and art historians that in 1992 both groups joined forces to elect him Fellow of the British Academy.

Amongst his other distinctions, he became a Trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1987 and is a member of the editorial boards of both British and German journals of aesthetics. He has been a faculty member of the National Endowment of the Humanities Institute,  New York, a visiting professor at Tel Aviv and California Universities and  a frequent guest speaker at both the Louvre and the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

In an essay on one of Michael Podro’s books, the reviewer not only uses expressions such as “stunning” and “magisterial”, but also the phrase “He really makes us look at works of art afresh.”  What better accolade could there be for an art historian cum philosopher ?

Chancellor, I present to you Michael Isaac Podro.

*This paragraph is taken, almost verbatim, from The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Biography  (Oxford: OUP, 1997, p.405)