Gallery: Johannes A. Gaertner

from being human summer-fall 2022

by Anthroposophical Society in America

Kent Metcalfe, 1952-2022

... One of a dying breed: the European émigré humanist in whom vocation and avocation, learning for a living and living for learning, ran in perfect parallel harmony. — Susanna Gaertner

Johannes A. Gaertner ( 1912-1996), poet, author, artist, anthroposophist, professor of art history, studied theology and left Heidelberg with a ThD in 1936. His intent was to concentrate on early Christian archeology. To avoid conscription, he left Berlin for Lima, Peru, where he intended to spend a year ... that became ten. In 1941 he met and married my mother; they came to this country just after the war, and, in the manner of Einstein, Nabokov, and other émigré eggheads, he obtained a position at Lafayette College, at that time an all-male bastion of engineering and science. Johannes Gaertner “became” the Humanities, teaching German, French, Spanish, Latin, Art and Music Appreciation. As Lafayette grew, languages and music peeled off and Johannes founded and for decades was the Department of Art History. Legions of his students have remembered him in testimonials. One went on to chair art history at Yale, another became director of the Art Museum in Melbourne.

**Susanna Gaertner & Johannes A. Gaertner**

In 1990, his daughter Susanna organized publication of Worldly Virtues: A Catalogue of Reflections. Then in 2021 she brought out an exhibit of his pen and ink drawings, created between the 1950’s and 1990’s, at the R. Blitzer gallery in Santa Cruz, California. Now these remarkable drawings are online to view or acquire at tahawuscenter.wixsite.com/johannes-gaertner—and we have been allowed to share the images of whimsy, caricature, character, and insight that follow...

“Optimism and cheerful hope are not entirely justified, but neither are pessimism and dark despair. Whether the good will ultimately prevail is uncertain, but we must act as if with our help it could and will. And though we have no contract, we must assume that Nature intended us to exist and to survive. God is, perhaps, on our side.” — From Prof. Gaertner’s preface to Worldly Virtues