German art historians

Gustaf Adolf Britsch (11 August 1879 – 27 October 1923) was an early 20th-century German art theorist and the founder of Gustaf Britsch Institute in Starnberg, Germany.

Hans Jantzen (26 April 1881 in Hamburg – 15 February 1967 in Freiburg im Breisgau) was a German art historian who specialized in Medieval art.

Kurt Badt (3 March 1890 in Berlin − 22 November 1973 in Überlingen) was a German art historian.

Helmut Ruhemann CBE, (b. 1891 – d. 1973) was a German painting conservator and restorer, considered the pre-eminent of his profession during his lifetime.

Oskar Hagen (14 October 1888, Wiesbaden, Germany – 5 October 1957, in Madison, Wisconsin, United States) was a German art historian.While lecturing at the University of Göttingen from 1918 to 1925, Hagen helped establish the Göttingen International Handel Festival. He established the revival of Handel operas in Germany, beginning with his heavily-edited version of Rodelinda in 1920. He later moved to the United States to be professor at the University of Wisconsin, where he founded the department of Art History. In addition to his work as an art historian, Hagen also composed original music. Hagen is the father of actress and drama teacher Uta Hagen.

Ernst Pfuhl (17 November 1876, Charlottenburg – 7 August 1940, Basel) was a German-Swiss classical archaeologist and art historian. He was the son of sculptor Johannes Pfuhl (1846–1914) and a son-in-law to art dealer Athanasios Rhousopoulos (1823–1898).

Paul Jacobsthal (23 February 1880 in Berlin – 27 October 1957 in Oxford) was a scholar of Greek vase painting and Celtic art. He wrote his dissertation at the University of Bonn under the supervision of Georg Loeschcke. In 1912 he published a catalog of the Greek vases in Göttingen, and received a position as a professor at the University of Marburg.
In the 1920s Jacobsthal became interested in the work of John Beazley on vase painting, and began to adopt Beazley's taxonomical methodologies. His 1927 work, Ornamente griechischer Vasen, was dedicated to Beazley. In 1930 Jacobsthal and Beazley began to collaborate on an inventory of early Greek vases, the Bilder griechischer Vasen, a project which they concluded in 1939. After World War II, the two scholars served as co-editors of the Oxford Classical Monographs.
In 1935 Jacobsthal was forced to leave Nazi Germany on account of his Jewish heritage – though he was baptised a protestant, both of his parents were Jewish. He settled in England, and in 1937 was appointed as a lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford. There he continued his collaboration with Beazley.
Soon after his arrival in England, Jacobsthal began to study the art of the Celts, and in 1944 published his study of Early Celtic Art. This book focused on the impact of Greek ornament on Celtic decorative arts, and was one of the earliest English-language works to employ the terminology established by Alois Riegl in his Stilfragen. From 1947 through 1950 Jacobsthal served as University Reader in Celtic Archaeology at Oxford University.
Jacobsthal's final study, Greek pins and their connexions with Europe and Asia (1956), returned to the cataloguing of material from Greek antiquity, while remaining engaged with issues of the reception of Greek art abroad.
Jacobsthal's students included the Swiss archaeologist Karl Schefold and Hans Möbius.