Trude Krautheimer-Hess - Infinite Women

Born: 11 February 1902, Germany
Died: 12 September 1987
Country most active: Germany, United States, Italy
Also known as: Trude Hess

This biography is shared from The Dictionary of Art Historians, part of the Duke Digital Art History and Visual Culture Research Lab, in line with the Creative Commons licensing. See below for full attribution.

Private scholar and collector. Trude Hess was born to a wealthy manufacturing family. At 22, she married the promising art historian Richard Krautheimer. She studied art history at the universities in Jena, Frankfurt and Berlin, graduating in 1928 under the supervision of Adolph Goldschmidt and Rudolf Kautzsch. Her dissertation, Die figurale Plastik der Ostlombardei von 1100 bis 1178, was published in the Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft the same year. She assisted her husband in research in Rome and elsewhere until the two were forced to emigrate because of religious persecution of Jews. In 1935 they moved to the United States where Richard taught art history first in Louisville, Kentucky and then at Vassar. In 1942 she volunteered for war service in the American Red Cross. For most of the 1950s she was actively involved researching Lorenzo Ghiberti, which resulted in the book of the same title, co-authored with her husband published in 1956. Throughout the 1940’s and 50’s she published articles in the Art Bulletin and Burlington Magazine. By the 1960’s, Krautheimer had amassed a personal collection of Italian master drawings and was known in New York art circles as a connoisseur of distinction. The collection was distinctly hers, not her husband’s. The collection was exhibited at the Duke University Art Museum in 1966. The Romanesque scholar Walter B. Cahn consider Krautheimer-Hess outstanding for her studies of north Italian sculpture.