Art History

Lisa Tremper Hanover, longtime director of the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College, has been named director and chief executive of the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, the Michener's board of directors announced Tuesday. She will succeed Bruce Katsiff, who has headed the Michener since 1989. Katsiff said last year that he would retire in 2012 and devote himself to photography. Hanover, 55, has been the Berman's director for 25 years and also serves as an adjunct professor of fine arts at Ursinus, located in Collegeville, Montgomery County.

While studying city planning at Harvard University, Abraham A. Davidson had difficulty drawing perspectives correctly. In his autobiography on a Temple University website, Dr. Davidson wrote that a Harvard professor discouraged his thoughts of graduate studies in architecture but, he recalled, "I might be allowed to continue in city planning. "I thought city planning was beset by politics, while art history was something 'purer.' "Little did I then realize . . . " Dr. Davidson, 76, of Center City, who retired as an art history professor at Temple University's Tyler School of Art in May after a 43-year career there, died of sepsis Sunday, Dec. 18, at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.

The Woodmere Art Museum, the idiosyncratic collection housed in a rambling Victorian structure on six acres at the top of Chestnut Hill, has a new director/chief executive officer. William Valerio steps down Friday as assistant director for administration of the Philadelphia Museum of Art to take the leadership of the 70-year-old museum, whose focus is artists of Philadelphia and the region. "It's hard to leave, because of course I love the Philadelphia Museum of Art and it's one of the special places on the planet," he said.

George Cameron Vail is a whirlwind in disguise. You might not know that he exists but for the persistent, colorful stories spun by those who have worked with him - successful artists, a big-name Camden County prosecutor, and the former editor of a once thriving chain of South Jersey weeklies. We found him, this retired art professor, at his home in Audubon, where he still makes a daily trek to the carriage-house studio in his backyard to paint landscapes and portraits, to carve guitars and dulcimers from tiger maple and mahogany, and to restore antique art. "I don't usually do interviews," said Vail, 82, a twinkle in his eyes.

Find me an art gallery with an exhibit of Haitian paintings, and I am nearly giddy with pleasure. The colors, the inventiveness, the exuberance, the poignancy - all of it delights me anew with each exposure. It was a trip to Haiti more than a dozen years ago that ignited my passion for Haitian art, which (now, as then) has an international reputation. Early last year, however, a trip to the Dominican Republic made me feel like a jilting lover. Over time, rationality has prevailed.

Marjorie K. Sieger, a former educator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art whose field of expertise was Japanese art, died Saturday. She was 73 and lived in East Falls. Though a specialist in Japanese art, she was equally at ease lecturing and teaching Islamic, Indian, Southeast Asian and Chinese art. A museum spokesperson said, "As the museum's first coordinator of public programs for non-Western art, she enriched the lives of thousands of visitors with her great enthusiasm and knowledge of cultures throughout the world.

Alexandra Grilikhes, 70, who built a University of Pennsylvania library from a fledgling facility into a respected source of information, died Saturday of breast cancer at her home in the Roxborough section of Philadelphia. She also was an award-winning poet and novelist who taught at the University of the Arts. As director of Penn's Annenberg School for Communication Library from the late 1960s until she retired in the early 1990s, Ms. Grilikhes "built a real library," said Larry Gross, deputy dean of the Annenberg School.

Siduri Beckman, 14, swoons over George Eliot's Silas Marner with a passion many girls her age reserve for, say, One Direction boy-band phenom Harry Styles. "I loooove that book," she said, sitting in the auditorium at her school, Julia R. Masterman. Correction. She loves Eliot's Middlemarch first, then Silas Marner . But Philadelphia's first youth poet laureate - Mayor Nutter announced her title this week - has never read Harry Potter. If her tastes seem a little serious, Beckman herself is not. She explains that her parents, Karen and Michael Beckman of West Philadelphia, named her Siduri after the "bartender to the gods" in the Epic of Gilgamesh . The literary Siduri knows the secret of everlasting life, Beckman says.

Haverford College will wait more than a year to get its first choice for a new leader, Lafayette College president Daniel H. Weiss. The prestigious Main Line liberal arts college on Tuesday announced that Weiss, an art history scholar who has led Lafayette since 2005, would become Haverford's 14th president in July 2013. Weiss, 54, asked for the time to finish his eighth year with Lafayette and oversee projects he had started, including the design and building of a new center for global education and a new arts campus.

"Why have there been no great women artists?" Linda Nochlin asked this explosive question in 1971 and changed the study of art history. Then and now, her seminal essay, published in Art News, posed a question that still provokes debate. Do the names Peeters, Neel, Frankenthaler and Lin - all accomplished women artists - trip off your tongue like Van Gogh, Picasso, Eakins and Calder? If challenged to name the top 10 best-known or contemporary artists, how often would you include a woman on the list?