Born in 1891 in Bremerhaven, Germany, into a family of Danish origin, With (pronounced “Veet”) had a distinguished career as a museum professional and art publicist in Germany under the Weimar Republic. In 1933, the Nazis ousted him from his position as the director of the Cologne Museum of Applied Arts. He exiled himself to the United States for political reasons in 1939. He taught at Hamilton College, Black Mountain College, and the Pasadena Art Institute before becoming director of the short-lived Modern Institute of Art in Beverly Hills (1948-1949). An adjunct at UCLA since 1948, he was hired there as Full Professor in 1950. He retired in 1962 but continued to teach until 1966. He died in Los Angeles in 1980.
With was trained in Vienna under Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941), who was also, a decade later, the teacher of former UCLA faculty member Katharina Otto-Dorn. His doctoral dissertation on Japanese sculpture, which he had been able to study in situ during a long trip to East Asia in 1913-14, was one of the first, anywhere in the world, on an East Asian art-historical topic. He submitted it in 1918 after having fought in the trenches during the entire four years of World War I. He published about a dozen books in German before coming to the United States, but he was above all a charismatic personality and a mesmerizing lecturer. Over time, his research interests became more diverse, and by the time he arrived at UCLA, he had developed into a generalist and an art theoretician. Denying such artificial distinctions as “High Art” vs. “Low Art” and “Art” vs. “Folklore”, and deeply skeptical toward the narrow “style art history” dominant in the discipline at the time, With embraced a “functionalist theory of art” that looked at artworks from all over the world as culturally different solutions to concrete visual problems. At UCLA, he was responsible for firmly anchoring the study of the visual production of non-European civilizations (“Global Art”) in the curriculum, setting a precedent that was widely followed by other institutions.
With deserves to be ranked among the major art historians of the twentieth century. That he is almost forgotten today is perhaps due to the fact that he published little during his time in the United States. An ambitious book project on Functionalism in Art, for which he received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, never saw the light of day; the notes fill many boxes in the Karl With Archives at the Getty Research Institute. A delightful volume of memoirs, continually switching from German to English and back again, was published posthumously: Autobiography of Ideas: Lebenserinnerungen eines außergewöhnlichen Kunstgelehrten (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1997); it is a valuable source of information about the UCLA art-and-art history scene during the post-World War II era.
—Lothar von Falkenhausen, March 2025
August Sander, Art Scholar [Karl With], 1932, from Portfolio IV/19 “The Scholar” from People of the Twentieth Century
