About the Author: Virginia Pitts Rembert Liles
Virginia Rembert, who passed away in 2013, was an extraordinary professor, scholar, and administrator. A brilliant teacher, she mentored generations of art and art history students during a career that spanned over 45 years. She was the pioneering first woman art department chair at three southern institutions. Her distinguished record of research and publication ranged from Northern European art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to contemporary art. It was her doctoral dissertation (and later book) on twentieth-century Dutch abstractionist Piet Mondrian and his influence on American painting that introduced her to Carl Holty and his work, leading her eventually to write a biography of Holty as well.
A native of Birmingham, she was the daughter of a Methodist minister and an elementary school teacher. She earned a bachelor’s degree in art and English from the Alabama College for Women (now University of Montevallo), a master’s degree in fine arts and fine arts education from Teachers’ College, Columbia University, a master’s degree in art history from the University of Wisconsin, and a doctoral degree in art history from Columbia University, where she wrote her dissertation, “Mondrian, America, and American Painting.”
Her teaching and administrative appointments included Beloit College, Massachusetts College of Art, Birmingham-Southern College, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where she was Donaghey Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History, and the University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa). While at the latter, she helped found the first art history master’s program in the state. She was department chair at BSC, UAB and UA. She served as President of the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) for a year and was an active member of its board of directors for seventeen years, eventually receiving its Distinguished Service Award. After retiring in 1990 as Professor Emeritus, she received the Distinguished Career Award from UA’s College of Arts and Sciences’ Society of the Fine Arts. She subsequently lived in New York City for five years and then returned to Birmingham.
During her busy teaching career and in her leadership roles, she tirelessly fostered local art communities wherever she lived, lecturing to interest groups and writing newspaper reviews and articles for museum bulletins and other local arts publications. Meanwhile she published scholarly articles and reviews in national art journals and periodicals, including Art News, Arts Magazine, Woman’s Art Journal, and Art Papers. In her retirement, she published two books: Piet Mondrian in the USA: The Artist’s Life and Work (Parkstone Press, 2002) and Bosch: Hieronymous Bosch and the Lisbon Temptation: A View from the Third Millennium (Parkstone Press, 2004). She continued to write and exhibited her drawings and watercolors.
Virginia Rembert will perhaps be best remembered as an inspiring teacher. Arnold “Arne” Glimcher, founder of Pace Galleries in New York, was her student at Massachusetts College of Art. Robert Kaufmann, who served as librarian at the Yale University Art and Architecture Library and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, called her courses at BSC “electrifying.” She was my own mentor and role model in art history at BSC. Her classes on Giotto, Bruegel, Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Mondrian, among others, were unforgettable. With her remarkable combination of bracing intelligence, elegant erudition, interdisciplinary breadth, and calm passion, she opened our eyes to the intellectual and spiritual meanings of art and to the infinite possibilities of the human spirit. Her classes made us see the world in a new light. We looked forward to them with joy.
Marilyn R. Brown
Professor Emeritus
Department of Art and Art History
University of Colorado, Boulder
and Newcomb Art Department
Tulane University, New Orleans