Champa, Kermit Swiler

Kermit Swiler Champa (1939-2004): French and American Impressionist painting scholar; Brown University Professor of Art and Architecture, 1970-2004. Champa was initially interested in music. He studied the trombone in grade school and toured Europe as part of Yale's marching band. In his academic classes at Yale, Champa studied art history. He graduated from Yale with a BA in 1960, continuing at Harvard where he studied with the art critic Clement Greenberg, and wrote his doctoral degree in 1965 under Frederick Deknatel (q.v.) in Impressionism. He returned to Yale to teach art history as an assistant professor. He joined the art history faculty of Brown University in 1970. In 1974 became a full professor at Brown. Champa had the dubious honor of being named one of the "ten sexiest professors in America", by Esquire magazine in 1975. Champa wove film into his art courses as well, and caused a furor when, in 1989, he planned to show (overtly racist) Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith for its ground-breaking film techniques. His The Rise of Landscape Painting in France: Corot to Monet appeared in 1991, a book using music as the framework for the intellectual importance of French landscape painting. He married Judith Tolnick Champa, a director director. Again, in Masterpiece' Studies: Manet, Zola, Van Gogh and Monet (1994) Champa emphasized the interrelatedness of music, art and literature on French painting of the 1880's. He was named the first Andrea V. Rosenthal Chair of History of Art and Architecture a Brown in 1995, an endowed professorship named after a pupil of his who had died in the Lockerbie plane bombing. He fought a prolonged battle with lung cancer from which he died. At the time of his death, he was revising The Slang of Aestheticism: The Anglo-American Color-Music Project 1898-1950, another project examining the correlation between art and music.

From the guide to the Kermit Champa papers, Champa (Kermit) papers, 1977-2000, (John Hay Library Special Collections)