Mauner to receive prestigious French medal

George Mauner, distinguished professor emeritus of art history and past director and fellow emeritus of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Penn State, has been named ÒOfficier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des LettresÓ by the French Minister of Culture. This order, founded in 1957, recognizes artists, writers and scholars who have contributed significantly to furthering the arts of France throughout the world.

In addition to general courses, Mauner taught undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of modern art and on the history of taste and criticism from 1962 until his retirement in 1996. He has been the recipient of Penn State’s Faculty Scholar Medal in recognition of his research activity and influential publications.

Mauner has written six books, including two devoted to Edouard Manet and three to Cuno Amiet, whom Mauner has shown to be the link between French and German modernism at the turn of the last century. He also wrote the first scholarly work devoted to the French Symbolists during the 1890s, the ÒNabis.Ó In addition, he has completed several catalogues for exhibitions he curated, including Manet, the Still-Life Paintings (MusŽe d’Orsay, Paris, and the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore) and Cuno Amiet, from Pont-Aven to BrŸcke (Bern and Geneva, Switzerland).

He also curated Three Swiss Painters, which opened at Penn State’s Museum of Art (now Palmer Museum of Art) in 1973 and then traveled to Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum, the Williams-Proctor-Munson Museum in Utica and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Under Mauner’s directorship, the Institute for the Arts and Humanities organized a number of interdisciplinary conferences that attracted international interest, including Music of the American Theatre, which featured an exhibition of the art of George Gershwin at the Palmer Museum of Art. He also led the organization conferences on poet-painter Else Lasker-SchŸler and on Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart’s librettist, who spent seven years in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, and later introduced the study of modern languages at Columbia University.

After his retirement, Mauner organized The World of Jean Cocteau, a symposium with lectures, films, a concert, an art exhibition and the world premiere of the opera Paul and Virginie, written by Cocteau and Raymond Radiguet. Mauner secured permission to produce the French play in English, recruited Charles Kalman to provide the score (the original composer, Erik Satie, did not complete the score before his death) and assembled a Penn State team to produce the opera. After its premiere at Penn State, the opera toured to Washington, D.C., and New York.

The designation, Officier, represents the rank above Chevalier. Honorees are entitled to wear the insignia of this Order represented by a medal, which will be presented to Mauner at a ceremony at the French Embassy in Washington, D.C. The date of the ceremony has not yet been determined.