User:Gerbis

Gerbis is Gerhard Bissell, an art historian with M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. I conducted research in Rome for several years on Roman baroque sculpture, particularly Melchiorre Cafà and Pierre Le Gros. Since 1993 I live in Britain.

For many years and to this day, I am contributing extensively to Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon (Artists of the World), the successor to Thieme Becker, the famous encyclopedia of artists' biographies. To date, I have written and edited in excess of 2,700 biographies of painters, sculptors, architects, photographers, garden designers etc., covering a vast array of countries, styles and periods from the Renaissance to the present day. I have also edited more than 1,000 English Wikipedia pages, several hundred German and a few Italian and French.

I have in the past been attached to the University of Reading and was also involved in the National Recording Project of the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association for some time.

My main publication is the book Pierre Le Gros 1666-1719, published in 1997, of which a few copies are still available directly through me. My tributes On the Tercentenary of the Death of Pierre Le Gros and to the 20th century American photographer Diane Arbus are consultable online.

I am also a practising art photographer with a variety of approaches from street photography to architecture, abstract and extensively photoshopped images. A large selection can be seen on Si Vede.

Further detail can be found on my website gerbis.net.