Cav. Irma B. Jaffe, Ph.D.
BY SIOBHAN C. PHINNEY, GS ’99

Cav. Irma B. Jaffe, Ph.D. Irma Jaffe’s career as an art historian and author is extraordinary since it didn’t begin until almost mid-life: she left the University of Illinois when she was eighteen years old, in her sophomore year, to get married. Twenty years later, the day after she sent her daughter off to Radcliffe College, she went “back to school,” entering Columbia University’s School of General Studies. She and her daughter received their undergraduate degrees one day apart because Radcliffe’s graduation was held the day after Columbia’s.

After graduating magna cum laude and being elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1958, Jaffe entered graduate school at Columbia where she was awarded a Ph.D. in 1966. She then left the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she had become curator in 1964, to accept Forham University’s invitation to establish its Department of Fine Arts – an innovation for Fordham. She hired a staff of art historians and remained chair of the department for the next twelve years during which time her first three books were published: Joseph Stella (Harvard University Press); John Trumbull, Patriot Artist of the American Revolution (New York Graphic Society); and The Sculpture of Leonard Baskin (Viking Press), in addition to many scholarly articles in art history journals including the Art Bulletin, The Gazette des Beaux Arts, Arte Lombarda, and others. Her literary career has included editorial appointments on several journals including Art in America.

Jaffe’s love affair with Italian culture, which has brought her to her new book, Shining Eyes, Cruel Fortune, The Lives and Loves of Italian Renaissance Women Poets (Fordham University Press, 2002), began with her article in 1964 on the so-called “Barccacia” fountain, the famous boat-shaped fountain in the Piazza di Spagna, at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome. She is the author of the article on art in the new encyclopedia, “The Italian American Experience,” which details the contributions made by Italianborn and Italian heritage artists to the art of the United Sates for 250 years. After retiring from the Fordham faculty, she continued her scholarly life as cultural consultant for the Italian Encyclopedia Institute of New York, under whose auspices she organized a series of international symposia. For her contributions to American-Italian cultural relations she was recognized by the Italian government with the award of Cavaliere in the Order of Merit of the Republic of Italy. She serves on the Board of the American Italian Society of the Legions of Merit.

A natural ability for leadership has been manifested in the many and varied activities Jaffe has undertaken. In her senior year as a student in the General Studies program, she conceived and initiated the SALUTE TO THE ALUMNI program. Her belief that education should take students beyond the abstractions of cloistered, university study prompted her while on the faculty at Fordham to develop the “Bread and Soup of the World Undinner,” a hunger banquet where students and faculty paid for an entire dinner but were served only bread and soup. The money from the symbolic dinner was contributed to UNESCO and CARE for Ethiopia, at that time (1982) ravaged by starvation. As “organizer and inspiration” for this event she was awarded a citation from the State of New York, under Governor Hugh Carey. She conceived, organized, and chaired Fordham College’s innovative Honors Program and fought successfully for Fine Arts to be included in the college’s core curriculum.

A strong conservationist, Jaffe has traveled to Patagonia to band penguins as a volunteer for the Wildlife Conservation Society (the New York Zoo) and to Hawaii to participate in a dolphin language study. She lives in New York and is a member of the Central Park Conservancy.

Although constantly occupied in research and writing, Jaffe has also organized a number of international art exhibitions, including “Conditional Commitment,” which investigated visually, and with artists’ comments, the validity of the theory of “art for art’s sake.”

The passing of thirty-eight years since that first article on the fountain in the Piazza di Spagna has not diminished her love for Italy, its people, and its culture, which is evident in her Shining Eyes, Cruel Fortune. Without Italian culture, she says, everyone must know there could never have been Western civilization, as we know it. She is not Italian.