CAA News Today

Professor Emeritus, Dr. Lloyd Engelbrecht (1927–2016), died peacefully in his sleep in hospice on New Year’s Eve after battling neuroendocrine cancer for half a year. He was a beloved faculty member of the Art History program at the University of Cincinnati, 1980–2001, where he taught the history of design, and modern art and architecture, and mentored twenty-four M.A. advisees.

He was the author of the first comprehensive, fully-documented biography of László Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Mentor to Modernism (Flying Trapeze Press, 2009) and, with his wife June Engelbrecht, the award-winning biography, Henry C. Trost, Architect of the Southwest (El Paso Library Association, 1981). Together, they also created a catalogue raisonné of the work of Trost and his family firm of Trost & Trost. Additionally, Engelbrecht published essays in Taken by Design: Photographs from the Institute of Design, 1937–1971 (U of Chicago Press, 2002), Best of Triglyph (Arizona State U Press, 2002), The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910-1940 (U of Chicago Press, 1990), and 50 Jahre New Bauhaus (Bauhaus-Archiv, 1987). Recently, he was working on a biography of Chicago’s first Modernist painter, Rudolph Weisenborn (1881–1974). Engelbrecht’s publications concerned the influence of the German Bauhaus in the U.S., and he helped mount exhibitions in both American and European museums.

Engelbrecht’s degrees were AB in General Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1950; MS, Library Science, Columbia University, 1951; and an interdisciplinary doctorate from the Committee on History of Culture at the University of Chicago, University of Chicago, 1973. Engelbrecht received grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Engelbrecht was a remarkably kind, generous, and positive man who will be missed by his two daughters, Khadija Engelbrecht Fouad and Julie Rowlands, and their husbands, Aladdin Fouad and David Rowlands, four grandchildren, Omar Fouad, Maryam Fouad, Ibrahim Fouad, and Hussain Fouad, and numerous friends, as well as many devoted former students. He was predeceased by his wife June-Marie Fink Engelbrecht.