Distinguished Scholars

Richard J. Powell is the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art & Art History at Duke University, where he has taught since 1989. A recognized authority on African American art and culture, Powell has organized numerous art exhibitions, most notably: The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism (1989); Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance (1997); To Conserve A Legacy: American Art at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (1999); Back to Black: Art, Cinema, and the Racial Imaginary (2005); and Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist (2014). Among the major museums where his curated exhibitions have been presented are the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, London's Whitechapel Art Gallery, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Along with teaching courses in American art, the arts of the African Diaspora, and contemporary visual studies, he has written extensively on topics ranging from primitivism to postmodernism, including such titles as Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (1991), Black Art: A Cultural History (1997, 2002 & 2021), Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (2008), and Going There: Black Visual Satire (2020). From 2007 until 2010, Powell was Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin, the world’s leading English language journal in art history. In 2013 he received the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, and in 2016 was honored at the College Art Association's Annual Conference as the year's most Distinguished Scholar. In 2018 Powell was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2021 he was offered membership in the American Philosophical Society. Powell was chosen to deliver the 71st Annual A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Elizabeth Cowling is Professor Emerita in the History of Art and Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, where she taught for many years. She has published widely on European Modernism, especially Cubism, Primitivism and Surrealism, and specialised in the work of Picasso. Picasso: Style and Meaning (2002) won the 2003 British Academy Book Prize and Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose was named Apollo Book of the Year for 2006. She curated Picasso’s Late Sculpture: ‘Woman’ for the Museo Picasso, Málaga in 2009 and Picasso Portraits for the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the Museu Picasso, Barcelona in 2016-17. The exhibitions she has co-curated include Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, De Chirico and the New Classicism, 1910-1930 (Tate Gallery, 1990), Picasso: Sculptor/Painter (Tate Gallery, 1994), Matisse Picasso (Tate, London; Grand Palais, Paris; MOMA, New York, 2002-3), and Picasso Looks at Degas (Clark Art Institute, Williamstown; Museu Picasso, Barcelona, 2010-11). She is co-curator with Emily Braun of the Met’s current exhibition Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition. Her current research focuses on the Cubists’ debt to the decorating trade.

Charles W. Haxthausen is the Robert Sterling Clark Professor of Art History, Emeritus, at Williams College. In 2009 he was recipient of the College Art Association’s award for Distinguished Teaching of Art History. His exhibition Sol LeWitt: The Well-Tempered Grid, which he curated for the Williams College Museum of Art in 2012, received an Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators. He has published widely on modern and contemporary art and art criticism with a focus on Germany. His books include Berlin: Culture and Metropolis (1990) and The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University (2002). His translations, with extensive commentary, of the art criticism of Carl Einstein, A Mythology of Forms: Selected Writings on Art, was recently published by the University of Chicago Press. Haxthausen’s residency at the Lauder Research Center in 2019-2020 was cut short by the pandemic; he returned in the fall of 2022 to continue work on a book reassessing Paul Klee’s position in the European avant-garde.

Pepe Karmel is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at New York University. He assisted in the organization of Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism (1989), and was co-curator for Picasso: Masterworks from the Museum of Modern Art (1997–98) and the retrospective Jackson Pollock (1998), all for the Museum of Modern Art. Karmel also curated the installation Dialogues with Picasso, currently on view at the Museo Picasso Málaga (through 2023). He has written about modern and contemporary art for numerous exhibition catalogues and journals, and is the author of two books: Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (Yale University Press, 2003) and Abstract Art: A Global History, forthcoming from Thames & Hudson in fall 2020. During his residency at the Research Center, he will be studying later Cubism, focusing on how the artistic interaction among Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and Juan Gris extended into the 1920s.

Dawn Ades is Professor Emerita of the History and Theory of Art at the University of Essex, Professor of the History of Art at the Royal Academy, a former trustee of Tate (1995–2005) and of the National Gallery (2000–2005), and a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2013 she was appointed CBE for services to higher education.

She has organized or co-curated numerous major exhibitions including Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978); Art in Latin America: The Modern Era 1820-1980 (1989); Dalí’s Optical Illusions (2000); Salvador Dalí: The Centenary Exhibition (2004); Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents (2006); Close-Up: Proximity and Defamiliarisation in Art, Photography and Film (2008); and Dalí/Duchamp (2017–18). Apart from the catalogues associated with these exhibitions, her publications include Photomontage (1986), Marcel Duchamp (with N. Cox and D.Hopkins, 1999), A Dada Reader (2006), and Writings on Art and Anti-art (2015). During her residency, Ades continued her research on Surrealism and on the women of the New York avant-garde, ca. 1917.

© 2014, photograph by Carla Borel

Nicholas Sawicki is Associate Professor of Art History at Lehigh University. His principal area of research is early twentieth century European art and he is a specialist in modern Czech art. Sawicki has published extensively on modernism in Prague, as well as on the history of exhibitions, collecting, and transnational artistic exchange. He is the author of monographs on a group of Prague artists, the Eight (2014); the painter and printmaker Friedrich Feigl (2016); as well as recent articles on Max Brod, Vincenc Kramář, and Pablo Picasso. During his residency in the Research Center, he advanced work on a new book on modernist infrastructures in early twentieth century Prague, and a publication on the curatorial work of Douglas Cooper.More recently, he has published a monograph on the contemporary artist Shimon Attie, Starstruck: An American Tale (2023), and is working on a study of the newly discovered drawings of Franz Kafka.

Adrian Sudhalter holds a Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. She is a specialist in early twentieth century German art, with a focus on Dada. Since 2017, she has served as Research Curator for the Merrill C. Berman Collection. In 2016, she presented her major research project Dadaglobe Reconstructed at the Kunsthaus Zürich and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the accompanying catalogue was a finalist for the College Art Association’s Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Award for Museum Scholarship. Sudhalter has held curatorial positions at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard Art Museums, and at MoMA, for whom she co-edited the scholarly volumes Dada in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art (2008) and Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented, 198-1939 (2020). At the Research Center, she completed the essay, “Collage as Symbolic Form: Margaret Miller, Collage, and the ‘Dislocations of War,’” which was published in 2020. As an outgrowth of that project, she is currently preparing a belated realization of MoMA’s (unrealized) 1948 Collage catalogue, filling a major lacuna in the historiography of this technique.

Christopher Green is Emeritus Professor in the History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art and a Fellow of the British Academy. Green’s scholarship on modernism, and Cubism in particular, has produced numerous publications, including Cubism and its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916-1928 (1987), which won the Mitchel Prize for a book on 20th Century art; Art in France 1900-1940 (2000); and Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo (2005). He has also curated several recent exhibitions: Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris (Tate Modern, 2005); Objetos vivos: Figura y natura muerta en Picasso (Museu Picasso, Barcelona, 2008); Modern Antiquity: Picasso, de Chirico, Léger, Picabia (The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011); Mondrian/Nicholson: In Parallel (The Courtauld Gallery, 2012); and Cubism and War: The Crystal in the Flame (Museu Picasso, Barcelona, 2016). At the Research Center, Professor Green, advanced work towards his forthcoming book Cubism and Reality: Braque, Picasso, Gris, to be published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts in 2025. He is also currently co-curating an exhibition with the working title ‘Henri Rousseau’s Secrets’ with the Barnes Foundation and the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, scheduled to open in Philadelphia in Fall 2025, and Paris in January 2026.