Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art Team
Leonard A. Lauder
Leonard A. Lauder is Chairman Emeritus of The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. and the senior member of its Board of Directors. The Company is one of the world's leading manufacturers and marketers of quality skin care, makeup, fragrance and hair care products.
Mr. Lauder is highly involved in the worlds of art, education, politics and philanthropy. He currently serves as Chairman Emeritus of the Whitney Museum of American Art, to which he has donated hundreds of works of art. Additionally, he has been a major supporter of the University of Pennsylvania, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Aspen Institute and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital, among other organizations. He is also Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation.
The Lauder Family received the 2011 Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in recognition of its long-standing commitment to philanthropy and public service.
In 2013, Mr. Lauder pledged his collection of Cubist art to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He also provided significant support for the creation there of the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art to advance the scholarship of early twentieth-century art.
© 2014 MMA, photograph by Jackie Neale
Neil Cox
Neil Cox is Head of the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, joining the Center in 2022 as its third leader after Rebecca Rabinow and Stephanie D’Alessandro. Previously, in the UK, he was Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA), the University of Edinburgh, and before that Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex. At Edinburgh he Directed the ARTIST ROOMS Research Partnership, a collaboration with Tate and National Galleries of Scotland, and was Director of Postgraduate Research for ECA. At Essex he was Head of Department three times and served a term as Chair of the Board of Trustees of Colchester-based contemporary visual arts organization Firstsite during its major capital build project.
His publications include Cubism (London, 2000) and The Picasso Book, (London, 2010). He also worked with Dawn Ades and David Hopkins on Marcel Duchamp (London, 1999, second revised edition, 2021). He has written journal articles and exhibition catalogue essays on Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Surrealism and desire, and on the sculpture and the drawings of Richard Serra. He has curated three exhibitions: A Picasso Bestiary (Croydon, 1995), Constable and Wivenhoe Park: Reality and Vision (Colchester, 2000), and In the Presence of Things: Four Centuries of European Still Life Painting, Part 2: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 1840-1955, at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon in 2011.
Selected publications
1. Authored and Edited Books
Cox, N., with D. Povey, A Picasso Bestiary, Academy Editions, London, [March], 1995, 208pp., 240 illustrations. [book published on occasion of exhibition]
Cox, N., with D. Ades and D Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp, Thames and Hudson, London, [Spring] 1999, 228pp., 180 illustrations. (Note: I wrote Chapters 1, 4, and 7). SECOND REVISED EDITION, 2021.
Cox, N., Cubism, Phaidon Press, [November] 2000, 440pp., 265 illustrations [also translated into Greek, Korean and Japanese].
Cox, N., with J. Clarkson, (eds.) Constable and Wivenhoe Park: Reality and Vision, University of Essex, Colchester, [September] 2000, 100pp. 50 illustrations. [book published on occasion of exhibition]
Cox, N., Picasso’s ‘Toys for Adults’: Cubism as Surrealism, The 2008 Watson Gordon Lecture, Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland [September] 2009, 48pp., 20 illustrations.
Cox, N., The Picasso Book, London: Tate, [May] 2010, 224pp., 80 illustrations.
Cox, N., Picasso: Q + A, Duncan Baird Publishers, London [November] 2010, foreword by Simon Schama.
Cox, N., In the Presence of Things: Four Centuries of European Still Life Painting, Part 2: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 1840-1955, [Exhibition and Catalogue] Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, 20 October 2011-8 Jan 2012; catalogue 247 pp., 120 illustrations.
2. Academic Journal Papers and Essays
Cox, N., ‘Marat/Sade/Picasso’, Art History, 17: 3, (1994), pp.383-417.
Cox, N., ‘La Mort posthume: Maurice Heine and the poetics of decay’, Art History, 23:3, (2000), pp.417-449.
Cox, N., ‘A Painting by Antoine Caron’, Papers of Surrealism, 7, The Use-Value of Documents, November 2007. http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal7/index.htm
Cox, N., ‘The Origin of Masson’s Massacres’, Umeni, LV: 5, (2007), pp.387-399.
Cox. N., ‘Braque and Heidegger on the Way to Poetry’, Angelaki: A journal of the theoretical humanities, 12:2, (December 2007), pp. 97-114.
Cox, N., ‘Picasso: (In)human face’, Angelaki: A journal of the theoretical humanities, 16: 1 (May 2011), pp.199-222.
Cox, N., and Greengrass, M., ‘Painting Power: Antoine Caron’s Massacres of the Triumvirate’, in G Murdock et al (eds.) ‘Ritual and Violence: Natalie Zemon Davis and Early Modern France’, Past and Present, Supplement Series, Oxford: OUP, 2012, pp.241-274.
Cox, N., ‘Out in “The Open” with Braque and Saint-John Perse: L’ordre des oiseaux, 1962’, in Kathryn Brown (ed.), Picturing Language: The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-Century Europe, Ashgate, 2013, pp.45-58.
Cox, N., ‘A is for Aesthetics’, ENCLAVE online review 13, [October] 2015
Cox, N., ‘Desire Bound: Violence, Body, Machine’ in David Hopkins (ed.) The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Dada and Surrealism, London: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, pp. 334-351.
3. Exhibition Catalogue Essays
Cox, N., ‘One mile under the mountain’, [Exhibition catalogue essay] Michael Dan Archer: Passing Through, University of Hertfordshire Gallery, February 2000. (Also available on-line at www.archersculpture.co.uk.)
Cox, N., ‘Critique of Pure Desire, Or When the Surrealists were Right’, in J Mundy (ed.) Surrealism: Desire Unbound, London: Tate Publishing, September 2001, pp. 245-273.
Cox, N. ‘Histoire de l’oeil’, in J Mundy (ed.) Surrealism: Desire Unbound, London: Tate Publishing, September 2001, p.232.
Cox, N., ‘Picasso’s Mirrors: The Mobility of Thoughts’ and ‘Catalogue Entries’, Picasso: Eleven Paintings from International Collections, Vancouver B.C.: Vancouver Art Gallery, October 2005, pp. 3-36.
Cox, N. ‘Sacrifice’, Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents, Hayward Gallery 2006, pp.106-114.
Cox, N., ‘Ultra-barbaric: Gauguin, Picasso and Modernist Primitivism’, Picasso: Small Figure, Museo Picasso, Málaga, 2007, pp.3-63.
Cox, N., ‘Dunkle Materie: Braques Schwarz’, exhibition catalogue essay, Georges Braque, Bank Austria Kunstforum Vienna/Hatje Kantz, November 2008, pp.70-81
Cox, N. ‘The Sur-reality effect: the 1930s’ in Picasso: Challenging the Past, National Gallery, London, February 2009, pp.87-93.
‘Paragraphs on Five Painters’, in Simon Carter (ed.), New East Anglian Painting, Ipswich, 2012, pp.5-11.
Cox, N., ‘Landscape’ and ‘The Cast of Characters’, Picasso in the Nahmad Collection, Monaco: Grimaldi Forum/Paris: Hazan, 2013, pp.330-337 & 348-354.
‘After Nature’, essay on Picasso’s still-life paintings of the 1920s for exhibition on Picasso en el Taller, Madrid, Fundacion Mapfre, February 2014, pp.25-39 (also available as digital version)
Cox, N., ‘The Question of Centering’, Richard Serra 2014, Gagosian/Rizzoli: London and New York, September 2015
Cox, N., ‘Europe after the Rain: Cubism and the New Spirit, 1918-25’, in Christopher Green, ‘Cubism and War. The Crystal in the Flame’, Museu Picasso, Barcelona, 2016, pp.64-80.
Cox, N., ‘Sexuality’ and ‘Violence’, Alberto Giacometti, Tate: London, 2017, pp.97-8 and 115-6.
Cox, N., ‘The Shape of Feeling’, Richard Serra: Drawings 2015-17, Museum Boijmans van Beunigen/Steidl/Gagosian, New York 2017, pp.11-21.
Cox, N., ‘Picasso in his Element? An Autumn of Surrealism’, Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy, Tate: London, 2018, pp.176-183.
Cox, N., ‘Drawing Fascism: 6 February 1934’ Jose Lebrero Stals and Pepe Karmel (eds.), Picasso e historia, Museo Picasso, Malaga, 2021, pp.63-82.
‘Pre-Socratic Surrealism: Bataille and Masson with Nietzsche, Sade and Herakleitos’, in Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, (ed.) Archaic Ontological Past: Pre-Socratic Philosophy and European Avant-Garde Art, Institut de livre, Athens, 2021, pp. 63-98
4. Review Articles
Cox, N., ‘Review of D. Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit, University of California Press, 1995; and J. Seigel, The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp, University of California Press, 1995;’ The British Journal of Aesthetics, 37: 2, (April 1997) pp.181-183.
Cox, N., ‘Putrefying Individuality: Picasso’s Masks’ Review Article of W.Rubin (ed.), Picasso and Portraiture, Thames and Hudson, 1996; and J. Brown (ed.), Picasso and the Spanish Tradition, Yale University Press, 1996; Art History, 21: 1, (March 1998), pp.129-134.
5. Reviews of Single Academic Books
Cox, N., ‘Review of R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 31: 4, (October 1991), pp. 385-387.
Cox, N., ‘Review of T. de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade, University of Minnesota Press, Oxford, 1991’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 32: 4, (October 1992), pp. 375-377.
Cox, N., ‘Review of J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 33: 3, (June 1993), pp. 299-301.
Cox, N., ‘Review of K. Kleinfelder, The Artist, his Model, her Image, his Gaze: Picasso's Pursuit of the Model, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1993’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 35: 3, (June 1995), p.304.
Cox, N., ‘Surrealism is born’, review of P. Read, Apollinaire et les Mamelles de Tirésias: le revanche d’éros, Press Universitaires de Rennes, 2000, Art History, 25:2 (April 2002), pp.268-270.
Cox, N., ‘T J Clark, Picasso and Truth’, The Burlington Magazine, August 2014, Vol. CLVI, No. 1337 (August 2014), pp.541-543.
6. Other
Cox, N., ‘Translation of a Poem by Maurice Heine’, 491: Art Fragments, Issue 1 1996
Cox, N., ‘Arturo Duclos, University Gallery, University of Essex’ [exhibition review] Untitled, 18, spring 1999, p.31.
Cox., N., ‘Material Worlds Apart - Matisse and Picasso’, Tate Magazine, No 29, Summer 2002, pp.22-28
Cox, N., ‘Cubism, Ferrara’ [exhibition review], The Burlington Magazine CXLVI: 1121 (December 2004) pp.842-843.
[As editor for posthumous publication, with Kate Dunton] Puttfarken, T., ‘Caravaggio and the Representation of Violence’ Umeni, LV: 3 (2007), pp.183-195.
[As editor for posthumous publication] Puttfarken, T., ‘Vasari and Renaissance Art History’, in Elkins, J. and R. Williams (eds.), Renaissance Theory, London: Routledge [Spring] 2008.
Cox, N., ‘Picasso in 1932: uncanny eroticism?’, ULEMHAS Review, London, 2010
Cox, N., ‘Picasso and the Politics of Freedom’, Tate Etc., Issue 19, summer 2010, pp.102-105
Cox, N., and Demori, L., ‘Interpreting Ungaretti: 21 Works of Art’ in Carlo Pirozzi and Katherine Lockton (eds.), Like Leaves in Autumn: Responses to the War Poetry of Guiseppe Ungaretti, Edinburgh: Luath Press, [March] 2015, pp.30-32
Cox, N., ‘Dali/Duchamp’, [exhibition review], Burlington Magazine, CLX, 1, pp.51-52
Cox, N., ‘Maurice Heine’ The International Encyclopaedia of Surrealism, Surrealists A-L, Ades, D, et al, (eds), 2019, London: Bloomsbury Academic, vol 2, pp.352-4
Jen Begazo
Jen Begazo is the Digital Programs Associate of the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Lehman College, CUNY, and an M.A. in Social Design and Innovation from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Prior to joining The Met, Jen has applied her human-centered design methodologies across the globe in countries such as Kenya, France, India, Belgium, and the Netherlands. With particular interests in communication and intentional design, Jen seeks to broaden the reach of understanding and thinking across all boundaries and borders. At the Research Center, she manages the Instagram account, website, and external communications.
Laura James
Laura joined the research center in November 2020 having previously fulfilled the role of Assistant Administrator in the Department of Paper Conservation. Prior to joining The MET, Laura gained years of fine art administration experience in multiple New York City art galleries and auction houses. At the research center she assists with managing the fellowship application and onboarding processes for the research center, and facilitating the research center’s activities including lectures, programs, and new initiatives. Laura holds a BFA in art history with MA coursework in fine arts administration from Savannah College of Art and Design.
Rowan Murry
Rowan is the new Associate for Administration at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art. She recently received her M.A. in Museum Studies from NYU where she researched white-washing and DEAI initiatives in classical art collections, culminating in her M.A. thesis titled “Myths of Whiteness: The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy in U.S. Museums.” Rowan also received her B.A. in Art History from The University of Mississippi and has previously worked at New-York Historical Society and The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.
Lauren Rosati
Prior to joining The Met in 2018, she held curatorial positions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The National Academy Museum, and Exit Art. Her writing and criticism have appeared in books; edited volumes; exhibition catalogs for The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art; peer-reviewed journals (The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory, Leonardo); magazines (Art in America); and online.
In the Research Center, she manages the Modern Art Index Project, organizes public programs, and contributes to departmental research initiatives. Her own research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of modernism, in particular the relation of visual art to sound, performance, media, science, and technology. Rosati holds a B.A. from the New School and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. from the City University of New York, Graduate Center.
Selected publications
Books (edited)
Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces, 1960 to 2010. Edited with Mary Anne Staniszewski. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012.
Books (chapters)
“‘Listen My Heart’: Sound Art, Cinema, and the Possibilities of Surround Sound.” Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship, eds. Laura Brueck, Jacob Smith, and Neil Verma, pp. 297–310. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Co-authored with Alexis Bhagat.
“John Cage’s Cinema for the Ear.” Radio as Art: Concepts, Spaces, Practices, eds. Anne Thurmann-Jajes, Ursula Frohne, Jee-Hae Kim, Maria Peters, Franziska Rauh, and Sarah Rothe, pp. 243–54. Cologne: Salon Verlag, 2019.
“Clifford Owens: Studio Visits at the Studio Museum in Harlem.” PERFORMA: New Visual Art Performance, ed. Roselee Goldberg, pp. 154–59. New York: PERFORMA, 2007.
Peer-Reviewed Journals
“Mapping the Field of Sound Art: René Block’s Diagrammatic Modernism.” Leonardo 55, no. 5 (October 2022): 533–41.
“‘Civilizing’ Noise: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Sound, Colonialism, and Power.” In special issue, MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory 2, no. 2 (November 2021): 3–14.
Exhibition Catalogues
“Surrealism in the Air.” Surrealism Beyond Borders, eds. Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale, pp. 56–59, 342–43. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.
R. Luke DuBois: In Real Time. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University, 2015.
Make/Do: Contemporary Artists Perform Craft. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2014.
Articles (online)
“Keeping Score: ‘With Womens Work’ at Issue Project Room.” Art in America (April 21, 2021). https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/aia-reviews/with-womens-work-issue-project-room-1234590445/.
“Georges Braque’s Still Life with Metronome, late 1909.” A Closer Look. The Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art. October 21, 2020.
“Sounds from Outer Space: The Moog at MoMA.” Inside/Out. Museum of Modern Art. March 10, 2015. Republished in MoMA Magazine, August 28, 2019.
Catalogue Entries
“Pablo Picasso: Man with a Guitar.” Recent Acquisitions: A Selection, 2016–2018: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 76, no. 2 (Fall 2018): pp. 68–69.
Other Texts
“Selected Artists’ Biographies.” Surrealism Beyond Borders, eds. Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale, pp. 322–27. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.
“In Conversation: Oliver Beer’s Vessel Orchestra and the Democracy of Sound.” Interview with Oliver Beer. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Blog. August 2, 2019. https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/2019/oliver-beer-vessel-orchestra-interview.