Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art Distinguished Scholar
Current
Lynda Nead
Lynda Nead is Visiting Professor of History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art. A specialist in British art and culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, her most recent book is Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain (2019). Her book, British Blonde: Women, Desire and the Image in Post-War Britain, will appear in September 2025. She has held numerous governance and advisory roles in museums and galleries and is currently on the academic panels of The London Museum and the National Gallery London. She is a Fellow and Council Member of the British Academy and a Trustee of Campaign for the Arts and the Holburne Museum, Bath. Her new research project is on the uncanny imagination in twentieth-century British art and culture.
Past
Adrienne L. Childs
Adrienne L. Childs is an art historian and curator who has published widely on race and representation in European and American art. She is Senior Consulting Curator at The Phillips Collection. She is co-curator of Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest for The Phillips Collection and the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati. She curated Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition at The Phillips Collection. Her current book is an exploration of Black figures in European decorative arts entitled Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts. The High Museum of Art awarded Childs the 2022 Driskell Prize in recognition of her contribution to African American art and art history.
Richard Powell
Richard J. Powell is John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art & Art History at Duke University. An authority on African American art and culture, Powell has organized numerous exhibitions, including: 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). Key books include Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (1991), Black Art: A Cultural History (1997), Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (2008), and Going There: Black Visual Satire (2020). Powell is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Elizabeth Cowling
Elizabeth Cowling is Professor Emerita in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. A scholar of Cubism, Primitivism, Surrealism, and Picasso. Her books include Picasso: Style and Meaning (2002) and Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose (2006). She curated Picasso’s Late Sculpture: ‘Woman’ (2009) and Picasso Portraits (2016-17). She co-curated Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978), On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, De Chirico and the New Classicism, 1910-1930 (1990), Picasso: Sculptor/Painter (1994), Matisse Picasso (2002-3), Picasso Looks at Degas (2010-11), and the Met exhibition Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition (2022-23) She is currently the lead scholar on two major Research Center digital projects.
Charles W. Haxthausen
Charles W. Haxthausen is the Robert Sterling Clark Professor of Art History, Emeritus, at Williams College. His exhibition Sol LeWitt: The Well-Tempered Grid (Williams College Museum of Art, 2012), received an Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators. A specialist in German art and culture, his books include Berlin: Culture and Metropolis (1990) and The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University (2002). His translations, with commentary, of the art criticism of Carl Einstein, A Mythology of Forms: Selected Writings on Art, was published in 2022. His residency at the Research Center in 2019-2020 was cut short by the pandemic; he returned in fall 2022 to continue work on a book reassessing Paul Klee’s position in the European avant-garde.
Pepe Karmel
Pepe Karmel is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at New York University. At MoMA, he worked on 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). At the Museo Picasso Málaga, he curated the installation Dialogues with Picasso (2020-2023). He has written about modern and contemporary art for exhibition catalogues and journals and is author of three books: Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (2003) Abstract Art: A Global History (2020), and Looking at Picasso (2023). At the Research Center, he studied later Cubism, focusing on how the artistic interaction among Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and Juan Gris extended into the 1920s.
Dawn Ades
A Fellow of the British Academy, Dawn Ades CBE is Professor Emerita the University of Essex. 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). Books include Photomontage (1986), Marcel Duchamp (with N. Cox and D. Hopkins, 1999), A Dada Reader (2006), and Writings on Art and Anti-art (2015). At the Met, she worked on on Surrealism and on the women of the New York avant-garde, ca. 1917.
© 2014, photo Carla Borel
Adrian Sudhalter
Adrian Sudhalter is Research Curator for the Merrill C. Berman Collection, and a specialist in modern German art, with a focus on Dada. In 2016, she presented her major research project Dadaglobe Reconstructed at the Kunsthaus Zürich and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Sudhalter has worked at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard Art Museums, and at MoMA, where she co-edited 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,’” published 2020. She is currently preparing a belated realization of MoMA’s 1948 Collage catalogue, filling a major lacuna in the historiography.
Nicholas Sawicki
Associate Professor of Art History at Lehigh University, Sawickiworks on modern European art, especially Czech art. He 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. At the Research Center, he worked on modernist infrastructures in early twentieth century Prague, and an essay on the curatorial work of Douglas Cooper. More recent work includes his book on contemporary artist Shimon Attie, Starstruck: An American Tale (2023), and a study of the newly discovered drawings of Franz Kafka.
Christopher Green
A Fellow of the British Academy, Green’s publications include Cubism and its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916-1928 (1987); Art in France 1900-1940 (2000); and Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo (2005). He has curated many 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); and Cubism and War: The Crystal in the Flame (Museu Picasso, Barcelona, 2016). His next book is Cubism and Reality: Braque, Picasso, Gris (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2025). He is co-curating an exhibition on Henri Rousseau with the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, and the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris (2025-26).