The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, a leading research organization dedicated exclusively to the study of modernism, announced the appointment of three visiting senior scholars over the coming year.
Since its inception in 2013, six leading researchers have been invited to pursue research at the Research Center. The Distinguished Scholars this year are Elizabeth Cowling, Professor Emerita in History of Art and Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh; Charles W. Haxthausen, Robert Sterling Clark Professor of Art History, Emeritus, Williams College; and Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University.
Neil Cox, Head of The Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, said “I am thrilled to be welcoming three brilliant scholars to work with us over the next 15 months. Their diverse interests and experience will be of immense value to our other research fellows and to the wider Met community and beyond, especially since all three have remarkable records in exhibition curating and publications.”
Elizabeth Cowling will be in residence at the Research Center for two periods of six weeks each, one beginning this fall and one beginning in the winter. She has published extensively on European modernism, especially Cubism, Primitivism, and Surrealism, and is an expert on Picasso. Her book 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. Cowling is an internationally recognized curator: she co-curated 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; Grand Palais, Paris; MOMA, New York, 2002–03); and Picasso Looks at Degas (Clark Art Institute, Williamstown; Museu Picasso, Barcelona, 2010–11). She is also co-curating with Emily Braun the exhibition Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition, which opened at The Met on October 20, 2022, and will be on view through January 22, 2023. While at the Research Center, she will develop her current research on the Cubists’ debt to the decorating trade for the center’s website.
Charles Haxthausen is returning to the Research Center for six weeks, from late October to early December 2022, following a residency in 2019–20 that was cut short due to the pandemic. He will continue his work on a book reassessing Paul Klee’s position in the European avant-garde and will give a public lecture on the project at the Museum in November 2022. 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 is collected in Carl Einstein, A Mythology of Forms: Selected Writings on Art, recently published by the University of Chicago Press. 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.
Richard J. Powell will be in residence at the Research Center in 2023, from September to December, where he will advance his work on the transcultural and multiracial dimensions of modern art, taking full advantage of the collections at The Met. He will give a public lecture on his research toward the end of his residency. 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); Back to Black: Art, Cinema, and the Racial Imaginary (2005); and Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist (2014). His books include Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (1991), Black Art: A Cultural History (1997, 2002, and 2021), Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (2008), and Going There: Black Visual Satire (2020). From 2007 to 2010, Powell was Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin, the world’s leading English language journal in art history. In 2022, Powell delivered the 71st annual A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
About The Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art
Founded in April 2013, The Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art is a leading center for scholarship on modern art, with a special focus on Cubism. The first such institution dedicated exclusively to the study of modernism within an encyclopedic museum, the Research Center makes critical contributions to scholarship through its fellowships for emerging as well as senior scholars, support for publications on modern art, and its robust program of exhibitions, lectures, publications, research projects, and workshops.
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November 3, 2022
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