Fellows

Stephanie Huber received a PhD from the City University of New York, Graduate Center in 2022. Her dissertation, “Cultural Predicaments: Neorealism in The Netherlands, 1927–1945” brings together archival research and film theory to address an unsettling figurative painting style that conveyed modern alienation by perversely appropriating Dutch Old Master traditions and combining them with film aesthetics. She used her fellowship year to transform her thesis into a book. Her research has been supported by grants from the Mellon Council for European Studies, Fulbright, and the American Association for Netherlandic Studies. Her peer-reviewed articles have been published in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, Moving Image Review, Art Journal, and Modernism/Modernity. She has taught at Hunter College and Baruch College and previously had a fellowship at the Isamu Noguchi Museum. In fall 2023, she received a Publication Grant from The Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern to support her book project Dutch Neorealism, Cinema and the Politics of Painting.

Adri Kácsor is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. She studies twentieth-century Soviet and international revolutionary arts and politics, with a focus on the hybrid aesthetics of Hungarian communist artists and theorists who lived in exile in Europe and the Soviet Union between the two world wars. By bringing the figure of the migrant to the forefront of histories of European and Soviet modern art, her work seeks to rethink the relationship between avant-garde and socialist realist aesthetics. During her residency at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, Adri completed her dissertation titled “Migrant Aesthetics: Hungarian Artists in the Service of Soviet Internationalism, 1919-1945.” Prior to her doctoral studies, Adri studied journalism and history at the Eötvös Loránd University and the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.

Alexandra Chiriac is an art historian specializing in histories of twentieth century modernism, with a focus on performance and design. She holds a PhD from the University of St. Andrews and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and her research has been supported by numerous grants, including an award from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (2015–19). During her time as a Leonard A. Lauder Fellow, Chiriac completed her first monograph entitled Performing Modernism: A Jewish Avant-Garde in Bucharest (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022). Her peer-reviewed publications examine aspects of Romanian, Jewish, and Soviet transnational design and performance history, and she has been an invited speaker at Columbia University and the Venice Biennale. Prior to her graduate studies, Chiriac worked at Sotheby’s and co-curated exhibitions at GRAD, a non-profit cultural platform for Russian and Eastern European arts based in London.

Hyewon Yoon holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, where she completed her dissertation “Exile at Work: The Photographic Portraiture of Gisèle Freund, Lisette Model, and Lotte Jacobi, 1930–1955” in 2016. She teaches in the Department of Painting at Seoul National University College of Fine Arts. As a Leonard A. Lauder Fellow, Yoon worked on her second book that explores the work of Alexey Brodovitch, an émigré from Russia best known for his role as the Art Director of Harper’s Bazaar by considering how his graphisme is derived from an aesthetic of pastiche that draws on the technical and formal resources of a variety of European avant-garde movements. Yoon’s research has been supported by numerous institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte. Her essays include “Zum Thema des Porträts im Exil: Gisèle Freund in Frankfurt,” Fotogeschichte (Spring 2019) and “Practice in Color: Gisèle Freund in Paris,” October (Summer 2020).

Jason Mientkiewicz is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation examines the emergence of geometrical abstraction in Russia in the early-20th century through the work of the collective "Affirmers of the New Art" (UNOVIS). This project provides a critical history of the group, its expansion through rapidly restructuring art academies across the new Soviet state, and its participation in contemporary discourses concerning the role of art in the formation of revolutionary collective subjects. Shared by those affiliated with UNOVIS is a rigorous engagement with developments in avant-garde art in Western Europe—Cubism chief among them. As a Leonard A. Lauder Fellow, Jason focused on Cubism's position in art school curricula throughout Russia at this moment, as well as its contested status in debates on art's role in socialist politics.

Jonathan Vernon received his Ph.D. from The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, in 2019. His thesis studied how Constantin Brancusi’s work was written into American, Western European, and Romanian art histories and reinterpreted by sculptors in the 1960s. As a Leonard A. Lauder Fellow, he began developing a manuscript that asks what the idea of the fragment has meant to modern history, culture and politics. Before joining the Research Center, Jonathan was an Associate Lecturer at The Courtauld (2018–19) and Ridinghouse Contributing Editor at The Burlington Magazine (2014–17). He has also been a fellow of the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Henry Moore Institute. His published works include a monograph on Modigliani and an exhibition catalogue on British sculpture since the 1960s for Karsten Schubert Gallery.

Meghan Forbes holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she completed her dissertation, “In the Middle of It All: Prague, Brno, and the Avant-Garde Networks of Interwar Europe” in 2016. As a Leonard A. Lauder Fellow, Meghan completed a book manuscript, which documents historical correspondence, travel accounts, and periodical publications related to previously overlooked networks of exchange between the Czech avant-garde and peers to the East and West. Forbes has received numerous fellowships in support of her work, including a Fulbright Award (2014–15). She is the editor of International Perspectives on Publishing Platforms: Image, Object, Text (Routledge, 2019) and co-curator of BAUHAUS↔VKhUTEMAS: Intersecting Parallels (Museum of Modern Art, 2018). Before joining the Research Center, Forbes was the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives Fellow at MoMA for Central and Eastern Europe.

Raphael Koenig is Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut, and affiliated faculty of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life.

Koenig’s research and teaching interests focus on the intersection of esthetics and social issues in literature, philosophy, and the visual arts, specifically with regard to Disability Studies, Medical Humanities, Jewish Studies, Diasporic Literatures, and Critical Refugee Studies. His recent publications explore the interplay between mental health and artistic production, specifically the reception history of works produced in psychiatric institutions in France and Germany. They include Portals: The Visionary Architecture of Paul Goesch (Yale University Press – Clark Art Institute, 2023), and the edited volume L’art brut, objet inclassable? (Bordeaux University Press, 2021).

Koenig has taught at the University of Toulouse II (previously Mirail) and at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D in 2018. He holds undergraduate and MA degrees from the Sorbonne and the École normale supérieure in Paris, as well as an agrégation in Modern French Letters. He is a member of the Editorial Board of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.

Giovanni Casini is a Researcher (equivalent to Assistant Professor) at the University of Turin. He holds a Ph.D. from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. During his residency at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art in 2018-20, Casini expanded his doctoral dissertation on the Paris-based dealer Léonce Rosenberg and the history of his Galerie L’Effort Moderne in the interwar period and prepared a book manuscript, Léonce Rosenberg’s Cubism: The Galerie L’Effort Moderne in Interwar Paris, which was published, with the support of a Publication Grant from The Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, by Penn State University Press in October 2023. In 2016, Casini was a Fellow at the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) in New York and the Guggenheim Museum's 2017–18 Hilla Rebay International Curatorial Fellow. He is one of the researchers selected for the Research Program (2021-2024) on Picasso initiated by FABA – Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte under the supervision of Michael FitzGerald. Casini is curating the exhibition Dans l’appartement de Léonce Rosenberg. De Chirico, Ernst, Léger, Picabia, which will be held at the Musée National Picasso-Paris from 30 January to 19 May 2024.

Hilary Whitham Sánchez is an art historian specializing in modern and contemporary art along the Black Atlantic. The Leonard A. Lauder Fellowship enabled Whitham Sánchez to complete her dissertation, the first comprehensive analysis of the dada poet Tristan Tzara’s activities as a critic, collector, and curator of African objects from the movement’s founding in 1917 to the opening of the exhibition African Negro Art at MoMA in 1935. Her analysis of the previously overlooked role of blackface in the dadaists’ 1921 performance has been published in Modernism/modernity. She is currently expanding her dissertation into a book that brings her study of Tzara’s activities into the period of African independence until his death in 1963. Whitham Sánchez holds a PhD. from the University of Pennsylvania, and her work has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art and the Mellon Foundation.

Luise Mahler is a Berlin-born independent art historian and researcher based in New York. Her scholarship focuses on the intersection of art criticism, the history of art history, and language as well as on the art market. She is currently at work on a book comparing the cubist theories of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Vincenc Kramář with those of their Central and Eastern European contemporaries which she began during her residency at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art. This study includes the first English-language translation of Kramář's 1921 book Kubismus by Alex Zucker and Nicholas Sawicki in collaboration with Charles W. Haxthausen and Mahler for which she received funding from FABA-Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. Her recent publications include “Reading Picasso in Munich and Prague in 1922"; an essay co-written with Anna Jozefacka and supported by a Josef Dobrovsky Fellowship of the Czech Academy of Sciences, as well as an introduction to Hedwig Fechheimer’s 1914 monograph Die Plastik der Ägypter (Reimer 2021), included in the first of two volumes produced by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) research network “Wege – Methoden – Kritiken: Kunsthistorikerinnen 1880-1970,” of which Mahler is a member. Between 2014 and 2016 she served as an Assistant Curator for the exhibition "Picasso Sculpture" at the Museum of Modern Art. In 2015 she co-chaired the symposium “Charting Cubism across Central and Eastern Europe.” Mahler holds an M.A. from Hunter College, City University of New York.

Sean O’Hanlan is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art at Stanford University. Her dissertation, provisionally titled “André Breton and the Modern Art of Collecting,” traces the evolution of poet and critic André Breton’s personal collection across much of the twentieth century, from its origins during the interwar period—owing much to the experimental forms of Cubism—to his articulation of the Surrealist movement in the postwar period. While in residence at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, she continued her doctoral research on the legacy of Breton’s interrelated and vitally important activities as a collector, gallerist, curator, and maker of objects, as they shaped the history of Surrealism and, indeed, modern art.

Rachel Boate received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2019. Her dissertation "Embodied Abstraction: The Crisis of Representation in 1930s France" examines the degree to which artists Jean Hélion, Fernand Léger, Vassily Kandinsky, and Joan Miró (among others) conflated abstract and representational forms in their work to create a new visual language in response to the ongoing social and political crises rocking interwar France. Boate teaches courses on modern art at New York University and Marymount Manhattan College. Her essay "Fernand Léger's New Realism: Painting for the People in 1930s France" will appear in the edited volume Realism(s) of the Avant-Garde in 2020.

Maria Castro is Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She received her PhD in History of Art and Architecture from the University of Pittsburgh and specializes in modern and contemporary art with a focus on art of the Americas. As a 2016-18 Leonard A. Lauder Pre-Doctoral Fellow, she advanced her dissertation titled “Between São Paulo and Paris: Tarsila do Amaral and the Intersecting Identities of Antropofagia” (completed in 2020). At SFMOMA, she has contributed to such projects as the major survey Diego Rivera’s America (2022) and co-organizes the museum’s ongoing permanent collection exhibition Open Ended: SFMOMA’s Collection, 1900 to Now. Maria has curated or co-curated exhibitions including Pan American Unity: A Mural by Diego Rivera (2021), Amalia Mesa-Bains: Venus Envy, Chapter I and Madrinas y Hermanas (Godmothers and Sisters) (2022), A Living For Us All: Artists and the WPA (2022), and Sitting on Chrome: Mario Ayala, rafa esparza, and Guadalupe Rosales (2023).

Samuel Johnson is a specialist in the art and architecture of the Russian and Soviet avant-gardes. He is currently the Director of Graduate Studies in Art History and the Carole & Alvin I. Schragis Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Music Histories at Syracuse University. His book manuscript, El Lissitzky on Paper: Print Culture, Architecture, Politics, 1919–1933, treats El Lissitzky’s theoretical and practical engagement with print as an alternative to the production art paradigm outlined by Soviet theorists in the early 1920s. His essays include “El Lissitzky's Other Wolkenbügel: Reconstructing an Abandoned Architectural Project,” The Art Bulletin (September 2017); and “Ornement / masse: la troisième dimension du suprématisme,” in Chagall, Lissitzky, Malévitch : L’avant-garde russe à Vitebsk, 1918–1922 (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2018). In 2017, he received a Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for ModernArt’s Publication Grant for his book El Lissitzky on Paper: Print Culture, Architecture, Politics, 1919-1933, which locates the nexus of Lissitzky’s work as an architect and print designer in the material of paper, a precious commodity that supported both utopian projects and political control in the USSR.

Anna Jozefacka is an art historian specializing in modern architecture, art, and design history. Her research spans several broad areas: urban history, visual culture, interiors studies, and provenance. Some of these she pursues in the context of Cubism. She curated the exhibition Picasso: A Cubist Commission in Brooklyn (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2023-24) about the unrealized painting commission Pablo Picasso received from the American artist, collector, and critic Hamilton Easter Field in 1909. She is the author of the lead essay in the accompanying catalogue as well as “A Home for Modern Art in Brooklyn,” in Perspectives. In addition, she is the author of the essay “Private Rooms of the Cubist Still Life” in Domestic Space in France and Belgium: Art, Literature, and Design (1850–1920) (Bloomsbury 2022) andco-author of “Reading Picasso in Munich and Prague in 1922” in Umění/Art (2022); “Cubism Goes East: A Case Study of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s Central Eastern European Network of Agents and Collectors,” in Years of Disarray 1908-1928: Between Anxiety and Delight: The Birth of the Modern Central-European Citizen (Olomouc Museum of Art, 2018); and “Catalogue of the Collection” in Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection (New York, 2014). In 2015 she co-chaired the symposium Charting Cubism across Central and Eastern Europe.

Outside of Cubism, she co-authored The Propaganda Front: Postcards from the Era of World Wars (Boston 2017) and authored “The Matchbook and Its Transition from Commercial to Private Reminder” in The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts (2015) and “Bringing the Public Home: venues of cultural activity in wartime Warsaw (Faire venir le public à maison: les lieux culturels dans Varsovie occupée)” in Villes et culture sous l’Occupation: expériences françaises et perspectives compares (Paris 2012).

Jozefacka earned her doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 2011.

Trevor Stark was a 2014–16 Leonard A. Lauder Fellow in Modern Art. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University in 2016. Stark's first book Total Expansion of the Letter: Avant-Garde Art and Language after Mallarmé (MIT Press, 2020) analyzes the status of language in European avant-garde art from Cubism to Dada in relation to the historical reception of the poetics of Stéphane Mallarmé. His recent publications include articles on Pablo Picasso, Chris Marker, Hugo Ball, and Marcel Broodthaers. He was a 2016–17 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and is currently Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at the University of Calgary.

Vérane Tasseau holds a PhD from Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne with a thesis on the Kahnweiler sequestration sales held between 1921 and 1923 following the sequestration of his gallery's stock in 1914; research project begun in 2014 thanks to the Lauder Fellowship. She is currently working on its publication. From 2001 to 2005, Tasseau worked as a Curatorial Assistant at the Picasso Museum, Paris (Matisse Picasso, 2001; Picasso Surreal, 2005), as research assistant at MoMA in 2006-07 (Georges Seurat: The Drawings). Now a freelance art historian and curator working in Paris and New York, Tasseau is also a part-time researcher for the Picasso Administration. With Cécile Godefroy, she edited a special issue on Picasso's working techniques for Cahiers d'Art (December 2015), she wrote Picasso, L’Art en question (Hazan, 2018) and regularly collaborates with museums on Picasso exhibition catalogs. Together with Annie Cohen-Solal, Tasseau is co-curator of the exhibition “A Foreigner called Picasso” on view until mid-February 2024 at Gagosian, New York (21st Street).