Timothy Benson
Timothy O. Benson is Curator of the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies at LACMA, established in 1983 as a research facility devoted to the study of the Expressionist movement as one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of its kind in the world. Its extensive holdings of 6,000 prints, drawings, and posters, and a library of over 10,000 rare books, periodicals, graphic art portfolios, and secondary literature complemented by a Scholar-in-Residence program allow the Rifkind Center to transcend the role of a conventional graphic cabinet to facilitate the comprehensive study of a seminal modernist cultural movement. Benson received his Ph.D. and M.A. at the University of Iowa and B.A. at Grinnell College with studies at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and graduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has taught at the University of Nebraska, Simpson College, Drake University, and the University of Southern California. His exhibition catalogues include Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy (1993, 2nd ed., 2001), Emil Nolde: The Painter’s Prints (Los Angeles, Boston, 1995), Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation (Los Angeles, Munich, Berlin, 2002), Hans Richter: Encounters (Los Angeles, Metz, Berlin, Lugano, 2013) and Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky (Zurich, Los Angeles, Montreal, 2014). His publications include Raoul Hausmann et les Avant-Gardes, (with Hanne Bergius and Ina Blom, 2015), Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes (with Éva Forgács, 2002), Raoul Hausmann and Berlin Dada (1987, Pbk. 1989), “Malevich and Richter: An Indeterminate Encounter,” (with Aleksandra Shatskikh) in October (2013) and “Dada Geographies” in David Hopkins and Michael White, eds, Virgin Microbe (2014). An alumnus of the Humboldt Foundation he received the German Order of Merit in 1997. Among his current projects is an exhibition entitled World War I: The Global Media War planned for 2020.
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Books by Timothy Benson
The German museum edition includes a 127-page supplement containing the essays in English, including the bibliography.
All essays except the final chapter (Cathérine Hug's conversation with Georg Baselitz and Robert Menasse) appear in English in the forthcoming exhibition catalog German Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky (Prestel and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2014) and in French in the forthcoming De Van Gogh et Gauguin à Kirchner et Kandinsky : L'Expressionnisme allemand et la France (Prestel with the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, 2014). Illustrations in the German edition differ from those of the English and French editions because of differences in the checklist for the Zurich venue.
Articles by Timothy Benson
Evolved in part through nomadic modernism— Matthew Rampley’s ‘networks of mobility of art and artists’ – the ‘Modernist Other’ of the formation ‘Eastern Europe’ was ‘being transformed into the postmodernist Other (of undulating expanse) in the 1920s (Andrzej Turowski). Chance and fragmentation in photomontage further disrupted the chain of determinism, contributing to a self-reflective discourse about time and space seen in dada, as well as in the Devětsil photocollages of Jindřich Štyrský and Karel Teige—all suggesting that we consider a more episodic historiography.
In the global present, episodes of encounter involving non-European self-identifying modernist movements have prompted many useful metaphors that expose entanglements in colonial and post-colonial asymmetrical circumstances including ‘transmodernism’ (Christian Kravagna), microhistories, ‘cultural mediation’ (Piotr Piotrowski), ‘contextual modernism’ (R. Siva Kumar), microsociology (Thomas Hauschild), micro-stories, and what David Joselit calls a ‘reanimation’ of heritage, a concept similar to Rampley’s ‘critical heritage discourse’. Moreover, the much needed ‘critical museum’ hoped for by Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius and Piotrowski appears to be in full swing across the U.S. and Canada, prompting a further shift in priorities from post-colonial to decolonization, audiences to communities, collecting to repatriation, and global to local. Curators and scholars may become entrepreneurial facilitators drawing together diverse objects and ideas in unexpected juxtapositions, not unlike Joselit’s notion of a ‘curatorial episteme’. Central European modernism is rich in vanguard strategies that could invigorate contemporary discourses in smaller, more focused, more affordable, and ecologically sustainable exhibitions and publications.
The German museum edition includes a 127-page supplement containing the essays in English, including the bibliography.
All essays except the final chapter (Cathérine Hug's conversation with Georg Baselitz and Robert Menasse) appear in English in the forthcoming exhibition catalog German Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky (Prestel and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2014) and in French in the forthcoming De Van Gogh et Gauguin à Kirchner et Kandinsky : L'Expressionnisme allemand et la France (Prestel with the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, 2014). Illustrations in the German edition differ from those of the English and French editions because of differences in the checklist for the Zurich venue.
Evolved in part through nomadic modernism— Matthew Rampley’s ‘networks of mobility of art and artists’ – the ‘Modernist Other’ of the formation ‘Eastern Europe’ was ‘being transformed into the postmodernist Other (of undulating expanse) in the 1920s (Andrzej Turowski). Chance and fragmentation in photomontage further disrupted the chain of determinism, contributing to a self-reflective discourse about time and space seen in dada, as well as in the Devětsil photocollages of Jindřich Štyrský and Karel Teige—all suggesting that we consider a more episodic historiography.
In the global present, episodes of encounter involving non-European self-identifying modernist movements have prompted many useful metaphors that expose entanglements in colonial and post-colonial asymmetrical circumstances including ‘transmodernism’ (Christian Kravagna), microhistories, ‘cultural mediation’ (Piotr Piotrowski), ‘contextual modernism’ (R. Siva Kumar), microsociology (Thomas Hauschild), micro-stories, and what David Joselit calls a ‘reanimation’ of heritage, a concept similar to Rampley’s ‘critical heritage discourse’. Moreover, the much needed ‘critical museum’ hoped for by Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius and Piotrowski appears to be in full swing across the U.S. and Canada, prompting a further shift in priorities from post-colonial to decolonization, audiences to communities, collecting to repatriation, and global to local. Curators and scholars may become entrepreneurial facilitators drawing together diverse objects and ideas in unexpected juxtapositions, not unlike Joselit’s notion of a ‘curatorial episteme’. Central European modernism is rich in vanguard strategies that could invigorate contemporary discourses in smaller, more focused, more affordable, and ecologically sustainable exhibitions and publications.