Alexander Kauffman is a historian of modern art, curator, and educator. For recent teaching, publications, and curatorial projects, please visit alexanderkauffman.com.
The Hungarian artist Margit Pogány is best known today as the sitter for Constantin Brancusi’s en... more The Hungarian artist Margit Pogány is best known today as the sitter for Constantin Brancusi’s enduring sculpture series Mademoiselle Pogany. A previously unpublished letter and little-known painted self-portrait by Pogány provide new insights into her commissioning of Brancusi’s sculpture and its significance to Pogány’s artistic career.
Amidst a surge in white supremacist violence across the country, the time has come to reconsider ... more Amidst a surge in white supremacist violence across the country, the time has come to reconsider how American museums are presenting European art.
Marcel Duchamp was among the first artists in the transatlantic avant-garde to acquire his own mo... more Marcel Duchamp was among the first artists in the transatlantic avant-garde to acquire his own movie camera in 1920 but would produce only a single complete film, Anemic Cinema (1926), over the course of his decades-long career. Scrutiny of written sources and other archival materials reveals significant experimentation with the moving image in other formats and media, particularly after his relocation to the United States in the 1940s. Avoiding standard filmmaking, the artist interrogated period conceptions of the cinematic medium and spectatorship through a series of filmic and nonfilmic works, including Discs (ca. 1945–47), Please Touch (1947), and Étant donnés … (1946–66).
Abstract: Michel Foucault’s legacy in shaping understanding of the museum and its ideological ope... more Abstract: Michel Foucault’s legacy in shaping understanding of the museum and its ideological operations is well established in the field of museum studies. Tony Bennett’s adaptation of the ‘disciplinary complex’ in his ‘exhibitionary complex’ essay of 1988 marshalled Foucauldian theory into the field’s mainstream, and contributed to the subsequent methodological shift known as ‘the new museology’ or ‘critical museum studies.’ Less recognised are Foucault’s contributions to theorisations of the museum by modernist art history. Focusing on a passage from his essay ‘Fantasia of the Library’ and its reception by Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss, and others, this article reflects on Foucault’s outsized impact on recent modernist art history. It concludes that Foucault’s commentary stimulated art history to engage with the museum, but at the same time, constrained the field’s conception of modernism’s geographies, protagonists, and institutional formations.
The Hungarian artist Margit Pogány is best known today as the sitter for Constantin Brancusi’s en... more The Hungarian artist Margit Pogány is best known today as the sitter for Constantin Brancusi’s enduring sculpture series Mademoiselle Pogany. A previously unpublished letter and little-known painted self-portrait by Pogány provide new insights into her commissioning of Brancusi’s sculpture and its significance to Pogány’s artistic career.
Amidst a surge in white supremacist violence across the country, the time has come to reconsider ... more Amidst a surge in white supremacist violence across the country, the time has come to reconsider how American museums are presenting European art.
Marcel Duchamp was among the first artists in the transatlantic avant-garde to acquire his own mo... more Marcel Duchamp was among the first artists in the transatlantic avant-garde to acquire his own movie camera in 1920 but would produce only a single complete film, Anemic Cinema (1926), over the course of his decades-long career. Scrutiny of written sources and other archival materials reveals significant experimentation with the moving image in other formats and media, particularly after his relocation to the United States in the 1940s. Avoiding standard filmmaking, the artist interrogated period conceptions of the cinematic medium and spectatorship through a series of filmic and nonfilmic works, including Discs (ca. 1945–47), Please Touch (1947), and Étant donnés … (1946–66).
Abstract: Michel Foucault’s legacy in shaping understanding of the museum and its ideological ope... more Abstract: Michel Foucault’s legacy in shaping understanding of the museum and its ideological operations is well established in the field of museum studies. Tony Bennett’s adaptation of the ‘disciplinary complex’ in his ‘exhibitionary complex’ essay of 1988 marshalled Foucauldian theory into the field’s mainstream, and contributed to the subsequent methodological shift known as ‘the new museology’ or ‘critical museum studies.’ Less recognised are Foucault’s contributions to theorisations of the museum by modernist art history. Focusing on a passage from his essay ‘Fantasia of the Library’ and its reception by Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss, and others, this article reflects on Foucault’s outsized impact on recent modernist art history. It concludes that Foucault’s commentary stimulated art history to engage with the museum, but at the same time, constrained the field’s conception of modernism’s geographies, protagonists, and institutional formations.
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Papers by Alexander Kauffman
https://hyperallergic.com/476685/committing-to-anti-racism-in-galleries-of-european-art/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00043079.2017.1249255
https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/kauffman.pdf
https://hyperallergic.com/476685/committing-to-anti-racism-in-galleries-of-european-art/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00043079.2017.1249255
https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/kauffman.pdf