Dr Shulamith Behr
Courtauld Institute of Art
Shulamith Behr is Senior Lecturer in German 20th-Century Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She has published widely on Expressionism and her interests revolve around cultural identity, politics and gender studies. She has an abiding interest in the notion of Holocaust Culture as well as Arts in Exile in Great Britain. She was curator of the exhibition, Gabriele Münter: The Search for Expression 1906-1917, held at the Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery in 2005, and contributed to the catalogue of the Tate Modern exhibition, Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction 1900-1921. Her recent research is published in the Yearbook Arts in Exile in Britain 1933-1945: Politics and Cultural Identity, a volume that she co-edited.
While a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge, Dr Behr will focus on Ludwig Meidner, a leading exponent of German literary and artistic Expressionism, and the years he spent in exile in Britain. She will consider his internment as an 'enemy-alien' and his subsequent preoccupation with a cycle of watercolours and drawings, Suffering of the Jews in Poland. The study raises significant questions regarding 'cultural transmission' at a time of greatest vulnerability in the make-up of the refugee artist. The project will benefit from an environment in which the art-historical discipline is subject to the scrutiny of theological, literary, political and scientific enquiry.
Expressionism, Tate Gallery Publishing, London, 1999 (Cambridge University Press 2000)
Beyond the Muse: Gabriele Münter as Expressionistin, in Gabriele Münter: The Search for Expression 1906-1917, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery in association with Paul Holberton Publishing, London, 2005
Klaus E. Hinrichsen (1912-2004): the Art Historian behind "Visual Art behind the Wire.", in S. Behr and M. Malet (eds) , Arts in Exile in Britain 1933-1945: Politics and Cultural Identity, The Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, vol. 6 (2004), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2005
Kandinsky, Münter and Creative Partnership, in Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction 1900-1921, Hartwig Fischer and Sean Rainbird (eds), Tate Publishing, London, 2006, pp. 77-100; 213-214. German edition, Kandinsky: Malerei 1908-1921, Öffentlich Kunstammlung Basel, 2006
Contact Dr Behr
