Professor James Cuno

Professor James Cuno will be succeeding Professor Eric Fernie as Director of the Courtauld on 7 January 2003. His career is described below.
James Cuno has been Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums and Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard since 1991. Previously he served as Director of the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, Director of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at UCLA, and Assistant Professor at each of those institutions as well as at Vassar College. He received his Ph.D. in the history of art from Harvard with a dissertation on "Charles Philipon and La Maison Aubert: The Business, Politics, and Public of Caricature in Paris, 1820-1840."

Under his directorship, the Harvard University Art Museums have organized the following national and international touring exhibitions: Ben Shahn’s New York: The Photography of Modern Times (2000), Ellsworth Kelly: The Early Drawings, 1948-1955 (with the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 1999), Brice Marden Work Books (with Kunstmuseum Winterthur and Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, 1998), Füseli to Menzel: Drawings and Watercolors in the Age of Goethe (1998), "Drawing is another kind of language": Recent American Drawings from a New York Private Collection (1997), Gods, Kings, and Tigers: The Art of Kotah (with Asia Society, 1997), Worlds Within Worlds: The Richard Rosenblum Collection of Chinese Scholars’ Rocks (1997), Tiepolo and His Circle: Drawings in American Collections (with Pierpont Morgan Library, 1996), The Fire of Hephaistos: Large Classical Bronzes from North American Collections (1996), Hare’s Fur, Tortoiseshell, and Partridge Feathers: Chinese Brown- and Black-Glazed Ceramics,400-1400 (1995), The Mediated Object: Selections from the Eli Broad Collections (1996), The Renaissance in France: Drawings from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris (1995), The Made Landscape: City and Country in17th-century Dutch Prints (1992), and Seventeenth-Century Dutch Drawings: A Selection from the Maida and George Abrams Collection (1992).

In addition, the Art Museums successfully concluded their largest capital campaign ever. This resulted in endowed curatorships in Ancient Art, Asian Art, Islamic and Later Indian Art, Modern Art, and Photographs, and in, among other things, the renovation and expansion of the Art Museums’ Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies.

James Cuno has written and lectured extensively on topics ranging from French caricature of the 18th and 19th centuries to contemporary American art, as well as on the role of art museums in contemporary American cultural policy. He teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses on the art of 19th-century France. He is a graduate of Willamette University (1973), received an M.A. in the history of art from the University of Oregon (1978), and an A.M. and Ph.D. in the history of art from Harvard University (1985).

He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves or has served as a Trustee of the Association of Art Museum Directors (where he was President 2001-02), the Wadsworth Atheneum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; on the Visiting Committee to the J. Paul Getty Museum; and on advisory committees to the museums at the Rhode Island School of Design, Colby, Bowdoin, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Vassar, and Oberlin Colleges. He has also served on the Board of the College Art Association, for which he was an Annual Meeting co-chair, and on the National Committee for the History of Art.

He is a reviewer for the University of California Press, University of Chicago Press, University Press of New England, Princeton University Press, and the Getty Grant Program.

He is married and has two daughters.