BA Fine Arts and Honours (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg), MA (University of Manchester), PhD (University of Essex)  

Contact details:

Room 16 (West Wing)

The Courtauld Institute of Art

Somerset House

Strand

London WC2R 0RN

 

+44(0) 20 7848 2827

shulamith.behr@courtauld.ac.uk


Shulamith Behr completed her studies in Art History and Theory at the University of Essex. Her PhD thesis focused on ‘Wassily Kandinsky as Playwright: the Stage Compositions 1909-1914’, an investigation that posited the central significance of the Bühnenkompositionen to any survey of Kandinsky’s complex oeuvre.  In 1990, she was appointed Bosch Lecturer in German Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art and she is currently Senior Lecturer and the outgoing Head of the MA Programme. She has contributed widely to the study of German Expressionism: as an editor, jointly with David Fanning and Douglas Jarman, of Expressionism Reassessed (Manchester University Press, 1993), as the curator - and author of the accompanying catalogues - of exhibitions on Conrad Felixmuller at the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery (Leicester) and at The Courtauld Gallery in 1994, and as the author of Expressionism for Tate Gallery Publishing in 1999. She has published a growing body of work exploring the contribution of women artists to German and Swedish modernism, starting with her Women Expressionists (Phaidon, Oxford, 1988) to essays for catalogues of the Gabriele Münter (1992-93) and Sigrid Hjérten (1999) retrospectives held in Germany and Stockholm.

She is completing an in-depth study of Women in Expressionist Culture: Artists, Patrons and Dealers (Princeton University Press). This book explores the impact of modernity on women as practitioners, supporters and consumers of modern art. It examines their increased visibility in public life, and their ‘differencing’ of avant-garde culture in Germany, Holland and Scandinavia. Relating to this project, she was the curator and contributor to the catalogue of the exhibition Gabriele Münter: The Search for Expression 1906-1917 held at The Courtauld Gallery (23 June – 11 September 2005), and organized the symposium ‘From Expressionism to Exile: German-Speaking Women Practitioners and the Public Sphere’ (1 July 2005). 


Dr Behr’s research on art and exile is published in the volume Arts in Exile in Britain 1933-1945: Politics and Cultural Identity, which she co-edited with Marian Malet. As a Leverhulme Research Fellow during the academic year 2007/2008, her project focused on the exile period of Ludwig Meidner, a leading exponent of German literary and artistic Expressionism. In 2008, as part of a strategy to promote research-led and interdisciplinary teaching, she launched an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Forum MA on Arts in Exile. This special option was taught in collaboration with a Visiting Professor, Sander L. Gilman, and had a rippling effect in the wider London art world. Twinning their initiatives with The Courtauld, the Ben Uri Gallery (The London Jewish Museum of Art) held an exhibition to coincide with the course (21 January – 19 April 2009). Entitled Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile in Britain c. 1933-1945, the display brought together over ninety works, providing an incomparable opportunity for hands-on research. The colloquium ‘Listening to the Past: Oral History as a Resource’ (30 January 2009) was timed to pre-empt the selection of dissertation topics, alerting students to the benefits and pitfalls of interviewing techniques.

From autumn 2010, Dr Behr will be offering a related, yet thematically directed, MA special option, entitled German Art and Cultural Politics, the 1930s to the 1950s: Inner Emigration, Exile and Remigration.


Research Interests


  • German, Austrian and Scandinavian twentieth-century visual culture
  • Cultural identity, politics and gender
  • Art and exile in Britain 1933-1945

 

 

PhD titles supervised to completion include:


  • Yehuda Bacon, Disseminating Memory: Lines across an Abyss
  • Negative Dialectics: The Late Art of East and West German Photography, 1968-1999
    (co-supervised with Julian Stallabrass) 
  • The Right to Indifference: Abstraction in the work of Gego (1912-1994) and Jesús Soto (1923-2005)
  • Rescuing Wagner: the Cultural Politics of Set-Design in Germany 1924 -1938
  • Resurrecting Apollo: Figurative Sculpture by Gerhard Marcks in the Federal Republic and its reception in the context of German Philhellenism 1925-1970
  • Art and National Reconstruction in Germany 1945-1955
  • Women under Socialism: Both Sides of the Camera - Women Photographers and the Construction of Female Identity in the Photographic Representation of the GDR c.1949-1961
  • The Making of Fred Uhlman: Life and Work of the Painter and Writer in Exile
  • The Neue Secession in Berlin 1910-1914. An Artist’s Association in the Rise of Expressionism
  • Der Neue Salon: The Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung in Munich 1937-1944
  • Moral Cathedrals: War Damage and Franco-German Cultural Propaganda on the Western Front 1870-1938

 

 

PhD theses currently supervised:


  • Alexander Archipenko and cultural exchange between the wars: from European avant-gardes to avant-gardism in the USA
  • Import and Reception of Western Art in Soviet Russia in the 1920s and 1930s (co-supervised with John Milner)
  • Weimar in Black and White: a Study of the Woodcut in Germany, 1918-1933
  • Russian Women Artists and the First World War (co-supervised with John Milner)
  • Armin T. Wegner’s photographs of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-16, and their afterlife
  • Hans Feibusch, the archive and the public sphere

 

Publications in Press:

 

‘Académie Matisse and its relevance in the life and work of Sigrid Hjertén’, in A Cultural History of the Nordic Avant-Garde. Vol. 1: Avant-Garde Critical Studies, ed. Tania Ørum, et al, Rodopi, Amsterdam & New York  

‘Künstlergruppe Brücke and the Public Sphere: Bridging the Gender Divide’, in Bridging History: Perspectives on Brücke, ed. Christian Weikop, Ashgate, Farnham


 

Recent Publications:

 

'Die Künstlergruppe Brücke und die Öffentlichkeit – Von der Überbrückung der Kluft zwischen den Geschlechtern', in Rosa. Eigenartig grün. Rosa Schapire und die Expressionisten, ed. Sabine Schulze, Ausst.-Kat. Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Hatje und Cantze, Ostfildern 2009, pp. 54 – 87

with Sander L. Gilman, 'Forced Journeys. An Introduction’, in Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile in Britain 1933-1945, ed. Rachel Dickson and Sarah Mac Dougall, Ben Uri Gallery and Ashgate, London, 2009

 

Interpretive essays to catalogue, guide and panels, Georg Baselitz Retrospective, The Royal Academy, London, 2007

‘Kandinsky, Münter and Creative Partnership’, in Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction 1900-1921, ed. Hartwig Fischer and Sean Rainbird, Tate Publishing, London, 2006, pp. 77-100; 213-214. German edition, ‘Kandinsky und Münter: Eine kreative Partnerschaft’, in Kandinsky: Malerei 1908-1921, Kunstmuseum Basel, pp. 75-98; 216-218, 2007

‘Marie-Louise von Motesiczky: Tate Liverpool’, exhibition review, The Burlington Magazine, vol. CXLIX, no. 1241, August 2006, pp. 560-562

Entries on ‘Ida Dehmel’ and ‘Dr Rosa Schapire’ in Jewish Women: a Comprehensive Historical Encyclopaedia, ed. Paula E. Hyman and Dalia Ofer, Shalvi Publishing Ltd, Jerusalem, 2006, CDROM

Author of ‘Preface’, co-editor of volume and single author of essay, ‘Klaus E. Hinrichsen (1912-2004): the Art Historian behind “Visual Art behind the Wire”’, in Arts in Exile in Britain 1933-1945: Politics and Cultural Identity, ed. Shulamith Behr and Marian Malet, The Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, vol. 6 (2004), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2005

‘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, pp. 43-71

n ‘Expressionism’ in the New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz, Charles Scribner’s and Sons, New York, 2005
Expressionism - Bibliography

‘Differencing Modernism: Swedish Women Artists in Avant-Garde Culture’, in Utopia and Reality: Swedish Modernism 1900-1960, ed. Cecilia Widenheim, Yale University Press, London and New York, 2002, pp. 108-121; published as well in the quarterly of the Institute of Art History of the Polish Academy of Sciences: Biuletyn Historii Sztuki, no. 3- 4, 2003, pp. 451-464

‘Modernity, Family and Fashion: Performative strategies and the artist couple Sigrid Hjertén and Isaac Grünewald’, in Sigrid Hjertén och Isaac Grünewald: Modernismens pionjärer, ed. Birgitta Flensburg, Norrköpings Konstmuseum and Arken Museum for Moderne Kunst, 2002, pp. 14-26; published and translated as ‘La modernité, la famille et la mode. Le couple Sigrid Hjertén-Isaac Grünewald et leurs strategies de mise en “oeuvre”’, in ArtNord: La Revue des arts nordiques, no. 6, 2003, pp. 34-38

‘Veiling Venus: Gender and Painterly Abstraction in Early German Modernism’, in Manifestations of Venus: Essays on Art and Sexuality, ed. Caroline Arscott and Katie Scott, Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 126-141

‘Att differentiera modernismen - Svenska kvinnliga konstnärer i det tidiga 1900-talets avantgarde-kultur’, in Utopi och verklighet - svensk modernism 1900-1960, ed. Cecilia Widenheim, P. A. Norstedts and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2000, pp. 108-121

Single author of Expressionism, Tate Movements in Modern Art, Tate Gallery Publishing, London, 1999 (Cambridge University Press 2000)

‘Sigrid Hjertén und der “Körper”: die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Akt’, in Sigrid Hjertén – Wegbereiterin des schwedischen Expressionismus (bilingual catalogue: Sigrid Hjertén: Pioneer of Swedish Expressionism) ed. Katarina Borgh Bertorp, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, and Käthe-Kollwitz-Museum, Berlin, 1999, pp. 33-41

Keywords


Arts in Exile, Expressionism, Felixmüller, German Art, Grünewald, Hjertén, Kandinsky, modernity, Münter, Meidner, public sphere, remigration, Schapire, Swedish Modernism, van Heemskerck, Werefkin, Women Expressionists