Emily Christensen is an art historian, writer and curator specialising in the visual culture of modernism in Germany, with a particular interest in the intersection between modernism and colonialism. She has taught a variety of courses at The Courtauld Institute since 2019 and holds a PhD from The Courtauld.
Emily’s recent curatorial projects include the Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter rooms in the exhibition Re-Orientations: Europe and Islamic Art from 1851 to Today at the Kunsthaus in Zurich (March to July 2023), and co-curating the exhibition Drawing on Arabian Nights at The Courtauld Gallery Project Space (February to June 2023).
Her doctoral project examined Wassily Kandinsky’s strategic use of references to “the Orient” in his development of abstraction from 1909-1913, when he lived in Munich. It examined Kandinsky’s work in the context of the broader visual culture there, including exhibitions, literature, print culture, advertising material as well as through attitudes to gender, race, colonialism and national identity.
Emily has published in The Burlington Magazine, World Art, Manazir Journal, Aesthetica Universalis, and in an exhibition catalogue.
Teaching
MA: Core Methodologies
MA Guest Lectures: Munich and the Blue Reiter (for MA Collecting and Curating the Modern); Gabriele Münter’s Photographic Practice (for MA Modernism after Postmodernism)
BA2: The Female Body in French Art 1871-1914
BA1: Techniques & Meaning in Twentieth-century Art
BA1: Foundations, Nineteenth and Twentieth-century Art
Courtauld Short Courses: Making Sense of Abstraction
Courtauld Short Courses: Fantasies Reframed: Orientalism and its Contexts, Courtauld Short Courses
Courtauld Showcasing Art History: Agents of Change: Women Artists in German and Austrian Modernism (participating lecturer); Photography and the Avant-garde (participating lecturer).
Education
2017 – 2023: Courtauld Institute of Art, PhD programme: “Refiguring Kandinsky: strategies of Orientalism in Wassily Kandinsky’s experimental abstraction”
2015 – 2016: The Courtauld Institute of Art – Masters in the History of Art: Experiencing Modernism (Distinction)
2014 – 2015: The Courtauld Institute of Art – Graduate Diploma in the History of Art
1997 – 1998: London School of Economics and Political Science – Master of Laws in International Law and Cultural Property Law (with Merit)
1992 – 1996: Australian National University – Bachelor of Laws with Honours
1992 – 1994: Australian National University – Bachelor of Arts majoring in Russian and French
Publications
Special Issue co-editor, “Challenging Orientalism: New Perspectives on Perception and Reception”, World Art 13, no.1 (2023)
“An Ambivalent Engagement: Wassily Kandinsky and Islamic Art”, Re-Orientations: Europe and Islamic Art from 1851 to Today (Zurich: Kunsthaus Zurich, 2023), 212-227
“Gabriele Münter’s Photographs of Tunisia”, Re-Orientations: Europe and Islamic Art from 1851 to Today (Zurich: Kunsthaus Zurich, 2023), 228-245
“Wassily Kandinsky at the exhibition Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst in Munich, 1910: a modernist artist’s interpretation of Persian art”, Manzir Journal 3 (2021) 165-173
“’Ambivalent Images’: Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract-Orientalist paintings”, Aesthetica Universalis 3 (2018), 52-88 (English language version)
“’Ambivalent Images’: Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract-Orientalist paintings”, Aesthetica Universalis 4 (2018), 109-146 (Russian language version)
“The Tunisian Sources of Kandinsky’s Improvisation on Mahogany”, 159 The Burlington Magazine, (September 2017)
Contributing author, Museums and the Holocaust: Law, Principles and Practice (Institute of Art and Law)
Conferences
Session Co-chair: “Challenging Orientalism: New questions of perception and reception”, Association for Art History Annual Conference (April 2021)
“Wassily Kandinsky at the exhibition Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst in Munich, 1910: a modernist artist’s interpretation of Persian art”, Geometry and Colour: Decoding the Arts of Islam in the West 1880-1945, Kunsthaus Zurich (November 2020)
“Violence and Voyeurism in the Tunisian Photographs of Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky”, Association for Art History New Voices Conference on Art and Conflict, University of Edinburgh (November 2018)
“Ambivalent images: Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract-Orientalist paintings”, Wassily Kandinsky: Synthesis of Arts, Synthesis of Cultures, Conference at Moscow State University (December 2016)