Katherine M. Kuenzli’s research focuses on European art 1880-1940, and more specifically on questions of modernism studied from a broad cultural and political perspective. Her topics of research include art and politics; constructions of the Total Work of Art; interrelationships between painting, architecture, and design; boundaries between public and private spheres; formulations of national versus international cultures; museums, their history and public; colonial encounters and relationships between modernist art and the “primitive”; and modernist art pedagogies. She is currently at work on a monograph entitled “Designing Modernism: Henry van de Velde’s Internationalist Aesthetic from Neo-Impressionism to the Bauhaus.” Kuenzli teaches courses in modern European art from the French Revolution through World War II. Some of her recent courses include surveys of nineteenth-century modernism and the twentieth-century avant-garde, a freshman seminar on Vincent Van Gogh and the myth of genius, and an upper-division seminar on Wagner and modernism. Her work has been supported by Fulbright, Chateaubriand, Dedalus, DAAD, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Getty Library, and Canadian Centre for Architecture grants.
Publications:
BOOK
The Nabis and Intimate Modernism: Painting and the Decorative at the Fin de Siècle (Ashgate, 2010) (332 pages). (http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754667773)
ARTICLES AND ESSAYS
“Expanding the Boundaries of Modern Art: The Blue Rider, Parisian Modernism, and Henri Rousseau,” in German Expressionism and France: From Van Gogh and Gauguin to the Blue Rider (Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Forthcoming 2014)
“The Birth of the Modernist Art Museum: The Folkwang as Gesamtkunstwerk,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (Forthcoming, December 2013)
“Architecture, Individualism, and Nation: Henry van de Velde’s 1914 Werkbund Theater Building,” The Art Bulletin 94, no. 2 (June 2012): 251-73.
“Intimate Modernism: The Nabis, Symbolist Theater, and the Gesamtkunstwerk,” in Art, History and the Senses, eds Patrizia di Bello and Gabriel Koureas (Ashgate 2010), pages 67-82. Click on link
“Aesthetics and Cultural Politics in the Age of Dreyfus: Maurice Denis’s Homage to Cézanne,” Art History, vol. 30, no. 5 (November 2007), 683-711.
“Painting and Memory in the Career of Edouard Vuillard,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, vol. 3, no. 1 (Spring 2004), 7822 words, http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Book Review Essay of Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman eds, Bauhaus 1919-1933 (Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 344pp.; Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin/Museum f|r Gestaltung, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, and Klassk Stiftung Weimar, Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model (Hatje Cantz, 2009), 376 pp.; Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Ulrike Ackermann and Ulrike Bestgen eds, Das Bauhaus Kommt aus Weimar (Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009), 380 pp. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, June 2011.
Book Review of Henri Dorra, The Symbolism of Paul Gauguin: Erotica, Exotica, and the Great EROTICA, Dilemmas of Humanity (University of California Press, 2007), 361pp. (1673 words), caa.reviews, January 2010.
