Emily Braun

Emily Braun is Distinguished Professor at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. In 2022, she co-curated the Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Her research interests are interdisciplinary and include the interaction between political ideologies and visual culture; the construction of gender and otherness in art criticism; the history of exhibitions and collecting; Italian modernism, and Cubism. She also writes on European art since 1945. She is the author of Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (2000), a “landmark” study “that is as indispensable for cultural historians of twentieth century Europe as it is for historians of the visual arts” (The Journal of Modern History, 2002). In 2016, she curated and authored Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: it received the 2016 Dedalus Foundation Exhibition Catalogue Award. Her other exhibitions include The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and their Salons (2005, Jewish Museum, New York; National Jewish Book Award winner) and Gardens and Ghettos: the Art of Jewish Life in Italy (Jewish Museum, New York 1989; Henry Allen Moe Prize). With Hunter College MA students, she organized De Chirico and America (1996, Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery) and Robert Rauschenberg: Night Shades and Phantoms (2019, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York). Since 1987, Braun has curated the Leonard A. Lauder Collection of Cubist Art. She co-curated Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection (2014) for the Metropolitan Museum of Art; its catalogue won First Place from the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC), as well as the Henry Allen Moe Prize, New York Historical Association, for Catalogue of Distinction in the Arts.

Braun has received a Getty Foundation Senior Research Grant (1993), was a Fellow at The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library (2002) and held the Edmond J. Safra Professorship at CASVA (2020).

Degrees/Diplomas: Ph.D. Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1991

Research Interests: Art and visual culture in late 19th century Europe and 20th century Europe and the United States

Selected Essays/ Articles since 2016  

“Italian Jewish Artists and Fascist Cultural Politics: on Gardens and Ghettos at the Jewish Museum in New York (1989),” Interview with Emily Braun by Raffeale Bedarida and Sharon Hecker in Bedarida and Hecker, eds. Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today London: Bloomsbury, 2022.

 “Harlequin, l’Etranger,” in Annie Cohen Solal, ed. Picasso l’Etranger. Paris: Musee’ national de l’histoire de l’immigration,” 2021.

“Il ragionamento del ragioniere: Presenza e assenza dell’arte italiana del primo Novecento nella Collezione Cerruti” in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, ed. La Collezione Cerruti. Catalogo generale. Turin: Allemandi, 2021.

 “The Juggler” in Iria Candela ed. Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019.

“Seeing the Forest for the Trees” (Giuseppe Penone’s Eco-Poetics) in Carlos Basualdo ed. Giuseppe Penone, The Inner Life of Forms. New York: Rizzoli, 2018.

 “Cryptic Corn: Magic Realism and the Art of Grant Wood” in Barbara Haskell, ed. Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and Yale University Press, 2018.

 “Shadows, Shading and Shades,” in Harry Cooper ed. Cubism: CASVA Seminar Papers 3. Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 2017.

“The Dirt Paradigm,” in Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel and Ulrich Wilmes eds. Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965. Munich: Haus der Kunst, 2016.