Scandinavia House

About Dr. Patricia G. Berman

Patricia G. Berman is an art historian specializing in the art and visual culture of the late 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st centuries. She is the Theodora L. and Stanley H. Feldberg Professor of Art and Chair of the Art Department at Wellesley College and also teaches at the University of Oslo’s Institute of Philosophy, the History of Ideas, Art History, and Classical Studies, where she is a part of a research project entitled Edvard Munch, Modernity, and Meditation.

Her research interests include turn-of-the-(20^th) century European art, especially in Scandinavia, and mid-century modern American painting and photography. Berman is particularly interested in national identity formation, issues of gender and sexuality, and in the problems of public space. Her books include studies of the artists Edvard Munch and James Ensor, and of Danish painting in the 19^th century. She has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Anna and Samuel Pinanski Teaching Prize, Wellesley College (2008) and both a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant and an American Philosophical Society Fellowship (2006). She is also a two-time Fellow of The American-Scandinavian Foundation (ASF) (1984; 1985) and has been a member of the ASF Committee on Fellowships and Grants since 1992. Berman was named an Advisory Trustee to the ASF in March 2012.

Berman’s curatorial work has included Luminous Modernism: Scandinavian Art Comes to America, A Centennial Retrospective, 1912 (2011, Scandinavia House/The American-Scandinavian Foundation, NY); In Munch’s Laboratory: The Path to the Aula (2011, Munch Museum, Oslo), Edvard Munch and the Modern Life of the Soul (2006, Museum of Modern Art, NY); Cold War Modern: The Domesticated Avant-Garde, 1945 – 1960 (2000-01, Wellesley College); Edvard Munch and Women: Image and Myth (1997, San Diego Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, Oregon, Columbia, South Carolina, and the Yale University Art Gallery); and Modern Hieroglyphs: Gestural Drawing and the European Vanguard, 1900 – 1918 (1995, Wellesley and the Equitable Collection). Early in her career, she worked closely with Kirk Varnedoe on the landmark exhibition Northern Light: Realism and Symbolism in Scandinavian Painting, 1880 – 1910, which toured the U.S. in 1982-83.

About Dr. Reva Wolf

Reva Wolf teaches and writes about art of the 18^th century to the present. She is the author of two books: Goya and the Satirical Print in England and on the Continent, 1730-1850 (David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc., 1991) and Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 1997). Wolf’s recent work focuses on methodology, art and humor, the reception of art, and issues of appropriation and authenticity. She has held fellowships at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harvard University, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. She was the 2010-11 recipient of the State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

About Dr. Jay A. Clarke

Dr. Jay A. Clarke is Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and Lecturer in the Graduate Program in the History of Art at Williams College. From 1997 to 2009 she served as a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago and, from 2001 to 2008, on the part-time faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism. Her publications include, among others, The Impressionist Line from Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec (2013), Landscape, Innovation, and Nostalgia: The Manton Collection of British Art (Yale University Press, 2012); Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth (Yale University Press, 2009); and several articles on German and Norwegian visual culture and historiography.

Clarke received her Ph.D. from Brown University in 1999 with a dissertation on printmaking and art criticism in Berlin during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. She has received grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, DAAD, Marshall Fund, The American-Scandinavian Foundation (ASF), and the Ferdinand Möller Stiftung. Among the numerous exhibitions she has curated are: The Strange World of Albrecht Dürer (2010), Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth (2009), and Postwar German Works on Paper: Gifts of Susan and Lewis Manilow (2002).