A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
Annie Bourneuf has a pixie haircut and wears a grey sweater over a blue blouse.

On This Page

Annie Bourneuf

Professor

Contact

Bio

Education: BA, magna cum laude, 2001, Harvard University; MA, 2006, PhD, 2011, Princeton University. Awards: 2024-25 Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor in Art History, Williams College; 2020 Dedalus Foundation Senior Fellowship; 2019 David Baumgardt Memorial Fellowship, Leo Baeck Institute; 2016 Robert Motherwell Book Award; 2016 Jean Goldman Book Prize; Felix Gilbert Residential Fellowship, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, Research Fellowship for postdoctoral researchers.

Personal Statement

My research interests center on modernism, mostly in Central Europe, with an emphasis on its relations with politics, technologies of reproduction, religion, and class. A new project reexamines cultural pessimism.rs around them, such as kissing, hiding, defacing, visualizing, and meditating.

Books

  • Behind the Angel of History: The Angelus Novus and Its Interleaf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022)
  • Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015)
  • Awarded the 2016 Robert Motherwell Book Award
  • Awarded the 2016 Jean Goldman Book Prize

Selected Recent Articles and Book Chapters

  • "Lucia Moholy's Documentation Service." In Lucia Moholy exhibition catalogue, ed. Jordan Troeller (Prague: Kunsthalle Praha, 2024), in press.
  • "Type/Face: Wassily Kandinsky and Walter Benjamin on Language and Perception." In German Expressionism: Der Blaue Reiter and Its Legacies, ed. Dorothy Price, Manchester University Press, 2020
  • "Otti Berger's bauhaus picture book." In The Bauhaus and Harvard, ed. Laura Muir, Harvard Art Museums, 2020
  • “Interfaces and Proxies: Placing Moholy-Nagy’s Prints,” Leonardo 50, no. 3 (2017), special section “In Focus: László Moholy-Nagy,” ed. Maria Kokkori, Joyce Tsai, and Francesca Casadio
  • "An Art of Privacy?: Wilhelm Hausenstein on Paul Klee." In Paul Klee: Making Visible exhibition catalogue, ed. Matthew Gale, Tate Modern (London: Tate Publishing, 2013).
    Republished in Painting: Critical and Primary Sources, ed. Beth Harland and Sunil Manghani (London: Bloomsbury, 2015)
  • "Picasso, Braque, and the Uses of the Print, 1910-1912." In Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-12 exhibition catalogue, ed. Eik Kahng, Santa Barbara Museum of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
  • "'Radically Uncolorful Painting': Walter Benjamin and the Problem of Cubism." In Grey Room 39 (Spring 2010), special issue on Walter Benjamin's Media Tactics: Optics, Perception, and the Work of Art, ed. Michael W. Jennings and Tobias Wilke.
  • "A Refuge for Script: Paul Klee's Square Pictures." In Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse, and Modernism, ed. Robin Schuldenfrei and Jeffrey Saletnik (London and New York: Routledge, 2009).

Recent Thesis Advisees

  • Justice Henderson (2023), "Ed Clark's 'Reactions' to Paris and New York, 1952-66"
  • Samantha Adams (2021), “Ambivalent Images, or Tracing Repetition Compulsion in the Visual Vocabulary of Georges Bataille’s Editing of Documents Magazine, 1929-1930”
  • Gunnar Olseth (2021), “Touch and Vision in Claude Cahun's Irrational Objects”

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

The main aim of this intensive course is to learn how to write art history by doing it. Each student will write an original research paper investigating a single, particularly compelling object of her choosing in scaffolded stages over the course of the entire semester, while drawing on a range of library and museum resources and responding to constructive criticism from the teacher and from peers. The course guides students to pose generative questions of their objects, to find and analyze sources, and to make persuasive arguments.

We will also at times study the study of art, examining the history of the museum as a framework for such study, and reflecting on as well as using some key analytical moves often used by art historians. We will not only study statements by scholars reflecting on their own methods, but also exemplars of analysis, which we will in turn take apart to figure out how to do such analysis ourselves.

While this course is required for the BA in Art History and BFA with Art History Thesis, any undergraduate who wants to write art history is warmly welcome.

Class Number

2024

Credits

3

Description

This course examines the complex and multifarious relations between art and fascism in the twentieth century, especially the cultural politics and the use of art in fascist movements and regimes; interwar Germany and Italy will provide much of the material we will probe. Exploring Walter Benjamin¿s dictum that fascism practices the ¿aestheticizing of politics¿ and Eric Michaud¿s argument that an ¿assimilation of work into artistic activity¿ lay at the center of the Nazi myth, we will examine the role of art in fascist ideology and the relationship of artistic modernism, avant-gardes, and fascism (to quote Benjamin again: ¿With D¿Annunzio, decadence made its entry into political life; with Marinetti, Futurism; and with Hitler, the Bohemian tradition of Schwabing¿).
Art, architecture, film, and media made to support or under the sponsorship of the Mussolini and Hitler regimes will be examined in detail. We will also devote a great deal of attention to early attempts to analyze fascism, reading Benjamin, Bloch, Adorno, Kracauer, Reich, and Bataille, among others.
This class is conceived as a collaborative reading group for investigating the intertwining of art and politics in and around counterrevolution, in hopes of getting a clearer view of this intertwining than is afforded when ties between art and emancipatory politics are assumed, so weekly reading, reading responses, and active participation in and co-leading of class discussions are crucial. The class culminates in students planning and completing research papers that substantively engage with early twentieth century histories of fascism and art and may well explore developments outside Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy.

Class Number

2169

Credits

3

Description

The thesis, as the final requirement to be fulfilled for the Masters of Art degree in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism, demonstrates the student's ability to present a lucid, sustained work of scholarly research and critical thinking on a specific topic in the field of 19th, 20th and 21st-century art. The thesis indicates the student's thorough command of the available documentation and scholarly research on the subject and suggests clearly-defined objectives and a methodologically-sound approach to a fresh assessment of the topic. This seminar assists the student in selecting, researching, analyzing, designing, organizing, and writing the Art History thesis. Students learn how to select and narrow their topic by organizing materials; preparing an outline, abstract, and bibliography; and defending their proposal before a faculty panel. During this semester, they select their thesis committee and complete most of the research. This seminar is required for the Master of Arts in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism and is taken in the second or third semester of course work.

Class Number

2019

Credits

3