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.

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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

1934

Credits

3

Description

In the fraught context of Germany between the end of the First World War and Hitler's rise to power, arguments about politics often turned into arguments about media, and vice versa. Artists and writers saw recently developed media such as film, radio, and the photographically illustrated magazine as transforming not only art, but also politics, sense perception, and the nature of subjectivity. In this course, we study the work of artists associated with Expressionism, Dada, and New Objectivity to understand the relations among aesthetics, politics, and new media at this pivotal moment.

Class Number

2110

Credits

3

Description

This independent study program for Master of Arts in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism candidates is taken in the final term of coursework.

Class Number

2536

Credits

3