John Elderfield
John Elderfield is an independent curator and art historian, and Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he has directed more than twenty exhibitions, ranging from Fauvism and its Affinities (1976) and Kurt Schwitters (1985) to the celebrated Henri Matisse: A Retrospective (1992), and more recently, Manet and the Execution of Maximilian (2006), Armando Reverón (2007), and Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-17 (2010).
As Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum, he reinstalled that collection in 2004 in its newly rebuilt premises. He earned B.A. and M.Phil. degrees from the University of Leeds and a Ph.D. from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London University, and has been awarded a Harkness Fellowship, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and the first Mitchell Prize for a book on twentieth-century art. In addition to his exhibition catalogues, he has published books on Hugo Ball (1974/1996), Helen Frankenthaler (1988), and Pierre-Paul Prud’hon (1997), among others; some seventy-five articles on modern art and related subjects; and he lectures widely.
Among his recent affiliations and awards, he has been a Visiting Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (2001); an Associate Fellow at the American Academy in Rome (2006); named by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People of the Year (2005); was made Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government (2006); and awarded an honorary D. Litt. from the University of Leeds (2008). He serves on the board of the Dedalus Foundation, the Members’ Board of the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C, the American Advisory Committee of the Courtauld Institute of Art, the American Committee of the Premium Imperiale Prize, and the Advisory Committee of the Kate Weare Dance company; is a Member of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, and an Honorary Member of Proyecto Armando Reverón, Caracas. He was recently a contributor to Bob Dylan. The Brazil Series (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, 2010), and is currently working on the exhibition, with accompanying publication, De Kooning: A Retrospective (The Museum of Modern Art, 2011).