Jack Flam
Jack Flam has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Dedalus Foundation since its inception and has been President and CEO since 2002. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art and Art History at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and is the author of numerous books, catalogues, and articles on various aspects of nineteenth and twentieth-century European and American art, and on African art. Dr. Flam earned his M.A. from Columbia University and his Ph.D. from New York University, where he was named a University Honors Scholar. He organized exhibitions in major European and American museums, and has lectured extensively at museums and universities throughout the United States, as well as in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
His books include: Matisse: the Man and His Art, 1869-1918 (1986); Motherwell (1991); Richard Diebenkorn: Ocean Park (1992); Matisse: The Dance (1993); Western Artists/ African Art (1994); Matisse on Art (revised edition, 1995); Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (1996); Judith Rothschild: An Artist’s Search (1998); Les peintures de Picasso: un théâtre mental (1998). Matisse in the Cone Collection: The Poetics of Vision (2001); Matisse and Picasso: The Story of Their Rivalry and Friendship (2003); Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History (2003); Manet: Un bar aux Folies- Bergère ou l’abysse du miroir (2005); Matisse in Transition: Around Laurette (2006).
Since 2006, he has been director of the Robert Motherwell Catalogue Raisonné Project and he will be a co-author of the catalogue raisonné of Robert Motherwell’s paintings and collages, which will be published by Yale University Press in 2012.
His articles and reviews have appeared in numerous journals, including African Arts, American Heritage, Apollo, Art Bulletin, Artforum, Art in America, Art Journal, ArtNews, Arts Magazine, Connaissance des Arts, Connoisseur, Journal de la Société des Africanistes, Journal of African Studies, Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, Source, Storia dell’Arte, and The New York Review of Books.
His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship. His book Matisse: The Man and His Art, 1869-1918 won the College Art Association’s Charles Rufus Morey Award for the most distinguished art history book published in 1986; it was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Biography and was a finalist in the Los Angeles Times book awards.
From 1984 to 1992, Dr. Flam was art critic of The Wall Street Journal and in 1987 he won the Manufacturers Hanover/ Art World prize for distinguished newspaper art criticism. In 1981 he was chosen by Robert Motherwell to be series co-editor of “The Documents of Twentieth- Century Art,” and he has continued to edit the series, which is now published by the University of California Press. He is an advisory board member of Source: Notes in the History of Art, and has also served on the board of directors of the United States section of the International Association of Art Critics, on the fine arts jury of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as juror for the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Travel Fellowships, and on the arts advisory committee of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He currently serves as a member of the advisory boards of the Public Art Committee of the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, and of Source: Notes in the History of Art.