Jan 11, 2024, 6:30 PM – 8 PM

In Conversation: Benjamin Buchloh, Cathy Caruth and Leah Dickerman

Join Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Professor of Art History at Harvard University, and Cathy Caruth, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, with art historian and curator Leah Dickerman for a discussion on the subject of contemporary art, trauma and postwar European history in relation to the work of artist Stéphane Mandelbaum.

This conversation is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Stéphane Mandelbaum. A precocious and skillful draftsman, Stéphane Mandelbaum used his artistry to probe the depths of his own persona by conjuring some of the darkest visages of the twentieth century in Europe. His drawings are inhabited by figures from his nightmares like the German Nazis Joseph Goebbels and Ernst Röhm, as well as those from his fantasies like Arthur Rimbaud and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Raised in a Jewish household impacted by the Holocaust, Mandelbaum’s subjects are often Jewish figures, and his pages are filled with words in Yiddish, a language that the artist had taught to himself. The presence of the Hebrew alphabet juxtaposed with images of Nazis and underworld characters give his drawings a patina of menace and even violence, which was tragically borne out by the artist’s assassination by a criminal syndicate in 1986 at age twenty-five. Mandelbaum’s sensational end is a coda to an artistic life lived on the edges of society.

ASL interpreters will be available during this event.

Benjamin H.D. Buch

Benjamin H.D. Buchloh is the Andrew W. Mellon Research Professor of Modern Art and Contemporary Art at Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences where he taught from 2005 – 2022.

A selection of his essays on American and European artists of the post WWII period, has been published in two volumes, Neo Avantgarde and Culture Industry (MIT Press, 2006), and Formalism and Historicity (MIT Press, 2016). A third volume, Refuse and Refuge is currently being prepared for publication. With Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Yve-Alain Bois and David Joselit, Buchloh is the editor of the two volume history of the arts of the Twentieth Century, Art since 1900 (Thames & Hudson). His monograph Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History was published by MIT Press in 2022.

Buchloh was awarded the Golden Lion for Contemporary Art History and Criticism at the Venice Biennale in 2007.
Cathy Caruth

Cathy Caruth is the Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University and Chair of Comparative Literature. She has published widely on the literature and theory of trauma. including most notably Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Literature in the Ashes of History, and Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience.
Leah Dickerman

Leah Dickerman is an art historian and a curator who specializes in twentieth and twenty first century European and American art. Dickerman is currently the inaugural Director of Research Programs at The Museum of Modern Art, charged with developing an interdisciplinary research community through residencies, institutional partnerships, and programs; new strategies to share knowledge and research resources; and a framework for mentoring the next generation of art historians, curators, and museum professionals. She is also a longtime member of the editorial board of October magazine. Previously, she was a curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art and in the Department of Twentieth-Century Art at the National Gallery of Art.

Major support for Stéphane Mandelbaum is provided by the Robert Lehman Foundation, Alice and Tom Tisch, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Generous funding is provided by Christie's, Kathy and Dick Fuld, Jill and Peter Kraus, the Director's Circle of The Drawing Center, and an anonymous giver. Additional support is provided by Iris Zurawin Marden, and Harry Tappan Heher and Jean-Edouard van Praet d'Amerloo.