EXHIBITIONS · ART
Maurice Berger
Also known as: Berger, Maurice
Maurice Berger (May 22, 1956 – March 22, 2020) was an American cultural historian, curator, and art critic, who served as a Research Professor and Chief Curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Berger was recognized for his interdisciplinary scholarship on race and visual culture in the United States. He curated a number of important exhibitions examining the relationship between race and American art, including the critically acclaimed For All The World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights co-organized in 2011 by the National Museum of African American History and Culture of the Smithsonian Institution and the Center for Art, Design & Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which focused on the role visual imagery played in shaping, influencing, and transforming the modern struggle for racial equality and justice in the United States. On March 22, 2020, he fell ill and died in Copake, New York, from heart failure, exacerbated by untested complications of COVID-19. He was 63 years old.
I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.
— from Labyrinths
Most acclaimed
Labyrinths
"A sensational, eye-opening account of Emma Jung's complex marriage to Carl Gustav Jung and the hitherto unknown role she played in the early years of the psychoanalytic movement. Clever and ambitious, Emma Jung yearned to study the natural sciences at the University of Zurich. But the strict rules of proper Swiss society at the beginning of the twentieth century dictated that a woman of Emma's stature--one of the richest heiresses in Switzerland--travel to Paris to "finish" her education, to prepare for marriage to a suitable man. Engaged to the son of one of her father's wealthy business colleagues, Emma's conventional and predictable life was upended when she met Carl Jung. The son of a penniless pastor working as an assistant physician in an insane asylum, Jung dazzled Emma with his intelligence, confidence, and good looks. More important, he offered her freedom from the confines of a traditional haute-bourgeois life. But Emma did not know that Jung's charisma masked a dark interior--fostered by a strange, isolated childhood and the sexual abuse he'd suffered as a boy--as well as a compulsive philandering that would threaten their marriage. Using letters, family interviews, and rich, never-before-published archival material, Catrine Clay illuminates the Jungs' unorthodox marriage and explores how it shaped--and was shaped by--the scandalous new movement of psychoanalysis. Most important, Clay reveals how Carl Jung could never have achieved what he did without Emma supporting him through his private torments. The Emma that emerges in the pages of Labyrinths is a strong, brilliant woman, who, with her husband's encouragement, becomes a successful analyst in her own right"-- "A sensational, eye-opening narrative nonfiction account of Emma Jung's complex marriage to Carl Gustav Jung, and her critical impact on the early years of the psychoanalytic movement"--
Modigliani
"Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) is one of the best known - and most misunderstood - artists of the twentieth century. His incisive portraits, erotically charged nudes, elegant drawings of caryatids, and primitivistic sculpture have been admired for decades. Modigliani's work, however, has typically been examined in the limited context of his so-called bohemian, anti-intellectual lifestyle. This book revises this approach toward Modigliani's art, presenting a revisionist examination of the unique historical, social, religious, and cultural significance of his oeuvre." "Modigliani: Beyond the Myth looks at the artist and his art from a variety of important perspectives: his proud heritage as a Sephardic Jew, whose spirituality embraced non-Western, classical, and Christian iconography while retaining its own ethnic identity; his critical engagement and melding of tribal and ethnographic art with Judaism in his portraiture; the representation of the female nude in his works from a feminist cultural perspective; the remarkable reception of his work in Italy after his death, and the failure of traditional art history to account for or analyze these important aspects of his life and work."--BOOK JACKET.