Barbara McCloskey

Associate Professor

Department of History of Art and Architecture

University of Pittsburgh

 

104 Frick Fine Arts

University of Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh, PA 15260

Phone: 412-648-2417

Fax: 412-648-2792

Email: bmcc@pitt.edu

 

 

 


Barbara McCloskey has published books, catalogue essays, and anthology articles on the relationship between art and politics in German 20th century art, the visual culture of World War II, and artistic mediations of the experience of exile in the modern and contemporary eras.  She is currently researching the relationship between East German and Soviet Socialist Realism for an essay that will appear in the exhibition catalogue The Art of the Two Germanys during the Cold War (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2008), curated by Stephanie Barron and Eckhart Gillen. Professor McCloskey is also working on two book projects. One is a single-authored study on German exile artists and intellectuals in the United States during World War II. The other, with co-author Professor Paul Jaskot of DePaul University, is a political history of 20th century German art and visual culture.

 

Professor McCloskey’s lecture courses and seminars cover the history of art in 20th century Germany, international Dada and Surrealism, critical theory, and art historical methodology.  Graduate students working under her supervision have developed Master’s and Ph.D. theses on topics ranging from art and photography in Weimar and the Third Reich to studies of 1930s American muralism and leftist art history, East German art and design, Czech surrealism, and issues of nationalism in Russian fin-de-siéclè art.  Many of her students have competed successfully for prestigious national and international awards including DAAD, Wolfsonian, Fulbright, Berlin Prize, and Fulbright-Hayes fellowships.

 

 

 


Select Publications:

 

“Exile for Hire: George Grosz in Dallas.”  In Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick, eds., Caught by Politics: German Exiles and American Visual Culture in the 1930s and1940s (Palgrave Press, 2007).

 

“The New Solidarity: Cross-Border Labor Networks and Mural Art in the Age of ‘Empire’,” Fred Evans, co-author.  In Anatole Anton and Richard Schmitt, eds., Toward a New Socialism (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2007).

 

 “From the ‘Frontier’ to the Wild West: German Artists, American Indians, and the Spectacle of Race and Nation in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” In I Like America, exhibition catalogue (Frankfurt am Main: Schirn Kunsthalle, 2006).

 

“Cartographies of Exile,” 135-152.  In Alexander Stephan, ed., Exile and Otherness: NewApproaches to the Experience of the Nazi Refugees (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005).

 

Artists of World War II (New York: Greenwood Press, 2005). 

 

George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

 

“George Grosz,” 326-33; and “Lyonel Feininger,” 360-67.  In Renée Price, ed.,  New Worlds: German and Austrian Art, 1890-1940, collection catalogue (New York:

Neue Galerie, 2001). 

 

“Art in a Globalized World: Xu Bing’s Languages of Exile” in Kunst und Politik 2 (2000): 205-212.

 

"George Grosz in den USA: Kunst und Antistalinismus in den dreißiger Jahren," 276-82. In George Grosz: Berlin-New York, exhibition catalogue (Berlin: Nationalgalerie, 1994). 

 

 

 


Academic Degrees:

 

January 1992             PhD in Art History, Northwestern University. 

August 1986              MA in Art History, Northwestern University.

June 1981                   BA in Art History, University of California at Los Angeles.

 

 

 


Recent Public Lectures and Panels:

 

March 2007               “Collectivism after Fascism: The Problem of Socialist Realism in East German Art,” invited lecture at SUNY Stonybrook.

 

January 2006             “Visualizing War in Great Britain, Japan, and the United States during World War II,” for the Visual Culture of War panel at the Bard Graduate Center for Design, New York City.

 

February 2005          Organized and chaired panel, “Nationalism,

Internationalism and the Arts in Central Europe during the

Cold War,” for the Historians of German and Central European Art Caucus, College Art Association meeting, Atlanta, Georgia.

 

April 2004                 “Cartographies of Exile” at the Exile and Otherness: New Approaches to the Experience of the Nazi Refugees conference, Ohio State University. 

 

May 2003                   “The New Solidarity: Cross-Border Labor Networks and Mural Art in the Age of ‘Empire’,” Fred Evans, co-author.  Delivered at the First Annual Culture Studies Conference, Pittsburgh.

 

November 2002       “Exile for Hire: George Grosz in Dallas” lecture at the Global

Diasporas and the United States conference, Florida Atlantic

University, Boca Raton, Florida.

 

April 2002                 “The Face of Socialism: George Grosz and José Carlos

Mariátegui’s Amauta,” lecture in The Latin American Left and Avant-Garde Art, or José Carlos Mariátegui and Unorthodox Socialism session of the National Conference of the British Association of Art Historians, Liverpool, England.

 


Honors:

 

2000                            Recipient of the David and Tina Bellet Excellence in

Undergraduate Teaching Award for the College of Arts and Sciences. 

 

 


Selected Grants and Fellowships:

 

2006                            Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) summer research grant.

2006                            University of Pittsburgh Center for West European Studies (CWES) travel grant.

2003                            University of Pittsburgh Type I Research Grant. 

2002                            Hewlitt International Small Grant.

2001                            Research Fellow at the Northwestern University Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization.                               

1996                            Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) Team

                                    Teaching in German Studies Grant. 

1995-96                                              Getty Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. 

 

 


                                               

Selected Courses Taught:

 

Upper-level undergraduate lecture courses and seminars

 

• The German Artworld and Expressionism

• Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic

• Dada, Surrealism, and the Politics of Desire between the Wars

• Art in the Third Reich and Memorializations of the Holocaust

• Art and World War II

• Soviet Art and the West

• Approaches in Art History

• Surrealism’s Revolutionary Unconscious

• Expressionism in the 20th Century

 

Graduate seminars

 

• Methods of Research and Scholarship in Art History

• Weimar Culture

• Amerika/America: German Artists and “Americanism” in Weimar and Exile

• Panofsky in Exile

• Marxism and Art History

• Nationalism, Postnationalism, and the Arts

• Postsocialism in the Arts and Art History

 

 

 


Dissertations and Master’s Theses Supervised:

 

Dissertations

• Leesa Rittelmann, Constructed Identities: The German Photobook in Weimar and the Third Reich (2002).  Now an assistant professor in the tenure stream at SUNY Fredonia.

• Sylvia Rhor, Mural Painting and Public Education in Chicago, 1905-1941 (2004).  Now an assistant professor in the tenure stream at Carlow University.

• April Eisman, Bernhard Heisig and the Cultural Politics of East German Art (2007). Appointed assistant professor in the tenure stream at the State University of Iowa, beginning fall 2007.

• Cynthia Persinger, Meyer Schapiro and the Politics of Style.  In progress.

• Karla Huebner, Eroticism, Identity, and Cultural Context: Toyen and the Czech Avant-Garde. In progress.

• Kristen Harkness, Redesigning Russianness: Empire, Nation, and Gender in Late Nineteenth Century Russian Art. In progress.

• Annah Krieg, In the Service of the Nation(s): Medieval and Neo-Medieval Architecture in the Contested Terrain of Breslau/Wroclaw, 1860-1960.  In progress.

• Maria D’Anniballe, Italy’s Fascist Regime and the Restoration of the Medieval Past: The Case of Verona (co-chair, Kirk Savage).  In progress.

• Jessica Glaser, Mediating Modernism: Ostalgie and East German Design of the 1950s and 1960s.  In progress.

 

MA Theses

 

• Janet McCall, “Otto Dix’s Metropolis: Gender and German Identity in the Weimar Republic,” (1993).

• Leesa Rittelmann, “The Public and Private Worlds of the Nineteenth Century American Photographer, Alice Austen,” (1993).

• Ana Montoya, “The Representation of Frida Kahlo in the Work of Rupert Garcia,” (1993).

• Sylvia Rhor, “Fear and Fascination at the Masked Ball: Paul Gavarni’s Lithographs during the July Monarchy,” (1995). 

• Nancy Zielinski, “The Evolution from Pictorialism to Purism: References to James M. Whistler in Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work,” (1995).

• Elizabeth Teller, “Christian Schad’s Portraits of the ‘New Woman’: Spectatorship and Sexual Identity in Weimar Germany,” (1996).

• Jeanne Pearlman, “Joseph Beuys in the United States,” (1997).

• Adam Young, “From National to Irrational: The Changing Role of the Gesamtkunstwerk from Wagner to Dada,” (1999).

• Savannah Schroll, “Black Empowerment through German Culture: George Grosz and Romare Bearden in 1930s America,” (2000).

• Kate Giberman, “Mstislav Dobujinsky’s Petersburg and the Russian Revolution of 1905,” (2000).

• Vladimir Voloshin, “John Heartfield: The Modern Publicity Artist,” (2000).

• María Carolina Carrasco, “José Sabogal and the Amauta Years,” (2002).

• Kristen Harkness, “Mikhail Vrubel’s Fairy-Tale Heroines and Identity in Fin-de-Siéclè Russia,” (2003).

• Annah Krieg, “’As the blood speaks, so the people build’: King Heinrich I, Heinrich Himmler, and the Construction of the Thousand-Year Reich in Quedlinburg,” (2004).

• Maria D’Anniballe, “Italy’s Fascist Regime and the Restoration of the Medieval Past: The Case of Verona,” (2004).

• Jessica Glaser, “Mediating Modernism: Ostalgie and East German Design of the 1950s and 1960s,” (2005).

 

 

 


Professional Association Memberships:

 

• College Art Association

• American Association of University Professors

• German Studies Association

• Historians of German and Central European Art Caucus, College Art Association

• German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Alumni Association

• Radical Art Caucus, College Art Association

• North American Exile Studies Association