Contributors
Yaëlle Biro
PhD, is an Africanist art historian and independent scholar, formerly Curator of African arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2007–2021). Her research focuses on African arts’ history of collecting at the turn of the twentieth century, and its historical implications for the field’s development. She completed her dissertation in 2010 at the Sorbonne on African arts’ trade networks, a version of which was published as Fabriquer le regard: Marchands, réseaux et objets d’art africains à l’aube du XXe siècle (Presses du réel, 2018). She curated, among other exhibitions, “African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde” (2012), “In and Out of the Studio: Photographic Portraits from West Africa” (2016), and “The Face of Dynasty: Royal Crests from Western Cameroon” (2018). Her recent publications include “A Great Audacity of Taste: Aesthetic Judgments of African Sculpture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in The Language of Beauty in African Art (2022); and the co-edited volume Rhapsodic Objects: Art, Agency, and Materiality, 1700–2000 (2022).
Christine E. Brennan
PhD, is Research Scholar and Collections Manager in the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She received an MA in history and a certificate in Museum Studies from New York University, then completed her PhD at the Bard Graduate Center in 2019, with the dissertation “The Brummer Gallery and the Market for Medieval Art in Paris and New York, 1906–1949.” Brennan’s research focuses on the history of collecting, the market for medieval art, and provenance. She has contributed to the exhibition catalogues Making The Met (2020) and Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel and French Decorative Arts from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2013). Most recently, she published “Prince Pierre Soltykoff’s Famed Collection of Medieval Art,” in Collecting and Provenance: A Multidisciplinary Approach (2019) and “The Met and World War II: How Met Staff Protected the Collection at Home and Cultural Heritage in Europe,” in Museo, guerra y posguerra: Protección del patrimonio en los conflictos bélicos (2022).
Richard Serly Brummer
(1924–2022), an accomplished film editor, was the younger son of antique dealer Imre Brummer and dancer Etelka Serly. As a child actor he appeared in the Broadway production of Noel Coward’s “Conversation Piece,” and several off-Broadway shows. He served during WWII in the US Army Signal Corps attached to the Air Force, as a Radar Engineering Crew Chief, and was honorably discharged in 1946. Postwar, Richard attended Parsons School of Design, and through Parsons, studied painting in Italy and Paris. He then pursued film studies at New York University, and took part in America’s experimental film movement, bringing together leading experimentalists to help form the Independent Filmmakers Association, Inc. Early films he co-produced, edited and/or directed include “The Drum,” “First Fear,” and “Jazz Dance.” Later in Los Angeles he worked as a sound and picture editor on over fifty features, and over one-hundred TV shows, commercials, trailers, music videos, documentaries, etc., and was a member of the Motion Picture Editors Guild.
Elizabeth Dospěl Williams
PhD, is Curator of the Byzantine Collection at Dumbarton Oaks. Her teaching, publications, and exhibitions explore dress practice, sensory experience, materiality, and aesthetics in the medieval eastern Mediterranean through a focus on wearable objects and interior design. Williams was co-editor and contributor to the born-digital Catalogue of the Textiles in the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection (2019) and Liminal Fabric: Byzantine and Early Islamic Furnishing Textiles (Dumbarton Oaks Papers 73, 2019). Her exhibitions include “Ornament: Fragments of Byzantine Fashion” (Dumbarton Oaks) and “Woven Interiors: Furnishing Early Medieval Egypt” (George Washington University Museum/the Textile Museum). Her publications on provenance and curatorial practice include “ ‘Into the Hands of a Well-Known Antiquary of Cairo’: The Assiut Treasure and the Making of an Archaeological Hoard,” in West 86th (2014) and “Equity, Access, and New Narratives for Byzantine Art in the Museum,” in Towards a Critical Historiography of Byzantine Studies (2023). Williams completed her PhD at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, with specializations in Byzantine and early Islamic art history.
Anne Dunn-Vaturi
is Senior Research Associate in charge of provenance in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2009–) where she documents ownership history, ranging from the permanent collection (posted on the museum’s website) to incoming loans. She received an MA in art history, archaeology, and museum studies from the École du Louvre, and completed an MA in archaeology at the Sorbonne. She worked at the Musée du Louvre for an audit of long-term loans to other museums. Since 1998, she has been conducting research on ancient art looted in France during the Nazi era. She co-wrote “ ‘Unclaimed’ Artworks Entrusted to the French Museums after World War II: The Case of the Near Eastern Art and Antiquities,” in The Fate of Antiquities in the Nazi Era (forthcoming 2023). Another topic of interest is ancient board games, in particular the game of Hounds and Jackals. She co-curated the exhibition “Art du Jeu, Jeu dans l’Art: de Babylone à l’Occident médiéval” at the Musée de Cluny in Paris (2012–2013).
Christel H. Force
PhD, aka Christel Hollevoet, is an independent scholar, formerly Associate Research Curator in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2005–2018). Previously she held curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art (1990–2005) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Force obtained an art history degree from the Université Libre de Bruxelles; completed her MA at McGill University; was a fellow of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (Curatorial); and received her PhD from the City University of New York, Graduate Center (2001). Force serves on the Advisory Board of Bloomsbury’s “Contextualizing Art Markets” series; and was a Steering Committee member of the German/American Provenance Research Exchange Program for Museum Professionals (2017–19). She recently published “Intellectual Property and Ownership History” in Collecting and Provenance: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach (2019); “Otto Feldmann, promoteur de Picasso en Allemagne avant 1914” in Les artistes et leurs galeries: Paris-Berlin, 1900–1950, vol. 2: Berlin (2020); and edited Pioneers of the Global Art Market: Paris-Based Dealers Networks, 1850–1950 (2020).
Tom Hardwick
studied Egyptology as an undergraduate and postgraduate at the University of Oxford. He is a specialist in pharaonic Egyptian material culture and has worked with Egyptological collections and archives in the United Kingdom, Egypt, and the United States. In addition to curating permanent collections of Egyptian material, he curated the temporary exhibitions “Egyptomania” (Bolton Museum, 2009) and “Mrs Goodison and Friends” (The Atkinson, Southport, 2017–18), the latter displaying and contextualizing a largely intact nineteenth-century private collection now in Southport. He provided curatorial support for the renovation of Howard Carter’s house in Luxor to mark the centenary of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. His research interests include pharaonic Egyptian sculpture and the histories of collecting and forging pharaonic Egyptian antiquities.
Julie Jones
(1935–2021) was dedicated to the field of Precolumbian art since joining the Nelson-Rockefeller-founded Museum of Primitive Art as a graduate intern in 1960. In 1969, when the museum’s collection was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jones moved with it, helping to establish a new department at the Met for the care, study, and exhibition of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. She retired from the Met as Department Head in 2013. In her time there, she oversaw renovations to the Rockefeller galleries and organized numerous exhibitions, including “Houses for the Hereafter: Funerary Temples of Guerrero, Mexico” (1987) and “The Andean Tunic” (2011). She also contributed to the landmark exhibition “Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries” (1990). Jones has also served on the Editorial Board of the Metropolitan Museum Journal and on the Advisory Board for the Kislak Collection at the Library of Congress.
Lucretia Kargère
is Conservator for Medieval sculptures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has been the principal conservator for the Met Cloisters since 2002. She came to the Met in 1996, when she was awarded the first of several fellowships for the technical study and treatment of medieval sculpture. Lucretia has published a significant study of French Romanesque sculptures from the Museum collection, and is the co-author of The Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculpture (Getty Conservation Institute, 2020). She holds a BA from Brown University, and an MA in art history and advanced certificate in conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
John Laszlo
MD, is the nephew of Ernest Brummer’s wife, Ella Baché Brummer. Now retired, he had a long career as medical oncologist, Professor of Medicine, and Director of Clinical Research at the Duke Cancer Center. He studied at Columbia University, then Harvard Medical school, the National Cancer Institute, and Duke Medical Center. He published some two hundred and fifty scientific papers and three books. For the last ten years of his career, he was the National VP for Research at the American Cancer Society in Atlanta. Laszlo was born in 1931, and in 1938 his parents fled Vienna with him, and settled in New York. His father’s sister, Ella Baché, came to New York in 1942, and later married Ernest Brummer. Laszlo saw his aunt and uncle frequently at their home in New York and occasionally in Paris or Switzerland.
Maya Muratov
PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Adelphi University, and is Research Associate in the Department of Greek and Roman Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, focusing on provenance. She received her PhD in Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She is a practicing field archaeologist and cultural historian whose research interests include religious and social history of the Greek colonies in the Northern Pontic region, and the history of collecting antiquities in Europe and the US from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. She recently published “The Provenance of the Capodimonte Crater: The Men Behind the Vase,” in Il ‘Grand Mausolée’ di Polignano. Riscoperta di un contesto pauceta del IV secolo a.C. (2019), and “ ‘Fraudulent Ingenuity’: Charles W. King and 19th Century Collections of Antique Gems,” (co-authored with T. D’Angelo) in Collecting and Collectors: from Antiquity to Modernity (2018), a volume which she also co-edited.
Martina Rugiadi
PhD, is Associate Curator in the Islamic Art Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has been involved in archaeological projects in Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Jordan, and Oman, and she is currently co-directing the Towns of the Karakum (ToKa) project in Turkmenistan. Her publications and exhibitions have covered a variety of topics, with a particular focus on palatine architecture, the production and circulation of ceramics, and the entangled histories of Islamic art, the market, and the museum. Most recently, she co-edited the volume The Seljuqs and their Successors: Art, Culture and History (2020), and published “(Un)broken iconographies: The bird-and-quadruped ceramic fragment from the Masjed-e Jomʿe of Isfahan”, in Maḥabbatnāma. Scritti offerti a Maria Vittoria Fontana (2020). Her current research projects explore medieval drinking practices, Islamic-period spolia, and the intersection of Islamic art history, archaeology, and cultural heritage of Afghanistan.
William D. Wixom
(1929–2020) was Curator Emeritus of the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He served as Michel David-Weill Chairman of the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1978 until his retirement in 1998. Previously, he was curator of Medieval and Renaissance art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. He holds a Master’s degree from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Wixom lectured and published on a wide variety of topics on medieval art and culture, and curated numerous exhibitions, both at the Met and at the Cleveland Museum of Art, including “Treasures of Medieval France” (1966–7), “Renaissance Bronzes from Ohio Collections” (1975), “Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg” (1986), and “Mirror of the Medieval World” (1999).