Elderfield, John 1943–

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Elderfield, John 1943–

PERSONAL:

Born April 25, 1943, in Yorkshire, England; son of Henry and Rhoda May Elderfield; married Joyce Davey, January 9, 1965; married Jill Elizabeth Moser, January 8, 1989 (divorced 1995); children: (first marriage) Matthew, Jonathan. Education: Attended Victoria University of Manchester, 1961-62; University of Leeds, B.A. (with honors), 1966, M.Phil. (with distinction), 1970; Courtauld Institute of Art, London, Ph.D., 1975.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd St., New York, NY 10019.

CAREER:

Winchester School of Art, Winchester, England, lecturer in art history, 1966-70; Yale University, New Haven, CT, research fellow, 1970-72; University of Leeds, Leeds, England, lecturer in art history, 1973-75; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, curator of painting and sculpture, 1975-93; director of department of drawings, 1979-93, chief curator at large, 1993-2003, chief curator of painting and sculpture, 2003-08. Adjunct professor, Hunter College of the City University of New York.

MEMBER:

International Association of Art Critics, Royal Society of Arts (fellow), College Art Association of America.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Harkness fellow, 1970-72; Guggenheim fellow, 1972-73; Mitchell Prize, 1986, for Kurt Schwitters; named one of "100 Most Influential People," Time magazine, 2005.

WRITINGS:

Morris Louis, Arts Council of Great Britain (London, England), 1974.

(Editor) Hugo Ball, The Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary, Viking (New York, NY), 1974.

The "Wild Beasts": Fauvism and Its Affinities, Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), 1976.

European Master Paintings from Swiss Collections: Post-Impressionism to World War II, Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), 1976.

Matisse in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), 1978.

The Cut-outs of Henri Matisse, Braziller (New York, NY), 1978.

(With Arne Eggum) The Masterworks of Edvard Munch, Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), 1979.

New Work on Paper, Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), 1981.

The Modern Drawing: One Hundred Works on Paper from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York Graphic Society (New York, NY), 1983.

(With John Golding) The Drawings of Henri Matisse, Thames & Hudson (New York, NY), 1985.

Kurt Schwitters (monograph), Thames & Hudson (New York, NY), 1985.

The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn, Houston Fine Art Press (Houston, TX), 1988.

Frankenthaler, Abrams (New York, NY), 1989.

Henri Matisse: A Retrospective, Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), 1992.

Henri Matisse: Masterworks from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), 1996.

(With Pierre-Paul Prud'hon) The Language of the Body, Abrams (New York, NY), 1996.

(Editor, and author of introduction) Hugo Ball, Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1996.

Pleasuring Painting, Thames & Hudson (New York, NY), 1996.

(With Sarah Whitfield) Bonnard, Abrams (New York, NY), 1998.

(Editor, with others) ModernStarts: People, Places, Things, Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), 1999.

(With Lynne Cooke) Bridget Riley: Reconaissance, Dia Center for the Arts (New York, NY), 2001.

(With others) I Simposio Internacional Armando Reveron, Caracas, Septiembre 2001: Ponencias, Proyecto Armando Reveron (Caracas, Venezuela), 2001.

(Editor) Visions of Modern Art: Painting and Sculpture from the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), 2003.

(Editor) Modern Painting and Sculpture: 1880 to the Present at the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), 2004.

Manet and the Execution of Maximilian, Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), 2006.

(With Jeffrey Weiss) Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965, National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), 2007.

(With Luis Perez-Oramas and Nora Lawrence) Armando Reveron, Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), 2007.

(With Michael Auping and Elizabeth Reede) Martin Puryear, Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to books, including Howard Hodgkin Paintings, Abrams (New York, NY), 1995; The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, by Jane Livingston, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1997; and Against the Grain: Contemporary Art from the Edward R. Broida Collection, Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), 2006. Contributor to art journals. Contributing editor, Artforum, 1972-74, and Studio International, 1973-75.

SIDELIGHTS:

John Elderfield is an art historian and museum curator as well as a regular contributor to art journals. He has served at a number of major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City, where he worked for many years and served as the chief curator of the department of painting and sculpture until his retirement in 2008. Elderfield has written and edited numerous volumes on individual painters and styles of art, including European Master Paintings from Swiss Collections: Post-Impressionism to World War II, The Modern Drawing: One Hundred Works on Paper from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, The Language of the Body, and Manet and the Execution of Maximilian. Bonnard, a biography of French painter Pierre Bonnard that Elderfield coauthored with Sarah Whitfield, addresses the artist's rise in popularity following his death and examines the different influences on his career. Scott Veale, writing in the New York Times Book Review, observed of Elderfield: "In meticulous, often scientific, detail he decodes Bonnard's use of color, perspective and other devices in his optical bag of tricks."