Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa

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LAJER-BURCHARTH, Ewa

PERSONAL: Female. Education: Institute of Art History, University of Warsaw, Poland, M.A.; City University of New York, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Harris K. Weston Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture.

MEMBER: Association of Art Historians

AWARDS, HONORS: John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, 2000.

WRITINGS:

Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1999.

Other writings include Counter-Monuments, 1987. Also contributor to academic journals in art history and feminist studies.

SIDELIGHTS: Ewa Lajer-Bucharth is a Harvard University professor who specializes in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century contemporary art, feminism, and critical theory. She is recognized for writing Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror, a book about the work of a noted French artist between 1794 and 1800. Nicholas Mirzoeff reviewed the work for the College Art Association Web site, noting: "She presents David as an artist struggling with trauma and loss that he often represented in terms of gender and gender ambiguity. Hers is a David for our time, a man desperately searcing for Prozac avant la lettre." Lajer-Burcharth discusses the "unresolved tension" the artist had within his body and connects it to popular prints, medical literature, fashion and pyschoanalysis. The result, Mirzoeff concludes, will change many perceptions of David's work.