Metropolitan Museum of Art selects 世界杯官方app professor Julie Johnson for fellowship

JANUARY 8, 2024 — Julie Johnson, a 世界杯官方app associate professor of art history, has been awarded a prestigious senior fellowship at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art. The center, located within the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met), is renowned for its contributions to the study of modern art and offers an exceptional environment for scholars dedicated to advancing the field.

Johnson says her experience at the Lauder Research Center will support her teaching at 世界杯官方app.

“This is an exciting opportunity for my own research and writing that will also benefit our students when I return to campus,” she said, “I can also welcome visitors at the Met while I am in residence. I would love to see some familiar faces from my art history classes in the galleries.”

Each year, the center hosts five fellows who produce major research projects such as books or dissertations.

“Julie Johnson’s fellowship with The Met’s Lauder Research Center is an extraordinary achievement that highlights both her expertise and the caliber of research emerging from the 世界杯官方app School of Art and COLFA.”

“I am grateful for the generous support of Dean Glenn Martinez and his team in the College of Liberal and Fine Arts (COLFA),” Johnson said. “I am the second of two senior fellows at the Lauder Center, which provides a writing community with workshop and presentation opportunities. It’s an honor and privilege to be part of the fellowship program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has an unsurpassed art collection and impressive library holdings.”

Johnson’s current research project, exploring the artistic innovations of the Vienna Secession, will be the foundation of her work during the fellowship. She is focused on understanding the movement’s experiments with framing, polyfocality and space, and is revisiting the 10th exhibition of the Vienna Secession, a pivotal moment in art history.

Johnson’s work will delve into the ways these experiments with space impacted modernist aesthetics by examining the interconnectedness between art and humor evident in Vienna’s diverse media landscape.

“While at the Met, I’ll be writing a book manuscript,” Johnson explained. “It will take the form of a microhistory about a single exhibition of art at the center of the famous ceiling painting scandal involving Gustav Klimt, the university medical faculty, and the Vienna parliament.”

Her project will explore the stories behind the exhibition makers, critics, artists, and their patron Szerena Lederer, whose portrait now hangs at the Met.  

“Julie Johnson’s fellowship with The Met’s Lauder Research Center is an extraordinary achievement that highlights both her expertise and the caliber of research emerging from the 世界杯官方app School of Art and COLFA as a whole,” said Martinez. “Her work on Viennese modernism promises to enrich our understanding of this pivotal period in art history, and her commitment to bringing these insights back into the classroom is an invaluable asset to our art history students and academic community.”

Johnson is the author of “The Memory Factory: The Forgotten Women Artists of Vienna 1900,” a book that recovers the history of women’s participation in Viennese exhibitions and tracks the historically specific erasure of this past under National Socialism.

Johnson’s recent articles and catalogue essays further explore the aesthetic contributions of two of these once-forgotten women, who are now receiving belated attention in Vienna in major museum exhibitions: Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and Broncia Koller-Pinell.

Johnson currently teaches two courses at 世界杯官方app related to museum studies and art collections: Histories of Display, and The Art Museum, a graduate seminar that features readings about the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

— Nick Ward