This website is primarily devoted to modern and contemporary visual arts and music, and focuses on areas of interaction between the two.
In particular, I am interested in the emergence and development of Modernism–its development and iterations, from the well-known movements of Cubism, Dada, Constructivism, to its embrace of the primitivist and vernacular, the disruption of linearity and form in music and art, and the juxtaposing and fusing together of high and low artistic modes. My work focuses on the way in which artists at the outset of the 20th century–such as Picasso and Klee, Stravinsky and Debussy–succeeded in disrupting a Romantic sense of order to create new tropes, without necessarily rejecting past traditions.
I am trained as an art historian. Born in Switzerland, I grew up in Paris and attended Brown University and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. As a director of Berggruen & Zevi in London, I organized exhibitions of Paul Klee, Alberto Giacometti, Not Vital and Elisabeth Scherffig, among others. As associate curator at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, I curated retrospectives of Matisse's paper cut-outs, Yves Klein, and Picasso's work for the stage. More recently, I curated the exhibition Pablo Picasso: From Cubism to Classicism 1915–1925 at the Scuderie del Quirinale and Palazzo Barberini, Rome.
I have written on modernist literature (Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Paul Morand), on twentieth century and contemporary art (Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Cy Twombly, Ed Ruscha, Adriana Varejão) and on the relationship between music and visual arts (George Condo's Jazz paintings, Picasso & Stravinsky in Italy). I am a member of the Scientific Committee of the Musée Picasso, Paris, and of the International Council of the Museum Berggruen, Berlin. I also serve on the board of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, Providence.
Apart from various curatorial projects, I am involved in a small number of musical events focused on 20th Century and Contemporary music. These focus mainly on piano music, ranging from Alexander Scriabin to Unsuk Chin and Helmut Lachenmann.