College of Arts & Sciences
Department of Art

Peter Chametzky is Professor of Art History and Chair of the Art Department. From 1998 to 2012 he taught at Southern Illinois University, first as Associate Professor and then as Professor, and served as Director of the School of Art and Design on the Carbondale campus from 2008-12. Previously, he taught at Adelphi University (1990-98), the School of Visual Arts (1984-88), and in the School of Continuing Education at New York University (1986-88). He earned his PhD in Art History from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1991. His BA, also in Art History, is from Cornell University. He has also studied in Freiburg iBr, and Stuttgart, Germany.

Peter teaches courses in 20^th and 21^st Century art, theory, and culture. His research focuses on 20^th-century German art and culture.  He is currently researching contemporary Jewish artists in Germany as part of a book project. He chaired a double-session at the 2013 College Art Association meeting in New York, titled: “From Lesser to Tanya Ury, German-Jewish Artists, 1890-2010.”

Publications since 2000 include:

Forthcoming:

 Konstanze Rudert, curator and editor, Im Netzwerk der Moderne. Kirchner, Braque, Kandinsky, Klee … Richter, Bacon, Altenbourg und ihr Kritiker Will Grohmann, (Dresden: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in association with Hirmer Verlag, Munich, 2012), review of exhibition and publication, The Art Bulletin, September 2013.

 “Missed Opportunities, Misunderstandings: Baumeister and the United States,” Willi Baumeister International, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart and Deutscher Kunstverlag, October 2013 (in English and German).

 “Artists as Avatars,” review essay placing three recent art historical publications, Bettina Gockel, Die Pathologisierung des Künstlers: Künstlerlegende der Moderne (2010), Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Germany  (2009), and James A. van Dyke, Franz Radziwill and the Contradictions of German Art History, 1919-45 (2011) in the context of art historical methodologies and modern intellectual history. Modern Intellectual History, 2013.

Book:

Objects as History in Twentieth-Century German Art: Beckmann to Beuys (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2010).

Articles/Chapters:

 “Global Art, National Values, Monumental Compromises: ‘German' 9/11 Commemoration in America, ‘American’ Holocaust Commemoration in Germany,” The Massachusetts Review (50^th Anniversary Issue), vol. 50/1-2 (May 2009): 155-180.

 “Not What We Expected: The Jewish Museum Berlin in Practice,” Museum and Society, vol. 6:3 (November 2008): 216-245 (http://www.le.ac.uk/ms/museumsociety.html).

 "From Werkbund to Entartung: Willi Baumeister's Wall Pictures" in The Built Surface: Volume 2. Architecture and the pictorial Arts from Romanticism to the twenty-first century, ed. Karen Koehler (London: Ashgate Press, 2002): 159-185.

 "The Post-History of Willi Baumeister's anti-Nazi Postcards," Visual Resources, vol. XVII, no. 4 (2001): 459-480.

 "Rebuilding the Nation: Norman Foster's Reichstag Renovation and Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum Berlin," Centropa, vol. 1 no. 3 (September 2001): 245-264.

 "Paul Westheim in Mexico: A Cosmopolitan Man Contemplating the Heavens," Oxford Art Journal, vol. 24, no. 1(May 2001): 23-44.

Reviews:

 Cordula Grewe, Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism (Ashgate, 2009), American Historical Review (February 2012): 287-88

 Matthew Baigell, Milly Heyd, and Rose-Carol Washton Long, eds., Jewish Dimensions in Modern Visual Culture (Brandeis University Press, 2010), Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture 5 (2011): 121-4.

 Juliet Koss, Modernism After Wagner (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), Design and Culture, 3:2 (Summer 2011): 257-9

 Timothy O. Benson, ed., Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910-1930 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art and MIT Press, 2002), Centropa, vol. 3, no. 2 (May 2003): 158-163.

 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945-1948, Labor History, vol. 41, no. 1 (February 2000): 112-14.