Patricia Leighten

Professor Emerita of Art, Art History and Visual Studies

Education

• Ph.D., Rutgers University 1983

• M.A., Rutgers University 1975

• B.A., University of Massachusets at Boston 1973

Overview

Patricia Leighten received her PhD from Rutgers University. Her field of research is late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century art and politics in France, and the history of photography. She has won numerous awards and fellowships and published extensively on visual culture and anarchism in Paris. The first art historian to publish a study of the importance of the anarchist movement for the development of twentieth-century modernism, in Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897−1914 (Princeton University Press 1989), she extensively expanded on this subject in The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris (University of Chicago Press 2013). She is also co-author, with Mark Antliff, of A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906-1914 (University of Chicago Press 2008), trans. Le cubisme devant ses contemporains–Documents et critiques (1906-1914) (Paris: Les Presses du réel, forthcoming 2019) and Cubism and Culture (Thames & Hudson 2001), trans. Cubisme et culture 2002).  She is currently researching photography and anarchist ideology in the 20th century, and continuing to present her scholarship at conferences and in publications.

Expertise