Nicholas Sawicki is an art historian whose principal area of research is early-twentieth-century European modernism. He writes frequently on modern art in Prague, as well as on the history of exhibitions, collecting, and transnational artistic exchange. He works closely with visual and literary primary sources, making them more accessible through translation and digital publishing.
Prof. Sawicki is the author of monographs on the vanguard group of Czech, German, and Jewish artists the Eight (2014) and the painter and graphic artist Friedrich Feigl (2016), and is contributing author on a digital edition of rare historical documentation of Pablo Picasso’s first retrospective in 1913, published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2019). He has published on the Prague writers Max Brod and Franz Kafka and their relation to visual culture; the reception of cubism in the work and writings of figures including Adolphe Basler, Douglas Cooper, and Vincenc Kramář; and the role of modern and avant-garde magazines in the circulation of artistic ideas and imagery in the early twentieth century.
He has contributed to numerous scholarly editions, journals, and conferences in the United States and internationally, and his writings have appeared in the Burlington Magazine, Centropa, Images, Los Angeles Review of Books, Art Market Dictionary, Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, and other publications. Prof. Sawicki has been a Distinguished Scholar at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as a Fulbright Scholar. He is the past recipient of fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, Leo Baeck Institute, and Social Sciences Research Council.
Before coming to Lehigh, Prof. Sawicki held academic appointments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Grinnell College. He is a first-generation American and received his BA from New York University and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.
https://lehigh.academia.edu/NicholasSawicki