Magdalene College Cambridge

Mr Richard Calvocoressi

Mr Richard Calvocoressi is a Fellow Commoner at Magdalene.

My museum career began in 1977 when I joined the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA) in Edinburgh as a research assistant. In 1979 I was appointed a research assistant at the Tate Gallery (as it then was), and upgraded in 1982 to assistant keeper. My main responsibility at the Tate was German and Austrian art and to this end I successfully recommended the acquisition of works by Joseph Beuys, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, A.R. Penck, Arnulf Rainer, Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus and others. I also curated the Oskar Kokoschka centenary exhibition at the Tate in 1986.

In 1987 I became director of the SNGMA where I built up a world-class collection of Dada and Surrealist art and literature, including acquiring the collection and library of Gabrielle Keiller and the archive and library of the collector, writer and artist Sir Roland Penrose, along with some thirty artworks from his outstanding collection. This led to my being invited to give the Roland Penrose Memorial lecture at Tate Modern in 2001. I chose as my subject ‘Roland Penrose and Douglas Cooper: Rival Collectors of Modern Art’. From 2007 to 2015 I was director of the Henry Moore Foundation (chairman: Duncan Robinson), where I commissioned a new sculpture store, archive and visitor centre for its Hertfordshire headquarters and presided over a grants programme of between £0.5 million and £1 million a year. Since 2015 I have been curating exhibitions, writing catalogues, and interviewing artists for Gagosian. In late 2023 I co-curated an exhibition about the American photographer Lee Miller and her artist friends (Man Ray, Picasso etc.) at Gagosian in New York. I am currently collaborating on a life of the collector of Cubism, Douglas Cooper, with the biographer Adrian Clark, to be published in 2024.

Research Interest

One of my main interests is post-second world war German and Austrian art, in particular how artists from these countries dealt with their recent shared history.

A related theme I have researched is the appropriation of memorials for political ends. In 2010 I co-organised a conference at the Imperial War Museum in London entitled ‘The Politics of Memory’. The same year my essay ‘Moore, the Holocaust and Cold War Politics’ was published in Tate Britain’s Henry Moore exhibition catalogue. In 2013 I co-curated the exhibition Bacon/Moore: Flesh and Bone at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, analysing, among other things, the effect of war, atrocity and Christian iconography on the work of these two giants of twentieth-century British art.

Qualifications

BA, English Language and Literature, University of Oxford (Magdalen College, 1969-72)

MA, History of Art (19th and 20th centuries), Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London (1973-75)

Career/Research Highlights

2004: Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art awarded Gulbenkian Museum of the Year Prize (£100,000) on the strength of its 'Landform' commissioned by Richard from Charles Jencks

2008: Richard appointed CBE for services to the arts, particularly in Scotland.

Professional Affiliations

  • Trustee of the Edward James Foundation (2006-10)
  • Art Fund (2008-18)
  • Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art (2012-21).

Ongoing Trusteeships:

  • Artist Rooms Foundation (Tate/National Galleries of Scotland)
    The Foundation Foundation (Antony Gormley)
    Grimsthorpe and Drummond Castle Trust

Steering Committee

  • The Cosmic House, London (Charles Jencks Foundation).

Selected Publications

Exhibition Catalogues

Tate Gallery
Tinguely (1982), Reg Butler (1983), A.R. Penck (1984), Max Beckmann (1984, contribution), Oskar Kokoschka (1986).

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
Alastair Morton and Edinburgh Weavers: Abstract Art and Textile Design (1978), Francis Picabia (1988, contribution), Russian Painting of the Avant-Garde (1993, contribution), The Romantic Spirit In German Art (1994, contribution), Lucian Freud. Early Works (1997), The Private Klee Works from the Bürgi Collection (2000, contribution), Howard Hodgkin: Large Works (2,000, contribution), The Surrealist and the Photographer: Roland Penrose and Lee Miller (2001, contribution), Advertising and the Artist: Ashley Havinden (2003, contribution).

Gagosian
Michael Andrews: Earth Air Water (2017), Francis Bacon: Couplings (2019), Friends and Relations: Freud, Bacon, Auerbach and Andrews (2022). Contributions to Gagosian catalogues: Francis Bacon: Late Paintings (New York, 2015), Alberto Giacometti/Yves Klein: In Search of the Absolute (London, 2016), Anselm Kiefer: Field of the Cloth of Gold (Paris, 2021), Rachel Whiteread (London, 2021).

Monographs
René Magritte (Phaidon Press, 1979, 1984), Lee Miller: Portraits from a Life (Thames and Hudson, 2002), Lucian Freud on Paper (Jonathan Cape, 2008), Anselm Kiefer: Uraeus (Gagosian, 2019), Georg Baselitz (Thames & Hudson, 2021), Douglas Cooper (Gagosian, 2024).

In addition to the above-named artists, critical appraisals in book or catalogue form of: Damien Hirst, Joan Miró, Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Man Ray, Jenny Saville. Since the mid-1970s, reviews and articles for the Burlington Magazine, TLS, Apollo, Art Newspaper, Spectator, New Statesman, FT Weekend etc.

Related websites

Wikipedia: Richard Calvocoressi
Gagosian: Richard Calvocoressi