ECR French Nineteenth-Century Art Network presents:
Between Public and Private: Auction Houses Beyond the Market
Thursday 6 March 2025 1600 (GMT) // 1700 (CET) // 1100 (EST) // 0800 (PST)
* * Please note the updated time of this event **
This panel aims to demystify the role of auction houses in the art-world ecosystem. Much more than just a marketplace for artworks, auction houses can also play a pivotal, if underrated, role in the shaping of museum collections and exhibitions, from acquisitions and deaccessions to exhibition checklist assistance with private collectors, and provenance research. This Network Session will share some behind-the-scenes insights that go beyond important sales and blockbuster prices to speak candidly about the relationship between the auction house, public institutions, private collectors, and the market.
Kathryn Kemnitzer (Sotheby’s New York, 19th-Century European Paintings) will be joined by Emerson Bowyer (Searle Curator, Painting and Sculpture of Europe, at the Art Institute of Chicago) and Jaden Katz (Global Fine Arts Associate at Sotheby’s New York) to show how this dynamic relationship works in practice.
Speaker Bios:
Kathryn Kremnitzer joined Sotheby’s in June 2021. She earned her PhD at Columbia University in 2020 with a dissertation that explored how Édouard Manet worked across media in the 1860s. She was previously Research Associate in the Painting and Sculpture of Europe department at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she worked on Manet and Modern Beauty (2019), Monet and Chicago (2020), and Cezanne (2022), and contributed to the online scholarly catalogue of Manet’s works in the collection. As a Curatorial Assistant at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, she worked on Madame Cézanne (2014) and Tiepolo Caricatures from the Robert Lehman Collection (2014). She specializes in 19th-century European painting, particularly French, and works on paper.
Emerson Bowyer is Searle Curator, Painting and Sculpture of Europe, at the Art Institute of Chicago. A specialist in 18th- and 19th-century French and British art, he has previously worked at the Frick Collection, New York, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and he Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His exhibitions include David d’Angers: Making the Modern Monument (Frick Collection, 2013), Luminous Worlds: British Works on Paper 1760–1900 (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco); Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (Met Breuer, 2018); Canova: Sculpting in Clay(National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and Art Institute of Chicago, 202324); Camille Claudel (Art Institute of Chicago, and J. Paul Getty Museum, 202324). Emerson is currently working on an exhibition focused on Vilhelm Hammershoi’s paintings of his apartment at Strandgade 30 in Copenhagen.
Jaden Katz is a Global Fine Arts Associate at Sotheby’s New York, working between the Restitution and 19th-Century European Paintings departments. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in History and Art History at University of Michigan in 2023, with a thesis on the Salon de la Rose+Croix.