Emilie E.S. Gordenker gives the ‘Walter W.S. Cook Annual Lecture’, IFA

Thu, Oct 24 - Thu, Oct 24  2013

Emilie E.S. Gordenker, Director of the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, will give the Walter W.S. Cook Annual Lecture on October 24^th. The lecture, ‘Are Cross-Sections Boring? The Case of Saul and David’, takes place at The Institute of Fine Arts, New York.

The Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis not only has a renowned collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings, but is a formidable research institution. Now in the middle of a project to renovate and expand the museum, the Mauritshuis will reopen in mid-2014 with a new challenge: how to share cutting-edge scholarship, particularly material technical research, with a broad public. By way of example, this lecture will present the latest findings relating to technical investigation of the painting Saul and David by Rembrandt, including some of the newest tools developed for researching paintings. It will also offer some thoughts about how to present sophisticated scientific research to a public that ranges from highly trained art historians to tourists.

Emilie Gordenker has been Director of the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis since January 1, 2008. She was born in Princeton, NJ (United States) in 1965, and holds dual US and Dutch nationality. Emilie Gordenker earned her Ph.D. in 1998 from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University with a specialty in the history of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art, the history of dress of that period, and the artist Anthony van Dyck. While in New York, she worked for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection and the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD). She taught at Rutgers University, New York University, Vassar College and the Bard Graduate Center for the Decorative Arts.