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Patricia Leighten

Professor Emerita of Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Box 90766, Durham, NC 27708-0766
114 S. Buchanan Blvd., Duke University, Box 90766, Durham, NC 27708

Overview


Patricia Leighten received her PhD from Rutgers University. Her field of research is late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century European art and politics, especially France, and the history of photography. She has won numerous awards and fellowships. 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 that 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, 2019) and Cubism and Culture (Thames & Hudson 2001), trans. Cubisme et culture (Paris: Thames & Hudson, 2002).  She is currently researching photography and anarchist ideology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and presenting her scholarship at conferences and in publications.

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Professor Emerita of Art, Art History & Visual Studies · 2016 - Present Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

Recent Publications


William James, Anarchism, and the Picasso-Stein Circle

Journal Article Journal of Avant-Garde Studies · 2025 Featured Publication Historians in the fields of literature and art history have long recognized the profound impact of the philosopher William James on Pablo Picasso’s close allies Leo and Gertrude Stein, and some have acknowledged their possible role in conveying James’s phi ... Cite

Provincial Paris, Cosmopolitan Cubism

Chapter · 2023 Featured Publication Cite
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Education, Training & Certifications


Rutgers University · 1983 Ph.D.
Rutgers University · 1975 M.A.