Judith Wechsler

Judith Wechsler is an art historian and filmmaker who has written and directed 29 films, predominantly on art. She was the National Endowment for the Humanities Professor in art history at Tufts University, taught for many years at MIT, and was a visiting professor at Harvard, Ecole Normale Supèrieure, and The Hebrew University. Her books include The Interpretation of Cézanne (UMI Research Press, 1981); A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th-Century Paris (Thames and Hudson, 1982); Cabinet des dessins, Honoré Daumier (Flammarion, 1999), and she is the editor of On Aesthetics in Science, among other volumes. The author of numerous essays on Daumier and other early modern painters, Wechsler has made films for the Louvre, including Drawing the Thinking Hand (1996) and Rachel de la Comédie francaise (2003) as well as for the Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Getty, and others. Many of her films are distributed by the Circulating Film library of the Museum of Modern Art and are housed at the Harvard University Film Archive. Wechsler has been a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Bogliasco, and the van Leer Foundation, in Jerusalem. She is a recipient of six grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and two from the National Endowment for the Arts and is a recipient of a Mellon Award for teaching at Tufts. In 2007, she was decorated with the Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres from the French government.