Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Wednesday, October 3, 2018 in HART, News, Student/Alumni, Vanderbilt University, VRC.

The Department of History of Art has awarded Downing undergraduate research grants to Liz Horner and Michelle Zhu, both of whom are working with Christopher Johns, the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of History of Art.

Horner will travel to New York in early November for research in the Provenance Research Project of MoMA and the works now in their permanent collection deemed “degenerate” by the Nazis. She will also visit the Neue Galerie, which owns Gustav Klimt’s Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), the portrait in one of the most notorious cases of restitution, Republic of Austria v. Altmann (2004). The trip will provide material for her Honors thesis, “Art in War: The Legal Implications of Looting, Repatriation, and Restitution.”

Zhu will use the grant to travel to several collections in Germany that are essential for her Honors thesis on the landscapes of German Romantic painters Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich and their religious, literary, and philosophical milieux. Based in Vienna for the spring semester, Zhu plans to travel to see works by these artists in the extraordinary museums in Hamburg, Dresden and Bertlin.

The department awards these Downing grants for travel to exhibitions and research centers to supplement academic instruction for HART majors who are in the Honors Program, in advanced seminars, or in upper-level “W” (writing) courses. These grants provide assistance for up to $1,500 in travel costs and are awarded in the fall and spring semesters of each academic year.