Sarah Rapoport

Sarah Rapoport studies nineteenth-century British and French art and visual culture with a focus on artistic and cultural exchange across the Channel. Her dissertation centers around case studies in the work of James Tissot and his transmanche interlocutors (amongst them Degas, Whistler, Millais and Bracquemond), examining the ways in which conceptions of Englishness and Frenchness shaped their art and its critical reception. This project takes up questions around national identity and cultural patrimony; the aesthetics of labor in an age of industrialization; the politics of art criticism; and the promises and myths of artistic cosmopolitanism. Her other research interests include materiality and intermediality; alternative modernisms; and marginalized genres and aesthetic categories, such as still life, detail, and the decorative.

 

Prior to joining the doctoral program at Yale, she served as the Louise Bourgeois 12-Month Intern in Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she assisted with the exhibitions Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented, Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern, and Cézanne Drawing. In the 2022-23 academic year, she was the Mellon-Marron Museum Research Consortium Fellow in Drawings and Prints at MoMA. There she provided research support for Käthe Kollwitz: A Retrospective and authored a catalogue essay that traces the afterlives of Kollwitz’s work amongst artists and activists of the American Left.

 

Sarah holds a BA with Highest Honors in Art & Archaeology from Princeton University. Her thesis, “Surface Anxieties: Vulgarity in the London Paintings of James Tissot,” was awarded the Stella and Rensselaer W. Lee Prize.