Dr Christian Weikop is a Professor in Modern and Contemporary German Art and has published extensively in this field. He was in the first wave of prestigious University of Edinburgh Chancellor’s Fellow (CF) appointments, and was the first CF in History of Art, a position he held between 2012 and 2017.

Christian studied Art History and Theory at the University of Essex and completed his PhD at the University of Birmingham in 2005. Between 2004 and 2010, he worked at the University of Sussex as a Visiting Lecturer, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, and as a Senior Researcher on the AHRC Modernist Magazines Project (2008-10), the latter resulting in his co-editing volume 3 of the Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (2013). Additionally, he has worked at Bard College Berlin, the Universities of Birmingham and Loughborough, as well as the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Shortly before joining the University of Edinburgh in 2010, he was Luftbrückendank Fellow of the Centre for British Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin. Christian founded the ECA Research Forum for German Visual Culture in February 2011. He has recently taken over the editorship of the Peter Lang series ‘German Visual Culture’ and is in the early stages of composing an edited volume exploring new perspectives on Degenerate Art for this series, a volume stemming from a conference that he is organising on this subject, hosted by the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS, October 2018).

Much of Christian’s research has focused on pre-1945 German art, especially Expressionism and Dada, but in the last seven years he has worked extensively in a post-1945 field with respect to the five German artists in ARTIST ROOMS, organising many symposia and other events and producing various publications on August Sander, Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, and Joseph Beuys. This was part of an ECA research partnership (2011-16) with Tate and NGS, which maintains a number of ongoing projects, not least on the artist Joseph Beuys, and Christian is leading a project documenting Beuys’s connections to Edinburgh, and Edinburgh College of Art. Furthermore, he has produced a major online Tate ‘In Focus’ project on Kiefer (2016) and he co-wrote the exhibition catalogue for the critically acclaimed 2014 Kiefer retrospective at the Royal Academy (RA). At the behest of the RA, he interviewed the legendary artist at his studio complex in Croissy on the outskirts of Paris in October 2013, followed by an RA interview with Baselitz the following year. He is currently preparing texts on Kiefer’s work for a forthcoming book on the Marx Collection, to be produced by the Nationalgalerie – Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.

Along with one of his PhD students, Frances Blythe, Christian has worked with Keith Hartley (Deputy Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art) and others on the NGS exhibition catalogue for a major retrospective on Emil Nolde, to be held at the National Gallery of Ireland (14 February - 10 June 2018) and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (14 July-21 October 2018). This is one of his many publications on German Expressionist artists, including a volume on the Brücke group (2011). In the summer of 2018, he is giving a keynote lecture on Ernst Ludwig Kirchner at a four-day conference devoted to the artist held in Davos, Switzerland, which precedes his contribution to the catalogue for a major exhibition, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Imaginary Travels, at the Budeskunsthalle, Bonn, Germany, November 15, 2018 – February 17, 2019, in collaboration with the Kirchner Museum Davos and the Art Centre Basel.

As an extension of his work on Expressionism, he, along with team members Dr Jill Lloyd and Dr Dorothy Price, was commissioned by the Arts Council England to write expert reports and make films on the international importance of the Expressionist collection at the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery in Leicester (see link below). And in terms of other public engagement and knowledge exchange, Christian has worked for broadcast media, and most recently wrote and presented a documentary on Wassily Kandinsky for BBC Radio 3 (2017), which was ‘Pick of the Week’ in many broadsheet newspapers, the Radio Times, and on BBC Radio 4.

Dr Weikop discusses Expressionist artist Max Pechstein.

• See the full interview