Claudia Mesch
Claudia Mesch is an American art historian and critic who writes about 20th‑century and contemporary art and film. She has written several books, including Joseph Beuys: The Reader (co-edited, 2007), a biography of Joseph Beuys (2017), Modern Art at the Berlin Wall: Demarcating Culture in the Cold War Germanys, and Art and Politics: A Small History of Art for Social Change since 1945. She is respected for her work on visual culture after 1945.
Mesch was born in Chicago. She earned a BA in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Yale University in 1982, received a Fulbright‑Hayes grant to travel in Europe, studied with Albert Boime and Peter Wollen, and completed an MA at UCLA in 1990. She earned her PhD in art history in 1997 from the University of Chicago and is a professor at Arizona State University.
Her research focuses on how modern art crosses borders and engages with politics, with particular attention to German modernism and the work of Joseph Beuys. Her 2008 book Modern Art at the Berlin Wall argues that East and West German art histories stayed connected during the Cold War. Her 2013 book Art and Politics highlights artists who used art to advocate for social change, including feminism and environmentalism. She is a founding editor of the open‑access Journal of Surrealism and the Americas (started in 2007) and contributes to textbooks such as Western Art History From the Renaissance to the Present: a Thematic Approach (2026 edition).
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 17:38 (CET).