Hunter Professor Emily Braun Scores Prizes for Birds and Art

From the NY Times: "As a professor and scholar, Ms. Braun has gravitated toward more fractured, less bucolic art, like the Italian artist Alberto Burri's wounded assemblages of discarded burlap sacks or scorched industrial plastics, which will appear in a retrospective she is organizing for the Guggenheim Museum this October, and the Cubist works in Mr. Lauder's collection, which she has helped him build over 28 years and which he has promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The birds, in their tiny portraits, are more straightforward charmers. Ms. Braun noted the "illusionistic textures" in their plumage and how "each has a personality": a red grouse with an aristocratically stretched neck, a wistful black grouse with a tail like a lyre, a woodcock criminally intent on dinner, a portly English partridge caught midwaddle. Dinner guests try to identify them; no one has named all four."