Dr Cathy Corbett finished a PhD at the Courtauld in 2022 on the subject of the Belarusian sculptor Ossip Zadkine. She was supervised by Professor Christopher Green. Her work on Zadkine included a study of modern sculpture in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century, and led to an examination of the impact Zadkine’s work in the 1920s may have had on British sculptors including Gertrude Hermes and Henry Moore. She has written about the friendship that Zadkine maintained over many years with the artist Edward Wadsworth and the latter’s extensive social circle of artists and writers. She is now researching Zadkine’s atelier and the many British and American artists who were taught by him in New York, Black Mountain College and Paris. Until 2023, she worked at The Courtauld Gallery as an assistant on their Gauguin Avant et Après manuscript project.
Cathy read Theology at Keble College Oxford and taught Religious Studies in senior schools for many years before returning to study art history. Her BA (Hons) in History of Art is from the University of Reading, and her MA at the Courtauld was awarded a Distinction. She is also a member of Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA).