Ambre Gauthier
Ambre Gauthier, who holds a Ph.D. in art history, is director of the Marc Chagall archives and catalogue raisonné. She is also in charge of the marcchagall.com digital project.
Graduate of the École du Louvre, her master's theses, validated in 2009 and 2010, examined the place of art magazines in the writing of European and transatlantic artistic exchanges, through the publications of La Révolution surréaliste (1924-1929) and Broom, an International Magazine of the Arts (1921-1924). Her articles have appeared in several publications, including La Revue des revues (no. 44, March 2011) and Les Cahiers de l’École du Louvre (no. 3, October 2013), leading to a research contract at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky/Centre Pompidou in Paris to study the Paul Destribats collection. Dr. Gauthier also participated as a researcher on the book La Collection Paul Destribats, une collection de revues et de périodiques des avant-gardes internationales, ed. Didier Schulmann, Paris, Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2011.
Her thesis, defended at Université Paris X-Nanterre in 2015, focused on art gallery magazines in Paris, Berlin, Brussels and New York between the wars (1918-1940) and the role of art criticism and magazines in defining international business strategies aiming to redefine the art market. In the course of her research, she also examined the sale of Marc Chagall's works between Paris, Brussels and Berlin (the Bernheim-Jeune, Le Centaure and Der Sturm galleries). Dr. Gauthier has spoken about her research at several international symposia. Her work has been published in reference books, including Pioneers of the Global Art Market, London, Bloomsbury Publishing (2020) and MODERN ART REVIEWed. Art Reviews, Bulletins and Journals in Europe: 1910-1940 (2022).
Between 2016 and 2023, she participated in research on Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Guillaume and Paul Rosenberg for the digital project Bibliographies de critiques d'art francophones (HiCSA-Laboratoire Histoire culturelle et sociale de l’art, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne). She also collaborated on the project Bloomsbury Art Market, Protagonists, Networks, Provenances and was asked to write articles on the Paul Guillaume, Alfred Flechtheim and Iris Clert galleries.
From 2015 to 2017, Dr. Gauthier was a lecturer in modern and contemporary art history at the Université de Nantes. In 2017 and 2023, she obtained her qualification as university lecturer in history and civilizations: history of the modern world, history of the contemporary world and history of art.
She worked at various museums, including the Louvre, Paris; MAC/VAL and the Centre Pompidou, galleries and auction houses, including Sotheby’s Paris, before joining the Comité Marc Chagall as a researcher in 2013, where she appraised the artist's works and researched their provenance. In 2019, Dr. Gauthier became director of the Marc Chagall archives and catalogue raisonné.
As a curator, the first exhibition she worked on was Marc Chagall, Le Triomphe de la musique (“Marc Chagall, the Triumph of Music”) at the Cité de la musique/Philharmonie de Paris (2015), which traveled to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal and the Los Angeles County Museum (2016-2017). Continuing a collaboration with Curators Inc. in Japan that began in 2013, she curated Marc Chagall, The Third Dimension, a show at the Tokyo Station Gallery, which traveled to the Nagoya City Art Museum and the Aomori Prefectural Museum of Art in 2018. The same year, she collaborated with the Macao Museum of Art (MAM) on Marc Chagall, Light and Colour in Southern France. Also in 2018, she and Meret Meyer co-curated Chagall, du noir et blanc à la couleur (“Chagall, from Black and White to Color”), a show created for the Centre d’art de l’Hôtel de Caumont in Aix-en-Provence. In 2020, Dr. Gauthier curated the exhibition Marc Chagall et les revues d’art (“Marc Chagall and Art Magazines”) at the Musée national Marc Chagall in Nice with Jean-Baptiste Delorme and Anne Dopffer. In 2023, she and Meret Meyer co-curated Chagall politique (“Political Chagall”) at the Musée d’art et d’industrie André Diligent-La Piscine in Roubaix, the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid and the Marc Chagall National Museum in Nice. The show shed new light on the artist’s work through a social and political approach based on in-depth research of his archives.
Since 2023, Dr. Gauthier has been a regular speaker at symposia and panel discussions on catalogues raisonnés (Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Paris; Adagp, Paris), including the recent colloquium “Documenting, Organizing and Promoting an Artist's Collection: Challenges and Strategies” held by Adagp on April 8, 2025.
Dr. Gauthier also collaborates with various institutions on publications about 20th-century art, the art market and decorative arts, including the Musées royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique, Brussels; Fondation Mapfre, Madrid; Musée des Beaux-arts, Montreal; Grey Art Gallery, NYU, New York; Marc Chagall National Museum, Nice; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris; Musée d’art et d’industrie André Diligent-La Piscine, Roubaix; Musée de Sarrebourg; Musée d’art moderne, Troyes; and the Museum of Arts and Design, Lithuanian National Museum of Art, Vilnius.
