Coffee with a Curator

April 1, 2026
The center shifts: Paris, New York, and Giacometti in a post-war world

Join us for this month’s installment of our Coffee with a Curator series, where Museum staff or invited guests speak on a range of Salvador Dalí-inspired topics.

In conjunction with our special exhibition, Alberto Giacometti & Salvador Dalí, we are pleased to welcome back guest speaker H. Alexander Rich, Ph.D., for an engaging lecture, The Center Shifts: Paris, New York and Giacometti in a Post-War World, examining Alberto Giacometti’s work and influence in the shifting cultural landscape of the postwar era.

Before World War II, Paris had been the center of all things avant-garde in art for the preceding century. It is where major movements like Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and Surrealism were birthed and where artists like Monet, Picasso, Matisse, Dalí and Giacometti rose to worldwide fame. After 1945, everything changed, as all eyes turned to New York City, transforming the trajectory of the art world and the development of modern art as we know it today.

In this lecture, H. Alexander Rich, Ph.D., will explore the seismic shift of the modern art world from Paris to New York in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and how the influence of artists like Giacometti and the exhibition of their work in the United States elevated their stardom and propelled the rise of modern American art movements like Abstract Expressionism.

H. Alexander Rich, Ph.D.

H. Alexander Rich is president and CEO of the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, SC. Before taking the helm of the Gibbes in summer 2025, Dr. Rich was executive director and chief curator of the Ashley Gibson Barnett Museum of Art at Florida Southern College, in Lakeland, where he was also a tenured professor of art history and chair of the College’s Department of Art History and Museum Studies. Dr. Rich is a specialist in Modern and Contemporary art history, with a particular focus on European and American art of the 19th and 20th centuries. He earned his Ph.D. in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and his A.B. from Dartmouth College.

A native of New York City, Dr. Rich is also curator of more than sixty far-ranging and acclaimed museum exhibitions, including Masters of Spain: Goya and Picasso, Rembrandt’s Academy,Chagall: Stories into Dreams, Toulouse-Lautrec and the Belle Époque, The Art of the Highwaymen and Rockwell/Wyeth: Icons of Americana at The AGB. Prior to his professorship at Florida Southern, Dr. Rich taught previously in both the History of Art Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York and in the City University of New York system. During his undergraduate and graduate studies he also worked and interned in both curatorial and education capacities at museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum and the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, NH.

In Charleston, Dr. Rich is currently overseeing a major expansion of the Gibbes Museum as he guides the nearly 170-year institution into its next chapter.