Shulamith Behr
South African art historian (1946–2023)

Shulamith Behr (1946–2023) was a British art historian. She was a senior lecturer, and Honorary Research Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She was a specialist in 20th-century German Expressionism, with a particular interest in German and Swedish women artists.
Early life and education
Behr was born in South Africa, and earned a B.A. Honours degree in Fine Arts in 1969, from the University of Witwatersrand, winning the Henri Lidchi Prize as the top undergraduate in the History of Art. In 1971 she obtained a First Class Honours degree in the History of Art, and stayed on as a lecturer at the University of Witwatersrand until 1978. Behr completed her studies in the United Kingdom, earning an MA in Art History at Manchester University, and a PhD in Art History and Theory at the University of Essex.
Career
Behr joined the faculty of the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1990, as Bosch Lecturer in German Art. In 2000 she was appointed Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century German Art, and in 2012 was named an Honorary Research Fellow.
She was considered a leading expert in the field of German Expressionism, publishing and/or editing 10 books, curating 4 exhibitions and contributing to exhibition catalogues in the United Kingdom and Germany. In 2007/08 she held the post of Leverhulme and CRASSH Research Fellow at Cambridge University.
The public source identifies “Shulamith Behr” as south African art historian (1946–2023). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Shulamith, Behr and South.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q85442076. VIAF identifies the subject as 76394225. The Library of Congress control number is n88047401. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946, 2023, 1969 and 1971.
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This entry incorporates text from “Shulamith Behr” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.