Martha Wolff

Martha Wolff was the Eleanor Wood Prince Curator of European Painting and Sculpture before 1750 at the Art Institute of Chicago, retiring in 2018.

Martha Wolff was a Fine Arts concentrator at Harvard and then received her PhD in History of Art from Yale University in 1979. She worked in the European Paintings Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at the National Gallery of Art before joining the Art Institute of Chicago as curator of European painting before 1750. In Chicago from 1986, she worked broadly on European painting and sculpture, producing collection catalogues, installations of the permanent collection, and exhibitions. At the same time, she maintained a special interest in late medieval and Renaissance art in northern Europe and in the fertile exchanges among the artists who made secular and devotional paintings, prints, illuminated manuscripts, and textiles in this transitional period. Hence, her final effort there was especially gratifying: conceiving and installing new galleries for Chicago’s medieval and Renaissance art, arms, and armor that opened in 2017. Her projects since retirement in 2018 have included teaching at Carleton College in the fall of 2021 and a monograph (in collaboration with colleagues in Switzerland and Spain) on the striking and rare fifteenth-century embroidered altarpiece in the Art Institute of Chicago, to be published by the Abegg-Stiftung later this year.