Pierre Apraxine

Pierre Apraxine (December 10, 1934 – February 26, 2023) was an American art historian.^[1][2]

Biography

Born in 1934 in Tallinn, Estonia, into a noble family tracing its roots back to 15th-century Russia, his family relocated to Brussels before World War II.^[3][4] During a return to Estonia in 1941 to safeguard family property, his father was arrested by the Red Army and executed in Leningrad.^[3]

Apraxine studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Royal Higher Institute for the History of Art and Archaeology.^[3] In 1969, he received a Fulbright scholarship and moved to New York, where he worked at the Museum of Modern Art until a union walkout in 1973.^[3]

Apraxine developed an interest in 20th-century photography while employed at the Marlborough Gallery, learning under painter and photographer Paul Katz.^[3] Apraxine was part of a group of photography enthusiasts known as the "Eye Club," which included curator Françoise Heilbrun, art dealers André Jammes and Gérard Lévy, and collector Sam Wagstaff.^[3]

Apraxine co-curated several exhibitions, including The Waking Dream (1993), La Divine Comtesse: Photographs of the Countess de Castiglione (2000), and The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (2005) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.^[3]