Klesch Collection Funds AI Art History Fellowship at Birkbeck

Anita Klesch, who studied art history and computing at Birkbeck, University of London, is returning to her alma mater with a gift that bridges those two worlds. She and her husband, A. Gary Klesch — founders of The Klesch Collection, a London-based holding of 15th- to 17th-century European art — are funding a new two-year postdoctoral fellowship in the history of art and technology, with a focus on artificial intelligence.

The fellowship, announced by Birkbeck on 19 August 2026, will support research at the intersection of art history, AI and emerging technologies, according to a Birkbeck statement. Birkbeck, University of London. Researchers working on any aspect of art history from the Early Renaissance through the 20th century are eligible to apply. The Art Newspaper.

Four suggested research themes give a sense of the ambition. They range from "Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Art History" and "Museums, Collections and AI" to "3D Scanning and Digital Heritage" and "Extended Reality (VR, AR and Mixed Reality) as an Art Historical Tool." The work will be supervised by Joel McKim, a reader in digital media and culture at Birkbeck who directs the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology.

The personal thread runs deep. Anita Klesch earned her master's in computer applications for history of art at Birkbeck in 1999 and her PhD there in 2012. Her doctoral thesis was titled "A Golden Age or Crisis? The History of Art in the Age of Information Technology" — a question she first posed nearly a decade and a half before generative AI began reshaping galleries, auction catalogues and conservation labs.

The Klesch Collection itself is younger. Gary and Anita Klesch started it in 2014 with the acquisition of a set of Four Seasons by the 16th-century Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, known for composing portraits from fruit, flowers and vegetables. The collection now includes works by Anthony van Dyck, Sofonisba Anguissola and Peter Paul Rubens. In 2023, the couple bought a work by Gerrit Dou at Christie's London for US$7 million, inclusive of fees — the auctioneer's commission on top of the hammer price. Earlier in 2026, they acquired a major work by Sandro Botticelli, which will be loaned to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford for three years.

What makes the fellowship notable is the fit between the donor and the discipline. A collector of Renaissance and Baroque painting is channelling money into the question of how machine learning, 3D scanning and virtual reality can change the way that same art is studied, displayed and preserved. The person paying for the research wrote her thesis on exactly that tension.

Applications are open to postdoctoral researchers. The fellowship runs for two years under McKim's supervision at the Vasari Research Centre.