Professor Alastair Wright
Associate Professor in the History of Art
St John's College
Research Interests
- French modernist art
- British Pre-Raphaelitism
- Art and Politics
My research focuses primarily on European modernisms. My first book, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism, was published by Princeton University Press in 2004, and more recently I curated an exhibition of Paul Gauguin’s prints at the Princeton University Art Museum. The accompanying catalogue, Gauguin’s Paradise Remembered: The Noa Noa Prints, examined the role played by reproduction in Gauguin’s understanding of French colonialism in Tahiti. I have published essays inArt History, Oxford Art Journal, Art Bulletin, Burlington Magazine, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Artforum International, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide and in various edited volumes.
I am currently working on two new projects. In the first I am exploring the question of artistic belatedness in French art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a particular emphasis on the work of the Neo-Impressionists. The second is a study of the politics of embodied spectatorship in the work of the 19th-century British painter Ford Madox Brown.