Professor Alastair Wright

I teach modern art and visual culture for both the first year course (Prelims) and courses taken in subsequent years. At masters level, my teaching focuses on French modernism and the interaction between art and mass culture.  In all my teaching I encourage students to engage as closely as possible with actual works of art, regularly leading visits to collections in Oxford and beyond.

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.

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See page on the History of Art Department website