Ellen McBreen
Assistant Professor of Art History
Degrees
Ph.D., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
M.A., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
B.A., Joint Concentration: Fine Arts/Visual & Environmental Studies (studio arts), Harvard University
Main Interests
19th and 20th-century art; the visual culture of French colonialism; history of
photography; contemporary art
Creative Work
My current project is a book-length study of Henri Matisse's sculpture. It offers several close readings of Matisse's appropriations from nude photography and African art. I argue for the pivotal roles played by these two resources in helping Matisse refigure the European tradition of the nude, and the dominant narratives of identity that tradition was meant to support. The project also disputes the notion that Matisse, primarily known as a painter, was only a sculptor on the side, by demonstrating how his sculptures' nuanced play with constructions of race and gender is, in fact, a key to understanding the artist≠s larger fascination with cultural and sexual origins.
I am also researching and preparing an exhibition, "Henri Matisse and His 'Palette of Objects'" that will open at the Musée Matisse in Nice in 2011. The exhibition explores Matisse's personal collection˜of African and Oceanic art, photographs, and objets d'art˜as both subject and point of origin for his paintings and sculpture.
Although my current work is primarily focused on European art, it is grounded in the idea that the history of modernism in the West is a culturally hybrid history. I am fascinated by the role visual culture and technology has played in shaping points of contact between the West and its imagined Others.
Selected Publications, Creative Work or Performances
"Matisse: Painter as Sculptor,"(exhibition review) in Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide, Spring 2009.
http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring_09/reviews/mcbr.shtml
"Escultura en los orígenes de la differencia: Matisse y Picasso en 1907" in Arte
Moderno: Ideas y conceptos. Madrid: Fundación Cultural, Mapfre Vida, 2008.
"The Joy of Life, The Idyllic in French Art, circa 1900 by Margaret Werth,"(book review) Modernism/modernity 11:3 (September 2004): 596-598.
"Biblical Gender Bending in Harlem: The Queer Performance of Nugent's Salome
(1930)," Art Journal 57:3 (Fall 1998): 22-28.