Anne Wagner

An art historian, critic and teacher, Anne M. Wagner writes on a range of topics in 19th, 20th, and 21st century art, especially sculpture. Class of 1986 Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, she is now based in London, where in 2013-14 she was Visiting Professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Other positions held since her move abroad include the post of Henry Moore Foundation Research Curator at Tate Britain, 2010-11; Visiting Distinguished Professor at the University of York, 2010-13; and Mellon Residential Fellow in Arts Practice and Scholarship at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for the Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago, 2012. Her books include Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux: Sculptor of the Second Empire, 1986; Three Artists (Three Women), 1996; and Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture, 2005. A House Divided: On Recent American Art appeared in 2012. About this book, a reviewer observed: “Wagner always starts with the process of encountering specific works of art. Descriptive but never prescriptive, she avoids generalisation and cuts through critical commonplace. She shows how the work of art also puts the viewer to work. Focusing on canonical artists, she inspires us to see new things in art that we thought we already understood, and to look again at things we had earlier dismissed” (Times Higher Education Supplement, 24 May 2012). With T. J. Clark, she is the curator of Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life, a major exhibition staged at Tate Britain in 2013, as well as the co-authored book that accompanied the show. Her articles and essays have appeared in such journals as Art History, Representations, October, the London Review of Books, and Artforum