Todd Cronan

vitae

Download Complete Vitae HERE (pdf)

EDUCATION

Ph.D., 2005 University of California, Berkeley, History of Art
Dissertation: “The Despair of the Physical: Matisse, Santayana and the Philosophical Temper of Modernism” (Committee: Whitney Davis, T. J. Clark, and Martin Jay)
M.A., 1996 Johns Hopkins University, History of Art
B.A., 1994 University of California, Berkeley, History of Art (with distinction), cum laude

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

2007– Assistant Professor, Twentieth Century Art, Department of Art History, Virginia Commonwealth University
2008, su Visiting Professor, Twentieth Century Art, University of California, Berkeley
2005–06 Visiting Professor, Twentieth Century Art, University of California, Berkeley
2003–05 Editor, Qui Parle, http://quiparle.berkeley.edu

SELECTED FELLOWSHIPS

2006–07 Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
Research Project: The Authority of Things: The Cathedral Façade in Modernist Painting, 1890–1960
2004 Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellowship, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA
2000–01 Deutscher Akademische Austauschdienst, Berlin, Germany
1997–98 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, Northwestern University

lectures

Upcoming public lectures

“Intention and Interpretation,” panel co-chair, College Art Association 98th Annual Conference, Chicago, February 2010

Recent public lectures and panels chaired

“Matisse, Bergson, and the Pathology of Perception,” College Art Association Conference, 2009
“Matisse and Mimesis,” The College of William & Mary, 2008
“From Postmodernism to Modernism: Painting as Affect Machine,” Virginia Commonwealth University, 2008
“‘The Hypnotic Power of the Image’: Matisse and Mimesis,” Courtauld Institute of Art, 2008
“Monet After Impressionism,” Curator-Scholar Talk, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007
“‘Irresistible Dictation’: Matisse and Personality,” College Art Association Conference, 2007
“The Authority of Things: The Cathedral Facade in Modernist Painting from Monet to Matisse” J. Paul Getty Research Institute, 2007
“Does the Psyche Exist?” Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, 2006
“Georg Simmel’s Impressionism,” Harvard University, 2005
Co-Chair and Respondent, “Jackson Pollock’s Afterlife, 1956-2006,” College Art Association Conference, 2006
“The Pleasures of Merely Circulating: Matisse’s Woman Before an Aquarium and Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium,” College Art Association Conference, 2005
“Proust and Valéry at the Museum,” Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, 2005
“Winckelmann and the Lucretian Sublime,” International Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Conference, 2003
Chair and Respondent, “Schopenhauer’s Corps(e),” Modern Language Association Conference, San Diego, 2003
“The Rigors of Bildung in Schlegel, Heine, and the Brothers Grimm,” Yale University, 2002
“The Image in the Cathedral: Goethe After Benjamin,” Yale University, 2001



research

Major fields
> Modernism from Manet to Minimalism
> Historiography of Art History
> Affectivity and the Role of the Viewer

Research Specializations
> Avant-garde Painting and Sculpture in France
> Mimetic Theory from René Girard to Jean-Luc Nancy
> Phenomenology and Deconstruction
> Historical Materialism from Marx to Badiou

Major Projects
> Matisse, Bergson and the Philosophical Temper of Modernism
Who is the philosopher of Modernism? Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Sartre and Adorno are the prime candidates for the position. And yet we have to confront the fact that these are not the thinkers who shaped the practice of modern art. Whether we approve or not, the major artists of the twentieth century fed on everything except the major works of modern thought, turning instead to Theosophy, Neo-platonism, Zen Buddhism, Cabalism, Jungian archetypes, and other mystical philosophies for inspiration. While contemporary critics often ridicule these popular forms of thought, the fact remains that fashionable philosophies were a driving intellectual force behind modernism. Looking closely at the work of Matisse, I point to that role mysticism -- specifically trance, hypnotism, and psychic automatism -- played at the foundations of his practice, and again how the occult shaped modernism. Further still, I show the persistence –– or is it the apotheosis? –– of the occult under postmodernism.

> Contagion
This study traces the history of contagion in the visual arts from Seurat and Gauguin to the entarte Kunst exhibition of 1937. Since Plato denounced the influence of the arts on the passive public, art theorists and artists have either recoiled or reveled in the formative power of art to shape its public. Whether it is embraced or denounced, contagion enforces a foundational distinction between the artist and his or her public.



teaching

Select courses taught

Virginia Commonwealth University

Matisse & Picasso (seminar)
Impressionism: Beginnings and Endings (seminar)
Deconstruction in the Visual Arts (seminar)
Why Photography Matters Now (seminar)
Art in Paris, 1890-1920
Contemporary Art, 1963 to Now
Modern Art at Mid-Century, 1914-1963

University of California, Berkeley

From Mondrian to Minimalism: The Life and Death of Abstract Art, 1912-1970
Matisse & Picasso (seminar)
Modern Art and the Museum
Matisse and Hedonism
Neoclassicism in Modern Art

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Modern and Postmodern Art and Architecture (seminar)
Introduction to Art Theory

publications

Navigate the titles below for publication details and downloads.

Matisse, Bergson, and the Philosophical Temper of Modernism, forthcoming 2010

"Merleau-Ponty, Santayana and the Paradoxes of Animal Faith," British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Spring 2010

"Georg Simmel's Timeless Impressionism," New German Critique 106, pp. 83-101, 2009

"'Primordial Automatism': George Santayana's Later Aesthetics," Overheard in Seville 25, pp. 20-27, 2007

"Biological Poetry: George Santayana's Aesthetics," Essays in Criticism (Oxford, UK), forthcoming

"Shaken Realism," Review Essay of Michael Fried, Menzel's Realism, Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte 4, pp. 578-92, 2006

"Looking Into Surfaces," in David D. Kim (ed.), Georg Simmel in Translation, Cambridge Scholars Press, pp. 229-61, 2006

Translation of Max Horkheimer, "Schopenhauer and Society," qui parle 15: 1, pp. 85-96, 2004

"On Max Horkheimer's 'Schopenhauer and Society,'" qui parle 15: 1, pp. 81-83, 2004

"Clement Greenberg's Last Book," qui parle 14: 2, pp. 205-12, 2004

"Shaken Realism," Review Essay of Michael Fried, Menzel's Realism, qui parle 14: 1, pp. 123-58, 2003

"Transparency and Mediation: On Frank Lloyd Wright's Utopian Imagination," Northwestern Journal of Art History, pp. 10-21, 2001