Matthew Affron
B.A., Brown University, 1985
Associate Professor, Modern Art Matthew Affron’s main research interest is the history of modern art in the first half of the twentieth century. Much of his research has focused on the painter Fernand Léger. He has published essays in journals and exhibition catalogues on Léger’s painting, his ideas about the social functions of art, and his involvement with photography and propaganda. Mr. Affron contributed to the book that accompanied the exhibition Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler (1997). He was co-editor of Fascist Visions (Princeton University Press, 1997), a volume of essays about the interrelations between modern art and fascist ideology in France and Italy. Affron is Curator of Modern Art & Academic Curator at the University of Virginia Art Museum. His principal exhibition projects include: American Collage (organized in conjunction with The Phillips Collection, 2004); Fernand Léger: Contrasts of Forms (2007); and Matisse, Picasso, and Modern Art in Paris: The T. Catesby Jones Collections (a collaboration of the University of Virginia Art Museum and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2009-2010). Currently, in partnership with the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, he is planning an exhibition entitled Joseph Cornell and Surrealism (2013). Matthew Affron teaches several large lecture courses on the history of European and American art from the middle of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth: Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, Modern Art (1900-1945), The History of Photography. His undergraduate and graduate seminars deal with major art movements (surrealism, cubism), with questions of modernist art theory (theories of modernism, the idea of abstraction), with focused problems in the history of the avant-garde, and with the history of photography and experimental cinema.
McIntire Department of Art | |
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