faculty

e. bruce robertson, professor

curriculum vitae

specialization

American art 1700-1945; History of collecting and museums; British watercolors

office hours

Arts 2314, Monday 10-12:00

phone

805 893 2351

B.A. Swarthmore College

Ph.D. Yale University

Bruce Robertson specializes in American art but always with one foot out the door - he doesn't like sitting still. He was educated at Swarthmore College and Yale University but is a New Zealander by birth; his dissertation was in eighteenth-century British watercolors and he is now concentrating on museum history. For a number of years he held a dual appointment with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as Chief Curator, Center for the Art of the Americas, and Deputy Director for Art Programs. While there he started the Latino and Latin American Art Initiative, and acquired Thomas Eakins' The Wrestlers (Eakins' last sporting painting), as well as works by Yun Gee, Miki Hayakawa, Abbott Thayer and William Rimmer. He is currently a consulting curator at LACMA.

His publications include Sargent and Italy 2003 (Princeton), Ruth Harriet Louise and Hollywood Glamour Photography 2002 (UC Press, with Robert Dance), Twentieth Century American Art: The Ebsworth Collection 2000 (National Gallery of Art); Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory 1999 (Yale, contributor); Marguerite Makes a Book 1999 (Getty); Marsden Hartley, 1995 (Abrams); Reckoning with Winslow Homer: His Late Paintings and their Influence, 1990 (Indiana UP); and in collaboration with Edward Nygren, Views and Visions: American Landscape before 1830, 1987 (which won the first Charles Eldredge Prize of the National Museum of American Art, now SAAM); and The Art of Paul Sandby, 1985 (Yale).

He has held fellowships at the Huntington Library, the Paul Mellon Centre in London, and the UC Humanities Research Institute, winning a Getty Collaborative Research Grant in 1996; he is co-director of the Microcosms Project, on the history of museums and universities, with Mark Meadow and Rosemary Joyce. He was also a vice-president of the College Art Association for four years, and currently serves on the editorial boards of Museums and Society and the Smithsonian American Art Journal. His current projects include the exhibitions Telling Tales: American Narrative Painting 1780-1920, in collaboration with colleagues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (where it will open in the Fall of 2009), and O'Keeffe and Abstraction (which will open at the Whitney at the same time). He is also finishing a book, Placing Knowledge: The Museum and the University in the Nineteenth Century.