Paul Galvez

Research Fellow and MA Curriculum Coordinator

A historian of modern art from its historical emergence to the present, Paul Galvez is a research fellow at EODIAH as well as one of the coordinators of the Institute’s Master’s Program in Art History. His research interests range broadly from realist painting to the Russian avant-garde to contemporary abstraction, and his articles have appeared in journals such as October, Art Journal, and Les Cahiers du musée national d’art moderne. Previously taught classes include surveys of the art of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, the history of modern sculpture, art and colonialism, and late nineteenth-century decorative arts.

At EODIAH, Galvez’s research and writing has been devoted to a forthcoming book on the landscapes of Gustave Courbet. As in all his work, of primary concern for him are the formal and material dimensions of the work of art, in their deepest sense. Indeed, the way in which Courbet’s scenes of primordial nature put into question the very distinction between form and matter is what drew him to the artist in the first place. In pursuing this and other projects, Galvez’s work takes a multifaceted approach, often drawing upon philosophy, literary criticism, the history of science, and conservation science, in addition to history and art history. Galvez has also contributed to the catalogue raisonné of Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings and is at work on a larger research project on Gauguin’s ceramics.

Dovetailing with his critical interest in the phenomenological experience of art is Galvez's activity as a curator and critic. Exhibitions of postwar and contemporary art that he organized have taken place in Paris (galerie Nathalie Obadia) and Dallas (galerie Frank Elbaz). His many catalogue essays and exhibition reviews in Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, and elsewhere have focused on the enduring and and yet contested legacy of postwar art at work within recent artistic practice, especially contemporary painting.