Stephen F. Eisenman

Academic

Eisenman was born in Forest Hills, New York City and educated at SUNY Albany, Williams College and Princeton University where he received his Ph.D in 1984. From 1984-1998 he taught at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and since then at Northwestern where he is Professor of Art History. He served two terms (2008–19; 2013–15) as President of the NU Faculty Senate. His main fields of interest are 19th Century European Art and Design, 20th Century European and American Art, Critical Theory (Frankfurt School), Animal Studies and Art and Ecology.

Professor Eisenman is the author of The Temptation of Saint Redon (1989), Gauguin's Skirt (1997), The Abu Ghraib Effect (2007), and The Cry of Nature – Art and the Making of Animal Rights (2014) and is the principal author and editor of Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical Edition (fourth edition 2010). Eisenman has curated numerous exhibitions in the United States and Europe, including Paul Gauguin - Artist of Myth and Dream (2007), Design in the Age of Darwin (2008), and The Ecology of Impressionism (2010). The catalog for his exhibition, William Blake in the Age of Aquarius Northwestern's Block Museum (September 2017 to March 2018) was among The New York Times' The Best Art Books of 2017.

Eisenman’s first major article, “The Intransigent Artist, Or How the Impressionists Got Their Name,” (published in the catalogue for the exhibition, The New Painting, Impressionism, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986) is frequently cited and has twice been anthologized.^[2][3] It revealed the degree to which early Impressionism was identified by contemporary critics as an expression of radical (“intransigeant”) and even Communard sensibility. He further demonstrated that the subsequent self-naming of the group (“Expositions des Impressionistes”) was an effort to avoid destructive political labeling.

Gauguin’s Skirt, a widely reviewed and controversial book, contested the emerging notion that the artist was a misogynist whose art validated French Colonialism.^[4] By careful use of archival and ethno-historical sources, he demonstrated that Gauguin identified with the indigenous Maohi people and indeed produce a radical art of ethnic (as well as gender) hybridity.

The Abu Ghraib Effect described the art historical and mass cultural sources of the photographic motifs deployed by the American guards at the notorious Iraqi prison. It argued that these motifs constitute a long-lived, representational pathos formula whereby those who are tortured appear to welcome and even participate in the cruelties meted out by their tormentors.

The Cry of Nature – Art and the Making of Animal Rights follows The Abu Ghraib Effect by exploring another, essential “pathos formula” in modern art: the outcry of the animal subjected to torment by humans. Found in the writings of Rousseau, Gay, La Mettrie and Blake among many others, the motif became the intellectual and moral basis for many animal rights campaigns from the 18th to 20th Centuries. It is represented by Hogarth, Stubbs, Bewick, Gericault, Soutine, Picasso and many others.

Eisenman is a regular reviewer of books and manuscripts for the Art Bulletin, the University of California Press, University of Chicago Press and University of Minnesota Press. He is an art critic for New City and New Art Examiner in Chicago.

Activism

Eisenman is activist, engaged in campus, community and statewide politics. He has lectured and written extensively on critical issues ranging from animal rights, torture, prison reform, socialism, and environmentalism. His letters, articles and op-eds concerning torture and prison reform have appeared in the New York Times, Monthly Review, Art in America, and the Chicago Sun-Times. His work with the grass-roots organization Tamms Year Ten, led to the closing in January 2013 of Tamms, Illinois' notorious C-Max prison. His efforts to reduce and ultimately end experimentation on animals led to his publication of a report outlining a process whereby research antibodies can be obtained by purely in vitro methods, without any need to extract antibodies from animals. Eisenman's two most recent books focus on animal rights: The Cry of Nature - Art and the Making of Animal Rights (London: Reaktion Books) and The Ghosts of Our Meat - Sue Coe (New York: DAP). He was President of the Faculty Senate at Northwestern University between 2008–11 and 2013-15. He was founding co-President of the Radical Art Caucus (a College Art Association organization) from 2002-2007. In April 2017, he co-founded Anthropocene Alliance (Aa), a nonprofit based in Chicago that helps people harmed by environmental abuse and climate change get educated and organized. His wife, the British environmentalist Harriet Festing, is co-founder and Executive Director of Aa.

Books

The Ghosts of our Meat (New York: DAP, 2014)

The Cry of Nature – Art and the Making of Animal Rights (London: Reaktion, 2013)

Nineteenth-Century Art: A Critical History revised and expanded Fourth Edition), (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2010)

Paul Gauguin (Barcelona: Poligrapha, 2010)

The Ecology of Impressionism (Milan: Skira, 2010)

Design in the Age of Darwin: From William Morris to Frank Lloyd Wright (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008)

Paul Gauguin: Artist of Myth and Dream (Milan: Skira, 2007)

The Abu Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion Books; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Turkish Edition, 2008; Revised Spanish Edition, 2014)

(With Richard Brettell), Nineteenth-Century Art in the Norton Simon Museum of Art, (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006)

Gauguin’s Skirt (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. Paperback, 1999)

The Temptation of Saint Redon — Biography, Ideology and Style in the Noirs of Odilon Redon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)

Selected articles

“Socialism and Animal Liberation – A Necessary Synthesis”, Animal Liberation Currents, November 2016

“The Real Swinish Multitude,” Critical Inquiry, Winter, 2016

"Criticizing Animal Experimentation, at My Peril," Altex, November 2015, http://altweb.jhsph.edu/news/2015/antibodies_proposal.html

“True Noir,” Art in America, February 2015, pp. 21–23.

“The Political Logic of Radical Art History in California: 1974-1985: A Memoir,” in Re-New Art History, Art/Books, 2014, pp. 44–52.

“An Aesthetic of Invisibility – The Representation of Torture and Solitary Confinement in the United States,” The Challenge of the Object / Die Herausforderung des Objekts, CIHA Congress Proceedings, T. 1-3. Edited by G. Ulrich Großmann/Petra Krutisch. Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, vol.3, pp. 63–65, 2014

“The Harmony of Labor: Camille Pissarro’s Apple Pickers,” in Impressionism and Post Impressionism in the Dallas Museum of Art, (Yale University Press, 2013)

“Tamms is Torture,” (with Laurie Jo Reynolds), Creative Time Reports, February 2013, np.

“Water-boarding -- A Torture both Intimate and Sacred,” in Speaking about Torture, edited by Julie A. Carlson, and Elisabeth Weber, (New York and London Fordham and Oxford University Press), 2012, pp. 129–140.

“Three criteria for inclusion in, or exclusion from a World History of Art”, World Art, Volume 1, Issue 2, Winter, 2011, pages 281-298.

“The Resistible Rise and Predictable Fall of the American Supermax”, Monthly Review, November 2009, pp/ 31-37.

“Death and Tourism – Claude Monet’s Paintings of Venice,” in Art, Value, Politics, edited by Jonathan Harris, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), 2007, pp. 123–145.

“Monet, Gauguin, y los origins del imperialismo,” in Gauguin y los Origines del Symbolismo, (Madrid: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza y Caja Madrid Fundacion), 2007, pp. 113–129.

“In Search of the Primitive: Gauguin, Morris and Imperialist Culture,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2005.

“Communism in Furs: A Dream of Prehistory in William Morris’s John Ball,” The Art Bulletin, March 2005, pp. 93–111.

William Morris and the Kelmscott Chaucer,” Around the Block , Journal of the Block Art Museum, January 2005, pp. 3-5.

“Monet and the Autonomy of Painting,” Monet – Atti del convegno, Treviso: Linea d’Ombra Libri, 2003, pp. 139–145;

"An Introduction to William Morris's "Why I Became a Socialist." Journal of the Radical Art Caucus, vol. 2, 2004, n.p.

“Class Consciousness in the Design of William Morris,” Journal of William Morris Studies, vol. xv, no. 1, Winter 2002-3, pp. 17–37.

"William Morris: Syr Pereceyvelle of Gales," The World from Here, Los Angeles: The UCLA Hammer Museum of Art, 2002, pp. 131–134.

Selected curated exhibitions with catalogues

William Blake and the Age of Aquarius, September 2017 - March 2018.

The Ghosts of Our Meat – Sue Coe, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA Nov. 2013 - March 2014.

From Corot to Monet: The Ecology of Impressionism, Complesso del Vittoriano, Rome, February 2009 - June 2010.

Design in the Age of Darwin: From William Morris to Frank Lloyd Wright, Evanston, Block Art Museum, May–August 2008.

Paul Gauguin – Artist of Myth and Dreams, Complesso del Vittoriano, Rome, October 2007 - February 2008.

How We Might Live: The Art of William Morris and Gustav Stickley, Evanston, Block Art Museum, January 4 – March 5, 2005.

Designing Utopia: The Art of William Morris and Friends, Katonah, New York, The Katonah Museum of Art, February – April, 1992.

The Graphic Works of Odilon Redon, Katonah, New York, The Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, N.Y., March–May, 1990.

Dialogue/Prague/Los Angeles, Prague and Los Angeles, March and July, 1989.

Landscapes of Ferdinand Hodler, (with Oscar Batschmann), Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, 1987.

Selected catalogue essays

Gauguin/Van Gogh – L’Avventura del Colore Nuovo, Brescia, Museo di Santa Giulia,” October 25, 2005 – March 6, 2006. (Co-author with Charles Stuckey of the 75 Gauguin catalogue entries.)

“How We Might Live: Perspectives of Morris and Stickley.” Block Art Museum, January 4 – March 5, 2005.

“Impressionist Paintings in the Buhrle Collection,” in The Catalogue of the Collection of the Buhrle Foundation, Zurich, Volume II, (Milan: Linea d’Ombra Libri), 2005.

“Pissarro and the Seine,” in Monet, la Senna, le ninfee. Il grande fiume e il nuovo secolo, Museo di Santa Giulia, October—December, 2004.

"Turismo e morte: i dipinti veneziani di Claude Monet," Monet, i luogi della pittura, (Treviso and Venezia: Linea d'Ombra), 2002, pp. 181–192.