Roger Benjamin

Roger Harold Benjamin (born 18 June 1957) is professor of Art History at The University of Sydney.[1]

Benjamin is an Australian art historian and curator who was born and raised in Canberra, where he attended the Canberra Grammar School. Moving to Melbourne, he trained in Fine Arts and Philosophy at the University of Melbourne (1975–79) before travelling to the United States for his MA (1981) and PhD (1985) at Bryn Mawr College, undertaking research in Paris. His first book and articles in French, British and American journals focused on Matisse and the art of the Fauves (Matisse’s "Notes of a Painter": Criticism, Theory and Context, 1891-1908, Ann Arbor 1986).

Benjamin moved back to Australia with his appointment as lecturer in Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne, where he taught for 14 years (1984–98). In 1995 he co-curated the travelling retrospective Matisse for the Queensland Art Gallery, and in 1997 curated Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. His long-standing interest in Orientalist art culminated in Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism and French North Africa, 1880-1930 (Berkeley, 2003), which received the prestigious Robert Motherwell Book Award in 2004. Benjamin’s exhibition Renoir and Algeria was organised by the Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute before travelling to Dallas and Paris, where it was reincarnated as De Delacroix à Renoir: L'Algérie des peintres (2003).

Benjamin moved from Melbourne to Canberra as a research fellow at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at ANU (1998–2001). His work on contemporary Australian art includes the exhibition Juan Davila (Sydney & Melbourne, 2006) and numerous writings on Tim Johnson. He has taught on Aboriginal art since 1992, and in 2009 curated Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Painting from Papunya (Ithaca, New York).

From 2003 to 2007 he was J. W. Power Professor and Director of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney, succeeding Virginia Spate. Academics whose postgraduate work Benjamin has supervised include Ian McLean, Mary Roberts, Chris McAuliffe, Charles Green, Caroline Jordan, Luke Gartlan, Natalie Adamson, and Stephen Gilchrist. Benjamin held the Australian Research Council’s DORA professorial fellowship from 2013 to 2016, resulting in his book Kandinsky and Klee in Tunisia, University of California Press, 2015. His exhibition Biskra, sortilèges d'une oasis [Biskra, visions of an Oasis] was held at the Arab World Institute, Paris in 2016 before travelling to the Musée Matisse in Nice in 2017.