George Baker is Professor of Art History at UCLA, where he has taught since 2003 and worked to design and lead the department’s program in modern and contemporary art. Trained by key revisionist art historians such as Linda Nochlin and Rosalind Krauss, Baker taught previously at Columbia University and SUNY Purchase, where he held a joint appointment in Humanities and the School of the Arts. Since the 1990s, he has worked as an art critic internationally, writing regular criticism for magazines such as Artforum, Frieze, Aperture, Texte zur Kunst, and Parkett. For the last twenty-five years, he has served as an editor of the journal OCTOBER and its publishing imprint OCTOBER Books.

A scholar of the modernist avant-gardes (especially Dada and Surrealism), Baker works expansively and in interdisciplinary ways within the fields of both modern and contemporary art, with a special focus across these periods in the history and theory of photography and film. His early book The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (MIT Press, three editions, 2007/2008/2010) claimed a new centrality for the Dada avant-garde in modern culture, arguing for the ways its methods of destruction and negation paradoxically reinvented the materiality, economy, and mediums of art itself, as well as the subjectivity involved in art’s production and reception. Reviewed internationally and beyond the academy—in publications including The New York Times, The Nation, Artforum, Art in America, The Times Literary Supplement, and The London Review of Books—Baker’s study has become central to the contemporary rethinking of the avant-garde. It is widely considered by critics as a major prod to the reconsideration of Dada in museums and within art history globally in recent years, and as “the most inspiring and thoughtful monograph on Dada currently available.” It has also led to much dialogue outside of the field of modernist studies, informing the changing debates on contemporary art, especially around issues of painting.

Baker is the author or editor of eight other books, a collaborator on many major museum catalogues and artist retrospectives internationally, and he has published over 100 further essays, interviews, and reviews. His Dada project on Picabia led to new connections between the modernist tactics of formal “reinvention” explored in the book, and later postmodernist ideas of the cultural “expansion” of art—a political and aesthetic concern that resulted in Baker’s now-canonical essay on contemporary photography, entitled “Photography’s Expanded Field.” An ongoing historical and critical project, Baker’s ideas have been developed most extensively in the recent book Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of Photography (University of Chicago Press, 2023). Focusing on four artists—Zoe Leonard, Moyra Davey, Tacita Dean, and Sharon Lockhart—the book outlines a shared analogue aesthetic in photography and film, one that ironically proceeds through a collective recalcitrance, clinging to outmoded technological forms and seemingly nostalgic motifs. And yet this aesthetic represents perhaps the most compelling work involved in the broader reformulation of photography and film today. Baker’s larger concern has been to account not just for the formal expansion of photography, but the parallel and consequent expansion of politics and desire implicit in the contemporary work in question. Although intentionally limited in its case studies to work made by women artists, the feminist politics at issue in Lateness and Longing moves from a politics of identity to what could be called a politics of subjectivity, an ethical issue that unites Baker’s historical and contemporary projects.

Professor Baker’s work and research has been supported by an Andrew Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, a Georges Lurcy Foundation Fellowship in France, the Chester Dale Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery, a Whiting Foundation Fellowship, and a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Getty Research Institute. Recently, the book Lateness and Longing received both an Arts Writers Grant from the Warhol Foundation and Creative Capital, and the inaugural publication award from the Magdalena Abakanowicz Charitable Foundation. Baker was also appointed a Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in 2024.

Baker’s forthcoming projects include the edited anthology Tacita Dean (OCTOBER Files, MIT Press, 2025), the main critical essay (“Off-Painting”) in the monograph Sanya Kantarovsky Selected Work 2010-2024 (MIT Press, 2025), and a book of his collected early criticism, to be entitled The Other Side of the Wall: Essays, Interviews, Reviews. Two volumes of his writing on photography have been translated or are being translated for publication outside of Anglophone contexts; his writings generally have been republished globally, with translations into Chinese, Ukrainian, Farsi, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Czech, Slovenian, Swedish, Dutch, Turkish, and Hebrew, among others.

Education

Ph.D., Columbia University, 2001 (with Distinction)
Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, Critical Studies, 1994-95
BA, History of Art, Yale University, 1992

Research

Fields of study: Modern Art; the historical avant-gardes and international modernism; Dada and Surrealism; Picasso and Cubism; postwar U.S. and European art; global Contemporary Art; the history and theory of photography; experimental film and film theory; poststructuralist, feminist, and queer theory; philosophies of modernity and temporality.

Professor Baker’s research and teaching seeks political and under-recognized histories, and questions the power embedded in canons. A former first-generation college student himself, Baker works closely with First Gen students in the classroom, seeking new ways to connect to issues of class in art history, an issue often at the root of his art historical projects. Baker’s current research and recent publications also focus above all on feminist art histories, and queer art and artists, who are made central to the critical projects of art and representation that Baker clarifies in his writing and brings into the classroom.

In his book on Paris Dada, Baker focused on the artist Francis Picabia, long considered an idiosyncratic or even undigestible historical figure, from an incomprehensible movement that exceeded the project of art history and its methods. From this moment, Baker has continued to seek out underground or repressed histories—marginalized “artist’s artists,” art historical “minor” histories, aesthetic counter-discourses—or alternate and marginalized conceptions of seeing and of vision. Baker’s most recent undergraduate and graduate classes follow this trajectory. They include seminars on the colonialist structure of modernist “primitivism”; “minor” histories of Surrealism; new approaches to radical political documentary in the 1930s; transformed models of “phenomenology” in modern art; or, most recently, the “Other Sixties” opened up by attention to American expatriate and queer artist Paul Thek and his circle.

Since arriving at UCLA, Professor Baker has directed and supported dissertations on the widest variety of topics in modern and contemporary art, including: Surrealism and photography, the Mono-ha group in Japan, Alberto Giacometti’s war-time miniatures, postwar Japanese photography, Fluxus, Italian Arte Povera and the reinvention of figuration, feminist film practices of the 1970s, documentary photography in Poland and Eastern Europe, Andy Warhol’s late work, Robert Smithson and the legacies of Soviet film, Robert Rauschenberg and the queer neo-avant-garde, Joseph Beuys and postwar German art, the Pictures Generation, Donald Judd and the Chinati Foundation, Sigmar Polke’s global turn, the geographical imaginary of Yiddish modernism in the early twentieth century, and the gendered model of modernist photography invented by Pictorialism in the United States.

Books

Courses

SELECTED COURSES TAUGHT, UNDERGRADUATE

  • AH 23. Modern Art
  • AH C129A. Modern Art, 1900 to 1950
  • AH C129B. Dada, 1915 to 1923
  • AH C129C. Surrealism, 1924 to 1939
  • AH C131A. Contemporary Art, 1940s to 1950s
  • AHC131B. Contemporary Art, 1960s to 1970s
  • AH C128A. History of Photography, 1839 to 1910
  • AH C128B. History of Photography, 1910 to Present
  • AH C128C. History of Photography: Selected Topics
  • AH 185. Undergraduate Seminar, changing topics each year. Recent undergraduate seminars have included “Picasso,” “The Theory and Practice of Art Criticism,” “Modernist Sculpture: Models, Histories”

 

SELECTED COURSES TAUGHT, GRADUATE

Changing seminars in Modern Art, Contemporary Art, and the History of Photography. Recent seminars have included:

  • “Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”
  • “The Dada Idea”
  • “Modernism and the Minor”
  • “Untimely Meditations: A Seminar on Anachronism”
  • “Theories of Modernity”
  • “Photography and Atavism”
  • “Photography’s Expanded Field”
  • “Avant-garde and Underground”
  • “Postwar European Art, 1940s-1970s”
  • “Contemporary Sculpture After Sculpture” (with Miwon Kwon)

Selected Links