George Baker is Professor of Art History at UCLA, where he has taught modern and contemporary art and theory since 2003. A New York and Paris-based critic for Artforum in the 1990s, he now works as an editor of the journal October and its publishing imprint October Books. While known for his criticism and essays on contemporary art, he resists the specialization of the “contemporary” as an academic field and regularly offers courses on all aspects of modernism and the historical avant-garde, on the history of photography in the 19th- and 20th-centuries, and on specialized topics in post-WWII and contemporary art history.
Baker received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2001, and is a graduate of the art history program at Yale University and the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has received, amongst others, an Andrew Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, CASVA and Whiting Foundation fellowships, a postdoctoral fellowship from the Getty Research Institute, and, most recently, a 2014 Arts Writers Grant from the Warhol Foundation and Creative Capital. He is the author of The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (MIT Press, 2007), and the editor, with Eric Banks, of Paul Chan: Selected Writings, 2000-2014 (Schaulager and Badlands Unlimited, 2014). Currently, he is working on disparate projects including a revisionist study of Picasso’s modernism and a book on the work of four women artists—Zoe Leonard, Tacita Dean, Moyra Davey, and Sharon Lockhart—to be entitled Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of Photography. The latter is part of a larger project that, in his art criticism, Baker has termed “photography’s expanded field,” detailing the fate of photography and film works in contemporary art.
Education
Ph.D. Columbia University, 2001
Research
George Baker is Professor of Art History at UCLA, where he has taught modern and contemporary art and theory since 2003. A New York and Paris-based critic for Artforum in the 1990s, he now works as an editor of the journal October and its publishing imprint October Books. While known for his criticism and essays on contemporary art, he resists the specialization of the “contemporary” as an academic field and regularly offers courses on all aspects of modernism and the historical avant-garde, on the history of photography in the 19th- and 20th-centuries, and on specialized topics in post-WWII and contemporary art history.
Baker received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2001, and is a graduate of the art history program at Yale University and the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has received, amongst others, an Andrew Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, CASVA and Whiting Foundation fellowships, a postdoctoral fellowship from the Getty Research Institute, and, most recently, a 2014 Arts Writers Grant from the Warhol Foundation and Creative Capital. He is the author of The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (MIT Press, 2007), and the editor, with Eric Banks, of Paul Chan: Selected Writings, 2000-2014 (Schaulager and Badlands Unlimited, 2014). Currently, he is working on disparate projects including a revisionist study of Picasso’s modernism and a book on the work of four women artists—Zoe Leonard, Tacita Dean, Moyra Davey, and Sharon Lockhart—to be entitled Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of Photography. The latter is part of a larger project that, in his art criticism, Baker has termed “photography’s expanded field,” detailing the fate of photography and film works in contemporary art.
Books
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- Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of Photography
- The University of Chicago Press, 2023
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- Dive Bar Architect: On the Work of D.E. May
- LAXART Books, 2018
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Photography’s Expanded Field
- Photography’s Expanded Field
- Kharkiv, Ukraine: IST Publishing, 2018
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- Paul Chan: Selected Writings, 2000-2014
- Schaulager and Badlands Unlimited, 2014
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- Gerard Byrne: Books, Magazines, and Newspapers
- Lukas & Sternberg, 2003
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- James Coleman
- MIT Press, 2003
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- James Coleman: Drei Filmarbeiten
- Sprengel Museum, 2002
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
- Experimental Critical Theory
- OCTOBER Magazine
- “The Relational Field of Photography,” Fotomuseum Winterthur, 2013.
- “Art Historian, critic, brings to light work of artists in the shadows,” UCLA Today, April 2011.
- “Interview with George Baker,” UCLA Bookzone, December 2008.
- MIT Press Podcast, Episode 4, December 2007.