Dr Lucy Whelan

BA (Cambridge), MSt, DPhil (Oxford)

My research centres on modern art in Europe, with a particular focus on France. Broadly speaking, I focus on modern artworks and artists that lie in a transverse relationship to the canonical avant-garde. I am interested in how individual artists responded to intellectual, cultural and social contexts, as well as in processes of making, artistic self-fashioning, and gender. Other longstanding interests include visual theory and approaches to art history. 

My first book, Pierre Bonnard Beyond Vision, published by Yale University Press, presents a revised understanding of Pierre Bonnard’s practice as a painter, draughtsman, and photographer. It explores how his works offer original strategies for establishing art as a system of signs—but from within the tradition of figurative painting. As such it aims to reframe some of the major modernist innovations of the early twentieth century.  

I am currently working on new projects that take ecological and feminist approaches to French art from the late nineteenth century to the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. 

Before coming to Downing, I held a Hanseatic Scholarship from the Alfred Toepfer Foundation at the Humboldt University in Berlin. I completed my DPhil and MSt in the History of Art Department at the University of Oxford, and have a BA in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge.