Professor at University of East London
Fay (Fae) Brauer is Professor Emeritus of Art and Visual Culture at the Centre for Cultural Studies Research, University of East London and Associate Professor of Art History, and Honorary Associate Professor in Art History and Cultural Theory at the University of New South Wales. Her books include "Picturing Evolution and Extinction: Regeneration and Degeneration in Modern Visual Culture"; "Rivals and Conspirators: The Paris Salons and the Modern Art Centre"; "The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinism and Visual Culture", and "Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti". She is the author of many book chapters and journal articles investigating the interrelationship of art, visual culture, medicine and science, particularly in relation to the Anthropocene, the body, eugenics, genetics and alternative sciences such as "animal magnetism" and occultism. She has Honours Degrees from the University of London with an MA and PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
The first Head of School of Art Theory at The University of New South Wales, Brauer chaired the team that instigated in 1991 the innovative B.Art Theory, its Honours programme, as well as its double degree with Arts and Social Sciences, Law, and Commerce. These new degrees were designed to provide students with interdisciplinary knowledge of art history, philosophy and cultural theory, particularly pertaining to contemporary art, as well as museum collections, gallery policies, exhibition curation and art publishing. She also chaired the team that instigated the M.Art Theory and PhD in Art Theory, while introducing 12 new undergraduate courses and four postgraduate ones. For her teaching and student supervision, Brauer has won numerous awards. Outstanding students include Dr Keren Hammerschlag, Senior Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship; ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences; Dr Laura Fan, PAD Art Writing Programme, Malaysia, and Alexei Glass-Kantor, Executive Director of Artspace, Sydney; Chair of Contemporary Art Organisations of Australia, Australian Centre for the Moving Image Curator, Adelaide Biennale, Parallel Collisions, Curator, Encounters for Art Basel | Hong Kong, dedicated to large-scale installations, and the instigator of opportunities for co-curated, artist-led projects with peer institutions in 14 countries.
For some forty years, Brauer has been researching and publishing as an interdisciplinary scholar on art, its histories, theories and exhibitions for which she has received numerous grants and residencies. Her research encompasses Modernism and Postmodernism, particularly intersections with art, science and medicine. It traverses the Anthropocene and Ecoaesthetics; Darwinian and Neo-Lamarckian evolution and eugenics, particularly the visual cultures of eugenics; the body, sexualities and the fitness imperative; neurology, hysteria and trauma; magnetism, mesmerism and occultist sciences; vitalism, the fourth dimension and the cultural politics of art institutions. Her books include Vitalist Modernism: Art, Science, Energy and Creative Evolution (2023); Picturing Evolution and Extinction: Regeneration and Degeneration in Modern Visual Culture (2015); Rivals and Conspirators: The Paris Salons and the Modern Art Centre (2013), The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms and Visual Culture (2009), plus the award-winning Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti (2008). Forthcoming books include The Body in British Art, Science and Medicine during the long nineteenth-century; Regenerating and Regendering Bodies: Modernist Biocultures and Fitness Imperatives in the French Radical Republic; Feminizing Muscle: Body Trouble in Modern Visual Culture; and Symbiotic Species: The Art of Transformism in Solidarist France.
During the Covid pandemic over 2020/2021, she was involved in the exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, l’Orangerie and Muséum de l’histoire naturelle, Les origines du monde : L’Invention de nature au siècle de Darwin, from 19 May to 18 July 2021—due to transfer to the Montréal Musée des Beaux-Arts—providing the catalogue essay, “The Sombre Face of Evolution: Devolution, Degeneration and Eugenics”: “La face sombre de l’évolution. Dégénérescence, regression et extinction”. For the exhibition at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum opening on 15 March 2024, Paris 1874: Revolution in der Kunst. Vom Salon zum Impressionismus, she provided the catalogue essay, “Die Unterdrückung des Impressionismus: Haussmannisierung, Kunst im Zweiten Kaiserreich unt die Salons des refusés”: “Suppressing Impressionism: Haussmannization, Empire Art and the Salons des Refusés”, A Revolution in Art: Paris 1863-1874. From Salon to Impressionism.
Author of some 40 book chapters, most recently these include two chapters on two remarkable Jewish art dealers during the twentieth century, Alfred Flechtheim and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, drawing upon research stretching back to her time as a PhD student when granted a unique opportunity to access their archives. These book chapters are:
“Flamboyantly Gay, Jewish and Avant-Garde: Alfred Flechtheim’s Dealing with Transitional Aesthetics, Transsexualities and Antisemitism” Chapter 11, Modernist Aesthetics in Transition: Visual Culture in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024)
“Exterminating Cubisms: Bochisme, L’Art Juif and the Vilification of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler”, Jewish Art Dealers and the European Art Market, 1850-1940 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), the book arising from the conference on Jewish Dealers and the European Art Market at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2021.
Other recent book chapters include the following:
“Composing Symmorphies: Chromatism, Astral Vision and the Music of the Spheres in František Kupka’s Cosmological Modernism”, Art, Music, and Mysticism at the Fin-de-Siècle: Seeing and Hearing the Beyond (Routledge Research in Art History, 2024)
“Exposing ‘The Venereal Peril’: Fournier’s Syphilography, Munch’s Heredo-Syphilitic, La Syphilis Arabe, and Picasso’s Prostitutes”, Contagion, Hygiene, and the European Avant-Garde, Chapter 4, Part II: ‘The Avant-Garde and Illness: Syphilis, The ‘Spanish Flu’, Tuberculosis’, Contagion, Hygiene, and the European Avant-Garde (Routledge Research in Art History, 2023)
“Vitalist Picasso: Bergson’s “Psychic States”, Phantasmatic Luminenscence and Occultist Cubism”, Chapter Five, Vitalist Modernism: Art, Science, Energy and Creative Evolution (Routledge, Taylor &amp; Francis Group, 2023)
“Vitalist Cubisms: The Biocultures of Virility, Militarism and La Vie Sportive”, Sport and the European Avant-Garde (1900-1945) (Brill International Publishing: Avant-Garde Critical Studies, 2022)
“The Pasted Paper Devolution: The Dialogism of Degeneration and Regeneration in the Cubist Collages”, Of Modernism: Essays in Honour of Christopher Green (The Courtauld Institute of Art and Paul Holberton Publishing, 2020)
“Scientistic Magnetism and Hauntological Metarealism: The Phantasmatic Doubles of Duchamp and Durville”, Realisms of the Avant-Garde (European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, Walter de Gruyter, 2020)
“Capturing Unconsciousness: The New Psychology, Hypnosis and the Culture of Hysteria”, A Companion to Nineteenth Century Art (John Wiley &amp; Sons, Inc., 2019)
“Mesmeric Modernism: František Kupka’s Art as a Magnetic Force Field” (Moscow: Russian State Institute for Art Studies, 2019)
“Dealing with Cubism: Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's Perilous Internationalism”, Dealing Art on Both Sides of the Atlantic, 1860-1940 (Brill International Publishing, 2017)
Other Book Chapters
• Magnetic Modernism: František Kupka's Mesmeric Abstraction and Anarcho-Cosmic Utopia”
• Intimate Vibrations: Inventing the Dream Bedroom
• Turquet's 'Turkey': Ending the Salon
• Becoming Simian: Devolution as Evolution in Transformist Modernism
• The Janus Face of Evolution: Degeneration, Devolution and Extinction in the Anthropocene
• Wild Beasts and Tame Primates: “Le douanier” Rousseau’s Dream of Darwin’s Evolution
• Framing Darwin: A Portrait of Eugenics
• The Transparent Body: Biocultures of Evolution, Eugenics and Scientific Racism
• The Stigmata of Abjection: Degenerate Limbs, Hysterical Skin and The Tattooed Body
• One Friday at the French Artists’ Salon: Pompiers and Official Artists at the ‘Coup de Cubisme’
• Eroticizing Lamarckian Eugenics: The Body Stripped Bare during French Sexual Neoregulation
• Making the Eugenic Body Delectable: Art, ‘Biopower’ and ‘Scientia Sexualis’
• Rationalizing Eros: The ‘Plague of Onan’, the Procreative Imperative and Duchamp’s Sexual Automatons
• Dangerous Doubles: Degenerate and Regenerate Body Photography in the Eugenic Imagination
• Dégénéréscence
• Le duo dangereux: “L’homme normal” et le corps dégénéré
• Dangerous Doubles: Degenerate and Regenerate Body Photography in the Eugenic Imagination
• Commercial Spies and Cultural Invaders: The French Press, Pénétration Pacifique and Xenophobic Nationalism in the Shadow of War
Articles
• Virilizing and Valorizing Homoeroticism: Eugen Sandow’s Queering of Body Culture before and after the Wilde Trials
• L’Art Eugénique: Biopower and the Biocultures of Regeneration
• Contesting “Le Corps Militaire”: Antimilitarism, Pacifism, Anarcho-Communism and 'Le Douanier' Rousseau's La Guerre
• Rupturing Versailles: Joana Vasconcelos’s Disembodiment, Feminization and Kitsch
• Moral Girls’ and ‘Filles Fatales’: The Fetishization of Innocence
• The Sado-Masochism of Invention: Marcel Duchamp’s Ironic Inversions of Jules Amar’s Human Motor
• Flaunting Manliness: Republican Masculinity, Virilized Homosexuality and the Desirable Male Body
• “Bulging Buttocks”: Picturing Virile Homosexuality and the ‘Manly Man’
• Eradicating Difference: The Bioethics of Imaging ‘Degeneracy’ and Exhibiting Eugenics
• Representing ‘Le Moteur Humain’: Chronometry, Chronophotography, ‘The Art of Work’ and the ‘Taylored Body
• The Darwin/ist of Art History
• The Darwin of Art History: E. H. Gombrich
• Writing French Art Histories of Dissension in the Shadow of Vichy
• Hegelian History, Wölfflinean Periodization and ‘Smithesque Modernism’
• Crossing Disciplines and Cubism
• An Horizon is both pictorial and strategic: The Geopolitics of Land and Landscape
• And love a fantasy breastfeeding our sexuality
• The Art(s) of Political Correctness
• In my art I try to give fear a face”: Paula Rego
• The Sleep of Reason begets Monsters: Bonita Ely
• Nature/Nurture/Culture: Janet Laurence
• The Bricoleur - The Borderico - The Postcolonial Boundary Rider
• BERLIN-BERLIN: The Art of Post-Unification Exchange
Contemporary Art Catalogues
•The Art of Installation, Ivan Dougherty Gallery Catalogue, Sydney, March 1989;
• “Inversion/Subversion”, The Viaduct Project, New South Wales Government Ministry for the Arts, 1995-1996;
• “The Sublime and the Strange, Malcolm Poole’s Aerial Art”, Malcolm Poole: Paintings, Australia House Exhibition, London, May 2001.
• “Forging a new ‘School of Paris’: Chez la Cité des Arts”, ‘Paris Days’ Exhibition, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, The University of New South Wales, March-April 2002;
• “The Sexed Body: The Great Danger”, With and Without You: Revisitations of Art in the Age of AIDS, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, October-November 2002;
• Burnt Offerings, Galerie Baudoin Lebon, Paris, June 2006;
• Four Seasons: Vivian Van Blerk, La galerie Beckel Odille Boïcos, Paris, June 2006;
• The Cultures of Dissection: Kate Scardifield's Women Wielding the Knife, Exhibition, The Whole and the Sum of its Parts, Kate Scardifield, MOP Projects, 2010 (ISBN 978-1-921661-136); • Circulation and Respiration: Lisa Jones' Body Circuits and Breathing Cities, Exhibition, Lisa Jones, Invisible Cities, Conny Dietzschold Gallery, Sydney and Cologne, 2013 (ISBN 978-0--9803315-7-8);
• Anthropocene, UEL AVA Exhibition, AVA Gallery, University of East London, Docklands Campus, April 2016; co-curator of exhibition;
• “Naturyzacja Ewolucji: Kolonie Zwierzece, Drzewa Zycia I Modernizm, Miedzygatunkowy”, Superorganizm: Awangarda I Doswiadczenie Prysrody;
• ‘Superevolution: Interspecies Modernism and the Naturization of Modernity’, Chapter Seven, Superorganism: The Avant-Garde and the Experience of Nature; Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland, 2017, pp. 149-184 (14 illustrations); ISBN 978-83-63820-53-4;
• Earth, UEL Exhibition, AVA Gallery, University of East London, Docklands Campus, April 2018;
Contemporary Art, Theory and Polemics
Contemporary Polemics Writer, Art Monthly UK, 1985-1992; Art Monthly, Australia and International, 1986-1992; Artscribe.
Contemporary Art Guest Lectures
Feminisms and "Femmage": Miriam Schapiro, Lecture in Honour of Simone de Beauvoir, Art Gallery of New South Wales, April 1986.
The Commodification of Art: Blue Poles, Power Institute of Fine Art, University of Sydney, April 1986.
The Spectacle of the Venice Biennale, RMIT and University of Melbourne, October 1988.
Gender, Otherness and the Museum: The Politics of Representation, Queen Mary College, University of London, July 1996.
“Spectacular Bodies: Dissecting Art, Science and Medicine”, The Best of COFA Lecture Series, 20 April 2010, The University of New South Wales College of Fine Arts (see website, UNSWTV: Faculty of Fine Arts).
“Artists as Geneticists: Evolutionism, Transspeciation and Transgenic Art”, Art Talk: Critical Dialogue, Convenor Simeon Lockhart Nelson, University of Hertfordshire School of Creative Arts, Hatfield, 26 November 2014.
“Becoming Simian: Modernism’s Challenge to the Anthropocene”, Culture, Memory and Extinction, The Natural History Museum, Flett Theatre, 11 December 2015.
“Primate Visions: Modernist Monkey Business and Interspecies Relationality”, New Research in Art History and Visual Culture, University of Bristol Postgraduate Guest Lecture Programme, Convenor, Professor Dorothy Price, 26 April 2016.
Conferences
Convening 10 Conferences, Brauer has also convened 24 Conference Sessions.
Personal
She is married to the playwright, Justin Fleming, has two children, Marcus and Lara and two grandchildren, Jura and Olieve. She resides in London, Paris, and Sydney.
References.
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