Dr. Robert Jensen

Associate Professor

Office: 203 Fine Arts Bldg.

Telephone: 859.257.2336

Email: robert.jensen@uky.edu

Education: University of Berkeley, Ph.D.

Robert Jensen is an associate professor of art history with field emphases in the history of modernism and the economics of art since joining the University of Kentucky faculty in 1994, Dr. Jensen has taught numerous undergraduate and graduate courses on a wide range of subjects, ranging from contemporary art to colonial American art. Included among his seminars have been courses on abstract art, the art of the 1960s, the representation of the body in early 20th-century European art, and the self-portrait in Western art. Forthcoming seminars will include a seminar entitled “What was Painting?” and one on Edouard Manet. Dr. Jensen has been the principal reader on a number of diverse M.A. thesis paper projects, including most recently “A Crisis of Artistic Identity in the Career of John Sloan”; “Georges Seurat: Port-en-Bassin, Le Pont et les Quais (1888)”; “Conceptual Art and the Interpretive and Exhibition Functions of the Museum”; “Elements of Market Recognition: The Early Targets and Flags of Jasper Johns,” and “‘Malignant Passions’: George Caleb Bingham and Order No. 11.”

Dr. Jensen’s first book Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-siècle Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) extends the analysis found in his dissertation, “The Marketing of an Avant-Garde. Dealers, Ideology and the Trade in Modernism Between France and Germany”. He is currently working on a book titled The Painter’s Trade, a fundamental reexamination of the nature of artists’ careers in late 19th-century Paris. Dr. Jensen has also long been interested in theoretical issues related to photography and mechanical reproduction, and has published essays on such diverse topics as “The Photographic Grotesque” and “Against Photography: Reading Barthes on the Photograph.” Most recently, Dr. Jensen has been working in close collaboration with the University of Chicago economist, David Galenson, on the econometric study of artistic importance, especially in regard to the varied life cycles of artists’ careers.

Dr. Jensen’s most recent essay on this subject is “Anticipating Artistic Behavior: New Research Tools for Art Historians,” Historical Methods, vol. 37, no. 3 (Summer 2004). Among other related projects are “Cézanne and Vollard: An Anatomy of a Relationship,” in Ambroise Vollard and his Artists (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fall 2006); a forthcoming essay “Careers and Canvases: The Rise of the Market for Modern Art in the 19th Century,” in Van Gogh Studies (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, Summer 2006); and “Measuring Canons: Reflections on Innovation and the 19th-Century Canon of European Art,” in Partisan Canons, ed. Anna Brzyski (Durham: Duke University Press, Summer 2007).

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