Dr Saul Nelson

Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Architecture

I am a historian of modernist art with an emphasis on painting. My research focuses on intersections between developments in modernist painting and new historiographic tools, particularly those emanating from Marxism, anticolonialism, and feminism. I want to understand how and why pictorial approaches that might appear anachronistic - history painting, for instance - were retained and transformed under changing political and social conditions.

I am interested in following these developments up to the present day - in understanding the relevance of modernist aesthetic questions for contemporary painters. I am at work on two book projects: 'Reconstructing Modernism in the Digital Age' and 'History Painting after Bolshevism'

Selected Recent Publications

'Manet and Neoliberalism: The Case of Salman Toor', Critical Inquiry, 52, 2 (2026), pp.283-312.
Never Ending: Modernist Painting Past and Future (Yale University Press, 2024)
'High Art Kitsch: Kehinde Wiley's Hyperrealism of the Spectacle', New Left Review, 144 (2023), pp.83-94.
'Fashioning Modernism: Rose Piper's Painting and Fabric Design', Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 27, 3-4 (2022), pp.125-142.
'Abstract Nationalisms: Barnett Newman and Buried History', American Art, 36, 1 (2022), pp.60-89.

Teaching Interests and Responsibilities

My teaching covers modern painting, from the eighteenth century to the present day. I teach on painting's relation to revolutionary political ideas, historical thinking, and institutional structures.

I welcome PhD proposals on modernism and contemporary painting, especially in relation to questions of historiography, politics, and decolonisation.