John Klein
			Ph.D. Columbia University 1990 Visiting Associate Professor, 2005-7
		Professor Klein’s teaching and research are primarily on art of the first half of the 20th century in Europe and the United States. He is internationally known as a specialist in the work of Henri Matisse. His book Matisse Portraits (Yale University Press, 2001) was a finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Prize of the College Art Association. In addition to many articles, essays, and book chapters on Matisse’s art, he has also published on painting in series from Impressionism to Pop Art, Fauve portraiture and landscape painting, the portraiture of Félix Vallotton, and the economic and political context for collecting modern painting in Denmark, among other topics. In his work on Matisse and other modern artists he has stressed such issues as mediterraneanism, the legacies of fin-de-siècle primitivism, cross-cultural exchanges in the context of European colonialism, and adaptations of the classical tradition in the 20th century. His next book is on the decorative projects that Matisse designed for domestic, state, and ecclesiastical contexts in the period 1930-1954. These decorations, made with such diverse means as mural painting, stained glass, cut glass, tapestry, printed fabrics, and ceramic tile, are in some ways culminations of the decorative aesthetic Matisse theorized for his easel painting much earlier in his career. In the larger sphere, they made important contributions to a general revival of French decorative arts, and to their ideological function in restoring France’s cultural traditions following the Second World War. Klein is also editing a volume of essays on Matisse’s painting Le Bonheur de vivre (Barnes Foundation) that will study this keystone work from a variety of perspectives, including psychoanalytic theory, reception theory, the function of classicism in France’s contentious political climate, and an analysis of the painting’s stylistic inconsistencies as a reflection of debates about national identity in the period. Klein’s future projects include a survey of modern portraiture, a study of the caryatid in modern sculpture as a synthesis of the classical and the primitive, and a book on American Earthworks combining cultural analysis, object biography, guidebook, and maintenance manual. Professor Klein has been Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Missouri-Columbia since 1998. He has also taught at Columbia University, St. Lawrence University, Purchase College, and the Pont-Aven School of Art in France, and has worked in the Department of European and Contemporary Art at the Yale University Art Gallery, among other museum affiliations. Other recent publications: “Inventing Mediterranean Harmony in Matisse’s Paper Cut-Outs,” in Visualising the Modern Mediterranean, ed. Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming 2006). “Degree Zero of Self-Portraiture: Matisse’s Self-Portrait in a Striped Jersey, 1906,” in Matisse 1905-1918 (Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst, 2005). “Paradoxe du portrait fauve,” in Matisse-Derain: Collioure 1905, un été fauve (Paris: Gallimard, 2005). “L’Héritage de Gauguin, ou l’art de relativiser l’idéal primitiviste,” in Actes du Colloque: Paul Gauguin, héritage et confrontations (Papeete, Tahiti: Université de la Polynésie Française, 2003). “Objects of Desire and Irresistible Forces: Matisse Between Patrons, Collectors and War,” introduction to Henri Matisse: Four Great Collectors (Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst, 1999). “The Dispersal of the Modernist Series,” Oxford Art Journal 21 (1998). “Un Artiste français en Océanie: Henri Matisse et Tahiti,” in Océanie, curieux, navigateurs et savants: Les collections océaniennes des musées du Nord-Pas de Calais (Paris: Somogy, 1997). “Matisse After Tahiti: The Domestication of Exotic Memory,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 60, no. 1 (1997). Courses for Fall 2005: Modern Sculpture, Canova to Koons Rethinking Matisse (seminar) Courses for Spring 2006: Introduction to Modern Art The Decorative Aesthetic of Modernism (seminar) Courses taught recently at University of Missouri-Columbia: Public Art/Art and Its Publics Dada and Surrealism Historiography and Method (seminar) Cubism (seminar) Critical History of Portraiture, from Antiquity to Today (seminar) The History of the Art Museum (seminar)