Lucy Whelan

FR/EN

Lucy Whelan is a postdoctoral researcher at Sciences Po, where she holds a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship. She is an art historian whose research centres on France in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and addresses questions around artistic self-fashioning, subjectivity, gender, and the environment.

Lucy’s first book, Pierre Bonnard Beyond Vision, was published with Yale University Press in 2022. This examines strategies for deconstructing the presumed authority of the artist’s gaze in figurative art, through exploring questions of embodiment, gender, pictorial time, artistic processes, and the depiction of landscape.

At Sciences Po, she is working on a new project that takes ecological and feminist approaches to painting and sculpture in postwar France. This focuses primarily on women artists, including the sculptor Germaine Richier.

Prior to her arrival at Sciences Po, Lucy has spent three years as Research Fellow at Downing College, University of Cambridge, where she also taught in the History of Art Department. She has also been an Associate Lecturer at the University of York and the Courtauld Institute of Art, and spent two years as part of the Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte at the Humboldt University in Berlin, funded by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation. She completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2018.

SELECTED PublicationS

Dream States, Madness, and Poetry in Bonnard’s Contre-Jour Nudes’. In Bonnard and the Nordic Countries, ed. Linda Hinners (Nationalmuseum Sweden, forthcoming, 2024).

‘On Taking Artists at their Word: Artists’ Writings and Statements from 1850 to the Present’. In Where Words and Images Meet: 1670–2020, ed. Florence Grant and Ludmilla Jordanova. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.

‘Review Article: Three Women Artists in Postwar Paris: Anna-Eva Bergman, Germaine Richier, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva.’ French History 37, no. 3 (September 2023): 317–26.

Pierre Bonnard Beyond Vision. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. 

‘Pierre Bonnard’s Books: An Interpretation.’ Source: Notes in the History of Art 40, no. 4 (Summer 2021): 261–68.

‘Pierre Bonnard’s Books: A Catalogue with an Introduction.’ Source: Notes in the History of Art 40, no. 3 (Spring 2021): 186–97.

‘New Light on Pierre Bonnard’s Wife and Model Marthe.’ The Burlington Magazine 162, no. 1406 (May 2020): 412–19.

‘Painting the Present after Impressionism: Pierre Bonnard and Time’s Continuous Duration.’ In Time on a Human Scale: Experiencing the Present in Europe, 1860–1930, edited by Allegra Fryxell and Julian Wright. Proceedings of the British Academy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.