Daniel Spaulding

Education
B.A. University of California, Berkeley, 2008
M.A. Yale University, 2013
M.Phil. Yale University, 2013
Ph.D. Yale University, 2017

Research Interests
Contemporary art, global modernism, post-World War II Europe, historiography and methodology in art history, art and politics, the social history of art, critical theory, Romanticism.

Biography
I am a scholar of 20th and 21st century art, with a focus on Western Europe in the post-World War II era. In the broadest terms, my work addresses the entanglement of modern artistic strategies with the emergence of capitalism as a global economic and social order.

My first book project is a study of the 20th century German artist Joseph Beuys. Here I argue that Beuys’s work represents a sustained though problematic working-through of transformations in the postwar West German welfare state at the cusp of the neoliberal era. My second book will expand upon these themes by considering a wider range of artists in postwar Germany whose serialized approaches to mark-making I correlate with gendered and racialized shifts in the Western European labor market in the 1960s and ’70s. Although my research is anchored in this period, I have a strong investment in tracing back genealogies of recent art to much earlier moments of crisis and critique, such as the moment of Romanticism at the turn of the 19th century. At present I am also expanding my research and, especially, my teaching to reflect recent work in the field of global modernist art history.

A further area of my research is the historiography and methodology of art history, with an emphasis on the German intellectual tradition during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I am a founding editor of Selva: A Journal of the History of Art, an online peer-reviewed publication dedicated to the study of past models of art interpretation, with a particular emphasis on “radical” approaches to art history and criticism. Our aim, per the journal’s mission statement, is to “channel the study of art towards a more urgent engagement with our current state of crisis, both within and without the academy.”

Selected Publications
“Panofsky’s Antinomies,” Journal of Art Historiography 25 (December 2021):1–31.

“Greenberg avec Mao: Supports/Surfaces and the Specific Contradiction of Painting,” Selva: A Journal of the History of Art 1 (Fall 2019):91–114.

“Unworking Posenenske,” in Charlotte Posenenske: Work in Progress, ed. Jessica Morgan, 162–77 (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2019).

“The Red Flag: The Art and Politics of German Maoism,” with Lauren Graber, in Art, Global Maoism, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, eds. Jacopo Galimberti, Noemi de Haro-García, and Victoria H.F. Scott, 109–27 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019).

Teaching
AH 105: Introduction to Modernism
AH 227: The Ends of Modernism
AH 408: Topics in Twentieth-Century Art
–Global Modernism
AH 409: Interpreting Contemporary Art
AH 500: Special Topics in Art History Proseminar
–The Art of Antagonism
AH 556: Proseminar in 20th Century European Art
–Art in Europe, 1945–1975
AH 600: Special Topics in Art History
–Global Modernism
AH 701: Practicum in Art History: Bibliography, Historiography, Methods
AH 800: Special Topics in Art History Seminar
–The Art of Antagonism
AH 856: Graduate Seminar in Twentieth Century European Art
–Art in Europe, 1945–1975