Goldsmiths - University of London

Brendan Prendeville

Teaching

At present I teach a BA special subject, ‘The Truth in Painting’. Prior to becoming HoD, I also taught an MA special subject, ‘Thinking the Sensuous’.

Areas of supervision

I have supervised dissertations on philosophy and the monumental, documentary and social practice, and painting and singularity. I am currently supervising research projects on projective space, the French ‘cultural exception’, spatiality in contemporary relational and media-art practices, the blue sky in modern visual culture, and the unknowing of beauty. Given my present commitments, and my workload as HoD, I am not currently taking on more supervisions.

Research interests

I studied painting, then art history, and for a long period combined part-time teaching with freelance art writing and organizing exhibitions. Since the 1990s my general research interests have concerned phenomenology, Bergsonian philosophy, and themes of embodiment and selfhood, as these bear on painting in particular and on visual culture in general. I approach philosophy as a historian rather than a philosopher, which for me entails situating both philosophical concepts and artistic practices historically, in relation to shared concerns or common points of reference. I have written on art of periods ranging between the seventeenth century and the present, with a recurrent emphasis on realism.  Merleau-Ponty has been central to my research, not only due to his preoccupation with painting, but also because of a (historical) question arising from that: to the extent that the philosopher is justified in seeing the work of certain painters (Cézanne and Klee most notably, but with arguable extension to others) as enacting his themes in practice, how should this come to be so? I am researching a book concerning the tacit (but not fortuitous or narrowly personal) basis on which paintings may come to have meaning imparted to them by painters and (independently) by viewers, across time. My most recent articles, ‘Discernment’ (on Damisch, and with reference to Velázquez), and the essay on Agnes Martin, were both ventures in this direction. I have a parallel research interest in the cinema of Robert Bresson.

Selected publications

Books:

Realism in 20th Century Painting, Thames & Hudson, 2000

(in translation: La peinture réaliste au XXe siècle, Paris 2001 and El Realismo en la Pintura del Siglo XX, Barcelona 2001)

Like the Face of the Moon, London, South Bank Centre, 1991 (Exhibition catalogue).

Selected articles:

‘The Meanings of Acts: Agnes Martin and the Making of Americans’, Oxford Art Journal 31:1 2008, pp 51-73 [ PDF version ]

‘Discernment’, for Damisch special issue of Oxford Art Journal. 28:2 2005, pp 213-226. [ PDF version ]

‘Seurat and the Act of Sensing’, in Cedric Brown and Therese Fischer-Seidel, Susanne Peters and Alex Potts, eds., Perception and the Senses / Sinneswahrnehmung, A.Francke Verlag, 2003, pp 166-187.

(A revised version of the above is to be included in A Seurat Companion, ed. Paul Smith, Penn State Press, due to be published in 2010)

‘Varying the Self: Bacon’s Versions of van Gogh’, Oxford Art  Journal 27.1, 2004, pp 23-42.

‘Uncertain Light’, in M’ARS, Ljubljana, Year XIII, no 1-2, 2001, pp 46-51.

‘Merleau-Ponty, Realism and Painting: Psychophysical Space and the Space of Exchange’, Art History, vol. 22 No. 3, Sept 1999, pp. 364-388.

(The above article has been reprinted in Ted Toadvine, ed., Merleau-Ponty: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, vol. 2: Perception and Expression (Routledge 2006), pp. 300-329.)

‘The Features of Insanity, as seen by Géricault and by Büchner’, Oxford Art Journal, 18:1, 1995, pp. 96-115.

Grants & awards

British Academy Small Grant, 1997

Leverhulme Fellowship, 2002-3