Frédérique Baumgartner

18^th- and 19^th-century European Art 
Ph.D., Harvard University, 2011
M.A., Columbia University, 2003

Frédérique Baumgartner is the Director of the MA in Art History program. She specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art, with a focus on France during the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. 

Currently, she is writing Other Scaffolds: The Art of Hubert Robert During the French Revolution, a book that considers Robert’s paintings of outdoor festivals, public gardens, and national museums, as well as his prison oeuvre. The book argues that Robert’s critical representation of these cultural transformations is essential for our understanding of the Revolution’s aspirations and failures. In parallel, she is developing a project on Jean-Étienne Liotard’s pastel portraits in view of didacticism (and its limits) in the plates of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. This is part of her recent research on pastel as a visual and material lens through which to consider fundamental aspects of Enlightenment thought and culture. Other interests include artistic identity and displacement in moments of political turmoil, particularly Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s career as an émigrée, as well as video and performance art. 

Frédérique’s work has been supported by an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship (Columbia), the Center for European Studies (Harvard), and the Arthur Sachs Scholarship Fund. She is a recipient of the 2025 Division of Humanities Faculty Recognition Award for Community Building and Engagement.

Prior to joining the Art History and Archaeology faculty, Frédérique taught at the École du Louvre and was an Assistant Curator at the Musée national d’art moderne-Centre Pompidou (Paris). At Columbia, she teaches curatorial practice and object-centered research through the MA in Art History Presents initiative, inaugurated in 2017. 

Frédérique advises MA theses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art and welcomes applications in this field.  

Articles and Catalogue Entries

"Rethinking Revolutionary Vandalism: Destruction and Creation in a Drawing by Hubert Robert," in The Art of Revolutions. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 109, part 5 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society Press, 2020): 105-127.

“Réorienter l’imagination. La mise en valeur du fond dans l’œuvre d’Hubert Robert,” in Histo.art 12, dir. Étienne Jollet (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2020), 87-104.

“Hubert Robert in Prison: Self, Revolution, and the Contingencies of Artistic Inscription,” Journal18 Issue 8 Self/Portrait (Fall 2019), http://www.journal18.org/4374.

“Peinture d’histoire et histoire de l’art au Salon de 1781: Léonard de Vinci mourant dans les bras de François 1er de F.-G. Ménageot,” in Le Salon de l'Académie royale de peinture et sculpture. Archéologie d'une institution, dir. Isabelle Pichet (Paris: Éditions Hermann, 2014), 103-124. 

“Two Rediscovered Paintings by Hubert Robert and their French Revolutionary Context,” The Burlington Magazine 155, no. 1322 (May 2013): 317-323. 

“Reviving the Collective Body: Gina Pane's Escalade Non Anesthésiée,” Oxford Art Journal 34, no. 2 (2011): 247-263. 

Catalogue entries in Collection Nouveaux Médias: Installations. La Collection du Musée national d'art moderne-Centre Pompidou (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2006).

Catalogue entries and compilation of an anthology of essays on video installation in Tiempos de Vídeo.
1965-2005 (Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Foundation “La Caixa,” Barcelona, September 28, 2005-January 8, 2006).

Artist biographies and catalogue entries in Encyclopédie Nouveaux Médias, www.newmedia-art.org (Musée national d’art moderne-Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Centre pour l’image contemporaine, Genève; Fonds national d’art contemporain, France, 2005).

“Théodore Géricault: The Times of Day,” The Rutgers Art Review 21 (2005): 1-20.

“Surroundings,” in Here and There (Catalogue of the 4th Triennial of Contemporary Art in Slovenia held at the Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana, December 18, 2003-March 31, 2004), 17-21.

Reviews

Oliver Wunsch, A Delicate Matter. Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University, 2024), Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 48, no. 1 (March 2025): 100-101.

Margaret MacNamidhe, Delacroix and his Forgotten World. The Origins of Romantic Painting (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015), caa.reviews (March 2018).

Cordula Grewe, The Nazarenes. Romantic Avant-Garde and the Art of the Concept (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), The Burlington Magazine 159, no. 1367 (February 2017): 143.

The Critique of Reason. Romantic Art, 1760-1860 (Exhibition held at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven), The Burlington Magazine 157, no. 1349 (August 2015): 574-576.

Nina Dubin, Futures & Ruins: Eighteenth-Century Paris and the Art of Hubert Robert (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2010), caa.reviews (Summer 2012).