Frédérique Baumgartner

18th- and 19th-century European Art
Ph.D., Harvard University, 2011

Frédérique Baumgartner’s research focuses on 18th- and 19th-century art in Europe, with a particular emphasis on the intersection of art and politics. Her current book project examines the politicization of the art of Hubert Robert during the French Revolution in relation to notions of cultural experience, looking at Robert’s pictures of outdoor festivals and public museums, among others. She is also working on a project on Robert’s prison oeuvre, highlighting the artist’s effort to reflect on the French Revolution’s aspirations and failures. Frédérique’s more recent project, looking at Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s career when she was an émigrée, explores the dynamic between displacement and artistic identity in a period that witnessed the fall of the cosmopolitan ideal and the rise of nationalism.

Frédérique’s fellowships have included an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University, research and writing fellowships from the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and an Arthur Sachs scholarship from the Arthur Sachs Scholarship Fund. Prior to joining the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia as a postdoctoral fellow in 2011 and becoming director of the MA in Art History in 2013, she taught at the École du Louvre in Paris.

Previously, Frédérique was an assistant curator at the Musée national d’art moderne-Centre Pompidou in Paris and remains interested in video and performance art. At Columbia, she teaches curatorial practice through the MA in Art History Presents initiative, inaugurated in 2017.

Frédérique holds a PhD from Harvard University and an MA from Columbia University, as well as degrees in art history and museum studies from the École du Louvre in Paris.

"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 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

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