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Professor Roger Benjamin

Prof Roger Benjamin

BA Hons Melbourne
MA and PhD, Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania

Phone: +61 2 9351 3599
Fax: +61 2 9351 4212
Location: Room 227, RC Mills Building
Email:



Academic Honours and Grants

  • Winner of the Robert Motherwell Book Award (Dedalus Foundation,New York 2004) for Orientalist Aesthetics, Art, Colonialism and French North Africa.
  • Professeur invité, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.
  • Professor Roger Benjamin and Dr. Catriona Moore are both listed as Chief Investigators for a very large ARC LIEF grant which was successful for the 2005 year, and is currently submitting for 2nd-year funding, with a projected budget of $548,700 from the ARC. USyd will be receiving research quantum for our involvement.
    It is entitled "Dictionary of Australian Artists Online", and the UNSW is the lead institution.
  • June 2004, Robert Motherwell Book Prize (presented by the Dedalus Foundation of New York) for the outstanding publication in the history and criticism of modernism in the arts for the year 2003, for Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism and French North Africa, 1880-1930 (prize: US$20,000)
  • Millard Meiss Award (College Art Association), to support publication of Orientalist Aesthetics.
  • President, Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, December 1999 - December 2003.
  • Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize, awarded by the College Art Association of America for the best first article by a younger scholar in the Art Bulletin for 1993.
  • Large Grant, Australian Research Council, University of Melbourne, 1993 and 1994.

Research Interests

  • French Orientalist art, 1880-1930, including Renoirs Algerian work, and a study of the Algerian oasis resort of Biskra in literature, painting and photography
  • The art of Matisse, including an essay on his 1906 masterpiece Le Bonheur de Vivre
  • The interpretation of contemporary Indigenous Australian art. This includes a curatorial project on early Papunya boards and their aftermath, c. 1971 c 1985, for the Actus Foundation of New York (opening at Cornell University Gallery in January 2006)
  • Contemporary Australian painting

Publications

  • [CURRENT PROJECT] Curator and academic editor of Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya, a traveling exhibition organized by the Herbert Johnson Museum, Cornell University. Touring to the Fowler Museum of Cultural History, UCLA; Seattle Art Museum; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Ian Potter Museum, University of Melbourne. Catalogue published by the Johnson Museum, Ithaca, New York.
  • [CURRENT PROJECT] Academic editor of Juan Davila: Works 1970-2006, a retrospective exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Touring to the National Gallery of Victoria. Accompanying book published by Melbourne University Publishing (Miegunyah Press) in association with MCA.
  • [CURRENT PROJECT] “Landscape in Collioure”, in Matisse in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Kasper Monrad and Sven Bjerkhof, eds., Copenhagen, September 2005
  • [CURRENT PROJECT] “The Port of Algiers and Topographies of Power”, in Walls of Algiers, Frances Terpak and Zeyneb Celik, eds., Getty Publications, Los Angeles, forthcoming
  • [PUBLICATION: HISTORICAL STUDIES] “Andalusia In The Time Of The Moors: Regret and Colonial Presence in Paris, 1900,” in Edges of Empire: Orientalism and Visual Culture, Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones and Mary Roberts, eds., Blackwells Publishers, Oxford, forthcoming mid-2005
  • [PUBLICATION: HISTORICAL STUDIES] “Orientalism, Modernism and Indigenous Identity”, Art of the Avant-Gardes, book 2 of Art of the Twentieth Century, eds. Steve Edwards and Paul Wood, Yale University Press in association with The Open University, New Haven and London, 2004, pp. 84-107.
  • [PUBLICATION: HISTORICAL STUDIES] “Renoir et l’Algérie”; “Renoir: un impressionniste en Algérie” (trans. Jeanne Bourniourt) in Stephane Guégan (ed), De Delacroix à Renoir: L’Algérie des peintres, Editions Hazan and Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, 2003, pp. 208-221; catalogue entries pp. 228-255.
  • [PUBLICATION: HISTORICAL STUDIES] Renoir and Algeria, with an essay by David Prochaska, Yale University Press and Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, New Haven and Williamstown, Paris, 2003, 164 pp.
  • [PUBLICATION: HISTORICAL STUDIES] Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism and French North Africa, 1880-1930, University of California Press, Berkeley and London, 2003, 352 pp
  • [PUBLICATION: HISTORICAL STUDIES] "Colonial Tutelage or Indigenous Affirmation? Racim and Mammeri, Algerian Painters", in Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography, ed. Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2002, pp. 43-78 (11,000 words)
  • [PUBLICATIONS: CONTEMPORARY ART] “Crossing country: The alchemy of Western Arnhem Land art in Sydney”, (review), Art Monthly Australia, December 2004-February 2005, no. 176, pp. 12-15. (2,500 words).
  • [PUBLICATIONS: CONTEMPORARY ART] “Gordon Bennett”, “Angela Brennan”, “Juan Davila”, “Michael Nelson Jagamarra”, “Tim Johnson”, “Emily Kam Kngwarray”, “Ross Moore”, “Peter Tyndall”, “HJ Wedge”, in See Here Now: Vizard Foundation Art Collection of the 1990s, ed. Chris McAuliffe, Thames & Hudson (Australia), Melbourne, 2003. (4,800 words)
  • [PUBLICATIONS: CONTEMPORARY ART] “Juan Davila: Panorama of Santiago, Chile, 1973-2003”, in Witnessing to Silence: Art and Human Rights, eds. Caroline Turner and Nancy Sever, Drill Hall Gallery and Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, 2003, pp. 20-23 (1500 words).
  • [PUBLICATIONS: CONTEMPORARY ART] “Radiant Cultures: Tim Johnson’s Art”, in Synergies, ed. Howard Morphy and Nigel Lendon, Australian National University Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 2003, pp. 9-14 (c. 2000 words)
  • [PUBLICATIONS: CONTEMPORARY ART] “Schulim Krimper”, “Gordon Bennett,” in Australian Art in the National Gallery of Australia, ed. Anna Gray, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2002, pp. 383, 230. (500 words)
  • [ACADEMIC HONOURS/GRANTS] December 2004, Renoir and Algeria commended in the competition for Best Exhibition Catalogue, annual prize awarded by the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (funded by the School of Art History, Classics and Cinema Studies, University of Melbourne)
  • [ACADEMIC HONOURS/GRANTS] June 2004, Robert Motherwell Book Prize (presented by the Dedalus Foundation of New York) for the outstanding publication in the history and criticism of modernism in the arts for the year 2003, for Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism and French North Africa, 1880-1930 (prize: US$20,000)
  • [ACADEMIC HONOURS/GRANTS] Actus Foundation (New York City) grant to support the teaching of Aboriginal art over four years at the University of Sydney (2003-2006, US$4,800 total); Actus Foundation grant to support a curatorial and research assistant for Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya, 2004-2007 (AU$12,000 per annum)
  • [ACADEMIC HONOURS/GRANTS] Professeur invité, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (section for the Islamic Mediterranean), 15 March-15 April 2002 (5,000 euros)
  • [COMPLETED POSTGRADUATE RESEARCH DEGREES] Luke Gartlan (University of Melbourne), With Argus Eyes: the Photography of Baron Raimund von Stillfried, PhD, 2004
  • [COMPLETED POSTGRADUATE RESEARCH DEGREES] Natalie Adamson (University of Melbourne), The Identity of the Ecole des Paris in painting and Criticism, 1939-1964, PhD, 2003
  • [PAPERS/GUEST LECTURE] Occasional Address, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences graduation, University of Sydney, 4 June 2004.
  • [PAPERS/GUEST LECTURE] Inaugural Professorial lecture: “From Tomes to Terabytes: Confessions of an Art Historian in the Era of Visual Culture”, 5 May 2004
  • [PAPERS/GUEST LECTURE] “The Port of Algiers and Topographies of Power”, paper at Walls of Algiers, A Getty Research Institute Workshop, 22-27 May 2004, Los Angeles.
  • [PAPERS/GUEST LECTURE] “Cézanne and radical still life practice”, The Impressionists, Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, Symposium, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 19 June 2004.
  • [PAPERS/GUEST LECTURE] Repeated as one of two talks in An Impressionist Evening, with Dr. Ted Gott (NGV), Alumni and Friends of the Power Institute, 31 August 2004
  • [PAPERS/GUEST LECTURE] “Renoir and Algeria: politics, research, exhibition”, Keynote lecture, Art Association of Australia and New Zealand annual conference, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra , 6 December 2003.
  • [PAPERS/GUEST LECTURE] “Hild a Rix Nicholas ‘en orientale’”, Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, annual conference, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra , 5 December 2003.
  • [PAPERS/GUEST LECTURE] "The J. W. Power Collection of Contemporary Art and the Vizard Collection Compared", in Creators, Critics, Collectors: Collecting contemporary art in the 1990s, Symposium at Ian Potter Museum of Art, U of Melbourne, 13 September 2003.
  • [PAPERS/GUEST LECTURE] "Ingres and the Serpentine Line: Drawing, Portraiture, Nudes", Diploma course, Gallery Society, Art Gallery of NSW, 10 and 11 August 2003.
  • [PAPERS/GUEST LECTURE] "Renoir and Algeria", Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 15 February 2003; repeated at Visual Culture Colloquium, Bryn Mawr College, 24 February 2003.
  • [PAPERS/GUEST LECTURE] "Recherches orientalistes et initiative indigène: les peintres algériens à l’époque coloniale", in symposium Regards obliques sur l’orientalisme: la peinture des sociétés d’Islam, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 15 March 2002: first of four lectures in French based on my book Orientalist Aesthetics.
  • [PAPERS/GUEST LECTURE] "Renoir and Orientalism, " National Gallery, London, 8 April 2002.
  • [PAPERS/GUEST LECTURE] "Colonial Museology in Algiers, "Occidents will Happen, Tate Britain, London, 4 April, 2002.
  • [PAPERS/GUEST LECTURE] "La France musulmane: colonial and indigenous identities in the painting of French Algeria", Nationalism and French Visual Culture, 1870-1914, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2 February 2002 (to be published in Studies in the History of Art). Repeated Washington University in St. Louis, 5 February 2002.
  • [MEDIA REPORT] Interview for ABC Television’s 7:30 Report on French Masters from the Musée Léon Dierx with Jocelyn Nettlefold, 9 March 2005.
  • [MEDIA REPORT] Power Institute Foundation for Art & Visual Culture, Annual Report 2003, University of Sydney, 2004, 20pp. (editor)
  • [MEDIA REPORT] Coverage of Inaugural Lecture UniNews (21/5/04)
  • [MEDIA REPORT] Coverage of Motherwell Book Award, UniNews (18/6/04), mentions in SMH, Canberra Times, The Age, AAANZ Newsletter, NSW Ministry of the Arts Newsletter, CAA Newsletter.
  • [MEDIA REPORT] Interview on Renoir and Algeria, National Public Radio, Dallas, Texas, 12 June 2003.
  • [MEDIA REPORT] Interviews on Renoir and Algeria, local radio, Albany, New York, 14 February 2003.
  • Review of Orientalist Aesthetics in
    Canberra Times (AUS)
    African History (USA)
    Apollo (UK)
    Cahiers du Musee National d’Art Moderne (France)
    Meanjin (AUS)
    Art Monthly Australia (AUS)
    Choice (USA)
    The Art Bulletin (USA)
    The Art Newspaper (Italy/UK)
    H-France (USA)
    Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art (AUS)
    The Art Book (UK)
    The Oxford Art Journal (UK)
  • Reviews of Renoir and Algeria in:
    Apollo (UK)
    The Burlington Magazine (UK)
    The Art Book (UK)