Professor Roger Benjamin
Professor of Art History
Roger Benjamin trained in art history at the University of Melbourne and Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. His research has focused on the art and theory of Matisse, French Orientalist painting, and contemporary Australian Aboriginal art. In 1995 he co-curated Matisse for the Queensland Art Gallery; his exhibition Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee was held at the Art Gallery of NSW in 1997. In 2003 he published Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism and French North Africa, 1880-1930 (which won the Motherwell Book Award in New York in 2004); in the same year he curated Renoir and Algeria for the Clark Art Institute of Williamstown Massachusetts. Recent projects include a monograph on the Chilean-Australian artist Juan Davila (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006) and Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Painting from Papunya (Cornell University Press).
Formerly Director of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney, he is Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History & Film Studies, and a Research Associate of the US Studies Centre. In semester 1 2011 he is teaching American Art: Pollock to Warhol, a Master's seminar cross-listed with the US Studies Centre. Professor Benjamin also works to enrich the Centre's cultural engagement in the US-Australia dialogue and its sponsorship of artistic and scholarly events.
