Alexander Nemerov teaches and writes about American visual culture from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century.  He has focused primarily on painting but lately has turned more and more to the study of film, theater, and sculpture.  His writing often analyzes fiction and poetry alongside works of visual art.

His seminars include “The Visual Culture of the American Home Front, 1941-1945” and “American Art in the Democratic Age, 1830-1860.”  His recent lecture courses have been a survey of American photography from the daguerreotype to 1971; a survey of American painting and sculpture from Copley to Pollock; and a survey of western art from Giotto to David.

He is now at work on two projects:  a study of a single night’s performance of Macbeth during Abraham Lincoln’s Presidency; and a study of the artistic relationship of his father, the poet Howard Nemerov, and his aunt, the photographer Diane Arbus.

Selected Publications
“Morris Louis:  Court Painter of the Kennedy Era,” in Morris Louis Now:  An American Master Revisited (Atlanta:  High Museum of Art, 2006)

“The Boy in Bed:  The Scene of Reading in N. C. Wyeth’s Wreck of the ‘Covenant’,” Art Bulletin 88 (March 2006):  7-27

Frederic Remington and the American Civil War:  A  Ghost Story (Stockbridge, Mass.:  Norman Rockwell Museum, 2006)

Icons of Grief:  Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures (University of California Press, 2005)

“The Flight of Form:  Auden, Bruegel, and the Turn to Abstraction in the 1940s,” Critical Inquiry 31 (Summer 2005):  780-810

“Coming Home in 1945:  Reading Robert Frost and Norman Rockwell,” American Art 18 (Summer 2004):  58-79

“The Dark Cat:  Arthur Putnam and a Fragment of Night,” American Art 16 (Spring 2002):  36-59

The Body of Raphaelle Peale:  Still Life and Selfhood, 1812-1824 (University of California Press, 2001)

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