CAA Award for Carol Armstrong

We are delighted to announce that Professor Carol Armstrong has been awarded the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement for Writing on Art. This richly deserved accolade, conferred by the College Art Association, the national organization representing our field, recognizes a colleague whose work is notable for poetic eloquence that is braided with historical insights and feminist critique.  Her colleagues and students in the Department of the History of Art offer warm congratulations on the award—though none of us can quite accept that Carol has announced her retirement from teaching at the end of the Spring term, 2025. We all wish her the very best as she moves ahead full time with research, writing and creative projects.

Among her many publications, Cézanne’s Gravity (2018), Manet Manette (2002) and Odd Man Out : Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas (1991) are essential reading for all scholars of nineteenth-century painting. As accomplished a critic and historian of photography as she is of painting and drawing, Carol’s publications also include Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843-1875 (1998) and an edited volume, Ocean Flowers (2004), which accompanied an exhibition of the work of Anna Atkins. Some of her many essays on modern and contemporary artists have been assembled in the anthology Painting Photography Painting (2023).

Carol has been at the heart of the Department’s intellectual life since her arrival in 2007, following appointments at the University of California, Berkeley, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; and Princeton University.  In 2013, on the occasion of the 150-year anniversary of Edouard Manet’s two most famous paintings, she co-curated an exhibition called “Lunch with Olympia” with Robert Storr at the Yale University School of Art’s Edgewood Gallery. In December 2021, she organized and contributed to the conference “Woman/Artist,” gathering together several generations of Yale artists, art historians and students to address anew the famously sarcastic question posed by Linda Nochlin in 1971, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

Congratulations, Carol.