Christopher Wood (art historian)


Christopher S. Wood is professor and chair of the Department of German at New York University; he is best known as an art historian.

Early life and education

Wood is the son of Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize winning historian of the early American republic and University professor emeritus at Brown University. His sister, Amy Wood, is a professor of history at Illinois State University.
Wood was raised in Barrington, Rhode Island, attending Barrington High School. He earned an A.B. in history and literature at Harvard University, in 1983. After a year on a Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst Fellowship at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany, he returned to Harvard and in 1992 received a PhD in fine arts. From 1989 to 1992, he was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Career

From 1992 to 2014, Wood rose, incrementally, from assistant professor to Carnegie Professor in the History of Art at Yale University. In 2014, he joined the German studies department at New York University.
Wood has also held visiting appointments at the University of California, Berkeley ; Vassar College, as Belle Ribicoff Distinguished Visiting Scholar, 2001; and Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
From 1999 to 2002, he was book review editor of the journal of the College Art Association, the Art Bulletin. His review of Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologie, in Art Bulletin 86 : 370-73, was selected as one of 38 texts for inclusion in the Art Bulletin Centennial Anthology, 1911-2011. In 2019 he published A History of Art History.

Research

Wood's dissertation and first book, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, was a monograph on the sixteenth-century German painter who created the first pure landscape paintings in the European tradition. This book was reissued with a new Afterword in 2014. Wood has published many articles on the art and culture of the German late Middle Ages and Renaissance, including essays on Albrecht Dürer and Albrecht Altdorfer; on drawings; on the cult of images and Reformation iconoclasm; on ex votos; and on early archeological scholarship. He has also written on Italian artists including Piero della Francesca, Raphael, and Dosso Dossi.
In 2000 Wood published an anthology of translated writings by Viennese art historians of the early twentieth century, with an introductory essay: '. His work on the history of the discipline of art history and its meaning within modernity includes articles on Alois Riegl, Josef Strzygowski, Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, Otto Pächt, Ernst Gombrich, and Michael Baxandall. He has translated the treatise Perspective as Symbolic Form by Panofsky.
Another aspect of his research is the coordination of art and history. Early archeological studies, archaism, and typology are the main themes of his ', which was awarded the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship. , co-authored with Alexander Nagel, has been widely reviewed. The French translation by Françoise Jaouen was awarded the Prix de la traduction of the Salon du livre et de la revue d'art at the Festival de l'histoire de l'art, Fontainebleau, June 2013. Italian and Spanish translations are in press.

Honors