Art Department

Brian Lukacher

Brian Lukacher has taught in the Department of Art at Vassar College since 1986. His teaching addresses the social formation of European visual culture and its philosophical and literary affiliations from the Enlightenment until the threshold of modernism. Seminar topics have included “Death in the Landscape: Poussin/Turner/Cézanne” and “Ruskin and Baudelaire.” His scholarship and research focuses on the social history and esthetic philosophy of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art and architecture. His scholarly essays have appeared in Word and Image, AA Files: Annals of the Architectural Association, and Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. He is the author of the monograph Joseph Gandy: Architectural Visionary in Georgian England (published by Thames & Hudson in 2006). He is also a contributing author to Nineteenth-Century Art: A Critical History (published by Thames & Hudson and now in its third edition) and to exhibition catalogues on Victorian pictorial photography and romantic antiquarian topography. Lukacher’s current scholarly project is entitled Fallacies of Vision: The Phantoms of J. M. W. Turner.