Full Name: Isaacson, Joel
Gender: male
Date Born: 1930
Date Died: unknown
Home Country/ies: United States
Subject Area(s): French (culture or style), Impressionist (style), and painting (visual works)
Institution(s): University of Michigan
Overview
Painter; Monet scholar and professor of the history of Art, University of Michigan. Isaacson initially pursued a career as a painter. He entered the Design Department of Brooklyn College in 1949 where his teachers included Stanley William Hayter, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. After graduating in 1952, he served two years in the U.S. army. Isaacson was discharged and spent the years 1954-1955 at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London. He returned to the United States, attending Oberlin College, graduating in 1957 with an MFA. As a painter, he moved to San Francisco, exhibiting in group shows for the next two years. Drawn to the history of art, he entered the University of California, Berkeley, writing his dissertation on Claude Monet’s early stylistic development, under Herschel B. Chipp. Isaacson joined The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1964 as an assistant professor. In 1972 Isaacson published one of the volumes in Alan Lane’s ground-breaking, single-work-of-art book series Art in Context. His topic was Monet’s le déjeuner sur l’herbe. He followed this with another monograph on Monet, Claude Monet: Observation and Reflection in 1978. Together with the French nineteenth-century studies scholar Jean-Paul Bouillon (b.1941), he curated a show for the University of Michigan Museum of Art, “The Crisis of Impressionism, 1878-1882,” issuing an accompanying catalog. Isaacson remained his entire career at Michigan, becoming emeritus in 1995. He returned to Berkeley in early 1996, pursuing painting once again.
Selected Bibliography
- [dissertation:] The Early Paintings of Claude Monet. University of California, Berkeley, 1967
- Monet: le déjeuner sur l’herbe. New York: Viking Press, 1972.
- Claude Monet, Observation and Reflection. Oxford: Phaidon, 1978.
- and Bouillon, Jean-Paul. The Crisis of Impressionism, 1878-1882. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Museum of Art, 1980.
Sources
Joel Isaacson webpage, https://www.isaacsonpaintings.com/bio.html
Contributors: Lee Sorensen