Faculty Emeritus

Biographical Information:

Professor Spector is a specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European art. He is currently working on a book about early school education under the Third Republic in France and its bearing on the formation of the Parisian avant-garde before World War I. He is also working on Freud's influence on Klee and Miro and serves as editor for the psychoanalytical journal American Imago. Professor Spector recently completed a series of studies on Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q., linking it to fin-de-siècle Symbolism. His most important previous publications include Surrealist Art and Writing, 1919 to 1939, The Gold of Time(Cambridge University Press, 1997), and The Aesthetics of Freud, 1972/8, which has been reprinted and translated into many languages. The second Chinese edition was re-issued in 1997.

Recent Publications:

Surrealist Art and writing, 1919 to 1939, The Gold of Tome. Cambridge University Press, Oct.1996.

Editor, 2 issues of American Image, Vol.53, nos.1,2, "New Directions in Art History," I and II, Spring, Fall 1996; with my introduction to no.1, pp.1-5, and my article "Medusa on the Barricades," in no.1, pp.25-51. 

"Delacroix's Liberty on the Barricades in 1815 and 1830" in Source, Notes on the History of Art vol.xv no.3, Spring, 1996, pp.36-41. 

"Transparence, Utopia and Narcissism; Breton in the Twenties and Thirties" forthcoming in a volume publishing a Hofstra Symposium on "The American Years of Andre Breton." 

Preface to the second printing of the Chinese translation of The Aesthetics of Freud, 1996. 

Two lectures bear on this research: "Die Grenzen der Vernunft in der modernen Kunst: Klee, Miro und Freud" (Goethe Universitat, Kunstgeschichtliche Institut, Vienna, Sept.26, 1997); "Rebus" (SUNY, Stony Brook, Nov.19, 1997).