• Chair, Art History and Archaeology

• Ph.D. in Art History at Columbia University

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Getty Museum Buys a Seldom-Exhibited Gauguin The New York Times March 12, 2008 -- The J. Paul Getty Museum announced Tuesday that it had acquired "Arii Matamoe," an 1892 painting by Paul Gauguin that has been in a private collection in Switzerland for decades and has been exhibited publicly only once since 1946. Elizabeth Childs, a Gauguin scholar who is chairwoman of WUSTL's art history and archaeology department, comments.

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Elizabeth Childs

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She arrived at Washington University in 1993, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1998. She spent 1996-1997 on sabbatical with a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers. She also received an Elisa Mellon Bruce Senior Visiting Fellowship which allowed her to spend the Spring of 1997 in residence at the Center for the Advanced Study of Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Professor Childs' teaching was honored when she was awarded the Council of Students in Arts and Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award in both 1996 and 2004. In 2005, she received an Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award from the Graduate Student Senate of the university.

She especially enjoys visiting museums with students, and in 2004 organized a trip for students to view the major Gauguin exhibition at the Museum of the Arts, Boston, as well as several field trips to the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis and the St. Louis Art Museum.

A selected list of publications includes:

Daumier amd Exoticism: Satirizing the French and the Foreign, Peter Lang Press, 2004.

"Catholicism and the Modern Mind: The Painter as Writer in Late Career," in Gauguin: Tahiti Musuem of Fine Arts Boston, 2004, pp. 223-242.

"Gauguin as Author: Writing the Studio of the Tropics," The Van Gogh Museum Journal, 2003, pp. 70-87.

"Eden's Other: Gauguin and the ethnographic grotesque," in Frances Connelly, ed. The Grotesque and Modern Art, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 175-192.

"Seeking the Studio of the South: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Avant-Garde Identity," in Cornelia Homburg, ed. Vincent Van Gogh and the Painters of the Petit Boulevard, Rizzoli Press with the St. Louis Art Museum, 2001, pp. 113-152.

"The Colonial Lens: Gauguin, Primitivism, and Photography in the fin-de-siècle," in Lynda Jessup, ed. Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity, University of Toronto Press, 2001, pp. 50-70.

Review of Stephen Eisenman's Gauguin's Skirt for the anthropological journal Pacific Studies (The Institute for Polynesian Studies, Laie, Hawaii), vol. 23, no1/2 (March-June 2000), pp. 75-85.

Three essays [on Degas, on Gauguin, and on "The Photographic Muse"] in Dorothy Kosinski, The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso (Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 24-33; 70-87; 116-141.

Suspended License: Censorship and the Visual Arts, Seattle: University of Washington Press (1997)

"Time's Profile: John Wesley Powell, Geology, and Art at the Grand Canyon, 1869-1882," American Art, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 7-36

(Co-authored with John Klein) "Oceanic Escapes: Travel, Memory and Decoration in the Art of Henri Matisse," in Roger Benjamin ed, Matisse, Queensland Art Gallery, 1995, pp. 122-135.

"Big Trouble: Daumier, Gargantua, and the Censorship of Political Caricature," Art Journal, vol. 51 (Spring 1992): 26-37

Femmes d'esprit: Women in the Caricature of Honoré Daumier, Hanover: University Press of New England, 1990 (co-edited and co-curated with Kristen Powell);

"The Secret Agents of Satire: Daumier, Censorship, and the Image of the Exotic in Political Caricature 1850-1860," in Proceedings of the Annual Meetings of the Western Society for French History, vol. 17 (1990); 334-346.

(Edited, with Louis Provost), Honoré Daumier: A Thematic Guide to the Oeuvre, Garland Press, 1989.

(Co-authored with L. Flint) Handbook to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1986.

Childs' book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Master Drawings and Women's Art Journal. Work in progress includes a book on painting and photography in fin-de-siècle Tahiti (under contract with University of California Press), and a monographic study on Gauguin (for Phaidon Press's "Art and Idea" series). She has also recently lectured or given papers at New York University, the University of North Carolina, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, The College Art Association meetings, and The French Historical Studies meetings.