Margaret Werth received her BS from Boston University and her MA and PhD from Harvard University. Her primary area of interest is art and visual culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her book The Joy of Life: The Idyllic in French Art, circa 1900, published in 2002, explores dreamlike representations of mythic community, individual fantasy, utopianism, and sensual joie de vivre in French painting from 1890 to 1917. Artists such as Henri Matisse, Paul Signac, Puvis de Chavannes, Paul Cezanne, and Henri-Edmond Cross figure prominently in her book and are discussed in relation to contemporary political, literary, psychological, and philosophical discourses. An essay on Pablo Picasso's early representations of the body was published in Picasso: The Early Years (National Gallery of Art, 1997), and an essay on Matisse’s Nude with a White Scarf of 1909 in a collection of essays on Matisse published by the Statens Museum fur Kunst, Copenhagen in 2005. Her new book project studies representations of the human face in painting, printmaking, photography, and film between circa 1880 and 1930. It investigates how such images elaborate changing ideas about subjectivity, identity, affect, gender, sexuality, technology, and visuality.
Professor Werth teaches courses on Modern Art (19th and 20th century), Symbolism, Modern Portraiture, Silent Film, Literature and the Visual Arts, Nineteenth-Century Paris, Histories and Theories of Landscape, Early Twentieth-Century Modernisms, and Methods and Theories of Art History. She taught at Barnard College, Columbia University, before coming to the University of Delaware in 2001. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Georges Pompidou Art and Culture Foundation.
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