Paul Hayes Tucker
Paul Hayes Tucker is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Boston having also served as a Visiting Professor at Williams College, The Institute of Fine Arts, and University of California Santa Barbara. The author or editor of eleven books on French art of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries and guest curator for numerous international exhibitions, Tucker has also written on a host of modern and contemporary artists and is presently preparing a textbook on modern art.
I never thought I would become an art historian. Before I went to Williams College, I didn’t even know there was a history of art. During my first couple of semesters, I took courses in the field to fulfill distribution requirements, but it wasn’t until my junior year, when I encountered Renaissance art firsthand during a summer program in Florence, that my eyes—and heart—opened. I decided right then, that if one could make a career out of this unlikely discipline, I wanted in. I returned to college committed, completing a dual major in art history and history.
It has been said that Jasper Johns’s Painted Bronze (1960) was generated by an offhand remark uttered in 1960 by the Abstract Expressionist, Willem de Kooning. The Dutchman was apparently grousing about Johns’s suave dealer, Leo Castelli, and his ability to market works by emerging artists. “Give that son-of-a-bitch two beer cans,” de Kooning supposedly snarled, “and he could sell them.”
