Cécile Whiting

Picture of Cécile Whiting
Chancellor's Professor, Art History
School of Humanities
Professor, Visual Studies
School of Humanities
Ph.D., Stanford, Art History
B.A., Swarthmore College
University of California, Irvine
Department of Art History
2216 Humanities Gateway
Mail Code: 2785
Irvine, CA 92697
Research Abstract
My research focuses primarily on American art of the mid-twentieth century about which I have published three books: Antifascism in American Art (Yale, 1989), A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture (Cambridge, 1997), and Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s (Berkeley, 2006). My most recent book was awarded the 21st Charles C. Eldredge Prize awarded annually by the Smithsonian American Art Museum for outstanding scholarship in the field of American Art. More recently, in 2018 I received the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History from the Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

Before joining the faculty at U.C.I., I taught between 1988 and 2003 in the Department of Art History at U.C.L.A. At U.C.I. I have served as Director of the Graduate Program in Visual Studies, Associate Dean of Graduate Studies in the School of Humanities, and Chair of the Department of Art History.

My teaching surveys the history of American art from the colonial through modern periods. Specialized seminars have covered topics such as Interwar Modernity, Vision/Body/Affect, and U.S. War, Art, and Memory.

SELECTED RECENT PUBLICATIONS
•BOOKS

Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Paperback 2008.
Awarded the 21st Annual Charles Eldredge Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in American Art.

A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• “Courageux guerriers, heroines sentimentales,”(traduit de l'anglais par Jean-Francois Cornu) in Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, catalog published by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2013.
• Chapter 3, “Lichtenstein’s Borrowed Spots,” Swedish translation in Den Maskulina Mystiken, ed. A-L Lindberg (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2003).
• Chapter 1 (revised), “Oldenburg’s Store.” In Claes Oldenburg, ed. Nadma Rottner. Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press.

Antifascism in American Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

•SELECTED ARTICLES
"On the Road with Alexis Smith," forthcoming in Alexis Smith: The American Way (Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 2022).

“Christina Ramberg,” forthcoming in Unforgettable: An Alternate History of American Art ed. Charles C. Eldredge (University of California Press, 2022).

"Andrew Wyeth and the Birds of War" Panorama 7.2 Fall 2021.

“Peter Blume’s The Rock and the Post-war Landscape,” special issue on “Landscape and Aesthetic Spatialities in the Anthropocene,” RANAM (Recherches Anglaises et Nord-Americaines), Spring 2021, 73-87.

“Abstraction and the Aerial View,” in First Glimpse: Introducing the Buck Collection at the UCI Institute and Museum for California Art ed. Kevin Appel (Verona, Italy: Verona Libri, 2018), 106-127.

"Propaganda in the Pacific," in The Asia-Pacific War in Visual Culture, ed. Yongchul Kim (Seoul: Hyunsil Publishing Co., 2018)

"Philip Johnson: The Whence and Whither of Art in Architecture," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 75 no.3 (September 2016): 318-338.

"Ben Shahn: Aggrieved Men and Nuclear Fallout during the Cold War," American Art 30 (Fall 2016): 3-25.

"Ed Ruscha City Optics: Gunpowder Ribbon Drawings," Forthcoming in Ed Ruscha: History, eds Benoit Buquet, Jean-Pierre Criqui, Larissa Dyransky (Zurich: JRP Pringier)

"Apocalypse in Paradise: Niki de Saint Phalle in Los Angeles," Woman's Art Journal 35 (Spring/Summer 2014): 14-22.

“Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Venus at the Shore,” Proceedings from Yasuo Kuniyoshi Symposium, University of Tsukuba, Japan,2013.

“The Sublime and the Banal in Postwar Photography of the West,” American Art 27 (Summer 2013): 44-67.

“Second Sex in the Second City: Women of Chicago Imagism,” in Chicago Imagism: Paintings, Sculptures, and Works on Paper from the Collection of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art ed. Jane Simon (Madison: Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011), 115-133.

“The Los Angeles Tableau of Ed Kienholz,” in Kienholz: The Signs of the Time ed. Martina Weinhart (Frankfurt: Shirn Kunsthalle with Walter Koenig Publishers, 2011).

“Contemporary Art, Studio Ceramics, and the Clay Revolution in Los Angeles,” in Common Ground: Post WWII Innovations in Clay eds. Christy Johnson and Wilona Billie Sessions (Pomona: American Museum of Ceramic Art, 2011).

“David Hockney: A Taste for Los Angeles,” Art History 34 (September 2011) and in Anglo-American: Art between England and America, 1770-1970 eds. David Peters Corbett and Sarah Monks (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

“California War Babies: Picturing World War Two in the 1960s.” Art Journal 69 (Fall 2010): 41-61.

“It’s Only a Paper Moon: The Cyborg Eye of Vija Celmins,” American Art 23 (Spring 2009)36-55.

“Los Angeles Art in the 1960s,” in Time & Place: Los Angeles 1957-1968 ed. Lars Nittve (Stockholm: Moderna Museet Exhibition Catalogue in association with Steidl Verlag Publishers), October 2008, 11-35. Reprinted in Hot Spots: Rio de Janiero/Milano-Torino/Los Angeles, 156-1969 (Kunsthaus Zurich Steidl, 2009).

“A New England Lament: Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand in the 1940s,” Art Bulletin 99 (December 2007): 797-814.

“Ed Ruscha Gunpowder Drawings,” brochure for exhibition at Craig F. Starr Associates, New York (October 24- December 15, 2007).

“More Than Meets the Eye: Archibald Motley and Debates on Race in Art.” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 26 (2001): 449-476.

“Decorating with Stettheimer and the Boys.” American Art 14 (Spring 2000): 25-49.

“Trompe L’œil and the Counterfeit Civil War.” The Art Bulletin 79 (Spring 1997): 251-268.
Last updated
04/06/2022