Jennifer Johnson is currently a Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College at the University of Oxford. Her research concerns the construction of meaning in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century painting, with a particular interest in notions of materiality. Since receiving her PhD from History of Art at Oxford in 2014, Jennifer has published a book with Bloomsbury based on her doctoral thesis. The book, Georges Rouault and Material Imagining, is a reappraisal of the work of an artist who has tended to dwell on the margins of modernist art history. Often described as a difficult and dark painter, Jennifer shows us that Georges Rouault’s oeuvre is in fact deeply experimental.
She is currently researching the history of British and French abstraction, particularly in relation to landscape in the 1930s, and in the 1950s and 60s. Beginning with a study of the work and writings of Prunella Clough, Jennifer is interested in the ways in which the genre of landscape painting, including notions of the picturesque and topology, as well as changing ideas about the status of the ‘object’, inform this work, and what kind of experience – of the painted or constructed landscape, or of the world outside the work – is at stake.