Tamar Garb is Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art, UCL.
She graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, the University of Cape Town with a BA (Art) in 1978. In 1980 she was awarded an MA in Art Education from the Institute of Education, University of London and in 1982 she graduated with an MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art. She completed her PhD at the Courtauld Institute which was awarded in 1991. She was appointed as Lecturer at the Courtauld in 1988 and at UCL in 1989 and was promoted to reader in 1995 and professor in 2001.
Her research interests have focused on questions of gender and sexuality; the woman artist and the body in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century French art; feminist politics in the context of global and international developments in theory and practice; and questions of gender and sexuality in historic and contemporary areas.
Key publications include Sisters of the Brush: Women’s Artistic Culture in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris (Yale University Press, 1994); Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin de Siecle France, (Thames & Hudson, 1998) and The Painted Face, Portraits of Women in France 1814 -1914 (Yale University Press, 2007).
Her interests have turned recently to post-apartheid culture and art as well as the history of photographic practices in South Africa. In 2008 she curated an exhibition on Landscape and Language in South African Art entitled Land Marks/Home Lands; Contemporary Art from South Africa at Haunch of Venison Gallery in London. In April 2011, her exhibition Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography opened at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.