Paul Wood

Paul Wood began working for the Open University in the 1980s as a part-time Tutor in Scotland, based in Edinburgh. Since the 1990s he has worked in the Dept of Art History at Milton Keynes. His main involvement has been in the history of the modern movement. Previously, he was a Tutor on A315, Modern Art & Modernism which ran between 1983 and 1992, a Course Team member on A316 Modern Art: Practices and Debates from 1992 to 2003. He is currently Course Team Chair of AA318 Art of the Twentieth Century which appeared in 2004. He also works on the second level course A216, Art and its Histories and has written on the relation between non-western art and the ‘modern movement’ for the level 1 course AA100 The Arts Past and Present. His work has been published in numerous books, catalogues and journals in the field. His principal research interests lie in the theory of modernism and the avant-garde, and in revolutionary art and realism. More recently, he has worked on contemporary questions of globalisation and the relation of the western canon to non-western art. He is currently working on issues around the ‘Benin bronzes’ and is involved in a joint project with the Open University and the British Museum on Ancient Egyptian art.In collaboration with Charles Harrison, he began Art in Theory in the early 1990s: a project to document the changing ideas which have informed the practice of modern art. Art in Theory 1900-1990 was published in 1992. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood were then joined by Jason Gaiger, and subsequently two further volumes have appeared, tracing the process back to the mid-seventeenth century: Art in Theory 1815-1900 and Art in Theory 1648-1815. In 2002 a new edition of the twentieth century volume was published as Art in Theory 1900-2000, thus completing the project to document the theoretical formation of the art of the extended modern period from the founding of the Academy to post-modernism.