HENRY McMAHON

BIO
Henry McMahon teaches courses in the history of modern art. He holds a PhD in art history from Rice University. Through a model of language advanced by the French literary theorist Jean Paulhan, in which the material aspect of any language figures as part of our habitual communication in it, Henry’s dissertation reconsiders the works of the French painters Jean Fautrier and Jean Dubuffet and the Danish painter Asger Jorn.
As he argues, each of these painters engages in the same play between material and immaterial that we all do in our everyday uses and encounters with language, each attempting in this way to build wide audiences for modernist painting that had eluded more private and arcane avant gardes.
Henry is adapting his dissertation into articles on Fautrier, Dubuffet, and Jorn, while conducting additional research on the French painter Georges Braque and the German painter Wols for a book project on Paulhan and this commonplace avant garde.

EDUCATION
PhD in Art History, Rice University, 2025
BA in English, Gallatin School, New York University, 2004

PUBLICATIONS
“Jean Paulhan’s Critique of Judgment,” Écrire la Terreur, eds. Antoine Poisson and Anton Hureaux. (Forthcoming)“Commonplace Avant Garde: Jean Paulhan and Modernist Painting in Midcentury
France.” PhD dissertation. Department of Art History, Rice University. July 2025.

COURSES TAUGHT
ART175: History of Global Art I
ART473A: Art of the First Half of the Twentieth Century
ART474B: Art Since 1945