Dr Jenny Nachtigall

Jenny Nachtigall is Lecturer in Modernity and its Critical Histories. She specialises in modern and contemporary art in its global contexts, German art and material culture of the interwar period, aesthetics and the historiography of art. She currently works on a monograph that revisits the roles of visual pedagogy for the making of modern art, especially abstraction, in interwar Germany. A second project is an edited volume of essays on and translations by the critic and writer Lu Märten: Lu Märten’s Social History of Form: A Sourcebook on Art, Material Culture and Feminism.

Jenny Nachtigall joined the department in 2022 as a Lecturer in Modernity and its Critical Histories. She was awarded her PhD in the History of Art at UCL. Prior to her appointment, she held visiting professorships in the history of art and aesthetics at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, the Städelschule Frankfurt, and the Goethe University Frankfurt. Jenny’s research and teaching were supported by the AHRC, the DAAD, the DFG Foundation, Etxepare Euskal Instiutua and Volkswagen Foundation a.o. She is a member of the editorial group of Oxford Art Journal.

Research

Jenny’s research interests include the art and material culture of modern Germany in its global contexts with a specific focus on the applied arts, abstraction and visual pedagogy. She is interested in art writing and historiography and has published on alternative histories and theories of form-thinking in the work of Carl Einstein and Lu Märten. Other interests include the histories of vitalism and ecological thought in modern art and philosophy, transnational networks of artistic exchange and collaboration, and contemporary painting. 

Her current book project examines the roles that imperial and reform pedagogies played for the visual vocabularies of German interwar art and material culture. At its core is a group of artists, abstract art collectives and writers that have remained largely understudied in scholarship on the design education of the interwar period and the Bauhaus. The project traces how their images and texts were informed by object lessons, drawing education and forms of pictorial instruction that date to the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, when Germany’s imperial designs and ambitions for national building defined conceptions of subjecthood, vision and space.  

An ongoing project engages with different histories of ecology and modernity’s vitalist imagination. Jenny is especially interested in the function of organic processes, biological images and ecological models for the emergence of new, experimental forms of visual practice. A recent essay on Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s drawings and reliefs explored the artist’s kinaesthetic sensibility and use of environmental form to organise her image-objects towards a shared space or “common dimension”. A work-in-progress examines the water-themed abstract paintings of Czech artist duo Toyen and Jindřich Štyrský  in relation to the new image worlds of the ocean that commodified entertainment (grottos, world fairs) and visual technologies of photography and film brought to a mass audience.

Specialisms
19th and 20th century European art and material culture in its global contexts, German modernism, aesthetics and the historiography of art, ecology, contemporary art.

Selected Publications

• “Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Environments” in Briony Fer, ed., Sophie Taeuber-Arp. La règle des courbes (The Rule of Curves), (Zurich: Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2026).
• “Shape, Unceasing. Notes on Process in Amy Sillman’s Recent Work”, in Kathleen Bühler, Eva Birkenstock (eds.), Amy Sillman – Oh Clock! (Cologne: Koenig Books, 2024).
• Hybrid Ecologies/ Hybride Ökologien, co-editor (Berlin/ Zurich: Diaphanes, 2019).
• “Vitalism/ Living Form” in Anselm Franke, Tom Holert, ed., Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930 (Berlin/ Zurich: Diaphanes, 2018).
• “Get Rid of Your Self: Lu Märten’s Monist Art History”, in Illiberal Arts, ed. Anselm Franke, Kerstin Stakemeier (Berlin: Polypen/b-books, 2021).
• “Art Work as Life Work. On Lu Märten’s Feminist ‘Objectivity’” (with Kerstin Stakemeier), October, vol. 178 (Fall 2021). 

Teaching and Supervision

Jenny currently teaches a variety of undergraduate modules, including “Planetary/Provincial: Modern Art and Architecture in its Global Context”,  “The Modern Arts of Living” and the “History of the Category ‘Art’”. 

She welcomes enquiries from potential postgraduate students keen to work on topics relating to modern and contemporary art and material culture in its global contexts, German art, abstraction, the historiography of art and ecology. Prospective students should contact Jenny directly at: jenny.nachtigall@ucl.ac.uk. 

Current Research Students

Caitlin Power: Subtractive Posthumanism: Rethinking Received Notions of the Reproductive Body in Weimar Germany (UCL, second supervisor with Frederic J. Schwartz)

Zaena Sheehan: Porous Bodies: Bio-materialism in Contemporary Art (UCL, third supervisor with Cadence Kinsey, Helia Marcal)

Manon Abt: Between Re-imagination and Resignation: The Preservation of Early Computer-Based Artworks (1960-1991) (UCL, second supervisor, with Pip Laurenson)

Contact 

Office: Room 303, 20 Gordon Square
Office Hours: Term 3, Thursdays, 14:00-15:00. Please book here
Email: jenny.nachtigall@ucl.ac.uk