William Norman Bryson (born 1949) is an Anglo American art historian who authored several major works that were particularly influential in the 1980s and 1990s. He graduated with a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1977, and subsequently worked as a professor at King's College until 1988, when he moved to Rochester, NY. There, he worked for two years at the University of Rochester before moving to Harvard University in 1990.^[1] In a shift from that earlier period, he now is faculty at University of California, San Diego, and primarily writes about contemporary art, such as Sharon Lockhart. His career is characterized by a move to a more literary theory-based approach to art history,^[2] including Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime (1983), Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (1986), and Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (1987). He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997.^[3]

Works

• The Swimmer & Other Poems (1969)
• Word and Image: French Painting in the Ancien Regime (1981)
• Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (1983)
• Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (1984)
• The Logic of the Gaze (1986)
• Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (1989)
• Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (1990)
• In Medusa's Gaze: Still Life Paintings From Upstate New York Museums (1991)
• Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (1993)
• Inside/ Out: New Chinese Art (1998)