Tony Green

Tony Green is Emeritus Professor of Art History, University of Auckland, New Zealand. He was educated in Britain. While at Harrow School, he discovered modern painting and poetry and applied himself enthusiastically to both arts. He amused himself also with playing the piano and singing. His first degree was English Literature at St Catharine's College Cambridge. After that he spent two years at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, ending with a post-graduate diploma. He taught...See more

Tony Green is Emeritus Professor of Art History, University of Auckland, New Zealand. He was educated in Britain. While at Harrow School, he discovered modern painting and poetry and applied himself enthusiastically to both arts. He amused himself also with playing the piano and singing. His first degree was English Literature at St Catharine's College Cambridge. After that he spent two years at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, ending with a post-graduate diploma. He taught European art history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at the University of Edinburgh from 1960 to 1969. While in Edinburgh he gave numerous extra-mural classes and, encouraged by Anthony Blunt, worked at a thesis on Nicolas Poussin and the Seven Sacraments, which resulted in a PhD in Fine Arts in 1968. In 1969 he was appointed founding professor of art history in the University of Auckland. He began to pay serious attention to contemporary painting and sculpture and especially to the practices of his New Zealand contemporaries He wrote many reviews and articles for New Zealand periodicals and exhibition catalogues. He was founder of the Bulletin of New Zealand Art History, which he edited from 1972 to 1985. From the mid-1970s he became active as a poet and has published eight books of poems. He co-edited, with Wystan Curnow, Roger Horrocks and Judi Green, Splash, a small poetry and arts magazine in the 1980s, which was closely connected with the 'Language' writers in USA. While in Auckland, he began to accumulate essays on Nicolas Poussin's paintings and on various theoretical issues in the arts. These were based his teaching in seminars and they have been extensively re-written for this book. Two of these had ephemeral publication through the Dept of Art History as Rebecca at the well: questions of text & image and A shadow in Arcadia. See less