After receiving his PhD with a dissertation on the German painter Franz Radziwill, James van Dyke taught, translated, and worked as a free-lance museum docent and scholar in Germany in the 1990s. In 2000, he returned to the United States, where he taught at Reed College and Oberlin College until arriving at the University of Missouri in 2010. Trained in the social history of art, he is a specialist in twentieth-century German painting and politics, with a particular interest in the ways in which artworks, artists, and artistic institutions have been and continue to be shaped by catastrophic historical events, structural social contradictions, and extreme ideological responses to them. While he has published on the work of a number of artists, at the center of his research over the last fifteen years has been the painting of Otto Dix, examined both in detail and situated in the broad fields of artist production, politics, and economics. With the completion of his book on Dix, a new, very different book-length project is taking shape. It will examine the the styles, iconographies, and functions of the corporate imagery of the Royal Dutch Shell group in competing and conflicting political systems between the late 1920s and the mid-1940s, above all concentrating on the United Kingdom, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and revolutionary Mexico. This project aims to bring together the methods and and interests of the social history of art with the ideas of ecocriticism. His research has been supported by grants and fellowships from, among others, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Gerda-Henkel-Stiftung, the Getty Research Library, the National Humanities Center, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C..

Focus Area

Modern European Art, Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Art and Theory

Teaching

• ARH_VS 2850: Introduction to Visual Culture
• ARH_VS 3740: Nineteenth-Century European Art
• ARH_VS 3750: Modern Art in Europe and America
• ARH_VS 3760: Contemporary Art
• ARH_VS 4005/7005: Topics in Modern and Contemporary Art History
  • --Photography between the Wars
  • --Modern European Design
  • --War and Photography
  • --Modernism in Missouri (Maymester)
  • --Modern and Contemporary German Art in Missouri Museums (Maymester)
• ARH_VS 4130/7130: Museum Studies in Theory and Practice
• ARH_VS 4760/7760: Modern Sculpture (2020: Modern Sculpture, History, and Public Memory)
• ARH_VS 4780/7780: Advanced Topics Course in Contemporary Art
  • --Contemporary Art and Memorial Culture
  • --Institutional Critique
• ARH_VS 8750: Seminar in Modern and Contemporary Art
  • --Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the Avant-Garde in Imperial Germany
  • --Modernism, Figurative Painting, and Politics in France, Italy, and Germany after World War I
  • --Otto Dix and Weimar Culture
  • --Realism
  • --Modern Art, Mass Media, and Radical Politics in the Weimar Republic (cross-listed as GERMAN 8087)
  • --Modern German Art in Missouri Museums

Selected Publications

Books:

Franz Radziwill and the Contradictions of German Art History, 1919-1945, Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).

Otto Dix in Detail: Painting and Precarity in the Field of Weimar Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, under contract, anticipated publication in Spring 2026). 

Selected Articles and Essays:

“Kafka’s Drawings and the Social History of Art,” The Germanic Review, 99, no. 2 (2024): 273-96, special issue on Kafka’s Drawings, edited by Carsten Strathausen.

“The Painter Werner Peiner, the Culture of the German Oil Industry, and the Nature of Hitler’s State,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 85, no. 3 (September 2022): 390-414, special issue on Art and Environment in the Third Reich, ed. Matthew Vollgraff and Greg Bryda. 

“Modernism and the State: German Art Academies in Crisis during the Weimar Republic,” Kunstchronik (Munich) 75, no. 5 (May 2022): 218-26.

“German Art and War in the Year 1932,” Oxford German Studies, 49, no. 4 (December 2020): 336-62, special issue on German culture in the aftermath of World War I, edited by Catherine Smale and Tara Talwar Windsor.

“On Masculinity and Male Sexuality in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Soldiers’ Bath,” Art History 43, no. 5 (November 2020): 892-926.

“Style,” Kunst und Politik. Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft 21 (2019): 149-56, special issue on “Keywords for Marxist Art History Today,” ed. Andrew Hemingway and Larne Abse Gogarty.

“Dix und die Illustrierte Moderne,” in: Egger-Lienz und Otto Dix: Bilderwelten zwischen den Kriegen, ed. Helena Pereña and Astrid Flögel, exh. cat. Tiroler Landesmuseen, Innsbrück and Zeppelin Museum, Friedrichshafen (Munich: Hirmer, 2019), 137-49.

“On the Possibility of Resistance in Two Silverpoints by Otto Dix,” in: Art and Resistance in Germany, ed. Elizabeth Otto and Deborah Ascher Barnstone (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 151-72.

“Dix Petrified,” in: Art and War (German Visual Culture series), ed. Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Barbara McCloskey (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017), 103-27.

“On the Challenge of Nazi Art,” German Quarterly 90, no. 3 (2017): 366-8.

“Otto Dix’s Triptych The War,” Kunst und Politik. Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft 18 (2016): 25-35, special issue on “Hauptwerke politischer Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert/Icons of 20th-Century Political Art,” ed. Andrew Hemingway and Norbert Schneider.

“The Politics of the New Objectivity, A Specific History,” in: New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933, ed. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann, exh. cat. Museo Correr, Venice, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (New York: Prestel, 2015), 65-75.

“On the Grotesque Body in a Double-Sided Drawing by Otto Dix,” in: Naked Truth: The Body in Early 20th Century Germany and Austria. Middlebury College Museum of Art, 2015, (Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2015), 61-77.

“Radical Art History and the Art of Social Protest in Imperial Germany,” in: Protest and Social Reform in German Culture, 1871-1918, ed. Godela Weiss-Sussex and Charlotte Woodford (Munich: Iudicium, 2015), 15-35.              

“Erasure and Jewishness in Otto Dix’s Portrait of the Lawyer Hugo Simons,” in ReNew Marxist Art History, ed. Warren Carter, Barnaby Haran, and Frederic J. Schwartz (London: Art/Books, 2013), 362-81.

“Torture and Masculinity in George Grosz’s Interregnum,” New German Critique 119, vol. 40, no. 2 (summer 2013): 137-65

“Ernst Barlach and the Conservative Revolution,” German Studies Review 36, no. 2 (2013): 281-305.

“Something New on Nolde, National Socialism, and the SS,” Kunstchronik (Munich) 65 (2012): 265-270.

“Otto Dix’s Streetbattle and the Limits of Satire in Düsseldorf, 1928,” Oxford Art Journal 32 (2009): 37-65.