Paul Hayes Tucker (born 1950) is an American art historian, professor, curator, and author. He is regarded as the worldâÂÂs leading expert on Claude Monet (1840-1926) and an authority on French Impressionism. He spent 36 years teaching at the University of Massachusetts Boston, with visiting professorships at Williams College, The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, and the University of California Santa Barbara. He has curated major Monet and Impressionist exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Royal Academy of Arts, London, the National Gallery, Washington, The Wadsworth, the Artizon Museum, Tokyo, the Nagoya City Art Museum, and the Hiroshima Museum, among other institutions. He has also authored or edited 11 books.
Tucker was born in New York City. He grew up in Pelham, New York. Inspired by his grandfather Carlton J. H. Hayes, Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University and United States Ambassador to Spain during World War II, Tucker attended Williams College believing he would be a history major. The shift to art history came while studying under renowned Williams art history professors S. Lane Faison, Whitney Stoddard, and William Pierson, as well as spending a junior year summer in Florence taking art history courses in a program run by the University of Michigan and Sarah Lawrence College. His career trajectory was confirmed by his frequent visits to the Clark Art Institute during his senior year at Williams and a year-long NEH fellowship at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio that he was awarded after graduation.
As a graduate of Williams, he was a member of the so-called "Williams Mafia", a legendary group of art historians who matriculated from the college in the 1960s and 1970s and went on to become directors of major museums across America. Tucker also played football and rugby at Williams becoming a Little All-American offensive tackle in 1971.
From the Toledo Museum of Art, he went to Yale, where he earned his PhD in the History of Art in 1979. Tucker studied primarily under Robert L. Herbert, a leading modernist scholar who was responsible for advancing the discipline as a social art historian. Tucker's dissertation on MonetâÂÂs classic Impressionist paintings of the 1870s, Monet at Argenteuil, 1871-1878, was the first study of the artist that set his work in a social-political context. It became his first book. (Yale University Press, 1982.)
Tucker set the attendance record at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1990 with Monet in the '90s. The Series Paintings, which attracted 530,000 visitors, only to break his own record with Monet in the 20th Century in 1998 which drew 565,000. Both shows also broke records in London when they were at the Royal Academy of Arts. Monet in the 90s attracted 658,00 visitors in 1990. Monet in the 20th Century counted 813,000 in 1999 which made it the most visited exhibition in British history at the time. The catalogue for the exhibition sold over 125,000 copies, the most illustrated books Yale University Press had ever printed. His Monet. A Retrospective at the Bridgestone Museum (now Artizon Museum), Tokyo, Nagoya City Art Museum, and Hiroshima Museum was the second most visited show in Japan in 1995. Monet's Garden. Impressions of Giverny, which he curated for The New York Botanical Garden (May 19 â October 22, 2012), also broke records there. Other noteworthy shows Tucker curated include:
He is married to Maggie Moss-Tucker, and has two children, actor Jonathan Tucker and Jennie Taylor Tucker. Tucker retired from his position at UMass Boston to move to California in 2014, where he continues to work in the area of 19th and 20th century art. He is presently working on a college textbook on modern art titled Never Neutral. Modern Art: Courbet to Pollock.