Niccola Shearman is a historian of twentieth-century European art, with a focus on Germany and Austria to 1945. She has taught a variety of undergraduate courses at The Courtauld and at the University of Manchester. She is a regular contributor to Courtauld Short Courses, in addition to other freelance public lecturing, and in 2024 will curate a display of Expressionist works on paper at the Courtauld Gallery (with Emily Christensen).
Niccola’s PhD (2018) concerned the intense wave of woodcut printmaking in the aftermath of the First World War in Germany. Entitled ‘Weimar in Black and White’, it examined the careers of two artists in the context of a widespread emotional investment in this spare graphic medium during a volatile era. Her publications and research interests continue to lie in the history of printmaking, especially where these overlap with theories of empathy and the psychology of vision; as for instance in relation to the Gestalt School of early twentieth century Berlin. Teaching and research on Viennese modernism extends to the careers of artists in exile in the UK. Amongst other writing projects, she is to be co-editor of a volume of essays in honour of the late Dr Shulamith Behr (Peter Lang, 2025).
Education
- 2018: PhD, Courtauld Institute of Art, Weimar in Black and White: the Woodcut in Germany, 1918 – 1927
- 2007: MA in the History of Art (German art & cultural politics, 1890-1945), Courtauld Institute.
- 1988: PGCE in German and French, London University Institute of Education.
- 1986: BA Hons in Modern Languages, Oxford University.
Teaching
Courtauld Institute
Associate Lecturer: BA1 Topic Course, 2014-18 and 2024-25, Graphic Expressions – printmaking in Germany, 1880-1923
Short Courses Lecturer: Summer School 2016-24 (Art of the Weimar Republic / Vienna 1900 / visions of Utopia in German Expressionist Art); Study Tours to Munich and Vienna; Showcasing Art History series lectures 2022, ‘Agents of Change: women in German and Austrian Modernism’; Introduction to Art History (with Anne Puetz) 2025
University of Manchester, Art History and Cultural Practices
Lecturer for 20th Century Art, 2019-2023: Lectures and seminars in German Expressionism (BA1) European Field Trip Vienna module (BA2,) Art of the Weimar Republic (BA3) Art in Vienna (BA2); BA3 dissertation.
Publications
2024: ‘Werefkin and her salon’ & ‘The Blaue Reiter Almanac: a collective endeavour’, in Natalia Sidlina, ed., Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider, London: Tate
2023: ‘Emotional Viewing: on finding a visible relief in the German woodcut print, c. 1435-1921’ in Juliet Simpson and Gabriele Rippl, eds, Emotional Objects: Northern Renaissance Afterlives in Object, Image and Word, Journal of the Northern Renaissance special issue, no. 14 (Online; open access)
2018: ‘Reversal of Values: on the woodblock and its print in German modernist art’ in M.Bushart and H. Haug, eds, Sammelband zur Tagung Spur der Arbeit, Berlin: Böhlau.
2017: Encyclopedia of Bible Reception, vol. 15, entry on the art of Oskar Kokoschka, Berlin: De Gruyter (online publication).
2014: ‘“Seeing is Everything”: On the visual demands of Lyonel Feininger’s woodcuts’, Immediations (Courtauld Institute journal of postgraduate research).
2012: ‘Chasing Linear Fantasies: a study of the Gothic line in the work of Ernst Barlach’, in A. Lepine & L. Cleaver, eds, Gothic Legacies: Four Centuries of Tradition and Innovation in Art and Architecture, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
- Book Reviews for The Burlington Magazine, Prints Quarterly, Art History