Matthew James Holman is a writer, critic, and academic based in London. His work spans literature and the visual arts, with a particular focus on the avant-garde, cultural diplomacy, and the political life of modern art.
His first book, Frank O'Hara and MoMA: New York Poet, Global Curator (Bloomsbury), frames O'Hara as a central figure in the global circulation of postwar American art. Forrest Gander, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, wrote of it: ‘although Holman writes (to our immediate joy) less like an academic than a good novelist, his conjuring of a formative American cultural moment is assiduously researched.’ He is currently at work on a group biography of Black Mountain College.
He has written for major institutional publications, including the catalogue for Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (September 2026), and has contributed essays on artists including Frank Auerbach, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Françoise Gilot, and Christopher Le Brun, as well as Megan Rooney, Daniel Crews-Chubb, Emily Kraus, and Theodore Ereira-Guyer.
His criticism appears regularly in the Financial Times, Frieze, Apollo, the Times Literary Supplement, the Literary Review, New Left Review, and Jacobin, among others. He is Commissioning Editor at The Art Newspaper.
He completed a PhD in American cultural history at University College London, and has held fellowships at Yale University, the Smithsonian, the Courtauld Institute of Art (Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Fellow), the Paul Mellon Centre, and the John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin (Leverhulme Trust Fellow). He is Lecturer in Literature at the University of Hertfordshire and teaches art history on the public programme at the Courtauld. His academic writing — on subjects ranging from New Deal theatre to Abstract Expressionism and environmental poetics — has appeared in the Oxford Art Journal, Essays and Studies, Critical Quarterly, Textual Practice, and the Journal of Modern Literature.
For enquiries: matthew.james.holman@gmail.com
