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. He lectures at two colleges of the University of London: in modern literature at Royal Holloway, and on the public programme at The Courtauld Institute of Art, where he has designed the ten-part ‘Blueprints for a Better World: Radical Art Schools and the Making of Modern Art’ programme (autumn 2026).
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.
Matthew 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 to monographs on Frank Auerbach, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Georg Baselitz, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Françoise Gilot, Daniel Crews-Chubb, and Sir Christopher Le Brun, as well as exhibition texts on Megan Rooney, Emily Kraus, Noah Beyene, and Theodore Ereira-Guyer, among others.
His art and literary criticism appears regularly in the Financial Times, Frieze, Apollo, the Times Literary Supplement, the Literary Review, New Left Review, New Statesman, Burlington Contemporary, and Jacobin, among others. He is Commissioning Editor at The Art Newspaper.
Matthew completed a PhD (no corrections) in American cultural history at University College London, and has held fellowships at Yale University, the Smithsonian, the Courtauld (Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Fellow), the Paul Mellon Centre, the John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin (Leverhulme Trust Fellow), and was the F. R. Leavis Fellow at the University of York, though that does not reflect an endorsement of Leavis’ approach to poetics. His academic writing—on subjects ranging from New Deal theatre to Abstract Expressionism and environmental poetics—has appeared, or is forthcoming, 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
