Mark Hallett (art historian)

Hallett, who grew up in mid-Wales, attended his local secondary School in Tregaron, Cardiganshire. He took his undergraduate degree at Cambridge University, graduating in 1986, and studied for a master's degree (1989) and a PhD (1996) at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at Yale University in 1990–91.

Having been appointed lecturer in 1994, he spent eighteen years teaching History of Art at the University of York, where he was made a professor in 2006. He was Head of the History of Art department at York between 2007 and 2012, and a member of the University's Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies.[2]

Hallett was appointed Director of Studies at the Paul Mellon Centre in October 2012. In this role, he oversaw a major expansion of the Centre's premises, personnel, activities and remit. Under his leadership, the Centre became known for supporting and publishing research on British art and architecture of all periods, having previously been distinguished by its primary focus on the art of the Georgian era. In this same period, the Centre became recognised for its pioneering forms of online publication, its transformative support of the British Art Network, its expanded learning and events programme, and its ambitious in-house research projects. During his time as Director, Hallett has also oversaw the launch of a succession of new funding streams within the Centre's Grants and Fellowships programme. These have included two rounds of Research Continuity Grants, which were designed to sustain art-historical research during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the continuing New Narratives initiative, which is intended to support the development of a more diverse range of scholarly voices in the field of British art studies.

As an art historian, Hallett is best known for his writings on eighteenth-century graphic satire, exhibition culture and portraiture, and for his books and catalogues on the artists William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds.[3] He also co-edited and contributed to the major online publication, The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018 (Paul Mellon Centre, 2018). More recently, he has been working on modern and contemporary British art, and has published on figures such as Michael Andrews and Frank Auerbach. He has also become involved in making films about different aspects of British art, and is currently working on a film project devoted to The Procession, by the contemporary artist Hew Locke.

Hallett has also been involved in curating numerous major exhibitions, including James Gillray: The Art of Caricature (Tate Britain, 2001); Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity (Tate Britain, 2005); Hogarth (Tate Britain, 2007); William Etty: Art and Controversy (York Art Gallery, 2011); Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint (Wallace Collection, 2015); The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition (Royal Academy, 2018); and George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field (Yale Center for British Art, 2018). In 2019, he co-curated the Tate Britain Spotlight Display Vital Fragments: Nigel Henderson and the Art of Collage.

Hallett has been a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge and at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He gave the 2011 Watson Gordon lecture at the Scottish National Gallery and the 2019 Aspects of Art lecture at the British Academy.

In 2021, he was appointed a member of the Reviewing Committee for the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest.