Rate My Professor Richard Mann

Richard G. Mann is Professor Emeritus of Art at San Francisco State University within the Arts and Culture faculty. He received his B.A. from Kalamazoo College in 1972, M.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1974, and Ph.D. from New York University in 1982. Mann joined the faculty in 1991 as Professor of Art and served until attaining emeritus status in 2017. Throughout his tenure in the Art Department, he contributed significantly to art history education and scholarship, advising graduate theses and participating in faculty exhibitions and gallery talks, such as the 2012 In-Gallery Talk alongside colleagues Santhi Kavuri-Bauer and Gwen Allen.

Mann's research specializations center on Spanish art history, with a particular focus on the sixteenth-century painter El Greco. His major publication, El Greco and His Patrons: Three Major Projects (Cambridge University Press, 1986), analyzes three significant commissions that shaped the artist's career and legacy. He co-authored Spanish Paintings of the Fifteenth through Nineteenth Centuries (National Gallery of Art, 1990) with Jonathan Brown, offering a detailed systematic catalogue of the National Gallery's Spanish holdings. Mann also presented scholarly papers, including 'Tradition and Originality in El Greco's Feast in the House of Simon' in 2002, exploring the artist's Byzantine and Renaissance influences. As a reviewer for CAA Reviews, he evaluated key exhibition catalogues and monographs, such as David Davies and John H. Elliott's El Greco (2005). Mann developed and regularly taught a two-semester multicultural course in Queer Art History, broadening the curriculum to include diverse perspectives in modern and contemporary art. His work has influenced students and peers through committee service on master's theses in art history and contributions to academic discourse on patronage, iconography, and cultural contexts in European art.