Pamela Warner

I think I became an art historian because of an experience I had during my junior year abroad in France. My History of Artistic Techniques class was taking a tour of the stunning Musée Fabre in Montpellier. The professor, who must have been well known to museum staff, suddenly walked right up to a small Renaissance painting and took it off the wall to show us the back. I was stunned! Art shifted from being an image to look at to being a physical object that could be handled. I can't take any works of art off the wall on our Paris Muse tours, but I try to help my visitors to really see and appreciate the physical features of each object. If there’s one thing I'd like people to take away from my tours, it’s the idea that you don’t have to have prior knowledge of art in order to enjoy looking at it. I connect to art visually, emotionally and intellectually, but all of that begins, in my mind, with a good close look.

My favorite place in Paris for getting the urban vibe is watching hip hop dancers practice routines using their reflection in the glass windows of the Mitterand National Library It inspires me to see bodies moving as I head inside to sit in a chair and do research!

Quai François Mauriac, 75013

Pamela studied French and Art History at the University of Michigan and went on to earn her Masters and Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Delaware, specializing in the 19th century. She taught for 9 years, earning tenure at the University of Rhode Island, before returning to Paris full-time in 2013 with her husband, a painter from Switzerland. She has published a number of scholarly articles and co-edited a volume on 19th-century portraiture. When she’s not working for Paris Muse, she’s teaching yoga classes or working on her new Masters degree in Asian studies with a project on a 20th-century yoga lineage from Gujarat in northwestern India.