Brandon Taylor is Professor Emeritus of History of Art, University of Southampton, and currently Visiting Tutor in History and Theory of Art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. From 2008-13 he was Visiting Professor in History of Art at the University of Reading. In 2000 he was a Visiting Scholar at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, Yale University, and in 2001 and 2002 at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague and the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava. In 2004 he was nominated a membre suppléant of the Comité Internationale d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA), and in 2007 and 2008 he was a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California. In 2015 he was a Research Scholar at the Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp Foundation, Berlin.

His research fields include modern art and modernism, contemporary and recent art, the history and theory of art institutions, and the art of central and eastern Europe and the former USSR. Among his books are St Ives and British Modernism: The George and Ann Dannatt Collection (Pallant House, Chichester, 2015), After Constructivism (Yale University Press, 2014), Urban Walls: A Generation of Collage in Europe and America (Hudson Hills Press, New York 2008), Sculpture and Psychoanalysis (as editor, Ashgate and The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 2006), Contemporary Art: Art Since 1970 (Prentice Hall, New York 2005), Collage: The Making of Modern Art (Thames and Hudson, London 2004), Art for the Nation: Exhibitions and the London Public (Manchester University Press 1999), The Art of Today (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1995), Art and Literature Under the Bolsheviks (Pluto Press, London, 2 vols, 1990 and 1991). Most recent publications include The Life of Forms in Art (Bloomsbury Publishing, London and New York 2020) and Make It Modern: A History of Art in the 20th Century, (Yale University Press 2022). His books have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Korean, Russian and Chinese.

In recent years he has developed a studio practice as a painter and has exhibited in group shows in London and elsewhere. He is currently Chairman of the George Dannatt Trust.