Release Date: September 18, 2014

Thomas Crow of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University to Give the 64th Annual A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Thomas Crow, 64th A.W. Mellon Lecturer in the Fine Arts at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, spring 2015.

Washington, DC— The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art has announced that Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, will give The Sixty-Fourth A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts.

The series, entitled Restoration as Event and Idea: Art in Europe, 1814‒1820, will be held in the West Building Lecture Hall at the National Gallery of Art on March 15, 22, and 29 and April 12, 19, and 26, 2015. This year, with the East Building under renovation, the Gallery plans to broadcast the lectures in real time to audiences all over the world via a live-streaming video feed.

Professor Crow will consider the period 1814‒1815, following the fall of Napoleon. During this time, artists throughout Europe were left uncertain and adrift, with old certainties and boundaries dissolved. How did they then set new courses for themselves? Professor Crow's lectures will answer that question by offering both the wide view of art centers across the continent—Rome, Paris, London, Madrid, Brussels—and a close-up focus on individual actors— Francisco Goya (1746‒1828), Jacques-Louis David (1748‒1825), Antonio Canova (1757‒1822), Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769‒1830), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780‒1867), and Théodore Géricault (1791‒1824). Whether directly or indirectly, these artists were linked in a new international network with changed artistic priorities and new creative possibilities emerging from the wreckage of the old.

About the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts

Since 1949, the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts have presented the best in contemporary thought and scholarship on the subject of the fine arts to the people of the United States. The program itself is named for Andrew W. Mellon, founder of the National Gallery of Art, who gave the nation his art collection and funds to build the West Building, which opened to the public in 1941.

Past speakers have included Sir Kenneth Clark, E. H. Gombrich, Michael Fried, Helen Vendler, and T. J. Clark. For a full list, please visit: http://www.nga.gov/research/casva/meetings/mellon-lectures-in-the-fine-arts.html.

About Thomas Crow

Thomas Crow is known for his interest in the political and social dynamics of the production of art and in the role of art in modern society, as well as for his close reading of a wide range of individual works, often in conversation with each other.

His newest book, The Long March of Pop: Art, Design, and Music, 1930‒1995, will be published by Yale University Press in 2015. Among his extensive list of published books and articles are Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (1995; revised edition, 2006); The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent (1996, 2005); The Intelligence of Art (1999); Modern Art in the Common Culture (1996); Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (1985); "The Practice of Art History in America," Daedalus 135 (spring 2006); and "Marx to Sharks: The Art-Historical ’80s," Artforum 41 (2003), among others. He is a contributing editor of Artforum.

Professor Crow is also the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship; the Charles Rufus Morey Prize of the College Art Association; and the Eric Mitchell Prize for the best first book in the history of art, among other accolades.  He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  Currently the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, Crow will spend the fall as a fellow at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, working on the subject of the lectures.

Before his appointment at the Institute of Fine Arts, he was director of the Getty Research Institute, professor of art history at the University of Southern California, the Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, and professor and chair in the history of art at the University of Sussex.