Release Date: May 17, 2017

Hal Foster of Princeton University Presents the 67th Annual A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts in 2018 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Hal Foster, Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, presents the 67th A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts on April 8, 15, 22, and 29, and May 6 and 13, 2017, at the National Gallery of Art. Photo by Sandy Tait

Washington, DC—(Updated: January 5, 2018) The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art has announced that Hal Foster, Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, will give the 67th annual A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts in 2018.

The lecture series, entitled Positive Barbarism: Brutal Aesthetics in the Postwar Period, will be held in the East Building Auditorium at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, on April 8, 15, 22, and 29 and May 6 and 13 at 2:00 p.m.

In his six-part series, Foster asks how artists began again after the mass deaths of World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb. What language was invented, what ground identified but the most raw, the most basic, the most zero-degree? He is interested in the pervasive turn, from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s, to the brut and the brutalist, the animal and the creaturely. His lectures will focus on the early work of Jean Dubuffet, Asger Jorn, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Claes Oldenburg, among others.

April 8: Walter Benjamin and His Barbarians

April 15: Jean Dubuffet and His Brutes

April 22: Georges Bataille and His Caves

April 29: Asger Jorn and His Creatures

May 6: Eduardo Paolozzi and His Hollow Gods

May 13: Claes Oldenburg and His Ray Guns

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

Since 1949, the preeminent 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, T. J. Clark, Thomas Crow, E. H. Gombrich, Michael Fried, Mary Miller, Helen Vendler, Irene Winter, and, most recently, Alexander Nemerov.For a full list, visit www.nga.gov/research/casva/meetings/mellon-lectures-in-the-fine-arts.html.

About Hal Foster
Foster teaches and publishes in the areas of modernist and contemporary art, architecture, and theory and is interested in the relation between art and philosophy at times of political crisis. His most recent books include Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (2015); Junkspace with Running Room, coauthored with Rem Koolhaas(2013); The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha (2012); The Art-Architecture Complex (2011); and Art Since 1900: Modernism, Anti-Modernism, Postmodernism, coauthored with Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh (2011). He was a founding editor of Zone magazine and Zone Books, and he writes regularly for October (which he coedits), Artforum, and The London Review of Books. He is the recipient of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism from the College Art Association (2012) and the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing (2010). A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has been a Siemens Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and a Paul Mellon Senior Fellow at the National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.

Press Contact:
Christina Brown, (202) 842–6598 or [email protected]