Release Date: February 20, 2015

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

Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, presents the 64th A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts on Sundays, March 15, 22, and 29 and April 12, 19, and 26, at the National Gallery of Art.

Washington, DC—Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, will give the 64th annual A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts in a series entitled Restoration as Event and Idea: Art in Europe, 1814–1820.

All lectures will take place on Sunday afternoons at 2:00 p.m. and are free and open to the public. Because of the East Building renovation, the lectures will be presented in the West Building Lecture Hall, which has limited capacity. Entry passes (one per person) will be required for admission and will be distributed starting at 1:00 p.m. on a first-come, first-served basis on the day of each lecture in the East Building Concourse.

The lectures will be streamed live. At the Gallery, the live stream will be shown in the West Building Project Room and the East Building Reception Room. The live stream will also be available at http://www.nga.gov/audio-video/video/nga-live.html. On the Wednesday following each lecture, a video screening will be shown in the West Building Lecture Hall at noon. Audio recordings will be available each Tuesday, and video recordings with closed captioning will be available each Friday following the lecture at http://www.nga.gov/audio-video/mellon.html.

Crow will consider the period 1814–1820, 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? Crow's lectures will answer that question by offering both a 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.

March 15: Moscow Burns/The Pope Comes Home, 1812–1814: David, Gros, and Ingres Test Empire's Facade

March 22: At the Service of Kings, Madrid and Paris, 1814: Aging Goya and Upstart Géricault Face Their Restorations

March 29: Cut Loose, 1815–1817: Napoleon Returns, David Crosses Borders, and Géricault Wanders Outcast Rome

April 12: The Religion of Ancient Art from London to Paris to Rome, 1815–1819: Canova and Lawrence Replenish Papal Splendor

April 19: The Laboratory of Brussels, 1816–1819: The Apprentice Navez and the Master David Redraw the Language of Art

April 26: Redemption in Rome and Paris, 1818–1820: Ingres Revives the Chivalric while Géricault Recovers the Dispossessed

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, T. J. Clark, E. H. Gombrich, Michael Fried, Mary Miller, Helen Vendler, and Irene Winter. 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 the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He holds an MA and a PhD in art history from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a BA from Pomona College. His interests center on the entwined aesthetic and social dynamics in the production of art and the role of art in modern society.

Crow's most recent book, The Long March of Pop: Art, Design, and Music, 1930–1995, was published by Yale University Press in January 2015. He is also the author of Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (1995, 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); and articles including "The Practice of Art History in America," Daedalus 135 (spring 2006) and "Marx to Sharks: The Art-Historical '80s," Artforum 41 (2003). He is a contributing editor of Artforum. A selection of Crow's books will be available for purchase in the Gallery Shops and online at www.shop.nga.gov. 

Crow has received numerous honors throughout his career, including the Eric Mitchell Prize for the best first book in the history of art (1986), the Charles Rufus Morey Prize of the College Art Association (1987), and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1988–1989). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is currently the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship (2014–2015) and spent the fall of 2014 as a Michael Holly Fellow at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.

Before his appointment at the Institute of Fine Arts, Crow 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.