Thomas Crow to Deliver A.W. Mellon Lecture at Institute for Advanced Study

Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, will give a public lecture, “Cut Loose, 1815­–1817­: Napoleon Returns, David Crosses Borders, and Géricault Wanders Outcast Rome,” which will take place Friday, April 10, at 5:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall. The lecture is the third in the series of talks under the theme of “Restoration as Event and Idea: Art in Europe, 1814–1820” which is part of the sixty-fourth A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art. This event is sponsored by the Friends of the Institute.

Crow’s research interests center on the entwined aesthetic and social dynamics in the production of art and the role of art in modern society. In this lecture, Crow will examine the displaced and wandering existences of Jacques-Louis David and Théodore Géricault, both in geographical and psychological exile, during which each was forced to reexamine and reconfigure the fundamentals of his artistic life.

Crow is the author of many books including The Long March of Pop: Art, Design, and Music, 1930­–1995 (Yale University Press, 2015), Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (Yale University Press, 1995, 2006) and The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent (Yale University Press, 1996, 2005). He has received numerous honors for his work including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, the Michael Holly Fellowship at the Clark Art Institute, and the Charles Rufus Morey Prize of the College Art Association. Crow is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a contributing editor of Artforum.

Crow received his Ph.D. in art history from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1978. Prior to joining the Institute of Fine Arts, Crow served as the Director of the Getty Research Institute, the Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art and Chair of the History of Art Department at Yale University and Professor and Chair in the History of Art at the University of Sussex. He has also held appointments at the University of Southern California, the University of Michigan, Princeton University and the University of Chicago.

For more information on this and other lectures at the Institute, visit www.ias.edu/events.

About the A.W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts

The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts were inaugurated in 1949. Endowed by a gift of the Old Dominion Foundation and the Avalon Foundation (creations of Paul Mellon and his sister, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, respectively) the lecture series was founded “to bring to the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts.” The lecturers were to be, and have been, of “exceptional ability, achievement and reputation.” The National Gallery engages distinguished scholars from all disciplines to lecture on subjects in their fields, as the original gift mandated, “provided such subjects have a relationship to or bearing on the Fine Arts or are important to understanding, appreciation, or promotion of the Fine Arts.” As publication was always an essential part of the vision of the Mellon Lectures, a relationship was established between the National Gallery and the Bollingen Foundation for a series of books based on the lectures. Since 1967 the series has been published by Princeton University Press. For discussions of lectures and lecturers through 2001, see CASVA’s publication The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, Fifty Years, edited by Elizabeth Cropper (2002).