Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

A distinctive
feature of social and
cultural life at CMC

 

Modern Time, Classical Time, and Cosmic Time in the Progress of Théodore Géricault

Mon, April 16, 2018
Dinner Program
Thomas Crow

From the moment of his journey to Rome in 1816, the young outsider Théodore Géricault—the most meteoric talent of Romantic painting—underwent dramatic transformations as an artist, under both the stimulus of ancient remains and the charged intensity of Roman daily life. He was accompanied in this odyssey by his lesser known contemporary Antoine Jean-Baptiste Thomas, whose startlingly vivid and sociologically sophisticated depictions of the city remain almost unknown. On his return journey to Paris in 1817, as Thomas Crow, professor of modern art at NYU will discuss, Géricault witnessed scenes of climate-induced privation and distress that haunted his fraught progress toward the epoch-making Raft of the Medusa.

 

Thomas Crow is Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. His first book, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Yale University Press), won a number of awards. His most recent books are The Long March of Pop: Art, Music, and Design 1930–1995 (Yale University Press, 2015) and No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art (University of Washington Press, 2017). Restoration: The Fall of Napoleon in the Course of European Art (Princeton University Press), based on the 2015 Andrew Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in Washington, will appear this fall.  

Crow earned his doctorate at UCLA, and his first teaching position was at CalArts. Subsequent posts included the University of Michigan, the University of Sussex, Yale, and USC. In the 2000's, he brought the study of California art to the Getty Research Institute as its director. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds honorary doctorates from Pomona College and the University of London. Last year, he delivered the 2017 Paul Mellon Lectures at Yale and the London National Gallery: "Searching for the Young Soul Rebels: Style, Music, and Art in London 1956-1969."  

Professor Crow's Athenaeum presentation is the Ricardo J. Quinones Lecture co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.

Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

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