The Institute of Fine Arts Faculty
Thomas Crow
Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art
My teaching and research at the Institute of Fine Arts reach from the later seventeenth century in Europe to the later twentieth century and the contemporary. My first book, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (1985) offered a fresh model for understanding the art within the larger culture of its period. It received three prizes and has been acknowledged as revitalizing its area of study for a cohort of younger scholars who followed.
At the same time, my commitment to understanding the interaction between artistic creation and social circumstance led me to seek such patterns in the art of twentieth century, the early outcome being “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts” (1982), a widely cited and reprinted essay that demonstrated interdependency rather than antagonism between modern fine art and popular forms of visual expression.
Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (1996) narrowed the wide scope of Painters and Public Life onto the creative interactions of a small number of key artists within the studio where they were formed, observing how their affiliations and rivalries played out over the period of Revolution and Empire. That interest in individual artistic formation later led me to write Gordon Matta-Clark (2003), a study of that then little known but immensely influential young sculptor, who died prematurely in 1978. As Matta-Clark had been a leader in the emergent New York art community of SoHo in the 1970s, an account of his life entailed a large and necessary social dimension.
All of these concerns—the broad social history of artistic form, reassessing cultural hierarchies, the individual formation of artists—came together in my recent and expansive Long March of Pop: Art, Music, and Design 1930-1995 (2015). I have also continued along the explicitly theoretical direction begun in “Modernism and Mass Culture” with two books, The Intelligence of Art (1999) and No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art (2016), which differentiates its subject from self-regarding religion or spirituality. Anchored in the stringent insurgency of 18th-century Jansenists, the book endeavors to isolate, beyond pragmatic materialism or sensory blandishments, potential intimations of the infinite in abstract art, that is, theology’s core concern.
My Andrew W. Mellon Lectures, delivered at the National Gallery of Art in 2015, took up European art in the immediate wake of Revolution and Empire under the title Restoration: the Fall of Napoleon in the Course of European Art, 1814 to 1820. The book that followed was awarded the Laura Shannon Medal in European studies. I followed these in 2017 with the Paul Mellon Lectures, given at the London National Gallery and Yale Center for British Art, on the subject of “Art, Ideas, and Subcultures in Postwar London,” published as The Hidden Mod in Modern Art, London 1955-1969: Searching for the Young Soul Rebels. There followed in 2023 a cognate study of art in the context of 1960s-70s California (my personal point of origin): The Artist in the Counterculture: from Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and Other Tales from the Edge.
My latest project has entailed a return to my scholarly beginnings in the 18th Century and the French Revolution, all the more as it realizes an idea that first came to me as a graduate student. My thought had been to write a searching, book-length examination of the single painting that exemplifies the latter cataclysm: The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David, mapping it across historical, technical, and philosophical matrices. Its long delayed ooutcome will be published in late 2025 as Murder in the Rue Marat: A Case of Art in Revolution.
My courses at the Institute have reflected all these strands of interest, as have the topics chosen and independently developed by my students. Since arriving at the Institute in 2007, I have sponsored thirty-two completed doctorates to date, with a full complement of masters advisees every year. On the external side, I have been for thirty years an active contributing editor at Artforum. In addition to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, I have held J.S. Guggenheim and NEH fellowships, with residencies at the Clark Art Institute and the American Academy in Rome. I hold honorary doctorates from Pomona College and the University of London.
Before coming to the Institute of Fine Arts, I served as director of the Getty Research Institute, professor of art history at the University of Southern California, professor and chair in the history of art at the University of Sussex, UK, and the Robert Lehman Professor and Chair of art history at Yale.