The Fifty-fifth A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 2006
Really Old Masters: Age, Infirmity, and Reinvention
Simon Schama
November–December, 2006
East Building Auditorium
Lecture Guidelines
Lectures are held in the East Building Auditorium (eba) at 2:00 p.m. Lectures are free and open to the public. Seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Registration is not required.
November 12
To Start With: Finito?
View a video recording of the November 12 lecture:
Wednesday, November 15, noon, East Building Auditorium
Saturday, November 18, 2:00 p.m., West Building Lecture Hall
Friday, November 24, 11:30 a.m., East Building Auditorium
November 19
The Elixir? Jacques-Louis David and Revolutionary Rejuvenation; Goya and Infirmity
View a video recording of the November 19 lecture:
Wednesday, November 22, noon, East Building Auditorium
Saturday, November 25, 10:30 a.m., East Building Auditorium
December 3
Indistinct Visions: Turner and Monet
Video Recording
View a video recording of the December 3 lecture:
Wednesday, December 6, noon, East Building Auditorium
Saturday, December 9, 2:00 p.m., East Building Auditorium
December 10–Rescheduled for Sunday, December 17
Picasso and Matisse: The Endgames of the Avant-Garde
View a video recording of the December 17 lecture:
Wednesday, December 13, noon, East Building Auditorium–Rescheduled for Wednesday, December 20
Saturday, December 16, noon, East Building Small Auditorium–Rescheduled for Saturday, December 23
Now presenting: Sunday, December 10 at 2:00 p.m.
Exclusive preview of Picasso from Simon Schama's POWER OF ART, a landmark 8-part PBS series, premiering in summer 2007
December 17
Picasso and Matisse: The Endgames of the Avant-Garde
Book signing to follow.
View a video recording of the December 17 lecture:
Wednesday, December 20, noon, East Building Auditorium
Saturday, December 23, noon, East Building Small Auditorium
The previously scheduled lecture for December 17, Losing It: The Case of Willem de Kooning, has been cancelled.
Simon Schama, University Professor, department of art history and archaeology, Columbia University, studied history at Cambridge University, where from 1966 to 1976 he was a fellow at Christ's College. From 1976 to 1980 he was a fellow and tutor in modern history at Brasenose College, Oxford. From 1980 to 1993 he was professor of history, Mellon Professor of the Social Sciences, William Kenan Professor of the Humanities, and senior associate of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. He has also taught at the École des hautes études en sciences socials in Paris. He delivered the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge University in 1993 and the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Oxford University in 1996 and at Harvard in 2001. In 2001 he delivered the Finzi-Contini Lecture at Yale University, and in 2002 he was the Phi Beta Kappa Orator at Harvard.
He is the author of Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780–1813 (1977), awarded the Wolfson Prize for History; Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel (1979); The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987); Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989), for which he received the NCR Prize; Landscape and Memory (1995), winner of the W. H. Smith Literary Award and the student-voted Lionel Trilling Book Award at Columbia; Rembrandt's Eyes (1999); and the trilogy A History of Britain (2001–2002). His most recent book is Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (2006).
His books have been translated into eleven languages, and several have been adapted for television series. His work as writer and presenter for the BBC includes Art of the Western World; Rembrandt: The Public Gaze and the Private Eye; a five-part series based on Landscape and Memory; the award-winning fifteen-part History of Britain; and the eight-part-series The Power of Art. His historical novel Dead Certainties (1991) was the subject of a PBS film for The American Experience.
Simon Schama is a regular contributor to magazines and reviews. His art criticism for The New Yorker received a National Magazine Award in 1996. His other awards include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literary Award (1992). In 2001 was made a Commander of the British Empire.
A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts
The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts were established by the National Gallery of Art's Board of Trustees in 1949 "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."