Press Release
For Press Inquiries Only:
Mary Jane McKinven
Senior Publicist
(202) 842-6358
mj-mckinven@nga.gov
Release Date: April 13, 2004
The National Gallery of Art will present the 53rd A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. The 2004 series, More Than Meets the Eye, will be given by renowned art historian and author Irving Lavin, professor emeritus, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
All lectures are on Sundays at 2:00 p.m. in the East Building Auditorium, and are free of charge; seating is on a first come, first seated basis. The series includes the following lectures:
April 18
The Story of O from Giotto to Einstein
April 25
Michelangelo, Moses, and the Warrior Pope
May 2
Caravaggio I: Divine Dissimulation
May 9
Caravaggio II: The View from Behind
May 16
The Infinite Spiral: Claude Mellan's Miraculous Image
May 23
Going for Baroque: Observations on the Postmodern Fold
"It has been said that the history of art is the history of ideas, and these lectures will explore the way artists have used a variety of figures of speech--metaphor, irony, puns, paradoxes--to embody unseen meaning in visual form," said Lavin. "The first and last lectures will pursue two opposite traditions--geometric line and chaotic surface--as they were taken up and adapted over time, from Giotto to Jasper Johns and from Bernini to Frank Gehry, to convey new meaning in our own era. The four intervening talks will plumb single masterworks by Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Claude Mellan for deep thoughts that can be perceived in no other way than through the eye. The medium and the message become, truly, one."
IRVING LAVIN
Irving Lavin, one of America's most distinguished art historians, is professor emeritus in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he served on the faculty from 1974 until 2002.
Professor Lavin has written extensively on the history of art ranging from late antiquity to Pablo Picasso. His numerous books on Florentine and Roman sculpture and architecture include Santa Maria del Fiore: The Cathedral of Florence and the Pregnant Madonna (1999); Bernini, the Savior, and the "Good Death" in Seventeenth-Century Rome (1998); Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts (1980); and Bernini and the Crossing of Saint Peter's (1967). Studies published in Past-Present: Essays on Historicism in Art from Donatello to Picasso (1993) range from the early Renaissance through the twentieth century.
Professor Lavin taught at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, from 1963 to 1974 and at Vassar College from 1959 to 1961. He received his B.A. from Washington University (1948), an M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (1952), and an M.A. (1953) and Ph.D. (1955) from Harvard University. He was a Dumbarton Oaks senior research fellow (1957-1959), a senior Fulbright scholar in Italy (1961-1963), an American Council of Learned Societies fellow (1965-1966), a Guggenheim fellow (1968-1969), and resident scholar at the American Academy in Rome (1972, 1979). He delivered the C. T. Mathews Lectures at Columbia University (1957), the F. J. Walls Lectures at the Pierpont Morgan Library (1975), the Slade Lectures at Oxford University (1985), the Jerome Lecture at the University of Michigan and the American Academy in Rome (1985-1986), and the Una's Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley (1987), and he has held lectureships at the Collège de France (1984, 1990).
Professor Lavin also served on the boards of the College Art Association and the Society of Architectural Historians, as a trustee of the Canadian Center for Architecture, as president of the United States National and International Committees for the History of Art, and he is a trustee of the SacraTech Foundation. Honorary awards include membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome; the Premio "Cultori di Roma" by the city of Rome and Istituto di Studi Romani; Accademico d'Onore by the Accademia Clementina, Bologna; the Premio Daria Borghese, Rome; the Medal of Honor on the Tercentenary of Gianlorenzo Bernini by the city of Rome; and the Medal of Honor, Tercentenary of Francesco Mochi by the city of Montevarchi. He was three times winner of the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize awarded by the College Art Association of America.
PAST LECTURERS
The annual A.W. Mellon Lectures series, established in 1949, is designed to bring the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship in the fine arts to the public. Past lecturers include Sir Kenneth Clark (1953); E. H. Gombrich (1956); Sir Isaiah Berlin (1965); Stephen Spender (1968); Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (1970); Jacques Barzun (1973); Leo Steinberg (1982); Anthony Hecht (1992); and Kirk Varnedoe (2003).
General Information
The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden are at all times
free to the public. They are located on the National Mall between 3rd
and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, and are open Monday through
Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00
p.m. The Gallery is closed on December 25 and January 1. For information
call (202) 737-4215 or the Telecommunications Device for the Deaf (TDD)
at (202) 842-6176, or visit the Gallery's Web site at www.nga.gov.
Visitors will be asked to present all carried items for inspection upon
entering the East and West Buildings. Checkrooms are free of charge and
located at each entrance. Luggage and other oversized bags must be presented
at the 4th Street entrances to the East or West Building to permit x-ray
screening and must be deposited in the checkrooms at those entrances.
For the safety of visitors and the works of art, nothing may be carried
into the Gallery on a visitor's back. Any bag or other items that cannot
be carried reasonably and safely in some other manner must be left in
the checkrooms. Items larger than 17 x 26 inches cannot be accepted by
the Gallery or its checkrooms.
For additional press information please call or send inquiries to:
Press Office
National Gallery of Art
2000B South Club Drive
Landover, MD 20785
phone: (202) 842-6353 e-mail: pressinfo@nga.gov
Deborah Ziska
Chief of Press and Public Information
(202) 842-6353
ds-ziska@nga.gov
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