National Gallery of Art

New Fellowship

Beinecke Postdoctoral Fellowship Program
CASVA announces the creation of the Beinecke Postdoctoral Fellowship—a biennial appointment for two consecutive academic years. The inaugural Beinecke Postdoctoral Fellowship will be awarded from September 2021–August 2023 and was made possible through the generosity of Frederick W. Beinecke and his family in response to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s 75th Anniversary Endowment Challenge Grant. Applications are open now and due by November 15, 2020.

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New Presentation

David Bomford on Édouard Manet’s The Railway (1873)
Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor, 2018

From the series Reflections on the Collection: The Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professors at the National Gallery of Art

Just Announced

The Seventieth A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts
Contact: Art and the Pull of Print
Jennifer Roberts, Harvard University

The lecture series will take place in a virtual environment on March 14, March 21, March 28, April 11, April 18, and April 25, 2021.

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Upcoming Lecture

Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art
Telling the Past Differently: Italian Renaissance Art in the Hands of the Beholder
Megan Holmes, University of Michigan

The recorded lecture will premiere on Friday, October, 30, at 1:00 p.m. on YouTube and Facebook, and will be archived on our website.

See announcement (PDF, 955KB)

Save the Date

Wyeth Foundation for American Art Symposium
Feminism in American Art History

Live panel discussion
Friday, December 11, 2020
3:30 p.m.

Presentations by Kirsten Pai Buick, Aruna D’Souza, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Lisa Farrington, Jessica Horton, Jenny Lin, Helen Molesworth, and Jennifer Van Horn will be released on Friday, December 4, on our website.

New Publication

Center 40: Record of Activities and Research Reports, June 2019–May 2020 (PDF 10.7MB)

This year the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts welcomed fellows in residence from Canada, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The topics of their research ranged from the response to industrially produced metals in mid-nineteenth-century France to the emergence and reception of Michelangelo’s non finito, from Japanese export lacquer for an Iberian clientele at the turn of the seventeenth century to work of the Italian artist Jacopo Bassano in the context of agricultural transformation on the Venetian mainland, and from sensory perceptions among the Yorùbá people to conceptual and performance art and social commentary in Chile from 1977 to 1983. Read more

2020–2021 Members Announced

CASVA announces new academic year appointments. For the safety of members and staff, the academic year will begin in a remote environment. Members will benefit from the digital resources, database subscriptions, and interlibrary loan services of the National Gallery of Art Library, and fellows and professors will present and discuss their research virtually.

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Learn more about CASVA Fellowships

New Publication

The Global Reception of Heinrich Wölfflin's Principles of Art History
Studies in the History of Art, Volume 82
Edited by Evonne Levy and Tristan Weddigen, summer 2020

Can the reception of a single, widely disseminated book offer a historical road map for a global art history? This is the question posed by the editors of this volume of essays, which charts the enduring response to the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History, first published in German in 1915. Translated into 22 languages and still in print in many of them, Wölfflin’s book inaugurated an art history based entirely on “forms of seeing” and employing a comparative method. Many of the translators and transmitters of the text are represented in essays on the book’s readership in Europe, North and South America, and South and East Asia. From its reception, positive and negative, the first genealogy of a global art history emerges.

New Article

CASVA Curates

CASVA is not only committed to supporting the research and development of art historians of all backgrounds and fields, but also all art historical practices and professions. This piece by Dean Emerita Elizabeth Cropper discusses how CASVA endeavors to bring academic and museum practice together and highlights recent predoctoral fellows who have joined the ever-evolving and expanding curatorial profession.

This feature was originally intended for the spring 2020 issue of the Gallery’s Bulletin, which could not be published due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

New Translation

Chinese Painting and Its Audiences (Princeton University Press, 2017), a Bollingen Series publication based on The Sixty-First A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts by Craig Clunas, has been translated into Chinese by Guangxi Normal University Press.

Learn more (in Chinese)

New Visiting Senior Fellowships

The creation of the Leonard A. Lauder Visiting Senior Fellowships will support scholars researching historically underrepresented areas of art-historical study. The first cycle of fellowships will support those focusing on the arts of African Americans, Africa, and the African diaspora.

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Learn more about CASVA Fellowships

Postponed

The Sixty-Ninth A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts
Transparence and Ambiguity: The Modern Space of Axonometry
Yve-Alain Bois, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ

Fall 2022 dates to be announced.

New Audio and Video

Wyeth Lecture in American Art
Art Is an Excuse: Conceptual Strategies, 1968–1983
Kellie Jones, Columbia University

Watch / Listen

New Dean Announcement

Professor Steven Nelson Announced as New Dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts

The National Gallery of Art announced the appointment of Steven Nelson as dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA). Nelson is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at CASVA (2018–2020), on leave from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he is professor of African and African American art history and director of the UCLA African Studies Center. Nelson will become CASVA's third dean since its founding in 1979 and will succeed Elizabeth Cropper, who will retire in late May 2020. Nelson will begin his tenure in July.