CROW, Thomas E. 1948-

PERSONAL: Born 1948. Education: Pomona College, B.A., 1969; University of California, Los Angeles, M.A., 1975, Ph.D., 1978.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—University Park Campus, Getty Research Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, instructor in critical studies, 1977-78; University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, assistant professor of history of art, 1978-80; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, assistant professor of art and archaeology, 1980-86; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, associate professor of history of art, 1986-90; University of Sussex, Sussex, England, professor of history of art and chairman of department, 1990-96; Yale University, New Haven, CT, Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art, 1996-2000, department chairman, 1997-2000; Getty Research Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, director, 2000—. Lecturer at symposia on artists and art history.

MEMBER: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies.

AWARDS, HONORS: Mitchell Prize for the History of Art, 1986, for Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris; Michigan Society of Fellows senior fellow, 1987-90; National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, 1988-89.

WRITINGS:

Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1985.

(With others) Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1987.

Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1995.

Modern Art in the Common Culture, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1996.

The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, Harry N. Abrams (New York, NY), 1996.

The Intelligence of Art, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1999.

Contributor to books, including Ross Bleckner, Harry N. Abrams (New York, NY), 1995; Stephanie Barron, Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons: Four Decades of Art from the Broad Collections, Harry N. Abrams, 2001; Stephen Eisenman, Nineteenth-Century Art: A Critical History, Thames & Hudson (New York, NY), 1994. Contributing editor, Art Forum, 1993—.

SIDELIGHTS: Thomas E. Crow is an art historian and critic whose works defy easy summarization. His essays on issues involving the social and aesthetic aims of art works range widely, from the eighteenth century through the modern era. As Roger Malbert noted in the Times Literary Supplement, Crow's "exemplary texts are all firmly grounded in the empirical study of particular objects." Crow's first books concern the schools of painting in eighteenth-century France, specifically ofin the period prior to and including the French Revolution. More recently he has discussed the production of art in a cultural context, from the uses of art for political purposes in the 1960s to the commercial and social imperatives placed upon art in the modern world.

New York Times Book Review correspondent William Olander called Crow's Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris "the most comprehensive and valuable study of art and public life in that era now in print." Olander concluded: "The question of who is the audience for art, the viewer, the spectator, is a particularly vexing one, so obviously yet mysteriously is it linked to both production and consumption. Mr. Crow's book seems to suggest that little, if anything, has changed about that since the late 18th century. After reading it, one is almost tempted to agree."

P. N. Furbank, writing in the London Review of Books, described Crow's Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France as "a history of the decline and fall, and amazing final reprieve, of history-painting in France." Furbank commented: "It is the fate of the ignorant amateur, like myself, to be convinced by whichever art-historian he happens to be reading at the time. But dazzled I certainly am, and, with the occasional sceptical twitch, also convinced, by Crow's book, which humanises and makes deeply involving a school of painting I used to consider chilly and remote."

Modern Art in the Common Culture "attacks the postmodern endeavor to blur the distinction between fine and popular art and to treat 'visual culture' as all of a piece," wrote Arthur C. Danto in the Times Literary Supplement. Danto felt that Crow's work "is set off by a discussion of the state of the field that makes this far and away the most searching and important book in the philosophy and history of art to have appeared in the past decade." Art in America essayist Marcia E. Vetrocq suggested that the book "resonates with Crow's determination to engage a community of writers and readers beyond academia, as well as with his pleasure at having become a new citizen of that larger community." Vetrocq also remarked that Modern Art in the Common Culture "remains a deeply compelling work which stands as a summons to fresh thinking."

Crow's The Intelligence of Art is a collection of four extended essays relating art to specific moments in the evolution of European capitalism, from the early stirrings of enterprise in the twelfth century to the studies of certain art historians in the twentieth century. In the Art Bulletin, David Summers found the work "a manifesto and an essay in method, in which case studies create the effect of close inference as works of art and exemplary scholarship are adapted to the author's developing thesis." In his review of the book, Malbert wrote: "Crow's dialectical skills are impressive. . . . This short but flawlessly written and intricately argued book offers a profoundly challenging critique of the current state of art history. It . . . should contribute to the revitalization of a discipline that Crow tactfully suggests has become increasingly 'complacent and inward-looking.'. . . Crow is an authoritative critic of contemporary art."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Art Bulletin, June, 2002, David Summers, review of The Intelligence of Art, p. 373.

Art in America, February, 1996, Garry Apgar, review of Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France, p. 25; March, 1998, Marcia E. Vetrocq, review of Modern Art in the Common Culture, p. 37.

London Review of Books, August 3, 1995, P. N. Furbank, "Oppositional," p. 23.

Nation, October 14, 1996, Paul Mattick, review of Modern Art in the Common Culture and The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, p. 33.

New Republic, July 3, 1995, Lynn Hunt, review of Emulation, p. 36.

New York Times Book Review, March 9, 1986, William Olander, review of Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, p. 21.

Publishers Weekly, May 20, 1996, review of The Rise of the Sixties, p. 253.

Times Literary Supplement, November 8, 1996, Arthur C. Danto, "Why Modern Isn't Contemporary," pp. 14-15; November 5, 1999, Roger Malbert, review of The Intelligence of Art, p. 11.*