This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: American Classics.

Robert Rauschenberg spent a crucial period as a young artist in Rome and Florence. Of the works he produced at that moment, most were pitched into the Arno after a single bad review. The imprint of that sojourn took some years to re-merge, doing so when the demands of his art awakened a latent attachment to classical myth, which he rendered through outwardly, almost aggressively anti-classical means. The origins and outcomes of that paradox will be the subject of this presentation.

Thomas E. Crow is the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art, and Associate Provost for the Arts at New York University. He has authored two influential studies of eighteenth-century French painting: Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (1985) and Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France(1995). Subsequent publications, including The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent and the essay collection Modern Art in the Common Culture (both 1996), examine the later twentieth century, while The Intelligence of Art (1999) analyses specific moments in the history of art. Crow’s more recent texts focus on single artists, including Gordon Matta-Clark (2003), and Robert Smithson (2004), and his most recent book, The Long March of Pop: Art, Design, and Music, 1930–1995, was published by Yale University Press in January 2015.

Thomas E. Crow is the James S. Ackerman Scholar in Residence at the American Academy in Rome in the fall of 2016.

The lecture will be held in English. You can watch this event livestreamed at https://livestream.com/aarome

The event is organized in collaboration with the Visual Studies - Rome Network (ViStuRN).