The arc of original London Modernism appeared to end with the Mod media spectacle of the mid-1960s, then to be buried by the hippy wave. But the true Modernist cult persisted with its original exclusivity, secrecy, and exquisite discrimination restored.
The Paul Mellon lectures, which are named in honour of the philanthropist and collector of British art, Paul Mellon (1907-1999), were inaugurated in 1994 when Professor Francis Haskell delivered the first series at the Gallery in London. The model for the series was the Andrew W. Mellon lectures, established in 1949 in honour of Paul Mellon’s father, the founder of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The lectures are biennial, given by a distinguished historian of British art.
By the mid-1960s, the mass media caught up with the Modernist style pioneers. Mod-inspired cinema, broadcasting, and glossy print gave unprecedented visibility to women artists—Pauline Boty and Bridget Riley in particular—but at serious cost to the legacies of both.
In 2017 the lectures will be delivered by Tom Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. His teaching and research reaches from the later seventeenth century in Europe to the contemporary in both Europe and America.
