The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, has named the art historian Alexander Nemerov as the next speaker in its prestigious A. W. Mellon Lecture series.
Nemerov will deliver six talks in March, April and May 2017 in a series titled The Forest: America in the 1830s, which looks at the work of painters like Thomas Cole and John Quidor and writers like James Fenimore Cooper.
"There is a sense, on the one hand, of art being too fully achieved [in this period] to really portray the humanness of the forest," Nemerov says. "But the lectures will explore those artists who somehow do portray the meeting of art and life, or who allow life to come [into their work] even if they don't want to."
Nemerov, a scholar of American art and professor of art and art history at Stanford University, has written on an array of subjects, from the Civil War and Macbeth (Acting in the Night, University of California Press, 2010) to the relationship between his father, the poet Howard Nemerov, and Howard's sister, Diane Arbus (Silent Dialogues, Fraenkel Gallery, 2015). His most recent book looks at the work of the sociologist and photographer Lewis Hine (Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine, Princeton University Press, 2016).
But America in the 1830s is new terrain—one that allows him to expand beyond "the local and specific nature of the topic," he says. "The main stakes of the lectures have to do with experience in the past, and whether it is possible for us to have a sense of what it was like to be alive" at an earlier moment, he says.
Nemerov is the 66th lecturer in the series, which has included speakers like Isaiah Berlin, Naum Gabo and Kirk Varnedoe. The lectures will be delivered on 26 March, 2, 9, 23 and 30 April and 7 May.