Thomas Crow to Lead Getty Research Institute

Thomas Crow, an internationally renowned art scholar and critic who heads Yale University’s art history department, has been named director of the Getty Research Institute. The appointment, announced Monday, ends a yearlong effort to fill one of the most prestigious positions at the Getty Center in Brentwood.

Crow, 52, will take charge of one of the world’s largest research centers for art history on July 1. Housed in a sleek, cylindrical building in the hilltop complex designed by architect Richard Meier, the institute offers an 800,000-volume library and special collections of primary source material. It also publishes scholarly resource books, operates a visiting scholars program and presents public exhibitions, lectures, seminars and conferences.

“The Getty Research Institute is a microcosm of the whole enterprise of art history,” Crow said in a telephone interview from his office at Yale. In addition to accumulating a vast storehouse of libraries and archives, the institute synthesizes and publishes information that advances understanding of the visual arts, he said.

In making the announcement, Getty President Barry Munitz praised Crow as an original thinker whose appointment emphasizes the Getty’s “commitment to intellectual leadership” in the visual arts. Under Crow’s direction, the institute will expand its collaborative relationships with USC, UCLA, Cal State L.A., the Claremont Colleges and other academic institutions, Munitz added. Crow will succeed Salvatore Settis, who resigned last year to return to his former teaching position at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy.

Born near Chicago in 1948, Crow moved to San Diego with his family in 1961. He was graduated from Pomona College in Claremont in 1969 and completed his PhD in art history at UCLA in 1978. Prior to joining the faculty at Yale in 1996, he held teaching positions at CalArts, the University of Chicago, Princeton University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Sussex in England.

He is also the author of five books. His primary effort, “Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” published in 1985, won both the Brie Mitchell Prize for the best first book on the history of art and the College Art Assn.’s Charles Rufus Morey Prize for the most distinguished book on the history of art. Among his more recent critically acclaimed books are “The Intelligence of Art,” a 1999 critique of the current state of art history, and “Modern Art in the Common Culture,” a 1996 examination of connections between modern art and popular culture. Crow is also a contributing editor to Artforum, a leading journal of art criticism.

Although he has not lived in Southern California for the past 20 years, Crow said he has “a running start” in his new position. He has served on the Getty Research Institute’s advisory board of scholars since 1997. During the past 18 months, he has played an active role at the institute, including the conversion of the visiting scholars program from a closed, invitational system to an application process, open to curators, critics and artists, as well as art historians.