Lectures in Art History: Andrew McClellan, Tufts University

“Rivals on the Fenway: Isabella Stewart Gardner, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Destiny of the American Art Museum”

Phillips Hall, room 215

Andrew McClellan is currently a Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the National Humanities Center and on leave from the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Tufts University. Trained at the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), McClellan has written on painting, sculpture and architecture, but especially on the history of museums and art collecting. An overriding interest in contexts, institutional frameworks, the display and reception of art informs five of his books: Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (1999), Art and Its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium (2003), The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao (2008), The Art of Curating: Paul J. Sachs and the Museum Course at Harvard (2018), and Revisiting History in Museums and at Historic Sites (2022). His current project, ‘Rivals on the Fenway,’, supported by his residential fellowship at the National Humanities Center, is a book-length exploration of the simultaneous formation and complementary design of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Drawing on archival sources, this study will offer a new vision of the overlapping trajectories of public and private art museums in the United States.

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Contact: Lyneise Williams, williale@email.unc.edu