Thomas Wolfgang Gaehtgens - Biography#

Pr. Dr. Thomas Gaehtgens is a German art historian with special interest in French and German art from the 18th to the 20th century. After completing his dissertation in 1966 on the French Renaissance sculptor, Germain Pilon, at the University of Bonn and publishing in 1972 his Habilitationsschrift about Joseph-Marie Vien at the University of Göttingen, he became Professor at this university until 1978, then Professor, University of Hamburg (1974-1975) and Professor of Art History at the Freie Universität Berlin (1980-2006).

His career has been fully international. In 1979-1980 he was Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, 1985–86 Visiting Scholar at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Los Angeles. This experience materialized in a major exhibition of American painting of the 18th and 19th centuries held in Germany in 1988. From 1992-96 he was President of CIHA.

In 1997, he founded and directed the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte in Paris (Centre Allemand d'Histoire de l'Art de Paris), which organizes conferences, symposia, and workshops, undertakes research projects, and has published many books on art, many of which he edited himself. In 1998-1999 he held the Chaire européenne at the Collège de France in Paris. In November 2007, after his retirement from the University in Berlin, he was appointed director of the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in Los Angeles, California, his current position, from which he is about to retire.

Gaehtgens took also international responsibilities, when he became President of the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art (CIHA which is related to UNESCO) 1992-1996,. In 1992, Gaehtgens was responsible for the organization of the Twenty-Eighth International Congress of the History of Art in Berlin.

In 2004, he received an honorary doctorate at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London and in 2011 an honorary doctorate from the Université de Paris-Sorbonne. In 2009, Gaehtgens received the Grand prix de la francophonie of the Académie française. In 2011, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.