Institute of Fine Arts

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The Institute of Fine Arts, commonly called the IFA, is a graduate school of New York University and is one of the world’s leading graduate schools and research centers in art history, archaeology, and conservation. The IFA's sole focus is graduate work; there are no undergraduate classes. The Institute has a permanent faculty, along with adjunct lecturers from top museums, research institutes, and conservation studios. Since the Institute awarded its first PhD in 1933, more than 1600 degrees have been conferred. A high proportion of alumni hold international leadership roles as professors, curators, museum directors, archaeologists, conservators, critics, and institutional administrators. [adapted from standard IFA press release; see http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/fineart/ifa/index.htm]

Along with departments at Yale, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, Columbia, and Berkeley, the IFA is one of the most prestigious programs for art-historical graduate work in the US. Located in the James B. Duke House in Manhattan about one block down Museum Mile from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the IFA enjoys a close relationship with that museum, holding classes there, employing curators as professors, and sending many students to work there. As Walter Cook said apropos of the most ambitious enterprise of a well-known Fine Arts Department (presumably that of Harvard University's Fogg Museum), "You may spend your money on a museum, but we are going to move right next to a museum and let them buy our works of art, while we spend it on the professors and get the best there are." (As quoted by Harry Bober in "The Gothic Tower and the Stork Club," originally published in the Spring 1962 issue of Arts and Sciences. For the full text of the article, see http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/fineart/ifa/curriculum/art_history.htm)

Some of the IFA's more notable graduates include: Robert Rosenblum; Linda Nochlin, Mariet Westermann, and Robert Lubar, all of whom now teach at the IFA; Susan Vogel and Zainab Bahrani, professors at Columbia; Slobodan Curcic, professor at Princeton; Tim Barringer, professor at Yale; Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Charles Little, curator of the medieval department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Anne Poulet, director of the Frick collection.

A number of important scholars have taught at the IFA, including Erwin Panofsky, Walter Friedlaender, Kirk Varnedoe, and Horst W. Janson. For a full faculty list, see http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/fineart/ifa/curriculum/art_history.htm

[edit] External links

• For further information, see: http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/fineart/
• Interview with Philippe de Montebello, Apollo magazine