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Award-Winning Medievalist Aden Kumler to Present 2026 A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts
Aden Kumler, an award-winning art historian, will present a four-part lecture series entitled In Praise of Difficulty: Ambiguity, Aesthetics, and the Work of Art in Medieval Europe, to take place in the National Gallery’s East Building Auditorium every Sunday from May 3 to 24, 2026, from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. In the series, Kumler will focus on difficulty as an aesthetic strategy, value, and theme in medieval European art. The lectures expand upon one of the central topics of Kumler’s scholarly research: how the material conditions of life shape people’s thought, imagination, and actions. The Mellon Lectures inaugurated in 1949, the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts is the longest-running lecture series at the National Gallery of Art. The series was founded “to bring to the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts.” Past lecturers have included art historians, artists, poets, and musicologists.
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