PARIS.- The 7th edition of the Art History Festival is being held from June 2 to 4, 2017 at Fontainebleau castle and city. Nature is the festival’s main theme in 2017 while The United States is invited as guest country and Jeff Koons as the guest of honor.

The Art History Festival, unique event in Europe, gathers worldwide art history specialists every year. Conceived as a crossroad between publics and knowledge, the event is open to everyone and is completely free of charge. This three day festival offers lectures, discussions, concerts, exhibitions, screenings, and tours about art history. The event welcomed more than 27 000 visitors in 2016.

This year’s programme proposes more than 300 events, and is structured around three main themes: the annual theme, the guest country and the Forum de l’actualité (forum on current events in the world of art history).

Nature
The 7th edition of the Art History Festival invites you to explore every aspect of nature’s theme. Three perspectives are being covered: nature and the well-ordered unity, with all the exceptions presupposed; nature staged and nature as global environment. A specific attention is being given to gardens’ history.

The United States
Every year, the festival invites a guest country. Its research and teaching methods, its museum politics, and its heritage management are being compared with those of France. This invitation is also an opportunity to highlight the art in that country, its cultural artistic movements, its famous artists, its paradoxes and contradictions as well as its contemporary artistic scene.

In 2017, the festival is presenting lectures on American art (from Amerindian art to skyscrapers), portraits of American artists (from Andy Warhol to Cindy Sherman) and collectors (from Gertrude Stein to Dominique de Ménil), panels on the impact of the artist in the American society, American museums news and lectures named « Lunch with a genius ».

Forum de l’actualité (forum on current events) will discuss the hottest topics
Forum de l’actualité offers around twenty different lectures, roundtables and debates. It presents museums and exhibitions current themes, art history research and teaching, patrimonial concerns, but also main topics seen in national and international press. A string of lectures are particularly dedicated to the art market. For example, a lecture offers the possibility to discover the auction world or to question the importance attached to biennials, ancient and contemporary art fairs and shows in the international art market landscape. Other roundtables revisit current events themes, as the ivory trade and ivory art pieces, art theft or patrimonial destruction in war-torn countries.

This year, the Forum offers at lunch time, on Saturday and Sunday, professional meetings on art history trades and courses which help preparing students in art history to their future professional milieu (with the participation of Institut national du Patrimoine, École du Louvre, Association des professeurs d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art des universités, and Drouot Formation).

The art history Festival welcomes: • The art magazine and book fair, which presents a panorama of art books publishing. • The Cinema section « Art & Camera », which presents a whole section devoted to American film makers as Frederick Wiseman, a documentary film about Land Art artistic works, Terrence Malik and John Ford’s movies dealing with nature as an icon. • The Spring University dedicated to art teaching in school and held in partnership with the Ministry of National Education and Higher Education and Research. This year’s theme is « the body between nature and culture»

The Art History Festival also hosts families and young publics oriented activities that include: • Guided tours and workshop; • Concerts and dance performances; • Emily Dickinson’s readings by actors from the Comédie Française; • An artistic and cultural education project, a result of a yearlong process that involved 15 classrooms from first-grade class to tenth-grade class.