Thomas W. Gaehtgens received his doctorate in 1966 at the Institute of Art History at the Universität Bonn and his habilitation in 1972 at the Universität Göttingen. In 1979, he was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. Between 1980 and 2006 he served as professor at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He was a Getty Scholar at the J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica, from 1985 to 1986. In 1992, he organized the 26th International Congress of Art History in Berlin and served as the president of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA) from 1992 to 1996. Professor Gaehtgens taught at the Collège de France in 1995 and held the position of European Chair at the Collège de France between 1998 and 1999. He was director of the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte/Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art in Paris, an organization he founded in 1997. In 2004, he received an honorary doctorate at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Since 2007, he has been the director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Professor Gaehtgens was awarded the Grand Prix de l’Académie Française pour la Francophonie in 2009. In 2011, he received an honorary doctorate from the Paris-Sorbonne, and was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In recognition of his influential scholarship, Gaehtgens was awarded the prestigious Prix Mondial Cino del Duca 2015 by the Institut de France. His research interests include eighteenth- to twentieth-century French and German art history, as well as the history of the museum.