Thomas Gaehtgens is director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. He has been a professor in the department of Art History at the Free University in Berlin since 1979 and was founding director of the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte / Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art in Paris. Over his academic career, he developed several fields of interest, including eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French and German art and the history of the museum. His current research centers on eighteenth-century French sculpture, particularly the representation of the Grands Hommes in France and Germany, and Versailles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.