Matisse gave two separate accounts of the moment at which he
began work on the first version of The Dance, each of them
emphasizing the immensity of the surface he had to master, “to
possess,” as he put it. In the first version, it is an...
Pablo Picasso did not speak often about abstraction, but when he
did, it was either to dismiss it as complacent decoration or to
declare its very notion an oxymoron. The root of this hostility is
to be found in the impasse that the artist reached in...
Thames & Hudson has published Matisse in the Barnes Foundation
edited by Yve-Alain Bois, Professor in
the School of Historical Studies. The Barnes Foundation's Matisse
collection, comprised of fifty-nine works from every stage of the
artist’s career...
Anyone leafing through the pages of this volume cannot but
be struck not only by the pace at which the artist’s production
evolved during this early period of his career but also by its
diversity—with the exception perhaps of the paintings
he...
Yve-Alain Bois, Professor of Art History in the School of
Historical Studies, discusses the work of artist Ellsworth Kelly.
The talk explores how things that look apparently simple in the
artist’s work are in fact much more complex than they seem.
Ellsworth Kelly is one of the very first artists whose work I
liked. Perhaps he was second, just after Piet Mondrian. One of the
things I asked Kelly after we finally met and became friends, close
to a quarter of a century ago, was why he had not...
Two years ago I was asked to organize a medium-size Picasso
exhibition in Rome, the first in that city since 1953, that would
function as an introduction to the artist’s work for a whole
generation of Romans who had not been exposed to it (unless...
Seven lectures on the theme The Sensuous in Art were
presented by the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton
University in the 2006-2007 academic year. From medieval to
contemporary art, the series focused on what Yve-Alain Bois,
Professor of...
It is noteworthy that as between two proofs of a theorem
mathematicians will prefer the one which, as they say, is more
“elegant,” a term which has primarily an aesthetic rather than a
logical significance. It is a striking fact that creative...
