Yve-Alain Bois To Speak On Non-Composition In Twentieth-Century Art

Yve-Alain Bois, Professor of Art History in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, will present the lecture The Difficult Task of Erasing Oneself: Non-Composition in Twentieth-Century Art on Wednesday, March 7, at 4:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the campus of the Institute.

Professor Bois's lecture will explore the precursors and legacy of Alexandr Rodchenko's exhibit of a triptych of monochrome panels in Moscow in 1921, when he famously declared the end of painting. Rodchenko's emphatic gesture was the conclusion of a yearlong debate within the young Soviet avant-garde about the notions of composition (to be abolished as the product of a "bourgeois subjectivity") and construction, a "materialist" concept that revolved around the idea of the dissolution of the self in the collective society to come. This was not the first occurrence of such a dream of "objectivity" and "impersonality" in art, and it certainly would

Professor Bois's lecture will examine how, rather than always leading to the myth of the death of painting (or sculpture), as Rodchenko had it, the idea that the artist should erase all traces of him- or herself was a dictum that helped sustain many different artistic practices during the past century, from Kasimir Malevich's Black Square of 1915, Jean Arp's collages "according to the laws of chance" of 1916-18, and Piet Mondrian's modular grids of 1918-19, to Pop Art, Minimalism, Process art, Conceptual art and beyond.

A specialist in twentieth-century European and American art, Professor Bois is recognized as an expert on a wide range of artists, from Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso to Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman, and Ellsworth Kelly. The curator of a number of influential exhibitions in the past decade, he is currently working on several long-term projects, including a study of Barnett Newman's paintings, the catalogue raisonné of Ellsworth Kelly's paintings and sculptures, and the modern history of axonometric projection.

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Professor Bois obtained his doctorate from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (1977). He began his career at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris in 1977. He joined the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University in1983 and remained there until 1991, at which time he accepted the Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Professorship of Modern Art in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Bois was acting chair of the department in 1999-2000, and chair from 2002-2005. He joined the Faculty of the Institute in 2005.

For further information about this event, which is free and open to the public, please call (609) 734-8175.