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...
“When Paul Cézanne wants to speak ... he says with his picture
what words could only falsify.” In The Voices of Silence
(1951), French author and statesman André Malraux expressed his
view that the Post-Impressionist painter could only “speak”
with...
In the Spring 2013 Institute Letter, Uta
Nitschke-Joseph wrote “A Fortuitous Discovery: An Early Manuscript
by Erwin Panofsky Reappears in Munich,” in which she reconstructed
the convoluted fate of the lost, and in 2012 re-found, Habilitation
thesis...
Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at New York University, examines the displaced and wandering existences of Jacques-Louis David and Théodore Géricault, both in geographical and psychological exile, during which each was forced to reexamine and reconfigure the fundamentals of his artistic life.
In the art of Paul Klee (1879-1940), we find an unmatched
pluralism of styles--figurative as well as abstract, geometric as
well as biomorphic, linear as well as painterly, severe styles
alongside more fluid ones, often within the production of a...
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.
