Yve-Alain Bois to Discuss Matisse in Institute for Advanced Study Lecture

Yve-Alain Bois, Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, will a give a public lecture, “Matisse’s Scale: What’s with the Bamboo Stick?,” on Friday, May 5, which will take place at 5:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the Institute campus.

In his public lecture, Bois will focus on Matisse’s use of the bamboo stick in large-scale works and the bodily conception of scale it entails. In a photograph dating from 1931, Matisse is shown sketching The Dance—a gigantic mural commissioned by Albert Barnes for his Foundation—with his charcoal at the end of a six-foot bamboo stick. This unusual practice stems from the artist’s discovery that squaring up a small sketch, as has been the standard procedure for large paintings and murals, was incompatible with his aesthetic. The bamboo stick resurfaces in Matisse’s studio at the end of the 1940s when he is working on his Vence Chapel, his old age further emphasizing the acrobatic nature of the feat and the amazing control the artist had of his drawing tool (and his wrist). But while Matisse’s use of the cane is consistent with the artist’s creed with regard to two of the chapel’s murals—Saint Dominic and the Virgin and Child—it seems absurd when he dealt with the third mural, the Stations of the Cross, for which each of the fourteen stations were first sketched on individual pieces of paper at their final scale.

A specialist in twentieth-century European and American art, 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. He has curated and co-curated a number of influential exhibitions, including Piet Mondrian, A Retrospective (1994); L’informe, mode d’emploi (1996); Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry (1999); and Picasso Harlequin 1917–1937 (2008).

His books include Ellsworth Kelly: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Reliefs, and Sculpture: Vol. 1, 1940–1953 (2015); Matisse in the Barnes Foundation (2015); Art Since 1900 (with Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Rosalind Krauss, 2004); Matisse and Picasso (1998); Formless: A User’s Guide (with Rosalind Krauss, 1997); and Painting as Model (1990). Bois is currently working on several long-term projects, foremost among them the catalogue raisonné of Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings and sculptures, whose second volume (out of five) he plans to finish this year.

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 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. Bois joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University in 1983 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.