Yve-Alain Bois to Deliver 2020 Mellon Lectures at National Gallery of Art

Yve-Alain Bois, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, will give the 2020 A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

The lecture series, titled "Transparence and Ambiguity: The Modern Space of Axonometry," will draw from various disciplines, most notably the history of art and the history of science, in order to ask why axonometry, which has been independently discovered, forgotten, and rediscovered several times in history, took hold only at the dawn of modernity.

The lectures will be held in the East Building Auditorium at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, on March 22, March 29, April 5, April 19, April 26, and May 3, 2020 at 2:00 p.m. The schedule is as follows:

March 22: El Lissitzky: Axonometry as "Symbolic Form"?
March 29: From Denis Diderot to William Farish: Mechanical Drawing and Its Failed Encounter with Industry
April 5: From Crystallography to Josef Albers via the Necker Cube: Transparency versus Ambiguity
April 19: Architectural Rationalism and the Worm's-Eye View
April 26: Theo van Doesburg versus Walter Gropius: Axonometry as the Graphic Esperanto of Modernist Architecture
May 3: The Postwar Resurgence of Axonometry: From Alison and Peter Smithson to Minimalist Sculptors

Read more at National Gallery of Art.