Yve-Alain Bois in Conversation with Lisa Florman and Philip Armstrong

Join us for this conversation that brings together acclaimed art historians and Picasso experts Yve-Alain Bois and Lisa Florman with Philip Armstrong, expert in French visual culture, for a discussion of the artist’s works, including those in our fall exhibition, Transfigurations: Modern Masters from the Wexner Family Collection.

A widely recognized specialist in 20th-century art and longtime editor for the journal October, Yve-Alain Bois has curated and co-curated a number of highly regarded exhibitions, including Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry (1999) and Picasso Harlequin 1917–1937 (2008). His influential books include Painting as Model (1990); Formless: A User’s Guide (with Rosalind Krauss, 1997), Matisse and Picasso (1998); and Art Since 1900 (with Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Rosalind Krauss, 2004). Bois is currently working on a study of Barnett Newman’s paintings and the catalogue raisonné of Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings and sculptures. He has previously taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins University and is now a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Ohio State Professor and Chair of History of Art Lisa Florman’s primary interests are modernism, the history of art history, and above all, the intersection of the two. Florman’s first book, Myth and Metamorphosis (2000), examined Picasso’s classicizing prints of the 1930s in the context of both surrealism and contemporaneous understandings of classical antiquity. Her second book, Concerning the Spiritual—and the Concrete—in Kandinsky’s Art was published this year by Stanford University Press. Florman contributed the essay “Vis-à-vis: Regarding Picasso’s Figure Paintings” to the Transfigurations exhibition catalogue.

Ohio State Associate Professor of Comparative Studies Philip Armstrong has published widely in the area of contemporary visual arts and culture and has written numerous essays on contemporary political theory. His recent publications include As Painting: Division and Displacement with Laura Lisbon and Stephen Melville (2001), Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political (2009), and Jean-Luc Nancy: Politique et au-delà with Jason Smith (2011).