Yves-Alain Bois will present UB Clarkson Lecture in Architecture on April 7

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Yves-Alain Bois, PhD, 2010 Clarkson Chair in Architecture in the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, will present the 2010 Clarkson Lecture in Architecture April 7 at 5:30 p.m. in 301 Crosby Hall, UB South Campus.

The lecture will be free and is open to the public.

Bois, an historian, theorist and critic of modern art who, in the mid 1990s, revived the polemic about formalism in art, will be in residence in the UB School of Architecture and Planning during the 2010 spring semester as Clarkson Chair in Architecture.

He is a recognized expert on a range of canonical artists including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman, Ellsworth Kelly, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Ryman, Ed Ruscha and Richard Serra, and has curated many exhibitions to international acclaim.

Bois, who received a master's degree and a PhD from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes under the tutelage of French structuralist Roland Barthes and art historian Hubert Damisch, began his career in 1977 at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris.

Since 2005, he has been professor of art history in Princeton's School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, a position he assumed after several years as Joseph Pulitzer Jr. Professor in Modern Art at Harvard University, where he chaired the Department of History of Art and Architecture.

Bois is the author of numerous essays for exhibition catalogues and journals and several highly regarded and much-translated books, among them "Matisse and Picasso" (1998), for which he received the Alfred H. Barr Award; "Painting as Model," a collection essays published by MIT Press in 1990, and "Art Since 1900," with Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss, published in 2004 by Thames & Hudson.

He is currently working on the modern history of axonometric projection, a type of orthographic projection used to create a pictorial drawing of an object, where the object is rotated along one or more of its axes relative to the plane of projection.

UB's Clarkson Chair in Architecture is an endowed visiting position that is awarded annually to a distinguished scholar or professional. The award is in recognition of excellence in the pursuit of scholarship and professional achievement within the discipline and is made possible by the generous support of Will and Nan Clarkson.