Art scholar Yve-Alain Bois will discuss Matisses creation of The Dance as a turning point in the artists career on Saturday, Nov. 12, from 11:30 to 12:30 at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Tickets are $10 onsite, $8 online, members and students are free of charge. In 1930, Dr. Albert Barnes commissioned a large mural from Henri Matisse for the Main Gallery of his foundation. The making of The Dance marked a turning point in the artists career. Simply put, it led to a creative reboot. Matisse abandoned the conservative style he adopted in the 1920s and began bold new experiments in color and materials. In this talk, art scholar Yve-Alain Bois traces the history of the monumental commission and its impact on Matisse. He delves into the challenges of the project, including its immense scale; in a letter to Barnes, Matisse wrote that he had to find a way to extend my legs and arms for the superhuman dimensions. The artist solved the problem with a long drawing stick and paper cutouts, both of which he returned to in a frenzy of creative output at the end of the 1940s. Bois will also discuss the recently recovered documents (letters, diagrams, technical notes, and more) that illustrate a fuller picture of Matisses work on The Dance, including the devastating mistake that set the artist back by more than a year. The exhibition Matisse, Dr. Barnes, and The Dance is currently on view. For tickets or additional information, visit www.barnesfoundation.org. Yve-Alain Bois Bois is a professor emeritus at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. He has written extensively on 20th-century art, including the work of Matisse, Picasso, and Mondrian. He has curated or co-curated several exhibitions, notably of the aforementioned artists, as well as Linforme, mode demploi at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Ellsworth Kelly: Early Drawings at the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Mass. He is an editor of the journal October and a contributing editor of Artforum.