Description and resistance: On Yve-Alain Bois’s Painting as Model

In the introduction to Painting as Model, Yve-Alain Bois attempted to provide for his readers ‘a map of the field of forces against which (or with which)’ the essays had been written. If those essays continue to hold an important position within the discipline today, it is nonetheless the case that the ‘field of forces’ from (and in opposition to) which they draw their significance has subtly but noticeably changed. This article looks in some detail at several of the most prominent published reviews of Painting as Model, discusses how the art-historical terrain has shifted since 1990 and then how those differences both enable and require us to reconceive the nature of Bois’s project. The phrase ‘materialist formalism’, which he originally used to describe his approach, arguably carries different connotations now than it did a quarter century ago, with the result that we might be better served by describing Bois’s work in other terms – terms that would place a greater premium on the descriptive nature of his criticism and the forms of resistance that it enacts.