Williamstown, Massachusetts—On Tuesday, September 20, the Clark Art Institute’s Research and Academic Program will host a lecture by Clark Fellow Olivier Bonfait entitled, “Read the Story and the Picture,” at 5:30 p.m. in the Manton Research Center auditorium. 

In this lecture, Bonfait spans antiquity to the twenty-first century, delving into the interplay between the pictorial intelligence of the story based on a left-right dynamic and the lateralization of vision which is also part of  daily experience.

Prior to this free lecture, attendees are invited to join a reception in the Manton Research Center Reading Room starting at 5 p.m. No registration is required to attend. 

A recorded video of this lecture will be released on the Clark’s YouTube channel on September 27. For more information, visit clarkart.edu/events.

Olivier Bonfait is a professor at the Université de Bourgogne and the École du Louvre, and is also a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He earned his Ph.D. from the Sorbonne with a dissertation on art and society of Baroque Bologna. 

Bonfait has published extensively, in particular on Nicolas Poussin and “Caravaggesque” painting. When he was director of the art history department at the Villa Médici—Académie de France (Rome), Bonfait curated several exhibitions spanning seventeenth- to nineteenth-century European art. 

At the Clark, he is researching the history of large-format painting and considering its important role in the formation of modern nation states.