Giorgio Morandi's steady pursuit of a poetic vision in still-life and landscape painting (as well as engravings and etchings) has secured him a singular and revered position in the history of Modern art. While drawing on the achievements of Giotto, Cezanne, the metaphysical painters and the Cubists, Morandi's work finally resembles no one else's and quietly defies paraphrase: everything is enigmatically clarified in the work itself, in all its apparent simplicity, on terms entirely specific to the artist's compositional gifts, in which respect he might almost be the Erik Satie of painting. As Morandi himself put it, "Truth is written in a different alphabet from ours: its characters are triangles, squares, circles, spheres, pyramids, cones and other geometrical figures." His still-lifes and landscapes could be described too easily as serene in their groupings of muted objects, but strange tensions arise among these objects in their clusterings and quiet nuances of light and color. The original writings and interviews collected in this substantial new volume trace Morandi's various influences, illuminate the atmosphere of Bologna that so characterized the artist's sensibility, and allow us to analyze the myth that has formed around his life and personality. Karen Wilkin, editor of this volume and the author of monographs on Georges Braque, Anthony Caro, Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann, Kenneth Noland and David Smith, has assembled an important contribution to the critical understanding of this great artist....

Since the early 1980s, Anthony Caro has been preoccupied with sculpture as space and metaphor for space. For the first time Karen Wilkin reveals the sculptor's fascination with the difference between interior and exterior and with sculptural volume and mass. Work emerging from Caro's studio over the last two decades has been preoccupied with density and containment. Wilkin looks back at Caro's career to find the seeds of this approach in pieces such as "Man Taking off His Shirt" (1955-56) through to the "Emma Lake" series (1977-78) and "Millbank Steps of 2004": mysterious interiors from which the visitor is excluded. These culminate in his work at Bourbourg, Pas-de-Calais, where Caro was commissioned to create a sculpture out of an architectural space. He treats the entire choir as a sculptural volume animated and punctuated by his invented structures such as an enormous baptismal font. Karen Wilkin has drawn on her vast knowledge of Caro's sculptures, based on thirty years of experiencing the works directly, visiting the studio and holding conversations with the artist. She reaches out to new audiences for his work whilst at the same time offering new insights and interpretations to meet the demands of the specialist....

Colour field painting, which emerged in the United States in the 1950s, is based on radiant, uninflected hues. Exemplified by the work of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons and Frank Stella, among others, these stunningly beautiful and impressively scaled paintings constitute one of the crowning achievements of postwar American abstract art. "Color as Field" offers a long-overdue reevaluation of this important aspect of American abstract painting. The authors examine how colour field painting rejects the gestural, layered and hyper-emotional approach typical of Willem de Kooning and his followers, yet at the same time develops and expands ideas about all-overness and the primacy of colour posited by the work of other members of the abstract expressionist generation, such as Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. From the fresh historical standpoint of the 21st century, this fascinating reassessment ranges across the artists' individual approaches and their shared understandings, concluding with insights into the ongoing legacy of post-1970s colour field painting among present-day artists....