As curator of a major U.S. museum, Germano Celant had access to the most influential figures in the scene at a time when America was the eye of the contemporary art storm. This book presents his essays devoted to the most powerful movements in American art from 1960–2000....

Piero Manzoni was the enfant terrible of the post-war Italian avant-garde before his untimely death in Milan in 1963 at the age of just twenty-nine. Curated by Germano Celant, the artist’s premier scholar and author of the two editions of the Manzoni catalogues raisonné’s (Milan, 1975 and Milan, 2004), this stunning catalogue spans Manzoni’s entire oeuvre, including works belonging to the Manzoni archives as well as several international museums and private collections. In addition, it presents several works by Manzoni’s American and European contemporaries. Manzoni’s alignments and responses to other artists active at the time, from Robert Rauschenberg to Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana to Robert Ryman, and Cy Twombly to Jasper Johns, demonstrate his own decisive contribution to the art of the late fifties and early sixties. The book is published on the occasion of the first complete retrospective in the U.S. on this artist, installed at the Gagosian Gallery, New York, from January 24 to March 7, 2009. A must-have for every conceptual art fan....

Merce Cunningham (1919-2009) pioneered the contemporary conception of dance as a moving image of life. His innovations in the field date back to the 1940s, when, after meeting composer John Cage, he proposed the separation of music and dance and applied chance procedures to the structure of his dances; later, he used technology to further extend and blur the medium's boundaries. Collecting testimonies from Cunningham's friends and collaborators, this volume surveys the milestones in Cunningham's career, from 1944 to 1999. Composers such as Gordon Mumma, Earle Brown and John Cage, artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Nam June Paik and dancers such as Yvonne Rainer, Douglas Dunn and Carolyn Brown describe their collaborations with Cunningham over the past half-century, in interviews, essays and memoirs, alongside Cunningham's own writings and a wealth of illustrations....