A marvellous book which teaches us how to see. There is not a word out of place. And the author’s seriousness allows us to feel his full passion, what really matters for him… This book will provide me lasting company, and I will often look in its pages for backing for my own judgements. —Jean Starobinski When a great painter also happens to be an intelligent and cultivated one, his observations on art count a hundred times more than a critic’s or a historian’s do. A man’s knowledge of his own craft is both irreplaceable and indispensable. —Simon Leys Throughout his whole development I have never ceased to admire the acuteness of his vision and his faultless insight into the art of the past. —Samuel Beckett Avigdor Arikha was one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. He was born in Romania to German-speaking Romanian Jewish parents and spent most of his life in Paris. A talented child, he started drawing early on. During the Second World War, he was deported to a concentration camp in the Ukraine, where he drew the horrors he witnessed. These drawings saved his life. During the 1950s, he established himself in Paris and was enjoying a successful career as an abstract painter. In 1965, a Caravaggio exhibition prompted him to convert to drawing from life. He stopped using colour until 1973, when he started again to paint. He worked with a religious, almost war-like, intensity until his death. Arikha was also an erudite and passionate scholar, endowed with a deep understanding of the history of art and its techniques, well-versed in world history and fascinated by science. He wrote many essays and curated important exhibitions of masters such as Poussin, Velázquez and Ingres. In this collection of essays that he wrote between 1965 and 1994, Arikha expounds on art and artists (Mantegna, Velázquez, Poussin, David, Ingres, Degas, Matisse, and more), technique, seeing, and the state of culture in his day which, one could argue, is no more hopeful today, almost thirty years later.

The first comprehensive collection of writings by Martha Rosler considers the intersection of art and politics, the operation of art systems, feminist art practices, and the media. Decoys and Disruptions is the first comprehensive collection of writings by American artist and critic Martha Rosler. Best known for her videos and photography, Rosler has also been an original and influential cultural critic and theorist for over twenty-five years. The writings collected here address such key topics as documentary photography, feminist art, video, government patronage of the arts, censorship, and the future of digitally based photographic media. Taken together, these thirteen essays not only show Rosler's importance as a critic but also offer an essential resource for readers interested in the issues confronting contemporary art. The essays in this collection illustrate Rosler's ongoing investigation into means of exposing truth and provoking change, providing a retrospective of characteristic issues in her work. Mixing analysis and wit, Rosler challenges many of the fundamental precepts of contemporary art practice. Her influential essay, "In, around, and afterthoughts: on documentary photography," almost single-handedly dismantled the myth of liberal documentary photography when it appeared. Many of the essays in this volume have had a similarly wide-ranging influence; others are published here for the first time. Illustrating the essays are 81 images by Rosler and other artists and photographers.

Ad Reinhardt is probably best known for his black paintings, which aroused as much controversy as admiration in the American art world when they were first exhibited in the 1950s. Although his ideas about art and life were often at odds with those of his contemporaries, they prefigured the ascendance of minimalism. Reinhardt's interest in the Orient and in religion, his strong convictions about the value of abstraction, and his disgust with the commercialism of the art world are as fresh and valid today as they were when he first expressed them.

Born in Bern, Switzerland, in 1933, Harald Szeemann was a crucial force in identifying, exhibiting, and writing about the important new movements in postwar contemporary art. This collection of seventy-four texts from the curator’s vast body of written work—which includes essays, lectures, studio notes, reviews, interviews, correspondence, and transcripts—introduces the depth of his method, insight, and inclusive artistic interests. The pieces have been translated from German and French and collected in an informed, authoritative edition, making this the first time Szeemann’s work is accessible in English. The first two sections of this volume republish Szeemann’s anthologies Museum der Obsessionen (1981) and Individuelle Mythologien (1985). The final part assembles important writings from 1986 until his death in 2005 to represent the later years of his career and round out a record of his contribution to and dialogue with later twentieth- century art and artists. The book’s publication coincides with the opening of the Getty Research Institute’s exhibition Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions and complements its catalogue, as well as a contemporaneous satellite show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, that focuses on Szeemann’s Grandfather exhibition (1974).