Newly translated writings on art from the Italian arte povera provocateur Featuring a luxurious faux-leather binding, Piero Manzoni: Writings on Art features 25 texts by the Italian artist Piero Manzoni (1933-63), spanning from 1956 to 1963, the year of the artist's premature death by heart attack. Writing during the Italian economic miracle of the '50s and '60s, Manzoni's essays and manifestos represent his response to the state of midcentury Italian art and art writing. Selected by art historian Gaspare Luigi Marcone, all writings have been either translated into English for the first time or newly translated. Each text is accompanied by extensive archival images and contextualized with editorial commentary. The book features a foreword by the Piero Manzoni Foundation's director, Rosalia Pasqualino di Marineo, and a newly commissioned essay by one of today's best-known art historians, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh.

Focusing on artwork by Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and Piero Manzoni, Jaleh Mansoor demonstrates and reveals how abstract painting, especially the monochrome, broke with fascist-associated futurism and functioned as an index of social transition in postwar Italy. Mansoor refuses to read the singularly striking formal and procedural violence of Fontana's slit canvasses, Burri's burnt and exploded plastics, and Manzoni's "achromes" as metaphors of traumatic memories of World War II. Rather, she locates the motivation for this violence in the history of the medium of painting and in the economic history of postwar Italy. Reconfiguring the relationship between politics and aesthetics, Mansoor illuminates how the monochrome's reemergence reflected Fontana, Burri, and Manzoni's aesthetic and political critique of the Marshall Plan's economic warfare and growing American hegemony. It also anticipated the struggles in Italy's factories, classrooms, and streets that gave rise to Autonomia in the 1960s. Marshall Plan Modernism refigures our understanding of modernist painting as a project about labor and the geopolitics of postwar reconstruction during the Italian Miracle.

Presenting the conservation challenges related to different media and materials of considerable art-historical value, the studies in this volume include symposium papers by art historians, physicists, philosophers, artists, conservators and critics, on topics such as accidental damage, working with artists, packing and transport, and installation.

ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s-60s, is the first large-scale historical survey in the United States dedicated to the German artist group Zero (1957-66). Founded by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, joined by Günther Uecker in 1961, the group expanded to include ZERO, an international network of like-minded artists who shared the group's aspiration to redefine art in the aftermath of World War II. Featuring more than thirty artists from nine countries, the catalogue explores the experimental practices developed by this extensive network of artists whose work anticipated aspects of Land art, Minimalism, and Conceptual art. The publication is organized around points of intersection, exchange, and collaboration that defined these artists' shared history. Among the themes explored are the establishment of new definitions of painting; the introduction of movement and light as both formal and idea-based aspects of art; the use of space as subject and material; the interrogation of the relationship between nature, technology, and humankind; and the production of live actions or demonstrations. At once a snapshot of a specific group and a portrait of a generation, this title celebrates the pioneering nature of both the art and the transnational vision advanced by the ZERO network.