American painter and sculptor Salvatore Scarpitta (1919-2007) spent his childhood in Hollywood, where he fostered a love of dirt track racing. He moved to Italy in 1936 to study painting, and later fostered friendships with artists such as Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni. Scarpitta's mature work was to emerge from a unique mid-terrain between the unlikely twin influences of drag racing and Arte Povera; it led to his well-known wrapped or bandaged paintings, shaped canvases and even to replica racing cars, which frequently saw service before being exhibited. In the 1970s he made a series of sleds, the first of which was bought by Willem de Kooning. Despite Scarpitta's associations with both Abstract Expressionists and Pop artists, his work remained on the fringes of the postwar period's defining movements. As his influence emerges on a younger generation, this volume assesses his oeuvre.

Recorded and transcribed throughout the 1960s, Carla Lonzi's Self-portrait ruptures the linear tradition of art-historical writing. Lonzi first abolishes the role of the critic, her own, seeking change over self-preservation by theorising against the act of theorising. This is the voice of feminist experimentalism in Italian art and literature, and here Lonzi speaks for herself in English. Self-portrait montages her verbatim conversations with fourteen prominent artists working at the time, all men except one. Lonzi's vital feeling that it was impossible to respond professionally to the political and existential problems embedded in the production and distribution of artworks drives the book's contingent structure. Artmaking struck Lonzi as the invitation to be together in a humanly satisfying way. This first English translation brings Lonzi's final work of criticism before her break with 'art' to an international audience. Her uncompromising enactment and pragmatic drop-out discontinues the narration of postwar modern art in Italy and beyond.