Interviews with American artists - David Sylvester

With his great knowledge, sympathy and provocative style, art critic David Sylvester was unique in his ability to get great artists to talk freely. This astounding book includes nineteen interviews, recorded over the past forty years, with leading American artists. The eldest was born in 1903, the youngest in 1955 - together they illuminate all the great developments in American art. Here are the views of David Smith, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Alex Katz, Robert Morris and many others. Conversations from the 1960s vividly conjure up the New York art scene, while artists like Carl Andre, Cy Twombly and Jeff Koons, speak straight from today. We hear the composer John Cage on music and the spatial imagination. We follow Richard Serra, as he installs his mighty steel sculptures in New York City and Bilbao. Speaking for themselves - intimately, comically, ruefully, passionately - all the artists offer unparalleled insights about their aims, techniques, beliefs, allegiances. No one but David Sylvester could have produced this intricate collage, a chorus of voices which blend to create a revealing and unusual history of American art in the twentieth century.