David Sylvester has been called “the best living writer in English about modern art” (Daily Telegraph). With his expertise, sympathy, and provocative style, he is unique in his ability to talk freely with influential artists. This astounding book includes 21 interviews, recorded over the past forty years, with leading American artists. Together they illuminate all the great developments in American art. Here are the views of David Smith, Richard Serra, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Nevelson, and more.

Conversations from the 1960s vividly conjure up the New York art scene immediately after the war, when the newly arrived Europeans met the Americans who had worked together in the Depression, their different traditions colliding and fusing as they walked the city, talked and worked together. Others, like those with Carl Andre, Cy Twombly, Alex Katz, and Jeff Koons, speak straight from today. No one but Sylvester could have produced this intricate collage, this chorus of voices that blend to create one of the most revealing and unusual histories of American art in the twentieth century.