Book Description

This close examination by the noted French writer Philippe Sergeant of the works of the American artist Donald Sultan presents five different appoggiaturas or "accompaniments" to the paradoxes, and their resolutions, that surface in Sultan's work. Sergeant comments on the frame and the limits it presents, the history of seeing (inescapably neccessary yet necessary to escape), the logical and mathematical questions posed by Sultan's constant use of the square, the problem of the will of the artist, considered historically and grammatically, and the space that Sultan has carved out for himself between figuration and abstraction. Donald Sultan is one of the leading younger artists working in New York, and his works are frequently exhibited there at the Knoedler Gallery. He also has a substantial overseas following. Philippe Sergeant is a novelist, dramatist, and essayist who has written extensively on the plastic arts. This is his first work to be translated into English.