John C. Welchman’s compelling study reassesses Italian Futurism; the words and images in Dada and Surrealism; affect in the work of Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger; the delirious splits and metaphorical ricochets of Salvador Dalí; the social and philosophical ideas mobilized by René Magritte; “whiteness” in the work of Günter Brus; postwar US–UK exchanges on sculpture; and relations between writing and seeing in the work of Rémy Zaugg.

This volume is a collection of dynamic and engaged writings by art historian John C. Welchman on a range of contemporary European artists. Anchored in concerns that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, Welchman poses thoughtful and provocative questions about how these artists receive and negotiate the social and aesthetic histories through which they live and work.

On the Last Afternoon: Disrupted Ecologies and the Work of Joyce Campbell offers a number of portholes into the relations between photography, philosophy, ecology, material history, science fiction, and the care and reading of sacred and symbolic landscapes, as they have been engaged by artist Joyce Campbell over her near three-decade career.

From November 2017 to September 2019, res·o·nant, a conceptual light and sound installation by Mischa Kuball, pulsed throughout the architecture of the Libeskind building in the Jewish Museum Berlin.

In his influential 1986 text, now translated into English for the first time, Swiss artist Rémy Zaugg (1943–2005) laid out fundamental ideas on the art museum. For him, the museum is an everyday tool that enables the encounter between viewer and work—raising the question of the kind of architecture appropriate for such a space.

First presented in lecture format at Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, these essays reflect the wealth of the exchange that exists between theoretical writing and artistic thinking, sharing the fascination that each of these authors has with both the work of an artist and how this work functions in relation to larger contexts and broader ideas.