'The best living writer in English about modern art' - Grey Gowrie. With his great knowledge and sympathy and provocative style, David Sylvester is 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, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Alex Katz, Robert Morris...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 Carl Andre, Cy Twombly and Jeff Koons, speak straight from today. We hear the composer John Cage on music and the spatial imagination and the generosity of creation. We follow Richard Serra, as he installs his mighty steel scuptures in New York City and Bilbao.