As one of the greatest pioneers of international conceptual art, Italian artist Piero Manzoni (1933-1963) maintained strong ties with the Netherlands. The unlocking of his intensive correspondence with Rotterdam gallery owner Hans Sonnenberg has revealed the extent of Manzoni's influence on the post-war avant-garde in the Netherlands.0During his short artistic career Piero Manzoni produced more than a thousand canvases, sculptures and other objects. He radically rejected the conventional context of the work of art, even integrating the body of the artist in the work. He also created so-called Achromes, literally: ?without colour.? Manzoni considered the surface of the canvas to be a space of unlimited possibilities. It no longer accommodated the illusion of the painted representation, or the artist's personal expressive gesture, but it became an autonomous entity instead. Manzoni's work was of great influence on artists associated with the Dutch nul-groep and the international ZERO movement.0'Manzoni in Holland' is the untold story of the special relationship that one of the most prominent avant-garde artists of the twentieth century had with the Netherlands.00Exhibition: Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam, The Netherlands (18.02.-02.06.2019).

The original edition of this ambitious reference was published in hardcover in 1998, in two oversize volumes (10x13"). This edition combines the two volumes into one; it's paperbound ("flexi-cover"--the paper has a plastic coating), smaller (8x10", and affordable for art book buyers with shallower pockets--none of whom should pass it by. The scope is encyclopedic: half the work (originally the first volume) is devoted to painting; the other half to sculpture, new media, and photography. Chapters are arranged thematically, and each page displays several examples (in color) of work under discussion. The final section, a lexicon of artists, includes a small bandw photo of each artist, as well as biographical information and details of work, writings, and exhibitions. Ruhrberg and the three other authors are veteran art historians, curators, and writers, as is editor Walther. c. Book News Inc.

Reproduction of the original: Holland by Edmondo de Amicis

Focusing on artwork by Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and Piero Manzoni, Jaleh Mansoor demonstrates and reveals how abstract painting, especially the monochrome, broke with fascist-associated futurism and functioned as an index of social transition in postwar Italy. Mansoor refuses to read the singularly striking formal and procedural violence of Fontana's slit canvasses, Burri's burnt and exploded plastics, and Manzoni's "achromes" as metaphors of traumatic memories of World War II. Rather, she locates the motivation for this violence in the history of the medium of painting and in the economic history of postwar Italy. Reconfiguring the relationship between politics and aesthetics, Mansoor illuminates how the monochrome's reemergence reflected Fontana, Burri, and Manzoni's aesthetic and political critique of the Marshall Plan's economic warfare and growing American hegemony. It also anticipated the struggles in Italy's factories, classrooms, and streets that gave rise to Autonomia in the 1960s. Marshall Plan Modernism refigures our understanding of modernist painting as a project about labor and the geopolitics of postwar reconstruction during the Italian Miracle.