Craig Staff: 3 books

Since the publication of Clement Greenberg's 'Modernist Painting' in 1960, the status of painting and its continued legitimacy as a medium has been repeatedly placed under question. As such, painting has had to continually redefine its own parameters and re-negotiate for itself a critical position...

The monochrome – a single colour of paint applied over the entirety of a canvas – remains one of the more contentious modernist artistic inventions. But whilst the manufacture of these 'pictures of nothing' was ostensibly straightforward, their subsequent theorisation has been anything but.

Contemporary art is often preoccupied with time, or acts in which the past is recovered. Through specific case studies of artists who strategically work with historical moments, this book examines how art from the last two decades has sought to mobilize these particular histories, and to what effect,...