Sean Scully: Glorious Dust

Sean Scully uses pastels to create abstract works in emotive response to color. This beautifully produced two-volume set, which accompanies the traveling exhibition Wall of Light , which starts at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. then travels to The Modern in Fort Worth, Texas and The Cincinnati Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, and ends at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, brings together 100 of those subtle and ecstatic celebrations, along with four written pieces about them by Arthur Danto, who has been tracking Scully's work for a dozen years. Danto is Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia, and has since 1984 also been the art critic for The Nation. His contributions here range from catalogue texts for some of Scully's most significant exhibitions to a Nation piece, and are brought together here for the first time, allowing readers to trace the history and development of a major artist in the writings of one of America's leading art critics. Among Danto's insights are that "Scully's historical importance lies in the way he has brought the greatest achievements of Abstract Expressionist painting into the contemporary moment." He also comes bearing secrets from the "Pastel involves rubbing friable chalk over toothed paper, which in its nature confers a certain sparkling luminosity to the forms, and it is responsive to differences in pressure. The principle of pastel, Scully once told me, is that of putting on makeup."