An immaculately produced volume, Donald Sultan is a detailed examination of the artist’s distinguished thirty-year career and captures the essence of an innovative spirit whose work continues to evolve and inspire.

In the electrified atmosphere of New York’s downtown art renaissance of the 1980s, when graffiti and post-modern figuration were filling gallery walls and art magazines, Donald Sultan (b. 1951) developed a strikingly different style using simple iconography and a complex technique. His gouged and spackled paintings of lemons, tulips, and vases were abstract, familiar, erotic, and captured enthusiastic critical attention immediately. Influenced by artists from Sasetta to Warhol, Sultan chose still life as the vehicle for advancing his mission to “haul painting into the 21st century.” Today, Sultan’s work can be found in more than forty-five American museums, including MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art.

Carter Ratcliff is a leading art critic and contributing editor to Art in America. He received the College Art Association’s 1987 Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Art Critics Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Poets Foundation Grant. John Ravenal is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.