Some of the most ravishing and daring paintings of the 20th century belong to the tradition of all-over, color based abstraction, pioneered by the generation of Color-Field painters in the late 1950s and early 1960s including Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Helen Frankenthaler. This tradition continued to evolve in the work of a subsequent generation throughout the 1970s. Cynthia Polsky, who, between 1962 and 1974, created a group of ambitious, inventive works on paper and large-scale paintings distinguished by eloquent drawing and diaphanous clouds of color, is part of this next generation.
 
Cynthia Polsky's paintings remind us that we can be deeply moved and profoundly stimulated by things that defy language and ideation. In an era when ambitious artists often seem less engaged by the visual than the conceptual, it is reassuring to be confronted by evidence of the potency and complexity of the visual.
 
The essays in this volume by the curator--critic Karen Wilkin and the poet-critic John Yau discuss the rich overtones of Cynthia Polsky's work, from the world o nature and the world of art, including dance, music and Asian calligraphies, and illuminate the varied sources that inform this accomplished and original body of work.
 
Her works are represented in numerous private and public collections including the Allentown Museum of Art, Allentown, Pennsylvania, the Corcoran Museum, Washington DC, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York.

Karen Wilkin is a New York based critic and curator, specializing in 20th century modernism. She has organized exhibitions and written books on Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, David Smith, and Anthony Caro among others. Ms. Wilkin writes regularly for The New Criterion, Art in America, Hudson Review and the Wall Street Journal.
 
John Yau has published more than thirty books of poetry, fiction and criticism, and has contributed essays to monographs on Richard Pousette-Dart, Helmut Federle, Morris Graves, Brice Marden, Pat Steir, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. He teaches at Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University). Both a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry (2006-7), he is currently working on a book on Jasper Johns.