Donald Sultan: The Disaster Paintings

A survey of Donald Sultan’s monumental landscape series. Working at the intersection of abstraction and realism, Donald Sultan has created a unique painting technique that defies categorization. This multifaceted consideration of Sultan’s Disaster Paintings includes an expansive critical essay that situates the series within the tradition of landscape painting and draws connections to the Italian Arte Povera movement of the 1960s. The book also features an in-depth conversation between the author and Sultan, a poetic response to the work by his longtime collaborator Max Blagg, and numerous illustrations of the works along with archival drawings and photographs. The book provides readers with a deep understanding of the underlying themes of Sultan’s iconic series, his elaborate technique, and the catastrophic events that inspired the paintings

Alison Hearst is Assistant Curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.