William Grosvenor Congdon was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1912. From the end of the 1940s, for more than a decade he was one of the most successful painters formed in the climate of the New York School, thanks to the original balance he struck between Abstract Expressionism and the European figurative tradition. Permanently in exile, an inexhaustible traveler, Congdon then - also as a consequence of his conversion to Catholicism - moved farther and farther away from the art world and market.

This volume is the result of the need for a thorough investigation of an artist who, thanks to renewed critical interest, has been recognized as one of the great masters of the second half of the twentieth century. The book reveals the seductive complexity of Congdon's journey as well as the extraordinary quality of his works.

Three scholars - two eminent American art historians, Peter Selz and Fred Licht, and Congdon's most attentive biographer, Rodolfo Balzarotti - have confronted Congdon's poetic universe, with its parabola of expression and crowded landscape of existence; what emerges is above all the sign of the immense richness of experience of the man and the artist, which The Foundation for Improving Understanding of the Arts has the task of safeguarding but which belongs by right to the history of our time.