Stella's first book of art criticism offers the opportunity to see painting problems from the point of view of one of the world's most prominent abstractionists . In Working Space, Stella develops the thesis that the crisis in modern abstrction is analogous to that in representational art in sixteenth-century Italy, and similarly requires a renewed attention to creating a potent, flexible pictorial space such as Caravaggio developed to propel painting forward. A provocative discussion of critical problems in contemporary art, fueled by a nontraditional reevaluation of the work of prominent figures in art history