Describes how his creative life was profoundly shaped by a neurological condition called synesthesia which caused him to experienced colors as sounds and sounds as colors.

""Abstract art is always rooted in experience of the real world." So begins art historian Pepe Karmel's bold new exploration of the origins and evolution of the movement that revolutionized modern art. Traditional histories of the subject have concentrated on formal innovations--abstraction as a sequence of "isms"--with less interest in how the art relates to the world around us. At the same time, these histories have tended to privilege a core group...

Portrait of Ellsworth Kelly and his work.