Christian Boltanski came to prominence in the 1980s with major exhibitions athe Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris in 1984 and the Whitechapel Gallery,ondon in 1990. This text explores his art, arguing that it hovers betweenhe trauma of the extermination camp depot and the redemption of a memorialhrine.;Boltanski can be described as an alchemist, philosopher, potentialuicide, clown or Rasputin. His work has ranged from the creation of an "ronic museum of the self" to sensitive portrayals of ordinary people. Hisnstallations are made up of collections of everyday objects such as clothingr shoes; and photographs - such as passport photographs, school portraitsnd family albums. They memorialize ordinary people - the unknown childrenilled in the Holocaust, the people of a Swiss canton, or the employees of aalifax carpet factory. Recently he worked on a production of Schubert'sinter Reisse at the Lyric Theatre, London, and will continue to work onheatrical and operatic productions.;The book is part of a series of studiesf important artists of the late-20th century. Each title offers a

Didier Semin is Professor or Art History at the Ecole nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He is a regular contributor to Art Press and Beaux Arts Magazine, and his books include Boltanski (1988) and Arte Povera (1992).

Tamar Garb is a critic and historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual culture and Professor of Art History at University College London. Her books include Sisters of the Brush: Women's Artistic Culture in Late 19th Century France (1994), The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity (co-edited with Linda Nochlin, 1995) and Bodies of Modernity (1998).

Donald Kuspit is Professor of Art History and Philosophy at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. His books include The Cult of the Avant Garde Artist (1993), Idiosyncratic Identities: Artists at the End of the Avant-Garde (1996) and The End of Art (2004).