Raphael Rubinstein is Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Houston, USA. He is a New York based art critic and in 2002, the French government presented him with the award of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters. In 2010, his blog The Silo won a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. In 2014 The Silo was given a Best Blog Award of Excellence by the International Association of Art Critics. In April 2017, The Miraculous: Houston, a public-art installation by artist and wife Heather Bause Rubinstein, based on his book The Miraculous, debuted as part of the CounterCurrent Festival.

[This book] is a fascinating study in skeptical digression. The author has managed to erect a transparent monument to the inescapable paradox of thought thinking itself, which makes for itself the most interesting of art.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsIntroductionPart I: What is Provisional Painting?1. Provisional Painting (2009)2. To Rest Lightly on the Earth (2011)3. Painting the Stuckness: Samuel Beckett, Bram Van Velde, Georges Duthuit4. Weak Thought, Strong Painting (Gianni Vattimo)5. A Precarious Chain of SignifiersPart II: Varieties of the Provisional6. Some Precursors: Dorothea Rockburne, Pat Steir, Joan Snyder, Chris Reinecke, Sigmar Polke, Carmengloria Morales, Suh Se-ok, Nahum Tevet, Gérard Gasiorowski, Pierre Buraglio7. Varieties of the Provisional: Michael Krebber, Albert Oehlen, Rachel Hecker, Amy Feldman8. Painting As Is (Luca Bertolo and Co.)9. In Glimpses: David Hammons’s Tarp PaintingsConclusion: After Provisional PaintingNotesBibliographyIndex