Orde Levinson is an artist, poet, art historian and educator, but above all he has a love of art with a willingness to share his expertise with others. He began his research on Kahnweiler at Magdalen College, Oxford, and has previously published on John Piper, John Muafangejo, Shakespeare and Cubism. Samuel Beckett called Levinson's lyrical comedy Ndilapa Nkosi a “moving feat,” and Myfanwy Piper described his catalogue raisonné on the prints of her husband John as “meticulous and inexhaustible in research. It is, however, not only a work of scholarship but one of enthusiasm and love.”

Praised by peer reviewers as a “remarkable project,” a “prodigious achievement,” “essential and long-awaited,” the real contribution of the present edition is the careful gathering and translation of the writings of one of the most important commentators on and first-hand witnesses of the pioneering breakthroughs of twentieth-century art, especially Cubism.