This week, associate editor Zack Hatfield revisits “James Bishop: Remembering to See,” Carter Ratcliff’s 1988 feature on the unclassifiable painter, who died in February at age ninety-three. Art historian Molly Warnock reflects on Bishop’s legacy in the current issue. John Ashbery once described the art of James Bishop as “half architecture, half air.” In other words, a ruin. In his 1988 essay on the elusive painter, who was born in America but resided in France, the poet-critic Carter Ratcliff revels in the “ruined image” of Bishop’s abstraction, locating in his idiosyncratic treatment of surface, structure, and luminosity a bracing alternative to modernity’s ideas of artistic progress, its tenuously promised futures. “Bishop carries on a demolition whose chief residue is the subtlety that empties his art, opening it to the questions memory supplies,” Ratcliff writes. It’s difficult to imagine Bishop as a wrecking ball. A specialist in the barely perceptible, he claimed to belong to the “quiet wing of Abstract Expressionism,” but he comes into view in this searching essay as an artist who discovered the present by razing every certitude.