Art Since 1940: Strategies of BeingIn Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, Jonathan Fineberg presents the art of the last six decades of our century as a series of responses, made by exceptional men and women, to the conditions of life in baffling and chaotic times. This Second Edition includes a whole new chapter on the 1990s and augmented sections earlier in the book. The year 1940 marks a defining moment in 20th-century art, when many artists of the European avant-garde moved en masse to New York. The city was instantly transformed into the art capital of the world, triggering radical changes of direction as artists, both immigrant and American-born, struggled with the reshuffled facts of their existence. For these artists, says Fineberg, making art was -- as it continues to be for artists today -- a strategy of coming to terms with their moment in history. This book helps us understand these "strategies of being" of the greatest postwar artists, and by extension other artists both well-known and little celebrated. Professor Fineberg focuses on artists' lives and how they intersected with broader cultural issues. Individual artists looked at indepth include Calder, Hofmann, Gorky, Motherwell, de Kooning, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, David Smith, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Bacon, Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Johns, Beuys, Klein, Warhol, Rosenquist, Westermann, Arneson, Hesse, Nauman, Christo, Polke, Richter, Guston, Bearden, Aycock, Kiefer, Clemente, Borofsky, Basquiat, and Wojnarowicz. Professor Fineberg's thematic discussion treats ideas and events that are critical to understanding how social and cultural climates have affected creative people from the 1940s to the present. The accent is on individual artists and their experience. Interspersed are fascinating considerations of scores of major tendencies -- from the Cobra, art informel, British Pop Art, Bay Area figurative painters in the 1950s, and the artists and writers of the Beat Generation, to the Minimalists, the impact of feminism, minority artists, conceptual art, European neoexpressionism, the East Village of the 1980s, recent artists of appropriation, installation, and the return to the body in the art of the 1990s. Written in a vivid prose (that often makes you feel as if you were there) and illustrated with nearly 600 illustrations, Art Since 1940 is an intelligent, clearly plotted, and rewarding tour of the art of our times. Book jacket. |
Contents
Acknowledgments | 11 |
New York in the Forties | 20 |
The Sense of a New Movement in New York | 31 |
Copyright | |
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2000 Artists Rights abstract expressionism aesthetic American Art Andy Warhol Arneson Arshile Gorky Artists Rights Society Barnett Newman began Cage Calder catalog New York Center Chicago Christo and Jeanne-Claude cited Claes Oldenburg collage color complex composition Contemporary Art created culture David Smith drawings early Estate Eva Hesse exhibition catalog existential experience figures forties Gallery gestural Giacometti Greenberg Harold Rosenberg Hesse Hockney Hofmann idea identity images installation Interview Jackson Pollock Jasper Johns Jean Dubuffet Jonathan Fineberg Kaprow Landscape late look Mark Rothko materials Modern Art Museum of American Museum of Modern nature objects Oil on canvas painter painterly painting Paris performance Philip Guston Photograph courtesy Picasso picture pop art portrait Postmodernism Private collection reality Richard Robert Motherwell Robert Rauschenberg sculpture sense seventies sixties space studio style subject matter surface surrealism surrealists University Untitled viewer visual Whitney Museum Willem de Kooning York School York/ADAGP