Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century

By the middle of the 20th century, abstraction was the accepted language of art as practiced by painters and articulated by critics, who began to investigate its historical and theoretical dimensions. Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century includes seminal essays on abstract painting by eleven of its most incisive critics and written over four decades, between 1960 and 2000. Tracing the post-Greenbergian development of such critical issues as hard-edge painting, deductive and serial structure, monochrome abstraction, the psychological analogy, regionalism, and the ‘death of painting’ in post-modernism, they examine works by Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella, Brice Marden, Sherrie Levine, and Gerhard Richter, among others. The introduction and commentary by Frances Colpitt situates the essays historically and examines their philosophical sources and influences, from formalism and phenomenology, to structuralism and poststructuralism. What emerges is a coherent and optimistic picture of abstract painting, the definitive contribution of modern art.

• Analyzes contemporary abstract painting from critical and philosophical perspectives • Includes major essays by well-known critics covering critical developments in abstraction since 1959 • Surveys a broad range of issues of abstraction in the second half of the twentieth century

Introduction; 1. Four abstract Classicists Jules Langsner; 2. Literalism and abstraction: Frank Stella’s retrospective at the Modern Philip Leider; 3. Serial imagery John Coplans; 4. The silent art Lucy R. Lippard; 5. After the ultimate Grégoire Müller; 6. Marden, Novros, Rothko: painting in the age of actuality Sheldon Nodelman; 7. The end of a painting Douglas Crimp; 8. Signs taken for wonders Hal Foster; 9. The current state of nonrepresentation Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe; 10. The abstract self-object Donald Kuspit; 11. Once removed from what? David Pagel; 12. Systems of opinion: abstract painting since 1959 Frances Colpitt.

‘Absorbing and illuminating collection of essays - should appeal to all scholars of contemporary art.’ de Arte