This comprehensive and authoritative book illustrates art from the 1940's and stresses the individuality of the artists in relation to their political, social, and cultural contexts. The book focuses on the meaning of the major works and innovations. It features nearly 600 illustrations (approximately half in color) representing art since 1940, both in Europe and America. It explores the full range of periods, artists, and movements: New York in the Forties; Calder, Hofmann, Gorky, Motherwell, De Kooning; Existentialism (Pollock, Newman, Rothko, David Smith); The New European Masters of the Late Forties (Dubuffet, Giacometti, Bacon), plus so much more. For anyone interested in Postwar Art. Fineberg's new edition is the book to learn modern art from--many times over. No other study is as truly comprehensive. Always sensitive to the political context of modern and contemporary art, Fineberg resists playing ideological favorites. Every artist, every medium, receives a sympathetic, informative view in accessible prose that never dodges the inherent complexities. Follow Fineberg as he moves from accounts of the careers of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock to the fantasy world of Maya Deren's filmmaking, to Alfredo Jaar's manipulations of public information, to Kerry James Marshall's drawings of black superhero comics, to the cultural appropriations of Nikki S. Lee, and on and on. It's all there, and it's all succinctly, yet deeply, authoritatively, considered. --- Ric hard Shiff , The University of Texas at Austin The great value of Fineberg’s account of the art of the past seventy years is its attentiveness to what happens for artists in the course of their work, how the play of individual circumstances makes breakthrough moments possible, and how the life of art is always as well an experiential record of ways of living. --- Franklin "Buzz" Spector , Washington University in St. Louis The premise of this book is that artists use their art to think about their experience; it gives them a language in which to work out a way of existing in the world. So the front and back of the cover are illustrated with some of the great artists featured in the book doing their work. FRONT COVER: 1. Yoko Ono in the first performance of Cut Piece, Yamaichi Hall, Kyoto, 1964 photo courtesy Lenono Photo Archive © Yoko Ono 2. Ann Hamilton wearing her 1984 # 13: Toothpick Suitchair photo courtesy Ann Hamilton Studio 3. Josef Beuys lecturing with a blackboard, New York, 1974 photo photo by Peter Moore © Estate of Peter Moore/ VAGA, New York 4. Ilya Kabakov performing The Walk with Ilya Kabakov , Moscow, circa 1980 photo © Yuri Rost 5. Christo and Jeanne-Claude talking to workers at The Gates assembly plant in Queens, N.Y., February 2005 photo Wolfgang Volz 6. Jackson Pollock painting, East Hampton, N.Y., 1950 © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2010 , photo by Hans Namuth. Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Photograph © Hans Namuth Estate SPINE: 7 Cai Guo-Qiang in The Century with Mushroom Clouds–Projects for the 20th Century , 1996 Photograph by Hiro Ihara, courtesy of the artist BACK COVER: 8. Roxy Paine welding Conjoined , Madison Park, N.Y.C., 2007 photo © Sofia M. Paine 9. Louise Bourgeois at home working on her mixed media sculpture Confrontation , New York, 1982 photo Inge Morath, courtesy Louise Bourgeois Studio/© Louise Bourgeois. DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2010 10. Andy Warhol during the filming of Lupe Velez (portrayed by Edie Sedgwick) in the home of Panna Grady at the Dakota apartment building, New York, 1965 photo © Nat Finkelstein 11. Kerry James Marshall drawing, Chicago, 2009 photo by J. Fineberg 12. David Smith welding, Bolton Landing, 1952 photo © John Stewart 13. Robert Arneson, modeling a self portrait, Benicia, California, 1978 Photo courtesy and © estate of Robert Arneson/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2010 Jonathan Fineberg is Gutgsell Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois and a trustee of The Phillips Collection in Washington. He earned his B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, an M.A. from the Courtauld Institute in London, and studied psychoanalysis at the Boston and Western New England Institutes. He has taught at Yale, Harvard, and Columbia universities and among his awards are: the Pulitzer Fellowship in Critical Writing, the NEA Art Critic's Fellowship, and the College Art Association’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in the History of Art. His other books include: Christo and Jeanne-Claude: On the Way to the Gates (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), The Innocent Eye: Children's Art and the Modern Artist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), Imagining America: Icons of 20th Century American Art (with John Carlin; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005; also a two-hour television special on PBS), and When We Were Young: New Perspectives on the Art of the Child (Berkeley: Unive