Introduction -- Things must be pulverized: abstract expressionism -- Wounded painting: informel in Europe and beyond -- Witnesses: post-war figurative painting -- Against gesture: geometric abstraction -- Post-painting part I: after Pollock -- Anti-tradition: pop painting -- A transcendental high art: neo-expressionism and its discontents -- Post-painting part II: after pop -- New figures: pop romantics
Summary:
Painting, with its endless capacity for reinvention, continues to occupy a privileged position in Western art. Since the mid-20th century, new practices have pushed art into territories such as performance and installation, leading some critics and artists to declare painting irrelevant or even finished. But these developments have, in fact, driven painting to new heights of innovation and interest, making these seventy years arguably the most lively in its history. Morgan Falconer tells the story beginning with Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists on both sides of the Atlantic, proceeds through postwar abstraction in France, social realism in East Germany, the end of geometric abstraction in Europe, American post-painterly abstraction, the handmade ready-mades of Rauschenberg and Johns, Pop's rise in Britain and the US, painting's confrontations with photography in the 1960s and beyond, the return of expressionism in the 1980s, new approaches to Pop in the 1990s and 2000s, and the continued variety of some of the most recent paintings to be made by a younger, 'post-medium' generation of artists. Painting Beyond Pollock is an illuminating guide for both specialists and enthusiasts of painting, written in language that is intelligent and accessible.
