Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century

by Edited by Frances Colpitt

• ISBN13: 9780521004534
• ISBN10: 0521004535
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-02-11
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
List of Contributors	xi
Introduction	xv
Four Abstract Classicists	1	(10)
Jules Langsner
Literalism and Abstraction: Frank Stella's Retrospective at the Modern	11	(14)
Philip Leider
Serial Imagery	25	(24)
John Coplans
The Silent Art	49	(12)
Lucy R. Lippard
After the Ultimate	61	(8)
Gregoire Muller
Marden, Novros, Rothko: Painting in the Age of Actuality	69	(20)
Sheldon Nodelman
The End of Painting	89	(16)
Douglas Crimp
Signs Taken for Wonders	105	(14)
Hal Foster
The Current State of Nonrepresentation	119	(10)
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
The Abstract Self-Object	129	(12)
Donald Kuspit
Once Removed From What?	141	(10)
David Pagel
Systems of Opinion: Abstract Painting Since 1959	151	(54)
Frances Colpitt
Index	205