Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Pollock and After: The Critical Debate brings together key writings on debates about Abstract Expressionism and Modernist art history. It is an essential resource for understanding post-war American art and culture. The second edition has been fully revised and updated in response to new critical approaches to post-war American art. It includes nine new articles and a substantial overview essay by Francis Frascina.
Articles are grouped into three parts, each with an introduction by Francis Frascina. Part One includes two foundational articles by the influential Modernist critic, Clement Greenberg, and represents the debate about Greenberg's work, with contributions by T.J. Clark and Michael Fried. Part Two focuses on revisionist writers, who questioned established ideas about Modernist art history, examining the relationship between Abstract Expressionism and the politics of McCarthyism and the Cold War.
The third part, which is new to the volume, is devoted to recent developments of revisionist critiques. Contributors explore the work of Greenberg's contemporaries, the relationship between critical and commercial responses to Abstract Expressionism, and perceptions of cultural value in the 1940s and 1950s, and challenge assumptions about ethnicity, gender and sexuality in the construction of the 'post-war American artist'.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgements (p. ix)
• Preface (p. xi)
• Looking Forward, Looking Back: 1985-1999 (p. 1)
• Part 1 The critical debate and its origins
• Introduction (1985) (p. 29)
• 1 Avant-Garde and Kitsch (p. 48)
• 2 Towards a Newer Laocoon (p. 60)
• 3 Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art (p. 71)
• 4 How Modernism Works: a Response to T. J. Clark (p. 87)
• 5 Arguments About Modernism: a Reply to Michael Fried (p. 102)
• Part 2 History: representation and misrepresentation--the case of abstract expressionism: Revisionism in the 1970s and early 1980s
• Introduction (1985) (p. 113)
• 6 American Painting During the Cold War (p. 130)
• 7 Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War (p. 147)
• 8 Art and Politics in Cold War America (p. 155)
• 9 Abstract Expressionism: the Politics of Apolitical Painting (p. 181)
• 10 The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America (p. 197)
• 11 Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed (p. 211)
• Part 3 Revisionism revisited
• Introduction (1999) (p. 229)
• 12 Abstract Expressionism, Automatism and the Age of Automation (p. 234)
• 13 Action, Revolution and Painting (p. 261)
• 14 The Market for Abstract Expressionism: the Time Lag Between Critical and Commercial Acceptance (p. 288)
• 15 Revisiting the Revisionists: the Modern, Its Critics, and the Cold War (p. 294)
• 16 Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (p. 307)
• 17 Pollock and Krasner: Script and Postscript (p. 329)
• 18 Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Gender and Subjectivity (p. 348)
• 19 Greenberg on Pollock (p. 361)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

In Pollock and After (more aptly Greenberg and After), Modernism's preoccupation with artistic autonomy and formal quality is situated in the historical context that enabled it to flourish in the US, despite public coolness to Abstract Expressionism, America's first indigenous school of avant-garde art. The anthology focuses upon Clement Greenberg's ``Avant-Garde and Kitsch'' (1939) and ``Toward a Newer Laocoon'' (1940), seminal statements of Modernist theory that are here accompanied by recent commentaries by T.J. Clark, Michael Fried, and Thomas Crow. In other essays, such commonly overlooked aspects of the Modernist situation as the Marxist underpinnings of Greenberg's ideas and the political appropriation of Abstract Expressionism, an avowedly apolitical art, are extensively documented. A companion anthology to Modern Art and Modernism, ed. by Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (1982) and Modernism, Criticism, Realism, ed. by Charles Harrison and Fred Orton (CH, Jun '85), Pollock and After continues to explore contemporary critical problems and recent art history in a distinctly anglo-American frame. The strength of this anthology is that its deconstructive thrust is largely unencumbered by deconstructive theory; it demonstrates weaknesses and omissions in Modernist art theory and Modernist art history by engaging them directly, withoug denying their strengths and without invoking literary poststructuralism as the revisionist rationale. Highly recommended. Upper division undergraduates and graduate students.-W.B. Holmes, University of Rhode Island

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Francis Frascina is John Raven Professor of Visual Arts at Keele University. His publications include: Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester University Press 1999), (co-editor with with Jonathan Harris) Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts (Phaidon 1992), and (co-editor with Paul Wood, Jonathan Harris and Charles Harrison) Modernism in Dispute: Art Since the Forties (Yale University Press 1993).