Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being

In Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, Jonathan Fineberg presents the art of the last six decades of our century as a series of responses, made by exceptional men and women, to the conditions of life in baffling and chaotic times. This Second Edition includes a whole new chapter on the 1990s and augmented sections earlier in the book. The year 1940 marks a defining moment in 20th-century art, when many artists of the European avant-garde moved en masse to New York. The city was instantly transformed into the art capital of the world, triggering radical changes of direction as artists, both immigrant and American-born, struggled with the reshuffled facts of their existence. For these artists, says Fineberg, making art was -- as it continues to be for artists today -- a strategy of coming to terms with their moment in history. This book helps us understand these "strategies of being" of the greatest postwar artists, and by extension other artists both well-known and little celebrated. Professor Fineberg focuses on artists' lives and how they intersected with broader cultural issues. Individual artists looked at indepth include Calder, Hofmann, Gorky, Motherwell, de Kooning, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, David Smith, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Bacon, Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Johns, Beuys, Klein, Warhol, Rosenquist, Westermann, Arneson, Hesse, Nauman, Christo, Polke, Richter, Guston, Bearden, Aycock, Kiefer, Clemente, Borofsky, Basquiat, and Wojnarowicz.Jonathan Fineberg is the author of 'Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being', published 1994 under ISBN 9780130454690 and ISBN 0130454699.