Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century

Essays that trace the critical issues surrounding abstract painting's contribution to modern art.

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.