Books in the Contemporary Artists and their Critics series

This 1998 selection of essays by a prominent art historian, critic, and curator of modern art, examines twentieth-century art and artists who have operated outside the established art world. In lucid and accessible prose, Peter Selz explores modern art as it reflects the transformation of politics and culture.

In this collection of critical essays, Barry Schwabsky re-examines the art produced since the 1960s, demonstrating how the achievements of 'high modernism' remain consequential to it, through tensions between representation, abstraction, and pictorial language.

Surrealist Art and Writing offers a fresh analysis of Surrealism - of the artists Dali, Ernst, Masson, and Tanguy and the writing of Surrealism's leaders - Andre Breton, Aragon and Eluard. Spector uses a multidisciplinary approach to examine how the ideas and images of this avant-garde movement grew up in antipathy to middle class values.

Demonstrating a concern with on-going modernism, Masheck's essays guide the reader through the anti-modernist polemics of the 1970s and 1980s, which are particularly relevant in the light of Postmodernism's demise.

This book, first published in 1999, studies the work of a generation of 'respondents' to the New York School, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly, who reintroduced pictorialism and verbal content in their paintings and assemblages. Welish offers a reevaluation of the major trends and production of post-war American painting.

The collection presents a coherent and optimistic picture of abstract painting, the definitive contribution of modern art. Includes seminal essays on abstract painting that trace the development of hard-edge painting, deductive and serial structure, monochrome abstraction, the psychological analogy, regionalism, and the 'death of painting' in post-modernism.

Tsion Avital poses the question: 'Is modern art art at all?' He argues that the nonrepresentational art produced in the twentieth century was not art, but rather the debris of the visual tradition it replaced.

In this book, Matthew Baigell examines the work of Edward Hopper, Ben Shahn, Frank Stella, and other artists, relating their art works to the social contexts in which they were created. Collectively, Baigell's work demonstrates the importance of America as the defining element in American art.

Cezanne's painting The Eternal Feminine has been known by a variety of titles and, as Wayne Andersen has discovered, has also been altered. This volume is the first to interrogate the original state of The Eternal Feminine and to resolve its mysterious importance to Cezanne and the history of art.