The landscape of signs : American pop art 1960 to 1965. The electronic consciousness and New York pop -- Andy Warhol -- Roy Lichtenstein -- James Rosenquist -- H.C. Westermann, Peter Saul, and the Hairy Who -- West Coast pop -- Robert Arneson -- In the nature of materials : the later sixties. Back to first principles-- minimal art -- Eva Hesse and investigations of materials and process -- Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra -- Artists working in the landscape -- Arte povera, and a perserving rapport with nature in Europe -- Politics and postmodernism : the transition to the seventies. Re-radicalizing the avant-garde -- Christo and Jeanne-Claude -- Postmodernism -- Surviving the corporate culture of the seventies. A new pluralism -- Romare Bearden -- Alice Aycock -- Philip Guston's late style -- Painting at the end of the seventies. New expressionist painting in Europe -- The peculiar case of the Russians -- New imagist painting and sculpture -- The eighties. A fresh look at abstraction -- American neo-expressionism -- Post-modern installation -- Appropriation -- New tendencies of the nineties -- To say the things that are one's own.
Introduction -- New York in the forties. New York becomes the center -- The sense of a new movement in New York -- A dialog with Europe. Alexander Calder -- Hans Hofmann -- Arshile Gorky -- Robert Motherwell -- Willem de Kooning -- Existentialism comes to the fore. Jackson Pollock -- Barnett Newman -- Mark Rothko -- David Smith and the sculpture of the New York School -- The new Eruopean masters of the late forties. Jean Dubuffet and postwar Paris -- The extentialist figuration of Alberto Giacometti -- Francis Bacon -- Some international tendencies of the fifties. Purified abstraction -- "New images of man" in Europe and America -- The beat generation : the fifties in America. "A Coney Island of the mind" -- Robert Rauschenberg -- Appropriating the real : junk sculpture and happenings -- Claes Oldenburg -- Jasper Johns -- The European vanguard of the later fifties. Nouveau réalisme -- Joseph Beuys -- British pop : from the Independent Group to David Hockney.
Fineberg (art history, Univ. of Illinois) asserts that the "implicit underlying subject matter of modern art is always the personality of the artist in its encounter with the world." Fineberg has not let any theory of contemporary art constrain the organization of his book. In a system that at first seems chaotic, he lets what is most important filter up, whether it be an individual artist, a movement, a critic's theory, a style, or a medium. The result is a rich mixture of essentially separate essays that allows the reader to choose how to use the book. Unfortunately, for all his innovations, Fineberg repeats some of the common mistakes of this type of book: Barely ten percent of the artists on the contents pages are women; photography is given scant attention; and architecture, that bastion of the the individual artist, is divorced from the "fine arts." Still, Fineberg should be lauded for his provocative and inspiring assessments (whether or not one agrees with his thesis), and his eminently readable and engaging text should become a new standard of the form. For all art collections--Eric Bryant, "Library Journal."