Postwar Art

Catalog description

At a time of seismic shifts in the American polity, postwar art has too often seemed above the fray. Even as New York came to replace Paris as the epicenter of art world in the post war period, the rapid succession of styles and movements from Abstract Expressionism to Neo-Dada, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art and Happenings can seem to have their own internal logic, severed from the historical backdrop of the time. Some of the artists we'll consider include Pollock, Krasner, Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, Kusama, Martin, Lichtenstein, Bearden, Oldenburg, LeWitt, Chicago and Judd. In this course, we'll reexamine American art and art criticism in the postwar period alive to everything from the Cold War's virulent anti-communism to the rise of progressive liberation movements around race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender. In the process, we will repeatedly underscore how art both served, and bit, the hand that fed it.