This chronologically organized and comprehensive anthology of readings tells the whole story of art in America from 1900 to the present. It focuses on the themes, issues, and controversies that occurred throughout the century--using selections that are contemporary with the art--by artists, critics, exhibition organizers, poets, politicians, and other writers on culture. Some recurring themes and issues include issues of identity; the changing nature of modernism and modernity; nationalism; art as individual or community expression; the nature of public art; and the role of criticism, censorship, and government intervention. Texts by well-known writers include Meyer Schapiro, Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, Donald Kuspit, and Kate Linker. A guide for those interested in both the standard interpretations of American art and in alternative readings.

Avoiding well-worn discussions of style and abstraction, the author explores the rich American artscape that developed between world wars from a cultural perspective, exploring the role of art in the great American search for identity.

"A provocative interpretation of the political and cultural history of the early cold war years. . . . By insisting that art, even art of the avant-garde, is part of the general culture, not autonomous or above it, he forces us to think differently not only about art and art history but about society itself."—New York Times Book Review

Between the 1890s and the 1930s, movie going became an established feature of everyday life across America. Movies constituted an enormous visual data bank and changed the way artist and public alike interpreted images. This book explores modern painting as a response to, and an appropriation of, the aesthetic possibilities pried open by cinema from its invention until the outbreak of World War II, when both the art world and the film industry changed substantially. Artists were watching movies, filmmakers studied fine arts; the membrane between media was porous, allowing for fluid exchange. Each chapter focuses on a suite of films and paintings, broken down into facets and then reassembled to elucidate the distinctive art–film nexus at successive historic moments.

Since ’45 details the collision of American history and modern art. Since World War II, New York has been the indisputable center of the art world, and as Katy Siegel shows, it has had a profound influence on the preoccupations that contemporary art would come to have. Tracing art history over the past decades, she shows how anxieties over race, mass culture, the individual, suburbia, apocalypse, and nuclear destruction have supplanted the legacy of European artistic traditions. Siegel’s study encompasses a variety of works, including Rothko’s planes of color, Warhol’s serial silkscreens, Richard Prince’s cowboys, Robert Longo’s Men in Cities, Faith Ringgold’s Black Light, and Laurie Simmons’s dollhouses, and moves fluidly from discussions of artists’ works, art museums, and galleries to cultural influences and significant historical events. Rather than arguing on nationalist grounds or viewing American culture as representative of a now-devalued nation, Siegel explores how American culture dominated not only American artists but created conditions that now, after the full globalization of the art world, affect artists around the world. Since ’45 will interest all readers engaged in post-war and contemporary art in the United States and beyond.

Made in U.S.A. takes a new look at American art of the 1950s and 1960s and shows us how American it was. This is a provocative study of those artists who appropriated everyday images form the world of mass media and suburban living and forced their viewers into a sometimes witty, sometimes bittersweet, confrontation with the realities of living in late twentieth-century America.