Pollock and After: The Critical Debate

Pollock and After: The Critical Debate brings together key writings on debates about Abstract Expressionism and Modernist art history. It is an essential resource for understanding post-war American art and culture. The second edition has been fully revised and updated in response to new critical approaches to post-war American art. It includes nine new articles and a substantial overview essay by Francis Frascina.
Articles are grouped into three parts, each with an introduction by Francis Frascina. Part One includes two foundational articles by the influential Modernist critic, Clement Greenberg, and represents the debate about Greenberg’s work, with contributions by T.J. Clark and Michael Fried. Part Two focuses on revisionist writers, who questioned established ideas about Modernist art history, examining the relationship between Abstract Expressionism and the politics of McCarthyism and the Cold War.
The third part, which is new to the volume, is devoted to recent developments of revisionist critiques. Contributors explore the work of Greenberg’s contemporaries, the relationship between critical and commercial responses to Abstract Expressionism, and perceptions of cultural value in the 1940s and 1950s, and challenge assumptions about ethnicity, gender and sexuality in the construction of the ’post-war American artist’.

Francis Frascina is John Raven Professor of Visual Arts at Keele University. His publications include: Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester University Press 1999), (co-editor with with Jonathan Harris) Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts (Phaidon 1992), and (co-editor with Paul Wood, Jonathan Harris and Charles Harrison) Modernism in Dispute: Art Since the Forties (Yale University Press 1993).