Author Description

Art History After the Sixties examines the 1960s and 1970s as a watershed era in our current understanding of art and its historiography. Pamela Lee asks how, why, and at what cost art critics of that generation shifted their attention away from aesthetics to focus pimarily on the social and political nature of art, most notably in the writings appearing in the influential journal October. She also looks closesly at the major artists of that era from Robert Smithson, most well known for his provocative earthwork Spiral Jetty, to Andy Warhol. Art History After the Sixties is the fifth volume in "Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts", James Elkins's series of short books on the theories of modernism written by leading art historians on twentieth-century art and art criticism. The book will feature a critical introduction by a fellow art historian placing the book in conversation with the previous books in the series.