As art critic for The New Republic, Jed Perl is renowned for combining a passion for art and a skepticism about the current art establishment with an ability to write about art in the context of our larger culture. In this collection of essays, including two written especially for this book, he delivers a brilliant mixture of first-rate art criticism and politically informed insight into the true workings of the American art world.Perl offers incisive analysis into the marketing mentality that dominates today's museums, the poverty of academic criticism, and the changing expectations...

Antoine Watteau, one of the most mysterious painters who ever lived, is the inspiration for this delightful investigation of the tangled relationship between art and life. Weaving together historical fact and personal reflections, the influential art critic Jed Perl reconstructs the amazing story of this pioneering bohemian artist who, although he died in 1721, when he was only thirty-six, has influenced innumerable painters and writers in the centuries since--and whose work continues to deepen our understanding of the place that love, friendship, and pleasure have in our daily lives....

John Heliker: Drawing on the New Deal marks the rediscovery of a remarkable and largely unknown body of early work by an eminent American artist. Heliker (1909-2000) developed a highly personal and expressive approach to drawing during the WPA years. His early drawings compare to his Social Realist contemporaries Ben Shahn and Philip Evergood. Heliker shared in their political activism and produced many anti-fascist cartoons for The New Masses , some represented here. During WWII and the immediate Postwar years, Heliker earned critical acclaim for his bold experimentations with biomorphic and...

Experience the creative explosion that transformed American art, in the words of the artists, writers, and critics who were there: In the quarter century after the end of World War II, a new generation of painters, sculptors, and photographers transformed the face of American art and shifted the center of the art world from Paris to New York. Signaled by the triumph of abstraction and the ascendancy of painters such as Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, and Kline, this revolution generated an exuberant and contentious body of writing without parallel in our cultural history. In the words of...