The fourth and final installment in Irving Sandler's series on contemporary art, Art of the Postmodern Era surveys the artists, works, movements, and ideas as well as the social and cultural context of this energetic and turbulent period in art.The book begins with the late 1960s, when new directions in art emerged, ranging from diverse postminimal

FROM 1947 TO 1951, more than a dozen Abstract Expressionists achieved "breakthroughs" to independent styles. 1 During the following years, these painters, the first generation of the New York School, received growing recognition nationally and globally, to the extent that American vanguard art came to be considered the primary source of creative ideas and energies in the world, and a few masters, notably Pollock, de Kooning, and Rothko, were elevated to art history's pantheon. Younger artists who entered their circle in the early fifties-the early wave of the second generation-such as Larry...