After Modernist Painting: The History of a Contemporary Practice

This book presents both a historical survey and a critical re-evaluation of the contested and contingent nature of the medium of painting over the last 60 years. Offering a critical account of painting specifically, rather than art more generally, After Modernist Painting provides a timely exploration of what has remained a persistent and protean medium.

Taking Clement Greenberg’s ＂Modernist Painting＂ as its starting point, the book focuses on certain developments, including the relationship of painting to Conceptual Art and Minimalism, the pronouncement of painting’s alleged death, its response to Installation Art’s foregrounding of site, how painting both images and imagines the digital and how it continues to embody a particular set of ideas and responses to the world.

Revised and expanded to reflect developments in the field since the first edition was published in 2013, After Modernist Painting addresses a range of global artists and painting practices - from the Dansaekhwa art movement in South Korea to the Conceptualism of Geta Bratescu in 1970s Romania. Essential reading for students on fine arts painting courses, the book is an invaluable resource for those seeking to understand the themes and issues that have pertained to painting within the context of postmodernism and contemporary artistic practice, and also provides a valuable starting point for other, more specialized histories of particular painters.

Craig Staff is Professor in Fine Art and is also the Programme Leader for the MA Fine Art at the University of Northampton, UK.