Jonathan Fineberg

Art History

The new edition of
Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being

“Fineberg's new edition is the book to learn modern art from – many times over. No other study is as truly comprehensive. Always sensitive to the political context of modern and contemporary art, Fineberg resists playing ideological favorites. Every artist, every medium, receives a sympathetic, informative view in accessible prose that never dodges the inherent complexities. Follow Fineberg as he moves from accounts of the careers of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock to the fantasy world of Maya Deren's film making, to Alfredo Jaar's manipulations of public information, to Kerry James Marshall's drawings of black superhero comics, to the cultural appropriations of Nikki S. Lee, and on and on. It's all there, and it's all succinctly, yet deeply, authoritatively, considered.”

Richard Shiff

Effie Marie Cain Regents Professor
of Art History The University of Texas at Austin

"Conventional scholarly research on twentieth—and now twenty-first—century art often describes its history in terms of contesting ideological movements, in which the careers of individual artists serve to exemplify this or that –ism. Jonathan Fineberg's Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being elucidates the philosophical and political discourses of the art world, but it also records the lives of artists as matters of consequence beyond ideology. Artists hold beliefs, and may act on them, but they also learn from what they do and from each other in more personal ways. The great value of Fineberg's account of the art of the past seventy years is its attentiveness to what happens for artists in the course of their work, how the play of individual circumstances makes breakthrough moments possible, and how the life of art is always as well an experiential record of ways of living."

Buzz Spector

Dean
College & Graduate School of Art
Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts
Washington University in St. Louis