A House Divided: American Art since 1955

In this exhilarating book, Anne Middleton Wagner challenges readers to rethink the work of a range of post-World War II artistsJasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Maya Lin, Bruce Nauman, and Agnes Martin among themand thus to re-assess the relationship of art to politics and social life. The art of U.S. empire, she argues, is marked by deep dividedness. Painters and sculptors seemed entranced by American symbols, yet used them to enigmatic endsexuberant, nightmarish, or both. Nor could postwar culture decide if it preserved sites devoted to productive withdrawalfor artists, the special zone called the studioor simply maintained a margin where numbed subjects rehearsed the rites of vanished self-expression. This book charts the to-and-fro in recent American art between acknowledging the facts of nation and consumerism, and searching for meaningful models. And it shows that this process engageseven structuresnational history and the citizens self.