After Modernist Painting

The History of a Contemporary Practice

Craig Staff (University of Nottingham, UK)

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Hardback

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English

Bloomsbury Visual Arts
22 May 2025

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.

By: Craig Staff (University of Nottingham UK)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Edition: 2nd edition
Dimensions: Height: 240mm, Width: 160mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 700g
ISBN: 9781350363830
ISBN 10: 1350363839
Pages: 232
Publication Date: 22 May 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

List of Illustrations Preface to Second Edition Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Arbitrary Objects 2. Auto-Critique 3. Painting in the Expanded Field 4. A Costume of Rags 5. Manic Mourning 6. An-atomising Abstraction 7. Situating Painting 8. Imag[in]ing the Digital 9. Bodying Back and Forth Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

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

Reviews for After Modernist Painting: The History of a Contemporary Practice

Craig Staff writes about the strengths of painting in new and refreshing ways. He does not separate painting from our lives. He argues that painting is absorbent; it breathes in and breathes out, influenced by our lives as well as by other forms of art including sculpture, film and theatre. * DAVID REED, ARTIST * Restoring attention to the critical history of painting since the 1960s, this book adopts a globalised approach which decentres traditional tellings of this period. It makes for essential reading in a time of the medium’s ascendance in contemporary practice. * BEN STREET, AUTHOR OF HOW TO ENJOY ART: A GUIDE FOR EVERYONE (2021) *