PREFACE
Art history is not transparent. It is written by individuals, who bring to it their own personal baggage of appetites, psychological makeups, ethnic identities, social positions, political and religious persuasions, and so on. Claims to objectivity notwithstanding, the historian's idiosyncrasies shape art history. Consequently, it would be useful for the historian to present his or her sociopsychoethnic autobiography in the preface to a work. However, given the limitations of space and the reader's patience, it would not be feasible -- and, given the workings of the unconscious, not even possible. Still, the question of motivations ought to be dealt with, if only cursorily. Specifically: Why has the historian selected a particular topic and, even more significant, a particular approach?

In my own case I encountered abstract expressionist painting while I was a graduate student in the early 1950s, and it moved me as little else in my life had, certainly infinitely more than the academic American history I was studying at the time. I simply had to know more about it. I found out where the artists met -- the Cedar Street Tavern, the Club, the artists' cooperative galleries on Tenth Street -- and began to socialize with them. I also painted for a year, and although I was told by artists I respected, Philip Guston, for example, that I had "talent," the intensity for me was not in art making. In the mid-fifties I found that intensity in writing art criticism. But, since I had been trained as a historian, it seemed natural to me to chronicle the art I had come to love and believed to be the most vital, original, and masterly in the world. I started to work on The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism. 1 At the time the American art-conscious public was still hostile to abstract expressionism. In response I wrote as an embattled partisan, from within the movement, as it were.

I did not rely entirely on my own taste but also paid close attention to the opinions of respected artists, art editors and critics, museum curators and directors, and dealers and collectors. Not surprisingly their views generally paralleled my own. More than that, I sought to formulate a consensus of what these artists and art professionals deemed of great-est significance and value at any time. This consensus provided me with a kind of "objective" base by which I was guided. The fact that the artworld consensus is ever changing does not minimize its momentary significance, since it reveals which art has made the art world sit up and take notice and has made the strongest impact on culture...

INTRODUCTION
The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.
-- DON DELILLO, WHITE NOISE
And the only intelligence that matters is . . . not to cling to the previous state and to accept a new state. Just to be able to be there for every new challenge.
-- FRANCESCO CLEMENTE
By 1967 the major sixties isms, namely pop art; stained-color-field abstraction, or formalism; and minimalism, had become established in the art world. Their rationales had become familiar, too familiar for them to be thought of as avant-garde. Pop art had been the most notorious of sixties movements up to the end of 1963. After that it no longer generated much art-world discourse. Pop art's innovators -- Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Tom Wesselmann -- continued to command attention. But they had not spawned a second generation; as a result pop art seemed to be on the wane. In actuality it went underground, emerging again, in entirely new guises, only toward the end of the 1970s.

As subjects of art-world discourse, formalist painting and minimal sculpture were longer lived. The premises of color-field abstraction had been formulated by Clement Greenberg in two major articles: "Louis and Noland," 1960, and "After Abstract Expressionism," 1962. 1 The painters he championed -- Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski -- had achieved considerable art-world recognition by 1964, the year Greenberg organized a show titled Post-Painterly Abstraction. 2 Many young painters took up stained-color-field abstraction, soon creating a glut, but none achieved the status of the three leaders. As the sixties progressed, stained-color-field abstraction generated less and less art-world interest outside narrowing formalist circles. 3 But long after the movement and Greenberg's pronouncements on its behalf had ceased to be relevant, his formalist ideology remained current and controversial. Beginning in 1964 art writers made a strong case in polemical essays for the minimal sculpture of Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Dan Flavin, and Carl Andre. Their work achieved art-world acceptance with the Primary Structures show at the Jewish Museum in 1966. Minimalism proved to be more viable than...