Foreword by Dore Ashton
Introduction: 'Starting over at the beginning'
1. 'Every person is a special kind of artist'
2. Cartoons and Communists
'Hack'
Public Art and Public Media
Comrade Cubist
The Origins of 'Art-as-Art'
Comrade Ad
3. 'Painting-Reason' and 'Picture-Purpose'
Abstract Art for Society's Sake
The Inconsolable Polymath
Collage as Destruction
'Painting is more than the scum of its pots': Beyond Formalism
4. The Intellectual Gift of the Post-Historic Artist
'Blue in art is blue. Red in art is red. Yellow in art is yellow. Dark gray in art is not dark gray': Aesthetics and Indeterminacy
'How to make Modern Art in America: Fifteen Years Later'
Perfection and the End of Art
Neither Secular nor Sacred
Systems of Strife
5. 'An Invasion of the Ultimate'
Jamming
Rules
Convictions
Realignment
6. 'Every Dogma has its Day'
'The re-reformation of formalism'
'A dark flame, fog forming in the unformed': Responsive Eyes
Unfinished Business
The Success of Failure
7. Reinhardt and the Art of the Sixties
Empty Devices, Dead Diagrams and Invisible Spectacles
Trailer
8. Political Art and Political Power
Scepticism
The Artist as Citizen
Art and Resistance
9. Reinhardt's Difficult Freedom
Appendix
References
Bibliography
Artist's Chronology
Acknowledgements
Index