How Art Becomes History

This study is an account of how the new art history revises the understanding of American art, society and culture of the past 50 years. It explores the overlapping social, political, cultural and aesthetic issues of post-New Deal America. The book focuses on pioneering developments in art history and cultural studies, from the dissolution of formalism in the late 1960s through the re-emergence of Marxism in the 1970s and the infusion of semiotic, feminist, psychoanalytical and racial issues in the 1980s.