Even for astute, well-informed observers, following the progress of American art since World War II can be confounding. "Isms," movements, counter-movements, variations, vogues, and fads seem to come and go with increasing rapidity. Art historian Marshall B. Davidson notes: "Developments and changes that were formerly wrought over several decades, at least, now take place in a matter of seasons, and what the mass media hail as the latest trend one week, may be obsolete the next." Indeed, the mass media -- along with the nationwide growth of sophisticated art communities and the evolution of modern-leaning college and university art departments -- are in great measure responsible for the swift spread of ideas and experiences. But as later-twentieth-century people have come to "consume" information, entertainment, and fashions (not to mention goods and natural resources) at an accelerated pace, so do styles satiate and quickly pall. Creative persons are continually challenged to explore and experiment.

Ironically, for all of humankind's cultural sharing -- in the physical sciences, behavioral sciences, education, as well as the arts and humanities -- the troublesome fact remains that, on a global scale, social, political, economic, and environmental problems evade solution. The post-war decades have seen enormous upheaval and collective apprehension, distress that is reflected in much American art. "It was primarily as a result of the cataclysmic events surrounding World War II," Davidson continues, "that artists began to revise their fundamental precepts and devise new approaches to their work that would express the distortion and anarchism of the age." Similarly, John Wilmerding reflects: "The explosion of the atomic bomb in 1945 marked a turning point in modern history; for the first time the human race possessed the ability to destroy itself totally. Man's affairs seemed to assume a heroic and tragic scale. Not surprisingly, so did the art of the period." And in a kind of apologia for abstract expressionism (a term first coined by critic Clement Greenberg), the dominant modern movement of the late '40s and '50s, former Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Robert Beverly Hale declares:

If our art seems violent, it is because we have perpetrated more violence than any other generation. If it deals with weird dreams, it is because we have opened the caverns of the mind and let such phantoms loose. If it is filled with broken shapes, it is because we have watched the order of our fathers break and fall to pieces at our feet. We have seen in our century the development of fantastic scientific paraphernalia -- and much ill will. We live in fear of some monstrous event which will bring, at best, a curious and distorted future; at worst, annihilation. The artist is in part a prophet. We should not complain if the shadows that have lately haunted us have for some time been visible upon his canvas.

Audacious, raw, impulsive, certainly anti-realistic -- abstract expressionism enabled American art, as University of Illinois professor Robert M. Sokol explains, "to shuck its affected provinciality and its feelings of inferiority to contemporary European movements." While post-war European societies rebuilt and re-ordered, America (where the homeland was not physically hurt in the conflict) rode abstract expressionism to leadership on the international art scene. To be honest, however, the American avant-garde had been infused with the creative energy of those European moderns who emigrated to escape totalitarianism, a long list that includes: Josef Albers, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann (link), Fernand Leger, Laszlo MoholyNagy, Piet Mondrian, and Yves Tanguy. "The fact that good European moderns are now here is very important," stated pioneer abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock in 1944, "for they bring with them an understanding of the problems of modern painting. I am particularly impressed with their concept of art being the Unconscious."

Greatly influenced by the "automatism" of surrealism, the abstract expressionists -- Hofmann, Pollock, as well as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, explored collage, found-object sculpture or assemblage, and neo-dada inventions. "And it was at this precise moment," Calvin Tomkins points out, "by one of those historical quirks that seem inevitable, that Marcel Duchamp re-emerged from the shadows of the New York art scene." The seventy-two-year-old dada master -- whom de Kooning called "a one-man art movement" -- was living in Manhattan in 1959, when French critic Robert Lebel published, in Paris, a book on Duchanip's career. It was read enthusiastically on both sides of the Atlantic, and Duchamp was "re-discovered." His work figured prominently in an influential Museum of Modern Art exhibit in 1961. Significantly, the show focused attention on the use of junk and found materials, and demonstrated the aesthetic possibilities of "things" one would ordinarily think of as non-art.

A second wave of reaction in the '60s, led by Andy Warhol (link), Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Lindner, and others, propounded a counter to abstract expressionism in images of popular culture -- comic strips, advertising, package design, mass-produced utilitarian objects. Sometimes humorous, other times irreverent or downright grim, pop art, as it was called, addressed the chief preoccupations of a ravenously consuming American society -- food, sex, and the automobile.

Meanwhile, a third group of reactionary artists faulted abstract expressionism for excessive emotional outpouring and undisciplined technique. The solution was a total about-face: they expunged their work of any evidence of materials manipulation (in painting: bravura brushwork, deliberate spattering, dripping for semi-accidental effect; in sculpture: obvious direct modeling, carving, assembling, typically resulting in strong textural contrasts) in favor of a smooth, ethereal -- some would say dehumanized, or mechanized -- reductive abstract object that is sublimely anti-expressionist. The same Clement Greenberg in 1961 bestowed the umbrella title "post-painterly abstraction," though the several variations, or sub-headings, are probably better known: "minimalism," "hard edge," "op," and "color field." Such earlier, less "gestural" abstract expressionists as Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko can be seen as stylistic progenitors for the post-painterly Barnett Newman, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Gene Davis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Helen Frankenthaler, among many, as well as sculptors Larry Bell, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Tony Smith, and others.

Little wonder that Tomkins would call the 1960s "a visual Tower of Babel." But it was no less so in the '70s. Again the emerging avant-garde pulled in opposite directions. Some artists, appalled by what they saw as unwarranted influence of art dealers -- what Tomkins calls the "commercially tainted existence of art," and Sokol refers to as the "profiteering of collectors" -- set out to devise works that were uncollectible, or, at least, not so readily suited to commercial exploitation. The result, which certain critics have labeled "poststudio" art, was either a de-emphasis of the physical object (as in the case of "conceptual art," performance art, self-destructive art, or forms involving transitory materials such as smoke, light beams, reflections, etc.) or enlargement of the physical object to scale much beyond what can be adequately displayed in parlor or museum (environmental art, earthworks). Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner are among the better-known conceptual artists; Christo and Robert Smithson have created enormous outdoor "enhancements" of buildings or landscape settings.

At virtually the same time, remarkably, painters Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, Robert Bechtle (link), Philip Pearlstein (link), Chuck Close, Robert Cottingham, and numerous others, along with sculptors Duane Hanson and John De Andrea, advanced the antithesis of non-art art -- a revival of realism, identified variously as new realism, photo-realism, super-realism. These artists present images in acute focus and detail, "out-camera-ing" the camera, far out-doing the wax-museum figure. Some of the group have revived pop art's tongue-in-cheek look at glitzy commercialism -- gaudy storefronts, packages, automobiles. Some borrow the advertising artists' technique of using projectors to throw a photographic image to paper or canvas, where it can be meticulously traced. All seem to view their worlds with cool, detached, un-romantic eyes. Moreover, one is struck by these artists' keen sensitivity to shape, pattern and design; at the most trompe-l'oeil illusionistic, the pieces can be astonishinglv abstract.

Though trends of the '70s persist, the decade of the '80s, to this writing, has been marked by one conspicuous new development. Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Gary Stephan, Jean Michel Basquiat, and Mike Glier are among a wave of younger artists who propound a harsh new kind of expressionism. (The trend is, in fact, being called neo-expressionism.) Much of the work may strike the spectator as warmed-over '60s-period Rauschenberg or de Kooning. Some of it seems a glorification of that anti-social, anti-establishment visual shout from the ghetto or bario-graffiti. Characteristically, the work is scruffy and crude, with brutal, slashing paint gestures and grotesque distortions of form, as though deliberately intended to challenge conventional felicity and refined taste. And it does. Much of the production, as Sam Hunter interprets, is an "apocalyptic art," revealing "profound anxiety," "a sense of social malaise," or, more objectively, "desolate vistas of a post-atomic universe." It is, in short, a disturbing, pessimistic vision of the world and its future. Curiously, certain abstract-expressionist impulses are being restated.

While abstract expressionism dominated contemporary American painting and sculpture in the late '40s and '50s, the prevailing modern architectural mode was its aesthetic contradiction: the orderly, strict-modular, sheer, rectangular design systems of the International Style. Introduced before the War by German émigrés Walter Gropius and Ludwig Meis van der Rohe, the style remained pre-eminent for business and large office structures through and beyond the time of the two men's death in 1967. Variations are built to the present day. But, as in the fine arts, reaction set in by the 1960s. Such inventive architect-designers as Louis I. Kahn, Eero Saarinen, and I. M. Pei led, as Frederick Koeper describes, "a major shift in contemporary architecture toward geometrical order and the celebration of the wall after many decades of ascendancy of the metal skeleton." Indeed, walls once again become massive elements to contrast surfaces of glass, and, particularly in reinforced concrete structures, curved planes and continuous "skins" or "shells" are part of the architect's more recent technical vocabulary. Some forms of architectural expression in the '80s -- the work of Robert Venturi, Richard Meier, and Michael Graves, for example -- are highly sculptural and decorative, with artfully integrated ornament, albeit of stylized or abstract design. A signal comparison of nomenclature for certain concurrent movements in painting and sculpture, much architecture of the '70s and '80s is critically identified as "post-modern."