OSHER 449 - Art of Our Own Time: Movements of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century and Beyond

World War II, with its global devastation and the threat of atomic war, set the stage for the second half of the twentieth century. In the wake of the war, the global center of art shifted from Paris to New York. This helps explain the predominance of American artists in world art markets until the last decades of the century. The persistence of social and political upheaval and technological change is reflected in the dominance of modernism and the avant-garde. We will explore abstract expressionism, painterly abstraction, color field, minimalism, pop art, feminist art, earth and site-specific art, post modernism, and architecture.