Never Ending: Modernist Painting Past and Future

A new history of postwar painting that explores how the desire to look backward shaped some of the period’s most radical artmaking

This incisive account of modernism’s postwar development examines how painters, such as Joan Mitchell, Barnett Newman, and Rose Piper, invoked tradition in order to respond to, participate in, and disrupt the histories of the movement being written at midcentury. Saul Nelson argues that artists’ turn to the past, often dismissed as regressive, offers an importa...