In the quarter century after the end of World War II, a new generation of painters, sculptors, and photographers transformed the face of America art and shifted the centre of the art world from Paris to New York. This revolution generated an exuberant and contentious body of writing without parallel in our cultural history. Jed Perl has gathered the best of this writing together for the first time, interwoven with fascinating headnotes that establish the nature of the aesthetic battles that defined the era.