This course investigates the contested field of advanced art in the post-war period, from the emergence of Abstract Expressionism in the United States in the aftermath of WWII, to the increasingly transnational contexts of contemporary artistic production in the 21st century. We ask how artists engaged with the complex and often contradictory legacy of modernism, particularly in light of the collapse of the historical avant-garde projects of the pre-war period. How did artists negotiate between the imperative to preserve a space of autonomous artistic production and critique, and the equally urgent desire to engage the social in order to catalyze transformative change? While broadly a survey of the artistic production of this period, we also attend to art’s critical and theoretical interpretations, paying particular attention to the relations between social context, formal innovation, and the construction of art history in and of itself.