Modern and contemporary art can be both baffling and beautiful, it can also be innovative, political, and disturbing. Closely informed by new critical approaches, this book sets out to provide the first concise interpretation of this period. Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, and Damien Hirst are among many artists discussed, within the political and cultural worlds they inhabited. The theoretical and issue-based debates that have driven the art of this period art along are followed through the key movements of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Postmodernism.