"This is the first extended study of authorship in mid-20th century abstract painting in the US. It describes how artists and critics used the medium of painting to advance their own claims about the role that they believed authorship should play in dictating the value, significance and social impact of the art object .Christa Robbins tracks the subject across two definitive periods: the "New York School" as it was consolidated in the 1950s and "Post Painterly Abstraction" in the 50s-70s. Thanks to many insistent, deep dives into key artist archives, Robbins brings to the page the minds and voices of painters Arshile Gorky, Jack Tworkov, Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Sam Gilliam, and Agnes Martin and of critics Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, and others. These are all important characters in the polemical histories of American modernism, but this is the first time they are placed together in a single study and treated with equal measure, as peers participating in the shared late modernist moment"--