This book discusses the role of gesture painting and the sculpture related to the painting in the development of distinctive artistic tendencies by the members of the second generation of the New York School during the second part of the fifties.

Introduction 1. The Milieu of the New York School in the Early Fifties 2. The Community of the New York School 3. The Colonization of Gesture Painting 4. Frankenthaler, Mitchell, Leslie, Resnick, Francis, and Other Gesture Painters 5. Gestural Realism 6. Rivers, Hartigan, Goodnough, Muller, Johnson, Porter, Katz, Pearlstein, and Other Gestural Realists 7. Assemblage: Stankiewicz, Chamberlain, di Suvero, and Other Junk Sculptors 8. The Duchamp-Cage Aesthetic 9. Rauschenberg and Johns 10. Environments and Happenings: Kaprow, Grooms, Oldenburg, Dine, and Whitman 11. Hard-edge and Stained Color-field Abstraction, and Other Non-gestural Styles: Kelly, Smith, Louis, Noland, Parker, Held, and Others 12. The Recognition of the Second Generation 13. The New Academy 14. Circa 1960: A Change in Sensibility