1. Introduction. 2. New York in the Forties. 3. A Dialog with Europe. (Calder, Hofmann, Gorky, Motherwell, De Kooning)
4. Existentialism Comes to the Fore. (Pollock, Newman, Rothko, David Smith)
5. The New European Masters of the Late Forties. (Dubuffet, Giacometti, Bacon)
6. Some International Tendencies of the Fifties. (Purified Abstraction, Greenberg's Definition of Modernism, The Cobra, The Figurative Revival of the Fifties)
7. The Beat Generation: The Fifties in America. (Cage, Rauschenberg, Junk Sculpture, Happenings, Fluxus, Oldenburg, Johns)
8. The European Vanguard of the Later Fifties. (Nouveau Realisme, Beuys, British Pop)
9. The Landscape of Signs: American Pop Art 1960 to 1965. (Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, Westermann, Saul, The Hairy Who, West Coast Pop, Arneson)
10. In the Nature of Materials: The Later Sixties. (Minimal Art, Stella, Judd, Tony Smith, Andre, Flavin, Morris, LeWitt, The Los Angeles Light and Space Movement, Eva Hesse, Nauman, Serra, Heizer, De Maria, Smithson, Arte Povera)
11. Politics and Postmodernism: The Transition to the Seventies. (Conceptual Art, Body and Performance Art, Christo, Polke, Baldessari, Postmodernism, Polke and Richter)
12. Surviving the Corporate Culture. (Pluralism, Feminism, Photo Realism, Public Art, Matta-Clark, Bearden, Aycock, late Guston)
13. Painting at the End of the Seventies. (Immendorff, Kiefer, Clemente, Bartlett, Rothenberg, Murray)
14. The Eighties. (Puryear, Cragg, Schnabel, Borofsky, Haring, Basquiat, and Wojnarowicz, Appropriation)
15. New Tendencies of the Nineties. (Return to the Body, Diasporic Identity, Kabakov, Ann Hamilton, Photography and Video, Art and Fashion)
16. To Say the Things That Are One's Own. Bibliography. Notes. Index. 