The post-WWII period saw the apex of high Modernism in painting with the abstract expressionists, led by the likes of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. They took the Modernists' radical approach to painting to the utmost extreme, by actually separating the brush from the canvas and completely rejecting representational art. At the same time, though, a new group of painters were laying the groundwork of Postmodernism, and were searching for new ways to break free of the canvas. Darling's show begins with the sudden and spontaneous explosion from all over the world, starting around 1948, of painters began actually attacking, distorting, and destroying the surface of their paintings. From the earliest pieces, in which artists began tearing, cutting, and–in the case of Niki de Saint Phalle actually shooting –their canvases, the assault on the very idea of painting is ratcheted up in the 1960s by a new wave of evermore radical artists. While the selection is worth seeing, it lacks the surprising urgency of Target Practice and is, in fact, completely representative of everything the more impressive artists in that show were fighting against.

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