The aim of this book is to trace the postmodern context in the arts through an analytical mapping of the work of some painters (including Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Eric Fischl and Anselm Kiefer), who not only emerged internationally in that period but also came to demarcate it aesthetically. Perhaps this is the main interest of the essay which, by re-discussing the concepts of avant-garde and post-avant-garde, analyses their historical background and presents Euro-American painting of the 1980s as the heir to a great crisis in which artistic discourse itself was called into question and ended - thanks to a process of increasing formal radicalisation - in a kind of symbolic apathy.