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Content: In the wake of Auschwitz, all representational 
        art- except Holocaust art- appeared suddenly irrelevant, so modern painters turned instead to abstract 
        art(albeit packed with emotion, symbolism or animation) in order 
        to express themselves. Amazingly, during the 1950s, the New 
        York School- featuring Jackson 
        Pollock's paintingsas well as the calmer Colour Field painting of 
        Mark Rothko - spearheaded a temporary recovery of art on both sides of 
        the Atlantic. These avant-garde painters succeeded in redefining the envelope 
        for abstract paintings, but they remained within the confines of modernism. They believed in creating authentic, finished works of art with important 
        content. But the "modernist" era was drawing 
        inexorably to a close. The widening revelations of the Shoah, the testing 
        of Atomic bombs, the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and the Vietnam War (from 
        1964), caused people to become more and more disillusioned about life 
        (and art). Already, in the mid-50s, Jasper 
        Johnsand Robert 
        Rauschenberghad produced the first post-modern style works of Neo-Dada 
        and Pop. Soon, mainstream Pop-art would usher in postmodernism proper, 
        as American TV networks focused on the 1968 Tet Offensive and the chaotic 
        Democratic Convention in Chicago. NOTE: In 20th 
          century architecture, the situation was slightly different.