Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss introduce a new set of concepts to our understanding of avant-garde and modernist art practices. Although it has been over 60 years since Georges Bataille undertook his philosophical development of the term informe , only in recent years has the idea of the formless been deployed in the theorizing and reconfiguring of the field of 20th-century art. This is partly because that field has most often been crudely set up as a battle between form and content; Formless constitutes a third term standing outside that opposition, outside the binary thinking that is itself formal. The authors chart its persistence within a history of modernism that has always repressed it in the interest of privileging formal mastery, and they assess its future within current artistic production. In the domain of practice, they analyze it as an operational tool, the structural cunning of which has repeatedly been suppressed in the service of a thematics of art. The book explores the power of the informe , and a new map of 20th-century art emerges from this reconceptualization and from the analyses of the work of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Lucio Fontana, Cindy Sherman, Claes Oldenburg, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others.