Abstraction is ailing. Ever since Clement Greenberg stopped making the rounds and writing reviews, its health has been on one long, slow decline. Yet as Mark Cheetham insists in his most recent book, this patient simply refuses to die. Cheetham, professor of art history and director of the Canadian Studies Program at the University of Toronto, introduces us to a robust cache of artists (and there are, as he well admits, many more among their ranks), who for the last forty years have insisted on making this presumably terminal pictorial mode their chief idiom. Abstract Art Against Autonomy extends the project Cheetham initiated with The Rhetoric of Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), in which he offered a history of the pervasive modernist invocation of purity with the aim of exposing its particular philosophical basis and ultimately self-defeating lacunae. By virtue of its exclusion of the impure, what this rhetoric engendered was instead anything but the absolute and universal. Cheetham’s subsequent projects focus on practices that deliberately unearth this “aesthetic ideology” and, he argues, “preserve the possibility of artistic discourse itself” (The Rhetoric of Purity, xvi.). With his latest book, he turns his attention to the current condition of abstraction...