The tableaux, environments, and conceptual pieces of Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz are direct, powerful, and uncompromising. The works span four decades, beginning with Edward's pieces from the 1950s and continuing with those produced jointly with Nancy Reddin Kienholz from 1972 until Edward's death in 1994. Emerging from the Beat aesthetic of the early 1950s, the Kienholz oeuvre embraces the honest spontaneity of jazz, the emotional intensity of Abstract. Expressionism, and the homemade approach of do-it-yourself modernism. At the same time, it is also socially conscious realist sculpture by artists resolutely engaged in an ongoing critique of the world around them. The Kienholzes probed the dark edges of postwar society, confronting war, racism, institutional indifference, sexuality, and cruelty. Published on the occasion of an important retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Kienholz: A Retrospective is the most fully illustrated book ever published on the Kienholz oeuvre. It reproduces in more than four hundred illustrations a selection of works ranging from intimate collages to life-size tableaux, created between 1954 and 1994. The eight texts in the catalogue - by art and social historians, artists, and friends - offer critical insights into the Kienholz work as well as personal reminiscences. Nancy Reddin Kienholz has also contributed an extended.