Title: The Culture of Spontaneity
First published: 1998
Description: The Culture of Spontaneity is the first comprehensive history of the postwar avant-garde. Daniel Belgrad integrates such diverse moments in American culture as abstract expressionism, bebop jazz, gestalt therapy, Black Mountain College, Jungian psychology, beat poetry, experimental dance, Zen Buddhism, Alfred North Whitehead's cosmology, and the anti-nuclear movement. Belgrad shows how a startling variety of artistic movements actually had one unifying theme: spontaneous improvisation.

Through sensitive and skillful readings of the artistic works as well as deft explications of their social, political, and intellectual contexts, Belgrad reconstructs the mentality of this counterculture, recovers its particular vocabulary, and describes how the aesthetic of spontaneity contradicted the dominant consumer society of the 1950s.

Focusing on the works of many key cultural figures such as Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Peter Voulkos, Merce Cunningham, Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and LeRoi Jones, Belgrad substantially revises our understanding of the most significant voices of the period and convincingly argues that the art of spontaneity constituted the cutting edge of postwar American thought.
Subjects: Improvisation in art, American Arts, Arts, American, Interpersonal communication, Arts, united states, Improvisation (music), Modernism (art), Arts, modern
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: NX165 .B35 1998