Title: Utopia and dissent
First published: 1995
Description: The provincial nature of California's prewar arts institutions, Richard Candida Smith shows, forced experimental artists to concentrate on their personal visions. This led to an aesthetics that stressed the importance of personal expression, the struggle to balance the private and public realms, and a view of the creative process as a means of exploring life's deeper mysteries. Most important, the arts became a source for developing new subjective models of the self.

All these ideas found expression in the soul-searching of the 1950s "beat generation," informing a decade-long debate about conformity and the traditional roles of American men and women.

By the 1960s, when America seemed to explode with social and political movements - the anti-war protest, sexual liberation, widespread experimentation with drugs and mysticism, the questioning of all forms of authority - California was established as a center of the counterculture and quickly became one of the focal points for a nation struggling to redefine itself.

People, many of whom were unfamiliar with the actual poems, novels, paintings and films of the California avant-garde, readily absorbed the ideas these artworks embodied as they crossed the line from a regional arts environment into American popular culture.

In charting the history of ideas spawned by California's arts and poetry movements, Richard Candida Smith introduces us to the major figures in those movements, placing them in social and intellectual context and offering fresh analyses of their most important works. Beginning with post-surrealists Helen Lundeberg and Lorser Feitelson, he explores the contribution of writers and artists such as Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Joan Brown, and Wallace Berman.

He concludes with an illuminating discussion of poets Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov, whose visions helped shape the discourse of the Vietnam War protest. Breathtaking in the depth of its scholarship, unequalled in scope, Utopia and Dissent will inform discussions of twentieth-century arts, literature, and history in America for many years to come.

A landmark study of the visual arts and poetry in California from 1925 to 1975, Utopia and Dissent demonstrates the profound influence this regional culture had not only on the arts but on the shape of American thought. As much an intellectual as a cultural history, the book traces the spread of ideas developed in California's bohemian enclaves before the Second World War into mainstream American society, where they became one of the major currents of 1950s and 1960s counterculturism.
Subjects: American Arts, Arts and society, Arts, American, Arts, Modern, Modern Arts, Arts, Aspect social, Arts et politique, Art
Places: California
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: NX510.C2 S63 1995