cover image Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Poltics in California

Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Poltics in California

Richard Candida Smith, Richard Candida Smith, Richard C?ndida Smith. University of California Press, $50 (560pp) ISBN 978-0-520-08517-6

Painters, writers and poets in California's postwar avant-garde, among them Kenneth Rexroth, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder and Denise Levertov, promoted the truth of subjective experience over all forms of collective authority. How their emphasis on personal freedom, nonconformity and irrationality filtered into the 1960s counterculture and the wider realm of public discourse is the theme of this rich, kinetic study enhanced by 59 art reproductions and photos. Candida Smith, assistant professor of history at the University of Michigan, highlights postsurrealist painters Helen Lundeberg and Lorser Feitelson; Michael McClure's frankly sexual dramas; Wallace Berman's ``cool'' assemblages, paintings and collages; Robert Duncan's plunge into kabbalism; the Beats' embrace of bohemian masculinity; and Snyder's quest to make the family and domestic relations the basis of global reorganization. He maintains that many California artists, by separating private experience from the public order, limited the potential impact of their utopian visions. (Mar.)