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This book presents a refreshing new approach to avant-garde art by demonstrating that a genuine core of modernism manifests a positive, joyful outlook. In contrast to those who see disintegration and negativity as the most authentic artistic responses to this century's gloomy zeitgeist, Donald Kuspit and Lynn Gamwell present twentieth-century art that has emotionally and intellectually affirmed life. Lavishly illustrated, their book includes colorful images of paintings, sculptures, decorative arts for the home, and gardens.
In his essay, "Happiness, Health, and Related Anomalies of Avant-Garde Art," Kuspit characterizes most avant-garde art, such as Duchamp's "readymates," as psychologically adolescent - youthfully rebellious, destructive of the past, and emotionally unstable - but singles out certain rare artists, notably Matisse, as being avant-garde in the mature sense of joining a historical tradition, striking a balance between the self's pursuits of happiness and social reality, and acknowledging suffering while transcending it with positive feelings for life.
In "Arcadian Impulses in Avant-Garde Art," Gamwell focuses on the intellectual dimensions of health and happiness, noting the large role that nature has assumed as a subject of life-affirming avant-garde art. Certain artists who have been receptive to the broad intellectual climate of modernism - especially the secular, scientific revolution in our understanding of nature - have created therapeutic landscapes, gardens of love, and, most distinctive of the avant-garde art, abstract art that symbolically presents the new cosmology.
