Artistic vanguards plot new aesthetic movements, print controversial magazines, hold provocative art shows, and stage experimental theatrical and musical performances. These revolutionaries have often helped create America's countercultural movements, from the early romantics and bohemians to the beatniks and hippies. This work looks at how experimental art and the avant-garde artists' lifestyles have influenced, and at times transformed, American culture since the mid-nineteenth century. The work will introduce readers to these artists and rebels, making a careful distinction between the worlds of the high modern artist (salons and galleries) and the bohemian.
Length: 220 pages.
Reviews
Put two serious historians together in one 254-page book, and you are likely to find a literary soufflé. Here is a book that has much matter.
Kotynek and Cohassey have collaborated on an immensely useful—and concise!—volume that fulfills the promise of its title . . . and then some. . . .
Kotynek and Cohassey make no grand generalizations to be derived from their study. They say that they intended to show “how artistic avant-gardists and their supporters formed or influenced countercultures and ultimately mainstream culture, which copies its values, as well as its aesthetic surroundings, symbols, and even myths.
This is precisely what American Cultural Rebels has achieved. If any should object that we have seen many trees but not the forest, one can reply that we have truly fascinating trees . . . and it’s been one hell of a ride.
----Brian Murphy, Professor Emeritus of English (Oakland University). Oakland Journal, Winter 2009 (Oakland University, Rochester, MI).
John Cohassey performed a valuable service when he chronicled the glory years of Black Detroit in Sunnie Wilson’s Toast of the Town: The Life and Times of Sunnie Wilson. His new work, American Cultural Rebels, promises to widen the scope and heighten the impact of his important cultural investigations.
---- John Sinclair
poet, writer, political activist