In a detailed and often startlingly close-up consideration of 122 works of art, here beautifully reproduced, many in full color, Alfred Appel explains, interprets, reveals - and throws a whole new light on - the art of the twentieth century. His wide-ranging commentary accompanying each work, from Mondrian's pulsating abstractions to Brancusi's soaring sculptures and Calder's Thirteen Spines, illuminates a whole network of cultural connections, from the literary to the aesthetic to the political.Appel champions the restorative, uplifting forces found in the works of such twentieth-century artists as Matisse, Lachaise, Paul Klee, Walker Evans, Joyce, Chagall, Stravinsky, Nabokov, Russell Lee, Leger, Milhaud (some of whom came to America to escape Hitler and quickly caught the native upbeat beat) . . .Their works have often portrayed the commonplace: cars, gasoline stations, roadside diners, electric signs, movies, radios, skyscrapers . . . celebrating - even through war in Europe and depression at home - the advances in technology, the new look of the cities . . .Appel discusses how their art stimulates and quickens the pulse, and how - with its folk images of the new, willed "primitivism," in part inspired by the tribal art of Africa and Oceania - it projects optimism, humor, energy.Full of ideas and brilliant critical insights, this is a book at once idiosyncratic, authoritative, and fun to look at and to read. Read Less