The art of celebration

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.