This book, the first one featuring the amazing artwork of Robert Williams, has been unavailable for many years. The book contains an overview of Williams's early work until 1979. It features images from t-shirt designs, comics, posters and oil paintings.

Brings together work of leading Lowbrow and Pop Surrealist artists. With over 100 examples by two dozens artists. Provides a timeline of the movement with graphic artists profiles.

With its origins in the 1960s hot rod culture and underground comix and rock music posters, Pop Surrealism/Lowbrow Art has evolved and expanded into the most vilified, vital, and exciting movement in contemporary art. Pop Surrealism is the first book to offer a comprehensive survey of this movement featuring twenty-three of today's most important and interesting artists.

Most Americans have seen or enjoyed Lowbrow art without having even heard of it. Sometimes called the "Pop Surreal" art movement, the images and influence of Lowbrow art are widespread, appearing on album covers, in comics, and galleries across the US and around the world. But not much is known about the origin of the movement, or the stories behind the artist themselves. "Lives of the Lowbrow Artists" seeks to shed some light on the origin story of Lowbrow Art, starting with the artists who created the work. This first volume profiles some of the founding artists (Shag, Tim Biskup, Miles Thompson, Derek Yaniger, Brandi Milne) whose now iconic images gave rise to a movement that remains uniquely symbolic, subversive, and story-based to its core.

In this unusually wide-ranging study, spanning more than a century and covering such diverse forms of expressive culture as Shakespeare, Central Park, symphonies, jazz, art museums, the Marx Brothers, opera, and vaudeville, a leading cultural historian demonstrates how variable and dynamic cultural boundaries have been and how fragile and recent the cultural categories we have learned to accept as natural and eternal are. For most of the nineteenth century, a wide variety of expressive forms—Shakespearean drama, opera, orchestral music, painting and sculpture, as well as the writings of such authors as Dickens and Longfellow—enjoyed both high cultural status and mass popularity. In the nineteenth century Americans (in addition to whatever specific ethnic, class, and regional cultures they were part of) shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into relatively rigid adjectival groupings than their descendants were to experience. By the twentieth century this cultural eclecticism and openness became increasingly rare. Cultural space was more sharply defined and less flexible than it had been. The theater, once a microcosm of America—housing both the entire spectrum of the population and the complete range of entertainment from tragedy to farce, juggling to ballet, opera to minstrelsy—now fragmented into discrete spaces catering to distinct audiences and separate genres of expressive culture. The same transition occurred in concert halls, opera houses, and museums. A growing chasm between “serious” and “popular,” between “high” and “low” culture came to dominate America’s expressive arts. “If there is a tragedy in this development,” Lawrence Levine comments, “it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Verdi, whom they had enjoyed in various formats for much of the nineteenth century, but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them. Too many of those who considered themselves educated and cultured lost for a significant period—and many have still not regained—their ability to discriminate independently, to sort things out for themselves and understand that simply because a form of expressive culture was widely accessible and highly popular it was not therefore necessarily devoid of any redeeming value or artistic merit.” In this innovative historical exploration, Levine not only traces the emergence of such familiar categories as highbrow and lowbrow at the turn of the century, but helps us to understand more clearly both the process of cultural change and the nature of culture in American society.

A New York Review Books Original An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it not only on aesthetic but on political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free. This new selection of Macdonald’s finest essays, assembled by John Summers, the editor of The Baffler, reintroduces a remarkable American critic and writer. In the era of smart, sexy, and everything indie, Macdonald remains as pertinent and challenging as ever.

A unique behind-the-scenes guide to the painting process of one of the most popular artists working in the growing, underground art scene of Pop Surrealism. Get ready for a behind-the-scenes look at the painting tools, methods, and inspirations of one of the top artists working in the growing field of Pop Surrealism. For the first time, beloved best-selling author and artist Camilla d’Errico pulls back the curtain to give you exclusive insights on topics from the paints and brushes she uses and her ideal studio setup, to the dreams, notions, and pop culture icons that fuel the creation of her hauntingly beautiful Pop Surrealist paintings. With step-by-step examples covering major subject areas such as humans, animals, melting effects, and twisting reality (essential for Pop Surrealism!), Pop Painting gives you the sensation of sitting by Camilla’s side as she takes her paintings from idea to finished work. This front row seat reveals how a leading artist dreams, paints, and creates a successful body of work. For fans of Camilla and the underground art scene, aspiring artists looking to express their ideals in paint, and experienced artists wanting to incorporate the Pop Surrealist style into their work, Pop Painting is a one-of-a-kind, must-have guide.