The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature and the Arts

In this volume, one of the great polymaths of our time focuses on the often disputed contributions of modern, primarily French, art and literature to contemporary culture. Emphasizing individual works and artists over theory and method, and with an authoritativeness characteristic of all his writing, Roger Shattuck embraces a wide range of themes, including politics, theatricality, the dynamics of artistic movements and the nature of consciousness. The essays here range from his celebrated analyses of Dada and the 1935 International Writers’ Congress, to fresh considerations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, to groundbreaking studies of Monet, Magritte and the art writings of Meyer Shapiro. A tour-de-force of aesthetic philosophy and criticism, “The Innocent Eye” is, says “The New York Times,” “a fast-paced, interesting book spun out of a wealth of intimately assimilated culture.”