Offers timely and urgent insights into the complexities of the early postwar era.... Jesty consistently focuses on uncovering the connections between avant-garde artists' engagement with a range of communities and social practices and their artistic and aesthetic choices. Jesty's project points the way to new methodologies that help us broaden, deepen, and rethink the framework of postwar art in Japan.(Journal of Asian Humanities at Kyushu University) A brilliant puzzle box of a book — at times vexing, but mostly delightful... Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan will undoubtedly be essential reading for years to come for students and scholars of Japanese modern art, global modern art, and the culture and society of Japan's crucial 1950s transitional moment.(Journal of Japanese Studies) Art and Engagement provides a timely example of the way in which minority voices and independent groups intervene in seemingly insurmountable political scenarios... it offers comprehensiveness of topic that simultaneously shoots in many directions, pointing readers toward divergent roads and avenues of further scholarship.(Japanese Studies) Jesty's argument for a "metamorphic" as opposed to a "volcanic" view of the avant-garde—the one calling attention to commitment and organization, the other privileging disruption and momentary liberation—should demand the attention of those studying modernist and avant-garde practice in any medium.(Modern Langauge Quarterly)