"Putting a Freudian view of life as an arena of conflict at the center of a view of modernism, this outspoken study tracks the avant-garde across a wide array of high culture — literature, music and dance, painting and sculpture, architecture and film. Conventional Victorians, according to Gay, found the belief in art for art's sake of libertine and aesthete Oscar Wilde as much a perversion as his homosexuality. But even fans often get it wrong, says Gay, embracing Edvard Munch's most famous painting, The Scream, as the quintessential symbol of modern angst, while Munch meant his nightmarish vision as a confession of his own inner state. And thanks to generous patrons, the oeuvre of anti-artist Marcel Duchamp, an enemy of museums, is featured prominently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Modernism isn't a single style, Gay shows: in literature, Ulysses's wordy, sensual world stands in direct opposition to Virginia Woolf's in Mrs. Dalloway, spare and cool. This latest from Gay (National Book Award winner for The Enlightenment) isn't a monumental or definitive treatise but a highly personal, arbitrary and invigorating collection of mini-essays that view a variety of artistic works from a fresh perspective. 16 pages of color, and b&w illus.. (Nov.) " Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

This is not a history of the rise, triumph, and decline of modernism, insists Gay (emeritus, Yale U.), though he is a laureled veteran American historian; though--while taking such liberties as old men can and must--he moves in a chronological direction both across and within chapters; though he strays at times from the formal analysis of novels and sculptures and buildings to place the works of their modernist creators within a framework of references historians have constructed. It is not a psychoanalysis of modernism either, he says but closer to one than to a history. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Gay's ambitious endeavor looks at the modernist rebellion that, beginning in the 1840s, transformed art, literature, music, and film. Beginning his epic study with Baudelaire, Gay traces the revolutionary path from its Parisian origins to its emergence as the dominant cultural movement. Illustrated.

National Book Award-winning historian Peter Gay traces the rise of Modernism, the cultural movement that shaped the Western world.

In Peter Gay's long-awaited work, his most ambitious undertaking since his seminal biography of Freud, the eminent scholar tells how Modernism swept through the arts beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, destroying traditional and classical artistic forms, and creating the modern world as we know it. Opening this epic book with Charles Baudelaire, Gay shows how the French poet's sexually explicit, and often perverse, poetry scandalized Paris in the 1840s and 1850s. In a sprawling work that examines the great Modernist influences in literature, poetry, music, and architecture, among other art forms, Gay presents a thrilling pageant of historical characters and legendary heretics, including Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and even Andy Warhol. In a final chapter devoted to Pop Art, Gay reveals how a new generation of artists ingeniously brought together high and low art, thus sounding the death knell of a movement that had dominated Western culture for over 120 years. 40 illustrations.

Peter Gay is the author of more than twenty-five books, including the National Book Award winner The Enlightenment, the best-selling Weimar Culture, and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time.