Synopses & Reviews
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.
Synopsis
Peter Gay's most ambitious endeavor since Freud explores the shocking modernist rebellion that, beginning in the 1840s, transformed art, literature, music, and film with its assault on traditional forms. Beginning his epic study with Baudelaire, whose lurid poetry scandalized French stalwarts, Gay traces the revolutionary path of modernism from its Parisian origins to its emergence as the dominant cultural movement in world capitals such as Berlin and New York. A work unique in its breadth and brilliance, presents a thrilling pageant of heretics that includes (among others) Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, and D. W. Griffiths; James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot; Walter Gropius, Arnold Schoenberg, and (of course!) Andy Warhol. Finally, Gay examines the hostility of totalitarian regimes to modernist freedom and the role of Pop Art in sounding the death knell of a movement that dominated Western culture for 120 years. Lavishly illustrated, is a superlative achievement by one of our greatest historians.
Synopsis
'Rich, learned, briskly written, maddening yet necessary study."Lee Siegel, New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
A celebration of subversives: the first one-volume history of the greatest cultural movement since the Enlightenment.
Synopsis
'Rich, learned, briskly written, maddening yet necessary study."Lee Siegel, New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
Peter Gay explores the shocking modernist rebellion that, beginning in the 1840s, transformed art, literature, music, and film. Modernism presents a thrilling pageant of heretics that includes Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, D. W. Griffiths, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Walter Gropius, Arnold Schoenberg, and (of course!) Andy Warhol.
About the Author
Peter Gay (1923--2015) was 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.