Picasso's War
How Modern Art Came to America
-
- USD 10.99
-
- USD 10.99
Descripción editorial
A riveting story of how dueling ambitions and the power of prodigy made America the cultural center of the world—and Picasso the most famous artist alive—in the shadow of World War II
“[Eakin] has mastered this material. . . . The book soars.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Vanity Fair, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker
In January 1939, Pablo Picasso was renowned in Europe but disdained by many in the United States. One year later, Americans across the country were clamoring to see his art. How did the controversial leader of the Paris avant-garde break through to the heart of American culture?
The answer begins a generation earlier, when a renegade Irish American lawyer named John Quinn set out to build the greatest collection of Picassos in existence. His dream of a museum to house them died with him, until it was rediscovered by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., a cultural visionary who, at the age of twenty-seven, became the director of New York’s new Museum of Modern Art.
Barr and Quinn’s shared goal would be thwarted in the years to come—by popular hostility, by the Depression, by Parisian intrigues, and by Picasso himself. It would take Hitler’s campaign against Jews and modern art, and Barr’s fraught alliance with Paul Rosenberg, Picasso’s persecuted dealer, to get Picasso’s most important paintings out of Europe. Mounted in the shadow of war, the groundbreaking exhibition Picasso: Forty Years of His Art would launch Picasso in America, define MoMA as we know it, and shift the focus of the art world from Paris to New York.
Picasso’s War is the never-before-told story about how a single exhibition, a decade in the making, irrevocably changed American taste, and in doing so saved dozens of the twentieth century’s most enduring artworks from the Nazis. Through a deft combination of new scholarship and vivid storytelling, Hugh Eakin shows how two men and their obsession with Picasso changed the art world forever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Eakin, a senior editor at Foreign Affairs, showcases his journalist's eye for detail with this fascinating look at a pivotal moment in modern American art history. In 1939, New York City's fledgling Museum of Modern Art presented a major exhibition, organized by visionary curator Alfred H. Barr Jr., that comprised 40 years of Picasso's art and brought the Spanish painter's work to America for the first time. The show established Picasso as a key figure in the modern art movement, and N.Y.C. as the center of the art world. Through lush prose and vigorous research, Eakin draws readers into the long evolution of the exhibition, vividly profiling the people who made it happen—from John Quinn, a shrewd art collector who died in 1924 before sharing his Picasso collection with American audiences, to Barr, a man "physically slight to the point of frailty" who would "transform the American art world" upon taking up Quinn's mantle. For years, Barr's efforts were stymied by the Depression—as well as American indifference toward Picasso's art—until the rise of the Nazis in France, and their antagonism toward modern art, motivated Picasso to team up with Barr to send more than 300 works to MOMA. Chock full of suspense and brilliantly rendered, this will have art connoisseurs transfixed.
