Twilight of the Belle Epoque
The Paris of Picasso, Stravinsky, Proust, Renault, Marie Curie, Gertrude Stein, and Their Friends through the Great War
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
Mary McAuliffe’s Dawn of the Belle Epoque took the reader from the multiple disasters of 1870–1871 through the extraordinary re-emergence of Paris as the cultural center of the Western world. Now, in Twilight of the Belle Epoque, McAuliffe portrays Paris in full flower at the turn of the twentieth century, where creative dynamos such as Picasso, Matisse, Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, Proust, Marie Curie, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, and Isadora Duncan set their respective circles on fire with a barrage of revolutionary visions and discoveries. Such dramatic breakthroughs were not limited to the arts or sciences, as innovators and entrepreneurs such as Louis Renault, André Citroën, Paul Poiret, François Coty, and so many others—including those magnificent men and women in their flying machines—emphatically demonstrated. But all was not well in this world, remembered in hindsight as a golden age, and wrenching struggles between Church and state as well as between haves and have-nots shadowed these years, underscored by the ever-more-ominous drumbeat of the approaching Great War—a cataclysm that would test the mettle of the City of Light, even as it brutally brought the Belle Epoque to its close. Through rich illustrations and evocative narrative, McAuliffe brings this remarkable era from 1900 through World War I to vibrant life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After the Franco-German War of 1871 1872, Paris experienced a remarkable artistic, literary, and scientific surge in the midst of immense political and religious turbulence, reshaping worldviews to embrace rapid change and immortalizing the period's innovators. McAuliffe (Dawn of the Belle Epoque) revisits this vibrant, controversial era and weaves brief chronological snapshots of the eponymous figures plus others like Sarah Bernhardt and mile Zola and their (often long-suffering) companions throughout her narrative. Visual artists receive the most biographical attention, illuminating the rise and fall of Matisse's Fauvism and Picasso's transformation into cubism, while the Curies' heartbreaking story of love for science and each other balances out the art colonies' fatalistic frivolity. McAuliffe tries to include too much into an eminently readable but overstuffed narrative; for instance, technological advances and the formative experience of Charles de Gaulle barely make an impression after impassioned descriptions of the robust exploits of Stein, Picasso, and Zola. For Paris, the Belle Epoque and its dazzling cultural movement resulted in a shining period whose inverse would soon be felt in the desolation and decimation of the Great War. Illus.
