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Chargement... Picasso's War: How Modern Art Came to Americapar Hugh Eakin
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. In the 1920s America was a very conservative place and its art scene concentrated on traditional masterpieces that sold for ever increasing prices. Collectors of modern art were few and far between but they tried to get others involved. Attempts were made to interest the public in the new art scene but the art was derided and ridiculed. "Picasso’s War" told the story of the people who strove to showcase modern art in the US through the first efforts of the Museum of Modern Art in rented spaces. It was a struggle to gain acceptance on one side of the Atlantic while on the other side the face of Europe darkened as the tides of war overtook artists, dealers and galleries.
In Hugh Eakin’s Picasso’s War, the artist featured in the title is—somewhat unexpectedly—a relatively minor character. This is clear from the book’s prologue. The dramatic and moody opening takes us to a 1924 dinner party in the New York home of John Quinn, a Wall Street lawyer and pioneering patron of modern art and literature. After the coffee is served, Quinn leads his friends and fellow modern art enthusiasts to see his latest acquisition. They were, Eakin writes, “seized by the giant rectangle. Confronting them was a nocturnal encounter as alluring as it was strange.” Given the book’s title, a reader may expect the giant rectangle to be a canvas by Pablo Picasso—it is not. It is almost unthinkable that the now universally acknowledged masterpieces of modern art, such as Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” or Henri Matisse’s “The Red Studio,” were scorned by American museums and that wealthy patrons refused to buy even a single canvas by either painter. Though it is a truism that innovative art often finds difficulty at first in being accepted, you would think that at a time when the masters of modern painting were already lionized in Europe, Americans would not be so slow in recognizing their significance. Yet such was the case. Even after the 1913 Armory Show, which is usually credited with introducing modern art to this country, it took another several decades before it was possible to mount a full-scale Picasso exhibit, and years to get the Museum of Modern Art off the ground, much less turn it into the formidable institution it is today. “For nearly 30 years, the effort to bring modern art to the United States was continually impeded by war, economic crisis and a deeply skeptical public,” Hugh Eakin writes. “It was a project that might well have foundered, and almost did, but for the fanatical determination of a tiny group of people,” whose story he sets out to tell in this fascinating, immensely readable narrative. Back when all of life was offline, back when to buy a record you had to go to a record store, back when there were record stores, the infrastructure required for cultural goods to get from creation to consumption had many more moving parts. These parts are the principals of Eakin’s story. His focus isn’t on the big-name modern artists, like Picasso and Matisse, who are offstage for much of the book. It’s on figures most people have never heard of: dealers, gallery owners, collectors, curators, and critics—the components of what sociologists call the art world. Prix et récompensesDistinctions
"The untold story of the exhibition that made America the center of the art world-and Picasso the most famous artist alive-in the shadow of World War II"-- Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)709.2The arts Modified subdivisions of the arts History, geographic treatment, biography Biography (artists not limited to a specific form)Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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