A veteran cultural historian weighs in with an encyclopedic account
of the fecund 120 years that engendered artists as varied and
brilliant as Frank Lloyd Wright, T. S. Eliot and Marcel Proust.Like
a playwright or director, Gay (Schnitzler's Century: The Making of
Middle-Class Culture, 1815 - 1914, 2001, etc.) sets the scene and
describes the principal players, then brings them onstage, watches
them perform and gives them notes afterward. His range and
erudition are bewildering - is there a modernist novel, poem or
play he has not read? A painting, sculpture, film or building he
has not seen? He deals with many players in perfunctory fashion,
but to numerous others - the notables - he devotes a few pages each
(there is room for no more tonnage in this tome). He begins with
the "founders" of the movement - Baudelaire, Monet and Oscar Wilde
among them - and moves on to the painters and sculptors, featuring
van Gogh, Munch, Beckmann and Picasso. Then it's off to the
writers, with special attention to Joyce and Woolf. In this
section, he occasionally loses control of his usually restrained
prose. "Like a seasoned animal tamer," he writes, "Woolf cracked
her whip on her prose and made the most feral brute cringe at her
orders." Proust and Kafka also merit much attention before the
music begins and the dancers leap onto the stage. Mahler,
Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Balanchine compose and cavort before
it's time for the architects - Wright, Le Corbusier, the Bauhausers
and others. The theater and the cinema follow, and Gay enshrines
Eisenstein, Chaplin and Welles in his Modernist museum. A final
ominous chapter assesses the effects of 20th-century totalitarian
governments on the Modernists. He concludes with the rather patent
commonplace that "the principal effect of fascism on the arts,
then, was negative."An educational summary and analysis of a most
miraculous cultural era. (Kirkus Reviews)
In his most ambitious endeavour since Freud, acclaimed cultural
historian Peter Gay traces and explores the rise of Modernism in
the arts, the cultural movement that heralded and shaped the modern
world, dominating western high culture for over a century. He
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, presenting along the way a
thrilling pageant of hereitcs that includes Oscar Wilde, Pablo
Picasso, James Joyce, Walter Gropius and Any Warhol. The result is
a work unique in its breadth and brilliance. Lavishly illustrated,
Modernism is a superb achievement by one of our greatest
historians.
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