Acclaimed cultural historian Peter Gay traces and explores the rise of artistic Modernism, the cultural movement that heralded and shaped the modern world, dominating western high culture for over a century. Peter Gay's most ambitious endeavour 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 scandalised 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, "Modernism" 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, "Modernism" is a superlative achievement by one of our greatest historians.
Author Biography
Peter Gay's first volume of his two-volume work, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, won a National Book Award, and his bestselling Freud: A Life for Our Time was finalist for the National Book Award. His other numerous works include studies on the eighteenth century, Voltaire's Politics and The Party of Humanity, and essays on the writing of history, Style in History and Art and Act. The recipient of Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, and Overseas fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge, and the Heineken Prize for Historical Study, Peter Gay is Sterling Professor of History at Yale University.
