The Observer
Book Description
Product Description
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.
From the Inside Flap
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.
From the Back Cover
Praise for Peter Gay:
Schnitzler's Century
'This is cultural history of the first order; and it is liberal and humane history at its very best.' David Cannadine
'[Gay] convey[s] with unusual efficiency what we hope to find in cultural history: the romance of the commonplace, and the shock of the old, not to mention the ordinariness of romance and the tedium on daily life, even in an age of rapid change.' Graham Robb,
New York Review of Books
'A hugely readable work that wears its learning lightly, so that it can be passed on to you. For a book that might have been as dry as we thought the Victorians were, there's hardly a dull moment.' Guardian
The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud
'Breathtakingly conceived... Few students of the 19th century have read as widely and as imaginatively as Gay. Few deploy erudition as elegantly as he does... Gay has been a master at treading the ground between the particular and the abstract, finding new particulars and revising prized abstractions.' Phyllis Rose, New York Times
'Has transformed our understanding of the origins and growth of middle-class life.... The strength of this book...is that through Gay's eyes we can get a warmer, more vivid and more accurate sense of the 'bourgeois experience' than has ever been available before.' Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph
'One of the major historical enterprises of the decade...an enterprise requiring a daring and breadth of knowledge possessed by few other contemporary historians, and one which [Gay] has carried to its term with inexhaustible energy and patience and an exuberance of spirit.' New York Review of Books
