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Description of  Modern: Genius, Madness, and One Tumultuous Decade That Changed Art Forever

A revelatory, fast-paced account of the most exciting, frenzied, and revolutionary decade in art history1905 to the dawn of World War I in 1914and the avant-garde artists who indelibly changed our visual landscape Modern begins on a specific dayMarch 22, 1905at a specific place: the Salon des Indpendants in Paris, where works of art we recognize as modern were first exhibited. Drawing on his forty five-year fine art career, author Philip Hook illuminates how this new art came to beand how truly shocking it was. With Hooks expert guidance, we witness movement upon movement that burst forth in dizzying succession: Fauvism, Expressionism, Primitivism, Symbolism, Cubism, Futurism, and Abstract art. As Hook barnstorms across Europeto London, Germany, Moscow, Scandinavia, and everywhere modern art was being madehis vivid accounts breathe new life into the work and times of Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Kandinsky, Malevich, Klimt, Schiele, Munch, and nearly two hundred other artists who painted, sculpted, and exhibited alongside them, and whose collective genius was understood and appreciated by few at the time. Hook reconsiders the decade from a series of fresh angles: What was the conventional art against which Modernism sought to rebel? Why were avant-garde artists so self-obsessed? What persuaded a few bold collectors to buy difficult modern art? And why did others pay so much money for Old Masters at the same time? helps us answer these questions and moreand to see how avant-garde artists marshaled their genius (and oftentimes their madness) to create works of such profound consequence, they still reverberate todayand which, taken together, made for a movement more influential than even the Renaissance. Read more