Picasso's War
Hugh Eakin, Foreign Affairs senior editor, has written on museums and the art world for The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.
In January 1939, Pablo Picasso was well-known in Europe but reviled in the United States. One year later, people from all across the country were wanting to view his work. How did the divisive leader of the Paris avant-garde make his way into the heart of American culture?
The answer begins a generation ago, when a rebel Irish American lawyer called John Quinn set out to amass the world's largest collection of Picassos. His concept of a museum to hold them disappeared with him, until it was rediscovered by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., a cultural visionary who became the director of New York's new Museum of Modern Art at the age of twenty-seven.
Barr and Quinn's common purpose would be derailed in the years ahead by popular antipathy, the Depression, Parisian intrigues, and Picasso himself. It would take Hitler's anti-Jewish and anti-modern art campaign, as well as Barr's tense collaboration with Picasso's persecuted dealer, Paul Rosenberg, to smuggle Picasso's most important paintings out of Europe. The breakthrough exhibition Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, mounted in the shadow of war, would establish Picasso in America, define MoMA as we know it, and move the art world's focus from Paris to New York.
Among the best books on art history, Picasso's War is the never-before-told account of how a single exhibition, a decade in the planning, forever altered American taste, saving dozens of the twentieth century's most lasting artworks from the Nazis. Hugh Eakin tells how two men and their infatuation with Picasso impacted the art world forever in a smart combination of new knowledge and compelling storytelling.
Author: Hugh Eakin
Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Picassos-War-Modern-Came-America/dp/0451498488/
Best Sellers Rank: #5,140 in Books
#3 in Artist & Architect Biographies
#8 in Art History (Books)
#12 in Individual Artists (Books)
