Modernism: The Lure of Heresy

A celebration of subversives: the first one-volume history of the greatest cultural movement since the Enlightenment.

Peter Gay's most ambitious endeavor 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 scandalized 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. 40 illustrations

• The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (Vol. 1) (Enlightenment an Interpretation) (v. 1)
• Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider
• The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom (Vol. 2) (Enlightenment an Interpretation) (v. 2)
• Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (Brief Encounters)
• The Use and Abuse of Art (Bollingen Series (General))
• My Name Is Asher Lev
• Money for Art: The Tangled Web of Art and Politics in American Democracy
• Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition
• Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity
• The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Theory and History of Literature, Volume 10)