Modernism: The Lure of Heresy : from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond"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. In his new book, Professor Gay's most ambitious undertaking since his magisterial cultural history of late nineteenth-century Europe, The Bourgeois Experience, he explores how Modernism swept through the arts from its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century, over-turning traditional and classical forms and creating the modern world as we know it. Taking Baudelaire as his starting-point, Gay shows how the French poet's sexually explicit and often perverse poems scandalized Paris in the 1840s and 1850s. Proceeding from Baudelaire's enormous influence, both as poet and art-critic, Gay examines the modernist achievements in literature, poetry, music, architecture and other art-forms, his cast running through Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf to Andy Warhol. And in a final chapter devoted to Pop Art, Gay discusses how a new generation of artists ingeniously brought together high and low art, thus sounding the death knell of a movement that had dominated Western culture for over 120 |
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Modernism: The Lure of Heresy from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond Peter Gay No preview available - 2009 |