Picasso's War: How Modern Art Came to America

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A riveting story of how dueling ambitions and the power of prodigy made America the cultural center of the worldand Picasso the most famous artist alivein the shadow of World War II Eakin has mastered this material. . . . The book soars.The New York Times Book Review (Editors Choice) ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Vanity Fair The New York Times Book Review The New Yorker In January 1939 Pablo Picasso was renowned in Europe but disdained by many in the United States. One year later Americans across the country were clamoring to see his art. How did the controversial leader of the Paris avant-garde break through to the heart of American culture? The answer begins a generation earlier when a renegade Irish American lawyer named John Quinn set out to build the greatest collection of Picassos in existence. His dream of a museum to house them died with him until it was rediscovered by Alfred H. Barr Jr. a cultural visionary who at the age of twenty-seven became the director of New Yorks new Museum of Modern Art. Barr and Quinns shared goal would be thwarted in the years to comeby popular hostility by the Depression by Parisian intrigues and by Picasso himself. It would take Hitlers campaign against Jews and modern art and Barrs fraught alliance with Paul Rosenberg Picassos persecuted dealer to get Picassos most important paintings out of Europe. Mounted in the shadow of war the groundbreaking exhibition Picasso: Forty Years of His Art would launch Picasso in America define MoMA as we know it and shift the focus of the art world from Paris to New York. Picassos War is the never-before-told story about how a single exhibition a decade in the making irrevocably changed American taste and in doing so saved dozens of the twentieth centurys most enduring artworks from the Nazis. Through a deft combination of new scholarship and vivid storytelling Hugh Eakin shows how two men and their obsession with Picasso changed the art world forever.