The Shock of the New: Seven Historic Exhibitions of Modern Art

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Dust jacket notes: "Several hundred thousand furious Frenchmen couldnt be wrong--or could they? When seven turning-point exhibitions of new works of art opened in Paris London New York Munich between 1863 and the untamed Surrealist show of 1938 people came in droves and in droves they rejected and jeered at works now considered great. At the Salon des Refuses Manets Dejeuner sur lherbe was greeted with abuse; the Impressionists fared little better at their first exhibition in 1874; Matisses Woman with a Hat became a storm center at the Salon dAutomne of 1905; the Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910 in London provoked a revolution in English taste; in New York Duchamps Nude Descending a Staircase made the Armory Show a cause celebre; Hitlers exhibition of so-called Degenerate Art in Munich in 1937--visited by two million people--was meant to condemn what we now regard as best in modern German art; the opening of the International Surrealist exhibition in Paris in 1938 nearly caused a riot. The Shock of the New superbly re-creates the context in which these judgments were made and unmade as the way was paved for the ultimate acceptance and triumph of the new art. It tells of the artists fighting back against official opinion by organizing their won shows and cites the varied sometimes brilliant and prophetic criticism of men like Thore Zola Roger Fry and Andre Breton. Beautifully juxtaposed are some of the great classics of modern art and now forgotten pictures-of-the-year along with contemporary comment letters memoirs newspapers and cartoons. "This volume captures the feverish excitement of the changing art scenes as new concepts new styles new forms burst upon the world. It is also an important contribution to understanding artistic developments the slow reformulation of taste and the public predicament when confronting the shock of the new. And it raises the vital question of whether current tolerance for anything new is a s