Author Interview: Hugh Eakin's "Picasso's War"
We’re back on ArtCurious with another great interview episode for you today. Today’s episode features a conversation about Picasso’s War, a recent book by journalist Hugh Eakin. Today we think of New York as the center of the twentieth century art world, but it took three determined men, two world wars, and one singular artist to secure the city’s cultural prominence. Pablo Picasso was the most influential and perplexing artist of his age, and the turning points of his career and salient facets of his private life have intrigued the world for decades. However, the tremendous feat of winning support for his art in the U.S. has long been overlooked—until now.
In PICASSO’S WAR: How Modern Art Came to America, Eakin details the never-before-told story of how a single exhibition, years in the making, finally brought the 20th century’s most notorious artist U.S. acclaim, irrevocably changed American culture, and in doing so saved dozens of the twentieth century’s most enduring artworks from the Nazis.
Through a series of discoveries leading to dozens of archives in the United States and Europe, Eakin successfully assembles first-hand accounts of the small group of people who made this happen: the renegade Irish-American lawyer John Quinn and the mountain-girl-turned-foreign correspondent, Jeanne Foster; the art dealer and Paris kingmaker, Paul Rosenberg; the wunderkind museum founder Alfred Barr and his sharp-witted, Irish-Italian wife, Margaret Scolari. Working sometimes together and often at odds, they were determined to bring the radical art revolutions of Europe to the States, no matter what stood in their way. In the end, they would have to overcome political revolutions, bankruptcies, divorces, art seizures—and years of American cultural hostility before they could achieve their goal. Collectively, it would take the destruction of New York’s first great modern art collection and finally, the Nazis’ war on modernism to bring this twenty-year quest to its surprising conclusion.
About the author:
Hugh Eakin, a senior editor at Foreign Affairs, has written about museums and the art world for The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.
Please enjoy this bonus episode, featuring my discussion with Hugh Eakin. Be sure to grab your copy of Picasso’s War from Bookshop.org, below. If you prefer Amazon, that link is below as well.
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