Overview

Modern begins on a specific day--March 22, 1905--at a specific place: the Salon des Ind�pendants in Paris, where works of art we recognize as modern were first exhibited. Drawing on his forty five-year fine art career, author Philip Hook illuminates how this new art came to be--and how truly shocking it was. We witness movement upon movement that burst forth in dizzying succession: Fauvism, Expressionism, Primitivism, Symbolism, Cubism, Futurism, and Abstract art. His vivid accounts breathe new life into the work and times of nearly two hundred artists, and whose collective genius was understood and appreciated by few at the time. Hook reconsiders the decade from a series of fresh angles: What was the conventional art against which Modernism sought to rebel? Why were avant-garde artists so self-obsessed? And why did others pay so much money for Old Masters at the same time? Modern helps us answer these questions and more--and to see how avant-garde artists marshaled their genius (and oftentimes their madness) to create works of such profound consequence, they still reverberate today--and which, taken together, made for a movement more influential than even the Renaissance.

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Philip Hook joined Sotheby's Impressionist & Modern Art Department in 1994. He is currently a board member and senior director of Impressionist & Modern art in London, and has over forty years' expertise as an art dealer and auctioneer. He joined Christie's in 1973 with a degree in the history of art from Cambridge University, and headed Christie's Nineteenth Century Paintings Department from 1980 to 1987. He is the author of Popular Nineteenth Century Paintings (1986); five successful novels set in the art world; The Ultimate Trophy (2009), a history of the Impressionist market and one of the Financial Times' Books of the Year; and Breakfast at Sotheby's: An A-Z of the Art World (2013), which was a book of the year in the Sunday Times, Spectator, Financial Times, Guardian, and Mail on Sunday. David Vickery is a network BBC TV announcer in the UK, with a track record in program narrations for Discovery, AETN, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and other channels. He trained as an actor at the prestigious Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama but has latterly discovered a love for golf croquet. It's a very competitive sport and brings out the er . . . best in him! David daily ponders whether to again adopt a cat.

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