Haystack Book Talk: Modernism and Tradition – The Foundations of Modern Art in America
Date: 03/16/2024
Time: 4:30 pm-5:30 pm
Haystack Book Talks presents Robert Dance in conversation with Hugh Eakin, the author of
Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America.
As late as the 1920s modern art was still scorned by American collectors and museums. Artists like Pablo
Picasso were renowned in Europe but disdained in the United States. Eakin tells the story of how
modern art came to be embraced by American culture, and how paintings that we now revere as
masterpieces first found their places on museum walls.
In Picasso’s War, Hugh Eakin recounts the never-before-told story of how a single exhibition, a decade in
the making, changed American taste, and, by chance and good fortune, saved dozens of the twentieth
century’s most enduring artworks from the Nazi’s. Eakins shows how two men, first John Quinn who set
out to build the greatest collection of Picasso’s in existence, and then Alfred Barr, Jr., a cultural visionary
who at a young age became the director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, changed the art world
forever.
“Eakin has mastered this material, read a mountain of sources, and synthesized them skillfully, and he
manages to braid aesthetics with history with personal details…the book soars. His achievement is
keeping the complex plotline moving, while offering sharp insights and astute judgements.” – The New
York Times Book Review (Editors Choice)
Hugh Eakin, the author of Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America, is a senior editor at Foreign
Affairs and a frequent writer on the art world for a number of notable publications, including The New
Yorker and New York Review of Books.
Robert Dance was an art dealer specializing in old master paintings. Later he turned his attention to film
history and is the author of several books including Ferocious Ambition: Joan Crawford’s March to
Stardom and The Savvy Sphinx: How Garbo Conquered Hollywood. He lives in Norfolk, CT.
Please register for this program here.