Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America

Eakin, a senior editor at Foreign Affairs, showcases his journalist’s eye for detail with this fascinating look at a pivotal moment in modern American art history. In 1939, New York City’s fledgling Museum of Modern Art presented a major exhibition, organized by visionary curator Alfred H. Barr Jr., that comprised 40 years of Picasso’s art and brought the Spanish painter’s work to America for the first time. The show established Picasso as a key figure in the modern art movement, and N.Y.C. as the center of the art world. Through lush prose and vigorous research, Eakin draws readers into the long evolution of the exhibition, vividly profiling the people who made it happen—from John Quinn, a shrewd art collector who died in 1924 before sharing his Picasso collection with American audiences, to Barr, a man “physically slight to the point of frailty” who would “transform the American art world” upon taking up Quinn’s mantle. For years, Barr’s efforts were stymied by the Depression—as well as American indifference toward Picasso’s art—until the rise of the Nazis in France, and their antagonism toward modern art, motivated Picasso to team up with Barr to send more than 300 works to MOMA. Chock full of suspense and brilliantly rendered, this will have art connoisseurs transfixed. (July)