Individual Artists, French Art, Avant-garde - Aesthetics, Cubism, Art Collecting & Patronage, Modern Art
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Overview
Picasso's stature as the foremost artist of this century is inseparable from his profound engagement with the art market. In making modernism, Michael C. Fitzgerald illustrates how Picasso enhanced his reputation in the art world - and in so doing transformed that world - by adroitly orchestrating the commercial presentation of his work. Drawing on previously unpublished correspondence between Picasso and his dealers and museum curators. Fitzgerald follows the artist from his search for a gallery in Paris through his acceptance by the renowned dealers Paul Rosenberg and Georges Wildenstein to the acclaimed 1939 retrospective of his work at the museum of modern art in New York. As a leader of the avant-garde, Picasso was a model for other artists, and Fitzgerald's analysis of his commercial strategies reveals the modern-art market to be no mere site of exchange but the dynamo of the art world, where critics, collectors, and curators join with artists and dealers to confer artistic standing. Rich in anecdote and observation, Making Modernism is a groundbreaking book, one that changes our view of the artist's studio, the dealer's gallery, and the world's great museums - indeed, our view of art itself.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Although Pablo Picasso declared in 1918 that dealers were the enemy of artists, this revealing illustrated study documents how Picasso strived to win the support of dealers, critics, collectors and curators who could boost his reputation-and sales. Through his friendships with two impresarios, poet Jean Cocteau and longtime ballet patron Eugenia Errazuriz, Picasso attracted the patronage of aristocratic circles that welcomed his shift from cubism to neoclassical styles. Then, in 1918, he formed an alliance with two prominent dealers in France, Paul Rosenberg and Georges Wildenstein. His intense collaboration with Rosenberg, according to the author, stimulated Picasso's art, exposing him to Post-Impressionists. Drawing on Picasso's correspondence, FitzGerald, associate professor of fine art at Trinity College in Connecticut, carries the story of Picasso's lionization at the 1939-1940 Museum of Modern Art retrospective in Manhattan. He makes a compelling case that entrepreneurship is a defining task of the avant-garde artist. (Mar.)Library Journal
The art marketplace has always been the domain of the dealer-private or auction house-and, for good or ill, it has increasingly become the sphere of influence of critics, collectors, and curators. In this engaging, well-written account, the author examines the role of the artist in the confluence of the aesthetic and the commercial during the rise of modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing upon extensive unpublished correspondence between Picasso and those involved with the marketing of his work, Fitzgerald presents this artist as a model entrepreneur in his collaboration with the major French dealers of his time, Paul Rosenberg and Georges Wildenstein. Fitzgerald's observations and his clearly and intelligently drawn conclusions open new venues for the study of modernism and give us a new and different view of the creators and the purveyors of today's art.-Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum of Art Lib., New YorkBook Details
Published
June 12, 1995
Publisher
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.
Pages
320
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780374106119