Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art [Paperback]

Michael C. Fitzgerald (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 18, 1996

Artists don't achieve financial success and critical acclaim during their lifetimes as a result of chance or luck. Michael FitzGerald's assiduously researched book documents Picasso's courting of dealers, critics, collectors, and curators as he established his reputation during the first forty years of the twentieth century. FitzGerald describes the care, patience, and resourcefulness invested by Paul Rosenberg, Picasso's dealer and close collaborator from 1918 to 1940, in building the financial value and public acceptance of Picasso's art. The book is based on and quotes generously from previously unpublished correspondence between Picasso and dealers, collectors, and museum curators.

Editorial Reviews

From 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.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From 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 York
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 324 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press (November 18, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520206533
• ISBN-13: 978-0520206533
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,301,253 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.