Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America 

By Hugh Eakin

480 pages

1st edition published July 12, 2022

Picasso’s War was recommended to me by DL, a fellow DM publisher and art collector that I’ve mentioned here several times.

Prior to this one, the only book I can remember reading about the history of modern art is The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe. He presented a wonderfully slanted and brilliant hypothesis about how a small group of European artists in the first two decades of the 20th century invented modern art by stripping away the techniques and technicalities that made traditional art subject to rational analysis.

Picasso’s War has a different perspective. It is the biography of a handful of American men and women who, through legal cleverness and promotional genius, practically forced the American art market to accept Fauvist and Cubist pieces by the likes of Jean Derain and Pablo Picasso – eventually creating the world’s largest and most vibrant market for modern art.

What I Liked About It 

* It tells an amazing story, one I had never heard before.

* It is nicely and neatly written. Hugh Eakin writes with authority, the authority you’d expect from the editor of Foreign Affairs. But his prose is clean and mean, which makes for fast, exciting reading.

* The book is filled with fascinating details linking the great artists of this period to the great novelists, poets, and critics.

Critical Reception 

* “[Eakin] has mastered this material, read a mountain of sources, and synthesized them skillfully…. His achievement is keeping the complex plotline moving, while offering sharp insights and astute judgments.” (New York Times Book Review)

* “Eakin spins neglected yarns of art history into pure gold in this clear, sensitive, and deftly written narrative.” (Vanity Fair)

* “Admirable and enjoyable…. The story in Picasso’s War is well told, with an impressive level of biographical detail.” (Louis Menand, The New Yorker)