This splendid volume featuring fifty-nine works from the Brooklyn Museum's renowned European collection celebrates France as the artistic centre of international modernism from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The years between the Revolution of 1848 and the end of World War II were characterised by profound social, intellectual and political change in France.
The art world, centred in Paris, also witnessed remarkable transformations as artists experimented with bold, expressive styles - Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism and Surrealism - that soon influenced the Western artistic canon.
The Brooklyn Museum was pioneering in the collecting and exhibiting of French modernism decades before its landmark 1921 exhibition, Paintings by Modern French Masters: The Post Impressionists and Their Predecessors, which hailed the then 'radical tradition of French painting.