One of a series introducing major movements in modern art to general readers, students and gallery visitors, this text looks at Cubism, perhaps the seminal movement for the arts of the 20th century, and certainly one of the most complex. Divided between the annual public exhibitions or the emerging network of private galleries, between French and immigrant artists, it was also the product of the decade before the outbreak of war in 1914. Behind the cliched image of "la belle epoque" France was torn by inter-class and international tensions, caught between excitement over the experience of modernity and anxiety about its consequences.
The book describes how the artistic avant-garde, and Cubism within it, were formed by that turbulent and complex period. Analyzing paintings by Picasso, Braque, Robert and Sonia Delaunay and their associates, the author traces their exploration of the conventions of pictorial representation in the interests both of reflection on the experience of modernity, and of critical resistance to its seductions.