Marginal to Mainstream

Marginal to Mainstream: French Modernism Between the Wars traces the near-miraculous progress of modern art in France in the first half of the twentieth century. Before World War I, it was a marginal phenomenon, largely absent from the museums and bought and sold by a handful of second-string dealers; by the early 1950s it had been canonized as the representative form of the epoch. The triumph of modernism, and the simultaneous establishment of Paris as the crucible of modern art, were not the p