Bohemian Paris : Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse and the Birth of Modern Art. Hardcover - 2002

New York:: Grove/Atlantic,, 2002.. First Printing of the First US Edition. A Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket. Paris is a mythical city, a capital of the arts synonymous with some of the most legendary events in world culture. This reputation has never been so richly deserved as at the beginning of the twentieth century, when fauvism, cubism, dadaism, and surrealism were born in a heady atmosphere that gave way to the modern sensibility. In Bohemian Paris, Dan Franck leads us on a magical exploration of the city and its hotbeds of artistic creation. He introduces erudite and eros-obsessed poet Guillaume Apollinaire; the painter Amedeo Modigliani, generous to a fault even when starving; the opportunistic but brilliant Jean Cocteau; rival geniuses Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. We encounter American writers Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and form-breaking modern writer and salonist nonpareil Gertrude Stein. Painters and writers, sculptors and poets, they lived like characters in a Balzac story, working, loving, and struggling against a backdrop of extravagant parties and dire poverty. With a novelist's verve and a historian's skill, Dan Franck paints this remarkable time, capturing the beauty and vitality distilled from these artists' lives, which became the cornerstones of great art.