Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-century Art

Picasso's stature as the foremost artist of this century is inseparable from his profound engagement with the art market. In making modernism, Michael C. Fitzgerald illustrates how Picasso enhanced his reputation in the art world - and in so doing transformed that world - by adroitly orchestrating the commercial presentation of his work. Drawing on previously unpublished correspondence between Picasso and his dealers and museum curators. Fitzgerald follows the artist from his search for a gallery in Paris through his acceptance by the renowned dealers Paul Rosenberg and Georges Wildenstein to the acclaimed 1939 retrospective of his work at the museum of modern art in New York. As a leader of the avant-garde, Picasso was a model for other artists, and Fitzgerald's analysis of his commercial strategies reveals the modern-art market to be no mere site of exchange but the dynamo of the art world, where critics, collectors, and curators join with artists and dealers to confer artistic standing. Rich in anecdote and observation, Making Modernism is a groundbreaking book, one that changes our view of the artist's studio, the dealer's gallery, and the world's great museums - indeed, our view of art itself.