二十世紀的西方藝術曆史是一個暴風雨般反叛、改變、價值重估和更新的敘事史。對於我們這些生活在這段曆史後半段的人來說，很難察覺這個故事現在已經結束瞭——就是說，現代主義已經是過去的事瞭。盡管少數鼓吹者還存在，還很活躍，但是藝術追求的主流已經變瞭，隻是給批評傢和曆史學傢留下瞭敘述與清點這段曆史的任務。

但是至今還沒有人提供這樣一個關於現代主義的綜閤性論敘。原因顯然在於無人有能力對建築師、舞蹈設計者、作麯傢、電影製作者、小說傢、畫傢和詩人的作品進行綜閤把握和評論。唯一的選擇是省略現代主義觀念，聚焦個彆作品，這些作品的意義在於它們引起瞭所有門類的藝術和藝術傢的改變。

A veteran cultural historian weighs in with an encyclopedic account of the fecund 120 years that engendered artists as varied and brilliant as Frank Lloyd Wright, T. S. Eliot and Marcel Proust.Like a playwright or director, Gay (Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture, 1815 - 1914, 2001, etc.) sets the scene and describes the principal players, then brings them onstage, watches them perform and gives them notes afterward. His range and erudition are bewildering - is there a modernist novel, poem or play he has not read? A painting, sculpture, film or building he has not seen? He deals with many players in perfunctory fashion, but to numerous others - the notables - he devotes a few pages each (there is room for no more tonnage in this tome). He begins with the "founders" of the movement - Baudelaire, Monet and Oscar Wilde among them - and moves on to the painters and sculptors, featuring van Gogh, Munch, Beckmann and Picasso. Then it's off to the writers, with special attention to Joyce and Woolf. In this section, he occasionally loses control of his usually restrained prose. "Like a seasoned animal tamer," he writes, "Woolf cracked her whip on her prose and made the most feral brute cringe at her orders." Proust and Kafka also merit much attention before the music begins and the dancers leap onto the stage. Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Balanchine compose and cavort before it's time for the architects - Wright, Le Corbusier, the Bauhausers and others. The theater and the cinema follow, and Gay enshrines Eisenstein, Chaplin and Welles in his Modernist museum. A final ominous chapter assesses the effects of 20th-century totalitarian governments on the Modernists. He concludes with the rather patent commonplace that "the principal effect of fascism on the arts, then, was negative."An educational summary and analysis of a most miraculous cultural era. (Kirkus Reviews)