二十世纪的西方艺术历史是一个暴风雨般反叛、改变、价值重估和更新的叙事史。对于我们这些生活在这段历史后半段的人来说，很难察觉这个故事现在已经结束了——就是说，现代主义已经是过去的事了。尽管少数鼓吹者还存在，还很活跃，但是艺术追求的主流已经变了，只是给批评家和历史学家留下了叙述与清点这段历史的任务。

但是至今还没有人提供这样一个关于现代主义的综合性论叙。原因显然在于无人有能力对建筑师、舞蹈设计者、作曲家、电影制作者、小说家、画家和诗人的作品进行综合把握和评论。唯一的选择是省略现代主义观念，聚焦个别作品，这些作品的意义在于它们引起了所有门类的艺术和艺术家的改变。

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)