Acclaimed cultural historian Peter Gay traces and explores the rise of artistic Modernism, the cultural movement that heralded and shaped the modern world, dominating western high culture for over a century. In his new book, Professor Gay s most ambitious undertaking since his magisterial cultural history of late nineteenth-century Europe, The Bourgeois Experience, he explores how Modernism swept through the arts from its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century, over-turning traditional and classical forms and creating the modern world as we know it. Taking Baudelaire as his starting-point, Gay shows how the French poet s sexually explicit and often perverse poems scandalized Paris in the 1840s and 1850s. Proceeding from Baudelaire s enormous influence, both as poet and art-critic, Gay examines the modernist achievements in literature, poetry, music, architecture and other art-forms, his cast running through Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf to Andy Warhol. And in a final chapter devoted to Pop Art, Gay discusses how a new generation of artists ingeniously brought together high and low art, thus sounding the death knell of a movement that had dominated Western culture for over 120