Modern Times, Modern Places: How Life and Art Were Transformed in a Century of Revolution, Innovation, and Radical Change - Hardcover

A celebrated critic explores the dramatic, rapidly changing history of the twentieth century, tracing the impact of science and technology on human life as revealed through the arts and examining the places and people that have represented successive frontiers of change, experimentation, and innovation. 15,000 first printing.

anged faster during the twentieth century than ever before. Science and technology set the pace, promoting men to the air like gods. There were revolutions on the streets, but also in the head: uprisings of the Marxist proletariat and of the Freudian id. The new physics of Einstein and his colleagues changed our understanding of nature by showing that matter is made up of empty space, and modern architects constructed buildings to match those new structural principles. Painters such as Picasso and Dali denied they were distorting the human form: they were simply acknowledging the ways in which modern men and women were different, both physiologically and psychologically.

Little wonder that, even before our unprecedented century has concluded, its culture has been studied, dissected, analyzed, questioned, rejected, and embraced. We are exhilarated by our own story. Yet the twentieth century's proud rejection of the Western humanist past and its newly specialized intellectual style has lef