In conversation with “Picasso’s War” author, Hugh Eakin

Join us for a conversation with American author Hugh Eakin on the unlikely story behind the arrival of modern art in the United States. Drawing on his acclaimed book Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America, Eakin tells how a rebellious Irish-American lawyer named John Quinn, one of the earliest champions of Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi, Cézanne, Henri Rousseau, Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound, and a whole generation of European modernists, set out to assemble the greatest collection of avant-garde art in the world, at a time when most Americans dismissed it as incomprehensible and absurd.

After Quinn’s death, his vision was taken up by Alfred H. Barr Jr., founding director of the Museum of Modern Art at just twenty-seven years old. Together with Paul Rosenberg, Picasso’s persecuted Paris dealer, Barr mounted the historic 1939 exhibition Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, which rescued masterpieces from the hands of the Nazis and shifted the center of the art world from Paris to New York.

Hugh Eakin is Editor at Large at Foreign Affairs Magazine and a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. A former editor at The New York Review of Books, his writing on museums, art, and culture has also appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times.

Additional information

Limited places are available and will be assigned by registration only.