Appleton Book Club: "In Montmartre"

The Appleton Museum of Art’s virtual book club meets on Zoom to discuss works of nonfiction that have been hand selected by Appleton staff. This meeting will discuss “In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art” by Sue Roe.
Led by Museum Educator Hollis Mutch, the book club is open to everyone. Buy or borrow the book and read at your own pace. Register for the Appleton Book Club meeting here on Eventbrite. Login details for the Zoom session will be sent in your confirmation email.
About this book: When the young Pablo Picasso first arrived in Paris in 1900, the most progressive young artists all lived and worked in the seedy hillside quarter of Montmartre, in the shade of the old windmills. Over the next decade, among the studios, salons, cafés, dance halls, and galleries of Montmartre, the young Spaniard joined the likes of Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Georges Braque, Amedeo Modigliani, Constantin Brancusi, Gertrude Stein, and many more in revolutionizing artistic expression.
Blending exceptional scholarship with graceful prose, Sue Roe paints a remarkable group portrait of the men and women who profoundly changed the arts of painting, sculpture, dance, music, literature, and fashion. She describes the origins of such movements as Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism, and reconstructs the stories behind immortal paintings by Picasso and Matisse. She shows how daily life in Montmartre—which brought artists together with acrobats and dancers, prostitutes and clowns—provided an essential cauldron for artistic experimentation and for the colorful relationships, friendships, loyalties, and feuds that gave rise to some of the most pathbreaking and lasting works of the twentieth century.
In Montmartre is a thrilling account of an extraordinary group of artists on the cusp of fame and immortality that brings vividly to life one of the key moments in the history of modern art.