Has American culture really moved past philistinism in the arts?

 That's the subthesis of "Picasso's War," reviewed below.

Picasso's War: How Modern Art Came to America by Hugh Eakin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Simply fascinating book. The title is a pun, covering both the "war" to get Picasso accepted by philistine Americans, even in NYC, and even on the board of MOMA to put up a Picasso-focused exhibition and buy his paintings, and the Spanish Civil War, which led Picasso to Guernica, which broke the ice.

The first half of the book is also a mini-bio of John Quinn, a man of whom I'd never heard before, and arguably the United States' top pre-1920 acquirer of Picasso, along with many other A-rank modern artists such as Matisse. But, I had heard of the Armory show, of which he was an organizer

There was no MOMA at this time. Quinn pushed for one, using the analogy in Paris of the Luxembourg to the Louvre as a push. Unfortunately, he died of colon cancer in his 50s, in the early 1920s. From there, the book picks up with the eventual creation of MOMA.

Among the ironies is that, 20 years before it was built, Americans were calling Picasso et al, but especially him, "degenerate art," as in exactly the phrase the Nazis used. (Stalin didn't use such a phrase in calling for "Soviet realism," but the idea was there, too. Pre-authoritarianism, Kaiserine and Weimar Germany, and Tsarist Russia, were actually the top two countries in the world, overall, to appreciate modern art pre-WWI, even more than France.)

That's plenty to whet the appetites of any general modern culture lover let alone art history person.

And, illustrated with many plates.

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In reality, color me skeptical, and I'll speak of classical music as well as the main plastic arts. 

I've lived within 125 miles or so of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex 3/4 of the past 25 years and within 90 miles or so 2/3 of that time. 

I'm a regular visitor to the Kimbell, Amon Carter and Dallas Museum of Art. I went once or twice to the McKinney Avenue Modern in Dallas. I've peeked through the glass windows at the Fort Worth Modern and the Nasher Sculpture Center.

On music, I am a former Dallas Symphony Orchestra season-ticket holder. I have been to various chamber performances on both sides of the Metromess.

In the art world, there may be truly exciting things deeper inside the glass windows at the Nasher and Fort Worth Modern. The DMA has interesting mobiles-like art at times, as well as multimedia stuff.

But, while the Kimbell has shown stuff like Rauschenbergs out of its collection, and had the great late-life Monet a few years ago, I've never seen something like a touring Cubism exhibit. The DMA did have a small exhibit of Dali's illustrations of a large-scale "Alice in Wonderland" beyond its house collection in Surrealism several years ago, but that was it. Among living or recently-deceased artists? I've never seen anything close to Serrano's "Piss Christ."

The DSO? Don't get me started. It's NEVER played a serialist work, whether by the New Vienna Trio, a later semi-serialist like Ernst Krenek, or late-life serialist Stravinsky. It's never played any of the more avant-garde modernist composers, not even biggies like Penderecki or Schnittke.

I got classical radio station WRR to play one of Alf's shorter pieces on its then-programmed Sunday listener requests time 15-plus years ago. And, have heard him played "voluntarily" once since then. Never heard, say, Penderecki's "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima" played on Aug. 6.

So, no, contra Eakin's implication, it's still wall-to-wall Philistines in at least this portion of the heartland.