Early Modernism

"This is partly a sentimental choice because Christopher Butler was my first tutor at university. I knew that I loved Virginia Woolf but I didn’t really know why. Nor did I have any clue about the artistic context from which she emerged. It was this book that showed me how it was possible to talk about art in a way which was quite alien to me then. We all grow up talking about novels in terms of what happens in them – plot and characters – but Early Modernism showed me how you talk about the form of a novel, the texture of a piece of music, or why it is that Matisse paints a room without perspective and how if you half close your eyes that flat canvas becomes a dance of forms. This book is very good for people looking for a language to describe that, and it’s also very liberating in its determination to talk in one breath about music, art and literature. Absolutely. Interdisciplinary studies are all the rage in academia at the moment but it wasn’t always that way. This is a really pioneering book in terms of showing how you can compare what goes on in a piece of music with what goes on on a canvas – which is not immediately obvious. You need to be given a little bit of help to see how things connect in that way. And there’s a wonderful geographical scope to it as well. My own work has been very British but Early Modernism swings off across Russia, Spain, Italy and France. It shows how very wide-reaching were those modernist changes, and how a conversation about art can go on across a thousand miles."