The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought (Hardback)

In the early 1870s mathematicians like Cantor and Dedekind discovered the set and divided the mathematical continuum; in 1886, Georges Seurat debuted his visionary masterpiece, "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte"; by the end of 1900, Hugo De Vries had discovered the gene, Max Planck had laid claim to the quantum, and Sigmund Freud had laid bare the unconscious workings of dreams. Modernism was dawning. William Everdell constructs in this volume a history of nascent modernism - narrating portraits of genius, profiling intellectual breakthroughs, and evoking the fin-de-siecle atmosphere of Paris, Vienna, St Louis and St Petersburg. He follows Picasso to Cabaret des Assassins, discourses with Ernst Mach on the contingency of scientific law, and takes in the riotous premiere of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring".