The Vertigo Years

[rich]

a new book just released this week in the US called The Vertigo Years.
 seems like good fodder for AtD

As Queen Victoria passes, Vienna-based historian Blom (To Have and to
Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting, 2003, etc.)
finds a Modern World breaking through the crust.In this masterful
presentation, the time in question is so richly laced with scientific
bedazzlement, social ferment and cultural churning that a sense of
giddying misadventure begins to feel strangely familiar. The roots of
tensions that alternately bind and threaten to fracture today's Europe
are all there, easily visible to us in hindsight but not to most of
those who lived through it and experienced as a result, the author
posits, mass vertigo. In analytical chronicles of this kind, the
little delights that leap out serendipitously are a large part of the
reward. The French, supposed masters of the art of love who were
unable to reproduce sufficiently to maintain the population, still
held sway as cultural arbiters, anointed in 1870 by a historian who
noted: "Perhaps nothing is properly understood in Europe until the
French have explained it." Yet these explicating authorities initially
greeted groundbreaking painters van Gogh and Gauguin as insane and
animalistic. The Viennese specialized in elegant duplicity, with their
high airs and public manners masking a seamy nightlife whose amateur
prostitutes almost outhustled the pros. Best tidbit: Felix Salten, the
Austrian writer who invented precious little Bambi, also produced
outrageously pornographic works. Sigmund Freud gave up researching the
function of bone marrow in lower fishes just in time to define the
malaise of the age - and treat those who could afford him. Parisians
shrugged then cowered in fear as growing masses of violent street
gangs mocked law and order. Real men hated the proto-feminists, and
raving anti-Semites saw Jews behind every ill. From Thomas Eakins's
stroboscopic photos to Duchamp's descending nude, everything was
coming apart.Offers rewarding insights into a period often obscured
from view by the decades of conflict that followed. (Kirkus Reviews)

Rich