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b'Today we think of New York as the center of the twentieth century art world, but it took three determined men, two world wars, and one singular artist to secure the city\\u2019s cultural prominence. Pablo Picasso was the most influential and perplexing artist of his age, and the turning points of his career and salient facets of his private life have intrigued the world for decades. However, the tremendous feat of winning support for his art in the U.S. has long been overlooked.

To discuss this largely forgotten story is Hugh Eakin, author of Picasso\\u2019s War How Modern Art Came to America. He details the story of how a single exhibition, years in the making, finally brought the 20th century\\u2019s most notorious artist U.S. acclaim, irrevocably changed American culture, and in doing so saved dozens of the twentieth century\\u2019s most enduring artworks from the Nazis.

A small group of eclectic figures made this happen: the renegade Irish-American lawyer John Quinn and the mountain-girl-turned-foreign correspondent, Jeanne Foster; the art dealer and Paris kingmaker, Paul Rosenberg; the wunderkind museum founder Alfred Barr and his sharp-witted, Irish-Italian wife, Margaret Scolari. Working sometimes together and often at odds, they were determined to bring the radical art revolutions of Europe to the States, no matter what stood in their way. In the end, they would have to overcome political revolutions, bankruptcies, divorces, art seizures\\u2014and years of American cultural hostility before they could achieve their goal. Collectively, it would take the destruction of New York\\u2019s first great modern art collection and finally, the Nazis\\u2019 war on modernism to bring this twenty-year quest to its surprising conclusion.'