In Hugh Eakin’s Picasso’s War, the artist featured in the title is—somewhat unexpectedly—a relatively minor character. This is clear from the book’s prologue. The dramatic and moody opening takes us to a 1924 dinner party in the New York home of John Quinn, a Wall Street lawyer and pioneering patron of modern art and literature. After the coffee is served, Quinn leads his friends and fellow modern art enthusiasts to see his latest acquisition. They were, Eakin writes, “seized by the giant rectangle. Confronting them was a nocturnal encounter as alluring as it was strange.” Given the book’s title, a reader may expect the giant rectangle to be a canvas by Pablo Picasso—it is not.

It is almost unthinkable that the now universally acknowledged masterpieces of modern art, such as Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” or Henri Matisse’s “The Red Studio,” were scorned by American museums and that wealthy patrons refused to buy even a single canvas by either painter. Though it is a truism that innovative art often finds difficulty at first in being accepted, you would think that at a time when the masters of modern painting were already lionized in Europe, Americans would not be so slow in recognizing their significance. Yet such was the case. Even after the 1913 Armory Show, which is usually credited with introducing modern art to this country, it took another several decades before it was possible to mount a full-scale Picasso exhibit, and years to get the Museum of Modern Art off the ground, much less turn it into the formidable institution it is today. “For nearly 30 years, the effort to bring modern art to the United States was continually impeded by war, economic crisis and a deeply skeptical public,” Hugh Eakin writes. “It was a project that might well have foundered, and almost did, but for the fanatical determination of a tiny group of people,” whose story he sets out to tell in this fascinating, immensely readable narrative.

Back when all of life was offline, back when to buy a record you had to go to a record store, back when there were record stores, the infrastructure required for cultural goods to get from creation to consumption had many more moving parts. These parts are the principals of Eakin’s story. His focus isn’t on the big-name modern artists, like Picasso and Matisse, who are offstage for much of the book. It’s on figures most people have never heard of: dealers, gallery owners, collectors, curators, and critics—the components of what sociologists call the art world.