Thanks to popular television shows like HBO’s Boardwalk Empire and Ken Burns’ new PBS documentary series Prohibition, we’re well informed about what went on socially and politically in the 1920s, from the rise of the Mafia to the new freedoms women enjoyed as voters and flappers. But what about visual art? What did painters, sculptors and photographers produce during the ten years between the Great War and the Great Depression?
     Youth and Beauty (Skira Rizzoli), a beautiful coffee-table book accompanying an exhibition opening at the Brooklyn Museum in October, gives plentiful answers to that question. Of course, we know what happened artistically in postwar Europe: it was the Golden Age of Modernism, when artists like Picasso, Mondrian and Kandinsky were producing some of their best work. Newly mature, Modernism bore its own wild children–Dada, Surrealism and Futurism among them.