An extraordinary fraternity of poets, painters and composers in Paris, between 1885 and 1945, built our modern notion of 'great art' on the principle that we must always think about the value of a work of art, not within the logic of its own medium, but as if it transposed the value of another medium. Peter Dayan chronicles the rise of this principle, describes its eclipse from the 1960s and shows how, in the 21st century, it is fighting back.

Introduction; Chapter 1 Whistler's Poetry; Chapter 2 Satie's Art; Chapter 3 Apollinaire's Art; Chapter 4 Braque's Music; Chapter 5 Ponge's Music; Chapter 6 Stravinsky's Poetry; Chapter 101 Conclusion;

Peter Dayan is Professor of Word and Music Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK. His influential book Music Writing Literature, from Sand via Debussy to Derrida (Ashgate, 2006) showed how, since the time of the Romantics, poetry has been creating a space which music needs, and vice versa. All his more recent work, on 20th-century writers, painters and composers from Julio Cortazar to Igor Stravinsky, has revolved around the question of why art in any given medium so compulsively defines itself as if it were in a different medium - and how this intermedial round actually provides a surprisingly resilient definition of art itself.