This paper looks at the treatment of
art in Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse", D.H. Lawrence's "Women in Love" and James
Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" by examining the way in which Gudrun, Stephen Dedalus, Lily Briscoe and other characters in the novels view
Art. It discusses whether art is truly the central priority of the modernist era by looking at it as a means of making life eternal and explores how art is used to "capture the moment" forever and how this is one of the main themes of modernism.