ePub Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-century Art by Wendy Steiner in Arts-Photography

Description

Whereas previous eras had celebrated beauty as the central aim of art; the modernist avant-garde were deeply suspicious of beauty and its perennial symbols; woman and ornament; preferring instead the thrill and alienation of the sublime. They rejected harmony; empathy; and femininity in a denial still reverberating through art and social relations today. Exploring this casting of Venus; with all her charms; into exile; Wendy Steiners brilliant; ambitious; and provocative analysis explores the twentieth centurys troubled relationship with beauty. Tracing this strange and damaging history; starting from Kants aesthetics and Mary Shelleys horrified response in Frankenstein; Steiner untangles the complex attitudes of modernists toward both beauty and the female subject in art. She argues that the avant-garde set out to replace the impurity of woman and ornament with form -- the new arch-symbol of artistic beauty. However; in the process of controlling desire and pleasure in this way; artists admitted the exotic fetish objects of "primitive" cultures -- someone elses power and allure that surely would not overmaster the sophisticated modernist. A century of pornography; shock; and alienation followed; and this rejection of feminine and bourgeois values -- domesticity; intimacy; charm -- kept the female subject an impossible and remote symbol. Ironically; as Steiner reveals; the feminist hostility to the "beauty myth" had a parallel result; leaving Western society alienated from desire and pleasure on all sides. In the course of this elegantly constructed and accessibly written argument; Steiner explores the cultural history of the century just ended; from Dada to Futurism; T. S. Eliots Wasteland and Picassos Les Demoiselles dAvignon to Pumping Iron II: The Women and Deep Throat; Jean-Michel Basquiat and Outsider Art; Naomi Wolf and Cindy Sherman; Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo; ranging across art and architecture; poetry and the novel; feminist writing and pornography. Only in recent years; Steiner demonstrates; has our culture begun to see a way out of this damaging impasse; revising the reputations of neglected artists such as Pierre Bonnard; and celebrating pleasure and charm in the arts of the present. By disentangling beauty from a misogynistic view of femininity -- as passive; narcissistic; sentimental; inefficacious -- Western culture now seems ready to return to the female subject and ornament in art; and to accept male beauty as a possibility to explore and celebrate as well. Steiner finds hints of these developments in the work of figures as varied as the painter Marlene Dumas; the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald; and the choreographer Mark Morris as she leads us to a rediscovery and a reclamation of beauty in the Western world. From one of our most thoughtful and ambitious cultural critics; this important and thought-provoking work not only provides us with a searching analysis of where we have been in the last century but reveals the promise of where we might be going in the coming one.