Overview
After decades of neglect by the artistic and critical community, beauty has recently reemerged as a hot topic. The nature of beauty remains as rich and problematic as ever: we long for completeness, health and perfection, yet more often than not we encounter fragmentation, weakness, and at best a tragicomic dignity."A Broken Beauty" examines recent ideas about beauty and the human image in light of the Western Classical and Christian traditions of the human figure. The book’s five essays trace the historical fusion of Classical and Christian ideas about beauty, as well as their rejection by much modern art, provocatively suggesting that the difficulties encountered by the beautiful in modernity may be related to a loss of faith. This powerful volume culminates with an eye to fifteen postmodern North American artists whose haunting pieces unite brokenness and beauty in a way that is uncommon within contemporary art. These artists, like the book’s essayists, find significance in beauty that is cultivated amidst the perennial human struggle for goodness, meaning, and dignity. "A Broken Beauty" is lavishly illustrated throughout with fullcolor reproductions of the art under discussion.Synopsis
After decades of neglect by the artistic and critical community, beauty has recently reemerged as a hot topic. The nature of beauty remains as rich and problematic as ever: we long for completeness, health and perfection, yet more often than not we encounter fragmentation, weakness, and at best a tragicomic dignity."A Broken Beauty" examines recent ideas about beauty and the human image in light of the Western Classical and Christian traditions of the human figure. The book s five essays trace the historical fusion of Classical and Christian ideas about beauty, as well as their rejection by much modern art, provocatively suggesting that the difficulties encountered by the beautiful in modernity may be related to a loss of faith. This powerful volume culminates with an eye to fifteen postmodern North American artists whose haunting pieces unite brokenness and beauty in a way that is uncommon within contemporary art. These artists, like the book s essayists, find significance in beauty that is cultivated amidst the perennial human struggle for goodness, meaning, and dignity. "A Broken Beauty" is lavishly illustrated throughout with fullcolor reproductions of the art under discussion.