Enduring Creation: Art, Pain and Fortitude - Softcover

"'Nigel Spivey's Enduring Creation is an exhilarating roller-coaster read down through the troughs of hurt and up to the summits of artistic creativity: deeply thought, richly learned, but written in a voice that's by turns sharp, funny and seriously provoking. It's hard to imagine anything better on art's birth-pangs amidst pain and suffering. Nietzsche would have loved it, but don't worry, so will you' - Simon Schama; 'The finest attempt yet by an art historian to make sense out of what seems to destroy sense, the experience of pain' - Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Art Newspaper; 'The most illuminating art book of the year... with clarity, perspicacity and a leavening of anecdotes, Spivey explores the profound, often tender and at times almost unbearable, interrelationship between art and pain, from the classical Laocoon to Picasso's studies for Guernica' - Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times; 'An interesting book on an important, perplexing theme' - The Rt. Rev Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford, The Times Higher Education Supplement; 'A genuinely scholarly work, but also a very personal one; a heart-piece that makes of its difficult subject matter something urgent and relevant and brave' - The Guardian; 'This is that rare thing, a book on art that can be read' - Brian Sewell, The Evening Standard"

Why has such an apparently unpleasant subject such as pain preoccupied artists of every age? Nigel Spivey explores this question in a perceptive and eloquent exposition that ranges from the Christian martyrs to Munch's seminal The Scream and the horrors of the Holocaust. Enduring Creation triggers and explores in depth a host of complicated questions surrounding the motivations of artists and the psychology of our response. Can pain be beautiful? Do we always pity suffering? Is there a link between sainthood and sado-masochism? The result is a brilliantly innovative work of cultural history, and one of those rare books that makes the past come alive by creating a persistent sense that it is of pressing relevance today.