A Broken Beauty - Hardcover

Aus dem Klappentext

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 bookâ 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 in a look at 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 bookâ 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 full-color reproductions of the art under discussion.

ESSAYISTS:

Lisa J. DeBoer
Gordon Fuglie
Theodore L. Prescott
Timothy Verdon

FEATURED ARTISTS:

Gabrielle Bakker
Stephen De Staebler
Gaela Erwin
Erica Grimm-Vance
Richard C. Harden
Bruce Herman
Edward Knippers
Timothy Grubbs Lowly
Mary McCleary
John Nava
David J. Robinson
Joel C. Sheesley
Melissa Weinman
Patty Wickman
Jerome Witkin