Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art [Anglais] [Broché]

With The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism, University of Pennsylvania English professor Steiner weighed in on the NEA funding controversies and Rushdie fatwa, finding our age literal-minded about how artistic images function in society. Scandal was named a New York Times Best Book for 1996. In this follow-up, Steiner posits that, unlike in previous eras, female beauty is no longer "the central aim of art." Whizzing through literature, visual arts, architecture, etc., Steiner muses on this theme in eight sections with titles like "The Infamous Promiscuity of Things and of Women" and "The Bride of Frankenstein: At Home with the Outsider." (She skirts topics like film and dance since beautiful women are still at the center of things there.) One obvious problem with such an all-embracing study is any author's human limits of expertise, but Steiner's judgments throughout seem to have been made in haste and ignorance. She lumps together painters (Gustave Moreau, Alphonse Mucha, Pierre Bonnard, Norman Rockwell) and writers (Penelope Fitzgerald, Andrei Makine, Philip Roth ) who have little in common apart from having once been thought "too pretty" and now acceptable, or else those who are "pointing us back toward beauty." Steiner thinks art should create a "win-win situation," where through "communication" and "mutuality" one begins to understand the "value" of "feminine" "beauty," but her engagement with the juggernaut of these terms, and of gender and representation in general, can be murky and baffling. ("[A] true prostitute's effects are indifferent to class, like the diseases she spreads," Steiner writes, unreflectively.) For Steiner, the art of the 20th century, "an art of garbage, babble, obscenity," is emblematized by Mapplethorpe's "classicistic renderings of gay sadomasochism." In trying to deal with all the arts, Steiner is illuminating on none of them.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Steiner (humanities, Univ. of Pennsylvania) examined the role of beauty in art in The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in the Age of Fundamentalism. Here she shows how traditional forms of beauty disappeared from art in the 20th century, when artists rejected this ideal as placing undue importance on ornament while often objectifying the female body. She shows how representations of beauty disappeared from art, citing examples from literature, popular culture, visual arts, and even pornography in this heavily illustrated book. These artists, she argues, provided considerable food for thought but left a hunger for the pleasure of visual beauty. In the early days of the 21st century, Steiner sees a resurgence of female beauty in art but with the continuing struggle to see women as fully human. By examining what happened to art and popular culture when beauty became suspect, Steiner hopes to lead us to a better understanding of beauty as a kind of communication in human culture. Steiner is both a respected scholar and a talented and accessible writer, and her book is strongly recommended for all academic art and feminist studies collections. Drew Harrington, Pacific Univ., Forest Grove, OR
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Steiner, author of The Scandal of Pleasure (1995), looks into why modern artists rejected the voluptuous female form, an aesthetic revolt that she sees as an all-out rejection of beauty. With references to the Kantian sublime and Mary Shelley's humanistic protest against the impersonalization of beauty in Frankenstein, Manet's Olympia, and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, she interprets the abstraction of modernist art and its fascination with purity of form as a refutation of women, ornament, decoration, and all classic images of beauty. The avant-garde believed that beauty had to be stripped from art to free art from the bourgeois values embedded in romanticism, a tradition that seemed hopelessly inappropriate for the horrific twentieth century. Scholarly but eminently readable, Steiner moves on to assess contemporary revivals of traditional beauty in art, which follow society's cycles of worship and vilification of women, both in the flesh and as representative of idealized beauty. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

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 Steiner's brilliant, ambitious, and provocative analysis explores the twentieth century's troubled relationship with beauty.

Tracing this strange and damaging history, starting from Kant's aesthetics and Mary Shelley's 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 else's 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. Eliot's Wasteland and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon 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. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Wendy Steiner is the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and Director of the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of The Scandal of Pleasure and has written for the Independent, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, The Guardian, and The New York Times. She lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.