Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting

J. M. Bernstein

Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Stanford University Press
Country
United States
Published
12 January 2006
Pages
416
ISBN
9780804748957

Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting

J. M. Bernstein

The aim of this book is to provide an account of modernist painting that follows on from the aesthetic theory of Theodor W.Adorno. It offers a materialist account of modernism with detailed discussions of modern aesthetics from Lessing, Kant, Schiller, and Schlegel to Adorno and Stanley Cavell. It discusses in detail competing accounts of modernism: Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, Yves-Alain Bois, Theirry de Duve, and Arthur Danto; and it discusses several painters and artists in detail: Pieter de Hooch, Jackson Pollack, Robert Ryman, Cindy Sherman, and Chaim Soutine. Its central thesis is that modernist painting exemplifies a form of rationality that is an alternative to the instrumental rationality of enlightened modernity. Modernist paintings exemplify how nature and the sociality of meaning can be reconciled.

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