Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting - Paperback

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 Kant to Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, and Adorno. It discusses in detail competing accounts of modernism: Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, Yve-Alain Bois, and Thierry de Duve; and it discusses several painters and artists in detail: Pieter de Hooch, Jackson Pollock, 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.

• | Author: J. M. Bernstein
• | Publisher: Stanford University Press
• | Publication Date: Jan 12, 2006
• | Number of Pages: 416 pages
• | Binding: Paperback or Softback
• | ISBN-10: 0804748950
• | ISBN-13: 9780804748957