Chapter One
The Monster Sublime
For the creator himself to be the child new-born he must also be willing to
be the mother and endure the mother's pain.
— FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, 1895
Man owes it to his incongruously developed reason that he is grotesque and
ugly. He has broken away from nature. He thinks that he dominates nature. He
thinks he is the measure of all things. Engendering in opposition to the laws of
nature, man creates monstrosities.
— HANS ARP, 1948
In the twentieth century, the avant-garde declared a clean break with history,
but their hostility to the female subject and the beauty she symbolized had deep
roots in the past. It arose from the Enlightenment notion of the sublime and
from a disgust toward women and the bourgeoisie that had been building
throughout the nineteenth century among increasingly disaffected artists and
writers. During the very period, in fact, when the female subject was the
predominant symbol of beauty in all the arts, an ideology was taking shape that
would displace her entirely, and that ideology became the basis of the
twentieth-century ... read full excerpt from: Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art ebook
