The Restoration of Venus: the Nude, Beauty and Modernist Misogyny

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This paper takes up Wendy Steiner’s argument in the Exile of Venus that the history of twentieth century art is one of resistance to the female subject as symbol of beauty. Steiner claimed that, following Kant’s theory of the sublime, the identification of feminine beauty with impurity was taken to extremes by avant-garde modernists who aimed to destroy beauty. In contrast to Steiner, I argue that the quest for purity in modernism took art in two different directions, one toward an ideal of purity in increasing abstraction and minimalism, the other toward the deliberate portrayal of ugliness based on an assumption that reality was, after all, not beautiful, truthfulness demanding this be reflected honestly in art. Needless to say, the female subject fared ill in either mode. The refinement of beauty in abstraction eliminated the female form (and all forms) altogether. More pointedly, the rejection of beauty in self-consciously ugly art implied and encouraged a misogynistic denigration

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