Hybris - Jean Clair - Johan & Levi - Libro Johan & Levi Editore
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Hybris

La fabbrica del mostro nell'arte moderna. Omuncoli, giganti e acefali

Once merely an exception and object of curiosity, the monstrous has become a common experience, overrunning everything with its troubled, deviant forms that defy the harmony of the classic canon. Indeed, in a disconcerting shift in perspective, disproportion, or hybris, has become the rule.

The abyss opened in 1895, when the many revolutionary discoveries and theories – cinema, psychoanalysis, x-rays, Penfield’s neurological research and the first studies of hysteria – prevented artists from continuing to represent the body as they had always done.

Jean Clair dissects the modern aesthetic with its proliferation of monstrous, exaggerated forms, beginning at the beginning with Goya, continuing with the malaise expressed in Redon’s symbolist paintings and arriving at the crossbreeds of the twentieth century in works by Miró, Ernst, Duchamp, Grosz, Picasso, Giacometti, and Balthus. Clair’s analysis focuses on three exemplary figures that weave themselves through the fabric of the centuries, eventually serving as tormented paradigms: the deformed, disjointed homunculus, the Behemoth, which, following on Swift and Voltaire, came to incarnate the deadly madness of the revolution that devours its own children, and the Acéphale celebrated by Bataille, the headless monster whose mutilated body is the unnerving child of the guillotine.

Bringing to bear the work of thirty years, Clair offers an intriguing view of the contemporary. Continuing his exploration of themes from exhibitions such as ‘Identità e alterità’ and ‘Crime et châtiment’, the author traces a path that winds through centuries of terrifying, exaggerated creatures who force themselves into consciousness with the finality of facts, becoming instruments to gauge the degree of disorientation in our hybris-saturated present. Now a new monstrous creature has appeared in an unexpected light as a colossal, decapitated, senseless container of an immense, formless, frenetic mass: the global museum.

Written by
Translation of
Topics Critics
Panoramas
Collection Saggi d'arte
Publisher Johan & Levi
Size cm 15.5 x 23
Pages 166 pages
Illustrations 63 images b/w
Published on 05/2015
ISBN 9788860101525
 

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Indice testuale

1. Prologue
Al di là del bello e del brutto


2. L’ingresso dei mostri
1895: un’anatomia impossibile


3. Nascita dell’omuncolo
“La bellezza sarà convulsa”


4. Il ritorno dei titani
Figure del gigante, dall’Illuminismo ai nostri tempi


5. La ghigliottina e il clavicembalo


6. Nascita dell’acefalo


7. Il museo e la morte

Hybris

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