Description
Book SynopsisArt, Truth, and Time is a book which endeavours to show that artistic creation depends as much upon the body, as it does the soul, and the soul’s intelligent use of the body’s way of understanding. When there occurs a complete disjunction between the two, as occurs in much of contemporary art, art is stripped of its inherent beauty, its wholeness. In this book the author considers the nature of art from its earliest manifestations to the present day, endeavouring to show that its truth transcends time and place through the unity of soul and body and man’s awareness of this unity, not a barren unity, but a unity which is profoundly creative.
Trade Review'This book is lighting from a clear sky.
For one who has spent many years contemplating the vastaterra which is the landscape of contemporary art, the words of the writer – clear, lucid, limpid as a summer stream – offer hope and consolation.
Here is a vision of art which is supremely sane, lit with the light of heaven which can be touched with our fingers, called by St Thomas Aquinas organa organorum, the tool of tools, then held close in the dizzy course of time so that truth might be known in our world.
This book should be read by all those who care about the fate of art in our times.' -- CHARLES STEPHENS
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements 9 Foreword 11 Preface 13 PART ONE – Art and Truth The Experience of Truth 16 Art, Truth and Time 18 PART TWO – Art and Humankind Body and Soul: Some Reflections on Art and Religion 24 The Sense of Touch Versus Conceptual Art 28 Why Artists Need Hands and the Process of Individuation 35 PART THREE – Criticism Spontaneity and Objectivity 41 Relativism: Art Without Object 46 Boredom and ‘The Art of Change’ 51 Technology and Technique Versus Art 56 The Importance of the Subjective: the True Meaning of Originality 63 PART FOUR – Art and Death Two Contrasting Images of Death: or Horizontal and Vertical Images of Death 70 Art and Death: the Endless Search, the Enduring Present 77 PART FIVE – Architecture To Innovate with Tradition: the Aesthetic Spirituality of Dom Paul Bellot, Architect and Monk 88 Visual Silence in Monastic Architecture: Cistercian Architecture of the 12th and 13th Centuries 95 APPENDIX 101
