Does great art express something purely spiritual? No way: A new book shows how much greed, digestion and disease flow into their creators.
“Wherever the yellow spot is and where the finger points, that’s where it hurts.” With a piercing and gloomy gaze, 40-year-old Albrecht Dürer looks at the viewer from his drawing. The finger points to the left side, with the yellow circle at the level of the spleen. The recipient is a doctor who stays away. Yet the male nude with carefully reproduced beard and hair is a masterful sheet. The artist is sure of himself in two senses: aware of his creative power and of his suffering body. He also brings pain as a “sign of his relationship with the world”, as Andreas Beyer writes.
In his richly illustrated book “Künstler, Leib und Eigensinn”, the German art historian goes in search of something rare: the traces of the interweaving between works of art and the bodies of their creators. He says: Although the fine arts speak directly to our senses, although we call an artist’s entire oeuvre a “corpus”, “the history of aesthetics is characterized by hostility to the body.”
