Off-Modern Catholic Aesthetics

Why did Catholics embrace modernist aesthetics? Rather than antagonism, or via any transparent embrace, this book argues that the encounter between modernist aesthetics and Catholicism provides a fruitful historiographic vantage point for examining the intellectual hinterland of the modernist imaginary.

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Why did Catholic actors embrace modernist aesthetics? And conversely, why did modernist architects and artists embrace pre-modern ideas to look to the future? Off-Modern Catholicism explores the surprising ways in which Catholic intellectuals, faced with exile during World War II, reconfigured their thought to promote modernist buildings and paintings in France and America. By drawing on the life and work of Marie-Alain Couturier, Marcel Breuer, Dominique de Menil, and Jean Labatut, you will be invited to explore a “detour into the unexplored potentials of the modern project” via an encounter between two cultural forces often considered antithetical to each other.