Modern Art and the Life of a Culture

Join Biola art professor Jonathan Anderson in the Morris Reading Room of the Biola Library as he discusses his new book Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism, coauthored with William Dyrness (IVP Academic). Light refreshments will be served. Books will be available for purchase and signing.

About the Book:

The dominant narratives of modern art history tell of a rift between art and religion, by which the two became adversaries or simply mutually unintelligible to each other. In this new book, Jonathan Anderson (an art critic) and William Dyrness (a theologian) offer a rereading of the history of modern art by paying closer attention to the religious contexts and the theological concerns that shaped its development—contexts and concerns that have been largely neglected by both scholars and laypeople alike. This rereading produces revised accounts of several of the most important modernist artists—one that sees theology to be of vital concern to interpreting the works of Vincent van Gogh, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Natalia Goncharova, John Cage, Andy Warhol, and many others—while also challenging the tendency among Christians to follow the declinist narrative of Hans Rookmaaker’s influential book, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (1970). In this new book, the first in IVP Academic's new Studies in Theology and the Arts series, Anderson and Dyrness emphasize the persistence of (religious) life in modern art and argue that the history is much more theologically interesting than it has yet been given credit for.