Description:
In 1970, Hans Rookmaaker published Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, a groundbreaking work that considered the role of the Christian artist in society. This volume responds to his work by bringing together a practicing artist and a theologian who argue that modernist art is underwritten by deeply religious concerns.
Brief description:
William A. Dyrness (DTheol, University of Strasbourg; Doctorandus, Free University) is professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary.
Review Quotes:
"As insightful as Hans Rookmaaker's provocative book Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (1970) was in tracing with broad strokes his concern with the cultural demise of Christian values in the post-Enlightenment West, Anderson and Dyrness make probing and illuminating use of the forty-five years of subsequent research to show that the sacred and secular have been far more complexly interwoven than Rookmaaker recognized. The authors, using the same end date, open up a broad spectrum of well-researched and illuminating contextual material that serves as a needed corrective to Rookmaaker's generalized schema and models a multidisciplinary, art-historical and theological approach that is deliberately generous, open and sympathetic rather than confrontational."
E. John Walford, professor emeritus of art history, Wheaton College