Trends: Beyond Nightmare

Beauty has never been the exclusive subject of artists, or even their aim. As poets and painters have discovered over the centuries, hell is far more dramatic than heaven. Most painters look with an equal eye on both, as the fancy moves them. But some few, and among them some of the great, have had an ob session for the ugly, and seemed intent on making it uglier. Like T. S. Eliot's Webster, they always saw the skull be neath the loveliest skin. In a time when many artists have become so detached...

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