Whereas previous eras had celebrated beauty as the central aim of art, the modernist avant-garde were suspicious of beauty and its symbols, woman and ornament. They rejected harmony, empathy, and femininity in a denial still reverberating today. Steiner¿s analysis explores the 20th cent. troubled relationship with beauty. Tracing this damaging history, starting from Kant¿s aesthetics and Shelley¿s response in ¿Frankenstein,¿ Steiner untangles the complex attitudes of modernists toward both beauty and the female subject in art. Only in recent years has our culture begun to see a way out of of this impasse, revising the reputations of neglected artists such as Pierre Bonnard, and celebrating pleasures and charm in the arts of the present. Illus.