After The Beautiful Av Robert B. Pippin

In his Berlin lectures on fine art, Hegel argued that art involves a unique form of aesthetic intelligibility-the expression of a distinct collective self-understanding that develops through historical time. Hegel's approach to art has been influential in a number of different contexts, but in a twist of historical irony Hegel would die just before the most radical artistic revolution in history: modernism. In After the Beautiful, Robert B. Pippin, looking at modernist paintings by artists such as Edouard Manet and Paul Cezanne through Hegel's lens, does what Hegel never had the chance to do. While Hegel could never engage modernist painting, he did have an understanding of modernity, and in it, art-he famously asserted-was 'a thing of the past,' no longer an important vehicle of self-understanding and no longer an indispensable expression of human meaning. Pippin offers a sophisticated exploration of Hegel's position and its implications. He also shows that had Hegel known how the