The Invisible Masterpiece

by Belting, Hans

• ISBN13: 9781861890887
• ISBN10: 1861890885
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-06-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

The "invisible masterpiece" is an unattainable ideal, a work of art into which a dream of absolute art is incorporated but can never be realized. Using this metaphor borrowed from Balzac, Hans Belting explores the history of "the masterpiece" and how its status and meaning have been elevated and denigrated since the early nineteenth century. Before 1800, works of art were either imitative (portraits and landscapes) or narrative (history painting). But under the influence of Romantic modernity, the physical object--a painted canvas, for example, or a sculpture--came to be seen as visible testimony of the artist's attempt to achieve absolute or ultimate art; in short, the impossible. This revolution in interpretation coincided with the establishment of the first public art museums, in which classical and Renaissance works were presented as the "real" masterpieces, timeless art of such quality that no modern artist could possibly hope to achieve. The Mona Lisa and other celebrated paintings preoccupied artists who felt burdened by this cult of the masterpiece as it came to be institutionalized. Belting explores and explains how twentieth-century artists, following Duchamp, struggled with their personal dreams of absolute art. It was not until the 1960s that artists, such as Warhol, finally began to reject the idea of the individual, totemic work of art and its permanent exhibition, as well as the related concept of the "masterpiece" and the outmoded art market that fed off it.

Author Biography

Hans Belting is Professor of Art History and Media Theory at the Hochschule fur Gestaltung, Karlsruhe, Germany, and Visiting Professor at Columbia University, New York.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. 7
Introduction	p. 11
The Farewell to Apollo	p. 27
Raphael's Dream	p. 50
Shipwrecked	p. 71
Paris: A City and a Museum	p. 96
The Artists' Curse	p. 120
A Hieroglyph of Art	p. 137
In the Labyrinth of Modernity	p. 155
Escape Routes to Freedom	p. 177
The Inferno of Perfection	p. 202
The Cathedral of Memory	p. 225
An Invisible Masterpiece	p. 248
The Fate of an Art Fetish	p. 273
The Dream of Absolute Art	p. 294
The Fiction of Absolute Art	p. 315
The Absolute Artist	p. 335
American Modernism	p. 362
The Call to Freedom	p. 384
The Work as Memory	p. 405
Bibliographical References	p. 427
Chapter References	p. 432
Photographic Acknowledgements	p. 470
Index	p. 472
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.