The Invisible MasterpieceThe "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. |
Contents
PREFACE | 7 |
I | 11 |
The Farewell to Apollo | 27 |
Raphaels Dream | 50 |
Shipwrecked | 71 |
A City and a Museum | 96 |
The Artists Curse | 120 |
A Hieroglyph of Art | 137 |
The Fate of an Art Fetish | 273 |
The Dream of Absolute Art | 294 |
The Fiction of Absolute Art | 315 |
IS The Absolute Artist | 335 |
American Modernism | 362 |
The Call to Freedom | 384 |
The Work as Memory | 405 |
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES | 427 |
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Common terms and phrases
absolute art abstract abstract art aesthetic ancient Andy Warhol antiquity art history artist avant-garde Balzac's Barnett Newman Baudelaire beauty become body Broodthaers cathedral Cézanne classical colours concept Conceptual art contemporary created Cubism cult culture Dante Delacroix Demoiselles depicted dream Duchamp essay exhibition fiction figure Fluxus Frenhofer gallery Gauguin gaze Géricault Gertrude Stein Glass Gogh Guernica history of art idea of art ideal illus Ingres invisible masterpiece Jackson Pollock Leonardo living longer look Louvre Malevich Manet Marcel Broodthaers Marcel Duchamp memory mirror modern art Mona Lisa motif Musée français museum myth nature oil on canvas once Pablo Picasso painter painting Paris perfection photograph Picasso picture portrait Poussin produced Proust Raphael Rauschenberg Renaissance ritual Rodin rôle Ruskin's Salon sculpture seemed Sistine Madonna smile stage statue studio symbol tion traditional Venus Venus de Milo viewer vision Warhol woman writing wrote York