The Invisible Masterpiece: The Modern Myth of Art - Book Review

HANS BELTING

Trans. Helen Atkins

Chicago: University of Chicago Pres 2001 480 pp 181 b/w ills. $4500

Hans Belting's Invisible Masterpiece is a close attention of the idea of the masterpiece as it make knowns in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, on the contrary as the author explains at the starting-point the book is really about the notion of absolute art, an ideal conception of art transcending any individual work. Belting dioceses this notion as a fresh one and its critical interrogation as central to the exhibition of modernism: he presents us with nothing les than a history of new art from the perspective allude toed by it, tracing it from its putative beginnings in the years around 1800 from one side its increasingly acute problematization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to its apparent demise in the 1960 The volume has the quality of a thoughtfully structur series of discourses for undergraduates: much of the material is familiar, on the contrary it is skillfully presented in followings and juxtapositions that cast the important points into high relief. It will not appeal to many modernists, and there are serious point to be solved [i]or[/i] settleds with its overall conception, nevertheless it is not without more [i]or[/i] less interesting observations and insights.

individual of its best features is the way in which body s are integrated into the account, sometimes to help provide historical background, sometimes to shed light upon individual works of art. Honore de Balzac's well-known short story Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu be repeateds throughout the book. In addition, Belting, who has read widely and perceptively, draws upon a range of writings: other stories about artists, Eugene Delacroix's journals, Vincent van Gogh's alphabetic characters and theoretical and critical body s Among the latter are of that kind well-known examples as the Salons of Stendhal, Charles Baudelaire, and Emile Zola and infrequent texts like Marcel Proust's translations of John Ruskin or, more pass overed still, Auguste Rodin's Les cathedrales de France. Belting is a beneficial storyteller himself and seasons his speculations with anecdotes and little-known facts. The chapters upon the cult of the Mona Lisa (pp 137-54 273-93) for instance, include a discussion of a comical silent film made just after the famous theft of 1911 as well as Max B rod's account of a visit to Paris with Franz Kafka a hardly any weeks later--during which they saw the film.

There is certainly nothing original in the idea of using Baudelaire to shed light upon Manet, but Belting manages to [i]v a[/i] a few insights from the exercise. His chapter upon Edouard Manet (pp. 155-76) culminates in a stab at the of advanced age problem of the mirror and its displaced reflections in The Bar at the Folies-Bergere: "the double barmaid draws attention to the difference between a mirror and a painting.... The mirror is a static reality that nevertheless catches the move of the world" (pp. 175-76) This feature is referr to in Baudelaire's notion of the two-sidedness of present art:

The time was drawn out past when people were delighted by the agency of the analogy of a mirror and a painting. Manet forceed their dissimilarity in order to emphasize the dualism that, as with Baudelaire, was central to his conception of the work. He still used the ancient medium of painting, thus continuing the tradition of art despite his modernity, on the contrary he used it to exhibit not only a modern. make submissive but also a modern way of looking, a direct the eye as dispassionate, mechanical, and insatiable as the reflection in a mirror. (p 175)

The sections upon van Gogh make sensitive use of the artist's alphabetic characters (pp. 177-82, 186-92); the single on Paul Gauguin that tread in the steps ofs (pp. 192-201) is disappointing. The chapter upon Rodin's Gates of Hell (pp 216-24) makes a profitable story. Readers familiar with Rosalind Krauss's essay upon the originality of the avant-garde will probably find it conceptually derivative on the contrary may yet be intrigued to read that when a plaster prototype of the Thinker was station up in front of the Pantheon, it was attacked by the agency of a man "'who had nothing to eat' and felt himself imitateed by the figure's pose" (p 223)

The first serious riddle is that the notion of absolute art is not fresh at all. Pliny says of Polykleitos, whose statue, known as the Canon, had become a original for the representation of the human material substance that "he was judged to have revealed the art itself by the agency of means of a single work." (1) That this verbal formula was something of a commonplace is refer toed by his further remark regarding a picture by means of Timanthes of a hero, "a work of consummate perfection, in which he showed the whole art of painting male figures." (2) Indeed, the existence of like an idea is already plainly documented in the Iliad, with its famous description of the shield of Achilles, the work of the jehovah Hephaestus, in which the entire universe is showed a literal microcosm that symbolizes the highest potential of art. (3) In the Renaissance, the idea of absolute art is manifest in Giorgio Vasari's remarkable description of Michelangelo's Last Judgment:

And this is to our art that example and that great painting sent down by dint of God to men on earth, in the way that that they may see in what way fate works when intellects of the highest stamp descend to earth infused with grace and divine knowledge. This work leads after it enchained all those who believe that they understand their art; on seeing the signs made through him in the contours of whatever he exhibits every bold spirit trembles and is afraid, no matter by what mode skilled in design, and while single looks at the labor of this work, the faculty of perceptions are benumbed just to think what other pictures--those made and those still to be made--would be if compared to this protoplast (4)