After the Beautiful
Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents

Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
2 Philosophy and Painting: Hegel and Manet
3 Politics and Ontology: Clark and Fried
4 Art and Truth: Heidegger and Hegel
5 Concluding Remarks
Bibliography
IndexReview Quotes
E. Millán | Choice
“In his engaging, innovative study, Pippin uses the work of Manet and Cezanne (the grandfather and father of modernism) to embark on a kind of philosophical time travel with Hegel. Pippin persuasively argues that Hegel’s thought remains relevant for helping one understand the achievements of modernist painting as philosophical achievements. . . . The theoretical and historical sweep of Pippin’s study is impressive and delightfully illuminating. . . . Highly recommended.”
Martin Donougho, University of South Carolina
“After the Beautiful is a strikingly original contribution to the debate on the relevance of Hegel’s Aesthetics to the contemporary world, and not just the art world. Taking a modified Hegelian approach shorn of metaphysical commitments, the author seeks to shed light on the ‘crisis’ of modernism: how art might perhaps make sense—both intelligible and felt sense—of a senseless, disjointed reality. Through subtle readings of texts and artworks, Robert B. Pippin brings out the need to interpret art as a mode of address, as communication in a society that puts communicability in question. This is a challenging book, which brings Hegel to life in unexpected ways.”
Terry Pinkard, Georgetown University
“There is a fair amount of philosophical literature about whether Hegel could accommodate modern, post-1840s art within his philosophy, but that field usually divides into the ‘Yes, he can,’ and ‘No, he cannot’ camps. Both camps generally argue on the basis of canonical Hegelian texts, differing only on the implications they draw from those texts. In After the Beautiful, however, the historical Hegel himself is drawn into criticism under Robert B. Pippin’s contemporary interpretation—called to alter his original account in certain key areas if he is to stay true to his original program. This is a very ambitious way of doing philosophy, and Pippin pulls it off very well.”
Ralph Ubl, University of Basel
“From the first contemporary commentaries on Édouard Manet to the most sophisticated art historical interpretations, the critical response to modernist painting has always suffered from a mismatch between aesthetic and social accounts of its nature. Robert B. Pippin’s new book offers nothing less than a compelling argument overcoming this dualism. His philosophical reconstruction of the history of art from Manet to Cézanne demonstrates forcefully that in modernist painting the most unsettling question of modern life found expression: whether a meaningful social practice is conceivable.”
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