The Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism: Hegel and the History of Painting

THE PHILOSOPHY OF PICTORIAL MODERNISM: HEGEL AND THE HISTORY OF PAINTING

In his Berlin lectures on fine art in the 1820s, Hegel made two famous and very controversial claims. The first was that the content of fine art, religion and philosophy was essentially the same, and the second was that all the fine arts had become for us a "thing of the past," no longer an important vehicle of human self-knowledge. The "modern" art that Hegel considered was early nineteenth century romantic art. He died in 1831, and so did not witness the most revolutionary change in the history the arts, what we now loosely call "modernism." This lecture concentrates on modernist painting and asks about the bearing of both Hegel’s general approach to the meaning of art, and of his historical and diagnostic analysis, to modernist pictorial art. One version of the basic question would be: what should Hegel, given his philosophical and aesthetic commitments, have said about the achievement and historical significance of Édouard Manet’s revolutionary paintings of the 1860’s, generally credited with being the among the first modernist paintings? Or: what sort of crisis in the credibility of conventional painting was modernist experimentation responding to, and what would it mean to consider these issues as being of philosophical significance?

Co-presented with Sydney Ideashttp://whatson.sydney.edu.au/events/published/sydney-ideas-professor-robert-pippin>.

Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books on German idealism and the relation of philosophy to modern culture. These include, Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (1989); Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (1991); and Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (1997), Henry James and Modern Moral Life (1999), and After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (2014). He is a winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the American Philosophical Society.

MONDAY 17 NOVEMBER 2014
6-7:30pm
Law School LT 106
Sydney Law School
The University of Sydney


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