Reviews for The Unknown Masterpiece

The average rating for The Unknown Masterpiece based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-01-26 00:00:00 Peter Michaud Artist and His Model (1926) - by Pablo Picasso This New York Review Books edition is indeed a classic since it includes not only two highly philosophical works by French master Honoré de Balzac on the nature of art and music but also an illuminating introductory essay by philosopher of art/art critic Arthur C. Danto. For the purposes of my review I will focus on the author's tour de force, The Unknown Masterpiece. The story revolves around three painters - Porbus, Poussin and Frenhofer. Porbus can be seen as the Flemish painter Frans Pourbus, Poussin, the master Nicolas Poussin in his youth and Frenhofer, the true genius in the story, is a creation of Balzac's imagination. After reading and falling in loving with this short work, many are the artists who have linked themselves to Frenhofer, including Picasso, Matisse and Cézanne. Rather than simply recapping events within the story, I will turn to a number of provocative philosophical questions raised by Balzac's tale. Firstly, there is the matter of art as a form of magic. In his essay on The Unknown Masterpiece included in this NYRB edition, Danto states: "From the perspective of magic, every image has the possibility of coming to life, and perhaps the first images every drawn, however crudely executed, were viewed with an awe that still remains a disposition of the most primitive regions of the human brain. This is why images have been forbidden in so many of the great religions of the world, and why they have been destroyed in the name of iconoclasm. It is why Plato was afraid of art, and drove artists from his Republic." At one point Frenhofer judges a portrait painted by Probus: "You can see she's pasted on the canvas - you could never walk around her." To paint in such a way that the viewer can mentally walk around a woman, man, animal, plant or other object painted on canvas requires rendering a two dimensional plane into three dimensions, technical expertise developed in the Western artistic tradition over centuries, reaching staggering heights beginning in the period of the Italian Renaissance. Yet to really vitalize a painting, an added ingredient is needed. What shall we call it? Genius, perhaps? At this juncture, we can make a critical point: if any image can come to life, even those first images created in the dawn of humanity as Danto notes, how powerful and magical is a painting infused by highly polished technique coupled with the spark of genius? Now institutions and champions of the status quo who fear the power of the image really have something to worry about. Frans Pourbus the Younger - Portrait of Isabella Clara Eugenia, around 1600-1615 Nicolas Poussin - detail from Eliezer and Rebecca at the Well, l648 We can move on to critical point number two: for the artists in the tale, as for nearly all artists, is it any accident hot-blooded passionate love for another person is so much a part of their lives and has such an influence on their art? There's something both inspiring and intoxicating about love, most especially erotic love, and how eroticism mixed in with the mystery of artistic creation is nothing less than explosive. Frenhofer exclaims, "Oh! I would give all I possess if just once, for a single moment, I could gaze upon that complete, that divine nature; if I could meet that ideal heavenly beauty, I would search for her in limbo itself!" And the female nude? Oh, yes, as Balzac details in his story, the keg of dynamite that is erotic love becomes supercharged even further when an artist takes a woman's nudity as the subject. Again, Frenhofer: "Poetry and women show themselves naked only to their lovers!" And the female who poses nude for Frenhofer? The beautiful Gillette, the loving mistress of Poussin. You will have to read for yourself to find out exactly how Balzac's story unfolds. Shifting our focus to a slightly different topic, does the sense of place participate in this creative and artistic magic? In the spirit of his realistic prose, Balzac notes the exact locations of the artist's studios - Rue des Grands-Augustins, Pont Saint-Michel, Rue de la Harpe. Ah, Paris! Such a magnet for artists. So inspired was Pablo Picasso by Balzac's story, he moved his studio to Nº 7 Rue des Grands-Augustins. Lastly, at the very end of the story, along with Porbus and Poussin, we encounter the masterpiece Frenhofer has spent the last ten years of his life painting. From Balzac's description, can you see what the artist wishes you to see? And what does it mean to know a masterpiece? Taking Picasso's Artist and His Model pictured above, what would it mean to come to know this work of art? Or maybe a better question would be: Could we ever completely know such art? Does a measure of power derive from its mystery? And there's that foot! Echoes of Frenhofer and Balzac?

Review # 2 was written on 2014-03-08 00:00:00 Craig Devrell This is one of Balzac's little jewels. From the very start Balzac sets its date and location. We are in 1612, in the early Regency of Maria de Medici, since only a couple of years had elapsed from the assassination of her husband and King Henri IV. Their son Louis XIII was then only eight years old. And the location is, as we can expect, Paris. But not just any place in Paris. We are in the Rue des Grands-Augustins, which is a perpendicular to the Boulevard of the same name which runs parallel to the Seine just across from the Ile-de-la-Cité. The significance of this street is that this is where the young Louis XIII was almost immediately enthroned when his father died. And the significance of having chosen this earlier period is that Balzac wrote his work soon after the Bourbon Monarchy had fallen. It is as if in choosing this past framework Balzac wanted to go back to a period of France that for him should have not ended. There are two main characters who are real and famous. There is a young painter who is none other than Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and there is also the considerably older and now less well known painter François (Frans) Pourbus (1569-1622) who came from Flanders. As Balzac tells us, the latter had lost his place as court painter to his compatriot Rubens. May be we are not surprised. This is how Pourbus saw the Queen. And this is how Rubens envisioned her husband welcoming her portrait. Balzac is rendering homage to the street where the young Bourbon King was declared King by situating the art studio of Pourbus in the address of Nº 7, Rue des Grands-Augustins. But if the context is seventeenth century Paris, Balzac develops a discourse on art that reads very much like a nineteenth century criticism of the Art Salons. We have a fully developed debate between the Disegno & Colore or the classicists and the Romantics epitomized during Balzac's time by Ingres and Delacroix. Colore And Disegno But even if Balzac also wrote regularly about the contemporary Salons, this is not just the writing of any art critic. This novella is couched in the very colorful, and rich and textured and delineated prose that is Balzac's inimitable writing. A true delight to read. And yet, the novella is not even about these two poles in painting. It is not about these people, nor their times. It is about something else. It is about the relationship of the painter and his representation, or to be more specific, about him and his (female) sitter. Creation and possession, and the limitations and impossibilities in these. And this is precisely what Pablo Picasso chose to focus on when the gallerist Ambroise Vollard asked him to illustrate Balzac's novel in 1931. In his thirteen engravings we see Picasso exploring the role of artistic creation, its limitations and the ultimate goal of appropriation or possession. For Picasso, his art and the implied window, a representational concept inherited from the Renaissance and through which he saw his world, was always framed by the female. We cannot be surprised then if he was fascinated by this Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu, where Balzac says: Ce n'est pas une toile, c'est une femme! Une femme avec laquelle je pleure, je ris, je cause et je pens and cette femme nest pas une créature, c'est une création.. Picasso's framing women: Illustrating the tale by Balzac was not enough. A few years after completing the series of etchings, Picasso moved his studio to Nº 7 Rue des Grands-Augustins. To be able to photograph this warrants a new pilgrimage to my most beloved city. And of course, Picasso also had to portray and render homage to his honored genius Honoré de Balzac.