Hegel’s aesthetic theory is unrivalled in its scope, its systematic philosophical ambition and its wealth of detail. However, Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics also contain Hegel’s infamous thesis that art ‘comes to an end’ in modernity. Anyone who wishes to draw on Hegel’s aesthetic theory has to confront this thesis in one way or another. In his most recent book, Robert Pippin develops a powerful and attractive way of doing so. While doing full justice to the sense of crisis which resonates in Hegel’s dictum of the end of art, Pippin insists that art has lost none of its relevance in modernity. This is because he reads modernist art as offering itself one of the most powerful expressions of crisis – of its own crisis as well as well as of the kinds of crisis which inevitably arise in the context of the socio-political structures of modernity. Drawing on student transcripts of several lecture courses as well as on the published version of the lectures edited by Hegel’s student Hotho, Pippin is up-front about the fact that his interpretation diverges from the ‘official’ position expounded in the Lectures on Aesthetics. However, he urges that Hegel’s aesthetics—considered in the context of Hegel’s system as a whole—offers more powerful resources for theorizing modernist art than Hegel himself envisaged.

In order to tap these resources, certain elements of Hegel’s position have to be revised. This can be done, Pippin suggests, by turning Hegel’s own tools against himself. Pippin recommends that one should do so, in particular, with regard to two Hegelian theses. Hegel seems to be claiming at times that the modern state differs from its historical predecessors in that it achieves a complete reconciliation of individual citizen and political institutions. Accordingly, in the modern state, individual and political freedom are allegedly fully realized. However, taking into account Hegel’s own masterful analysis of struggles of recognition both between individuals and between individual and society as a whole, there is no reason to believe that such struggles simply cease in the modern state, Pippin points out. On the contrary, certain characteristics of modern states, such as modern capitalism and mass-consumerism—characteristics which had not yet become fully apparent at Hegel’s own time—suggest that such struggles will continue ever more forcefully and violently in modern society.

The second revision concerns the relation between Geist and nature (I follow Pippin in leaving Hegel’s term Geist untranslated). It is fairly uncontroversial to say that for Hegel Geist is subject to historical development and that this development can be described, broadly, as a process of liberation from nature. But Hegel sometimes seems to be going too far in this direction, claiming that this process eventually culminates in a complete separation of Geist from natural embodiment—as if freedom were only fully realized once Geist has been completely severed from nature. This realization of freedom is supposed to be achieved in modernity. Hence Geist in its fully liberated state, modern Geist, is in principle not congenial to sensuous embodiment and expression. With this train of thought, Pippin suggests, Hegel fails to do justice to the powerful dialectical tools offered by his own notion of Geist. We can learn from Hegel that the antagonism of Geist and nature can never be resolved, since it is essential to both relata that they are related antagonistically to each other. This insight—to which Pippin also refers as the ‘amphibian problem’—can be turned against Hegel’s own stated position.

If we are ready to discard both of these claims, Pippin suggests, we will have undermined important reasons for Hegel’s worries about the status of art in modernity. For if Hegel holds that art becomes obsolete in modernity, then this is because he sometimes comes close to believing that freedom is fully realized in modern political institutions, and that modern freedom does not allow for the kind of sensuous expression or embodiment which is characteristic of art. Pippin wishes to reject both of these notions on grounds which are, in my view, forceful and convincing.

This part of Pippin’s argument is complemented on the other hand by a claim which is expressed in the title of the book and taken up in Pippin’s concluding remarks. While art does not become obsolete in modernity, it nevertheless cannot quite assume the place it used to have. On Pippin’s reading, modern art for Hegel must be art ‘after the beautiful’. Beauty, in Hegel, stands for a seamless unity of the sensible and the rational, of Geist and nature. Understood in this way, beauty was the central ideal of ancient Greek culture, dominating all aspects of Greek life. From Hegel’s point of view, this ideal is no longer tenable in modernity.Footnote ¹ But this means that if art can thrive in modernity, it cannot do so in virtue of manifesting the unity of sensible form and geistig content. Putting both strands of the argument together, it follows that modern art must exist in a kind of limbo: its place is neither the seamless unity of nature and Geist (as in the beautiful ancient Greek culture), nor Hegel’s alleged complete liberation of Geist from sensible embodiment.

The way in which Pippin’s argument—the bulk of which is developed in the introduction and in chapter 2—carves out such a niche for modern art within a Hegelian framework is exciting, bold, and convincing. Summarized in this way, the argument of course gives rise to further questions. To say that modern art takes its place in between the unity of Geist and nature and the completed liberation from nature would seem to be a description of a problem rather than a solution. But Pippin suggests that this is precisely the way in which (some) modernist works should be understood: as expressions of problems. The problems in question are the central Hegelian themes mentioned above: the ‘amphibian problem’ on the one hand, the ongoing struggle for recognition in modern society on the other.

That this is a fruitful way of looking at modernist artworks is demonstrated by Pippin’s Hegelian analysis of Manet’s paintings in chapter 2. Broadly put, these paintings can be understood—almost paradoxically—as sensible embodiments of the problem of how Geist can be sensibly embodied. In Manet’s Olympia, for instance, a nude woman seems to address the beholder in a bold and almost defiant way, by looking him straight into the eye. At the same time, her look remains opaque and mysterious, resisting interpretation. Such looks are ubiquitous in Manet’s works. They challenge the beholder just like the open breach of painterly conventions, enigmatic gestures and inexplicable symbolism one finds in Manet’s paintings. Manet’s works are riddles, and they are supposed to be appreciated and experienced as such: as a challenge to the spectator, rather than as a readily accessible sensible expression of meaning. In virtue of being riddles, they draw attention not only to the problem of finding shareable meaning in a human being’s conduct, looks and gestures, but to the problem of sensible intelligibility in general. Manet’s works are puzzling, sometimes even shocking, and this is what marks them out as modernist. They thereby testify to the emergence of a crisis in modern art as well as modern society and culture in general. But precisely because they are such powerful expressions of deep human puzzles, they are nevertheless successful as works of art. On Pippin’s analysis, this tension lies at the heart of modernist art in general.

While the puzzles expressed in Manet’s works are to a certain extent perennial human problems, they become especially acute and urgent in modernity. In chapter 3, Pippin explores how they emerge as distinctively modern problems by entering into a dialogue with art historians Michael Fried and T. J. Clark. Drawing on Clark, for instance, Pippin points out that it is essential to Manet’s Olympia that the woman depicted in it is probably a prostitute who displays her body like a commodity. Against this background, her look should be interpreted as a challenge to enter into a struggle for mutual recognition, rather than as expressing the confident expectation to find such recognition. Olympia thus draws attention to how modern capitalism undermines, rather than secures, conditions of mutual recognition. Similarly, Pippin incorporates Michael Fried’s notion of ‘theatricality’ into his Hegelian framework. From the eighteenth century onwards, painters were increasingly aware that a painting can only capture a spectator’s interest if it somehow manages to present its subject matter as authentic and genuine rather than as artificial and theatrical. In order to escape the theatrical, painters resorted to such strategies as depicting subjects who are deeply absorbed in their activity, or involved in particularly demanding, spectacular activities. Manet’s way of tackling this problem is novel and radical. Rather than trying to avoid theatricality, he boldly embraces it, by having his subjects address and challenge the spectator directly with their looks. According to Pippin’s Hegelian approach, this painterly revolution can be understood as bringing out the perennial Hegelian theme that an individual subject’s identity is necessarily the result of a joint effort of interpretation and recognition between two subjects.

Pippin’s Hegelian approach to modernist art proves to be extraordinarily fruitful. However, as Pippin himself points out in the final chapter of the book, it is not without alternatives. Here Pippin sketches a Heideggerian interpretation of modernist works such as Cézanne’s paintings. There are important parallels between the Heideggerian and the Hegelian accounts of modernist art. For both philosophers, art is a mode of revealing truth; if it is of aesthetic significance, then the aesthetic itself has to be understood as standing in an essential relation with truthfulness. Both agree, furthermore, that the relevance of art is under threat in modernity. But while Hegel attributes this to the rational self-sufficiency of modern society and culture, Heidegger, in contrast, sees it as an indication of a deep deficiency and blindness of modernity. Certain kinds of modernist painting—in particular by Van Gogh and Cézanne—offer a corrective to this deficiency. Such works should be perceived as events in which a fundamental ontological truth about the structure of being discloses itself. In contrast to Hegel, Heidegger insists that being is never fully intelligible. In being disclosed, it is also, at the same time, concealed. This twofold structure of disclosure and concealment becomes paradigmatically apparent in works of art.

Pippin clearly considers the Hegelian account of modernism to be superior to the Heideggerian. As I understand it, his critique of the Heideggerian position is ultimately an immanent one. On the Hegelian account, modernist artworks are analogous to deeds which need to be interpreted in a shared effort of mutual recognition between artist, artwork and spectator. On the Heideggerian account, in contrast, the concealment of truth in the work of art is an event rather than a deed. But this means, Pippin argues, that Heidegger fails to capture an important characteristic of modernist works of art. Clement Greenberg has pointed out that a crucial aspect of the late Cézanne’s work is a tension between painterly composition on the one hand and the subject matter depicted on the other. One might describe this tension as resulting from the artist’s struggle to make the subject matter apparent in the medium of paint. Because he does not conceive of the painting as a deed and active achievement, Heidegger cannot do justice to this crucial aspect. This shortcoming also becomes apparent in his analysis of other modernist works, such as Van Gogh’s peasant shoes.

After the Beautiful is in many respects the culmination of Pippin’s earlier work on Hegel’s aesthetics and artistic modernism. But it is interesting to note that his approach has changed considerably, in particular in comparison with his 2002 article ‘What was abstract art? (From the point of view of Hegel)’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2002). In this article, Pippin also defends a Hegelian account of pictorial modernism. But here he celebrates the movement towards abstraction in painting as the artistic expression of the accomplishment of modern freedom. Painterly abstraction amounts to a liberation from the authority of nature and affirmation of rational self-determination within the medium of art. With regard to this aspect, Pippin’s tone has changed dramatically. One may speculate that this is mainly because he now considers the ‘amphibian problem’ to be more formidable than before. It is a central claim in After the Beautiful that (modern) Geist, even though striving towards freedom, remains essentially related to nature, to sensible, natural forms of embodiment. Nature can therefore not simply be left behind or overcome. This gives rise to tension, to an ongoing struggle for reconciling the freedom of Geist with its need for natural embodiment. Modernist art is one of the main sites in which this struggle is carried out. Precisely because it thereby conceives of modernist art as essentially a manifestation of tension and crisis, After the Beautiful presents an even more powerful Hegelian account of modernist art.