A Fable of Modern Art

By Dore Ashton

Book Overview

Dore Ashton's masterly analysis of modern art grows out of a consideration of Balzac's brilliant and little known 'philosophic' story The Unknown Masterpiece in which the concerns of C zanne, Picasso, and the abstract expressionists are strikingly prefigured. Balzac's fable is discussed not only within the context from which it emerged--early nineteenth-century romanticism--but also in its embodiment of various attitudes towards art. Ashton illuminates a web of associations linking Balzac to C zanne, Rilke, Schoenberg, Kandinsky and Picasso as they struggle with the yearning to express the inexpressible, to make concrete the abstract.

As Professor Ashton develops the conjectures of her book she reveals the interrelations of literature, music, and art and the basic problems which engage or beset the contemporary artist and those who seek to understand and appreciate contemporary art. This is a book of extreme originality which ranges so widely and offers such valuable insights that it forms an important contribution not only to the history of art and culture, but also to the history of ideas.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520073010
• ISBN13: 9780520073012
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 0.3" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Ripping The Yarns

Ashton's enquiry into the linkages of Modernism's prime suspects is swift and decisive. The paradigm is established early, the dilemna espoused at the birth of modernism by one of its advocates, Balzac, in his novel, 'The Unknown Masterpiece'. Cezanne, Rilke, Kandinsky and old 'sexy pants,' Picasso are combed over and fitted to Ashton's enmeshing tale. A French flick,Jacques Rivette's,'La Belle Noiseuse', of the early 90s made an excellent stab at filming Balzac's novel in contemporary garb. Its drawn out enactment of the creative process has only been surpassed by Tarakovsky. The coincidental advent of these two revisions could be regarded as a railing against the prevailing ethical vaccuum in the visual arts: a time when pastiche and design, and digital morphing have drowned complexity, structure, spatial issues & the hand crafted disciplines - not to venture notions of enchantment or 'spirituality' which post-modern agendas seem bereft of. Perhaps we are already staring from the terrors of the abyss, referred to regularily in the text. The balancing act between abstraction and mimesis, between chaos and surplus information, individual vision and profound feeling of the heart, the role of Nature's laws governing the arts, the emphasis on process above content; Ashton eloquently articulates the crucial growth nodes of Modernism. The ironic footer to this resides in the caption,'Unknown.' Balzac's book is likely 'unknown' as is the aforementioned film, and lastly, Ashton's marvellous analysis, which might spur the art novice with a set of useful questions. For more on art visit>rodmoss.com