C’s Aethetics

This study by noted critic Joseph Masheck covers familiar art-historical ground in a newly interdisciplinary philosophic manner. Exploring the development of a modernist aesthetics of painting in its most decisive early form, it considers Paul Cézanne as, notwithstanding inherited realist and naturalist presuppositions concerning painting, deliberately becoming, first, an impressionist, but then the greatest postimpressionist—which is to say, anti-impressionist.

Masheck's innovative experiment in art criticism attempts to see these by no means arbitrary transformations in light of the analytical tradition of modern philosophical thought. Published with the assistance of the Bryn Mawr College.Center for Visual Culture.

“In that abstract painting was made possible by a cubism whose patron saint was … Cezanne, [I] … search for the implicit philosophical aesthetics of the single most crucial artist for the development of modernism. [...] But I also write as a teacher who sees a generation afoot that has learned to deal with postmodernism before understanding modernism (if at all)--which might be something like the American way of starting the dinner with the salad, if one ever got some meat. So I am perhaps also doing something constructively remedial about that …”-From the preface.

Philadelphia: Slought Books and the Center for Visual Culture, Bryn Mawr College, 2004

ISBN: 0-9714848-3-X