The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac

His goal is to make the art itself disappear-to feel as if “the air is so real you can no longer distinguish it from the air around yourselves.” But when Frenhofer eventually displays his masterpiece, Balzac exposes the gap between a creator’s hopes and an audience’s reception. Frenhofer shares his struggle to create the perfect painting. Together, they consider what their profession means and contemplate techniques. Frenhofer, an old and respected acquaintance of Porbus, is also there. In 17th-century Paris, the lives of three painters briefly collide: A young Nicolas Poussin visits the studio of a man he admires, François Porbus. The Unknown Masterpiece, by Honoré de Balzac (translated by Richard Howard)īalzac’s novella, which influenced modernists such as Paul Cézanne and Picasso, is about the sacrifices that artists are willing to make for their art, and whether or not universal beauty exists. Beyond their function and appeal, they carry memories-sometimes violent ones. Finlay’s investigation adds depth to our interpretation of the history of art: Colors don’t simply flow out of a tube. Finlay focuses on “mummy brown,” the shade extracted from crushed Egyptian mummies and allegedly used in Romantic artworks such as Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. Most macabre of all is the troubling past of brown.

Red has a bloody background: Millions of cochineal beetles have been killed to produce the lucrative pigment carmine, and Spain violently invaded Mexico, where it was traditionally extracted. Ochre, the by-product of clay and ferric oxide, brings Finlay to Australia and its Aboriginal people, who have used it for thousands of years in ceremonial practices. The results reveal how political a painter’s palette can be. In her book, Finlay unearths the background of familiar hues. Many accounts of art history begin with how humans first acquired the materials that create colors. Together, they affirm that, as Picasso said a century ago, creative work reveals to us what is hidden it is fundamental to how we process the world. The six titles presented below explore different facets of visual art: the materials, the concepts, the people. Memoirs, manifestos, and aesthetic histories offer insights into what can otherwise be unspoken and untranslatable, including the mystery involved in the making of a piece. Viewers are driven to understand who makes art and why, seeking out behind-the-scenes details about well-loved artworks.

Those inexplicable feelings make many people curious. Their creations can differ wildly from our expectations and outlook they frequently inspire emotion by surprising us or, as Picasso believed, by manipulating our perception. In 1923, Pablo Picasso told his peer, the Mexican gallery owner Marius de Zayas, that “art is a lie”-but one that “makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.” Artists intuitively engage-in paint, clay, prints, film-with the strangeness of life.

The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac