In his Berlin lectures on fine art, Hegel argued that art involves a unique form of aesthetic intelligibility the expression of a distinct collective self-understanding that develops through historical time. Hegel s approach to art has been influential in a number of different contexts, but in a twist of historical irony Hegel would die just before the most radical artistic revolution in history: modernism. InAfter the Beautiful, Robert B. Pippin, looking at modernist paintings by artists such as Edouard Manet and Paul Cezanne through Hegel s lens, does what Hegel never had the chance...