The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré De Balzac - ISBN: 9780940322745
Paperback
A painter’s masterpiece: genius or failure? Art’s eternal question.

The Unknown Masterpiece

And, Gambara

$33.87

  • Paperback

    160 pages

  • Release Date

    15 September 2006

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Summary

A New York Review Books Original

One of Honoré de Balzac’s most celebrated tales, “The Unknown Masterpiece” is the story of a painter who, depending on one’s perspective, is either an abject failure or a transcendental genius—or both. The story, which has served as an inspiration to artists as various as Cézanne, Henry James, Picasso, and New Wave director Jacques Rivette, is, in critic Dore Ashton’s words, a “fable of modern art.”

Published here in a new translation by poet R…

Book Details

ISBN-13:9780940322745
ISBN-10:0940322749
Author:Honoré De Balzac, Arthur C. Danto
Publisher:New York Review Books
Imprint:NYRB Classics
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:160
Edition:Main
Release Date:15 September 2006
Weight:190g
Dimensions:203mm x 127mm
Series:New York Review Books Classics
What They're Saying

Critics Review

“The greatest novelist of the nineteenth century and perhaps of all time.” —The New York Times “The hero of The Unknown Masterpiece, Frenhofer, is one of Balzac’s archetypal artists…” —TheWashington Post

About The Author

Honoré De Balzac

Honore De Balzac (1799-1850) is generally credited as the inventor of the modern realistic novel. In more than ninety novels, he set forth French society and life as he saw it. He created a cast of over two thousand individual and identifiable characters, some of whom reappear in different novels. He organized his works into his masterpiece, La Comedie Humaine, which was the final result of his attempt to grasp the whole of society and experience into one varied but unified work.

Richard Howard was born in Cleveland in 1929. He is the author of fourteen volumes of poetry and has published more than one hundred fifty translations from the French, including works by Gide, Stendhal, de Beauvoir, Baudelaire, and de Gaulle. Howard received a National Book Award for his translation of Fleurs du mal and a Pulitzer Prize for Untitled Subjects, a collection of poetry.

Arthur C. Danto (1924-2013) was the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, art critic for The Nation, and author of many books about art and philosophy. He coined the term “artworld.”

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