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. In After the Beautiful, Robert B. Pippin, looking at modernist paintings by artists such as Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne through Hegel&;s lens, does what Hegel never had the chance to do. While Hegel could never engage modernist painting, he did have an understanding of modernity, and in it, art&;he famously asserted&;was &;a thing of the past,&; no longer an important vehicle of self-understanding and no longer an indispensable expression of human meaning. Pippin offers a sophisticated exploration of Hegel&;s position and its implications. He also shows that had Hegel known how the social institutions of his day would ultimately fail to achieve his own version of genuine equality, a mutuality of recognition, he would have had to explore a different, new role for art in modernity. After laying this groundwork, Pippin goes on to illuminate the dimensions of Hegel&;s aesthetic approach in the path-breaking works of Manet, the &;grandfather of modernism,&; drawing on art historians T. J. Clark and Michael Fried to do so. He concludes with a look at Cézanne, the &;father of modernism,&; this time as his works illuminate the relationship between Hegel and the philosopher who would challenge Hegel&;s account of both modernity and art&;Martin Heidegger. Elegantly inter-weaving philosophy and art history, After the Beautiful is a stunning reassessment of the modernist project. It gets at the core of the significance of modernism itself and what it means in general for art to have a history. Ultimately, it is a testament, via Hegel, ...