C's Aesthetics: Philosophy In The Painting

This new publication, co-published by Slought Books and the Center for Visual Culture, Bryn Mawr College, is authored by noted critic Joseph Masheck and explores the development of modernism and aesthetics through the work of postimpressionist Paul Cézanne. Masheck's innovative experiment in art criticism has been undertaken in the analytical tradition of twentieth-century philosophical thought.

"In that abstract painting was made possible by a cubism whose patron saint was the postimpressionist Cézanne, what follows is a 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, attempting to think, on its own terms but perhaps ‘forward’ again, through the work of a mythic ‘founder’ whose work opened so much future.

As should become evident in reading, the device of reducing the painter’s name to ‘C’ is something more than an analytical affectation: it is a way of defetishizing a name all too famous in one way (art) so that we may perhaps for once assess with some detachment what its bearer may have accomplished in other (aesthetic-philosophic) terms." -- from the preface to C’s Æsthetics