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 numer of different contexts, but in a twist of historical irony Hegel would die just before the most radical artistic revolution in history: modernism. In this work, Robert B. Pippin, looking at modernist paintings by artists such Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne through Hegel's lens, does what Hegel never had the chance to do.