{"product_id":"the-unknown-masterpiece-isbn-9780940322745","title":"The Unknown Masterpiece","description":"A New York Review Books Original\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne 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.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePublished here in a new translation by poet Richard Howard, \"The Unknown Masterpiece\" appears, as Balzac intended, with \"Gambara,\" a grotesque and tragic novella about a musician undone by his dreams.“The greatest novelist of the nineteenth century and perhaps of all time.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e “The hero of \u003ci\u003eThe Unknown Masterpiece\u003c\/i\u003e, Frenhofer, is one of Balzac’s archetypal artists. . .” —\u003ci\u003eTheWashington Post\u003c\/i\u003eHonoré 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, \u003ci\u003eLa Comedie Humaine,\u003c\/i\u003ewhich was the final result of his attempt to grasp the whole of society and experience into one varied but unified work.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRichard 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 \u003ci\u003eFleurs du mal\u003c\/i\u003e and a Pulitzer Prize for \u003ci\u003eUntitled Subjects\u003c\/i\u003e, a collection of poetry.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eArthur C. Danto (1924-2013) was the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, art critic for \u003ci\u003eThe Nation\u003c\/i\u003e, and author of many books about art and philosophy. He coined the term “artworld.”","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305094795493,"sku":"NP9780940322745","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780940322745.jpg?v=1767742006","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-unknown-masterpiece-isbn-9780940322745","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}