The dispute over one work of art, Degas's Landscape with Smokestacks, was featured in headlines and on television. But because the suit was settled before trial, the story behind the headlines has not been publicly presented. Howard J. Trienens, a lawyer for the defendant collector, traces the landscape's travels from its pre-WWII home to its current location in the Art Institute of Chicago, laying out the mystery surrounding the work and demonstrating the legal complexities that surround Holocaust restitution cases, yet are seldom examined in depth by the media.
That modern art is different from earlier art is so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning. Yet there is little agreement as to the meaning or the importance of this difference. Indeed, contemporary aestheticians, especially, seem to feel that modern art does not depart in any essential way from the art of the past. One reason for this view is that, with the exception of Marxism, the leading philosophical schools today are ahistorical in orientation. This is as true of phenomenology and existentialism as it is of contemporary analytic philosophy. As a result there have been few attempts by philosophers to understand the meaning of the history of art—an understanding fundamental to any grasp of the difference between modern art and its predecessors.
