  Hegel’s judgment that modern artists are—and are quite rightly—free to adopt whatever style they please has surely been confirmed by the history of art since Hegel’s death in 1831. There is reason to suspect, however, that Hegel might not have welcomed many of the developments in post-Hegelian art. This is due to the fact that, although he does not lay down any rules that are to govern modern art, he does identify certain conditions that should be met if modern art is to be genuine art. Hegel notes, for example, that such art should “not contradict the formal law of being simply beautiful and capable of artistic treatment” (Aesthetics, 1: 605; VPK, 204). He insists that modern artists should draw their content from their own human spirit and that “nothing that can be living [lebendig] in the human breast is alien to that spirit.” He also remarks that modern art may represent “everything in which the human being as such is capable of being at home [heimisch]” (Aesthetics, 1: 607). These may appear to be fairly innocuous conditions, but they suggest that certain post-Hegelian art works would not count in Hegel’s eyes as genuine works of art. These might include works that by no stretch of the imagination can be called “beautiful” (such as some of the paintings of Willem De Kooning or Francis Bacon), or works in which it is evidently hard to feel very much “at home” (such as the writings of Franz Kafka). Hegel’s account of the different arts (such as sculpture and painting) also suggests that he would not have regarded the move from figurative to abstract visual art as appropriate: Netherlandish and Dutch painters excelled in the creating of “objective music” through the play of colors, yet they did so not in the abstract but in the very depiction of concrete, identifiable objects. (Robert Pippin takes a different view on this last point; see Pippin 2007.)