For two centuries, Gesamtkunstwerk—the ideal of the “total work of art”—has exerted a powerful influence over artistic discourse and practice, spurring

In this groundbreaking book David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The

The Total Work of Art provides a broad survey that incorporates many canonical artists into a single narrative. With particular attention to the influence of th

Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Siegfried. Parsifal. Tristan und Isolde. Both revered and reviled, Richard Wagner conceived some of the nineteenth century’s

In The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork, artists, curators, and scholars from many countries and fields offer new ways of understanding the history and contempor