Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Yasmina Reza's Art. Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.
Art: Introduction
Art: Plot Summary
Art: Detailed Summary & Analysis
Art: Themes
Art: Quotes
Art: Characters
Art: Symbols
Art: Theme Wheel
Brief Biography of Yasmina Reza
Historical Context of Art
Other Books Related to Art
- Full Title: Art
- When Written: Early 1990s
- Where Written: Paris, France
- Literary Period: Contemporary
- Genre: Drama; comedy; absurdist theatre
- Setting: Paris, France
- Climax: After a long, savage night of verbally and physically fighting over Serge’s controversial acquisition of a two-hundred-thousand-franc, all-white painting, Serge urges his friend Marc, who was “disturbed” by Serge’s purchase, to desecrate the painting by drawing on it with one of their friend’s Yvan felt-tipped pens, as Yvan looks on in horror.
- Antagonist: The Antrios
Extra Credit for Art
Whiteout. Although the all-white painting Serge acquires is fake—as is its painter, the renowned “Antrios”—there are some very famous and very controversial all-white paintings in several important and well-respected galleries today. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is home to one of Robert Rauschenberg’s 1951 series White Paintings, a collection of modular all-white paintings featuring two-, three-, four-, and seven-panel pieces, which were conceived by the artist as art that “looked untouched by human hands.” The real-life inspiration for Antrios may very well be Robert Ryman, whose white paintings—which stretch back to the 1970s, the same time Serge says his Antrios was created—have sold for sums as high as $15 million dollars as recently as 2014, and a retrospective of Ryman’s all-white, “intellectual baggage”-inducing work was shown in New York City in 2015.