The present volume, translated and edited by Stefano Catucci, is the first Italian collection of Leo Popper's most significant essays.
Leo Popper (1886-1911) is a unique essayist of the early twentieth century. He grew up in Budapest like György Lukács, a close friend of his, and died of tuberculosis before reaching the age of 25. After receiving a solid musical education in his early youth, he devoted himself mostly to painting and it is only in relation to this activity that he cultivated aesthetic theory and art criticism. This hierarchy of interests emerges very clearly from his essays, only a few of which were published during his lifetime.
Leo Popper approaches art from an immanent point of view. He places great importance on the technique, the materials, and the practical aspects of the artist's work. Such an approach enables him to re-elaborate in original ways many of the issues that were central to early twentieth-century debates on aesthetics: from the ornament (Riegl) to functional beauty (Loos), from the difference between abstraction and empathy (Worringer) to that between talent and genius (Weininger). In all of these cases, Popper distances himself in radical ways from psychologism, as well as from the most extreme kinds of functionalism, and in his aesthetics he adopts "form" as a key concept.
Another important aspect of Popper's thought, as it emerges from his essays on "Kitsch" (1910), is the fundamental "ethical" dimension that underpins the entire formal structure of the work of art. "Kitsch" is a symbol of the ethical reversal of modernity, because it is both a challenge to the laws of weight and a type of individualism bound to failure. At the same time, however, a new means of transportation like the airplane (cfr. "Towards an Aesthetic of Airplanes", 1910) shows how technology has yet to adjust its relationship with aesthetics.
All of Leo Popper's essays are informed also by another concept that had never discussed in great detail, though it undoubtedly represents his most original and lasting contribution to aesthetics: the notion of misunderstanding. According to Hans Robert Jauss, Leo Popper's approach to the notion of "misunderstanding" foreshadows the modern aesthetic of reception. And it is for similar reasons that György Lukács, whose early works were strongly influenced by Popper, could describe him as «a unique case in the history of art criticism».