Despite being set in Paris at the beginning of the 17th century, The unknown masterpiece is a story in which Balzac deals with the nature of the contemporary art of his time and, to a large extent, his treatment of this subject is still valid today. This is due to the fact that Balzac examines certain aspects of human nature that had previously been described as myths (Prometheus, Pygmalion, etc.), i.e., anxiety, divine emulation, possession, the power of the mind, human weakness, and so on.

The result of Frenhofer's work is, at least, a masterpiece of excess, a piece that is worked to such an extreme that it becomes indecipherable; a work of art, which has passed right through the mirror of reality from the outside world, to become a purely internal fantasy. Does this loss of a sense of reality pose a specific threat for artists, who cannot but examine themselves introspectively, lost or bewildered in the intricate labyrinths of their egos? Trapped by his destructive dream, without noticing, Frenhofer had destroyed what he himself had created, with the result that in the end (as he himself pathetically recognises), he is left with nothing.

In spite of this, some artists of the second half of the 20th century, practised a kind of painting with many similarities to Balzac's negative description (non painting) of the work of Frenhofer. From Kandinsky onwards, most abstract impressionists (Rothko, De Kooning, Krasner, etc.), informalists of different kinds (Jorn, Saura, Forg...), the new breed of abstract artists (Scully, Polke,...) and several non figurative artists (Basquiat, Marcaccio...) converted into "art" what until then could only have been conceived as "madness".

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