Introduction

This anthology is conceived as an introduction to recent thinking about the past of Marxist art history. It is not offered in the spirit of nostalgia – a kind of dusting off of relics – but as a prompt to critique and renewal. My assumption is that much of the history the contributors tell is little known in its specifics, and that its achievements are often misconstrued and undervalued.

The dominant mood in the art-historical academy of Britain and the United States today is a kind of liberal pluralism, an attitude that fosters tolerance of a range of different perspectives – in itself not an unworthy goal – but provides little or no incentive to debate between them, or to push their differences to a point of issue. Formalist art history, queer art history, feminist art history, post-colonial art history, and the social history of art coexist, with various overlaps and combinations, and behave as a set of rival specialisms. Marxist art history is at best a small side dish in this great smorgasbord, and is usually encountered only in diluted or adulterated forms. Two widely used anthologies published in the 1990s both assume that it is essentially obsolete,1 while a student textbook on ‘the New Art History’ that appeared in 2001 suggests that ‘classist Marxism’ – whatever that might be – has collapsed ‘under the weight of its corrupt and incompetent practical correlates’ and ‘because a rigorously conducted self-critique left most of its exponents unwilling to defend the traditional centrality of class’.² In brief, for these authors, the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites, and the turn of China to market Stalinism, has finally discredited Marxism, while postmodern theory has remaindered it. In effect, they all assume the ‘end of history’ position trumpeted most famously by Francis Fukayama; that is, that free-market capitalism and liberal democracy is the final terminus of human societies.³

To some extent, of course, we have been here many times before. The idea that the brutalities, horrors and inequalities of the Soviet experiment discredited Marxism as a theoretical system is not exactly new. Conservatives and liberals alike have always been eager to pronounce Marxism’s obsequies. At one level, what we see yet again is an absurd – though hardly disinterested – category mistake, a confusion between a state ideology and a complex system of critical thought. After all, it is from within the Marxist tradition itself that many of the fiercest and most insightful critiques of Stalinism have come – one only has to recall the names of Trotsky, Charles Bettelheim, Tony Cliff and Herbert Marcuse to get the point. But the debacle of the USSR reinforced the discrediting of social-democratic politics in western Europe and elsewhere, making the idea that state power could be used to meliorate the operations of capital in the interests of the broad masses of society apparently obsolete, and leading to a corruption of language whereby a reactionary regression to free-market principles was denoted by the term ‘reform’. This was represented ideologically in the neo-liberal mantra that there are no alternatives to the market and the current forms of the bourgeois state, despite the immiseration of the poorest and most disempowered in all societies where neo-liberal policies have been implemented and the degradation of the political process to new depths of corruption and inanity in the long-established democracies that has accompanied it.4 I am not, of course, suggesting that the art-history academy in Britain and the United States, which is by and large liberal or sentimentally social-democratic in its leanings, actively endorses neo-liberalism. But on the other hand the marginalisation of the one system of thought that speaks for systemic critique, rather than changes of attitude within the existing social arrangements, is not just coincidence. In effect, the overwhelming majority in the academy also accept that there is no alternative. The best we can hope for is a micro-politics of particular interest groups. Given the social make-up of the academy and its functions within the larger order of things this is hardly surprising, but it is also disabling at both the analytical and practical levels.

Neo-liberalism and the resurgence of imperialism in the aftermath of the Cold War have brought their own contradictions, the anti-globalisation and anti-war movements being among them. Although these movements stand outside the old traditions of the left in many respects, there has also been a marked revival of interest in Marxism and other traditions of radical thought, which is registered in numerous publications. It is these developments that provide the occasion for this book.

The method and principles of a Marxist art history do not come ready made from the legacy of Marxism’s founders. Although Marx intended to write on aesthetics on two occasions in his life, he never did so. Thus, as with so much else in Marxist theory, an aesthetics has to be pieced together from fragmentary statements and deduced from the larger premises underlying his and Engels’s texts on other matters.⁵ As the uninitiated reader will discover from this volume, there is an important strand within Marxist art history that denies that aesthetics, understood as a general theory of the arts, is consistent with Marxism at all. Thus, from one perspective at least, one can have a Marxist theory of art that supersedes aesthetics – but even this is no simple matter given the many competing interpretations there are of Marx’s method and the nature of his theory of history. All this is, of course, to say that Marxism is not any single theory, but rather a family of theories that registers the impact of a whole range of different historical circumstances on the understanding and development of the original texts, with all their gaps and provisionality. Many of the central premises of Marxism are still subject to fierce and ongoing debate, and are likely to remain so.6 Moreover, in a certain sense a Marxist art history is a contradiction in terms, in that Marxism as a totalising theory of society necessarily throws all disciplinary boundaries into question as obfuscations of bourgeois thought, and, in one variant, at least, sees them as a product of the reification of knowledge characteristic of capitalist society.⁷ The attempts by Riegl, Wölfflin and others to demarcate art history’s specific domain by giving art its own internal logic of development, centred on the category of style, might seem to precisely illustrate this phenomenon.⁸

But although Marxist art history has from the beginning attacked the premises of formalism, there is a way in which it is obliged to concede it certain insights, and this is because of the notion that the different spheres of intellectual production have what Engels called an ‘ inherent relative independence’.⁹ In a letter of 1890, Engels observed, in the face of the degradation of the Marxist method by younger ‘materialists’:

But our conception of history is above all a guide to study, not a lever for construction after the manner of the Hegelian. All history must be studied afresh, the conditions of existence of the different formations of society must be examined individually before the attempt is made to deduce from them the political, civil-law, aesthetic, philosophic, religious, etc., views corresponding to them.¹⁰

The correspondence of Engels’s later years shows him repeatedly working to correct the prevalent misconception that Marxism stood for a crude economic determinism:

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of material life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.¹¹

And what Engels had to say about determination in the last instance in relation to philosophy would have applied to art as well, namely that it came about

within the limitations imposed by the particular sphere itself: in philosophy, for instance, by the operation of economic influences… upon the existing philosophic material handed down by predecessors. Here economy creates nothing anew, but it determines the way in which the thought material found in existence is altered and further developed, and that too for the most part indirectly…¹²

Thus the tradition of German-language art history still speaks to us in important ways, because more than any other variant of the discipline it posited art’s specific domain in philosophically sophisticated ways, and continues to raise key issues about the relation of historical explanation to aesthetics.

It should be clear from this that within the broad purview of historical materialism art was left with a considerable degree of relative autonomy, and it provided no formulas as to how the determining influence of the economic was to be understood in its relationship with all the other causal factors. Such matters could only be established on an individual basis. Thus, while Marx and Engels were insistent that the production of art had to be understood as complexly determined by social interests, they acknowledged it as a special activity, the development of which was partly the result of endless reworking of the traditions and inherited materials of its particular domain. The question for their successors was how to relate these two characteristics. Further, neither did their literary remains indicate how the so-called science of aesthetics was to be understood. That it fell within the category of ideology was clear enough, but what was its truth content, if indeed it had any? How could the questions of judgement that were its central province be related to the historical critique of class societies that seemed to be Marxism’s principle task? Most importantly, was there a way in which the meanings of art (or at least some art) exceeded the category of ideology, and if so, how did they do it?

Marxists of the generation after Marx and Engels inevitably had to turn their attention to questions of culture as Marxism – particularly in Germany – was transformed into the ideology of increasingly large working-class parties within the bourgeois democratic order that sought to offer their members a holistic vision of the world to be counterposed to the culture and values of the dominant class and its allies.13 Leading thinkers within the Second Socialist International (founded 1889) who gave their attention to cultural questions included Georgii Plekhanov and Franz Mehring, both of whose writings were at times reference points for some of the figures covered in this anthology.¹⁴ However, by far the most original and profound Marxist writer on art of this generation was William Morris, hence his inclusion here. Caroline Arscott’s chapter is representative of a new wave of Marxist scholarship on Morris’s thought and practice, which should produce a recognition that his aesthetics and historical vision are far more sophisticated than has been recognised hitherto, even by his Marxist admirers.¹⁵ The originality of Morris’s Marxism is partly to be understood through the fact that his particular intellectual formation within the Romantic movement made it possible for him to think about art in ways that are more akin to those of the young Marx than of more ‘orthodox’ Marxists such as Plekhanov and Mehring, whose outlook partook of the positivistic tendencies of the Second International. (In this regard, it is not coincidental that unlike them Morris remained a revolutionary Marxist, and was unwavering in his rejection of reformism.)16 The Second International also provided the political frame for the first Marxist art historians proper, namely Wilhelm Hausenstein and Eduard Fuchs. Walter Benjamin’s critique of the latter – the subject of Frederic Schwartz’s chapter – focuses precisely on the limitations of such a scientistic approach to the understanding of art’s history and its import.¹⁷

The success of the Bolshevik revolutionary model in Russia in 1917 impelled a reorientation of Marxist thought, which quickly assumed international dimensions with its adoption by new parties across the world and the setting up of the Third International in 1919. Yet as the 1920s progressed, political conditions in the USSR became increasingly inimical to critical Marxist work, and the Stalinisation of the international communist movement produced similar results elsewhere. But however stifling and banal the emergent Stalinist orthodoxy and however tarnished the image of the first workers’ state, the Soviet Union stood as a stimulus – and increasingly a challenge – to creative thought. Moreover, Stalinism was not a system created overnight, and until the Central Committee’s decree of April 1932 ‘On the Reconstruction of Literary and Artistic Organisations’ there were numerous competing artistic groupings within the USSR itself. Indeed, the atmosphere of debate was intensified by the Cultural Revolution of 1928–31 that accompanied the collectivisation of agriculture and the First Five-Year Plan. The renewed ‘class war’ policy of these years had as its cultural corollary a campaign against the bourgeois intelligentsia and the promotion of a new proletarian intellectual cadre. This was precisely the agenda of the largest and most powerful writers’ organisation of the period, namely RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), which aggressively advocated a class conception of literature, realist in subject matter and straightforward in style. Although RAPP’s theorising was to feed in to the doctrine of Socialist Realism that became official doctrine at the Soviet Writers’ Congress of 1934, it was not the same thing – and indeed, both the April Decree and the new doctrine partly marked a reconciliation with the traditional intelligentsia.¹⁸ Further, the essentially sociological conception of literary value that RAPP took up from the writings of Plekhanov was to be contested in the 1930s by Mikhail Lifshits and Georg Lukács, who were the first major theorists to develop an aesthetics informed by Marx’s early writings, then becoming available in published form. By contrast with RAPP’s incipiently instrumentalised conception of art, Lifshits and Lukács advanced a model of the aesthetic that was in effect an affirmation of the cognitive achievements of classical bourgeois culture, a position that set them against both proletarianism and modernism. This was a very different notion of realism from that associated with Stalin’s vision of writers as ‘engineers of human souls’.¹⁹ As Stanley Mitchell shows in his chapter on Lifshits, for both thinkers aesthetics was a terrain on which they could contest Stalinism in a way that was impossible in other areas of intellectual life that were perceived as closer to the political.20

While figures such as Frederick Antal, Francis Klingender, Meyer Schapiro and Max Raphael all had phases of contact with the communist movement and may at times have passed as fellow-travellers, this does not mean that they suspended their critical faculties – the three latter, at least, became disenchanted, and in Schapiro’s case moved close to Trotskyism. As will be evident from the chapters that follow, they arrived at no common theory and their work is strikingly various in style and method. Of the four, Klingender’s art history is the least interesting methodologically, and is also clearly marked by the agenda of the Popular Front line that impacted so powerfully on cultural production of the years 1935–39. Yet as David Bindman points out, the cultural correlates of Popular Front thinking, however shallow the Marxism involved, propelled Klingender into a creative rethinking of art-historical inquiry that led him to consider radically novel questions and to address aspects of British visual culture hitherto considered beneath art historians’ attention.²¹

Klingender’s lack of formal art-historical training may account in some degree for the freshness of his approach, as well as its limitations. But the same cannot be said of Antal, who Paul Stirton shows was deeply immersed in the German-language traditions of the discipline. Moreover, his personal formation within Germany and Austria put him in contact with a far more sophisticated Marxist culture than anything that could be found in British communist circles. In the ‘Introduction’ to his Florentine Painting and its Social Background Antal had disavowed the conventional assumption that the development of pictorial naturalism provided a criterion according to which styles were either ‘progressive’ or ‘retrogressive’, and indeed queried whether the art of ‘long periods or entire centuries’ should be so judged.²² This certainly flew in the face of authoritative voices in contemporary Soviet aesthetics who argued that there were absolute criteria of value, and that ancient Greek art was progressive while medieval art was inherently less so; that realism was the style of the advanced artists who identified with the cause of the workers and peasants everywhere, while modernism was shot through with symptoms of the bourgeoisie’s cultural decline.²³ However, in his insistence that style and the ‘thematic elements’ that were in the final analysis a symptom of ‘the general outlook on life’ were ultimately inextricable,²⁴ Antal’s position allowed for the possibility that there could be a kind of historical judgement on style. That this was the case is confirmed by his attack on l’art pour l’art and assertion of the value of artists such as Hogarth, Goya and Daumier.²⁵ It would be wrong to think of Antal as advocating simply a species of art history as ideology critique, with points being awarded to artworks according to the measure of their contribution to humanity’s progress towards history’s communist endpoint. He was far too sophisticated for that. Rather, in the face of the increasing authority of a modernist aesthetic in Britain that conceived artistic production and response as taking place in some realm apart of transcendental values, it was necessary to assert that form and meaning were inseparable, and that some kinds of pictorial art that Bell, Fry and their admirers demeaned as having merely literary qualities, were no less worthy of art-historical attention and were themselves formally complex.

The challenge of what to do with modernist art from a Marxist perspective, which became more acute after Socialist Realism became the communist movement’s official aesthetic in 1934, was approached far more consistently by Raphael and Schapiro. Like Antal, both accepted German-language art history as the most advanced model in the field,26 at the same time as they subjected it to critique. Both were extraordinarily wide-ranging in their interests, and more theoretically ambitious than any other Marxist art historians of their generation, Hauser excepted. (How many art historians of any stripe have thought it appropriate to write a substantial work on epistemology, as Raphael did?)²⁷ As Stanley Mitchell’s analysis of Raphael’s critique of Picasso’s Guernica reveals, Raphael viewed modernism critically, but also accepted it as the most significant art of his time. In this respect, he and Schapiro are similar, and they were friends until differences over the Moscow Trials separated them.²⁸ More than Antal, they both stood for what Schapiro called ‘the ultra-empirical attention, which is the appropriate aesthetic attitude’.²⁹ However, as I argue in Chapter 7, Schapiro embraced modernist art with perhaps more sympathy, and lived into a period in which it seemed necessary to defend it because it seemed the aesthetic correlate to the survival of any critical culture within either the bourgeois democracies or the Soviet bloc.

Raphael and Schapiro should properly be identified with that current in twentieth-century Marxist thought known as Western Marxism, which was premised on a refusal of both the positivistic variant of the Second International and the philosophical crudities of the Soviet version, and stood for a more open and critical appraisal of the Marxist tradition. For the most part, Western Marxist thinkers were not only distanced from the practical struggles of the working-class movements, they were also more receptive to developments in bourgeois thought, and generally more concerned with problems of philosophy and culture than with those of economics and politics.³⁰ Three other thinkers represented in this volume are conventionally associated with this tradition, namely Benjamin, Lefebvre and Hauser. The chapters on the two former are included because of their immense influence within art-historical practice over the last three decades. Yet as Frederic Schwartz points out, the appropriation of Benjamin has been highly selective, and his most important statement on art history has been curiously neglected – one can only suspect because the methodological and political challenge it represents is so uncompromising and hard to realise. Lefebvre, too, has been very partially read, and his early writings, which belong to the period of his two-decade involvement with the Partie Communiste Française, have been either dismissed or ignored. None the less, as Marc Léger illustrates, they are texts of considerable interest that exemplify the resistance of intellectuals who felt it was necessary to support the existing forms of the working-class movement, at the same time as they rejected Stalinism.31 They also exemplify how aesthetic questions could function as a kind of pressure point in relation to larger issues of both Marxist theory and the goal of socialist transformation.

Arnold Hauser’s Social History of Art (1951) has often served as the scapegoat for a Marxist art history, which is at one level ironic, given that its author claimed to ‘separate theory and practice in Marxism’, to be ‘a scientist’ without ‘a political task’.³² Yet even that inveterate Cold Warrior Ernst Gombrich felt obliged to acknowledge some merit in Hauser’s monumental project,³³ and his other books, particularly The Philosophy of Art History and Mannerism, have seldom received their due from the art-historical left in the English-speaking countries.³⁴ In Chapter 9, John Roberts shows that Hauser was engaged in a complex dialogue with the work of Lukács and Adorno, and whatever the limitations in his analyses of specific works, some of his larger theses continue to command attention.

This book is primarily concerned with the recovery and re-evaluation of Marxist art history, and related aesthetic literature, up to c.1985. In this regard, it is in part a continuation of a project that began more than 30 years ago with the emergence of a New Left art history. I have not at this point in time thought it appropriate to include chapters evaluating the achievements of individual figures from that later moment, and consideration of developments since then would require another volume. Instead, I sketch the international history of the New Left in the art-history field in Chapter 10, while Jutta Held and O.K. Werckmeister give accounts of key developments in the German movement in the final two chapters. Our anthology is in no sense intended as the final word on this history.³⁵ If it serves to spark renewed interest and fresh critical debate, it will have done its job.