10
New Left Art History’s International
The project of a Marxist art history, like any other political project, is necessarily a collective one. In this essay I sketch the movement out of which our contemporary practice issues in the form of an institutional and bibliographical account. This is followed by a consideration of the theoretical issues that were raised by the work of the 1970s and 1980s and on the significance of its heritage for us today.
Like the radical student movement of the 1960s from which it drew its dissident energies, the art history of the New Left was an international phenomenon. In effect, it was the product of groupings of various strengths in Britain, France, Germany and the United States, which achieved some degree of common cause through personal contacts, conferences, and the diffusion of translated material in the small periodicals each generated. Pre-eminent amongst these groupings in its size and level of organisation was that in Germany, where the student movement had been given a focus in the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), which split from the Social Democratic Party in 1961. The SDS was not only exceptionally effective in critiquing the undemocratic character of university education and demonstrating against US imperialism, it was also theoretically engaged with the highly sophisticated Marxism of the Frankfurt School, which offered one of the most productive strands of cultural analysis within the broad tradition of Marxist thought. In 1968, year of mass student demonstrations throughout Germany, a group of progressive art historians formed the Ulmer Verein für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften (UV) at the Congress of the Verband Deutscher Kunsthistoriker (VDK) in Ulm, with an agenda for the radical reform and democratization of art history, partly driven by the continuing presence of former National Socialists within the German university system. Two years later, in a session on ‘Das Kunstwerk zwischen Wissenschaft und Weltanschauung’ at the VDK Congress, a group of younger art historians gave papers united by a common insistence that the discipline could not be seen simply as an objective science, and arguing its ideological complicity with various social interests.1 In 1974 the UV launched its own organ, Kritische Berichte, which took its title from the famous inter-war journal of the same name, and a series of books eventually appeared under its imprint.2 By 1977, the UV claimed around 400 members and had effectively become a rival to the VDK, no longer just an offshoot.3 The intellectual ground for this impressive collective achievement had evidently been laid in the 1960s, as the beginning of the following decade saw the appearance of a sequence of major Marxist art-historical publications, including Michael Müller and Reinhardt Bentmann, Die Villa als Herrschaftsarchiteckur (1971),4 Michael Müller et al., Autonomie der Kunst: Zur Genese und Kritik einer bürgerlichen Kategorie (1972) and O.K. Werckmeister, Ende der Ästhetik: Essays über Adorno, Bloch, das gelbe Unterseeboot und der eindimensionale Mensch (1971). Kritische Berichte in the 1970s was the forum for a whole range of gifted historians, including Horst Bredekamp, Jutta Held, Klaus Herding, Jost Hermand, Berthold Hinz, Kathryn Hoffmann-Curtius, Wolfgang Kemp, Hans-Ernst Mittig, Norbert Schneider and Martin Warnke among others. In addition to its engagement with the problems of art-historical pedagogy and the museums (critical exhibition reviews were a particularly lively component of the journal), its innovative features included articles on the social history of architecture, on the arts under National Socialism and on the history of photography. Although appraisals of the work of Antal, Hauser and Raphael appeared in its pages, its contributors seemed relatively unconcerned by the example of earlier Marxist art history, but instead, and unsurprisingly in the context, treated the theory of the Frankfurt School as the key model with which they had to engage.5 However, the attitude of Werckmeister (who had been based in the United States at the University of California at Los Angeles since 1965), as articulated in a forceful essay of 1973 titled ‘Ideologie und Kunst bei Marx’,6 seems to have been shared by many.
Werckmeister argued that the Marxist aesthetics of the Soviet bloc and of the Frankfurt School, however different in some respects, were both symptoms of the fact that the goal of revolutionary change was off the agenda in ‘a politically stabilized, static socio-economic order’. Marx himself had not formulated an aesthetics, not because he never found the time, but because it was fundamentally incompatible with his notion of art as an activity ‘free of any social purpose’, which was perennially estranged from its own essence throughout history and was subsumed under the category of ideology in class societies. The very project of aesthetics as a science of art in general that covered a whole range of diverse practices was itself precisely the kind of ideological abstraction to which Marx and Engels had counter-posed their own science of history. Far from art being the embodiment of a special kind of truth as aesthetics proposed,
the more historical research relates the messages of art works from the past and present to the socially conditioned functions for which they were originally intended, the more the concept of ideology, by which their seeming truths and values are reconverted into the subjective beliefs and purposes of those who lived with it, imposes itself as the fundamental category of a history of art true to its name.7
Trenchant as the presentation of Werckmeister’s argument was, his conception of the relationship between art and ideology seems undialectical, and there will be plenty of Marxists who find his conception of Marx’s method too straightforwardly naturalistic to register adequately the complex relations between the dialectic and empirical inquiry that characterises his mature writings.8 However, the relationship between dialectic and naturalism in Marxist method is a matter of continuing debate, and Werckmeister’s work matches with a long tradition in Marxist thought that has generated work of considerable stature.9
It is a sign of the alienation of the 1960s student generation from the dominant institutions and values of contemporary bourgeois culture – the evident complicity of museums and academic institutions with capitalist interests and state power – that the art historians of the New Left in other national contexts would arrive at the same conclusion, even though they did so by different theoretical routes. Despite the range and exemplary character of the work of the UV historians, surprisingly little of it has appeared in English,10 and many in the British and American art-historical New Left do not seem quite to have grasped its collective import. Further accounts of the German art-historical left are given in the essays by Jutta Held and O.K. Werckmeister in this volume.11
When art historians from Germany met with invited representatives from Britain (T.J. Clark) and the United States (David Kunzle) at a colloquium on Marxist art history in Marburg in June 1979 and heard reports on the left art-history movements in their countries, these seemed very small and under-organised by comparison with the German scene.12 With regard to the United States, this can have been less the effect of a lack of student militancy than of the absence of any significant party of the left and the virtual eradication of Marxism as an intellectual tradition within the nation during the Cold War. In fact, Students for a Democratic Society (1960–70) boasted an organisation equal to that of the German SDS. But the formation of the American art-historical New Left was less coordinated and more bound up with the rise of militant artists’ organisations and the women’s movement than its German counterpart. In this regard, it is relevant that art historians’ main professional organisation in the United States, the College Art Association (CAA), is also that for artists. The first sign of a radical critique of both art history and art practice from within the professions was the formation of the New Art Association (NAA) of the CAA in January 1970 as ‘an active and critical group’ within the larger organisation. Among the art historians who participated in this were Carol Duncan, Edward Fry, Patricia Hills, Eunice Lipton, Linda Nochlin, D. Stephen Pepper and Alan Wallach. In October and November of that year, the NAA held a three-day conference at the State University of New York at Buffalo, attended by more than a hundred participants. ‘We are against the artificial segregation of the study of art from other disciplines and its careful protection from social issues’, and ‘We are against the fragmentation of knowledge which suppresses the real implication of our cultural heritage by providing an ideology which upholds the racist, patriarchal and class structure of our society’, its manifesto asserted.13 At the CAA’s annual meeting at the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago in February 1971, the swanky official banquet contrasted with the NAA panel on the theme of ‘The Politics of Culture: An Open Forum on the Political and Economic Underpinnings of the Visual Arts’ held across the hall, which included satirical presentations by the Art Workers Coalition.14 Unfortunately, all this energy was not given focus by a clear political or theoretical agenda, and after a disastrous second convention held at the School of the Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio, in October, the NAA petered out.15
The New Art Association was more concerned with issues of artists’ economic needs, academic employment and pedagogy than with theory.16 But that theory was needed was evident to socialist–feminists involved with the first of the feminist art journals, Women and Art, who in 1972 published a special supplement ‘On Art and Society’ which reprinted Meyer Schapiro’s then little-known paper ‘The Social Bases of Art’ and Max Raphael’s previously untranslated ‘Workers and the Historical Heritage of Art’ amongst other texts.17 The alliance between radical artists and art historians was also vividly represented by an anti-catalog, produced by a number of different artists’ groupings who banded together in late 1975 under the name of Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (AMCC) to critique the Whitney Museum of American Art’s decision to display the collection of Mr and Mrs John D. Rockefeller III as a bicentennial exhibit of Three Centuries of American Art, despite the private character of the collection and the fact that it included work by only one woman artist and none by black artists. ‘Such a celebration of exploitation and acquisition was hardly an appropriate homage to our long-buried revolution’, the AMCC asserted. In the face of an exhibition that constructed the ‘“history” of American art from the standpoint of the ruling class’, the Catalog Committee of the AMCC produced an eighty-page collective text that sought to ‘demystify’ that history under such headings as ‘The Love of Art and the Love of Public Relations’, ‘Black Art and Historical Omission’, and ‘Looking for Women in the Rockefeller Collection.’18 The anti-catalog was not academic art history, but more a combination of artists’ book and artist activism played out in the form of art-historical critique – and none the worse for that. Like so many other initiatives of the period, it was a space in which a critical and historical discourse was generated outside the constraints of academia and mainstream art publishing. What it lacked in terms of scholarly polish, it more than made up for in terms of political edge and collective agency.19
The same year that AMCC formed, three art historians at the University of California at Los Angeles – T.J. Clark, David Kunzle, and O.K. Werckmeister – initiated the idea for a session on ‘Marxism and Art History’ at the annual CAA conference of 1976, which led to the formation of the Caucus for Marxism and Art History, subsequently renamed the Caucus for Marxism and Art to acknowledge the broadening of its base to include politically radical artists such as Rudolf Baranik, Ursula Meyer, Martha Rosler, May Stevens and Allan Sekula. The Caucus organised sessions (usually more than one) at the CAA’s conferences over the years 1976–80, sessions that drew large audiences and prompted vigorous debate. At the first of these occasions, statements by the speakers were available in mimeograph sets, and the proceedings of the meetings of 1977, 1978 and 1979 were also published. However, the Caucus had neither enough members nor sufficient funds to launch a journal of its own, and by 1979 leading figures such as Clark and Werckmeister were losing interest in it and it was having difficulty generating sufficient papers by North American scholars to justify a session, or indeed its own continuance. In this regard, the fate of the Marxist Caucus contrasts strikingly with the continued growth and vitality of the CAA Women’s Caucus for Art (launched in 1972) and the succession of feminist institutional initiatives and art magazines in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1980, both the Marxist Caucus sessions at the CAA conference in New Orleans were given over to women speakers addressing questions of feminism and ‘the politics of sexuality’ – although this was conceived as a gesture of solidarity with the Women’s Caucus, many of whose members chose to boycott the event to protest the fact that Louisiana had not ratified the Equal Rights Amendment.20 In 1976, the CAA had devoted a whole issue of its quarterly Art Journal to feminist art history, and in 1982 the first anthology on the theme appeared.21 By contrast, not only were the Marxist art historians unable to realise a collective volume illustrating Marxist approaches, they either published in the new British journal Art History, or tried to make a space in non-specialist Marxist periodicals such as the brilliant but short-lived Marxist Perspectives (1978–80) or the California-based Praxis: A Journal of Radical Perspectives on the Arts (1975–82). Their weakness also contrasted with that of American left-wing historians, who in 1973 had established the Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians’ Organization, and in the following year launched the dynamic Radical History Review, which was (and remains) alert to cultural matters.22
In the years around 1950, Antal and Hauser had both assumed (mistakenly at that point) that a ‘social history of art’ was becoming the common sense of the discipline.23 Two decades later, this seemed to those in the Marxist Caucus to be precisely the problem. At its first session in 1976, there was reportedly ‘considerable debate around the difference between a Marxist approach to art and the social history of art as practiced by historians not calling themselves Marxist’, and in his paper T.J. Clark observed the way in which ‘experience’ substituted for ideology in that kind of art history ‘which feels the need to refer to those historical realities with which artist and patron are constantly in contact, but which dares not name those structures which mediate and determine the nature of that contact’, citing Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, but also doubtless thinking of J.J. Pollitt’s Art and Experience in Classical Greece (both published in 1972).24 Clark argued that art history had to be fought on its own terrain, that Marxism should demonstrate its superiority to ‘bourgeois art history’ by showing that its own procedures generated a more complex and real grasp of artworks than its rival, for all that rival’s ‘much vaunted “contact with the object”, its spermatorrhoeic love affair with “creativity” and “genius”’. By Marx’s own example, revolutionary politics was not to be separated from theoretical work or patient labour in the libraries and archives. The emphasis of Werckmeister’s paper was rather on the inherent contradictions that Marxist art history faced within ‘a capitalist society which shows no sign of being actively changed in a direction envisaged by Marxist political theory’: a ‘critical art history, by its own dynamic as a social science, is bound to turn against the ideological functions which art is assigned in capitalist institutions’. It was obliged ‘to become one of the critical factors within this society’ and to aim for producing in students the ‘coherent historical consciousness which is the condition for political consciousness’.25 The two statements were not contradictory, but in retrospect they seem to foretell a difference of emphasis with regard to art history’s political instrumentality that would be reinforced by other differences.
Despite these acute opening statements, the Marxist Caucus did not generate a sustained theoretical or political debate – or at least none that has left a printed record. The most significant theoretical statement it published was Peter Klein’s critique of Hauser’s social history of art, which argued that Hauser’s model was ‘overly schematic’, and effectively represented a mapping of Wölfflinian style history onto a social and cultural history that owed more to Weber and Mannheim than it did to Marx. Hauser’s positions on ideology and aesthetic value were self-contradictory and implied ‘an abdication of critical, scientific rationality’. All told, they represented an ‘undigested amalgam of ethical idealism and historical materialism’ that betrayed the fact that he, unlike his friend Lukács, had not escaped the thinking of pre-First World War Budapest intellectual circles. His was the ‘harmless, castrated Marxism’ of ‘a typical left bourgeois’, comparable to ‘most members of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas, etc.)’.26 This onslaught on historicism was matched by a paper on the implications of the changing historical reception of works of art for ideology critique by the Paris-based Greek art historian Nicos Hadjinicolaou, intended to defend arguments against aesthetics he had already advanced in his 1973 book Histoire de l’art et lutte des classes.27 In the context, it seems striking that there was no attempt to assess the heritage of Meyer Schapiro’s work, apart from a rather inept attempt by Donald Kuspit to identify the dialectical element within it.28
In the event, the CAA Marxist Caucus saw the presentation of a number of papers that would issue in some of the classic essays of Marxist art history of the 1970s by scholars such as Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, Serge Guilbaut, David Kunzle and Eunice Lipton.29 But that the pool of such scholarship was severely restricted is illustrated by the fact that the most powerful contributions to the last of the published Proceedings were by non-American scholars, namely Michel Melot, of the French Histoire et critique des arts group, and the Caucus’s UK representative, Adrian Rifkin.30 After 1980 the Caucus dissipated. This does not mean, of course, that Marxist art history simply disappeared from the scene, and many of the individuals who had been involved in the Caucus continued to produce politically engaged work, but they did so without the collective focus the Caucus had briefly provided.
In Britain, where academic art history was a relative latecomer and a much smaller affair than in North America, there was no professional body for the discipline until the formation of the Association of Art Historians (AAH) in 1974. Although from 1976 onwards both session themes and individual papers at the AAH’s annual conference demonstrated interest in the conjunction of art and social history, and T.J. Clark gave a plenary paper at the 1977 meeting,31 the first clearly Marxist-oriented session was that headed ‘Art/Politics’, organised by Adrian Rifkin for the 1980 conference. Throughout the 1980s the AAH’s annual meetings provided the occasion for a sequence of forums with some Marxist papers, but after the end of the decade such contributions were distinctly in a minority.32 Under the liberal and imaginative editorship of John Onians, its journal Art History (launched in 1978) was quite receptive to Marxist work33 – as was the Oxford Art Journal, which was set up by a group of Oxford postgraduates in the same year. However, it is symptomatic of the sociology of British education that the most important and stimulating textual focus for critical art history in Britain was not the discipline’s official journal, but a magazine put out on a shoestring budget by a group of art and design historians at Middlesex Polytechnic under the Constructivist-sounding title Block, which was launched in 1979.34 Of necessity, this group was primarily oriented towards art practice and more concerned with design history and the mass media, since outside the universities art historians were employed mainly to teach art and design students and worked in institutions at that time far more open to various forms of media studies and to interdisciplinary work.35 Block’s bold sans serif titles and its double-column layout were also part of its challenge, making it feel more like a topical magazine than some dusty academic journal.
Block is partly a register of the extraordinary vitality of the educational culture that was created by the 1960s student generation before the Conservative Party’s education cuts and the so-called ‘reforms’ that imposed oppressive management regimes, increasingly onerous workloads and a philistine culture of relentless quantification on the colleges and polytechnics, subsequently re-branded as ‘new universities’. The radicalism of the 1960s also had an afterlife in a whole range of cognate publications with which Block and its contributors were in dialogue, publications such as the stencilled papers of Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Camerawork, History Workshop Journal, Radical Philosophy, Red Letters and Screen. From the outset, Block’s quality of vibrant cultural radicalism partly came from the artists its editors managed to involve, including, amongst others, Rudolf Baranik, Susan Hiller, Mary Kelly, Barbara Kruger, Nancy Spero and May Stevens. Moreover, artists did not only provide examples of their work; some – Terry Atkinson, Peter Dunn, Lorraine Leeson, Tony Rickaby, Martha Rosler and Jo Spence among them – contributed major critical and historical pieces. For instance, Rickaby’s article on the Artists’ International Association was a groundbreaking piece of research on communist cultural history, while Spence’s on Heartfield’s photomontage remains an exemplary instance of Marxist–feminist analysis.36
The Marxist orientation of many of Block’s contributions in the journal’s first three years was pronounced. However, it was a Marxism very different in flavour from that of the groupings I have referred to in Germany and the United States, because of the particular direction of New Left cultural analysis in Britain more broadly. In this regard, the main disciplinary loci for theoretical work were not art history, but historical, literary and film studies, the latter in particular constituting a kind of perceived avant-garde. In all these areas in the 1970s it seemed to many as if the Marxism of Louis Althusser was at the cutting edge of ‘theoretical practice’, to invoke that philosopher’s own terminology. But what accompanied Althusser’s Marxism – and indeed at the time to many seemed readily compatible with his particular variant – were a semiology drawn from Barthes and a theory of the subject drawn from psychoanalysis, and more specifically from Lacan.37 Apart from an article by John Tagg on Raphael in the second issue, the Block-ites generally showed little interest in the earlier achievements of Marxist art history, and the work of Althusser and his follower Pierre Macherey generally served as a measure for the past.38 Both Alan Wallach and Adrian Rifkin wrote of the need for Marxist art historians to make a proper appraisal of their own ancestry, and particularly the work of Antal, but this call was not heeded in the pages of Block or elsewhere.39 Part of the problem was that the category of style, so crucial to the art history of Antal, Hauser and Schapiro because of their need to supersede the German-language art history that offered the most sophisticated theoretical models to date, seemed to have been remaindered by the arrival of structuralist theories of meaning, which claimed greater scientific exactitude and were seen as inherently superior to models of style history tainted with Hegelian idealism. The fact that Saussurean linguistics itself was vulnerable to the charge of idealism was recognised by some, but this did not lead to any deeper appraisal of the value of style, which was seen as one cause of the overly generalised correlations between art and ideology in the work of Antal and Hauser.40 In the fervid embrace of French intellectual trends, the achievements and complexities of the German-language tradition of art history were consigned to the has-beens.
I do not want to suggest that some of Block’s more reflective contributors were unaware of problems in the Screen theory model, that the ‘applicability to the visual image of a theory primarily developed in relation to the literary text’ could not be assumed, or that ‘the seductiveness of Barthes’ rhetoric should not blind us to the idealism in the implicit separation of signification from production’, for instance.41 Neither do I want to belittle the seriousness with which these issues were addressed. But it seems now (as it did to the author then) that theory always needed to be corrected through yet more theory in a condition of perpetual change, so that fundamental problems of the relationship between say the systems of Lacan and Foucault and historical materialism were never worked out, and the practice of Marxist historical analysis itself was not developed in relation to the new model – partly perhaps because it could not be. This was a problem that Rifkin identified in a note appended to the incisive assessment of the challenges facing a Marxist art history that made up his opening talk at the 1980 ‘Art/Politics’ session as it appeared in Block:
I would have liked… to have dealt with some new obstructions, some of which arise not from a dogmatic Marxism, but from an over openness that tends to eclecticism, to a mingling of different conceptual structures, with little regard either for their concrete philosophical relation to each other, or to their political and social character.42
Unfortunately, although some major essays in Marxist historical work appeared in Block,43 this reckoning between historical materialism and these sundry more recent developments did not take place in its pages. A sign of the times was Griselda Pollock’s article ‘Vision, Voice and Power: Feminist Art History and Marxism’ of 1982. While at one level this was a critique of some established variants of feminist art history and a call for them to be corrected through a sophisticated Althusserian Marxism, in arguing that feminists should make a ‘fruitful raiding of Marxism for its explanatory instruments’ to advance their own agenda, Pollock left the relationship between Marxism and feminism as political projects undefined, and, correspondingly, seemed to assume that no theoretical reconciliation between the two was possible.44 When in 1985 Block’s editors looked back on the ten issues that they had seen through the press, they made clear that the orientation of the magazine was firmly of the left, but made no reference to Marxism or socialism.45 The savage attack on the institutions of British social democracy and the trade unions (and particularly the shattering defeat of the 1984–85 miners’ strike) by the Thatcher government provides one context for this. But another is the concurrent sense of intellectual disarray produced by the advent of postmodernism. We can take John Tagg’s 1985 article ‘Art History and Difference’ as more broadly symptomatic of the intellectual mood. ‘Five to ten years ago’, Tagg wrote, ‘it was possible to imagine a central unified project, crucially marked by the conjunction of Marxism and Art History’, but ‘the confidence of ten years ago seems now in need of its own explanatory archaeology’. His conclusion was that ‘no singular strategy can do anything but conceal the inherent complexities and necessary diversity of response’. It was not that the supposed ‘Marxism–Feminism–psychoanalysis’ triplet would not hold together because they were conceptually incompatible, nor was it that the particular forms through which the three might be reconciled had yet to be achieved; it was rather that there was simply no ‘homogeneous Reality’ to which they all referred. Rather than being contradictory, social reality was simply diverse. Lacking an adequate concept of totality, lacking an adequate conception of the dialectic, Althusserian Marxism (with its feminist and semiological add-ons) collapsed in the face of the challenges of the postmodern. Lyotard trumped Marx!46 Thereafter, Marxist art history became increasingly rare in Block’s pages.
Another important focus for New Left art history, and one with a different theoretical focus, was History Workshop, which represented the alliance between politically engaged art historians and the new history from below associated with Marxist scholars such as Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson. Althusserianism was debated in the pages of the journal History Workshop, but implicitly, at least, it was Gramsci who provided the framework for its underlying project. As with Block, History Workshop was also a space in which the relations between Marxism and feminism were negotiated, and in 1982 the journal changed its subtitle from A Journal of Socialist Historians to A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Historians. The issue of Autumn 1978 had included a special feature on ‘Art, Politics, and Ideology’, which contained articles by the historians Hobsbawm and Louis James, the design historian John Heskett and the artist Tony Rickaby, and an introduction by Raphael Samuel that argued for a more visually aware social history and a more socially aware history of art.47 To this end, History Workshop organised intermittent ‘Art and Society Workshops’ between at least 1977 and the early 1980s, active players in these events including, among others, Tom Gretton, Hannah Mitchell, Stanley Mitchell, Alex Potts and Adrian Rifkin. Moreover, throughout the decade the journal published a small number of important articles on art-historical themes.48 Yet valuable as all this work was in broadening out art history’s remit and extending it beyond the familiar canon of great works into the realms of printed ephemera and other ‘low’ materials, it did not centrally address the key questions of the aesthetic and the constitution of art history’s special domain.
In a summary dismissal of Marxist art history, Donald Preziosi has suggested that it was counterposed to an ill-defined notion of the bourgeois discipline, which functioned as a kind of straw man.49 This is not the case. During the early and mid 1980s, New Left art historians in all the countries considered here published a sequence of swingeing exhibition critiques that indicted both the conceptual inconsequentiality of catalogues and displays, and the conservative political assumptions that underpinned them.50 In Britain, landscape painting functioned as a kind of ideological pressure point, both because of the intense mythologising that surrounded landscape in the culture at large, and because of the tensions between the Thatcher government’s modernising project (which included a symbolic assault on motifs within British conservatism associated with the party’s aristocratic residues) and its simultaneous ratcheting up of elements from traditional nationalist rhetoric to silence its internal critics and justify its bellicose foreign policy.51
The 1970s had seen a sequence of innovative exhibitions around British landscape painting at London’s Tate Gallery, which already intimated a new approach to the field informed by social and intellectual history.52 However, none of these took note of the new Marxist social and cultural history of rural England associated, most notably, with Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams. The turning point in this regard was the 1980 publication of John Barrell’s The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840, which opened with an acknowledgment of the transformation that Thompson’s work in particular had wrought in understanding Georgian history. The book’s essays represented
an attempt to study the image of rural life in the painting of the period 1730–1840… taking advantage of the new freedom that Thompson’s works have given us to compare ideology in the eighteenth century, as it finds expression in the arts of the period, with what we may now suspect to have been the actuality of eighteenth-century life.53
Barrell’s academic base is literature, and he did not pretend that The Dark Side of the Landscape was art history as such. None the less, this and his other work in eighteenth-century studies acted as a reference point for a sequence of subsequent publications by David Solkin, Michael Rosenthal and Ann Bermingham.54 Of these, the first was the most controversial, taking the form of a catalogue to the Tate Gallery’s 1982 exhibition Richard Wilson: The Landscape of Reaction, which from the title alone announced a radical break with the preoccupations of gentlemanly connoisseurship. This promise was realised both in Solkin’s substantial volume of 251 pages – unusually large for an exhibition catalogue at that time – and in the didactic arrangement of the display. Although Solkin’s text made only an endnote reference to Thompson, he did pointedly align himself with the by now controversial Barrell,55 and insistently described eighteenth-century society in terms of class division. Although he seemed to avoid the term ideology (preferring the Barthesian ‘mythology’), he defined the attitudes that underpinned form and iconography in Wilson’s landscapes with a profound knowledge of eighteenth-century poetry and political theory, which for the most part had great explanatory power. Exhibition and catalogue alike – the latter having been ironically sponsored by Britoil – made an extraordinary impact, and were denounced in editorials in the Daily Telegraph and the conservative arts magazine Apollo for intruding Marxism into the gracious world of Georgian Britain and a national institution funded by public money. But they were also attacked in organs of liberal opinion such as the Guardian, New Statesman, and Times Literary Supplement for implying that the viewing of great art was not a self-sufficient experience to which historical knowledge (particularly of a Marxist-tinged kind) was an irrelevant distraction.56 Barrell, and those associated with him, would keep British art of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a politically charged area into the 1990s.57
Despite the theoretical volatility of the French student movement and despite the role that art students had played in the events of May and June 1968 in Paris, it is striking that in the nation where student rebellion had come closest to a revolutionary issue the New Left established a collective voice in art history quite late on. The Histoire et Critique des Arts group, launched in 1977, addressed itself to students (explicitly ‘étudiantes et étudiants’) and all art professionals,
to combat in a manner as collective and systematic as possible the prevailing conceptions and practices, effects of the social and political domination of the bourgeoisie, to transform the relations between those who practise the arts and those who study them, and to propose other ways of addressing the interpretation, conservation, diffusion and ‘consumption’ of works of art and archaeological remains.
It would combat the ‘total domination of bourgeois thought in the domain of the arts’ from a Marxist perspective, acknowledging the divergent tendencies that claimed to be Marxism, but refusing any exclusive variant.58
Histoire et Critique des Arts was impressively international in orientation. It arranged for Ulmer Verein historians to speak in Paris, and conferences it organised at Besançon on ‘Les Réalismes’ and at Grenoble on Daumier featured German, Italian, British and American speakers.59 Its journal printed translations of articles and papers by historians representing the same nationalities. One of the notable achievements of Histoire et critique des arts (the journal having the same name as the organisation) was its sequence of themed issues, which in addition to those devoted to the conference proceedings at Besançon and Grenoble, also addressed questions of the avant-garde, museums, the Marxist approach to art history, and exhibitions.60 However, praiseworthy as this internationalism is, it also seems to hide a weakness – namely the inability of the group to generate very much original material of its own. Thus in addition to the strong presence of scholars such as T.J. Clark, Linda Nochlin, Klaus Herding and David Kunzle at the aforementioned conferences was their representation in the journal, where they often seemed numerically to outweigh the French contributors.61 For example, the issue on avant-gardes contained translations of articles on American painting in the Cold War by Max Kozloff and Eva Cockroft that had already appeared in Artforum, together with an article by Serge Guilbaut, who was then based at UCLA. The only contribution from the Histoire et Critique des Arts group itself was an article by Nicos Hadjinicolaou.62 The issue devoted to Marxist art history contained translations of articles by T.J. Clark, John Tagg and Klaus Herding, and a collective contribution by Tom Cummings, Deborah Weiner and Joan Weinstein. The only substantial French article was the first of a projected two-part Althusserian critique of Hadjinicolaou’s Histoire de l’art et lutte des classes.63 This is not to imply that the French contributions were underdeveloped or lacking in quality, and in the course of its brief life Histoire et critique des arts printed substantial essays by Hadjinicolaou, Maurice Domino, Patrick Le Nouëne and Michel Melot, as well as shorter contributions by Laura Malvano, Maria Ivens and others.64 Moreover, as with Kritische Berichte, it was particularly vigorous in its critiques of contemporary exhibitions as symptoms of the stultifying ideology surrounding art in bourgeois societies. Thus it printed three substantive appraisals of L’Art en France sous le Seconde Empire, a large exhibition shown at the Grand Palais in 1979 that celebrated the lavish luxury goods of the haute bourgeoisie under a repressive regime, presenting them effectively as the worthy counterpart of a political power that matched with the presumptions and aspirations of their present-day counterparts.65 However, despite these promising beginnings, Histoire et critique des arts appeared only from 1977 to 1980.
A broad pattern is discernable, I think, and indeed is fairly well understood in outline if not particulars. The New Left of the 1970s generated a substantial body of Marxist art history, but the momentum of this project declined in the following decade due to a complex of political, institutional and ideological factors, and the fragile organisational base withered away or was turned to other purposes. However, in addition to the external factors, the project’s internal limitations also need to be considered, and it is to them I now turn.
The impact of 1960s radicalism amongst intellectuals, academics and students, in both Europe and the United States, led to a boom in Marxist publications, the like of which had not been seen since the 1930s. This new market for Marxism extended into the realm of culture and the arts, so that within three years a publisher as geared to mass sales as Penguin could think it worthwhile to issue two anthologies on the related themes of Radical Perspectives in the Arts and Marxists on Literature.66 In addition to several specific historical studies, the decade also saw the appearance of a sequence of major works of Marxist literary theory that sought to review the history of work in the field and establish the grounds for contemporary critical practice, notable among these being Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and Form, Terry Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology and Raymond Williams’s Marxism and Literature.67
Art history produced individual essays of great interest, but no major book-length synthesis of equivalent stature. John Berger’s famous Ways of Seeing (1972) was an original work of popularisation that became a staple of art-school teaching, but it was limited in its depth by its orientation to the mass market of the original television series.68 Nearer the mark was a work to which reference has already been made, namely Nicos Hadjinicolaou’s Art History and Class Struggle, which appeared in English translation in 1978.69 The book is not without its merits, and the early chapters do useful work in laying out a critique of art history as a bourgeois discipline. However, although in the preface to the English edition Hadjinicolaou mentioned the work of a number of earlier Marxist contributors to ‘art history and materialistic aesthetics’, in the main text he claimed that ‘the only important studies which have so to speak laid the foundations for a science of art history’ were by Antal.70 The key to this dismissive attitude towards most earlier Marxist practice in the field was Hadjinicolaou’s alignment with the Marxism of Louis Althusser and his followers Nicos Poulantzas and Pierre Macherey – indeed, Art History and Class Struggle can be seen as an attempt to do for art history what Macherey had done for the study of literature in Pour une théorie de la production littéraire.71 This explains the book’s insistent demarcations between science and ideology, its vehement anti-humanism and anti-Hegelianism, and its writing out of issues of value as no more than the observer’s self-recognition in an artwork’s ‘visual ideology’.72 Lukács’s work was essentially dismissed for confusing the scientific study of literature with aesthetics, and the Frankfurt School thinkers simply passed unmentioned.73 It is significant that the one text that could stand as equivalent in theoretical sophistication to those volumes by Jameson, Eagleton and Williams I mentioned earlier, namely Arnold Hauser’s The Philosophy of Art History (1958), was not considered by Hadjinicolaou as an instance of Marxist thinking at all, and he limited himself to observing that he did not find its address to theoretical questions ‘entirely satisfactory’.74 Given the Hegelian character of Hauser’s Marxism this was not surprising.
As a rallying cry to right art history through the stark and stringent procedures of Althusserian ‘theoretical practice’, Art History and Class Struggle may have hit the spot in the Paris of the early 1970s, but the translated version met critical opposition both from those attached to a more humanistic Marxism and from those who thought it failed to live up to more recent theoretical developments.75 Even in the heyday of British Structuralist Marxism, critical assessments of Althusser’s work were appearing in the pages of New Left Review – ironically, at the same time as the journal and its associated publishing house played a key role in making it accessible to English-speaking audiences.76 Further, in 1975 New Left Books published a collection of essays by the Italian Marxist Sebastiano Timpanaro that were full of scathing judgements on both Althusser and the Structuralist thinkers whose ideas he had imported into Marxism. Like Althusser, Timpanaro stood for an anti-Hegelian Marxism, but one that rejected his ‘theoreticist’ model of science and ‘supreme disdain for the empirical’, as well as the inability to conceptualise individual agency except as an ideological effect. Against the Structuralist model, Timpanaro advocated a revivified materialism and renewed attention to the limits placed on human activities by biology and the natural order.77
Despite the fundamental flaws in Althusser’s philosophy, it is only proper to acknowledge the energising effect of his writings on left cultural criticism in Britain in the 1970s. Terry Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology, for instance, sought to formulate the principles of an Althusserian ‘science of the text’ as an alternative to Raymond Williams’s work, which while it was ‘one of the most significant sources from which a materialist aesthetics might be derived’, was also marred by ‘“humanism” and idealism’. However, by contrast with Hadjinicolaou, Eagleton offered significant criticisms of Althusser’s and Macherey’s formulations on the relationship of literature and ideology, and rejected the ‘theoretical prudery’ with which Marxist criticism so often backed off from thorny questions of value. He also showed himself far more sympathetic to the work of Lukács and the Frankfurt School.78 As things turned out, the most notorious laboratory for the development of Althusserian cultural theory in Britain was not in literary theory but in film studies, and especially in the grouping associated with the journal Screen, which epitomised that fusion of Marxism, structuralism, semiology and psychoanalysis (dubbed by Jonathan Rée the ‘nouveau mélange’)79 that was taken as the hallmark of avant-garde discourse at mid decade. In Screen-style criticism Althusser effectively came to supersede Marx, and the fundamental incongruities between the linguistic idealism of Structuralist thought and Marxist materialism were blurred over in an ontological sleight of hand by describing language itself as ‘material’. Licensed by Althusser’s own portentous claims for Lacan’s importance,80 the innovations of Structuralist Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis were assumed to provide the grounds for a relatively straightforward reconciliation between two traditions of thought radically different in their objects and philosophical premises, and which earlier thinkers had not found so easy to bring into alignment. Moreover, what Timpanaro called Althusser’s ‘scientistic pomposity’ and tendency to confuse ‘terminological acquisitions’ with ‘conceptual advances’ were reproduced by his British followers,81 who frequently inclined towards a vehement denunciatory style that seemed to confuse theoretical diktat with argumentative cogency and political radicalism.
At the end of the decade, Althusser and his followers were subjected to withering criticisms in two major publications: E.P. Thompson’s long essay ‘The Poverty of Theory’, and the anthology One-Dimensional Marxism. Thompson’s essay is by turns brilliant and acute, intemperate and unbalanced, and it distorts the object of its attack in some degree, asserting unfairly that Althusserianism was ‘Stalinism reduced to the paradigm of Theory’.82 A more balanced critique was advanced in One-Dimensional Marxism, which included a critical dissection of Screen by Kevin McDonnell and Kevin Robins that, while expressing admiration for the journal’s ‘promethean ambitions’ to achieve a grand theoretical synthesis that would do once and for all for the bourgeois ideology of the subject, exposed massive problems with both the components of the proposed fusion and with its aesthetic and political implications.83 Yet significantly, the art historians whose work was most overtly indebted to Thompson’s and Williams’s culturalist Marxism, that is the grouping that was transforming English landscape studies, kept entirely mum on the matter. Indeed, to judge by their publications, it is striking how very limited their engagement with Thompson’s work was. None of them referred to the famous ‘Peculiarities of the English’ essay or the exchanges with Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn with which it was associated, none referred to his critique of Althusserian Marxism.84 It was as if the writings of Thompson and Williams could be appropriated for the insights they offered into particular historical problems, but the distinctive character of the Marxism that underpinned them required no discussion. In the context, the very association of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British paintings with class division seemed, if not exactly subversive, at least an impolite challenge to the establishment – as doubtless it still does in some quarters. But in reality the new history of British art was more Marxisant than Marxist: its contribution was to the development of a comprehensive social history of art that accepted class as an aspect of social ontology, but was not much concerned with class struggle and saw no necessary alignment between its inquiries and Marxism as either a theory or a politics. In the 1980s, Barrell developed an interpretation of eighteenth-century British writings on the arts grounded in J.G.A. Pocock’s concept of ‘civic humanism’, and which took its cue more from Foucauldian discourse theory than from the Marxist concept of ideology.85 This model has been widely influential, but it has led to an approach in which ideas are only loosely connected with the contest of social interests, and where the concept of hegemony is effectively a dead letter.
Although Althusserian Marxism made a mark in the pages of Block, it did not have as much influence on art-historical practice in Britain and the United States as it did on film theory and literary studies.86 Hadjinicolaou’s historical contributions on French art around 1830 found a readership,87 but they probably contributed in a diffuse way to the interest in the reception history of works of art, in which regard they complimented the example of T.J. Clark’s writings rather than offering a methodological exemplar. Overall, Clark’s work provided a far more potent model because it accorded art objects themselves – or at least some art objects – a more active and even occasionally dramatic role in the historical process than Hadjinicolaou had done, and correspondingly was far more concerned with the individual agency of the artist producer. By comparison, Hadjinicolaou’s attempts to demonstrate the applicability of his theory in Art History and Class Struggle appeared wooden and formulaic. Indeed, Clark’s two books on art and the French revolution of 1848, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–1851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, both of which appeared in 1973, seemed to set the terms of Marxist art-historical debate in Britain and the United States more than any other publications. That this should have been the case was doubtless due primarily to their sheer quality and the way they keyed in to current intellectual and political trends, but it also suggests that contemporaries – this one included – were either ignorant of the German-language developments in the field or unwilling or unable to invest the time in engaging with them.88 Although Clark listed a number of texts by earlier Marxist art historians in the common bibliography to both volumes, in the theoretical prologue to the second he observed that ‘when one writes the social history of art, it is easier to define what methods to avoid than propose a set of methods for systematic use, like a carpenter presenting his bag of tools, or a philosopher his premises.’89 This seeming theoretical openness may also have been part of the books’ appeal. Indeed, what is striking about them and Clark’s other statements from the time is his refusal to be confined by the theoretical fences that others were committed contemporaneously to erecting and guarding. The acknowledgments to Lacan, Lévi-Strauss and Macherey seem consistent with the tendency of the so-called Structuralist Marxism so prominent in the period,90 but this does not sit easily with the Hegelian tropes in Clark’s writing and his insistence on the power of dialectical thinking,91 so at odds with the relentless anti-Hegelianism of Althusser.
This conjunction certainly caught the eye of Peter Wollen when he commented on the important article on Manet’s Olympia that Clark published in Screen in 1980. Not that Wollen attacked Clark for Hegelianism as such, but he felt the need to correct Clark’s conception of contradiction through a somewhat opaque discussion of Lucio Colletti’s critique of what he perceived as unscientific residues of Hegelian dialectic in Marx.92 In his reply, Clark did not directly rebut Wollen’s arguments about the dialectic, but we can take as a kind of rebuttal his quotation of a passage from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit characterising the condition of consciousness in capitalist societies as defined by ‘obfuscations, discontinuities, blankness and uncertainty’ and scarcely amenable to ‘complete determination’. The ‘search for determinacy’ might remain the goal, but the nature of reality did not permit the kinds of scientific certitude implied in the rhetoric of the Althusserians. Yet the fact that Clark chose to situate himself in relation to Screen’s theoretical project at this juncture is also significant, given that journal’s association with the defence of avant-garde film practice – as is his aligning of his position with voices in the journal that spoke for ‘an impatience…with the idea that texts construct spectators’, that is with a loosening up of the Structuralist project, and an acknowledgment that ‘films [and other art objects] are read unpredictably, they can be pulled into more or less any ideological space, they can be mobilised for diverse and even contradictory projects’.93 Moreover, he did firmly repudiate Wollen’s misapprehension that the position underlying his argument was one that had as its concomitant some Lukácsian concept of realism, and affirmed his belief that there were ‘moments at which modernism was compelled, and not just by exterior circumstance, to exceed its normal terms of reference and sketch out others in, in preliminary form’. These moments, despite their scrappiness, had been part of modernism, ‘and it seems at present they are the ones we shall have to retrieve and learn from’.94 Thus, in the early 1980s Clark emerged as a defender of modernism on the basis of a kind of left-Greenbergianism, a Greenberg corrected, as it were, through the Hegelian concept of negation.95 This model was to have enormous influence in Britain and the United States, partly through the Open University’s modern-art courses, although in the process of dissemination its critical force as a kind of Marxist critique was largely lost.96 Clark’s espousal of the avant-garde set his work in stark contrast with that of other major figures of the art-historical New Left such as Hadjinicolaou and Werckmeister, who, despite the different theoretical paths by which they arrived at their positions, were united in rejecting any notion of a Marxist aesthetic. Indeed, Hadjinicolaou viewed the avant-garde in its recent forms as essentially a market ideology, and a concept without analytical value: ‘The notion of the avant-garde and all its synonyms, as well as the middle-class ideology which underlies it, should be abandoned to the defenders of the established order.’97
Despite Clark’s withering disdain for the bourgeois cultural production of his time – ‘the absence…of a bourgeoisie worth attacking in the realm of cultural production’ – this concern with defending the ‘cognitive power’ of modernist practices put an increasing distance between him and others on the left, partly because his original concern with some special moments in modernism’s history, when it had a critical force, seemed to broaden out into ‘the painters we most admire’ – a locution reminiscent of middlebrow cultural journalism.98 Clark’s newly advertised concern with the aesthetic effectively saw him addressing the same kinds of question of art’s specificity that had preoccupied earlier ‘humanist’ Marxist art historians such as Hauser, Raphael and Schapiro. And it seemed to some to compromise the hard-fought struggles to establish art’s historicity in the face of the ideological complicity of bourgeois artistic culture with the barbarisms of class oppression and imperialism, all dressed up as humanistic values, which it had been the main project of the New Left to uncover. In a stinging review of Clark’s 1984 book The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, Adrian Rifkin would claim that its author was engaged in ‘a pragmatic aestheticising of history that precludes the aim of an historical sociology or semiology of art’, a project that pulled social history ‘into shape [in effect out of shape] to serve the history of art’. Overall, the book was ‘conservative art history’.99 Clark, in turn, set himself against ‘the dominant orthodoxy’ of the ‘present-day Left academy’, that assumed ‘pictures have nothing important – nothing specific or difficult, to tell us’.100 In part, what both Rifkin and Hadjinicolaou had picked up on was the way in which Clark’s project seemed defined in terms that tied it more to the internal reform of art history than to the demands of a revolutionary politics.101
It will be evident from the above, I hope, that the art-historical New Left, for all its brief elan, was not united in a shared theoretical project, and that its relationship with the examples of earlier Marxist art history, and with the diverse and complex traditions of Marxist thought more broadly defined, were various and not adequately debated. But by the mid 1980s a fundamental fault line had emerged between those who viewed Marxist art history as necessarily antithetical to aesthetic judgements – which were simply questions of ideology – and those who thought the cognitive claims of art were an intrinsic part of the Marxist project. That fault line has not been bridged since, and is not likely to be any time soon since it derives from fundamental divisions within Marxism itself. (Readers can judge the merits of each side by consulting the now large body of work produced over the years by the two key figures of the art-historical New Left, namely Clark and Werckmeister.)102 Matters were further muddied by the shifts in the political climate in the Reagan–Thatcher years and the arrival of art history’s own ‘nouveau mélange’ under the name of ‘the New Art History’, a development marked by the publication of an anthology of essays under that title in 1986. Here was precisely that ‘cheerful diversification of the subject’ against which Clark had warned more than a decade before.103 In fact, the anthology in question provided a space for some to take their distance from this new brand name, and notably Rifkin, who described the very idea of a ‘new’ art history as ‘an anxious liberal stratagem to market a faded product in a new package’ and a ‘basically reactionary’ attempt to ‘police the boundaries’ of the discipline.104 But the problem was not just with the heterogeneous mix of models the ‘new’ embraced, it was with the social history of art itself, since for the most part this had remained captive to accepted notions of ‘quality and progress’ and refused to question the authority of the object ‘series’ of sanctioned great works that set the parameters of art-historical inquiry. The historical sociology of art, which it had once seemed would cut the ground from under all the familiar bourgeois obfuscations around the category art, was now seen to be inadequate to the task, or at least in the spirit (and by the methods) in which it was being generally undertaken. ‘Quality,’ Rifkin argued, functioned as ‘a talismanic warding off of change whose own origins and functions are repressed’ and he implied that currently feminist practices were more successful in contesting established shibboleths than ‘Marxist or social or sociological histories of art’.105 Contemporaneously, Hadjinicolaou warned against a social history of art that reduced Marxism to ‘a few tesserae which could bring to perfection the panoramic mosaic of traditional art history’: ‘the social history of art is really easy: it has no proper subject matter, it does not commit one to anything and one can practice it in a very profitable way.’106 The course of events since has entirely confirmed these judgements.
In the increasingly reactionary political climate of the 1980s, Marxist art history was doomed to shrivel as a fashionable option and become confined to the far smaller number of those for whom any reconciliation with the idea of capitalism as an historical endpoint was impossible, and who preferred a historically aware and critical assessment of post-structuralism to swallowing it whole. While the veterans of the New Left were able to find niches in university and college departments and even to enjoy successful careers, this was not because their political positions had found acceptance, but rather because academic art history now tolerated their type of practice as one of a number of separate ‘approaches’ to the discipline – a discipline that in any case seemed increasingly porous and unable to define or defend its particular object of study. The liberal academy accepted Marxism as one of a number of perspectives, and in the climate of post-Cold War triumphalism assumed that Marxism was effectively over and done with. After all, was it not one of those grand meta-narratives that post-structuralism had discredited? At the same time, the post-structuralist rejection of epistemology and embrace of perspectivism made principled debate near impossible. However, what had occurred was a political defeat, not an intellectual one. Developments in the area of feminism, gender studies and post-colonial theory brought home with renewed force that Marxism is not, and cannot be, a theory of everything. But none of these developments offered anything in the way of a general theory of history and society that supplanted Marxism’s systemic critique of capitalism. Nor did they remainder the complex debates around philosophy and method that continue within the Marxist community. Marxism has remained a vital tradition of thought, not simply because of the achievements of its founders, but also because their system contained within itself an acknowledgment of the historicity of all intellectual production and its necessary dependence – in particular ways – on the shifting conditions of other social practices. Marxism thus conceives itself as an historical object, and as a tradition that must be continuously self-critical to be true to its most basic premises. It is correspondingly obliged to take into account the new understandings that emerge across the whole range of intellectual fields, even when those understandings are pronounced in terms antithetical to Marxism. This is not to say, of course, that it should simply ingest each new development that comes along, but it must explain them and take whatever is true from them, if necessary modifying its own findings in the process. This is a difficult, complex and unending task. But the continuing achievements of Marxist science depend on it. Whether we shall find much collective encouragement to do this in the general conditions of our times depends on factors that are beyond our control. The omens are not good. But then it has always been Marxism’s ambition to provide the tools that would enable human beings to end their object status in the historical process and become its identical subject–object, even against the odds.107