‘There is a solidarity based on something other than victimization.’ Meridel Le Sueur

It is easy to forget how conservatively entrenched art history was in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. Its governing institutions embraced a mixture of empiricism, traditional iconographic studies and evolutionary formalism, with Ernst Gombrich as its ruling maître and gatekeeper. Its narrowness was matched by its reactionary addiction to certain notions of ‘quality’ and ‘value’. There were exceptions to this consensus – for instance, Arnold Hauser’s brilliant work on art history, agency and subjectivity in his still overlooked masterpiece The Philosophy of Art History (1959)1 – and the continuing work of an earlier generation of Marxist art historians, but the majority of the work was marginal to the discipline to say the least. More importantly though, Marxist art history itself was trapped, like its conservative antithesis, within a methodological impasse. Oblivious or indifferent to the extraordinary technical, cognitive and cultural transformation of art and its criticism in the first decades of the twentieth century, the attempt on the part of Marxist art historians in the 1940s and 1950s, such as Francis Klingender and Frederick Antal, to reconstruct an artisanal painterly realism at the centre of a would-be radical art history looked bathetic and after-the-fact.2 No wonder Hauser left Britain: the pincer movement of a Stalinized counter-canonic historicism on the one hand and a historicizing panoply of Great Western painterly achievement on the other presented a dismal mixture of righteous politicking and bourgeois genuflection. Indeed, both traditions shared all the old and familiar traits of an inflationary humanism in which a succession of Great Art and Great (Male) Artists brings to life the unfolding ‘drama of humanity’. That is why, if you were fortunate enough to have read Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in French in Britain in the 1940s,3 and taken its problems seriously – as Hauser had done – your sense of the place of Western art and Western art history would certainly be less sanguine. In fact, you might say that the aestheticism and formalism of traditional art history were strikingly morbid. Moreover, you also might say, in an echo of Nietzsche in Untimely Meditations,4 that both Stalinist humanism’s and bourgeois humanism’s obsession with the glories of precedent was a way of beating the modern over the head.

With art history in Britain at such an impasse, it is no surprise that it imploded in the way that it did in the early 1970s. Unable to shift its objects of reflection in any meaningful sense, or to open them up to new forms of historical scrutiny, it ran aground when faced with the new social forces (the post-1968 workers’ movement, the women’s movement, postcolonial struggle) and new methodological demands (anti-humanist Marxism and psychoanalysis; the critique of the art object as artefact; the hermeneutic significance of heterodox or ‘secondary’ forms of cultural production) that were then sweeping through the discipline. The initial response on the part of traditional art history was quick and sharp: the new methodologies, the new evaluations and judgments, the new traditions, the new categories were relativistic, didactic, aesthetically impoverished, imperious – art history will overcome this and see this out. This reaction was in many ways clearly driven by a conservative alliance of anti-Marxists, anti-feminists and the intellectual patrons of art history’s prominent place in the Great Tradition. But these condemnations were in fact less to do with reactionary bravura than an explicit material recognition of where art history had to sit if it were to do its job, or any worthwhile job: that is, to provide a reliable service of connoisseurship and attribution for the museum. In this respect, the worldly place that art history recovered for itself out of what I would describe as the discipline’s intellectual ‘nervous breakdown’ in the 1960s made its subservient role to the museum and its market imperatives all the more explicit. Thus, paradoxically, in confronting its own intellectual limitations and occlusions, it reattached itself to its traditional function, making art history of necessity – and, therefore, without evasion – an adjunct to museology. This is why most art history today survives largely as a servant of the intimate relationship between the market and the museum, in which the business of attribution, evaluation and judgment-towards-procurement makes the market safe for the museum and the museum safe for the market – no different in fact from Bernard Berenson’s forays into the world of private consultation at the end of the nineteenth century (which Berenson and his generation of art historians were desperate to keep secret, for fear of undermining the image of impartial and independent scholarship).

Thus if the new art history in the 1970s sought to jam up, or disrupt, these lines of support and provision, it soon became clear that reshuffling or expanding the canon was no answer to the fundamental relationship between art history and the facilitation of a free exchange of commodities on the market. Expanding the canon, reversing hierarchies and opening up aesthetic judgment to objects traditionally excluded from its purview simply revivified the relations between the market and the museum. Indeed, in this respect, it was just what the traditional machinery of attribution and judgment-towards-procurement called for in order for it to stay in business. Consequently, many radical art historians of this generation withdrew from the traditional domain of canonically defined artistic judgment, either moving into areas that art history had always looked down upon and had little interest in reclaiming (the graphic arts, posters, native or indigenous arts) or exiting art history altogether into other realms of study such as philosophical aesthetics or photo-theory.5

There was a clear question to be addressed then for the fledgling radical or Marxist art historian: where should one place one’s transformative energies? Inside this expanded orbit of high culture, or outside of it in the sphere of popular visual practices? Many writers chose the latter and were central to establishing what we now know as cultural studies, urban and environmental theory, moving-image theory and their interdisciplinary offshoots. (The nervous breakdown of art history was also the rebirth of cultural theory more generally.) Those who decided to stay within the bounds of art history, however, saw the nature of the political and critical work to be done from a different position. For all the museal limitations of the discipline, it was imperative that the historicization and critical reception of art was not left unopposed to the conservative and liberal connoisseurship that was regaining ground. As such, historicization was made to function as an explicit intervention in, and reflection on, the present as a means of defining the new in art, or, conversely, exposing its limitations. At one level, this strategy was no different from Hauser’s art history and the older Marxist approach: the problems of the past have a determinate bearing upon the blockages and hiatuses of the present. But under conditions where the very ontology of the art object had broken down (post-Constructivism, post-Dada, post-conceptual art), the questions and issues art history posed to the past became defined by their overt relationship to the present. This methodological shift to an art history of the present, so to speak, was clearly discernible in British and North American art history following the English translation of Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory in 1984.6 Admittedly, Adorno was not the only intellectual source for this shift – Gramsci’s work on hegemony and post-Althusserian studies of ideological state apparatuses were also contributory factors, along with Lacanian feminism – but for those on the left who ‘stayed in’ art history, Adorno’s anti-historicism and emphasis on form as a political problem were increasingly influential, either directly or indirectly, and established a space for new research. In this respect, after art history’s nervous breakdown, Adorno’s writing operated as an explicit anti-historicist ‘shifter’ in challenging the methodological limits of the legacy of Marxist and bourgeois humanism, irrespective of his actual influence on specific art historians. Hence, in Adornian terms, historicization became a source of reflection, not simply on ‘quality’ or ‘maintaining quality’ in art, but on the value of the questions art history asks of the art of the past, pushing art history closer to the heuristic demands of art theory. In these terms, the value of art history is premised on the quality of the questions it poses to the present, as much as those it asks of the past. This means exposing art history – following German critical theory more generally – to a transcendental method, in which political economy and the social production of art are not simply the ‘backdrop’ to artistic exemplariness but the very substance of its structural limitations, aporiae and possibilities. In other words, the historical art work becomes a set of conflicts that artists inherit, deflect, obscure, remake, expand or redefine under different conditions and with different expectations. Indeed, if art history is to be adequate to the contemporary and future conditions of art’s production, it must proceed from the blockages and hiatuses of the present. This means breaking, in a fundamental way, with the old historicist and evolutionary machinery of ‘influences’ that assume an unproblematic symmetry between art work, artist and social context.

This is not exactly the revival of Heinrich Wölfflin’s art history without names, in which individual artistic production is subject to the accumulated weight of formal precedent. But, nevertheless, making the art work visible as a site of conflict in this way means that the unfolding of art cannot be seen in terms of the mystifications of self-expression. The subjectivity of the artist is the outcome of the problems and aporetic conditions in which he or she finds him- or herself. This art history is materialist in its disregard for ‘creativity’ over and above artistic production as a determinate set of inherited (destabilizing) problems. The materialist instantiation of the art work as subject to internal conflict, therefore, redefines art history as a dialectical encounter with the art work as set of productive troublespots and symptoms.

One can see a little bit clearer, then, why Marxist and radical historians stayed in art history. To historicize art in these terms is also to defend it as a source of counter-knowledge and resistance to the culture that would domesticate it or academicize its affects and insights. Hence, as Adorno’s influence deepened in leftist art history in the 1990s, the advocacy of a dialectical ‘art history’ became first and foremost a defence of the dissensual and negative powers of art within the culture. Art is not just an ideological effect of the market and the museum, but also a set of practices and knowledges that are at variance with, and unassimilable to, the logic of the commodity-form. Artistic forms may circulate as commodities but this does not mean that the use-values of art are thereby simply subordinate to the equivalence of exchange-value. Even if the majority of art works circulate as dry goods within the market and museum, art’s non-equivalent status as a commodity (its irreducibility to the timelines and repetitions of the value-form) is the condition of its theoretical emergence and self-transformation as art. In other words, the art work-as-commodity stands outside the terms of commodity relations as normally understood. Thus, staying in ‘art history’ is precisely about defending this residual non-equivalence (or autonomy) of art against its subordination to inherited academic practices, the democracy of ‘mass culture’ and the technical dissolution into the domain of the popular technological image. Art, as emergent category, represents an irreducible source of speculative and non-identitary practice and thinking. As such, the rush into popular culture, as a way of resolving art’s museal status, begins to appear as a potential categorical error.

That is why, if exiting art history for this generation of radical art historians was about ‘democratizing’ art as a diverse range of reproducible cultural practices, staying within the discipline was, conversely, about defending art’s autonomy against its reduction to the effects and demands of the capitalist sensorium (although it was never simply a debate about non-reproducibility and autonomy as such; ‘staying in’ art history was never about defending the non-reproducible modernist object per se). For Marxist art historians, such a defence becomes a holdout, or a placeholder, in Adorno’s classic formulation, for the delayed promise of a non-alienated culture. And, therefore, the reworking of the canon, for all its limitations, is the site where this defence of non-equivalence must occur.

Andrew Hemingway’s art-historical writing is very much the product of this preceding history and its intellectual horizons. As a historian who has ‘stayed in’ art history, he has focused largely on defending the emancipatory promise of art as the fulcrum for the reworking and extension of the canon. As such, his work through the 1990s and into the new millennium insisted on providing a counter-hegemonic space within the discipline. But the development of this position has been far from straightforward. It was not as if Hemingway simply settled on an ‘enlightened’ (Adornian) dialectical method. On the contrary, his early work was still sympathetic to a Marxist-humanist critique of the bourgeois canon, in which it is the job of the historian both to rub the bourgeois artefact against the grain (to expose its ideological fissures) and, coterminously, to propose an alternative range of artefacts that either expose the divisions and exclusions of ‘bourgeois culture’ or directly confront it through an explicit alliance with socialist or radical politics. The first position derives from the reading of primary and would-be secondary works in the canon as aporetic sites of class tension (as in John Barrell’s pioneering and exemplary work on Constable, Gainsborough and the eighteenth-century English landscape tradition, The Dark Side of the Landscape);7 and the second comes from an orthodox Marxist defence of social realism as a source of ‘class consciousness’ that is veiled or excluded by modernism more generally. Crucially, therefore, Marxism in art history occupies here the classical territory of postwar Marxist aesthetics in which modernism is as much a problem for artistic form as the solution. Modernism may have won the cultural high ground, but the histories of realism provide a range of resources for reshaping the canon in productive, heterodox ways (certainly after the demise of late American modernism). Accordingly, Hemingway largely operated at first within this conventional dyad of modernism/realism, in which the antinomies of representation provide the source for both a rewriting of the exclusions of the pre-modern painterly canon and the proposal of an alternative painterly aesthetic after the cul-de-sacs of late modernism.8 The possibilities and limits of realism in painting thereby became the primary terrain upon which a new Marxist history set out its stall.

One can see the extent to which the traditional armature of art history as a discipline aligns itself with the classical ideals of Marxist humanism: the defence of non-equivalence is best serviced through the medium of painting, in so far as a painting remains the principal artistic site of sensuous vitality and complexly embedded social meaning. As such, it has remained the focus of Hemingway’s major interests throughout his career. Painting – be it Constable, Cotman, Neue Sachlichkeit, 1930s social realism, the Mexican muralists or the Precisionists – is where his dialectical and counter-hegemonic work has taken him. Indeed, surprisingly for an art historian who was formed in the period of art history’s disconnection from its pre-modern and modern objects of painterly reverence, Hemingway has hardly ever referenced, let alone written about, photography, conceptual practices, installation art or post-object aesthetics. Whatever counter-hegemonic principles have been formulated and worked through have been solidly grounded in a conventional leftist canon of realist and realist-modernist painterly achievement. This has produced a tension in his avowal to ‘stay in’ art history, between his commitment to a dialectical encounter with the art object as a conflicted and aporetic entity and his broader advocacy of a popular democratic culture from below that is reliant neither on museums nor on the commercial calendar and mass cultural provision, and in which painting would play only a subsidiary role (if one at all). In some sense, the commitment to the latter has been shaped and constrained by the vicissitudes of the former.

This position derives from Hemingway’s attachment to the social programmes of the arts in the United States in the 1930s. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that his counter-hegemonic art history is overwhelmingly determined by the experience and achievements of this period, the most extensive and successful confrontation with bourgeois culture from below in the whole of twentieth-century capitalism. Consequently, Hemingway appears to place a greater emphasis on the significance of New Deal cultural democracy above that of the Russian Revolution itself. This is not because the ‘cultural front’ of the New Deal produced works of greater merit than the Russian Revolution, or that it generated a more enduring literature or persuasive theory, but because it mobilized far more workers in the production and reception of a range of cultural practices, both inside and outside of the market, than the heroic days of the Russian avant-garde. This might appear adventitious, and indeed conservative; without the world-transforming precedents of the Russian Revolution there would have been no American ‘cultural front’ in the 1930s, just as without the Russian avant-garde there would have been no rethinking of the objects of art history. But Hemingway is not downplaying the structural connection between the Russian avant-garde and a new art history for any transformative understanding of the category of art and its social claims. Rather, the New Deal’s ‘cultural front’ offers a critical purchase on cultural change from below under capitalism, in a historical epoch where the memory and actuality of the Russian Revolution and the Russian avant-garde is obviously attenuated. In this sense, the politics of Hemingway’s dialectical art history are closer to the worldliness of state policy than they are to the challenges of art as revolutionary technique. That is why much of his writings on the modern period have been embedded in the language of social and political provision rather than the language of avant-garde resistance. He is less interested in the cognitive transgressions and interruptions of works themselves – of the negations of artistic form – than in how art speaks to, or fails to speak to, its possible extra-artistic visibility and efficacy.

Of course, the radical achievements of the ‘cultural front’ are no less delimited as an exemplar for culture today than those of the Russian avant-garde itself, but this does not obscure what Hemingway takes to be the real intersection between cultural production and popular democracy as a model of non-market capitalist statecraft that New Deal culture instantiated. What is at stake for him as an art historian is a kind of making legible of those moments within capitalism where the possibility of another world, another set of cultural relations, is made palpable. Thus it is not surprising that the New Deal ‘cultural front’ – an era in US history all too easily erased by ideologues of the ‘American Century’ – looms so large in his vision because it represents the most extensive period under capitalism in the twentieth century when the coordinates of an alternative cultural actuality were put in place. Bourgeois culture did not lose its hegemony in the United States, obviously; nevertheless, for almost ten years it had to contest the legitimacy of its products and ideals with organized labour, which resulted in an extraordinary range of experiments from below, across the fields of realism and modernism. One may ask then: does Hemingway see the ‘cultural front’ as lost opportunity in a way that is no different from the Russian Revolution (and thus to be mourned) or as a model of provision and political alliance that contemporary art under late capitalism might learn from now? His writing from the left is not noted for its mournfulness, so we must presume that the dominance of the New Deal ‘cultural front’ in his thinking represents something close to the latter – namely, an exemplary moment in art in which a progressive popular culture and working-class creativity intersected: ‘the arts projects stand out as a striking anomaly through which the subordination of artistic production to the market was for a brief period effectively challenged’.9 Yet if he acknowledges the institutional and practical achievements of this moment, pointedly revealing how the US state took on a ‘progressive’ role in the 1930s, he is clear how much of this culture was built on shifting political sands, as evidenced by the demise of the left once the United States entered the war in 1941. Thus, although he remains an ardent defender of Michael Denning’s view of the ‘cultural front’ as establishing a new historical bloc and moral economy,10 he distances himself from Denning’s view that this produced an engaged class consciousness. Despite the widespread support of popular democracy and the left cultural turn, there was a seeming inability of working-class discontent in the United States in the 1930s and early 1940s to ‘cohere into a sustained class politics’.11 In this respect, Hemingway follows David Brody and Gary Gerstle’s work on US labour politics in the 1930s: inter-ethnic alliances and anti-capitalist politics in the period were surprisingly fragile, indeed overly ‘culturalist’ as opposed to class-based.12 As such, he is absolutely frank about the political limitations of the ‘cultural front’ once capital regained the initiative during and after the war. He has no illusions about how such counter-hegemonic cultural initiatives can survive in the long run without a fundamental confrontation with capital and the state.

What distinguishes Hemingway’s art history from most social history operating in the wake of art history’s nervous breakdown is that it is profoundly attached to the history of the left itself. Indeed, for Hemingway, the objects of art history and the struggles of the left in the twentieth century mutually presuppose each other. This makes his counter-hegemonic art history quite distinct from the majority of the new social art history, which is either utterly generic in its radicalism, or indifferent to the political struggles immanent to shifts in cultural policy and artistic transformations. As a result, it has been concerned to lay to rest the assumption that one can ‘do’ art history’s relationship to politics through recourse to the most generalized of oppositions – Stalinism versus liberalism; Trotskyism versus Stalinism; realism versus modernism; artists versus the state – as if designating a work, or set of works, as ‘modernist’ (and therefore anti-Stalinist) settles the complex relationship between realism, modernism and political commitment between 1930 and 1970. On the contrary, these familiar polarities enclose a shifting range of alliances and overlaps that make the production of the political in modern art – and the production of modern art in and through the categories of the political – a more fraught question than either the social history of art or modernist art history would accept. Crucial to this for Hemingway is the ideological and cultural status of Stalinism itself. Stalinism, because of its overwhelming identification with the figures of ‘communism’ and ‘anti-capitalism’, has served little more than a cipher for aesthetic and cultural repression in postwar art history, resulting in an unwillingness on the part of historians to accept the divisions, oppositions and antinomies within its political and cultural formation for fear of endorsing Stalinism as such. The Trotskyist and liberal autopsy of cultural Thermidor in the Soviet Union after 1929 and ‘actually existing socialism’ after the 1950s has, therefore, failed to recognize the difference between Stalinism (as a repressive and reactionary programme of defence of ‘socialism in one country’) and non-Soviet Stalinism as internally conflicted space of the ‘communist idea’. To defend the reality of the latter is not to defend the iniquities of the former, but rather to recognize that in countries outside of the immediate influence of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) – such as the United States in the 1930s – the designation Stalinism/communism was a wider space of dissensus and anti-capitalist identification than ‘Sovietism’. Indeed, in the US between the late 1920s and late 1930s, the formation of ‘Stalinism’ had to contend with (accommodate and negotiate with) a range of popular democratic impulses and forces that had a distinct Americanist tenor and character, making it impossible for the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) to ‘Sovietize’ its counter-hegemonic strategies, particularly in the area of race and racism. Accordingly, to be a (non-Trotskyist) communist or radical leftist in the United States was in no sense to endorse all the things the CPSU or CPUSA believed ‘Stalinism’ to be, even if one accepted the historic prestige of the Soviet Union itself.

Thus for Hemingway to open up the dyad Stalinism/communism in this way is not only to acknowledge the range of political subjectivities that shaped the historic bloc of the ‘cultural front’ (under CPUSA leadership), but to dissociate realism from a Sovietized Stalinism, an association fundamental to modernist (and quasi-Trotskyist) art history, as exemplified by Clement Greenberg’s 1939 essay ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’.13 In fact, recognizing the value of the former entails the necessity of the latter. Therefore, what is at stake for Hemingway is precisely a dialectical art history that is adequate to the vicissitudes of modernity and to recent political history: an art history in which anti-Stalinism is not to override the opening up of Stalinism to its heteroclite political formation. Anti-Stalinism may have defined the modernist narratives of the twentieth century but, to date, such a position has also allowed a huge amount of radical work to be lost to condescension or crude divisions. In his major book on American politics and art, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956, Hemingway’s aim is no less a complete reassessment of social-realist practices along these lines, practices that once played such a large part in the visual cultures of the New Deal, yet have fallen out of favour since the historic ‘victory’ of postwar American modernism and the subsequent retreat from painterly realist modes. As he asserts, such a revision in the book is not an apology for Stalinism, or to make a Stalinized culture more palatable, but to show how Stalinism/state communism served as ‘a focus for socialist aspirations’ across a range of artistic practices.14 Artists on the Left, then, at one level follows Denning in discussing the visual arts and cultural form as part of the historic bloc of the ‘cultural front’; but, unlike Denning, it also looks at how the cultural policies of the CPUSA and the political subjectivities of the ‘cultural front’ actually intersected and clashed as a constitutive part of this bloc and its diverse cultural practices and artistic allegiances. Thus, although there have been many studies in which social realism and the left cultural turn have been invoked in relation to the cultural policies of the CPUSA and ‘Stalinism’, there have been few studies, as Hemingway argues, in which there is a discussion of ‘the organisations through which this was effected, [and] how the CP’s shifting aesthetic ideology was registered in artistic practice’.15 Moreover, his revisionism is also temporal. He dissents from the view that the left cultural turn was in decline in the late 1930s with the collapse of the anti-fascist front (which was so crucial in spreading the influence of cultural leftism beyond the remit of the party). On the contrary, work within the – albeit depleted – ‘cultural front’ continued well into the late 1940s, when, with the arrival of the Cold War, state repression finally made it impossible to openly pursue any popular counter-hegemonic project.

This restorative history of the left in art in the United States, then, serves a particular methodological function for an art history resistant to the usual narrative of modernism against realism. Realism and popular claims on the public sphere are not external to the claims of modernism more broadly in the 1930s, nor are these claims exhausted by the end of the decade. Greenberg’s reductive polarization of realist kitsch to modernist self-reflection serves only to simplify the New Deal conjuncture in the interests of a tendentious expulsion of ‘politics’ from matters of artistic judgment. Hemingway believes, therefore, that any broader assessment of this period – beyond the clichés of modernist anti-Stalinism – cannot begin without the political and factional history of the period being put into place as the means whereby other critical judgments can be legitimately made: ‘from a better history to better judgement. My point is not that aesthetic criteria can be finally decided – knowledge only provides the grounds for judgement in this area, it cannot itself deliver them – but that with a better history we can at least have more grounded and fruitful dialogues about such matters.’16 But providing better grounds for making such judgments is a fraught business when it comes to the primary concern of Artists on the Left: namely, the refurbishment of realist painting in the 1930s and 1940s as a rational, humanist antipode to the alienated affects of mass culture and the capitalist sensorium. For, although Hemingway may revise and nuance our assessment of the place of ‘Stalinism’ within the realist/modernist debate in the period – ‘dereifying’ it, so to speak – the painterly materials that he has to work with are limited to say the least. Much of the social-realist easel painting he discusses – irrespective of its varied debts to expressive or geometric modernist form or the superimpositions of montage – is weakly academic or insidiously imitative of both European realism and modernism. There are isolated works of note, and periods in various artists’ careers where the dialogue between modernism and realism can match European achievements, but, overall, painting in this period is too easily won over to sentiment or pathos. Consequently, if Hemingway is concerned to stress the significance of debates on modernism from within the Americanized ‘Stalinist’ purview of realism, the broad ambition during the ‘cultural front’ for a ‘socialized modernism’ in painting never really catches fire. The achievements of the New Deal mural stand, in some sense, separate from easel painting and, as such, constitute what is truly innovative about painting’s contribution to the ‘cultural front’: a public wall painting that gave interpellative clarity and collective symbolic form to the aims and achievements of the ‘left turn’. However, the possibility of developing these experiments as a public social-modernist practice never got off the ground and so was never in a position to test or rebuff the hubris of Abstract Expressionism. Yet, the affection in which the remaining murals are still held indicates that before the recrudescence of modernist easel painting after 1945, this model of a public painting had a residual ideological role to play in the development of a popular democracy in the United States. The murals were important sites of public dissensus and non-compliance. Pointing to this, though, does not obviate the wider problems that Hemingway’s reclamative painterly-humanist art history faces at this juncture: painting, even in public mural form, could not do the requisite critical work on modernism some believed possible in the 1930s and 1940s; and nor could it do so, even more emphatically, after the 1950s and 1960s. Artists on the Left is therefore a long goodbye not just to the state interventionist idealism of Roosevelt’s New Deal, but also to the classical humanist association between the left, realist painting and the politics of non-equivalence. In an increasing meta-technological world after the 1950s, the appellative claims of social-realist painting were not only bathetic, but actually impeded the left’s engagement with the complex cultural forms and affects of capitalism.

The reality of this situation is precisely what split the new art history in the early 1970s: painting, in either its high-modernist or its social-realist modes, was clearly unable to do the necessary transformative work of non-equivalence and autonomy; that is, it could no longer produce knowledge through painterly form. And this is why the post-critical theoretical art history of Peter Bürger and the early October writing on modernism in the early 1970s insisted on the crucial difference between modernism (as painterly canon) and the historic avant-garde (as praxis) as a way of defining a new technical regime for art (the readymade, assemblage, interdisciplinarity, reproducibility as authorship, conceptualization) irreducible to painterly hierarchy. One might ask, therefore, why Hemingway did not choose to write a history of all visual practices (photography, film, posters, design, crafts) within the ‘cultural front’ as an account of the contribution that New Deal plebeian modernism made to this emergent regime. How does the ‘cultural front’, for example, negotiate the legacy of the Soviet/European avant-garde? What impact did photography have on the popular democracy of the period? What were the productive relations between photographic image and text at this time? What is noticeable about Artists on the Left is that its critical dormancy precipitates a methodological crisis in Hemingway’s writing that announces a determinate shift away from the humanist-realist tradition in the structuring of his counter-hegemonic art history. For just as the recovery of the social-realist painterly object fails to generate a productive encounter with the present, the defence of the realist painterly object as an Enlightenment (communist) barrier against abstraction and reification narrows the range of exemplary and suasive objects that a dialectical art history might want to consider important. Indeed, the notion of the object as a productive troublespot and symptom becomes subordinate to the exigencies of recovering a lost political history.

It is possible to detect, then, an increasing openness to Adorno in Hemingway’s writing after Artists on the Left. Adorno allows Hemingway to recover or extend the range of modernist objects worthy of dialectical approbation. This is not to say that Hemingway’s art history becomes expressly Adornian, or that he completely drops his commitment to the classical legacy of painterly modernism/realism but, rather, that he recovers what Adorno and Hauser considered axiomatic for an art history not caught up in an affirmative ‘realist ethics’ and the construction of an exemplary leftist canon: the work of art as symptomatic critique and negative or aporetic space. This shift is expressed in Hemingway’s turn, not just to Adorno and Hauser themselves, but to that German tradition of romantic anti-capitalism from which Adorno and Hauser both draw, and which shapes the preoccupations of late-nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century German art history and philosophy. As Hemingway argues in an unpublished essay, ‘Arnold Hauser: Between Romantic Anti-Capitalism and Marxism’,17 Hauser’s post-Adornian art history in the 1960s offers an anti-classicizing defence of modernism in which the alienated and ‘corrupted’ materials of artistic production offer a utopic glimpse into the future. For Hauser, art works are not truer or more perspicacious because they ‘match’ or do not ‘match’ ordinary empirical reality, but because of their conspicuous failures and formal incongruities – that is, the materials of artistic critique are not necessarily those of explication. As he argues, it is precisely as a result of ‘their imperfections and inherent meaninglessness [that art works] point towards a fuller more meaningful whole, which is not there for the taking, but has to be striven for’.18 Consequently, for Hauser, the leftist defence of social realism as a site of rational self-reflection is self-defeating in so far as it assumes that the irrationalism associated with the modernist dissolution of form can lead only to bad art. On the contrary, as Hemingway says, quoting Hauser approvingly, ‘the artist’s sense of alienation can also lead to “the most profoundly self-revelatory creations” becoming “the raw material” of the work – a conclusion that points towards an Adornian rather than a Lukácsian aesthetic’. It is hard not to assume, therefore, from Hemingway’s endorsement of Hauser/Adorno here, that the attempt to revivify the painterly social-realist tradition from inside the history of the left could not sustain itself as either art history or as counter-hegemonic practice. Indeed, there is a larger methodological question at stake for Hemingway. What is crucial to Hauser and the anti-capitalist tradition (which also takes in the early Lukács) is the insistence on the aporetic status of the art work as a site of expressive homology with the contradictions and conflicts of the age. This ‘historicism’ has rightly been attacked for its easier conflation between the artist’s intentions and the social and political conditions under which the work of art is produced; art is evidence not just of its conditions of production, but also of the artist’s resistance or indifference to these conditions. Yet expressive homology has a significant role to play in any adequate assessment of the relationship between artistic subjectivity and artistic form. For what the concept of expressive homology permits is precisely the construction of a space for defence of the art work as troublespot and symptom. The art work is not just the determinate outcome of the causal relations that constitute its material visibility as a designated thing we can call an art work – the institutional arrangements of studio, patron and gallery; the allegiances of artistic tradition – but also the experiential evidence of the culture’s ideological habitus. The work may reject that habitus, exceed it or inhabit it without resistance, yet the range of formal moves it makes will inevitably define a place for itself within the Weltanschaaung of the culture. This is ‘expressive homology’.

Now I would rather not use the term Weltanschaaung. It plays hostage to a crude historicism in which the concept pre-exists its own historic construction. This means that art works either unknowingly participate in a shared culture that is happening behind their back or, retrospectively, find a place that has already been created for them in the culture. Neither position is satisfactory in so far as both dissolve the self-consciousness of artistic production as a site of non-equivalence. Yet even if one rejects the notion that individual works ‘express’ the prevailing relations of the culture in such a fashion – as Althusser and Adorno famously do – one still has to answer the vexed question of the relationship between the formal decisions/qua options of art and art’s generic meaning; and this, essentially, is a transcendental hermeneutic issue. Why do art works appear to inhabit their historical moment, even if they ostensibly reject its prevailing or given forms? This is so because the problems that art works seek to resolve (or dissolve) are defined by the ideological frameworks and material conditions that artist and art work are obliged to inhabit or negate. Consequently, Hemingway says something quite revealing at the end of the essay on Hauser, although is not quite clear whether it represents an auto-critique or a riposte to the positivistic tendencies of the art-historical left more generally: ‘in retrospect it seems to me now that the New Left’s social history of art (and its liberal progeny) has been too narrowly confined to what it understands as specific causal mechanisms and too unwilling to confront the necessarily intuitional character of those homologies that become inescapable when we enter the domain of meaning’. In other words, the social history of art, and certainly an older Marxist art history, has consistently failed to recognize the internal vicissitudes of the art work as a condition of its truth claims. In this sense, the formal truths of art are made from the reified materials of a given Weltanschaaung. This Hauserian/Adornian shift is clearly visible in The Mysticism of Money: Precisionist Painting and Machine Age America, in which Precisionist painting is prised from its official productivist and technologist rhetoric to find a more ambiguous critical identity in the widespread romantic anti-capitalism of 1920s America.19

Hemingway’s work on Precisionism, then, serves to correct some of the ‘affirmativist’ shortcomings in his earlier defence of the classic modernist/realist painterly tradition. Here the nascent interface between realism (photographically derived referents) and modernism (geometric atmospherics and architectural abstractions) produces an object of study that is singularly at odds with the technological culture and formal traditions that produced it, rendering the prevailing optimism about machine civilization at the time, and subsequently, ‘facile’. Indeed, the Precisionist paintings of George Ault, Charles Sheeler, Louis Lozowick and Ralston Crawford become, for Hemingway, exemplary objects of ideological ‘irresolution’. That is, they serve to define a space or spaces between the crass objectivism and boosterism of the machine age and its rural obverse, the pastoralist invocation of romantic anti-capitalism, so widespread at the time in elite and regionalist artistic circles, and best represented by such figures as William Carlos Williams and the early Alfred Stieglitz. Precisionism’s romantic anti-capitalism – its cultural disaffection – is haunted, therefore, not by images of rural idylls but by the irresolvable anxieties of being modern as the outcome of technological development and the expansion of the commodity-form. In this sense, technology in Precisionism is a realm of conflict and not the neutral or picturesque backdrop to industrialization or the ‘American scene’. That is why, for Hemingway, it does not simply set out to represent the objects and surfaces of a newly technologized industrial world but to translate these forms and effects into an experientially coherent whole that is defined by an empathy-free return of the object to the spectator’s gaze. Precisionism’s famed obliqueness is precisely what establishes the truth-conditions of the work: its resigned qualities produce a range of formal/metaphoric effects in which the loss of empathy on the part of the spectator becomes a homology of capitalist abstraction.

One can see, therefore, why Hemingway’s book on Precisionism represents a decisive Hauserian/Adornian shift in his art history and is far closer to their reading of the truth-claims of art as symptomal and aporetic. Indeed, in his conclusion Hemingway makes this shift explicit, quoting Adorno from Aesthetic Theory: ‘for Adorno truth in artworks cannot be separated from ideology … [it is] the “distorted image of the true”. “Art cannot have one without the other” … and thus “in art, ideology and truth cannot be neatly distinguished from each other”. Precisionism, as I understand it, exemplifies this point.’20 The assumption, therefore, that, Precisionism might either be praised or condemned as a celebration of the ‘American Scene’ does a palpable injustice to the complex romantic anti-capitalist milieu from which the work emerged, perhaps best represented by the writing of Sherwood Anderson. But if Precisionist painting is valued precisely because of its aporetic status, Hemingway’s account of Precisionism is not an Adornian history per se. If an Adornian dialectics is a way of releasing the art work from moral judgment and from aestheticizing categories, it is not, thereby, a way of overruling a Marxian commitment to a ‘totalizing’ social history of art. In this sense, Hemingway’s art history remains defiantly Lukácsian in its ambitions.21 The autonomous production of the art work becomes legible only once it is brought to life relationally as part of a broad social and political analytic. There is no art work and artistic judgment without the definitional framework of culture and politics out of which the struggle for art’s autonomy is produced. And this is one of the reasons why Hemingway is so interested in reviving the concept of Weltanschaaung. Weltanschaaung is another name for a Lukácsian meta-historicization of form, in which the requirement is to think the ‘totality’ philosophically, even if the totality is always out of reach. In an article in 2012 on art history and methodology, he brings the legacies of Adorno and Lukács ‘together’ to reflect on this question. In order to open up a gap between what we might call a defence of an aporetic-dialectical art history and a causal-centric and positivistic social history of art and aestheticized Adornian valorization of the art object, art history must produce its modes of historicization in tension with the truth-claims of philosophy. ‘If one accepts a cognitive definition of the aesthetic – that is, one that makes it something more than the prompt to a form of disinterested pleasure – then the measure of value will be a work’s truth. This is not something that historical inquiry alone can determine; it depends on a totalizing and philosophical approach to the understanding of a cultural moment.’22 That will be very much Hemingway’s critical legacy: the formation of a post-Adornian art history that grounds the social legibility of the art work within a non-totalizable ‘totality’ (although he may contest ‘non-totalizable’ in this context). Consequently, for all his traditional (humanist) respect for the canon – or canon building – the privilege given to certain art works is never at the expense of would-be secondary works and the cultural relations that make them possible, thereby rendering the judgment of all art works as historical. So we might say, then, that the split that occurred in the early 1970s between art history and cultural studies after art history’s nervous breakdown is a profoundly false and debilitating one. There is nothing to be gained by defending art’s non-equivalence in opposition to the heteronymous cultural conditions that bring it into being. And this is why Hemingway’s decision to stay in ‘art history’ was more than just a defence of art’s autonomy: at a significant level it was always about allowing art history and cultural theory to speak together, even if their paths remain far from congruent.

1 Arnold Hauser, The Philosophy of Art History (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1959).

2 For example, Francis Klingender, Marxism and Modern Art: An Approach to Social Realism (Lawrence & Wishart: London, 1943); and Frederick Antal, Hogarth and His Place in European Art (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1962).

3 Walter Benjamin, ‘L’Oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée’, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. 5, no. 1 (1936), pp. 40–68.

4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. D. Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1997)

5 One key text in this shift is Adrian Rifkin’s ‘Can Gramsci Save Art History?’, Block, no. 3 (1980).

6 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. E. B. Ashton (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1984).

7 John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1980).

8 A symptomatic text of this conjuncture is Francis Frascina (ed.), Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (Harper and Row: New York, 1985).

9 Andrew Hemingway, ‘Cultural Democracy by Default: The Politics of the New Deal Arts Programmes’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 30, no. 2 (2007), pp. 269–87.

10 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (Verso: New York, 1996).

11 Andrew Hemingway, ‘Middlebrow: For and Against’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 22, no. 1 (1999), p. 171.

12 David Brody, Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1993); and Gary Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1989).

13 Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, Partisan Review, vol. 6, no. 5 (1939), pp. 34–49.

14 Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2002), p. 4.

15 Ibid., p. 1. One interesting exception to this rule in histories of this period is David Evans, John Heartfield: AIZ/V1 1930–38 (Kent Fine Art: New York, 1992).

16 Hemingway, Artists on the Left, op. cit., p. 282.

17 Andrew Hemingway, ‘Arnold Hauser: Between Romantic Anti-Capitalism and Marxism’, delivered at the international colloquium ‘L’histoire de l’art: généalogies et enjeux d’une pratique’, Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, 11–12 December 2009.

18 Hauser, The Philosophy of Art History, op. cit., quoted in Hemingway, ‘Arnold Hauser: Between Romantic Anti-Capitalism and Marxism’, op. cit.

19 Andrew Hemingway, The Mysticism of Money: Precisionist Painting and Machine Age America (Periscope Publishing: Pittsburgh, 2013).

20 Ibid., p. 205.

21 For Hemingway’s sympathetic discussion of the early Lukács, see his reflections on Lukács’s ‘Art for Art’s Sake and Proletarian Writing’ (1926), ‘The Historical and Political Context of Lukács’s “Art for Art’s Sake and Proletarian Writing”’, in Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall (eds.), Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence – Aesthetics, Politics, Literature (Continuum: London and New York, 2011).

22 Andrew Hemingway, ‘Reading Art and Art History’, Art Bulletin, vol. 94, no. 2 (June 2012), p. 164.