marxism and the history of art

From William Morris to the New Left
Edited by Andrew Hemingway
Hemingway 00 Pre iiiHemingway 00 Pre iii 30/5/06 10:55:1130/5/06 10:55:11
First published 2006 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Andrew Hemingway 2006 The right of the individual contributors to be identifi ed as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 2330 8 hardback ISBN 0 7453 2329 4 paperback
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England
Hemingway 00 Pre ivHemingway 00 Pre iv 30/5/06 10:55:1130/5/06 10:55:11
Contents
Introduction 1 Andrew Hemingway
3. Frederick Antal 45 Paul Stirton
4. Art as Social Consciousness: Francis Klingender and British Art 67
David Bindman
5. Max Raphael: Aesthetics and Politics 89 Stanley Mitchell
6. Walter Benjamin’s Essay on Eduard Fuchs: An Art-Historical Perspective 106
Frederic J. Schwartz
7. Meyer Schapiro: Marxism, Science and Art 123 Andrew Hemingway
8. Henri Lefebvre and the Moment of the Aesthetic 143 Marc James Léger
9. Arnold Hauser, Adorno, Lukács and the Ideal Spectator 161 John Roberts
10. New Left Art History’s International 175 Andrew Hemingway
11. New Left Art History and Fascism in Germany 196 Jutta Held
Hemingway 00 Pre vHemingway 00 Pre v 30/5/06 10:55:1130/5/06 10:55:11
vi MARXISM AND THE HISTORY OF ART
12. The Turn from Marx to Warburg in West German Art History, 1968–90 213
Otto Karl Werckmeister
Hemingway 00 Pre viHemingway 00 Pre vi 30/5/06 10:55:1130/5/06 10:55:11
Illustrations
1. William Morris, Pimpernel, wallpaper, 1876. V & A Images/Victoria & Albert Museum. 16
2. ‘Carved Heads of Maori Chief’s Staves’, from Henry Balfour, The Evolution of Decorative Art, 1893, fi g. 23. Courtauld Institute of Art: Photographic and Imaging. 20
3. Illustration of tattooed heads, fi gs 31 and 32 from Alois Riegl, Stilfragen, 1893. Courtauld Institute of Art: Photographic and Imaging. 24
4. ‘Tawhiao, The Maori King’, from Illustrated London News, 14 June 1844, p. 576. Special Collections, Senate House Library, University of London. 26
5. Giotto, The Confi rmation of the Rule of the Franciscan Order, fresco, Bardi Chapel, S. Croce, Florence, c. 1320. Photo Alinari. 54
6. Nardo di Cione, The Damned (detail of Last Judgment), fresco, Strozzi Chapel, S. Maria Novella, Florence, 1354–57. Photo Alinari. 55
7. Andrea Orcagna, Strozzi Altarpiece, tempera on wood, Strozzi Chapel, S. Maria Novella, Florence, 1357. Photo Alinari. 56
8. Théodore Gericault, Entrance to the Adelphi Wharf, crayon lithograph, 1821. Private Collection, London. 60
9. Richard Newton, A Will O Th’ Wisp, coloured etching. Private collection. Photograph: Warren Carter. 76
10. C.J. Grant, Reviewing the Blue Devils, Alias the Raw Lobsters, Alias the Bludgeon Men, wood engraving, c. 1833. Private collection. Photograph: Warren Carter. 78
11. J.C. Bourne, ‘Working Shaft, Kilsby Tunnel, July 8th 1857’ and ‘Great Ventilating Shaft, Kilsby Tunnel’, lithograph. Photograph: Warren Carter. 84
12. James Sharples, The Forge, steel engraving, 1849–59. Private collection. Photograph: Warren Carter. 86
13. Pablo Picasso, Guernica, oil on canvas, 349 × 776 cm, 1937. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Photograph: Archivo Fotográfi co Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. © Succession Picasso/DACS 2006. 100
vii
Hemingway 00 Pre viiHemingway 00 Pre vii 30/5/06 10:55:1130/5/06 10:55:11
viii MARXISM AND THE HISTORY OF ART
14. The Punishment of Dirkos by Zethos and Amphion (the Farnese Bull), fi g. 43 in Emanuel Loewy, The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art, 1907. Photograph: Warren Carter. 126
15. Apollo from Tenea, fi g. 27 in Emanuel Loewy, The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art, 1907. Photograph: Warren Carter. 127
16. Henri Matisse, Nasturtiums with the Painting ‘Dance’, oil on canvas, 191.8 × 115.3 cm, 1912. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Scofi eld Thayer, 1982 (1984.433.16). © Succession H. Matisse/DACS 2006. 135
Hemingway 00 Pre viiiHemingway 00 Pre viii 30/5/06 10:55:1230/5/06 10:55:12
Series Preface Esther Leslie and Mike Wayne
There have been quite a number of books with the title ‘Marxism and …’, and many of these have investigated the crossing points of Marxism and cultural forms, from Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and Form to Terry Eagleton’s Marxism and Literary Criticism, Raymond Williams’ Marxism and Literature, John Frow’s Marxism and Literary History and Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg’s Marxism and The Interpretation of Culture. These titles are now all quite old. Many of them were published in the 1970s and 1980s, years when the embers of 1968 and its events continued to glow, if weakly. Through the 1990s Marxism got bashed; it was especially easily mocked once its ‘actually existing’ socialist version was toppled with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Postmodernism made Marxism a dirty word and class struggle a dirty thought and an even dirtier deed. But those days that consigned Marxism to history themselves seem historical now. Signs of a regeneration of Marx and Marxism crop up periodically – how could it be otherwise as analysts seek explanatory modes in a world that, through 15 years of perma-war and the New World Disorder, is deeply riven by strife and struggle? Anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation conceive the world as a totality that needs to be explained and criticised. Marxism, however critically its inheritance is viewed, cannot be overlooked by those who make efforts to provide an analysis and a consequent practice.
Our series ‘Marxism and Culture’ optimistically faces a pessimistic world scenario, confi dent that the resources of Marxism have much yet to yield, and not least in the cultural fi eld. Our titles investigate Marxism as a method for understanding culture, a mode of probing and explaining. Equally our titles self-refl exively consider Marxism as a historical formation, with differing modulations and resonances across time, that is to say, as something itself to be probed and explained.
The fi rst two books in the series address popular or mass culture. Mike Wayne’s Marxism and Media Studies outlines the resources of Marxist theory for understanding the contemporary mediascape, while also proposing how the academic discipline of Media Studies might be submitted to Marxist analysis. John Roberts’s Philosophizing the Everyday uncovers the revolutionary origins of the philosophical concept of the everyday, recapturing it from a synonymity with banality and ordinariness propounded by theorists in Cultural Studies.
The present volume shifts the attention to ‘high culture’. Taking into its broad scope the insights of a number of key fi gures in Marxist
ix
Hemingway 00 Pre ixHemingway 00 Pre ix 30/5/06 10:55:1230/5/06 10:55:12
x MARXISM AND THE HISTORY OF ART
aesthetics, the volume draws a balance sheet. Marxism’s directedness towards transformation might make it sit uneasily in a discipline which has characteristically been about the analysis of objects that are property, objects that are in many ways related to conservation, tradition, preservation and value in its monetary guise. However, this volume reveals the pertinence of Marxist theory to manifold aspects of the art world: the materiality of art; the art market and the vagaries of value; the art object as locus of ideology; artists, art historians and art critics as classed beings; art and economy; art as commodity; the analogism of form and historical developments. The book’s fi nal chapters weight the analysis towards the moment just prior to ours, with the ascendance of the New Left in Visual Culture Studies. We hope that the research here stimulates further study of the contemporary relevance of Marxism in the fi eld of culture, addressing further themes such as the role of funding and the role of the gallery, questions of recuperation, the demands of technology. We await proposals on these and other themes!
Hemingway 00 Pre xHemingway 00 Pre x 30/5/06 10:55:1230/5/06 10:55:12
Acknowledgments
The project for this collection arose out of my experiences of teaching art- historical methodologies over the last 25 years and the frustration I have often felt that the interpretative and political tradition that is the foundation of my own thinking is so poorly represented in current literature about the discipline. The fact that so many friends have encouraged me to pursue it or offered to contribute confi rmed that a publication along these lines is needed. Two events in particular served as further encouragement, namely the session ‘Towards a History of Marxist Art History’ that I co-organised with Alan Wallach for the College Art Association annual conference in Philadelphia in 2002, and the international conference on ‘Marxism and the Visual Arts Now’, held at University College London later in the same year and organised by Matthew Beaumont, Esther Leslie, John Roberts and myself. Both of these were well attended and prompted vigorous debate. Some of the conversations they started have since been continued in the ‘Marxism and Interpretation of Culture’ seminars at the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research. I must also mention the important work that has been done by Paul Jaskot and Barbara McCloskey in initiating and running the Radical Art Caucus of the College Art Association. Its sessions, too, have continued to prompt fresh thinking. In addition to those mentioned above and the contributors to this volume, I want particularly to thank the following individuals for the stimulus I’ve received from their conversations with regard to questions of Marxism and art history in recent years: Warren Carter, Gail Day, Steve Edwards, Stephen Eisenman, Al Fried, Tom Gretton, Paul Jaskot, Janet Koenig, David Margolies, Stewart Martin, Fred Orton, Adrian Rifkin, Greg Sholette, Peter Smith, Frances Stracey, Ben Watson, and Jim van Dyke. As always, Carol Duncan’s companionship and support have been vital.
xi
Hemingway 00 Pre xiHemingway 00 Pre xi 30/5/06 10:55:1230/5/06 10:55:12
Introduction
This anthology is conceived as an introduction to recent thinking about the past of Marxist art history. It is not offered in the spirit of nostalgia – a kind of dusting off of relics – but as a prompt to critique and renewal. My assumption is that much of the history the contributors tell is little known in its specifi cs, and that its achievements are often misconstrued and undervalued.
The dominant mood in the art-historical academy of Britain and the United States today is a kind of liberal pluralism, an attitude that fosters tolerance of a range of different perspectives – in itself not an unworthy goal – but provides little or no incentive to debate between them, or to push their differences to a point of issue. Formalist art history, queer art history, feminist art history, post-colonial art history, and the social history of art coexist, with various overlaps and combinations, and behave as a set of rival specialisms. Marxist art history is at best a small side dish in this great smorgasbord, and is usually encountered only in diluted or adulterated forms. Two widely used anthologies published in the 1990s both assume that it is essentially obsolete,1 while a student textbook on ‘the New Art History’ that appeared in 2001 suggests that ‘classist Marxism’ – whatever that might be – has collapsed ‘under the weight of its corrupt and incompetent practical correlates’ and ‘because a rigorously conducted self-critique left most of its exponents unwilling to defend the traditional centrality of class’.2 In brief, for these authors, the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites, and the turn of China to market Stalinism, has fi nally discredited Marxism, while postmodern theory has remaindered it. In effect, they all assume the ‘end of history’ position trumpeted most famously by Francis Fukayama; that is, that free-market capitalism and liberal democracy is the fi nal terminus of human societies.3
To some extent, of course, we have been here many times before. The idea that the brutalities, horrors and inequalities of the Soviet experiment discredited Marxism as a theoretical system is not exactly new. Conservatives and liberals alike have always been eager to pronounce Marxism’s obsequies. At one level, what we see yet again is an absurd – though hardly disinterested – category mistake, a confusion between a state ideology and a complex system of critical thought. After all, it is from within the Marxist tradition itself that many of the fi ercest and most insightful critiques of Stalinism have come – one only has to recall the names of Trotsky, Charles Bettelheim, Tony Cliff and Herbert Marcuse to get the point. But the debacle of the
1
Hemingway 01 intro 1Hemingway 01 intro 1 25/5/06 12:16:5725/5/06 12:16:57
2 MARXISM AND THE HISTORY OF ART
USSR reinforced the discrediting of social-democratic politics in western Europe and elsewhere, making the idea that state power could be used to meliorate the operations of capital in the interests of the broad masses of society apparently obsolete, and leading to a corruption of language whereby a reactionary regression to free-market principles was denoted by the term ‘reform’. This was represented ideologically in the neo-liberal mantra that there are no alternatives to the market and the current forms of the bourgeois state, despite the immiseration of the poorest and most disempowered in all societies where neo-liberal policies have been implemented and the degradation of the political process to new depths of corruption and inanity in the long-established democracies that has accompanied it.4 I am not, of course, suggesting that the art-history academy in Britain and the United States, which is by and large liberal or sentimentally social- democratic in its leanings, actively endorses neo-liberalism. But on the other hand the marginalisation of the one system of thought that speaks for systemic critique, rather than changes of attitude within the existing social arrangements, is not just coincidence. In effect, the overwhelming majority in the academy also accept that there is no alternative. The best we can hope for is a micro-politics of particular interest groups. Given the social make-up of the academy and its functions within the larger order of things this is hardly surprising, but it is also disabling at both the analytical and practical levels.
Neo-liberalism and the resurgence of imperialism in the aftermath of the Cold War have brought their own contradictions, the anti-globalisation and anti-war movements being among them. Although these movements stand outside the old traditions of the left in many respects, there has also been a marked revival of interest in Marxism and other traditions of radical thought, which is registered in numerous publications. It is these developments that provide the occasion for this book.
The method and principles of a Marxist art history do not come ready made from the legacy of Marxism’s founders. Although Marx intended to write on aesthetics on two occasions in his life, he never did so. Thus, as with so much else in Marxist theory, an aesthetics has to be pieced together from fragmentary statements and deduced from the larger premises underlying his and Engels’s texts on other matters.5 As the uninitiated reader will discover from this volume, there is an important strand within Marxist art history that denies that aesthetics, understood as a general theory of the arts, is consistent with Marxism at all. Thus, from one perspective at least, one can have a Marxist theory of art that supersedes aesthetics – but even this is no simple matter given the many competing interpretations there are of Marx’s method and the nature of his theory of history. All this is, of course, to say that Marxism is not any single theory, but rather a family of theories that registers the impact of a whole range of different historical circumstances on the understanding and development of the original texts, with all their
Hemingway 01 intro 2Hemingway 01 intro 2 25/5/06 12:16:5725/5/06 12:16:57
INTRODUCTION 3
gaps and provisionality. Many of the central premises of Marxism are still subject to fi erce and ongoing debate, and are likely to remain so.6 Moreover, in a certain sense a Marxist art history is a contradiction in terms, in that Marxism as a totalising theory of society necessarily throws all disciplinary boundaries into question as obfuscations of bourgeois thought, and, in one variant, at least, sees them as a product of the reifi cation of knowledge characteristic of capitalist society.7 The attempts by Riegl, Wölffl in and others to demarcate art history’s specifi c domain by giving art its own internal logic of development, centred on the category of style, might seem to precisely illustrate this phenomenon.8
But although Marxist art history has from the beginning attacked the premises of formalism, there is a way in which it is obliged to concede it certain insights, and this is because of the notion that the different spheres of intellectual production have what Engels called an ‘ inherent relative independence’.9 In a letter of 1890, Engels observed, in the face of the degradation of the Marxist method by younger ‘materialists’:
But our conception of history is above all a guide to study, not a lever for construction after the manner of the Hegelian. All history must be studied afresh, the conditions of existence of the different formations of society must be examined individually before the attempt is made to deduce from them the political, civil-law, aesthetic, philosophic, religious, etc., views corresponding to them.10
The correspondence of Engels’s later years shows him repeatedly working to correct the prevalent misconception that Marxism stood for a crude economic determinism:
According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of material life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.11
And what Engels had to say about determination in the last instance in relation to philosophy would have applied to art as well, namely that it came about
within the limitations imposed by the particular sphere itself: in philosophy, for instance, by the operation of economic infl uences… upon the existing philosophic material handed down by predecessors. Here economy creates nothing anew, but it determines the way in which the thought material found in existence is altered and further developed, and that too for the most part indirectly…12
Hemingway 01 intro 3Hemingway 01 intro 3 25/5/06 12:16:5825/5/06 12:16:58
4 MARXISM AND THE HISTORY OF ART
Thus the tradition of German-language art history still speaks to us in important ways, because more than any other variant of the discipline it posited art’s specifi c domain in philosophically sophisticated ways, and continues to raise key issues about the relation of historical explanation to aesthetics.
It should be clear from this that within the broad purview of historical materialism art was left with a considerable degree of relative autonomy, and it provided no formulas as to how the determining infl uence of the economic was to be understood in its relationship with all the other causal factors. Such matters could only be established on an individual basis. Thus, while Marx and Engels were insistent that the production of art had to be understood as complexly determined by social interests, they acknowledged it as a special activity, the development of which was partly the result of endless reworking of the traditions and inherited materials of its particular domain. The question for their successors was how to relate these two characteristics. Further, neither did their literary remains indicate how the so-called science of aesthetics was to be understood.…