What Marx did for art

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What did Karl Marx have to say about ‘the immortal movement of its time’ – art?

ReNew Marxist Art History edited by Warren Carter, Barnaby Haran and Frederic J. Schwartz

Karl Marx (1818–83) was far too busy changing the world to devote much time to art, although he was partial to a bit of Dickens and Balzac. What he did do was to leave art historians with 'a guide to study' as his great friend and benefactor Friedrich Engels put it, which has been used for tackling art and visual culture for the last century or so.

For one thing, he gave us the concept of the ‘economic base’: the underpinning for all civilizations from Greco-Roman slave societies up to the capitalist present day. On top of this rises the superstructure: the roles and institutions that each society creates to hold things in place, such as law, religion, education, and of course art. Marx believed that when class conflict arose, as he argued it surely must, the superstructure was the place where this would be fought out.

So Marxist art historians ply their trade, sifting through the visual culture of the past looking for evidence of class war and, moreover, signs of the ideology of the dominant class. This ‘false consciousness’ in us all takes for granted the state of affairs in which we find ourselves.

That said, this heavyweight tome on the renewing of Marxist art history, if you ever believed it had gone away, may not seem too appealing. There is much to be feared in this collection of, not surprisingly, academic essays addressing the question: what kind of Marxist art history is there today and what should it be doing? Yet there are also some genuinely broader insights for both the politically committed and the merely curious as to what the role of Marxist art history can possibly be in an age of capitalist dominance and neo-liberalism.

The editors, all at some time involved at University College London with retiring art historian Andrew Hemingway, to whom the book is dedicated, have split the contributions into four areas representing the academic career and concerns of Hemingway himself, who appears to be held in almost saintly esteem by several of the contributors. The eulogizing at one point led me to check that the great man hadn't actually joined the ranks of the hallowed! In fact some of the writers have been in print with the him not too long ago.

The opening salvos dealing with ‘Marxist Theory in Practice’, by John Roberts and Stephen Eisenman, are well paced and form a gentle introduction. The former tracks the development of the discipline in the 1970s, and the latter's memoir equally maps the experience of a young art historian amid the reactionary environment of the US.

The most accessible to all but the most strident social art historians are the middle sections dealing with ‘Landscape, Art and Ideology’, and with ‘The Shaping of Modernism’. Particularly good are Brian Foss' description of the encroachment of industry into Canadian landscape painting, and Steve Edwards' essay on the aesthetics of late 19th-century photography in London and its status as labour. Both these writers demonstrate the way in which social art historians using Marxist analytical tools approach their subjects and explain their goals, and they do so in a style that is entertaining and enlightening. This accessible vein continues in Barnaby Haran's exposure of the propaganda potential in Soviet lithograph's of rural life in Tajikistan, and in Jody Patterson's description of the convergence of the two great modernist traditions of socialist realism and abstraction in the form of American paintings representing political and social unrest in the 1930s New York docks.

Beyond these essays, buyer beware! And at £25 for the soft back all but the committed, in the Marxist sense, could find themselves submerged in the type of dense, turgid and neologistic language that puts off so many from the actually rewarding and instructive world of social art history. The final section, ‘Marxism in a New World Order’, contains essays beyond the direct interests of guru Hemmingway, asking what Marxist art historians think about contemporary art.

In arguably the most interesting contribution, the late Frances Stracey examines the complex role played by women in the Situationist International (SI), both as contributors and as the discussed and often pornographic subject matter. (The SI was a group of assorted artists and intellectuals active 1957–72.)  Indeed the balance of male and female authors throughout this project has to be welcomed but there is little beyond the frontiers of Western art. Even the essay revealing the commodification of the work of a politically motivated Colombian photographer only goes to demonstrate the power of Western art institutions and the art market in neutralizing politically charged art.

Nevertheless, with the focus on text rather than illustrations and all these monochrome, this is not a book for anyone expecting anything more than a red tint to their visual expectations. Someone once said that it was possible to study art history and not actually look at a picture. I fear that reading a book like this will only reinforce such a view. As a Marxist art historian myself, I believe that our discipline needs to be more transparent and welcoming and less opaque and exclusive. What does stand out from this volume, however, is the diversity and range of Marxist art historical focus, away from the abstract theories of philosophers Theodor Adorno (1903–69) and Georg Lukacs (1885–1971) and from whimsical notions about William Morris'  designs and Otto Dix's alleged violent anti-Semitic attack on his preparatory drawings.

As Marx himself said 'art is the immortal movement of its time' and arguably a Marxist approach to art and its history is crucial to any understanding of the epoch in which it was produced.

ReNew Marxist Art History, edited by Warren Carter, Barnaby Haran and Frederic J. Schwartz, is published by Art / Books in association with University College London, £25.00 / $35.00 / €30.00 (ppb)