2

3
4
Warren Carter is a staff tutor at the Open University and a teaching fellow
in history of art at University College London.

Barnaby Haran is a teaching fellow in history of art at the University of

Bristol.

Frederic J. Schwartz is the head of the Department of History of Art at

University College London. He is the author of The Werkbund: Design
Theory and Mass Culture Before the First World War and Blind Spots:
Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany.

Cover image: Karl Marx photographed in London in 1875 by John Mayall.

Courtesy of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

Page 2: Carol Duncan, Under Wraps (Bust of Lenin), 2011,

pencil on paper, 25.4 × 21.6 cm.

5
6
CONTENTS

Title Page

PREFACE
Warren Carter, Barnaby Haran and Frederic J. Schwartz

INTRODUCTION
Warren Carter, ‘Towards a History of the Marxist History of Art’

MARXIST THEORY IN PRACTICE

John Roberts, ‘Art History’s Furies’

Stephen F. Eisenman, ‘The Political Logic of Radical Art History in

California 1974–85: A Memoir’

Warren Carter, ‘The Dialectical Legacies of Radical Art History:

Meyer Schapiro and German Aesthetic Debates in the1930s
and 1940s’

Stewart Martin, ‘Approaching Marx’s Aesthetic: Or, What is

Sensuous Practice?’

Matthew Beaumont, ‘A Communion of Just Men Made Perfect:

Walter Pater, Romantic Anti-Capitalism and the Paris
Commune’

Norbert Schneider, ‘What Remains of Adorno’s Critique of

Culture?’

Frederic J. Schwartz, ‘Aby Warburg and the Spirit of Capitalism’

LANDSCAPE, CLASS AND IDEOLOGY

7
Alan Wallach, ‘A Note on Aestheticizing Tendencies in American
Landscape Painting 1840–80’

Brian Foss, ‘Meaning, Change and Ambiguity in Canadian

Landscape Imagery: Homer Watson and The Pioneer Mill’

Charles Ford, ‘“One spectator is a better witness than ten

listeners”: Roger North, Making the Past Public’

Steve Edwards, ‘An “Ever-Recurring Controversy”: John

Thompson, William James Stillman and the Bootblacks’

Tom Gretton, ‘Calaveras and Commodity Fetishism: The

Unhallowed Supernatural in the Work of José Guadalupe
Posada’

Angela Miller, ‘Reading Ahab: Rockwell Kent, Herman Melville and

C. L. R. James’

Caroline Arscott, ‘William Morris, Ornament and the Coordinates of

the Body’

MARXISM AND THE SHAPING OF MODERNISM

Barnaby Haran, ‘Red Hashar: Louis Lozowick’s Lithographs of
Soviet Tajikstan’

Martin I. Gaughan, ‘Lu Märten and the Question of a Marxist

Aesthetic in 1920s Germany’

Rachel Sanders, ‘Experiment and Propaganda: Art in the Monthly

New Masses’

Jody Patterson, ‘Stuart Davis and Left Modernism on the New York
Waterfront in the 1930s’

Fred Orton, ‘Action, Revolution and Painting: Resumed’

James A. van Dyke, ‘Erasure and Jewishness in Otto Dix’s Portrait

of the Lawyer Hugo Simons’

8
Paul B. Jaskot, ‘The Nazi Party’s Strategic Use of the Bauhaus:
Marxist Art History and the Political Conditions of Artistic
Production’

MARXISM IN A NEW WORLD ORDER

Alex Potts, ‘Realism and Materialism in Postwar European Art’

Frances Stracey, ‘The Situation of Women’

Peter Smith, ‘Photography, Language and the Pictorial Turn’

Chin-tao Wu, ‘Scars on the Landscape: Doris Salcedo Between

Two Worlds’

Gail Day, ‘Realism, Totality and the Militant Citoyen’: or, What
Does Lukács Have to Do with Contemporary Art?

Kerstin Stakemeier, ‘Deartification This Side of Art: Ideology

Critique, Autonomy and Reproduction’

Notes on the contributors

Index
Copyright

9
T his book is the result of a project that had two
goals. It was conceived as a Festschrift in
honour of Andrew Hemingway, to mark the
occasion of his retirement from the Department of
History of Art at University College London. But the
project quickly exceeded that initial objective, and
for two reasons. First, a Festschrift implies the end
of an academic career, something patently not the
case with Andrew, who continues to teach, publish
and supervise doctoral students. And second, his
field of activity has always gone beyond the confines
of a single academic institution, even one to which
he contributed so much and whose direction he
helped to determine over two decades. He was, for
example, at the centre of the University of London’s
Labour History Seminar for many years, and was
the principal figure behind the Seminar for Marxism
and the Interpretation of Culture (now renamed the
Seminar for Marxism in Culture) that came out of it.
He was also crucial to the development and
continued profile of the Oxford Art Journal for many
years. And he has been a tireless organizer of
conferences – the international MAVAN (Marxism
and the Visual Arts Now) set the agenda for many
for a decade – symposia and volumes of collected
texts. As supervisor, external reader and editor, he
has encouraged and challenged scores of scholars,
whose work has gained in richness, depth and
rigour as a result. In a discipline once handicapped
by insularity, he has been a key link between
academics in the United Kingdom, United States,
Canada, Germany and France.

10
Doing justice to such a wide range of activity and
influence would have resulted in a publication three
times this size. The book as it is, however,
represents the attempt of the editors to gather a
representative group of Hemingway’s colleagues,
students and interlocutors in the service of the
second goal: to provide a snapshot of the state of an
art history that can be considered properly Marxist.
The volume is divided into four sections. Three of
these correspond to areas of Hemingway’s own
scholarly commitments, and one does not. The first
section, ‘Marxist Theory in Practice’, addresses
theoretical issues of materialist art history and
explores case studies in the development of the
tradition itself. Establishing an intellectual context
for the rest of the book, John Roberts maps out the
development of Hemingway’s own scholarship by
situating it within the moment in the 1970s when
a generation of academics, radicalized by the
utopian moment of 1968, withdrew from the subject
altogether, embracing instead the newly emergent
domains of popular or visual cultures. Roberts
charts what was at stake in Hemingway’s decision
to stay within art history, reading his research
through his initial attachment to a form of humanist
realism and then the shift to a post-Adornian
position in which the work of art is read as a form of
symptomatic critique, all within a Lukácsian
framework emphasizing the continuing importance
of the concept of totality. Stephen Eisenman
provides a personal account of another trajectory of
the period: his formation as a radical art historian in
California from the early 1970s through to the
mid-1980s, from the moment when a Marxist art
history was being forged with both Otto Karl
Werckmeister and T. J. Clark at UCLA through to its

11
recuperation and eventual eclipse in the 1980s.
Looking at the development of this tradition
through the prism of internal debates within the
subject, its relationship to other radical traditions
within the Californian academic system (including
the presence of key members of the Frankfurt
School) and the broader economic shifts impacting
upon the university sector, Eisenman charts how
the initial political optimism of the earlier work
became transmuted into a form of political fatalism
in which revolutionary defeat was preordained and
avant-garde strategies were understood as
compromised.
Warren Carter assesses the political rationale that
underpinned Meyer Schapiro’s aesthetic theories
during a period of emerging crises on the Left, in
particular the schisms caused in the 1930s by the
repressions of the Soviet Union. He situates
Schapiro’s ideas in a dialogue with German Marxist
debates on aesthetics, and traces the influence of
Bertolt Brecht’s ‘epic theatre’ and Georg Lukács’s
rival notion of ‘epic realism’ in Schapiro’s thinking
on public art, most notably the work of Diego
Rivera, and later in Abstract Expressionism’s
gestural appeal against alienation. In the following
text, Stewart Martin considers the basis of Marx’s
concept of the aesthetic in the sensuous
materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach, and argues that
Marx’s break with the latter in his ‘Theses on
Feuerbach’ necessarily involved jettisoning any
conception of the aesthetic. Martin shows that
thinking through the consequences of this rupture
allows a radical clarification of Marx’s new
conception of practice, as this emerges from his
critique of sensuousness materialism (and idealism);
and furthermore that this new vantage point

12
suggests a new basis for an appreciation of Marx’s
relation to aesthetics, indeed a new orientation to
the critique of aesthetics within the capitalist mode
of production. Putting aside Walter Pater’s
reputation as the leading ‘art-for-its-own sake’
aesthete of the late nineteenth century, Matthew
Beaumont addresses the seldom-explored sociality
of Pater’s writings as a rebellious form of romantic
anti-capitalism. Beaumont recasts details such as
Pater’s homosexuality and his apparent antagonism
towards modernity as contributory elements of a
‘social dreaming’ based on utopian, liberatory
impulses that equated with sensory aesthetic
experiences, and indicates a modern, even
prophetic, sensibility inherent in ‘Diaphaneitè’, his
putative manifesto. In the next contribution,
Norbert Schneider, a key figure in the development
of a left art history in the Federal Republic of
Germany, provides an erudite reconsideration of
Adorno’s influential critique of culture, exploring its
sources, strategies and lacunae. Schneider shows
something else too: that, as in the case of
Werckmeister, art history emerging from the
German New Left was not a passive recipient of
critical theory but instead a unique and productive
site from which to engage with this body of thought.
Finally, Frederic J. Schwartz starts in non-Marxist
territory – a brief encounter between art historian
Aby Warburg and sociologist Max Weber – to
explore how Warburg’s work represented an
ambivalent and uncomfortable engagement with
turn-of-the-century debates about the nature and
origins of capitalism. Paradoxically, Warburg’s
tentative and evasive treatment of the issue,
Schwartz argues, proved influential for later critical

13
theorists, from Ernst Bloch to Walter Benjamin and
Siegfried Kracauer.
The second section, ‘Landscape, Class and
Ideology’, focuses on a set of concerns that was
crucial to the development of a Marxist art history
in the wake of the New Left, while at the same time
reconsidering approaches to this material. Alan
Wallach explores aestheticizing tendencies within
Hudson River School painting from the 1850s and
1860s, developments that had been obscured with
the invention of the art-historical category of
‘Luminism’ from the 1950s as a means both to
market a particular type of landscape art and to
define a home-grown pictorial model in the
nineteenth century. Drawing upon the work of
Pierre Bourdieu and examining the paintings of
John F. Kensett, Wallach argues that these
aestheticizing tendencies coincide with the needs of
a particular patrician class seeking to distinguish
itself through its aesthetic sensibility in an attempt
to secure a cultural hegemony in line with its
political and economic power in the post-Civil War
period. Brian Foss shows how the landscapes of the
Canadian painter Homer Watson from the turn of
the twentieth century responded to the
encroachment of industry and infrastructure on the
wilderness, and were consonant with a nostalgic
and selective discourse about nature that saw
modernity as an imminent threat. Marketing himself
as imbued with the ‘pioneer spirit’ to an urban
audience, Watson was caught between preserving a
natural paradise and serving a cultural elite that the
very destructive processes of modernization had
enabled. Charles Ford uses the consideration of the
class dynamics of an earlier period –
late-seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century

14
England – as a way to explore the emergence of the
‘bourgeois public sphere’ as described by Jürgen
Habermas. But Ford comes to decidedly
un-Habermasian conclusions, seeing the
wide-ranging work of polymath Roger North as
negotiating a place for private knowledge in the
new publicity of published and circulating texts.
Despite the usefulness of Habermas’s categories in
describing the origins of what we identify as the
Enlightenment, the contours of privacy, publicity
and authorship are drawn here in a very different
way.
The remaining texts in this section similarly stretch
categories, chronologies and media. Looking at John
Thompson’s Street Life in London from the 1870s,
Steve Edwards considers the political economy of
nineteenth-century British photography. He
addresses themes of continued urgency about the
document’s social agency (in a rebuttal to both the
influence of Michael Fried’s attenuation of the
medium’s social promise and the ironic archival
style of some contemporary work), debates on the
métier of photography and its aesthetic status, the
nuances in the iconography of labour, and the
operation of photography as a form of work. Tom
Gretton moves through and beyond an
iconographical analysis of the prints produced by
the Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada in Mexico
City between 1888 and 1913. Focusing on what he
terms the ‘specific commodity function’ of these
sheets, he identifies precisely the urban audience
for them, at the same time drawing upon and
challenging the anthropological work of Michael
Taussig on both devils and commodity fetishism.
Concentrating on the artist Rockwell Kent’s 1930
illustrations for Moby Dick, Angela Miller

15
elaborates a triadic relationship around the epic
nautical narrative between Herman Melville’s
original text, Kent’s dramatic woodcuts and C. L. R.
James’s 1953 Marxist analysis of the book. She
argues that the figure of Ahab becomes a shifting
cipher of political personality cults as the era of
dictators moves on to the Cold War, a site of tension
that echoes the antagonisms of Kent’s political
thinking, an idiosyncratic version of socialism that
combined unionist collectivism with the survivalist
individualism of the wilderness adventurer. Caroline
Arscott reconsiders a seemingly familiar topic – the
designs of William Morris – in terms of the political
potential of affect, desire and subjectivity. Framing
her discussion by reference to Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri’s discussion of biopolitics in Empire,
she investigates the intimations of sensory
experience in Morris’s designs for printed textiles
and their relation to both Morris’s own aesthetics
and contemporary physiological aesthetics.
Section three, ‘Marxism and the Shaping of
Modernism’, considers the historical intersection of
Marxism and the modernist projects of the early
twentieth century, teasing out the complexities and
specificities of these episodes. In the first chapter,
Barnaby Haran discusses how Louis Lozowick’s
apparently unambiguously celebratory lithographs
of Soviet Tajikistan invoked the conflicts that
underlay ‘red hashar’, a sovietized version of
Central Asian neighbourliness, whereby figures
such as veiled and unveiled women and Tajik Red
Army horsemen and tractor drivers were used as
symbols of ongoing traumas in the imposition of
communist modernity against Islamic, feudal
traditionalism. Embroiled in international
controversies about proletarian iconography, which

16
he largely challenged, Lozowick’s pictures of
Tajikistan were imbued with touristic, melancholy
romanticism about the indigenous world that the
Soviet modernizers were forcibly remaking. Martin
Gaughan explores the complex work of Lu Märten,
writings that amount to a sophisticated but largely
forgotten attempt to develop a Marxist aesthetics in
1920s Germany. Gaughan unearths a debate that
developed in the pages of Die Linkskurve and Die
Rote Fahne, involving not only Märten but also Karl
August Wittfogel and Gertrud Alexander, important
figures who remain obscure. Rachel Sanders
demonstrates that far from being a monolithic
organ of communist propaganda, the American
magazine New Masses was a site of competing
viewpoints and shifting editorial lines during its two
decades of existence from 1926. Concentrating on
its most modernist and plural phase, before
increasing political and aesthetic entrenchment
after 1934, Sanders examines the varying strategies
of its artists and the responses of editors and
writers to developments in Soviet and Comintern
policies such as the Third Period Line and the
emergence of the Popular Front. By focusing upon
one painting by Stuart Davis – previously mistitled
Artists Against War and Fascism – Jody Patterson
demonstrates how the traditional binary opposition
between a supposedly agitational social realism and
a purported disinterested abstraction in the 1930s
American art world is patently unworkable. She
brings new iconographic arguments to bear upon
Davis’s work to argue that while it may indeed
represent a critique of the rise of fascism in the
1930s – in particular in terms of the Spanish Civil
War – it also comments upon the struggles between
various trade-union factions on the waterfront on

17
the East Coast, whose more radical members were
protesting the use of American ships to carry arms
to the forces of Franco, a multivalency made
possible by the painting’s very abstraction.
In the following text, Fred Orton returns to, and
revises, his essay on Harold Rosenberg’s celebrated
account of American postwar gestural painting,
‘The American Action Painters’. Orton’s essay, first
published in the Oxford Art Journal in 1992, and
thus seven years before Rosenberg’s papers were
released by the Getty Research Institute, reads
Rosenberg’s account as a continuation of his earlier
political commitments in the 1930s when he was
within the orbit of the American Communist Party
and then Trotskyism. After Stalinism and Nazism
had destroyed any claims that Moscow and Paris
may have had for cultural supremacy, Rosenberg
sees in the New York Abstract Expressionist artist a
surrogate proletarian agency defined by the
changed political circumstances of the early 1950s,
when the opportunities for political dissent had
withered under McCarthyism. The last two essays in
this section offer a different take on the relations
between Marxism and modernism. Instead of
focusing on projects where these two are more or
less unproblematically allied, James A. van Dyke
and Paul B. Jaskot employ a sensitive and
fine-grained materialist approach to the concrete
details of the relations of art and politics, allowing a
more complex picture of these relations to emerge.
Van Dyke takes as his subject a portrait by Otto Dix,
a painter who stayed programmatically clear of
political commitments. Van Dyke argues that a
non-revolutionary painter, even in potentially
revolutionary times, offers valuable material for a

18
materialist history of art, revealing clearly the
networks
of institutions, discourses and social forces that
such an artist needed to negotiate, and showing the
precise ways specific works of art were produced
and functioned socially. Jaskot, in turn, reconsiders
the National Socialists’ political mobilization of
images of the Bauhaus, teasing out the local
conditions and subtle chronology of this
engagement of enemies. Focusing on institutions
and events allows a more complete and complex
account of entities that are usually generalized and
considered only in terms of ideologies whose
contours are sketched with an unhelpfully broad
brush.
The final section, ‘Marxism in a New World Order’,
considers Marxist perspectives on recent and
contemporary art. As such, it does not so much echo
or engage in debate with the writings of this book’s
dedicatee, but represents work that is nonetheless
part and parcel of the Marxist milieu in which he
and others operated. In the first chapter, Alex Potts
considers the politics of the investment in
materiality of European artists in the postwar years,
specifically Renato Guttuso’s and Asger Jorn’s
development of innovative, alternate realist
practices that simultaneously diverged from older
conventions and newer trends of leftist culture,
such as social realism or neo-realism. Although
differing in degrees of legible subject matter,
Guttuso and Jorn shared a commitment to the
necessity of the physicality of painting that
superseded their relative disparities around the
dualism of abstraction and figuration, and their
practices proposed a sustained affective experience
of materiality in the production and reception of art

19
with the potential for an interdependent model of
agency. In the next contribution, we publish
posthumously a text by the late Frances Stracey, a
colleague and friend whom the editors of this book,
and many of its contributors, miss deeply. She
explores the position of women in relation to the
Situationist International: first in terms of how they
were depicted in the representational strategies in
its journal Internationale situationniste; and second,
how the role they played within the group was
articulated at a theoretical level in their writing.
Stracey argues that the seemingly random images
of women culled from glossy magazines and
pornographic sources constituted two different
levels of détournement as a critique of the
commodity fetishism in consumer society and the
sexism endemic to it. Furthermore, she argues that
in its renewed call for a more inclusive proletariat,
the Situationist political programme was
proto-feminist, despite the limited number of female
participants within the SI itself. Peter Smith’s
‘Photography, Language and the Pictorial Turn’
considers the radical interplay of word and image in
the hybrid medium of the photo-essay, in which the
photograph and the text are placed in a critical
relation to each other that emphasizes, rather than
blurs, their discrete ontologies. Smith highlights the
radical possibilities for contemporary art practice of
the dialectical photo-essay format, exemplified by
the work of Allan Sekula, one that mobilizes the
photograph’s non-linguistic basis rather than
relying on the simplifying anchorage of captions.
The juxtaposed text, he argues, acts as a
provocative foil for enquiry into the represented
social reality.

20
In the first of three essays on contemporary
practice, Chin-tao Wu considers the Colombian
artist Doris Salcedo, questioning the ways that she
has negotiated, even colluded with, a Western art
world in which the insatiable demand for so-called
‘Third World artists’ among curators and collectors
can appear cynical and opportunistic. Often typified
by evocative arrays of associative found objects,
Salcedo’s work involves an examination of the
traumas in Colombian society of the civil war and
political suppression of the 1980s, but Wu considers
that the extent of the artist’s adherence to the
aggressively speculative art market risks sacrificing
political import about a local situation for global
success. In a project she cheerfully admits is
‘perverse’, Gail Day considers the work of Allan
Sekula, Chto Delat, Freee and Radek Community
through the lens of Lukács’s concepts of reification,
realism and totality. Reading Lukács against the
grain, Day has little trouble reconnecting with the
complexity of his thought, circumventing the crude
statements of his positions (including his own
statements) and mobilizing it in productive ways. In
the last contribution, Kerstin Stakemeier begins
with an exploration of Adorno’s concept of
Entkunstung or ‘deartification’, the ineluctable
encroachment in modernity of the outside world on
the autonomy of art. She finds there a productive
place to reopen the negative dialectic of Adorno’s
critical theory, focusing on the issue of artistic
labour, one not dealt with adequately by Adorno (or
other critical theorists). Her reflections draw
sustenance from and yield insight on a range of
postwar contemporary practices whose projects
centre on a consideration of labour, from Italian
Workerism to feminist art and theory.

21
The reader will notice a lack of texts from beyond
the Anglo-American and German art-historical
communities. There are reasons for this. Isolated
examples have appeared elsewhere, but the
constellations of intellectual momentum,
institutional politics and publishing opportunities
have worked against the development of sustained
and vigorous production of scholarship in these
contexts. In France, for example, the journal
Histoire et critique des arts served as a focus for a
group of that name, holding important conferences
and engaging in international discussions that were
very much part of the advanced debates of the late
1970s. Scholars such as Nicos Hadjinicolaou,
Michel Melot and Patrick Le Nouëne had much to
say, but the group, and the journal itself, served
more as a forum to publish work from North
America and Germany than actually establishing an
autonomous discourse in its own right. In Italy, the
architectural history of the so-called ‘Venice School’
around Manfredo Tafuri, Massimo Cacciari,
Francesco Dal Co and Marco De Michelis at the
IUAV (Istituto Universitario di Architettura di
Venezia) generated work of impressive
philosophical rigour and depth, which was
combined with an active involvement in communist
politics. Yet a certain narrowness of focus –
architecture and the issue of the capitalist city – has
prevented this scholarship from serving as a model
beyond these respective fields. Isolated within the
academic context of their country, the most
important
resonances of the Venice School have been felt, as
is often the case, in North America, and there more
in schools of architecture than within the field of art
history.

22
As this book and others show, it is possible to draw
a genealogy of a Marxist history of art, but this
should not blind us to the contingencies of each
moment in this complex trajectory. A Marxist art
history was a necessity a century ago, but it was
necessarily scattered and heterogeneous due to the
institutional bases open to it (political parties of the
left with their own institutional problems) and those
avenues that were closed (the academy). The
energy of the 1960s and 1970s generated by the
New Left similarly made a Marxist art history seem
necessary. The efforts of an embattled younger
generation in Germany, the United States and
Britain, against great odds and opposition, showed
too that it was possible, and that conservative
institutions could be both challenged and
transformed in the process. But the momentum and
sheer weight of these institutions allowed them to
assimilate and incorporate, and ultimately to diffuse
and defuse, the energies of that particular moment.
Thus the tradition with which we are dealing saw its
energies divided and its alliances fractured as its
insights were incorporated within a hegemonic
academy and its larger perspective was rejected.
But now this tradition of thought has new
opportunities to negotiate its relationship to
institutions, as these latter no longer look so secure,
so insulated and so isolated. The paradoxical
situation of Marxist art history today – oppositional
but intellectually strong, marginal in terms of
personnel but integral to the thinking of the
discipline – means that there is reason neither for
fatalism nor for withdrawal. This collection of
essays is, in the best sense, incomplete, full of
remnants of the past and promises of the future, the
balance of which we can not yet be sure. While

23
drawing on, and simultaneously challenging, the as
yet unexhausted work of Marx and Marxist views of
the past, new interventions and frameworks are
being developed. For example, recently formed
groups such as Historical Materialism (a journal, a
set of conferences and a publishing venture) will
feed into the further development of Marxist art
history. We are aware that figures such as Alain
Badiou, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri and others
who have opened up lines of enquiry and critique
are only occasionally alluded to in this collection.
But we are confident that these perspectives, and
others, will be represented – and that Marxism will
look quite different – the next time someone
attempts a project such as the one we have
undertaken in the pages that follow.

The editors would like to add just two final notes.

First, our thanks to our publisher Andrew Brown of
Art / Books and to Tamar Garb and Stephen Smith
at University College London for their belief in and
support of this project over several years. And
second, the dedication of this book from all those
involved: to Andrew Hemingway.

24
PREFACE
Warren Carter, Barnaby Haran and Frederic J. Schwartz

25
‘Here we wish only to affirm that a theory of social and historical
change is a prerequisite of any discourse that claims to engage
with the historically specific circumstances involved in the
generation of art objects or other cultural products.’1

I n his entry on the ‘Social History of Art’ for the

1996 anthology Critical Terms for Art History,
Craig Clunas begins with the question: ‘What might
a social history of the “Social History of Art” look
like?’2 In an introduction to an anthology devoted to
‘renewing’ Marxist art history, this is something
that obviously needs to be considered. It is also an
appropriate question to begin with, for it is a
subject to which Andrew Hemingway, to whom this
volume of essays is dedicated, has been committed
(and, moreover, is still thinking about) over the
course of his academic life. Not only has he
produced highly commendable models of a Marxist
history of art in terms of the production of early
nineteenth-century English landscape imagery; the
art produced by those artists either in, or associated
with, the Communist Party in the United States
between 1926 and 1956; and more recently his
interpretation of American Precisionism in the
interwar period. He has also been concerned for
many years in historicizing the shifts within the
discipline itself, incisively assessing how a Marxist
take on the subject has been affected by political
and economic transformations within the wider
culture as a whole.3 This is a project crystallized in
Hemingway’s study of the Marxist art historian
Meyer Schapiro, and codified (if unfinished in terms

26
of his own continuing work on the subject) in his
2006 anthology Marxism and the History of Art.4
What distinguishes this latter text is that it brings
together the two significant traditions within the
Marxist history of art: the interwar generation of
Schapiro, Max Raphael, Francis Klingender,
Frederick Antal and Arnold Hauser; and a
subsequent New Left one which, radicalized by the
utopian impulses of 1968, attempted to regenerate
a Marxist art history after the impasse of the Cold
War years.5 If the intellectual efforts of T. J. Clark
and Otto Karl Werckmeister loom large in this
renewal, they nevertheless differ in their approach.6
At his most extreme, Werckmeister has argued that
the subject of aesthetics has no basis in the works
of classical Marxism
and is therefore purely ideological; moreover, in
terms of its centrality within critical theory, this
subject has become a utopian surrogate for, and
obstacle to, the potential for actual revolutionary
transformation.7 It should thus be jettisoned for a
more thoroughgoing materialist critique of the
ideological role that art has played, and continues
to play, within bourgeois society.8 Werckmeister
calls for specific concrete historical work over
philosophical abstraction. For him, the Marxist
history of art is a contradiction in terms in that the
science of Marxism is by its very nature a totalizing
system of thought with disciplinary boundaries
being little more than one of the obfuscations of
bourgeois thought. Clark, by contrast, in his focus
upon the particular historical conjuncture of art and
politics in revolutionary France in 1848 and
afterwards, has persuasively provided accounts of
how art works during moments of social upheaval
can become ‘a disputed, even effective, part of the

27
historical process’ and, moreover, have the
potential to work against the grain of dominant
regimes of power.9 The form of immanent critique
here clearly has a relationship to the work of
Theodor W. Adorno, and this has become more
explicit in later years; while the focus upon the
agency of painting in-and-of itself shares more than
a passing resemblance to the Greenbergian model
of modernist canon building. Indeed, it was the
codification of this tradition, and the claims that
Clement Greenberg made for this type of painting,
with its relationship to nineteenth-century French
painting, that became one of the principal sites of
critique for the social history of art within the
anglophone world. The combination of both – the
canon and the claims made for it – became the
object of analysis for Fred Orton and Griselda
Pollock when they began teaching on the masters
programme in the Social History of Art at Leeds
from 1979 onwards, a course that had been
initiated by Clark several years earlier.10
If Clark’s later writing skirts perilously close to
upholding the modernist canon – reading negativity
as value where Greenberg reads formal purity –
then Werckmeister has consistently sought to knock
down such edifices. Whereas Clark stays with the
more traditional objects of art history,
Werckmeister has instead engaged with a far more
diffuse range of cultural artefacts, from the music of
Kraftwerk to Japanese anime – objects clearly
beyond the purview of a more traditional (and
Clarkian) history of art.11 Yet both of them locate
this radical impulse within the discipline to the
political upheavals of 1968. Werckmeister
understands the radicalization of the discipline as a
product of the ‘second and general crisis of late

28
capitalist society’ that ran until 1973; and Clark
attributed his seminal books of that year to political
quietism, representing the shift from his
involvement in Situationism to academia, from the
street to the archive.12 So whereas Werckmeister
locates the radical critique of the discipline within
‘the larger intellectual and academic movements of
that time’, Clark reads it as already symptomatic of
defeat, with its rapid absorption into what was to
become a far-from-Marxist ‘social history of art’ that
contributed to a rejuvenation of the subject within
the strict confines of the academic marketplace.13
For Clark, then, this shift ultimately played a
recuperative role for the discipline ‘as the 60s
slipped away and the academic world returned to
its old habits’.14 A Marxist art history became the
social history of art, which, alongside competing
methodologies representing the rival claims of
feminism, psychoanalysis, sexuality and race,
transmogrified into the smorgasbord that became
known as ‘the new art history’.15 (This moment was
captured in the title of the well-known 1986 book of
the same name edited by A. L. Rees and Frances
Borzello.16) This is what we would like to posit as
one of the key differences between Marxist art
history and the new art history: the former was
always in some meaningful way somehow refracted
through the struggles of 1968, an attempt to think
through some productive relationship between the
subject of art history and the broader social
upheavals of that moment; while the latter
represents an institutionalized effort with no
necessary connection to such radical energies.
When Clark writes in his ‘On the Social History of
Art’ (an acknowledged reference to Hauser) that ‘it
is easier to define what methods to avoid than

29
propose a set of methods for systematic use’, he is
clearly distancing himself from that former
generation of Marxist art historians mentioned
earlier.17 By flagging up the ‘taboos’ of ‘the notion
of works of art “reflecting” ideologies, social
relations, or history’; or talking about ‘history as
“background” to the work of art’; or offering
analysis depending upon ‘intuitive analogies
between form and ideological content’, Clark is
making a sideswipe at the likes of Schapiro,
Raphael, Klingender, Antal and Hauser.18 In this
way they are positioned – as right-wing critics liked
to argue – as historians who worked with a
simplistic economic model of cultural analysis that
directly reads off the class interests of those who
patronize art into the formal composition, and
ideological character, of the works produced. Yet
the work of these earlier pioneers within the
Marxist tradition cannot simply be subsumed under
the kind of crude historicism that characterized the
Second International and must instead be seen as
part of a broader attack upon a Stalinist economism
that attempted to grant a greater specificity to the
cultural by introducing a more complex set of
relations between the base and the superstructure.
They were successful in this to different degrees.
While Klingender can probably be understood as
the one member of his generation who most crudely
conceives of artistic production and analysis within
a Soviet framework indebted to Georgi Plekhanov,
Raphael and Schapiro instead had a more sustained
and complex engagement with modern art, and
Hauser and Antal were always critical of any
tendency within the discipline that reduced
extra-artistic phenomena to mere background
material.19

30
As early as his ‘The Marxist Theory of Art’ of 1932,
Raphael was distancing himself from both bourgeois
and historicist accounts of the discipline and was
using the dialectical method to grant art a greater
autonomy than it had been formerly been
allowed.20 According to John Roberts, this was
possible because in the 1920s Raphael had read
Marx’s ‘Introduction to a Critique of Political
Economy’, which expanded the preface to A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,
first published in 1859, and was published by Karl
Kautsky in his journal Die Neue Zeit in 1903.21
Marx’s discussion of methodology in this text, in
particular his dismissal of the dialectic as a unitary
philosophical method, allowed Raphael to counter
both economist and historicist misreadings of Marx.
It also allowed him to break the crude binary
opposition between modernism and social realism
that became increasingly entrenched after 1934,
when the latter became the official Soviet line in all
matters aesthetic. While Raphael, like Schapiro
(who befriended him while he was in New York),
never uncritically celebrated modernism per se,
both were clear that it represented the most
significant art of their time, and they therefore
treated it with the theoretical sophistication that it
properly deserved.22 For Schapiro, modernism in
the visual arts was deeply contradictory in that,
while representing a historically progressive ideal
of individual freedom within bourgeois society, in its
mediation via the privatized market it was in part
constitutive of class divisions under capitalism.23
If the anti-fascist diaspora of the 1930s led Raphael
to New York, then the Hungarian Antal left
Germany for Britain, where he became part of a
Communist Party-dominated critical art milieu that

31
included Klingender as well as the likes of Anthony
Blunt and Herbert Read. Unlike the community of
exiles that washed up in New York, which had a
strong and vibrant anti-Stalinist and, at times,
pro-Trotskyist element, that in London was more
orthodox communist with a concomitant emphasis
on realist and popular traditions within the arts
(Read’s sympathetic embrace of modernist formal
innovation being the notable exception here).24 This
probably marked the work of Klingender more than
the others, particularly during the period of the
Popular Front – although even here it had the
positive effect of widening the purview of the
objects deemed suitable for art-historical enquiry,
as well as radical readings of canonical artists such
as Hogarth and Goya.25 Despite this more orthodox
communist milieu, it would be wrong to
characterize, for example, Antal’s work as purely a
form of crude reflectionism for, as Roberts makes
clear, he ‘was instrumental in weakening some of
the historicist and populist inflections of vulgar
Marxist art history’.26 Formed within the
intellectual circles of Central Europe, he had
contact with a far more sophisticated conception of
art history as a discipline, and Marxism as a
totalizing critique, than that enjoyed by the likes of
Klingender in Britain.27 This enabled him to develop
a more nuanced and complex position than the
latter, and one, moreover, in which he could
challenge the typically orthodox Soviet valorization
of realism over modernism; yet at the same time
assert the value of artists such as Hogarth and Goya
for the very formal complexity being celebrated by
the likes of Clive Bell and Roger Fry within the
tradition of pictorial modernism.28

32
These interwar initiatives within the field of the
Marxist history of art in Britain find their fruition in
the postwar work of Hauser, also an émigré from
Hungary to Britain and – like Antal – a participant in
the Sunday circle organized around Georg Lukács
and Béla Balázs, and then in the short-lived
Hungarian Soviet Republic.29 His two-volume The
Social History of Art of 1951 was the first major
attempt in the anglophone world to produce a
non-isolationist history of art.30 The wide-ranging
synthesis of the history of art from cave painting
through to the industrial art of film was widely
criticized, by no less a figure as Ernst Gombrich as
well as others, as being too sweeping in its range
and guilty of a type of class reductionism that was
typically deemed to characterize Marxist art history
in the interwar period.31 In response to these
attacks, and in an effort of self-criticism, Hauser
then published The Philosophy of Art History in
1959, which is not only anti-Hegelian and
anti-historicist but also contains the first mention in
English of Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ from 1936.32
Despite the fact that the work drew deeply from the
spheres of the social sciences and philosophy, for
Roberts ‘Hauser’s book was at the end of one
tradition, and not at the beginning of another, for
all its prefigurations’.33 Yet the work was largely
ignored and it was business as usual within the
subject, as the Courtauld Institute of Art and its
connoisseurial commitments reigned supreme
during the Cold War period.
It was the expansion of working-class and
lower-middle-class student numbers in the 1960s
and the opening up of the new universities and
polytechnics, combined with the emergence of a

33
local Marxist theoretical culture indebted to
continental philosophy, that would revivify the
Marxist history of art in the early 1970s. Roberts
has also rightly pointed to the specific role of
British art schools within these wider shifts in
access to higher education, and the radical
theorization of visual culture that they undertook,
which then provided the ideological lead in the
critique of traditional art history.34 This
radicalization of the subject took place slightly
earlier in Germany and the United States and was,
as Werckmeister has made clear, part of the
political unrest that swept Western European and
American universities during the economic crisis of
1968–73, prompted most notably by the Grand
Coalition between Christian Democrats and Social
Democrats in Germany, and by the Vietnam War in
the United States.35 As early as 1968, progressive
art historians in Germany formed the Ulmer Verein
für Kunst-und Kulturwissenschaften at the congress
of the Verband Deutscher Kunsthistoriker in Ulm
with the intention of radically reforming the subject
in opposition to what they perceived as the
reactionary nature of the discipline within a German
university sector that still included former National
Socialists.36 They launched their own journal in
1974 – Kritische Berichte – which published articles
by a range of radically committed historians,
including Horst Bredekamp, Jutta Held, Berthold
Hinz, Norbert Schneider and Martin Warnke.37
As Hemingway has made clear, however, this
generation of Marxist art historians was never that
interested in the example set by their interwar
predecessors and, perhaps unsurprisingly given the
institutionalization of the Frankfurt School within
postwar West German academic culture and its

34
appropriation by the New Left, turned towards
critical theory as the most useful model for radical
intellectual work.38 Werckmeister, as mentioned
earlier, provided a pervasive critique of this
preoccupation with aesthetic philosophy in general,
and the Frankfurt School in particular, to argue
instead for the need for detailed and systematic
conjunctural analyses of art works to expose how
they worked ideologically within bourgeois society.
It is worth pointing out here that Werckmeister had
been teaching at the University of California at Los
Angeles (UCLA) since 1965, and this geographical
distance not only allowed him perhaps to resist the
allure of the Frankfurt School as a model for radical
intellectual labour, but also meant that he was to
play an important role within the institutional
history of the radical art community in the United
States. And the word ‘community’ is appropriate
here because, as Hemingway has pointed out,
unlike its counterpart in Germany, this grouping
included both artists and art historians – itself a
product of the fact that it was bound up with the
rise of militant artists’ organizations and the
women’s movement, with the College Art
Association (CAA) being the principal institutional
forum for both art historians and artists alike.39 Just
like in Germany, a group that had been radicalized
by the political crisis in the United States formed
the New Art Association within the CAA in 1970. It
included art historians such as Carol Duncan,
Patricia Hills, Linda Nochlin and Alan Wallach.
While this organization was already fading by 1972,
many of its members would provide the personnel
for the Caucus for Marxism and Art History
(subsequently renamed the Caucus for Marxism and
Art) that came out of the 1976 CAA session

35
organized on the theme of ‘Marxism and Art
History’ by Werckmeister, Clark and David Kunzle –
the latter two also at this point in California. Like its
predecessor, the Marxist Caucus included radical
artists among those who participated in its sessions,
including Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula.40 Despite
the early vitality of the Marxist Caucus, it
nevertheless failed to generate enough interest to
produce its own journal, and it folded by 1980. And,
like its German counterpart, it showed relatively
little interest in the work of the interwar generation
of Marxist art historians. Yet as early as its first
session, the fault lines between the competing
versions of what a post-1968 Marxist art history
should be were already sketched out in respective
papers by Clark and Werckmeister, and both were
highly conscious of how their proposed models sat
alongside a now solidly reconstituted ‘social history
of art’ that was essentially denuded of any
conception of class as a transformative category.41
It is also worth noting that many of those involved
with the Marxist Caucus would go on to produce
some of the most important politically engaged
work within the subject in that decade and
afterwards. 42
In Britain this institutional radicalization happened
later, mainly because, as Hemingway himself has
remarked, academic art history was a relative
latecomer, with those involved numbering far fewer
than in the United States. As a consequence, the
discipline in this country did not have its own
professional body until the formation of the
Association of Art Historians (AAH) in 1974.43 While
there was interest in the conjunction of art and
social history in individual papers at AAH
conferences, and Clark gave a plenary in 1977, the

36
first session devoted to the relationship between
Marxism and the history of art was that organized
by Adrian Rifkin in 1980 entitled ‘Art / Politics’.44
Marxist art history also had an institutional base in
academia with the above-mentioned masters
programme in the Social History of Art at Leeds
from 1976 onwards. Key moments in the formation
of this counter-tradition for Orton and Pollock
include the publication of John Berger’s Ways of
Seeing in 1972 (and the critical response to this
from the left) as a broadside against the
conservative conception of art presented in Kenneth
Clark’s Civilisation television programme and book
of 1969; the publication of Kurt Forster’s
manifesto-like critique of the discipline in his
‘Critical Art History or the Transfiguration of
Values’ in the pages of New Literary History in
1972, which included within its roll-call of Marxist
art historians Schapiro, Antal, Hauser and
Werckmeister, among others; the 1973 texts by
Clark on the relation between art and politics
during the revolution of 1848 and its aftermath; the
formation of the Marxist Caucus in the United
States; and the free-and-easy traffic between North
American radical art historians and their British
counterparts after the formation of the AAH as an
institutional home in the United Kingdom, as well as
the role of its journal Art History in publishing work
by both British and American Marxist art historians
after 1980.45
These transformations within the discipline, and the
emergence of a renewed Marxist history of art after
the impasse of the Cold War years, have to be
situated alongside other institutional and academic
shifts that fed into this process. The important
collective work done at the Centre of Contemporary

37
Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham under the
leadership of Stuart Hall from 1968 until 1979 is
just one.46 The broadening of the scope of the term
‘culture’ to include working-class customs and
rituals that was such an important part of the
Centre’s output no doubt served as a critique of the
comparatively limited nature of the term within
traditional art history, one that threw a vivid
spotlight upon the relationship between the latter
and the art market. Its work also acted as one of the
places where the ideas of contemporary continental
Marxists entered into British academia, in
particular that of Louis Althusser and Antonio
Gramsci – a form of radical sociology that its
counterpoint in the anglophone world had
successfully resisted at all costs.47 Another
influence on the development of Marxist art history
was the complex theoretical work done in the
journal Screen under the new editorial board
between 1971 and 1982, which combined a similar
emphasis upon continental Marxism with a focus
upon Russian
Formalism, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin,
Jacques Lacan and psychoanalysis as a way of
reading film – again a shift from the rarefied objects
of high art to the objects of industrially produced
mass entertainment, with an engagement with the
radical contemporary cinema of Jean-Luc Godard
and, in particular, his collaboration with Jean-Pierre
Gorin in the Dziga Vertov Group, as a counter to the
blandishments of typically Hollywood fare.48 And
just as the focus upon class at the CCCS gave way
to a discursive practice that would go on to
privilege race in the process of identity formation,
then Screen would increasingly become
preoccupied with gender and sexuality, and how

38
these were understood in relation to Lacanian
psychoanalysis, as the prism through which to read
film.
When Orton mentions the importance of Clark’s
work in his reflections on the formation of a Marxist
history of art, he refers not to the example of
Hauser, whom Clark mentions (ironically or not),
but to Pierre Macherey’s symptomatic and
thoroughly Althusserian reading of the literary
canon.49 Orton’s and Pollock’s radicalization as art
historians precipitated not a return to the older
interwar generation but rather to Marx himself, in
particular The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte and the Grundrisse, filtered through the
new theoretical work being done within the more
radical contemporary contexts of sociology and film.
These interests converged in the magazine Block,
which was produced at Middlesex Polytechnic from
1979 to 1985. This institutional basis clearly
registers just how integral the emergence of the
new polytechnics and their widening intake, as well
as non-traditional academic departments like art
and design catering to a more working-class student
population, were to the development of a Marxist
art history in Britain.50 A close relationship to art
practice is reflected in the fact that the magazine
opened its pages to artists, including Terry
Atkinson, Martha Rosler and Jo Spence, some of
whom contributed not just art works, but critical
and historical texts as well. That Block published
important work in Marxist art and design history
and theory in its first three years is undeniable: it
included an article on Max Raphael by John Tagg,
and calls for a proper appraisal of the work of the
interwar generation of Marxist art historians.51 But
the model of Marxism that it drew upon was very

39
much that forged within the pages of Screen: a
mélange of the Marxist structuralism of Althusser
and his followers, a semiology indebted to Roland
Barthes, and a theory of the subject found in
Lacanian psychoanalysis. As Hemingway puts it: ‘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.’52 If these models
shared, in some form or other, a relation to
Hegelianism, this was to have no place in the
cultural politics of the 1970s, especially after
Althusser had supposedly detached Marx from
these pre-scientific residues and opened up a space
for the non-sublimated complexity of the whole that
could now be analysed by a whole range of different
disciplines.53
Jon Bird has argued that there were in fact two
intellectual paradigms at work in the pages of
Block: one that emphasized the social and material
components of cultural production, and another that
focused upon representation and the way it
interpellated subjectivity.54 Yet these two strands
were not as compatible as some at the time had
hoped. The potential and necessary rapprochement
between Marxism and feminism was always part of
the New Left project that came out of 1968, and,
even if this was never finally realized in any
satisfactory way, it did lead to extremely promising
and productive work.55 The feminist critique of
Clark’s model of art history had begun as soon as
the seminal texts of 1973 had been published: the
claim that in his celebration of male artists Clark
not only reproduced the same canon as the
traditional art history he supposedly set out to
contest, but also that both his model and its

40
conservative counterpart were essentially
interchangeable in their subordination of women.
Clark had attempted to address these criticisms in
his discussion of Olympia published in Screen in
1980, yet despite these efforts, the type of Marxist
history of art he practised came under virulent
attack in a reconfigured Althusserian strain of
feminism in the pages of Block.56 The importance of
Pollock’s critique in ‘Vision, Voice, and Power:
Feminist Art History and Marxism’ is undeniable in
that it mobilized the latest theoretical insights from
continental philosophy and film theory to take apart
the masculinist assumptions of Clark’s model of
Marxist art history, as well as the interwar tradition
that predated his post-1968 variant.57 While she
critiqued certain types of feminist art history from
the vantage point of Althusserian Marxism, she
nevertheless called for a ‘fruitful raiding of Marxism
for its explanatory instruments’ for the purposes of
advancing feminist critique, with any belief in the
potential reconciliation between the two positions
seemingly remaindered.58 Even when Pollock
attempts to keep Marxism and feminism in some
kind of productive relationship, there is a problem.
As Roberts has made clear, a purported feminist
historical materialism – as Pollock later defined her
project – in which gender is not substituted for
class, but instead shown to be somehow
coterminous with it, and with race as well, is not
actually any form of Marxism at all.59 As he puts it,
historical materialism foregrounds class relations
and class exploitation as the primary mode of
analysis, ‘[n]ot because the working class is the
most oppressed social group, but because its
structural relationship to the means of production
expresses the fundamental asymmetrical relations

41
of power locked into the capitalist system’.60 This
does not necessarily mean that Marxism is a
mono-causal system of historical explanation, but
neither is it a totally open one based on symmetric
relations of power, as Pollock seems to posit. As
such, Roberts is clear that Pollock’s critique of
Clark was right in its criticism of his ‘classist’
treatment of gender, but wrong in its positing of
gender difference as the fundamental historical
division within bourgeois society.61
Nevertheless, the feminist critique of the Marxist
history of art fed into the emergence of the new art
history with its distrust of singular modes of
explanation and a
corresponding emphasis upon methodological
difference that became a characteristic feature of
intellectual life in the post-Althusserian period.
This, like the Marxist history of art practised by
Werckmeister and Clark, also has its roots in 1968,
in particular the May events in France. For if the
combined student and working-class action that
brought Paris and other parts of the country to a
standstill was crushed, or dispersed, then these
radical impulses found a more durable expression in
developments in contemporary French theory. As
Perry Anderson makes clear: ‘structuralism proper
… passed through the ordeal of May and
re-emerged phoenix-like on the other side –
extenuated and modulated’.62 If structuralism, at
least in its Althusserian manifestations, offered
points of contact with Marxism, then
poststructuralism was, by contrast, resolutely
anti-Marxist: it emphasized the discursive over and
above the ideological, and was even more
vociferously anti-totalizing, these themes being
exemplified paradigmatically in the work of Michel

42
Foucault. Thus the critique of Marxist art history –
or its containment within a reinvigorated ‘social
history of art’ as part of an academically
institutionalized eclecticism – is cognate with the
wider intellectual trends within academia as a
whole. The fact that these shifts coincided with a
period of political and economic retrenchment after
1979, and then the fall of the wall and the
consolidation of the capitalist market within the
sphere of the former Soviet Union and beyond after
1989, comes as no great surprise. That many of the
figures associated with the radicalization of the
subject in the aftermath of 1968 were able to
establish successful teaching and publishing
careers is not necessarily symptomatic of the
success of the Marxist history of art in overturning
its more traditional counterpart, but more – as
Hemingway has argued – that their practice had
been absorbed into academic art history and
tolerated as one of just a number of competing
methodologies within a reinvigorated discipline.63
This is a process of which Clark, Werckmeister and
others of their generation were acutely aware from
the mid-1970s onwards.
This process of absorption is nowhere more
apparent than in the success of the journal October,
which was first published in 1976.64 Here the
conflation of contemporary avant-garde theory and
the contemporary avant-garde art work forged in
the pages of Screen has a clear afterlife within the
subject of art history. Somewhat ironically – given a
title that would seem to indicate some kind of
meaningful relationship to the Soviet avant-garde –
October, in its initial stages at least, represented
something of a break with Marxist art history.65
Two of its founding editors, Rosalind Krauss and

43
Annette Michelson, resigned from the editorial
board of Artforum when their colleagues John
Coplans and Max Kozloff attempted to shift the
journal in a leftward direction to reflect the
radicalization of the discipline in the United States
in the early to mid-1970s. Instead, the editors of
October are better known for promoting
poststructuralist theory than Marxism, for which
they showed only limited sympathy.66 Influenced by
journals such as Tel Quel, they drew upon the likes
of Jacques Derrida,
Foucault and Lacan in analysing practices that in
some cases are informed by the work of these
thinkers, although, as with Screen, this was fused
with theoretical components from Western
Marxism, in particular the writings of Brecht and
Benjamin, and especially the latter’s work on
allegory. Indeed it was through this emphasis upon
the allegorical, as it was read through certain
contemporary art practices, that the October
group’s particular postmodern project initially
became crystallized.67 However, as Gail Day has
convincingly argued, by the 1990s any radical
impulse in the earlier formulations of this project
had become uncritically recuperated to represent
little more than ‘a loose symbolic aesthetic of the
ineffable nature of art’.68 This model of art history
reproduced a binary opposition between the
‘inorganic’ and the ‘organic’ art work, and
‘fragment’ against ‘totality’, in which the attack
upon any dialectical component within Marxist art
history, initiated within the discipline in its
Althusserian formulations, now seemed complete.69
The fate of October, with its undeniable energy and
rigour, is in important ways a result of the local
conditions of the development of French

44
poststructuralism and its re-emergence in a
different field. The negative stance of scholars such
as Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and others towards
Marxism had much to do with the stranglehold of an
institutionalized French Communist Party, one that
combined a crude instrumentalization of theory
with unfortunate political tactics, especially in the
wake of the events of 1968. In other contexts, these
figures’ politically charged analysis of power and
challenge to psychoanalysis could have led to an
internal critique within Marxism itself – but not in
France. These political sensitivities and their
discursive habits crossed the Atlantic, but they had
different political valences in Tel Quel and October.
In the North American art-historical context,
heterodox Marxisms willing to shed their name had
genuine left credentials and appeal, but merged all
too easily and seamlessly with the theoretical
eclecticism of a new art history divested of its
radical origins and energies. Thus, despite the
seeming redundancy of this model of art history for
the Marxist history of art, October has,
nevertheless, published important translations of
Western Marxist theory, as well as some
sophisticated neo-Marxist criticism of contemporary
art. This is the case particularly after 1991, when
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Hal Foster, both
already contributors to the journal, joined the
editorial board on a full-time basis. As with Fredric
Jameson, who has since the early 1980s consistently
sought to bring the theoretical departures
represented by post-structuralism within the orbit
of historical materialism and hold them in a
productive tension, so the art criticism of Foster
and Buchloh has attempted to utilize, to different
degrees, the insights provided by these intellectual

45
shifts to bear upon a sophisticated contemporary
engagement with European and American
neo-avant-garde art practices – all within the remit
of a Marxist emphasis upon political economy.70
Buchloh’s political formation was within the
German New Left, and his criticism is more
insistently
dialectical, situated as it is within the tradition of
critical theory.71 In a sustained series of largely
monographic essays since the late 1970s, he has
increasingly turned against the politically
pessimistic post-Adornian framework provided by
Peter Bürger, with its outright dismissal of the
potential political import of any artistic production
after the failure of the historical avant-garde in the
early decades of the twentieth century, to argue
instead that certain artistic practices in the postwar
period maintain an important critical distance from
the culture industry of late capitalism.72 Indeed it is
in the interstices of both – the avant-garde and the
culture industry – that the work of the
neo-avant-garde draws its critical purchase. If
Buchloh rarely makes reference to
poststructuralism in his writing, then Foster, in a
series of essays since the early 1980s, has regularly
sought to argue for a self-reflexive and oppositional
postmodern art practice that has a critical
relationship to a fully spectacularized commodity
culture.73 Buchloh invokes Benjamin and his
concept of the allegorical, but more through the
prism of Brecht with a concurrent emphasis upon
the political project of the historical avant-garde;
whereas Foster is clearly more indebted to a
Jamesonian model that appropriates some of the
key tenets of poststructuralism but turns them
against the supposed all-encompassing processes of

46
recuperation that have all too often characterized
discussions of the term. In this respect, Foster is
also critical of Bürger’s dismissal of the potential
political efficacy of the neo-avant-garde.74
As such, the work of both Buchloh and Foster
represents an important extension of the Marxist
history of art, if not the only contemporary variant,
as we believe the essays in this anthology will
demonstrate. That it is hegemonic in terms of the
present state of the discipline is probably as much
to do with its institutional basis within the pages of
October – where it sits alongside work that is
stridently anti-dialectical, anti-totalizing and
unapologetically anti-Marxist – as it is to do with its
complex and nuanced theoretical insightfulness in
relation to the critical claims they make for certain
neo-avant-garde art practices. Despite various
institutional and collegial overlaps, none of the
contributors to this volume is associated with a
particular journal, set of institutions or specific
discursive mode. In short, they are not centred
upon the Ivy League, the ironic ultimate destination
of the new art history, now no longer so new.
To return to Craig Clunas’s question posed at the
outset, what we hope to have made clear in this
introduction is that a social history of the social
history of art – or what we would want to call more
specifically a Marxist history of art in its interwar,
post-1968 and contemporary incarnations – has
inevitably to be an institutional one. Such a history
would track how the various interventions,
counter-hegemonic strategies and theoretical
disruptions of this tradition were explicitly pitched
against the discipline in its more conventionally
conservative, connoisseurial and neo-formalist

47
variants – ones that we would like to argue have a
strange afterlife in the current headlong rush
towards the contemporary and the concomitant
celebration of the products
of a now fully globalized art market, a development
that can in many ways be understood to have its
antecedents in the pages of October. In this sense,
we present this collection of essays as a
continuation of this counter-tradition, seeking to
exemplify how the dominant discourses of the
subject can be subverted, reread and constantly
challenged. As such, the book seeks to demonstrate
that a Marxist history of art is an ongoing project,
even if it has to consistently renegotiate its position
vis-à-vis the ever-present dangers of incorporation
and appropriation – now more persistent than ever
in terms of the increasing institutional pressures of
research assessment exercises and the all-important
need for academics to publish. But more than this,
the theoretical tools provided by Marxism are not
only indispensable in any meaningful attempt to
historicize the Marxist history of art, but also
because their ability to systematize and totalize are
essential to the wider project of critiquing the
discipline of art history as a whole, in all its forms,
both past and present.
1 Andrew Hemingway and William Vaughan (eds.), ‘Preface’, Art in
Bourgeois Society, 1790–1850 (Cambridge University Press:
Cambridge, 1998), p. xi.

2 Craig Clunas, ‘Social History of Art’, in Robert S. Nelson and Richard

Shiff (eds.), Critical Terms for Art History, 2nd edn (University of
Chicago Press: Chicago, 2003), pp. 465–78.

3 Andrew Hemingway, Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture in Early

Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge
and New York, 1992); Artists on the Left: American Artists and the
Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (Yale University Press: New Haven

48
 and London, 2002); The Mysticism of Money: Precisionist Painting and
Machine Age America (Periscope Publishing: Pittsburgh, 2013). It is
also worth noting here the important anthology of texts that he
co-edited with William Vaughan on the concept of bourgeois society
and theoretical issues around the category of class in relation to art
produced in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States in the
period 1790–1850; see Hemingway and Vaughan (eds.), Art in
Bourgeois Society, op. cit. On the Marxist history of art more generally,
see Andrew Hemingway, ‘Marxism and Art History after the Fall of
Communism’, Art Journal, vol. 55, no. 2 (1996), pp. 20–7; and
‘Introduction’ and ‘New Left Art History’s International’, in Andrew
Hemingway (ed.), Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris
to the New Left (Pluto Press: London, 2006), pp. 1–8, 175–95.

4 Andrew Hemingway, ‘Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s’,

Oxford Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 1 (1997), pp. 13–29; ‘Meyer Schapiro:
Marxism, Science and Art’, Marxism and the History of Art, pp.
123–142.

5 It is worth pointing out here that although the major work of Hauser and
Antal appeared after the war, this was because of their displacement as
exiles, first from Austria and then from National Socialism in Germany.
See Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory
(Columbia University Press: New York, 2011), p. 10.

6 For perhaps the most sophisticated engagement with the work of Clark,
which also discusses the pertinent differences in methodology between
him and Werckmeister, see Day, ‘T. J. Clark and the Pain of the
Unattainable Beyond’, Dialectical Passions, op. cit., pp. 25–69.

7 For his critique of Adorno’s aesthetic see Otto Karl Werckmeister, ‘Das
Kunstwerk als Negation: Zur geschichtlichen Bestimmung der
Kunsttheorie Theodor W. Adorno’, Ende der Ästhetik: Essays über
Adorno, Bloch, das gelbe Unterseebot und der eindimesionale Mensch
(S. Fischer: Frankfurt am Main, 1971), pp. 7–32; and of Benjamin as a
misplaced model of a revolutionary intellectual, ‘Walter Benjamin’s
Angel of History, or the Transfiguration of the Revolutionary into the
Historian’, Icons of the Left: Benjamin and Eisenstein, Picasso and
Kafka after the Fall of Communism (University of Chicago Press:
Chicago, 1999), pp. 9–35.

8 See in particular Otto Karl Werckmeister, ‘Marx on Ideology and Art’,

New Literary History, vol. 4, no. 3 (Spring 1973), pp. 501–19; ‘Radical
Art History’, Art Journal, vol. 42, no. 4 (Winter 1982), pp. 284–91; ‘A
Working Perspective for Marxist Art History Today’, Oxford Art Journal,
vol. 14, no. 2 (1991), pp. 83–7.

49
9 T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848
Revolution (Thames & Hudson: London, 1973), p. 10; The Absolute
Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–1851 (Thames &
Hudson: London, 1973).

10 See Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, Avant-Gardes and Partisans

Reviewed (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 1996).

11 Clark came under particular attack for this from both his supporters and
detractors when he followed up the 1973 texts with his book on Manet.
See T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet
and his Followers (Thames & Hudson: London, 1985). For perhaps the
most sustained and trenchant critique from the left, see Adrian Rifkin,
‘Marx’s Clarkism’, Art History, vol. 8, no. 4 (December 1986), pp.
488–95. This alleged hagiography of the venerable tradition of great
artists could also be levelled at Clark’s almost fin-de-siècle anthology
Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (Yale
University Press: New Haven and London, 1999). For an example of
Werckmeister’s engagement with cultural works that fall outside of such
canonical histories, see Citadel Culture (University of Chicago Press:
Chicago, 1991).

12 Werckmeister, ‘Radical Art History’, op. cit., p. 284; Clark, ‘Preface to

the New Edition’, Image of the People, 2nd edn (Thames & Hudson:
London, 1982), p. 6. For Clark on Situationism, see T. J. Clark and
Donald Nicholson-Smith, ‘Why Art Can’t Kill the Situationist
International’, October, vol. 79 (Winter 1997), pp. 15–31.

13 Werckmeister, ‘Radical Art History’, op. cit., p. 284; Clark, ‘Preface to

the New Edition’, Image of the People, 2nd edn, op. cit., p. 6.

14 Clark, Image of the People, 2nd edn, op. cit., p. 6.

15 As Clark succinctly put it: ‘For diversification, read disintegration.’ T. J.

Clark, ‘On the Conditions of Artistic Creation’, Times Literary
Supplement, 24 May 1974, p. 562.

16 A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello (eds.), The New Art History (Camden
Press: London, 1986). It is worth noting that this anthology did contain
essays that were already critical of both the term and what it might
represent. See in particular Tom Gretton, ‘New Lamps for Old’, pp.
63–74; and Adrian Rifkin, ‘Art’s Histories’, pp. 157–63.

17 Clark, Image of the People, 2nd edn, op. cit., p. 10.

18 Ibid.

50
19 On Klingender, see David Bindman, ‘Art as Social Consciousness:
Francis Klingender and British Art’; on Antal, see Paul Stirton,
‘Frederick Antal’; and on Hauser, see John Roberts, ‘Arnold Hauser,
Adorno, Lukács and the Ideal Spectator’; all in Hemingway (ed.),
Marxism and the History of Art, pp. 67–88, 45–66, 161–74.

20 See Max Raphael, ‘The Marxist History of Art’, John Tagg (ed.),
Proudhon, Marx, Picasso: Essay in Marxist Aesthetics (Lawrence &
Wishart: London, 1981), pp. 75–112; and Tagg, ‘The Method of Max
Raphael: Art History Set Back on Its Feet’, Radical Philosophy, vol. 12
(Winter 1975), pp. 3–10; ‘The Method of Criticism and its Objects in
Max Raphael’s Theory of Art’, Block, vol. 2 (1980), pp. 2–14.

21 John Roberts, ‘Introduction: Art Has No History! Reflections on Art

History and Historical Materialism’, Roberts (ed.), Art Has No History!:
The Making and Unmaking of Modern Art (Verso: London, 1994), p. 5.
The Grundrisse, of which this text was the opening section, was not
published in its entirety until 1939–41 in Moscow.

22 Raphael and Schapiro eventually fell out over their different responses
to the Moscow Trials.

23 For Schapiro on modernism, see his celebrated ‘Nature of Abstract

Art’, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers II (George
Braziller: New York, 1978), pp. 185–211.

24 See in particular Herbert Read, The Politics of the Unpolitical

(Routledge: London, 1943).

25 See in particular Francis Donald Klingender, Art and the Industrial

Revolution (Royle: London, 1948); Hogarth and English Caricature
(Transatlantic Arts: London, 1944); and Goya in the Democratic
Tradition (Sidgwick & Jackson: London, 1948).

26 Roberts, ‘Introduction: Art Has No History!’, op. cit., pp. 6–7.

27 See Frederick Antal, Classicism and Romanticism with Other Studies

in Art History (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1966).

28 Hemingway, ‘Introduction’, Marxism and the History of Art, p. 6. See

Frederick Antal, Hogarth and his Place in European Art (Basic Books:
New York, 1962), pp. 213–17.

29 Under the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Antal was chair of Budapest’s

Museum of Fine Arts and Hauser was a literary theory specialist at the
Secondary-School Teacher-Training College alongside Karl Mannheim.
See Day, Dialectical Passions, op. cit., p. 11.

51
30 Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, 2 vols (Routledge & Kegan
Paul: London, 1951). Reprinted in four volumes in 1962.

31 Ernst Gombrich, ‘The Social History of Art’, Art Bulletin, vol. 35 (March
1935), pp. 79–84.

32 Arnold Hauser, The Sociology of Art (University of Chicago Press:

Chicago, 1982); Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations
(Fontana: Glasgow, 1973), pp. 219–53.

33 Roberts, ‘Introduction: Art Has No History!’, op. cit., p. 8. For Roberts,

these prefigurations include a range of themes that would be taken up
within the subject after the impact of Althusserianism, most
significantly, perhaps, in Nicos Hadjinicolaou, Art History and Class
Struggle (Pluto Press: London, 1978), which directly linked its author’s
work to the earlier tradition in Marxist art history, even if it in fact
represents a distinct break in its embrace of structuralism.

34 Roberts, ‘Introduction: Art Has No History!’, op. cit., p. 2. In particular

he mentions the important role played by Victor Burgin and Art and
Language in this context. On the radicalization of art schools at the
time, see Lisa Tickner, Hornsey 1968: The Art School Revolution
(Frances Lincoln: London, 2008).

35 Werckmeister, ‘Radical Art History’, op. cit., p. 284.

36 For an analysis of the development of Marxist art history in West

Germany with specific relationship to the residual role of National
Socialism within academia, see Jutta Held, ‘New Left Art History and
Fascism in Germany’, Hemingway (ed.), Marxism and the History of
Art, op. cit., pp. 196–212.

37 See Hemingway, ‘New Left History’s International’, op. cit., pp. 175–7,
for a detailed history of the formation of radical art history in Western
Germany in the period in question.

38 Ibid., p. 176.

39 Ibid., p. 177.

40 Again, see Hemingway, ‘New Left History’s International’, op. cit., pp.
177–81, for a detailed institutional history of these events.

41 T. J. Clark, ‘Preliminary Arguments: Work of Art and Ideology’ and Otto

Karl Werckmeister, ‘From Marxist to Critical Art History’, Papers
Presented to the Marxism and Art History Session of the College Art
Association and Meeting in Chicago, February 1976, pp. 5–6, 29–30.

52
42 This, as Hemingway has flagged up, includes Carol Duncan and Alan
Wallach, ‘The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An
Iconographic Analysis’, Marxist Perspectives, vol. 1, no. 4 (Winter
1978), pp. 28–51; Duncan and Wallach, ‘The Universal Survey
Museum’, Art History, vol. 3, no. 4 (December 1980), pp. 447–69;
Eunice Lipton, ‘The Laundress in Late Nineteenth-Century French
Culture’, Art History, vol. 3, no. 3 (September 1980), pp. 295–313;
Serge Guilbaut, ‘Greenberg, Pollock, or from Trotskyism to the New
Liberalism of the “Vital Center”’, October, no. 15 (Winter 1980), pp.
61–78; and David Kunzle, ‘Bruegel’s Proverb Painting and the World
Turned Upside Down’, Art Bulletin, vol. 59, no. 2 (June 1977), pp.
197–202.

43 Hemingway, ‘New Left History’s International’, op. cit., p. 181. For his
analysis of the genesis of Marxist art history in Britain, see pp. 181–7.

44 Ibid., p. 181.

45 See Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, ‘Memories Still to Come … An

Introduction’, Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed, op. cit., pp.
viii–xii; John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1972);
‘Ways of Seeing’, Art-Language, vol. 4, no. 3 (October 1978); Kurt W.
Forster, ‘Critical History of Art, or a Transfiguration of Values?’, New
Literary History, vol. 3, no. 3 (1972), pp. 459–70.

46 For a classic text in this vein, see Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds.),
Resistance Through Rituals (Hutchinson: London, 1976).

47 For a CCCS text that deals more overtly with the theoretical impact of
Althusser and Gramsci, see Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies,
On Ideology (Hutchinson: London, 1978). For an account of the
institutional resistance to Marxism within British sociology, see Perry
Anderson, ‘Components of the National Culture’, English Questions
(Verso: London, 1992), pp. 48–104.

48 For a sympathetic history and analysis of Screen, see Anthony

Easthope, ‘The Trajectory of Screen’, Francis Barker et al. (eds.), The
Politics of Theory: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the
Sociology of Literature, July 1982 (University of Essex: Colchester,
1983), pp. 121–133. Ben Brewster was an important link between the
Screen editorial board and New Left Books, which translated and
published key texts in Western Marxism from Lukács through to
Althusser.

49 Orton and Pollock, ‘Memories Still to Come …’, op. cit., p. xii. Pierre
Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production (Routledge & Kegan Paul:
London, 1978).

53
50 See George Robertson (ed.), The Block Reader in Visual Culture
(Routledge: London, 1996).

51 See John Tagg, ‘The Method of Criticism and its Objects in Max
Raphael’s Theory of Art’; Adrian Rifkin, ‘Can Gramsci Save Art
History?’, Block, no. 3, pp. 37–9 (1980); and Alan Wallach, ‘In Search
of a Marxist Theory of Art History’, Block, no. 4 (1981), p. 17.

52 Hemingway, ‘New Left History’s International’, op. cit., pp. 182–3.

53 Roberts, ‘Introduction: Art Has No History!’, op. cit., p. 9. On the

problems with Althusserianism in general, see Simon Clarke et al.,
One-Dimensional Marxism: Althusser and the Politics of Culture
(Allison & Busby: London, 1980); and for its implications for art history,
see Roberts, ‘Introduction: Art Has No History!’, op. cit., pp. 9–14; and
Hemingway, ‘New Left History’s International’, op. cit., pp. 187–95.

54 Jon Bird, ‘On Newness, Art and History: Reviewing Block 1979–85’,
Rees and Borzello (eds.), The New Art History, op. cit., p. 37.

55 See in particular in this regard, Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe

(eds.), Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production
(Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1978); and in the sphere of
Marxist-feminist art history, Carol Duncan, The Aesthetics of Power:
Essays in a Critical Art History (Cambridge University Press:
Cambridge, 1993).

56 T. J. Clark, ‘Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of “Olympia” in

1865’, Screen, vol. 2, no. 1 (Spring, 1980), pp. 18–41.

57 Griselda Pollock, ‘Vision, Voice, and Power: Feminist Art History and
Marxism’, Block, no. 6 (1982), pp. 2–21. The importance of this
intervention, and the problems associated with it, are discussed by both
Roberts and Hemingway. See Roberts, ‘Introduction: Art Has No
History!’, op. cit., pp. 13–20; Hemingway, ‘New Left History’s
International’, op. cit., pp. 183–4.

58 Pollock, ‘Vision, Voice, and Power’, op. cit., p. 21.

59 See Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and

the Histories of Art (Routledge: London, 1988).

60 Roberts, ‘Introduction: Art Has No History!’, op. cit., p. 16.

61 Ibid., p. 17.

62 Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso,

1983), p. 39.

54
63 Hemingway, ‘New Left History’s International’, p. 194.

64 For an overview of the first decade of the journal, see Annette

Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp and Joan Copjec (eds.),
October: The First Decade (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1986).

65 For a nuanced account of the political problems with this particular

trajectory within October, see Day, ‘Absolute Dialectical Unrest Or, the
Dizziness of a Perpetually Self-Engendered Disorder’, Dialectical
Passions, op. cit., pp. 132–81.

66 This direction was signalled at the outset in that Krauss and Michelson
resigned from Artforum specifically because the editorial board refused
to publish Foucault’s 1968 essay ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’, which then
appeared in translation in the very first issue of October. See ibid., p.
134.

67 Ibid., p. 134. For an important contribution in this regard, see Craig

Owens, ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of
Postmodernism’, October, vol. 12 (Spring 1980), pp. 67–86 and ‘The
Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism Part 2’,
October, vol. 13 (Summer 1980), pp. 58–80.

68 Day, Dialectical Passions, op. cit., p. 133.

69 Ibid.

70 For the initial, and now canonical, example of this argument, see
Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism’, New Left Review, no. 146, (July–August 1984), pp. 53–92;
and Day, ‘The Immobilizations of Social Abstraction’, Dialectical
Passions, op. cit., pp. 182–245, for a sustained engagement with the
work of Buchloh, Foster and Jameson – and the problems with what
she describes as the ‘dematerialisation’ in their particular brand of
post-1968 Marxism.

71 For a collection of his essays, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,

Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and
American Art from 1955 to 1975 (MIT Press: Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 2000); and for his own lucid account of his political and
intellectual trajectory, see ‘Introduction’, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture
Industry, pp. xvii–xxxiii.

72 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (University of Minneapolis

Press: Minneapolis, 1984). This influential critique of the autonomy of
art as an essentially bourgeois concept argues that only Dada,

55
 Constructivism and Surrealism constituted an avant-garde in their turn
against the bourgeois institutions of display.

73 See Hal Foster (ed.), ‘Postmodernism: A Preface’, The Anti-Aesthetic:

Essays on Postmodernist Culture (Bay Press: Seattle, 1983), pp.
ix–xvi, for an early attempt at theorising this critical distinction; and
Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Bay Press: Seattle, 1985),
for a collection of his earlier essays that apply this to contemporary art
practices at that time.

74 See Hal Foster, ‘Introduction’, The Return of the Real: The

Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (MIT Press: Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1996) for his most sustained polemic against Bürger.

56
INTRODUCTION
TOWARDS A HISTORY OF THE MARXIST HISTORY
OF ART
Warren Carter

57
58
MARXIST THEORY IN
PRACTICE
LANDSCAPE, CLASS AND IDEOLOGY
MARXISM AND THE SHAPING OF MODERNISM
MARXISM IN A NEW WORLD ORDER

59
ART HISTORY’S FURIES
John Roberts

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

Meridel Le Sueur

I t 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

60
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

61
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

62
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

63
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

64
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

65
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

66
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

67
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

68
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.

1 Greg Sholette, A Scholar on

the Left: Andrew Hemingway,
2013, bas-relief sculpture,
plaster, 21.6 cm × 27.9 cm.

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

69
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

70
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

71
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

72
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

73
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

74
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.

75
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

76
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

77
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

78
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

79
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

80
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

81
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

82
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

83
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

84
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

85
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

86
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

87
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).

88
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 –

89
 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.

90
THE POLITICAL LOGIC OF RADICAL
ART HISTORY IN CALIFORNIA 1974–85
A MEMOIR
Stephen F. Eisenman

1974: Henry Kissinger, Muhammad Ali, T. J. Clark

I n the fall of 1974, I was an eighteen-year-old

sophomore at the State University at Albany. I
was an indifferent student, but my engagement with
literature, art and politics was deepening. For
example, I bought at the Strand Bookstore in
Manhattan – but did not actually read – a
remaindered copy of Walter Benjamin’s
Illuminations. And I read, but did not understand,
Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. Critical
theory was not yet on my horizon. Like many others
of my age, I was furiously opposed to the Vietnam
War – now a decade old – and brimming with hatred
for my country. The Watergate hearings the
previous spring, followed by Nixon’s resignation,
had been the highlights of my life, and I despaired
only that the president’s perfidy was not revealed
before his trouncing of the sainted George
McGovern in the 1972 elections. Even prior to
Watergate, however, my family and I, living in the
Jewish enclave of Forest Hills, Queens, had a
profound hatred for Nixon and his Rasputin, Henry
Kissinger. Joseph Heller summarized our antipathy

91
and shame in 1976 in his novel Good as Gold, when
he called Kissinger ‘a moral defilement’ and staged
the following exchange between ‘the Governor’, a
stand-in for Nelson Rockefeller, and the author’s
protagonist, a middle-aged English professor named
Gold, with ambitions to become secretary of state:
‘Gold, every Jew should have a big gentile as a
friend, and every successful American should own a
Jew. I’m big Gold, and I am willing to be your
friend.’ Scholarship, like radical politics, is
motivated by resentment as much as the spirit of
enquiry, and hatred of Nixon and Kissinger
undoubtedly spawned more than one academic
career.
In 1974, I did not need the Frankfurt School to
teach me about the intersection of culture and
politics. My sports idol, Muhammad Ali – whose first
championship bout against Sonny Liston in 1964 I
heard on a radio console in my family living room –
was a figure who, because of his Muslim faith and
opposition to the draft, occupied both the news and
sports pages of the New York Times, and his
championship fight against George Foreman in
Kinshasa, Zaire, in October 1974 (‘the Rumble in
the Jungle’) was as political as much as it was about
boxing. Foreman’s flag-waving antics following his
1968 Olympics victory – the games in which
Tommie Smith and John Carlos made their
Black Power salutes – was to me unforgivable, so I
was naturally jubilant when, in spite of all
predictions, Ali knocked out Foreman in the eighth
round.
At Albany that year, I took courses with, among
others, Ann Sutherland Harris, a connoisseur of
Italian baroque art, and an expert on the versatile

92
but insipid painter Andrea Sacchi. Harris was
impatient in the classroom; she often projected
more than a hundred slides in her fifty-five-minute
volleys, many of them upside down or sideways. I
also studied with Robert D. Kinsman, a professor of
modern art who was both punctilious and insightful
in the classroom. He had studied with Meyer
Schapiro at Columbia in the late 1950s and
conceived of works of art as riddles or dreams that
required long and patient explication. (Like many of
the great man’s pupils, Kinsman had not completed
his dissertation on Ozenfant, Le Corbusier and
L’Esprit Nouveau, and he left behind few scholarly
traces, apart from an exhibition catalogue from
1963 devoted to Jimmy Ernst.) We used as our
textbook George Heard Hamilton’s Painting and
Sculpture in Europe: 1880–1940, in the Pelican
History of Art series, which inspired me. The book
has many limitations, not least its teleological
structure (abstraction is made to seem the
preordained aim of modern art), and its bizarre
portmanteau chapter titled ‘Other Schools and
Masters’, which strings together German Dada,
Max Beckmann, Egon Schiele, Paul Klee, Gerhard
Marcks, Rik Wouters, Giorgio Morandi and Henry
Moore, among others. But unlike Fritz Novotny’s
prior volume in the Pelican series, Hamilton’s book
was actually filled with ideas, not merely
descriptions and sources. (One forgets these days
how truly terrible was most of the scholarship on
modern art before the 1980s.) It was also in 1974
that I read Schapiro’s great article ‘The Apples of
Cézanne: An Essay on the Meaning of Still Life’,
published six years earlier in the ARTnews Annual,
and gained an inkling that art history could address
both the dynamics of form and psychology. ‘In

93
[Cézanne’s] habitual representation of the apples as
a theme by itself’, Schapiro wrote, ‘there is a latent
erotic sense, an unconscious symbolizing of a
repressed desire.’ 1
Meanwhile, two thousand miles to the west at
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), there
arose for the first time an institutionalized version
of radical or Marxist art history, a type of
scholarship that had previously been practised only
sporadically and without official sanction in New
York with Schapiro, in London with the émigrés
Frederick Antal, Arnold Hauser and Francis
Klingender, and in Paris with Henri Lefebvre. In Los
Angeles, however, under the leadership of Otto Karl
Werckmeister it became the house style.
Werckmeister, a German from Berlin with
rebarbative manners and an annihilating intellect,
was appointed chair in 1971 and immediately began
a Robespierrean purge, determined to force his
department colleagues to be free. He supplanted
the four old boys who previously ran the place and
initiated a regime of radical democracy – for
example, granting full department voting rights to
graduate students as well as to junior faculty. He
also fostered, as Carol Duncan described to me, ‘a
culture of intellectual confrontation’ that became
notorious in a discipline renowned for its good
manners.
Werckmeister hired the radical feminist Duncan as
a visiting professor in 1973, the year she published
in Artforum her iconoclastic essay ‘Virility and
Domination in Twentieth-Century Vanguard
Painting’. There she argued that, for all their
supposed originality, the Fauves and Expressionists
relied upon the most trite of clichés: that women

94
are either weak vessels or femmes fatales, and that
the avant-garde male artist must by rights exercise
his authority – either actually in the studio, or
virtually on the canvas – over the bodies of women.
These artists’ vaunted freedom, articulated by
means of ‘large and spontaneous … painterly
gestures’ and a ‘barely controlled energy’, as
Duncan wrote, was in fact merely the expression of
the ‘fantasies and fears of middle-class men living in
a changing world’.2
Though by outward signs no feminist himself,
Werckmeister clearly approved of Duncan’s work.
Her conclusions were aligned with his own
conviction, stated in his 1973 article ‘Marx on
Ideology and Art’, published in New Literary
History, that the ‘semblance of [art’s] autonomy …
was in fact contrived to serve particular interests of
socially organized material production…. The
historical investigation of art, like that of any other
human product, is bound [required] to go beyond its
confines and reach the basis of these conditions.’3
Rejecting the theory of ‘non-simultaneity of the
development of material and artistic production’,
found in Mikhail Lifshitz’s Karl Marx’s Theory of
Art, Werckmeister insisted that putatively leftist
critics had falsely imputed ‘notions of social
progress and historical critique’ to works of modern
art, thus severing them from their actual material
base. Duncan, who in 1973 also published in the Art
Bulletin her article ‘Happy Mothers and Other New
Ideas in French Art’, exploring the impact of
natalism on late-eighteenth-century paintings of
women, shared her UCLA department chair’s
insistence upon the need for a rigorous examination
of art’s social base and the need to challenge its
supposed autonomy. Neither Werckmeister nor

95
Duncan, in sum, believed that works of modern art
could significantly advance politics – or indeed even
cogently represent it – in the absence of an
organized mass movement. That view was soon
proposed, with additional energy and subtlety, from
a new quarter.
It was Duncan who in 1973 (so she tells it) pulled
from the bottom of a pile of job applications that
belonging to one T. J. Clark, an almost unknown
thirty-year-old Englishman who had just published
two books devoted to the art of the 1848 Revolution
and Gustave Courbet, The Absolute Bourgeois and
Image of the People.4 The quality of the works and
the confidence of the voice were undeniable, and
Clark was quickly offered a position. His decision to
leave England and come to the United States was
undoubtedly the result of many factors, but the dire
economic circumstances in Britain may have been
one. The year 1974 saw the end of the almost
three-decades-long expansion of the United States
and European economies. From an average growth
rate of 7.2 per cent during the previous two years,
the US economy slid into a contraction of more than
2 per cent; the situation was even worse in England,
where the decline was
nearly 4 per cent. And unlike in the United
Kingdom, hiring in the California system was
largely unaffected by the downturn. (That the
decline in both countries marked the beginning of a
major contraction – phase B of a Kondratieff wave
that still continues – was at the time unrecognized,
except perhaps by Paul Sweezy, Immanuel
Wallerstein, Ernest Mandel, Robert Brenner and a
handful of other radical economists and
historians.)5

96
Another factor in Clark’s defection may have been
Los Angeles’ well-known, if not always congenial,
left history. It was called ‘Weimar on the Pacific’ in
the 1940s for its large population of
German-speaking intellectuals, many of them
communist, including Theodor W. Adorno, Max
Horkheimer, Alfred Döblin, Arnold Schoenberg,
Lion Feuchtwanger and Bertolt Brecht. The latter’s
poem about the city, entitled ‘Contemplating Hell’,
was no doubt familiar to Clark, but did not deter
him. It begins:

Contemplating Hell, as I once heard it,

My brother Shelley found it to be a place

Much like the city of London. I,

Who do not live in London, but in Los Angeles,

Find, contemplating Hell, that it

Must be even more like Los Angeles.6

More significantly, Los Angeles was now becoming

a magnet for New Left scholars, with posts taken by
the young Marxist historians Brenner and Russell
Jacoby. In addition, David Kunzle, the British social
historian of art – in self-deprecation he would say
‘Marxisant’ – was a lecturer at the California
Institute of the Arts in Valencia and the author in
1973 of The History of the Comic Strip, a genre that
had always been beneath the radar of art historians
more disposed to Ingres than Cruikshank. He was
hired at UCLA in 1977.
Clark remained at UCLA for only a couple of years,
but in that time became the teacher or advisor of
several graduate students including Thomas Crow,

97
Holly Clayson, Serge Guilbaut and Joan Weinstein,
all of whom practised, at least for a time, some
variant of radical or Marxist art history. They
concerned themselves with the ways in which works
of modern European or American art articulated
divergent class and political interests; described
artists as commodity producers rather than as
geniuses outside of time; and understood art works
as sites of contestation more than as expressions of
social consensus. But each of them also succumbed,
to a greater or lesser extent, to what Jacoby called a
‘fetish of the defeated’ – that is, a tendency not just
to reject the autonomy of art as Werckmeister and
Duncan had done, but to see revolutionary failure or
defeat as preordained, and reification as inevitably
triumphing over resistance regardless of the
activation of the underlying social base. Guilbaut,
for example, published in 1985 his How New York
Stole the Idea of Modern Art, arguing that Abstract
Expressionism was hardly the radical voice its
champions made it out to be,
but rather a rhetoric of Cold War liberalism, barely
distinguishable from the shrill cries of
7
anti-communism. (Guilbaut’s error, ironically
enough, was the vulgar Marxist one of assuming
that he who pays the piper always calls the tune.)
Weinstein, a student of Werckmeister, published in
1990 a book entitled The End of Expressionism,
which argued that German state institutions, and
the various pre-First World War vanguard
movements, combined to turn Expressionism into a
veritable language of revolution, only to see that
association dissolve in the disastrous aftermath of
the actual revolutionary upsurges in Berlin, Munich
and elsewhere in 1918–19.8 In both books,
avant-garde strategies are presented as hopelessly

98
compromised, with collapse or accommodation
inevitable. Crow, too, in the end accepted this
undialectical parti pris, although in his first major
publications he assumed a different posture, the
result perhaps of his closer emulation of the theory
and method adumbrated in Clark’s two early books.

1 Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans, 1849–50, oil

on canvas, 315.2 × 660.4 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

What characterized Clark’s work immediately

before he came to UCLA was its recognition of the
class-component of vision and its supple use of the
Marxian concept of mediation. For example, he
showed that Gustave Courbet, in his trilogy of
works from 1849–50 – The Stonebreakers, A Burial
at Ornans [1], and The Peasants of Flagey
Returning from the Fair, marshalled a set of styles
and techniques derived from popular art – for
example, cheap woodcuts and broadsheets from
Épinal [2] – for the purpose of putting history
painting (that mode of high-mindedness, if not
pomposity, that dominated the walls of the Salons)
at the disposal of workers and peasants. The
distinctive attributes of modernist painting
therefore – such as its flatness and affectlessness –

99
were not the consequence of some quasi-Kantian
redefinition of the medium, but signs of affiliation
with an entirely alternative and demotic artistic
tradition. Clark demonstrated, as well,
that while the success of that avant-garde gambit
ultimately depended upon the mediating
circumstances of viewership – economic,
geographic, ideological and biographic – its
outcome could not be forecast at the beginning. A
Burial, as one of its contemporary antagonists
wrote, was an ‘engine of revolution’, and Clark
agreed, notwithstanding the Napoleonic coup d’état
in December 1851 that left in tatters both the
socialist cause and Courbet’s project of Realism.
Some popular movements fail not because of the
theoretical impoverishment of their leaders or, as
Marx wrote, their ‘speaking and writing section,
politicians and literati’, but because of the sheer
strength of the forces of order. These were lessons
no doubt learned from Clark’s own experience with
the Situationist International, a circle of artists and
revolutionaries who during the uprisings of May
1968 in Paris lent their efforts to organizing
students and workers in a massive general strike
that nearly brought down the French government of
President Charles de Gaulle. Within weeks of de
Gaulle’s dissolution of the National Assembly on 30
May 1968, however, revolutionary energies were
dissipated, and the opportunity had passed for what
the Situationsts called détournement – the diversion
or reorientation of commodity culture for the
purpose of enabling the free pursuit of primitive
desires. But that defeat did not invalidate all of the
political and aesthetic strategies that preceded it.
These, anyway, are some conclusions that may be
drawn from Clark’s writing and teaching of the

100
early and mid-1970s, ones not fully absorbed by his
UCLA students.

2 Anonymous, Le Convoi de Malborough,

lithograph, Pellérin lithographers,
Épinal, c. 1860.

Back in Albany, New York, the halcyon days of

seemingly unlimited educational and arts spending
were over, and the mood was grim. Three years
before, Governor Rockefeller had overseen the
brutal suppression of a prison uprising at Attica
near Buffalo, leading to the deaths of thirty-nine
prisoners and ten guards, and in 1973 he signed a
series of anti-drug laws that mandated long prison
terms for possession and sale of so-called narcotic
drugs, regardless of the age or record of the
offender. (The sale of two ounces of marijuana,
opium, heroin or cocaine was punished with a
minimum sentence of fifteen years to life.) ‘Law and
Order’ – Nixon’s, Agnew’s and other Republicans’
racially inflected slogan – remained the byword in
Albany as elsewhere in late 1973 and 1974, as

101
Rockefeller resigned the governorship to become
Gerald Ford’s appointed vice-president. The State
University of New York was still the largest system
of public higher education in the country, with over
230,000 students, and Albany remained one of its
flagships (its campus designed in 1954–6 by Edward
Durrell Stone), but now retrenchment was the order
of the day. Ann Harris found her tenured position
under threat, and at the end of 1974 left for greener
pastures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and
Robert Kinsman was summarily fired. Though there
was a modest recovery underway by the time I
graduated in 1977, and the unemployment rate had
declined, the lure of a fellowship from the wealthy
Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts,
just thirty miles to the east, was irresistible.

1978: Albert Boime, Herbert Marcuse and Jimmy Carter

I received my initial graduate training in art history

at Williams College between 1977 and 1979. There I
studied with, among others, Julius Held, George
Heard Hamilton, Daniel Robbins and Albert Boime.
At Williams, Boime was visiting professor in 1978
and taught a seminar on the French juste milieu,
the art that developed in the wake of the 1830
revolution and the regime of Louis Philippe. Thomas
Couture – part Classicist and part Romanticist, part
modernist and part pompier, part radical and part
conservative – was the key figure in Boime’s course,
and the subject of a massive monograph he
published two years later. We spent a long time in
that class looking at Romans of the Decadence and
The Enrolment of the Volunteers of 1792 [3], the
latter of which was housed in the nearby Springfield
Museum of Fine Arts. Later that year, Boime took

102
up his position at UCLA – he was hired by
Werckmeister – and his seminar on juste milieu led
me down a path that eventually intersected with
that of Werckmeister, Clark, Crow and southern
California’s radical intellectual tradition.
First, Boime was unapologetically Marxist. He
would more or less repeat Karl Marx’s two least
nuanced formulations of method that became the
basis for what in the twentieth century was called
‘dialectical materialism’, or what Stalin called
‘Diamat’. The first is from The Communist
Manifesto: ‘The history of all hitherto existing
societies
is the history of class struggle’; and the second,
from the 1859 Critique of Political Economy: ‘The
totality of the relations of production constitutes the
economic structure of society, the real foundation,
on which arises a legal and political superstructure,
and to which correspond definite forms of
consciousness.’ Though these statements still seem
to me, in a general sense, true, they do not take us
very far down the path of an art history that is both
historical and material in outlook. Yes, the struggle
between patrician and slave, peasant and lord, and
proletarian and bourgeois has in successive ages
shaped the disposition of power and distribution of
resources, but this binary formulation denies the
dynamic character of the contest: that each class is
always in a process of transformation, and that
subsidiary groupings – some of which are organized
according to ethnic, gender, national or religious
characteristics – may also be determining of the
outcome of a given political dispute. And while it is
also true, as Marx said, that the idealist Hegel must
be stood on his feet, the materialist approach to
history does not argue that the superstructure –

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philosophy, law, literature, art and culture in
general – is merely a reflection of the economic
foundation of a given society. Rather, as Marx
himself realized, and as generations of scholars who
followed him also understood, the two domains
could not be so easily separated; culture or
ideology, as Marx elsewhere wrote, ‘becomes a
material force when it grips the masses’.9

3 Thomas Couture, The Enrolment of the Volunteers

of 1792, 1848–51, oil on canvas. Museum of Fine
Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts.

Without these two correctives, a radical art history

would be impossible since the discipline is most of
all concerned with understanding why works of art
look the way they do and what they meant to their
original audiences, questions that cannot possibly
be answered except by examining the changing
subsets of the large social formations that actually
made, looked at, responded to and collected works
of art. And we must also recognize that art works –
at least at certain key moments in history – actually

104
changed minds and moved bodies to act in the
sphere of the political. (This, as we have seen, was
one of Clark’s key insights concerning Courbet in
1850. It was also fundamental for his pupil Crow,
whose dissertation was completed in 1978 and
concerned the political impact of Jacques-Louis
David’s Oath of the Horatii when it was exhibited at
the Salon of 1785.) Moreover, the distinction
between the economic foundation and the cultural
superstructure is not always clear. Take, for
example, the French Salon, the particular focus of
Boime’s research before he came to UCLA: it was
from the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth
century at once a marketplace for a particular type
of luxury good and an institution for the inculcation
of ideology. Or take the many other arts and
manufactures that exist on the border between base
and superstructure and that clearly fall within the
domain of art-historical research – Wedgewood,
Thonet, Morris and Company, Liberty, the Bauhaus
and even Andy Warhol’s Factory!
But back in 1978, my dissatisfaction with Boime’s
teaching did not lay primarily in his conventional or
‘vulgar’ Marxism – I had read very little Marx up to
that point – but in his almost complete dismissal of
psychoanalysis. I spent my second summer in
Williamstown reading the complete works of
Sigmund Freud (I cannot now remember why,
except that I had just finished reading Jane Austen)
and, given the investment, I could not accept the
idea that the Id, Ego and Superego, the Oedipus
Complex, the Castration Complex, parapraxes, the
Pleasure Principle, Thanatos and all the rest were
mere superstructure and without any foundation in
the actual matter and dynamics of the human mind
and brain, or without any practical or historical

105
significance. What I turned towards as the result of
the challenge from Boime, therefore, was the work
of Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse. Brown’s
two best-known works, Life Against Death (1959)
and Love’s Body (1966), were efforts to achieve a
synthesis of Marx and Freud, at the time the holy
grail of left intellectuals. Capitalism itself, Brown
argued, effected a colossal repression or group
neurosis, a childlike anality marked by an extreme
of possessiveness, acquisitiveness (what Marx in
1844 had called ‘the sense of having’), a preference
for control and an infatuation with ‘filthy lucre’.
What was needed, therefore, was a revolution of
desire – a ‘polymorphous perversity’ that would be
communal, erotic, expressive, anti-authoritarian and
anti-establishment.
Marcuse, who like Brown taught in California in the
early 1970s (the former at San Diego, the latter at
Santa Cruz), argued by contrast, in One
Dimensional Man (1964), that ‘technological
rationality’ – the achievement of material wealth
under the aegis of monopoly capitalism, combined
with a high degree of personal freedom in the West
(remember this was written at the apogee of the
postwar economic expansion) – had effected not a
widespread repression but a general
‘desublimation’, an emotional and
bodily pleasure that had rarely if ever been so
widely available.10 But far from being liberating,
this desublimation was, in fact, ‘repressive’ since it
blunted more profound drives for emancipation and
the good life, and even blocked the very
‘polymorphous perversity’ that Brown had
celebrated in his earlier Life Against Death.11 Art
and literature themselves had succumbed to
‘repressive desublimation’, not so much because

106
they were subsumed by kitsch, as Clement
Greenberg had once argued, but because they were
assimilated in a ‘harmonizing pluralism’ that
permitted everything and was threatened by
nothing. No longer did the arts function as ‘the
Great Refusal – the protest against that which is’;
instead ‘they were absorbed by what they refuted’,
and functioned to entertain rather than challenge.12
I should note here that Marcuse’s views about art
changed in the last decade or so of his life. When in
La Jolla in 1975 he met with Werckmeister, Clark,
Lee Baxandall, Bram Dijkstra and Fredric Jameson
as part of a new (and short-lived) ‘California Group’,
he was asserting the intellectual and political
significance of an idealist ‘aesthetic dimension’ as a
riposte to modern instrumental and technological
rationality.13 Emancipated from its material base,
Marcuse claimed, nineteenth- and
twentieth-century art announced revolutionary
change long before such change could actually
occur in material reality. Werckmeister and Clark,
as we have seen, and Jameson too, took an opposite
tack to argue that what Marcuse called ‘cultural
revolution’ was a chimera and that recent art had
become ‘affirmative’, a handmaiden to, if not
indistinguishable from, the culture industry, in
effect using early Marcuse to argue against late
Marcuse.
What Brown and Marcuse offered me in 1978 – a
decade after they were taken up by the American
New Left for their bracing
anti-establishmentarianism and apparent hedonism
– was an understanding that what we then called
‘high art’ was in constant struggle and negotiation
with technological and capitalist development, and

107
that in fact, the two domains could not be
disaggregated. Moreover, I learned that the
achievements of the previous decade – in the
domains of civil rights, free speech, anti-war and
arms control, women’s and gay liberation – were at
best partial and provisional, and potentially
repressive forms of desublimation. Indeed, the new
social order proposed by Jimmy Carter – despite lip
service paid to international human rights –
consisted of little more than weak moral homilies
and cultural pluralism tinged with asceticism,
precisely the opposite of what Brown, Marcuse and
the New Left championed. And, of course, within
two years progress in all social and political
domains would be rolled back with the anointing of
Ronald Reagan. Major sectoral changes in the
United States economy – the decline of the
automobile and steel industries and growth of the
service sector, disinvestment in national
infrastructure, and the rapid rise of the London and
New York financial services sector – all combined to
destabilize and frighten the national electorate and
render nugatory theories of revolution that had
flourished in the 1960s.
But the art history of my time did not then seem
crippled by the ‘harmonizing pluralism’ described
by Marcuse. The work of Clark and a group of other
young British Marxist and feminist scholars –
including Adrian Rifkin, Lisa Tickner, Fred Orton
and Griselda Pollock, who wrote for the new journal
Art History and the magazine Block – suggested to
me that there was an emerging model for
art-historical work that might soon conquer the
field. It entailed close and sustained attention to the
style and structure of works of art in the confidence
that it was precisely in their subtle formal

108
interstices – and especially in anomalous or
otherwise inexplicable elements (shades of
Schapiro) – that the operations of a larger political
and ideological dynamic could be most clearly seen
and understood. The scholarship required careful
archival as well as formal discriminations if a case
were to be made for an art work’s particular critical
salience, and radical art historians were, as a
group, committed to making them, especially since
the constant, disingenuous complaint of right-wing
art history was that the left wing lacked ‘an eye’,
the connoisseurial capacity that supposedly
distinguished real from ersatz art historians. The
result of this marriage of formal and archival
attentiveness was a social history of art that at its
best was true to objects and their changing
histories and, as Thomas Crow recently wrote to
me, provided ‘a deeper analysis of the ways of
capital [than was otherwise available]’. In 1978
therefore, at the age of twenty-two, I believed that
art historians might themselves revive an
avant-garde impulse that was inoperative, if not
defunct, in the current artistic and political spheres
during the waning months of the 1970s, when
Carter was walled up in the White House Rose
Garden, Reagan lay waiting in the wings, and the
American art scene – which I covered as a critic for
Arts Magazine – was dominated by the affectation
and empathy of the triad of Robert Longo, Julian
Schnabel and David Salle.

1984: Art History in the Age of Reagan

In 1984 I completed at Princeton my dissertation on

Odilon Redon under the guidance of Thomas Crow,
and travelled out to Los Angeles to begin teaching

109
at Occidental College, while Werckmeister soon
thereafter left UCLA and moved to Northwestern,
where he and I would eventually become
colleagues. At almost the same time, Crow was
denied tenure despite having published what was
widely considered the most important book ever
written on David and the art of the French
Revolution. The antagonism of East Coast art
history towards the West Coast insurgents was
manifest at Harvard as well as Princeton, where
Clark (hired by Harvard in 1981) faced attacks from
his senior colleague Sidney Freedberg and from
Irving Lavin at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton. But then suddenly a peculiar thing
happened: the old guard modernists folded and the
social art historians (or at least a subset of them)
prevailed, but in their victory left behind some of
the very insurgent energies that were their initial
impetus.
That the old boys packed it in – the Eitners, Elsens,
Champas, Ackermans, Jansons, Dorras, Hamiltons
and Rosenblums – is not surprising: they were
approaching retirement and had accomplished
surprisingly little. Most of their work was pre-art
historical: collecting and cataloguing images,
identifying subjects and sources, addressing
changes in style, and sometimes examining
patronage – but avoiding serious analysis and
interpretation. When the work was more ambitious,
as in the case of Rosenblum, it was ahistorical and
untheorized: a matter of reflection theory and
zeitgeist. 14
Crow’s work – on David and other subjects – was
obviously more ambitious, and clearly revealed his
Californian upbringing, experience and training. In
an article entitled ‘Modernism and Mass Culture in

110
the Visual Arts’, he theorized and historicized the
relationship between the two, using Impressionism
as the pivot. Impressionism, he said, revealed a
complicity between modernism and commodity
culture that previous critics – notably Greenberg –
were at pains to deny. Quoting at length from
Schapiro’s 1937 essay ‘The Nature of Abstract Art’,
Crow noted that the art of Claude Monet, Auguste
Renoir and the rest depicted (this is Schapiro via
Crow):

breakfasts, picnics, promenades, boating trips, holidays and

vacation travel. These urban idylls not only present the objective
forms of bourgeois recreation in the 1860s and 1870s; they also
reflect in the very choice of subjects and in the new aesthetic
devices the conception of art solely as a field of freedom for an
enlightened bourgeois detached from the official beliefs of his
class. In enjoying realistic pictures of his surroundings as a
spectacle of traffic and changing atmospheres, the cultivated
rentier was experiencing in its phenomenal aspect that mobility of
the environment, the market and of industry to which he owed his
income and his freedom.15

But rather than conclude from this, as had

Schapiro, that the Impressionist painter simply
‘succumbed to the general division of labor as a
full-time leisure specialist’, he proposed that the
very relentlessness with which these artists went
about their pursuit of leisure – at the levels of both
subject and style – revealed a coordinated group
effort to rescue some kind of rich and affective
communal life from the damaged goods of
provisioned recreation and commodity culture – the
bread and circuses of late Second Empire and early
Third Republic France. In this respect, the
Impressionists more resembled subsequent
resistant subcultures – think Beats, Mods,

111
Skinheads, Punks, Hip Hop – than previous artistic
schools and movements. Such resistant subcultures
employ style in its widest sense – hair and clothing,
patterns of speech, drug use, and modes of
recreation and representation – to establish
imagined relations to arenas of life and labour that
are cut off to them by virtue of their class or race.
In making this argument, Crow obviously reached
outside art history to anthropology and sociology, in
particular to the English theorists Phil Cohen and
Stuart Hall from the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, as well
as the latter’s protégé Dick Hebdige. (He may also
have been drawing upon his knowledge and
recollection of southern California’s rich history of
subcultural styles, from zoot suit and low-rider in
the 1940s to waacking and hardcore in the 1970s.)
And later modernist artists too – from Picasso and
Braque to Andy Warhol and beyond – similarly
immersed themselves in the detritus, ephemera and
erotic blandishments of mass and commodity
culture in order to create an alternative social and
symbolic space that might be more satisfying and
arresting than the ones in which they found
themselves. In this way, modernism may be seen as
parasitical upon mass culture. But the energy
extends in the opposite direction as well: precisely
because of their extremism and intensity, and their
constant prowling for new experiences and
sensations, the modernist avant-garde revealed to
the wider capitalist culture areas of expressive
deficit, that is, modes of experience and affective
intensity that had not yet been fully colonized and
exploited by capitalist culture, or what Theodor
Adorno called ‘the Culture Industry’. In Crow’s now
well-known formulation, ‘the avant-garde serves as

112
a kind of research and development arm of the
culture industry’.16
That final, jaundiced conclusion – which has been
enormously influential for subsequent work on
modernism and the avant-garde – does not seem to
me quite right. To my view, the history of the
European and American avant-garde – taking
account of its diffusion to Latin America, Africa,
India and elsewhere – indicates that some art works
possess a cognitive force whose effect can be either
immediate or delayed, proximate or remote, but in
any case material and political, and that the
consequences of an aesthetic intervention cannot be
forecast at the outset. In their first major works,
Clark and Crow argued this, but their writings of
the early and mid-1980s bear the stamp and tenor
of their time: California in the age of Reagan. It was
a period of particular despair for the left – a
president and former movie actor, whose
warmongering was only matched by his insouciance
– held a country in his thrall by means of an
extraordinarily well-managed media apparatus. Why
wouldn’t critics and art historians assume that mass
culture and ‘the spectacle’ – that synonym for
reification coined by the Situationist Guy Debord –
were capable of overwhelming all challenges,
indeed able to subsume and utilize all resistance.
Why wouldn’t they argue, as Werckmeister had in
1973, that ‘cultural revolution’ was a meaningless
term in the absence of a fully fledged social and
political revolt? ‘There is no alternative’ intoned
Margaret Thatcher on a regular basis during those
depressing years, meaning that free markets and
globalization, organized and orchestrated by the
principal capitalist powers of the northern
hemisphere, must inevitably have their way. The

113
power of Hollywood and Disney – or ‘the Industry’
as everyone calls it in Los Angeles – seemed equally
certain in those years.
Thus it appeared to many that the circuit between
art and capital was closed, and the possibility that
the avant-garde may actually intervene into the
circuitry of real life was ended, if it ever existed. In
the 1980s and after, Clark too seemed convinced
that the historic avant-garde was a myth. After
pages of careful attention to the form
of Manet’s Olympia [4] in the chapter devoted to it
in The Painting of Modern Life (1985) – its location
in the tradition of the nude, and analysis of the
voluminous and often shrill critical response to it –
Clark concludes that the work was at once
particular and general, multivocal and singular:
‘The achievement of Olympia, I should say, is that it
gives its female subject a particular sexuality as
opposed to a general one. And that particularity
derives, I think, not from there being an order to
the body on the bed but from there being too many,
and none of them established as the dominant one.
The signs of sex are present in plenty, but they fail,
as it were, to add up.’17 Opacity and negation, Clark
argued, are the best that modernists can hope for.

114
4 Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas,
130.5 cm × 190 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Conclusion: Counter-intution

I will be brief. Southern California, and in particular

UCLA was the birthplace of a version of radical art
history that was deeply influential. It was the
product of two distinct European intellectual and
political traditions, as well as southern California’s
peculiar culture and history. The Frankfurt School
theorists Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Leo Lowenthal
(who taught at Berkeley from 1956 to 1972) and, of
course, Marcuse had a significant impact on radical
or critical art history. Werckmeister, Brenner and
Jacoby at UCLA, Jameson at the University of
California, San Diego, and Martin Jay at Berkeley
were all instrumental in transmitting and clarifying
this intellectual legacy. The Situationist tradition
too – though rarely invoked explicitly by Clark

115
during his brief spell at UCLA – was also significant,
especially since it offered so many useful terms for
analysing the highly mediated culture and industry
of southern California.

5 Internal FBI memo concerning

‘Black Nationalist Hate Groups’, 6
May 1970.

But what is surprising or counterintuitive here is

that radical art history did not arise – as might be
expected – from a robust movement for social
change, but from a world-historical political defeat.
By 1971, when Werckmeister became chair at
UCLA, the anti-war and civil rights struggles that
marked campus politics in the 1960s were mostly
over. The FBI’s Counterintelligence Programs [5]

116
had successfully infiltrated the Los Angeles Black
Panther Party and instigated fratricidal warfare,
and the struggles of Chicano and Asian students
and community leaders for equal rights and
opportunities settled into demands for so many
ethnic and cultural studies programmes. This was
the period of what Jameson called ‘the cultural turn’
and the idea of a radical art history – one that was
fully adequate to objects and histories, while
providing ‘a deeper analysis of the ways of capital
[than was otherwise available]’ – was buffeted by
enormous assimilative forces. In the face of these
forces, radical art history blinked, accepting
either what was taken (mistakenly) to be the
Situationist orthodoxy that resistance to the power
of the spectacle is futile, or the Marxist orthodoxy
that revolutions in culture are phantasmatic in the
absence of political revolution.
But alternative perspectives still exist and remain to
be fully explored. (1) That art is one of many
expressive systems that have at times in the past
gripped the masses and become a material force,
and that even when their power is cognitive more
than instrumental, they may aid in the restructuring
of consciousness as to once again merit the
designation materialist and political. (2) That
however great the recuperative power of the
avant-garde, its function in highlighting the
affective deficits generated by capital may be even
greater. Today increased diagnoses of depression
and the massive dispensation of both psychotropic
drugs and cognitive behavioural therapy indicate
that the happiness gap – the space between the
capitalist promise of pleasure and its deliverance –
is continuing to grow in much of the economically
most dominant powers. ‘Depressive hedonia’ is

117
Mark Fisher’s pithy diagnosis of the antic search for
pleasure and its constant retreat; it is a disease that
grows more acute as the economic crises lasts
longer.18 (3) That the authority of contingency must
be better recognized – that the results of a
particular ideological and cultural struggle cannot
be determined before it has even been waged, and
that success is always a possibility. This, anyway,
was an intuition some of my generation had in the
mid-1970s as we witnessed the defeat of the United
States in Vietnam, the overthrow of Richard Nixon,
and the succession of victories by the aging
Muhammad Ali. It is one that we should keep in
mind as we watch, or participate in, present or
future Springs, Occupations, Awakenings and other
social movements in the Middle East, United States,
Europe and beyond.
1 Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Apples of Cezanne: An Essay on the Meaning of
Still Life’, in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (George Braziller:
New York, 1978), p. 12.

2 Carol Duncan, ‘Virility and Domination in Twentieth-Century Vanguard

Painting’, Artforum, vol. 12, no. 4 (December 1973), p. 31.

3 Otto Karl Werckmeister, ‘Marx on Ideology and Art’, New Literary

History, vol. 4, no. 3 (Spring 1973), p. 508.

4 T. J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France

1848–1851 (Thames & Hudson: London, 1973) and Image of the
People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Thames & Hudson:
London, 1973).

5 See, for example, ‘The Depression: A Long-Term View’, MR Zine, 10

October 2008, <http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/
wallerstein161008.html>, accessed 25 August 2013.

6 Erhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los

Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (University of California Press:
Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2007).

118
7 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract
Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (University of Chicago
Press: Chicago, 1985).

8 Joan Weinstein, The End of Expressionism: Art and the November

Revolution in Germany, 1918–19 (University of Chicago Press:
Chicago, 1990).

9 Karl Marx, ‘Introduction’, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s

Philosophy of Right (1844), <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/
works/1844/df-jahrbucher/law-abs.htm>, accessed 25 August 2013.

10 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of

Advanced, Industrial Society (Beacon: Boston, 1964), passim.

11 Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning

of History (Wesleyan University Press: Middletown, 1959), passim.

12 Ibid.

13 Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, op. cit.

14 See for example, Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the

Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (Harper and Row:
New York, 1977).

15 Thomas Crow, ‘Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts’, in

Modern Art in the Common Culture (Yale University Press: New Haven
and London,

1998), p. 12.

16 Ibid., p. 35.

17 T. J. Clark ‘Olympia’s Choice’, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the

Art of Manet and his Followers (Princeton University Press: Princeton,
1999), p. 131.

18 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realist: Is There No Alternative? (O Books:

Winchester and Washington, DC, 2009), p. 21.

119
THE DIALECTICAL LEGACIES OF
RADICAL ART HISTORY
MEYER SCHAPIRO AND GERMAN AESTHETIC
DEBATES IN THE 1930S AND 1940S
Warren Carter

M eyer Schapiro’s work has had a greater impact

upon the development of radical art history in
the anglophone world than that of any other Marxist
art historian. His often essayistic contributions have
influenced later studies on medieval sculpture,
Courbet and mid-nineteenth-century French
Realism, Impressionism and Abstract
Expressionism.1 Schapiro was a ‘Western Marxist’
in that he rejected the positivistic Marxism of the
Second International and the vulgar philosophical
orthodoxies of the Soviet Union, aligning himself
instead with a more expansive and critical approach
to the Marxist tradition. In keeping with the thesis
of British historian Perry Anderson, Schapiro – like
other Western Marxists in a period shaped by
working-class defeats – became increasingly more
concerned with questions of philosophy and
aesthetics, as opposed to more explicitly political
and economic ones.2 Many of the ideas and themes
in his writing were developed in tandem with those
of European Western Marxists, particularly those
associated with the classic German debates of the
1930s and 1940s who would later be collated in the
celebrated volume Aesthetics and Politics.3 He was

120
influenced by the theoretical and historical
framework developed by Georg Lukács, even if he
ultimately inverted his aesthetic judgments; had a
friendship with Bertolt Brecht while he was in New
York in 1935–6 and afterwards; admired the work of
Walter Benjamin, whom he visited in Paris in 1939
in a failed attempt to get him to come to the United
States; and had a friendship and somewhat
ambiguous intellectual relationship with Theodor W.
Adorno, alongside whom he published in the
Zeitshrift für Sozialforschung in 1938.4 With this in
mind, I want to tentatively sketch out an analysis of
Schapiro’s thought as being formed in some kind of
conjunction with the central figures responsible for
these classic debates, and with Lukács in particular.
I want to begin with what is undoubtedly Schapiro’s
most celebrated essay, ‘Nature of Abstract Art’ of
1937, and the paper of the previous year with which
it is nearly always counterposed, ‘The Social Bases
of Art’. Both of these texts have been the subject of
critical attention from, among others, Serge
Guilbaut, Thomas Crow and T. J. Clark, all
exemplars of the social history of art. Each argues
that there is a marked shift between the two texts.
For Guilbaut, these supposed differences in
Schapiro’s position played a pivotal role in the move
from the communist-led Popular Front to
Trotskyism and
thereby the ‘art for art’s sake’ that triumphantly
followed.5 Crow characterizes the first essay as the
kind of leftist art history that dismissed ‘all
avant-garde claims to a critical and independent
stance as so much false consciousness’, while the
second instead ‘offered a qualified apology for
modernism’.6 And Clark dismisses the voice of the
first essay as ‘any old Stalinist in full cry’, one that,

121
moreover, produces ‘false alternatives’ (and that
‘the same could be said of Lukács, largely’),
whereas the second essay represents little more
than an ‘inconsequential hedging of bets’.7 As
Andrew Hemingway has made clear, however, the
differences between the two texts are overstated
and perhaps more the product of their respective
contexts and functions.8 ‘The Social Bases of Art’
was delivered to the first American Artists’
Congress Against War and Fascism in New York –
which Schapiro helped to found and organize – and
was therefore in part a polemical call-to-arms;
‘Nature of Abstract Art’ was a review of Alfred H.
Barr’s catalogue to the 1936 show ‘Cubism and
Abstract Art’, which Barr had curated at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, published in
Marxist Quarterly – a journal devoted to Marxist
scholarship, of which Schapiro was an editor – and
it was therefore more dispassionate and theoretical
in tone.
Contrary to the interpretations of Guilbaut, Crow
and Clark, rather than disparaging modern art in
his earlier 1936 paper, Schapiro merely argued that
it was just as ‘social’ as the art that preceded it:
‘The preponderance of objects drawn from a
personal and artistic world does not mean that
pictures are now more pure than in the past, more
completely works of art. It means simply that the
personal and aesthetic contexts of secular life now
condition the formal character of art, just as
religious beliefs and practices in the past
conditioned the formal character of religious art.’9
While the very conception of artistic individualism
becomes homologous to bourgeois individualism via
the mediations of the art market, and is in this
sense therefore predicated upon the exploitation of

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the working class under capitalism, Schapiro
argued that ‘the social origins of such forms of
modern art do not permit one to judge this art as
good or bad; they simply throw light upon some
aspects of their character and enable us to see more
clearly that the ideas of modern artists, far from
describing eternal and necessary conditions in art,
are simply the results of recent history’.10 And, as
befitting a paper written for an audience of artists
radicalized by the economic crisis of the 1930s,
Schapiro finished with the rallying cry that it is only
by ‘recognizing the dependence of his situation and
attitudes on the character of modern society’ that
‘the artist acquires the courage to change things, to
act on his society and for himself in an effective
manner’, to produce one in which ‘all men can be
free individuals’, to the extent that individuality will
lose ‘its exclusiveness and its ruthless and perverse
character’.11
As already mentioned, the later paper, ‘Nature of
Abstract Art’, was written as a critique of Barr’s
‘Cubism and Abstract Art’. While, for Schapiro,
Barr’s catalogue essay may have provided a precise
chronology of the development of abstract art, it
nevertheless ‘excludes as irrelevant to its history
the nature of the society in which it arose, except as
an incidental obstructing or accelerating
atmospheric factor’.12 In opposition to such
formalism, and in line with historical materialism,
Schapiro instead insisted that ‘the banal divisions of
the great historical styles in literature and art
correspond to the momentous divisions in the
history of society’, a thesis that he then
demonstrated in an analysis of a series of modern
movements from Impressionism onwards.13 On the
mutability of realism and abstraction, Schapiro is

123
again clear that both ‘affirm the sovereignty of the
artist’s mind, the first in the capacity to recreate
the world minutely in a narrow, intimate field by
series of abstract calculations of perspective and
gradation of colour, the other in the capacity to
impose new forms on nature, to manipulate the
abstracted elements of line and colour freely, or to
create shapes corresponding to subtle states of
mind’.14 So that ‘as little as a work is guaranteed
aesthetically by its resemblance to nature, so little
is it guaranteed by its abstractness or “purity”’.15
For Schapiro then, ‘Nature and abstract forms are
both materials for art, and the choice of one or the
other flows from historically changing interests.’16
In this sense, there is more continuity in the two
essays than has generally been acknowledged, their
differences being more about context than shifts in
Schapiro’s politics. Nowhere in the earlier text does
Schapiro reduce avant-garde art to ‘false
consciousness’ tout court, or present ‘false
alternatives’ between realism and modernism. As he
said in an interview years later: ‘My essay on the
social bases of art was never meant to be a blanket
condemnation of modern art, but only a criticism of
some aspects of it. I was never interested in any
position that forced you to choose between social
realism and modern art.’17 That this was the case
was also suggested by an essay entitled ‘Rebellion
in Art’ that he wrote as late as 1950 on the subject
of the 1913 Armory Show as part of a series of
lectures on the theme of ‘America in Crisis’.18 For
Schapiro, whereas the more naturalistic art of the
past was formed within the institutional confines of
the Church, aristocracy and the state, and therefore
‘remained in all its innovations within the bounds of
widely accepted values, and continued to express

124
feelings and ideas that had emerged or were
emerging within these institutions’, modern artists
wishing to paint comparable works of broad human
content for large audiences were denied such
opportunities.19 Instead, they had little alternative
‘but to cultivate in their art the only or surest
realms of freedom – the interior world of their
fancies, sensations, and feelings, and the medium
itself’.20 Despite the harsh political climate of
McCarthyism, Schapiro still managed to inflect
these developments politically in that, while the
new art may seem to be ‘a fulfilment of an American
dream of liberty, it is also in some ways a
negation’.21 As in the focus upon the individual, the
modern artist is isolated ‘from activity in the world’
and thereby ‘confirms the growing separation of
culture from work and ideal social aims’ – that is, an
emancipatory politics that constituted the
framework of these debates in the 1930s.22
As Crow has noted, Schapiro’s two earlier essays
were clearly marked by a close reading of Marx’s
interpretation of the 1848–51 crisis in France: The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Schapiro
himself acknowledged the importance of Marx’s
‘brilliant’ essay, as well as his The Class Struggles
in France, in a footnote to his ‘Courbet and Popular
Imagery’ of 1941.23 Schapiro was convinced by
Marx’s theory that the forcible exclusion of
oppositional groups from the political process
between 1848–51 necessitated a kind of cultural
suicide on the part of the republican bourgeoisie,
the willed destruction of its own democratic
institutions, values and expressive forms under
Bonapartism. As Marx eloquently put it, after the
events of 1848–51 the bourgeoisie fully realized that
it ‘had to destroy all its instruments of defence

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against absolutism with its own hand as soon as it
had itself become absolute’.24 For Schapiro, as for
Marx, this political acquiescence necessitated a
renewed conception of individual autonomy outside
of the official public sphere; hence the first
flowering of consumer culture in the newly
constructed spaces of individuated leisure that were
pictured in Impressionist painting under the Second
Empire. It was this bourgeois retreat from the
public sphere, and its conceptualization within
Marx’s analysis, that also underpinned Benjamin’s
unfinished study of Baudelaire, a point made clear
in his claim that ‘the theory of l’art pour l’art
assumes decisive importance around 1852, at a
time when the bourgeoisie sought to take its
“cause” from the hands of writers and poets’.25 So
that, for Benjamin, Baudelaire ‘owed his enjoyment
of this society as one who had already half
withdrawn from it’. 26
This is, of course, also the main premise of Lukács’s
theory of realism in the bourgeois novel and its
decline after the political upheavals of the
mid-nineteenth century. For him, the period from
1789 to 1848 was one in which the European
bourgeoisie heroically pitted itself against political
absolutism and aristocratic society, and in the
process produced a rich culture of literary realism
that was the heir to the great classical and
humanist traditions of the past – from Shakespeare
and Cervantes through to the nineteenth-century
novels of Scott, Stendhal, Goethe, Dickens and
especially Balzac and Tolstoy. Following Marx,
Lukács defined realism as a literary mode in which
the lives of individual characters were portrayed as
part of a narrative that situated them within the
entire historical dynamics of their society. That he

126
could include the renowned royalist Balzac in his
pantheon of great realist writers set his theory
squarely against the more reductive one of the
Second International, which, with Georgi Plekhanov
and Franz Mehring, reduced art works to the
political ideology of their authors. After the
revolutions of 1848, the bourgeoisie ceased to be a
progressive class, but one instead intent on
consolidating its power over both a vanquished
ancien régime and a revolutionary proletariat. For
Lukács, this produced a corresponding shift in
culture as realism was superseded by naturalism,
and the evocation of the social totality was replaced
by the relativized voice of the author and the
various psychologies of his characters. In
naturalism, which for him was the precursor to
modernism in
general, the world is reduced to static situations
with fetishized objects described in only isolated,
fleeting, subjective impressions.27
Schapiro comes closest to a Lukácsian position in
the essay on Courbet when he convincingly
demonstrated how the artist’s ‘taste for the people’
was ‘nourished and directed by the artistic and
social movements of his time’.28 Schapiro
emphasized the fact that whether the artists and
authors associated with the movement were from a
peasant or lower-middle-class background, they
were, nevertheless, filtered through the capital
where ‘they encountered a higher culture and
consciousness of social life’.29 He therefore focused
upon the artists, authors, poets and critics who
gathered around Courbet in Paris, and examined
how the precise nature of their political
commitments varied and were transformed by ‘the
broader shifts within the class politics of the period’

127
– that is to say, he studied ‘the stratification of
peasants and small proprietors, of factory workers
and artisans, the first group attached to its soil,
conservative, often religious; the others, without
possessions, brought together in work and more apt
to independent resistance and struggle’, and,
moreover, how Bonapartism rested upon the
support of the former at the expense of the latter.30
For Schapiro this produced a bifurcation in culture.
Whereas Courbet remained committed to
revolutionary politics and joined in the Paris
Commune twenty years later, the poet and critic
Champfleury – ‘often identified as the apostle of
realism’ – nailed his colours to the mast by
accepting the Legion of Honour from the emperor
himself in 1867.31 According to Schapiro, ‘In
proposing two arts, a traditional, popular art and a
more realistic urban art, one conservative and
didactic, the other reproducing the spectacle of
modern progress, Champfleury satisfied perfectly
and in the language of an official adviser the
requirements of the regime of the third Napoleon
by whom he had just been decorated.’ Bonapartism
rested upon both support of the peasantry and the
economic expansion and prosperity of France
between 1850 and 1870, and for Schapiro, ‘The
latter assured the final triumph of realism, not in its
plebeian or insurgent aspect, but as a personal
aesthetic tendency toward the representation of the
privately experienced and matter-of-fact world
which culminated in Impressionism; the former
determined the taste for the arts of the static
peasantry and primitive cultures which in the crises
and social pessimism at the end of the century could
replace realism as models of a personal style.’32

128
As for Lukács in literature, so for Schapiro in
painting then: the events of 1848–51 had destroyed
any utopian impulses or democratic aspirations in
cultural production. The attempt by Courbet to
reach a working-class and peasant public was
ultimately crushed under the weight of political
reaction, and Realism was surpassed by the
privatized and subjective world pictured in
Impressionism – a view consonant with Schapiro’s
earlier essays, as well as lectures that he gave in
the 1940s and 1950s.33 But here the two men part.
If Lukács remained forever welded to a now
outmoded form of literary realism, denouncing
everything that broke from its strictures as mere
formalism, then
Schapiro would find some progressive value in
formal experimentation, even as he might condemn
the limited horizons of its class origins and
allegiances. Despite his admiration for Balzac,
Stendhal, Courbet and Daumier, Schapiro inverted
Lukács’s position in that for him, as Hemingway
makes clear, ‘realism in the visual arts was an
essentially nineteenth-century bourgeois aesthetic,
and his interest in it was as the forcing ground of
the more radical culture of modernism’.34 There is
an echo here of his two groundbreaking essays on
Romanesque sculpture and manuscript
illuminations of 1939 in which the ‘discoordinate’
composition of the sculpture at the Benedictine
monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos in Spain was
interpreted as the expression of class antagonisms
between ecclesiastical and secular authority,
between spiritual conformity and freedom; and the
secular motifs in the abbey church at Souillac in
France were similarly understood as heralding an
accommodation of religious art to lay preferences,

129
on a historical trajectory of social progress leading
away from the dogmatic affirmation of church
authority in the latter part of the twelfth century
and beyond.35 As Otto Karl Werckmeister has
argued, in this way ‘Schapiro ventured into an
interpretation of Romanesque art by analogy to
modern art, where prevalence of aesthetic form and
expression of individual sentiment are linked’ – in
the former, tied to a forward-moving progressive
bourgeois class, and in the latter, a now backward
and reactionary one.36
In discussing 1930s American painting years later,
Schapiro made it clear that he was not enamoured
with the type of nineteenth-century naturalism
produced by the Soyer brothers, Moses and
Raphael, with whom he had studied at the National
Academy of Design while an undergraduate at
Columbia. Indeed, the only social realist artist he
professed to admire was Philip Evergood, who
produced a more strident political art using
techniques partly derived from German
Expressionism.37 Such preferences distance
Schapiro from the vulgar sociological critiques of
modernism, and also the crude label of being a
Stalinist, the charge that Clark makes against him
and Lukács. Indeed, the materialist theories of
culture pursued by Schapiro and Lukács, and the
debates around realism and modernism – in
particular German Expressionism – were
circumscribed by similar arguments over the
relative merits of the Popular Front as a political
response to fascism in Europe and the United
States. Yet whereas Lukács’s theory of literature
was congruent with the Popular Front, in fact
preceding it by several years, Schapiro’s hostility to
this tactical turn by the communist movement was

130
never in doubt. This is not the place to discuss
Lukács’s strategic membership of the Communist
Party under Stalinism – what he described as his
‘entry ticket into history’ – but the charge against
Schapiro is unfounded on both political and
aesthetic grounds.38 Like many of the ‘New York
Intellectuals’ with whom he associated, Schapiro
was radicalized by the Depression and became a
fellow-traveller, publishing in communist magazines
such as New Masses. Yet, unlike them, by the 1936
presidential elections he was voting not for the
Communist Party
candidate, but the Socialist Party one – Norman
Thomas – in line with the Trotskyist Workers Party,
who also rejected the Popular Front as an
accommodation with capitalism and the
abandonment of revolutionary principles. While he
never described himself as a Trotskyist, he
supported the American Committee for the Defense
of Leon Trotsky, headed by his mentor John Dewey;
he published in the reconstituted Partisan Review in
the late 1930s during its period of identification
with Trotsky; he was one of the first to sign up to
the statement issued by ‘The League for Cultural
Freedom and Socialism’ that appropriated the
demand for the ‘complete freedom for art’ made in
the ‘Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art’
of 1938 written by Trotsky in collaboration with
André Breton and Diego Rivera; and it was Schapiro
who led the walkout of the American Artists’
Congress in 1940 after the Nazi-Soviet Pact.39
Yet, despite the fact that Schapiro had broken with
the Communist Party after the first round of the
Moscow Show Trials in 1936, his criticism of
Stalinism was perhaps most pronounced in his
critique of Soviet Socialist Realism, as it had to be

131
for Brecht, who, like Lukács, strategically remained
within the Communist Party, even if at a distance
from Moscow, first in Scandinavia, then America,
and finally in East Germany. In a lecture given as
early as 1938 entitled ‘Social Realism and
Revolutionary Art’, Schapiro declared that: ‘There is
a vast body of painting dedicated to the glorification
of the government and especially of Stalin’, one
that, moreover, ‘corresponds to the emergence of a
labour and bureaucratic aristocracy that is plebeian
and enjoys a petty bourgeois leisure’.40 That
Schapiro still subscribed to the original aims of the
Bolsheviks is intimated in the fact that he argued
that those paintings in which Stalin appeared ‘are
notoriously falsified historically, being based on
recent textbooks, which supplant the accounts
published shortly after the Revolution’.41 This art is
also, for him, aesthetically retardaire for, after the
liquidation of the Soviet avant-garde, they are
painted ‘in a dull literal style that continues the
native historical painting of the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, a painting based on the
academic salon art of the 1870s and 1880s in Paris
and Munich’.42 And, he finished with a swipe at his
former comrades in the United States by asserting
that the ‘sympathisers in capitalist countries who
echo these doctrines or tacitly accept the present
state of Russian art as a model for their own
countries do socialism the greatest disservice’.43
It is this combination of a purportedly radical art in
outmoded forms that drove Brecht’s critique of
Soviet Socialist Realism also, and of the figure that
he considered to be its main spokesperson and most
sophisticated theoretical defender, Lukács. As
Brecht notoriously said of him (and other Soviet
cultural theoreticians) to Benjamin: ‘They are, to

132
put it bluntly, enemies of production. Production
makes them uncomfortable. You never know where
you are with production; production is the
unforeseeable. You never know what’s going to
come out. And they themselves don’t want to
produce. They want to play the apparatchik and
exercise control over other people. Every one of
their criticisms contains a threat.’44 Like Schapiro,
Brecht was deeply critical of the idea that
nineteenth-century novelists, essentially bourgeois
writers, could be held up as the model for the
proletarian avant-garde of the present, a different
and antagonistic class altogether. Turning the
debate on its head, Brecht charged Lukács with
formalism and, parodying him, demanded: ‘Be like
Tolstoy – but without his Weakness! Be like Balzac –
only up-to-date!’45 For Brecht, as for Schapiro,
modernist formal devices represented yet another
technical means that could be used alongside
existing, more traditional ones in the creation of a
vanguard art produced to radicalize the masses. As
such, they were aligned in their resistance to both
the fetishization of artistic form and the type of
technological determinism that, for the pair of
them, had become crystallized under Stalinism in
the reactionary style of Soviet Socialist Realism.46
Such a combination of modernist formal devices
with traditional techniques of artistic production
was a significant component of the mural practice
of Rivera, whom Schapiro counted as a friend, and
whose art he described in a review of Bertram
Wolfe and Rivera’s Portrait of Mexico, published in
Marxist Quarterly as ‘The Patrons of Revolutionary
Art’ in 1937, as ‘the nearest to a modern epic
painting’.47 After returning to Mexico in 1921 to
paint the revolution, Rivera fused the formal

133
techniques of Cubism that he had learned in Paris
with a renewed commitment to history painting in
the traditional medium of fresco. Schapiro’s
designation of Rivera’s murals as ‘epic modernism’
was later taken up by David Craven, who argued
that the term was most probably deployed by
Schapiro in relation to the concept of Brechtian
‘epic theatre’.48 To support this claim, he makes a
point-by-point comparison between the main tenets
of Brechtian theatre and a reading of Rivera’s
National Palace mural completed between 1929 and
1935, highlighting most significantly: (1) the
deployment of an open narrative over and above a
closed one; (2) the desire to provoke the spectator
into action rather than passive contemplation; (3)
the construction of a human agency that is
malleable rather than fixed; (4) the use of montage
over linear narrative; (5) and the appeal to reason
as opposed to emotion.49 For Craven, Rivera used
the techniques of modernist montage in his mural to
produce a collage of various moments in Mexican
history that, in its lack of linear development,
standard plot or easy resolution, placed the viewer
ascending the staircase in the middle and actively
at the centre of interpretation.50
While Schapiro may well have had Brecht in mind in
terms of his designation of Rivera’s art as a form of
‘epic modernism’, I feel that there is in fact a more
suggestive correspondence to be made between this
description of the murals and Lukács’s conception
of Tolstoy’s work as a form of ‘epic realism’. Lukács
followed Lenin in describing Tolstoy as the ‘poetic
mirror of the peasant revolution’ that lasted from
1861 to 1905.51 For Lukács, the reason that his
novels deserve the designation of ‘epic realism’, and
represent the culminating moment in realist

134
literature in the period following 1848–51, is
because Tolstoy ‘lived in a country in which the
bourgeois revolution was still the order
of the day’, so that the ‘social conditions which
favoured realism and which determined the
development of European literature from Swift to
Stendhal were still in existence’.52 From his
Hegelian and pre-Marxist The Theory of the Novel
onwards, epic narration – the first stage in Greek
literature – was possible for Lukács only when there
was an organic unity in everyday life, when it felt
meaningful and immediately comprehensible in all
its minutiae.53 Once this had been sundered, it fell
upon the novel, and in particular narrativity, to
produce this lost wholeness once again, a sense of
the totality that – following Hegel – had become
even more obfuscated by the processes of
industrialization. For Fredric Jameson, it is Lukács’s
seminal History and Class Consciousness that
marks the shift from a metaphysical to a historical
analysis of the social totality, one that is already
latent in the passages on Tolstoy in the earlier
work, and one that would become central to his
later fully Marxist readings of the bourgeois
novel.54 For Lukács then, ‘Tolstoy’s great and truly
epic mentality … aspires to a life based on a
community of feeling among simple human beings
closely bound to nature’ – that is, the peasantry
under what Lenin referred to as a form of ‘Asiatic’
capitalism within pre-revolutionary Russia.55
In his ‘The Patrons of Revolutionary Art’ essay, after
describing Rivera’s murals as ‘pervaded by a
sincere hatred of oppression and by sympathy with
the masses’, Schapiro made a strikingly similar
claim for them being examples of ‘epic modernism’:

135
If Mexican art after 1920 is really fertilised by the revolution – at
least more than the art in Russia or any other country in the world
– it is partly because the movement was a bourgeois revolution
enlisting the support of almost the entire cultured stratum of the
country in the struggle against the great landholders and foreign
imperialists. The backwardness of this colonial country with no film
industry and general illiteracy, the positive survival of native arts,
gave to monumental painting an importance it could hardly win in
more developed cultures.56

As mentioned, this monumental wall painting

combined the age-old medium of fresco with
cubistic compositional techniques that Rivera had
learned while in Paris in the teens. Hence, yet
again, Schapiro adopted the same historical,
political and economic coordinates of Lukács’s
analysis of bourgeois culture, but ultimately
inverted them to celebrate the ‘epic modernism’ of
Rivera over the ‘epic realism’ of a writer such as
Tolstoy. In this, instead of following Lenin, Schapiro
once again concurred with Trotsky, who in a letter
published in Partisan Review the following year
wrote: ‘In the field of painting, the October
Revolution has found its greatest interpreter not in
the USSR but in faraway Mexico’, with 1917 being
the catalyst for Rivera’s ‘power of creative
penetration into the epic of work, oppression and
insurrection’.57 It therefore came as no surprise
that Schapiro was one of the first to endorse the
‘Statement of The League for Cultural Freedom and
Socialism’ that was published in Partisan Review.
Following the ‘Manifesto’ produced by Trotsky,
Breton and Rivera, Dwight Macdonald argued that
‘if art and science are to be true to the revolution,
they must first be true to themselves’.58

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For Crow, this enthusiasm for modernism in the
visual arts culminated in Schapiro’s ‘anodyne
celebrations of abstract painting in the 1950s’, and
here he refers to his 1957 defence of Abstract
Expressionism, ‘The Liberating Quality of
Avant-Garde Art’.59 Yet this essay is related to the
debates of the 1930s and 1940s, if only under
distinctly different historical conditions. As the
editors of Aesthetics and Politics make clear, one of
the key axes of these exchanges was ‘the relations
between “avant-garde” and “commercial” art under
the dominion of capital’, ‘the one subjectively
progressive and objectively elitist, the other
objectively popular and subjectively regressive’.60
Schapiro had made such a distinction himself in his
Courbet essay. And even earlier, in a little-known
essay entitled ‘Public Use of Art’ published in 1936
in Art Front – the paper of the Artists’ Union –
Schapiro had questioned the very efficacy of high
art, monopolized by the bourgeoisie, in a culture
pervaded by the mass media. Like Benjamin in ‘The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’,
Schapiro called for a fusion between the means of
technical reproduction developed by the mass
media and the relatively archaic realm of high art:
‘To make art available to everyone the material
means for diffusing the degraded contemporary art,
the printing presses and the admirable techniques
of reproduction, must become the vehicles for the
best art.’61 Yet for Schapiro, unlike Benjamin
perhaps, the techniques of mechanical reproduction
were not, in and of themselves, enough to
revolutionize life. Real cultural democratization was
possible only on the condition that ‘art embody a
content and achieve qualities acceptable to the
masses of the people’, and that ‘the people control

137
the means of production and attain a standard of
living and a level of culture such that the enjoyment
of art of a high quality becomes an important part
of their life’ – that is, only under socialism when the
working class actually owned the ‘means of
production’ was a thoroughgoing and pervasive
cultural democracy ever really possible. 62
In the context of 1950s America, Schapiro’s utopian
belief in the emancipatory potential of technology
and the mass media had, understandably, withered.
The postwar boom in the United States was
predicated upon the wholesale generalization of
Fordism and the ideas of scientific management.
The trade-union militancy of the 1930s had been
tempered by Taft-Hartley and the purging of its
most militant members under McCarthyism.63
Automation had led to deskilling and the driving
down of wages, both at home and abroad, as the
ever-increasing militarization during the Cold War
period ensured that the United States had access to
foreign markets and their cheap raw materials. The
burgeoning entertainment industries – Hollywood,
TV, radio and the commercial press – were
mobilized to ensure acquiescence, political quietism
and a willing submission to such conditions.64 The
subject became a staple of mainstream American
sociology in the period with works such as C.
Wright Mills’s White Collar and The Power Elite
being perhaps the most celebrated examples.65 This
is the context for the Frankfurt School’s analysis of
administered capitalism with its pessimistic
prognosis for human emancipation – best captured
in Horkheimer and Adorno’s earlier, yet prescient,
Dialectic of Enlightenment, with its withering
critique of ‘positivism’, which, they argued, had
produced a situation in which ‘thought finds itself

138
deprived not only of the affirmative reference to
science and everyday phenomena but also of the
conceptual language of opposition’.66 This is also
the context for Schapiro’s defence of postwar
American abstraction.
For Schapiro, the generalized division of labour
characteristic of postwar American industry had
ensured that there was ‘a separation between the
individual and the final result’, no longer any ‘bond
between maker and user’.67 As a consequence, few
people ‘were fortunate enough to make something
that represents themselves, that issues entirely
from their hands and mind, and to which they can
affix their names’.68 The process of alienation was
only reinforced by the mass media, which produced
‘a world of social relationships that is impersonal,
calculated and controlled in its elements, aiming
always at efficiency’.69 In opposition to the coercive
manipulation of the entertainment industry, ‘The
experience of a work of art, like the creation of the
work of art itself, is a process ultimately opposed to
communication as it is understood now.’70 In such a
depersonalized and technocratic society, abstract
painting had a critical edge in that it symbolized ‘an
individual who realises freedom and deep
engagement of the self within his work’.71 Yet
Schapiro emphasized the importance of gesture
over abstraction per se, ‘the mark, the stroke, the
brush, the drip, the quality of the substance in paint
itself … all signs of the artist’s active presence’ –
painterly techniques that had become synonymous
with Abstract Expressionism.72 Thus these works,
‘the last hand-made, personal objects within our
culture’, represented, for Schapiro at least, an
‘affirmation of the self or certain parts of the self,
against devalued social norms’.73 Under the

139
dehumanizing conditions of postwar capitalism
then, gestural painting thereby assumed a
progressive quality as ‘a means of affirming the
individual in opposition to the contrary qualities of
the ordinary experience of working and doing’. 74
Rather than Schapiro’s essay being a crass paean to
Abstract Expressionism, Francis Frascina has
argued that it was ‘a product of a Marxist
intellectual writing to support a critical version of
the avant-garde in the face of the great traumas of
Stalinism, the Holocaust and McCarthyism’.75 These
were the same historical coordinates of Adorno’s
work in exile, which also sought to defend, what he
considered to be, an embattled subjectivity under
the administered conditions of postwar American
capitalism. Like Schapiro, Adorno found it in the
most esoteric forms of high art; and like Schapiro,
the autonomous art work was counterposed to the
reified world of mass culture in its potential to
resist appropriation. Indeed, Craven points to the
similarity of Schapiro’s assertion in his text on
Rivera – ‘The fact that a work of art has a politically
radical content therefore does not assure its
revolutionary value. Nor does a non-political
content necessarily imply its irrelevance to
revolutionary action’ – to Adorno’s
claim, just five years after Schapiro’s defence of
Abstract Expressionism, that ‘politics have migrated
into autonomous art, and never more so when they
seem to be politically dead’.76 But here the
similarities end. As with Benjamin, Schapiro
ultimately had a more discriminating view of
popular culture and a clearer sense that the
rarefied objects of high art – like the paintings that
he sought to defend in the 1950s – could, as
Jameson reminds us, be used ‘to embellish the

140
splendid new structures of the great insurance
companies and multinational banks’.77 Schapiro
himself pointed to the contradictory nature of the
autonomous art work under capitalism, its ‘value as
an investment, its capacity to survive in the market
and to symbolise the social quality of the owner’, at
the same time that he was arguing for its potential
liberatory qualities.78 Nowhere does Adorno seem
as concerned, to continue with Jameson, ‘That
Schoenberg’s Hollywood pupils used their advanced
techniques to write movie music.’ 79
Unlike Adorno, Schapiro was never really convinced
by Lukács’s conception of reification, or the
necessary negative moment in dialectical
materialism. While Schapiro was no positivist, as
Hemingway has made clear, he was far too
attracted to empiricism and the ‘scientific model’
derived from the natural sciences to renounce the
enlightenment project as resolutely as Adorno and
Horkheimer.80 It was this that underpinned
Schapiro’s continuing belief in Marxism as a source
of knowledge and the working class as the potential
agency of emancipation – something that is entirely
absent in the writings of Adorno. And ultimately it
was this scepticism towards the explanatory power
of the dialectic that prevented Schapiro from fully
embracing Trotskyism, despite his long-standing
admiration for the Russian revolutionary leader
from an early age. While the dialectic may have had
some explanatory value for Schapiro, he was
rightfully suspicious of the way in which it had
become appropriated, traduced and ossified into
dogma under Stalinism.81 Indeed, for Schapiro
modern science and modern art were analogous in
their potential for human liberation, so that by the
late 1950s the tension in his writing between his

141
desire to keep realism and modernism in some form
of equal and productive relationship was finally
decided in favour of the latter. Yet unlike Adorno,
Schapiro had a greater belief in the affirmative role
of art over and above its capacity for negation, and
the artists he most admired – whether they be
Courbet, Rivera or Brecht – always orientated their
work towards a wider and more inclusive audience.
It is for these reasons that Schapiro’s writing is
more closely related to the heritage of classical
Marxism.
1 For Schapiro’s influence on medieval sculpture, see Otto Karl
Werckmeister, ‘The Emmaus and Thomas Relief in the Cloister of
Silos’, El románico en Silos: IX centanario de la consagración de la
iglesia y del claustro (Abadía de Silos: Silos, 1990); on Courbet, Linda
Nochlin, Realism (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1971); on Impressionism,
Robert Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society (Yale
University Press: New Haven and London, 1988); and on Abstract
Expressionism, David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural
Critique: Dissent During the McCarthy Period (Cambridge University
Press: Cambridge, 1999).

2 Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (Verso: London,

1979).

3 Theodor W. Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics (Verso: London,

1980). Michael Denning characterizes Schapiro as one of America’s
‘equivalents of “western marxism”’. Michael Denning, ‘“The Special
American Conditions”: Marxism and American Studies’, American
Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 3 (1986), p. 359.

4 Meyer Schapiro, ‘Review of Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern

Movement’, Zeitshrift fur Sozialforschung, vol. 7, nos. 1–2 (1938), pp.
291–3.

5 Serge Guilbaut, ‘The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America:

Greenberg, Pollock, or from Trotskyism to the New Liberalism of the
“Vital Centre”, in Francis Frascina (ed.), Pollock and After: The Critical
Debate (Harper and Row: London, 1985), p. 154.

6 Thomas Crow, ‘Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts’, Modern
Art in the Common Culture (Yale University Press: New Haven and
London, 1996), p. 18.

142
7 T. J. Clark, ‘Jackson Pollock’s Abstraction’, in Serge Guilbaut (ed.),
Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal
1945–1964 (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990), p. 224 and
n. 89, p. 238. This rather disparaging dismissal of Schapiro’s 1937
essay seems surprising considering Clark’s acknowledgment
elsewhere that ‘the few lines it devoted to Impressionist painting still
seem to me the best thing on the subject, simply because they suggest
so tellingly that the form of the new art is inseparable from its content’.
T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and
His Followers (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1984), p. 5.

8 Andrew Hemingway, ‘Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s’,

Oxford Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 1 (1994), p. 20.

9 Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Social Bases of Art’, in Matthew Baigell and Julia
Williams (eds.), Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First
American Artists’ Congress (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick,
1986), p. 123.

10 Schapiro, ‘The Social Bases of Art’, p. 126.

11 Ibid., pp. 126–7.

12 Meyer Schapiro, ‘Nature of Abstract Art’, Modern Art: 19th and 20th
Centuries: Selected Papers II (George Braziller: New York, 1978), pp.
187–8.

13 Ibid., p. 190.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Meyer Schapiro, Lillian Milgram, and David Craven, ‘A Series of

Interviews’ (July 15, 1992–January 22, 1995)’, Res, no. 31 (Spring
1997), p. 164.

18 The essay was delivered at Bennington College, Vermont, in the winter

of 1950–1 and published as Meyer Schapiro, ‘Rebellion in Art’, in
Daniel Aaron (ed.), America in Crisis: Fourteen Crucial Episodes in
American History (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1952), pp. 202–42.

19 Ibid., p. 217.

20 Ibid., p. 241.

21 Ibid., p. 240.

143
22 Ibid.

23 Meyer Schapiro, ‘Courbet and Popular Imagery’, Schapiro, Modern Art,

op. cit., p. 83, fn. 126; originally published as Schapiro, ‘Courbet and
Popular Imagery: An Essay on Realism and Naïveté’, Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 7, no. 1 (Fall 1946), pp. 164–91.

24 Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in David

Fernbach (ed.), Surveys from Exile: Political Writings Volume 2
(Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 190.

25 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’,

Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism (New
Left Books: London, 1973), p. 106.

26 Ibid., p. 59.

27 For an early and concise elaboration of Lukács’s critical distinction

between the realist and naturalist novel published in 1936 in
International Literature –and one that Schapiro could therefore have
conceivably read – see Georg Lukács, ‘Narrate or Describe’, Writer and
Critic and Other Essays (Merlin Press: London, 1978), pp. 110–48.

28 Schapiro, ‘Courbet and Popular Imagery’, op. cit., p. 54.

29 Ibid., p. 67.

30 Ibid., p. 68.

31 Ibid., p. 58.

32 Ibid., p. 71.

33 See the lecture Schapiro gave at Columbia University in March 1948,

and again at Dartmouth College in May 1950, for a particularly strong
restatement of this Lukácsian framework: Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Value
of Modern Art’, Worldview in Painting and Sculpture: Selected Papers V
(George Braziller: New York, 1999), pp. 154–6.

34 Andrew Hemingway, ‘Meyer Schapiro: Marxism, Science and Art’, in

Andrew Hemingway (ed.), Marxism and Art History: From William
Morris to the New Left (Pluto Press: London, 2006), p. 140.

35 Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Sculptures of Souillac’, W. R. W. Koehler (ed.),

Medieval Studies in Memory of A. Kingsley Porter, Vol. 1 (Harvard
University Press: Boston, Massachusetts, 1939), pp. 359–87; and
Meyer Schapiro, ‘From Mozarabic to Romanesque in Silos’, Art
Bulletin, vol. 21 (1939), pp. 312–74.

144
36 Otto Karl Werckmeister, ‘Review of Meyer Schapiro, Romanesque Art’,
Art Quarterly, vol. 2 (1979), p. 213.

37 Hemingway, ‘Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s’, op. cit., p. 17.

38 Quoted in Fredric Jameson, ‘Reflections in Conclusion’, in Adorno et

al., Aesthetics and Politics, op. cit., p. 202.

39 Dwight McDonald, ‘Statement of The League for Cultural Freedom and

Socialism’, Partisan Review, vol. 6, no. 4 (Summer 1939), p. 127; and
André Breton and Diego Rivera, ‘Manifesto: Towards a Free
Revolutionary Art’, Partisan Review, vol. 6, no. 1 (Fall 1938), pp.
49–53. See Hemingway, ‘Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s’,
op. cit., for an overview of Schapiro’s political allegiances throughout
this period; and Otto Karl Werckmeister, ‘Jugglers in a Monastery’,
Oxford Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 1 (1994), pp. 60–4, for the similarity
between Schapiro’s position and that of the authors of the manifesto.

40 Meyer Schapiro, ‘Social Realism and Revolutionary Art’, Schapiro,

Worldview in Painting and Sculpture, op. cit., p. 225.

41 Ibid., p. 223.

42 Ibid., p. 224.

43 Ibid., p. 226.

44 Quoted in Walter Benjamin, ‘Conversations with Brecht’, in Adorno et

al., Aesthetics and Politics, op. cit., p. 97.

45 Bertolt Brecht, ‘On the Formalistic Character of the Theory of Realism’,

in Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics, op. cit., p. 76.

46 For an analysis of how Brecht, like Schapiro, inverted Lukács’s

prescriptions for realism, see Steve Giles, ‘Realism after Modernism:
Representation and Modernity in Brecht, Lukács and Adorno’, Jerome
Carroll, Steve Giles and Maike Oergel (eds.), Aesthetics and Modernity
from Schiller to the Frankfurt School (Peter Lang: Bern, 2012), p. 182.

47 Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Patrons of Revolutionary Art’, Marxist Quarterly,

vol. 1, no. 3 (October–December 1937), p. 463.

48 David Craven, Diego Rivera: As Epic Modernist (G. K. Hall & Co.: New
York, 1997), p. 102. For one of Brecht’s best elaborations of what
actually constituted ‘epic theatre’, see Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Modern
Theatre is Epic Theatre’, in John Willett (ed.), Brecht on Theatre (Hill &
Wang: New York, 1964), p. 37.

145
49 Craven, Diego Rivera, op. cit., p. 123. It should be noted here that in
‘The Patrons of Revolutionary Art’, Schapiro does not make reference
to Rivera’s National Palace murals, but instead those that at the
Ministry of Education, Mexico City, and at the University of Chapingo,
Texcoco, Mexico State.

50 Craven, Diego Rivera, op. cit., p. 112. For perhaps the most
sophisticated reading of this mural scheme, see Leonard Folgarait,
Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940: Art of the
New Order (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1998), pp.
86–137.

51 Georg Lukács, ‘Tolstoy and the Development of Realism’, Studies in

European Realism (Merlin Press: London, 1972), p. 147; Vladimir Ilyich
Lenin, ‘Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution’, On
Literature and Art (Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1970), pp. 28–33;
originally published in Proletary, no. 35 (11 September 1908).

52 Lukács, ‘Tolstoy and the Development of Realism’, op. cit., pp. 135,
147.

53 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical

Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (MIT
Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971).

54 Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical

Theories of Literature (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1971), pp.
181–2; Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in
Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Merlin Press: London,
1971); and for a good example of Lukács’s later Marxist analysis of the
novel, see Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (1937) (Merlin Press:
London, 1962).

55 Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, op. cit., p. 145 and Lukács, ‘Tolstoy
and the Development of Realism’, op. cit., p. 162.

56 Schapiro, ‘The Patrons of Revolutionary Art’, op. cit., p. 464.

57 Leon Trotsky, ‘Art and Politics in Our Epoch’, Paul N. Siegel (ed.), Leon
Trotsky on Literature and Art (Pathfinder Press: New York, 1970), p.
110.

58 McDonald, ‘Statement of The League for Cultural Freedom and

Socialism’, op. cit., p. 127.

59 Crow, ‘Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts’, in Frascina

(ed.), Pollock and After, op. cit., p. 246. It should be pointed out here
that Crow later omitted this rather crass assessment of Schapiro’s 1957

146
 essay in a revised version of the text that appeared in the anthology of
his collected essays. See Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture,
op. cit., p. 18.

60 Perry Anderson et al., ‘Presentation II’, in Adorno et al., Aesthetics and

Politics, op. cit., p. 66.

61 Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Public Uses of Art’, Art Front, vol. 2, no. 10
(November 1936), p. 4. See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Production’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations:
Essays and Reflections (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: New York, 1968),
pp. 217–52.

62 Schapiro, ‘The Public Uses of Art’, op. cit., p. 5.

63 The Labor Management Relations Act, commonly known as

Taft-Hartley, was a direct response to the postwar labour upsurge of
1946. Among other things, the legislation prohibited jurisdictional,
wildcat, solidarity or political strikes; secondary boycotts; secondary
and mass picketing; closed shops; and monetary donations by unions
to federal political campaigns. It also required union officers to sign
non-communist affidavits and empowered the federal government to
obtain strikebreaking injunctions if it was deemed that an impending or
current strike imperilled national health or safety.

64 David Craven provides a useful overview of these developments in his

expansion of Schapiro’s 1957 essay, predicated upon the economic
analysis of the ‘third technological revolution’ as theorized by Ernest
Mandel. See both David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural
Critique, op. cit., pp. 141–5; and Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (New
Left Books: London, 1975), pp. 184–222.

65 C. Wright Mills, White Collar (Oxford University Press: New York,

1951); C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford University Press: New
York, 1956).

66 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment:

Philosophical Fragments (1944) (Stanford University Press: Stanford,
2002), p. xv.

67 Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art’, Art News,

vol. 56, no. 4 (Summer 1957), pp. 36–42; and republished as Meyer
Schapiro, ‘Recent Abstract Painting’, Modern Art, op. cit., pp. 213–26.

68 Ibid., p. 217.

69 Ibid., p. 223.

147
70 Ibid.

71 Ibid., p. 218.

72 Ibid.

73 Ibid., pp. 216–17.

74 Ibid., p. 218.

75 Francis Frascina, ‘My Lai, Guernica, MOMA and the Art Left, 1969–70:
Part 2’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 30, no. 4 (October 1995),
p. 717.

76 Craven, Abstract Expressionism an Cultural Critique, op. cit., p. 1;

Schapiro, ‘The Patrons of Revolutionary Art’, op. cit., p. 465; Theodor
Adorno, ‘Commitment’, Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds.), The
Essential Frankfurt School Reader (Blackwell: Oxford 1978), p. 318.

77 Fredric Jameson, ‘Reflections in Conclusion’, op. cit., p. 209.

78 Schapiro, ‘Recent Abstract Painting’, op. cit., p. 224.

79 Jameson, ‘Reflections in Conclusion’, op. cit., p. 209.

80 Hemingway, ‘Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s’, op. cit., p. 24.

81 On Schapiro’s relationship to Trotsky and dialectical materialism, see

Hemingway, ‘Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s’, op. cit., pp.
22–5; and Hemingway, ‘Meyer Schapiro: Marxism, Science and Art’,
op. cit., p. 138.

148
APPROACHING MARX’S AESTHETICS
OR, WHAT IS SENSUOUS PRACTICE?
Stewart Martin

T he elaboration of Marx’s aesthetics faces a

fundamental problem: Marx never wrote on
aesthetics. Of course, he was a cultured intellectual
with a profound artistic sensibility, and his writings
are littered with remarks on art, not to mention the
literary mode of his texts themselves. However, as
for an aesthetic theory, there is very little to go on.
One may make the most of what there is and
elaborate the consequences of his fragmentary
remarks, but this is a formidable and precarious
task. There remains another approach, a more
fundamental solution: that Marx did in fact write an
aesthetics, disclosed in his early writings on
sensibility. All that is required, therefore, is to
recognize this hidden treasure and bring it to light.
This fundamental problem and solution has framed
much of the tradition of Marxist aesthetics, at least
since these early writings were first published in
the 1920s and 30s.1
And yet, a further problem appears within this
frame, no less fundamental: Marx’s early
understanding of sensibility is written in the shadow
of Ludwig Feuerbach. Therefore, the essential
sources of his aesthetics, above all his ‘Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts’, are indebted to a

149
philosophy from which he unequivocally breaks in
the flashes of insight constituting his so-called
‘Theses on Feuerbach’. Yet again, we face a
formidable and precarious task of sifting through
what remains after this explosion in Marx’s thought.
Much of what he wrote about sensibility is ruined
and must be abandoned in pursuit of his radicalized
conception of practice. But a few fragments remain,
a few clues, above all Marx’s commitment to a
practice that is sensuous, a sensuous practice, that
emerges as a new principle of his thought. But what
is this exactly? What are its consequences? And
what is the new conception of sensibility and
perhaps aesthetics that it inaugurates? These are
the questions this essay addresses. They may
appear to be familiar. Certainly, no one has been
able to read Marx’s ‘Manuscripts’ without the
horizon of his critique of Feuerbach. This remains
nonetheless a matter of intense controversy. In any
case, what is original to these questions can be
made evident only by grasping the profound
problems from which they emerge.
Let us start with the issue of Marx’s debt to
Feuerbach. Self-evidently, we will have no chance of
understanding the nature of Marx’s break with
Feuerbach – both its character and its depth –
without understanding his investment in, even
identification
with, his forerunner. Marx outlines his unreserved
commitment to Feuerbach’s philosophy in greatest
detail in his ‘Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts’ (hereafter ‘Manuscripts’) as follows:

Feuerbach’s great achievement is:

150
(1) To have shown that philosophy is nothing more than religion
brought into thought and developed in thought, and that it is
equally to be condemned as another form and mode of existence
of the estrangement of man’s nature.

(2) To have founded true materialism and real science by making

the social relation of ‘man to man’ the basic principle of his theory.

(3) To have opposed to the negation of the negation, which claims

to be the absolute positive, the positive which is based upon itself
and positively grounded in itself.

Feuerbach explains the Hegelian dialectic, and in so doing justifies

taking the positive, that is sensuously ascertained, as his starting
point.2

Here we can read Marx’s emphatic commitment to

Feuerbach’s conception of sensibility. It appears as
only one of three interrelated debts, but, as will
become evident, it is a pivot around which revolves
Marx’s whole project to follow Feuerbach into an
alternative philosophical world to that occupied by
Hegel and left Hegelianism. However, within a year,
in the spring of 1845, we can see in his ‘Theses on
Feuerbach’ (hereafter ‘Theses’) a withdrawal from
or, rather, transformation of each of these
commitments in the attempt to radicalize his
conception of the reality of practice. Understanding
these transformations therefore provides an
invaluable key to understanding Marx’s originality
and its consequences for all that came before and
after this revolution in his thought.
Starting with the first point, concerning religion, it
is theses 4, 6 and 7 that stand out. In thesis 4, Marx
writes:

151
Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-estrangement,
of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular
one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its
secular basis. But that the secular basis lifts off from itself and
establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only
be explained by the inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness of
this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, itself be both
understood in its contradiction and revolutionised in practice. Thus,
for instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret
of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in
theory and practice.3

This thesis does not appear to depart from Marx’s

debt to Feuerbach, since it concerns the ‘secular
world’ rather than philosophy. And even if we read
the ‘fact of religious self-estrangement’ as referring
to Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel’s philosophy –
namely, that
it restores religious estrangement – then Marx
appears to reaffirm this fact. Nonetheless, a new
and more fundamental starting point is announced:
the fact of secular self-estrangement, or the
estrangement within the secular basis itself. This
transformation is derived from a consequence of
Feuerbach’s argument. If religion is an
estrangement that is produced by its secular basis,
then why does the secular basis produce this
estrangement in the first place? This is not
explained by the critique of religion as
estrangement; that only presupposes estrangement.
It must be explained by the critique of the secular
basis, its contradictions and how they produce
estranged forms such as religion. In fact, without
such a critique there has been no substantive
critique of religion. Marx hereby subjects

152
Feuerbach to the same criticism that he makes of
left Hegelianism in general.
This criticism is extended in thesis 7, where we can
also see Marx withdrawing from his second debt to
Feuerbach concerning the social: ‘Feuerbach,
consequently, does not see that the “religious
sentiment” is itself a social product, and that the
abstract individual which he analyses belongs to a
particular form of society.’ However, it is thesis 6
that exposes the conceptual basis of Marx’s
objections by introducing his decisive criticism of
Feuerbach’s conception of Gattungswesen or
genus-being:

Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of

man. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each
single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social
relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this
real essence, is hence obliged:

(1) To abstract from the historical process and to define the

religious sentiment [Gemüt] by itself, and to presuppose an
abstract – isolated – human individual.

(2) Essence, therefore, can be regarded only as ‘genus’ [Gattung],

as inner, mute, which unites the many individuals in a natural
way.4

Clearly, these three theses unequivocally contradict

Marx’s prior debt. Suddenly, Feuerbach is
transformed from the philosopher of the social into
a philosopher of the abstract individual. This claim
is in many ways more contentious than the first.
There is an obvious sense in which Feuerbach did
not pursue the kind of criticism of the secular world

153
that Marx pursues in his critique of political
economy – which, it should be noted, Marx had
been pursuing before the ‘Theses’ under the
auspices of a contribution to and extension of
Feuerbach’s insights. With respect to the social,
however, we face a direct conflict testified to by a
struggle over the same terms. Feuerbach had
declared in his Principles of the Philosophy of the
Future that: ‘The highest and last principle of
philosophy is … the unity of man with man.’5 And
Marx was evidently thinking of just such a claim
when he was outlining his debt to Feuerbach in the
‘Manuscripts’. So how are we to understand Marx’s
volte-face in the ‘Theses’?
The pivot may be located in the idea of
Gattungswesen. This is an idea that Marx had
deployed throughout his attempt to elaborate a
historical and social conception of man in the
‘Mnuscripts’. So its rejection in thesis 6 is no less
dramatic than the criticism of Feuerbach’s
conception of the social. But the fact that Marx is
seemingly prepared to abandon the term
Gattungswesen indicates that it is the source of
what he objects to. And, indeed, this is confirmed
when we examine Feuerbach’s own words. The
introduction to The Essence of Christianity, reads as
follows:

Consciousness in the strictest sense is present only in a being to

whom his genus [Gattung], his essentiality [Wesenheit], is an
object. The brute is indeed conscious of himself as an individual –
and he has accordingly the feeling of self – but not as genus-object
[Gattung Gegenstand]: hence, he is without that consciousness
which derives its name from science. Where there is this
consciousness, there is a capability of science. Science is the
consciousness of genera [Bewußtsein der Gattungen]. In life we

154
have to do with individuals, in science with genera. But only a
being to whom his own genus, his own essentiality, is an object,
can make the essential nature of other things or beings an object
of thought.6

What is evident here is that Feuerbach does not say

that the essence of man is revealed socially or
historically. Rather, man’s essence is revealed by a
distinctive capacity of consciousness to apprehend
itself not as an individual but as a genus, that is, as
a generic or universal being. To the extent that this
being is universal, it discloses the universality
within which all beings exist. In other words, the
apprehension of nature by consciousness is the
apprehension of the condition of all natural beings.
And this is possible because consciousness is not an
individual or specific apprehension, but a universal
or abstract apprehension. Hence, Marx’s objections
are confirmed. Gattungswesen is disclosed to
consciousness as such, as the capacity of
universalization or abstraction by man in general,
regardless of his social and historical relations. The
unity of man and man is therefore ‘natural’ or a
function of coexistence within a natural universe.
Feuerbach does not say that this is the capacity of
an isolated individual, but since consciousness is
not determined socially it is effectively isolated.
As has already been mentioned, Marx’s
‘Manuscripts’ contain extensive passages that do
little else than paraphrase or improvise around the
idea of Gattungswesen. Given the problems the
‘Theses’ expose, the question arises of what can be
salvaged, if anything, from these passages? In the
critical light cast back by the ‘Theses’, it is evident
that the ‘Manuscripts’ discern a contradiction
between abstract consciousness and

155
Gattungswesen. Thus, Marx objects that ‘universal
consciousness is an abstraction from real life and as
such in hostile opposition to it’.7 And yet, he
opposes this abstract consciousness to
Gattungswesen. This tension is evident in his
proposition of a speculative identity of
‘genus-consciousness’ and ‘genus-being’: ‘As
genus-consciousness man confirms his real social
life and merely repeats in thought his actual
existence;
conversely, genus-being confirms itself in
genus-consciousness and exists for itself in its
universality, as a thinking being.’8 The problem
here may be attributed to Feuerbach himself, for
there is a change in his writings, from The Essence
of Christianity to his later more polemical works,
such as the Principles, which are orientated to an
intensified critique of abstract consciousness and
Hegel through recourse to sensibility. It seems
likely that Marx’s ‘Manuscripts’ were influenced by
this later phase of Feuerbach’s writing. However,
what Marx’s ‘Theses’ expose is not a distinction
between early and late Feuerbach, but rather a
radical critique of his thought as a whole. This
means that, however influenced Marx was by
Feuerbach’s critique of abstract consciousness, he
decides in the ‘Theses’ that Feuerbach’s alternative
of sensuous consciousness offers no real alterative:
that it is still abstract, still presupposes the
abstraction of all beings in the disclosure of being in
general, since it is only in the space of this
abstraction that the objective, or sensuous, or
anything that is opposed to consciousness, can
appear.
The critique of Gattungswesen therefore provides
an invaluable introduction to the issues surrounding

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the third of Marx’s debts to Feuerbach: namely, his
commitment to the ‘sensuously ascertained’. It also
introduces us to the decisive issues surrounding
Marx’s radicalized conception of practice, which is
presented as a new mode of sensibility opposed to
Feuerbach. This is stated most concisely in thesis 5:
‘Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking,
wants intuition [Anschauung]; but he does not
conceive of sensuousness as practical
human-sensuous activity.’9 Marx does not therefore
abandon sensuousness altogether, but rather its
intuitive or conscious mode. What is at stake here is
intimated further by the complex propositions of the
first thesis:

The chief defect of all previous materialism (that of Feuerbach

included) is that the thing [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness are
conceived only in the form of the object [Objekt], or of intuition
[Anschauung], but not as human sensuous activity, praxis, not
subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active
side was set forth but abstractly by idealism – which, of course,
does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants
sensuous objects, really distinct from conceptual objects, but he
does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. In The
Essence of Christianity, he therefore regards the theoretical
attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is
conceived and defined only in its dirty-Jewish form of appearance.
Hence he does not grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary’, of
‘practical-critical’, activity.10

Clearly, the ‘Manuscripts’ had also sought a theory

of the reality of practice. What has changed,
therefore, is not so much the end as the means.
Suddenly, Marx sees Feuerbach’s sensuous
materialism as just another obstacle to grasping the
reality of practice, even worse than idealism.

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In order to demonstrate Marx’s realization here it is
worth looking at his reference to Feuerbach’s The
Essence of Christianity, which is ostensibly to the
chapter on ‘The Significance of the Creation in
Judaism’. Here we find thi s striking passage:

The standpoint of theory is the standpoint of harmony with the

world. The subjective activity in which man contents himself and
allows himself free play is the sensuous imagination [sinnliche
Einbildungskraft] alone. Satisfied with this, he lets Nature subsist in
peace, and constructs his castles in the air, his poetical
cosmogonies, only out of natural materials. When, on the contrary,
man places himself only on the practical standpoint and looks at
the world from thence, making the practical standpoint the
theoretical one also, he is in disunion with Nature; he makes
Nature the abject vassal of his selfish interest, of his practical
egoism. The theoretic expression of this egotistical, practical view,
according to which Nature is in itself nothing, is this: Nature or the
world is made, created, the product of a command….
Utilitarianism, use, is the essential principle of Judaism.11

The consistency of this passage with Feuerbach’s

own on Gattungswesen quoted above is evident.
Practice limits nature, does not allow it to stand
objectively in its independent universality, and
instead reduces it to individual interest, something
created in order to be useful. It is rather the
theoretical standpoint that grasps the object of
nature as a whole, and it does so by abstaining from
practice. Sensuous imagination, the essential
faculty of artistic production since Kant, which is
free from interest, is therefore proto-theoretical for
Feuerbach: ‘for the theoretic view was originally
the aesthetic view, the prima philosophia’.12
The full extent of Marx’s need to turn away from
Feuerbach is now exposed. Far from offering a

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route to a theory of practice, beyond Hegel,
Feuerbach is a cul-de-sac from which Marx must
turn back and start again. Feuerbach’s whole
orientation towards nature, towards the sensuous
object, is revealed to be opposed to practice, to be
theoretical, since the sensuous objectivity of nature
only appears within the abstract space opened up
by theoretical consciousness, which is characterized
by its withdrawal from any individuality or specific
practical interest. Feuerbach’s sensualism is
therefore misunderstood if it is simply opposed to
theory or consciousness – even if this is a confusion
that Feuerbach himself often generated. The
sensible, the individual or even the practical
interests are not excluded from theory in so far as
they are included in the generic space of nature
that a universal consciousness discloses. But this
inclusion presupposes an abstraction that is the act
of consciousness, not activity itself. To conceive of
sensuousness, individuality or practice
independently of this abstraction of consciousness
requires an altogether different approach.
Having realized this, Marx begins afresh. But his
new starting point is a stumbling block. He
recognizes that intuition and objectivity (‘the form
of the object’) are theoretical, not practical, and
that he must turn against Feuerbach’s sensualism.
And yet, he goes on to describe practice as both
objective and, repeatedly, sensuous. How are we to
negotiate these apparently contradictory claims? Is
this pivotal moment in Marx’s self-understanding
also one of theoretical confusion, perhaps even of
collapse?
In broad strategic terms, Marx’s alternative is
obvious. He realizes that Feuerbach does not offer

159
him a theory of practice or, rather, of the reality of
practice. He then
realizes that idealism offers him a theory of the
reality of practice in the mode of the constitutive
subject, whose activity constitutes itself and its
world. But he maintains his critique of idealism –
that it is abstract theory, or abstract mental labour.
Evidently, sensuousness and objectivity are his
terminological markers for an activity that is not
idealist, not abstract. This much is clear. But still,
how are we to grapple with the contradictions these
markers generate? How can objectivity be a mode
of intuition or non-practical materialism, and yet
remain the measure of real practice, as opposed to
idealism? And what of the fact that sensuousness is
typically a mode of passivity, not activity? It is as
such that Feuerbach opposes it to the activity of
idealism, and Hegel would agree to disagree. Is not
the idea of a sensuous activity simply a
contradiction in terms?
We can make more substantive sense of Marx’s goal
by considering how he argues for the reality of
practice elsewhere. Let us take the example he
offers in his elaboration of his critique of Feuerbach
in The German Ideology: a cherry tree. The reality
of a cherry tree may appear to reside in its
objectivity, which we grasp as something beyond
ourselves, independent of ourselves, and which we
therefore grasp most appropriately through
sensibility, that is, through our passive reception of
it as a reality existing independently of us. This
certainly differs from Hegel, for whom the reality of
the tree resides in our knowledge of it, since the
cherry tree exists only to the extent that the
concept ‘cherry tree’ adequately determines the
sensations appearing to consciousness. In these

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terms, the tree’s reality is generated through an
activity or practice of consciousness that knows or
conceptualizes what it senses. However, for Marx,
the reality of the tree resides in the fact that it is a
product of human activity. That is, in the sense that
it is transplanted and maintained by human labour,
by human industry. If it were not for this activity,
there would be no cherry tree for Feuerbach to
sense.13 Nor would there be a tree for Hegel to
know, and producing knowledge of the cherry tree
does not amount to producing the cherry tree.
Reality is therefore practical, produced and
reproduced by human labour on nature. This means
that reality is historical to the degree that history is
the course of this activity of production, the
evolution of different ways or modes in which these
activities transform nature from something external
to human activity to something increasingly internal
to it. Marx even concedes that Feuerbach’s
approach may be appropriate to pre-historical
nature, where nature is independent from human
action, but that such nature is increasingly marginal
to the modern world in which Feuerbach lives.14
Hence we can see how the practical transformation
of sensibility underpins Marx’s other criticisms of
Feuerbach. To approach reality as practice is to
approach it as produced through history and the
social relations that individuals enter into in order
to produce and reproduce their lives throughout
history. To approach reality
as merely sensuous is to treat it as an externality
appearing to man. Man is therefore abstracted from
any historical or social determination, and the
sensuousness or objectivity of the object effectively
presupposes an abstract man, a consciousness that

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takes a theoretical standpoint, not a practical
standpoint.
Feuerbach suddenly ceases to present an
alternative to Hegel. He even regresses behind him,
for Hegel had grasped the constitution of objectivity
by consciousness as an activity, which indeed
reduces the world to something created by man.
Feuerbach suppresses this by treating objectivity as
a natural or independent reality that consciousness
only exposes to view or contemplates.
But with this realization of what Feuerbach and
Hegel share, the task facing Marx is clarified: the
critique of abstraction as a critique of
consciousness as such. Whereas previously Marx
had pursued this through Feuerbach’s critique of
idealism, he now realizes that Feuerbach and
idealism are both forms of abstraction inasmuch as
they are both philosophies of consciousness.
Feuerbach’s investment in sensuousness is not
enough, in itself, to overcome the abstraction of
reality by consciousness. Sensuous particularity,
however insistent, remains a phenomenon within
the abstraction that consciousness generates by
separating itself from sensuousness. Ironically,
Feuerbach’s very act of apprehending the object as
real, in opposition to the human consciousness that
apprehends it, reduces the object to a
determination of the abstract realm of objectivity
constituted by consciousness, namely, as what is
opposed to consciousness. Feuerbach wants to
avoid just this problem by counterposing abstract
consciousness to sensuous consciousness, but the
abstraction is generated by the very infinitude of
otherness that consciousness establishes as its field
of objectivity, and since sensuousness appears

162
within this field it is constituted by this act of
abstraction.
Henceforth, the task of grasping the reality of
practice is premised on the critique not only of
abstract consciousness, but of sensuous
consciousness too – that is, a fundamental critique
of consciousness as such. The ‘Theses’ only appear
to shuttle endlessly between Feuerbach and Hegel
in so far as this new opposition of practice to
consciousness is not grasped. This radicalized
critique of consciousness characterizes Marx’s
progress into The German Ideology, generating its
axiomatic propositions:

Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious being,

and the being of men is their actual life-process.15

It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines

consciousness.16

The first historical act is … the production of the means to satisfy

… needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an
historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today,
as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled
merely in order to sustain human life.17

However, if the problem with Feuerbach’s

philosophy of sensuous consciousness is now
exposed, and thereby the negative conditions of
Marx’s alternative conception of sensuous practice,
we have yet to directly consider the other side to all
this, namely, Hegel. Indeed, without understanding
Marx’s relation to Hegel we cannot fully grasp
either his relation to Feuerbach or the originality of
his conception of practice. To this end, it is

163
instructive to extend our critical review of the
‘Manuscripts’ and consider Marx’s critique of
Hegel’s concept of labour there, since this offers
one of the most illuminating elaborations of the
ambivalence Marx displays in the first thesis
towards the idealist conception of activity. The
following passage from the ‘Manuscripts’ is
seminal:

The importance of Hegel’s Phenomenology and its final result –

the dialectic of negativity as the moving and producing principle –
lies in the fact that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a
process, objectification as de-objectification [die
Vergegenständlichung als Entgegenständlichung], as alienation
and as supersession of this alienation; that he therefore grasps the
nature of labour and conceives objective man – true, because real
man – as the result of his own labour.18

This investment in Hegel’s ‘importance’ – that

Hegel grasps the nature of labour, and the nature of
man as ‘the result of his own labour’ – presents an
immediate problem when compared to Marx’s
outline of his debt to Feuerbach. Marx’s third point
claimed that Feuerbach’s importance was ‘[t]o have
opposed to the negation of the negation, which
claims to be the absolute positive, the positive
which is based upon itself and positively grounded
in itself ’19 – which is to say, the ‘sensuously
ascertained’.20 Furthermore, Marx goes on to
endorse the fact that Feuerbach ‘conceives the
negation of the negation only as a contradiction of
philosophy with itself, as philosophy which affirms
theology’.21 However, here above, in Marx’s outline
of Hegel’s importance, he commends the negation
of the negation. It is no longer philosophy’s
self-contradiction, but rather the essence of labour
and hence of man.

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This tension raises a question over the necessity of
alienation as a moment of, or passage to, realization
or dealienation. How is this possible in terms of the
absolutely positive? Surely, the absolutely positive
admits of no process, no alienation? This is a
philosophically decisive issue, but it is apparently
dissolved easily enough by Marx’s procedure. This
is revealed in Marx’s claim that Feuerbach ‘justifies
taking the positive, that is sensuously ascertained,
as his starting point’.22 In other words, the
contention is not to oppose positivity to process, but
to oppose the positive or sensuous to the abstract as
the starting point of the process. Marx is saying, in
opposition to Feuerbach, that Hegel: (1) starts with
the abstract or religion, (2) negates this through
positing the sensuous and the objective as
alienation, and then (3) negates this negation by
restoring abstraction or philosophy/religion. Now if
we reconstruct
this process taking the positive-sensuous as the
starting point, then we have: (1) the sensuous, in
which man exists in an unrealized or limited form,
(2) the negation of the sensuous, as a moment of
objectification and alienation of man, and then (3)
the negation of this negation, as the dealienation or
realization of man.
Two things should be noted about this alternative
dialectic. First, objectification is a negation or
externalization of sensuousness for Marx, whereas
for Hegel it is a negation or externalization of
consciousness. Second, because sensuousness is the
starting point and objectification is, following
dialectical logic, not merely the externalization or
alienation of sensuousness, but also the expression
of sensuousness, this means that the supersession
of alienation is a return to sensuousness, not

165
consciousness. In other words, it is because the
subject or starting point of labour is not
consciousness but sensuousness that the
overcoming of its alienation is not the overcoming
of its sensuousness in self-consciousness, but the
expansion or realization of sensuousness. To the
extent that objectivity is understood as a form of
sensuousness, it is differentiated from alienation as
such, and is absent from neither the starting point
nor the finishing point. This explains Marx’s famous
critique of Hegel’s conception of alienation:

The main point is that the object of consciousness is nothing else

but self-consciousness, or that the object is only objectified
self-consciousness, self-consciousness as object. (The positing of
man = self-consciousness.)

It is therefore a question of surmounting the object of

consciousness. Objectivity as such is seen as an estranged human
relationship which does not correspond to human nature, to
self-consciousness. The reappropriation of the objective essence
of man, produced in the form of estrangement as something alien,
therefore means transcending not only estrangement but also
objectivity. That is to say, man is regarded as a non-objective,
spiritual being.23

At this point, defenders of Hegel typically point out

that Marx is wrong to claim that self-consciousness
is non-objective or spiritual. And they are certainly
right inasmuch as Hegel distinguishes his ‘absolute
idealism’ from ‘subjective idealism’ by precisely this
point that absolute self-consciousness is determined
by objectivity. However, it is evident that Marx
knows this, and acknowledges it above in his claim
that the object, for Hegel, is ‘objectified
self-consciousness’. A defender of Hegel might

166
persist by claiming that Marx is wrong to claim
that: ‘The only labour Hegel knows and recognizes
is abstract mental labour.’24 Hegel certainly does
know labour that produces the objective world, not
just its knowledge. Indeed, this is explicit in Hegel’s
account of the movement of objective spirit. It is
also evident in his Philosophy of Right, where he
conceives of private property as a product of free
will and its labour, which, dialectically, is both the
alienation and the realization of free will. But again,
Marx knows this. The absence of Marx’s
commentary on Hegel’s passages on labour in his
Elements of the Philosophy of Right is more than
unfortunate. (Marx’s ‘Critique of the Doctrine of the
State’ starts from paragraph 261, after these
passages, which are located in Hegel’s discussion of
‘The System of Needs’, paragraphs 189–208, and
particularly paragraphs 196–8.) But these passages
reveal what Marx addresses explicitly in the
‘Manuscripts’, namely, that:

Hegel adopts the standpoint of modern political economy. He sees

labour as the essence, the self-confirming essence, of man; he
sees only the positive and not the negative side of labour. Labour
is man’s coming to be for himself within alienation or as an
alienated man.25

Marx’s critique of Hegel in terms of political

economy is certainly instructive. Marx’s basic
objection to political economy revolves around its
uncritical relation to wage labour, which is for him
the fundamental form that labour takes under the
conditions of private property. Wage labour enables
the buyer of labour to put it to work in exchange for
a wage that substitutes the value of what labour
produces by a lower value. The wage therefore
transforms the labour process from a process in

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which labour realizes itself, into a process in which
labour is derealized or alienated from what it
produces. It thereby institutes, and accumulates,
the alienation of labour from both its products and
the means to produce and reproduce itself.
Hegel’s labour of consciousness is obviously not the
same thing as wage labour. But they are
homologous. Wage labour produces objects, and
thereby produces and reproduces the human world.
As such, it does not just concern ‘abstract
knowledge’. However, the wage labourer returns to
his or her life after work without the objects s/he
produced, only with a wage instead, which is an
abstract representation of the value of his or her
labour, and which is worth less than the value s/he
produced. Moreover, the wage labourer even
returns home with a sense of relief that s/he is no
longer at work, that life away from work is true life,
since work is not a realization of life but merely a
means to it. The wage labourer’s life is therefore
homologous to the philosophical life described by
Hegel, returning to itself from labour and
alienation. So Marx’s critique of Hegel is not just
directed at the abstract labour of consciousness,
but at its reproduction of the abstract labour of
wage labour.
This does much to clarify Marx’s alternative
conception of labour, or at least what is at stake
within it. However, there remains a residual but
significant ambiguity. It is in many ways obvious
that Marx is seeking to overcome alienated labour.
Indeed, at points he even suggests that labour itself
must be overcome for it is intrinsically alienated.
And yet, he often treats alienation as a necessary
stage of this process. This is evident in his criticism

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of Hegel’s conception of labour. Concluding the
passage on the Phenomenology’s ‘importance’,
quoted above, Marx writes:

The real, active relation of man to himself as a genus-being, or the

realization of himself as a real genus-being, i.e. as a human being,
is only possible if he really employs all his genus-powers – which
again is only possible through the cooperation of mankind and as a
result of history – and treats them as objects, which is at first only
possible in the form of estrangement.26

Note: ‘only possible’. And this claim is ostensibly

reproduced in his repeated arguments for the need
for, or productivity of, capital in generating the
conditions for its overcoming or communism.
Political or historical objections may be, and have
been, made to the latter claim. But in the circuit of
texts and ideas we have been examining here a
philosophical objection may be raised. Namely,
given the centrality of alienation to Hegel’s
conception of labour, how can this be maintained by
Marx’s alternative conception of labour, or
sensuous practice? Indeed, can Marx maintain his
critique of the abstract labour of consciousness, and
of wage labour, while retaining a logic of
alienation? In other words, if alienation is not a
separation of subjectivity from objectivity – if, that
is, the sensuous subject of labour is not alienated
from the sensuousness of objectivity in this sense –
can it still be properly described as alienation or
estrangement?
This problem is in many ways concealed by Marx’s
approach to it as a passing historical phase, or in its
somewhat suspended existence as an object of
criticism. Marx criticizes alienated labour,
projecting an alternative, but simultaneously

169
maintains it in so far as its alternative is projected
into a future that will emerge only through the
passage of alienated labour. But does he continue to
presuppose elements that he nonetheless criticizes?
In a way we might ask whether Marx has produced
a similar problem to that which he diagnoses in
Feuerbach and left Hegelianism as a whole: does he
produce a critique of alienated labour in terms of
non-alienated labour, but without elaborating
non-alienated labour or how it generates alienated
labour?
This suspicion returns us to the scrutiny of what is
meant by sensuous practice. This can be advanced
by extending our consideration of Marx’s critique of
Hegel via an inquiry into Hegel’s own conception of
sensation, since this offers a clarification of how
alienation is integral to consciousness for Hegel.
Moreover, it offers us a clarification of how
sensation opposes both consciousness and
alienation. To start with, it should be recognized
that Marx’s proposition that man becomes objective
through starting out from sensation, rather than
consciousness, makes no sense in Hegel’s terms,
since, for Hegel, the objective is a phenomenon of
consciousness. Conversely, for Hegel, sensation as
such admits of no objectivity. What distinguishes
sensation from consciousness for Hegel is that
sensation relates to what it senses as its own
reality. Pure sensation is characterized by an
immediate particularity, which generates
distinctiveness but not separation between sense
and what is sensed. As Hegel puts it: ‘what I sense,
I am, and what I am, I sense’.27 This means that the
differentiation of a subjective sphere from an
objective sphere is not known to sensation. It is
known

170
only to consciousness, which is thereby
categorically distinct from sensation. Hegel
elaborates this as follows:

Mere sensation … has to do only with what is individual and

contingent, with what is immediately given and present; and this
content appears to the sentient soul as its own concrete reality.
When by contrast I rise to the standpoint of consciousness, I enter
into relationship with a world outside me, with an objective totality,
with an internally interconnected sphere of manifold and complex
objects confronting me. As objective consciousness, I certainly
have initially an immediate sensation, but at the same time what is
thus sensed is for me a point in the universal interconnection of
things, something, therefore, which points out beyond its sensory
individuality and immediate presence.28

In other words, objectivity is a product of

consciousness in the sense that it is consciousness
that produces the separation of subjectivity from
objectivity. Far from contradicting consciousness,
objectivity can only be objective – that is, standing
against subjectivity – to the extent that it stands in
the space produced by consciousness.
Consciousness can be conscious of sensations, but
these are then determined according to a
differentiation of subjectivity and objectivity. Thus,
consciousness relates to sensation as the index of
an inner or outer object. Mere sensation knows no
objectivity, it merely ‘knows’ a manifold of
sensations without objectivity or subjectivity. In this
sense, the attribution of externality that is often
given to sensation, including by Hegel, is an
externality to consciousness, not to sensation itself.
Perhaps most significantly of all here,
consciousness’s separation of itself as a subject
from everything that it is not presupposes an
abstraction. Everything is reduced to the abstract

171
determination of being as opposed to
consciousness, that is, as being objective. In other
words, for Hegel, consciousness constitutes
objectivity as an abstract realm or world, and it is
only within this world that objects, as such, appear.
Now, to the degree that Hegel’s account of
sensation holds, it clarifies a number of
characteristics of his philosophy and the problems it
presents to both Feuerbach and Marx. It clarifies
how objectivity is not opposed to the abstraction of
consciousness, but rather derives from it. It also
clarifies how sensuousness is not opposed to this
abstraction in so far as it is apprehended by
consciousness. Thus, it clarifies both why Marx
needs to radicalize his critique of sensuous
consciousness to a critique of consciousness as such
– that it is only through this that he will overcome
abstraction – and why he might nonetheless be right
to retain sensuousness as a quality of practice that
is irreducible to the practice of consciousness.
Finally, it clarifies why alienation presents such a
decisive issue, since if alienation is understood to be
the separation of subjectivity from objectivity, then
it is evident how it is an act of consciousness. If it is
not this separation, then what exactly are we
dealing with? This question is only part of the major
problem that still needs to be resolved, since it is by
no means
evident that pre- or non-conscious sensation grasps
the reality of practice. We must therefore ask yet
again: what is sensuous practice?
Perhaps the first thing to confront is the extent to
which practice is irreducible to sensation. Marx
describes practice as driven by needs, which he
understands as forms of sensation. But surely

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needs, by definition, generate a space between
themselves and their satisfaction. Is this space the
abstract space of consciousness, its differentiation
of itself from all that stands outside of it? But needs
are surely specific. Consciousness would be perhaps
a universal need. But then perhaps this is just the
point at which need is changed categorically into
something beyond itself. We might say that needs
generate a space within the internality of pure
sensation, but that this space does not separate
subject from object – it is not an abstract space.
Furthermore, it is a space that surely dissolves
again with its satisfaction. (Indeed, this is why
Hegel thinks that need and consumption cannot
sustain the self-determining independence of
objects.) But what of the means towards satisfying
needs, which are definitive of labour for Marx (and
Hegel)? Are not means precisely a further extension
of this space between need and satisfaction? Does
this extension extend to infinity, to the whole of
being or nature? And yet, surely means are specific
too, bound to the immanent process of needs and
satisfactions. Means, like needs or satisfactions,
may appear within a universal realm of objectivity
disclosed by consciousness, but that does not mean
that they themselves disclose such a realm, or that
consciousness does anything other than recognize
or represent their independent existence. To
conceive of itself as a means, consciousness would
perhaps be like conceiving of a universal tool, a tool
that was the means to everything. And yet again,
surely there is no such tool. A universal tool would
cease to be a tool. All tools, all means, are specific.
But what of labour itself? Isn’t labour itself such an
impossibly universal tool? But surely this is yet
again an abstraction of labour, which transforms it

173
categorically into something beyond itself. Labour is
surely always specific, always concrete, and never
abstract except in the treatment of it from outside,
from the vantage of consciousness or capital.
I offer these tentative remarks at a moment when I
am nonetheless attempting to resolve these issues
since it is difficult to present a resolution confirmed
by Marx’s own writings. Whether this was due to
Marx’s confusion or my own, his texts seem to
equivocate when it comes to defining the
independence of practice from the practice of
consciousness. For example, when he describes
human labour by distinguishing a bee from an
architect, where the architect constructs his
building first in his mind before he does so in
reality, how are we meant to understand this in
opposition to the labour of consciousness? Is it to
the degree that the actual building is distinct from
the potential building? But is actualization all that is
at stake in the notion of sensuous labour? This
would suggest that needs or purposes are objects of
consciousness, which sounds reasonable, but how
does this distinguish consciousness from practice?
A more profound example emerges when Marx
formulates his account of abstract labour. How are
we to understand this in terms of sensuous
practice? How can labour be sensuous and yet
abstract? How can labour present an alternative to
the labour of consciousness if both are abstract?
Marx says that the abstraction of labour is real, not
just an idea. And yet its reality derives from the
artificial reality of capital. Labour is always
concrete, he maintains, always specific to needs,
means and ends. Abstract labour exists not by the
dissolution of this specificity, but by its suspension

174
at another level of existence, the existence of
capital, which itself exists only on the basis of
labour in its concreteness. But, as with his early
endorsement of the need for alienation, the
distillation of labour power in abstract labour is
presented by Marx as a liberating separation of
traditional labour from its entwinement with nature,
and the liberation of the needs and satisfactions
that this enables. Are we to understand this merely
as a disciplining of concrete labour that remains
concrete throughout the abstractions of the wage
and the value-form? Or, even if this is true, is this
abstraction not constitutive of concrete labour, not
only in organizing it under capital, but also in
developing its richness as a prelude to communism?
In other words, does not this abstraction
ontologically transform labour and enable its
liberation as free activity? The account of abstract
labour may well present a profound contribution to
Marx’s general theory of labour, for it generates a
conception of abstraction out of the constitution of
labour itself, rather than the consciousness of it.
But it also requires careful scrutiny of the terms in
which Marx differentiates practice from abstraction.
Probably the most spectacular example of Marx’s
ambivalence over his conception of labour is
presented by his ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right: Introduction’. This text was written between
the end of 1843 and the start of 1844, just before
the composition of his ‘Manuscripts’, and so it
comes before the revelations of his ‘Theses’.
However, it presents such a dramatic and ironic
presentation of the concept of practice that he is
grappling with that it warrants attention. Its
notoriety also gives us the opportunity to see how
Marx’s ambivalence has infused his legacy. Marx

175
presents the proletariat as the ‘universal class’, who
promise to become the class of humanity, rather
than simply another limited political class,
inasmuch as they are the class that has nothing. We
might say that the proletariat are the class of
universal need. Having nothing, their needs are not
specific but universal. Hence their satisfaction is
not the emancipation of one class against the
others, but the emancipation of all classes, of
humanity. The revolutionary class is therefore
generated through the abstraction of particular
interests. We are now in a position to understand
that this conception of politics presents the most
dramatic embodiment of all the aspects of
Feuerbach and Hegel that Marx will go on to
oppose. The only question is whether, when Marx
says he is addressing ‘Germans’ – whom he mocks
as being unable to conceive of politics other than
philosophically – does this ironic interpellation
extend to the full
awareness of the philosophical perversion it
presents? Put simply, does Marx fully understand
the irony? Does he present such a vivid image of the
practice or politics of abstraction because he had
grasped its alternative, and even to the degree that
he could joke about it? Or because he had yet to
grasp its alternative? What is nonetheless clear is
that the idea of politics presented in this text
profoundly contradicts the idea of revolutionary
practice outlined in the ‘Theses’.
And what about aesthetics? We have grasped
sensuous practice as the principle according to
which Marx’s aesthetics must be elaborated – that
is, if it is to be an aesthetics that is derived from
what is essential and original to Marx, rather than
Feuerbach or Hegel. And yet this task of

176
elaboration, with all the further issues it harbours,
still lies ahead. We have reached the end but we
have yet to begin. But at least we have reached the
beginning.
1 The research of Mikhail Lifshitz and Georg Lukács into Marx’s aesthetics
on the basis of his early unpublished manuscripts and notebooks
remains seminal here, despite their questionable orientation of it
towards a theory of Socialist Realism. See in particular Lifshitz’s The
Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx (1933), trans. Ralf B. Winn (Pluto Press:
London, 1973); and Lukács’s ‘Marx and Engels on Aesthetics’ (1953),
trans. Arthur D. Kahn, in Writer and Critic and Other Essays (Merlin
Press: London, 1970), pp. 61–88. For an approach derived more
exclusively from Marx’s ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, see
Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez’s Art and Society: Essays in Marxist
Aesthetics (1965), trans. Maro Riofrancos (Merlin Press: London,
1974).

2 Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ (1844), in his Early

Writings, trans. G. Benton (Penguin: London, 1975), pp. 381–2.

3 Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (from original version from Marx’s

notebooks of 1845), in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German
Ideology, Collected Works, Vol. 5 (Lawrence & Wishart: London, 1976),
p. 4. Henceforth all references to the ‘Theses’ refer to this text (pp.
3–5).

4 Marx, ‘Theses’. Here, as elsewhere, I have translated Gattung as

‘genus’ and Gattungswesen as ‘genus-being’, or left the German
untranslated. The received rendering as ‘species’ or ‘species-being’
collapses the distinction between species and genus, which is
especially misleading in so far as it suggests specificity rather than
generality, thereby obscuring Marx’s objection to the abstraction of
Feuerbach’s conception of Gattungswesen. It may be noted that the
English translation of thesis 6 tries to compensate for this by
introducing ‘general character’, despite this being absent from Marx’s
text or Engels’s edition of it.

5 Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843),

trans. M. Vogel (Hackett: Indianapolis, 1986), § 63, p. 72.

6 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (1841), trans. G. Eliot

(Dover Publications: New York, 2008), p. 1 (translation altered).

7 Marx, ‘Manuscripts’, op. cit., p. 350.

177
8 Ibid., pp. 350–1.

9 Marx, ‘Theses’, op. cit. (translation altered).

10 Ibid. (translation altered).

11 Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, op. cit., pp. 94–5 (translation

altered).

12 Ibid., p. 94.

13 ‘The cherry-tree, like most fruit-trees, was, as is well known, only a few
centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore
only by this action of a definite society in a definite age has it become
“sensuous certainty” for Feuerbach.’ Marx and Engels, The German
Ideology, op. cit., p. 39.

14 Ibid., p. 40.

15 Ibid., p. 36.

16 Ibid., p. 37.

17 Ibid., p. 42.

18 Marx, ‘Manuscripts’, op. cit., pp. 385–6 (translation altered).

19 Ibid., p. 381.

20 Ibid., p. 382.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid., pp. 386–7.

24 Ibid., p. 386.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid. (translation altered).

27 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace and A. V. Miller

(Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2007), § 402, p. 85.

28 Ibid., Zusatz to §402, p. 84.

178
A COMMUNION OF JUST MEN MADE
PERFECT
WALTER PATER, ROMANTIC ANTI-CAPITALISM
AND THE PARIS COMMUNE
Matthew Beaumont

I n April 1895, the German social democrat Eduard

Bernstein, then living in political exile in London,
where he acted among other things as one of
Engels’s literary executors, published an article in
Die Neue Zeit on the trial of Oscar Wilde. In this
bulletin from the British metropolis, ‘On the
Occasion of a Sensational Trial’, Bernstein insisted,
in relatively enlightened tones, that it was not
Wilde’s sexual activities or proclivities that might
prove politically unhealthy but his aesthetics:

The doctrine of art for art’s sake, the release of art from everything
which lives and should live in the popular consciousness, the
proclamation of art as the preserve of an initiated aristocratic
freemasonry – this double think is corrupt: it is far more dangerous
to society than the actions of which Wilde was accused.1

Understandably, this critique of aestheticism, which

accurately lances the movement’s elitist tendencies,
has proved influential on the left. It prevailed, for
example, in Peter Bürger’s Theory of the
Avant-Garde (1974), where he argued that, in
aestheticism, ‘apartness from the praxis of life,
which had always been the condition that

179
characterized the way art functioned in bourgeois
society, now becomes its content’.2 But it fails to
capture aestheticism’s contradictory, sometimes
confrontational relationship to the reified reality
from which it attempted to escape.
The point of this essay is to reexamine the
particular mode of aestheticism that the
impressionist critic Walter Pater, who had
reluctantly acted as a mentor to the scandalous
Wilde, practised in the 1860s and 1870s; and to
consider that mode, to express it in Andrew
Hemingway’s terms, both as an instance of
reification and as ‘a mode of resistance to its
effects’.3 There has been something of a consensus
among historians of the fin de siècle in England that
Pater is not susceptible to a political interpretation.
This is in part no doubt because the biographical
record is so scant. It is also, more importantly,
because his writings appear to retreat
self-consciously from politics into aesthetics.
Traditional scholars of aestheticism have tended
simply to accept this impression, overlooking the
fact that no movement is more political than one
that strives to retreat from politics into aesthetics
(the phrase l’art pour l’art, Adorno once ominously
observed, ‘was the mask of its opposite’). 4
In the last couple of decades, queer theorists and
other postmodernists have challenged the
assumption that Pater is ‘a political
embarrassment’.5 But, in spite of the pioneering
accounts of aestheticism this has produced, it has
had the effect of emphasizing sexual politics to the
detriment of, well, politics. Perhaps this situation is
beginning to change. Benjamin Morgan has for
instance recently argued in a sophisticated article

180
that ‘Pater’s interest in aesthetic freedom grounds
the politics of his work in a way that does not
depend upon his subversive queerness’.6 And
Matthew Potolsky has made the ‘counter-intuitive
claim’ that Pater ‘is a fundamentally political
writer’.7 I prefer to think of him as at once an
apolitical and a political thinker. In my meditations
on Pater’s writings from roughly the mid-1860s to
the mid-1870s, I posit him as a romantic
anti-capitalist – one whose attunement ‘to the most
fleeting individual reactions was bound up with the
reification of these reactions’, as Adorno once
formulated the problem, but at the same time
constituted a concerted rebellion against this
reification.8
Pater’s career as a published writer, from the
mid-1860s to the mid-1890s, roughly coincides with
the period in which – once the confidence in the
capitalist system that had been characteristic of the
third quarter of the nineteenth century had started
to corrode, especially in the face of a sustained, if
uneven economic depression – utopian literature
became an almost compulsory form of political
discourse. Hundreds of utopian fictions were
printed in Britain, Europe and Japan in the final
thirty years of the century, in addition to numerous
polemical books and pamphlets that delineated the
society of the future. ‘At the present day,’ G. W.
Foote, editor of the journal Progress, put it in 1886,
‘social dreams are once more rife.’9 As I have
explained in another context, an anticipatory
consciousness shaped English culture in the late
nineteenth century. A utopian structure of feeling
helped to define the fin de siècle – one of those
times in which ‘contradiction, fracture, or mutation
within a class’, as Raymond Williams put it, ‘is at

181
once lived and articulated in radically new semantic
figures’.10 Pater has not often been associated with
this ideological climate, precisely because, as I
pointed out, he is generally dismissed as
anti-political, or apolitical. But his impressionist
criticism can nonetheless productively be
reconsidered as a species of social dreaming.
This proposition can be tested, in the first instance,
in relation to Pater’s anonymous assessment of
William Morris’s poems in 1868, which was first
published in the Westminster Review and then
adapted for the controversial conclusion to his most
famous book, Studies in the History of the
Renaissance (1873). The opening paragraph of this
review proposes that, from ancient Greece right up
to the present, poetry has ‘project[ed] above the
realities of its time a world in which the forms of
things are transfigured’; but that, unprecedentedly,
the kind of aesthetic poetry exemplified by Morris
both ‘takes possession’ of this world and
‘sublimates beyond it another still fainter and more
spectral, which is literally an artificial or “earthly
paradise”’. Beyond
the abstract utopianism that is definitive of all
poetry, Pater seems to be contending, Morris’s
poetry contains a concrete utopianism – albeit of a
paradoxically spectral sort. Pater goes on to argue
that it articulates a spiritual longing: ‘The secret of
the enjoyment of it is that inversion of
home-sickness known to some, that incurable thirst
for the sense of escape, which no actual form of life
satisfies, no poetry even, if it be merely simple and
spontaneous.’11 This is not a political longing. It is
noticeable, for example, that the incurable thirst
diagnosed by Pater is not for escape itself but ‘the
sense of escape’. So this is a peculiarly attenuated

182
form of escapism; and no doubt the aesthetic that it
adumbrates is therefore doubly depoliticized. But it
is, perhaps, proto-political (in this respect it
anticipates Morris’s exploration of both political and
sexual longing, in News from Nowhere of 1891). It
is best understood as a statement characteristic of
romantic anti-capitalism, which according to the
definition provided by Robert Sayre and Michael
Löwy ‘represents the revolt of the repressed,
manipulated and deformed subjectivity, and of the
“magic” of imagination banished from the capitalist
world’.12
Pater’s writings about art – which restlessly reach
for ‘a world in which the forms of things are
transfigured’, and for a ‘fainter, more spectral’
world beyond that – are visibly animated by what is
sometimes described as a ‘utopian impulse’. I am
generally suspicious of this phrase, at least in terms
of its analytical value, because a ‘utopian impulse’
can be detected in almost anything if one looks hard
enough. The concept of ‘an obscure yet omnipresent
Utopian impulse’, as Fredric Jameson terms it in a
slightly more generous assessment than mine, is
impossibly capacious.13 This is the problem with the
appropriation of Ernst Bloch’s celebration of the
utopian impulse by the contemporary sub-discipline
of Utopian Studies, as Matthew Charles has
recently pointed out in a trenchant piece.14 But in
relation to Pater it seems more promising, largely
because he uses language precisely as a medium for
registering and testing out impulses. And these
impulses transmit a charge that is recognizable for
its utopian energies. In his essay on Coleridge, to
give a preliminary example, Pater observes that the
poetry Wordsworth contributed to the Lyrical
Ballads ‘vibrates with that blithe impulse which

183
carried him to final happiness and
self-possession’.15
An impressionist aesthetic like Pater’s, as in the
preface to Studies in the History of the
Renaissance, is the impossibly self-reflexive attempt
to intellectualize one’s spontaneous response to an
artefact, or some more quotidian phenomenon such
as a face one happens to encounter in the street, in
the precise instant of experiencing it – an aspiration
quite as doomed as lighting the gas to capture a
sense of what darkness looks like, as his exact
contemporary William James put it in another
context.16 It entails at the same time intellection
and the cancellation of the intellect. ‘The function of
the aesthetic critic’, he asserts in the preface, ‘is to
distinguish, analyse, and separate from its adjuncts,
the virtue by which a painter, a landscape, a fair
personality in life or in a book, produces this special
impression of beauty or pleasure, to
indicate what the source of that impression is, and
under what conditions it is experienced.’17 The
pseudo-scientific certainties from which this
sentence starts steadily fall apart as Pater affirms
the supremacy of the self, though they are
reasserted once more in the reference to the
conditions in which an impression is experienced. In
Studies, aesthetics is a science of the faintest
pulsations or sensations. It is an empiricist attempt
to grasp almost imperceptible emotions.
In his comments on Wilde’s trial, Bernstein
underlined the idea that the archetypal decadent is
a descendent of the romantic: ‘Unlike the latter,
[the decadent] does not look to the past, but neither
does he look to the future, regarding which he
remains sceptical.’18 Aestheticism, according to

184
him, is immersed in a perpetual present. But this
assumption is inapplicable in Pater’s case. In spite
of his notorious claim, in the final sentence of the
conclusion to Studies, that ‘art comes to you
professing frankly to give nothing but the highest
quality to your moments as they pass, and simply
for those moments’ sake’, Pater understands the
present as a dialectic of the past and future (p.
121). This is apparent, for example, in his
discussion of the ‘pictorial poetry’ of the School of
Giorgione, which he admires because ‘it presents us
with a kind of profoundly significant and animated
instants, a mere gesture, a look, a smile, perhaps –
some brief and wholly concrete moment – into
which, however, all the motives, the interests and
effects of a long history, have condensed
themselves, and which seem to absorb past and
future in an intense consciousness of the present’
(p. 133). These moments, embodied in more or less
erotic encounters with those looks, smiles and
gestures, redeem the present, assimilating the past
and future to it, and imparting a sense of
completion to it. If under capitalism, as I have
argued elsewhere in relation to Morris, the present
is not present to itself, Pater’s ‘significant and
animated instants’ promise to redress this condition
of alienation.19
The aesthetic that Pater excavates from the past, in
particular that of the Renaissance, is in Studies
intended to act as the foundation for an ethic that,
in the future, might redeem the deformations of
capitalist society (including the repression of
homosexuality). The reception of this book, which
was viciously attacked by conservative
commentators, testified to the ethical implications
of his impressionist criticism. As Michael Levenson

185
has recently pointed out, it was ‘an effect of Pater’s
writings … to promote new styles of life, as well as
new works and opinions’. Levenson is thinking of
aspects of what he calls ‘metropolitan experience’,
including ‘conversational habit, dress’;20 but Pater’s
prose also promoted a kind of attitude or disposition
that was inescapably political as well as cultural. He
admitted as much when, partly capitulating to the
backlash against the book, especially in religious
circles, he omitted its conclusion from the second
edition. He later maintained that he had taken the
decision to do this because he thought ‘it might
possibly mislead some young men into whose hands
it might fall’ – a disingenuous claim that Studies
had been in danger of falling into the hands of those
to whom he had effectively directed towards in the
first place.21 Pater’s interest had always been in
ethics as much as aesthetics, though he secreted
the former in the language of the latter.
Pater’s writings of the 1860s and 1870s do indeed
look to the future. A principle of hope, to use
Bloch’s concept, is for example constituent of the
piece that, in the absence of a paper on Fichte,
which has been lost, is generally said to inaugurate
Pater’s intellectual biography. This is ‘Diaphaneitè’,
a paper he read aloud in July 1864 to his intimates
in the Old Mortality Society, a fraternity of young,
mostly agnostic intellectuals studying at Oxford.
John Nichol had set up the Society in 1856, and for
the next decade it thrived as an alternative, albeit
exclusive forum for philosophical debate inside the
university, attracting a number of intellectual
luminaries, including A. C. Swinburne and J. A.
Symonds. According to the one historian to have
collated the scattered records of this group, in
literature and art, but also in politics, ‘the Old

186
Mortality was radical’. Its four main causes, most
vehemently prosecuted by Swinburne, were the
nationalist struggle in Italy, the overthrow of
tyranny in France, the abolition of university tests,
and the campaign against ‘all restrictions on the
freedom of opinion’.22 The Society’s reputation for
radicalism, and a certain intellectual avant-gardism,
probably persisted up to Pater’s time; but I suspect
that, in the 1860s, once Swinburne had moved on,
its commitment to republicanism and agnosticism
or atheism declined. Revealingly, Pater offended
one of his more conservative confederates when he
delivered a paper at his own lodgings in February
1864. S. R. Brooke, who in spite of his protestations
might not have been representative of the Society’s
opinions, denounced Pater’s defence of aestheticism
on this occasion as ‘one of the most thoroughly
infidel productions it has ever been our pain to
listen to’.23
Pater devised the elusive title of ‘Diaphaneitè’ in
order to evoke a condition of diaphanousness; that
is, a transparency of spirit at once luminous and
mysterious. The paper is an enigmatic, highly poetic
meditation on the ‘type of life’, as he puts it, that
‘might serve as a basement type’ (p. 140).24 By
‘basement type’ he means the archetype that might
form the foundation of a different social order, one
that is peaceful and filled with a sense of
completeness (again, not unlike the utopian society
in News from Nowhere, which Morris characterizes
as ‘an epoch of rest’). Pater looks to the past,
particularly the Hellenic past, for the proleptic
image of a utopian future that might still be
realizable: ‘the character we have before us is a
kind of prophecy of this repose and simplicity,
coming as it were in the order of grace, not of

187
nature, by some happy gift, or accident of birth or
constitution, showing that it is indeed within the
limits of man’s destiny’ (p. 137). To claim, as Kate
Hext has done, that in this paper ‘the individual and
society become dichotomies’ is to depoliticize it.25
Their relationship is dialectical rather than
dichotomous. In its synthesis of individual and
social perspectives, and of politics and aesthetics,
‘Diaphaneitè’ is in effect Pater’s manifesto.
Certainly, in terms
both of form and content, it is closer to a manifesto
than the conclusion to Studies. It is tempting, in
fact, to claim that it is one of the forgotten
manifestos of the fin de siècle. It is in some respects
the equivalent of his disciple Wilde’s essay ‘The
Soul of Man Under Socialism’: ‘The Soul of Man
Under Aestheticism’.26
‘Diaphaneitè’, then, posits nothing less than the
prototype of a utopian society. ‘The type must be
one discontented with society at it is’, Pater
declares; and the mass proliferation of this man of
the future, he adds, ‘would be the regeneration of
the world’ (p. 140). This is no activist, though, not
even of an ascetic, transcendental kind. ‘The
philosopher, the saint, the artist, neither of them
can be this type.’ No, Pater’s ‘revolutionist’, to use
his ascription, is the diaphanous type (p. 138). The
diaphanous character, innocent, transparent,
sublimates ‘the human body in its beauty’, and so
incorporates ‘the true, though visible, soul or spirit
in things’.27 It creates a perfect communion of body
and spirit. ‘Like all the higher forms of inward life
this character is a subtle blending and
interpenetration of intellectual, moral and spiritual
elements’, Pater announces in ‘Diaphaneitè’; ‘it is a
mind of taste lighted up by some spiritual ray

188
within’ (p. 137). In this, and in its perfect simplicity,
it represents a critique of the dessicated, spiritually
dissociated conditions of life in industrial society,
one that is paradoxically both crystalline and
quicksilver. In contrast to the saint, the artist or the
philosopher, who is so often ‘confused, jarred,
disintegrated in the world’, the diaphanous type is
‘like a relic from the classical age, laid open by
accident to our alien modern atmosphere’ (pp. 137,
138). It floats in and out of both Marius the
Epicurean (1885), Pater’s novel, and his Imaginary
Portraits (1887); and it haunts Studies too. One
might even interpret its characteristic disposition,
its ‘wistfulness of mind’, which he defines as ‘a
longing after what is unattainable’, a longing that is
social or political as well as intellectual, as a precise
definition of the utopian impulse.
The diaphanous type embodies the youthful Pater’s
utopian dreams of a homosocial society that might
reinstate the ethics and aesthetics associated with
the spirit of Hellenism, and in particular ‘the care
for physical beauty, the worship of the body’ that he
celebrates in the preface to Studies (p. xi). His
description in ‘Diaphaneitè’, it is evident, like his
characterization of Marius, is on one level an
attempt to sublimate the painful, sometimes
exquisite sensitivity that, as a man who loves other
men, he feels as he confronts life in ‘the adulterated
atmosphere of the world’ (p. 139). More
immediately, it is thought to have been inspired by
Charles Lancelot Shadwell, a friend and former
student famed for his handsomeness and himself a
member of the Old Mortality. ‘Often the presence of
this nature’, Pater intones in a calmly controlled
voice that nonetheless seems to tremble with erotic
excitement, ‘is felt like a sweet aroma in early

189
manhood’ (p. 139). Adolescence, as this
demonstrates, carried a certain utopian as well as
erotic charge in the Hellenic milieu of Oxford in the
1860s and 1870s.28 Pater subsequently
dedicated Studies to Shadwell, who had in the
summer of 1865 accompanied him on the trip to
Italy during which he soaked up many of the
impressions that permeate the book.
The chapters of Studies in the History of the
Renaissance, especially the one on Winckelmann,
which lifts some of its sentences directly from
‘Diaphaneitè’, read like a sustained effort to recover
the diaphanous character, this time by excavating
the past rather more systematically, if still
idiosyncratically. At one point in ‘Diaphaneitè’ he
characterizes diaphanousness as ‘a thread of pure
white light that one might disentwine from the
tumultuary richness of Goethe’s nature’ (p. 139).
Studies traces the thread of light that runs through
the richness of the Renaissance; and, having
unpicked this thread, as the conclusion reveals, it
also attempts, in a far more violent movement, to
weave it deep into the nineteenth century, in the
hope that, like a late form of Romanticism, it might
eventually redeem the dispiriting realities of life in
an industrial society. Like Romanticism, it thus
constitutes a critique of the present and, at least
potentially, a utopian alternative to it (one critic has
pointed out that ‘Pater’s volume might have been
titled Studies in the History of Romanticism’).29
Romanticism, too, is for Pater an ‘outbreak of the
human spirit’, as he puts it in the preface to Studies
(p. xi). The book thus constructs an antinomian
tradition – openly aesthetic, surreptitiously both
homoerotic and atheistic – that it uses to recruit
readers to a secret, elitist association that can

190
constitute the nucleus of an ideal society. As Rachel
Teukolsky observes in an insightful discussion of
Pater’s art criticism, ‘while he eschews violence, his
writings constantly touch on a subtle thematics of
revolt organized around an elite group identity’.30
This coded thematics of revolt, which sublimates
violence and ascribes responsibility for social
transformation to an elite group, is characteristic of
romantic anti-capitalism. It entails both an
expression of oppositional politics and a
displacement of it. Pater’s paper on the diaphanous
character might be described as an attempt to
articulate a utopian politics that is apolitical. It
acknowledges that to prognosticate about the
Coming Race is to engage a political language; but
it seeks at the same time to escape the logic of
political language by etherealizing it, diaphanizing
it.31 What Pater hopes for is a revolution without
revolution (which is rather different from a process
of evolution, and rather more radical):

Revolution is often impious. They who prosecute revolution have to

violate again and again the instinct of reverence. That is inevitable,
since after all progress is a kind of violence. But in this
[diaphanous] nature revolutionism is softened, harmonised,
subdued as by distance. It is the revolutionism of one who has
slept a hundred years. [p. 138]

Pater’s revolutionist is a Rip Van Winkle relieved to

discover, on awakening from his epochal sleep, that
the social transformation that has taken place in the
meantime
embodies not the sudden appearance of modernity
but its utopian displacement. This revolution has
occurred ‘with an engaging naturalness, without the
noise of axe or hammer’ (p. 140). Pater’s utopia is
thus ideological in the sense that Althusser

191
intended when he referred to the imaginary
resolution of real contradictions.
As I have implied, ‘Diaphaneitè’ sets the template
for Pater’s thinking in the 1870s and 1880s to the
extent that this thinking can be described as
utopian. I have argued elsewhere that the decisive
event of the final three decades of the late
nineteenth century for the utopian (and dystopian)
imagination is the irruption of the Paris Commune
in 1871.32 Here, I want to speculate that it is at
least partly in the shadow of this event that Pater
shapes his social dream in Studies in the History of
the Renaissance. In spite of the Commune’s tragic
failure, which can be summarized by recalling that
in the so-called semaine sangliante at least 25,000
proletarians were slaughtered by the French army,
the democratic workers’ state briefly instituted by
the Communards fundamentally, triumphantly
reorganized the conception of the future that had
prevailed in Europe up to that point. Marx said of
the Communards that, ‘they have no ideals to
realize, but to set free the elements of the new
society with which old collapsing bourgeois society
itself is pregnant’, thereby suggesting that they had
simultaneously materialized the socialist utopia and
made the concept historically irrelevant.33 If for the
emergent socialist movement the Commune
represented a brave attempt to institute a utopian
future, for the bourgeoisie it represented the
apparition of a dystopia that had only narrowly been
exorcized.
The impact of the Commune on aesthetics has in
general been drastically underestimated; and not
least because T. J. Clark, among others, has
authoritatively argued that modernism emerged

192
largely from the bourgeois modernization of Paris.
More recently, Albert Boime has instead
emphasized the fact that ‘Modernism is wrought out
of the unexpected dislodging of that bourgeoisie
and the replacement of its rule – if ever so brief – of
Paris by that of another class: the proletariat and its
political expression in the Commune’.34 In
late-nineteenth-century France, the emergent
aesthetic of the Impressionists – the term was first
used in this context in 1874 – was shaped to an
important extent by the cultural politics of Paris in
the aftermath of the Commune: ‘The Impressionists
– moderate republicans – descended into the public
sphere to reclaim its sullied turf for the
bourgeoisie.’ ‘Their aesthetic purposes’, Boime
adds, ‘are inseparable from their participation in
the political and cultural reclamation of Paris.’35
At the time, conservative commentators often
pointed to the elective affinities, as they perceived
them, between Impressionism and communism or
anarchism. For example, Art Age, an American
journal, fulminated that Impressionist painting was
‘communism incarnate, with the red flag and the
Phrygian cap of lawless violence boldly displayed’;
and, in The Times, a British critic of the first
Impressionist exhibition commented, ‘One seems to
see in such work evidence of as wild a spirit of
anarchy at
work in French painting as in French politics.’36
These responses are intimations of the
entanglement of aesthetics and politics that will
characterize the avant-gardes of the early twentieth
century. Levenson underlines the idea that ‘the
event of the Paris Commune hung over later
Modernism as a memory’ because it instituted the
‘radical undecidability of the tie between aesthetics

193
and politics that became an abiding mark of
Modernism’.37
The relevance of the Commune to apparently
esoteric debates about aesthetics in England at this
time is revealed in an anonymous review from 1872
of J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle’s A History of
Painting in North Italy (1871), the prime example of
the new scientific art criticism against which Pater
defined his impressionist aesthetic in Studies.38 In
‘these days of “Communism” and
“Internationalism”’, it portentously notes,
barbarism is once more a historical possibility. It is
therefore of supreme importance that the morals of
the proletariat should be schooled, in Arnoldian
fashion, through the appropriate cultivation of
artistic taste. I will quote from the opening pages of
this review at some length:

The ‘Communists’ of Paris, whatever may be said to the contrary

by their apologists, waged war against the arts and literature as a
part of that civilization which they consider it their mission to
destroy. If they had been allowed a few more hours to mature and
carry out their plans, it has been proved, beyond question, that the
public and probably the private libraries, galleries, and museums of
the capital, would have been destroyed. We hope and believe that
our working classes are not inspired by the same ignorant and
fanatical fury. The interest they have hitherto shown in the
collections of art and science, which at such vast expense and
such infinite labour have been collected together in this great
metropolis, leads to a contrary belief. If London had ever the
misfortune of falling into the power of a mob, we trust that they
would prevent the repetition of such scenes as were witnessed in
Paris. But there are always reckless men to be found, and they
would be encouraged and directed in their recklessness by
foreigners, who, outlawed and expelled from the rest of Europe,
conspire against civilization and order under the protection of our

194
laws, and would rejoice in being able to bring about the destruction
of our most glorious national monuments.39

More sympathetic commentators correctly argued

that the English and European press had largely
fabricated the destruction caused by the
Communards. The positivist Frederic Harrison, for
instance, who courageously praised the ‘skill and
efficiency with which the Commune has been
organised’ in an article for the Fortnightly Review,
a periodical to which Pater contributed at this time,
condemned the ‘lurid inventions’ of the English
press.40 For the reactionary critic in the Quarterly
Review, though, the Commune represented an
extremely dangerous political precedent; not least
because, according to him, the exiled Communards
who had fled to London threatened to foment a
comparable destruction of bourgeois civilization in
England. The prospect that the review of A History
of Painting in North Italy opens up is of ‘the return
of Europe to
a state of barbarism, anarchy, and misery scarcely
surpassed in the darkest periods of the middle
ages’. ‘These considerations force themselves upon
us’, the anonymous author continues, ‘when we take
up Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s volumes.’41
Rather more significantly, these considerations also
forced themselves, in the aftermath of the
Commune, on Friedrich Nietzsche. He too was
convinced, in the words of the Quarterly Review,
that its representatives had ‘waged war against the
arts and literature as a part of that civilization
which they consider it their mission to destroy’.
Indeed, as Dominic Losurdo has alleged, the ethics
and aesthetics elaborated by Nietzsche in The Birth
of Tragedy (1872), his meditation on ancient Greek

195
culture, were significantly shaped by the traumatic
impact of the Commune. In a letter of 21 June 1871,
referring back to the false rumour that the
retreating Communards had set fire to the Louvre,
he pontificated as follows:

For some days I was completely destroyed by doubts and

overcome by tears: all scientific, philosophic and artistic existence
seemed to me an absurdity, if a single day could obliterate the
most marvellous works of art, or rather, entire periods of art.

This feeling of ‘the autumn of culture’, as Nietzsche

put it in a letter several years later, persisted long
after it had become obvious that the destruction of
the Louvre was in fact a falsification used for
propagandist purposes. As Peter Thomas has
explained, ‘Losurdo demonstrates that whatever
else The Birth of Tragedy became, it must also be
understood in its own historical moment, as a
theoretical response to a specific political event –
the uprising of the Commune – articulated within a
constellation of ideologies.’42
A number of critics have emphasized the parallels
between Pater and Nietzsche, almost exact
contemporaries who, in spite of their cultural and
intellectual differences, were both highly
idiosyncratic Hellenists indebted to the example of
Winckelmann’s classicism. J. Hillis Miller, for
example, once described Pater as ‘the nearest thing
to Nietzsche England has’, and Nietzsche,
conversely, as ‘the Pater of the German-speaking
world’.43 I am not proposing that Pater, like
Nietzsche, was positively traumatized by the
Commune; but I am suggesting that, in spite of the
unpromising biographical material available, we
read Pater centrifugally rather than centripetally,

196
opening him up to the Commune.44 On the
continent, of course, the ideological effects of the
Commune were considerably greater than in
England. I would claim, however, that, if the
Commune was a non-event in England, it was
nonetheless a decisive non-event.
Pater’s impressionism, it might be said, is a
sustained effort to redeem the aesthetic in the face
of its bourgeois degradation, on the one hand; and,
on the other, its complete abolition, according to
apologists for the bourgeoisie, by the proletariat. If
the proletariat threatened to destroy the work of
art, as in the propagandist caricatures of the
Commune, then the bourgeoisie, through the
processes of commodification and
mechanical reproduction, had effectively already
destroyed the aura of the work of art. Pater’s
aesthetic is an attempt to salvage the aura of art in
the face of this dual prospect. The famous
ekphrastic discussion of the Mona Lisa in Studies,
first published in the Fortnightly Review in 1869,
which is a sustained attempt to restore an auratic
quality to the painting, takes on an especially
intense resonance in this context – susceptible as
this painting subsequently became both to the
Communards’ alleged attack on the Louvre and to
the relentless capitalist logic of technological
reproduction.
My deliberately provocative contention, then, is that
the publication of Studies in the History of the
Renaissance in 1873, like that of The Birth of
Tragedy in the previous year, represents an
intervention, albeit a characteristically elliptical
one, in aesthetic debates that had been
fundamentally transformed by the example of the

197
Paris Commune (and in spite of the fact that a
number of its chapters first appeared before the
Commune). To put the claim at its most polemical,
the ‘Parisian Commune’, as Pater briefly refers to it
in a review of Edmund Gosse’s poems published in
1890, is an absent determinant of his thought at
this time.45
By the early 1870s, almost a decade after the
composition of ‘Diaphaneitè’, the application of
words like ‘revolutionist’ had of course become
ideologically unacceptable, but Pater continues to
develop an aesthetics that, in part because of its
ethical and political implications, is shaped by the
utopian structure of feeling characteristic of the
late nineteenth century. The development of the
concept of diaphanousness, first in Studies in the
History of the Renaissance, then in Marius the
Epicurean, embodies a double movement. It
describes both an interiorization, most emphatically
in Studies; and a kind of collectivization, most
obviously in Marius. In the former, diaphanousness
operates as a principle of hope, momentarily
perceptible in the Paterian subject’s response to the
art object – a fine alchemical deposit of the utopian
impulse. In the latter, Pater recasts interpersonal
relationships, in so far as they are reminiscent of a
forgotten culture, specifically a homosexual pagan
culture, as ‘a communion of just men made perfect’,
as he calls it, that might redeem the society of the
future.46
A communion of these men, of course, is not a
commune. This utopian emblem is a delicate,
probably fragile equilibrium of the political and the
spiritual. In his attempt to find a refuge from the
reification of contemporary culture, Pater is an

198
exemplary romantic anti-capitalist – because he
reaches both into the past and, less overtly, into the
future; and because he strives for both an
individualist and, more covertly, a collectivist
solution. The inner and the outer life are
dialectically interfolded. In a review of
Dostoevesky’s novellas from 1922, Lukács identified
the Russian writer as a man who, ‘as the
“forerunner” of the human being living out his inner
life and liberated both socially and economically,
attempted to portray the soul of this man of the
future’.47 Pater too might be interpreted as
someone whose prose explores the inner life of
someone as it might be recast in a society that had
been socially, economically and
sexually liberated. His prose, in its persistent,
delicate attention to the most refined of aesthetic
impulses, is an evocation of the soul of the man of
the future.
In the conclusion to Studies, Pater famously used an
image of a ‘swarm of impressions’ in order to
portray individual experience (p. 119). It is perhaps
significant that, five years later, in an essay on ‘The
Bacchanals of Euripides’ (1878), he redeployed the
image of the swarm in the context of collective,
socially transformative, even violent experience:

Coleridge, in one of his fantastic speculations, refining on the

German word for enthusiasm – Schwärmerei, swarming, as he
says, ‘like the swarming of bees together’ – has explained how the
sympathies of mere numbers, as such, the random catching on fire
of one here and another there, when people are collected together,
generates as if by mere contact, some new and rapturous spirit,
not traceable in the individual units of the multitude. Such
swarming was the essence of the strange dance of the Bacchic
women.48

199
An emphatically interior metaphor, the swarm of
impressions, opens out onto an unexpectedly
exterior one, the swarming of people spontaneously
generating ‘some new and rapturous spirit’. The
seething inner life of the conclusion, imprisoned by
the ‘thick wall of personality’, is in the piece on
Euripides momentarily liberated (in part, perhaps,
because it is identified with the disruptive and
joyfully subversive sexuality of female dancers). In a
striking metaphorical shift, the involutions of the
spirit are suddenly and surreptitiously transformed
into a carnivalesque, if not revolutionary movement.
Here is an explosive reinscription of the hope Pater
had expressed at the end of ‘Diaphaneitè’, that the
diaphanous type, ‘discontented with society as it is’,
might form a ‘majority’, and so ensure ‘the
regeneration of the world’.
1 Eduard Bernstein, ‘On the Occasion of a Sensational Trial,’ in Bernstein
on Homosexuality: Articles from ‘Die Neue Zeit’ 1895 and 1898, trans.
Angela Clifford (Athol Books: London, 1977), p. 17. He continues: ‘We
will think no worse if Wilde [is] found guilty, and no better if the jury
acquit him. Whatever the law says, his actions were quite
inconsequential. It is the mental outlook which he represented and to
which he gave expression which is important.’

2 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw

(University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1984), p. 48.

3 See Andrew Hemingway, The Mysticism of Money: Precisionist Painting

and Machine Age America (Periscope Publishing: Pittsburgh, 2013),
pp. 22–3.

4 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf

Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Athlone Press: London, 1997),
p. 239.

5 Heather K. Love, ‘Forced Exile: Walter Pater’s Queer Modernism,’ in

Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (eds.), Bad Modernisms
(Duke University Press: Durham, North Carolina, 2006), p. 39.

200
6 Benjamin Morgan, ‘Aesthetic Freedom: Walter Pater and the Politics of
Autonomy,’ ELH, vol. 77, no. 3 (2010), p. 733. ‘Perhaps what is
aesthetic about aestheticism’, Morgan explains, ‘is not just its
obsession with “convulsed sensuousness” or purified ideals, but rather
its recognition that physical beauty dramatizes the dilemma of the
modern subject who is immersed in the material world, but striving to
be free of material contingency’ (p. 749).

7 Matthew Potolsky, ‘Literary Communism: Pater and the Politics of

Community’, in Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins (eds.), Victorian
Aesthetic Conditions: Pater Across the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan:
Basingstoke, 2010), p. 185. Slightly implausibly, Potolsky goes so far
as to identify Pater with ‘a properly activist politics’ (p. 186).

8 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 239.

9 G. W. Foote, ‘Social Dreams’, Progress, vol. 6 (1886), p. 190.

10 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press:

Oxford, 1977), pp. 133–5. See Matthew Beaumont, Utopia Ltd.:
Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870–1900 (Brill: Leiden,
2005), p. 3 – the final version of this book, it should be noted, was
indebted to the characteristically scrupulous and perceptive comments
that Andrew Hemingway made in a report for the publisher.

11 Peter Faulkner (ed.), William Morris: The Critical Heritage (Routledge &
Kegan Paul: London, 1973), pp. 79–80.

12 Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy, ‘Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism’,

in G. A. Rosso and Daniel P. Watkins (eds.), Spirits of Fire: English
Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods (Associated
University Presses: London, 1990), p. 36. By the time they came to
adapt this article, first published in New German Critique in 1984, for
their book Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine
Porter (Duke University Press: Durham, North Carolina, 2001), Löwy
and Sayre had decided to reject the term ‘romantic anti-capitalism’ on
the grounds that it is a pleonasm: ‘for us Romanticism is anticapitalist
by its very nature’ (p. 15). Hemingway has wisely commented that
‘such a usage ignores the functions and value of romanticism as a
period concept’, thereby dehistoricizing romanticism and missing ‘the
force of its revivals and the work of updating and adaptation that needs
to be done with each phase of neo-romanticism’. Hemingway, The
Mysticism of Money, op. cit., p. 207.

13 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called

Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), p. 3.

201
14 See Matthew Charles, ‘Utopia and Its Discontents: Dreams of
Catastrophe and the End of “the End of History”’, Studies in Social and
Political Thought, vol. 18 (2010), p. 31: ‘It is Bloch’s failure to properly
resolve the theoretical tension between these two aspects –
Utopianism and Utopia’ [i.e., the utopian impulse and the utopian
blueprint] – that makes his work so amenable to the kind of jettisoning
of the Utopia in its historical form that is currently being performed.… In
The Principle of Hope, that which Adorno describes as the innermost
antinomy of Bloch’s thought is stretched so wide that it appears as if
one problematic half can simply be lobbed off [sic], and the other half
uncritically taken up by Utopian Studies.’

15 Walter Pater, ‘Coleridge’, in Appreciations, with an Essay on Style

(Macmillan: London, 1924), p. 85.

16 William James, ‘On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology,’

Mind, vol. 9 (1884), p. 3.

17 Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. Matthew

Beaumont (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2010), p. 4. Hereafter,
references to this edition appear in parentheses after the quotation.

18 Bernstein, ‘On the Occasion of a Sensational Trial’, op. cit., p. 15.

19 See my discussion of ‘Utopia and the Present in News from Nowhere’

in Utopia Ltd., op. cit., chapter 5.

20 Michael Levenson, Modernism (Yale University Press: New Haven,

2011), p. 28.

21 For further discussion, see Matthew Beaumont, ‘Introduction,’ in Pater,

Studies in the History of the Renaissance, op. cit., p. xxv.

22 Gerald C. Monsman, ‘Old Mortality at Oxford’, Studies in Philology, vol.

67 (1970), p. 372.

23 Cited in Monsman, ‘Old Mortality at Oxford’, op. cit., p. 371.

24 Walter Pater, ‘Diaphaneitè,’ Appendix B in Studies in the History of the

Renaissance, op. cit., p. 140. Hereafter, references to this edition
appear in parentheses after the quotation.

25 Kate Hext, ‘The Limitations of Schilleresque Self-Culture in Pater’s

Individualist Aesthetic’, in Victorian Aesthetic Conditions, op. cit., p.
216.

202
26 For a discussion of ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, see Matthew
Beaumont, The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the
Fin de Siècle (Peter Lang: Oxford, 2012), chapter 8.

27 These phrases are taken from Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean, ed.
Michael Levey (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 87.

28 See Regenia Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence and Globalization:

The Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–1920 (Palgrave Macmillan:
Basingstoke, 2010), p. 59: ‘The value of adolescence to admirers of
classical art like Schiller and Pater was precisely in its
characterlessness, the smoothness of a vacuous face showing
something of the detached indifference of the Gods.’

29 John J. Conlon, Walter Pater and the French Tradition (Bucknell

University Press: London, 1982), p. 65.

30 Rachel Teukolsky, The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and

Modernist Aesthetics (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2009), p. 147.

31 See E. G. E. Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (Alan Sutton: London,

1995). Lytton’s post-human is sphinx-like in ‘its calm, intellectual,
mysterious beauty’ (p. 8) – in short, it is diaphanous.

32 See Beaumont, Utopia Ltd., op. cit., chapter 4. Lukács noted that ‘the
years 1870–1 marked [a] turning-point in the development of ideology’:
see The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (Merlin Press:
London, 1980), p. 310.

33 Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, in Selected Writings, ed. David
McLellan (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1977), p. 545.

34 Albert Boime, Art and the French Commune: Imagining Paris after War
and Revolution (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1995), p. 3. See
also John Milner, Art, War and Revolution in France 1870–1 (Yale
University Press: New Haven, 2000), pp. 139–81.

35 Boime, Art and the French Commune, op. cit., pp. 7–8.

36 Both judgments are cited in Adam Parkes, A Sense of Shock: The

Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing (Oxford
University Press: New York, 2011), p. 10.

37 Levenson, Modernism, op. cit., p. 14.

38 See Rachel Teukolksky, ‘The Politics of Formalist Art Criticism: Pater’s

“School of Giorgione”,’ in Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins and Carolyn

203
 Williams (eds.), Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire (ELT Press:
Greensboro, 2002), op. cit., pp. 152–8.

39 Anonymous, review of A History of Painting in North Italy, Quarterly

Review, no. 133 (July 1872), pp. 119–20.

40 Frederic Harrison, ‘The Revolution of the Commune,’ Fortnightly

Review, no. 53 (1 May 1871), p. 558.

41 Anonymous, review of A History of Painting in North Italy, op. cit., p.

121.

42 For both Losurdo’s argument and Nietzsche’s comments on the

Commune, I am reliant on Peter Thomas’s review of the former’s
intellectual biography of the latter, Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico
(2002), ‘Over-Man and the Commune,’ New Left Review, vol. 31 (Jan/
Feb 2005), p. 139.

43 J. Hillis Miller, ‘Walter Pater: A Partial Portrait’, Daedalus, vol. 105, no.
1 (Winter 1976), p. 97.

44 The terms centrifugal and centripetal, used in this sense, are taken
from Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the
Paris Commune (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1988), p.
10.

45 See Walter Pater, ‘Mr. Gosse’s Poems,’ in Essays from ‘The Guardian’
(Macmillan: London, 1901), p. 109.

46 Pater, Marius the Epicurean, op. cit., p. 178. The phrase is taken from
a Stoic professor who acts as Marius’s mentor and who expounds ‘the
idea of Humanity – of a universal commonwealth of mind, which
becomes explicit, and as if incarnate, in a select communion of just
men made perfect’.

47 Georg Lukács, ‘Dostoevsky: Novellas’, in Reviews and Articles, trans.

Peter Palmer (Merlin Press: London, 1983), p. 51.

48 Walter Pater, ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’, in Greek Studies: A Series

of Essays (Macmillan: London, 1918), pp. 56–7.

204
WHAT REMAINS OF ADORNO’S
CRITIQUE OF CULTURE?
Norbert Schneider

T he major reference works on culture like to

begin their reflections with Cicero, who used
agriculture as a metaphor for intellectual processes
in the expression cultura animi – ‘cultivation of the
mind’.1 It soon becomes clear, however, that this
solitary source in antiquity offers little assistance in
relation to the history of the concept and the
problem. Although the word cultura appears
sporadically in the Western tradition, not
infrequently in the context of cultus, it was at a very
late stage that it acquired the semantic content and
ideological charisma with which we are familiar
today. It was only during the eighteenth century
that the concept of culture started to gain in
significance, as the economically and socially
advancing bourgeoisie was beginning to define its
own values and interpretations. In Herder, ‘culture’
is closely related to the idea of humanity, a state of
civilized behaviour, which – as he describes it in
Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind –
only emerged through an infinitely long process of
evolution. Herder accordingly associates Kultur
(culture, civilization) with Kultiviertheit
(cultivation), although he already notes sceptically:

205
Nothing can be more vague than the term [cultivation] itself;
nothing more apt to lead us astray than the application of it to
whole nations and ages. Among a cultivated people, what is the
number of those who deserve this name? in what is their
preeminence to be placed? and how far does it contribute to their
happiness? I speak of the happiness of individuals; for that the
abstract being, the state, can be happy, when all the members that
compose it suffer, is a contradiction, or rather a verbal illusion,
evident to the slightest view.2

Leaving aside the fact that pessimistic tones can

already be heard in this remarkable paragraph, the
overall impression is suggested that culture has
something to do with happiness, that Herder’s
philosophy of culture has clearly eudaemonistic
traits. The evolutionary aspect alone – which was
later taken up in Hegel’s philosophy of history3 –
allows all that is past to be viewed in Herder from
the horizon of the present as a movement of ascent,
in a secularized expectation of salvation.
It is obvious that the experience of the advances
made in productive forces during the Industrial
Revolution4 entered into these conceptions of
perfectibility.5 The bourgeoisie, which was
increasingly playing the leading role in society, was
now actively
exploring and defining new value systems and forms
of behaviour, new forms of sociability and politics
that were in harmony with the new state of
technology and the resulting improvement in the
standard of living. Whereas the high bourgeoisie,
which was profiting from industrialization, had
sufficient reason to base optimistic views of cultural
progress on these new achievements, the petty
bourgeoisie was only too well aware of the social

206
effects of mechanization and industrial-capitalist
profit-making.
It was therefore hardly an accident that the first
significant critique of culture came from an
intellectual descended from this social sphere. In
1749, Rousseau famously gave a decisively negative
answer to the prize question set by the Académie in
Dijon regarding what the sciences and arts had
contributed to the improvement of morals.6
Rousseau associated culture with ‘artificiality’ and
‘unnaturalness’, which he primarily perceived in
aristocratic forms of behaviour, their luxury, their
extravagant wastefulness at the expense of the
oppressed and the exploited. Since the only way of
correcting this state of affairs was to eliminate
inequality, Rousseau attempted to provide historical
and genetic evidence that equality existed in the
original state of humanity, the ‘état d’animalité’,
when humans were supposedly at one with nature
and there were no endogenous factors driving them
away from it. It was amour propre, love of oneself
and the desire to take priority over others and to
outdo competitors, that had led to ‘inégalité parmi
les hommes’.7 Rousseau was thus tracing an
affective structure that had been identified before
him by Hobbes and Spinoza, who spoke of appetitus
or conatus as the instinctive source of human
actions – and which, beyond the realm of
philosophical terminology, we may identify with
profit-seeking. His critique of culture, which
appealed to Nature – as both a retrograde and
ultimate utopia – to act as a corrective, was thus
directed not only against hedonism, luxury and the
fashions of aristocratic culture, but also within the
Enlightenment itself against the self-referential
perfectibilism of a sated bourgeoisie with an

207
unquestioned belief in progress. The Jacobins and
the social-revolutionary movements of the
nineteenth century were able to draw potential
political implications from this.
In Rousseau’s critique of culture, the ideologemes
of the conservative provincial aristocracy, which felt
pushed into a marginal position by the upstart
aristocrats at court,8 and those of the petty
bourgeoisie, threatened with being overrun by the
rise of industrial capitalism, appear to be bound
together. His critique thus represents the initial
phase of this pessimistically inflected form of
discourse. The second phase can be dated to the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In
this case, however, it primarily concerned the
educated bourgeoisie, among whom individual
theorists expressed their ‘discontent with culture’ in
ways that had mass appeal.9 The style and above all
the ideological goals of this critique of culture were
decisively defined by Nietzsche. Faced with
advancing industrialization, with the natural
sciences and technological disciplines in the midst
of a rapid rise, and the humanities
and cultural disciplines becoming increasingly
obliged to justify themselves, writers such as
Nietzsche made efforts to open up fresh horizons
for philosophy, which had supposedly lost its
purpose, for the unsettled educated bourgeoisie.
Although such authors made concessions to the new
spirit of the age to the extent that they rejected all
forms of antiquarian, historicist thinking and all
‘nostalgia for the past’ in general (as Nietzsche
presented it in ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of
History for Life’), and in this way were able to catch
up with modernity, they also castigated ‘so-called
industrial culture’ as ‘altogether the most vulgar

208
form of existence that has ever been’.10 As a
remedy against this culture, Nietzsche held up the
ideal of the ‘noble’ artist who, not unlike the
Übermensch, ‘breathes’ power.11 Nietzsche
regarded his ideal of culture as being realized in a
‘unanimity of life, thought, appearance and will’,12
with a destiny ‘to promote the production of the
philosopher, the artist and the saint within us and
without us and thereby to work at the perfecting of
nature’.13
Nietzsche’s critique of culture was already strongly
orientated towards the philosophy of life. It was
mainly directed against the ossified dogma, lacking
all vitality, of academic philosophers and
philologists that was often enough to become the
object of satirical mockery around and after 1900.
During this period, thinkers such as Georg Simmel
endorsed Nietzsche’s conclusions. In a volume of
essays entitled Philosophische Kultur (1911) and in
his book Der Konflikt der modernen Kultur (1916),14
Simmel complained that culture – still regarded by
him and other philosophers of the period as
representing an objectification of the mind – was
constantly in danger of losing contact with life,
becoming sterile and congealing into formality.
During this historical period, the critique of culture
mainly served the function of pushing forward a
mental process of self-purification and renewal
within the educated classes – and a Dionysian
aspect, a body-affirming vitality in the sense
adopted by the Life Reform Movement,15 was
intended to contribute to this. Freud introduced the
idea of liberating the libido into the debate as well.
However, in an effort to preserve its own sphere,
cultural criticism continued to immunize itself

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against everything technological, from which only
disaster or even barbarism appeared to emanate.
The phenomenon regarded in this negative way was
given the name ‘civilization’. This is seen most
clearly in Oswald Spengler, who wrote that ‘the
“Decline of the West” comprises nothing less than
the problem of Civilization’.16 While ‘culture’ for
Spengler signified a climax, ‘civilization’ marked the
degeneration that was inevitably to follow: ‘The
Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the
Culture.’17 While ‘culture’ represented ‘life’,
Spengler associated ‘civilization’ with withering and
death: ‘Culture and Civilization – the living body of
a soul and the mummy of it … Culture and
Civilization – the organism born of Mother Earth,
and the mechanism proceeding from hardened
fabric. Culture-man lives inwards, Civilization-man
outwards in space and amongst bodies and
“facts”.’18
Reckless and distorted though Spengler’s
hypotheses and theories appear to us today, to his
contemporaries they seemed utterly plausible. The
Decline of the West was one of the most widely
debated works of cultural criticism during the
1920s and also represented a challenge for
left-wing intellectuals. The young Adorno was not
unaffected by this, and in 1955 he published an
essay in Frankfurter Hefte entitled ‘Was Spengler
Right?’ ‘Where among all of Spengler’s disputatious
critics’, the essay asks, ‘was there one who was his
peer?’19 Adorno therefore attempted nothing less
than to adopt a similar role – albeit with a
considerable delay and in the light of the
experiences of the Second World War, the
emergence of totalitarian dictatorships and the

210
development of a ‘civilization in which innocent
millions were done to death in gas-chambers’,20
which afterwards simply went back to its normal
routine.
Adorno admits that some of Spengler’s
‘predictions’, such as his ‘thesis of the
metamorphosis of democracy into dictatorship’ had
been borne out as a result of the emergence of
totalitarianism. Also ‘striking’ was the prediction of
certain phenomena of ‘modern mass society,
especially its atavistic aspects for which he
developed the image of “modern cave-men”, and
this long before contempt for the masses itself
became an article for mass consumption’.21 Adorno
elsewhere mentions, not without admiration,
‘Spengler’s sharp eyes’,22 but he reconstructs the
motifs and the cui bono of Spengler’s hypotheses
critically. Despite the accurate diagnoses and
prognoses (for instance, the prediction of a
‘mounting intellectual indifference’,23 which Adorno
saw as being manifested in the positivism of the
social sciences), Spengler’s pessimism ultimately
implied an affirmation and reinforcement of existing
conditions instead of an indictment of them. His
contempt benefited the elites ‘whose approval the
author of The Decline of the West craved’.24 Adorno
counts Spengler as one of the ‘fore-runners’ of
fascism, even though Hitler had never been ‘fein
genug, well-bred enough’ for him.25 He reproaches
him for having mistaken ‘the “natural” qualities of
previous history’ – which he had only been able to
see as belonging to a blindly coursing fate – for
‘Nature and the nature of things itself’. Spengler
had thereby slandered the Enlightenment: ‘He was
a patron of that dark doom whose coming he had so
gloomily forecast.’26

211
Lorenz Jäger has correctly described Horkheimer
and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, first
published in hectographed form in 1944, as
representing a leftwing response to The Decline of
the West, ‘with a similarly grand claim to present a
comprehensive interpretation of history’.27 As its
title suggests, the two authors were concerned with
showing that Enlightenment is always ambiguous.
On the one hand, it was a precondition for freedom
– that is, for leading humanity out of the constraints
of Nature using the tools of reason. On the other
hand, however, in the form of instrumental
rationality – that is, in the reified form of objectified
structures and institutions – it was susceptible of
becoming impenetrable for ‘each individual’.
According to them, this became manifest in every
form of bureaucracy in the state and the economy,28
and in the unsurpassable brutality, the barbarism of
the systematic, industrial-scale murder committed
by the Nazi henchmen. ‘The absurdity of a state of
affairs in which the enforced power of the system
over men grows with every step that takes it out of
the power of nature, denounces the rationality of
rational society as obsolete.’29
Horkheimer and Adorno were concerned among
other things with showing that totalitarian features
prevail even in societies with democratic
constitutions, through systemic moments that are
already phenomenologically evident from the
products of the culture industry alone: ‘Culture now
impresses the same stamp on everything. Films,
radio and magazines make up a system which is
uniform as a whole and in every part.… The
decorative industrial management buildings and
exhibition centers in authoritarian countries are
much the same as anywhere else.’30 According to

212
Adorno, who wrote the chapter ‘The Culture
Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, the
monopolistic character of production enforces
identical structures; there is no space for diversity
or resistance in this world concerned only with
business and with profit. The schematization of
‘formats’ (hit songs, stars, soap operas, etc.) affects
not only their outward form of serial production. In
addition, it also penetrates into the content, the
structure of which is so standardized that the story
can be anticipated from the very first moment.
Adorno wanted to show how the culture industry
makes everything interchangeable and debases the
aesthetic quality to the level of a commodity. For
him, criticism of the all-encompassing
predominance of exchange-value is also undertaken
from a psychosocial point of view, as he is
concerned to highlight its effects on people’s
affective structure and mental-cognitive
constitution: everything, he argues, leads to a
disenfranchisement and debasement of
consciousness. Although the products of the culture
industry are intended to divert people from the
compulsions of work by providing ‘amusement’,
drawing consumers into an apparently different
sphere, the mechanized labour process with its
unvarying rhythms reproduces itself in the
manufacturing of ‘amusement commodities’: ‘What
happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can
only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s
leisure time. All amusement suffers from this
incurable malady.’31
In Adorno’s critique of the culture industry, the
analytic instruments for which were provided by
Marx’s and Lukács’s theory of alienation and
reification,32 the old opposition between culture and

213
civilization still shines through, as well as the
pattern of high culture followed by decay.
Admittedly, this analogy does not weaken the
substance or legitimation of Adorno’s approach. His
method of negative dialectics protected him, at
least in most cases, from adopting emphatic stances
regarding what culture ought to be. He did not wish
to be an ‘advocate of culture’ like the
representatives of a bourgeois cultural criticism
that he regarded as ‘imprisoned within the orbit of
that against which it struggles’.33 For him, such
critics were merely a ‘salaried and honoured
nuisance’ who work their way up to being experts
and judges and in
the process acquire an ‘arrogance’ based on the
fact that ‘in the forms of competitive society in
which all being is merely there for something else,
the critic himself is also measured only in terms of
his marketable success – that is, in terms of his
being for something else’.34 Adorno usually only
described culture ex negativo, to avoid any
conformist affirmation. To demonstrate the extent
to which the bourgeois concept of culture had
degenerated, he turned again and again to the
example of the Nazis, whose canon of culture
included only its shell, such as the names of classic
authors for whom they demanded narrow-minded
reverence – without noticing the potential for
criticism and resistance which, according to h im, is
inherent in culture a priori.
Admittedly, Adorno occasionally offers positive
examples of what culture is: ‘Culture is only true
when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets
this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism
is an indispensable element of culture which is in

214
itself contradictory.’35 A desire to define this
ontologically would imply fetishizing it:

But the greatest fetish of cultural criticism is the notion of culture as

such. For no authentic work of art and no true philosophy,
according to their very meaning, has ever exhausted itself in itself
alone, in its being-in-itself. They have always stood in relation to
the actual life-process of society from which they distinguished
themselves. Their very rejection of the guilt of a life which blindly
and callously reproduces itself, their insistence on independence
and autonomy, on separation from the prevailing realm of
purposes, implies, at least as an unconscious element, the
promise of a condition in which freedom were realized.36

This paragraph contains in a nutshell the most

important criteria for defining culture according to
Adorno – or at least it reveals what are, for him, its
central semantic connotations. Ultimately, culture
coincides with the ‘authentic work of art’, which is
characterized by ‘autonomy’, as the governing force
for a utopian claim to freedom, an emergence from
the realm of purposes, or – speaking less
philosophically – from the sphere of labour with its
conditions of exploitation and mental and physical
disintegration.37 Cultural theory is thus subsumed
into aesthetics, in a theory of the ‘work of art’ as a
monad, which, although it is inseparable from social
processes, nevertheless has the power to resist
them. Adorno believes the work of art is capable of
asserting itself, as an inner form of organization,
against a thoroughly and monopolistically organized
society. As evidence for this he invokes everything
that enjoyed respect and repute in the classic
avant-garde – from an opaque Symbolism with
Mallarméan leanings to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone
music. Depersonalization (‘Je est un autre’),
dissonance and disintegration, although their

215
inherent tendency is to generate neuroses,
paradoxically become the guarantors of an
anti-ascetic form of hedonism.38
There is no concealing the fact that Adorno,
through this aesthetic of the ‘autonomous’ work of
art, was in fact providing his own educated
bourgeois preferences with a consistent form of
legitimation. It was no accident that this aesthetic
was capable
of being adapted seamlessly by precisely those high
priests of elitist culture whom he mocked as
philistines, and that it could even be integrated into
a quietist model of iconicity whose interpretative
glass-bead game forever amounted to no more than
a demonstration of harmonious coherence.39
Adorno’s concept of autonomy has certainly passed
through different theoretical waters than that of the
various immanentist trends that have been taken in
by the ideology of self-styled autonomous art. The
latter is incapable of admitting to its commodity-like
nature, precisely because it secretly knows that the
law governing its stylistic differentiation, the logical
conclusion of which is the recognizable logo of the
works themselves, follows the competitive
mechanisms of a market that promotes continuing
innovation. Adorno, by contrast, was well aware of
the character of art as a commodity. But although
he always showed his reverence for Benjamin
during the postwar period – perhaps from a sense of
guilt over failure to provide support during
Benjamin’s exile – he did not wish to follow his
politicization of the issue in his ‘Work of Art’ essay,
which famously concludes with the epigrammatic
sentences, ‘This is the situation of politics which
Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism

216
responds by politicizing art.’40 Adorno accepted in
principle Benjamin’s theory that works of art had to
be appropriate to the most advanced state of the
productive forces; and he also agreed with his view
of the transition from cult-value to
exhibition-value.41 However, while Benjamin –
closer to Brecht here – wished in principle to see
the aura destroyed, Adorno rescued it by stopping
at Benjamin’s phenomenological description of the
aura (‘We define … the latter as the unique
phenomenon of a distance, however close it may
be’).42 Adorno: ‘What is called aura in this passage
is something that is familiar to artistic experience.
It generally goes by the name of “atmosphere”. The
atmosphere of a work of art is the connection of its
moments in so far as they point beyond
themselves.’43 The auratic moment, Adorno
continues, does not deserve any sort of Hegelian
ban, because ‘Careful analysis reveals aura to be an
objective property of the work of art.’44
With this type of formulation, he was able to hold
the work of art, as the epitome of his concept of
culture, away from any economic causal nexus. He
regarded the latter as operating – to an extreme
extent – only in the culture industry. In the United
States, where he suffered such a culture shock, he
experienced the way in which the culture industry,
the aesthetic of triviality, had entered so-called
‘high art’ in the form of the consumerist
iconography of Pop art. However, with his
orientation towards the classic avant-garde, he had
not reflected on the problem this raised. Pop art
was cynically implementing a demand raised by
early left-wing movements for the elimination of the
contrast between high and low culture,45 which
always also represented a class antagonism. When

217
Warhol assimilated his works to the phenotype of
commodity aesthetics (such as product packaging)
to the extent of making the two visually
indistinguishable, he was sarcastically
demonstrating the commodity character of all art
under capitalism.
Adorno remained in his normative positions and
trimmed his concept of art so that that only opacity,
mysteriousness, dissonance and blackness remained
as criteria.46 Otherwise able to speak eloquently
about the commodity character of cultural
objectifications, he was here subscribing to idealist
premises in the belief that it was possible to distil
something ontologically (and thus essentialistically)
from art that was untouched by, and undebasable
by, the economy. This shows the limitations of his
approach, which like no other was to shape the
thinking of the critical intelligentsia of 1968.
In structural terms, Adorno’s procedure was hardly
different from that of Lukács, whom he often
criticized. They both raised their own personal
preferences to the level of a universally valid
standard – nineteenth-century realism in the case of
Lukács, and the avant-garde inclined towards
abstraction in the case of Adorno. Adorno gave
practically no empirical attention to artistic
processes at all. For this would have meant
grasping in categorical terms the polymorphism of
everything that throughout history has counted as
art. Adorno subscribed only to the conceptual
standard of ‘modern art’.
Despite all the revivals in the field of abstraction,
however, modern art had ultimately come to an end
already around 1960. The name ‘Zéro’47 – quite

218
unintentionally – was an indication of this terminal
state, and while Clement Greenberg’s demand for
‘flatness’ insisted on flattening within aesthetics,
from today’s point of view it can also be regarded in
a figurative sense as a demand for semantic
shallowness. Along with the ‘expansion of art’48
there came greater awareness of the fact that art is
a consensus term that needs to be approached not
through analyses of its essence, but instead
historically and functionally. The institutional
analysis49 of the ‘Artworld’50 by Arthur Danto and
George Dickie promises greater insights here than
an aesthetic theory that is perpetually asserting
apodictically what works of art allegedly ‘want’.
When Adorno, usually with aphoristic brevity, spoke
in an unmistakably affirmative way about the
twentieth century’s ‘-isms’, he was regarding them
as something decreed by nature, as they appeared
to be sufficiently justified by their expressive or
ideological achievements. He never reflected on the
mechanisms of selection initiated in the art market
or on the processes of canonization arising through
the accreditation provided by the museums.
Another blind spot in his theory was the fact that in
celebrating the authentic work of art he was still
subliminally paying tribute to the aesthetics of
genius – which by no coincidence first arose at the
time when the capitalist art market was starting to
establish itself. With the prospect of acquiring
economic capital, the market even today finds
indispensable the consecration of artists that is
provided by the system of gallery-owners, art critics
and the associated museum personnel, as Bourdieu
in particular has shown in his analyses of ‘symbolic
capital’.51

219
What remains, then, of Adorno’s critique of culture?
The gloomy diagnoses of his critique of the culture
industry may still have force – and everything that
has since supervened in the entertainment industry
in the age of digitalization would have
driven him to irretrievable despair. However, in
view of the objections presented above, the elitism
of his theory of the work of art seems to me to be a
most unsuitable alternative – no matter how
fascinated we may still be by h is thinking even
today.
1 Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (Harvard University
Press/Loeb Classical Library: Cambridge, Massachusetts, rev. edn,
1945), pp. 158–61, II 13: ‘Cultura autem animi philosophia est; haec
extrahit vitia radicitus et praeparat animos ad satus accipiendos eaque
mandat iis et, ut ita dicam, serit, quae adulta fructus uberrimos ferant.’ /
‘Now the cultivation of the soul is philosophy; this pulls out vices by the
roots and makes souls fit for the reception of seed, and commits to the
soul and, as we may say, sows in it seed of a kind to bear the richest
fruit when fully grown.’ It should be noted that strictly speaking, Cicero
is not discussing cultura animi here, but rather describing cultura as
philosophia animi. This is by no means a minor distinction, but it has
not been taken into account in the endless lexicographic traditions in
which the formula has been passed down, as the source reference is
almost never used. On the term cultura, see Karl Ernst Georges,
Ausführliches lateinisch-deutsches Handwörterbuch (Hahn: Hanover,
1992; reprint of 8th edn, 1913), vol. 1, col. 1793.

2 Johann Gottfried Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man

(1784–91), trans. T. Churchill (Johnson: London, 1800), p. v.

3 See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of

World History: Introduction, Reason in History, trans. H. B. Nisbet, intr.
Duncan Forbes (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1975), p. 54:
‘World history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom – a
progress whose necessity it is our business to comprehend.’

4 See T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution 1760–1830 (Oxford

University Press: Oxford, 1968); Sidney Pollard, Peaceful Conquest:
The Industrialization of Europe 1760–1970 (Oxford University Press:
Oxford, 1981); Dieter Ziegler, Die Industrielle Revolution
(Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft: Darmstadt, 2005), pp. 13–14.

220
5 The idea of perfectibilitas, the perfection and improvement of people’s
living conditions, is already found earlier than the eighteenth century in
Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal and Malebranche, as well as in the
Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes – for example, in Bernard Le
Bovier de Fontenelle, ‘Digression sur les anciens et les modernes’
(1687) in Oeuvres de Fontenelle, ed. Georges-Bernard Depping (Belin:
Paris, 1818; reprinted Slatkine: Geneva, 1968), vol. 2, pp. 353–65, here
p. 357.

6 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours qui a remporté le prix à l’Académie

de Dijon, en l’année 1750, sur cette question proposée par la même
académie: ‘Si le rétablissement des sciences et des arts a contribué à
épurer les moeurs’, par un citoyen de Genève (Barrillot: Geneva, n.d. [?
1751]); also in Œuvres complètes, ed. B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond,
vol. 3 (Gallimard: Paris, 1964), pp. 1–107.

7 See Rousseau, ‘Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité

parmi les hommes’ (Amsterdam, 1755); in Œuvres complètes, vol. 3,
op. cit., pp. 109–225.

8 See Renato Galliani, Rousseau, le luxe et l’idéologie nobiliaire: Étude

socio-historique (Voltaire Foundation at the Taylor Institution: Oxford,
1989).

9 See Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, the original German title of Sigmund
Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, trans. Joan Riviere, ed. James
Strachey (Hogarth Press: London, 1963; International
Psycho-Analytical Library, no. 17).

10 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German

Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and
Adrian del Caro (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2001), p. 56.

11 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality,

trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge,
1997), p. 120 (‘in both cases the aristocratic culture breathes power’).

12 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for

Life’, in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge, 1997), p. 123.

13 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, in Untimely

Meditations, op. cit., p. 160.

14 Georg Simmel, Philosophische Kultur: Gesammelte Essais (Klinkhardt:

Leipzig, 1911) and ‘The Conflict of Modern Culture’ [1916], trans. D. E.

221
 Jenkinson, in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby
and Mike Featherstone (Sage Publications: London, 1997), pp. 75–89.

15 See Ulrich Linse, ‘Die Lebensreformbewegung (Sammelrezension)’, in

Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 17 (1977), pp. 538–43; Wolfgang R.
Krabbe, Kulturkritik und Lebensreformbewegung, 1870–1930
(Fernuniversität: Hagen, 2005), part 1: Kulturkritik und
Lebensreformbewegung.

16 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles F. Atkinson

(New York: Knopf, 1927), p. 31. German original: Der Untergang des
Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte
(Braumüller: Vienna, 1918).

17 Ibid., p. 31.

18 Ibid., p. 353. As early as 1914, Thomas Mann – who then still held
pro-war attitudes – in his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man reprimanded
his brother Heinrich Mann for being a ‘literatus of civilization’, implying
not only decadence but also Francophilia, and above all a lack of
literary cultivation. See Hermann Kurzke, ‘Die Quellen der
“Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen”: Ein Zwischenbericht’, in
Internationales Thomas-Mann-Kolloquium: 1986, in Lübeck (Francke:
Berne, 1987; Thomas-Mann-Studien, vol. 7), pp. 291–310, esp. pp.
298–9 (with numerous references).

19 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Was Spengler Right?’, Encounter, vol. 26 (1966),

pp. 25–8, here p. 26. German original: ‘Wird Spengler rechtbehalten?’,
in Adorno, Kritik: Kleine Schriften zur Gesellschaft (Suhrkamp:
Frankfurt am Main, 1971; edition suhrkamp, 469), pp. 96–103.

20 Adorno, ‘Was Spengler Right?’, p. 26.

21 Ibid., pp. 26, 28.

22 Ibid., p. 28.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid., p. 29.

27 Lorenz Jäger, Adorno: Eine politische Biographie (Deutscher

Taschenbuch-Verlag: Munich, 2005), p. 173.

222
28 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment,
trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 38.

29 Ibid., pp. 38–9.

30 Ibid., p. 120. See also Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, trans.

Anson G. Rabinbach, New German Critique, vol. 6 (Fall 1975), pp.
12–19, reprinted in Adorno, The Culture Industry, ed. J. M. Bernstein
(Routledge: London, 1991), pp. 98–106.

31 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. 137.

32 See Karl Marx, ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret’, in
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes
(Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1976), pp. 163–77; here p. 165: ‘In order,
therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of
religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous
figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both
with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of
commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism
which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are
produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the
production of commodities.’ Georg Lukács, ‘Reification and the
Consciousness of the Proletariat’, in Lukács, History and Class
Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney
Livingstone (Merlin Press: London, 1971), pp. 83–222.

33 Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and

Shierry Weber (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1967), pp.
19–34, here p. 20.

34 Ibid., p. 20.

35 Ibid., p. 22.

36 Ibid., p. 23.

37 Elsewhere, he writes, ‘That which legitimately could be called culture

attempted, as an expression of suffering and contradiction, to maintain
a grasp on the idea of the good life. Culture cannot represent either that
which merely exists or the conventional and no longer binding
categories of order which the culture industry drapes over the idea of
the good life …’ – Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, in The
Culture Industry, op. cit., p. 104.

38 ‘By representing deprivation as negative, they [works of art] retracted,

as it were, the prostitution of the impulse and rescued by mediation
what was denied. The secret of aesthetic sublimation is its

223
 representation of fulfilment as a broken promise.’ Horkheimer and
Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., pp. 139–40.

39 Max Imdahl, who explicitly appealed to Adorno, stated for example as

the quintessence of his interpretation of Picasso’s painting Guernica
that ‘the cohering of incoherence and coherence is the real message’ –
Max Imdahl, ‘Zu Picassos “Guernica”: Inkohärenz und Kohärenz in
moderner Bildlichkeit’, in Rainer Warning and Winfried Wehle (eds.),
Lyrik und Malerei der Avantgarde (Fink: Munich, 1982), pp. 521–65,
here p. 560.

40 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (Fontana: Glasgow,
1973), pp. 219–53, here p. 244.

41 Ibid., p. 227: ‘This is comparable to the situation of the work of art in

prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it
was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later did it come
to be recognized as a work of art. In the same way today, by the
absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a
creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are
conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as
incidental.’

42 Ibid., pp. 224–5: ‘The concept of aura which was proposed above with
reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference
to the aura of natural ones. We define the aura of the latter as the
unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while
resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain
range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you
experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image
makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary
decay of the aura.’

43 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Christian Lenhardt

(Routledge & Kegan Paul: London and Boston, Massachusetts, 1984),
p. 386.

44 Ibid., p. 386.

45 See Leslie A. Fiedler, Cross the Border – Close the Gap (Stein and
Day: New York, 1972).

46 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 58: ‘If works of art are to survive
in the context of extremity and darkness, which is social reality, and if
they are to avoid being sold as mere comfort, they have to assimilate
themselves to that reality. Radical art today is the same as dark art: its

224
 background colour is black. Much of contemporary art is irrelevant
because it does not take note of this fact, continuing instead to take a
childish delight in bright colours. The ideal of blackness is, in
substantive terms, one of the most profound impulses of abstract art.’

47 See Klaus-Gereon Beuckers (ed.), Zero-Studien: Aufsätze zur

Düsseldorfer Gruppe Zero und ihrem Umkreis (Münster: Lit, 1997;
Karlsruher Schriften zur Kunstgeschichte, vol. 2).

48 See Jürgen Claus, Expansion der Kunst (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1970).

49 See George Dickie, Aesthetics: An Introduction (Pegasus: New York,

1971); Dickie, ‘Defining Art’, in American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 6,
no. 3 (1969), pp. 253–66.

50 On the ‘Artworld’, see Arthur C. Danto, ‘The Artworld’, in Journal of

Philosophy, vol. 61 (1964), pp. 571–84; Danto, The Transfiguration of
the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Harvard University Press:
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981); Danto, The Philosophical
Disenfranchisement of Art (Columbia University Press: New York,
1986); Danto, The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art
World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2001).

51 Bourdieu regards ‘symbolic capital’ as representing ‘the capital of

consecration – implying a power to consecrate objects (this is the effect
of a signature or trademark) or people (by publication, exhibition, etc.)
and hence of giving them value, and of making profits from this
operation’ – Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure
of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford University Press:
Stanford, 1996), p. 148. He regards the art market as a sphere in which
symbolic capital is converted into economic capital. However, he also
points out that the economy penetrates every pore of aesthetic and
intellectual endeavours, even when they are opposed to the market
under the banner of the avant-garde. One should not believe ‘that there
is no economic logic in this charismatic economy founded on the sort of
social miracle which is an act free of any determination other than the
intrinsically aesthetic intention. We shall see that there are economic
conditions for the economic challenge which leads to its being oriented
towards the most risky positions of the intellectual and artistic
avant-garde, and for the aptitude to maintain oneself there in a lasting
way in the absence of any financial counterpart; and there are also
economic conditions of access to symbolic profits – which are
themselves capable of being converted, in the more or less long term,
into economic profits’ (Rules of Art, p. 216).

Translated by Michael Robertson

225
ABY WARBURG AND THE SPIRIT OF
CAPITALISM
Frederic J. Schwartz

I n March 1907 Aby Warburg read the first edition

of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the
‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and responded
enthusiastically.1 He called it ‘magnificent’
(prachtvoll) in his journal, adding ‘We must have
him [Weber] for Hamburg.’2 To his wife Mary, he
wrote that the essay was among ‘the most
impressive’ texts he had read since the works of
Thomas Carlyle and Hermann Osthoff.3
Warburg read The Protestant Ethic at an important
moment, as he was painstakingly drafting his essay
‘Francesco Sassetti’s Last Will and Testament’4 in
isolation in Berlin, and he claimed the treatise gave
him the courage of his convictions in his own work.
The overlap of Weber’s and Warburg’s interests is
clear: both explore the emergence of a modern turn
of values towards active involvement in the world,
towards the rational exploitation of natural
resources or trade opportunities for the
accumulation of wealth. Both were tracing the
development by which, in the West, the
otherworldly demands of religion turned towards an
ethical interaction with the larger world. For
Warburg at the time, this was a process of
enlightened reconciliation, part of the civilizing

226
process; for Weber, it was part of a more
ambivalent development of Western modernity.
Yet the fundamental incompatibility of the
sociologist’s bold thesis about the origins of
capitalist modernity and the art historian’s
interrogation of the afterlife of antiquity is equally
clear, and an examination of the latter’s response in
the light of his own work has led commentators to
characterize Warburg’s reading of Weber as
idiosyncratic.5 Warburg claimed to find important
confirmation in Weber of his own exploration of the
process by which Sassetti, a merchant in the service
of the Medici, balanced a deeply felt religiosity with
worldly concerns in quattrocento Florence. But if
the sociologist was concerned with the same issue –
the way Christian values came to be harmonized
with worldly life – his argument was very different.
Weber traced the development of a methodical
mode of living orientated towards the accumulation
of wealth combined with a worldly ascetic lifestyle
to Protestant, and particularly Calvinist, notions of
vocation and predestination. His argument was, in
fact, that the secular advances of modern capitalism
did not find fertile soil in Catholic Renaissance
Florence, as had been asserted by Werner Sombart
in his Modern Capitalism of 1902 and repeated, in
qualified and contradictory form, in several works
thereafter.6

227
 1 Max Weber, c. 1918, from
Marianne Weber, Max Weber:
Ein Lebensbild (J. C. B. Mohr:
Tübingen, 1926).

Bernd Roeck and Charlotte Schoell-Glass have

pointed to some of these contradictions and also
noted the strong identificatory aspect of Warburg’s
reading of Weber. In his notes and letters to his
wife, the art historian seems to have been most
affected by the pathos of Weber’s discussion of the
Protestant ethic: the demand for an ascetic life that
must nonetheless be orientated towards secular and
worldly pursuits, what Weber called the ‘iron cage’
(stahlhartes Gehäuse) of duty, of selfless toil in a
calling that had become detached from the deep
values that once gave it meaning.7 In The

228
Protestant Ethic, Warburg found deeply affecting
terms by which to understand his discomfort with
his own Jewish and mercantile Hamburg
environment – but in a description of Calvinism
and other Protestant sects. Thus we find in his
private writings a deeply personal reading of
Weber, one that seems to conflate a ‘Jewish’ with a
‘Protestant’ ethos; while in his published work,
Warburg refuses to argue in the open with Weber
about whether the origins of capitalism are to be
found in Catholic Italy or in the Protestant new
world.
Warburg sent his Sassetti study to Weber, and
Bernd Roeck has located and published Weber’s
polite reply.8 That would seem to be the end of the
Weber–Warburg dialogue. But a closer looks reveals
two things: first, it shows some good grounds for
Warburg’s rejection of Weber’s thesis, as well as
reasons not to engage in open debate; and second,
it points to a longer afterlife of this exchange, both
in and beyond Warburg’s and Weber’s work. And if
Warburg’s complex response leaves him open to
accusations that he was a careless reader of Weber,
the sociologist’s writings show his own inability to
get to grips with the work of the art historian.
Teasing out the complexities of this interchange
allows important historiographical and
epistemological concerns to come into focus around
the complex issues of both ‘spirit’ and capitalism in
the early twentieth century.

229
 2 Aby Warburg (right) with his brothers (left
to right) Paul, Felix, Max and Fritz, 1929.
Photo: Warburg Institute, London.

When Weber wrote to Warburg to thank him for

sending a copy of the Sassetti essay, it seems at
first glance that the sociologist had understood the
art historian quite well. Weber was fascinated by
the simultaneous presence, in Sassetti’s testament,
of mutually exclusive sets of values and approaches
to the world, by Warburg’s attention
to conflicting Weltanschauungen that could
nonetheless be reconciled or held in some sort of
balance. We can call these Weltanschauungen
sacred and secular – or Christian and
world-denying, on the one hand, and ‘pagan’ and
world-affirming on the other. Weber wrote that he
found Warburg’s account ‘extremely convincing’,
and points to the way the essay captured:

the wonderful lustre that fell upon this [Florentine] bourgeoisie, that
it was not like the Calvinist one, standing on firm ethical ground,

230
that it could not play the ‘Superman’ with good conscience, the
consciousness of the inner conflict and doubt, the suffering under
the sudden incursion of economic forces that demand a new style
of life, but which they cannot achieve on this ground.9

Weber understands, in other words, Warburg’s

attention to contradiction. Yet he reads the
Florentine situation backwards through the lens of
his own conclusions about the Protestant ethic,
seeing in the Renaissance merchant an incomplete
historical state, more particularly an inability to
achieve a ‘new style of life’. He implies a teleology
tending towards capitalist modernity, but this
teleology in fact contradicts what he described as a
fateful coincidence of value-rationality
(Wertrationalität) and means–end rationality
(Zweckrationalität) that produced, by a historical
accident, the ideological preconditions for the
development of a modern economy, one in which
the desire to display the worldly signs of God’s
grace paradoxically led to the methodical pursuit
and generation of wealth. This casts light on the
differences between the two scholars and suggests
that there are methodological reasons for
Warburg’s reluctance to get to grips with Weber’s
real thesis. For Weber was looking for a unified
point of view, a consistent set of values that would
characterize a powerful ethic and would create a
consistent ‘style of life’. Wilhelm Hennis, perhaps
the most important recent commentator on Weber,
has analysed the ‘spirit’ of capitalism as the
principle behind a consistent form of the conduct of
life, and indeed finds in the question of
Lebensführung the central problematic of the
sociologist’s entire oeuvre.10 Hennis’s argument,
which seeks to redefine the relation of Weber’s

231
work to the academic sociology that followed in its
wake, is corroborated by the pithy but peculiar
response to Warburg. Warburg, for his part, found
no consistent styles of life or of art in history, but
rather discontinuities and contradictions, agonistic
negotiations between competing values and beliefs
that could be reconciled but resisted identity. In his
letter, Weber sees such clashes as a sign of
incomplete development; and while Warburg
implied at times a similar teleology, he was more
interested in these inconsistencies and came to see
them as constants of human history.
The difference was not merely one of
temperamental or methodological inclination. At the
time of the so-called Methodenstreiten, or
methodological debates in the human sciences,
much more was at stake. Warburg’s attention to
contradiction, his refusal to focus on form alone,
and his rejection of linear development and neat
periodization
dization amount to an implicit critique of prevailing
art-historical models of style. This model
represented a compelling convergence of idealism,
formalism and historicism that saw in visual form a
more or less faithful image of a historically specific
spirit or world view, a constellation perhaps most
powerfully expressed in Heinrich Wölfflin’s famous
remark that one could see the spirit of the Gothic as
clearly in the shoes worn at the time as in the
greatest cathedrals.11 It was an unstable
convergence, creating methodological conundrums
and inviting both circular reasoning and cliché; but
the model and its problems were at the centre of
Alois Riegl’s important conception of the
Kunstwollen, Wölfflin’s sophisticated but ambivalent
attempt to define the visual root of form, and Erwin

232
Panofsky’s neo-Kantian exploration of ‘symbolic
form’. All of these attempts involved the need to
abstract from works of art the common denominator
of a consistent visual style, the conviction that such
a visual idiom expressed something essential about
a culture – its ‘spirit’ – and the axiom that this
common form alone was an adequate expression of
the culture.
The likes of Riegl, Wölfflin and Panofsky were
attuned to the methodological problems of this
view, but they were equally attached to the
paradigm. And the specificity of Warburg’s
art-historical practice lay in his rejection of it.
Though notes of the time reveal a conviction about
the ‘organic’ nature of a culture, he drew attention
to the stylistic discontinuities in word and image; he
insisted on the complex and sometimes
contradictory textuality of the visual; and he
resisted the attempts to characterize cultures as
harmonious or unified. In his essay on
‘Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Image at the
Time of Luther’, for example, he wrote as follows of
Raphael’s frescos for the tomb of Agostino Chigi at
Santa Maria del Popolo:

The formal beauty of these figures and the exquisite taste with
which the artist reconciles pagan and Christian belief, must not be
allowed to obscure the truth that even in Italy, around 1520, at the
time of greatest artistic freedom and creativity, the antique was –
as it were – revered in the form of a Janus-faced herm. One face
wore a daemonic scowl, exacting superstitious awe; the other face
was Olympian and serene, inviting aesthetic veneration.12

The serenity, balance and anthropocentric forms of

the High Renaissance cannot, in other words, be
taken as evidence of a consistent, harmonious

233
humanist culture. Warburg took images to be
symptoms rather than essences, and dealt with
them as singular artefacts rather than examples of a
type. And if his alternative conceptual framework
formed around anthropological poles of myth and
enlightenment, Aberglaube and Besonnenheit,
created its own problems, Warburg’s interest in the
afterlife of antiquity played havoc with usual
periodizations and productively troubled historicist
assumptions about historical time.13
Compared with Warburg’s mix of philological
positivism and methodological modesty or
scepticism, Weber’s work looks rather different, for
all its sophistication.
Weber worked with abstractions that combined the
characteristics of the diverse phenomena of history,
fully aware, at least in his methodological writings,
that they never existed in pure form: he called these
abstractions ‘ideal types’, and indeed ‘capitalism’
and ‘the Florentine bourgeoisie’ were two
examples.14 He was also aware that the process of
concept formation was rooted in the present and
had no claim for absolute historical validity. The
‘ideal types’, he writes in the second edition of The
Protestant Ethic, are ‘absolutely necessary, in order
to bring out the characteristic differences’, but also
‘in a certain sense [do] violence to historical
reality’.15 Such concepts were abstractions that
unified and harmonized, that neatly packaged the
past into unproblematic entities that simply did not
exist. Weber was attuned to the risks of his
conceptual tools, the trap of hypostatization, but
parted company with orthodox neo-Kantians by
seeing the types more as a concentrate of historical
reality than the result of mere reflection. In Joachim
Radkau’s, words the types were, for Weber,

234
‘structurally present within reality and not just
projected into it by the human mind.’16 If for
Warburg there was no one, fundamental ‘spirit’ of
the Renaissance, or for that matter capitalism, it
was precisely such a ‘spirit’ that Weber, Sombart
and others at the time sought.
Indeed the orthodox art-historical approach based
on the concept of style – the ‘ideal type’ par
excellence – was often taken as a model by the
economists of the younger Historical School of
Political Economy and the sociologists who emerged
from it. Weber discusses Riegl’s notion of the
Kunstwollen extensively in his fundamental
methodological essay ‘Der Sinn der “Wertfreiheit”
der soziologischen und ökonomischen
Wissenschaften’, written in 1913 and published in
Logos in 1917/18. Though he found it productive,
Weber finds problems in a history of art in which
aesthetic judgments inevitably play havoc with
causal accounts. This problem of the
‘heteronomous’ way in which the objects of art
history are given to the knowing subject
notwithstanding, he notes that ‘in the field of
painting, the delicate modesty of the problematic in
Wölfflin’s Classic Art is a quite outstanding example
of the achievements possible in empirical work.’17
Sombart refers to the work of Wölfflin in writing
that the task of the economist was to identify the
‘stylistic context’ of economic systems as art
historians had identified the ‘spirit of the Gothic’,18
and Max Scheler praised Sombart’s success in
discovering the ‘strict inner stylistic unity
[Stileinheit]’ of historical economies.19 In his
magisterial essay on the state of hermeneutics
between the wars, published in the Jahrbuch für
Kunstgeschichte in 1921/2, Karl Mannheim treats

235
the work of Riegl, Sombart and Weber as related
attempts to determine historical world views.20 For
all his circumspection, Weber was working within
this problematic; Warburg was not.
The argument that Warburg read in 1907 was,
certainly, an extraordinary one. Weber saw the
emergence of modern capitalism in the West as the
result of a particular convergence. In his terms, the
path to modernity was opened by the fact that
means–end rationality, so characteristic of the
modern economy and domination
of nature, could lay claim to Western culture only
when it became value-rational. The Calvinist belief
in predestination, and in the signs of worldly
success as evidence of God’s grace, led to a
religious drive behind an ascetic, methodical
organization of life combined with the ruthless
quest for financial gain. And the argument led to
extraordinary conclusions. First, Weber asserted
that capitalism had irrational roots, or roots that
were based on religion and not instrumental logic:
the desire to display the signs of grace. And second,
that capitalism had become irrational once again:
once these two forms of rationality converged,
leaving subjects locked into the need for a calling in
the absence of other values, modern industrial
society no longer needed the religious bases of its
origin. The result was rationality and specialization,
the ascetic drive for the accumulation of wealth
without the belief in God’s grace or any other
values, what Weber called the ‘iron cage’ of
capitalism.
With its compelling logic and extraordinary
derivation of a specifically modern form of
alienation, the argument spoke to Warburg, though

236
the art historian clearly rejected both Weber’s
methodological presuppositions and indeed his
conclusions. And we see in his work how Weber
turned a deaf ear to Warburg’s implicit objections.
The reasons are clearly the hermeneutic habits of
thought that I have explored elsewhere as the result
of romantic anti-capitalism, the positing of a unified
spirit and culture in the past that was, in fact, a
fantasy, a projection onto the past of precisely the
qualities of life that were felt to be missing from an
alienated present. Already in the first edition of The
Protestant Ethic we see the search for a unified
‘spirit’ as a causal factor. We see the positing of a
corresponding ‘style of life’ as the root of
capitalism, not as the result of practical imperatives
or opportunities (and here we must leave aside
entirely the question of Weber’s complex
engagement with Marx). In the book, Weber echoes
the Kulturkritik of his time that bemoaned the loss
of unity: Goethe, he writes, ‘tried to teach us the
basic ascetic motive of the bourgeois style of life – if
it is indeed to be Style and not its lack’.21 The lack
of style of contemporary life, its failure to develop a
unified spirit and culture, was of course a
commonplace of contemporary thought. Cut off
from values and from spirit, life was no longer, says
Weber, the expression of a style. Style – an
abstraction, a concept – was at some level very real
for Weber. As attuned as he was to the risks of his
conceptual tools, the risk of hypostatization, the
ideal type had its own energy that led it to be taken
by Weber as historical and social reality.22 In the
second edition, Weber shows more such tendencies.
For one, he removes the sceptical quotation marks
around the notion of the ‘spirit’ of capitalism.23 And
he inserts a long footnote on Leon Battista Alberti,

237
the Florentine humanist and son of a businessman.
In one of his responses to The Protestant Ethic,
Sombart had pointed to Alberti’s simultaneous piety
and practical economic attitude; Weber insists that
his religion was merely formal, that he was
‘inwardly already emancipated from … the tradition
of the Church’.24 The Renaissance figure as
resolutely secular, with a clear-cut attitude and
style of life:
it is as if Weber had forgotten the case of Sassetti,
Warburg’s lesson about how the things that matter
in history and drive it are often those that make a
mockery of ideal types and the concept of style,
with their tendency to homogenize and hypostatize.
Yet significant though they are, these
methodological differences should not blind us to
larger and more significant implications of the brief
meeting of minds between Weber and Warburg.
Two points need to be made: first, that in his works
on the Florentine bourgeoisie and on pagan-antique
prophecy at the time of the Reformation, Warburg
had wandered into a large debate on the origins of
capitalism; and second, that he wanted absolutely
no part in it. Studying the complex afterlife of
antiquity in the Renaissance, Warburg was working
from the same sources as, for example, Sombart in
his Modern Capitalism, The Bourgeois, and other
studies; in his work on Dürer and Luther, Warburg
was covering much of the same ground as Weber
and also Ernst Troeltsch, in his monumental work
The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches of
1911;25 and in his work on the complex
interrelations of religion, economies and culture, he
was in the very same territory as Georg Simmel,
whose Philosophy of Money appeared in 1900 and
whose Religion appeared in 1906.26 And Warburg

238
was surely aware that the common ground needed
to be traversed very carefully. For as is now clear,
the debates about capitalism were inseparable from
debates about religion. With his sensitivity to
anti-Semitism, for example, he knew well Sombart’s
notorious The Jews and Economic Life of 1911, a
book in which the author attributed the calculating
and exploitative aspects of capitalism to a
specifically Jewish ethic.27 Sombart’s book was later
than the Sassetti essay, but it expanded on points
Sombart had been making since 1903 while it
fleshed out, with an extensive scholarly apparatus,
the current tendency to equate Jews and the
problems of a modern economy that was a mainstay
of the anti-Semitism of the time. Thus another
reason for Warburg’s resolute refusal to establish
the sort of precise links between religious beliefs
and economic ethos that are so obvious in the work
of Weber.
Yet Warburg’s refusal to accept the terms of the
debate that raged in this scholarly area came at a
cost. His ‘Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and
Images in the Age of Luther’, for example, looks
dated compared with other writings of the time on
the Reformation. Luther is the hero of Warburg’s
account, remaining sceptical of Phillip
Melanchthon’s intense engagement with astrology.
For Warburg, Melanchthon’s attention to the astral
arts reveals a ‘primitive, totemistic obsession with
correspondences (as embodied in the pagan nativity
cult)’, while Luther is cast as one of the ‘leaders of
the struggle for historical objectivity’.28 Yet seeing
Luther as the pioneer of an enlightened
Christianity, answerable to individual thought and
eschewing the pagan trappings and magical ritual
of Catholicism, is a specifically nineteenth-century

239
conception of the Reformation. It is a view espoused
chiefly by perhaps the most influential theologian of
the late nineteenth century, Albrecht Ritschl, who
codified the view of Luther’s rejection of Rome as
part of a German tradition of freedom of
conscience;
it is also in line with the nationalist, Prussian
investment in Luther as representing a modern
form of Christianity that was deeply implicated in
Bismarck’s Kulturkampf.29 In Warburg’s time,
Luther came to be cast in a much less favourable
light. Ernst Troeltsch’s Reason and Revelation in
Johann Gerhard and Melanchthon of 189130 was a
first move in a new picture of Luther as a more
ambiguous figure; and twenty years later in The
Social Teachings of the Christian Churches,
Troeltsch focused on Luther’s compromise with
prevailing political powers and judged it harshly.31
Troeltsch’s work was key not only to Weber’s view
of Protestantism,32 but also a line of thought that
followed, privileging Thomas Münzer, opponent of
Luther and rebel leader during the Peasants’ War,
as the preeminent political theologian of
Protestantism. Ernst Bloch, a student of Troeltsch
and Weber, developed this critique of Luther in his
expressionist Thomas Münzer as Theologian of the
Revolution (1921), as did Hugo Ball in his left-wing
but disturbingly anti-Semitic Critique of the German
Intelligentsia (1919).33 Both works were acquired
by Warburg’s library immediately upon publication;
and if they arrived too late to be of use to Warburg,
his lack of interest in Troeltsch’s earlier work
implies that they might in any case never have been
pressed into service.
And there is something else that separates Warburg
(before his Kreuzlingen years) from the sociologists

240
emerging from the Historical School of Political
Economy and the critical theorists who followed.
The project the sociologists set themselves was, in
Weber’s words, to develop ‘historical and
theoretical knowledge of the general cultural
significance of capitalist development’, with the
search for the origins of a modern economy the
historical prerequisite of the enquiry.34 And the
project was part and parcel of a critique of
technological and economic progress. The discourse
represented by figures such as Ferdinand Tönnies,
Simmel, Weber and Troeltsch, so trenchantly
labelled by Lukács as ‘romantic anti-capitalism’,
was structured by a narrative of decline from
pre-capitalist communities united by common
values to an alienated capitalist society based only
on the bonds of self-interest.35 The subtext of the
historical projects was the feeling of cultural crisis
at the turn of the century, which was also behind
the urgency and pathos of the works of Weber and
others. The potentially crude distinctions between
the pre-capitalist and the present and the tendency
toward an asymmetry of values in analysing
cultures notwithstanding, such a standpoint was
extraordinarily productive, especially in the subtle
hands of Weber and Simmel. Weber’s thesis is
typical: exploring the origins of the modern
economic system, it allows a view of contemporary
capitalism that reveals the causes of the alienation
it engenders and the deeply irrational nature of its
manifestations. Yet if the tone of the argument was
very much of its time, Warburg’s thought again
looks even more dated, often structured by simpler
and unproblematized notions of enlightenment and
myth. The will of Sassetti is analysed through a
simple dichotomy of inward-looking piety and a

241
secular, active approach to the world inspired by
the ancients, with the latter privileged; and
while Warburg establishes that Sassetti’s invocation
of the figure of Fortuna and the pagan references in
his impresa allow a complex negotiation of these
conflicting beliefs, this tension is in no way simply
overcome. Warburg shifts the terms somewhat in
the Luther essay, with the Protestant form of
Christianity and its alliance with an independent
and enlightened approach to the world privileged
over a backward belief in magic and a
relinquishment of active control over the world.
Here, too, Warburg’s work looks like a holdover
from the previous century. He certainly believed
that capitalist modernity represented an advanced,
if always endangered, epistemological position, at
least until the ‘Serpent Ritual’ lecture. In a
statement of 1900 – he was writing to his brother
Max, asking for funds for his library – he says that
‘capitalism is … capable of intellectual achievement
of a scope which would not be possible otherwise’.36
Though framed triumphantly, it is an extraordinary
statement, one that posits a link between the nature
of knowledge and specific economic forms and that
points to Weber’s theory of rationalism and
rationalization, to Simmel’s exploration of modern
intellectuality, and to Lukács’s analysis of
reification. Yet we have a good sense of why it
might have proved difficult for Warburg to develop
this line of thought in a satisfactory way.

242
 3 ‘Centaurus and Lupus’, from Christoph
Semler, Coelum stellatum in quo asterismi
(Magdeburg, 1731).

Thus, despite the subtlety of his micro-historical

studies, Warburg’s terms remain ahistorical. It is
the timeless starry sky that served Warburg as a
figure for the transcendental ambivalence of both
knowledge and the image in human thought,
showing the possibilities of enlightenment always
haunted by the tendency to fall into magical or
mythic thought. ‘The celestial globe’, he said
typically in a lecture of 1911, ‘the customary symbol
of the heavenly vault, is a genuine product of Greek
civilization arising from the dual gift of the ancient
Greeks: their talent for the immediacy of a concrete
poetic imagination and their power of
mathematically abstract visualisation.’37 The gods
the Greeks found in the sky, he writes in the
‘Pagan-Antique Prophecy’
essay, ‘were beings of sinister, ambivalent, and
indeed contradictory powers: as star signs they
expanded space, marking the way for the soul’s

243
flight through the universe; as constellations they
were also idols, with whom, as befitted the childlike
nature of man, the mere creature might aspire to
mystic union through devotional practices’.38
For Warburg here, the constellations were an
ambivalent map of the heavens, the horizon of
possible relations to the world. These differing
possibilities, however, were transhistorical, not
taking into account the specificities of modes of
production and the varieties of political power. But
for the two generations for whom capitalism came
into focus as an object of study, one with its own
very specific political, existential and
epistemological puzzles, the skies were crowded
with figures of thought, with Denkfiguren. Such
figures give a sense of the various possibilities of
knowledge in the terrain entered by Warburg,
possibilities opened up by Weber and the debate
over the emergence of economic modernity, but
with the potential to point beyond the limitations of
a merely romantic anti-capitalism. For the early
Lukács, writing in the winter of 1914–15, however,
there was as yet no contradiction in the heavens:

Happy are those ages for which the starry sky is the map of all
possible paths – ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of
the stars. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of
adventure and yet their own. The world is wide and yet it is like a
home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential
nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are
sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to
one another, for fire is the soul of all light and all fire clothes itself
in light. Thus each action of the soul becomes meaningful and
rounded in this duality: complete in meaning – in sense – and
complete for the senses; rounded because the soul rests within
itself even while it acts; rounded because its action separates itself

244
from it and, having become itself, finds a centre of its own and
draws a closed circumference round itself.39

Here the mix of magic and calculation was an

effective horizon for orientation. The
anthropomorphic tendencies and the intermingling
of the human and the divine created an adequate
state of half-knowledge, allowing for the full
unfolding of the subject; for all its irrationality it
was preferable to a world drained of magic by the
limitless instrumental knowledge of a calculable
world, one understood through and dominated by
means–end rationality. For the alternative was the
knowledge of the lack of meaning. This is what had
to be faced, in ‘manly’ fashion, by anyone who chose
‘Science as a Vocation’, the title of Weber’s famous
speech to students at the University of Munich on 7
November 1917.40 But this lack of answers to the
fundamental questions of life brought forth its own
demons. Weber’s metaphors in this lecture are
revealing; they hover between irony and argument.
A world devoid of orientation was, said Weber, the
‘fate’ of modern man in a world he describes as one
in which different world views, all equal and equally
false in their denial of meaningless, fought for the
allegiance of human subjects like the heathen gods.

We live as did the ancients when their world was not yet
disenchanted of its gods and demons … as Hellenic man at times
sacrificed to Aphrodite and at other times to Apollo, and, above all,
as everybody sacrificed to the gods of his city, so do we still
nowadays, only the bearing of man has been disenchanted and
denuded of its mystical but inwardly genuine plasticity. Fate, and
certainly not ‘science’, holds sway over these gods and their
struggles.… Many old gods ascend from their graves; they are
disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They
strive to gain power over our lives and again they resume their

245
eternal struggle with one another.… Who is to answer the question
… ‘Which of the warring gods should we serve?’41

Weber’s references to ‘fate’ here – a paradoxical

characterization of a world devoid of magic – stands
in sharp tension with his analysis of rationalism and
complicates it. The relation between reason and
conviction, however, takes place for him across a
void and describes a sort of mise en abyme rather
than generating a dialectic.
When Bloch looked to the heavens in Thomas
Münzer, he seems to stay closer to Warburg’s than
Weber’s interpretation but describes reason as
politics instead of taking it as a reified category.
Like Warburg, he saw in astrological habits a
tendency that would undermine the positive
energies of the Reformation. ‘Pagan pride’, he
wrote, had played a role in the peasants’ revolt, but
at a fateful moment, ‘their gazes went upwards,
they sought to read [God’s] will in the stars.’42 The
revolution fell prey to what Bloch in the second
edition called (certainly after familiarity with
Warburg) ‘this other side of the Renaissance, one
not guided by the Muses but instead chiliastic’.43
This was his political commentary on Weber’s and
Troeltsch’s Luther, one turned into a trenchant
critique of capitalism. Luther’s ‘idolisation of the
State’ led, he wrote, ‘to a new “religion”: capitalism
as religion [which] inaugurated a veritable church
of Satan’.44
‘Capitalism as religion’: this is the title of one of
Walter Benjamin’s most compelling and mysterious
writings, a fragment written in 1921 and inspired by
Bloch’s phrase.45 We know from the bibliographical
notes that are part of this fragment that it

246
represents Benjamin’s reading of Weber’s The
Protestant Ethic and Troeltsch’s Social Teachings of
the Christian Churches.46 Benjamin seeks to turn
the tables on Weber’s famous thesis: instead of
seeing capitalism merely as religiously conditioned,
he takes it to be a fundamentally religious
phenomenon, a new religion in a godless world. In
this he was perhaps simply following the
metaphorics of Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation’ to
their conclusion, seeing the fate of capitalist
rationality and disenchantment as inseparable from
the revival of the pagan gods.47 In any case,
capitalism creates simultaneously guilt and debt
(both Schuld in German) and does so completely
without dogma, but ‘serves essentially to allay the
same anxieties, torments and disturbances to which
the so-called religions offered answers’.48 Benjamin
radicalizes Weber’s collapsing of the poles of
rationality/capitalism and irrationality/religion but
declines to prove his point, writing that, ‘We cannot
draw closed the net in which we are caught. Later
on, however, we shall be able to gain an overview of
it.’49
‘We cannot draw closed the net in which we are
caught’: this is a figure for a typical hermeneutical
paradox, the impossibility of achieving knowledge
from within a context and the simultaneous
impossibility of escaping one’s own position as a
place from which to know. But it is also an image
that describes Warburg’s historical predicament
particularly well. He was unable to address the
tightly knotted questions of the relation of religion
to capitalism, and capitalism to knowledge,
because, as an assimilated Jew of a specific
generation, he was caught in their net. In his
Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiel (The origin of

247
German tragic drama) of 1925/8, however,
Benjamin would develop this paradox more fully
and productively, interestingly enough using the
Warburgian figure of the constellation that was
thoroughly familiar to him. For the book, we know,
was born under the ambivalent star of Warburg,
intellectually productive but professionally a dead
end.50 Many others have explored this elective
affinity so I shall limit myself to a few comments.
For one, Benjamin was no doubt impressed by the
way Warburg managed to avoid the trap of the
art-historical notion of style. Benjamin, too, had
little use for bland concepts that subsumed complex
works and reduced them to a common denominator.
Style, or the ideal type, wrote Benjamin, was a
fallacy: ‘As far as historical types and epochs in
particular are concerned, it can, of course, never be
assumed that the subject matter in question might
be grasped conceptually with the aid of ideas such
as that of the renaissance or the baroque.’51
Rejecting an easy approximation of concepts to the
world to be known, he preferred an epistemology of
the extreme:

It is … erroneous to understand the most general references which

language makes as concepts, instead of recognizing them as
ideas. It is absurd to attempt to explain the general as an average.
The general is the idea. The empirical, on the other hand, can be
all the more profoundly understood the more clearly it is seen as
an extreme. The concept has its roots in the extreme.52

Benjamin gave limited credence to concepts in

general, which were ‘spontaneous products of the
intellect’ and not ‘ideas’, for which Benjamin
claimed ontological validity.53 This was a distinction
that broke the chains of neo-Kantianism in a way

248
that created a speculative realm of thought instead
of (like Weber) sinking into hypostatization.54
Like Warburg, Benjamin was interested in the way a
work’s relation to its period exploded the ideal type.
For while many have pointed out that Benjamin’s
approach to the Baroque occurred in the wake of
the contemporary art-historical rehabilitation of the
period, they have not pointed to the way his work
deviated from this tendency. If art historians such
as Wölfflin and others found a proper style in the
Baroque, one they said was equal to that of the
Renaissance, Benjamin studies the work of this
period as precisely not coalescing into a harmony,
rather one that had no harmonizing principle
because it was predicated on rupture, on the lack of
coherence. It was the reverse projection of the
romantic anti-capitalist plaint of the lack of unity in
the modern age
back onto previous centuries, a critique of the kind
of thinking that served as the motor of the work of
Wölfflin, Riegl, Weber and the early Lukács. And
Benjamin worked out the anti-hermeneutical
possibilities of knowledge by considering man’s
relation to the heavens. ‘Ideas are to things’, he
writes, ‘as constellations are to stars.’55
The conceptual space Benjamin opens up by his
image of the stars is an extraordinarily complex
one. He complicates Warburg’s sceptical sense of
the constellation as a sort of map, one that gives
orientation but whose image could assume an
autonomous and threatening life of its own. For
Benjamin, the stars or things have no meanings in
themselves; this is to be found, as for the ancients,
only in their configurations. But the constellation
cannot tell us what the star is, just as the star has

249
no power to determine its own position – it cannot
see how we see it. The individual existence of the
star is preserved, as the individual work of art is
rescued from the reduction to style for Warburg.
Yet the constellations are not simply there to grasp
– they are too far away, empty without the stars and
too dependent on the knowing subject’s own
position. It is an image of knowledge in a world of
fragments that cannot be reassembled into any easy
form of meaning. It is balanced – or stranded –
between the premodern plenitude of meaning and
modern disenchantment, a position of debilitating
stasis between different kinds of certainty. For
Benjamin in the Trauerspiel book, this is the only
epistemology possible under the conditions that
Weber called – ironically? – the revival of the pagan
gods’ fight for human allegiances.

250
4 Sandro Botticelli, Primavera,
c. 1482, tempera on panel,
202 cm × 314 cm, detail.
Uffizi, Florence.

251
5 ‘Tiller Girls’, from Film-Photos wie noch nie (Kindt
& Bucher: Giessen, 1929).

Benjamin’s image of the stars was not the only such

epistemological figure current in the wake of the
sociologists’ account of the disenchantment of the
world. In ‘The Mass Ornament’ of 1927, Siegfried
Kracauer combines Weber’s account of
rationalization with the traditional categories of art
history in a new way.56 In the organic movement of
the forms of the past, the ornaments of their dance,
one could, Kracauer said, read the spirit of the age,
the spiritual bonds of an organic community. One
could do this in the present too – his example is the
Tiller Girls – but such an exercise yielded another
paradox: that the ornament had become
autonomous, that it existed above the

252
human subjects of which it was formed, that they no
longer could see the ornament, understand their
place within it. The search for spirit to be read in an
unmediated way from form showed only the lack of
spirit governing form in modernity.57

6 Albrecht Altdorfer, The Battle of Alexander, 1529,

oil on panel, 158.4 cm × 120.3 cm, detail. Alte
Pinakothek, Munich.

In these related figures of the limits of knowledge,

both Kracauer and Benjamin are, no doubt, playing
with a formulation of Nietzsche’s from The Birth of
Tragedy: ‘It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that
existence and the world are eternally justified –
while of course our consciousness of our own
significance hardly differs from that which the
soldiers painted on canvas have of the battle
represented on it. Thus all our knowledge of art is
basically quite illusory.’58 But Benjamin and
Kracauer lacked Nietzsche’s faith that allowed for
the leap into the realm of the aesthetic.

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Warburg was aware that progress was always
precarious; by the time of the Serpent Ritual
lecture, delivered in Ludwig Binswanger’s
Kreuzlingen sanatorium, he saw that it was
endangered from the inside. His description could
come straight from Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation’:

Our own technological age has no need of the serpent in order to

understand and control lightning. Lightning no longer terrifies the
city dweller.… Scientific explanation has disposed of mythological
causation.… Whether this liberation from the mythological world
view is of genuine help in providing adequate answers to the
enigmas of existence is quite another matter.59

Indeed, the extraordinary fact is that the

description might well have come from ‘Science as
a Vocation’: letters show that Warburg was again
reading Weber’s work while in Kreuzlingen.60 Like
Weber, Warburg sees the risk that disenchantment
itself could lead to the destruction of the distance
he thought necessary to enlightenment: ‘The
culture of the machine age destroys what the
natural sciences, born of myth, so arduously
achieved: the space for devotion, which evolved in
turn into the space required for reflection’,61 into
Denkraum. Like the constellations taken as gods,
technology without Denkraum could become
dangerously tangible, turning the transformative
potential of science into the destructive forces once
found in magic. In an essay of 1926 with the
Warburgian title ‘To the Planetarium’, Benjamin
described something similar. Like Warburg in the
Serpent Ritual essay, and like him probably thinking
about Weber, whose insights he valued but whose
methodology he rejected, Benjamin saw a reversion
to myth; like Warburg’s Melanchthon and Münzer’s
peasants, he saw a return to the stars:

254
Nothing distinguishes the ancient from the modern man so much
as the former’s absorption in a cosmic experience scarcely known
to later periods.… [But] it is a dangerous error of modern men to
regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable … it is not; its
hour strikes again and again, and then neither nations nor
generations can escape it, as was made terribly clear by the last
war, which was an attempt at new and unprecedented
commingling with the cosmic powers.62

7 Sternsaal in Hamburg Planetarium, c. 1930.

Photo: Planetarium Hamburg.

Typically, he was ambivalent: the collective

intoxication of cosmic experience had led to
disaster but could nonetheless not be banished from
modern culture. It could, however, become
enlightened in the overthrow of the capitalist
organization of this dangerous knowledge,
redeemed by revolution. This was a different
revolution from Bloch’s, one that kept a consistent
view of the heavens as a guide for worldly action,
however ambivalent, Janus-faced, Delphic.

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The spectre of revolution was, we know, more than
Warburg could handle, tainted as it was, so often,
by anti-capitalism framed as anti-Semitism. But
both the possibility of it and its failure were part of
the complex moment of modernity that he, Weber,
Benjamin and others were trying, over these
decades, to grasp. It is a fascinating configuration
of scholars who sought to determine the
relationship of modernity to reason, deeply aware
that the tools of reason were a net in which they
stood but could not draw closed, scholars struggling
for an overview but thematizing its impossibility.
The view skywards gave no such overview, there
was no map there of all possible paths. What we can
say, however, is that even if Warburg only
accidentally wandered underneath this sky, onto the
terrain of a debate about the emergence of
capitalism and the nature of knowledge possible
under those conditions, there are ample signs that
he did, nonetheless, leave his mark there.
My thanks to Claudia Wedepohl, Eckhart Marchand, Spyros Papapetros
and Bernd Roeck, who sparked my interest in this topic in a lecture at the
Warburg Institute many years ago.

1 Max Weber, ‘Die Protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus’,
Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, part 1, vol. 20, no. 1
(1904), pp. 1–54; part 2,: vol. 21, no. 1 (1905), pp. 1–110.

2 Quoted in Bernd Roeck, ‘Aby Warburg und Max Weber: Über

Renaissance, Protestantismus und kapitalistischen Geist’, in Enno
Rudolph (ed.), Die Renaissance und ihr Bild in der Geschichte, Die
Renaissance als erste Aufklärung, vol. 3 (J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck]:
Tübingen, 1998), pp. 189–205, here p. 205.

3 Ibid., p. 205.

4 Aby Warburg, ‘Francesco Sassettis letzwillige Verfügung’, in

Kunstwissenschaftliche Beiträge August Schmarsow gewidmet (K. W.
Hiersemann: Leipzig, 1907); Aby Warburg, Werke in einem Band
(Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 2010); translated as ‘Fransesco

256
 Sassetti’s Last Injunctions to his Sons’, in Warburg, The Renewal of
Pagan Antiquity, trans. David Britt (Getty Research Institute: Los
Angeles, 1999).

5 Roeck, ‘Aby Warburg und Max Weber’, op. cit.; Charlotte Schoell-Glass,
Aby Warburg und der Antisemitismus: Kulturwissenschaft als
Geistespolitik (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1998),
pp. 109–16.

6 Sombart’s influential and widely read views on the origins of capitalism

were complex and changing. In the first edition of his Der moderne
Kapitalismus, he advocated a multi-causal view of these origins,
arguing that the late medieval/early Renaissance Catholic Church
created conditions in which merchant capitalism could thrive: Werner
Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, vol. 1, Die Genesis des
Kapitalismus (Duncker and Humblot: Leipzig, 1902). He did not frame
his views in terms of the importance of religion per se as the decisive
factor in this development until one year later, in his Deutsche
Volkswirtschaft im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, where he discussed
specifically ‘the influence of quite immense proportions’ of the Jewish
‘spirit’ and ‘nature’ (Wesen) on the development of capitalism in
Germany: Sombart, Die deutsche Volkswirtschaft im neunzehnten
Jahrhundert (1903), 4th edn (Georg Bondi: Berlin, 1919), esp. pp.
112–19. He devoted an entire book in 1911 to his argument that the
Jewish ‘spirit’ was key to the development of the capitalist ‘spirit’. The
book was widely read, with 15,000 copies printed by the last
(unchanged) edition of 1928. Sombart, Die Juden und das
Wirtschaftsleben (1911) (Duncker and Humblot: Munich and Leipzig,
1928). In his 1913 Der Bourgeois, he specifically argues (now explicitly
against Weber) that Catholicism was significantly more fertile ground
for the development of capitalism than Puritanism: Sombart, Der
Bourgeois: Zur Geistesgeschichte des modernen Wirtschaftsmenchen
(Duncker and Humblot: Munich and Leipzig, 1913), passim. At the
same time, however, he published studies on Luxus und Kapitalismus
and Krieg und Kapitalismus (both Duncker and Humblot: Munich and
Leipzig, 1913). Whether this palimpsest represents a subtle view of the
complex interactions behind the development of a modern economy or
is simply contradictory has been argued for the past century. Current
appraisals of Sombart’s profuse and often belle-lettristic work tend
towards the latter view. On the debate between Weber and Sombart
regarding the origins of capitalism, see, from an extensive literature,
Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Patrick Camiller
(Polity Press: Cambridge, 2011), pp. 204–7; Bernhard vom Brocke,
‘Werner Sombart, 1863–1941: Eine Einführung in Leben, Werk und
Wirkung’, in Vom Brocke (ed.), Sombarts

257
 Moderner Kapitalismus’: Materialien zur Kritik und Rezeption (dtv:
Munich, 1987), esp. p. 39ff; Hartmut Lehmann, ‘The Rise of Capitalism:
Weber versus Sombart’, in Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth
(eds.), Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts
(University of Cambridge Press: Cambridge, 1995); and Malcolm H.
Mackinnon, ‘The Longevity of the Thesis: A Critique of the Critics’, in
Weber’s Protestant Ethic.

7 ‘The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For

when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life,
and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the
tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is not
bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production
which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into
this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic
acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them
until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In [Richard] Baxter’s view the
care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint
like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment”. But fate
decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.’ Weber, The
Protestant Ethic, trans. Parsons, p. 181. See Radkau, Max Weber, op.
cit., chapter 8; Gordon Marshall, In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism:
An Essay on Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic Thesis (Hutchinson:
London, 1982), and more generally Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An
Historical Interpretation of Max Weber (Alfred A. Knopf: New York,
1969) and Lawrence A. Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics,
and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber (University of California
Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989).

8 Roeck, ‘Aby Warburg und Max Weber’, op. cit., p. 205.

9 Ibid.

10 Wilhelm Hennis, Max Webers Fragestellung (J. C. B. Mohr [Paul

Siebeck]: Tübingen, 1987) and Hennis, Max Webers Wissenschaft vom
Menschen (J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck]: Tübingen, 1996).

11 I explore these issues in the first chapter of my book Blind Spots:

Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany
(Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2005).

12 Aby Warburg, ‘Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu

Luthers Zeiten’, Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der
Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, no. 26 (1920);
‘Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther’, in
Warburg, The Revival of Pagan Antiquity, op. cit., p. 621.

258
13 This is explored most energetically (and controversially) in Georges
Didi-Huberman, L’Image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps des
fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Les Éditions de Minuit: Paris, 2002).

14 The use of ‘ideal types’ is discussed most extensively in Max Weber,

‘Die “Objectivität” sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer
Erkenntnis’ (1904), in Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur
Wissenschaftslehre (J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck]: Tübingen, 1922), pp.
146–214; ‘“Objectivity” in Social Science and Socal Policy’, in Weber,
The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. and ed. Edward A.
Shils and Henry A. Finch (The Free Press: New York, 1949), pp.
50–112. See also Hans Henrik Bruun, Science, Values and Politics in
Max Weber’s Methodology (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2007), pp. 41–8,
207–38.

15 Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, op. cit., p.
233, n. 68.

16 Radkau, Max Weber, op. cit., p. 259. Radkau here draws on Helmuth
Plessner’s brief but penetrating comments on the tensions within
Weber’s epistemology: Plessner, ‘Erinnerungen an Max Weber’, in
René König and Johannes Winckelmann (eds.), Max Weber zum
Gedächtnis: Materialien und Dokumente zur Bewertung von Werk und
Persönlichkeit (Westdeutscher Verlag: Cologne and Opladen, 1963),
pp. 32–3.

17 Max Weber, ‘Der Sinn der “Wertfreiheit” der soziologischen und

ökonomischen Wissenschaften’, in Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur
Wissenschaftslehre, p. 481ff, here p. 485. See also the slightly different
translation of this passage in ‘The Meaning of “Ethical Neutrality” in
Sociology and Economics’, in Weber, The Methodology of the Social
Sciences, op. cit., p. 32.

18 Werner Sombart, Die drei Nationalökonomien: Geschichte und System

der Lehre von der Wirtschaft (Duncker und Humblot: Munich, 1930),
pp. 211–13, referring to Heinrich Wölfflin, ‘Das Problem des Stils in der
bildenden Kunst’, Sitzungsberichte der Königlichen Preussischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 31 (1912), pp. 572–8. On the
relations between the ‘Younger Historical School’ of political economy
and the historiography of art, see my The Werkbund: Design Theory
and Mass Culture Before the First World War (Yale University Press:
New Haven and London, 1996), pp. 75–81.

19 Max Scheler, ‘Der Bourgeois’, in Scheler, Abhandlungen und Aufsätze,

vol. 2 (Verlag der Weissen Bücher: Leipzig, 1915), pp. 312–13.

259
20 Karl Mannheim, ‘On the Interpretation of “Weltanschauung”’ (1923), in
Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Keckskemeti (Oxford
University Press: New York, 1952). An interesting example of historical
sociology that combines the historiography of art with the perspectives
of Weber, Sombart, Simmel and Scheler is Alfred von Martin,
Soziologie der Renaissance: Zur Physiognomik und Rhythmik
bürgerlicher Kultur (Ferdinand Enke: Stuttgart, 1932); Eng. edn,
Sociology of the Renaissance, trans. W. L. Luetkens (Kegan Paul:
London, 1944).

21 ‘Daß die Beschränkung auf Facharbeit, mit dem Verzicht auf die
faustische Allseitigkeit des Menschentums, welchen sie bedingt, in der
heutigen Welt Voraussetzung wertvollen Handelns überhaupt ist, daß
also “Tat” und ‘Entsagung’ einander heute unabwendbar bedingen:
dies asketische Grundmotiv des bürgerlichen Lebensstils – wenn er
eben Stil und nicht Stillosigkeit sein will – hat auf der Höhe seiner
Lebensweisheit, in den “Wanderjahren” und in dem Lebensabschluß,
den er seinem Faust gab, auch Goethe uns lehren wollen.’ Weber, ‘Die
protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus’, op. cit., pp.
107–8; see also the different translation in Max Weber, The Protestant
Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other Writings, ed. and trans.
Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (Penguin: New York, 2002), p. 120.
Weber is even more explicit in his response to one of his critics:
‘capitalism no longer appears to the most serious-minded people as the
outward expression of a style of life founded on a final, single, and
comprehensible unity of the personality’. Weber, ‘A Final Rebuttal of
Rachfahl’s Critique of the “Spirit of Capitalism” (1910), in Weber, The
Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other Writings, op.
cit., p. 294.

22 And indeed, some of the most trenchant criticisms of Weber concern

precisely this matter. Consider Joseph Schumpeter’s devastating
dismissal: ‘So soon as we realize that pure Feudalism and pure
Capitalism are equally unrealistic creations of our own mind, the
problem of what it was that turned the one onto the other vanishes
completely.’ Quoted in Peter Baehr and Gorden C. Wells, ‘Introduction’,
in Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other
Writings, op. cit., p. xxviii.

23 As noted in Radkau, Max Weber, op. cit., p. 180.

24 Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, op. cit., pp.
196–8. Sombart discusses Alberti in Der Bourgeois, op. cit., pp. 278–9,
433. Weber and Sombart’s disagreement about Alberti is discussed in
Marshall, In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism, op. cit., pp. 97–9.

260
25 Ernst Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und
Gruppen, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 (J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck]:
Tübingen, 1923); The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans.
Olive Wyon, 2 vols (Allen and Unwin: London, 1931).

26 Georg Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes (Duncker und Humblot:

Leipzig, 1900). This is the first edition, which was acquired by Warburg;
the second and final edition was published in 1907 and appeared in
English as The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David
Frisby (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1978); Georg Simmel, Die
Religion (1906; Rütten und Loenig: Frankfurt am Main, 1912).

27 The first edition in the Warburg Institute Library shows a few marks in
Warburg’s hand. They are limited to the correction of typographical
errors and a single ironic marginal comment on the putative recent
decline in Jewish ‘sexual morals’.

28 Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, op. cit., p. 611. Warburg

recognizes, however, that Luther nonetheless believed in the
significance of ‘natural’ portents.

29 Albrecht Ritschl, Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung and

Versöhnung, 6 vols (Adolph Marcus: Bonn, 1870–4). Die christliche
Lehre is not in Warburg’s library, though he did own Ritschl’s Fides
implicita: eine Untersuchung über Köhlerglauben, Wissen und Glauben,
Glauben und Kirche (Adolf Marcus: Bonn, 1890). In a recent
exploration of Warburg’s ‘Pagan-Antique Prophecy’ and Benjamin’s
Trauerspiel book, Jane O. Newman emphasizes Luther’s belief in
portents and sees a significant compromise on his part, going on to
construct a notion of a ‘Lutheran astrology’ in the Reformation. She
also posits Warburg’s acceptance of what she sees as Luther’s position
and the art historian’s belief ‘in the cohabitation of modernity with
something like divine magic at a kind of primordial level in the German
unconscious’, relating this to the Protestant war theology in the wake of
Karl Barth’s interpretation of the position of the Church in the First
World War. Though a fascinating and energetic reading of the material,
I find it tends to distort Warburg’s position and also overcomplicates his
understanding of Luther; as Newman writes, Warburg ‘does not
explicitly rely on war theological claims’. Jane O. Newman, Benjamin’s
Library: Modernity, Nation and the Baroque (Cornell University Press
and Cornell University Library: Ithaca, 2011), chapter 3, here p. 164.

30 Ernst Troeltsch, Vernunft und Offenbarung bei Johannes Gerhard und

Melanchthon: Untersuchung zur Geschichte der altprotestantischen
Theologie (Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht: Göttingen, 1891).

261
31 See Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, vol. 2,
pp. 467–515, 561–76. On Troeltsch’s revisions of the views of Ritschl,
his teacher, see Harry Liebersohn, Fate and Utopia in German
Sociology, 1870–1923 (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988),
pp. 45–51; on his social and political critique of Luther, pp. 58–60.

32 The relation between the thought of Ritschl, Troeltsch and Weber is

discussed in W. R. Ward, ‘Max Weber and the Lutherans’ and in
Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, ‘Friendship between Experts: Notes on Weber
and Troeltsch’, in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel
(eds.), Max Weber and his Contemporaries (Unwin Hyman/The
German Historical Institute: London, 1987) and in Graf, ‘The German
Theological Sources and Protestant Church Politics’, in Hartmut
Lehmann and Guenther Roth (eds.), Weber’s Protestant Ethic, op. cit.

33 Ernst Bloch, Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution (Kurt Wolff:
Munich, 1921; 2nd edn, Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1972); Hugo
Ball, Zur Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz (Der Freie Verlag: Bern, 1919);
see Critique of the German Intelligentsia, trans. Brian L. Harris
(Columbia University Press: New York, 1993).

34 ‘Geleitwort’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, vol. 19

(1904), p. v. The authorship of this text, published on Weber, Sombart
and Edgar Jaffé’s assumption of the editorship of the Archiv, is
discussed in Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage, op. cit., p. 84.

35 On romantic anti-capitalism, see Michael Löwy, Georg Lukács: From

Romanticism to Bolshevism, trans. Patrick Camiller (NLB: London,
1979) and Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the
Tide of Modernity (Duke University Press: Durham, North Carolina,
2001).

36 ‘Dass der Kapitalismus auch Denkarbeit auf breitester, nur ihm

möglicher, Basis, leisten kann’: letter of 30 June 1900, quoted in E. H.
Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, 2nd edn (Phaidon:
Oxford, 1986), p. 130.

37 Warburg, ‘Über astrologische Druckwerke aus alter und neuer Zeit’,

lecture to the Gesellschaft der Bücherfreunde, Hamburg, 9 February
1911, quoted in Gombrich, Aby Warburg, op. cit., p. 199.

38 Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, op. cit., p. 599.

39 Georg Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans: Ein

geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der großen Epik
(Paul Cassirer: Berlin, 1920), p. 9; and Lukács, The Theory of the
Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic

262
 Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Merlin Press: London, 1971), p. 29
(translation modified).

40 Max Weber, ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’, in Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze

zur Wissenschaftslehre, op. cit.; ‘Science as a Vocation’, in From Max
Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright
Mills (Oxford University Press: New York, 1958). On the date of the
original lecture, see Radkau, Max Weber, op. cit., pp. 487–9.

41 Weber, ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’, op. cit., pp. 546, 547, 551; ‘Science
as a Vocation’, op. cit., pp. 148, 149, 152–3. The paradoxical relation of
rationality and fate in Weber’s work is discussed in Peter Lassman and
Irving Velody, ‘Max Weber on Science, Disenchantment and the
Search for Meaning’, in Lassman and Velody (eds.), Max Weber’s
‘Science as a Vocation’ (Unwin Hyman: London, 1989), esp. pp. 175ff,
187ff. See also Bryan S. Turner, For Weber: Essays on the Sociology
of Fate, 2nd edn (Sage: London, 1996), esp. chapter 1.

42 Bloch, Thomas Münzer, 2nd edn, op. cit., p. 57. Bloch refers here to
the scene in the fifth act of Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen, in which
Metzler and Link, leaders of the revolting peasants, discuss the
meaning of a comet and stars for their rebellion. Michael Löwy
discusses Bloch’s and others’ responses to Weber’s Protestant Ethic in
‘Anticapitalist Readings of Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Ernst Bloch,
Walter Benjamin, György Lukacs, Erich Fromm’, Logos: A Journal of
Modern Society and Culture, vol. 9, no. 1 (2010).

43 Bloch, Thomas Münzer, 2nd edn, op. cit., p. 59

44 Ibid., p. 123. The phrase ‘inaugurated a veritable church of Satan’ was

replaced in the second edition by ‘brought a church of Mammon’.

45 Walter Benjamin, ‘Kapitalismus als Religion’, in Benjamin, Gesammelte

Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. 4
(Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1985); ‘Capitalism as Religion’, in
Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W.
Jennings, vol. 1 (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press:
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996).

46 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, p. 290. On this text, see Uwe

Steiner, ‘Die Grenzen des Kapitalismus. Kapitalismus, Religion und
Politik in Benjamins Fragment “Kapitalismus als Religion”’, in Dirk
Baecker (ed.), Kapitalismus als Religion (Kadmos: Berlin, 2009);
Michael Löwy, ‘Capitalism as Religion: Walter Benjamin and Max
Weber’, Historical Materialism, no. 17 (2009); Werner Hamacher, ‘Guilt
History: Benjamin’s Sketch “Capitalism as Religion”’, Diacritics, vol. 32,
no. 3/4 (2002); Samuel Weber, ‘Closing the Net: “Capitalism as

263
 Religion”’, in Weber, Benjamin’s – abilities (Harvard University Press:
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2008); and Löwy, ‘Anticapitalist Readings
of Weber’s Protestant Ethic’, op. cit.

47 I follow here Steiner’s argument in ‘Die Grenzen des Kapitalismus’.

48 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, op. cit., p. 288.

49 Ibid.

50 One of the best accounts of the relation of Benjamin to the work of

Warburg and his circle remains Wolfgang Kemp, ‘Fernbilder. Benjamin
und die Kunstwissenschaft’, in Burkhardt Lindner (ed.), Walter
Benjamin im Kontext, 2nd edn (Athenäum: Königstein im Taunus,
1985). On Warburg and Benjamin more generally, see Matthew
Rampley, The Remembrance of Things Past: On Aby M. Warburg and
Walter Benjamin (Harrassowitz: Wiesbaden, 2000).

51 Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928), in

Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann
Schweppenhäuser, vol. 1 (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1972);
Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne
(NLB: London, 1977), p. 41.

52 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, op. cit., p. 35. On

Benjamin’s epistemological extremism, and also its relation to Weber’s
notion of disenchantment, see Norbert Bolz, Auszug aus der
entzauberten Welt: Philosophischer Extremismus zwischen den
Weltkriegen (Fink: Munich, 1989).

53 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, op. cit., p. 30.

54 Benjamin and the problems of Neo-Kantianism are discussed with

great insight in Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of
Experience (Routledge: London, 1988).

55 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, op. cit., p. 34.

56 Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Mass Ornament’, in Kracauer, The Mass

Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Harvard University
Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1995).

57 For other complexities of Kracauer’s remarkable epistemological figure,

see Schwartz, Blind Spots, op. cit., pp. 137–44.

58 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner,

trans. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage: New York, 1967), p. 52 (Section 5).

264
59 Aby M. Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of
North America, trans. Michael P. Steinberg (Cornell University Press:
Ithaca, 1995), p. 50.

60 Letter of 3 November 1921, Heinrich Sieveking and Rosa Sieveking to

Mary Warburg: ‘On the whole we could not speak much about scholarly
matters. Nonetheless, your dear husband showed us the works of Max
Weber that he had acquired after our last conversation and apparently
had also read.’ Warburg Institute Archive GC/29668.

61 Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians, op. cit., p. 54.

62 Walter Benjamin, ‘Zum Planetarium’, in Einbahnstrasse (Ernst Rowohlt:

Berlin, 1928), pp. 80–1; ‘To the Planetarium’, in Benjamin, Selected
Writings, vol. 1, op. cit., p. 486.

265
MARXIST THEORY IN PRACTICE

266
LANDSCAPE, CLASS AND
IDEOLOGY
MARXISM AND THE SHAPING OF MODERNISM
MARXISM IN A NEW WORLD ORDER

267
A NOTE ON AESTHETICIZING
TENDENCIES IN AMERICAN
LANDSCAPE PAINTING 1840–80
Alan Wallach

I n an essay published in 2011 entitled ‘Rethinking

“Luminism”’, I attempted to develop
social-historical basis for studying American
a

landscape painting in the period 1840–80 – roughly

the lifespan of the Hudson River School.1 Artists
associated with the school – among them such
well-known figures as Thomas Cole, Asher B.
Durand, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt and John
F. Kensett – flourished during the 1840s, 1850s and
1860s. However, from the mid-1850s onward their
work came under increasing critical attack. By the
late 1870s, the newly invented label ‘Hudson River
School’ reinforced a growing critical consensus that
the artists in question were now passé.2 In 1883,
Clarence Cook, a long-time critic for Horace
Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune and probably the
most astute observer of the New York art scene
from the 1850s on, could write, ‘Nothing more alien
to what is recognized as art everywhere, outside
England at least, has ever existed than the now
defunct or moribund school of landscape once so
much delighted in as the American school, but now
so slightingly spoken of as the Hudson River
School.’3

268
Cook stood for the advanced taste of his day. By the
late 1870s, he was championing Blake, Thoreau and
Whitman in literature, and Albert Pinkham Ryder,
William Merritt Chase, Frank Duveneck and
Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the visual arts.4 The
sharp distinction he drew between ‘what is
recognized as art everywhere’ and the productions
of the ‘moribund’ Hudson River School followed
logically from his aversion to anything that smacked
of the academy or academic routine, and from his
fascination with Barbizon painting and the work of
Courbet and Manet.5 In 1883, Cook was willing to
acknowledge that the Hudson River School ‘had
played its part and played it well’ in ‘the pleasant
and peaceful if a trifle tame and tedious days
“before the war”’.6 Yet by setting up an antithesis
between the academic (the Hudson River School)
and the avant-garde, the provincial and the
cosmopolitan, he obscured a historical dynamic that
was already at work in the 1850s and 1860s within
the school itself.
Cook’s was an influential voice in the debates of the
period and it would be wrong to fault him for a lack
of historical perspective. However, more recent
commentators have tended to compartmentalize
movements within the New York art world and have
thus failed to appreciate the extent to which
aestheticizing tendencies were already present
in the work of artists active in the 1850s and 1860s.
The problem has been compounded by ‘Luminism’,
a term invented in the 1950s and applied to the
work of such artists as Kensett, Sanford Robinson
Gifford, Martin Johnson Heade and Fitz Henry
Lane.7 John Baur, Barbara Novak and John
Wilmerding, among others, defined ‘Luminism’ as a
movement that epitomized an indigenous or native

269
style, thus furnishing what in the 1950s, 1960s and
1970s seemed to be a compelling answer to the
once ubiquitous question: ‘What is American about
American art?’8 ‘Luminism’ – both the term itself
and the arguments that accompanied it – has
proved a formidable obstacle in the way of
understanding the evolution of the Hudson River
School and later movements in nineteenth-century
American painting. Although most scholars now
place the term in scare quotes, signalling scepticism
or disbelief, ‘Luminism’ has shown remarkable
staying power.9 In ‘Rethinking “Luminism”’, I
argued that the phrase ‘aestheticizing tendencies’
more precisely described developments within the
Hudson River School during the period 1840–80,
and that a historical account of these tendencies
necessarily involved an analysis of class, taste and
the institutionalization of the category fine or high
art.

To make my case, I pursued three interrelated

arguments. First, I maintained that however much
their scholarship was distorted by nationalist belief,
Cold War ideological imperatives and collecting
preferences, the early students of ‘Luminism’
identified tendencies or currents in
mid-nineteenth-century American landscape
painting that contrasted with, and in some respects
stood in opposition to, the Hudson River School
‘mainstream’ – Cole, Church, Bierstadt and Thomas
Moran among others. I call these tendencies
‘aestheticizing’ because they led to a seemingly
autonomous art in which formal qualities took
precedence over subject matter.

270
Second, I argued that the appearance of
aestheticizing tendencies in American landscape
painting in the period was inextricably bound up
with the growth of New York City’s bourgeois
fractions, which, as the historian Sven Beckert and
others have shown, coalesced to form a unified
bourgeois class or bourgeoisie in the years
immediately following the Civil War.10 My argument
here mainly concerned the class’s evolving cultural
needs, especially its need to institutionalize, and
thereby exert control over, the definition of art.
Third, I attempted to show that, far from being an
offshoot of the Hudson River School or a peripheral
phenomenon, the aestheticizing tendencies under
consideration originated within the school, and
their appearance could be attributed to the
contradictory needs and expectations of artists,
patrons and publics (none of these terms, I would
add, can be separated from the issue of class).
These tendencies represented a radical shift in
meaning and artistic value. The growing popularity
during the 1840s,
1850s and 1860s of the painted sketch as well as
more finished small-scale landscapes anticipated
the aesthetic exclusivity that increasingly defined
fine or high art in the United States during the
decades following the Civil War.
I began the essay with a quotation from Adorno’s
Minima Moralia: ‘The aestheticism of the
nineteenth century cannot be understood internally
… but only in relation to its real basis in social
conflicts.’11 By invoking Adorno at the beginning of
a study devoted to opposing tendencies within the
Hudson River School, I hoped to signal not only my
alignment with the critique of ideology associated

271
with the Frankfurt School, but also my belief that it
is impossible to produce a historical account of
aestheticism, or for that matter almost any artistic
phenomenon, by treating it as a Ding an sich, a
thing in itself that conforms to its own inherent or
immanent laws of development. Thus, with the
epigraph, I hoped to prepare the reader for a
critique of earlier attempts to explain ‘Luminism’ –
the arguments put forth by Baur and especially
Novak, who tried to develop an analytical
vocabulary from sources ranging from the
nineteenthcentury American critic James Jackson
Jarves, a favorite of Baur’s, to Heinrich Wölfflin. In
American Painting of the Nineteenth Century,
which appeared in 1969 and remains in print,
Novak characterized American art not only in terms
of ‘the real’ and ‘the ideal’ à la Jarves, but also in
terms of a stylistic pathology in which ‘Luminism’
falls on the side of the classical in Wölfflin’s
well-known cyclical scheme and is often associated
with the primitive.12 Like Baur, Novak asserted that
the term ‘Luminist’ could be applied to artists as
different as Lane and Kensett. In both instances,
Novak’s claims were based on what could be called
‘pseudo-isomorphism’ – apparent formal similarities
that in effect override differences in cultural
context and social function. Thus, according to
Baur, Novak and Wilmerding, Heade, along with
Lane, epitomized ‘Luminism’ despite the crucial
differences in background, training, culture and
historical context that separated these two artists
from each other and from a more culturally and
sociologically coherent group of New York painters,
which Novak et al also considered ‘Luminists’,
including Kensett, Durand, Gifford and James A.
Suydam.13

272
2

In addition to anticipating my critique of immanent

theories of stylistic development – theories central
to Novak’s and others’ efforts to define ‘Luminism’ –
I intended the epigraph from Adorno to set the
stage for my main argument: that the emergence of
aestheticizing tendencies in mid-nineteenth-century
American landscape painting was based in social
conflict and, in particular, the conflicts that
accompanied the coalescence of the new bourgeois
class that emerged during the Civil War. By conflict
I do not mean only violent confrontations between
classes or class fractions, although the history of
New York City in the mid-nineteenth century is
replete with such conflicts,
perhaps most famously the 1849 Astor Place riots
and the draft riots of 1863.14 I mean as well the way
in which a class can unselfconsciously or, as it
were, instinctively work to advance its interests in
the face of opposition from other classes. In the
case of a dominant class like New York’s newly
powerful bourgeoisie, the class would want to
maintain and augment its economic, political and
cultural hegemony.

273
1 John F. Kensett, Long Neck Point from
Contentment Island, Darien, Connecticut, 1870–2,
oil on canvas, 39 × 62 cm. Carnegie Museum of Art,
Pittsburgh; gift of the Women’s Committee, 80.51.

Broadly put, I am concerned with the relation

between the social (the domain of classes and class
relations) and the aesthetic (the domain of art).
Adorno’s statement implies that the social forms the
‘real basis’ for the aesthetic. Thus in order to
account for ‘Luminism’, or what I prefer to call
aestheticizing tendencies, it is necessary to analyse
the relation between the social and the aesthetic –
in this instance between, on the one hand, a newly
powerful bourgeoisie and, on the other,
aestheticizing tendencies in the
mid-nineteenth-century New York art world.
To begin with the aesthetic, consider Kensett’s
Long Neck Point from Contentment Island, Darien,
Connecticut [1] a view of a sunset over Long Island
Sound that the artist painted between 1870 and

274
1872.15 A close study of the painting reveals the
artist’s attentiveness to nuances of light, colour and
atmosphere. Such details as the sailboat that
pierces the horizon line, the spit of land –
Contentment Island – that extends into the Sound in
the distance, the clumps of grass that straggle into
the water at the
lower right, the rocky shoreline and trees in the
middle distance – these details make credible a
composition that otherwise appears to verge on
abstraction. The basic arrangement of forms is
disarmingly simple. The horizon line divides the
painting into two unequal rectangles. The sky, with
its combination of soft pinks, blues and greys,
occupies more than two-thirds of the canvas. The
pale blue of the water contrasts with the
luminescent pinks of the sky. The shoreline and
trees break up what would otherwise be a banal
composition. Linking earth and sky, they close off
the right side of the composition and form a
contrast with the left, which opens onto a space that
extends beyond the edges of the canvas. These
contrasts between left and right and top and bottom
set up a palpable tension between the
three-dimensional space Kensett represents and the
canvas’s two-dimensional surface.

275
2 Thomas Moran, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,
1872, oil on canvas, 213 × 266.3 cm. Smithsonian
American Art Museum, Washington, DC, lent by the
Department of the Interior Museum.

Long Neck Point from Contentment Island readily

speaks to what today might be called aesthetic
sensibilities. Indeed, it appeals to nothing much
more than the viewer’s capacity for visual pleasure.
However, the mid-nineteenth-century art public for
the most part assumed that a painting should tell a
story, teach a lesson, depict a subject of national or
religious significance. When, for example, Thomas
Moran exhibited Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone
[2] in 1872, a mammoth seven-by-ten-foot canvas
celebrating one of the nation’s greatest natural
wonders, the painting proved to be a popular
sensation. Congress purchased it that same year
and put it on display in the
Capitol rotunda where, two years later, it was
joined by a companion piece, Moran’s Chasm of the
Colorado.16

276
3 Frederic Church, Heart of the Andes, 1859, oil on
canvas, 168 × 302.9 cm. Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York, Bequest of Margaret E. Dows, 1909,
09.95.

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone embodied on an

epic scale the ambition present in the work of
leading Hudson River School artists. Consider
Frederic Church’s Heart of the Andes [3], a work
that glossed American imperial aspirations. The
painting excited great popular enthusiasm when
Church exhibited it in New York and London in
1859.17 Or take Albert Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains,
Lander’s Peak of 1863 [4], another work that
exemplifies the Hudson River School. This large
canvas, which includes in the foreground scenes in
a Shoshone village, was carefully calculated to
gratify the curiosity of eastern audiences about
western scenery and the ongoing conquest of
Native American tribes. Two years after he
exhibited the painting at the National Academy of
Design’s annual exhibition, Bierstadt sold Rocky
Mountains, Lander’s Peak for $25,000, at the time

277
the highest price ever paid for an American
painting. 18
Even though Kensett was closely associated with
the Hudson River School, his mature paintings
stand at a far remove from the work of Church and
Bierstadt, a fact contemporary critics readily
acknowledged.19 Kensett’s paintings teach no
lessons in patriotism, offer no paeans to Manifest
Destiny. Landscape is no longer sublime spectacle
but an occasion for reflection (literally in the case of
Kensett’s Long Neck Point from Contentment
Island). Indeed, it barely registers that for all their
careful detail, the canvases he painted between the
mid-1850s and his death in 1872 depict American
scenes. Moreover, Kensett’s painting is tiny by
comparison with such works as Church’s Heart of
the Andes. Its size – 39 × 62 cm – indicates that the
artist anticipated an audience of one or at most two
viewers at a time as opposed to the crowds that
lined up to see Heart of the Andes. The painting
thus offered a more private, a more personal or
subjective experience, than the works of
mainstream Hudson River School artists – an
experience in which the viewer focuses on the
artist’s choices, his technique, his touch. The viewer
might appreciate the extraordinary – one might say
photographic – exactitude of Long Neck Point from
Contentment Island, but if the painting can be
considered a record of the appearance of nature, it
is also a record of a second nature. For it was the
artist’s sensibility, his refined perception of
qualities of light, colour and atmosphere, and his
unique way of translating visual experience into an
artistic language or code that the viewer also
admired. And that admiration was then reflected
back upon the viewer, for the appreciation of

278
Kensett’s painting required skills associated with
connoisseurship.20 As observed earlier, subject
matter has lost most of its importance: the painting
functions more as an embodiment of a rarefied
artistic sensibility than as a record of the
appearance of a place. Viewers’ capacity for
appreciation, their cultivated aesthetic sensibility,
their aspiration to what the influential art journal
the Crayon called ‘the ideal of Art’, demonstrated
their love of art – what Pierre Bourdieu has
sardonically described as ‘l’amour de l’art’.21

4 Albert Bierstadt, Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak,

1863, oil on canvas, 186.7 × 306.7 cm. Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1907,
07.123.

And it is to Bourdieu that we must now turn to

account for the transformations of taste that led to
the rise of the aestheticizing tendencies I have been

279
describing. Bourdieu argues that in the nineteenth
century, a striving for ‘distinction’ lay at the core of
bourgeois identity.22 By ‘distinction’ Bourdieu
means possession of the competencies and skills,
like those associated with connoisseurship, that
were needed to properly appreciate works of art. A
taste for art resulted from a privileged background
and lifestyle – Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’. Although a
product of education, it was often thought of as
innate. Ultimately it defined an insuperable social
barrier between those who were blessed with it and
those who were not.
If we accept Bourdieu’s argument, then it stands to
reason that the appearance of aestheticizing
tendencies in mid-nineteenth-century American
landscape painting coincided with and was, indeed,
integral to the emergence in the 1860s of an
increasingly powerful and unified bourgeoisie – a
class that was working towards securing its cultural
hegemony through the creation of the Metropolitan
Museum and other institutions of high art that
could set standards of taste for society as a whole.23
But cultural hegemony was not only a matter of
institutions. The ability to appreciate art primarily
in terms of form and aesthetic sensibility was to
become a feature of the class’s claims to
‘distinction’, in effect legitimatizing its drive for
cultural hegemony.

In this respect, Kensett’s career is symptomatic.24

Born in 1816, he was trained as an engraver but in
his early twenties decided on a career as a painter.
In 1840, he travelled to Europe in the company of
Durand and two younger landscapists, John Casilear

280
and Thomas Rossiter. He remained for seven years,
studying art and producing landscapes for the New
York and London art markets. By all accounts, he
had a congenial personality and a gift for what
today would be called ‘networking’. While still in
Europe, he corresponded with Abraham M.
Cozzens, Robert Hoe, Henry Marquand, Frederick
Sturges and Robert Olyphant – financiers and
industrialists with an interest in art. (Olyphant, a
merchant in the China trade and later a railroad
executive, became a close friend and the artist’s
chief backer.25) Kensett also counted among his
friends and patrons the collector-clergymen Henry
W. Bellows, Elias Magoon and Samuel Osgood, the
politician Hamilton Fish, the historian George
Bancroft, the publisher George P. Putnam, and the
writers William Cullen Bryant, Nathaniel Parker
Willis and George William Curtis. In 1848, shortly
after his return to the United States, Kensett was
elected an associate of the National Academy of
Design. He was elected a full academician a year
later. His election to membership of the Century
Association
that same year was, according to John Howat,
‘central, perhaps key, to his career at this time’, but
it was also the inevitable outcome of the
connections and alliances he had formed during the
preceding eight years.26 Kensett was an early
member of New York’s powerful Union League
Club, which was founded in 1863, and the principal
organizer of the League’s art exhibition at the 1864
Metropolitan Sanitary Fair. He was also a founding
trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, at
his death in 1872, president of the Artist’s Fund
Society.27

281
Kensett’s artistic evolution is inseparable from the
roles he played in the New York art world, not only
his close identification with his patrons and friends
and the institutions that enabled patronage, but
also, more generally, with the outlook and interests
of an emerging bourgeoisie. His success – from the
mid-1850s on he was ranked on a par with Church
and Bierstadt, the leading figures of the American
School – can be attributed not only to whatever
talents he possessed, but also to a sharp instinct for
what was wanted. As John Paul Driscoll writes, in
the mid-1850s, the painter ‘shifted from the more
conventional anecdotal picturesque mode derived
from the tradition of Cole and Durand, to the quiet
openness, light, and simplification of form, color
and composition that is now recognized as his
mature style and associated with the phenomenon
of “luminism”’.28 This shift, which came at a
moment when new aesthetic criteria were being put
forth in the pages of the Crayon and elsewhere,
could not have been at all fortuitous.29 The line that
stretches from Kensett’s Newport and Shrewsbury
River paintings of the later 1850s to the minimalist
landscapes that comprise the ‘Last Summer’s
Work’, as it is now called, accorded with both the
artist’s inclinations and a growing demand for
rarefied art forms. Critics lauded Kensett’s art not
only for its fidelity to nature, but also for its
‘refinement’. And as Melissa Trafton has observed,
the term ‘refinement’, so often used by Kensett’s
contemporaries to characterize his art, stood for
‘opposition to popular taste associated with
commercialism, and eventually [in the post-Civil
War period, to] affiliation with European [aesthetic]
values’.30 ‘Refinement’ was a notable feature of
American culture during the 1850s and 1860s, and

282
it went hand-in-hand with the class’s striving for
distinction.31

Kensett’s career reached its apex in the early

1860s, after which his art began to lose critical
favour. In 1864, in a scathing critique of the five
paintings he contributed to the art exhibition at the
New York Sanitary Fair, Cook condemned Kensett’s
work as superficial and monotonous, a charge that
other critics later levelled against his art.32 Kensett
died in 1872 and for a brief moment his reputation
soared. A retrospective exhibition filled the National
Academy of Design’s galleries with his work; an
executors’ sale of the contents of his studio
generated a frenzy of enthusiasm and reaped the
then stupendous sum of $130,000.33 In 1874, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, in deference to the
memory of one of its artist-trustees, mounted a
memorial exhibition.34 Thereafter Kensett’s
reputation along with that of the Hudson River
School went into precipitous decline.
Still, to paraphrase Cook, Kensett had played his
part and played it well. No artist of the preceding
decades had been more identified with the New
York bourgeoisie and its interests, and none had
done more when it came to making artistic
sensibility the subject of art. As we have seen,
Kensett’s late landscapes stood in opposition to the
more popular forms of Hudson River School
painting. They thus presaged the school’s demise
even as they anticipated the aesthetic exclusivity
that Cook had long advocated and that would
characterize so much of American painting in the
decades ahead.

283
1 Alan Wallach, ‘Rethinking “Luminism”: Taste, Class, and Aestheticizing
Tendencies in Mid-Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting’,
in Nancy Siegel (ed.), The Cultured Canvas: New Perspectives on
American Landscape Painting (University of New Hampshire Press:
Durham, New Hampshire, 2011), pp. 115–47.

2 See Gerald Carr, ‘Initiating and Naming “The Hudson River School”’,
Thomas Cole National Historical Site Newsletter (Fall 2011), pp. 5–6.
For a discussion of the context in which the term first appeared, see
Kevin Avery, ‘A Historiography of the Hudson River School’, in John K.
Howat (ed.), American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River
School (Metropolitan Museum of Art: New York, 1987), pp. 3–4.

3 Clarence Cook, ‘Art in America in 1883’, Princeton Review, vol. 11 (May

1883), p. 312.

4 Clarence Cook, ‘Society of American Artists’, New York Daily Tribune

(11 April 1880), p. 7, cited in Barbara Jean Stephanic, ‘Clarence Cook’s
Role as Art Critic, Advocate for Professionalism, Educator, and Arbiter
of Taste in America’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Maryland,
1997), pp. 82–3.

5 See Cook, ‘Art in America in 1883’, pp. 315–16.

6 Ibid., p. 312.

7 See J. Gray Sweeney, ‘Inventing Luminism: “Labels are the Dickens”’,

Oxford Art Journal, vol. 26, no. 2 (2003), pp. 93–120. John Baur first
coined the term. See Baur, ‘American Luminism: A Neglected Aspect of
the Realist Movement in Nineteenth-Century American Painting’,
Perspectives USA, vol. 9 (1954), pp. 90–1.

8 See Baur, ‘American Luminism’, op. cit.; Barbara Novak, American

Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the
American Experience, 3rd edn (Oxford University Press: New York,
2007; orig. publ. 1969); John Wilmerding (ed.), American Light: The
Luminist Movement, 1850–1875, Paintings, Drawings, Photographs
(National Gallery of Art: Washington, DC, 1980).

9 See, for example, Katherine E. Manthorne and Mark D. Mitchell,

Luminist Horizons: The Art and Collection of James A. Suydam
(National Academy of Design Museum and School of Fine Arts and
George Braziller: New York, 2006).

10 See Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the
Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge
University Press: New York and Cambridge, 2001); Frederic Cople

284
 Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York,
Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles (University of Illinois Press:
Urbana, 1982); Edward Pessen, Riches, Class, and Power Before the
Civil War (Transaction Publishers: New Brunswick, 1990; orig. publ.
1973); E. Digby Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a
National Upper Class (Transaction Publishers: New Brunswick, 1989;
orig. publ. 1958); Peter Dobkin Hall, The Organization of American
Culture, 1700–1900: Private Institutions, Elites, and the Origins of
American Nationality (New York University Press: New York, 1982).

11 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (Verso:

London, 1978), p. 93.

12 Baur was deeply influenced by Heinrich Wölfflin and Henri Focillon,

leading proponents of formalist theories of art history (see Sweeney, p.
98, n. 11). Novak twice refers to Wölfflin directly in American Painting of
the Nineteenth Century, pp. 5, 81, and his influence is apparent
throughout the book. See Jochen Wierich, ‘Mutual Art History: German
Art History and American Art’, in Barbara Groseclose and Jochen
Wierich (eds.), Internationalizing the History of American Art
(Pennsylvania State University Press: University Park, 2009), pp. 54–7.

13 Manthorne and Mitchell, ‘Luminism Revisited, Two Points of View’, in

Luminist Horizons, p. 124, distinguish between Heade and Lane, on the
one hand, and the group of New York artists that included Kensett and
Suydam. They see the latter group as ‘luminists’ who advanced an
aestheticizing or, as they put it, ‘modernist’ aesthetic, but they fail to
grasp the social and historical dynamics underlying this development.

14 See Peter Buckley, ‘To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New
York City, 1820–1860’, unpublished PhD thesis (State University of
New York at Stony Brook, 1984); see also the informative and
well-documented Wikipedia entry regarding the draft riots,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_draft_riots>, accessed 5
March 2013.

15 For Kensett’s late work, see Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, ‘The Last
Summer’s Work’, in John Paul Driscoll and John K. Howat (eds.), John
Frederick Kensett: An American Master (Worcester Art Museum in
association with W. W. Norton: New York and Worcester, 1985), pp.
136–61.

16 See Joni Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American
West (Smithsonian Institution Press: Washington and London, 1992),
pp. 43, 63–6, 95, 115–16, 149–50.

285
17 See ‘Heart of the Andes’, in Natalie Spassky et al., American Paintings
in the Metropolitan Museum of Art II: A Catalogue of Works by Artists
Born Between 1816–1845 (Metropolitan Museum of Art: New York,
1985), pp. 269–75; J. K. H. (John K. Howat), ‘Heart of the Andes,
1859’, in Howat (ed.), American Paradise, op. cit., pp. 246–50; Frank
Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church (National Gallery of Art: Washington, DC,
1989), pp. 54–8.

18 ‘The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak’, in Spassky et al., American

Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art II, op. cit., pp. 321–6.

19 See, for example, James Jackson Jarves, The Art Idea, ed. Benjamin
Rowland, Jr. [1864] (The Belknap Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1960), pp. 190–3.

20 Between the 1850s and 1870s, American collectors grew increasingly

sophisticated. Many factors influenced this development: critics’ efforts
to educate the art public, the expansion of the art market, the
appearance of art dealers, new art institutions, especially the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Connoisseurship was especially important
when it came to Kensett’s art, a point I develop further below. See
Melissa Geisler Trafton, ‘Critics, Collectors, and the Nineteenth-Century
Taste for the Paintings of Frederick Kensett’, unpublished PhD thesis
(University of California, Berkeley, 2003), pp. 77–8. Trafton’s
dissertation is the most comprehensive study of Kensett to date.

21 See Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbell, The Love of Art: European
Museums and their Public, trans. Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman
(Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1990); originally published as
L’Amour de l’art (Éditions de Minuit: Paris, 1966).

22 See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critque of the Judgment of

Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Harvard University Press: Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1984).

23 See Alan Wallach, ‘The Birth of the American Art Museum’, in Sven
Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum (eds.), The American Bourgeoisie:
Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan:
New York, 2010), pp. 247–56.

24 For Kensett’s biography, see Mark Sullivan, ‘John F. Kensett, American

Lansdcape Painter, unpublished PhD thesis (Bryn Mawr College,
1981), pp. 2–81; John K. Howat, ‘Kensett’s World’, in John Paul Driscoll
and John K. Howat (eds.), John Frederick Kensett: An American
Master (Worcester Art Museum in association with W. W. Norton: New
York and Worcester, 1985), pp. 15–47; see also Driscoll, ‘From Burin to
Brush’, ibid., pp. 49–135; and Trafton, ‘Appendix A: Chronology of

286
 Kensett’s Life’, in ‘Critics, Collectors and the Nineteenth-Century Taste
for the Paintings of Frederick Kensett’, op. cit., pp. 351–9.

25 See ‘Olyphant, Robert Morrison’, Archives Directory for the History of

American Collecting,
<http://research.frick.org/directoryweb/
browserecord.php?-action=browse&-recid=6332>, accessed 15 May
2013.

26 Howat, ‘Kensett’s World’, op. cit., p. 35.

27 Ibid., pp. 40–7.

28 Driscoll, ‘From Burin to Brush’, op. cit., p. 99.

29 Edited by William Stillman and John Durand, son of the painter Asher
B. Durand, and drawing upon the talents of well-known writers and
poets, the Crayon is usually if somewhat mistakenly remembered as an
American vehicle for Ruskin’s ideas. Ruskin played an important role in
the early years of the journal but, as Janice Simon has shown, under
the influence of German idealism, it evolved a
Unitarian-Transcendentalist critique of Ruskin. See Janice Simon, ‘The
Crayon 1855–1861: The Voice of Nature in Criticism, Poetry, and the
Fine Arts’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Michigan, 1990). For
an earlier discussion, see Roger B. Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic
Thought in America, 1840–1900 (Harvard University Press: Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1967). See also William James Stillman, The
Autobiography of a Journalist (Houghton, Mifflin and Company: Boston
and New York, 1901), vol. 1, pp. 222–31.

30 See Trafton, ‘Critics, Collectors and the Nineteenth-Century Taste for

the Paintings of Frederick Kensett’, op. cit., pp. 11–13.

31 In a chapter entitled ‘Domesticating the Sublime’, Angela Miller has

characterized the work of Kensett, Gifford et al., as ‘atmospheric
luminism’, which she links to refinement and the feminization of
American culture during the 1860s and 1870s. See Miller,
‘Domesticating the Sublime: The Feminized Landscape of Light, Space
and Air’, in The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and
American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Cornell University Press:
Ithaca, 1993), pp. 244–88

32 See Clarence Cook, ‘Exhibition of Pictures at the Sanitary Fair’, New

York Daily Tribune (16 April 1864), p. 12.

287
33 See Howat, ‘Kensett’s World’, op. cit., pp. 46–7; Eleanor Jones Harvey,
The Painted Sketch: American Impressions from Nature, 1830–1880
(Dallas Museum of Art: Dallas, 1998), pp. 101–4.

34 See Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, ‘Museum Exhibitions

1870–2011’, p. 82,
<http://libmma.org/digital_files/archives/
Museum_Exhibitions_1870-2011.pdf>, accessed 15 April 2013.

288
MEANING, CHANGE AND AMBIGUITY
IN CANADIAN LANDSCAPE IMAGERY
HOMER WATSON AND THE PIONEER MILL1
Brian Foss

T he subject of landscape looms large for

historians of Canadian art. ‘Every damn tree in
the country has been painted’, the abstract artist
Graham Coughtry (1931–99) famously complained,
frustrated as he was at almost every turn by the
value invested in landscape painting by Toronto
critics and patrons. Canada, the second-largest
country in the world and one of the most
geographically diverse, has long been defined by its
landscape. It informs and shapes everything in the
national superstructure. For example, the
University of Toronto political economist Harold
Innis, in a series of publications, chronicled the
country’s economic reliance upon resource
extraction to build his argument that ‘the present
Dominion emerged not in spite of geography but
because of it’. For Innis, Canada’s very size (its
extension fully west to the Pacific Ocean), as well as
its political structures, can be traced firmly back to
its economic grounding in its resource-extraction
economy.2
There is also, however, a grim side to the Canadian
obsession with geography. Here, too, important
aspects of Canada’s superstructure derived – in

289
varying degrees of explicitness – from the
omnipresent and sparsely inhabited landscape. In
the field of cultural criticism, Northrop Frye
characterized Canadians as having an enduring
wariness vis-à-vis nature: a ‘garrison mentality’ in
which everything that lies outside the barriers that
we construct against the ever-threatening natural
environment is to be feared.3 Frye thus reversed the
more optimistic ‘frontier thesis’ proposed in the
American historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893
essay ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American
History’: an essay that cast the westward march of
American migration within an Edenic myth of
national self-fulfilment. Novelist, poet and critic
Margaret Atwood has identified fear and
ambivalence towards the landscape as central
themes in Canadian writing,4 and has made those
qualities the driving forces in her eerie short story
‘Death by Landscape’, in which the principal
character, Lois, collects iconic examples of
twentieth-century Canadian landscape painting
because ‘she wanted something that was in them,
although she could not have said at the time what it
was. It was not peace: she does not find them
peaceful in the least. Looking at them fills her with
a wordless unease.’5 A symbol both of national
potential and uniqueness on the one hand, and of
suspicion, even dystopia, on the other, the
landscapes of Canada have long been an internally
conflicted cornerstone of the nation’s thought,
celebration, criticism and analysis.
Although my work on Canadian landscape imagery
has relied more explicitly on social history and
cultural studies than it has on Marxist methodology,
it owes much to two key thinkers of the left:
Raymond Williams and Andrew Hemingway.

290
Williams’s 1975 monograph The Country and the
City proposes a cogent analysis of landscape
representation, with English landscape – and its
relationship to urban life – dissected by means of a
sweeping survey of four centuries of poetry and
prose.6 His analysis of the complexities involved in
the countryside’s frequent presentation as an
embodiment of an idealized past, as compared with
the rampant capitalism and social confusion of the
city, has been germane to my studies of the
Canadian scene. So has his rejection of a dualistic
approach to country and city in favour of his stance
that the two phenomena are indissolubly related to
each other in ways that have everything to do with
the definition of landscape’s cultural and economic
use-value.
As for Hemingway, his 1992 monograph Landscape
Imagery and Urban Culture in Early
Nineteenth-Century Britain has long been a crucial
book for me. That publication builds upon the
proliferation of scholarship from the previous two
decades concerning the social construction of
British nature and its imagery.7 Much of this body
of work was inaugurated by The Country and the
City, and is explicitly based upon – or is implicitly
inflected by – Marxist methodologies. These are
studies that have been taken well beyond formal
analysis of the oeuvres of individual artists. They
instead situate landscape paintings solidly within
the parameters of cultural studies, with all the
attention this requires vis-à-vis issues of class,
socioeconomic and political contextualization, and
questions of labour, power and consumption. How,
for example, fine-art representations of landscape
exist on a continuum with a range of popular and
commercial imagery. How these complementary

291
forms of imagery are promoted to specific
audiences or fractions of audiences, and how those
recipients may subsequently valorize them as
objects of consumption by investing them with overt
ideological attributes. How, in other words, an
insistence upon the ‘naturalness’ of nature and a
taste for fine-art images of that self-same nature are
inevitably obscurantist. These are questions that a
Marxist approach to art history is singularly well
positioned to address.
For its part, Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture
asks how naturalistic landscape painting – an
innovative phenomenon in early nineteenth-century
Britain – came to be so central to popular and
critical middle-class taste during the years from
around 1805 to 1830. The book addresses this
question through an exhaustive analysis of
published material that ranges from philosophical
texts of the Scottish Enlightenment to art reviews in
newspapers of differing political stances. This
extensive literary research is justified on the
grounds that, as Hemingway notes early on in the
book, ‘Landscape paintings were produced for use
primarily within urban spaces,
and what we can know of their meanings comes
mainly from texts produced by urban intellectuals.’8
Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture is never
reductive in its materialist, documentary probing of
evolving ideas about beauty and taste – notably the
development of associationist aesthetics, the
privileged status such aesthetics gave to
middle-class subjectivity in interpretations of visual
imagery, the ways in which such interpretations
could be linked to modern-themed, naturalistic
landscape painting, and the multi-platform means
by which these conjoined phenomena were

292
marketed to middle-class publics that were happy to
expand their appropriation and consumption of the
visual arts. Sophisticated, subtle, grounded in
meticulous research and rigorous analysis,
Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture is a
masterful Marxist exploration of the relationships
between social class, taste, fine art, popular culture,
published texts, and the appropriation and
consumption of art. Suffice it to say that the book
was within constant reach when I began to examine
the work of the Canadian landscape artist Homer
Ransford Watson (1855–1936).
Watson was a landscape painter right down to his
fingertips. Born in the village of Doon, on the Grand
River in Waterloo County of south-central Ontario,
he attributed his fascination with landscape to his
intense psychological, emotional and physical
involvement with the geographical setting in which
he had been born and in which he spent virtually his
entire life. ‘[G]reat landscape artists’, he proclaimed
in a 1900 lecture at the University of Toronto, ‘are
no more cosmopolitan than are great patriots, and
no immortal landscape has been painted which has
not had as at least one of the promptings for its
creation, a feeling its creator had of having roots in
his native land and being a product of its soil.’9
Watson’s life story, carefully defined and tended by
the artist, by his friends and patrons, and by
journalists, is a variation on a biographical conceit
common since at least the time of Vasari. Born in a
backwater settlement, Watson lost his father when
he was a child, was reprimanded by the village
schoolmaster for drawing caricatures in his school
notebook, taught himself to draw based on
illustrations in magazines, and won occasional,
modest prizes by exhibiting his early paintings at

293
local fairs. Not until he lived in Toronto for several
months when he was in his late teens did he
actually encounter the work of professional artists.
With their encouragement, he visited New York
state from 1875 (possibly 1876) until late 1877. His
travels there are known in only the vaguest detail,
but he probably saw canvases by members of the
Hudson River School. Certainly he sketched in the
Adirondack Mountains and along the Susquehanna,
Mohawk and Hudson rivers: terrain that was
central to the Hudson River aesthetic. He got as far
as New York City but, as he later recalled, ‘I got so
impatient to rush back home and use all this
knowledge that I could not stay in the city any
longer. So home I went and commenced to paint
with faith, ignorance and delight.’10 For almost the
entirety of the rest of his long career, Watson would
devote himself to recording the landscapes around
Doon and along the Grand River.

294
1 Homer Watson, The Pioneer Mill, 1880, oil on
canvas, 86 × 127 cm. Royal Collection Trust. Photo:
copyright © 2013 HM Queen Elizabeth II.

An essential part of Watson’s reputation was based

on the well-publicized fact that other than a handful
of lessons from an unnamed New York painter who
‘kindly offered to teach me how to use a maul stick
[sic] and spread paint on a palette’,11 he was
entirely self-taught. This self-presentation relied,
especially near the start of his career, on the
cultivation of a backwoods persona cut off from all
things urban. Thus, recalling how in 1880, at the
age of twenty-five, he had submitted a painting –
The Pioneer Mill [1] – to the inaugural exhibition of
the Canadian Academy of Arts (which was soon
thereafter given permission to add the word ‘Royal’
to its name), Watson described how anxious he had
been. ‘Of course,’ he asserted, ‘I knew nothing
about painting, and how I got through the job of
making a picture … I do not know.’12
This self-deprecation makes for an endearing story,
but like many such stories it incorporates fictional
elements. By 1880 Watson had already been a
member of the Ontario Society of Artists, easily the
brightest star in the province’s rather meagre art
firmament, for two years. He had exhibited there
twice, and had received complimentary newspaper
reviews as someone who was ‘very rapidly coming
to the front in the estimation both of the public and
his fellow-artists’.13 Nor do the dimensions of his
paintings from these early years suggest someone
who was hesitantly feeling his way.
Watson had in fact begun producing large canvases
in about 1877, when he was in his early twenties.
The Castellated Cliff of 1879 (now in the National

295
Gallery of Canada) measures 88 × 126 cm, and A
Coming Storm in the Adirondacks (Musée des
Beaux-Arts de Montréal), of the same year, is 86 ×
119 cm. The Pioneer Mill – the painting he
submitted to the 1880 Canadian Academy exhibition
– has similar dimensions: 86 × 127 cm. In short, it
seems unlikely that when Watson sent that painting
to the academy’s first show he was as trepidatious
as he later claimed.
The Pioneer Mill made Watson’s reputation. It was
purchased, for the equivalent of his two previous
years of earnings, by Canada’s governor-general,
the Marquis of Lorne, the husband of Princess
Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria. Lorne had
bought the painting as a gift for his mother-in-law.
Victoria hung it in Windsor Castle, where it remains
to this day.14 Nor was Lorne alone in his admiration
for Watson’s work. Newspaper reviewers
unreservedly approved of The Pioneer Mill. The
Globe, one of Toronto’s two most respected daily
newspapers, described it as ‘an admirable
landscape, wonderfully truthful in design, with rich
but quiet colouring; rocks, water, sky and foliage
are all strong and realistic’.15 But Watson’s
recollection of the Globe’s headline as reading
‘Country Boy Paints Picture Bought by Princess
Louise’ sounds almost too good to be true – and
that’s exactly what it was. The announcement of the
painting’s purchase in the 8 March 1880 issue
occupied only part of a single paragraph in what
was otherwise a long, multi-column report. Contrary
to Watson’s romantically embroidered memory, the
article’s title made no reference to him. Nor did the
headlines of any other reviews.

296
Also contrary to Watson’s memory, none of the
reviews referred to him as a ‘country boy’. The
Canadian Spectator did ask how it was possible that
the art of painting should flourish ‘among men who
are of humble parentage – men who have not
received a classical or liberal education’, but the
reviewer was referring to Canadian artists in
general, not to Watson in particular. ‘Genius’, the
Canadian Spectator’s reviewer wrote, ‘fills a void
which education cannot do. Among the founders of
the great European schools of painting were men of
humble origin, yet men upon whose heads it pleased
Heaven to accumulate gifts and graces not
generally bestowed upon mortals.’16 That same year
(1880), reviewing Watson’s comparably large A
Coming Storm in the Adirondacks at the Art
Association of Montreal, two newspapers described
him as a ‘genius comparatively unaided by culture’
and a ‘back woods’ figure who had enjoyed ‘no
advantages for the study of art but those furnished
by dame nature’.17 Refrains like these would
become central to Watson’s reputation, repeated in
published appraisals throughout his long life. A
relatively early instance dates from 1902, when
Katherine Hale, the author of an admiring article
about a visit to his home in Doon, described coming
upon ‘a charming old stone house in the last stages
of decay, enwoven in vines and orchard-set.
Convinced that it is our Mecca we turn for
confirmation to a respectable citizen on the
sidewalk. “Last house to the right, stranger”, he
says decisively, and disappointed we drive on.’18
The success of Watson’s art was thus presented by
Watson himself and by others as an exemplification
of the cliché of inexplicable, untrained genius
soaking up inspiration and talent from ‘dame

297
nature’. The origins of that characterization lay in a
confluence of factors: broader aesthetic and
cultural trends; the economic development of
southern Ontario; relationships between rural and
urban realities, expectations and attitudes; and the
personal histories of Watson and his forebears. The
remainder of this essay considers these interrelated
issues, with particular attention to the painting that
launched Watson’s career in spectacular fashion:
The Pioneer Mill.

Nostalgia and death: Water-wheel mills in North

American culture

Abandoned mills driven by water wheels –

especially mills powered by vertically mounted
breastshot and undershot wheels (the most
stereotypically familiar types)19 – feature in several
large and small Watson canvases during three
decades beginning in about 1879, and also in
numerous undated drawings and a large,
accomplished etching.20 The latter sold badly: an
unfortunate result of the inexperience of Watson’s
Toronto dealer when it came to marketing etchings,
the high customs duties imposed on imported prints
(Watson had made the print in 1889–90 while living
in England), and a serious lack of Canadian support
for the Etching Revival.21 These reasons had little
to do with the appeal of the subject itself, however.
Ruskin distrusted representations of decaying mills
and other workaday architecture because of what
he described as their sentimentalization of human
poverty and decay,22 but many laypeople, artists
and critics saw that very characteristic as integral
to the attractions of the imagery.

298
In the field of romantic literature, for example,
Scribner’s Monthly did nothing unusual when in
1874 it published a long poem recalling the glory
days of an antiquated grist mill, and linked the
building’s emotional and psychological resonance to
its now deceased owner’s home in heaven.23 Mary
Dwinell Chellis’s novel The Old Mill, published in
Boston in 1884, luxuriates in the travails of a man
who, out of despair after the loss of his wife and
children, closes down the family’s mill, consigning it
to a process of evocative decay. ’Neath the Maple
by the Mill, a song published in Toronto in about
1881, associates the titular building with the
singer’s wooing of his sweetheart, revealing only in
the final verse that their courtship took place long
ago and that the beloved is now dead and buried
‘’neath the maple by the mill’. Such unabashedly
anti-modernist texts and songs were produced and
consumed throughout the last decades of the
nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Among a
multitude of examples, ‘The Old Mill’ – an undated
poem by Ontario native Wilson Pugsley MacDonald
– concludes with a description of ‘phantom millers
[who] move in rhyme / Even as when in life, and on
clear nights / You can behold them toiling as though
time / Had never passed the Humber’s silvered
heights.’ (The Humber River is one of two
waterways flanking Toronto.)

299
 2 The Aldine: The Art Journal
of America, vol. 7, no. 12
(December 1874), back cover.
Photo: Library and Archives
Canada.

Interest in the associational potential of old mills

was not, though, limited to popular novels, poems
and songs. North American painters and illustrators
also made regular use of the theme, which at least
in the United States mutated from a pre-Civil War
emphasis on what has been termed an ‘almost
daemonic omnipotence’ to a postwar rusticated
nostalgia.24 The latter connotation, growing out of
the Picturesque aesthetic’s formal and
psychological exploitation of mills, was quite unlike
the celebration of bourgeois economic prosperity

300
that had characterized the first sustained
appearance of mill imagery in European art, in
seventeenth-century Holland. During the mid-to late
1870s, the Aldine – a magazine noted for its
high-quality engraved reproductions and from
which Watson may well have drawn much of his
skill in depicting dramatic, stormy skies25 –
published nostalgia-invoking representations of
small, antiquated, wheel-powered mills in
reassuringly pastoral settings. One of these images
[2], issued in 1874, illustrates a poem in which the
deadness of the season, the decay of the
mill and the end of human life are unambiguously
conflated: ‘A wreck, beyond repair, the old mill
seems, / A type alike of manhood and the time – /
Decay o’ercreeping all his busy schemes: / Himself
low buried ’neath the winter rime.’26 Other views of
water-powered mills from yesteryear, prepared by
American printmakers such as the prolific John
Douglas Woodward, were used less to invoke death
than to suggest a bygone rural simplicity that was
out of step with the hurly-burly of the modern
world. Woodward’s engravings were included in,
among other publications, the hugely popular
Picturesque America; or, The Land We Live In of
1872–4. ‘Labor mars the landscape it enters,’ wrote
O. B. Bunce, one of Picturesque America’s many
essayists, ‘but the mill seems to partake in the spirit
of its surroundings, to gain a charm from woods and
waters, and to give one.’27
George Inness, described by Watson as the
outstanding figure in American landscape art, was
one of many well-known contemporary painters who
depicted this subject. Watson may have met the
American when they were both in New York, Inness
having relocated there from Europe in 1876. At the

301
very least, Watson could have encountered Inness’s
paintings during his New York sojourn of the late
1870s, perhaps at the National Academy of Design,
where old mills were frequent subjects in post-1860
annual shows and where Inness enjoyed a
well-publicized critical triumph in 1877.

A society in flux

The fascination with the remnants and symbols of a

disappearing past was abetted in Ontario by sea
changes in the province’s economic and social
infrastructures. Its industry at the time of Watson’s
birth in 1855 consisted mostly of small businesses,
although there was already significant evidence of
steam-based technology and, consequently, of
industrial expansion and specialization of labour.28
Until the 1860s, however, most mills were powered
by water wheels. Only 41 of Ontario’s grist mills
were steam-driven in 1854, compared with 569 that
used wheels.29
During the 1870s and 1880s, however, many of the
latter had fallen or were falling into picturesque
decay, among them Doon’s first grist mill.30 Those
that were powered solely by water wheels
accounted for only about twelve per cent of all
industrial establishments in Ontario in 1871.31 And
other, related technological changes were also
occurring. For example, a grist business in the
village of German Mills, midway between Doon and
the nearby town of Berlin (the latter would be
patriotically renamed Kitchener in 1916), became in
1863 the first in Canada to employ the new gradual
reduction, multi-stage grinding technique. Patented
in Canada that same year, this technique challenged
the single chop, fast-reduction method, which

302
required two traditional grindstones mounted close
together. Twelve years later and only a few miles
further afield, at his mill at St Jacobs, also in
Waterloo County, E. W. B. Snider established
Ontario’s first gradual-reduction rolling mill. Rolling
mills used corru
gated iron (or, from the early 1880s, porcelain)
cylinders instead of the grindstones that had been
the defining technology throughout the preceding
decades and centuries. Rolling mills quickly proved
their value: they produced whiter flour, required
less supervision, were more easily maintained, did
thirty-seven per cent more work than traditional
grist mills and needed forty-seven per cent less
power.32 Of the six establishments named in an
1884–5 summary of flour mills in Waterloo County,
only two were comparatively small-scale concerns
that utilized millstones; the others were all
large-scale commercial rolling mills.33 Inexorably,
the small wheel-driven mills lovingly chronicled by
Homer Watson – buildings that had been centres of
community life (marriage banns had often been
posted on their doors, for example) – were replaced
by businesses that were less concerned with
building relationships with local farmers than they
were with acting as hubs for large geographical
areas.

303
3 Winslow Homer, The Old Mill (The Morning Bell),
1871, oil on canvas, 61 × 96.8 cm. Yale University
Art Gallery, bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark, BA
1903. Photo: Yale University Art Gallery.

These changes happened quickly, and were usually

drastic and always noteworthy. The American artist
Winslow Homer, for example, tracked changes in
textile manufacture in his The Old Mill of 1871 [3].
In this painting, female factory workers begin to
traverse an inclined walkway that leads past an
abandoned textile mill (the empty-windowed
building on the left of the canvas) to arrive at a new
facility just beyond the forsaken structure. The only
part of the more recent building that is visible (seen
just above the roof of the abandoned one) is a
bright, shiny bell, the ringing of which
embodied the new tyranny of timed labour: ‘the
most distinctive fixture and defining attribute of the
new mills’.34 As an 1898 description of an idyllic
picnic on the banks of Waterloo County’s Grand
River, near Doon, put it:

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It seems to me I’d like to go

Where bells don’t ring, nor whistles blow,

Nor clocks don’t strike, nor gongs don’t sound,

And I’d have stillness all around.35

The changes in technology and scale that

characterized mills of all types were symptomatic of
a larger phenomenon: the increasing urbanization
of southern Ontario. During the 1850s, railway
incursions by the Grand Trunk and the Great
Western led to the expansion of manufacturing in
Berlin, Galt, Preston, Doon and other Waterloo
County towns. An 1860s gazetteer described Berlin
as lacking water power and other resources
necessary for industry, but even as that judgment
was being published the foundations were being
laid for a dramatic economic and population boom
that led to Berlin being incorporated as a town in
1871. By then Waterloo County had an industrial
workforce of some four thousand: the ninth largest
in Ontario’s thirty-seven counties.36 An 1872
observer – with, it should be noted, a fair degree of
poetic licence – compared the concentration of
industry in the small town of Hespeler (near Doon)
to that in the British industrial centre of Bradford.37
Doon itself had a population of only 150 in 1871,
but this rose to about 300 in the 1880s (when a
resident could justly describe it as ‘a busy and
prosperous village’),38 and to 600 by the end of the
century. By that time the once bustling but now
outdated Grand River canal system had been largely
displaced by the urban concentration of large-scale,
technology-driven industry that relied on the
railways for the mass transport of raw materials
and finished products alike. ‘The artist’, according

305
to an 1893 magazine article, referring to visual
artists in general rather than to Watson in
particular, ‘now delights to haunt its [the Grand
River’s] banks and transfer some of its numberless
bits of enchanting scenery to his canvas or his
paper.’39
Canada officially became a dominion of the British
Empire in the final third of the nineteenth century
(in 1867), and in this era of nation-building a great
deal of faith was invested in economic growth and
in the related rise of cities. But that faith was
tempered by an increasing association of urban life
with noise, dirt, a hectic pace, materialism and
artificiality. All of these were blamed for what were
claimed to be escalating levels of stress, poor
mental and physical health, and the loss of the
self-reliance that rural life, trumpeted as an organic
social order founded on simplicity and natural
virtue, supposedly fostered and symbolized.
Chronologically coincident with the fame of The
Pioneer Mill, an 1881 book entitled American
Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences argued
that ‘Americanitis’ was creating neurasthenic
conditions among urbanites in
the United States, and that ‘a restful time away
from modern civilization in a park, at a cottage, or
in Canada should return the sufferer, at least
temporarily, to health’.40 Yet despite Canada’s
presumably bucolic character, concerns similar to
those highlighted by American Nervousness gave
pause to the recently established (1868) Canada
First Movement. Beginning in the 1870s, its
members, conservative nationalists all, championed
the already fragile idea of Canada as a principally
agrarian nation. In a related vein, nascent urban
moral reform and social-welfare projects were

306
promoted in newspapers as early as the 1880s.
Twenty years later, they were complemented by the
growth of presumably restful suburbs, the
popularity of the village community ideal, and a
drive towards town planning. The latter manifested
itself as early as 1890 in the town of Waterloo, near
Doon, when the municipality adopted Ontario’s
Public Parks Act and was thus positioned to acquire
land to preserve as salutary parkland. 41
It was under these circumstances that city dwellers
became key proponents and consumers of nostalgia
for an idealized rural past. The 1880s were marked
by North American journalists reaching largely
urban readerships (including many Canadians)
through such periodicals as Ladies’ Home Journal,
Good Housekeeping, Atlantic Monthly and Saturday
Evening Post. These were magazines that often
espoused what a later analyst described as ‘a
philosophy which seems in retrospect appropriate
only to Outing and Forest and Stream’.42 Previously
understood and championed primarily by those who
actually lived there, during the last quarter of the
nineteenth century the southern Ontario
countryside became increasingly understood in
terms of its therapeutic relationship to Toronto and
other burgeoning cities.43 In this regard, railways
supported the most striking travel trend to blossom
during the last three decades of the century: a
fashion for rural spas and waterside resorts that
catered to urbanites. Preston, next door to Doon
and much noted for its mineral baths, was one such
locale. But city dwellers were also cycling, hiking
and boating through non-resort areas, as well as
spending time as guests on farms.44 The Grand
River was popular with large groups and single
day-trippers alike, including artists both amateur

307
and professional.45 Cycling magazine in 1893
specified the attraction of the area around Doon: ‘A
number of Toronto waifs … [who were] sent out to
breathe the pure air and give a sight of green fields
and woods’ had ‘pale pinched faces’ before their
arrival; but when they ‘first caught sight of the
flowers near the track at the [train] depot they ran
and plucked them in the wildest glee’.46 Picnics,
too, were a popular pastime along the Grand River.
In the words of American art historian Angela
Miller, picnics epitomized ‘the contradictory
experience of men and women benefiting directly
from economic expansion and reluctant to slow the
juggernaut of progress yet concerned with
maintaining a sense of continuity with the past’.47
This reciprocal relationship between the rural and
the urban also played itself out in Watson’s career.
The cities of Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa were
where his work was most frequently exhibited.
Although many of his paintings were initially
subsumed
into the collections of his friends and admirers in
the towns around Doon, his most visible and
acquisitive collectors tended to be city dwellers
associated with high finance and industry, including
railway development. Like John Constable and the
Barbizon artists to whom he was compared by
Oscar Wilde at the time of Wilde’s May 1882 visit to
Toronto,48 Watson dedicated himself to lovingly
recording a local landscape with which he was
intimately familiar and then selling those paintings
to powerful figures whose lives and activities were
thoroughly urban, much as cosmopolitan Parisian
collectors had earlier been the driving force behind
the popularity of the decidedly anti-urban Barbizon
artists.49 The same rural/urban relationship

308
characterized the art and audience of the English
artist George Clausen (1852–1944), whose paintings
Watson first saw at the Goupil Gallery in London
and with whom he established a warm friendship
after meeting him in 1887. Described by Watson as
a devotee of truth,50 Clausen – like his
contemporaries Henry Herbert La Thangue in
England and Jules Bastien-Lepage in France –
espoused a rural nostalgia painted in a
painstakingly realist aesthetic that was rooted in a
close connection with his immediate milieu and that
supplanted Jean-François Millet’s imagery with a
more uncritical, and therefore more palatable and
‘timeless’ depiction of old-world country lives,
infrastructures and economies.
Like the Barbizon artists, like Constable and like
Clausen, Watson offered a view of rural society that
actively avoided heavy industry and urbanization,
which were expanding throughout southern Ontario
during the last decades of the nineteenth century.
At the same time, the sentimental identification of
Watson’s art as embodying a relationship of both
negation and desire between his bucolic world and
his patrons’ modern urban lives was referenced by
commentators such as the anonymous critic who
reviewed the Royal Canadian Academy’s 1892
annual exhibition for the serial publication The
Week. To that author, Watson’s ‘romantic pastorals’
exemplified why ‘landscapes [are] the most lastingly
soothing of all pictures; they bring the tired and
harassed drudge of city life back to the playgrounds
of his youthful truant days, and woo the memory
away from present care’.51 This rural/urban
relationship reached what was perhaps its apogee
of verbal expression in 1929. In that year, R. C.
Reade, writing in the Toronto Star Weekly, adopted

309
an aggressively anti-modern vocabulary for bringing
Watson once again to the attention of Toronto
readers. Reade described making a ‘pilgrimage’ to
visit ‘the hermit of Doon’, who ‘lives hidden in the
woods … because he has no passion for painting
rubber plants and artificial palms’. Appropriately
enough, Watson’s ‘sylvan retreat’ (Doon: ‘a
shrinking violet as modest as its most illustrious
citizen’) proved difficult for the adoring journalist to
find, ‘[e]ven with the most detailed road
directions’.52 Just five months before the
cataclysmic stock market crash that would gut the
financial security that Watson had accumulated
over the course of a career stretching far beyond
Doon and Waterloo County, his image remained
that of a recluse inhabiting an anachronistic idyll.

Family and pioneer legacies

However, the emphasis that Watson laid on a

serene antidote to urbanism went beyond Victorian
romanticism, beyond the psychological and social
impacts of the changes that were transforming
southern Ontario’s industrial infrastructure, and
beyond the relationship between rural subject
matter and urban desires and expectations. Equally
important was Watson’s family history. The two
previous generations of Watsons had been bound up
with small-scale milling in Waterloo County. Their
involvement appears to have led the artist to base
the eponymous building in The Pioneer Mill roughly
on a sawmill built by his grandfather James
following the latter’s emigration to Canada from the
United States.53 ‘The fondest recollections I had of
the place [Doon] dwelt there [in the mill]’ the artist
wrote in an undated and fictionalized

310
autobiographical manuscript. ‘A history was
connected with it and the place was now a ruin.’54
The business operated by Ransford Watson (James’s
son and Homer’s father) was a combination saw and
woollen mill that failed three years after his death
in 1864 and was sold.55 An uncle leased the
property in 1872 and opened a sawmill and pail
factory, at which the seventeen-year-old Homer
worked. Sixteen years later, in 1888, the mill was
sold a second time. That event, which Watson’s wife
described as having made her husband ‘blue for
three days’, furnished an indication of Watson’s
psychological investment in his family history.56
Small wonder, then, that many of Watson’s images
of mills are permeated by a sense of personal
longing and loss more profound than the
generalized and histrionic Victorian sentiment
about the past. The titles of his paintings and
drawings frequently incorporate words such as
‘deserted’ and ‘haunted’, the latter term
particularly resonant in view of the twelve-year-old
Watson having witnessed the death of his older
brother Jude in a milling accident. ‘Life and thought
hath fled away’ is the regretful inscription below
another drawing of a crumbling mill. Indeed,
Watson’s progress from the most detailed surviving
preparatory drawing for The Pioneer Mill to the
painting itself evinces an increasing emphasis on
age and disuse, as if the artist’s steps towards the
final painting recapitulated the decline in the
family’s fortunes from one generation to the next.
The drawing includes a male figure carrying an
object that may be a fishing pole.57 But in the
finished painting that figure has been changed into
an elderly man with a long white beard. Rather than
carrying a pole over his shoulder, he leans upon a

311
stick or cane for support. The tall, flourishing tree
that anchors the left side of the drawing has
become a corpse: a dead trunk, exposed roots and a
few remaining but lifeless branches. The roof and
walls of the mill itself show the damage wrought by
time, and the foliage that merely surrounds the
building in the drawing now overwhelms it.
These points of transition between the preparatory
drawing and the painting demonstrate that The
Pioneer Mill, perhaps more than any other art work
by Watson, embodies the moral tensions he felt
between linked binaries: nature and progress,
creation and
destruction, civilization and excess. Of those pairs,
progress, creation and civilization were closely
associated with the whole phenomenon of
pioneering. Significantly, throughout his long life,
Watson described himself as a proud grandson of
homesteading pioneers. ‘[M]y love’, he wrote, late
in life, ‘has always been where cultivation went on
to furnish a living to men who came out of the
pioneer stage to a more refined rural life, where
people were growing into what Canada will be more
and more.’58

312
4 George Agnew Reid, Logging, 1888, oil on canvas,
107.4 × 194 cm. National Gallery of Canada,
Ottawa. Photo: copyright © 2013 NGC.

This dedication to pioneer activities and values was

far from an isolated point of view.
Nineteenth-century Ontario was fixated on the
figure of the pioneer as the embodiment of
enterprise, persistence, resourcefulness and
59
bravery. Over the course of the half century
beginning in 1850 there appeared hundreds of
Ontario pioneer-related fiction and non-fiction
publications of every type, the best known today
being memoirs by the English immigrant sisters
Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill,
including Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, or, Life
in Canada (1852), Life in the Clearings Versus the
Bush (1853) and Life in the Backwoods: A Sequel to
Roughing It in the Bush (1887). Many in this genre
cast pioneers as noble warriors felling trees that are
described as worthy opponents: as ‘Caesars’ (in
Alexander McLachlan’s poem ‘The Emigrant’ of
1861) and ‘kings’ (in Isabella Valancy Crawford’s

313
1884 poem ‘Malcolm’s Katie: A Love Story’).60 The
same themes appeared in art. George Agnew Reid’s
sizeable 1888 painting Logging [4] was described
by him as representing ‘a phase of the development
of Canada which in its main aspects ended about
seventy-five years ago in old Ontario, where the
farms were cleared by the heaping together of the
large and small
logs and brush’.61 Nine years later Reid donated
two large mural paintings to decorate Toronto’s city
hall: The Arrival of the Pioneers and Staking a
Pioneer Farm. Moreover, the huge (and hugely
popular) Toronto Industrial Exhibition annually
included a pioneer-style log cabin, built to order on
the site. In 1879, exploiting the truism that pioneer
values and skills were all too lacking in modern
society, the Mail remarked that the cabin had been
built by ‘old men … who are still capable of
performing work which, if imposed on young men,
would make them wish they never were born’.62
But if the pioneers encapsulated progress, creation
and civilization, what followed on from their arrival
in southern Ontario also had a dark side. In
Wellington County, where European settlement had
begun in about 1820, it was estimated in 1881 that
the length of time between initial settlement in
relentlessly treed bush and the occupation of all the
available land and the need to import firewood was
a mere twenty-five years.63 There is no reason to
believe that the situation in neighbouring Waterloo
County was any different. In paintings such as
Log-Cutting in the Woods [5], Watson envisioned
human economic activity taking place within a
natural setting of which it makes use but which it
does not push beyond the bounds of sustainability.
However, it had been in 1880 – the year The

314
Pioneer Mill was completed, exhibited and sold –
that the first warning was raised that the felling of
woodlands along the Grand River was resulting in
flooding: a new phenomenon in the area.64 Only
about a decade later, Watson’s unpublished essays
‘A Landscape Painter’s Day’ and ‘The Village’ were
unequivocal about how the sawmill built by his
grandfather had eventually undercut its own
viability by destroying the trees upon which it
depended. ‘A Landscape Painter’s Day’ describes its
author’s thoughts when, during a thunderstorm, he
took shelter in the by-then abandoned mill:

5 Homer Watson, Log-Cutting in the Woods, 1894,

oil on canvas, 45.7 × 61 cm. Montreal Museum of
Fine Arts, gift of Lord Strathcona and family. Photo:
Brian Merrett.

315
I thought of those earlier years when the mill in its vigorous life tore
into sections with the giant force of its devouring saw the bodies of
all the neighbouring trees. Year after year the forest was spoiled in
order to furnish food for the saw. Into its depths rolled resinous
timber, and gorged with such richness, a ruinous waste came
about. No forests rose anew in place of those shreds. The pulse of
the life of the mill became less and when the last of those
cloud-cleaving pines were laid low to supply man with his needs,
then the mill wrought its own death.

The floods of water that the forests once held in their mould bore
down every year with might, until at last they wreaked vengeance
upon the old mill for being the agent that had loosed them to
turbulent life.65

The Pioneer Mill, more than any other of his art

works, was the ground on which Watson worked
through the tensions between the admiration he
and his society had for local pioneers, and his
deeply personal awareness of the ultimately
destructive relationship between the pioneers and
the environment that had originally sustained them.

Postscript

Two decades after writing ‘A Landscape Painter’s

Day’, Watson would take very public action to strike
a balance between the advantages of pioneer
activities and the ensuing loss of the qualities that
made rural life so desirable. In 1913 he became
instrumental in a successful campaign to preserve a
wooded area near his home and studio: a tract
threatened by population growth and the
corresponding demand for more land to develop. As
a key organizer and the president of Waterloo
County Grand River Park Limited, he helped to

316
raise funds to buy and preserve the forty-acre stand
of trees named Cressman’s Woods (rechristened
Homer Watson Memorial Park in 1944), located
next to Doon. The site was about to be auctioned
and was expected to be purchased by an
entrepreneur who was determined to replace the
trees with something more ‘civilized’.66 Fittingly,
the warning that Watson had tried to convey in The
Pioneer Mill about an ultimately self-defeating
relationship between civilization and nature was
marshalled by him again in 1913, this time to
thwart a twentieth-century version of that same
menace. In the next year, however, began the war
that would employ technology of unprecedented
rapaciousness to inflict devastation upon the
natural and built environments of Europe. The
Pioneer Mill became, more than ever, a symbol of
the unrecoverable past.
The years following the successful preservation of
Cressman’s Woods were not kind to Homer Watson.
His wife Roxa died in January 1918. Deeply
distressed, he began to take solace in spiritualist
séances and in doctored photographs that showed
him surrounded by the translucent bodies of
deceased relatives and friends, much as his
paintings and drawings of settler life captured
fondly recalled but increasingly ghostly rural and
pioneer histories. His eclipse as a key figure in
contemporary Canadian art was implicit in the rise
of the Group of Seven, whose frankly modernist
approaches to picture-making he occasionally
admired but which he also criticized for proposing
too narrow a definition of ‘Canadian’ and for
focusing too much on landscapes that rarely
contained Euro-Canadian settlements of much
significance. (‘Let him [the artist] paint where he

317
can dominate the scene, and not be dominated by
the scene’, Watson advised.67) As if to emphasize
his outmoded status, the Depression blighted his
final years by plunging him into financial chaos
from which he never recovered.
In 1957, however, two decades after Watson’s
death, the pioneer ethos to which he had been so
devoted was made the subject of what was hoped to
be a revival. In that year, the Doon Pioneer Village
was opened to the public. Its goal was to celebrate
the settlers of Ontario and especially those of the
Grand River area, commemorating a period in
which (according to one proponent of the project)
‘men and women had purpose, perseverance, thrift
and sincerity, qualities not as prevalent in our own
age’.68 In an almost painful bit of irony, the location
proposed for the Village in 1954 was Cressman’s
Woods, although that plan was, mercifully, scuttled.
Over the next two decades, the outdoor museum
acquired large numbers of buildings and artefacts,
many with little or no connection to the district
around Doon or even to the pioneer era. The driving
force was instead a fuzzy, generalized nostalgia for
‘old things’ of every description: an approach very
different from the intensely personal presentation of
local scenery and architecture by which Watson had
established his credibility and reputation. Not until
the implementation of a 1979 master plan was this
ahistorical tactic abandoned, but at the cost of
redefining the museum’s focus away from the
pioneer era altogether. From now on, the site,
renamed Doon Heritage Crossroads, would present
‘a typical, rural Waterloo County crossroads of
1914’.69 Nineteen-fourteen marked, ironically
enough, the definitive arrival of twentiethcentury
modernity in the form of the First World War: a

318
phenomenon in opposition to everything for which
Watson’s depictions of Doon and its landmarks
stood and were valued. By that time, however,
Watson’s bucolic but (as in The Pioneer Mill)
conflicted imagery had already established itself as
a template for the ambiguity that the work of
Harold Innis, Northrop Frye, Margaret Atwood and
others would enshrine as the pervading relationship
between Canadians and the landscapes that
surround them.
1 An earlier, more detailed version of this essay was published in the
Journal of Canadian Art History, vol. 33 no. 1 (Spring 2012), as part of
a two-volume homage to the Québécois art historian François-Marc
Gagnon. I am very grateful to the Journal, and especially to Sandra
Paikowsky, who conceived the project, for their permission to publish
this reworked version of that text.

2 Harold Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian

Economic History, rev. edn (University of Toronto Press: Toronto,
1977), pp. 392–3.

3 Northrop Frye, ‘Conclusion’, in Carl F. Klinck (ed.), Literary History of

Canada: Canadian Literature in English (University of Toronto Press:
Toronto, 1965).

4 Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature

(House of Anansi Press: Toronto, 1972).

5 Margaret Atwood, ‘Death by Landscape’, in Atwood, Wilderness Tips

(McClelland and Stewart: Toronto, 1991), p. 102.

6 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford University Press:
New York, 1975).

7 For example: John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural
Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge University Press:
Cambridge and New York, 1980); David Solkin, Richard Wilson: The
Landscape of Reaction (Tate Gallery: London, 1982); and Ann
Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition,
1740–1860 (University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1986).

319
8 Andrew Hemingway, Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture in Early
Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge
and New York, 1992), p. 8.

9 Homer Watson, ‘The Methods of Some Great Landscape Painters’

(1900), in Gerald Noonan, Refining the Real Canada: Homer Watson’s
Spiritual Landscape (mlr editions canada: Waterloo, Ontario, 1997), pp.
267–8.

10 Homer Watson to John M. Lyle, 15 February 1933 (Homer Watson

fonds, National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives).

11 Ibid.

12 Quoted in Jane VanEvery, With Faith, Ignorance and Delight: Homer

Watson (Homer Watson Trust: Doon, 1967), p. 47.

13 ‘Ontario Society of Artists: Seventh Annual Exhibition – Second Day’,

Toronto Globe, 17 May 1879.

14 Oliver Millar, The Victorian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the
Queen, vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1992), p. 280.

15 ‘Academy of the Arts’, Toronto Globe, 9 March 1880.

16 Thomas D. King, ‘Fine Arts at the Capital’, Canadian Spectator, vol. 3,

no. 12 (20 March 1880), p. 137.

17 ‘Comparatively unaided by culture’: ‘Art Association of Montreal:

Exhibition of Works by Canadian Artists’, Montreal Gazette, 14 April
1880. ‘Back woods’: ‘Something To Be Proud Of’, Montreal Daily
Witness, 14 April 1880.

18 Katherine Hale, ‘The Art of Homer Watson: A Leading Canadian

Landscape Artist’, Canadian Magazine, vol. 20, no. 2 (December
1902), p. 140.

19 The breastshot wheel – the most common North American type –

rotated when falling water struck it near the centre of the wheel’s
circumference. The undershot wheel – the oldest type, commonly used
in conjunction with shallow running water – rotated when water struck
the bottom of the wheel.

20 Among the paintings dated 1879 are: The Grist Mill (71 × 56 cm;
private collection), Old Mill and Stream (60 × 88 cm; Castle Kilbride,
Baden, Ontario) and The Old Mill (34.0 × 60.5 cm; Homer Watson
House and Gallery, Doon).

320
21 Rosemarie L. Tovell, ‘Homer Watson’s The Pioneer Mill: The Making
and Marketing of a Print in the Canadian Etching Revival’, Journal of
Canadian Art History, vol. 31, no. 2 (2011), pp. 12–36.

22 John Macarthur, ‘The Heartlessness of the Picturesque: Sympathy and

Disgust in Ruskin’s Aesthetics’, Assemblage, vol. 32 (April 1997), pp.
126–41.

23 ‘The Brook and the Mill: How the Brook Went to Mill’, Scribner’s
Monthly, vol. 8, no. 2 (June 1874), pp. 199–201.

24 Kenneth W. Maddox, In Search of the Picturesque: Nineteenth-Century

Images of Industry along the Hudson River Valley (Edith C. Blum Art
Institute, Milton and Sally Avery Center for the Arts:
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 1983), p. 19.

25 J. Russell Harper, Homer Watson, R.C.A., 1855–1936: Paintings and

Drawings (National Gallery of Canada: Ottawa, 1963), n.p.

26 The Aldine: The Art Journal of America, vol. 7, no. 12 (December

1874), back cover. See also ‘The Old Mill’, The Aldine: A Typographic
Art Journal, vol. 6, no. 6 (June 1873), p. 126; and ‘The Old Mill’, The
Aldine: The Art Journal of America, vol. 9, no. 9 (September 1879), p.
278.

27 O. B. Bunce, ‘Scenes on the Brandywine’, in William Cullen Bryant

(ed.), Picturesque America; or, The Land We Live In, vol. 1 (D.
Appleton and Company: New York, 1874), p. 222. Woodward’s
antebellum mill imagery is discussed in Sue Rainey and Roger B.
Stein, Shaping the Landscape Image, 1865–1910: John Douglas
Woodward (Bayly Art Museum, University of Virginia: Charlottesville,
1997), pp. 28–9.

28 Darrell A. Norris, ‘Migration, Pioneer Settlement, and the Life Course:

The First Families of an Ontario Township’, in Donald H. Akenson (ed.),
Canadian Papers in Rural History, vol. 4 (Langdale Press: Gananoque,
Ontario, 1984), pp. 130–52.

29 Felicity Leung, Grist and Flour Mills in Ontario: From Millstones to

Rollers, 1780s to 1880s (History and Archaeology series, no. 53)
(National Historic Parks and Sites Branch, Parks Canada, Environment
Canada: Ottawa, 1981), p. 89.

30 Geoffrey Hayes, Waterloo County: An Illustrated History (Waterloo

Historical Society: Kitchener, 1997), p. 15.

31 G. T. Bloomfield and Elizabeth Bloomfield, ‘Water Wheels and Steam

Engines: Powered Establishments of Ontario’, in Elizabeth Bloomfield

321
 (ed.), Canadian Industry in 1871, Research Report, no. 2 (University of
Guelph: Guelph, Ontario, 1989), p. 8.

32 On the shift from traditional grindstone to gradual-reduction roller

milling, see Leung, Grist and Flour Mills in Ontario, op. cit.; and Leung,
‘Grist and Flour Mills in Ontario: Their Technological Development,
1780–1880’, in Alan A. Brookes (ed.), Fourth Annual Agricultural
History of Ontario Seminar: Proceedings (University of Guelph: Guelph,
Ontario, 1979), pp. 6–39.

33 Gazetteer and Directory of Waterloo County, cited in Leung, Grist and

Flour Mills in Ontario, op. cit., pp. 205–6.

34 Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr, ‘Winslow Homer’s (So-Called) Morning Bell’,

American Art Journal, vol. 29, no. 12 (1998), p. 6.

35 ESSIE, ‘A Day with Nature’, Berlin News-Record, 19 August 1898.

36 Hayes, Waterloo County, op. cit., p. 62.

37 Elizabeth Bloomfield, ‘Building the City on a Foundation of Factories:

The Industrial Policy in Berlin, Ontario, 1870–1914’, Ontario History,
vol. 75, no. 3 (1983), pp. 207–8; Hayes, Waterloo County, op. cit., p.
62.

38 A. O. Kummer, ‘Reminiscences of A. O. Kummer, Early Settler, Doon’,

Waterloo Historical Society, Annual Volume, no. 52, 1965, pp. 63–4.

39 Thomas L. M. Tipton, ‘At the Mouth of the Grand’, Canadian Magazine,

vol. 1 (1893), p. 350.

40 George Miller Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and

Consequences (1881), quoted in D. M. R. Bentley, ‘Charles G. D.
Roberts and William Wilfred Campbell as Canadian Tour Guides’,
Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 32, no. 2 (Summer 1997), p. 86.

41 Paul Rutherford, ‘Tomorrow’s Metropolis: The Urban Reform

Movement in Canada’, Canadian Historical Association Papers
(Canadian Historical Association: Ottawa, 1971), pp. 203–24.

42 Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America

(Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 1969), p. xviii.

43 Allan Smith, ‘Farms, Forests and Cities: The Image of the Land and the
Rise of the Metropolis in Ontario, 1860–1914’, in David Keane and
Colin Read (eds.), Old Ontario: Essays in Honour of J. M. S. Careless
(Dundurn Press: Toronto, 1990), p. 79.

322
44 Hayes, Waterloo County, op. cit., pp. 99–100; Roy I. Wolfe, ‘The
Summer Resorts of Ontario in the Nineteenth Century’, Ontario History,
vol. 54 (September 1962), p. 159.

45 The popularity of the area with artists of all kinds is documented in the
Berlin Daily Record newspaper, including ‘Town Topics’, 24 July 1893,
and ‘Art School’, 27 September 1893.

46 Quoted in ‘Fresh Air Youngsters’, Berlin News-Record, 10 July 1893.

47 Angela L. Miller, ‘Nature’s Transformations: The Meaning of the Picnic

Theme in Nineteenth-Century American Art’, Winterthur Portfolio, vol.
24, no. 2/3 (Summer–Autumn 1989), p. 124. Doon area picnic
getaways of five and six hundred people are mentioned in ‘Doon’,
Berlin Daily Record, 1 November 1894.

48 Primary sources for Wilde’s reaction to Watson’s art include: ‘Oscar at

the Gallery’, Toronto Telegram, 25 May 1882; ‘Art Decoration’, Toronto
Daily Mail, 26 May 1882; and ‘Oscar Wilde’, Toronto Globe, 26 May
1882. Wilde’s Canadian tour as a whole is the subject of Kevin O’Brien,
Oscar Wilde in Canada: An Apostle for the Arts (Personal Library:
Toronto, 1982), while his views on art in Canada are discussed in detail
in Kevin O’Brien, ‘Oscar Wilde and Canadian Artists’, Antigonish
Review, vol. 1, no. 4 (Winter 1971), pp. 11–28.

49 Nicholas Green, The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape Painting and

Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Manchester
University Press: Manchester and New York, 1990).

50 Quoted in Wyly Grier, ‘Art Notes’, The Week, vol. 12, no. 11 (8
February 1895), p. 258.

51 ‘Art Notes’, The Week, vol. 9, no. 10, 8 April 1892, p. 298.

52 R. C. Reade, ‘Hermits of Art’, Toronto Star Weekly, 4 May 1929, p. 3.

53 The building in The Pioneer Mill differs somewhat from the one
depicted in Watson’s drawing titled My Grandfather’s Sawmill
(Sketchbook Z, 7898.18, National Gallery of Canada). The artist later
insisted that ‘[w]hen I want to paint a picture I make a number of
studies of things I want to put in the composition and when I have these
done I sit down in my studio and paint as suits my fancy using the
sketches where I feel they suit’ (quoted in R. M. Fleming, ‘Homer
Watson, Painter of Canadian Pictures’, Ottawa Journal, 15 November
1913).

54 Homer Watson, ‘A Return to the Village’, in Noonan, Refining the Real

Canada, op. cit., pp. 310–11.

323
55 Elizabeth Bloomfield and Linda Foster, Families and Communities of
Waterloo Township in 1861 (Caribou Imprints: Guelph, Ontario, 1995),
p. 18; Muriel Miller, Homer Watson: The Man of Doon (Summerhill
Press: Toronto, 1988), pp. 22–3.

56 Roxa Watson to Susan Mohr Watson (mother) and Phoebe Watson

(sister), 5 May 1888 (Homer Watson fonds, National Gallery of Canada
Library and Archives).

57 Homer Watson, Sketchbook B, 7874.1v and 7874.1r, National Gallery

of Canada.

58 Homer Watson to Arthur Lismer, 30 September [1930], (Homer Watson

fonds, National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives). This aspect of
Watson’s thought is considered throughout Noonan, Refining the Real
Canada, op. cit.

59 Michael Bunce, in The Countryside Ideal: Anglo-American Images of

Landscape (Routledge: London and New York, 1994), argues that
whereas the British rural landscape was valued primarily in aesthetic
(often picturesque) terms, the North American ideal ‘has tended to
value the settled rural landscape more as a symbol of agricultural
progress and of bygone lifestyles’ (p. 36).

60 Susan Glickman, The Picturesque and the Sublime: A Poetics of the

Canadian Landscape (McGill-Queen’s University Press: Montreal and
Kingston, 1998), p. 47. The valorization of pioneer themes in Victorian
Canadian literature is also addressed in Susan Wood, The Land in
Canadian Prose, 1880–1945 (Carleton University: Ottawa, 1988), and
Carole Gerson, A Purer Taste: The Writing and Reading of Fiction in
English in Nineteenth-Century Canada (University of Toronto Press:
Toronto, 1989).

61 George Agnew Reid, typed note dated 7 October 1941, in Reid

Scrapbook no. 1, p. 132 (Edward P. Taylor Research Library and
Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario).

62 ‘The Industrial Exhibition’, Toronto Mail, 25 September 1879.

63 Elizabeth Waterston and Douglas Hoffman (eds.), On Middle Ground:

Landscape and Life in Wellington County 1841–1891 (University of
Guelph: Guelph, Ontario, 1974), p. 31.

64 Hayes, Waterloo County, op. cit., p. 189.

65 Homer Watson, ‘A Landscape Painter’s Day’, quoted in VanEvery, With

Faith, Ignorance and Delight, op. cit., pp. 61–2.

324
66 See especially David Brownstein, ‘Early Conservation Efforts in
Waterloo County’, Waterloo Historical Society, Annual Volume, no. 86,
1998, pp. 17–31.

67 Quoted in Noonan, Refining the Real Canada, op. cit., p. 27.

68 Mary Tivy, ‘Dreams and Nightmares: Changing Visions of the Past at

Doon Pioneer Village’, Ontario History, vol. 94, no. 1 (Spring 2002), p.
84. My entire discussion of Doon Pioneer Village is heavily indebted to
Tivy’s excellent analysis.

69 Ibid., p. 93–4.

325
‘ONE SPECTATOR IS A BETTER
WITNESS THAN TEN LISTENERS’
ROGER NORTH, MAKING THE PAST PUBLIC1
Charles Ford

T here has been much interest of late in the

English lawyer and essayist the Honourable
Roger North (1651–1734) and his work as a musical
theorist, biographer and autobiographer, and
eccentric natural philosopher. North published little
during his lifetime, and nothing under his own
name, but he left numerous manuscripts, including
several complete works that were later published by
his son, Montagu. At the end of the first decade of
the eighteenth century, when he was in his sixties,
North initiated an asymmetrical dispute with the
bishop and historian White Kennett (1660–1728).
Although almost invisible in recent historiography,
Kennett was a significant public figure in his time,
publishing a great deal, both under his own name
and anonymously, notably A Complete History of
England of 1706. North subsequently ‘named’
Kennett in a vitriolic, anonymous pamphlet
published in 1711 in response to the Complete
History, and then again in a sustained,
seven-hundred-page attack, Examen, or an Inquiry
into the Credit and Veracity of a pretended
Complete History, which appeared later under his
name (although not until 1740, after both men were
already dead, in one of the books that Montagu

326
North issued). There is no evidence that the two
ever met, although it is possible; they certainly
shared acquaintances.
In order to situate and examine the non-parallel
relation between the two men, both are considered
here as typical historical agents within a third
historical entity: Habermas’s notion of the
Bourgeois Public Sphere. In this context, I attempt
to explore issues connected with each writer’s
declared identity as an author before a public. It is
quite possible, and very profitable, to understand
North’s career as an author and his dispute with
Kennett within the general topic of class, or of
political party (the ostensible cause of the dispute),
or even of cultures of informational exchange, but
the Bourgeois Public Sphere offers a general theory
of the period that brings these elements together in
an enabling way. Such an enquiry into the
North–Kennett dispute tests the Bourgeois Public
Sphere’s effectiveness as an explanatory device, for
even though it was conducted between typical
characters, it was not carried out according to the
ideal conditions described by Habermas.
Habermas’s account of the Bourgeois Public Sphere
described ‘private people come together as a
public’2 at a moment in early modernity.3
(Habermas himself did
not, in fact, use the term ‘Public Sphere’– his own
term Öffentlichkeit is perhaps better translated as
‘Public-ness’ – but ‘Public Sphere’ has been used in
the English-speaking world as a double-sided tool of
reference both to the ostensible historical object
and to the Habermas-ness of that topic.4) ‘The
public’ was for Habermas a new entity or force in
the world that first comes into view (for us, looking

327
back from now) in England around 1700. It
emerged as a political and cultural player, claiming
the right to establish knowledge, to determine the
rules of commodity exchange, and to decide who
was, and who did, what. The formation overlaps
with something we might today call ‘public opinion’;
it is simultaneous with the emergence of ‘public
credit’; and it inaugurates an age of new standards
such as ‘public taste’, ‘public decency’ and (with all
its dark baggage) ‘public safety’. New sites such as
stock exchanges, coffee houses and newspapers
produced, or were produced by, a self-consciously
emergent, literate, informed and opinionated
property-owning class. The published materials that
constitute this historical entity as a site, or (for us)
an archive of discourse(s), were written in the
vernacular. The Bourgeois Public Sphere enclosed a
large readership with insufficient Latin for its
Other, the Republic of Letters.5 For anyone who
enters the literature of the period via Mac Flecknoe,
The Battle of the Books and The Dunciad,
Habermas’s Bourgeois Public Sphere is a curiously
anodyne abstraction. The lived experience of
‘reasoned debate’ included the drab, sometimes
brilliant, and often unreasonably toxic
pamphleteering of Grub Street party politics. The
only checks on excess were the emerging and
linked concepts of politeness (not itself necessary to
reason, although it may have been polite to reason
that it was) and the laws of libel.
At the imagined moment of the perfectly round
Bourgeois Public Sphere, in its ideal manifestation
(which is hardly a historical object, rather a
metaphysical one, and more of a ‘device’ for
understanding a set of conjuctions), authority was
not granted by the status of the individual speaking

328
(‘publicness (or publicity) of representation’6), but
by the quality of their reasoning. Reasoned
argument would produce truths and authorize
knowledge. Membership of this public was open to
all. To be a qualifying private person, you needed
literacy, property and opinions (or, later, Tastes, for
the Bourgeois Public Sphere inaugurates the Critic).
The imagined Bourgeois Public Sphere is therefore
rational, secular and open, reverse-engineered out
of Kant’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’ The spherical
form brought to mind by the English translation of
Öffentlichkeit is something to play with. The
moment of bourgeois publicness is also the moment
of financial bubbles. The conditions under which
information circulated, authoring and authorizing
new knowledges (within ‘informed and critical
discourse’7), were exactly the conditions required to
facilitate speculation.
Roger North was the youngest of fourteen children,
ten of whom survived into adulthood. His father was
Dudley, the fourth Baron North, who had sat in the
Long Parliament; his mother was Anne Montagu, an
accomplished woman who features
prominently in North’s biographical writings. The
eldest son inherited the baronetcy and plays no part
in this narration. The second, Francis, was trained
as a lawyer. He rose through the profession to
become Lord Keeper of the Seal during the last
years of Charles II. He died in late 1685, but at the
time of his death was just months past the peak of
his legal and political career. Under Charles, he had
been at the heart of court and government, but
James II, who became king in the spring of 1685,
preferred others. Francis had been the patron of
Roger’s rapid ascent through the legal profession
during the 1670s and 1680s. The two brothers were

329
close, sharing professional interests, an enthusiasm
for natural philosophy and a love of music.8 A third
brother, Dudley, five years younger than Francis
and ten years older than Roger, was a merchant
engaged in trade primarily with Turkey.9 After
returning from Constantinople in 1680, Dudley was
thrust into politics, being appointed as a pro-crown
sheriff of the City of London, entering parliament
and serving as a commissioner of the Treasury.
Together, all three brothers acted as fixers for
Charles II. All three were embroiled in the corrosive
legal politics of the Exclusion Crisis and the Popish
Plot. Roger, for example, was involved in the trial of
the Rye House Plotters, and was a prosecutor in the
trials of Algernon Sidney and Lord Russell; Dudley
was involved in bullying the Corporation of London.
All three became wealthy through these activities
(not to mention advantageous marriages).
James II’s determination, upon his accession, to
accommodate and even reintroduce the Catholic
religion created problems for families such as the
Norths. Whereas they were unquestionably loyal to
the Stuart monarchy, they were also Protestants.
Roger North could not unquestioningly support the
king’s policies on toleration, nor his plans for a
standing army with Catholic officers – neither could
he obstruct his king. He remained a courtier, but
not an important one, and definitely not a player.
He retained his posts as attorney-general to the
Queen and steward to the See of Canterbury, that
is, legal advisor to Archbishop Sancroft. In the
latter role, he became immersed in the Anglican
resistance to James’s Declaration of Indulgence.
When James quit the country in 1688 and William
and Mary were given the joint throne the following
year, Roger found himself further confounded by

330
circumstances. He lost his seat in parliament. He
was called before a House of Lords committee to
answer for his previous actions. Although he
welcomed James’s departure, and would have
accepted William and Mary as regents (he was not a
believer in divine right, rather in constitutional
authority), he felt unable to sign the oath of loyalty
to the new regime. He became a non-juror, and
remained a suspected Jacobite for the rest of his
life.
In December 1690, Roger North completed his
purchase of a country seat, Rougham, in the
remotest north of Norfolk. A few days less than a
year later, Dudley died. At the age of forty, Roger
now entered his long retirement from public life.
But he remained extremely busy. He became
involved in helping other non-jurors, and was
approached by many for his advice, especially on
legal matters (he was an expert executor and
managed the estates of both of his brothers as well
as, famously, that of Sir Peter Lely). He married the
daughter of a Jacobite City magnate, Sir Robert
Gayer, and raised a large family. He indulged his
delight in building, music and the improvement of
his estate. But most of all, and it would seem every
day, he practised his obsession: writing.
As has been said, Roger North published little in his
lifetime, committing himself largely to
manuscript.10 His first identified writing was the
preface to the Discourses on Trade, a short treatise
now generally accepted as the work of Dudley
North.11 This text was ignored at its publication
and, according to Roger’s later biography of his
brother, was unobtainable only a few years later.12
There is a rare, original copy in the British Library,

331
where there is also a manuscript version. The
manuscript contains a number of marginal
comments and emendations, perhaps in Dudley’s
hand.13 It would seem that Roger saw what was to
be a posthumous and anonymous publication
through the press. Perhaps the main text was
written by Dudley as a bid for influence upon, or for
a place within, the new administration, in which
case, had he lived, it is conceivable that it may have
been published under his own name.14 The conceit
with which the preface opens is the fiction that this
is a private document prepared for a public
readership:

These Papers came direct to me, in order, as I suppose, to be

made Publick: And having transmitted them to the Press, which is
the only means whereby the University of Mankind is to be
inform’d, I am absolved of that trust.15

The preface argues for plain English, plain-speaking

and the conversational presentation of arguments.
It commends ‘Mechanical’ scientific thinking (‘built
upon clear and evident Truths’16), citing Cartesian
‘Method’. It argues in favour of free trade and
deploys a commodity theory of money, turning
radically from the ruling ‘balance of trade’ and
bullionist dogmas. The preface is expressed in a
humorous and conversational tone, confirmed by
the conventional, rhetorical anxiety with which the
pamphlet is presented before the ‘University of
Mankind’:

The publick is an acute, as well as merciless Beast, which neither

over-sees a Failing, nor forgives it; but stamps Judgment and
Execution immediately, thô upon a Member of itself; and is no less
Ingrateful than common Beggars, who affront their Benefactors,
without whose Charity their Understandings would starve.17

332
All in all, the reasoned manner of argument, and
argument for reason, along with the rhetorical
apprehension of prejudiced and unreasonable
readers (albeit phrased so as pleasantly and politely
to exclude the present reader), fits with our
assumptions about the communication of knowledge
and ideas within a Habermasian Bourgeois Public
Sphere. Yet, the disappearance of the text from the
Public Sphere, lamented by Roger, indicates its
power to exclude or not to hear unwanted voices. It
is a place where reasoned debate could become lost
or appear irrelevant. We need to build this
into our model of the Sphere’s function as a space
of communicative practice, for it suggests that it
was a place where communication could be
obstructed or fail. North’s manuscript copy ensured
its survival, but only in the Intimate Sphere.18
The fact that North never published under his own
name during his lifetime was typical of his class and
of his period. But anyone who has read books and
pamphlets from this period will be familiar with
pencilled-in attributions on their title pages, some
of them dating from the time of publication.
Anonymity did not protect an identity from
identification: John Locke confessed to his
authorship of the ‘anonymous’ Treatises on
Government only in his will, but the text had been
long identified as his. Hilkiah Bedford was fined and
went to prison as the identified author of The
Hereditary Right of the Crown of England asserted
rather than reveal the name of the real author,
George Harbin. The publication of Alexander Pope’s
The Dunciad was followed by a number of ‘keys’ to
the anonymized objects of his satire. Identifying
authors was part of the process of reading in the
early years of the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and

333
being ‘identified’ could lead to obscurity, celebrity
or even confinement. It is unlikely, therefore, that
North’s, or anyone’s, use of anonymity was meant
absolutely to conceal identity, rather only to screen
it and to provide a space for legal manoeuvre. We
might argue that, in the context of the Habermasian
Bourgeois Public Sphere, those who adopted the
screen of anonymity may be eschewing the
representation of their status before the public,
thus becoming instances of reason (even if public
opinion might identify and exclude them). North
published three books under the pseudonym ‘A
Person of Honour’.19 In the scheme proposed by
Habermas, this particular persona, or screen, the
‘Person of Honour’, might indicate a kind of residual
‘publicity of representation’, that is, an identity by
kind, for it might refer to North’s title as the son of
a baronet, ‘the Honourable’. As Habermas makes
clear, the Bourgeois Public Sphere did not bring to
an end all the older forms of publicity, and many
features of the traditional authority of kind remain
(if ‘only’ in ritual) to the present day. The reference
to an author as a ‘Person of Honour’ might, on the
other hand, or even also, be intended to refer to the
writer’s non-juror status, someone standing upon
their honour, and function as a coded identity to a
specific readership. Then again it may simply and
neutrally imply a certain worthiness, appropriate to
a private person in the self-assembled public; in
support of this we could refer to Steven Shapin’s
account of late-seventeenth-century authorship.20
Francis, Dudley and Roger North had
unsuccessfully lobbied in parliament during the
1680s for the adoption of a land register. The
Arguments & Materials, an anonymous pamphlet
published in 1698, is a reworking for the press of

334
their arguments.21 The conceit deployed in the text
is that of the anonymous author as an amanuensis,
who had written down verbatim and in a busy,
engaging style, the opinions expressed in private
conversation by ‘A Gentleman of the Long Robe’
(presumably a screened reference to Francis).22 The
scandal of multiply sold land; the tortuous
processes of transfer
and inheritance; the profitability of such confusion
to lawyers; the extraordinary legal problems of
resolving the situation – all are discussed in a plain
and conversational presentation. Like the
Discourses, the Arguments & Materials is written
with a good humour, but no polemical vigour of its
own, rather one that is attributed to a character
within the text. A third text, The Reflections on our
Common Failings of 1701,23 anonymously presented
a translation of an anonymous French original and
was decidedly different in tone from Roger North’s
own essays on manners.24 It appeared shortly
before the appearance of periodicals such as the
Tatler and the Spectator, the apotheosis of the
topical essay that plays such a role in Habermas’s
account of the transformation of the Public Sphere.
(Such essays characteristically ventriloquized the
world view of their actual, and widely identified,
authors through a cast of pseudonymous
characters.)
Together these three texts – the Discourses,
Arguments & Materials and Reflections – dropped
into and through the Public Sphere leaving hardly a
ripple, although all three represent and contribute
to our understanding of what the Public Sphere
might have comprised in an ideal community of
texts imagined to represent an ideal community of
communicating agents. Two other publications by

335
North can be understood as contributions to the
growing bibliography of advice literature. The
Gentleman’s Accomptant of 1714 provides a
comprehensive introduction to household economy.
It was in a long tradition of such advice, a tradition
to which Roger’s own father had contributed.25 In
the same vein is his advice on fish-keeping, which
links out to a new genre of advice on land
improvement; it was his most reprinted publication
during the eighteenth century.26 North’s
manuscripts contain a number of possible additions
to this kind of advice literature: there are multiple
versions, at different levels of finish, of works on
architecture, music, the education of lawyers and
much else.
One other anonymous work was published during
his lifetime, of a quite different tenor: Reflections
upon some passages in Mr Le Clerc’s Life of Mr
John Locke, signed as by ‘Your humble Servant’.27
This 1711 pamphlet will disappoint anyone curious
to understand North’s reading of the great
philosopher. Instead, it is a critique of Le Clerc’s
history of recent times, which he calls ‘pure Extract
and rectified Spirit of History’.28 It attacks Le
Clerc’s presentation of the ‘Secret History’ of the
reign of Charles II:

the rankest Libels in their time, by degrees become Secret History

(forsooth) and by succeeding Generations are valued as great
Curiosities, and Discoveries of concealed Truth, till at length they
gain the honourable Title of Anecdotes, turning the Verities of
former Times into worse than Fable or Romance […] [T]here were
not many, if any Secrets in that Court.29

North especially criticizes Le Clerc’s sympathetic

treatment of the early political career of John

336
Locke’s patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury (‘that the
Court was bad, and he was good; the Court Popish
and Tyrannous, and he a Protestant, and a Protector
of Liberty’30).
As the full title of the work indicates, the pamphlet
included North’s first mention of White Kennett’s
third volume of the Complete History of England (‘If
he had nam’d it any thing but History, he had come
off better’31). Both the Life of Mr John Locke and
the Complete History had been in the public domain
since 1706. North had apparently not felt the need
to comment publicly (or, indeed, privately in his
manuscripts) on either, until urged to do so, several
years later, by others.32 Retired, retiring and
approaching sixty, he was an unlikely political
player, and as we shall see, disavowed any party
affiliation. But he had been an eyewitness in
Charles II’s court, he had been a privy councillor,
and before that, from his earliest days as a law
student, he had sat in the background, listening and
playing bass viol, while his older brother Francis
entertained courtiers. Furthermore, he was in
possession of the former Lord Keeper’s diaries,
notes and correspondence. Certainly, his personal
knowledge and his evidently undiminished forensic
skills qualified him for the task. Le Clerc’s text was
subjected to a prosecuting counsel’s interrogation.
Three important works were published in the early
1740s by Roger’s son, Montagu. These included two
biographical volumes – the life of Francis North and
the lives of Dudley and John North – and the
Examen.33 All appeared under Roger North’s own
name and represent his emergence as an identified
author in the Bourgeois Public Sphere. They set
straight the public record (call it ‘history’) with
regard to both the reputation of King Charles II and

337
those of his brothers. The earlier Reflections upon
some passages in Mr Le Clerc’s Life of Mr John
Locke had been published soon after the Whig
prosecution of Henry Sacheverell in 1710; it can be
related to a widespread furore that defined the
territory of the Public Sphere at that time, reaching
from Parliament to Grub Street, a furore that
resulted in the passing of the Riot Act in 1714. It is
clear from internal evidence that the Examen was
substantially complete by then. Why was it not
published until 1740? Why was it not pitched into
the reasoned exchange of ‘private persons come
together as a public’ twenty-five years earlier at a
moment when it may have had a greater impact? It
is hard to believe that it was likely to lead to the
prosecution of someone of North’s status.34 Why
were all of the posthumous books published under
his name (and this includes the reprint of the 1711
Reflections, which was added as an appendix to the
Examen)? There is another puzzle. In the
advertisement following the dedication in the
Examen, Montagu North states that the original
manuscript was to be placed in the library of Jesus
College, Cambridge, ‘where, whoever shall
entertain any Doubt of the Fidelity of the Publisher,
will be permitted to peruse it’.35 The manuscript is
still there. What is being proved? The answer to
some of these questions, and clues to answers for
the rest, can, as Schmidt has argued, be discovered
in the preface to the Examen.
First, something needs to be said of White Kennett’s
book that prompted North to write. The third
volume of the Complete History is a remarkable
piece of historical synthesis and a foundational
work for the Whig interpretation of history.36 It was

338
very successful, being reprinted four times before
1715, and an amended edition appeared in
1719. It is organized in strict chronological order:
the marginalia run relentlessly through the
calendar of the seventeenth century from ‘Born Nov
19. 1600’ (‘The Life and Reign of Charles the First’,
p. 1) to ‘1701. Question, Whether the Convocation
was dissolved with the King’s Death.’ (‘The Life and
Reign of King William the Third’, p. 849). It is a
‘scriptural’ history, assembling a comprehensive
array of printed materials with scarcely any
paraphrase. The transcribed material is glossed by
a linking editorial commentary, which not only leads
the reader through the ostensible object of the
history (that is, what was imputed to have
happened), but also reveals an agenda (for example,
that popery and religious dissent result in the
seizure of arbitrary power). The commentary is
notably understated, and the reader is obliged to
look out for the implications of the lengthy
quotations. Overall it is a remarkably secular and
pragmatic account, avoiding any kind of
constitutional metaphysics. Charles II and James II
are negatively reviewed. Charles was characterized
as a secret papist and criticized for his protection of
his brother. The Exclusion Crisis and the Popish
Plot were presented as manifestations of arbitrary
power at its ugliest. If Titus Oates was not exactly
made a hero, he was certainly allowed to have been
generally in the right. Many ‘court party’
personalities were assigned to damnatio memoriae,
or misremembered. Francis North, who had been
Lord Keeper throughout the crucial period of the
early 1680s, has only two citations in the index. His
brother Dudley is wrongly given a baronetcy, rather
than a knighthood. The book lacks any sense of the

339
author’s own direct experience of the events
covered (even less his personal knowledge of or
involvement in them). Kennett was not well
connected; he knew few of the personalities
discussed; he had not been there; he had not been a
spectator. The volume was published anonymously,
attributed to ‘a Learned and Impartial Hand’.
In his preface to the Examen, Roger North makes a
number of points that, while criticisms of Kennett,
stand also as declaration of his own investment in
historical writing.37 His opening statement claims
that he writes to defend Charles II against the
slanders of ‘defamatory Pretenders’. He declares
that all historians have some ‘Political scheme of
their own’; for his own part, he ‘pretends not to be
exempt from that Infirmity’. One side stands for the
‘Preservation … of the National Interest’; the other
side, though ‘pretending uncommon Zeal for the
Protestant Religion and Law, at the Bottom,
mean[s] only private Interests’ (and ‘all the
scandalous Atheists, Sectaries and Heretics, are
generally found to herd with the latter’). The
dispute is presented as being between the
‘constant’ and the ‘querulous’. Histories such as
Kennett’s are declared to be continuations of the
very squabbles that gave rise to the formation of
parties in the time of Charles II.

[T]his Writer [i.e., North himself] defies the Imputation as being of a

Party, so long as it is the Side of Truth and Sincerity, which cannot
properly be termed a Party, but a Duty, and justly is in no Man’s
Election to take and leave, as Party-Dealers commonly suppose;
otherwise common Honesty, as well as Fidelity to lawful
Governments may be a Party Character.

340
Here North alludes to the reputation of ‘trimming’
that stuck to Kennett throughout his interesting
career. Kennett had been a devoted Stuart
loyalist,38 then a defender of the Church against
James II, then a signer of the oath of loyalty to
William and Mary,39 then a supporter of the
Williamite bishops, and eventually a propagandist of
Whig ecclesiastical policy (ending up in the House
of Lords as Bishop of Peterborough).40 North
argues that is the task of historians to reveal the
facts, but a historian must not present history
without comment:

whoever, on Pretence of Impartiality, in that Distinction is

mealy-mouth’d, may be accounted not only a sneaking Neutral in
the Cause of Good and Evil, but a positive Traitor to Goodness
itself.41

Here North satirizes Kennett’s representation of

himself on the title page of the Complete History as
‘a Learned and Impartial Hand’, as well as
criticizing his practice of insinuating rather than
declaring his judgments. For North, impartiality
was not an option. As he saw it, one can only write
with a ‘Political scheme’; the only positions
available are ‘constant’ avowal of right or
‘querulous’ private interest.
North turns next to a criticism of Kennett’s method.
Kennett (and/or John Hughes, the general editor of
the Complete History) laid claim to using the ‘best
writers’ as sources. North disputes the claim. First,
he criticizes the poor citation that compromises the
evaluation of sources. Second, he disputes whether
the sources were indeed ‘the best’, pointing to the
numerous citations from partisan pamphlet
literature. North pounces on Kennett’s claim that

341
contemporary history is problematic, that it was
difficult for people to judge of their own times.
Kennett had been understandably apprehensive of
‘Imperfect Remembrances, confused Notions,
Partiality to one Side, and Prejudice to another’,
but, North argues, ‘[h]e makes no Distinction; but
Divines, Statesmen, Scholars, lawyers, Gentle,
Simple, Wise, Unwise, Honest, or Dishonest, all are
involved’, going on to point to ‘the most violent
Party-Men’ who ‘have wrote the most useful
Histories’. The proposition is then turned against
Kennett, who had himself used the accounts of
‘Contemporaries’, albeit material drawn only from
printed sources (‘Acts of State, Records,
Proclamations, Declarations, and the like’). In
eschewing the direct expression of experience,
North argued, Kennett missed the point of
documentary material: ‘What is most useful to be
known is seldom or never to be found in any public
Registrations; and is not to be expected or hoped
for, but from private Memoirs.’ North dismisses
Kennett’s history as a mere compilation of stuff that
was eavesdropped.42

Posterity is like to want the chief Truths, of our Times, and

(subducting private Memoirs and Remembrances until the World
will be pleased to accept of them) the Work of Compilers, that is
Critical History, will grow exceeding difficult … at present, the
Current of History is muddy, and instead of clearing, the Stream
grows continually more foul.

In the last paragraphs of the preface, North turns to

Kennett’s decision to publish his history
anonymously. Kennett had said that ‘No prudent
Writer will set a Name to the History of his own
Times.’ North’s reply is that not only have many
‘prudent Writers’ done just that, but that it is ‘not

342
only prudent, but just to do it, for the Character of
the person always known, is a Character of the
History’. North sums up his own intention by stating
that he will embrace controversy, from time to time
directly criticizing Kennett’s text (the ‘examen’
element), but also allow himself licence to pass back
and forth over the issues. He says that he will
employ digressions and anecdotal material from
memoirs (he refers specifically to those of his
brother, Francis). In this way, he intends to produce
a ‘New Work’,43 thereby implicitly criticizing
Kennett’s rigid chronological organization. On the
first page following the preface, page one of the
Examen proper, he writes: ‘I shall follow him not by
Years, as he moves with an hobbling Pace, but by
Subjects, which may assist Unity.’ No reader will
have failed to have noticed that before the author’s
preface the book had begun with ‘a Concise
Chronology of the Chief Passages Taken Notice of in
the Examen […] from the Chronological History of
England put out by Mr. Pointer 1714, Vol. I.’44 In
North’s history, chronology was not irrelevant; it
was useful, but it was no more than a tool.
From this, several overlapping responses can be
given to the questions asked above. Clearly North
could not, by his own admission, publish the
Examen or the biographies of his brothers
anonymously. The character of the person is the
character of the history; authorship determines
authority; anonymous publication would have
diminished the books’ value and meaning. The
unambiguous identification of the author by
definition authorizes the narrative of remembered
experience. If, as Schmidt argues, he was
apprehensive for his own safety, then it might have
been prudent to forbear publication until after he

343
was dead and immune from prosecution, although
(and here I make a sentimental investment and
declare) that was not his style. But then, maybe
what was at stake was not so urgent. Maybe what
was at stake was not to be hazarded in the
poisonous atmosphere of London during the last
years of the last Stuart. I am not convinced that
North thought that the vindication of his king and
his brothers should take place in the same forum as
the polemics of contesting parties, not least for fear
of that vindication being mistaken for a matter of
those parties. The books may have worked better in
Latin, in the Republic of Letters, but their intended
readership was not to be found there. The books
required a more considered readership, something
closer to the imagined ‘private people come
together as a public’ of the ideal Habermasian
Public Sphere, although it is likely that North did
not consider that yet to be properly assembled.
They were written for a better future and were left
to his son. They self-consciously inaugurate an
archive of direct experience for generations to
come.
The recessive authorization of the text of the
Examen by the deposition of Roger North’s
manuscript in the library of Jesus College might be
understood as a quaint
manifestation of that same ambition. A manuscript
represents authorship in a different way from a
printed text, even one issued under a name. Roger
North (or rather, his manuscript trace) was placed
outside his book, as a reference or witness. This is
hardly a kind of proof by the criteria of what he
called ‘critical history’, but it is an impressive
investment in the value systems of both traditional
‘publicity of representation’ and self-representation

344
through reason within the Bourgeois Public Sphere.
One is reminded of the Arguments & Materials for a
Register of Estates, or the system of double-entry
bookkeeping advocated in The Gentleman’s
Accomptant, where property (and commodities) do
not ‘belong’ within the property itself, to be
asserted by possession and defended by legal
disputation, but in the identification of the property
as a relation marked by a separate record in the
public domain and beyond dispute.
On the other hand, there may be an alternative
anxiety that prompted Montagu North, and his
printer Fletcher Gyles, to establish the authenticity
of the text of the Examen. On 6 March 1740, Philip
Yorke, 1st Earl of Hardwicke, passed judgment on a
dispute in Chancery: Gyles v. Wilcox. This was a
dispute over ‘fair use’. Fletcher Gyles had published
an edition of Matthew Hale’s Pleas of the Crown.45
Wilcox and Barlow had produced an abridgment
(with the Old French and Latin translated into
English) as the Treatise of Modern Crown Law. The
dispute was whether such abridgement was piracy
(‘colourably shortened only’ in the terminology
developed by Yorke) or the production of a ‘new
work’. The case is of further interest inasmuch as it
removed responsibility for judgment in such cases
from a jury, handing it over to arbitration by experts
(who in this case ruled that Wilcox had produced a
‘real and fair abridgement’). Gyles v. Wilcox set a
common-law precedent that remains influential, not
only in establishing the means by which copyright
should be determined (expert witnesses), but also in
establishing that a literary work was the product of
a writer’s labour (including in this case the labour
of the abridger), rather than the property of a
publisher.46 The manuscript in Cambridge provides

345
substantial proof of the authorship of the Examen.
Should anyone acting on behalf of the Complete
History wish to argue that the Examen depended
upon the Complete History, and that it was not a
‘new work’, the manuscript would refute them.
Furthermore, should publication be complicated by
any litigation, the original text would be accessible
through the ‘publicity of representation’ offered by
the status of a Cambridge college. This is not the
absolute answer to my earlier question, any more
than the previous meditation on recessive
referencing of authorship, but it places the issue
firmly in a Bourgeois Public Sphere policed by legal
innovation during early modernity.
We have seen that for Roger North, writing about
the past should embrace the opacity and complexity
of localized, immediate experience, something we
could call ‘the personal’. Memoir and anecdote tell
us truths about human desire, motive and agency.47
Furthermore, as North freely acknowledged, the
writing of history itself is no more than desires,
motives and agencies at work in opaque, complex,
local and
immediate situations (for example, party interest).
As we have also seen, in North’s judgment, White
Kennett’s Complete History was incomplete, and its
author deluded as to the possibility of his
impartiality.
‘Anecdotal’ is a word very often deployed as a
derogatory term by professional historians.48 Before
1771, parliamentary business could be known only
anecdotally; after that date, its reporting the
proceedings of Parliament ceased to be punished,
although limits remain in place to this day.
Parliament retains privileges (‘private laws’) that

346
exempt it (like parts of the legal process and many
parts of government process) from full and
immediate exposure to publicity. Anecdotes enter
the Public Sphere on the authority of the source (‘a
government spokesman’, ‘someone close to the
minister’, etc.). These limits of public knowledge
mark the boundaries of any imagined Public
Sphere, and to understand them is to understand
the rules of civil society. It is still possible, wherever
one lives in the world, to go to prison for sharing
anecdotes.
For North, the self-regulating reason of a public did
not necessarily offer a neutral space of judgment.
That space was polluted by what he called ‘Party’.
He was a reader of Hobbes as well as Descartes,
and we can trace in his writings a Hobbesian
apprehension regarding private reason. Reason, in
its reasoning, could not always be trusted to
understand itself as separate from private interest
and individual desire.49 As Jamie C. Kassler has
argued,50 for North it was the English common law
that provided a rein on the possible excesses of
self-regulating reason. With law comes our
understanding of our ‘Duty’ (this notion of Duty is
about as metaphysical as North ever gets) to
respect and maintain the Crown, Parliament and
the Reformation settlement.
The Examen, together with the biographies of
North’s brothers, constitutes a Stuart-loyalist
version of the recent past. These texts have
remained marginal in the dominant narratives of
the period, becoming interesting only recently in
micro-histories of resistance and of a lost cause.
Perhaps they should be read in conjunction with
Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones as framing devices for

347
an enquiry into the failure of the Great Rebellion to
attract the support of English Jacobites. While the
biographies of the North brothers have enjoyed
several revivals by antiquarian and revisionist
historians since the early nineteenth century, the
Examen has never been reprinted, despite
Coleridge’s enthusiastic endorsement.51
I would like to turn briefly, and in conclusion, to the
intimate sphere of Roger North as represented in
the manuscript materials. They document a life
occupied in continual, laborious writing. They have
been called ‘a trackless sea of loose papers and
manuscripts;’52 one can get lost, but they are not
that indeterminate. One can read for an underlying
system and for a chronology of topics. His Cartesian
anti-Newtonianism articulates a distinctive position
in natural philosophy that we must attend to.53 His
manuscripts on music have been a resource for
musicologists for nearly two hundred years.54 His
observations on the law, and advice to anyone
studying law,55
together with numerous descriptions, characters
and anecdotes of legal personalities, are another
remarkable resource. As Kassler has shown, such
material makes up a complex, fractured but
readable whole, and in her persuasive account,
presents us with a conservative, neo-stoic
intellectual.56 North’s manuscript materials
included not only his own writings but also those of
his brothers, as well as manuscripts and letters,
deeds and records inherited from previous
generations of the family. They passed on to his son
and remained in the North family until they ceased
to do their job or their purpose was forgotten and
they were sold off as waste paper. They are now

348
distributed between a number of libraries; some
even remain at Rougham. 57
It is unlikely that I have exhaustively explained why
Montagu North published his father’s works, but I
can point to Roger North’s own explanation of why
he wrote. In the preface (‘prfando’) that opens BL
Add MS 32526, he states:

Insatiable desire to know, ambitious thincking, care of prserving

Even ye hints, & Embrio’s of thought /designe of Improving.\
facility, as well as pleasure, In scribling, and Courting a style, are a
Combination of Inducem’ts to what you find here, and /also\ Much
More of like fustian, In other places, wch by their solemne
appearance In books, seem to have had somewhat of ye polite,
[but?] In truth are but Extemporaneous sentiments, from one that
writes swifter then thincks, and hath No test of his owne thoughts
but his Review after wrighting.

We might pathologize his writing as graphomania.

We might empathize with a painful loneliness. What
inhibited him from publishing his writings?

Men of collegiate conversation, have often freedome of

comunicating sentiment’s, & so test them upon others
understanding, wch where candor dwells, is of admirable use and
satisfaction! but few ages allow a sett of Men of [this?] candor, to
admitt such freedomes without censure, Either [the?] church or
some stage principles may be hurt by ye Consequence even of a
truth as they thinck, & then it is discourag[ed?] or Els some state
policy, or faction may be Interested, & for that cause, truth Is to be
supprest, or Els ill Nature, love of contradiction, raish raiseth a
battery Impertinently, or a plagiary humour, If a thought be good, to
run away [with?] & then claime it, hinder this freedome of
Conversation, [Whereby?], In our pudle & slough of time, that
advantage is denyed.

349
Oh! for the Age of hero’s. Galileo, Gassendi, Pieriesk. [….?]
Kepler, /[Cartesius?] [&?]\ with ye Noble [train?] of humanists,
Erasmus /[longolius?] [….?]\ etc. who sent their thought about by
letters.58

North’s longing for the collegiality of honourable

persons, where ideas would not be abused, stolen or
twisted, but could circulate anecdotally in the
private realm and remain unalienated, where the
printed form is simply an extension of that process
of communication, can be read as a proposal as
much for an alternative modernity as for a lost past.
The device of the Bourgeois Public Sphere reveals a
set of relations (of people, law and technologies)
where some such extended privacy, or
domesticated
publicity, ought surely to have been available, but
was not. The Bourgeois Public Sphere was
essentially a market for and of information.
Inasmuch as that market was an agent in history, it
represented its claims to reason, progress and
modernity against its own characterization of a
darker, traditional past. Persons like Roger North
stand for, and in, that darkness. Other Tory
intellectuals engaged with the Bourgeois Public
Sphere more effectively through satire; they played
upon the insecurities of their readership, pointing to
a different darkness shining through the gaps in the
imagined rationality of modernity. An enquiry into
the relationship of North’s published and
unpublished works reveals a negotiation of the
distinctions between the private and the public, and
a nostalgia for, or maybe aspiration for, separate
and unmixable domains. This nostalgia is played out
in a complicated relationship with the new forms of
publicity. It produces a curious publishing career,

350
one that requires careful interpretation by
twenty-first-century readers.

Works cited

Anonymous (White Kennett), A Complete History Of England: With

The Lives Of All The Kings and Queens Thereof; From the Earliest
Account of Time, to the Death of His late Majesty King William III,
Containing A Faithful Relation of all Affairs of State Ecclesiastical
and Civil. The Whole Illustrated with Large and Useful Notes, taken
from divers Manuscripts, and other good Authors: And the Effigies
of the Kings and Queens from the Originals, Engraved by the best
Masters, ed. John Hughes. London: Printed for Brab. Aylmer, Reb.
Bonwick, Sam. Smith and Benl. Walford, Will. Freeman, Tim.
Goodwin, Tho. Bennet, Matth. Wotton, John Walthoe, Sam.
Manship, Tho. Newborough, John Nicholson, Richard Parker, and
Benj. Took. 1706. Vols 1 and 2 are previously existing texts by
various authors: John Milton, Sir Thomas Moore, Samuel Daniell,
John Habington, Hall and Hollingshead, George Buck, Sir Francis
Bacon, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, John Hayward, Francis
Godwin, William Cambden and Arthur Wilson; Vol. 3. is attributed
to ‘a Learned and Impartial Hand’.

Anonymous (W.K. A.M. = White Kennett?), A Dialogue Between

Two Friends Occasioned by the late Revolution of Affairs And the
Oath of Allegiance, by W. K. A.M. London: Printed for Ric. Chiswell
at the Rose and Crown in St Paul’s Church-yard. MDCLXXXIX
[1689].

Anonymous (White Kennett, 1683), Witt against Wisdom, or a

Panegyrick upon Folly: Penn’d in Latin by Desiderius Erasmus,
Render’d into English, Oxford, Printed by L. Lichfield, Printer to the
University, for Anthony Stephens, Bookseller near the Theater.
1683.

351
Anonymous (White Kennett), An Address of Thanks to a Good
Prince, presented in the Panegyrick of Pliny, upon Trajan, the Best
of Roman Emperours, London, Printed by M. Flesher, for Tho.
Fickus, Bookseller in Oxford. 1685.

Anonymous (William Newton), The Life of the Right Reverend Dr.

White Kennett, Late Lord Bishop of Peterborough. With several
Original Letters Of the late Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Tennison,
The late Earl of Sunderland, Bishop Kennett, etc. And some
Curious Original Papers and Records, Never before Publish’d.
London, Printed for T. Cox under the Royal-Exchange; J. Brindley
in New-Bond-Street; F. Cogan at the Inner-Temple-Gate, Fleet
Street; and J. Stag in Westminster-Hall. M.DCC.XXX [1730].

Anonymous (Dudley North, fourth Baron North), Observations and

advices oeconomical, London: Printed by T. R. for John Martyn
Printer to the Royal Society, at the sign of the Bell without
Temple-Bar, 1669.

Anonymous (Dudley North), Discourses upon Trade; Principally

Directed to the Cases of the Interest, Coynage, Clipping, Increase,
of Money. London, Printed for Tho. Basset, at the George in
Fleet-Street. 1691.

Anonymous (Francis North), A Philosophical Essay on Music

Directed to a Friend, London, Printed for John Martyn, Printer to
the Royal Society; at the Bell in Saint Paul’s Church-Yard, Feb 3rd
1676/7.

Anonymous (Roger North), Arguments & Materials for a Register

of Estates, London: Printed for Samuel Lowndes over against
Exeter-Exchange in the Strand, 1698.

Anonymous (Roger North), Reflections in our Common Failings,

Done out of French, By a Person of Honour. London: Printed by G.
Croom, for R. Smith at the Angel and Bible, without Temple-Bar;
and John Chantry, over-against Exeter-Change in the Strand.
1701.

352
Anonymous (Roger North), Reflections upon some passages in
Mr. Le Clerc’s life of Mr. John Locke: In a letter to a friend. With a
Preface containing some Remarks on two large Volumes of libels;
the one initialled State-Tracts, and the other falslely call’d The
Compleat History of England, Vol. III commonly ascrib’d to Dr
Kennet, London: Printed for J Morphew, near Stationers Hall,
1711. The pamphlet is signed ‘Your humble Servant; this text is
also included as an appendix to the Examen, where it is signed
‘Your humble Servant, R. North’, see below, Roger North, Examen.

Anonymous (Roger North), A Discourse of Fish and Fish-Ponds

[…] Done by a Person of Honour, London, Printed for E. Curll, at
the Dial and Bible against St. Dunstan’s Church in Fleet-Street.
1713.

Anonymous (Roger North), The Gentleman’s Accomptant: or an

Essay to Unfold the Mystery of Accompts. By Way of Debtor and
Creditor, commonly called Merchants’ Accompts; And Applying the
Same to the Concerns of the Nobility and Gentry of England. […]
By a Person of Honour. London: Printed for E. Curll, at the Dial
and Bible against St. Dunstan’s Church in Fleetstreet. 1714.

Anonymous (Roger North and Sir Richard Weston), The

Gentleman Farmer: Or Certain Observations Made by an English
Gentleman Upon the Husbandry of Flanders; And the Same
Compared with That of England […] Written by a Person of Honour
in the County of Norfolk. London: Printed for E. Curll over-against
Catherine-Street, in the Strand. M.DCC.XCVI [1726].

White Kennett, Parochial Antiquities Attempted in the History of

Ambrosden, Burcester, and Other Adjacent Parts In the Counties
of Oxford and Bucks. By White Kennett Vicar of Ambroseden.
Oxford, Printed at the Theater, M.DC.XCV. [1695].

Roger North, Examen: or, an Enquiry into the Credit and Veracity
of a Pretended Complete History; shewing the Peverse and
Wicked design of it, and the many falsities and abuses of Truth

353
contained in it. Together with some Memoirs occasionally inserted.
All tending to vindicate the Honour of the late King Charles the
Second, and his Happy Reign, from the intended aspersions of
that foul pen. By the Honourable Roger North, Esq; London,
printed for Fletcher Gyles against Gray’s-Inn Gate in Holborn.
MDCCXL [1740].

Roger North, The Life of the Right Honourable Francis North,

Baron of Guilford, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under King
Charles II. and King James II. Wherein are inserted The
Characters of Sir Matthew Hale, Sir George Jeffries, Sir Leoline
Jenkins, Sidney Godolphin, and others the most eminent Lawyers
and Statesmen of that Time. By the Honourable Roger North Esq;
London. Printed for John Whiston, at Mr. Boyle’s Head in
Fleet-street. MDCCXLII [1742].

Roger North, The Life of the Honourable Sir Dudley North, Knt.
Commissioner of the Customs, and afterward of the Treasury to
his Majesty King Charles the Second. And of the Honourable and
Reverend Dr. John North, Master of Trinity College in Cambridge,
Prebend of Westminster, and sometime Clerk of the Closet to the
same King Charles the Second. By the Honourable Roger North,
Esq; London. Printed for the Editor, And sold by John Whiston, at
Mr. Boyle’s Head in Fleet-street. MDCCXLIV [1744].

Roger North, A Discourse of the Poor, Shewing the Pernicious

Tendency Of the Laws now in Force For their Maintenance and
Settlement: Containing likewise, Some Considerations Relating to
National Improvement in general. By the late Hon. Roger North,
Esq; London: Printed for M. Cooper in Paternoster Row; and Sold
by W. Craighton in Ipswich. 1753.

Roger North, A Discourse on the Study of the Laws of England, by

the Hon. Roger North. Now first printed from the Original MS. in
the Hargrave Collection. With Notes, and Illustrations By a Member
of the Inner Temple. London. Printed for Charles Baldwyn,
Newgate-Street, London, MDCCCXXIV [1824].

354
1 ‘Unus oculatus testis praestat auritis decem’, Roger North’s
misquotation of a line from the second act of Plautus’ Truculentus. The
line is employed as the epitaph, on the title page of Roger North, Life of
Francis North. The implication is that (for North) the testimony of a
direct witness has greater value than that of any number of
secondhand eavesdroppers, a point returned to later in the essay. The
primary texts discussed are referred to in shortened form throughout
the essay and footnotes; full publication details are given in the
bibliography.

2 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:

An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger
and Frederick Lawrence (Polity Press: Cambridge, 1989), p. 27. The
English-language edition emerged long after the German and French
editions (Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer
Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Luchterhand: Darmstadt,
1962) and L’Espace public: archéologie de la publicité comme
dimension constitutive de la société bourgeoise, trans. Marc Buhot de
Launay [Payot: Paris, 1978]). Habermas’s concept had a delayed
impact on Anglo-American scholarship, arriving at the moment of
post-structuralism and the ‘collapse’ of Marxism, a moment marked by
the publication of Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public
Sphere (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992).

3 There is an enormous literature. Three articles have helped me

understand current options for contemporary readers: Harold Mah,
‘Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of
Historians’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 72, no. 1 (2000), pp.
153–82; Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in
Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 45, no. 2 (2006),
pp. 270–92; and Conal Condren, ‘Public, Private and the Idea of the
“Public Sphere” in Early–Modern England’, Intellectual History Review,
vol. 19, no. 1 (2008), pp. 15–28. Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern
Revolution (Yale University Press: New Haven, 2009), especially
chapters 5, 6 and 7, gives a compelling account of the pre-emptive
foreclosure of any Public Sphere as a ‘real space’ by what the author
convincingly calls a Catholic, modernizing king, James II. Michael
McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the
Division of Knowledge (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore,
2005) is a productive utilization of the concept, both as a device and as
an object of study, for a social and cultural history of early modernity.

4 Mah, ‘Phantasies’, op. cit., p. 154, states that the Habermasian Public
Sphere has become ‘a prescriptive disciplinary category – a category to
be

355
 invoked in studies that aspire to disciplinary significance’. That is an
assertion to make one cautious, and encourages a degree of
circumspection, if not inhibition, in the rest us.

5 Gareth V. Bennett, White Kennett, 1660–1728, Bishop of Peterborough:

A Study in the Political and Ecclesiastical History of the Early
Eighteenth Century (SPCK: London, 1957) lists sixty-eight printed
works by White Kennett. These can be divided into learned works
addressed to the ‘Republic of Letters’ and those presented for the
‘Public Sphere’. An example of the former would be his Parochial
Antiquities, which was rare, expensive and full of Latin (and also sent
out under the author’s name); of the latter, Witt Against Wisdom (a
translation of Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, published anonymously),
which was rightly popular, and frequently reprinted, appearing with
Holbein’s illustrations in later editions.

6 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, op. cit.,

p. 7.

7 Ibid., p. xi.

8 See, for example, Anonymous (Francis North), A Philosophical Essay on

Music.

9 For a thorough account of, and context for, Dudley North’s career, see,
Richard Grassby, The English Gentleman in Trade: The Life and Works
of Sir Dudley North 1641–91 (Clarendon Press: London, 1994).

10 See Peter T. Millard, ‘The Chronology of Roger North’s Main Works’,

Review of English Studies, New Series, vol. 24, no. 95 (August 1973),
pp. 283–94; and Jamie C. Kassler and Mary Chan, Roger North:
Materials for a Chronology of his Writings, Checklist No. 1 (University of
New South Wales: Kensington, New South Wales, 1989).

11 Two earlier pamphlets have been attributed, at least in part, to Roger

North: ‘The Narrative of Sir Francis North …’ (1680) and ‘A Letter
Concerning the Disabling Clauses …’ (1690), see Jamie C. Kassler,
The Honourable Roger North, 1651–1734: On Life, Morality, Law and
Tradition (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2009), pp. 363–8. No doubt more will be
presented, or come to light, in the future.

12 Anonymous (Dudley North), Discourses upon Trade. The Discourses

was installed in the canon of economic literature only at the moment of
political economy. It features in John Ramsay McCulloch, A Select
Collection of Early English Tracts on Commerce, from the originals of
Mun, Roberts, North and others (Political Economy Club: London,
1856), and was highly commended by Ricardo ‘I had no idea that

356
 anyone entertained such correct opinions, as are expressed in this
publication, at so early a period.’ See Letters of David Ricardo to John
Ramsay McCulloch, ed. Jacob H. Hollander (Publications of the
American Economic Association: New York, 1895), p. 126; this
reference from Jacob H. Hollander, (ed.), Discourses upon Trade: A
Reprint of Economic Tracts (Johns Hopkins Press: Baltimore, 1907).
Roger wrote in his Life of Dudley North, p. 181: ‘it is certain the
pamphlet is, and hath been ever since, utterly sunk, and a copy not to
be had for money’. Julian Hoppit, ‘The Contexts and Contours of British
Economic Literature, 1660–1760’, Historical Journal, vol. 49 (2006), p.
102, quotes Terence Hutchison, Before Adam Smith: The Emergence
of Political Economy, 1662–1776 (Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1988), who
noted that the Discourses ‘seems to have disappeared from view
almost completely very soon after its publication’.

13 BL Add MS 32522; this volume also includes transcripts of letters from

Dudley, sent in the 1660s when he travelled to Archangel, and then via
Italy to Turkey; they form part of Roger’s Life of Dudley. The manuscript
is not discussed in George D. Choksy, ‘The Bifurcated Economics of
Sir Dudley North and Roger North: One Holistic Analytical Engine’,
History of Political Economy, vol. 27, no. 3 (1995), pp. 477–92, a
comprehensive analysis of the North brothers’ economic and social
theory.

14 See Julian Hoppit, ‘Contexts and Contours’, pp. 89–91, for a discussion
of the ‘typical’ anonymity of economic texts in the period.

15 Anonymous (Dudley North), Discourses upon Trade, A2.

16 Ibid., A4v.

17 Ibid., A2r.

18 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,

p. 28, ‘Intimsphäre’ – this is Habermas’s only reference to a spherical
object and it is clearly used figuratively. We may infer a limited
circulation of texts within the intimate sphere (which includes letters as
well as drafts and ‘problematic’ texts). See Harold Love, The Culture
and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century
England (University of Massachusetts Press: Amherst, 1998) for an
account of texts moving from hand to hand within coteries. Such
circulation, for example, was Sir William Petty’s principal means of
‘publication’.

19 Anonymous (Roger North), Reflections in Our Common Failings

(1701), A Discourse of Fish and Fish-Ponds (1713), and The
Gentleman’s Accomptant (1714). There are 803 entries (books and

357
 musical scores) in the British Library catalogue for ‘A Person of
Honour’. The earliest is dated 1642; nearly all ‘originals’ are from this
moment of the Bourgeois Public Sphere. Many are scholarly
reproductions, many are duplicates. The number of identified authors is
few – attributions run to some twenty suggested names, most, but not
all aristocratic.

20 Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in

Seventeenth-Century England (University of Chicago Press: Chicago,
1994).

21 Anonymous (Roger North), Arguments & Materials for a Register of

Estates. Land registration for the whole of the United Kingdom was
introduced only following the Land Registration Act of 1862, and was
not properly, or universally, achieved until the twentieth century. Local
systems existed at that earlier time – reference is made to one such in
Norfolk, which Roger North, as a Norfolk landowner, knew well.

22 Anonymous (Roger North), Arguments & Materials, p. 1. The device of

representing ‘philosophical’ arguments in this way is as old as
philosophical literature – that is, first person accounts of the
conversations of others.

23 Anonymous (Roger North), Reflections in our Common Failings, Done

out of French, By a Person of Honour, after Anonymous (Pierre de
Villiers), Réflexions sur les défauts d’autrui, Paris, 1691. The original
preface, also translated, discusses the anonymity of authors, and the
anonymization of the ‘real’ persons discussed in the essays. We might
conclude that the effect of their ‘reality’ was enhanced through their
screening in this way – the implication being that they had be
anonymized to avoid scandal, or to protect the author (an implication
that might, furthermore, increase the sense of social prestige of any
reader who believed that they could identify them). This kind of
reality-effect and double-take was employed ubiquitously in literature of
the period, and with great comic effect by numerous satirists.

24 A number are included in Franciscus J. M. Korsten, Roger North

(1651–1734): Virtuoso and Essayist (Holland University Press:
Amsterdam, 1981).

25 Anonymous (Dudley North, fourth Baron North), Observations and

advices oeconomical.

26 Anonymous (Roger North), A Discourse of Fish and Fish-Ponds. It is

likely that Roger North was himself responsible for its republication in
1726, accompanied by Sir Richard Weston’s Discours of Husbandrie
(originally edited and published by Samuel Hartlib in 1650).

358
27 Anonymous (Roger North), Reflections, p. 33.

28 Ibid., p. 25.

29 Ibid., pp. 5, 18.

30 Ibid., p. 27.

31 Ibid., p. 6.

32 Roger Schmidt, ‘Roger North’s Examen: A Crisis in Historiography’,

Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 26, no. 1 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 57–75,
provides evidence that the Examen, and likely the Reflections, too,
came about at the urging of George Hickes, the non-juror ‘Bishop of
Thetford’ and former friend (and subsequently enemy) of White Kennett
(see especially pp. 61–4).

33 Roger North (1740), (1742), (1744). Montagu North (he spells it

‘Mountagu’) later published an edition of Roger (and Dudley) North’s A
Discourse upon the Poor.

34 Bearing in mind and respecting Schmidt’s suspicions of Roger North’s

apprehensions on this point, the Examen is far from being a
‘dangerous’ ideological statement like The Hereditary Right of the
Crown of England asserted, which saw Hilkiah Bedford fined and
imprisoned in 1714.

35 Roger North, Examen, p. b.

36 Butterfield writes (in Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of

History (G. Bell and Sons: London, 1931; Norton: New York and
London, 1965), p. 6.) ‘We cling to a certain organisation of the past
which amounts to a whig interpretation of history, and all our deference
to research brings us only to admit that this needs qualifications in
detail […] there is a tendency for all history to veer over into whig
history.’ White Kennett and other Whig historians of his generation not
only represent Whig party positions, but a methodology and purpose in
historical representation for a public that inaugurates a ‘modern’ idea of
history, or ‘history in the public sphere’; Habermas is in direct descent
from this.

37 Roger North, Examen, pp. i–xiv (in order not to clutter the page and the
lower margin, the numerous quotations in the following paragraphs
have not been given their own specific reference).

38 Anonymous (White Kennett), An Address of Thanks to a Good Prince.

359
39 Anonymous (W.K. A.M. = White Kennett?), A Dialogue Between Two
Friends.

40 See Bennett, White Kennett, op. cit., for an excellent review of

Kennett’s career as an author and churchman; see Anonymous
(William Newton), The Life of the Right Reverend Dr. White Kennett
(1730) for a contemporary defence of Kennett against his detractors.
Kennett was a remarkably interesting scholar of history in his own right,
a fact not properly acknowledged in this present essay, and scarcely
put right in this note.

41 Schmidt, ‘Roger North’s Examen’, op. cit., p. 70, astutely relates this to
a Whig cultural politics of ‘politeness’, citing J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue,
Commerce, and History (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge,
1985), p. 236.

42 Thus the title of this essay; see note 1, above.

43 See below for a discussion of what might be implied by the term ‘New
Work’.

44 Roger North, Examen (1740), unnumbered page at front of volume.

45 Sir Matthew Hale (1609–76), Chief Justice, was one of the most
important jurists of the seventeenth century, a colleague and adversary
of Francis North, known personally to Roger North, who wrote a
pungent, though admiring ‘Character’ him in his autobiography: Roger
North, Notes of Me: The Autobiography of Roger North, ed. Peter T.
Millard (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2000). Roger North
drafted the manuscript of Notes of Me during the first years of his
retirement. The text was first published as The Autobiography of the
Hon. Roger North […], in a very corrupted transcription, edited by
Augustus Jessopp (D. Nutt: London, 1887).

46 For a full account of this case and its contexts, see R. Deazley,
‘Commentary on Gyles v. Wilcox (1741)’, in L. Bently and M.
Kretschmer (eds.), Primary Sources on Copyright (1450–1900),
accessed via <www.copyrighthistory.org>.

47 Although, bearing in mind that this would require that the anecdote was
true, such a judgment depends upon our evaluation of the author’s
character and motives – what Aristotle would put under the heading of
‘ethos’ in his trio of artistic proofs in rhetoric.

48 ‘Anecdote noun: origin French anecdote, or its source, medieval Latin

anecdota […] from Greek ἀνέκδοτα things unpublished, ἀν priv. +
ἔκδοτ-ος published, from ἐκ-διδόναι to give out, publish: applied by

360
 Procopius to his ‘Unpublished Memoirs’ of the Emperor Justinian,
which consisted chiefly of tales of the private life of the court; whence
the application of the name to short stories or particulars.’ OED online,
<http://www.oed.com>, accessed 24 November 2012.

49 Individual desire as a motive force in the economic life of a nation was

one of the insights (found also in the writings of his fellow radical Tory,
Nicholas Barbon) offered by Dudley North in the Discourses upon
Trade.

50 Kassler, The Honourable Roger North, op. cit., passim.

51 In an essay in The Friend in 1809, Coleridge wrote: ‘[Roger North’s]

language gives us the very nerve, pulse, and sinew of a hearty, healthy
conversational English’, see The Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Prose and Verse: Complete in One Volume (Thomas, Cowperthwait
and Co.: Philadelphia, 1840), p. 487. Pages 329–41 of the Examen
were republished as ‘A Discourse on the English Constitution’ in
William Jones (ed.), The Scholar Armed against the Errors of the Time;
or, a Collection of tracts on the principles and evidences of Christianity,
etc. (F. C. & J. Rivington: London, 1795).

52 Schmidt, ‘Roger North’s Examen’, op. cit., p. 70.

53 John P. Friesen, ‘The Reading of Newton in the Early Eighteenth

Century: Tories and Newtonianism’, unpublished PhD thesis (University
of Leeds, 2004), pp. 184–209.

54 See Mary Chan and Jamie C. Kassler, Roger North’s ‘The musicall
grammarian and Theory of sounds’: digests of the manuscripts; with an
analytical index of 1726 and 1728 ‘Theory of sounds’ by Janet D. Hine
(University of New South Wales: Kensington, New South Wales, 1988).

55 North, A Discourse on the Study of the Laws, op. cit.

56 Kassler, The Honourable Roger North, op. cit., passim.

57 See Millard, ‘Chronology’, op. cit., and Kassler and Chan, Materials,
op. cit.

58 BL Add MS page 32526, f. 2r. I have sought to carry over the

provisionality of the manuscript draft by including the illegible, his
strikings out and insertions; it is edited to appear unedited – as if
presented ‘anecdotally’.

361
AN ‘EVER-RECURRING
CONTROVERSY’
JOHN THOMPSON, WILLIAM JAMES STILLMAN
AND THE BOOTBLACKS1
Steve Edwards

J ohn Thompson’s photographs,

published in monthly parts through 1877 and
originally

1878 as Street Life in London, have long had a

place in the history of photography, but an
uncertain one. The Crawlers or ‘Hookey Alf’ of
Whitechapel have often been reproduced, while
frequently being confined to the dismal category of
proto-documentary, which establishes an
unproblematic teleology between the
nineteenth-century document and its later
inflections. As the publisher’s note to the 1994
reprint of Street Life in London puts it: ‘John
Thompson was a pioneering documentary
photographer – one of a breed for whom arduous
travel under extremely difficult conditions did little
to dampen enthusiasm.’2 None of this tells us much.
While the first historians of photography –
Beaumont Newhall, Helmut Gernsheim, Walter
Benjamin, Gisèle Freund and Lucia Moholy – took
up a range of photographic forms in search of a
‘new vision’, those who followed tended to narrow
their focus to constitute the history of photography
on the grounds of the museum and its approved
forms of taste. Documents, in contrast, belonged in

362
institutional archives and reports of both official
and non-governmental organizations.
During the 1980s, a group of theorists and
historians began to pay attention to the
photographic document and its role in culture.
Molly Nesbit’s account of Eugène Atget and the
document is for me the outstanding description and
definition, and I hope to develop on her categories
in this essay.3 Nesbit approaches the document as a
form through the work of Atget, who, she suggests,
made and sold photographs for a variety of clients.
In particular, he supplied pictures to workers in the
skilled Parisian trades: decorative-metal workers,
illustrators, theatre designers and people who
traded on nostalgia for ‘vieux Paris’. Atget was not
an artist and he did not claim anything special for
these images. Art was of little significance for the
craft workers or designers who employed these
pictures. In this sense, Nesbit characterizes the
photo-document as a ‘nonaesthetic’, workaday form.
Atget’s documents, she argues, displayed two
principal features: first, they were practical,
utilitarian images; second, they were built on
semiotic polysemy or ‘openness’. Usually, they were
frontal and planar, but documents have no absolute
form: the same image might be used by different
specialists, and so it had to be available to different
kinds of specialist attention. Information, clarity
and detail
are what matter in such images. According to
Nesbit, ‘an architectural photograph would be
called a document, as would a chronophotograph, a
police i.d., or an X ray. They had one thing in
common: all of them were pictures that went to
work.’4 However, before considering how the
document figured in nineteenth-century debates, I

363
want to comment on one of the main lines of the
research from the 1980s, which drew heavily on
Foucault’s account of ‘carceral society’. As we
know, for many anglophone readers and writers,
this work seemed to offer an alternative to
Marxism, dissolving class politics and the state into
an amorphous power.5 The account, first advanced
by John Tagg and subsequently adopted by David
Green and others, suggested that these
photographs represented a crucial point at which
the camera extended the disciplinary gaze of the
Panoptican out onto the streets.6 Tagg argued that
Thompson’s work, along with that of Thomas
Annan, Dr Hugh Diamond, Arthur J. Mumby and
others, entailed ‘a “procedure of objectification and
subjection”, the transmission of power in the
synaptic space of the camera’.7 During the second
half of the nineteenth century, it was said,
photography became a pervasive technology of
power-knowledge that cast its web over society.
Foucault was concerned with an institutional or
professional ‘normalizing gaze, a form of
surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to
classify and to punish. It establishes over
individuals a visibility through which one
differentiates them and judges them.’8 In the
‘regimes of truth’ that emerged from this process,
visibility was particularly important. Subjecting the
bodies of the poor, the outcast and the marginal to
disciplinary visibility, these theorists insisted,
photography played an important role in
constructing discourses of ‘otherness’. Visibility
exposed the objects of knowledge to controlling
scrutiny. It was by defining and demarcating the
‘deviant’ that a normative conception of the self
could be established: the ‘abnormal’ or ‘deviant’

364
defined what it was to be normal. This process of
investigation entailed a hierarchical vision, because
in each case the person with the camera had the
social authority, or money, to arrange and pose
others for scrutiny: Thompson, for instance, noted
the ‘trifling sums’ that he paid to poor Chinese
people for ‘the privilege of taking such subjects’.9
Some people were authorized to look; others were
subject to what Tagg called the ‘burden’ of being
the ‘bearers of meaning’.10 There is reason enough
to locate Street Life in this context. As a reviewer in
the Graphic put it: ‘The manifold industries of the
poor in our great city are transferred from the
street to the drawing-room by “Street Life in
London”.’11 Whose street? Whose drawing-room?
Another writer suggested: ‘If, henceforth, there
should continue to be truth in the proverb that
“there is a half of the world which knows not how
the other half lives,” it will not be the fault of Mr.
Thompson, or his literary coadjutor, Mr. Smith.’12
Similar comments are to be found in the Leeds
Mercury, Northern Echo, Morning Post and a host
of others; they demarcate ‘us’ from ‘them’. The
account of photography that emerged in the 1980s
re-evaluated these images, positioning them at the
centre of photography and assigning them a
determining social weight.
Of course, this is to go over old ground and the
debate has moved on. For one thing, we know there
is much more to Foucault than this story allows.13
Nevertheless, the attention to Thompson and his ilk
appears to have been short-lived. The kind of
images that drew so much attention during the
1980s are again slipping from view as a younger
generation, shaped by the experience of
neoliberalism and postmodern theory, have turned

365
away from power, ideology and documents. In their
place, we find a new engagement with auteurism,
playfulness and self-reflexivity. The current
obsession with Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida and
Michael Fried’s photographic turn are just surface
ripples of a deeper current.14 In recent
historiography, the document as evidential mode
has been replaced by a few key areas of
investigation that bear on the nineteenth century.
First, there is an exploration of the pioneers of
photography (principally William Henry Fox Talbot)
perceived through the lens of postmodern theory;
second, there is a growing body of work concerned
with photographs by women – Julia Margaret
Cameron, Clementina Hawarden and those elite
amateurs that created elaborately decorated picture
albums; third, in line with revisionist histories of an
anti-modernist stripe that find complex effects in
academic art, there is attention to the elite makers
such as Camille Silvy. Whether it is Talbot,
Cameron or Silvy, the photographer is positioned as
a self-conscious picture-maker whose work can be
mined for art-historical allusions and references,
and the likes of Thompson are once again occluded.
These readings are heavily influenced by the art of
the 1980s and the art history that has spiralled out
of it, but they often seem impervious to the wider
emplotment of their work: if we put aside the
veneer of theory and feminism, we find ourselves
not so far from Mike Weaver’s ‘Talbot’ or Helmut
Gernsheim’s ‘Cameron’.15 Canon critique has given
way to a revivified aestheticism-cum-Victorianism,
and the document again finds itself in the role of
poor relation. My question is what are we to make
of pictures such as those produced by Thompson?
What kind of knowledge do we require to think

366
about these images; to imagine their appearance
and disappearance from the histories of
photography?
There is a wider pattern of continuity across these
historiographical shifts, which involves the ‘retreat
from class’.16 The problem is that without the
dialectics of capital and class – the critique of
political economy – it is not really possible to come
to terms with Thompson’s work or with the
character of the document, and I do not just mean
the content or subject of the images.17 These are
images of the casual poor, but there is more to the
matter than that. Thompson’s street figures will be
familiar to any reader of Henry Mayhew and the
emerging literature of social exploration, but one of
them [1] strikes me as particularly symptomatic.18
This untitled picture appeared along with the
photograph of ‘the donkey boy’ as illustrations to
the section of Street Life entitled ‘Clapham
Common Industries’. The presence of this image
suggests some awkward questions about the social
position of the photographer at this time. The
accompanying text by the journalist Adolphe Smith
– who was to become a labour and union activist
– brings out the marginal status of the
photographer. The success of such itinerant
photographers, Smith argued, depended more on
their manners than on skill. He wrote:

Many practiced hands, who have highly distinguished themselves

in the studio, when the work is brought to them, are altogether
unable to earn a living when they take their stand in the open air.
They have not the necessary impudence to accost all who pass by,
they have no tact or diplomacy, they are unable to modify the style
of language to suit the individual they happen to meet, and they
rarely induce any one to submit to the painful ordeal of having a

367
portrait taken. On the other hand, men who are far less skilled in
the art often obtain extensive custom by the sheer force of
persuasion.19

According to Smith, many of the itinerants who

worked Clapham Common had come down in life.
They had, he said, previously: ‘been tradesmen, or
owned their own studios in town; but after
misfortune in business or reckless dissipations, they
were reduced to their present less expensive and
more humble avocation’.20 In the off-season, Smith
argued, these men made portraits at the racetracks:
often ‘being locked up by the police under the
Vagrancy Act’, or ‘sleeping in a tap-room’.21 The
character in the photograph, Smith claimed, is
represented ‘with the class of subject which
generally proves most profitable. Nurses with
babies and perambulators are easily lured within
the charmed focus of the camera.’22 This is a tale of
class and gender, seduction and gullibility and there
is much to be said. However, historians of
photography seem to be drawn to Silvy’s gentlefolk
rather than to nurses, babies and common
photographers.
We do not need to rely on Smith’s text for our sense
of the dubious nature of this practice; it is also
figured by Thompson’s illustration. Thompson goes
out of his way to include in our field of view all
those questionable features that the photographer
he depicted would have carefully excluded from his
portrait of baby. Look at the mean handcart rigged
up as a portable developing tent; the simple display
of his wares that are hopelessly out of date; the
empty, plain chair, the nurse and above all the
presence of the two other men. The man behind the
nurse, who is dressed roughly, is, I presume, the

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photographer’s assistant or ‘tout’. The young man,
lurking in the shadow behind the tree, with what I
take to be a basket, seems to be a decisive detail; he
introduces a brooding and sinister presence into the
frame. All this seems significant because it mirrors
just what Thompson was himself doing; travelling
the streets making photographs. Thompson, who
was born in Edinburgh, spent most of the 1860s
travelling and working in Asia: the Himalayas, Siam,
Vietnam, Cambodia, Hong Kong and China.23 The
albums and books he produced reveal a
simultaneous attraction and repulsion to his
subjects.24 In what was to become a cultural
pattern, Thompson turned to photographing the
English poor as something of an outsider.25

369
 1 John Thompson, ‘Clapham
Common Industries’, from
Street Life in London, 1877/8.
Library of the London School
of Economics and Political
Science, R(SR)/1146.

There is a distance between Thompson and the

Clapham Common photographer, but it is not
clear-cut or decisive. Audrey Linkman has
suggested there was a critical reorientation of
perceptions of this kind of work during the 1860s.26
Previously itinerant photographers had been viewed
as pioneers, and their work was viewed as a decent
or legitimate trade, but during this period they were
repositioned by the photographic gentlemen as
‘travelling bunglers’ who undermined the status of
the profession. These photographers made cheap
portraits – sometimes for as little as sixpence –
often they worked in old or cheap formats; the
daguerreotype and the tintype were more common
in this field than paper prints. These men were also
prone to the odd dodge. The photographic gents
were concerned with the way such men would
tarnish their precious status; they seemed too
proximate to the world of the huckster, showman
or street musician. These figures congregated at
sites of popular amusement, such as fairs, parks,
seaside spots, race meetings and even pubs.
Thompson’s photographer mentions these rounds of
work, and it will be remembered Smith refers to
‘race meetings’, ‘tap rooms’ and ‘vagrancy’. As
Linkman correctly observes, this was an area linked
in the popular imagination with ‘cheapjacks and
tricksters, operating in the twilight zone of petty
criminality beyond the pale of respectability’.27 The

370
inclusion of this image in Street Life casts its
shadow over all the others, and suggests that we
are not looking at the secure gaze of power, but at
an unstable point of view. From this perspective,
the photographer appears to belong – along with
other street traders such as purveyors of ‘old
clothes’ and patent medicine men – in a marginal
and economically precarious circle of occupations.
One batch of images in Street Life in London
focuses on cabmen, another on assorted labourers,
and there are miscellaneous traders, but it is worth
noting just how many of the pictures take as their
subject forms of artistic labour – admittedly in its
low modality. There are, in addition to Clapham
Common photographers, ‘“Caney” the Clown’ and
‘Italian Street Musicians’; there is a portrait of
‘Tickets’, a sign painter, and ‘The Wall Worker’ who
hangs advertisements on a fence. Yet another group
focuses on aesthetic pleasure: ‘Covent Garden
Flower Women’; ‘Street Advertising’; the ‘Dealer in
fancy-Ware’, ‘November Effigies’ and that walking
picture ‘The London Boardman’. By extension, it is
possible to recognize that many of the traders
selected bear on bodily pleasure and taste: as well
as the cheap fish seller, there are ‘Half-Penny Ices’,
‘The Street Fruit Trade’, ‘“Mush-fakers” and Ginger
Beer Makers’ and ‘The Seller of Shell-Fish’. The
point is that Street Life in London seems, if not
internal to all of this, at least proximate to it.
Photographers and reporters also walked the
streets plying their trade. Thompson and Smith
glimpsed a connection and traced a line that put
together street life and the sensations.
There is a historiographical problem here. It seems
to me that once you cut away conceptions of class
and ideology from the analysis of images like this

371
they can only appear as objects of aesthetic irony –
that is to say, the moments of social anxiety,
self-recognition or imbrication will be
misrecognized as the defining tropes of modernist
or postmodernist art. Discourse analysis dislocated
from social interests means social unease can be
recast as a formal mise en abyme of representation.
The current obsession with the photo-document in
conceptual art is symptomatic of this structure of
feeling, because it turns on an ironized conception
of the evidential mode. The fixation on
‘photo-conceptualism’ reveals a period disdain for
those naive enough to actually believe in truth or
reality.28 My point is that, in the condition of the
long 1980s, the rejection of photography as a fine
art generated its aestheticist antipode. But to make
sense of this anxiety we need to think about the
relation between documents and pictures revolving
around patterns of social division and framed by, or
set against, the intense debate on the labouring
poor during the period.29 To be clear, I do not think
Street Life in London engages in aesthetic irony or
self-reflexive artfulness. Rather, it is a book
redolent with petty-bourgeois doubts (and perhaps
fears). The relation of self and other is much more
immanent in Thompson’s work than that allowed for
in the existing account. The respectability of
photography is the key point in this instance, but it
ran through everything photographers did during
this period; they were profoundly insecure and the
press repeatedly reinforced their association with
the city’s low life and rabble. Some photographers
wanted to force a clear distinction and insist on
their own place in the circle of respectable
professions, but what is compelling about
Thompson and Smith’s book is that they seem to

372
have worked through both proximity and distance,
attraction and repulsion, as if they were not quite
sure whether they were internal or external to the
precarious forms of life they depicted.
Art works and documents were torn halves of
photography in the period, and they have been
further prised apart in recent scholarship.
Photographers wrote endlessly about art, and their
discussions constantly turn on the relation to an
underling, usually figured as slave, servant or
mechanic. The relation of art works and humble
documents is embedded in a distinction between
mental and manual labour and the concomitant
oppositions between abstraction or generalization
and particularity or detail.30 What we need to
account for this problem is an oxymoronic
construction – an art history from below. Here I am
just going to look at one debate from the 1870s,
initiated by W. J. Stillman, before returning once
more to Thompson. In some ways this was the last
great English debate on the character of
photography before the rise of Pictorialism.
William James Stillman was an antiquarian and
amateur photographer active in the Hellenistic
Society. In February 1872, he published an essay
that initiated an extensive controversy. If we
include his replies, Stillman’s argument elicited
some thirty contributions. On at least three
occasions, the editor of the Photographic News –
the journal in which the debate took place – tried to
call a halt to the discussion, but he found it
impossible to hold back the flood of invective.
Stillman’s argument occasioned initial responses
from H. P. Robinson and N. K. Cherrill, since they
were directly implicated in his argument, but other

373
leading photographer-writers were also drawn in to
the discussion. W. T. Bovey, George Croughton,
William England and Edwin Cocking all had their
say. As the editor of the Photographic News put it,
this was an ‘ever-recurring controversy’.31 The
arguments are repetitive, but this kind of
reiteration points to a knot or sticking point that
registers a symptom or what we might call, shifting
gear, a ‘structure of feeling’.32 The discussion might
appear tedious to the reader, but it animated its
participants. At various points, Stillman re-entered
the fray. The military metaphors – and they are
ubiquitous – are apposite and register that
photographers saw themselves under attack. It is an
example of the hypertropic flood of figurative
language that broke out whenever anyone broached
the question of photography’s status, and it
provides access to key undercurrents of
photographic ideology.33
Stillman was a fascinating figure: an American
journalist, diplomat, art critic and painter who spent
most of his life in Italy, Greece, Crete and England.
A friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louis Agassiz and
others, he was a key figure in the acclaimed
Adirondack Club. Sometime revolutionary
conspirator associated with Lajos Kossuth in
Hungary and Francesco Crispi in Milan, he proved
unfit to fight in the Union Army during the
American Civil War and instead became US consul
to Rome and Crete. He edited the first American art
journal, the Crayon, was for a while editor of
Scribner’s Magazine, and then became a journalist
for The Times; he wrote on the Cretan Insurrection
and the revolution in Herzegovina. Stillman was not
an artistic naïf: he was himself a painter and was
close to Ruskin and Rosetti (Ruskin was godfather

374
to his son). For what it is worth, he has been called
‘the first American pre-Raphaelite painter’.34 In
1870, he published The Acropolis of Athens,
Illustrated Picturesquely and Architecturally in
Photography.35 He also published a handbook for
photographers and made technical improvements to
apparatus. Leading photographic publishers sold his
albumen prints, and his work is to be found in the
archives of Alma-Tadema and others.36 Stillman
could not be ignored by the gentleman guardians of
photography.
The published responses to Stillman insisted that
photography was a fine art, and I have argued
elsewhere that by this time their sense of self was
wrapped up with this idea,37 but attending to the
dispute, which sometimes became very bad
tempered, provides us with a way into the
photographic imaginary around the time Thompson
was working. One commentator signing himself ‘an
indignant photographer’ claimed that they had ‘an
enemy in our camp’. He referred to the ‘heresies’
that Stillman’s had set out ‘in all their naked
hideousness’. Stillman, this writer said,
‘depreciated photography’ and was determined to
‘sink it in the estimation of its admirers as a
mechanical trade’.38 What had Stillman done to
deserve being afflicted with this set of mixed
metaphors?
The answer is that Stillman had committed the
primal sin when he wrote in the Year-book of the
Photographic News for 1872 that photography was
not a fine art but a record of fact; it rendered ‘what
the eye may see, but no hand be it ever so skillful,
render in perfection’. Photography was a ‘handmaid
of the knowledge of the visible world’.39 Taking as

375
his example Robinson and Cherrill’s In the
Gloaming, he suggested this picture was a
‘mis-statement made by a combination of truth’.40 It
should be remembered that Robinson’s book on
Pictorial Composition had recently appeared.41 In
this account, artistic beauty sits alone and apart,
while handmaids and facts keep company.
Immediately, the dispute began. A writer using the
pseudonym of Theophilus Thiddlemitch described
these views as ‘utterly heterodox and heretical’ and
they could not be allowed to pass.42 This already
suggests a consensus had descended with the
gloaming over photography during the 1860s.
‘Thiddlemitch’ responded to Stillman’s suggestion
that photographs were records of fact by
suggesting that such pictures were: ‘dry,
uninteresting, hopelessly uninstructive, very
“primeval forests” of useless information’. What is
being said here is that documents were primitive,
shapeless or unformed and unselective – according
to ‘Thiddlemitch’, this was a ‘tremendous mistake’ –
what was needed he thought were not copies and
records but ‘art’.43 Stillman responded that he had
not ridiculed In the Gloaming; in fact, he thought it
was excellent, if a work of artifice. Still, he ‘stood by
his guns’. What makes art, he said, is not what is
taken from nature, but the ‘poetic regard – a charm
of memory, or an intensifying of some meaning
which he found in nature’. Art entailed
‘idealization’, ‘greater unity and harmony’ and in
this ‘photography must inevitably plead
destitution’.44 There is a basic dichotomy in
Stillman’s account – and it is one shared by his
opponents – framed in the terms of academic
aesthetics. While he was much more careful than
many critics in formulating his terms, he was

376
suggesting that art results from the idealization of
nature; in contrast, photography is an accurate
record or copy of existing phenomena. Art and
photography, he said, were ‘antipodal’. He claimed
that ‘substantially and materially, photographs are
records of nature’ and not amenable to what the
photographer thought about the subject.45 The
imagination was central to art and the document or
record was the form of image which had not been
marked by imagination or subjective presence. An
important line demarcated photography from art,
and documents from pictures.
In a published response, Robinson and Cherrill
begin in military frame noting that Stillman ‘has let
off his guns, but the shot did not come our way
particularly’. They insisted that photography was
amenable to ‘artistic feeling’ and was more than a
‘mere map-making copy of the mechanical camera’.
While Stillman admitted that the work of Robinson
and Cherrill displayed ‘harmony and unity’ and
could not be dismissed as mere mechanical
reproduction, he insisted that ‘photography is not
an art in the sense of the term which we imply when
we talk of its higher meaning’. Robinson and
Cherrill conceded this point, but attempted to hold
back the full force of Stillman’s argument and
sustain a link between art and idealization.46
Stillman’s response suggested (citing the Journal of
Arts and Sciences) that there many arts that
‘manifest great technical excellence’, such as glass
polishing, and then continued ‘a clever and
dexterous boot black [is] an artist in his way’.47
Here Stillman put his foot in it, by contrasting an
art of ‘technical achievement’ such as bootblacking
– the cleaning of shoes done on the street, often by
the very poor – and an art of design in a way that

377
lined photography up with the manual work. And
then he offered another analogy that was bound to
rankle. He wrote:

There is a turning of a lathe which will, if you place a model of a

statue in one compartment turn you out a perfect copy in another.
Suppose the model to be a living figure and the copy to be a
statue, would the mechanist, no matter what his part in the
arrangement of the figure be a sculptor?48

By the beginning of the 1870s, the term

‘mechanical’ had become slippery and could refer to
mechanics (workers) or machines and sometimes
confounded the two. Turning the handle in this
dispute clearly refers to machine work, but it
echoes with the constant references in the
photographic literature to street musicians working
with a barrel-organ as a simulacrum of artistic
labour.49 Like barrel-organ players, the effect
seemed artistic, but it was utterly mechanical and
mindless. Here we can already see some key terms
and oppositions: ignorant mechanics, glass
polishers, bootblacks, lathe turners and copies
stand in opposition to art works, imagination,
selection and gentlemen. Photography was another
word for social division. Citing Peter Le
Neve-Foster, Stillman insisted that ‘photography
should maintain its place in the witness-box’ if not
as a clue to identity of the criminal then as ‘a
certain witness to the harmony, majesty, and actual
beauty of nature’.50 This did not mean running
down photography, since a great engineer did not
have to be an artist, the relation of photography to
art, was akin to that of philosophy to poetry or ‘the
school master to the singing master’. It was better,
he said and his republicanism came through in this,

378
to be ‘photographer-in-ordinary to nature than
portrait painter to Her Majesty’.51
W. T. Bovey picked out a key sentence from
Stillman, who had said: ‘With mechanical aid and
guidance, photography truthfully transcribes; ergo,
it produces that which is not art.’52 Bovey rightly
observed that Stillman was separating out:

‘art’ as opposed to ‘the arts’, which last he stintedly defines ‘arts of

execution or technical achievement’. The term art, which when not
proceeded by the definite article, he interprets as ‘an art of design’
implying, I presume, that it designs before it executes.53

Photographers responded by attempting to

subjectivize themselves, stressing the guiding
intelligence behind the camera. Stillman gave a list
of the techniques that photographers tried to assert
their presence: ‘the contrivance of Rembrandt
tricks, and double printing’; the ‘multiplication of
dodges, &c.’; ‘designing a picture, and picking up
parts here and there to print together in one
whole’.54 The latter referred directly to the work of
Robinson and Cherrill. In any case, Bovey had put
his finger on the wound by noting Stillman’s
distinction between art and the mechanical arts. It
is a story of architects and bees. Among the many
published comments in this dispute, Albert
Dumsday drew attention to Dr Nuttall’s distinction
between mental arts that required ‘the exercise of
mind more than that of the body’; and physical arts
‘in which manual labour is chiefly concerned
including the various trades and manufactures’. The
mental arts were subdivided into ‘Liberal, Polite,
and Fine arts’. This is a neat summary of an old
dichotomy in Western thought running back at least
to Plato and structured around the mental/manual

379
labour couplet.55 Dumsday would like to have
included photography in the Liberal Arts, but he
knew that painting depended on the ‘mind’s eye’
and photography
on the ‘bodily eye’. Where painting was an ideal art,
photography was a material one.56 On the one side
was the mind and the imagination and on the other
the material body. The distinctions between ‘noble’,
‘worthy’ and ‘cultivated’ mental work and vulgar
labour – between the ‘mind’ and the ‘hand’ or ‘body’
– structured thinking on art and work from the
ancients through the Renaissance and Reynolds up
until the nineteenth century and beyond. It is
interesting that shoes play such a profound role in
this debate.
You will remember that Stillman compared
photographs as records to the work of the
shoeblack. Jacques Rancière has constructed an
account of art, knowledge and work in which the
lowly shoemaker plays a prominent figural role.
This is not the place to discuss Rancière’s
anti-foundational philosophy of equality and its
relation to Marxism; there are overlaps, but the
difference is marked and the perspectives are not
easily reconciled. Here, I am concerned with the
way that he has revealed the shoemaker as a
structuring point for orders of knowledge in
philosophy and sociology from the ancient Greeks to
our own time. High-flown language, the language of
experts, has often been produced by allocating the
shoemaker a fixed place outside thought; think of
Pliny the Elder’s tale of the ignorant shoemaker
who dared to criticize details in a painting by
Apelles and was told that he should ‘stick to his last’
– a phrase still used in English for someone who
speaks of things beyond their competence.

380
According to Rancière, the rule of anti-egalitarian
thought turns on the distribution of roles or places;
artisans are expected to stick to their task and know
their place. At the same time, the shoemaker poets
of early nineteenth-century France, in refusing to
accept their place in the social hierarchy and
aspiring to write poetry or philosophy, confounded
the allotted positions of class.57 It is in this mixing
of roles or crossing of lines that Rancière locates
equality. His argument need not be confined to his
French examples. Looking back from 1880, Thomas
Frost recalled spending time with Jem Blackaby ‘in
the shoemaker’s garret, talking by turns of politics
and poetry’.58 These two Chartist cobblers made no
distinction between politics and poetry; it was the
elision that made them who they were, enacting a
double dislocation from the worker’s world that was
simultaneously a claim to social transformation. In
Street Life in London, the shoeblack, even lower
than shoemakers, stands for a form of work that
encapsulates the social division of mental and
manual labour and positions photography with the
latter.
A critical examination of the photographic writing
of the period reveals that art and labour are
mutually exclusive categories, and yet they depend
on each other for their values and associations. The
concept of the artist as a free subject rests on the
ideology of the worker as a servile copyist: the
worker is a man, or woman, without a mind who
must work because he or she is not free to
determine their own destiny. The worker in
bourgeois ideology is narrow, constrained and
lacking in imagination. The claims that begin to be
made in the 1860s for the photographers as artistic

381
subjects inscribed a contradiction at the heart of
the practice. The veracity of the
photograph – its intellectual force – depended upon
its being ascribed the attributes of mechanical
labour. This conception of photography established
a hierarchy of the forms of work with the artist at
its apex. In the contrast of mechanical and
intellectual labour – of vulgar photographs and
elevated art – a dialectical relation was set in train.
The mechanical character of the photograph
emancipated the artist in a way the traditional
historians of art could not imagine, since it occupied
the structural position of manual, rather than
intellectual, labour. In doing so, photographers
found themselves playing the role of
under-labourer, or maid servants, or slave, to the
artist, who had been cast as the subject who was at
the furthest remove from the world of work. This
relation could be mobilized internally and
externally. Internally, it demarcated photographic
pictures from photographic documents; externally,
it separated photography from true art. Professional
photographers needed the language of art – often in
a full academic idiom – in order to assert their own
subjective presence in the face of the contaminating
apparatus.59 At the other pole of this dialectic stood
the document – a subjectless and immediate form.
To make pictures with a machine was tolerable –
important even – only so long as no one claimed
these images were art works. The moment that
claim was made, then both the truth content of the
document and the work of a free and liberal subject
were called into question. The field of debate was
fluid, but the practice we know as photography is
made from the fragments produced in this collision
of worlds.

382
Stillman was smart. He knew that that photography
did not slot simply into the available conceptions.
He wrote: ‘When photography condescends to
flatter and be agreeable, and tries to make things
prettier than they are, it is of no importance what it
does, it is damned as photography and fallacious as
art.’ This is not so far from Baudelaire’s view.60 It
might seem that he advocated that modernist old
chestnut a ‘new form of communication’; after all,
he did say that ‘every guild must define its own
qualifications’. The real point is that he located
photography on the wrong side of a divide.
Photography was a useful art, as well as industrial,
but it most definitely is not an art of design, but of
record. Just to give one last telling citation from this
important paper, he said:

I mean that photography is an art-science, and has nothing to do

with anything but truth and the best way to tell it; and that it is,
therefore, the antipodes of art, as science is of poetry, just the
other pole of representation – the essential elements in one being
imagination and the expression of artistic individuality; and of the
other, the absolute physical fact.61

This is about as clear as statement as could be

imagined of what Lukács in History and Class
Consciousness called the ‘antinomies of bourgeois
thought’, or what Allan Sekula, following Lukács,
described as the ‘chattering ghosts’ of bourgeois art
and bourgeois
science that shape what we might call
photography’s hauntology.62 Photographers needed
this dirempt practice, but they did not want to
admit to it or talk about it, certainly not with this
kind of directness. They preferred to shuffle
between poles, covering themselves with the lustre
of art while deploying the mechanical guarantee.

383
For his lucidity, Stillman drew their ire. The editor
of the Photographic News responded, stating that
Stillman ‘utterly erred’ and referring to his
‘pernicious error’ and his ‘cardinal error’.63
The debate went on and on, circling the same basic
distinctions and antimonies.64 Stillman shifted his
terms somewhat, focusing on hand work, but his
argument remained basically the same.
Photography is ‘an art’ or an ‘art-science’. The
editor intervened insisting that photographers had
refuted all of Stillman’s arguments, and yet again
Stillman replied.65 The arguments continued,
without anything substantive added to the basic
distinctions. In fact, these same oppositions have
been repeated throughout much of the history of
photography. The year 1888 – in which George
Eastman launched his Kodak – represents one
moment in a process of pathological repetition. It
was the development of the second wave of amateur
photography that once more injected a tone of
ressentiment into the photographic press. For one
thing, the rise of the amateur was already well
under way when Eastman made his contribution.
For example, John Taylor has examined the
vituperative tone that permeates the writing of P.
H. Emerson and that is fixed on the new amateurs
and day-trippers.66 In the debates of the 1880s and
1890s, the amateur appeared to transport the
characteristics of the vulgar and the mass into
photography itself. The figure of the amateur
opened old wounds, and again suggested the
photographer’s proximity to the world of work. This
argument is equally applicable to the very different
aesthetic tendency of Pictorialism, which came to
the fore in the closing decades of the nineteenth
century. All that gum-smudging offered another

384
petty-bourgeois utopia of art. Take, for instance, the
category of ‘fuzziness’ that appeared in an
exchange in the British Journal of Photography in
1897. J. H. Baldock, defending the concept of sharp
pictures, wrote: ‘Fuzziness, I take it, is one of the
attempts to make a photographic picture rival a
hand painted-picture. As well might a player on the
barrel-organ try to emulate Paganini on his
violin!’67 While C. Moss in the same debate argued:

It may be, and is, argued that the camera is a machine and
therefore cannot give anything but mechanical results, and,
consequently, photography is doomed to stand for ever outside
that circle of art to which painting and drawing are admitted.68

The only thing that it seems appropriate to say at

this point is déjà vu.

385
 2 John Thompson, ‘The Wall
Worker’, from Street Life in
London, 1877/8. Library of the
London School of Economics
and Political Science, R(SR)/
1146.

Despite the many changes that have taken place,

the splits between elevated and base, esteemed art
and vulgar document, artist and worker, remain the
ordering conditions of photographic knowledge. But
these days the allotropic form and its allegorical
shadow are simply assumed rather than openly
debated. The terms of this structure run through
the avant-garde, the new social landscape and
conceptual art, all the way to the practices that

386
figure in Michael Fried’s book and considerations of
tableau photography. But I want to conclude by
returning to Thompson one last time, because I
think there is a fragment of another vision in his
book, or at least a point for allegorisis that opens up
a different image of the worker, and it is one that if
taken seriously might necessarily reconfigure our
account of the photography. Street Life in London
includes a photograph of a cobbler and two images
of bootblacks. ‘The Wall Worker’ depicts three men
outside a pub with one figure standing and two
seated [2]. The man on the right, who has neither
pipe nor tankard, is ‘Cannon’, who was once a
prosperous shoemaker employing as many as thirty
workers and specializing in children’s morocco
boots. Mortgaged and losing skilled men to
‘sodgerin’ during the Crimean War, Cannon ended
up in the workhouse. From there he became a
crossing sweep and then a wall worker – hanging
cheap advertising on a fence or wall. Here he is
idle, a cobbler out of place. Not that we should
romanticize, Cannon attributed the decline of the
English tradesman to the ‘pride of the working
classes’ (trade unions and strikes) and fashion. He
is one of the Thompson’s figures who have come
down in life, and his presence suggests that viewers
in their drawing rooms might not be entirely secure.
There is not much more to this example than that,
and I have included it mainly for the sake of
completing a little series.

387
 3 John Thompson, ‘The
Independent Shoe-Black’, from
Street Life in London, 1877/8.
Library of the London School
of Economics and Political
Science, R(SR)/1146.

‘The Independent Shoe-Black’ concludes the volume

[3]. Here a boy cleans a gentleman’s boot while four
men look on; it is likely that their attention has been
caught by the presence of the photographer and
journalist. Smith’s narrative concentrates on the
conflicts between those competing in the trade;
between men and boys; the able bodied and the
disabled: ‘useful, though perhaps unfair, patronage
is accorded to the members of the Boot-black
Brigades’ – licensed bootblacks. The story told here
is of an independent black and the hardships of the
trade. This is an odd choice of subject for a book or

388
an image addressed to the respectable, because it
was those organized in the Shoe-Black Brigade,
with their scarlet jacket, peaked cap and identifying
number, who suggested paternalistic intervention
against ‘demoralization’.69
The blacks in the Brigade were licensed by the
police, moralized and tolerated by the authorities,
whereas an unlicensed black like the one depicted
suggested a different kind of licence: the unordered
life of the pauper or the ‘residuum’, usually
perceived as heathen, unruly and criminal.70
Perhaps the boy is meant to present the viewer with
all those associations called up by demoralized
labour. Except Smith’s text openly identifies with
this figure and his independence; in contrast, he
suggests the Brigades and the process of licensing
shoeblacks has ‘decidedly trespassed on the
freedom of the street industries’.71 Gareth Stedman
Jones has argued that the primary ideological lens
through which pauperism was perceived in the
1870s was that of ‘demoralization’, and he links this
directly to the agenda of a professional middle class
in the making. Moralizing intervention was to be
their task and their guarantee of authority. This
photograph of a young shoeblack and accompanying
text do not fit that ideological purview. Whatever its
problems, Street Life in London is closer to life on
the street than professional moralizers.

389
4 John Thompson, ‘Jacobus Parker, Dramatic
Reader, Shoe-Black, and Peddler’, from Street Life
in London, 1877/8. Library of the London School of
Economics and Political Science, R(SR)/1146.

Another image [4] provides, if anything, a stronger

interruption, once more pointing to Thompson’s
uncertainty, but also refusing the story set out by
Stillman and
his critics. ‘Jacobus Parker, Dramatic Reader,
Shoe-Black, and Peddler’ is represented standing at
his accustomed “pitch”’.72 Seventy years old, half
blind and pro-temperance, Parker had been a
vellum binder in the Treasury Office, while working
in his spare time in the theatre and improving
himself. After an illness that cost him the sight of
one eye, he left his place, failed in business with his
son as an independent bookbinder and found
himself in the Lambeth Workhouse. Parker

390
discharged himself from this Bastille and made a
living as a dramatic reader performing
Shakespeare, Goldsmith, Burns and others on the
streets. By the time Thompson found him, he was
poor – living in a ‘garret’ – and combining blacking
shoes with performing poetry. The presence of
Parker in Street Life in London gives the lie alike to
ancient philosophers and Royal Academicians, to
bourgeois journalists and gentlemen photographers.
The poor man may be compelled to graft and grind,
but his place is not fixed or immutable. The division
of mental and manual labour that shaped the
categories of photography might correspond to
social division, but this was a historical and not a
natural process. Parker too would have liked to put
behind him bootblacking and grovelling at the feet
of rich men; his great dream was to perform a
‘Shakespearian evening’. We do not know if it ever
came to pass, but we do know that boot blacks,
even lower down the social scale than cobblers,
might also contemplate poetry while cleaning shoes.
How then would we need to think of photography?
1 A version of this essay was presented in 2010 at the conference ‘Why
Photography Matters as Document as Never Before’, Rovira i Virgili
University, Tarragona, Spain. That paper appeared in Catalan in Jorge
Ribalta (ed.), Per què la fotografia és avui més important com
document que mai (The Private Space Books: Barcelona, 2012), pp.
73–103. I would like to thank Jorge Ribalta, who invited me to speak
and edited the conference proceedings.

2 John Thompson, Victorian Street Life in Historic Photographs (Dover

Publications: New York, 1994).

3 Molly Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums (Yale University Press: New Haven
and London, 1992). See also Nesbit, ‘The Use of History’, Art in
America, vol. 74 (February 1986), pp. 72–83; Nesbit, ‘Photography, Art
and Modernity (1910–30)’, in Jean-Claude Lemagny and André Rouillé
(eds.), A History of Photography: Social and Cultural Perspectives
(Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1987), pp. 103–23. For a

391
 detailed account of Nesbit’s argument, see my review ‘A Walk on the
Wild Side: Atget’s Modernism’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 16, no. 2 (1993),
pp. 86–90.

4 Ibid., p. 16.

5 Foucault has recently reappeared as a different kind of thinker.

6 John Tagg, ‘A Means of Surveillance: The Photograph as Evidence in

Law’, in The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and
Histories (Macmillan: Basingstoke, 1988), pp. 66–116; David Green,
‘On Foucault: Disciplinary Power and Photography’, Camerawork, no.
32 (1985), pp. 6–9; ‘A Map of Depravity’, Ten.8, no. 18 (1985), pp.
37–43.

7 Tagg, ‘A Means of Surveillance’, op. cit., p. 92.

8 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

(Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 25.

9 John Thompson in Vicki Goldberg (ed.), Photography in Print (University

of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 1981), p. 164.

10 Tagg, The Burden of Representation, op. cit., p. 6.

11 ‘Christmas Books’, The Graphic, 1 December 1877.

12 ‘Illustrated Books’, Daily News, 26 November 1877.

13 Foucault’s late lectures addressing ‘biopower’, ‘biopolitics’ and

‘subjectivization’ provide a different perspective and one of more
interest to contemporary Marxists. See, for example, Michel Foucault,
Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France
(Picador: New York, 2007); The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the
Collège de France (Picador: New York, 2008). Foucault’s late lectures
and writing made an impact on a range of radical thinkers from Daniel
Bensaid to Toni Negri.

14 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Vintage:

London, 1993); Geoffrey Batchen (ed.), Photography Degree Zero:
Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (MIT Press:
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2011); Michael Fried, Why Photography
Matters as Art as Never Before (Yale University Press: New Haven and
London, 2008). This is to reduce neither Barthes nor the debates on his
work to this symptom. It is also fair to note that Fried has his own
long-standing agenda.

392
15 Mike Weaver, ‘Henry Fox Talbot: Conversation Pieces’, in Mike
Weaver (ed.), British Photography in the Nineteenth Century: The Fine
Art Tradition (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1989), pp.
11–23; Weaver, ‘Diogenes with a Camera’, in Weaver (ed.), Henry Fox
Talbot: Selected Texts
and Bibliography (GK Hall: Boston, Massachusetts, 1993), pp. 1–25;
Helmut Gernsheim, Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and
Photographic Work (Aperture: New York, 1975).

16 Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat From Class or a New ‘True’

Socialism (Verso: London, 1986).

17 Art history as a discipline seems impervious to the current renaissance

in Marxist theory. It is as if art historians did not have to bother
themselves with Marxism once Althusser exited the scene.

18 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor: Cycolpaedia of

the Condition and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Those That
Cannot Work and Those That Will Not Work, 4 vols (Dover
Publications: New York, 1968).

19 Adolphe Smith, in Thompson, Street Life in London (1877); republished

as Victorian Street Life in Historic Photographs, op. cit., p. 31.

20 Ibid., p. 33.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid., p. 31.

23 David Jacobs, ‘Thompson, John (1837–1921)’, John Hannavy (ed.),

Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, vol. 2 (Routledge:
New York, 2008), pp. 1387–8.

24 Thompson published The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China and China

(1875) and Illustrations of China and its People (1873–4). All are
available, with different titles, in modern reprints.

25 For the outsider’s view in photography, see Steve Edwards, ‘Disastrous

Documents’, Ten.8, no. 15 (1984), pp. 12–23.

26 Audrey Linkman, The Victorians: Photographic Portraits (Tauris Parke

Books: London and New York, 1993).

27 Ibid., p. 148.

28 In fact, I think the current mood significantly misrecognizes the relation

to photography in some of the best works of conceptual art and what

393
 followed. See John Roberts, The Impossible Document: Photography
and Conceptual Art in Britain 1966–1976 (Camerawords: London,
1997); Blake Stimson, The Pivot of the World: Photography and its
Nation (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2006); and Steve
Edwards, Martha Rosler: The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive
systems (Afterall: London, 2012).

29 Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship

Between Classes in Victorian Society (Penguin: Harmondsworth,
1976).

30 For this debate, see Steve Edwards, The Making of English

Photography, Allegories (Penn State University Press: University Park,
Pennsylvania, 2006). Perhaps this is the place to acknowledge my debt
to Andrew Hemingway’s work on British art and aesthetics: Andrew
Hemingway, Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture in Early
Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge
and New York, 1992). I should also mention John Barrell’s The Body of
the Public: The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt
(Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1986). Of course, that
makes it necessary to point to Hemingway once more: Andrew
Hemingway, ‘The Political Theory of Painting Without the Politics’, Art
History, vol. 10, no. 3 (September 1987), pp. 381–95.

31 Editorial, ‘An Art Critic on Photography in Relation to Art’, Photographic

News, 15 March 1872, p. 122.

32 Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital (New Left Books:
London, 1970); Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production
(Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1978). For a version of this
argument in art history, see T. J. Clark, ‘On the Social History of Art’,
Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution
(Thames & Hudson: London, 1974); On ‘structure of feeling’, see
Raymond Williams, The Country and City (Paladin: St Albans, 1975);
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press:
Oxford, 1977).

33 For the heightening of metaphorization, see Franco Moretti, Atlas of the

European Novel 1800–1900 (Verso: London, 1998).

34 William James Stillman, The Autobiography of a Journalist (Houghton,

Mifflin and Company: Boston and New York, 1901); Elizabeth
Lindquist-Cock, ‘Stillman, Ruskin and Rossetti: The Struggle Between
Nature and Art’, History of Photography, vol. 3, no. 1 (1979), pp. 1–14;
Barbara Rotundo, ‘William James Stillman’, in Catalogue of the William
James Stillman Collection (Friends of the Union College Library:

394
 Schenectady, 1974), pp. xi–xxi; Deborah Harlan, William James
Stillman: Images in the Archives of the Society for the Promotion of
Hellenic Studies (Council of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic
Studies and Council of the British School at Athens: London, 2009).

35 William James Stillman, The Acropolis of Athens: Illustrated

Picturesquely and Architecturally in Photography (F. S. Ellis: London,
1870).

36 His two-volume autobiography contains the odd line on his

photographic activities, but there is not a word about the controversy.
He mentions having to leave his photographic apparatus when fleeing
down a mountain in Crete; he notes that when his first wife was dying in
Crete, he himself ‘was prostrated mentally and physically, and unfit for
anything but my photography’; he also refers to the publication of his
Athens photographs, which he said ‘cleared for me about $1000’.
William James Stillman, The Autobiography of a Journalist, op. cit., vol.
2, pp. 62, 69, 76. This is not unusual; these disputes mattered for
photographers, but were incidental matters for those bourgeois
professionals who became embroiled in them. See, for example, the
autobiography of Frederick Pollock, Personal Remembrances of Sir
Frederick Pollock, Second Baronet, 2 vols (Macmillan: London, 1887).
For many years, Pollock was president of the Photographic Society, but
this activity does not figure in his large book.

37 Edwards, The Making of English Photography, Allegories, op. cit.

38 An Indignant Photographer, ‘The Art Controversy’, Photographic News,

8 March 1872, p. 117.

39 William James Stillman, Year-book of the Photographic News, 1872, p.

51.

40 Ibid.

41 H. P. Robinson, Pictorial Effect in Photography, Being Hints on

Composition and Chiaroscuro for Photographers (Piper & Carter:
London, 1869).

42 Theophilus Thiddlemitch, ‘Recent Opinions of Photographic Art’,

Photographic News, 9 February 1872, p. 68.

43 Ibid. It is notable that Peter Le Neve-Foster was expressing similar

views about Robinson’s work: ‘clouds gone mad’. For this, Thiddlemitch
sanctioned and forgave him, but not Stillman. See also W. T. Bovey,
‘Mr, Foster and his Critics’, Photographic News, 16 February 1872, p.
78.

395
44 William James Stillman, ‘The Art Question’, Photographic News, 16
February 1872, p. 80.

45 Ibid. According to Stillman, photography ‘may substitute an agreeable

and well composed sky for a bad one, a good corner of a hedge row for
a bad one – may even, by judicious turning a head this way or that,
hide the worse and show the better view of a face; but it still remains
what the lens sees it and the camera records. With all your thinking you
cannot make a hair that is white on the screen come black on the film.’

46 H. P. Robinson and N. K. Cherrill, ‘The Art Question: In Reply to Mr

Stillman’, Photographic News, 23 February 1872, p. 94. They added a
note that In the Gloaming was the least appropriate of their pictures for
the kind of error Stillman thought he had found, implying it was not a
combination print.

47 Stillman, ‘The Art Question’, op. cit., p. 105. Spinoza earned his living
as a glass polisher, and if I were really clever I would work that in here.

48 Ibid., p. 106. He continued: ‘I have seen a machine, in fact in which a

person might be laced, and accurate measurements be taken, at
hundreds of points, of his figure, and then a mass of clay substituted for
him, the points closed in again, left his figure completely indicated in
the clay, so that only the intervals between the points needed to be cut
away to make the entire statue, accurately roughed out. Will my
opponents admit that in either of these cases the operator is an artist?
If not, in what sense is the photographer as such, an artist; and if a
good photographer is not necessarily an artist, how can photography
be asserted to be Art?’

49 See Edwards, The Making of English Photography, Allegories, op. cit.

50 Stillman, ‘The Art Question’, op. cit., p. 106.

51 Stillman, Year-book of the Photographic News, op. cit., p. 51; Robinson

and Cherrill, ‘The Art Question: In Reply to Mr Stillman’, op. cit., p. 117.
Robinson and Cherrill responded by claiming that ‘Mr. Stillman runs
into the fatal error of separating the man and the means. We have
never claimed for photography that it could do pictures by turning a
handle.’ The same point is made by another critic who noted the ‘ever
recurring controversy’ about art and photography ‘consists in
confounding the unintelligent means with the intelligent agent and in
measuring the result by the method.’ Anonymous, ‘An Art Critic on
Photography in its Relation to Art’, Photographic News, 15 March 1872,
p. 122.

52 Bovey, ‘The Art Question’, op. cit., p. 127.

396
53 Ibid.

54 William James Stillman, Letter, Photographic News, 15 March 1872, p.

129.

55 For a consideration of these distinctions in the contemporary literature

of photography, see Antoine Claudet, ‘The Art Claims of Photography’,
Photographic News, 20 September 1861, p. 447. For the extended
ramifications, Edwards, The Making of English Photography, Allegories,
op. cit. Also of interest is Joel Snyder, ‘Res Ipsa Loquitur’, in Lorraine
Daston (ed.), Things that Talk: Object Lessons From Art and Science
(MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004), pp. 195–221. For the
wider debate, see Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (1867) (Lawrence &
Wishart: London, 1954); Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual
Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (Macmillan: London, 1978).

56 Alfred Dumsday, ‘The Division in the Arts’, Photographic News, 28

March 1872, p. 155.

57 Jacques Rancière, The Nights of Labour: The Worker’s Dream in

Nineteenth-Century France (Temple University Press: Philadelphia,
1989); Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor (Duke
University Press: Durham, North Carolina, 2004). For the history of
militant shoemakers, see also Eric Hobsbawm and Joan Scott, ‘Political
Shoemakers’, in Hobsbawm, Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the
History of Labour (Weidenfeld & Nicholson: London, 1984), pp. 103–30.

58 Mike Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History

(Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2009), p. 6.

59 Edwards, The Making of English Photography, Allegories, op. cit.

60 Charles Baudelaire, ‘On photography’ [1859], in Beaumont Newhall

(ed.), Photography: Essays and Images (Secker & Warburg: New York,
1981), pp. 112–13.

61 William James Stillman, Letter, Photographic News, 15 March 1872, p.

129.

62 ‘The antimonies of bourgeois thought’ is the title of Section II of

Lukács’s great essay ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the
Proletariat’, in Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness:
Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Merlin Press:
London, 1971). This idea was applied to photography by Allan Sekula:
Allan Sekula, Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works
1973–1983 (The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design:
Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1984), p. xv. For ‘hauntology’, see Jacques

397
 Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International (Routledge: London, 1994). Much
of the subsequent debate is collected in Michael Sprinker (ed.), Ghostly
Demarcations: A Symposium On Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx
(Verso: London and New York, 1999). For a different version of Gothic
Marxism, see David McNally, Monsters of the Market: Zombies,
Vampires and Global Capitalism (Brill: Leiden, 2011).

63 Editorial, ‘Is Photography a Fine Art?’, Photographic News, 28 March

1872, p. 145. 64 Stillman reiterated: ‘The proper function of
photography is the recording of truth – facts, if you please – and that
any work which has been mended for the sake of pictorial
modifications, or to make it resemble a work of design (as I use the
word), has lost just so much of its value as a photograph – that, in fact,
so-called art-photography (i.e., employing photography to produce
artificial combinations) is not increasing, but diminishing the value of
the result, and is, in fact, really an obstacle to the perfecting of the true
art of photography, just as retouching is a cause of toleration of much
bad work, and of much photographic shortcoming.’ William James
Stillman, ‘The Art Question: An Explanatory Rejoinder’, Photographic
News, 5 April 1872, p. 165.

65 Editorial, ‘Is Photography a Fine Art?’, op. cit., pp. 169–71; W. J.

Stillman, ‘The Art Question’, Photographic News, 12 April 1872, p. 179.

66 John Taylor, ‘Landscape and Leisure’, in Neil McWilliam and Veronica

Sekules (eds.), Life and Landscape: P. H. Emerson – Art and
Photography in East Anglia, 1885–1900 (Sainsbury Centre for the
Visual Arts: Norwich, 1986), pp. 73–82; ‘The Alphabetic Universe:
Photography and the Picturesque Landscape’, in Simon Pugh (ed.),
Reading Landscape: Country – City – Capital (Manchester University
Press: Manchester, 1990), pp. 177–96; ‘Travellers, Tourists and
Trippers on the Norfolk Broads’, A Dream of England: Landscape,
Photography and the Tourist’s Imagination (Manchester University
Press: Manchester, 1994), pp. 90–119.

67 ‘Sharp Versus Fuzzy Photographs’, British Journal of Photography, 31

December 1897, pp. 840–2. It should be noted that the categories of
‘fuzziness’ and ‘woolliness’ are to be found in the middle of the 1860s.

68 Ibid.

69 For a discussion of the shoeblack and the Brigades in paintings of the

period, see Nancy Rose Marshall, City of Gold and Mud: Painting
Victorian London (Yale University Press: New Haven and London,
2012), pp. 169–77.

398
70 Jones, Outcast London, op. cit.

71 Thompson, Street Life in London, op. cit., p. 131.

72 Ibid., p. 47.

399
CALAVERAS AND COMMODITY
FETISHISM
THE UNHALLOWED SUPERNATURAL IN THE
WORK OF JOSÉ GUADALUPE POSADA1
Tom Gretton

T his essay discusses some of the printed pictures

of devils and animated skeletons that José
Guadalupe Posada made in Mexico City from his
arrival there in 1888 through into the 1910s; he
died early in 1913.2 Posada produced thousands of
printing blocks on a huge range of topics, both
variously secular and variously religious for
illustrated newspapers, pamphlets and books.
However, his major claim to posthumous fame
derives from the illustrations he made for Antonio
Vanegas Arroyo, a publisher of cheap newspapers,
chapbooks and single-sheet ‘street literature’.3 This
is an exceptional body of work, not least because it
has survived in quantities unusual for cheap
mass-produced printed material, which almost
always suffers from the law ‘the more there were,
the fewer there are’. Vanegas Arroyo kept the
blocks Posada made for him, and used them for
different subjects, in different layouts, with
different texts, for years and indeed decades
afterwards.
One must assume that most of Posada’s blocks were
made on commission, that Vanegas Arroyo asked

400
Posada, whose business was located a few city
blocks away, for a treatment of a specified subject
in an image of a certain size. So although it may be
accurate to call the images ‘Posadas’, it is not
helpful to give that name to the objects in which the
pictures were printed.4 On any Vanegas Arroyo
sheet or pamphlet, several cultural agents (one or
more print-makers, one or more writers, the people
who did the typesetting and the page-making as
well as the press-men) have been at work. So I will
call these objects Posada/Vanegas Arroyo sheets, or
PVA sheets for short.
Posada’s work has been celebrated now for ninety
years, in Mexico, in the United States, in South
America, and in Europe both east and west, via a
flow of articles, books and exhibitions and the
opening of museums in Mexico (Aguascalientes,
1972) and museum and library collections in the US
and elsewhere. It has achieved this status through a
combination of factors, including the need to
construct a ‘national-popular’ culture in Mexico in
the aftermath of the Revolution, the requirement of
modernist art practice to identify and find value in
its ‘primitive’ and ancestral other, and the
availability of this body of work as a screen on
which to project ideas of ‘the political artist’, ‘the
people’ and ‘Mexican identity’.5 Alongside these
accidental influences on Posada’s critical fortune,
there is the fact that his output as printed in the
PVA sheets
has a striking materiality, a complex position in the
play of cultural influences in modernizing Mexico
City, and a considerable strength of design and
draughtsmanship. These qualities enable his output
to sustain the cultural work that for the best part of
a century it has been asked to undertake.6

401
This essay frames Posada’s printed pictures in a
different way. They can be understood to have
provided a set of bleak metaphors for and
commentaries on the realities of city life for
subaltern groups under modern capitalism. They
can also be understood to have provided
representational and behavioural ‘weapons of the
weak’.7 At the same time, they provided, for a
significant section of the population of Mexico City
and its hinterland, an ironizing and self-devaluing
induction into a commodified visual and
printed-news culture. These pictures reward such
interpretations, and respond to such hypotheses, as
least as richly as they have until now rewarded
interpretations that have cast them as ‘popular’ in
the drama of the myth of origin of the Mexican
nation.8
Of the huge and various set of pictures made by
Posada for Vanegas Arroyo, one group has had an
especially splendid critical fortune: the calaveras
(skulls) and those ejemplo (example) images that
show devils attending the devastation of families.
For this body of images, I will construct an
argument that links what is represented with the
commodity-form functions of these sheets, in
particular their embodiment of ‘cheapness’ and
their negation of the benefits that print-culture
pedagogy was understood to bring to those
interpellated by it. That is to say, I offer an analysis
that shows that the power of the PVA sheet lies, at
least partly, in its synthesis of iconography, visual
form, genre and commodity-form. I interpret these
synthesized aspects of the sheets in the context of
the incomplete, imperfect and contested processes
of class formation in Mexico City in the generation
before the Revolution.9 In this frame, I take their

402
iconography to be a representation of migration to
cities as the work of the devil, and of life in the city
as a purgatory at best. I argue that the primary
audience for these prints was urban, literate and
with occasional spare cash for recreational reading.
This audience was not drawn from the pelados and
léperos, whose presence on the street evoked
bourgeois disgust and fear (and who are well
represented, often with that spin, in Posada’s
oeuvre), but from another group, marginalized in
ways and by processes different from those that
pauperized the pelados.10 For the consumers of PVA
sheets, whose integration into the urban
socioeconomy had not been completely disastrous,
the sheets produced and reproduced both a
material inclusion in and a cultural exclusion from a
commodified, modern urban existence – that is, a
subaltern position. This chapter does not deal with
the question of whether the role of these sheets was
causal or symptomatic; but for me, the production
and reproduction of a relationship to the means of
consumption within a given mode of consumption
has a claim to be thought of as causal.
My title is adapted from that of a book by Michael
Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in
South America.11 Taussig, at that time a Marxist
anthropologist, investigated
the history, and the contemporary significance, of
devil-worship in the tin mines of Bolivia and on the
sugar plantations of western Colombia.12 ‘Devil’
here is a collective noun: in this context Catholicism
has to some extent managed to simplify the spirit
world into two opposing cartels, one of good and
one of evil, but it has failed to convert those cartels
into stable monopolies. Taussig found that both in
mining communities and among manual workers on

403
sugar plantations an intensification of capitalist
exploitation was accompanied by an intensification
of forms of devil-cult. The mine, and the ore, have a
‘devil’ guardian, and groups of workers maintain
altars to him within the mines. This spirit owner of
the mountain has evolved into a devil, a malevolent
power, since the Spanish arrived. In contrast, the
spirit owners of agricultural resources, which are
much less turned to the market, remain, as the
sources suggest they were in the pre-Columbian
world, supernatural powers with the capacity to
help or hurt us, a tendency to do both
indiscriminately, and an unstable willingness to be
drawn into relations of reciprocal benefit. Individual
cane-cutters are said by their colleagues to make
bargains with what they characterize as the devil to
increase their productivity, and thus their income.
Such diabolical bonuses are fated to be sterile: the
worker concerned will spend the gains on drink or
on similar pleasures, not on accumulation. Taussig
understands these phenomena as being produced
by social groups whose world view is based on
analogical relationships rather than causal ones
(the barter relationship, the exchange of different
but similar use-values, being one of analogy) as they
are forced to make adjustments to a world in which
use-values are replaced through the capitalist
market by exchange-value, by the fetish forms that
are money and the commodity.
Taussig’s ambitions for his data are enormous and
focus on the desire to make us see the workings of
the market not as natural but as a social construct,
one that to these outsiders looks to be sterile,
diabolical, unnatural. He argues that participation
in ‘devilish’ activities gives those involved a set of
resources through which to resist smooth insertion

404
into the market; for him, devil beliefs show that the
culture of these neophyte proletarian miners is in
an important respect antagonistic to the process of
commodity formation. In mediating the oppositions
intrinsic to these acculturations to capitalism, such
beliefs may even stimulate the political action
necessary to thwart or transcend it.13 Thus, for
Taussig, devil-cults are not some picturesque
outcrop of ‘primitive’ or ‘traditional’ beliefs that
have till now withstood the erosions of time and
‘reality’, but a cultural innovation, a new way of
dealing with new circumstances, though one that
gains much of its power by making a plausible claim
to being old. For Taussig, devil beliefs are
antithetical rather than antecedent.
I want to use Taussig’s schema to provide an
analogical understanding of the processes of which
I take Posada’s devils and skeletons for the PVA
sheets to be both constitutive and symptomatic.
Antonio Vanegas Arroyo printed and published
many different sorts of cheap commodities: a
non-periodical newspaper called the Gazetta
Callejera, as well as several actual periodicals;
images of Christ, the Virgin and saints to sell on the
street or outside shrines; song-sheets (including
corridos) and song-books to sell in the market and
the drink-shops; chapbooks with household hints
and recipes; conjuring tricks and spells; short
stories and playlets for children or for puppet
booths; broadsheets on the occasion of disasters,
crimes and executions; fake-news sheets that mixed
the lurid with the moralizing; and sheets for the Dia
de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead (All Souls’
Day), 2nd November, the morrow of All Saints’ Day.
All of Vanegas Arroyo’s stock-in-trade was
illustrated, the pamphlets and chapbooks having at

405
least a cover picture. His business in Mexico City
had been going for perhaps eight years by the time
Posada started to provide prints for him,
supplementing and then probably supplanting the
work produced by Manuel Manilla. With Posada’s
arrival, the pictures became bigger in area and
visual impact and more inventive than they had e
arlier been.
Pictures of devils visiting this world, or views from a
world just like this one but populated by skeletons,
figure largely. Many of the moralizing fake news
stories (collectively ejemplos) are illustrated with
devils urging on invented criminals and sinners to
their violent, and almost always intrafamilial, sins
and crimes. Devils like monkeys urge on daughters
to kill their parents, sons to kill their fathers, or
fathers their children; devils like bat-lizards prompt
men to immolate and then snack on their whole
family; while the visitors from the underworld wait
for their own takeaway. Devils deliver to the mouth
of hell a daughter who had told lies about her
parents. And for the Day of the Dead, Vanegas
Arroyo produced a range of sheets, which he called
calaveras, on which skeletons do things that belong
to this world.
Critics and historians have tended to deal with this
material as though it were in one way or another
‘traditional’. It has been examined as a continuation
of the European danse macabre convention, in
which skeletons haul off to judgment men and
women who represent the range of social stations,
an iconographic tradition revisited in
late-eighteenth-century Mexico.14 Perhaps more
usually, it has been seen as a reincarnation of Aztec
death-cults, a symptom of an essential aspect of an

406
essential national character, of Mexico’s special
relationship with death.15 Of course, cultures do
have their longue durée, and it is very tempting to
interpret these devils and skeletal presences as
evidence of the survival of an Aztec imaginary
through four centuries of Spanish cultural
imperialism, another example of the syncretic
relations between Hispanic and pre-conquest belief
systems that is taken to characterize Mexican
culture. Despite the fact that they tell us nothing
particular about the nature and direction of cultural
change in Mexico in the generation before the
Revolution and fail to address the particularities of
Posada’s oeuvre, such interpretations are so
comfortable that few have moved beyond them. It is
striking that few have tried to understand the
emergence of the calaveras and the devil ejemplos
in terms of the social pressures of nation-building,
class formation and induction into the
16
imperialist-capitalist world economy and culture.
Vanegas Arroyo developed a new commodity, and
for it Posada invented an imagery, a stock of
pictures to make it desirable. These sheets are not
only representations, they are also bits of an
innovative material practice. They are things for
sale, directly dependent for their substance, their
appearance and their market on the most recent
technological advances spawned by industrial
capitalism. PVA sheets were printed on wood-pulp
paper, new to Mexico and to the world in the
second half of the nineteenth century, and utterly
transforming the cost and supply of their raw
material. Vanegas Arroyo printed his merchandise
on modern rotary or treadle-platen presses. The
pictures that Posada supplied were cheap and
plentiful because he made inventive use of line

407
blocks, one of the new photomechanical processes
that, emanating from Vienna, Paris and New York
after 1870, were by the 1890s transforming
printmaking regimes in Calcutta as well as Mexico
City. The sheets were sold to and consumed by men
and women who had a choice of commodity in this
price range: a PVA sheet typically cost the same as
the government-sponsored El Imparcial, or as the
wide range of downmarket four-page penny-press
newspapers. Vanegas Arroyo distributed his prints
around the Federal District using the network of
newsboys that had developed with the growth of the
low-price newspaper press. So the PVA sheets were
new sorts of things: new in the manufacturing and
distribution techniques and resources which made
them possible; new in terms of the development of a
‘modern’ relationship between news and the
everyday; new as material objects that structured
and were structured by that broad evolution that we
call the commercialization of culture.
Antonio Vanegas Arroyo sold his single-sheet
products and his pamphlets to a market that is hard
to define: we do not know who bought PVA sheets
and have to work from internal and contextual
evidence. Internal evidence is harder to come by
than it is with newspapers: there are no
advertisements through which to correlate the
market, no letters to the editor. We are left with the
nature of the objects themselves, the limited range
and register of their texts, and whatever the style
and iconography of the images can tell us. We will
come back to these.
Contextual evidence must begin with the city.
Mexico City was both a boom town and a relatively
small one in the period. Its population had been

408
more or less static at between 150,000 and 200,000
from the middle of the seventeenth to the early
nineteenth centuries; from the 1850s to 1910 it
almost tripled.17 This growth depended on
immigration from the rest of Mexico, made up to a
large extent of more or less literate adults, many
from the country’s central states, rather than from
the arid ‘frontier’ north or the tropical and still
largely uncolonized south.18 Posada was typical of
an important strand of this immigration, a skilled
artisan-entrepreneur arriving from Aguascalientes
via Léon in his late thirties; Vanegas Arroyo was
also typical, coming from Puebla in his late
twenties. Mexico City’s economy was being shaped
by considerable foreign investment in waterworks,
public transport, power generation, and the
metropolitan retail
sector, and by the growth of a state with modern
ambitions, ideology and bureaucracy. The postal
and telephone system, the drainage and sewage
system, the tramway and railway system, the
booming newspaper industry, the growing police
force and swelling ministries all provided both
skilled and unskilled ‘working-class’ metropolitan
jobs that do not fit the archetype of the industrial
proletariat. There was also a diverse and adaptable
artisan and service-sector workforce.
Manufacturing was overwhelmingly in small
workshops, typically in premises open to the street
or the courtyard. Women worked as servants, in the
clothing industry, in the booming and mechanizing
tobacco industry and the few large cotton mills; but
in huge numbers they worked on or just off the
street, providing food and drink to a workforce, of
both sexes, that was still largely without the means
of preparing or storing food.

409
‘Working class’ will do as the name of this
metropolitan workforce, and of the market for the
PVA sheet, only if one recognizes how badly it fitted
the classic definitions of what at the end of the
nineteenth century the working class was supposed
to be – supposed not only by the leaders of the
Second International and their alarmed opponents
in national and municipal governments over the
developed and developing world, but by politically
aware men and women in every place where books
and newspapers were read. The idea of the
proletariat was paradigmatic: its relation to the
means of production within a specific mode of
production, its organizational forms, its cultural
ambitions, its critique of capitalism provided the
models and the yardsticks. In this context it is
significant that in Mexico City, where there seem to
have been fewer ‘worker peasants’ than in Moscow
or Saint Petersburg, the most developed
oppositional political movement among workers was
not socialist but anarchist.19 Politically aware
workers in Mexico, for the most part, did not want
to think of themselves precisely as members of an
organized working class struggling for the state.
But they, like the rest of this population sucked in
by the labour demands of modernization, needed to
distinguish themselves from agricultural workers,
both of the peasant and of the new agri-proletarian
sort.20
Life on the city street was one of the tools of this
double differentiation, a site of struggle both
between the forces of order (broadly experienced)
and the people who occupied the streets of the
metropolis, and between metropolitan ‘popular
culture’ and patterns of deference and solidarity
that had been adequate away from the city.

410
Baudelaire’s street, the boulevard, was a great river
that swept the observer along in its powerful
course, leaving him, as once had the River Jordan,
baptized into a modern state of grace. The
paradigmatic street in Porfirian Mexico City was
something more like a swamp: it teemed with
noxious life, it was dangerous if you did not know
your way about it, it was hard to extract yourself
from, and living in it made you unfit to enter
bourgeois spaces and places. In this context, it is
worth noting that one of the inescapable
characteristics of the PVA sheet is its hostility to
those who try to make the street a Baudelarian
site of spectacle.21 Not only gringo tourists but also
catrins, dandies who may be more or less hard up,
are represented in hostile ways and particularly
subject to a plebeian violence with which devils
have nothing to do.22 The PVA sheets are also very
frequently hostile to forms of transport that
prioritize the street as a communications network
rather than as a cultural space. Vanegas Arroyo
used the play on the word slaughter, matar, to
produce sheets featuring a motorista matarista; but
bicycles and especially electric trolley-cars are also
represented as murderous.

411
1 José Guadalupe Posada, Asombroso y funesto
suceso … Eleuterio Mirafuentes (Shocking and
terrible incident that really took place in the city of
Saltillo on the first day of this month, and the
miracle full of portents done by the Most Holy
Virgin Mary of Guadalupe for Anastacia Mello, the
mother of the wretched Eleuterio Mirafuentes), c.
1890–1900, photomechanical line-block from
scratch-board original, 8.2 × 13.4 cm. This title
comes from the 1918 republication preserved in the
Vanegas Arroyo collection.

The violence that devils promote is of a different

sort. It breaks up families rather than impinging on
already disarticulated lives lived on the street, and
especially it breaks up the lineage structures that
give those families their value and their stability.
Family relationships are understood in this
iconography as sacred. Relations of duty and
dependence are part of an order that is natural and
divine: that is why devils promote the profane,
unnatural, diabolical acts that destroy it. In the

412
families of the poor especially, such acts take the
form of physical violence. They often involve
reversals of sanctioned roles: women act violently to
men, children kill parents. In ‘horroroso asesinato!
Acaecido en la ciudad de Tuxpan el 10 del presente
mes y año’, a woman has asked a man for sex.
Because they are linked in a pseudo-family through
shared
godparenthood, the man turns her down, so she
knifes him to death. While one devil gives her a
helping hand, another reaches out, symbolically to
take her to hell. In rich families, too, violence may
take its toll, but in such cases the PVA sheets tend
to represent devils promoting behaviours of
unnatural greed; avarice and disinheritance break
up the flow of the lineage – sacrilege in a different
mode.23
In Asombroso y funesto suceso … Eleuterio
Mirafuentes [1], another image for a pseudo-news
sheet, probably made in the 1890s and last
republished in 1918, a son drops a rock on his
father while his mother looks on and a devil gives
him a helping nudge. The sheet tells of the miracle
the Virgin of Guadalupe granted to the mother: the
father survived the son’s murderous attack. It is
worth pointing out the disjunction in graphic
register between the two-dimensional and summary
graphic code used to represent son, mother and
devil and the subtle rendering of the father’s body
position and clothing: the picture embodies an
assault on ‘high’ culture and its values in every
respect, from its aggression against news (as with
‘horroroso asesinato!’, the assault is announced as
having taken place ‘this month’) to its concentration
of artistic competence in the body of the brutalized
father.

413
This iconography is not of itself particularly
surprising. Parricide and thus its cognates have
long been singled out as diabolical in Western
culture, and for centuries devils have carried
sinners gleefully to hell. But the emergence of this
imagery aimed in this commodity at this audience in
Mexico City at this time was not determined by the
recurrent nightmares of recurrent family dramas or
by the representational resources that made up the
historical dimension of Mexican visual culture.
Mexico City, which until the last third of the
eighteenth century had been represented as an
Utopia, was by this time very clearly established as
a focus of chaos, crime and debauchery, as a place
at least a little hellish.24 The people who formed the
audience for these sheets were very likely to be
newcomers to the city, and to its economic and
cultural relations. It seems probable that in this
period, migration to Mexico City was provoked by
‘pull’ motives more than by ‘push’ ones (even if
pressure on customary landholding from the
beneficiaries of liberal laws and judicial favours had
played a part), which may differentiate it from the
city’s even more explosive growth after the
Revolution. By coming to the capital, the men and
women who made the journey had destroyed their
‘natural’ family-based community and done violence
to their own lineage in search of worldly gain. The
argument by analogy, that choosing to take a place
in globalizing metropolitan capitalism entails taking
a place in hell, is at least implicit.
I have argued elsewhere that one of the dominant
characteristics of Posada’s imagery of family
violence (and of criminal violence other than with
guns in general) is its lack of specific location, so
that the association in the family-devil genre is

414
rather between dislocation and the anxiety of
cultural dissolution than between Mexico City and
cultural dissolution. Family violence thus represents
marginality rather than
urbanity.25 The calaveras add a dimension to this
argument. In them, location is very often perfectly
clear. The already-dead are on the streets of the
city, which is not exactly how the Christian festival
of All Souls seeks to represent them. The two-day
festival in memory of all the dead has since the
seventh century been important in the Christian
calendar. All over Christendom it has two phases:
on 1 November to celebrate a catch-all saints’ day
for those saints whose deeds and names and
achieved passage into heaven have slipped the
earthly Church’s attention; and on 2 November, to
pray, in a portmanteau memento mori, for the souls
of all the departed, whatever their destination. By
emphasizing the inevitability and the imminence of
the passage between this world and the next, the
festival asserts and maintains the difference
between them. In Mexico the festival concentrates
on the souls more than on the saints. Its dominant
ritual takes the form of a visit to the graves of
relatives, where special food and drink is both
consumed and sacrificed (left on the grave), and the
grave is decked with cempasúchitl, marigolds. Onto
this firmly established and important festival –
which (mutatis mutandis) closely resembles
Spanish, French and other European practice in the
closing decades of the nineteenth century – have
grown, in Mexico, a couple of other, linked,
functions. The first is prophylactic: if the dead are
not acknowledged and honoured on 2 November,
they may come back and command our attention in
unwelcome ways. The second expresses the

415
participants’ sense of place and of lineage. The
grave must be visited. The visit reties the bonds
between the generations, and emphasizes the
lineage as localized and rooted.26 This requirement
to visit the grave made the ritual celebration
problematic in Mexico City in the 1890s and 1900s,
given the fact that cities until the installation of
‘modern’ public-health facilities needed steady
immigration even to maintain a constant population,
the great majority of living men and women in the
booming city would be much more likely to have
children in the ground locally than ancestors.27
Since the second half of the eighteenth century, the
festival in Mexico City had developed a specialized
market. The food to be consumed included the
widespread pan de muerto, dead bread, but also
sugar skulls as well as little edible (sacrificial)
sculptures of priests, soldiers, market women and
figures representing other social positions, perhaps
originally made of marzipan but already by the
1780s typically made of sugar. Sugar is special, as
Stanley Brandes has pointed out.28 Sugar tied
Mexico to global capitalism nearly as strongly as
silver had done, and as baler twine for Mr
McCormick’s harvesters was beginning to do. And
sugar is empty calories; it gives much pleasure, but
it is sterile. The diabolical pacts supposed to be
made by cane cutters had that same trajectory. Do
the PVA sheets, by analogical projection, fulfil the
same function? Do they represent a sterile pleasure,
an integration into consumer capitalism that
devalues the values that ‘modernization’ is
promoted as bringing? I think that that question can
best be answered by looking at the nature of the
commodity, rather than at the representations it

416
carried. But first there are things to be said about
the representations.
In the 1880s Vanegas Arroyo had published sheets
illustrated not by Posada, but by a designer/relief
engraver called Manuel Manilla. The illustrations
that survive, from later printings, are of two sorts.
First, there are spin-offs from a play about the Don
Juan story, Don Juan Tenorio, written in Spain in
1844 by José Zorilla with the Day of the Dead in
mind and by the 1880s performed at that time every
year both in Spain and in Mexico. Then there are
danse macabre images, in which skeletons usher or
haul the living into the land of the dead,
represented as the cemetery: Calaveras, saltad de
la tierra, in which Hercules wrestles a skeleton, is
an example. Manilla’s seems to me to be a
conservative imagery, supporting the performative
emphasis of the Day of the Dead festival, and
following the established representational forms
and ambitions of the Church’s version of it. No
sheets printed by Vanegas Arroyo in the 1880s
seem to have survived, so we cannot know precisely
what they looked like.29 We may assume that they
had a mixture of representational and emblematic
images, as sheets made in and after the 1890s had,
even if we guess that the profuseness of illustration
came with Posada.
Posada’s dominant iconography is different. Manilla
showed the inevitability of contact between the
living and the dead, but there are a limited number
of surviving Posada calavera prints that show
interactions between us and them, and in none of
them is the skeleton that inexorable summoner of
the danse macabre. Instead, Posada most usually
showed the dead as functionally the same as the

417
living, so that our fleshliness became a distinction
without a difference. It is as though the purpose of
the Days of the Dead, to keep the departed securely
in their place, has itself been turned on its head. It
is not even that Posada is deploying the convention
that reminds us of the skull beneath the skin, as did
a contemporary, and in social terms more
successful, Mexican caricaturist such as Villasana.30
Posada’s calavera images are of two main sorts.
There are the set pieces, scenes in which large
groups of skeletons interact in some this-world
environment, and sets of smaller blocks (the
smallest no more than 20 millimetres square), made
to be used over and over again scattered among the
texts of a whole range of different calaveras. These
small blocks give us typical and representative
figures. They represent the parade of social types.
The composite overleaf [2] is made from much
recycled blocks from the 1890s, each about 60
millimetres high; out of the group, I have selected a
priest, a street entertainer, a nattily dressed but
aging bourgeois man and rich woman of uncertain
age. Here as elsewhere, Posada has collapsed the
couple doing the danse macabre into a single
figure: death is not imminently coming for the
whole range of social types but has already taken
possession of them.
Such small blocks often represent work, and
particularly the retail food industries on and just off
the street. In another composite of images [3],
perhaps 75 millimetres high at most, dating from
the later 1890s or the 1900s, I see three women and
one man: the bird-seller with the baby on her back
is the poorest, the man at the drink machine with

418
the bottle of aguardiente on the table is the most
prosperous and may, like the baker, be working in a
shop. These figures come from a set of street
traders, probably all done for the two-sided
Calavera chusca, dedicada à las placeras,
tortilleras, verduleras y toda gente de lucha …, and
again much recycled: trades also figure prominently
in the thumbnail set.31

2 José Guadalupe Posada, Composite of

four figures from a set of social types,
c.1890–1900, photomechanical
line-blocks from scratch-board originals,
from 5.8 to 6.2 cm high. The earliest
surviving examples of these blocks seem
to be distributed between the Calavera

419
 de Cupido and the Gran Panteon
Amoroso, both from the 1890s.

In Posada’s images, the skeletons do what we do,

and particularly what we do on the street. They
fight, they court and they flirt, they saunter arm in
arm. There is another loose series, or maybe it is an
observer’s conflation, in which the friendships,
sentimental adventures, hard knocks and conflicts
of the street are pictured, again in scratch-board
images from the 1890s no more than 70 millimetres
high. A prosperous man up from the country flirts
with a woman; a poorer couple shout and argue. A
policeman hauls a streetwalker away. Two poor
men drink pulque arm in arm; and a similar pair are
in the last act of a dispute: a standing man holds a
curved knife over a kneeling, screaming companion.
One has to wonder on what plane of existence the
murderee will find himself next.
The set-piece images cover much of the same
ground. They represent life in the market and on
and off the street, including the noisy work of
calavera sellers (Rebumbio de calveras). The
Calavera de las Artes shows workers plying their
different trades on the street. In Calaveras
Zalameras de las Coquetas Meseras, a party is
going on in a bar.32 In the Calavera de los
Patinadores, three men work off their night-court
sentences by sweeping the streets under the eye of
an equally skeletal policeman.33 Sometimes these
calaveras represent crowds involved in all the
business of nation-building and state-formation, for
example reacting to the affair of Mora and Morales,
executed in June 1907 for assassinating the
ex-president of Guatemala; fleeing from a man with
a bloody knife (Calavera Oaxaqueña, 1903, reissued

420
several times, in 1912 as Calavera de Pascual
Orozco); or riding bicycles decked out as
personifications of Mexico’s newspapers, an image
from the 1890s much recycled and reworked (for
example in De Este Famosa Hipodroma en la Pista
…).

3 José Guadalupe Posada,

Composite of four
food-and-drink-sellers from
the Calavera Chusca, 1911
printing. Photomechanical
line-blocks from pen drawings;
the blocks are all c. 7.5 cm
high.

421
4 José Guadalupe Posada, Calavera Revuelta de
Federales, Comerciantes y Artesanos, c. 1910,
photomechanical line-block from pen drawing, 14.4
× 26.5 cm. Title from 1911 printing.

The roles of history and of armed struggle are

invoked [4], as in an image that was probably made
for the Centenario of 1910, the celebration of a
hundred years of independence from Spain. It was
much recycled and is here used in 1911 as Calavera
Revuelta de Federales, Comerciantes y Artesanos,
with verses about the Federales, their regiments
and their officers, and about named street traders
and artisans; it was used later for a calavera about
the First World War.34 The imagery thus involves
the dead both in street life and in the emerging
national culture.
The imagery also scrambles the relationship
between the dead and the living in the cemetery, as
in llorando el hueso [5], where a group of skeletons
in modern dress looks at a shrouded skeleton
weeping upon a grave.35 Skulls litter the
foreground; the well-dressed skeletons on the left

422
run away in terror; those behind the weeper and on
our right, representing a wider cross-section of
types, either frown in disapproval or seem to laugh
at the weeper, whom Western traditions of tomb
iconography prompt me to call ‘her’. Posada’s
iterative iconography draws no line between
metropolis and necropolis, and the success of the
commodity suggests that his way of seeing struck a
chord.
This way of representing the dead goes some way
towards solving the growing capital’s cultural
problem of dislocation. If life on the city street can
be shown as a vigorous and eventful living death,
then, in a macabre way, migration has not severed
the cord that links this world to that of the
departed. But although this innovation lessens the
problem of dislocation, it reinforces that of
dissolution. These images turn a sacred ritual of
separation into a secular spectacle of assimilation
and demystification.
That which was sacred is profaned, and the
everyday experiences of urban life are represented
as identical with activities in the ectoplasm; thus
that which was solid is melted not into energy, as
are sugar skulls, but into air. 36
So far I have concentrated on a discussion of
Posada’s imagery of devils and skeletons as
representations available to recently arrived and
subaltern urban groups and have not discussed
them as objects that play their part in constituting a
commodified print culture dominated by bourgeois
values, as producers, not merely denizens, of the
subaltern. The PVA sheets are not just
representations, they are things made, sold, bought
and consumed. So are sugar skulls, so what is the

423
difference? The analogy of empty calories, of sterile
pleasures, is useful here. Food is supposed to be
consumed without residue, so that nothing is
thrown away, and also so that the consumer does
not get obese. From this point of view, the sugar
skull, though peculiar, is not flagrantly
transgressional. But the whole logic of print culture
is (or at any rate was, for men and women educated
in the nineteenth century) that it is cumulative: its
twin apotheoses are the library and the well-stocked
mind, given that paper is too valuable to throw
away. Even its characteristic ephemeral form, the
newspaper, takes its identity from the
(anti-ephemeral) series to which it contributes.
Thus, while getting fat on food is a sin, getting fat
on print is a virtue.

5 José Guadalupe Posada, llorando el hueso, c.

1905, photomechanical line-block from
pen-drawing, 12.5 × 16.3 cm; taken from a sheet

424
entitled la Calavera de los Peleles. ‘Calavera de los
Peleles’ is difficult to translate: a pelele is a wimp or
a simpleton, but also a puppet or a guy (as in Guy
Fawkes).

The PVA sheet is, within this analogy,

transgressionally ‘lite’. It provides an integration
into (bourgeois, commodified) print culture that,
given its occasional nature and its sacrificial
destiny, undermines the possibility of accumulation:
thus it integrates the group defined by its market as
outsiders, people who belong on the street, not in
the book-room. The calavera is sold and bought at a
festival whose theme is sacrificial consumption, so
that it would be sacrilegious to keep such a sheet
and add it to your library. In this, the calaveras are
typical of the PVA sheet. In all the collections that I
have examined, only one print, probably a theatre
poster, bears evidence of having been used (in this
case, of having been pinned up). The rest all seem
to have come from the stock-in-trade of the Vanegas
Arroyo family, switched over in the mid-1920s from
the street market to the collectors’ market. This is
reasonably good evidence that the original people
who bought these sheets bought them to use them
up, not to lay them down.
The nature of the different sorts of sheets reinforces
this tendency to treat them as something that is
bought to be thrown away – bought, in a sense, to
be garbage. The recycled and reissued bogus moral
stories of familial murders violate the primary
requirement of the newspaper, that it be at the
same time always the same as itself and always
different; they violate the primary requirements of
news, that it specify place and time, and that it
make truth claims of the ‘fact’ sort, rather than of

425
the ‘value’ sort: the devils pictures make this
incompatibility flagrant. To choose to buy such a
product is to choose a specific negation of
print-centred ‘modern’ culture, one that is newly
(that is, ‘modernly’) produced by that culture.
Again: ‘real’ news reports in PVA sheets may be
acknowledged as being quoted from a newspaper,
but in their material form they specifically refuse to
become newspaper-like.
The calaveras both embody and represent
abundance. They were various in any one year, and
they were cheap. Calaveras en monton is a very
common headline: a whole heap of calaveras.
Barata de calaveras, cheap skulls, and rebumbio de
calaveras, racket, crowd-noise of calaveras, are
other repeated titles. Posada and Vanegas Arroyo
developed the calavera as a form with a mass of
verses, and typically a jumble of different prints,
often evidently in different styles, and printer’s
decorative blocks, large and small, decorating each
page. Thus chaotic plenty is a theme both of the
way the commodity is marketed and of the way it is
constructed. They are cheap, they are plentiful, and
they represent cheapness and plenty in both their
design and their rough and fragmentary facture. So
buying them is no sacrifice; but they are produced
to be consumed for an occasion in which sacrificial
consumption is required. They were thus both some
sort of surrogate of sacrificial food and a
debasement of the sacrificial ritual; the fact that the
paper on which they were printed is of the same
relatively high quality as is now (and perhaps then
was) used for decorative cut-outs around the Day of
the Dead tends to confirm the
sacrificial circuit in these prints. Buying these
sheets thus functions to represent the triumphalist

426
claim of capitalism, that the production and
consumption of commodities produces growth, as
that proposition’s own negation: capitalism offers
its neophytes sterile gratification at best.
The commodity nature and the representational
function of the PVA sheets were powerfully
contradictory. They give us, cultural historians,
access to a set of material practices through which
men and women both accepted the cultural
relations of print-commodity capitalism and
developed a subversion of these relations. But the
terms of that subversion made it rather a
disempowering than an empowering one, at least in
the way it tended to close off access to disciplined
and informed political organization and activity.
Those forms of cultural power depend on and derive
from the sort of this-worldly cumulative behaviours
that the PVA sheet represents as sterile.
And aesthetic merit? In the case of Posada’s
imagery it is a complex matter: post-mortem
publishers have had the luxury of severing the
images from the texts that always accompanied
them in Posada’s lifetime and for almost twenty
years after that. If artists and art historians had not
found aesthetic merit in these pictures, the archive
– consisting partly of printing blocks, but largely of
printed sheets constituting the stock-in-trade of
Vanegas Arroyo’s heirs – would not have survived. If
I did not find various of the strengths and depths in
these images that go under the collective title of
aesthetic merit, I probably would not go working on
or thinking about the work. I do not think that if
Vanegas Arroyo had gone on working with Manilla,
rather than with Posada, the archive would have
survived, and I do not think historians would have

427
found themselves prompted to ask the same
questions, or find such various and relevant
answers, if by chance it had. But what about the
first consumers of the work? Did they seek or find
aesthetic gratification in the shoddy sheets in which
his images appeared? There is no evidence about
the problem, but there is no reason to suppose that
the people who bought the PVA sheets could not see
the sorts of merits of design and draughtsmanship
that I see, no reason to suppose that Posada helped
to make Vanegas Arroyo (relatively) rich and
powerful only because of his astute identification of
subject matter and iconography. And this presents a
final complexity. These sheets make material a
contradictory identification with what is worthless,
bad, in the ‘goods’ that modernity offers, but their
‘popular’ commercial success also suggests that in
that ‘bad’, men and women identified and valued
something that we might be able to agree was a
good.
1 This essay first saw the light of day as a paper for the seminar
‘Comparative Labour and Working-Class History’ that Andrew
Hemingway and Rick Halpern ran at the Institute of Historical
Research. Andrew urged me to publish it: his wish is my command. I
dedicate it to Posada, a hundred years after his death.

2 Posada was born, the son of a baker, in Aguascalientes (430 kilometres

north-east of Mexico City).

3 Tom Gretton, ‘Posada’s prints as photomechanical artefacts’, Print

Quarterly, vol. 9 (1992), pp. 335–56. My account of Posada’s use of
line-block technology is not fully accepted in Mexico.

4 ‘Posada’ was the trademark of a block-making shop as well as the

signature of a picture-maker: many of the standard publications on
Posada attribute to him images that may be contested on
connoisseurial grounds, as well as more than a few that legibly bear
other signatures and are clearly by other hands.

428
5 David Forgacs, ‘National-popular: genealogy of a concept’, in Simon
During (ed.), Cultural Studies Reader (Routledge: London, 1993), pp.
177–90.

6 A brief introduction to the first half-century of his critical fortune appears

in chapter one of Ron Tyler (ed.), Posada’s Mexico (Library of
Congress: Washington, DC, 1979). Fernando Gamboa curated the first
monographic exhibition ‘Posada Printmaker to the Mexican People’ at
the Art Institute of Chicago in 1944.

7 James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant

Resistance (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1985).

8 For a recent interpretation of Posada’s work that reads it against the

‘revolutionary precursor/essential Mexican’ grain, see Raphael Barajas
Durán, Posada: Mito y Mitote: la Caricatura Política de José Guadalupe
Posada y de Manuel Manilla (Fondo de Cultura Economica: Mexico
City, 2009).

9 Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution: Volume 1 – Porfirians, Liberals

and Peasants (University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln and London,
1986), pp. 42–4, 127–39.

10 Pelado literally translates as skinned/skint, and lépero, leper, means

both a shunned outcast and someone whose skin/clothing is hanging
off in tatters. In both cases, the nakedness, the lack of resources, is
both real and metaphorical.

11 Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South

America (University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1980).

12 His current web autobiography characterizes his thinking as ‘strongly

influenced by both the Frankfurt School of critical theory and French
post-structuralism’, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/michael-taussig/
biography/, accessed 12 December 2012, which tell us not much more
than that he has moved on.

13 Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, op.

cit., p. 17.

14 Fray Joaquín Bolaños, Portentosa vida de la Muerte, Emperatriz de los

sepulcros, Vengadora de los agravios del Altísimo, y muy señora de la
humana naturaleza (Mexico, 1792).

15 Peter Wollen, J. G. Posada, Messenger of Mortality (Redstone Press:

London, 1989), p. 15, puts it thus: ‘a crucial connection can be
discerned between the calaveras and the art of the pre-Columbian

429
 period, with its own profusion of skulls and pressing reminders of
death’.

16 Patrick Frank, Posada’s Broadsheets: Mexican Popular Imagery

1890–1910 (University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 1998) has
shown how closely Vanegas Arroyo’s ‘ephemeral’ production followed
and referred to scandals and catastrophes made famous in the
‘mainstream’ press.

17 See, for example, Jonathan Kandell, La Capital: The Biography of

Mexico City (Henry Holt: New York, 1988), p. 354.

18 Mexico had even by 1910 about 40 per cent as many kilometres of

railway as Britain, and in a count of railway metres per square
kilometre, less even than that of the Russian Empire.

19 John Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, 1860–1931

(University of Texas Press: Austin, 1978).

20 Tom Gretton, ‘Posada and the “Popular”: commodities and social

constructs in Mexico before the Revolution’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 17,
no. 2 (October 1994), pp. 32–47.

21 Curiosidades mexicanos shows Gringo tourists react with horror to the

sight of a sewage-collection cart. Asalto en Teplito: Corrido gives us a
toff mugged at night in a park. Los Atropellamientos electricos: Corrido
shows a cyclist slaughtered by an electric tram.

22 What is perhaps Posada’s most famous single image (and the most
famous Mexican woman after the Virgin of Guadalupe), the calavera
catrina (the calavera of the female catrin) reprised by Diego Rivera in
his ‘Dream of a Sunday afternoon in Alameda Park’, had been known
on an earlier sheet as a garbancera, a chick-pea-stew-seller.

23 There is no catalogue raisonné of Posada’s oeuvre; given the

disputable attribution of many ‘Posadas’, the dispersion and duplication
of holdings of his work, and the recycling and reworking of many of his
pictures from sheet to sheet, there may never be one. The most
accessible collections of his (and others’!) work in the Anglo-Saxon
world remain Stanley Appelbaum and Robert Berdecio (eds.), Posada’s
Popular Mexican Prints (Dover Publications: New York, 1972) and
Julian Rothenstein (ed.), J. G. Posada, Messenger of Mortality
(Redstone Press: London, 1989). In Mexico, the 1930 publication by
Frances Toor et al., Posada: Monografia de 406 Grabados has been
re-editioned since the 1990s, most recently by Diego Rueda (RM
Verlag: Barcelona, 2003). There is also the much fuller Carlos Pellicer
(ed.), José Guadalupe Posada: Ilustrador de la Vida Mexicana (Fondo

430
 Editorial de la Plástica: Mexico, 1963). One may also consult the even
more inclusive compilation by Hannes Jähn, The Works of / Das Werk
von José Guadalupe Posada (Zweitausendeins: Frankfurt am Main,
1976).

24 Jérôme Monet, La Ville et son double: Images et usages du centre –

Le parable de Mexico (Nathan: Paris, 1993).

25 Tom Gretton, ‘The Cityscape and “the People” in the prints of José
Guadalupe Posada’, in Iain Borden, Joe Kerr and Jane Rendell (eds.),
The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space (MIT
Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002), pp. 212–27.

26 Elizabeth Carmichael and Chloe Sayer, The Skeleton at the Feast: The
Day of the Dead in Mexico (University of Texas Press: Austin, 1992).

27 For this ‘negative net reproduction rate’ in early modern cities in the
Western world, see for example Peter Clark (ed.), The Oxford
Handbook of Cities in World History (Oxford University Press: Oxford,
2013), p. 404.

28 Stanley Brandes, ‘Sugar, colonialism and death: on the origins of

Mexico’s Day of the Dead’, Comparative Studies in Society and History,
vol. 39, no. 2 (1997), pp. 270–99.

29 There are no surviving calavera prints either with the Calle Incarnacion
address, or with Vanegas Arroyo appearing named simply as Vanegas,
both of which would date the production from the 1880s and before the
era of Posada.

30 La Situacion: a lithograph probably from the 1880s republished without

further identification in Aida Sierra Torre, José Maria Villasana:
Caricatura Política y Costumbrista (CNCA: Mexico City, 1998).

31 ‘Saucy calavera dedicated to the street-vendors, tortilla-sellers,

greens-sellers [all female] and all struggling people. Clothes-dealers,
stall-holders and meat-sellers …’. Title taken from the British Museum’s
copy, published before c. 1905.

32 ‘Flattering calavera about the cute waitresses’.

33 ‘Street-cleaners calavera’. This is an unusual image, in that the four

skeletons share the picture space with a live man. He is unaware of
their presence, and stands drinking pulque in a bar. He drinks from a
skull.

34 The messy/turbulent/scrambled calavera of the Federales (national

militarized police force) traders and artisans.

431
35 ‘The bone is weeping’, or perhaps ‘weeping over the bone’.

36 I do not simply pull ‘ectoplasm’ out of the ether. Many prominent

people, in Mexico as elsewhere, were committed to spiritualism in
these years. In Mexico, the belief had a focus in opposition to the
official positivism of the Porfiriato.

432
READING AHAB
ROCKWELL KENT, HERMAN MELVILLE AND C. L.
R. JAMES
Angela Miller

‘All great books are symbolical myths, overlaid like a palimpsest

with the meanings that men at various times assign to them.’
Clifton Fadiman1

I n 1930, two editions of Herman Melville’s Moby

Dick appeared, both illustrated by Rockwell
Kent.2 A leading American artist of the interwar
years, Kent had already made a considerable
contribution to the revival of book arts, fuelled by
the desire to raise publishing standards while at the
same time encouraging greater public interest in
the classics. Kent’s broad reading – evident in a
considerable personal library of the classics from
Chaucer to Shakespeare, Voltaire and Melville,
along with the Russian works of Gorky, Tolstoy and
Turgenev – prepared him well as an illustrator; his
sense for what the artist Abbott Thayer called
‘interstellar austerities’ earned him a request from
no less than Thomas Hardy, who wished to have
him illustrate a collection of late poems.3
By 1930, Kent’s reputation as an image-maker and
illustrator was so considerable that the editors at
Random House not only gave him top billing in the
design of the book, but left off Melville’s name
altogether.4 The oversight was satirically marked by

433
Robert Frost in a poem of 1947: ‘There is a story
you may have forgotten / About a whale. / Oh, you
mean Moby Dick / By Rockwell Kent that
everybody’s reading.’5 For the commission, Kent
made black-and-white pen-and-ink drawings that
laboriously reproduced the appearance of woodcut
(and wood engraving), drawings that were then
translated for the deluxe edition into woodcut
itself.6 The choice may seem odd; unlike illustrators
of other editions of Moby Dick from the 1920s and
1930s, Kent interpreted Melville through the lens of
an anachronistic medium that was itself
contemporaneous with the history contained in
Moby Dick. In doing so, his illustrations added one
further layer to the dense texture of historical and
mythic references that characterize the great book.
Paralleling Melville’s own encyclopedic range of
genres, Kent mined a variety of historical styles,
referring not only to sixteenth-century European
engravings and nineteenth-century woodcuts and
almanacs, but also to emblem books, and
Blake-inspired nudes.7
On receiving his assignment, Kent avidly
researched the history of whaling at the Museum of
Natural History in New York and the New Bedford
Whaling Museum, driven by his own interest in the
whaling communities he encountered while residing
in Maine and Newfoundland. But his illustrations
far exceeded an antiquarian approach. Skilfully
matching the retrospective quality of Melville’s own
narrative of whaling, which already by 1851
appeared in a historical light, Kent also captured
something of the mythic quality of the book, a text
that produced inexhaustible meanings for
generations of readers. Published in the years when
the nation lurched forward into industrial

434
modernization, Moby Dick arced across the decades
to link the founding of the republic with its
unrealized destiny.8
In what follows I hope to demonstrate that Kent’s
version is as interesting for its blind spots as for its
considerable power in translating Melville’s text for
his own generation. These blind spots are most
apparent in relation to the politically charged figure
of Ahab at the centre of the book, whose meaning
unfolded across several generational and historic
registers both before and after Kent tackled the
subject. In an extraordinary interpretation of Moby
Dick, written by the Trinidadian Marxist intellectual
and writer C. L. R. James twenty-three years after
Kent’s illustrations, we may locate the elements of a
radically different understanding of the book.
James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways fully
articulates the implications of the ‘totalitarian’
personality for artists and writers on the left, a
historical type yet to emerge when Kent contrived
his Ahab in 1930. Bracketing either end of the
period that witnessed the global rise of fascism and
the Second World War, Kent’s and James’s readings
of Melville make glaringly apparent the shift in the
political valence of personality following the rise of
Hitler and Stalin, and expose one source of the
ambivalent allegiance to collectivism within the
American left itself.
The choice to illustrate Moby Dick was Kent’s: the
book resonated with his own myth-inspired
imagination, sense of epic grandeur, and taste for
forbiddingly desolate landscapes. From the
beginning of the commission, William Kittredge –
director of design and typography at Lakeside Press
– perceived a strong fit between artist and author.

435
He wrote to Kent, ‘it is as though you were working
side by side – Melville with words and you with
pictures’.9 Both artists confronted a world that – in
1850 and again in 1930 – seemed on the brink of
vast and tumultuous changes, an unsettling of
fundamental political and social landmarks and
structures of value. Both decades ignited a sense of
cultural doubt and self-appraisal at parallel periods
of political and social crisis.
For the commission, Kent made 135 drawings for
each of the chapter headings; another 95 appearing
at chapter conclusions; 23 full-page illustrations;
and 8 half-page designs, along with a range of
epigrammatic or emblematic medallions and
smaller images scattered throughout the text.
Exploiting the stark tonal contrasts of the woodcut
medium he was emulating in his pen-and-ink
drawings, he produced a series of formally distilled,
highly stylized images [1]. As a bitonal medium,
woodcut flattened tonal gradation in favour of
starker dark and light value contrasts, largely
restricting or eliminating the chiaroscuro
gradations and subtle tonalism possible in other
print media such as acquatint, lithography or even
wood engraving. Far removed from the symbolist
suggestiveness of Pictorialist photography that
emerged a few decades after Melville’s book,
woodcut nonetheless captured Kent’s vision of
Moby Dick. He wrote to Kittredge that Moby Dick
was ‘a most solemn, mystic work, with the story and
the setting serving merely as the medium for
Melville’s profound and poetic philosophy.… The
color, so far as I can see, is determined; night, the
midnight darkness enveloping human existence, the
darkness of the human soul, the abyss.’10

436
 1 Rockwell Kent, ‘Moby Dick’, from
Moby Dick (R. R. Donnelly and Sons
Company, Lakeside Press: Chicago,
1930), letterpress and woodcut, vol.
1, p. 273 (chapter 41).

This allegorical turn of thought in Kent’s response

to Moby Dick also characterized how he translated
the book into visual imagery. His choice of woodcut,
as I would like to argue, served his personally
inflected reading, and in the end brought him closer
to Ahab than to Melville. His own dramatic (and
self-inflating) account of why he was drawn to
woodcut was staged in Melvillian rhetoric of dark

437
and light: ‘How like the night the wood block,
coated black! How like a shaft of light the tool that
cuts the black – and by its touch illuminates an
object hidden there! Wood, then, shall be, must be,
the medium.’11 Woodcut – with its stark value
contrasts – also captured contemporaneous
readings of Melville’s book as a universe defined
around the moral polarities of good and evil. Lewis
Mumford’s 1929 account, for instance, noted the
sudden manner in which the early naturalism of the
opening chapters disappears from the book with the
arrival of Ahab: ‘Once Moby Dick gets under way,
the fable itself belongs to Heaven and Hell,… so
that everything which would relieve men’s
exasperation or take the edge off their lonely
delight, disappears, as the land disappears beyond
the horizon’s edge.’12 This impulse to read Ahab in
terms of conventional moral polarities, however,
falls short of realizing the full philosophical
complexities of the book; the black-and-white values
of the woodcut medium at times worked poorly with
its wealth of symbolist association, its moral
tenebrism, its elusive and shaded multiplicity of
meanings.13 Nonetheless, these symbolist qualities
helped drive the literary rediscovery of Melville –
finding its counterpart in the contemporaneous
revival of interest in the art of Albert Pinkham
Ryder.14 Despite the limited suggestiveness of
woodcut, it was a medium that would prove
peculiarly well adapted to representing Ahab, the
‘godless godlike’ captain of the Pequod, whose
quest for absolute meanings and control of an
indecipherable universe drove the collective fate of
the shipboard community.
Manipulating the relative ratio of white to dark that
constituted the primary expressive dimension of

438
woodcut, Kent introduced a range of different
moods into his illustrations for Moby Dick,
modulating from daytime vistas of the ocean to the
sooty dark imaginings of Melville’s more
psychologically charged passages. Kent’s imitation
of woodcut and wood engraving also proved
versatile enough to capture the shifting moods and
landscapes of the book. The genre-like quality of its
opening chapters, for instance, found expression in
charmingly naive, toylike images reminiscent of
eighteenth-century New England street signs:
‘genre pictures in the manner
of Teniers, with a dash of Hogarth or Rowlandson’,
as Mumford put it, belonging ‘to the land and its …
little ways’.15 After these accurately detailed
opening passages, however, the book takes a
profoundly different turn.
By the 1920s, Moby Dick was no longer understood
as a boy’s adventure story about a man and a whale.
Indeed, the reception history of the book from that
point on revealed, in Nick Selby’s words, ‘a
changing understanding of what America and its
culture might mean’.16 Any consideration of Kent’s
illustrations must reckon, therefore, with both the
extent to which they engage the broader histories of
the nation and with Kent’s own psychological
profile, deeply imprinted with the peculiar
vulnerabilities and obsessions of those decades of
crisis and national reinvention between the wars.
Three years in the making, Kent’s drawings
participated in – and contributed to – the Melville
revival taking shape between the two world wars.
Charting nothing less than the voyage of the
American soul, to paraphrase D. H. Lawrence, Moby
Dick drew powerful responses from a range of
critical voices.17 The interwar rediscovery of

439
Melville was driven by a fascination with his
symbolic reach and his epic synthesis of different
ways of knowing the world. Lawrence’s 1923
Studies in Classic American Literature helped
launch the symbolic reading of Melville’s dark book;
of the whale, he wrote ‘Of course he is a symbol.’18
Lawrence read Moby Dick as an allegory of the
‘ghastly maniacal hunt’ of a doomed white race,
severed from self-knowledge by its alienation from a
mythologized blood consciousness – a source of
cosmic wholeness without which European
post-Enlightenment culture would atrophy. If
Lawrence found the book’s ‘esoteric symbolism’ to
be of ‘considerable tiresomeness’, he still
proclaimed Melville ‘a deep, great artist’.19 In its
scepticism towards positivist science, and towards
the fixed certainties of natural taxonomies and
inherited categories of meaning, Melville’s book
spoke to the critical engagements of the artists and
writers in the 1920s who grappled with the
celebratory myths that underwrote the expansion of
business and what Mumford called ‘the harassed
specialisms which still hold and preoccupy so many
of us’.20 Mumford found in Moby Dick a fully
realized and richly symbolic universe.21 Melville
furthermore heralded a new ‘interAmerican …
hemispheric’ sensibility; questioning the
foundations upon which his contemporaries built
their ‘vast superstructure of comfort and
complacency’, Melville refused to shrink ‘from the
cold reality of the universe itself’.22
The Melville revival was part of a growing
awareness of American history and culture that
characterized the second generation of modernism
in the United States. Over the next decade, artists
and writers, following the call of cultural critics

440
such as Van Wyck Brooks, writing for the little
journal Seven Arts, turned to cultural resources
grounded in their own native experience to forge
new pathways into their histories. They explored
issues of cultural and national identity through the
lens of such mythic figures as Columbus, the
Puritan, the pioneer and the voyager.23 This interest
in the mythic construction of America took many
forms in these years, from F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s invocation of the ‘green breast of the
New World’ at the end of The Great Gatsby, to the
revival of sixteenth-century maps of the New World
by New Yorker cartoonist John Held to satirize the
growing gap between America’s original promise
and its current degradation by standardized
commerce. All of these texts were part of a broader
cultural effort to reclaim the mythic dimensions of
American identity from a society desiccated by the
effects of mass culture, consumerism and sham. The
famous conclusion of Gatsby, in particular, invokes
the wonder that accompanied the original
encounter with the New World, only to reflect upon
its fatal and tragic historical course. Recollecting
this capacity for wonder, Fitzgerald then proceeded
to his melancholic meditation on the breach
between myth and history. For this interwar
generation, Moby Dick reignited a sense of the
immeasurable scale of the universe, a scale
reasserted in face of the blighting quest of Ahab at
its centre.

441
2 ‘Ahab’, vol. 1, p. 179 (chapter 28).

The immensity of Melville’s themes call upon an

imagistic power that exceeded Kent’s emblematic
imagination and his jewel-like images. Kent was
limited both by his own imaginative disposition and
by the black-and-white medium he chose, which ill
equipped him to visualize a universe that resisted –
like the white whale at its heart – the contracted
and finite measures of individual significance.
Kent’s illustrations best match Melville’s text when
it is most emblematic, as for instance in ‘Ahab’ [2],
in which the elusive captain first appears on deck.
Ishmael notes the ‘slender rod-like mark, lividly
whitish’ and resembling the seam made in a
lightning-struck tree that runs like a brand down
Ahab’s face and neck, and – he imagines –
continuing perhaps from crown to sole. Kent
translated this passage into its most metaphoric
terms: lighting striking the trunk and tangled roots
of a great tree in an abstract composition that
opens the chapter.
Kent’s most symbolically charged images are those
least tied to the explicit narrative of the novel – for

442
instance, the spectral image of the giant squid [3]
projected onto a cosmic scale that expands across
the horizon – gently cradling, or engulfing, the frail
whaler in an ambiguous image of protection
threatening destruction. Kent uses the woodcut
style to desubstantialize the mass of the squid in a
manner that bridges the narrative and the symbolic.
His activation of this more symbolist imagination is
largely outweighed, however, by a mode of
image-making that seems to issue from Ahab’s own
Manichean vision of a universe defined around clear
dualities of good and evil. The compositions
themselves – full-page illustrations, vertical in
orientation, and organized around a horizon line
dividing the sea from the heavens – play off the
‘abyss’ of marine darkness against the vastness of
the star-studded skies in an allegory of an
imprisoning nature and a celestial realm of
freedom. This form of pictorialization served the
two-dimensional universe of allegory, but flattened
Melville’s far more ambiguous and environmentally
complex vision.24

443
3 ‘Squid’, vol. 2, p. 136 (chapter 59).

Kent’s Ahab both builds upon and complicates the

characterization that Melville offers in the text by
borrowing from a Freudian discourse of repression
and psychosis within which the loss of the
character’s leg is linked to a sexual wound. This
allusion to
castration is there in Melville’s text, but it takes a
more explicit form in Kent’s interpretation. 25
Ahab’s monomania – in this Freudian narrative – is
the product of his wounded manhood. Other
illustrations suggestively link his compromised
masculinity to his will to dominate nature. The
illustration for ‘The Quadrant’ draws a link to the
specifically phallic quest for mastery of the sea;
Ahab’s leg – amputated at the knee – projects from
the crotch as if to suggest that scientific
instruments are a substitute for the lost wholeness
of Ahab the man [4]. In chapter 106, Ahab’s ivory
leg causes him an accident of such severity that it

444
pierces his groin, an injury whose associations with
castration Kent renders explicit in one illustration.26

4 ‘The Quadrant’, vol. 3, p. 171 (chapter

118).

Ahab’s tyrannical will is also linked to the imperial

arrogance of the nation itself and associated with
the fate of the Pequod, named after a tribe of New
England Indians fighting against extinction. The link
between Ahab and the ill fate of the community he
leads is most powerfully invoked at the end of the
book, when a sky-hawk is pinioned by the harpooner
Tashtego as he grasps the spar of the main mast of
the sinking whaler subsiding into the waves. ‘[H]is
whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab’, the
bird of heaven is drawn down into the ‘great shroud
of sea’ like the archangel Michael to whom he is
linked, ‘his imperial beak thrust upwards’. If
Melville’s earlier work had implied a

445
spread-eagle patriotism that granted the nation its
historical exceptionalism, he had, by the time he
wrote Moby Dick, arrived at a far darker vision of
the historical forces driving the nation’s destiny, a
vision realized in this, the book’s penultimate
image.27 Kent’s image of Tashtego sinking beneath
the sea is matched on the next page by an image of
Ishmael – arm shooting towards heaven – borne
skyward by the buoyancy of the coffin that saves
him [5, 6]. Kent’s illustrations offer their own
commentary on the text, pitting the destructive
energies of ‘the flag of Ahab’ against the salvation
offered to the one individual who – Kent’s image
seems to imply – was able to buck the charismatic
hold of Ahab over his crew. What Kent suppresses
in this pair of images, however, is the orphaned
condition of Ishmael himself in Melville’s text:
utterly abandoned in the vastness of the ocean, he
is picked up by the emblematically named Rachel
searching for her lost children. Abandoning the
melancholic message at the end, Kent’s final image
serves instead as an emblem of the artist-prophet
and Promethean saviour of the race, miraculously
resurrected – a message far removed from
Melville’s tragic existential vision.

446
5 ‘The Chase — Third Day’,
vol. 3, p. 282 (chapter 135).

447
 6 ‘Epilogue’, vol. 3, n.p.

Kent’s emphasis on physical and psychic wounding

and Promethean rebirth had relevance both to his
own life and to his interwar generation. A man of
energetic contradictions, Kent’s cult of self emerged
in tandem with his long association with
international communism.28 Isolation – alternating
with periods of excessive socializing and
womanizing – would become part of the repeating
rhythm of his life, in a familiar pattern that carried
him through three wives and considerable public
fame. For Kent and others in these years of
intensifying collectivism and political action, the
need for isolation existed in tension with his

448
commitments to develop new networks and new
agents of collective action. This tension – between
the solitary ways required by the artist and the
political and topical pressures drawing artists
beyond themselves – was not peculiar to Kent. In
1936, Peppino Mangravite published a statement
rife with conflicting loyalties – between the need for
‘aesthetic independence’ unconstrained by social
ties, and the need for ‘an association … in which all
artists of standing can meet on common ground’ to
act on behalf of shared concerns. Simultaneously
calling for artists to mobilize in collective actions
and for them to be wary of sacrificing their
independence in the process, Mangravite’s message
reveals the ambivalence that artists felt concerning
the impact of such activity on their own production.
Committed as he was to collective organizing, and
an ardent socialist, Kent gave his first loyalty to his
own work; he remained somewhat indifferent to the
actual working-class cultures and everyday realities
of ordinary people on whose behalf such actions
were dedicated. A rousing public speaker, he was
never more rhapsodic than when he was writing
about himself. Kent’s political allegiances were
loosely formed but deeply held. As early as 1904 he
was drawn to the socialist labour politics of the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW); later he
would become involved in the efforts to unionize
artists in the 1930s, participating and speaking at
the American Artists’ Congress of 1936.29 At the
heart of his socialist politics was a belief in the
autonomy of labour, a conviction grounded
ultimately in his own frequently inflated pride in
submitting to no one and remaining his own master.
Along with his presidency of the Artists’ League of
America, and his membership in both the American

449
Labor Party and the International Workers Order,
Kent proudly listed his union and labour
credentials, including the United Brotherhood of
Carpenters and Joiners of America, the United
American Artists; the United Office and Professional
Workers of America; the National Longshoremen’s
and Warehousemen’s Union.30
Kent’s truculence in asserting his own
independence, however, is hard to reconcile with
his abiding loyalty to the Soviet Union under Stalin,
which, unlike many of his Trotskyite colleagues, he
never renounced.31 Overlooking decades of Stalinist
‘state capitalism’, he continued to believe in the
possibility of a new society organized around
labour, even while he professed contempt for the
American working classes in the concrete.32 While
never a member of the CPUSA, he refused, during
the McCarthy hearings, to deny his involvement.
His principled defiance all but shut down his
career.33 A guest of the Soviet government in the
1950s, he was pilloried, threatened and boycotted
by US arts institutions during these years.34 Kent
saw his radicalism as a badge of masculine
honour, recognized, alongside Paul Robeson, by the
labour and union movement. In his 1955
autobiography, he represented his politics as
anti-fascist well into the 1950s, casting the
anti-communism for which he was persecuted as
driven by the powerful fascist sympathizers he
believed to be still running the government.35 His
political narrative hued closely to the anti-fascism of
the 1930s, long after his colleagues had moved past
it and into the familiar terrain of Cold War
anti-communism. Kent thus remained unmoved by
the structural similarities that linked fascism with
Soviet communism, similarities that would become

450
fully apparent to C. L. R. James twenty-three years
later.
Enmeshed in these contradictory impulses and
commitments, Kent was bound to Melville’s book –
and in particular to Ahab – by a series of complex
affinities. Kent’s vision of Ahab – the isolated and
solitary captain of the Pequod – bore the mark of his
own personal need for self-testing in a harsh and
punishing wilderness. It was out of such
experiences – in Newfoundland, Alaska, Tierra del
Fuego and Greenland – that his art took shape,
fuelled by his legendary energies.36 Like Ahab, a
man aloof and untethered by social relations, Kent
fled domestic entrapments with predictable
regularity, devising all manner of ways to avoid any
sustained period of time at home with his first wife
and growing family. His associates speculated on
the reasons for his restiveness: a nomadic impulse
driving him to the literal ends of the earth. Kent
recounted how – motivated by a desire to subdue
his own sensual nature – he sought out extreme
weather and physically challenging conditions in
the far north.37 Like Ahab – in flight from the
comforts of his landlocked domestic haven – Kent’s
rebellion against physical weakness sent him in
pursuit of the rigours of harsh arctic extremes.38 It
was also a reaction against his own submissive
tendencies, and against a feminized entrapping
nature.39 In N by E, his account of a voyage on a
thirty-three-foot cutter from New York Harbor to
the rugged shores of Greenland, Kent told of a
terrifying moment when during his watch on board,
the vessel was engulfed in a darkness ‘sullen and
ominous’. Surrounded by this ‘huge brown
cloudbank’, he felt his sight smothered, ‘I could
have screamed for horror of it, shrieked into the

451
silence to tear it and precipitate whatever
cataclysm it so long held back.’ Such moments of
suffocating terror verge on fears of
self-annihilation. Kent’s sensibility required
panoptic visibility; he felt stifled by darkness,
unstrung by any loss of vision. It may have been this
terrifying loss of a securely charted self in relation
to world that drew him so strongly to the blinding
clarity of northern light and space.
Kent’s self-testing shared wider anxieties about a
newly vulnerable masculinity in the years between
the wars: a fear intensified by the broad cultural
exposure to disease and bodily fragmentation that
gave rise to a range of physical regimens, and more
generally, to an obsession with the impermeable
and hard male body.40 Such anxieties found
expression in a broader impulse in the visual
culture of the interwar decades towards stark
outlines and impenetrable forms, along with a
movement away from what one defender of Kent
called the ‘abysmal present-day slough of
self-expression’.41
Kent’s characteristic rhythmic outline and his
incisive silhouetted figures clearly situated against
their backgrounds and often monumentally scaled
in relation to the landscape, as well as the often
blandly smooth surfaces of his prints and paintings,
give evidence of related efforts to visually manage
anxieties about psychic dissolution and loss of
selfhood. He was also drawn towards subarctic
climates where he was able to escape the strain of
social negotiation and intersubjective exchange.
Like Ahab, Kent seemed persistently to have fled
‘the interdebtedness between mortals’.42

452
This psychological profile may also offer insight into
the artist’s tight and assertive control over his
medium. At least one reviewer would link this
quality of formal and technical control to Kent’s
will-driven personality. In a prophetic 1927 essay,
the author noted that Kent exerted ‘too strong a will
… on the paint … signs of too determined a control
of the substance of his medium’. Kent’s vast
illuminated unpeopled landscapes imply a world
without boundaries or constraints except those of
nature itself. And yet ‘Within this freedom and
boldness … in Mr. Kent’s pictures, there is implicit
another freedom which he tends too much to deny:
the freedom and miracle of the pigment, that kind
of subconscious life that appears in the medium,
and might be said to exist in it, just as it exists in
the artist himself.’43 It is a striking anticipation of
the trajectory that would define advanced American
art after the Second World War, a movement
towards the medium as part of the very nature in
which artists like Kent – defined by the romantic
frontier mythos of the previous century – were
utterly unprepared to participate. The unconscious
life of paint itself – like the vast watery world of the
Pacific – was a world inaccessible to human will and
ambition, a world over which the artist self would
come to relinquish control. The medium with which
Kent was most identified – wood engraving –
reasserted the fine manual motor skills that had
been seemingly ceded in the Second Industrial
Revolution to mechanization, with the advent of
half-tone and other machine forms of
44
reproduction. Kent exercised his desire for control
through his most fundamental aesthetic procedures.
Yet these procedures soon gave way in the next
generation to new attitudes towards the medium of

453
paint and to new environmental forms of knowledge
that would exceed the grand frontier romance of
wilderness conquest and the subjugation of nature
in its myriad forms. This presumption of control
exercised upon the world of paint – or of nature –
was one Kent could not give up. His own personal
mythos remained deeply implicated in it. Yet even
his contemporaries glimpsed how limiting his
approach was, and how outmoded it soon would be.
Melville’s most imagistic moments exceeded Kent’s
allegorical imagination, conjuring worlds of
inchoate shapes and phantasmal realities through
which we glimpse other ways of being.45 As Moby
Dick implies through its shifting knowledge frames
and forms, it is these older inheritances – as well as
more modern scientific taxonomies of knowledge –
that impose conceptual limitations on the ability of
Ahab and his world to move beyond their
species-centric vision.
C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades, and
Castaways, published in 1953, was separated by
only twenty-three years from Kent’s illustrations of
Moby Dick. James drew explicit links between the
unholy alliance of Ahab and his crew and
twentieth-century mass politics; his text exposed
the underlying social pathologies of an emerging
world system of industrial production. For James,
Ahab was the dialectical product of a world in the
grip of the inanimate and deterministic forces of
mechanization, industrialization and growing
scientific knowledge. The totalitarian type
embodied in Ahab, which James explicitly linked to
both Hitler and Stalin, represented an impulse to
control a set of forces created by humans and yet
very quickly appearing to exceed their control.46 In
place of Ahab’s world-destroying mission, James

454
would emphasize the collective energies of the
Pequod crew, from which all forms of individual
hubris and charismatic self-fashioning have been
burned away. James affirmed the power of ordinary
men, united by labour and a shared liberatory quest
across geographical and cultural divides, a
dimension nowhere apparent in Kent’s focus on
Ahab.
What makes James’s analysis of particular interest
is that he acknowledges Ahab as a product of a
specifically American historical environment. James
writes that, ‘He has been trained in the school of
individualism and an individualist he remains to the
end.’47 From his historical vantage, James captured
with great force the relationship of extreme forms
of individualism to the rise of totalitarian drives in
the twentieth century. Individualism for James
would also come to be associated with the
destructive power of mental abstraction and
subjective thought to enshroud human beings and
blunt the force of the real. Mariners, Renegades,
and Castaways situated an exceptional American
character type – the frontiersman, the pioneer –
within world historical forces shaping modernity.
Centred on a receding industry – whaling – that
appeared to face away from the modern world,
Moby Dick for James unlocked its deepest meanings
in relation to the rise of both Hitler and Stalin in the
1930s.48
Ahab’s quarrel – for James – is with the very
mechanical and industrial civilization that has
raised him up, a civilization that assaults
personality as an autonomous force. James’s
analysis here builds on a broader critique of
industrialization traceable to nineteenth-century

455
Romanticism, and which resurfaced in the twentieth
century in the notion of personality as a force of
cultural redemption.49 Ahab thus represented a
perversion of the desire for meaningful action in the
world. James brought together this quite human
need with the totalitarian impulse for willed control,
in Ahab’s case, control over an inchoate universe of
vital energies.
To all these tendencies and their associated dangers
– including subjectivity and megalomania – James
would counterpose the crew – an ‘Anacharsis
Clootz’ deputation’ crossing lines of nation, race
and ethnicity. For James, only the ‘ever-present
sense of community … the grace and wit and
humor’ offered by the crew of the Pequod held out
any chance of salvation. This shipboard community
was for James proleptic,
anticipating a new democratically realized global
community, and a ballast – ineffectual in the end –
against the despotic ambitions of Ahab.50 Ahab,
‘trained in the school of individualism’, is unable to
see how his human distance from his crew was itself
the product of the very system against which he
rebels: a system grounded in a hierarchy of workers
and authoritarian masters, in which autonomy
emerges as the sole prerogative of those in
command, an arid, desolate condition of isolation.51
Ahab’s stark existential choice is to organize the
world he hates or to destroy it.52 In James’s view,
individualism was an ideology that blocked any
mediating social formation that would moderate and
redirect the atomizing force of industrial
production. It left its agents marooned, in a
condition of social fragmentation generating
spiritual despair. The lack of human association
then breeds an introspective turn seeking answers

456
in the ‘inner consciousness’. It was here – in the
‘deepest soil of Western Civilization’ – that the
madness of Hitler and Stalin was nurtured.53 In
James’s account, the very conditions of capitalism
generate this type, whether among Nazis, or Soviet
‘administrators, executives, organizers, labor
leaders, intellectuals’. Here, in the managerial
excesses of ‘advanced’ societies lay the seeds of a
personality type uncontained by any form of social
or communal experience. For James, Ahab has
become the monomaniacal haunted man he is
because of his isolation from the crew of the
Pequod. This form of tyranny – the product of the
individual cast loose from anchoring human and
social bonds – was directed at managing things and
men, producing an unprecedented centralization of
power. James concludes, ‘He is the most dangerous
and destructive social type that has ever appeared
in Western Civilization, the totalitarian type
itself.’54
Acting against this power was the ‘world-federation
of modern industrial workers’ that was the crew of
the Pequod. In contrast with the self-consuming
energies of Ahab are the three savage harpooners
who remain untouched by the ‘intellectual and
emotional self-torture’ from which Ahab suffers, and
which propels the madness of the Pequod universe.
The alternative to the hypertrophy of the self was
the full realization of personality through communal
action.55 Binding self and others together was a
common tie to nature through the agency of tools:
technologies brought to heel by their social
purpose. James’s Hegelianism is here most
apparent in this vision of the productive dialectic
through which self – interacting with the object
world – attains to full consciousness through its own

457
objectification. It is solipsism that short circuits the
realization of the self through its material relations,
and for James, Ahab was the very type of the
solipsist.56

7 ‘Midnight, Forecastle’, vol.

1, p. 259 (chapter 40).

Kent’s Ahab – conceived in the late 1920s, while the

‘stomach ulcer of fascism’ was still a gurgle –
nonetheless prophesied unwittingly the rise of what
James would label the ‘totalitarian’.57 Like James,
Kent was a socialist. In this respect, the two
responses to Moby Dick are branches of the same
trunk. Yet there the commonalities cease. A closer
examination of Kent’s ambivalent relationship to the

458
figure of Ahab reveals his contradictory allegiances,
at once to collectivism and to the romantic vision of
imperial selfhood. Verging on a decade of renewed
collectivism, Kent’s 1930 illustrations for Moby Dick
give a surprisingly attenuated treatment of the
shipboard community that drew James’s admiring
analysis more than twenty years later.58 In contrast
to James’s collectivist vision, Kent falls notably
short in capturing the global reach of the crew, or
the vivacity with which Melville evokes their social
worlds. One is a Shakespearean low shipboard
interlude among the sailors, who in Kent’s
illustration are a grizzled and generic group that
fails to capture the diverse cultures of the crew,
from China and Spain to Malta, Sicily and Tahiti [7].
In this scene – chapter 39 – Melville also conjures
the life-affirming erotically charged energies that
unite the crew in human camaraderie against the
backdrop of Ahab’s obsession and then threaten to
draw them down into primordial rhythms of
violence. The illustration at the head of this chapter
shows the miniaturized and faceless crew in profile.
Another scene of human community is the frank
depiction of Queequeg in bed with Ishmael in a
moment of homosocial intimacy across vast social
and cultural distances (‘The Counterpane’, chapter
4). The majority of the scenes of the Pequod crew,
however, frame the shipboard experience as one of
isolation and confrontation with a vast impersonal
natural world (‘The First Lowering’, chapter 48).59
This view of the ship experience maps the
existential dread of Ahab onto his crew in a manner
that suggests just how far Kent himself fell short of
grasping the social basis of collectivism.

459
 8 ‘The Symphony’, vol. 3,
p. 237 (chapter 132).

Kent’s most powerful visualizations centre on Ahab,

a figure whose will-driven obsessions ultimately
deform and distort the element of enchantment that
emanates from the watery Pacific world in which
the action unfolds. It is Ahab who absorbs the bulk
of Kent’s interests in the second half of the book. In
the concluding image of ‘The Chase – First Day’,
(chapter 133), Kent endows the doubloon – sign of
Ahab’s blasphemous mission – with a sacramental
aura, making of Ahab one who worships graven
images, in violation of the biblical commandment.
Kent captured this in the horrific image of Ahab’s
skeletal face rippling in the water [8], suggesting a
Melvillian understanding that nature was inherently
mute, and that whatever the individual saw in it was
a projection of himself.60
Attracted to the figure of Ahab, Kent overlooked
such picture-worthy subjects as offered themselves
throughout the book; in his illustration for ‘A
Squeeze of the Hand’ (chapter 94), Kent opens with
a horizontal image of a detached arm and hand

460
squeezing globules of whale sperm, losing an
opportunity to pictorialize Melville’s image of
communal intimacy in which shipboard labour is
transformed into a utopian dissolution of
boundaries.61 That Kent chose not to translate such
scenes in his illustrations is revealing of what he
found most compelling in his own reading of Moby
Dick.62 Raymond Bishop’s illustrations for the book,
published by Albert and Boni in 1933, grant more
attention to the collective labour performed by the
ship’s crew, although they are somewhat more
generic in appearance.63 Gripped by the riven and
tortured figure of Ahab, Kent was unable to
visualize the shipboard camaraderie that might
have balanced the ghastly intensity of Ahab’s
obsession. Kent portrays Ahab, as he appears in
Moby Dick itself, alone and isolated, confronting the
universe through no mediating frames except those
of his own monomania, signalled by his piercing and
bulging eyes – the physical attributes of a
world-commanding will. Ahab remakes the world in
the image of his obsession; his prophetic force as a
figure of modernity is the manner in which he
commands a Promethean power to overcome the
gravity field of other egos through the sheer
magnitude of his personality. Melville, Kent and
James all grasped the implications of this form of
authoritarian individualism: the peculiar
charismatic power that Ahab exercises over those
on board, collapsing world into self through the
voiding of agency among those around him. Yet
Kent’s focus on Ahab, and his debilitating and
disempowering impact on his crew, reveals an
attraction that balances the repellant power of
Ahab’s monomania. The seeds of this attraction are
in Melville’s text itself; Melville’s Ahab is at once

461
commandingly godlike and demonic. Melville’s
anatomy of the doubled Promethean impulse is the
thrust of chapter 94, ‘The Chart’. This symbolic
duality – both godlike and godless – is evident in
Kent’s treatment of Ahab, and indeed in his own
Luciferean pencil self-portrait of 1934. Kent’s
emblematic image of calipers measuring the globe
that concludes the chapter captures these
interlocking contraries. Evoking William Blake’s
image of Urizen as the god creator, the image
associates this with Ahab’s blasphemous thirst for
mastery of the natural world. Kent graphically
imagined Ahab’s madness in a vocabulary of stark
skull-like imagery, bulging eyes and contorted
features. Indeed, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and
Songs of Experience frames the three-volume
Lakeside Press edition of Moby Dick, from the
opening image of a youth with arm extended as he
gazes out (frontispiece to volume one), to the final
stylized image of a figure plummeting to darkness,
Icarus-like (title page of volume three).
For Kent, the autonomous self was the primary
force of resistance against the enslaving regimens
of industry and of mechanized forms of labour.64 An
essay by his friend Carl Zigrosser reveals this
charismatic quality in the make-up of Kent, about
whom he wrote that, ‘He might have been and may
still become a great leader of men through his
personal magnetism, his adherence to principles
and his unquenchable personal vitality.’ Zigrosser
pondered ‘through what arduous self-discipline
[Kent] achieved such mastery over himself …
Perhaps it was because from birth onwards, he has
never allowed any challenge to his will to remain
unanswered.’ Zigrosser goes on to describe Kent in
terms that recall eugenic discourse in the decades

462
between the wars.65 Kent – seen through
Zigrosser’s eyes, emerges as the very type of the
ubermensch. His public persona spoke to modernist
fears of enervation and degeneracy. Kent admired
Nietzsche, producing a series of drawings of Thus
Spake Zarathustra, and engraving a motto in
German from the book onto his fountain pen.66 He
shared with Alfred Stieglitz and Marsden Hartley a
deep attachment to German culture and history that
placed him under suspicion in the First World War,
along with shared racial biases against ‘French
degeneracy’.67 Also in common with Stieglitz and
Hartley, he expressed moments of aristocratic
disdain for democracy, as when he wrote to
Zigrosser in 1919, ‘I don’t like today.… I don’t like
our Democracy which appears to me more and more
clearly as the last word in brute tyranny.’ And like
others similarly formed, Kent expressed a
selfardour bordering on the messianic: ‘I begin to
be conscious of power – of an absolute power
unrelated to anything else in the world. I begin to
see a purpose to it all … and to believe profoundly
in my own destiny, but with a kind of wonder why it
happens to be I who has been chosen to carry on for
a while the cloud-hidden ideals of the race.’68 He
fantasized a complete withdrawal from the present,
fencing himself against intrusion to turn ‘to eternity
and the Cosmos … within’.69 Energized by his trip
to Alaska in 1919, he rose to dithyrambic heights: ‘I
want to paint the rhythm of eternity.’70 Kent the
socialist appears in such moments to be deeply
divided in his loyalties, contemptuous of those weak
enough to be followers, and yet seduced by the
power to dominate, and by the charismatic force of
his own personality.

463
Such a reading places Kent in strange company
with the spiritual godmother of libertarianism Ayn
Rand, and her character from The Fountainhead,
Howard Roark. In these years, Ben Duggar linked
Kent and Frank Lloyd Wright – who inspired the
figure of Roark – as sharing much ‘in spirit, in
philosophy’. Kent, like Wright and Roark, was
trained as an architect. All three figures – real life
and fictional – were given to self-mythologizing;
each was marked by sententious pronouncements,
truculently principled stances, and an unflinching
sense of purpose. And finally, all three shared
elements of what Meyer Schapiro would call – in a
review of a book by Wright in 1935 – a ‘theogonic’
form of self-mystification. Reasserting the hierarchy
of individual over mass, the theogonic elevated the
creative self to a position of central authority, and
in doing so bucked all forms of authority beyond the
self – a type of ‘anti-authoritarian individualism’
with which Kent’s biographers associated him. Kent
saw history through the lens of his own personality
and as the product of individual actors.
Lacking in his repertoire of wood engravings is any
developed sphere of the social. His Blakean figural
language featured low horizons, colossal figures
looming above the landscape, grand vistas of
mountains and starry heavens. In this symbolic
world, the human element assumed cosmic
dimensions.71 His lifelong friend Zigrosser wrote of
Kent that, ‘Man is the hero of most of his pictures.…
He stands almost alone in his use of symbolism
among the artists of today.’72 Kent’s subject,
however, was not man as social actor but man in his
most eternal and epic form, remote from the
developmental challenges presented by the social
realm. Reading Kent’s Ahab through the lens of

464
Nietzsche counterbalances James’s reading of the
totalitarian bent of Ahab with a different if
complementary understanding: a man, not unlike
Kent himself, who was intent on remaking the world
in his own image by overcoming the constraints
imposed on him by nature.
Kent recorded his own theogonic moments, as when
he ‘had stood in spots where I have known that I
was the first white man who had ever seen that
country, that I was the supreme consciousness that
came to it. I have liked the thought that maybe
there was no existence but in consciousness and
that I was in a sense the creator of that place.’73
Kent’s robust self-mythologizing – and his theogonic
attitude towards a nature he created out of his own
form-giving powers – sat uneasily with his social
dedication to unionization and collective action on
behalf of the newly formed artists’ groups of the
1930s. Poised between his socialist commitments
and his individualistic mythos, Kent was, all
unknowingly, drawn to the authoritarian elements
always embedded as a possibility within the
double-edged figure of American monomania – a
self-guided god-dethroning energy with the power
to usurp and mobilize the democratic masses.
Zigrosser framed the tragic dimension of Kent’s
world in Nietszchean terms: ‘Man in all this mental
struggle has … come to the very end of his own
resources. He has discovered that he can not fly at
will into the universal, but is bound down to earth
by the limitation of his senses. It is a tragic but at
the same time an heroic conception.’74
By the 1950s, however, the contrary terms that had
occupied, sometimes uncomfortably, the same
ground in the 1930s would become starkly

465
polarized. The theogone-cum-master of the universe
embodied in such charismatic public figures as
Wright and Kent were now arrayed in very different
colours, filtered through the language of
totalitarianism, of master and slave, of autonomy
and domination. Such terms expanded in the 1950s
across a broad spectrum, from the liberationist
radicalism of James – deeply anti-Stalinist and
dedicating his energies to anti-colonial movements –
to the virulently right-wing anti-communism of the
US under McCarthy.
Seeping into James’s characterization of Ahab, the
anti-totalitarian rhetoric of tyrants, masters and
slaves was turned, in one instance, against Kent
himself – steadfastly loyal to the Soviet Union.75 In
1950, Max Eastman, former socialist editor turned
rabid anti-communist, published a letter to Kent
asking him to explain his continued
allegiance to the Soviet regime responsible for
disappearing and eliminating thousands of dissident
writers as ‘enemies of the people’. ‘I keep trying to
think of excuses for you. Is it perhaps just a zeal to
be “radical,” to be against the capitalist as of old,
that constrains you to play the lackey to an infinitely
more dreadful tyrant?… Is it necessary … to adore,
to bend your knees to a Lord and Master after
all?’76 Rising to a zealous pitch of condemnation,
Eastman invoked the ‘enslavement of men’s minds
and bodies to a tyrant’, asking rhetorically what
unanalysed ‘demon in the Zeitgeist’ was pushing
Kent to such suicidal actions, in a manner that
brings to mind Ahab’s self-destructive pursuit of the
phantasmal white whale.77
Kent’s contradictory behaviour and crossed
loyalties are unusual only in bringing together in

466
one individual the range of sympathies and
conflicted allegiances that characterized the 1930s
more broadly. Both a socialist and a profoundly
self-driven individualist, his career exposes
fundamental tensions in the collectivism of the
1930s: between democracy and the individual; over
the role of singular charismatic figures in mass
movements; and concerning the place of personality
as both a model of social redemption and a force
capable of capsizing mass movements through a
dangerously commanding self-obsession. Neglecting
the communitarian ethos just coming into focus in
the early years of the 1930s, and emphasized in
James’s 1953 book on Moby Dick, Kent’s Ahab
captured a different dimension of the novel with
prophetic power: the maniacal force of an
ego-driven madman who would remake the world in
his own image. Ahab’s charismatic force in bending
the shipboard community to his will substituted a
cult of personality for democratic communal action.
Complicating Kent’s own moral and political stance
towards the authoritarian personality embodied in
Ahab was the extent to which he shared aspects of
Ahab’s overweening will and egoistic projections
onto nature. Impelled by desires for mastery – over
his own weaknesses and over those who would
compromise or hedge Kent’s unyielding nature, he
may have been, like Milton, ‘of the Devil’s party
without knowing it’, drawn to the very qualities of
Ahab that fascinated C. L. R. James while provoking
his unambiguous political condemnation.78 James
the anti-Stalinist and Kent – loyally pro-Soviet until
the end of his life – each found in the figure of Ahab
a cipher of the present. But Kent, unable to wrest
himself free of his own self-mythologizing,
unwittingly retraced the apotheosis of the individual

467
that was, for James, the fatal force threatening his
world.
1 Clifton Fadiman, ‘Introduction’, in Herman Melville, Moby Dick; or, The
Whale (Heritage Press: New York, 1943), p. v.

2 Lakeside Press of R. R. Donnelly and Sons published a deluxe edition

priced at $70.00, one of four illustrated American classics. The other
three in the series were Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales; Henry David
Thoreau’s Walden; and Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the
Mast. On the commission, see David Traxel, An American Saga: The
Life and Times of Rockwell Kent (Harper and Row: New York, 1980),
pp. 159, 166. The Modern Library and Random House both published a
concurrent edition with 283 illustrations, a Book-of-the-Month Club
selection.

3 Thayer Papers, Archives of American Art, quoted in Constance Martin,

Distant Shores: The Odyssey of Rockwell Kent (Chameleon Books Inc.:
Berkeley, California, 2000), p. 12; Rockwell Kent, Voyaging: Southward
from the Strait of Magellan (G. P. Putnam’s Sons and Knickerbocker
Press: New York and London, 1924), p. 24, quoted in Martin, Distant
Shores, op. cit., p. 17; Jake Milgram Wien, Rockwell Kent: The Mythic
and the
Modern (Hudson Hills Press: Manchester and New York, 2005), p. 15.
See also Alan Wallach, ‘Rockwell Kent’, Arts Magazine, vol. 54, no. 2
(October 1979), on Kent’s mythic landscapes, with their ‘calculated
formality and deliberate emotional distance’, resulting in ‘a stylized and
objective quality’ quite distinct from the expressionist language that
runs through a different current of American art.

4 Bennett Cerf, At Random, as cited in Wien, Rockwell Kent, op. cit., p.

105.

5 Quoted in Elizabeth A. Schultz, Unpainted to the Last: Moby Dick and

Twentieth-Century American Art (University of Kansas: Lawrence,
1995), p. 27.

6 I am most grateful to Jamie L. Jones for sharing her chapter ‘The Black
Arts and the White Whale: Rockwell Kent’s Illustrations for Moby Dick’,
from ‘American Whaling in Culture and Memory, 1820–1930’,
unpublished PhD thesis (Program in the History of American
Civilization, Harvard University, 2011).

7 Jones argues that American publishing in the 1920s deployed these

older media – especially in the ‘American Classic’ series initiated by
Lakeside Press – in a retrospective spirit.

468
8 A characteristic endeavour was the ‘Retrospective Exhibition of
American Art’ in 1921, including some six hundred works of visual art,
dating from 1689 up to the present. This was purportedly the first such
retrospective ever given to American art, an overlooked moment of
cultural self-construction that opened the way for many more such
exhibitions featuring a range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century arts,
as well as for the grand inventories of the Federal Art Project (Index of
American Design). See Wien, Rockwell Kent, op cit., p. 61.

9 Quoted in Schultz, Unpainted to the Last, op cit., p. 28.

10 In a letter to William Kittredge, 11 November 1926, quoted in Wien,

Rockwell Kent, op. cit., p. 134.

11 Rockwell Kent, How I Make a Woodcut, from the series Enjoy Your
Museum (Esto Publishing Company: Pasadena, 1934).

12 Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville (Literary Guild of America: New York,

1929), p. 160.

13 This more nuanced reading is already apparent in Clifton Fadiman’s

1943 commentary, in which he uses such terms as ‘chiaroscuro’: ‘the
symbolic values of the book are not allegorically plain, as in The
Pilgrim’s Progress’. Fadiman, ‘Introduction’, op. cit., p. ix.

14 See Wien, Rockwell Kent, op. cit., p. 50.

15 Mumford, Herman Melville, op. cit., p. 161.

16 Nick Selby (ed.), Herman Melville: Moby Dick (Columbia University

Press: New York, 1998), pp. 8, 15.

17 D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (T. Seltzer:

New York, 1923/1973), p. 153.

18 Ibid., p. 145.

19 Ibid., pp. 160, 159, 146.

20 Mumford, Herman Melville, op. cit., p. 181.

21 Ibid., p. 171.

22 Ibid., pp. 4, 5.

23 Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature and William Carlos

Williams’s In the American Grain are among the best known and most
probing of these efforts, although they point in quite different directions.
In 1943, Clifton Fadiman identified the adventurous readers of Moby

469
 Dick in the twentieth century as the ‘lucky Balboas and Columbuses
who … rediscovered its Pacific rhythms and Atlantic rages’. Fadiman,
‘Introduction’, op. cit., p. v.

24 Allegory reads surface narrative or meaning in relation to a deeper

subtextual meaning that is stable and contains the key that unlocks
whatever internal significance resides in the surface. Surface and depth
in allegory are hierarchically arranged as levels of truth; the manner in
which surface and depth mutually animate one another in symbolist
modes of meaning is flattened out in this more emblematic expression.

25 That Melville was aware of Ahab’s symbolic castration and its effects
on Ahab is evident from the chapter ‘Ahab’s Leg’, in which he writes
that ‘Ahab did at times give careful heed to the condition of that dead
bone upon which he partly stood.’

26 ‘Ahab, Fallen in Nantucket’, in chapter 106, ‘Ahab’s Leg’, vol. 3, p. 122.

27 Schultz, Unpainted to the Last, op. cit., p. 32, gives a similar, though
less explicit, reading of this image.

28 Typical of this self-mythologizing is this from Wilderness: ‘We came to

this new land, a boy and a man, entirely on a dreamer’s search; having
had vision of a Northern Paradise, we came to find it.’ Rockwell Kent,
Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska (Wesleyan
University Press and University Press of New England: Hanover, New
Hampshire, and London, 1996), p. 3.

29 According to Michele Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of

Art (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1995), p. 245, Kent joined
the Socialist Party in 1904. See Traxel, An American Saga, op. cit., p.
43. See also Frances Pohl, ‘Rockwell Kent and the Vermont Marble
Workers’ Strike’, Archives of American Art Journal, vol. 29 (1989), pp.
150–60; and Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams (eds.), Artists Against
War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress
(Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, 1986).

30 See Rockwell Kent, published by the American Artists’ Group in 1945.

31 In 1952, Kent would write to a correspondant that he ‘had the honor of

having introduced Melville to the Soviet people’. Traxel, American
Saga, op. cit., p. 206.

32 Kent’s contempt for the working classes was phrased in Nietzschean

rhetoric of ‘slavish self-abasement’; see Traxel, American Saga, op. cit.
p. 176; Alan Wallach, ‘Rockwell Kent’, op. cit., p. 15, recalls hearing

470
 Kent in his later years making a speech ‘which had as its theme, and
frequent refrain, “Thank God for the Soviet Union!”’

33 See Arthur Sabin, Red Scare in Court: New York Versus the
International Workers Order (University of Pennsylvania Press:
Philadelphia, 1993), p. 253.

34 Kent apparently wished to join the party but was advised against it on
the grounds that he was more valuable working outside the party
(presumably because his membership might erode his appeal to a
broad public). Personal correspondance with Andrew Hemingway.

35 Rockwell Kent, It’s Me, O Lord: The Autobiography of Rockwell Kent

(Da Capo Press: New York, 1955).

36 Kent’s cultural notoriety in the decades between the wars was

nourished by the books he published of his exploits in the arctic and
subarctic wilderness, and his daily exposure to danger. These
published adventures in turn promoted other artistic enterprises in such
widely varied spheres
as advertising, lecturing, political activism and fine-arts exhibitions.
Small wonder then that Kent – apparently without any saving irony –
would incorporate himself, becoming a marketable entity in which the
strands of charismatic personality, a recognizable and easily imitated
style, and wilderness adventure would conjoin in a self-reinforcing
product: ‘Rockwell Kent, Inc.’ See Merle Armitage, Rockwell Kent
(Alfred Knopf: New York, 1932), p. 4.

37 Carl Zigrosser, ‘Rockwell Kent’, Print Collector’s Quarterly, 25 April

1938, p. 141.

38 Jamie L. Jones notes one other striking affinity associating Kent with
Ahab, in her chapter on Kent’s illustrations of Moby Dick: writing about
the illustration at the head of chapter 36 (‘The Quarter-Deck’, vol. 1, p.
236), she notes the manner in which Ahab’s ivory leg cuts into the
deck, like an engraving tool: ‘This image … offer(s) a strong
characterization of Ahab that concisely links the mad captain with his
navigational powers and with Kent’s own woodcutting practice.’ Jones,
‘The Black Arts and the White Whale: Rockwell Kent’s Illustrations for
Moby Dick’, op. cit., pp. 5–6.

39 His biographer Merle Armitage referred, for instance, to ‘the suffocating

effects of our lip-stick civilization’. Armitage, Rockwell Kent, op. cit., p.
42.

471
40 See Christopher Wilk, Modernism: Designing a New World: 1914–1939
(V & A Publications: London, 2006); Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies
(University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1987).

41 Armitage, Rockwell Kent, op. cit., p. 24.

42 The phrase is from C. L. R. James, from Mariners, Renegades, and

Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In
(Bewick Editions: Detroit, 1978), p. 55.

43 Stark Young, ‘The World of Rockwell Kent’, New Republic, vol. 50, no.
648 (4 May 1927), p. 302. This view was echoed in a passage quoted
by Armitage, Rockwell Kent, op. cit., p. 41: ‘Everything is done by pure
intention and perfect values and no dependence for effect is placed
upon accidents or surface appearance of paint.’

44 Kent’s commitment to the craft of wood engraving was acknowledged

as unusual – a quality that – ‘much out of fashion’ and ‘reactionary’ –
marked his departure from the spurious effects of ‘broken color,
exaggerated impasto’, and ‘surface appearance’ that marked the
school of Paris with which Kent was favourably compared by his
defenders. Merle, Rockwell Kent, op. cit., p. 41. In addition, Kent
rejected the modern hierarchy of the arts, blurring the lines between
printmaking, fine arts and advertising. He drew a distinction, however,
between artists working in advertising while maintaining their
autonomy, and artists doing commercial art entirely driven by the needs
of the patron. See Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art,
op. cit., pp. 243–55; also ‘There is no such thing as commercial art: A
letter from Rockwell Kent’, Professional Art Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 4
(Summer 1936), pp. 6–7.

45 This is most apparent in chapter 87, ‘The Grand Armada’.

46 James was not alone in associating Ahab with Hitler; Fadiman,

‘Introduction’, op. cit., p. vi, indirectly linked them as well.

47 James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, op. cit., p. 8.

48 James’s most explicit statement of this theme is in Mariners,

Renegades, and Castaways, op. cit., p. 60, in which he identified
Melville’s primary theme as ‘how the society of free individualism would
give birth to totalitarianism’.

49 See here Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural

Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and
Lewis Mumford (University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1990).

50 James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, op. cit., pp. 71, 53.

472
51 Ibid., p. 8.

52 Ibid., p. 50.

53 Ibid., pp. 10, 31.

54 Ibid., pp. 5, 12.

55 Here however it should be pointed out that James’s vision of

collectivism exceeded that of Melville himself; the crew of the Pequod
in truth is fully implicated in Ahab’s maniacal quest, drawn – with the
exception of Starbuck – into his obsessive vision by the sheer force of
magnetic personality.

56 James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, op. cit., pp. 19–20, 32.

57 The phrase is Stuart Davis’s in ‘The New York American Scene in Art’,
Art Front, February 1935.

58 One possible reason for the virtual absence of scenes of the crew is
that the full-page illustrations were vertical in orientation, making it quite
challenging to conceive a composition of multiple figures that would fit
the format.

59 See for instance ‘Knights and Squires’, p. 171; ‘Dusk’, p. 244; ‘The First
Lowering’, p. 325; and ‘The Spirit Spout’, p. 339.

60 The theme of Narcissus in Kent’s work is interesting in this regard. See

his wood engraving ‘Forest Pool’, which reprises the Narcissus theme.

61 ‘I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and
I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it,
mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding,
affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last
I was continually squeezing their hands and looking up into their eyes
sentimentally … let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us
squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of
kindness.’ On the ambiguity of Kent’s version of Ahab, see Schultz,
Unpainted to the Last, op. cit., p. 35.

62 Kent served as president of the International Workers Order (IWO),

founded in 1930, a multinational federation formed out of immigrant
Jewish subcultures to serve the mutual aid and insurance needs of
workers, and comprised of communists and socialists. He would
articulate a vision of multiculturalism at the heart of the IWO: ‘more like
a tapestry, woven of brilliant colored threads, every one of which can
be distinguished and keep its own characteristics’. Given these
sympathies, and his own argument with the melting-pot vision of

473
 American assimilation, it is noteworthy that Kent did not pick up on the
theme in Moby Dick, to which James had responded so forcefully two
decades later. The quote appears in Sabin, Red Scare in Court, op. cit.,
p. 252; on Kent and the IWO, see Sabin, pp. 249–66 and passim.

63 See for instance ‘Men at Try-Works’.

64 On Kent’s frontier mythos, see Wallach, ‘Rockwell Kent’, op. cit.; also
Kent, Wilderness, op. cit.: ‘To sail uncharted waters and follow virgin
shores – what a life for men!’

65 In Zigrosser’s words, Kent was impatient ‘with weakness, sickness, and

the neurotic temperament in general. Enjoying superb health and
vitality, he cannot understand a state of sickness. Having disciplined his
faculties to the control of will, he cannot tolerate vacillation or
irresolution.… His
is a highly objectified art, clean, athletic, sometimes almost austere and
cold.’ Zigrosser, ‘Rockwell Kent’, op. cit., p. 151.

66 ‘Zarathustra and his Playmates’ (1919: brush and ink, Morgan Library);
Kent also had Wagnerian moments, as when he described the northern
lights of Greenland as like ‘a glorified Isolde’s veil; and where the
breath of her desire touched it, it grew hot and bright’ (Salamina).
Armitage, Rockwell Kent, op. cit., p. 44, humorously imagined his
ascension to Valhalla. On the enormous impact of Nietzsche in the US,
see Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche: A History of an
Icon and His Ideas (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2012). The
book traces the scope of Nietzsche’s reception, which spanned the
political spectrum, from Emma Goldman to Ayn Rand.

67 Traxel, An American Saga, op. cit., p. 121.

68 Quoted in ibid., p. 111. Kent’s contempt shaded into eugenic language,

as when he dismissed the ‘physically deformed, slouch-gaited,
dull-eyed, dead-souled’ people he encountered in Vermont. Kent also
invoked ‘knightly ideals’ from the age of chivalry for his children; see
Traxel, An American Saga, op. cit., pp. 124–5.

69 Quoted in ibid., p. 108.

70 Ibid., p. 117.

71 Characteristic of this is his woodcut ‘Workers of the World Unite!’ – a

heroic nearly nude man with a spade lunging out against an unseen
bayoneted army against a toylike industrial backdrop.

72 Zigrosser, ‘Rockwell Kent’, op. cit., p. 151.

474
73 Ibid., p. 149.

74 Ibid., p. 153.

75 This at least is the assertion made by Traxel, An American Saga, op.

cit., p. 178.

76 Max Eastman, ‘An Open Letter to Rockwell Kent’, Plain Talk, vol. 4, no.
7 (April 1950), p. 45.

77 Ibid., p. 41.

78 Melville may also have been of the devil’s party, sharing with Kent
moments of theogonic self-inflation in which he assumed divine
powers. He famously wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne that the secret
motto of Moby Dick was ‘Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in
nomine diaboli!’ My thanks go to David Blake for this connection.

475
WILLIAM MORRIS, ORNAMENT AND
THE COORDINATES OF THE BODY
Caroline Arscott

M ichael Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest that a

periodic surfacing of resistance on the part of
the exploited and oppressed that Marx described
has been replaced with a new form of struggle
requiring new topological metaphors. Pointing out
that Marx deployed the deep image of the mole for
the working class, they propose that this should be
rethought in the globalized world in terms of the
movement of snakes: ‘Well, we suspect that Marx’s
old mole has finally died. It seems to us, in fact, that
in the contemporary passage to Empire, the
structured tunnels of the mole have been replaced
by the infinite undulations of the snake.’1 The
topology is redefined by the lack of depth that has
been codified in postmodern theory, by the abolition
of distance in the digitally connected world, by the
openness of the external reaches of a network that
can always be extended by adding new nodes. The
systematic subterranean dismantling of the system,
invisible until the moment of a sudden wholesale
collapse, is replaced by a network that occupies the
whole surface like a worldwide web.2 The virtuality
of location, however, is twinned to an insistence on
bodily existence: the denizen of Empire is
monstrous due to the continuous shaping pressures
of labour and oppression; it is sheer flesh forever

476
remade by capitalism. To lean on China Miéville’s
version of the potential of the monstrous, we can
interpret Hardt and Negri’s idea of flesh in this
way: the remade can turn to the voluntary
refashioning of the body for their own purposes.3
Every point, every instance of flesh, connects to the
virtual centre, so for Hardt and Negri any struggle
constitutes a challenge to the organization of power
in toto, as well as an expression of the unique
circumstances of the point of subversion: ‘Simply by
focusing their own powers, concentrating their
energies in a tense and compact coil, these
serpentine struggles strike directly at the highest
articulations of imperial order.’4 The new world
order is defined by Hardt and Negri in terms of the
way that power is smoothly diffused. The efforts to
dominate and subjugate move not just horizontally
to the frontiers but establish a hold ‘throughout the
biopolitical latticework of world society’.5 With this,
they see a potential for challenges to the status quo
to arise from the single points caught in the
latticework.
Looking back to the nineteenth century, they see
proletarian and anti-colonial internationalism as
prefiguring and in some sense inventing the
globalization that
they characterize as Empire.6 I, too, will be reading
back to the nineteenth century, somewhat in the
manner that Hardt and Negri reference
nineteenth-century communist internationalism,
and looking at the design work of William Morris as
instances of latticework conceived of in biopolitical
terms – as examples of coiled and distributed power
and agency. The politics of the shallow field of
pattern were Morris’s speciality, always conceived

477
by him in relation to the depth of fleshed-out
nature.
The question that comes to prominence in Hardt
and Negri’s discussion is how a complete system
can yield any opposition. This is their first concern:
where is the point of resistance if there is an
abandonment of classic formulations of ideology in
which truth or science could offer a ground on
which to stand? How is resistance generated if the
‘external standpoint no longer exists’, and rather
than the coercive quelling of difference, the system
maintains itself by ‘an insignificant play of
self-generating and self-regulating equilibria’.7
Their answer is driven by an investment in
energetics as linked to human potential. Drawing on
Deleuze and Guattari, they take the position that
the social arena is a dynamic field, subject to
energy flows. Reimagining this social field as a
muscular biological entity, in terms that challenge
what they see as Deleuze and Guattari’s rather
general presentation of dynamism, they contend
that the living, totalized entity has the capacity to
break out in challenge everywhere and anywhere.8
In taking this discussion back to the latter part of
the nineteenth century, I argue that the biopolitical
latticework was already a political tool, a way of
conceiving of submission and resistance.
Topological metaphors were being explored in
which political possibilities, questions of the
concentration of energies, of affect, desire and
subjectivity, were being presented. The new
topologies of the latter part of the nineteenth
century were biologically based, positing a new kind
of organism viewed in terms of the morphological
potential of flesh subject to the variations produced

478
by natural and artificial selection and the damaging
impact of industrial labour and colonial and
imperial warfare. Physiological aesthetics drew on
evolutionary theory to vest life and identity in a
total organism infiltrated by neural pathways. Mind
and body dualities were set aside as consciousness
was conceived of as dispersed through the mental
apparatus not just of the brain’s grey matter but in
the neural fibres and ganglionic centres. Will in
flesh became a viable concept rather than will as
the controller of despised flesh. In Victorian
physiological aesthetics, the proposal is that the
organism interacts with the environment, receiving
stimuli through the receptor points connected to the
nervous system. Pleasure – associated with effective
vital functions – and pain – associated with damage
or wasting to the biological entity – can be
experienced by the subject. Aesthetic pleasure is
seen as a variant of this reception of stimulus on the
part of the organism.9 Grant Allen, in his
Physiological Aesthetics of 1877, following on from
work by Henry Maudsley, Alexander Bain, Herbert
Spencer and James Sully, focused on the sense
organs, the ‘peripheral end organs of the
cerebro-spinal nervous system’. Indeed, Allen
famously defined aesthetic pleasure as ‘the
subjective concomitant of the normal amount of
activity, not directly connected with the life-serving
function in these peripheral end organs of the
cerebro-spinal system’.10 The passive processing of
sense data is aesthetic pleasure for Allen, and play
or aesthetic production would be the active
equivalent.
Regenia Gagnier has pointed out the emphasis on
consumption in this passive biological model that
was important for the Aesthetic Movement and

479
contrasts it with William Morris’s refutation of art
for art’s sake, his insistence that art should serve a
purpose.11 According to Gagnier, certain modes of
Aestheticism were shaped by the logic of
consumption in commodity culture. She rightly
brackets Morris off from such aspects of
Aestheticism (and, in the latter part of the century,
Decadence).12 In Morris’s view, art was for the
purpose of fulfilled being: art served a crucial
purpose in sustaining and improving life. He
considered it to be sheer deprivation, a vicious
thwarting of natural human response, for there to
be an absence of beauty in our utilitarian objects
and in our surroundings. The pleasures of art are,
for him, directly connected with a life-serving
function and are a fundamental need for human
beings. Additionally, he believed that, along with
necessary access to the pleasures deriving from art,
there was a need for both knowledge about making
and skill in making – in other words, abstract and
practical art and craft education, what he called ‘a
share of knowledge and access to skill of human
hand’.13 We certainly cannot see Morris as fixated
on a notion of the consumption of art as the central
reference point for the aesthetic. Production for
need and artistic production meeting aesthetic
needs form an inescapable corollary to the
enjoyment of art. Nevertheless his position does
overlap with that of the full array of Aestheticist
positions in that he conceives of aesthetic
experience in terms of the activation of the senses
and the processing of sense data. In so far as he
puts the sentient organism to the fore, Morris, like
members of the Aesthetic Movement, draws on the
ideas being developed in physiological aesthetics.
His organism is ready to play, ready to know, ready

480
to make, ready to fight. His aesthetic and social
ideal centres on the healthy organism, active in
supplying its appetites, polymorphous, libidinally
charged, liberated from damaging or tyrannical
inhibitions, and, like Grant Allen’s aesthetic
physical being, open to the extremes of stimulation.
I have argued that the life forms envisaged in his
designs, the twisting plant forms, stand as
representatives of the human subject as social
being, beautiful in itself and engaged in aesthetic
experience.14
Bearing in mind Hardt and Negri’s snakes and
Marx’s mole, we can assess Morris’s designs in
terms of slithering all-overness versus intimations
of systematic tunnelling way below to enable a
once-and-for-all caving in of a falsely integral
surface. In one example of a Morris-designed
printed fabric of 1876, African Marigold [1], the
surging directional movement of the tulip stems in
blue can be looked at to assess Morris’s vision of
the energies, location and temporality of social and
physiological being in
its ideal form, its constitutional vigour enabling
political action. The mutability and expansiveness of
its flesh is the condition of organisms that can and
do evolve. That mutability speaks of the future but
also of the legacy of slavery (bond slavery and wage
slavery) and the industrial deformities of the
present. The biopolitical theme allows Morris to
present utopian and dystopian visions
simultaneously. The assumptions of physiological
aesthetics oblige any vision of pleasure to consider
the experience of pain as well.

481
 1 Morris and Company, African
Marigold, designed by William
Morris, furnishing fabric, 1876.
Victoria and Albert Museum,
London (CIRC.42-1954). Photo:
copyright © 2013 V&A Images. All
Rights Reserved.

Ornament is well suited to plot the bodily and social

coordinates of the decentred individual or the
collective, viewed in terms of interconnected
biological systems and an interdependent ecological
system. Unlike the pictorial, ornament builds on two
axes of the two-dimensional surface by repetition,
potentially ad infinitum. Morris can be said to have
put the proletarian body into ornament and thereby
accessed the utopian
possibilities of this art form. One way of thinking
about this is to think of the Vitruvian theory of

482
ornament – in which ornament originates in the
decoration of triumphal monuments with the
severed body parts of conquered victims – as having
been brought into dialogue with the
nineteenth-century design theory of Gottfried
Semper – in which ornament is seen as the
formalization of the intrinsic craft actions of the
maker, transmitting the structural elements of
textiles or pottery to painted or printed patterns on
the surface.15 Morris puts not just the action but
the body of the maker onto the surface, reversing
the Vitruvian idea to present the recombined
potential victor rather than the disassembled victim.
He makes the design function in the essentially
two-dimensional geometric grid and in the depth of
the forms indicated; the two propositions – that the
design is flat and that the forms have depth and
move through three-dimensional space – are held in
paradoxical opposition in a way that is unique to his
work. The conviction of rude corporeal presence
(and the health and strength, and so beauty, that go
with it) depends on the three-dimensionality of the
motifs in the design. The waxy, somewhat pliable
fleshy petals of the white blooms, each petal
structured with interior grooves and exterior ridges,
occupy space assertively. These are manifestly tulip
flowers. Morris’s choice of plant species is not
always easy to determine, but comparison with a
seventeenth-century Dutch watercolour of tulips
accessioned by the South Kensington Museums in
1876, the year of Morris’s design, allows us to be
sure [2].

483
2 Simon (Pietersz) Verelst, Tulips, watercolour,
after 1668. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
(263-1876). Photo: copyright © 2013 V&A Images.
All Rights Reserved.

In Morris’s rendition, the tulip blooms with their

primitivized stylization are vast, excessive. As the
double ring of petals consists of some that fold
inwards and others outwards, the bulk is magnified.
The petals in the double ring are splayed and rolled
together alternately along the nearest edge of the
larger blooms, the rolling over of the petal serving
to expose the stamens, which command attention
within the design. They are as bright and almost as
large as the African marigold blooms that act as the
counterpoint to the tulips in the design. These
stamens (in botanical terms, the male organs of the

484
plant) rise as plump, apparently swelling,
impossibly smoothly rounded forms, top-heavy on
their flexible stems, clustered together, mutually
touching, potentially moving apart as their
increasing weight outbalances the available
support. For all the challenging tectonic mass of the
tulip blooms, the design shows us accommodation
and curbing. If the maximum point of affect in the
large tulip heads is the stamen as
peripheral-end-organ, a mobile sense receptor, then
an equal charge is available in the smaller tulip
heads at the point where there is a collision with
the surging line of the other stem. The S and
reverse-S of the blue foliage ‘belonging’ to the
smaller tulip slides behind the other stem; but then
at the triumphant point of delivery of the flower
head into the heart of the spiral there is a point of
coincidence with that stem; the petals are forced
back and down, others find a space by placing their
points over the foliage. These instances of
deflection present touch and sensory stimulus as
the stamens do, and in line with 1870s materialist
physiology there is a switching between pleasure
and pain. The deflection is evidence of the energy of
the vectored forces, the velocity and substantiality
of the snakelike stems. In this congested design,
there is a necessity for accommodation: the tulips
cannot occupy the whole space of the spirals’
enclosure; they shift to left or right to give space to
the less doughty marigold.
I wish to draw attention to the reformatting of the
environment in terms of pattern in art of the 1860s
(and beyond) and the importance to this
reformatting of the biological. An early Victorian
naturalistic presentation in which every object and
figure held its place by virtue of its ability to signify

485
moral categories or objective certainty gave way to
one in which the cumulative repetitions of ornament
governed the pictorial field. Morris and
contemporaries such as Christopher Dresser,
William de Morgan and Walter Crane were looking
again at the presentation of the natural world,
coming back to the sixteenth-century ceramics of
Bernard Palissy so admired in the early Victorian
period for the variety of natural form and mimetic
representation that they
offered, and seeing them instead in terms of an
interconnected system offering overall pattern.16
Examples of Palissy ceramics were bought by the
South Kensington Museum in the 1850s and 1860s
in the prime period of Victorian naturalism [3].
In the 1870s it was possible connect with Palissy in
a new way: to picture the snake as is done in a
watercolour by George William Mote [4]. In Mote’s
picture the snake stands both as an area of pattern
and a biological entity, its breathing sentience
indicated by the faintest touch of a grass stalk and
two staring eyes. It is hardly a figure of sin, as
Ruskin, spokesperson for Pre-Raphaelite
naturalism, would have any snake (he called the
snake ‘a divine hieroglyph of the demoniac power of
the earth’).17 The adder’s triangular markings are
displayed as geometric shapes in a neat coil
presenting an orderly area of patterning in amongst
the rocks, fallen leaves and grasses. In paintings of
the 1870s and beyond, subdued mood and
ornamental order take the place of histrionics and
multiplied symbols of natural theology. George
William Mote, gardener-artist employee of the
paper-mad aristocrat Sir Thomas Phillipps, was the
artist who painted this work in 1870.18 His adder is
probably painted from life on the estate at

486
Thirlestaine House. We can imagine that if it moves,
it will encounter not just leaves but scraps of paper
or vellum, given that Phillipps strewed the country
with paper from broken wagons when he moved his
vast collection of documents there in the 1860s. The
information-technology tycoon of his day, he bought
up every available book, manuscript and stray
document available on the market, significantly
distorting the trade in books and in waste paper. I
am offering Mote’s snake as a marker of the ground
level of physiologically embodied aesthetic
subjectivity that depends on an environment in
which repetitive large-scale systems of
accumulation occur. The parallel with a
late-twentieth-century information age is deliberate.

3 Earthenware dish with coloured glazes,

probably by Bernard Palissy. Victoria
and Albert Museum, London
(5476-1859). Photo: copyright © 2013
V&A Images. All Rights Reserved.

487
 4 George William Mote, An Adder,
signed and dated 1870, oil on canvas,
18.4 × 28.6 cm. Maas Gallery, London.

Biology, and in particular evolutionary biology, was

arguably the sphere in which repetition on a vast
scale and the overall results of minute variation
were studied to greatest effect. Lying behind the
formulations of physiological psychology were the
findings of Charles Darwin on evolution. To draw
attention to the forms of biological existence that
Darwin proposed in the 1870s and at the start of
the 1880s, I will refer in particular to the
earthworm study that he produced as his last book:
The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the
Action of Worms (1881).19 This is a book that
explores bodily coordinates, sensibility and systems
of accumulation. The worm is an index of any life
form, and its achievements correspond to the
possibilities inherent in nature, which accumulates
minute changes and out of these produces the
wonders of the natural world. The wonders that the
worm produces are not diversity of form and colour
but the beauty of the smooth and refined. At the end
of the book Darwin says:

488
When we behold a wide, turf-covered expanse, we should
remember that its smoothness, on which so much of its beauty
depends, is mainly due to all the inequalities having been slowly
levelled by worms.20

The levelling is done by the repeated ingestion,

internal grinding and excretion of earth, which
makes it finer and finer. He measures the amount of
earth shifted and refined by worms over periods of
time and establishes the mechanical and chemical
processes whereby they break down the matter that
passes through their bodies. He establishes the
sensitivity of the eyeless worm to touch, vibration
and light with a series of experiments. This
hermaphroditic organism is a primitive life form of
minimal organization capable of moving forwards or
backwards, with a body that grows incrementally as
the segments multiply. The naked, unarmoured
worm, ringed by nerves, is a responsive creature.
Most importantly, Darwin’s earthworms are
credited with a form of subjectivity since he carried
out experiments to show the decision-making
powers of the creatures. He investigated the way
that the worms draw leaves into their burrows, for
food, to provide a cosy lining, and to plug the
entrance as a weather-proofing measure. His
interest in sensory apparatus gives way to a
determination to demonstrate the worms’
decision-making ability. Not just their
responsiveness to sensation but their intelligence is
being asserted, notwithstanding the small size of
the cerebral ganglia, which he acknowledges.21
According to Darwin, they drag different-shaped
leaves into their burrows in different ways; they
adapt the orientation of the leaf to the best way of

489
plugging the entrance; the selection of orientation
is not random.
Darwin tested this by introducing leaflike pieces of
paper into the worms’ environment. Narrow-based
and very narrow-based triangles were cut out of
writing paper and rubbed with animal fat to
waterproof them somewhat. The worms’ interaction
with these objects left traces: dirt is left on the
paper where the worm has covered any part of it
with slime; some more easily removed dirt is to be
seen on the side that dragged along the ground.
Dirty base edges and creases are left on triangles
grabbed and pulled into the burrow from the base.
However, in the surprise result of the experiment,
in the greater number of cases relatively clean
triangles without creases, and without dirty base
edges resulted from the worms’ adoption of the
most advantageous grab-and-pull method whereby
the worm assesses the shape of the triangle and
selects the sharp apex for the sucking grab. This
Darwin takes as evidence of intelligence, careful
decision-making on the part of the worms. He
surmises that the blind worm moves around the
object and touches it repeatedly with its front end,
which Darwin explains serves as a tactile organ.22
The claim for the aesthetic effects of earthworm
activity must be taken along with the account of
their singular subjectivity. Physiological evolutionist
models of biological existence in the 1870s and
1880s offered fresh approaches to the aesthetic
where the body was at the centre, and mental and
psychological processes were considered as aspects
of embodied sensibility. This involved a
reconceptualization of the participation of the
sensible individual in the wider collective, where

490
space and touch and force, accommodation and
cooperation could come to be understood in terms
of the
systemic and incremental. The change produced by
the action of worms is not actually evolutionary, but
it stands as a figure for evolutionary processes and
offers a different presentation of the outcome of
evolution from that which was apparent in Darwin’s
earlier work. Multi-coloured miscellany gives way to
the smooth, ‘wide, turf-covered expanse’. This
placid uniformity is subtended by the intense
physicality of the worldwide population of
constantly labouring worms.
William Morris’s design work was a conscious effort
to envisage a healthy being under new conditions of
life and to recognize the emotional and political
ramifications of change, growth and contestation.
He was interested in living labour and its fleshing
out. He drew on the paradigms of evolutionist
biology and physiological aesthetics to give an
account of politics, the temporality of which does
indeed seem closer to that of constantly slithering
snakes than to the sporadically surfacing mole.
Because this is a vision of a future unfolding of the
commonwealth’s power and beauty, the healthy
flesh is omnipresent, not set in dramatic opposition
to an opposing oppressor. The process of change is
ongoing, though: there is nothing here that is fixed
or inert and the process involves the agonies and
pleasures of growth and movement. Somatic and
psychic investment is amplified, not reduced, in this
utopian vision, and it is through this investment that
the utopian can be seen to carry with it an account
of the cost of political change and the toll levied on
the bodies and minds of the labourers in an
alternative dystopia. Such a dystopia corresponds to

491
the late Victorian present or the continuation of the
present into ever greater deprivation and
provocation.
Hardt and Negri use the embodied labourer as a
way of troubling postmodern theory, where the
world is conceived of solely in terms of information
flow. This puts fleshy depth of productive labour
into the worldwide web. Equally they challenge an
account of the all-embracing, disabling colonization
of somatic being and mental life by the ruling forces
in society, proposing that, while power has indeed
been integrated into the bodies of populations in
this way, the possibility of contestation remains.
Glossing Foucault in order to revise his
presentation, they write: ‘Society, subsumed within
a power that reaches down to the ganglia of the
social structure and its processes of development
reacts like a single body.’23 Their claim is that the
integration of every person through the annexation
and control of somatic and mental processes
relocates the position of social contestation,
potentially, from the margins of the state to the
substantial centre. The invasion of every physique
and mind paradoxically creates a new context in
which contestation is possible.24 This yields
somewhat wishful visions of spontaneous revolt,
which sits with traditions of syndicalism and
anarchism if seen as a programme for political
organization. But it also represents the ongoing
activity of living labour, wormlike, breaking down
the fixed territorializing structures attendant on the
accumulation of dead labour.25 There is an analogy
between the topologies explored in Hardt and
Negri’s ‘omniversal’ and
Morris’s vision of the commonweal: in both cases,
there is a thickening of the web by the insistence on

492
laborious, fleshy presence. To be aware of this
analogy is to suggest another way of reading their
work and the biopolitical lattice that they describe,
as a dystopian-utopian meditation on power and
potential.
This essay is based on a paper delivered at Historical Materialism
Conference, London, November 2009; my thanks to Steve Edwards for
inviting me to participate in the session on ‘Utopias, Dystopias and
Socialist Biopolitics’.

1 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press:

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000), p. 57.

2 Karl Marx drew on the idea of the mole a number of times. In a letter of
1858, it is a figure for the undermining effects of unsustainable
economic arrangements: ‘From a paper which recently appeared in the
Moniteur it transpires that, if compared with 1855 and ’56, the stored up
commodities in the French customs entrepôts are enormous, while the
Economist’s correspondent declares outright that Bonaparte caused
the Bank to make advances on the same and thus enabled their
holders to return them. But with the approach of spring they will
inevitably be thrown on the market, and then, there is no doubt, there
will be a crash in France, answered by crashes in Belgium, Holland,
Rhenish Prussia, etc./ In Italy the economic situation is truly frightful.…
Taken all in all, the crisis has been burrowing away like the good old
mole it is. Salut. Your K. M.’ Marx-Engels Correspondence 1858, Karl
Marx to Friedrich Engels, 22 February 1858, <http://www.marxists.org/
archive/marx/works/1858/letters/58_02_22a.htm>, accessed 22 March
2013.

3 China Miéville envisages a category of people or creatures remade by

the punitive state in his Bas-Lag series of novels: Perdido Street
Station (2000), The Scar (2002), Iron Council (2004).

4 Hardt and Negri, Empire, op. cit., p. 58.

5 Ibid., p. 41.

6 Ibid., p. 51.

7 Ibid., p. 34.

8 Ibid., p. 28.

493
9 See Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth
Century (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1970); Edwin Clarke and L. S.
Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts
(University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987); and
Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880
(Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2000).

10 Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics (Henry S. King: London, 1877), p.

34.

11 Regenia Gagnier, The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and

Aesthetics in Market Society (University of Chicago Press: Chicago,
2000), p. 137. See also Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace:
Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford University Press:
Stanford, 1986).

12 Regenia Gagnier assigns Morris to a category of ‘practical Aesthetes’

along with Ruskin and Wilde, whom she distinguishes from the
Decadents.

13 William Morris, ‘How We Live and How We Might Live’, 1884.

14 Caroline Arscott, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings

(Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2008).

15 Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, The Architecture: In Ten Books (c. 15 BC),

trans. Joseph Gwilt (Priestley and Weale: London, 1826), Book One,
pp. 4–5; Harry Francis Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper: Architect of the
Nineteenth Century (Yale University Press: New Haven and London,
1996), chapter 4, ‘The Zurich Years 1855–69’.

16 Fiona McCarthy, A History of British Design 1830–1970 (George Allen

and Unwin: London, 1970; 2nd edn, 1979); Stefan Muthesius, The
Poetic Home: Designing the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Interior
(Thames & Hudson: London, 2009).

17 John Ruskin, The Queen of the Air, II (1869), ‘Athena Keramitis

(Athena in the Earth)’ (George Allen: Orpington, 1883), p. 88.

18 Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792–1872) was a compulsive collector of books

and manuscripts, buying secondhand material and job lots of papers.
His collection included 40,000 books and 60,000 manuscripts. In 1863,
he moved from Middle Hill near Broadway (Worcestershire) to
Thirlestaine House, Cheltenham, and required over a hundred wagons
to move his vast collections. When several of the wagons foundered in
the process, papers were scattered; the countryside was said to be
littered with scraps of paper for years. Sir Thomas Phillipps: Portrait of

494
 a Collector, exhibition held at Grolier Club, New York, 1972 (no
catalogue). See The Middle Hill Press: A Checklist of the Horblit
Collection of Books, Tracts, Leaflets, and Broadsides Printed by Sir
Thomas Phillipps at His Press at Middle Hill, Or Elsewhere to His
Order, Now in the Library of the Grolier Club (Grolier Club: New York,
1997). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
<http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22143>, accessed 27 March
2013.

19 Charles Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action

of Worms (1881) (Appleton: New York, 1882). In this book, Darwin
came back to observations he had published early in his career in a
paper for the Geological Society in 1837 and an article for the
Gardeners’ Chronicle in 1844.

20 Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, op. cit., p. 313.

21 He introduces, as a point of comparison, the worker ant.

22 ‘When a worm first comes out of its burrow, it generally moves the
much extended anterior extremity of its body from side to side in all
directions, apparently as an organ of touch’, Darwin, The Formation of
Vegetable Mould, op. cit., p. 28.

23 Hardt and Negri, Empire, op. cit., p. 24.

24 This, the ‘paradox of power’ is that of a new context attendant on the

invasion of every physique and mind: ‘a new context, a new milieu of
maximum plurality and uncontainable singularisation – a milieu of the
event’, ibid., p. 25.

25 ‘As it contests the dead labour accumulated against it, living labour
always seeks to break the fixed territorialising structures, the national
organisations, and the political figures that keep it prisoner. With the
force of living labour, its restless activity, and its deterritorialising desire,
this process of rupture throws open all the windows of history’, ibid.,
p.52.

495
MARXIST THEORY IN PRACTICE
LANDSCAPE, CLASS AND IDEOLOGY

496
MARXISM AND THE
SHAPING OF
MODERNISM
MARXISM IN A NEW WORLD ORDER

497
‘RED HASHAR’
LOUIS LOZOWICK’S LITHOGRAPHS OF SOVIET
TAJIKISTAN
Barnaby Haran

I n April 1931, Louis Lozowick travelled to the new

republic of Tajikistan in Central Asia, the lone
visual artist among a group from the International
Union of Revolutionary Writers (hereafter IURW).1
During his stay in the country, he made sketchbook
drawings that he subsequently developed into
lithographs, which appeared in magazines and
exhibitions over the next few years, constituting a
portfolio of images of sovietization in action at the
peripheries of the Soviet Union.2 His travelling
companions formed a ‘Writers Brigade’ that
included the veteran Austrian journalist Egon Erwin
Kisch, the Frenchman Paul Vaillant-Couturier,
editor of the communist newspaper L’Humanité, the
Polish modernist writer Bruno Jasieński, the
Norwegian journalist Otto Liuhn, and Joshua Kunitz,
a fellow American and an editor of the magazine
New Masses.3 A revolving cast of Communist Party
officials guided the travellers eastwards through the
steppes towards Central Asia, extolling the marvels
of sovietization in their particular localities in highly
selective itineraries that avoided scenes of hardship
or suppression. The Writers Brigade detailed this
extensive journey in numerous publications that

498
typify the communist subgenre of travel writing by
mixing observation with propagandist affirmation.4
Arriving in the mountainous Tajikistan, the writers
conflated the epic transformations of sovietization
with the rich history and dramatic landscape of the
region. Lozowick enthused in Theatre Arts Monthly:

Here in the pathway of the Sassanian kings, Alexander the Great,

Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane, the radical changes brought by the
Soviet have been greater than in the Soviet Union as a whole: from
the wooden plow and the tiny individual plot to the latest
agricultural machinery and collective farming; from polygamy and
child marriage to complete equality of the sexes.5

Lozowick’s lithographs betray a touristic fascination

with this outer reach of the USSR, and while
purporting to describe sovietization, they idealize
the process and exoticize the setting. These images,
writes Andrew Hemingway, ‘suggest a magical
transformation in a picturesque environment rather
than a desperately poor Muslim region being
wrenched into the twentieth century’.6
Rather than simply detailing sovietization,
Lozowick’s affirmative vignettes are redolent of the
propagandist ritual of ‘red hashar’. Lozowick
explained ‘red hashar’ by describing a procession in
the city of Kurgan Tiube:

Tajiks in colourful costumes, turbans, kerchiefs, astride diminutive

donkeys and all singing in a chorus. Musicians played the drums
and pipes and dancers headed the procession. The riders carried
red flags with inscriptions: ‘Soviet Cotton for Soviet Factories’,
‘Cotton Independence for U.S.S.R.’ etc. The whole thing had the
festive air of a wedding ceremony or a celebration of some holiday.
It was a procession I was to see in all parts of the country, ‘red
hashar’, representing an old Tajik custom of mutual aid, of helping

499
a neighbour behind in his field work; and it was a good illustration
of the way in which the Soviet system utilizes old customs and
institutions by transforming them to meet new needs.7

‘Red hashar’ was a performative representation of

sovietization, a means of reframing potentially
anti-Soviet Tajik traditional culture in a pageant of
collective enterprise. If sovietization indicated the
rapid modernization, collectivization and partial
secularization of a society defined by residual
feudalism, religious dogmatism, rigid gender
hierarchies, and traditionalism in culture, while
bypassing both the development of capitalism and
the revolutionary event, then ‘red hashar’
epitomized the attempt to justify these dramatic
changes through cultural rituals. Insisting upon
harmonious redirection rather than disruption was
crucial because these changes were controversial.
Martha B. Olcott writes:

The Soviet takeover in Central Asia was a political, economic, and

social revolution. The Bolsheviks called for the immediate
nationalization of all land, including the waqf (clerically owned)
lands; an action which threatened the power of the traditional
leaders. The Soviet authorities in Tashkent introduced
anti-religious legislation which outlawed Koran schools and closed
all Shari’a (religious) courts. The social tensions implicit in these
unprecedented actions were exacerbated by the previous isolation
of Central Asia from even the most moderate ideas.8

Olcott explains that the Soviet state aimed to ‘sculpt

its citizenry in an ideal image’.9 Bringing Tajikistan
into pace with the Bolshevik tempo involved the
supplication of the old to the new, and ‘red hashar’
thus connoted obeisance, or enforced cooperation,
to imposed transformations. ‘Red hashar’ licensed
the continuation of traditional pastimes, such as

500
equine sports, to contain Tajiks who might resist
sovietization by joining the Basmachi (a derogatory
term meaning ‘brigands’), a movement that
violently opposed religious, land and gender reform.
‘Red hashar’ therefore balanced precariously
between appeal to cooperation and forcible
insistence.
Lozowick does not represent the Basmachi or any
apparent obstacles to sovietization in his
lithographs, which mark his most directly
pro-communist subject matter. Yet despite the
celebratory tone and consequent ideological
glossing, they repeatedly show disparities between
new and old with mild comic overtones, thus
implying an incongruous nexus of Soviet and Tajik
social orders. This is especially apparent in his
representations of Tajik men, whose opposition to
sovietization often constituted the old violently
rejecting the new. In stylistic terms, his treatment
of the images appears conflicted, mixing together
modernist and outmoded techniques to produce an
unstable but tendentious modernism. Lozowick
mediates between his characteristic spatial
arrangements, developed in the early 1920s in
response to European avant-garde tendencies, and
more traditional modes of description, marking his
greatest adherence to conventional figuration yet
retaining aspects of his prior innovations, as if
seeking a bespoke visual idiom to communicate this
troubled meeting of old and new.

501
 1 Louis Lozowick, Tanks #2, 1929,
lithograph, 37. 3 × 22.7 cm.
Smithsonian American Art Museum,
Museum purchase. Copyright ©
1929 Lee Lozowick.

In some respects, Lozowick’s images are consistent

with a gradual shift in his output from the
schematic depictions of cities and machines with
which he made his name during the previous

502
decade to a politically engaged mode that
emphasized the social determinates of industry and
urbanism [1].10 For Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt
and Barbara Zabel, this turn towards a more literal
and socially contingent mode emphasized the
worker’s role in constructing machines and
buildings to suit the transformations brought by the
Great Depression. In opposition to Marquardt and
Zabel, Hemingway complicates this narrative by
questioning the degree to which Lozowick’s
Precisionist machine aesthetic was essentially an
American version of Constructivism predicated on
technological optimism that gave way to social
realism, and argues that his late 1920s figurative
work was thematically nuanced and formally
complex, borrowing compositionally from radical
formalist photographic perspectives while asserting
the continued importance of graphic art.11 His
representations of New York during this time offer a
vision of an alienated capitalist metropolis that was
more coterminous with the disconcerting ‘magic
realism’ of Neue Sachlichkeit, with its residual faith
in art, than the technophile, propagative ethos of
Constructivism. In 1930, Lozowick wrote a short
article on lithography in which he derided the
polarities of ‘ornamental abstraction’ and
‘photographic actualism’ in favour of a medium that
retained crafted qualities but witnessed the
conversion of three-dimensional form through ‘the
grainy surface of the stone’ into textural and tonal
surfaces, into a post-abstract figurative art.12
Furthermore, lithography as a medium bestrode the
old and the new, with its prior innovativeness now
an outmoded technology, yet suits this curious
hybrid of residual gallery art with a type of visual
travel reporting-cum-propaganda. Superficially, the

503
propagandist agenda underscoring his Tajikistan
images might necessitate an abandonment of such
critical potential, in that sovietized societies were
purportedly non-alienated. Yet in these
juxtapositions of old and new, Lozowick struggles to
represent the Tajik as a worker, and suggests the
alien nature of proletarianism in a hitherto feudal
social order.
Perhaps the Tajikistan images witness Lozowick’s
ambivalent response to the communist debates
about proletarianism at the turn of the 1930s, in
which his work was strongly censured. Indeed, he
was grudgingly caught up in the wave of cultural
proletarianism through his involvement with the
John Reed Clubs and New Masses. In New Masses
in 1929, Pauline Zutringer claimed that Lozowick’s
‘machine art is bourgeois’ because it glorified
capitalist objects at the cost of the proletarian, a
crude argument that he batted away as ‘unsolicited
heroicization of the worker’ in a terse riposte
printed below the article.13 Under the editorship of
Mike Gold, New Masses interpreted the broad
policies of the ‘Third Period line’, which
distinguished communist parties from other leftist
and especially social democratic political
movements, to call for proletarian consciousness in
opposition to a somewhat reductive model of
bourgeois culture. Gold, Kunitz and several
members of the communist milieu travelled to
Kharkov for the Second World Plenum of the
International Bureau of Revolutionary Literature in
November 1930, and found that such proletarianism
was not a rigid cultural policy.14 Nevertheless,
Lozowick made an awkward attempt to validate his
practice in an article entitled ‘Art in the Service of
the Proletariat’ in Literature of the World

504
Revolution in 1931, with an optimistic statement
that revolutionary artists ‘have profited by the
experiments of the last twenty-five years … [and]
utilize the laconic clear-cut precision of certain
younger artists’.15 However, the following year
Anne Elistratova, in International Literature (the
new title of Literature of the World Revolution),
harshly demonized Lozowick’s machine art as a
‘repudiation of the revolutionary class struggle’ in
an extensive critique of New Masses’ riven cultural
policy and ineffectual response to the Depression.
Elistratova provided a more serious version of the
‘machine art is bourgeois’ thesis:

Lozowick depicts the process of production as devoid of

personality and of human traits; the human factor in the class
relations under the system of production escapes the field of his
artistic vision. By showing the might of technique ‘in general’,
outside of its class content, of technique per se, Lozowick falls into
a fetishization of capitalist technique.16

The degree to which this public dressing down in

International Literature influenced Lozowick in his
coeval development of the Tajikistan lithographs is
uncertain, although the almost exclusive focus on
the ‘human factor’ of the citizens of this emergent
republic is telling. Certainly, when the images
appeared in International Literature the following
year, they may have restored some faith in the
political consonance of Lozowick’s art with the
IURW. Paradoxically, having reluctantly measured
his machine art against a confused model of
proletarianism, Lozowick’s Tajikistan images depict
a region where both machines and proletarians
were in short supply, and capitalism was as alien a
concept as communism. Here they encountered a
world

505
far from the proletariat’s industrial metropolitan
locus, and a populace that was not predisposed
towards proletarianism.

2 Louis Lozowick, At the Gates of Pamir, 1932,

lithograph, 13.5 × 25.4 cm. Smithsonian American
Art Museum, Gift of Adele Lozowick. Copyright ©
1932 Lee Lozowick.

The overriding theme of the accounts by the group

was the epic encounter of old and new in a dramatic
environment. Tajikistan is predominantly made up
of the mountainous topography of the Pamir
Highlands, an outgrowth of the Hindu Kush, with a
smaller area of flatlands in the Ferghana Valley
around the capital Dushambe (renamed Stalinabad
in 1931; now Dushanbe). In a New Masses piece of
November 1931, which featured the first
appearance in print of Lozowick’s images, a set of
four loosely rendered sketchbook drawings, Kunitz
writes that Tajikistan ‘is primitive, wild. Here and
there one discovers traces of civilization: now a
green patch of cultivated land rising on a steep
incline – a triumph of human persistence and

506
ingenuity; now an ethereally woven bridge
suspended perilously over the angry, roaring
Dushambe’.17 Although not illustrating this text,
Lozowick’s representation of the precarious ‘Devil’s
Bridge, Tajikistan’ depicts a lone Tajik on a donkey
cautiously progressing over a rickety structure high
above a wild river that curls with an almost rococo
flourish. In Kunitz’s ‘Red Roads in Central Asia’
from the August 1932 issue of Travel, a photograph
of the bridge has a caption citing the structure as
proof of the necessity of modern bridges for road
systems, whereas Lozowick’s image does not have
such purposeful anchorage, but merely displays
aesthetic and touristic delight in this antiquated
scene. In his bucolic lithograph At the Gates of the
Pamir [2], Lozowick shows a Tajik shepherd blithely
guiding his flock along a ridge overlooking
a dazzling mountain panorama in a scene that
strongly invokes romantic landscape paintings (it is
worth noting that following the Tajikistan trip,
Lozowick visited Yosemite National Park, joining a
long lineage of American landscape artists, from
Albert Bierstadt to Ansel Adams, who marvelled at
this paradisiacal environment). Indeed, technical
experimentation is entirely absent in this image, as
if modernism is somehow ill equipped to
communicate the grandeur and timelessness of a
scene where modernity is almost an antithetical
phenomenon. When the image appeared in
International Literature, with the subtitle ‘Taking
Sheep to Pasture’, it perhaps served as contextual
scenery for other images showing sovietization’s
achievements, such as ‘Pioneers Going to School’
and ‘Native Volunteers of the Red Army’. However,
when used to illustrate Kunitz’s ‘Soviet Asia Sings’
in New Masses in April 1935, the lithograph

507
acquired the caption ‘Sheep Collective – Tajikistan’,
which might seem fanciful but is loosely credible,
inasmuch as Vaillant-Couturier describes the party
resting at the mountain collective farm of Kahalla in
the Pamir borders.18 There is, however, a definite
slippage in these images from the narrative of
sovietization into generic Grand Tour wonderment
at Tajikistan’s sublime vistas.
In Free Soviet Tadjikistan, Vaillant-Couturier recalls
a conversation at Tashkent station when a guide
called Marussya warned the embarking party:
‘Beware of romance and the picturesque.’19 As the
written accounts and Lozowick’s images
demonstrate, forsaking romantic, exoticizing tropes
when conveying the particularity of Tajikistan’s
topography was not easy. Such touristic marvelling
at the republic’s natural beauty and atavistic
customs offended the group’s Tajik communist
guide. Kunitz relays that as the car rumbled
through mountain passes, Vaillant-Couturier waxed
lyrical about the passing scenery, thus aggravating
Isai Khodsaiev, a member of the Tajik State
Planning Commission, ‘a veritable dynamo, a typical
Bolshevik’ and an unambiguous champion of the
new.20 Kunitz quotes his plea:

If you ever write about Tadjikistan … please don’t fall into the error
of most of our Russian literary comrades who visit us, don’t
descend to exoticism, don’t become worked up over the
magnificence of chaos … the quaintness of our apparel, the
mystery hidden beyond our women’s paranjas (veils), the charm of
sitting on rugs under shady plane trees and listening to the sweet
monotone of our bards, of drinking green tea from a piala and
eating pilaf with your hands.21

508
Although Kunitz states that he replied that a
smattering of exoticism would enliven the reportage
and might encourage curiosity among American
readers who had scant knowledge of the republic,
he concurs with Khodsaiev’s insistence that the
Writers Brigade should highlight the achievements
of sovietization, such as new irrigation systems,
educational facilities, improvements in sanitations,
advances in cotton farming, numerous inroads
against religious intransigence, and the liberation of
women.22
Lozowick’s lithographs address many of these
details of sovietization, but I will focus primarily on
images that witness the more controversial aspects
– of which the most contentious issue was the
unveiling of Tajik women. Lozowick’s images of
veiled and unveiled women illustrate Kunitz’s 1935
two-part ‘New Women in Old Asia’ article in New
Masses about the liberation of women. Kunitz relays
women’s conditions through the harrowing story of
Khoziat Markulanova, the organizer of a village
Women’s Department, who experienced the forced
wearing of a paranja from childhood and an
unwanted arranged marriage. The new Soviet
authorities facilitated Khoziat’s escape from
effective slavery, and provided her sanctuary and an
education in Tashkent.23 For the Soviets, the
paranja symbolized the status of the Tajik woman as
a chattel, liable to be married before puberty, sold,
swapped, constrained or beaten – a situation
sustained by Adat and Shari’a (common and
religious laws, respectively).24 Gregory J. Mansell
terms Central Asian Muslim women ‘the surrogate
proletariat’ through which ‘intense conflicts could
be engendered in society and leverage provided for
its disintegration and subsequent reconstitution’.25

509
While too cautious to outlaw the paranja for fear of
a mass rebellion, the Soviets launched ‘a campaign
to promote unveiling [that] culminated in the hujum
(onslaught) of 1927, in which thousands of women
tore off and burned their veils in public squares’, a
performative display that heralded reforms for
women and girls such as the banning of polygamy
and marriage under the age of sixteen, and the
granting of equal legal status and divorce rights.26
As Marianne Kemp writes, in reference to
neighbouring Uzbekistan:

Unveiling became a ritual act that had both personal and political
significance for the women who chose to unveil, and who
persuaded others to do so. In these public unveiling shows, identity
with the state was performative, and gender subversion was a
declaration of loyalty to the state and the Communist Party. Of the
many thousands of women who rejected the norms of Central
Asian urban Muslim culture by suddenly revealing their faces in
public, hundreds were murdered between 1927 and 1929. The
unveilings, and the social backlash that unveilings stirred, were the
crucible within which women became Uzbek citizens.27

The origins of these policies lay in the Muslim Jadid

movement, which formed an ‘uneasy collaboration
with the Soviet regime’ and provided the personnel
for the local membership of the Communist Party.28
Adrienne Edgar writes that it is easy to simplify a
Soviet-Central Asian opposition: ‘One should be
careful not to overstate the distinction between
“alien” Soviet rulers and the “indigenous” leaders of
Muslim nation-states. The Soviet state and party
apparatus in Central Asia included indigenous
communists who rhetorically and even
enthusiastically supported female emancipation.’29
However, many aggrieved Tajik men opposed these
measures with extreme violence. Lozowick writes

510
that a husband publicly murdered his actor wife on
stage in Stalinabad, and recounts how, under orders
of Fuzail Maksum, the Basmachi lynched four
unveiled women teachers in Garm.30 If, as Lozowick
notes, such events became subjects for literal
theatrical productions, then the imposed
enlightenment manifested in public unveiling and
its brutal responses were symbolic gestures in a
contest about control, a performative counterpart to
‘red hashar’ that was incipiently divisive.31

511
 3 Louis Lozowick, Woman Unveiled,
Tajikistan, 1932, lithograph, 21 × 14.5
cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum,
Gift of Adele Lozowick. Copyright ©
1932 Lee Lozowick.

For the Writers Brigade, the paranja was the

repulsive emblem of reactionary Tajik tendencies,

512
but despite condemning sexual inequality, their
accounts were disparaging and unsympathetic
towards the veiled women. Vaillant-Couturier wrote
harshly that ‘the moving object which looks like a
shapeless bundle set on a pair of feet is a woman,
wearing her horsehair mask. This woman is the
symbol of resistance to socialism, a perambulating
conception of private property, of stark ignorance
and religious bigotry.’32 He shows no interest in the
agency, identity or even substance of the woman
herself but, like the other writers, conflates the
unpleasant odour of the veil with malign
intransigence against sovietization. In an equally
condemnatory manner, Kunitz discusses veiled
women as ‘strangely amorphous, ghostlike
creatures that glide, silent and mysterious through
the narrowly-winding, deserted alleys of any Central
Asian town or village … these are the women of
Central Asia, vestiges of a remote past, living
corpses eternally imprisoned in their coffins’.33
Lozowick’s Woman in Veil, Tajikistan shows such a
figure, a spectral form consisting of dark shapes
against a forbidding background of a high village on
a mountain with steep, jagged inclines where a goat
stands on a precipice (the figure of the woman is an
adaption of one of the sketches that accompany
Kunitz’s ‘Soviet Tadjikistan’ article, with an added
landscape setting that dramatizes the paranja).
Here Lozowick’s marks are abrasive, with large
areas of shadow contributing to a jarring, ominous
atmosphere.
The counterpoint to this image appears on the
following page of Kunitz’s ‘New Women in Old Asia’
as Woman Unveiled, Tajikistan, and is similarly a
development from a sketchbook drawing featured in
the ‘Soviet Tadjikistan’ article. Whereas Lozowick

513
frames the tiny veiled figure in an eerie scene, the
unveiled women and child dominate an airy and
calm landscape [3]. Here, Lozowick’s smooth,
measured handling shapes an optimistic image of
the Soviet liberation of women. Through unveiling,
the figure becomes embodied as a woman – the act
of revelation gives her both consciousness and
physical substance. Indeed, Kunitz’s statement that
‘it is generally the adventurous, daring, and,
naturally enough rather good-looking woman who
flings aside her paranja’ is indicative of an equation
of enlightenment and natural sexuality in the
Writers Brigade accounts, which often comment
upon the attractiveness of female Party officials.34
Illuminated by dazzling light, this graceful Soviet
Madonna, with delicately drawn features and an
affixed infant, strolls in a serene landscape, where
in the distance a train passes by a modern
conurbation nestled beneath a softly rendered
mountain. If the mountain goat in Woman in Veil,
Tajikistan perhaps symbolizes (male) native
reaction, then here the train heralds the modern
collective equality of
sovietization. Indeed the ‘red train’ was a staple
motif of communist culture (Vaillant-Couturier’s
1922 collection of poems was entitled Trains
Rouges) from the early years of the Bolshevik
Revolution, with its fêted propaganda trains, to
Viktor Turin’s 1929 documentary Turksib about the
construction of the Turkestan–Siberia railway, from
which Tajikistan’s newly built railway line
branched. The ‘red train’ and the enlightened
liberated mother move in symbiotic progress. The
combination of light, space and order presents
sovietization as a cleansing as well as enlightening
process, as if the removal of the odour of the

514
paranja eradicated the murk of mysticism (Kunitz
notes how part of Khoziat’s recuperation involved
the donation of clean clothes and underwear).35 Yet
it is notable that the unveiled woman’s sovietization
manifests in motherhood, and therefore domestic
work, rather than activity in the workplace, and
ultimately proletarian consciousness. She is
perhaps not a fully realized Soviet subject, but a
conduit to, or carrier of, sovietization’s future. If
there is a progression in Lozowick’s lithographs in
Kunitz’s ‘New Women in Old Asia’ from veiled
darkness to unveiled illumination, then the ensuing
image of a ludicrously joyous boy and an unveiled
girl travelling on a donkey entitled Pioneers on Way
to School, Tajikistan (dressed in a similar manner to
the students in Vaillant-Couturier’s photograph of
Samarkand Workers’ Faculty) concludes the
liberation of women from the yoke of tradition and
expresses optimism for both sexes of the next
generation.36
Yet while Tajik women and children could gain
significantly from sovietization, their independence
came at the expense of a traditional Muslim
patriarchy characterized by proverbs such as ‘there
is only one God in this world; [but] for a women
there are two: God and her husband’ or ‘just as the
shepherd may cut the throat of any of his herd’s
sheep, so is the husband entitled to dispose of his
wife’s life’.37 Sovietization catalysed a profound
crisis for the male Tajik, involving a loss of rank,
and restitution was sought with ferocity, often in
the form of violence against women or members of
the regime via the Basmachi, who represented,
alongside restorative political ends and increasingly
unrealistic military aims, a desperate bid to
recapture a lost warrior identity. Lozowick’s images

515
of Tajik men do not use the narrative device of
progressive enlightenment. In the context of
Kunitz’s ‘New Women in Old Asia’, the scenes of
male Tajik culture, which follow the process of
unveiling, juxtapose old and new, suggesting an
encounter of tradition with modernity rather than a
development. Each of these images depicts
traditionally dressed Tajiks men engaging with
facets of sovietization, such as political propaganda,
technology and collectivization.

4 Louis Lozowick, Red Tea House, Tajikistan, 1932,

lithograph, 25.4 × 27.6 cm. Smithsonian American
Art Museum, Gift of Adele Lozowick. Copyright ©
1932 Lee Lozowick.

516
One of the manifestations of ‘red hashar’ in
Tajikistan was the appropriation and redefinition of
existing customs, religious centres and social
forums to instil the alien ideas of the new regime in
the local culture [4]. In Red Tea House, Tajikistan,
Lozowick shows the sovietized version of the
traditional male Tajik meeting centre. He notes that
‘in ancient tea-houses … cloaked and bearded
story-tellers squat cross-legged on
the floor [discussing] industrialization,
collectivization, emancipation of women, liquidation
of illiteracy’.38 As if illuminated by stage lighting,
three men partake of chai while a fourth plucks a
regional string instrument called a dutar beneath a
generic propaganda piece with workers striding
forward holding aloft a torch and a poster of Lenin,
which states ‘Zinda Bod Rohi Lenin’ (meaning ‘Rohi
Lenin for ever!’) in reference to the Tajik town
where Lozowick presumably witnessed this scene.
Like the slogans at the ‘red hashar’ parade, the
Soviet posters permeate sovietization into their
everyday lives. The Tajiks appear placid in their tea
ritual, and comfortably familiar with the posters.
Two of the men, one of whom is a village elder, face
the viewer as if posing for a photograph, and the
passivity of the group contrasts with the striding
Bolsheviks on the wall and Lenin’s focused
expression. Lozowick does not rigidly demarcate
the walls and the floor, and the figures hover in a
spatially
dislocated realm, a transcendent zone of leisure
where traditional music and communist slogans
seemingly coexist in a ‘red hashar’ tableau. Yet the
disparity of Lenin and the marching figures with the
nonchalant tea drinkers is almost comical,

517
indicating two strikingly separate realities more
than a logical relationship.

5 Louis Lozowick, Airport,

Tajikistan, 1932, lithograph,
22 × 18.4 cm. Smithsonian
American Art Museum, Gift of
Adele Lozowick. Copyright ©
1932 Lee Lozowick.

The contrast of sovietization and traditional Tajik

society is more pronounced in Airport, Tajikistan,
where a Soviet aviator cheerfully tinkers with his
plane, amused at a lackadaisical Tajik shading
himself beneath the fuselage, as if the aircraft was
merely an elaborate sun awning [5]. Sitting squat in
profile, his loose attire, turban and beard contrast
with the aviator’s sleek, modern appearance. In the
distance, another Tajik gazes at a large van driving
away from the airfield. The Tajiks seem primitive

518
and passive, as if oblivious to or entranced by
technology, while the aviator looks towards the
viewer to share an affectionate conspiratorial joke.
Kisch’s description of the arrival of Soviet officials
in Dushambe, before the name change to
Stalinabad, matches the jocular tone of Lozowick’s
image: ‘Here the stages of evolution are curiously
jumbled. The airplane, which dropped out of the
clouds and alighted in Dushambe with the members
of the Government, was the first vehicle seen in this
part of the world. There was great astonishment,
but, since birds can fly, why not human beings?’39
Kunitz takes up this theme to describe the
unfamiliarity of Soviet technology in a land where
some of ‘the inhabitants have never seen a wheel.
The story is told that when some bandits saw an
automobile advancing along the recently built road,
they thought it was a devil and, panic-stricken,
scurried off into the mountains’.40 The new
transport technologies brought the Soviet tempo to
Central Asia, but invariably highlighted different
temporalities – Lozowick describes how ‘airplanes
go from Stalinabad both east and west.
Automobiles, busses, trucks whizz by the leisurely
camels and donkeys.’41 If the plane, the train and
the automobile signified sovietization, then few
Tajiks had access to such vehicles but rather
depended on beasts of burden for transport; Kunitz
recalls how the president of Tajikistan referred to
donkeys as ‘our dear little Fords’.42 The Writers
Brigade accounts all cite the airport in Stalinabad,
with its fleet of twenty-eight planes, as a key symbol
of sovietization, alongside the electric power
station, railway station, cinema, restaurants and
City Park.43 Despite these constructions,
photographs support the travellers’ descriptions of

519
the shanty-town qualities of Stalinabad, which was
in a rudimentary phase
of development with basic housing and
44
infrastructure. However, its state of dilapidation
was due – they largely neglect to add – to the Soviet
obliteration of the city in the campaign against the
Basmachi. The name change from Dushambe to
Stalinabad was the symbolic marker of the Soviet
sacking of the city, which was assisted by aerial
bombardment, perhaps even from the plane
depicted by Lozowick.45

6 Louis Lozowick, Collective

Farmer, 1932, lithograph, 17.1
× 15.7 cm. Smithsonian
American Art Museum, Gift of
Adele Lozowick. Copyright ©
1932 Lee Lozowick.

In contrast to these two scenes of leisure, Collective

Farmer shows a working Tajik in command of a

520
machine [6]. He drives a mighty tractor across a
vast field of a collective farm, most likely cultivating
cotton, which was the region’s most valuable crop.
His face registers steely determination for the huge
task of collectivization, underscored by two distant
tractors that mark out the scale of the field. As this
tractor (or ‘full-track crawler’, to be precise) is
steered by belts rather than a wheel, he seems to
control the machine by reins as if riding a horse or
camel. Removed from his customary transport, he
appears incongruous and awkward, and constrained
in the cramped composition, with its photographic
close-up and oblique viewpoint.46 Dominating the
image, the tractor recalls one of Lozowick’s early
‘Machine Ornament’ drawings, witnessing the artist
reviving his machine-aesthetic techniques to convey
the mechanization integral to sovietization. At the
1935 Weyhe Gallery exhibition, the image was
entitled ‘Tractor, Tajikistan’, reflecting the
predominance of the machine. In Central Asia, the
tractor was imbued with significance beyond its
agricultural functions, serving mutual ritual and
practical functions such as providing wedding or
funeral transport (Kisch shows a photograph of a
tractor-drawn funeral).47 The tractor was important
in rationalizing farming, but also showed the
benefits of modernization in a practical way and
was therefore a powerful symbol of sovietization.48
Kunitz wrote that the tractor was the machine that
best communicated the transformative power of the
revolution to the Tajiks: ‘the moment the poor
peasant discovered that working the soil with a
tractor was easier, better, cheaper, faster than
struggling with an omach (primitive plough), he
became excellent potential material for a kolkhoz
(collective farm)’.49 Machine and Tractor Stations

521
were the organizational centres for collectivization
throughout the Soviet Union, providing each
kolkhoz with tractors, repairs, fuel, training and
meetings, and were workplace hubs just as the red
tea houses were leisure forums. Kunitz muses, ‘Is it
surprising that one of the Bolshevik slogans in
Central Asia was “the enemy of the tractor is our
class enemy?”’50 A photograph of a row of tractors
parked outside the Emir’s palace in Bukhara, now
the Machine and Tractor Station of a
cotton-growing collective farm, demonstrates the
potent Soviet symbolism of the tractor.51 The
Basmachi frequently attacked the stations to
undermine sovietization but also as symbolic
targets.
Therefore, the tractor was not a sufficient bulwark
against opponents of sovietization, but a site of the
contest between equine and mechanical cultures.
The Soviets used more momentous means of
ensuring control over Tajikistan. Botakoz
Kassymbekova
recounts that the Soviet authorities engaged in
social engineering in an attempt to secure
collectivization, moving five thousand households
between 1925 and 1928 from Tajik sedentary
groups from the mountainous Pamirs to replace
Uzbek nomadic tribes in the Ferghana Valley. She
writes that ‘human movement was central to the
process of territorial production in early Soviet
Tajikistan: human bodies were being used, quite
literally, to secure and territorialize space’.52 In
other words, the tractor driver in Lozowick’s image
might even be a displaced migrant, grappling with
an alien environment as well as new technological
farming methods and collective organization (due to
minimal roads and long winters when parts of the

522
country were entirely cut off from one another,
there was little internal migration before the
Soviets imposed such demographic movements).
Apart from using forced resettlement to create a
stable farming populace, Kassymbekova argues that
Soviets also sought to guarantee border security
against raids from the Basmachi out of their bases
in neighbouring Afghanistan.
As the accounts by the Writers Brigade relay, the
swansong of the Basmachi coincided with the trip to
Tajikistan, in a revival of violence that persisted
until the capture and execution of the leader
Ibrahim Bek in June 1931 and continued
sporadically until 1934. If the Basmachi were
diminished in size from the Civil War years, then
military sorties led by Maksum and Bek between
1929 and 1931 compensated with ferocity by
destroying railways, burning down collective farms,
attacking Machine and Tractor Stations and
demolishing tractors, and massacring communist
officials, pro-Soviet Tajiks, and women activists and
teachers. The Red Army responded with a
‘scorched-earth campaign’ across Central Asia, and
during 1929 deported 270,000 Turkestanis,
destroyed four cities (Andidzhan, Namangan,
Marghelan and Dushambe), and razed 1,200
villages.53 In April 1931, Bek led a final expedition
of a thousand troops from Afghanistan into
Tajikistan and ‘with all the fury of a jihad, or holy
war … implemented a large-scale programme of
mass terror’.54 The campaign was heralded by
sermonizing from mullahs, and further publicized in
a widely disseminated manifesto that claimed
affiliation with the League of Nations, insisted that
unveiling ‘converted women into prostitutes’,
denounced collectivization and tractors, demonized

523
Soviet rule as ‘satanic’, and concluded that ‘this
treacherous and horrid government deprives
subjects of the rights to be masters of their wives
and property’.55 Despite such targeted propaganda,
Bek failed to gain enough support among a
populace who correctly doubted his chance of
victory against the Red Army, and in June was
arrested and subsequently executed. The Writers
Brigade was camped outside Stalinabad as the
plane transporting the captured leader circled
victoriously over the city.56
The Basmachi mobilized anti-Soviet sentiment by
asserting traditional religious values, gender
relations and property rights, and represented a
violent revival of male warrior culture in the face of
sovietization. Given that the Basmachi had no
uniform, there was no discernible visual
dissimilarity between them and other rural Central
Asians. Vaillant-Couturier recalled seeing a group of
men on a station platform near Tashkent: ‘The first
of the men carried a revolver at the hip, the last a
rifle behind his back. That was all the difference I
could at first detect between them and the five
others.’57 The guard were transporting the
Basmachi prisoners to Stalinabad, most likely for
rehabilitation as proletarians. Vaillant-Couturier
later encountered some apparently successful
examples: ‘These men had fought against socialist
construction. Now they also took part in it as
shock-brigade workers! Communism had raised
these ex-bandits to the dignity of workingmen.’58

524
 7 Louis Lozowick, Border Guards,
1932, lithograph, 26.6 × 18 cm.
Smithsonian American Art Museum,
Gift of Adele Lozowick. Copyright ©
1932 Lee Lozowick.

The government also recruited Tajik men, including

former Basmachi, to guard the borders of
Tajikistan, and these soldiers were known
colloquially as ‘Red Sticks’.59 Charles Shaw notes
that ‘although locals may have joined up with the
Red Army out of a calculus of personal safety, their
willingness to take up arms was celebrated as proof

525
of the congealing of Soviet society’.60 Lozowick’s
lithograph Border Guards, or ‘Native Volunteers of
the Red Army (Tadjikistan)’ (as entitled in the
International Literature suite), shows two Red
Sticks on horseback on a winding mountain track
[7]. The foreground figure has the noble authority of
an equestrian statue on an improvised plinth, a
representational sculpture whose magical presence
marks the border and is analogous to the framing
boulders, being metaphorically tough, durable and
natural in the landscape. His great coat is an
important detail that signifies a uniform, as in all
other respects Basmachi soldiers similarly wore
turbans, rode horses and carried rifles. Despite the
dense rockiness of the backdrop, the image is light
and elegant, due to the predominance of blank
space, the economy of the details, the delicate tonal
modelling and the slightly askew perspective, which
is a schematic ordering that retains the decentring
and angular perspective of his earlier work. The
image is carefully constructed – the protagonist is
mirrored by the second soldier, whose steep
descent conveys the precarious nature of the
environment – and amalgamates his erstwhile
technique of radical spatial realignment with the
iconography, handling and compositional
relationships of more traditional pictorial idioms, as
if seeking a composite argot, a ‘post-Cubist’
picturesque, to connote sovietization’s melding of
old and new.
The figures function as ciphers of the extensive
policing of the Soviet Union’s outer limits for, as
Shaw states, ‘the border was a sacred space in
Soviet culture’.61 The authorities needed local
volunteers with specialist knowledge of the area but
also reliability and loyalty, a tricky balance that

526
nominally depended on cooperation but in practice
was guaranteed by money or coercion. Shaw writes
that ‘the Soviet border project was unusually
ambitious because the “us” – or the new Soviet
person in the border-guard uniform and the kolkhoz
dungarees – was in a constant, self-conscious
process of creation’.62 In Lozowick’s image, the Red
Sticks are new Soviet citizens mobilized against the
Basmachi, manifesting recuperated warrior rites
now reframed as the means of defending
sovietization. The border of Tajikistan and
Afghanistan was one of the most important frontiers
in the Soviet Union, and the Red Sticks were crucial
to its success in guarding against the Basmachi but
also in keeping Tajiks from fleeing from
collectivization.63 The Red Sticks therefore policed
both sides of a porous border, and served as
symbolic markers of the military power that
accompanied sovietization, and the transformation
of the resistant Tajik into an enforcer of the new
regime. Only in this liminal performance, does the
male Tajik find his Soviet
substance, yet his agency is as agent of the ruling
Soviet order; not quite the colonial policeman, but
an example of native voluntarism, he is an allegory
of the Soviet Union crystallizing at its indeterminate
margins.
Soon after the arrest of Bek, the Writers Brigade
attended a Red Sticks festival in the mountains,
which involved dancing, songs and storytelling, and
the martial-arts sport of goshten (a Tajik version of
ju-jitsu). At another Red Sticks event in the Pamirs,
the group witnessed the frenzied equine sport of
‘goat-ripping’, essentially a high-speed free-for-all
polo for fifty players on horseback with a handheld
goat carcass instead of mallets and a ball. Taking

527
place on mountainsides with intricate rules but also
considerable violence, ‘goat-ripping’ often incurred
injuries and sometimes fatalities of man or horse. As
Lozowick details in his 1933 Travel article
‘Hazardous Sport in Tajikistan’:

This brutal game has been forbidden by the Soviet Government,

because of its danger to the lives of men and animals and because
it interferes with the people’s regular occupations. It’s impossible to
keep them on the job when the game is played in their
neighbourhood. Nevertheless, in spite of the ban, local authorities
in the more isolated centres occasionally permit the sport as a
concession to one of the old customs which is not particularly
dangerous to the new social order.64

Lozowick’s lithograph of two goat-ripping players,

on anatomically suspect horses in a whirl of
movement, contrasts with his representation of the
heroic border guards. He conveys the dynamism of
the sport in a friezelike figural arrangement in
which one player attempts to steal the goat in a
primal melée of men and animals. He writes that
‘obviously “goat-ripping” is a heritage of an ancient
time – when the goat was a common zoomorphic
symbol of many people in many lands’.65
Goat-ripping involved a sanctioned venting of
traditional warrior rites, an opportunity for
performing horsemanship skills within the confines
of a legitimized Soviet event that concluded with
fireside songs, music and stories about defeating
the Basmachi. On the borders of Tajikistan, the
authorities permitted the Tajik a moment of
licensed combative expression in the form of
traditional sports, contained within the frame of a
‘red hashar’ ritual that circumscribed the limits of
his new Soviet being, allowing a release of primal

528
antic energies followed by pacified participation in
sovietized storytelling.
The collision of old and new in Tajikistan is
ubiquitous to the point of platitude in the Writers
Brigade accounts, as these foreign communists
sought to explain the necessary revisionism of
sovietization while expressing touristic yearning for
elements of the disappearing society. The
fascination of visitors with the old world of Central
Asia was widespread, evident in Lozowick’s almost
rueful statement that:

Much of this legacy from the past is merely exotica, according to

the crusading Soviet. It can serve no definite
purpose in the new order and therefore is not worth retaining,
except in the form of records. Such amusements are being
registered, collected, photographed before they are gone and
forgotten. In all parts of the country one meets composers taking
down folk-songs, poets collecting folk-lore, philologists and
archaeologists.66

In an unpublished account about Samarkand’s

architecture, Lozowick details with lyrical intricacy
the rich varieties of styles relating to the
sedimented history of this ancient city without
reference to sovietization except a brief mention of
the new regime’s commitment to conservation of
historic monuments (although he does not mention
the cities obliterated by the Red Army in the purge
of the Basmachi).67 Perhaps he felt it his task to
provide pictorial documents of the customs and
everyday scenes of traditional life that he
witnessed, alongside recording the triumphs of
sovietization. As Mikhail Kalatosov’s astonishing
1930 documentary film Salt for Svenetia shows, the
Soviets often expressed profound fascination with

529
the strange ancient rites of the indigenous people
that they were remaking as new citizens. Certainly,
Lozowick’s images echo the selectiveness and
paternalism of anthropological documentary – for
instance, could a Tajik shading under an aeroplane
ever be a comrade, let alone a proletarian, rather
than an object of study, an ‘other’?
Lozowick was admiring of ethnographic studies of
the region. In reporting on the marginal Jews of
Central Asia for the Menorah Journal, he fêted a
regional museum where an ethnographic display
demonstrated Soviet archival collation of the plants,
animals and people of the area, and a photographic
exhibit of ‘Racial Types of Central Asian Jews’
featured a legend that noted how by avoiding
intermixing ‘the Jews of Central Asia have retained
their racial type in greater purity than the Arabs’.68
He also marvelled at ‘old photographs of Bokhara
Jews’ in the Central Asiatic Library, which had the
‘straightforwardness and simplicity of early
daguerreotypes’.69 These archival traces of the
dwindling Jews captivated him, but he also searched
for signs of extant Jewish life. In Stalinabad, despite
being told this was the only world capital with no
synagogue, he found one, which was ‘very primitive,
hardly to be distinguished from the surrounding
flat-roofed clay huts’, but was informed that it was
‘soon to be converted into a workers’ club’ because
all the young Jews had migrated to the collective
farms.70 The text does not evince anxiety (his
writing style was hardly emotive and this was a
piece for the travel section of the magazine), and
yet Lozowick’s account details a narrative of Jewish
diminishment due to sovietization that borders on
nostalgic. It is worth recalling that his leftism was
rooted in those encounters with anti-Semitism that

530
had originally caused him to emigrate from Imperial
Russia, and his engagement with Russian art,
culture and society bore traces of his experience as
a specifically Jewish exile, displaced in the diasporic
flight from pogroms.71 Drawn to past, present and
future in Tajikistan, Lozowick witnessed temporal
disjuncture that manifested pertinently in the
scattered remains of the vanishing Jewish
population.
‘Red hashar’ aimed for mutual harmony, but the
process of sovietization was really a severe collision
of old and new. Kunitz’s enthuses:

Central Asia is in a paroxysm of change. The immemorial droning

of the somnolent East is drowned out by the strains of the
Internationale mingled with the sirens of new factories and the hum
of American and Soviet motors.… For years now Central Asia has
been a medley of clashing values. The revolution has unleashed a
whirlwind of passion. The old fights back, desperately, brutally. But
the new is triumphantly advancing. Even those who cling to the old
cannot resist the magnificent upsurge of the new.72

It was a violent clash, which calmed only when the

Red Army crushed the Basmachi. In Lozowick’s
portfolio, old and new appear in degrees of tension
in style as well as content, signifying competing
techniques and themes that achieve only a fictive
resolution. Additionally, Lozowick’s own crisis with
proletarianism found a mirror in the Tajiks who
themselves were far from ready for sovietization,
and his seemingly uncritical fealty veiled an
acknowledgment of the difficulty of reducing his, or
any, art to a unitary proletarian allegory or
technique. While representing Soviet enlightenment
clearly with the motif of unveiling, his images of
male Tajiks incongruously encountering

531
sovietization suggest a society in conflict. In an
undated note, he recalls receiving a radio message
while flying over Central Asia about a Basmachi
attack, and ponders ‘Thus the Civil War in the
Soviet Union was not quite over even as late as
1931.’73 While his affirmations of sovietization may
contain elisions and border on misdirection, the
treatment of contradictions between the old and
new shows a stumbling performance of ‘red hashar’
that does not quite conceal several ongoing
conflicts.
1 Tajikistan, the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, was founded in 1929. It
was frequently spelled as ‘Tadjikistan’ in the 1930s, but I use the
current official spelling except when citing a primary text. Tajikistan
became an autonomous republic within Uzbekistan in 1924, before
joining the USSR as the Seventh Independent Republic in 1929.
Tajikistan was formerly known as Eastern Bukhara, a province of the
khanate of Bukhara, presided over by the Emirs but ruled by the Tsar
since annexation by Imperial Russia in the mid-1840s.

2 Lozowick’s images accompanied the following articles: Louis Lozowick,

‘Hazardous Sport in Tajikistan: the Daredevil Horsemen of Central
Asia’, Travel, no. 61 (September 1933); ‘The Theatre of Turkestan’,
Theatre Arts Monthly, November 1933; ‘4 Drawings from Tadjikistan by
Louis Lozowick’, International Literature: Organ of the International
Union of Revolutionary Writers, no. 3 (1933). His images also appeared
in several pieces by Joshua Kunitz: Joshua Kunitz, ‘Soviet Tadjikistan’,
New Masses, November 1931; ‘New Women in Old Asia’, New
Masses, 2 October 1934; ‘New Women in Old Asia’, New Masses, 9
October 1934; ‘Soviet Asia Sings’, New Masses, 23 April 1935. The
lithographs featured at the following exhibitions: ‘American Print
Makers, Eighth Annual Exhibition’, Downtown Gallery, New York, 3–29
December 1934; ‘The Fifth Exhibition of American Book Illustration’,
Gallery of the Architectural League, New York, 19–30 March 1935;
‘Paintings and Lithographs by Louis Lozowick’, Weyhe Gallery, New
York, 6–18 April 1936.

3 The term ‘Writers Brigade’ appears in the text that accompanies

Lozowick, ‘4 Drawings from Tadjikistan’, frontispiece.

4 See Egon Erwin Kisch, Changing Asia, trans. Rita Reil (Alfred A. Knopf:
New York, 1935; Berlin, 1932); Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Free Soviet

532
 Tadjikistan (Co-operative Publishing House of Foreign Workers in the
USSR: Moscow, 1932); Joshua Kunitz, Dawn Over Samarkand: The
Rebirth of Central Asia (International Publishers: New York, 1935);
Bruno Jasieński, Man Changes His Skin, trans. H. G. Scott
(Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR:
Moscow, 1935). There is some suggestion that Lozowick himself
intended to write a book, as ‘The Fifth Exhibition of American Book
Illustration’ exhibition note lists ‘three illustrations for a book on Soviet
Tajikistan’. See ‘The Fifth Exhibition of American Book Illustration’,
Louis Lozowick Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution (hereafter LLP), Reel 5989, Frame 860. As well as the
publications listed above, Lozowick wrote ‘New World in Central Asia’,
Menorah Journal, no. 20 (July 1932), which was not illustrated. He also
produced two unpublished essays: ‘Soviet Frontiers’, undated
manuscript, LLP, Reel 5896, Frames 471–82, and ‘The Architecture of
Samarcand’ [sic], undated manuscript, LLP, Reel 5895, Frames
909–16.

5 Lozowick, ‘The Theatre of Turkestan’, op. cit., p. 887.

6 Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the

Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (Yale University Press: New Haven
and London, 2002), p. 17.

7 Lozowick, ‘Soviet Frontiers’, op. cit., p. 1.

8 Martha B. Olcott, ‘The Basmachi or Freemen’s Revolt in Turkestan

1918–24’, Soviet Studies, July 1981, p. 352.

9 Adeeb Khalid, ‘Backwardness and the Quest for Civilization: Early

Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective’, Slavic Review, vol.
65, no. 2 (Summer 2006), p. 233.

10 Born into a shtetl in Kiev in 1892 and experiencing the anti-Semitic

persecution of a pogrom in his childhood, Lozowick had fled to America
in 1906 and began his career taking classes at the National Academy
of Design. He travelled to the Soviet Union in 1922, chronicling its
cultural developments and establishing a reputation as one of
America’s foremost experts on Soviet art and culture by giving lectures,
writing several important articles, and producing the essay for the first
American survey of post-revolutionary developments for the Société
Anonyme’s Modern Russian Art exhibition catalogue in 1925. He was
closely involved in the 1927 Machine-Age Exposition, giving talks on
Russian art. Lozowick produced numerous illustrations and publicity
materials for New Masses. In 1930, he cemented his reputation as an
expert of Soviet art with a chapter in Voices of October, a book on

533
 Soviet culture that he coauthored with Kunitz and Joseph Freeman,
wrote extensively on Soviet film and theatre, and was an active
member of the communist John Reed Clubs.

11 Andrew Hemingway, The Mysticism of Money: Precisionist Painting

and Machine Age America (Periscope Publishing: Pittsburgh, 2013), p.
148.

12 Louis Lozowick, ‘Lithography’, Space, vol. 1, no. 2 (March 1930),

reprinted in Lozowick, Survivor for a Dead Age, op. cit., pp. 286–7.

13 Pauline Zutringer and Louis Lozowick, ‘Machine Art is Bourgeois’, New

Masses, February 1929, p. 31.

14 Beyond asserting dialectical materialism as the basis for

proletarianism, the conference’s resolutions about style were opaque,
non-proscriptive and centred on literature rather than visual art, stating
in a special issue of Literature of the World Revolution that ‘we must
recognize that in the overwhelming majority of cases, except for the
proletarian literature of the USSR, our movement has not even begun
to formulate the problems of creative method’. ‘The Results of the 2nd
International Conference of Revolutionary and Proletarian Writers’,
Literature of the World Revolution, 1931, p. 6.

15 Louis Lozowick, ‘Art in the Service of the Proletariat’, Literature of the

World Revolution, no. 4 (1931), reprinted in Lozowick, Survivor for a
Dead Age, op. cit., p. 289.

16 A. Elistratova, ‘New Masses’, International Literature, no. 1 (1932), p.

110.

17 Kunitz, ‘Soviet Tadjikistan’, op. cit., p. 12.

18 Kunitz, ‘Soviet Asia Sings’, op. cit., p. 18; Vaillant-Couturier, Free

Soviet Tadjikistan, op. cit., p. 34.

19 Ibid., p. 6.

20 Kunitz, ‘Soviet Tadjikistan’, op. cit., p. 12.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid., p. 13.

23 Kunitz, ‘New Women in Old Asia’, part one, p. 26.

24 Ibid., p. 23.

534
25 Gregory J. Mansell, The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and
Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919–1929 (Princeton
University Press: Princeton, 1974), p. xxii.

26 Adrienne Edgar, ‘Emancipation of the Unveiled: Turkmen Women

under Soviet Rule’, Russian Review, vol. 62, no. 1 (January 2003), p.
132.

27 Marianne Kemp, ‘Pilgrimage and Performance: Uzbek Women and the

Imagining of Uzbekistan’, International Journal of Middle East Studies,
vol. 34, no. 2 (May 2002), p. 264.

28 Adeeb Khalid, ‘Backwardness and the Quest for Civilization: Early

Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective’, Slavic Review, vol.
65, no. 2 (Summer 2006), p. 241. It should be noted that ‘the new’ was
not an entirely Soviet introduction as many of the Tajik communists
originated in the Central Asian Muslim reform movement called the
Jadid (the New). The origins of the Jadid date back to the 1880s, when
Ismail Gasprinski, a reformist Muslim scholar who was editor of the
journal Tercümen, proposed the notion of ‘Usul-e-jadi’ (new educational
principles), encouraging modernization of Central Asia via education
and reconciliation of Islam with Western science. See Ahmed Rashid,
‘The Fires of Faith in Central Asia’, World Policy Journal, vol. 18, no. 1
(Spring 2001), p. 46.

29 Adrienne Edgar, ‘Bolshevism, Patriarchy, and the Nation: The Soviet

“Emancipation” of Muslim Women in Pan-Islamic Perspective’, Slavic
Review, vol. 65, no. 2 (Summer 2006), p. 271. Recent scholars
appraise the neglected role of Jadid Muslim feminists, who remain
largely unrecognized in the accounts by Soviet writers and foreign
communist or fellow-traveller visitors. Furthermore, there was
considerable regional variation in Central Asia in the amount of women
who wore the paranja, such as in Turkmenistan where women were
largely unveiled. See Edgar, ‘Emancipation of the Unveiled’, p. 132.
See also Marianne Kamp, The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam,
Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism (University of Washington
Press: Seattle, 2006).

30 Lozowick, ‘Soviet Frontiers’, op. cit., p. 7. Mansell confirms that such

reprisals occurred, involving the murders of many women activists,
including Anna Dzhamal and Enne Kulieva, who were early Zhenotdel
(the Party’s Women’s Department) members, and Hamza Hakim Zada
Niyaziy, a leading Uzbek writer. Mansell, The Surrogate Proletariat, op.
cit., pp. 282–3.

31 Lozowick, ‘The Theatre of Turkestan’, op. cit., p. 887.

535
32 Vaillant-Couturier, Free Soviet Tadjikistan, op. cit., p. 55.

33 Kunitz, ‘New Women in Old Asia’, part 1, op. cit., p. 23.

34 Kunitz, ‘New Women in Old Asia’, part 2, op. cit., p. 19; Lozowick, ‘New
World in Central Asia’, op. cit., p. 169. There are some similarities with
the 2004 ban on conspicuous displays of religious affiliation in French
schools, which is the subject of Joan Scott’s The Politics of the Veil
(Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2007). Scott argues that while
masquerading as a liberatory gesture, the ban contrasts healthy
Western and aberrant Muslim sexualities, p. 127.

35 Kunitz, ‘New Women in Old Asia’, part 1, op. cit., p. 26.

36 For the Writers Brigade, the expansion of education was one of the
Soviet’s most tangible achievements, as within a generation an almost
entirely illiterate populace had risen to 25 per cent literacy and 46 per
cent of children attended schools. Vaillant-Couturier, Free Soviet
Tadjikistan, op. cit., p. 17.

37 Mansell, The Surrogate Proletariat, op. cit., p. 114.

38 Lozowick, ‘The Theatre of Turkestan’, op. cit., p. 887.

39 Kisch, Changing Asia, op. cit., p. 97.

40 Joshua Kunitz, ‘Red Roads in Central Asia’, Travel, vol. 59 (August

1932), p. 7.

41 Lozowick, ‘New World in Central Asia’, op. cit., p. 170. Botakoz

Kassymbekova ‘Humans as Territory: Forced Resettlement and the
Making of Soviet Tajikistan, 1920–38’, Central Asian Survey, vol. 30,
nos. 3–4 (September–December 2011), p. 353.

42 Kunitz, ‘Red Roads in Central Asia’, op. cit., p. 7.

43 Kunitz, Dawn over Samarkand, op. cit., pp. 242–3; Vaillant-Couturier,

Free Soviet Tadjikistan, op. cit., p. 11; Kisch, Changing Asia, op. cit., p.
89.

44 Kunitz, Dawn over Samarkand, op. cit., p. 242.

45 Lozowick does mention that Dushambe was ‘destroyed in the civil war’,
but does not indicate that this was a Soviet action. Lozowick, ‘New
World in Central Asia’, op. cit., p. 170.

46 Hemingway discusses the correspondence of his late 1920s images of

New York with ‘New Vision’, or radical formalist, photographic

536
 perspectives and subjects. Hemingway, The Mysticism of Money, op.
cit., p. 136.

47 Kisch, Changing Asia, op. cit., opposite p. 154.

48 Sheila Fitzpatrick reports that in 1928 there were 33 million horses in

the USSR; in 1934 there were 15 million. Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants:
Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization
(Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1994), p. 138. It was also a machine
that a Tajik might well use. Kunitz notes that ‘approximately sixty per
cent of the peasant population of Tadjikistan is said to have joined the
collective-farm movement and the tractor is now a familiar sight in a
land where the hoe and the ox were the principal methods used for
tilling the soil’. Kunitz, ‘Red Roads in Central Asia’, op. cit., p. 10.
Vaillant-Couturier records a conversation with Comrade Petrov,
manager of the Vaksh State Farm, who relayed that of the six hundred
tractor drivers who would graduate from the farm’s training school 70
per cent would be Tajik and Uzbek. Vaillant-Couturier, Free Soviet
Tadjikistan, op. cit., p. 39.

49 Kunitz, Dawn Over Samarkand, op. cit., p. 205.

50 Ibid., p. 206.

51 Kisch, Changing Asia, op. cit., opposite p. 62.

52 Kassymbekova, ‘Humans as Territory’, op. cit., p. 349.

53 William S. Ritter, ‘The Final Phase in the Liquidation of Anti-Soviet

Resistance in Tadzhikistan: Ibrahim Bek and the Basmachi, 1924–31’,
Soviet Studies, vol. 37, no. 4 (October 1985), p. 488. In 1931, the
Basmachi numbered about 2,000, whereas in the peak of the
movement, c. 1922, they numbered about 18,000, although this was
not a standing army but a loose network of opponents to the Soviets,
but as the Red Army in Central Asia numbered 150,000 and were
consistently brutal in supressing revolt (killing 50,000 at Kokand in
1918), the resistance, although damaging, was limited in scope. See
Marie Broxup, ‘The Basmachi’, Central Asian Survey, vol. 2, no. 1
(June 1983), pp. 58–60.

54 Ritter, ‘The Final Phase’, op. cit., p. 490.

55 For Bek’s Manifesto of 1931, see Kisch, Changing Asia, op. cit., pp.
140–4.

56 Vaillant-Couturier, Free Soviet Tadjikistan, op. cit., p. 27.

57 Ibid., p. 8.

537
58 Ibid., p. 16.

59 Kisch, Changing Asia, op. cit., p. 126.

60 Charles Shaw, ‘Friendship under Lock and Key: The Soviet Central
Asian Border, 1918–34’, Central Asian Survey, vol. 30, nos. 3–4
(September–December 2011), p. 337.

61 Shaw, ‘Friendship under Lock and Key’, op. cit., p. 332. Shaw relays
that the Central Asian border ran for 5,484 km and was consistently
short of guards, or Pogranichnye voiska (border troops).

62 Ibid., p. 333.

63 Shaw states that between 1931 and 1933, 3,153 Tajik families left the
country, and in 1933 4,372 families were held at border. Eighty to
eighty-five per cent were poor farmers or labourers, ‘precisely the
population that was supposed to benefit most from Bolshevik rule’. The
authorities suppressed information about Tajik attempts at emigration.
Ibid., p. 339.

64 Lozowick, ‘Hazardous Sport in Tajikistan’, op. cit., p. 16.

65 Lozowick, ‘The Theatre of Turkestan’, op. cit., p. 886.

66 Ibid., p. 887.

67 Lozowick, ‘The Architecture of Samarcand’, op. cit., p. 10.

68 Lozowick, ‘New World in Central Asia’, op. cit., p. 167.

69 Ibid., p. 168.

70 Ibid., p. 170.

71 Hemingway, The Mysticism of Money, op. cit., p. 109. For examples of

Lozowick’s writings about Jewish art and culture in the Soviet Union,
see: Louis Lozowick, ‘The Art of Nathan Altmann’, Menorah Journal,
February 1926; ‘Eliezer Lissitzky’, Menorah Journal, April 1926;
‘Russia’s Jewish Theatres’, Theatre Arts Monthly, June 1927; ‘The
Moscow Jewish State Theatre’, Menorah Journal, May 1928.

72 Kunitz, Dawn Over Samarkand, op. cit., p. 14.

73 Louis Lozowick, ‘Note on Russia and Russian Artists’, undated note,

LLP, Reel 5897, Frames 322–84.

538
LU MÄRTEN AND THE QUESTION OF A
MARXIST AESTHETIC IN 1920S
GERMANY
Martin I. Gaughan

I n 1930, Die Linkskurve, the journal of the

Proletarian Revolutionary Writers League (Bund
proletarisch-revolutionärer Schriftsteller, or BPRS),
published a series of articles by Karl A. Wittfogel
entitled ‘On the Question of a Marxist Aesthetic’
(‘Zur Frage einer marxistischen Ästhetik’). Although
it came at the end of the decade examined here, I
refer to it at this point to establish retrospectively,
as it were, some of the issues raised at the
beginning of the decade. Central to Wittfogel’s
elaboration is a critique of a recently published
edition of Franz Mehring’s writings on culture.
Long active in the cultural politics of the Social
Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei
Deutschlands, or SPD) from the late nineteenth
century, Mehring established the policy that the
culture of the revolutionary period of the
bourgeoisie, the so-called heritage or Erbe, was the
paradigm for working-class reference and
emulation, and rejected contemporary
manifestations of modernist innovation from
naturalism onwards as marking the decline of that
class, its pessimistic capitulation to the challenges
of the historically evolving. A founder member of
the German Communist Party (Kommunistiche

539
Partei Deutschlands, or KPD), Mehring died shortly
after its foundation, but his cultural influence would
be dominant in the pages of the KPD paper, Die
Rote Fahne, through Gertrud Alexander, its cultural
editor until her departure for Moscow in 1925, who
was a staunch defender of the Erbe and
intransigent critic of leftist innovation – a position
shared with Lenin, among others. By the late 1920s,
the KPD was taking a more organizational role in
cultural politics: writers’ and artists’ groups were
formed, particularly the BPRS and the Association
of German Revolutionary Artists (Assoziation
revolutionärer bildender Künstler Deutschlands, or
ARBKD, known as ASSO). It was at this point that
Wittfogel began his series, with a modified critique
of Mehring’s position. Mehring’s Kantian origins, he
wrote, would have to be subjected to Hegelian
dialectical discipline in order to move forward
towards a Marxist aesthetic. I shall return later to
this series but would like to point to two related
aspects of these discussions: first, the high level of
abstraction at which the articulation of the
aesthetic is conducted; and second, the general
absence of reference to concrete practices –
significantly it is only in a footnote that such
reference occurs: ‘also the performances of a good
agitprop troop are art’.1 In a critical response to
Wittfogel, also published in Die Linkskurve, Lu
Märten, one of the
major art-historically informed critics of the period
and responsive to innovation in practice, countered:
‘It appears to me that the requirement is for a
practical aesthetic … which would disclose that
many bourgeois [art] forms simply cannot be
adapted for revolutionary objectives.’2 The struggle
for a practice-based theory or a theoretically

540
informed practice characterizes cultural production
on the left throughout the decade of the 1920s. This
essay traces various stages of those struggles and
Märten’s role in them.

Practice and Theory 1919–20

These struggles arose soon after the November

Revolution of 1918, involving Dadaist practitioners
and the Die Rote Fahne critic. The first instance is
known as ‘The Art Scoundrel’ (Der Kunstlump)
debate, involving John Heartfield and George Grosz
as authors of an article of that name attacking the
bourgeois heritage published in Der Gegner, a
journal sympathetic to Dadaist activity. In her reply
in Die Rote Fahne, Alexander accused them of
cultural vandalism with regard to the classical
tradition, which she considered the site of learning
for the proletariat. Her reaction is not surprising,
since she was described as a ‘student’ of
Mehring’s.3 Alexander’s response to the Dada Fair
(Dada Messe) of June 1920, again in Die Rote
Fahne, provided the next opportunity for the
defence of the Erbe, the revolutionary bourgeois
heritage. Yet Märten published a more insightful
and nuanced criticism of the Fair a month later,
also in Die Rote Fahne. Both reviews will be
considered further below.
Given the reception of the avant-gardist Dada work,
it is not difficult to understand the concern that
Wieland Herzfelde, Heartfield’s brother and with
Grosz a member of the KPD, had with the status of
criticism on the left. In 1921 he wrote a pamphlet,
issued by his own publishing house, the Malik
Verlag, entitled ‘Society, Artist, Communism’
(‘Gesellschaft, Künstler, Kommunismus’). It dealt

541
with the relationship between the artist and
bourgeois society, the artist’s pathway to
communism and subsequent role in bourgeois
society, and the artist in the communist state.
Herzfelde proposed that the artist bear the
responsibility of transforming communism from a
statist principle (Staatsprinzip) into one of active
consciousness (Prinzip des lebendigen
Bewusstseins).4 More immediately, he touched on
the difficulty presented to the artist who takes the
side of the proletariat, ‘often subject to the
shameful ignorance of revolutionary Marxist
comrades with regard to contemporary art’.5
Herzfelde, of course, was not unaware of the
problems arising from the tumultuous political and
social conditions of postwar and post-revolutionary
Germany: he was himself rescued from the
infamous Moabit prison through the intervention of
diplomat and Dada-circle acquaintance Count Harry
Kessler. The transition period or Übergangszeit to a
proletarian art may be a long time: ‘During this
period (years? decades?) many artists originally
working for the bourgeoisie will have to be engaged
on working for communist objectives.’6 How,
then, would the developments already occurring in
contemporary art overlap with the political project
of the committed artist and produce this transition
to a proletarian art?
Two critics mentioned above, Alexander and
Märten, had crucial roles to play in the development
of critical and theoretical positions, so some
background details are necessary before going on
to consider their contributions. In their
Linksradikalismus und Literatur, Walter Fähnders
and Martin Rector assess their contribution thus:

542
The controversies which she [Lu Märten] had with Gertrud
Alexander from 1919 to 1921 over questions of content and
method extend beyond issues of Mehring’s [classical heritage]
position and left-wing communism: with them [Alexander and
Märten] begins a fundamental discussion on the question of a
materialist aesthetic which would continue through to the formation
of the Proletarian Revolutionary Writers League (BPRS) in 1928 at
the end of the Weimar Republic.7

Both critics were members of the SPD before the

foundation of the KPD, which they joined, and both
contributed to left-of-centre women’s journals in the
pre-war period, including Die Gleichheit, edited by
Clara Zetkin, who later assisted Märten in her
publishing attempts. Differences in educational
background and experience may be seen to account
for the different cultural positions they adopted
after the November revolution. Alexander attended
university at Jena, then art school in Eisenach,
followed by study at the Royal Academy of Arts in
Berlin, where she also taught drawing. Mehring’s
advocacy of the Erbe was likely to be
sympathetically received, and one is not surprised
to find hostility to radical innovation in the arts in
her reviews for Die Rote Fahne, for which she was
appointed cultural editor. Märten’s career was
more varied: her formal education was severely
constrained by illness and downward mobility, but
contact with two very different cultural circles was
to shape her experience and politics. The first was a
turn-of-the-century Berlin ‘Bohemia’ in which she
was encouraged to engage in creative writing,
producing a number of novels and a staged play.
The second was the applied arts movement
(Kunstgewerbebewegung) and founder members
Friedrich Naumann and Theodor Heuss, from which

543
her interest in the shaping role of the technical in
the development of form would evolve. There is
almost no material on either critic in English; only a
little more in German.8
In 1906, Märten submitted the article ‘Kunst,
Klasse und Sozialismus’ to the SPD journal Neue
Zeit, but it was rejected by Karl Kautsky, on behalf
of the board, ‘because in its present form it is too
difficult to understand […] for most of our readers’.
She also submitted an essay on Vincent van Gogh,
which was rejected by Mehring.9 In 1914, her Die
wirtschaftliche Lage der Künstler (The Economic
Situation of Artists) was published and cited in
parliament during the discussion on the funding of
the Reichswirtschaftsverband bildender Künstler.10
What these and other publications in the pre-war
period demonstrate was Märten’s concern with the
artist in society and
her interest in formal innovation, which placed her
at odds with the Mehring-led SPD position vis-à-vis
the tradition and the evolving.
The Dada Fair of June 1920 was the initial occasion
for the exchange of fundamentally irreconcilable
positions on what art should be and do in a
post-revolutionary context. Herzfelde wrote the
introduction for the catalogue: ‘We only need to
take the scissors and cut out those things from the
reproductions of paintings and photograph them for
our own use […] we can take objects themselves.’
The Dada programme is informed by ‘a duty to
make current events in time and place the context
of their images, sourced in the illustrated
newspaper and lead stories in the press’.11 This was
no mere anarchy let loose upon the world but
productive of ‘an intense awareness of the structure

544
and functions of the very diverse social elements,
with true insight into the real conditions rising from
the forces of production, all to be understood from
the position of communism’, as he would write in
his 1921 pamphlet ‘Society, Artist, Communism’.12
As mentioned above, Alexander had already had, in
the Kunstlump controversy, a critical engagement
with Grosz and Heartfield: the emblematic
photograph of them holding a large placard
announcing ‘Art is dead. Long live the machine art
of Tatlin’ was confirmation of her earlier negative
response. For Alexander, the exhibition was a
‘collection of perversities’ reeking of bourgeois
decadence. She took particular exception to the
daubing of unacceptable language on reproductions
of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Botticelli’s Flora,
displayed as examples of bourgeois art that must be
trampled down – echoes of the Kunstlump
controversy. Nor does she find significance in the
new materials. She recognizes the intention of the
assemblages ‘Prussian Archangel’ (ceiling mounted,
a papier mâché pig’s head, topped by an officer’s
cap and set in an officer’s uniform) and
‘Electro-mechanical Tatlin Sculpture’ (a tailor’s
dummy with military medals and a lightbulb for a
head), but suggests that they are out place. Their
site is instead that of the ‘anti-militarism
Panopticum, where nobody would take exception to
them’. Alexander takes it upon herself to warn the
workers against such bourgeois decadence
masquerading as Dada insolence (Frechheit): ‘Die
Arbeiter sind gewarnt’.13
Alexander characterizes the work one-dimensionally
as ‘Ulk’ (joke) and takes exception to the Berliner
Post critic for invoking Rabelais in this context.
Märten, on the other hand, places the work within

545
the more multi-dimensional historical category of
satire in her review ‘History, Satire, Dada and other
things’ (‘Geschichte, Satyre, Dada und Weiteres’),
also published in Die Rote Fahne.14 What she
characterizes as a ‘a dialectic of satire’ is at play in
Dada’s engagement with bourgeois culture and
capitalism. ‘Dada is a manifestation of its time’, she
writes, ‘no mere invention’:

What it attempts to do satirically through its distinctive means

curiously enough lands it up at the same time in non-dadaist
territory. The fact is that there is no longer a medium, let alone an
art, necessary to present the satire or the caricature, no intellectual
instance required to transcribe this material into the dialectic of
satire.
Instead, these times and this society, the material substance of
capitalism overall – is in and of itself satire. All that is required is a
simple reproduction of present circumstances in an age of world
war and counter-revolution.15

Should Dada intend to fully make clear the cultural

logic of capital, ‘the ambition for art must be
abandoned’, a situation Märten perceives as a
dilemma for Dada, for in abandoning art, the critical
bridge to capitalism and its art would also be
abandoned. Dada, ‘seriously revolutionary’, would
have to negotiate this dilemma in order to become
an enemy of the bourgeoisie and not a reflection of
its culture.16 Märten’s thinking here would appear
to be an early articulation, not fully realized, of the
later more mature dialectic of ‘art and anti-art’
proposed by another Berlin Dadaist, Hans Richter,
in his 1973 book Dada: Art and Anti-Art.17 Dada is
not dismissed but is seen more as an indicative
transitional phase, a phase in which a more honest
art than that of the bourgeoisie will emerge, one
initially possibly ‘even technically impoverished’.18

546
In correspondence with the Czech leftist artist Karl
Teige in 1924, she wrote: ‘I took Dada completely
seriously, if not all its individual members.’19
A similar range of actors and issues are to be found
in the setting up of the Proletarisches Theater in
1920. It was established by Erwin Piscator, another
member of the Berlin Dada group; and two
members, Grosz and Heartfield, would contribute
visual material to its performances. In a sense it
could be seen as positively applied Dada technique
from the Dada Fair earlier that year. Piscator’s
statement of aims makes the relationship clear: ‘It
was not a question of a theatre that would provide
the proletariat with art, but of conscious
propaganda, nor of a theatre for the proletariat but
of a Proletarian Theatre.’ Moreover, ‘[we] banned
the word art radically from our programme, our
“plays” were appeals and were intended to have an
effect on current events, to be a form of political
activity.’ The theatre opened on 14 October, and
Alexander’s review of the first night appeared in Die
Rote Fahne three days later. There were three short
plays on the bill, including ‘Russlands Tag’, for
which Heartfield provided the set design.20 The
presence of Herzfelde’s wife at the box office selling
copies of the Dada-inclined journal Der Gegner,
which, as a special issue, contained the
Proletarisches Theater programme, written by
Piscator, triggered much the same response from
Alexander as did the Dada Fair: ‘With that my
expectation evaporated. Proletarian Theatre!
Bourgeois literati connected with Dada swarmed
around the entrance door.’21 She concedes that the
intention may have been to put communist and
proletarian ideas on the stage, but that in itself is
not sufficient. Her inherited aesthetic (Mehring’s

547
Erbe) requires a traditional approach. What she saw
was ‘not art but propaganda … Theatre is a space
pledged to artistic achievement…. Art is a hallowed
affair whose concept should not be surrendered to
the most vulgar, botched piece of propaganda
carried out on a stage by way of a coloured poster
style.’22 She is concerned about the workers ‘not
yet ready for independent judgement’, and suggests
productions of
revolutionary bourgeois drama – Schiller’s ‘Die
Räuber’ is mentioned as providing ‘the powerful art
which frees the spirit and liberates’.23
Märten’s essay ‘On the Necessity for a Proletarian
Theatre and the Proletarian Theatre’ (‘Über
proletarisches Theaterbedürfnis und proletarisches
Theater’) was published in the Berlin journal Die
Arbeit in 1921. Her interest is precisely in the
transitional phase between one historical form of
theatre and its successor: in her opinion, ‘the
revolutionary question is whether the existence of a
particular art – here the theatre – is at all necessary
and self-evident for future culture’.24 She supported
‘the productivity of factographic theatre work’.25
Contrary to Alexander, she understood the
operation of the Proletarisches Theater as
addressing the workers more effectively than
political propaganda did. ‘The question of material
resources arises here’, Märten wrote, ‘and if the
agitational effectiveness of proletarian theatre
becomes so circumscribed, then the parties and
groups should sustain it.’26 Piscator’s production of
‘Russlands Tag’ involved the range of material
Märten would espouse in her various writings. The
text was not scripted but assembled from a collage
of newspaper reports, a Dada practice; it also used
film and projection of text. She had addressed a

548
related issue in an article published in Herzfelde’s
Der Gegner, in 1921, ‘The Revolutionary Press and
the Feuilleton’ (‘Die revolutionäre Presse und das
Feuilleton’). She is concerned with how art is
presented in the feuilleton: ‘Here and there the
worker is presented with a discussion of the good
and bad in art, the content of which he is incapable
of understanding, a situation he must accept
because he has not been furnished with the
instrument of criticism, only with the criticism
itself’.27 The feuilleton must become an organizing
function of the (KPD) party: the specialist and
technical virtuosity of journalism and
‘Feuilletonismus’ that the bourgeois press-machine
(Press-Mechanismus) has developed must be
‘revolutionised from the ground up’: ‘If Kapital had
to be retrieved from newspaper articles, and Marx’s
Nachlass stems from there’, she wrote, ‘then every
newspaper or journal would be undying.’28 In the
introduction to her major work Historical
Materialism with Regard to the Substance and
Transformation of the Arts
(Historisch-Materialistisches über Wesen und
Veränderung der Künste), she writes that this ‘short
article’ is ‘a foreword to the work on matters of art
that is postulated therein … an orientation for
shared thinking and cooperation, because every
listener and questioner is here a co-worker’.29 In
both articles, Märten is setting the agenda for ideas
that will later, in a more articulated form,
contribute greatly to the development of a Marxist
aesthetic: the factographic ‘operierende Künstler’
and the concept of ‘Umfunktionierung’ in the early
1930s.30
The two examples of theoretical differences
between Alexander and Märten set out above

549
concerned concrete examples of cultural practices
aligning themselves with the left – the Dada Fair
and the Proletarisches Theater. Their next
engagement would be on more abstract ground,
that of the concept of historical materialism and its
role in elucidating cultural practices. The issues
were raised across five articles, two in
the Internationale Jugend Bibliothek and three in
Die Rote Fahne. Märten initiated the discussion in
the Internationale Jugend Bibliothek with her
‘Historical Materialism with Regard to the
Substance and Transformation of the Arts: A
Pragmatic Introduction’
(‘Historisch-Materialistiches über Wesen und
Veränderung der Künste. Eine pragmatische
Einleitung’). As much of this material is raised and
discussed in Alexander’s responses and Märten’s
reply to her, my focus here will be on those three
articles. The exchanges centred on the relationship
of art to traditional handicraft (Handwerk), the
machine and Marx’s theory of labour (Märten); and
on the ideological and spiritual in the conditioning
of artistic form (Alexander). Although a charge of
technical determinism would hang over Märten’s
position, that does not seem to be supported here,
as she explicitly defines materialism ‘not only
according to technical features, but also according
to the natural, the organism of the natural human
being’.31
Alexander’s response is the best starting point for
the rehearsal of the issues. This appeared in both
Internationale Jugend Bibliothek and Die Rote
Fahne, entitled ‘Historischer Materialismus und
Kunstkritik’. She argues for a traditional concept of
artistic production that accommodates the
requirement of the historical-materialist method:

550
‘through the artistic means fashioned by the genius
of its creator [a work of art] grips and excites our
soul’. Such ‘psychic experience’ of art is also
historically materially conditioned because man is a
social being.32 She refers to Märten’s question
whether ‘new duties for the arts could be
determined as a result of historical-materialist
investigations’, but rejects it on the grounds that
‘the historical-materialist method must be
dialectical and not used mechanically or from an
external point of view’, accusing her of ‘failing to
see the intuitive apprehension of relationships to
penetrate through to the dialectic mediations of
phenomena’.33 These criticisms are preliminary to a
long passage on the Gothic cathedral. For
Alexander, the cathedral incarnates an ideological
programme, that of the Catholic Church, and is
essentially an art work; for Märten it is primarily
the result of technical advance, partly influenced as
she was by Gottfried Semper, the
nineteenth-century architect, and his concept of the
Zweckbau determined by material, function and
technique. For Alexander, this ‘would be to
mechanise and flatten out historical materialism’.34
She does, however, concede that Märten may in
general be advocating an acceptable pathway to the
future: ‘If one from now on wishes to undertake in
principle the issue of “proletarian art” as an art of
the future, Lu Märten may be quite right if she
means that a new art is realistically conceivable
through a more intimate relationship with the social
labour process, through the realisation of the
material culture of mankind.’ But Alexander cannot
see the determining features in the ‘technical
possibilities’.35 Her own pathway to the future is,
again, traditional: it involves the ‘complete

551
penetration of everyday life and its material culture
with higher value objects … a general raising in the
education of the spirit … the growth of a new ethos
… The feeling of association of all in communism by
way of a shared purpose in work
and life is a prerequisite for the development of the
arts.’36 Mistaking Märten’s position for being only
deterministically informed, she refers to an earlier
piece by Märten, ‘Maschine und Diktatur’ of 1919.
Märten was working at ROSTA, the Soviet
telegraphic service in Berlin, when news of artistic
innovations began to trickle through from Russia.
That article brought a number of developing issues
together: her own interest in Handwerk and the
Kunstgewerbebewegung (applied arts movement),
new Russian work, the ‘social dictatorship’ in
cultural production and ‘the overcoming of the
machine by the machine’.37 Alexander claims that
they both share the same ground, the recognition of
the need to guard against ‘the flattening or
narrowing of the historical materialist horizon
through the reduction of a phenomenon to one
cause instead of pursuing the dialectic of all factors,
material as well as spiritual’.38
Märten’s response, ‘Kunst und historischer
Materialismus’, appeared in Die Rote Fahne. Not
unexpectedly she is critical of Alexander’s
conception of the operation of the
historical-materialist method. Its objective is not
that of ‘intuitive recognition’, the ‘ideological ideal’,
but the demonstration by way of deduction and
exactness of what the facts are. This operation
threatens such ideological concerns as ‘soul’ or
‘art’, as their foundation is laid bare. Whoever
reaches for historical materialism as if for a simple
tool (Handwerkzeug) and delves no deeper than

552
ideas like ‘religious need’, ‘victorious church’, ‘the
spirit of revolution’, ‘artistic essence’, ‘relinquishes
the right to judge the outcome of the method’.39
Nor can the invocation of the economic sphere be
used as a shortcut. Whoever thinks that ‘handicraft
(Handwerk) has never had anything to do with art
has not grasped the ABCs of empirical research’.40
The concept of labour stands at the beginning of all
historical phenomena. Alexander had quoted Marx
to the effect that each age fashions its necessary
forms of expression with the requisite means to
achieve its goals. Märten now invokes his chapter
on Handwerk in Das Kapital, claiming that
Alexander seems to be unaware of it: the ‘brilliant
passage in this investigation where Marx states that
the machine has freed labour from its content is
either not known or is not understood by our
comrade’. With Marx’s example, the historical
materialist must grasp the subject while letting go
of preconceptions.41 The Gothic ‘spirit’ must give
way to the historical stage of labour and technique.
As arts editor of Die Rote Fahne, Alexander had the
last word. She characterized Märten’s prioritizing
of technique as vulgar Marxism, a
misunderstanding of what Marx meant by the
relations of production. Rejecting Märten’s
attention to the specifics of labour as too literal,
Alexander wrote that labour must be considered
more broadly: ‘Labour does not only stand at the
beginning of all historical phenomena but is the
condition for all human existence and consequently
the foundation for the relations of production.’42
As with their stances on Dada and the
Proletarisches Theater, we find here also, within the
official organs of the left, the KPD paper Die Rote
Fahne and the

553
Internationale Jugend Bibliothek, two very different
concepts on the demands of historical materialism
in its investigation of culture. For Alexander it is a
method for a more extensive elaboration of the art
of the past; Märten instead wants to excavate that
past through a concept of labour based on Marx in
order to establish forms of art responsive to
technological change in the present.

1924: Wesen und Veränderung der Formen und Künste:

Resultate historisch-materialistischer Untersuchungen
(Substance and transformation of forms and the arts: Results
of historical materialist investigations)

The pre-publication phase of this book had many

moments indicative of cultural activity on the left.
Märten, as noted above, worked in Berlin for
ROSTA between 1917 and 1919, tasked with
cataloguing extracts from the international press
and forwarding them to Russia. She came into
contact with politicians and journalists who had
worked for the revolution, and about this time
occasional references to Proletkult and new cultural
organizations are found in her work: references to
the alliance between workers and artists on the
basis of the ‘social dictatorship’, with artists
becoming organizing engineers in production.43 It
was from this contact with Russian sources that the
idea for her book arose, initially through a member
of the Soviet Trade Mission. In November 1921, the
commission for its composition was agreed by the
scientific-technical section of the Counsel for
Political Economy and ratified by the External
Purchasing Commission for the Commissariat for
Popular Education. There was a suggestion that
Anatoly Lunacharsky, Director of the Commissariat
for Enlightment, might oversee its translation.

554
Unfortunately for Märten, negotiations finally fell
through in 1922 due to limitations set on Russian
funds in Germany. The book was published by a
German publisher, Seehof, whose Taifun-Verlag
published a wide range of Soviet Russian material
in German translation.44 Such contacts would
undoubtedly have provided Märten with privileged
access to current practical and theoretical concerns
in the Soviet Union, informing and supplementing
her own pre-war engagement with related issues.
Märten described her project thus: ‘In the present
work the attempt has been made to set out for the
first time the forms of appearance of the so-called
arts and to make clear and transparent the
motivating forces of the spiritual and artistic
production from the standpoint of historical
materialism.’45 The book contains eight chapters,
covering music, architecture, sculpture, painting
and literature, all subject to the overarching method
quoted above. The salient theoretical concerns are
discussed below. Two major strands constitute the
core of her theorizing: fundamentally, the role of
technique; the critique of the Erbe and her related
sympathy for formal innovation and
experimentation, as reflected in her articles on
Dada and the Proletarisches Theater. All are
interrelated. Later in the 1920s, she would extend
more fully her
interest in technique and innovation in a series of
articles on radio and film. Writing on this aspect of
Märten’s work, Erhard H. Schütz claims that ‘it
contains the central ideas – pleasure, experiment,
science – of discussion on film of the following
years, as they were particularly marked by Brecht,
Benjamin and Kracauer’.46

555
Aside from her critique of Alexander’s position,
Märten was also unconvinced by arguments for a
proletarian art as such: ‘When, as happens today,
proletarian art is discussed and debated, the
concept of art is accepted without further ado as an
eternally determined complex of forms. That is
neither revolutionary nor scientific historical
materialism: a concept of art in its socioeconomic
dimension must be investigated.’47 Like Piscator,
she opposed the fetishization of a proletarian
drama, and sought a more dynamic
conceptualization of the post-revolution transitional
phase, the Übergangszeit: ‘All transitional
phenomena which can be thus named are means of
struggle, which will eventually be able to choose
other, more effective forms.’ Later in the same
passage she wrote: ‘it is ridiculous to want to
reroute proletarian consciousness through
bourgeois forms of artistic consciousness, to expect
images and theatre performances which should
completely reflect the content and form of the new
social vitality, as yet latent and unconscious’. The
‘new forms’, she continues, ‘are therefore to be
discovered, exploited and, for the first time, to be
developed … [They are] no longer to be identified
with the requirement “art” but rather with actual
life.’48
Her most contentious claims were those made
around the role of technique. As noted above, she
had been involved with the Werkbund circle
(Naumann and Heuss) in the pre-war period and
had written on craft, the machine and the division
of labour, and how these changes had impacted on
the arts. She had come to see the activity of labour
as the originary moment and had turned to Marx’s
theory of labour as the explanatory model, one over

556
which she had differed with Alexander. There was
an unfulfilled plan to write ‘a “heroic epic” titled
Die Arbeit, which would set out the entire
development of human labour up to the
self-conscious proletariat’.49
For our purposes here, a long passage on
Suprematism and Tatlin should suffice for the
exposition of these ideas in their relationship to
form. The Russian artists, she claimed, ‘had not
contributed new words to the vocabulary of art but
had created a new language itself’ in which ‘new
problems demanded richer technical means for
their resolution. Finally, the necessity to produce
“pictures”, “artworks” that only amuse the layman
or at best repulse him, is being reconsidered
critically’. In this new language, ‘every material is
suitable … and its new grammar and aesthetic
demand manual technical training and a closer
bond with its powerful ally, the machine’. In
Suprematism she sees ‘a revolutionary destructive
force’ that is ‘the first intimation of future
synthesis’.50
This new language is not art but the media,
languages and materials of new forms. Form in this
production process displaces art: ‘No spiritual
process needs to be embodied where everything in
real life represents itself as it has really happened.’
Here
Märten makes a radical claim: ‘It cannot be called
classless “art”.… It can only be called “classless
forms”.’ The result will be ‘a perfect artistic culture,
namely the type of forms appropriate to purpose,
object and material; yet, perhaps, without “arts”’.51

557
In her ‘Kunst und Proletariat’ of 1925, Märten
presents a precise account of what has been
described above, where she posits the technique/
form position against that of ideology/content:
‘Material form is ignored; instead these
expectations [for proletarian art] are automatically
related to content, the idea, the tendency of the
proletarian world-view. It is proposed that what is
now known as “laboratory art”, so designated by
Trotsky and others, be rejected.’52 ‘All of socialism’s
spiritual insights’, she claims, ‘were in step with the
facts of material production. Equally so with art
attention must be paid to technical material
conditions.’53 The ‘klassenlose Formen’ discovered
through ‘Laboratoriumskunst’ would reconstruct
the ‘Alltag’, the everyday, in order to enrich it (‘um
es reicher zu machen’).54

‘Formalist barbarism’?

In the fifth part of his essay ‘On the Question of a

Marxist Aesthetic’, Wittfogel accused Märten of
‘failing to proceed in a materialist or dialectical
manner’, of ‘formalist barbarism’.55 It seems to be a
question of the correct theory as ‘Lu Märten often
discovers the real material relation but not as a
result of her theory, but despite it.’56 Märten’s
counterattack is set on two fronts: her
interventionist intention and her questioning of
Wittfogel’s exposition of a relevant aesthetic
strategy. ‘Do we want to create, even with deficient
means, a class-based art, or should we wait until a
fully realised socialist society drops from the sky?’
she asks. Opting for the former requires ‘not the
standards of traditional aesthetics’ but ‘a practical
aesthetic’.57 She is not impressed with Wittfogel’s

558
claim that his series has been a first step towards a
Marxist aesthetic, built as it is on quotations from
Hegel.58 Wittfogel replied by accusing her of being
an ultra-leftist Trotskyist, arguing from a
Trotsky-informed nihilistic view of art and of
neglecting proletarian art – this, we should recall,
was the period of the Stalinization of the KPD.59 He
did, however, offer her a welcome if she forsook her
earlier position and joined the Linkskurve
programme. The invitation was not taken up.
By the date of publication of Märten’s major work,
the context for politics on the left had changed. ‘The
March Days’ of 1923 saw the defeat of the last
insurrectionary attempt, and 1924 brought the
Americanization of the economy and the attempted
stabilization of capital. An indication of how
Märten’s work would be received can be seen in a
report of an address she gave to Künstlerhilfe
members in Die Rote Fahne in February 1925
(Künstlerhilfe was one branch of Münzenberg’s
empire of assistance to KPD causes). The report
was written by Alfred Kemeny (under the
pseudonym Durus), who replaced Alexander after
her move to Moscow. Kemeny would be an
important figure in
promoting ASSO founded in 1928. Märten spoke on
the machine and ‘classless forms’; Kemeny reports
on opposition to her ideas. For him, bourgeois art
will automatically wither. At present, ‘[t]he most
pressing and important objective of art is as the
most effective form of revolutionary agitation and
propaganda in class struggle.’60 A rather different
issue, not in relation to Märten’s work specifically,
was raised by Grosz on his return from Moscow in
1924, where he had participated in a large
exhibition of German art. Because of the great

559
imbalance in technological advance between
Germany and Russia, he declared that
productivist-style art did not register as an objective
for German artists.61 In 1929 Märten was invited to
lecture at both the Marxistische-Arbeiter-Schule
(MASCH) in Berlin and at the Bauhaus in Dessau. At
MASCH she taught a series on philosophical and
historical materialism. Her Bauhaus lecture, also
published in their journal, was entitled ‘historischer
materialismus und neue gestaltung’, a subject that
supported the policy of the Marxist director,
Hannes Meyer. Ignored by the ‘Stalinizing’ KPD,
her ideas found interest in less orthodox leftist
circles, ideas that attempted, on a materialist basis,
to indicate a practice and aesthetic at odds with the
espousal of the art of the revolutionary bourgeois
period (the Erbe) and philosophical aesthetics by
Mehring and Wittfogel. But, importantly, some of
her ideas on practice would find resonance in the
work of Heartfield and Brecht, with their applied
materialist aesthetics.
1 My references here are to the 1973 reprint of this series: Karl August
Wittfogel, Zur Frage einer marxistischen Äesthetik: Abhandlung
(Kölnkalkverlag: Cologne, 1973), here p. 28, n. 6.

2 Wittfogel, Zur Frage, op. cit., p. 42.

3 The Heartfield/Grosz article was triggered by an episode in the

immediate post-revolution period when workers and soldiers
exchanged fire in the vicinity of the Zwinger Museum in Dresden, as a
result of which a Rubens painting was slightly damaged. What angered
Heartfield and Grosz was Oskar Kokoschka’s response to the
combatants to vacate the scene of culture and remove themselves to
the heath where no such damage could be done. The original
documents are reprinted in Walter Fähnders and Martin Rector (eds.),
Literatur im Klassenkampf: Zur proletarisch-revolutionären
Literaturtheorie 1919–1923 (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag: Frankfurt am
Main, 1974), pp. 47–60.

4 Ibid., p. 160.

560
5 Ibid., p. 143.

6 Ibid., p. 142.

7 Walter Fähnders and Martin Rector, Linksradikalismus und Literatur:

Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der sozialistischen Literatur in der
Weimarer Republik (Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag: Reinbek, 1980), p.
129. Richard H. Schütz’s periodization is also arresting: he writes about
‘Lu Märten’s contribution to the discussion on the theory of form, which
lasted almost twenty years, from the “old” social democratic to the
“Stalinisation” of the KPD.’ Schütz, ‘Zur Kontinuität des
Geschichtsoptimismus in der materialistichen Literaturtheorie’,
alternative: Zeitschrift für Literatur und Diskussion, no. 89 (1973), p. 71.

8 Barbara McCloskey gives a brief but significant account of their

controversy over the Dada Fair in George Grosz and the Communist
Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936 (Princeton University
Press: Princeton, 1997). The only major study of Märten to date is
Chryssoula Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopia: Lu Märtens literarische
Arbeit und Formästhetik seit 1900 (Max Niemeyer Verlag: Tübingen,
1988). The then West German journal alternative: Zeitschrift für
Literatur und Diskussion reprinted some of the original exchanges
between Alexander and Märten in issue no. 89 (1973). Before the
dissolution of the GDR, there was a move towards rehabilitation of
Märten, for which Rainhard Mai was responsible. See Mai, ‘Theorie der
“Formen” oder Theorie der “Kunste”? Lu Märtens Versuch eine
marxistiche äesthetische Theorie in Deutschland, Anfang der
zwanziger Jahre zu konzipieren’, in Kunst im Klassenkampf:
Arbeitstagung zur proletarisch revolutionären Kunst (Verband Bildener
Künstler der DDR: Berlin, 1979), pp. 84–92; and Rainhard Mai (ed.), Lu
Märten: Formen für den Alltag. Schriften, Aufsätze, Vorträge (VEB
Verlag der Kunst: Dresden, 1982).

9 See Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopie, p. 82. But Mehring was
enthusiastic about her play ‘Bergarbeiter’ (‘Miners’), which was staged
in Stuttgart in 1909. He reviewed it in Die neue Zeit: ‘A stirring and
impressive episode from the life of miners, in which a successful
balance between psychological insight and dramatic strength is
maintained’. Reprinted in alternative: Zeitschrift für Literatur und
Diskussion, no. 89 (1973), p. 100.

10 Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopie, op. cit., p. 118.

11 Uwe Schneede (ed.), Die Zwanziger Jahre: Manifeste und Dokumente

Deutscher Künstler (DuMont: Cologne, 1979), pp. 31–4.

12 Fähnders und Rector (eds.), Literatur im Klassenkampf, op. cit., p. 152.

561
13 Ibid., pp. 100–2.

14 Märten was acquainted with a number of Berlin Dadaists: she

published in Wieland Herzfelde’s Der Gegner, and Hannah Höch and
Raoul Hausmann
were among her circle of friends. See Kambas, Die Werkstatt als
Utopie, op. cit., p. 137.

15 Reprinted in the catalogue Revolution und Realismus: Revolutionäre

Kunst in Deutschland 1917 bis 1933, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin,
1978, pp. 85–6. The reference to counter-revolution was the Kapp
Putsch of March 1920.

16 Ibid., p. 86.

17 Adorno would articulate it more fully: ‘Just as all art is secularised

transcendence, so all art participates in the dialectic of enlightenment.
Art has faced the challenge of this dialectic by developing the aesthetic
concept of anti-art. From now on, no art will be conceivable without the
moment of anti-art. This means no less than that art has to go beyond
its own concept in order to remain faithful to itself.’ Theodor W. Adorno,
Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London
and New York, 1986), p. 42–3.

18 Revolution und Realismus, op. cit., p. 86.

19 Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopie, op. cit., p. 203.

20 Details of these productions are to be found in Erwin Piscator, The

Political Theatre, trans. Hugh Rorrison (Eyre Methuen: London, 1980),
pp. 44–5. One of the plays, ‘Der Krüppel’ (The Cripple), was by K. A.
Wittfogel, writing under the pseudonym Julius Haidvogel.

21 Fähnders und Rector (eds.), Literatur im Klassenkampf, op. cit., p. 209.

22 Ibid., p. 208.

23 Ibid., p. 210.

24 Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopie, op. cit., p. 143.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 Reprinted in alternative: Zeitschrift für Literatur und Diskussion, p. 102.

28 Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopie, op. cit., p. 133.

562
29 Ibid.

30 When Brecht and Benjamin were discussing setting up the journal

Krise und Kritik, her name was brought up: ‘Benjamin thought a
“debate” was necessary on “what has until now been brought from the
materialist side about literary criticism (Franz Mehring, Merten etc)”.’
Erdmut Wizisla, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a
Friendship, trans. Christine Shuttleworth (Libris: London, 2009), p. 79.
Wizisla accepts Chryssoula Kambas’s argument that ‘the name, written
from dictation, must conceal Lu Märten, based on the reception of
Märten during the 1920s’. Wittfogel was also on the list.

31 Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopie, op. cit., p. 147.

32 Die Rote Fahne, 20 May 1921, reprinted in alternative: Zeitschrift für

Literatur und Diskussion, pp. 63–4.

33 Ibid., pp. 64–5.

34 Ibid., p. 66.

35 Ibid., p. 70.

36 Ibid.

37 Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopie, op. cit., p. 127.

38 Reprinted in alternative. Zeitschrift für Literatur und Diskussion, p. 70.

39 Ibid., p. 60.

40 Ibid., p. 61.

41 Ibid.

42 Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopie, op. cit., p. 149.

43 Ibid., p. 127.

44 Ibid., pp. 176–8. More unfortunately, he went bankrupt and had to

offload stock to other outlets.

45 Ibid., p. 154.

46 alternative: Zeitschrift für Literatur und Diskussion, p. 96.

47 Reprinted in ibid., p. 83.

48 Ibid., p. 86.

563
49 Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopie, op. cit., p. 157. As a self-supporting
intellectual typical of the Weimar period, she worked on international
labour archives in Berlin.

50 Ibid., p. 173.

51 Ibid.

52 Die Aktion, reprinted in alternative: Zeitschrift für Literatur und

Diskussion, p. 54. She had reviewed Trotsky’s Literature and
Revolution the previous year and found his distillation of the cultural
through historical materialism less than clear.

53 Ibid., p. 55.

54 The question has been raised as to whether Märten may have got to
know of Boris Arvatov’s work in the Soviet Union: apparently it was only
published in German translation a year later, in 1926.

55 Wittfogel, Zur Frage, op. cit., p. 34.

56 Ibid., p. 39.

57 Ibid., p. 43.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid., p. 50.

60 Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopie, op. cit., p. 180.

61 This is stated in a co-authored pamphlet with Wieland Herzfelde, Die

Kunst ist in Gefahr (Art is in Danger), in which Dada is strenuously
defended and the false objectivism of Neue Sachlichkeit strongly
attacked.

564
EXPERIMENT AND PROPAGANDA
ART IN THE MONTHLY NEW MASSES
Rachel Sanders

N ew Masses, the American magazine of ‘arts and

letters’, was first published in May 1926 and
ran as a monthly until October 1933, when it
transformed into an overtly political weekly
(1934–48). Although never an official organ of the
Communist Party USA (CPUSA), it was a principal
disseminator of policy and sought to be the
authoritative voice on the culture of the
revolutionary left. History has painted a picture of
an affiliation that dutifully marched to the tune of
the Soviet piper.1 New Masses has been dismissed
as ‘a vehicle for party dogma’ teeming with
‘pedestrian proletarian art and prose’, its ‘mindless
crudity … a direct consequence of the international
Stalinist line on cultural matters’.2 Its illustrations
and cartoons have been described as systematically
evolving from ‘formally innovative, often abstract,
art’ to ‘art of explicit social and political content’ in
a manner that ‘paralleled the comparable shift from
abstract constructivism to socialist realist art in
Soviet Russia during the same years’.3 However,
pictorial evidence does not corroborate this
assertion. As a monthly, New Masses fielded
complex concepts, tactics and influences, including
Leninist theory, Proletkult and the model of
proletarian culture developed by the Russian

565
Association of Revolutionary Writers (RAPP) that
became the root of Stalin’s ‘method’ of Socialist
Realism, as well as modernist developments
prevalent in capitalist art markets and realisms that
had emerged through its periodical predecessors.4
The result was a remarkable eclecticism. This essay
will analyse its diversity through emphasis on
stylistic idiom, its relationship to image content,
and the perceptions of artists, theorists and national
and international critics of its aesthetic and
utilitarian worth.
New Masses was founded with the support of an
abundance of artists and intellectuals and a grant
from the American Fund for Public Service. The
prospectus submitted for funding laid out a
non-partisan programme, but the continuation of
the strain of national radicalism that had emerged
through the Masses (1911–17) and the Liberator
(1918–24) was affirmed when those involved
declared ‘allegiance unqualifiably with the
5
international labor movement’. Many contributors
to the early numbers had been involved with these
magazines, including editor Michael Gold, who
stressed, in the second issue, that New Masses was
an American experiment, ‘not a magazine of
Communism or Moscow’. Nonetheless, he
designated Russia and its revolutionary
culture the ‘spiritual core’ around which thousands
of artists were ‘building their creative lives’.6
Indeed, before the year was out paeans to the ‘great
artist-nation, great scientist-nation, great
worker-nation’ filled the magazine’s columns and
Lenin’s portrait adorned its cover [1].7

566
 1 Hugo Gellert, cover of New Masses,
November 1926. Courtesy of the author.

Russia may have been a cultural beacon, but New

Masses was consistently out of step with Soviet
theory and practice, although this fact did not
become apparent until it gained sustained contact
with Soviet art and literary groups starting with the
Second Conference of Revolutionary and
Proletarian Writers, held at Kharkov in November
1930. Even so, it remained non-doctrinaire. As
Andrew Hemingway states, ‘New Masses

567
articulated the Party’s position on political issues
(with which there could be no public disagreement),
but continued to reflect the wide differences of
opinion among communists and fellow-travellers on
cultural matters.’8 The magazine exhibits neither
uniform approach to content nor dominant stylistic
idiom. Its artists transgressed directives and models
of practice set in place by the Communist
International (Comintern). This permissive attitude
demands attention because, unlike earlier left-wing
movements, communists endlessly deliberated upon
formulating a programme for the production of
effective revolutionary art to which they could
adhere.
Between May 1926 and April 1928, the spectrum of
political opinion of the editorial and executive
boards shaped New Masses. These disappeared in
June and Gold became sole editor until he was
pressured into a three-man board in July 1931,
which grew to six before the magazine became a
weekly.9 With each new editorial grouping,
adjustments in format and appearance occurred,
but patterns of artistic activity, of stylistic
transformation or favoured subject matter, do not
neatly coincide with such changes, and it is a
mistake to view modernist activity as determining
the early issues, proletarian realism defining Gold’s
periodical, or an emulation of Russian realism
dictating the eighteen months that followed. The
magazine’s artistic history is nuanced, and
oversimplification distorts our comprehension and
limits our appreciation of the images. New Masses’
life can be usefully divided into phases; the risk in
prioritizing these is interpreting the artistic
narrative as falling into step behind the political
story.

568
The Phases of New Masses

The monthly New Masses coincided with a period of

bitter factional fighting within the CPUSA, which
was utilized by the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union (CPSU) for its own power struggles.10 The
magazine, which supported party policy from the
outset, never become embroiled in these quarrels.
Its incipient latitudinarian politics are apparent
from the contributing socialists, independent
Marxists and adversaries of the left; in particular,
the publication of material by Leon Trotsky after he
had lost his Politburo seat, and by his supporter and
biographer Max Eastman, who had been chief
editor of the Masses and the Liberator, exemplifies
partial knowledge of, or partial allegiance to, the
Soviet government.11
The bold format and the variety and volume of
graphics featured in the first six months testify to
the vision for New Masses outlined in its
prospectus, which promised
‘at least half the pages will consist of pictures’.
These would be political cartoons, drawings of
American life and ‘pictures that have no
“journalistic” value but are based on the emotions
of art’.12 Printed inside and out in varying single
colours under black on quality paper, it was initially
several square inches larger than the roughly
A4-sized magazine it shrank to in June 1928 and
was visually striking with many full-page images. It
claimed, in November 1926, that the switch to black
and white, and a smaller size was made so ‘brave
readers can hide their copies on subways from
reactionary eyes’, although publishing costs were
undoubtedly a concern.13 Printed on cheaper paper,
the magazine was robbed of its vibrancy, yet variety

569
endured. This was amplified in the early magazine
by the number of individual contributions from
unknown artists, such as Ernest Fiene’s soft-toned,
naturalistic rural idyll Barns (June 1927) or the
heavy marks, condensed space and flattened forms
of Fred Gardner’s The Art Season Opens in
Woodstock (June 1927). These ‘one-offs’ dwindled in
later issues, but they continued to appear until early
1933.
William Gropper and Louis Lozowick were the
predominant artists of Gold’s magazine, an
interesting combination as in many ways their
oeuvres embody the stylistic dichotomy of realism
and modernist abstraction that Gold associated with
opposing classes. During this phase, illustrations
decreased in number and size, although full-page
pictures still appeared – mainly works by Lozowick,
who published in thirty-five of the thirty-eight issues
that Gold edited, including numerous industrial
vistas built of flat or tonal geometric forms in the
vein of American Geometry (September 1928).
Gold’s first editorial as chief welcomed ‘unorthodox
subjects in unorthodox techniques’.14 He accepted
experimentation, but formal play for its own sake
was not compatible with his cultural agenda. His
editorship began just weeks before the Comintern
ushered in the ‘Third Period’, an ultra-sectarian
phase when all reformists were regarded as
counter-revolutionary. This policy kept the CPUSA
on the margins of American political life, even as
the flailing economy plunged the nation into
depression, leaving millions unemployed, homeless,
hungry and notionally ripe for revolution. The tenor
of Gold’s magazine frequently complemented rigid
Third Period rhetoric. It propagated the
class-against-class Party line and asserted

570
proletarian realism as appropriate communist
culture, its single-minded, robust, virility that was
guilty of ‘crudities, puerilities and so-called crimes
against good-taste’ lauded above sickly,
emasculated, aimless modernism, the product of a
decaying society.15 Gold’s New Masses has been
continually associated with ‘leftism’, a criticism that
denoted the unsatisfactory practices of prioritizing
propaganda value, rejecting bourgeois culture,
undervaluing form and technique and insisting on
worker authorship, although recent scholarship has
persuasively disputed this charge.16 Certainly there
is no indication of ‘leftist’ attitudes in the art
featured, which was idiomatically diverse and never
solely propagandistic or partisan.
Gold’s dedication to proletarian culture predated
New Masses and he expressed belief in its organic
growth in his earliest writings, yet his concept
lacked fixed form or identity.17 Gellert’s
indomitable, muscle-bound labourers that regularly
adorned the magazine’s pages – for example, the
Russian peasant and proletarian holding aloft the
hammer and sickle behind Lenin on the November
1926 cover – could be seen as graphic
manifestations of Gold’s theory. Proletarianism
frequently heroized workers when recreating their
lives in art, and privileged them through requests to
make their own voices heard. Gold implored
workers to write of their lives ‘in mine, mill and
farm’.18 His ambition to form a ‘staff of industrial
correspondents’ is reminiscent of Russia’s Left
Front of Art (LEF) and earned him considerable
criticism on the communist world stage – at the
Kharkov conference, in the international journal
Literature of the World Revolution and in the
German Die Linkskurve, as well as from fellow

571
Americans concerned that the results would be
‘reportorial’ rather than ‘creative and cultural’.19
Proletarianism was never a sanctioned strain of
communist cultural theory, being opposed by Lenin,
Trotsky and Stalin, and at Kharkov the International
Union of Revolutionary Writers (IURW) sought to
halt its dominance in America. New Masses was
accused of neglecting important theoretical
developments, prompting a ten-point ‘program of
action’ that committed it to strengthening its
knowledge.20 Six American delegates representing
the magazine and its offshoot cultural organization
the John Reed Club (JRC) were among more than
one hundred representatives from twenty-three
different countries invited to participate in the
conference. They included Gold, Gropper, A. B.
Magil, Joshua Kunitz, Fred Ellis and Harry Alan
Potamkin – the former three were elected to the
executive council of the IURW, cementing a keenly
pursued affiliation.21
Despite improved channels of communication and
availability of theoretical materials, New Masses
remained wanting for one Russian reviewer whose
harsh critique of the 1931 issues ran in
International Literature (the journal of the IURW).
Twenty-year-old Anne Elistratova concluded that
‘insufficient politization [sic]’, ‘rotten liberalism’
and ‘theoretical backwardness’ were the root
causes of the magazine’s deficiencies. She berated
its style and the overall paucity of revolutionary
content, and particularly reproved artists who
fixated ‘on isolated phenomena of the capitalist
system without showing their connection to the
system as a whole’. New Masses stalwarts Gellert,
Gropper, Jacob Burck and Otto Soglow were all

572
deemed guilty of ‘an advocacy of passiveness and
non-resistance’, their works denounced as mere
registers of degradation in danger of fulfilling ‘a
demobilising function’.22 Although her zealous
appraisal was based on an essentially
one-dimensional view of what communist art should
be – naturalistic, militant social criticism – her
article demonstrated understanding of initiatives
propounded at Kharkov and highlighted that these
had been either misunderstood or ignored.
In September 1932, New Masses published an
IURW-formulated resolution determining the need
for an artistic strategy founded on
‘Marxism-Leninism’ to address its ‘grave
shortcomings’.23 The impact of Soviet criticism on
its art was negative, although not immediate.
Throughout 1932 a range of idiosyncratic styles
received ample space. But the 1933 issues became
much drier visually; many even lacked a cover
image, and most of the interior graphics were
smaller, filling either a half-page or half-column.
Humour maintained a foothold, but there were few
non-political works. Stylistically, experimentation
was undeniably reined in, yet the expressive
cartoon line was still favoured over the naturalism
characteristic of Russian realism, evident, for
example, in Gropper’s comic attack on Roosevelt’s
New Deal So What? (July 1933), with its blue eagle
defecating for the unemployed.

The Dominant Idioms of New Masses

A political aesthetic that flourished in the fine art of

the American left during the 1930s was
consolidated in New Masses. Its genealogy can be
traced to two principal sources: the emotive,

573
rough-hewn realism of Honoré Daumier that had
been forged into the emblematic style of socialism
by the artists of the Masses; and the vitriolic,
scratchy linear expressionism of George Grosz that
had been absorbed into the Liberator via the
illustrations of Gropper and Adolf Dehn and had
become quickly representative of the fledgling
communist movement. These styles were well
represented in New Masses, affirming its artistic
lineage, but it also featured something unseen in
the pages of its predecessors: experimentation with
modernist idioms derived primarily from Cubism,
including abstract pieces.
The use of modern techniques appealed to those
who wished to see the publication of a
sophisticated, non-doctrinaire journal. A 1928
review declared great revolutionary art to be
‘revolutionary both in theme and method’.24 When
Gold proclaimed the newly launched periodical ‘a
magazine of American experiment’, it was with the
proviso ‘let’s not experiment in the minor esthetic
cults’.25 The following year, however, he
championed ‘the new free technique’ of the Russian
futurists and decried ‘stodgy tradition[al]’
propaganda that had ‘bored so many persons,
including revolutionists’.26 Enthusiasm for the
practices of the post-revolution Russian avantgarde,
in so far as they were understood – for
Constructivism, Proletkult and the LEF – permeated
the left, despite acknowledged conflict between
innovation and communication. As one play review
noted, ‘from the standpoint of winning new converts
… stale language and stale form’ would be most
effective, while that which excites artists ‘would be
absolutely valueless’.27

574
 2 Louis Lozowick, Decorations,
from New Masses, December 1927.
Courtesy of the author.

‘Valueless’ was art editor Hugo Gellert’s

assessment of Constantin Brancusi’s work in one of
the few New Masses articles on fine art. Gellert
chastized the Romanian
sculptor for making art an end rather than a means,
stating ‘pure form leaves us in darkness’.28 Through
his prolific contribution, Gellert was integral to the
magazine’s aesthetic. His distinctive style embraced
modernist characteristics; his subjects were often
isolated motifs constructed from thick strokes of
flat-edged crayon creating sharp, geometric, planar
blocks of shading that reveal a firm grasp of modern

575
French art, especially Cubism, and of contemporary
trends in advertising, specifically Art Deco graphics.
Like the majority of New Masses’ artists, Gellert
tempered experimentation with figuration. David
Burliuk, Morris Pass, Jan Matulka and Theodor
Scheel were among those who drew heavily on
post-Cubist modernism, reducing urban and
industrial scenes and images of labour to stylized
forms and flat, angular blocks of
solid monochrome, as in Matulka’s Fishing Boats
(December 1927), with its fractured picture space
and multiple perspectives. It was not the dominant
practice, but the early magazine featured a wealth
of such art, which maintained a presence under
Gold’s editorship, including Lozowick’s abstract
Decorations [2] that dotted the columns.
Lozowick was the most consistent practitioner of
modernist abstraction publishing in New Masses
and the only contemporary American communist to
write in a sustained manner on the subject of art.29
Despite his non-figurative propensities, he warned,
‘The great danger of extreme preoccupation with
formalism is that it is likely to degenerate into
decoration and ornamentation’ when disconnected
from life.30 Lozowick advocated a synthesis of
realism and formal experimentation, praising
Russian art that inhabited a middle ground between
the two and being blatantly derogatory about
conservative practices that took ‘advantage of the
fact that the tastes of the masses are unsusceptible
to the formal appeal of the modernist’.31 As a
Russian immigrant to the United States aged
twelve, who had twice visited his birth country
during the 1920s, Lozowick’s knowledge of Soviet
culture no doubt gave him clout among his peers. In
Voices of October (1930), he wrote ‘though

576
revolutionary themes in service of the state are not
in themselves objectionable, they cannot alone
constitute art, unless treated with technical
competence’. He championed artists who applied
their knowledge of ‘radical tendencies, Cubism,
Futurism, Constructivism, and Expressionism … to
the solution of modern artistic problems’, even
though the Comintern’s preference for naturalism,
and the subsequent abandonment of abstraction by
Russian artists, must have been apparent to him
during his second visit (1927–8).32
Art’s utilitarian purpose was integral to Lozowick’s
aesthetic. His characteristic iconography of industry
and cityscapes, captured in lithographs such as
New York, a celebratory vision of Manhattan’s
towering skyscrapers against the majestic curve of
the Brooklyn Bridge, which was selected for the
cover of the New Masses prospectus (c. 1925),
demonstrated his faith in ‘the paramount
importance of machinery and technique in the
achievement of the revolution and in the functioning
of the new society’.33 His enthusiasm for
technological power and precision was entirely
consonant with his politics at a time when Lenin
declared that communism equalled ‘soviets plus
electrification’ and the ‘scientific management’ of
labour was being wholly embraced by the CPSU.34
In a 1931 article in Literature of the World
Revolution, Lozowick divided proletarian art into
negative and positive themes. Negative subjects
made ‘an annihilating attack on the capitalist
regime in all its aspects’, whereas positive subjects,
such as his images of industrial progress, should be
understood ‘as a product of that rationalisation and
economy which must prove allies of the working
class in the building of socialism’.35 His distinction

577
validates his activity, but his objective was thematic
diversity.
Lozowick’s ‘fetishization of capitalist technique’ was
singled out for criticism by Elistratova who
described his work as ‘devoid of personality’ and
politically inadequate.36
She was not alone in this opinion; one disapproving
New Masses reader attacked his lithographs for
their ‘neutral, static quality’ that lacked the
‘incentive to struggle’.37 Another likened Lozowick
and his drawings of ‘pretty machines’ to jazz
musicians who compose ‘for a bastard capitalistic
generation’.38 Lozowick was not an aestheticist, but
it seems that members of his audience identified
him as such.

578
 3 Theodor Scheel, Camera Eye,
from New Masses, April 1930.
Courtesy of the author.

Analysis of modernist characteristics in the monthly

New Masses exposes how asynchronous America
and Russia were; for example, the April 1930 issue
featured Scheel’s Camera Eye [3], an exuberant, if
chaotic, synthesis of mechanical forms and symbols
of mental and physical labour reminiscent of the
photomontage produced a decade earlier by
Constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko. Elistratova
admonished
‘a resurrection’ of processes wherein ‘the
revolutionary content of the work was subordinated
to experiments of a formal nature’.39 The use of
modernist forms had become a question of the value
of bourgeois culture (or culture the CPSU perceived
to be bourgeois), but the problem was never
addressed with specific instruction, even inside
Russia where excessive criticism of modernist
trends and support of traditional practitioners and
teaching methods at institutions such as the
reopened, renamed All Russian Academy of Arts
made clear the government’s conservative tastes.
Marx’s and Engels’s admiration for the likes of
Balzac and Dickens confirmed a preference for
realism and the utility of bourgeois culture. Of
course their letters on literature and propaganda
predate the birth of modernist art, and so Lenin
became the last word on this issue: art had to
communicate with the masses. His views were
largely drawn from those of Georgi Plekhanov, who
was not opposed to stylistic innovation per se, but
believed modernist tendencies were the upshot of
artists ‘in hopeless disaccord with the social

579
environment’.40 Realism linked use-value to
artistic-value; it assumed accessibility and was the
crux of the content debate; revolutionary art was to
represent the social reality of continuous class
struggle by finding a midway between factual detail
and abstract concepts, presenting the viewer with
the ‘typical’. But in Stalinist Russia, realism was
mutating into ‘truth to the essence of communism’,
with celebratory and romantic aspects inapplicable
outside the country.
The IURW argued that although communist culture
could not be produced in capitalist nations, the
Soviet Union’s cultural forms could be appropriated
to inspire the struggling foreign proletariat.
However, the models of practice available to
Americans were sparse. Two exhibitions of Russian
paintings and graphics were held in New York
during the 1920s but received little attention from
the communist press. The second of these included
modernist works, but the foreword to the catalogue
commended minimal ‘Cezannism’ [sic] and ‘the
blighting abstractions of Cubism’.41 New Masses
proffered ‘Stalin’s formulation: “proletarian culture
– national in form, proletarian in content”’ as vague
description of artistic activity realized inside the
Soviet Union.42 It printed the occasional Russian
image, crude lubok or broadside-style propaganda
pieces that were equally uninformative about
contemporary methods.43 Literature of the World
Revolution featured very few pictures. Its
successor, International Literature, printed
graphics by international artists; the majority of this
undoubtedly approved art can best be described as
naturalistic, if inclined heavily towards an
aggressive, ‘blocky’ or angular technique (sensual,
undulating lines are not a common feature).

580
Of the New Masses artists, Gellert’s and William
Siegel’s later illustrations sit most comfortably
within the favoured Soviet idiom. Siegel was the
only one whose works underwent substantial
transition from modernist experimentation (Fifth
Avenue Bus, October 1927) in the early magazines.
Late 1932–3 brought a profusion of maladroit
statements, for example Siegel’s Eviction (July
1933), with its weeping mother and
stoic father who glares at his uniformed portrait
propped against the family’s possessions piled in
the street before the turned back of a policeman.
Stylistically, the clumsy composition and inelegant
naturalistic outline have little in common with the
ubiquitous and distinctive Daumieresque Masses
idiom that thrived in the Liberator and progressed
to New Masses, identifying these periodicals as
inheritors of a mode associated with the nation’s
left.

581
 4 Harry Sternberg, Subway
Construction, from New Masses,
December 1927. Courtesy of the author.

With Masses contributors such as Maurice Becker,

Boardman Robinson and Art Young featuring
heavily in the early numbers of New Masses,
coarse, grainy artless strokes of lithographic crayon
had a healthy existence from the beginning, and
remained significant in later years by engaging
younger artists; Burck, Soglow, Reginald Marsh,
Don Brown and Harry Sternberg all explored the
aesthetic, some emulating it closely, others pushing

582
its boundaries. With its urban iconography and
types, its one-line joke, and a manner that adopts
the assured, wobbling ink squiggles and cross-hatch
lines favoured by Young, Soglow’s interior bar
scene When Beer was Lawful Instead of Awful (May
1927) is clearly rooted in The Masses tradition; so
too is the unrefined style and compositional format
of Sternberg’s Subway Construction [4], although
scenes of heavy labour were uncommon in the
earlier periodical. The means of representation that
dominated The Masses and its blend of irreverent
humour and
social commentary continued to be relevant into the
1930s, inspiring such works as William Hernandez’s
scene of urban entertainment ‘Let’s Go. I Didn’t
Come to the Theatre to See the Depression’
(February 1933).

583
 5 William Gropper, The
Dishwasher, from New Masses,
February 1930. Courtesy of the
author.

The strain of realism pervading New Masses did not

result from Russian influence but from home-grown
practice. An approach redolent of its eponym had
taken shape in its prospectus. It heralded the
pursuit of slang, crudeness and vitality, ‘moving
picture [sic], radio, vaudeville, strikes, machinery or
any other raw American facts’.44 It became
intimately combined with the principles of
proletarian realism – ‘swift action, clear form, the

584
direct line, cinema in words’ – manifested visually in
works such as Gropper’s beautiful illustration East
Side (August 1929) or The Dishwasher [5], one of
his many images that displays deep understanding
of the New York immigrant, working-class
experience, accomplished through the
representation of the typical.45 By rooting his
practice in biographic experience, Gropper
produced pictorial counterparts to Gold’s novel
Jews Without Money (1930).
The pre-Kharkov magazine was rife with
contradiction concerning idiom, partly because Gold
insisted there was ‘no conscious straining after
proletarian art’; it was instinctual, ‘the natural
flower of [the worker’s] environment’.46 By stating
‘there is no ‘style’ – there is only clarity’, he created
something of a guidance void.47 In fact, as late as
September 1933, he wrote, acknowledging his own
weaknesses, ‘No proletarian critic that I know has
paid much attention to the difficult problem of
style.’48 American artists may have construed their
work as broadly conforming to Comintern ideals as
no criticism was levelled at the style employed for
these native themes, although the subject matter
did come under attack. Elistratova expected images
that served ‘as a militant banner’; instead, she
found ‘satirical drawings and cartoons … so mild
and harmless that they might be reprinted in any
bourgeois humorous journal’. She deemed New
Masses realism ‘the manifestation of direct political
indifference’ and even panned overtly political
statements such as Gropper’s Hunger March
(February 1931), which was faulted for suggesting
‘spontaneous resentment’ with no hint of organized
communist activity.49

585
There were also American critics who desired
blatantly political art. John Kwait (a pseudonym for
Meyer Schapiro) reprimanded artists who treated
social elements ‘abstractly and picturesquely’. He
called for art that ‘re-enact[ed] in a vivid, forceful
manner the most important revolutionary
situations’.50 Burck, staff artist for the Daily Worker
(the CPUSA’s English-language newspaper),
castigated him for suggesting that ‘the only art
suitable to the working class is agitational’, but
Kwait was not alone in his concern that American
social realism was too timid.51 As critic Jerome
Klein stated, ‘If the artist is to be effective he can
hardly be too concrete and specific.… There is no
virtue in the cryptic.’52 Even so, opinion was divided
on the best means to make effectual statements.
While Kwait called for ‘a simple plastic language’,
Klein
shared fellow Art Front (magazine of the Artists’
Union) columnist Jacob Kainen’s viewpoint that ‘the
old, literal naturalism is failing to register
esthetically in the face of vast social passions and
portents of doom’.53
A 1931 resolution by the International Bureau of
Revolutionary Artists (IBRA), signed by Ellis and
Gropper, asserted that the goals of revolutionary art
would be realized ‘using the accumulated artistic
experience and achievements of past centuries’.
Goya, Courbet and Daumier were unsurprisingly
named as appropriate references, but the
comparatively modernist van Gogh and Gauguin
were also cited.54 Lunacharsky’s ‘Marxism and Art’,
published in New Masses the following year,
argued, ‘It is possible to find in a degenerate work
of art something which is very useful from a
technical point of view.’55 A year later, Soviet

586
dramatist Vsevolod Vishnevsky advised readers of
International Literature to ‘look at Grosz, look at
Proust, look at Picasso … we should be able to see
that behind them, beside them, a tremendous new
seed is already sprouting. One must understand
where it is and grasp it, taking culture as a whole
under investigation.’56 Such theoretic sources
indicated openness to experimentation that was
embraced by Americans seeking paradigms fitting
to their lived experience, which they found in
German political imagery, particularly that of Grosz.
Grosz’s art raised questions about content in the
early New Masses. Reflecting on why it did not
‘glorify the workers’ or ‘the nobility of the
revolutionary spirit’, a laudatory 1927 article
tendered Grosz’s belief that ‘during a period of
struggle the revolutionary artist has no choice but
to criticize the masters of society, and to shock
people out of their faith in the superiority of the
ruling class’.57 Grosz’s ‘Prost Noske! The Young
Revolution is Dead’, published alongside the article,
delivers just such a slap, with its representations of
sword-impaled babies and castrated and
disembowelled males. Grosz’s expressive subject
and style was closely emulated, principally by Dehn
and Gropper. His influence on Dehn is apparent in
the sinewy lines and distorted forms of comic
grotesques of the bourgeoisie. Dehn made scathing
physiognomic statements on occasion, as in O Lord,
Our Shepherd (September 1927), although
generally his work lacked Grosz’s virulence.
Gropper’s constant presence and prolific output
meant that his work, probably more than that of any
other contributing artist, denoted a communist
aesthetic for the New Masses readership. He

587
published a total of 163 cartoons between 1926 and
1933. He was among those artists, including Siegel
and Isidore Klein, who grabbed the opportunity of
regular publication to explore a variety of styles.
These included smooth, rounded, cartoon strokes
influenced by Young (Ladies, It Gives Me Great
Pleasure, July 1926) and an occasional foray into
heightened naturalism (Toward a Classless Society,
November 1932), but the illustrative style
immediately identifiable as his is indebted to Grosz.
This is most apparent in scratchy, abrasive
drawings such as Join the Maroons (April 1927), in
which the mutilated bodies of army veterans also
pay homage to the
German artist’s postwar invective. Gropper’s use of
Grosz’s narrative symbols and distorted or
condensed spatial arrangements added a modern
flavour to his work. Dishwasher employs the latter;
this image successfully blends proletarian realism
with expressionist line and form that flirts with the
grotesque. Comparatively, Gropper’s delivery is
often softened by crayon line and touches of
shading, along with comic text, but the idiom he
developed was no less expressive and was
interpreted as a ‘felt’ comment on the reality of his
world, which prevented censure of staid passivism
from left-wing American critics. Lozowick argued
that as a result of his experimentation Gropper’s
‘best cartoons carry power, vitality, and conviction
which a mere recording of actual events could
never achieve’.58 For Lewis Mumford, Gropper had
earned ‘a pre-eminent place as an interpreter of the
mangled reality that people confront today’, making
him ‘one of the most accomplished’ artists of his
generation.59

588
6 Herb Kruckman, ‘After All, It is a Case of the
Survival of the Fittest’, from New Masses, June
1932. Courtesy of Marx Memorial Library, London.

Critical response is crucial to establishing why

American leftist art transgressed Soviet example.
Writing in Art Front, Harold Rosenberg praised
Gropper’s ‘coherent
purposefulness’, but he also felt moved to defend
his ‘unworried eclecticism’ and so simultaneously
drew attention to it, implying Gropper’s manner
was too tame, for while he was producing quality
art influenced by such varied sources as Breughel,
Forain and Cubism, he was ‘load[ing] revolutionary
material into the old apple-carts of art-technique’.60
Anita Brenner spelt out her hope for stylistic
progression in her review of the 1933 John Reed
Club exhibition, which included work by several

589
New Masses illustrators. She asserted that
propaganda was hampered by conventional political
idioms (she cited Daumier and Goya), arguing that
artists ‘cannot adequately and movingly paint or
carve their time and place in the technical and
emotional terms of another age’.61
Many American critics believed the ‘contemporary
artist must … develop plastic methods which are
suited to his needs’.62 This was Lozowick’s opinion,
but his figurative post-Cubist abstractions
introduced a level of challenging sophistication that
was negatively received, whereas expressionism
appears to have been valued, praised by critics as
‘the direction par excellence for social disillusion’
and pursued by numerous artists.63 Emotive content
is, arguably, a salient feature of New Masses
imagery throughout its run as a monthly.
Naturalistic representation presented a problem for
American artists: how did one create in a manner
aligned with the social and political struggle, that
critiqued the dominant order and its cultural
preferences, in a style so deeply rooted in
traditional skills it was entirely inoffensive?
Expressionist tendencies – aggressive line, twisted
forms and warped spatial arrangements – offered a
solution. They were a means to grab the viewer’s
attention and a vent for political frustrations. They
also allowed artists to make comprehensive
statements while being in the stylistic vanguard.
Overwhelmingly, stylistic experimentation meant
incorporating the grotesque as an appropriate
response to the experience of a society in crisis.
Herb Kruckman’s ‘After All, It is a Case of the
Survival of the Fittest’ [6] is exemplary of an
abundance of works contributed by Scheel, Soglow,

590
Phil Bard, Philip Reisman and Anton Refregier,
among others.

Conclusion

Lack of comprehensive theoretical material and

poor lines of communication contributed to, but do
not wholly account for, the apparent fact that
American artists did not adhere to Soviet pictorial
example. When the Bolsheviks seized upon realism
as the aesthetic to convey their politics, they bled
out the critical element so fundamental to its
nature, creating art transparently didactic or
fantastical in sentimentality, and redundant in
non-communist countries. Nonetheless, the model
had impact beyond Russian borders as the process
of Stalinization absorbed cultural agencies, such as
New Masses, keenly seeking direction from the
foremost representatives of the proletariat.
Presumably conscious of the limitations and
specificity of Soviet practices, the
theoretical advice extended by the CPSU was never
a rigid universal cultural mould into which
international activity was expected to fit, but rather
an aesthetic of flexible parameters necessary to the
creation of an effective political tool.
Ostensibly no visual sources were to be
disregarded, yet International Literature printed
commentary encouraging the artist to ‘hate, not by
request, but by himself … pure work, technical
armor’ and ‘formal innovation’.64 The gap between
Soviet theory and practice and criticism such as
Elistratova’s against ‘the might of technique’ must
have caused confusion.65 Certainly her critique was
detrimental to the presence of cubistic modernism
in New Masses, with Lozowick all but disappearing

591
from its pages from 1932–3, possibly suggesting
resistance to accommodating her demands.
Americans repeatedly employed modernist styles
and even when condemned by foreign or national
critics these were not summarily rejected. Clearly
they held appeal, prompting the question, did
artistic quality take precedent over political utility?
The means of representation were never far from
the artist’s mind, as Lozowick informed one critical
reader: ‘Art has its own specific problems of
importance to the artist and the worker. People who
make flying excursions into sociology and aesthetics
would do well to remember this.’66 Of course the
magazine’s artists were not preoccupied with
experimentation that pandered to the art market’s
obsession with originality, though that is not to say
that vocational success was not a concern, but
rather they held a belief, one that took root in
predecessor periodicals, that freedom of expression
was the reward of political revolt, and this was
routinely on display in New Masses.67
Alongside the dominant idioms discussed, which
had established left-wing associations that may
explain their assumed acceptability, the diverse
styles of New Masses ranged from the scratchy,
needle-thin etched lines of Reisman (The Working
Class Mother, August 1928) to the dense
cross-hatching, fluid outline and bulbous shapes of
Mitchell Siporin (The Father, the Sons and the Holy
Guns, October 1931), the soft-textured naturalism
of Marsh (Pneumatic Drill, January 1928) to the
raw-edged woodblock prints of Gan Kolski (cover,
May 1929). The subject matter was similarly
diverse. Humour was a potent tool, with capitalist
bosses and the upper classes habitually mocked.
Empathetic depictions of people’s lives, attacks on

592
political powers, lynching and working-class
demonstrations were all common content. Current
affairs occupied artists; inevitably these changed
over time with Depression conditions unsurprisingly
becoming a priority, alongside the growing threat of
Nazism. There are, however, no obvious trends
linking style and subject. Examples can be found of
jokes, explicit propaganda and non-political
graphics in every idiom and all classes, races and
genders were depicted in all styles.
The rationale for experimentation seems to have
been the production of apposite art forms for artist
and audience. In part, this involved New Masses
appropriating the practices of its predecessors,
which were the result of years of seeking popular
appeal.
By maintaining established idioms and embracing
new techniques, artists were able to draw images
that made sense to its readership, that
communicated emotional investment, and that were
suitably progressive within the cultural framework
of a capitalist society. They were encouraged in this
by the nation’s left-wing critics, who implied
Russian art did not live up to the task, arguing that
work ‘couched in classic and archaic terms …
obscure[d] the subject’ and made ‘the emotional
impact of the picture an abstract one’.68 Lozowick
believed that if the artist could ‘apply the force of
technical equipment to the wealth of new themes,
no prospect for what he might accomplish would be
too hopeful’.69 There was a demand for thematic
and idiomatic diversity and quality – but art had to
strike the right balance between innovation and
utility. As Gold wrote, ‘I think a new content often
demands new form, but when the new form gets so

593
far ahead of us all that we can’t understand its
content it is time to write letters to the press.’ 70
That some Russian critics found this approach
problematic is palpable in Boris Ternovetz’s review
of a John Reed Club exhibition held in Moscow in
1933, which included pieces by Gropper, Bard,
Burck and Lozowick. His underlying critical tone –
his emphasis on the need for vigilance against
bourgeois ‘abstract schematism on the one hand,
and sickly expressionist hysterics on the other’ –
belies his assessment that ‘the general impression
was extremely favourable’. Ternovetz noted that
other Soviet critics shared his concerns and
proposed that a major benefit of the exhibition was
a ‘stock-taking for the foreign artists themselves’,
submitting their work to ‘fraternal criticism’
exposed ‘their diseases of growth’.71 Improved
channels of exchange had not transformed New
Masses’ imagery, which maintained an identity
independent of Soviet influence. By 1935
international military aggression prompted the
adoption of the Popular Front policy (a drive to form
an anti-fascist coalition) and previous cultural
directives were overshadowed by the conciliatory
strategies that afforded communist sympathizers
aesthetic autonomy. But the visual evidence
indicates that cartoonist Russell Limbach was
voicing the long-held opinion of many when he told
readers that year, ‘The American artist has nothing
to learn from his comrades in the USSR in the field
of graphic art.’ New Masses featured ‘much better
material for a study of what revolutionary art can or
should not be in this country’.72
1 See Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary
Communism (Harcourt: New York, 1961); James Gilbert, Writers and

594
 Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America (John Wiley &
Sons: New York, 1968); and Eric Homberger, American Writers and
Radical Politics, 1900–1939 (St Martin’s Press: New York, 1986).

2 Leslie Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of The Masses,

1911–17 (University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1982), p. 207.
Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A
Critical History (Viking Press: New York, 1957), p. 278.

3 Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt, ‘New Masses and the John Reed Club,
1926–1936: Evolution of Ideology, Subject Matter and Style’, Journal of
Decorative and Propaganda Arts, no. 12 (Spring 1989), pp. 57–8. The
length of Marquardt’s text necessarily limits the detail of her argument,
which redresses previous appraisals of New Masses, but her
preoccupation with modernist trends results in a distorted account of
the magazine’s artistic development. Her viewpoint stems from her
study ‘Louis Lozowick: Development from Machine Aesthetic to Social
Realism’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Maryland, 1983), which
describes a shift from 1929 onwards, indicative of overt politicization,
when labourers were
introduced into the artist’s monumentalized urban scenes. This is not
discernable in the pages of New Masses – peopled prints predate
Gold’s editorship, while Lozowick’s unpopulated landscapes continued
to feature into the 1930s. Similarly, Patricia Phagan ‘William Gropper
and Freiheit: A Study of his Political Cartoons, 1924–35’, unpublished
PhD thesis (City University of New York, 2000), argues that following a
trip to the USSR in 1927 Gropper’s work became more naturalistic. In
fact, Gropper’s New Masses work is stylistically changeable. There is
evidence that Russian art made an impression, but this was an addition
to his oeuvre, not a change of direction.

4 Andrei Zhdanov announced the ‘artistic method’ of Socialist Realism at

the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in August 1934. See C.
Vaughan James, Soviet Socialist Realism (Macmillan: London, 1973).

5 Quoted in Marquardt, ‘New Masses and the John Reed Club,

1926–1936’, op. cit., p. 58–9.

6 Michael Gold, ‘Let it be Really New’, New Masses, vol. 2, no. 2 (June
1926), p. 20–6.

7 Michael Gold, ‘The Ninth Year’, New Masses, vol. 2, no. 1 (November
1926), p. 5.

8 Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the

Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (Yale University Press: New Haven
and London, 2002), p. 29.

595
9 New Masses had six initial editors: Michael Gold, Joseph Freeman,
Hugo Gellert (art editor until August 1928), John Sloan, Egmont Arens
and James Rorty. Freeman and Rorty dropped to the ‘Executive Board’
in December 1926 and Sloan left the magazine. William Gropper
replaced him as art editor. In July 1931, the editorial board consisted of
Gold, Robert Evans and Louis Lozowick. In February 1932, Gellert and
Moissaye J. Olgin joined, followed by Whittaker Chambers in May
1932. Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (Random
House: New York, 1978), pp. 94–6, describes the addition of Chambers
as a result of Party involvement.

10 Political division complicates the historiography of the CPUSA.

Theodore Draper’s The Roots of American Communism (Viking Press:
New York, 1957) and American Communism and the Soviet Union
(Viking Press: New York, 1960) are the determining texts of the Cold
War perspective. See also, Howe and Coser, The American
Communist Party, op. cit., and Harvey Klehr and John Haynes, The
American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself (Twayne
Publishers: New York, 1992) for ‘traditionalist’ views. Fraser Ottanelli’s
revisionist interpretation The Communist Party of the United States
(Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, 1991) argues that the
CPUSA was not a servile appendage of Moscow, but ‘was shaped by a
homespun search for policies which would make it an integral part of
the country’s society’ (p. 4). My study of the visual culture has led to
similar conclusions.

11 Eastman published Leon Trotsky: Portrait of a Youth in 1926. He

became a political pariah as a result of his support for Trotsky, who
made his last speech at the Eighth Comintern Plenum in May 1927
before being expelled from the Party.

12 Quoted in Marquardt, ‘New Masses and the John Reed Club,

1926–1936’, op. cit., p. 58–9.

13 New Masses, vol. 2, no. 1 (November 1926), p. 5. New Masses

frequently printed requests for financial support.

14 Michael Gold, ‘Editorial Notes’, New Masses, vol. 4, no. 1 (June 1928),
p. 17.

15 Michael Gold, ‘A Letter from a Clam Digger’, New Masses, vol. 5, no. 6
(November 1929), p. 11.

16 James Murphy, The Proletarian Moment: The Controversy over Leftism

in Literature (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 1991) demonstrates
that Gold’s association with extreme leftism arose from sweeping
statements and contradictions in his writing. Murphy’s introduction

596
 identifies numerous texts that have asserted New Masses, and Gold
particularly, as proponents of leftism. Marquardt uncritically accepts
this, claiming ‘Gold narrowed the formal and thematic range of “workers
art” during 1929 and 1930.’ Marquardt, ‘New Masses and the John
Reed Club’, op. cit., p. 67.

17 Irwin Granich (Michael Gold), ‘Towards Proletarian Art’, Liberator, vol.

4, no. 2 (February 1921), pp. 20–4.

18 Michael Gold, ‘Go Left, Young Writers!’ New Masses, vol. 4, no. 8
(January 1929), pp. 3–4.

19 Michael Gold, ‘A New Program for Writers’, New Masses, vol. 5, no. 8
(January 1930), p. 21. Ralph Cheney, ‘On New Program for Writers’,
New Masses, vol. 5, no. 9 (February 1930), p. 21. On the LEF, see
Brandon Taylor, Art and Literature Under the Bolsheviks, vol. 1 (Pluto
Press: London, 1992), pp. 175–83.

20 Fred Ellis et al., ‘The Charkov Conference of Revolutionary Writers’,

New Masses, vol. 6, no. 9 (February 1931), p. 7.

21 The IURW was a Soviet-based coordinating body for the exchange of

theoretical material. Literature of the World Revolution, which was
published in four languages – German, French, English and Russian –
thoroughly covered the Kharkov conference in a ‘Special Number’.

22 A. Elistratova, ‘New Masses’, International Literature, no. 1 (1932), p.

109–11.

23 ‘Resolution on the Work of New Masses for 1931’, New Masses, vol. 8,
no. 3 (September 1932), p. 21.

24 Bernard Smith, ‘Machines and Mobs’, New Masses, vol. 3, no. 11

(March 1928), p. 32.

25 Gold, ‘Let it be Really New’, op. cit., p. 26.

26 Michael Gold, ‘A New Masses Theatre’, New Masses, vol. 3, no. 7

(November 1927), p. 23.

27 Kenneth Fearing, ‘Hoboken Blues’, New Masses, vol. 3, no. 12 (April

1928), p. 27.

28 Hugo Gellert, ‘O+.I. = Brancusi’, New Masses, vol. 2, no. 3 (January

1927), p. 25. See also ‘Pound vs. Gellert’, New Masses, vol. 2, no. 5
(March 1927), p. 25.

597
29 Lozowick published his opinions in articles, reviews and books, such as
Modern Russian Art (1925) and Voices of October (1930). His papers
include numerous essays on modern artists including Cézanne and
Kandinsky, and he wrote at length on Marx and art.

30 Louis Lozowick, ‘Lithography: Abstraction and Realism’, Space, March

1930, Lozowick papers, AAA, 5895.

31 Louis Lozowick, ‘A Decade of Soviet Art’, Menorah Journal, vol. 16, no.
3 (March 1929), p. 245.

32 Joseph Freeman et al., Voices of October: Art and Literature in the

Soviet Union (Vanguard Press: New York, 1930), pp. 273–81.

33 Louis Lozowick, ‘Machine Art is Bourgeois’, New Masses, vol. 4, no. 9

(February 1929), p. 31.

34 On Russia’s relationship with Taylorism, see Taylor, Art and Literature

Under the Bolsheviks, op. cit., pp. 120–9.

35 Louis Lozowick, ‘Art in the Service of the Proletariat’, Literature of the

World Revolution, no. 4 (1931), p. 126–7. Lozowick put forward a
similar argument in ‘What Should Revolutionary Artists Do Now?’, New
Masses, vol. 6, no. 7 (December 1930), p. 21.

36 Elistratova, ‘New Masses’, op. cit., p. 110.

37 Vern Jessup, ‘And Now, the Artists …’, New Masses, vol. 6, no. 5
(October 1930), p. 22. Interestingly, Jessup also accused Gellert of
producing
ineffective, ‘arty’ illustrations on occasion.

38 Pauline Zutringer, ‘Machine Art is Bourgeois’, New Masses, vol. 4, no.

9 (February 1929), p. 31.

39 Elistratova, ‘New Masses’, op. cit., p. 109.

40 Georgi Plekhanov, Art and Social Life (Lawrence and Wishart: London,
1953), pp. 177–224.

41 Quoted in Hemingway, Artists on the Left, op. cit., p. 26. The second
show, entitled ‘Exhibition of Contemporary Art of Soviet Russia:
Paintings, Graphics, Sculpture’, was held in a gallery at Grand Central
Station, New York in 1929; see Hemingway, pp. 26, 289.

42 ‘Art is a Weapon: Program of the Worker’s Cultural Federation’, New

Masses, vol. 7, no. 3 (August 1931), p. 12.

43 See examples in the January and November 1927 issues.

598
44 Quoted in Marquardt, ‘New Masses and the John Reed Club’, op. cit.,
p. 59.

45 Michael Gold, ‘Notes of the Month’, New Masses, vol. 6, no. 4

(September 1930), p. 5.

46 Gold, ‘Go Left, Young Writers!’, op. cit., pp. 3–4.

47 Michael Gold, ‘Note’, New Masses, vol. 6, no. 1 (June 1930), p. 22.

48 Quoted from Daily Worker, 1933, in Murphy, The Proletarian Moment,

op. cit., p. 122.

49 Elistratova, ‘New Masses’, op. cit., pp. 109–11. See also Ternovetz’s
criticism of the ‘sentimental lachrymose treatment of proletarian
themes’, Boris Ternovetz, ‘John Reed Club Art in Moscow’, trans. Louis
Lozowick, New Masses, vol. 8, no. 8 (April 1933), p. 25.

50 John Kwait, ‘John Reed Club Art Exhibition’, New Masses, vol. 8, no. 7
(February 1933), p. 23. On Schapiro, see Andrew Hemingway, ‘Meyer
Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 1
(1994).

51 Jacob Burck, ‘Sectarianism in Art’, New Masses, vol. 8, no. 8 (April

1933), p. 26.

52 Jerome Klein, ‘Twenty-One Gun Salute’, Art Front, vol. 1, no. 5 (May
1935), p. 6.

53 Jacob Kainen, ‘Our Expressionists’, Art Front, vol. 3, no. 1 (February

1937), pp. 14–15.

54 ‘To All Revolutionary Artists of the World’, Literature of World

Revolution: Special Number on the Second International Conference of
Revolutionary Writers, 1931, pp. 10–11.

55 Anatoly Lunacharsky, ‘Marxism and Art’, New Masses, vol. 8, no. 4

(November 1932), p. 14. Lunacharsky had resigned from the
Commissariat of Enlightenment in 1929, but he was not politically
discredited until after his death in 1933, and was still cited in New
Masses as a cultural authority.

56 Quoted in Murphy The Proletarian Moment, op. cit., p. 98.

57 Julian Gumperz, ‘George Grosz – Up Out of Dada’, New Masses, vol.

2, no. 6 (April 1927), pp. 17–18. Gumperz was the editor of the German
communist newspaper Die Rote Fahne (The red flag) and cofounder of

599
 Der Gegner (The opponent), a periodical aimed at the working class
that published Grosz’s art.

58 Quoted in Marquardt, ‘Louis Lozowick’, op. cit., pp. 135–6.

59 Lewis Mumford, ‘Satirist into Painter’, New Yorker, 27 March 1937,

reprinted in David Shapiro (ed.), Social Realism: Art as a Weapon
(Frederick Ungar Publishing Co: New York, 1973), pp. 203–5.

60 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Wit of William Gropper’, Art Front, vol. 2, no. 4
(March 1936), pp. 7–8.

61 Anita Brenner, ‘Revolution in Art’, The Nation, vol. 136, no. 3531 (8
March 1933), pp. 267–9. Brenner was an independent left-wing writer
who contributed to New Masses.

62 Kainen, ‘Brook and his Tradition’, Art Front, vol. 2, no. 3 (February
1936), pp. 6–7.

63 Kainen, ‘Our Expressionists’, op. cit., pp. 14–15.

64 I. Kataev, ‘Art on the Threshold of Socialism’, International Literature,

no.1 (April 1934), pp. 83–91.

65 Elistratova, ‘New Masses’, op. cit., p. 110.

66 Lozowick, ‘Machine Art is Bourgeois’, op. cit., p. 31.

67 See Gellert, ‘I Meet an Individualist’, New Masses, vol. 3, no. 5

(September 1927), p. 25. Also Lozowick, ‘What Should Revolutionary
Artists Do Now?’, op. cit., p. 21.

68 Jacob Kainen, ‘Revolutionary Art at the John Reed Club’, Art Front, vol.
1, no. 2 (January 1935), p. 6.

69 Lozowick papers, AAA, 5895.

70 Quoted from Daily Worker, 1934, in Murphy, The Proletarian Moment,

op. cit., p. 140.

71 Ternovetz, ‘John Reed Club Art in Moscow’, op. cit., p. 25.

72 Russell T. Limbach, ‘Soviet Art’, New Masses, vol. 17, no. 9 (26
November 1935), p. 25.

600
STUART DAVIS AND LEFT
MODERNISM ON THE NEW YORK
WATERFRONT IN THE 1930S
Jody Patterson

‘If the historical process is forcing the artist to relinquish his

individualist isolation and come into the arena of life problems, it
may be the abstract artist who is best equipped to give vital artistic
expression to such problems – because he has already learned to
abandon the ivory tower in his objective approach to his materials.’
Stuart Davis, 19361

T he relations between abstract painting and

leftist politics during the 1930s remain
problematic and understudied aspects of the
development of modern art in the United States.
The reasons for this neglect are both aesthetic and
ideological, with postwar critical and commercial
support for what was perceived as a distinctive
American style of gestural abstraction paramount
among them. By the late 1940s the hegemony of a
putatively apolitical formalism was accompanied by
widespread rejection of the socially engaged art of
the previous decade as a technically and politically
misguided cultural anomaly. Conventional accounts
of abstraction that insist on its opposition to
figuration by stressing its purity, universalism and
non-objectivity continue to bedevil an
understanding of the ways in which modernist
technical strategies were aligned with the

601
expression of contemporary social and political
concerns.
While the dominant visual mode in the United
States in the 1930s was realist, with those on the
left favouring either an illustrational naturalism or a
propagandistic social realism, there were some
artists who were convinced that giving form to their
political vision required a modernist idiom. This
desire to achieve a rapprochement between
modernist art and politics is perhaps most clearly
and ably demonstrated by the example of Stuart
Davis. Long acknowledged as one of America’s most
accomplished abstract painters, he was also one of
the left’s most ardent artist-activists during the
years of the Great Depression. Serving as president
of the Artists’ Union, an editor of its journal Art
Front, and national chairman of the American
Artists’ Congress Against War and Fascism, he was
a tireless supporter of the economic and political
rights of artists.2 But while he adhered to
communist political theory throughout the 1930s
and was insistent that Marxism was ‘the only
scientific social viewpoint’, he did not subscribe to
orthodox social-realist aesthetics of the period.3 He
was unwilling to relinquish the techniques of
painting developed by the School of Paris (seen by
some
leftist critics as ‘bourgeois’) and effectively denied
that the Communist Party provided any insight on
artistic matters. His refusal of communist
prescriptions for cultural production as both vulgar
and naive – despite his political fellow-travelling
until the end of the decade when, like many leftists,
he became disillusioned with Stalinism – was
underpinned by the belief that both art and politics
were dynamic processes that needed to respond to

602
changes in the material world. For Davis, just as
Marxism was the most progressive social and
economic force within the political realm,
modernism represented a historically necessary
break with earlier artistic strategies. Unlike
figuration, which was tied to what he regarded as a
moribund world view, abstract form and colour
were the most advanced tools at the artist’s
disposal and thereby offered the necessary
resources for engaging contemporary reality.
Davis’s approach to art and politics has proven
something of a tripping point for scholars. For
example, Karen Wilkin suggests that Davis
‘scrupulously separated his painting and his social
activism’.4 Although, as Wilkin observes, Davis
insisted that ‘good art … could not and should not
serve the needs of propaganda’, the distinction she
posits between his painting and his politics misses
the sophistication of his thinking during the 1930s.5
One of the central issues here is that while Davis’s
artistic output demonstrates a nuanced
understanding of European formal developments
and a commitment to a decidedly modernist visual
language, he was adamant that his work be
understood as ‘realist’, a position that had
important political resonances and which Davis
scholars have yet to take seriously.
Both ‘realism’ and ‘modernism’ are particularly
unwieldy concepts and a considerable degree of
terminological imprecision is commonplace. But
while discussions around realism had ossified in the
Soviet Union by 1934 and the influence of the
Comintern ensured that it was the Soviet model of
Socialist Realism that served as a benchmark for
consideration, there was nevertheless opposition to

603
the narrowness of what amounted to Moscow
criteria. As Raymond Williams puts it, the category
of realism remained ‘highly variable and inherently
complex’, with other alternatives enunciated across
the leftist cultural field.6 For Davis, an artist was
not merely an observer, nor was realism simply
premised upon mirroring the world. This approach
reduced art to its content and ignored the
significance of form and its specific basis in
material reality.7 He was insistent that while ‘class
consciousness must … be the guide to the value of a
work of art, it is not sufficient to evaluate a painting
in terms of its social ideology’; ‘its technical
ideology is also involved and must be rated.’8 The
art-historical habit of contrasting realism with
modernism is thus especially unhelpful with respect
to Davis.9 He consistently denied that the
deployment of modernist devices was tantamount to
an idealist art-for-art’s sake position and ardently
defended his approach to painting as a species of
realism grounded in the shapes, forms, spaces and
colours of the observable material world. As a
result, while much of his work of the 1930s exists
at a considerable distance from conventional realist
aesthetics (especially as formulated by communist
ideologues), formalist evaluations of his art that
focus solely on his savvy incorporation of modernist
pictorial devices render it next to impossible to
reconcile his painting with his politics and ignore
his stated ambitions.

604
1 Stuart Davis, Composition, 1935, oil on canvas.
56.4 × 76.5 cm. Smithsonian American Art
Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
Copyright © 2013 Estate of Stuart Davis / DACS,
London / VAGA, New York.

During the 1930s many left-wing critics were

sceptical of the capacity of modernism to carry
socially relevant content and condemned the use of
modernistic techniques as symptomatic of an
irresponsible and escapist evasion of social reality
aligned with individualism and apathy. Davis,
however, claimed that an adherence to the formal
techniques developed by artists dependent on the
bourgeois art market did not compromise allegiance
with the working class. As he explained, ‘A class’
culture may develop at a different rate than the
society and be at [its] best as the class is
decaying.’10 Modernist forms, which were tied to a

605
more dynamic view of contemporary experience
than the static and hierarchical world view
epitomized by naturalist aesthetics, constituted ‘the
highest product of the preceding epoch’11 and
thereby needed to be preserved and extended in the
creation of new social and economic relations.

2 La Corona cigar box label. Source

image for Composition, 1935.

That Davis saw a direct connection between the

concerns of artists and those of other workers is
evident in his Composition [1], an oil on canvas
painted after he was enrolled on the Works
Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project
(FAP), one of several cultural initiatives established
by President Roosevelt’s New Deal administration
and under whose auspices Davis was employed
from 1935 to 1939. The format of the painting
suggests a modernist variation on the still-life
genre. It features a collage of overlapping elements
clustered around the middle of the canvas and set
within a shallow pictorial space. Attesting to Davis’s
abiding interest in mass culture, the compositional
arrangement is based on a La Corona cigar box

606
label, which pictures a classical female figure with
flowing locks and robe seated in an idyllic
landscape surrounded by symbols of culture,
industry and agriculture [2]. While the overall
layout of Composition is inspired by the La Corona
label, the painting demonstrates the way in which
Davis adeptly engaged the lessons of Cubism and
montage to transform source materials. Central to
his working method was the practice of abstracting
pre-existing images and motifs and then subjecting
them to processes of fragmentation, recombination
and variation in placement and size. The top centre
of Composition is dominated by the silhouette of a
female head in three-quarter profile rendered in
thick black outline. The bust, which is set against a
watery blue ground and positioned beside the fluke
of an anchor, recalls the figurehead of a ship. A
bright-orange artist’s palette accompanied by paint
brushes is situated in the middle of the canvas and
is flanked by a draughtsman’s compass and square
on the left; to the right is a spade, sledgehammer,
ladder and oversized gear or cog resting against a
schematized building, whose prominent smoke
stack suggests a
factory or power station. The iconography thus
brings together the tools of the artist with those of
industry. As Mariea Caudill Dennison has noted,
this particular constellation of elements could be
‘interpreted as an assertion of the equality of all
workers’ – a parity that was pivotal to Davis’s
political perspective throughout the decade and was
confirmed by his experiences as a WPA employee.12
For Davis, artists were skilled labourers like any
other whose contributions to society were as
valuable and indispensable as those of other
workers.

607
3 Stuart Davis, Art to the people – get pink slips,
1937, gouache, traces of pencil and collage on
paper, 45.4 × 60.6 cm. Private collection, Houston.
Copyright © 2013 Estate of Stuart Davis / DACS,
London / VAGA, New York.

While elsewhere I argue for the political import of

the abstract public murals that Davis created under
the FAP, during the 1930s he also executed a
number of easel paintings that acknowledge
contemporary politics in a less opaque fashion.13
The paintings under consideration here are unusual
instances of his employing an explicitly political
iconography, but it should be borne in mind that his
political claims for modernist form nevertheless
extended to works where such motifs do not appear
and which for him were just as political. That said,
his Art to the people – get pink slips of 1937 is a
gouache

608
and collage on paper that incorporates a pointed
reference to the New Deal arts projects within the
context of a familiar seascape [3]. The harbour and
dockside paraphernalia were recurring themes for
Davis, who often retreated to the New England
coastal town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, during
the summer months. Gloucester was both a historic
colonial port on Cape Ann with a thriving fishing
industry and also home to one of the oldest artists’
colonies in the US, attracting nineteenth-century
landscape artists such Winslow Homer, along with
numerous members of the Ashcan School, with
whom Davis had trained as a student at the Robert
Henri School of Art in New York from 1909 to 1913.
Davis frequently reworked his Gloucester sketches,
and in this instance the title of the 1937 gouache is
derived from a newspaper headline that he cut out
and affixed directly onto the lower right-hand
corner of the composition.
The newspaper clipping stuck to the surface of Art
to the people references the American practice of
including a pink slip of paper in a worker’s pay
envelope as notification of immediate termination or
suspension of employment. Given that government
funding for the arts was a temporary relief whose
future was far from guaranteed and that artists on
its rolls were continually under threat of layoff,
Davis was acutely aware that New Deal cultural
programmes had been plagued by fluctuations in
funding since their inauguration. The already
tentative and uncertain nature of the FAP was
exacerbated in 1937 – the year Art to the people
was executed – when the much-vaunted ‘New Deal
recovery’ suddenly gave way to what became known
as the ‘Roosevelt recession’.14 In the face of another
financial downturn, it was clear to Davis that

609
increasing pressure to reduce the level of state
interventionism in the economic sphere would have
direct and unwelcome ramifications in the cultural
realm. As a result, not only did Davis and the
Artists’ Union fiercely lobby for the continuation of
the cultural projects, they also supported two
liberal bills introduced to Congress in 1938 that
sought to secure federal funding for the arts on a
permanent basis through the establishment of a
Bureau of Fine Arts. The first bill (introduced by
Representative John Coffee of Washington and
Senator Claude Pepper of Florida) never made it
past the committee stage, while the second
(introduced by Representative William Sirovich of
New York) was overwhelmingly rejected in June by
a vote of 195 to 35.15
That Davis tackled contemporary political issues in
the language of artistic modernism is also evident in
a gouache on paper entitled Daily Tribune and CIO
[4]. The predominantly abstract arrangement of
shapes, patterns and textures includes a reference
to the Chicago Daily Tribune, an emphatically
Republican paper whose conservatism would have
made it sceptical of arts projects as a New Deal
boondoggle. The gouache also includes the acronym
‘CIO’ inscribed across the lower central portion of
the composition. The CIO – Committee for Industrial
Organization (later to become the Congress of
Industrial Organizations) – was formed in November
1935 and comprised a federation of unions that
advanced the principle of industrial unionism over
craft
unionism and competed against the corrupt and
rabidly anti-communist American Federation of
Labor (AFL) to organize semi- and unskilled
workers on an industrial basis.16 As suggested at

610
the outset, Davis staunchly supported the
unionization of artistic workers and believed in the
solidarity of all labourers. Operating under the
assumption that leverage for expanding and
stabilizing federal patronage would be strengthened
by connecting with a broader working-class base,
the Artists’ Union (with Davis as president) began
courting the AFL as early as the spring of 1935,
later becoming affiliated with the more progressive
CIO in January 1938. The Chicago Daily Tribune
was not only doggedly anti-CIO, it was also
vehemently anti-communist and harshly critical of
the New Deal. On 17 April 1937, the front page of
the paper announced that the CIO was a ‘Red
stepping stone to a Soviet U.S.’, later claiming in a
headline on 10 February 1938 that a Senate Inquiry
in Washington ‘Links CIO, Reds, and Roosevelt
administration’.

611
 4 Stuart Davis, Daily Tribune and
CIO, c. 1936, gouache and traces of
pencil on paper, 24 × 22.5 cm.
Private collection. Copyright ©
2013 Estate of Stuart Davis / DACS,
London / VAGA, New York.

The recently published Davis catalogue raisonné

dates Daily Tribune and CIO to c. 1931 on stylistic
grounds, but this is impossible as the CIO was not
founded until four years later. The 1967 stock list of
the Downtown Gallery, which represented Davis
for much of the 1930s, dates the work to c. 1936,
but the explicit and unprecedented references to
Chicago and the CIO make it tempting to suggest a
slightly later date, namely 1937. While the painting
may well have been executed earlier in the decade,
Davis frequently returned to previous works to
make adjustments and it is conceivable that the
scrawling of ‘CIO’ and ‘Daily Trib’ on the otherwise
abstract composition was linked to the Memorial
Day Massacre at the South Chicago plant of
Republic Steel. The incident arose as a result of
Republic Steel’s efforts to break the strike called by
the Steel Workers Organizing Committee of the
CIO. The several thousand strikers and their
supporters who gathered on 30 May 1937 to protest
against restrictions on picketing were greeted with
tear-gas grenades, and ten unarmed demonstrators
were killed by the Chicago Police Department.17
Taking the side of industrial corporate power and
the police commissioner, who denounced the
episode as a communist-led provocation, the
Chicago Daily Tribune supported calling in National
Guard troops to reopen the mills, with the paper’s
headline three weeks after the massacre

612
victoriously stating that ‘CIO Grip on Steel
Smashed’. That Daily Tribune and CIO evokes the
Memorial Day Massacre is conjecture on my part,
but while Davis ardently rejected the Soviet
instrumentalization of art as illustrative
propaganda, he nevertheless executed paintings
that included tendentious references, albeit often
enigmatic and oblique, to the contemporary political
scene.

5 Stuart Davis, Waterfront

Demonstration, 1936, gouache and
traces of pencil on paper, 29.5 ×
39.4 cm. Fayez Sarofim, Houston.
Copyright © 2013 Estate of Stuart
Davis / DACS, London / VAGA, New
York.

A decidedly more clear-cut instance in which Davis

engaged political issues in his work (and
particularly those of labour’s rank-and-file) is
Waterfront Demonstration [5], a surprisingly brutal
gouache on paper that was exhibited at the
‘Waterfront Art Show’ in February 1937. The

613
exhibition was sponsored by the
communist-dominated An American Group, Inc. in
association with the Marine Workers’ Committee.
This was the second co-sponsored undertaking
following the success of the first ‘Waterfront Art
Show’ in December 1935, to which Davis also
contributed a painting. The first show was mounted
at the Italian Workers’ Club in Greenwich Village
and included a handful of paintings and
watercolours alongside a series of photographic
studies by Margaret Bourke-White documenting
working conditions on the New York docks.
According to the communist magazine New Masses,
the exhibition resulted from the revolt of a group of
artists against ‘the pitying attitude of many radical
intellectuals toward workers’, with many of the
artists included in the show having been trained in
‘the tough three-mornings-a-week schedule of the
waterfront units of the Communist Party’.18 The
second exhibition in 1937 was a much a larger
event that filled three floors of the New School for
Social Research and was comprised of 126 works in
various media by 107 artists, with a portion of the
proceeds from sales going to the Marine Workers’
Committee.
During the 1930s, the New York waterfront was a
focus for leftist activity, with communists exercising
a considerable degree of influence by taking the
lead in developing maritime unions.19 Although, as
leftist author Louis Adamic pointed out in 1938,
many waterfront unions already existed, most,
including the International Longshoremen’s
Association (ILA), were ‘out and out rackets’ run by
the corrupt AFL.20 However, in contradistinction to
the pronounced development of radical unionism
among longshoremen on the West Coast under

614
Harry Bridges (who was closely associated with the
Party and whose rank-and-file group functioned as a
branch of the ILA), the same period that culminated
in the ‘Big Strike’ in San Francisco in 1934 was
marked by the persistence of conservative unionism
in the East.21 Collective bargaining in the longshore
industry in New York had long since received
institutional accommodation.22 As a result, in the
midst of the increased labour militancy that marked
the 1930s, strike action to gain recognition was not
as pressing on the East Coast as it was in the
longshore industry in Pacific ports.
Although the ILA did not require the new
guarantees provided for under the National
Industrial Recovery Act and the Wagner Act (passed
in 1933 and 1935, respectively), this alone does not
explain the relative inactivity of New York maritime
workers during a period when radical unionism was
gaining momentum throughout the rest of the
nation. More to the point was the fact that on the
Atlantic coast ILA president Joseph P. Ryan was a
fanatical anti-communist. By mid-decade, Ryan was
sharing his convention platforms with some of
America’s staunchest supporters of Hitler and
Mussolini and he maintained order on the docks by
employing notorious
gangsters and ex-convicts as ‘union organizers’ to
police the waterfront. Beginning in 1927, when he
was elected to the presidency of the ILA, and
continuing until 1942, when his position was
ceremonially extended for life, ‘King Joe’ ensured
that there was not a single union-authorized strike
in the Port of New York.23 With Ryan at the helm,
the early 1930s were years of extreme quiescence
among maritime workers on the East Coast, and
even the onset of the Depression did not trigger a

615
significant wave of protest activity. The initiative for
the formation of a new union came not from the
waterfront’s rank-and-file but from the Communist
Party.24 Although there already existed nuclei of
communist activists on some docks, a 1936 report
on ‘Problems of Party Growth in New York’ flagged
up the fact that ‘more attention has to be paid by us
to concentration in this industry’ and the Party was
particularly keen to actively build a new union
under more radical leadership.25
By mid-decade, the East Coast ILA had, according
to many members, degenerated into little more than
‘a dues collection agency’ whose extensive
underworld connections and corrupt collaborations
with ship-owners led to the formation of ‘action
committees’ throughout the port.26 By the end of
1936 two important locals had elected ‘anti-Ryan
progressives’, and that autumn Bridges was invited
to New York by striking East Coast seamen. Hours
before he addressed a capacity crowd of 17,000
maritime workers at Madison Square Gardens, he
was called to ILA headquarters, where Ryan
dismissed him as the West Coast union organizer.
With Ryan on the defensive, Bridges repeatedly
stressed the importance of inter-coastal unity and
pledged his full support to New York longshoremen
if they decided to join the fight with their comrades
on the Pacific’.27 When Bridges returned to the East
Coast for a second time in the autumn of 1937, this
time as president of the International
Longshoremen and Warehousemens’ Union and
affiliated with the CIO, the situation on the New
York waterfront looked more promising.
Representatives from eleven locals had formally
endorsed the organizational principles of the CIO
and the dock’s rank-and-file were now leading the

616
anti-Ryan movement, finding themselves described
by one field organizer as ‘wild and rarin’ to go’.28
Such optimism was, however, to prove short-lived.
Ryan’s gunmen went to work in 1939 and physical
violence (threatened and actual) effectively silenced
the chorus of voices calling for reform and enforced
the authority of an utterly corrupt, conservative and
racketeering leadership.
During the mid-1930s, the activities of the maritime
unions were well-publicized, and a number of
cultural events were organized in support of their
efforts, with the ‘Waterfront Art Show’ one instance
in which artists were in the service of their
comrades’ struggle. As Ernst Brace noted in the
Magazine of Art, ‘the seaman’s strike was focusing
public interest upon this aspect of city life’ and
members of An American Group, Inc. wanted to
take some form of ‘united action in order to
demonstrate their solidarity’.29 As one might
imagine, the show was lionized in the communist
press,
with the Sunday Worker heralding it as an event of
‘tremendous educational and social significance’ in
that it was ‘the first important mass art exhibition in
this country with the definite aim of supporting the
rank and file of labor’.30 Leonard Sparks, the art
critic for New Masses, welcomed the ‘industrial
exhibition’ for enabling ‘increased contact with a
broader audience’ and for endeavouring to ‘define
in concrete terms the relations between art and
work’.31 The Daily Worker lauded the show for
demolishing ‘the old belief that artists were
individuals who had no relationship to the struggles
of the workers’.32 In the words of Jacob Kainen
(himself a modernist painter and communist
fellow-traveller with whom Davis was friendly), the

617
exhibition unequivocally demonstrated the ‘unity
between artist and worker’ by giving longshoremen
an opportunity to purchase ‘art that has a real
relationship to their jobs and daily life’.33
Long mistitled Artists Against War and Fascism,
Davis’s contribution to the ‘Waterfront Art Show’
depicts what leftist art critic Jerome Klein described
in the New York Post as ‘robot figures in police
uniforms cracking down on a lone demonstrator’.34
Central to the image is a wounded protestor with a
bloodied head being apprehended by two menacing
figures dressed in officer’s caps and dark uniforms,
one of whom wields a club or baton. Although it has
been suggested that Waterfront Demonstration is
‘entirely compatible with the esthetics of social
realism in that it emphasizes political message over
formal experimentation’, the unusual degree of
narrative coherence and pictorial transparency
hardly adheres to the more legible naturalistic
conventions adopted by painters within the Party’s
orbit, as was noted with disappointment by
communist critics at the time.35 The critic at New
Masses lamented the ‘unsubstantial nature’ of
Davis’s painting and seemed to find it no more
useful than works that depicted longshoremen as
‘lounging bums’ or ‘beaten derelicts’, never mind
the inappropriateness of images picturing ‘beautiful
marine blues’ or ‘chugging tug boats’.36 Klein, who
also wrote for Art Front and was a champion of
social realism during the 1930s, lumped Davis in
with those artists who continued to demonstrate
‘lingering tendencies toward esthetic
preoccupation’. Klein disparagingly described
Davis’s approach to Waterfront Demonstration as
both ‘esoteric’ and ‘highly specialized,’ ultimately
dismissing the gouache as ‘cryptic’.37

618
Waterfront Demonstration is more overtly polemical
than one might expect from Davis at this juncture,
which is not to say that his more abstract paintings
of the 1930s were apolitical or constituted anything
like a retreat into the ivory tower. Still, the gouache
does not fit neatly into the category of social
realism and remains more typical of his
Cubist-inspired collages of the decade. A number of
the elements incorporated into the composition are
indecipherable, but surrounding the officers one
can identify a tangle of black barbed wire; a dark
cylindrical form replete with a plume of smoke that
can be read as both a smoking gun barrel or a
steam ship’s funnel; and an overhead wharf lamp
that conjures a police interrogation room. The
factory building
with prominent chimney pictured in Composition
reappears in the centre ground, this time with a
second chimney and accompanied by a large piece
of industrial machinery. The building is borrowed
from Davis’s catalogue of Gloucester imagery, and
while it no longer exists, historical maps suggest
that it was Gloucester Electric.38 If so, the machine
in front could be a rotary excavator that would have
been used to move coal into the factory to generate
steam power. The painting also includes a fallen
placard with the word ‘LIBRE’ and a square
rendered in white, yellow, red and blue that was the
house flag of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam
Navigation Company (P&O), a British shipping
company that began operating out of New York
harbour in the nineteenth century. The very fact
that the painting has passed for so long under the
title Artists Against War and Fascism surely
suggests that the overall scene and the specifics of
its iconography maintain a degree of awkwardness

619
and interpretive indeterminacy characteristic of
modernist rather than social-realist practice.
Davis’s participation in the ‘Waterfront Art Show’
should be understood as a means by which he was
able to support the emergent rank-and-file
movement on the New York docks. Although New
Masses suggests that Davis’s contribution was not
immediately appreciated by the longshoremen, this
would have come as no surprise to the artist.39 Prior
to the advent of the arts projects, modernism had
been confined to the rarefied high-art spaces of
galleries and museums, places workers rarely, if
ever, visited. Their lack of leisure time and limited
access to art education meant that they were
unfamiliar with the most recent developments in
contemporary art. However, this did not mean that
workers would not take pleasure from modern art
or that they should be fed on a diet of popular
culture and images that merely reflected their lives
and experiences back to them. Subscribing to the
philosophy set out by John Dewey in his influential
Art as Experience of 1934 (and adopted by key
figures in the New Deal Administration, including
Holger Cahill, Director of the FAP), Davis
maintained that what was needed was a greater
democratization of culture. He was insistent that if
workers were given greater exposure to modernism
– something that was being achieved through
federal funding for public art – they would quickly
realize that they were already familiar with
modernist forms. As Davis explained, these forms
were directly culled from the design of
contemporary objects, including ‘the shape and
color of clothes, autos, cameras, airplanes, trains,
cooking utensils, etc’, things that workers already
knew and which in many instances they had

620
fashioned with their own hands.40 As such, while
the question of access to culture could not be
separated from the larger political and economic
issues of creating a more equal society, current
efforts towards the democratization of art would at
least enable increased access to modernism and
perhaps foster increasing interest in its forms,
spaces and colours.

6 Stuart Davis, The Terminal, 1937, oil on canvas,

76.4 × 101.6 cm. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
Copyright © 2013 Estate of Stuart Davis / DACS,
London / VAGA, New York.

Davis’s commitment to cultivating links between

artists and other workers is further demonstrated
by The Terminal [6], another oil on canvas that
takes the

621
New York docks as its subject. The painting, which
pictures longshoremen loading cargo, was exhibited
on at least four occasions during the 1930s
(including in the Whitney Museum of American
Art’s ‘Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American
Painting’ in 1937), thereby bringing heightened
attention to activities on the waterfront. Such
support for his fellow labourers was not only a
crucial component of class solidarity, but also
necessary if workers were to be brought on side in
lobbying for permanent federal funding for the arts.
As the independent leftist art historian Meyer
Schapiro advised in a lecture delivered to a
convention of unions from the eastern states in May
1936, although New Deal patronage constituted ‘an
immense step toward a public art and the security
of the artist’s profession’, the impermanence of
government support meant that artists needed to
make contact with a broader public if they were to
secure such patronage for the future.41 According
to Schapiro, whose lecture was published under the
title ‘Public Use of Art’ in the autumn issue of Art
Front, ‘It is necessary that the artists show their
solidarity with the workers both in
their support of the workers’ demands and in their
art’.42 However, while Davis agreed with Schapiro
on the issue of worker solidarity, their positions
were marked by differences of opinion over the
usefulness of the New Deal projects, and the
painter did not approve of the historian’s position
on aesthetics. Davis mistakenly believed Schapiro’s
views on art were underpinned by a crude
‘mechanical materialism’ and criticized him as an
‘idealist’ in relation to modernism. By 1938, Davis
had dismissed Schapiro as a Trotskyist, seemingly
not understanding his position on modernism,

622
which was far more refined and accommodating
than Davis gave him credit for. 43
The desire to form a united front between artists
and other members of the working class was not
only essential to establishing a more inclusive base
from which to fight for the extension of federal
patronage, but also central to the Popular Front
position adopted by the Communist Party at
mid-decade in the fight against war and fascism.
Davis was actively engaged in Popular Front
activities, serving as national chairman of the New
York Artists’ Congress, and his paintings of the
docks coincide with the Party’s recognition that
‘more attention has to be paid by us to
concentration in this industry’.44 Returning to
Waterfront Demonstration, I want to argue that this
painting might be understood to register differing
levels of political significance simultaneously.
Viewed under the title Waterfront Demonstration,
and within the context of the ‘Waterfront Art Show’,
it spoke to the specific experiences of marine
workers and their struggle to form a new union
independent of the anti-communist AFL. But the
image also works with respect to a broader set of
increasingly tense international issues, as is
suggested by the fact that the title Artists Against
War and Fascism only recently raised any
eyebrows. While the iconography may be read as
directly engaged with events on the docks, its date
and subject matter – namely fascist goons beating a
demonstrator – equally fit with the concerns of the
Party and its Popular Front line. On the one hand,
the multivalency of the image’s meaning is
attributable to the degree of abstraction and
departures from naturalism that characterizes
Davis’s formal repertoire; but, on the other, the

623
painting also points to the interconnectedness of
the violent struggles of longshoremen against the
fascistic leadership of Joseph Ryan and the AFL and
the fighting of Popular Front soldiers abroad in the
Spanish Civil War.
By 1936, the year in which Waterfront
Demonstration was executed, American communists
and fellow-travellers were not just battling fascism
at home but also abroad. While in July, at the
outbreak of war, Roosevelt declared that the US
would remain neutral, events in Spain symbolized
the fight against fascism worldwide, and the
Comintern responded in September by launching a
campaign for the formation of the International
Brigades to support the Republican forces. The first
group of American volunteers set sail from New
York on Christmas Day. Of the more than three
thousand US troops who fought in the Abraham
Lincoln Battalion, a high percentage were
communists, and it is estimated that more than a
third were industrial workers,
including steel workers, miners and a considerable
contingent of longshoremen.45 With this in mind,
the placard emblazoned with the Spanish word
‘LIBRE’ (free) that has been thrown to the ground
could suggest that liberty has fallen, with both
marine workers and the Republican army united by
their struggle to overcome injustice and to
overthrow a repressive regime.
Interestingly, Davis’s second gouache picturing
labour struggles on the waterfront (which is known
only through a contact-sheet photograph and which
has been titled Waterfront Demonstration No. 2 due
to its pronounced similarities to the extant painting)
also prominently features a placard. While difficult

624
to decipher, the script appears to read ‘STOP
MUNITION SHIPMENTS’.46 This reading of the
slogan would seem to be confirmed by a work
exhibited by the Chicago-based artist Mitchell
Siporin on the occasion of the New York John Reed
Club’s exhibition ‘Revolutionary Front – 1934’ in the
autumn of 1934. Siporin was an active member of
the Club (an organization that developed out of the
New Masses group in 1929 and which served as the
primary institutional base for communist and
fellow-travelling artists until 1935), and he was a
contributor to New Masses. The work in question,
which was illustrated in Kainen’s review of the
‘Revolutionary Front’ exhibition in Art Front, is
entitled Stop Munition Shipments and includes an
almost identical placard to the one Davis pictures in
Waterfront Demonstration No. 2. While I can only
speculate, such a slogan, combined with the
inclusion of the flag of the P&O Shipping Co.
(whose fleet not only carried passengers and mail,
but since the First World War had also been
involved in the transport of troops, munitions and
raw materials) almost certainly refers to the sham
of the non-interventionist policies in Spain
enunciated by the US and other Western
democracies. By 1936, the American Communist
Party, its fellow-travellers – as well as many liberals
and progressives – were demanding that the US
cease exporting weapons and supplies to fascist
aggressors, namely Germany and Japan. As such,
Davis could be seen to be linking up the specific
cause of the dockworkers with the Popular Front
more generally. Just as his formal motifs involve a
kind of condensation of elements from different
aspects of contemporary experience, so too does his

625
work manifest a condensation of distinct but
interrelated political concerns.
To conclude, I also want to suggest that Davis’s
inclusion of the Spanish word ‘LIBRE’ could be
interpreted to have significance beyond connecting
the struggles of waterfront workers with the
international context of the Popular Front. While
both versions of the artist’s Waterfront
Demonstration are more explicitly propagandistic
than much of his production in the 1930s, they are
nonetheless indebted to formal techniques
developed mainly by artists in Europe, and
especially those associated with the School of Paris.
For Davis, the deployment of such formal strategies
had important political implications and he insisted
they were radical in and of themselves. Moreover,
in opposition to those leftists who prescribed social
realism as
the only art capable of engaging social and political
issues in a meaningful way, he defended the artist’s
right to freedom of expression (‘LIBRE’) and
maintained that modernist forms were the most
advanced tools at the artist’s disposal. As he stated:

The arguments used to promote ‘social content’ in art entirely fail

to specify that social content expression is to be made specifically
in terms of art. They stress the subject matter and state that the art
form will follow from such subject matter. Such a view is
misleading in that it leaves out the essential element in the process
of art. In this argument, the individual does not exist, it is
regimentation. It is Fascism.47

While Davis scholars usually posit a ‘striking

disjunction between his paintings and his Marxist
political views’, thereby leading them to assess the
political and artistic aspects of his career

626
separately, such a distinction misconstrues the
sophisticated nature of his thinking on both
matters.48 Despite the degree of abstraction that
Davis incorporated into his painting practice during
the 1930s, he conceived of his work as playing a
vital and active role in the sociopolitical sphere. He
was not alone in adopting this position among
American artists, and serious and sustained
analyses of the political character of US modernism
in the interwar period would help bring the
historiography of American art in line with the most
advanced scholarship on European modernism.49
I would like to thank the Burlington Magazine and Art History for providing
an opportunity to develop my initial thinking on Stuart Davis’s waterfront
imagery. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Andrew Hemingway
and Warren Carter for their thoughtful contributions to this text, and to
Sarah Dunlap at the Gloucester Archives and Thomas Gordon for their
generous help with identifying aspects of Davis’s iconography.

1 Stuart Davis, ‘A Medium of Two Dimensions, Art Front, vol. 1, no. 5

(May 1935), p. 6.

2 On the Artists’ Union and Art Front, see Gerald Monroe, ‘The Artists’
Union of New York’, unpublished PhD thesis (New York University,
1977). Research for Monroe’s thesis led to the publication of a number
of highly useful articles on the topic, including ‘Artists as militant trade
union workers during the Great Depression’, Archives of American Art
Journal vol. 14 (1974), pp. 7–10; and ‘Artists on the barricades: the
militant Artists’ Union treats with the New Deal’, Archives of American
Art Journal, vol. 18 (1978), pp. 20–3. On the Artists’ Congress, see
Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams (eds.), Artists Against War and
Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress (Rutgers
University Press: New Brunswick, 1986); and Andrew Hemingway,
Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement,
1926–1956 (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2002), pp.
123–30.

3 Stuart Davis Papers, Reel 1, 1 October 1935. Harvard Art Museum, gift
of Mrs Stuart Davis. All rights reserved by the President and Fellows of
Harvard College.

627
4 Karen Wilkin, in Ani Boyajian and Mark Rutkoski (eds.), Stuart Davis: A
Catalogue Raisonné – The Complete Works of Stuart Davis, vol. 1
(Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2007), p. 79.

5 Wilkin, in Boyajian and Rutkoski (eds.), Stuart Davis, op. cit., p. 79.

6 Raymond Williams, ‘A Lecture on Realism’, Screen, vol. 18, no. 1

(1977), p. 61. See also Williams, ‘Realism,’ Keywords: A Vocabulary of
Culture and Society (Fontana: London, 1983), p. 259; and The Politics
of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. Tony Pinkney (Verso:
London, 1989).

7 Davis, ‘Abstract Painting Today’, in Francis V. O’Connor (ed.), Art for the
Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the
WPA Federal Art Project (New York Graphic Society: Greenwich,
Connecticut, 1973), pp. 121–7.

8 Davis papers, 31 March 1937.

9 This simplistic polarity has not gone entirely uncontested and a handful
of scholars have made much the same point; see, for example, Esther
Leslie, ‘Interrupted Dialogues of Realism and Modernism: “The Fact of
New Forms of Life, Already Born and Active”’, Matthew Beaumont
(ed.), A Concise Companion to Realism (Wiley-Blackwell: Chichester,
2010) pp. 143–59.

10 Davis papers, 10 January 1938.

11 Davis papers, 18 December 1937.

12 Mariea Caudill Dennison, ‘Stuart Davis, artists’ rights and cigars: La

Corona as the source for Composition (1935)’, Burlington Magazine,
vol. 150 (June 2008), pp. 472–3.

13 See Jody Patterson, ‘The Art of Swinging Left in the 1930s:

Modernism, Realism, and the Politics of the Left in the Murals of Stuart
Davis,’ Art History, vol. 33, no. 1 (February 2010), pp. 98–123.

14 Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in

Recession and War (Vintage Books: New York, 1995), p. 23.

15 On the bills, see Richard D. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists
(Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1973), pp. 151–5.

16 Boyajian and Rutkoski (eds.), Stuart Davis, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 581, n. 3.

17 George Robbins, ‘Chicago’s Memorial Day Massacre,’ New Masses,

no. 23 (15 June 1937), pp. 11–12. See also David Milton, The Politics

628
 of U.S. Labor: From the Great Depression to the New Deal (Monthly
Review: New York, 1982), p. 108.

18 Leonard Sparks, ‘Waterfront Art Show’, New Masses, no. 22 (16

February 1937), p. 17.

19 For a general history of waterfront activities during this period, albeit

with a pronounced emphasis on the Pacific coast, see Bruce Nelson,
Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in
the 1930s (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1988); and Howard
Kimeldorf, Reds or Rackets? The Making of Radical and Conservative
Unions on the Waterfront (University of California Press: Berkeley,
1988), especially pp. 120–5 for activities in New York. For a more
colourful and amusing account of the leading persona narrated by a
deeply anti-communist liberal journalist, see Murray Kempton, Part of
Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties (1955) (New
York Review of Books: New York, 1998), pp. 83–104.

20 Louis Adamic, My America (Harper: New York, 1938), p. 368.

21 On Harry Bridges, see Adamic, My America, op. cit., pp. 367–78; and
Charles Larrowe, Harry Bridges: The Rise and Fall of Radical Labor in
the United States (L. Hill: Westport, 1977). On the ‘Big Strike’, see Sam
Darcy, ‘The San Francisco General Strike’, The Communist, vol. 13,
no. 10 (October 1934), pp. 985–1004; Mike Quin, The Big Strike
(Olema Publishing Company: Olema, 1949); and Nelson, Workers on
the Waterfront, op. cit., pp. 127–55. See also Anthony W. Lee, Painting
on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco’s Public
Murals (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999), pp. 136–59.

22 For an overview of waterfront activities in the East during the 1930s,

see the introduction to Vernon Jensen, Strife on the Waterfront: The
Port of New York Since 1945 (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1974),
pp. 13–35.

23 Kimeldorf, Reds or Rackets?, op. cit., p. 15.

24 See Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront, op. cit., p. 79.

25 Max Steinberg, ‘Problems of Party Growth in the New York District’,

The Communist, vol. 15, no. 7 (July 1936), p. 649.

26 Kimeldorf, Red or Rackets?, op. cit., p. 122.

27 Bridges in ibid., p. 123.

28 Kimeldorf, Reds or Rackets?, op. cit., p. 124.

629
29 Ernst Brace ‘An American Group, Inc.’, Magazine of Art, vol. 31 (May
1938), pp. 271, 274.

30 ‘Marine Art’, Sunday Worker, 28 February 1937. On An American

Group, Inc. and the ‘Waterfront Art Show’, see Hemingway, Artists on
the Left, op. cit., p. 134.

31 Sparks, ‘Waterfront Art Show’, op. cit., p. 17.

32 Jacob Kainen, ‘Longshoremen are critics at waterfront art exhibit’, Daily

Worker, 16 February 1937.

33 Ibid.

34 J. Klein, ‘Artists Cover the Waterfront with New Spirit’, New York Post,
20 February 1937, p. 24. While Davis gave the title Waterfront
Demonstration in the exhibition, it has only recently been identified as
the painting known as Artists Against War and Fascism. Stuart’s son
Earl Davis titled this work many years after its completion.

35 Cécile Whiting, Antifascism in American Art (Yale University Press:

New Haven and London, 1989), p. 71.

36 Sparks, ‘Waterfront Art Show,’ op. cit., p. 17.

37 Klein, ‘Artists Cover Waterfront,’ op. cit., p. 24.

38 I am grateful to Sarah Dunlap at the Gloucester Archives for her efforts

to identify the building; on a 1917 Sanborn map of the area the chimney
is adjacent to the words ‘Gloucester Electric.’

39 Sparks, ‘Waterfront Art Show’, op. cit. Although Sparks refers to

Davis’s streetscape Coffee Pot (1931; private collection) when
recounting the longshoremen’s response, Hemingway is almost
certainly correct to speculate that Sparks was talking about Davis’s
contribution to the 1935 ‘Waterfront Art Show’; see Hemingway, Artists
on the Left, op. cit., p. 307, n. 55. For a review of the first exhibition,
see Jacob Kainen, ‘Waterfront Art Show’, Daily Worker, 19 December
1935.

40 Davis papers, October 1937.

41 Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Public Use of Art’, Art Front, no. 2, November
1936, pp. 4–6, reprinted in Worldview in Painting: Art and Society
(George Braziller: New York, 1999), p. 173.

42 Ibid., p. 175.

630
43 Davis dismissed Schapiro as a Trotskyist in his notes on 9 March 1938.
He labelled Schapiro a ‘mechanical materialist’ on several occasions;
see, for example, Davis papers, 27 August 1937.

44 Max Steinberg, ‘Problems of Party Growth in the New York District’, op.
cit., p. 649.

45 Fraser M. Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States from the
Depression to World War II (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick,
1991), p. 175.

46 See Jacob Kainen, ‘Revolutionary Art at the John Reed Club’, Art
Front, vol. 1, no. 2 (January 1935), p. 6.

47 Davis papers, 26 June 1936.

48 Whiting, Antifascism in American Art, op. cit., p. 67, n. 12. An important

exception is Patricia Hills, Stuart Davis (Harry N. Abrams in association
with the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution:
New York, 1996).

49 An example of this kind of scholarship is offered by David Cottington,

Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris
1905–1914 (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1998);
and Cubism and Its Histories (Manchester University Press:
Manchester, 2004).

631
ACTION, REVOLUTION AND PAINTING
RESUMED
Fred Orton

‘It is a psychological law that the theoretical mind, having become

free in itself, turns into practical energy. Emerging as will from
Amenthes’ shadow-world, it turns against worldly actuality which
exists outside it.’ Karl Marx, The Difference between the
Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, Notes, Part One
(1841)

‘Almost fifteen years ago Harold Rosenberg challenged me to

explain what one of my paintings could possibly mean to the world.
My answer was that if he and 267 others could read it properly it
would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism. That
answer still goes.’ Barnett Newman (1962)

T here was a time, in the 1950s and early 1960s,

when explainers of Abstract Expressionism
valued Harold Rosenberg’s writings and took them
into account. After that, he was increasingly
marginalized, unreferenced or ignored,
misunderstood, or knowingly or unknowingly
misrepresented. One reason for this
misunderstanding, misrepresentation and
marginalization might be that his writing on art
uses a specialized language that is bound up with
the terminology of modern culture, with experience
and poetry, and history and politics, especially, of
course, the history and politics associated with
Marx and Marxism, terminology not specifically

632
related to painting except in so far as painting is a
creative, imaginative activity. Bluntly, the criticism
levelled at Rosenberg that he does not understand
or look at pictures in ‘visual terms’, and that his
writing is ‘ideological’, is joint stock in rhetorical
trade of any critic who is frightened by any writing
on art that is informed by a commitment to Marx
and Marxism. Another not unrelated reason was the
increasing – and what came to be almost exclusive –
admiring attention that was paid to the
much-easier-to-read essays of Clement Greenberg.
This is not to say that that attention was
misdirected, for Greenberg is a necessary, if
insufficient, text. Critical art history needs him, but
if it is not to rehearse its histories of Abstract
Expressionism exclusively with reference to his
ideas about the triumph of a depoliticized art
practice, apolitical painting and art for art’s sake,
then Greenberg’s should not be taken as the only
story. This is precisely where Rosenberg takes on
importance. H is writings on art and culture give us
another necessary but insufficient corpus enabling a
knowledge of Abstract Expressionism. Many of the
Abstract Expressionists – most of the
Irascibles and others – regarded their work as
having a social and political content that
Rosenberg, as close as anyone to the studio talk and
closer than more or less anyone to its politics, was
committed to explaining. This he did consistently
and more vividly than any other explainer of
Abstract Expressionism, not as an apologist,
opponent or aesthete, but as someone keeping his
preoccupations up to date and well oiled.
This essay brings Rosenberg in from the margins
and begins writing against the grain of those bits of
conventional wisdom that represent his ideas as

633
naive, romantic, pseudo-philosophical, theatrical
and as reconciling an avant-garde ideology with the
ideology of postwar liberalism. It situates
Rosenberg in relation to the changes in New York
leftism in the 1930s and 1940s and uses his writing
on the proletariat and on what he refers to as ‘the
drama of history’ to explain what he meant by
‘Action Painting’ in his essay ‘The American Action
Painters’ in the December 1952 issue of ARTnews,
one of the first published attempts to endow
Abstract Expressionism with meaning. ‘Drama’: the
term, as Rosenberg uses it, is heavily resonant of its
origin in the classical Greek word δρᾶμα (drama),
meaning ‘action’, which is itself derived from δράω
(drao), meaning ‘to do’ or ‘to act’; ‘history’ comes
from the Greek ἱστορία (historia), meaning ‘inquiry,
knowledge acquired by investigation’, but now,
according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary,
signifies ‘a relation of incidents (in later use, only
those professedly true); a narrative, tale, story’.
History holds within it two meanings: the study of
events or occurrences that have happened in the
world, in real life, perhaps to oneself and the people
around us; and any narrative of events or
occurrences, real or imagined. There are two main
parts to the structure of drama and of the drama of
history: the sequence of events or plot will be
marked by conflict, hardship, difficulty and pain;
and the way that sequence of events or plot unfolds
and is resolved will move one to pathos, will touch
one in some emotional way. This essay stays with
the drama and offers a politicized history of ‘The
American Action Painters’ in place of those lazy
conventional dismissals mentioned in passing a
moment ago and sits alongside some recent serious
commentary that either takes an

634
existentialist-humanist tack or would explain
Rosenberg’s essay as evidencing a turn away from
Marxist politics.1
You will see from what follows that the significance
of ‘The American Action Painters’ has, in part, to be
located in the way that Rosenberg shows that the
political impasse, which many commentators on the
left in the 1990s regarded, and still regard, as
uniquely ‘postmodern’, was already inscribed within
the modernism that emerged in the United States
around 1940, and that this sense of impasse was
international and not solely an American
phenomenon. As far as Rosenberg was concerned,
Action Painting was painting about the possibility of
radical change that had not happened in the 1930s
and 1940s – far from it – and could not happen in
the 1950s. It was a possibility that neither he nor
the ‘American Action Painters’ could afford to
abandon. No more can we, now.
The politics of Action Painting were determined by
the demise of the proletarian revolution and its
continuing regeneration within capitalism as a
mode of production, acting out the possibility of
radically transforming the situation, while
continually failing to do so. As this essay proceeds,
it will become clear that the negation of negation
played out in Action Painting could never effect the
redefinition of identity that would negate the
negative identity given to the proletariat in
capitalism. The Action Painter could not succeed in
art where the proletariat had failed in politics.
Action Painting could not compensate at the
symbolic level for the fact that, at that moment, the
political action that would redefine the proletariat
did not seem available to it as a class. Action

635
Painting was caught up in the failure of the
proletariat. Nevertheless, the Action Painter
glimpsed that that failure was not – or need not be –
total.
In this reading of Rosenberg’s ‘The American Action
Painters’, the Action Painter was no middle-class
artist playing with symbolic or surrogate
revolutionary gestures, merely ‘acting out’, in art,
the ‘drama’ of political agency and identity that no
social class was able to do at the time. Action
Painting was not revolutionary posturing. It was
painting concerned with the dialectical possibility of
a revolution whose outlines could neither be defined
nor denied.

who thrust his fist into cities

arriving by many ways

watching the pavements, the factory yards,

the cops on the beat

walked out on the platform

raised his right arm, showing the fist clenched

‘comrades, I bring news’

came back then skies and silhouettes,

facing the bay, of sailors

who no longer take the sea

because of strikes, pay-cuts and class-unity

‘comrades, I bring news’

636
of the resistance of farmers

in Oneida county on a road

near a small white cottage

looking like a Xmas card,

4 shot, the road was blocked

glass to blow their tires

there was one guy we grabbed

some bastard of a business man

learning to play State Trooper

one of the boys tackled him neat as he ran

Behold my American images get it straight

a montage of old residences bridges shops freights

Xmas, the millions walking up and down

the tables where applications are received

the arguments that will yet get down to something

in the center of this a union-hall

and on the platform he

with right arm crooked, fist clenched

‘comrades, I bring news’

That poem by Rosenberg was published in the

January/February issue of Partisan Review.2
Entitled ‘The Front’, it refers to the life
circumstances of millions of Americans around
Christmas 1934, some five months into the sixth
year of what is euphemistically called the ‘Great

637
Depression’, and to capitalism in the prolonged
crisis that affected every part of the United States:
mass unemployment and applications for benefit;
strikes; organized labour; and the class struggle in
town and country. At the centre is a union hall; and
out onto its platform walks someone who raises his
right arm, fist clenched, and addresses the
assembly: ‘comrades, I bring news’. I cannot
describe the specific circumstances of the poem’s
making or limit the excess of meaning available for
its references to strikes, pay cuts and so on, nor
extend the particularity of that event in Oneida
County, New York State. What can be said – leaving
aside a discussion of its structure and the
momentum of its syntax – is that Rosenberg’s poem,
dedicated by its title to the United Front, was meant
to participate in winning the workers’ support for
revolutionary organizations and for an agreement
on action of some kind: resistance and insurrection,
if not revolution.
Aged twenty-eight when he wrote ‘The Front’,
Rosenberg had already earned himself something of
a reputation as a poet and intellectual. The
Symposium, edited by James Burnham and Philip
Wainwright and described as a journal of
philosophical discussion, had published several of
his essays, including, in 1932, the seminal
‘Character Change and the Drama’, which will be
considered in a moment.3 He had also edited with
H. R. Hays an ‘experimental quarterly’ called The
New Act.4 Harriet Moore’s Poetry: A Magazine of
Verse, which published all kinds of poetry,
conventional, unconventional and innovative, had
regularly included his poems and commissioned
book reviews from him, and would continue to do so
throughout the 1930s and 1940s.5 In 1936, William

638
Phillips and Philip Rahv reckoned Rosenberg as one
of those who had achieved ‘the much desired
integration of the poet’s conception with the leading
ideas of the time’ – a ‘desired integration’ that was
achieved by way of his awareness that the
necessary revolt was aesthetic as well as social and
that, as such, it was ‘a revolt within the tradition of
poetry rather than against it’.6
If ‘The Front’, as the editors of Partisan Review
were keen to point out, was the first of Rosenberg’s
poems to be published in a ‘proletarian magazine’,7
‘The Men on the Wall’, one of four poems by him
that were published in Poetry magazine in April
1934, some eight months before, may be the first
or, if not the first, one of first of his poems to make
reference to the historically specific social
circumstances of its writing. It is wholly different
from the other poems by Rosenberg that were
published along with it. Does ‘The Men on the Wall’
evidence the ‘integration’ required by Williams and
Rahv? As this extract shows, the appropriate
stereotypical metaphors are certainly all there:

A raised arm has many meanings.

Convictions falter with desire; the arm remains.

You have seen a sword

in the hand of the arm

flower from a sleeve of gold brocade;

you have seen in the pearl of dawn the arm

ascend from sleeping oyster-vagues,

rising to ripple the silent threats

639
of your old interior myth of arms.

And the future myth of avenues

is also yours; and that arm’s fist,

whose khaki cuff is stained with grease,

is yours, and clasps the hammer of your resolve.

And whose contending tendons flex with threat

Against the background factories and glass?

Pace quietly on the walls

while the wind still affirms

the faces of ruminants with folded arms,

the men below, divining peace before their doors;

the azure casings of whose blood are torn

by no quick hemorrhage of indissoluble event;

whose ecstasy, despair and rage

are hidden escapades that lift no arms.

Unlike ‘The Front’, ‘The Men on the Wall’ seems

more symptomatic than critical of the context that
inscribes it, while textually its language is not yet
positively the language of unrest, still less of
revolution. It is a poem with a social conscience but
one that has a tendency to leave some of its
characters thinking that taking action is not or will
not be necessary, while others amble half-asleep up
and down deliberating about it. Only one of them,
the one bearing the clinching metaphor of the hand
clasping the hammer, seems about to act or is
threatening to act. By the end of 1934, when

640
Rosenberg wrote ‘The Front’, that tendency had
changed, or had been clarified: the workers
recognize their alienation for what it is; they are
unemployed and angry, awake, politicized … and
taking action.
Unlike ‘The Men on the Wall’, which seems
uncommitted and full of suppressed action, ‘The
Front’ is clearly a committed poem full of exactly
the kind of action that would appeal to the editors
of Partisan Review, the then year-old journal of the
John Reed Club of New York. The Club was founded
in 1929, the year the Great Depression began and
the year Stalin’s first Five Year Plan was adopted.
Initiated by and affiliated to the International Union
of Revolutionary Writers, it was, from the outset,
influenced by the Proletkult movement, led by
members of the Communist Party (CPUSA), and
dedicated to the idea of art as a weapon for
informing, educating and radicalizing the worker. It
had branches in most large cities in the United
States and many of them, like the New York branch,
published their own periodical of literature and art.8
The ‘Harold Rosenberg’ of ‘The Front’ is a Marxist
and probably a fellow-traveller of the CPUSA, a poet
and critic committed to the artist’s capacity to
participate in the class struggle.9 But this ‘Harold
Rosenberg’ was short-lived. The authorial ‘I’ that
‘The Front’ had introduced in Partisan Review was
put in the position of having to change tack when,
in July–August 1935, the Seventh Congress of the
Third International, the Communist International or
Comintern, turned away from the United Front to
promote the ‘the establishment of a unity front with
social and democratic reformist organisations …
with mass liberation, religious-democratic and

641
pacifist organisations, and their adherents […] for
the struggle against war and its fascist
instigators’.10 Unlike the United Front that it
replaced, this ‘Popular Front’ was not a strategy of
class struggle but of class cooperation. And one
immediate effect of that cooperation was that the
Proletkult movement was abandoned.
Coming events cast their shadows before. The idea
of the Popular Front was there, for example, at the
moment Partisan Review published ‘The Front’ in
January 1935, when, under instructions from the
CPUSA, the National Committee of the John Reed
Clubs called for an American Writers’ Congress to
undertake an ‘exposition of all phases of a writers’
participation in the struggle against war, the
preservation of civil liberties, and the destruction of
fascist tendencies every where’.11
The American Writers’ Congress met at the end of
April, and Rosenberg reported on its proceedings in
the July issue of Poetry.12 He was obviously
impressed by the representative of a group of
Pennsylvania miners who were prepared to print
and circulate ten thousand copies of any poem that
they could recite or sing together and by an appeal
on behalf of three hundred workers’ theatres for
material to perform.13 Here ‘it became possible to
see how poetry might step forth from the little
magazines […] and walk once more upon the stage
and the street’.14 How, in other words, art might
achieve a valid constituency and a valid agency.
Nevertheless, it was clear to him that, faced with
the dangers presented by fascism and war, the
writer was forced to play his part not by revolution
but in the effort to protect peace, freedom and
progress.15 The questions were: what was the role

642
of the writer in the social movement, and what was
the best mode of performance?16 The answers were
provided by Earl Browder, national spokesman and
general secretary of the CPUSA, in his opening
address: one could not be converted automatically
into a literary genius merely by calling oneself a
‘Marxist’; revolutionary art could succeed ‘only
through achieving superiority as art, not through
politics’; ‘the socially conscious writer need not
engage in organisational activity at the expense of
his writing’. The attitude of the Party was: ‘better a
good writer than a bad organiser’.17 After quoting
Browder, Rosenberg made a point of mentioning
Waldo Frank, who also attacked ‘leftism’ and those
who would ‘capitulate easily to dogma, outside
control’.18 Frank, one of the editors of New Masses,
the cultural magazine of the CPUSA, would go on to
represent the League of American Writers, the
organization that came out of the Congress at the
Popular Frontist First International Congress of
Writers for the Defense of Culture that met two
months later in Paris. Rosenberg, writing in the
liberaldemocratic Poetry, pointed out, reassuringly,
and following Browder’s line, that though the
American Writers’ Congress ‘turned its face left it
donned no red uniform’.19
Later that year, Rosenberg became active in
Popular Front politics through his involvement with
Art Front, the official publication of the Artists’
Union, the militant trade union that had emerged
from the Unemployed Artists Group set up by the
John Reed Club of New York in 1933 and which, in
1935, came to represent the interests of artists
employed on the Federal Art Project. This was a
moment in the history of American art and culture
when artists were classed as, and classed

643
themselves as, wage-labourers. Art Front’s political
orientation was, of course, never in doubt.
Dominated by the Communist Party, it was
committed to art as propaganda, and
to guiding its members in their role as revolutionary
artists. Even so, it was always prepared to debate
whether the art they were to produce should be
social realist or modernist, realist, expressionist,
surrealist, abstractionist, etc., for, at that time,
there was no Party line on art, not even in the
Soviet Union. In a sense, Art Front was the New
York communist- and left-art community’s public
conversation. Moreover, it was, at that time, the
only periodical in the United States that was
primarily concerned with art and politics. At the end
of 1935, the editors of Art Front signified the
journal’s sympathetic attitude to modernist art by
bringing onto the board Joseph Solman and Max
Spivak, along with the assistant who had been
assigned to Spivak, working in the Mural Division of
the Federal Art Project – Harold Rosenberg.20
Rosenberg’s first efforts as a practising critic were
published in Art Front:21 a translation of a lecture
entitled ‘The New Realism’ that Fernand Léger gave
at the Museum of Modern Art;22 reviews of MoMA’s
‘Van Gogh’ and ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’ shows;23
several book reviews, including one of Salvador
Dalí’s Conquest of the Irrational;24 and a review of
William Gropper’s painting at the ACA gallery in
which he stated that ‘the revolutionary painter, far
from being a grim specialist of a world seen in
concentrated focus, is precisely the major
discoverer of new pictorial possibilities as well as
new uses for the old […] by his easy and graceful
mastery of the materials of social struggle, by his
presentation of it, as it were, from the inside,

644
without strain, [the revolutionary painter] carried
forward the possibility of technical discovery in
revolutionary art’.25
The history of American art has produced several
accounts of how artists on the left were affected by
the Russian–French Non-Aggression Pact of 1935
and the end of the United Front, by the three show
trials of prominent intellectuals, Party leaders and
activists in Moscow during August 1936, January
1937 and March 1938, by the signing of the
Russian–German Non-Aggression Pact, and by the
Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939.26 Large numbers
of intellectuals who began the decade in support of
the Communist Party lost faith in it at some point,
abruptly, reluctantly and with such disillusion that
they could not be reconciled to it. As we have seen,
Rosenberg’s support for the Party survived the shift
from the United Front to the Popular Front. It also
survived the Moscow Trials of 1936 and 1937, but it
was abandoned sometime before the events of
1939, probably early in 1938.27 The moment of
one’s move away from the Party, early or late, and
in Rosenberg’s quite late, is an important indicator
of the intensity – as a fellow-traveller or otherwise –
of one’s commitment to and subsequent
disillusionment with it and with the model of Soviet
communism as dictated by Stalin. It is to the point
that Rosenberg did not publish in New Masses after
July 1937 and did not put his name to ‘The Moscow
Trials: A Statement by American Progressives’
endorsing the trials in the May 1938 issue of New
Masses.28
For Marxists like Rosenberg, who were disillusioned
with the Party but who remained committed to

645
Marxist politics and to the revolutionary function of
the artist
and intellectual, it must have seemed inevitable that
they should be attracted by the character and
writings of Leon Trotsky – not to the Trotsky of the
Civil War and Red Army but to the outlawed, hunted
and peripatetic Trotsky of the 1930s, moving from
Turkey to France to Norway and then to Mexico,
analysing fascism and Stalinism and still committed
to keeping the radical Marxist project going.
Trotsky held that revolution and art were, in certain
respects, alike as forms of human activity. This was
clearly stated in his letter of 1 June 1938, to the
founding conference on the Fourth International,
which was called on his initiative in opposition to
the Comintern:

I have always forced myself to depict the sufferings, the hopes and
struggles of the working classes because that is how I approach
life, and therefore art, which is an in separable part of it. The
present unresolved crisis of capitalism carries with it a crisis of all
human culture, including art. […]

Only a new upsurge of the revolutionary movement can enrich art

with new perspectives and possibilities. The Fourth International
obviously cannot take on the task of directing art […] give orders or
prescribe methods. Such an attitude towards art could only enter
the skulls of Moscow bureaucrats drunk with omnipotence. Art and
science do not find their fundamental nature though patrons; art,
by its very existence, rejects them; […] Poets, artists, sculptors,
musicians will themselves find their paths and methods, if the
revolutionary movement of the masses dissipates the clouds of
skepticism and pessimism which darken humanity’s horizon
today.29

Two weeks later, Trotsky expanded on what he had

written to the Fourth International in a letter to the

646
editors of the still Marxist but, by then,
anti-Stalinist Partisan Review. This letter was
subsequently published in the August/September
issue of the journal under the title ‘Art and
Politics’.30 In the fall, Partisan Review made its
relations with Trotsky more secure by publishing
the manifesto of his International Federation of
Revolutionary Writers.31
It was at this juncture that Rosenberg reconnected
with Partisan Review, just at the moment when it
was courting Trotsky and identifying itself with
Trotskyism. He re-entered it in the winter issue with
a long critical discussion of Thomas Mann’s
idealistic, anti-radical anti-fascism, which he titled
‘Myth and History’.32 To the summer issue, he
contributed replies to a questionnaire-symposium
on ‘The Situation in American Writing’,33 and a
commentary on Arthur Rosenberg’s Democracy and
Socialism: ‘By his sly shifts in historical meanings’,
this author converted Trotsky’s ‘principle of
“permanent revolution” into that of the coalition
governments of the Popular Front’.34 Rosenberg
also signed the statement issued by the Trotskyist
League of Cultural Freedom and Socialism with its
demand: ‘COMPLETE FREEDOM FOR ART AND
SCIENCE. NO DICTATION BY PARTY OR
GOVERNMENT.’35 The next year, Partisan Review
published Rosenberg’s ‘The Fall of Paris’: this
essay, which is thoroughly Trotskyist in its art and
politics, will be considered directly.36
The foregoing describes part of the historical matrix
that produced ‘Harold Rosenberg’. It enables a
reading of ‘The American Action Painters’ as a text
situated in and inscribed by a particular Marxist
tradition, by the mutation and modification of New

647
York Marxism with regard to the CPUSA, by the
setbacks of the 1930s, and by the espousal of
Trotsky’s ideas about agency and the freedom of
art. Rosenberg’s Marxist beginnings were in the
early and mid-1930s, in the art and politics of the
Great Depression and the New Deal, the union
movement, strikes and resistance against repressive
state authorities, the move from the United Front to
the Popular Front, and from the Third International
to the Fourth International. The encounter with
Marxism and Marxist politics was significantly
different for him and for many of his comrades than
it was for those persons who began with Marx
around 1939, never having embraced but already
disenchanted with Soviet communism and the
Communist Party. This ‘Harold Rosenberg’ was not
the kind of commentator on art and culture who, in
the late 1930s and early 1940s, would quote Marx
word for word to get noticed by New York’s left
intelligentsia only to jettison that Marxism once it
had served its purpose. In the 1950s, this ‘Harold
Rosenberg’ was scathing about those persons of
what he called the ‘turning generation’, ‘couch
liberals’ with regard to their ‘guilty past’.37

II

Another clenched fist begins ‘The Fall of Paris’,

which was published in Partisan Review in
December 1940. This time it is the ‘rapping of the
soldier’s fist’ that announces the German army’s
unopposed entry into the city on 14 June 1940.
Rosenberg’s focus, however, is not on the demise of
Paris as the capital of France but as ‘the laboratory
of the twentieth century’ or the ‘Paris
“International”’, the place that had attracted artists

648
from all over the continents of Europe and America
and had become the site of their collective practice,
producing new ways of seeing, showing and telling.
Rosenberg, like Trotsky, thought that the continuity
of culture mattered, even through revolutions and
periods of social upheaval. As far as he was
concerned, the Paris International had not been
working very effectively for ten years or so, but it is
the German occupation of Paris that had effectively
closed it down for good and all (TN, 209).
Rosenberg thought that twentieth-century Paris was
to the intellectual what the United States had been
in the nineteenth century to the immigrant and
pioneer. It was a place where no one class was able
to its impose its purpose and its representations on
artistic creation, where individual nationalities and
cultures were blended, and yet where what was
alive in various national cultures might be
discerned or discovered. Paris stood for the
opposite of individualism and nationalism in art
because in it and through it the art of every
individual and nation was increased.
At the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the
1940s, with Europe at war with itself, and when
cultural production was being directed by state
bureaucracies in the United States and the Soviet
Union, what had been achieved in Paris provided
evidence for Rosenberg that artistic and cultural
internationalism was possible as a creative
communion that could sweep across national
boundaries (TN, 209–10). In effect, the Paris
International was a ‘No-Place’ (TN, 214).
Rosenberg’s Paris was a material place with a
particular physiognomy and a lot of ideology. It was
the French capital at a particular moment, say

649
1907–29, and the artists who gathered there. It was
also the style that was produced there: ‘Modernism’
or ‘the Modern’, ‘the Paris style’ or ‘the Paris
Modern’: a style that was based on the ‘assumption
that history could be entirely controlled by the
mind’; and, inasmuch as it was that, the Paris
Modern was as far as humankind had ‘gone toward
freeing itself from its past’ (TN, 214). The Paris
Modern had produced a ‘No-Time’ (TN, 214).
Rosenberg, of course, realized that the Paris
International was not entirely ‘the actual getting
together of peoples of different countries’. And he
also realized that the Modern ‘was an inverted
mental image … with all the transitoriness and
freedom from necessity of imagined things. A dream
living-in-the-present and a dream of world
citizenship – resting not upon a real triumph, but
upon a willingness to go as far as was necessary
into nothingness in order to shake off what was
dead in the real. A negation of the negative’ (TN,
212–13). Leaving aside any discussion of the
intended Zen connotations that attach to that use of
‘nothingness’ – which also attach to the references
to ‘No-Place’ and ‘No-Time’, designations that seem
informed by what he knew of the Zen state of
‘no-mindedness’ and which will be redeployed in
‘The American Action Painters’38 – it is important to
notice that, in this instance, Rosenberg is following
Marx and Engels following Hegel with regard to the
negation of the negation as a dialectical process of
development effecting a positive change.39
Rosenberg saw the Modern as ‘the style and tempo
of our consciousness’, of ‘the contemporary as
beginning in 1789’ (TN, 214), and by referring to it
as ‘a negation of the negative’ he pointed to its

650
critical, resistive and emancipatory potential in the
development of an advanced, liberating,
revolutionary consciousness. Paris had been central
to the Modern as the site of the International of
culture but not to the modern as a temporality
because ‘the social, economic and cultural workings
which define the modern epoch are active
everywhere’ (TN, 215). And just as the International
of culture had a capital, Paris, so in the 1920s the
political international, the Third International, had a
capital: Moscow. ‘It is a tragic irony’, writes
Rosenberg, ‘that these world centers were not
brought together until the signing of the
Franco-Soviet pact [in 1935] when both were
already dead. Then the two cadavers of hope
embraced farcically, with mutual suspicion and
under the mutually exclusive provincial slogans:
DEFENSE OF THE USSR and FRANCE FOR
FRENCHMEN’ (TN, 215).
And what happened to the formulae perfected by
Moscow and Paris that were discarded after the
Russian–French Non-Aggression Pact and the
inauguration of the Popular Front? They were taken
over by Germany and adapted to its particular aims.
‘In that country politics became a “pure (i.e.,
inhuman)” art, independent of everything but the
laws of its medium…. Against this advanced
technique, which in itself has nothing to do with
revolutionary change, the Paris of the Popular Front
compromise was helpless’ (TN, 218). The demise of
the Paris Modern and the Paris International was
inseparable from revolutionary defeat and the
defeat of the idea of revolution, that is, from the rise
of Stalinism and fascism, the rehegemonization of
nationalism and individualism, and the working

651
class’ loss of political independence. The German
occupation of Paris merely made it definitive.
Despite this double defeat, Rosenberg managed to
bring his essay on the fall of Paris to an optimistic
end. Against ‘Fascism’s modernist mysticism,
dreaming of an absolute power to rearrange life to
any pattern of its choice’, he glimpsed the
possibility of ‘other forms of contemporary
consciousness, another Modernism’ (TN, 220). But
he could not predict where or when this new
Modernism might come into being.

III

By the late 1940s and early 1950s, it had become

possible for Rosenberg to identify the new
International of culture – though not the
International of politics – and to discuss the
significance of the style associated with it. This he
does in ‘The American Action Painters’. Like ‘The
Front’ and ‘The Fall of Paris’, this essay begins with
a gesture or, more accurately, several gestures, set
epigraphically as a line taken from Apollinaire’s
poem ‘Merlin et la Vielle Femme’ (Alcools, 1913):
‘J’ai fait des gestes blancs parmi les solitudes’:
gestures – ‘tournoiements’ – that express ‘les
beatitudes qui toutes ne sont rien qu’un pur effet de
l’Art’. That quotation was set above another, this
time a sentence, slightly modified, taken from
Wallace Stevens’ 1942 essay ‘The Noble Rider and
the Sound of Words’: ‘The American will is easily
satisfied in its efforts to realize itself in knowing
itself.’ Or, as it is in Stevens’ essay, with the elision
reinstated: ‘It is obvious that the American will as a
principle of the mind’s being is easily satisfied in its
efforts to realize itself in knowing itself.’40

652
One thing that needs to be established immediately
is what Rosenberg thought was ‘American’ about
‘American Action Painting’. He was certainly trying
to write something about a kind of collective
identity, but there is not anything nationalistic,
patriotic or chauvinistic about it or about his idea of
what kind of ‘American’ the ‘American’ Action
Painter might be. In this context, ‘American’ has to
be understood as meaning a kind ethnic diversity
and cosmopolitanism.41 You only have to read his
1959 essay ‘Tenth Street: A Geography of Modern
Art’ to see how clearly, in his scheme of
things, the material and ideological space of the
American Action Painters was related to the
International of culture that he had described
nineteen years before in ‘The Fall of Paris’.42 In this
essay, ‘the new American “abstract” art’ is the kind
of painting made around Tenth Street, New York, by
displaced persons, immigrants, the sons and
daughters of immigrants, and by Americans who
have ‘moved’ there (DP, 102), maybe for reasons
similar to those of the artists, writers, etc., who
travelled from all over the world to Paris and who,
once there, made works that presented or
represented the Modern.
In ‘The American Action Painters’, the artist is
figuratively and literally a pioneer and an
immigrant. And just as the earlier International of
culture was determined partly by the physical
character of Paris and by the qualifying and
blending of nationalities and class positions that
was possible there, so ‘Tenth Street’ was
determined not only by its physical geography –
Rosenberg writes that it ‘has not even the
picturesqueness of a slum (DP, 103), it is ‘devoid of
local color’ (DP, 104) – but also by the unfixing and

653
mixing of nationalities, races, classes and ideologies
that occurred there (DP, 106). I have already
mentioned that in 1940 Rosenberg had had
recourse to the Zen state of ‘nothingness’ and,
drawing on the Zen of ‘no-mindedness’, had
described the Paris International as a ‘No-Place’
and the Paris Modern as a ‘No-Time’. In 1959 he
described the area around Tenth Street, New York,
as a ‘no environment’ (DP, 104): it was a location or
situation that was, as it were, everywhere because
it was nowhere attached to any particular situation
or location.43 More than that, as the new site of
cultural internationalism, ‘Tenth Street’
transcended the Paris International in terms not
only of its unfixity of nationality, race, class,
ideology and age (DP, 106), but also of its
modernism, which went beyond ‘the bellicose verbal
internationalism of the thirties’ (DP, 104). I will
consider this double ‘going beyond’ later. For the
moment, I want to stay with Rosenberg’s idea of
‘American’ and ‘Americanness’ and how it relates to
his thinking about identity and action.
One of Rosenberg’s most interesting considerations
of ‘Americanness’ occurs in his 1949 essay ‘The
Pathos of the Proletariat’.44 This was the second of
two essays on class and class struggle that he wrote
at a time when he was concerned with ‘the drama of
modern history as conceived by Marx – a drama in
which individual identity and action are replaced by
collective actors formed out of historical processes
and myths’ (AA, 206). The first of these two essays
was ‘The Resurrected Romans’ of 1948, an
extended engagement with Marx’s The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.45 Together, they
provided the core of a book of essays that
Rosenberg offered to several publishers between

654
1949 and 1951, under the title Marx’s Drama of
History, none of whom would take it on.46 Both
essays, but particularly ‘The Pathos of the
Proletariat’, are significantly inscribed by ideas that
Rosenberg had first published in that 1932 essay.47
We need to look at ‘Character Change and the
Drama’, which also had its place in the book on
Marx, before we consider how ‘Americanness’ is
represented
‘The Pathos of the Proletariat’ for it is in this early
essay that Rosenberg develops the ideas on
‘identity’ and ‘action’ that become so central to his
politics and his writing about art and culture in the
1940s and 1950s.
It is germane that what Rosenberg wrote in
‘Character Change and the Drama’ with reference
to Hamlet and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers
Karamazov, to name two of his case-study
examples, was informed as much by his studies at
the Brooklyn Law School between 1924 and 1927 as
by his interest in the poetics of drama.48 Legal
definitions were important for his argument. The
law defines an individual by his ‘overt actions’, by
what an individual did in a particular circumstance
or particular set of circumstances. The law does not
recognize ‘personality’, a person with a history and
psychology. It is interested only in a person’s
actions, as an ‘identity’ to which its judgments are
applied (TN, 138).49 Rosenberg goes on to argue
that, in Hamlet, the Prince is transformed from a
‘personality’ (a thoroughly naturalistic,
self-analytical, non-active psycho-biographical
character) into a dramatic ‘identity’ (a character
relevant to and able to perform the role required by
the interrelationship of the main events in the play)
(TN, 146–9).

655
Hamlet has all the qualities required for action but
lacks the identity structure necessary to his
character in the drama, a oneness with the role
originating in and responding to the dramatic laws
of his diegetic world. The change occurs when, on
his return from England after having escaped death
at the hands of the pirates, he acquires a certainty
with regard to his feelings and a capacity for action
that is no longer an expression of his ‘personality’
but is in accord with the dramatic rules of the
situation in which he finds himself. Regenerated, he
breaks with one character and transforms himself
into another: ‘This is I, Hamlet the Dane’ (Hamlet,
Act 5, Scene 1, 242). From that moment – from the
moment he jumps into Ophelia’s grave (AA, 143) –
when, as Wallace Stevens might have put it, his
mind, having become free of itself, emerges as will,
and turns against the worldly reality, ‘his action
hustles the play to its tragic close and the
apparently accidental character of his revenge
serves to emphasize that he is controlled at the end
not by the conflicting intentions of a self but by the
impulsions of the plot’ (AA, 149). Transformed, ‘all
at once, in a leap’ (AA, 143), from the image of a
‘personality’ to that of an ‘identity’, Hamlet ‘has
found at last his place in the play’ and, having
vacillated for so long, performs the actions required
of him by the plot (TN, 149).
Here, in Rosenberg’s legalistic thinking about how
dramatic thought required that Hamlet had to be
changed from ‘personality’ to ‘identity’ for the play
to become a tragedy and to excite a pathos (TN,
148), we find a key for understanding his reading
not only of Marx on class and class struggle but also
of the American Action Painters and Action

656
Painting. This paragraph near the end of ‘Character
Change and the Drama’ is crucial:

Individuals are conceived as identities in systems whose subject

matter is action and judgment of actions. In this realm the multiple
incidents in the life of an individual may be synthesized, by the
choice of the individual himself
or by the decision of others, into a scheme that pivots on a single
fact central to the individual’s existence and which, controlling his
behavior and deciding his fate, becomes his visible definition. Here
unity of the ‘plot’ becomes one with unity of being and through the
fixity of identity change becomes synonymous with revolution. (TN,
152)

There can be no doubt that here, in 1932,

Rosenberg has in mind that bit of Marx’s third
thesis on Feuerbach that goes: ‘The coincidence of
the changing of circumstances and of human
activity or self-changing can be conceived and
rationally understood only as revolutionary
practice.’50
Fifteen years later, in ‘The Pathos of the
Proletariat’, the change from ‘personality’ to
‘identity’ that becomes synonymous with revolution
is the crucial change required of ‘the hero of Marx’s
drama of history’ whose ‘action is to resolve the
tragic conflict and introduce the quiet order of
desired happenings’ (AA, 14). This hero is not to be
an individual but a particular kind of collective
identity, a social class: the proletariat (AA, 15). But
for an American radical like Rosenberg, four or five
years after the Second World War, the social
revolution seemed unlikely: though crisis-ridden,
capitalism seemed in good health; its
internationalism was well advanced; the
revolutionary processes within it had not genuinely

657
illuminated the worker about himself or united him
with other workers (AA, 43). Existence had not
effected a revolutionary consciousness. In Germany
and Italy, the proletariat had been ‘driven off the
stage of history by the defeat of the Communist
Party – in Russia it was driven off by its victory’ (AA,
56), leaving the Party ‘absolute with regard to class’
and ‘history’ (AA, 55). In ‘The Pathos of the
Proletariat’, the problem of the agency of
revolutionary change that Rosenberg had previously
theorized in terms of individual character change is
now theorized in terms of class. Knowing full well
that the drama of history is discontinuous with ‘long
intermissions in which the proletariat vanishes from
the stage’ (AA, 50), Rosenberg was concerned in
‘The Pathos of the Proletariat’ with the question of
how, at that historical moment, in 1949, the
proletariat, which had neither chosen nor been
compelled to change itself (AA, 56), might alter its
character and gain its revolutionary ‘identity’.
The proletariat had been brought into existence by
the Industrial Revolution. It is an ‘invention of
modern time’ (AA, 24). It is of ‘the Modern’ (AA,
25). As a social class, the proletariat is ‘a materialist
connection of men with one another’ formed ‘to
carry on a common battle with another class’ (AA,
15) – so, from the moment of its birth it ‘begins its
struggle with the bourgeoisie’ (AA, 21). The
proletarian, having no means of production of his
own, lives entirely and solely from the sale of his
labour-power and not from the profit derived from
any capital. But, if the individual capitalist and
proletarian as ‘the principal agents’ of the capitalist
mode of production, writes Rosenberg quoting the
‘Preface’ to Capital, are ‘individuals … only in so far
as they are personifications of economic categories,

658
embodiments of particular class-relations and
class-interests’ (AA, 17),51 individuals whose
definite social characters are
assigned to them by the process of social
production, then what did it mean to speak of the
proletariat as revolutionary? (AA, 17–18).
Rosenberg finds answers, or partial answers, to this
question in Marx’s The Class Struggles in France,
The Civil War in France and especially in The
Eighteenth Brumaire. In these ‘historical-literary’
writings, class transcends its economic form and
given function and ‘expresses its collective
personality and acts with an intelligence and spirit
peculiar to itself’ (AA, 19). It is clear to Rosenberg
that, in these texts, ‘the essence of class definition
consisted for Marx in this active character-shaping
spirit’ (AA, 19). In ‘Character Change and the
Drama’, Hamlet stopped being a ‘personality’
described by his psychobiography and gained an
‘identity’ defined ‘by the coherence of his acts and
with a fact in which they … terminated’ (TN, 136).
Without effecting a like change of character and
transforming itself from a ‘personification’ to an
‘identity’, the proletariat will not be able to act with
an intelligence and spirit peculiar to itself (AA, 19)
and so become ‘the future hero’ (AA, 21) who will
‘resolve the tragic conflict and introduce the quiet
order of desired happenings into the drama of
history’ (AA, 14). Since Rosenberg, following Marx,
believes that the proletariat is destined to alter
completely the conditions that created it, the
proletariat must undergo that character change
from ‘personification’ to ‘identity’ (AA, 19). Since its
very existence presupposes a revolutionary
consciousness and its own decision to act (and not
decisions or acts taken on its behalf) must be taken

659
as the basis of any change that might be considered
to be socialist, Rosenberg argues that the
self-consciousness that converts the proletariat
from ‘personification’ to ‘identity’ must be an aspect
of revolution and revolutionary practice (AA, 22).
The proletariat must come to realize itself through
its own self-understanding and its own action, its
own mindful active response to the structural
contradictions of capitalism. Its collective
consciousness must become free, issue as action to
overthrow all existing social conditions. ‘Both class
awareness and class identity arise out of class
action’ (AA, 22).
Rosenberg finds an answer to how the proletariat’s
social character might be transformed in that part
of The Eighteenth Brumaire where Marx writes that
the proletarian revolution will be effected by its
total abandonment of the past:

The social revolution cannot draw its poetry from the past but only
from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off
all superstitions in regard to the past. Earlier revolutions required
world-historical recollections in order to drug themselves
concerning their own content; the revolution of the nineteenth
century must let the dead bury the dead. There the phrase went
beyond the content; here content goes beyond the phrase. (AA,
23)

Whereas the bourgeois revolutions had been

performed in costumes borrowed from the past with
ghosts presiding over events – like the ghost of
Hamlet’s father – the proletariat revolution has to
be without recourse to myth and must be clear with
regard to its content. The proletariat, called into
existence by modern industry against

660
the bourgeoisie, is without a past. Its revolution ‘is
to owe nothing to that repertory of heroic forms out
of which history had supplied earlier revolutions
with the subjective means for meeting their
situation’ (AA, 23). Pastless, the proletariat must
begin its revolution by becoming at one with the
dramatic narrative of history, and, with a profound
asceticization of mind, understand itself for what it
is – not anything more nor less than, as Marx put it
– but the aforementioned ‘wretched personification
of wage labour’ (AA, 20, 23), the ‘personification of
exploitation and misery’ (AA, 53). In other words,
there will come a moment when the proletariat will
abandon its given character and function under
capitalism. In the words of the 1848 Manifesto, ‘The
proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.’
The proletariat will understand itself for what it is
and initiate the action necessary t o fulfill its
historical role.
The pastlessness of the proletariat is key to its
character and its revolutionary role. Likewise, the
‘American’. It was in ‘The Pathos of the Proletariat’
that Rosenberg developed the idea that the
proletariat and the American – a citizen of the
United States of America, that is – are alike with
regard to their pastlessness and their capacity for
action. As an immigrant or a descendent of
immigrants, the American is detached or estranged
from his origins – the culture, traditions, places,
things, even human relations of Europe or wherever
– and this constitutes a kind of pastlessness: the
‘American’ exists ‘without the time dimension’ (AA,
27). Moreover, ‘the American does not meditate, he
acts’ (AA, 28). And what ‘self-consciousness’ he has
is effected through ‘practical movement’ (AA, 28),
an action or series of actions that ‘For the American

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… is a natural response to need or desire (whether
his action can satisfy that need is another question)’
(AA, 31).
That Rosenberg sees the proletarian and the
American as similar might strike one now as a bit
flimflam, but the resemblance would have seemed
less forced in the 1940s when Lenin’s and Trotsky’s
views on US agriculture and industry were better
known than they are today.52 That is to say that, in
the context of use in which that assimilation was
effected, the qualities that, in 1949, make the
‘American’ similar to the proletarian, and vice
versa, would have been effective: ‘Many of the
attributes of the proletarian as the potential
embodiment of the spirit of the modern are,
inescapably, attributes of the American,53
unquestionably the best available model of the
new-fangled; from Marx to Lenin and Trotsky,
American practices have been cited to illustrate
qualities needed under socialism’ (AA, 29).54
However, though he is ‘a natural representative of
the modern’, the American, immigrant or
descendant of immigrants, is no revolutionary (AA,
29). He is pastless, in so far as the American has a
history that ‘history has been one of setting limits to
his revolutionising’ (AA, 30). Nevertheless, speaking
‘half-figuratively’,55 to become a human being the
proletarian must ‘Americanize’ himself by
overcoming the void that is his past and making a
new self through his actions (AA, 32). ‘Yet all the
relations of capitalist society forbid the working
class to act
except as a tool. Hence its free act must be a
revolutionary act, one that must subdue “all existing
conditions” and can set itself no limits’ (AA, 32). It

662
must ‘continue to create itself in revolutionary
action’ for ‘at rest it has no identity’ (AA, 37).
At which juncture it is worth recalling what Wallace
Stevens said about how ‘obvious’ it is that ‘the
American will as a principle of the mind’s being is
easily satisfied in its efforts to realize itself in
knowing itself’, easily satisfied which Rosenberg set
as one of two epigrams above his essay on the kind
of painting being made by the artists who gathered
around Tenth Street, New York, in the late 1940s
and 1950s. What, at that time, was impossible for
the proletariat became possible for the American
Action Painters, artists who were less easily
satisfied in their efforts to realize themselves in
knowing themselves than was Stevens’ generalized
‘American’.

IV

It should be clear from the foregoing that the

writings of Marx were the major resource for
Rosenberg’s thinking about ‘action’, about action as
a necessary way of coming to a proper awareness of
one’s self, one’s identity, one’s role in the drama of
history, and about what was special about the kind
of painting he called ‘American Action Painting’.
But they would not have been his only resource.
According to Robert Motherwell, for example,
Rosenberg was taken by something he read in the
proofs of an essay by Richard Huelsenbeck that
Motherwell included in his 1951 anthology The
Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology.56
Rosenberg lighted on the passage, in what was
eventually set under the title ‘En Avant Dada’,
where ‘Huelsenbeck violently attacks literary
esthetes, and says that literature should be action,

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should be made with a gun in the hand, etc.’57 In
Berlin, in 1918–20, this is revolutionary art. No
wonder the passage caught Rosenberg’s eye. The
appropriation of Marx as a resource aside, it is
certainly possible that Rosenberg also paid
attention to Huelsenbeck’s essay, which he and
Motherwell had known since at least 1947, when, as
editors along with John Cage and Pierre Chareau,
they included some fragments from it in the one and
only issue of Possibilities that came out in the
winter of 1947–8.58 In one of those fragments you
can read: ‘The Dadaist should be a man who has
fully understood that one is entitled to have ideas
only through action, because it holds the possibility
of achieving knowledge.’59 That seems compatible
with what he took from his reading of Marx.
It has to be said, with regard to Action Painting,
that I doubt that Rosenberg found much that was
useful in what he knew about Jackson Pollock’s way
of painting, either at first hand or by what he could
have seen in Hans Namuth’s photographs of Pollock
painting, which appeared in ARTnews in May 1951
– which is not to say that he did not find
something.60 Some commentators have claimed that
Rosenberg was thinking of Pollock when he wrote
‘The American Action Painters’, but this seems
unlikely,61 and,
anyway, he did not need to see – or see photographs
of – Pollock or any of the artists he might have had
in mind actually painting to write what he saw the
paintings as of. He did not think of himself ‘as a
critic writing about specific painters or sculptors’ or
about ‘problems that are distinctly – or let’s say,
exclusively – restricted to painting’; rather, he saw
himself as ‘dealing with the condition of some
creative act on the part of an individual or a group,

664
even … a pervasive spirit’.62 If Rosenberg had the
work of anyone in particular in mind as evidencing
the kind of action he associated with Action
Painting, it was probably the work of Barnett
Newman: specifically, perhaps, Onement I.63 This
was the painting that Newman made on 29 January
1948, his birthday, by fixing a piece of tape down
the vertical centre of a canvas that he had painted
cadmium red dark and, after that, smearing some
cadmium red light over it to test the colour.
Newman then studied what he had produced for
some eight or nine months, figuring out what
precisely he had done – ‘What was it?’ – and what
he might do, before definitively abandoning it as
complete64 and, having ‘affirmed himself … freed
himself’ and moved on with a ‘totally new vision’.65
We can now start reading ‘The American Action
Painters’ and answer the question posed about
Action Painting in the first section of the essay:
‘Modern Art? Or an Art of the Modern?’ For
Rosenberg, writing in 1952, Modern Art is painting
that has caught up with, or is catching up with,
what was produced by the ‘School of Paris’. The
academic, moribund Modernism of the late 1920s
and 1930s. Modern Art is painting that is secure in
the knowledge of what it is, practising its immediate
past, enabled and supported by a stable structure.
As Wallace Stevens might have phrased it: it puts
things together by choice, not of the will; it selects
from among objects already supplied by association;
it is a selection made for purposes that are not then
and therein being shaped because they have
already been fixed.66 Modern Art has to be negated:
an Art of the Modern will be the negation of that
negative (TN, 23–4).

665
But Modern Art is not only painting. As Rosenberg
points out, the category could also include
architecture, furniture, household appliances,
advertising ‘mobiles’, a three-thousand-year-old
mask from the South Pacific, and even a piece of
wood found on a park bench (TN, 35). Modern Art
has little or nothing to do with style or with when or
why something was produced, by whom it was
produced or for whom it was produced, etc., and
more or less everything to do with those persons
who are socially and pedagogically empowered to
designate it as ‘psychologically, esthetically or
ideologically relevant to our epoch’ (TN, 36). It is
part of a ‘revolution of taste’ conducted by those
persons who value it and contested by those who do
not. Responses to it represent ‘claims to social
leadership’ (TN, 36). In other words, he recognized
that what was being done with art was but an
aspect of the struggle for leadership within the US
ruling class that, during the ‘Cold War’, was
contested with opposing claims about the value of
Modern Art. On one side, there was that fraction
made up
of internationalist-multinationalist business liberals
who valued it, collected it and made it available to
the public in those bits of what C. Wright Mills
would call ‘the cultural apparatus’ that they owned
and controlled – the Museum of Modern Art, New
York, which Rosenberg has in his sights in ‘The
American Action Painters’, was a prime site in this
regard – and for whom Modern Art had ‘a supreme
Value […] the Value of the NEW’ (TN, 37). On the
other side, there was that fraction made up of
isolationist-nationalist ‘practical conservatives’ that
regarded Modern Art as un-American, subversive,
‘snobbish, Red, immoral, etc.’ (TN, 36) and whose

666
views were represented by the likes of
Congressman George A. Dondero.67 Rosenberg,
who understood how modernism – or those aspects
of Modern Art that were synonymous with the Art of
the Modern – put the cultural politics of both
fractions at risk, regarded this struggle, restricted
to ‘weapons of taste’, and at the same time
addressed to the masses, as a ‘comedy of
revolution’ (TN, 36). In other words, it was a farce.
The professional enlighteners of Modern Art use
Action Painting in their political struggle with those
who oppose their view of the world not only for
ideological purposes but also as a way of making
money (TN, 37). But they do not understand it.
Their value judgments are based in identifying
‘resemblances of surface’ and of perpetuating
beliefs about what is ‘modish’ (TN, 38). Which is
why they have failed to grasp ‘the new creative
principle’ that sets Action Painting apart from
twentieth-century picture-making (TN, 39). Action
Painting has nothing to do with taste or with ‘the
mode of production of modern masterpieces’, which
‘has been all too clearly rationalized’ (TN, 24). It is
a very different kind of practice from that of the
earlier abstractionists of the Paris Modern or, as it
is called in ‘The American Action Painters’, the
‘Great Vanguard’ (TN, 24). The Modern or the Great
Vanguard was historically and culturally specific to
the Paris International of 1907–29. Action Painting
was historically and culturally specific to the
community associated with Tenth Street, New York,
in the period 1945 to 1952. It was that community’s
response to the unevenness and discontinuity of
history and to what Rosenberg regarded as a break
in and with the Modern. Not surprisingly – or
illogically according to what Rosenberg had written

667
in ‘The Fall of Paris’ – the Action Painters regarded
the style of the Great Vanguard as dead or as
something that had to be transcended. Though it is
possible to see a cutaneous similarity between their
work and previous abstract painting, the two kinds
of painting are crucially different with regard to
their intention and function. Because of this, the
work of the American Action Painters had to be
seen as different and separate from the painting of
the Great Vanguard and from what the taste
bureaucracies and formalist critics had designated
as Modern Art (TN, 24). Rosenberg’s use of ‘the
Modern’ had remained consistent since ‘The Fall of
Paris’ and continued to mean – as it did in ‘The
Pathos of the Proletariat’, where he talked about
‘the spirit of the modern’ (AA, 29) – the style of an
epoch’s progressive consciousness. Action Painting
is not ‘Modern Art’. It is an ‘Art of the Modern’.
Rosenberg points out that most of the artists he’s
writing about were more than forty years old when
they became Action Painters. Before then, many of
them had been ‘“Marxists” (W.P.A. unions, artists’
congresses) […] trying to paint Society. Others had
been trying to paint Art (Cubism,
Post-Impressionism)’ (TN, 30). It amounted to the
same thing. They had been trying to paint the
Modern. By 1940, both Art and Society – the art of
the Paris International and the aspirational politics
of the Communist International – as the necessary
form and dynamic principle of the immediate future
were dead. It is in this double demise, not in ‘the
war and the decline of radicalism in America’, that
Rosenberg locates the beginnings of Action Painting
(TN, 30). ‘At its centre the movement was away
from, rather than towards. The Great Works of the

668
Past and the Good Life of the Future became
equally nil’ (TN, 30).
Stevens, thinking about the period from the French
Revolution to 1942, a moment in the war when the
defeat or triumph of Hitler was still undecided,
wrote about ‘the pressure of reality, a pressure
great enough and prolonged enough to bring about
the end of one era in the history of the imagination
and, if so, then great enough to bring about the
beginning of another’.68 In a sense, that is the
moment of Rosenberg’s ‘grand crisis’ (TN, 30), the
moment when the two Moderns became ‘nil’: the
moment when it became possible to make an Art of
the Modern again. But with what? The ideas,
beliefs, theories, practices, materials and methods
of Art and Society that survived were deemed
useless as resources for those artists who were
compelled to deal with the crisis and work it out in
practice. ‘Value – political, aesthetic, moral’ had to
be rejected.69 But this rejection did not take the
form of condemnation or defiance, as it had done
with Dada and Surrealism after the First World
War. This time, owing no political, aesthetic or
moral obligation to a past-dominated present but
trying presently to paint the Modern, the artist’s
reaction was one of diffidence (TN, 30): the artist
was not so much excessively modest and reticent as
distrustful and uncertain about what constituted
and might yet constitute ‘art’, ‘creation’, ‘creativity’,
‘individuality’ and the ‘identity’ of the artist.
In becoming ‘nil’, the two Moderns had provided
artists with a major resource for any vanguard
practice: ‘nothingness’. In a state of nothingness or
with the experience of nothingness, the Action
Painter ‘decided to paint … just TO PAINT’ (TN, 30).

669
There was no intention ‘to reproduce, re-design,
analyse or “express” an object, actual or imagined.
What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but
an event. The painter no longer approached his
easel with an image in mind; he went up to it with
material in his hand to do something to that other
piece of material in front of him’ (TN, 25). The
image that was produced by ‘staining’ the canvas or
by ‘spontaneously putting forms into motion upon it’
(TN, 25) was the indexical – and occasionally iconic
– mark or trace of those actions.70 Initially that was
all there was to it. But subsequently the painter
began to take stock of the way that the surface was
marked, started to attend
to the ‘act of painting’, to what might be learned
about painting and art … and about himself: ‘what
matters always is the revelation contained in the
act’ (TN, 26–7).
Action Painting, as Rosenberg sees it, is painting at
the point of formation, when everything has to be
redone. It is Ur-painting at the point of
thematization; but it is not yet, and may never
become, painting as an art.71 As if. In redoing
everything from scratch the Action Painter relies on
an ‘as if’. In our life circumstances, we behave as if
our world is as know it, we live our lives often
according to ideas and models that we know to be
untrue but take for granted as if they are true. The
as if is a fiction that we find useful for going on, for
achieving or maintaining what we want to achieve
or maintain. An as if is a useful fiction. Action
Paintings are ‘DRAMAS OF AS IF’ (AA, 27): ‘With
traditional esthetic references discarded as
irrelevant, what gives the canvas its meaning is not
psychological data but role, the way the artist
organizes his emotional and intellectual energy as if

670
[emphasis added] he were in a living situation’ (TN,
29).72 Although ‘the interest lies in the kind of act
taking place in the four sided arena [that is the
canvas], a dramatic interest’ (TN, 29), the artist
makes or takes those actions as if he were
intervening in his actual life circumstances, as if his
actions were actual interventions in the existing
social and political order of things.
We are now close to understanding this new
painting that Rosenberg regards ‘as an act that is
inseparable from the biography of the artist’, that is
‘a “moment” in the adulterated mixture of his life’,
that is ‘of the same metaphysical substance as the
artist’s existence’, and that has ‘broken down every
distinction between art and life (TN, 27–8). But we
will not understand it if we see it as Modern Art, if
we see it in relation ‘to the works of the past,
rightness of colour, texture, balance, etc.’, or as
expressing or representing some aspect of the
artist’s existence, for example, his ‘sexual
preferences or debilities’ (TN, 29). Taking the hint
from the reference to ‘the critic who goes on
judging’ (TN, 28), and recalling what he had written
previously in ‘Character Change and the Drama’
about the way the law defines a person by his overt
acts and its judgment being the resolution of those
acts, it seems clear that Rosenberg saw an Action
Painting as a sequence of lucid and comprehensible
actions that enabled a judgment by the painter and
the critic, a judgment that is an inseparable part of
recognizing the painter’s identity.73

With the American, heir of the pioneer and the immigrant, the
foundering of Art and Society was not experienced as a loss. On
the contrary, the end of Art marked the beginning … of an
optimism regarding himself as an artist.… On the one hand, a

671
desperate recognition of moral and intellectual exhaustion; on the
other, the exhilaration of an adventure over depths in which he
might find the true image of his identity.… Guided by visual and
somatic memories of paintings he had seen or made – memories
which he did his best to keep intruding into his consciousness – he
gesticulated upon the canvas and watched for what each novelty
would declare him and his art to be. (TN, 31)

Aware that their ideological and material conditions

were thoroughly immiserated and freed from – or
wanting to be free from – past ideas and beliefs, the
Action Painters, their imagination responding to the
pressure of reality, acted according to their
historical circumstances and entirely in their own
interests. The ‘saving moment’ came ‘when the
painter first felt himself released from Value – myth
of past self-recognition’ and ‘attempted to initiate a
new moment’ in which he would ‘realize his total
personality – myth of future self-recognition’ (TN,
31). It was at that point that the painter’s character
change became synonymous with revolution. This is
Rosenberg on revolutionary action in ‘The Pathos of
the Proletariat’:

For the worker action is but a possibility, the anguishing possibility

of transforming himself into an individual. Hemmed in on the bare,
functional stage of industrial production, altogether there, without
past or vision of paradise, he is, except for this possibility of acting,
a mere prop, a thing that personifies. Speaking half-figuratively, to
become a human being the proletarian must ‘Americanize’ himself,
that is, overcome the void of his past by making a new self through
his actions.

Yet all the relations of capitalist society forbid the working class to
act except as a tool. Hence its free act must be a revolutionary act,
one that must subdue ‘all existing conditions’ and can set itself no

672
limits. The proletarian victim of the modern cannot enter the
historical drama as an actor without becoming its hero. In ‘the
indefinite prodigiousness of their aims’, as Marx described them in
The Eighteenth Brumaire, the workers signify that with them
revolution is a need of the spirit, a means of redemption. Before
Marx’s internal pioneer opens a frontier without end. (AA, 31–2)

This is what he wrote, or rewrote, in ‘The American

Action Painters’:

The revolution against the given, in the self and the world, which
since Hegel has provided European vanguard art with theories of a
New Reality, has re-entered America in the form of personal
revolts. Art as action rests on the enormous assumption that the
artist accepts as real only that which he is in the process of
creating. ‘Except the soul has divested itself of the love of created
things …’ The artist works in a condition of open possibility, risking,
to follow Kierkegaard, the anguish of the esthetic, which
accompanies possibility lacking in reality. To maintain the force to
refrain from settling anything, he must exercise in himself a
constant No (TN, 32).

In other words, the artist must base his work in the

practice of the negation of the negative. The
‘constant No’ here is not merely the mental act of
saying ‘No’, which like many of the so-called
practices of negation that characterize ‘Modern Art’
are but arbitrary and gratuitous signs of caprice. It
refers, rather, to the objective ground of such
negations and is the vital element of the process of
cognition: negation defined as a dialectical moment
of objective development, becoming, mediation, and
transition. No simple negation of a given negativity
can produce a self-sustaining positivity. That’s
why Rosenberg gave this section of his essay the
inter-title: ‘It’s Not That, It’s Not That, It’s Not That’
(TN, 29).

673
The Action Painter can produce effectively only if he
is in a relation to the dominant culture as a
proletarian. Action is the prerequisite of the
proletariat’s identity. For the proletariat, which is
held in an exploited fixed relation to capitalism, the
free act, any action made spontaneously and
without recourse to myths of the past or the myth of
a utopian future, will be, by definition, revolutionary
and will inaugurate the revolution in permanence.
Likewise, action is the wilful prerequisite for the
vanguard painter’s striving to effect his ‘identity’. In
the crisis period of 1940 and after, an uncertain
malignant warlike whole, a world at war and then at
cold war, the painter could either remain a
‘personality’ or ‘personification’ and continue
putting things together on the canvas by selecting
from among what remained of Art and Society; or,
he could accept that there was nothing, that he had
nothing to secure or strengthen, and had to resist
or evade the pressure of that no-thing, evade or
negate it, and rid himself of all considerations not
demanded by the reality of the historical situation
and act appropriately and accordingly. And PAINT.
He could either carry on producing Modern Art or
he could produce an Art of the Modern, make art or
– if it were not art – make ‘original work
demonstrating what art is about to become’ (TN,
24).
As I read them, ‘The Pathos of the Proletariat’ and
‘The American Action Painters’ were written by a
Marxist who refused to succumb to a pessimism
that would have been quite alien to the tradition of
Marxism. The ‘Harold Rosenberg’ who wrote ‘The
Front’ at the end of 1934 is still there in these and
other essays written in the 1940s and 1950s. So is
the proletariat. The proletariat, of course, always

674
has the potential for revolution: ‘So long as the
category exists, the possibility cannot be excluded
that it will recognize itself as a separate human
community and revolutionize everything by
asserting its needs and its traditionless interests’
(AA, 56–7). And the American Action Painters
provided evidence that there was still a space and
some potential for personal revolt and insurrection.
For Rosenberg, ‘good’ Action Painting left ‘no doubt
concerning its reality as an action and its relation to
a transforming process in the artist’ (TN, 33). Weak
or ‘easy’ Action Painting lacked ‘the dialectical
tension of a genuine act, associated with risk and
will’ (TN, 34). Action Painting was optimistic
painting for it enabled the artist to realize an
‘identity’ that the proletariat, at that moment, could
not.
Maybe the Action Painters’ action was always, at
some level, a failure – unless we think of it as part
of a ‘revolution’ whose outlines were not
perceptible in political terms but the potential of
which could be denied only at the cost of an entire
loss of self. Rosenberg was able to remain
optimistic because his analyses incorporated the
dialectic: that, as Marx summarized it, ‘affirmative
recognition of the existing state of things, at the
same time also, the recognition of the negation of
that state, of its inevitable breaking up’.74 When it
appeared, the dialectical method, which
combines the negativity of man’s social experience
with the need for change, introduced an essential,
confident movement into Rosenberg’s writing.
Remember: the Paris Modern represented ‘a dream
of living-in-the-present and a dream of world
citizenship – resting not upon a real triumph, but
upon a willingness to go as far as was necessary

675
into nothingness in order to shake off what was
dead in the real. A negation of the negative.’ That
was how Rosenberg saw the work of the American
Action Painters. One could say that Rosenberg’s
Action Painter, like the proletariat will be when it
changes character and becomes one with the drama
of history, is someone who is aware that he is
nothing and acts to become everything, whose
mind, having become free, is externalized as will
and acts against the pressure of reality. He tried to
let nothing impose upon the act-painting, a
purposive productive act that was in its essence
critical of Art and Society. Those dramas of as if had
a kind of revolutionary boldness. When Barnett
Newman, in 1948, in response to Rosenberg’s
question about what one of his ‘paintings could
possibly mean to the world’, said that if ‘read
properly it would mean the end of all state
capitalism and totalitarianism’, he was surely
reminding Rosenberg of Onement I. Not that
Rosenberg would have needed reminding, of
course. His question was thoroughly rhetorical. If
the work of the American Action Painters had any
meaning, it was about revolutionary political agency
arising from the contradictions of capitalism, the
reality of which could not be totally excluded if the
prospect of radical change was to be kept open …
sometime … somewhere. American Action Painting
was the sign that the historical inevitability of
revolution was still there … is still there …
immanent. It was that, or it is not anything.
The following abbreviations have been used throughout this essay.

AA = Harold Rosenberg, Act and the Actor: Making the Self (New York:
World Publishing Co., 1970; University of Chicago: Chicago, 1983)
DP = Harold Rosenberg, Discovering the Present: Three Decades in Art,
Culture and Politics (University of Chicago: Chicago, 1973; Phoenix

676
Edition, 1976)
TN = Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (Horizon Press: New
York, 1959; University of Chicago; Chicago, 1982)

1 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’, ARTnews, vol. 51,

no. 8 (December 1952), pp. 22–3, 48–50, reprinted in The Tradition of
the New (Horizon Press: New York, 1959; University of Chicago;
Chicago, 1982), pp. 23–39. Rosenberg’s essay was discussed at the
Club on 16 January 1953, more or less immediately after its publication
– see Gary Comenas, <http://warholstars.org/abstractexpressionism/
timeline/abstractexpressionism53.html>, accessed 4 September 2013.
The first version of ‘Action, Revolution and Painting’ was published in
the Oxford Art Journal, vol. 14, no. 1 (1992), pp. 3–17, some
sevenyears before Rosenberg’s papers were released by the Getty
Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities in 1999. At
the time, I was unaware of their existence. I am pleased that they
confirm what was then achieved by an attentive reading of texts that
had long been in the public domain. This version of that essay has
been rewritten for its inclusion in this collection, hopefully improving it
by making certain passages less opaque and by adding some new
material.
Mention needs to be made of three studies that either use or abuse
the Oxford Art Journal essay, each of them, in whole or in part, offering
a serious scholarly account of Rosenberg’s writing, especially his art
criticism and, in particular, ‘The American Action Painters’: Elaine
Owens O’Brien, ‘The Art Criticism of Harold Rosenberg: Theaters of
Love and Combat’, unpublished PhD thesis (City University of New
York, 1997) – O’Brien had privileged access to Rosenberg’s papers
while researching and writing her thesis; Nancy Jachec, The
Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism (Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge, 2000); and Annika Marie, ‘The Most
Radical Act: Harold Rosenberg, Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt’,
unpublished PhD thesis (University of Texas at Austin, 2006). Marie’s
dissertation, which relates Rosenberg’s idea of ‘action’ to Marx’s notion
of ‘praxis’ – free creative and self-creative activity through which man
makes and changes the world and himself – more directly than did I, is
the only one to keep faith with the revolutionary politics that writes ‘The
American Action Painters’. For a more recent, briefer contribution to the
way that Rosenberg read Marx and how that reading informed his idea
of action and Action Painting, see Christa Noel Robbins, ‘Harold
Rosenberg on the Character of Action’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 35, no.
2 (2012), pp. 195–214.

2 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Front’, Partisan Review, vol. 2, no. 6

(January/February 1935), p. 74.

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3 Harold Rosenberg, ‘Character Change and the Drama’, The
Symposium, vol. 3, no. 3 (July 1932), pp. 348–69, reprinted in The
Tradition of the New, op. cit., pp. 135–53. See also his other work for
The Symposium: ‘Myth and Poem’, vol. 2, no. 2 (April 1931), pp.
179–91; a review of William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, vol.
2, no. 3 (July 1931), pp. 412–18; a review of Kenneth Burke’s Counter
Statement and Montgomery Belgion’s The Human Parrot and Other
Essays, vol. 3, no. 1 (January 1932), pp. 116–18; and a review of Jules
Romaine’s Men of Good Will, vol. 4, no. 4 (October 1933), pp. 511–14.

4 Rosenberg and Hays published three issues of The New Act – in

January 1933, June 1933 and April 1934. It was referred to as an
‘experimental quarterly’ by Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, vol. 45, no. 6
(March 1935), p. 357. The New Act published articles by René Daumal,
Paul van Otayen, Henry Bamford Parkes, George Plekhanov, Ezra
Pound, Samuel Putman and Parker Tyler. For Rosenberg’s
contributions, see ‘Note on Class Conflict and Literature’, The New Act,
no. 1 (January 1933), pp. 3–10, and ‘Sanity, Individuality and Poetry’,
The New Act, no. 2 (June 1933), pp. 59–75, two essays in which he
developed ideas that he had first published the previous year in
‘Character Change and the Drama’.

5 Rosenberg’s contributions are indexed in Thirty Years of Poetry: A

Magazine of Verse, Volumes 1–60, October 1912–September 1942
and Fifty Years of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Volumes 1–100,
1912–1962 (AMS Reprint Company: New York, 1963).

6 William Phillips and Philip Rahv, ‘Private Experience and Public

Philosophy’, Poetry, vol. 48, no. 2 (May 1936), p. 104.

7 ‘Contributors’, Partisan Review, vol. 2, no. 6 (January–February 1935),

p. 2.

8 For still recommended reading on the John Reed Club and Partisan
Review, see James Gilbert, Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary
Radicalism in America (Wiley & Sons: New York, 1968); Richard H.
Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social
Thought in the Depression Years (Weslyan University Press:
Middletown, 1973); Alan Wald, ‘Revolutionary Intellectuals: Partisan
Review in the 1930s’, Occident, no. 8 (Spring 1974), pp. 118–33; Eric
Homberger, American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900–1939:
Equivocal Commitments (St Martin’s Press: New York, 1986).

9 Considering the secrecy that continues to surround membership of the

Communist Party, and which was deliberately fostered by the CP, it is
very difficult to know who was and who was not a member of the

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 CPUSA. It seems that being a member demanded a kind of discipline
that most writers and artists could not accept. One has to remember
that the CPUSA was partly committed to a form of democratic
centralism and to the strategic use of writers and artists. Because it
could not tolerate any criticism from its members at local levels of
organization, it would not accept into its ranks any really independent
figures, and they, in turn, could not accept its dictates. It is my guess
that Rosenberg was a fellow-traveller, not a member of the CPUSA.

10 Jane (Tabrisky) Degras, The Communist International 1919–1943:

Documents, Volume 3 (Oxford University Press: London and New York,
1965), p. 375, quoted in Duncan Halas, The Comintern (Bookmarks:
London, 1985), p. 143, which provides an excellent discussion of the
Comintern’s revolutionary period.

11 See ‘The Coming Writers’ Congress’, Partisan Review, vol. 2, no. 6

(January/February 1935), pp. 94–6. The Congress, it was announced,
would also ‘develop the possibilities for wider distribution of
revolutionary books and the improvement of the revolutionary press, as
well as relations betweenrevolutionary writers and bourgeois publishers
and editors’. It was clear from this that when the Congress met at the
end of April it would not be concerned with revolution but with
establishing good relations with the literary bourgeoisie and with
fighting fascism.

12 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Writers’ Congress’, Poetry, vol. 46,

no. 4 (July 1935), p. 222–7.

13 Ibid., p. 226.

14 Ibid., p. 226–7.

15 Ibid., p. 225.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Presumably Browder’s mention of ‘uniforms’ would have been taken as

a clear reference to Max Eastman’s Artists in Uniform (New York,
1934).

20 Here I have relied on Gerald M. Monroe’s essay ‘Art Front’ in Archives

of American Art Journal, vol. 13, no. 3 (1973), pp. 13–19. The editorial
board’s shift towards modernism was made partly as a result of
pressure that had been brought to bear by some modernist members of

679
 the Union – Solman, Ilya Bolotowsky, Balcomb Greene, Mark
Rothkowitz [Mark Rothko], Byron Browne, George McNeil, and others –
and partly because the Popular Front made it necessary to open the
editorial board to modernism. The move did not go uncontested.
Rosenberg’s place was secured only on the advice of a visiting official
of the French Communist Party who sat in on a crucial board meeting.
In Poetry, vol. 5, no. 4 (January 1938), Rosenberg is referred to as a
‘poet, critic, and painter of murals’.

21 Rosenberg’s first piece for Art Front was a report of an Artists’ Union
demonstration outside the CAA on 15 August 1935, at which
eighty-three WPA artists and art teachers were arrested, see ‘Artists
Increase their Understanding of Public Buildings’, Art Front, November
1935, pp. 3, 6.

22 Fernand Léger, ‘The New Realism’, trans. Harold Rosenberg, Art

Front, December 1935, p. 10.

23 Harold Rosenberg, ‘Peasants and Pure Art’, Art Front, January 1936,
pp. 5–6, and ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’, Art Front, June 1936, p. 15.

24 Harold Rosenberg, ‘Book Reviews’, Art Front, March 1936, p. 14.

25 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Wit of William Gropper’, Art Front, March

1936, pp. 7–8.

26 See, for example, Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of
Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War
(University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1983). Chapter One, ‘New York,
1935–1941: The De-Marxization of the Intelligentsia’, pp. 17–47.

27 In 1937 Rosenberg published several things in the CPUSA magazine

New Masses, which affirmed the validity of the Moscow Trials and the
Party line. ‘Portrait of a Predicament’, his very hostile review – in the
context of New Masses it could not have been anything but hostile – of
William Saroyan’s 3 Times 3 appeared in the same issue as ‘The
Moscow Trials: An Editorial’, New Masses, 9 February 1937, see p. 24.
See also: ‘What We May demand’, New Masses, 23 March 1937, pp.
17–18, an article on literature and major political writing (that is, ‘But the
least we may demandfrom literature is that it equal the best political
and historical writings of our time in the consciousness of its own
subject matter. Only thus can
it probe the wound of humanity which the act of thinking and of political
combination is part of the effort to cure […] no poem or novel of the
past few years can equal as a literary expression of modern human
consciousness the Communist Manifesto or Marx’s Eighteenth
Brumaire’.); ‘Aesthetic Assault’, a review of Jules Romains’ The Boys in

680
 the Back Room, New Masses, 30 March 1937, p. 25; and a poem, ‘The
Melancholy Railings’, New Masses, 20 July 1937, p. 20. Rosenberg’s
contributions to New Masses indicate that he was not yet sympathetic
to Trotsky.

28 ‘The Moscow Trials: A Statement by American Progressives’, New

Masses, 3 May 1938, p. 19.

29 Leon Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937–8) (Pathfinder Press:

New York, 1970), pp. 351–2.

30 Leon Trotsky, ‘Art and Politics’, Partisan Review, vol. 5, no. 3, August/
September 1938, pp. 3–10.

31 See André Breton and Leon Trotsky, ‘Manifesto: Towards a Free

Revolutionary Art’, Partisan Review, vol. 6, no. 1 (Fall 1938), pp. 49–53
– it is generally agreed that this text is substantially Trotsky’s but that
he asked that his name be left off the by-line.

32 Harold Rosenberg, ‘Myth and History’, Partisan Review, vol. 6, no. 2

Winter 1939), pp. 19–39.

33 ‘The Situation in American Writing’, Partisan Review, vol. 6, no. 4

(Summer 1939), see pp. 47–9.

34 Harold Rosenberg, ‘Marx and “The People”’, Partisan Review, vol. 6,

no. 4 (Summer 1939), pp. 121–5, see p. 124.

35 ‘Statement of the LCFS’, Partisan Review, vol. 6, no. 4 (Summer

1939), pp. 125–7, see p. 127. Rosenberg also signed the League’s
manifesto ‘War Is the Issue!’, see Partisan Review, vol. 6, no. 5 (Fall
1939), pp. 125–7. See also Rosenberg on the LCFS in ‘Couch
Liberalism and the Guilty Past’, Dissent: A Quarterly Review of Socialist
Opinion, vol. 2 (Autumn 1955), pp. 317ff, reprinted in The Tradition of
the New, op. cit., pp. 238–9.

36 Harold Rosenberg, ‘On the Fall of Paris’, Partisan Review, vol. 7, no. 6
(December 1940), pp. 440–8, reprinted under the title ‘The Fall of
Paris’, in The Tradition of the New, op. cit., pp. 209–20.

37 See Harold Rosenberg, ‘Couch Liberalism and the Guilty Past’, in The
Tradition of the New, op. cit., pp. 221–40.

38 Rosenberg derives the idea of ‘no-place’ and ‘no-time’ from

‘no-mindedness’, a state of mind essential to Zen Buddhism.
‘No-mindedness’ is a state of mind that is present everywhere because
it is nowhere attached to any particular object. In so far as the Paris
International was a ‘no-place’, it grasped nothing of Paris as the capital

681
 of France yet refused nothing from any other place. In so far as the
Paris Modern was a ‘no-time’, it was an emptying or a negation of
history and so was completely open to the future. In a state of
‘no-mindedness’, an individual holds to no preconceptions: he just acts.
Nothingness is the negation of all qualities as a vital part of the process
of cognition. It is likely that Rosenberg derived his knowledge of Zen
‘nothingness’ and ‘no-mindedness’ from reading either D. T. Suzuki’s
An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (Eastern Buddhist Society: Kyoto,
1934) or Alan Watts’ The Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work, and Art in
the Far East (John Murray: London, 1936), which were the first books
to introduce Zen Buddhism to English-speaking readers, or both.
Rosenberg’s appropriation of Zen in 1940 seems unusual, for recourse
to Zen did not become common around Tenth Street until 1949, when
the Philosophical Library republished Suzuki’s An Introduction to Zen
Buddhism, with a preface by Carl Jung, and Suzuki himself began
teaching at Columbia University. See also n. 43 below.

39 For the exemplary formulation of the negation of the negation, see Karl
Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (1867), trans. Ben Fowkes (Penguin/New Left
Review: Harmondsworth and London, 1976), p. 929: ‘The capitalist
mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production,
produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of
individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor.
But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of
Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of the negation. This does
not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him
individual property based on co-operation and the possession in
common of the land and the means of production.’

40 Wallace Stevens, ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’ (1942), in
The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (Vintage
Books: New York, 1951), pp. 3–36 at p. 11. Rosenberg was very taken
with this essay and with ‘The Figure of the Youth as a Virile Poet’
(1944), which was also included in The Necessary Angel and from
where he came by Stevens’ notion of poetry as a ‘process of the
personality of the poet’ (see TN, 29). Stevens means by this that what
keeps ‘poetry a living thing, the modernizing and ever-modern
influence’ is ‘not the poet as subject’ or ego but a series of actions that
are of the poet’s distinctive character.

41 See David A. Hollinger, ‘Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism and the

Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligentsia’, American Quarterly,
vol. 27, no. 2 (May 1975), pp. 133–51, especially with reference to
Rosenberg pp. 146–7.

682
42 Harold Rosenberg, ‘Tenth Street: A Geography of Modern Art’,
ARTnews Annual, vol. 28 (1959), pp. 120–37, 184, 186, 190, 192,
reprinted with slight modifications in Discovering the Present: Three
Decades of Art, Culture and Politics (1973), op. cit., pp. 100–9.

43 See Rosenberg, ‘Tenth Street: A Geography of Modern Art’,

Discovering the Present, op. cit., p. 104: ‘Identical with rotting streets in
Chicago, Detroit, and Boston, Tenth Street is differentiated only by its
encampment of artist. Here de Kooning’s conception of “no
environment” for the figures of his Women has been realized to the
maximum with regard to himself.’ According to Thomas B. Hess, Willem
de Kooning (Museum of Modern Art: New York, 1968), pp. 78–9, de
Kooning came up with the idea of ‘no-environment’ while he worked on
Woman I (1950–2) to refer to ‘the American urban scene and its lack of
specificity … Everything has its own character, but its character has
nothing to do with any particular place.’ Rosenberg, in Willem de
Kooning (Harry N. Abrams: New York, 1973), p. 15, refers to de
Kooning coming up with the idea ‘no-style’ as an aspect of ‘the act of
painting’: ‘transient and imperfect as an episode in daily life, the act of
painting achieves its form outside the patterning of style. It cuts across
the history of art modes and appropriates to painting whatever images
it attracts into its orbit. “No Style” painting is neither dependent upon
forms of the past nor indifferent to them. It is transformal.’ See n. 38
above for something on Rosenberg’s early awareness and use of Zen
by 1940.

44 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Pathos of the Proletariat’, Kenyon Review, vol.

11, no. 4 (Autumn 1949), pp. 595–629, reprinted in Act and Actor, op.
cit., pp. 2–57.

45 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Resurrected Romans’, Kenyon Review, vol.

10, no. 4 (Autumn 1948), pp. 602–20, reprinted in The Tradition of the
New, op. cit., pp. 154–77.

46 Proposed under the title Marx’s Drama of History, the book was
rejected by Alfred A. Knopf (1949), Pantheon Books (1950) and
Beacon Press (1951) – see Marie, ‘The Most Radical Act’, op. cit., pp.
68, 324, ns 166, 171–3. Paul de Man, with whom Rosenberg was
acquainted during 1949–51, while de Man was teaching at Bard
College, knew of this project, see Marie, ‘The Most Radical Act’, op.
cit., p. 324, n. 176, quoting a letter to Rosenberg from de Man, 5
November 1949: ‘This book of yours on Marxism is an event of the first
importance and let no publisher tell
you otherwise. I mean it.’ For something on de Man’s acquaintance
with Rosenberg (and Mary McCarthy), see the disparaging and
misleading essay on de Man’s time at Bard by David Lehman, ‘Paul de

683
 Man: The Plot Thickens’, New York Times, 24 May 1992, p. 9, available
at <http://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/24/books/
paul-de-man-the-plot-thickens.html>, accessed 4 September 2013.

47 Harold Rosenberg, ‘Character Change and the Drama’, The

Symposium, vol. 3, no. 3 (July 1932), pp. 348–69, reprinted in The
Tradition of the New, op. cit., pp. 135–53, 154–77. This issue of the
journal also contained a lengthy review by Jack Burnham of the first
volume of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (1930).

48 Born in New York in 1906, Rosenberg attended College of the City of

New York (City College) in 1923–4, and then Brooklyn Law School,
from which he graduated in 1927 with a degree conferred under St
Lawrence University’s state charter to educate attorneys. On the
partnership between Brooklyn Law School and St Lawrence University
at this time, see Lawrence Baron, ‘A Menorah in the Wilderness: The
Jewish Presence at St Lawrence University. An Address for the Siegel
Memorial Lecture at St Lawrence University, October 30, 2006’, p. 4, at
<http://www.stlawu.edu/tradition/siegel%20baron.doc>.

49 For a tangential gloss on Rosenberg’s point of law, see this from Hilary
Mantel’s story of the circumstances surrounding the fall of Anne
Boleyn, Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate: London, 2012), p. 369:
‘Gregory [Cromwell] nods. He seems to understand, but perhaps
seeming is as far as it goes. When Gregory says, “Are they guilty?” he
means, “Did they do it?” But when he [Thomas Cromwell] says, “Are
they guilty?” he means, “Did the court find them so?” The lawyer’s
world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.’

50 Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (1845) in Marx, Early Writings

(Penguin Books/New Left Review: Harmondsworth and London, 1975),
pp. 420–3 at p. 422.

51 Karl Marx, ‘Preface’, Capital, vol. 1 (1867), op. cit., p. 92.

52 On the place that the United States of America had in Lenin’s thinking,
seeladimir, Lenin on the United States: Selected Writings (International
Publishers: New York, 1970). Trotsky’s most extended discussion of
the economy – and politics – of US monopoly capitalism is to be found
in the introduction to his book The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx
(Philadelphia, 1939), which was published separately as Marxism in the
United States (Workers Party Publications: New York, 1947).

53 Rosenberg has a note here: ‘In comparing the American and the
proletariat we are thinking of them, of course, not as categories, where
they overlap (since many Americans are wage workers), but as
collective entities or types – the first actual, the second hypothetical.’

684
54 See, for example, this fragment from Trotsky’s ‘Europe and America’
(1926), here taken from James P. Cannon, ‘Trotsky on the United
States’, International Socialist Review, vol. 21, no. 4 (Fall 1960),
reprinted in Leon Trotsky: The Man and His Work (Merit Publishers:
New York, 1969), pp. 87–8: ‘We do not at all mean thereby to condemn
Americanism, lock, stock, and barrel. We do not mean that we abjure to
learn from Americans and Americanisms whatever one can and should
learn from them. We lack the technique of the Americans and their
labour proficiency … to have Bolshevism shod in the American way –
there is our task!… If we get shod with mathematics, technology, if we
Americanise our frail socialist industry, then we can with tenfold
confidence say that the future is completely and decisively working in
our favour. Americanised Bolshevism will crush and conquer imperialist
Americanism.’

55 Rosenberg has a note here: ‘Only “half” figuratively, since becoming

Americans has been the actual salvation chosen by millions of
workingmen from older nations. With the proletariat there is more to the
impulse to become an American than their desire for economic
opportunity, flight from oppression, etc. Primarily, it is a will to enter a
world where the past no longer dominates, and where therefore that
creature of the present, the workingman, can merge himself into the
human whole. Thus proletarians immigrate to America in a different
spirit from middle-class people or peasants, who from the moment they
enter “American time” experience it as something disconcerting or even
immoral, and whose nostalgia for their homelands and customs is often
communicated from one generation to the next. But America’s thin time
crust, that seems so desolate to immigrants from other classes, is
precisely what satisfies the proletariat and has provided so many
workers with the energy to become leaders of industry. Becoming an
American is a kind of revolution for foreign proletarians, though it is a
magical revolution rather than a revolutionary act. It alters the
workingman’s consciousness of himself; like a religious conversion it
supplies him with a new identity. But this change does not extinguish
his previous situation as a character in the capitalist drama; he is still in
the realm of economic personifications. As an American, too, a
social-economic role will be assigned to him: worker, farmer, capitalist.
The elimination of these abstract types continues to call for a
transformation of the historical “plot”.’

56 Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology

(Wittenborn, Schulz, Inc.: New York, 1951).

57 ‘An Interview with Robert Motherwell’, Artforum, vol. 4 (September

1965), p. 37 – see Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘En Avant Dada’ (1920) in
Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets, op. cit., pp. 22–48.

685
58 Possibilities, no. 1 (Winter 1947–8), pp. 41–3.

59 Huelsenbeck, ‘En Avant Dada’, The Dada Painters and Poets, op. cit.,
p. 28.

60 Robert Goodnough, ‘Pollock Paints a picture’, photographs by Hans

Namuth, ARTnews, vol. 50, no. 3, May 1951, pp. 38–41, 60–1.

61 See Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Search for Jackson Pollock’, ARTnews,

vol. 59, no. 10 (February 1961), pp. 59–60, his review of Bryan
Robertson’s Jackson Pollock (Harry N. Abrams: New York, 1961).
Evidently Rosenberg went so far as to tell ‘Pollock, in the presence of a
witness’, that ‘The American Action painters’ ‘was not about “him”, even
if he had played a part in it.’ See also the letters exchanged between
Rosenberg and William Rubin in Artforum, April 1967, pp. 6–7 and
especially that of May 1967, p. 4, concerning Rubin’s ‘Jackson Pollock
and the Modern Tradition’, Artforum, February 1967, pp. 14–22. For
some more examples, not involving Rosenberg, see: Barbara Rose,
‘Hans Namuth’s Photographs and the Jackson Pollock Myth: Part One:
Media Impact and the Failure of Criticism’, Arts Magazine, vol. 53, no. 7
(March 1979), pp. 112–13; Deborah Solomon, Jackson Pollock: A
Biography (Simon and Schuster: New York, 1987), p. 210; Ellen G.
Landau, Jackson Pollock (Harry N. Abrams: New York, 1989), pp.
85–6; Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An
American Saga (Clarkson N. Potter: New York, 1989), pp. 703–7.

62 See John Gruen, The Party’s Over: Reminiscences of the Fifties – New
York’s Artists, Writers, Musicians, and their Friends (Viking Press: New
York, 1972), pp. 172–8, at p. 173.

63 Thomas B. Hess, for one, thought that this was the case; see Thomas
B. Hess, Barnett Newman (Tate Gallery: London, 1972), p. 30.

64 Barnett Newman, interviewed by Emile de Antonio, in Emile de

Antonio and Mitch Tuchman, Painters Painting (Abbeville Press: New
York, 1984), p. 306.

65 Hess, Barnett Newman, op. cit., p. 30.

66 Stevens, ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’, op. cit., pp.
10–11.

67 On the internationalist ‘business-liberals’ and the old-guard, ‘America

First’ isolationists as fractions of the US ruling class, see the books of
G. William Domhoff, for example, Who Rules America? (Prentice Hall:
Englewood Cliffs, 1967) and The Powers That Be: Processes of Ruling
Class Domination in America (Random House: New York, 1978).

686
 In ‘Revolution and the Idea of Beauty’, Encounter, vol. 1, no. 3
(December 1953), pp. 65–8, revised and reprinted as ‘Revolution and
the Concept of Beauty’ in The Tradition of the New, op. cit., pp. 74–83,
Rosenberg discusses how Alfred H. Barr Jr., Director of Collections at
the Museum of Modern Art, New York, responded to Dondero’s attacks
on Modern Art in his belated ‘Is Modern Art Communistic?’, New York
Times Magazine, 14 December 1952, pp. 22–3, 28–30. No doubt
Rosenberg would have chuckled when it came out in the New York
Times, 27 April 1966, that Encounter had been funded by the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA).
On the Abstract Expressionists’ relation to the struggle between the
business-liberals and isolationists, see Fred Orton, ‘Footnote One: The
Idea of the Cold War’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 14, no. 2 (1991), pp.
3–17.

68 Stevens, ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’, op. cit., pp. 21–2.

69 See the note that Rosenberg added in The Tradition of the New
(McGraw Hill paperback, 1965, and subsequent reprints), pp. 33–4: ‘As
other art movements of our time have extracted from painting the
element of structure or the element of tone and elevated into their
essence, Action Painting has extracted the element of decision inherent
in all art in that the work is not finished at its beginning but has to be
carried forward by an accumulation of “right” gestures. In a word Action
Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art; its mark is moral
tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties; and it judges
itself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the
incorporation of a genuine struggle, one which could at any point have
been lost.’

70 For an interesting discussion of the indexical and iconical in Abstract

Expressionism, see Richard Shiff, ‘Performing an Appearance: On the
Surface of Abstract Expressionism’, in Michael Auping, Abstract
Expressionism: The Critical Developments (Harry N. Abrams in
association with Albright-Knox Art Gallery: New York, 1978), pp.
94–123.

71 See Richard Wollheim’s account of Ur-painting in Painting as an Art

(Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1987), pp. 19–25, p. 359, n. 9.

72 The significance of ‘Dramas Of As If’, the inter-title that Rosenberg

gave to this section of ‘The American Action Painters’, has gone
unnoticed. The ‘as if’ at this point in the essay is almost certainly
derived from Hans Vaihinger’s Philosophie des Als Ob (1911), which
Rosenberg probably knew in C. K. Ogden’s translation, The Philosophy
of ‘As If’: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions

687
 of Mankind (Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.: London, 1924). In this
section of the essay, Rosenberg is pointing to two dramas of as if. First
(TN, 28), there is a negative as if, which is that of ‘The critic who goes
on judging [the new painting] in terms of schools, styles, form – as if the
painter were still concerned with producing a certain kind of object (a
work of art), instead of living on the canvas – is bound to seem a
stranger [to the painter and his act of painting]’. Second (TN, 29),
there’s the positive as if that the Action Painter uses for going on,
making paintings and realizing himself in the act of making a painting.

73 In ‘Character Change and the Drama’ Rosenberg pointed out that ‘The
Law is not a recognizer of persons; its judgments are applied at the end
of a series of acts’ (TN, 136). The judgment is the resolution of these
acts (TN, 136). That is why, for example, ‘Razkolnikov … in Crime and
Punishment sought judgment so that his act would be completed and
he could take on a new existence’ (TN, 136).

74 Marx, Capital, quoted by Rosenberg in ‘The Pathos of the Proletariat’,

Act and the Actor, op. cit., p. 35.

688
ERASURE AND JEWISHNESS IN OTTO
DIX’S PORTRAIT OF THE LAWYER
HUGO SIMONS
James A. van Dyke

‘What Marxism stands for, broadly speaking, is an emphatically

historical, materialist, and totalizing approach to the study of
societies – an approach that insists on the importance of material
constraints on human activities and the effects of the material
embodiments of discursive structures.’

Andrew Hemingway, ‘Marxism and Art History after the Fall of

Communism’1

T he story of Otto Dix, one of the most prominent

artists to work in interwar Germany, is not that
of a Marxist, socialist or communist painter, despite
the frequently transgressive and sometimes
scandalous nature of his work of the 1920s and
1930s, his friendship with left-wing artists and the
inclusion of his pictures in their exhibitions and
satirical publications between 1919 and 1926, the
militant praise of a radicalized Carl Einstein in
1923, and the political affiliations of a number of his
students in Dresden between 1927 and 1933. Far
more important to him than the thinking of Marxist
intellectuals was the vitalist philosophy of
Nietzsche, whose books he began to read around
1911 and continued to read at least sporadically
throughout the 1920s, with increased intensity once

689
again in the early 1930s. Among the results of this
intellectual disposition – which aligned Dix with a
significant element within imperial Germany’s
dissident middle-class, avant-garde culture – were
an affirmative, vitalistic relationship to lived
experience and a self-centred conception of artistic
practice rooted in the painter’s understanding of
Nietzsche’s ideas of the ‘will to power’ and the
extraordinary, singular ‘Übermensch’. Dix kept his
distance from political commitment and the
production of the tendentious visual imagery
required by the working-class movement, and his
career trajectory is marked by a dynamic that one
observes in every avant-garde formation in the
visual arts: brief, initial moments of group identity
and solidarity brought to an end by the
establishment of an individual reputation and the
pursuit of self-interest within the institutions of the
art market and state.2 Conversely, the Nietzschean
Dix’s ‘tragic art’ of ‘sweet cruelty’ – grotesque yet
exquisite images of sex, violence and the urban
margins – not only challenged and repulsed
bourgeois art collectors and some modernist art
dealers.3 Though they often claimed Dix as one of
their own from 1921 until 1926, critics for the
KPD’s Die Rote Fahne were increasingly
disappointed by the ambiguity in or development of
his
work.4 A not unsympathetic critic, writing for the
communist newspaper in Dresden in 1928,
characterized the painter not as a class-conscious
artist, despite being raised in a (relatively affluent)
working-class family, but rather merely as a
‘rebel’.5
Dix is thus not an artist who fits well into a
counter-art history that challenges the hegemonic,

690
more-or-less modernist canon by testifying to the
vitality – or mere survival – of a leftist artistic
culture in inhospitable circumstances. An
anti-bourgeois social critic and extraordinary
provocative painter to be sure, he cannot simply be
characterized as an artist on the left, despite his
reception by much of the German right since the
beginning of his public, professional life in 1919,
and despite his professional tribulations in and after
1933. Nonetheless, Dix’s work and career, which
were the products of political upheaval,
socioeconomic crisis and technological
modernization, certainly offer plentiful material for
a Marxist history of art. His characteristic tendency
to depict unpleasant subject matter with exquisite
technical refinement produces an aesthetic
ambivalence or dissonance – beauty is misshapen,
the horrible materialized richly – that might be
considered in terms of Adorno’s thinking about the
critical potential of art’s promise of happiness, even
if Dix’s painting certainly does not take the form of
modernist abstraction. Above all, however, Dix’s
professional ambitions, successful negotiation of the
institutions of modern artistic culture, and changing
social position beg for a ruthlessly critical account
written in the spirit of The German Ideology. As is
well known, Marx insisted there on the
demystification of the ideology of transcendent
artistic genius and of the fetishism of art by
‘deriving all the functional, aesthetic and
representative aspects of visual culture, including
art, from the historical conditions of its production
and reception’.6
The effects of historical conditions in Germany in
the 1920s are indeed vividly apparent in Dix’s work.
For instance, the young, increasingly well-known,

691
yet still precariously situated avant-garde painter’s
production of prints and works on paper rose
explosively during the years of accelerated inflation
and hyperinflation after the First World War. Much
as in earlier centuries, Dix made prints of many of
his major Dadaist paintings in order to maximize
the money he could make from them. He also
quickly and inexpensively churned out hundreds of
wilfully and exquisitely trashy, more often than not
frankly erotic ‘wares’ in watercolour and gouache
that were easy for his dealer, Karl Nierendorf, to
present – whether in his gallery or out of a suitcase
– to prospective buyers looking to find affordable
yet potentially profitable investments for their
rapidly depreciating currency.7 This mode of artistic
production came to a quick end, however, with the
end of the inflation and the establishment of a new,
reformed currency in early 1924, which by all
accounts exacerbated the already destabilized,
depressed market for contemporary art of late
1923. The War portfolio was one of the last efforts
along these lines, made not only to challenge
affirmative commemorations of the tenth
anniversary of the war’s beginning but also to
capitalize on the controversy prompted by the
public display of his monumental painting Trench in
Cologne and Berlin in 1923–4, which cemented
Dix’s celebrity as a scandalously critical rather than
merely obscene artist with a national profile. Upon
his appointment to the state art academy in
Dresden in late 1926, Dix shifted gears. The newly
established, salaried professor withdrew as far as
possible from the art market, immediately ending
the exclusive contractual relationship with
Nierendorf into which he had only reluctantly
entered shortly before. At the same time, he

692
focused increasingly on unusually large, time- and
labour-intensive, virtually unmarketable paintings
that reprised his defining avant-garde themes by
using formats, techniques and motifs derived from
the canonical Old Masters. In 1925, the painter
Heinrich Campendonk had written to Paul Klee that
artists such as themselves could survive
professionally only if they obtained a salaried
position.8 This may have been somewhat
exaggerated, but Dix’s programmatic works of the
years 1927 to 1933 are not only major statements of
critical visual thinking, but also the material traces
of an extraordinary degree of security, freedom and
privilege at a time when economic uncertainty,
technological modernization and social
transformation presented severe challenges for
artists working in traditional media.

693
1 Otto Dix, Portrait of the Lawyer
Hugo Simons, 1925, tempera and
oil on wood, 100.3 × 70.3 cm.
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts,
purchase, grant from the
Government of Canada under the
terms of the Cultural Property
Export and Import Act, gifts of the
Succession J. A. DeSève, Mr and
Mrs Charles and Andrea Bronfman,
Mr Nahum Gelber and Dr Sheila
Gelber, Mrs Phyllis Lambert, the
Volunteer Association and the

694
 Junior Associates of the Montreal
Museum of Fine Arts, Mrs Louise L.
Lamarre, Mr Pierre Théberge, the
Museum’s acquisition fund, and the
Horsley and Annie Townsend
Bequest. Photo: Montreal Museum
of Fine Arts, Brian Merrett.
Copyright © 2013 Artist Rights
Society (ARS), New York / VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Dix’s Portrait of the Lawyer Hugo Simons [1], which

the painter completed in 1925, is neither as
shockingly garish as the works on paper of the
hyperinflationary years nor as ambitiously
authoritative as the complex, self-conscious
triptychs of the last years of the Weimar Republic.
Although it was included in the important one-man
retrospective exhibition that Nierendorf staged in
his Berlin gallery in 1926, this picture was
reproduced only once at that time and is still not as
well known now as Dix’s most flamboyant, iconic
portraits of the mid-1920s, such as those of the
journalist Sylvia von Harden, of the art dealer
Alfred Flechtheim [11], or the dancer Anita Berber.
Nonetheless, Dix’s rendering of Simons, a lawyer
with whom the painter did business in Düsseldorf,
has a significant role to play in a study that
critically reexamines the painter’s work by taking
the things he made seriously not only
iconographically but also materially. It attests to the
need for scholars to register hitherto overlooked
patterns and procedures, details and marks in Dix’s
work – double-sided pictures, incised lines, carefully
positioned signatures and the like – and then to
show them to be indices of the causal,

695
determinative social forces, ideological discourses
and professional institutions that shaped the artist’s
thoughts, decisions and deeds. To look at Dix’s
pictures so closely and at such length is not to make
claims about the politics of intense, immersive
aesthetic reflection as a practice of resistance,
though there may be much death to see in them. My
approach is rooted instead in the original, core
concerns of the social history of art founded on
Marxist thought, namely the way in which art
objects materialize ideology, how they are produced
and function socially.

2 Otto Dix, Dr Simons in

Half-Figure, 1924, graphite on
tracing paper, 30 × 23 cm.
Kupferstichkabinett,

696
 Staatliche Kunstsammlungen
Dresden. Photo: Herbert
Boswank. Copyright © 2013
Artist Rights Society (ARS),
New York / VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn.

My argument begins with three drawings that Dix

made as he prepared to paint the portrait of
Simons. Two are bust-length portrait studies in
which the painter worked up to varying degrees of
finish his understanding of Simons’ facial features.9
The third is a small compositional sketch in pencil
on thin tracing paper, now in the collection of the
Kupferstichkabinett in Dresden [2]. This drawing
establishes the general disposition of the figure in
the painting and indicates the portrait’s most
distinctive features in a preliminary way, but
several significant differences are visible. For
instance, Dix exaggerated Simons’ features even
more than he subsequently did in the painting,
making the lawyer’s eyes seem particularly dark
and even crossed, accentuating the curve of his
forehead and the hook of his nose, emphasizing an
underbite, and drawing attention to the lawyer’s
facial musculature. Most notable, however, is the
lower part of Simons’ slight torso, which slopes on a
chair rather than sitting erectly. Where the figure’s
groin should be, the viewer sees a dark blotch of
graphite surrounded by traces of erasure. The dark
area is pierced by a hole. The smudge, erasure and
damage, taken together, constitute an act of
simultaneous demarcation and obliteration.
This feature is not mentioned in the sole scholarly
commentary on the drawing, presumably because it
was seen as nothing more than a meaningless index

697
either of the artist’s working process on the delicate
support or of some random event.10 Yet the
concentration of different kind of marks and the
real damage to the paper at this particular point in
the depiction of a man’s body does not seem
coincidental, or insignificant. It suggests instead
either that the painter had something in mind or
that he had some kind of trouble there, to the point
that he tore or wore through the paper. In either
case, the treatment of the paper, though apparently
unique in the corpus of Dix’s drawings, certainly
can be seen as part of a larger pattern in his work.
Several of his pictures of 1920 in particular went
beyond the incorporation of paper collage elements
characteristic of ironic or sociocritical Dadaist
narrative, suggesting a pronounced understanding
of the support as a potentially meaningful,
manipulable element in its own right rather than as
a merely neutral surface for the picture made upon
it. The Matchseller I, for instance, is a large picture
assembled out of numerous small pieces of fabric,
which is not unsurprising given that Dix was a
young, not-yet-established artist working at a time
of relative material scarcity. However, the visibility
of the seams of the cloth fragments, and the use of
especially rough materials within the contours of
the amputee’s body suggest that the painter
proposed an analogy between the nature of the
picture as object and the maimed body and
impoverished circumstances that the painter
depicted. The Altar for Cavaliers used doors to
reveal things that were generally hidden behind
decorous surfaces: the bodies of prostitutes in a
brothel, the ignoble thoughts of a gentleman, or the
abject corporeal reality of an aging yet fashionably
attired woman. Most appositely, in The Barricade

698
Dix is reported to have represented a bullet wound
in the body of the dead rebel at lower left quite
literally, by punching a hole through the canvas.11
Moreover, the association of Dix’s transgressive
work with violent impulses and actions was by no
means uncommon in the early 1920s.12
If it is thus plausible to conclude that the hole in
this drawing was not simply the result of an
accident or chance occurrence, but rather the
product of an intentional and meaningful gesture,
then it becomes necessary to ask what Dix meant to
communicate. The answer that seems most likely,
given the sitter’s identity, is that the painter sought
to point out Simons’ Jewishness. It may well be
overambitious to associate Dix’s pronounced
rendering of Simons’ facial features with the ideas
of late-nineteenth-century anthropologists who
claimed that the differences between Gentile
speech and Jewish speech – the latter was called
‘mauscheln’ – were caused by anatomical
differences in the nose and chin, as well as by
differences in the use of muscles for laughing and
speaking.13 However, there can be no doubt, if one
believes that the hole was made or left to make a
point, that the damage done to the lower part of the
drawing functions as a quite literal sign of the ritual
of male circumcision which, as Sander Gilman has
noted, was considered to be the most unequivocal
sign of Jewish difference and pathology in
much late-nineteenth-century medical discourse and
popular imagery, marking the male Jew even when
he was otherwise entirely assimilated and
indistinguishable from Gentile contemporaries.14

699
 3 Felix Meseck, Joseph and
Potiphar’s Wife, 1913, etching,
as reproduced in Eduard
Fuchs, Die Juden in der
Karikatur (Langen: Munich,
1921). Photo: Visual Resource
Center, Department of Art
History & Archaeology,
University of
Missouri-Columbia.

Given the visceral, and often intensely sexual nature

of Dix’s work, his preoccupation with masculinity,
and the ghoulish fascination with dismemberment
and disembowelment suggested by his harrowing
depictions of sex murder between 1920 and 1922, it
seems tenable to speculate that this aspect of

700
Jewish masculinity would have been of interest to
him. It certainly had been of great importance in
European discourse about Jews and Jewishness.
Along with the kosher slaughtering of animals,
circumcision had been a point of considerable
concern in Germany since the early nineteenth
century (as it remains to this day).15 Furthermore,
the circumcised penis, conceived as a damaged or
incomplete organ, had often been linked to
weakness and disease, and at the same time
contributed to the assertion of the femininity of
Jewish masculinity in both popular and intellectual,
scientific discourse. The clitoris was called the ‘Jew’
in vulgar Viennese slang, Gilman reports, and to
masturbate was ‘to play with the Jew’. Carl Jung
believed Jewish men were effeminate. Otto
Weininger equated the Jew and Woman. In a
footnote added to his essay on Leonardo in 1919, as
violence against Jews spread and intensified
throughout central Europe, Freud
asserted that one of the roots of aggressive
anti-Semitism was the unconscious equation of
circumcision with castration.16 It was perhaps this
equation, and its implication that Jewish men were
emasculated, that Dix may have meant to imply in
his drawing of Simons, just as it was suggested in
Felix Meseck’s etching of Joseph and Potiphar’s
wife of 1913, which was reproduced in 1921 in
Eduard Fuchs’s book on the Jews in caricature [3].
That image gives no indication that Joseph
possesses male genitals, while making him seem
slight and passive in comparison to the voluptuous
figure of the woman who aggressively tries to
seduce him despite his defensive hand gesture.

701
 4 Otto Dix, Dr Fritz Glaser and
Martha Dix playing music, c.
1922, graphite and ink. Otto
Dix Stiftung, Vaduz. Photo:
courtesy of Otto Dix Stiftung,
Vaduz. Copyright © 2013
Artist Rights Society (ARS),
New York / VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn.

In the painted portrait of Simons, however, Dix

reduced the hook of the sitter’s nose and the degree
of his underbite, and widened his upper torso to
bring his body and head into a less caricaturesque
proportion. If we assume that he had made the hole
in the drawing before he completed the painting,
then he also effaced the eye-catching obliteration of
the lawyer’s pubic area, though the shadow in the

702
opening of the lawyer’s jacket is quite dark as it
crosses the contour of his thigh. In a word, he
erased the most pronounced signs of Simons’
Jewishness, just as he did when painting another
Jewish man who had supported his work, the
Dresden lawyer and art collector Fritz Glaser. In a
private drawing of c. 1922, included in a letter, Dix
made Glaser’s ethnicity unmistakably clear not only
by caricaturing his features but also by inscribing a
tattoo-like Star of David on his temple [4]. But in a
painting of 1921, the
physiognomic and iconographic signs of his
Jewishness – the placement of Glaser’s figure is
usually thought to be a reference to the homeless,
wandering Jew – were integrated relatively subtly
into the portrait, masked by the picture’s
verisimilitude [5].17 A second portrait, completed in
1925 despite Glaser’s reported dislike of the first,
possibly referred to the process of Jewish
assimilation into German society, showing the
lawyer with his fair-haired and blue-eyed, Gentile
wife and their children [6]. Like the Star of David in
the drawing of Glaser, the hole in the drawing of
Simons seems to have remained nothing more than
a private, ribald ethnic joke, a typical, perhaps
symptomatic product of and contribution to Dix’s
usual process of self-definition as a potent German
artist and man by negation. Art for him was always
an expression of ego, vitality and sexual energy, and
he defined himself in the 1920s by contrasting his
own virility, impenetrability and mastery with the
inadequacy of other men: traumatized soldiers,
artists with congenital conditions, and perhaps
emasculated Jewish professionals. The act of
obliteration incorporated into this drawing thus
appears to have been part of the incessant,

703
vehement, even desperate performance of an
anxious subject, a man eager to assert himself
against occasional doubts about his work’s quality,
physical ailments and tortuous sexual impulses.18

5 Otto Dix, Portrait of the Lawyer

Dr Fritz Glaser, 1921, oil on canvas,
105.9 × 78.75 cm. Private
collection. Copyright © 2013 Artist
Rights Society (ARS), New York /
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

704
 6 Otto Dix, The Lawyer Dr Fritz
Glaser and his Family, 1925,
tempera and oil on fibreboard, 100
× 79 cm. Galerie Neue Meister,
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen
Dresden. Photo: Jürgen Karpinski,
Dresden. Copyright © 2013 Artist
Rights Society (ARS), New York /
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Even without the hole, Simons’ body remained the

most important sign in the final, painted state of the
portrait. The lawyer’s attire and haircut, the
wedding ring visible on his left hand, and the simple

705
wooden chair upon which he sits casually all reveal
something about the man’s class and character; he
is represented as a respectable middle-class
professional of some kind – no specific attributes
are visible – with no trace of ostentatiousness,
excess or decadence. However, all of these motifs
are
overshadowed by the elaborate yet ambiguous
gesture of his hands, which immediately attracts
the viewer’s attention and has been the focus of
most interpretive commentary. Several recent
writers have proposed that the gesture, in the
absence of other attributes, refers to the sitter’s
profession. It may do so with straightforward
naturalism, if Dix is deemed to have captured
Simons in the midst of his work, ‘emphasizing a
point of law’.19 The position of the hands may be
emblematic, resembling the Dharmachakra-mudra,
that is, the Buddhist symbol for an enlightened
person and teacher who ‘turns the wheel of the
law’. Dix apparently owned several books on
Buddhist art that had been published in the years
before he painted this picture.20

706
 7 Albrecht Dürer, Circumcision of
Christ, 1503–5, woodcut, 29.3 ×
20.9 cm, British Museum, London.
Photo: courtesy of the Trustees of
the British Museum.

However speculative, even surprising these

interpretative ideas are, they either fit the situation
well enough or can be supported with sufficient
circumstantial evidence to seem plausible. Yet it is
nonetheless unlikely that Dix’s picture was simply
descriptive
– his portraits never were – or that his primary
iconographic resource for the hands would have

707
been Far Eastern art. The most important materials
for his characteristic historicism were found much
closer to home. Dix painted this portrait as he was
responding to postwar cultural trends and economic
conditions by fashioning a new professional image
for himself as an artist deeply informed by the
values of the canonical German tradition in painting
and committed to its development in a
contemporary idiom. Hence, one suspects that
models for the hand gestures in the portrait of
Simons might be found there, and even a quick
survey of the work of Albrecht Dürer, the most
popular, revered Old Master of them all in Weimar
Germany, reveals at least three possibilities.
Several of Dürer’s early studies of hands show
elegantly curved index fingers touching the thumb,
and the same gesture appears near the centre of
the woodcut of the circumcision of Christ [7]. An
intricate arrangement of hands also occupies the
centre of Dürer’s remarkable and distinctive
depiction of the dispute between the
twelve-year-old Christ and the scholarly doctors in
the Temple [8].21

708
8 Albrecht Dürer, Jesus Among the Doctors, 1506,
oil on panel, 64.3 × 80.3 cm. Museo
Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain. Photo: Museo
Thyssen-Bornemisza / Scala / Art Resource, NY.

The position of the hands thus seems potentially to

have connoted several things, beyond Dix’s own
sense of his place in German art history. The
elegant gesture of the right hand must have
signified in terms not only of the sitter’s profession
but also of his class, communicating the noble
refinement of saintly women and wealthy men
holding fragile and precious objects. It was also
associated with the finely honed skills needed for
delicate, precise work, the kind performed in the
Jewish community by a mohel, for instance. At the
same time, the hands may have also signified
ethnically or racially. The virtual hole produced by

709
the circle of index finger and thumb over the
contour of an arm and in vertical alignment with the
groin, a detail that was not yet apparent in the
compositional sketch, could have referred to what
Dix had done to that drawing in order to indicate
the Jewishness of Simons’ body; the development of
the hand gesture in the final state of the portrait
could have led some viewers to recall Dürer’s
depiction of Christ’s circumcision. As speculative as
that is, there can be no doubt about the similarities
that exist between Dix’s portrait and Dürer’s
painting of the Disputation. The position of Simons’
fingers and the interplay of his hands evoke those
visible in the earlier painting by the German Old
Master, though they are not simply copies. Above
all, in both pictures Jewish men argue with their
hands.22

710
 9 Karl Arnold, ‘Berliner Bilder:
Grenadierstrasse’, in
Simplicissimus, 1921, here as
reproduced in Eduard Fuchs,
Die Juden in der Karikatur
(Langen: Munich, 1921).
Photo: Visual Resource
Center, Department of Art
History & Archaeology,
University of
Missouri-Columbia. Copyright
© 2013 Artist Rights Society
(ARS), New York / VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

10 Werner Hahmann, ‘Weihnachten bei Familie

“Schieber” oder Die geschenkte Kindereisenbahn’,
in Kladderadatsch, vol. 72, no. 50 (14 December
1919), here as reproduced in Eduard Fuchs, Die
Juden in der Karikatur (Langen: Munich, 1921).
Photo: Visual Resource Center, Department of Art
History & Archaeology, University of
Missouri-Columbia.

Dürer’s painting is an early example of a trope that

became widespread in discourse about Jews in
twentieth-century Germany (and elsewhere),
namely that they – no matter how thoroughly
assimilated in other respects – engaged in
pronounced gesticulation while talking or arguing.
References to this trait appear in a wide variety of

711
written sources, ranging from anecdotes about men
such as the modernist composer Gustav Mahler,
who sought to suppress such ostensibly telltale
signs, to dissertations in anthropology on Jewish
body language and pseudo-scientific treatises on
Jewish racial characteristics.23 Moreover, the
association of Jews with expressive hand
movements was also common in German artistic
discourse and visual culture during the Weimar
Republic. For instance, a number of commentators
during the early years of the Weimar Republic saw
in the dramatic gestures of the figures drawn and
painted by Ludwig Meidner and Jakob Steinhardt a
crucial component of a specifically Jewish kind of
expressionism. In 1919, one critic praised the
‘fervent gesture’ and ‘ecstatic movements’ in
Steinhardt’s depictions of Eastern Jews; and in
1924, a second, writing about contemporary Jewish
art in general, stated that ‘gesture is pure
expression’.24
Related ideas took less exalted form in the
illustrated satirical press in the early 1920s, as a
powerful wave of anti-Semitic agitation, pogroms,
assassinations and policy was sweeping across
Germany.25 In 1921, for example, the liberal
Simplicissimus published the depiction of a street in
the central Berlin neighbourhood where
unassimilated Jewish immigrants from Eastern
Europe had congregated particularly densely since
1914. The artist, the well-known illustrator and
caricaturist Karl Arnold, drew a lively scene filled
with Jewish men and women talking excitedly with
their hands [9]. Another drawing, published two
years earlier in the nationalist Kladderadatsch,
shows a Jewish black-marketeer – one of the
dubious occupations closely associated with the

712
popular image of the immoral, greedy, materialistic
Jew – with stereotypically soft facial features, a fur
collar and oval wire-rimmed glasses, and hands
[10].26 Those were the attributes that made the
figure potentially legible to a German reader, even
when the putatively fundamental truth of the
emasculated male Jewish body was hidden
discreetly from view.

Dix’s portrait of Simons is a ‘material embodiment

of a discursive structure’, namely that of the Jew in
German society. Though it shares certain elements
with anti-Semitic discourse and visual culture, this
should not be taken to mean that a revisionist
history of Dix’s career ought to construe strong,
direct links between the modernist painter and the
right-wing politics that were most closely aligned
with anti-Semitism in interwar Germany.27 Reality
was clearly far more complicated than that in this
case. At times of heightened anti-Semitic agitation,
violence and state policy, Dix painted pictures that
either unequivocally ridiculed the adherents of
virulent anti-Semitic ideology in the present or
reflected critically on the historical consequences of
the marginalization of the Jewish community: Altar
for Cavaliers (1920), Prager Strasse (1920) and
Jewish Cemetery in Randegg in the Winter (1935).28
He also took note of Nietzsche’s denunciation of the
racist, nationalist philistinism of Wilhelmine
society.29 Yet a number of letters written and
portraits rendered between the years 1921 and
1926 support the view that Dix’s thought was
nonetheless structured by ethnic and racial
stereotypes, as one might expect in a painter whose
work communicated by using the conventions of

713
physiognomy and caricature. He harshly described
the emancipated women and ‘soft’ Jewish ‘peenters
[Möler]’ whom he encountered at a ‘Sturm Ball’
hosted by Herwarth Walden in Berlin in 1923, then
dismissed them as a ‘horrible society. Decadent to
the bone.’30 In 1922 and 1924, he sought to fix the
identity of Jewish men such as Glaser and Simons in
the drawings reproduced earlier in this essay, and
was shocked in 1926 when a client in Erfurt, who
could pass as an ‘evangelical pastor’, turned out to
be a Zionist Jew. The man’s blonde hair, blue eyes
and lack of a ‘proper’ Jewish nose, the caricature of
which Dix drew into the letter, had reportedly been
the cause of awkward social encounters.31 Finally,
Dix painted his portrait of the influential Jewish art
dealer Alfred Flechtheim in 1926 [11], which
requires a few words.
On at least two occasions between 1923 and 1926,
Dix met or tried to meet with Flechtheim.32 At the
same time, he was often unsatisfied or angry with
Nierendorf, whose diaries and ledgers show him to
have been a dedicated but chaotic businessman.33
He would have known that his friend George Grosz,
alienated from communist politics, had been
represented by the francophile, modernist dealer
since 1923. It is possible that Dix painted the
picture in order to ingratiate himself with
Flechtheim by adding him to a contemporary
pantheon of German cultural celebrities; on one
occasion he noted to his wife that the picture was
turning out well, though he did not say by what
standards.34 On the other hand, Flechtheim had
been involved in a bitter polemic with the artists of
the Junges Rheinland in 1921, the avant-garde
circle with which Dix was involved during his years
in Düsseldorf.35 Moreover, between October 1922

714
and December 1924 Nierendorf repeatedly – and no
doubt self-interestedly alleged that his competitor
was openly, crudely dismissing the painter’s work in
Düsseldorf and Berlin, and so the common
interpretation of the portrait as a bitter retort
seems plausible.36 If the picture was meant as an
unsympathetic rendering of a prominent antagonist,
then its punchline is found not so much in Dix’s
depiction of Flechtheim’s facial features, which was
nothing unusual among portraits of the dealer made
in the 1920s, but rather more in his extended right
hand.37 This gesture, which has usually been
associated with the image of a grasping, greedy
‘Shylock’, might also tie Flechtheim to the
widespread associations of Jews with excessive
sexuality and crime. The motif – of the dealer’s
foppishly bejewelled fingers pressed to the chastely
classicizing female nudes evocative of some of
Picasso’s recent work – recalls Renoir’s portrait of
Ambroise Vollard holding the figurine of a woman;
but it is at the same time a gesture that comes
uncomfortably close to echoing the accusation,
frequently voiced on the extreme right, that urbane,
rich, degenerate Jewish predators threatened the
nation with their taste for and defilement of young,
pure, innocent Gentile (or Aryan) women.38
Furthermore, in so far as Flechtheim might screen
the drawings from the view of an interlocutor who
can be imagined to be facing him off to the left, the
position of the dealer’s right hand evokes the
common association of Jews with the illicit
production and distribution of pornography, as well
as with other parts of the sex industry.39 It is thus
perhaps not coincidental that Dix painted this
uncommissioned portrait the same year as the
campaign by conservative morality associations

715
against ‘trash and dirt’ (Schund und Schmutz),
which at least occasionally resorted to anti-Semitic
assertions and culminated in the passage of a
censorious law.40

11 Otto Dix, Portrait of the Art Dealer

Alfred Flechtheim, 1926, oil on canvas,
120 × 80 cm. INV. NG 46/61 Staatliche
Museen zu Berlin Preußischer

716
 Kulturbesitz, Neue Nationalgalerie,
Berlin. Photo: bpk, Berlin / Neue
Nationalgalerie / Joerg P. Anders / Art
Resource, NY. Copyright © 2013 Artist
Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

In any case, Dix’s relationship to Simons developed

into something clearly much more cordial and
remunerative. The earliest evidence of contact
between the two men dates from October 1924.41
Their ties were quite close by October 1926, when
the lawyer won a civil lawsuit on Dix’s behalf, which
the painter had brought against a dissatisfied client
who had refused to pay for a portrait of his
daughter on grounds of insufficient resemblance. In
one letter, Dix even referred approvingly to one of
the lawyer’s jokes about the defendant and his
daughter.42 In late 1926, Dix employed Simons once
again when he threatened legal action against
Jankel Adler, the painter’s former peer in the
Düsseldorf avant-garde, over a minor business
matter.43 For about one year, Simons also emerged
as one of Dix’s strongest patrons and promoters.
Aside from his own portrait and a family portrait
that was never painted, Simons was involved in the
commission of two portraits of close relatives in
1926.44 Furthermore, he sought to facilitate
contacts between his professional and social circles
and the painter. One letter, written by Dix in late
1925 as he was varnishing Simons’ portrait,
suggests that the portrait of the industrialist Dr
Julius Hesse (1926) was a result of this effort.45
Nonetheless, recent assertions that the portrait of
Simons expressed Dix’s warmth and respect for the
lawyer after the aforementioned lawsuit had been

717
won or was made in payment for services rendered
appear to be mistaken, as it was completed ten
months before the decision.46
On the basis of available evidence, the portrait of
Simons thus cannot simply be characterized as a
token of admiration and friendship. It must instead
be regarded, at least to a significant degree, as a
representative product of the material constraints
faced by its maker. The years between 1924 and
1929 are generally regarded as a period of relative
calm and affluence between the crises at the
Weimar Republic’s outset and end. However, the
currency reform of 1924 that ended the
hyperinflation of 1923 appears, according to
Nierendorf’s correspondence with Dix, to have done
nothing immediately to ameliorate the collapse of
the German market for contemporary art that had
begun in late 1923, especially when the art was as
challenging as Dix’s often was. Buyers, who had
been relatively plentiful as they sought good
investments for their money during the inflation,
grew scarce. Dealers responded with desperation or
resignation, and even Flechtheim hinted that he
might close up shop in Berlin.47 ‘Today’, Nierendorf
wrote in March 1924, ‘one can only do business
through personal connections.’48 Under such
circumstances, the solicitation of portrait
commissions and the cultivation of clients became
an increasingly important part of Dix’s professional
practice, as the focus on the genre – including the
portrait of Simons – of his mid-career retrospective
at Nierendorf’s gallery in Berlin in 1926 attests.49
In the drawing of Simons now in Dresden, Dix gave
typically aggressive visual form to his
preoccupations with sexuality, gender and ethnic or
racial identity. In the painting, however, he avoided

718
the most pronounced sign of the otherness of Jewish
masculinity in order to produce a visually striking
yet decorously restrained, even deferential portrait
of a potentially unusually valuable client, one who
was prepared to mobilize his social connections for
the artist. Having made a misstep with Fritz Glaser
a few years earlier, it seems likely that Dix would
have wanted to take no chances in the difficult
economic circumstances of 1925, and produced a
picture that would give the sitter no reason to be
unhappy. (That Simons decided to take the picture
into exile, and then resumed the correspondence
after 1945, indicates his success.) Seen this way,
the portrait of the lawyer Hugo Simons is an
appealing image that incorporates an erasure, an
act of repressive sublimation in the interest of
economic rationality.
1 Andrew Hemingway, ‘Marxism and Art History after the Fall of
Communism’, Art Journal, vol. 55, no. 2 (1996), p. 20.

2 Thomas Crow, ‘Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts’, in

Modern Art in the Common Culture (Yale University Press: New Haven
and London, 1996), pp. 3–37.

3 For this characterization of Dix’s Nietzschean art, see James A. van

Dyke, ‘Otto Dix’s Philosophical Metropolis’, in Olaf Peters (ed.), Otto
Dix, exh. cat., Neue Galerie, New York (Prestel: Munich, 2010), pp.
179–97, esp. p. 184. On the repulsiveness of Dix’s painting to certain
groups and individuals, such as the Munich art dealer Hans Goltz, see
Nierendorf to Dix, n.d., Nachlass Dix, I, C-524a; Nierendorf to Dix, n.d.
(c. 1924), Nachlass Dix, I, C-524f; Nierendorf to Dix, n.d. (c. September
1924), Nachlass Dix, I, C-524f; Nierendorf to Dix, 10 April 1925,
Nachlass Dix, I, C-524g; Nierendorf to Dix, 10 June 1925, Nachlass
Dix, I, C-524g, Deutsches Künstlerarchiv, Germanisches
Nationalmusum, Nürnberg (hereafter cited as NL Dix, DKA, GNM);
Andreas Strobl, Otto Dix: Eine Malerkarriere der zwanziger Jahre
(Reimer: Berlin, 1996), pp. 50–4. Flechtheim’s well-known aversion to
Dix’s painting is mentioned below.

4 Strobl, Otto Dix, op. cit., p. 137. On the critique of mass culture by Social
Democratic intellectuals and critics, see Geoff Eley, ‘Cultural Socialism,

719
 the Public Sphere, and the Mass Form: Popular Culture and the
Democratic Project, 1900 to 1934’, in David E. Barclay and Eric D.
Weitz (eds.), Between Reform and Revolution: German Socialism and
Communism from 1840 to 1990 (Berghan: New York, 1998), pp. 315,
333–4.

5 di., ‘Otto-Dix-Ausstellung’, Arbeiterstimme (Dresden), no. 230 (1 October

1928).

6 Otto Karl Werckmeister, ‘Radikale Kunstgeschichte 2006’, in Jens

Schröter, Gregor Schwering and Urs Stäheli (eds.), Media Marx: Ein
Handbuch (transcript: Bielefeld, 2006), p. 108 (my translation).

7 See Suse Pfäffle, Otto Dix: Werkverzeichnis der Aquarelle und

Gouachen (Hatje: Stuttgart, 1991). On the designation of Dix’s work as
‘wares’, see Nierendorf to Dix, 19 July 1923, NL Dix, I, C-524c, DKA,
GNM.

8 Heinrich Campendonk to Paul Klee, 27 November 1925, Stiftung

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

9 The earlier, smaller and sketchier of the two is in the collection of the
Kupferstichkabinett in Dresden; the later, larger and more polished
drawing, which closely corresponds to the painted portrait, is in a
private collection. The drawings are reproduced in Hans-Ulrich
Lehmann, Otto Dix: Die Zeichnungen im Dresdner
Kupferstich-Kabinett: Katalog des Bestandes (Kupferstich-Kabinett der
Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen: Dresden, 1991), pp. 104–5, and Olaf
Peters (ed.), Otto Dix, op. cit., p. 216.

10 Lehmann, Die Zeichnungen, op. cit., p. 106.

11 Der Streichholzhändler I, 1920, oil and collage on canvas, 144 × 166

cm, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Altar für Cavaliere, 1920, oil and montage
on wood, dimensions unknown, private collection, Berlin; Die Barrikade,
1920, oil and college on canvas, dimensions unknown, lost. On the
hole in Barricade, see Paul Fechter, ‘Die nachexpressionistische
Situation’, Das Kunstblatt 7, no. 11 (1923), p. 324.

12 See, for instance, Hugo Zehder, ‘Otto Dix’, Neue Blätter für Kunst und
Dichtung, no. 6 (1919) and Ilse Fischer, ‘Der Dadaist (Otto Dix)’, Das
Junge Rheinland, no. 9/10 (1922), both reprinted in Ulrike Lorenz (ed.),
Otto Dix: Welt & Sinnlichkeit, exh. cat., Kunstforum Ostdeutsche
Galerie Regensburg (Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie: Regensburg,
2005), pp. 45, 52–3.

720
13 Sander L. Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton University
Press: Princeton, 1993), p. 13.

14 Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, op. cit., p. 51.

15 Robin Judd, Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and

Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843–1933 (Cornell University Press:
Ithaca, 2007).

16 Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, op. cit., pp. 31–42, 49–83.

17 See Sabine Rewald, Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the
1920s, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art (Yale University Press:
New Haven and London, 2006), pp. 104–9, 162–4.

18 References to self-doubt, stomach ailments and insomnia are found in

Dix’s letters to his wife, Martha. See, for instance, Dix to Martha Dix, 3
July 1926, Otto-Dix-Archiv, Bevaix, Switzerland (hereafter cited as
ODA). In 1926, Max Scheler reported that Dix ‘suffered unspeakably’
from his sexual impulses. Quoted in Rainer Beck, Otto Dix: Die
kosmischen Bilder. Zwischen Sehnsucht und Schwangerem Weib
(Verlag der Kunst: Dresden, 2003), p. 182.

19 Anne Grace, ‘Portrait of the Lawyer Hugo Simons’, in Olaf Peters (ed.),
Otto Dix, op. cit., p. 217.

20 Darlene Cousins, ‘Otto Dix’s Portrait of the Lawyer Hugo Simons:

German Art for a Canadian Museum’, unpublished MA thesis
(Concordia University, 2002), pp. 26–7.

21 I would like to thank Alison Wright, of the Department of History of Art

at University College London, for drawing this painting to my attention.

22 It may even be the case that Simons is shown signing, using his fingers
to shape Hebrew letters phonetically related to his name: Shin, Samech
or Mem. This idea was suggested to me by a member of the audience
during the discussion of my presentation of this material at the invitation
of the Department of History of Art, University College London, in
September 2012.

23 See Hans F. K. Günther, Rassenkunde des jüdischen Volkes, zweite,

unveränderte Auflage (J. F. Lehmann Verlag: Munich, 1931), pp.
248–53; David Efron, Gesture and Environment: A Tentative Study of
Some of the Spatio-Temporal and ‘Linguistic’ Aspects of the Gestural
Behavior of Eastern Jews and Southern Italians in New York City,
Living under Similar as well as Different Environmental Conditions
(King’s Crown Press: New York, 1941); and Sander L. Gilman, ‘Straus,
the Pervert, and Avant-Garde Opera of the Fin de Siecle’, New German

721
 Critique, no. 43 (Winter 1988), pp. 35–68, esp. p. 66. For further
discussions in the primary and secondary literature, see H. B. Wells,
‘Notes on Yiddish’, American Speech, vol. 4, no. 1 (October 1928), pp.
58–66; Frank Thone, ‘Do You Talk with Your Hands?’ Science
News-Letter, vol. 30, no. 804 (5 September 1936), pp. 154–6; and
Leonid Livak, The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination: A
Case of Russian Literature (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2010),
p. 99.

24 MaryCelka K. Straughn, ‘Jewish Expressionism: The Making of Modern

Jewish Art in Berlin’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Chicago,
2007), pp. 268–70, 284.

25 Donald Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Louisiana State

University Press: Baton Rouge, 1980); Trude Maurer, Ostjuden in
Deutschland 1918–1933 (Hans Christians Verlag: Hamburg, 1986); and
Cornelia Hecht, Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer
Republik (Dietz: Bonn, 2003).

26 Steven E. Aschheim, ‘“The Jew Within”: The Myth of “Judaization” in

Germany’, in Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish
Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (New York
University Press: New York, 1996), pp. 45–68; and Bernd Widdig,
Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany (University of California
Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2001), pp. 9, 75, 86–7, 225.

27 For an overview of this material that registers the appearance of

anti-Semitic stereotypes in the work of Dix and Grosz, ties it to the
tendency of the left to amalgamate anti-capitalism with the figure of the
Jewish ‘plutocrat’ or ‘finance capitalist’, and then seeks to characterize
the painters as men whose work exemplifies the insidiousness of racial
stereotypes without ‘blaming them’ for the Holocaust, see Rose-Carol
Washton Long, ‘George Grosz, Otto Dix, and the Philistines: The
German-Jewish Question in the Weimar Republic’, in Natasha
Kuchanova (ed.), Experiment: Festschrift for Vivian Endicott Barnett
(Charles Schlacks, Jr., Publisher: Los Angeles, 2003), pp. 177–201.

28 Prager Straße, 1920, oil and collage on canvas, 101 × 81 cm,

Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Judenfriedhof in Randegg im Winter mit
Hohenstoffeln, 1935, mixed media on Masonite, 60 × 80 cm,
Saarland-Museum, Saarbrücken. The last of these paintings has been
the object of much commentary pertaining to Dix’s politics in the 1930s.
I have recently contributed to this literature in my essay ‘Otto Dix’s Folk
Culture’, in Otto Dix and the New Objectivity, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum
Stuttgart (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013), pp. 84–97. (This is the English
translation of ‘Otto Dix’

722
 Volkstümlichkeit’, in Das Auge der Welt: Otto Dix und die Neue
Sachlichkeit, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Stuttgart [Hatje Cantz: Ostfildern,
2012], pp. 84–97.)

29 Van Dyke, ‘Otto Dix’s Folk Culture’, op. cit., p. 88.

30 Dix to Martha Dix, n.d. (circa 1923), ODA. My translation.

31 Dix to Martha Dix, 10 July 1926, ODA.

32 On the possible attraction of Flechtheim to Dix, and on meetings

between the painter and dealer, see Nierendorf to Dix, n.d., NL Dix,
Bestand I, C-524a, DKA, GNM. See also Dix to Martha Dix, 2 October
1923 and 5 July 1926, ODA.

33 Evidence of Dix’s unhappiness with Nierendorf pervades the

correspondence in the NL Dix. Nierendorf’s ledgers are found in the
archive of the Galerie Nierendorf in Berlin, and transcriptions of the
diaries are located in the archive of the Berlinische Galerie.

34 Dix to Martha Dix, 4 July 1926, ODA.

35 Hans Albert Peters, Stephan von Wiese, Monika Flacke-Knoch and

Gerhard Leistner (eds.), Alfred Flechtheim: Sammler, Kunsthändler,
Verleger, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf (Kunstmuseum:
Dusseldorf, 1987), pp. 168–71.

36 Nierendorf to Dix, n.d. (in pencil dated December 1923), NL Dix, I,

C-524a; Nierendorf to Dix, 8 September 1922, NL Dix I, C-524b;
Nierendorf to Dix, 19 March 1924, NL Dix, I, C-524f; Nierendorf to Dix,
3 April 1924, NL Dix, I, C-524f; Nierendorf to Dix, 13 December 1924,
NL Dix, I, C-524f, DKA, GNM. See also Flechtheim’s letter to I. B.
Neumann of 23 May 1924, in which he describes Dix, with apparent
irony, as ‘the big guy, today’s [Franz von] Stuck [der große Mann, der
Stuck von heute]’, reprinted in Peters, Flechtheim, p. 174. For the most
recent such interpretation, see Rewald, Glitter and Doom, op. cit., pp.
116–20.

37 For reproductions of other portraits of Flechtheim, see Peters,

Flechtheim, op. cit., pp. 182–5, 228, 256–7, 264.

38 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1908, oil on

canvas, 82 × 65 cm, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London. On the
radical rightwing representation of the Jew as rapacious seducer of
German Gentile women, see Dennis E. Showalter, Little Man, What
Now? Der Stürmer in the Weimar Republic (Archon Books: Hamden,
1982), pp. 86–108.

723
39 Erich Wulffen, Der Sexualverbrecher, 6th edn (P. Langenscheidt:
Berlin, 1910), pp. 301–4; Edward J. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice:
The Jewish Fight against White Slavery, 1870–1939 (Schocken: New
York, 1982); Maurer, Ostjuden, op. cit., pp. 111–18.

40 Margaret F. Stieg, ‘The 1926 German Law to Protect Youth against

Trash and Dirt: Moral Protectionism in a Democracy’, Central European
History, vol. 23, no. 1 (1990), pp. 22–56; Klaus Petersen, ‘The Harmful
Publications (Young Persons) Act of 1926. Literary Censorship and the
Politics of Morality in the Weimar Republic’, German Studies Review,
vol. 15, no. 3 (October 1992), pp. 505–23; Luke Springman, ‘Poisoned
Hearts, Diseased Minds, and American Pimps: The Language of
Censorship in the Schund und Schmutz Debates’, German Quarterly,
vol. 68, no. 4 (1995), pp. 408–29.

41 After enquiring whether Dix was making a portrait of Simons and

suggesting how good it would be for one of the painter’s ‘real portraits’
to be displayed publicly in Berlin, Nierendorf mentioned the impending
opening of the exhibition of Dix’s watercolours at the Kronprinzenpalais
in Berlin on 1 November 1924. Nierendorf to Dix, n.d., Nachlass Dix,
Bestand IC 295, Deutsches Kunstarchiv, Germanisches
Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg. The initial acquaintance may have been
the result of a mutual connection to the Düsseldorf avant-garde. Anne
Grace states, without giving her source for her information, that Simons
was a patron of Johanna Ey’s gallery. Nathalie Bondil describes him in
general as a ‘knowledgeable connoisseur’ who collected Expressionist
art and admired artists associated with the New Objectivity. See
Nathalie Bondil, Otto Dix’s Portrait of the Lawyer Hugo Simons.
Düsseldorf 1925 – Montreal 1993: From Easel to Museum, a
Cautionary Tale, exh. cat., Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Museum of
Fine Arts: Montreal, 2010), accessed via <http://www.mbam.qc.ca/
ottodix/pdf/en/M_article.pdf>; Grace, ‘Portrait’, op. cit., p. 217.

42 See the correspondence between Dix and Simons, NL Dix, I, B-303,

DKA, GNM. See also Dix to Martha Dix, 4 July 1926, ODA.

43 See documents in NL Dix, I, B-304, DKA, GNM; and Dix to Hugo

Simons, n.d., copy in ODA.

44 Portrait of Anna Grünebaum-Wahl, 1926, tempera on wood, 77.5 ×

58.5 cm, McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Ontario; Portrait of Josef
May, 1926, oil, tempera and other media on board, 84 × 68.8 cm,
Cleveland Museum of Art.

45 See a letter from Dix to Simons (undated, c. December 1925), in which

the painter noted that he had written and posted a letter to Dr Hesse

724
 and hoped that a commission would result. Copy in ODA. For further
evidence of Simons’ activity, namely in securing the commission to
portray a ‘grain merchant on the Hindenburgwall [an important
commercial artery in Düsseldorf]’, see Dix to Martha Dix, 2 June 1926,
ODA. One wonders if this could be a reference to Flechtheim, whose
father had been an important grain merchant and who himself had
worked in the family business before becoming an art dealer. However,
his Düsseldorf gallery was located on the Königsallee (in the building of
the bank B. Simons & Co.), not the Hindenburgwall, and he had moved
his primary residence from Düsseldorf to Berlin in late 1923. See
Peters, Flechtheim, pp.162, 174.

46 Grace, ‘Portrait’, op. cit., p. 217. For similar conclusions, see also
Cousins, ‘Otto Dix’s Portrait’, op. cit., pp. 19–21; and Bondil, The
Portrait of the Lawyer Hugo Simons.

47 Nierendorf to Dix, 11 August 1923 and 3/5 September 1923, NL Dix, I,

C-524c; Nierendorf to Dix, 19 January 1924, NL Dix, I, C-524f;
Nierendorf to Dix, 30 March 1924, NL Dix, I, C-524f; Nierendorf to Dix,
n.d. (c. March 1924), I, C-524f; Nierendorf to Dix, 3 April 1924, NL Dix,
I, C-524f; Nierendorf to Dix, n.d. (after Easter 1924), NL Dix, I, C-524f;
Nierendorf to Dix, n.d. (c. late 1924–early 1925), NL Dix, I, C-524h,
DKA, GNM.

48 Nierendorf to Dix, 19 March 1924, NL Dix, I, C-524f, DKA, GNM.

49 Six of the ten oil paintings reproduced in the brochure of the Dix
retrospective staged by Nierendorf in 1926 were portraits, not including
a self-portrait and a portrait of the painter’s daughter, Nelly. Extant
photos of the installation suggest that an even higher percentage of the
paintings in the show were portraits. In any case, according to Löffler’s
catalogue raisonné, Dix painted between two and six portraits per year
between the years 1920 and 1924 (not counting self-portraits, portraits
of his family, or pictures of generic social types). In 1925, the number
rose to eight, and then to eleven in 1926. The number then fell to
between zero and four per year during Dix’s years at the state art
academy in Dresden from 1927 to 1933. See Fritz Löffler, Otto Dix,
1891–1969: Oeuvre der Gemälde (Verlag Aurel Bongers:
Recklinghausen, 1981).

725
THE NAZI PARTY’S STRATEGIC USE
OF THE BAUHAUS
MARXIST ART HISTORY AND THE POLITICAL
CONDITIONS OF ARTISTIC PRODUCTION
Paul B. Jaskot

I n the popular imagination, the Bauhaus and

National Socialism are still opposed terms, the
former representing individuality, artistic freedom
and modernist creativity, while the latter stands for
kitsch, cruelty and humanity at its worst. Such a
duality is indicated in the dramatic conclusion of a
New York Times article that accompanied the most
recent blockbuster exhibition on the Bauhaus at the
Museum of Modern Art (2009). In this article,
Nicholas Fox Weber indicated some of the many
ways in which Bauhaus artists participated in the
National Socialist agenda. In the last sentence, he
neatly summarized the duality between the school’s
scholarly and popular reception in relation to the
Nazi past: ‘The thought that anyone connected to
the Bauhaus could have helped promote Hitler’s
regime or design its camps is distinctly painful to
people who study and care about this extraordinary
school, which may have something to do with why,
more than 70 years later, it comes as news to many
of us.’1 Certainly, his implicit assumption is
dubious, that art is usually morally good and, in
contrast, the scholar is ‘pained’ when she discovers
any participation of artists in human degradation.

726
Even without Benjamin’s dictum that ‘There is no
document of culture which is not at the same time a
document of barbarism’, we have more than enough
examples in human history of art’s role as the
handmaiden to power and oppression to argue the
exact opposite of Weber’s moralizing. But still,
Weber did effectively point to the split in the
academic and popular reception of the famous
design school. On the one hand, the scholarly
community has been studying the relationship of
the Bauhaus to the Nazi past for some time; on the
other, the public (and by extension the market)
seems to be stubbornly unaware of and ‘surprised’
by these findings.
Indeed, while perhaps still an attention-grabbing
headline for the public of the Times, scholars have
for decades made the connection between the
Bauhaus and Nazi Germany a major point of study
and interest. Perhaps no other modernist subject in
twentieth-century art history has been so
consistently explored in terms of its relation to the
Nazi state, with the possible exception of those
artists pilloried at the so-called ‘Degenerate Art’
show that opened in Munich in 1937. Three now
canonical positions can be exemplified by the
important work of Barbara Miller Lane, Werner
Durth and Winfried Nerdinger. Nerdinger showed
in his 1993 essay on ‘Bauhaus Architecture in
the Third Reich’ that many Bauhaus architects were
actively involved in architecture during the Nazi
period, and even Gropius expressed an equivocal
attitude towards working with the state.2 Parallel to
this biographical focus, Durth studied the
architectural careers of key figures in Albert
Speer’s staff for rebuilding German cities during
the war. In his 1986 book, he pointed to some

727
notable patterns of experience among mid-century
architects. A sizable number were trained in the
Weimar years (including at the Bauhaus), embraced
Speer and Nazi practices through the war, and then
continued their trade with seemingly untarnished
reputations as suddenly ‘modernist’ architects in
the Cold War context of postwar German cities.3
And, crucially, Miller Lane was the first to show in
her 1968 text that, while we think of Nazi
architecture as all monumental, neoclassical and of
stone, actually a wide variety of styles were used by
specific leaders and institutions in the period
including the steel, glass and concrete
functionalism popularized at the Bauhaus.4 To my
mind, her work on the political function of German
architecture is still the gold standard and is
surprisingly undercited in the literature.
But whether we are talking about biographies of
key figures or the continuity between Weimar and
Nazi careers, scholars such as Durth and Nerdinger
share a position that has been naturalized in art
history: the history of the Bauhaus and National
Socialism is written from the perspective of the
architects and designers, not from that of the
right-wing politicians and bureaucrats. Even Miller
Lane’s dynamic account of the political function of
architecture tends to focus on individual figures
within the Party or useful formal and national
trends in the architecture of the period. That is to
say, we know how the Bauhaus was suppressed by
the Nazi state, how some of its members worked
under fascism, and how specific Nazi politicians
targeted its architecture and design or modernism
in general. What we do not know enough about,
though, is why the Nazi leadership took a political
interest in the school. How did the Party itself

728
actually see the Bauhaus politically? What was its
use, especially in the local struggles so necessary
for its rise to power? Why did they care about this
example in particular and, more importantly, when
did they care? The Bauhaus was not a constant
cipher for cultural debates within the Nazi state, in
spite of the popular idea that it was a consistent
focus of critique. Rather, it was a cluster of
particular artists, stylistic gestures and institutional
formations that could be referenced tactically and
sporadically as the occasion demanded. The Nazi
Party’s strategic use of the Bauhaus is more
complex than scholars have assumed, and analysing
this complexity helps us to gain a better
understanding of why the relationship between
architecture and politics became a central
component of Hitler’s Germany.
In particular, this essay insists on the historicity of a
political history of art. Such a project has been
modelled as well as theoretically discussed in
numerous venues by Andrew Hemingway. The
following argument attempts to take up two related
strands of Hemingway’s project. On the one hand, it
forwards the model of the
sober and hard-core insistence on a materialist
political history, grounded in institutions, that
rejects the abstraction of a murky projection of
political ideology onto art.5 And on the other, it
insists on a theoretically informed scholarship that
situates itself in relation to a Marxist tradition in
order to promote a collective social critique. Most
notably, my work here and elsewhere demands that
we as scholars take up the challenge of Marxist art
history in Germany that arose from a confrontation
with fascism beginning in the late 1960s. This
moment of German art history formed one of the

729
most active, productive and still critical strands of
our shared project. Hemingway, particularly in the
last decade, has frequently invoked this tradition
and individuals such as Jutta Held, Berthold Hinz
and Otto Karl Werckmeister, among others, as
scholars who have focused on the crucial Marxist
concepts of struggle.6 This historiographic
approach arose in the late 1960s in tandem with a
political challenge to postwar German institutions,
educational and otherwise. While building for some
years, an important public shot across the bow
occurred in 1970 when Martin Warnke organized a
session at the Cologne meeting of German art
historians, pointing out all too clearly how
establishment scholars masked their clear debt to
and use of sources from the Nazi period.7 Political
debate about the recent past weighed heavily and
hotly in postwar Germany, in art history as
elsewhere, and the question of fascism exploded in
new ways across disciplines with the political rise of
the left in the late 1960s.8 As a result, to this day,
the question of the Nazi past maintains for some
scholars a point of both art-historical interest but
also, and more importantly, institutional and
ideological critique that lays claim to the fact that
art history still has work to do, especially in
exposing its unrelenting role in affirming cultures of
domination.9 Hemingway’s insistence on a
historicist and scientific Marxism acknowledges and
deepens that agenda. This article is indebted to and
attempts to give further weight to that project.
In the following pages, I will focus on one key and
fateful moment in which the relationship of the Nazi
Party (NSDAP) to the Bauhaus shifted, the crucial
electoral year of 1930. Between the state elections
in Thuringia in December 1929 and the national

730
Reichstag elections in September 1930, the NSDAP
became a much more prominent part of Weimar
politics, after several years in which they attempted
strenuously to attract electoral coalitions to support
their candidates and their ideology. The rough and
tumble of electoral politics have too often been
flattened out in art history, so here the subtle
dynamics of even monthly shifts in events and
tactics form an important component of the
argument. Perhaps such dynamics were of little
interest to Mies van der Rohe, who led the Bauhaus
after 1930, but they were central to the Nazi
strategy to gain power. In this sense, analysing the
Bauhaus from the perspective of electoral struggles
highlights surprising ways in which the institution
became of use (or not) to the most extreme
right-wing parties. This will require some attention
to the particularities of Nazi politics and Hitler’s
priorities, not often
a topic of much study in art history. But taking us
into the weeds of some of the most brutal moments
of this rise to power will give us a more sober
assessment of the political function of art. In this
sense, I am arguing for a kind of historicity at the
centre of the most critical strands of Marxist
art-historical analysis.10

The Bauhaus and the Nazi Party came to the fateful

year of 1930 from two very different political
trajectories. As is well known and best documented
by Miller Lane, the Bauhaus as a state-sponsored
institution was often subject to the vicissitudes of
local or national political battles between the
ever-competing factions of Weimar democracy.
Already by the public 1923 Bauhaus exhibition in

731
the city of Weimar, the school was having problems
maintaining an apolitical identity, as the local Social
Democratic Party (SPD) proclaimed its products and
innovative pedagogy as an accomplishment of
socialist cultural policy in the Thuringian state.
Given the occasional grudging praise of aspects of
the school by the local Communist Party (KPD), as
well as its anti-traditional academic focus, these
associations soon meant that the Bauhaus was an
easy right-wing target as a leftist institution of ill
repute. This position became evident in the state
elections of February 1924, which ushered in a
conservative coalition led by the German People’s
Party (DVP). Considerable pressure was then put on
the new government to close the school. By
December, Gropius began dialogues with officials in
the city of Dessau within the small state to the
north, Anhalt, and in April 1925 he moved the
school to its new home, name intact. The school’s
political support remained relatively stable from
this time on, through Gropius’s resignation in 1928
and Hannes Meyer’s initial year as the new
director. In spite of the latter’s clear interest in a
more leftist and proactive agenda for the school –
exemplified in the commission to build the
Bundesschule des Allgemeinen Deutschen
Gewerkschaftsbundes (Federal School of the
German Trade Union Federation) – Meyer’s
ideological convictions and general political
conflicts were avoided until the pressures of the
Great Depression and his communist sympathies
became a more overt presence in 1930. Notably,
even after his resignation, Meyer, in a public letter
to Mayor Fritz Hesse of 16 August 1930, denied like
Gropius before him any politicization of the
Bauhaus, especially communist, during his

732
leadership.11 Of note, here, is the absence of any
interest by the Bauhaus leadership in the Nazi
Party, or fear of the propaganda against the school
coming from that source.
But why should they have been concerned? The
NSDAP had made relatively few inroads into the
state of Anhalt by this time, and after all,
educational institutions were state concerns. Even
during the Bauhaus’s pre-1925 years in Weimar,
where there were many völkisch and some
Nazi-affiliated politicians, the Party was not as yet
seriously focused on institutional politics. Instead,
its followers were committed to violent
overthrow of the government, such as had been
attempted by Hitler on 9 November 1923 in the
Beer-Hall Putsch in Munich (Bavaria). In these early
years, the Party agitated against the very notion of
a Weimar Republic democracy, so members had
little need for elections other than as moments to
undermine the system. For most of 1924, Hitler was
in prison writing Mein Kampf, and in the December
national elections the Nazi Party garnered a mere
three per cent of the vote. Hence, while in his book
Hitler could generally discuss his belief that
powerful political regimes produce good
architecture (as in the Rome of the Emperors) and
rail against Jewish department store buildings in
Berlin, the particularities of the Bauhaus or most
cultural matters were of no concern. Notably, in the
thousands of pages from the Nazi agitator Joseph
Goebbels’s diary covering the entire Weimar years,
the Bauhaus does not show up, perhaps surprisingly
given his acute attention to culture. Particularly in
the mid-1920s, Nazi leaders had other priorities.12

733
This situation would dramatically change beginning
with the refounding of the Party on 27 February
1925 after Hitler’s release from prison. He began at
this point to push the Party to engage more
tactically in electoral politics, albeit initially with
little success (as late as the May 1928 Reichstag
elections, the Party achieved only 2.6 per cent of
the vote). Following this change in its approach to
the national elections came the Party’s first interest
in developing cultural goals, including a gradual but
growing interest in criticizing the Bauhaus,
particularly after the 1929 electoral victories in
Thuringia and the installation in January 1930 of a
Party member, Wilhelm Frick, as that state’s
minister of the interior and education.13 We can
chart these changing positions in the major voice of
the Nazi Party, its official newspaper the Völkischer
Beobachter (People’s observer [VB]), a source that
has been of surprisingly little interest to art
historians.
Under the editorship of Alfred Rosenberg, Party
demagogue and close associate of Hitler, the VB in
general adapted its profile to the developing tactics
and demographic variability of the Party. So,
certainly, its early focus on virulent racist attacks
against German Jews and communists continued;
however, added to this after 1927 were sections on
contemporary literature, sports, women’s issues
and even a monthly horoscope. Cultural policy was
part of this general trend to create a broader base
for the Party beyond the hard-core believers. While
earlier scholars often characterized the Party as a
lower-middle-class entity, more recent research has
confirmed that it was more accurately a
Volkspartei, that is, a people’s party that strove for
a broad constituency of supporters across class,

734
geographic, age and gender lines.14 The Party’s
cultural agenda was thus calculated to deepen its
influence with one component of this more
expansive electoral strategy, the urban middle- and
upper-middle-class constituencies. The panache of
literary discussions, music reviews and art criticism
legitimated the Party and balanced its more virulent
racist and anti-communist agenda.15

1 Völkischer Beobachter (Munich

supplement), 22/3 September 1929.
Photo: courtesy of the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum.

735
All of these manoeuvres were part of a broader field
of electoral politics in the Weimar Republic, for the
NSDAP was not the only party that took engaging
with culture seriously as a means of increasing its
appeal. At the same time that Hitler was calling for
an expansion of Nazi Party efforts in cultural
politics in order to extend his influence beyond the
base of Party membership, the KPD was retreating
from exactly this tactic. Its leadership favoured
instead the establishment of left-wing artistic
organizations independent of other Weimar-era
constituencies. Previously, and since 1924 in
particular, the KPD had attempted to place
communists in Weimar cultural institutions as a way
of consolidating its influence. Reviews in the KPD
daily Die Rote Fahne (The red flag) and Party
politics had affirmed an alignment with art, such as
the promotion of George Grosz’s cause in his state
trials and the establishment of an artist society
within the Party in 1924, the Red Group. At this
moment when the KPD was expanding its influence
in German society, it embraced a cultural policy
meant to appeal both to Party members and
workers as well as the general artistic public. With
Stalin’s ascension to the leadership of the
International, however, attitudes began to change
in the late 1920s. In particular, in 1928, the year
Hitler overtly called for a cultural policy of the Nazi
Party, the KPD followed Moscow’s command and
reversed its interest in using cultural agents to link
to existing German institutions to form a broader
coalition, corresponding to the defensive but
militant mode of Stalin’s Moscow bureaucracy. For
the German KPD and its cultural reporting in the
pages of the Die Rote Fahne, this meant a
withdrawal from a more proactive interest in using

736
art as part of a coalition politics in favour of an
assertion of a clearer hard-line communist position
that could be critical of such seemingly cross-over
artists as Grosz. This sharpening of position would
have some success with drawing supporters,
especially as the economic crash set in and the
stark choices drove more voters to the KPD. At the
same time, though, the NSDAP would take up the
slack in the electoral dynamics by attempting to
represent itself as a Party of broad interest to the
German public.16
Important to emphasize here is the fact that the
Nazi Party did not have a coherent cultural
ideology, but it did have a consistent agenda that
addressed culture within the tactical context of
electoral politics. So, for example, in the summer of
1928, the VB could run a scathing set of reviews of
El Lissitzky’s installation at the Pressa exhibition in
Cologne that emphasized the internationalist
agenda of the show as well as the prominence of the
Soviet exhibition, mocking its particularly
innovative design. This, however, could be followed
by surprisingly positive reviews of functionalist
housing in Ernst May’s Frankfurt, the importance to
Germany of industrial materials in architecture, or
even mass-production techniques promoted by the
Bauhaus [1]. As Miller Lane has argued, when the
Party reached out for national legitimacy, the
Bauhaus could be occasionally incorporated as part
of the agenda, while only Jewish artists like Max
Liebermann or those associated with the
Communist Party, like Grosz, came in for
consistently negative critical assessments.17
A dramatic shift occurred in the Party press and
cultural policy with the success of the Nazi Party in

737
the December 1929 state elections in Thuringia.
Thuringia was not a random place for an important
NSDAP victory. Unlike Anhalt, the state had long
been a stronghold of völkisch groups, and, while
there were important pockets of industrialization, it
remained an area mostly of small towns where such
groups prospered. Hitler thought it important
enough to make his first visit in March 1925, and
the city of Weimar was the only location other than
Nuremberg (Bavaria) to host one of the
all-important annual Party rallies (in July 1926).
Through the 1920s, Hitler consolidated both the
organization of the NSDAP in Thuringia as well as
his own leadership role over the other völkisch
groups. The results of these efforts were at first
minimal;
for example, in the January 1927 Landtag elections,
the Nazi Party achieved only 3.4 per cent of the
vote. At this point, Hitler was still manoeuvring to
gain leadership of the right. With the economic
crisis and the rise in unemployment in 1929,
however, the time came for a stronger role for the
Party. In the new elections for 29 December, the
Nazi Party received 11.3 per cent of the vote, the
first time over 10 per cent anywhere, which allowed
them 6 out of 53 seats. This was just enough to
make them a swing Party that could ask
concessions from the conservative-right coalition.18
With six seats in the state parliament, they were
able to name one cabinet minister in the
conservative coalition government. Hitler did not
select one of the more high-profile positions such as
minister of economics but instead chose the
minister of the interior and education. He
demanded this position for a non-Thuringian, his
loyal Bavarian follower, Wilhelm Frick, who was

738
named to the post on 23 January. Crucial for
explaining this choice was the fact that the
ministries of the interior and education had the
least interaction with and interference from federal
agencies and also controlled the state police.
Hence, more could be accomplished to highlight the
Nazi agenda, and the compromises necessary with
federal agendas in the other ministries could be
avoided. Frick set about immediately consolidating
control over educational and policing institutions,
including the Weimar Academy of Art. Here he put
in as head the noted racist architect, Paul
Schultze-Naumburg, who had long argued against
the new architecture in Frankfurt, Berlin and, of
course, Dessau. The critique of the Bauhaus could
be easily linked with the Nazi success story of
Schultze-Naumburg, who was also by that time a
major player in the Party’s cultural wing, the
Fighting League of German Culture (Kampfbund für
Deutsche Kultur). With the success in Thuringia,
cultural policy could take an important position on
the central stage of the Party platform, legitimating
its aspirational interests, broadening its base and
consolidating its attacks on its perceived enemies.19
What is most revealing, however, is how attacks on
the Bauhaus were focused less on the stylistic or
pedagogic goals of the organization and
increasingly on its leadership. Of even more interest
in the regular articles on the topic that showed up
in the Party press in 1930 was the constant
drumbeat against Gropius. The current director
Mies van der Rohe and the left-wing former director
Hannes Meyer were rarely mentioned, all the more
surprising for the latter, who in the fall of 1930 had
moved to the Soviet Union with several Bauhaus
students, providing a seemingly obvious target.

739
Instead, Gropius became the main symbol of the
institution, its drift into internationalism, and its
connection to a vast communist and Jewish
conspiracy. For example, the most sustained
analysis of modernist architecture including the
Bauhaus came with three articles in the VB from
October and November 1930, authored by
Alexander von Senger, a Swiss architect who joined
the Rosenberg and Schultze-Naumburg circle.20 In
the first article on ‘Der Bolschewismus im
Bauwesen’ (‘Bolshevism in the building
industry’), Senger argued from the opening lines
that architecture was not merely a luxury or an
expression of the spirit, but also a means of
instantiating political power. For Senger,
Bolshevism was well aware of this and used the
seemingly harmless sobriquet of ‘Neues Bauen’ to
pursue its agenda by collapsing art and
propaganda, all the more reason for the Nazi Party
to defend the ‘political and biological significance of
art’ to the people.21 Gropius was the first architect
identified in the argument, initially named for
working with the ‘communist propaganda journal’
L’Esprit Nouveau. Senger warned of the communist
plot to destroy or ban all-important works of the
past, from Michelangelo to Kant, and ‘already
villages and cities have been torn down to be rebuilt
with the formula of the Bauhaus in Dessau’.22 In the
midst of further racist interpretations of the fall of
culture under a communist agenda, Gropius was
variously figured and connected to the Bauhaus,
‘Weimar-Dessau’. Well into the article, Senger also
briefly mentioned Meyer’s ouster from the school,
only to be replaced by Mies; he reminded readers
that the latter created the Berlin monument to
Liebknecht and Luxemburg. Having covered these

740
figures in two short paragraphs, he turned back to
Gropius and discussed the Sarraz declaration of the
International Congress of Modern Architecture
(CIAM) signed in 1928. The point of the article,
naturally, was not the stylistic or philosophical
commitments of the artists, but their international
connections, their favourable reception to the
radical politics of the Soviet Union, and their
implicit agenda of destroying a racially strong
German art and people. He ended the article
warning that the Bauhaus itself had this agenda at
the core of its interests.
The second and third article were, on the whole,
less specific in naming names except for the
appearance of Le Corbusier. Part two in the series
focused on Neues Bauen’s ostensible intensive
propaganda efforts in the last six years to influence
public opinion through the press and other venues.
Here, Le Corbusier and Senger’s fellow Swiss were
the primary enemies, and he cited various
quotations from Le Corbusier from the Neue
Zürcher Zeitung. He argued that the new building
attempted to rid architecture of spirit in order to
promote the industrialization of human society.
Against this, Senger asserted that real architecture
will survive as ‘Architecture is building brought to
life.’23 The Bauhaus once again threatened this
supposedly natural order by turning the building
from a spiritual expression of humanity to a profit
centre of capital, as its building methods of mass
production were literally dehumanizing. People and
construction would be poorer, but the Neues Bauen
architects would be richer with all the
state-sponsored work. In the concluding article of
the series, the ‘communist’ Le Corbusier again
played the lead role, for he served the role of

741
mammon, the collection of profit that was the
ultimate goal of Bolshevism. To further emphasize
the international agenda, Senger briefly brought in
building in the Soviet Union, especially by
architects associated with the ABC group, including
Hans Schmidt and Ernst May. For him, this was
additional evidence of the link between capitalist
patrons (for
instance, in Frankfurt) and communist plots in the
Soviet Union. The series ended with a reassertion of
the human and cultural bankruptcy of the nefarious
link between Marxism and Neues Bauen, in
general.24
It is clear that, on the whole, Senger’s main
professional and aesthetic targets were fellow Swiss
architects, especially Le Corbusier. But why so
much prominence to Gropius particularly in leading
the series off?25 Certainly he was well known and
well connected, but so were other members of the
Bauhaus such as Hannes Meyer who was after all a
founding member of CIAM, unlike Gropius. Given
the scandal of 1930 around Meyer, it is surprising
that he was thrown off with so little emphasis, here
or in other articles in the VB. However, seen from
the context of the strategic interests of the Nazi
Party at this moment and in this geography, the
focus on Gropius and not on the aesthetic
innovations of the Bauhaus or the politics of Meyer
made perfect sense. After all, the school continued
to survive but in the state of Anhalt, not in the state
of Thuringia. Mayor Hesse in Dessau led a broad
centre-left coalition, including members of the
German Democratic Party (DDP). The DDP, like the
SPD and the Centre Party, was one of the three
parties of the Weimar Republic most strongly
committed to defending democracy.26 Thuringia, on

742
the other hand, was the main symbol of success for
the Party, and its history and politics needed to be
highlighted in the Party newspaper. In this moment,
the local political need was to create controversy
and scandal around institutions known by these
voters, to secure and expand their electoral
support. In addition, while Frick and the Party could
build local constituencies, at the same time they
could use this very local process to attract national
attention, especially through the inflamed but broad
propaganda of the Party newspaper. While the
Dessau school could be mentioned, its earlier
incarnation in Weimar as well as the 1923 political
struggle that drove it out of that state and
ultimately secured Hitler’s leadership of the
völkisch right were a much more important political
touchstone, more convenient for building the base
in Thuringia while legitimizing the Party’s national
cultural agenda. Tactical references to Gropius and
the ‘Weimar-Dessau’ Bauhaus (glued as he was by
Nazi authors to a communist agenda that he never
espoused) would serve this purpose much better
than a discussion of flat roofs or even the current
director, Mies van der Rohe.
My example here of the dynamic between the local
consolidation of the Nazi Party and its national
aspirations draws attention to how its variable use
of the Bauhaus can help us explain aspects of the
Party’s political character. In this sense, the VB
articles on modernist architecture do not come
together as a coherent late-Weimar cultural policy,
as Miller Lane rightly observed; but they do
coalesce as a coherent strategy for targeting
specific electoral geographies in need of shoring up
as well as reflecting the constant tactical changes of
a Party seeking national influence. That is to say,

743
these articles tell us less about how the Bauhaus
was subject to Nazi slander, a pattern that
we already knew. But they do show how focusing on
the Bauhaus unmasks something about the political
dynamics of the Party. The art-historical question is
directed outwards to the political struggle of which
culture was a part.
Such a strategic need for the Bauhaus evaporated
as Hitler’s electoral successes mounted and there
were other targets and interests. In October 1931,
the NSDAP received 39 per cent of the popular vote
in state elections in Anhalt, and it strengthened its
hold with the April 1932 election, after which it
formed a conservative-right coalition led by the first
Nazi minister president, Alfred Freyberg. By 1932,
the Dessau city council was made up of a fractious
mix of forty members including representatives
from the DDP, NSDAP, SPD, KPD, and five others
from small right-wing groups. Hesse was still the
mayor, but his hold was slim in the face of the
fifteen seats of the NSDAP along with the five other
right-wing party members. By August 1932, the
NSDAP had succeeded in passing a resolution to
close the school the following October with a vote of
twenty to five (the SPD abstained, while the mayor
and four other councilmen voted against). For the
Nazi Party, the point here seemed again to be
strengthening its local authority, not coordinating
with a national ideological campaign against
modernism.27
The subsequent history is well known. Mies moved
the school to Berlin, where it survived for less than
a year. The fact that the Nazi leadership saw the
school in strategic terms also explains the almost
complete disappearance of the Bauhaus from Nazi

744
propaganda and state policy after Hitler was named
chancellor in January 1933. The National Socialist
agenda shifted immediately from electoral politics
to consolidating total power in the state. Notably,
when the school finally closed in July 1933, the
Gestapo letter that sealed its fate emphasized the
dismissal of unreliable faculty like Kandinsky and
Hilbersheimer. By then, Mies and the faculty had
already voted to close.28 This moment, though,
reveals again the perspective of the Nazi leadership
as it changed over time. In 1933, they focused on
getting rid of the political parties or dissident
unions that had plagued them in the Weimar
Republic; but at the state level of institutions like
the Bauhaus, there was not a significant need to
dissolve the institution, only to purge unreliable
members. Such a move was consolidated in the
April 1933 Law to Restore the Civil Service, which
allowed for the removal of any state official deemed
suspect, a tool the Party could use also to replace
them with its own members. For the Party, this law
proved helpful to deprive Bauhaus professors and
former professors of key positions or commissions.
Hence, for example, Paul Klee was ousted from his
professorship at the Düsseldorf Academy and
replaced with Party member Franz Radziwill.29 The
infamous 1937 ‘Degenerate Art’ show further
exemplified this emphasis on individuals designated
as ideological enemies. Of the hundreds of works on
display, Schlemmer, Klee and Kandinsky among
others connected with the Bauhaus were
particularly well represented. Nevertheless, in all
the wall texts and in the exhibition catalogue, the
Bauhaus is mentioned only once, on a single label
for a Kandinsky work that associated him with

745
the ‘communist Bauhaus in Dessau’.30 Post-1933
political attitudes towards the Bauhaus focused on
individuals and their ostensible status as ‘Jew’ or
‘communist’, not on the institution as a whole. With
the war years and with a few exceptions of the most
prominent representatives of the school, one’s prior
connection to the institution proved to be a
relatively irrelevant feature of an artist or
architect’s biography in the face of the fanatic
demands of the military and genocidal agenda.31
Too often, the literature on the Bauhaus
characterizes the historical relationship between
the school and National Socialism in parallel and
symmetric terms. That is to say, one reads regularly
of ‘the Bauhaus’ and ‘National Socialist Germany’
as though the two were equivalents. But culture
was always a strategic chip in the Nazi game that,
while absolutely central and of great importance,
never set the rules of the Party’s leadership to the
same degree that the political agenda did. Certainly
at crucial times and in specific ways, the role of
culture should never be underestimated in its
importance to the racist and oppressive goals of the
state. But, we need to see the cultural role of the
Bauhaus as a variable factor whose strategic use
could be of immense value at the particular moment
when the Party focused on its drive to power,
especially in Thuringia. In this sense, the Bauhaus
was of much less concern in general to the Nazi
elite at other moments of their domination than it
perhaps retrospectively appears.
For Hitler, the Bauhaus was one part of the general
cultural problem, and he was not interested so
much in the specific enemy as he was in the larger
ideological divisions that he kept firmly in his

746
sights. This became murderously clear to any Jew,
communist, gay man, Jehovah Witness, and the
many other categories of large groups of people
that the state rendered ‘enemies’ following Hitler’s
world view. When push came to brutal shove and
with the war as a driving force, he approved of his
underlings developing the legal, institutional and
practical means to put these general goals into
action. By 1939, the particularities of the Bauhaus
(long dissolved) or its artists (either in exile,
consolidated or imprisoned) need not bother him or
other Party leaders. Many of the ideas that these
artists worked on could be easily used to further the
war effort and genocidal project. Giving up on our
heroic and, indeed, Romantic notion that the
Bauhaus and its artists were a cultural bulwark of
equal authority or of equal interest to the powerful
within the Nazi Party perhaps diminishes their role
in one of the great ideological battles of the
twentieth century. But it most certainly makes their
political function and instrumentalization much
clearer.

I have argued that, while the outlines of the

national relationship of the Bauhaus to the Nazi
Party have long been known, the specific character
of that relationship at the local level reveals a
central dynamic of the Party during its electoral
struggles previously
outside of the cultural historical literature. In spite
of this argument that goes back to fundamental
German Marxist critiques of fascism from the late
1960s, the Bauhaus as a victim of the Nazi Party
has had a tenacious hold on the popular and
museological imagination. Let us revisit the Weber

747
article in the Times with which I started and the
Museum of Modern Art exhibition that it
highlighted [2]. A version of my article was first
given as a talk at a symposium to go along with
MoMA’s show. I was asked to speak on a topic
related to the Bauhaus and the Nazi Party.
Apparently, though, the talk I gave was not the talk
that was wanted. At the beginning of the
question-and-answer period that came after our
morning session, another scholar was asked to give
an impromptu
ten-minute lecture on the 1932–3 history of the
Bauhaus, emphasizing for example the persecution
the school faced at the hands of the growing faction
of Nazi Party members in the Dessau city council.
Now one could imagine that, for a general audience,
the curators Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman
could very well have wanted the more traditional
part of the narrative also to be told, however
unusual and singular it was to have another
impromptu lecture added to a conference. As my
article makes clear, I, too, find the historical
circumstances of Nazi oppressive tactics, cultural
and otherwise, important. But recentring the
narrative only around the suffering and ultimate
cultural triumph of the Bauhaus is the
mythologizing work of ideology, and does no service
to the historicity of a materialist analysis.
Complicating the relationship of the Bauhaus to the
Nazi Party means critiquing its continued isolation
from the complex political history of which it was a
part. It means showing in major exhibitions and
their catalogues not only the work of Klee and
Moholy-Nagy, but also of Fritz Ertl, the well-known
Bauhaus graduate and architect of the plan of
Auschwitz-Birkenau [3]. MoMA continues to insist

748
only on the history of the former, not the latter, a
position that of course follows its ‘civilizing’ role in
affirming the values assigned to art but also the
market, the political economy and thus the systems
of domination in which we currently operate.32

2 Exhibition catalogue cover,

Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for
Modernity (Museum of Modern Art:
New York, 2009). Photo: copyright
© 2013 Museum of Modern Art,
licensed by SCALA/Art Resource,
New York.

749
3 Fritz Ertl, Plan of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
Concentration Camp (aerial reconnaissance view),
21 December 1944. Photo: courtesy of US National
Archives (RG 263: Auschwitz, fldr. 19, CIA Ann.
Negs., #15).

The art history of our time continues the

centuries-old cultural work of commenting on the
present without threatening to change it. As
Hemingway and others have pointed out, this can
include the Marxist ‘perspective’, which has been
reduced at times to another -ism within a
department, a museum or a discipline.33 MoMA can
invite a Marxist art historian who emphasizes in his
talk questions of minimal institutional interest
without worrying that a revolution will break out
any time soon. But then, if cultural institutions can
be so expansive and, indeed, so seemingly inured to
materialist analyses that question grand artistic
values, why is there a continued need to reassert

750
the heroic narrative of the Bauhaus?34 One of
Marx’s great contributions was to show that the
goal of changing the world was also still predicated
on a rigorously materialist understanding of that
world. The millions of small and seemingly harmless
ideological assertions that surround us in our
cultural institutions and in art history create a
veneer of normalcy in constant need of critique to
reveal that supposedly ‘invisible hands’ represent
actually real institutional, classed and political
economic interests. The hammer of historicity puts
the critique of political economic power at the
centre of its inquiry, not as one historical condition
among many but as a fundamental concern. With
the ongoing and obvious use of art to prop up elite
systems and values, that critique also remains a
necessary and constant process. Putting the Nazi
Party in the middle of a story of the Bauhaus
continues that vital collective goal that extends a
Marxist art-historical project.
My thanks to Frederic J. Schwartz for his critical editorial comments.

1 Nicholas Fox Weber, ‘Deadly Style: Bauhaus’s Nazi Connection,’ New

York Times, Arts Section, 27 December 2009, p. 24.

2 Winfried Nerdinger, ‘Bauhaus Architecture in the Third Reich,’ in

Kathleen James-Chakraborty (ed.), Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to
the Cold War (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2006), pp.
139–51. Note that, while the original German was written in 1993,
Nerdinger’s text ignores important earlier work in the English-speaking
world, such as the compelling essay by Richard Pommer, ‘Mies van der
Rohe and the Political Ideology of the Modern Movement,’ in Franz
Schulze (ed.), Mies van der Rohe: Critical Essays (Museum of Modern
Art: New York City, 1989), pp. 96–145. While I disagree with key
aspects of Pommer’s argument (above all, his refusal to deal with class
struggle so apparent in the Weimar period), he has given by far the
most nuanced account of the variable relationship of Modernist
architects to Nazi politics.

751
3 Werner Durth, Deutsche Architekten: Biographische Verflechtungen,
1900–1970 (Vieweg: Wiesbaden, 1987).

4 Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918–1945

(Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1968).

5 Perhaps the most extended version of this critical project is clear from
Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the
Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (Yale University Press: New Haven
and London, 2002).

6 See, for example, both his introduction and his analysis of the New Left
in Andrew Hemingway (ed.), Marxism and the History of Art: From
William Morris to the New Left (Pluto Press: London, 2006).

7 Martin Warnke (ed.), Das Kunstwerk zwischen Wissenschaft und

Weltanschauung (Bertelsmann: Gütersloh, 1970). For the broader
context of this moment in German Marxist art history, see Jutta Held,
‘New Left Art History and Fascism in Germany,’ in Hemingway (ed.),
Marxism and the History of Art, op. cit., pp. 196–212; and Otto Karl
Werckmeister, ‘Radical Art History’, Art Journal, vol. 42, no. 4 (1982),
pp. 284–91.

8 See my discussion of the shifting interpretations of the Nazi past in Paul

B. Jaskot, The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics
of the Right (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2012).

9 A post-1968 generation of scholars has done significant work on

exposing the institutional relationship of art history to the politics of the
Nazi era, as well as its postwar impact on the discipline. While these
are not always Marxist in their critical import, most continue to cite and
extend that earlier work. See, for instance, the exemplary volume,
Nikola Doll, Christian Fuhrmeister and Michael H. Sprenger (eds.),
Kunstgeschichte im Nationalsozialismus: Beiträge zur Geschichte einer
Wissenschaft zwischen 1930 und 1950 (VDG: Weimar, 2005).

10 Note I first developed the argument about the Nazi Party’s strategic
use of culture in Jaskot, The Nazi Perpetrator, op. cit., esp. pp. 16–37.
This article draws from that analysis but focuses here and expands on
the particular case of the Bauhaus.

11 See the institutional analysis of this period in Éva Forgács, The

Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics (Central European University
Press: Budapest, 1995), pp. 118–81. Notably, in the substantive essays
in MoMA’s Bauhaus catalogue, there is little discussion of the move
from Weimar to Dessau, and none of the political context for this move

752
 or other moments in the Bauhaus’ history. Adrian Sudhalter’s
chronology in the back of the book,
however, does give better texture to these events. Adrian Sudhalter,
‘14 Years Bauhaus: A Chronicle’, in Barry Bergdoll and Leah
Dickerman (eds.), Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity
(Museum of Modern Art: New York, 2009), pp. 327–9. There are many
documentary collections and histories of the Bauhaus to consult. In
particular, see the now classic Hans M. Wingler, Bauhaus: Weimar
Dessau Berlin Chicago (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969).
For Meyer’s letter, published in Das Tagebuch, see the translation in
Wingler, pp. 163–5.

12 The diaries of Goebbels are now available in a digital format as a

searchable resource in key depositories such as the library of the US
Holocaust Memorial Museum. More generally, see the multiple edited
volumes in Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels:
Sämtliche Fragmente, 19 vols (Institut für Zeitgeschichte: Munich,
1987–2008). For the early years of the Party, see the summation in Ian
Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (Penguin: London, 1998).

13 Kershaw, Hitler, pp. 257–9, 318–20; Donald R. Tracey, ‘The

Development of the National Socialist Party in Thuringia, 1924–30,’
Central European History, vol. 8, no. 1 (March 1975), p. 30. Notably,
Hitler’s move away from revolutionary politics began to put him in
conflict with the left wing of the Party influenced by Gregor and Otto
Strasser, in particular.

14 See the excellent overview of the developing scholarly understanding

of the demographic character of the NSDAP in Paul Madden and Detlef
Mühlberger, The Nazi Party: The Anatomy of a People’s Party,
1919–1933 (Peter Lang: Oxford, 2007), pp. 23–51.

15 Surprisingly, the only systematic study of the Völkischer Beobachter

remains the relatively recently published Detlef Mühlberger, Hitler’s
Voice: The Völkischer Beobachter, 1920–1933 (Peter Lang: Oxford,
2004). Miller Lane showed early on what use it could be, in her analysis
of how the newspaper dealt variably with modernism. My own account
extends Miller Lane’s, but from the local perspective of Party tactics
and their significance.

16 For the KPD shifts in art policy in these years, see Barbara McCloskey,
George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis,
1918 to 1936 (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1997), pp.
104–47.

753
17 See for exemplary articles Jaromir, ‘Fahrt zur “Pressa”’, Völkischer
Beobachter, 10 July 1928, p. 3, or the coverage of the Grosz trial for
blasphemy (and the second time he was sentenced) in (Anonymous),
‘“Maulhalten, weiterdienen!”’, Völkischer Beobachter, 6 December
1930, p. 1. The first major article on culture to appear on the front page
of the newspaper that I found was (Anonymous) ‘Nationalsozialismus
und Kunstpolitik’, Völkischer Beobachter, 28 January 1928, pp. 1–2.
See, also, Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics, op. cit., p. 148, in
which she states it was Rosenberg not Hitler who played the key role to
use the VB in a ‘conscious effort to broaden appeal’.

18 For an extraordinary microhistory of the development of the Nazi Party

in Thuringia to which my essay is indebted, see Tracey, ‘The National
Socialist Party in Thuringia’, pp. 23–50.

19 Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics, op. cit., pp. 148–58.

20 Senger was a confirmed racist, as evidenced by his publications such

as Alexander von Senger, ‘Rasse und Baukunst’ (Gässler: Munich,
1935). He would become a professor at the Technische Hochschule in
Munich during the Nazi period. See, also, Miller Lane’s discussion of
Senger’s anti-Bolshevist stance that complemented
Schultze-Naumburg in Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics, op. cit.,
pp. 140–5.

21 Alexander von Senger, ‘Der Bolschewismus im Bauwesen,’ Völkischer

Beobachter, part 1, 22 October 1930, Beiblatt, p. 1.

22 Ibid.

23 Alexander von Senger, ‘Der Bolschewismus im Bauwesen’, part 2, 5

November 1930, Beiblatt p. 1.

24 Alexander von Senger, ‘Der Bolschewismus im Bauwesen,’ part 3, 7

November 1930, Beiblatt p. 1. See, also, Jean-Louis Cohen, Le
Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR: Theories and Projects for
Moscow, 1928–1936 (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1991); and
Sima Ingberman, ABC: International Constructivist Architecture
1922–1939 (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1994).

25 Note as well that other Gropius-era professors were cited, including

Moholy-Nagy, in Senger, ‘Bolschewismus,’ part 1, 22 October 1930, p.
1.

26 See Pommer’s subtle parsing of the relationship of modernist architects

to a variety of different political strains and, especially, his discussion of

754
 Mies’s relationship to the DDP in Pommer, ‘Mies van der Rohe,’ pp.
108–9.

27 Wingler, Bauhaus, op. cit., pp. 175–7.

28 Sudhalter, ‘14 Years Bauhaus’, pp. 236–7. See, also, Kershaw, Hitler,
op. cit., pp. 379–495.

29 James van Dyke has captured how artists weathered and negotiated
this systemic Nazi focus on individuals; see James A. van Dyke, Franz
Radziwill and the Contradictions of German Art History, 1919–45
(University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 2011), esp. pp. 70–114.

30 Stephanie Barron (ed.), ‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde

in Nazi Germany (Harry N. Abrams: New York, 1991), p. 61.

31 See, for example, the discussion of former Bauhaus students as

designers on both sides of the brutal Nazi war and genocide in
Jean-Louis Cohen, Architects in Uniform: Designing and Building for
the Second World War (Yale University Press: New Haven, 2011), esp.
pp. 290–9.

32 I follow here the classic argument in Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals:

Inside Public Art Museums (Routledge: New York, 1995). See, in
particular, her analysis of MoMA. For Ertl, see Cohen, Architects in
Uniform, op. cit., pp. 291–3.

33 Andrew Hemingway, ‘New Left Art History’s International,’ in

Hemingway (ed.), Marxism and the History of Art, op. cit., p. 194.

34 While this article was being completed, the MoMA held a monumental
show on ‘Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925’, which surveyed a wide
variety of examples of abstraction from many different countries. The
narrative ends triumphantly in the last room with examples of artists
from, of course, the Bauhaus, and a few others.

755
756
MARXIST THEORY IN PRACTICE
LANDSCAPE, CLASS AND IDEOLOGY
MARXISM AND THE SHAPING OF MODERNISM
MARXISM IN A NEW WORLD
ORDER

757
REALISM AND MATERIALISM IN
POSTWAR EUROPEAN ART
Alex Potts

A ndrew Hemingway’s analysis of the role played

by the communist movement in American
social-realist art in his book Artists on the Left
draws attention to a marked retrenchment in the
postwar period of the commitments that had
sustained such practice in the 1930s. With the onset
of the Cold War, the US government’s campaign
against leftist artists and intellectuals on the one
hand and the increasing ideological rigidity of the
American Communist Party on the other created
circumstances that were not favourable, to say the
least, for artists with ambitions to fashion art that
was visibly engaged politically. Hemingway,
however, does not leave the story there. He
concludes with a chapter ‘Social Art in the Cold
War’ in which he argues for the persistence in the
postwar US art world of a figurative realism
informed by politicized critical awareness – in many
cases radical liberal rather than Marxist.1 He also
shows how an artist such as Philip Evergood, who
remained loyal to his left political convictions,
continued to produce vital works that were, if
largely indirectly, informed by these earlier
convictions, even if he no longer enjoyed as before
the support network of a political movement with
whose anti-capitalist principles he could identify.2

758
In this essay, I build on Hemingway’s insights into
the ongoing importance in the postwar period of
artists’ commitment to engage with the political and
social realities of the times by bringing into play the
rather different situation in the European art world.
In Europe, a broader diversity of politically engaged
art was able to makes its mark. A significant group
of high-profile artists of left-leaning or Marxist
persuasion espoused a figurative mode of painting,
and thought of themselves as working within an
ongoing realist tradition, including such figures as
the Italian communist painter Renato Guttuso and
the French communist and socialist-realist André
Fougeron. Complementing and contesting this
tendency were the politically engaged artists who
took a vanguardist stance, and who held to the view
that it was only through experimenting with radical
alternatives to conventional representation that
their art could properly respond to the material
realities of the modern world. For them, these
realities did not enter into an art work by way of
consciously motivated processes of depiction but
through the artist’s immersion in the materiality of
artistic process. Artists of more conventional realist
persuasion generally took the view that such
a focus on process meant giving up on the
possibility of art’s conveying anything of substance
about reality, and attributed to its proponents a
formalistic commitment to the autonomy and
non-representational nature of art to which many
did not in fact adhere. In the case of an artist such
as the Danish COBRA painter Asger Jorn, it was in
part the compulsion actively to respond to the
political realities of his times that led him to explore
the representational potential of an informel
painterly abstraction, a compulsion he shared with

759
a number of anti-formalist painters working in a
similar radically non-naturalistic mode.3 These
included, among others, northern European artists
in the COBRA group, informel abstract painters
working in Italy such as Emilio Vedova, and artists
associated with the Situationist International, such
as the Gruppe Spur in Germany. It was in a
European context, where the political climate was
not so hysterically anti-communist as in the United
States, and where the art world was less in the grip
of the idea that modern art had to refuse direct
evocation or representation (or ‘illustration’ as
radical formalists would have it) of non-artistic
realities, let alone any evident projection of political
conviction, that the diverse nature of a politically
engaged realist-inclined art in the postwar period
emerged most clearly.
This chapter will concentrate on two of these
figures, Guttuso and Jorn, partly because of the
inherent interest of their art, but also because both
were eloquent writers whose thinking brings into
focus questions about artistic realism,
representation and the commitment to painting as a
material practice widely current in the postwar
period. The first section, ‘The Two Realisms’,
considers the different understandings of artistic
realism and of artistic process espoused by the
figurative realists on the one hand and the artists
committed to a more abstracting painterly
experimentation on the other. Guttuso plays a
leading role here because of the breadth of his
critical writing, which engages both with his own
commitments to realism and with the informal
abstraction that he was contesting but which he
nevertheless saw as a tendency that at its best had
a certain value and integrity. The second section,

760
‘The Materiality of the World and the Materiality of
Art’, examines Jorn’s wide-ranging thinking about
art and the aesthetic as material phenomena with a
view to illuminating the materialist mindset
informing his work as a radical practitioner of
aformal painterly abstraction. The chapter
concludes with brief reflections on how the
figurative realists and the more politicized
exponents of painterly abstraction shared certain
convictions about the material basis of their art,
suggesting through the configuring of their painting
the complex imbrication of human agency in the
impersonal forces and processes of the material
world.

The Two Realisms

Renato Guttuso was a key figure for postwar

realism, not only in Italy but also in Russia and
elsewhere in Eastern and Western Europe. His work
spoke both to those on the
communist left who believed that a viable,
politically engaged art needed to be based on
recognizable figurative representation, and to those
in the postwar artistic community who were not
motivated by a left political agenda, but who like
Richard Wollheim saw in Guttuso’s work a
confirmation that depiction continued to be a viable
option for the modern painter, against the growing
critical consensus that a serious modern art should
be divested of all trace of naturalistic depiction.4
More so than Fougeron, who in the immediate
postwar period held a similar position in France as
a politically committed communist working in a
realist mode, and who made his name in the late
1940s and early 1950s as the champion of a

761
somewhat rigid socialist realism, Guttuso played a
particularly central role within contemporary
European culture both as an artist and a writer on
art. In his capacity as critic, he offered some of the
more thoughtful reflections of the period on the
political necessity of a committed realism,5 while in
his art he tested the possibilities and limits of a
modern, politically engaged realism that ranged
from high-narrative history painting to more
informal painting of modern life.
The painting that more than any other established
Guttuso’s reputation as the proponent of a
politically engaged realism was Occupation of
Uncultivated Lands in Sicily [1], which made a
considerable stir when it was exhibited at the
Venice Biennale in 1950. With its strong figurative
presences and ambitious scale – it is close to three
and a half metres wide – it clearly offers itself up as
a history painting. It was ambitious politically, as
well as artistically. Popular occupation and
cultivation of neglected land on the huge private
estates of Sicily, contesting both the corrupt hold of
the Mafia as well as that of semi-feudal landed
interests on the island, was a live issue at the time
over which the Italian communists and the
conservative southern Christian Democrats had
strongly divided.6 With its somewhat abstracting (as
well as symbolic) colouring – the enlivening of the
empty landscape with passages of red, green and
white, echoing the tricolore of the Italian flag, as
well as areas of red picking up on the colour of the
communist banner raised at the head of the troop –
and the formalized effect of the friezelike array of
figures in the foreground, it clearly distances itself
from the naturalistic norms of Zhdanovist Socialist
Realism. At the same time, the individualizing of the

762
figures and their unheroic, everyday gestures and
clothing also make it very different from the
classicizing Italian novecento realism of the fascist
years – which incidentally is in evidence in Guttu
so’s work of the earlier 1930s.
This moment represented a high point of Guttuso’s
politically engaged social realism, during which he
produced two other large-scale large narrative
paintings concerned with the land occupation
movement in Sicily and its violent suppression,7 as
well as a more conventional dramatic history
painting of Garibaldi and his thousand storming a
bridge on their way to Palermo during his famous
Sicilian campaign of 1860, which caused
controversy when it was shown at the Venice
Biennale in 1952.8 Guttuso himself was from Sicily
and, by way of scenes situated in the south, took to
depicting national political issues having to do with
the Communist Party’s struggle to represent the
interests of the urban and rural poor and to liberate
Italy from its conservative (and fascist) past.
Generally speaking, from the mid-1950s onwards,
this kind of overtly political painting in a public
rhetorical mode gave way to more socially
orientated painting of aspects of everyday life,
initially often but not exclusively proletarian9 and
then in the later phase of Guttuso’s career
becoming more ‘bourgeois’ and symbolic, more
about his own social milieu. At the same time, he
continued to produce the occasional large-scale
painting addressing the public politics of the day,
particularly in the politicized later 1960s and early
1970s, with, for example, Newspaper Mural – May
’68 (1968), featuring police violence against
demonstrators that echoed US military violence in
Vietnam, and Togliatti’s Funeral (1972), a massive

763
allegorical work recalling the funeral of the Italian
Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti, who had
died in 1964. In the latter, Guttuso may have been
claiming Lenin (featured in multiple depictions,
together with a striking image of Gramsci) for an
Italian Communist Party that in the early 1970s was
increasingly distancing
itself from the Russian Soviet party line of
post-1968 retrenchment and stagnation. Then
again, one needs to bear in mind that Guttuso was
awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union
in the year he completed the painting.10

1 Renato Guttuso, Occupation of Uncultivated

Lands in Sicily, 1949–50, oil on canvas, 265 × 344
cm. Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der
Künste-Kunstsammlung, Berlin.

764
Guttuso’s more ambitious showings at the 1954 and
1956 Venice biennales were symptomatic of a shift
away from the evidently political social realism of
his work of the previous few years. These new
works included a large-scale multi-figure
representation of urban youth, Boogie-Woogie11 and
one of ordinary people disporting themselves on a
public beach, The Beach [2]. These two paintings
could be seen as contrasting the alienated
collectivities of modern urban mass entertainment
with more free-and-easy forms of everyday sociality
that were not subject in the same way to the forces
of capitalist consumerism – with the beach scene
possibly representing not just an actual reality, but
something of a projected new proletarian society
that would flourish under communism. The
conception of The Beach, together with its broader
political connotations, makes for an interesting
comparison with the work of the American Philip
Evergood, an artist very much of the left, who in the
1930s had been closely involved with Communist
Party cultural initiatives, and who in the postwar
period remained committed to figurative realism as
the most effective basis on which to engage with
the lived realities of the contemporary world.12

765
2 Renato Guttuso, The Beach, 1955–6, oil on canvas,
301 × 452 cm. Galleria Nazionale di Parma.

3 Philip Evergood, Music, 1933–59, oil on canvas,

170.2 × 303.5 cm. Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk,
Virginia.

766
Evergood’s mural-scale painting Music [3] –
conceived in 1933 for the Pierre Degeyter Club in
New York, a branch of the Workers Music League,
and then somewhat reworked by him in the 1950s13
– is, if anything, a more evidently social-realist
picturing of non-bourgeois sociality than Guttuso’s
The Beach. It shows an energetic, non-hierarchical
gathering of diverse types, come together to make
music in a way that contrasts strikingly with the
bourgeois formalities of a conventional orchestra
performance. The two figures in the foreground are
shown to be part of the group, the trombonist
momentarily stepping forwards to make his solo
contribution, and the fiddle player about to take up
from the trombonist’s intervention, with neither
singled out as lead figures any more than, for
example, the equally vigorous lady in the centre
background about to strike her triangle. This is an
image both very real but also at some level utopian,
more convincingly so because of its slightly ribald
Hogarthian humour. The affinities suggested here
between Guttuso and Evergood are not just
retrospective projections. Evergood came to know
Guttuso and admire his work when the latter had an
exhibition at the ACA gallery in New York in 1963,
and Guttuso took up an invitation from Evergood to
write the introduction to the catalogue of
Evergood’s show at Gallery 63 in Rome in 1963.
Evergood responded enthusiastically to Guttuso’s
essay, feeling it showed that they had a real ‘bond
of understanding’ and thanking Guttuso for his
appreciative insights into ‘what I have tried to say
in the language of paint’.14
When Guttuso in 1949–50 emerged as a champion
of realist painting with communist convictions, he
did so from an immediate postwar context where a

767
clear divide between a Marxist-inspired painterly
realism and a more radical-seeming aformal
abstraction was not yet firmly in place. He was
associated with various anti-fascist artistic
groupings that formed after the collapse of the
fascist government, most notably the Fronte Nuovo,
which included artists such as Vedova who later
were to become leading practitioners of informel
abstract painting. In 1948, Guttuso was signatory to
a letter defending modern trends in contemporary
art against an attack on these by Togliatti (writing
under a pseudonym), who called for a
socialist-realist aesthetic as the only viable form for
a truly communist art and who denounced what he
saw as the anarchy and the horrors, monstrosities
and imbecilities of the work in the National
Exhibition of Contemporary Art held in Bologna that
year. Concurrently, however, a split had begun to
open up between Guttuso and his realist associates
in the Fronte Nuovo and the abstractionists, which
led to Fronte Nuovo’s dissolution in 1950 when the
two groups showed their work separately at the
Venice Biennale. Guttuso’s emerging reputation as
a champion of artistic realism at this point
coincided with his developing closer relations with
the leadership of the Italian Communist Party – he
was made a member of its Central Committee in
1951.15 Still, he continued to argue as he had
throughout the later 1940s for an artistic realism
not bound by established convention, and distanced
himself, not just from non-representational
abstraction, but also from doctrinal socialist realism
and traditional forms of naturalism.
An underlying commitment to a broadly realist
approach to painting, and a scepticism about the
more radically experimental postwar avant-gardism

768
and the modernist ethos associated with it,
combined with a certain openness and generosity,
remained characteristic of Guttuso’s approach to
the art of his time through much of his career. Such
an outlook is consistent with the intellectual milieu
in which he moved – among his close associates
were figures such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto
Moravia, Carlo Levi and Else Morante. When he
reflected on the developments that had taken place
in the Italian art world of the immediate postwar
period, he took care to note the affinities between
the practitioners of painterly realism and the more
radical currents in early informel abstraction. Both,
he felt, shared a compulsion to start afresh after the
collapse of fascism, and both were dissatisfied with
existing forms of modernist abstraction and
Surrealist vanguardism.16
In his view, it was the group of so-called neo-realists
who were the first to respond, before the
practitioners of informel abstraction, to the
imperative ‘to immerse themselves in the “world”’,
an imperative he saw as reshaping postwar art and
taking it beyond the formalistic orthodoxies of
established modernism. This was, he explained, a
moment of deep crisis when it became imperative
for artists to ‘disavow their own gods, and have the
courage [to take on] a new barbarism if they truly
wanted to get at the
roots of evil’ (namely the evil of both fascism and
modern capitalism).17 While strongly critical of the
self-referential, formalistic tendencies of later
informel abstraction, and of its critical packaging as
symptomatic of existentialist anxiety and
pessimism, he saw the radical departure from the
geometric norms of pre-war abstraction and the
opening out to an expressionist disorder found in its

769
earliest manifestations as driven by a revolutionary
impulse broadly shared with the realists.18 Informel
abstraction in his view had two currents, one
characterized by an essentially conservative and
anti-socialist rejection of politics, and one that in its
striving for a qualitative transformation of
painting’s expressive potential had its roots in
revolutionary ideology. Among the Italian artists
who espoused an aformal, radically non-figurative
abstraction were those like Vedova who envisioned
their art as enacting a passionate engagement with
the conflicted and disturbing realities of the
times.19
Guttuso saw Pollock as a very considerable painter,
publishing an extended tribute to him in 1962 in
which he argued that full appreciation of his work
had properly to take on board its representational
aspects and get away from a fetishizing of the
purely abstract drip paintings of the years 1947–50
that dominated current critical presentations of the
artist. His summing up of the contradictory
tendencies in Pollock’s practice and of the
conditions ‘of permanent catastrophe within which
[this] artist of genius was formed’ is pretty astute.
He saw Pollock as torn between a dramatic-epic
‘Mexican-Picassian’ symbolic impulse and a lyrical
aspiration to naturalistic imagining, ‘a need for
action and repose, intense collective life and
solitude’, ‘a sense of the “modern” and need for the
antique spectacle of “nature”’, with the former
tendency taking on the character of ‘massacre’ and
the latter that of ‘the American landscape’ – all
played out in the context of the ‘turbulence and
lacerations of contemporary society’.20 It bears
mentioning here that Evergood, despite his polemic
against the formalistic doctrines of pure abstraction

770
that gained such ascendancy in the US, found it
possible to say in a late interview that, while he had
wanted to avoid the pitfalls of becoming either an
‘academician’ or a ‘Pollock-type painter’, he
nevertheless also ‘wanted to be as free and daring
as Pollock, or as disciplined as an Albert Ryder or a
Giotto if I could’.21
Asger Jorn, who in Guttuso’s terms would have been
a practitioner of informel abstraction,22 came to
prominence in a postwar context in which he too
saw himself as reacting against the formalistic
orthodoxies of modernist geometric abstraction as
well as the conservatism of academic naturalism.
He believed that a truly radical, politically
committed art, one that engaged in any compelling
way with the realities of life in the modern world,
could do so only by jettisoning traditional processes
of pictorial depiction and representation and by
working in the first instance with the physical
immediacy of painting’s materiality. For him, it was
not a matter of setting abstraction against
figuration. He was, as he saw it, committed to the
‘value of pictorial figuration’, but one radically
antithetical to naturalistic depiction.23 Like a
number of
his contemporaries, he wanted to hold onto an idea
of realism, but not in its conventional sense. He saw
the ‘materialist realism’24 that he championed as
bringing to life a reality that was ‘in contradiction
with existing reality’ and rather than merely
depicting existing phenomena gave rise to its own
powerfully striking and materially substantive
pictorial figurations.25
What divided the politically engaged materialist
realists and equally politically engaged artists

771
experimenting with new forms of painterly
abstraction, then, was not some formal dichotomy
between figuration and abstraction. Ideologically,
the difference between them had to do with
different attitudes to avant-garde radicalism, with
the informel abstractionists’ adherence to a
systematic, avant-garde-like negation of inherited
artistic forms separating them from the realists,
even if both took the view that being a modern
artist involved developing new ways of working.
Politically speaking, a somewhat anarchistic
Marxist radicalism was being pitted against a
Marxism more in tune with that of the culturally
liberal wing of the Communist Party. What mattered
for both was the commitment brought to bear in the
artist’s engagement with both reality and art. As
Guttuso put it, the critical disputes over the priority
of figurative and non-figurative tendencies in art
represented ‘the degeneration to the lowest level of
the fundamental debate between reality and
alienation’. The real issue was not a greater or
lesser degree of figuration, but the inherent quality
of the drive motivating the artist, the direction in
which it was going and its moral roots.26
At issue too was a fundamental divide over the
artistic process that would enable a vital and
compelling engagement with a larger reality to
enter into the art work. For the figurative realists
like Guttuso and Evergood, the basic model was a
version of the one that had informed conceptions of
realism and naturalism since the later nineteenth
century. It runs roughly as follows. The artist’s lived
sense of reality is registered in the artist’s mind as
he/she apprehends and experiences something in
the world, and this mental and psychic response is
in turn directly transmitted into the work of art and

772
re-embodied as physical phenomenon by way of the
artist’s activity of depicting what he/she has sensed
and felt. It is in this way that an artist’s human
apprehension of something in the external world
enters into the fabric of a painterly representation,
bringing the representation alive in ways that a
merely mechanical delineation of something
observed would not.27
In the essay ‘Concrete communication and concrete
images’ published in 1965, Guttuso explained his
commitment to figurative realism and his
relinquishing of non-figurative procedures as
follows: ‘Art is above all a moral problem – I think
that I gain certainty and doubt from the
irrepressible presence of things – but a doubt and
certainty that would make no sense, if it did not
take account of “the World”. Therefore I consider
figurative art not a convention but a necessity.’ For
him, the artist’s active viewing and apprehension of
things is registered ‘as an experience that
is constantly being put to the test. In experiences,
that fly by on our eyes, that in the end flow directly
into our blood through our direct actions or the
pages of newspapers’, and that in turn flow into a
painting through the artist’s handling and shaping
of the medium.28 In an essay on de Chirico
published in 1970, he expanded on how the latter
part of the process, particularly in so far as it
engaged the viewer, played out: ‘To take account of
the value of a painting with respect to its realism,
this involves being led by the hand of the artist and
forcefully apprehending the visible … this being led
to see and penetrate things, to seize things, this is
the philosophy of the painter.’29

773
A similar, if more down-to-earth view of painterly
depiction as registering a directly felt engagement
with things is to be found in statement published by
Evergood in 1946:

What an artist puts into his work comes back to him. If he feels
deeply about trees, he will observe them keenly and in his
canvases they will stand firm, and sway, and shimmer, and grow
old, and rot and die, and the young ones will sprout out of the
ground again. He will make the trees live and others who have
loved and observed trees will feel them live in his canvases…. He
has experienced something important and he has made others
conscious of how important his conviction is – even about trees.30

Interestingly, Evergood, like Guttuso, found he

would often get the kind of stimulus needed to
sustain his realist practice from magazine and
newspaper illustrations, a point that suggests that
certain aspects of the Pop New Realism of the later
1950s and early 1960s was closer to the figurative
realism of the postwar period than it was to the
more radical-seeming painting of the informel
abstractionists and Abstract Expressionists. Both
artists insisted on the importance of the humanist
dimension to a figurative way of working with its
registering of an artist’s directly felt engagement
with people and things that distinguished it from
non-objective abstraction. As Evergood put it in his
characteristically crisp uncompromising way, in the
dispute between radical abstractionist and realist
tendencies, ‘the issue is no longer between
representation and non-representation; it is
between humanism and formalism’,31 with
formalism here meaning abandonment of the
representational and expressive potential of art.

774
For the figurative realism of artists such as
Evergood and Guttuso, the materiality of what was
being depicted mattered more than the materiality
of the art work and of the painterly processes that
went into its making. Still, they did see the latter as
having a significant bearing on the capacity of a
work to evoke in a compelling way the phenomena
it was picturing, even if such concerns did not play
a particularly central role in their declarations of
artistic principle. For them, the materiality of things
in general was important. Guttuso insisted that
‘man and thing are the sole theme that belong to a
painter’ and that a painter, while having ideas, does
not depict ideas only things: ‘only in the way and
manner in which he paints can ideas emerge’.32
Both
Guttuso and Evergood adhered to the view that
painting did not just represent things but had to do
with the nexus of things in the world at large. As
Guttuso put it:

An apple, a bottle, a face, people at war or in peace, angels in

heaven, ecstasies of saints, massacres, the damned in hell,
crucifixions or concerts, newspapers, cinemas, museums, streets,
landscapes, palaces and closed-up rooms, messed-up beds,
discarded and dusty things, painting is the form of our coexistence
in each of the elements or in all of them together.33

Evergood, in a statement published in the Daily

Worker in 1942, similarly explained how his art was
closely bound up with a conception of ‘life, people,
buildings, objects, nature, as the complex product
of interacting social and natural forces’.34
In the art of these modern realists, the materiality
of the paint and drawing, while not foregrounded as
the generative basis of their art as it is was by

775
artists working in an informel, more radically
abstract mode such as Jorn and Vedova, is still very
much in evidence. Different elements and areas of
the picture canvas are rendered with different kinds
of painterly mark-making, and the materiality of the
latter intrudes to the point of interrupting
illusionistic transparency, in effect giving a material
grittiness to what is being represented. In a work
such as Guttuso’s The Beach [2], the bodies are
rendered in quite different ways, some smooth and
others hard and dry, and fashioned with a broken
patchwork of painterly marks in varied colours
(such distinctions mostly play out between the
female and male figures, but not consistently so).
Also striking is the way that Guttuso for the most
part refused to give his canvases an overall lushly
painterly feel, which would integrate the variegated
depictive processes. A somewhat rebarbative
materiality often makes itself felt, particularly in the
intriguing works he produced in the late 1950s and
earlier 1960s, many of them still lifes, where things
tend to be resistant and untactile rather than
sensuously textured, the arrangement of items
awkwardly fractured, and the concatenations of
forms messy rather than suggestively dense.35
A certain refusal of illusionistic or painterly
richness, an at times uneasily dry or flat materiality,
and an absence of sensuously saturated integration
of the pictorial field are apparent in Evergood’s
work too. He made the point that ‘the rawness of a
violent piece of color against a dull, dead piece of
color excites the eye very often much more than an
all-over rainbow beauty quality.’ He also expressed
an aversion to the refined sensuous touch and rich
painterliness associated with good painting,
stressing how he liked to put ‘things down flat’ in a

776
no-nonsense way: ‘This is painting: it takes greater
strength to do this than to brush and stroke, and
when I find myself brushing and stroking I hate
myself for it.’36 There may be more displays of
brushwork in Guttuso, but a conventional sense of
overall painterly richness is usually blocked by the
presence of areas that are either slightly discordant
or empty or casually messy
and by the accented linearity and angularity of the
black drawn marks.37 The refusal of a conventional
aestheticizing of the paint and the depictive
drawing is integral to the realist claims of such
work.
For experimental materialists such as Jorn,
conveying a sense of one’s immediate engagement
with lived reality was realized by immersing oneself
in the process of painting, in the give and take
between the artist’s impulse and action and the
material substance of the emerging painterly
configurations. A consciously imposed depictive
intent, compelling these configurations to conform
to shapes remembered or observed, only
interrupted the process and prevented the motifs
being formed from taking on a life of their own.38
Even for artists who were committed to a figurative
realism, this immersion in process would sometimes
loom large in their understanding of how the art
they were making would become resonant with
their apprehension of and responses to the world in
which they lived.39 Significantly, Evergood featured
in the series of articles in ARTnews in the early
1950s on artists’ approaches to painting, among
which is the famous description of Pollock’s drip
process with photographs by Hans Namuth.40

777
The Materiality of the World and the Materiality of Art

For most abstractly inclined artists who had a

radical political agenda, something rather different
was at stake in their intensive involvement with the
materiality of paint than a commitment to the
internal parameters of art and the self-defining
processes of making it. Such a high-formalist,
Greenbergian mindset came to dominate only later
on. Instead, what one finds in the comments made
by critics and artists at the time are intriguing,
often confused ruminations about how the material
processes of fashioning a work had affinities not
just with processes going on in the mind, but also
with those taking place more broadly in the physical
world. This was a materialist outlook that refused
conventional categorical distinctions between mind
and matter, between inner and outer worlds,
between the materiality of painting and the
materiality of the larger world of which it was part
and which in some way it was evoking. As the
painter Jean Dubuffet, an artist who was hardly on
the left in politics, but who was a close friend and
admirer of Jorn, put it: ‘The movements of the mind,
if one undertakes to give them body by means of
painting – have something in common – are close
relatives perhaps – with physical concretions of all
sorts.’41
Jorn’s reflections on aesthetics and on the broader
material constitution of things offer particularly
valuable insights into the outlook informing such a
materialist conception of painting, partly because
he was so actively involved with a number of radical
artistic initiatives that took shape in postwar
Europe, and partly too because of his political
commitments that make him a radical vanguardist

778
counterpart to the Italian communist Guttuso. He
was an irrepressible activist, who brought to bear in
his reflections on aesthetics a political perspective
informed by, if also to some degree critically
sceptical of, Marxist dialectical materialism.42 He
was a founder member of the Situationist
International, and a close friend of Guy Debord’s.43
Jorn’s painting is characterized by a free
intermingling of often discordant agglomerations of
stridently bright and also murkily coloured paint
[4]. Like Dubuffet, he was committed to the view
that the artist should be guided by an immersion in
painterly process, and that the configuring of forms
and motifs would be compelling only if pursued in
the first instance without conscious
representational intent,44 not because such a
process made the resulting work expressive of the
artist’s state of mind but because it was true to the
underlying formation of things.45 The way Jorn’s
reflections on aesthetics and the ‘natural order’ do
away with categorical distinctions between human
impulse and agency and the material environment
of which they are part has certain affinities with
currents of thinking in the materialist
46
phenomenology of the period. His broader
conceptualizing of materiality, however, has less to
do with such philosophical trends than with recent
scientific thinking about the nature of matter and
underlying physical processes, and with Marxist,
dialectical materialist theorizing of processes of
social change and political revolution.
Jorn’s errant and intriguing meditations on the
materialist basis of the aesthetic took shape in a
book published in 1952, entitled Luck and
Chance.47 Particularly striking is his

779
characterization of the spontaneous, activating
disruption he saw played out in aesthetic
experience as a physical, material phenomenon like
other natural processes. The aesthetic event’s
breaking with a known, habitual and ongoing
patterning of things, was as Jorn formulated it, ‘a
self-contradictory capacity of matter’.48
Subjectivity, and hence too the subjective impulses
which set in train an aesthetic phenomenon, were
not to be thought of as immaterial or spiritual, as
having to do with soul or mind existing
independently of the material world. The subject,
while ‘normally defined as the “conscious ego”, the
observing, thinking feeling, active individual’, was
in the final analysis ‘any exclusive or limited sphere
of interest in matter, any system of action, any
individuality … Every cell in the human body is an
object and at the same time an area of interest, a
subject or acting individual.’49 In other words, ‘we
do not perceive the subject as “the conscious ego”,
as is generally the case, but simply as a sphere of
interest or a viewpoint in matter, and thus not as
something outside this world but as something both
of and in it’.50
Jorn’s conception of matter was shaped by recent
scientific thinking in several ways. He was an avid
reader of his fellow Dane Niels Bohr’s essays that
were published in a book titled Atomic Theory and
the Description of Nature.51 Most notably he picked
up on quantum mechanical thinking about the
behaviour of matter that challenged determinist
Newtonian conceptions of causality – scientists
were finding that particle behaviour at the atomic
level was describable only in terms of statistical
aggregates of events that on an individual basis
occurred randomly and by way of discontinuous

780
quantum leaps. He was also drawn to discussions
deriving from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle
about how observation could not pin down atomic
particle behaviour because the process of
observation was itself a material event that
disrupted what it was observing and was part of the
phenomenon it was seeking to describe. This for
Jorn offered an understanding of materiality in
which the non-normative, disruptive aesthetic event
could be seen as integral to the basic constitution of
matter and changes taking place in the material
world. For Jorn, because the ‘experimental
evolution of the manifoldness of the universe and
nature is of such a kind that we could well say that
matter in all its regularity is an incurable gambler’,
the aesthetic event, the sudden, unpredictable
appearance of something unknown, was simply one
of many accidental occurrences taking place in the
physical world. Given that accident, ‘an event that
occurs without demonstrable or calculable reason
or purpose, or from causes that lie outside the
immediately observed area and are not
predetermined through insight or experience in
those who experience it’, is so pervasive, ‘the
function of chance is normal and ordinary’.52 Its
deployment in art was certainly not to be seen as
distinctive to art movements such as Dada or
Surrealism.

781
4 Asger Jorn, Dead Drunk Danes, 1960, oil on
canvas, 120 × 200.5 cm. Louisiana Museum of
Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark.

In thinking of the real change that he saw being

realized momentarily in a vital aesthetic
phenomenon, in contrast to the more constant,
relatively stable
metamorphoses ordinarily taking place in the
material world,53 Jorn was also taking into account
post-Darwinian understandings of the unpredictable
changes and mutations basic to processes of
evolution. ‘Real evolution’, in his view, occurred by
way of disharmonious breaks, eruptions of
something unpredictable and unpredetermined.54
For him, then, the interplay between a relatively
stable, ongoing constitution of things he identified
with the ethical in the realm of culture, and the
unpredictable, gratuitous eruption of excess he
associated with the aesthetic, was ‘a natural

782
phenomenon, the condition for all differentiation
and elaboration of matter’.55
Jorn’s thinking of aesthetics in material terms
clearly fed into his vanguardist conception of
painting as a process that gave rise to something
new, unintended and unpredictable that broke
radically with accepted forms of picturing. It was
also bound up with his anarcho-Marxist politics and
his conviction that real social and political change
could be realized only through a revolution that
destroyed the existing system.56 The model he had
in mind owes a lot to classical Marxist
understandings of how a fundamental
transformation of class relations could never be
realized by way of incremental change but only
through the violent revolutionary upheaval that
occurred once an existing social order was no
longer able to accommodate the new forces
emerging within it and began to break down. At the
same time, he took the basic form of this Marxist,
sociopolitical model of historical process and radical
change as operating more generally in the material
world, whether inorganic, biological or human: ‘On
the strength of its construction, every system, every
sphere of interest, mental as well as physical, has
an absolute limit of evolution, which it is unable
under any circumstances to transgress in time or
space except by dissolution in favour of the
formation of a new and richer structure.’57
Jorn’s ontology posed two very basic problems for
his radical libertarian political and artistic
convictions, the implications of which are possibly
played out more in his painting than in his writing.
The aesthetic or revolutionary impulse to realize
something radically new, on his understanding, was

783
impelled by a subjective goal basic to all organisms’
strivings, consisting ‘of power, of expansion, of the
most unlimited control of matter’.58 There was
nothing, however, in the sudden eruptions of
impulsive energy he associated with the aesthetic to
guarantee that their effect would be an opening out
to new liberating possibilities rather than a release
of destructive force or a meaningless play of blind
impulse. That was a risk that had to be taken – it
was in the end, to quote the title of his book, a
matter of ‘luck and chance’. In a painting such as
Dead Drunk Danes [4], one is being presented, it
seems, with a less-than-meaningful orgy of blind
impulse – at least if one looks to the title, which
refers to the Danish custom of taking a ferry to
Sweden to get blind drunk on duty-free alcohol. The
painting itself however is quite ambiguous; it seems
not to form into the promise of a truly democratic
interplay of impulse between freely acting agents
any more than it necessarily
conjures up a scenario of a blindly aimless alcohol
riot – the visages that emerge from and engulf
themselves in the paint work are monstrous but also
intriguingl y vital.
The second basic problem posed by Jorn’s
conceptions of materiality has to do with how, in
material circumstances such as those of modern
capitalism that were antithetical to and threatened
by the realization of a revolutionary impulse that
would bring about radical change, the aesthetic
event could take shape as anything greater than a
temporary ripple that ended up being little more
than a hopeless play of wishful thinking. Jorn in
effect posed the problem while leaving its
implications dangling in one of his more telling

784
characterizations of what he saw as the underlying
subjective impulses of the aesthetic:

the deeper ego-perspective [which] occurs in the individual as

wishes, dream, fantasies or ideas, which are the gradual
consciousness of one’s own unreleased possibilities. Tied to
feelings of dread about the elements that could threaten and
hinder their realization, these form images which are
straightforwardly ascribable to our physique in the mental
atmosphere of imaginings. These sheer illusions are certainly built
up of matter from the actual experienced world, but in their
structure have nothing to do with it, as they are fantasies and
self-delusions.59

When the impulse remained at the level of wishful

thinking, which in Jorn’s reckoning would have been
the case for most art being made at the time, it was
in danger of becoming a reified ideal appropriated
by the world from which it sought liberation: ‘All
ideal or subjective thought is wishful thinking,
invoked by capabilities or inner and organic sensory
influences. The latent unsatisfied wish becomes a
fixed idea or an ideal.’60 Certainly as time went on,
Jorn became increasingly pessimistic about the
potential for art to activate revolutionary impulses
that would bring about real change. This was
particularly so after his separation from the
Situationist International as it became apparent to
him that the group was beginning to see art as a
hindrance to revolutionary activism, and even more
so when the outburst of political radicalism in the
events of 1968, in which Jorn participated, was
suppressed and had to go into retreat. He felt that
the claims to be made for the liberatory potential of
art, given the social and economic conditions
operating against any immediate possibility of
revolutionary change, were very precarious:

785
The artist can create true art only in the most intense opposition to
this so-called ‘real’ life. But at the same time this unnatural but vital
opposition makes his own art unnatural and his aim, the perfect
masterpiece, unattainable; for the more he opposes society, the
more he opposes himself, and if he denies society he denies
himself, reality being the only foundation on which he can build
anything at all.

But if ‘Defeat is assured in advance’, it is not a

matter of giving up: ‘it is dependent on the
intelligence and drive of the individual artist how
far he will go’.61
There is a way in which his painting can be seen as
resisting a recuperation of libertarian impulse as
fixed ideal or marginal play, in that it is suggestive
of a gratuitous, potentially destructive vitality and a
dissolution of fixed bearings. Jorn took issue with
the ex-fascist Hans Sedlmayr’s pessimistically
conservative diagnosis of the negative effects on art
of a loss of centre (Verlust der Mitte) in the modern
world.62 In his painting of that name,63 though, the
ludicrousness, the monstrosity of what emerges in
such circumstances of a radical loss of centre seems
more in evidence than any intimation of a creative
development of human capacities. Among the more
negative effects seems to be the production of truly
aberrant apparitions such as Sedlmayr himself. If
other paintings seem less violently conflicted [4],
one hardly sees in them a celebration of the
liberatory potential of art-making. They testify to an
oddly compelling but also disturbing envisioning of
things that could realistically be materialized in the
late capitalist world Jorn inhabited. The projection
of imaginative possibility seems to be producing
disorientating monsters, with this imagined world
inevitably being mired in the world as it is, rather as

786
the looming images are materialized in a flux of
resistant if somewhat malleable paint.64

5 Asger Jorn, Stalingrad, le non lieu ou le fou rire

du courage, 1956, 1957–60, 1967, 1972, oil on
canvas, 296 × 492 cm. Silkeborg Kunstmuseum,
Denmark.

The general tenor of the later works to which Jorn

gave politically or ideologically loaded titles would
seem to be decidedly ironic about the generative
possibilities that might emerge from the aesthetic
gesturing of his painting. Ausverkauf einer Seele,
‘clearance sale for a soul’, presents a pretty bleak
prospect at first sight, even if tempered by a certain
humour.65 At the same time, the paint work, which
really mattered for Jorn, while suggesting a chaos
more of dissolution than of potentially regenerative
energy, is strikingly alive and powerful. Not much
promise, but not a closure on promise either, which
would after all be at odds with Jorn’s irrepressibly
activist outlook. This is to some extent true of his

787
most ambitious history painting, on which he
worked off and on between 1956 and his death in
1973: Stalingrad, le non lieu ou le fou rire du
courage (the non place or the mad laughter of
courage) [5]. This work was devised as an attempt
to figure in paint the unprecedented destructive
violence of the battle of Stalingrad and its status as
a world-changing event marking the beginning of
the defeat of Nazism, and what was after all a
communist victory. At first sight, it seems as if the
work is little more than a slightly impure abstract
field of paint, in which the faint traces of motifs
evoking figures and buildings are largely
obliterated. But in this white field of snowlike paint
there is something more than devastation. The
whiteness has a curiously impure beauty, not quite
alive but not quite inert either, while on closer
inspection faintly configured beings emerge here
and there, suggestive perhaps of the ‘mad laughter
of courage’ evoked in Jorn’s title. Again, the
effectiveness of the painting is inherent in its
materiality, both as paint work and as evocation of
the material residues of an undeniably
epoch-making and unimaginably violent event.66
The difference from Guttuso’s large-scale realist
political history paintings, or his and Evergood’s
more ambitious social-realist renderings of
everyday life, could, it might seem, hardly be more
radical, but only if one takes a conventional
formalistic view of the situation and discounts these
artists’ larger political and culture investment in
their practice. It would be easy to set the latter’s
explicit figuring of the human in contrast to what
seems to be the almost total obliteration of any
distinction between the human and the inhuman in
the painterly materiality of Jorn’s work. Taking

788
Jorn’s oeuvre as whole, however, there is usually a
figuring of some kind of human presence, often
indistinguishable from the monstrous and the
animal, in the visages that emerge from the
turbulent paint. Such suggestion is largely
obliterated, but not completely cancelled out in the
painting Stalingrad. Where, for all the differences,
an affinity may be found between the two very
different realisms discussed in this article – in
addition to a painter such as Jorn holding onto ideas
of animate and at times human presence – this may
be a shared understanding of a less than clear-cut
boundary between consciously motivated action and
the blind workings of inhuman forces and impulses.
In so much as both politically engaged realisms
were shaped by Marxist materialism, both
envisioned conscious human agency as immersed in
a nexus of forces, human and animal, social and
environmental, that largely lay beyond the purview
of individual human agency.
1 Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the
Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (Yale University Press: New Haven
and London, 2002). Other recent publications that address the
persistence of figurative realism in the postwar period include Brendan
Prendeville, Realism in 20th Century Painting (Thames & Hudson:
London and New York, 2000) and James Hyman, The Battle for
Realism: Figurative Art in Britain during the Cold War 1945–1960 (Yale
University Press: New Haven and London, 2001).

2 On Evergood, see Hemingway, Artists on the Left, op. cit., pp. 140–4,
227–33.

3 On the importance of realism as an imperative in the non-figurative,

more abstract work of the postwar period, see Alex Potts, Experiments
in Modern Realism: Worldmaking in Postwar European and American
Art (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2013), pp. 24–153.
See also the discussion there of Jorn, pp. 383–98.

4 Richard Wollheim, ‘Guttuso’, in Guttuso (McRoberts and Tunnard:

London, 1960). The British critics drawn to Guttuso’s work came from a

789
 wide spectrum, ranging from the more formalist Douglas Cooper to the
left champion of social realism, John Berger.

5 Renato Guttuso, Mestiere di Pittore: Scritti sull’ arte de la società (De

Donato: Bari, 1972). A number of key essays are translated into
German in Renato Guttuso: Gemälde und Zeichnungen (Museen der
Stadt Köln: Cologne, 1977).

6 Lara Pucci, ‘“Terra Italia”: The Peasant Subject as Site of National and
Socialist Identities in the Work of Renato Guttuso and Giuseppe De
Santis’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 71 (2008),
pp. 315–44.

7 The two paintings by Guttuso are Occupazione di terre in Sicilia, 1953,

200 × 278 cm. destroyed, and Portella della Ginestra, 105 × 200 cm,
Private Collection; illustrated in Pucci, “Terra Italia”, op. cit., figs. 7 and
12.

8 Guttuso, La battaglia del ponte dell’ammiraglio, 1952, 500 × 300 cm,

Uffizi; a second version dated 1955 is in the Galleria Comunale d’Arte
Moderna e Contemporanea. The conventional dramatic rhetoric was
not much liked by some of his closest admirers – John Berger,
Catalogue of an Exhibition of the Recent Works of Renato Guttuso
(Ernest Brown and Phillips: London, 1955).

9 Many of these paintings had topical political overtones, such as the very
fine Calabrian Worker’s Sunday in Rome (Rocco with a gramophone)
dating from 1960–1 in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

10 Guttuso, Giornale murale-Maggio ’68, 280 × 480 cm, Ludwig Forum,

Aachen, and I funeral di Togliatti, 1972, 340 × 440 cm, Museo d’Arte
Moderna di Bologna; illustrated in Renato Guttuso 1912–2012 (Skira:
Geneva and Milan, 2012), pp. 75, 152–3.

11 Guttuso, Boogie-Woogie, 1953, 165 × 205 cm, Museo de Arte Moderna

e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, illustrated in Renato Guttuso
1912–2012, op. cit., p. 74.

12 See note 2.

13 Kendall Taylor, Philip Evergood: Never Separate from the Heart

(Associated University Presses: London and Toronto, 1987), p. 87.
Though Evergood did not make any significant changes to the painting,
he invested enough in his retouchings to redate it ‘LIII-LIX’.

14 Taylor, Evergood, op. cit., pp. 130–1. In 1963, Guttuso gave Evergood
one of his drawings, which Evergood presented as a gift four years

790
 later to his friends Ann and Bill Feinberg (drawing sold at Swann
Auction Galleries in 2002).

15 There is a very informative analysis of the trajectory of Guttuso’s

artistic career in the entry by Raffaele De Grada on Guttuso in
Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 61 (2004); available online.

16 Guttuso, Mestiere, op. cit., pp. 111–2.

17 Ibid., p. 116, from an essay ‘Informale’ published in 1965.

18 Ibid., p. 103–5.

19 See the essays by Vedova ‘It’s not so easy to paint a nose’ (1948) and
‘Everything should be re-implicated (1954) in Emilio Vedova (Milan:
Charta, 2006), pp. 126–7.

20 Guttuso, Mestiere, op. cit., pp. 239–40.

21 Taylor, Evergood, op. cit., p. 176.

22 There seems to be no record of contact between the two artists, which

would have been unlikely given their very different political and artistic
affiliations.

23 Asger Jorn, Pour La Forme (Editions Alilia: Paris, 2001), p. 11 (first

published by the Internationale Situationniste in 1957); and Discours
aux Pingouins et Autres Écrits (École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts:
Paris, 2001), p. 72–3.

24 Jorn, Discours, op. cit., p. 98 (1949).

25 Ibid., pp. 46, 137.

26 Guttuso, Mestiere, op. cit., p. 238

27 This process is evoked very eloquently by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in

Oeil et Esprit (Gallimard: Paris, 1964), pp. 86–7.

28 Renato Guttuso (1977), op. cit., pp. 30–1.

29 Ibid., p. 50.

30 Herman Baron, Philip Evergood (ACA Gallery: New York, 1946), p. 27.
See also the statement quoted in Hemingway, Artists on the Left, op.
cit., p. 228.

31 Baron, Evergood, op. cit. p. 16.

32 Renato Guttuso (1977), op. cit., pp. 43, 48.

791
33 Ibid., p. 27, first published in 1942.

34 Taylor, Evergood, op. cit., p. 176.

35 See, for example, Guttuso, Interno con Accessori di Studio (damigiana,

cesto e sedia), 1960, oil and gouache on joined sheets of paper laid
down on canvas, 156 × 205 cm, Private Collection.

36 Taylor, Evergood, op. cit., p. 179

37 See, for example, La Discussione, 1959–60, oil and collaged

newspaper on canvas, 220 × 249 cm, Tate, London; image on museum
website and in Guttuso 1912–2012, op. cit., pp. 138–9.

38 This was a widely shared view at the time – see Potts, Experiments,
op. cit., pp. 70–2.

39 See, for example, the comments by the American figurative realist Ben
Shahn about how the painter needs to establish ‘a complete rapport
with his medium … paint has a power itself and in itself’. At the same
time he was deeply critical of the formalist denial of depiction by artists
‘who only manipulate materials’. John D. Morse (ed.), Ben Shahn
(Praeger: New York and Washington, 1972), pp. 85, 83.

40 Fairfield Porter, ‘Evergood Paints a Picture’, Art News, vol. 50 (January

1952), pp. 30–3, 55–6.

41 Peter Selz (ed.), The Work of Jean Dubuffet (Museum of Modern Art:
New York, 1962), p. 72; see also Potts, Experiments, op. cit., pp.
138–45.

42 He offered an extended critique of mainstream Marxist understandings

of value in the book Value and Economy published in 1963; translated
by Peter Shields in Asger Jorn, The Natural Order and Other Texts
(Ashgate: Aldershot and Burlington, 2002).

43 On Jorn and Situationist International, see Karen Kurczynski,

‘Expression as Vandalism: Asger Jorn’s “Modifications”’, Res, vol. 53/
54 (Spring/Autumn 2008), pp. 293–313; and ‘Asger Jorn and the
Avant-Garde: From Helhesten to the Situationist International’, Rutgers
Art Review, vol. 21 (2005), pp. 57–76.

44 Jorn, Discours, op. cit., pp. 143, 145 (1953).

45 Jorn, Forme, op. cit., p. 135.

46 The phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty is a good case in point, though

the measured temper of his writing could hardly be more different from

792
 Jorn’s. For a somewhat different take on Jorn’s blurring of distinctions
between human subjectivity and the non-human material world see Hal
Foster, ‘Creaturely Cobra’, October, no. 141 (Summer 2012), pp. 5–12.

47 It was reissued with some additions in 1963; the later edition is

translated in Jorn, The Natural Order, pp. 231–355.

48 Ibid., p. 256.

49 Ibid., pp. 243–5.

50 Ibid., p. 281.

51 Niels Bohr, Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature (Cambridge

University Press: Cambridge, 1934); first published in Danish in 1929.

52 Jorn, Natural Order, op. cit., p. 267

53 Jorn held to a decidedly non-static view of the basic nature of matter,

ibid., pp. 271, 320.

54 Ibid., p. 278; this he likened to the splitting which occurs when a new
organism comes into being (p. 284).

55 Ibid., p. 278.

56 Ibid., p. 331.

57 Ibid., p. 321.

58 Ibid., p. 322; see also his comment about how such impulses were at
root ‘an aggression or conquest, a reaching out beyond the static ego’,
ibid., p. 263.

59 Ibid., p. 301

60 Ibid., p. 301

61 Erik Steffensen, Asger Jorn: Animator of Painting (Edition Blondal:

Hellerup), 1995, pp. 157–8, from an essay Jorn wrote in 1971.

62 He argued to the contrary that ‘modern man can from now on retain his
faculties, indeed even develop them in these conditions’, Jorn,
Discours, op. cit., p. 310.

63 Jorn, Verlust der Mitte, 1958, oil on canvas, 146 × 114 cm, Stedelijk
Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent.

64 In a painting such as Jorn’s Letter to My Son (1956–7, oil on canvas,

130 × 195.5 cm, Tate, London; image on museum website), given its

793
 title, one might be prompted to see in it an array of vital, possibly
reassuring, or comic apparitions of various kinds, at the same time that
it is not impossible to see in some of them a certain monstrosity and
potentially aggressive power. Perhaps they are no more reassuring
than the figures in fairy tales, or the monsters and humanoid figures on
early medieval churches that Jorn admired.

65 Jorn, Ausverkauf einer Seele, 1958–9, oil with sand on canvas, 200 ×
250 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; image on
museum website.

66 On Jorn’s Stalingrad, see Karen Kurcunski, ‘No Man’s Land’, October,

no. 141 (Summer 2012), pp. 23–52 and Potts, Experiments, op. cit., pp.
383–4.

794
THE SITUATION OF WOMEN
Frances Stracey

‘There is dissimulation everywhere under a coercive regime.’

Charles Fourier
‘All oppression creates a state of war.’ Simone de Beauvoir1

S cattered throughout the first issue of the

Situationist International’s (SI) journal
Internationale situationniste (1958) is a seemingly
random selection of six images of women, an ad-hoc
mixture of bathing beauties smiling, beguiling,
crouching, posing, playing in water and reclining on
horseback [1–6]. With no obvious alterations and no
explicit recodings via captions or speech bubbles,
these images obey the principle of ‘minor
détournements’ (détournements mineurs). A ‘minor’
détournement was defined by the SI as an
appropriated element that had no importance in
itself and so drew its altered meaning(s) from the
new context or location in which it was placed.2
Typically this consisted of press clippings, a neutral
phrase or a commonplace photograph. In this
instance, everyday commercial images were shifted
from their original home in women’s magazines or
pornographic magazines and relocated in the SI’s
revolutionary journal. But to what critical effect?
There seems to be no clear relation between these
images and the anonymous mixture of articles in
which they appear, including the following: ‘Le

795
Bruit et la fureur’ (Anon.); ‘La Lutte pour le controle
des nouvelles techniques de conditionnement’
(Anon.); ‘Problèmes préliminaires à la construction
d’une situation’ (Anon.); ‘Les Situationnistes et
l’automation’ (Jorn); ‘Pas d’indulgences inutiles’
(Bernstein); ‘Action en Belgique contre l’assemblée
des critiques d’art internationaux’ (Anon.).3
Undoubtedly, this process of determinate
misplacement or disjunctive conjuncture worked to
challenge the conventional meaning or role of these
images. No longer circulating in their intended
home, these bikini babes cease to serve as the
props to the goods they were meant to sell, such as
holidays in the sun, beachwear, leisure lifestyles,
etc. The vacuousness of their posing is exaggerated
by the absence of a suitable or expected context.
Instead, they bump and grind against their new
situation. Juxtaposing the material to absurd effect,
the SI succeeds in exposing the gendered,
consumerist fiction that conflates images of woman
with desire and glamour, as seductive traits to be
projected onto the goods they support and promote.
The function of these images is rendered ridiculous
by the commodity’s absence in their new
context. Yet, at the same time, their ornamental and
seductive allure is presupposed and to some extent
maintained. Any jarring effect of their détourned
misplacement relies on their perceived erotic and
superficial appeal, which clashes against the
intellectual critique offered in the texts that they
supplement. The members of the SI are in danger of
replaying a decidedly feminized version of what
Wolfgang Haug defines as the ‘sexual semblance’ of
‘commodity aesthetics’.4 That is to say, they are
reliant on using the sex appeal of these types of
eye-candy as a lure, either to enliven the dull

796
rhetoric of the texts or to capture the interest of a
potential buyer flicking through the journal,
tempting them into reading the group’s critique of
the society of the spectacle. In such a case, a
limited transformation has occurred at the level of
the reader, since the images are no longer directed
at a presupposed female audience – the anticipated
consumers of women’s magazines from where these
images were sourced. Indeed, the same-sex
audience for these images complicates heterosexist
readings of them. And it should be noted that the
SI’s ideal reader was not male or of a fixed sex or
gender. These examples of minor détournements
set up an ambiguous and fraught oscillation: on the
one hand, they replay the fetishized character of the
commodity-image or spectacle; on the other, they
transform its workings by relocating it to a new,
out-of-place, avant-garde context that exposes the
ludicrously reductive function and fiction of the
sign-woman as the stand-in for sexual semblance as
such.

797
1 From
Internationale
situationniste, no. 1
(June 1958), p. 5.

798
 2 From
Internationale
situationniste,
no. 1 (June
1958), p. 7.

This analysis works in so far as the images are

treated somewhat generically, as incidences of
refunctioned or détourned spectacles. A more
substantive and complex reading of the same
images emerges, however, if the particularity of
their historical context is taken into account, such
as the specific types of postwar ‘women’s’
magazines in which they appeared. In an interview
with Michèle Bernstein in 1999, I asked why these
bikini-babe images were selected. Significantly, she
began her answer by admitting that she was
responsible for putting images into the SI’s journal.
Her reason for including images in general was

799
prompted by Lewis Carroll, who apparently said,
‘what is the use of a story without pictures’. This
allusion may appear to deflate their significance.
But I think it suggests that a particular use was at
stake in the détournement of images from the world
of popular, commercial-press culture, especially
when it is considered that they were directed at a
particular class of female consumers who bought
magazines such as Elle (founded in 1945) and Marie
Claire (founded in 1937 and running until 1944, and
revived in 1954), which Bernstein acknowledged
were the sources for the images. By the late 1950s,
both Elle and Marie Claire had undergone a
profound shift in the ideal of femininity promoted in
their pages. During the 1940s, the focus had been
on the ‘femme au foyer’, whose duty it was to keep
a good home even in
times of adversity (there was still rationing at this
time). Many articles concentrated on ideas of
domestic efficiency and on women’s contribution to
rebuilding the French economy by giving birth.
Despite women’s role in the Resistance, which had
helped to secure their right to vote in 1944, the
postwar role expected of women was still limited to
being a good mother and housekeeper.5
Interestingly, there were no advertisements in these
magazines during the 1940s, so selling goods
(which were scarce after the war) was not the
priority. The first advertisement for a washing
machine appeared in Elle in November 1949.6 But
selling a particular feminine role model certainly
was a priority.
By the late 1950s, however, advertising à
l’Américain was in full swing, with both magazines
displaying glossy images of modern ‘must have’
household machines and gadgets, even if they were

800
well beyond the average worker’s budget. Promoted
alongside such supposedly labour-saving devices
was a new ideal of the ‘superwoman’, targeting and
challenging its young female audience, typically
teachers or secretaries, to live up to the changing
roles of women in the labour markets of the late
1950s and early 1960s, when more than the
reproduction of children was necessary to rebuild
the French economy. Surveys carried out by these
magazines revealed that for these new women a life
at home was no longer sufficient or desired.7
Women’s increasing financial contribution to the
home was also reflected in surveys that showed the
changing attitudes and expectations of men, who
reportedly considered intelligence and common
sense at the top of the list of qualities of an ideal
wife, with domestic skills dropping to the bottom.8
Women were of course still expected to do the
‘double
shift’, however, earning a wage on top of cleaning,
cooking and bringing up baby. In fact, magazines
such as Elle were promoting a very limited
emancipation for women via gadgets, running
advertisements such as ‘Moulinex liberates women’.
In the 1950s, women still had few legal rights over
their bodies, parental home or bank accounts, and
these were not instituted until the late 1960s. But
during this time, the image of woman was in flux,
with an older ideal waning and a newer one yet to
be fully formed. For the young, upwardly mobile
audience of Elle or Marie Claire the ‘femme au
foyer’ may not have been for them, but the roles on
offer were still experienced as artificial, be it
worker, citizen, mother or a glamourous ‘do-it-all,
have-it-all’ superwoman.

801
 3 From Internationale
situationniste, no. 1 (June
1958), p. 11.

The reality of everyday life for most women was

more banal and tedious, and certainly at odds with
the shiny ‘alien settings of chrome and Formica’
advertised in magazines and forming the ideal
domestic settings of American movies that
inundated France after the war.9 A census in 1946
revealed that 20 per cent of dwellings in Paris had
no running water, 77 per cent had no bathroom and
54 per cent had no inside lavatory.10 Even those
who managed to move out of the inner-city slums to
the new low-rent ‘grands ensembles’ – the suburban
housing projects located on the outskirts of Paris –
could not afford luxury items such as fridges and
washing machines. Indeed, a survey in 1956 showed
that 60 per cent of housewives questioned wanted
such labour-saving devices but none could afford

802
the substantial initial outlay.11 This proves that the
burgeoning consumer or affluent society was
socially selective, forcing an economic division
between the haves and the have-nots, as well as a
gender division between working men who were
expected to provide these goods and their
non-working wives who wanted them.

4 From Internationale
situationniste, no. 1 (June
1958), p. 26.

803
 5 From
Internationale
situationniste, no. 1
(June 1958), p. 24.

For the SI, everyone – male or female – was

subjected to the alienating conditions of the society
of the spectacle. As they put it in 1953: ‘A mental
disease has swept the planet: banalization.
Everyone is hypnotized by production and
conveniences – sewage system, elevator, bathroom,
washing machine.’12 Yet, the effects of this
banalization were not symmetrical or
gender-neutral, but rather uneven and biased. As
Kristin Ross aptly describes it: ‘Women undergo the

804
everyday – its humiliations and tediums as well as
its pleasures – more than men. The housewife, that
newly renovated post-war creation, is mired in the
quotidian; she cannot escape it.’13 In the 1950s, it
was the category of ‘woman’ that the society of the
spectacle subjected to the coercive and
dissimulating drives of everyday life more heavily
than any other, constantly projecting fantasy
images of the proper way to look, act, cook, etc.
Images of women became the central site for the
alienating machinations of the spectacle.
So as representatives of the spectacle’s technique
of everyday control and regimentation, the images
of women in the SI’s journal are more illustrative of
the content of the texts in which they appear than it
first seems. For example, the article ‘The
Situationists and Automation’ concerns the
deadening effects of standardization on our desires
that results in ‘a total degradation of human life or
the possibility of continually discovering new
desires’; it is accompanied by a stereotypical
bathing
beauty.14 ‘The Battle for the Control of New
Techniques of Conditioning’ talks of a race between
free artists and the police in experimenting with,
and developing the use of, new techniques of
conditioning, such as advertising; a battle, that is,
to find a non-repressive use that contests the
spectacle’s controlled policing. This text is
accompanied by an image of a semi-naked woman
‘flashing’, which condenses the criminalized act of
indecent exposure with the titillating allure of the
striptease.
From Bernstein’s perspective, however, these
‘bikini babes’ had two specific meanings to be

805
played with. First up, they were ‘charmant’ and
‘splendid demonstrations of the natural look’, in the
sense that they no longer bore what she called
‘secondary sexual attractions’, such as make-up,
high heels, lacquered hairdos, all attributes of
high-maintenance screen idols like Betty Grable and
Marilyn Monroe.15 Such a ‘natural look’ at that time
symbolized liberation from an artificially contained
and concealed body, exemplified by the heavily
corseted ‘New Look’ created in 1947 by Christian
Dior. This restrictive garment can be understood as
part of France’s postwar ‘return to order’, when
women who worked in the war were expected to
free up their jobs for the returning soldiers and
suture themselves back into the role of housewife or
glamorous superwomen. There are, of course,
problems with Bernstein’s definition of the natural
look. It tends to reinforce a rather essentialist
reading of these images, as signs of the category of
‘natural woman’, at home in her essential element
of water or playing with animals. What is glossed
over is the obvious fact that the bikini-clad body is
not natural, but a historically (un)dressed body,
disciplined by a particular regime of zoned
eroticization. It may even be seen as representative
of a certain ‘body fascism’ with regards to the
proper or socially acceptable type of body, namely
youthful and of a certain weight, permitted to be
displayed in this garment and in magazines such as
Elle. The bikini is a peep-show garment, structured
to draw attention to the very parts it barely covers,
fragmenting the female body into erotic zones. Its
shocking and provocative appeal can be gleaned
from the fact that it took its name from the US
atomic-weapons testing in the Pacific Ocean near
Bikini Atoll. In the wake of the devastation wrought

806
by such bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945,
things considered intense or shocking were referred
to as ‘atomic’, and seductive or provocative women
were often referred to as ‘bombshells’. Therefore, it
is perhaps not a surprise that when two Frenchmen
independently designed skimpy alternatives to the
one-piece swimsuit in the summer of 1946, both
acquired nuclear nicknames. Jacques Heim created
a tiny two-piece called the ‘atome’; Louis Reard
introduced his design on 5 July, only four days after
the United States had begun testing in the Bikini
Atoll. In a bold marketing ploy, Reard named his
creation ‘le bikini’, implying that it was as explosive
an invention as the bomb. It is hard not to think that
it was precisely the provocative frisson of these
images that Bernstein (anonymously, on behalf of
the SI) was importing into the SI’s texts.

6 From Internationale situationniste, no.

1 (June 1958), p. 30.

Bernstein’s second interest in using these images of

bikini babes presents a very different model of the
body at stake. This is what she called their
‘paraplegic’ aspect. Most of the women on display
were, in a certain sense, deformed in some way,

807
disabled through the cropping of limbs. Their legs,
feet and arms were effectively amputated by the
photographic frame. In psychoanalytical terms,
rather than a narcissistic desire represented by a
whole body image, here circulates a desire for a
pre-symbolic, pre-Oedipal body, represented by
these sadistic ‘part objects’, bodies that are
fragmented or castrated at the level of the visible.
As photographic images, they are guillotined by the
shutter and cut up by the processes of framing and
cropping.16 No photograph is ever whole. Its frame
is porous to what is located outside of it, and its
meanings are supplemented by interaction with
what comes up against its borders: other images
and texts from different spaces and times.
Such an unstable web of signification is inherent to
the montage aesthetic of détournement itself. But
what needs to be resisted is a tendency to claim a
general or transhistorical reading of the SI’s
détourned images. The SI did not endorse the
technique of appropriation per se. They insisted
that to critically reuse existing images required an
understanding of the targeted audience and the
dominant meanings or codes in order to recode
them. The SI was emphatic in defining
détournement as a targeted tactic, reliant on
established meanings in order to see and
comprehend their undoing. I would argue that it is
in the gap opened up by the slippage of meaning
between a given signified (code) and signifier
(material support) – which takes place through the
ruination of the contingent or arbitrary, yet
historical, linkage between the two terms of the
sign – that a transformation emerges. Yet, the risk
of misrecognition haunts the replaying of given
images. This can be seen in the SI’s risk of

808
repeating, rather than undoing, the sexist
codification of these pictures. In order to
deconstruct this code and to reconstruct their
subversive potential, it is necessary to locate the
specific postwar context of these images, even if
this is something that the SI themselves failed to do.
For example, what Bernstein forgot to mention was
that one of these ‘amputees’, reclining on
horseback, was a culturally significant icon from the
1950s, namely Brigitte Bardot [6]. But I think such
naming is crucial when considering détournement
as a targeted assault. It exposes how images have
particular, material affects, such as contributing to
forms of socialization and processes of identification
and dis/mis-identifications. In the late 1950s, Bardot
stood for a new ideal of ‘woman’. Claire Laubier
remarks that for the younger cinema-going
generation of the time, the 1956 release of Roger
Vadim’s film Et Dieu créa la Femme (And God
Created Woman), starring Bardot as the adolescent
heroine Juliette, represented a transformed
portrayal of femininity. Instead of romantic,
vulnerable women who like to please men, such as
Monroe, or the distant, unobtainable screen star,
such as the icy princess Grace Kelly, here was a
more ‘earthy’, ‘identifiable’ female character that
defied received morality. In her bare feet and blue
jeans, she represented a sexually emancipated
‘femme-enfant’, a ‘Lolita with attitude’, a sort of
female James Dean, as was noted at the time.17 The
latter comparison presents a somewhat ambiguous
figure of a female, as a man in drag, conferring on
Bardot a masculine aura of independence and
rebelliousness, whose predatory sexual encounters
were undertaken without guilt or remorse. One
critic even remarked that from the back she looked

809
like a man, a reference to her athletic and sinuous
frame. Whatever the gender ambiguity (or perhaps
because of it), she symbolized a more instinctive
(hence still naturalistic) subject, for whom men
became ‘l’homme object’ – a feminine reversal that
mirrors the conventional masculine, heterosexist
desire that subjugates and objectifies its others.
Nevertheless, she was a sign of sexual liberation, a
reversal of the sex roles figured in the image of
female revolt. No longer passive, she was an
autonomous agent pursing her own intense
experiences. And unlike the equally aggressive and
predatory cinematic figure of the femme fatale, she
did not have to die for her indiscretions. Perhaps
this sign of rebellion or of the return of the
repressed explains why the SI appropriated the
particular image of Bardot into their texts.
Of course, Bardot also represented a home-grown –
that is, French – rebel with a cause. This
nationalized heroine could be read as a critique of
what the SI described as France’s postwar
colonization by American culture. The Marshall Plan
of 1948 did indeed set up an unequal trading, a sort
of one-way street whereby all things American
could flow in, but all things French stayed at
home.18 This Americanization was also read in
terms of a feminization or effeminization and
emasculation of French culture. While such terms
suggest a heterosexist orientation, they
nevertheless expose consumer culture as feminized,
grasping something of the dominant symbolic
codings of advertising at that time in which the
reified image of woman was predominant. It also
recognizes a particular gendered process of deceit
or disavowal, in which the image of woman veils or
dissembles what all of us, men included, are

810
subjected to within the alienating logic of the
commodity-form.

7 From Internationale situationniste, no. 9 (August

1964), p. 21.

Abusif images

In issue 9 of Internationale situationniste (August

1964), three images of women appeared that may
seem similar to the previous ones but present
significant differences. They are different partly in
so far as two of the images were sourced not from
women’s magazines but from porn mags such as
Playboy (first published in 1953), thereby
presupposing an exclusively male audience. Also,
unlike the bikini-babe images, all three can be
considered as examples of ‘exorbitant’ or
‘excessive’ détournements (détournements abusifs).
In contrast to a minor détournement, an exorbitant
détournement was defined as the
recontextualization of an intrinsically significant

811
element, which derives a different scope from the
new context, for example, a slogan by Saint-Just or
a sequence from a Sergei Eisenstein film. This
abusif form involves some alteration to the pillaged
element, such as the addition of a speech-bubble or
a new caption, as well as a new situation. Despite
not being significant images by the likes of
Eisenstein, these soft-porn images fit the abusif bill
in being spatially relocated and significantly altered
or damaged by the inclusion of an additional
element. I will refer to them as ‘pop-porn’ images –
my neologism to indicate the commercial
massification of sexuality or pornography at stake
within them.

8 From Internationale
situationniste, no. 9 (August
1964), p. 36.

812
Let us consider the first [7]: naked on a boat, with a
sailor hat at a jaunty angle, removed bikini strewn
in the background, glass in hand, the girl’s bubbled
utterance
reads: ‘I know of nothing better than to sleep with
an Asturien miner. They’re real men!’ And the
second [8]: reclining in a hammock, glancing over
her shoulder from her shadowy space, the girl
bubbles the words, ‘The emancipation of the
proletariat will be the work of the proletariat itself!’
These acts of excessive détournement are
paradoxically both transformative and complicit in
their effects. They are transforming in that the
usually silent porn star of the magazine tableau not
only looks directly at the viewer, but is also
permitted to talk back. By breaking the auratic or
distanced silence of her typically mute visual
appeal, the images trouble the voyeuristic
construction of most pornographic pictures. The
private male gaze solicited by conventional porn
mags is also abandoned by their new setting within
the Internationale situationniste, which is (at least
intended to be) public and ungendered. However,
these images remain complicit with the sexual
regime from which they are drawn in numerous
ways. Consider what these women are permitted to
voice and whose desire they speak of. In the first,
the reduction of the woman’s desire to the task of
pleasing and serving men reinscribes the
fantasmatic presupposition of conventional
heterosexist pornography. The desires
ventriloquized here are, of course, those of the SI,
and this act could be considered as a gesture of
empowerment in that the empty image-spectacle is
given a concrete, political consciousness. The
reference to the Asturien miners was to a

813
contemporary Spanish crisis, namely one of the
longest-running miners’ strikes, virtually continuous
since 1962. To speak openly in favour of it was to
risk state censure and police arrest, hence any
supportive images or literature, such as the SI’s,
had to be smuggled into Spain clandestinely. This
very censure is itself parodied by the use of a
censored image.
A label was in fact given to porn images in the
1960s: ‘the sulphur of liberation’.19 This invokes a
poisonous act of desublimation, in so far as
pornography freed up sexual taboos in the form of
exposed bodies, but only to convert them into
sexualized commodities for the porn industry. This
may be an example of what Marcuse termed
‘repressive desublimation’, whereby a loosening of
social repressions served a process of
redisciplining, in this case the control of the body
for monetary purposes. Yet, disciplined or
otherwise, these images were socially provocative,
and it is perhaps this aspect that the SI intended to
incorporate into their revolutionary texts. Despite
the fact that even the détourned proletarianization
of the second image does not necessarily challenge
the conventional erotics deployed here, it is still the
female body that acts as the ground for subversive
or transgressive tactics. The sexual allure of the
commodified female figure gets conflated with the
sign for liberation as such. Sexual difference
continues to drive the economy of the SI’s selected
pop-porn images, in that the woman-as-sign or
spectacle is the metonymic substitution of political
revolution (the miners’ strike) for sexual revolution.
The SI are decidedly of their time in this respect.
But by presenting the sign-woman as an ideal figure
for all rebels to identify with, in the sense of being

814
privileged as the most appropriate visual form for
the SI’s desire for revolution, an ambiguous process
of cross-gendered projection is staged.
These pop-porn images also interact with the texts
with which they are juxtaposed. The Asturien miner
example is collaged among a medley of newspaper
clippings sourced from French papers such as Le
Monde and Paris-Presse, the British Observer and
the Japanese Zenshin. What these clippings share is
their insurgent content. References are made to
various terrorist activities and armed insurrections
carried out by students in Barcelona and Madrid.
Support is given to various strikes, such as that of
dockers in Denmark and sailors in Rio de Janeiro.
Praise is given to the violent student protests
against the presence of American Polaris
submarines in Japan. All the events alluded to dated
from 1963–4 and so are contemporaneous with the
publication of the SI’s journal. The images of
women are therefore moored against international
acts of rebellion or terrorist insurgency against
governments and the sociopolitical status quo. As
with the ready-made texts, these ready-made, but
altered, pop-porn images act as examples of what
Greil Marcus describes as the SI’s practice of
‘intellectual terrorism’.20 This term refers to their
détournement, theft and thus refusal of the
intellectual property rights of published images. In
this way, Marcus argues, the journal – itself
copyright free – becomes a laboratory for
experiments in ‘counter-language’ (and I would add
‘counter-spectacles’), whereby détournement
becomes an act of ‘aesthetic occupation of enemy
territory, a raid launched to seize the familiar and
turn it into the other, a war waged on a field of
action without boundaries and without rules’.21 This

815
is an apt description of the anarchic tendency of
détournement, or what Marcus defines as, ‘a
politics of subversive quotation, of cutting the vocal
cords of every empowered speaker’.22 In the case of
the pop-porn images, I would argue it is also a case
of metaphorically giving the disempowered a voice.
As the Situationist Gil Wolman said of
détournement: ‘Any sign – any street,
advertisement, painting, text, any representation of
a society’s idea of happiness – is susceptible to
conversion into something else, even its opposite.’23
The outcomes of such reversals of perspective,
however, depend on the contingency of the act of
détournement, the concrete historical moment and
context in which it is put into operation. When this
situation changes, the reversal changes too or is
even lost altogether.
In the case of the proletarianized porn star [8], she
circulates amidst commentaries on the anarchist
tendency of the SI group itself. The longest collaged
snippet makes reference to a recent edition of the
English magazine Tamesis (March 1964), which
published an English translation (by David Arnott)
of the SI’s text ‘All the King’s Men’, first published
in issue 8 of Internationale situationniste (January
1963). The content of this text concerned the
insubordination of words. Even if words are made to
work on behalf of the dominant organization of life
(the spectacle), they are not therefore completely
automated: ‘Unfortunately for the theoreticians of
information, words are not in themselves
“informationist”; they embody forces that can upset
the most careful calculation.’24 Therefore, the SI
concluded that the so-called ‘newspeak’ of the
spectacle (we can add here news images), its
militarization of communication into information,

816
was by no means inevitable. For the SI, this opened
up the possibility for a new, immanently forged,
anti-spectaclist poetry of life.
If these two pop-porn images were anonymously
produced, the third and final one [9] was attributed
to the Scandinavian Situationist J. V. Martin, who
along with Bernstein, as well as Jan Strijbosch and
Raoul Vaneigem, was an editor of this issue of the
journal. The image, as with Bernstein’s Bardot, was
appropriated from the popular commercial press.
But unlike Bardot, this women has a speech bubble
added, as well as an atypical, lengthy, explanatory,
supporting caption that translates as follows:

Echoing the Spanish ‘comics’, which in a single blow received

political censure as well as moral censure from priests, the SI
distributed this photograph in Denmark on the occasion of the
engagement of the daughter of the Danish, social-democratic king
with the Greek sovereign, following polite protestations from the
left. Christine Keeler, in the famous photo attributed to Tony
Armstrong-Jones, here declares: ‘As the SI says, it is more
honourable to be a prostitute like me than the wife of the fascist
Constantin.’25

J. V. Martin produced a thousand copies of this

image. The year before, Christine Keeler had
become famous for having simultaneous sexual
affairs with both a Soviet naval officer, Eugene
Ivanov, and the British secretary of state for
defence, John Profumo. Profumo lied about the
affair and was later forced to resign. It was during
this scandal that the celebrated photograph of
Keeler naked, astride a copy of the Danish designer
Arne Jacobsen’s ‘ant chair’, appeared. The image
itself was apparently produced to promote a motion
picture that was never realized. So Martin’s

817
détournement of this image drew on its incendiary
context.

9 From Internationale
situationniste, no. 9
(August 1964), p. 37.

The other textual supports to this image include a

quotation from Guy Atkins’ book Asger Jorn,
published in 1964. It sets out the differences
between Jorn’s involvement with the COBRA group
and the SI. COBRA is described as a gregarious
movement, with little discipline, which accounted
for its purported growing out of control. The SI was,
on the contrary, a closed and tight-knit group, less
susceptible to breaks because of its disciplined and

818
coherent character. Yet, the relation of text to
image contradicts this premise by being far from
coherent or disciplined in the outcome of its
meaning. The SI’s practice turns on itself. It must
be emphasized that its détournements could, in
general, be subjected to retranslations and
alternative slippages of meaning.

Situationist women

Susan Rubin Suleiman has written that, ‘[unlike the

Surrealists,] the Situationists seem to have ignored
women altogether, except perhaps as sex objects in
the most banal sense’.26 This comment is, as I hope
I have shown, characteristic of the neglected
consideration of the SI by feminist readings. It
reveals a certain reconstruction and
acceptance of Surrealism by branches of a feminist,
psychoanalytically informed cultural criticism, for
which (typically) man-made images of women have
been successfully mined for their sociopsychic
revelations of masculinist fantasies of femininity.
This derives, in part, from the image culture of the
1920s and 1930s, especially its comparatively
closeted representations of sexuality, which enabled
any exposure of the body (Surrealist or otherwise)
to assume a scandalous or titillating allure. In
contrast, the SI confronted the media culture of the
late 1950s and 1960s, when images of sexuality are
less coy, ‘letting it all hang out’. In this culture of
openness, feminist-psychoanalytical readings
derived from methods of desublimation are
hard-pressed to deal with the blatant or conscious
(not unconscious) exposure of desires and fantasies
that are exploited to sell goods in the pages of
magazines. I have argued that the SI’s

819
appropriation of such conscious fantasies of
femininity can also be critically mined to explain
how and why such avowed (not disavowed) images,
strategically expose the dissimulating or
spectacliste character of the reigning image
economy of the 1950s and 1960s, which obviously
persists today in numerous ways.27 However,
although I hope to have punctured the sense that
the Situationists ‘ignored women altogether’, I
concede that the situation of women in the SI is
muted. But the question is how and why?
In important respects the reasons only confirm the
suspicions of feminist commentators. In the first
place there simply were not many women involved.
Of the seventy members of the SI listed, only seven
were women during the period 1957–67 (one of
whom, Kata Lindell, subsequently became a man),
and there were none between 1967 and the SI’s
dissolution in 1972.28 And of these seven, only two
can be described as active contributors in the sense
of having a substantive role in producing and taking
part in the construction of situations that utilized a
variety of tactical formats including painting,
sculptural tableaux, journal articles and books:
Bernstein and Jacqueline De Jong.29 Such a small
contingency of women seems to have encouraged a
misrepresentation of the SI as a men’s club. But not
only does this overshadow the fact that even this
small contingency compares favourably with the
female participants in other avant-garde artistic
groups, it also downplays the contributions of
Bernstein and De Jong.
Bernstein is perhaps not the best witness to her
contributions to the SI, claiming that she ‘only took
notes for the SI’. This may be recognized as a form

820
of feminine self-effacement perhaps induced by
male self-assertion. But it is mischievously modest.
Before becoming editor of Internationale
situationniste, Bernstein had been an active
contributor to the Lettrist International group (a
member from 1952 to its integration with the SI in
1957) and an editor, not just mimeographer/typist,
of their freely distributed journal Potlatch.30 As a
member of the SI from its inception, she not only
took notes during their conferences but also
contributed articles to their journal and was a
member of its editorial team, along with five or six
others (men), from 1963 to 1966.31 In the first issue
of Internationale situationniste, Bernstein produced
one of the
more hard-core SI texts called ‘Pas d’indulgences
inutiles’ (No useless leniency), which justified acts
of absolute exclusion from the group so as to
maintain its kernel of truth, intercut with a
détourned image of a bikini babe – undoubtedly
selected by Bernstein herself.32 Another important
contribution was her article ‘Sunset Boulevard’, in
praise of the cinematic technique of Alain Resnais’s
Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) and against the new
novel exemplified by the likes of Alain Robbe-Grillet
and films such as The Last Year at Marienbad.33
Among Bernstein’s activities outside the SI, she
wrote a ‘eulogy’ to Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio’s model
of ‘Industrial Painting’, in praise of its machinic,
anti-authorial, collective, mass production.34 She
also created anti-art works for the first and last
so-called Situationist exhibition called ‘Destruktion
Af RSG 6’. This consisted of a series of ‘Alternative
Victories’; coincidentally an image and description
of the latter was reproduced in issue 9 of
Internationale situationniste, the same issue in

821
which the bikini babes and pop-porn images
appeared.35
As a former – or rather, dropped-out – Sorbonne
student, Bernstein was considered one of the best
writers in the group, and one of the few adept in
English, which landed her the task of writing an
article introducing the SI to the anglophone world
for the Times Literary Supplement in 1964.36 She
also wrote two novels, the first of which was called
Tous les chevaux du roi (All the king’s men – a
reference to Lewis Carroll again), published in 1960
by the prestigious house Buchet-Chastel. It depicted
the everyday lives and loves of a young, modern
couple called Genevieve and Gilles – versions of
herself and her then husband Guy Debord (they
were married from 1954 to 1971). There are
psychogeographical wanderings through Paris;
sexual intrigue as the two share a female lover
called Carol; and in one scene where Gilles is asked
what he is so busy with all the time, he replies
‘reification’. ‘It must be a lot of work’, his young
lover says, ‘with lots of books and papers on a big
table.’ ‘No’, replies Gilles, ‘mostly I just drift
around.’37 This same dialogue would reappear as
the speech-bubbles of two wandering cowboys on
the cover of ‘The Return of the Durutti Column’, a
tract distributed as a preamble to the ‘On the
Poverty of Student Life’ pamphlet that appeared in
1966 during the student uprisings in Strasbourg.
Bernstein’s second novel, La Nuit (The night), was
also published by Buchet-Chastel in 1961. Here she
retells the same story as in the first novel, but in the
style of the ‘new novel’, replacing a linear narrative
with a multiplicity of perspectives. As a
consequence, the story appears in the form of a
series of disconnected scenarios centred around

822
night-time dérives about Paris. Both books’ themes
of adultery and polymorphous sexuality mirrored
the sexual ambiguity of Bernstein herself: ‘I don’t
know if I was bisexual then, even though I looked
like a boy and was thought to be a dyke. Later I
became more one way.’38 The SI invented the term
‘marsupial’ to describe such a sexually ambiguous
woman or androgynous ‘anti-woman’.39 This
freedom of sexuality within the group contradicts
the heterosexual perspective typically attributed to
its détourned images of women.
Bernstein contributed to the SI in crucial indirect
ways too. For example, it was through her contacts
at Buchet-Chastel that Debord was able to publish
The Society of the Spectacle. More importantly still,
perhaps, her waged labour provided necessary
funds both to live and to produce the glossy pages
and shiny metallic covers of their journal, as well as
backing other projects such as the short-lived
attempt to open a bar called Le Methode, in homage
to Descartes. She was the hidden motor running the
SI, its economic secret. The various jobs she has
been credited with include a race-track
prognosticator, a horoscopist, a publisher’s
assistant, a secretary at Éditions de Navarre, a
journalist for the newspaper Libération and,
surprisingly perhaps, a successful advertising
director. With regards to the latter, Bernstein
claimed, ‘To us, you understand, it was all
spectacle; advertising was not worse than anything
else. We took our money where we could find it.’40
It is worth mentioning that a year after she divorced
Debord in 1971 – that is, also after she no longer
provided money to him or the SI, or what was left of
it by then – the group dissolved.

823
De Jong’s encounter with the SI was briefer; she
was a member from the late 1950s to her expulsion
in March 1962. She first became aware of the SI
through an artist called Renee Nele (herself
excluded from the SI in February 1962) and Nele’s
contact with the German avant-garde group Gruppe
Spur.41 When De Jong first met Jorn and Debord it
was in Amsterdam while she was working at the
Stedelijk Museum. The story goes that Jorn fell in
love with her at first sight and it was through him
that she joined the SI, allegedly to help organize
revolutionary adventures in Amsterdam.42 With
regards to the status of women in the group at that
time, De Jong admits that there were always young
girls hanging around Michèle and Guy, and that she
was one of them. But, according to Bernstein, who
was and remains a good friend of De Jong’s, her
position, ‘as a very young, single-minded and
unattached person was different’.43
One of De Jong’s first collaborations with the SI was
what she describes as a ‘gesamt’ (that is,
collaborative) work, produced during the fifth SI
conference held in Gothenburg in 1961. It
comprised a détourned painting with the heads of
the contributors collaged onto the bodies of
frolicking peasant-folk types: from left to right, the
participants are named as, J. V. Martin, De Jong,
Nash, Kunzelmann and Debord. De Jong in fact
mentions an earlier collaboration when she visited
Pinot-Gallizio’s experimental laboratory in Alba,
Italy, in 1960. There she participated in the
collective and anonymous production of rolls of
Industrial Painting, examples of which had already
been exhibited in Turin (1958) and Paris (1959). At
the Gothenburg conference, De Jong proposed
publishing an English-language journal to be called

824
the Situationist Times. Ironically, it was produced
only after her expulsion in 1962. This resulted from
her solidarity with the Gruppe Spur, which was
excluded in February 1962 on the pretext of its
being too artistic. The expulsion took the form of a
pamphlet published without commentary through
the SI’s central committee and undersigned by
Debord, Kotanyi,
Vaneigem and Uwe Lausen, the latter a former
member of the Gruppe Spur. Problems about the
role of artists had already arisen at the conference,
much to the displeasure of practising artists such as
Heimrad Prem and Jorn’s brother, Jorgen Nash.
But, for De Jong the 1962 pamphlet was more about
petty jealousies and backstabbing.
While Nash and the other Spurists set up a Second
Situationist International, a so-called ‘New
Imaginist Bauhaus’ at Nash’s farm refuge,
Drakabygett, in Sweden, De Jong finally got round
to producing her journal, somewhat out of rage she
admits. Through Jorn (who had resigned from the SI
in April 1961), she managed to get Noel Arnaud to
edit the first two issues. He was already an
experienced editor of avant-garde journals such as
La Révolution surréaliste.44 These first two editions
were Rotaprint productions printed in East Holland
on a rotary press and distributed in Paris. When De
Jong better understood the process of journal
production and distribution, she took over as the
principal editor and publisher. Through the
publisher P. V. Glob, another friend of Jorn’s, the
Situationist Times expanded its distribution to other
European countries until it got into financial
trouble. After the sixth issue, the journal folded in
1967. Apparently, issue no. 7 was ready to go to
press but there was no money to print it up; its

825
theme was the ‘wheel’ – following earlier issues
themed around ‘the ring’, ‘the spiral’ and ‘the
labyrinth’. In stark contrast to Internationale
situationniste, the Situationist Times was printed in
bold colour and could be described as more artistic
in that images and its visual appearance were a
central aspect, and these outweighed more
politically rigorous, theoretical texts.
On closer scrutiny, it is clear that both Bernstein
and De Jong had considerable influence and
effectiveness within the SI, despite the dominance
of certain male members, notably Debord. And it is
evident that their contributions were tied, if not
literally married, to leading male lights. In an
interview, De Jong endorsed a remark by Bernstein
that, ‘I, myself and others were wives with an
absolute uncritical solidarity towards Debord and
obviously the SI in general’; De Jong went on to
claim that it was because of this that ‘the
expressions of the few women present left behind
no traces’.45 These comments indicate the decisive
ambiguity that pervades the situation of women in
the group. In one sense, they may be read as a
declaration of subordination, of both these
individual women and women’s issues as a whole. In
another, they declare a solidarity between women
and men, between women and the SI, and between
the SI and women. This solidarity should be
subjected to scrutiny by feminist criticism, but such
scrutiny should not blind itself to the political
emancipation of women through revolutionary
politics that are not dedicated to women
exclusively. The fact is that, when faced with
questions about the impoverished role of women in
the SI, both Bernstein and De Jong appeal not to
feminism but to a revolutionary identity that

826
transcends sex, sexuality or gender. It is to these
considerations of revolutionary identity and
organization that the situation of women in the SI
leads us.
The SI’s politics and mode of revolutionary
organization was based on a critique of all forms of
separation or division, such as that between
workers and non-workers, young and old, blacks
and whites, men and women. The danger of what
the SI understood as separatist or micro-politics,
such as anti-racism or anti-sexism, was its
distraction from a critique of the totality of the
spectacle. As the SI neatly put it, any singular or
micro-revolt against the society of the spectacle
‘reassures the society because it supposedly
remains partial, pigeonholed in the apartheid of
“youth problems” (analogous to “women’s issues”
or the “black question”) and is soon outgrown’.46
For the SI, only a total transformation of the
socioeconomic conditions of spectacle – for
example, its conversion into a form of
non-authoritarian communism based on the model
of workers’ councils – would or could bring about an
end to a society based on alienated divisions. This is
not say that the SI failed to recognize actually
existing discrepancies between different social
groups – see, for instance, their 1965 essay on the
Los Angeles Watts riots, or their support of the
battle for an independent Algeria, which includes a
critique of the lack of freedom for women in this
context.47
The broader question for the SI was how to
eradicate such prejudicial marginalizations and
hierarchical exploitations. The answer was always
at the level of totality, of a total war on the

827
spectacle, typically expressed in terms of a class
war between those in control, the so-called
directors of the spectacle, and those who were
dominated by it, the so-called executants. Or to use
the SI’s exact terminology, borrowed from Debord’s
contact with Cornelius Castoriadis’s analysis in the
group Socialisme ou Barbarie, a class war between
‘order-givers’ and ‘order-takers’. These terms
entailed an expansion of the Marxian definition of
the proletarian class in that the order-takers now
included not only the workers, but also their
managers and various technocrats – that is, those
who did not own the factories – those out of work,
or who refused to work, thieves and vagabonds,
abject figures dismissed by Marx as the ‘lumpen’.
Just as the SI had a diverse yet particular range of
cultural avant-gardist precursors – Dada,
Constructivism, Surrealism, COBRA, Lettrism – so
too they had specific political influences, from
anarchism to non-authoritarian socialism, or what
Richard Gombin calls the ‘radical tradition’
comprised of a non-aligned, non-Party-based
leftism.48 The principal model of revolutionary
organization appropriated by the SI was that of
workers’ councils: but not before subjecting it to a
sustained critique that exposed its historical
failures. In other words, the SI’s support of this
model was contingent upon an updated appraisal of
its continuing use-value within the present moment.
In two key texts from 1969, ‘Preliminaries on the
Councils and Councilist Organization’ (Riesel) and
‘Notice to the Civilized Concerning Generalized
Self-Management’ (Vaneigem), criticisms were laid
out concerning ‘councilist ideology’, especially the
tendency of ‘separation’ that had plagued existent
councilist movements.49 Not only did many workers’

828
councils maintain a division of labour, but in
practice (if not in theory) there
was often a separation between the elected
spokesperson and those doing the electing – this
despite their avowed principles of direct
democracy, under which the status of elected
representatives is revocable at any moment. It was
found, in fact, that those elected often operated
independently of its constitutive body of voters, and
not always on their behalf or for their benefit. For
Riesel, such disjunctions can be surmounted only by
‘making the local general assemblies of all the
proletarians in revolution the council itself, from
which any delegation must derive its power at every
moment’.50
On the plus side, however, council communism and
workers’ councils (in a form based on the SI’s
appropriation of the ideas of Anton Pannekoek)
were founded on the principle of individual
autonomy, in the guise of a self-creating
species-being, without the need of an ‘other’
stepping in to represent oneself, with the attendant
risk of reducing the difference of individual
singularity to the class of the same: of some ‘other’
representative becoming one’s substitute. This
explains the SI’s disdain of Leninism and Stalinism,
where the head or leader ruled over the body of a
subjugated proletariat – that is, the order-givers
ruled its order-takers, forming a dictatorship of and
not by the proletariat. In theory, the idea of
leadership and disciples was anathema to the SI
even if such an organizational ideal was not
apparent in its practice of constant exclusions and
realignments of their associative body/group.51
Nevertheless, autonomy and equality were the
minimum requirements for the group’s model of

829
revolutionary agency as indicated in the text ‘The
Class Struggle in Algeria’: ‘Radical
self-management, the only kind that can endure and
conquer, refuses hierarchy within or outside itself;
it also rejects in practice any hierarchical
separation of women (an oppressive separation
openly accepted by Proudhon’s theory as well as by
the backward reality of Islamic Algeria).’52
It was this focus on creative autonomy, or what De
Jong describes as their ‘elixir of creativity’, that
drew her into the SI’s orbit. And it was/is this
potential of the SI – its stress on transforming given
situations oneself (with the help of like-minded
others), without relying on the Party, unions,
organizers or any other representative stand-ins –
that also attracted later admirers such as
anarchist-leaning Carol Ehrlich in her 1977 article
‘Women and the Spectacle’ (Spectacular Times, no.
7). As she wrote: ‘We must smash all forms of
domination…. We have to see through the spectacle
… but that work must be without leaders as we
know them, and without delegating any control over
what we do and what we want to build.’ When it
comes to actions, she continues, ‘concede nothing
to them, or to anyone else…. We make history or it
makes us.’53 No doubt the SI would have fully
endorsed such a Marxian commitment to
self-making history. The obvious difference here, of
course, is that Ehrlich gives a specifically gendered
twist to women’s oppression by that ‘tormentor
called culture’, with the spectacle operating as the
root cause of a dominant and dominating
patriarchal society. The SI never made such a
clear-cut gender divide, since for its members all
order-takers are exploited by the alienating

830
conditions of spectacle whatever their age, sex or
race.
Nevertheless, the SI was not afraid to champion the
influence of specifically female role models. For
example, they openly praised and cited Rosa
Luxemburg; they rallied behind the actions of the
infamous ‘pétroleuses’ of the Paris Commune; and
they enthusiastically acknowledged the significance
of women’s active participation in the Parisian
‘Events’ of May 1968, of which the SI wrote: ‘The
extensive participation of women in all aspects of
the struggle was an unmistakable sign of its
revolutionary depth.’54 Also, with regards to May
1968, the SI, in its own book about the events,
singled out and paid tribute to a female protestor
who died fighting at the barricades.55 Such open
support for the work and acts of women by no
means signals a ‘feminist’ agenda. Indeed, it is safe
to say that the SI members were not feminists. But I
contend that this fact should be understood in a
similar sense to Simone de Beauvoir’s
contemporaneous assertion that she, too, was ‘not a
feminist’.
Such an anti-feminist, or more accurately
‘anti-feminine’ stance, emerged in response to what
de Beauvoir conceived of as the decidedly bourgeois
and reformist outlook of many so-called ‘women’s
groups’ existing at that time. As Claire Duchen
explains in her book Women’s Rights and Women’s
Lives in France 1944–1968, during this period the
word ‘feminist’ was rejected by many women’s
groups as evoking a pre-war, specifically
pre-suffrage moment, before, that is, the securing of
the right for women to vote, finally realized in
1945.56 The word feminist was considered the

831
opposite of ‘feminine’, it conjured up an aggressive
woman trying to be like a man. Most organizations,
according to Duchen, preferred the label ‘féminin’,
such as the Mouvement Démocratique Féminin (a
non-communist, leftist women’s political club).
Other groups such as the Union Féminine Civique
et Sociale (a Catholic, conservative women’s
organization) and the Union des Femmes
Françaises (a communist-dominated women’s
organization) also rejected the term feminist as old
fashioned, out of step with new law reforms and
legal rights for women (beyond suffrage) beginning
to emerge at that time. Though, as Duchen notes,
the actual changes in the situation of women at that
time were very limited, with no real advances. Real
changes in the Civil Code that would finally give
women some rights over her home, bank accounts,
family and own body – in the form of access to
contraception – would not be implemented until the
late 1960s and early 1970s. Instead, the common
focus of many of these mainly bourgeois women’s
groups was on limited legal reforms, usually for the
benefit of a very selective and specialized female
contingency.57
The beginnings of a broader challenge to patriarchy
had in fact appeared in 1949, with the publication
of de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex. It
immediately proved to be a bestseller. Its critical
reception was, however, very mixed and
predominantly negative. For example, Marie Claire
was anxious that such a libertarian woman as de
Beauvoir, whose desire for freedom rendered her
‘not real a woman’, should be allowed to teach
children.58 The communist journal Les Jeunes
Femmes was more

832
positive about the breadth of issues covered, if still
a little wary.59 The range and ambition of The
Second Sex were hard to digest. It was not
concerned with trying to achieve limited legal
reforms for particular classes of women, but placed
all women at the centre of a broader sociopolitical
analysis, in particular challenging the social
restrictions to women’s full autonomy.
Unfortunately, the publication of The Second Sex
was somewhat untimely. The breadth of its critique
of the political situation of women was not fully
appreciated or even recognized at its time. Yet, it
would become an important source and literary tool
for women’s emancipation post-1968, which
involved attacks on the totality of ‘women’s
situation’, including the ways in which the very idea
of what it means to be a woman was socially
contrived and mediated.
This attack aimed at the ‘total situation’ resonates
with a Situationist position. As de Beauvoir wrote,
‘all oppression creates a war’, but the means to
extricate oneself from this situation was not as her
then partner Jean-Paul Sartre had imagined it. For
Sartre, freedom lay in the possibility of
transcending or escaping the given situation, and
for him there was always the possibility of asserting
one’s freedom. But, as de Beauvoir acknowledged,
in light of her own experiences, in some situations
the ideal of ‘freedom of choice’ for all was not
always permissible, or possible, or else rendered
free choice a delusion. Her example was that
women (or rather the category ‘woman’) were
trapped in their situation like rats, because they
were not assigned any autonomy (or the faculty of
reason) in the then current societal structure. To
overcome such coerced limitations to their total

833
situation, women had to abolish the social
consequences and determinations assigned to
sexual difference. For de Beauvoir, as for the later
Situationists, freedom did not involve merely
overcoming the ‘givenness’ or ‘facticity’ of a
situation – this, in some sense, would be to accept a
historical (and thus changeable) condition as if it
were permanently fixed. Instead, freedom would
emerge only through the radical negation and
transformation of the concept of the already ‘given’
situation as such. It is the very coordinates of what
is accepted as the given situation that needs to be
revolutionized; at stake was the creative
construction of a totally new situation and, ideally,
new form of free, autonomous agency. As de
Beauvoir writes at the end of the section ‘Women’s
Situation and Character’, women must ‘reject the
limitations of their situation and seek to open the
road of the future. Resignedness is only abdication
and flight, there is no other way out for women than
to work for her liberation.’60 And if the members of
the SI would not agree with limiting such a
liberation to women only – since it opposed their
more inclusive model of a new proletariat, the
so-called order-takers – they would surely have
concurred with de Beauvoir’s insistence that to
succeed ‘this liberation must be collective’.61
By way of a brief conclusion, it could be argued that
the SI, despite its opposition to single-issue politics,
risked operating at a limited, micro-level by
attacking the realm of cultural images. It needs to
be remembered, however, that for the members of
the
group the spectacle, in the guise of capital become
image, was a global phenomenon. Nothing
remained outside its colonizing ways, just as

834
nothing escaped the logic of the commodity-form.
And if their critique of the spectacle at the level of
images is in danger of reproducing
women-as-spectacle, this is not so much a result of
their being anti-feminist but rather as a
consequence of the spectacle’s feminization of
useful appearance, of a gendered asymmetry in
capitalist uses of ‘sexual semblance’ to sell
commodities. Spectacle commodity aesthetics uses
women as the privileged sign of desire, or rather
commodity aesthetics in the late 1950s and early
1960s was hegemonically coded as feminine. It was
precisely the counterfeit character of such ‘sexist’
representations that the SI’s methods of
détournement set out to perturb. Here, habituated
responses, or what seems natural, were
denaturalized, via a sort of Brechtian process of
estrangement, which jolts and decouples
commonplace encounters with certain types of
images, such as the bikini babes and pop-porn.
Through the SI’s processes of mimetic restaging
and out-of-place resituating, a counter-hegemonic
recoding is put into play. In 1957 the bikini babes
were made homeless; disjointed and out of context,
they questioned their role as superficial ornaments
to the texts they supplemented. Such images were
emptied out or revealed as empty signifiers, able to
be filled-up with different connotations, thus
succeeding in troubling the image of woman as ‘the’
sign of desire by making absurd their sexy veil or
conceit. With the pop-porn images, the expected
mute body of pornography is undone with their
speech-bubble addresses to the viewer. This may be
an act of ventriloquism on behalf of the SI, but by
metaphorically speaking a political consciousness or
an act of scandal-mongering, an unstable but

835
generative space of engagement is opened up
between the silent voyeur and the image that talks
back.
At stake in the SI’s image war was a social or class
war, and taking part was not, as I hope the above
account of the role of Situationist women proves,
limited to only the male contingent of the group.
Their collective, egalitarian programme was to
search out and invent a revolutionary inclusive,
non-apartheid social situation, constructed by new
types of radical agencies emerging from the prism
of an altered or détourned spectacle. The task was
not simply to cause the ruin of the spectacle at the
level of images, which suggests an isolated project,
but rather to see such détournements as part of an
already global, decomposition of the spectacle
evidenced, for the SI, by the battles in Cuba, Congo,
Algiers and Saint Domingo. From a contemporary
feminist perspective (as multiple as that can be),
however, the group perhaps did not go far enough,
by not taking into account how we are differently
subjugated to, or terrorized by, the culture of the
spectacle along the lines of race, sexuality or
gender. We might all be saturated by the spectacle,
but surely to different degrees of acceptance and
resistance? In this light, it is fair to say that the
members of the SI were a symptom of the situation
and time that produced them, the late 1950s and
early 1960s, when, as Bernstein said to me, it was
not expected that a man could boil an egg.
Yet, as the SI diagnosed, even if you cannot step
outside of the spectacle, you can refunction it from
within, by speaking its language differently or by
picturing a differenced world. Détournement was
one strategy they used to defamiliarize and subvert

836
the commonplace assumptions about the meanings
and uses of certain images of women. It recodified
the spectacle’s ready-made image banks, conferring
on them what Valentin Voloshinov calls a different
‘accent’. In the case of the bikini babes and
pop-porn images, the SI confronts the spectacle’s
unseen and falsely naturalized sexism and so sets in
motion a critique of commodity aesthetics that
feminizes semblance itself. Its détournements
expose this sexism as a particular, sociohistorical
formation, not immutable or eternal, and therefore
transformable. It does not resolve such gendered
discriminations, but it does expose them to analysis.
It questions the inevitable conquest of the social by
its consumer images by revealing the work of
dissemblance involved in those images’ production –
namely, how the social relations that produced
these images remain hidden. The spectacle tries to
deny that its representations are the products of a
particular (alienated) form of social labour
determined by capitalist modes of production and
consumption. To attack the spectacle is to attack
capital – but who does this attacking? Who/what
emerges from it? For the SI in the 1950s and 1960s,
it was the task of anyone who felt alienated and
wanted to change, or rather revolutionize, the total
situation. Nevertheless, as a former Situationist
claimed, what the SI lacked was a more nuanced
model of the agents of revolution, and perhaps its
‘new revolutionary critique of the social’ would have
benefited from ‘a sex revolutionary critique of
culture’.62 A sense of differentiation, as being
significant to the struggle against spectacular
conditions, was acknowledged, somewhat belatedly,
at the end of the SI’s life in 1972, when it declared
that: ‘Everywhere the respect for alienation has

837
been lost. Young people, workers, coloured people,
homosexuals, women and children, take it into their
heads to want everything that was forbidden
them.’63 This is an untimely opening up of the new
proletariat along a ‘differenced’ axis at the moment
of the group’s own demise.
Too little and too late for some feminists perhaps,
but in the cultural climate of the late 1950s and
1960s, the SI did deconstruct the sexing of
commodity-images. Not, however, in the name of a
pro-feminist agenda, but in the name of an
autonomous, all-inclusive and hence unpredictable
new proletariat; an emergent but not yet instituted
figure constituted in part via new representational
strategies such as the SI’s collective and
anonymous détournements, intended to solicit and
picture a different way to live within, but against,
the machinations of the spectacle.
1 Both quotes from Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, trans. H. M.
Parshley (Picador: London, 1988), p. 627 and p. 726, respectively.

2 See Guy-Ernest Debord and Gil Wolman, ‘Mode d’emploi du

détournement’, in the Belgian revolutionary surrealist journal Les
Lèvres Nues, no. 8 (1956), p. 40. Here, they defined ‘minor
détournements’(détournements mineurs) and ‘excessive or exorbitant
détournements’ (détournements abusifs), and noted that any extended
process of détournement would usually be composed of one or more
sequences of exorbitant and minor types. This was a Lettrist text, but
the basic principles of this method was continued by the SI, as evident
in their essay ‘Le Détournement comme négation and comme prélude’
in Internationale situationniste, no. 3 (1959), pp. 10–11. See also the
definition of this and other SI concepts in
‘Définitions’ in Internationale situationniste, no. 1 (1958), pp. 13–14. A
later third model called ‘ultra-détournement’ was developed to describe
actions of appropriation that took place in the street, such as
reterritorializing public space with graffiti.

3 Articles in Internationale situationniste, no. 1 (1958), respective page

numbers pp. 4–6; pp. 6–8; pp. 11–13; pp. 22–5; pp. 25–6; pp. 29–30.

838
4 See Wolfgang Fritz Haug, ‘Towards a Critique of Commodity Aesthetics’
and ‘The Ambiguity of Commodity Aesthetics as Exemplified in the use
of Sexual Semblance’, in his Commodity Aesthetics: Ideology and
Culture (International General: New York, 1987), pp. 103–20 and pp.
119–20, respectively.

5 The right to vote was secured in 1944, but not exercised until 29 April
1945. See Claire Duchen, Women’s Rights and Women’s Lives in
France 1945–1968 (Routledge: London, 1994), p. 35. See also Claire
Laubier (ed.), The Condition of Women in France 1945 to the Present:
A Documentary Anthology (Routledge: London, 1990), esp. chapters 2
and 3.

6 Ibid., p. 2.

7 As one journalist put it, ‘they don’t want that life, restricted to domestic
tasks; housework, housekeeping, children and nothing else’; see
Duchen, Women’s Rights and Women’s Lives in France 1945–1968,
op. cit., p. 92.

8 Ibid., p. 94.

9 Kristin Ross, ‘French Quotidian’, in Lynn Gumpert (ed.), The Art of the
Everyday: The Quotidian in Postwar French Culture (New York
University Press: New York, 1997), pp. 19–28 (p. 24).

10 Duchen, Women’s Rights and Women’s Lives in France 1945–1968,

op. cit., p. 76.

11 Ibid., p. 75.

12 See ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’ attributed to Ivan Chtcheglov

published in Internationale situationniste, no. 1 (1958), pp. 15–20.
Abridged version in Ken Knabb (ed. and trans.), Situationist
International Anthology (Bureau of Public Secrets: Berkeley, 1995), pp.
1–4 (p. 2).

13 Ross, ‘French Quotidian’, op. cit., p. 24.

14 Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, op. cit., p. 47.

15 All quotes from my interview with Bernstein at her home in 1999.

16 See Frances Stracey, ‘Situationist Photo-Graffiti’, in David

Cunningham, Andrew Fisher, Sas Mays (eds), Photography and
Literature in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge Scholars Press:
Cambridge, 2005), pp. 123–44.

839
17 For these different interpretations of Bardot, see Laubier, The
Condition of Women in France 1945 to the Present, op. cit., pp. 34–41.
The ‘Lolita with attitude’ reading was by Simone de Beauvoir.

18 On the biases of postwar US aid in Europe, see Brian Holmes,

‘Invisible States: Europe in the Age of Capital Failure’, in Simon Sheikh
(ed.), Capital (It Fails Us Now) (B_Books: Berlin, 2006), pp. 29–57.

19 See Laurence Bestrand Dorléac, ‘The Art Scene in France, 1960–73’,

in David Alan Mellor and Laurent Gervereau (eds.), The Sixties: Britain
and France 1960–1973 – The Utopian Years (Philip Wilson: London,
1997), pp. 30–55 (p. 43).

20 Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth

Century (Picador: London, 1997), p. 178.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid., pp. 178–9.

23 Quoted in ibid., p. 179.

24 Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, op. cit., p. 114.

25 Internationale situationniste, no. 9 (1964), p. 37.

26 Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the

Avant-Garde (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1990), p. 214, n. 44.

27 Guy Debord uses the term ‘spectacliste’ in La Société du Spectacle

(Gallimard: Paris, 1992), thesis 14, p. 21.

28 See The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International, trans. and

ed. Christopher Gray (Free Fall Publications: London, 1974), pp.
162–3.

29 As De Jong clarified in an important interview in 1998, at the time of a

revived Situationist exhibition, other than Bernstein and herself, ‘there
were no other active women involved or rather who were members.
Gretel Stadler and Kata Lindell (who later became a man) were present
at Göteberg but no more than the women of … (no names given) …
however without other activities than being listeners in the audience’.
See Jacqueline De Jong interview with Dieter Schrage, published in the
exhibition catalogue, Situationistische Internationale 1957–1972
(Musuem Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig: Vienna, 1988), p. 69 (my
translation).

840
30 Berstein’s contributions to the Lettrist International include her
participation in the first screening of Debord’s film Hurlements en faveur
de Sade (1952), where she emitted a piercing scream and hurled bags
of flour at the audience; she was an editor of Potlatch (1954–9), the title
and concept of which, referring to forms of North American
gift-exchanges, was also attributed to Bernstein; she published articles
on the concept of the dérive, see her ‘Dérive au kilomètre’ in Potlatch,
nos. 9–11 (1954), p. 64; also on the use of psychogeography, see ‘Le
Square des missions étrangères’, Potlatch, no. 16 (1955); see also her
important contribution to ‘Le project d’embellissement rationels de la
ville de Paris’, Potlatch, no. 23 (1955).

31 She was an editor on issues 8 (1963), 9 (1964) and 10 (1966).

32 See Internationale situationniste, no. 1 (1958), pp. 25–6.

33 Internationale situationniste, no. 7 (1962), pp. 42–6.

34 See ‘Éloge de Pinot-Gallizio’, in Pinot-Gallizio (Bibliothèque

d’Alexandrie: Paris, 1960), n.p. See also Frances Stracey,
‘Pinto-Gallizio’s Industrial Painting: Towards a Surplus of Life’, in
Oxford Art Journal, vol. 28, no. 3 (2005), pp. 391–405, esp. p. 395.

35 Internationale situationniste, no. 9 (1964), pp. 43–4.

36 In Internationale situationniste, no. 10 (1966), p. 83.

37 For more on the background of these novels, see Andrew Hussey, The
Game of War (Jonathan Cape: London, 2001), p. 183.

38 Ibid., p. 182. And in an interview with me in 1999, Bernstein made it

clear that any sexuality was permissible among the SI; that they were
young, carefree and experimental.

39 Ibid., p. 184.

40 Marcus, Lipstick Traces, op. cit., pp. 377–8.

41 It was at the third international conference of the SI in Munich, April

1959, that the Gruppe Spur registered its affiliation to the group. In their
manifesto, the Gruppe Spur championed a new aesthetic against the
‘decomposed ideal beauty of the old world’ and against ‘the tired
generation, the angry generation, everything is buried. Now it is the turn
of the kitsch generation. WE DEMAND KITSCH, FILTH, ORIGINAL
MUD, CHAOS. Art is the shitheap where kitsch is staking its claim.’ See
Hussey, The Game of War, op. cit., p. 135. When De Jong met Prem,
she was impressed by his charisma and energy, and as an
experimental painter in her own right was drawn to Gruppe Spur’s

841
 radical, expressionist ideas since, as she stated in a 1998 interview
‘they appeared to be more attuned to my of thinking than the
informelles or Mack, Piene, even more than the Zero-Gruppe’. From
‘Jacqueline De Jong: Eine Frau in Der Situationistischen
Internationale’, an interview with Dieter Schrage in Situationistische
Internationale 1957–1972, op. cit., pp. 68–71, (p. 68) (my translation).

42 On Jorn’s meeting with De Jong, see Hussey, The Game of War, op.
cit., p. 149.

43 Schrage interview in Situationistische Internationale 1957–1972, op.

cit., p. 69.

44 Ibid., p. 71.

45 Ibid., p. 69 (my translation).

46 From ‘On the Poverty of Student Life’ (1966), republished in Knabb,

Situationist International Anthology, op. cit., pp. 319–37, (p. 326).

47 See ‘The Decline and the Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy’,

in ibid., pp. 153–60; and ‘The Class Struggle in Algeria’, in ibid., pp.
160–8.

48 Richard Gombin, The Radical Tradition: A Study in Modern

Revolutionary Thought, trans. Rupert Swyer (Methuen & Co. Ltd:
London, 1978). On ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, see Cornelius Castoriadis
[Pierre Chaulieu], La Société bureaucratique (Union Générale
d’Éditions: Paris, 1973). For Debord’s relation to ‘SouB’, see Shigenobu
Gonzalvez, Guy Debord ou la beauté du négatif (Éditions Mille et une
Nuits: Paris, 1988), pp. 31–6.

49 See ‘Preliminaries on the Councils and Councilist Organization’ (René

Riesel) and ‘Notice to the Civilized Concerning Generalized
Self-Management’ (Raoul Vaneigem), republished in Knabb,
Situationist International Anthology, op. cit., pp. 270–82 and pp. 283–9,
respectively. For example, Riesel castigates the one-sidedness of the
practices of the KAPD (German Communist Workers Party) ‘who
adopted councils as its program but by assigning itself[,] as its only
essential tasks[,] propaganda and theoretical discussion – ‘the political
education of the masses’ – it left the role of federating the revolutionary
factory organization to the AAUD (General Workers’ Union of
Germany)’, ibid., pp. 277–8.

50 Ibid., p. 271.

51 See the SI’s ‘manifeste’ (17 May 1960) in Internationale situationniste,

no. 4 (1960), pp. 36–8.

842
52 ‘The Class Struggle in Algeria’ (1965), in Knabb, Situationist
International Anthology, op. cit., pp. 160–8 (p. 167). In reference to
Proudhon, it is worth noting that despite the SI’s links to certain
anarchist tendencies, such as the Anarchist Federation, represented by
Guy Bodson, and brief exchanges with the review Informations et
correspondences ouvrières (formerly Informations liaisons ouvrières,
born in 1958 from a scission with Socialisme ou Barbarie) and with
L’Union des groupes anarchistes-communistes, the SI never joined
another political group; although links with the group Libertaire de
Ménilmontant in Paris did have some practical consequences when
member Gérard Joannès produced a détourned comic illustration for a
text by Vaneigem which appeared in Internationale situationniste, no.
11 (1967). See Gonzalvez, Guy Debord ou la beauté du négatif, op.
cit., pp. 34–5. For illustration, see Internationale situationniste, no. 11
(1967), p. 35. In general, anarchism was too nihilistic for the SI, whose
project was fundamentally reconstructive, namely to build on the ruins
of the spectacle. And as to why the SI never joined another group, this
can perhaps be deduced from their explicit desire to ‘perform
revolutionary tasks’, rather than be a revolutionary organization per se.
On the SI’s model of revolutionary organization in general, see Guy
Debord and Gianfranco Sanguinetti, The Veritable Split in the
International (Chronos Publications: London, 1972).

53 Carol Ehrlich, ‘Women and the Spectacle’, Spectacular Times, no. 7

(1977), p. 16.

54 See Anonymous, ‘The Beginning of an Era’, Internationale

situationniste, no. 12 (1969) translated in Knabb, Situationist
International Anthology, op. cit., pp. 225–6 (p. 226).

55 See Enragés et Situationnistes dans le Mouvement des Occupations

(1968), republished in its original format (Gallimard: Paris, 1998).

56 Duchen, Women’s Rights and Women’s Lives in France 1945–1968,

op. cit., p. 170.

57 For example, the Union Professionelle Féminine (Union of Professional

Women) sought better working conditions for professional women only,
as too the Association Françaises Diplômées des Universités (the
Association of French Women University Graduates), which only
represented female, graduate interests. See ibid., p. 167. Even
umbrella groups for various socialist and communist parties sought
rights for specific groups of working woman, seeking better pay
conditions, but seemingly unconcerned with expanding such benefits
and opportunities to ‘all’ women in general. This is even true of the likes
of the broader sounding Le Conseil National des Femmes (National

843
 Women’s Council), which did indeed focus on equal rights for women,
but only those who were married. Whether liberal, socialist or
bourgeois, the majority of then existing women’s groups supported
limited legal reforms, in local areas, rather than campaigning for a more
universal improvement of the situation of women in total: that is, there
was no united, mass women’s movement wanting to challenge the
patriarchal state per se.

58 Ibid., p. 188.

59 Ibid., p. 176. On the mixed reception of The Second Sex, see also
Laubier, The Condition of Women in France 1945 to the Present, op.
cit., esp. chapter 2, ‘Le Déuxième Sexe’, pp. 17–27.

60 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, op. cit., p. 639.

61 Ibid.

62 See ‘The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution’
(1967), a pamphlet by the English section of the SI (T. J. Clark, Charles
Radcliffe, Donald Nicholson-Smith), republished as The Boomerang
series, no. 3 (Chronos Publications: London, 1994): ‘From now on the
possibility of a new revolutionary critique of society depends on the
possibility of a sex revolutionary critique of culture and vice versa’, p. 8.

63 The Veritable Split in the International (1972), op. cit., p. 19.

844
PHOTOGRAPHY, LANGUAGE AND THE
PICTORIAL TURN
Peter Smith

P rivileging either the picture or the written text,

post-conceptual photography has reinforced the
view that all signs are interchangeable semantic
units that signify in ways that transcend disciplinary
and media boundaries. The principle of the
democratic equivalence of signs that is implied in
such a view has not only provided theoretical
legitimacy for various forms of artistic hybridization
– including the recent dominance of mixed-media
models of photographic practices and the hybrid
form of the image-text – but also offered a
conceptual base to theorists who are guided by the
idea of a common discourse that ignores traditional
boundaries in art. Proponents of semiotics, for
example, have long resisted the historical
separation of language and pictures, and have
challenged the rhetoric of purity in the visual arts
that in the past sought earnestly to avoid the
contamination of language. In the pages that follow,
I do not seek to quarrel with these theorists’
political task of opposing cultural stratification and
privilege in the conventional hierarchy of genres; I
do, however, wish to question the assumed
ontological equivalence of words and images
implied by such an approach.

845
To do so, I draw on some key ideas on these issues
from Roland Barthes and W. J. T. Mitchell, both of
whom have insisted that photographs have
properties that make them resistant to language
and other coded systems of meaning production.
Following this line of thought, I would argue that
the photo-essay is a radical hybrid medium in which
words and photographs interact in ways that exploit
their differences, the linguistic part of the message
being forced into a critical relationship with what
Mitchell calls the roots of the photograph. In this
way, the ‘reader’ is made aware of the tension
between the two levels of meaning, which allows
reflection on the formal object itself, as well as the
prospect of critical engagement with what it stands
for.
I would like to identify at the outset two distinct
approaches to the hybrid photo-essay. One involves
instituting and maintaining a clear separation
between words and pictures – the example I offer is
the work of Jeff Wall; the other effaces the
disciplinary and institutional boundaries between
image and text, as demonstrated in the work of
Allan Sekula. Wall’s avant-garde naturalism has a
traditional look about it. It usually consists of large
photographic pictures with separate titles, and the
subject matter is often explicitly inscribed in the
discourse of art history – The Storyteller of 1986,
for
example [1], recalls Manet’s painting Le Déjeuner
sur l’herbe. His works are commonly seen in print
(or on screen), but their primary site is the art
gallery. Wall thus secures an identity firmly in the
realm of ‘art’. Sekula’s work, by contrast, seems a
bit more ‘in the world’. Typically located in the
street or in a book, it might be described as a

846
‘scripto-visual discourse’1 of the kind that
challenges the institutional sites of art. Recent
commentary has suggested that Wall is the
conservative and Sekula the radical in this
comparison.2 According to this view, the
pictorialism of Wall is nostalgic revivalism (a
reactionary turn); Sekula, on the other hand, openly
confronts the historical separation of word and
image and appears to challenge the institutional
framework that sustains this distinction. He
foregrounds and conceptualizes themes (maritime
labour, for example) in a way that requires the
viewer to think about the work’s mode of
presentation as well as its subject matter. For
Benjamin Buchloh, this is a reflexive practice that
hovers between discourse and content.3

1 Jeff Wall, The Storyteller, 1986, transparency in

lightbox, 229 × 437 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

What I have just described is a straightforward

‘argument’ between two contemporary artists, the
key differences of which rest on the injunction
against medium-specificity in late-twentieth-century

847
art and criticism. Defenders of interdisciplinarity
such as Sekula and Victor Burgin adopted
‘scripto-visualist’ practices that challenged
traditional forms of naturalism on the one hand and
the modernist privileging of ‘opticality’ as the basis
for abstract art on the other. Instead, these and
other postmodernists favoured a use of language
and a form of hybridity that had roots in the first
wave of conceptual art, proponents of which
challenged the isolation of pictures from other
systems of communication and argued that images
are always constrained by words. An example of this
linguistic turn is present in the work of
Art and Language – a group that emerged in Britain
in the 1960s – which represented a sharp reaction
against the anti-intellectualism of the postwar art
world and a repudiation of the hegemonic role of art
criticism. According to Art and Language, the task
for art was to ‘supplant “experience” with a
“reading”’.4
By the mid-1970s, photography was increasingly
being used as a means of documenting performance
and temporary installations, a strategy that
sometimes juxtaposed writing, images and other
artistic forms. After a period of exclusive
commitment to ‘writing as art’, conceptualists no
longer saw language as the master code. Many
recognized that pictures might form the anchorage
for words, even in the most language-centred
modes of conceptual art. Photography thus came to
provide an intermediary position between art
(meaning pictures) and language. This shift in
medium preference among one-time conceptualists
marks the beginnings of a pictorial turn that
increasingly came to be dominated by photography,
even if its use in the work of artists such as Burgin,

848
Sekula, early Wall and Hans Haacke was
self-consciously ‘unaesthetic’. Photography had a
certain appeal because of its currency as a
functional and popular mode of communication; and
the fact that photographs (like words) are
constituent parts of complex sign systems
undermines the difference between ‘visual’ and
‘non-visual’ forms. As Burgin put it, ‘Simply because
a message is, in substance, visual, it does not follow
that all codes are visual. Visual and non-visual
codes interpenetrate each other in very extensive
and complex ways.’5 In a critical reflection on this
kind of revelation, W. J. T. Mitchell has noted how
art historians (in the Anglo-American world at least)
suddenly woke up to the idea ‘that paintings,
photographs, sculptural objects, and architectural
monuments are fraught with “textuality” and
“discourse”’.6 This belated ‘discovery’ for exponents
of semiotic-influenced methods in post-conceptual
and art photography was to become an article of
faith. Opposing approaches that admitted
‘medium-specificity’ as an ontological pretender or
any attempt to claim that photographs might
contain essential differences in comparison with
other types of signs were out of the question since
the conventionalist argument was now accepted as
gospel truth. The authority of French film theorist
Christian Metz was called upon to finally dissolve
the difference between word and image:

In truth, the notion of ‘visual’, in the totalitarian and monolithic

sense that it has taken on in certain recent discussions, is a
fantasy or ideology, and the image (at least in this sense) is
something that does not exist.7

The irrational cult of the visual, for Burgin and for

Metz, is thus negated since it belongs to a plurality

849
of codes that are connected in ways that define it.
From this perspective, the empirical view that
visual images are influenced by language (or vice
versa) is aligned with a more slippery, philosophical
belief that visual messages are somehow structured
from within by the non-visual influence of language.
From his early work,
Burgin thus engaged with mixed configurations of
signs (images, words and sounds) that constituted
‘language systems’, such as ‘the visual arts’ or
‘cinema’. Increasingly, this focus on semiotics
neutralized the word/image opposition. For many, it
was motivated by a desire to break out of the
academy and to make use of language-based models
in the deconstruction of media culture. The
imported New York School of modernism that filled
the English-speaking art journals of the period
seemed to have little connection with social
existence. As John Roberts has noted:
‘Greenbergian Modernism was vanquished through
the theoretical return of the artwork as sign.’8
The blurring of boundaries between word and
image in the 1960s and 1970s represented a
middling position between the linguistic and the
pictorial turning points in cultural politics. If the
rupturing of disciplinary boundaries caused a major
upheaval at this time – and there is evidence that it
did9 – it is nevertheless also true that these changes
provided the background and inspiration for much
of what was to follow. Among the many effects of
interdisciplinarity (including pedagogic crossovers
at university level), the coalescence of theory and
practice was the most important. It spawned a
mixing of practices and an increasing heterogeneity
in art, including a wide and varied use of new
media. This in turn led to a massive increase in

850
political engagement among a generation of young
artists influenced by identity politics and the
semiotic guerrilla warfare of the earlier generation
of conceptualists. Indeed, this shift in intellectual
and artistic fashion produced a new generation of
non-specialist critics and multi-media practitioners
and a spate of new university courses devoted to
‘interartistic’ and cross-curricular studies.
This moment also produced the anomaly of a
self-styled counter-hegemonic trend in art that
quickly became fashionable and highly marketable.
Artists such as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and
Richard Prince in the United States – all working in
the now dominant medium of photography –
represented a new generation whose
consciousness-raising projects fitted in well with the
glamour and exclusivity of the art/business world
that supported it during the boom of the 1980s and
beyond. Kruger’s word play of 1987 signals the skill
of the copywriter and graphic artist in the
philosophic pun ‘I shop therefore I am’ [2]. The
rhetorical forms of wit and irony in this kind of art
established a bridge between theoretical discourse
and popular culture. Kruger’s work in particular
belongs to the honourable lineage of agitational
graphic design. Despite its being for the most part
restricted as a practice to the art world and its
institutions (unlike the ‘agitprop’ it quotes),
Kruger’s genre-hybridity represented an attractive
extension to the more specialist discourse of
political writing.
The interventionist and counter-hegemonic use of
photography as a tool by second-generation
conceptualists such as Kruger signalled a gradual
shift to a mixed art practice. As I have argued

851
elsewhere, the motivation in this work was often
political. The full-blown return to pictures was,
however, driven only partly by that motive.
In the case of Wall, the ‘turn’ to a pictorial
paradigm was in fact a ‘re-turn’ driven by a
rejection of pluralism and of the hybrid forms of
conceptual and post-conceptual art.10 Wall
defended the embrace of pictorialism as a reaction
against a recuperated vanguardism. (It is worth
noting, however, that the upsurge in commercial
and public support for progressive art in this period
coincided with the return of the image as a key
factor in postmodernist aesthetics.) In so far as the
linguistic sign and the visual sign were deemed to
serve similar functions, the intellectual and political
functions of photography and the image-text were
ideologically consistent with the original turn to the
written word as an alternative artistic strategy. The
return of the image in the late 1970s and early
1980s represents therefore not so much a
self-conscious rejection of the language-based
model (there was no sudden change of direction),
but a desire to extend the self-reflexive critique of
art towards an expanded field that increasingly
encompassed a critical assault on commercial
culture. The work of Burgin in particular remained
strongly rooted in a language-centred epistemology.

852
 2 Barbara Kruger, Untitled: ‘I Shop
Therefore I Am’, 1987. Photo:
copyright © 1987 Barbara Kruger;
courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery,
New York.

For a more nuanced account of the pictorial turn we

might look to older philosophical debates about
pictures and words. The underlying thematic in this
debate centres on medium-specificity or, more
broadly, what Mitchell calls ‘the immanent
vernaculars of representation’.11 Let us note how
Burgin has struggled to position his own
transdisciplinary practice in opposition to
‘specificity’ and the ‘traditional’ divide between
words
and pictures.12 From early in his career as a
photographer, Burgin has sought to distance
himself from the ‘single-image aesthetic’.13
Nonetheless, the ‘phantasmic’ element in his

853
mature work clearly demonstrates an awareness of
the image as something that elevates sensory
experience as a basis for knowledge. In this sense,
his photographs prioritize the world as foundation
for the production of consciousness, and his work is
reflexively concerned with this process. In some
ways, this may look like a realist epistemology.
Most of Burgin’s writing, however, rejects such a
position; he seems always to doubt the specific
status of pictures even while he exploits their
‘natural’ effects. ‘I want to stress the image not as
illusion but as text [his emphasis]’, he says, and
‘mental processes exchange images for words and
words for images. It’s not a matter of translation
[my emphasis].’14 Which is to say, the ontological
sameness of verbal and visual signs is underlined.
Photography for Burgin thus became a pragmatic
extension of his theoretical work as he was
increasingly drawn to popular culture as a site for
critical sabotage and deconstruction. In 1976, he
designed and fly-posted a street poster that read
‘What does possession mean to you?’ The
juxtaposition of image and text demonstrates a
cut-and-paste technique symptomatic of the trend in
the postmodern avant-garde for the use of
‘quotation’ and intertextuality. The poster uses an
actual quotation (‘7% of our population own 84% of
our wealth’ was a statement taken from the
Economist), but it also ‘quotes’ a type of visual
rhetoric in advertising in the image of a young
couple as symbols of intersecting gender and
wealth mythologies. More importantly, it shows
Burgin’s interest in mediation itself. The work is
explicitly political in its choice of material, but a
deeper meaning attaches to the deconstructive
politics of representation. As with Burgin’s later

854
work, this poster typifies a kind of ‘knowing’
critique of the sign, a strategy in which the
simulation of images becomes routine. It is a
reflexive methodology in which the attempt to find a
neutral meta-language of representation is always
in danger of losing its connection with what Jessica
Evans has called ‘external “societal” logic’.15 Alex
Potts is another sceptic on this matter when he
describes the dangers of infinite regression in the
‘wanton chase from sign to signs’ and ‘endless
semiosis’.16 The concern here is about a polysemic
world of spectacle that no longer connects with the
‘outside, a referent or a general public’.17 The
determined opposition to ‘naive realism’ relies on a
kind of quotation aesthetics in which all images are
coded versions of other images. When the belief in
the indexicality of the photographic message is held
in suspension, or denied,18 it is treated like all other
signs – that is, as a constituent part of a purely
symbolic order in which meaning is for ever
deferred. Meaning is thus always in doubt, and
when a sign carries an ideological value it is ‘not
the reflection of real social relations but the
reflection of the social imaginary of its subject. The
image of an image, it is deprived of all real
denotation.’19 It is important to recognize how
mediation sets off a procession of signals that seem
to transcend objective reality. There is,
nevertheless, a sense in which we can say that
photographs
have a complex and negotiable relation with
conventional readings and are always a relay for
something outside signification. The contrast with
language is instructive in this regard since the
photograph is ineluctably connected to its referent
in a way that language is not. At the very least, we

855
can say that the insistence on the importance of the
process of signification as an exclusive realm of
connotation seems to leave out something that
never really goes away, even in the most dogmatic
anti-realist theory.
Mitchell sets his sights on what he describes as the
overconfident denouncement of the ‘natural’ and
‘non-conventional’ status of the photograph,20 in
comments that relate to Burgin’s rigid
conventionalism. Although Mitchell accepts that
‘“language” in some form usually enters the
experience of viewing photography’,21 the
suggestion that photographs are (as Burgin
expressed it) ‘invaded by language’ seems to
Mitchell to be not only overstretching the metaphor,
but tantamount to suggesting an affinity between
photography and language. To say that in certain
ways, in particular circumstances, a photograph
might be ‘invaded’ by language is one thing. Who
would deny it? The anchorage of a picture’s
meaning in language (and vice versa) is well known.
‘Invaded by’ is not, however, the same as ‘identical
with’.22 For Mitchell, the metaphor should certainly
be more carefully gauged to the problematic of the
word/image opposition. What we are bound to say
(following Mitchell) is that the ‘invasion’ – rather
than dissolving difference – might in fact produce
opposition and resistance. In other words, there
might be ‘some value at stake in such a resistance,
some real motive’, as Mitchell describes it, ‘for a
defence of the non-linguistic character of the
photograph’.23
The critical framework for a re-evaluation of the
‘non-linguistic’ status of photography (pace
Mitchell) derives from Barthes’s Camera Lucida.

856
The post-semiotic Barthes revisits an early
provocation: the photographic image as ‘a message
without a code’,24 a way of thinking that points
towards the need for a reconsideration of the
photographic image. As Mitchell notes, there is ‘one
connotation always present in the photograph … it
is a pure denotation; that is what it is to recognize it
as a photograph rather than some other sort of
image’.25 Mitchell describes a hypothetical wedding
snap:

Conversely the denotation of a photograph, what we take it to

represent, is never free from what we take it to mean….
Connotation goes all the way down to the roots of the photograph,
to the motives for its production, to the selection of its subject
matter, to the choice of angles and lighting. Similarly, ‘pure
denotation’ reaches all the way up to the most ‘readable’ features
of the photograph: the photograph is ‘read’ as if it were the trace of
an event, ‘relic’ of an occasion as laden with aura and mystery as
the bride’s garter or her fading bouquet.26

What is at stake here has importance for the way

photographs are seen. In so far as there is such as
thing as medium-specificity, we might consider how
documentary photography, in some of its forms,
connects the photographer and audience with what
Roberts has called the ‘dialogic and communicative
functions of photography’.27
Renewed interest in medium-specificity and the
question of an ontology of the photographic image
establishes a new connection between the earlier
modernist engagement with the reportorial and
sociocultural functions of photography.28 It marks a
return to an engagement with the peculiarity of the
photograph and its unique capacity to mediate
between the experience of modernity and the

857
perceived need to act as witness to that experience.
The denotative power of the photograph is key to
understanding this. Barthes’s emphasis on the
paradoxical nature of the photograph serves to
remind us that it always has two messages: one
without a code (the analogical) and one that
performs a rhetorical function. The first is
denotative and the second is connotative. For
Mitchell, this poses a significant sense of difference
between the two modes of being. One must be
‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ and the other is invested
with meaning. There exists a sense of resistance
between the two. The existence of these two levels
suggests something like the distinction between
photography and language. Barthes argued that the
denoted and the connoted message are not in
collusion (they are actually resistant to each other),
but the latter (the coded message of connotation)
‘develops on the basis of a message without a
code’.29 The parasitical relation of the coded
message in this case (an example of photo-text)
suggests that the value of photography lies in its
apparent freedom from values – that is, in the
suspended ‘reality’ of its pro-filmic moment.
Mitchell has shown how this paradox of coded
versus uncoded message production suggests a way
of thinking about the imbrication of photography
and language. There is an argument that it is
precisely this sense of difference between the
writing and photography that gives substance to the
photo-essay.
Mitchell recognizes a certain power in the abrasive
urban and regional subject matter of documentary
photographers in late-nineteenth-century and
Depression-era America. He refers specifically to
the pioneering 1890 photo-essay by Jacob Riis, How

858
the Other Half Lives, and the collaborative work of
the photographer Walker Evans and the writer
James Agee in the book Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men of 1941 [3]. According to Mitchell, the power
of these images derives in part from their shock
value. But there is something else – something more
than shock – that is to be found in the sense of
resistance between image and text. Mitchell notes
how the shift from reading to seeing is perhaps
awkward. It is, nevertheless, this awkwardness that
can be used in a reflexive and self-critical way:

to make the instrumentality of both writing and photography and

their interactions serve the highest interests of ‘the cause’ [the
left-wing idealism of the project] by subjecting it to criticism while
advancing its banner.30

Mitchell’s point is that separation of image and text

– as two distinct narratives – in Evans and Agee’s
book establishes a tension between the two things.
The refusal to anchor the images with a
self-explanatory or rationalizing text allowed the
two
discourses to meet tangentially in a way that allows
a partial but deliberately incomplete attempt to
document its subject. The design of the publication
leaves gaps in the narrative, inserts false names,
and is resistant to journalistic closure and
objectification of the subject matter. But despite
sensitivity to formal considerations, it is rooted in
something that keeps the reader’s attention. You
might say the procession of signifiers has an end
point, a basis in fact that conspires with the
illusionistic trappings of the imagery. The meaning
is elusive, but it retains a level of epistemological
power that is arguably missing in postmodernist
obsessions with the ‘shifting networks of symbolic

859
forms’.31 Mitchell shows that Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men is an attempt at a truthful statement
that draws attention to its own instrumentality as
much as it does to the subject matter. The images
are not merely illustrative; indeed, as Agee claimed,
the images and the text are ‘co-equal, mutually
independent, and collaborative’.32 Mitchell is keen
to dispel the danger of the sentimentalizing
narrativity of the photo-essay; he notes that some of
the best examples do not merely raise
consciousness, but disrupt the passage from
reading to seeing and make the text interactive and
challenging.

860
 3 Walker Evans, Floyd Burroughs,
1936, from Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men by Walker Evans and
James Agee, 1941.

The historical examples analysed by Mitchell,

especially Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, invite
comparison with Sekula’s attempts to breathe life
into the formerly demonized genre of documentary,
and in particular his use of the photo-essay in series
such as Fish Story of 1995 and the slightly later
Shipwreck and Workers [4]. What connects Sekula
with earlier humanist documentary photography is
his respect for the ‘naive realism’ of the photograph
and his willingness to explore the theme of work. In
some of the key examples within this tradition, the
celebration of labour rather than consumption has
important connections with democratic and idealist
struggles for social and political change. But
Sekula’s practice also represented an attempt to
pursue a method that addresses the separation of
the artist’s labour from that of the critic. In a
statement that echoes Agee’s thinking in the 1930s,
he proposed a type of mixed-media practice that, in
the words of Hilde Van Gelder, ‘aspires to abolish
the discursive schism between the critical essay and
the artwork’.33 Sekula observes:

As soon as you create a relay between text and image, you

undermine any purist claims for either text or image. Neither
element is foundational. The image is no longer the truth upon
which the text is a commentary or subjective gloss, nor is the text a
pinning down of a truth that is otherwise elusive in the image.34

861
4 Allan Sekula, Shipwreck and Workers: Part of
Titanic’s Wake, 1998/2000. Photo: courtesy of
Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica,
California.

In Sekula’s work we thus see a contemporary

attempt to demonstrate the dialectical nature of the
photo-essay in which language and photography
interact as they might do in the many other hybrid
forms that we take for granted in our daily lives.
Burgin’s insistence that pictures almost never are
seen on their own – that is, without the intervention
of words – is correct. But that does not mean that
pictures are the same as writing; moreover, the
case for medium-hybridity may undermine
important differences between media. What is
more, Sekula’s projects also intermingle empirical
research and critical comment with a certain
resistance to curatorship and the aesthetic
appropriation of the photograph. A work such as
Fish Story, for example, seems to show a respect for

862
lineages that reach back to the demotic traditions of
earlier photographic exhibitions in which
sequentially organized, archival projects formed a
basis for engagement with class oppression, social
fracture and the regimes of industrialized labour.
The revival of the photo-essay and the rehabilitated
practices of the photo-document may in some
limited way halt the trafficking of popular culture as
art. The photo-essay surely provides an important
precedent and object lesson for current practice in
the visual arts, in an era when new technology
digitally blends all signs. It offers an approach that
combines the radical interventionist strategies of
two quite disparate artistic formations: the
humanist projects of early twentieth-century
documentary photography with the anti-aesthetic
imperatives of conceptualism. It is significant that
Sekula was scornful of the return to pictorialism in
the work of Wall,35 whose failure, from Sekula’s
perspective, is that it negates the critical
aspirations of conceptual art and returns to the
aesthetically conservative ideology of the
‘single-image aesthetic’.
Both Sekula and Mitchell have in their different
ways argued for the value of the image-text as a
means of sustaining a popular hybrid format that
extends beyond the museum and art gallery and
continues to exploit the critical interaction of
writing and pictures. Sekula was following the
legacy of the 1930s to find a dynamic role for
photography and to retain a link with the social
world. It is also significant, however, that Sekula,
like Evans and Agee, avoided the conventions of
captions and narrative structure so that, as Mitchell
observes in his assessment of Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men, the separation of image and text is

863
not ‘simply a formal characteristic but an ethical
strategy, a way of preventing easy access to the
world they represent’.36 As with Evans and Agee’s
book, there is no obvious way to read Sekula’s
installations. There is an avoidance of sequential
narrative forms where image and text are more
simply juxtaposed. In Sekula’s work, the
conventional ordering of images and text that
audiences expect is challenged in a way that
negates the production of fixed meanings, which in
series such as Shipwreck and Fish Story prevents
any objectifying or sentimentalized view of the
worker. There is, nevertheless, a profound relation
between the two levels of meaning as the ‘reader’ is
invited to see the artist’s work as intervention
rather than expression of objective truth. When
Mitchell says that ‘our labor as beholders is as
divided
as that of Agee and Evans’,37 the same could be said
of our response to Sekula’s work. The linguistic
message is a foil that reminds us to see the picture
as a different thing – it is an emanation of a ‘past
reality’ that makes us think more deeply about the
photograph’s resistance to language. Despite the
challenging nature of these projects, we may note
also an important shift in emphasis away from the
politics of representation to a greater recognition of
values that attach to the objects and experiences
represented.
1 The phrase is used by Victor Burgin in Tony Godfrey, ‘Sex, Text,
Politics: An Interview with Victor Burgin’ in Block, vol. 7 (1982), p. 9.

2 See comment by Sekula cited in Hilde Van Gelder, ‘A Matter of Cleaning

Up: Treating History in the Work of Allan Sekula and Jeff Wall’, History
of Photography, vol. 31, no. 1 (Spring 2007), passim.

864
3 See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Photography Between Discourse and
Document’, in Allan Sekula, Fish Story (Richter Verlag: Rotterdam and
Düsseldorf, 1995), pp. 189–200.

4 Cited in Simon Morley, Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern
Art (Thames & Hudson: London, 2003), p. 146.

5 Victor Burgin, ‘Photographic Practice and Art Theory’, in Victor Burgin

(ed.), Thinking Photography (Palgrave Macmillan: London, 1982), p.
83.

6 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (University of Chicago Press: Chicago,

1994), p. 14.

7 The quotation is cited approvingly by Burgin in ‘Photographic Practice

and Art Theory’, op. cit., p. 83.

8 John Roberts, The Art of Interruption (Manchester University Press:

Manchester, 1998), p. 147.

9 The editorial comment in Block, vol. 7 (1982) makes this point: ‘More
than most other practitioners in the visual arts, he [Burgin] has
indicated the relevance of textual analysis to the still image and the
possibilities for a genuinely subversive art practice. Problems of gallery
space and the lack of serious critical interest have led Burgin, like a
number of other British artists, to exhibit primarily in Europe and
America.’

10 Wall has observed: ‘My work has been criticised for lacking interruption
[…] but, already by the middle of the 1970s, I felt that the “Godardian”
look of this art had become so formulaic and institutionalized.’ See
‘Interview: Arielle Pelenc in Dialogue with Jeff Wall’, in Thierry de Duve
et al., Jeff Wall (Phaidon: London, 1996), p. 11.

11 Mitchell, Picture Theory, op. cit., p. 14, n. 10.

12 Medium-specificity is condemned by Burgin as (among other things) a

symptom of patriarchal authority. See his The End of Art Theory:
Criticismand and Postmodernity (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke and
London, 1986), p. 47.

13 The phrase is cited by Van Gelder, ‘A Matter of Cleaning Up’, op. cit.,
p. 73.

14 Godfrey, ‘Sex, Text, Politics’, op. cit., p. 8.

865
15 Jessica Evans, ‘Victor Burgin’s Polysemic Dreamcoat’, in John Roberts
(ed.), Art Has No History: The Making and Unmaking of Modern Art
(Verso: London and New York, 1994), p. 208.

16 Alex Potts, ‘Sign’, in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (eds.), Critical
Terms for Art History (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1996), p.
19.

17 Evans, ‘Victor Burgin’s Polysemic Dreamcoat’, op. cit., p. 219.

18 See Joel Snyder’s scepticism on indexicality in James Elkins (ed.),

Photographic Theory (Routledge: New York and London, 2007), pp.
369–400.

19 Alain Badiou and François Balmès, De l’Idéologie (Maspéro: Paris,

1976), p. 30. Cited in Kevin McDonnell and Kevin Robins, ‘Marxist
Cultural Theory’, in Simon Clarke, Terry Lovell, Kevin McDonnell, Kevin
Robins, and Victor Jeleniewski Seidler (eds.), One-Dimensional
Marxism: Althusser and the Politics of Culture (Allison and Busby:
London, 1980), p. 166.

20 Mitchell, Picture Theory, op. cit., p. 282.

21 Ibid.

22 See Burgin, The End of Art Theory, op. cit., p. 51. The military
metaphor of photographs being ‘invaded’ by language signals his
connection with the tradition that has produced a pervasive ‘denigration
of vision in twentieth-century French thought’. For a discussion of these
issues, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth-Century French Thought (University of California Press:
Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994).

23 Mitchell, Picture Theory, op. cit., p. 283.

24 The well-known phrase is from ‘The Photographic Message’, in Roland

Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Fontana: London,
1977).

25 Mitchell, Picture Theory, op. cit., p. 284.

26 Ibid., pp. 284–5.

27 Roberts, The Art of Interruption, op. cit., p. 4.

28 See Jan Baetens and Hilde Van Gelder, ‘Editorial’, in History of

Photography, vol. 31, no. 1 (Spring 2007), pp. 1–2.

29 Mitchell, Picture Theory, op. cit., p. 284.

866
30 Ibid., p. 288.

31 Burgin uses the phrase in ‘Perverse Space’, in Beatriz Colomina (ed.),

Sexuality and Space (Princeton Architectural Press: New York, 1992),
p. 236.

32 Mitchell, Picture Theory, op. cit., p. 290.

33 Van Gelder, ‘A Matter of Cleaning Up’, op. cit., p. 73.

34 Ibid., p. 73.

35 Ibid., p. 74.

36 Mitchell, Picture Theory, op. cit., p. 295.

37 Ibid., p. 300.

867
SCARS ON THE LANDSCAPE
DORIS SALCEDO BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
Chin-tao Wu

A s they might do in any public square in a

Western European city on a sunny day, people
gather and casually stroll among the pigeons that
flock around the Plaza de Bolivar, the central
square of Colombia’s capital city, Bogotá. The
imposing facade of the grandiose colonial buildings
that flank the square adds to the monumentality
and the tranquility of the place. One could easily
mistake it, with its sun and strollers, for St Mark’s
Square in Venice. But the Plaza de Bolivar is no
European urban idyll. Pedestrian and public it may
be, but the tranquility of the place is under constant
surveillance and policed by an alarming number of
soldiers menacingly armed with submachine guns.
In keeping with the brutal history that afflicts the
country, the square, the location of important
government buildings such as the National
Congress, has had its role to play in civic bloodshed.
The Palace of Justice on its northern side was
witness, in 1985, to one of the most notorious
confrontations between Colombia’s guerrillas and
its government – a confrontation that resulted in
many of the country’s judges, as well as a large
number of fighters and civilians, being killed. Unlike
the siege of the Opera House in Moscow in 2002

868
that received substantial worldwide coverage in the
media, brutal events in a ‘Third World’ country such
as Colombia have very little global news value. The
Colombian artist Doris Salcedo has, over the last
decades, been persistently attempting to keep alive
in the public consciousness events such as these,
events that the West would be happier to ignore, if
not to forget. As an artist whose work since the
1990s is rarely exhibited in her home country, her
representation of the victims of Colombia’s warring
communities is destined, whether intentionally or
not, for Western consumption. Its consumers
include not only public art museums and spaces
that exhibit and support her work, but also the
commercial markets that trade in, and on, her art.
Although it is not usual for criticism to engage with
the market side of artistic output, it is nevertheless
important to acknowledge that art and commerce
are in an intricate, and often opaque, symbiotic
relationship. The friction generated by this conflict
of interest is particularly acute for an artist whose
work is politically orientated and engaged, and
which articulates violence and the depth of human
suffering. Can the artistic expression of anguish be
given a price within capitalism and traded for profit
by the world’s most powerful gallery owners? If not
a contradiction in itself, this sort of artistic
collaboration with market forces must be, at the
very least, problematic.
The bipartite nature of this essay is intended to
highlight not only the contradictory nature of
today’s art industry, but also the sorts of dilemma
that a politically engaged artist living in both the
creative and commercial worlds might have to face
in order to function within these different realms.
This approach entails a somewhat wider critical

869
perspective than is usual, since without
distinguishing clearly between the different
contexts in which a particular art work is seen and/
or traded, it is all too easy to lose sight of the
crucial role played by the politics of location and
their dynamics.1 Taking as examples those of
Salcedo’s works inspired directly by the 1985 siege
of the Palace of Justice, my paper aims, in the first
place, to investigate how the reception of her art in
the West might be typical of the way in which the
Western art world habitually consumes and
appropriates works from the ‘Third World’. It is my
hope also to shed light on how women artists, or
indeed any female cultural workers, from politically
troubled countries can make successful careers for
themselves within mainstream Western art
institutions. The high point of Salcedo’s artistic
output so far, Shibboleth, shown at Tate Modern in
2007, further illuminates the ways in which ‘Third
World’ artists can be accommodated and consumed
within a predominantly Western cultural discourse.
This is not, of course, to suggest that Salcedo is a
typical artist whose professional record can be
taken as any sort of examplar of a ‘Third World’
woman trying to make her way in the Western art
world. Salcedo’s career is in fact anything but
typical. No Latin American artist has managed what
she has achieved in such a short amount of time in
high-powered Western art establishments, both
public and commercial. Nevertheless, her political
interaction with Western institutions provides an
illuminating example of how it is possible for an
artist operating between two worlds to successfully
negotiate, and secure for herself, a position of
cultural prominence. Needless to add, it is never
easy for any independent researcher outside the

870
closed circle of cognoscenti to map clearly the
intricate networking and social-relation mechanisms
within the contemporary art world, especially as
these often require insider knowledge and special
access. The best that can be done is to sketch out
some significant historical junctures at which
certain key players and institutions have helped to
shape and impact on an artist’s development.
In common with many ‘Third World’ artists who go
to the Western centres of contemporary art for
training, Salcedo completed her postgraduate
studies in New York – an experience that not only
provides graduates with opportunities for further
professional development, but also frequently
facilitates personal networking and access to art
institutions in general. Having finished her masters
degree (in sculpture) at New York University in
1984, Salcedo took a further eight
years to make her institutional debut in the West,
namely the group show ‘Currents 92: The Absent
Body’ at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston
in 1992.2 The following year she appeared in a
group show at a leading New York commercial art
gallery, Brooke Alexander.3 Before 1993, her
exhibition record was exclusively in Bogotá; after
that point, she exhibited almost uniquely at Western
institutions. The year 1993 also saw her feature in
the special section of the 45th Venice Biennale,
‘Aperto 93: Emergence/Emergenza’.4 Given that the
biennale represents the largest gathering of art
specialists anywhere, appearing there placed her
work for the first time on the world stage.
It did not take Salcedo long to be awarded her first
solo show, ‘La Casa Viuda’, at Brooke Alexander in
1994, followed by another at White Cube in London

871
in 1995. Successive exhibitions in both New York
and London, the two most important centres of
contemporary art of the time, indicate that she had
secured a solid bridgehead in the commercial
market. In terms of her large furniture works, the
curators of biennial exhibitions such as the
Carnegie International 1995, curated by Richard
Armstrong, were particularly supportive of
Salcedo’s work, providing her with the space she
needed to show the work to its best advantage. A
new group of furniture pieces, all from 1998, were
then shown at the São Paulo Biennial of that year,
and were seen by Anthony Bond, who would curate
the first Liverpool Biennial the following year and
who asked that all of the pieces be exhibited in
Liverpool.5 The international nature of these
biennials earned for Salcedo an exposure as
extensive as a string of solo exhibitions would have
achieved.
By the end of the 1990s, Salcedo’s work had
entered the circuit of Western public institutions,
winning the support of respected curators such as
Dan Cameron and Charles Merewether, who
consistently drew attention to her output. The late
1990s witnessed a series of exhibitions of her
Unland works at the world’s most prominent art
museums: ‘Unland/Doris Salcedo’ at the New
Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and
SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico in 1998 and then at
the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1999,
and ‘Art Now 18: Doris Salcedo’ at the then Tate
Gallery in the same year. By the end of the decade,
Salcedo was well established in both the
commercial market and the public sector, and
moving at ease back and forth between the two. It
was the Tate exhibition, however, that

872
foreshadowed and facilitated her Turbine Hall
commission at Tate Modern in 2007. Despite
occupying a small area within the gallery, the Art
Now series at the Tate, devoted exclusively to
younger and emerging artists, represents an
important venue to showcase new talent. It is a
much coveted space and a golden opportunity for
any aspiring artist to acquire the kudos that
automatically goes with having been exhibited at
the Tate. Entering the Tate collection must have
been a turning point in Salcedo’s career, especially
given the strong support of its director, Sir Nicholas
Serota. What is remarkable, in
such circumstances, is that within a few years, she
was to be selected for a high-profile project of such
magnitude as the Turbine Hall commission.6 The
new millennium saw a significant change in
Salcedo’s working methods. Unlike her previous
pieces, which had been closely related to the
political and social situations in Colombia, her
works during the period before she took up the Tate
commission were primarily site-specific projects,
where art and architecture were well integrated
into the specificity of the locality in question.7 These
included the much acclaimed installation of 1,550
wooden chairs at the 2003 Istanbul Biennial,
Neither at the White Cube in 2004 and Abyss at the
Castello di Rivoli in Turin in 2005.
Despite shuttling back and forth between Bogotá
and the West, Salcedo has not interrupted her
output over the last two decades, overcoming both
the inconvenience and the discrimination involved
in leading this sort of double life, and she has,
above all, chosen to continue living in her home
city.8 This is in stark contrast to a substantial
number of other contemporary artists not born in

873
Western Europe or North America who have chosen
to move to one of these areas in order to pursue a
better career.9 It is in this sense that Salcedo’s
career is untypical as far as ‘Third World’ artists are
concerned. The fact that she had started out very
early in her career under the aegis of a New
York-based dealer must, one supposes, have
provided her with the art-world networking and
access links necessary to ensure future success,
which an artist based solely in Bogotá could not
possibly have been able to take advantage of.
Salcedo also is unique in the way in which she has
so far chosen to work. In comparison with the
majority of artists of her generation, she has
produced very little in terms of quantity.10 Each of
her works is a unique piece, and it is not her habit
to work in editions. During the 1990s, the worn
shoes of the Atrabiliarios series and the cemented
furniture series hardly amounted to a very
voluminous output, while in the millennium decade
she did mostly public projects that were not
particularly saleable. Two exceptions were the 2004
installation Neither, exhibited in the London
commercial gallery White Cube, which was sold to a
Brazilian collector, and the reinstalled piece known
as Abyss at the Castello di Rivoli. Though it is
customary for artists in such circumstances to put
their working drawings or sketches on the market,
Salcedo has so far made none available for sale.11
Given that a large number of her works from the
1990s have entered public collections, there are
very few pieces left to circulate round in the
market, which leaves demand for her work high and
constantly unsatisfied. How this situation is likely to
develop is something to which we shall return later
in this paper. Having briefly contextualized

874
Salcedo’s production in relation to the Western art
establishment, both public and commercial, over
the last two decades, it is time for us now to take a
closer and more detailed look at her output, with
the aim of better understanding why her work is so
sought after, and what makes her specific
contribution to contemporary art so original.

1 Doris Salcedo, Atrabiliarios, 1992–3, wall

installation with sheetrock, wood, shoes, animal
fibre and surgical thread in ten niches with 11
animal fibre boxes sewn with surgical thread.
Photo: Robert Pettus, courtesy Alexander and
Bonin, New York.

Since the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s,

Salcedo based all of her work on the first-hand
evidence she collected during her many field trips
into the countryside of her native land, places of
deadly civil conflict such as abandoned villages and
sites of mass graves and wholesale slaughter.
Although civil war has never been officially declared
as such, the civilian population of Colombia has
been constantly subjected to indiscriminate violence
occurring as a result of the internal conflicts

875
between different political parties and factions,
paramilitaries, guerrillas and drug dealers.
Employing, indeed recycling, personal domestic
objects used by the victims themselves, Salcedo
makes these scraps and fragments from everyday
life speak for the absent body and the missing
person and the pain and sorrow that their absence
brings.12 In one of her most famous installations,
Atrabiliarios [1], worn shoes, mostly from female
victims, are placed in boxlike niches inserted
directly into walls. The niches’ fronts are sealed
with translucent animal fibre, stretched taut with
surgical thread. The used shoes, which stand in a
relationship of synecdoche with their absent
owners, are the sewed and sealed memory and
mourning that the survivors have to carry around
with them together with their emotional wounds.
In another installation, La Casa Viuda, a series of
five works made between 1992 and 1995, used
doors and other domestic furniture such as bed
frames and stools have bones, zippers and
fragments of clothes inserted into them. The title of
the work – in English ‘the widowed house’ – already
evokes the image and association of a bereaved
woman alone with her loneliness and her grief. The
delicate insertion of human traces
into the furniture further works to strengthen its
visual complexity; the intimacy of the zippers and
fragments of personal clothing, being interwoven
with the domesticity of used objects, inevitably
invites association with their absent users. But in
Salcedo’s work, such emotional associations of loss
and memory are always very subdued and carefully
controlled. Even in La Casa Viuda VI [2] where a
child’s metal bicycle seat is blocked by one door and
fixed to another, the reference to a child’s suffering

876
and bereavement is understated and only indirectly
referenced. The potency of this work lies in the
ambiguity and understatement of the
representation, while Salcedo’s use of everyday
objects is charged with strong emotional
associations.

2 Doris Salcedo, La Casa Viuda VI, 1995, wood,

bone, metal in three parts: (1) 190.2 × 99.1 × 47
cm; (2) 159.7 × 119.3 × 55.8 cm; (3) 158.7 × 96.5 ×
46.9cm. Photo: D. James Dee, courtesy Alexander
and Bonin, New York.

But for her two major works related to the events in

the Palace of Justice in 1985, Salcedo was forced to
abandon her previous practice of employing objects
actually owned and used by the victims. Forced,
that is, in the context of her urgent need to ensure

877
the survival of the collective memory of the tragic
events that had traumatized
an already damaged country – at a time when the
government had been going out of its way to erase
all possible traces of the events by destroying each
and every object left in the burned-out building.13
The two works, in their use of chairs as both images
and objects, represent therefore a significant
departure for the artist, both emotionally and
artistically. In her previous work, Salcedo set out to
identify with, and substitute herself for, the victims.
As she herself stated:

I try to learn absolutely everything about their lives, their

trajectories, as if I were a detective piecing together the scene of a
crime. I become aware of all the details in their lives. I can’t really
describe what happens to me because it’s not rational: in a way, I
become that person; there is a process of substitution.14

In cases where objects are, as it were, imprinted

with their previous owners, the metonymic
substitution might be easier to imagine and to
sustain. What, then, is the role that the artist plays,
or more precisely that Doris Salcedo plays, in a
work of art created from her own resources rather
than from other people’s objects, and claiming to
make specific reference to contemporary historical
events? In her own eloquent essay commenting on
and explaining the work in question, Salcedo talks
of the role of the artist as interlocutor, using what
she calls ‘active memory’ to build a bridge between
the solitary remembering of individual victims and
the collective memory of a community.15 For
Salcedo, ‘active memory’ presupposes two basic
actions, that is, remembering (or recording) and
narrating:

878
To remember is to make a deliberate effort of memory. But the act
of recalling past facts without the capacity to narrate them
condemns memory to oblivion. Active remembering is, therefore,
above all a narration. If we limit memory to the act of remembering,
we convert it into a solitary memory: the traumatised victim
remembers in solitude. As a narrative act, [however,] memory
seeks an interlocutor and in that way transforms itself into social or
collective memory.16

The events of the siege of the Palace of Justice in

1985 gave Salcedo the impetus to produce two
major works. The first, Tenebrae, Noviembre 7,
1985 [3], was exhibited at the Camden Arts Centre
in London in 2001, and then in Documenta 11 at
Kassel in 2002. The second, more of a conceptual
intervention than an art object, took place at the
very location of the event it commemorates. In both
cases, chairs supply the central metaphor. In
Tenebrae (literally ‘shadows’), an entire room is
blocked off with elongated rods and upturned chairs
made of metal. A closer inspection reveals that what
appear to be metal studs preventing visitors from
approaching actually are chair legs. The ambiguity
of the relationship between the chairs, their legs
and/or the blocking rods, and the space thus
defined and blocked off, is a function of the (post-)
minimal sculptural language that Salcedo chooses
to use for her work. The chairs are
of a uniform shape and size, as are the standard
two-foot-by-two-foot blocking studs. Abstract
though the work is, some sense of violence
emanates from it, but to what extent can minimal
abstraction give expression to the specific realism
and ‘content’ that the artist implies by the
specifically dated title? Can the horrific violence of
lived experience be conceived of, or dealt with,

879
effectively in abstract terms? The sense of violence
that the space evokes is confirmed, or perhaps
strengthened, by a number of pieces of crushed
chairs placed outside the room (called Noviembre
6), an installation that is further expanded in the
Documenta exhibition [4]. Like the chairs and the
studs in the room, these are made of stainless steel,
lead, wood and resin, but they have been violently
crushed together by some unspecified force. Some
are, like a battered body, heavily disfigured and
barely recognizable as chairs. Others, again like a
battered body, retain the scars of the brutality that
has been inflicted on them.

3 Doris Salcedo, Tenebrae, Noviembre 7, 1985,

1999–2000, lead and steel in thirty-nine parts,
dimensions variable. Photo: Stephen White,
courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York.

880
Although the violence undergone by the crushed
chairs is clear in Salcedo’s work, the question that
remains is how far these objects can be made to
relate to the experience of the suffering of the
Colombian people, especially in the eyes of a
Western European audience? It would be less
problematic if we could see the chairs simply as a
representation of violence in general, but the artist
somehow hints at a more specific
reading of them by giving the composition the
definite title she does.17 The question is therefore
made more complex than it appears to be at first
sight. Over the past decades, despite her growing
international reputation, Salcedo has seldom
exhibited inside Colombia. Her works, even if they
are not deliberately designed for exhibition and
consumption in the West, have so far mostly been
seen only outside the social context that actually
inspired them.18 It is ironic, given this
decontextualization, that the interpretation of
Salcedo’s work in the West, critical or otherwise, is
always coloured by an emphasis on the fact that the
artist is from Colombia and that her work deals with
the living situation of that particular country – an
emphasis, it must
be said, that is partly of Salcedo’s own making and
of which she herself is very much aware.19 This
Western orientation, perhaps even appropriation, of
her work, as well as an awareness of the political
situation in Colombia are, in other words, two
important background factors that need to be taken
into account in any interpretation of these chairs.

881
4 Doris Salcedo, installation view of exhibition at
Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002. Photo: courtesy
Alexander and Bonin, New York.

Viewing these works in a Western art space in the

specific way the artist’s titles and the gallery
information seem to want us to see them, raises,
therefore, some particular problems. Encountering
the works without knowing anything of either the
artist or her past compositions is an entirely
different experience from that of seeing them with
knowledge of her background and particular
biographical details. When, for example, the British

882
art critic Adrian Searle asserts that, ‘It is hard to
look at Salcedo’s work and not think of real
disappearances and kidnapping in her native
Colombia’,20 he is clearly taking prior knowledge
for granted.
What complicates matters even further are
differences in the actual viewing contexts. One need
only, for instance, compare the visitor responses
that the different conditions at the Camden Arts
Centre and at Kassel elicited. At Camden, a typical
‘white cube’ gallery from which the outside world is
completely excluded, the works occupied the whole
space, which has the effect of giving the visitor a
more concentrated, if not controlled, and unified
atmosphere to contemplate. In contrast, at the
Fridericianum Museum at Kassel, Salcedo’s work
was shown in a huge room that it shared with the
works of Leon Golub. The enormity of the space
made Tenebrae and its accompanying installation of
chairs look quite lost. The nature of Documenta as
an art spectacle showing a multiplicity of works by
a huge number of different artists, with the
constant flow of hundreds, if not thousands, of
visitors crowding in to the exhibition space, made
any specifically Colombian reading of Salcedo’s
work quite impossible (something incidentally that
appalled the artist herself). It is difficult, if not
impossible, to imagine that visitors could have the
time for reflection necessary to relate these works
to their specific sociohistorical context, as a proper
appreciation of the pieces requires.
If the political context of Salcedo’s work might thus
be sometimes lost on its Western European
audience, quite the opposite is true in contexts
where the audience happens to be exclusively

883
Colombian. In Noviembre 6 y 7 [5], the second of
two works commemorating the tragic events of 6
and 7 November 1985 with which we are concerned
here, Salcedo chose the precise time and the actual
location of the event to make her commemorative
act of remembrance. At 11:45am on 6 November
2002, seventeen years after the siege of the Palace
of Justice, empty used chairs suddenly started to
appear, descending slowly from the roof down the
stone facade of the south and east walls of the
palace, an act that ended at 2:30pm on 7
November, at precisely the same time as the
original siege was brought to a brutal conclusion by
the
building being set on fire and many innocent lives
being lost. These wooden chairs, 280 in total, were
intended to cover the entire facade of the palace;
some of them were broken, others aged with the
imprint of the passing years.21
Chairs are everyday objects, banal and ordinary yet
intimate. Most of us spend a large proportion of our
waking lives on them. Empty chairs provide us with
no helpful definition of, or clue to, the social
relationships between them and their absent sitters,
but what they do effectively is evoke the people no
longer sitting on them, or rather the people who
should still be sitting on them. In Tenebrae, the
distortion of the chairs, upturned and with their
grossly extended limbs, seems to serve as an
additional reminder of the physical violence – and
torture – undergone by those who formerly sat on
them. The chairs chosen by Salcedo for her
conceptual installation are individual domestic
objects belonging to interiors. Several chairs set in
groups evoke people gathering together, a family
eating, for example, or staff assembling for an office

884
meeting. A large number of chairs – several
hundred – bring to mind an audience, a theatre or
cinema audience, perhaps, and a public spectacle.
Chairs can therefore be seen as objects of transition
between the individual, the private and the
domestic, on the one hand, and the collective, the
public and the spectacular on the other. To hang
chairs from an outside wall is to put outside what
belongs inside – in other words to turn the inside
out. The image thus created is not only one of a
cascade or waterfall of chairs, but also one that
evokes a large number of people trying to escape to
safety from the impending disaster inside. The
tragedy consists in the fact that what has actually
been saved are the chairs themselves rather than
the people sitting on them.
Like Ionesco’s more celebrated chairs, Salcedo’s
pieces are potent symbols of dehumanization. This
ephemeral art event marks out the palace as a place
of permanent memory, providing a public spectacle
of empty seats that is intended to prompt passers-by
to relive their own memories of the tragic events, as
well as to show solidarity with the victims’ families
and survivors in the loss and emptiness they have
ever since had to endure. No less important is the
fact that the Palace of Justice is located in the Plaza
de Bolivar, Colombia’s principal ‘space of public
appearance’, as Hannah Arendt once called ‘the
symbolic realm of social representation’.22 The very
publicness of the Plaza de Bolivar gives any private
act committed on it an immediate political
significance that is inevitably collective. By
appropriating the walls of the most public square in
her country’s capital, Salcedo staged a silent
protest in full public view, silently echoing the then
government’s own complicit silence and that of the

885
previous authorities, whose bungling inhumanity
brought about the initial tragedy.

5 Doris Salcedo, Noviembre 6 y 7, 2002,

installation, Bogotá. Photo: Oscar
Monsalve, courtesy Alexander and Bonin,
New York.

‘To live’, as Benjamin famously said, ‘means to leave

traces’.23 For those, however, whose traces are
deliberately erased by illegitimate or indiscriminate
force, their very existence is in danger of being

886
forgotten unless they find a voice with which to
express their violation and disempowerment. It is in
such cases that the artist can fulfil the role of
interlocutor, and can lend (rather than give) a voice
to those whose suffering has made them mute, and
whose complicitous fear paralyses their capacity to
act for themselves. In this way, private grief
imposes itself on public consciousness, the invisible
is made visible, the absent is made present, and the
forgotten is remembered. The domestic becomes
national, and the national, international. To view
Salcedo’s work outside its national boundaries,
however, poses a number of problems and
dilemmas for Western eyes: to what extent does our
gaze make us complicit onlookers, content to nod in
sympathy at abuses committed by the Other on the
opposite side of the world? And how far – dare one
ask? – is Salcedo’s critical success in the West a
function of our need to salve our own liberal
consciences?
This question has become even more relevant since
she was commissioned to produce the eighth
Unilever Series installation in the Turbine Hall of
Tate Modern in 2007. She was the first artist from
Latin America to be invited to fill such a prestigious
space, and only the third female artist to be so
honoured. Tate Modern is, arguably, one of the two
most prestigious modern and contemporary art
museums spaces in the world, on a par with the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. Salcedo’s
presence in such a high-profile commission in a
space of high visibility has undoubtedly brought her
to a position of considerable prominence.
Salcedo’s work at Tate Modern, Shibboleth,
consisted of a 167-metre-long crack that ran the

887
length of the vast Turbine Hall. To those entering
the museum, the fissure was barely visible. But as it
zigzagged across the floor, it grew progressively
more visible, wider and deeper until finally, when it
reached the centre of the space, it had the
proportions of a forklike trench. Gradually
thereafter, the cut again became less and less
visible, until it finally disappeared at the far end of
the hall. Along the length of what looked like an
earthquake fault line, a tunnel effect was created by
its sub-surface interior being covered with plastered
wire mesh, the structure of which was reminiscent
of containing fences around, for examples, prisons
or concentration camps. The biblical reference in
the title Shibboleth does, in fact, refer to a process
of separation, to the password that serves to
separate the sheep from the goats – to distinguish
the supposedly superior Gileadites from the
supposedly inferior Ephraimites.24 The work was,
however, popularly known as the ‘crack’, or ‘the
Tate crack’.25 To create a crack of these proportions
was, of course, no easy task. Leaving aside the
technical difficulties involved and the inevitable
health-and-safety concerns, Shibboleth was a direct
intervention into the structure of the architectural
space of Tate Modern – one might even say an
attack on its very structural integrity.
Shibboleth thus not only literally tears open the
floor of Tate Modern, but also symbolically
undermines the value system and structure of all
that this celebrated institution embodies. Salcedo
has not been reticent about telling her public
exactly what she considers the meaning of the work
to be: ‘If I as a Third World artist am
invited to build one of my works in this space, I
must bring them what I am, and the perspective of

888
what I am. I think the space defined by the work is
negative space, the space that, ultimately, Third
World persons occupy in the First World.’26 Salcedo
specified what this perspective might be in her
proposal statement for the commission: ‘Shibboleth
… addresses the w(hole) in history that marks the
bottomless difference that separates whites from
nonwhites. The w(hole) in history that I am
referring to is the history of racism, which runs
parallel to the history of modernity, and is its untold
dark side.’27 She further stated that:

This piece is inopportune…. Its appearance disturbs the Turbine

Hall in the same way the appearance of immigrants disturbs the
consensus and homogeneity of European societies. In high
Western tradition the inopportune that interrupts development,
progress, is the immigrant, the one who does not share the identity
of the identical and has nothing in common with the community.28

The crack in Shibboleth clearly represents a

separation and a fault-line running through the
foundations on which our sociopolitical life and
artistic culture are constructed. What appears to be
solid is undermined by a basic and structural fault.
Whether or not it represents racism, as defined by
Salcedo, is, however, open to question, since no
racial interpretation is inherent in the crack. As
with any effective art work, it is open ended so that
any one of a wide range of schisms can be read into
it.
For all its ambiguity, one thing that is crystal clear
is the work’s relationship to its host institution. The
physical violence that the crack imposes on the very
fabric of this high-profile building is unprecedented.
No other art work has so completely broken open
an art museum, so forcibly obliged its visitors to

889
look downwards instead of sideways or upwards,
and left such a permanent physical scar on its floor
space as Shibboleth has done. As British journalist
Rachel Campbell-Johnston put it: ‘Tate Modern, a
triumphalist monument to our modern Western
culture, is quite literally riven in two by an artwork
that provokes us to question the very foundations of
our ways of thought.’29 Campbell-Johnston’s
reflection is not untypical of studies on Salcedo’s
art. As with all of her public projects, Salcedo has
provided, for Shibboleth, a clear statement
analysing exactly what she had in mind at the start
of the project. In this way, she is able, from the
outset, to direct, to a certain extent, the critical
discourse to which her work is to give rise. The
racism discourse is no exception. In today’s climate
of political correctness, the racial interpretation of
the work is not only to be tolerated but even
actively, and willingly, embraced. As Sir Nicholas
Serota declared at the press conference
inaugurating the work: ‘There is a crack. There is a
line and eventually there will be a scar. That is
something that we and other artists will have to live
with.’30 In contrast to those missing Colombians
whose trace, erased by illegitimate and
indiscriminate force, but restored by Salcedo in her
early works, the scar that the artist has been able to
leave at
Tate Modern is well nigh impossible to erase. Not
only that, but it is actually welcomed by the
powers-that-be in the Western art establishment.
Indeed, the way in which Tate Modern went out of
its way to accommodate the artist was little short of
extraordinary. It is clear in retrospect that the
actual politics of the production of Shibboleth were
embargoed as confidential and completely sealed

890
off from any public scrutiny.31 It might be
understandable – though not necessarily acceptable
– if details of the actual financing of the commission
were kept secret. But even straightforward
technical questions such as how the piece was
constructed, and how deep the crack actually was,
remained resolutely unanswered. At the commission
press conference, the director of the museum, the
curator and the artist pointedly avoided responding
to such questions from increasingly frustrated
journalists. On-site staff were apparently also
instructed not to disclose any details of the
construction of the work itself, even though some
felt proud enough to confide: ‘Of course, I know
how it was made.’ This intriguing lack of
transparency turns out, on investigation, to be a
condition imposed by the artist herself. Even though
talking about methods of production and how art is
actually created has been an integral and
ubiquitous part of artistic discourse throughout the
centuries, Tate Modern felt able to turn a blind eye
to its own remit as a public educator and complied.
One would have thought that Tate’s worldwide
reputation would enable it to impose its own
conditions rather than accept those of the artists it
commissions. That it was willing to go to such
lengths to accede to Salcedo’s requests is an
eloquent testimony to the power relationship
between the self-proclaimed ‘Third World’ artist
and her ‘First World’ art institution. Even Salcedo
herself expressed surprise at Tate Modern’s
willingness to grant her and her work their
unqualified approval, and went on record as saying
– not without gratitude, one suspects – that ‘It’s
quite extraordinary that the Tate would accept this

891
work – there are not many museums in the world
that would dare.’32
However true this may be, it is undeniable that the
Tate commission launched Salcedo into a stage of
her career when she could command the same sort
of global attention that any comparable Western
artist would have enjoyed. Despite this, and
although she had long benefited from the support of
a circle of art-world insiders (museum directors,
critics and curators included), the media coverage
of her work and the critical writing it inspired had
remained surprisingly limited. This had nothing
directly to do with the quality of her work, but more
with the hegemonics, economic and cultural, of the
Western art world. The art support systems in the
West, the scope and scale of the art market, the
number and standing of the curators and critics, the
importance of art magazines, journals and books
are far more developed than any other ‘Third World’
country could possibly sustain. British artists such
as, for example, Rachel Whiteread, an approximate
contemporary of Salcedo’s, fare much better in the
sense that their work immediately generates scores
of notices
and reviews, both locally and internationally.33 With
the Turbine Hall commission, however, Salcedo
suddenly became a household name in the West,
and this success reverberated throughout the ‘Third
World’.
Salcedo’s new-found popularity in the Western
press and art establishment has brought with it a
new style of critical writing that raises certain
general methodological problems concerning the
accessibility of works of art. Given, for example, the
ephemeral nature of Salcedo’s Noviembre 6 y 7

892
performance work that took place in Bogotá, far
away from any contemporary art centre or location,
few Western curators or critics could actually have
seen the performance themselves.34 The need,
however, among some critics to produce a critical
narrative of this sort of performance means that
they often work from secondary material and at
second hand. The same photos and the same
performative details – both, one assumes, supplied
ultimately by the artist – are produced over and
over again by critics who have no means of properly
investigating the political and cultural contexts of
the actual site where the event took place. Just how
essential such considerations are when articulating
critical responses to art is well illustrated by the
case of Whiteread’s Holocaust Memorial in Vienna,
which no self-respecting critic would dream of
writing about without having been to Austria and
seeing the work first hand in situ.
The Western art establishment that extended such a
warm welcome to Salcedo is not of course
exclusively composed of public art institutions. In
anticipation of the high-profile exhibition of
Shibboleth, her agent in London, White Cube,
opened a solo show of her work on 15 September
2007, three weeks ahead of the opening of the Tate
Modern commission.35 The timing could not have
been more strategically chosen or more
commercially orientated. Given the upcoming
exposure, it was only reasonable to assume that
Salcedo’s reputation in the art world would rise
significantly and so, naturally, would her market
value.
The White Cube show must have posed a particular
problem for an artist whose political commitment

893
has always been part and parcel of her work. How
comfortable she is in a relationship with the high
priest of art capitalism that White Cube represents
must remain a matter for conjecture. Nonetheless,
eight medium-to-large furniture pieces, not to
mention a number of smaller cemented chairs, were
crowded into the modestly sized Hoxton Square
space. Rarely had the gallery displayed works in
such a crowded situation. In terms of quantity and
quality, what could easily have been a museum
exhibition in fact turned out to be a sales
opportunity, given the fact that the supply of
Salcedo’s earlier furniture pieces was so limited and
demand for it consequently so high. The five older
pieces that had been bought back from private
collectors by White Cube could therefore be seen as
a marketing strategy designed to secure a market
monopoly. As one critic anonymously remarked of
the gallery owner Jay Jopling: ‘He’s now the one
who owns everything; he can give you any price for
any piece.’36 Equally problematic were the three
new furniture pieces presumably produced
specifically for the sale. Although Salcedo has never
drawn any sort of line under the 1990s furniture
pieces,37 it was something of a surprise to see these
pieces resurrected, as it were, and reappearing on
the market after a break of ten or so years. With
each one being potentially worth half a million
pounds, if not more, it is easy to see what was at
stake. To quote one critic, again anonymously: ‘Of
course, artists can do whatever they want to; they
could produce 100 more pieces, but in a way,
nobody would respect that. It was a little
unexpected seeing again new pieces of the same
series that had already been concluded.’38

894
The issues (political and otherwise) raised by
Salcedo’s shows at Tate Modern and White Cube
can perhaps most usefully be viewed in the context
of the problematic relationship between public and
commercial enterprise under neoliberal capitalism,
a force unleashed under Britain’s Thatcherite
government when public institutions could no
longer function properly without being heavily
reliant on private (including commercial) money.39
Although Salcedo’s commission came under the
banner of the Unilever Series, the sponsorship
money, which amounts to some quarter of a million
pounds each year, is unlikely alone to have met the
full production costs.40 To quote Achim
Borchardt-Hume, the Tate curator who coordinated
the commission: ‘It’s not that sponsorship is the
same thing as the project budget; it’s not the
sponsor who pays for a project, nor did Unilever pay
for the whole Turbine Hall commission. It’s rather
that Unilever made the commitment to pay a certain
amount of money in support of the project, but then
the project budget is something else…. Obviously
Doris’s work has super-high production costs. It’s
not a low-budget production from the outset. There
can only be certain galleries, and certain
mechanisms of production, that could make that
possible.’41 Precisely what the ‘certain mechanisms
of production’ were that actually made Salcedo’s
commission possible is, however, destined to
remain a mystery. Who contributed, and how much,
towards the cost of producing Salcedo’s work?
Despite being a model of helpfulness and frankness
in other respects, Borchardt-Hume resolutely
declined to reveal any figures concerning the actual
cost of Salcedo’s commission or any sponsorship
deals involved in it. Nor was my question on the

895
same topic filed with the Freedom of Information
Office Group in the Director’s Office at Tate Modern
any more revealing. Not only did the Tate refuse to
disclose the total budget, they also declined to give
any detail of other additional funding. It stated:

Tate cannot disclose the amount of budget for individual

installations…. The amount of the budget for Shibboleth has been
withheld under section 43(2) of the Freedom of Information Act,…
as we believe it would prejudice Tate’s commercial interests to
release this…. The additional support: the FoI group considers that
to supply this information would prejudice the commercial interests
of Tate in relation to those sources, and that the public interest in
releasing this is outweighed by the public interest of Tate’s
continued ability to work with these sources.42

The Tate’s non-reply is a model of non-information,

if not intellectual dishonesty, and surely makes a
mockery of the so-called Freedom of Information
Act.
It is not impossible to imagine the Shibboleth
commission, having been first produced and
fabricated in Bogotá and involving many staff over
several months, and then being shipped to London
to be installed on site, over a matter of six or so
weeks, by Salcedo and a Colombian and local crew
consisting of scores of people working in teams,43
incurring costs that would easily overshoot the
million-pound mark. Since no private collector could
be expected to support a project so obviously
designed for the exclusive glory of Tate Modern,44
Salcedo’s commercial agents in New York and
London seem likely to have provided the only
mechanism whereby the commission could secure
the extra finance it needed. If this were the case, it
would come as no surprise to see these galleries

896
taking a direct and vested interest in enhancing the
reputation and market price of such an artist. It is,
moreover, no secret in the art world that
commercial dealers often have a financial role to
play in funding the appearance of their artists at
international biennials.
The intricate symbiotic relationship between the
Tate, a public institution, and commercial
enterprise in the shape of the superstar gallery
White Cube reveals a great deal about the dynamics
of today’s art world and its often opaque market
mechanisms. In particular, the lack of transparency
surrounding the politics of the production of
Salcedo’s Shibboleth commission brings to the fore
the problematic nature of public and commercial
‘cooperation’. Is it a happy marriage based on the
common interest of producing a landmark work of
art that serves the best interests of the Tate’s wide
public? Or is it perhaps a different sort of
partnership, one that, while ostensibly serving the
so-called ‘public interest’, is actually more like
private enterprise in disguise, advancing the
commercial interests of White Cube and – dare one
speculate? – those of the artist herself?
The politics of the production of Salcedo’s
Shibboleth commission are no doubt closely bound
up with those of the artist and those of Western art
institutions, public as well as commercial – a topic
rarely broached in the critical literature. While as a
‘Third World’ artist, Salcedo has produced work,
and Shibboleth above all, that carries with it a
critical political agenda vis-à-vis the power
structures of Western art institutions, this does not
apparently prevent her, at a personal level, from
being deeply involved and implicated in the very

897
power structures that she is criticizing. This
paradox is perhaps inevitable as long as the status
quo remains unchanged, with the current power
hierarchy in the contemporary art world still
dominated by Western institutions. After all,
Salcedo’s universal visibility in terms of global
reach can be achieved only if she works and
exhibits with powerful Western galleries, and her
critique of existing structures is possible only in so
far as it continues to be sanctioned by institutions
such as Tate. Even if the critique is somewhat
muted, Salcedo’s
work itself has certainly secured for her a
prominent place in the contemporary art world.
Few artists have so relentlessly devoted themselves
to the problematics of human violence as she has.
With her newly branded status as a
Tate-commissioned artist, her voice can now be
heard loud and clear.

In negotiating her way between the two worlds of

Colombia and America / Western Europe, Doris
Salcedo has certainly made her mark and changed
the artistic landscape for the better. She has forged
for herself a rewarding career both in terms of
aesthetic achievement and worldly success. Not all
works of art and practices, however, can be
accommodated to capitalist market interests to the
same degree or with equal legitimacy. Some, in
particular those who exploit the suffering of fellow
human beings – and the more so if these are
innocent women – are inevitably drawn into the
byways of the moral maze. They acquire a
privileged status that makes them special and at the
same time vulnerable. If, for whatever

898
well-intentioned reasons, this sort of work becomes
the victim of financial manipulation, then not only
the art and the artist who creates it, but also the
public for whose consumption it is intended, are all
thereby compromised. Only the future will reveal
how far Salcedo will have been able to reconcile
political belief with commercial expediency.
I would have liked to express here my gratitude to all those who were kind
and cooperative enough to speak to me as I prepared this essay, but
unfortunately the requirements of anonymity prevent me from
acknowledging their contribution more explicitly. An earlier and shorter
version was published under the title of ‘Scars and Faultlines: The Art of
Doris Salcedo’ in New Left Review, vol. 69 (May/June 2011), pp. 61–77.

1 Elizabeth Adan, for example, treats the spaces of White Cube and
Tate’s Turbine Hall as if they were exactly the same thing, calling both
‘quintessentially “First World” art institutions based in London’; see ‘An
“Imperative to Interrupt”: Radical Aesthetics, Global Contexts and
Site-Specificity in the Recent Work of Doris Salcedo’, Third Text, vol.
24, no. 5 (September 2010), pp. 591–2.

2 The biographical data are derived from the Phaidon monograph, Carlos
Basualdo et al., Doris Salcedo (Phaidon: London, 2000). This
publication contains the most comprehensive account available of
Salcedo’s exhibiting history up to the time it was published in 2000.

3 Salcedo started to work with Brooke Alexander gallery in 1992, and then
moved to Alexander and Bonin in 1995 when Carolyn Alexander, a
partner in Brooke Alexander, left to form her own gallery with Ted Bonin
(former gallery director at Brooke Alexander) in 1995; email
correspondence with Carolyn Alexander, 20 July 2010.

4 Although there were a hundred or so artists from many different

countries in ‘Aperto 93’, Salcedo came to notice by securing a half
page of press coverage in the established art magazine Flash Art:
‘Doris Salcedo’, Flash Art, vol. 26, no. 171 (Summer 1993), p. 97.

5 Telephone interview with Carolyn Alexander, Salcedo’s New York agent,

18 October 2010.

6 Although the commission was officially inaugurated in October 2007, the

actual process started as far back as April 2006; interview with Achim
Borchardt-Hume, then curator at Tate Modern, 28 November 2007.

899
7 For her work, Salcedo used to travel to areas of high violence outside
Bogotá, but when the security conditions in Colombia deteriorated, she
was forced to change her working habits; interview with Salcedo, 20
September 2003.

8 It was reported in 1995 that when her work was in transit from Colombia
to the United States, the suspicion was that it was in some way related
to drug trafficking, and it was accordingly destroyed by the customs;
see ‘Artwork Destroyed’, Los Angeles Times, 4 November 1995, Part F,
p. 2.

9 Chin-tao Wu, ‘Biennials sans frontières’, New Left Review, vol. 57 (May/
June 2009), pp. 107–15.

10 Hans-Michael Herzog made similar comments in his interview with the

artist, ‘Conversation between Doris Salcedo and Hans-Michael
Herzog’, trans. Camilla Flecha, Cantos Cuentos Colombians: Arte
Colombiano/Contemporary Colombian Art (Daros-America AG: Zurich,
2004), p. 143.

11 When asked if Salcedo would sell her working drawings, Carolyn

Alexander replied: ‘Actually she doesn’t do drawings. She sketches in
some notebooks, but she doesn’t do drawings. She said she’s not a
drawing person, it’s just not part of her work’; interview with Carolyn
Alexander, 18 October 2010.

12 Salcedo has said that she used 20 to 30 per cent of the objects she
collected from the victims in her work; interview with Salcedo, 20
September 2003.

13 Salcedo reports how, despite her repeated requests, the government

refused to give her any object from the building in commemoration of
the events of 1985; interview with Salcedo, 18 February 2003.

14 ‘Carlos Basualdo in conversation with Doris Salcedo’, in Basualdo et

al., Doris Salcedo, op. cit., p. 14.

15 Doris Salcedo, ‘Un Acto de Memoria’, D.C., no. 9 (December 2002),

n.p. Translated by Tim Girven, to whom I am grateful for his kind help.

16 Doris Salcedo, ‘Un Acto de Memoria’, D.C., no. 9 (December 2002),

n.p.

17 While not specifying where the event took place, Salcedo commented:
‘The only piece in that sense is that November has a date, a month and
a year. Wherever there’s a complete date with a year, that means it
refers to specific date…. That was the only exception, and that’s

900
 something I very much need’; interview with Salcedo, 20 September
2003.

18 This apparent exclusivity is in all probability linked to the security

situation in present-day Bogotá.

19 Interview with Salcedo, 18 February 2003.

20 Adrian Searle, ‘World of Interiors’, Guardian, 12 March 2002, p. 10.

21 According to Salcedo, she had intended to use 400 chairs, but had
finally to settle for 280 because of lack of finance; interview with
Salcedo, 18 February 2003. The number of chairs reported in the
catalogue Cantos Cuentos Colombians was 190; Herzog,
‘Conversation between Doris Salcedo and Hans-Michael Herzog’, op.
cit., p. 155.

22 Susana Torre, ‘Claiming the Public Space: The Mothers of Plaza de

Mayo’, in Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway and Leslie Kanes Weisman
(eds.), The Sex of Architecture (Harry N. Abrams: New York, 1996), pp.
241–50.

23 Walter Baenjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, in Peter

Demetz (ed.) &and Edmund Jephcott (trans.), Reflections: Essays,
Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (Schocken Books: New York,
1978), p. 155.

24 ‘Therefore Jephthah gathered all the males from Gilead, and warred
against Ephraim, and the Gileadites defeated Ephraim … and occupied
the margins of the Jordan, through where Ephraim’s people would have
to pass on their return. And as some of them arrived there and prayed
to be let through, they asked him, Aren’t you from Ephraim? And as he
answered, No, I am not, they replied: Then, say “Shibboleth”, as they
were unable to pronounce the same letters … and were beheaded …
so that forty thousand men from Ephraim died in that war’, Judges 12:
4–6.

25 Given the inevitable sexual overtones of the word ‘crack’, it is

interesting to speculate whether the work of a male artist would have
attracted the same nickname in popular usage.

26 Manuel Toledo, ‘Doris Salcedo contra el racismo’, BBC Mundo, 9

October 2007.

27 Doris Salcedo, ‘Proposal for a project for the Turbine Hall, Tate
Modern, London, 2007’, in Achim Borchardt-Hume, Paul Gilroy et al.,
Doris Salcedo: Shibboleth (Tate: London, 2007), p. 65.

901
28 Ibid.

29 Rachel Campbell-Johnston, ‘The Jagged Edge of Art’, The Times, 9

October 2007, p. 33.

30 ‘Latest Tate modern installation is a yawning chasm’, Epoch Times,

10–16 October 2007, p. 11.

31 The Turbine Hall was sealed off for six weeks when the construction of
Shibboleth was carried out. This was not the case, for example, with
Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project in 2003.

32 Ossian Ward, ‘Into the Breach’, Time Out London supplement, ‘Going
to Tate Modern’, October 2007, p. 5.

33 A search, for example, of the ArtBibliographieModern database in early

2003 revealed 156 entries for Whiteread but only 24 for Salcedo.

34 Salcedo mentions in her interview with Hans-Michael Herzog that she

did not give the local press any advanced notice of the performance;
see Herzog, ‘Conversation between Doris Salcedo and Hans-Michael
Herzog’, op. cit., p. 158.

35 The exhibition at White Cube took place between 15 September and

20 October 2007, while the Tate commission opened on 9 October.

36 Interview with the author, 05 December 2007.

37 Salcedo did, however, declare: ‘Originally I planned to do many more

pieces. I had planned to make a group of cement furniture after
finishing one piece and before beginning another, but it demanded too
much energy, and I felt I had already achieved what I was looking for’;
see Herzog, ‘Conversation between Doris Salcedo and Hans-Michael
Herzog’, op. cit., p. 152.

38 Interview with the author, 05 December 2007. Salcedo also produced

two more new pieces in 2008 for her New York gallery, Alexander and
Bonin.

39 See Chin-tao Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since

the 1980s (Verso: London, 2002).

40 The Unilever Series, inaugurated in 2000, was a sponsorship deal

between Unilever and Tate Modern worth £1.25 million for
commissioning works in the Turbine Hall over five years. It was
renewed in 2005 for a further three years for £1 million (Salcedo’s
commission falls under this tranche), and again in 2008, this time to the
tune of £2.1 million for the next five years; see the Tate’s press

902
 releases, ‘Unilever to pour £1.25m into Tate Gallery’, 13 May 1999;
‘Doris Salcedo to undertake the next commission in The Unilever
Series’, 6 April 2007; and ‘Unilever extend sponsorship of The Unilever
Series for a further five years’, 18 July 2007.

41 Interview with Achim Borchardt-Hume, 30 November 2010.

42 Email correspondence with Ruth Findlay, Senior Press Officer at Tate,

11 February 2011.

43 Salcedo stated in an interview: ‘There are around 100 people working

in teams’; see Ossian Ward, ‘Into the Breach’, Time Out London
supplement, p. 5.

44 Salcedo’s large furniture pieces are in any case mostly in public, not
private, collections. What is more, as the commission already had a
commercial sponsor in Unilever, and the title of the Unilever Series, any
additional donor would inevitably have had to remain more or less
anonymous. In some press reports, Shibboleth was described as ‘a
new £300,000 work of art’; see Nigel Reynolds, ‘Tate Modern reveals
giant crack in civilization’, Daily Telegraph, 8 October 2007. Informed
sources, however, do not endorse this figure. According to the popular
press, shipping the work from Colombia to London cost £23,410, and a
£3,000 commission fee was paid to the artist; see ‘Revealed: How the
Tate Modern’s “crack in the ground” cost the taxpayers £23,000’, Daily
Mail, 24 February 2008. It is far from clear how reliable this information
may actually be.

903
REALISM, TOTALITY AND THE
MILITANT CITOYEN
OR, WHAT DOES LUKÁCS HAVE TO DO WITH
CONTEMPORARY ART?
Gail Day

T he theme of this essay – Georg Lukács and

contemporary art – is not the most obvious of
subjects, its conjoined terms being deeply
incongruous, their contiguity seemingly precluded
by his harsh criticisms of aesthetic modernism.
Lukács seemed barely able to consider the new
literature of his own period; I am merely thinking of
the montage practices of the interwar period, not
imagining his likely response to the type of art work
produced towards the end of his life, let alone
subsequently. Moreover, Lukács’s interest in the
‘visual’ arts is limited; when he does address
modern art, he often struggles to comprehend it,
comparing the paintings of Paul Cézanne
unfavourably with those of, for example,
Rembrandt.1 Such problems do not apply to
Lukács’s most famous interlocutor and critic: we
feel we can readily speak of ‘Brecht and
contemporary art’, as did the curators of the 2009
Istanbul Biennial, who made Bertolt Brecht,
Elizabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill’s ‘What Keeps
Mankind Alive?’ from The Threepenny Opera the
thread of their selection.2 The problem extends
further than questions of Lukács’s aesthetic

904
judgments. There is something of his strong sense
of historical evolution and decay, his commitment to
‘the general line of development’, and his
untroubled rhetoric of ‘nation’, ‘people’ and
‘masses’ that seems of another time and place. Then
there is the humanism of his intellectual universe –
albeit one appended to a hard selflessness of one
placing himself in the service of the revolution – and
his (sometimes quite aggressive) modus operandi in
debates. One of the main tasks of this essay is to
overcome the (warranted) scepticism prompted by
its premise: that Lukács might have something to
offer for the critical consideration of art today.
Doing so requires looking beyond many received
ideas, and, to a degree, demands that we not
approach the undertaking by drawing up checklists
of where art does or does not match up to Lukács’s
strictures. To be clear from the outset: I do not
think Lukács would approve of the art I will discuss.
The mission is not to establish some notion of
‘Lukácsian art’, nor do I claim that, having been
long overlooked by art writers, Lukács actually
represents the way forwards for considering
contemporary aesthetic practices. My aim is both
more modest and perverse. I will suggest that the
points of contact between Lukács and visual art
today can be found in some unexpected places,
often emerging from precisely the type of
features that Lukács famously criticized
(description, reportage, montage or ‘Brechtian’
modes). In the process, some of the dichotomies for
which Lukács is usually known will start to unravel
or reverse; another will come to the fore, although
this one names a historico-political obstruction that
Lukács seeks to dislodge.

905
I

In discussions of ‘contemporary art’, the category

itself has come under increasing scrutiny.3 Is it not,
as a number of commentators have suggested, little
more than a marketing category devised by the
major auction houses? For some time there has
been a significant strand of left criticism that has
seen in art – and visual art especially – nothing but
the marks of ‘the commodity’. This line of critique
has become rather too undifferentiated, with all
aspects of (non-amateur) artistic production – from
open celebrations of conspicuous wealth through to
work genuinely seeking radical democratic effect –
tarred by the same brush. As one of the theorists
known for extending homologies between the
commodity-form and cultural forms, Lukács might
be understood as a progenitor for such criticism,
‘reification’ having become a dominant motif for the
critical common sense of today’s cultural theory
(albeit largely by way of simplified versions of ‘the
spectacle’, ‘the colonization of everyday life’ or ‘the
culture industry’). But over the course of the
twentieth century, the sense that came to prevail
increasingly lacked commitment to, or faith in, the
power and effectivity of agency (whether collective
or individual) – influenced by the series of political
setbacks and defeats, the compromising of the
socialist vision, the collapse of the revolutionary
ideal and the associated developments in postwar
social and cultural theory. In crucial, if highly
attenuated, ways this commitment fundamentally
shaped Lukács’s account. For him, criticism of the
object is displaced by a notion of criticism in or
through human action; this recognition of the
dynamic imbrication of subject and object (through

906
a praxis of mutual transformation) underpins his
outlook and – despite experiencing some of the
setbacks just mentioned – this political philosophy
provides resistance to the extending reificatory
powers of capital. With this conception, Lukács’s
work often meditates upon the gap between Sein
(what is) and Sollen (what ‘ought’ to be), the gap
between the existing state of things under
capitalism and the desired transformation of human
social relations. Deriving from his early engagement
with Kierkegaard, and inflected by Hegel’s
distinction between the real and the rational, this
contrast of Sein und Sollen – or, more precisely, the
question of how to pass from the former to the
latter – was translated into the politicized terms of
Marxism, becoming a vital strand in his aesthetic
writings on realism. I want to argue that this critical
problem returns – in ways caught between
subliminal registration and conscious deliberation –
for a number of key artists working today.
Prompted by a series of translations in the 1960s
and 1970s, the anglophone reception of Lukács was
simultaneously a site of his appearance and
disappearance. Attention to Lukács epitomized the
moment of the New Left, and, as a result, his work
also became a central focus of criticism. In the
1970s, radical discourses in art were much
influenced by the ‘critique of representation’ that
emerged through ‘neo-Brechtian’ film theory
(associated in Screen with the films of Jean-Luc
Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, or Jean-Marie Straub
and Daniéle Huillet), and also through approaches
to photography and video developed through
second-wave conceptual art. This approach was
complemented, in subsequent years, by the
development of a specifically postmodern

907
interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s theory of
allegory.4 Lukács was generally presented as the
point of polemical contrast. A critique of Lukácsian
realism – along with his suspicion of modernist
fragmentation and the methods of reportage – was
prominent to these developments (although
Lukács’s critics were often prone to conflating his
account of bourgeois realism simplistically with
Zhdanovist Socialist Realism). These debates still
linger and continue to impinge upon the discursive
parameters of today’s critical practices.
Yet, since the 1990s, something akin to a realist
impulse has re-emerged in artists formed through
or informed by these arguments. What has often
been referred to as the social or political ‘turn’ in
art invites reconsideration of the substance of
Lukács’s approach to realism. Even if most artists
still prefer to avoid any talk of ‘totality’, the efforts
of many practitioners today can be said to aspire to
‘portray’ contemporary social totality. There is no
space here to take on debates over ‘relational’ or
‘post-relational’ practices, many of which reject the
task of ‘representation’ altogether (let alone that of
‘portrayal’), seeing it as inherently dated and
problematic.5 Suffice it to say that whatever the
specific line of art-politics preferred, there has
emerged, in response to the post-1989 reordering of
the world and the extensions of the neoliberal
economic sphere, a felt urgency not only to
describe, witness or give testimony to the new
phase of capital accumulation, but also to account
for, analyse, respond to and intervene in it, and to
imagine how we might even exceed capital’s social
relations. Indeed, even ‘descriptive’ methods of
documentary reportage are now being deployed by

908
visual artists towards what we could characterize as
explicitly ‘narrative’ ends.

II

1 Allan Sekula, Volunteer Watching, Volunteer

Smiling (Isla de Ons, 12/19/02), 2002–3, horizontal
diptych, colour photographs, from Black Tide/Marea
negra. Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Above all it has been Allan Sekula’s work that has

been framed as an example of revived ‘critical
realism’. The use of the term by the artist himself,
and by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, who first applied it
to Sekula’s practice, is not without a certain irony,
one provoked by the need to navigate the legacy of
the Brecht–Lukács conjunction – and specifically, to
avoid forsaking Brecht’s critique of Lukács in
making the critical-realist
claim.6 Nevertheless, the ironic distancing goes
only so far: Sekula remains notable for taking
seriously the Lukácsian contribution, refusing to
duck the concept that leaves so many others
uneasy: that of social totality. Especially well versed
in debates concerning politicized aesthetics, Sekula
seeks to go beyond the historical dichotomy
abbreviated by the names ‘Lukács’ and ‘Brecht’,
preferring to focus on their common

909
cognitive-aesthetic, or realist, commitment. Already,
in the early 1980s, we find Sekula describing his
approach as a realism ‘against the grain’ or as ‘a
realism not of appearances or social facts but of
everyday experience in and against the grip of
advanced capitalism’.7 The emphasis here on a
‘realism not of appearances or social facts’ touches
on his engagement with Lukács’s critique of
immediacy, although photography – as Sekula
knows – was fundamentally problematized by this
very attribute, figuring in Lukács’s essays
adjectivally as a byword for naturalism.
(Interestingly, despite their differences, we can find
photography serving much the same essential role
for Brecht and Adorno.) Sekula’s point, then, is also
– and here Benjamin proves important – to
challenge the widespread denigration of the
photograph and to rescue its critical potentials from
a triple problem: the downplaying of photography
by the dominant aesthetic discourse; photography’s
‘art-ification’ (prominent from the 1960s and
1970s); and the ‘postmodern’ reaction to these
developments. As Sekula argues, photography
attracts him, first, because of its ‘unavoidable social
referentiality’ – albeit one that needed to be
handled with care – and, secondly, by the way the
life-world interpellates the photographer as ‘already
a social actor’.8 Seeking out a form of ‘extended
documentary’, he criticizes the lack of reflexivity to
be found in much traditional social documentary.9
However, Sekula also steps back from artistic
fascinations with the ‘fatalistic play of quotations
and “appropriations” of already existing images’
then current, as well as from approaches that posit
the ‘idealist isolation of the “image-world” from its
material conditions’.10 With his later projects, such

910
as Fish Story – a large work comprising
photographs, diagrams, captions and essays, and
around which the claims to ‘critical realism’
congregated – Sekula uses the literal and
metaphoric capacities of seafaring to delineate a
picture of the modern maritime economy, to reflect
on the history of its representations, and to
challenge late twentieth-century theoretical
preoccupations with digital speed, flows and
‘de-materiality’. Black Tide (2002/3) developed
these themes [1].
Similar challenges to an art of (uncritical)
appropriation – to the reduction of the
‘image-world’ to something divorced from
materiality (or of the world itself to image), and the
complacent tendencies within aesthetic
self-reflexivity – can be found voiced by a few other
artists and film-makers, such as Harun Farocki and
Martha Rosler. It has also been picked up, in widely
varying ways, by younger practitioners, such as
Ursula Biemann, Hito Steyerl and Oliver Ressler.
Crucial to this mode of realism is a certain
reflexivity about reflexivity, a willingness to subject
basic counter-intuitive lessons familiar from modern
art or film theory to a more sustained consideration,
and a determination to avoid the dangers of
aesthetic internalization. In the hands of a number
of artists, the distinction between the
representation of politics and the politics of
representation does not simply lead to the assumed
critical superiority of the constructed image, nor
does it conclude with a prohibition on representing
politics, as it did for so many first-wave
neo-Brechtians. Rather, it is taken as an imperative
to explore the dialectics of the materiality of the
image qua image, of materiality in the image, and

911
the materialism of representation’s own social
embeddedness (which would acknowledge the
image’s veiling, and the roles of the fetish and ‘real
abstraction’ in representation).11
Sekula is especially interested in how photography
has a ‘way of suppressing in a static moment its
often dialogical social origins’.12 His combinations
of texts and images with picture-story formats or
slide sequences, then, can be seen not only as
efforts to provoke Eisensteinian ‘third meanings’.
Nor, following Brecht’s well-known comments that
photographs of the AEG or Krupp factories failed to
show anything of the social reality of these sites,
should we see his work simply as the montagist’s
attempt to rectify this problem by constructing
something artificial.13 More exactly, Sekula’s
strategies should be understood as attempts to
release social distillates from their reified
suspension, to reactivate something of social
process evacuated by the stilling of life (a ‘stilling’
that is not restricted to photography, the time-based
work of film or video being equally susceptible to
the forces of social hypostasis). We will return to
this theme.

III

While generally displaying hostility towards the idea

of ‘totality’, contemporary cultural theory has
nevertheless translated Lukács’s concept of
reification into what might be called (in its
derogatory sense) a ‘totalizing’ account in which
capital’s power
is posited as near universal. This flattened-out
account of capitalist reification is the type of
argument to which the Russian-based workgroup

912
Chto Delat objects when, in ‘Declarations on
Politics, Knowledge and Art’ (and with echoes of
Brecht and Leon Trotsky), its members assert that
‘capitalism is not a totality’.14 Naturally, much turns
here on how ‘totality’ is conceived. It is certainly
possible to accept the idea that capitalism is a
totality – that is, to disagree with the statement
offered by Chto Delat – while still sharing the
intended challenge to its widespread
conceptualization as closed and undifferentiated,
and – crucially – as a seamless unity beyond
contestation.
In ‘Realism in the Balance’ (1938), Lukács argues
that the world market of capitalism presents us with
the most totalized social form to date.15 It was a
point he had been making since the early 1920s,
and it did not mean that he conceived capitalism as
all-powerful or as non-contradictory. Rather, he saw
himself as reiterating Marx and Engels in
describing capitalism’s unique integration of
political, economic and social aspects of life, and
also, as he puts it, the way capital is a force that
‘permeates the spatiotemporal character of
phenomena’.16 An additional dynamic to the 1938
discussion was introduced by Ernst Bloch, who
accused Lukács of adhering to an outdated
classicalidealist conception of reality as cohesive
and unified.17 In response, Lukács distinguishes the
harmonious totality of classical idealism from the
unified-and-fragmentary totality (contradictory
unity) of the globalized market economy. But as
Lukács emphasizes, their dispute did not essentially
concern the analysis of socioeconomic or historical
features, but was philosophical in character; that is,
their difference was over the way thought – and

913
specifically, dialectical thought – engages with the
surrounding reality.18
We can glimpse here some of the complexity to
Lukács’s conceptualization of totality. It is
customary to distinguish neo-Kantian, Hegelian and
Marxist phases to Lukács’s thought, and, further, to
demarcate within the latter the more ‘political’
essays of the 1920s from the ‘aesthetic’ work that
dominated subsequent years. While there are some
important changes to the way he contextualizes
totality and weights it, there is nevertheless a
remarkable consistency to his approach from The
Theory of the Novel onwards.19 Totality is
characterized most succinctly by Lukács himself as
‘a structured and historically determined overall
complex’, albeit one that needs to be grasped
dynamically (as concrete unity, and as both
systematic and historically relative).20 At different
moments, totality is used to refer to the external
world, to thought’s hold on that world, to the
subject’s action upon the world, to artistic
representation as such or to the ways art relates to
the world (structurally, or in terms of its
representational relation to the world, as both form
and content). In The Theory of the Novel – where
the concept of capitalism is still only implicit – we
find allusions to the lost ‘spontaneous totality of
being’,21 the ‘spontaneously rounded, sensuously
present totality’22 or the epic’s ‘extensive totality of
life’,23 as well as the limitless ‘real totality’ of our
world,24 which is contrasted to, and contained by,
the ‘created’ or ‘constructed
totality’ of the novel.25 In his political essays –
‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’ (1919), ‘The Marxism
of Rosa Luxemburg’ (1921) and ‘Reification and the
Consciousness of the Proletariat’ (1923) – Lukács

914
alludes to the ‘totality of the process’ to which
political action must relate (the larger historical
perspective he demands of the proletarian
movement);26 the knowable totality and the totality
to be known;27 totality of the object and the totality
of the subject.28 Different classes are also
understood to constitute totalities.29 Totality is a
point of view;30 it is both a ‘conceptual reproduction
of reality’31 and an act of knowledge formation, a
necessary presupposition for understanding
reality;32 it features as the historical process33 or
the social process.34 Moreover, as Lukács later
insists in ‘Realism in the Balance’, the ways in
which totality appears to us are contradictory: when
capitalism is relatively stable, it is experienced
partially and yet people assume it to be ‘total’;
conversely, in the midst of crises, when the totality
asserts itself, it seems as if the whole had
disintegrated.35 Totality appears simultaneously as
fragment and whole, but does so disjointedly and
unevenly.
Totality is not to be taken as something ‘out there’
bearing down upon us and yet beyond our ken.36
Despite its considerable weightiness in Lukács’s
writing, the concept is surprisingly modest in what
it performs; it simply demands that we consider the
interrelations and interactions between different
phenomena, that we relate the parts to the whole –
and that we conceive these parts – the whole and all
their relations – as mutable, as both materially
constraining and subject to human actions. For
Lukács, the category of totality is the crux of
dialectical methodology and central to Marx’s own
analysis. The late-twentieth-century anxiety that has
come to be associated with the impossibility of
understanding or representing totality (a view

915
disseminated especially by Fredric Jameson) is
absent in Lukács’s writings. It is not that the
question of totality’s unreachableness is
unacknowledged, but rather that this impossibility
of grasping its entirety is treated by Lukács as little
more than a banal truism, or, worse, as a weak way
to think. Essentially, Lukács’s sense of the modern
world is one of a permanently open totality, yet one
that is not conceived as some free-flowing vitalistic
flux, but as subject to specific determinations,
resistances, concretizations and actions. Already in
The Theory of the Novel, Lukács outlines how our
access to totality has lost the self-sufficient
immanence that characterized the world of the
ancients (where the ‘totality of being’ is described
as symbiotic and seamlessly connected with the
epic form);37 thenceforth humanity faces an
‘endless path of an approximation that is never fully
accomplished’ and will ‘always be incomplete’.38
This characterization translates in his early Marxist
essays into the ‘aspiration towards totality’, where
our task is not to attempt to grasp the ‘plenitude of
the totality’ but rather to think from totality’s point
of view (that is, to conceive ourselves as a vector in,
and as subject and object of, the historical
process).39 This attitude is echoed yet again in his
later essays on critical realism in art, where he is
fairly scornful about literary efforts ‘to portray the
totality
of a society in’, as he puts it, ‘the crude sense of the
word’.40 Advanced artists, he argues, are committed
to ‘the ambition to portray the social whole’, but
since the object before them is an ever-changing
‘infinite reality’ that they ‘cannot exhaust’, the
exploration of totality’s substance has to be ‘active,
unceasing’, the results only ever an

916
approximation.41 The ‘ideal of totality’ in art should
not be understood as a fixed sight or yardstick, but
grasped as a fluid ‘guiding principle’.42 In any case,
he suggests, art best approaches the question of
totality through intensive rather than extensive
means; by, for example, addressing ‘a particular
segment of life’.43 What he calls the ‘mere extensive
totality’ is taken to be typical of that ‘crude’
understanding to which he objects.44 Thus, the
partial perspectives prevalent in many recent art
works are no reason per se to see them as
inherently antipathetic to Lukács’s arguments.
Rather, the question to consider is whether their
limited scope provides a positive focus for
reflection, or whether they fail by dissolving into
mere partiality. The outlook here can be compared
to a point made in his 1921 essay on Rosa
Luxemburg (his immediate topic here being
political, rather than aesthetic, praxis). Attention to
the isolated parts of a phenomenon is not the
problem; ‘what is decisive’, Lukács argues, is
whether those parts are conceived as
interconnected with one another and integrated
within a totality, whether addressing them in
isolation serves to understand the whole (or, on the
contrary, if it remains an ‘autonomous’ end in
itself).45 We can observe that in recent art works
the facets of current reality explored rarely rest
solely in their particularities – certainly not for any
intelligent viewer; instead, they escalate their scale
of bearing, serving as ‘aspects’.

IV

Insufficient attention has been paid to the fact that

Lukács takes Socialist Realism to be only a potential

917
aesthetic.46 Given that Socialist Realism had
already held official status for some twenty years
when Lukács made this remark in 1956, his
perspective should give us pause.47 At one level, he
was marking his distance from the legacy of
Zhdanovism, but the allegoresis of Lukács’s essays –
as veiled critique of the narrowing horizons of
Soviet Socialist Realism and of Stalinist politics and
culture – is just a part of what is going on. Centrally
at stake is the question of social transitivity, a topic
that is often lodged under terms such as ‘the inner
poetry of life’ or ‘the poetry of things’, by which
Lukács seems to mean the activities and struggles
of human relations.48 His contrasting figure is that
of ‘still lives’, an expression encompassing both the
rigidities of reified forms and the failure of social
agents to act within and upon the world (the
paralysis of social life itself, akin to Sartre’s dead
totalities, or to Marx’s account of the power of dead
over living labour). We find ‘still lives’ at various
levels: there are, of course, the ‘still lives’ of
individual characters; but we also find the ‘still
lives’ of a plot-as-plot or the stilling of the genre of
the Bildungsroman. (Cézanne’s portraits –
specifically his paintings of people, rather than his
paintings of nature morte – are also seen as ‘still
lives’.) Ultimately, the category of ‘still lives’ even
comes to characterize the approach he supports,
insinuating itself into the very modality of bourgeois
critical realism. Increasingly, Lukács identifies a
stilling of lives in his most favoured art works.
Nineteenth-century naturalism comes to be
understood not so much as the external ‘other’ to
realism – ‘the conflict between realism and
naturalism’ described by Lukács in 194849 – but as
realism’s own immanent reduction. Most

918
interestingly, by 1956, the problem of ‘still lives’ is
used to characterize a situation between, on the one
hand, a critical realism that Lukács finds to be ever
more stalled, and on the other, the socialist realism
that is yet to be actualized.

2 Allan Sekula, Waiting for Tear Gas

[white globe to black], 1999–2000, single
slide from 14-minute continuous
sequence. Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Thomas Mann’s work was taken to be exemplary of

critical realism (and of its internal limits), forming
the subject of one of Lukács’s most admired essays
– ‘In Search of Bourgeois Man’ – prepared in the
mid-1940s.50 Mann’s work, Lukács believes, had
drawn progressively closer to socialism, but
because German culture lacked traditions
comparable to the militant citoyen or to the Russian
grazhdanin, Mann’s ‘search for bourgeois man’ –
that is, his efforts to grasp bourgeois social totality
– remained unrealized; the ability to understand the
world more fully required a commitment to
practical action within it. The militant invoked in
Lukács’s discussion of Mann, then, might be

919
understood simply as a literary protagonist, or as
the problem of Mann the artist, but it is important
to recognize how the militant citoyen acquires a
more extended role in Lukács’s argument, featuring
as a moment of social process and as the condition
for transitivity. Indeed, we find Lukács making the
essential point already in the early 1920s: ‘The
totality of an object’, he argues, ‘can only be posited
if the positing subject is itself a totality.’51 While it
may come as little surprise to encounter this
argument in History and Class Consciousness, it
might be less expected of his later writings on
realism; yet the subject that posits itself as a totality
is here being reworked through the idea of the
militant citoyen. Returning to contemporary
anxieties over the unattainability of totality, we can
note that the central problem resides, not, as so
often assumed, with the unprecedented complexity
of today’s world or with the reification of life; nor
does it really concern the difficulties of depicting or
representing that totality. Rather, our confrontation
with the question of totality – even our efforts to
delineate its mere outlines descriptively – is
inseparable from, dependent on, the subject’s claim
upon, and to, totality. What we find surfacing in
Lukács’s study of Mann, then, is no simple defence
and celebration of critical realism, but rather a
probing of its connection to, and limitations for,
social transitivity.

920
 3 Radek Community, still from
Manifestations, 2001, video of Moscow
action. Photo: courtesy of Petr Bystrov
on behalf of the artists.

A significant stream of art today explicitly commits

itself to the figure of the militant (as often militants
sans papiers as citoyens). The protestors and
syndicalists who feature in Sekula’s photo sequence
of the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, Waiting for Tear
Gas [2] and in his video essay Lottery of the Sea
(2006) would be obvious examples (not just by way
of representation – the figurative inclusion of the
militant in the work – but also through embodiment
in the rejection of the techniques and
subjectpositioning of professional
photojournalism).52 In videos such as Venezuela
from Below
(2004), Five Factories (2006) or Comuna under
Construction (2010), Oliver Ressler and Dario
Azzellini explore the role of workers’ councils or

921
community-based organizers building participatory
democracy through the Bolivarian revolution.
Taking a different approach, the now-disbanded
Radek Community [3] staged demonstrations at a
Moscow junction, bearing red flags and banners
with slogans such as the World Social Forum’s
‘Another World is Possible’ and appropriating the
rush-hour crowds assembling to cross the road. As
the lights change, the insignia of protest unfurl.
Resonant with the history of representations of
revolutionary masses (from early Soviet newsreels
to Sergei Eisenstein’s restaging of 1917), the work
is laden with a Dada-Situationist humour and
pathos. Such resonances highlight the historical
absence of the grazhdanin, and yet the work resists
full melancholic immersion (although this, in turn,
forces further reflection on
avant-gardism-as-vanguardism or -as-voluntarism,
and on art’s relations with social transformation –
indeed, it is this oscillation that is interesting).

922
 4 Chto Delat, still from
Partisan Songspiel: A
Belgrade Story, 2009, video.
Photo: courtesy of the artists.

The Radeks are named after the left councilist Karl

Radek;53 similarly, the words Chto Delat? – What is
to be done? – recall both the nineteenth-century
novel by Nikolay
Chernyshevsky and Lenin’s famous 1902 pamphlet
on the tasks of political organization. Both groups
have produced works that take us to the point
where we must consider not just their open political
contents, but the very links between aesthetics and
politics. Chronicles of Perestroika (2008) by Dmitry
Vilensky, a member of Chto Delat, assembles

923
documentary footage of mass gatherings in Saint
Petersburg between 1987 and 1991. Accompanied
by Mikhail Krutik’s score, reminiscent of the music
of silent cinema, this short film draws forth a triple
historical comparison and complex set of hopes,
disappointments – and reminders. In Partisan
Songspiel: A Belgrade Story [4], a scripted video
performance operates as a morality play in which a
monument to the Yugoslav partisans comes to life
as chorus and serves as counterpoint to the four
main characters (the Worker, the Lesbian, a
Romany Woman and an Injured War Veteran).
Despite suffering similarly at the hands of
neoliberal repression (personified by a business
leader, a city politician, a war profiteer and their
bodyguards), and despite expressing some partial
empathy for one another’s plight (each taking turn
to tell us the life story of another), the oppressed
types are unable to overcome their local interests
and social prejudices to achieve solidarity. The
statue-chorus is both classic meta-commentary and
political conscience, pointing to what has been
forgotten and what, in our aspirations for a better
future, is being politically overlooked. In Builders
[5] – a video work composed primarily of a
sequence of stills in which members of Chto Delat
appear together in various affable interactions on a
low wall – the voice-over dialogue reflects on their
varying attitudes towards the late Socialist Realist
painting The Builders of Bratsk (1960–1) –
sometimes known as They Built Bratsk
Hydro-Electric Power Station or Constructors of the
Bratsk Hydropower Station – by Viktor E. Popkov,
and offers further observations on unity and
organization in the present.54 Eventually acquiring
the collective form and postures of Popkov’s

924
assembly, Chto Delat constructs a tableau vivant (a
quintessential allegorical form); however, this
animation of Popkov is paradoxically frozen (and
stilled photographically). An aesthetic-political
aporia (both a circumscription by ‘art’ and an
injunction to exceed its limits) unfolds through a
number of tensions: the painting and its restaging;
the world built by Popkov’s figures and the future
being invoked by Chto Delat; worker-builders
represented in art, artist-constructors taking their
places; the initial appearance of some casual
flash-lit snapshots of friends larking about at night
contrasting with a deliberately managed set
echoing the devices of the canvas (the wall, the
darkened background, the sharp lighting of the
figures); jumps in the sequence of fixed shots
contrasting with the continuity of dialogue. Mimesis
is not here a passive reflection but a conscious act
of making (as if to reclaim or recoup the originary
magic).

5 Chto Delat, still from Builders, 2004,

video. Photo: courtesy of the artists.

925
6 Freee, Protest is Beautiful, 2007, billboard poster.
Photo: courtesy of the artists.

This intransitive circling – with its aesthetic and

political dimensions – dramatizes a dominant
problematic of recent art, which might be
understood as the difficulties of direct
commensuration, and the troubles of relaying,
between aesthetics and politics as such. The
problem is at once internalized by the work and
resisted. It is registered in, for example, the
knowing efforts of Chto Delat to stage occupations
of the role of the militant citoyen or Radek
Community’s attempt to ‘force’ its representation.
Sometimes it is embedded in tropes, as in Sekula’s
Lottery of the Sea, where the accumulation of the
metaphors ‘from below’ and ‘linking’, on one hand,
and the unleashing of ‘linking’ as metonyms and
associative chains, on the other, begin to imply
models of social transformation: ways of emerging,
anticipating, organizing and breaking through
political and social impasse. And what is mourned in
Freee’s Protest is Beautiful [6]?

926
Political dissent, the aestheticization and
commodification of rebellion (Freee’s works often
take the form of billboards, advertising slogans,
posters or shop signs), or the way the aesthetic
repeatedly circumscribes the political aspirations in
art – what has been called its ‘Midas touch’?55 It
would be fatuous to hold artists to account for the
intransitive situation. That their work addresses
these problems – absorbing them as themes
(explicitly and implicitly), or registering them more
structurally, while pushing the issues to their limits,
even if voluntaristically – seems significant
enough.56

VI

While much recent art has dispensed with the

experiencing humanist self as its subject, and would
therefore seem light years from Lukács, its own
‘predicaments’ and ‘dilemmas’ turn on this same
pursuit of the functional role of the militant citoyen/
sans papiers. As noted earlier, in Lukács’s account,
‘still life’ finally comes to characterize the hiatus
reached by bourgeois critical realism, its inability –
as he sees in Mann’s work – to progress beyond a
certain point, and to pass from advanced forms of
bourgeois to a fully socialist realism (the latter
understood as something more complex than the
phenomenon claiming the designation). However, it
is vital to recognize the extent to which this impasse
was also pressured from the other side, by the
difficulty of connecting to the conditions for this
socialist-realism-still-to-come, a socialist form of
realism that could ward off the contingent
pressures of the Zhdanovist legacy and inherit
instead those qualities Lukács valued in critical

927
realism. There was thus a gap between the present
state of things and the desired future: the
incapacity of the present to deliver the socialist
future, of course, but, more critically, a lack of
tangible ‘feelers’ that might connect Sein to Sollen,
and that might endow Sollen with more than just an
abstract disposition. The problem of intransitivity
was there for Lukács too: his withdrawal from
political debate after 1930 should be seen not
merely as a retreat into aesthetic issues, but as an
intensification of political questions within his
reflections on art – as nothing less than the
politicization of narrative and aesthetic
quandaries.57 Unlike Mann, the artists briefly
considered here are explicitly committed to the
projects of social emancipation, although they find
themselves in circumstances where the prospects
for realization seem far more uncertain. And so we
find much recent art living out a problem noted by
Lukács in The Theory of the Novel: the need to
navigate the gap between the intelligible ‘I’ of the
novel’s protagonist and the empirical ‘I’ – roughly,
between ‘art’ and ‘life’.58 Lukács understands this
difficulty as emerging not simply from the distance
between Sein and Sollen, but from their
hypostatization – a reification of difference into
opposition, a reified stilling of both historical time
and dialectical temporality. The bifurcation of these
two ‘I’s is attributed to the introjection of this
hypostatization within Sollen itself.59 An inflection
on this subject resurfaces in his disagreements
with Adorno – for example, in ‘The Ideology of
Modernism’, one of Lukács’s least propitious essays
from the 1950s – where he raises the problem of the
fissure between concrete and abstract possibility.60
And we can see its force working through the art

928
works considered. Through their efforts to make
raids on the structural function of the ‘militant’, to
seize hold of its fantasized forms, to reanimate its
legacies afresh, or to embed its motive forces in
tropic meditations, the frequent summoning of the
figure of social agency by some of the most
compelling artists working today vividly presents
the critical dilemma that Lukács’s writing
confronted: the problem of Sollen becoming an
abstract claim; the imperative to make it over into a
dynamic force for praxis, a desire seeking to create
the possibilities for its realization; the urgency to
retrieve Sollen from its reduction to no more than a
utopic placeholder or protected space for critical
thought. Whatever Lukács’s drawbacks, his
reflections offer important delineations of
challenges now facing us even more acutely, and an
example of how emancipatory ambitions refract
through aesthetic-political mediations.
This essay first appeared in Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall (eds.),
Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence – Aesthetics,
Politics, Literature (Continuum: New York and London, 2011). The author
and editors of this volume would like to express their thanks to the artists
discussed for their generosity in providing photographs of their work and
permission to reproduce them.

1 Georg Lukács, Writer and Critic, trans. A. D. Kahn (Merlin Press:

London, 1973), p. 138.

2 See What, How, Whom, What Keeps Mankind Alive? The Texts
(İstanbul Kültür Sanat Vakfi: Istanbul, 2009). Brecht’s relation to
modern art was complex, and was certainly not as straightforwardly
affirmative as is often suggested by debates that pit him against
Lukács.

3 See, for example, the special edition of October entitled ‘Questionnaire

on “The Contemporary”’ (October, vol. 130 [Fall 2009], pp. 3–124).

4 I address the problems with the postmodern interpretation of Benjamin

in ‘Allegory: Between Deconstruction and Dialectics’, Oxford Art

929
 Journal, vol. 22, no. 1 (1999) and Dialectical Passions: Negation and
Postwar Art Theory (Columbia University Press: New York, 2010).

5 Interestingly, the relational emphasis on ‘experience’ and ‘involvement’

comes close to Lukács’s category of ‘portrayal’ through ‘narrative’ (as
opposed to ‘description’ and spectatorial distance).

6 See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Allan Sekula: Photography between

Discourse and Document’, in Allan Sekula, Fish Story (Richter Verlag:
Rotterdam and Düsseldorf, 1995); also Hilde Van Gelder (ed.),
Constantin Meunier: A Dialogue with Allan Sekula (Leuven University
Press: Leuven, 2005) and Jan Baetens and Hilde Van Gelder (eds.),
Critical Realism in Contemporary Art: Around Allan Sekula’s
Photography (Leuven University Press: Leuven, 2006).

7 Allan Sekula, Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works,
1973–1983 (The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design:
Halifax, 1984), p. x.

8 Ibid., p. ix.

9 Ibid., p. x.

10 Ibid., p. xii.

11 Approaches vary considerably. If Steyerl holds to the politics of

representation (and for her, the ‘politics’ in this phrase remains vital),
Ressler is prepared to argue for the dissolution of highly reflexive
practice into an approach that reclaims the powers of the document:
Oliver Ressler, ‘Approaches to Future Alternative Societies’, interview
by Zanny Begg, <http://www.ressler.at/
approaches-to-future-alternative-societies/>, accessed 29 September
2013. Nevertheless, their difference needs to be grasped not as
dichotomous, but as a tensile distinction.

12 Sekula, Photography Against the Grain, op. cit., p. x.

13 Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Threepenny Lawsuit’, in Marc Silberman (ed. and

trans.), Bertolt Brecht on Film and Radio (Methuen: London, 2000), p.
165. The comments are mostly encountered in Walter Benjamin’s
quotation of Brecht: Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, in
Selected Writings, vol. 2 (The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999), p. 526. In a manuscript
entitled ‘No Insight through Photography’, Brecht attributes the
argument to Fritz Sternberg, but this time the reference is to a
photograph of the Ford factory (Brecht, ‘No Insight through
Photography [c. 1930], in Bertolt Brecht on Film and Radio, p. 144).

930
 See also David Cunningham, ‘Capitalist and Bourgeois Epic: Lukács,
Abstraction and the Novel’, in Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall (eds.),
Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence –
Aesthetics, Politics, Literature (Continuum: New York and London,
2011).

14 Chto Delat, ‘Declaration on Knowledge, Politics and Art’, in Chto Delat?

special issue, ‘When Artists Struggle Together’ (2008).
<http://www.chtodelat.org/
index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=494&Itemid=233&lang=en>,
accessed 26 September 2013.

15 Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetics and Politics (New Left Books: London,
1977), p. 21.

16 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist

Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Merlin Press: London, 1971), p.
23.

17 Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics, op. cit., pp. 16–27. Bloch, of
course, was defending Expressionism. In the cultural field more
generally, however, his characterization of Lukács has stuck firm.

18 Ibid., p. 31.

19 The ‘Hegelianism’ of The Theory of the Novel has to be understood

carefully: its account of the modern period, and of the novel as its form,
is reminiscent of the dynamics described by Hegel’s unhappy
consciousness (but it is not Hegelian in failing to progress beyond this
aporetic stage). Unlike Hegel’s, Lukács’s account of alienation is
historical and distinguished from objectification.

20 Cited in István Mészáros, ‘Totality’, in Tom Bottomore (ed.), A

Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Blackwell: London, 1983), p. 479.
Mészáros’s reference is to Lukács, A marxista filosófia feladatai az ui
demokráciában (The tasks of Marxist philosophy in the new
democracy) (Székesfóvárosi Irodalmr Intézet: Budapest, 1948).

21 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical

Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (MIT
Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971), p. 38.

22 Ibid., p. 46.

23 Ibid., p. 56.

24 Ibid., p. 54.

931
25 Ibid., pp. 38, 54.

26 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 198.

27 Ibid., p. 39.

28 Ibid., p. 28.

29 Ibid., p. 28–9.

30 Ibid., pp. 20, 27, 29.

31 Ibid., p. 10.

32 Ibid., p. 21–2.

33 Ibid., p. 24.

34 Ibid., p. 22.

35 Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics, op. cit., p. 32.

36 Note Lukács’s insistence in ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’: ‘We repeat:

the category of totality does not reduce its various elements to an
undifferentiated uniformity, to identity. The apparent independence and
autonomy which they possess in the capitalist system of production is
an illusion only in so far as they are involved in a dynamic dialectical
relationship with one another and can be thought of as the dynamic
dialectical aspects of an equally dynamic and dialectical whole.’
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., pp. 12–13.

37 Lukács, Theory of the Novel, op. cit., pp. 34–9.

38 Ibid., p. 34.

39 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 198.

40 Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. J. and N.

Mander (Merlin Press: London, 1963), p. 99.

41 Ibid., pp. 97–8, 99, 100.

42 Ibid., p. 100.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.

45 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 28. Lukács’s

outlook might be compared and contrasted with that of Adorno, who

932
 argued in his 1931 lecture that ‘the mind is indeed not capable of
producing or grasping the totality of the real, but it may be possible to
penetrate the detail, to explode in miniature the mass of merely existing
reality’. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, Telos, no. 31
(Spring 1977), p. 133.

46 Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, op. cit., pp. 96, 115.
This found an interesting reprise in the 1980s with Jameson’s project of
‘cognitive mapping’: it too was a hypothesis awaiting – without any
guarantee – its realization. See Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’,
in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture (Macmillan: Basingstoke, 1988).

47 Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, op. cit., p. 96.

48 Lukács, Writer and Critic, op. cit., pp. 126, 136.

49 Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of

the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki and others, trans.
E. Bone (Merlin Press: London, 2002), p. 5.

50 Georg Lukács, Essays on Thomas Mann (Merlin Press: London, 1964),

pp. 13–46.

51 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 28.

52 For an extended discussion of photographic representations of protest,

see Steve Edwards, ‘Commons and Crowds: Figuring Photography
from Above and Below’, Third Text, vol. 23, no. 4 (2009), pp. 447–64.

53 Karl Radek was secretary for the executive of the Communist

International, supported the Left Opposition from 1924 to 1929, and
died in a Russian camp in 1939.

54 Popkov’s painting (oil on canvas, 183 × 300 cm, State Tretyakov

Gallery, Moscow) is associated with the period of the Krushchev ‘thaw’,
and, in the artist’s career, as an example of Popkov’s ‘severe style’.

55 Peter Bürger, ‘Aporias of Modern Aesthetics’, in Andrew Benjamin and

Peter Osborne (eds.), Thinking Art: Beyond Traditional Aesthetics (ICA:
London, 1991), p. 14.

56 As Sekula noted in an essay from 1976–8, a ‘didactic and critical

representation’ is a necessary part of, but will not be sufficient for,
social transformation: for that, a ‘larger, encompassing praxis is
necessary’. Sekula, Photography Against the Grain, op. cit., 75.

933
57 Mészáros is particularly attuned to this continuity; see István Mészáros,
Lukács’s Concept of Dialectic (Merlin Press: London, 1972). See also
Jameson’s comment that Lukács’s political theories were essentially
aesthetic or narrative: Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form:
Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton
University Press: Princeton, 1971), pp. 163, 190.

58 Lukács, Theory of the Novel, op. cit., p. 48.

59 Ibid.

60 Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, op. cit., p. 21ff. This is

discussed in more detail in Day, Dialectical Passions, op. cit. The
‘feelers’ mentioned earlier in the paragraph derive from Adorno’s
intervention.

934
DEARTIFICATION THIS SIDE OF ART
IDEOLOGY CRITIQUE, AUTONOMY AND
REPRODUCTION
Kerstin Stakemeier

‘It is concrete, however, to analyze the deaesthetization of art as a

praxis that, devoid of reflection and on this side of art’s own
dialectic, progressively delivers art over to the extra-aesthetic
dialectic.’ Theodor W. Adorno1

I n Aesthetic Theory,2 Theodor W. Adorno points to

an irresolvable problem that he calls
‘deartification’ (Entkunstung):3 the encroachment of
the outside world into art’s autonomy, led by ‘those
who have been duped by the culture industry and
are eager for its commodities’, those who are ‘this
side of art’.4 The roles seem to be clearly
distributed. The assault of the twentieth century on
the nineteenth, that of mass culture on the modern
culture of emancipation, seems as fateful as it was
inevitable: the mission of the modernist advocates
of autonomy against the victims of its replacement
by disposable actualities, who are caught up in the
cultural-industrial present – all this seems
unmistakably clear. And yet, salvation does not
seem to come. ‘The deartification of art is not only a
stage of art’s liquidation but also the direction of its
development’,5 and those who have been duped find
themselves ‘this side of art’ as much as
deartification finds itself ‘this side of art’s own
dialectic’. There is not a ‘beyond’ in sight. Rather,

935
deartification is an assault by art in general, as part
of social reality, on the singular art work, seen as an
individuated protest against this social reality. The
institutionalized autonomy of art in the nineteenth
century that Adorno is addressing falls apart in the
twentieth century, when the artistic meaning of this
autonomy is detached from its economic meaning.
And precariously, autonomy lost the material power
of its artistic meaning precisely where Adorno and
others had, since the 1950s, been defending the
modern against its decline by instituting it as
modernism, demonizing its economic meaning.
Whereas autonomy characterizes the modern status
of art as a socially separate field of unproductive
labour and aesthetic individuation, deartification,
with Adorno, characterizes the mass-cultural
identification of its individuations, and counter to
him, the becoming-productive of artistic labour in
contemporary art. In the present text, deartification
is therefore not only a transitional figure that makes
it possible to see the disintegration of modernity as
the losing deal that Adorno recognized, but also the
mechanism that opens up concrete social
perspectives within art, its production
and circulation, in which art achieves a kind of
presentness that was still inconceivable in the
modernist understanding. This is a shift that
Marxist art historians such as Otto Karl
Werckmeister or Peter Gorsen already registered in
their discussions of Adorno’s posthumously
published Aesthetic Theory in the early 1970s. In
contrast to Peter Bürger’s immanent attempt to
expand the ‘Theory of the Avant-Garde’6 towards a
‘neo-avant-garde’, both insisted on Adorno’s
insufficient historicization of the category of art
itself, demanding an understanding that exceeded

936
its identification as inherently bourgeois.
Werckmeister saw a simultaneity of artistic
production, distribution and reception after the
Second World War, which fundmentally puts into
question the relevance of any contemporary
aesthetic theory in the face of contemporary art,7
and Gorsen proposed an ‘operative’ understanding
of art that takes into account its material terms of
production.8 Both account for the fact that, as
Andrew Hemingway has put it, ‘Marxism as a
totalizing theory of society necessarily throws
disciplinary boundaries into question as
obfuscations of bourgeois thought.’9 It necessitates
a contemporary understanding of art as a sphere of
(re)production, distribution and reception in which
the bourgeois antinomy of art and life can no longer
be pressupposed.
But for Adorno, the separation of art and life is the
necessary basis of artistic autonomy, and its
deartification is a two-sided perforation. On the one
hand is the decline of the historical
‘self-understanding … [of art] in relation to the
living contexts in which it previously had been
embedded’10 – the loss of its institutionalized
autonomy, obtained in modernity as a special social
status, and thus also art itself as an independent,
ideological figure.11 Deartification brings these two
aspects together: ideology and reality, in Adorno’s
words, are moving towards one another.12 What
remains is a modernist autonomy of ‘pure’ art as
ideology, in the middle of society, with the
simultaneous loss of the special status that socially
belonged to it. Deartification designates the
embedding of autonomous art as an integrated
social reality. In deartification, the autonomy in art
is not ruled out, but it has ceased to be modern. It

937
is, as I shall demonstrate, no longer the autonomy
of art, but autonomy in art.
On the other hand, deartification in Adorno is aimed
at the self-understanding ‘of alterity. Art needs
something heterogeneous in order to become art.’13
Alterity, which is to say the material level of the
special social status of art within the work,
increasingly develops a life of its own as the world
surrounding the art work becomes reorganized
according to the capitalist principle of exchange.14
The heterogeneous can no longer be integrated
without a trace; instead, an order is situated in the
work that increasingly lies outside its late feudal
means of production. Ultimately, the form of the
work becomes heterogeneous in itself due to these
changed elements. For ‘whatever tears down the
boundary markers is motivated by historical forces
that sprang into life inside the existing boundaries
and then ended up overwhelming them’.15
Deartification takes art outside the work, and it is, I
believe, through these heterogeneities that the
contemporary art that emerged from this can be the
equal of its time.
For this contemporary art, Herbert Marcuse’s
dictum from 1973 (based on Adorno) that ‘art, as
“ideology”, overrides the reigning ideology’ is no
longer sustainable.16 The fact that ‘each artwork
could be charged with false consciousness and
chalked up to ideology’ is not something that
emerges, for Adorno, from the artwork itself, but
from its special economic status as art. For ‘in
formal terms, independent of what they [that is, the
works] say, they are ideology in that a priori they
posit something spiritual as being independent from
the conditions of its material production and

938
therefore as being intrinsically superior and beyond
the primordial guilt of the separation of spiritual
and physical labour’.17 In modernism as Adorno
describes it, the relationship between art and
labour is a categorical one. Art’s capacities cannot
be distinguished by it; on the contrary, only the
rejection of general social labour as culpable makes
it possible for an individual art work to have the
‘power of its internal unity’.18 Breaking through this
separation out of the space of art itself, for Adorno,
is a defect of the deartification of modern art, and
at the same time it became an individualizing point
of departure for contemporary art. In Adorno’s
understanding, the end of the categorical divorce of
art from quantifiable, productive physical labour
does indeed mean a deartification of modernity and
thus a loss of its autonomy, but at the same time it
produced a new social type of art, contemporary
art, that could no longer be sufficiently explained
through an art-historical understanding of epochs.
Consider writings that draw their understanding of
art specifically from an understanding of its
production, as has been done in several publications
dedicated to artistic productions of the 1960s, most
recently in Julia Bryan-Wilson’s Art Workers:
Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2009),19
but also Helen Molesworth’s catalogue Work Ethic
(2003)20 and Justin Hoffmann’s brilliant
Destruktionskunst: Der Mythos der Zerstörung in
der Kunst der frühen sechziger Jahre (1995).21 The
question of the (un)productivity of artistic labour
turns into a characteristic of the art works and
accounts for the self-understanding of the artists as
producers. Here, art-historical periodization is
challenged by turning from an understanding of the
work to one of labour. Andrew Hemingway’s

939
seminal account Artists on the Left22 in many ways
opens up an even more fundamental a-epochal
understanding, in tracing the convergence of those
questions of labour and work with the origin of their
possible anti-capitalist meaning: the communist
movement in the United States between 1920 and
1950s. It is no coincidence, however, that these
accounts of (un)productive labour in art all begin
where Hemingway ends. His is a discussion of
radical politics and art, whereas the others are
accounts of radical politics in art. The rise of
contemporary art, and thus of productive labour in
the arts, coincided with the disintegration of
internationalist communist politics, a correlation to
which I shall return later.
Adorno’s attempt to deal with the becoming
‘contemporary’ of art in the 1960s concentrated,
conversely, solely on the level of its reception.
When he was claiming that ‘the most recent
deartification of art covertly exploits the element of
play at the cost of all others’,23 his reference point
for this, as it was for Marcuse during the same
period, was Friedrich Schiller’s letters On the
Aesthetic Education of Man (1801), a perspective
that cannot recognize any form of activity within art
as labour because its rejection is precisely what
constitutes this historical moment. Schiller,
however, was describing late feudal relations of
dependence; Adorno, as he himself writes, was
describing ‘high capitalism’. What he attacks as the
play of deartification is not least an actualization of
the historically changing forms of labour in art. ‘A
contradiction of all autonomous art is the
concealment of the labour that went into it, but in
high capitalism, with the complete hegemony of
exchange-value and with the contradictions arising

940
out of that hegemony, autonomous art becomes
both problematic and programmatic at the same
time.’ ‘The work of art’, continues Adorno in his In
Search of Wagner (1952), which deals with the
banishment of labour (Arbeit) from the work (Werk),
‘endorses the sentiment normally denied by
ideology: labour is degrading.’24 And the fact that it
does so seems incontrovertible to him. Autonomy
can be formed only beyond labour; both are socially
negative. And this is why he cannot recognize
labour in art despite practical ideology critique, and
why he classifies the appearance of any activity as
an element of play, in which spiritual and physical
labour are joined once again.
But what disturbs Adorno as the play of
deartification and contradicts his tactical projection
of autonomy as a presence of labour in the work
(Arbeit im Werk) develops into scenarios of artistic
disruption outside the constriction of the space of
the work. Labour and work thus become terms that
facilitate what Hemingway calls ‘a totalizing theory’
in that they enable an art history that identifies
artistic approaches by their homology to
non-artistic forms of labour and work. This is
because artistic forms of labour begin beyond
modernist forms of compositional work and are
orientated to the international forms of industrial
mass culture. In 1952 the Independent Group (IG)
was established in London. Richard Hamilton,
Eduardo Paolozzi, Reyner Banham, Alison and Peter
Smithson, Nigel Henderson, Toni del Renzio and
others examined the primacy of everyday culture,
which had become obvious from American
magazines and the adverts in them, and its priority
over aesthetic construction, something that, in the
ruins of Europe, could no longer be denied. They

941
suspended the work, or rather they inserted it into
exhibitions, lectures and series, where their artistic
and scholarly labour extended over photography,
architecture, painting, collage and art history, at
the same time as they incorporated their
mass-cultural repetitions and extrapolations.25
The developments by Allan Kaprow, Claes
Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg or Jim Dine from
painting to a practice of happenings and
performance in the second half of the 1950s in New
York, like many other artistic expansions of the
working
field at this time, could be discussed from a similar
perspective. These artists acted out ordinary
events, whether banal, as in Kaprow’s 18
Happenings in 6 Parts (1958), or traumatic, as in
Oldenburg’s Snapshots from the City (1960). They
acted out events with artistic means, making their
production public, codifying it rather than
segregating it. This can be seen precisely in relation
to the expansive changes in Fordist labour rules
occurring at the same time due to the increasing
importance of the service sector,26 which caused a
shift in how work was understood both inside and
outside art. With the professionalization of
previously unpaid, private or individually
remunerated activities – especially in the areas of
health, education and production services – the
postwar years saw a great change in the education
of artists, the structures of supply and the means of
production. Simultaneously, artists became part of
the social changes outside their genre: in
healthcare, finance and real estate. This situation
applied in particular to the changes in forms of
practice in the North American art scene, for here
the economic upheavals had clearly accelerated,

942
even in the 1950s. David Harvey, in his analysis of
the introduction of ‘flexible accumulation’, has
emphasized another aspect: that of, in Adorno’s
words, ‘atomization’27 – that is to say, a short-lived
pattern of consumer behaviour in relation to new
products. Harvey, on the basis of the growth of the
service sector in all areas of production, describes a
shift from the production of goods to that of
events.28 Even if, in my opinion, this opposition is
difficult to maintain, the transition it denotes is
extremely significant, especially with regard to
Kaprow’s assemblages, environments and
happenings, for example.29 And it is also significant
because the comparison of the commodity character
of the works in the sphere of distribution and their
seemingly pre-capitalist existence outside
exchange, which would enjoy great popularity a
decade later in conceptual art,30 is criticized here in
terms of practice. The becoming-event of art is
demonstrated by Kaprow, Oldenburg and others as
a step into public (production) practice. Even
Adorno, as cited above, reduced the reorganization
of the world in advanced capitalism to the
identification of its parts within exchange. He thus
emphasized, not least, the Fordist separation of
physical and mental labour. It is only from this
hierarchization that an area of mental labour
emerged that was seemingly prior to the sphere of
distribution, a potentially autonomous area of
activity. But with the social expansion and
professionalization of the service industries, which
characterized the end of the Fordist order of
production, this strict separation could no longer be
maintained.
For its part, the London IG turned out to be such a
timely artistic response to the upheavals of its day

943
because their common interests developed from the
opposition between the American mass culture and
the explosion of ordinary design that they examined
and the postwar situation in Britain. Their practice
found its structure in this opposition. They did not
stop being artists – all of them continued to produce
outside the IG – but they abstained from producing
art works in their collective projects. In
their exhibitions, they reconfigured the aesthetic
gaze above all beyond the modern hierarchy of art
and mass culture.31 Here the shift of artistic
activities intersects with another tendency, which
Harvey, considering the same period, traces as an
updated capitalist form of labour. Fordist mass
production becomes specialized in drastically
expanded but reduced numbers of segments of
goods produced. In art, even with the IG, and
subsequently in the product range of Pop art, one
can observe a drastic expansion of commodity
segments. But here, this means an absolute
increase in the quantity of production, precisely
because the artistic had previously been
diametrically opposed to Fordist production norms
(individuated single pieces as opposed to
standardized mass commodities). Artistic and other
forms of labour converged increasingly after the
Second World War, just as artistic and other forms
of commodities had.
From Adorno’s perspective, as already mentioned,
the irreconcilable opposition between industrial and
artistic production characterized the centrality of
the ideological position of modern art itself, its
autonomy as a socially given exclusion from a
process in which, as Hans-Georg Bensch has
summarized, the ‘goal of production is not to
sustain people. But the goal of production is to

944
sustain capital, which … can only be sustained
through accretion.’32 The position of modern art as
a sphere of production is systematically irrelevant
to capital, for ‘luxury goods’, as Frank Kuhne adds,
‘are meant for individual consumption, without, as
is the case of food, being necessary to reproduce
the use value of the commodity of labour. The
production of luxury is thus opposed to the
understanding of capital as an end in itself.’33 Quite
in keeping with Adorno, the autonomy of art,
viewed socially, is a continuing negative process of
unproductive labour, which is, however, dissolved
from its boundaries by the changes outlined here,
involving the disintegration of Fordism up to the
point of flexible accumulation. Through the
sustained intensification of the division of labour
and the progressive integration of service labour in
the luxury sector as well as in the mass sector, art
production too can no longer strictly be
distinguished from the general goal of capital. Art
begins ‘to produce for production’s sake’,34
becoming a productive part of capitalist postwar
society. Not because it now produced consumer
goods – although this also developed into an area of
its own within the upper segments of the gallery
market, where artists create lamps, architecture,
chairs, tables and rugs as a luxury sideline to their
art production, which are then distributed in series
by galleries – but because their ways and types of
production, their forms of distribution and margins
of productivity, become increasingly tightly
interwoven with the adjacent supply industry. An
industry arises.
This also concerns the status of art as an ideological
figure, for ‘one can speak of ideology’, as Adorno
writes in 1954, ‘in a meaningful way only to the

945
extent that something spiritual emerges from the
social process as something independent,
substantial, and with its own proper claims’.35 In a
devastated modernity, forms of
permeability appear, which Louis Althusser
summarized eleven years later in the productive
supposition that ‘men live their actions, usually
attributed to freedom of “consciousness” by the
classical tradition, in ideology, by and through
ideology; in short, that the “lived” relation between
men and the world, including History … is ideology
itself’.36 The reverse projection onto art as
counter-ideological ideology, which Adorno
strategically confronted with its present, is in part
itself a past ideological phenomenon of a no longer
current division of the various social areas of
production from one another. Only in the modernist
vision of things does a postmodernity take the place
of modernity, whereas, for instance from
structuralist perspectives such as Althusser’s, new
autonomies and antagonisms can be recognized
from the increased mediation of an ideological
social life – autonomies and antagonisms that are
built up on a present and constantly changing
ideological practice, momentarily coming detached
from them instead of being built up on historical
independencies of social functions in relation to the
concrete circumstances of living. For Adorno, what
happens to autonomous modern art in deartification
(its ideological role as the ideal of mental labour)
became an inherent artistic process with the
capitalist realization of art after the Second World
War through the interconnection of society by
expanding the service industry (as autonomization
of the ideology of a solely mental labour). This
reversal in the meaning of modernity on the one

946
hand and the emergence of the contemporary (art)
on the other can be briefly situated, with the full
manifestation of these tendencies in the late 1960s
and 1970s, in the connection of two fundamental
economic and social changes in perspective, two
political battles over autonomy. I shall outline them
here in conclusion:
1. The transition from Fordism to so-called
post-Fordism – or to use Harvey’s words, ‘flexible
accumulation’, as he described it in the United
States of the late 1980s – in the period starting
around 1950 was described by theorists of
‘Workerism’ (operaismo) in Italy during the 1960s
and early 1970s, such as Raniero Panzieri or Mario
Tronti, from a concrete political practice. One could
say that where Hemingway outlined the collapse of
the Russia-orientated communist party model by
way of the necessarily disaligned practice of its
affiliated artists, Workerism began to offer a model
in which this form of organization was rethought
from the actual conditions of labour at the time. The
altered significance of service labour in capitalist
production thus also plays a central role in
Workerist theory, which first appeared publicly in
Antonio Negri’s ‘Proletarians and the State’
(1976)37 in the figure of the ‘socialized worker’ and
of organizing outside the factory.38 In contrast to
Harvey, the emphasis here is not so much on the
changed constitution of capital, but rather on the
changed role of labour and labourers. At the end of
the 1960s, Tronti argued that the working class
needed to liberate itself from its status as wage
labourers in order to become politically
autonomous, and thus to be more than a mere
economic category. ‘He

947
emphasizes their “autonomy” and “subjectivity” to
the point of defining them as the propulsive element
in capitalist development, and capital as a function
of the working class.’39 In Tronti’s words:
‘Distribution, exchange, consumption must be seen
from the standpoint of production.’40 The starting
point of subjectification thus remains the factory,
but now as the image of total capitalist
organization, not merely as a geographical site.
Autonomy in the workers’ struggle is socially
repositioned, within and outside the walls of the
factory: ‘the working class must see itself materially
as part of capital’.41
Tronti’s discussion of political autonomy within the
framework of a disintegrating modernist concept of
capitalist antagonism is interesting here primarily
because autonomy is not defined as a development
beyond the mere economic function of its own social
role, but as a development from this.42 This concept
of autonomy materializes the fulfilment of a Fordist
role against the goal immanent to its system, for
instance in the claims and battles about a feminist
art (history) in 1970s Germany, in which there was
a struggle for the autonomy of a ‘feminine aesthetic’
(Silvia Bovenschen), not least precisely because this
could not be aligned with the modernist
understanding of autonomy in art and thus set up
an explosion within the modernist view of
autonomy. The ideological concept of modern
autonomy in art functions here as an authoritarian
citation, the authority of which is updated through
an artistic practice that is turned against it. In
‘Workerism’, Tronti introduced a realization of the
social meaning of autonomy, in which the modernist
belief in an autonomy from economic production
came to be seen as a mere projection that was

948
immanent to capital. What distinguishes both
Althusser’s structuralist theories and Tronti’s
workerist theories of the 1960s and 1970s, in
comparison to many of the ideas that follow them
and take up the same object, is their insistence on
the ongoing materiality of modern categories in
their present, their effectiveness far beyond their
own timeliness. In many respects, the public life of
art remains modernist to this day, but the possible
strategies for undermining modernist hierarchies
and ideological figures dramatically changed with
the paradigm of the fundamental dehierarchization
of ‘distribution, exchange, consumption’. Speaking
with Tronti, one could say that artists have to be
liberated from their merely economic role (that of
unproductive and immeasurable labour) in order to
be able to become politically autonomous (from a
self-conception as service providers).
2. Feminist efforts in the same period – as
advocated, for example, by participants in the
Wages for Housework campaign, founded in 1972
by Selma James with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia
Federici and others – were aimed at exactly this
point. These theorists, with Marxist and, in the case
of Dalla Costa and Federici, Workerist backgrounds,
emphasize the role of reproductive labour, already
undermined in the context of Fordism, in the
constitution of capital, demanding that it be
incorporated
into the analysis and political confrontation of the
capitalist present. What is deemed to be
‘unproductive’ labour should be made visible as in
fact productive, and an end should be put to its
privatization. If it was not entirely unjustifiable that
art production fell out of the Marxist analysis of
capital in modern times because its order of

949
production does not stand in any systematic
connection to that of the value its generates, this
was not so easy to claim for reproductive labour. As
Dalla Costa argued in 1971, the contrary is the
case; the unpaid labour of reproduction, mostly
performed by women, produces exactly that
commodity on which the production of all other
commodities is dependent: ‘the workforce’.43 But
the labour of women, seen as unpaid and therefore
socially as unproductive, ‘appears to be a personal
service outside of capital’.44 Also the ‘Politicization
of Private Life’,45 which Helke Sander called for in
1968 at the Socialist German Student Union, marks
exactly this point as the basis of a newly modified
definition of autonomy against capital, where
capital’s innermost driving principle, ‘to produce for
production’s sake’, its advanced, expanded
reproduction, finally materializes. Making
unproductive labour public as a service to capital
encounters the residues of modern societies that
still exist in the present, here those of women’s
housework, by becoming autonomized, in Tronti’s
sense, against the system of capitalist reproduction
instead of being identified as part of the business of
the capitalist present.
What artistic production shares with reproductive
labour – aside from the fact that both are
stigmatized as unproductive in the modern image of
society – is, on the one hand, the myth of their
immeasurability in the Fordist schema; and, on the
other, their capitalization as a service arm over the
course of the increasing flexibility of accumulation
after the Second World War. Both areas of
production were characterized in the Fordist
schema of capital by their exclusion from direct
industrialization, by the advanced archaism of their

950
labouring means, and by the limitation of their
social existence to public forms of representation
based on negating the work carried out in them. But
where the projection onto art was that onto a
seemingly purely mental labour, the epitome of
disembodied autonomy, reproductive labour was
reduced to the stereotype of an ostensibly merely
physical effort, the essence of bodily heteronomy.
The feminist battle that continues to this day over
establishing autonomy from the perspective of
reproduction within capital is therefore, in my view,
seminal for an artistic redefinition of what could be
designated as autonomies in art today. This is
reflected not only in those works of the 1960s and
1970s that explicitly used these relations as the
starting point of their productions, works for
example by Margaret Harrison, Mary Kelly, Helke
Sander or Mierle Laderman Ukeles. There has also
been a return to making the private ‘public’ and
visible in current artistic efforts, which represents a
breaking down of the boundaries of one’s own
existence within globalized capital in aesthetic
reconstructions, and does not allow for any
strict separation of work (artistically individualized
production) and life (capitalistically individualized
reproduction).
The question of how much an artistic practice,
which in a certain sense autonomizes phenomena
that are otherwise socialized, can be made more
timely could be discussed in relation to the works
and methods of artists such as Discoteca Flaming
Star, Emma Hedditch, Karolin Meunier, Ulrike
Müller, Anja Kirschner and David Panos, Johannes
Paul Raether and Ian White, to name but a few. A
more thorough answer to this question, however,
remains to be developed. For against the backdrop

951
of a generative understanding of ideology critique,
autonomy and reproduction, this effort would be
less concerned with a continued self-reflection of
artistic orders of production, distribution and
consumption than with their homologies with other
social sites, phenomena and narratives, in relation
to which it would be necessary to register one’s
own ideological role as much as its oppositional
autonomization. Again, this leads back to the need
for, in Hemingway’s words, a ‘totalizing theory of
society’ in which art history marks one specific
thread, one that, since the rise of contemporary art,
has been forced even more to help shape an
understanding of artistic autonomy as a process of
autonomization that confronts modernist nostalgias
and enables a solidly united understanding and
possibly an organization of contemporary (artistic)
labour.
An earlier version of this text (translated by Daniel Hendrickson) appears
in Eva Birkenstock, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, Jens Kastner, Ruth
Sonderegger (eds.), Kunst und Ideologiekritik nach 1989 (Kunsthaus
Bregenz: Bregenz, 2013).

1 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf

Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, 1998), p. 182.

2 Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, originally published in 1970, is a

posthumous collection of systematic fragments on a critical theory of
aesthetics. Adorno himself had planned for the book to be completed in
the same year.

3 The English translations of Adorno’s texts tend to translate the term with
‘deaesthetization’, which I think entails a misunderstanding, as it
wrongly identifies art with aesthetics. As the difference between art as a
practice of manual as much as of intellectual labour and aesthetics as
its philosophical dignification lies at the core of my attempt to actualize
Adorno’s idiosyncratic term, I will translate Entkunstung as
‘deartification’ in this text.

4 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 16.

952
5 Ibid., p. 79.

6 Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main,

1974); Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (University of
Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1984).

7 Otto Karl Werckmeister, ‘Das Kunstwerk als Negation: Zur

geschichtlichen Bestimmung der Kunsthteorie Theodor W. Adornos’, in
Ende der Ästhetik: Essays über Adorno, Bloch, Das gelbe
Unterseeboot und Der eindimensionale Mensch (Fischer: Frankfurt am
Main, 1971).

8 Peter Gorsen, ‘Transformierte Alltäglichkeit oder Transzendenz der

Kunst?’, in Peter Brückner, Gisela Dischner, Peter Gorsen, Alfred
Krovoza, Gabriele Ricke, Alfred Sohn-Rethel (eds.), Das Unvermögen
der Realität: Beiträge zu einer anderen materialistischen Ästhetik
(Wagenbach: Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, 1974).

9 Introduction to Andrew Hemingway (ed.), Marxism and the History of Art:

From William Morris to the New Left (Pluto Press: London, 2006), p. 3.

10 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Theorie der Halbbildung’, Gesammelte Schriften,

vol. 8: Soziologische Schriften I (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1997),
p. 97. Adorno writes about education here, but in a structure that can
be extended to art and philosophy, as Adorno himself argues; see p.
112f.

11 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Contribution to the Theory of Ideology’, in

Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (ed.), Aspects of Sociology
(Heinemann: London, 1973), p. 189.

12 Ibid., p. 193.

13 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Art and the Arts’, in Can One Live after
Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader (Stanford University Press:
Stanford, 2003), p. 375.

14 Adorno’s critique of capitalism as a social form of reproduction is

essentially based on a critique of exchange made absolute. A problem
that I will return to in the next part of this text.

15 Adorno, ‘Art and the Arts’, op. cit., p. 370.

16 Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Beacon Press:

Boston, 1972); see Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 232ff.

17 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 227.

953
18 Ibid., p. 77.

19 Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War

Era (University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2009).

20 Helen Molesworth (ed.), Work Ethics (Baltimore Museum of Art:

Baltimore, 2003).

21 Justin Hoffmann, Destruktionskunst: Der Mythos der Zerstörung in der

Kunst der frühen sechziger Jahre (Silke Schreiber: Munich, 1995).

22 Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the

Communist Movement,1926–1956 (Yale University Press: New Haven
and London, 2002).

23 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 317.

24 Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner (Verso: London, 2005), p.

72.

25 See Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass

Culture in Britain, 1945–1959 (Manchester University Press:
Manchester, 1995).

26 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the

Origins of Cultural Change (Blackwell: Cambridge, 1990), pp. 152–3,
156–7.

27 See Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Schöne Stellen’, Gesammelte Schriften, vol.

18: Musikalische Schriften IV (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1997), p.
695.

28 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, op. cit., p. 157.

29 See Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (Harry

N. Abrams: New York, 1966).

30 See Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art

Object from 1966 to 1972 (Praeger: New York 1973, ‘Escape Attempts’,
p. viiff, and ‘Postface’, p. 263ff.

31 See Thomas Schregenberger and Claude Lichtenstein (eds.), As

Found: The Discovery of The Ordinary (Lars Müller: Zurich, 2001).

32 Hans-Georg Bensch, ‘Zum “Automatsichen Subjekt”’,

<http://www.trend.infopartisan.net/trd0705/t180705.html>, accessed 27
September 2013.

954
33 Frank Kuhne, ‘Marx’ Ideologiebegriff im Kapital’, in Hans-Georg
Bensch and Frank Kuhne (eds.), Das Automatische Subjekt bei Marx
(Zu Klampen: Lüneberg, 1998), p. 85.

34 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (1867) (International Publishers: New York,

1967), p. 592.

35 Adorno, ‘Contributions to the Theory of Ideology’, op. cit., p. 199.

36 Louis Althusser, For Marx (Verso: London, 2005), p. 233.

37 An English translation appears in Antonio Negri, Books for Burning:

Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy (Verso: London,
2005).

38 See Dario Gentili, ‘The Autonomy of the Political in the Italian Tradition
(Tronti, Negri, Cacciari)’, in Nathaniel Boyd, Michele Filippini and Luisa
Lorenza Corna (eds.), The Autonomy of the Political: Concept, Theory,
Form (Jan van Eyck Academie: Maastricht, 2012), p. 12.

39 Gisela Bock, ‘Zur deutschen Ausgabe’, in Mario Tronti, Extremismus

und Reformismus (Merve: Berlin, 1971), p. 10.

40 Mario Tronti, ‘La fabbrica e la società’, Quaderni Rossi, no. 2 (1962).

No English translation has yet been published. German translation in
Mario Tronti, Arbeiter und Kapital (Verlag Neue Kritik: Frankfurt am
Main, 1974), pp. 17–40. A French translation also exists:
<http://multitudes.samizdat.net/L-usine-et-la-societe>, accessed 27
September 2013.

41 Tronti, Arbeiter und Kapital, op. cit.

42 Post-Workerist theories have seen the changes in concrete working

conditions since the 1970s in an essentially more contemporary way,
even if their optimistic outlooks on new classes, new movements and
new forms of labour are faced with economic, social and cultural
hegemonies that effectively reinitiate social structures that continue to
be built up on the basis of modernist models of society. See Thomas
Atzert (ed.), Toni Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno:
Umherschweifende Produzenten (ID Verlag: Berlin, 1998).

43 <http://libcom.org/library/
power-women-subversion-community-della-costa-selma-james>,
accessed 27 September 2013.

44 Ibid.

955
45 <http://www.1000dokumente.de/pdf/dok_0022_san_de.pdf>, accessed
27 September 2013.

956
957
NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

Caroline Arscott is Professor of Nineteenth-Century British Art

and Head of Research at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London,
where she has taught since 1988. In 2008, she published William
Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings. She has an interest
in Victorian biology and physics, and leads an interdisciplinary
project on Victorian telegraphy with King’s College London and
University College London. In 2013, she published on Morris,
Darwin and tapestry in The Clever Object, a special issue of Art
History.

Matthew Beaumont is Senior Lecturer in English at University

College London. He is the author of Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of
Social Dreaming in England, 1870–1900 (2005), The Spectre of
Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle (2012)
and, with Terry Eagleton, The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in
Dialogue (2009).

Warren Carter is a staff tutor at the Open University and a

teaching fellow in history of art at University College London. He is
also one of the co-conveners of the long-running seminar series
‘Marxism in Culture’ at the Institute of Historical Research in
London. He has published on 1930s art in the United States and
Mexico.

Gail Day is Senior Lecturer in History of Art in the School of Fine

Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds.
Her book Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory
(2010) was shortlisted for the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher
Memorial Prize.

958
Steve Edwards is head of the Department of Art History at the
Open University. He is an editor of Oxford Art Journal, Historical
Materialism: A Journal of Critical Marxist Theory, as well as of the
Historical Materialism book series. His recent publications include
The Making of English Photography: Allegories (2006) and Martha
Rosler: The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (2012).

Stephen F. Eisenman is Professor of Art History at Northwestern

University, Evanston. He is the author of eight books, including
The Ecology of Impressionism (2011), The Abu Ghraib Effect
(2007) and Gauguin’s Skirt (1997). His latest book, The Cry of
Nature: Art and the Making of Animal Rights, was published in
2013. From 2008, Eisenman worked with a group of Chicago
artists and activists to end torture at Tamms supermax prison in
Illinois. His article on the prison, ‘The Resistible Rise and
Predictable Fall of the American Supermax’, was published by
Monthly Review in 2009.

Charles Ford is Senior Lecturer in History of Art at University

College London. He has worked extensively on early modern texts,
and has recently completed translations of Karel van Mander and
Samuel van Hoogstraten, both soon to appear on the web. He is
also preparing transcriptions of two volumes of Roger North’s
manuscripts for web publication.

Brian Foss wrote his PhD under Andrew Hemingway’s

supervision, taught art history at Concordia University, Montreal,
and is now Director of the School for Studies in Art and Culture at
Carleton University, Ottawa. He has curated and published
extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canadian art, is
the author of War Paint: Art, War, State and Identity in Britain
1939–45 (2007), and co-edited The Visual Arts in Canada: The
Twentieth Century (2010).

Martin I. Gaughan publishes on German cultural politics in the

1920s, especially on the left. He is author of German Art,
1907–1937: Modernism and Modernisation (2007), as well as
chapters on German Dada in various collections of essays. He was

959
formerly Director of History of Art and Theory at Cardiff
Metropolitan University.

Tom Gretton is Senior Lecturer in History of Art at University

College London. He works on nineteenth-century print culture,
particularly the work of José Guadalupe Posada and upmarket
illustrated general-interest weekly news magazines in Britain and
France between 1840 and 1914. Recent publications include ‘From
La Méduse to the Titanic: Géricault’s Raft in Journalistic Illustration
up to 1912’ in 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth
Century.

Barnaby Haran teaches history of art at University of Bristol. He

completed his PhD at University College London in 2008, with
supervision from Andrew Hemingway. He has published articles on
photography and film for Oxford Art Journal and Textual Practice.
He is currently developing a study on American and Soviet
avant-garde interrelations during the first Five Year Plan.

Paul B. Jaskot is Professor of Art History at DePaul University,

Chicago. His work focuses on the political history of modern
German art and architecture, with a specific concentration on the
Nazi period. His latest book is The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar
German Art and the Politics of the Right. From 2008 to 2010, he
was the President of the College Art Association.

Stewart Martin is Senior Lecturer in Modern European

Philosophy, Aesthetics and Art Theory at Middlesex University,
and a member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical
Philosophy. He is the author of various essays, mostly concerning
the philosophical critique of capitalist culture. He is currently
working on a book about Marx’s conception of life.

Angela Miller is Professor of Art History and American Studies at

Washington University, St Louis. She has lectured and published
on a range of topics spanning from the sixteenth century to the
mid-twentieth. Her current research focuses on US modernism,
pragmatism and cultural democracy in the first half of the twentieth
century. Most recently she led a co-authored team to produce

960
American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity (2008), an
integrated history of American arts from pre-conquest to the
present.

Fred Orton is Emeritus Professor of the History and Theory of Art

at the University of Leeds. He has published widely on
nineteenth-century European art, twentieth-century American art
and criticism, and Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture. His books include
Figuring Jasper Johns (1994), Jasper Johns: The Sculptures
(1996) and, with Ian Wood and Clare A. Lees, Fragments of
History: Rethinking the Ruthwell and Bewcastle Monuments
(2008).

Jody Patterson received her PhD from University College London

in 2009. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Smithsonian
American Art Museum, Washington, DC, and the Terra Foundation
for American Art Europe. She is Lecturer in Art and Visual History
at Plymouth University.

Alex Potts teaches history of art at the University of Michigan, Ann

Arbor. He is a member of the History Workshop Journal editorial
collective, and author of the book Experiments in Modern Realism:
World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar European and
American Art (2013).

John Roberts is Professor of Art and Aesthetics at the University

of Wolverhampton, and the author of a number of books, including
The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the
Readymade (2007) and The Necessity of Errors (2011). His book
Photography and Its Violations is to be published in 2014.

Rachel Sanders completed her PhD, ‘Realism and Ridicule: The

Pictorial Aesthetics of the American Left, c. 1911–34’, under
Andrew Hemingway’s supervision in 2011. She is currently
teaching at the City Literary Institute, Covent Garden, and
developing her research on the Liberator and New Masses.

Norbert Schneider is Professor Emeritus and former Director of

the Institute of Art History at the University of Karlsruhe. Prior to
that he taught at the universities of Münster, Bielefeld and

961
Dortmund. He has written numerous books dealing with the social
history of painting (especially of the early modern era), art theory
and aesthetics, and epistemology.

Frederic J. Schwartz is Professor of History of Art and

Architecture at University College London. He is author of The
Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture Before the First
World War (1996; German edition, Der Werkbund: Ware und
Zeichen 1900–1914, 1999) and Blind Spots: Critical Theory and
the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany (2005), as well as
numerous articles on German art, architecture, literature and
critical theory.

Peter Smith teaches history of art at the University of West

London. His specialist interests include utopianism and the visual
arts. He is author of ‘Never Work! The Situationists and the Politics
of Negation’, in Matthew Beaumont, Andrew Hemingway, Esther
Leslie and John Roberts (eds.), As Radical as Reality Itself:
Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century (2007). He has
also published ‘Attractive Labour and Social Change: William
Morris Now’, in Phillippa Bennett and Rosie Miles (eds.), William
Morris in the Twenty-First Century (2010). He is currently
co-authoring a book on theories and practices of photography.

Kerstin Stakemeier is a junior professor at the cx Centre for

Interdisciplinary Studies, Academy of Fine Arts Munich. Her
Painting: The Implicit Horizon (edited with Avigail Moss) and
Anfang Gut. Alles Gut. Actualizations of ‘Victory over the Sun’
(1913) (edited with Eva Birkenstock and Nina Köller) were both
published in 2012. Her next book, Entkunstung: Artistic Models for
the End of Art, is forthcoming.

Frances Stracey (1963–2009) was Senior Lecturer in History of

Art at University College London. She is the author of a series of
groundbreaking articles on the Situationist International, published
in Oxford Art Journal, October and Art History, among other
places. Her monograph Constructed Situations: The Situationist
International (1957–1972) is forthcoming.

962
James A. van Dyke teaches history of art at the University of
Missouri-Columbia and writes about German art, visual culture and
politics between the world wars. His book Franz Radziwill and the
Contradictions of German Art History, 1919–45 appeared in 2010.
His current book project is entitled Otto Dix: The Production of the
Artist in Crisis.

Alan Wallach is the Ralph H. Wark Professor of Art and Art

History and Professor of American Studies Emeritus at the College
of William and Mary, Williamsburg. He writes on the history of
American art museums and on nineteenth-century American
landscape painting. In 2007, he was the recipient of the College Art
Association’s Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award.

Chin-tao Wu specializes in contemporary art and culture, and has

contributed to New Left Review, Third Text and Journal of Visual
Culture. Her book Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention
Since the 1980s, published in 2002, has been translated into
Turkish (2005), Portuguese (2006) and Spanish (2007). She is
currently Associate Research Fellow at the Academia Sinica in
Taiwan and an Honorary Research Fellow of University College
London.

963
964
INDEX

Numerals in italics refer to illustrations.

Abstract Expressionism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;
see also Action Painting
abstract painting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
see also abstraction in art; Action Painting; geometric
abstraction; informel painting; painterly
abstraction
abstraction (philosophical) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
abstraction in art 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13,
14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19;
see also abstract painting; geometric abstraction;
informel painting; painterly abstraction
ACA gallery, New York 1, 2
Action Painting 1;
see also Rosenberg, Harold
Adamic, Louis 1
Adams, Ansel 1
Adirondack Club 1
Adler, Jankel 1
Adornian theory 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
see also Adorno, Theodor W.; post-Adornian theory
Adorno, Theodor W. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13,
14, 15, 16;
aesthetics 1;
concept of autonomy 1;
Aesthetic Theory 1, 2, 3, 4;
Dialectic of Enlightenment 1, 2;
Entkunstung 1, 2;
In Search of Wagner 1;
Minima Moralia 1;
‘Was Spengler Right?’ 1

965
Aesthetic Movement 1;
see also aestheticism; art for art’s sake
aesthetic subjectivity 1;
see also subjecthood, subjectivity
aestheticism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
see also Aesthetic Movement; art for art’s sake
aesthetics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29,
30;
critique of 1;
Marx’s concept of 1, 2
Agassiz, Louis 1
Agee, James 1;
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 1, 2;
see also Evans, Walker
agency 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,
17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23;
see also social agency
agitprop 1, 2;
see also propaganda
Alberti, Leon Battista 1
Aldine: The Art Journal of America 1
Alexander, Gertrud 1, 2
Ali, Muhammad 1, 2
alienation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
16, 17, 18, 19, 20
All Russian Academy of Arts 1
Allen, Grant 1
Allgemeinen Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes (Federal
School of the German Trade Union Federation) 1
Alma-Tadema, Lawrence 1
Altdorfer, Albrecht The Battle of Alexander 1
alterity 1;
see also Other, the
Althusser, Louis 1, 2, 3, 4;
see also Althusserian theory; post-Althusserian theory
Althusserian theory 1, 2;
see also Althusser, Louis; post-Althusserian theory
American Artists’ Congress 1, 2, 3, 4
American Artists’ Congress Against War and Fascism 1, 2

966
American Civil War 1, 2, 3, 4
American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky 1
American Federation of Labor (AFL) 1, 2, 3
American Fund for Public Service 1
American Labor Party 1
American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences 1
American Writers’ Congress 1
An American Group, Inc. 1
anarchism, anarchists 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Anderson, Perry 1, 2
Anderson, Sherwood 1
Annan, Thomas 1
Antal, Frederick 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
anti-aesthetic mode in art 1, 2
anti-capitalism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
anti-communism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
anti-dialecticalism 1
anti-fascism, anti-fascist 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
anti-feminism 1, 2
anti-Hegelianism 1
anti-historicism 1, 2
anti-Marxism, anti-Marxist 1, 2
anti-Semitism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
anti-socialism 1
anti-Stalinism 1, 2, 3, 4
Apollinaire, Guillaume 1;
‘Merlin et la Vielle Femme’ 1
applied arts 1, 2
appropriation art 1, 2
architecture 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
Arendt, Hannah 1
Armory Show, New York 1
Arnaud, Noel 1
Arnold, Karl 1;
‘Berliner Bilder: Grenadierstrasse’ 1
Arnott, David 1
Art and Language 1
art as commodity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
Art Association of Montreal 1
Art Bulletin 1

967
Art Deco 1
art for art’s sake 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
see also aestheticism; Aesthetic Movement
Art Front 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Art History 1, 2
art market 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24
Artforum 1, 2
Artist’s Fund Society 1
artists’ groups 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14,
15
Artists’ League of America 1
Artists’ Union 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
ARTnews 1, 2, 3
ARTnews Annual 1
Arts Magazine 1
Ashcan School 1
ASSO see Assoziation revolutionärer bildender Künstler
Deutschlands (ARBKD)
Association of Art Historians (AAH) 1
Association of German Revolutionary Artists see
Assoziation revolutionärer bildender Künstler
Deutschlands (ARBKD)
Assoziation revolutionärer bildender Künstler
Deutschlands (ARBKD) 1, 2
Atget, Eugène 1
Atkins, Guy 1
Atkinson, Terry 1
Atlantic Monthly 1
Atwood, Margaret 1, 2
Ault, George 1
aura (of the work of art) 1, 2, 3;
see aslo Benjamin, Walter
autonomy, individual 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
autonomy of art 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11;
see aslo deartification
autonomy of labour 1;
see aslo labour

968
avant-garde, the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14,
15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28,
29, 30;
see aslo neo-avant-garde, the; Russian avant-garde;
Soviet avant-garde; vanguard, vanguardism
Azzellini, Dario 1

969
Badiou, Alain 1
Bain, Alexander 1
Balázs, Béla 1
Ball, Hugo 1
Balzac, Honoré de 1, 2, 3, 4
Bancroft, George 1
Banham, Reyner 1
Barbizon school 1, 2
Bardot, Brigitte 1, 2, 3
Bard, Phil 1, 2
Baroque, the 1
Barr, Alfred H. 1
Barrell, John 1
Barthes, Roland 1, 2, 3, 4;
Camera Lucida 1, 2
Basmachi (Tajik) 1, 2, 3, 4
Bastien-Lepage, Jules 1
Baudelaire, Charles 1, 2, 3
Bauhaus 1, 2, 3, 4
Baur, John 1
Baxandall, Lee 1
Becker, Maurice 1
Beckert, Sven 1
Beckmann, Max 1
Bedford, Hilkiah 1
Bek, Ibrahim 1, 2
Bell, Clive 1
Bellows, Henry W. 1
Benjamin, Walter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13,
14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19;
Illuminations 1;
‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’ 1, 2, 3, 4;
Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiel 1, 2
Bensch, Hans-Georg 1
Berber, Anita 1
Berenson, Bernard 1
Bergdoll, Barry 1
Berger, John 1

970
Berliner Post 1
Bernstein, Eduard 1, 2
Bernstein, Michèle 1;
La Nuit 1;
Tous les chevaux du roi 1
Biemann, Ursula 1
Bierstadt, Albert 1, 2, 3, 4;
Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak 1, 2
Bird, Jon 1
Bishop, Raymond 1
Blackaby, Jem 1
Blake, William 1, 2, 3
Bloch, Ernst 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
Thomas Münzer as Theologian of the Revolution 1, 2
Block 1, 2
Blunt, Anthony 1
Bohr, Niels 1
Boime, Albert 1, 2, 3
Bolsheviks, Bolshevism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Bonapartism 1
Bond, Anthony 1
Borchardt-Hume, Achim 1
Borzello, Frances 1
Botticelli, Sandro 1, 2;
Flora 1;
Primavera 1
Bourdieu, Pierre 1, 2, 3
bourgeois art 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
bourgeois art history 1, 2
bourgeois culture 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;
see also Erbe
bourgeois humanism 1
Bourgeois Public Sphere 1
bourgeoisie 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
16
Bourke-White, Margaret 1
Bovenschen, Silvia 1
Bovey, W. T. 1, 2
Brace, Ernst 1
Brancusi, Constantin 1

971
Brandes, Stanley 1
Braque, Georges 1
Brecht, Bertolt 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12;
The Threepenny Opera 1;
‘What Keeps Mankind Alive?’ 1
Brechtian modes and theory 1, 2, 3
Bredekamp, Horst 1
Brenner, Anita 1
Brenner, Robert 1, 2
Breton, André 1, 2
Breughel, Pieter the Elder 1
Bridges, Harry 1, 2
British Journal of Photography 1
Brody, David 1
Brooke, S. R. 1
Brooke Alexander, New York 1
Brooklyn Law School 1
Brooks, Van Wyck 1
Browder, Earl 1
Brown, Don 1
Brown, Norman O. 1
Bryant, William Cullen 1
Bryan-Wilson, Julia 1
Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. 1, 2, 3
Bunce, O. B. 1
Bund proletarisch-revolutionärer Schriftsteller (BPRS) 1,
2
Burck, Jacob 1, 2, 3
Bürger, Peter 1, 2, 3, 4;
Theory of the Avant-Garde 1, 2
Burgin, Victor 1, 2
Burliuk, David 1
Burnham, James 1

972
Cacciari, Massimo 1
Cage, John 1
Cahill, Holger 1
‘California Group’ 1
California Institute of the Arts 1
Calvinism 1, 2, 3;
see aslo Protestantism
Camden Arts Centre, London 1, 2, 3
Cameron, Dan 1
Cameron, Julia Margaret 1
Campbell-Johnston, Rachel 1
Campendonk, Heinrich 1
Canadian Academy of Arts, Toronto 1, 2
Canadian Spectator 1
canon in art 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13;
critique of see counter-canon, leftist canon
capital 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,
17;
see aslo capitalism
capitalism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21,
22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35,
36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49,
50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58;
see aslo capital; capitalist modes of production;
consumer capitalism; industrial capitalism
capitalist modes of production 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Carlyle, Thomas 1
Carnegie International, Pittsburgh 1
Carroll, Lewis 1, 2
Carter, Jimmy 1, 2
Casilear, John 1
Castello di Rivoli, Turin 1
Castoriadis, Cornelius 1
Catholic, Catholicism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
see aslo Catholic Church
Catholic Church 1;
see aslo Catholic, Catholicism
Caucus for Marxism and Art 1

973
Caucus for Marxism and Art History see Caucus for
Marxism and Art
Cavalcaselle, G. B. 1
Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham
(CCCS) 1, 2
Centre Party (Germany) 1
Century Association, New York 1
Cervantes, Miguel de 1
Cézanne, Paul 1, 2, 3
Champfleury (Jules François Felix Fleury-Husson) 1
Chareau, Pierre 1
Charles II, King of England 1, 2
Charles, Matthew 1
Chase, William Merritt 1
Chaucer, Geoffrey 1
Chellis, Mary Dwinell 1
Chernyshevsky, Nikolai 1, 2
Cherrill, N. K. 1
Chicago Daily Tribune 1
Christian Democracy party (Italy) 1, 2
Christianity 1, 2;
see also Calvinism; Catholic, Catholicism; Catholic
Church; Protestantism
Chto Delat 1, 2, 3;
Builders 1;
‘Declarations on Politics, Knowledge and Art’ 1;
Partisan Songspiel: A Belgrade Story 1, 2
Church, Frederic 1, 2, 3;
Heart of the Andes 1, 2
Cicero 1
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown 1
Clark, Kenneth 1
Clark, T. J. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;
Image of the People 1;
‘On the Social History of Art’ 1;
The Absolute Bourgeois 1;
The Painting of Modern Life 1
class, classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29,
30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42

974
class consciousness 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
class cooperation 1
class formation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
class identity 1, 2, 3
class politics 1, 2, 3
class relations 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
class solidarity 1
class struggle 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
class war 1, 2, 3, 4
Clausen, George 1
Clayson, Holly 1
Clunas, Craig 1, 2
COBRA 1, 2, 3
Cocking, Edwin 1
Coffee, John 1
Cohen, Phil 1
Cold War 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1, 2, 3
Cole, Thomas 1, 2
collectivism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29,
30, 31, 32, 33
collectivization 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
College Art Association (CAA) 1
Columbia University, New York 1, 2, 3, 4
Comintern (Communist International) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,
9
Commissariat for Enlightment (Soviet) 1
Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) 1, 2
commodity aesthetics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
commodity culture 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
commodity exchange 1
commodity fetishism 1, 2, 3
commodity-form 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
commodity-image 1
commodity, the 1, 2, 3
communism, communists 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11,
12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25,
26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39,
40, 41;

975
 in France 1, 2;
in Germany 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
in Italy 1, 2, 3, 4;
in the Soviet Union 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
in the US 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11;
see aslo Communist Party
communist art, communist aesthetics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
communist cultural theory 1, 2
communist culture 1, 2, 3
Communist Party 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
see aslo individual national parties
Communist Party (France) 1
Communist Party (Germany) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Communist Party (Italy) 1, 2, 3
Communist Party (Soviet Union) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Communist Party (US) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
communist politics 1, 2, 3, 4
communist propaganda 1, 2
conceptual art, conceptual artists 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Congress of Industrial Organizations see Committee for
Industrial Organization (CIO)
connoisseurship 1, 2, 3
consciousness 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14,
15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28,
29, 30, 31;
abstract consciousness 1, 2;
class consciousness 1, 2, 3;
critique of 1, 2;
‘genus-consciousness’ 1;
labour of 1, 2;
political consciousness 1, 2;
proletarian consciousness 1, 2, 3;
revolutionary consciousness 1, 2;
self-consciousness 1, 2, 3;
sensuous consciousness 1, 2, 3
Constable, John 1, 2
Constructivism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
consumer culture, consumerism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;
see aslo consumption
consumption 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14;

976
 see aslo consumer culture, consumerism
contemporary art 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
continental philosophy 1, 2, 3
Cook, Clarence 1, 2
Coplans, John 1
Cotman, John Sell 1
Coughtry, Graham 1
counter-canon, leftist canon 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
see aslo canon in art
Courbet, Gustave 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;
A Burial at Ornans 1, 2;
see aslo Realism
Courtauld Institute of Art, London 1
Couture, Thomas 1;
Romans of the Decadence 1;
The Enrolment of the Volunteers of 1792 1, 2
Cozzens, Abraham M. 1
CPSU see Communist Party (Soviet Union)
CPUSA see Communist Party (US)
Crane, Walter 1
Craven, David 1, 2
Crawford, Isabella Valancy 1
Crawford, Ralston 1
Crayon 1, 2, 3
Crispi, Francesco 1
critical realism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
critical theorists, critical theory 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;
see aslo Frankfurt School
critique of culture 1, 2, 3, 4;
see aslo Adorno, Theodor W.
Croughton, George 1
Crowe, J. A. 1
Crow, Thomas 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
‘Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts’ 1
Cubism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
‘Cubism and Abstract Art’ (MoMA) 1, 2
‘cultural front’ 1;
see aslo New Deal
culture industry 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
see aslo Adorno, Theodor W.

977
Curtis, George William 1

978
Dada, Dadaism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
Daily Worker 1, 2, 3
Dal Co, Francesco 1
Dalí, Salvador 1
Dalla Costa, Mariarosa 1
Danto, Arthur 1
Darwin, Charles 1, 2, 3
Daumier, Honoré 1, 2, 3, 4
David, Jacques-Louis 1, 2;
Oath of the Horatii 1
Davis, Stuart 1, 2;
Art to the people – get pink slips 1, 2;
Composition 1, 2;
Daily Tribune and CIO 1, 2;
The Terminal 1, 2;
Waterfront Demonstration 1, 2, 3, 4
Day, Gail 1
Dean, James 1
deartification 1, 2
de Beauvoir, Simone 1
Debord, Guy 1, 2, 3;
The Society of the Spectacle 1;
see aslo Situationism, Situationists; society of the
spectacle, the; spectacle, the
de Chirico, Giorgio 1
de Gaulle, Charles 1
‘Degenerate Art’ 1, 2
Dehn, Adolf 1, 2
De Jong, Jacqueline 1, 2, 3
Deleuze, Gilles 1, 2
De Michelis, Marco 1
Denning, Michael 1, 2
Dennison, Mariea Caudill 1
Depression, the Great 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
Der Gegner 1, 2
dérives 1;
see aslo détournements; Situationism, Situationists
Derrida, Jacques 1
Descartes, René 1, 2

979
design theory 1
desublimation 1, 2, 3
détournements 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14,
15;
see also dérives; Situationism, Situationists
Dewey, John 1, 2;
Art as Experience 1
dialectical art history 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
dialectical criticism 1, 2, 3, 4
dialectical materialism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
dialectics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,
17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25
Diamond, Dr Hugh 1
Dickens, Charles 1
Dickerman, Leah 1
Dickie, George 1
Die Arbeit 1, 2
Die Gleichheit 1
Die Linkskurve 1, 2, 3
Die Neue Zeit 1, 2
Die Rote Fahne 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Dijkstra, Bram 1
Dine, Jim 1
Dior, Christian 1
Discoteca Flaming Star 1
discourse 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11,, 12, 13, 14, 15
Dix, Otto 1, 2;
Altar for Cavaliers 1, 2;
Dr Fritz Glaser and Martha Dix playing music 1;
Dr Simons in Half-Figure 1;
Jewish Cemetery in Randegg in the Winter 1;
Portrait of the Art Dealer Alfred Flechtheim 1, 2;
Portrait of the Lawyer Dr Fritz Glaser 1;
Portrait of the Lawyer Hugo Simons 1, 2;
Prager Strasse 1;
The Barricade 1;
The Lawyer Dr Fritz Glaser and his Family 1, 2;
The Matchseller I 1;
War portfolio 1
Döblin, Alfred 1

980
Documenta, Kassel 1, 2
documentary photography 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11,
12, 13;
see aslo photo-document; photo-essay;
photojournalism
Dondero, George A. 1
Dostoevesky, Fyodor 1, 2;
The Brothers Karamazov 1
Downtown Gallery, New York 1
Dresser, Christopher 1
Driscoll, John Paul 1
Dubuffet, Jean 1
Duchen, Claire 1
Duggar, Ben 1
Dumsday, Albert 1
Duncan, Carol 1, 2, 3;
‘Happy Mothers and Other New Ideas in French Art’ 1;
Under Wraps (Bust of Lenin) 1, 2;
‘Virility and Domination in Twentieth-Century
Vanguard Painting’ 1
Durand, Asher B. 1, 2, 3
Dürer, Albrecht 1, 2;
Circumcision of Christ 1;
Jesus Among the Doctors 1
Durth, Werner 1
Duveneck, Frank 1
Dziga Vertov Group 1

981
Earl of Hardwicke, Philip Yorke 1
Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper 1
Eastman, George 1
Eastman, Max 1, 2
Economist 1
Edgar, Adrienne 1
Ehrlich, Carol 1
Einstein, Carl 1
Eisenstein, Sergei 1, 2, 3
El Imparcial 1
Elistratova, Anne 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Elle 1, 2
Ellis, Fred 1, 2
El Lissitzky 1
Emerson, P. H. 1
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 1
Engels, Friedrich 1, 2, 3, 4;
The German Ideology 1, 2
England, William 1
Enlightenment 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Entkunstung see deartification
epic modernism (Schapiro) 1;
see aslo modern art; modernism; Rivera, Diego
epic realism (Lukács) 1, 2
epic theatre (Brecht) 1, 2;
see aslo modernism
Épinal, images d’ 1, 2
Erbe 1, 2, 3, 4
Ernst, Jimmy 1
Ertl, Fritz 1;
Plan of the Auschwitz-Birchenau Concentration Camp
1
estrangement 1, 2, 3, 4
Etching Revival 1
Evans, Jessica 1
Evans, Walker 1, 2;
Floyd Burroughs 1;
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 1
Evergood, Philip 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

982
 Music 1
exchange, principle of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
exchange-value 1, 2, 3, 4
existentialism 1, 2
expressionism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

983
Fähnders, Walter 1
false consciousness 1, 2
Farocki, Harun 1
fascism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,
17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23
Fauvism 1
Federal Art Project (FAP) 1, 2, 3
Federal Bureau of Investigation 1
Federici, Silvia 1
feminism, feminists 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12;
see aslo women’s movement, the
feminist art history 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
feminist historical materialism 1
fetish, fetishization 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
Feuchtwanger, Lion 1
Feuerbach, Ludwig 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
Principles of the Philosophy of the Future 1, 2;
The Essence of Christianity 1
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 1
Fielding, Henry 1
Fiene, Ernest 1
figuration, figurative art 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
film and film theory 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
First International Congress of Writers for the Defense of
Culture 1
First World War 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Fisher, Mark 1
Fish, Hamilton 1
Fitzgerald, F. Scott 1
Flechtheim, Alfred 1, 2, 3, 4
Foote, G. W. 1
Forain, Jean-Louis 1
Fordism 1, 2, 3
formalism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15;
see aslo Russian Formalism
Forster, Kurt 1
Fortnightly Review 1, 2
Foster, Hal 1
Foucault, Michel 1, 2, 3

984
Fougeron, André 1, 2
Fourier, Charles 1
Fourth International 1
Fox Talbot, William Henry 1
Frankfurt School 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
see aslo critical theorists, critical theory
Frankfurter Hefte 1
Frank, Waldo 1
Frascina, Francis 1
Freedberg, Sidney 1
Freee 1, 2;
Protest is Beautiful 1
French Communist Party see Communist Party (France)
French Resistance 1
French Revolution 1, 2
Freud, Sigmund 1, 2, 3
Freudian narrative 1, 2
Freund, Gisèle 1
Freyberg, Alfred 1
Frick, Wilhelm 1, 2, 3
Fridericianum Museum, Kassel 1
Fried, Michael 1, 2, 3
Fronte Nuovo 1
Frost, Robert 1
Frost, Thomas 1
Frye, Northrop 1, 2
Fry, Roger 1
Fuchs, Eduard 1, 2;
Die Juden in der Karikatur 1, 2, 3
Futurism 1

985
Gagnier, Regenia 1
Gainsborough, Thomas 1
Gardner, Fred 1
Gattungswesen 1
Gauguin, Paul 1
Gayer, Sir Robert 1
Gazetta Callejera 1
Gellert, Hugo 1, 2, 3
geometric abstraction 1;
see aslo abstract painting; abstraction in art
German Communist Party see Communist Party
(Germany)
German Democratic Party (DDP) 1
German Expressionism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
German People’s Party (DVP) 1
Gernsheim, Helmut 1, 2
Gerstle, Gary 1
Gestapo 1
gestural painting 1, 2, 3, 4;
see also informel painting; painterly abstraction
Getty Research Institute 1
Gifford, Sanford Robinson 1
Gilman, Sander 1
Giorgione 1
Giotto 1
Glaser, Fritz 1, 2, 3, 4
Globe (Toronto) 1
Glob, P. V. 1
Godard, Jean-Luc 1, 2
Goebbels, Joseph 1
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1, 2, 3
Gogh, Vincent van 1, 2, 3
Gold, Michael 1, 2, 3, 4;
Jews Without Money 1
Golub, Leon 1
Gombin, Richard 1
Gombrich, Ernst 1, 2
Good Housekeeping 1
Gorin, Jean-Pierre 1, 2

986
Gorky, Maxim 1
Gorsen, Peter 1
Gosse, Edmund 1
Gothic, the 1, 2
Goupil Gallery, London 1
Goya, Francisco de 1, 2, 3
Grable, Betty 1
Gramsci, Antonio 1, 2, 3
Graphic 1
Greeley, Horace 1
Greenberg, Clement 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ 1;
Greenbergian criticism 1, 2, 3
Green, David 1
Gropius, Walter 1, 2, 3
Gropper, William 1, 2, 3, 4;
East Side 1;
Hunger March 1;
Join the Maroons 1;
Ladies, It Gives Me Great Pleasure 1;
The Dishwasher 1, 2, 3;
Toward a Classless Society 1
Grosz, George 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
‘Prost Noske! The Young Revolution is Dead’ 1;
‘The Art Scoundrel’ (Der Kunstlump) 1, 2
Group of Seven 1
Gruppe Spur 1, 2
Guattari, Félix 1
Guilbaut, Serge 1, 2;
How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art 1
Guttuso, Renato 1, 2, 3;
‘Concrete communication and concrete images’ 1;
Newspaper Mural – May ’68 1;
Occupation of Uncultivated Lands in Sicily 1, 2;
The Beach 1, 2, 3;
Togliatti’s Funeral 1
Gyles, Fletcher 1

987
Haacke, Hans 1
Habermas, Jürgen 1, 2, 3;
public sphere, concept of 1, 2, 3, 4;
see aslo Bourgeois Public Sphere
Hadjinicolaou, Nicos 1
Hahmann, Werner 1
Hale, Katherine 1
Hale, Matthew 1
Hall, Stuart 1, 2
Hamilton, George Heard 1, 2
Hamilton, Richard 1
handicraft 1, 2
Handwerk see handicraft
happenings 1, 2
Harbin, George 1
Harden, Sylvia von 1
Hardt, Michael 1, 2, 3, 4;
Empire 1;
see aslo Negri, Antonio
Harris, Ann Sutherland 1, 2
Harrison, Margaret 1
Hartley, Marsden 1
Harvard University 1
Harvey, David 1, 2
hashar 1
Haug, Wolfgang 1
Hauptmann, Elizabeth 1
Hauser, Arnold 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;
Hauserian art history 1, 2;
The Philosophy of Art History 1, 2;
The Social History of Art 1
Hawarden, Clementina 1
Hays, H. R. 1
Heade, Martin Johnson 1, 2
Heartfield, John 1, 2, 3, 4;
‘The Art Scoundrel’ (Der Kunstlump) 1, 2
Hebdige, Dick 1
Hedditch, Emma 1
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;

988
 Elements of the Philosophy of Right 1;
Philosophy of Right 1, 2;
The Phenomenology of Spirit 1, 2
Hegelianism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Heim, Jacques 1
Held, John 1
Held, Julius 1
Held, Jutta 1, 2
Heller, Joseph 1
Hemingway, Andrew 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13,
14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22;
Artists on the Left 1, 2;
Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture in Early
Nineteenth-Century Britain 1;
Marxism and the History of Art 1;
The Mysticism of Money 1
Henderson, Nigel 1
Hennis, Wilhelm 1
Herder, Johann Gottfried von 1
Hernandez, William 1
Herzfelde, Wieland 1, 2
Hesse, Fritz 1
Hesse, Julius 1
Heuss, Theodor 1, 2
Hext, Kate 1
Hilbersheimer, Ludwig 1
Hills, Patricia 1
Hinz, Berthold 1, 2
Histoire et critique des arts 1
historical materialism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Historical Materialism (group) 1
Historical School of Political Economy, German 1, 2
historicism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;
see aslo anti-historicism
Hitler, Adolf 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
Mein Kampf 1
Hobbes, Thomas 1, 2
Hoe, Robert 1
Hoffmann, Justin 1
Hogarth, William 1, 2

989
Holocaust, the 1
Homer, Winslow 1, 2;
The Old Mill (The Morning Bell) 1
homosexuality 1, 2, 3
Horkheimer, Max 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
Dialectic of Enlightenment 1, 2;
see aslo Adorno, Theodor W.
Howat, John 1
Hudson River School 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Huelsenbeck, Richard 1
Hughes, John 1
Huillet, Daniéle 1
Hungarian Soviet Republic 1
hybrid form, hybrid medium (in art) 1, 2, 3, 4

990
iconography 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
idealism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
identity politics 1
ideology 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,
17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30;
aesthetic ideology 1, 2, 3, 4;
anti-Semitic ideology 1;
avant-garde ideology 1;
bourgeois ideology 1;
communist ideology 1;
liberal ideology 1;
Nazi ideology 1, 2;
photographic ideology 1;
political ideology 1, 2;
revolutionary ideology 1, 2
image-text 1, 2
Impressionism 1, 2, 3, 4
Independent Group 1
indexicality 1
individualism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
industrial capitalism 1, 2
industrial production,
industrialization 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14,
15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23
Industrial Revolution 1, 2
Industrial Workers of the World 1
informal abstraction see informel painting
informel painting 1, 2, 3
Inness, George 1
Innis, Harold 1, 2
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton 1
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston 1
instrumentalization of art 1, 2
interdisciplinarity 1, 2, 3
International Brigades 1
International Bureau of Revolutionary Artists (IBRA) 1
International Bureau of Revolutionary Literature 1
International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) 1
International Federation of Revolutionary Writers 1

991
International Literature 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
International Longshoremen and Warehousemens’ Union
1
International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) 1, 2
International Union of Revolutionary Writers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,
6
International Workers Order 1
Internationale Jugend Bibliothek 1, 2
Internationale situationniste 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11,
12, 13;
see also Situationism, Situationists
internationalism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
intertextuality 1
intransitivity 1
Ionesco, Eugène 1
Istanbul Biennial 1, 2
Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia see
Venice School of architecture
Italian Communist Party see Communist Party (Italy)
Italian Workers’ Club 1
Ivanov, Eugene 1

992
Jacobsen, Arne 1
Jacoby, Russell 1, 2
Jäger, Lorenz 1
James II, King of England 1, 2
James, C. L. R. 1, 2;
Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways 1, 2
James, Selma 1
James, William 1, 2
Jameson, Fredric 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Jarves, James Jackson 1
Jasieński, Bruno 1
Jay, Martin 1
Jews, Jewishness 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
John Reed Clubs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Jopling, Jay 1
Jorn, Asger 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
Ausverkauf einer Seele 1;
Dead Drunk Danes 1, 2;
Luck and Chance 1;
Stalingrad, le non lieu ou le fou rire du courage 1, 2
Journal of Arts and Sciences 1
Jung, Carl 1

993
Kainen, Jacob 1, 2, 3
Kalatosov, Mikhail 1
Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur 1
Kandinsky, Wassily 1
Kant, Immanuel 1, 2, 3
Kaprow, Allan 1
Kassler, Jamie C. 1
Kassymbekova, Botakoz 1
Kautsky, Karl 1, 2
Keeler, Christine 1, 2
Kelly, Grace 1
Kelly, Mary 1
Kemeny, Alfred 1
Kemp, Marianne 1
Kennett, White 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
A Complete History of England 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Kensett, John F. 1, 2;
Long Neck Point from Contentment Island, Darien,
Connecticut 1, 2
Kent, Rockwell 1, 2;
Moby Dick 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
N by E 1
Kessler, Count Harry 1
Khodsaiev, Isai 1
Kierkegaard, Søren 1, 2
Kinsman, Robert D. 1, 2
Kirschner, Anja 1
Kisch, Egon Erwin 1, 2, 3
Kissinger, Henry 1
kitsch 1, 2, 3
Kittredge, William 1, 2
Kladderadatsch 1
Klee, Paul 1, 2, 3, 4
Klein, Isidore 1
Klein, Jerome 1, 2
Klingender, Francis 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Kolski, Gan 1
Kommunistiche Partei Deutschlands (KPD) see
Communist Party (Germany)

994
Kossuth, Lajos 1
Kozloff, Max 1
Kracauer, Siegfried 1, 2, 3, 4
Kraftwerk 1
Krauss, Rosalind 1
Kritische Berichte 1
Kruckman, Herb 1, 2;
‘After All, It is a Case of the Survival of the Fittest’ 1, 2
Kruger, Barbara 1, 2;
Untitled: ‘I Shop Therefore I Am’ 1, 2
Krutik, Mikhail 1
Kuhne, Frank 1
Kunitz, Joshua 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
Dawn Over Samarkand 1;
‘New Women in Old Asia’ 1, 2, 3;
‘Red Roads in Central Asia’ 1;
‘Soviet Asia Sings’ 1;
‘Soviet Tadjikistan’ 1, 2
Kunstgewerbebewegung see applied arts
Kunstlump controversy (Heartfield and Grosz) 1, 2
Kunstwollen 1
Kunzle, David 1, 2;
The History of the Comic Strip 1
Kwait, John (Meyer Schapiro) 1

995
labour 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,
17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30,
31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40;
abstract labour 1, 2;
alienated labour 1;
artistic labour 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;
autonomy of 1;
collective labour 1;
Hegel’s theory of 1;
iconography of 1;
images of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
industrial labour 1, 2, 3;
intellectual labour 1, 2, 3;
labour of consciousness 1, 2, 3, 4;
labour politics 1, 2;
manual labour 1, 2, 3, 4;
Marx’s theory of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
mechanized labour 1;
mental labour 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
productive labour 1, 2;
reproductive labour 1;
unproductive labour 1, 2, 3, 4;
wage labour 1, 2
Lacan, Jacques 1, 2
Lacanian psychoanalysis 1, 2
Ladies’ Home Journal 1
Lakeside Press 1, 2
landscape art 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14,
15, 16, 17
Lane, Fitz Henry 1, 2
language in art 1;
see aslo textuality
La Révolution surréaliste 1
l’art pour l’art see art for art’s sake
La Thangue, Henry Herbert 1
Laubier, Claire 1
Lavin, Irving 1
Lawrence, D. H. 1
League of American Writers 1

996
League of Nations 1
Le Clerc, Jean 1, 2
Le Corbusier 1, 2, 3
Lefebvre, Henri 1
Left Front of Art (LEF) 1, 2
leftism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,
17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25;
leftist art 1, 2;
leftist art history 1, 2, 3;
leftist canon see counter-canon counter-canon, leftist
canon; leftist critics 1, 2, 3
Léger, Fernand 1
Lely, Sir Peter 1
Le Monde 1
Le Neve-Foster, Peter 1
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
Leninism 1, 2
Le Nouëne, Patrick 1
Les Jeunes Femmes 1
L’Esprit Nouveau 1, 2
Le Sueur, Meridel 1
Lettrist International 1
Levenson, Michael 1, 2
Levi, Carlo 1
L’Humanité 1
liberalism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
Libération 1
Liberator 1, 2, 3, 4
Liebermann, Max 1
Lifshitz, Mikhail 1
Limbach, Russell 1
Lindell, Kata 1
Linkman, Audrey 1, 2
Literature of the World Revolution 1, 2, 3, 4
Liuhn, Otto 1
Liverpool Biennial 1
Locke, John 1, 2, 3;
Treatises on Government 1
Longo, Robert 1
Los Angeles Black Panther Party 1

997
Losurdo, Dominic 1
Lowenthal, Leo 1
Löwy, Michael 1
Lozowick, Louis 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
Airport, Tajikistan 1;
American Geometry 1;
‘Art in the Service of the Proletariat’ 1;
At the Gates of the Pamir 1;
Border Guards 1, 2;
Collective Farmer 1, 2;
Decorations 1, 2;
‘Hazardous Sport in Tajikistan’ 1;
‘Machine Ornament’ 1;
Pioneers on Way to School, Tajikistan 1;
Red Tea House, Tajikistan 1, 2;
Tanks #2 1;
Voices of October 1;
Woman in Veil, Tajikistan 1;
Woman Unveiled, Tajikistan 1, 2
lubok 1
Lukács, Georg 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14,
15;
History and Class Consciousness 1, 2, 3;
‘In Search of Bourgeois Man’ 1;
‘Realism in the Balance’ 1;
‘Reification
and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ 1;
‘The Ideology of Modernism’ 1;
‘The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg’ 1;
The Theory of the Novel 1, 2, 3;
‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’ 1
Lukácsian theory, Lukácsian aesthetics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Luminism 1, 2
Lunacharsky, Anatoly 1, 2
Luther, Martin 1, 2, 3
Luxemburg, Rosa 1, 2, 3

998
Mabb, David 1;
Liubov Popova Untitled Textile Design on William
Morris Garden Tulip Wallpaper for Historical
Materialism 1
Macdonald, Dwight 1
MacDonald, Wilson Pugsley 1
Macherey, Pierre 1
machine art, machine aesthetic 1, 2, 3
Magazine of Art 1
magic realism 1
Magil, A. B. 1
Magoon, Elias 1
Mahler, Gustav 1
Mail (Toronto) 1
Maksum, Fuzail 1, 2
Mandel, Ernest 1
Manet, Édouard 1, 2, 3;
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe 1;
Olympia 1, 2
Mangravite, Peppino 1
Manilla, Manuel 1, 2, 3
Mannheim, Karl 1
Mann, Thomas 1, 2, 3
Mansell, Gregory J. 1
Marcks, Gerhard 1
Marcuse, Herbert 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
Eros and Civilization 1;
One Dimensional Man 1
Marcus, Greil 1
Marie Claire 1, 2, 3
Marine Workers’ Committee (US) 1
market, the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;
see aslo commodity, the; consumer capitalism; art
market; market economy
market economy 1
Markulanova, Khoziat 1
Marquand, Henry 1
Marquardt, Virginia Hagelstein 1
Marsh, Reginald 1, 2;

999
 Pneumatic Drill 1
Marshall Plan 1
Märten, Lu 1, 2, 3;
Die wirtschaftliche Lage der Künstler 1;
Historical Materialism with Regard to the Substance
and Transformation of the Arts 1;
‘Historical Materialism with Regard to the Substance
and Transformation of the Arts: A Pragmatic
Introduction’ 1;
‘History, Satire, Dada and other things’ 1;
‘Kunst, Klasse und Sozialismus’ 1;
‘Kunst und historischer Materialismus’ 1;
‘Kunst und Proletariat’ 1;
‘Maschine und Diktatur’ 1;
‘On the Necessity for a Proletarian Theatre and the
Proletarian Theatre’ 1;
‘The Revolutionary Press and the Feuilleton’ 1;
Wesen und Veränderung der Formen und Künste:
Resultate historisch-materialistischer
Untersuchungen 1
Martin, J. V. 1, 2
Marx, Karl 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24;
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 1;
Capital 1;
concept of aesthetics 1, 2;
Critique of Political Economy 1, 2;
‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ 1, 2, 3, 4;
Grundrisse 1;
‘Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy’ 1;
theory of alienation 1;
The Civil War in France 1;
The Class Struggles in France 1, 2;
The Communist Manifesto 1, 2, 3, 4;
The Difference between the Democritean and
Epicurean Philosophy of Nature 1;
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 1, 2, 3, 4,
5;
The German Ideology 1, 2;
theory of labour 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

1000
 ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ 1, 2, 3, 4
Marxism, Marxists 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13,
14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27,
28;
orthodox Marxism 1, 2;
see aslo anti-Marxism; neo-Marxism
Marxism and the Visual Arts Now (MAVAN) 1
Marxist aesthetics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Marxist art historians 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Marxist art history 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11;
see aslo leftism: leftist art history; Marxist art
historians; radical art history
Marxist politics 1, 2, 3, 4
Marxist Quarterly 1, 2
Marxistische-Arbeiter-Schule 1
mass culture 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
mass media 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Masses 1, 2, 3, 4;
see aslo New Masses
material relations 1
materialism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29,
30
materialist aesthetics 1, 2
materialist realism 1
materiality (in art) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
materiality (of the world) 1, 2
Matulka, Jan 1, 2
Maudsley, Henry 1
May, Ernst 1, 2
May 1968, events of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Mayhew, Henry 1
McCarthy, Joseph 1, 2
McCarthyism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
McLachlan, Alexander 1
means of production see production: means of production
medium-specificity 1, 2, 3
Mehring, Franz 1, 2, 3
Meidner, Ludwig 1
Melanchthon, Phillip 1, 2

1001
Melot, Michel 1
Melville, Herman 1, 2;
Moby Dick 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Menorah Journal 1
Merewether, Charles 1
Meseck, Felix 1;
Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife 1, 2
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1, 2
Metz, Christian 1
Meunier, Karolin 1
Mexican muralism 1;
see aslo Rivera, Diego
Mexican Revolution 1, 2
Meyer, Hannes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Michelangelo 1
Michelson, Annette 1
middle class, the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Miéville, China 1
Miller, Angela 1
Miller, J. Hillis 1
Miller Lane, Barbara 1, 2, 3, 4
Millet, François 1
Mills, C. Wright 1, 2
Mitchell, W. J. T. 1
Moby Dick see Kent, Rockwell; Melville, Herman
modern art 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15;
see aslo modernism
modernism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29,
30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38,
39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49;
see aslo ‘epic modernism’; ‘epic theatre’; modern
art
modes of production see production: modes of production
Moholy, Lucia 1
Moholy-Nagy, László 1
Molesworth, Helen 1
Monet, Claude 1
Monroe, Marilyn 1, 2
Montagu, Anne 1

1002
Moodie, Susanna 1
Moore, Harriet 1
Moore, Henry 1
Moran, Thomas 1, 2;
Chasm of the Colorado 1;
Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone 1, 2
Morandi, Giorgio 1
Morante, Else 1
Moravia, Alberto 1
Morgan, Benjamin 1
Morgan, William de 1
Morning Post 1
Morris, William 1, 2, 3, 4;
African Marigold 1, 2;
News from Nowhere 1, 2
Morris and Company 1, 2;
African Marigold 1, 2
Moscow Trials (1936–7) 1
Mote, George William 1;
An Adder 1
Motherwell, Robert 1
Mouvement Démocratique Féminin 1
Müller, Ulrike 1
Mumby, Arthur J. 1
Mumford, Lewis 1, 2, 3
Münzer, Thomas 1, 2, 3
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal 1
Museum of Modern Art, New York 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Museum of Natural History, New York 1
Mussolini, Benito 1

1003
Namuth, Hans 1, 2
Nash, Jorgen 1, 2
National Academy of Design, New York 1, 2, 3, 4
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa 1, 2
National Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union 1
National Socialism see Nazi Party; Nazism
naturalism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
16, 17
Naumann, Friedrich 1, 2
Nazi Party 1, 2, 3;
see aslo Nazism
Nazism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
see aslo Nazi Party
Nazi-Soviet Pact 1
negation of the negation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Negri, Antonio 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
Empire 1;
‘Proletarians and the State’ 1;
see aslo Hardt, Michael
Nele, Renee 1
neo-avant-garde, the 1, 2;
see aslo avant-garde, the; Bürger, Peter; vanguard,
vanguardism
neo-Brechtian modes 1, 2
neo-Kantianism 1, 2, 3
neoliberalism 1, 2, 3, 4
neo-Marxism 1
neo-realism 1, 2
Nerdinger, Winfried 1
Nesbit, Molly 1
Neue Sachlichkeit 1, 2
Neues Bauen architecture 1
Neue Zeit 1, 2, 3
Neue Zürcher Zeitung 1
New Art Association 1
new art history 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
New Deal 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
New Left, the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
New Literary History 1, 2

1004
New Masses 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York 1
New School for Social Research, New York 1
New York Artists’ Congress 1
New York Daily Tribune 1
New Yorker 1
New York Times 1, 2, 3
New York University 1
Newhall, Beaumont 1
Newman, Barnett 1, 2, 3;
Onement I 1, 2
Nichol, John 1
Nierendorf, Karl 1, 2, 3, 4
Nietzsche, Friedrich 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ 1;
The Birth of Tragedy 1, 2;
Thus Spake Zarathustra 1;
Untimely Meditations 1
Nixon, Richard 1, 2, 3
Nochlin, Linda 1
non-figurative art 1, 2, 3;
see also abstract painting; abstraction in art;
geometric abstraction; painterly abstraction
North, Dudley (father) 1, 2
North, Dudley (son) 1, 2
North, Francis 1, 2
North, John 1
North, Montagu 1, 2, 3, 4
North, Roger 1, 2;
Arguments & Materials 1, 2;
Discourses on Trade 1, 2;
Examen, or an Inquiry into the Credit and Veracity of a
pretended Complete History 1, 2, 3;
Gentleman’s Accomptant 1, 2;
Reflections upon some passages in Mr Le Clerc’s Life
of Mr John Locke 1;
The Reflections on our Common Failings 1
Northern Echo 1
Northwestern University, Evanston 1
Novak, Barbara 1, 2

1005
November Revolution (1918) 1
Novotny, Fritz 1
NSDAP see Nazi Party

1006
Oates, Titus 1
objectivity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Observer 1
October 1, 2
Olcott, Martha B. 1
Oldenburg, Claes 1
Olyphant, Robert 1
Ontario Society of Artists 1
operaismo see Workerism, Italian
opticality 1
ornament 1, 2, 3
Orton, Fred 1, 2, 3
Osgood, Samuel 1
Osthoff, Hermann 1
Other, the 1, 2, 3;
see also alterity
Oxford Art Journal 1, 2
Ozenfant, Amédée 1

1007
painterly abstraction 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
see also abstract painting; abstraction in art; Action
Painting; informel painting; gestural painting
Palissy, Bernard 1, 2
Pannekoek, Anton 1
Panofsky, Erwin 1
Panos, David 1
Panzieri, Raniero 1
Paolozzi, Eduardo 1
Paris Commune 1, 2, 3
Paris-Presse 1
Partisan Review 1, 2, 3, 4
Pasolini, Pier Paolo 1
Pass, Morris 1
Pater, Walter 1, 2;
‘Diaphaneitè’ 1, 2, 3;
Imaginary Portraits 1;
Marius the Epicurean 1, 2;
Studies in the History of the Renaissance 1, 2, 3;
‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’ 1
patrician class, the 1;
see aslo property-owning class, the; ruling class, the;
upper classes
Pepper, Claude 1
performance art 1
permanent revolution, principle of 1;
see aslo revolutionary action; revolutionary
consciousness; revolutionary politics;
revolutionary practice
phenomenology 1
Phillipps, Sir Thomas 1
Phillips, William 1
photo-document 1, 2, 3;
see aslo documentary photography; photo-essay;
photojournalism
photo-essay 1, 2, 3;
see aslo documentary photography; photojournalism
Photographic News 1, 2
photography 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;

1008
 language and 1
photojournalism 1
photomontage 1
photo-text 1
Picasso, Pablo 1, 2, 3
pictorialism 1, 2, 3
Pictorialism 1, 2, 3
Pierre Degeyter Club 1
Pinot-Gallizio, Giuseppe 1
Piscator, Erwin 1, 2, 3
Plato 1
Playboy 1
Plekhanov, Georgi 1, 2, 3
Pliny the Elder 1
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 1, 2
political economy 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Pollock, Griselda 1, 2, 3;
‘Vision, Voice, and Power: Feminist Art History and
Marxism’ 1
Pollock, Jackson 1, 2, 3;
see aslo Abstract Expressionism
Pop art 1, 2
Pope, Alexander 1;
The Dunciad 1, 2
Popkov, Viktor E. 1
popular culture 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Popular Front 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
pornography 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Posada, José Guadalupe 1, 2;
Asombroso y funesto suceso … Eleuterio Mirafuentes
1, 2;
Calavera chusca, dedicada à las placeras, tortilleras,
verduleras y toda gente de lucha … 1, 2;
Calavera de Cupido 1;
Calavera de las Artes 1;
Calavera de los Patinadores 1;
Calavera de Pascual Orozco 1;
Calavera Oaxaqueña 1;
Calavera Revuelta de Federales, Comerciantes y
Artesanos 1;

1009
 Calaveras, saltad de la tierra 1;
Calaveras Zalameras de las Coquetas Meseras 1;
De Este Famosa Hipodroma en la Pista … 1;
Gran Panteon Amoroso 1;
‘horroroso asesinato! Acaecido en la ciudad de Tuxpan
el 10 del presente mes y año’ 1, 2;
llorando el hueso 1, 2;
Rebumbio de calveras 1
post-Adornian theory 1, 2, 3, 4
post-Althusserian theory 1, 2
post-conceptual art 1
post-conceptual photography 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Post-Impressionism 1
post-relational art 1;
see aslo relational art
postmodernism, postmodernist theory 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,
9, 10, 11
poststructuralism, poststructuralist theory 1;
see aslo structuralism, structuralist theory
Potamkin, Harry Alan 1
Potlatch 1
Potolsky, Matthew 1
Potts, Alex 1
Precisionism 1, 2, 3, 4
Prem, Heimrad 1
Pre-Raphaelites 1
Prince, Richard 1
Princeton University 1
print culture 1, 2, 3
production
means of production 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
modes of production 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;
relations of 1, 2;
see aslo capitalist modes of production; industrial
production, industrialization
productivism 1, 2
Profumo, John 1
Progress 1

1010
proletarian, proletarianism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11,
12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25,
26;
see aslo proletarianization; proletariat, the; worker,
the; working class, the
proletarian art 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Proletarian Revolutionary Writers League 1, 2
proletarianization 1
proletariat, the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14,
15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28,
29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36;
see aslo proletarian, proletarianism; proletarianization;
worker, the; working class, the
Proletarisches Theater 1, 2
Proletkult 1, 2, 3, 4
propaganda 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
16, 17, 18, 19;
see aslo agitprop; communist propaganda
property-owning class, the 1;
see aslo patrician class, the
Protestantism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
see aslo Calvinism
Proust, Marcel 1
psychoanalysis 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Putnam, George P. 1

1011
Quarterly Review 1, 2

1012
Radek, Karl 1
Radek Community 1, 2, 3;
Manifestations 1
radical art history 1, 2, 3;
see aslo leftism: leftist art history; Marxist art history
Radkau, Joachim 1
Radziwill, Franz 1
Raether, Johannes Paul 1
Rahv, Philip 1
Rancière, Jacques 1
Rand, Ayn 1
Raphael 1, 2
Raphael, Max 1, 2, 3;
‘The Marxist Theory of Art’ 1
Rauschenberg, Robert 1
Read, Herbert 1
Reade, R. C. 1
Reagan, Ronald 1, 2
realism, realists 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14,
15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28,
29, 30, 31, 32, 33;
see aslo critical realism; epic realism; magic realism;
materialist realism; neo-realism; social realism;
socialist realism; Socialist Realism (Soviet);
Realism; realist painting
Realism 1, 2, 3;
see aslo Courbet, Gustave
realist painting 1, 2, 3;
see aslo realism, realists
Reard, Louis 1
Rector, Martin 1
Red Army, Soviet 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Redon, Odilon 1
Rees, A. L. 1
Reformation, the 1, 2, 3
Refregier, Anton 1
Reichswirtschaftsverband bildender Künstler 1
Reid, George Agnew 1, 2;
Logging 1;

1013
 Staking a Pioneer Farm 1;
The Arrival of the Pioneers 1
reification 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
Reisman, Philip 1
relational art 1;
see aslo post-relational art
Rembrandt van Rijn 1, 2
Renaissance, the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Renoir, Auguste 1, 2
Renzio, Toni del 1
representation, critique of 1
representation, modes of 1, 2
representation, politics of 1, 2, 3
reproductive labour 1;
see aslo labour
Resnais, Alain 1
Ressler, Oliver 1, 2
revolutionary action 1, 2, 3, 4
revolutionary art 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
revolutionary consciousness 1, 2, 3
revolutionary politics 1, 2, 3, 4
revolutionary practice 1, 2
Reynolds, Joshua 1
Richter, Hans 1
Riegl, Alois 1, 2
Riesel, René 1
Rifkin, Adrian 1, 2
Riis, Jacob 1
Ritschl, Albrecht 1
Rivera, Diego 1, 2, 3
Robbe-Grillet, Alain 1
Robbins, Daniel 1
Robert Henri School of Art, New York 1
Roberts, John 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Robeson, Paul 1
Robinson, Boardman 1
Robinson, H. P. 1
Rodchenko, Aleksandr 1
Roeck, Bernd 1, 2
Rohe, Mies van der 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

1014
romantic anti-capitalism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Romanticism 1, 2
Roosevelt, Franklin D. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
see aslo New Deal
Rosenberg, Alfred 1, 2
Rosenberg, Arthur 1
Rosenberg, Harold 1, 2, 3;
‘Character Change and the Drama’ 1, 2, 3, 4;
‘Modern Art? Or an Art of the Modern?’ 1;
‘Myth and History’ 1;
‘Tenth Street: A Geography of Modern Art’ 1;
‘The American Action Painters’ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
‘The Fall of Paris’ 1, 2, 3;
‘The Front’ 1, 2, 3;
‘The Men on the Wall’ 1;
‘The New Realism’ 1;
‘The Pathos of the Proletariat’ 1, 2, 3, 4;
‘The Resurrected Romans’ 1
Rosetti, Dante Gabriel 1
Rosler, Martha 1, 2, 3
Ross, Kristin 1
Rossiter, Thomas 1
ROSTA, Berlin 1
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 1
Rowlandson, Thomas 1
Royal Academy of Arts (Berlin) 1
ruling class, the 1, 2;
see aslo patrician class, the; upper classes
Ruskin, John 1, 2, 3
Russell, Lord (William) 1
Russian art 1, 2, 3, 4;
see also Russian avant-garde;
Socialist Realism (Soviet);
Soviet art, Soviet art theory
Russian Association of Revolutionary Writers (RAPP) 1
Russian avant-garde 1, 2;
see aslo Soviet avant-garde
Russian Formalism 1, 2
Russian–French Non-Aggression Pact (1935) 1, 2
Russian–German Non-Aggression Pact (1939) 1

1015
Russian Revolution 1, 2, 3
Ryan, Joseph P. 1, 2
Ryder, Albert Pinkham 1, 2, 3

1016
Sacchi, Andrea 1
Sacheverell, Henry 1
Saint-Gaudens, Augustus 1
Saint-Just, Louis Antoine de 1
Salcedo, Doris 1, 2;
Abyss 1;
Atrabiliarios 1, 2;
La Casa Viuda 1, 2, 3;
Neither 1, 2, 3, 4;
Noviembre 1 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
Noviembre 6 y 7 1, 2;
Shibboleth 1, 2;
Tenebrae, Noviembre 7, 1985 1, 2, 3, 4;
Unland 1
Salle, David 1
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 1
Sancroft, Archbishop William 1
Sander, Helke 1
São Paulo Biennial 1
Sartre, Jean-Paul 1, 2
Sassetti, Francesco 1, 2, 3
Saturday Evening Post 1
Sayre, Robert 1
Schapiro, Meyer 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;
‘Courbet and Popular Imagery’ 1;
‘Nature of Abstract Art’ 1;
‘Public Use of Art’ 1, 2;
‘Rebellion in Art’ 1;
‘Social Realism and Revolutionary Art’ 1;
‘The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art’ 1;
‘The Nature of Abstract Art’ 1;
‘The Patrons of Revolutionary Art’ 1;
‘The Social Bases of Art’ 1
Scheel, Theodor 1, 2, 3;
Camera Eye 1
Scheler, Max 1
Schiele, Egon 1
Schiller, Friedrich 1, 2
Schmidt, Hans 1

1017
Schnabel, Julian 1
Schneider, Norbert 1
Schoell-Glass, Charlotte 1
Schoenberg, Arnold 1, 2, 3
School of Paris 1, 2, 3
Schultze-Naumburg, Paul 1
Schütz, Erhard H. 1
Scott, Sir Walter 1
Screen 1, 2
Scribner’s Magazine 1
Scribner’s Monthly 1
Searle, Adrian 1
Second Conference of Revolutionary and Proletarian
Writers 1, 2
Second International 1, 2, 3, 4
Second World War 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Sedlmayr, Hans 1
Sekula, Allan 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;
Black Tide 1, 2;
Fish Story 1, 2, 3;
Lottery of the Sea 1, 2;
Shipwreck and Workers: Part of Titanic’s Wake 1, 2;
Volunteer Watching, Volunteer Smiling (Isla de Ons,
12/19/02) 1;
Waiting for Tear Gas [white globe to black] 1, 2
Seminar for Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture 1
semiology 1;
see aslo semiotics
semiotics 1, 2, 3, 4;
see aslo semiology
Semler, Christoph 1;
Coelum stellatum in quo asterismi 1
Semper, Gottfried 1, 2
Senger, Alexander von 1
Serota, Sir Nicholas 1, 2
Seven Arts 1
Shadwell, Charles Lancelot 1
Shakespeare, William 1, 2, 3;
Hamlet 1, 2
Shapin, Steven 1

1018
Sheeler, Charles 1
Sherman, Cindy 1
Sholette, Greg 1
Sidney, Algernon 1
Siegel, William 1, 2
signs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Silvy, Camille 1
Simmel, Georg 1, 2;
Der Konflikt der modernen Kultur 1;
Philosophische Kultur 1;
Philosophy of Money 1
Simons, Hugo 1, 2, 3
Simplicissimus 1, 2
simulation 1
Siporin, Mitchell 1, 2
Sirovich, William 1
SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico 1
Situationism, Situationists 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11;
see aslo Debord, Guy; dérives; détournements;
Internationale situationniste; Situationist
International; spectacle, the
Situationist International 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
see aslo Debord, Guy; dérives; détournements;
Internationale situationniste; Situationism,
Situationists; spectacle, the
Situationist Times 1
Smith, Adolphe 1, 2
Smithson, Alison 1
Smithson, Peter 1
social agency 1, 2;
see aslo agency
Social Democratic Party (Germany) 1, 2
social history of art 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
social realism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14,
15, 16, 17
socialism, socialists 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13,
14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27;
see aslo anti-socialism; Socialist Party (US)
Socialist German Student Union 1
Socialist Party (US) 1

1019
socialist realism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Socialist Realism (Soviet) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
society of the spectacle, the 1, 2, 3;
see aslo Debord, Guy; Situationism, Situationists;
spectacle, the
Soglow, Otto 1, 2, 3
Solman, Joseph 1
Sombart, Werner 1, 2;
Modern Capitalism 1, 2;
The Bourgeois 1, 2, 3;
The Jews and Economic Life 1
Soviet art, Soviet art theory 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
see aslo Russian art
Soviet avant-garde 1, 2;
see aslo Russian avant-garde
Soviet communism see communism, communists: in the
Soviet Union
Soviet culture 1, 2
Soviet Union 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
sovietization 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Soyer, Moses 1
Soyer, Raphael 1
Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) 1, 2, 3, 4
Spanish Civil War 1, 2
Sparks, Leonard 1
spectacle, the 1, 2, 3,, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;
see aslo Debord, Guy; society of the spectacle, the
Spectacular Times 1;
see aslo Situationism, Situationists
Spectator 1
Speer, Albert 1
Spence, Jo 1
Spencer, Herbert 1
Spengler, Oswald 1, 2
Spinoza, Baruch 1
Spivak, Max 1
Stalin, Joseph 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
Stalinism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,
17
Stalinization 1, 2

1020
State University of New York 1
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1
Stedman Jones, Gareth 1
Steinhardt, Jakob 1
Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) 1, 2, 3
Sternberg, Harry 1;
Subway Construction 1, 2
Stevens, Wallace 1, 2, 3, 4;
‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’ 1
Steyerl, Hito 1
Stieglitz, Alfred 1, 2
Stillman, William James 1
Straub, Jean-Marie 1
Strijbosch, Jan 1
structuralism, structuralist theory 1, 2, 3, 4;
see aslo poststructuralism, poststructuralist theory
Sturges, Frederick 1
subalternity 1, 2
subjecthood, subjectivity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11,
12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25,
26, 27;
see aslo aesthetic subjectivity
Suleiman, Susan Rubin 1
Sully, James 1
Sunday Worker 1
Suprematism 1
Surrealism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Suydam, James A. 1
Sweezy, Paul 1
Swift, Jonathan 1
Swinburne, A. C. 1
symbolic capital 1
symbolic form 1, 2
Symbolism 1
Symonds, J. A. 1
Symposium 1

1021
Tafuri, Manfredo 1
Tagg, John 1, 2
Tajikistan 1, 2
Tamesis 1
Tate Gallery, London 1
Tate Modern, London 1, 2
Tatler 1
Tatlin, Vladimir 1, 2
Taussig, Michael 1, 2;
The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
1
Taylor, John 1
Teige, Karl 1
Tel Quel 1
Teniers, David the Younger 1
Ternovetz, Boris 1
Teukolsky, Rachel 1
textuality 1, 2
Thatcher, Margaret 1
Theatre Arts Monthly 1
Third International 1, 2
Third Period 1, 2, 3
Thomas, Peter 1
Thompson, John 1, 2;
Street Life in London 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Thoreau, Henry David 1
Tickner, Lisa 1
Tiller Girls 1
Times, The (London) 1, 2
Times Literary Supplement 1
Togliatti, Palmiro 1, 2
Tolstoy, Lev Nikolayevich 1, 2, 3, 4
Tönnies, Ferdinand 1
Toronto Star Weekly 1
totalitarianism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
totality, concept of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11;
see aslo Lukács, Georg
trade unions see union movement
Trafton, Melissa 1

1022
Traill, Catherine Parr 1
transitivity 1, 2, 3
Travel 1, 2
Troeltsch, Ernst 1, 2, 3;
Reason and Revelation in Johann Gerhard and
Melanchthon 1;
The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches 1, 2, 3
Tronti, Mario 1, 2, 3
Trotsky, Leon 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;
‘Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art’ 1
Trotskyism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Turgenev, Ivan 1
Turin, Viktor 1
Turner, Frederick Jackson 1

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Übergangszeit, the 1, 2
UCLA see University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Ukeles, Mierle Laderman 1
Ulmer Verein für Kunst-und Kulturwissenschaften 1
Unemployed Artists Group 1
union movement 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
see aslo unionism; unionization
Union des Femmes Françaises 1
Union Féminine Civique et Sociale 1
Union League Club 1
unionism 1, 2, 3, 4;
see aslo union movement; unionization
unionization 1, 2;
see aslo union movement; unionism
United American Artists 1
United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America
1
United Front 1, 2, 3, 4
United Office and Professional Workers of America 1
University College London 1, 2
University of California, Berkeley 1, 2
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,
6
University of California, San Diego 1, 2
University of Leeds 1, 2, 3
University of London 1
University of Munich 1
University of Toronto 1, 2
unproductive labour 1, 2, 3
upper classes 1;
see aslo patrician class, the; ruling class, the
use-value 1, 2, 3, 4
utopianism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21

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Vadim, Roger 1
Vaillant-Couturier, Paul 1, 2, 3, 4;
Free Soviet Tadjikistan 1;
Trains Rouges 1
Vanegas Arroyo, Antonio 1
Vaneigem, Raoul 1, 2
Van Gelder, Hilde 1
vanguard, vanguardism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12;
see aslo avant-garde, the;
neo-avant-garde;
Russian avant-garde;
Soviet avant-garde
Vasari, Giorgio 1
Vedova, Emilio 1, 2, 3
Venice Biennale 1, 2, 3, 4
Venice School of architecture 1, 2
Verband Deutscher Kunsthistoriker 1
Verelst, Simon (Pietersz) 1
video art 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Vietnam War 1, 2, 3
Vilensky, Dmitry 1
Vinci, Leonardo da 1, 2;
Mona Lisa 1, 2
Vishnevsky, Vsevolod 1
Völkischer Beobachter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Vollard, Ambroise 1
Voloshinov, Valentin 1
Voltaire 1

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Wages for Housework 1
Wainwright, Philip 1
Walden, Herwarth 1
Wall, Jeff 1, 2, 3;
The Storyteller 1, 2
Wallach, Alan 1
Wallerstein, Immanuel 1
Warburg, Aby 1, 2, 3;
‘Francesco Sassetti’s Last Will and Testament’ 1;
‘Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Image at the
Time of Luther’ 1, 2, 3
Warburg, Felix 1
Warburg, Fritz 1
Warburg, Max 1
Warburg, Paul 1
Warhol, Andy 1, 2, 3
Warnke, Martin 1, 2
‘Waterfront Art Show’ 1, 2
Watson, Homer Ransford 1, 2;
A Coming Storm in the Adirondacks 1;
‘A Landscape Painter’s Day’ 1;
Log-Cutting in the Woods 1;
The Pioneer Mill 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
‘The Village’ 1
Weber, Max 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
‘Science as a Vocation’ 1, 2;
The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 1, 2,
3
Weber, Nicholas Fox 1
Week 1
Weill, Kurt 1
Weimar Academy of Art 1
Weimar Republic 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Weininger, Otto 1
Weinstein, Joan 1, 2
Werckmeister, Otto Karl 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11;
‘Marx on Ideology and Art’ 1
Werkbund 1
Westminster Review 1

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White, Ian 1
White Cube, London 1, 2
Whiteread, Rachel 1
Whitman, Walt 1
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1
Wilcox and Barlow 1
Wilde, Oscar 1, 2, 3, 4;
‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ 1
Wilkin, Karen 1
Williams, Raymond 1, 2, 3
Williams, William Carlos 1
Willis, Nathaniel Parker 1
Wilmerding, John 1
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 1, 2
Wittfogel, Karl August 1, 2, 3;
‘On the Question of a Marxist Aesthetic’ 1, 2
Wolfe, Bertram 1
Wölfflin, Heinrich 1, 2, 3, 4;
Classic Art 1
Wollheim, Richard 1
Wolman, Gil 1
woman-as-sign 1
women’s movement, the 1, 2;
see aslo feminism, feminists
Woodward, John Douglas 1
Wordsworth, William 1
worker, the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29,
30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36
workers’ movement, the 1
Workers Music League 1
Workers Party (US) 1
Workerism, Italian 1, 2, 3
working class 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14,
15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25;
see aslo proletarian, proletarianism; proletariat, the
Works Progress Administration (WPA) 1, 2
Wouters, Rik 1
Wright, Frank Lloyd 1
Writers Brigade 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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Year-book of the Photographic News 1
Young, Art 1, 2

1028
Zabel, Barbara 1
Zeitshrift für Sozialforschung 1
Zenshin 1
Zetkin, Clara 1
Zhdanovism, Zhdanovist Socialist Realism see Socialist
Realism (Soviet)
Zigrosser, Carl 1, 2
Zorilla, José 1
Zutringer, Pauline 1

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Copyright

First published in the United Kingdom in 2013 by Art Books Publishing Ltd
in association with the Department of History of Art, University College
London

Copyright © 2013 Art Books Publishing Ltd

Texts copyright © 2013 the contributors

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