From the early decades of the twentieth century until the 1980s, Marxist art history was at the forefront of radical approaches to the discipline. But in the last two decades of the century and into the next, Marxist art historians found themselves marginalized from the vanguard by the rise of postmodernism and identity politics. In the wake of the recent global crisis there has been a resurgence of interest in Marx. This collection of essays, a festschrift in honor of leading Marxist art historian Andrew Hemingway, brings together 30 academics who are reshaping art history along Marxist lines. The essayists include Matthew Beaumont, Warren Carter, Michael Corris, Gail Day, Paul Jaskot, Stewart Martin, Frederic J. Schwartz, Caroline Arscott, Steve Edwards, Charles Ford, Brian Foss, Tom Gretton, Alan Wallach, Michael Bird, Martin I. Gaughan, Barnaby Haran and Fred Orton, among others. Read more...
Introduction. Towards a history of the Marxist history of art / Warren Carter --
Marxist theory in practice. Art history's furies / John Roberts
The political logic of radical art history in California 1974-85: a memoir / Stephen F. Eisenman
The dialectical legacies of radical art history: Meyer Shapiro and German aesthetic debates in the 1930s and 1940s / Warren Carter
Approaching Marx's aesthetic: Or, what is sensuous practice? / Stewart Martin
A communion of just men made perfect: Walter Pater, romantic anti-capitalism and the Paris Commune / Matthew Beaumont
What remains of Adorno's critique of culture? / Norbert Schneider
Aby Warburg and the spirit of capitalism / Frederic J. Schwartz --
Landscape, class and ideology. A note on aestheticizing tendencies in American landscape painting 1840-80 / Alan Wallach
Meaning, change and ambiguity in Canadian landscape imagery: Homer Watson and The Pioneer mill / Brian Foss
One spectator is a better witness than ten listeners: Roger North, making the past public / Charles Ford
An ever-recurring controversy: John Thompson, William James Stillman and the Bootblacks / Steve Edwards
Calaveras and commodity fetishism: the unhallowed supernatural in the work of Jose Guadalupe Posada / Tom Gretton
Reading Ahab: Rockwell Kent, Herman Melville and C.L.R. James / Angela Miller
William Morris, ornament and the coordinates of the body / Caroline Arscott --
Marxism and the shaping of modernism. Red Hashar: Louis Lozowick's lithographs of Soviet Tajikstan / Barnaby Haran
Lu Marten and the question of Marxist aesthetic in 1920s German / Martin I. Gaughan
Experiment and propaganda: art in the monthly New masses / Rachel Sanders
Stuart Davis and Left modernism on the New York waterfront in the 1920s / Jody Patterson
Action, revolution and painting: resumed / Fred Orton
Erasure and Jewishness in Otto Dix's Portraint of the lawyer Hugo Simons / James A. van Dyke
The Nazi Party's strategic use of the Bauhaus: Marxist art history and the political conditions of artistic production / Paul B. Jaskot --
Marxism in a new world order. Realism and materialism in postwar European art / Alex Potts
The situation of women / Frances Tracey
Scars on the landscape: Doris Salcedo between two worlds / Chin-tao Wu
Realism, totality and the militant Citoyen: or, What does Lukacs have to do with contemporary art? / Gail Day
Deartification this side of art: ideology critique, autonomy and reporduction / Kerstin Stakemeier.
