"Critical Discourse in the Formation of a Social History of Art: Anglo-American Response to Arnold...

Critical Discourse in the Formation of a Social History of Art: Anglo-American Response to Arnold Hauser

MICHAEL R. ORWICZ

Ernst Gombrich opened his review of Arnold Hauser's Social History of Art1 with the following observation:

If by the 'social history' of art we mean an account of the changing material conditions under which art was commissioned and created in the past, such a history is one of the desiderata of our field. [ ...] Unfortunately, Mr. Hauser's two volumes are not concerned with these minutiae of social existence. For he conceived his task to be quite different.2

Written a year and a half after the publication of Hauser's book, Gombrich's lines are particularly significant. For he not only claimed that a social history of art had yet to be constituted, he also repeated an essential distinction which ran through most of his predecessors' reviews: a distinction between two conceptions of such a history of art.

I want to examine these conceptions as they emerged in the critics' initial reading of Hauser, which I will confine to their reception in England and the United States between November 1951 and March 1953 .3I will locate their presence in other discourses, and suggest how this distinction was, in the end, dominated by certain political confrontations of the Cold War. But first, I will begin much closer to the field of art history itself, and describe its limits at the time of Hauser's first reading.

A social history of art was, as Gombrich affirmed, nearly non-existent. Its absence is particularly apparent in the Ph.D. theses underway between 1950 and 1952. Of the ninety dissertation topics surveyed by the College Art Journal,4 almost half comprised strictly monographic studies of an artist's 'technique' or 'stylistic development', or of one art work's 'influence' on another. As for the remaining, a third treated conventional art- historical categories within traditional style- periods, without the slightest reference to either social, historical or cultural factors. Another third, while confronting the questions of patronage, art theories, artistic training or criticism, once again made no apparent recourse to fields outside art history. Finally, in no more than five of these ninety theses, do we find the concepts 'society', 'history' or 'context' employed. A similar pattern emerges among the already 'established'

art historians. Taking, for example, the articles published in the Art Bulletin at this time,5 we find that over 80% focused on the 'problems' of dating and attribution, formal description and iconographical analysis. While only two, of a total of nearly sixty, dealt with art theory, and four treated either patronage, literature or technique, not one attempted a social interpretation of art. Moreover, neither the titles of articles appearing in the other 'establishment' journals,6 nor the programmes of the annual meetings of the College Art Association,7 make any explicit connections between art and social context. Clearly, Anglo- American art historians showed little interest in developing a social history of art.

Yet, a more historical conception was emerging. As early as 1944, the C.A.A. 'officially' demar- cated the field from art 'appreciation' studies, identifying the former's interests to be the 'contemporary cultural and social patterns ... [the] historical context'8 in which the work of art was produced. By 1949, Frederick Antal could charac- terize as 'severely historical' the recent publications of as diverse a group as' Herbert Read, Richard Krautheimer, Meyer Schapiro, Anthony Blunt, Millard Meiss, and Gombrich himself.9 He perceived a unity in their common interpretation of art through some consideration of social, political and economic history. Indeed, by the early 1950s, even the concept of immanent formal evolution was being displaced by more advanced art historians for whom the artist's historical and cultural 'environment' played a substantial role in stylistic development. 10 Iconological studies were increasingly practiced,"1 and sessions seeking relations between art, literature and philosophy began to appear at the annual C.A.A. con- gresses. 12 Combined, such factors reveal the emergence of a conception which would dominate the field throughout the 1950s: the idea of art history as cultural history.

This notion, which situated the art work and artist within selected cultural practices of a given historical period, was largely stimulated by the re- emergence of the 'humanities' in American post- war scholarship. Learned societies and academic associations, the C.A.A. among them, stressed the reassertion of 'man' as the object of diverse studies.'3 The College Art Journal ran numerous articles throughout the early 1950s, declaring the importance of art within the 'humanities', and

52 THE OXFORD ARTJOURNAL - 8:2 1985

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warned that:

the writing of history has been transformed by economic determinism; in the social sciences, man

14 himself has become little more than a statistic ...

Since the late 1940s, 'humanities' programmes developed with unprecedented vigour in American universities. Their curricula typically integrated the arts, literature, history and philosophy, in an attempt to trace the 'fundamental human values' presumed to be embodied in culture.'5 As the work of art acquired the status of 'proof' of the cross- cultural and ahistorical nature of such values, art history assumed the role of interpreting the work in connection with other cultural practices.

The principle underlying the 'humanities' placed 'man'/'individual'/'culture' outside of social and material realities. As the former director of the Rockefeller Foundation for the Humanities claimed:

the peculiar quality of the humanities . . . is the revela- tion of the individual characteristics shown by man a-s a person, not as one of a typed group or mass of people. The social interpretation of literature has been tried; that, at times, has been deforming to taste ... evidence of how men lived in social groups will never strengthen a reader's sense of the infinite variety of human nature.16

It was this ideological division - culture/society, individual/social groun - which organized much of the practice of art history in the academic system. It dominated, for instance, art history's adoption of a particular interdisciplinary research strategy. In the early 1950s, the major research sponsoring institutions encouraged exchanges between diverse fields, in an attemVt to develop 'cumulative empirical research'.1 The Social Science Research Council, for example, urged historians to borrow freely from anthropology, sociology and psychology.18 Among art historians, however, such eclecticism did not lead to the foundation of a social approach to art.'9 On the contrary, those who took up an interdisciplinary method conceived it though the culture/society division, and resisted incorporating the social sciences. At best, they applied general psychoanalytic theories to the conventional 'problems' of artists' biographies and techniques, formal and iconographical analyses, essentially concealing art history's traditional objects under a new method.20 Such a perspective also determined the composition of the 'humanities' programmes themselves, which consistently excluded sociology and the other social sciences from their curricula.21 The C.A.A., moreover, clearly sanctioned such programmes, demonstrating its interest and support throughout the pages of the College Art Journal.22 Lastly, it was this very ideology which dominated conventional art history's reception of Hauser's Social History of Art.

The cultural history conception of art history

obstructed the constitution of a social approach within the discipline. It legitimized appropriating the methods and notions which belonged to other fields, precisely because it protected art history's traditional objects. The materiality of the art work, the emphasis on its production, its form and its autonomy all remained intact. This conception had, in fact, disrupted so few of the field's principles, that of the art historians (properly speaking) who reviewed Hauser's book - H.W. Janson, Walter Abell, Gombrich and T.S.R. Boase - all but the latter inscribed themselves into its practice. 23

A social or Marxist approach in the field was evidently marginal. Frederick Antal's Florentine Painting and its Social Background, as well as his 'Remarks on the Method of Art History', had been published immediately after the war, as were the books of F.D. Klingender.24 By 1947, New York's International Publishers had not only brought out the latter's Marxism and Modern Art, and the works of Marxists Sidney Finkelstein and Louis Harap, but also the first American edition of Marx and Engels' notes on literature and art.25 Yet these studies were almost entirely ignored by conventional art history. In fact, two months before the appearance of Hauser's book, the College Art Journal published a warning against the application of Marxist methods, describing them as narrow and unscientific, producing 'specious interpretations, [and] an inadequate view of art history'.26 This was only one point of view, and not all that extreme in 1951. But its characterization of Marxism was to be articulated by most of the conservative and the liberal critics who reviewed Hauser. For it was one of the principal concerns which determined their conceptions of a social history of art.

II

Hauser's critics were familiar enough with the state of the discipline. They were chiefly profes- sional art and literary critics, museum officials or art historians, whose reviews appeared in literary and cultural journals, the book review sections of major newspapers, or in specialized art history periodicals. Their discourses inscribed them into two distinct groups:27 a conservative position, held by the art historians already mentioned, and including critics J.P. Hodin, Francis Watson and an anonymous critic writing in London's Times Literary Supplement, and a liberal or left-wing position, which I will develop below. Significantly, not a single sociologist or social science publication demonstrated any interest in the Social History of Art.

The conservative critics were themselves divided over the acceptability of a social history of art. A minority, constituted primarily of formalist art historians, opposed the idea entirely. T.S.R.

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Boase, for whom style was the exclusive object of art history, insisted that its analysis alone could:

produce a history of art that does not appear bound by any inevitable link to parallel developments of the social structure.28

While he considered Hauser's object to be style as well, Boase patently dismissed his social explana- tion of its evolution. Rather, he defined its development as:

a process of adaptation of motifs, gestures, folds of draperies, foliage and so forth, which seems to respond to some particular artistic sensitivity, not to any generalfluctuations of taste... and in the higher reaches, where Raphael, or Rembrandt or Shakespeare moves, the wind may still bloweth where it listeth.29

Here, against Hauser's extrinsic and social deter- minants, Boase clearly affirmed that style evolved immanently, that its origins were located in the individual artist, and that 'artistic genius' did indeed exist. Moreover, Boase refused a social history of style by maintaining the very perspective that reemerges in the other conservatives' discourses, that of the autonomy of art.

Most of the conservatives, however, welcomed the principle of a social history of art, but rejected Hauser's. For them, as the critic of the Times Literary Supplement stated, such an art history should comprise:

the history of the artist's relations to his public, the history of taste, the history of criticism, the history of art education, the history of art collecting, of art dealing, and so on . . .30

Most of the others agreed.3' They also agreed that Hauser's conception was entirely different, and it was just this difference that Gombrich identified:

What he [Hauser] presents is not so much the social history of art or artists as the social history of the Western World, as he sees it reflected in the varying trends and modes of artistic expression ... 32

For Gombrich, and the others,33 Hauser had neglected the importance of the art work and artist, had reduced them to mere 'reflections' of much broader social processes. Moreover, Hauser no longer perceived such processes as strictly artistic and cultural practices, but had now extended them to include more general social conditions.

For the conservatives, Hauser had displaced their traditional concerns in three principal ways. First, he treated the relationship between art and society too generally, too comprehensively, without sufficient detail or subtlety. Most cited Hauser's chapter on the Stone Age as a ready example, neglecting his more nuanced interpretations of subsequent periods.34 Here, they char-

acterized his schematic correlations of style/ content with social and economic patterns, as 'crude', rigid, and reductive.35 They considered that an analysis of such a general nature explained neither the diversity of styles found within a given period, nor the manner in which a style might express a 'social mood'.36 For these critics, Hauser's account was inadequate, not only because they found exceptions, and thought it ultimately unprovable,37 but because of the nature of the evidence by which Hauser had drawn his conclusions, and more exactly, that which he had neglected.

The conservatives attacked Hauser's evidence through their second major critique; that his terms, his very expressions, were unsuitable to his subject. Francis Watson, writing in London's Spectator, claimed:

The vocabulary of the class struggle which Dr. Hauser (perhaps unavoidably) adopts sometimes cloaks rather than clarifies his meaning. 8

The T.L.S. critic sharpened this attack, remarking that:

one feels sorry when with a bump the author suddenly lands again in the barren field of 'the petit-bourgeois class' and 'high capitalism'. These terms of economic history tell one so little about art. Only rarely do they explain aesthetic phenomena.39

These critics disqualified Hauser's language from the possibility of signifying for the history of art. His were empty, obscure, unfamiliar terms, partly due to their 'Marxist' connotations, but equally because they referred to concepts which belonged to the social sciences, to economics and to politics. Such fields, incapable of articulating the particular concerns of art and aesthetics, were wholly inappropriate. For the conservatives, the evidence had to be sought elsewhere. The T.L.S. critic, for example, insisted that:

To make these [Hauser's] generalizations bearable, many references would be needed to individual works, and the sayings, doings and writings of individual artists.40

Watson reiterated this opinion, adding that:

The problems with which he [Hauser] is concerned are exceedingly complex and are usually best illustrated by considering individual works of art in their immediate historical context.41

Such remarks are significant. For they not only mark the distance between Hauser's and the conservatives' conceptions of the 'social' in a social history of art, they also reveal that the latter perceived it through a cultural history model. For themh, style and content could not be explained through social and economic movements, nor by class perspectives. They had to be situated much




closer to- specific works of art, found in their relations to other works, and traced in the immediate cultural and personal experiences of the individual artist. Their 'social' designated the immediate circumstances of artistic practice, conditions which rarely extended beyond the boundaries of Cculture'. For Hauser, on the other hand, form and content developed in direct relation to concrete material conditions, and reflected the social interests which they served at a given historical moment. His 'social' was located precisely in the conditions and relations of the forces of production, far beyond the limits of the concept 'culture'.

It was this very division - culture/society, art/ social sciences - which organized the critics' distinction between the 'acceptable' and 'unaccep- table' Hauser. Both Watson and the T.L.S. critic, for example, regarded Hauser's treatment of David as a failure, arguing that his 'politico- social'42 interpretation overstressed factors which were outside the actual paintings. As Watson stated:

what it would really have been interesting to know is how it came that David found these 'new' forms in English neo-classical painting. . .43

For these critics, Hauser has neglected the 'internal' issues of art, the immediate questions of David's personal and artistic choices, for which a social interpretation could not account.44 Their praise, on the other hand, of Hauser's 'Manne- rism' chapter is equally significant, for it is precisely here that Hauser interprets style and content almost exclusively through cultural and intellectual connections, and abandons social and economic factors altogether.45 Apparently, for the conservatives, the 'acceptable' Hauser ignored the social, and confined himself to a cultural history of art.

Yet, the critics' fundamental critique emerged in their discussions of Hauser's method and his theory of history. Gombrich coherently articulated their common position as follows:

Mr. Hauser is deeply convinced that in history 'all factors, material and intellectual, economic and ideological, are bound up together in a state of indisoluble interdependence' . . . so it is perhaps natural that to him the most serious crime for a historian is the arbit- rary isolation of fields of inquiry.446

Gombrich was right: Hauser had developed a broad and synthetic theory in which art evolved in relation to both material and cultural development. But the critics opposed this conception. Gombrich, for example, claimed that:

For his purpose, facts are of interest only insofar as they have a bearing on his interpretation. [... .] so we watch him almost from page to page thinking out ever new and ingenious expedients in order to bring his hypo- thesis into harrnony with the facts.47

Clearly, for most critics, Hauser's theoretical approach twisted, distorted and falsified the empirical evidence, resulting in an 'unmethodical and partisan ... subjective and erratic' method.48 The critics' own conception, on the other hand, is already present in their critique of Hauser's general scope, and their insistence on 'individual works . . . individual artists'.49 It surfaces again in Watson's demand for the 'immediate historical context', and Gombrich's desire for the 'minutiae of social existence '.50 Against Hauser's comprehen- sive and synthetic art history, the critics insisted on its periodization, its fragmentation, its discontinuity with other domains. For them, the work of art could only be explained through a succession of highly specialized synchronic studies, dominated by 'fact' and detailed, scrupulous documenta- tion.51 Indeed, in comparing the Social History ofArt to Antal's earlier Florentine Painting and Its Social Background, many praised the latter precisely because he treated only one mode of art production in a single time and place.52

The radical empiricism which organized the critics' rejection of Hauser's theory, emerges in another of Gombrich's objections to Hauser's conception of history:

Perhaps the trouble lies in the fact that Mr. Hauser is avowedly not interested in the past for its own sake, but believes that 'the purpose of historical research is the understanding of the present' . . .53

Here, Gombrich revealed his own idea of historical research; an autonomous practice, whose categories and formulations are immanent and entirely detached from contemporary conditions. It is a conception which refuses dialectical or critical thinking, and, as Adorno and Horkheimer clearly recognized, undermines the very possibility of developing a broad theoretical approach to history.54

Most critics identified Hauser's particular theory as 'materialist', 'dialectical materialist', ceconomic determinist', or 'Marxist'.55 They were right, for Hauser described each transformation of style/content as evolving dialectically from the previous, and developing in direct relation to social and economic conditions. Although most conceded that Hauser himself recognized the general nature of this theory, and applied it somewhat prudently in later chapters, they nevertheless rejected it altogether. Boase, for example, considered it simply 'an informed opinion ... not susceptible to scientific proof.56Janson termed it a 'conceptual strait-jacket'57 which limited the plurality of possible explanations of form. Others - like Gombrich, Abell and Hodin - were much more hostile. For the former, dialectical materialism was an 'intellectual mousetrap', a 'theoretical paralysis', a 'fantasy world' and a 'logical absur- dity'.58 These are strong words, calling up an

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image of intellectual constraint, instability and irrationality. But for these critics, Hauser's theory was dangerous. For it not only 'confused' a process of reasoning with empirical reality - an argument through which Gombrich refuted the empirical existence of capitalism 59 - but, more importantly, it imposed a manner of structuring that reality. It displaced, as Gombrich clearly recognised, 'ordinary [human] sympathy' and 'intuitive understanding' as viable historical methods.60 Walter Abell, on the other hand, opposed what he called Hauser's 'economic determinism', because it neglected:

the psychological complexity of creative experience... The whole mystery of psychic existence, individual and collective, [which] must be taken into account ... 61

Similarly, Hodin charged that Hauser's 'Marxist- Hegelian categories' excluded the creative act itself, and confined art to:

the 'horizontal' relationship of man to man without taking into consideration the 'vertical' component, the relationship of man to creation and to the creative process itself ... [Hauser] attempts to identify the validity of art solely by the aid of material and histori- cally limited facts, in this way reducing the work of art to the level of activities of a merely practical aim and value. [. . .] the relationship of man to the universe, to creation does not exist at all.62

For these critics, Hauser's materialism denied the very ideology which structured their conceptions of art. It eliminated the 'mystery . . . of existence' and 'creativity', negated art's 'spiritual quality' and its 'universal' value. By relativizing the past, by fixing the art work and artist within the specific network of social and economic relationships which determined their meanings, Hauser had elided the conservatives' notion of the autonomy of art and neglected, as Gombrich clearly saw, the very principles of the 'humanities'.63

The conservatives' defense of the 'humanities', their insistence on separating art from society, was, of course, linked to the politics of the Cold War. But just how this intersection was articulated is, I think, suggested in three citations. The first, an article entitled 'Art and the Humanities', published in the 1949 College Art Journal, defined the 'human values' as follows:

If ours is a free society, what makes it free? What are the values that our freedom upholds? ... the real values are human values, and when they are acknowledged and implemented as human rights, we can have a free society.fi

The second, by D.H. Stevens, former director of the Humanities for the Rockefeller Foundation, gave the arts a more precise role in what he considered to be the current

political misuse of art and artists by dictators. Denial of freedom of thought... has not stopped men from creative effort and self expression in any but the captive countries. Such sweeping denials of human rights as do exist today will not in the end overcome the rights of citizens to learn and of artists to create.65

These discourses find their unity in the ease with which the 'humanities' - 'human values', 'creativity' and 'expression' - take on a political identity. Their meaning shifts from one text to the other, from the general identification with 'our' social and political perspectives, to Stevens' more specific reference. There, the notions of 'artistic freedom', individual liberty of 'creation' and self- expression, are mobilized against conceptions of the suppression of freedom through political oppression. But Stevens went even further, and fixed the object of his discourse for, in 1953, the 'captive countries' could only refer to the growing political importance of the Soviet Union. Here, as in other contemporary discourses on art, 66 the language and ideology of 'humanism' gained political currency in the broader fight against Commu- nism.

It was precisely this latter conflict which determined Hodin's, my third example, reading of the Social History of Art. Two months after reviewing Hauser, Hodin attacked the current Soviet campaign against Western ideas of 'artistic freedom' in the following manner:

The consequence of the Marxist theory that maintains that art is only a 'superstructure based on the conditions of production' has been to reduce art in Russia to nothing more than an instrument of political propaganda at the service of the Communist party ... It is this lack of comprehension of the genesis of... creation which has had such disastrous results . . .

The order of the day for all arts is 'socialist realism' with all its . . forced obedience to the party line, called 'freedom' . . . [which] makes us realise what the dictatorship of the proletariat means for the unusually gifted man, without whom no art is possible.67

This text restores the concepts against which Hodin articulated his Hauser critique, and speci- fies the political nature of that earlier discourse. It shows that Hodin's insistence on the 'individual artist', 'genius', 'creation' and 'artistic freedom' was meant precisely to displace such notions as art as propaganda, artistic constraint, and the imposition of a style and content. For him, Hauser's presumed reduction of art to a 'merely practical aim', his denial of its 'spiritual quality' - all results of materialist theory - were elements of a particular vision of Soviet Communism, a vision which Hodin clearly opposed. He acknowledged as much in concluding his Hauser piece by speci- fying his political strategy, his need to confront Hauser's position:




'why [do] we attach such detailed attention to a critical analysis of [Hauser's] work?... What we are concerned with is to save those values which rightly claim to stand above our daily pettiness, to save the greatness and courage of the human mind, its fantasy, its dreams, from that levelling tendency which Marxist thought will always bring about ... When a method is adopted in which the importance of the work of art disappears like the egg in the hands of a conjuror and what remains are social conditions, social influences, the social skeleton, then we feel the necessity of protesting against such a method.68

I am not saying that this ideological conflict, conspicuous as it is in Hodin's discourse, was the single factor which determined the conservatives' readings of the Social History of Art. But it clearly organized their perspectives. It accounts, I think, for the vehement terms in which Gombrich refuted Hauser's theory, and his reliance on Karl Popper in working that refutation out, in order to preserve the 'humanities'.69 It also explains his, Abell's, and the others' insistence on a strictly empirical approach. At a time when Anglo- American scholarship was establishing the hegemony of 'fact', objectivity and empirical validity over the 'complex windings of Marxist dogma',70 the conservatives' assault on dialectical materialism could not escape political implications.

III

The liberal and left-wing critics read the Social History of Art differently. Not because most were outside the field of art history, but rather due to their political convictions. For these critics made up the American Old Left, or were close to the Communist Party.7' Despite a significant division in their political tendencies, they categorically opposed the conservatives, and acclaimed Hauser's conception of a social history of art.

Clement Greenburg articulated what would become their common position; Hauser had upgraded conventional art history precisely by focusing on

the social conditions under which art has been produced and consumed, and how these have determined its form as well as content . . . He shows how art has reflected social interests and, more important, social moods and how infinitely complex this process of reflection has been. What matters, however, is not so much that art illuminates society as that social factors help explain aesthetic aims.72

It is Greenberg's term 'determined' which demar- cated these critics' social history of art from that of the conservatives. It illustrates the extent to which they felt that art was integrated into its social context. For if most assumed that style and content were the objects of a social history of art, they were certain that their interpretation could

not be limited to immanent processes, nor to the artist's immediate social/cultural relationships. Rather, it had to be located in the broad social, economic and political conditions in which the work was produced and consumed. The critics' descriptions of such conditions varied. Francis Taylor, the most centre-left of the group, saw them as a vague combination of 'spiritual and economic reasons... human experience and political necessity'.73 Greenberg, calling them 'social interests and ... social moods', almost certainly meant class interests and ideology.74 For James Dudley, of London's Communist Daily Worker, they signified exactly that.75 Yet, their common conviction was that Hauser had indeed succeeded in examining the problems proper to art, without minimizing the very social, economic and political factors which extended far beyond the boundaries acceptable to the conventional critics.

The relationship between art and society was, for the left-wing critics, best articulated through Hauser's 'Marxist' theory.76 While the conservatives had dissolved Marxism into a uniquely Soviet ideology, these critics recognized its plurality. In fact, it was the debate over its tendencies, and the critics' inscription into one or another of them, that divided the left, setting Greenberg, Philip Rahv and Serge Hughes against the position articulated by James Dudley. It was, moreover, this very controversy that determined their evaluations of Hauser's Marxist theory. For Philip Rahv, editor of the Partisan Review, 'Hauser's Marxist bias ... has nothing in common with the shifty and specious ideology manipulated by the culture-commissars'.77 Similarly, Greenberg considered that Hauser's

analysis of the development of society is unequivocally Marxist - appropriately so, because no other available method can extract equally plausible meanings from the seeming contradictoriness of social evolution, especially in its relation to art. Mr. Hauser's Marxism is too 'orthodox', in the Bolshevik sense, for my taste and his interpretation of social history as such follows the standard lines closely . .. but it rarely interferes with his view of art, since he does not extend his Marxism to aesthetic questions proper.78

For Greenberg, Rahv and their comrades, there were clearly two Marxisms. An 'acceptable' one, which elaborated a theory of history and accounted for the complexities of social and economic relationships. There was also a 'crude' and 'vulgar' Marxism, which reduced the intricacy of social and political relations to essentially economic ones, and whose theory they considered materia- lized in party positions and Soviet politics.79 Greenberg's ending lines are particularly important, for it was precisely the exclusion of a Marxist social theory from the domain of aesthetics that determined its acceptability. In the decade before

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the Second World War, these critics' commitment to a Marxist politics and a revolutionary art was developed on the model of Soviet Communism and the 'Proletkult'. Here, artists and intellectuals felt they had a determining role in social revolution. Yet, in 1936, as the Communist Party aban- doned this programme, and called on artists, writers and intellectuals to adopt a strict political alliance, a division emerged within the left. The key issue, for these critics, was the degree to which their radical literary, artistic and intellectual practice was to be valued uniquely on the basis of its political expediency, its engagement in the new Party position, or on non-political merits. The question was whether their critical, formal and artistic aims were to be entirely determined by political allegiances. By 1937, this split had developed into a full rupture. Disillusioned by the 1936- 37 Moscow trials, many American left-wing artists and critics - Rahv and Greenberg among them - became intransigently anti-Stalinist, and opposed the Party, calling instead for a theoretically 'pure' Marxism, a Marxism independent of political affiliations and constraints.

The conflict between these 'independent and critical' Marxists,8' and those, like Dudley, who held the Communist position, continued to crys- tallize in the early 1950s around the relationship between artistic/intellectual and political practice. With the development of the Soviet and American atomic bombs and the intensification of the Korean war, the Cold War and domestic anti- Communism were at their peak. The Communist Party's adoption of Stalin's aesthetic programme had once again turned art into a political weapon. It was, in effect, mobilized in the British Commu- nist Party's 'Artists for Peace' campaign which, in the early 1950s, took the form of exhibitions of international scope denouncing America's 'capita- list culture' and atomic armament.82 For the Communist left, 'the artist is a key figure . .. in the world battle for peace and progress'.83 The anti-Communist left however - and particularly the Partisan Review - sought to contain this very notion. For Rahv, and co-editor William Phillips, Communism simply meant Stalinism. It implied 'absolute terror and dictatorship, and confronts us with the question of the sheer survival of the most elementary freedoms and human values'.84 The Soviet Union and the Communist Party at home now posed the principal threat to what remained of the Old Left's ideals of democratic socialism. While just how the latter was to be constructed remained as yet unclear, one thing was certain: the primary responsibility of radical and liberal intellectuals and artists was to break with the Commu- nist Party and develop a critique 'without losing sight of our radical goals'.85

This conflict permeated the Left's assessment of just where Hauser had succeeded and where he had failed. Dudley, for example, found Hauser's treatment of David to be one of his best:

Dr. Hauser shows why the French bourgeosie chose classicism, among a number of current trends, as the art best capable of representing its heroic and patriotic ideals... [he] shows convincingly that the more intimately David was connected with political interest, the greater was the artistic worth of his creations.86

Here, Dudley made two essential observations. First, Hauser had succeeded - exactly where the conservative Francis Watson claimed he had failed - for it was precisely the class interests which David represented, and not the conventional 'problems' of sources and influences that concerned Dudley. But more important is Dudley's claim that David's success, and the aesthetic quality of his paintings, derived from his commitment to progressive politics. For it was just that position which Greenberg, Rahv and Hughes had fought since the late 1930s. These critics denied that 'genuine Marxist aesthetics'87 existed, and insisted that works of art could not be judged by their 'progressive sentiment or the correctness with which they mirror the social conflicts ...'88 For them, artistic and political practice had to be detached, and Hauser failed whenever his interpretation came too close to party positions.89 Hughes, for instance, reckoned exactly that; Hauser had collapsed Marxist political theory with aesthetics:

If he has failed, it is due in part to the virtual impossibility of extracting any valid aesthetic doctrine from Marx . .90

Rahv and Greenberg, on the other hand, saw it differently. For Rahv, Hauser had preserved the balance between art and politics, because he

is quite aware of the limitations of his method. He knows very well that artistic quality cannot be explained socio- logically, nor does he offer such explanations. And time and again he asserts that artistic progress - in the sense of movement, change and innovation - is frequently compatible with political conservatism ... .9

Rahv manoeuvred his discourse well. For the conclusion that he drew, and had to maintain, was exactly the contrary of the position which Dudley articulated. For Rahv, Hauser had emphasized the discontinuity between art and politics. But in order to beat Dudley on his own terrain, to oppose him in his own terms, Rahv reformulated his very position and turned it against him. He broke the unity which Dudley gave to the configuration 'artistic quality/artistic progress/politics', and assigned each element an entirely different, now depoliticized, significance. Through this discur- sive strategy, Rahv constructed another Hauser, one who was much closer to his own ideological perspective.

But Rahv also opposed the conservatives' position. As he saw it, Hauser's theory refused the




very principles on which the conservatives had formulated their art history. For it was their very neglect of 'context' which, Rahv claimed, resulted in an

increasing misuse and misreading of the text [i.e. art work] itself. For the historicity of a text is inextricably involved in its nature and function ... 92

For Rahv, Hauser's materialist theory - which he identified as 'historicism' - denied the conservatives' formalist and mechanically empirical approaches.93 By restoring the work's dialectical relationship with its historical 'context', Hauser had relativized the art work, and established limits to the notions through which it could be interpreted. He thus devalued the conservatives' ahistorical conceptions of 'artistic freedom' and 'genius', their 'idolization of the art-object and ... overestimation of its saving power'.94 He denied their very claim of the 'autonomy of art'.95 Hauser's social history was, for Rahv, a critical history, for, as he claimed:

If the 'purpose of historical research is to understand the present', as Mr. Hauser maintains, then the academic researchers in literature evade that task by retreating into the sheerfacticity of the past.96

Rahv, like Gombrich, attached considerable importance to this passage, for Hauser's conception of history had ideological weight for both sides. For Rahv, it was an affront to the conservatives' radical empiricism, and their notion of the 'past fpr its own sake'. It signified that Hauser had recognised the dialectical relationship between past and present; between the historical meaning of a work of art, and the present conditions in which its interpretations were produced.

IV

Hauser's was good history, as far as the left conceived it. For, unlike the right, which had mobilized empiricism in their categorical refusal of Hauser's Marxism, it was the author's very perspective which worked for the left. The Communist left could read Hauser's position as a political one, and recognize his concerns to be largely their own. The anti-Communist left, on the other hand, navigating between its critique of 'Soviet total- itarianism... and American capitalism', between its radical past and a more conventional future,97 had to define its Marxism carefully, and differentiate its anti-Communism from that of the right. This left read politics right out of Hauser, and constructed his Marxism as a depoliticized materialist history of art.

Yet, both left and right converged on one essential point: their acceptance o~f the work of art as the object of art history. The left, while situating the work within broader social and economic histo-

ries, nevertheless sought its singular, auth- entic 'meaning', one whose unity was thought to be fixed in its initial conditions of production, its materiality, its form and the artist's intent. Their ultimate aim was to explain the work itself and recover its historical significance. Here, the left's social history of art joined that of conventional art history, for in both the privileged status of the work remains intact and only the nature of the evidence changes.

It is this very conception of the social history of art, increasingly practiced today, that continues to displace the real object of art history. For in its insistence on interpreting an intrinsic, however historicized, significance to the work, it considers the work as the principal site and source of its own 'meaning'. The work is always whole, always complete. It participates in other histories, receives a 'context' from them, but is never allowed to enter fully, for it must always emerge as the subject of its own history. Such a conception disregards the work's historical and ideological functions, its real place in those other histories.

A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the symposium 'Theories et Applications de l'Histoire Sociale de l'Art', Muse6e des Beaux-Arts, Chartres, 10-11 December, 1983. I would like to thank Claire Beauchamps for her gen- erosity and tirelessness in translating that text, and Hilary Ballon for providing research material otherwise unob- tainable. I am particularly grateful to Annie Coombes, Alex Potts and Adrian Rifkin for their critical reading and valuable suggestions.

Notes

1. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1951; Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1951.

2. The Art Bulletin, vol. 35, no. 1, 1953, pp. 79-80. 3. The subsequent readings and uses of Hauser's book, occurring

in the historical conjunctures of the late 1950s to mid-1960s, and again in the early 1970s, will be the subject of a future study.

4. These conclusions are drawn from material published by Alan Gowans, 'A Report on Pending Ph.D. Theses in Art History', College Art Journal, vol. 10, no. 2, 1950-51, pp. 162-166; vol. 11, no. 2, 1951-52, pp. 127-130; vol. 12, no. 1, 1952, pp. 62-64. The survey comprised dissertations in progress in the United States and Great Britain.

5. Analyzed were vol. 31, 1949 through vol. 34, 1952. 6. Surveyed were the College Art Journal, vol. 4, 1944 through vol. 16,

1957, and The Burlington Magazine, vol. 91, 1949 through vol. 93, 1951. 7. See 'Tentative Program of the Annual Meeting of the College Art

Association', in the fall issues of the College Art Journal, vol. 5, 1946 through vol. 16, 1957.

8. College Art Association Committee to Investigate the Purposes of History of Art, 'Statement of the Place of History of Art in the Liberal Art Curriculum', College Art Journal, vol. 3, no. 3, 1944, p. 84. The committee's findings do not appear to reflect a general con- sensus within the C.A.A.

9. Frederick Antal, 'Remarks on the Method of Art History: I' The Burlington Magazine, vol. 91, no. 550, Feb. 1949, pp. 49-52, and part II, ibid. no. 552, March, 1949, pp. 73-75.

10. Art historians as diverse as H.W.Janson, on the one hand, and Meyer Schapiro, on the other, acknowledged such a displacement. Seejanson's review of Hauser in the Saturday Review, vol. 35, no. 5, Feb.

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2, 1952, and Schapiro's 'Style' in Anthropology Today: and Encylopedic Inventory, ed. A. Kroeber, Chicago, 1953, pp. 287-31.

11. See Alfred Neumeyer, 'Victory Without Trumpet, an Essay on Art History in Our Time', College Art Journal, vol. 16, no. 3, 1957, pp. 198-211.

12. The first of such sessions to appear after the war was 'Art and Literature', held at the 1950 C.A.A. meeting. It was immediately followed by an 'Interrelation of Literature and Art' session (1951), and numerous papers (1956) on the relation between imagery and nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy.

13. This object appears to have been constructed against a pre-war emphasis on science and technology. See Lennox Grey's forward to Patricia Beesley, The Revival of the Humanities in American Education, New York, 1940; Fred Millet, The Rebirth of Liberal Education, New York, 1945; David Stevens, The Changing Humanities: an Appraisal of Old Values and New Uses, New York, 1955; andJohn Gillin, ed., For a Science of Social Man, New York, 1955. The American Council of Learned Societies, which grouped together some 18 academic associations, including the C.A.A., sponsored, encouraged and developed research in the 'humanities'.

14. Edward Rannells, 'Art in the Humanities', College Art Journal, vol. 8, no. 4, 1949, p. 256. Among other articles which appeared in the College ArtJournal, we find: R. Reynolds, 'A Plea for Wider Distribution of Art Values', vol. 11, no. 2, 1951-52, pp. 93-95; S. Pepper, 'A Balanced Art Department', ibid, pp. 166-171; P. Mangravite, 'The Relation of Creative Design to an Education in the Humanities', vol. 11, no. 3, 1952, pp. 172-177; W. Kolodney, 'The Search of Man for His Lost Soul', ibid, pp. 177-180; A. Gowans, 'A-Humanism, Primitivism, and the Art of the Future', vol. 11, no. 4, 1952, pp. 226-239; C. Hamburg, 'Art as Knowledge', vol. 12, no. 1, 1952, pp. 2-11.

15. Beesley, op. cit.; Millet, op. cit. chap. II and III; Stevens, op. cit., p. 1Off.

16. Stevens, ibid. (My underscore). 17. Social Science Research Council, 'The Social Sciences in Histo-

rical Research: A Report of the Committee on Historiography.' Social Science Research Council Bulletin, no. 64, 1954, p. 140ff.

18. ibid. chap. 3. Schapiro's 'Style' is an example of just such a trend. Presented at a conference which united social scientists with historians, his paper claims the need of combining sociological, psychological and historical methods. (op.cit. p. 311.)

19. Schapiro (ibid.) confirmed such a situation in claiming t?at art historians rejected a uniquely 'social' approach, fearing that 'materialism' would reduce 'the spiritual or ideal to sordid practical affairs'. Schapiro did not, however, see such a 'reduction' as part of a more general political discourse.

20. Walter Abell, reviewing Hauser, claimed that art historians 'must . . . develop a frame of reference based alike upon economic and all other social sciences, upon philosophy and upon psychology'. (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 11, no. 3, March 1953, p. 265) His own approach however, was almost entirely limited to a psychology of art. (See The Collective Dream in Art: A Psycho-historical Theory of Culture Based on Relations Between the Arts, Psychology and the Social Sciences, Cambridge, 1957.)

The application of psychoanalytic theories to art gained popula- rity and legitimacy in the early 1950s, and was especially marked by the appearance of Arnheim's, Kris', Gombrich's, and Malraux's publications. Meyer Schapiro, as well as many other lesser known scholars, took up and diffused this line of investigation. The College Art Journal, for example, published numerous psychoanalytical studies by Arnheim, D.E. Schneider and Portnoy, and the C.A.A. sponsored at least one entire session (1947) and several panels (1950) on this subject at its annual meetings. (see College Art Journal, vol. 6, no. 2, p. 88; vol. 7, no. 3; vol. 9, no. 3).

21. Beesley, op.cit.; Rannells, op.cit. pp. 264-267. 22. See the papers of a symposium 'Art, Science and the Humani-

ties in the College Curriculum', in College Art Journal, vol. 5, no. 3, 1946, pp. 1 62-201. The C.A.A. also sponsored a panel 'The Role of the Artist in Liberal Education' at its 1948 meeting (papers published in the College Art Journal, vol. 7, no. 3, 1948, pp. 155-198), organized at least one conference 'Liberal Arts and the Humanities' (Bard College,July 1951), and held a session on 'The College Art Associa- tion and the Humanities' at its 1955 meeting. For the C.A.A.'s support of the American Council of Learned Societies, see the report of the president of the C.A.A., in College Art Journal, vol. 13, no.4, 1954

and vol. 14, no. 3-4, 1955. Between 1950 and 1954 alone, the College Art Journal published no less than 15 articles dealing explicitly with teaching art and art history as a 'humanity'.

23. H.W. Janson's publications of this period reveal an interest in cultural and intellectual history. (See Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, London, 1952; Key Monuments in the History of Art, Englewood Cliffs, 1953; and, with Dora Jane Janson, The Story of Painting for Young People, New York, 1952.) Walter Abell, on the other hand, sought to analyze culture throught general psychoanalytical and broad historical methods, in order to develop a 'pyscho- historical' or 'psycho-technical' theory of culture. (op.cit. p. 5). Gombrich was more narrowly concerned with psychology and the individual artist. (See The Story of Art, 3rd edition, London, 1950, preface and introduction; and Art and Illusion, A Study of the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, New York, 1960, chapt. 9). Lastly, T.S.R. Boase, a strict formalist, described paintings in terms of form, emotion, and degree of artistic 'success'. (See for example his chapter on Turner in English Art, 1800-1870, Oxford, 1959.)

24. F. Antal, Florentine Painting and Its Social Background, London, 1948; 'Remarks', op. cit.; F.D. Klingender, Marxism and Modern Art, London, 1943; New York, 1945; Hogarth and English Caricature, London, 1944; Art and the Industrial Revolution, London, 1947; Goya in the Democratic Tradition, London, 1948.

25. Klingender, op. cit.: S. Finkelstein, Art and Society, New York, 1947; L. Harap, The Social Roots of The Arts, New York, 1949; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Literature and Art, New York, 1947.

26. John Martin, 'Marxism and the History of Art', College Art Journal, vol. 11, no. 1, 1951, p. 3ff.

27. The constitution of 'positions' in critical discourse, their relation to one another, and the place which an individual critic's discourse assigns him within this network, are among the primary problems which any research into criticism must confront. I will explore these issues in a forthcoming study on Art Criticism, Politics and Ideology in Paris, 1885-1889. For the moment, at least, these critics have been divided according to their preconceptions of a social history of art, and their conceptions of its immediate (art historical/aesthetic) and broad (political) implications.

28. The Burlington Magazine, vol.94, no. 595, Oct. 1952, p. 299. Boase was at the time President of Magdalen College, Oxford, and former director of the Courtauld Institute. H.W. Jarison, also in this category, and then chair of the Fine Arts Department of New York University, identified Hauser's concern as explaining the 'countless changes in style'. (op. cit.)

29. ibid. My underscore. 30. Times Literary Supplement (London) (hereafter, T.L.S.), Dec. 28,

1951, pp. 829-30 31. Gombrich, for example, found that such an art history ought to

treat: the recorded rules and statutes of lodges and guilds, the development of such posts as that of peintre du roi, the emergence of public exhibitions, of the exact curricula and methods of art teaching. (op. cit. p. 79-80.)

Similarly, Francis Watson claimed that a social history of art should confine itself to form and content, artist and patron:

Most people would probably agree that the form as well as the content of art bear some fairly close relationship to the artists producing it, and of those for whom it is produced. (The Spectator,

vol. 187, Nov. 23, 1951, p. 712.) 32. Op. cit. p. 80. My underscore. 33. The T.L.S. critic, for example, considered that: The title of his [Hauser's] book does not in fact represent its contents. [But] ... is much more largely devoted to the history of style and of thought than to social history. (Op. cit. p. 829)

Joseph Hodin revealed his own conception of a social history of art, in his critique that Hauser's book was:

not complete neither where the arts are concerned nor in its analysis of the cultures, nor in its treatment of the personalities, nor in the discussion of the problems, although such completeness is suggested by the title. ((College Art Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, 1953, p. 306.) 34. Of the reviews written byJanson (op. cit.), Boase (op. cit.), Abell

(op. cit.), and Gombrich (op. cit.), only the latter extended his discussion beyond Hauser's treatment of the late Renaissance.




the interpretation of art to something like the mathmatical certainly 2+2 =4'. (op. cit); Boase claimed that Hauser's correlations were 'not susceptable to any final demonstration'. (op. cit.)

36. For the former, Boase rhetorically stated that Hauser: 'is well aware of the dangers that surround him and of the infinite variety that remains within any movement however firmly its origins and tendencies are classified'. (op. cit.)

For the latter, see Gombrich, op. cit. p. 82. 37. Boase, op. cit.; Gombrich, ibid. 38. op. cit. 39. op. cit. p. 829. The critic for the Studio, complained that Hauser's: arid jargon of economics and sociology... so often comes between us and the thought. (vol. 143,Jan. 1952, p. 96).

Similarly, Janson rhetorically claimed that Hauser: is well aware of the limited scope of sociological analysis, and has a healthy suspicion of conceptual strait-jackets . . . (op. cit.) 40. op. cit. p. 830 41. Op. cit. 42. ibid. T.L.S. op. cit. p. 830. 43. Op. cit. 44. The T.L.S. critic, for example, considered that Hauser ought to

have accounted for David's personal motivations, claiming that David and other artists supported the French Revolution. He stated:

The connection between this and their attitude to private and academic patronage needs some comment, and a social history of art ought to give it. (op. cit. p. 830) 45. Janson, for instance, claimed that: Some of the best chapters in his book (e.g. the splendid discussion of sixteenth-century Mannerism...) deal with esthetic phenomena that are least susceptible to sociological interpretation. (op. cit.) (My underscore).

Gombrich focused precisely on this chapter, in order to refute Hauser's methodology. (op. cit. p. 82)

46. Op. cit. p. 80. 47. Ibid. 48. Hodin, op. cit. p. 306. See alsojanson (op. cit.), T.L.S. (op. cit.) and

The Studio (op. cit.). 49. T.L.S. op. cit. p. 830. 50. Watson, op. cit.; Gombrich, op. cit. p. 80. 51. Gombrich continued this argument throughout subsequent

texts, making constant recourse to the radical positivism of Karl Popper. In the 1960s, for example, he attacked the principle of 'holism' - here, Hauser's 'indissoluble interdependence' - which he connected to Hegelianism, by claiming that:

there is no necessary connection between any one aspect of a group of activities and any other.

(See 'Style', in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David Sills, vol. 15, p. 358, New York, 1968. See also In Search of Cultural History, Oxford, 1969).

This is, moreover, the same conception of history which Popper defended against 'holism':

history is characterized by its interest in actual, singular or specific events, rather than in laws or generalizations.

(See The Poverty of Historicism, London, 1957, p. 143ff.) 52. Abell, op. cit.; T.L.S. op. cit. p. 830. 53. op. cit. p. 83. My underscore. 54. Frankfurter Beitrcge zur Soziologie, Band 4, 1956, pp. 93-105. 55. Gombrich, op. cit. p. 80; The Studio, op. cit.; Abell, op. cit.; Hodin, op.

cit. pp. 303, 305ff. 56. Op. cit. 57. Op. cit. 58. Op. cit. p. 80, 81. 59. Ibid. 60. Op. cit. p. 83. 61. Op. cit. 62. Op. cit. p. 307. 63. Op. cit. p. 83. 64. Rannells, op. cit. p. 257. My underscore. 65. Op. cit. p. xi-xii. My underscore. 66. Serge Guilbaut, 'Creation et developpement d'une avant-garde:

New York 1946- 195 1', ilistoire et critique des Arts, no. 6, 1978, pp. 29-48. See also 'Responsibility of the Artist in Contemporary Society Symposium' in College Art Journal, vol. 15, no. 3, 1956.

67. 'The Soviet Attitude to Art', The Contemporary Review, no. 1050,

June, 1953, pp. 349-350. For a summary of this campaign, which developed in the late 1940s and intensified in 1952-53, see Donald Drew Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts: Western Europe, London, 1970, p. 537f.

68. Op. cit. p. 308. 69. See, for instance, Popper's 'What is Dialectic' (reprinted in

Conjectures and Refutations, London, 1963, pp. 312-355), which Gombrich acknowledged in his review of Hauser (op. cit. p. 80). Both Gombrich and Popper held the same positivist positions in attacking dialectical and materialist thinking, and, in the end, Marxism. See also Popper, (op. cit. section 31, pp. 147-152) for an example of where Gombrich developed his formulations.

70. Not only was empiricism becoming the cornerstone of American scholarship, but the Social Science Research Council, fundamental in its development, clearly favored it against dialectical thinking:

One would hardly apply the term [cumulative empirical research] ... to the complex windings of Marxian dogma. It is of first importance in Marxian dialectics that each new proposition asserted to be true must be logically consistent with the words of the master; it is a secondary consideration whether or not the words have any empirical validity ... We must distinguish sharply between those propositions that can and those that cannot be proven false, that is, between those that can and that cannot be tested empirically. (Op. cit. p. 140).

This characterization of materialism is similar to that which we have already seen among most of Hauser's critics; it is considered as intel- lectually dishonest, unprovable, dominated by non-academic motives.

For the importance of empiricism after the Second World War, see Donald MacRae, 'Social Stratification; a Trend Report', Current Socio- logy, vol. 2, 1953-54, p. 15ff

71. Those who made-up this position included Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Clement Greenberg, then art critic for the left-wing Partisan Review; Philip Rahv, editor of the Partisan Review; Serge Hughes, critic and writer in the Commonweal; and critic for the Communist Party press (Great Britain), James Dudley.

72. New York Times Book Review, Dec. 23, 1951, p. 7. Writing from a more radical political perspective, James Dudley considered Hauser's book 'a model of detachment and scientific method', in relating art 'to the social process'. (The Daily Worker, Dec. 19, 1951, p. 2)

Francis Taylor, on the other end of liberal politics, equally praised Hauser:

Mr. Hauser is not concerned with the history of styles or schools of art but with the fundamental spiritual and economic reasons underlying the artists' adoption of a given technique or fashion.

(New York Herald Tribune Book Review, June 27, 1952, p. 6.) 73. Ibid. 74. Op. cit. p. 7. See also Greenberg, below. 75. Op. cit. See below. 76. Greenberg (op. cit.) Philip Rahv (Partisan Review, vol. 19, no. 2,

March-April, 1952, pp. 225-233), and Serge Hughes (The Commonweal, vol. 56, Sept. 12, 1952, pp. 559-561) all used this term.

77. Op. cit. p. 225. 78. Op. cit. p. 7. Greenberg's emphasis. 79. See William Phillips and Philip Rahv, 'In Retrospect: Ten

Years of Partisan Review', in The Partisan Review Reader, ed. W. Phillips and P. Rahv, New York, 1946, pp. 679-668, and James Burkhart Gilbert, Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in American, New York, 1968.

80. Phillips and Rahv, op. cit. p. 681ff. and Partisan Review, vol. 4, no. 1, December, 1937, pp. 3-4. See also Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, 'Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed', Art History, vol. 4, no. 3, September 1981, p. 309ff., as well as the numerous critical studies in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina, London, 1985.

81. Phillips and Rahv, op. cit. p. 683. 82. Egbert, op. cit. p. 536ff. 83. Sidney Finkelstein, cited in Donald D. Egbert, Socialism and

American Art, Princeton, 1967, p. 92. 84. Phillips, 'The Politics of Desperation', Partisan Review (British

edition), vol. 15, no. 2, 1948, p. 175.

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83. Sidney Finkelstein, cited in Donald D. Egbert, Socialism and

American Art, Princeton, 1967, p. 92. 84. Phillips, 'The Politics of Desperation', Partisan Review (British

edition), vol. 15, no. 2, 1948, p. 175. 85. Phillips, op. cit. p. 174. See also Serge Guilbaut, How New York

Stole the Idea of Modern Art, Chicago, 1983, p. 105ff. 86. Op. cit. 87. Greenberg, op. cit. p. 7. 88. Ibid. 89.Both Rahv (op. cit. p. 225) and Hughes (op. cit. p. 561) considered

Hauser's treatment of the twentieth century to be dangerously close

to C.P. interpretations. 90. Ibid. 91. Op. cit. pp. 232-233. My underscore. For Greenberg's view see

my text, above, and op. cit. p. 7. 92. Op. cit. p. 226. 93. Ibid. 94. Op. cit. pp. 231-232. 95. Ibid. 96. Op. cit. p. 226. 97. Phillip Rahv, 'Disillusionment and Partial Answers', Partisan

Review, vol. 15, no. 5, 1948, p. 257. See also Gilbert, op. cit., chapter 8.

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