Hello everyone, I’m taking an online art history class (currently on the High Renaissance!!), and my prof asks us to ~do our own research~ to share with the class what we’ve learned about the art of each era.
Anyway, I’m a relatively new Communist (it still feels exhilarating to even type that out!), and I was so excited to discover that there are Marxist art historians, as seen here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_history#Marx_and_ideology
I would love to include some subversive ideas into my contributions to class discussion, so I was just wondering if any of you art lovers had any other art history resources that could help enrich my understanding of art history through a historical materialist lens?
Also, the art historians listed in the wikipedia article above appear to be mostly “vulgar Marxists” or like Trotsky, none of which I really understand–but I do know that many of you don’t care for either tendencies. But maybe there are better Marxist art histories out there?
Ohh thank you! If you recommend Adorno and Horkheimer then I will check them out.
French realism is threaded pretty strongly with the early communist movement IIRC, with Courbet and others being part of the Paris Commune.
Worth looking at your Germans - Marx directly, as well as like Georg Simmel and Max Weber. I’d second Luckas, who synthesized a lot of those guys were addressing. Walter Benjamin was probably the biggest influence on me, and Greenberg and TJ Clark are well worth it. Really though, read everyone - post-structuralism is still hot shit as far as I’m aware, and it addresses a lot of the failures of revolutionary Marxism in ways that are only productive (edit: just don’t trust anyone who tells you they understand Anti-Oedipus, because they’re a goddamn liar)
