![]() ![]() Clark cites two sentences from Georg Lukács’s great work History and Class Consciousness: ‘And yet, as the really important historians of the nineteenth century such as Riegl, Dilthey and Dvořák could not fail to notice, the essence of history lies precisely in the changes undergone by those structural forms which are the focal points of man’s interaction with environment at any given moment and which determine the objective nature of both his inner and outer life.1 But this only becomes objectively possible (and hence can only be adequately comprehended) when the individuality, the uniqueness of an epoch or an historical figure, etc., is grounded in the character of these structural forms, when it is discovered and exhibited in them and through them.’ While acknowledging that this statement proposed ‘a difficult and fertile thesis about history… that art historians might care to contemplate again,’ Clark used it mainly to make a contrast between the lofty intellectual stature of art historians in the early twentieth century and that of their British counterparts in the 1970s.2 In this essay I want to explore Lukács’s ‘difficult and fertile thesis about history’ as a way in to the art history of his sometime friend Arnold Hauser, whose The Social History of Art has been seen as a landmark in Marxist approaches to the discipline since its first publication in 1951.3 In the process I will argue that Hauser’s divided loyalties between Lukács and another early friend, Karl Mannheim, help to explain the complex weave of Marxist and romantic anti-capitalist motifs in his work.4 ![]()
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