Hauser Arnold - Social History of Art, Volume 4

Jonathan Harris

Contexts of reception

Arnold Hausers The Social History of Art first appeared in 1951, published in two volumes by Routledge and Kegan Paul. The text is over 500,000 words in length and presents an account of the development and meaning of art from its origins in the Stone Age to the Film Age of Hausers own time. Since its publication, Hausers history has been reprinted often, testament to its continuing popularity around the world over nearly a half-century. From the early 1960s the study has been reprinted six times in a four-volume series, most recently in 1995. In the period since the Second World War the discipline of art history has grown and diversified remarkably, both in terms of the definition and extent of its chosen objects of study, and its range of operative theories and methods of description, analyses and evaluation. Hausers account, from one reading clear in its affiliation to Marxist principles of historical and social understanding the centrality of class and class struggle, the social and cultural role of ideologies, and the determining influence of modes of economic production on art appeared at a moment when academic art history was still, in Britain at least, an elite and narrow concern, limited to a handful of university departments. Though Hausers intellectual background was thoroughly soaked in mid-European socio-cultural scholarship of a high order, only a relatively small portion of which was associated directly with Marxist or neo-Marxist perspectives, The Social History of Art arrived with the Cold War and its reputation quickly, and inevitably, suffered within the general backlash against political and intellectual Marxism which persisted within mainstream British and American society and culture until at least the 1960s and the birth of the so-called New Left. At this juncture, its first moment of reception, Hausers study, actually highly conventional in its definition and selection of arte-facts deemed worthy of consideration, was liable to be attacked and even vilified because of its declared theoretical and political orientation.

By the mid-1980s, a later version of Marxism, disseminated primarily through the development of academic media and cultural studies programmes, often interwoven with feminist, structuralist and psychoanalytic themes and perspectives, had gained (and regained) an intellectual respectability in rough and ironic proportion to the loss of its political significance in western Europe and the USA since the 1930s. Hausers study was liable to be seen in this second moment of reception as an interesting, if, on the whole, crude, antecedent within the development of a disciplinary specialism identified with contemporary academic art and cultural historians and theorists such as Edward Said, Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu and T.J. Clark. By the 1980s, however, Hausers orthodox choice of objects of study, along with his unquestioned reliance on the largely unexamined category of art seen by many adherents of cultural studies as inherently reactionary meant that, once again, his history could be dismissed, this time primarily on the grounds of its both stated and tacit principles of selection. Yet The Social History of Art, whatever its uneven critical fortunes and continuing marginal place in most university courses, has remained an item, or an obstacle, to be read or at least dismissively referred to within the study of the history of art. Why should this be the case?