Notebook 29 2020

An attempt to define Marxism as an art historical methodology is specifically complicated by the post-communist predicament. The study aims at cleaning the way for a fresh analysis and provides a first ever survey of possible Marxist approaches that peaked between the 1940s and 1970s. It is based on the inherent materialist character of visual arts, „art history“ cannot be confounded with aesthetics, philosophy and theory of art, and should also be set aside from the history of architecture. Marxist theory and methodology thus cannot be simply extended to art history from the texts by Marxs, Engels, Lenin and other theoreticians who dealt mainly with literature and general aesthetics. In this respect, Marxism proves to be largely incompatible with the history of art that is based on the Eurocentric tradition of „high quality art“ inherently connected with the elites.

The purpuse of this paper is a charitable interpretation of Karel Teige´s architectural criticism which can be regarded as one of the few original contributions to the Marxist theory of art and culture to have come out of Czechoslovakia. Teige´s approach involves a dualism of architecture as art – which he rejects – and architecture as technology, or science – which he promotes. He based this preference on two theoretical elements of Marxism: the materialist theory of history – in particular the base/superstructure model – and the critique of ideology. For Teige, it was only under the conditions of industrial capitalism the the growth of forces of production caused the separation between the utilitarian and aesthetic functions of architecture. Hence, only at this point it became possible to classify architecture as an element of the economic base. Ornament, as an aesthetic aspect of architecture, is ideology in the original Marxist sense of „false consciousness“ – which implies that ideology can acquire both propositional and plastic form. Ornament in architecture hides the transient and contradictory nature of the building types such as banks, factories and parliaments, or, rather, the institutions housed in them. The paper also compares Teige´s contributions with the ideas of some later Marxist theorists of architecture (Lefebvre, Tafuri, Jameson). It appears that Teige is perhaps more rudimentary, yet clearer and more coherent than the recent authors. These virtues also enable us to detect the limits of Marxism in the field of the theory of architecture.

This article looks at the question of how the reception of Marxism changed the way the institution of the museum was perceived, especially in relation to the public and public space. It takes the specific example of the Museum of Art (Muzeum Sztuki) in Łódź, Poland, and its director Marian Minich. Though Marxism as such was one of the intellectual sources of the avant-garde in the 20th century, during the period of Stalinism, on the contrary, the avant-garde was dismissed as a manifestation of formalism in countries of the Soviet Bloc and committed socialist realism became canonical. In spite of this, Minich, director of the museum in Łódź from 1935 to 1965, managed to retain a link to the radical theses of the avant-garde regarding the abolition of the boundary between art and life, even within the constraints defined by state ideologies and propaganda. Minich, who creatively combined Marxism with the ideas of Heinrich Wölfflin, came up with a concept of educating the lay public that emphasised the historically conditioned development of the art form as opposed to the official emphasis on an artwork having content that was easy to understand. The article looks at both Minich’s theoretical reflections, as well as the exhibition and popularising practice ensuing therefrom, which it places within the context of the time.

This text was published in English.