Arnold Hauser Biography and List of Works

Hungarian-born British writer on the history of art and film. Among Hauser's major works is The Social History of Art. It stirred great controversy when it appeared in English in the 1950s because of its political orientation. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s when Marxist views gained popularity among Academic researches. However, Marxism started to lose its attraction among intellectuals before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Postmodernist art historians have rarely made references to Hauser's fundamental study.

"Genuine, progressive art can only mean a complicated art today. It will never be possible for everyone to enjoy and appreciate it in equal measure, but the share of the broader masses in it can be increased and deepened, The preconditions of a slackening of the cultural monopoly are above all economic and social. We can do no other than fight for the creation of these preconditions."
(from Social History of Art, vol. 4)

Arnold Hauser studied history of art and literature in the universities of Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. In Paris his teacher was Henri Bergson who influenced him deeply. After World War I Hauser spent two years in Italy doing research work on the history of classical and Italian art. In 1921 he moved to Berlin. By that time he developed his view that the problems of art and literature are fundamentally sociological problems. Three years later he settled down in Vienna and in 1938 he moved to London, where he started to research for Social History of Art. The work took ten years to finish. During this period Hauser wrote a number of essays about film for Life and Letters Today and Sight and Sound. From 1951 he was a lecturer of the history of art at the University of Leeds. From 1957 to 1959 he was a visiting professor at Brandeis University in the United States.

Hauser's last book, The Sociology of Art (1974) investigated the social and economic determinants of art. His suggestion that art does not merely reflect but interacts with society is a widely accepted premise. He also saw the art establishment and art reviewers as servers of commercial interests. As in his Social History of Art, Hauser's approach was Euro-centred and did not pay much attention to non-Western art.

Social History of Art was the result of thirty years of scholarly labour. It traced the production of art from Lascaux to the Film Age in the framework of changing socio-historical forces. Hauser's thesis was that form and content develop in direct relation both to concrete material conditions and to cultural development. This Marxist-oriented approach was rejected by critics on the right but they had to admit that Hauser's aesthetic judgments were not so radical. He did not regard the relation between work of art and social forces as a simple one-to-one correspondence. A politically conservative artist can break reactionary conventions and dogmas. According to Hauser, "every honest artist who describes reality faithfully and sincerely has an enlightening and emancipating influence on his age." In this Hauser refers to Engel's analysis of Balzac's Comédie humaine. But Dickens is another case: "... all the characters of this naturalist are caricatures, all the features of real life are exaggerated... everything is transformed into the stylised, simplified and stereotyped relationships and situations of the melodrama."

According to Hauser, the separation of sacred and profane art took place in the Neolithic age. Profane art, which was restricted to the craft, probably lay entirely in the hands of women. Heroic and Homeric ages meant a decisive turn towards the social system of monarchy relying on the personal loyalty of vassals to their lord. A new type of man appeared on the scene - the artist with a markedly individual personality, but economic independence was out of the question. In the Middle Ages the emphasis was not on the personal genius of the artist but on the craftsmanship. The impersonal commodity-production dominated the whole of art.

The increased demand for works of art in the Renaissance led to the ascent of the artist from the level of the petty bourgeois artisan to that of the free intellectual worker. The concept of genius appears. Shakespeare looked down the broad masses of the people with a feeling of superiority and made in his dramas clear the struggle between the Crown, the middle class and the aristocracy. Gradually the bourgeoisie took possession of all the instruments of culture. Rousseau was the first to speak as one of the common people himself. He turned against reason because he saw in the process of intellectualisation also that of social segregation.

After the French Revolution the artists and writers created their own standards and their work brought them into a constant state of tension and opposition towards the public. Through Byron restlessness and aimlessness became a plague. The theory of 'l'art pour l'art' gave expression to romantic opposition to the bourgeois world, before Flaubert and Baudelaire, on the other hand, shut themselves in their ivory towers, and the theory started to reflect conservative attitude. The estrangement of the intellectuals from the practical affairs was seen in the belief in the absoluteness of truth and beauty. Bohemians emerged as a caricature of the intelligentsia. In Russia the intellectual leadership passed into hands of the cultural elite and remained there up to the Bolshevist revolution. The film signifies the attempt to produce art for masses and give fulfilment to the social romanticism.

For further reading: American Journal of Sociology, January 1960; Science and Society, Spring 1985; World Authors 1900-1950, vol. 2, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996) - See also: The Artist at Odds with Society by Heather A. Fraser

Philosophie der Kunstgeschichte, (1958)
Der Manierismus, (1965)
Soziologie der Kunst, (1974)