A Working Perspective for Marxist Art History Today

Abstract

In his perceptive review article on my The Making of Paul Klee's Career, 1914-1920, in the Oxford Art Journal, vol. 13, no. 2 (1990), David Craven has characterised my conception of Marxist theory on the basis of an essay I wrote in 1971. Such a reference to work from twenty years ago is problematical for any scholar who, like myself, attempts to continue working in the Marxist tradition. Just about the time when Craven's review appeared, Norbert Schneider in Germany edited a special issue of Kritische Berichte (18 [1990], no. 3), entitled 'Zwanzig Jahre danach', which contained a collection of articles by a number of German art historians who participated in the Marxist challenge to conventional art history in the Federal Republic around 1970, and who were reviewing the situation of Marxist art history twenty years later. Such a review imposed itself all the more urgently after the demise, in the fall of 1989, of the German Democratic Republic, the first German socialist state. The following English version of my contribution to the Kritische Berichte is intended as a response to David Craven's review. It has been revised and expanded, in part as a response to discussions held, in December 1990, with a number of friends in Britain, most notably Andrew Hemingway, Michael Podro, and Alex Potts.