The Question of Class: An Ongoing Challenge to

Art History
A Conference in Honour of Andrew Hemingway

Saturday 19 June 2010

Gustav Tuck Lecture Theatre
University College London

Organisers: Warren Carter and Frederic J. Schwartz

At the end of the academic year 2009-2010, Professor

Andrew Hemingway will retire from his chair at UCL. It
is thus a timely moment to reflect upon a
distinguished career in the History of Art. But the
moment is also right to do something more ambitious
than this: to gauge the state of current research, and
future possibilities, in the area in which Hemingway
has for several decades been a key international
figure, the Marxist History of Art.

The 1970s and 1980s were a period of intense critical

engagement with the objects and methods of the
discipline. By the mid-1980s, the impact of feminist,
Marxist, structuralist, and psychoanalytic approaches
had resulted in a tendency then termed the ‘New Art
History’, a critical framework long associated with the
History of Art Department at UCL. And though the
impetus for this radical rethinking of the discipline
came largely from the particular constitution and
problematics of the New Left in Britain, this aspect of
art-historical practice and methodology, in particular
the interrogation of class as a historical and critical
category, has often faded from view. Its insights and
approaches have been absorbed into the more
generic field a ‘social history of art’ in apolitical ways
that undermine its critical import.

Hemingway’s work stands out as the most sustained,

sophisticated and influential engagement with this
important tradition within the History of Art in the UK
and has helped restore its critical capacity. The
impact of his work goes beyond his scholarship, to
include the supervision of a large number of doctoral
students, wide-ranging work organising conferences
and editing collections, and energetic efforts of
bridge-building between the discipline in this country
and sympathetic scholars in the US, France and
Germany. By focussing on particular areas where
Hemingway made seminal contributions, this
conference has three aims: first, to reassess the
categories, methods and historical roots of a Marxist
history of art; second, to explore their current use in
advanced research in the discipline as a whole; and
third, to assess the future of this tradition, both
intellectually and institutionally.
The Question of Class: An Ongoing Challenge to Art
History
A Conference in Honour of Andrew Hemingway

10.00 Introduction
Fred Schwartz (University College
London)

10.15 Landscape/Class/Ideology
Chair: Tom Gretton (University College
London)

Alan Wallach (College of William &

Mary)
"Toward a Social History of Mid-Nineteenth
Century American Landscape Painting"
Alex Potts (University of Michigan)
"The Shifting Terrain of Nineteenth- and
Twentieth-Century Art Histories"

12.15 Lunch

13.15 Marxism & Modernism

Chair: Warren Carter (University College
London)

Gail Day (University of Leeds)

"Realism, Totality, and the Militant Citoyen: Or,
What Has Lukacs To Do With Contemporary Art?"
Respondents:
Esther Leslie (Birkbeck, University of
London)
Michael Corris (Sheffield Hallam
University)
Jody Patterson (Ecole Normale
Supérieure)
Barnaby Haran (University College
London)

15.15 Tea

15.15 Marxist Historiography & Art History

Chair: Matthew Beaumont (University College
London)

Steve Edwards (Open University)

"Forms of History"
Respondents:
Caroline Arscott (Courtauld Institute)
 John Roberts (University of
Wolverhampton)
Fred Schwartz (University College
London)
Fred Orton (University of Leeds)

17.45 Valediction
Pete Smith (Thames Valley University)

18.00 Closing Remarks

Tamar Garb (University College London)

Admission is free and all are welcome, but spaces must be reserved. Please
contact Warren Carter (w.carter@ucl.ac.uk) by Wednesday 9 June.