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ALSO BY DONALD D. EGBERT

The Tickhill Psalter

Princeton Portraits
Socialism and American Art
Editor (with Stow Persons) and Co-Author of
Socialism and American Life
 SOCIAL
RADICALISM
AND
THE ARTS

Western Europe
 SOCIAL
RA DICALISM
AND
THEH ARTS

Western Europe

sy Donald Drew lgbert

A Cultural History from
the French Revolution to 1968

ALFRED-A:KNOPF Be 1970

New York
 THISIS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

Copyright © 1970 by Donald D. Egbert. All rights reserved

under International and Pan-American Copyright Conven-
tions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House
of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House,
Inc., New York.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-79351
Manufactured in the United States of America

FIRST EDITION
To Virgima Wylie Egbert

ot)End GsCS CO
 CONTENTS

Foreword by Clinton Rossiter Xvi

Preface XX1X

Introduction: THE VARIETIES OF MODERN RADICALISM, THEIR ORIGINS,

AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR ART
1. The Problem
N . Democracy, Patronage in Art, and the Social Organ-
ism ih
. Revolution, Progress, and the Historical Dimension 19
. Socialism and Communism 39
Anarchism 43
Radicalism
. Radical “Left” and Radical “Right” 51

. Liberalism and Conservatism 54

. Politics, the Artist, and Alienation 60

part 1. Marx, Engels, and the Marxian Theory of Art

Chap. 1. THE LIVES OF MARX AND ENGELS IN RELATION TO THE
ARTS 67
1. Art and Marxism 67
2. The Careers of Marx and Engels, and the Arts
3. Marx’s Contributions: Organicism and Art WI
4. Marx and Engels on Literature 81

Chap. 2. THE THEORIES OF MARX AND ENGELS IN RELATION TO

THE ARTS 84
1. Marx’s Philosophical System
2. Marx’s Contributions: Materialism and Art 86
3. Marx’s Contributions: Organicism and Art 97
4. Marx’s Contributions: The Dialectical Process, the
Social Organism, and Art 98
_ Marx’s Contributions: The Class Struggle and Art 102
. Marxism, Truth, Propaganda, and Art
nw
105
. The Spread of Marxism in Relation to Other Forms
110
of Socialism
viii / CONTENTS

part 1. Radicalism, Marxism, and the Theory:and Practice

of Art in France and Switzerland
Chap. 3. FRENCH UTOPIAN SOCIALISM AND ITS IMPLICATIONS
FOR ARTISTS AND THE ARTS 137
. The Background of French Utopianism EEi
. Saint-Simon and the Idea of Avant-Garde 119
The Disciples of Saint-Simon, and Art 124
. Fourier, His Disciples, and Art 133
. Cabet, the Icarians, and Art 143
N . Utopianism
pW
An and Romanticism; Bohemianism and
“Art for Art’s Sake” 145
a Saint-Simonianism, Christian Socialism, and Art 158
8. Saint-Simonianism, Comte, Marx, and Art 160
Q. Utopianism: Conclusion 162

Chap. 4. OTHER RADICAL ARTISTS AND CRITICS IN FRANCE FROM

THE RESTORATION OF THE BOURBONS TO THE PARIS
COMMUNE OF 1871
a5 Liberalism and Revolutionary Republicanism: Goya,
in Spain; Géricault, Scheffer
. Revolutionary Republicanism and _ Delacroix’s
Liberty 170
. Revolutionary Republicanism: The Critic Planche;
Daumier, and the Barbizon School 176
. The Republic of 1848-1851 and Art. Chenavard 183
. Napoleon III, and Social and Artistic Radicalism 186
. Courbet and Other Social Realists 188
The Anarchism of Proudhon and Courbet 196
. Thoré and Radical Art Criticism 200
Oo. The Commune: Courbet and Other Artists
AMS
ON 203
Chap. 5. FROM THE COMMUNE TO THE END OF WORLD WAR I,
1871-1918 206
1 . The Significance of the Commune for Later French
Radicalism 206
. Viollet-le-Duc, Republican of the Left 207
N
W . The Catholic Social Movement and Its Influence
on Art 210
. Anarchism: Bakunin and Art 212
. Anarchism: Kropotkin and Art 220
. Marxism: Guesde and Art 226
NI
f
Ou . Radicalism and “Reality”: Impressionism, Literary
Naturalism, Photography 228
. The Neo-Impressionists, the Symbolists, and An-
archism 237
. The Crisis in the Artists’ Conception of Reality 249
1 O. Anarchism and Art Criticism 251
1 1. Socialism: Jaurés and Art
255
 Contents / ix

1 2 Artists and the Dreyfus Case 257

13. The Social Radicalism of Van Gogh, the Synthe-
tists, the Nabis, and the Fauves 258
14. Artistic Individualism and Social Radicalism, Espe-
cially Anarchism 262
15. Survival of Utopian Socialism: The Architecture
of ‘Tony Garnier 267
TOF Anarcho-Syndicalism: Pelloutier, Sorel, and Art 269
am Futurism and Anarcho-Syndicalism 273
18. The Social Radicalism of the Abbaye de Créteil,
and the Beginnings of Cubism 285
Chap. 6. FROM WORLD WAR I AND THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION
TO 1968 292

. The Bolshevik Revolution and Avant-Garde Artists 292

. From Anarchism to Communism Among Artists 294
. Dada: Apolitical and Communist 295
. Surrealism, and Politics on the Left to 1934 297
. Art and the Popular Front to the Spanish Civil War 308
eB
WN. Art and the Popular Front from the Beginning of
An

the Spanish Civil War to the Nazi-Soviet Pact 314

. Art from the Nazi-Soviet Pact Through the Re-
sistance 320
. Picasso: From Anarchist to Communist e22
. Picasso and Other Post-War Communist Artists:
Pignon, Fougeron, Léger, Taslitzky 327
10. Picasso and “Peace” 340
11. Picasso, Léger, etc., and Arguments About Socialist
Realism and Abstraction 346
12. The New Left and Art 359
13° Tinguely, Schéffer, Vasarely, La Nouvelle Tendance,
and the New Avant-Garde 364
part ut. Radicalism, Marxism, and the Theory and Practice
of Art in England
Chap. 7. BRITISH UTOPIAN SOCIALISM, PHILOSOPHICAL RADICAL
THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR ARTISTS AND THE
ISM, AND

ARTS 381
1. Owen Versus Bentham 381
2. Godwin and His Influence on Owen, Coleridge,
Shelley, Leigh Hunt’s Circle, etc. 386
3. Owen’s Communities and His Labor Movement 390

Chap. 8. OTHER RADICAL ARTISTS AND CRITICS OF ENGLAND FROM

CARLYLE’S “SIGNS OF THE TIMES” TO THE DEATH OF
WILLIAM MoRRIS, 1829-1896 Boo
1. Carlyle and Mill 399
2. Carlyle, Chartism, and Saint-Simonianism
401
3. Carlyle, Coleridge, and Organicism 404
x / CONTENTS

Carlyle, Art, and Craft 406

Vb
Town Planning, and the Influence of Owenism and
Fourierism 410
Ruskin and Christian Socialism 415)
Ruskin, “Truth to Nature,” and the Gothic Revival 418
Ruskin and the Paris Commune 424
©gDMorris: From Radical Liberalism to Marxian Social-
ism 424
10. Radical Friends and Acquaintances of Morris: The
Avelings, Bax, Kropotkin, Mrs. Besant, etc. 430
11. Radical Friends and, Acquaintances of Morris and
Kropotkin: Wilde, Crane, Cockerell, Carpenter, etc. 436
2: Morris and the Fabians 439
Ey Morris’s Theories of Art and Society 443
14. Morris, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and Archi-
tecture 449
15, Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites 451
16. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Radicalism of Ford Madox
Brown 457
17. Pre-Raphaelitism and “Art for Art’s Sake”: Whis-
tler, and the Anarchism of Wilde and Mallarmé 462
18. “Art for Art’s Sake” and the Reduction of Form to
Essentials, Abstract or Realistic-Functional; Mack-
murdo 466

Chap. Q. THE CONTINUING INFLUENCE OF WILLIAM MORRIS 472

1. Later Disciples of Morris: Lucien Pissarro, Ashbee,
Gill, etc. 472
N Fabianism and Art 476
WN
The Garden City Movement: Howard, Penty,
Parker and Unwin 479
4. The Heritage of the Garden City Movement as Re-
flected in the New Towns 485
5. From Morris to Soviet Communism: Sylvia Pank-
hurst; Clough Williams-Ellis 490
Chap. 10. THE INFLUENCE OF SOVIET COMMUNISM, 1917-1968 492
1. Communism and Art in the 1920’s 492
2. Communism and Art in the Early 1930’s 495
. The Artists International Association Before the
Spanish Civil War 497
. The Artists International Association from the Be-
ginning of the Spanish Civil War to 1939 501
. The Artists International Association and Contacts
Abroad 504
. The Artists International Association and the Eus- —
ton Road School 506
. Artists and Art Critics of the Left Review: Boswell,
Holland, Fitton; Blunt 508
 Contents / xi

8.Communism, Anarchism, and Surrealism 514

9.Mass-Observation 516
10. The Left Book Club and Its Influence on the Arts 517
11. Writers on the Left and the Theater of the Left 519
12. ih Artists Refugee Committee, and John Heart-
eld 522
13. Munich, World War II, and James Boswell in the
Post-War World 527
14. The Artists International Association During World
War II and After 530
15. The Communists and the Arts After World War II 535
16. The Declining Influence of Communism in the
Arts After World War II: Paul Hogarth, Betty Rea,
the “Kitchen Sink School,” etc. 541
Chap. 11. THE RADICALISM OF MODERN ENGLISH ART CRITICS; AND
THE RISE OF THE NEW LEFT 551

1. The Background of Twentieth-Century Radical Art

Criticism 551
. Roger Fry 552
. Wyndham Lewis 555
. Sir Herbert Read Soy
. Christopher Caudwell 560
. Francis Klingender 562
. Frederick Antal 564
. Arnold Hauser 566
. John Berger 568
=] 00
RW
AM
N . The New Left
CON 571

PART 1v. Radicalism, Marxism, and the Theory and Practice

of Art in Germany and Other Continental Countries
(Holland, Belgium, Scandinavia, Austria, Italy)

Chap. 12. RADICAL ARTISTS AND CRITICS OF GERMANY, ETC., FROM

THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY TO THE END OF
WORLD WAR I, CA. 1825-1918 583

. Germany: The Nineteenth-Century Background 583

. German Social Democracy and Art Theory 589
_ German Socialism and the Ideas of William Morris 593
N
RW _ German and Austrian Radicalism, Realism, and
Functionalism from 1848: Menzel, Strauss, Wagner,
Semper 594
. Holland: Berlage 600
nw. Belgium: The Radical Background 603
7. Belgium: “Les XX” (Khnopff; Ensor, and His In-
fluence on the Dutch Painter Toorop) 605
xii / CONTENTS

8. Belgium: The Labor Party and Art Theory 609

9. Belgium: Art Nouveau (Horta and Van de Velde),
and Its Spread to Spain and Austria 609
10. Belgium: Other Social-Concermed Artists (Meunier
and Masereel) 618
11. Norway: Munch and the Background of German
Expressionism 621

Chap. 13. FROM WORLD WAR I AND THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION —

TO 1968 623

ile Germany: The Background of Social and Artistic

Radicalism After World War I 623
. German Christian Socialism and Art Theory: Tillich 627
. Social-Concerned German Graphic Artists: Koll-
witz, Zille, Grosz 628
. Dada and Communism in Berlin and Cologne:
Huelsenbeck, Heartfield, Grosz, etc.; Baargeld
. Dada, Communism, and the Theater in Berlin:
Piscator 638
. “Die neue Sachlichkeit” and Social Radicalism: Otto
Dix 640
. Music and Social Radicalism: Weill, Eisler, and the
Music Dramas of Bertolt Brecht 640
. Cooperation of Radicals, Artistic and Social: The
Novembergruppe 643
. The Bauhaus: Gropius, Mies, Feininger, Klee, Kan-
dinsky, Schlemmer 646
10. The Bauhaus: Its Background and Spirit, Artistic
and Social 649
ia The Bauhaus: The Social Radicalism of Hannes
Meyer Versus Gropius and Mies 654
LP The Bauhaus and the International Style 662
13. The Bauhaus: Its Principles in Relation to the
Development of Housing 665
14. The Bauhaus: Moholy-Nagy, Constructivism, and
De Stijl 672
15. Hitler, and German Emigrés in the Arts, West and
East 678
16. Germany East and West After World War II: So-
Socialist Realism and the New Left 680
Sl Italy: Communism and Radical Art Groups 688
18. Italy: Communism and the Socialist Realism of
Renato Guttuso 693
19. The New Left and the Revival of the Bauhaus —
Tradition on the Continent 699
20. The New Alienation of the Avant-Garde on the Con-
tinent 708
 Contents / xiii

Conclusion: 1 . The Alienated Artist, Non-Conformism, and the

Avant-Garde TR
. The Revolutionary Tradition and National Charac-
teristics 716
. From Revolutionary Radicalism to Official Accept-
ance of Avant-Garde Art 721
. Relationships Between Radical Artists and Radical
Historians and Critics, Artistic and Social 722
VI. . The Artist’s Temperament and His Choice of Rad-
icalism 726
. Radicalism and Artistic Media 729
. The Radical Artist and Ideology 731
. The Radical Artist and Subject-Matter 732
OD
0
CY. The Alienation of Western Artists from Socialist
Realism 734
10. Artists’ Political Ties and Artistic Quality 735
11. Why Study the Political and Social Ties of Artists? 736
12. The End of Traditional Social Alienation in the Arts
and of the Traditional Conception of Avant-Garde 741

Notes 747

Index follows page 819

 ILLUSTRATIONS

NOTE: Titles in italics are those of independent works, paint-

ings unless otherwise indicated. Titles placed in quotation
marks are of works used for multiple reproduction in a
periodical or published series, and are drawings unless other-
wise noted.

FIG. . The Oath of the Horatii (1785) by Jacques Louis David.

Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo. courtesy of Alinari.
FIG. . The Death of Marat (1793) by Jacques Louis David.
Photo. courtesy of the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts,
Brussels. 37.
FIG. . Hall of the Convention at the Tuileries (1792), architec-
ture by Guy Gisors. Photo. courtesy of the Bibliotheque
Nationale, Paris. 52

FIG. . “Barbarians!”, etching by Francisco Goya, from The

Disasters of War (1810-1813). Photo. courtesy of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Schiff Fund,
1922. 56
FIG. . The Raft of the Medusa (1819) by Théodore Géricault.
Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo. courtesy of Alinari. 57
FIG, . Arnold Ruge with the Young Hegelians at Berlin, Novem-
ber 10, 1842, drawing by the young Friedrich Engels.
Courtesy of La Critique sociale, but reproduced from
Alain Sergent and Claude Harmel, Histoire de Panarchie
(Paris: Le Portulan, 1949), opp. Pp. 129. 7O

FIG. . The Three Graces (1819), sculpture by Bertel Thorvald-

sen. Photo. courtesy of Thorvaldsens Museum, Copen-
hagen. 80

FIG. . Sketch for “The New City” of the Saint-Simonians by

[Victor Amand?] Chambellan. From Henry-René
d’Allemagne, Les Saint-Simoniens, 1827-1837 (Paris:
Librairie Griind, 1930), opp. p. 308. 126
xvi / ILLUSTRATIONS

FIC. 9. Project (1849) for the Grandes Halles, Paris, by Eugene

Flachat. From Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Archi-
tecture (3rd enl. ed., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1954), Fig. 133, p. 231. 131
FIG. 10. Victor Considerant’s project for a Fourierist phalanx,
after his drawing of 1834. From the lithograph “Un
Phalanstére,” by Arnoux, which accompanied Consider-
ant’s Description du phalanstére (2d ed., Paris, 1848). 337
FIG. ae “Gracchus” Babeuf (date unknown), bronze relief by
Pierre Jean David d’Angers. Photo. courtesy of the Musée
des Beaux-Arts, Angers; J. Evers, Angers, photographer. 147
FIG. 12. Allons, enfants de la Patrie! (1825) by Ary Scheffer.
Photo. courtesy of the Dordrechts Museum. 171
FIG. ek Liberty Leading the People on the Barricades or July 28,
1830 (1830-1831) by Eugene Delacroix. Musée du
Louvre, Paris. Photo. courtesy of Alinari. A77
FIG, 14. “La Rue Transnonain, le 14 avril 1834” (1834) by
Honoré Daumier, lithograph from a supplement to La
Caricature. Photo. courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1920. 179
FIG. 1s. The Uprising (ca. 1848) by Honoré Daumier. Photo.
courtesy of the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
FIG. 16. The Man with the Hoe (1862-1863) by Jean Francois
Millet. Photo. from the San Francisco Museum of Art,
courtesy of W. W. Crocker. 183
FIG. 17; The Stone-Breakers (1850, now destroyed) by Gustave
Courbet. Photo. courtesy of the Staatliche Kunstsamm-
lungen Dresden, from the Deutsche Fotothek Dresden. 188
FIG. 18. The Studio (1855) by Gustave Courbet. Photo. courtesy
of the Musée du Louvre, Paris; Cliché des Musées Na-
tionaux. 191
FIG. 19. “A Barricade” in the Revolution of 1830 (1846) by
Philippe Auguste Jeanron. From Louis Blanc, Histoire
de dix ans (sth ed., Paris: Pagnerre, 1846), Vol. 1, opp.
Pp. 199. 502-3
FIG. 20. A Corner of the Studio (1845) by Octave Tassaert.
Photo. courtesy of the Musée du Louvre, Paris; Cliché des
Musées Nationaux. 195
FIG. 21. The Digger (1900) from a proposed Monument to the
 Illustrations / xvii

Workers, sculpture by Jules Dalou. Petit Palais, Paris.

Photo. courtesy of Giraudon. 204
FIG. 22. Design for a “Vaulted Hall—Iron and Masonry” (1864)
by Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. From Viollet-le-
Duc, Entretiens sur l'architecture, Vol. 2 (Paris, 1872),
Fig. 18, opp. p. 32. 211

FIG. 23) The Poultry Market (1882) by Camille Pissarro. Photo.

from a negative courtesy of Bernheim-Jeune, Paris. zat
FIG. 24. The Siesta, Eragny (1899) by Camille Pissarro. Photo.
supplied by the Department of Art and Archaeology,
Princeton University. 232-3
FIG. 25. Men Before a Factory (1882-1883), drawing by Georges
Seurat. Photo. courtesy of the Musée du Louvre, Paris;
Cliché des Musées Nationaux.
FIG. 20. The Pile Drivers (1902) by Maximilien Luce. Photo.
courtesy of Frédéric Luce. 239
FIG. Py “Portrait of Maximilien Luce” (reading La Révolte) by
Paul Signac, from La Plume, September 1, 1891, p. 288. 242
FIG. 28. “Le Démolisseur’ by Paul Signac, lithograph for the
Temps nouveaux series, announced September 26, 1896.
From Robert L. and Eugenia W. Herbert, “Artists and
Anarchism; Unpublished Letters of Pissarro, Signac and
Others—I,” Burlington Magazine, Vol. 102 (Nov. 1960),
Fig. 18, opp. p. 473. 243
FIG. 20. The Anarchist (1892), woodcut by Félix Vallotton. From
Hedy Hahnloser, Felix Vallotton, 1865-1925, Vol. 1,
Der Graphiker (Zurich: Verlag der Ziircher Kunstgesell-
schaft, 1927), Pl. 2. Photo. courtesy of the Kunsthaus
Ziirich, by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 246

FIG. 30. “And that one?” “He shouted ‘Long live liberty.’” By
Félix Vallotton, from L’Assiette au beurre, March 1, 1902,
p. 771. Photo. from the Princeton University Library. 247
FIG. 24. The Bearers of the Burden (April 1881), drawing with
wash by Vincent Van Gogh. Photo. courtesy of the Rijks-
museum Krdller-Miiller, Otterlo. 259
FIG. 32. Washerwomen at, Arles (1888) by Paul Gauguin. Photo.
courtesy of William S. Paley. 260

FIG. 33- “Winter: ‘Are the Prisons Heated?” by Alexandre

Stein-
len, from L’Assiette au beurre, April 4, 1901, pp. 8-9.
Photo. from the Princeton University Library. 264
XVili / ILLUSTRATIONS

FIG. 34. Project for the station of Une Cité industrielle (1901-
1904?) by Tony Garnier. From Garnier, Une Cité
industrielle (Paris: Vincent, 1917), Pl. 64. 268
FIG. 35. Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1910-1911) by Carlo
Carra. Collection, the Museum of Modern Art, New
York. Photo. courtesy of the Museum. 276-7
FIG. 36. The Revolt (1911-1912) by Luigi Russolo. Collection,
Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. Photo. courtesy of -
the Gemeentemuseum. 278
FIG. 37: Dynamism (Automobile) (1913) by Luigi Russolo.
Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Paris; Cliché des Musées
Nationaux. 279
FIG. 38. Project for skyscraper apartments from the Cittd nuova
(1914) by Antonio Sant’Elia. From Alberto Sartons, Gli
elementi dell’architettura funzionale (2d ed., Milan:
Ulrico Hoepli, 1935), p. 316. 280
FIG. 39. “Liberty” by Frank Kupka, from L’Assiette au beurre,
January 11, 1902, pp. 8-9. Photo. from the Princeton
University Library. 282
FIG. 40. Fugue (1911-1912), pastel by Frank Kupka. From Jean
Cassou and Denise Fédit, Kupka (Paris: Editions Tisné,
1964), courtesy of Verlag Gerd Hatje, Stuttgart. 284
FIG. . Abundance (1910) by Henri Le Fauconnier. Collection,
Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. Photo. courtesy
of the Gemeentemuseum. 289
FIG. 42. Evocation of Lenin (1933) by Salvador Dali. Photo. from
the Archives Photographiques, Paris, courtesy of the artist. 307
FIG. 43. The Workers’ Meal (1935-1936) by Jean Lurcat. From
Claude Roy, Jean Lurgat (Geneva, 1956). Photo. courtesy
of the publisher, Pierre Cailler, Editeur, Pully-Lausanne,
Switzerland. 310
FIG. . Marseille, Unité d’habitation (1947-1952) by Le Cor
busier. Photo. courtesy of Wayne Andrews.
315
FIG. 45. Drawing of an anaichist meeting by Pablo Picasso, said
to have been made for Blanco y negro (1897?). From
Anthony Blunt and Phoebe Pool, Picasso; The Formative
Years (New York: New York Graphic Society, 1962) ?
Fig. 60, courtesy of the New York Graphic Society, and .
permission of SPADEM 1969 by French Reproduction
Rights, Inc.
323
FIG. Guernica (1937) by Pablo Picasso. Collection, the Mu-
 Illustrations / xix

seum of Modern Art, New York. Photo. courtesy of the

Museum; Soichi Sunami, photographer. 326-7
FIG. 47. “A Miner” (1948) by Edouard Pignon, from Arts de
France, Nos. 23-24, p. 40. O20
FIG. . The Constructors (final version, 1950) by Fernand Léger.
Photo. courtesy of the Musée Fernand Léger, Biot, and
of SPADEM 1967 by French Reproduction Rights, Inc. 331
FIG. 49. National Defense (1950) by André Fougeron, from his
series Le Pays des mines. Bucharest Museum. Photo.
courtesy of the artist; Photo. Cauvin, Paris, photographer. 335
FIG. 50. “Blast-Furnace Team” (1947) by Boris Taslitzky, from
Arts de France, Nos. 13-14, p. 47. 337
FIG. 51. Riposte (1951) by Boris Taslitzky. Photo. courtesy of the
artist; Hervochon, Paris, photographer. 338-9
FIG. . “Dove” (1949) by Pablo Picasso, from the poster for the
World Congress of Peace, Paris, 1949, reproduced from
the New York Daily Worker, April 14, 1949, p. 1, cour-
tesy of the Daily World, and permission of SPADEM
1969 by French Reproduction Rights, Inc. (The repro-
duction was cropped at the top by the Daily Worker.) 341
FIG. 53. Massacre in Korea (1951) by Pablo Picasso. Collection of
the artist; but reproduced from Wilhelm Boeck and
Jaime Sabartés, Picasso (New York and Amsterdam:
Harry N. Abrams, 1955), p. 429, courtesy of SPADEM
1961 by French Reproduction Rights, Inc. 342-3
FIG. 54. War (1952) by Pablo Picasso. Musée National Picasso,
Vallauris; but reproduced from Wilhelm Boeck and Jaime
Sabartés, Picasso (New York and Amsterdam: Harry N.
Abrams, 1955), p. 430, courtesy of SPADEM 1961 by
French Reproduction Rights, Inc. 344-5
FIG. 55: “Stalin” by Pablo Picasso, from Les Lettres frangaises,
March 12-19, 1953, p. 1. Photo. courtesy of the Museum
of Modern Art, New York; Soichi Sunami, photographer. 349
FIG. 56. Liberation of the Concentration Camp of Buchenwald,
April 11, 1945 (1964), oil sketch for painting, by Boris
Taslitzky. Photo. courtesy of the artist. oy

FIG. 57+ Peintres caréneurs (1964) by André Fougeron.

Artist’s
collection. Photo. courtesy of the artist; Photo. Cauvin,
Paris, photographer. 358
xx / ILLUSTRATIONS

ric. 58. Model (1966) of the future building for the Central
Committee of the French Communist Party, by Oscar
Niemeyer. Photo. courtesy of L’Humanité, Paris. 359

FIG. 59. Sketch for Homage to New York (1960) by Jean

Tin-
guely. Collection, the Museum of Moder n Art, New
York; gift of Peter Selz. Photo. courtesy of the Museum
of Modern Art; Soichi Sunami, photographer. 367
FIG. 60. Orion-C (1963) by Victor Vasarely. Photo. courtesy of-
Galerie Denise René, Paris, eye.
Fics. 61 and 62. Neon No.3 (1965), two stages of a construction
with flashing neon tubes, by Frangois Morellet. Photos.
courtesy of Matko Me&trovié; Branko Bali¢, Zagreb,
photographer. 3713
FIG. 63. Project for an “Industry-House Establishment” (1787- )
by Jeremy Bentham. From The Works of Jeremy Ben-
tham, John Bowring, ed., Vol. 4 (Edinburgh: W. Tait,
1843), frontispiece (furniture omitted). 383
FIG. 64. Robert Owen’s project (1816) for a Village of Cooper-
ation, with other Villages in the distance. From Catherine
Bauer, Modern Housing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1934), p- 69. 392
FIG. 65. Robert Owen’s project (1825) for a communal settle-
ment at New Harmony, Ind., designed by Stedman
Whitwell. From the Cooperative Magazine and Monthly
Herald, No. 1 (Jan. 1826), but reproduced from George
B. Lockwood, The New Harmony Movement (New York:
D. Appleton, 1905), Opp. p. 70. 393
FIG. 66. London, Crystal Palace (1851), interior, by Joseph Pax-
ton. From Dickinson's Comprehensive Pictures of the
Great Exhibition of 1851 (London, 1854); but reproduced
from John Gloag and Derek Bridgwater, A History of
Cast Iron in Architecture (London: George Allen and
Unwin, 1948), frontispiece. 408
FIG. 67. James Silk Buckingham’s “Proposed Model ‘Town of Vic-
toria” (1849). From Buckingham, National Evils and
Practical Remedies (London: Peter Jackson, [1849]),
frontispiece. 412-13
FIG. 68. The cultural center of Robert Pemberton’s project (1854)
for “Queen Victoria Town,” New Zealand. From Pem-
berton, The Happy Colony (London: Saunders & Otley,
1854); but reproduced from Visionary Architecture,
 Illustrations / xxi

intro. by Kurt von Meier, Auckland City Art Gallery,

October 1962, unpaged. 414
FIG. 60. O’Shea at work on the Oxford Museum of Natural
Science in the late 1850’s. From Kenneth Clark, The
Gothic Revival (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1929), Pl. 19. Photo. courtesy of Constable and Co., Ltd.;
Hills and Saunders, photographers. 421
FIG. 70. Bexley Heath, Kent, Red House (1859-1860) by Philip
Webb for William Morris. From William R. Lethaby,
Philip Webb and His Work (London: Oxford University
Press, 1935), Opp. p. 4. 428
FIG. 71s An early type of Morris chair. From the Architectural
Review, August 1950, Fig. 5, p. 128. 429
FIG. 7. Typography by William Morris, a page from the Kelm-
scott edition (1892) of Caxton’s The Golden Legend.
From Gerald H. Crow, William Morris, Designer (Lon-
don: The Studio, 1934), p. 101. 433
FIG. 73: “The Capitalist Vampire” by Walter Crane, cover of the
American magazine, the Comrade, October 1903. 441
FIG. 74- The Race Meeting (1853), drawing by John Everett
Millais. From John G. Millais, The Life and Letters of
Sir John Everett Millais (New York: Stokes, 1899), Vol.
1, p. 153. 453
FIG. 75: Work (1852-1863) by Ford Madox Brown. Photo.
courtesy of the City Art Gallery, Manchester; Entwhistle,
Thorpe & Co. Ltd., photographers. 458
FIG. 76. “Houseless and Hungry’ by Luke Fildes, from the
Graphic, December 4, 1869, p. 9.

FIG. 77+ On Strike (1890) by Hubert von Herkomer. Photo.

courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts, London. 463
FIG. 78. Welwyn Garden City (1920- ), use-plan by Ebenezer
Howard, Louis de Soissons, and others. From Catherine
Bauer, Modern Housing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1934), Pl. 8-C. 483
FIG. 79: Hampstead Garden Suburb (1905- ), the Great Wall
and some of the larger houses as seen from the Heath
extension, by Raymond Unwin. Photo. courtesy of Wal-
ter Creese. 484
xxii / ILLUSTRATIONS

FIG. 80. Harlow, ten-story block of flats (1951

), The Lawn, Mark
esy of
Hall North, by Frederick Gibberd. Photo. court 488
the Harlow Development Corporatio n.
at the ex-
FIG. _ The Café (1938) by Graham Bell. (The figure
courtesy of
treme right is William Coldstream.) Photo.
the City Art Gallery, Manchester, from Sir William
Coldstream. 507

FIG. 82. “Cyrrealist Exhibition London 1936” by James Boswell,

from the Left Review, July 1936, p. 509. Photo. courtesy
of the artist, from the New York Public Library. 5

83. “For Charity” by James Fitton, from the Left Review

,
FIG.
The
February 1935. Reproduced from Julian Symons,
Thirties (London: The Cresset Press, 1960), Pl. 14,
510
courtesy of the author and James Fitton.
FIG. 84. “Hunger Marchers” by James Boswell, from International
Literature, December 1934, p. 78. Photo. courtesy of the
artist.
511

FIG. 85. Pit Boys at Pit Head (1942), drawing by Henry Moore.
Photo. courtesy of the Wakefield City Art Gallery, Eng-
land, from the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
512

FIG. 86. Goering, the Executioner (September 14, 1933), photo-

montage by John Heartfield, showing the burning Reichs-
tag in the background. Reproduced from Wieland Herz-
felde, John Heartfield (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst,
1964 ),p. 152. 525

FIG. 87. Sheffield (1953) by Derrick Greaves. Photo. courtesy of

the Balliol College Art Committee, Charles Burroughs,
Secretary; B. J. Harris, Oxford, photographer. 540
FIG. 88. “The Village Chairman” (1954), by Paul Hogarth. From
Hogarth, Looking at China (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, Ltd., 1956), p. 42. Photo. courtesy of the artist. 545

FIG. 89. Two Girls in a Wind (1956-1957), bronze by Betty Rea.

Photo. courtesy of Lettice Ramsey of Ramsey & Muspratt,
Ltd., Cambridge, England, photographers. 548
FIG. 90. “TAmerican] Soldiers in Transport Plane” (1966-1967)
by Gerald Scarfe. From Richard West, Sketches from
Vietnam (London: Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1968), p. 38.
Reprinted by permission of A. D. Peters & Co. 579
FIG. gl. The Public Funeral of Victims of the March Revolution
 Illustrations / xx11i

of 1848 (1848) by Adolph Menzel. Photo. courtesy of the

Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Ralph Kleinhempel, photographer. 595
FIG. 92. The Rolling Mill (1875) by Adolph Menzel. Photo. from
the National-Galerie, East Berlin, courtesy of the Staat-
liche Museen zu Berlin. 595
FIG. 93. Amsterdam, Stock Exchange (1898-1903) by Hendrik P.
Berlage. From Moderne Bowkunst in Nederland, No. 1
(Rotterdam: W. L. & J. Brusse N. V., 1932), p. 24. 602

FIG. 94. Amsterdam, Stock Exchange (1898-1903), interior, by

Hendrik P. Berlage. Photo. courtesy of Dr. Franz Stoedt-
ner. 603
by
FIG. 95- The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889 (1888)
James Ensor. Photo. courtesy of Louis Franck and the
Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts, Antwerp, from the Museum
of Modern Art, New York; Soichi Sunami, photographer. 606

FIG. 096. After the Strike (ca. 1887) by Jan Toorop. Photo. cour-
tesy of the Rijksmuseum Kréller-Miiller, Otterlo. 607
drawing by Jan
FIG. 97- In Front of the Workhouse (ca. 1892),
Toorop. From Anthony Blunt and Phoebe Pool, Picasso;
The Formative Years (New York: New York Graphic
Society, 1962), Fig. 61. 608

FIG. 98. Brussels, Maison du peuple (1896-1899, now destroyed )

by Victor Horta. From L’Architettura; Cronache e storia,
December 1957, p. 548.
899, now destroyed),
FIG. 99: Brussels, Maison du peuple (1896-1
interior of the theater, by Victor Horta. Photo. courtesy
of Dr. Franz Stoedtner.
FIG. 100. Uccle, Henry van de Velde’s own
house (1895-1896).
Photo. supplied by the Depar tment of Art and Archae-
614
ology, Princeton University.
FIG. 101. Brass inkwell (1898) by Henry van de Velde. Photo.
courtesy of the Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum,
616
Trondheim, Norway.
Meunier.
FIG. 102. The Puddler (ca. 1885), bronze by Constantin
University;
Photo. courtesy of the Art Museum, Princeton
619
Elizabeth Menzies, photographer.
Masereel. From
FIG. 103. The Worker (1949), woodcut by Frans
eae
Frans Masereel: mit Beitrégen von Stefan ZWei 620
44.
(Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1959), Fig.
xxiv / ILLUSTRATIONS

FIG. 104. Workmen on Their Way Home (1916) by Edvard

Munch. Photo. courtesy of Kommunes Kunstsamlinger,
Oslo; O. Vaering, photographer.
FIG. 105. Memorial to Karl Liebknecht (1919-1920), woodcut
by Kathe Kollwitz. Reproduced from Kathe Kollwitz,
intro. by F. Schmalenbach (Bern: Renaissance Verlag,
1927), Pl. 60. 629

FIG. 106. The Propeller Song (“We Protect the Soviet Union”),
lithograph for a poster (1932) by Kathe Kollwitz. Re-
produced from Kaethe Kollwitz, intro. by Carl Zigrosser
(New York: H. Bittner, 1946), Fig. 59, courtesy of Henry
Regnery Co. 630

FIG. 107. “Hunger” (ca. 1924) by Heinrich Zille. From Otto

Nagel, H. Zille ({East] Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1961),
p. 167, courtesy of Frau Margarete Kohler-Zille. 631

FIG. 108. “The Communists Fall—and the Exchange Rises” by

George Grosz, from Grosz, Das Gesicht der herrschenden
Klasse, Kleine revolutionare Bibliothek, Band 4 (Berlin:
Malik-Verlag, 1921), Pl. 19. 635
FIG. 109. “Cathedral of Socialism” (1919), woodcut by Lyonel
Feininger for the first manifesto of the Bauhaus. Re-
produced from Hans Hess, Lyonel Feininger (New York:
Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1961), p. 88. 647
FIG. 110. Dessau, Bauhaus workshops (1925-1926) by Walter
Gropius. From Gropius, The New Architecture and the
Bauhaus (Boston: Charles T. Branford Co., 1955), Pl. 7. 652

FIG. 111. Berlin (near), monument to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa

Luxemburg (1926, now destroyed) by Mies van der Rohe.
From Philip C. Johnson, Mies van der Rohe (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1947), p. 37, courtesy of Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe. 658
FIG. 112. Weimar, memorial to those killed in the Kapp Putsch
(1921, destroyed but rebuilt), by Walter Gropius. From
Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius, eds.,
Bauhaus, 1919-1928 (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1938), p. 203, courtesy of Walter Gropius. 661
FIG. 113. Products of the Bauhaus by various designers. From
Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus
(Boston: Charles T’. Branford Co., 1955), Pl. 5. 666
FIG. . Vienna, Karl Marx Hof (1924-1928) by Karl Ehn. From
 Illustrations / xXXV

Catherine Bauer, Modern Housing (Boston: Houghton

Mifflin, 1934), Pl. 41—-A. 668
FIG. tis: Vienna, Karl Marx Hof (1924-1928), plan, by Karl Ehn.
From Catherine Bauer, Modern Housing (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1934), Pl. 41-B. 668
FIG. 710, Berlin, Siemensstadt, housing (1929) by Walter Gropius.
From Catherine Bauer, Modern Housing (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1934), Pl. 1-A. 670
FIG. Tay Berlin, Siemensstadt, plan of housing (row in black at
left is that by Gropius illustrated in Fig. 116). From
Catherine Bauer, Modern Housing (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1934), p. 179. 670
FIG. 118. Rhythm of a Russian Dance (1918) by Theo van Does-
burg. Collection, the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Photo. courtesy of the Museum; Soichi Sunami, pho-
tographer. 675
FIG. 119. Nickel Construction (1921) by Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy. Col-
lection, the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo.
courtesy of the Museum. 676

FIG. 120. Korea (1949), drawing by Renato Guttuso. From John

Berger, Renato Guttuso (Dresden: VEB Verlag der
Kunst, 1957), p. 21. 695
FIG. 121. The Miner (1953) by Renato Guttuso. From Iskusstvo,
No. 9, 1958, Fig. 26, p. 29. 696

FIG. 122. “UniData-Programm” (1964), office equipment for use

with electronic data processing machines, designed by
Tom4s Maldonado in collaboration with Rudolf
Scharfenberg and Gui Bonsiepe. From Ulm 12/13; Zeit-
schrift der Hochschule fiir Gestaltung, March 1965, p. 63;
courtesy of Tomas Maldonado. 701
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 FOREWORD

Doonaxp D. Ecsert’s multivolume study of the relations between political

radicalism and the arts (of which this is the first, self-contained volume)
began as one of a series of books about Communist influence in American
life under the sponsorship of the Fund for the Republic. In the course of
Professor Egbert’s inquiry he moved, marching to the beat of his own
drummer but also with my approval and indeed encouragement, beyond
the limits fixed in the terms of our original understanding. The result will
be an elaborate treatment of a compelling subject in several separate but
closely related studies.
He and [ are both grateful for the early generosity of the Fund for the
Republic, which, in effect, made it possible for him to link up the relation
of American Marxism and the arts to other forms of social radicalism. I am
grateful also for the subsequent generosity of the Department of Art and
Archaeology, the Council of the Humanities, and the University Research
Fund—all of Princeton University—which made it possible for him to go
much farther with his researches into the cultural background of Commun-
ism in the present book, and in another in which he proposes to investi-
gate Communism and the arts in Russia. His volumes, I am certain, will be
landmarks in the development of our understanding of both Marxist
thought and Western art.
Clinton Rossiter, Cornell University
General Editor, Studies of Communism in American Life
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 PREFACE

"Tus noox was crown out of my essay on socialism, communism, and the
arts published in the two-volume collaborative book, Socialism and Ameri-
can Life (Princeton, New Jersey, 1952), which I edited with Professor
Stow Persons. As a consequence of that essay (which, revised and enlarged,
was reissued separately as a paperback in 1967), Alfred H. Barr, Jr., of the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Lloyd Goodrich, of the
Whitney Museum of American Art, proposed that I undertake a study of
the effects of recent American anti-communism on artists and art. Shortly
thereafter, and partly at the suggestion of Mr. Goodrich, I was asked by
Professor Clinton Rossiter, general editor of the Fund for the Republic’s
series of books on Marxian communist influence in the United States, to
write for that series a book on communism and the arts. As this offered an
opportunity for combining the two proposals, I undertook to do so.
Because both American art and American social radicalism have had
their sources so largely in Europe, they cannot be adequately understood
without knowledge of the European origins of conceptions of art held by
American Marxists, anarchists, and other kinds of radicals. Yet no general
study has ever been made of the many relationships between the varieties
of social radicalism and artistically radical artists in Europe, especially since
the French Revolution. This is the reason for the present book, which the
author hopes to follow with others on the Soviet version of communism
and on social radicalism in the United States, as these affect the arts.
The entire study is intended to be a kind of cultural history of modern
radicalism as reflected in theories of art, works of art, and the social
activities and beliefs of their creators. A rough draft of the whole has
already been written. Because of the range of the work, its preparation
would of course have been impossible without the generous help of experts
in many fields. I am particularly indebted to Professor Rossiter for his
constant understanding and encouragement, and also to Theodore Draper,
the late Joseph Freeman, William C. Seitz, and Eugene Becker, all of
whom like Professor Rossiter read and criticized a preliminary draft of the
entire study. It was also looked over as a whole, and major portions read,
by Alfred Barr and Professor Daniel Aaron. Professor James Ackerman of
Harvard University provided stimulating criticism on various major points.
xxx / PREFACE

Needless to say, such merits as the work may now have are largely due to
the knowledge and abilities of these distinguished and forceful critics.
With specific regard to the present volume, I also owe much to former
colleagues at Princeton University. Professor William Homer, Professor
Robert Rosenblum, and Edward Fry have patiently answered my often
importunate queries out of their special knowledge of modern European
art. Professor George Mras has been especially helpful in going over the
section on France with particular reference to nineteenth-century art criti-
cism and its influence. Professor Kurt von Meier read the section on social
and artistic radicalism in Germany from the point of view of an art
historian interested in the history of ideas and working partly in the field of
twentieth-century German art. Of my present colleagues, Robert Judson
Clark has aided me in dealing with problems concerning architecture in
central Europe, and Kenneth Frampton with architecture in England.
Dr. Herbert Hiibner, sociologist of the arts and historian of the
Bauhaus, read and criticized not only the section on Germany but also the
Introduction and the chapters on Marx and Engels. Two great German-
American architects, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,
generously furnished information about the Bauhaus for the essay from
which this book has grown; and Professors Tomas Maldonado and Emilio
Ambasz have helped me to arrive at a better understanding of the history
and aims of the Hochschule fiir Gestaltung at Ulm. Wieland Herzfelde
kindly wrote me about recent activities of his brother, the artist John
Heartfield. I am much indebted to Professor Sidney Hook and Professor
Loyd Easton for enlightenment about specific aspects of Marxism, and to
Arthur Voyce for information about the arts and aesthetics in Russia.
Generous assistance with problems relating to art in France has been
furnished by Mrs. Eugenia Herbert, Boris Taslitzky, André Fougeron, Dr.
Bernard Geiser, the late Jean Lurcat, Miss Cecily Mackworth, Sir Roland
Penrose, Harold Rosenberg, Professors Roger Shattuck, George Wood-
cock, Anthony Eardley, and Arthur E. Bestor, Jr.
A draft of the section on England has been read and criticized by the
well-known British artist and socially oriented writer on graphic art, Paul
Hogarth, while the latter part of that section was also read by the late
Betty Rea, the sculptor who for many years was secretary of the Artists
International Association. Special acknowledgment and thanks must like-
wise be given to Julian Symons, as historian of the 1930’s in Britain, and to
James Boswell, Richard Carline, Fred and Diana Uhlman, Misha Black,
Ewan Phillips, Mrs. Marjorie Abbatt, Clifford Rowe, the late James Lucas,
Sir William Coldstream, Mrs. Evelyn Antal, Dr. Arnold Hauser, the late
Sir Herbert Read, John Berger, and Professor Neal Wood, for their
informative answers to queries about socio-artistic events in Britain in
which many of them had been active participants.
Because of the range of the work—to the immediate preparation of
which I have been devoting every effort apart from my teaching duties for
 Preface / xxxi

the past dozen years—much time and financial assistance have of course
been necessary. For securing these, the ever-encouraging help of Professor
Rensselaer Lee, former Chairman of the Department of Art and Archaeol-
ogy in Princeton University, of his successor in that position, Professor
David R. Coffin, and likewise of Professor Whitney J. Oates, Chairman
of Princeton’s Council of the Humanities, has been indispensable. The
organizations furnishing the necessary funds are listed in Professor Rossi-
ter’s foreword: to them I extend my own warm thanks here.
The research itself was largely carried out in the Princeton University
Library, the New York Public Library, and the library of the Museum of
Modern Art in New York, the members of whose staffs often went beyond
the call of duty in rendering always considerate assistance. I must also
gladly thank Mrs. Cecilia Howell and Mrs. Dorothy Silvester for typing
and re-typing numerous drafts, and my wife, Virginia Wylie Egbert, for
much editorial and research assistance.
Since the subject-matter of this book is so central to my entire study
of social radicalism and the arts in modern times, the inclusion of a few
words about the background of the author and his work may be of
relevance here. After all, not only do Marxists believe that the individual is
fundamentally determined by the period and society in which he lives, but
many who, like myself, are neither socialists nor communists agree, as I do,
with the dictum of the noted contemporary British historian Edward
Hallett Carr: “Before you study the history, study the historian. . . .”
With this in mind, it can be noted that my interest in the social
aspects of art and its history developed belatedly and almost accidentally. I
had no particular interest in social questions until, in the early 1940's as
the art-historian member of the Program of Study in American Civilization
at Princeton, I was asked to participate in an undergraduate conference on
“Socialism and American Life.” The subject was suggested by the talented
young philosopher of the Program, David F. Bowers, who had become
interested in social problems a decade earlier largely as a result of personal
hardships in the Depression. Professor Stow Persons and I participated
with him in conducting the conference, which resulted in the collaborative
book, Socialism and American Life, published after Bowers’s death. As I
mentioned, it was out of my essay in that book that this work developed.
In this Preface, let it be made very clear that my intent throughout
the whole study is to investigate—and do justice to—artists as highly
exceptional individuals within human society, even though the nature of
the subject makes it necessary to emphasize only those artists and art
critics who have actually or allegedly held radical beliefs as to what the
nature of society should be. ‘To avoid possible misunderstanding, it must
be stressed that this book is not intended as art history in any one of the
most usual senses of the term, but rather as constituting a kind of source-
book for the cultural history of modern social radicalism as seen through
the various arts and theories concerning them. On this account, relatively
Xxxli / PREFACE

little formal analysis of individual works of art has been made; and,
correspondingly, explicit evaluations of artistic ment deriving from formal
qualities of specific works are intentionally lacking.
Let me say also that in dealing with artists, their works, theories, and
activities with relation to their social attitudes, I have consciously tried to
be as objective as possible—though I am well aware that even natural
scientists no longer claim absolute objectivity and that my attempt to be
objective will bring down upon me the typical Marxist-Leninist accusation
of having succumbed to “bourgeois objectivism.” Furthermore, this book
has been written in the essentially non-Marxian belief that, however
scientifically objective the methods which the historian can and must
employ in establishing facts, the inevitable importance of qualitative judg-
ments, conscious or unconscious, not only in selecting facts but also in
explaining them, means that the writing of human history should be in the
end a humane discipline, in spite of E. H. Carr’s near-Marxist assertion to
the contrary. As such, history writing—while neither specifically an art nor
a science but sui generis in its own pluralistic approach to human affairs—
is in the end more like an art than an inductive science, even apart from
the question of the historian’s ability to achieve a degree of literary style.
Consequently, the historian (and especially one who, like the author, is an
art historian also professionally trained as an architect) should certainly
have some relation to, and sympathy for, artists of other kinds. In the best
of circumstances, however, the dominant spirit of the day in the Western
world, according to which literary “art” is often regarded as requiring
rigorous minimization of “factual” detail on the ground that detail only
obscures interpretation and expression, no doubt makes it peculiarly difh-
cult at best for a source-book of facts and ideas such as this to be accepted
as worthwhile historical “art.” Yet as one of the greatest of recent British
historians, the late Sir Lewis Namier, has written: “If history is not to be a
catalogue of mere suppositions it must be based on minute facts—facts
about people who mattered.” In the present book, of course, these “people
who mattered” include on the one hand artists and theorists of art, and on
the other, social theorists and social activists who in some way have
affected the arts. In discussing them, however, a conscious effort has been
made to include not merely “minute facts” but also what the historian
Herbert Butterfield has criticized Namier’s followers for omitting, namely,
“things that enlarge the,mind.” Since there are relatively few books or
articles wholly relevant to the theme of this book, the numerous footnote
references are intended to take the place of a formal bibliography. They
will include mention of some of the more important items published while
this book is itself being prepared for publication.
One might add here that the criticisms, whether favorable or unfavor-
able, offered by the numerous experts in various fields who have so kindly
read drafts of all or part of this work have made it obvious that in our age
of specialization little agreement exists as to what the “essential facts” are
 Preface / xXxxill

for this kind of wide-ranging book. Indeed, many of the criticisms, valuable
and, indeed, indispensable as they certainly have been, have mostly told as
much about the critics who made them as they have about the study of
which this book is a part. Nor have the critics by any means agreed as to
the style of writing that such a study requires. Let it be said here that for
better or for worse I have tried to employ, as being harmonious with my
subject-matter, a “functional” style not unlike that which—we shall see—
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels consciously sought to develop for them-
selves. In attempting to achieve this, I have become much indebted to the
expert and kindly help of my editor, Mr. Herbert Weinstock.
Of course, any historical work may fail as “art” for a variety of reasons.
Yet insofar as this book and future related volumes thus fail, a statement
by the great French historian Jules Michelet offers some solace to the
author. In one of Michelet’s prefaces (as quoted by Edmund Wilson) he
explains that if his narrative lacks the symmetry of art, it is because the
facts of history won’t permit it. Another remark by Michelet, made in one
of his letters, is further consoling to me as it must be to any other
historian. “You would have difficulty,” he wrote, “imagining how hard it is
to reduce that long string of centuries to the unity of a work of art.”
This does not mean, of course, that I venture to think significant unity
has been achieved in this work with anything even remotely approaching
the success of that famous historian, champion of the people, near-Saint-
Simonian, and right-wing Hegelian, Michelet, who in his earlier works, at
least, was so great a stylist, and whose very partisanship for the French
Revolutionary tradition made for a livelier style. Nor am I even confident
that, despite every effort, major errors of omission or commission whether
of fact or interpretation have been successfully avoided within a study
which attempts to be both panoramic and specialized in harmony with
Ranke’s dictum concerning the nature of good historical writing. Yet if
such errors and my own limitations help to stimulate others to deal more
adequately with my subject, or with aspects of it, a major purpose of this
pioneering attempt will have been achieved. For surely the general topic is
one fundamental for understanding important aspects of culture in the
twentieth century no matter what the particular political, economic, or
other social inclinations of the reader may be.
Donald Drew Egbert
Princeton, New Jersey
December 31, 1968
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 INTRODUCTION

THE VARIETIES OF MODERN

RA DICALISM, THEIR ORIGINS
AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS
HOR ART

1. The Problem

Moan . . . creates in accordance with the laws of beauty.” * This asser-

tion, made by Karl Marx when he was about twenty-six years old and
before he devoted his life so largely to economics, suggests the theme of
this book as part of an investigation of the relationships of communism
and other forms of social radicalism to the arts in modern times. ‘Through-
out, the Marxian “laws of beauty” and their effects on the arts and their
history will be compared and contrasted with the art theories and practices
of rival forms of radicalism, such as anarchism, as well as with those of
Marx’s “utopian” predecessors in socialism and communism. Where this
book deals with western Europe, others are planned that will consider
Russia and the United States.
As was noted in the Preface, the aim of the study as a whole will be to
serve as a kind of source-book for the cultural history of modern radicalism
as seen through the history of art. At the same time it traces the history of
that alienation of avant-garde artists from prevailing society in modern
times which has led so many of them to social radicalism, often of some
overtly political kind. In this work, therefore, the relation of the arts to
man’s social ideas and social environment will be studied by investigating
the direct and indirect effects of communism and other kinds of social
radicalism on the works and on the activities, artistic and social, of
radically inclined artists and art critics. Especially will it seek to find out
how the beliefs of an artist in a field other than art—namely, his social
beliefs—are related to his own works and also to the theories of radical
critics of both society and art. It is for this reason that the contents do not
4 / INTRODUCTION

represent art history in any of the most usual senses of the term, but rather
an important aspect of cultural history: the history of social conceptions as
they affect and are affected by the theories, actions, and creations of that
most individualistic type of human being, the modern artist. Yet in the
course of the investigation the more usual approaches to the history of art
—chronological, biographical, philosophical, critical, psychological, aes-
thetic, formalistic, iconographic, etc.—will necessarily enter in as part of
the effort to achieve as broad a cultural perspective on our theme as
possible.’
"Inasmuch as nearly all of the artists and critics discussed in this book
and its fellows have either in fact or allegedly been sympathetic to some
form of communism or other kind of social radicalism, the arts and their
social background have to be investigated in almost equal measure as
answers are sought to questions such as the following: In the light of the
relationships—or absence of them—between the social radicalism of artists
and their works of art, how are social radicalism and aesthetic radicalism
related to each other? How are the beliefs of artists and art critics related
to their social environment? To what degree have the artist and critic been
determined by that environment? Or in what ways and why have they
sought to change the environment, especially in industrialized societies;
and what have been the effects of this effort on works of art? To what
extent do art forms and art criticism develop independently of the social
environment? What effects do art historians and critics have on artists?
Lastly, ought each work of art be evaluated with reference to the environ-
ment and beliefs of the artist, as communists and other social radicals hold,
or solely in its own right? In other words, are those art historians and critics
who devote themselves primarily to the artist’s social milieu or ideas rather
than to his individual works guilty of a “genetic fallacy,” as is so often
maintained, particularly by those who believe in art for art’s own sake?
Communism—like fascism—traises with particular immediacy the
questions as to how the nature, the role, and the problems of art are
affected by mass society, and as to whether the effects have any relevance
to artistic quality. A further question concerns the results of government
control on the arts, especially when the government is a more or less
totalitarian one. Then, communists have often had the support of some
non-communists while encountering the opposition of other non-
communists, so that the consequences for art both of the collaboration be-
tween communists and other kinds of radicals and reformists and of the
particular opposition of anti-ccommunists on the Right must equally be
accounted for. By looking for the answers to such problems with direct
reference to specific artists and works of art, the relation of communism
and other socially radical movements to culture can be studied in’ a highly
concrete way.
In the course of arriving at possible answers, three different though
closely interrelated subjects require constant investigation. First, it is neces-
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 5

sary to study the art theories of,.communists and other radicals to see the
relationships between those theories and possibly corresponding socio-
political theories. Second, the social and political activities of socially
committed artists, activities which they and many of their fellow radicals,
at least, have at the time regarded as so important, will require investiga-
tion. Finally, we must seek to determine the nature and value of the
effects of such art theories and socio-political beliefs and actions on the
works of art created by socially engaged artists.
The originality of this study will lie neither in its treatment of
socio-political history nor in its art history, although in each of these areas
important material never before assembled has been gathered together,
and new interpretations made. In a work of such size and scope the author,
even more than most historians, is necessarily dependent on the original
research of innumerable historians of many kinds who have preceded him.
Nevertheless, perhaps the scope itself gives rise to an essentially new
approach, while the work can claim a degree of originality for its docu-
mented discussion of the interrelationships—and lack of them—between
certain major aspects of social history and art history. It can also ask for’
serious consideration of its conclusions, because these will have been
reached on the basis of more thorough documentation than has been
attempted before in this field.
One might add parenthetically that the necessity for such detailed
documentation does not result simply from an intent to be “scientific”
based on a belief that the scholar ought to proceed in the way that
scientists have often been mistakenly supposed to take—by erecting hy-
potheses only after enormous fact-finding. It springs instead especially
from the fact that each work of art necessarily possesses an element of
significant uniqueness, as also do the insights of each artist capable of
creating such works. The problem of achieving a balanced structure of
documented observation and of hypothesis, of both the “how” and the
“why” of history, is therefore especially difficult in dealing with the history
of art. And the difficulties are only compounded when art history is studied
in connection with contemporary social history, thereby becoming cultural
history in a wider way.
As the subject-matter of the present book and proposed companion
volumes on Russia and the United States should make clear, in both
geographical range and time span they differ markedly from the remainder
of the series of books on communist influence, sponsored by the Fund for
the Republic, within which my own work on communism and the arts was
originally commissioned as a single volume. For the other books in the
Fund for the Republic’s series have been devoted specifically to communist
influence on American life alone while being essentially restricted to the
particular brand of Marxian communism, now known as Marxism-
Leninism, which spread to the United States from Russia in the years
following the triumph of the Bolsheviks in 1917, and especially after the
6 / INTRODUCTION

rise of Stalin to power. However, the investigation of relationships be-

tween the arts and even Marxism-Leninism requires a broader historical
perspective than does the study of communism in other fields. Com-
munism in the arts is not so easily identifiable as it is in most other areas
of thought and action, because by the very nature of art itself connections
between art and communism are often indirect and highly tenuous, with
supposed connections frequently turning out to be non-existent. To avoid
erroneous conclusions even about American art, artists, and art critics, it
is necessary to consider the arts against the general historical background
of the radical influences which have spread within and from Europe.
This study therefore could not adequately be restricted to the period
since 1917, nor could it adequately be limited to communism and to a
single country. After all, great works of art—in contrast to most great
political achievements in an age of nationalism—make an appeal to the
hearts of men that goes beyond national boundaries. And surely, also, the
most important forms of radicalism, such as Marxism and its outgrowth,
Marxism-Leninism, are consciously international movements that cannot
be thoroughly comprehended by investigating communism merely in some
one country into which they have spread, and in which, as in the United
States, they have all too often become confused with other forms of
radicalism and even with reformism. Nor can they be wholly understood
by considering them in the country of their origin alone. Instead, they
must be investigated both in their spread and in their original home, at
once separately and together—and this is particularly important in study-
ing them in relation to the arts.
It is for reasons such as these that this book will be but one in a series
by the same author, and that it is itself divided into four Parts, after an
Introduction dealing with the major aspects of modern secular social
radicalism and their immediate sources in the late eighteenth century. The
first of the four Parts is devoted to the two most influential social radicals
of all time, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—to their lives in relation to
their doctrines with meaning for the arts. Relatively little has been written
by non-Marxist authors on the subject of their theories relevant to art, and
thus comparatively little by authors who, like the author of this book,
attempt to be as objective as possible. Because the author is not a Marxist,
orthodox Marxists will, of course, maintain that by that very fact he is
necessarily incapable of understanding Marxism, since they hold that only
through participating directly and wholeheartedly in Marxist action can
one come to understand the Marxian communist movement. And they
believe that there is no such thing as “objectivity,” that one’s views of
history are ultimately determined by the economic class to which one
belongs by birth or by wholehearted adoption. I would agree that there can
be no “scientific objectivity” in writing history, that the historian is indeed
inevitably formed to a considerable degree by his environment, as well as
‘by his heredity, but would maintain that with due care the historian can
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 7

increase his objectivity somewhat, and that some historians are able to be
more objective than others. After all, even a partial historical truth is less
futile than the assertion that historical truth is impossible. As everyone
knows, Marx and Engels based on historical principles their entire system
of “scientific socialism” —which for non-Marxists is in fact largely utopian
and at best reveals only partial truths. Nevertheless, positively or nega-
tively, even as partial truths their ideas have, of course, been profoundly
significant for culture, and so for the arts, throughout the modern world—
and in western Europe longer than elsewhere.
The remaining three Parts of the book therefore investigate the theory
and practice of art in relation to social radicalism in three major geographi-
cal areas of Europe, with Marxism considered in relation to rival social
movements. Because Marx and Engels grew up in post-Napoleonic Europe
(Marx was born in 1818, and Engels two years later), these Parts begin
with the study of radicalism and the arts after the French Revolution and
the fall of Napoleon in order better to understand the background out of
which Marxian theories of art developed. It was, of course, a background in
which the burgeoning Industrial Revolution (so named in the 1820's by
analogy with the French Revolution) was a primary factor. Thus the
second Part deals with social radicalism—including, eventually, Marxian
radicalism—and the theory and practice of art in France after 1815, with
some reference to Spain, and also to Switzerland simply because so many
radicals exiled from France and other countries sought refuge there. Part
III is similarly devoted to England, and Part IV to Germany, Austria, and
the neighboring countries of Holland, Belgium, Scandinavia, and Italy.
In this way, then, the book furnishes background for understanding
the effects on culture of the spread of modern social radicalism from its
origins in western Europe to Russia, still the chief focus of international
Marxism (though now threatened by Red China), and from both to the
United States, the leading non-communist and anti-communist country of
our time. For this reason, in the present book those aspects and regions of
European social radicalism are stressed whose influence has particularly
affected the Soviet Union and the United States.
It should be emphasized that not only the “fine arts” but also what
many would call “minor arts,” crafts, or “applied” and industrial arts are
investigated, and there is even some reference to civil engineering. This is
because socialists and communists, together with some non-communists, in
demanding socially useful art tend to do away with any distinction be-
tween fine arts on the one hand and crafts and applied arts on the
other—that distinction regarded as so fundamental by the classic-academic
tradition in art. Correspondingly, also, they hardly distinguish among
architecture, building, and civil engineering, especially when civil engineer-
ing is applied to public works useful to society as a whole. Although
emphasis throughout is placed on what are usually called the visual arts or
arts of design—on painting, sculpture, the graphic arts, architecture, and
8 / INTRODUCTION

related crafts—which are the arts the author knows best, there will be
frequent mention of other arts. There will be at least some reference to the
dance, especially in a later volume on Russia, and also to the theater and
motion pictures, which themselves are at least partly visual arts; and occa-
sionally the non-visual art of music will be referred to when it casts light on
the interrelations of communism and other kinds of radicalism with the
arts of design. Furthermore, literary figures, in addition to art critics, who
have made major contributions to the climates of opinion within which
visual arts have developed, will frequently be cited.
A book on the subject of communism, other radicalism, and the arts
needs to deal with the several arts and crafts because secular socialists and
communists in modern times have commonly believed that society is a
kind of living organism, with all its parts vitally interrelated like the parts
of such an organism. Marxian communists further hold that all aspects of a
human society—including, therefore, its arts—are interrelated because ulti-
mately determined by the existing situation in political economy, specifi-
cally by the economic mode of production prevailing in the particular stage
of society. It is on this account,that any political or economic decision
made by the leaders of the Soviet Union is expected to affect, and to be
taken into immediate account by, all aspects of Soviet culture, including
all the arts. Similarly, when a decision is issued concerning any aspect of
culture, such as a single art, it is immediately supposed to be applied to all
aspects of culture, including all the arts and crafts. Communists every-
where, of course, have been expected by the Soviet leaders to take strict
account of these decisions—though the recalcitrance of the Red Chinese
has of late immensely complicated the situation.
It should be remembered, also, that historically Marxism and other
forms of socialism and communism, including most varieties of anarchism,
have themselves been so interrelated that they cannot be understood in
complete isolation from one another in spite of the efforts of Marxists to
set off Marxism by itself. This means that, in order to trace accurately the
historical strands leading to contemporary relationships between the arts
and the major varieties of radical belief, it will be necessary to locate
historically and define, later in this Introduction, the various meanings
which have been given to such terms as communism, socialism, anarchism,
and radicalism, and also to such others as democracy and even liberalism
because these have been claimed by communists for themselves. At the
same time, some indication will be given of the historically varied implica-
tions for art of each of these originally socio-political terms—implications
to be studied in detail in the chapters that follow.
I am thoroughly aware that there are many, including many artists,
who are skeptical of the value of any of the arts as vehicles for the study of
communism, especially in non-communist countries. Art, they say, is art,
not politics, economics, or sociology; and they rightly insist that works of
art are not merely historical or social documents. They also maintain that
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 9

the non-artistic activities of an artist are irrelevant in judging the quality of

his works. But the communist point of view (as well as that of the social
sciences ) is that art is not and cannot be independent of other aspects and
activities of life, and that those who hold otherwise are wrong. Commu-
nists—and social scientists—insist that, to an important degree, the work
of art is inevitably a product of its time and place, including its social
environment: as William Morris wrote after becoming a kind of Marxian
communist, “it is impossible to exclude socio-political questions from the
consideration of aesthetics.” * After all, it is this point of view that is being
investigated in the present book. In any case, it is surely the duty of art
historians to deal not only with the history of the creation of works of art
but equally with the history of the effects of art on culture, because a work
of art, besides being the product of an artist or group of artists working in a
certain environment, evokes reactions from that environment.
Certainly most of the leading social radicals, including Karl Marx
himself, have been interested in art, even though nearly all of them have
assigned to it a secondary role. For instance, Marx studied the history and
philosophy of art as a university student. In the late 1850's, relatively early
in his career but well after he made the statement with which this
Introduction begins, he copied from a book on aesthetics many statements
that interested him, and in a fragmentary draft for an introduction to his
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy specifically sought to
investigate the connections between art and economic conditions. Later,
after he had turned his primary attention to economics, Marx still did not
fail to consider the relation of art to the economic development which he
regarded as ultimately exerting a determining influence on the other
aspects of human life. Nevertheless, unlike many of his followers, he was
careful to point out that art is not determined by economics in any
one-to-one way.
Although Lenin did not pretend to know much about the arts, he too
found himself attracted to and affected by them. His wife recorded his
interest in paintings. So fond was he of music, especially the music of
Beethoven, so much did it affect his nerves and emotions, that he once said
he was afraid to listen to Beethoven’s Appassionata too often, for fear that
it might affect his judgment. Quite early he regretted his lack of knowledge
of the history of art, which he saw as a most attractive field, one in which
there was much valuable work to be done by some Marxist. Furthermore,
Lenin became the first great Marxian leader to comprehend the full
possibility of art for propaganda and agitation, calling not long after the
Bolshevik Revolution for “propaganda by monuments.” * From this it was
easy to pass to the conception of “art as a weapon,” a social weapon which
could be used to forward the communist cause. This conception came to
prevail under Stalin, who had no knowledge of art and no interest in it for
its own sake. Following Lenin and Stalin, to this day the communist
leaders who now govern more than a third of all the people in the world
10 / INTRODUCTION

and influence many more through Communist parties elsewhere, hold—in

theory at least—that the significance of the arts lies in their usefulness for
promoting communist social aims in the effort to reach more rapidly the
Marxian goal of the classless society.
In the light of these facts, it is obvious that the arts are important for
any thorough study of communism, whether or not one accepts the com-
munist conceptions of the nature and purpose of art. The Marxist-Leninist
belief that art should be devoted to propaganda as a social weapon
raises with particular immediacy that basic problem of the relation be-
tween society and the individual which is so vital for the modern world.
Not only is it a problem that divides the communist and non-communist
sectors of the world in their battle for the minds of men, but it also has
divided and continues to divide communists themselves. ‘The conflicts in
Soviet Russia among Stalin, Trotsky, and other possible heirs of Lenin that
had begun even before his death, as well as the later ideological struggle
between the Soviet Union and Red China, have involved major implica-
tions for the arts destined to affect communists in western Europe as
elsewhere.
Stalin’s two greatest Soviet opponents, Trotsky and Bukharin, of
course fundamentally differed from him in their theories of communist
development, and therefore in their conceptions of the development of
culture and the arts. Although Bukharin—originally a landscape painter by
profession—and ‘Trotsky—a literary critic of ability who had been intro-
duced to the visual arts by his future wife when she was a student of art
history in Paris—also differed in their theories of art, neither subordinated
the arts so immediately and wholly to political ends as did the artistically
ignorant Stalin.
If, as Stalin and his political successors have tended to insist, the artist
is required to devote his art directly to social propaganda, it is obvious that
works of art will inevitably be immediately shaped by the artist’s political
environment, and directly censored by the government under which he
lives. Art will tend to be considered simply a social instrument—a concep-
tion springing largely from the French Revolution and then especially
from the beliefs of the first great modern socialist, Henri de Saint-Simon,
whose ideas strongly influenced Karl Marx. But in contrast to Stalin,
Saint-Simon, we shall see, ultimately gave the artist a primary role in
society. And to those—including Trotsky and Bukharin—who unlike Sta-
lin and his successors in the U.S.S.R. are sensitive to the arts themselves, it
seems far more obvious that significant works of art, even though necessar-
ily reflecting the time and place of their origin, are not and should not be
regarded merely as socially useful products of a given environment. For
they are also the personal products of talented individuals able to express
highly significant original insights through the medium of their art. Thus
the awareness of a Trotsky, for instance, that the great artist by his
sensitive intuition and originality of insight is often able to rise above his
environment and foreshadow future developments was indicated by his
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 11

statement: “Art, don’t you see, means prophecy. Works of art are the
embodiments of presentiments. . . .”° In saying this, Trotsky—uncon-
sciously influenced by a conception of the artist as prophet which had
been a contribution of the romantic movement to art theory—clearly
implied that the artist who has such presentiments about the future should
be able to transcend political doctrines dominant in his own time and
social environment. As a consequence, Trotsky and his followers abroad as
well as in the U.S.S.R. were accused by Stalinists everywhere of being
supporters of “art for art’s sake,” the doctrine, romantic in origin, that art
is autonomous and that the artist must therefore be free from outside
control over his art, and especially from political control. Yet Trotsky was
at first regarded by Stalinists as representing a deviation to the Left from
true Marxism-Leninism, while we shall see in this book that “art for art’s
sake” has often been closely connected with anarchists, whom communists
regard as the last bourgeois revolutionaries, and thus as subscribing to a
deviation of the Right. The confusion resulting from this Stalinist lack of
consistency in accusing Trotsky of both leftism and rightism has ever since
worked havoc on artists sympathetic to the Soviet brand of communism.
Because the attacks upon Trotsky and Bukharin by the Stalinists, in
the arts as in all other fields, were destined to have repercussions among
communists everywhere, in this and later books I shall often have occasion
to refer to artists or writers affected by them. Today, however, the chief
division in the communist world is of course that between the supporters
of the Soviet Union and those of Red China, with each group accusing the
other of heretical revisions of Marxist-Leninism. Although the very exist-
ence of this conflict has caused the influence of the Soviet Union even on
Western communists to weaken somewhat of late, its influence will pre-
sumably continue to remain at least culturally stronger in western Europe
than that of China. For the Russians themselves have far more in common
with Western traditions, being in so many respects the heirs of that
western European movement known as the Enlightenment which, by way
of the French Revolution, was also the source of many of Karl Marx’s
doctrines. Certainly, it would seem to be significant that in the ideological
conflict between the Russians and Mao Tsse-tung almost all of the Commu-
nist parties of the West have so far continued to give at least some
nominal allegiance to Moscow.

2. Democracy, Patronage in Art,

and the Social Organism

Recarotess of such internecine conflicts, however, communism as always

especially raises the basic problem of the relation of the gifted individual to
society—that problem with such direct relevance to creators of works of
12 / INTRODUCTION

art. And although it is a problem that is particularly acute under commu-

nism, it is indeed acute under any form of democracy, non-totalitarian as
well as totalitarian, and so is doubly important for the study of communist
influence in non-totalitarian democratic countries such as those of western
Europe and North America. The very different meanings which the word
“democracy” has been given in modern times thus requires analysis here in
order to arrive at better understanding of the chief conceptions of demo-
cratic art, which often has been radical art in its time. For even though in
western Europe and the United States alike, non-communists tend to
restrict the term ‘“‘democracy” to certain non-communist countries, it must
be remembered that Marxian communists have often spoken of themselves
as the true democrats.
To the Greeks in Antiquity, from whom the word “democracy”
comes, the term had normally meant the rule of the demos, the populace
or the poor, and therefore no less a sectional form of government than
aristocracy or oligarchy. However, members of the Left in modern times—
particularly the revolutionary Left, including Marxists, anarchists, and
syndicalists—have in theory regarded any form of government as incom-
patible with the absolute popular sovereignty which is their ultimate
political and social goal. Consequently, the most typical version of political
democracy in the West, based on parliamentary representation, has by no
means emerged as universally acceptable to the Left, even though it has
been accepted by many of its reformist, rather than revolutionary, adher-
ents. Robespierre maintained that no man could represent another, and
the anarchist Proudhon wrote of universal suffrage as being, in his eyes,
nothing but “a lottery.” ® Lenin and other Marxists have frequently regarded
“democracy” as the rule of the proletariat over all other classes, but have
considered this state of affairs to be entirely provisional because their
ultimate ideal is the classless society that is supposed to develop when the
state withers away. Thus in 1894 Lenin, as a Marxian socialist, wrote:
“between the ideas of the democrats and those of the socialists . . . lies an
entire abyss.” ’
As a temporary matter of tactics, however, political democracy has
been acceptable to Marxists, including the founders of Marxism them-
selves: hence Engels once wrote that he and Marx had early considered it
necessary to join the democratic party “as the only possible way of being
able to speak to the working class. . . .”* Not only was Marx himself a
vice-president of the Brussels Democratic Union as a young man, but
democracy then meant for him pretty much what he later called commu-
nism. Even after Marx and Engels began to call themselves communists
they described themselves as “democratic communists.” By then—and
thereafter—they regarded themselves as economic democrats, as distin-
guished from political democrats; and Marxists ever since have been likely
to emphasize that they are the true democrats because they stress eco-
nomic democracy rather than merely political democracy as the basis of
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 13

the good society and its arts. In this light, too, it has even been argued by
some Marxists that Marx did not in the end wish to sacrifice the individual
to society, because as a young man he wrote in 1844: “we must avoid
setting up ‘society’ as an abstraction in the face of the individual. The
individual is the social being. . . . The individual life and the generic life
of man are not different.” ° For Marx considered that in the eventual good
—or Classless—society the two would be identical.
Like the other modern conceptions of democracy, Marx’s version
sprang from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Even though
the word “democracy” is as old as the Greeks, it began to enter the
common speech of the modern world as a favorable term only in the
period of the Enlightenment: to Montesquieu, for instance, whose ideas so
strongly influenced the American post-Revolutionary tradition, “democ-
racy” still implied—unfavorably—what later was named “socialism.” It
was in the Enlightenment, also, that a new sense of humanitarianism
developed, giving rise both to a new spirit of philanthropy (a word
popularized at that time) and to new egalitarian tendencies leading to a
vogue for democratic ideas. The new humanitarianism further brought
into being an interest in social reform or in social revolution that had
particular implications for the arts, and especially for the social arts of
architecture and town planning. In England, which had had its last
revolution against absolutism in 1688, the idea of very gradual reform
toward a more democratic spirit (even before the word “democratic” was
in common use) was able to prevail over that of democratic violent
revolution; whereas in France, of course, the idea of revolution repeatedly
prevailed, beginning with the great French Revolution of 1789 which itself
was so largely a product of the Enlightenment. Indeed, the term “demo-
crat” first became current in the 1780's during revolutionary conflicts in
the Low Countries foreshadowing the French Revolution, which was, in
fact, simply the most important part of a general European revolution. It
was essentially as a result of that revolution that in the 1790’s the word
“democrat” at last began to be more widely introduced into the United
States,?° whose founders had almost all rejected the conception of democ-
racy as standing for a far too unstable kind of government,” and whose
Federalist art essentially continued to follow British style. When mainly
under the influence of the French Revolution the word finally did become
popular in the United States, it long stood for a quite different conception
of democracy from that chiefly emphasized by the French Revolutionary
tradition itself. For in America the word was first adopted chiefly by
agrarian landowners, who were stimulated by the egalitarian spirit of the
American frontier and believed in decentralization, but who were essen-
tially conservative inasmuch as they looked backward to an agrarian Eden.
Their point of view thus sharply contrasted with the radical democracy of
the mainly middle-class, town-dwelling democrats of the French Revolu-
tion,” who stood for progress and for greater centralization—with conse-
14 / INTRODUCTION

quent different effects on the arts. Furthermore, this American version of

democracy was highly individualistic: it was regarded by its proponents as
implying a multitude of individual voices,” rather than that conception of
the voice of the people as a whole which became dominant in the French
Revolution and wherever the influence of that Revolution spread, espe-
cially on the Continent.
This made for a decided difference in the clientele and patrons of
artists. The American painter, both before and after the American Revolu-
tion, was chiefly dependent on individual middle-class patrons who wanted
only portraits of themselves and members of their families, and for many
years, portraits in the British tradition—the American Revolution brought
no sudden change in patronage. The French Revolution, however, fostered
a revolution in patronage and taste. The French Revolutionary tradition
gave far more encouragement than the American tradition both to art for
the masses and to official domination of art by the state—and a state under
essentially urban bourgeois control, especially after the final destruction of
Bourbon rule in the Revolution of 1830. No longer could French artists
rely on the patronage of an absolute monarch and of a nobility for which
the monarch set the tone in an unbroken artistic tradition. Now, being so
largely at the mercy of a complacent, largely sub-artistic bourgeoisie,
progressive artists in France, by whom originality was increasingly valued
as an end, became increasingly alienated. And in self-defense they tended
eventually to form themselves into groups sharing both a common ap-
proach to art and a common anti-bourgeois social ideology—significantly,
the very word “ideology” had been invented in France in 1796 during the
Revolutionary period at a time when the term “bourgeois” too was begin-
ning to have a pejorative connotation.
It should be added, however, that the meaning of democracy in
modern times has been further complicated by the fact that the idea of
democracy as connoting the voice of the people as a single mass was only
one of two different conceptions springing primarily from the French
Revolution itself. The non-Marxist historian and philosopher of history,
J. L. Talmon, has in recent years distinguished these two versions respec-
tively under the names of “totalitarian” or “popular” democracy on the
one hand, and “liberal” or “bourgeois” democracy on the other.'* Though
both stood for the idea of progress, they did so in different ways, with con-
sequent different effects on the kinds of art likely to be preferred by their
proponents. T’almon sees both ideas of democracy as stemming from
overlapping sources in the French Revolution, tracing them both to the
conflict of 1793 between the Montagnards, made up primarily of Jacobins,
and the Girondins, who were what later became known as liberals. And the
ultimate source of that mortal political conflict he has found in the
personal conflict between Rousseau and Voltaire.
The increasing exaltation of the idea of popular, or mass, democracy
by the Jacobins in the French Revolution had meant that the glorification
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 1 5
of the idea of republic, which had succeeded the original demand for
simply reforming the monarchy, had dwindled considerably. Although
Robespierre regarded himself as a disciple of Rousseau, his proposals were
usually shaped more immediately by the political situation than by Rous-
seauistic doctrines. Thus by July 1791 he had attacked the term “republic”
as being much too vague and insignificant, and had urged that under the
new Constitution laws should be promulgated in the name of the French
people instead of the French Republic.® The decline of the idea of
republic affected the subject-matter and treatment of art, for with it
eventually declined that association of works of art with the example of
classical Antiquity which had so helped to stimulate a new patriotism
(Fig. 1) leading to revolutionary republicanism.
Primarily out of the conception, exalted in the French Revolution by
the Jacobins, of democracy as standing for the voice of the people as a

Fic.1. The Oath of the Horatii (1785) by Jacques Louis David.

16 / INTRODUCTION

mass, were eventually to develop the chief forms of modern socialism,

including utopian socialism, modern communism, and communist-
anarchism. Hence, as the great anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin noted,
socialists, communists, and anarchists alike are the heirs of the French
Revolutionary tradition.’* In the spirit of selected aspects of that tradition,
they have believed in the revolutionary myth and often in a revolution to
be brought about after existing society has been undermined by a con-
spiracy of devoted revolutionaries. They have also believed that the coming
revolution would not involve either the simple substitution of one ruling
class for another, or merely of one system of government for another (as
the American Revolution had so largely done). Consequently, German
Marxists, French or Spanish anarchists, and Russian populists and Marxist-
Leninist communists have all tended to base their conception of revolution
upon the idea of achieving a total new society through political revolution,
with society likely to be regarded as a kind of living organism, and the
revolution as affecting the entire social organism, including its cultural and
artistic aspects.
Even before the French Revolution, this conception of society as an
organism had already been popularized by Rousseau, that maverick of the
Enlightenment, and by his one-time friend Denis Diderot. Especially from
their thought it entered the French Revolutionary tradition.
Rousseau, after all, had been the first modern to popularize the
conception of popular, or mass, democracy (even though, as is too often
forgotten, he rejected this idea for societies larger than a city state). It
was a conception directly reflected in his doctrine of the “general will,”
first fully expressed in the 1762 version of his Du contrat social (On the
Social Contract). Only three years later, the painter Anton Raphael
Mengs wrote in his Gedanken tiber die Schénheit und iiber den Ge-
schmack (Reflections on Beauty and ‘Taste) that “the beautiful is that
which pleases the most people.”
To Rousseau, the “general will” constituted the life spirit of the social
organism—because at times he regarded the state and society as living
organisms, referring to the state, for instance, as “‘a moral person whose life
is in the union of its members,” ** and comparing the body politic to the
human body. Somewhat similarly, that other great figure of the Enlighten-
ment, Denis Diderot, considered the entire universe to be a living and
social organism, likening it to a cosmic polyp and also to a swarm of bees.
It is worth emphasizing, therefore, that the very word “organism” had first
come into use among biologists and zoologists in the early eighteenth
century—and also that eventually many social and artistic radicals were to
regard good works of art themselves as organisms with a “life” of their
own. For them only an “organic” work of art could be good art.
Out of the related ideas of the social organism and of mass democracy,
there could and did grow up the belief that to be democratic good art must
be aimed at the masses, must be socially useful, socially functional, and to
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 17

this end must be understandable by all members of society. Furthermore,

the conception of the social organism, which was taken over by Marx,
meant that the arts were considered to be organically related to one
another as well as to the society of their time and place. Yet the latter was
to be a view held not only by radicals of the Left but also by Nazis and
other members of the radical Right: indeed the first to state directly in
print that literature is the expression of society was apparently the ultra-
conservative French monarchist De Bonald, who in 1806 began his Du
style et de la littérature with that assertion.
A further complicating factor is that one of the progenitors of the idea
of the social organism, Rousseau, was also, of course, a chief progenitor of
extreme romantic individualism: Rousseau’s social contract was, after all, a
contract among individuals. Hence, although such a statement by him as
the one previously quoted—that the state is “a moral person whose life is
in the union of its members”—could be regarded by many of his followers
as emphasizing the dominant importance of society as an organism, other
followers could regard him as stressing the fundamental significance of the
individual members as organisms.” Thus Rousseau was to be looked upon
sometimes favorably, sometimes askance by individual socialists, commu-
nists, and anarchists. For he was to be simultaneously a major source for
the romantic glorification of either society or the state (the former leading
to socialism and communism, the latter sometimes to one kind of totalitar-
ianism) and of a romantic individualism (leading in part both to modern
anarchism and to the encouragement of laissez-faire liberalism). Corre-
spondingly, these divergent views could result in primarily valuing a work
of art either for being the unique creation of a unique organism, the artist
who produced it, or instead for what it could contribute to the progress of
a larger social organism, whether the state, a class, or human society as a
whole, to whose welfare the artist should subordinate his individuality.
In any case, for Rousseau—and for many radical followers—the effects
of the historical development of civilization on the social organism and its
members have seemed to be disastrous. The state of nature (which for
Rousseau was an ideal model that had not necessarily existed) was superior
to civilization—as nature itself is to art. Rousseau believed, as he declared
in his Discours sur les sciences et les arts of 1749-1750, that the develop-
ment of luxury which accompanied the development of civilization had
corrupted morals and destroyed what power art produced. This led him to
attack the fine arts as products of civilization and luxury, and to exalt use-
ful arts and crafts that do not stimulate wants. The evils of luxury, he
believed, can be remedied only in a direct consumers’ economy in which
accumulation of capital will not be possible—and he therefore deprecated
the goals of a rising bourgeois society, and, while not wanting to destroy
private property (because that seemed to him impossible), sought to con-
fine it within the narrowest limits and keep it always subordinated to
the public good. To repair the damage caused by “beginning art” —that
18 / INTRODUCTION

to date under the luxury promoted by

is, art as it has developed
civilization—a “perfected art” is necessary.” But because the foundations
of contemporary society are based on injustice that is bound to deepen
class antagonisms, a revolutionary explosion seems inevitable (though
Rousseau himself wanted to avoid a revolutionary showdown, and had
faith that man—a moral being—can with proper education reassert him-
self over history and regain a mastery over his fate without such an
upheaval). In the light of these views about the social organism, its
members, and its historical development, it is hardly surprising either that
Engels, in his Anti-Duhring of 1878, marveled at how Rousseau had in so
many ways anticipated Marx * or that Rousseau has had a profound effect,
direct and indirect, upon radicals interested in the arts. He himself was
known as the composer of a successful, and characteristically pastoral,
opera, Le Devin du village (1752); and he also published much about the
art of music, including a Dissertation sur la musique moderne in 1743 and
the section on Music (1749) in Diderot’s great Encyclopédie.
One might add here that although for Rousseau the good life within
the social organism involved a return to nature in rural society, he increas-
ingly pointed out that because many people could not return to nature,
man should seek to improve modern urban and industrial society. As a
consequence, he was an ancestor of modern town planning and housing.
It should be emphasized, however, that the conceptions of the nature
of the good society and of democracy, and correspondingly of social and
democratic art, held by radicals in the modern period have changed a good
deal with the passage of time. This has been particularly true of the
Marxists. In 1848, Marx and Engels were by no means ashamed to be
called democrats because socialist workers and democracy were then on the
same side of the barricades. Yet privately, they were already making some
distinction between democracy and communism because they equated
democracy with the exercise of political power by the proletariat, which it
can do without having to carry out a consistent community of property.
Furthermore, in 1848 the concept of democracy included, together with
the laboring masses willing to fight against the wealthy upper class, the left
wing of bourgeois liberalism. Partly on this account, Marx’s and Engels’s
blueprint for a communist revolution, An Address from the Central Com-
mittee to the [Communist] League, was also called A Plan of Action
Against Democracy. By 1864, Marx and Engels had come so to dislike the
word “democrat” that, ironically enough, they even disliked the term
“social democrat,” which they regarded as good enough only for Lassal-
leans. Then, in a letter of 1884, Engels indicated that for him democracy
no longer necessarily coincided with the rule of the proletariat, but might,
indeed, be a barrier behind which the combined groups of the bourgeoisie
and of feudalism would ward off the rule of the proletariat. In 1923 the
secretary of the German Communist Party even stated that, “The masses
will say with us: we will rather burn in the fire of revolution than perish on
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 19

the dung-heap of democracy.”* Meanwhile, in The State and Revolution

(1918) Lenin had declared that while democracy means equality, it is also
a form of the state—one that gives the proletariat a chance to destroy the
bourgeois state machinery, it is true, but nonetheless a form of state.
Hence Stalin, in praising the Soviet Constitution of 1936, distinguished
between bourgeois democracy as the democracy of the propertied minority
and Soviet democracy as the only true kind because it is democracy for all.
With so wide a background of attitudes toward, and definitions of,
democracy, it has been possible for communists and other radicals to select
the definition, narrow or broad, best suited to the situation at hand, and
with a consequent choice in democratic art. Thus at times when commu-
nists have found it advisable to collaborate with non-communists—as, for
instance, during the period of the Popular Front in the 1930’s—it has been
possible for them to accept the support of a wide variety of artists,
including many of whose works they would not ordinarily approve. And
they may accept as fellow-communists foreign artists whose art they will
not display in their own country: some of the more abstract works of art of
that good communist Pablo Picasso are still regarded by the Soviet leaders
as unsuited for public exhibition in the U.S.S.R.

3. Revolution, Progress,
and the Historical Dimension

Because the different conceptions of democracy can to a considerable

degree be related to different revolutionary traditions, it becomes necessary
to investigate now in more detail the attitudes toward the arts of the
revolutionary traditions particularly relevant to this book.” The first, and
most important, is the French Revolutionary tradition from 1789, and the
revolutions elsewhere that it influenced, including the Bolshevik, or “Octo-
ber,” Revolution of 1917 (which occurred in October according to the
Julian calendar then still used in Russia, but in November according to the
Gregorian calendar of the West). The second is the English Revolutionary
tradition as descended especially from the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688.
The third is the American Revolutionary tradition from 1775 (relevant
here insofar as its influence has been felt in western Europe in ideological
and artistic conflict with Soviet influence).
Nearly every revolution, of course, is a complex event with complex
causes; moreover, if it lasts for any length of time it has its own internal
historical development. Generalizations such as those that follow are there-
fore inevitably oversimplified. Still, even though historians ordinarily do
not wholly agree on any one set of generalizations about a given revolution,
it is undeniable that the three revolutions cited above did indeed differ
20 / INTRODUCTION

from one another in fundamental ways. It is clear that they and the
traditions that they have established have had different conceptions of the
nature of the good society and government, and also different conscious or
unconscious attitudes toward the relation of art to society, with consequent
different results for the arts. It is further clear that, as Kropotkin said, the
French Revolutionary tradition is the source of modern socialism, commu-
nism, and anarchism, the major varieties of radicalism whose relations to
the arts are being investigated in this book. It was also a source of
liberalism, then regarded as radical. Hence, wherever the influence. of the
French Revolutionary tradition has spread, so also have these major vari-
eties of radicalism, each with its consequences for art. But in countries
having their own revolutionary tradition, such as England and the United
States, or for that matter Mexico, the relation of radicalism to the arts has
been different. Even so, certain parallel or overlapping effects, including
effects on the arts, have resulted from the three above-mentioned revolu-
tionary traditions, because they have all shared certain common factors.
One factor common to all three of these revolutions has been that
they were all successful “popular? revolutions carried out in the name of
“freedom” for a majority opposed to a privileged minority, and to this
degree were democratic. Hence, in theory, if not always in practice, none
was authoritarian and rightist, so that after each of these revolutions, fora
time at least, artists could be free from any style, radical or conservative,
imposed from above. Furthermore, all three occurred in societies already
progressing economically, even if financial mismanagement did exist in
their pre-revolutionary regimes. They therefore had at least some resources
for supporting intellectuals and the arts. Nonetheless, each of the three
revolutions was aided by a shift of allegiance of intellectuals to it from the
pre-revolutionary regime. But in the French Revolution and its heirs artists
were included among the alienated, and therefore radically revolutionary,
intellectuals as they were not in the English and American Revolutionary
traditions. Still, the successful conclusion of all three revolutions in each
case did bring a sudden flowering of intellectual and cultural life that
stimulated the arts. Such post-revolutionary flourishing of the intellectual
aspects of life is hardly surprising, because both the American and French
revolutions were heirs of the Enlightenment, and as such shared its
exaltation of reason and intellect. Also, the English Revolution of 1688
had furnished, especially through John Locke, many ideas to the Enlight-
enment, including that of a state of nature in which men are free and
equal, and that of a compact to become an ordered society in which the
power of government is minimal. This common heritage made it easier for
the varieties of modern radicalism that developed in France out of the
Enlightenment, and out of the French Revolution so largely stimulated by
the Enlightenment, to spread into England and the United States. At the
same time, however, the largely different national revolutionary traditions
of those two countries made it very difficult for such imported radicalisms
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 21

in pure form to gain a foothold firm enough to enable them to spread

beyond some relatively small minority and have a wide effect on culture
and the arts.
By the latter part of the eighteenth century, England, after all, had
long lost any tradition of the revolutionary violence that marked the
French Revolution. Her last revolutions had occurred in the seventeenth
century following the emergence of the first fully developed political
radicals in early modern Europe, the Puritans of Tudor and Stuart Eng-
land. The revolution of the 1640’s against Charles I that had been marked
by so much violence, had, of course, in the end collapsed, bringing the
Restoration and the accession of Charles II to the throne. The last English
revolution of all, the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 against what was
regarded as the increasing absolutism as well as the Catholicism of James
II, had been so popular and so short as to be essentially non-violent and
bloodless. Unlike the French Revolution, too, this revolution like its
predecessor of the 1640’s had been led by some aristocratic landowners in
opposition to a monarch supported by other aristocratic landowners. It
therefore was not a class revolution conducive to producing class art.
Indeed, “class” as a social term did not then exist. (In modern times it first
appeared in England in the mid-eighteenth century as a revival of an
ancient Roman term—thereby paralleling the Roman Revival in the arts.
It became widespread only as the Industrial Revolution developed, replac-
ing the old hierarchical term “order.” )
It should be emphasized that, because politics and economics were so
inextricably interwoven with church government and theology in the
minds of seventeenth-century Englishmen, the English revolutions were
religious-political in contrast to the much more nearly total social and
cultural French Revolution, by which all aspects of the social organism,
including its culture and arts, were affected. Consequently, the English
revolutions—unlike the French Revolution of 1789 and its numerous heirs
in France and elsewhere, including so many later revolutions on the
Continent—did not in the end essentially change the pre-revolutionary
attitude toward the arts and artistic style. As the modern idea of progress
had not yet developed, after the expulsion of James IT in 1688 the arts of
England went on essentially in the same style as before except that any
tendency toward “popish” religious subject-matter was eliminated. And
members of the aristocracy more than the monarchs were the chief patrons
of art—as they were to remain until relatively recent times. Furthermore,
the “Glorious Revolution,” even while enhancing parliamentary govern-
ment, had left England a monarchy, with its society still conceived of as a
hierarchy, not an organism as in the conception dominant within the
French Revolutionary tradition. It was now, however, a more flexible
hierarchy, with art patronage regarded as separate from the monarch, and
therefore from the state and politics.
After this, too, the English nobility, independent through inherited
212) NUE ROD Ul TEOMN

wealth and status, was regarded as mediating between the other two basic
orders of society, the crown and the commons, and thus as preventing the
crown from making further attempts at absolutist tyranny, and the com-
mons from turning society into a revolutionary mob. In other words, an
equilibrium eliminating revolution had developed; and it was to be main-
tained on the basis of characteristic British empiricism rather than on the
basis of any a priori abstract theory of mechanistic or organismic order.
The resulting flexibility, which was reinforced from then on by an increas-
ing degree of social mobility, enabled England, in contrast to France, to
achieve enough social reform thereafter to prevent the occurrence of
large-scale violent revolutions. A climate of opinion was established in
which such measures as the removal of political power and influence from
the House of Lords in 1911 after it had opposed a budget calling for social
insurance, or even the proposal in 1967 that its traditional hereditary basis
be abolished, could come about simply as measures of reform rather than
of revolution.
This English spirit of gradualism could certainly be expected to have
different effects on culture, including the arts, from those that the far more
violent French Revolutionary tradition has had not only in France but
also elsewhere on the Continent, where so many revolutions and revolu-
tionaries, including Karl Marx, have regarded the French Revolution as the
archetype of true revolution. In England, therefore, where demands for
change and progress by violent rejection of the past never prevailed after
the seventeenth century, in art as in politics change was gradual and
evolutionary. Correspondingly, even the more progressive artists were not
so alienated from society as to seek to alter it and the artistic situation by
violence; also the idea of an avant-garde violently at odds with the Estab-
lishment was to be essentially lacking in England long after it had origi-
nated in France. Only after the decline of the British aristocracy especially
as a consequence of the events of 1911 and two world wars did progressive
artists become so wholly dependent on the patronage of a middle class
whose attitude toward art they regarded as essentially Philistine that there
developed a significantly large avant-garde of artistically and socially alien-
ated artists. And its social alienation, in England as elsewhere, was espe-
cially stimulated during the great Depression of the 1930’s by the spread of
anti-bourgeois ideas coming from Soviet communism, that self-proclaimed
heir of the Jacobinism of revolutionary France.”°
This French Revolutionary tradition and the major varieties of social
radicalism it fostered, especially through the social emphases in the Consti-
tution of 1793, have likewise had very different effects upon the arts from
the American Revolutionary tradition. After all, unlike the French Revolu-
tion, the American Revolution, in being basically restricted to questions of
authority * and of liberty achieved through defiance of authority, was
intended as essentially a political, not a social and cultural, revolution,
even though largely stimulated by economic causes. Although in emphasiz-
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 23

ing political equality the American Revolution, like that of France, was
destructive of the idea of social hierarchy that continued to prevail in
Britain, despite Sam Adams and Tom Paine its social implications became
clear only gradually and belatedly. And only well after the Revolution did
American art and architecture very gradually and belatedly give up their
pre-revolutionary primary reliance on English models—as the continuing
flow of young American artists to study in London demonstrated well into
the nineteenth century. Only gradually—and partly through the stimula-
tion offered by the political and social example of the French Revolution
—did the more democratic tendencies implicit in the American Revolu-
tionary tradition become powerful enough to affect belatedly some of the
more popular currents of American arts, eventually resulting, for instance,
in the proliferation of scenes of democratic American life in the mass-
produced lithographs of Currier and Ives. But in American art, as in that
of England, until well into the twentieth century there were no significant
indications of sympathy for social revolution or for the related idea of class
conflict that so largely came from the Marxist heirs of the French Revolu-
tion to affect the arts. Correspondingly, too, until well along in the
twentieth century there was no real conception, in America as in England,
of an artistic avant-garde of socially alienated artists.
The American Revolutionary tradition, then, like the English tradi-
tion, long lacked the very idea of consciously democratic social and cultural
revolution of the masses so characteristic of the French Revolutionary
ideal.?8 For both lacked that conception, inherited from Diderot and Rous-
seau among others, of society as an organism, which has been so strong in
the largely romantic revolutionary tradition of France wherever it has
spread.
In contrast to England and the United States, too, the French Revo-
lutionary tradition, including that highly successful, partial descendant, the
“October” Revolution in Russia, has sought to develop highly centralized
governments in order more effectively to carry out organically complete
social revolutions. Hence revolutionary France, in 1793-1794, and Soviet
Russia, from November 1917 to the New Economic Policy of 1921, and
then especially under Stalin, not only sought state control of economic
planning but also went on from there to develop a program for an organic
new society which involved changing things, institutions, laws, and even
the cultural aspects of life. Because the French and the Bolshevik revolu-
tions promoted the efficiency of the government rather than any “Tight” of
the individual to a romantic freedom to be himself, the Jacobins and the
Bolsheviks increasingly expected artists to devote their art to promoting
and exalting the power of the state—a duty not expected of artists other
than some political cartoonists in either the English or the American
Revolution. It was for this reason that the general role of the artist as
propagandist became so important in the French Revolutionary tradition.
Furthermore, since in France artists had been among the intellectuals who
24 / INTRODUCTION

transferred their allegiance from the Ancien Régime to the Revolution, it

was in France that alienation (as Hegel later named it) was first strongly
found among artists. The most prominent early example was that of the
painter Jacques Louis David. Alienated from the Bourbon monarchy and
its Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture because he believed he had
been unjustly prevented from winning competitions for its Grand Prix de
Rome (even though he was awarded that prize in a later competition),
David helped to stimulate the French Revolution with his paintings
exalting ancient Roman patriotism (Fig. 1) and republicanism. And in
1793 during the Revolution, as a prominent Jacobin, he voted for the
execution of Louis XVI and was personally responsible for bringing about
the closing of all the old royal Academies. It should be added that David
was willing to become Bonaparte’s “First Painter” and propagandist appar-
ently because he accepted Bonaparte’s declaration of himself as “son of the
Revolution.”
Not only the later revolutions in France, notably those of 1830, 1848,
and the Commune of 1871, but also nearly all later revolutions on the
Continent were to be more or less modeled on the French Revolution of
1789. None was modeled on the English “Glorious Revolution.” The
American Revolution, which unlike the English and French revolutions,
was basically territorial-nationalist, served as the inspiration and model for
territorial-nationalist revolutions seeking liberty—including, for instance,
on the Continent the successful Czechoslovak Revolution of 1918. This
differed from the American Revolution, however, in having a linguistic and
racial basis that in art called for a specifically national revolution in at least
the subject-matter, as the American Revolution had not to any great degree.
Because the French Revolution had sought to spread its ideals interna-
tionally, so also did the international socialist, communist, and anarchist
movements that grew out of it. Thus, because to Karl Marx the Jacobin
aspects of the French Revolution constituted an ancestor and model for
the one most truly organic social revolution, that of the proletariat, the
proletarian revolution too was to be international. Therefore, insofar as
Marxian socialist and communist movements have been interested in the
arts, in theory at least they have fostered international art movements in
which artists have been called upon to devote their art to promoting the
proletarian movement and the coming of the classless society.
One major consequence of the fact that the French Revolution and
its successors, unlike the English and American revolutions, have not
restricted themselves to a primary specific political end within fixed limits
has been that they have had to attempt many more political and social
experiments based on abstract theories. Thus the French Revolutionary
tradition has offered many more opportunities for radical movements,
social and artistic, and those movements have been especially likely to have
a basis in elaborately abstract theories and consequent manifestoes.
But because the American Revolutionary tradition, on the contrary,
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 25

originated in an essentially political revolution, wherever its influence has

spread it has hardly affected the arts but has influenced simply the concep-
tion of political organization. The American Revolution had taken over
from England the idea of political powers related, not organically, but in
equilibrium. The English equilibrium, social as well as political, among
crown, aristocratic property-owners, and commons, and centering on the
aristocracy, had, of course, to be rejected by the American Revolutionaries
because they rejected crown and aristocracy. Still, under the American
Constitution it was replaced by another three-part equilibrium, though
now in government only, among the executive, legislative, and judicial
powers.
Significantly, the British conception of balance of powers as a prereq-
uisite to liberty, to which the fathers of the American Constitution clung
in their own way, had been attacked during the American Revolution in
the famous pamphlet Common Sense (January 1776) by Tom Paine, who
was later to be so important a figure in the French Revolution—and one of
the first designers anywhere of a metal bridge. For the idea of balance in
government did not agree with Paine’s belief in the concept of the social
organism, or with his utter faith in the idea of simultaneous and organic
progress in all fields, whether progress toward a completely democratic
society or toward a sheer social utility in engineering structure that was
anti-traditional, anti-academic, and thus likewise anti-authoritarian. In
other words, in Paine’s thought the idea of social revolution was integrated
with the idea of revolution in technology which marked the Industrial
Revolution. In this integration he had been foreshadowed by Diderot and
directly anticipated by Abraham Darby, the British ironmaster who in the
late 1770’s had built at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire the first successful
metal bridge. Moreover, Darby’s social dissent, which led him to be sympa-
thetic to the French Revolution, was reinforced by his Non-conformist
religious Dissent, descended from those early political radicals, the
Puritans and Independents of Stuart England. Thus whereas in France, in
the tradition of the Enlightenment and French Revolution, social radical-
ism ordinarily has had an anti-clerical basis arising out of atheism or deism,
we shall see that in England it has often been related to religious Non-
conformism. In both cases this naturally resulted in a suspicion of those
arts, or subjects in art, that might be considered to show sympathy for
“popery.”
It is worth noting that Tom Paine’s religious background linked
English Dissent with the spirit of the Enlightenment and the French
Revolution. Born the son of an English Quaker, he became a deist. As
such, it is clear that unlike traditional Quakers he was far from objecting to
the representational arts, for among his friends and supporters were those
staunch democratic republicans, the American artist Charles Willson
Peale, the first holder of an American patent for a wooden bridge, and that
highly unorthodox, partly Swedenborgian, radical English artist, William
26 / INTRODUCTION
French
Blake, who supported both the American Revolution and the
Revolution.
However, John Adams, like nearly all the other founding fathers, had
any
considered Paine’s Common Sense to be “so democratical” in lacking
provision for political “equilibrium or counterpoise” that it could only
result in evil confusion. Furthermore, unlike the French Revolutionary
Constitution exalted by Robespierre, the American Constitution, with its
emphasis on an equilibrium resulting from checks and balances, was
founded on Montesquieu; and Montesquieu’s constitutional theory in its
final form entirely lacked any organic conception of the state. Instead,
going beyond the different English empirical balance of powers, it was
based on Newtonian physics: the American doctrine that each power is
separate and related to the others by a series of checks and balances is
entirely mechanical.” Its whole phraseology and conception have been
taken from mechanics, from the metaphor of the machine which equals
the sum of its parts, and not at all from the biological metaphor of the
organism which is more than the sum of its parts. Correspondingly, too,
the American conception of democratic society, insofar as it continued to
emphasize the individual—and thus the “multitude of voices” rather than
the people-as-mass—tended to remain atomistic, and therefore more mech-
anistic than organismic. This atomistic conception almost inevitably gave
rise to a climate affecting the prevailing conceptions of the individual artist
and his role, making it very different from that dominant under the French
Revolutionary tradition and its heirs elsewhere.
In France, where the conception of the social organism has been so
much stronger, artists have been far more likely to be members of art
groups, official or anti-official; and the most important official groups have
been both highly centralized and nationwide. Thus, although David and
the other Jacobins managed to close the old royal Academies in 1793, at the
end of 1794 the equally official Institut de France was set up, with new
academies organized under its control in a national system more organi-
cally centralized than ever before. In the United States, on the contrary,
the first academies of art were organized with the greatest difficulty, and
like nearly all later American artists’ groups were both unofhcial and local.
Somewhat similarly, in England the empiricist point of view, so strong
from Locke to Bertrand Russell, has helped to prevent the Royal Academy,
founded belatedly in 1768in imitation of the academies of Bourbon
France, from dominating art and artists as completely as the academies of
France so long succeeded in doing. For the empiricist point of view
presupposes a complete separation between subject and object—and there-
fore a passive, rather than organically active, relationship between the
individual observer and a work of art or its creator. Emphasis:on the
observer as individual, and therefore on the individual as patron, dimin-
ished the role in art of the state, and thus of official academies, as well as of
other artists’ groups. In the United States, where British empiricism was
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 27

carried much further by a much more egalitarian pragmatism, no art

academies on a national scale or official basis have ever existed. Only when
the great Depression of the 1930’s so weakened American atomistic indi-
vidualism were many artists glad to work under the federal government’s
new, and temporary, Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.)—and
some of those artists became sympathetic to Soviet communism.
In France, however, not only have there been official academies of art
except for a very brief period during the Revolution, but also the varieties
of social radicalism that so largely grew out of the French Revolutionary
tradition have perennially encouraged the formation of anti-official groups
of avant-garde artists alienated from the Establishment. And because
Marxism so strongly emphasized the idea of the social organism and of the
organic relation of the arts to society, it was to have an appeal for many
alienated artists, especially after the successful revolution of the Bolsheviks
in Russia. The culmination in relating art one-to-one with society and
politics, with the social organism, came, of course in the Soviet Union after
the aesthetic of socialist realism still officially prevailing in the U.S.S.R.
and Red China was adopted under Stalin. However, the aesthetic of
socialist realism calls for the utter subordination of art to government
policy, and we shall see that many artists were eventually to become as
alienated from it as earlier they had become alienated from bourgeois
academicism.
The emphasis on the conception of society as an organism that,
implicitly at least, became so strong in the French Revolution, especially in
its more Jacobin aspects, and in its heir, the communist revolution in
Russia, is only one of the many characteristics that these two revolutions
have had in common, characteristics with profound effects upon the arts.
It has been mentioned that both revolutions showed a strong desire to
spread the revolution internationally (though in the French Revolution
there was no central organization like the Comintern for this purpose).
Both also became increasingly nationalistic at home, as the subject-matter
of their arts shows. Both passed from relative moderation to radical
violence, eventually relying on terror to achieve conformity under the
guidance of leaders of the dominant party. Both were torn between the
desire to destroy the art of the previous regime and the desire to preserve it
in order to demonstrate that progress had been made beyond it. ‘They were
equally torn between a propaganda art to educate their own citizens, and
patronage of art that instead would impress the outside world. Both
revolutions also eventually passed toward dictatorship, with the social
organism utterly controlled by its head—a Napoleon or a Stalin—who did
not hesitate to intervene directly in the arts, and who himself, under a
“cult of personality,” became a primary subject for works of art.
Nevertheless, even though the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution in
Russia, like Marx earlier, have regarded themselves as the heirs of the
French Revolution, and even though there have been marked resem-
28 / INTRODUCTION

blances between the two revolutions (and between developments in their

respective arts), it must also be emphasized that there have been major
differences between the two revolutions ® (and their conceptions concern-
ing art). For one thing, the Russian Revolution, with that in Mexico a few
years earlier, began a new category of modern revolutions, the revolution of
backward countries. Also, the “Terror” of the French Revolution, unlike
those of the Bolshevik Revolution and of Stalin’s Russia, had not been a
class terror, and its official art had not been the art of a class. After all,
the French Revolution was a revolution made by the bourgeoisie and
working classes together, whereas the Bolshevik Revolution, of course,
claimed to be proletarian (the largely middle-class intellectuals who led it
considered that they had become members of the working class). ‘There-
fore its official art too eventually had to be “proletarian” and “socialist.” In
France, not until after the Revolution of 1830—when the bourgeois lib-
erals, always previously regarded as highly radical, had enabled the bour-
geois monarchy of Louis Philippe to come into being—was there formed
that anti-bourgeois alliance of revolutionary workers with anti-bourgeois
intellectuals which was to remain so typical of the later French Revolution-
ary tradition. Among those intellectuals, avant-garde artists alienated from
bourgeois society played a prominent part in seeking to overthrow the
bourgeoisie (for some revolutionaries, we noted, already a term of oppro-
brium in the Revolution of 1789) and arrive at a more truly organic society.
Thus, especially under the French Revolutionary tradition as it developed,
artistic radicalism and social radicalism have very often been closely en-
twined. But in Soviet Russia this was to be the case only for a brief period
after the Bolshevik Revolution: because neither Lenin nor Stalin could
understand avant-garde art, they insisted that the masses could not under-
stand it either, and took increasingly stringent measures to suppress it.
That Russian Revolution, far more than the French Revolution, was
essentially a revolution of peasants, one in which, therefore, the question
of folk art had to be taken into account. But its leaders forced the peasants
to make way for the communist version of an industrial revolution from
above, in the course of which folk art has been expected eventually to
disappear. In these characteristics the Revolution in Russia contrasted not
only with the French Revolution, but in another way also with what
happened in Germany. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, under
Prussian leadership, Germany was able to carry out its own industrial
revolution from above. In Germany, however, the aristocratic, pre-
industrial social system not only managed to survive the spread of the
French Revolution of 1789 and to be victorious in the Revolution of 1848,
but even largely withstood the revolution accompanying the defeat of
1918. Nevertheless, with that revolution and the founding of the demo-
cratic Weimar Republic the masses became sufficiently important so that
they, especially the peasants among them, could eventually be made use of
by Hitler in establishing fascism in Germany. And Hitler also made use of
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 29

them for destroying the democratic avant-garde kinds of art that had
managed to flourish under the Weimar Republic despite the opposition of
the Right.
To sum up: the tradition of the French Revolution was to be consid-
erably modified as it affected society and culture on the Continent, both in
Germany, where the old organization of society managed to survive so
long, and even in Russia, where the Bolsheviks, in overturning the old
society, so largely regarded themselves as the heirs of the French Revolu-
tion. Nevertheless, that tradition in all its continental manifestations has
had considerably different conceptions of the good society, and of the
relation of culture and art to it, from those prevailing under the English
and the American traditions. Hence, when the influence of the French
Revolution—and later of that in Russia—spread among many Bnitish and
American radicals, some of them artists, it was only to be expected that a
wide range of conflicts and combinations would arise among the three
traditions. Eventually, as some American influences spread abroad and the
American Revolutionary tradition and that of Soviet Russia confronted
one another, it was only to be expected that correspondingly American and
Soviet conceptions of art too would tend to compete with one another for
influence, doing so especially in western Europe after the Second World
War.
The conflict between two different revolutionary traditions so appat-
ent in the confrontation of the United States and the Soviet Union in the
cold war that followed World War II has been particularly complicated
because historically, despite basic differences, the two traditions have
reflected the same relatively new conception of the meaning of the word
“revolution” itself. Because the idea of revolution is so fundamental to
Marxism (at Marx’s graveside Engels characterized him as “before all else
a revolutionary”), to anarchism, and to other forms of recent or contempo-
rary social radicalism, as well as to the artistic radicalism of so much
avant-garde art, the historical development of this newer conception of
revolution requires further analysis.

Tue TERM “revolution” had originated in astronomical science, but purely

as a cyclical idea. This had achieved special importance for the natural
sciences in general during the Renaissance following the publication of
Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543). The cyclical
conception was transferred from science to history early in the Enlighten-
ment by the Neopolitan jurist and philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico
is
(1668-1744) in his book Scienza nuova (1725 and 1730). Vico—who
said to have influenced Marx directly—applied the conception to the
history of society, which he regarded as an organism even before Diderot
by Marx,
and Rousseau. Largely from Vico came the doctrines, held
Engels, and other socialists and communist s among others, that human
30 / INTRODUCTION

society is a kind of organism, and that the eternal ideal history followed by
all nations (and so by different societies) is cyclical in its development, like
the life cycle of an organism, with history operating in accordance with
laws considered to be as scientific as the laws of nature. By exalting history
as the “new science,” Vico also became the progenitor of that entire
movement—reflected in this book, among so many others—which tends to
elucidate an aesthetic fact by its history.”
Vico anticipated Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the first great “mod-
em” art historian, whose Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (History of
Ancient Art) of 1764 treated the history of art in Greece as a life cycle from
birth to decline and death. This idea was taken over from Winckelmann
by Herder, who applied ‘it to the life span of the whole of a culture
anywhere. Marx was only one of many who thereafter maintained that
there is a relation between periods of the growth and decline of a society
and periods of art, and combined this with Rousseau’s conviction that a
revolutionary explosion was inevitable (or almost inevitable).
After the idea of revolution was first given a political meaning, the
cyclical conception was retained for some time; however, “revolution” long
connoted, not the overthrow of an old form of government and progress to
a new one, but the restoration of ancient rights and liberties. It was in this
sense that the term had first been used—in England in the reaction against
the Cromwellian dictatorship at the time of the Restoration of Charles II
in 1660.** In this sense, also, it was employed during the “Glorious
Revolution” of 1688 against James II, the last great British revolution.
Likewise, at first both the American revolutionaries of 1775.and the French
revolutionaries of 1789 had simply sought the return of former rights: only
gradually did each group come to seek the overthrow of the existing
government in order to replace it by a new kind. At first, too, both were
directly stimulated by examples offered by republics of classical Antiquity,
which themselves had sought the restoration of ancient rights and liberties
—and this stimulation was intensified by the previous development, during
the Enlightenment, of modern archaeology in such classical excavations
as those of Herculaneum and Pompeii. Very soon, the new vogue for
classical archaeology and for the Roman works of art found in the excava-
tions was being reflected in the arts of the later eighteenth century; and
these, in turn, directly affected politics in the French Revolution. Marx
essentially recognized this fact when, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte (1852), he wrote that “the heroes as well as the parties and the
masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time in
Roman costume and with Roman phrases.”
Significantly, advanced thinkers of the Enlightenment, out of which
the thought of the French Revolution so largely came, had particularly
admired those philosophers of classical Antiquity known as the Eclectic
School because they had tried to select and combine the best ideas of
previous philosophers. From such adrhiration for eclecticism in eighteenth-
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 31

century thought it was easy to pass to eclecticism in the arts. The term
“eclectic” was first applied to artists—and to artists of a relatively “mod-
ern” period—by that first modern art historian and great classicist, Winck-
elmann. In 1763 he gave the name “Eclectici” to the Carracci and their
school of painters at Bologna, who in the late sixteenth and early seven-
teenth centuries had tried to synthesize into a single style the best features
of works by their great predecessors during the Renaissance and classical
Antiquity. Winckelmann’s use of this term, which he regarded as appli-
cable to a certain stage in the cycles of human history, was by no means
disapproving. Artists who in their work consciously or unconsciously car-
ried further the ideas of Winckelmann and of the Philosophes, including
their ideas about history and society, began to select from styles of the past
aspects and elements that they regarded as best suited for expressing their
own ideas. While at first, like Winckelmann and his chief painter-friend
Mengs, they remained within the styles, ancient and “modern,” of the
classic tradition (being especially stimulated to do so by the Neo-
Platonism so particularly strong in the eighteenth century), it was not
long before some of them were borrowing from an ever-wider variety of
other styles.
For a considerable time, however, eclecticism of a classical kind
remained the method and style of many “advanced” artists. Still, because
of its association from the beginning with the academy of the Carracci at
Bologna, and because academicism had become associated with absolut-
ism, especially in Bourbon France, classical eclecticism increasingly fell
into disrepute with anti-academic and anti-monarchic artists and critics.
Increasingly, many of them subscribed to the idea of original genius, which
eventually became a fundamental doctrine of romanticism. This was a
conception stimulated by a very different aspect of eighteenth-century
Neo-Platonism—the anti-rational (and thus anti-academic) aspect derived
from Plato’s theory of the furores and creative enthusiasm as well as from
Aristotle’s doctrine of the Saturnine temperament as the birthright of
extraordinary men distinguished in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the
arts. In France the first great forerunner of the romantic conception of
original genius was Diderot, who—following the Conjectures on Original
Composition (1759) of the English literary critic Edward Young—ac-
knowledged the spontaneity and autonomy of genius,* an acknowledg-
ment not unrelated to his belief in progress.
Clearly, at the very time when great figures of the Enlightenment, and
then of the French Revolution, were deliberately looking back more or less
eclectically at examples from the classic past, they were also subscribing to
the idea of progress, and some of them to the even newer concept of
original genius.
The idea of progress itself had been developing primarily out of
progress in science, and was, of course, furthered especially by the resulting
on by
revolution in technology named—to repeat—the Industrial Revoluti
32 / INTRODUCTION

analogy with the French Revolution. Eventually, too, this belief in prog-
ress through rational comprehension and use of laws of nature had been
applied to political progress and, especially in the French Revolution
(though hardly in the American Revolution), applied as well to the social
progress of the people, the masses. It is for this reason that modern
socialism and communism derive so largely from the tradition of the
French Revolution, as does the related idea of popular art in the sense of
art for the masses. Also, the idea of progress passed into the arts, giving rise
to the modern conception of the avant-garde artist—a conception first
named in France within the early socialist movement shortly before the
first deliberate artistic revolution at the time of the performance of Victor
Hugo’s Hernani early in 1830.
The belief that technological progress and social progress are organi-
cally related and can equally be achieved through the exercise of man’s
reason, that belief so clearly exemplified by Tom Paine, had likewise been
especially foreshadowed in the writings of Diderot (who was Marx’s
favorite prose author), and was directly related to his ideas about art.
Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the subtitle of which was Ou dictionnaire raisonné
des sciences, des arts, et des ‘métiers, was a monument both of the
Enlightenment and of the Industrial Revolution in exalting rational prog-
ress of a technological, socially “functional,” and therefore, in his view,
socially “realistic” kind—to use later terminology. For one of the main
purposes of the Encyclopédie was reform of social abuses, especially
through popular education concerning the most up-to-date developments
within applied arts and crafts, and thus through “mechanic” crafts and
industrial arts.
Because for Diderot—who is often called the first art critic in the
modern sense of the term—art had to be socially functional, he was one of
the important precursors of modern functionalism in architecture, though
he actually wrote relatively little architectural criticism. The kind of paint-
ing that he most admired, and about which he wrote a great deal, was the
moralizing pre-romantic realism of Greuze. Such art Diderot considered
socially useful because, as a literal and contemporary representation of the
everyday life of ordinary people, it could be understood by everyone, and
because it educated by teaching a moral lesson. Here is a direct foreshad-
owing of the idea of art as useful for contemporary social and political
“propaganda,” a term first used in that sense in the French Revolution.
(It came, however, from the religious origin of “propaganda” in the Catho-
lic Counter-Reformation of the seventeenth century, as the name of the
Congregatio de Propaganda Fide [Congregation for the Propagation of the
Faith], in charge of missionary activities, suggests.) In rejecting the French
regime and dominant society of his time, Diderot had likewise essentially
rejected, as being at once socially and artistically bad, the official academic
art produced under that monarchic regime and aristocratic society, art
regarded by its academic exponents as based on principles good for all
time. But he nonetheless took over the Old Regime’s belief in the impor-
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 33

tance of a didactic art, an idea which, largely under his influence, was to be
very important for the French Revolution and its heirs.
The unsigned article “Art,” in the first volume of the Encyclopédie,
published in 1751 and believed to have been written by Diderot, main-
tained the traditional distinction between “liberal arts” and “mechanic
arts” which roughly corresponds to the distinction between fine arts and
crafts. But, as could be expected of Diderot, the writer clearly expressed his
intention to devote the article mainly to the mechanic, or useful, arts.
However, in a supplement to the Encyclopédie added in 1776 and
1777, an additional article “Art” was included. In it, the “liberal arts” were
dealt with by Marmontel and there was a long section entitled “Beaux-
Arts,” extracted from Johann Georg Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der
schonen Kiinste (1771-1774). Although Diderot had nothing to do with
this supplement, ideas in it not unnaturally tended to become associated
with his name.
The supplement not only carried further the attempt to prove the
social value of art, but in the “Beaux-Arts” section, maintained that the
great age of democratic liberty, of social utility, and of art had been that of
the Greeks and Etruscans, when art was devoted to the state’s purposes.
After this period of Antiquity, which constituted the golden age of liberty,
the heads of states separated their particular interest from the common
interest. As a consequence, “the fine arts ceased to serve the good of the
state. They became arts of luxury, and soon their true dignity was lost sight
of.” °7 The idea of the decline of art as luxury increased recalls Rousseau,
but that of serving the good of the state again foreshadows propaganda,
doing so here in a way already anticipated by Diderot in speaking of the
theater, for instance, as an instrument that could help a government
prepare its people for receiving laws.
Significantly, well before Sulzer and not unlike Marx later, Rousseau
had praised the societies of classical Antiquity—in his case especially the
republics of Sparta and early Rome. He too had regarded such societies as
manifestations of liberty: he referred to “the Roman people” as “a model
for all free peoples. . . .” °° He had particularly admired those ancient
societies in contrast to the society of his own day because they were closer
to a state of nature,*® further removed from the evils of civilization among
which he included social inequality, thereby foreshadowing modern social-
ism and communism, though he himself was not an economic egalitarian.
His exaltation of more “primitive” societies, partly under the influence of
Plato, was not nearly so great as Voltaire and Diderot liked to claim in
attacking him, but the publicity resulting from their attacks only helped
to stimulate a strain of primitivism in avant-garde art, which at times was
to have strong social implications. For throughout Western history cul-
tural primitivism has been a form often taken by communism and
egalitarianism, with consequent effects on the arts.
a
In fact, however, Rousseau himself was more a progressivist than
primitivist. In Emile (1762), the second title of which is De l'éducation,
34 / INTRODUCTION

he held that progress should be fostered by deyeloping the talents and

genius of the individual by better education in a better social environment,
though he rejected the belief, held by his contemporary Helvétius and later
by such social radicals as the utopian socialists Fourier, Owen, and Cabet,
that the individual is simply what his education—including his art educa-
tion—makes him. Rousseau was the first great exponent of social evolu-
tion; and because for him history was therefore the principal object of all
studies, many of his followers tended to regard it as of vital importance for
art. In his view, also, education was to emphasize only what is useful—so
that his ideas too could help to foster the development of functional art.
Because for Rousseau the ideal environment was pastoral or agrarian, he
likewise foreshadowed populist radical movements, with ultimate effects
on aspects of folk art. But because he increasingly recognized that it was
impossible for everyone to escape from an urban environment, and there-
fore urged the improvement of cities, he was, as we indicated, an ancestor
of modern urban renewal. And in emphasizing the individual, he antici-
pated the interrelated development of modern anarchism, the Marxist
ideal of the classless society, and romantic individualism, all of which were
destined to have highly significant meaning for the history of art.
Now it should be noted that the article on “History” in the Encyclo-
pédie, written by Rousseau’s older rival, Voltaire (who is often called the
first modern historian), was partly concerned with determining the authen-
ticity of origins, so that even Voltaire encouraged the new respect for
“primitive” cultures, which Marx was to regard as socially superior to any
others before the classless society to come. Whereas before the late eight-
eenth century, history had been the story of events affecting the lives of
men from some beginning date—ordinarily regarded as of divine origin,
such as the creation of the world, the founding of Rome, or the birth of
Christ—history came to be looked upon as a man-made process extending
backward into the infinite or indefinite past and forward into the infinite
or indefinite future. In Christian countries historians began to use “B.c.” as
well as “‘a.p.” Thus the birth of Christ was no longer taken by historians as
simply a basic beginning date (which it had been ever since the sixth
century), but instead as a turning point in the historical process from
which to count time backward as well as forward in an infinite process.
This new conception of history as process primarily caused the failure of
the attempt during the French Revolution to establish a new calendar with
a new—and secular—founding date. This conception also particularly
encouraged the new special regard for primitive cultures, as well as for the
idea of progress, both of which were later strongly reflected in Marx’s
conception of historical development, while having a profound effect upon
the arts. .
Like the other Encyclopedists, Voltaire was involved with the idea of
progressive advancement of the human race toward a perfection conceived
of as complete rationality, the kind of perfection that for Marx would
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 35

come in the classless society. Like Vico, Voltaire regarded history as a

science. It is because he was concerned more with the general cultural
progress of humanity than with political and military events that he is
frequently regarded as the first social historian. As such, he went beyond
Vico, being perhaps the first to regard the arts, including the applied arts,
as important aspects of social development. He apparently was the first to
assert—in his universal history published in 1756 entitled Essai sur les
moeurs. . . (Essay on Customs . . .)—that the history of a civilization is
especially mirrored in the works of art it produces. More than other aspects
of history, “the glory of the arts, which will never pass away . . . is,” he
declared, “indeed most worthy of the attention of posterity... .” “ From
this it was easy to pass to the idea that art should be made use of for
improving civilization and society—and so for propaganda.
Direct reflections of many of these ideas and tendencies of the age of
the Enlightenment and of proto-romanticism can be found in the beliefs
and works of the greatest artist of the French Revolution, Robespierre’s
good friend Jacques Louis David, who in some ways foreshadowed the
Revolution in his art. David, who was born a middle-class Parisian, did this
in two important paintings which were artistically revolutionary. One was
his epoch-making Oath of the Horatii (Fig. 1), recognized as the mani-
festo of a revolutionary style when it was first exhibited at the Salon of
1785. The other was his Brutus, completed in 1789 only a few months
before the outbreak of the Revolution. Significantly, this depicted the early
Brutus who had expelled the Tarquinian monarchy from ancient Rome in
favor of the republic maintained by Brutus even at the cost of ordering the
execution of his two sons for conspiring to restore the monarchy—an exam-
ple of Stoicism earlier exalted in Voltaire’s tragedy Brutus (2730)8
In subject-matter, therefore, both paintings were intended to contrast
the innately natural, Stoic virtue to be found in classical Antiquity with
the absence of virtue under the French monarchy, while the Brutus was
soon to be regarded as connoting republicanism. The two pictures also
constituted a revolution against the typical art of the contemporary French
academic tradition, both of them being anti-academic in their novel type
of composition and in their romantic kind of classicism. For both were
composed with a radically new kind of freedom in being deliberately
the
divided into two unequal groups of neo-classic figures. In other words,
figures did not build up in hierarchic fashion to make a centralized compo-
sition in the manner characteristic of the academic classicism that had
of the
been established as the official style of France with the founding
Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1648.
We have noted how David’s alienation from that Academy, which
thought
had failed to award him its Grand Prix de Rome as early as he
closing of all
just, had led him during the Revolution to bring about the
e triumph of
the academies as soon as he could, in 1793 after the complet
he had been
the Jacobins. But early in the Revolution, in September 1790,
36 / INTRODUCTION

prominent in founding an anti-academic artists’ society. This was signifi-

cantly named the Commune des arts in accordance with his conception of
what a good artists’ organization should be—a free and democratic associa-
tion with absolute freedom of exhibition, in contrast to the undemocrati-
cally restricted official Salons with their academic juries.
After the Commune des arts was suppressed in 1793, partly because of
the activities of royalist members, an even more revolutionary and anti-
academic organization took its place, the Société populaire et républicaine
des arts, which in turn was followed, in 1794, by the Club révolution-
naire des arts, to which David, Proud’hon, Gérard, and J. B. Isabey be-
longed. The Société populaire et républicaine des arts, of which David had
been the leading member, had linked its artistic radicalism directly with
political radicalism, serving as the more or less official art organization dur-
ing the “Terror,” and so during the time when David served as a high po-
lice official and as president of the Jacobin Club. The name of this group,
in placing “‘populaire” ahead of “républicaine,” reflected the shift that had
taken place in the political philosophy of the Revolution: the concept of
government by popular democracy had taken precedence over that of
republic. :
A parallel development had occurred in David’s own art: his picture
The Death of Marat (Fig. 2), painted in 1793 and presented by the artist
to the Revolutionary Convention, is in a very different style from that of
his earlier Oath of the Horatii (Fig. 1) and Brutus. In the Marat, the dead
Jacobin leader is depicted, in a highly realistic way, lying in the bathtub
where he was assassinated. Here there is none of the idealization character-
istic both of the old academic classicism and of the romantic neo-classicism
of the Oath of the Horatii and the Brutus; nor are there any of the literary
associations so characteristic of romantic art and of those two paintings.
Still, in the Marat some implications of a romantic kind occur because
Marat, for all that he has been so realistically represented, has been
romantically exalted by David in an emotional, almost “religious” way,
though David was a Jacobin atheist. Marat has been “sanctified,” as it
were, by the ancient classical idea of noble simplicity, now infused with a
suggestion of infinity by means of the large, dim, but luminous space above
him. This more or less romantic realism of the Marat anticipated the
realistic art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the works
of the many social realists among artists, and eventually the “socialist
realism” of Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet art, which was to furnish the
basis for the art theories upheld by the official Communist parties of
western Europe and of the rest of the world. It should be added that David
anticipated those theories not only in some of his paintings but also in
words. He proclaimed that artists could have no higher duty than “to
produce work of ‘usable application,” and that art has a deliberately
“utilitarian aim; not the particular utility of a principal caste, but the
general utility of the nation, of the masses. . . .” *
& _ S) ) = < iS) Q i)8 Paa fo}— = N bl al ™ lonon
~~ os
Ooa iss}1S)le)=
—
on o ° S) “4 A is}= ae}
38 / INTRODUCTION

The change in David’s style occurring with The Death of Marat also
paralleled the change that had taken place in the prevailing conception of
history during the French Revolution. The Oath of the Horati and the
Brutus, in turning back toward Antiquity as a golden age of patriotism
and republican liberty, had reflected a backward-looking cyclical concep-
tion, whereas the Marat, in rejecting the past for a new, purely contempo-
rary subject-matter and style, connoted the idea of forwarding human
progress throughout history, and of doing so in a “realistic”? way. The
picture thereby anticipated major developments both in nineteenth-cen-
tury thought destined to affect Marx and in radical art. As Hannah Arendt
has written: “Theoretically, the most far-reaching consequence of the
French Revolution was the birth of the modern concept of history in
Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel’s truly revolutionary idea was that the old
absolute of the philosophers revealed itself in the realm of human affairs.
. . . The model for this new revelation by means of a historical process was
clearly the French Revolution, and the reason why German post-Kantian
philosophy came to exert its enormous influence on European thought in
the twentieth century, especially in countries exposed to revolutionary
unrest—Russia, Germany, France—was not its so-called idealism, but, on
the contrary, the fact that it had left the sphere of mere speculation and
attempted to formulate a philosophy which would correspond to and
comprehend conceptually the newest and most real experiences of the
time: =
Hegel’s greatest follower, and the one most responsible for the “revo-
lutionary unrest” and indirectly for the new “social realism” of the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries including the “socialist realism” of Soviet
art, was, of course, Marx. Like Hegel (who as a young man had been
sympathetic to the revolutionary republicanism of the French Revolu-
tion), Marx combined in a dialectical system the cyclical conception of
history and the idea of progress. Following Hegel, too, Marx made history
itself the absolute. Like Marx himself, Marxian communists believe firmly
in the importance of history as demonstrating and illuminating social
change and social progress, which eventually—by means of revolution and
evolution, and with the aid of all good Marxists—will bring about the
classless society, and with it the highest development of art.
Yet even apart from this fact, in studying communism, the historical
dimension is important to, cast light on the meaning of the very word
“communism.” For it has meant different things at different times in
history, and today still possesses several widely varying meanings; indeed, it
is on its way to becoming at once as imprecise and as comprehensive a
term as “capitalism.” As a consequence, debates on the subject of commu-
nism often fall into endless misunderstandings through simple lack of
knowledge of the interpretations that historically have been given to
“communism” itself. These misunderstandings have only been multiplied
by the various and changing meanings of such overlapping terms as
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 39

“socialism,” “anarchism,” and “radicalism,” which likewise have had sev-

2? 66

eral meanings that are frequently confused in different ways by both

communists and non-communists, often with significant results for artists
and art. Because this book investigates relationships between works of art
and the politico-economic beliefs of artists, it becomes highly important
that in this Introduction the different meanings of such terms be defined,
and their history summarized, as a basis for any fruitful discussion.” In the
course of discussing these terms, they will have to be distinguished from
“Jiberalism,” that other word of multiple and often vague meaning—but
originally regarded as having radical connotations—with which they have
frequently been confused, thereby affecting the arts as well as politics in
various ways. The confusion has been compounded by the fact that, like
modern democracy itself, modern liberalism, radicalism, anarchism, and
secular socialism and communism were largely outgrowths of the Enlight-
enment and of the French Revolution. And all of them were affected by
the romantic movement—out of which also paradoxically developed many
of the tenets of an often extremely conservative political ideology in
which a return to an elaborate Anglican or Roman Catholic religious
liturgy, and a Gothic Revival in art and architecture especially suited to
such a liturgy, frequently played an important part. But that same revival
of the Gothic spirit, largely by emphasizing the cooperative spirit of the
medieval guilds, was at least as often to be associated with liberalizing
socialism, and even communism, as the career and influence of William
Morris will especially serve to demonstrate.

4.. Socialism and Communism

Irs, of course, generally known that both “communism” and “socialism”

have regularly implied some kind of collective action, as opposed to
competition among individuals. They have also connoted doctrines in
which emphasis has been put on living in common, on common education
in social morality, or on collective social planning. And they have espe-
cially stood for common ownership of at least some of the means of
production as a way of eliminating unearned increment in the belief that
this will permit the individual to come nearer to fulfilling his potentialities.
Because so many of the chief authorities on socialism and communism
today regard socialism as the inclusive term, with communism therefore as
but one variety of socialism,“ the history of the words “socialism” and
“socialist” will be noted first, with particular reference to some historical
figures whose ideas about art will be dealt with later in this work.
Even though Rousseau’s influence on later socialists and communists
varied enormously from individual to individual, many of the ideas lying
least as
behind modern socialism and communism had been anticipated at
40 / INTRODUCTION

early as his dissertation of 1754 Sur Vorigine de Vinégalité parmi les

hommes (On the Origin of Inequality Among Men), which was also a
most important early example of a theory of social environmentalism in
which art is mentioned. Furthermore, two contemporaries of Rousseau, the
Abbé Morelly and the Abbé de Mably, were specifically cited by Friedrich
Engels as great personages of the French Enlightenment out of which
“modern socialism” developed.*® Morelly, whose Code de la nature was
published in 1755, is said to have been the first writer to establish an
aesthetic based on the sensualist philosophy,** the kind of aesthetic ac-
cepted later by the many artists with socially radical inclinations who
emphasized realism in art. ;
The writings of all these figures of the Enlightenment influenced
“Gracchus” Babeuf, that last of the Jacobins in the French Revolution.
Babeuf, who was guillotined in 1797 after the failure of his Conspiracy of
the Equals, was praised by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto,
and—because he did not believe in private property—is often called the
first modern communist.
Nevertheless, the actual terms “socialism” and “communism” as used
to express the ideas represented‘by such men did not originate until the
period after the Napoleonic wars, when the exceedingly rapid development
of the Industrial Revolution had brought in its train, together with prog-
ress in many fields, immense economic and social dislocations. ‘These were
enhanced by the population explosion made possible by enormously in-
creased industrial productivity. One difficulty, therefore, which became
apparent first in England, the most advanced industrial country, was that
of housing the enormous masses of the new proletariat. Tom Paine called
for public housing as part of the welfare state that he sketched in 1792
in the second volume of The Rights of Man. But the task of helping the
poor and of seeking to provide better housing for them was undertaken
by a few philanthropists moved by the new humanitarianism which had
developed in the Enlightenment: in 1796 there was founded in England
the Society for Bettering the Condition . . . of the Poor, which made the
first attempt to wrestle with a social and architectural problem that has
increasingly beset industrialized societies. So enormous did this and other
social and artistic problems raised by the Industrial Revolution become
that it soon seemed obvious to some humanitarian spirits and rebels that
these problems could not be solved by individuals, but only by a drastic
reorganization of society itself.
Against this background, the word “socialist” was first employed in
England to mean one who opposes individualism. Its use began with
followers of Robert Owen, the philanthropic industrialist who became the
first modern socialist in England. Owen’s followers first applied this name
to themselves in 1827, adopting it officially in 1841. In France it seems to
have first appeared in its modern meaning in 1830. The term “socialism”
apparently originated slightly later in France, where it appeared in print in
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 41

1831 (almost immediately after the Revolution of 1830). There it was

applied especially to the doctrines of the first great utopian socialist, Henri
de Saint-Simon,* in whose later theories much attention was first paid to
artists as constituting a social avant-garde. Within only a few years,
however, “socialist” and “socialism” were being customarily applied to the
whole reform movement of which the Owenites and Saint-Simonians had
been but two different sects. As has already been mentioned with reference
to the art of David, it was in France that the idea of using art for directly
fostering the achievement of social goals first developed, largely out of the
ideals of the French Revolution, many decades before this conception of
art was to be widely accepted by social radicals in the United States. It was
especially the socialist followers of Saint-Simon who developed that Revo-
lutionary idea further before it was taken up by the Marxists.
The failure of the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe brought about the
decline of militantly revolutionary socialist movements such as that of
Marx and Engels as proclaimed in their Communist Manifesto. As a
consequence, the term “socialism” was for years to be increasingly re-
stricted to the democratic socialism which seeks non-totalitarian goals
solely by evolutionary and peaceful means. This kind of socialism has been
represented primarily by the Social Democratic parties on the Continent,
by the British Labour Party, andby the Socialist Party in the United
States; and is what “socialism” usually means even now to non-commu-
nists.
In the Soviet Union, however, and among the members of Commu-
nist parties and their sympathizers everywhere, “socialism” has been given
a special and very different meaning. Because it is employed in this sense
among Marxist-Leninists in western Europe as elsewhere, it is necessary to
summarize its history here in order to understand “socialist realism” in the
arts.
Lenin popularized this special meaning of “socialism” by reviving an
occasional usage of Marx, who sometimes applied this name to what he
more often referred to as the first phase of communist society.” By either
of these terms, Marx meant a transitional period of planned economy after
the proletariat has brought about public ownership of the means of
production under a proletarian government. In using the words “proletar-
iat” and “proletarian,” Marx was simply taking over the name of the
lowest class of ancient Roman society as revived by Rousseau and orators
of the French Revolution,” and popularized by Saint-Simonians. ‘The
proletarian form of state, Marxists believe, will wither away into a classless
and stateless society which Marx saw as the second stage of communism.
In the Marxian view, this will be the culmination of historical develop-
ment, including the development of artists and the arts, at least as far as
man can now foresee.
Some six months before the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917
(or, as we noted, October under the Julian Calendar then in use in
42 / INTRODUCTION

Russia), Lenin revived the name “socialism” for Marx’s first stage of
communism—the stage in which Lenin anticipated Russia would soon find
itself. On this meaning is based the official name of the Soviet Union,
adopted in Lenin’s lifetime: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Once
Lenin had applied “socialism” to that first phase of communism which
Marx had also occasionally called socialism, he frequently restricted “com-
munism” to Marx’s second stage of communism—in its complete form
represented by that classless and stateless society which Leninists believe is
coming about throughout the world only because communist countries, by
encircling the remaining capitalist countries, are rendering them impotent.
Eventually, capitalism will disappear into communism, which alone will
make possible the fulfillment of the potentialities of the individual, includ-
ing the individual artist.
However, in 1917, the year in which Lenin gave these meanings to the
words “socialism” and “communism,” he also confusingly revived an even
earlier meaning of “communism’—reform by violent revolutionary action,
as opposed to gradual, evolutionary reform. Although “communist” had
appeared during the French Revolution as early as 1791 in debates of the
Convention, apparently its first use in the violent sense was in secret
revolutionary societies founded in France in the late 1830’s and the 1840's,
during the reign of Louis Philippe. It was taken over in 1847 for the name
of the Communist League, which was mainly the former League of the
Just as reorganized with the help of Marx and Engels. The new name was
adopted under their stimulation to distinguish the militant working-class
movement of Marx’s circle from the non-militant efforts at social reform
included under “socialism.” This accounts also for the name of the Com-
munist Manifesto, written by Marx and Engels as the official platform of
the Communist League,” with a now famous first sentence calling “com-
munism” that “spectre” which “is haunting Europe.” It was a spectre,
indeed, and its spirit had already begun to influence the works of some
artists.
The Communist Manifesto was published in German in London in
1848 shortly before the outbreak of the rash of revolutions which in that
year began to spread throughout Europe. Their failure, as was mentioned
above, meant the decline of violently revolutionary socialism, which for
years thereafter remained in abeyance. The terms “communist” and “com-
munism” tended to disappear, being replaced by the now almost wholly
non-militant words “socialist” and “socialism” until Lenin deliberately
revived the usage of Marx and Engels from the Communist Manifesto.
This he did in order to distinguish his own brand of revolutionary social-
ism from the socialism of the Social Democratic parties, which had be-
come especially strong in western Europe. For not only had their socialism
largely become non-militant and evolutionary, but also they had, he main-
tained, betrayed the cause of socialism by supporting their respective
nations instead of Marxist internationalism, in World War I. On this
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 43

account, also, Lenin led the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party
(Bolsheviks) to change its name to the Russian Communist Party (Bol-
sheviks). Since then, the word “communism” has popularly been taken to
mean only this Leninist revolutionary kind of socialism, which soon in-
sisted that the arts must be devoted to what Lenin himself called “propa-
ganda by monuments.”
Nevertheless, two additional meanings for “communism” often add to
the confusion caused by the term, and themselves have had implications
affecting the arts. For one thing, the word has long been used simply as a
general term applicable to any system based on holding property in com-
mon. For a long time, also, it has often been applied to that kind of small
cooperative community which seeks either religious or secular reform on
the basis of some degree of collective ownership. In the Communist
Manifesto of 1848, such communities of a religious nature were almost
completely passed over by Marx and Engels, who, as atheists, regarded all
religious socialism and communism as necessarily reactionary. Marx and
Engels lumped those cooperative communities, which were secular rather
than religious in aim, with other secular socialist groups of a peaceful
nature under the name “Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism,”
thus using the word “utopian” in the derogatory sense in which it had
been applied by some earlier reformers to rival schemes of which they did
not approve. For a long time, Marxists have called “‘utopians” the
members of all non-Marxian communities, religious as well as secular,
which have been marked by some degree of public ownership of the means
of production. This usage has usually been followed by non-communists as
well, although some authorities now prefer the more exact—if awkward—
“communitarians” for the members of such utopian communities.
In spite of Marx’s ultimate scorn for what he himself had called
utopian socialism (which he contrasted with his own “scientific” socialism
because he believed he had discovered the natural laws governing the
development of human society), he and Engels especially recognized the
accomplishments of three earlier thinkers cited in the Communist Mani-
festo as critical-utopian socialists and communists. These were Saint-
Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen, who, along with other secular
utopians not mentioned by name, were praised for their critiques of
capitalism and for having established “the Socialist and Communist sys-
tems properly so called... .”™

5. Anarchism

Hiistoricatry, of course, the chief radical rival of all the varieties of

communism in modern times has been anarchism, which rejects the idea
that society is governed by rational laws. The modern use of “anarchist”
44 / INTRODUCTION

and “anarchism” began during the French Revolution. The two terms
derive from the Greek anarchos, meaning “without head or chief,” by way
of anarchia, meaning “the condition of a people without government” :
they connote both individualism and anti-statism. The origin of these
terms out of the Greek during the French Revolution is significant because
it reflects that reversion to exemplars from classical Antiquity which
marked both the social thought and the art of the time. Although, in
theory at least, the French Revolution itself was directed against the
absolutist monarchical state in the interests of egalitarian democracy and
of respect for the individual in communal action, and so was largely
anarchic, it increasingly emphasized the will of the people as a whole
rather than the liberties of individual persons. The word “anarchist” was
first used during the Revolution as a term of opprobrium: in 1793, a
Girondin, Brissot, demanded the suppression of the group known as the
“Enragés,” whom he called anarchists. The Enragés—whom in 1845 Marx
and Engels were the first to canonize as socialist pioneers, and whose name
was to be adopted in the late 1960’s by elements of the New Left—were a
loose association of like-minded individuals united only in rejecting state
authority, in advocating that the people act directly, and in believing that
communistic economic measures, rather than political action, offered the
best means for ending the sufferings of the poor. As opponents of state
authority in the tradition of Rousseau’s early Discourses, the Enragés were
even more opposed to the Jacobins than to the Girondins. When the
Jacobins were overthrown and replaced by the Directory, its members were
violently assailed as “anarchists’—a term here used simply for partisan
abuse. Thus during—and long after—the French Revolution, “anarchist”
was often applied not only to true anarchists but also to opponents whose
policies one considered disastrous, or else to rivals one wished to smear
indiscriminately—and this occurred in the arts as well as in politics.
The first great modern anarchist did not call himself one. This was
William Godwin, whose famous Enquiry Concerning . . . Political Justice,
written partly under the influence of sympathy-for the French Revolution
in 1793 (the year in which the word “anarchist” was first used in France),
is the first monument of modern anarchist theory, while also being a
logical continuation of Rousseau’s Discourse on . . . the Origin of Ine-
quality. Significantly, one of Godwin’s friends was the ultra-romantic and
individualistic Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli, whose radicalism had com-
pelled him to flee his native Zurich, who in 1767 had published in London
a pamphlet defending Rousseau, and who, in his Lectures on Painting of
1801, was probably the first to stigmatize eclecticism in art as despicable.
Fuseli had a considerable influence on his younger friend William Blake,
who also knew Godwin. Godwin’s own ideas affected those of the first
British utopian socialist, Robert Owen. And through Godwin’s influence
on his son-in-law, Shelley, and on Coleridge and Southey earlier, his
individualistic kind of anarchism profoundly affected English and Ameri-
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 45

can romantic literature and art as well as English and American social
thought.
The first man ever to call himself an anarchist, however, was a
Frenchman, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, who in 1840 proudly applied to
himself the very term that had been used to condemn him—and who was
influenced by Rousseau even while declaring hostility to him. Proudhon, a
friend of Gustave Courbet, from whom he derived a deep interest in art
theory, was also destined to be one of Marx’s greatest opponents. From his
“mutualist” anarchism, which stemmed in part from Fourier’s socialism,
largely sprang the communist anarchism (as it was later named) of
Bakunin, another of Marx’s greatest rivals. This in turn was developed
further by another Russian, Peter Kropotkin. Mutualist and communist
varieties of anarchism, regarded as forms of socialism, were eventually
imported into the United States, where they were to be found side by side
with the native, and much more individualistic, American anarchist tradi-
tion established by Josiah Warren, previously a follower of Robert Owen
—a tradition independently represented by that American maverick,
Henry David Thoreau. At times, in the United States as elsewhere,
Christian implications entered into anarchism as they entered into other
varieties of socialism. Particularly strong was the international influence of
the Russian “Christian anarchist,’ Leo Tolstoy, who, however, even
though influenced by Proudhon, sought to reject the label of anarchist
because he associated it with violence. One might add that anarchist
violence has traditionally appealed especially to Russian and Latin temper-
aments.
The anarchists’ opposition to any form of state, their support either of
extreme individualism without disturbing existing property relations, or of
a social organization based on local communes with community ownership
and community operation of land and capital, could especially fit in with
the suspicion with which many Americans, Thoreau and his admirer Frank
Lloyd Wright among them, have traditionally regarded a strong central
government. Anarchism (which, be it remembered, Marxists regard as the
last gasp of bourgeois revolutionaries) could have a special attraction for
artists in both Europe and America, because of the highly individualistic,
anti-official, and artistically revolutionary nature of so much avant-garde
art since the late eighteenth century, and because so many of the founders
and leaders of both communist and individualist anarchism, including
Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and Josiah Warren,
themselves regarded at least some of the arts as being highly important.
The combination, even within communist-anarchism, of an individualistic
emphasis, frequent interest in the arts, and strongly social aims naturally
made anarchism appeal to artists who regarded themselves as being both
artistically and socially radical. This was equally true for such noted artists
as Pissarro, Seurat, Signac, the young Picasso, the young Diego Rivera, and
the Americans Robert Henri and George Bellows, all of whom were
46 / INTRODUCTION
for their
social-conscious anarchists while also being artistically radical
Picasso, and
time. With the decline of communist-anarchism, Signac,
to an interes t in Marxia n com-
Rivera, among others, found it easy to pass
founde d in 1922-1 923 still
munism, though an anarchist international
survives at Toulouse.

6. Radicalism

A\warcuisM, socialism, and communism are, after all, only the most
every-
important varieties of social radicalism in modern times. Today, as
radical-
one knows, the word “radical” itself can be transferred from social
ism to many other fields, so that one might, for instance, refer to radical
or
art, and mean simply art that. artistically is radically new, unusual,
extreme. But it was in the sense of social radical ism that “radica l” origi-
nated in the late eighteenth century, appearing in England, where it was
used to refer either to radical economic and political reform on democratic
lines or to the upholder of such reform. In this sense, it first came into use
as an adjective in the term “radical reform,” which was employed at least
as early as 1791 in a pamphlet urging this as part of supporting the French
Revolution against Edmund Burke’s attack upon it.“ Here “radical,” in
accordance with its derivation from the Latin, represented the idea of a
return to “roots,” or origins, which was widespread in the philosophy of
English democrats of the later eighteenth century, especially under the
influence of Rousseau, and which reflected the new history-consciousness
so significant for art and art history. But, like the word “revolution,” the
meaning of “radical” shifted from this kind of restorative, and thus
essentially reverse cyclical, conception, to one emphasizing progress, and—
increasingly—revolutionary progress. After about 1810 the word was being
used in the expression “radical reformer,” taken as applicable to those who
supported the ideas of regular parliaments and universal suffrage and to all
who wished to alter the constitution in accordance with some sweeping
general reform. In that early period, the word already possessed both
revolutionary and utopian connotations; and that was still true in 1819,
when, for brevity, “radical” was first used as a noun. By the following year
“radicalism” made its appearance in England. Thereafter, “radical” and
“radicalism” achieved wide currency: by 1823, at least, both terms were
beginning to be used in France, and soon they spread to other countries in
western Europe and America.
In England itself, however, the idea of radicalism had been undergo-
ing important transformations before the word itself had come into use.
During the 1790’s those showing a radical spirit had been only a small,
primarily middle-class, minority sympathetic to the ideas of the French
Jacobins, and could be identified especially by their allegiance to the
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 47

celebrated defense of the French Revolution made against Burke by Tom

Paine in The Rights of Man (1791-1792). But during the early years of
the nineteenth century what became known as “radicalism” developed
into a popular movement containing widely diverse tendencies, in which
for a time members of the working class and middle-class reformers were
found together. Even some disgruntled manufacturers and gentry were
attracted to it, usually for quite different reasons. Consequently, radicalism
was no longer clearly definable: its adherents merely agreed negatively in
opposing what they regarded as restrictions upon political liberties. ‘The
discontented members of the gentry within the radical movement were
mostly hoping for the restoration of aristocratic privileges. But even that
great majority of radicals who urged popular revolution or reform as
progress could arrive at little agreement on social and economic ques-
tions.°° When the term “radical” was eventually applied to art, it was
applied to a wide variety of new kinds of art, and so similarly lacked clear
definition.
Radicalism achieved a wide popular appeal first in England primarily
because it was the first country to become industrialized. And the radical
movement first became particularly popular in the four years immediately
following the Napoleonic wars—years during which, however, it remained
extraordinarily ill-defined and untidy. Within the movement, a conflict
developed between elements of the “middle class” (a term that first
appeared about 1812) and elements of the “working class” (a term first
occurring in English labor writings shortly after Waterloo). The crisis
came with the “Peterloo Massacre” in 1819, when a huge but peaceful
popular demonstration was violently broken up, mainly by mounted mid-
dle-class yeomanry consisting of vindictive Manchester manufacturers,
merchants, and shopkeepers. One result was that later in 1819 and early in
1820 there was organized in London the “Cato Street Conspiracy” of
members of the working class, chiefly shoemakers, with the aim of over-
throwing the government. But the participants, who still called one
another “Citizen” and used other terms inherited from the French Revolu-
tion, were exposed and their leaders hanged.
Appalled by such events, the middle-class reformers within the Eng-
lish radical movement took a more determined stand, doing so under the
very name “radicalism” itself. Jeremy Bentham, who had turned democrat
in 1808 and had soon become the leading philosopher among the radicals,
wrote his Radicalism Not Dangerous in 1820 in a deliberate effort to
separate the Radicals as a new party from the cause of those who today
would probably be called communists because of their demand that the
government be overthrown ,by violent revolution. In the 1830's, John
Stuart Mill—who was influenced also by Saint-Simonian socialism—
headed the attempts of the Benthamite radicals to form a party devoted to
“the people” against the aristocracy. However, the attempt to form a
separate Radical Party had failed by the end of the 1830’s. The party of the
48 / INTRODUCTION

Radicals thereafter lost its’ popular character and primarily represented

doctrinaire members of the middle class who customarily supported the
left wing of the Whigs, and then that of the Liberal Party. Known as the
“intellectual” or “Philosophical” Radicals, they were also called, from their
Benthamite philosophy, the “Utilitarians”—a name bound to reflect their
attitude toward the arts, if indeed they thought of art at all. It is significant
that Fabianism—a non-violent form of British socialism led by middle-
class intellectuals—was to develop very largely out of the utilitarianism of
Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Like Bentham and almost all the other
Utilitarians except Mill, nearly all the Fabians were to have little interest
in the visual arts, with those who had any such interest likely to restrict it
to useful crafts or else to the town planning and mass housing aspects of
architecture which likewise could be regarded as having immediate social
utility. As a consequence, socially radical painters and sculptors were
almost compelled to look to other forms of social radicalism for leadership.
In contrast to the Continent, where the term “radical” regularly
connoted radical revolution against the bourgeoisie, before the middle of
the nineteenth century the Philosophical Radicals of England had become
a thoroughly middle-class and utterly non-violent party compelled by
weakness to ally itself with liberalism. And by then liberalism itself had
lost the revolutionary radical connotations it had once possessed.
Not only did the Radicals fail to establish their own independent
party, but also they increasingly split over a major inconsistency in
Bentham’s thought. One consequence of that split was to be the eventual
development of a radical Right—which, in opposing the Left, was to make
frequent attacks on the works of artists suspected of holding leftist eco-
nomic or political views. In England, where the English genius for compro-
mise largely prevented the direct physical conflicts between classes urged
by Marx and so frequent on the Continent, the radical Right represented a
far less violent point of view. It was less violent, also, than that of the
radical Right in the United States, even though this American variety in
contrast to radicalism on the Continent,” developed largely under ideas
ultimately derived from Bentham.
The split within English Radicalism which grew out of the inconsist-
ency in Bentham’s ideas and was to have considerable effects on attitudes
toward art arose in the following way. Bentham sought to apply the
principles of Newtonian science to political, economic, and moral affairs in
order to achieve “the greatest happiness of the greatest number’—a slo-
gan he borrowed directly from the eighteenth-century French Philosophe
and utilitarian Helvétius, who also had a mechanistic, rather than organis-
mic, conception of society. Like Bentham, nearly all Philosophical Radi-
cals tended to glorify science as “practical” at the expense of art (though
J. S. Mill and various literary figures, including Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt’s
circle earlier, became exceptions). Bentham’s followers fell into two
divergent groups because, in trying to apply Newtonian mechanistic prin-
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 49

ciples, Bentham had respectively based the juristic and economic aspects
of his philosophy upon two contradictory doctrines. In his philosophy
of law he rejected the idea of “natural law’ as being a mere “fiction,”
maintaining that jurisprudence is a science of man-made restraints. As a
disciple of Adam Smith, however, he simultaneously held that economic
science requires a search for the “laws of nature,” being based on a natural
identity of interests and so, unlike jurisprudence, on freedom from any
artificial restraints. He therefore insisted that the state exists for the in-
dividual, his mechanistic conception of society achieving expression in an
atomistic—and essentially non-artistic—individualism very different from
the kind of individualism inherent in the romantic doctrine of original
genius, which regards the individual as a unique organism.
Twenty years or so after Bentham’s death in 1832, his followers in
England developed a new and simplified form of Utilitarian philosophy by
abandoning the first of these conflicting principles in favor of the second,
with its exaltation of economic individualism. In doing this, they became
followers of Adam Smith far more than of Bentham himself, because the
ideas of laissez-faire, free trade, the spontaneous identification of interests,
and the rejection of any economic regulation of the individual by govern-
ment and law pretty much summed up their social conceptions. Thorough
confusion as to the meaning of “Radical” arose because of the increasing
opposition between the Benthamite Radicals’ heritage as representing the
political Left, and their economic doctrines, which, once regarded as highly
radical, were being taken over by conservatives as the truly conservative
point of view. This confusion led inevitably to the weakening of English
Radicalism. Then, the decline of the Liberal Party, to the left wing of
which the Radicals had eventually given strong support, led many Radicals
to drift into the Fabian-inspired Labour Party during the 1920’s and later,
in an effort to maintain their radical spirit. But some of those loudest in
proclaiming their Radicalism found it much easier to coalesce with the
Conservatives, who had largely adopted the once radical doctrines of
Iaissez-faire—with the paradoxical result that a radical Right had at last
developed, but one without any interest in art except when attacking
artists actually or allegedly leftist.
The same kind of development, but more pronounced, occurred in the
United States, and was destined to have repercussions in western Europe
and elsewhere abroad when the United States became the leading anti-
communist nation after World War II. The American radical Right took a
more extreme form than that of England because in the United States the
economic individualism fostered by the English Utilitarians was reinforced
by American nationalism, based on the atomistic political tradition of
Montesquieu, as well as by the American individualistic spirit stimulated
by the frontier and radical Protestantism, in addition to the romantic
movement. By the twentieth century, many Americans who most strongly
upheld the originally liberal and then radical economic doctrine of individ-
50 / INTRODUCTION

ualistic “free enterprise” were to be found on the political far Right. The
members of this radical Right—which in mid-century included supporters
of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and by the early 1960’s the much-discussed
John Birch Society—were, of course, among the most vocal opponents of
communism, real or alleged, at home or abroad. But because their interests
were fundamentally economic and political, and based on an atomistic
rather than an organismic conception of society and culture, they paid
little or no attention to the arts, except negatively when they discovered
artists among the upholders of economic doctrines, such as those of
Marxism, which they regarded as economically and politically subversive.
Whereupon they tended to judge works of art on the basis of the economic
and political doctrines of the artists who made them, rather than on their
artistic merit—being in this respect not unlike most Marxists.
On the Continent, the radical Right had begun to develop well before
the end of the nineteenth century, arising, essentially independent of
English developments, in reaction against the French Revolutionary tradi-
tion. Indeed, the extreme Right has been described as “a mirror image of
the radical Left” **—and the latter on the Continent has mainly developed
out of the French Revolution and its heritage. Moreover, the radical Right
of continental countries, in opposing the internationalism of the Left, has
been marked by strong national variations—and the arts, in order to be
regarded as acceptable by the Right have had to reflect these national
characteristics. Radical nationalists took over the Marxist argument that
contemporary institutions, morality, laws—and art—reflect the values and
desires of the ruling group,” but applied them to the nation rather than
internationally.
It should be emphasized that the radical Right on the Continent, in
reacting against the violent heritage of the French Revolution, has been far
more violent in its own radicalism than has that of England. Even while
attacking the social and economic radicalism of the far Left, it has shown a
particularly strong readiness to conduct politics with some or all of the
techniques and appeals introduced by mass parties of the Left.°' These
techniques have often involved the conception of art as a weapon of
propaganda—with the paradoxical result, for instance, that Nazi art, as the
art of a radical Right, was to have many characteristics in common with
contemporary socialist-realist art in Stalin’s Russia. For if radical national-
ists have paid any attention to art at all, they too have ordinarily upheld
the “realistic” kinds of art which for a century or more have been most
easily understood by the masses, and therefore could be most directly
useful for conveying propaganda messages to them.
Thus, on both Left and Right, the term “radical” has retained its
original connotations of radical change, though change of this kind, first
demanded by radicals of the Left, was only later to be sought by the
various types of radical Right. But seek it they did, for which reason we
must beware of assuming that the spirit of the Right has been limited
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 51

entirely to simple conservative protest either against change in society or

against the direction of change.” We must therefore take into account the
fact that demands for change made by the radical Right, as well as those
made by the Left, have often affected the arts. On the Right, however, the
situation has been complicated by the simultaneous participation of static
conservative points of view lacking on the Left. These, combined with the
inclination of the radical Right to have no positive interest in any but the
most “realistic” useful arts, have naturally stirred the enmity of avant-garde
artists. Yet the term “radical” was eventually applied to the work of such
artists themselves, as showing a radical change in style from generally
accepted canons of art. But when such artistically radical artists have also
been inclined toward social radicalism, it is only natural that, in rejecting
the radicalism of the Right, they have been attracted instead to the Left.

7. Radical “ Left’ and Radical “Right”

Now rr should be noted that the terms “Left” and “Right” grew out of
the French Revolution as a means of distinguishing radicals from what
soon became known as conservatives.” Furthermore, the origin of “Left”
and “Right” as political labels offers a clear case of how political terminol-
ogy may be directly determined by artistic fashion. For these terms devel-
oped at the time of the post-Napoleonic Restoration of the Bourbons,
when the ultra-royalists were the extreme conservatives and the liberals
were leaders of radicalism. The new terms grew out of the architectural
form of the meeting-hall of the French legislative body. That hall, built in
the old Palais Bourbon, had been designed in 1795 under the Directory,
and had been completed two years later, in the then avant-garde Roman
Revival Style, with semi-circular banks of seats like a Roman theater. On
these the members seated themselves from Right to Left, as seen by the
presiding officer facing them. However, the idea for this semicircular
chamber, designed by the architects Gisors and Leconte, goes back to a
design made earlier in the French Revolution, being anticipated in the
half-oval of banked seats that Gisors had installed in 1792 within the
former Salle des machines at the Tuileries to make a meeting place for the
Revolutionary Convention (Fig. 3). During the earliest meetings of the
Convention, the delegates had sat wherever they pleased, but they had
gradually drifted into a seating arrangement in accord with their political
sympathies. The Girondins had placed themselves to the right of the presi-
dent’s chair, the Jacobins, to the left, with the most radical members
(almost all of whom were Jacobins) in the high seats at the rear—from
which circumstance the radical bloc in the Convention became known as
“La Montagne” (The Mountain).
Thus by the shape of its seating the very architecture of the assembly
 FIG. 3. Hall of the Convention at the Tuileries (1792), architecture by Guy
Gisors.

hall of the Convention tended to stimulate in France a multi-party system

in a political spectrum from far Left to extreme Right—and it continued
to do so wherever the influence of the French Revolutionary tradition
spread. As that tradition also stood so largely for an organic integration of
society, politics, and culture, the political range from Left to Right could
be related to a parallel conception of French artists as ranging from
ultra-conservative members of the academies on the extreme artistic Right
to artistically ultra-radical, anti-academic artists on the far Left.
In England, however, in contrast to France, the very different shape of
the House of Commons (in which, as a consequence of being modeled on
a Gothic college chapel, the seats of the party of Government are on one
long side of a rectangular gangway, with those of the Opposition party on
the opposite side) has directly encouraged a two-party political system. But
in the absence of any conception of society, politics, and culture as being
organically interrelated there has been in England, until very recently,
almost no conception of politics and the arts as being parts of the same
social organism. As for the United States, though the seating for both the
House of Representatives and the Senate in the Capitol at Washington
was from the beginning designed in a semi-circular Roman Revival fashion
following that of the Revolutionary Convention and National Assembly in
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 53

France, nevertheless no spectrum of numerous parties ranging from Left to

Right ever developed as it did in France. For not only did the United
States soon develop a two-party system on a different basis from that of
England, but also the members of the American Congress have been likely
to vote more as individuals than have legislators in either France or
England. A similar atomistic American individualism has prevailed also
among American artists, so that, as we noted earlier, no official national
academies of art against which the artistically more radical or liberal artists
might join in reacting as in France have ever developed in the United
States.
Although originally the labels “Right” and “Left” were respectively
applied to royalists and their radical opponents in France, after monarchi-
cal authoritarianism was defeated in the Revolution of 1830 and socialism
of various hues simultaneously increased in importance, “Right” and
“Left” were applied instead to those who respectively held conservative
and radical attitudes toward social change and the distribution of eco-
nomic wealth. With the passage of time, “Left” and “Right” were also
used to distinguish the wings of a single radical party, whether in France
itself or in a country where the influence of the French tradition had
spread. For instance, in 1909, Lenin attacked the Bogdanov group within
his own Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party as “Left.” From poli-
tics the two terms could easily be borrowed, to be applied in other fields.
Very shortly after Lenin had accused Bogdanov and his followers of
leftism, four Russian art students were expelled from the Moscow School
of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture as “leftists.” Their particular
leftism, however, primarily consisted in devotion to the paintings of Cé
zanne, Van Gogh, and Matisse, and so was more artistic than political.
Similarly, after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, artistically radical,
abstract artists were called “left-wing.” At first under Lenin they had
freedom to work as they chose. They could be encouraged to do so by
Anatoly Lunacharsky, who, as Lenin’s Commissar for Education, was in
charge of Soviet culture, including the arts, because a few months after the
Bolshevik Revolution, he had carefully asked Lenin whether “left-wing”
artists could be allowed to decorate Moscow’s Red Square for May Day.
And to this question Lenin had replied, “I’m no expert in this; I don’t
want to impose my taste on others”—thereby causing much trouble for
later Soviet regimes that flatly rejected “modern” art.** Nevertheless, Lenin
himself disliked modern art, and when he began to attack political leftism
in connection with his step backward toward capitalism with his New
Economic Policy, his attack was applied also to leftism in art, with the
result that many modern artists left Russia for western Europe. Further-
more, in the political struggle among Lenin’s would-be heirs, and especially
after the triumph of Stalin in that struggle, both “leftist” and “rightist”
were applied very directly by Stalinists (who regarded themselves as the
center) to modern art movements and to works of art of which they did
54 / INTRODUCTION

not approve—that one-to-one relating of art and politics so characteristic

of Stalin and his successors, and as far as possible imposed by them on
official Communist parties throughout western Europe and elsewhere.
Thus “Right” and “Left,” which had originated simply as descriptive
terms, had become terms of opprobrium.

§. Liberalism and Conservatism

Durie the post-Napoleonic period in which “Right” and “Left” became

political labels in France, the related words “conservative” and “liberal”
became party labels. For “conservative,” a term that had appeared in the
French Revolutionary period, developed into the name of an ultra-nght-
wing party, the Conservateurs de la légitimité, made up of the ultra-
royalists who welcomed the return of the Bourbons to France. (Not until
1830 was “Conservative” applied to the name of a party in England to
replace the long-accepted term “Tory.”) Yet even though liberals and
conservatives were so opposed to each other, both were concerned with
restoration in their different ways; both reflected the new consciousness of
history so important for the arts.
It was the Conservateurs de la légitimité who in 1820 first gave
currency in France to “liberal” as a party name by derisively applying it to
their opponents—the liberals then being the most important radicals, and
thus leaders of what had just been named the “Left.” Not only was this
not the first use of “liberal” as a political term, but also the idea of
liberalism had been in existence for some time. It had, however, existed in
two different versions, from which have sprung respectively the two great
branches of modern liberalism.
One of these two branches rests on the historical empiricism of John
Locke and the British Whigs of the eighteenth century, and has tended to
regard the state as a necessary evil. Correspondingly, it has tended to reject
state patronage of art. The other branch, which sprang from the Enlight-
enment and the French Revolutionary tradition, has aimed instead at
achieving social patterns through a priori reason, patterns in which the arts
could play a part. It has believed that through such reasoning, a scientific
view of the nature of society can be arrived at, one on which, therefore, a
truly good society can be scientifically based. This highly rationalistic
kind of liberalism, unlike the other, has regarded the state as a necessary—
if possibly temporary—good, whose patronage of the arts is therefore good.
Far more than the other variety of liberalism, it was originally considered
to be highly radical. Its rationalism has made it appeal particularly to some
of the “intelligentsia,” and modern socialism and communism have been,
in large part, offshoots from it.
In many countries, including those of western Europe and also the
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 55
United States, the two branches of liberalism—one insisting on the exten-
sion of individual rights to all members of the community, the other on
the right of the people as an organic whole to govern itself—were to come
together in a wide variety of mixtures. And these have developed in ways
that at times have made it all too easy for non-liberals to confuse liberalism
with the radicalism of socialists and communists. As a consequence, when
eventually the political term “liberalism” was applied to other fields,
including the arts, some purely artistic liberals were to be accused, quite
wrongly, of being socialists or communists.
Originally, however, the name “liberal” was directly applied only to
supporters of the second branch of liberalism noted above—and so only to
political revolutionaries on the Continent who upheld the French Revolu-
tionary tradition of the eighteenth century in opposing royalty and the
church, not on empirical grounds, but on the basis of the reason common
to all men as making possible the formulation of scientific natural laws of
society, transcending factionalism. “Liberal” in this sense was invented in
1799 and used in that year by Napoleon, who claimed to be a liberal
preserving values above faction. After Napoleon fell from power, “liberal”
was promptly applied as a term of derision by royalist conservatives to their
opponents, who, like “radicals” earlier and “anarchists” later, took over as
their own a name scornfully given to them. This did not occur first in
France, however, but under French Revolutionary influence in Spain,
where the party that took the name “Liberales” had been advocating
constitutional government since the occupying armies of Napoleon had
been forced out of the country. It was apparently within the two years
while the Spanish Constitution of 1812 was being prepared that “Liberal”
first became the name of a party. Then, in 1820, a revolt of the “Liberales”
momentarily made possible a liberal government—and a great artist of
revolution, Goya (Fig. 4), unequivocally spoke up in favor of it, thereby
becoming even more of a hero to future radicals. In that same year, the
Liberals of France too adopted the name derisively applied to them by
their own royalist opponents. And one of their number was Géricault,
whose most famous painting, The Raft of the Medusa (Fig. 5), had
involved a direct liberal attack on the monarchical regime of the Bourbon
Restoration.
Originally, then, the term “liberal” denoted a party, a government, a
policy, or an opinion that was radically anti-monarchical and anti-clerical
in its demand for freedom. But as liberalism has in fact stemmed from
two different sources while maintaining an attitude stressing the value
of freedom for individuals, minorities, and nations, it has never developed
a single highly organized and dogmatic system of thought. Conse-
quently, “liberal” increasingly has become a term ever more difficult to
define in any permanent way, whether in politics or, eventually, in other
fields, including that of art.
Thus, members of the extreme sections of Liberal parties have often
56 / INTRODUCTION

been called radicals. But even among liberals themselves, the original
revolutionary connotations of “liberal” disappearedin the course of the
nineteenth century, and particularly after the Revolution of 1830 in
France. Today, when many conservatives and radicals alike refer to them-
selves as liberals, and when some liberals even call themselves conserva-
tives, “liberalism” is used still more loosely, and so is still more difficult to
define, especially because for years liberals and conservatives have both
often been arguing in the language of liberalism.
Nevertheless, one can at least say that the term “liberalism” has
usually implied a strong conception of the rights of man based on a belief
in the natural harmony of interests, ‘and that it has also ordinarily ad-
hered to the idea of progress in the betterment of mankind on earth—
progress for which the arts have been considered important by some
liberals. From political liberalism, therefore, these beliefs could spread to
liberalism in the arts, among other fields. But now, whether applied to
politics or to art, “liberal” has come to mean little more than “progres-
sive” or “reform-minded.” At times it is even used politically to mean
“social democratic,” and so has become confused with democratic social-
ism. And it has fallen into disrepute with many non-communists because
communists, who have long regarded liberalism as a bourgeois movement,
have nonetheless in recent years done their best to take the term over by

ric. 4. “Barbarians!,” etching by Francisco Goya, from The Disasters of War

(1810-1813).
 Se

Fic. 5. The Raft of the Medusa (1819) by Théodore Géricault.

applying it to some of those sympathetic to them, including some artists.

The point should be made, however, that even though a truly liberal
environment can make the life and work of an artist easier, the liberal at-
titude is fundamentally different from that of the avant-garde artist to-
ward his own work. For liberalism is based on compromise, whereas the
greater radically modern artists have not compromised in their art.
It was from liberalism—and especially from the more radical and
rationalistic branch of it which came out of the French Enlightenment
and the French Revolution—that socialists took, in theory at least, the
concept of the rights of man. Their conception of such rights was there-
fore different from that of the American Revolutionary tradition, which,
of course, derived more directly from British thought stemming from John
Locke and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. Yet the two traditions,
French and American, were similar enough in some respects so that they
could merge: they did so in the thought of Tom Paine, who had important
friends among politically radical artists in France as well as in America and
England.
The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 had made possible the origin of
50/7 INTRODUCTION

the political cartoon as we know it, one of the chief weapons, at once social
and artistic, of liberals and radicals. For that revolution had created
freedom of the press, the political condition under which alone caricature
and satire as self-sufficient art forms could develop.” It made possible the
eighteenth-century social satires of William Hogarth, especially beloved
today by Marxian art historians, and the anti-upper—class political carica-
tures of James Gillray and others, mass-produced by “print shops.” Out of
these sources, the modern political cartoon developed as a democratic
social art, especially after the invention of lithography at the end of the
eighteenth century. The cartoon, being critical of the day’s happenings,
had a basis in actuality at once antiacademic and conducive to popular
realism, particularly in revolutionary times. It spread to the Continent
with the French Revolution of 1789, with attacks on Napoleon, and
especially with the Revolution of 1830, which did so much to stimulate the
radical republican Daumier as a socio-political cartoonist. Daumier’s car-
toons, at times mordantly realistic (Fig. 14), usually emphasized satire
rather than sheer caricature. The combination of the two became frequent
on the Continent only after the Revolutions of 1848, eventually reaching a
kind of radical peak in the cartooris of George Grosz, who was for a time
very close to the communist Left (Fig. 108), following the German
Revolution of 1918.
However, communists—although, like other socialists, they took over
from liberals their version of the old idea of human rights—have tended
when in power to react against the primary emphasis placed by liberals on
the civil and political rights of the individual, including freedom of the
press. They have also reacted against the original belief of liberalism that a
natural harmony of interests with which men should not interfere exists
within the social .order—a doctrine which, when applied to art, could
encourage free individual expression. Most liberals, however, while con-
tinuing to believe in political freedom and equality before the law, eventu-
ally abandoned or even reversed those originally liberal doctrines of free
trade and a free market based on Adam Smith’s “system of natural liberty”
which increasingly were taken over by economic conservatives. Most lib-
erals, too, more and more came to believe that economic as well as political
justice could best be advanced by governmental forces and governmental
control, a belief that has often affected the arts—for instance, under the
W.P.A. of the Depression years in the United States. But indirectly at
least, it was not so much the liberals as the socialists and communists, who,
deriving from Rousseau and the French Revolution, and appalled by social
injustices arising from absolute monarchy and then from the Industrial
Revolution, had first emphasized on a large scale the idea of achieving
economic justice through social action. The result was that their artist
friends were expected to employ their art as an educational tool for social
improvement, and so for propaganda.
In such ways the economic views of many liberals, including some
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 59

artists, came to overlap those of socialists and communists, and other

radicals, many of whose own views in other respects had grown out of
liberalism itself: it is not without reason that Marxism has been called by
the author of one of the best general books on communism, “the illegiti-
mate and rebellious offspring of nineteenth-century liberalism.” ™ Liberals
and socialists and communists alike have shown faith in progress and
perfectibility, and have upheld democracy and equality (even though they
have interpreted these terms differently). And some liberals have joined
socialists and communists in being highly critical of the American system,
especially its capitalism. In view of such overlappings and _ historical
connections, it is scarcely surprising that many political and economic
liberals, including some artists, European and American alike, have been
mistakenly accused of being either communists or strongly sympathetic to
communism.
It cannot be too strongly emphasized, however, that it is possible for
an artist to be artistically liberal or radical while having no interest in
political or economic radicalism, or in very rare instances even while
holding conservative political and economic views. Yet many artists whose
works have in some way been radical, whether in subject-matter, tech-
nique, or form, have been mistakenly accused by conservatives of infusing
their works with communistic content. We shall see, for instance, that in
the French election campaign of 1877 under the Third Republic, Manet
and his Impressionist friends were attacked by the royalist-Bonapartist
alliance as abettors of the Red Terror, Le Spectre rouge, of the com-
munists, and as producers of Communard art. Yet in fact, of all the major
Impressionists, only Camille Pissarro was socially and politically radical—
and even he became not a communist, but an anarchist. Manet was a
liberal republican (and all liberal republicans were then falsely ac-
cused by the royalists of having communist sympathies) with essentially
bourgeois tastes in everything but his art. Degas was actually a middle-
class royalist, and Cézanne a staunch Catholic with economic views of
the most conservative kind. Clearly, avant-garde art does not necessarily
go hand in hand with radical political beliefs, though the two do so fre-
quently overlap.
As similar attacks have been leveled at many other artists, European
and American, often with equal injustice, such accusations and the reasons
for them will have to be investigated here. Accusations of this kind, which
at times have been made with full sincerity, have ordinarily come from one
of two chief groups. On one hand, they have come from conservative
artists, mostly academically trained, who by temperament and training
tend to be suspicious of radical innovations in art either as violating what
they consider to be fundamental artistic principles good for all time
everywhere or as displaying a supposed lack of craftsmanship and technical
ability. Or else such attacks have come from purely political or economic
conservatives—especially those of strongly nationalistic bent—who, in lev-
60 / INTRODUCTION

eling accusations of this kind, have usually shown ignorance of art while
giving expression to their own conscious or unconscious belief that eco-
nomics or politics ultimately determines all other aspects of human life. As
was mentioned earlier, paradoxically enough this is a presupposition largely
shared by secular socialists and communists, and especially by orthodox
Marxian communists, who regard the economic-political situation as ulti-
mately determining not only man’s social and political life but also the
whole socio-cultural organism, including the arts. It is this presupposition,
then, which makes many political conservatives, as well as communists in
general and Marxian communists in particular, regard works of art—if
considered worthwhile at all—as mete tools for achieving social ends, as
useful essentially for achieving “propaganda by monuments.”

9. Politics, the Artist, and Alenation

Iw rue heat of pursuing social goals—especially political and economic
goals—communists, many non-communists, and also anti-communists of
the far Right have revealed themselves and their often overlapping aims
unconsciously in the kind of art that they have accepted and fostered. ‘This
means that study of the art and art theories of communists or of anti-com-
munists can cast considerable light on the nature and presuppositions of
communism and of anticcommunism at one and the same time. Through-
out this study of social radicalism in relation to the arts, therefore, the
unconscious revelations of communists, as well as the conscious ones, are
investigated by means of the arts in relation to those of other radicals and
of anti-ccommunists. The author (who, to repeat, is not a communist or a
socialist) believes that such revelations as seen through the medium of the
arts make especially clear certain cultural limitations of communism in
general and of Marxism in particular. At the same time, the constant
recurrence throughout Western history of various kinds of communist
minority groups also suggests that those of us who reject communism
today would do well to consider communist criticism of “capitalistic”
culture (now actually involving a mixed economy rather than pure
capitalism) ” in an effort to bring Western culture to its fullest possible
fruition. Selfimprovement, after all, requires self-criticism—as so many
communist groups have themselves maintained; and adequate self-criticism
surely demands that the criticisms made by others, including even those
with whom one may disagree most profoundly, should be taken into full
account.
Two warnings are necessary here. The first is addressed to those
interested primarily in artistic quality. This is not a book about art by
itself, but about the relation of works of art, art theories, and their
respective creators to certain conceptions of society. Some of these concep-
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 61

tions are based upon philosophical pre-suppositions diametrically opposed

to those dominant in Western society this side of what Winston Churchill
called the Iron Curtain, and correspondingly tend to represent diametri-
cally different conceptions of art. In Marxist and other socialist societies
and groups, for instance, those in control have ordinarily been interested in
works of art not for themselves but for their social utility: it is on this
account that in this study little analysis of the formal qualities of individ-
ual works will be found. Although implicitly, at least, some indication of
the author’s view of the relative artistic merit of individual works of art,
and of the philosophical presuppositions behind them, will be given
throughout, no explicit and organized discussion of artistic significance and
value will be made until the conclusion of this volume.
The second word of warning is addressed to those who may tend to
confuse communism with other forms of political radicalism or liberalism,
and then to relate these all directly to artistic radicalism. It must be
reiterated that the relationship between communism and _ radicalism
in the arts is certainly not that simple except under a rigidly totalitarian
regime. While it is, of course, true that a considerable number of Euro-
pean and American artists have been, at least for a time, warmly sympa-
thetic to communism or some other form of social radicalism, we shall find
that other artists who have participated in communist-led activities have
done so because they were unaware of the communist connections. The
largest number, however, have so participated because, though not commu-
nists themselves, they have wished to register a protest against some aspect
of life, particularly middle-class life, which communists then also happened
to be protesting. As such protests reflect the ideas and beliefs of artists,
surely they too are important for understanding the history of art.
It must be remembered that the very nature of artistic creation since
the early Renaissance, and especially since the foreshadowings of the
romantic movement in the eighteenth century, tends to make artists regard
themselves as completely free agents even when they are participating in
social causes guided by communists or other social radicals. It must also be
remembered that this very sense of the necessity for freedom has placed
avant-garde artists among the true revolutionaries, particularly in those
regions affected by the French Revolutionary tradition, with its organismic
concept of revolution as being not merely political but social and cultural
as well. Within that tradition, avant-garde artists have been likely to
anticipate and even further revolution by their art—as David did for the
Revolution of 1789, or as the liberal Géricault to a lesser degree did for the
Revolution of 1830 by his early opposition to the restored Bourbon mon-
archy. We shall see, among other instances, that Daumier similarly antici-
pated and even furthered the Revolution of 1848 in France; Courbet, the
Commune; modern Russian artists, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917; and
various German expressionists, the German Revolution of November 1918.
We shall also find—to repeat—that the application of the term “avant-
62 / INTRODUCTION

garde” to artists as well as to leaders of a social movement first occurred

within early French socialism.
Artists affected by the French Revolutionary tradition, with its social
and cultural emphasis, have further indicated particular readiness to found
their own revolutionary societies or councils, established, like David’s
Commune des arts, in opposition to official academic bodies created from
above by rulers or governments. ‘These revolutionary organizations of
artists, or artists and writers, appeared and played a political role not only
in the Revolution of 1789, but also in the Revolution of 1848 in France, in
the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917,
the German Revolution of November 1918, and the Hungarian Revolution
of 1956. Indeed, societies of this kind in many fields “were to make their
appearance in every genuine revolution throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Each time they appeared, they sprang up as the
spontaneous organs of the people, not only outside of all revolutionary
parties but entirely unexpected by them and their leaders.”
Artists’ organizations of this kind—long lacking in the United States,
where artistic and socio-political ideas tended to be kept in utterly separate
compartments until the twentieth century—have regularly crossed party
lines by including adherents of various parties. Many of their members
have, like David, both charted the path to revolution and stimulated the
progress of revolution, so that they too have been among the true revolu-
tionaries. In addition, the members of such revolutionary societies have
shown themselves to be true democrats and true egalitarians, for the
societies have cut not only across party lines but also across the lines of
social class—members of various classes sharing a common anti-academi-
cism. ‘Their egalitarianism has been demonstrated, when they have held
exhibitions, by the way in which they have customarily rejected the
discriminations of juries of academic type. After all, though artists do
constitute one kind of elite, the ranking of an artist in history is ultimately
decided by a thoroughly democratic process. Unlike the ranking of a
scientist by fellow scientists, that of an artist is not decided by his fellow
artists or determined by members of any one social class or by government
officials, except temporarily under an absolutist or totalitarian government.
On the contrary, in the more truly democratic societies it is decided by all
those of whatever class who love art, and who yet may be incapable of
making even the most insignificant works of art themselves.”* Surely, this
is as democratic a process of selection as could exist.
Despite the important role of artists and artists’ societies early in
revolutions, however, such revolutionary groups usually have soon disap-
peared. For as the revolutions have progressed, these organizations have
ordinarily been crushed before their fruition by a party risen to dominant
position—often, indeed a party that has assumed dictatorial powers under
the leadership of some politician who, like nearly all politicians every-
where, is ignorant of, and usually uninterested in, the arts. Such a poli-
 The Varieties of Modern Radicalism / 63

tician is often a professional revolutionary—and therefore himself a prod-

uct of the French Revolutionary tradition. Yet only after the way to a
revolution of the total type represented by that tradition has been charted
by wniters and artists, and the revolution itself largely stimulated by them,
has the professional revolutionary usually been able to take over the revo-
lution by means of his party; and then his influence on the arts has
regularly proved both restrictive and backward-looking. As Hannah Arendt
has written: “the part played by the professional revolutionist in the out-
break of the revolution has usually been insignificant to the point of non-
existence,” even though “his influence upon the actual course a revolution
will take has proved to be very great. And since he spent his apprentice-
ship in the school of past revolutions, he will invariably exert this influence
not in favor of the new and the unexpected, but in favor of some action
which remains in accordance with the past. Since it is his very task to as-
sure the continuity of revolution, he will be inclined to argue in terms of
historical precedents, and the conscious and pernicious imitation of past
events, which . . . lies, partially at least, in the very nature of his profes-
sion.” ° As a consequence, the leading professional revolutionists who
have found in Marxism their official guide to the interpretation of all his-
tory, past, present, and future, have nearly all had especially retrograde ef-
fects on the arts as on various other aspects of life.”* Marx, himself, in the
tradition of the French Revolution, had urged a kind of revolution not
merely political but organically social and cultural. An interest in the arts
was to reappear in such leading Marxists as his son-in-law Paul Lafargue,
Wilhelm Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, and especially
Plekhanov, Lunacharsky, and Trotsky. Still, Marx’s emphasis in his mature
and later years upon political economy as the one fundamental determin-
ing factor for each phase of human society and its culture was to be imi-
tated and exaggerated by his followers, among whom, of course, have in
practice been the most effective social revolutionaries in history—but
many of whom have been reactionaries in the arts.
The next two chapters, then, will be devoted to the lives of Marx and
his devoted friend Engels in relation to the development of their theories
which have so profoundly affected the culture, art criticism, and art of the
world. One of those theories, about which much will be said as a major
theme of this book, was Marx’s early doctrine of the alienation of man, as
creator and producer, from himself and from other men in modern “capi-
talist’”” society as a consequence of private ownership of the means of
production. For under capitalism, according to Marx, the world of objects
that originally were the product of man’s labor and knowledge becomes
independent of man and uncontrolled.
Like much of Marx’s thought, this theme of alienation can be traced
to ideas of leading thinkers of the Enlightenment.” Before the term
“alienation” originated, writers of the Enlightenment were alienated by
the censorship of the absolutist Bourbon regime and its academies and by
64 / INTRODUCTION

the centralized power of the Catholic Church. Before the term was used,
too, alienation manifested itself among artists in the French Revolution—
for instance, in the personal alienation of David from the academic
tradition. It manifested itself far more in the Industrial Revolution, in the
alienation not only of workingmen and intellectuals from the bourgeoisie
because of social injustices under capitalism, but also of avant-garde artists
from the bourgeoisie because of the kind of art the bourgeois Philistine
stood for, so that in the arts it was closely related to lack of sympathetic
patrons. Meanwhile, the problem of alienation had early passed from the
Enlightenment to German romantics, and had become central to German
classical philosophy, especially in the writings of Fichte, Hegel (from
whom the term derives), and Feuerbach. Thence it passed to Marx and
Engels, who related it to what they regarded as the deplorable social
conditions brought about by bourgeois capitalist society in an age of
industry. Marx’s early formulation of the problem of alienation has ena-
bled Marxism to appeal to many avant-garde artists who have felt alienated
from middle-class society, and whose alienation has led them to search for
a society in which the arts can come to fuller fruition, and in the search,
often, to collaborate with political‘and economic radicals.
 PART I

Marz, Engels, and the

Marxian Theory of Art
 1

THE LIVES OF
MARX AND ENGELS IN
RELATION TO THE ARTS

1. Art and Marxism

‘Due evenruar enormous influence of whatever Karl Marx or Friedrich
Engels had to say which in some manner could be related to art makes it
necessary to deal at length with such aspects of their theories, even though
neither of them ever discussed the arts in any organized way in spite of
Marx’s plans to do so. Until quite recently, relatively little had been
published on the general meaning of their doctrines for the visual arts.
(Much more had been written about their significance for literature, to
which Marx and Engels referred more frequently.) Furthermore, most of
what has been published to date has come from communists or communist
sympathizers who, as members of some specific group, have been anxious
to justify the group’s line of the moment by appealing to some statement
made by the founders of Marxism.’ Such statements have usually been
regarded by faithful Marxists as principles above time. But Marx and
Engels themselves, like all human beings, were partly determined by their
period in history—by their time and place, and thus, among other things,
by certain prevailing ideas about art, certain prevailing fashions in art.

2. The Careers of Marx

and Engels, and the Arts
KK art Marx (1818-1883) began his lifelong friendship with Friedrich
Engels (1820-1895) at Paris in 1844. They had first met two years earlier
in Cologne at the office of the Rheinische Zeitung, of which Marx was
68 / MARX, ENGELS, AND THE MARXIAN THEORY OF ART

then editor, but at that time had not been impressed with each other.
Now, however, Marx was profoundly attracted by ‘an article that Engels
submitted to the one and only number of a yearbook of which Marx had
become editor. Appropriately, it was an article that condemned the exist-
ing economic system in the name of justice, but refused to accept the views
of Robert Owen and other utopian socialists. So powerfully were these two
young men drawn to each other that during that same year they wrote
their first collaborative book, and roughly four years later, in 1847-1848,
were the joint authors of the Communist Manifesto.
Both Marx and Engels came from the Rhineland. Marx was a native
of Trier; and it was there that his father, a Jewish lawyer “strongly imbued
with French eighteenth-century ideas of religion, science, and art,’ * had
been converted to Christianity, a fact that has had some bearing on the
frequent later comparisons of Marx to a Hebrew prophet and Marxism to a
Christian heresy. Through his father, a political liberal, the young Marx
was impregnated with liberalism and early became interested in the writ-
ings of Diderot (who always remained his favorite prose writer), of Vol-
taire, and of Locke. And especially through his older friend and future
father-in-law, Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, he developed an interest in
classical literature and in Saint-Simonianism,* which had been introduced
into Germany in 1818 by a native of Trier named Ludwig Gall.
At seventeen, Marx entered the University of Bonn in the faculty of
law, in deference to the wishes of his father. But he minimized his law
studies, announcing that he proposed to attend at least seven courses of
weekly lectures. Among them were lectures on Homer and on Propertius,
poet of the Roman republican period, by August Wilhelm Schlegel, on
mythology, and also on the history of art by Eduard d’Alton. In the
following year, Marx transferred to the University of Berlin, where he
again devoted himself to intense study of a wide variety of subjects,
including, besides jurisprudence, philosophy, history, and art. In philoso-
phy he now concentrated especially on the idealism of Hegel, being
particularly influenced by a radical group of young Hegelians who opposed
the church and eventually also the state, which Hegel exalted as the
highest expression of the Idea or Spirit. In a letter to his father of
November 10, 1837, Marx wrote that during an illness he had become
acquainted with Hegel’s works from beginning to end—and in the same
letter noted that he was making excerpts from Winckelmann’s History of
Ancient Art (1764) and Lessing’s Laokoon (1766), among other books.
Like so many other young Germans of the period, Marx was lastingly
affected by Hegel’s philosophy in the fields of social, historical, and aes-
thetic studies, especially as reinterpreted after Hegel’s death by the He-
gelian left wing, which included the materialist Feuerbach. Marx much
approved of Hegel’s way of thinking, as well as of many of his ideas, but
not of his conclusions. And of course he was more sympathetic to the
 The Lives of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 69

revolutionary republican that the young Hegel had been than to the
monarchist that he had become in maturity.
Hegel’s certitude that the real, now identified with history as the
highest form of knowledge, was ultimately identical with the rational had
enabled him to create “a new science which consists in the history and
criticism of human institutions, viewed as great collective quasi-personali-
ties, which possess a life and character of their own and cannot be
described purely in terms of the individuals who compose them.” * For
“Hegel transferred the concept of the personal character of the individual
which gradually unfolds itself throughout a man’s life, to the case of entire
cultures and nations. . .” °; in other words, he treated them, especially the
state and its culture, as if they too were organisms, developing and chang-
ing like human beings. In Hegel’s view the historian must rise above being
a mere chronicler and antiquary to depict an age and culture as a living
organism (and we shall see that some of his followers were to treat works
of art as organisms). “It was largely due to his influence that there came
into existence a new school of German historians whose work made all
writers who explained events as the outcome of the character or intentions,
the personal defeat or triumph of this or that king or statesman, seem
naive and unscientific.” 7’Thenceforth, also, historical subjects previously
regarded as remote and special preserves, such as the history of philosophy
and the history of art, “began [especially] to be treated as complementary
and indispensable elements in the general history of culture: facts pre-
viously thought trivial or sordid were accorded sudden importance as being
hitherto unexplored domains of the activity of the Spirit—the history of
trade, the history of dress, of the useful arts were seen to be essential
elements in the complete, ‘organic,’ institutional history of mankind.” *
It was especially under the influence of this Hegelian conception of
history that the history of art and problems of aesthetics always interested
Marx (although few of his biographers really discuss this fact). Even as a
young Left Hegelian, he began to reinterpret Hegel's conception of art.
Hegel had seen the development of history as involving the self-realization
of the spirit in the ascending spheres of religion, art, and philosophy; as
soon as art, following upon religion, had exhausted its possibilities, its
function was at an end. This devaluation of the arts was pursued by the
Young Hegelians, including Marx (despite his strong interest in aesthet-
ics) with the eventual result that for Marx and orthodox Marxians, art
eventually became merely part of a superstructure resting upon economic
development as fundamental.
The beginnings of Marx’s reinterpretation could already be seen in
one of two anonymous pamphlets parodying and revising Hegel’s teachings
on religion and art which came out of the Left Hegelian circle in 1841 and
1842. Although the chief author of both was Marx’s teacher and friend,
Bruno Bauer (see Fig. 6), Marx himself wrote much of them, including a
 Fic. 6. Arnold Ruge with the Young Hegelians at Berlin, November 10,
1842, drawing by the young Friedrich Engels.

section on art in the second one.® He had also written his Traktat iiber die
christliche Kunst (‘Treatise on Christian Art), and decided to rewrite it as
two articles, one attacking religious art, the other the romantics. None of
these has survived. But the general character of the Traktat can be
established on the basis of the two anonymous pamphlets to which Marx
contributed, and of extracts from books read by Marx and recorded in his
notebooks at the beginning of 1842 as he worked on the treatise while
living with Bruno Bauer in Bonn. The extracts are from books dealing
primarily with Christianity and classical art.° The anonymous pamphlets,
together with these extracts, show that Marx was interested in making an
anti-Christian (in his view anti-reactionary) apologia for the French
Revo-
lution, and especially for the terroristic wing of it represented by
the
Jacobins. He saw ancient Greek art as reflecting the democracy
of the
Greek republics, and therefore as directly related to the democratic
ideals
of the Jacobins in the Revolution.
Some fifteen years later, in 1857 and 1858, Marx, stimulated
by an
 The Lives of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 71

unaccepted offer from a one-time Fourierist at Brook Farm, Charles A.

Dana, to write an article on aesthetics for an American encyclopedia, made
copious extracts from a then recent multi-volume work on aesthetics by the
Hegelian Theodor Vischer, as well as from various articles on the same
subject in French and German encyclopedias." He apparently intended to
write a book of his own on aesthetics, but never did so.
Largely because of the nature of Hegel’s philosophy, including his
philosophy of art, the role of the individual artist has tended in theory to
be minimized by Marxists (and also by many non-Marxist German and
other art historians under the influence of Hegel), in favor of social
conditioning. For Hegel and his followers glorified the state as alone
making possible man’s freedom to cultivate religion, art, and philosophy
(in that advancing order)—doing so in spite of the primary importance for
artistic quality of the artist’s personal talent and imagination. Thus, even
while enormously fostering the history of art, the Hegelian tradition and
its Marxian derivative have nonetheless particularly encouraged a kind of
art history which may neglect a basic aspect of art itself.
When, in 1841, Marx had received his doctor’s degree from the Uni-
versity of Jena as an external student, it was in philosophy and for a thesis,
not on the idealism of Hegel, but on “The Difference Between the Natural
Philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus,” the two greatest Greek materi-
alists, with particular admiration for Epicurus. Already he was displaying
what was to be his lifelong interest in philosophical materialism, even
though in his treatment of his thesis subject he on the whole still adhered
to Hegel’s absolute idealism. He had not yet arrived at his basic doctrine
that political economy is the fundamental factor in human history.
Unable to obtain an academic post because of a reputation for non-
conformity, Marx decided to become a journalist. Soon he attracted so
much attention by his trenchant contributions to a newly founded liberal
paper, the Rheinische Zeitung, that he was asked to become its editor. At
the time he knew little about communism, and when his paper was
accused of communist tendencies, he decided to learn about the various
forms of communism and to publish critiques of them. His already radical
views quickly brought censorship to the paper and compelled him to give
up the editorship. Because he felt that he was inadequately equipped to
deal with social subjects such as the French socialism which in a vague way
had been frequently referred to in the columns of the periodical, he took
the opportunity to devote himself to study, and delved deeply into the
literature of socialism and communism, no doubt stimulated by Lorenz
von Stein’s Sozialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreichs (So-
cialism and Communism of France Today), published in 1842. With his
customary restless energy, Marx had taught himself French by reading the
works of the Paris utopian socialists, especially Fourier, Cabet, and Leroux,
as well as of Saint-Simon and the anarchist Proudhon. Also, “For a month
he was absorbed in the histories of ancient and modern art in order to
72 / MARX, ENGELS, AND THE MARXIAN THEORY OF ART

gather evidence to demonstrate the revolutionary and disruptive character

of Hegel’s fundamental principles. . . .”
A letter that Marx wrote in September 1843 indicates that he was
already well acquainted with the writings of Fourier, Cabet, and Prou-
dhon; and in it he asserted that his task did not consist in the setting up of
utopias but in criticizing existing social and political conditions, “in inter-
preting the struggles and aspirations of the age.” * In October 1843, the
month after he wrote this letter, Marx went to Paris as editor of the
Deutsch-Franzésische Jahrbiicher (Franco-German Annals); a contribu-
tor to its single issue was his future rival, Bakunin. At Paris, he plunged
into a study of the history of the French Revolution, French ma-
terialism, and French socialism. There he became personally ac-
quainted with Proudhon (whom he helped to introduce to Hegel’s
philosophy, which they discussed at length), with the radical Heinrich
Heine, with Cabet, Considerant, Leroux, and other leading French
radicals, as well as with Engels, who also contributed to the Jahr-
biicher.
Engels had been born at Barmen, the son of a wealthy manufacturer
of cotton goods who was a most‘ austere Calvinistic pietist. Even before
graduating from the Gymnasium the son had gone into the textile business
at his father’s insistence. After three years in an office in Bremen—a period
in which his letters were filled with sketches of people he saw, for he liked
to draw—he entered the army as a volunteer, and, while stationed in
Berlin, fell, like Marx, under the influence of the radical wing of the
Hegelian group.
One of Engel’s crude but lively surviving sketches, from the very early
1840's, shows a meeting of the Berlin Young Hegelians, or “Die Freien”
(The Free Ones) as they liked to call themselves (Fig. 6). Engels drew
them arguing violently with a visitor, Arnold Ruge, who had tried to set
himself up as a kind of high priest of Left Hegelianism.** Ironically looking
on at the argument is a lonely, highbrowed, bespectacled young man
negligently smoking a cigarette as he rests one hand on a table. This was
Johann Caspar Schmidt, who made at least one contribution to Marx’s
Rheinische Zeitung. Adopting the pseudonym of Max Stirner, he became
an individualist anarchist, author in 1845 of Der Einzige und sein Eigen-
tum (The Ego and His Own).”® Stirner is mentioned here with Marx and
Engels because, like them, he too turned Hegel’s philosophy upside down,
though in a very different way, and because Marx and Engels attacked him
so bitterly in their Die deutsche Ideologie, written in 1845-1846. Where
Marx and the somewhat more Hegelian Engels inverted Hegel’s idealism
into materialism on a “scientific” and collectivistic basis (or, in Marx’s
view, put Hegel truly on his feet), Stirner inverted Hegel in a doctrine
denying all absolutes and institutions, basing itself on the anti-intellectual
“ownness” of the human individual. As a consequence he distinguished
between “human” work, which can be organized collectively, and “individ-
 The Lives of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 73

ual” work, especially artistic and scientific, which cannot in any way be
socialized—for who can take the place of a Raphael or a Mozart? Preach-
ing insurgent self-assertion, Stirner foresaw a Union of Egoists drawn to
one another in free intercourse simply by each one’s respect for the others’
ruthlessness. Even more than Marx, he attacked all who believed that the
property question could be settled amicably and within the bounds of
morality. By insisting that each egoist must wage a constant struggle to
defeat the state—a struggle carried on outside all conceptions of morality
—he anticipated later anarchist and nihilist violence, though apparently
without having any direct influence on it, for his book was long unknown
to other anarchists.
Soon after Engels made the sketch in which he showed Stirner and
the other Young Hegelians (Fig. 6), he met Moses Hess, probably the first
German writer to direct Saint-Simonianism into the main current of
German thought, and in 1842 was converted to communism by Hess, who
independently influenced Marx. Engels was sent to Manchester in 1842 as
the agent for his father’s spinning mill: it was while he was passing
through Cologne on his way to England that he first met Marx. In
England, Engels soon established connections with utopian socialism as
well as with the Chartist and trade-union movements, and became a con-
tributor to Robert Owen’s paper, the New Moral World.
Engels considered that only Carlyle’s recently published Past and
Present had shown any real grasp of the seriousness of conditions in
England. He admired Carlyle as an anti-bourgeois even while regarding
him as saturated with idealism, and so with the wrong sort of German
philosophy. At that time, Engels collected the material on the basis of
which he published in 1845 the powerful indictment of English capitalism,
Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (translated as The Condition
of the Working Class in England in 1844), in which he referred to Carlyle
at length. After Engels attracted Marx’s attention in 1844 by the pre-
viously mentioned article damning the existing economic system, the two
began to correspond; Engels looked up Marx at Paris in August of that
year, and they became fast friends. On the same brief visit to Paris, Engels
met the future anarchist Bakunin for the first time, Marx having made
Bakunin’s acquaintance in the previous March.”
Meanwhile, between April and August 1844, Marx had written the
four manuscripts collectively known as the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1844, in which he paid special attention to the concept of
artistic creativity. These manuscripts are also particularly important be-
cause they represent the conclusion of Marx’s idealist phase, his shift from
a quasi-Jacobin to a communist position, and thus to the first of his general
an
formulations of Marxism. Like the later ones,” this took the form of
exposition of world history, but in this case Marx maintained an essentially
aesthetic point of view toward the future, apparently stimulated by the
‘deas of the Saint-Simonians. In treating history as the process by which
74 i MARX, ENGELS, AND THE MARXIAN THEORY OF ART

man makes himself more fully human, he held that man accomplishes this
as Creator, through the process of his work and production. Voluntary
productive activity is man’s element, and in this activity he expresses
himself as an artist. Man differs from animals not only because of his
ability to produce independently of immediate physical needs, but also
because in producing he “creates in accordance with the laws of beauty” *
—or would do so if he had not been alienated from himself and his work
by the organization of society, especially that of capitalist society.
The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, first published in an
incomplete Russian translation in 1927, remained little known until a
complete edition in the original German appeared in 1932. Because their
relatively subjective emphasis on the self does not appear in the “scientific
socialism” of Marx’s maturity, there has since been much dispute as to
whether or not the Manuscripts represent a preliminary form of Marxism
essentially abandoned by Marx, as Soviet scholars, among others, maintain.
Many others (but not the present writer) believe that Marx essentially
retained this early view even after he had shifted to an emphasis on
socio-economic problems as basic for understanding the productive process
under capitalism.” The dispute, especially since World War II, has neces-
sarily affected interpretations of the immediate value ascribed to artistic
production by Marx, and thus of his theory of art, giving rise particularly
to what is often called the New Left, regarded as “revisionist” by official
Marxist-Leninists.
When, in the year after writing the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts, Marx was forced to leave Paris because of pressure exerted by
the Prussian government, he moved to Brussels, where he was joined by
Engels. ‘There he remained until the outbreak of revolution in France early
in 1848. There he wrote with Engels in 1845-1846 Die deutsche I deologie
(not wholly published until 1962), three-quarters of which was devoted to
refuting the philosophy of the German individualist anarchist Stirner.
Then Marx devoted himself to a polemic against Proudhon’s book La
Philosophie de la misére, though two years earlier he and Engels had
defended Proudhon in a book, Die Heilige Familie (The Holy Family),
that was largely based on Fourier’s ideas. Marx’s attack on Proudhon,
which was at least as much an attack on Hegel, was derisively entitled La
Misére de la philosophie (1847); in it are to be found many of the
doctrines that he and Engels embodied in their Communist Manifesto of
the following year. At that early date the battle between what became
known as Marxism and the anarchist movement—especially in the form
largely descended from Proudhon, which over thirty years later was to be
named communist-anarchism—was already being joined. (Shortly before
Marx died, he had to convert both his French sons-in-law, Lafargue and
Longuet, from anarchism to Marxism. He died unconvinced of his success:
a year or so before his death in a letter to Engels he had called Longuet
“the last of the Proudhonists” and Lafargue “the last of the Bakuninists.” )
 The Lives of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 75

The Communist Manifesto had been commissioned at a congress of

the Communist League held in London in December 1847 and attended
by both Marx and Engels. Previously, the major part of the Communist
League (which lasted until 1852) had been known as the League of the
Just, a society founded by a group of refugee German artisans, though
one of the younger members was a miniature-painter, Karl Pfander. The
League was founded as part of a revival of the tradition of a famous figure
of the French Revolution, the violent revolutionary “Gracchus” Babeuf,
who, after the overthrow of the Jacobins in Thermidor 1794, had vainly
hoped to overthrow the succeeding Directory and revive Jacobinism by
means of the conspiracy conducted by his revolutionary Society of Equals.
It was in this tradition, beginning in 1847 and continuing for a period of
five years, that Marx’s conception of revolution was most apocalyptic—and
it was this period of Marx’s thought that Lenin was to emphasize.
When revolution again broke out in France in February 1848—the
revolution that Engels called “‘the first great battle between proletariat and
bourgeoisie,” which resulted in greatly increased radicalism among artists
as well as in the exile of Louis Philippe—the Belgian government, fearful
lest the revolution spread to Belgium, expelled Marx from Brussels. He was
welcomed at Paris by the Revolutionists, but soon returned with Engels to
the Rhineland, where they founded at Cologne the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung, which at that time carried the subtitle Organ der Demokratie,
even though in it Marx advocated revolutionary terrorism. After the paper
was suppressed, he returned to Paris in 1849 only to meet the newly
developed counter-revolution there. Exiled once more, he now went to
England, to live in London for the rest of his life. There he devoted
himself to study in the British Museum, and was long partly supported by
Engels, who had reentered business in Manchester. From 1851 to 1862,
and again at the time of the Paris Commune of 1871, Marx eked out his
income by writing articles for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, with
whose managing editor, the former Fourierist Charles A. Dana, he had
become acquainted during the Revolution of 1848. In 1857, the year in
which Marx was to make his excerpts from Vischer’s book on aesthetics,
Dana had offered Marx a commission to write several articles, including
one on aesthetics referred to earlier, for the New American Cyclopaedia.
Although Marx contributed to the Cyclopaedia (which Dana edited with
George Ripley, the former head of Brook Farm under whom it had
become a Fourierist community), he decided not to write the article on
aesthetics. For Dana would allot only a single page to it, and after
consulting with Engels, Marx concluded that the subject could not possi-
bly be dealt with in so brief a space.” He did, however, contribute other
articles, some of them written by Engels under Marx’s name.
Meanwhile, after the defeat of the democratic forces nearly every-
where in the revolutions of 1848-1849, and especially after the imperialist
coup d'état of Napoleon III, Marx and Engels increasingly deemphasized
76 / MARX, ENGELS, AND THE MARXIAN THEORY OF ART

revolutionary violence. Even as a revolutionary, Marx disapproved of con-

spiratorial methods, which he regarded as calculated’ only to irritate public
opinion without bringing about changes in its foundations. He set about to
create an open political party dominated by his view of society—with the
result that in 1864 he delivered the inaugural address at the meeting of the
International Workingmen’s Association, or First International, a loose
federation of trade unions and radical societies and parties. Three years
later he published in German the first volume of his greatest work, Das
Kapital (Capital), which he offered to dedicate to Charles Darwin, who
made an evasive reply. While working on this volume, Marx had spoken of
it in letters to Engels as a “work of art” and had referred to “artistic
considerations” in connection with the delay in completing it.
Only in 1870 was Engels able to leave Manchester and join Marx in
London after selling out his share of the textile business inherited from his
father; thereafter, their collaboration, previously carried on mostly by mail,
became especially close. They and their followers managed to dominate
the general council of the International in London, but in so doing they
alienated Michael Bakunin and others who objected to the arbitrary way in
which the council sought to govern the organization by loftily censuring or
approving the actions of local federations and other groups, and even those
of individual members. Objections were especially raised when, from Lon-
don, the general council attempted to direct the insurrection of the
Commune in Paris, and also when, at a secret meeting in 1871, the council,
supported by only a few delegates, arbitrarily decided to direct the forces of
the International toward electoral agitation. This set many of the more
individualistically minded members thinking about the evils not only of
this governing body but also of any government, however democratic its
origin. Such was the first spark of what eventually was called anarchist-
communism or communist-anarchism, though until about 1880 supporters
of the movement were known simply as Bakunists or Bakuninists.”* To
them and their leader, Bakunin, Marxism was simply a form of state
socialism, and the Marxian doctrine of the eventual withering away of the
state a mere vague and unconvincing dream—instead, they held, the state
ought to be abolished immediately.
The struggle in the International between the factions of Bakunin
and Marx was the occasion not only of the beginning of communist-
anarchism but also of the formation of modern social democracy as a
movement. From Marx, of course, in addition to the various social-demo-
cratic movements on the Continent, likewise ultimately developed the
authoritarian socialism of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, though it was also
stimulated by ideas derived from Engels rather than Marx, as well as from
certain native Russian radical currents, some of them influenced by Baku-
nin. The communist-anarchism that directly stemmed from Bakunin in
turn mainly gave rise to the revolutionary labor movement known as
 The Lives of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 77

syndicalism, which was partly Marxian in origin, and which had certain
connections with art and art theory.
So powerful in the contest within the International did the Bakunin-
ists show themselves to be that in 1872 Marx and his followers transferred
its headquarters to New York in a desperate effort to keep the organization
out of Bakunin’s control. The result was that the International dwindled
away and expired in 1876, the year of Bakunin’s death. However, anarch-
ism gained in strength under his successors, reaching its peak with an
international congress held at Amsterdam in 1907. Not long thereafter it
declined sharply nearly everywhere. But meanwhile Bakunin’s followers,
especially through the influence of his chief successor, Peter Kropotkin,
had been paying much more attention to the arts than had the Marxists.
After Marx died in 1883, Engels completed from Marx’s notes the
second and third volumes of Das Kapital. It was Engels whose efforts
chiefly led to the calling of the Second, or Socialist, International in 1889
and the subsequent growth of social democracy. For when the failure of
the Revolutions of 1848-1849 was followed by that of the Paris Commune
of 1871, Engels—even more than Marx—had come to believe that parlia-
mentary methods as distinguished from revolutionary violence could bring
some decisive results for the working class.

3. Marx and Engels on the Visual Arts

Or rue two friends, Marx knew more about the history of the visual arts
because of his early interest in that subject as a university student. Engels,
who never followed up his earlier interest in sketching, deliberately trained
himself in science as his major contribution to his intellectual companion-
ship with Marx. Nevertheless, because both were men of wide cultivation
who read and spoke a large number of the major European languages,
ancient and modern, they each had a considerable knowledge of literature,
an art to which they referred in their writings and letters much more often
than to the representational arts and to music.
Indeed, their references to specific painters and sculptors were rare,
and, like their more frequent references to literature, were usually made for
the purpose of illustrating some point in their social theories. ‘The most
significant early mentions of contemporary artists were made by Engels
in the fall of 1844 from his home at Barmen in the Rhineland. He had
gone there in September directly from Paris after making a friend of Marx,
who had just been writing his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
of 1844 in which artistic creativity is discussed. Presumably, therefore, the
subject of artists and art was also much in Engels’s mind.
From Barmen, Engels strongly promoted communism in the Rhine-
78 / MARX, ENGELS, AND THE MARXIAN THEORY OF ART

land while writing Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England. In early
October he wrote Marx an undated letter in whith he recommended to
him an artist named Seel—a “raging communist,” who, Engels declared,
would be “very good to use as a caricaturist.” A month later, Engels wrote
an article entitled “Rapid Progress of Communism in Germany,” which
was published in Robert Owen’s New Moral World on December 13. In
this, which Engels signed simply “An Old Friend of Yours in Germany,”
he used the terms communism and socialism synonymously, and listed
“Dr. Charles Marx, at Paris,” “Frederick Engels, at Barmen,” and “Henry
Heine” as among the half-dozen most active literary personalities in Ger-
man socialism. He also proudly mentioned the conversion to socialism of
Karl Lessing, whom he called the outstanding history painter of Germany.
Most important, he described at length a painting by Carl Hiibner, call-
ing him one of the best German painters. This picture represents the cruel
lot of Silesian weavers, which had led them to participate in a violent
strike that year. The strike had been hailed by Marx as a portent of the
proletarian revolution, and at Marx’s urging had been exalted by Heine
in a poem, “Song of the Silesian Weavers,” translated in full by Engels
in his article. Among the figures in Hiibner’s painting that Engels de-
scribed are a well-fed manufacturer with a face he called red and feeling-
less as brass. It contrasts sharply with the agony of a working-class mother
whose weaving the industrialist rejects, while the whole group of mis-
treated weavers is regarded with cold nonchalance by the industrialist’s
son, a young dandy smoking a cigar and leaning over a barrier with a
horsewhip in his hand. According to Engels, this one painting, widely
displayed in Germany, generated “more effective Socialist agitation than
a hundred pamphlets. . . .”
These references by Engels to the value of painting and caricature for
promoting the communist cause are particularly important as being ap-
parently the first references made by a Marxian communist specifically to
the usefulness of contemporary visual arts for “agitation” (still the Marx-
lan communist term for what is popularly called propaganda). Signifi-
cantly, Hiibner’s The Silesian Weavers, so praised by Engels, was to be
regarded in communist East Germany after World War II as an impor-
tant forerunner of the socialist realism developed in the Soviet Union
under Stalin and his successors. Furthermore, the strike of the Silesian
weavers had furnished the subject-matter for Gerhart Hauptmann’s fa-
mous socially radical and tealistic play of 1892, Die Webern (The
Weavers), which itself was the subject of a series of illustrations that first
brought fame to the socially concerned artist Kathe Kollwitz.
Over the years, Marx and Engels referred to Raphael more often
than to any other artist. Once they mentioned him, together with Leo-
nardo da Vinci and Titian, as showing how the artist directly reflects his
particular social environment—Raphael that of Renaissance Rome, Leo-
 The Lives of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 79

nardo and Titian respectively that of Florence and Venice. Earlier in the
same discussion, seeking to refute Max Stirner, Marx and Engels had cited
Raphael with Mozart as showing how all artists are so completely products
of the society of their time and place that Raphael’s designs for frescoes
could be executed perfectly well by other artists of his period in Italy, while
Mozart’s Requiem could be successfully completed by another composer
under the same social conditions.” They went on to reject the idea of the
purely individual character of artistic labor, insisting that in their own day,
in art as in science, “It had already . . . been found necessary to organize
this ‘individual activity” ” In support of such necessity for collectively
producing works of art they cited the French battle-painter, and secret
revolutionary, Horace Vernet (who had made much use of assistants), as
one who “would not have had time for a tenth of his pictures if he had
regarded them as ‘works which only this individual was capable of
completing.’ ” * In relating art to labor, Engels referred to “the pictures of
Raphael,” along with “the statues of Thorvaldsen” (Fig. 7) and “the
music of Paganini,” as illustrating how the human hand is not merely an
organ of labor, but has achieved high perfection as the product of human
labor.** Nevertheless, Raphael did not paint realistically enough to suit
Marx and Engels, who declared that when leading revolutionaries were
depicted they should be pictured “in their real form” and “in strong
Rembrandtian colors, in all their living qualities,” because in “apotheoses
of Raphaelite beauty all pictorial truth is lost.” ** Such emphasis on realism
by the founders of Marxism has since, of course, greatly affected the art of
most Marxian artists, especially in the Soviet Union.
Next to Raphael, Leonardo was the artist cited most frequently by
Marx and Engels. In addition to their previously mentioned statement that
Leonardo’s art reflected the specific social conditions of Renaissance Flor-
ence, Engels once wrote that Leonardo and Albrecht Diirer, together with
Machiavelli and Luther, all of whom belonged to an age before the evil
capitalistic division of labor, were especially good examples of the many-
sided man *°—the type of man that the followers of Marx and Engels still
believe that everyone will become under the ideal conditions of the
classless society. This idea of the many-sided man free from the crippling
consequences of the division of labor, Marx and Engels took, with numer-
ous other ideas, from Fourier.’ Ultimately, it reflects the romantic con-
tempt for specialization.
Engels especially loved the art of music, particularly orchestral music,
which to socialists and communists could connote collective harmony. He
_Jike Lenin later—was utterly devoted to the works of Beethoven, whom
he once called the culmination of music. On the negative side, Marx very
much disliked Wagner, who upheld artistic and social revolution in a kind
of anarchistic way, and who in Marx’s view totally falsified German
mythology in the text of Der Ring des Nibelungen.
 The Lives of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 81

4. Marx and Engels on Literature

Due ABOVE are nearly all of the major references to specific important
artists or composers made by Marx and Engels.** But in spite of the
paucity of their direct references to artists a good deal of light is cast on
Marxism in the arts by their much more frequent references to literature
and writers.” Some of these are worth mentioning here, because they
likewise were for the purpose of illustrating important aspects of Marxian
social theories.
Although Marx and Engels agreed in so many ways that leading
followers have tended to regard their thought as a monolithic system, they
were by no means identical twins in their literary judgments or in the
relationship of those judgments to their likewise somewhat differing philo-
sophical and social beliefs. For instance, Marx was mainly interested in
classical literature, especially that of classical Antiquity but also as repre-
sented by more recent “classics.” And he often admired such literature
when it had no direct social implications. Late in life he once recorded—in
a game called “Confessions,” played with his daughters—that Diderot was
his favorite prose author. Of all Diderot’s writings, he most admired Le
Neveu de Rameau, but more for its scornful laughter at human existence
than for any sociological content, though Hegel had made its protagonist
the symbol of alienation. In the same game Marx indicated that Shake-
speare, Aeschylus, and Goethe were his favorite poets. Although at times
he sought to make even the works of such poets illustrate his social
theories, he read them, and also the writings of Dante, Cervantes, and
Lessing, primarily for pleasure. In addition, he spent a good deal of time
reading novels, particularly those of the eighteenth century and of Sir
Walter Scott and the elder Dumas, among others, as an escape from his
economic studies.
Engels, however, liked to occupy himself with literature of the Middle
Ages, especially that of the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries—in this
follawing, though at a distance of almost a generation, the younger Ger-
man romantics. His tastes, then, inclined more toward the romantic im-
pulses of the early nineteenth century as manifested in German medieval
poetry involving both the nationalistic spirit and the problems of compara-
tive philology beloved by the German romantics. Furthermore, whereas
Mary’s tastes remained essentially fixed in an un-Marxian way, Engels was
much readier to follow dictates of the times, and therefore to enjoy the
literature that political theory seemed to require at a given hour.
It was, however, Marx who drew Engels’s attention to the shrewd
social awareness of Balzac, who was much influenced by Saint-Simonian-
ism and then by Fourierism. Marx hoped eventually to write a study of

ric. 7. The Three Graces (1819), marble by Bertel Thorvaldsen.

82 / MARX, ENGELS, AND THE MARXIAN THEORY OF ART

Balzac. But the question remains how much Marx admired Balzac for his
social realism and how much simply because he’ enjoyed reading him.
Certainly, in Marx’s writings one can hunt in vain for any sustained
remarks in favor of realism in literature or in the visual arts: indeed, it is
said that he did not even use the word.”
Both Marx and Engels regarded Balzac as a kind of literary ally (they
could not consider him a political ally because he upheld monarchy,
aristocracy, and the Catholic Church). In a letter that Engels wrote to a
novelist friend, Margaret Harkness, five years after Marx’s death, he re-
ferred to Balzac as a “master of realism,” one “far greater . . . than all the
Zolas, past, present, or future.” For, with Marx, Engels regarded Zola as
being too completely deterministic—a view destined to affect the Soviet
aesthetic of “socialist realism.” In the letter, however, Engels refused to
find fault with his correspondent for “not having written a purely socialist
novel . . . to glorify the social and political views of the author.” Indeed,
he declared that: “the more the author’s views are concealed the better for
the work of art. The realism I allude to may creep out in spite of the
author’s views.” ** Clearly, the last statement is at variance with the view of
Lenin, Stalin, and other Marxist-Leninists that a work of art must inten-
tionally serve as a weapon for social propaganda in the class struggle.
In a sense, Balzac had helped to pave the way for this Marxist-Lenin-
ist view, inasmuch as he attempted to use scientific categories for literary
control over social reality in the Foreword (1842) to La Comédie hu-
maine. And Engels after Marx’s death directly related literary realism to
the question of social tendencies in the work of art. In his Ludwig
Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (1888)
Engels made a fatal confusion between Marxist philosophical materialism
and realism, which in his usage came to mean the same thing. Even
though Engels never said that realism was the only mode of art, Lenin,
Stalin, and their followers took it for granted, with disastrous results for
most arts.
In addition to jointly admiring Balzac, though in somewhat different
ways, Marx and Engels followed up Engels’s early interest in Carlyle,
whom they jointly called in a review of Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets
(1850) “the only English writer on whom German literature has exerted a
direct and very considerable influence.” They emphasized that “Carlyle
has the merit of having opposed the bourgeoisie in literature at a time
when official English literature was completely dominated by bourgeois
attitudes, tastes, and ideas; and in a manner which at moments was even
revolutionary.” * But they attacked Carlyle for his monarchical, hierarchi-
cal, and thus anti-democratic point of view while also assailing his “com-
pletely demoralized and banal Saint-Simonism.” ** |
Another author affected by the doctrines of Saint-Simon—and also by
those of Fourier—to whom Marx and Engels devoted much space in their
writings was the French social novelist Eugéne Sue. As early as 1843,
 The Lives of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 83

writing in Robert Owen’s New Moral World, Engels had praised Sue, with
Dickens and George Sand, as bringing about almost a social revolution by
elevating the poor. Still, Marx and Engels both regarded Sue as reflecting
bourgeois idealism in reducing the living personality to an automaton in
the service of the author’s abstract concepts. Marx himself particularly
approved of such contemporary English realistic novelists as Dickens,
Thackeray, Charlotte Bronté, and Mrs. Gaskell, insisting that they “have
revealed more political and social truths than all the professional politi-
cians, publicists, and moralists put together. . . .”** In Das Kapital, he
quoted the French worker-poet Pierre Dupont, noted for his revolution-
ary songs. He also praised Shelley as a thoroughgoing revolutionary, and
was a personal friend of Heinrich Heine, who had some Saint-Simonian
and Fourierist inclinations. To Heine, Engels once referred as “that most
eminent of all living German poets” who “has joined our ranks, and
published a volume of political poetry which contains also some pieces
preaching Socialism.” *° Of the contemporary Russian revolutionary. critics
of literature or art destined to influence the Stalinist aesthetic of socialist
realism, Marx and Engels most often mentioned Chernyshevsky. Engels
once referred to Dobrolyubov. Engels’s considerable liking for folk poetry
would have influence later on the exaltation of folk art as a form of
socialist realism in Stalin’s Russia.

In appiT1Ion to the light often cast on the ideas of Marx and Engels
about the visual arts by what they had to say about literature, other aspects
of their thought had meaning for art. The very fact that they attempted to
develop an all-embracing philosophical system meant that they had to take
account of art, so that they by no means regarded it as unimportant.
Neither of them ever dealt with the visual arts or even with music in any
really concrete way, but what they had to say not only about literature but
about other aspects of life had—as they knew—profound implications for
art.
 2,

THE THEORIES
OF
MARX AND ENGELS IN
RELATION TO THE ARTS

1. Marx's Philosophical System

No one recognized more fully than Marx and Engels the contrast
between the ideals and the actual accomplishments of the great secular
utopians, whose importance, however, they also acknowledged. Engels
wrote: ““. . . German theoretical socialism will never forget that it rests
upon the shoulders of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen, the three who, in
spite of their fantastic notions and utopianism, belonged to the most
significant heads of all time, and whose genius anticipated numerous
things, the correctness of which can now be proved in a scientific
way. . . .”* But Marx and Engels felt that their own descent from Ger-
man classical philosophy helped to make their doctrines immeasurably
superior to those of the utopians. “We German Socialists,” wrote Engels,
“are proud of the fact that we are derived not only from St.-Simon, Fourier
and Owen, but also from Kant, Fichte and Hegel.” 2 Among other things,
like the young Hegel, Kant and Fichte had been revolutionary republicans
highly sympathetic to the French Revolution. However, as Lenin was to
state, these were only two of three chief influences on Marx’s thought, the
other being English classical economics.’ Largely on the basis of German
philosophy and English political economy, as well as of utopian socialism,
which itself was stimulated:by ideas derived from the Philosophes of
eighteenth-century France, Marx was able to discover and formulate what
he believed to be the scientific laws governing the development of human
society, and therefore ultimately of the arts. It is significant that Marx once
mentioned that the astronomer Kepler, who wrote that he had discovered
the scientific laws governing the “Harmony of the World,” was one of his
two chief heroes—the other being that leader of violent proletarian
revolu-
tion in ancient Rome, the gladiator-slave Spartacus.
 The Theories of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 85

No matter how much one may disagree with Marx’s belief that he had
formulated the true laws under which society develops, it can hardly be
denied that he, with the help of Engels, succeeded in lifting socialism and
communism to the plane of philosophy in a way and to a degree that none
of his predecessors, including Saint-Simon, Owen, and Fourier, had ever
achieved. Nor can it be denied that at the same time Marx succeeded in
bringing socialism and communism down to earth, and did so primarily by
making a direct link between his version of socialism and the cause of the
rising industrial proletariat. Far more than the secular utopians, Marx
integrated his theory and practice by means of that philosophy of history
by which he sought to relate socialism and communism to the whole
history of mankind, including the future as well as the past and present.
But although he necessarily included the arts in a philosophical system
which he believed took full account of all aspects of human existence, he
subordinated them to political economy as the primary determinant of
man as a human—and therefore historically social—being.
With Marx, all good Marxists believe that the philosophical system he
created, which views human society as an all-embracing social universe in
which everything is organically related to everything else,* constitutes the
one valid science of society. Marxian communists therefore have applied tc
economic, political, and other social situations, including even artistic
situations, a theory which they wholeheartedly believe to be scientific, and
which they maintain can be made use of in much the same way that the
natural scientists of the nineteenth century applied the scientific laws that
they had discovered in the fields of physics, chemistry, and biology. And
because Marxists have customarily believed that all theory which does not
result in action is valueless, they have sought to bring their supposedly
scientific theory to bear on everyday practical matters. As a consequence—
and particularly under the influence of Engels—they have often shown
themselves to be somewhat more like engineers * than like academic philos-
ophers or theoretical scientists. The similarity of the Marxian point of
view to that of engineers, and so to that of many leading secular utopians
who actually were engineers, has at times been particularly visible in the
approach of some Marxists to art, especially to the art of architecture. Not
unlike engineers, many Marxists have tended to look upon architecture
from a utilitarian point of view under which the “good” building may be
could
likened to a well-functioning machine, an analogy for which they
find support in the often mechanistic philosophy of Engels. More “ortho-
with a
dox” Marxists, however, have usually preferred to make an analogy
with the essentially organismic
well-functioning organism, in accordance
philosophy of Marx.
once
As the first to succeed in making socialism into a system at
integra ted many of the
philosophical and sociological, one into which he
Hegel’s theory of
major intentions of the secular utopians together with
l contributions.
organic development, Marx of course made many origina
 86 / MARX, ENGELS, AND THE MARXIAN THEORY OF ART

AT THE RISK of oversimplification, Marx’s major contributions to social-

ist and communist theory can be placed under four main headings, each of
which has had major significance for the arts. These are: Marx’s economic
and historical materialism, his historical and social organicism, his new
application of the Hegelian dialectical process, and his chiliastic doctrine
of a class struggle eventuating in a classless society after the triumph of the
proletariat in a revolution. Although in each of these Marx had predeces-
sors to whom he owed much, to each he gave his own highly original
interpretation and integration, with meaning for art. It should be reiter-
ated that because Marx believed economic conditions ultimately determine
the development of human society, he felt it necessary to devote himself
primarily to the study of economics (a subject, it is said, which he actually
disliked). As Engels declared at Marx’s graveside, Marx perceived the
simple fact that “men must eat, drink, dress, and find shelter, before they
can give themselves to politics, science, art, religion, or anything else”—an
insight not unique to Marx, however, for Marx apparently derived it from
Hegel, and it was equally made by his contemporary, John Ruskin.* The
result of this perception in Marx’s case was that he never thoroughly
investigated the implications of his philosophy for art, never wrote the
work on aesthetics for which in the 1850's, after he had left the Continent
to live in England, he had begun to make notes. It is in the absence of this
work that his theory of art has to be investigated chiefly on the basis of his
general philosophy as applicable to the relatively infrequent statements
about the visual arts or literature made by himself or by Engels. Some of
these, of course, have their basis in Marx’s economic and _ historical
materialism.

2. Marx’s Contributions: Materialism and Art

Tar Marxism is a form of philosophical materialism is clearly indicated

by Engels’s statement: “the material, sensuously perceptible world to
which we ourselves belong is the only reality. . . 2”? Because of Marxist
materialism, Marxists believe that man, like animals and insects (and thus
like Diderot’s swarm of bees mentioned in the Introduction), is a product
of the material world of nature, subject to the laws of nature includin
g
those of his physical environment. In contrast to animals and insects,
however, “man produces independently of physical needs,” * and through-
out human history has exchanged with other men the product of his
labor.
He therefore is essentially a social being, so that to Marxists reality
for
mankind is not merely a reality according to the laws of nature
but
 The Theories of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 87

primarily a social reality with, in the last analysis, an economic basis.

Artists, following Engels, are expected to depict this material reality, their
works being expected to serve a social purpose, and thus to be “socially
realistic.” As a consequence, Marxists and Marxist-Leninists have tended
to reject what Hegel in his Aesthetics called “the beauty of abstract form,”
and to go beyond Engels in favoring the kind of social realism in art that
since 1932 has been ofhcially called “socialist realism.”
In contrast to religious utopians (who ordinarily have maintained that
man is characterized by original sin) and to secular utopians (who have
believed with Rousseau that man is by nature good, though prevented by
environment from realizing his true nature), Marx (like Helvétius and
other Philosophes, earlier) held that man is by nature neither good nor
bad, but is fundamentally what his social environment makes him. And
ultimately his social environment is determined by the situation in politi-
cal economy. In other words, economic conditions resulting from the
prevailing mode of production ultimately exert a determining influence on
the processes of human life—and therefore on the intellectual processes
that for Marx included those of art, as well as on the political and other
social processes.? At some point a revolutionary change will be needed in
order to bring the lagging mode, or social relations, of production among
men (by which Marx meant essentially property relations) into harmony
with those prevailing forces of production (forces essentially economic and
technical) which affect the prevailing mode of production. Only by revolu-
tionary change, Marx believed, can relations of production exemplifying
the truly democratic principles of a classless society ultimately be achieved.
The mode of production, then, determines the existing political situation,
to changing which all good Marxists must devote their efforts—and _pre-
sumably their arts—in order to help bring about the classless society.
According to Marx, also, every mode of production, if permitted to develop
independently, evolves in conformity with certain laws comparable to
those governing the evolution of an organism from a seed.”° In holding all
of this Marx was, of course, making the assumption that industrial produc-
tion is universally valid, with the result—we shall see—that he had to make
an exception in the case of works of art.
Because in the Marxian view art is characterized by intellectual proc-
aspect of
esses, it is regarded as part of a mental system and therefore as an
from purely material
ideology," so that works of art are considered to differ
are both regarded as
goods. Nevertheless, material goods and works of art
that reason, Marx
determined by the prevailing mode of production. For
had a very differ-
held that ancient Greek society, for example, necessarily
in the
ent kind of art from that of nineteenth-century capitalism because,
of ancient
last analysis, the mode of production under the slave economy
As Engels
Greece was very different from that of industrial capitalism.
, philosophical,
phrased it not long before he died, “Political, juridical
is based on
religious, literary, artistic [italics here mine], etc., development
88 y. MARX, ENGELS, AND THE MARXIAN THEORY OF ART

economic development. . . .” He now added, however: “It is not that

the economic position is the cause and alone active, while everything else
only has a passive effect. There is, rather, interaction on the basis of the
economic necessity, which ultimately always asserts itself” “—a sentence
representing a considerable softening of Marx’s more complete economic
determinism. In other words, according to Engels, art, even though ulti-
mately determined by economic development, can modify it and other
aspects of life while being affected by them. As art is a means of communi-
cation and an aspect of ideology, it can help motivate men’s minds in
bringing about social change, including for Engels even economic change.
The Marxian artist, therefore, is expected by Marxists to devote his art to
this end in some way in order that art may become socially useful, though
it is only a comparatively minor part of a superstructure resting on the
economic base of society.
Because Marxists believe that the processes of human life, including
those of art, are ultimately determined by the prevailing economic
situation, they are not determined by God (as the religious utopian com-
munists had believed) or completely by human reason (as the secular
utopians usually maintained). In rejecting belief in God, Marx considered
religion to be merely opium for the people, so that all good Marxists have
frowned upon all contemporary religious art even while regarding the
religious art of the past as a necessary expression of past forms of society.
Besides attacking religion, on which, obviously, all religious commu-
nism is based, Marx carefully put limitations on man’s reason, which was
regarded as so all-powerful by the chief secular utopians. For Marx and
Engels maintained that human reason can be free to operate only within
the limitations imposed on the one hand by the scientific laws of nature
and on the other by the similar laws determining the development of
relations in human society, the laws which Marx believed that he himself
had discovered. In Engels’s words, “Men make their history themselves,
[but] only in given surroundings which condition it and on the basis of
actual relations already existing. . . .”* Freedom consists, according to
Engels, in “the recognition of necessity,” because “necessity is blind only
in so far as it is not understood.” ** Man is free insofar as he understands
how the laws of nature and of the historical development of society
operate; and he can plan human goals, including artistic goals accordingly.
(This, of course, is the now familiar historicist point of view descended
especially from Vico, which holds that through the study of history man
can prophesy the future. It is a point of view that Hegel, following certain
ancient philosophers in seeking to fashion his synthesis of Greek philoso-
phy and Christianity, had stimulated *; and it was later to underlie twen-
tieth-century totalitarianism as well as aspects of some democratic
planning, in the arts, as in other fields.)
In sum: Marx believed that the fundamental law on which all social
change is based, the law he himself had discovered, was that such change
 The Theories of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 89

occurs necessarily and inevitably with alterations in the mode of produc-

tion. All human history—and therefore the history of art—develops in
accordance with this economic law of the motion of society; so that if man
understands this law, he can and should act to accelerate human progress.
Because for Marxists progress consists primarily in advancing toward the
goal of the classless society, it becomes the duty of the Marxian artist to
use his art for fostering progress toward that goal which will make possible
the spiritual self-regeneration of man accompanied by material abundance.
Art is useful for aiding progress beyond the class conflicts which through-
out recorded history have been so conspicuously expressed in politics,
reaching a peak in bourgeois politics. Economics is the key to such class
conflicts.
Because of their belief in progress, those Marxists interested in the arts
should be likely, theoretically at least, to encourage new subject-matter as
well as new artistic media and progressive techniques which they regard as
useful for speeding up progress toward the classless society. The question at
once arises, however, as to whether art, politics, law, science, philosophy—
all of which, be it remembered, are for Marxists primarily determined by
the prevailing mode of production—are progressing simultaneously and
uniformly in the march toward the classless society. Here the problem is
complicated by the early education and preferences of Marx himself. We
know that as a university student he had spent considerable time studying
the literature and art of classical Antiquity before writing his doctoral
thesis on the classical materialist philosophers, Democritus and Epicurus.
At that time he had come to the conclusion, to which he always sub-
scribed, that Greek art is the greatest art to date, or even, as he called it,
“in certain respects . . . the standard and model beyond attainment.”
Marx’s admiration for Greek art was related to the admiration for
Greek democracy which he shared with, and ultimately derived from,
many of the great figures of the Enlightenment. This, in turn, was
connected with the doctrine of “alienation” (Entfremdung)—likewise
stemming from the Enlightenment—which he early took over from Hegel
but greatly altered.” Not only has this doctrine appealed to the many
avant-garde artists alienated during the last century and a half from
middle-class society, but in the period since World War II it has figured
very prominently in the “revisionist” formulations of socialism itself that
have taken place in Britain and western Europe, even though Marx had
later essentially given it up.* It has also played an important part in the
related existentialism of Tillich, Sartre, and others, which in recent years
has itself been attractive to many members of the avant-garde.
In the Marxian view, alienation—an old psychiatric term meaning loss
of personal identity or of the feeling of personal identity—culminates in
the division of labor under capitalism which alienates man from his own
productions, his own self, and other men. As Marx and Engels put it,
alienation means that man’s own action in government, wealth, and
go ff MARX, ENGELS, AND THE MARXIAN © HHO Rie) OF eee Ral

culture “becomes to him an alien opposing power, which enslaves him,

instead of being ruled by him.” ** Man’s accomplishments in these areas, as
history develops, cause him to become divided within himself, never truly
“at home,” never truly whole in his social and creative life. Because
capitalistic society especially transforms free creative self-activity into alien-
ated labor, under capitalism: “The less you eat, drink and read books; the
less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public-house; the less you
think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save—the greater
becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour—your
capital. . . . All passions and all activity [including artistic activity] must
therefore be submerged in greed.” *°.One might add that to the problem of
alienation Marx and Engels, in their debates with Lassalle, implicitly
related the problem of realism in art; because the realist (such as Balzac)
overcomes his alienation to achieve an organic unity between material
reality and the selective autonomy of his fable, whereas the deterministic
naturalist (such as Zola) merely makes an inert inventory of the physical
and technical content of the world.
For Hegel it had been Rameau’s nephew in Diderot’s dialogue Le
Neveu de Rameau (which Marx likewise so greatly admired) who epito-
mized the kind of culture in which alienation, this estrangement of the
self, comes to a climax. With this kind of “capitalistic” culture, as Karl
Marx called it, Hegel and Marx contrasted Hellenic civilization: both
Marx and Hegel considered that the Athenian polis of Pericles’ day had
been a community in which no such estrangement had occurred, one in
which, on the contrary, there had been a vital unity of man and society, of
the particular and the general. Hegel held, however, that this unity had
resulted from the Athenian state, whereas Marx regarded it as resulting
from the democracy of the ancient Greeks, among whom, he said, “com-
munal life was ‘a truth’ while at present it is an idealistic lie.” 2 Marx
insisted in 1844 that only “democracy”’—which he was soon essentially to
call “communism”—can provide such substantial unity of people and state
as existed “in ancient Greece where the res publica was the actual content
of private life, the actual existence of the citizen, and the merely private
man was the slave.” * For Marx, the democracy and the equality among
citizens of the Athenian republic made it the model for his classless
society, in which, however, slavery and the state would have been
eliminated.
Even though Marx undoubtedly believed that the communal spirit of
ancient Greek democracy helped to justify him in calling Greek art “in
certain respects . . . the standard and model beyond attainment,” by
making such a statement he really abandoned the belief in progress
characteristic of many aspects of his philosophy. And in so doing, he—like
Hegel before him—at least partly reflected the influence upon him of the
fashion in art prevailing during his youth in Germany. Because at that
time the Greek Revival had been particularly strong, it is significant that,
 The Theories of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 91

with Engels, Marx greatly admired the work of the Greek Revival sculptor
Thorvaldsen (Fig. 7), and that eventually he actually modeled his own
appearance on a Classical bust of Zeus.** One may ask whether Marx
realized that Greek art, especially in its manifestations of the latter part of
the fifth century B.c. and later, is usually considered to reflect a philosophi-
cal point of view much more like those of Plato and Aristotle than
like those of his philosophically materialist heroes, Democritus and Epicu-
rus. For classical art has tended to value principles of design and propor-
tion that, like the Platonic “ideas” or the “universals” of Aristotle, have
come to be regarded as wholly or largely transcending time and place, and
therefore as being basically good for all time everywhere. As a consequence,
the classic point of view in art—particularly as exemplified by that aca-
demic version of the classic tradition which was especially stimulated by
the revival of Neo-Platonism during and after the Renaissance—has im-
plied that human nature is unchanging. But Marx, like the secular utopi-
ans before him, believed that human nature changes with the social and
natural environment, and that only by improving the social environment
can human progress toward the Marxian classless society be made possible.
This point of view, of course, could appeal also to many avant-garde
artists.
In view of Marx’s admiration for the art and culture of the Greeks, it
is worth recalling here that the very idea of wooing the masses through the
medium of art is rooted, not in the academic version of the classic
tradition, with its emphasis on rational principles considered good for all
time, but in those romantic revivals of past styles, especially classic styles,
which were developed in the late eighteenth century as stimuli for the
emotions of “modern” man. The classical varieties of romantic revivalism
in art, even though using the same classical forms as those of academic art,
and though likewise partly fostered by Neo-Platonism, were thus basically
different in approach. We have mentioned that a German painter of the
eighteenth century, Winckelmann’s friend Mengs, apparently was the first
to voice the thought that the beautiful might be defined as that which
pleases the greatest number of people; ** and Mengs, like Winckelmann,
was one of the chief heralds of the aesthetics of the romantic kind of
classical revivalism so beloved by Marx. In view of this early connection
between the classical revival in art and art for the masses, it is especially
significant that the mass art of the French Revolution, that upheaval
which exerted so profound an influence on the origins of both secular
socialist utopianism and of Marxism, was itself so largely an art of roman-
tic classical revivalism of the kind represented in France by David (Fig. 1)
even before the outbreak of the Revolution.
Marx’s insistence that the art of the Greeks remained unsurpassed in
history compelled him to relate this belief to his seemingly contrary one
that in other respects—such as the organization of society, scientific knowl-
edge, etc-—mankind today has progressed far beyond the Greeks; and this
92 / MARX, ENGELS, AND THE MARXIAN THEORY OF ART

he did in the following way. “It is well known,” he said, “that certain
periods of [the] highest development of art stand in no direct connection
with the general development of society, nor with the material basis abi of
its organization. Witness the example of the Greeks as compared with the
modern nations or even Shakespeare.” ®° For although, with Engels, Marx
insisted that change and development in all fields is grounded in economic
change, he also said, “In considering . . . transformations [in the economic
foundation of society, and hence in its art as part of the superstructure] the
distinction should always be made between the material transformation of
the economic conditions of production[,] which can be determined with
the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic
italics mine] or philosophic—in short ideological forms . . .” ** which by
their very nature cannot be determined with such precision.
Clearly, then, although Marx agreed with Hegel that the history of an
object explains its reality, he also believed in the non-uniformity of histori-
cal development, so that for him aesthetic progress did not have to parallel
economic progress, in spite of being ultimately affected by it. Because in
his view the economic laws governing the development of society can alone
be determined “with the precision of natural science,” while the laws of art
cannot, the implication plainly is that progress in art does not have to
parallel either social or scientific progress, or indeed, any other kind of
progress.” In maintaining this, Marx differed sharply from the secular
utopians, who tended to believe that progress is uniform in all fields. By
insisting that development in different fields is not uniform, Marx could
therefore regard Greek art as, in some respects, the finest in history, at least
partly because it was an indication of the free democratic society of the
Greek republic. Nevertheless, Marx recognized that, in being based on
slavery, classical political economy—and consequently, classical art—were
incompatible with modern conditions. For the French and Industrial
revolutions had raised labor, traditionally the most despised of human
activities, to the highest rank of productivity, while claiming to assert the
ideal of freedom under previously unheard-of conditions of universal equal-
ity. Furthermore, Marx maintained that capitalism, being nearer in time to
the classless society than was the slave economy of ancient Greece, is
therefore a far more advanced form of social organization—with the
implication that the total content available to artists becomes greater with
time. Yet while capitalism represents a relatively advanced form of society,
“capitalist production,” declared Marx, “is hostile to certain branches of
spiritual production, such as art and poetry” *—a major point made by
communists in their attack on “bourgeois” culture.
Thus although capitalistic society has gone beyond previous societies
in economic development, and still further beyond them in the natural
science and technology that have helped its economic development, Marx
believed that it could not hope to equal certain earlier forms of art.
Capitalist technological supremacy, for example, is of no use for aiding
 The Theories of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 93

modern man in a vain attempt to equal the epic poetry of the Greeks:
“Inasmuch as we have so far surpassed the ancients in mechanics, etc., why
[should we] not also create an epic poem?” *® asked Marx sarcastically.
Because for Marx artistic progress does not have to parallel economic
progress, even though never entirely independent of it, he did not regard
works of art as economic commodities. Indeed, he accounted for the
decline of art under capitalism on the ground that “all the so-called higher
forms of labor—intellectual, artistic, etc—have been transformed into
commodities [by bourgeois capitalism] and have thus lost their former
sacredness.” *° Under capitalism, he declared, “even the highest forms of
spiritual production are recognized and forgiven by the bourgeoisie only
because they [i.e., artists, men of letters, etc.] are represented and falsely
labelled as direct producers of material wealth,” ** so that works of art are
admired for what they will fetch rather than for their quality as art. In
other words, capitalism is accused of stressing sheer quantity and exchange
value in art instead of the quality and use value that ought to be empha-
sized, that will be emphasized in the classless society, and that had even
been recognized to some degree in societies previous to capitalism, notably
those of classical Antiquity and of the Middle Ages. As Marx phrased it,
“In most striking contrast with this [capitalistic] accentuation of quantity
and exchange-value, is the attitude of writers of classical antiquity, who
hold exclusively by quality and use-value.” * Similarly, if to a lesser degree,
he believed that “Among the craftsmen of the Middle Ages there is still to
be observed a certain interest in their particular work and in their skill,
which was capable of rising to some degree of artistry,” in contrast to “the
modern worker, who is indifferent to his work.” * Obviously, Marx was
likely to judge all art on a materialistic basis, although in an aesthetic even
more than in an economic sense; and this, combined with his atheism, led
toward a kind of naturalism, a fact made especially clear by one remark
made by him about the Greek art that he admired most: “If we consider
the gods and heroes of Greek art without religious or aesthetic prejudices,
we find in them nothing that could not exist in the pulsations of
nature,’ **
Thus, according to Marx, that pre-capitalistic emphasis on quality and
the
use-value which characterized the ancient and medieval societies was
artists who
determining environmental factor in producing workmen and
could possibly
as men ‘were better rounded and therefore happier than they
better
be under capitalism, and who, as a result, were able to produce
feudalis m,
works of art. For Marx insisted that in Antiquity and under
community
despite slavery and serfdom, individuals still retained some real
and therefore
ties, and had not yet been desocialized and depersonalized,
spirit
alienated, as they later became under the inhuman and mechanistic
later Marxists,
of capitalism. Moreover, Marx and Engels, unlike many
nce, such as Leo-
always had before them the ideal man of the Renaissa
type of man who was well-rounded,
nardo da Vinci or Machiavelli—the
 94 / MARX, ENGELS, AND THE MARXIAN THEORY OF ART

with a head for both the arts and the sciences, and who combined the
thinker with the man of action. It was this kind:of all-sided man, though
with the addition of a fully developed social consciousness, that Marx and
Engels believed would be the typical man of the classless society, under
which, therefore, the development of the individual personality would
reach its peak.
It should be emphasized that although Marx maintained that in
earlier periods of history the workers had been able to have a sense of
workmanship and artistry impossible in capitalistic society, he also re-
garded Greek art, and, to a lesser degree, medieval art, as representing the
social childhood of man, the time when mankind was still in a relatively
immature state. So even though he considered ancient art superior to any
other that could exist in history before the coming of the classless society,
he did not seek to turn the clock back by attempting to revive the
conditions of pre-capitalist society. Believing firmly that the laws of histori-
cal development, aided by human action, foreordain progress toward the
triumph of the proletariat and the classless society, he insisted that the
future should surpass the past, that the social maturity of mankind
should surpass its childhood. Said Marx, “A man can not become a
child again unless he becomes childish. But does he not enjoy the artless
ways of the child and must he not strive to reproduce its truth on a higher
plane? . . . Why should the social childhood of mankind, where it had
obtained its most beautiful development, not exert an eternal charm as an
age that will never return? . . . The Greeks were normal children.
The
charm that their art has for us does not conflict with the primitive
character of the social order from which it had sprung. It is rather
the
product of the latter, and is rather due to the fact that the unripe
social
conditions under which the art arose and under which alone it
could
appear can never return.” *
Nevertheless, paradoxically enough, Marx held that the very decline
of
art, which he saw in capitalist society, does in a major
sense represent
progress even from the standpoint of art itself, because such
decline is one
of those many evils under capitalism which are helping to pave the
way for
the revolution of the proletariat and so for the classless
society. And the
classless society, by taking advantage of the methods of
production devel-
oped under capitalism and adapting them to a new
social order, will be
marked by enormous new productive possibilities in
art as in everything
else. Only in this classless society, Marxists believe,
can the full develop-
ment of the productive powers of society and the creative
powers of the
individual human personality be achieved, powers
that have inevitably
been cramped under capitalism. Although man has
the power to transform
his own nature through labor, and history is the
record of this transforma-
tion, it cannot proceed adequately in a society
disrupted by class antago-
nisms. Communism alone can make the complete
transformation possible,
yet is not an end in itself (as many later Marxist
s have supposed). For
 The Theories of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 95

Marx early wrote: “Communism is the necessary form and energetic

principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal
of human development, the form of human society.” *
As all students of Marxian communism know, the cornerstone of the
economic doctrine on the basis of which Marx assailed capitalism is the
labor theory of value, the theory—derived largely from English classical
economics—that the value of a commodity must depend solely on the
amount of “socially necessary” labor expended in producing it. Marxists do
not consider works of art to be commodities, but they do say that art and
labor are closely related: in fact, following Engels, they hold that art
originated out of labor during the early period of history when human
society first reached the stage of trade and industry, and that the skilled
hand is actually the product of labor. Moreover, much as the production of
commodities requires the planned labor of workmen, so the production of
works of art requires the planned and therefore conscious labor of artists.
Only human beings can produce works of art, and they can do so simply
because, as Engels said, “The further men become removed from animals
_. . the more their effect on nature assumes the character of a premedi-
tated, planned action directed towards definite ends known in advance.” *
Or as Marx himself expressed it, “But what distinguishes the worst archi-
tect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in
imagination before he erects it in reality.” °° It is in being unlike animals or
insects that “man . . . creates according to the laws of beauty,” * which
nevertheless in the last analysis are relative to the prevailing mode of
production. The Marxian artist is therefore expected to understand the
ever-developing laws of beauty, and to plan his work in his imagination
first, in accordance with them. In the Marxian view, art and scientifically
rational planning therefore are closely related to one another, a fact that
helps to account for the emphasis placed in the Soviet Union on large-scale
planning in the arts as in other aspects of life.
In recognizing that artists are not direct producers of material wealth,
of commodities, Marx had to put the artists of his time among what, in his
Theories of Surplus Value (intended as the fourth volume of Capital), he
spoke of as “third persons.” Such persons function in various roles outside
the productive pattern, and so outside the two great opposing classes,
ers,
bourgeoisie and proletariat. Among them he included artists, entertain
well as many
ministers, teachers, physicians, and various functionaries, as
fit neatly
representatives of the petty bourgeoisie and others who failed to
he paid
into his two major categories. To such groups of “third persons”
be swallowed
little direct attention because he regarded them as fated to
classes that alone to him had meaning
up in one of the two great opposing
for modern history.” .
ers of
This separating of artists, among others, from the direct produc
ed art as unimpo rtant. But it
commodities did not mean that Marx regard
art, unlike that of
did mean that he recognized that the worth of works of
96 yi MARX, ENGELS, AND THE MARXIAN THEORY OP-ART

other products of human labor, should ordinarily not depend on the

amount of socially necessary labor time required for producing them.
Unlike other workmen, the artist usually does not work for a fixed wage,
and unlike so many other products of human labor, especially in an
industrialized society, works of art are usually unique products, so that
there can be no real criterion for comparing them. In this respect they
differ fundamentally from commodities, for if commodities are to have
value they cannot be unique; they must in some way be comparable in
order that there may be some basis on which they can be exchanged.
Consequently, to Marx the very uniqueness of a work of art meant that it
customarily does not have a value, but merely a price; and he was con-
vinced that under capitalism this price depends either upon the whims of
millionaires or upon artificial scarcity deliberately caused by a dealer or by
the artist himself, an unsocial state of affairs of which he thoroughly
disapproved. Furthermore, as indicated above, he believed that under
capitalism works of art are treated—wrongly—as if they were commodities.
Only in a few rather exceptional cases can a standard of comparison
exist between works of art, so that, according to Marxian doctrine, only
exceptionally can art have a value instead of simply a price. For example,
such a standard does exist with certain kinds of art, such as prints, which
by the very nature of the medium are more or less mass-produced. Some
Marxists have pointed out that it can exist also in those instances, rare in
capitalist society, under which the artist is paid a fixed wage like other
workmen, as was the case with those American artists who worked for the
federal government’s Works Progress Administration during the Depres-
sion of the 1930's.” Here the wages of artists could be compared, and on
that basis a value could be arrived at for the works of art produced by
them. Furthermore, because Marx glorified the workman as a member of
the proletariat, and because he believed that the separation between the
“fine arts” and crafts found in capitalist society prevented the full develop-
ment of the individual artist and craftsman, the tendency has been for
artists under Marxian control to be organized in associations not unlike the
guilds of the Middle Ages, even though more directly like unions of
modern workingmen. For this reason, Marxists have often praised the
artists’ guilds of the Middle Ages on the ground that the artist who was a
member of such an association, like the workman who is a member of a
modern union, was able to play a more responsible social role. In Soviet
Russia and elsewhere, communists have established artists’ unions to ena-
ble the artist to take a more effective place within the social organism: in
this way they proved able to exert particularly strong influence on the arts
in western Europe and the United States during the Depression of the
1930's. At times, leaders of Communist parties have even tried to insist
that the artist must also concern himself directly with such social duties as
working in a factory or on a farm: for instance, in East Germany during
the early 1960's the party was honoring such “worker artists” and claiming
that their art was as good as, if not better than, that of other artists.
 The Theories of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 97

3. Marx's Contributions: Organicism and Art

Mention of the social organism brings us to a second main aspect of

Marx’s philosophy, his historical and social organicism, which has likewise
involved special problems for art. Hegel had seen in nature an ascent
toward an ever-higher unity and interconnection of which the mechanical,
the physical, and the organic were successive stages. Marx, however, and
especially Engels, regarded nature as an organic whole, a unity resembling
a living organism inasmuch as all of its parts are interconnected, and yet
which is more than the mere sum of its parts, including its human parts.
Unlike orthodox philosophical materialists, however, Marx did not pass
from inquiry into nature to inquiry into the nature of man, but followed
the reverse procedure. For he started with man in human society, which he
regarded as a living natural phenomenon like a biological organism, with
all parts organically interrelated, and the whole more than the total of the
parts. In likening human society to a living organism, and classes within
society to organisms, Marx was applying to society and class the analogy
that Hegel had eventually applied to that (for him) highest form of
society, the state, and specifically to the Prussian state, which he regarded
as the Divine Idea as it exists on earth—whereas Marx, who regarded the
state as class-dominated, and therefore ultimately evil, branded nationality
a myth, Somewhat like Saint-Simon earlier, Marx usually applied the
organic analogy also to periods within the history of human society; that is
to say, he tended to regard the age of capitalism, or that of feudalism, as if
it were a kind of organism with its own life history of birth, youth,
maturity, old age, and death.
If well before the time of Marx and Hegel, and even before that of
Saint-Simon, this organic analogy could already be found in the thought of
Vico and Diderot, it was developed further within the romantic tradition,
Schell-
especially early German romanticism as exemplified by Herder and
ing.** Somewhat like Marx later, Herder had believed that history unfolds
when
according to the laws of living things, a belief he applied to the arts
. . . has had its period of growth, bloom, and
he declared that “every art
a revolutionary re-
decline.” “4 Under the influence of Herder, Schelling,
publican, is said to have been the first to conceive of nature and humanity
however, the
as a single mighty unified organism.** In contrast to Marx,
the organic analogy also to
romantics were especially likely to apply
for the individua l genius,
individual human beings in order to account
cannot be accounte d for
such as the great artist, whose outstanding talents
parts. In
by assuming that an individual 1s merely the sum of his physical
rationalis ts of the
this, the romantics were opposing the belief of many like
human beings,
Enlightenment, such as Holbach, who maintained that
 98 / MARX, ENGELS, AND THE MARXIAN THEORY OF ART

the Newtonian universe, are simply machines determined solely by and

operating under the laws of physics and chemistry. Under this latter
rationalist view, human society also came to be regarded not as an organ-
ism but as a sort of machine—an analogy that we shall see was implicit in
the early thought of Saint-Simon, although he increasingly tended to
abandon it in favor of that other, and more romantic, analogy which likens
human society to a living organism.

4. Marx's Contributions: The Dialectical

Process, the Social Organism, and Art

Marx, then, in regarding society and major historical periods alike as

organisms, tended to follow in the footsteps of the romantics and of the
later thought of Saint-Simon, while rejecting the romantics’ view of the
individual genius as a unique organism. Following Hegel, Marx also dif-
fered from the romantics in his conception of the fundamental nature of
organic unity, because to Hegel and Marx alike organic unity is achieved
dialectically. In other words, instead of being a simple unity, it is one of
contraries within which strong tensions and oppositions are not only
permitted but actually required. It is a dynamic unity of content and
form in which any given tendency, or “thesis” —because of inner contradic-
tions that reside in the nature of every single thing—gives rise to a
counter-tendency, its own antithesis. Inevitably a struggle develops be-
tween thesis and antithesis; and out of this warfare there develops a
synthesis which itself gives rise to its own antithesis, so that this cyclical
process continues indefinitely, and within it progress is possible. But in the
stages of each repetition is implicit an idea of growth, maturity, and decay
not unlike the life cycle of an organism.
Even though Hegel actually stressed the dialectic rather less than did
Kant, Fichte, and Schelling earlier,” in his view and that of Marx
the
dialectic is a law that operates equally in the processes of logic, of
the
rational world, and also of human history; for through the
dialectic,
history becomes part of the very content of reason. And Hegel,
at least,
directly related to the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis three
different states
of art: to the thesis, symbolical art; to the antithesis, classical
art; to the
synthesis, romantic art. Marx’s version of the dialectic certainl
y did not
glorify romantic art or indeed any other kind in this primary
way. Never-
theless, even in his conception of the dialectic, the
dialectical method
stood for a unity of content and form. And the period
of bourgeois
capitalism as a thesis necessarily included its art; the
dictatorship of
the
proletariat—with its own art—was then the antithesis; and
the classless
 The Theories of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 99

society—with its art—would constitute the synthesis, and therefore would

produce the finest artistic results of all.
Hegel and Marx thus rejected the aesthetic of the romantics insofar as
it laid special emphasis on the organic unity of the individual genius,
upholding instead a dialectical and therefore dynamic social unity. But this
social kind of organic unity, which Hegel and Marx regarded as fundamen-
tal, had its own basis in romantic thought. Hegel and Marx simply
believed that an organic unity was far more possible within a large-scale
social unit—the state for Hegel eventually, the class and ultimately the
classless society for Marx—than within the life either of a single smaller
social institution or of any individual person, including such individuals of
genius as artists. Marx’s new application of this Hegelian dialectical proc-
ess was the third of his major contributions to social theory and practice,
one that can be discussed only in relation to his organicism.

Inasmucu as Marx held that the social organism evolves according to

definite laws of history, his concept of organicism in many ways resembles
the doctrines of Darwinian evolution, which he and his followers seized
upon while sharply opposing the individualistic kind of social Darwinism
upheld by Herbert Spencer, in spite of Spencer’s belief, too, that a society
is a living organism. Indeed, Marx and his followers to this day have
recognized that Darwin’s Origin of Species supplied a basis in natural
history for his own philosophy of historical materialism, “a basis [as Marx
wrote] in natural science for the class struggle in history,” “* which is why
he wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin. For Darwin, more than
anyone before him, brought history into science, while writing of the
“social instinct” in the higher animals. In Marxism, as in Darwinism, the
idea of evolutionary process and development is fundamental: Engels
referred to “the great basic thought that the world is . . . to be compre
hended . . . as a complex of processes. . . .”** And because the social
development of the world, fostered by the efforts of all thoroughgoing
Marxists, is held to be proceeding toward the Marxian goal of the classless
well.
society, the Marxist believes not only in process but in progress as
the Marxian dialectical process, however, the revolution of the
Within
antithesis (the proletariat) against the thesis (the bourgeoisie) out of
a sharp break
which the antithesis has grown, introduces into the process
that in this respect is non-evolutionary, so that later Marxists seized upon
the concept of biological mutation as a further supporting parallel for
Marxism.
All these beliefs that form part of Marx’s version of organicism have
profound meaning for art. Society is an organism, which evolves according
to the dialectical process; the good society is the organic society; every
to every other,
activity in the organic society is important because related
LOs© Vi MARX, ENGELS, AND THE MARXIAN THEORY (OP ART

so that artistic activities, too, are important for society. Individual human
beings, including individual artists, are regarded as subordinate to society
because the social organism is more than the sum of its individual parts.
Marxists, and especially Marxist-Leninists, therefore frown upon individu-
alistic self-expression in art, upon “art for art’s sake”; or, to put it more
accurately, they believe that the artist should achieve self-expression by
devoting himself and his art to social action in order to help bring ever
nearer the goal of the classless society, that goal in which the dialectical
process reaches a culmination. For this reason they say that only in the
classless society can the all-sided development of individual personality
become complete, and that only then can the arts reach levels of excellence
and originality transcending even those of Greek art, so greatly admired by
Marx.
In contrast to this future classless society, all class societies (that is to
say all societies since primitive man), and especially industrialized capital-
ist society, are considered to suffer from grave evils caused by the narrow
specialization of the individual resulting from the division of labor. As
Marx and Engels wrote, “The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in
certain individuals, and its consequent suppression in the broad masses of
the people, is an effect of the division of labor. . . .” They went on to
attack professional specialization in art as follows, linking it with the evils
of nationalism: “With a communist organization of society, the artist is
not confined by the local and national seclusion which ensues solely from
the division of labor, nor is the individual confined to one specific art, so
that he becomes exclusively a painter, a sculptor, etc.; these very names
express sufficiently the narrowness of his professional development and his
dependence on the division of labor. In a communist society, there are no
painters, but at most men who, among other things, also paint.” © In this
statement lies the seed of the official Soviet belief that art and other
aspects of social life are to be totally integrated within a communist society
that will refuse to allow the individual artist to devote himself solely and
freely to his art, insisting that he has social duties to perform under the
guidance of the Communist Party, made by Lenin into a kind of super-
organism. As Engels once wrote with regard to the art and profession of
architecture: “Socialism will abolish both architecture and barrow-pushing
as professions, and the man who has given half an hour to architecture will
also push the cart a little until his work as architect is again in demand. It
would be a pretty sort of socialism which perpetuated the business of
barrow-pushing.” * Clearly, according to this it would equally be “a pretty
sort of socialism” which perpetuated the profession of architecture at the
expense of pushing the cart for society.
Marxists thus believe that the division of labor, particularly in its
capitalistic phase, has produced individually specialized artists who are
therefore neither social-minded nor well-rounded men. This has helped to
give rise, they hold, to an evil regionalistic and nationalistic chauvinism in
 The Theories of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 101

art, an evil distinction between the artist and the masses, between city and
country, between production and consumption, between work and enjoy-
ment, between intellectual and manual labor, between aesthetic signifi-
cance and utility, between high art and folk art, between fine arts and
crafts. In Marxian theory, especially as developed further in the Soviet
Union, Marxian artists, unlike the narrowly specialized artists of capital-
ism, are expected to participate in the life of the masses and to create many
different kinds of things, and are also expected to deal with both applied
and fine art while obliterating any major distinction between them. They
—and especially the architects and planners—are particularly expected to
try to do away with the distinction between city and country, of which
Engels declared, “The elimination of the difference between the city and
the village can be accomplished only through the elimination of capitalism
itself.” According to Engels, this requires that the great cities of the
present be dismantled before true communism can be achieved. The
dismantling “will take much time and trouble,” but will be done “—a
statement that implies the garden city (to be discussed later), although
Engels did not use the term. Moreover, works of art must have social
significance, must be integrated within the social organism, and must be
functionally useful, and therefore in the last analysis will reflect the social
conditions produced by their own particular economic and natural environ-
ment. Like all socialistic art, Marxian art tends to be socially functional (of
course, this does not mean that all functionalistic art has been produced by
communists and socialists, or that there has been agreement among com-
munists and socialists as to exactly what constitutes functional art). As this
functionalistic point of view tends to make the Marxian architect in
particular resemble an engineer, it is worth reiterating here that although
most Marxists—following Marx himself—have likened works of art to
well-functioning organisms, others—including to some degree even Fried-
rich Engels—have tended to liken them to well-functioning machines. ‘The
differences between these two metaphors have given rise to severe and
confusing disputes among Marxists, including major arguments in the
Soviet Union between the followers of Stalin and those of the eventual
leader of the Right Opposition to Stalin, Nikolai Bukharin, who in the late
1920’s was accused by the Stalinists of having succumbed to “mechanism.”
Yet in 1932, three years after Bukharin’s complete defeat, Stalin himself
referred to writers as “engineers of human souls.”
The conception of progress which grows out of Marx’s belief in a
dialectical kind of organic unity is necessarily very different from that
ordinarily held by the secular utopians, most of whom, with the partial
exception of the Saint-Simonians, believed that man is progressing continu-
ously and mechanically in a relatively straight line. Marxists hold that
progress in art, as in everything else in history, is governed by the Hegelian
dialectic, because the dialectic among other things is the law of historical
motion. Consequently, in the Marxian view—in contrast to that of the
102 yh MARX, ENGEES, AND THE, MAR X2AN SH BOR YO) Paar

utopians—even progress itself necessarily involves contradictions. As Lenin

said, Marxists look upon dialectics as “the study of the contradiction
within the very essence of things,” ** so that “Development is the ‘struggle’
of opposites.” ** But where Hegel’s dialectic, applied to history and prog-
ress, had assumed that the clash of opposing nations was the force behind
this conflict of opposites, Marx (and Lenin after him) insisted that the
warfare of classes in the class struggle—the fourth doctrine basic to Marx’s
philosophy and to the Marxian theory of art—provided that force.

5. Marx's Contributions:
The Class Struggle and Art

Tur conruicr of opposing classes Marx considered to be inevitable

whenever changes in the social structure—that is, in social relations, which
he regarded as being basically relations of production—fail to keep up with
the forces governing the mode of production. Such conflicts mean that
progress occurs in an irregular, zigzag manner once described by Lenin as
“a development . . . im spirals, not in a straight line; a development in
leaps and bounds, catastrophes, revolutions. . . .” °* Consequently, while
Marxists do believe in evolution, all orthodox Marxists also believe in
revolution, even though the abortive revolutionary movements in France
during the lifetime of Marx and Engels ultimately led them to the
conclusion that the time was not ripe, and that revolution must await the
process of economic change which would bring capitalism to the point of
collapse. After Marx’s death, Engels especially had come around to the
view that for the time being it was advisable to emphasize constitutional
political action while continuing to believe that at some stage a revolution-
ary rising would be necessary. Out of this more evolutionary point of view
was to develop that “revisionist” (and so not “orthodox”) form of Marx-
ism which holds that the revolution need not be a violent and catastrophic
one, and that communism can be wholly achieved by gradual evolution.
In spite of the irregularity that all Marxists, revolutionary or evolu-
tionary, believe to characterize the process of social development, all parts
of this dialectical process are regarded as natural phenomena, and therefore
as organically related. As Stalin once said, “dialectics does not regard
nature as an accidental agglomeration of things, of phenomena, uncon-
nected with, isolated from, and independent of, each other, but as a
connected and integral whole, in which things, phenomena are organically
connected with, dependent on, and determined by each othens sie
process of social development is not only dialectical, but also consists of a
series of organically related natural phenomena, and it is because these
phenomena of social development are also considered to be natural that
 The Theories of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 103

they are regarded as determined by scientific laws like the laws governing
the other phenomena of nature.
Because for the orthodox Marxists the dialectical process implies a
belief in revolution as well as in evolution, theoretically (though not in
Soviet Marxism today) they are willing to have a revolution in art as in
everything else. Hence Marxian art, in theory at least, is often markedly
anti-traditional—whether in subject-matter, medium, form, or content, or
in some combination of these. This anti-traditionalism is in harmony with
the statement of Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto that, “In
bourgeois society . .. the past dominates the present; in communist
society the present dominates the past.” But, because all parts of the
dialectical process of development are held to be organically connected like
the parts of a single organism, the past is considered to be organically
related to the present. Indeed, the past casts light on the present, because
according to the Marxian doctrine of historical materialism, the present
grows out of the past and is very largely determined by it—a doctrine
consistent with a belief that the present dominates the past only if one
accepts the Hegelian dialectic.
Applied to art, the implication here is that the Marxist must under-
stand and make use of his knowledge of past art—from ancient, feudal, or
capitalistic society—in creating the art of the present. Among orthodox
Marxists, tradition comes to be regarded as one of the inescapable determi-
nants of art as of other aspects of life. As Lenin once said, “one can
become a Communist only when one enriches one’s mind with all the
wealth of knowledge created by mankind” *; and again, “Proletarian cul-
ture must be the result of a natural development of all the stores of
knowledge which mankind has accumulated under the yoke of capitalist
society, landlord society and bureaucratic society.” It was largely because
of this belief that Lenin and Stalin were responsible for expelling from
Soviet Russia ultra-modern artists who seemed to reject the past
completely.
In emphasizing proletarian culture even while carefully defining it,
Lenin was simply acknowledging the all-important role that Marx had
assigned to the proletariat in bringing about progress toward the revolution
and therefore toward the classless society. All Marxists agree on the
importance of the proletariat, that class which implies the existence of a
highly industrialized society to produce it. But not only have Marxists
failed to reach agreement among themselves as to whether the revolution
of the proletariat must be a violent one or whether it can be essentially
evolutionary—they have also not agreed on the role of art in bringing
about that revolution. Nor have they agreed about the place of art during
the period immediately following the revolution, which they call the
“dictatorship of the proletariat’”—that idea borrowed by Marx from the
Jacobins, even though he actually referred to it in this famous phrase only
failed
once when writing for publication. For that matter, they have even
104 yh MARX, ENGELS, AND!) THE MARXIAN THEORY OF -ART

to be consistent as to the nature of the proletariat itself, regarded by

Marx as the equivalent of the masses, but by Lenin as leading the masses,
in which he included the peasants.
We shall find that although some Marxists have declared that art is
useful as a weapon for the proletariat in the class struggle, some of the
more revolutionary Marxists have been inclined to feel that art is a
distraction in the struggle, that the good Marxist should devote himself
solely to political and economic activities in his effort to bring the classless
society more rapidly into being. Marxists are likely to be more ready to
accept art as worthwhile during the dictatorship of the proletariat, but they
have differed greatly in their conceptions as to the nature of good art
during this period.
For even in agreeing that art, like all other works of man, is ultimately
determined by the nature of the economic organization of society, they
have been divided over the question as to how art should express and
reflect the productive relations of an industrialized society. And they
necessarily failed to agree on the nature of proletarian art, having also
disagreed as to the exact nature of the proletariat itself. Marx, because of
his primary concern for the urban workers in the highly industrialized
countries of western Europe, had far less interest in agriculture and the
farmer than did the secular utopians, who, as romantics, glorified the
return to nature. But even though he ordinarily tended to restrict the
proletariat to the industrial workers, in the preface he and Engels wrote for
the second Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto early in 1882,
they did include a brief statement to the effect that “if the Russian
Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so
that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership
of land [in the peasant villages] may serve as the starting-point for a
communist development.” ® With little more than this to go on, Lenin
modified Marx’s doctrines in order to meet the specific problems of Russia
as a relatively unindustrialized country by giving the poorer peasant-farm-
ers a place as allies of the industrial workers. As a result, after his death
there were violent quarrels among his would-be successors as to just what
the relationship of industrial worker and peasants should be—quarrels in
which was involved the question as to the exact relation of folk art to the
art of the industrial proletariat. Nevertheless, despite all their quarrels
Marxists have believed that the proletariat is the only class able to bring
the classless society into being, and that it can accomplish this only in the
face of all-out opposition by the bourgeoisie, so it goes without saying that
all Marxists have been likely to reject bourgeois subjects and forms in art as
inimical to the masses, and to stress only those kinds of art which for them
best answer the needs of the proletariat itself.
One of its most important needs, of course, is adequate housing, but
on this subject Marxists have by no means always agreed. For one thing,
they have differed as to the relation between the community and the
 The Theories of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 105

family, although in theory at least, they, like the religious and secular
utopians, have usually stressed the importance of communal housing. In
the Soviet Union, for example, there has been a long-continued struggle
between the preference of most of the population for single-family houses
and the official tendency to subordinate the family to the state by em-
phasizing communal, multi-family housing, and public dining facilities.”
In Marx’s own day, the housing problem had not been studied with
nearly so much scientific thoroughness as it was to be after World War I,
yet Marx and Engels did not neglect it by any means. Engels sought to
investigate the problem in detail in his work, The Housing Question
(1872), and there took the position, earlier supported by Marx and himself
in the Communist Manifesto, that housing for the proletariat is to be
rejected before the revolution, for fear that, with improved living condi-
tions, the zeal of the masses for bringing about a revolution will be lessened
and the revolution thereby postponed. In the meantime, according to
Engels, the kind of additional housing to be countenanced for the masses
is housing seized from wealthy capitalists by the proletariat.
However, even though Marxists have argued with one another about
the exact nature of suitable housing for the masses and as to when it should
be achieved, all Marxists have agreed upon its ultimate importance. This,
of course, brings an aspect of the art of architecture into especially direct
connection with the Marxian concept of social planning.

6. Marxism, Truth, Propaganda, and Art

Cvosrty RELATED to Marx’s dialectical doctrine of change and progress is
the Marxian conception of truth, including artistic truth. We know that
the Marxian principles of design and composition in art are regarded as
ever-changing because they are ultimately determined by the changing
modes of economic production. At any given time, therefore, they are
necessarily relative to the economic conditions of production which charac-
terize the particular society, the particular period and place. But as man-
kind progresses, artistic values, like other values, are considered by Marxists
as coming ever closer to approximating absolute values, absolute truth; be-
cause, as our knowledge increases, the core of absolute truth available to us
increases in size. But while Marxists do maintain that an absolute stand-
ard exists, they hold that in any specific instance it can only be approxi-
mated, being the sum total of all relative truths.” This relativism (which,
according to Engels, is necessarily more pronounced in the historical
sciences, including therefore the history of art, than in the natural
sciences) * implies that human nature is ever changing. And in this
respect the Marxian point of view, despite Marx’s own admiration for
Greek art, contrasts sharply with more absolutistic philosophies of art,
106 y MARX, ENGELS, AND) THE MAR XCVAIN Te Pio Y TO AK

notably with those of all the various kinds of academicism which stem
from the classic tradition. As mentioned previously, the academic artist,
believing that human nature never changes fundamentally, holds the essen-
tially Neo-Platonic view that good art must be rational in being based on
ideal general principles considered to be valid universally and for all time.
In contrast to the academic artists, Marxists maintain in theory that,
like the principles of design prevailing at a given time, the artist’s personal
style is basically determined by his environment—not merely by the natu-
ral environment but also, and primarily, by the economic, and therefore
social, environment. And the social environment, of course, manifests itself
in the class structure, the historical development of which basically results
from environmental conditions, especially from the prevailing mode of
production, the prevailing division of labor. It was for this reason that Marx
and Engels once wrote, with reference to Raphael, that an artist is “condi-
tioned by the technical advances made in art before him, by the organiza-
tion of society and the division of labor in his locality, and finally, by the
division of labor in all countries with which his locality maintained rela-
tions. Whether an individual like Raphael is able to develop his talent
depends entirely upon demand, which in turn depends upon the division of
labor and the consequent educational conditions of men.” * Like the
secular utopians, Marx and Engels placed great importance on education
as determining man, and therefore the artist; but, unlike the utopians, they
maintained that education itself is ultimately determined by the prevailing
division of labor, and consequently by the relations of production in the
particular economy.
Whether or not a specific great artist such as Raphael happens to arise
at a specific time was held by Marx and Engels to be a matter of chance,
although if he had not existed, a substitute would necessarily have been
demanded and eventually found. In the words of Engels, already quoted in
part: “Men make their history [including art history] themselves,
[though] only in given surroundings which condition it and on the basis
of actual relations already existing, among which the economic rela-
tions . . . are still ultimately the decisive ones... . . That such and such a
man . . . arises at that particular time in that given country is of course
pure accident. But cut him out and there will be a demand for a substitute,
and this substitute will be found, good or bad, but in the long run he will
be found.” ®
Thus Engels did not say that the substitute will necessarily be the
natural equal of the man he replaces; on the contrary, he was careful to
state that “good or bad . . . [the substitute] will be found.” The role of
the great individual (and therefore of the great artist), although ultimately
determined by the prevailing relations of production, was therefore not
denied by Engels and Marx, even though they believed that only amnptive
classless society, after all the artificial discriminations resulting from class
 The Theories of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 107

distinctions have been abolished, will the individual be able to develop his
creative potentiality to the full.
Interestingly enough, Marx held that the artist’s originality, which,
being peculiar to him, constitutes a kind of freedom, does not appear in
the content of the work of art he creates but in its form. For content is
the expression of truth; and according to Marx, truth—being social rather
than individual—has a universal character. In Marx’s own words: “the
truth is universal; it does not belong to me, it belongs to everybody; it
possesses me, I do not possess it. My possession is the form which
constitutes my spiritual individuality.” ° Such a statement could help to
encourage formalism among some Marxian artists.
It is because Marxists believe the “good” man and the “happy” man
can and must help society to come closer to absolute truth by moving
history forward toward the classless society that they regard as the good
artist the one who is active in producing socially useful art. This activism
grew out of Marx’s answer to what Engels called “the paramount question
of the whole of philosophy,” namely, “the question of the position of
thinking in relation to being. . . .” ® The older materialists had held that
our knowledge of the external world was obtained by the impact of purely
passive sensations upon the mind. Marx taught that these sensations,
which he believed gave “faithful images of the external world, did not
provide immediate knowledge but only stimuli to knowledge which com-
pleted itself in action; for if sensations were purely passive, it was impossi-
ble to explain why they should result in conscious activity; and if men were
unable to react on their environment and change it, revolutions could no
longer be regarded as a form of human activity and were simply incidents
in a mechanical process.” * Hence, in opposing the mechanistic philoso-
phy of so many of the eighteenth-century Philosophes and other material-
ists, which often was dominant in the thought of the secular utopians (and
which tended to dominate also that of Engels, who by no means always
followed Marx slavishly), Marx insisted that we perceive a thing only as
part of the process of acting upon it. Much later the followers of Stalin in
the Soviet Union were to accuse the followers of Bukharin of being
mechanists who therefore could not be good Marxists.
“This activist theory of knowledge—known today as Instrumentalism
—which insists that knowledge is indissolubly bound up with action, is the
most distinctive feature of Marx’s philosophy” ® as distinguished from his
theory of history and economics. Therefore, some of the chief followers of
the twenticth-century American Instrumentalist, John Dewey (who was
not a Marxist though sympathetic to some aspects of Marxism), were to
become thoroughgoing Marxists with considerable influence upon Marxian
art theory in the United States.
Marx wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach, “All philosophies have sought
to explain the world; our business is to change it.” Much more than the
108 / MARX, ENGELS, AND THE MARXIAN THEORY OF ART

utopians, Marxists—including the Marxian artist—are expected to regard

theory and practice as one, and to take an activist role in forwarding the
dialectical process in history. Activism of this kind accounts for the much
greater emphasis placed on propaganda by Marxists than by any of their
predecessors in communism. And the use of art for such a purpose is made
possible by the fact that although, as Engels said, “political, juridical,
philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on
economic development,” nevertheless “all these react upon one another
and also upon the economic base.” ” In other words, although the artist is
ultimately conditioned by the economic and social situation, his art in turn
reacts upon that situation and inevitably plays a role of social action which
can help or hinder progress. It is for this reason that the artist must choose
sides in the class struggle; and when he chooses the side of the proletariat,
his creations will promote the cause of the workingman whether or not the
artist himself is from the working class—an argument later to be brought
forward in the Soviet Union and among Communist parties elsewhere,
against the belief that only those born into the proletarian class can
produce good Marxian art.
In the “orthodox” Marxian view, then, all art is class propaganda for
good or bad, and is considered good in this stage of history only if it helps
to bring about and complete the revolution of the proletariat which will
make possible the classless society. The art of Marxists must therefore be
of a kind useful for training the leaders of the revolution—and Marxian
communists are likely to restrict the word “propaganda” to this meaning.
But it must also be suited to the needs of the masses and to their
understanding, and in addition must spur them to action—must serve the
purpose of “agitation” as well as of education. In the process of arousing
the masses, morality and truth, like everything else, are to be considered as
basically relative to the prevailing economic and social situation. “We
maintain,” Engels declared, “. . . that all former moral theories are the
product, in the last analysis, of the economic stage which society had
reached at that particular epoch,” a doctrine implicit also in Lenin’s
statement that communist morality “is entirely subordinated to the inter-
ests of the class struggle of the proletariat... . We do not believe in
eternal morality. . . .”” It is because of this view (usually rejected by the
“revisionist” versions of Marxism) that, to non-Marxists, the “orthodox”
Marxist seems to act as if the end justified the means in art as in the rest of
life; whereas Marxists themselves would prefer to say that the end cannot
be separated from the means because the two are dialectically interrelated
and interpenetrated.
As good propaganda is considered to be that which best educates the
masses for action in their historic social role, Marxists especially emphasize
those artistic media which they consider most useful for this purpose, those
which most easily can be bent to the socially functional approach that
Marxists emphasize. Edmund Wilson has pointed out that the greatest
 The Theories of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 109

founders of Marxism—Marx himself, Engels, and Lenin—all deliberately

sought to develop a style of writing that can best be called
“functionalistic,” * in their efforts to win mass support. In architecture,
Marxists could usually be expected to emphasize the utilitarian and struc-
tural functionalism also supported by early predecessors such as Diderot.
In the representational arts, like Diderot before them, they could be
expected to equate in some way social functionalism with social realism.
And later Marxists have found a philosophical basis for so doing in such a
previously mentioned statement by Engels as: “the material, sensuously
perceptible world to which we ourselves belong is the only reality... .”
For as we have noted, Engels, and Lenin later—unlike most non-Marxian
materialist philosophers, and more directly than Marx himself—equated
philosophical materialism and realism. Hence, most later “orthodox”
Marxists have sought to treat the arts, and especially the representational
arts such as painting, sculpture, the graphic arts, theater, and film, in a
materialistically realistic way, rejecting abstraction in art as reflecting
philosophical idealism.
Because Marx and Engels gave no more specific directives for artists
than they did for administrators—that is to say, practically none at all—
later Marxists, especially in the Soviet Union, have had to improvise on the
basis of a few general statements by the founders of Marxism. Concerning
the results of those improvisations it is sufficient to emphasize here that in
the efforts of Marxists to stimulate the masses to social ends by means of
socially functional and realistic art, they have stressed those art forms
which can most easily be seen, comprehended, participated in, or made use
of by large numbers of people—for example, newspaper cartoons, great
public buildings, mass housing, monumental sculpture, mural painting,
music, the social drama, motion pictures, mass parades, pageants, and the
like. These have all usually been presented in a fairly literal style, one to
which, also, the public has already become somewhat accustomed, so that
it thereby takes some account of the culture of the past. Buildings and
other works of art are frequently made enormous, both to be more easily
visible and to impress the masses by sheer size. As might be expected, the
kinds of art considered most important are likely to be those which best
lend themselves to mass production and distribution, and which—like the
motion picture or like newspaper and poster art—can therefore reach the
largest possible audiences. However, this approach to art has, of course, not
been restricted to Marxian countries such as the Soviet Union. While it
has become especially characteristic of totalitarian art everywhere (includ-
ing that of Nazi Germany), it has also affected all of the modern mass
societies.
Thus the techniques of mass production created by the Industrial
in the
Revolution have made it possible for Marxists—and everyone else
of their propaga nda on
modern world—to increase enormously the impact
to make it ever more
the masses, and at the same time have tended
2b iy ©) vy, MARX, ENGELS, AND THE MARXIAN THEORY OF ART

important, economically speaking, for artists to appeal in some way to

popular taste. Marx himself did not demand as directly as do his present-
day followers that the artist speak in a manner easily comprehended by the
great masses of the people, because he believed that the enjoyment of
beauty is immediate and directly dependent upon the nature of the
individual beholder. Like the secular utopians, however, he believed that
the individual can arrive at his own true nature only through education
and thus through environmental conditioning—thereby stimulating his
followers to develop the art of propaganda much further.”

7. The Spread of Marxism in Relation

to Other Forms of Socialism

SSucu are the general characteristics usually found in Marxian art every-
where. No matter where or by whom a particular art medium or art form
has originated, if it could be useful for propagating Marxian content it has
usually been seized upon by Marxists, and then has usually spread widely
because of the international spirit of Marxism. This spirit—which Marxists
believe had already been foreshadowed in, and made possible by the
growth of great international cartels and monopolies under capitalism—is
reflected in such statements of Marx and Engels as this one, previously
cited: “With a communist organization of society . . . the artist is not
confined by .. . local and national seclusion. . . .” Through Marxist
internationalism, the different currents of Marxian art, currents that have
varied in character both with the particular variety of Marxism and with
the country of their origin, have been encouraged to intermingle and
become modified by one another in many different ways. Although Marxist
internationalism has, of course, particularly encouraged the spread of
Marxian art theory and practice among the countries where Marxism is
strong, it has also fostered the spread of aspects of Marxian art even where
Marxism is weak, and occasionally even into areas where there is no actual
Marxism at all. For while such art has naturally spread most easily where
its content is appreciated and understood, frequently the international and
supposedly “progressive” forms of some Marxian art, quite apart from their
socialist or communist subject-matter and content, have been admired and
imitated by international-minded or “progressive” people who are not
interested in Marxism, and who for one reason or another have ignored the
original Marxian content of those forms. At such times, the Marxian forms
have often been much modified by the dominantly non-Marxian environ-
ment.
In its spread, too, Marxism has been gravely affected by struggles
among the different varieties of Marxism, struggles reflected in the arts.
 The Theories of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 111

Some of the conflicting conceptions of art arose out of the different tastes
and somewhat different social views of Marx and Engels themselves.
Especially important was Engels’s tendency to equate Marxist philosophi-
cal materialism with realism, including realism in art, in a way that Marx
did not. Also important was Engels’s readiness after Marx’s death to
propose a new relationship between the economic basis of society and the
intellectual superstructure,-to which in the Marxian view the arts belong.
Where Marx had believed in the direct linear dependence of the super-
structure upon the economic foundation, Engels, as we have seen, moved
in the direction of more mutual dependence; at the same time he subdi-
vided Marx’s superstructure into several fields, each possessing a certain
small degree of autonomy.” In so doing, Engels paved the way for future
revisions of Marxism which have led to major splits among Marxists and
their conceptions of good art.
A further major inconsistency affecting the spread of Marx’s and
Engels’s basically international—or, better, anti-national—point of view,
existed in Marx’s own thought: like other political progressives of his day
he supported the claim of Poland for national independence. ‘This fact,
later much reinforced by a similar inconsistency on the part of Lenin with
regard to the “nationalities” of the old Russian empire, helped to pave the
way for the desperate struggle between Trotskyite internationalism and the
nationalism of the Stalinists, who upheld “socialism [first] in one country,”
the Soviet Union. Repercussions of this conflict still affect conceptions of
art among communists. So also does the “polycentrism” that arose among
other communist countries and Communist parties after Stalinism itself
had been so seriously weakened by Khrushchev’s 1956 assault on the
reputation of Stalin.
It should now be emphasized that despite the numerous major impli-
cations of Marxism for the arts, in Marx’s own day and for some years
thereafter, Marxism as such had little influence on the practice of art. Even
though Marx himself was interested in art and by no means neglected it in
his thought, his references to it were very scattered because, as we have
seen, he had decided to give up his once projected book on aesthetics in
order to devote himself primarily to political economy, which he regarded
as basic for all other aspects of life, and especially important for controlling
the evils of capitalistic society. His followers everywhere have therefore
devoted themselves first and foremost to the social problems of economics
and politics, and, in theory at least, to the problems of the working class.
Consequently, widespread interest in the arts developed only belatedly
among Marxists, and did so very largely under the influence of non-
Marxian or “revisionist” currents of thought until a new kind of Marxian
aesthetic was established in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the complete
publication in 1932 of Marx’s previously almost unknown Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 cast a new light on his early ideas about
the importance of artistic activity, which eventually caused many pre-
112 / MARX, ENGELS, AND THE MARXIAN THEORY OF ART

viously “orthodox” Marxists outside of the U.S.S.R. to revise their views.”

Marx’s most influential predecessor as a father of modern socialism,
Saint-Simon, had at first made art secondary to science and industry much
as Marx was long supposed to have always made it secondary to economics.
Eventually, however, Saint-Simon gave a primary social role to artists. The
influence of Saint-Simon’s thought spread very widely, affecting, we know,
Marx himself. As will be seen in the chapters that follow, not only did it
influence much of the later radicalism in France and on the Continent but
it also passed to England, where Saint-Simon’s later views about the
primary place of the artist became mixed in varying ways with other
currents of radicalism and reform, including aspects of Christian socialism
and at times of Marxism. In England some of these currents were devel-
oped and spread by men of genius who in addition to being social
reformers were great practitioners of the literary and visual arts. In urging
reform they insisted that art and its sense of creativity are basic for the
good life now, not merely in some future Marxian classless society. One of
the greatest of these men was William Morris, the artist-craftsman and
literary man whose beliefs were in many respects stimulated by social ideas
that were ultimately Christian in‘ origin or that indirectly stemmed in part
from Saint-Simon. Only belatedly was Morris directly influenced by Marx-
ism, at which time he did join Marxian parties and took over major
Marxian ideas. Once he had done so, because of his prominence it became
easier for Marxists to pay more attention than previously to art, which for
Morris was as basic to human life as economics had become for Marx. But
in many respects Morris was a Marxian revisionist before “revisionism.”
Furthermore, although he opposed the anarchists, he had many beliefs in
common with his good friend, the great communist-anarchist Kropotkin.
Consequently, his own ideas were seized upon by many Continental artists
with anarchistic inclinations, artists affected by the tradition—always inter-
ested in art—which had developed out of Fourierism, through the mutual-
ist anarchism of Proudhon, to the communist-anarchism of Bakunin and
Kropotkin. Thus Henry van de Velde, the Belgian Neo-Impressionist
painter and anarchist, could adopt most of William Morris’s ideas, and
then as architect and designer help to carry them to Germany, where they
could affect many Marxists and non-Marxists alike. For in Morris’s
thought there were also many non-Marxian strands, and these enabled him
to have particularly wide influence on many non-Marxian reform move-
ments, some of them purely social, some both social and artistic, some
simply artistic in aim. In many cases, the supporters of these reform move-
ments throughout the Western world were to show themselves willing to
cooperate with Marxists because of a common interest in what they re-
garded as social improvement. Therefore, insofar as they have affected the
arts, these movements too require investigation, the more so as they have
often been attacked as being Marxist even when they actually were not.
Although the influence, social and artistic, of Morris and his followers
 The Theories of Marx and Engels in Relation to the Arts / 113

became very widespread in England and on the Continent, whence it came

to the United States, it reached Russia only in minor degree. In Russia,
after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and especially after 1932, there was
gradually worked out an independent Marxian philosophy of art based
largely on Russian sources, a Marxist-Leninist philosophy destined to affect
communists, and those influenced by communism, throughout the world.
Like the influence of William Morris, that of the Russian version of
Marxian art theory and practice has been spread outside of the Soviet orbit
not only by Marxists but also by many non-Marxists, some of them willing
to collaborate with Marxists because of a common interest in bringing
about social change, others interested in the forms of some originally
Marxian-influenced art quite apart from its content.
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 PART II

Radicalism, Marxism,
and the Theory and
Practice of Art in France
and Switzerland
 >
FRENCH UTOPIAN
SOCIALISM AND ITS
IMPLICATIONS FOR ARTISTS
AND THE ARTS

1. The Background of French Utopianism

Tur werivence of socialism (including communism and communist-

anarchism) on the practice of the arts became strong only after the Napo-
leonic wars. For although the seeds of that influence largely lay in the
French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon to power and his constant wars
had prevented them from germinating. After his fall, however, and during
the very period when Marx (who was born in 1818) and Engels (two years
his junior) were growing up, various developments stimulated the growth
of radicalism.
Among these was the great industrial expansion in the advanced
countries of Europe after the Napoleonic wars, which brought especially
grave economic crises in its train. According to one leading twentieth-cen-
tury communist critic of the arts, Christopher Caudwell, the year 1825 was
that of the first great capitalist crisis.1 Coincidentally, it was a year also
marked by the death of the first great father of modern socialism, Saint-
Simon, the influence of whose ideas on Marx’s father-in-law, and eventually
on Marx himself, has already been noted. Then, in the five years immedi-
ately following, the efforts of the Bourbon king, Charles X, to make
himself an ever more absolute monarch stirred up increasing opposition
that resulted in his overthrow in the Revolution of July 1830 by opponents
holding a variety of political views, who were linked together not by
economic grievances but by their anti-monarchism. For the anti-monarch-
ists on the barricades of the July Revolution (among whom, as in the
Revolution of 1789, artisans and skilled craftsmen predominated) included
representatives of every strain of “radicalism” that had developed with the
French Revolution—republicans, liberals, democrats, and socialists. ‘The
socialists, however, were divided on the subject of violent revolution
Pie Ji PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

because Saint-Simon himself, and that other great father of French social-
ism, Charles Fourier, had both suffered imprisonment and the threat of
death in the French Revolution after 1789, and so opposed revolutionary
violence.
The reign of Louis Philippe of the house of Orléans that followed the
fall of Charles X only aroused French radicals still further because they felt
that they had been betrayed when the Revolution of 1830 had been
succeeded, not by the establishment of a republic or democracy but by still
another monarchy—and one with a king who was quintessentially bour-
geois in his tastes, at that. Consequently, this monarchy too was opposed
by those who regarded themselves as liberals, or republicans, or democrats
—and republicans and democrats were becoming increasingly confused
with one another—as well as by socialists and communists (violent or
non-violent), and eventually by anarchists (violent or philosophical).
Among the members of these groups, too, were many artists, especially
avant-garde artists romantic in tendency, and therefore strongly opposed to
the monarchy’s official academicism in art. In contrast to such politically
engaged artists, many other artists who opposed the monarchy were apoliti-
cal, but likewise hated both the bourgeoisie and the academic art which by
then had become regarded as an expression of the bourgeois monarchy of
Louis Philippe.
It will be recalled that in 1843-1844, in Louis Philippe’s reign, Marx
and Engels themselves went to Paris for the very reason that it had become
the chief center of ideas about, and agitation for, social reform and social
revolution. And the very year, 1848, in which Louis Philippe was over-
thrown by revolution, was, of course, that in which Marx and Engels had
already issued the basic doctrines of Marxism so effectively in the Commu-
nist Manifesto.
In the years from the fall of Napoleon to the fall of Louis Philippe,
not only did the two chief currents of later socialism—Marxism on the one
hand and communist-anarchism on the other—begin to develop primarily
out of Saint-Simonianism and Fourierism respectively, but also the Saint-
Simonians and the Fourierists had already begun to display an interest in
the arts which made them particularly successful in attracting artists and
art critics to their conceptions of social progress. The artists and critics
drawn to them, and to the varieties of socialism, communism, and anarch-
ism which developed out of their ideas, nearly all belonged to the artistic
avant-garde—that term which, we shall find, apparently came from Saint-
Simon. Thus avant-gardism in the arts tended to go hand in hand with
social radicalism, as well as with political liberalism and romantic individu-
alism, for all of these were opposed to the conforming spirit and the smug
values of the bourgeoisie. As members of the avant-garde, many of the
more talented of these radical artists led the way toward the various
“modern” artistic movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
 French Utopian Socialism and Its Implications for Artists and the Arts / 119

centuries whose influence was to be felt throughout Europe, including for

a time Soviet Russia, and also in the United States.
Neither Saint-Simon nor Fourier lived to see their ideas come to
tangible fruition. But by the time Saint-Simon died in 1825, and Fourier in
1837, they both had attracted disciples who carried their ideas much
further. Not only were both specifically praised as predecessors by Marx
and Engels, but both paid considerable attention to the arts.

2. Saint-Simon and the Idea of Avant-Garde

Henrr ve Saryt-Stmon (1760-1825) * was an intellectual heir of Rous-
seau and also of the rationalists of the Enlightenment, one of whom was
his teacher Alembert, who collaborated with Diderot on the Encyclopédie
and became the friend of Jefferson. Saint-Simon, briefly a soldier with the
rank of colonel in the war for American independence long before he
developed his social system, held, like Marx later, that the laws of the
historical development of human society can be discovered through sci-
ence. And like Marx he insisted that “The golden age of humanity is not
behind us; it is to come, and will be found in the perfection of the social
order.’ &
Saint-Simon first expounded his socialist doctrines, which so strongly
affected Marx and many other social radicals, in his L’ Industrie. Only four
volumes of this appeared at irregular intervals between 1816 and 1818,
although he had promised to publish each month a volume of 300 to 400
pages devoted to articles on the arts and sciences. Here and in other
writings he emphasized that the time was becoming ripe for a new social
system based on universal association, and that the transition to it could be
brought about only by an advance in knowledge accompanied by a devel-
opment from the feudal and theological to the industrial and scientific. It
is not surprising that Saint-Simon’s theories, with their respect for in-
dustrial production, appealed to engineers, especially as in 1799 he had
taken up his abode for a time directly opposite the Ecole polytechnique,
almost the first of the great engineering schools, founded five years earlier
as a product of the French Revolution. There he took courses, and there
such disciples as Enfantin, official leader of the Saint-Simonians after the
master’s death, and Auguste Comte, Saint-Simon’s one-time secretary, were
trained as engineers (though Comte was expelled from the Ecole). And
Comte—by carrying further Saint-Simon’s belief that a science of man
could be developed which would follow the physical sciences in progressing
from the “conjectural” to the “positive” (or exactly scientific, experimen-
tal, and practical) stage—became an even more immediate progenitor of
positivism and sociology than his master. It was Comte who with other
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
12,0 y PRACTICE

sciences”;
disciples of Saint-Simon in the 1830’s invented the term “social
it was he who in the 1830’s invented the word “sociology.”
Although Saint-Simon eventually conceived of himself as a rebel
against the atomistic mechanism and destructive criticism of eighteenth-
century thought, he began by reviving the Voltairean cult of Newton as a
thoroughly mechanistic philosophy while inconsistently upholding human-
itarianism and the idea of progress. But because he regarded the New-
tonian universe as a great machine, his version of mechanism was synthetic
rather than atomistic, with unifying implications for human society. Saint-
Simon’s admiration for Newton, moreover, was related to his own concep-
tion of history and of the importance of revolutionary crises in history. For
in SaintSimon’s reading of history, political crisis and revolution in the
realm of human thought went together: he saw each political or social
revolution as accompanied by a scientific, philosophical, or religious revolu-
tion. He considered that the Civil War in England and the English
Revolution of 1688 had a counterpart in the scientific and philosophical
revolutions of Newton and Locke. Yet for him the French Revolution
constituted a vastly more important turning point in political and social
history than did the English revolutions of the seventeenth century, be-
cause it represented the final overthrow of the feudalism of the Middle
Ages, and thereby ended a political and social crisis throughout Europe
which had been evolving since the eleventh century. This vast crisis in
socio-political history he saw as accompanied by a great revolution in
thought culminating in his own scientific, philosophical, and religious
system.
In developing that system, Saint-Simon sought to arrive at the laws
governing the science of man as Newton had discovered the scientific laws
of the universe. But in doing so, he tended to move away from a New-
tonian, and thus mathematical, conception to one that was essentially
historical, evolutionary, and organismic, rather than mechanistic. Quite
early he found in history the same critical ages, the same changes of taste,
as in the history of the individual human being, with history therefore
developing through periods of adolescence, maturity, and decay like the
life-cycle of a living organism.* To those periods, therefore, he related the
three chief historical periods through which he saw society as developing
successively—the periods of slavery, feudalism, and industrialism (an idea,
of course, largely taken over by Marx). But Saint-Simon had also seen
history in another cyclical way—as the alternation of what he called
“critical” and “organic” epochs—an anarchical and selfish period of analy-
sis being followed by a synthetic epoch. In such an epoch, society achieves
an integration like that of a living organism, which unlike a machine is
more than the sum of its individual parts. Because through this cyclical
process of alternation Saint-Simon saw science, including the science of
man, rising to an ever higher level of development, his conception had
 French Utopian Socialism and Its Implications for Artists and the Arts Yada

some similarities to the Hegelian dialectical process* later adopted by

Marx. And great art, he believed much like Marx, could be produced in
periods when the individual was relatively independent of the state and art
and industry were the primary concerns of the state, as in the Athenian
democracy.
At the end of Saint-Simon’s life one of his chief interests was the
spiritual-religious aspects of man and society. This led him to expound
what he called the New Christianity in his Nouveau Christianisme, pub-
lished in 1825, very shortly before he died. The New Christianity he
envisaged as based on a feeling of universal sympathy and love. For
promoting this feeling, he rejected the clergy of the old Christianity;
instead, he had come to feel that artists, as a new kind of priesthood, were
best fitted to move mankind toward progress by stimulating sentiment.
Where originally, under his earlier, more mechanistic philosophy, he had
limited the role of artists merely to the positivistic end of popularizing
ideas introduced by the scientists, now, especially in the conclusion to his
Opinions littéraires, philosophiques et industrielles, likewise published in
1825, he placed artists at the head of an administrative elite trinity
consisting of artists, scientists, and industrialists-artisans. In so doing, he
gave rise to the conceptions both of an artistic avant-garde and of a social
vanguard—conceptions with enormous importance for the history of art
and of social radicalism alike.
In the Opinions, Saint-Simon defined “artist” very broadly as signify-
ing “the man of imagination,” declaring that the term includes all moral
teachers, and “embraces simultaneously the works of the painter, of the
musician, of the poet, of the literary man, in a word everything that has
sensation for its object.” ° And in an accompanying dialogue between an
artist and a scientist, or “savant,” former soldier Saint-Simon had the artist
say: “It is we, artists, who will serve you as avant-garde [his own word]: the
power of the arts is in fact most immediate and most rapid: when we wish
to spread new ideas among men, we inscribe them on marble or on canvas;
. . and in that way above all we exert an electric and victorious influence.
We address ourselves to the imagination and to the sentiments of man-
kind; we should therefore always exercise the liveliest and most decisive
action; and if today our role appears nil or at least very secondary, what is
lacking to the arts is that which is essential to their energy and to their
success, namely, a common drive and a general idea.” ’
Needless to say, the Saint-Simonian social movement was supposed to
furnish that drive and idea. But according to Saint-Simon the good society
will be achieved only “when [individualistic] egoism, this bastard fruit of
civilization, has been pushed back to its last defenses, when literature and
the fine arts have put themselves at the head of the movement, and have
finally filled society with passion for its own well-being. . . . What a most
beautiful destiny for the arts, that of exercising over society a positive
D222 / PRACTCEM Om SAR T TN Ni Gxk:
ereRTA AND SWITZERLAND

power, a true priestly function, and of marching forcefully in the van of all
the intellectual faculties, in the epoch of their greatest development! ‘This
is the duty of artists, this their mission. . . .” ° Saint-Simon added that it
was the duty of the scientists, by solid demonstrations, to second the
conceptions of the arts. By such means, government eventually would be
reduced merely to the role of police, an idea that, like Marx’s classless
society, was ultimately anarchistic.
In these doctrines, we have one of the first clear foreshadowings by a
socialist of some later Marxian theories about society and art according to
which society would be highly centralized under the direction of an elite
group, with the end of art to be social utility achieved by making works of
art didactic and easily understood by the multitude as Diderot and David
had already urged. This conception of art would continue to be held by
those social radicals, including the followers of Karl Marx, whose interests
were to be basically economic and political—and who disregarded Saint-
Simon’s idea of artists as the foremost leaders of society. At the opposite
pole, however, were some who were so enchanted by the kind of leading
role ascribed to the artist by Saint-Simon that they completely rejected his
belief that art should be devoted to achieving social goals, and therefore
necessarily be functional, ultilitarian, didactic, and easily understandable.
In other words, they subscribed to a belief in that movement, romantic in
origin, known as “Tart pour l'art” or “art for art’s sake.” But since the
upholders of “Tart pour l'art” (about which much will be said later in this
book) strongly opposed Saint-Simon’s exaltation of social utility as the end
of art, they were to be sharply attacked by the Saint-Simonians and then
by Marxians.
Furthermore, out of Saint-Simon’s doctrines likewise came the idea of
a socio-political vanguard without any of the directly artistic implications
stressed by Saint-Simon (even though it is true that he himself nowhere
mentioned the word “beautiful’”’). It was this socio-political conception of
the avant-garde that was reflected in the Marxists’ view of themselves as
the leaders of the proletariat. In the Communist Manifesto, for instance,
Marx and Engels declared that “The Communists . . . bring to the front
the common interests of the entire proletariat... . The Communists. . .
are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of
the working class parties of every country ...,; on the other hand,
theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage
of clearly understanding the line of march ... of the proletarian
movement.” ° Here, plainly, is the conception of a political “vanguard”; so
that even though Marx and Engels did not use the term, they assumed
that they and the other Marxian communists were the avant-garde.” Now,
too, the idea of the political vanguard was isolated from the artistic
vanguard and already related directly to “the working class parties.” In
May of the same revolutionary year of 1848, a radical newspaper called
 French Utopian Socialism and Its Implications for Artists and the Arts / 123

L’ Avant-garde was briefly published at Paris shortly before the outbreak of

the abortive second revolution of that year, in which Paris workingmen
opposed the government of the new republic for swinging to the Right. By
the 1880’s, at least, Marxists were becoming accustomed to using avant-
garde as a political term, one result being that during the 1890’s numerous
provincial French newspapers connected with the Marxists of the Parti
ouvrier were either named L’ Avant-garde or bore titles beginning with that
word. But it was Lenin who developed the statement of Marx and Engels
in the Communist Manifesto into the doctrine that the party constitutes
the political “avant-garde” (his own term),"! which on the basis of eco-
nomics should lead and control all fields—including those of culture and
the arts, thus given a thoroughly secondary role. In holding this view,
Lenin differed not only from Saint-Simon but even somewhat from the
young Marx, who had been so strongly influenced by Saint-Simonianism.
And he disregarded what Marx and Engels had written in the Communist
Manifesto: “The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to
other working class parties.” ”
Furthermore, Lenin’s conception of the vanguard differed from that
already reflected in the ideas of leading communist-anarchists. For they
related the conception of the social vanguard more directly to art than did
the mature Marx, and much more than Lenin or any other “orthodox”
Marxian leader was to do. Thus where the Marxists have ordinarily ex-
ploited the Saint-Simonian socio-artistic conception of the avant-garde
simply in politics, many anarchists have done so in both politics and art.
Furthermore, the anarchists have placed more emphasis on the individual
than did the Saint-Simonians and Marxists, thereby reflecting, as we shall
see, the influence of Saint-Simon’s rival, Fourier. This more individualistic
spirit for a long time enabled anarchism to have a greater appeal than
Marxism for artists—even some artists who believed in “art for art’s sake.”
It is thus significant that in the late 1870’s the anarchist Peter Kropot-
kin was co-editor of an anarchist magazine in Switzerland called L’Avant-
garde, published from 1876 until 1878, when it was brought to an end by
the police. Although this was a political magazine, we shall find that
Kropotkin was much interested in the arts, and that his ideas affected
many artists, among them the group of painters called the Neo-Impression-
ists, whose leaders, including Seurat (Fig. 25), Signac (Figs. 27 and 28),
Pissarro, and Luce (Fig. 26), were all anarchists. Still later, in Mexico the
Neo-Impressionist and Synthetist painter Dr. Atl, a leader of the “Mexican
Renaissance” of the early twentieth century, published during the Mexican
Revolution an anarcho-syndicalist, and so revolutionary, workers’ magazine
called La Vanguardia, which included on its staff the radical painters
Siqueiros and Orozco, who then inclined toward anarchism. And we shall
see that one of the chief leaders of the “art-for-art’s sake” movement, Oscar
Wilde, had declared himself an anarchist.
 CT CB) SOP AUREL IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
124 / TERA

3. The Disciples of Saint-Simon, and Art

A rrr Saint-Simon died in 1825, his disciples carried much further both
his socialism and his ideas about the social function of art within the
anticipated ideal social order made possible by industry,” an order matked
by an ever-widening association of men culminating in a world state. In
the year of his death they established a magazine he had projected, called
the Producteur; Journal philosophique de Vindustrie, des sciences et des
beaux-arts (1825-1826), in which history was proclaimed a science. In it,
also, the poet Léon Halévy, who had helped to encourage Saint-Simon’s
own interest in the arts, wrote that the “art of moving the masses” would
soon be so fully developed that the painter, musician, and poet “will
possess the power to please and to move with the same certainty as the
mathematician solves a geometrical problem or the chemist analyses some
substance. Then only will the moral side of society be established.” “
The Producteur had to cease publication after only a year or two. In
1828-1829, however, the group delivered a series of lectures to the public
on La Doctrine de Saint-Simon. The principal author of these was Saint-
Amand Bazard. The first of them, entitled, in translation, “On the Neces-
sity of a New Social Doctrine,” was largely devoted to consideration of the
sciences, industry, and the fine arts as the three great organs of the “social
body” considered as a “Collective Being.” The fine arts, as “the expression
of feeling,” constitute “the language of mankind,” and “Tt is the fine arts
that condition men toward social acts... .” All the fine arts contain two
elements: poetry and form or technique. Because the present epoch is
“critical,” not “organic,” its distinguishing mark is selfish egoism, and the
poetic element is lacking in the arts. “The poet is no longer the divine
singer, placed at the head of society to serve as interpreter to man, give him
laws, . . . reveal the joys of the future to him, and stir up and sustain his
progressive march.” ** Hence a new social doctrine is necessary, the doc-
trine of Saint-Simon.
The Revolution of July 1830 gave the Saint-Simonians a new freedom
to expound their doctrine. Consequently, in that revolutionary year they
issued a proclamation demanding community of goods, abolition of the
right of inheritance, and the enfranchisement of women. In 1830, too, one
of their number, the dramatist and former professor of rhetoric Emile
Barrault, was entrusted with the task of publishing a work on the Saint-
Simonian theory of art which would also be a call to artists. Entitled Aux
artistes: Du passé et lavenir des beaux-arts, doctrine de Saint-Simon, it was
the first strong effort of social reformers to convert artists and writers of the
romantic period to the cause of social progress. In this, Barrault even saw
French Utopian Socialism and Its Implications for Artists and the Arts / 125

art as the essence of Saint-Simon’s New Christianity, declaring that

“henceforth the fine-arts are the religion, and the artist is the priest.”
Soon the Saint-Simonians were also urging the need for social art in the
columns of Le Globe, a periodical of which they gained possession early in
1831 through Pierre Leroux, a printer and editor who had become a
member of their group. In this, among other things, they published
projects for vast public works which they scarcely distinguished from works
of art.
As noted in the Introduction, it was in 1831 that the word “social-
ism,” opposed to “individualism,” first appeared in French periodicals.
And according to some authorities Pierre Leroux, as a Saint-Simonian,
invented the term, which was primarily applied to the Saint-Simonians in
contrasting them with the individualism of the English Philosophical
Radicals, or Utilitarians.” The disciples of Saint-Simon had formed a
society, or “family,” that lived out of a common purse in the Hotel de
Gesvres on the rue Monsigny, Paris, under the direction of two leaders,
Saint-Amand Bazard and Prosper Enfantin, who had been proclaimed
supreme in 1829 and whose title of “Peres” indicated the religious connota-
tions of Saint-Simonianism. However, the two Fathers could not agree.
Bazard seceded in 1831, taking many members of the sect with him. The
resources of the main group, led by Enfantin, were further reduced by a
series of extravagant entertainments which brought discredit upon its
members. In 1832, under attack from the French government, Enfantin
resolved to take his forty principal disciples to his estate at Ménilmontant
near Paris, and to accustom them to manual labor and the life of “proletar-
ians.” There, under the guidance of Enfantin and eight “Apostles”—one
of whom was Barrault, author of the call to artists—the disciples lived in a
communistic society which like so many other communist groups was
marked by the practice of mutual confession, and also by having its own
distinctive garb. This was designed by the Saint-Simonian landscape
painter, Raymond Bonheur, father of the better-known artist Rosa Bon-
heur.
At Ménilmontant, in harmony with the later doctrines of Saint-
Simon, his disciples gave particular consideration to the arts, especially
some involving group participation. One art that they wholeheartedly
practiced at this time was choral singing, to which they devoted nearly all
those moments of leisure not occupied by studies or bodily exercise. Vari-
ous books of Saint-Simonian songs were published. In early morning, at
sunset, and before going to bed, as well as before and after meals, the whole
company sang prayers and couplets, sometimes accompanied by a French
horn and a trombone; and a special choir of about twenty voices was
organized to reinforce the musical program. Most of the music was written
by Félicien David (1810-1876), who had been converted to Saint-Simont-
anism by the painter Paul Justus, himself a member of the choir. Among
the Saint-Simonians, David was able to develop the musical talent which
 Fic.8. Sketch for “The New City” of the Saint-Simonians by [Victor
Amand?] Chambellan.

was to make him widely known, particularly after 1844, when his sym-
phonic poem Le Désert was received with such enthusiasm at its first
performance that it had to be performed to cheering audiences for a
month.
Another art to which the community at Ménilmontant paid much
attention was architecture in its more social aspects, including city plan-
ning. During the discussions to prepare the Livre nouveau, in which
Enfantin wished to bring together his revelations concerning the past and
the future, he devoted time and effort to considering the ideal city of the
future. This “City of God, the New Jerusalem,” as he called it, should be
designed on the model of the human form “as [the Roman architect]
Vitruvius had dreamed” *“—in other words, it should have an organic
basis. Displaying a drawing of a naked man, Enfantin stated that the head
symbolized the temple of his city, that the chest stood for the academies,
universities, and other educational institutions, the belly for the workshops
and factories, the legs for great promenades like the Champs-Elysées, and
the feet for theaters and centers of the dance, places of relaxation after
work. One of Enfantin’s Apostles, Charles Duveyrier, was called upon -to
act as architect for the “City of God,” capital of the new humanitarian
world; and in that capacity he developed Enfantin’s idea by describing in
great detail how Paris should be replanned following the symbol of the
human form. A sketch signed Chambellan (presumably Victor Amand
French Utopian Socialism and Its Implications for Artists and the Arts / 127

Chambellan [1810-1845], a pupil of the painter Gros) was even made to

show what “The New City” would look like a century later (Fig. 8). The
artist obviously strained to create an architecture quite different from that
of the past or present—indeed, its strange domical and tower forms
anticipated the kind of “Martian” architecture used to illustrate twen-
tieth-century science fiction. This “futuristic” conception was in some
contrast to the drawings for ideal Fourierist and Owenite communities
(Figs. 10, 64, and 65), which were designed for the present, and in which
elements of existing styles could be recognized even though often put
together in new and “progressive” ways. Like the schemes of Owen and of
Fourier’s followers, however, in romantic fashion the ideal Saint-Simonian
city was depicted as harmoniously set in a “natural” landscape resembling
an informal, romantic garden, to avoid that separation of city and country
regarded as evil by so many socialists and communists, including—later—
Karl Marx.
Among those with whom Pere Enfantin particularly discussed archi-
tecture at Ménilmontant in the summer and early fall of 1832 was his
Apostle, Michel Chevalier. This was the engineer who in 1833-1835 made
a visit to the United States on a government mission to study American
canals and railroads, two types of the socially useful constructions that
socialists so often have not clearly distinguished from public architecture.
Chevalier recorded his impressions in a volume published in 1836, entitled
in the English translation Society, Manners, and Politics in the United
States. Chevalier found in American culture little general interest in arts
other than those having particular social usefulness—especially, therefore,
those relevant to public works.
In Enfantin’s first discourse with Chevalier and his other disciples to
prepare the Livre nouveau, he had already maintained that the Saint-Sim-
onians must study geometry with the purpose of developing what was
already known about forms and of applying this knowledge to great works
of public utility, a heading under which he characteristically lumped
together architecture and industrial works. In a later conversation dealing
with the nature of the future ideal Saint-Simonian temple, Enfantin
showed a modern conception of structural design as well as a clear interest
in using modem materials for architecture. He declared that “Architecture
as a theory of construction is [as yet] an incomplete art: the notion of
mobility, of movement, is lacking in it.. . . The construction of an edifice
must have play, elasticity, in it.” This led Chevalier to ask him: “But if
elasticity must perform so important a role in future architecture will
metals then be much employed?” “Certainly,” Enfantin replied. “Iron is
in the first rank of materials for sacerdotal architecture.” *” Chevalier was
thereby stimulated to dream in a highly romantic way about new technical
possibilities in designing the temple of the future. Not only did he carry
further the idea of using the new material of iron and new ways of
assembling it to allow play in the parts (in order to meet the problem of
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
i268 / PRACTICE

most
settling foundations, etc.), but he also saw the building as having the
d that the
advanced equipment technologically. For instance, he declare
a method that
problem of heat and light “would be conquered by gas,” *
Philippe Lebon,
had become available in few places since a Frenchman,
had first lighted his house with manufactured gas.”*
Chevalier’s description of the temple combined such realistically
practical considerations as these with the high-flown romantic imagery
beloved of the Saint-Simonians and other utopians. In romantic fashion
y
also, he repeatedly likened architecture to music, stressing the harmon
which the Saint-Simonians, like other utopian socialist s, saw as symboli c of
the social relations of the future. Other images in Chevalie r’s account
reflected a related romanticizing of the science and technology that would
make possible such social progress. For instance, he compared the cast iron
columns of his dream temple to the pipes of an organ, and referred to the
entire building as “a temple of melody and harmony,” “a lamenting
orchestra.” Yet alternately, even within the same sentences, he likened it
to “great thermometers,” or to a “Voltaic pile,” a kind of electrical
generator. As a Saint-Simonian, however, Chevalier by no means forgot the
arts: he wrote that in the temple “the life of mankind” would be “mani-
fested by music, by all the arts, by the profusion of paintings, of sculptures,
by panoramas and dioramas which would unite in a single point all space
and all time.” ” So utterly delighted was Chevalier by all these images
which he had concocted for describing the temple of the future that he
rewrote them in the form of a poem.
Some weeks before these descriptions were written, the Saint-Simoni-
ans had actually begun to build a temple for themselves at Ménilmontant;
but despite the bold words of Enfantin and Chevalier about structure and
composition, in its general conception this was not very advanced. For it
reflected the spirit of the then fashionable classical revivalism in architec-
ture: the scheme was derived from the theaters of classical Antiquity, on
the ground that the early classical theaters had possessed religious connota-
tions, and so had been “a branch of the temple.” At one of their meetings
to prepare the Livre nouveau, the Saint-Simonians had grandiloquently
described the nature and purpose of the kind of temple they were propos-
ing to build. “Today a temple will rise . . . vaster than the Greek circus
[sic] or the theater of Antiquity; . . . it will rise and will open its breast to
the theater, the pulpit, the forum, the novel, in permitting them to deploy
there. . . .” The basically theatrical conception of the religious service
proposed for this building was made very clear when the Saint-Simonians
declared that in it “the new drama will be born . .*.” in which both
tradition and the past and prophecy and the future will be represented. In
some of the religious dramas, indeed, the past was not to be represented at
all; instead, the word of the future alone would burst forth with a marvel-
ous exaltation.” By glorifying the future in this exceedingly romantic way
the Saint-Simonians foreshadowed various avant-garde art movements.
 French Utopian Socialism and Its Implications for Artists and the Arts / 129

However, the Saint-Simonians’ temple was never built at Ménilmon-

tant, though a certain amount of work on the foundations of the building
was carried out. Because the members of the sect were regarded as danger-
ously subversive by the French government, they were subjected to almost
constant harassment, and in 1832 several of them were arrested. Despite
their plea that politically they were not revolutionary but reformist, Enfan-
tin, Chevalier, and Duveyrier were each sentenced to a year in jail as well
as a fine, and Barrault and another Apostle were fined. When, after long
and complicated legal actions, Enfantin and Chevalier actually were sent
to prison late in 1832, from his cell Pére Enfantin abdicated all authority
over his “children,” though he hoped that the abdication would be only a
temporary one. Although this brought the Saint-Simonian sect to an
official end, in the next years many of the former members of the Ménil-
montant community did their best to carry on Saint-Simonian missionary
activities. For instance, in 1833 a Saint-Simonian mission of artists went
into Burgundy and Switzerland to seek converts. About the same time,
Barrault led a missionary group to the Near East: his influence on the
mate of his ship, Garibaldi, will be discussed later. After being expelled
from Constantinople, he sought to go with another expedition to evange-
lize in the south of Russia, but the tsarist government refused to admit
him.
Meanwhile, after some months in jail, Enfantin and Chevalier (who
had now broken with one another) had been released. In 1832, before
Chevalier began the visit to the United States during which he studied
American culture as well as canals and railroads, he had already urged that
canals be constructed across the isthmuses of Panama and Suez—for these
would especially encourage the association of all peoples and the develop-
ment, through industry, of all the resources of the globe. This was in
thorough accord with the doctrines of Saint-Simon himself because, after
fighting for American independence, he had visited Mexico in 1784, and at
that time had offered, in vain, a project for developing communication by
water between the Atlantic and Pacific. Despite this failure, Saint-Simon’s
doctrine of the need for making such canals had been made a cardinal
religious principle by the Saint-Simonian sect.
When, in August 1833, Enfantin was released from prison, he set
about furthering a project to build a canal across the isthmus of Suez. To
this end he went in person to Egypt, where a group of disciples had already
arrived: one was the composer Félicien David, whose most important
work, Le Désert, was inspired by his stay in Egypt. As Enfantin, like many
other Saint-Simonians, had received a thorough training in engineering at
the Ecole polytechnique, he was able to push the project with professional
competence. But after another French engineer, Ferdinand de Lesseps,
had become one of those most involved in forwarding the project in
association with Enfantin and one of Enfantin’s friends, De Lesseps
eventually managed to get rid of his two colleagues in order to carry out
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
130 Va PRACTICE

the construction of the canal on his own. Even though De Lesseps was not
a Saint-Simonian, then and later he subscribed to the Saint-Simonian idea
of progress according to which universal peace and plenty must ensue from
technical and industrial achievement.
Enfantin’s career by no means ended when he was forced out of the
Suez Canal project. By the time of his death in 1864 he had acquired a
considerable reputation as an outstanding developer and administrator of
railroads in France, being especially responsible for developing the Paris-
Lyon-Méditerranée system.
Many other Saint-Simonians became famous, some as engineers, some
(including Michel Chevalier) as economists, others as great industrialists
and men of business, putting into practice their Saint-Simonian belief in
the importance of working for progress in an age of industry. Chevalier
became a major promoter of the idea of building a tunnel across the
English Channel: the society he founded for that purpose still exists. Even
Emile Barrault, the rhetorician and dramatist who in 1830 had written the
Saint-Simonians’ call to artists, turned in 1851 to “practical” affairs, devot-
ing himself to patent law. Throughout the lifetime of these men the
influence of Saint-Simonianism continued to persist strongly in France,
enduring far into the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and so
through the Second Empire in which many of them were prominent as
advisers of Napoleon ITI.
It was only to be expected that the Saint-Simonians’ emphasis on the
importance of social progress in the industrial epoch, reflected in the
exalting of the new material of iron by Enfantin and Chevalier, would par-
ticularly continue to affect the social and technological art of architecture
in great public works. This it notably did in the case of the engineer-
architect Eugéne Flachat, one of Enfantin’s eight Apostles at Ménilmon-
tant. In 1849, twelve years after he had built the first railroad in France,
Flachat submitted a design for a tremendous building to house the
Grandes Halles, or central market, of Paris. Although this design (Fig. 9)
was not accepted, it was structurally far in advance of the one carried out,
because it proposed to cover the tremendous clear span of 260 feet by
means of a highly advanced metal truss, called a Polonceau tie. Not only
did the magnitude and social function of the Grandes Halles make it the
kind of program a Saint-Simonian such as Flachat would regard as most
important for the new industrial age which the Saint-Simonians felt them-
selves destined to call forth, but also Flachat’s proposed solution deliber-
ately made use of the advanced mass-produced structural material of iron,
doing so by means of the latest techniques.
In ways like this, disciples of Saint-Simon continued to act in accord-
ance with their deceased master’s doctrine that in the new social’ order
industry will progress to meet man’s physical needs while supplying the
basis of social organization and of culture. Even though so many of them
were engineers—and therefore might well have been expected to hold a
 Lae Mee Lae
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FIG. 9. Project (1849) for the Grandes Halles, Paris, by Eugéne Flachat.

mechanistic philosophy—in harmony with Saint-Simon’s later views they

maintained that society is an organism within which artists and artisans,
together with the learned, perform work of particular social usefulness.
Indeed, in carrying further Saint-Simon’s doctrines concerning the major
role of the artist in bringing about the new society, his followers empha-
sized far more than he had that art, the moral expression and guide of
society, will especially display its social utility by achieving reform through
its own effectiveness for inspiring love of liberty and its power to produce
social improvement. Their theory therefore called exclusively for a moral
and pedagogical art. As a consequence their paper, Le Globe, had de-
manded in 1832 that Saint-Simonians give to all the arts a moral and social
character.** And, like Chevalier later, it had declared that in making use of
science and industry, painters should follow the example set by the huge
painted illusionistic panoramas and dioramas * which had recently become
very popular, and which offered such possibilities for social propaganda.
So important a place did Enfantin himself give to the artist that as
“Pére’” he had gone even further than La Doctrine de Saint-Simon in
maintaining that the leader-legislator in the new society must be a kind of
artist. For it would be as an artist that the leader would grasp the social
situation intuitively, acting under the principle of association—that princi-
ple which the Saint-Simonians shared with their chief rivals, the Fourier-
ists. Furthermore, the artist-leader’s intuitive response to the social situation
would then become law. Because the artist was regarded as piercing
the veil separating us from the future, art by definition must be progressive
in a way impossible in societies of the past, which caused art to decline
because the social relations prevailing in them isolated the artist, thereby
 ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
132 # PRACTICE OF

from exercising
making him maladjusted. As a result, they prevented him
ve compr ehension of
his true function as the prophet-leader whose intuiti
t of isolation
social problems enables him to guide society (This concep
by Marx, who did
anticipates, of course, that of alienation later developed
not, however, limit it to the artist.)
had shifted
Under Enfantin the emphasis of Saint-Simonianism thus
d by Saint-
from that need for attaining scientific proof, at first stresse
leader as prophet,
Simon himself, to reliance on the intuition of the artist-
icism. In
thereby moving from scientific rationalism to a kind of romant
their retreat at Ménilmontant, the Saint-Simonians worked out their ro-
ing;
mantic philosophy of pantheism under which God is in all and everyth
so that God, man, society, and nature were all regard ed as part of the
one great cosmic organism—a pantheism to be attacked by the atheistic
Marx in spite of his own social organicism and the great influence of
Saint-Simonianism upon his thought.
The doctrine of the Saint-Simonians that artists are to be the leaders
of the social organism naturally aided in attracting artists and in stimulat-
ing them to urge social reform as; well as the liberty that the individual
artist as leader would have. Meanwhile, after Enfantin had succeeded in
taking over control of the Saint-Simonian movement, it had become much
more collectivistic, because, unlike Saint-Simon, his followers attacked the
principle of private property. At the same time, while never becoming the
parti des travailleurs envisaged by Saint-Simon, they did carry the distinc-
tion between bourgeoisie and proletariat very far, and underlined the real-
ity of class conflict. It was they who popularized the term “proletarian,”
as well as such other terms as “capitalist,” “wage-earner,” “‘industri-
alism,” “industrialist,” and “solidarity,” some of which—notably “industri
alism” and “industrialist’—they apparently originated. Although from
Saint-Simon both collectivistic and libertarian tendencies could be derived
(much as they could also be derived from the writings of Rousseau, who
had so largely inspired Saint-Simon), as time passed, the Saint-Simonians
became even more collectivistic and totalitarian—exemplifying that tend-
ency to be carried further by Marxists, from Marx himself through Lenin
to Stalin. It must be emphasized, however, that the Saint-Simonians
differed sharply from the later Marx, Marxists, and Marxist-Leninists in
stressing the primary role of the artist as leader of the anti-bourgeois
movement.
Like Marx himself, many of the Saint-Simonians were of Jewish
descent—so many, indeed, that a professor at the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem has recently written: “If there is reason to attach special signifi-
cance to the fact that Karl Marx was of Jewish ancestry and that Jews have
played a prominent and conspicuous part in extreme radical and revolu-
tionary movements in modern times, the quest for an explanation should
really start a generation before Marx, namely with the Saint-Simonist
School.” ”
The greatest rivals of the Saint-Simonians, the Fourierists, were on the
 French Utopian Socialism and Its Implications for Artists and the Arts / 1 3 3

contrary strongly anti-Semitic, a fact that may be ascribed to the bitterness

of the conflict between the two groups. Even in its early days, then, the
socialist movement was split between its own attraction for some Jews and
a simultaneous tendency within its ranks toward anti-Semitism—that split
to be found later in communist Russia, among other places, one often
having implications for artists and art.

4. Fourier, His Disciples, and Art

Line tue Saint-Simonians, their Fourierist rivals also had a high regard
for the arts, in accordance with the ideas of Fourier himself. Charles
Fourier (1772-1837) had been led to seek the development of a new and
harmonious social order throughout the world by his sufferings during the
grave social disharmony of the French Revolution. In 1793, when he was a
businessman in Lyon, the troops of the Revolutionary Convention had
occupied and pillaged the town, taking most of his fortune. Although the
citizens of Lyon, Fourier among them, rose in revolt, their insurrection
was promptly suppressed, and he was among those jailed. After five days
in prison, hourly expecting to be guillotined, he had escaped by accident;
then, when arrested again, had been able to stay out of jail only because
he was conscripted into the Revolutionary army.
Fourier’s search for a new social order had led, he believed, to his
discovery of the existence of a previously unknown “Social Science” based
on a unitary social code founded by God * and revealed by attraction. He
therefore regarded himself as the heir and equal of Newton, holding that
as Newton had discovered the laws of material attraction, he himself had
discovered the passional attraction that is the key to human nature,
arriving at the “universal laws of attraction” in 1799, the year in which he
had gone to Paris to study the exact sciences. He first published his social
system based on these laws in 1808—but did not attract a single disciple
for six years, and only gradually gained influence after that.
Fourier’s socialism was enough like the English socialism of Robert
Owen so that in 1824 he wrote Owen to try—in vain—to convert him to
Fourierism. Although acknowledged by Marx and Engels in the Commu-
nist Manifesto as a leading forerunner of their communism, Fourier was
less an ancestor of Marxism than Saint-Simon was. For he was essentially a
radical, petty bourgeois critic of bourgeois society, with a corresponding
regard for the contemporary individual which made him an ancestor of
communist-anarchism rather than of Marxian communism. Nevertheless,
one reason why the Fourierists criticized the commercialism of bourgeois
society was that it had caused the arts to suffer greatly “—a foreshadowing
of Marx that also helped many Fourierists to be sympathetic to the
contemporary Gothic Revival in architecture and other arts. As one con-
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
134 ff PRACTICE

sciously following in the footsteps of the Rousseau of the Discourse on

Inequality, Fourier believed that contemporary civilization represented a
tissue of evils imposed by society, and that once these had been removed,
human beings would work together in a spirit of cooperation. This would
enable them to bring about a “harmony of the passions”—the passions
being defined as “the active faculties of the soul.” The good society,
therefore, he called Harmony, as opposed to Civilization.
Fourier’s discovery and enunciation of this principle of harmony was
greatly stimulated by his early study of, and love for, the art of music. This
led him to insist that education should begin at the age of six months with
the training of the child’s ear by a series of small concerts, and that at age
four and a half each child should undergo an examination, the first part of
which would require participation, both musical and choreographic, in an
opera. In holding that harmony was a principle based on the will of God as
well as on human nature, Fourier demonstrated that, like Saint-Simon but
unlike Marx later, he was not an atheist, even though far from being an
orthodox Christian.
Fourier’s conception of universal harmony was related to his ulti-
mately Neo-Platonic belief in universal unity, which in turn led to his
essentially romantic belief in what he regarded as “universal analogies”
(what Baudelaire was later to call “correspondances”).Fourier drew analo-
gies between colors, sounds, curves, passions, and rights. He thereby ex-
tended the analogy between colors and sounds which played so important
a part in the art theory of romantics and later of the Symbolists. In such
analogies Fourier perhaps felt the stimulation of Emanuel Swedenborg
(1688-1772), the Swedish scientist and mystic in whose thought the
Neo-Platonic conception of universal unity and harmony was synthesized
with Christian unity—a synthesis in which sounds and colors could harmo-
niously correspond. Many of the romantics—and probably Fourier—were
also stimulated by the essentially Neo-Platonic ideas of Father Castel, who,
following in the path of Fourier’s hero, Newton, and of the seventeenth-
century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, had set forth in 1725 the theory of the
color-clavichord, with colors specifically related to notes of the scale (a
theory rejected, however, by Rousseau). In any case, the interest in interre-
lating color harmony, musical harmony, and social harmony which was so
important a part of Fourier’s doctrines could be seen earlier and later in
the art theory of other radicals—social, artistic, or both.
To Fourier, men must work together, as do bees, to achieve social
harmony because, in isolation, “The individual is an essentially false
being.” * The universe is a single organic whole, and society must be
organized as a harmonious part of this cosmic unity, with men voluntarily
organizing to secure human happiness (a conception thus differing: from
the Saint-Simonian idea that the new society would arise essentially out of
the rhythms of history under the guidance of an elite). Fourier’s scheme of
social organization, as put forward in such writings as The New Industrial
and Associative World, therefore called for harmonious living in a series of
French Utopian Socialism and Its Implications for Artists and the Arts / 1 35

communities, each of which “ought to consist of eighteen hundred people.

With more than two thousand it would become overcomplicated, degener-
ating into a mob; with less than sixteen hundred it would be weakly held
together, subject to failures of mechanism, to interruptions of industrial
attraction.” ** Fourier’s doctrine of industrial attraction meant that within
each Fourierist community, or “phalanx,” the different kinds of work, in
which agriculture and industry were emphasized together, were to be
rationally distributed so as to make them as economic as possible and
equally healthy and attractive. Every phalanx (a name obviously intended
to connote social solidarity) was therefore to have “a complete system . .
of the seven industrial functions,” respectively identified by Fourier as
domestic work, agricultural work, manufacturing work, commercial work,
educational work, study and utilization of the sciences, and—seventh and
last—“‘Study and utilization of the fine arts.” * The word “utilization”
indicates that the arts were to be socially functional.
Fourier further emphasized the importance of art for the phalanx
when he wrote, somewhat Rousseauistically: “As for choosing aspirants,
rich or poor, various qualities should be looked for which are deemed
vicious or useless in civilization, such as:

“A good ear for music

“Politeness in the family circle
“Aptitude for the fine arts.” *
Fourier’s recommendation to select “aspirants, rich or poor . .
7

reflects his belief that the Fourierist phalanx was to be neither egalitarian
nor anti-capitalistic, as does his further recommendation that due attention
must be paid to “Establishing the graduated scale as to age, fortune, and
intelligence.” ** Within the phalanstery (as the huge unitary building to
house the phalanx was to be called), a range of food, clothing, and
apartments from simple to sumptuous was supposed to be provided so that
each member could live according to his taste and means. ‘This encourage-
ment of some individualism in the phalanx, itself a small self-sufficient
commune independent of the government of a state, helped to make
Fourier’s system a direct ancestor of communist-anarchism. For Fourier
regarded individual relationships, freely entered upon without the interven-
tion of an administrative bureaucracy (except to record desires), as charac-
teristic of the ideal society. His politics therefore verged on anarchism, and
his ideas have always had a great attraction for anarchist theoreticians. We
shall see, also, that this strong element of individualism made Fourierism
and anarchism alike appeal to some of those romantic individualists of the
artistic avant-garde who subscribed to the doctrines of “art for art's sake”
and then to Symbolism. Furthermore, it particularly aided the spread of
Fouricrism in the United States, where numerous phalanxes were founded
by American disciples.
As part of this individualism, private property was retained in the
the
Fourierist phalanx, as was a considerable degree of capitalism; indeed,
 7OP7ART/INSERANEE AND SWITZERLAND
uz6 / PRACTICE
of dividend-paying
property of the phalanx itself was represented by shares
s, was to go to labor,
stock. Although the main share of profits, five-twelfth
to capital, with
nearly as large a proportion, four-twelfths, was assigned
And thoug h seven- eighths of the
three-twelfths allotted to skill or talent.
mechan ics, capita list members
members were supposed to be farmers and
ghth, in which scientists
were nonetheless included in the remaining one-ei
and artists—men of skill and talent—were also placed.
and
Even in Fourier’s theory of history, the development of the arts
ation into
sciences was related to an organic social life. He divided all civiliz
of an organi sm:
four periods corresponding to those,in the life cycle
of society
infancy (a period corresponding to that of the patriarchal state
exalted by Rousseau, and to some degree by Marx later), adolescence,
virility, and decay. The decay of civilization would be followed by the
arts
spread of Fourierist Associationism, within which, as we have seen, the
gave
would play an important part—a conception of the future that
Fourier’s system, like that of Saint-Simon, a special appeal for progressive
artists.
As the Associationist movement developed, it—like Saint-Simonian-
ism—was expected by its adherents to bring about the union of all peoples
on the globe. However, whereas the social system of the Saint-Simonians
was a highly centralized one led by an elite under the direction of the
Saint-Simonian prophet, or “Pére,” that of the Fourierists made the pha-
lanxes independent communes, though having as their object “to put,
throughout the world, the producer en rapport with the consumer, [and to
do so] with the greatest order and foresight, by the shortest ipad. <7 This
end would be accomplished by having the phalanxes associate themselves
voluntarily into departments, provinces, and nations, organized into a
federation governed by a world congress—a decentralized system not un-
like that later envisaged by the communist anarchists. Thus, by means of
this process of voluntary federation—which, unlike Saint-Simonianism
and Marxism, meant the rejection of central government now—a world
revolution would be brought about in a wholly rational, gradual, and peace-
ful manner that likewise was to contrast with the Marxian idea of
revolution. For as soon as men, by nature rational, saw the ideal example
set by any Fourierist phalanx, they would wish to join, and thereby would
peacefully spread over the world phalanxes, and the social harmony that
they represented. |
The disorders of the French Revolution had stimulated Fourier’s aim
to bring about a new social order, and Napoleon’s highly centralized
regime had apparently helped stimulate him to specify that the Fourierist
social order should be thoroughly decentralized. Because the individual
phalanx was therefore utterly basic to his system, he carefully described it
and the phalanstery to house it. The architecture of the phalanstery and
the layout of its grounds, were, however, described in the greatest detail
 FIG. 10. Victor Considerant’s project for a Fourierist phalanx, after his draw-
ing of 1834.

not by Fourier himself but by his chief French disciple, Victor Conside-
rant, whom Karl Marx first met in 1843.
Like so many Saint-Simonians, Considerant was an engineer. He had
entered the Ecole polytechnique at Paris in 1826, becoming a convert to
Fourierism four years later, only a few months before the outbreak of the
Revolution of 1830. In the following year he resigned his commission in
the French army engineers to devote himself to advocating Fourierism. His
description of the ideal phalanstery was first published in 1834 as a
brochure entitled Considérations sociales sur Varchitectonique, which was
republished in 1848. This pamphlet consisted of the architectural parts of
Considerant’s three-volume work on Fourierism, Destinée sociale, first
issued between 1834 and 1844, and likewise republished in 1848. The
frontispiece to the brochure, also included in Destinée sociale, was a
one-point perspective of the ideal phalanx drawn by Considerant himself
in accordance with Fourier’s own ideas.** On the basis of this, he had an
artist prepare an elaborate, carefully rendered, bird’s-eye perspective (Fig.
10) to show the entire layout of a phalanstery, its grounds, and its setting.””
Each phalanx was supposed to occupy an area of about three square
miles. The phalanstery, designed, as we have said, to house all the 1,800
members in a single great building, was envisaged as a palace not unlike
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
138 if PRACTICE

the Palais Royal, the Invalides, or the Louvre in Paris, because Fourier
and Considerant believed that in the Fourierist good society men should
live like the kings of earlier societies. As depicted by Considerant and his
artist, the ideal phalanstery was an enormous three-story structure consist-
ing of a central section flanked by two huge wings, formally designed so as
to convey the harmonious collective order in which the Fourierists, like
other socialists, felt that rational men should want to live. The building
was described as containing, in addition to apartments of varied size and
cost for the members, communal dining rooms and kitchens, ballrooms
and other rooms for community recreation, a library, a hotel, schools and
nurseries, as well as council chambers for community government. Behind
the building, great formal gardens, not unlike those of the Tuileries were
planned for common enjoyment. The entrance front of the phalansterv
faced on an avenue, on the far side of which were placed the factories,
studios, warehouses, stores, stables, and working or service buildings neces-
sary for the phalanx.
In view of the important place assigned in Fourier’s system to the arts
and to those members with aptitude for the arts, it was only to be expected
that in the phalanstery an important feature would be displays of works of
art, though art was secondary to industry. Thus Considerant wrote that the
enveloping “‘street gallery,” intended as the main circulation within the
building, would have glazed upper floors “decorated with a rich exhibition
of some of the industrial and artistic products of the phalanx and of
neighboring phalanxes.” * He further said of the phalanstery that “Pic-
tures will be necessary in its corridors and public rooms, colors in its great
workshops, frescoes on the walls of its theaters, on its vaulted ceilings
frescoes and sculpture; statues in its atria and great staircases, statues on its
entablatures and among the trees of its shady gardens, waterspouts at the
angles of the cornices, on its steam engines heads of bronze and furnace-
mouths of iron, marbles in its basins, altars in its temples, and a thousand
works of art to clothe them and to ornament them worthily.” *
In spite of these brave words, however, no phalanx ever remotely
approximated the ideal so glowingly described: indeed, every one of them
established failed, most very quickly—including the first one, established in
what is now Rumania. Considerant himself made two attempts to found a
phalanx, one in France and one in the United States. That in France was
established in 1832, five years before Fourier’s death (and without his
approval) at Condé-sur-Vesgre, about forty miles from Paris, with funds
supplied by a wealthy Englishman. Considerant’s phalanx in America was
founded in Texas near the present site of Dallas, in the mid-1850’s, and
named Réunion. As in other experiments of the kind, the great majority of
the members were romantic “intellectuals” rather than the practical: farm-
ers and mechanics who were supposed to constitute seven-eighths of the
membership and were so necessary for establishing an agricultural-industrial
community. Furthermore, the romanticism of the colonists made most of
French Utopian Socialism and Its Implications for Artists and the Arts / 1 39

them far too individualistic to collaborate harmoniously in the manner

presupposed by Fourierism.
It is significant that the most successful of all communities based on
Fourier’s ideas—which had a great vogue in many countries, including
Russia—was founded by a thoroughly practical businessman in direct
connection with an industry that he established and over which he main-
tained control in an un-Fourierist way. This settlement was the “Fami-
listére,” established by J. B. A. Godin at Guise, France, in connection with
an industry in enameled metal kitchenware and in heating appliances,
founded in 1852. Godin, after rejecting the ideas of Saint-Simon, Owen,
and Cabet, had discovered Fourier’s theory of universal harmony and unity
in 1842. Between 1859 and 1883, he built his Familistére more or less along
the lines of Fourier’s phalanstery, with a main building containing three
enclosed courtyards for living quarters. When Godin died in 1888, he left
the Familistére to the workers, who have remained in control of it.
While Godin’s Familistére was in the course of construction, one
Jules Borie published, in 1865, a book entitled Essai sur un nouveau mode
de maisons d@habitation in which he described a new kind of building that
he called “aerodomes” and claimed to have invented. These, too, recalled
aspects of the Fourierist phalanstery, but were large eleven-story buildings
that made use of flat roofs for schools, gymnasia, and children’s recrea-
tional rooms.
The influence of Fourierism was to continue in France into the
twentieth century. As late as 1922 a Fourierist review, La Rénovation, was
being published, and we shall see that the noted modern French architects,
Tony Garnier and, through him, Le Corbusier, were strongly influenced by
Fourierism, with Godin’s Familistére and Borie’s aerodomes serving as
connecting links.
However, the highest point of Fourierism had been reached in the
1840's, thanks largely to the efforts of Considerant, a more practical man
than Fourier himself. As early as 1832, the year Considerant had estab-
lished his unsuccessful phalanx at Condé-sur-Vesgre, he had founded with
Fourier a journal called the Phalanstére, which soon expired, but was
succeeded in 1836 by the much more successful Phalange. It was in this
journal that there first appeared Fourier’s Cités ouvriéres—his discussion of
the problem of housing workers, that perennial concern of socialists and
communists, among others. So important was this essay considered to be
by Fourier’s disciples that they reissued it as a pamphlet after the Revolu-
tion of 1848.
By 1840 the Fourierists had become strong enough so that they had
founded a Société pour la’ propagation et la réalisation de la théorie de
Fourier, usually known as the Ecole sociétaire, among whose leaders were
Considerant himself, Francois Cantagrel, Gabriel Désiré Laverdant, Victor
Hennequin, and Victor Meunier. In 1843 the group established a newspa-
per, the Démocratie pacifique, with Considerant as editor, to publicize
140 ii PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

further the Fourierist “social science”: in that same year the young Karl
Marx made Considerant’s acquaintance.
The Fourierists’ interest in the arts gave rise to much art criticism in
the Phalange and the Démocratie pacifique, written by two of the Fourier-
ist leaders, Laverdant and Cantagrel, as well as by such lesser Fourierists as
Eugéne Pelletan, Charles Brunier, the brothers Louis and René Ménard,
and Francois Sabatier,*’ a patron of Courbet. In 1845, the best of the Four-
ierist art critics, Désiré Laverdant, published in the Phalange an article on
the Salon for that year which was regarded as so significant a statement of
Fourierist art theories that it was also issued as a separate book under the
title, De la mission de l'art et du réle des artistes; Salon de 1845. In this,
Laverdant spoke of art as “the expression of society” that “manifests . . .
the most advanced social tendencies; it is the forerunner and the revealer’;
and when “art worthily fulfills its proper mission as initiator . . . the
artist is truly of the avant-garde. .. .”* Thus, although a Fourierist,
he employed the term “avant-garde” first used by Saint-Simon nearly a
quarter of a century earlier. Laverdant and most of the other Fourierist art
critics also held that art has an,educational mission requiring realistic
subjects—a point of view characteristic of most socialist and communist
art critics down to those of the Soviet Union today.
During the monarchy of Louis Philippe, Considerant and the other
leaders of the Ecole sociétaire had been faithful to the regime in spite of
their radical ideas, regarding it as an element of order, and therefore as
conducive to harmony among men. In mid-February 1848, however, with
the government suppressing liberty of thought, they began to preach
revolution. After the King fled on February 24, they became resolutely
republican: late in February, the Démocratie pacifique proclaimed on its
front page, “All socialists are republicans, all republicans socialists.” *
When Louis Napoleon became a candidate for president of France,
the Fourierists were among his opponents, and in June 1849 put on a
manifestation against him—with the result that when he made himself
emperor in 1852, Démocratie pacifique had to cease publication. Napo-
leon’s accession to imperial power also compelled Considerant—who had
signed the “call to arms” in the manifestation of June 1849—to go into
exile. After some years in Belgium, he went to Texas in 1853 to prepare the
site for the Fourierist phalanx at Réunion. The failure of that community
to maintain its Fourierist principles led Considerant, disgusted, to with-
draw to San Antonio accompanied only by one faithful disciple, a young
Belgian architect. The general amnesty issued by Napoleon III in 1869
induced Considerant to return to France, where he lived in relative obscu-
rity. In 1871, the year of the Paris Commune, he joined the First Interna-
tional and became a Communard.
In 1855, the year in which the first large band of Fourierists had
reached the site of Considerant’s phalanx of Réunion, there also arrived in
Texas—doubtless primarily for the purpose of visiting Réunion—César
French Utopian Socialism and Its Implications for Artists and the Arts / 141

Daly, a widely known French architect, archaeologist, and publicist who,

while still a student, had become a devoted disciple of Fourier in the
revolutionary year of 1830. Like Considerant, Daly had received engineer-
ing training (then so conducive to interest in a science of society), having
attended the Ecole polytechnique at his native city of Douai. However, he
had then pursued architectural studies at Paris, first in the atelier of the
architect Duban (an academic reformer who in 1832 used iron in adding to
the Ecole des Beaux-Arts), and next in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts itself.
Daly, one of the founders in 1840 of the Société pour la propagation et la
réalisation de la théorie de Fourier, in the same year began publication of
the Revue générale de larchitecture et des travaux publiques, which, for
exactly a half century under his editorial guidance, was the leading archi-
tectural magazine of France.
The title of the periodical reflects the interest in public works as social
expression which the Fourierists shared with the Saint-Simonians. Daly’s
first editorial declared that the magazine’s purpose was “to serve as a bond
between the men of special aptitudes of all countries, in constituting
among them an intellectual association for the profit of science, humanity,
and themselves”—a characteristic Fourierist statement. In that editorial,
also, he wrote that the Revue would address itself “simultaneously to
Architects, to Engineers, to Archaeologists, to Industrialists, to
[agricultural] Proprietors, and finally to Governments. . . .” “* Hence the
one-time student at both a polytechnical school and an architectural
school deliberately linked architects and engineers in a Fourierist way to
“show the intimate correlation which exists between science and art.
_. .?4 Eyen more basically Fourieristic was his association of industrial-
ists with agriculturalists. He likewise placed industrialists and archaeolo-
gists together—and later indicated why when he wrote that “The influence
of industry on art, and the history of primitive art, no matter [what] the
nation or country, are the two studies that form the basis of the modern
architectural aesthetic.” “ To the Fourierist Daly, much as to Marx, the
study of history was vital for understanding culture, and his emphasis on
primitive art long foreshadowed twentieth-century developments while
reflecting a romantic concern both for origins and for progress.
Daly’s career similarly served to join industry with art, and art with
archaeology. In the progressive atmosphere of 1848, he founded a Société
d’artistes décorateurs with the specific aim of bringing art into relation
with industry; then in the following year, as architect of the diocese of
Tarn, he began restoring the great church of Sainte-Cécile at Albi, the
fnest Gothic cathedral in the south of France. He was very careful to
indicate, however, that he was not wholly a romantic Gothicist any more
than he was wholly an upholder of the academic point of view, for he
wrote in the Revue générale that same year of “the almost neutral position
that we have generally kept between the defenders of the [academic]
classic doctrines of the Institut [de France] and the neo-Gothicists” (italics
 142 Vi PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

his).** In the same issue he showed the kind of progressive architecture

which—as a Fourierist—he believed in when he wrote of the “Architecture
of the future,” describing it as “A new architecture, a new style, that will
take us out of the sterility and the servility of copying, is what everybody
demands; and is what the public waits for.” “ However, the Fourierist
hopes, stimulated by the Revolution of 1848, that this progressive state-
ment reflects, dwindled during the presidency of Louis Napoleon, whose
election the Fourierists had opposed, and who was soon to make himself
emperor. His disfavor, and the corresponding decline of Fourierist hope for
social progress in France, were presumably responsible for the study-jour-
neys that Daly began to make in 1850, and that for nearly a decade were to
take him over much of the world, including large parts of America—jour-
neys from which he regularly reported back to the Revue générale.
During these years when the opposition of Napoleon and the rising
influence of the anarchist Proudhon (who took over many of the ideas of
Fourier, the chief source of modern anarchism) were causing Fourierism
itself to decline, Daly’s own social views were becoming somewhat less
pronounced. But he never became reconciled to the architecture fashion-
able during the period of the Second Empire. Thus, in 1867 he loudly
lamented the kind of “eclectic atmosphere completely enveloping the
world” ® because this was an eclecticism of several utterly diverse styles
resulting from three contemporaneous currents of architecture sharply
opposed to one another: the “rationalist [or engineering-functionalistic]
school,” the “classic [or academic] school,” and the “neo-Gothic [or espe-
cially romantic] school.” Such diversity of approach was completely out of
harmony with Daly’s own Fourierist hope of unifying art with modern
science and industry as part of the achievement of an organic unity of art
and culture throughout the world. But even though, like Fourier, he
demanded a rational organization of society, and even though he himself
was a leader of the rationalist school of architecture, he believed that this
rationalist school ought to disappear eventually into a more elevated school
involving the alliance of architecture with sentiment: such an alliance
alone, he maintained, could merit for architecture the name of art in its
spiritual connotation. To achieve this alliance, he sought to synthesize the
three diverse aspects of contemporary architecture within a single unified
approach: “For us,” he wrote in one of his editorials in the Revue générale,
“the classic, neo-Gothic and rationalist schools are merely the diverse
facets of eclectic unity.” © In other words, only by means of an eclectic
synthesis could a truly organic modern style be achieved. After all, it was
Daly himself who a few years earlier, in 1863, had been the first to
proclaim the “Organic School” of architecture * on the analogy of func-
tionalism in living organisms—that biological analogy already found in
Diderot and in the romantic tradition. On this same organic conception, of
course, was to be based much later architectural theory, including Louis
French Utopian Socialism and Its Implications for Artists and the Arts / 1 43

Sullivan’s famous slogan, “Form follows function,” and the “organic archi-
tecture” of Sullivan’s great pupil, Frank Lloyd Wright, which have had so
much influence abroad as well as at home.

5. Cabet, the Icarians, and Art

I apprrion to Fourier, Saint-Simon, and the English socialist Robert

Owen, a group of “critical-utopian socialists” called the Icarians was
specifically mentioned with some favor by Marx and Engels in the Com-
munist Manifesto. This group was headed by a French reformer and
socialist named Etienne Cabet, who in his youth had carefully studied the
writings of Fourier and Saint-Simon—much as the young Marx was to
study the writings of Cabet himself before meeting him at Paris in 1843.
Cabet, like many other utopian socialists after the Revolution of 1830, was
influenced by the history of the conspiracy of that French Revolutionary
communist, “Gracchus” Babeuf, published in 1828 by one of the partici-
pants, Filippo Buonarotti, under the title, Conspiration pour légalité, dite
de Babeuf. Buonarotti’s own continuing revolutionary activities have made
him known as the first professional revolutionary.
Even more influential for Cabet were the ideas of Robert Owen, with
which he came into direct contact in England during the period of more
than five years from 1834 to 1839, which he spent there while exiled from
France by the government of Louis Philippe. In England, also, Cabet
became acquainted with Thomas More’s Utopia, that most influential of
Renaissance descriptions of an ideal community in imitation of Plato’s
Republic, and the one from which utopian socialism and communism take
their name. (Significantly, two years previously Cabet’s mentor, Robert
Owen, had explicitly acknowledged his own debt to More and Plato.) ©
On the basis of the Utopia, Cabet himself wrote, in a highly romantic
vein, his own utopian novel, Voyage . . . en Icarie (1839), which became
so popular and influential that five more editions of it were published
between 1840 and 1848. Soon the word “communism,” recently originated
within the secret revolutionary societies of Paris to indicate reform by
militant and revolutionary means, was being applied specifically to the
theories of Cabet, and his many followers were becoming known as Icarians.
In the Voyage . . . en Icarie, Cabet described in considerable detail
the architecture of his ideal city of Icaria. Unlike the proposed Fourierist
phalanx, which housed all its members collectively within a single great
phalanstery, Icaria had one-family houses. Nevertheless, in the interests of
equality (Cabet was much more of an egalitarian than Fourier, even
though his Icaria had a dictator modeled on Napoleon), the inte-
all those
riors of Icarian houses were all laid out in the same way, with
144 i PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

on any single street exactly alike. In Icaria a prize was even offered for a
standardized model house with standardized parts—already reflecting that
interest in standard housing for the masses which has remained so great a
concern of socialists and communists, and, partly under their stimulation,
of many non-socialists and non-communists.
Such standardization also reflects Cabet’s socialist emphasis on social
utility as the end of art: indeed, one of the three fundamental rules he laid
down for Icaria was “that the agreeable be sought only when we have the
necessary and the useful.” * Like the other utopian socialists (and like
Marxists later), he held that only by creating a suitable environment could
harmoniously rounded—and thus social-minded—individuals be devel-
oped, and for this reason declared that Icaria should eventually be deco-
rated with paintings and sculpture.
For Cabet, much as for the Saint-Simonians, the Fourierists, and
Marx, the comprehension of history was important; and his belief in the
significance of history helped to lead him to an eclectic revival of the styles
of the past—the kind of eclecticism then considered fashionably progres-
sive in any case. Because, again like the Saint-Simonians and Fourierists,
Cabet believed that there should be progress without violent breaks with
the past (even though he was a much more militant reformer than they),
he made use of past styles of various periods side by side as a sign of
progress. ‘Thus he declared that in the capital city of Icaria there were to be
found “all the varieties of architecture. Here you would believe that you
were at Rome, in Greece, Egypt, India. . . .”™ It was this kind of
eclecticism, with its simultaneous use of many styles from the past, that
the Fourierist architect, Daly, later attacked as being destructive of organic
social and cultural unity. For Daly, we have seen, sought instead to
synthesize the eclectic approaches that gave rise to this multiplicity, in
order to achieve an organically unified style that would both encourage and
express an organically unified society.
As for Cabet’s later life, in 1847 he began to make plans for actually
establishing an Icaria. In accordance with the personal advice of Robert
Owen, he (like Considerant later) selected Texas for the site of his
community. He bought a million acres of land there, and sent out some of
his followers as colonists. After the Revolution of 1848—which Icarianism
had done much to precipitate—Cabet was one of those proposed for the
presidency of the Second Republic, but when his candidacy proved futile,
in 1849 he decided to join those of his followers who had already gone to
the United States. Because the Icarians found to their horror that their
Texas land was not in a single tract but in alternate sections, with the
intervening sections held by the state, the Texas plan was given up, and
Cabet authorized instead the purchase of part of the former Mormon town
of Nauvoo, Illinois. There dissensions arose among the Icarians as a result
of Cabet’s own authoritarianism. He himself was driven out, and with a
minority of his followers founded another Icarian community at Chelten-
French Utopian Socialism and Its Implications for Artists and the Arts / 145

ham, Missouri, where he died in 1856. While becoming, like so many other
leaders of socialist or communist groups, ever more authoritarian, he had
increasingly sought to impose his authority on the arts of the Icarians.

6. Utofranism and Romanticism;

Bohemianism and “Art for Art's Sake”

Dine: att historical eclecticism in the arts, the eclecticism of architectural

style that Etienne Cabet described in his Icaria, and the synthesized
eclectic approach to design that the Fourierist architect, César Daly,
advocated later, grew out of the romantic use of the past for stimulating
the emotions. But in contrast to the more extreme romantics who wished
to use the past primarily for stimulating their own emotions as individuals,
the utopian socialists sought to take account of the past in some way
socially useful for the present and future; and, in so doing, considered
themselves to be both rationalists and realists. In the light of that fact, it is
hardly surprising that the style of art most admired by followers of
Saint-Simon and by many followers of Fourier was a romanticized realism
in which art and morals were equated and social utility demanded, much
as in the theory and literary practice of Diderot earlier. Indeed, romantic
realism was the favorite style of French avant-garde artists in that second
quarter of the nineteenth century, which saw the peak both of French
romanticism and of utopian socialism. Nor is this overlapping of romanti-
cism and realism in art surprising. The modern critic Jacques Barzun has
gone so far as to maintain that all romantic art has a realistic intention,
and we have seen that the very conception of avant-garde art apparently
originated in Saint-Simon’s later doctrine giving to artists the leading role
in the ideal society. Furthermore, Fourierism, with its insistence on decen-
tralized government and on consequent relative freedom of the individual
—characteristics which made it the chief progenitor of most later anarch-
ism—could also be especially attractive to many of the romantics for
whom individual freedom of expression was paramount. At the same time,
the social concerns of both Saint-Simonian and Fourierist socialists could
appeal to that spirit of humanitarianism which was the other side of the
romantic coin. Lastly, like the romantics, the Fourierists and Saint-Simoni-
ans were utterly opposed to the bourgeoisie, who after the Revolution of
1830 essentially controlled the official academies of art, which were anath-
ema to romanticism.
Consequently, even though the romantics objected strongly to the
emphasis placed by the bourgeoisie and by the utopian socialists (and
especially the Saint-Simonians) on social utility and moral purpose in the
arts, even though so many of them likewise objected to the exaltation of
146 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

mass democracy by the socialists (especially the Saint-Simonians), in other

major respects many romantics were drawn to socialism. A considerable
number was even attracted to the Saint-Simonian variety, yet many of
them were eventually drawn to Fourier’s doctrines, which could appeal to
upholders of social art and to those attracted by the more individualistic
and anarchistic side of Fourierism.
Thus not only did the leading romantics consider themselves to be
avant-garde in their views about art, and therefore artistically radical, but
many, in rebelling against a society increasingly dominated by the bour-
geoisie, became in some way socially radical as well. ‘This was true of some
members of the circle around Victor Hugo, which in France is usually
considered to include the first true romantics, even though its members in
many respects were following paths indicated earlier by Rousseau. And we
shall see that it was true even of some upholders of “V’art pour Vart,” that
movement largely stimulated by romanticism and especially popularized by
Hugo’s one-time supporter, Théophile Gautier.
It was in the mid-1820’s, at the very time when the Saint-Simonian
school was beginning to flourish after the death of its master in 1825, that
the Cénacle (actually a second Cénacle), the famous literary and artistic
club centering on Victor Hugo, was founded. Among other members of
this romantic group were the future great literary critic Sainte-Beuve, the
poet Alfred de Vigny, and the painter Louis Boulanger; while the sculptors
Barye and David d’Angers (Fig. 11), and even the great romantic painter
Delacroix (Fig. 13), were associated with it less directly. Although some
members of the Cénacle were simply artistically radical, others were led by
their romantic hatred of the bourgeoisie toward social radicalism as well.
In the 1820’s Sainte-Beuve was the one most strongly drawn to socialism—
in his case to Saint-Simonianism, from which, however, he began to move
away late in 1831. Well before the Revolution of 1830, too, writings of
Victor Hugo and Alfred de Vigny reflected Saint-Simonian ideas, though
in a much vaguer way. Although as late as 1837 Vigny wrote in his journal
in typical Saint-Simonian fashion that “The priests of present society are
the poets, painters, sculptors, etc.,” ° by the end of the 1830’s he had
broken away from all such socialistic influences. Hugo, on the contrary,
became ever more sympathetic to socialism. He himself later declared,
“My socialism dates from 1828,” * though in fact he had been moving
toward socialism for several years before that. Nevertheless, the socialism
that he then displayed remained so vague that in 1830 he still thought of
himself primarily as a liberal, then even defining romanticism as “only
liberalism in literature.” * Consequently, the Saint-Simonians, to whom
liberalism was an enemy, were far from willing to accept him. Nor were the
Fourierists then willing to do so either. After the mid-1840’s, however,
when Hugo began work on Les Misérables, he became so wholeheartedly
socialistic that the Fourierists thereafter showed themselves very favorably
disposed to him. At the same time he continued to be at once romantic in
 Fic. 11. “Gracchus’’ Babeuf (date unknown), bronze relief by Pierre Jean
David d’Angers.
spirit and artistically avant-garde. Some of Hugo’s amazing romantic draw-
ings even anticipated modern abstract expressionism and modern mixed
media: he made some purely abstract experiments, and at times he mixed
coffee and burnt-match ends with his ink to get richer effects.
Many other great romantics felt at least some influence from Saint-
Simonianism and Fourierism, especially various other leading romantic or
romantic-realistic novelists. Stendhal, after first opposing the Saint-Simoni-
ans, found some good in them, but became more sympathetic to Fourier-
ism. One novelist who, like Hugo, passed from the influence of the
Saint-Simonians close to Fourierism and who was deeply interested in the
visual arts was Balzac, destined to become Karl Marx’s favorite novelist. In
his novels of the Comédie humaine, Balzac presented no less than fourteen
painters and sculptors, of whom six play very important roles. His short
story of 1831, “Le Chef d’ceuvre inconnu,” is about a painter who ruins
his art by divorcing it from nature in seeking the Absolute. In 1831, also,
his novel La Peau de chagrin showed enough Saint-Simonian quali-
ties so that the editor of the leading Saint-Simonian periodical, Le Globe,
became convinced that the novel was susceptible to a Saint-Simonian
interpretation.” However, even while admitting that Saint-Simonianism
had put its finger on the social malady of the period, Balzac came to feel
148 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

that it overemphasized industrialism and that the, thought of Charles

Fourier was therefore more profound. The result was that in 1840 he
almost became a convert to Fourierism—though seven years later he had
become so hostile to socialism (a fact neglected by Marx) that at a ban-
quet given by Heine, he almost came to blows with Eugene Sue.
Sue himself, who has often been called the creator of the socialist
novel and who was to be both praised and attacked by Marx and Engels,
was first affected by Saint-Simonianism and then much more strongly by
Fourierism. His novel Les Mystéres de Paris (1842-1843) contains one of
the first descriptions of an ideal “garden factory,” while his Le Juif errant
(1844-1845) and especially Les Miseres des enfants trouvés (1851) de-
scribe housing clearly reminiscent of Fourierist phalansteries.
It was only Saint-Simonian doctrine, however, that particularly at-
tracted George Sand—though mainly in the version developed by the
socialist printer and editor, Pierre Leroux. Leroux, who rejected the mysti-
cal Saint-Simonianism of Saint-Simon’s leading disciple, Enfantin, in order
to expound his own kind of Saint-Simonianism, was a founder late in 1831
of the Revue encyclopédique, a magazine addressed directly to philoso-
phers and artists which lasted until 1835. Ten years later, with George
Sand and another friend, he established the Revue indépendante, in its
time the principal organ of the partisans of social art.
As a socialist, George Sand was closely connected with the under-
ground workers’ movement of the 1830’s and 1840’s, which by its social
and political agitation was an important factor in bringing about the
Revolution of 1848. To Agricol Perdiguier, leader of this movement and
her friend, George Sand wrote in 1840: “It is above all in the people and in
the working class that the future of the world resides.” ©
George Sand best expressed her ideas about “art for the people” and
about the related theme of the role of the artist in society in her novel
Consuelo (1843). By novels of this kind she did much to popularize the
essentially romantic idea, already stimulated by Saint-Simon and the
Saint-Simonians, of the dedicated artist as a person set apart, entrusted
with a mission to serve humanity and raise it to a higher level. Further-
more, in the preface to her novel, Frangois le Champi, serialized in 1848,
she declared that “art is a demonstration of which nature is the proof,”
and demanded a new “art for all” in conformity with modern life—clearly
a realistic art, although she did not actually use the word “realistic.” This
was two years before “realism” was applied to the painting of Courbet.
George Sand had first become interested in the ideas of the Saint-Sim-
onians through Franz Liszt, who with several other leading romantic
composers and musicians was attracted by the strong emphasis placed by
the Saint-Simonians on the value of art in general and music in particular
for stimulating social harmony. Liszt, who in July 1830 wrote his Revolu-
tion Symphony (which he was to revise in those other Revolutionary years,
1848-1849), attended meetings of the Saint-Simonians. So also did Hector
French Utopian Socialism and Its Implications for Artists and the Arts / 149

Berlioz, who directly applied to music Saint-Simonian precepts concerning

social utility as the aim of art in his Chant d’inauguration des chemins de
fer. Berlioz was apparently one of the artists who attended the twice-a-
week sessions specially organized in 1831 by the Saint-Simonians specifi-
cally to attract artists, sessions conducted by a young architect named
Henry.” A year earlier, Charles Fourier had attended some of the more
“religious” meetings of the Saint-Simonians.
Even more than the Saint-Simonians, the Fourierists stressed the
importance of music. We have seen that Fourier himself had insisted on a
good ear for music as an important prerequisite for anyone wishing to join
a Fourierist phalanx, while strongly supporting opera as an art at once
musical and collective, and so doubly significant for encouraging har-
mony among men. Allyre Bureau, music editor of the Fourierist journal
Démocratie pacifique, devoted himself specifically to the art of music in
his call to musicians, L’Art dans la République; Aux artistes musiciens,™
when the Revolution of 1848 proclaimed the “Social Republic.”
It was the greater emphasis placed by Fourier on the individual that
made his ideas more attractive than Saint-Simonianism to some representa-
tives of “bohemianism” and “l'art pour ['art”—two essentially romantic
movements developed, though not invented, by disciples of Victor Hugo
who rejected the insistence of the Saint-Simonians on social purpose and
utility in art. Both of these movements in their modern form were first
popularized by Théophile Gautier and his friends after coming together as
a group on February 25, 1830, in support of the first performance of
Hugo’s play, Hernani—an occasion constituting the first clear application
of the idea of revolution to the arts, and in a very real sense presaging the
Revolution of July 1830. It not only marked what the French usually
consider to have been the first great triumph of romanticism in France, but
also the triumph of modern bohemianism in the arts even before “Dohemi-
anism” existed as a term related to art. The performance likewise stimu-
lated the development of “l'art pour Part,” which was destined at times—
but only at times—to have socially radical connections of an essentially
anarchistic kind.
In preparation for the first performance of Hernani, Hugo had
charged the poet Gérard de Nerval and the architect, painter, and future
poet, Petrus Borel, to recruit a claque of partisans among the young
romantics. Nerval had the help of his friend Gautier in recruiting a group
of artists in the studio of the painter Rioult, where Gautier was spending
part of his time studying painting. (Only after 1830 did Gautier, whose
poetry had led Sainte-Beuve to introduce him to Hugo in 1828, become
wholly a poet, novelist, and art critic.) It was Gautier who at the perform-
of the
ance of Hernani led its partisans in opposing the jeering members
bourgeoisie, a term then first being widely used in the pejorative sense that
vest
had originated in the French Revolution. On this occasion he wore a
mic,
of red satin as a gesture at once anti-bourgeois, romantic, anti-acade
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
150 A PRACTIGE

avant-garde, and revolutionary in spirit—for not only was the color one
that had been associated with the idea of revolution since the first red flag
had been raised by radicals in 1792 during the French Revolution, but it
was also non-conformist and bohemian in being worn to a formal first-
night at the theater. As Gautier intended, his red vest proved highly
successful in needling the bourgeois members of an audience already upset
by Hugo’s romantic, anti-academic, and artistically revolutionary play. For
Hernani had been written as a deliberate attack on the academic point of
view: it flatly disregarded the traditional classic-academic unities of time,
place, and action then accepted by the bourgeoisie—and indeed by all but
the romantics—as utterly fundamental for any meritorious dramatic per-
formance. Furthermore, by disregarding the unities, Hugo achieved a more
realistic effect, so that Hernani was a monument not only of romanticism
but of realism as well, thus foreshadowing a persistent overlapping there-
after of romanticism and realism even in works by the most extreme
romantics. The literary revolution represented by the first performance of
Hernani was followed, five months later, by the Revolution of 1830, as a
result of which baiting the bourgeoisie changed from a studio prank to a
serious social demonstration. But now the various kinds of radicals who
played so important a part in that Revolution came to feel that they had
been betrayed by the bourgeois liberals, until then regarded as fellow-radi-
cals, who had allowed the Revolution to end in a monarchy with that
quintessentially bourgeois king, Louis Philippe, on the throne. Thereafter,
alienation of radicals, social and artistic, from the bourgeoisie was com-
plete, and these two kinds of radicals were often to be linked in common
action by their mutual antipathy to the middle class.
Thus during the reign of Louis Philippe even many artists of bohe-
mian spirit began to incline both toward serious social radicalism and
toward realism in art. Although when Gautier had worn his red vest to the
opening of Hernani the word “bohemian” in its modern artistic sense had
been unknown, the bohemian attitude had been in existence among
French artists for some time. Indeed, it had already begun to develop
among them by the end of the eighteenth century as a reflection of the
spirit of social liberty engendered by the French Revolution. It had first
appeared among some of David’s pupils, who like their master were
enemies of system. Their leader was Maurice Quai, who in 1797 had
begun to air his beliefs that art could prosper only if its practitioners set
about returning to the most ancient, or primitive, sources. As a conse-
quence, he and his friends soon became known as “‘Les Primitifs,” as “Les
Etrusques,” or else—because Quai and his immediate friends eventually
began to wear beards and long hair while strolling through Paris dressed as
Homeric chieftains—as “Les Barbus” (The Bearded Ones). This anticipa-
tion of later bohemianism was related to Quai’s belief that David was
insufficiently primitive because he displayed in his school casts of the worst
Graeco-Roman sculpture. Quai himself wanted to go back to Phidias, and
French Utopian Socialism and Its Implications for Artists and the Arts / 151

so to a Greek Revival of art from the age of Pericles—although sometimes

he also urged the primitivism of the Quattrocento in Italy. But even
though Quai’s proto-bohemianism represented a radical social attitude, it
should be noted that unlike many later bohemians he was anti-political,
and so anticipated Gautier and other upholders of “art for art’s sake.” For
he believed that David had betrayed the cause of art by frittering away his
energies on politics.
The thorough alienation of the social and artistic avant-garde from
the bourgeoisie after the Revolution of 1830, however, meant that when
the words “bohemian” and “bohemia” in the artistic sense first appeared
in print during the reign of Louis Philippe, they did so in association with
a romantic realism very different from the early romanticism of Quai. And
they were popularized in association with implications of social realism.
“Bohemian” and “bohemia” in art have often been supposed to derive
from their use in the Scénes [de la vie] de Bohéme of Henry Murger—a
romantic work with overtones of social realism first published in 1851," on
the basis of tales published in serial form between 1845 and 1849, and of a
play, La Vie de Bohéme, made from them by Murger and a collaborator in
1849. But although Murger’s writings, and especially the performances of
the play, undoubtedly did most to popularize the new terms, “bohémien”
and “ Bohéme” used with the same meaning had apparently first appeared
in print in 1839 and 1840, respectively, within writings of that great
romantic realist, Balzac,®’ who, we noted, was influenced by Saint-Simoni-
anism and later even more by Fourierism, and was much interested in the
visual arts. Murger, who had originally intended to be a painter, apparently
took these terms over from Balzac, the only modern writer mentioned with
approval in Murger’s Scénes de la Boheme. Not only was Henry Murger
himself a thorough bohemian but, like Balzac eventually, he was strongly
influenced by Fourierism. It is worth adding that he was introduced to
poetry by a Fourierist friend, and former teacher, Eugene Pottier, a de-
signer of textiles and a poet, who took part in the Revolution of 1840 and
the Paris Commune of 1871, which inspired him to write the words for
what became the communist song, the Internationale. Such interrela-
tionships among radical poets and artists of somewhat different political
views obviously suggest that their political ideas are often not very clearly
defined in their own minds—after all, art is not politics, and artists and
poets are rarely politicians or political philosophers, though their social and
political views, among others, ordinarily are positively or negatively related
in some way to their art.
Modern bohemianism among artists, then, is a social attitude with
romantic overtones which from its early days has sometimes had socially
radical as well as artistically radical connotations, with the social radical
tendencies mostly related to Fourierism at first. This was true even of the
bohemianism of Gautier, whose novel of 1835, Mademoiselle de Maupin,
is usually regarded as the first great monument of “l'art pour art,” and its
152 i. PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

preface as the first great manifesto of that movement, which was so

artistically radical in its time. This brings us to the point, hitherto scarcely
noted, that artists and writers who have upheld “art for art’s sake” not only
have been likely to display in their art an individualism so extreme as to be
artistically anarchistic, but that many of them, in opposing the Philistine
bourgeoisie, have also indicated sympathy for some variety of social revolu-
tion or reform. And as could be expected, their social radicalism, like that
of so many bohemians, has ordinarily been of some relatively individual-
istic kind—usually Fourierism or the anarchism that so largely grew-out of
i
Gautier did not actually employ the phrase “lart pour l'art” in his
preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, although he often used it later—for
instance in his book, L’Art moderne (1856).°° As Gautier had been a
disciple of Victor Hugo, it is significant that Hugo later claimed to have
originated the term in 1829—an incorrect claim, because it had been used
as early as 1804 under German influence by another romantic writer,
Benjamin Constant, who after the fall of Napoleon was to be the thcoreti-
cian of the French Liberals.”° For that matter, Gautier himself had already
expounded the ideas fundamentalto “art pour l'art” even before writing
Mademoiselle de Maupin™ in 1834, the year in which he became aware
that defective sight must prevent him from becoming a painter. Nonethe-
less, it was the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, dated May 1834, but
published in 1835, that constituted the first real manifesto of the move-
ment. For in it there appeared with particular clarity such an essential
doctrine as the idea of the autonomy of art, and the consequent demand
for eliminating all utilitarian or moral purpose from works of art. These
ideas had already been stimulated especially by the idealistic conception of
art as “disinterested,” which had come into France from that revolutionary
republican, Kant, by way of German romanticism,” only to be largely
misunderstood. Later, they had been further popularized in France
(though without using the phrase “art for art’s sake”) in a lecture given in
1818 during the Restoration by Victor Cousin, a philosopher and aestheti-
cian influenced by Kant, who was a member of the radically revolutionary
Carbonari movement and became sympathetic to the Revolutions of 1830
and of 1848.
In the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, Gautier showed certain
social preoccupations, most of them negative but some positive. Holding
that the artist should work only for an appreciative elite, he attacked the
point of view of the bourgeoisie, which exalted utility and moral purpose as
aims in the arts, and he assailed both Saint-Simonianism and republican-
ism for their utilitarian conceptions of art,’? while also eulogizing Charles
Fourier through several pages. In his praise of Fourier, however, Gautier
had in mind, not Fourier’s social ideas as such, but rather his almost
anarchistic individualism, regarded by Gautier as the reflection of a desira-
bly unique kind of inspired romantic genius. Thus he wrote: “The only
French Utopian Socialism and Its Implications for Artists and the Arts / 153

one among you who has common sense is a madman, a great genius, an
idiot, a divine poet far above Lamartine, Hugo, and Byron. He is Charles
Fourrier [as Fourier originally spelled his name], the phalansterian, who is
all this in himself alone. . . .” ™
The romantic circle around Gautier, even before he wrote Mademoi-
selle de Maupin in 1834, had become known as the Petit cénacle in
imitation of Hugo’s Cénacle. Connected with it were such young artists as
Corot, Diaz, Chassériau, Marilhat, Célestin Nanteuil, Eugene Deveria,
and the sculptors Préault and Jehan du Seigneur—the last of whom is
frequently said to have begun “art for art’s sake” in the visual arts with his
statue, Roland furieux, exhibited at the Salon of 1831. These artists were
linked to one another by their romanticism, and therefore by a common
hatred both of the bourgeoisie and of the academic point of view in art,
but in other respects they did not all agree: indeed, in 1834, Gautier and
his immediate friends themselves began to poke fun at the Petit cénacle.
Nor should it be thought that its members shared precise political party
doctrines of any kind. Not only were nearly all of them not political-
minded, but insofar as some of them—and also some of those other artists
who later became supporters of “art for art’s sake’—showed a degree of
socio-political interest, this itself grew out of their romantic individualism
and libertarianism. It took the form either of the republicanism rejected by
Gautier himself, or more often of a Fourierism or an anarchism growing
out of Fourierism—all usually of a fairly vague kind.
One of the most prominent members of the Petit cénacle, for in-
stance, was the architect-painter-poet Petrus Borel, to whom, with Gérard
de Nerval and Gautier, Hugo had entrusted the task of rounding up
partisans for the first performance of Hernani. A year earlier, in 1829, as a
young architect, Borel had tried to introduce a radically new architectural
style, one so radical, indeed, that it involved him in a series of lawsuits. In
addition, so politically radical was he that when the Revolution of 1830
broke out, his father locked him up to prevent him from taking part.
After the Revolution, in attacking the bourgeoisie with his friend Gau-
tier, Borel helped to popularize the term “Philistine” for those who
insisted on giving art an immediately utilitanan or moral value. This term,
originating in German student slang to distinguish between the students,
or “gown,” and their despised and much more numerous enemies of the
“town,” had been taken over by German romantics. The first to use it had
apparently been Clemens Brentano (1777-1842), the romantic poet, nov-
elist, and brother of Goethe’s friend Bettina von Armnim. In 1811, Brentano
der Geschichte, on the
wrote a satire, Der Philister vor, in und nach
Philistine as representing»a perennial type of mentality that, judging
has no
everything in terms of immediate usefulness and material values,
and
regard for such useless objects and occupations as are implied by art
term from
culture. (It was Carlyle who, in 1827, likewise borrowing the
it into English; and later Marx and
such German romantics, introduced
 OF ART IN RAN GESAND SWITZERLAND
154 if PRACTICH

Engels—who, we know, admired Carlyle—delighted in applying it to the

bourgeoisie. )
As a republican and a fervent Jacobin, Borel loved to wear a vest in
the style of Robespierre, while seeking to terrorize the bourgeoisie by
declaring, “My republicanism is lycanthropy”: as a consequence he became
known as “Borel, the Lycanthrope” (or Werewolf). That his wild republi-
canism was so individualistic and libertarian as to constitute a kind of
anarchism was indicated when he said, “If I speak of republic, that is
because the word represents the widest independence that association and
civilization can permit.” ® In using, the word “association” here, Borel
apparently had Fourierism in mind: the Fourierists called themselves
Associationists. In this connection, therefore, it is worth mentioning that
one of the later supporters of “l'art pour l'art” and a prominent member of
the group of poets called Parnassians, Charles Leconte de Lisle, became a
leading Fourierist, and assisted Fourier’s chief disciple, Victor Considerant,
on the Fourierist journals Phalange and Démocratie pacifique. Leconte de
Lisle was also a member of a circle of young Jacobins afhliated with
Blanqui’s Société des Droits de Phomme which worked actively for revolu-
tion.” In 1848, he wrote a friend: “There am I, a violent (enragé)
communist.” ” However, the Commune of 1871 so disturbed him that he
was ready to urge the death penalty for those responsible for that
“crime.” ’ Yet it is significant that as an upholder of “art pour Tart” he
later became an anarchist sympathizer as well as a Parnassian: he was
found to be a subscriber to the leading anarchist magazine, La Révolte,
when the police seized its subscription lists in 1894.
Some of the many upholders of “Part pour Tart” who were not
themselves socially engaged nevertheless felt that they had to be thor-
oughly acquainted with all the ideas of their own day, including socially
radical ideas with which they did not agree, in order that their works might
be thoroughly and exactly up-to-date, and so avant-garde. This became
true of the anti-bourgeois Gustave Flaubert in his. maturity. Flaubert, who
became a leader of the second generation within the “l'art pour Tart”
movement, always remembered the Revolution of 1830 with pleasure
because at that time, although only eight years old, he was already a
democrat. Furthermore, in December 1847 he was sufficiently radical to
attend at Rouen, with his friend the future novelist, poet, and anti-
academic art critic, Maxime du Camp, one of the revolutionary banquets
that were so striking a feature of political life just before the Revolution of
1848 in spite of the efforts of Louis Philippe’s regime to prohibit them.
After the outbreak of that Revolution in February 1848, Flaubert made a
special trip to Paris with Du Camp to see the events of the Revolution—
though, characteristically, Flaubert’s purpose was to look at it “from the
artistic point of view.” ® Du Camp, however, was much more political-
minded: as an officer in the garde mobile of the Republic he was seriously
wounded in putting down the workers’ insurrection of June 1848, and was
French Utopian Socialism and Its Implications for Artists and the Arts / 155

awarded the cross of the Légion d@’honneur. In 1860 he was to serve in

Garibaldi’s expedition against the Bourbons in Sicily and Naples, and in
the 1870’s to write histories of the Revolutionary year 1848 and of the
Commune of 1871. He was violently anti-academic (nevertheless, he was
eventually elected to the Académie frangaise).
While Du Camp became a leading socialist, his friend Flaubert was to
attack socialism as an outmoded enemy of liberty, even though continuing
to regard it as an important subject for a novelist to study in order to be
able to write about his time. Hence in a letter of 1864, eight years after the
publication of Madame Bovary (in the Revue de Paris, founded by Du
Camp and Gautier) had made him the leading realistic novelist, he wrote:
“T have just gone through [the writings of] Lammenais [who, though not a
socialist, had done much to stimulate Christian socialism], Saint-Simon,
Fourier, and I am taking up [the anarchist] Proudhon again from one end
to the other.” ® For Flaubert—and to some degree Gautier also—felt the
need to understand with the utmost exactness the relations to the social
milieu of the individual characters that they wrote about. Consequently,
they were sometimes led to study contemporary social doctrines as part of
achieving scientifically objective understanding of the contemporary envi-
ronment—they particularly admired science for its absence of moralizing.
Thus it was that some of the supporters of “art pour Dart,” especially
Flaubert himself, were paradoxically led to a scientific kind of realism in
art (even though Flaubert was to write George Sand in 1876 that he hated
realism). In architecture, such realism could take the form of an avant-
garde demand that the most advanced technology be made use of to arrive
at a scientifically functional kind of building of the most up-to-date
sort—functionalism in architecture being, as we have emphasized, a kind
of realism. Théophile Gautier wrote in 1850: “Mankind will produce a
completely new architecture out of its period exactly at the moment when
the new methods created by recently born industry are made use of. ‘The
application of cast iron allows and enforces the use of many new forms, as
can be seen in the railway stations, suspension bridges, and the arches of
conservatories.” **
The realism in art that resulted from the desire of a Flaubert or a
Gautier wholly to comprehend the contemporary environment in its most
up-to-date, avant-garde aspects was, paradoxically enough, not unlike that
also demanded by many of the social radicals who, far from upholding “art
for art’s sake,” insisted that art must be socially useful in a contemporary
way. It was, of course, particularly easy for Flaubert’s social-minded con-
temporaries who rejected the idea of art for its own sake, to pass to a
basically social kind of realism in art—one that might or might not be
based on a scientific approach. We shall see that the art of Courbet was
socially realistic, partly under the stimulation of his friend, the anarchist
Proudhon, who was much influenced by Fourier’s social doctrines and had
sharply attacked “Tart pour Vart” for rejecting social utility and moral
156 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

purpose. Courbet’s approach to art, however, was not basically scientific in

aim—unlike that of the Neo-Impressionists later, who admired Courbet
and were likewise influenced by anarchism.
As for the “art for art’s sake” movement, which in its own way was
socially rebellious, it spread internationally, especially to England, partly
through the influence of Charles Baudelaire, who was converted to “Tart
pour l'art” from his earlier love for revolution and socialism. His Journals
show that he had been greatly affected by the Revolution of 1830, and that
he had been a socialist at the time of the Revolution of 1848—in the latter,
as a republican member of a mob, he raided an armory and ran around
with a rifle shouting threats against opponents of the Revolution.” In that
year, too, he published a periodical, Le Salut publique, at the head of
which was a drawing of a worker defending a barricade, made for Baude-
laire by his friend, the radical painter Courbet. As late as 1852, Baudelaire
was a revolutionary socialist whose sympathies led him to attack the
“puerile utopia of the school of l'art pour Tart” and to declare that “art
was henceforth inseparable from morals and from utility.” This he did in
his preface to the songs of the revolutionary worker-poet, Pierre Dupont,™
who later was favorably cited by Karl Marx in Das Kapital. So disgusted,
however, was Baudelaire by the coup d’état by means of which President
Louis Napoleon made himself Emperor Napoleon III, that he soon gave
up socialism and politics to become an ardent leader of “lart pour l'art.”
As such, he helped to carry further the theory of art for the sake of art,
in which more than ever the emphasis given by academicism to idealiza-
tion, generalization, and imitation was rejected, together with its belief in
the communication of ideas and facts. More than ever, the artist’s function
was reinterpreted in terms of the observation and creation of sensuous
patterns, with imagination thus triumphing over understanding and utility.
The result was that by 1853 the word “artist,” as redefined under the
influence of Saint-Simon reinforced by the “art for art’s sake” movement,
had widely acquired a new meaning: where previously it had usually
referred to an artisan, scientist, or painter, it now had come to mean
imaginative creator in general.“ And for Baudelaire, imaginative creation
was related to that analogy with organic nature which from Diderot had
passed into the romantic tradition. Significantly, as an art critic Baudelaire
modeled himself on Diderot and declared that the best critics in general
were those who, from lonely personal contact with organic nature, “know
the admirable, inevitable relationship between form and function.” ®
Baudelaire was one of the first to become interested in Japanese art—
especially Japanese prints, which foreshadowed so much modern art in
reducing form to somewhat abstract essentials even while also directly
reflecting the nature of the medium, in this case color printing from wood
blocks. His friend, the engraver Félix Braquemond, had in 1856 ac-
cidentally discovered some Japanese prints that had been used as wrap-
French Utopian Socialism and Its Implications for Artists and the Arts / 157

ping paper, and had communicated his enthusiasm to Baudelaire, Manet,

the Goncourt brothers, and Degas.
More than anyone else, Baudelaire bridged the gap between romanti-
cism and Symbolism (which became a movement only in the mid-1880’s) .
As Anna Balakian has shown in her study of literary Symbolism, The
Symbolist Movement (1967), Baudelaire did this partly by his treatment
of Swedenborgianism, which had been infiltrating art forms through such
romantic illuminists as Blake, Novalis (a pupil of Schiller, Schlegel, and
Fichte), Emerson, and the romantic realist Balzac (who had even declared
that Swedenborgianism was his religion and had become the most eminent
popularizer of Swedenborg). Baudelaire’s doctrine of “correspondances,”
deriving from the Neo-Platonic conception of universal unity, made a link
between sounds and colors like that made earlier by Swedenborg and the
romantics. Also, particularly in Baudelaire’s prose criticism and in his
descriptions of the effects of drugs on human sensitivity, he came close to
the technique of veiled communication, evoking in the language of visible
things, as symbols, a reality beyond the senses. He thereby also foreshad-
owed a new definition of poetry, in which the poem becomes an enigma,
making ambiguity an expressive element. As these conceptions could easily
be transferred from poetry to other arts, Baudelaire was a direct forerunner
not only of Symbolism, but also of art movements stimulated by it,
including Synthetism, cubism, dadaism, and surrealism—all of which, like
Symbolism, have had some connections with social radicalism.
Baudelaire’s influence on Symbolism and later art movements, and on
social radicalism, partly resulted from his ecstatic discovery of Richard
Baude-
Wagner, previously discovered by ‘Théophile Gautier in Germany.
and was
laire heard a concert of Wagner’s music in Paris in February 1860,
g
so impressed that he wrote a fan letter to the composer. In the followin
at Paris
year he was one of the few at the first performance of Tannhduser
on of
who did not seek to boo and hiss it off the stage. Wagner's concepti
e work
opera as an organic integration of the arts into a total and collectiv
ire—
of art (or as Wagner had called it, a Gesamtkunstwerk) led Baudela
for Apmil 1,
in an essay on Wagner published in the Revue européenne
ser—to
1861, less than three weeks after the performance of Tannhdu
nt unity so
discuss the integration of art forms into a harmonious significa
mingling of sense stimuli. At the
as to make possible a broader synaesthetic
power of Wagner' s music to stir up
same time, he carefully considered the
and ideas by stimulat ing a single
a multi-sensory plane of images, emotions,
which in another
sense—thereby anticipating the idea of simultaneity,
be added that
form was to be so important in cubist theory. It should Baude-
even easier for
Wagner's leitmotivs were symbols, and so made it
laire and the Symbolists to admire his music.
the movements it affected,
Baudelaire also influenced Symbolism, and
by the cosmopolitan spirit of his writings, so different from romantic
ite: fh PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

nationalism and so characteristic of modern avant-garde art and of most

modern radicalism. The seeds of this cosmopolitanism had existed in the
Enlightenment and in the theories of the Saint-Simonians and Fourierists,
but it was first clearly given modern artistic expression by the Symbolists as
a consequence of the influence of Baudelaire upon them.
Partly through an acquaintance of Baudelaire and of the Symbolist
poet Stéphane Mallarmé, the American-born but thoroughly cosmopolitan
painter Whistler, the doctrines of “Tart pour Tart” were spread to Eng-
land. There, in part by way of Whistler’s influence, they also reached Os-
car Wilde, who in 1891 published his essay, “The Soul of Man Under
Socialism,” °° written from an anarchist point of view, and who two years
later openly declared himself to be an anarchist. Although Whistler, unlike
Wilde, showed no interest in social ideas (except for a very brief period
early in his career), in his painting he was so individualistic and libertarian
as to be a kind of artistic anarchist. His statement of his “art for art’s sake”
point of view, made in the published lecture Ten O’Clock, was much
admired by his friend Mallarmé, who translated it into French. But
whereas Whistler was by that time simply a kind of anarchist in his art,
Mallarmé was enough of a socio-political anarchist to subscribe to the
anarchist journal La Réyolte, although as an upholder of the “l'art pour
Part” tradition he kept his art separate from his anarchist social interests.

7. Saint-Simonianism,
Christian Socialism, and Art

Mcu as the influence of Fourierism and anarchism—artistic or social or

both—passed to England partly in connection with the “art for art’s sake”
movement, so the influence of Saint-Simonianism spread there partly by
way of Christian socialism. In France, the connection between Saint-Sim-
onianism and Christian socialism had been made especially through Phi-
lippe Buchez, a one-time Carbonaro and Saint-Simonian physiologist and
doctor who considered Saint-Simon’s Nouveau Christianisme a master.
piece, yet who in his Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution frangaise
(1833-1838) was destined to publish the first exoneration of Robespierre.
Buchez’s Saint-Simonian regard for literature and the fine arts as social
creations—"“the creations of all that is least individualistic in man” *“—was
eventually combined with a kind of Roman Catholic Christian socialism.
One of his disciples was the sculptor Pradier. The influence of this
Christian socialism spread to Evangelicals and Anglicans in England,
where it was reinforced by the ideas of Fourier, interest in which was
stimulated especially by the arrival in England of Jules Lechevalier, an
French Utopian Socialism and Its Implications for Artists and the Arts / 159

exile from France as a result of the unsuccessful workers’ insurrection of

June 23, 1848. A one-time Saint-Simonian, Lechevalier had fallen out with
Saint-Simon’s chief disciples in 1831-1832. Thereupon he had become a
Fourierist while continuing to champion social art. This he had upheld in
his journal, L’Europe littéraire, doing so especially in an article of 1833
entitled “De l’art comme élément de la vie sociale.” *
The religious socialism of which Buchez became the leader in France
had been especially stimulated by the cry for social justice and liberty in
perhaps the most popular book of the 1830's, the Paroles d’un croyant
(1834) of Lamennais, a Catholic priest turned democrat. He was expelled
from the Church because of his eventual belief that mankind must express
its collective beliefs by other means, and was a leader of the republican
party in the Revolution of 1848. Although Lamennais himself was a sharp
critic of the unorthodox New Christianity of the Saint-Simonians, the
combining of his ideas with others ultimately deriving from Saint-Simoni-
anism was destined to have a profound influence upon George Sand, upon
the development of Christian socialism in both France and England, and
in some respects, too, upon the cooperative movement of which Buchez
was also a founder.
So respected was Buchez in France that after the Revolution of 1848
he was chosen to be president of the National Assembly. ‘The nature of his
influence on the arts is reflected in a statement by him that is also
art
indicative of the moralizing romantic realism characteristic of so much
th century: “When a work of art
during the second quarter of the nineteen
first is to know whether it is in
is presented to us, the question to resolve
it
conformity with morals [la morale], the second will be to know whether
is well made.” *
of which
The development of Roman Catholic Christian socialism,
the Roman Catholic
Buchez was a founder, occurred in connection with
lism,
religious revival that arose in reaction against the extreme rationa
n had begun with
deism, and atheism of the Enlightenment. ‘This reactio
and deism of the
Rousseau’s defense of religion against the atheism
nt of which the
Philosophes. He thereby had originated a religious moveme
he had paved
Catholic revival was one of the beneficiaries, and in this way
c writers Cha-
the way for men as various as Lamennais and the romanti
Hugo.” This reli-
teaubriand, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and even Victor
was characterized
gious movement in its Catholic or near-Catholic aspects
romantic return to the
by a medieval revivalism largely stimulated by the
to encourage a
past, especially the medieval past. This in turn helped
of St. Thomas
revival of medieval philosophy, notably the philosophy
correspondingly fosteri ng a Gothic Revival ism in architec-
Aquinas, while
participants in the religious
ture and other arts. Although many of the for its
to the past
aspects of the medieval revival were led to try to return
sought, like Buchez, to make use of ideas from the
own sake, many others
160 ye PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

Christian Middle Ages in order to bring about a better future. ‘Thus

medieval revivalism paradoxically represented, on the one hand, a spirit of
artistic, social, and religious radicalism, and, on the other, an artistic,
social, and religious ultra-conservatism.

§. Saint-Simonianism,
Comte, Marx, and Art

I rue romantic side of utopian socialism, and especially of Saint-Simoni-

anism and Fourierism, appealed to many writers and artists, many others
rejected the romantic aspects of Saint-Simonianism in favor of those
aspects considered socially realistic, practical, and scientific to a degree not
found in Fourierism. One of the writers who partly took the latter position
was Auguste Comte (1798-1857), the former secretary and disciple of
Saint-Simon, and with him regarded as the founder of sociology, the term
invented by Comte in 1837.
Comte, after attending the Ecole polytechnique, was attracted to
Saint-Simonianism in 1815, two years before he became Saint-Simon’s
secretary and adopted son. In 1822, he wrote an exposition of Saint-Sim-
onian ideas. However, when Saint-Simon published this in 1824, he added
a preface objecting to it on the ground that Comte had neglected the
religious, or imaginative and sentimental, side of human nature in his
desire to reorganize society on the basis of pure reason and scientific
ability. The two men fell out, and Comte increasingly went his own way,
breaking completely with the Saint-Simonians after Saint-Simon’s death.
In his desire for a practical application of science to society to cleanse it of
superstition and inequality of wealth, Comte developed the positivistic
aspects of Saint-Simon’s thought into his own full-blown philosophy of
positivism—a term first used in 1829, pejoratively, in the Doctrine de
Saint-Simon by one of the disciples of Saint-Simon with whom Comte had
fallen out.
One of his own major insights grew out of his doctrine of progressive
historical stages of consciousness—from a theological stage, through a
metaphysical one, to a third, and final, positive stage in which the world is
explained in terms of scientific truth. This insight therefore involved the
principle of the changing nature of psychological perception in time,
which, applied to art, means the principle that works of art are seen
differently at different periods. Comte at least implicitly included the arts
as part of his first great synthesis, the Cours de philosophie- positive
(1830-1842) and then more explicitly in his Systéme de politique posi-
tive (1851-1854). As set forth by Comte and by those who followed him,
positivism was destined to affect the arts m France at least as much as the
French Utopian Socialism and Its Implications for Artists and the Arts / 161

more romantic aspects of Saint-Simonianism had done earlier. Regarded

for some time as avant-garde, positivism strongly, if often indirectly, influ-
enced various artists who considered themselves to be both socially and
artistically radical.
Because positivism assumes that the world is simply the sum of the
objects that the scientific observer finds in his experience (even though
Comte did indicate the superiority of the heart over the head), it simulta-
neously exalts science and confines knowledge merely to the data of
experience. These data, the positivist holds, the mind passively receives,
organizing them but adding nothing. As the influence of positivism spread,
it therefore could be expected that aesthetics would become scientific in
aim and that the artist’s task and duty would be more and more regarded
as that of observing, analyzing, and representing visible and tangible
objects in the “real” world of sense experience, and of trying to do so in an
objectively descriptive way. In the representational arts, realism of this
kind increasingly became the aim of art, with the consequence that toward
the middle of the nineteenth century some socially radical avant-garde
artists—notably Courbet—largely eliminated the romantic element from
the romantic-realistic current in art.
Although the positivism of Comte could also encourage the extreme
scientific or pseudo-scientific naturalism of many later artists and writers,
the
he himself held that, while the purpose of science is to estimate reality,
purpose of art is to embellish reality. In believing this, he retained a basic
is the
principle of the academic point of view, namely that the end of art
embellishment of the world by ideal beauty. And with this conservative
religious
aspect of his thought there went hand in hand a paradoxical
had sharply criticize d Comte
conservatism. For even though Saint-Simon
aspect of human nature, the
for neglecting the religious, or sentimental,
“love thy neighbor ”
latter developed a religion of humanity by raising
above the love of God to make collective humanity the end of all worship;
of Woman
and the religion of humanity was symbolized by the worship
“New Christi-
rather than of Man. Comte himself rejected Saint-Simon’s
result was that
anity” in favor of what he called “new Catholicism.” The
politics not
he helped to stimulate a rightist movement in religion and
even though his
unrelated to the romantic Gothic Revival in the arts,*t
encouraged an
retention of the academic principle of ideal beauty also
art. Such academi-
academic, and therefore conservative, version of realistic
in the first volume
cized realism is reflected in Comte’s statement of 1851,
consists in an ideal
of his Systeme de politique positive, that “Art always
of perfection.”
representation of what is, destined to cultivate our instinct
of the
This became the definition of good art favored by typical members
on the “real” and the
bourgeoisie, for whom positivism, with its emphasis to
in art they liked
“practical” had eventually become gospel—although
added. However , in the same
have a degree of romantic sentimentality
“our proletari ans alone are
yolume Comte had previously declared that
 i 62 y, PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

capable of becoming the decisive auxiliaries of new philosophies.” Those

anti-bourgeois radical artists, such as Courbet, who were both influenced
by the positivist spirit and sympathetic to the proletariat sought to elimi-
nate from their art the academic and romantic elements favored by the
bourgeoisie. They therefore concluded that the end of art should be more
directly and completely the descriptive representation of objects as seen in
the world of the senses, in the natural and social environment.”

In appirion to Comte, there was an eventually even more influential

social philosopher influenced by Saint-Simonianism who was especially
attracted by the more “scientific” and “realistic” aspects of Saint-Simon’s
thought, but who largely rejected its romantic aspects—with consequent
major effects upon the arts. This social philosopher was Karl Marx. Never-
theless, even Marx’s “scientific socialism,” which owed so much to earlier
French radicalism, did not entirely reject its romantic individualistic ele-
ment. For while Marx held that individual human beings are determined
by the laws of nature and by the laws of social development he himself had
discovered, he also maintained that the individual who understands those
laws—namely, the good Marxist—can, and ought to, make use of such
knowledge to bring the almost inevitable goal of the classless society more
rapidly into being.
On this ground, Marx and Engels could justify their special admira-
tion for the romantic-realistic art of Balzac—himself, we know, affected by
Saint-Simonianism and Fourierism. Indeed, so great was Marx’s admira-
tion for Balzac that—as his son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, recorded—he
planned to write a book about the novelist as soon as he had completed his
own economic studies. In order to praise Balzac as a realistic writer, the
two founders of Marxism had to adopt the view that Balzac’s vision
as an
artist compelled him to go against his own class sympathies and prejudices
,
his own political beliefs. For these, in spite of the influence of Saint-Sim-
onianism upon him, as we noted, were royalist—and therefore to
a Marx-
ist, of course, reactionary.** But in fact Marx and Engels admired
Balzac’s
romanticism as well as his realism—and on this account rated him
far
higher than Zola, whose would-be scientific realism they, and the
Soviet
aestheticians of socialist realism later, regarded as too completely determin-
istic.

9. Utopianism: Conclusion
Cxearty, Saint-Simonianism and Fourierism have had exceed
ingly signifi-
cant meaning for art, both in their own right and throug
h their influence
on later social movements. Partly out of Saint-Simonianism
sprang not
French Utopian Socialism and Its Implications for Artists and the Aris 7 163

only Marxism, and hence Marxism-Leninism, but also Christian socialism

and the positivism of Comte, which originally was regarded as socially
radical. Out of Fourierism, in turn, largely developed communist-anarch-
ism. Fourierism and communist-anarchism too have affected the arts
directly, but, unlike Saint-Simonianism and Marxism, they have paradoxi-
cally had some connections with artistic movements in which even the
many social-minded participants have insisted on the necessity for keeping
art entirely separate from all social movements—and therefore have sub-
scribed to “art for art’s sake.”
During the immediate post-Napoleonic period in France, there were,
however, social movements then regarded as radical which in origin were
independent of both Saint-Simonianism and Fourierism, notably liberal-
ism and radical republicanism. To these subscribed some of the most
famous artists of the early nineteenth century, whose style was destined to
affect later generations of artistically radical artists, many of whom partici-
pated in socially radical activities.
 --
OTHER RADICAL ARTISTS
AND CRITICS IN FRANCE
FROM. THE RESTORATION
OF THE BOURBONS TO THE
PARIS COMMUNE OF 1871

1. Liberalism and Revolutionary

Republicanism: Goya in Spain;
Géricault, Scheffer

Irs significant that the word “Conservative” first became part of the
name of a political party when it was adopted after the fall of Napoleon by
the Conservateurs de la légitimité, who welcomed the return of the
Bourbons of France. By 1820, French Conservatives, following the exam-
ple of conservatives in Spain, were scornfully applying the term “liberal” to
their chief opponents, who were led by Lafayette with the romantic writer
Benjamin Constant as their chief theoretician. The Liberals willingly
accepted the label, already adopted by the constitutional party in Spain.
Soon, too, the utopian socialism of Saint-Simon and Fourier, which was
equally anti-monarchy, was gaining many converts.
It could be expected that, as monarchists, the French Conservatives
and their successors would be sympathetic to the academic version of
classicism in art because they could regard it as reflecting that spirit of
absolute monarchy under which French academicism had been officially
established in the age of Louis XIV. Conversely, the Liberals, then re-
garded as highly radical, and the socialists could both be expected to reject
the traditional academic point of view and its emphasis on rational prin-
ciples of ideal beauty, regarded as transcending time, in favor of the ro-
mantic and the realistic in art. For liberals and socialists alike have always
subscribed to the idea of progress in history rather than to any principles
above the flux of history, and so have been especially interested in contem-
 Other Radical Artists and Critics in France / 165

porary and future events and in their historical development out of and
beyond the past. Together with liberalism, and especially with utopian and
Marxian socialism, romanticism and realism in the arts have shared a belief
in the importance of comprehending and representing history and thus
historical change: they have agreed that any ideal which seeks to stand
outside history is necessarily false.t On this account, upholders of romanti-
cism and realism, originally regarded as artistic radicals, could join political
liberals, socialists, and other early radicals in opposing monarchy and the
academic tradition associated with it. And many romantics and realists
became liberals as long as liberalism remained radical in spirit, or else
socialists, anarchists, or some other kind of political and social radicals.
Because of the ambiguity of the word peuple, liberalism also often went
hand in hand with romantic national messianism.
The conflict between the academic spirit and the spirit of romanti-
cism and realism was destined to endure—indeed, it still goes on. In
France, especially, the academic tradition was long so firmly established in
the minds of the majority as the one mode best suited for official art that it
was able to survive not only the Revolutions of 1789 and 1830 directed
against the Bourbons but later revolutions until 1968. It is true that, in the
process of surviving, the official academic tradition had to compromise
somewhat with romanticism and realism in order to become and remain
the favorite kind of art of the great majority of the bourgeoisie, the class
that after every revolution of the modem era in France has managed to
come out on top. But in this way the academic point of view was able to
remain so strong that even those romantic or realistic French artists who,
as revolutionary republicans, liberals, or socialists of one sort or another,
opposed all monarchy for a time continued to show in their works some
unconscious traces of the academic approach to art. Even David, the first
great anti-monarchical and revolutionary artist of France, whose paintings
at times showed such a high degree of early revolutionary romanticism, as
for instance in his Oath of the Horatii (Fig. 1), or again such a high
degree of early revolutionary realism, as in his Death of Marat (Fig. 2),
nevertheless ordinarily retained in his big official pictures a relatively
non-romantic, non-realistic, academic style.
that
As could be expected, however, it was David’s romantic-realism
was
was later to be praised by Lenin’s master in socialism, Plekhanov, and
to attract considerable attention from other Marxist or Marxist-Leninist
writers on art2 Nevertheless, Marxist-Leninists have not placed him at the
top of the list of early revolutionary artists, partly because they consider that
s for
he prostituted his revolutionary ideals by executing official painting
Napoleon, whom he so worshipped as his defender against the academic
in
Institut that he went into exile in Brussels when Napoleon fell. Also,
aca-
spite of David’s anti-academicism he had often retained a relatively
Marxist-
demic style—one without sufficient romantic-realism to suit the
Leninist aesthetic of socialist realism.
d
Instead of David, therefore, Marxist-Leninists have generally regarde
 166 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

as their favorite artist of David’s period the Spaniard Goya, who employed
a kind of romantically revolutionary realism in depicting Spaniards desper-
ately resisting Napoleon’s imperialism (Fig. 4) between 1808 and 1814.
Furthermore, as was noted in the Introduction, when in 1820 the Spanish
Liberals revolted against the monarchy of Ferdinand VII and established a
liberal government at a time when liberalism was considered thoroughly
radical, Goya came out wholeheartedly in favor of the new regime. For this
temerity he paid by going into precautionary exile when Ferdinand was
restored to the Spanish throne in 1823 by French troops. Five years later,
Goya died at Bordeaux.
It should be added that in order'to accept Goya as a leading precursor
of socialist realism, Marxist-Leninists have had to ignore his statement,
made in the prospectus for the Caprichos of 1796-1798, that an artist
“may remove himself entirely from nature and depict forms or movements
which to this day have existed only in his imagination.” * Nevertheless, the
extraordinary dynamism of such works by Goya as his etchings of the
Spaniards struggling against Napoleon (Fig. 4)—a dynamism conveyed by
qualities of line and composition as well as of subject-matter—could
especially be related to the Marxian emphasis on revolutionary human
action to speed the coming of the classless society and its universal peace.
The passion with which this revolutionary dynamism was conveyed was
enormously enhanced by Goya’s use, in part, of the relatively new aquatint
technique (invented in France in the late 1760’s) in order to achieve the
greatest possible range of chiaroscuro.
Goya’s liberalism was paralleled in France by that of Géricault. The
latter had become a liberal in 1815, five years before the French Liberals
had officially adopted that name for their party. He had been led to
liberalism mainly as a member of a radical circle meeting in the atelier of
the painter and revolutionary liberal, Horace Vernet—who, it will be
recalled, was to be admired by Marx for his collectivistic methods of
mass-producing huge paintings with the aid of assistants.
Géricault was the first artist to depict anonymous masses of men in
chaotic struggle—in this considerably anticipating the novelists’ descrip-
tions of war, such as that by Stendhal in La Chartreuse de Parme (1839).
He was also one of the earliest great artists to be interested in the lives of
workingmen: these he depicted in watercolors and lithographs executed in
England between 1820 and 1822, with settings influenced by English
caricaturists such as Rowlandson and Cruikshank.
However, the most immediate reflection of Géricault’s political lib-
eralism in his works is, we noted, to be found in his most famous painting,
The Raft of the Medusa (Fig. 5), which he first exhibited in
1819. He
deliberately intended this picture to be an anti-monarchical and
liberal
monument: the subject was chosen by the artist at least partly
to make a
direct attack on the restored monarchy of Louis XVIII by
assailing the
incompetence of the captain of the wrecked ship Medusa,
who was a
 Other Radical Artists and Critics in France / 167

political appointee. Furthermore, Géricault sought to depict the results of

this incompetence with the realism of an eyewitness account, although in
its concern with struggle, tension, and death his painting also possesses
strong romantic overtones. At the same time Géricault consciously wished
to achieve a monumentality of composition * that in fact is an unconscious
survival of the academic approach. It should be added that even though his
choice of subject had been largely motivated by his political liberalism, he
was shocked to find (as he complained in a letter) that the picture was
judged solely on the specific spirit in which it had been painted rather than
on its merit as a work of art conveying universal human anguish.’
The combination of realistic and romantic elements with a still-
academic style in this picture motivated by radical politics could much
later be expected to appeal to upholders of the Marxist-Leninist aesthetic
of socialist realism on which the official style of the Soviet Union has long
been based, and which, like most official conceptions of art in modern
times, itself contains a strong element of academicism. Nevertheless, admi-
ration for Géricault’s art had been slow to develop among socialists and
communists because not long after his death the revolutionary spirit of
French liberalism dwindled, and liberalism became associated with the
bourgeoisie. For the Liberals took control of France after the Bourbons had
been expelled by the Revolution of 1830, and it was they who made
possible the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe. Only much later,
therefore, was the early kind of revolutionary liberalism with which Ger-
cault had been associated to be regarded as a historical anticipation of
Marxism, and Géricault’s own style as making him an important precursor
of the socialist realism of Marxist-Leninists.
Eventually, however, Géricault was to be made the hero of a widely
popular Marxist-Leninist novel, La Semaine Sainte, published in 1958 by
Louis Aragon, the noted French communist writer and friend of Picasso,
who sought to relate Géricault to the revolutionary tradition of Marx and
Lenin. The novel deals with the Holy Week of 1815, during which
Napoleon, on his return from Elba, was nearing Paris. It tells how, by the
end of the week, Géricault, then a lieutenant of musketeers in Louis
XVIII’s army, had become convinced that the future lay neither with the
Bourbons nor with Bonaparte because the Bourbons had showed that they
did not acknowledge the French Revolution and Napoleon had _deliber-
ately destroyed it. Even though the communist author ended his novel
with Géricault not yet seeing his way to a third and supposedly better
allegiance, his conversion to liberalism and the ultimate coming of the
communist revolution were at least tacitly implied.° In other words, the
all of
novel was essentially about secular divisions among Frenchmen,
whom “ought” to be moving like Géricault in the direction of the Left.
They should, in short, all be moving toward that union of intellectuals
the
with workers at the head of the nation which had been the aim of
Left
Jacobins and which has remained the immediate aim of the Marxist
168 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

under the influence of the French Revolutionary tradition.

Géricault had studied painting at Paris in the atelier of Pierre Guerin
who, left without a father at a tender age, had had to support his mother
and sisters, and as a consequence of his struggles had developed a particu-
lar interest in depicting the sorrows of humanity. Partly as a consequence of
his humanitarian interests, his atelier had become a center for liberal
political and social ideas, and for some of the most socially or artistically
radical young artists of the time. In that atelier, Delacroix, the future great
innovator of romantic art (Fig. 13), was a student. Another student there
was Ary Scheffer (Fig. 12), who knew Delacroix well and later was
regarded as his chief, but friendly, rival among the romantic painters.
While working in Guérin’s. studio, Scheffer became Géricault’s devotedly
admiring friend—and even more of a political liberal and republican than
Géricault himself.
Ary Scheffer, his artist-brother Henry, who likewise was one of Gué-
rin’s pupils, and another brother, the publicist Charles Arnold Scheffer,
were not only liberals but also highly revolutionary republicans. Ary and
Henry Scheffer were closely linked with some members of Saint-Simon’s
socialist circle, being especially friendly with Augustin Thierry, the future
noted historian who was Saint-Simon’s secretary from 1814 to 1817. Al
though Ary and Henry Scheffer apparently never became complete Saint-
Simonians, in 1816 they were members of the original editorial board of
Saint-Simon’s periodical, L’Industrie, and as such attended a weekly meal
with Saint-Simon as host.’ And their brother Arnold was to be an editor of
Le Globe under Pierre Leroux shortly before it became a wholly Saint-
Simonian periodical in 1831.
All of the Scheffer brothers were prominent among the revolutionary
republicans of France. In combating the renewed strength of monarchism
resulting from the various restorations in Europe after the fall of Napo-
leon, the republican movement was at first led by liberal secret societies,
notably by that of the Carbonari, of which the three Scheffer brothers
became members. This was an anti-monarchical organization of uncertain
origin (it perhaps emanated from Freemasonry) that represented views
ranging from moderate liberalism to ultra-revolutionary radicalism,® and
was strong among the republican bourgeoisie and patriotic nobility rather
than among the masses. The Carbonari movement had first become espe-
cially powerful in Italy, where its name originated but where it had
perhaps been stimulated by soldiers of the French Revolution, At any rate,
in the early years of the nineteenth century it appeared in particular
strength among Neapolitan republicans who opposed equally the absolutis-
tic rule of the Bourbon king, Ferdinand, and the usurpation of kingship by
Napoleon’s marshal, Murat. During the post-Napoleonic era in. Italy,
among the Carbonari were the young Mazzini and also Byron, whose
readiness to become a Carbonaro reflected the strong element of romantic
 Other Radical Artists and Critics in France / 169

libertarianism and love of conspiracy in this and the numerous similar

secret societies of the time.
During the early post-Napoleonic period the Carbonari also became
particularly strong in France in opposition to the restored Bourbons there:
it is said that in 1819 there were 20,000 French Carbonari alone. Two of
the seven founders of the French movement at this time were Bazard, the
future Saint-Simonian “Pére,” and Buchez, who, we have seen, was later a
Saint-Simonian and then a founder of French Christian socialism. Another
future Saint-Simonian, Arnold Scheffer’s friend Pierre Leroux, was likewise
a Carbonaro. So, also, were the Marquis de Lafayette, who succeeded
Bazard as president of the French organization and leader of its revolution-
ary conspiracies, and Auguste Blanqui, that revolutionary republican for
whom Marx had a life-long admiration.
As Carbonari, the three Scheffer brothers all became deeply involved
in liberal revolutionary activities. They were joined in the Carbonari by the
landscape painter Paul Huet, one of Ary Scheffer’s friends from the atelier
Guérin. They were also joined by Horace Vernet, who although never a
student under Guérin was the good friend of Ary Scheffer as well as of
Géricault, and was to be mentioned favorably by Marx and Engels when
they wrote Die deutsche Ideologie in 1845-1846.
In 1818, Arnold Scheffer was jailed for three months for publishing a
brochure entitled De I’état de Ia liberté. In the following year, his brother
Ary exhibited at the Salon a picture, The Patriotic Devotion of the Six
Burghers of Calais, recording the sacrifice of six citizens of Calais who in
1347 gave themselves as hostages to Edward III of England in return for
lifting the bloody siege of their city. Romantic in its Gothic Revival sub-
ject-matter, the painting also reflected democratic connotations inasmuch
as the six hostages were representatives of and from the people. Years later,
the sculptor Rodin was to treat the same subject, again largely for demo-
cratic reasons.
As Carbonari, the Scheffer brothers were closely connected with their
fellow-member and leader, Lafayette. Arnold Scheffer was Lafayette’s secre-
tary, and the first portraits painted by Ary Scheffer in France (whence he
had come from Holland as a boy) were of Lafayette and members of his
family.® In the circle of Lafayette, Ary made the acquaintance of Comte
Charles Philibert de Lasteyrie, who applied in his own domain the meth-
ods that the great British utopian socialist, Robert Owen, had ted early in
his career in his factory town at New Lanark.
The peak of the Scheffer brothers’ revolutionary career came in 1821,
when they all played important roles in organizing and attempting to carry
out an abortive Carbonari insurrection at Belfort. This was only one of
many failures of the Carbonari and similar secret societies as they vainly
attempted to lead the revolutionary republican movement to victory. After
the Bourbon king Louis XVIII was succeeded by his brother, Charles X,
170 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

in 1824, the repeated lack of success of such liberal conspiracies encouraged

the new king, like other continental monarchs, to move toward absolut-
ism. During Charles’s reign, Ary Scheffer’s studio was a refuge of conspira-
tors against the regime; and he tried to maintain his own revolutionary
spirit by painting scenes illustrating such songs of the Revolution as the
Chant du Départ and the Marseillaise (Fig. 12). However, the complete
failure of revolutionary liberalism was causing it to become ever more
discredited as the leading revolutionary republican movement. As it gradu-
ally lost its place of leadership, the liberals themselves became increasingly
disheartened and less radical and revolutionary in spirit.
The Revolution of July 1830, in which Charles X and the House of
Bourbon were finally overthrown, was brought about, and the king’s
abdication compelled, by a combination of republican, radical, and liberal
workers and students of Paris. The French provinces failed to uphold the
republicans of Paris, however, with the consequence that it was the liberal
bourgeoisie of France, rather than the working class, who gained control.
And the bourgeoisie turned, not to republicans and a republic, but to the
Orléanist party, which set up Louis Philippe as a constitutional monarch.
Because Louis Philippe himself was so essentially bourgeois in tastes and
interests, he and his liberal supporters became anathema to both republi-
cans and socialists, the number of whom steadily increased as more opposi-
tion to his reign developed.
One formerly revolutionary liberal at first strong in support of Louis
Philippe was Ary Scheffer, who had taken an active part in the Revolution
of 1830 and painted a picture of it called Scenes of the Days of July. As
time passed, however, he found himself increasingly disgusted with Louis
Philippe’s regime. Beginning in 1844, he ceased to take an active interest in
public affairs—thereby displaying that ultimate disillusionment with poli-
tics which had been so frequent among once-radical artists. This did not
prevent him, however, from continuing to lead an ardent campaign of
radicals in art opposed to the tyranny of the Academy. With the painters
Delacroix, Chenavard, and Théodore Rousseau, and the sculptor Barye,
among others," he attended fortnightly dinners given by the painter Dupré
in 1847. With them he formed a society whose members were pledged not
to exhibit their works at the royal Salon: open war was declared on the
academic jury system as being undemocratic and inimical to all progressive
art.

2. Revolutionary Republicanism
and Delacroix’s Liberty
AA mone Tue radicals who had been chiefly responsible for the
success of
the Revolution of 1830, the socialists had not played an impressive role.
For at that time the chief socialists were followers of Saint-Simon,
who,
 Fic. 12. Allons, enfants de la Patrie! (1825) by Ary Scheffer.

like his rival Fourier, had been led by imprisonment and threats of execu-
tion in the French Revolution of 1789, to abhor revolutionary violence.
Therefore, when the Revolution of 1830 broke out, the Saint-Simonians
found themselves divided. On July 28, 1830, the two “Fathers” of the
Saint-Simonian sect hastily issued a circular recommending neutrality to
their disciples. In spite of it some of their younger followers fought or
sought to fight on the barricades: Sainte-Beuve, for instance, was much
disappointed when he rushed back to Paris from Normandy only to find
the Revolution completed. However, most of the artists and writers more
simply
or less affected by Saint-Simonianism, including Balzac and Hugo,
the chief example of
went quietly on with their own work, so that
romantically realistic art depicting the Revolution of 1830 was executed,
not by a Saint-Simonian, but by a great romantic painter only temporarily
stimulated by republicanism and by liberalism.
Leading
The work of art in question was Delacroix’s famous Liberty
of
the People on the Barricades (Fig. 13), which was painted with a degree
figure of
realism most unusual for the time, apart from the allegorical
i727 PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND ls WUt2y ia

Liberty herself. This figure, however, is so classical in spirit despite its

movement, that it may even have been suggested to Delacroix by some
Victory statue of Antiquity such as the Victory of Paionios. If so, the
figure reflects the kind of romantic classicism exemplified in the Greek
revivalism that had become popular in much Western art at that time,
especially as a result of the Greek War for Independence of 1821-1829.
In any case, so well did Delacroix’s Liberty express the spirit of the
Revolution of 1830 that it became, and long remained, a symbol of both
liberty and republicanism—and therefore of important aspects of early
social radicalism. It must be remembered that in 1830 when the Revolu-
tion inspired Delacroix to paint the picture, and continuing at least until
the failure of radical republicanism in the Revolutions of 1848, the word
“republic” connoted in France, and elsewhere on the Continent, meanings
very different from the kind of democratic organization under middle-class
capitalist control which it came to signify in the later nineteenth century.
After the Carbonari and other liberal secret societies failed in their leader-
ship of the republican movement, it was led for a time by a variety of
radicals for whom the word “republic” had already come to have several
different and somewhat conflicting meanings beyond the earlier simple
opposition to monarchical tyranny. To many of the more radical it
connoted a United States of Europe envisaged as a brotherhood of work-
ers, with weapons transformed into tools to be used by all members
of society and with economic equality considered as even more important
than equality before the law or political equality. Among the republicans
were therefore numbered many internationally minded utopian socialists.
Other republicans, however, were strongly nationalistic, dreaming of their
country—Young France (celebrated in an unpolitical way by Theophile
Gautier in his Jeune-France of 1833), Young Italy, Young Germany, or
whatever it might be—as taking the lead in far-reaching agrarian, in-
dustrial, and economic reforms.” The Italian republican patriot, early
socialist, and one-time Carbonaro, Giuseppe Mazzini—who was so stimu-
lated by Saint-Simonian ideas that his views~ have been described as
“four-fifths . . . Saint-Simonist in origin,” and as “Saint-Simonism applied
to nationalism” “—combined both aspects of republicanism and joined
these with socialist ideas when he founded Young Italy to transform
Carbonarism in 1832. Two years later he founded Young Europe. In doing
so, although never a socialist, he anticipated the combination of interna-
tional socialism and nationalism made in Stalin’s highly un-republican
Russia. It is significant that Mazzini, who, like Saint-Simon in his later
days, held an organismic view of society, in romantic and Saint-Simonian
fashion regarded the true artist as a “priest of universal life and prophet of
high social aim.” * About equally interested in problems of social organiza-
tion and in music, as an exile in London from 1837 Mazzini wrote articles
on Italian and German music (surprisingly, he disliked “modern” music),
as well as on Fourierism, communism, and his friend Carlyle, among other
 Other Radical Artists and Critics in France / 173

subjects. One might add that Mazzini was joined in the nationalist Italian
republican cause by young Garibaldi after the latter—as he related in the
first edition of his autobiography—had been stimulated by conversations
he had had with Saint-Simon’s disciple, the theoretician of art, Emile
Barrault, while serving as mate on the ship carrying Barrault’s group of
Saint-Simonian missionaries to the Near East in 1833. Garibaldi—whose
favorite artist was Hogarth, called by him “the painter of the people” “—
often advocated anarchism, but became sympathetic to the Marx-dominated
International Workingmen’s Association (First International) and the
Paris Commune of 1871, eventually calling himself a socialist.
To such varieties of republicans in 1830 and for the next eighteen
years, at least, Delacroix’s Liberty could in one way or another serve as a
symbol of their political dreams. Yet by the time Delacroix first exhibited
Liberty Leading the People at the Salon of April 1831—in which over forty
other representations of the July Revolution were also displayed—lack of
unity among radicals had enabled the bourgeoisie to take over, with the
result that the bourgeois regime of Louis Philippe was firmly in the saddle
and republican theories were already being judged subversive. Although
Louis Philippe bought the painting so as not to disturb republican
opinion,*® it was relegated by official order to the comparatively obscure
corridors of the Louvre. Then, in July 1839—the year of an abortive radical
revolt led by Blanqui and Barbés—the regime decided to remove all
pictures inspired by the July Revolution of 1830 from their stretchers, roll
them up, and hide them away in a storeroom; however, the Directeur des
Beaux-Arts happened to be a friend of Delacroix, and he advised the
painter to take the picture away while “waiting for better times.”
What had happened to Delacroix’s painting simply reflected the
growing repression under Louis Philippe’s bourgeois monarchy. ‘The
French electorate was restricted to less than 250,000 men; and there were
heavy limitations on freedom of speech, of the press, and of association
which were especially disturbing under a regime that had come to power as
a result of a popular revolution against a monarch who had violated the
tight to free expression. In 1834, repressive laws passed by Louis Philippe’s
government brought about an unsuccessful revolt of the workers of Lyon,
as a result of which the French workers came to feel that they had been
excluded from the social body controlled by the bourgeoisie. The inevita-
ble consequence was that they were increasingly attracted by anti-bourgeois
revolutionary movements, especially after the failure in 1839 of the work-
ers’ insurrection led by Blanqui and Barbés and after the publication in
1840 of Louis Blanc’s book Organisation du travail, which made socialism
an integral part of the working-class movement.
By the time Marx arrived at Paris in 1843, therefore, that movement
and socialism had begun to approach each other in several different ways.
First, there was the Democratic Socialist Party of Blanc and Ledru-Rollin,
which was composed of a mixture of proletarian and middle-class elements,
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
Vs yi PRACTICE

but which rejected communism. Then there was the proletarian utopian
him-
communism of Etienne Cabet, who, however, was not a proletarian
self. Nonetheless, from the ranks of the proletariat there were already
coming forward such socialist leaders as the anarchist Proudhon and the
one-time Saint-Simonian, Pierre Leroux, both of whom had begun as
printers and so as craftsmen-members of the working class. Another influ-
ential working-class leader was George Sand’s friend Agricol Perdiguier,
one example of whose writings had been read with approval by Delacroix
in 1843 while visiting George Sand, whose son Maurice was his pupil.
Meanwhile, too, the spirit of revolution had been growing stronger.
Since early in Louis Philippe’s reign, more and more political societies had
been founded to oppose the’ monarchy and its bourgeois aristocracy. The
ever-increasing official persecution of such societies forced them under-
ground, and as secret organizations they became ever more violent in spirit.
By 1840, as a consequence of the failure of the coup of Blanqui and Barbés
the year before, some of these societies had already given rise to splinter
groups of a distinctly communist as well as revolutionary character: in that
year, for instance, a communist banquet was held at Belleville as counter-
part to the banquets of the reformist opposition. One group stressing
revolutionary socialist internationalism, the Bund der Gerechten, was
made up of German refugees, among whom was Wilhelm Weitling, a
famous communist tailor with an interest in the arts who later settled in
the United States. It was from this and lesser circles of German émigrés
that delegates went to the congress of the Communist League, held in
London in 1847, which commissioned Marx and Engels to draft the
authoritative statement of the communist revolutionary democrats known
as the Communist Manifesto.
After Louis Philippe’s regime was overthrown in the February Revolu-
tion of 1848 and was succeeded by the provisional government, hundreds
of radical political clubs flourished in France: every socialist sect and every
apostle of revolution had a society. Of these—which for a time, like the
similar societies of the French Revolution, exerted some political influence
—the two most widely known among radical writers and figures in the arts
were Barbés’s Club de la révolution, of which Pierre Leroux, Proudhon,
and the noted socialist art critic Thoré were members, and Blanqui’s
Société républicaine centrale, to which belonged the socially concerned
writers Sainte-Beuve, Baudelaire, and Leconte de Lisle. Despite much
agitation by such groups, the middle-class provisional government man-
aged to weather all storms. The bloody repression of the revolt of the
workers of Paris in June 1848 meant that the Revolution of 1848 failed as a
workers’ revolution in France as in the other countries of Europe, for soon
Louis Napoleon was elected President of the Second Republic. In 1852,
following a coup d’état in the previous year, he succeeded in making
himself Emperor as Napoleon III, being supported by a plebiscite to the
tune of 7,481,000 votes to 647,000. Meanwhile, the utopian sects had faded
 Other Radical Artists and Critics in France / 175

away after 1848, leaving behind the anarchists, of whom Proudhon was the
chief figure, together with the heirs of Jacobinism who followed such
radical leaders as Blanqui, called by some the inventor of the term “In-
dustrial Revolution,” and only a few scattered Marxists. These groups were
always under attack by the government, and under pressure were likely to
collaborate or even to merge.
As for Delacroix, after the expulsion of Louis Philippe in 1848, he had
served on the jury to judge the designs submitted in a competition for a
figure symbolizing the new republic. At this time, also, he lent his Liberty
Leading the People to a painter from Lyon who wanted to display it in
that area so noted for its radicalism; however, the new regime was worried
by the revolutionary connotations of the picture and refused to allow it to
be shown. Yet Delacroix was now very far from being a revolutionary: the
political liberalism which had led him to paint the Liberty had long since
evaporated. He wrote: “I have buried the man of yore with his hopes and
his dreams of the future.” ** He was by no means enthusiastic about the
Revolution of 1848, and so did not carry out the request of the socialist art
critic Thoré that he paint an Equality on the Barricades of February to
celebrate the revolution. Moreover, Delacroix flatly rejected basic doctrines
of the great utopian socialists. Thus in his journal for 1850 he sharply
criticized that belief in the idea of progress and the steady perfectioning of
humanity which, he said, Saint-Simon, Fourier, and others had made
fashionable. On the contrary, declared Delacroix, “Humanity goes by
chance. . . . Perfection is here when barbarism [simultaneously] is there.”
Far from there being progress in art, it is to the civilizations of Antiquity
that “we owe. . . our arts, in which we shall never equal them. . . . They
are our masters in everything. . . .” ”
In 1855, some three years after Louis Napoleon had made himself
emperor, Delacroix even declared that for himself the public had become
“ce stupide troupeau” (this stupid herd)—hardly a revolutionary or so-
cially liberal point of view. In view of his attitude in mid-century, it 1s
scarcely surprising that when he wished to display the Liberty at the
Exposition universelle of 1855, Napoleon III, consulted by his officials,
granted permission after merely asking if the painting was a good one. But
if the Exposition universelle seemed to have provided Delacroix with a
long-deserved, long-delayed triumph, it was one that many social radicals
regarded as a betrayal. On behalf of the socialists, therefore, Flaubert’s
friend, the socialist writer Maxime du Camp, made a violent attack on
Delacroix, maintaining that he was out of touch with humanity and
history, untruthful, and disdainful of human dignity—as well as ignorant
of the first notions of drawing.”°
Soon Delacroix’s Liberty was acquired by the state for the Luxem-
bourg Museum—a fact clearly demonstrating that both its subject-matter
and its kind of romantic realism no longer seemed revolutionary, libertar-
ian, or socially daring even to an imperial regime. Then, in 1874, under the
n7 6 Vi PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

Third Republic, the Liberty was placed in the Louvre as a symbol of that
new regime. For by that time republicanism in France was associated
entirely with the bourgeoisie and capitalism, which it had certainly not
been back in 1830, when the revolution of that year had inspired Delacroix
to paint the picture. Much later, however, its revolutionary subject-matter,
treated in a style of romantic realism largely derived from Géricault, was
destined to attract—like Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa—the admiration
of Marxist-Leninists, who regarded the painting as a precursor of Soviet
socialist realism." And they did so even though Delacroix himself had cast
aside all social interests soon after painting the picture.

3. Revolutionary Republcamsm: The Critic

Planche; Daumier, and the Barbizon School

“Wren Delacroix’s Liberty had first been exhibited in 1831, most of the
handful of critics who reacted favorably to it were sympathetic to the
romantic socialism of the Saint-Simonians as well as to romantic realism in
art, while being somewhat more inclined to a politically revolutionary
point of view than were the leaders of the Saint-Simonians themselves.
One of these critics was Gustave Planche, who two years later, in 1833, was
to be the first to apply the word “réalisme” to art, apparently doing so
under the influence of Balzac, with whom he was well acquainted.” As a
young man, Planche had become interested in Saint-Simon’s theories of
social reform and had enjoyed the friendship not only of Balzac, but also
of Sainte-Beuve, Victor Hugo, and George Sand. Eventually, however, in
the years after he had first made use of the term “realism,” he gave up
socialism, becoming increasingly conservative in politics and increasingly
opposed to realistic art.
One of Planche’s good friends in his more radical days was the noted
romantic sculptor Pierre Jean David d’Angers, a one-time member of Vic-
tor Hugo’s Cénacle as well as a wholehearted revolutionary republican who
had fought on the barricades against Charles X in the Revolution of 1830.
David d’Angers’s radicalism was reflected, not so much in his style, which
was an only slightly romantic-realistic version of academic classicism, as in
his subject-matter. For he liked to make posthumous portraits of all who
had served their country in liberty, and of all revolutionaries whether he
wholly agreed with them or not. Thus he executed a full-length statue of
Jefferson (now in the Capitol at Washington) from a portrait by Sully
owned by Lafayette, a bust of Washington (also in the Capitol), a
medallion of Bolivar, and medallions of those far more radical revolution-
aries, Marat and “Gracchus” Babeuf (Fig. 11).
David d’Angers’s friend Gustave Planche was not the only socially
 Fic. 13. Liberty Leading the People on the Barricades or July 28, 1830
(1830-1831) by Eugéne Delacroix.

radical writer to recognize the merit of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the

People (Fig. 13) when it was first exhibited: another was Heinrich Heine.
Unlike Planche, however, Heine remained a radical—although an uneven
one—for the rest of his life. Besides being early influenced by Saint-Simoni-
anism (he dedicated one of his books to Enfantin).” Heine, we have seen,
was destined to become Marx’s friend and to be exaggeratedly praised for
his socialism by Marx and Engels. It is thus especially significant that he
recognized in Delacroix’s painting a kind of social realism. This he noted
was related to a technique which deliberately eschewed the smooth surface
and flawless colors of the official academy style for a rougher, bolder
manner which enhanced the realistic effect. He wrote: “Just this absence
of varnish and sheen . . . and [the presence of] the sun-dried hue .. . all
gives to the picture a truth, a reality, [and] an originality in which we find
the real physiognomy of the days of July.” ** Nevertheless, even while
reality,
Heine valued the painting for its expression of revolutionary social
y individualist ic originality. Heine
he equally valued it for its romanticall
175 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

was an extreme romantic to whom the artist as a completely free individ-

ual, alone master of his soul, had a vital significance that was to be
essentially rejected by the much more nearly deterministic Marxists. This
romantic individualism was almost equally characteristic of Delacroix,
who, as noted above, so rapidly lost that brief interest in social liberalism
which had flared up in him during the Revolution of 1830.
On this account, despite the admiration of some early socialists for
Liberty Leading the People, the earliest French artist to be wholeheartedly
admired by Marxists was not Delacroix, as it was not David, Geéricault, or
even Goya. Instead, it was an even more “realistic” artist who throughout
his life devoted himself especially to depicting common people in contem-
porary life, and who did so with great sympathy. ‘This artist was Honoré
Daumier (1808-1879), the greatest French social satirist of all time who
also painted for his own pleasure sympathetic pictures of washerwomen
and other members of what Marxists call the proletariat. Yet in politics
Daumier, who was a contemporary of Marx and who fought on the
barricades in the Revolution of 1830, was never a socialist, communist, or
anarchist—he was a “typical revolutionary republican,” *° and as such was
strongly anti-bourgeois in the days before republicanism became regarded
as associated with the bourgeoisie and capitalism. His ardently democratic
sympathies were shared by his first friends in the world of art, the talented
sculptor Auguste Préault and the highly radical painter Philippe Auguste
Jeanron (Fig. 19).
In view of Daumier’s realism, it is significant that he never forgot
advice given him in his youth by Balzac; and he himself was much admired
by Delacroix, who made copies of some of Daumier’s designs. It was the
comparatively new medium of lithography (invented by Senefelder about
1796) that made it possible for this great graphic artist to reach a mass
audience with his social criticism on a scale impossible only a few years
earlier, when Géricault had used the medium for several drawings of work-
ingmen. Ever since, the lithograph has been a favorite medium of socially
radical artists and other radicals—indeed, one of Karl Marx’s sons-in-law,
Paul Lafargue, gave up his profession of medicine to open a photographic-
lithographic studio.
Because Daumier was so anti-bourgeois, he strongly opposed the
monarchy of Louis Philippe, that quintessentially bourgeois king. From
1832 until 1835, in which year the government of Louis Philippe forbade
all political caricature, Daumier drew devastating cartoons against the
regime for the periodical, La Caricature morale, religieuse, littéraire et
scientifique (1830-1835). In 1832, he was sentenced to jail for six months
because he had caricatured Louis Philippe too recognizably in a lithograph
entitled “Gargantua.” Daumier’s somewhat older friend Balzac also con-
tributed to La Caricature, the publisher of which, the journalist and
caricaturist Charles Philipon, was an even more radical critic of the regime
 Other Radical Artists and Critics in France / 179
of Louis Philippe than the artists and writers he employed. Even though
Philipon had to give up publishing La Caricature when Louis Philippe’s
regime clamped down, he continued to publish, in milder form now, his
other periodical Le Chariyari, for which Daumier also drew. Among the
other artists whom Philipon drove to explore the new medium of litho-
graphy while commenting adversely on conditions under Louis Philippe
were such considerable figures as Decamps, Granville, and the future great
photographer Nadar. Another was Balzac’s friend Gavarni (pseudonym of
Guillaume Sulpice Chevalier), whose strongest social concerns, however,
developed only later as a consequence of his horror at seeing working-class
conditions in highly industrialized England.
Still, at this period French industry was likewise beginning to
develop on a large scale; and Daumier’s anti-bourgeois views led him to
sympathize with the workers. In 1834 he published in a supplement to La
Caricature one of his most celebrated lithographs, “a Rue Transnonain”

Fic. 14. “La Rue Transnonain, le 14 avril 1834” (1834) by Honoré Daumier,
lithograph from a supplement to La Caricature.
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
180 / PRACTICE

(Fig. 14). The drawing was inspired by the massacre of twelve innocent
working people in a single Parisian apartment house at 12 rue T’ransnonain
after a sniper in the building had killed a wounded officer of troops
mobilized to break the threat of a workmen’s uprising stimulated by an
insurrection of silk workers in Lyon earlier that year. These uprisings
accompanying the growth of the infant trade-union movement in France
were specifically caused by the new repressive laws of Louis Philippe’s
regime against freedom of association. The lithograph depicts the shambles
of a workman’s lodging after the butchery: on the floor in a pool of blood
is the body of a man murdered in his nightshirt, beneath him is his dead
child, by his outthrust left hand the head of another dead man, while in
the dark background can be dimly seen a woman’s body. Here, to the stark
realism of the rendering, great emotional intensity is added by the diagonal
composition of the spotlighted main figure in the midst of dark shadows.
Although forced by censorship to give up political cartooning from
1835 until Louis Philippe was overthrown in 1848, Daumier continued to
express through his art his indignation at certain aspects of French social
life, together with a private readiness for revolution. This was to be
exemplified in an exhibition, “Daumier as a Polemicist,” put on at Paris in
1945 by the communist-dominated National Front of the Arts. For a
radically revolutionary spirit had been reflected not only in Daumier’s
return to political satire in 1848 and in the difficult years of 1870-1871
but especially in works that he executed for himself, such as the oil
paintings, The Uprising (Fig. 15) and A Family on the Barricades, or the
watercolor, Camille Desmoulins Speaking in the Palais Royal, July 12,
1789, which depicts Desmoulins making the speech immediately responsi-
ble for the outbreak of the French Revolution. These and “La Rue
Transnonain” were among the illustrations selected for a series of articles
published in the chief Soviet art magazine, Iskusstvo (Art), about an
exhibition at Moscow in 1958 celebrating the 150th anniversary of Dau-
mier’s birth.”
Daumier welcomed the Revolution of February 1848, which pro-
claimed the “social republic,” and he took part in the competition held by
the new government for a figure of the Republic, a competition organized
by the radical painter Jeanron. Daumier’s oil sketch, now in the Louvre,
was one of twenty-four selected out of several hundred for exhibition.
However, Daumier was an opponent of the leftist revolution of June 1848,
which marked the final break of middle-class radicals with the extreme
Left; and he made particular fun of the socialists in 1849 in a series of ten
sheets entitled Les Femmes socialistes. He opposed Louis Napoleon, who
was known as “Saint-Simon on horseback,” ** doing so particularly after
the latter made himself Napoleon IIT in 1852. But Daumier equally op-
posed conservatives who saw the red spectre of communism wherever they
looked, ridiculing them, for instance, in his lithograph of 1869 entitled
“Le Spectre rouge.” The superb little paintings of laundresses and other
 FIG.15. The Uprising (ca. 1848) by Honoré Daumier.

working people that he executed in the late 1850’s and 1860's, and that so
well expressed his sympathy for the lower classes, were not exhibited until
1878, a year before he died: only then did a group of friends led by Victor
Hugo manage to put on a show of Daumier’s paintings as well as his
drawings. In that thoroughly bourgeois period in France, however, the
exhibition was a dismal failure, running a deficit of 4,000 francs—and a
year later Daumier was buried in a pauper’s grave. No doubt the failure of
the exhibition resulted partly from Daumier’s known sympathy with the
Commune of 1871, reflected in some of his published drawings and in his
election, with or without his consent, to its Commission of Artists to
protect works of art and liberalize the training of artists.
Among Daumier’s artist friends were several members of the anti-aca-
demic and realistic Barbizon School, which took its name from the village
of Barbizon in the forest of Fontainebleau, where Daumier himself some-
times worked with them. As most artists of the Barbizon School were
landscape painters, their art therefore could not so directly convey social
values. Nevertheless, insofar as their painting was anti-academic and rela-
tively realistic, indirectly at least it had social implications, as did some of
the activities of Barbizon artists. As early as 1833 the landscape painters
Théodore Rousseau, Dupré, and Jacque, all of whom became prominent in
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
082 Vy. PRACTICE

other intel-
the Barbizon School, had allied themselves with Daumier and
lectual radicals, including the painter Jeanron and the critic Thoré, with
the aim of fighting the official academic Salon.* In April 1847, Rousseau,
, and
Dupré, and Jacque joined Daumier, Jeanron, Delacroix, Ary Scheffer
the studio of the animal sculpto r
other artists at the meeting held in
rating an indepe ndent group to
Barye for the purpose of legally incorpo
urge battle with the Academy. Furthermore, the Barbizon artists partici-
pated in the events of 1848, and their careers were strongly affected and in
some cases actually shaped by the Revolution. For it marked the end of
romanticism and an early triumph of realism among progressive artists. In
this triumph the Barbizon landscape painters were leaders, partly because
in their hands the act of painting outdoors direct from nature had passed
from a frequent custom to a necessity, made possible by the invention of
paint in tubes. Now realism became important also in figure painting,
which by its very subject-matter could more directly communicate social
content. But in its figure painting as in its landscapes, the Barbizon School
—somewhat like Jean Jacques Rousseau, Jefferson, and Delacroix, as well
as Morris and even in some respects Kropotkin later—displayed an anti-
industrial point of view.
The greatest figure painter of the Barbizon School, Jean Francois
Millet (1814-1875), is, of course, noted for his subjects taken from peasant
life, Not unlike his friend Daumier, he thus was at once anti-academic and
anti-bourgeois in his subject-matter. His style too was unacademic in being
unusually realistic for that time—according to some authorities Millet was
actually influenced by the style of Daumier.”
Although, with Daumier, Millet welcomed the proclamation of the
Second Republic after the Revolution of 1848 and participated in the new
government’s competition for the figure of the Republic, he was little
inclined to politics. He flatly denied that he was a socialist, insisting that
he did not even know what the word meant *; and indeed, although he
asserted the moral superiority of hard labor, and thus the dignity of labor,
there was no sentiment of social protest or cry of revolt in his sympathetic
paintings of peasants, because his attitude toward the treatment of the
peasantry in French society was essentially fatalistic. Nevertheless, his art
was very frequently explained by others in political terms. And in depicting
common people in a realistic way he was not without influence, especially
on various Americans, including writers and artists, who did incline toward
socialism or communism. For example, the well-known poem The Man
with the Hoe, written in a populist vein by the American socialist poet
Edwin Markham, was directly inspired by Millet’s painting of the same
name (Fig. 16), even though in a letter of 1863 Millet had denied that this
painting was socialistic. And in 1938 the American communist newspaper,
the Daily Worker, ran an article entitled “Mullet, ‘Painter of Peasants’;
Famous Artist Made Unique Contribution to French Painting,” which
declared that, even though Millet lacked social insight in various ways,
“as a groundbreaker . . . his contribution has been weighty indeed.” *
 Fic. 16. The Man with the Hoe (1862-1863) by Jean Frangois Millet.

Certainly Millet’s sympathetically monumental presentation in a solidly

realistic style of common men and women engaged in thoroughly non-
capitalistic activities, could be expected to appeal to socialists and com-
munists.

4. The Republic of 1848-1851

and Art: Chenavard

"De comperirion for the figure of the Republic, in which Daumier and
Millet participated after the Revolution of 1848, was not, however, the
chief art project of the new French Republic. More important, in size at
least, was a project by an artist of radical ideas for a grandiose, and far
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
184 if PRACTICE

from realistic, series of murals intended for the Panthéon at Paris, which in
1791 had been converted from the church of Sainte-Geneviéve to a temple
to honor the great men of France.
The project for the murals was the idea of the painter Paul Chenavard
(1807-1895).°* In April 1848, accompanied by his friend Charles Blanc,
the radical art critic and historian who had become Director of the
Beaux-Arts, Chenavard had called upon the Republic’s Minister of the
Interior, Ledru-Rollin, a radical who had been a leader in overthrowing
King Louis Philippe. Chenavard’s sketches for a series of murals for the
Panthéon on the history of humanity and its greatest men so impressed
Ledru-Rollin that on his own initiative he commissioned Chenavard to
execute them.
It should be noted that Chenavard’s friend Charles Blanc was the
brother of the utopian socialist Louis Blanc, author of the famous socialist
book, Organisation du travail (1839), who had set a new precedent for
socialists by taking part in a government, the revolutionary Provisional
Government of 1848. His project for national social workshops controlled
by workingmen was the chief social and economic project of the new
Republic. Like Chenavard’s mural project, it too was destined to fail, but
historically it helped to make Louis Blanc a major link between utopians
and Marxians.
Chenavard too had socially radical interests, though his art, apart
from his choice of subject-matter, was essentially academic. A native of
Lyon, where Fourier had lived during the French Revolution, Chenavard
had become a member of Victor Hugo’s Cénacle at Paris. In 1830, with his
friend the lithographer Charlet, he had led a claque at the opening of
Hugo’s Hernani, as another friend, Gautier, had done. During the 1830's
Chenavard had spent much time with Saint-Simonians and Fourierists; but
it was their ideas concerning history and humanity, rather than their
immediately social ideas, that primarily inspired the subject-matter of his
murals for the Panthéon inasmuch as he believed neither in the common
man nor in the machine age.
Of the many other influences on Chenavard, one was that of Pierre
Simon Ballanche, like Chenavard a native of Lyon, who through his
connections with Saint-Simonian leaders seems to have been largely re-
sponsible for the religious developments within Saint-Simonianism. An-
other influence was that of the group of religious communist painters in
Rome known as the Nazarenes, or German Pre-Raphaelites. On a trip to
Rome in the early 1830’s, Chenavard had made friends with the two
leading Nazarenes, Overbeck and Cornelius. Through them he was intro-
duced to Hegel. Also, like such German romantic writers and philosophers
as Herder, Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling, and Fichte, and like Hugo, Le-
roux, Sainte-Beuve, and others in France, Chenavard was stimulated by
oriental mysticism, especially that of India. This was a current destined to
continue to influence much avant-garde art in the West, including, we
 Other Radical Artists and Critics in France / 185
shall see, that of important socially radical artists in the twentieth
century.
Chenavard’s politically revolutionary sympathies had been demon-
strated in 1832, when he painted a scene from the life of that early hero of
the French Revolution, Mirabeau. The quality of the painting was ad-
mired by such painters as Delacroix and Gros, but, exhibited at the Salon
of 1833, it had to be withdrawn for political reasons by order of Louis
Philippe himself.
When, after the fall of Louis Philippe, Chenavard received the com-
mission for the murals in the Panthéon, he insisted that his several
assistants join their talents to his in a deliberately anonymous style—
thereby anticipating that emphasis on collective works of art so typical of
many later social radicals. Significantly, Chenavard’s first chief assistant in
preparing the murals was Dominique Papéty (1815-1849), an ardent
Fourierist, who was a pupil of Ingres but was influenced also by Ary
Scheffer as well as by Chenavard himself. One of Papéty’s best-known
works is The Dream of Happiness in the Musée Vivenel at Compiégne.
This academic depiction of a Fourierist Eden was painted in 1839 while
Papéty, a winner of the Grand Prix de Rome, was a student under Ingres
at the French Academy in Rome. Another of his works with strong
Fourierist implications is his The Past, the Present, and the Future of
1847, a huge work over three meters long, now in the Museum at Marseille
in very poor condition. In academic fashion, this consists of three unre-
lated allegorical figures: an old man seated in shadow, to represent the
Past; a seated younger man representing the Present; and the angel of the
Future, standing and radiant. It may well have been this picture reflecting
a Fourierist conception of history which led Chenavard a year later to
choose Papéty as his assistant for the Panthéon murals, the more so as the
painting, like the murals themselves, was executed in a somewhat banal
academic-classic style.
Work on the murals continued through the workers’ insurrection of
June 1848, the first genuine civil war between proletariat and bourgeoisie,
which was caused by the government’s dissolution of Louis Blanc’s “na-
tional workshops” and his flight into exile. ‘The mural project also survived
the flight of Chenavard’s patron Ledru-Rollin after the latter's abortive
attempt in 1849 to stir insurrection against Louis Napoléon, who had
defeated Ledru-Rollin for the presidency of the Republic.
The coup d état of 1851 that enabled Louis Napoléon to make
himself Napoléon III was followed by the reestablishment of the Pan-
théon as a church by order of the Emperor himself. Catholic reaction then
succeeded in bringing Chenavard’s project to a close, though Napoleon
sought to make some amends by giving him the nbbon of the Légion
dhonneur in 1853. All that remains of Chenavard’s tremendous effort is an
incomplete series of designs too large to be exhibited. Most of the series is
preserved in the Musée des Beaux-Arts of his native Lyon.
 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
186

In spite of Chenavard’s essentially academic style, his ideas and

personality made him the admired friend of many leading French artists
He
and critics who were either artistically or socially radical in some way.
was the close friend of Delacroix and the sculptor Préault. He knew well
the one-time Saint-Simonian critic, Gustave Planche, who like that other
socially radical critic Charles Blanc admired Chenavard’s views. Chenavard
was also the friend of Gautier and of Baudelaire, though the latter rejected
his essentially academic belief that history offers the highest subjects to
painters. When the “Friday Club” of artists was founded at Paris in 1851,
with Daumier, Barye, Corot, and the republican architect Viollet-le-Duc
among its members, Chenavard was ‘by common consent chosen as presi-
dent. He even had friends ‘in the circle of the realist painter Courbet,
including the critic Champfleury and Courbet himself, with whom he
liked to argue. For although Courbet too was a social radical, his then
avant-garde realistic art retained-enough traditional elements so that the
two artists could at least have a basis for argument. Such good friends were
they that Courbet even painted a portrait of Chenavard.

5. Napoleon IIL, and Social

and Artistic Radicalism

Line Chenavard, Millet and Daumier were among the friends of Courbet
(1819-1878); and like Daumier, Courbet refused a decoration offered by
the government of the Second Empire. This was at a time when Napoleon
III was trying to rally liberals and radicals to his support, as already he had
rallied the masses by means of a mollifying program of social legislation.
Among other things, Napoleon had early taken an interest in the problem
of workmen’s dwellings, and within a year of the coup @état by which he
made himself Emperor, had organized an important competition for work-
men’s flats called cités ouvriéres. It should be added that the favorite
architect of Napoleon and the Empress Eugénie, Chenavard’s friend, the
great architect-archaeologist and theoretician of architecture, Eugene Em-
manuel Viollet-le-Duc, was violently anti-academic and anti-clerical while
also being a revolutionary republican who as a lad of sixteen in 1830 had
helped to build a revolutionary barricade in Paris. Naturally, as long as the
Second Empire lasted, Viollet-le-Duc had to avoid any overt expression of
his republican sympathies, even though the Emperor must have known of
them. Thereafter, however, Viollet-le-Duc professed them publicly and
participated in Left-republican politics. :
If it seems paradoxical that a left-wing republican such as Viollet-le-
 Other Radical Artists and Critics in France fa es ay
Duc should have become an imperial protégé, it must be remembered that
Napoleon III had always been opposed as a Bonapartist upstart by the
royalist supporters of the houses of Bourbon and of Orléans, and therefore
by the chief supporters of the academic tradition, who were royalists.
Furthermore, though Napoleon had obtained support from the provinces
to justify his coup d’état by claiming to be the “Man of Order” who alone
could save them from the folly of “Red Paris,” he had had leftist connec-
tions before becoming ruler of France. Although he later denied that he
had ever been a Carbonaro in his youth, as was often alleged, while in
prison from 1840 to 1846 following his abortive revolt against the govern-
ment of Louis Philippe, he had corresponded with the largely Saint-Sim-
onian author George Sand, the anarchist Proudhon, and the revolutionary
socialist Louis Blanc; had collaborated with several journalists of the Left;
and had become the hero of the positivists. In 1845 he had written his
L’Extinction du pauperisme; and he received the support of workingmen
for his coup d'état of 1851. In 1852 that counter-revolution was even
approved by Proudhon in La Révolution sociale démontrée par le coup
@état du 2 décembre, which saw Proudhon appeal to Napoleon to “carry
out without restrictions or equivocation the social revolution.” * Only in
the light of a supposedly “socialistic” emperor, so many of whose bankers
and administrators were former Saint-Simonian socialists, can one under-
stand the politics of France at the time of the Second Empire. It should be
added that Napoleon’s eventual Empress, Eugénie, as a young woman in
the mid-1840’s had so thoroughly studied the works of Fourier that she had
even become known as “la jeune phalanstérienne,” and they had left a
lasting impression on her mind.
Hence, because the Emperor and his Empress were opposed by royal-
ist conservatives, including the leading upholders of the academic tradi-
tion, and themselves had had socially radical interests, it is not wholly
surprising that at times Napoleon should seek to rally to his support
socialists and other radicals, as well as liberals, while correspondingly giving
encouragement to opponents of academicism in art. He in turn received
from those opposed to the academic point of view some cooperation in
artistic matters even when they did not politically favor his regime.
In 1863 Napoleon III particularly attracted avant-garde painters and
sculptors by establishing the Salon des refusés for the exhibition of works
rejected by the official, academic Salon. And in the same year he had also
pleased the opponents of the academic tradition by decreeing a reorganiza-
tion of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. As part of this, Viollet-le-Duc was given
the chair of history and aesthetics there—but the students of the Ecole
were so opposed to this radically anti-academic innovation that they
created continuous disturbances at his lectures and in the end compelled
him to resign.
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
188 / PRACTICE

6. Courbet and Other Social Reatists

since 1840, was one
Une Viollet-le-Duc, Gustave Courbet, a socialist
gave any support to
of the radical and anti-academic artists who never
had been
Napoleon III, even though his friend, the anarchist Proudhon,
the outbreak
briefly attracted into doing so. When, in January 1870, before
imed the lib-
of the disastrous Franco-Prussian War, Napoleon III procla
entati onal
eral Empire, which he believed provided France with repres
since
government and constitutional freedoms such as it had not known
1789, Courbet himself was far too much of a social and political revolu-
tionary to be seduced. He had already been opposed to Napoleon II when
the latter was President of France. In a letter of 1851, before the coup
’état that resulted in Napoleon becoming Emperor, Courbet had declared
himself a democrat, a republican, and a revolutionary, while linking real-
ism in art to his political views. As he put it, he was “not only a socialist
but also a democrat and a republican, in a word a partisan of all revolution,

ric. 17. The Stone-Breakers (1850, now destroyed) by Gustave Courbet.

 Other Radical Artists and Critics in France / 189

and above all a realist. . . .”** He had just exhibited in the Salon of
1850-1851 (it opened December 30, 1850) three realistic pictures: the
huge Burial at Ornans, the Stone-Breakers (Fig. 17), and Peasants of
Flagey Returning from the Fair. They apparently were all specially com-
posed as a protest against the existing social system.
It was with reference to the Burial at Ornans that the word “realism”
had first been applied to Courbet’s art by a friend, the bohemian novelist
and critic of art, literature, and music, Champfleury, in the issue of the
periodical L’Ordre for September 21, 1850.°° Champfleury—who identified
the realist with the dreamer, thereby linking realism with romanticism—
had used “realism” in a favorable sense; however, in the following year
Courbet’s kind of art had been assailed as “‘the realistic reaction” and also
called “materialistic” by the critic Louis de Geofroy, in an article on the
Salon of 1850." We have already seen that the word “réalisme,” applied to
art, had been launched by Gustave Planche in 1833, shortly after the
Revolution of 1830, at a time when he was still sympathetic to Saint-Sim-
onian socialism as well as to realism. About 1846, “realism” as an art term
had begun to achieve general currency; * but only after the Revolution of
1848 did it become clear that realism had come to stay, so that it was easy
for Champfleury in 1850 and Geofroy in 1851 to pick up the term and
apply it to Courbet’s painting. As Courbet began to catch the public eye,
the links uniting realism, social radicalism, and bohemianism must have
seemed complete.
Champfleury’s Les Bourgeois de Molinchart, serialized in 1854 and
published as a book in 1855, a year before Madame Bovary came out in the
Revue de Paris, marked the. beginning of the full Realist School in the
novel. He had come to his ideal of realism as truth in painting and
literature through his admiration for the method of the near-Fourierist
novelist Balzac. Champfleury and many of his friends were members of the
hungry Fourierist group of bohemian artists around another admirer of
Balzac, Henry Murger, whom both Champfleury and Courbet knew well:
him
Champflury, indeed, twice shared quarters with Murger, encouraged
“Marcel” of Scénes de la
to write more realistically, and was the original
vie de Boheme.
politi-
Although Champfleury never attacked the middle class from a
point of view, he and his friends,.including Courbet, saw
cal-economic
isie on the
society as essentially divided between the vast stupid bourgeo
ng themselves,
one hand, and on the other the artist-bohemians, includi
class and
together with all classes and parties in opposition to the middle
circle differed,
the aristocracy. The bohemianism of Champfleury and his
Petit cénacle in
however, from the earlier bohemianism of Gautier and his
origins.” ‘This
having a strong admixture of working-class sympathies and
eury’s belief in the importa nce of democratic
helped to encourage Champfl
who toward 1848 had become associated
art: he was one of several critics
in support of
with the young socialist and republican critic, Charles Blanc,
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
190 Vi PRACTICE

what was known as the Ecole démocratique.*° Under the persistence of this
point of view Courbet himself was to write several years later that, “Real-
ism is in essence democratic art,” “t a statement that could appeal to
Marxists and Marxist-Leninists in future years.
It was in 1855, the year of Gustave Courbet’s closest collaboration
with Champfleury, and the year in which Champfleury published in book
form his realistic novel Les Bourgeois de Molinchart, that Courbet became
popularly recognized as the chief founder of realism in art. For after two of
his major works had been rejected by an academic jury as not suited for
exhibition among the nearly 1,900 paintings selected for display at the
Exposition universelle of 1855 in Paris, he staged an exhibition of his own
in a pavilion specially constructed on the avenue Montaigne at the thresh-
old of the exposition and bearing the inscription Le Réalisme. The catalog
for the exhibit contained an introductory manifesto entitled Du réalisme,
which Champfleury helped him to write—and in which Courbet said,
“The title of ‘Realist’ has been thrust upon me as the title ‘Romantic’ was
thrust upon the men of 1830.” Still, in his art and thought he did flatly
reject, in favor of depicting the “real” world of the senses, the classical—
and academic—ideal that the role of the artist should be to make the
world more beautiful through the beautiful forms of his works. While also,
as he believed, rejecting romanticism, he nonetheless subscribed to the
romantic conception of the artist as a seer and prophet, a leader “on the
summits of mankind”—that conception in which he had been anticipated
by Saint-Simon, among others, and which was later to be so well expressed
by Trotsky in the statement already quoted from Literature and Revolu-
tion (1924): “Art, don’t you see, means prophecy. Works of art are the
embodiments of presentiments. . . .”
Courbet, as both the prophet and the leader of realism, displayed at
his exhibition of 1855 his latest and to date most important picture (Fig.
18), a huge work nearly twenty feet long and twelve feet high now usually
called The Studio, to which he gave the title “Realistic Allegory.” Its
subtitle was “Interior of My Studio, Particularizing a Seven-Year Phase in
My Life as an Artist,” that phase from 1848 to the completion of the
picture. It included, at the right, a representation of Proudhon (who had
been sent to prison for attacking the principle of private property), of the
musician Promayet, of Champfleury, and of Baudelaire (who, accused of
obscenity, would soon be publicly censured and fined). At the left of the
painting Courbet depicted a group of figures intended to demonstrate his
concern for the underprivileged and exploited.” In the center Courbet
represented himself with the Muse of Realism—a blowzy model. For he
believed that of all creatures only man can mold his environment; and of
all men the painter is most concerned with molding the real world, because
it is through art that men’s perception is ordered and through it that what
they will recognize as Reality is determined. This complicated subject-
 Fic. 18. The Studio (1855) by Gustave Courbet.

matter can best be interpreted in the light of Courbet’s Fourierist interests,

and, indeed, seems to reflect the direct stimulation of a sketch made about
1848 by Dominique Papéty for a truly doctrinaire Fourierist painting,
never executed, to be entitled The Last Evening of Slavery.”
It should be noted that the realism exalted by Courbet and by his
friend Champfleury was regarded by their opponents and many of their
supporters as socialist propaganda. Even so, their special concern was rural
(Fig. 17) rather than urban, and so had a strong populist tinge. It should
be emphasized, too, that even though Courbet became popularly regarded
as the father of realism and as a propagandist for social radicalism, he had
been preceded in realism, as in social radicalism, by other painters. Several
of them were strongly socialistic, and at least one had painted truly
proletarian subjects in realistic style relatively early in the reign of Louis
Philippe.
This artist was Philippe Auguste Jeanron (1807-1877), a devoted
socialist and republican, who represented the continuation of an unbroken
but generally neglected current of paintings of the lower classes which had
persisted in French art from the time of Chardin (d. 1779).“* Jeanron’s
Blacksmiths of the Corréze, painted in 1836, had been greeted by the
socialist critic Thoré (about whom much will be said later) as the first step
toward a popular art. And Jeanron himself, as a fervent socialist in the late
 RSA
Se

SS
POSS

1830's and the 1840's, collaborated with other socialists as well as other
republicans. In 1846, for example, some illustrations by Jeanron were
included in Louis Blanc’s Histoire de dix ans, 1830-1840, which attacked
the first ten years of Louis Philippe’s reign as showing how the Revolution
 FIG. 19.
“A Barricade” in the Revolution of
1830 (1846) by Philippe Auguste
Jeanron, from Louis Blanc, Histoire
de dix ans (1846).

of 1830, made by the working people, had been perverted by the bour-
geoisie. Among Jeanron’s illustrations for this is a highly realistic scene of
revolutionaries in violent action on the barricades of 1830 (Fig. 19); and
certainly Jeanron’s revolutionaries are represented far more specifically as
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
194 fi PRACTICE

proletarians than are those of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (Fig.
13). In the same year that Jeanron’s illustrations were published in Blanc’s
book, he made for Ledru-Rollin—whose program of 1841 had already
shown him to be a Jacobin radical democrat—a series of designs represent-
ing proletarian life,*’ and he also played an active part in the Revolution
of 1848. Soon after that Revolution, he was the leading spinit in a Société
libre de peinture et de sculpture holding sessions in which he spoke out for
realism in painting. From 1848 until 1850, at the instigation of Ledru-
Rollin, he served as director of the collections of the Louvre and of the
National Museums.
By 1845 Jeanron, who in 1847 published an Histoire des peintres with
Gautier and Charles Blanc, had already become one of the first painters to
react against the excesses of “literary” subject-matter and of moralism
which were so characteristic of the romantic-realistic painting of the time.
While still recognizing that works of art have a moral significance, Jeanron
now insisted that, before everything else, the artist should seek to “satisfy
himself.” * During the reign of Louis Philippe he thus already reflected
the kind of romantic individualism that could help to lead many later
radical French artists toward anarchism.
A contemporary of Jeanron and Courbet, Alexandre Antigna
(1818-1878), though a pupil of the still largely academic Delaroche, was
with Jeanron among the first artists to depict the proletariat—likewise
during the reign of Louis Philippe. The art of Octave Tassaert (1800-
1874), although not turned toward realism as firmly as that of Jean-
ron or even that of Antigna, by 1834 was already being compared with
the doctrines of Proudhon, the social radical who became Courbet’s best
friend. But of course Tassaert, like Antigna and even Jeanron,*’ came
nowhere near being so great an artist as Courbet, whose first attempt to
paint a socialist picture was made about the time of the Revolution of
1848 “ and his first meeting with Proudhon. Still, like Courbet and so
many other social and artistic radicals, Tassaert was affected by bohemian-
ism, as his best-known painting, depicting the artist in a corner of his
studio (Fig. 20), so clearly shows.
The realistic style of Courbet, in combination with his anti-clericalism
and his socialism, was to make him perhaps the chief foreign hero of Soviet
socialist realism in painting—the more so as he played a prominent role in
the Paris Commune of 1871, which Marx and Engels regarded as the best
illustration of a revolution of the proletariat, and which was partly stimu-
lated by the earlier Paris Commune of the French Revolution. Moreover,
Courbet’s art was somewhat related to an old French tradition of popular
art, to which an aesthetic value was now given, and his “realist” circle
included several writers who were inspired by the forms of folk’ art.*
Somewhat similarly, the socialist realism of the Stalinists and their succes-
sors in the Soviet Union was also to glorify folk art, the vogue for which, of
course, had originally developed within the early romantic tradition.
dee Tt

FIG. 20. A Corner of the Studio (1845) by Octave Tassaert.

 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
196 vi PRACTICE

7. The Anarchism of Proudhon and Courbet

1840's,
Courser was no Marxist: his social views, Fourierist in the
great friend, Marx’s rival, the anarchis t
became essentially like those of his
Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865). Unlike many leading French social-
ists and other social radicals of the time, including Blanqui and. Louis
Blanc, Proudhon had never been a Saint-Simonian, but he was not unaf-
fected by Saint-Simonian doctrines, and with SaintSimon and Comte gave
special importance to art and its social usefulness. He was, however, more
closely connected with other French secular utopians who had some
interest in art. As a young man he had been greatly influenced by Fourier,
whom he had first met in 1829 when, as a printer, he had supervised the
printing of one of Fourier’s books. “For six whole weeks,”’ Proudhon said
later, “I was the captive of this bizarre genius.” ° Also, in the 1840's
Proudhon had become so well acquainted with Etienne Cabet that at one
point Cabet even designated Proudhon as his successor.” In the Revolu-
tion of 1848, Proudhon helped to build a barricade, the only practical
revolutionary act he ever performed. Only in 1849 did he turn away from
politics and political reform to become a true anarchist.
Like Cabet, Proudhon differed from Fourier and Saint-Simon in being
more completely egalitarian, because he insisted on equal rights for all
men. He originated the term “scientific socialism’”—which Marx appar-
ently took from him. Like Marx, he was one of the major founders of
international socialism, though his socialism consisted primarily of cheap
social credit for agricultural producers. In repudiating political for eco-
nomic action, and the state and collectivism for the voluntary cooperation
of individuals, he was the chief founder of French anarchism as well.
Indeed, Proudhon is said to have been the first man anywhere to call
himself an anarchist, something his great English predecessor, William
Godwin—whose anarchism differed from that of Proudhon especially in
growing partly out of a background of Calvinistic Protestant individualism
—had not done.” It is highly probable that the ideas of Godwin reached
Proudhon through the great British utopian socialist, Robert Owen, who
may even have met Proudhon on a visit to Paris in 1848. Proudhon
influenced the “Christian anarchist” Tolstoy; on a visit to Proudhon
in 1861, Tolstoy was struck by, and remembered, the title—War and Peace
—of a philosophical work Proudhon was then completing.
After Proudhon’s death, the Commune of 1871 was based on his ideas
more than on those of any other man. Though Marx and Engels regarded
the Commune as the best illustration of their doctrine of the dictatorship
of the proletariat, Proudhon had rejected that doctrine. Furthermore, in
opposition to Marx, Proudhon dismissed communism as a system of
 Other Radical Artists and Critics in France / 197

oppression and slavery which creates only a spurious equality, in which the
strong are exploited by the weak, and which does not in fact abolish
property. He once remarked that, besides Hegel, the chief influences in his
life were Adam Smith and the Bible, the last being, of course, highly
un-Marxian. As Proudhon insisted upon the right of the individual to
enjoy the product of his own labor, he differed, in upholding a system of
cooperative production, from the many later anarchists who urged collec-
tive ownership.
Even so, Proudhon’s ideas about the evils of private property often got
him into trouble, and once, at least, in connection with his interest in art.
In 1848, after the revolution of that year, he published in his periodical, Le
Représentant du peuple, a letter from a well-known sculptor, Antoine
Etex, which Proudhon’s opponents declared was an attack on property.”
Interestingly enough, Etex—who is best known as the sculptor of two of
the groups on the Arc de Triomphe de |’Etoile in Paris—was a political
radical who fought on the barricades in 1830, but whose sculpture never-
theless was academically conservative. This fact obviously indicates once
more that political radicalism and artistic radicalism, so often found
together, are not inevitably interrelated.
Proudhon’s friendship with Courbet stimulated his own interest in art
and Courbet’s interest in the social importance of art. The two came from
the same region of eastern France, and both sprang from the peasantry
which they, unlike Marx, always regarded as a politically revolutionary
group. Proudhon considered Courbet to be the representative in art of the
best aspects of their day because he belonged to the movement that would
“bring the end of capitalism and the sovereignty of the producers.” * In
turn, Courbet greatly admired Proudhon’s conversation, delighted in his
writings, accepted his theories, and shared his love for the common man,
especially the peasant and laborer. Instead of romanticizing them like
Millet, Courbet demanded justice for them, relief from their social misery.
In his famous Stone-Breakers (Fig. 17) of 1850, formerly in Dresden but
destroyed at the end of World War II,” Courbet was implicitly attacking
the social system—assailing the degradation of indentured labor by means
of his realistic style, which, abandoning so many of the conventions of
academic and romantic artists, had a characteristically robust and direct
quality which one of Proudhon’s recent biographers has specifically com-
pared to that of his prose.” Furthermore, Courbet’s massive human forms,
with their extraordinary solidity reinforced by the treatment of textures
and by the concreteness of the natural forms and artifacts that surround
and
them, were not unrelated to the materialistic philosophy of Proudhon
himself. |
ion
Proudhon and Courbet maintained that art must draw inspirat
by art." In-
from life but also insisted that life in its turn is illuminated
industrial
deed, Proudhon anticipated William Mornis in England and the
Majorats litté-
designers of the twentieth century by suggesting in his Les
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
198 f PRACTICE

raires (1862) that industry and work should be ennobled by art. He went
beyond Morris in the degree to which he foresaw the beginnings of a kind
of collective art, sharable by all the people, that could be expressed, in part
at least, by modern machinery and precision instruments. In this Proudhon
was wholeheartedly supported by Courbet, whose desire (as he told
Sainte-Beuve, that former Saint-Simonian, in 1862) was “to establish a
kind of monumental painting appropriate to modern society,” and there-
fore to the Machine Age. With this end in view, Courbet proposed “to
convert our large railroad stations into modern temples of painting,” and
by means of frescoes to depict “picturesque, moral, industrial, metallurgi-
cal subjects; in short the saints and miracles of modern society.” * In thus
proposing to convey social propaganda on a monumental scale by means of
frescoes in railroad stations, Courbet had been anticipated by the Fourier-
ist Victor Considerant.”
While stressing the importance of the Machine Age for contemporary
society as a whole, Courbet and his friend Proudhon likewise saw the
possibility of a new style in art which would also respect the needs of each
regional environment, a point of view to be shared by William Mornis.
And like both Morris and Marx, Proudhon maintained that in the good
society the artist would no longer be a man apart, but would be reinte-
grated into the daily life of his time, entering the world of labor as an
equal, sharing in its rights and in the dignity common to all workingmen.”
In contrast to Marx, Proudhon—with Morris—insisted that progress does
not depend on the economic organization of society, but on man and his
moral development.* Although Proudhon was much influenced by the
philosophy of Hegel, to which he had been introduced by Marx and by the
anarchist Bakunin, he conceived of the Hegelian synthesis not as the result
of violent struggle between thesis and antithesis, but as a dynamic balance
of opposing forces—a doctrine which, since it so fundamentally required
mutual cooperation, he called Mutualism. Thus his particular form of
anarchism is known as mutualist anarchism. And as he moved away from
agrarian populism toward recognition of the age of industry, he fore-
shadowed what was later called syndicalism.
In 1863, Proudhon was asked by Courbet to write a brief essay
expounding the theoretical basis of Courbet’s painting Le Retour de la
conférence, which had just been refused by the official Salon because it
represented the clergy unfavorably—so unfavorably, indeed, that it was
later bought by a devout Catholic who destroyed it. Although Proudhon
originally intended this essay (which Courbet wanted to use in connection
with a forthcoming exhibition of his work in London) to be only four
pages long, he became so interested in it that he developed it from the
proposed leaflet into a full-length book, Du principe de Tart et de sa
destination sociale (1865), one of the first studies exclusively devoted to
the social relevance of art. In this work—in which he dealt almost entirely
 Other Radical Artists and Critics in France / 199

with painting, giving only passing references to literature and architecture

—Proudhon expressed the view, similar to that of his English contempo-
rary, John Ruskin, that art must have a moral purpose and social relevance
in order to have meaning. Consequently, like Ruskin and William Morris
later, Proudhon attacked the doctrine of “art for art’s sake,” and congratu-
lated Courbet on having freed painting from it. He maintained that art
can be justified only if it exists within its own social context as “art for
man’s sake.” “Art,” he declared, “like literature, is the expression of
society. . . .” ® In it, reason and reality are basic, and the artist’s imitation
of nature should not be idealized, idealization being the antithesis of the
real. The aim of art is “to teach us to mix the agreeable with the useful in
all aspects of our existence. . . .” °* Yet its ultimate end is far more than
this, because art “has for its object to lead us to the knowledge of
ourselves, through the revelation of our thoughts . . . and thence to
contribute to the development of our dignity, to the perfectioning of our
being.” *t This end, Proudhon insisted, could be achieved solely by means
of strictly contemporary art, for he believed that art can respond ade-
quately to the aspirations of men only in the society within which it is
produced. In contemporary society, of course, he regarded Courbet and his
school as best carrying out this aim.
Although Proudhon thus considered himself and Courbet to be anti-
academic realists of a social kind, he was careful to point out that “Physi-
cal reality is only valuable because of the spirit and the ideal which breathe
in it.” © For this reason, Proudhon preferred to call what he regarded as
the school of Courbet the “critical school” rather than to use either the
term “realist” applied to it by Champfleury and Courbet or the term
“naturalist” © given by some others. This school Proudhon regarded as
producing art that is “essentially moralizing and revolutionary” *; and it
might be noted here that Courbet conveyed this moral quality simply by
depicting, as it were, a slice of life itself, and not by telling a moralizing
story in paint, as Diderot had urged and as the English Pre-Raphaelites
had been doing. To Proudhon, such a slice of life was necessarily more
than a sheer reproduction of nature, because he held that it is impossible
to
for an artist, or even a photographer, not to interpret his subject, not
idealize it in accordance with his predilections (even though the artist
ought not to set out to do so consciously and in accordance with academic
principles). This allowance for an element of idealism was to be charac-
arts,
teristic of the attitude toward art of most anarchists interested in the
Marxists—to accept
ultimately permitting many of them—unlike most
a high degree of abstraction. And Proudhon’s willingness to extend this
element of idealism to the photograph—thereby accepting photography
to Courbet’s
as an art—could also help to give theoretical justification
others.
frequent practice of basing his paintings on photographs taken by
Because Proudhon and Courbet regarded art as a revolutionary stimu-
 / PRACTICE OF ART IN BRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
200

lant to man’s moral and intellectual development, they never succumbed

to the idea that art should first and foremost be a form of partisan
propaganda, a social weapon—the view that was to dominate so much of
the art produced in, or under the direct influence of, Stalinist Russia. Yet
Proudhon did insist that some of Courbet’s works, and notably his Stone-
Breakers (Fig. 17), are true examples of socialist painting, constituting “a
satire on our industrial civilization” ““—even though Courbet himself ap-
parently had not thought of the Stone-Breakers in that way. Proudhon also
declared that Courbet was the first to accomplish socialist painting success-
fully, although he did admit that some works by earlier artists were also to
be especially admired for their essentially realistic revolutionary and social
connotations. For instance, he called David’s Death of Marat (Fig. 2) “a
light in the stormy night of the Revolution.” ®
Like Diderot and so many socialists who have upheld realism in art
along with socialism, Proudhon was also a utilitarian and functionalist
in architectural expression because of his belief that “the decorative value
of a monument is to reveal its purpose by the exterior,” while glorifying
modern materials.” And “the great thought” of his book on art theory was,
he insisted, “to reconcile art with [both] the just and the useful.”
Proudhon died early in 1865, only four months after the founding of
the International Workingmen’s Association (First International), so that
he never became an opponent of Marx within that organization. At his
death, his book on art remained unfinished. Completed by Courbet with
the aid of a mutual friend, it was published later in the year; and when it
appeared, Courbet in delight wrote: “It is the most wonderful thing one
could possibly imagine . . . the greatest honour that a man could wish for
in his whole life.” The basic doctrines in the book were not, however,
well received by the young Zola who praised Courbet in a review but said
that he must be judged “absolutely” as artist and not as a cog in a socialist
machine. Nor was it well received by an old friend of Proudhon, whose
ideas, once similar to Proudhon’s, had somewhat diverged from them. This
friend was Théophile Thoré (1807-1869), so longa republican and fervent
socialist, who for years had been the leading art critic among French
radicals.

8. Thoré and Radical Art Criticism

"T'noré, whose career spanned, and in many ways summarized, radicalism

in the period from the Revolution of 1830 almost to the Commune, had
early and permanently been attracted to socialist movements. In the
Revolution of 1830 he was a fighter on the barricades at a time when he
was already affected by Saint-Simonian doctrines, which came to him
especially through his friend Pierre Leroux, who like himself strongly felt
 Other Radical Artists and Critics in France / 201

the influence of the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Thoré contributed a

political column to the left-wing Revue indépendante of Leroux and George
Sand. To a lesser degree, also, Thoré’s beliefs were tinged with Fourierism,
so that his earlier art criticism ran parallel with that published in such
Fourierist journals as the Phalange and the Démocratie pacifique by Désiré
Laverdant, Francois Cantagrel, and other Fourierists previously men-
tioned. Like most of these Fourierist critics, Thoré too held that art had an
educational mission requiring realist subjects, although at that time the
kind of realism which he and they upheld was the romantic variety then
popular with social radicals and with some members of the artistic avant-
garde—a realism in which, therefore, artistic romanticism was linked with
a romantic humanitarianism strongly emphasizing moral meaning in art.
In his early days, Thoré especially admired the works of a fervently
republican comrade, the romantic sculptor David d’Angers (Fig. 11), who
had been connected with Hugo’s Cénacle and had so actively participated
in the Revolution of 1830. Declared Thoré: “Imbued with new political
ideas,” David d’Angers “continues the noble tradition of French
thought” * in being preoccupied with the moral significance and the
teaching value of his art. Yet while maintaining that good art also requires
the artist to be socially and politically engaged like David d’ Angers, ‘Thoré
always differed from most of his socialist friends in holding that an
equilibrium should be sought between collectivism and the individual,
between authority and liberty.
In 1834, with Louis Blanc and others, Thoré founded the short-lived
Reyue républicaine. Four years later he tried—unsuccessfully—to found a
new journal, La Démocratie, “to continue the social and political move-
ment of the French Revolution . . .” * a journal in which Louis Blanc,
Pierre Leroux, and another of Thoré’s friends, Jeanron (Fig. 19), had
agreed to collaborate. At this time ‘Thoré regarded Jeanron as the artist
most likely to achieve a truly popular art, “an art peculiar to the XIXth
century:
Still another of Thoré’s good friends was Théodore Rousseau, the
leading landscape painter of the Barbizon School, with whom he became
acquainted in 1834. Both Rousseau and Thoré were encouraged by the
old-time liberal, democratic, and republican painter, Ary Scheffer. Through
Thoré also made friends with Dupré and Diaz, two other
Rousseau,
to
Barbizon landscapists. He believed strongly that in the country, close
nature, the soul of man could best recover its liberty—a doctrine largely
-
stemming, of course, from Jean Jacques Rousseau. Thoré did his unsuccess
Rousseau, also long
ful best to persuade his painter-friend, Théodore
the
faithful to the republican’ creed, to join him in militantly supporting
monarchy of
republican cause, and thus the cause of progress, against the
for the
Louis Philippe in order to aid in bringing about an era far better
as eminently
arts. For Thoré regarded conditions under Louis Philippe
dangerou s for men and art
hostile to art, believing that nothing was more
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
202 vi PRACTICE

alike than to steep themselves in the prevailing sordid materialism and

prosaicism. On this account he himself took part in conspiracies against
Louis Philippe while writing violent revolutionary brochures. One of these
pamphlets, published in 1840, got him into serious trouble: he was tracked
down as a dangerous radical, arrested, and sentenced to a year in jail.
After the regime of Louis Philippe had been overthrown by the Rev-
olution of 1848, Thoré was offered the directorship of the National Mu-
seums. He refused the position (he asked that it be given to Jeanron)
because he wanted to devote himself entirely to political action. Among
other activities, he founded a daily, La Vraie république, in collaboration
with Pierre Leroux and George Sand.
The actions of Louis Napoleon, when elected President of France
after the Revolution of 1848, soon disturbed Thoré, with the result that in
1849 he took part in an unsuccessful insurrection. As a consequence, he—
like most other French socialists—was compelled to flee into exile, settling
eventually in Belgium. Thence he participated in organizing the con-
spiratorial Commune révolutionnaire in 1852. Two years later, he aban-
doned politics and set about constructing a new career as a connoisseur of
art under the pen-name of Biirger. Only after eleven years of exile did an
amnesty allow him to return to France, where he spent the last seven years
of his life.
In 1857, three years after beginning his second career in art criticism,
Thoré announced, in his Nouvelles tendances de l'art, the death of roman-
ticism. This, he maintained, had occurred at the Exposition universelle,
held at Paris in 1855. There romanticism had finally achieved its definitive
public acceptance, which to him meant its end because it was no longer
avant-garde. As yet, however, Thoré did not defend the newer and more
complete realism of Courbet. When eventually he did support Courbet,
and also Millet and Daumier, it was with some reluctance because he
always retained a strong tinge of romanticism. Eventually he also gave his
support to Manet, though somewhat grudgingly because Manet’s objectiv-
ity distressed him. Thoré was attracted to the early paintings of Renoir and
Monet as well as to Manet, and so to the beginnings of Impressionism,
which were in harmony with his own ideas because he himself was
increasingly insisting on the importance of the visual experience and of
color. But had he lived, he would never have accepted Impressionism in its
full development because it tended to destroy the solidity of objects, which
for him as for many other socialists so largely constituted the “real.” After
all, it was Thoré who, in 1842, had rediscovered the great Dutch seven-
teenth-century “realist” Vermeer, and who first established a scientific
treatment of Dutch art.
Nevertheless, in his last years, ‘Thoré could not accept the concepts of
realism and of socially useful art expounded by his old friend Proudhon in
that posthumously published book, Du principe de Tart et de sa destina-
tion sociale. For in it Proudhon declared that social utility requires the
 Other Radical Artists and Critics in France / 203

work of art to preach a moral—the doctrine so characteristic of the

romantic realism to which Thoré himself had subscribed back in the
1830’s. Although he still maintained that art and moral preaching tend to
the same end, he now insisted that they are not the same thing, holding
that art is free as well as subordinated to social goals.
Thus Thoré’s later views differed sharply from those of Courbet who,
as we have seen, rapturously welcomed Proudhon’s book, which he himself
had helped to complete. Six years after the book was published in 1865,
Courbet’s pacificism did not prevent him from taking an active part in the
Paris Commune, that uprising which was so largely based on Proudhon’s
doctrines, but in which representatives of many parties participated—in-
cluding the old-time Fourierist, Victor Considerant, though only one
Marxist delegate, a refugee from Hungary.

9. The Commune: Courbet and Other Artists

"Tum Commune, inspired by Courbet, who was elected to its Communal

Council and Educational Commission, had established a Fédération des
artistes de Paris. The program for this was signed by Courbet and thirteen
other artists in April 1871. The signer in the name of the industrial artists
was Eugéne Pottier, the Fourierist, republican, and vaguely Proudhonian
textile designer and poet. Pottier, who had fought on the barricades in
1848, is now known chiefly as the author, in 1871, of the Commune-
inspired words to the Internationale, adopted fifteen years later by the
Marxian socialists as the official workers’ revolutionary song.” Among the
of
artists who, in addition to Courbet and Pottier, had signed the program
the Fédération were the sculptors Dalou, Falguiére, and Dubois. Daumier
were
and Corot were among the artists promptly elected to membership, as
Millet, who, however, were then absent from Paris. The
Manet and
e and
program guaranteed artists complete freedom from. state interferenc
on aesthetics, art
proposed new centers for teaching art, and for lectures
history, and the philosophy of art, thus replacing the Ecole des Beaux-Arts,
center of the hated academic tradition. The intentions of the Fédération
conduct exhibi-
to safeguard the contents of the National Museums, to
artists on
tions (thereby replacing the academic salons), and to employ
of artists elected
public commissions were also announced.”® The assembly
with the
Courbet president of the Commune’s art commission charged
preservation of the National Museums and works of art.
artistes, the
One of the signers of the program of the Fédération des
three conserva-
sculptor Jules Dalou (1838-1902), was mamed one of the his
republican like
tors of the Louvre. He had grown up a passionate
in the Revolution
father, a proletarian glovemaker who had participated
r fae had had mamy years of
of 1848. In Dalou’s efforts to become a sculpto
 Other Radical Artists and Critics in France / 205

miserable poverty and, like so many other young avant-garde artists before
and since, had passed through a period of bohemianism. Although his role
in the Commune was purely artistic, when the Commune collapsed he was
compelled to go into exile in London, where he taught in the Royal
College of Art until amnestied in 1879. He always retained his devotion to
the working class, giving much of the last thirteen years of his life to his
self-inspired project for a huge Monument to the Workers. When he died,
he left—besides many sketches—two finished statues with their niches
(Fig. 21), some reliefs, and sketch models of more than 150 statues of
workers of all trades.
Another artist who had to flee to England because he had been a
Communard was the painter James Tissot, a friend of Ingres as well as of
Whistler and Degas. The scenes of fashionable life in high society that he
painted in England during the 1870's, and that brought him considerable
wealth and contemporary renown, would hardly lead one to suspect the
interest in social reform and revolution which had made him a participant
in the Commune. They serve to demonstrate that the hardships of the
poor interested the Victorian art lover far less than the leisure of the
rich.
Like Pottier, Dalou, and Tissot, Courbet too had to flee from France
on the collapse of the Commune. He had been responsible for a resolution
urging the government of the Commune to authorize the “unbolting” of
the famous Napoleonic column in the Place Vendéme. Soon thereafter,
the column was pulled down, and Courbet was photographed shaking
hands with the destroyers. As a consequence, after the Commune, al-
though he had not been a member of the council that voted for destroying
the column, he was accused of direct responsibility for its destruction, and
sentenced to six months in jail and the then enormous fine of 350,000
francs to meet the costs of rebuilding. Only by escaping to Switzerland,
where he died in 1877, did he avoid being compelled to pay.
Because of this episode, as well as because of the social nature of his
views on art and his realistic style, Courbet became one of the chief heroes
of the Marxists and Marxian sympathizers, who—in accord with the
art
Stalinist line since 1934—have strongly urged “socialist realism” in
while attacking abstract art. For example, Louis Aragon published a biogra-
with
phy of Courbet in 1952, while Stalin was still alive, and in it quoted
that
special approval a statement by Courbet made in 1861: “I hold. . .
represen-
painting is an art essentially concrete and can consist only in the
things. It is an entirely physical language which
tation of real and existing
An object abstract, invisible, non-exist ent
is made up of all visible objects.
” * Yet communis ts have to disregard the
is not in the domain of painting.
. . I deny
fact that, despite his social interests, Courbet had also said: “.
that art is completely
that art can be taught, or, in other words I maintain
individual.” *

The Digger (1900) from a proposed Monument to the Workers,

FIG. 21.
sculpture by Jules Dalou.
 oO
FROM THE COMMUNE TO
THE END OF WORLD WAR IL
1871-1918

1. The Significance of the Commune jor

Later French Radicalism

"Tue Communs, brief as it was, proved to be the only strong flare-up of

French Revolutionary political radicalism in the second half of the nine-
teenth century. Even though regarded by Marx, Engels, and Lenin as the
best illustration of their theories about the revolution and dictatorship of
the proletariat, and by the anarchists as the pattern of a future anarchist
society, the Commune was made possible only by the defeat in the
Franco-Prussian War of Napoleon III, who had held down all French
radical movements with an iron hand while gaining the support of the
masses through his program of social legislation. In spite of the admiration
of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, as well as the anarchists, for the Commune, it
had never attacked the property rights of the middle class, but had actually
protected them. Although as the conscious heir of the revolutionary Com-
mune of Paris inaugurated in 1792, the Commune of 1871 did adopt the
red flag, it was not really a workers’ regime, and the term “CCommunards”
was applied to its supporters especially by their enemies: they most often
referred to themselves as “Féderés.” ‘The Commune’s emphasis on federal-
ism made it, indeed, the nearest approach so far to a political realization of
Rousseau’s theory as expressed in the Social Contract.1 For although
Rousseau had believed that,in the ideal community, state and citizenry
would be identical, he had realized that this would be possible only in a
small city-state, that in the large and complex nation-state of modern
times, federalism was the nearest approach to the ideal. But for the
majority of the French people in 1871 the Commune connoted not
federalism but the “Red spectre.” As a consequence, it proved so frighten-
ing to them that, after it had been bloodily suppressed, French radicalism
was slow to regain its strength. Not only had radicals been compelled to
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 207

flee into exile, most of them going to Switzerland, but also in 1872, the
International Workingmen’s Association (First International) had been
outlawed in France. The building of the great Neo-Romanesque church of
the Sacré Coeur on the heights of Montmartre in Paris was encouraged as
an “expiation for the crimes of the Commune.”* Although the Third
Republic felt secure enough in 1876 to allow some renewal of socialist
agitation, not until 1879-1880 did it proclaim an amnesty for Commu-
nards. Also, those many Frenchmen who were good Roman Catholics—as
most of the artistic radicals were not—could no longer be socialists or
communists without encountering the deep disapproval of their Church,
because in his encyclical “On Socialism” (Quod apostolici muneris) of
December 28, 1878, Pope Leo XIII had directly attacked socialism, com-
munism, and nihilism, while declaring that “The socialists wrongly assume
the right of property to be of mere human invention. . . . More wise. . .
the Church recognizes the existence of inequality among men”—inequal-
ity, that is, not in things spiritual but in things temporal.
As for the industrial workers of France, convinced by the violent
suppression of the Commune that revolution was outmoded as a method
of establishing socialism, they lost confidence and forsook the barricades.
Eventually, however, their confidence in the Third Republic—which was
to prove to be the most stable government in France since the outbreak of
the French Revolution—was strengthened by the adoption in 1884 of a
trade-union law which freed the unions from regulations designed to
hamper their activities.

2. Viollet-le-Duc, Republican of the Left

Hor a long time after the Commune, the further development of social
radicalism in France was hampered by the fears that the Commune had
engendered in the minds and emotions of most Frenchmen. For this
reason, the Third Republic in its early days was threatened, not by
radicalism, but rather by royalist plots and by a split among the republi-
cans between conservatives and liberals whom the royalists accused of
sympathy for the “spectre rouge.” In the eyes of one left-wing republican,
the great medieval archaeologist and theoretician of architecture, Eugene
Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, the early Third Republic was to a deplorable
degree dominated by middle-class money-power. As he put it: “The nobles
of the Middle Ages counted only on their sword|s], which was absurd and
brutal; today the great (if great they be) count only on their money-
chest|s]; is this better? Is it above all more moral?” °
Viollet-le-Duc had grown up under the influence of his uncle, the
painter Etienne Delécluze, a pupil of David, who was both a romantic and
a liberal. Under the Restoration, Delécluze had opposed the regime of
208 i PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

Louis XVIII, demanding a change in the system of government and a

radical reform of the academic principles on which the arts and letters
were officially based. During these years, some of Delécluze’s friends still
more radical than he—among them Ary Scheffer—were affliated with the
Carbonari.
Through the influence of his uncle, the young Viollet-le-Duc was sent
to a school run by a rabidly anti-clerical republican, who in his educational
beliefs was a disciple of Pestalozzi, and thus essentially a romantic in the
tradition of Rousseau. By the time the Revolution of 1830 broke out,
Viollet-le-Duc, then sixteen years old, had so thoroughly imbibed revolu-
tionary republican doctrines that—as we noted earlier—he participated in
building a revolutionary barricade on a Paris street. His equally radical
spirit in matters of art became manifest when, despite his unyielding
determination to become an architect, he refused to enter the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts, the official, and academic, center for education in all the
visual arts. Instead, after brief study with the architect A. F. R. Leclére, on
his own he devoted himself to the investigation of medieval architecture,
eventually becoming the outstanding authority on the subject. He first
became widely known in 1840 when he made a report showing how the
great Romanesque church of the Madeleine at Vézelay should be restored
—with the result that the restoration was entrusted to him. A year later,
with another architect, he won the competition held to select the restorers
for the Cathedral of Notre Dame at Paris.
After Napoleon III came to power, Viollet-le-Duc’s friend, the medie-
val archaeologist Prosper Mérimée, today best known as the author of
Carmen, introduced him into the circle immediately around Napoleon;
and for the Emperor he restored the great medieval chateau of Pierrefonds.
During Napoleon’s reign, also, he published his celebrated ten-volume
Dictionnaire raisonné de Vlarchitecture francaise du xi° au xvi’ siécle
(1854-1868). In this he upheld the “organic” approach to art, writing of
“The organism of architecture’; and in it, also, he declared that “The arts
belong to the people. . . .”* architecture being for him an essentially
democratic and social production like language. Even though a revolt of
students compelled him to resign from the chair of history of art and
aesthetics at the highly academic Ecole des Beaux-Arts, to which he had
been appointed by Napoleon III in 1863, his lectures, to which the
students had refused to listen, were by no means wasted. For he published
them under the title Entretiens sur architecture in two volumes with an
atlas of plates, the first volume being published in 1863 under the Second
Empire, the second volume and atlas only in 1872 after the Commune.
The Entretiens were destined to affect profoundly many avant-garde archi-
tects, some of them social radicals.
In the Franco-Prussian War, after his patron Napoleon III had be-
come a prisoner of the Germans, Viollet-le-Duc had played a leading role
in the defense of Paris as a lieutenant colonel of engineers; and when the
Commune was established, it sought his services as military engineer. But
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 209

because he regarded the Commune as politically too far Left, he withdrew

from Paris rather than support it. Nevertheless, he equally did not serve in
the Versailles army of the conservative republican Thiers, which so blood-
ily crushed the Commune and which he considered to be too far on the
Right.
In 1873, in the first municipal elections held at Paris following the
Commune, Viollet-le/Duc—after openly making a republican profession of
faith—was chosen as a municipal councilor representing the Montmartre
district, an office he held until 1879, the year of his death. Even before the
fall of Napoleon III, he had daringly been expressing his “democratic
opinions” * in a somewhat left-wing paper, the Centre gauche. Under the
Third Republic, he showed himself an utterly ardent anti-clerical left-
republican: until he died, he contributed regularly to a large number of
leftist papers, including the Centre gauche, the Peuple, and the Bien
public. During these years he repeatedly assailed the money-power dom1-
nating France under the bourgeois Third Republic, declaring that the
possessors of money constituted the “new feudalism,” which, he prophe-
sied, would be mastered like medieval feudalism by its own Louis XIV,
and then overwhelmed in its own Revolution of 1789. He predicted that
this new French Revolution would certainly “come soon,” to lead “us
straight to Communism,” of which he as a republican of the Left did not,
however, approve. He asked sardonically, “What would the Saint-Simo-
nians, our feudal lords, say then?” ‘thereby indicating that the Saint-
Simonians, by this time far removed from their earlier communist princi-
ples, had become the real rulers of France through their highly effective—
and now thoroughly bourgeois—role in French finance.
In these years after the Commune, Viollet-le-Duc’s already great
influence as a theoretician of architecture steadily increased, stimulated
particularly by the publication in 1872 of the second volume of his
Entretiens sur larchitecture. In the Entretiens, he continued the scientific
exposition of Gothic architecture in relation to masterpieces from other
historic styles, and also more than ever before drew parallels from the
Gothic and other examples of “rational” architecture as the basis for
creating a modern style. For he held that, after analyzing the masterpieces
of the past in order to grasp “the development of the immutable principles
of our art,”* the architect must make his own synthesis serving the
conditions and using the materials of his own period. In the second
l
volume of the Entretiens, too, he particularly emphasized the architectura
possibilities of the new material of iron (Fig. 22), doing so in a positivisti-
one of
cally rational—hence structurally economical—way that made him
the chief founders of modern functionalism. In his approach to architec-
John
ture he thus differed sharply from his great English contemporary,
said of Viollet-le-D uc’s great Dictionnair e
Ruskin. Ruskin once jealously
he
raisonné de Varchitecture, “I ought to have written it myself,” * but
the
emphasized ornament far more than structure, and thoroughly disliked
, Ruskin sought to reform
use of iron as a structural material. Furthermore
 if PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
210

society and the arts together on the basis of principles drawn from the
Middle Ages, whereas Viollet-le-Duc had stated at the beginning of his
Entretiens that there is no necessary connection between the quality of an
art and the quality of the type of society which produced it. “Art has its
value independent of the milieu in which it is born . . .” ° he declared. As
a consequence, later avant-garde architects who admired Viollet-le-Duc’s
rational materialism but, unlike him, were socialists, were likely to combine
his conception of functional structure based on principles paralleling those
of medieval architecture, with Ruskin’s socio-aesthetic doctrines, likewise
inspired by architecture of the Middle Ages. For instance, we shall see that
this combination was made by a great Dutch founder of modern architec-
ture, the Marxian architect Hendrik Berlage (Figs. 93 and 94)—for Marx
himself had had almost nothing to say about architecture. Yet it was
especially easy for Berlage to bring together Marx and Viollet-le-Duc
because they each tended to equate rationalism with a kind of materialism,
and Viollet-le-Duc provided a reasoned program of architectural revolution
somewhat parallel to Marx’s and Lenin’s program of political revolution. It
should be added that Viollet-le-Duc’s theories of “race” were taken over by
the Comte de Gobineau, from whom they passed to Houston Stewart
Chamberlain and thence to fascism as represented by Hitler’s circle,
thereby affecting fascist art as well.

3. The Catholic Social Movement and

Its Influence on Art
Iw vie decade after the Commune, the last years of Viollet-le-Duc’s life,
there began in France an important social movement likewise somewhat
influenced by medieval thought, but in origin contrasting sharply with
Viollet-le-Duc’s anti-clericalism and republicanism, having been founded
by devout Roman Catholic aristocrats. Although this Catholic movement
scarcely affected the development of modern art in France itself, it was
destined to have considerable effect elsewhere on conceptions of craftsman-
ship in the arts.
The founders, two French aristocrats, Comte Albert de Mun and
René de La Tour du Pin, while prisoners of the Germans during the
Franco-Prussian War had been given by a Jesuit priest the social writings
of Bishop von Ketteler (1811-1877) of Mainz. Ketteler had been seeking
to revive the spirit of Catholicism among workers by means of a revival of
the guild system, and his efforts had considerable influence on craftsman-
ship in connection with the Gothic Revival in the arts. Later, his writings
played an important part in the discussions which led Pope Leo XIII to
issue his famous encyclical of 1891, Rerum novarum, on the condition of
the working classes. This, the first of the great social encyclicals, was so
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Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc.
212 y PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

“radical” in calling for intervention by the state to protect workers for the
common good of all the citizens that it was attacked even by some
Catholics as “socialistic.” Yet though strongly upholding the right of every
man to receive a living wage and to acquire and own property, it rejected
socialism and maintained the priority of man over the state. For even while
insisting that the state must treat all citizens as equal, Leo did not reject
his earlier view, expressed in the encyclical “On Socialism” of 1878, that
the Church recognizes the inequality of men.
Meanwhile, as a result of reading Ketteler, De Mun and De La Tour
du Pin had decided that they themselves must do something to Christian-
ize the workingman in a counter-revolution against evils introduced by the
French Revolution. Beginning in 1878, De Mun—after the early death of
De La Tour du Pin—established some 375 workers’ centers, each with its
recreation facilities, cheap restaurant, and unemployment fund.
De Mun’s centers, which reached a total membership of 37,500, were
influential up to World War I. They stimulated the establishing of
somewhat similar organizations by men who regarded De Mun’s move-
ment, founded from above by noblemen, as being entirely too undemo-
cratic. One of these was the Sillon movement, which, founded about 1893,
was led by Marc Sangnier, who sought to inject a democratic spirit into his
groups in an effort to meet the criticism by liberals and monarchists that
Catholicism and democracy were incompatible. Out of the Sillon move-
ment and similar contemporary Catholic organizations in France came
Peter Maurin,” who eventually settled in the United States and in 1933
founded the Catholic Worker with Dorothy Day, a former writer for leftist
periodicals such as the Socialist Call and the communist-controlled New
Masses.” Like the French movements from which it sprang, the group
around the Catholic Worker has had an interest in religious art, with con-
siderable implications for craftsmanship because of the influence on
Maurin of the English Catholic Fabian and near-communist artist-
craftsman, Eric Gill. And it has attracted two excellent artists in black-
and-white, the aristocratic, Belgian-born, Catholic woman who signed her
work A. de Bethune, and the Quaker Fritz Eichenberg. Both have been
noted for their fine woodcuts—a kind of multiple production art executed
in a style emphasizing craftsmanship and Christian social subject-matter
appropriate to Maurin’s aim, “a Utopian, Christian Communism.” ”

4. Anarchism: Bakunin and Art

Ly concenrrarinc on a Christian version of personalist democracy, Peter

Maurin and some of the French circles that influenced him were tinged
with anarchism and its emphasis on the individual. At the time when
Maurin’s interest in social problems was beginning, anarchism was the
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 213

most influential form of social radicalism in France among intellectuals.

For when, almost a decade after the collapse of the Commune, secular
radicalism began to arise again as an important factor in French life, it was
not so much the Marxists as the anarchists who led the way; and in the
1880’s and 1890s, especially, the anarchists made much more successful
efforts to attract French artists and other intellectuals than did the Marx-
ists. The influence of Proudhon’s anarchism had never died out, and after
the early 1880’s it was reinforced by that of the great Russian-born anarch-
ist, Prince Peter Kropotkin, who had early felt the influence of Proudhon’s
writings, and who eventually developed a social doctrine called “mutual
aid.” This—which was soon to have a strong influence on Peter Maurin,
among others—somewhat resembled Proudhon’s “Mutualism.” Like Prou-
dhon, Kropotkin was interested in art, and some of his followers played a
major part in spreading on the Continent the ideas of Ruskin and William
Morris, whose beliefs about the importance of art for life in the good
society had much in common with those of Proudhon and himself. Kropot-
kin is, therefore, a key figure for the study of art in relation to social
radicalism both on the Continent and in England, where in later life he
resided for many years and where William Morris became his good friend.
In order to understand Kropotkin’s kind of anarchism, which he
helped to name communist-anarchism, it is necessary to examine the ideas
of an earlier anarchist who influenced him even more than did Proudhon
—his fellow Russian, Michael Bakunin, Marx’s most effective opponent
within the socialist movement.
Like Proudhon before him and Kropotkin later, Bakunin regarded art
as highly important for mankind. Consequently, he, together with these
other two most influential of Continental anarchists, helped greatly in
setting the stage for anarchism to play a significant role in affecting various
major art movements in Europe during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries—a role more important than that of Marxism until
well into the twentieth century. For this reason, his life and ideas were to
have important, if indirect, bearing on the social beliefs of many artists.
Bakunin was born in 1814 in a family belonging to the lesser nobility
move-
of Moscow. His youth was passed in the heyday of the romantic
were always to be visible in his conduct of his
ment, the effects of which
other human beings and toward the arts.
own life and his attitude toward
his best friend for a time was Vissario n
When he was a young man,
saint of the Soviet theoreti cians who
Belinsky, destined to become a patron
Bakunin early
under Stalin developed the art theory of socialist realism.
, in 1836, as a young artillery
showed an attraction to the arts—for instance
had earnest discussions
officer, he and a cousin with whom he was in love
to mankind.
as to whether the visual arts or music had contributed more
which they heard the
And with her he attended at least one concert at
his beloved favorite
Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, who was always to be
composer.
se of his special
In 1840, Bakunin departed for western Europe. Becau
214 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

admiration for Hegel, he became a student at the University of Berlin nine

years after Hegel’s death. Before leaving Russia, he, like Belinsky, had
already become deeply interested in German idealism: in 1835, he was first
drawn to the philosophy of Kant, a year later to that of Fichte, and finally,
in 1837, to that of Hegel. He had also learned while still in Russia that the
Hegelians in Germany had split, and that the Left Hegelians—who sO
deeply influenced Karl Marx while he was a student at Berlin—were
seeking a materialistic basis for religion and philosophy and were able to
appear as champions of revolutionary opinions. In contrast to Marx,
however, Bakunin remained a Hegelian all his life, thereby retaining an
element of philosophical idealism which continued to have an effect on the
attitude toward art of his successors in anarchism.
Even during Bakunin’s gay student days in Berlin, his love of philoso-
phy was combined with a love for art, so that the chief delights of his life
at this time have been listed—perhaps in significant order—as “Deer, art,
and metaphysics.” * During this period, too, he and his fellow students
flocked to the weekly Beethoven concerts, at which the great symphonies
were performed in turn, in preference to all others. ‘These young romantics
of the 1840’s, as the Russian radical Alexander Herzen remarked, “ignored
Rossini, tolerated Mozart . . . and conducted philosophical investigations
into every chord of Beethoven” ”; for Beethoven, not yet considered a
universal classic, was regarded as the musical interpreter of German ideal-
ism.
Bakunin’s inseparable friend at Berlin, with whom he shared living
quarters, was the future great novelist Ivan Turgenev, then something of a
caricaturist, who studied drawing, became a collector of French pictures,
including landscapes by Théodore Rousseau and Corot, and had a passion
for music and the stage."* Turgenev, too, was to be a lifelong radical, one in
whose writings Karl Marx and Lenin found stimulation. Eventually, how-
ever, his friendship with Bakunin waned, largely owing to the latter’s
unreliability in money matters—and Marx, of course, became Bakunin’s
greatest rival. Turgenev’s radicalism developed under the influence of
Western radical thought. So also did that of Bakunin, on whom Turgenev
may have modeled the hero of his novel Rudin, although his own social
views differed sharply from those of Bakunin in being non-violent and not
really socialistic. Nevertheless, Turgenev later played an important part in
supporting Alexander Herzen’s Kolokol (Bell), a radical magazine pub-
lished in Russian mostly at London, with which Bakunin was also to be
connected for a short time, and which did much to stimulate Russian
socialist, populist, and revolutionary thought. The degree of Turgenev’s
radicalism was such that in his novel Fathers and Sons, he raised the term
“nihilist” from obscurity, and in the course of writing the novel so. com-
pletely identified himself with his nihilist hero, Bazarov, that he even kept
a diary in Bazarov’s name in which he considered current events from his
hero’s point of view.”
As for Turgenev’s friend Bakunin, he failed to return home to Russia
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 215

when ordered to do so by the Russian government, thereby sentencing

himself to exile. Meanwhile, in Switzerland he had come in close contact
with Wilhelm Weitling, the radical tailor with an interest in art who is
sometimes called the first German communist. Weitling, after falling out
with Marx, was to migrate to the United States, and there continue to
demonstrate his belief in the importance of art for socialists.
Bakunin first met Marx at Paris in March 1844 at a meeting attended
also by the French radicals Pierre Leroux and Louis Blanc, among others.
He soon decided to settle in Paris, where he remained until 1847. During
this period, when French utopianism was still at its peak, Bakunin, like
Marx, made the acquaintance of all the leading French radicals of the day.
He met Leroux’s disciple, George Sand. He called on Etienne Cabet, the
Icarian, and Victor Considerant, then the leading Fourierist. Most impor-
tant of all, he made a friend of, and was strongly influenced by, the
anarchist Proudhon, whom he, like Marx, helped to introduce to the
writings of Hegel, which had not yet been translated into French. At this
time, also, Bakunin first came to know Herzen and met once more his old
friends Belinsky and ‘Turgenev.
Bakunin’s contacts with so many noted radicals made him sharply
anti-bourgeois. He now wholeheartedly hoped for a revolution in Russia
which would begin in Poland and result in a republican Federation of
Slavs. Together with his love for the Slavs, a distaste for Germans eventu-
ally added to his disagreement with Marx and Engels, the latter of whom
especially disliked everything Slavic.
In 1849, Bakunin was in Dresden and about to leave that Saxon city
in order to promote a Slav revolution in Bohemia, when an insurrection
broke out in Saxony itself as part of the wave of revolutions that had been
in
sweeping Europe since 1848. Bakunin was a leader of this insurrection,
which his friend Richard Wagner was also involved. Bakunin had recently
Dresden,
heard Wagner conduct his last pre-revolutionary concert in
Symphon y of Bakunin’ s favorite artist, Bee-
which included the Ninth
at Dresden in which this concert was held had
thoven. The opera house
friend, the architect Gottfried Semper, also a
been designed by Wagner’s
of
leading figure in the Dresden revolt, and destined to become a founder
collapsed in the
modern architectural functionalism. When the revolt
Bakunin, Wagner, Semper, and other
face of attacks by Prussian troops,
where the revolutio nary provi-
revolutionaries had to flee. Near Freiberg,
and two
sional government was supposed to reestablish itself, Bakunin
red Wagner, who urged
other major leaders of the revolution encounte
Chemnitz , where, he assured
them to press on to the industrial city of
, however, Baku-
them, the insurrection could be continued. At Chemnitz
making the slightest
nin—-worn out—was arrested in his bed without
managed to escape
resistance. But Wagner, who had gone to another inn,
During a brief stay
safely to Weimar, and thence to Switzerland and Paris.
and after returning to
in Paris he read Proudhon’s What Is Property?
and Revolution (1849),
Switzerland wrote, in German, a small book, Art
216 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

which exercised especially strong influence on anarchists in France as did

another, The Work of Art of the Future (1850), destined to have an
international influence through its exaltation of the Gesamtkunstwerk.
Ernest Newman suggests that by this time Wagner had also become
influenced by Marxism as well as by anarchism, having probably been
introduced to writings of Marx, Engels, and other socialists and commu-
nists by Bakunin at Dresden.
The Saxon government turned Bakunin over to the Austrians, who in
turn passed him to the Russians. In 1857 he was given the choice of
remaining in jail or becoming a permanent exile in Siberia, and selected
the latter alternative. Four years thereafter, violating his word of honor to
return to Irkutsk following a journey within Siberia, he managed to get on
an American ship bound for San Francisco. After a week there, he took
ship for Panama, crossed the isthmus, and embarked for New York, where
he landed on November 18, 1861.
Little is known of Bakunin’s short stay of a month in the United
States, and there is no record that he displayed any interest in American
art. He did journey to Boston to see the great naturalist Louis J. R. Agassiz,
whom he had met in Switzerland and who was curator of the Zoological
Museum at Harvard. And he did record that he found in America “a
universal and unconditional sympathy for Russia and faith in the future of
the Russian people”; but noted that, because of the Civil War then raging,
“the country has been brought by way of democracy to the same miserable
results which we have achieved by despotism.” 78
In December 1861, Bakunin sailed for England, where he contributed
briefly to Herzen’s radical magazine, Kolokol. He tried to participate in a
Polish revolution in 1863, but it collapsed before he and fellow-revolution-
aries could reach Poland. Soon he was in Italy as a disciple of Italian
nationalism, and there at the age of fifty became an avowed atheist, setting
the same example for future anarchists that Marx was setting for future
communists—an example that necessarily resulted in the rejection of all
contemporary religious art.
Bakunin settled in 1867 in Switzerland, the country destined to
receive those other great Russian exiles, Kropotkin and Lenin. In that year
he was one of the speakers at an international congress at Geneva of the
League of Peace and Democracy, which represented a wide range of radical
and republican views. Garibaldi was the star of the congress, in which
Victor Hugo and John Stuart Mill also participated. The meeting was
attended out of curiosity by Dostoyevsky and his wife, then residing at
Geneva. The occasion clearly inspired the episode of the nihilists in The
Idiot, published the following year. It also sowed in the novelist’s mind the
first seeds of The Possessed (1871), the main character of which he based
on Bakunin’s friend the terrorist Nechayey; and a leading Soviet critic has
Claimed that another character, Stavrogin, was drawn from Bakunin
himself. In this connection it is appropriate to note that Dostoyevsky,
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 217

although by then relatively conservative and a Slavophile, had in his youth

been so fascinated by Western socialism that in 1849 he had been sen-
tenced to several years in Siberia after narrowly escaping execution for
participating in a conspiracy of Russian Fourierists against the tsarist
regime.”
The year after the Congress of the League of Peace and Democracy,
Bakunin enrolled in the Geneva section of the International Working-
men’s Association (First International), which had been established in
1864. In the same year, accused of being a communist, he delivered a
speech which remarkably foreshadowed his forthcoming bitter dispute
with Marx while also indicating his strong opposition to certain character-
istics of communism which long afterward were to be evident in the Soviet
Union. He hated communism, he declared, “because it concentrates and
swallows up in itself for the benefit of the State all the forces of society,
because it inevitably leads to the concentration of property in the hands of
the State, whereas I want the abolition of the State... .” He continued:
“I wish at the same time for the abolition of personal inherited
property, which is nothing more than a State institution. . . . That is the
sense. . .in which I ama collectivist, but not a communist.” *
The word “collectivist,” however, is hardly adequate for describing
Bakunin’s political system. The essence of that system, and therefore of his
opposition to Marx, was the extreme individualism which led him to reject
the state. And this was in fact a culmination of one aspect of romanticism,
much as Marx’s social doctrines were in other ways partly a culmination of
humanitarian social doctrines stemming from romanticism and the En-
lightenment. In general, Bakunin accepted Rousseau’s doctrine that man is
inherently virtuous if unperverted by social or political authority, and that
the more primitive he is, the more closely he approximates the ideal of
virtue. In Bakunin’s view, too, the most primitive men in the modern
world are the peasant and the industrial worker. The Russian peasants he
particularly admired because their villages had a communal organization
which he regarded as a model for the communism of the future, a view
that could help to encourage folk art. Even though he agreed with Marx
on the necessity for a violent revolution of the proletariat, in his concep-
the
tion of the proletariat Bakunin never separated the peasantry from
urban workers, the country from the town. Later, this affected anarchist
views about town planning.
While followers of Mazzini and Proudhon had been more active than
d to gain
those of Marx in founding the First International, Marx manage
broke out between
control of its general council in London. Soon warfare
, objecte d to the
him and those who, under the leadership of Bakunin
d that, as
authoritarian centralism of the council. Bakunin had long believe
all submiss ion
he once phrased it, “All exercise of authority perverts, and
ed when, in 1869,
to authority humiliates” **; and so he was greatly disturb
him to submit to
the council of the International from London required
218 fe PRACTICE OF ART LN) BRAN Ce) FAWND SWITZERLAND

the breaking up of his own International Brotherhood, or Secret Alliance,

of Socialist Democracy, an organization he had founded shortly before he
had joined the First International.” As was mentioned earlier, he gained
particular support in opposing the First International's general council
when it attempted to take over the direction of the Commune in Paris by
remote control, and especially when, at a secret meeting later in 1871, it
made a major policy decision affecting all sections of the International. All
of these events contributed to the beginning, under Bakunin’s leadership,
of what became known as communist-anarchism, which was to exert such
wide influence on artists.
Switzerland was particularly well suited to be a place of origin for
communist-anarchism and a place of refuge for foreign radicals such as
Bakunin. In Switzerland, the economic depression that followed the Napo-
leonic wars had given rise to the Radical Party. In 1847 this had triumphed
over the conservative and Catholic rural cantons in a brief and almost
bloodless civil war, and then had made the previously very loose Swiss
federation into a single federal state in which a progressive and relatively
radical spirit was predominant. Inasmuch as it was still a federation, with
an emphasis on freedom of the individual and with an exceptionally high
standard of living for its citizens, including the individual workingman,
Switzerland had much in common with the communist-anarchist ideal of
voluntarily federated communes made up of freely participating and fairly
equal individuals. Because Swiss workingmen had both a high standard of
living and a degree of freedom lacking in other continental countries,
radicalism in Switzerland lacked the bitterness and violence so widely
prevalent elsewhere on the Continent throughout the working classes and
their supporters among intellectuals. As a consequence, the Swiss govern-
ment could safely allow foreign radicals such as Bakunin to live in Switzer-
land and to seek the support of Swiss workingmen for their ideas.
In 1870 Bakunin had received the backing of those sections of the
International in the Jura region of French Switzerland, sections made up
chiefly of watchmakers, whereas the Geneva sections continued to support
Marx. Bakunin also had many supporters in Spain and Italy, where some of
the members of his Social Democratic Alliance had led the way in spread-
ing the revolutionary radicalism that the First International itself stood
for. Spain, to which Proudhonian anarchism had already spread, also
became and remained a major center of Bakuninist anarchism: apparently
it appealed to an instinctive Spanish liking for collectivism and federalism
combined with individualism. One might note here that, as a youth in
Barcelona, Picasso was to be much influenced by anarchism, and he later
strongly supported the anarchists and their communist and liberal allies
against Franco in the civil war of the late 1930’s, which ended in the defeat
not only of Spanish anarchism and communism but of liberalism as well.
In Italy, likewise, Bakunin’s followers had pioneered for the Interna-
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 219

tional. Bakunin himself broke openly with Mazzini when the latter at-
tacked the Paris Commune as anti-nationalist and anti-religious. Even
though Bakunin had earlier predicted the utter failure of the Commune,
he now sprang to its defense, presiding briefly over the short-lived Com-
mune at Lyon; and after Mazzini died in 1872, he became the oracle of the
Italian proletariat. The enduring strength of more or less Bakuninist
anarchism in Italy can be seen later in the influence of anarchism on the
modern art movement known as futurism—a movement later to turn
toward Fascism.
In this connection, it should not be forgotten that even while Baku-
nin’s extreme individualism made him one of the founders of communist-
anarchism, paradoxically he was also an originator of the idea of the select
and closely organized revolutionary party characterized, as he said, by
“absolute effacement of individuals, of wills, in collective organisation and
action.” #4 In practice, though not in theory, he was entirely willing to
confer upon himself the dictatorship of the elite revolutionary party. As a
result, he apparently became one of the more remote ancestors of Fascism
—that movement with which Marinetti, the founder of futurism, eventu-
ally sought to associate futurist art. Indeed, one of Bakunin’s chief biogra-
phers, E. H. Carr, writing in 1937, declared that it is possible to “argue that
the modern clash between the proletarian and Fascist dictatorships is the
latest expression of the historical struggle between Karl Marx and Michael
Bakunin.” *”°
The personal clash between Marx and Bakunin had reached a peak at
the Congress of the International held at the Hague in 1872. Though in
1869-1870, Bakunin had weakened himself by close connections with the
Russian terrorist Nechayev, at the Hague his followers were on the verge of
winning out over the supporters of Karl Marx. Then Marx decided that he
could keep control only by transferring the headquarters of the Interna-
tional to New York—where in six years the main organization quietly
dwindled and disappeared.
Meanwhile, Bakunin had participated in an attempt to establish a
republic in Lyon on the fall of Napoleon III, but this proved no more
successful than the Commune in Paris. After this failure and after the
moving of the International’s headquarters to the United States, he lived
on in comparative quiet in Switzerland, where he died on July 1, 1876.
A few years earlier, he had listed what he called the seven degrees of
human happiness. Of these, “art and science” constituted the third degree,
being romantically preceded by “first, to die fighting for liberty,” and
smok-
“second, love and friendship”—and realistically followed by “fourth,
°° Even during his
ing; fifth, drinking; sixth, eating; and seventh, sleeping.”
him most,
fnal illness Bakunin showed his interest in the art that attracted
as the greatest of all, when
and in the artist whom he had so long regarded
and
he left the hospital briefly to hear a friend play Beethoven’s music
220 if PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

remarked: “Everything will pass, and the world will perish, but the Ninth
Symphony will remain.” * To Bakunin, as to so many other social radicals,
music could connote social harmony.
Bakunin’s individualistic opposition to political action and Marxist
authoritarianism had reflected his own support, in theory at least, of the
idea of government by voluntary cooperation in loose federations. We have
seen how it had been Fourier’s idea that the phalanxes would cooperate in
federations which, through a final great confederation, would eventually
govern the entire world. From Fourier through Proudhon this conception
had reached Bakunin, and from him it passed on to his successors among
continental anarchists. It was these successors who had to formulate the
theory of communist-anarchism, and even to name the movement, because
Bakunin himself was so little a theorist that his rival, Marx, had referred to
him contemptuously as “A Mahomet without a Koran.”

&. Anarchism: Kropotkin and Art

Cer among Bakunin’s successors was Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921),”

who had been converted to anarchism during a brief visit to Switzerland in
1874, two years before Bakunin died and while the First International was
still in existence (though with its headquarters in America). Kropotkin
had returned to Russia without taking the opportunity to meet Bakunin—
to his later intense regret because when he next returned to western
Europe, Bakunin had died. Like Bakunin, Kropotkin was born into the
Russian nobility and was compelled by his radicalism to live most of his
life in exile. In contrast to Bakunin, however, Kropotkin died in his native
land, to which he had returned, filled with hope, after the Revolution of
March 1917 had overthrown the tsarist regime, but before the Bolshevik
Revolution had taken place in November of that year. His participation in
radical movements as an anarchist thus spanned the whole period from the
First International to the beginnings of Soviet Russia.
All his life Kropotkin had a deep concern for art, and especially for
painting and music. His mother painted in watercolors, and from child-
hood he drew and painted. He was also a pianist who loved both classical
and modern music, and who wrote in his autobiography, “Music . . .
played a very great part in my development.” *® Kropotkin himself did not
have a high estimate of his own abilities in these arts, and the opinions of
others as to his talents vary greatly—with fellow anarchists giving them the
highest rating. In her autobiography, the American anarchist Emma Gold-
man waxed ecstatic about drawings by Kropotkin which she discovered
after his death, and she was equally impressed by his abilities as a pianist.
The authors of the chief biography on Kropotkin suggest, however, that
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 221

she exaggerated his talents both as painter and pianist, citing with refer-
ence to the latter the socialist G. D. H. Cole who as a lad at Hampstead
had heard Kropotkin play and who remembered his playing as
“atrocious.” ** Nevertheless, Kropotkin’s own pleasure in the practice of
two arts undoubtedly reinforced his lifelong belief that art must be part of
life in the ideal anarchist society—a belief that helped to attract many
artists to anarchism.
Like Marx, Kropotkin regarded the good society as a living organism
working in all its parts for the good of all. But his ideal social organism
differed from that of Marx especially in placing more emphasis on opportu-
nity for the personal initiative of each individual and in paying more direct
attention to the arts. ‘To quote his own words, Kropotkin called for “a new
form of society . . . a society of equals . . . able to apply their knowledge
and capacities to production, in an organism so constructed as to combine
all the efforts for procuring the greatest sum possible of well-being for all,
while full, free scope will be left for every individual initiative. This society
will be composed of a multitude of associations, federated for all the
purposes which require federation: trade federations for production cf all
sorts—agricultural, industrial, intellectual, artistic; communes for con-
sumption, making provision for dwellings, gas works, supplies of food,
sanitary arrangements, etc; federations of communes among themselves,
and federations of communes with trade organizations; and finally, wider
groups covering all the country, or several countries, composed of men who
collaborate for the satisfaction of such economic, intellectual, artistic, and
moral needs as are not limited to a given territory.” * He declared that
“After bread has been secured, leisure is the chief aim.” ** And as his chief
biographers have stated, “by leisure he means the facilities for each man to
follow, in the time free from essential work, all those individual inclina-
tions which produce art, literature, and science. He sees this achieved by a
great extension of mutual-interest associations, similar to the existing
learned societies, but embracing all amateurs of each particular activity.
Thus science and the arts will be freed from the domination of money, and
‘exclusively cultivated by those who love them, and for those who love
them,” [and thereby] will take ‘their proper place in the work of human
development.’ ” **
Kropotkin as well as Marx regarded the “division of labor” as the
feature of capitalist society most stultifying to the human spirit. For this
reason, in his ideal anarchist society, writers, scientists, etc., were to be
called upon to do their share of chosen manual work in order to give
strength and balance to their work in study or laboratory. By voluntary
labor the efficiency of industry would be increased, because, as Kropotkin
put it, “the most important economy, the only reasonable one, is to make
life pleasant for all, because the man who is satisfied with life produces
infinitely more than the man who curses his surroundings.” *
Such ideas as these are of course very similar to those of Fourier, who
 ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
222 yh PRACTICE OF

was felt by Bakunin and

influenced Proudhon, whose influence in turn
system he did not
Kropotkin. However, Kropotkin made it clear that in his ms
nal dining-too
require the phalansteries of Fourier, or even the commu
utopia ns regar ded as impor-
and living-quarters which Fourier and other
, was to emphasize in
tant, and which Premier Khrushchev, among others
should make
the Soviet Union much later. In Kropotkin’s view, people
y is essential to
whatever domestic arrangements they chose, because privac
time spent in society,
many human beings, and “isolation, alternating with
is the normal desire of human nature” **“—a doctrine basic to communist-
anarchism as he envisaged it.
Kropotkin arrived at the full expression of these ideas gradually, and
only by reacting against the completely antithetic society in which he had
been brought up. In his youth, as a member of an extremely aristocratic
Russian family, his rank had entitled him to the honor of becoming a
member of the tsar’s own Corps of Pages; and the high standing in the
Corps that his intellectual ability gave him led to his appointment as
personal page de chambre to Alexander II himself. So early did Kropotkin
revolt against this way of life in the very heart of tsarist autocracy that
when he completed his term in the Corps of Pages, he applied for an
officer’s commission, not in the fashionable regiment to which his rank
entitled him, but in a regiment of Siberian Cossacks on the far eastern
frontier of the Russian Empire. During his service in eastern Siberia, he
made the long journeys and surveys that eventually brought him a well-
merited reputation as a geographer and also led to the studies which raised
doubts in his mind about the emphasis placed by Darwin on the struggle
for existence as a factor in evolution. But Darwin had also emphasized the
principle of cooperation as a factor in the evolution of man. By so doing he
may have helped Kropotkin lay the foundations for his own future evolu-
tionary theory of “mutual aid’”—in connection with which the arts could
be valued for their usefulness as part of the full life of the individual
among other individuals, instead of as immediate propaganda for stirring
up revolution in the Marxist-Leninist manner.
In 1871, largely as a result of reading the works of Proudhon and of
such Russian revolutionaries as Herzen and as Chernyshevsky (whose
writings influenced Lenin before those of Marx), Kropotkin decided to
enter fully the stream of rebellion which was drawing into itself so many
Russian youths of the period. In 1872, he decided to pay a visit to
Switzerland, at that time the center of the most active sections of the
International Workingmen’s Association, or First International, and thus
of the socialist movement. There he was especially impressed with the Jura
Federation, that organization of workingmen, chiefly watchmakers, in
French Switzerland, which formed part of the International and was then
supporting Bakunin in criticizing the authoritarianism of the general coun-
cil of the International, located in London and dominated by Marx and
Engels.
Kropotkin later wrote that after only a week among the watchmakers
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 223

of the Jura “my views upon socialism were settled. I was an anarchist.” *”
He returned home to Russia, where he participated so fully in revolution-
ary activity that he was arrested and imprisoned in 1874. After two years,
with the help of devoted radical friends, he made a sensational escape from
jail and from Russia. Following a brief stay in England, he went once more
to Switzerland. There he met for the first time Bakunin’s friend the noted
Italian anarchist and insurrectionist, Exrico Malatesta; ** and he now de-
cided to settle in Switzerland. He soon began to collaborate with a French
exile, Dr. Paul Brousse, in publishing the latter’s anarchist paper L’Avant-
garde (1876-1878), printed chiefly for smuggling over the border to stimu-
late anarchism in France. Its title reflects the perennial radical belief in the
need for a vanguard in social progress which had grown out of the
doctrines of Saint-Simon, in whose conception of the social vanguard
artists had first become highly important.
In 1878 the Swiss authorities suppressed L’Avant-garde and impris-
oned Brousse—who soon after leaving prison abandoned anarchism for
Marxism. But Kropotkin, after a brief trip to Paris, returned to Switzerland
in the same year and founded, as a successor to L’Avant-garde, a periodical
called Le Révolté, destined to become the most influential anarchist paper
since the disappearance of Proudhon’s Le Peuple in 1850.
As a radical protest movement against society and state, anarchism in
the 1870’s and 1880's appealed especially to impoverished artisans in
Switzerland, Belgium, and Austria, as well as to downtrodden rural labor-
ers in Spain and southern Italy. It must be remembered that at this time
anarchism had become the chief form of revolutionary radicalism on the
Continent because “Marxist Socialism” had in practice now come to stand
for a much greater degree of reformism in accordance with the spirit of
Marx’s inaugural address to the International in 1864—that “birth-certifi-
cate, as it were, of modern Social-Democracy.” * And at this time the Jura
Federation in Switzerland had already become the ideological center of
what, in 1880, Kropotkin urged a congress of the Federation to call by the
name of “anarchist-communism”—only to find that he had been briefly
anticipated by Italian anarchists in using the term. Although from the very
beginning the Jura Federation had been the chief center, it had become so
especially under the influence of anarchists from outside of Switzerland,
notably anarchists from Latin countries. For although anarchistic libertar-
janism strongly appealed to the Latin temperament, it was then repressed
by the governments of France, Italy, and Spain. Thus it was chiefly to
French Switzerland that political exiles from those other Latin regions
migrated in exile and in search of freedom.
Particularly important for the anarchist cause in Switzerland at that
time was a French refugee named Jean Jacques Elisée Reclus, who had
been exiled from his native country for participating in the Commune as a
national guardsman. He had become a friend of Bakunin, and delivered
one of the three speeches at Bakunin’s funeral. Like Kropotkin, Reclus was
a geographer; and at the time he first met Kropotkin at Geneva in 1877, he
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
224 / PRACTICE

to
had been an anarchist for nearly ten years. It was easy for the two men
strike up a friendship, which lasted until the death of Reclus and in the
t
course of which they became two of the chief figures in the anarchis
movement.
Elisée Reclus had been a radical all his life.’ As a youth of eighteen
already influenced by Fourierism, he had identified himself with the
republicans in the Revolution of 1848, with the result that he was com-
pelled to leave France after Louis Napoleon’s coup d'état of December
1851. The next five years, at a time when he was an ardent Proudhonian,
he spent abroad, going first to Britain and from there to Central America
and the United States, where he hélped to spread Proudhon’s mutualist
anarchism. On this trip he and a friend made a survey for the Panama
Canal later followed by De Lesseps and the Americans. It was after
returning to France in 1857 that Reclus began to achieve his reputation as
a geographer. Fourteen years later, as mentioned above, he was again
exiled, this time for participating in the Commune; and he then made his
way to Switzerland. In 1890, however, he settled in Belgium, and was
chiefly responsible for introducing anarchism successfully into that coun-
try, where he became a professor of geography at the University of Brus-
sels.
A few words should also be included here about Elisée Reclus’s older
brother, Elie Reclus, a well-known anthropologist who was a radical, a
friend of Kropotkin, and much interested in art, especially Greek art. Like
Elisée, Elie too became a convinced Fourierist before the Revolution of
1848, and as a Bakuninist later, had been prominent in introducing
anarchism into Spain in 1868 at the moment of the proclamation of a
Spanish revolution. After Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état, he too had gone to
England. When an amnesty was proclaimed, he returned to Paris where he
edited a Fourierist cooperative magazine having a wide circulation among
the workers. To him was originally entrusted the task of making the
French translation of Marx’s Das Kapital, but he never carried it out. (It
was finally made by Joseph Roy, who had previously translated Feuer-
bach.) With his brother, Elie Reclus participated in the Commune, but
instead of serving as a national guardsman, he was led by his love for art to
accept a position as keeper of the Louvre Museum and also of the
Bibliotheque nationale under Charles Vaillant. According to Kropotkin,*
it was largely owing to Elie Reclus’s foresight in safely storing the treasures
of these two institutions that they were preserved during the bombardment
of Paris by the Versailles armies of Thiers and during the conflagration
that followed. Reclus was nearly executed after the fall of the Commune,
and like his brother had to go into exile, but he returned to Paris after the
amnesty to resume his life work in ethnology.
Another friend, in addition to the Reclus brothers, whom Kropotkin
made in these early days was Turgenev, Bakunin’s one-time friend, who as
an old man in Paris in 1878 asked Kropotkin to come to see him. At the
time, Kropotkin, with a few other anarchists, was more or less secretly
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 225

attempting to revive the French labor movement, destroyed by the defeat

of the Commune, and to start socialist groups. In this task he was aided by
Jules Guesde, who in the following year was to establish the first truly
Marxian socialist party in France.
Meanwhile, Kropotkin had returned from Paris to Switzerland, and in
1878 founded at Geneva the anarchist magazine Le Révolté. For this
periodical he wrote a series of articles which in 1885 were collected into a
book edited with an introduction by Elisée Reclus and published in Paris
as Paroles d'un réyolté. In these articles he warmly espoused ideas already
being spread by two English non-anarchist writers, Ruskin and William
Morris, whose beliefs about the importance of art for life in the good
society in many respects paralleled those of Proudhon and Kropotkin.
Although Kropotkin differed from Ruskin and Morris in considering art a
luxury, and so refused to give the artist a primary role in the social battle,
his articles in Le Révolté and the book made from them did insist that the
artist could not remain neutral in the struggle for humanity and justice.”
In thus holding that art and life must be integrated, he was easily able to
support the similar views of Ruskin and especially of Morris,“ who became
his friend.
It was because Kropotkin was in a French prison that his book,
Paroles d'un révolté, had to be edited by Elisée Reclus. Kropotkin had
been expelled from Switzerland in 1881 as a result of pressure exerted on
the Swiss government by the tsarist regime, and after a brief period in
England had gone to France. In England he had then found little or no
interest in anarchism or other forms of social radicalism; but in France a
considerable anarchist movement had begun to develop in 1881 and 1882,
at which time the anarchist movement first clearly separated itself from the
general socialist trend in France. A terrible economic crisis at Lyon late in
1882 offered a special opportunity for the spreading of anarchism. When
three anarchists exploded bombs in the Thé&tre Bellecour and recruiting
offices at Lyon, and to the frightened members of the middle class it
seemed that a workers’ revolt was developing, Kropotkin was arrested as a
terrorist and sentenced to five years in jail. While serving his term of
imprisonment, he found opportunity for much serious thinking, and the
authors of his chief biography have written that “there is no doubt that
from this period dates the beginning of his change from a pamphleteer and
an agitator to a scholar concerned in a scientific way with the problems of
sociology.” “ The result was that after Kropotkin was released from prison
early in 1886 and went to England (staying at Paris with Elie Reclus on
the way), he soon became widely known as a scholar unfavorable to
social
terrorism. Even though still an anarchist, he now was accepted in all
1917.
circles in England, where he lived until he returned to Russia in
Throughout much of his life, and especially after 1896, when the anarch-
ists were expelled from the Second [or Socialist] International, Kropotkin
movement.
was regarded as the most distinguished figure in the anarchist
Soon after Paroles d’un révolté had been published at Paris in 1885, it
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
220 yh PRACTICE

had begun to exert influence on radical-minded French artists because in it

Kropotkin had made so direct an appeal to young artists, poets, and
musicians for socially relevant art. He called upon them to “Narrate for us
in your vivid style or in your fervent pictures the titanic struggle of the
masses against their oppressors; inflame young hearts with the beautiful
breath of revolution.” He urged them to “show the people the ugliness of
contemporary life” and the “ignominies of the existing social order.” *
Declaring that for contemporary art there no longer existed the joy of
having rediscovered the world of Antiquity and through it the sources of
nature—that joy which had characterized the masterpieces of the Renais-
sance—he maintained that realism was not an adequate replacement for
the true revolutionary idea which art still lacked.** In this way Kropotkin
encouraged young artists to develop new anti-academic artistic movements
regarded as better suited than realism to truly revolutionary art, and thus
fostered approaches to art very different from that of most Marxists,
approaches leading to Symbolism and abstraction.
After Kropotkin was imprisoned, artists were further influenced by his
magazine, Le Révolté, which in 1883 had been turned over to a former
contributor named Jean Grave, a French anarchist shoemaker whom Kro-
potkin had first met two years before in Paris.*7 Grave soon moved the
paper to Paris from Geneva. Because he became so successful in leading
artists to anarchism, and because his periodical and its successors had a
particularly stimulating effect on the many French artists who contributed
to them, the story of Grave as a publisher of anarchist magazines is
especially important for the history of French art.
In 1887, Le Révolté was suppressed by the French government, where-
upon Grave promptly revived it under the name of La Réyolte. This,
which paid much more attention to art than its predecessor, was in turn
suppressed in 1894, and Grave was sentenced to serve a term in jail. In the
following year, after being released from prison, he established a similar
magazine, Les Temps nouveaux, the official journal for anarchist doctrine
until the outbreak of World War I in 1914 brought it to an end, together
with so many other radical magazines in various countries.
Thus, especially because of Kropotkin’s influence—exerted through the
publication in 1885 of Paroles dun révolté, and particularly through Le
Réyolté, as continued by Jean Grave under various names—anarchism
proved highly successful in attracting the support of French artists. In so
doing, it proved far more effective than Marxism.

6. Marxism: Guesde and Art

A xruoven a few scattered Marxists had played an extremely minor role
in the Commune, it was Marx’s spirited defense of the Commune from
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 227

London that had brought his name and doctrines strongly before the
public. One result was that in 1876, when at last the government of the
Third Republic felt secure enough to relax its rigid pressure against social-
ist agitation, there had returned to France from exile in Geneva a recent
convert to Marxism named Jules Guesde who had been forced to flee to
Switzerland to escape punishment for supporting the Commune in the
press. In Switzerland he had become an anarchist and for a time had sided
with Bakunin in the struggle against Marx in the First International, only
to be converted to Marxism in 1876 shortly before returning to Paris.
There in 1879, the year of the partial amnesty granted to those who had
participated in the Commune, he founded the first French Marxist party,*
the Parti ouvrier francais, in which the Marxists cohabited with and
contended with reformists, anarchists, and cooperators. ‘The following year
found him writing the party’s program in Marx’s study in London with the
help of Marx, Engels, and Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue. In 1880,
another Marxist party was established in France by former followers of
Blanqui. Thus the simultaneous existence of various socialist parties of
Marxist persuasion, destined to be so characteristic of French socialism,
had begun. Two years later this tendency became still more marked when,
after reformists had become dominant in Guesde’s own party, he and his
followers broke away to form a new revolutionary party. Second only to
Guesde in this was Paul Lafargue, who sometimes wrote on art, and who,
as mentioned earlier, opened a studio for photolithography and engraving.
When Jean Grave and other anarchists began to disseminate Kropot-
kin’s doctrines in France, the two chief Marxian groups—Guesde’s party
and the reformist party from which he had broken away—made occasional
efforts to compete with the anarchists in attracting artists. ‘These attempts
were half-hearted both because of the lack of unity among French Marxists
and because as Marxists they so strongly emphasized economic factors
alone as basic. However, in 1890 a Marxian periodical, the Revue rouge, in
which Guesde, Edouard Vaillant, and Lafargue were especially interested,
did publish in its first issue an article insisting on the integral connection
between the life of the people and great art. In the following year, the
Reyue socialiste, journal of the reformists, not to be outdone, somewhat
more explicitly published a manifesto urging the artist to emerge from
isolation in his revolt and join the masses.” Nevertheless, because the
interést of most Marxists in the visual arts was long to remain so thor-
oughly secondary, relatively few attempts were made by Marxists to follow
up these early efforts until after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.”
From 1892 to 1898, Guesde’s Parti ouvrier francais subscribed to a
reformist point of view, but then it returned to a revolutionary position.
After contending for years with numerous other French Marxist parties, in
1905 it disappeared as a party by fusion into a unified French socialist
party in which reformism became dominant.
228 i PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

7. Radicalism and “ Reality’: Impressionism,

Literary Naturalism, Photography
Beerore tuming to the many French artists attracted not to Marxism but
to anarchism during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, it
should be noted that for some time there had been a tendency in France
for non-radicals to confuse artistic radicalism with political radicalism—a
tendency often encountered elsewhere. Especially during the years follow-
ing the Commune, after political and economic radicals had so thoroughly
frightened their opponents, radicals in other fields were often to be at-
tacked as social radicals whether or not they were actually interested in
radical politics and economics. For instance, right-wing political propa-
ganda frightened dealers and collectors by describing realism and Impres-
sionism as socially subversive doctrines. The painter Manet—a liberal
republican who was not very political-minded though he had been a
member of the federation of artists organized under the Commune—and
some of his largely apolitical friends among the Impressionists were sub-
jected to organized attack as political radicals mainly because their artistic
techniques and forms then seemed so radical. In the election year of 1877
they heard themselves described as producers of “Communard” art and
abettors of the “spectre rouge.” We know that even more than Manet,
Degas was essentially middle-class royalist in his ties—although he did read
the anarchist Proudhon on the arts and spoke of him with a certain
admiration.” Yet somewhat as with Manet, Degas and the politically
conservative Cézanne were eventually to be accused of being communists
and also of being immoral, merely because of their artistically radical art.
Criticism of this kind is, however, often far from-consistent, as is indicated
by the fact that one great contemporary artist, the leading Impressionist
Monet, was a republican, a pacifist, and a friend of Zola, yet no one ever
accused him of being a political radical.™
Artistic radicalism and social radicalism do not inevitably go hand in
hand, but enough evidence has been given to indicate that those who in
one field are sympathetic to the idea of social progress and therefore to
liberalism or radicalism, are temperamentally more likely to be sympa-
thetic to radicals in other fields. Consequently, although most of the
Impressionists, like most artists everywhere, had little interest in politics, at
least one leading Impressionist and many of the Neo-Impressionists did
have close connections with the anarchist movement. So also did many of
their friends in the radical literary and artistic movement known as Sym-
bolism, which, though it had a long pre-history, is usually said to have
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 229

begun in 1885-1886, largely as an individualistic reaction against natural-

ism and against the objectivity of the literary group called the Parnassians.
Not only did the individualistic spirit of the Symbolists help to make them
sympathetic to anarchism, but in seeking a literary and artistic revolution
they were also stimulated by ideas derived from earlier writers several of
whom had been influenced by previous political revolutions. One of these
earlier writers was that leader of “l'art pour Vart,’ Baudelaire, who had
been so greatly affected by the Revolution of 1830 and had been a socialist
in the Revolution of 1848. Another was Arthur Rimbaud, who untruth-
fully declared that he had participated in the Commune, to which,
however, he was certainly sympathetic. It is worth noting that the many-
sided Rimbaud has contradictorily been labeled by different authors as a
communist, an anarchist, and a nihilist. In his poetry, he combined Bau-
delaire’s notions of Swedenborgianism with those of Fourier (also cited by
Baudelaire) and other visionaries and illuminists who dreamed of a univer-
sal language. In the 1870’s Rimbaud’s poems, together with those of his
friend Paul Verlaine and of Stéphane Mallarmé, clearly anticipated the
Symbolist movement, which began in the mid-1880’s and with which
Verlaine and Mallarmé were connected. Like other participants in that
movement, Verlaine developed anarchist sympathies. So also did Mal-
larmé, who, by carrying further the Baudelairean idea of the importance of
enigma in poetry, and by recognizing the implications of chance in his last
poem, “Un Coup de dés” (A Throw of the Dice), anticipated dada and
Neo-dada, many of whose practitioners have had anarchistic inclinations.
Of the Impressionists, the only important one to manifest direct
sympathy for anarchism was the Jewish artist Camille Pissarro, whose five
artist sons were likewise anarchist sympathizers.™ Pissarro particularly ad-
mired the writings of Proudhon and Kropotkin, but he also studied Marx.
He once wrote that “the movement of ideas in present society tends with
extraordinary energy toward the elaboration of new philosophical and
~
scientific systems destined to become law in societies of the future.”
in the social field has of
Such exaltation of science, law, and progress
to
course been characteristic of most social radicals from secular utopians
“scientifi c systems” in this
anarchists and Marxists. The emphasis on
as an
statement could, however, also be applied to Pissarro’s artistic views
t. For Impressio n-
Impressionist who eventually became a Neo-Impressionis
also one regarded by
ism was not only an artistically radical movement but
it sought to
many authorities as possessing a basis in scientific law because
at least partial
depict the effect of sunlight on objects at a given instant in
this more
accord with the optical laws of light and color. As is well known,
further
or less scientific approach to realism in art was to be carried much
and Neo-
by the Neo-Impressionists. Consequently, as an Impressionist
Pissarro
Impressionist who was also an anarchist with Marxian sympathies,
degree.
combined artistic and social “scientific” radicalism to an unusual
drawings and
His social radicalism was displayed especially in his many
230 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

frequent paintings with figures, in which he showed a warm regard for

both the urban masses (Fig. 23) and the peasantry (Fig. 24):social beliefs
can of course be better revealed in figure paintings than in landscapes. On
this account it is significant that Pissarro and other Impressionist figure
painters were, like Seurat and like Van Gogh later, greatly stimulated by
the Barbizon figure painter Millet, in whose works a socially moral com-
mitment was so strongly implicit. However, the leading Impressionist
landscape painters, Monet and Sisley, were especially sensitive instead to
the works of the Barbizon landscapist Daubigny precisely because he
lacked such commitment. Thus the figure painters among the Impression-
ists were the ones more likely to show 'that the ideals of the French Revolu-
tion “lived on in revolutionary-republican and socialistic ideas.” ”
The Impressionists’ favorite subject-matter, landscape, was unsuited to
social expression in art; also, the very technique they employed was itself
poorly adapted to convey the directly propagandistic social realism that
Marxists in particular have been likely to insist upon far more strictly than
the anarchists. Insofar as the Impressionists sought to represent the effect
of light on surfaces at an instant, they could hardly reflect in their art the
Marxian view that the present grows dialectically out of the past, the
future out of the present. It is therefore hardly surprising that Impression-
ism was to be banned in the Soviet Union under Stalin as an inadequate
expression of Soviet socialist realism. Stalinite socialist realism and the art
of the Impressionists were both influenced by the art of Courbet, to be
sure, but for quite different reasons. Although both admired his realistic
innovations, the Impressionists admired him for being anti-academic rather
than for his social radicalism or for his relatively literalistic kind of realism.
But the Stalinist aesthetic exalted him for the social realism of his subjects
presented in that realistic kind of technique which itself so largely fur-
nished the basis for official—and thus essentially academic—Soviet social-
ist realism in painting.
Zola, whose admiration for Courbet has been mentioned, had also for
a time regarded the Impressionists highly; and his’ literary art, like that of
the Impressionists in painting, was likewise destined to be rejected by the
Stalinists in the U.S.S.R., though for somewhat different reasons. As the
father of literary naturalism, that mechanistically “scientific” kind of social
realism in the novel, Zola had been able to admire the Impressionists as
long as he thought that their realism had a basis in science. (The term
“naturalist” had been coined by an art critic, Castagnary, in 1863 to
distinguish the new generation of young painters from the older realists.)
Actually, Courbet’s kind of socially realistic subject-matter and realistic
technique could appeal to Zola’s own social interests far more than could
most of the Impressionists. For although Zola was in fact very much of an
individualist, he called himself a socialist, and in at least one major novel,
Germinal, showed the direct influence of Marxian “scientific” socialism.
Zola’s naturalism—rejected by Marx and in Stalin’s Russia as too
completely deterministic and mechanistic—partly reflected the positivi
sm
 * i
ME my 4

S
= 4 2)iss}- = °
FIGs 23. The Poultry Market (
ei ©O© Nn Zs Oo> O a —cS)
FIG. 24.
The Siesta , Eragny (1899 —
by Camille Pissarro.
234 i. PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

and environmentalism of Taine (who in 1864 had become professor of

aesthetics and the history of art in the reform at the Ecole des Beaux-
Arts), and partly the influence of the scientist Claude Bernard. But the
naturalistic Germinal, published in 1885, two years after Marx’s death, is
said to contain the first allusion to Marxism ever made in French litera-
ture.” And in that novel, which is about a disastrous strike of coal miners,
Zola expressed the struggle between workers and owners in highly Marxian
terms. Readers of the novel are led to believe that, of the three major strike
leaders, the pro-Marxist one has more to offer than either the partisan of
the anarchist Bakunin or the advocate of peaceful agreement. Zola had
read some of Marx’s works, but his‘main source of information for the
novel was Jules Guesde, founder of the first French Marxian party in 1879.
Although the main theme of Germinal is the Marxian one of class
conflict, Zola himself insisted that this novel was simply a “cry of pity for
the suffering.” ** Furthermore, though he believed in art for the masses, his
point of view had long been so individualistic as almost to resemble that of
some kind of individualistic anarchism. He had declared in Mes haines
that his own art was an affirmation of the individual, free of all rules and of
all social demands, and that “A work of art is a corner of creation seen
across a temperament.” * In saying this, he specifically rejected Proudhon’s
more nearly communistic belief that the artist by himself is nothing, but is
everything by humanity and for humanity.
It is noteworthy, therefore, that after Germinal the novels in which
Zola tried to offer answers to social problems saw him moving further and
further away from Marxism. In his novel Paris (1888), he showed some
sympathy for anarchism, among other forms of social radicalism. However,
in Travail, his last socialistic novel, published in 1901, the year before he
died, he showed that he had become convinced that Fourierism was the
socialistic answer to all problems: as an exile in London because of his
activity in the celebrated Dreyfus case, he had reread the works of Fourier.
And Fourierism, as we have repeatedly noted, was itself a major source for
French anarchism because it too connoted decentralization of the state,
thereby tending to emphasize the individual human being.
In Mes haines, the work in which Zola had declared that his art was
an affirmation of the individual, he had also said that one should admire
Courbet “only for the energetic manner in which he has grasped and
rendered nature” “°—and therefore not for his social views. It is significant
that this statement has been’ quoted in the chief history of Impression-
ism,” because it was essentially on account of the more or less “scientifi
c”
manner in which the Impressionists grasped and conveyed nature that
Zola
had become their supporter and friend, and especially the friend of Manet.
Arnold Hauser has claimed in The Social History of Art (1951)
that it is
impossible to make a clear-cut distinction between naturalism and
Impres-
sionism.” While it is true that the two do overlap, Zola, the leading
literary naturalist, eventually became somewhat disillusioned with the
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 235

Impressionists because of their lack of minutely realistic detail. And as

time went on, most of the Impressionists tended to become still less
“Tealistic,” less objective in their approach to nature.
Before that happened, however, their belief in the importance of
direct-from-nature vision inherited from Courbet had combined with their
own fascination with rendering the momentary to link Impressionism with
journalism.“ The leading Impressionists all contributed drawings to the
illustrated weekly La Vie moderne, founded in 1879 by the publisher
Charpentier to defend the cause of Impressionism and the modern move-
ment in the arts. This particular linking of art with journalism, fostered
both by the Impressionists’ belief that a picture should be a record of a
moment and by the new photo-mechanical processes, helped to encourage
graphic artists to become social commentators—Forain, for instance, began
on La Vie moderne. It also helped to stimulate other illustrated periodicals
to devote themselves primarily to social comment, often of a highly radical
kind.
Because the works of the Impressionists themselves increasingly dif-
fered both from the literary naturalism of Zola and from the realistic
painting of Courbet, whom they so greatly admired, it is obvious that a
shift was taking place in the conception of what constitutes realism in art.
Previously, there had been two basic ideas underlying realism, including
Courbet’s conception of realism—ideas which had, in fact, originated in
the classic tradition, but were given a new twist. The first is that beauty is a
quality in objects; the second that the task of the painter involves copying
of the model because works of art should be imitations of their models.
his
Some artists now came to believe that when an artist merely copies
consist
model in literally following Courbet’s statement, “painting . . . can
resulting
only in the representation of real and existing things,” the
aes-
reproduction—unlike Courbet’s own art—does not possess significant
the painter
thetic qualities. This led these artists to doubt that the task of
the question of
is to copy his model exactly—and therefore to re-examine
ce, some
what the approach to nature should be in art. As a consequen
by realism, following the ideal of “science,”
artists continued in the way set
c notion of science as mere descrip-
but now giving up the earlier positivisti
scientific
tive imitation in favor of what they regarded as more modern
of perception .” This, we know,
methodology, with emphasis on the role
but developed especially
happened to some degree with the Impressionists,
now doubting the
with the Neo-Impressionists. Still other artists, however,
toward Symbolism, that
idea of realism, could take a new tack and move
that artistry is the
continuation of “l’art pour Tart,” eventually claiming
or of his private mental
rendition of the artist’s sensibilities and feelings
of a kind of romantic
life®° This second view—reflecting the continuation
of those revolution-
‘ndividualism combined with a revival of the idealism
basis of more
ary republicans Kant and Fichte—was to be the theoretical
art, currents to which some
abstract and non-objective currents of modern
236 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

of the Impressionists, especially Manet, eventually contributed. However,

because the Symbolists employed the language of visible things, using
them as symbols for evoking a reality beyond the senses, and because they
regarded the Neo-Impressionists as doing this too, Symbolist art critics
became the strongest supporters of Neo-Impressionism, while also helping
to pave the way for the abandoning, in non-objective art, of visible things
as subject-matter.
Thus, these two trends, realistic and abstract, have been by no means
completely independent of one another—they have been interrelated,
partly because both of them have been influenced by artistic, and in some
cases also social, ideas derived from: Courbet. Not only did the relatively
realistic Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists admire Courbet, but so does
Picasso, whose relatively abstract Young Woman on the Bank of the
Seine, painted in 1950 (six years after he joined the French Communist
Party), was directly inspired by Courbet’s painting of 1851 with the same
title. And Kandinsky, perhaps the first modern artist to paint a non-
objective painting, as a young man in Paris had felt the influence of the
Neo-Impressionists.
Among Courbet, Zola, and Impressionism, then, and between Symbol-
ism and Neo-Impressionism, there were direct and indirect connections
that involved “realistic,” “social,” and comparatively “scientific” tendencies
in art and literature, and eventually also tendencies leading to abstrac-
tion, realism and abstraction having overlapped. Before turning to Neo-
Impressionism and Symbolism, it is worth mentioning that this overlapping
was eventually to be found in the medium of photography, in which
Courbet and several of the Impressionists, notably Manet and Monet, took
considerable interest, although by the very nature of the medium itself,
realistic tendencies persisted longer in photography than in painting.
Photography had been invented by Niepce in the 1820’s, but not until
1839 had the invention been made public by his colleague Daguerre. ‘The
pioneer photographer Nadar (1820-1910) % was a close friend of the
Impressionists: among his many subjects were Monet’s paintings and
Monet himself. In 1874, the first exhibition of the group took place in his
studio, and one of Monet’s paintings called An Impression—Sunrise
prompted a hostile critic to dub the group, “Impressionists.” Like Courbet
and Pissarro, Nadar displayed social interests, at least in his youth. A friend
of Balzac, of Murger, author of Scénes de la vie de Bohéme and Fourierist
sympathizer, and also of Eugene Pottier, author of the Internationale,
Nadar had worked as a caricaturist on Charivari with Daumier and had
tried to join revolutionists in Poland during the revolutionary year of 1848,
only to be interned in Germany for the duration of the uprisings. Nadar’s
tastes in painting were different from those of the Impressionists, being
closer to the realism of Courbet and Manet (both of whom very frequently
made use of photographs for their painting) than to the Impressionism of
his friend Monet. Yet it is significant that photography, like much of the
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 237

art of the Impressionists, ordinarily makes a record of nature at an instant

and in a kind of scientifically realistic way.* Interestingly enough, there-
fore, a book on art written in 1949 by an American communist sympathizer
under the influence of Marxian scientific socialism and of the Stalinist
party-line of socialist realism carefully recorded the connection between
photography and the Impressionists *°—whose art, however, he regarded
as unfortunately naturalistic rather than truly realistic, in accordance with
the then prevailing Stalinist line.

8. The Neo-Impressionists,
the Symbolists, and Anarchism
More important for the development of modern art than the overlap-
ping of realism and abstraction in photography was that which took place
between the Neo-Impressionists and the Symbolists, who were especially
linked by their belief in communist-anarchism. Camille Pissarro, the only
one of the leading Impressionists who was an anarchist, was for a time
greatly influenced by his younger anarchist friends, Seurat (Fig. 25),
Signac (Figs. 27 and 28), and Maximilien Luce (Fig. 26), the chief
Neo-Impressionists.° At the eighth, and last, Impressionist Exhibition,
held in May-June 1886, Seurat, Signac, Camille Pissarro, and his son
Lucien exhibited together (Degas and Gauguin were among the other
exhibitors). The four showed paintings with small regular brushstrokes
that brought them instant notoriety. In the fall of 1886, the Symbolist art
critic and anarchist Félix Fénéon, writing in the near-anarchist Belgian
journal L’Art moderne, declared that this kind of painting was superior to
Impressionism, and named it “Neo-Impressionist.” He did this in a review
of an exhibition of the Société des artistes indépendants held in Paris in
August-September 1886, in which Signac, Pissarro, and other artists work-
ing in this new style had participated. It was apparently Signac who had
introduced Seurat to Fénéon and to other Symbolist critics and commu-
nist-anarchists, such as Gustave Kahn and Paul Adam, who likewise be-
came fervent supporters of the Neo-Impressionists.
Although, like the Impressionists in their early days, the Neo-Impres-
sionists sought to paint the “real” world of nature by objectively depicting
the
what they saw, they did not seek to depict objects at an instant, as did
Impressionists, but tried to paint the permanent essence of objects—
thereby lifting them above mere objectivity in a way that could appeal to
the Symbolists. Furthermore, it seemed to the Symbolists that, in so doing,
as the Egyp-
the Neo-Impressionists were recalling “primitive” styles, such
the early Renaissan ce. Yet, at the
tian, the early Greek, the Gothic, and
thorough ly scientific in aim, far
same time, the Neo-Impressionists were
the Symbolis ts admired as
more so than were the Impressionists; and this
238 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

expressing the modern age. Consequently, the Symbolist critic Adam,

writing in the Revue contemporaine for May 1886, praised the Neo-Im-
pressionists for linking scientific modernism with “primitive” styles of the
past. In their unashamed rationalism, the Neo-Impressionists sought to
adapt the accentuated brushwork of the Impressionists to a scientific and
mechanical procedure suited not only to depicting the permanent essential
reality of objects, but also to suppressing the personality of the artist—
thereby flouting the individualism dear to the Impressionists, whom they
regarded as deplorably romantic. Correspondingly, their Symbolist admirer
Fénéon praised their technique as “a conscious and scientific manner,” “an
impersonal and as it were abstract treatment” by which they achieved “the
permanent” and “superior reality”; and he contrasted their approach with
the “fugitive” and “mere objective reality” of the Impressionists, based on
“accidents,” “arbitrariness,” and “improvisation.” * ‘To the Neo-Impres-
sionist technique of small regular touches of pure color Seurat himself gave
the name of “Divisionism.”
It is significant that the Neo-Impressionists were linked with earlier
artistically and socially realistic tendencies in France: Seurat had begun as
an admirer of the art of Millet and Daumier,” and Luce had originally
been influenced by the technique of Daumier and Courbet.” Seurat
occasionally depicted workingmen (Fig. 25). But far more than his friends

FIG. 25. Men Before a Factory (1882-1883), drawing by Georges Seurat.

a hy Se at ; 2 2 - ay ats * a;
 FIG. 26. The Pile Drivers (1902) by Maximilien Luce.

Seurat and Signac, whose social views usually were not directly reflected in
their landscape paintings, Luce liked to depict in a somewhat glorified way
industrial landscapes filled with factories and workingmen (Fig. 26) “—
perhaps because, in contrast to Seurat and Signac, he had come from a very
humble working-class background. It is significant, also, that his figures are
executed with far more realistic solidity and literal detail than those of
Pissarro (Figs. 23 and 24), Seurat (Fig. 25), and Signac (Figs. 27 and 28).
Like their friend Pissarro and his sons, who became Neo-Impression-
ists, the other chief members of the Neo-Impressionist group were all
thoroughly sympathetic to anarchism, Seurat somewhat less openly than
the others largely because he died in 1891 before the group’s interest in
anarchism reached its peak. Many of the early paintings by Seurat that
have survived are studies of peasants, showing that the artist was drawn to
subject-matter Millet and Pissarro had treated before him. Still, from the
very beginning Seurat’s drawings were concerned with urban as well as
country subjects, and after about 1882 he paid particular attention to
subjects drawn from the industrial suburbs—factories (Fig. 25), railroads,
and especially people of the poorer quarters such as Pissarro also depicted.
‘Théo van Ryssel-
Like Pissarro, too, Seurat, Signac, Luce, the Belgian-born
240 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

berghe, and other Neo-Impressionists especially admired the writings of

Kropotkin,” whose demand for a better society appealed to them because,
with so many other avant-garde artists, they could justly consider them-
selves victims of the existing bourgeois social order. And the reason why
they tended to be more sympathetic to anarchism than to Marxian social-
ism was once made very clear by Camille Pissarro’s son, Lucien, who
remarked that the individual autonomy sought by the anarchists must
apply to artists because they should not be made subservient to an aes-
thetic dictated by any collectivity.* In a sense, also, the very technique
that the Neo-Impressionists employed, with its strongly accentuated indi-
vidual brush strokes, which nonetheless are brought together in harmony
to form the picture as a whole, paralleled the individualistic yet communal
spirit of communist-anarchism. So likewise did the isolation of the individ-
ual figures within the total unified composition of Seurat’s paintings: his
circus performers, for instance, are isolated not only from society but also
from one another even while composed together.
Kropotkin’s direct plea to artists, in the articles republished in 1885 at
Paris in Paroles d’un révolté, had made a distinct impression on Pissarro
and his friends among socially radical French artists. Pissarro—who in 1890
prepared a never-published album of drawings entitled Turpitudes sociales
—wrote his friend, the anarchist writer Octave Mirbeau, in 1892: “I have
just read Kropotkin’s book. It must be admitted that, if it is utopian, it is
in any case a beautiful dream. And as we have often had the example of
utopias become realities, nothing prevents us from believing that this will
be possible some day, unless man is engulfed and returns to complete
barbarism.” ® Years later, on a visit to France in 1905, Kropotkin appar-
ently stayed at Pissarro’s house in Paris.®°
As was mentioned earlier, Kropotkin’s ideas about art were especially
disseminated by the French anarchist Jean Grave through Kropotkin’s
former paper, Le Révolté, which Grave took over in 1883 and published in
Paris under various titles until 1914. It should be added, however, that
Kropotkin was not the only major influence on Grave’s thought concerning
the arts, for Grave found Richard Wagner's Die Kunst und die Revolution
(Art and Revolution)—first published in 1849 immediately following his
participation in one of the revolutions that had shaken the entire Conti-
nent—to be particularly in accord with anarchist views. In it, Wagner
demanded a social revolution to help make possible a revolutionary new
and socially integrated art freed from the hampering shackles of national-
ity, with artists paid from the common purse. Much as the anarchists saw
themselves in revolutionary opposition to existing society as large-scale
community, so Wagner saw art as “revolutionary because its very existence
is opposed to the ruling spirit of the community.” * Even though he
attacked “the windy theories of our socialistic doctrinaires,” he also de-
clared that the desired new “human fellowship” could not be achieved eby,
the influence of our Art alone,” but only “by union with the great and
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 241

inevitably approaching social revolution. . . .” * Small wonder, then, that

in 1898 the first translation of Wagner’s book into French appeared under
the auspices of Grave’s anarchist periodical, Les Temps nouveaux. Mean-
while, Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal (1877-1882 )—written after he had
passed from romanticism through a kind of impressionism—had become
regarded by the Symbolists as a forerunner. Yet eventually he could also
become a patron saint of those exponents of the radical Right, the Nazis
—so that, somewhat like his early friend Bakunin, he linked anarchist and
fascist tendencies.
By the end of the nineteenth century, although there were in France
only about 1,000 anarchist militants and 4,500 sympathizers who regularly
read anarchist papers such as Les Temps nouveaux, there were also 100,000
people who were vaguely anarchist in sympathy and up to a point prepared
to support anarchist aims. The effective influence of Les Temps nouveaux
and its immediate predecessor, La Révolte, for instance, is well indicated
by the now noted men who were subscribers as well as by its now noted
artist-contributors. The subscribers included such famous writers as J. K.
Huysmans, Alphonse Daudet, Anatole France, Pierre Loti, Rémy de Gour-
mont, Leconte de Lisle, and Mallarmé, who was especially influenced by
the Art and Revolution of Wagner, that idol of the Symbolists, and who
referred to the anarchist terrorists as “these saints.” “* It was Huysmans
who, in his novel A Rebours (1884), had linked the newly fashionable
Decadent-Symbolist movement with British Pre-Raphaelitism.
Among the artists who contributed drawings to La Réyvolte and Les
Temps nouveaux, Neo-Impressionists were particularly prominent. In
1891, for example, there was published in La Réyolte a portrait drawing by
Signac (made in imitation of a woodcut but largely following a watercolor
of 1890) showing Maximilien Luce, Grave’s closest friend and Signac’s
fellow Neo-Impressionist, reading that magazine (Fig. 27). Of all the
anarchist periodicals, Les Temps nouveaux (1894-1914) was most attrac-
tive to artists (Fig. 28). Signac, Luce, Camille Pissarro, and Van Ryssel-
berghe, as well as Vallotton (Figs. 29 and 30), Steinlen (Fig. 33), the
artist whose pseudonym was Caran d’Ache (Russian for pencil), the future
Fauve, Van Dongen, and the Belgian sculptor Meunier (Fig. 102) were
among the artists who contributed to the albums of lithographs published
by Les Temps nouveaux—whose debts were twice paid off by Pissarro.
Other anarchists who drew for the magazine were Grandjouan and Kupka
a
(Fig. 39). Among the contributions of Signac were the lithograph of
workman entitled “Le Démolisseur” (Fig. 28), and also the cover of the
magazine from 1896 to 1900, originally designed as a poster, which showed
an anarchist artist slaying a three-headed capitalist dragon with his brush.*
Grave,
Years later, during World War I, Signac described himself to
publisher of La Réyvolte, as “nurtured on your principles, on those of
Reclus and Kropotkin—for it is you who have formed me.” ©
Signac, like Kropotkin, other anarchists, and other members of the
FIG. 27. “Portrait of Maximilien Luce” (reading La R evo.
Z
Ite ) by Paul Signac,
from La Plume , September 1, 1801.
ric. 28. “Le Démolisseur” by Paul Signac, lithograph for the Temps nouveaux
series, announced September 26, 1896.
244 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND] SWITZERL AAS

Neo-Impressionist group, was also sympathetic to doctrines of Ruskin and

William Morris, the two English social reformers devoted to the arts who
were connected with the Pre-Raphaelite movement and were so noted for
their efforts to bring art to the working class. Signac’s friend and Kropot-
kin’s disciple, Grave, had been one of the first in France to print extracts
from the writings of Morris, who had eventually called himself a commu-
nist in spite of his respect for the individual as artist and craftsman, and
who, with Marx’s daughter Eleanor, had earlier founded in London the
Socialist League. When this was taken over by anarchists who insisted
upon the necessity for violent revolution, Morris withdrew his Hammer-
smith Branch and founded his own Hammersmith Socialist Society.
Morris’s Hammersmith group, to which the artist Walter Crane and
the printer Emery Walker also belonged, was joined early in 1891 by
Lucien Pissarro,®’ the eldest of Camille Pissarro’s seven children, who five
years earlier had first exhibited with the Impressionists as one of the first
Neo-Impressionists. Lucien had gone to England in 1883 to learn English;
in 1890 he settled there permanently, and soon—stimulated by the books
that Morris began to print at the Kelmscott Press in 1891—set up his own
Eragny Press to produce fine editions illustrated with his own wood
engravings. In 1896 he wrote his father: “I believe I vaguely perceive that
my movement might indeed have some connections with the neo-gothics
of the Arts and Crafts. . . .” ** Thus it was especially through his printing
that Lucien Pissarro was led to become associated with the arts and crafts
movement of William Morris and Emery Walker, the two socialist friends
who were also the greatest printers of their time. But this was an associa-
tion of which Lucien’s father did not approve. In letters to his son,
Camille Pissarro protested against Lucien’s willingness to accept the many
aspects of Morris’s ideas which, like those of Morris’s fellow Pre-Raphael-
ites earlier, were related to the Gothic Revival. Camille wrote to the son
in 1898 as follows: “I do not doubt that Morris’ books are as beautiful as
Gothic art, but it must not be forgotten that the Gothic artists were
inventors, and we have to perform, not better, which is impossible, but
differently and following our own bent.” And he urged Lucien to return to
“the true direction” of art, “which is the return to nature.” *° Two years
later, he again wrote Lucien: “Wouldn’t it be better to soak yourself in
nature? . . . We are here to show the way! According to you salvation lies
with the primitives, the Italians [glorified by the Pre-Raphaelites]. Accord-
ing to me this is incorrect. Salvation lies in nature, now more than ever.” ©
Obviously, the artistic realism and the contemporaneity in art that these
statements reflect could be in entire harmony with Camille Pissarro’s
radical commitment to realities of contemporary social life.
So much of Lucien Pissarro’s time was spent in England that he
played little part in spreading the doctrines of William Morris to France,
where they became widely known only after the artistic and social ideas of
Ruskin as well as of Morris had already directly affected continental artists
in Belgium. By the middle and late 1890's, however, increasing attention
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 245

was being paid to Morris and Ruskin even by French critics and artists. In
addition to various articles, there was Gabriel Mourey’s book, Passé le
détroit; La Vie et l'art a Londres, published in 1895; and Morris’s death in
1896 brought forth a spate of obituary notices. Not until the following year
did there appear in book form (after serial publication in the Revue des
deux mondes, beginning late in 1895), the first important French study of
Ruskin in which his ideas about art were related to his economic and social
thought: Robert de la Sizeranne’s Ruskin et la religion de la beauté.™ This
book profoundly affected the style and thought of Marcel Proust, who was
much interested in the arts, especially painting, and who in 1900 published
a long two-part essay on Ruskin in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts.” Also, with
André Gide and Léon Blum, Proust, who had fought for Ibsen, introduced
the Christian anarchist Tolstoy to the French, and for a time claimed to be
an intellectual anarchist.
That an artist such as Camille Pissarro could be interested simultane-
ously in anarchism and Marxian communism, while his son Lucien could
pass easily from anarchism to admiration for William Morris (who never
thought of himself as an anarchist but passed from left-wing liberalism to
regarding himself as a Marxian communist) certainly suggests that the
political ideas of artists are likely to be quite vague. For this reason, artists
when left to themselves have rarely been linked in complete and whole-
hearted devotion to the doctrines of a single political party. Pissarro
himself was a member of a politically heterogeneous group called the Club
de Part social, the members of which had in common only an anti-conserv-
ative point of view. Among the members was Rodin, who hoped in vain to
make a tremendous Tower of Labor. Rodin wrote in his book Les Cathe-
drales de France (1914), “I am an artist and I am a plebeian, and the
Cathedral was made by the artists for the people” “’—thus expressing his
lay in
view, admired by Marxist-Leninists later, that the justification of art
people. The membership of the
its expressive communication with all the
various shades
Club de Vart social also included, besides several writers of
Louise
of radical social opinion, anarchist militants such as Jean Grave and
Michel, heroine of the Commune.
artists
Even though Paul Signac was one of the most political-minded
views: he not only
of his time, he too found it easily possible to shift his
ely came out
moved from anarchism to admiration for Morris, but ultimat
in France
in public support of communism ** after anarchism had declined
star of so
and after the Bolshevik Revolution had made Russia the guiding
many anti-bourgeois artists throughout the world.
as anarchism
Nevertheless, in the 1890’s and early 1900's and as long
main attraction for
retained any widespread vogue, it was always the
pressionists con-
social-minded artists. Throughout those years the Neo-Im
butors to various anarchi st journals in
tinued to be among the chief contri
For exampl e, in 1893 Maximilien
addition to those already mentioned.
all had illustr ations in a special
Luce, Lucien Pissarro, and Camille Pissarro
ne which some-
anarchist number of the periodical La Plume—a magazi
246 He PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

times opened its columns also to Marxists. Pére Peinard was another
anarchist magazine to which some of the Neo-Impressionists sent drawings
along with other artists. This was a decidedly proletarian weekly with
especially propagandistic illustrations; it was published by the anarchist
Emile Pouget, a friend of Camille and Lucien Pissarro, and after Pouget’s
exile to London from 1894 to 1896 it appeared under the title La Sociale.
Maximilien Luce in particular drew for Pére Peinard: among other things,
he executed for it a series of lithographs based on works by Constantin
Meunier, the Belgian sculptor of the workingman (e.g., Fig. 102), then
being exhibited in Paris for the first time. Contributors also included all
the five sons of Camille Pissarro, and such other anarchist artists of the
time as Ibels, Willette, and Félix Vallotton, the Swiss-born artist who was
responsible for reviving the woodcut as an artistic medium. One of his
woodcuts, made in 1892, was entitled L’Anarchiste (Fig. 29). As an
anarchist himself, Vallotton loved to attack the state as suppressing liberty
(Fig. 30).
It is especially important to remember that the Neo-Impressionists

|
7 \ hence | S— 7 12
VINS LIOUEURS

fa i Za
=! ih
nn
Lhe
: AVid IN
‘ x
07]
= ——_
 ’” by Félix Val-
ric. 30. “And that one?” “He shouted ‘Long live liberty.
lotton, from L’Assiette au beurre, March 1, 1902.

Fic. 29. The Anarchist (1892), woodcut by Félix Vallotton.

248 yi PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

frequently exhibited with the Société des artistes indépendants, established

in 1884. Of this Seurat and Signac were two of the founders, and Signac
exhibited with it as late as 1934, the year before he died. Lucien Pissarro
exhibited from the beginning, but his father did not, believing that the
society should be reserved for young artists. This organization could espe-
cially appeal to the anarchist sympathies of the Neo-Impressionists (even
though its constitution banned all political discussions), for it had no
officers, being run by a committee. Also, it insisted on conducting all of its
exhibitions without the interference of juries and without awards—an
anti-academic point of view like that of the Commune des arts which the
painter David had established during the French Revolution three years
before he brought about the closing of the Academies. The anti-academic
individualism of the Société des artistes indépendants was in full harmony
with a statement made in La Révolte by the Neo-Impressionists’ anarchist
friend, Jean Grave, in which he declared his agreement with Oscar Wilde
—soon to declare himself an anarchist—in holding that “art is the supreme
manifestation of individualism.” * It is worth recording in this context
that Wilde, who had met Kropotkin in England through William Morris,
described the famous anarchist in De Profundis (1905) as one of the only
two men he had ever known who led perfectly fulfilled lives.
Thus the individualism of anarchists might at times even lead them to
agree with statements made by Wilde and other upholders of “art for art’s
sake.” Conversely, Oscar Wilde, though an extreme supporter of “art for
art’s sake,” could become so interested in the problems of the individual in
society that he could publish “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” in 1891.
In this, Wilde—who, two years later, when answering a questionnaire from
a Symbolist review, L’Hermitage, called himself an anarchist—sought the
society most favorable to the artist. It was with this aim that he put
forward a theory of individualism, based on voluntary cooperation in
production and distribution, which was widely read in anarchist circles and
which may even have influenced Kropotkin’s later theories.
Clearly, the problem of the relation of the individual to society was
one of great interest to anarchists and to many upholders of “art pour
l'art” alike; and some, at least, of both groups agreed in their answers to
economic problems. But even the social-minded among the supporters of
the “art for art’s sake” point of view insisted that the problems of art are
basically of the individual and not of society; whereas many anarchists,
including the Neo-Impressionists, were somewhat indecisive on this point.
After the 1880's, however, most of the Neo-Impressionists were increas-
ingly led by their own spirit of individualism to give up subjects with an
overt social message and to move toward a position nearer to art for its
own sake. Yet they did so at the very time when the anarchist movement
and their interest in it were becoming strongest and most militant, so that
their change of subject-matter did not at all mean a desertion of the social
cause. ‘hey themselves were aware of this developing split between their
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 249

social views and the subject-matter of their art, and they worried about it,
but they instinctively felt that art must be more than social propaganda.
Consequently, in a lecture that Signac gave in 1902 he declared: “The
anarchist painter is not one who will show anarchist paintings, but one
who without regard for lucre, without desire for reward, will struggle with
all his individuality, with a personal effort, against bourgeois and official
conventions. . . . The subject is nothing, or at least is only one part of a
work of art, not more important than the other elements, colour, drawing,
composition... . . When the eye is educated, the people will see something
other than the subject in pictures. When the society we dream of exists,
the worker, freed from the exploiters who brutalize him, will have time to
think and to learn. He will appreciate all the different qualities of the work
rarer:

9. The Crisis in the

Artists’ Conception of Reality

Tus we see that not long after the death of Karl Marx in 1883, a major
crisis had arisen in painting, one found also in other visual arts and in
was
literature. It was, indeed, a crisis in the conception of reality—and
art and Western culture alike. On the one
increasingly to split Western
in the empirica l observat ion of nature and its
hand there was the belief
point of view of the positivist s, of the
perpetuation in art—the general
others.
“ccientific’” naturalists, and of “orthodox” Marxian realists, among
originall y romantic belief, reflected so
On the other hand there was the
and related movemen ts, in the
often in “lart pour Tart,’ Symbolism,
a kind of reality
importance of translating personal vision into forms with
of their own—that abstract approach to art which Marxist- Leninists, espe-
as this approach started from
cially, have attacked as formalism. Yet insofar
materiali stic, and so could
sense stimuli, it was non-metaphysical and
s and Marxists.
satisfy not only anarchists but even some scientist
istic regard for
The conflict between the Neo-Impressionists’ anarch
on the other their belief
the liberty of the individual on the one hand, and
the world of nature
in the importance of participating in and representing
torn between the
and human society, necessarily meant that they were they
two. This dilemma,despite Signac’s bold words in his lecture of 1902,
Seurat, in the last years of
never could fully resolve. However, their leader,
to pass from seeking
his life—between 1886 and 1891—had already begun
nature by irradiating his
merely to record sensations of the world of
ance with scientific laws of
canvases with effects of natural light in accord
human emotions by means of
color, to the problem of expressing specific
ions of lines. (In this way
certain combinations of color, values, and direct
 PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
250 /

he foreshadowed Van Gogh and expressionism, which, however, aban-

doned science.) He did this under the influence of a new friend, the
physiologist Charles Henry, to whom he was probably introduced by a
mutual friend, the anarchist art critic Fénéon. Henry—a former assistant
of the scientist Claude Bernard, perhaps the first to reject nineteenth-
century inductive science for a deductive approach—sought to make use of
psychology, physiology, and mathematics, as well as of physics, for creating
a universal system of harmony based on the achievements of modern
science.® Such a system of harmony would, of course, presumably include
social harmony. It thus undoubtedly was doubly attractive to the anarchist
painter Seurat, who, like so many earlier social radicals—among them
Charles Fourier, ancestor of so much of modern anarchism—sought an or-
ganic unity of the arts while regarding music as particularly important.
After Seurat’s death, his friend, the Symbolist critic and anarchist Gustave
Kahn, could write that the painter had spoken of “trying to compare the
progress of his art to that of musical arts, very concerned about finding a
unity at the basis of his efforts and those of poets and composers.” *
It is significant that this statement concerning Seurat was written by a
Symbolist friend who, like most Symbolist writers, artists, and critics, was
also an anarchist. For not only had Charles Henry been close to a group of
Symbolist poets and critics, Fénéon and Kahn among them, to whose
publications he contributed even before influencing Seurat, but also, as we
have noted, the ideas of the Symbolists were in many other respects very
close to those of Seurat. Like him, too, the Symbolists related music to a
unity of the arts, because their intent was to isolate the aesthetic essence,
and in so doing to make a direct and autonomous appeal to the human
spirit like that made by music. This they sought to do by eliminating from
their works of literature and visual art, though not from their social beliefs,
all directly intellectual appeal. In endeavoring to accomplish this, the
Symbolists—including one of the most important of them all, the poet
Mallarmé—were carrying the Baudelairean defense of essential poetry to
its ultimate conclusion, a fact indicating that their-basic doctrines grew out
of “Part pour Vart.” *°° They were strongly affected by the version of
Neo-Platonic idealism which was such a major element within the roman-
tic tradition, as well as by anarchism; like Blake, many romantics, and
Baudelaire, they were influenced by the mysticism of Swedenborg.
The theories of the Symbolists therefore also shared with the last
theories of Seurat a conviction that art is essentially an abstraction able to
communicate feelings through the inherent evocative forms made possible
by the medium of painting and drawing, regardless of what the forms
represent. In other words, the basis of painting (and other arts) should
be a configuration of abstract elements that might convey a variety
of emotions—a foreshadowing of both cubism and expressionism. Seurat,
however, always retained his belief in an approach to art based on science,
and so did not sever himself from the world of nature as reflected in
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 251

scientific principles. But the Symbolists, in spite of the friendship of some

of them for Charles Henry, did largely sever their art and poetry from the
environment, both natural and social. In so doing, they largely anticipated
the cubists, who, at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century,
cut the Gordian knot completely by plumping for personal vision in art
stimulated only by the outer world, rather than for representing the
external world of nature and of human society. They thus adopted a
formalist approach to art which has marked movements affected by cubism
ever since.
Marxists, on the contrary, ordinarily continued to support the social
utility and realism in art that Marx and especially Engels had regarded as
related to their materialistic philoophy—a philosophy constituting a kind
of “common-sense realism’’—one that many non-Marxists regard as actu-
ally a “naive realism.” It was only to be expected, therefore, that most
Marxists would attack cubism and movements stemming from it, while
also assailing the highly personal distortions of nature made by expression-
ists, lumping cubists and expressionists together as deplorably “Gdealistic”
and thus formalistic. In the Soviet Union under Stalin and his successors
such attacks have continued to this day.

10. Anarchism and Art Criticism

'T'o reTuRN to the Neo-Impressionists from this anticipation of later art

movements related positively or negatively to them, it should now be
emphasized that in their dilemma of choosing between scientific theories
and anarchistic belief in individual freedom they had the sympathy of their
friend, the leading French political anarchist of their day, Jean Grave. For
although as a publicist for socio-political anarchism Grave himself pre-
ferred somewhat propagandistic subjects in art, he was nevertheless sufh-
ciently libertarian and sympathetic to his artist friends so that—unlike
nearly all “orthodox” Marxist and Marxist-Leninist leaders later—he was
able to concede that the artist could not yet hope to be understood fully by
the masses #—a view likewise held by William Morris even when he
called himself a Marxian communist.
The art critics most friendly to the Neo-Impressionists—who were
like the
Symbolists—were also, we know, sympathetic to anarchism. But,
terroris m.
anarchist leaders themselves, they varied in their attitude toward
countrie s
Anarchistic terrorism became especially prominent in the Latin
rsy even
of the Continent during the early 1890's, and stirred up controve
t move-
among the anarchists while bringing new dangers to the anarchis
at Barcelona,
ment. In 1892, a bomb was thrown in the Liceo theater
tely sent
killing many innocent people. From England, Kropotkin immedia
he disowne d the act and its perpetra tors.
to La Révolte an article in which
252 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

Jean Grave, as editor of La Révolte, even though agreeing that terrorism

was not an “efficacious means of proclaiming brotherhood, solidarity and
justice,” # pointed out to Kropotkin the provocations that the Spanish
people and Spanish radicals had undergone from an oppressive govern-
ment. Kropotkin, persuaded to withdraw the article, afterward took the
position that, although he disliked terrorism and would not himself will-
ingly commit violence, he was unable to stand as judge over those who in
desperation performed terrorist acts.
One of the art critics who aided in establishing a close connection
between the anarchism of the time and Symbolism was the novelist, poet,
critic of literature, and historian of ‘art, Camille Mauclair. And one of
Mauclair’s first works was a study of Mallarmé, whom he met in 1891. In
1898 Mauclair wrote a novel, Le Soleil des morts, important as fostering
interest in both Symbolism and anarchism. ‘Throughout the 1890’s he was
contributing numerous political articles to radical magazines, including
two anarchist periodicals, L’Endehors and the Revue anarchiste, and also
to the Revue socialiste and La Plume, which, we noted, at times showed
sympathy for both anarchism and Marxism.
Although Mauclair—unlike almost all other Symbolist critics—at-
tacked the art of the anarchist Pissarro and his fellow Neo-Impressionists,
as well as that of Gauguin, ‘Toulouse-Lautrec, and Cézanne, his ability as a
critic was especially praised by Seurat’s friend Paul Adam,“ himself an
author of Symbolist novels as well as a noted art critic especially sympa-
thetic to Neo-Impressionism. Moreover, Adam firmly upheld his own
anarchist beliefs in an article in the Revue blanche entitled “Critique du
socialisme et de l’anarchie,” published in 1893.'° In it, Adam, so many of
whose friends among the Symbolists as well as among the Neo-Impression-
ists likewise were anarchistic, called for an organization of society based
especially on “autonomy of communes” and “federative decentraliza-
tion” ***—basic doctrines of communist-anarchism which sharply differen-
tiate it from Marxian communism before the Marxian “withering away”
of the state. As a communist-anarchist, Adam did not hesitate to
urge anarchist terrorism and violent revolution: in his writings of the
eatly 1890's, he frequently insisted that only a mass uprising could save
France and bring about the emancipation of the proletariat. Even though
he was exceptional among anarchists and Symbolists in mixing social
and religious principles, he did not hesitate to praise as “a Saint” the
anarchist Ravachol,*” guillotined for his terrorist acts of 1892, including
bombing the homes of two judges in anarchist trials as well as a barracks—
though with no loss of life.
Gustave Kahn, that leading Symbolist and anarchist who was Seurat’s
friend, and who, not unlike the Saint-Simonians and positivists, believed in
the possibilities of a true “social science,” took a much milder position
than Adam because he had little faith in the efficacy of violence. He did
revolt against the severity of the punishment meted out to one anarchist,
Auguste Vaillant, who on December 9, 1893, had thrown a bomb from the
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 253

visitors’ gallery in the Chamber of Deputies. Although no one was killed,

Vaillant too was guillotined—only to be avenged by the Italian anarchist
Santa Caserio, who, in 1894, stabbed President Carnot to death with a
dagger inscribed “Revenge for Vaillant.’ Yet in the end this seems to have
been too much for Kahn: he completely rejected the terrorist act of Emile
Henry in bombing, in 1894, the Cafe Terminus of the Gare Saint-Lazare at
Paris, an act for which Henry—like Ravachol, Vaillant, and Caserio—was
sent to the guillotine.
Another noted Symbolist art critic, however, seems actually to have
been Henry’s accomplice. This was Fénéon (1861-1944), that close friend
of the chief Neo-Impressionists, including Seurat, Signac, Luce, and Pis-
sarro, of the critic Adam, and of Mauclair, Mallarmé, and other leading
Symbolists. Fénéon also knew Van Gogh, in whose company he is shown
in a drawing by Lucien Pissarro. Even though Fénéon was regularly
employed as a clerk at the War Ministry, he became an art critic in his
spare time in order to give support to his artist and writer friends. When
he was only twenty-eight years old, he was made chief editor of the Revue
indépéndante, newly founded on his own initiative after the first Salon des
indépéndants in 1884 to help Seurat and his friends. For this periodical he
recruited contributors from among the declining naturalists and the rising
Symbolists, including Zola and Robert Caze (a friend of Seurat) on the
one hand, and Mallarmé on the other—despite their many differences,
naturalism and Symbolism were “both nurtured by fatalistic philosophies
in which the human will is subordinated to outer influences and
pressures,” *°° including chance and time. It was in the office of Fenéon’s
Reyue indépéndante that Luce held his first one-man show. A portrait of
Fénéon painted by Signac in 1890, which reflects the influence of Symbol-
ism and the scientist Charles Henry, has a cyclically dynamic background
that anticipates such art movements as futurism and kinetic art.
After the anarchist Vaillant had thrown his bomb in the Chamber of
Deputies late in 1893, the French government had promptly begun to
enact severe laws to enable it to meet future anarchist acts with dispatch
and force: one emergency law forbade anarchist propaganda in any form.
In addition, wholesale arrests followed over a period of time, especially
after the assassination of President Carnot and the bomb thrown by Emile
Henry. The police rounded up a large assortment of known anarchists,
writers, editors, burglars, and prostitutes, who were all said to be partici-
pants in a great anarchist conspiracy. Fénéon, together with the painter
Luce, was among those arrested.” Numerous anarchist writers and artists
managed to flee the country, among them Paul Adam, Gustave Kahn,
to
Octave Mirbeau, the artist Steinlen, and Camille Pissarro, who escaped
Belgium. There he was met by the Belgian Neo-Impressionist, anarchist,
and contributor to Les Temps nouveaux, Théo van Rysselberghe, with
whom the noted anarchist Elisée Reclus and Pissarro and his son Félix
made a visit to Holland.
in
Following the numerous arrests in Paris in 1894, there took place
264. / PRACTICE. OF ART IN PRANCEFAND Ms Wa t7 hale)

the same year the famous “Trial of the Thirty,” by means of which the
anarchist outrages in that city were at last brought to an end. During the
trial, the fact that investigators had found in Fénéon’s office a flask of
mercury and detonators was stressed by the prosecution, which contended
that these explosives had been entrusted to Fénéon by an anarchist friend,
presumably Henry. Mallarmé was one of the witnesses for Fénéon. Al-
though Fénéon and Luce were ultimately acquitted, Fénéon admittedly
had contributed to anarchist publications and certainly considered ideal
anarchism far superior to ideal capitalism. He once declared that “the
anarchist acts have done more by far for propaganda than twenty years of
brochures by Reclus or Kropotkin.” *”
Fénéon worked for the Revue blanche and, after it ceased publication
in 1903, for Le Matin. In 1906 he was given a position at the famous art
gallery of Bernheim Jeune in Paris, an appointment deliberately kept secret
because of his notoriety; and there for almost twenty years he devoted
himself to fostering art and the welfare of his painter friends.”* Mean-
while, his anarchism as much as his art criticism had drawn many artists to
him. The Fauvist painter Kees van Dongen has told how, as a young artist
shortly after 1900 in Paris, where he contributed to the anarchist periodical
Les Temps nouveaux, “I had met a curious gentleman named Félix
Fénéon. I had met him because he was an anarchist. We were all anarch-
ists without throwing bombs, we had those kinds of ideas. But Fénéon
turned out to be an important art critic. . .’—and in that capacity he had
aided Van Dongen in getting a start as a successful artist.*”
Much as many of the Impressionists and Seurat had done, Fénéon
eventually gave up his earlier demand for “realistic” art. He came to feel
that “the painter of today has been freed by photography, still or motion,
of the tedious, utilitarian mission which devolved upon his colleagues of
yesteryear: to reveal to men the exterior world in its average reality.” ”* As
a result, together with Impressionists such as Monet, he played a part in
paving the way for modern abstraction. After World War I, he published a
book entitled L’Art moderne (1919), and also, like his friend Signac and
many other radicals throughout the world, he transferred his hopes from
anarchism to communism.**
One result of the defection of leading Impressionists from realism had
been the publication by Zola of his novel L’@uvre (1886), as an exposé of
those former friends and allies in the cause of realism.%° However, Zola’s
realism itself was not unaffected by the changing times—we have seen that
from the near Marxism of his Germinal (1885) he passed to the overt
Fourierism of Travail (1901), his last socialistic novel. Between them, in
his novel Paris, published in 1898, while retaining his supposedly “scien-
tific” documentary method, he had added a fervent social appeal, thereby
introducing an implicit optimism and lack of objectivity absent from his
earlier “scientific” works such as Germinal. In Paris, too, Zola, who was
always horrified by anarchist violence, nonetheless showed his sympathy
for the desperation that led men to such violence, for which he held the
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 255

bourgeoisie responsible. Setting the novel in the early 1890's, that peak of
anarchist violence, he included as characters in slightly fictionalized form
the bomb-throwing anarchists Emile Henry and Auguste Vaillant, the
revolutionary Blanqui, and the Marxist Jules Guesde, as well as a Prou-
dhonian, a Fourierist, and a nihilist from eastern Europe. In this way,
although not then wholly accepting the program of any one of these forms
of organized social radicalism, Zola did suggest that certain common
elements among them will form the nucleus for a new and lasting social
ideology, the key to which is science.* Nevertheless, Zola—like most of
his friends or former friends among avant-garde and anti-bourgeois artists
—remained far too individualistic to accept any kind of party or group
discipline willingly. While he could express general sympathy for Fourier-
ism in his novel Travail, he could hardly have been expected ever to join
any Marxian party, in which discipline would be so important, even though
in 1896 the major French Marxist parties showed that they had abandoned
any thought of the violence that Zola deplored in the anarchists.

11. Socialism: Jaures and Art

Lune 1rs anarchist members, the Second (or Socialist) International,

founded at Paris in 1889 on the hundredth anniversary of the French
Revolution, inspired apprehension in ruling classes throughout Europe,
including the bourgeoisie in France. Its first international May Day dem-
onstration in 1890, for an eight-hour day, only increased those apprehen-
sions. Nevertheless, its Marxist members were moving, like Engels, away
from the idea of the necessity for violent revolution. After 1891, even that
former revolutionary Marxist, Jules Guesde, who had founded the first
Marxian party in France and had supplied Zola with information for
Germinal, had gradually (if temporarily) moved from belief in revolution-
ary violence toward reformism, as the still more revolutionary Blanquists
likewise were doing. The result was that in May and June 1896 the various
a
socialist groups in France were able to hold a convention at which
platform called the Saint-Mandé Program was adopted and became a kind
of charter of French socialism. Based on a speech by the socialist leader
attain-
Millerand, this abjured violent revolution in favor of the gradual
ment of socialist objectives by parliamentary means, relying on universal
in
suffrage as the method for taking over government—in other words,
In
becoming reformist, French Marxism adopted methods of liberalism.”
had
that same year, the Second International, at its Congress in London,
violent
at last succeeded in expelling the anarchists for advocating the
general strike.
socialism
Although, under the Saint-Mandé Program, French Marxian
inantl y reformi st, a severe setback in
became and long remained predom
* Despite
the elections of 1898 made Guesde into a revolutionary again.’*
256 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE “AND Sw tezeepan®

the absorption of Guesde’s party into a unified socialist party in 1905,

French socialists did not achieve anything like true unity until just before
the outbreak of World War I—which then destroyed that unity by leading
a majority of socialists, in France as elsewhere, to put nationalistic patriot-
ism before Marxist internationalism. Even the greatest of the socialist
leaders, Jean Jaurés (1859-1914), who was assassinated on the eve of
World War I, had not been able wholly to unify the French socialists in
the pre-war period by winning them all to the kind of revisionist Marxism
that he had developed in the 1890's, and that took art very much into ac-
count. It should be added that Jaurés always rejected the version of revi-
sionism expounded by the leading German revisionist, Eduard Bernstein.
Jaurés had first identified himself as a socialist in 1890. Although he
often called himself a Marxist, he never concealed his opposition to
orthodox Marxism, and his socialist inspiration originally came from non-
Marxian sources—from French utopianism and German philosophical
idealism. Not only did he reject internationalism and revolutionary vio-
lence in favor of parliamentary reformism and support of the Third
Republic; he also declared that the theory of historical materialism is no
more valid than that of historical idealism; and held that the two can be
reconciled and synthesized.”° With Jaurés’s idealism went an interest in
art largely for its own sake. Asserting that economics can explain every-
thing about man except what is distinctly human, he declared that al-
though the operation of economic factors limits democracy, law, philoso-
phy, science, and art, these each have their own independent logic and
history of development—about as flat a denial of Marxian organismic
historical materialism as one could find. Even though Jaurés agreed with
Marx that “all development ultimately is a reflection of economic phenom-
ena in the brain,” he insisted that this is true only “on the condition that
we say that there is [sic] already in the brain, in virtue of its aesthetic sense,
imaginative sympathy, and need for unitary understanding, fundamental
forces which influence economic life.” ** Therefore, in contrast to Marx,
Jaurés dealt at some length with the arts, especially in discourses entitled
“Art and Life,” “Art and Socialism,” and “The Social Theater,” * holding
that art of great beauty is “made for all.” Its glory “is the supreme
communism since it supposes that the artist, the creator, going beyond the
narrow and miserable limits of his individuality, has known how to give his
work a value [that is] impersonal and eternal. . . .” * Socialism will lead
the artist to the most universal themes; and Jaurés agreed with William
Morris that “science and art will flourish only in the new society, where the
enjoyment of them will be part of life itself.” ** Jaurés spoke with special
approval of the views about art of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Richard
Wagner.” In 1901, he devoted a long and on the whole favorable article
to Zola’s novel Travail, in which, while recognizing the strong influence of
Fourier, he disapprovingly saw a lack of adequate recognition of the class
struggle as formulated by Marx.
In spite of Jaurés’s personal artistic interests, the French Marxists,
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 257

constantly preoccupied with their disagreements, on the whole paid little

attention to the arts, even as propaganda. When they did support them,
they especially stressed one art form emphasized by Jaurés, namely, the
social theater, which historically has been so beloved by social radicals in
general and Marxists in particular as a group-art that can be easily devoted
to direct and large-scale propaganda.”® But it should be reiterated that
even in showing this interest in the theater—together with some very
minor interest in other forms of art—the French Marxists were largely
under the influence of Belgian socialism,’ which had already been af-
fected by anarchism as well as by the ideas of William Morris.

12. Artists and the Dreyfus Case

"Pe asanvonmenr of violence by the French Marxists in 1896 was not
enough to persuade the individualistic Zola to join their ranks, even
though he called himself a socialist while deploring anarchist violence.
However, in the famous case of Captain Alfred Dreyfus—that first Jewish
officer ever appointed to the general staff of the French army, who was
falsely accused of treason by anti-Semitic fellow-officers—Zola was joined
in supporting Dreyfus by Marxists and other social radicals, including,
eventually, the anarchists. He was equally backed by nearly all the avant-
garde artists of the time, many of whom were socially as well as artistically
radical. In the violent controversies stirred by the Dreyfus case, the anti-
Dreyfusard group consisted of a combination of anti-Semites, nationalists,
and clericals, among whom was De Mun, the distinguished aristocratic
leader of the Catholic social movement.
When Zola was tried for libel (being ultimately fined), Claude
Monet and Georges Clemenceau accompanied him to court. Monet also
signed the Dreyfusard Protest of the Intellectuals, the one overt political
action of his life. Among the many socially radical artists and art critics
who in one way or another participated in seeking justice for Dreyfus were
the anarchist painters Camille Pissarro, Signac, Luce, Ibels, and Vallotton,
the anarchist critics Adam and Fénéon, and the socialist artist Eugene
Carriére. These radicals were not primarily moved by any particular sympa-
thy for Dreyfus himself, but rather by the fact that the case demonstrated
to them what one critic belonging to the group called “the present social
rottenness.” 1° It should be emphasized, too, that these artists and critics,
who as radicals were in theory so sympathetic to the social problems of the
masses, in the Dreyfus case diverged sharply from mass opinion: for some
time the masses overwhelmingly believed in Dreyfus’s guilt. This is only
one of many examples of the highly ambiguous relationship existing then
as now between the masses and socially radical avant-garde artists. Espe-
cially characteristic of that relationship has been the almost complete
failure of the masses ever to show any real understanding of, or sympathy
for, the work of such artists.
a5 O ji PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

13. The Social Radicalism of Van Gogh,

the Synthetists, the Nabis, and the kauves
Duis last point is especially well illustrated by the complete lack of
popularity achieved by the art of Vincent Van Gogh in his lifetime. Yet
that great Dutch-born painter, who was much influenced by the French
Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, had been so committed to the
masses in his youth that for a time he had shared the hardships of miners
in Flanders while serving as a lay preacher for a Calvinist missionary
society. In his paintings and drawings, he included miners and other
working people (Fig. 31) and also factories. His connections with the
Neo-Impressionists had been partly through his brother and chief support,
Theo Van Gogh, and partly on his own. Theo Van Gogh was a friend of
Camille Pissarro, of Seurat (from whom he bought a painting), Luce, and
Signac. Vincent Van Gogh himself was such a good friend of Signac that
the latter visited him at the asylum in Arles only a few days after the
famous incident in which Vincent sliced off the lobe of his ear. Signac
reported that “throughout the day he spoke to me of painting, literature,
socialism.” *° Van Gogh had long had a favorite scheme for an artists’
colony on a communistic basis, which led him to urge the chief Impres-
sionists to establish a cooperative society of painters who would divide
among themselves the money received for their works—a scheme which a
Marxist art historian, Wilhelm Hausenstein, later likened to a Fourierist
phalanstery of artists.° Furthermore, Van Gogh proposed that in this
society, paintings should actually be cooperatively produced under what
Hausenstein termed “a socialism of the artistic act of creation.” * Van
Gogh’s friend Gauguin, who joined him in the south of France in the hope
of establishing such a society, had similar ideas. So, also, did some of those
other artists in the late 1880’s who as Synthetists were closely related both
to Gauguin and to the Symbolist movement, even including among their
number Mallarmé, the noted Symbolist poet, anarchist sympathizer, and
Gauguin’s much admired friend. Like Mallarmé, Gauguin believed that
colors in painting and sounds in music are directly related.
Gauguin was the first artist to see fully the relevance of primitive
expression for modern experience. And not only was his whole artistic
career an epitome of a kind of anarchistic revolt against the futility of
modern bourgeois civilization, but he also came from a family noted for its
revolutionary social interests. His grandmother, Flora Tristan, had-been a
famous revolutionary propagandist whom the workers of the revolutionary
year 1848 regarded with fervent admiration. At the age of thirty-two she
had made contact with the Fourierists, but came to admire Saint-Simon as
 FIG. 31. The Bearers of the Burden (April 1881), drawing with wash by
Vincent Van Gogh.

well as Fourier: she once wrote, “Jesus, Saint-Simon, Fourier, spoke in the
same way.” * In 1839 she made a study of the lamentable conditions in
which the working classes of London lived, describing them in an influen-
tial book, Les Promenades dans Londres, which was published in 1840 and
thus anticipated by five years Friedrich Engels’s famous Die Lage der
arbeitenden Klasse in England. Also, in 1843, she came to the conclusion
that workers might best achieve their enfranchisement by forming them-
selves into a “class” through “compact, solid and indissoluble union” *—
here anticipating, again by five years, the publication by Marx and Engels
in the Communist Manifesto of their famous slogan, “Workers of the
world, unite!”
With such a grandmother, it was easy for Gauguin himself to be
he
socially as well as artistically radical, even though about the nearest
came to social radicalism in his art was in painting washerw omen (Fig.
32). In 1876 he became the pupil of Pissarro, and may well have been
wrote
drawn to him partly by his anarchism. Certainly, in 1882 Renoir
about them both in a letter to an art-dealer friend as follows: “To exhibit
if I
with Pissarro, Gauguin and [the Impressionist] Guillaumin would be as
were exhibiting with some Socialist Party or other.” In referring to “some
 FIG. 32. Washerwomen at Arles (1888) by Paul Gauguin.

Socialist Party,” Renoir evidently had anarchism in mind, for he added:

“A little further, and Pissarro would be inviting the Russian [anarchist]
Lavroff or some other revolutionary.” *°°
Gauguin himself once participated in revolutionary activities. It may
have been Pissarro (with whom he later fell out on artistic grounds) who
put him in touch with Spanish revolutionaries in Paris grouped around
their former prime minister, Ruiz Zorilla, leader of the republican party.
When that party instigated a revolution in Spain, it was Gauguin who
took Zorilla across the Spanish frontier—and who, when the insurrection
failed, also “brought him back to France hidden in a wagon of hay.”
Later in the 1880’s, Gauguin found himself reading with overwhelm-
ing emotion the verses of Manet’s anarchist friend, the then obscure
teacher of English, Mallarmé, who was destined to be so prominent in the
Symbolist movement when it became fashionable beginning in 1885-1886,
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 261

and who, like Gauguin, became also a Synthetist. In 1887, Gauguin

described his own recent paintings as “Synthetist-Symbolic.” Like other
Symbolists and Synthetists, Gauguin had an interest in the occult, and this
seems to have led him to an interest in theosophy,’*” which, we shall see,
has helped to lead many other modern artists to social radicalism through
its belief in universal brotherhood.
Most of the other Synthetists adhered, with Mallarmé, or even Gau-
guin, to a non-violent kind of anarchism. As one art historian has written
of the Synthetists, they all believed that: “There was not only a crisis
within art but also a crisis of art . . . so that according to them it was
necessary to change society itself in order to arrive at a truly good kind of
art. . . Thus it is not surprising that in such an artistic sphere the
revolutionary sentiment ran high—in this respect they were the continua-
tion of their naturalistic predecessors, and they even preached anarchism,
generally in words rather than in actions.” **
Some of the Synthetists became members of the art group much
influenced by Gauguin called the Nabis (Prophets). The connections
of the Nabis with both Impressionism and Symbolism were indicated in
1891 in the title of their first exhibition: “Exposition des peintres impres-
sionistes et symbolistes.” ** One member of the group, Edouard Vuillard,
made use of visual ambiguities to transmute the commonplace into poetry
much as his friend Mallarmé did in words. Like the Synthetists, several of
the Nabis had anarchist inclinations, especially Félix Vallotton (Figs. 29
and 30), and also Ibels and Roussel, who contributed illustrations and post-
ers for publications of Kropotkin and Jean Grave. Furthermore, Ibels with
another anarchist edited the monthly L’Escarmouche (1893-1894), to
which Toulouse-Lautrec—whose best-known works were made possible by
the large-scale introduction of color lithography in the 1880’s—regularly
submitted biting drawings. The Nabis were encouraged by the anarchist
art critic Fénéon: they made drawings and posters for the Revue blanche
of
while Fénéon was its art critic and, eventually, its secretary general. All
de l’ceuvre of their friend Lugné-Poé, a
them worked for the Thédtre
in 1893 which often put on plays regarded as
Symbolist theater founded
socially radical, including those of Bjgrnson and of Ibsen. The Nabis were
influ-
much interested in Neo-Platonic philosophy—which had so strongly
They were partly stimulated by ideas
enced the romantics before them.
signs related to the planets, which
concerning color music and symbolic
they derived from writings of members of the Theosophical Society.
artists
One might note here, in connection with art movements and
especial ly affected by Van
related to Impressionism, that among the artists
to be, with Matisse,
Gogh was the socially radical painter Vlaminck, later
Dongen, Marquet, and others, a member of the
Braque, Derain, Van
Wild Beasts. Vla-
famous group named by opponents “Tes Fauves,” or
dissatisfaction with
minck was led to primitive art in 1904 partly by his
the support of
society in the civilized world. In his youth he had sought
262 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

Zola, and beginning in 1900 he was an anarchist for a short period, even
contributing articles to an anarchist paper.” Other Fauves—including, as
we have seen, Van Dongen—found anarchism a congenial doctrine. Much
later, Marquet was to show sympathy for Soviet communism; however,
some Fauves with social interests were eventually led by their more or less
anarchistic individualism toward the far Right. For instance, Derain and
Vlaminck, the latter of whom had contributed to the communist paper
L’Humanité in 1935, were even to be accused of collaboration with the
Nazis in World War II.

14. Artistic Individualism and

Social Radicalism, Especially Anarchism
Ir snoutp se recorded that when the paintings of the French Impression-
ists were first exhibited in the United States, they were again attacked by
some critics as being socially as well as artistically radical. The very first
exhibition of Impressionist art in the United States—sent to New York in
1886 by the French dealer Durand-Ruel, with the help of the American-
born Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt, who was the daughter of the
president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and far from a social radical—was
declared by one critic to be “communism incarnate, with the red flag and
the Phrygian cap of lawless violence displayed.” ** Actually, the leading
American Impressionists who, like Mary Cassatt, followed in the footsteps
of those in France, were hardly affected by the social ideas of Pissarro or
those of the Neo-Impressionists Seurat, Luce, and Signac, even though
they did consider themselves artistically radical. This suggests that when
artistically radical movements are exported from one country to another
they often lose any socially radical connotations that they may originally
have had. Furthermore, the individualism of artists resulting from con-
sciously seeking that originality and uniqueness of expression regarded—es-
pecially since the beginning of romanticism—as so essential to great art is
not conducive to wholehearted social radicalism. It is more likely instead
to lead toward the kind of individualistic anarchism of which Thoreau, as
literary artist, is one of the best-known American examples. But such
artistic anarchism has often made it particularly easy for an avant-garde
and thus anti-bourgeois artist to cooperate with political radicals, including
anarchists, socialists, and communists. For theoretically the goal of all
these various forms of social radicalism is the fullest development and true
freedom of the individual human being, the goal that Marx maintained
would one day be reached in the classless society.
This theoretical emphasis on the importance of the individual in the
goals of the chief varieties of radicalism has helped to make it possible for
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 263

socially radical artists to pass with ease from one variety to another. The
vagueness of the radicalism of many such artists has allowed them to have
a general sympathy for almost any anti-bourgeois or radical movement as
long as it sought to improve the condition of the poor and bring art to the
people. This was essentially the case with the composer Gustave Charpen-
tier, best known for his opera Louise (1900), with its working-girl heroine,
her father who talks of social inequalities, her bohemian poet-lover,
and a garden overlooking Paris from the heights of Montmartre. From the
time that Charpentier—a winner of the academic Grand-Prix de Rome—
first conceived of Louise in 1887 at the age of twenty-seven, he had wanted
to compose a work with sharply accentuated social tendencies “*; and he
did so partly under the influence of Symbolist, realistic, and socially radical
plays that he saw at the Théatre de l’ceuvre—especially those of Ibsen.
Often in the evenings Charpentier could be seen sitting at the table of
notorious anarchists at the Café du delta. He regarded himself as a
plebeian and a socialist, and was described as being, in 1892, “full of the
naive revolutionary idealism then fashionable.” “* In the 1890's he is said
to have written several of the radical songs that abounded in the left-wing
journals of the time.’ In 1901 he spoke eloquently at the Bourse du travail
in favor of establishing the Syndicat [i.e., Union] des musiciens d’orchestre
and then in support of the strike that followed. It is significant that the
term “naturalism” has been applied to his music.
Like Charpentier, many artists found it possible to be sympathetic
simultaneously to socialism, anarchism, and syndicalism. Many of these
contributed impartially to anarchist and socialist magazines while perhaps
making a living by contributing drawings to magazines that had no politi-
cal aim at all. Such was the case with Théophile Alexandre Steinlen
(1859-1923) “*—with the result that his art was able to exert a strong
influence on some American artists with anarchist sympathies, on others
inclined toward Marxian socialism, and on still others who were
who
entirely apolitical, as Steinlen himself certainly was not.
to
Steinlen was a native of Lausanne, who at the age of twenty went
as a designer of printed textiles.
Mulhouse in France to work in a factory
the
Three years later he moved to Paris, where he was destined to become
thus continu-
chief artistic chronicler of the bohemian life of Montmartre,
by the
ing the tradition of artistic bohemianism so largely developed
second generation of French romantics under the leadersh ip of Gautier.
one of the first
After arriving in Paris, Steinlen was greatly influenced by
L’Assom moir; and in
books that he read there, Zola’s naturalistic novel
an “art
1808 he was to draw a cover for Zola’s Paris. Determined to practice
drawing s that he
populaire,” he sought to democratize art through the
social propa-
made for popular magazines, thereby becoming a powerful
a young socialist
gandist. One of his favorite comrades on Montmartre was
socialiste to “denounce
who in 1893 founded the periodical Le Chambard
To this Steinlen
without fear or mercy” social iniquities and their authors.
264 ff PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

contributed many drawings, and he was also a contributor to the socialist

Almanach de la question sociale. By temperament, however, Steinlen was
especially sympathetic to anarchism, and so contributed frequently to Les
Temps nouveaux, published by his friend Jean Grave. He also drew for La
Feuille. This periodical had been established by a highly individualistic
anarchist friend who rejoiced in the pseudonym of Zo d’Axa, and who had
previously published that thoroughly subversive literary journal
L’Endehors (1891-1893). The latter had been taken over for a time by
Fénéon, when Zo d’Axa had found it advisable to hide from the police.
Steinlen’s political and social interests are clearly indicated by the
dynamic revolutionary action of his: famous Vive la Communel!, by his
sympathetic drawings of strikers and other working-class people (Fig. 33),
by his covers for pamphlets by Kropotkin and Reclus issued by Les Temps
nouveaux, and by his portrait drawing of Maxim Gorky, who as much as
anyone was eventually responsible for establishing in Stalin’s Russia the
style of literature and art known as socialist realism. In our illustration,
Steinlen has emphasized the loneliness of downtrodden members of the
proletariat by means of the sense of vast space in perspective, which
contrasts with the “materialistic” ‘solidity of the figures. In the light of

FIG. 33. “Winter: ‘Are the Prisons Heated?’” by Alexandre Steinlen, from
L’Assiette au beurre, April 4, 1901.
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 265

Steinlen’s interests, it is hardly surprising that from the founding of the

French Communist Party in 1920 until he died in 1923 he contributed
illustrations to communist periodicals. As early as 1919, a book on Steinlen,
“painter of the Parisian proletariat,” was published in Soviet Russia, and
later he was to be further exalted under the aesthetic of socialist
realism."*°
Steinlen became best known to a wide public for the drawings he
submitted to L’Assiette au beurre and Gil Blas illustré, magazines that
were socially on the Left and had many anarchist contributors. Because
Steinlen loved to depict, in a relatively realistic yet moving style clearly
descended from Daumier and Millet, the everyday life of the Parisian
masses or the bohemian atmosphere of Montmartre itself, his art pro-
foundly affected many of the artists who drew for the Masses in the
American bohemia of New York’s Greenwich Village. Yet in France itself,
in contrast to the United States, the realist tradition of newspaper and
magazine illustration represented by Steinlen had relatively little effect on
the general course of art.
A contemporary of Steinlen in the so-called School of Montmartre
working in an even broader lithographic style, one stimulated mainly by
Daumier and Goya, was Jean Louis Forain (1852-1931), who in the late
1880’ exhibited with the Impressionists. Forain’s style and social satire
likewise influenced American artists of the Masses group, even though, in
contrast to Steinlen and most Masses artists, he was a devout Roman
Catholic, who thus had a strong Christian strain in his art. Partly for this
reason he was regarded as a hopeless bourgeois by many French anarchists,
including Jean Grave. Their disdainful opinion of him was only reinforced
at the time of the Dreyfus case, when, unlike the more socially radical
artists, he was an anti-Dreyfusard.
artist
Contemporary with Forain and Steinlen was another Parisian
art for
who at least as strongly as Steinlen devoted himself to using his
for such
social protest. This was the anarchist Grandjouan, who drew
and Le Libertai re. And with
anarchist periodicals as Les Temps nouveaux
of the chief contrib utors to
his fellow anarchist Steinlen, he was one
French slang is roughly
L’Assiette au beurre (1901-1912), whose title in
al, which was
equivalent to the American word “graft.” To this periodic
under the pseudonym
edited by the anarchist journalist Gustave Blanchot
on, Kupka,
“Gus Bofa,” such artists sympathetic to anarchism as Vallott
contributed—as did
Van Dongen, Willette, Ibels, and Caran d’Ache also
an realist painter of the
Forain, Jacques Villon, Juan Gnis, and the Americ
issue of L’Assiette au
poor, Eugene Higgins. Especially impressive was the
of France with Russia
beurre for July 1, 1905, which protested the alliance
The anarchists Grand-
in the light of the Russian Revolution of that year.
nted among the
jouan, Steinlen, and Kupka were prominently represe in it
this issue, while among the writers represented
artist-contributors to
Anatole France, and
were Elisée Reclus and Jean Grave, Jean Jaurés,
266 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

Gabriel Mourey, who had been among the first to publicize the wntings of
Ruskin and Morris in France. ,
In 1907, at a time when Grandjouan was famous as perhaps the chief
contributor to L’Assiette au beurre, he told Emma Goldman that the
mission of art is simply to inspire the vision of a new social dawn. He
assured her—somewhat exaggeratedly—that “In this respect all our artists
are revolutionaries,” adding that “Steinlen and the others are doing for art
what Zola, Richepin, and Rictus have done for letters. ‘They are bringing
art in rapport with the currents of life, the great human struggle. . . .”
Before Emma Goldman left Paris, Grandjouan made a cover design for her
American anarchist periodical, Mother Earth, which had similar aims.
Emma Goldman had gone to Europe in 1907 to attend the first
successful international anarchist congress, which was held that year in
Amsterdam. As the largest congress of anarchists, it represented the peak
of their international influence. In France, anarchism had already begun to
decline, partly as a result of the controversy over terrorism, partly as a
result of the related rise of anarcho-syndicalism. One might note here,
however, that although stemming from anarchism in its emphasis on direct
economic action, syndicalism was ‘affected by Marxism and alienated the
more orthodox—and more individualistic—anarchists by its emphasis on
coercive organization.
With World War I came the collapse of the anarchist movement,
except in Spain, which was not drawn into the war. Princip, the assassin
who brought on the war by shooting Archduke Ferdinand and his wife at
Sarajevo in an effort to draw the attention of the world to the plight of
subjugated Slavs, described himself as a radical nationalist, but before 1912
he had been interested in Marxism and also acknowledged the influence of
the revolutionary writings of Kropotkin, Bakunin, and Stepniak, another
Russian anarchist. Furthermore, his accomplice, Chabrinovich, who had
vainly tried to assassinate Ferdinand with a bomb a half hour before
Princip fired the fatal shots, was a genuine anarchist.
The question of whether or not to support the war split the ranks of
the anarchists as it did those of the socialists. Kropotkin and Grave joined
with thirteen other prominent anarchists in signing a declaration approv-
ing war against Germany, whereas many other anarchists, including the
Italian Malatesta and also Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman in the
United States, strongly opposed the war. The Neo-Impressionist painter
Luce wrote Grave in 1916 upholding the war, whereas Signac wrote Grave
in the same year regretting his own failure to protest against it. Finally,
after the revolutions of 1917 in Russia ended in the victory of the Bolshe-
viks, Marxism won out in its long international contest with anarchism,
becoming the major form of socialism throughout most of the world with
the notable exception of Spain, where communist-anarchism remained
strong until the defeat of the Loyalists by Franco in 1939.
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 267

15. Survival of Utopian Socialism:

The Architecture of Tony Garmer

Iw France during the period when anarchism was strong, there had
survived some influence of the kind of utopian socialism represented by
Saint-Simon and also by Fourier, from whom anarchism itself had partly
stemmed. Even after the decline of anarchism, this kind of socialism
underlay the social radicalism of some French artists; and it has already
been mentioned that as late as 1922 a Fourierist review, La Rénovation,
was still being published in France. One highly influential artist of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who had socialist leanings de-
scribed by a biographer as resembling the mild socialism of a Saint-Simon
or a Fourier was the architect Tony Garnier (1869-1948) .“°
Garnier was born at Lyon, that city which even before the Revolution-
ary year of 1848 had been a chief center of French socialism, and he was
raised in a socialist family. Although trained as an architect chiefly in Paris
at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the great center of French academicism at
which he won the Grand Prix de Rome in architecture, the highest student
honor, Garnier eventually rebelled against his academic training. Like all
other winners of the Grand Prix in the various arts, he was sent at state
expense to the French Academy at Rome. There the architectural students
have always been expected to devote themselves primarily to investigating,
and making restoration drawings of, architectural remains from classical
Antiquity and the Renaissance, for such classic forms were regarded as the
basis of the whole academic tradition. With his socialistic background,
however, Garnier was much more interested in architectural problems
raised by the expansion of modern industry. He therefore asked permission
to omit making the usual drawings of classical remains in order to design
instead a whole imaginary, ideal—and in this respect utopian—industrial
town. When permission was refused and he was compelled to make a series
of immense restoration drawings of the ancient city of Tusculum, Cicero’s
home town, Garnier completed designs for his industrial city on his own
time. Between 1901 and 1904, therefore, he prepared a series of drawings
to
for this town, which, although never intended to be built, was designed
take direct advantage of and give realistic expression to the functional
possibilities of the new and highly unacademic material of reinforced
concrete. With the addition of some later drawings, the designs were
34),
finally published in 1917 under the title Une Cité industrielle (Fig.
and
and exerted wide influence first in France, then in post-war Germany,
In our illustration, the mushroom col-
eventually throughout the world.
 FIG. 34. Project for the station of Une Cité industrielle (1901-1904?) by
Tony Garnier.

umns supporting a double cantilever reflect an extraordinarily advanced

conception of ferro-concrete design, so that this drawing was presumably
made several years after 1904.
Not only was the Cité industrielle a kind of modern utopia in the
tradition of Fourier’s phalanstery,**° but also Garnier recognized the affin-
ity of his work to Emile Zola’s slightly earlier novel, Travail (1901), by
inscribing on his drawing for an assembly building the words TRAvaIL / E£.
zoLa.’” Zola’s novel, we have seen, is based on the utopian socialist
doctrines of Fourier. And Garnier himself, like Fourier and other utopians,
believed in the fundamental goodness of man. When he was asked why
there was no law court, police force, jail, or church in his industrial city, he
replied that in the new society under socialist law there would be no need
for churches, and that as capitalism would be suppressed, there would be
no swindlers, thieves, or murderers.**
Largely as a result of the interest that Garnier’s drawings had aroused
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 269

long before publication, he had been commissioned in 1905 by the Radical-

Socialist (actually liberal) mayor of Lyon, Edouard Herriot, to design and
build a large section of Lyon along the lines of his project for an industrial
city. The work for Lyon was published in 1919 in a book with a preface by
Herriot, who later said he regarded Garnier as a “realist.” *” ‘Thanks to
Garnier’s projects for the Cité industrielle and his work for the city of
Lyon, he became one of the chief founders of modern architecture. As he
had never lost contact with the official French academic tradition in
architecture, but had sought to reform it by his teaching within it, his
influence—combined with that of the architect Auguste Perret (1874-
1954), who also studied and taught at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts—was
a major factor in modifying that tradition considerably.” And Perret,
it is interesting to note, had been born into a French family in Belgium
because his father was then in exile, having been condemned to death in
absentia for firing cannonades at the Louvre in 1871 as a supporter of the
Commune.

16. Anarcho-Syndicahsm:
Pelloutier, Sorel, and Art

Mleanwume, contemporary with Tony Garnier and Perret, there had

developed in France an important social movement that was to affect
directly at least one influential American artist, the cartoonist Robert
Minor, who contributed to the Masses and other left-wing periodicals as a
member of the Industrial Workers of the World before becoming a
leading member of the American Communist Party. This French develop-
ment was the previously mentioned revolutionary labor movement known
as syndicalism, of which the I.W.W. was a largely native American
version. Syndicalism dominated much French radical thought of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only to be weakened by the
founding of the Communist International in 1919 and then almost totally
destroyed in the late 1930’s by the overthrow of the Spanish Republic on
which the syndicalists had pinned their hopes.
Syndicalism, or anarcho-syndicalism as it is often called, arose within
by
the official socialist fold, and its organizers were inspired especially
the Paris Commun e. Althoug h it originat ed under
Proudhon, Marx, and
the direction of men who repudiated any connection with Bakuninism, it
too began as an anti-authoritarian movement and so was somewhat af-
fected by Bakuninian anarchist influences. Although it was also partly
(but
Marxist in origin, its leaders rejected all parties and “state socialism”
the
not the state as such). And to a considerable degree it reflected
contempt felt by many workers for Marxian socialism because French
failure
Marxism long failed to provide adequate leadership for labor, a
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
270 ft PRACTICE

resulting chiefly from the inability of the Marxian groups in France to

unite in the face of competition from French anarchism and other varieties
of radicalism. Indeed, one subject on which the Marxists especially could
not agree was the proper relation of a socialist party to the syndicalist
movement itself: the disagreement came to a head in 1906 when the
French socialists split wide open in a three-way division on this question.”
The winning faction was that of Jaurés,who believed that the Socialist
Party and the syndicalists’ organization should remain separate, even while
seeking close and harmonious relations and cooperating freely with one
another.
The syndicalist creed had begun to evolve strongly in France in the
late 1880’s, and had been backed by two increasingly powerful labor
organizations—the Fédération des Bourses du travail and the Confeédera-
tion générale du travail—which in 1902 united under the latter name.
Although syndicalism was partly Marxist in orientation, the descent of the
syndicalists from Proudhon, and to some degree from Bakunin, made them
reject all forms of political action in favor of the general strike as the chief
weapon of violent economic action. They believed that control in the
future classless society would be decentralized by placing it in the hands of
local syndicats, or trade unions. As internationalists, like both the orthodox
Marxists and the anarchists, the syndicalists were anti-patriotic, and this
and their opposition to political action made them strongly anti-militaristic
as well. They differed especially from the Marxists in their anti-intellectual-
ism, which gave them a different attitude toward art from that of Marxists,
who believe that art is a form of ideology and therefore characterized by
intellectual processes. With their utter confidence in the power of the
general strike, the syndicalists adopted an exaggeratedly pragmatic point of
view toward labor, industry, and the machine age which ordinarily led
them to accept only the most immediately utilitarian kinds of art—those
directly useful for encouraging the syndicalist cause as a revolutionary labor
movement. Among such were the songs of Montéhus, which Lenin ad-
mired much as Marx admired those of the worker-poet Pierre Dupont,
whom he cited in Das Kapital.
In theory, then, the syndicalists considered art important; but the
day-to-day concern of the rank-and-file with labor problems meant that
interest in art was certainly not widespread within the movement. Never-
theless, the great leader in developing syndicalism in France and the
creator of the Bourses du travail, Fernand Pelloutier, had in 1896 joined a
group of anarchists in reviving a philosophic-literary review called L’ Art
social. This had originally been founded in 1891 by anarchists who had
insisted on advocating only purely propagandistic art, and in 1894 it had
faded away. However, when it was revived in 1896, the new group of
backers included, beside Pelloutier, some anarchists close to Jean Grave
and thus sympathetic to a somewhat broader view of the function of art.
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 271

Although L’Art social continued to appear in its revived form for only six
months, the Groupe de l’art social which had revived it—and which was
called by one writer “in a sense the Academy of Anarchism . . .” *°—
remained a center of social and artistic discussion for some years. It
conducted lectures throughout Paris, especially in working-class sections,
with the aim of bridging the gap between manual and intellectual workers;
and it also projected free art exhibitions and theatrical presentations for
the purpose of encouraging simultaneous artistic and social education.
According to Pelloutier, the group did not seek to impose a single line on
its members and was even open to arguments against incorporating social
ideas in art.*** Yet Pelloutier himself believed that the artist should directly
join the social struggle. To art he gave the task of destroying the myths on
which contemporary society rested, insisting that only “the awakening of
minds to scorn of prejudices and laws” could “lead to a social revolution,”
one that “this awakening art alone can accomplish.” *’ Even while regard-
ing art as fundamental, Pelloutier thus implied that it should be solely
propagandistic.
Soon there arose on the fringes of the syndicalist movement a French-
man who had much influence, especially outside of France, as a theoretician
of syndicalism, though he was never called upon to formulate syndical-
ist policies. This was Georges Sorel,“* whose development out of
Fourierism and whose shifting relationships to Marxism are of importance
here because of his interest in art. Like so many of the secular utopians in
France—including numerous Saint-Simonians and Fourier’s chief disciple,
Victor Considerant—Georges Sorel was a civil engineer with that admira-
tion for the “practical” and for the “machine” which a civil engineer could
be expected to possess. His own Fourierist inclinations, before he was being
affected by Marxism and then by syndicalism, are suggested by a statement
of 1895, two years after he had first become interested in socialism. Sorel
then declared that “the ideas of Fourier have remained very much alive in
our country. One may say that nine out of every ten Frenchmen concerned
with social questions are incomplete or illogical Fourierists.” *° One of
Sorel’s closest associates in the late 1890’s was the leader of French social
Christianity, Charles Péguy. By 1899, however, Sorel had taken his stand
with the “revisionist” Marxists, who subscribe to an evolutionary, rather
than revolutionary, form of socialism. In France the predominant version
of révisionism was that expounded by the art-minded Jaures—whom,
however, Sorel eventually excoriated.
Thus, only a few years later, Sorel was applying Marxian revolutionary
theory not to revisionism but to the practice of revolutionary syndicalism,
and was becoming known—at least outside of the immediate syndicalist
circles—as the leading theoretician of modern syndicalism. In Sorel’s case,
his engineer’s regard for the practical and useful was reinforced by his
study of pragmatic philosophy, to which he joined elements of Marxism
272 uh PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

and Proudhonian doctrine, as well as of the philosophy of Nietzsche,

notably Nietzsche’s demand for an elite of individual supermen. At first
Sorel’s philosophical pragmatism was strongly influenced by the im-
plied pragmatism of Bergson, but he soon passed from that to the avowed
pragmatism of William James and other philosophers of the American
school. Characteristically, the last of all Sorel’s many writings was entitled
De Lutilité de pragmatisme (1921), and in it the utilitarian and functional
approach of the engineer was combined with the emphasis on sheer social
utility especially characteristic of syndicalists. By this time, too, he had
become an apologist for Lenin, and he was soon to praise Mussolini in
spite of his own opposition to the state. His admiration for such leaders
was born of their readiness for revolutionary action, on account of which he
was ready to overlook everything else.
Because Sorel believed that rationalism had become the weapon of
reform rather than of revolution, he had long before become an irrational-
ist who assailed the Enlightenment and labeled Diderot a Philistine. Even
while accepting many Marxian ideas, he attacked a chief source of Marx’s
thought and denigrated one of Marx’s major heroes. In contrast to Marx,
also, he believed in the primacy of politics alone. With such an individual
mixture of ideas, Sorel could hardly be expected to found a school of
thought or an aesthetic, although aspects of his ideas did affect a wide
variety of people, including some devoted to the arts, in widely different
ways.
In spite of the predominantly non-artistic orientation of syndicalism,
Sorel had quite early become interested in the social implications of art, as
his article “La Valeur sociale de l’art” (1901) * indicates. In this he held
that, in a society of industrial workers such as he believed was characteris-
tic of modern times, the productions of man should be graded in a
hierarchy according to their functional importance for man’s culture.
Within such a hierarchy, he declared, the productions of decorative art are
the least important, whereas “The most interesting form of modern art is
that which makes beauty descend completely into utility.” ** For Sorel saw
in modern times a “very marked tendency. . . to accord an aesthetic value
to our great means of production” **—in other words, to machines. To
him, also, the mission of art in the last analysis is “to ennoble manual work
and make it the equal of scientific work.” ** Besides differing from Marx in
upholding a mechanistic, rather than organismic, kind of social functional-
ism in art, Sorel also differed from him sharply in his view that the mission
of the artist, as the member of an elite, is to foster a spirit of individualism.
Thus he wrote: “The artist is truly an artist only in the degree in which he
feels his spiritual independence . . . one can hope that aesthetic education
will have the effect of developing individualism in the world;—and that is
good.” **
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 273

17. Futurism and Anarcho-Syndicalism

Dur GENERAL spirir of the kind of syndicalism expounded by Sorel
anticipated the way of thinking of the poet, editor, and promoter of art,
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who in 1909 founded the revolutionary and
anti-bourgeois art movement that he called futurism—a term he had
coined the year before. Even though Marinetti was an Italian, he had
been affected by influences from French literary Symbolism. The mani-
festo in which he announced the futurist movement was written in French
and first published at Paris on the front page of the issue of Le Figaro for
February 20, 1909. When, in 1912, Marinetti sought to weld his various
lectures and stray articles on futurism into a book which would present a
roughly continuous account of his position, it too was published in French
at Paris under the title of Le Futurisme. For that matter, even though the
artists early connected with futurism were all Italians who began as
futurists in Italy, they increasingly showed the influence of some French
movements in the arts even while themselves giving much stimulation to
aspects of modern art in France and elsewhere.
In a manner that was to be characteristic of futurist writings, Marinet-
ti’s first futurist manifesto **° sounded the praises of rebellion, war, anarch-
ism, and the dynamism and speed of the industrial age exemplified by
modern machines. The most frequently quoted passage of the manifesto is
the famous sentence: “A racing motor-car . . . which looks as though
running on shrapnel, is more beautiful than [a Greek statue,] the Victory
of Samothrace.” The manifesto continued: “We wish to glorify War—the
only health giver of the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm
of the Anarchist. . . .” Further: “We shall sing of the great crowds in the
excitement of labour, pleasure and rebellion; of the multi-coloured and
polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capital cities; of the nocturnal
vibrations of arsenals and workshops . . . of adventurous liners scenting
the horizon; of broad-chested locomotives prancing on the rails . . . ; and
of the gliding flight of aeroplanes. . . .” Aesthetically, like so many con-
temporary pioneer movements, futurism declared itself to be violently
anti-academic, and especially had its basis in the thought of Bergson.
Not only did Marinetti mention the “excitement of labour” in this
first manifesto but in his book Le Futurisme he also highly praised “the
right to strike’—undoubtedly under the influence of anarcho-syndicalism.
For he showed that his conception of democracy was based on society
within the mechanized big city in which labor unions are so significant
(even though for him the revolutionary mob was still more important) .**°
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
274 / PRACTICE

The attention paid to trade unions, however, was only a minor part of the
futurists’ exaltation of the dynamism characteristic of the modern in-
dustrial age of technology and the machine: it was this that eventually led
Marinetti to attack handicraft and the roots of the arts and crafts move-
ment by assailing, in a lecture in England, “the lymphatic ideology of your
deplorable Ruskin. . . .” *” Politically, the sympathies of the futurists lay
with revolutionary anarchism, although as a group they themselves were
violent Italian nationalists, and in this respect differed basically from the
anarchists, who by definition are anti-statists.
In the very month in which Marinetti published this first futurist
manifesto in Paris, three young Italian painters—Carlo Carra (Fig. 35),
Umberto Boccioni (who also became a sculptor), and Luigi Russolo (Figs.
36 and 37)—met with him in Italy and proposed that painters be included
in the futurist movement. With the enthusiastic support of Marinetti, who
previously had given little thought to the visual arts, the three painters and
two other friends issued in 1910 a manifesto of their own. From then on,
futurist manifestoes in various arts came thick and fast. Among them was
Russolo’s Manifesto of Futurist Music entitled L’Art des bruits (1913),
which declared: “We must break ‘out of the narrow circle of pure musical
sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise sounds . . . ,” ** doing so
by means of special machines. It thus paved the way for musique concrete,
first performed publicly in 1948, and also for that of the contemporary
American composer, John Cage, like Russolo an anarchist. Another charac-
teristic futurist manifesto was Futurist Cinematography (1916): the cin-
ema was admirably suited to depicting movement, and did so by means of
machines. More than any previous group the futurists reflected that
tendency to rely on written manifestoes which was to become so common
among twentieth-century artists because they felt the ineflicacy, or unsuita-
bility, of the painted canvas to express their radicalism, social or artistic.
And Marinetti had obviously adopted the manifesto as a time-honored
weapon of political agitation.
In all these futurist documents, mechanics and science were exalted
far more than in the actual works of art by the futurists: it was in the
paintings of later artists such as Fernand Léger (Fig. 48), who died a
communist," that the words of the futurists were to be more completely
embodied.
As the literary style of Marinetti’s first manifesto shows, he had been
especially inspired by the Symbolists Mallarmé and Huysmans, who them-
selves had so many connections with anarchism, and by translations of the
poetry of Walt Whitman,” that poet claimed by both anarchists and
Marxian communists. Also, the painters who joined Marinetti had been
especially affected by two stylistic tendencies, the divisionism of the Neo-
Impressionists and the curvilinear style of the movement known as Art
Nouveau. It should be added that, in the early days of futurism, the
futurists were linked more closely by the revolutionary mood that they
shared than by any common elements in their artistic heritage or even by
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 275

their artistic principles. Indeed, Marinetti made a revolutionary cult of the

anti-artistic and the ugly, urging his followers “to spit upon the altar of
art,” thereby foreshadowing the nihilism of the dada movement, which
had some connections with Marxian communism.
Two of the most characteristic futurist pictures are Carra’s Funeral of
the Anarchist Galli (Fig. 35), painted in 1910-1911, and Russolo’s Revolt
(Fig. 36) of 1911-1912. Carra’s picture represents an episode that had
occurred some six years earlier but obviously had made a deep impression
on him. An anarchist named Angelo Galli had been killed during a general
strike in Milan in 1904. At his funeral, a riot had developed involving
mounted policemen and an angry crowd, in the course of which Galli’s
red-draped coffin had almost been knocked from the shoulders of the
pallbearers and trampled underfoot—and it is a moment of this combat
that the artist recorded.
Even more than Carra, Umberto Boccioni (who had lived for some
months in Russia in 1904) had strong social sympathies which are reflected
in some of his drawings and paintings. Before he had joined the futurist
movement he had already shown in a few of his works his interest in both
social protest and action—for instance, in a lively drawing of a crowd
dating from 1908." As a futurist, too, he sometimes revealed his sympathy
for workers in action, such as those in his Street Pavers of 1911, which in
subject was reminiscent of Courbet’s Stone-Breakers, but was urban and
executed with the Neo-Impressionist technique of spots of color which the
futurists valued for the pictorial dynamism that they could produce. ‘The
very love of the futurists for dynamic space, however, eventually caused
them to replace this Neo-Impressionist technique with one stressing
“force-lines” (e.g., Figs. 36 and 37); and these not only eliminated ob-
jects from futurist paintings but even destroyed space as ordinarily
conceived.
The futurists were fighting against the isolation of the individual
human being as well as for freedom of personal expression, with motion as
the means of expression. In the kind of importance that they gave to
the individual they showed the influence of that anstocratic anarch-
ist, Nietzsche, of whom Russolo even painted a symbolic portrait; for, like
Nietzsche, they believed in the necessity of an elite—in their case, some-
what like Saint-Simon, an elite of artists. They agreed with Bergson in
holding that there is no such thing as a definite, isolated object, maintain-
ing that there are only intimations of objects within a continuous flux,
which for them was a flux of color and form. Because in their view, too, the
individual human being should not be isolated, they sought an identity
between object and human emotion, an empathy with the world of things,
somewhat as German romantic idealists had. Like so many of the roman-
tics, they also believed in the possibility of color symphonies devoid of
logical meaning and simply intended to exalt the sensibility. Although the
analogy of music fascinated them, they did not value it either for its
possibilities of stimulating social harmony, as communist and communist-
 Te, Be
Funeral of the Anarchist Galli
(1910-1911) by Carlo Carra.

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK.

COLLECTION,
 FIc. 36. The Revolt (1911-1912) by Luigi Russolo.
COLLECTION, HAAGS GEMEENTEMUSEUM.

anarchist groups were likely to do, or for its rational system, as secular
communists did. .
In connection with their desire for individual freedom of expression,
the futurists—like artists in the French Revolution or like the Neo-Impres-
sionists in France—insisted on holding their exhibitions without juries.
Consequently, their first group-showing, held in Milan in April-May 1911,
was entitled Mostra d’arte libera (Exhibition of Free Art).
In the autumn of 1911, at the urging of one of their newer colleagues,
the painter Severini, several of the leading futurist painters—who until
then had been merely part of a relatively provincial group of Italian artists
—went to Paris to see the latest developments in that capital of the art
world. These forthwith considerably affected their own art: thus Russolo’s
Dynamism (Automobile) of i913 (Fig. 37) shows the influence of cubism
to a far greater degree than does Carra’s Funeral of the Anarchist Galli of
1911 (Fig. 35). In February 1912, the futurists held an exhibition of their
own in Paris, and in a notice entitled The Exhibitors to the Public which
they published in French in connection with this show they declared: “If
our pictures are futurist, it is because they are the result of absolutely
futurist conceptions, ethical, aesthetic, political and social’ (italics
mine).'’* The exhibition attracted much attention and was displayed later
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 279

in the same year at London, Berlin, Brussels, The Hague, Amsterdam, and
Munich. It achieved such worldwide notice that it was written up at length
in several American periodicals, including the New York Sun, the New
York Evening Journal, and the Literary Digest. The futurists were invited
to take part in the famous Armory Show of 1913 at New York which first
brought modern art to the attention of many Americans; but they decided
not to participate as a group. ‘Two years later, however, they did arrange a
comprehensive exhibition at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition
in San Francisco.
Meanwhile, in July 1914 an Italian architect, Antonio Sant’Elia (who,
like Boccioni, was to be killed two years later in World War I), had issued
a manifesto on architecture * that most authorities believe allied him with
the futurists. In the same year—apparently under the influence of ‘Tony
Garnier’s Cité industrielle ** (Fig. 34) and possibly also that of the ideas
of Dr. Tony Moilin, a utopian socialist and Communard shot after the
Commune, who in the late 1860’s had proposed streets at various levels
with railways above and below, as a cure for the Paris trafic problem *”—
Sant’Elia published his own Cittd nuova. His drawings, which had fist
been displayed in May 1914 at an exhibition of the group Nuove tendenze,
depicted an ideal city of the future characterized by compositions reflect-

FIG. 37. Dynamism (Automobile) (1913) by Luigi Russolo.

280 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

ing the futurists’ delight in intersecting streams of movement (Fig. 38). Its
forms, deliberately intended to constitute a complete revolutionary break
with the past, represented an anti-historical point of view unacceptable to
orthodox Marxists and later to Marxist-Leninists. As Sant’Elia wrote: “the
edifices we envisage will have their raison d’étre only in the special condi-
tions of modern life, and will derive their esthetic value from their attune-
ment to our up-to-date sensibility. This architecture cannot be subjected to
any law of historical continuity. It shall be new just as our state of mind is
new.” *° He therefore declared, “I proclaim that Futurist architecture is
the embodiment of mathematical calculation, of daring and simplicity; it is
the art of building with reinforced concrete, iron, glass, cardboard, textile
Fic. 38. Project for skyscraper apartments from the Cittd nuova (1914) by
Antonio Sant’ Elia.
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 281

fibers, and other substitutes for wood, stone, and brick, affording a maxi-
mum of lightness and elasticity.” *”
As a consequence, his drawings for his ideal city show a mechanisti-
cally functional kind of design in concrete, steel, and glass, foreshadowing
aspects of that modern movement in architecture which was to develop
especially in the years after World War I and to become widely known as
the International Style."* In those later years, however, futurism itself was
to have particular influence on the art of Italian Fascism—indeed, Mani-
netti sought, with only partial early success, to have futurism accepted as
the official art of the Fascist movement, which likewise emphasized in-
dustrial mechanization and a Nietzschean elite. Mussolini, Marinetti’s
close friend, had until 1914 been a left-wing socialist with strong revolu-
tionary, anarchist, and syndicalist inclinations. In 1903, as an exile in
Switzerland, he had begun to collaborate with a revolutionary syndicalist
weekly of Milan called Avanguardia socialista. He had translated Kropot-
kin’s book, on the French Revolution, La Grande Révolution (1909), into
Italian. And he had declared, “What Iam. . . I owe to [the syndicalist]
Georges Sorel.” *”
Meanwhile, the influence of futurism had spread widely. One painter
who had early felt its influence was Frantisek, or Frank, Kupka
(1871-1957), a native of Bohemia trained in the academies of Prague and
Vienna. In 1894, he went to France, where he chiefly lived for the rest of
his life. Kupka was apparently the first artist of France to think through
and define abstractionism in painting. Indeed, in the new kind of pure
abstract painting which he developed in 1911-1912 (Fig. 40), he may have
anticipated Mondrian, Delaunay, Picabia, the Lithuanian Ciurlionis, and
the Russians Larionov and Malevich, though presumably not Kandinsky,
each of whom likewise has had supporters claiming that their candidate
was the first to paint in a completely abstract mode.
Where Kandinsky and Mondrian painted abstractly under the influ-
ence of theosophy, a movement with strong social interests, Kupka had
become associated with spiritualism and—like the futurists later—with
anarchism. After settling in France in 1894, he had made a precarious
living as a fashion illustrator and poster designer while also illustrating
anarchist pamphlets. From about 1900, for some years he had devoted
himself almost entirely to drawings for anarchist or anarchist-oriented
to
magazines such as Les Temps nouveaux and L’Assiette au beurre and
illustrating books, including one by Elisée Reclus. He also made sketches
n
for Kropotkin’s book of 1909 on the French Revolution. Our illustratio
(Fig. 39)—from an issue of L’Assiette au beurre in 1902 entitled L’Argent
sar-
and entirely devoted to drawings by Kupka attacking capitalism—is
Art Nouveau
donically labeled “Liberty.” Rendered in the avant-garde
the drawing
style of the time, and showing some influence from Steinlen,
factories pour
depicts humanity dominated by a bloated capitalist whose
out munitions of war.
and
In Kupka’s early paintings he worked in a kind of Pre-Raphaelite
FIG. 39. “Liberty” 7
by Frank Kupka, from L’Assiette au beurre, January 11, 1902.
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 283

Art Nouveau manner, but he became increasingly interested in problems

of color. Like such predecessors in anarchism as the Neo-Impressionists, he
began to steep himself in color theory, following Seurat. Like Seurat, too,
and like the Symbolists, in whom he was much interested, he came to
think of painting and color in terms of music as the title, Fugue, of Figure
40 shows. But as that illustration also indicates, Kupka differed from the
Neo-Impressionists in his interest in abstraction, an interest put into words
with other ideas in a kind of manifesto he gave to a New York Times
correspondent in 1913. Although later he preferred to call his art “con-
crete” rather than “abstract,” or “non-objective,”’ in this he declared: “I
have come to believe that it is not really the object of art to reproduce a
subject photographically. Music is an art of sounds that are not in nature
and almost entirely created. Man created writings, the airplane and the
locomotive. Why may he not create in painting independently of the
forms and colors of the world about him? . . . I believe I can produce a
figure in colors as Bach has done in music.” *° The importance given here
by Kupka to modern machines of movement, such as the airplane and the
locomotive, reflected the stimulation of futurism. So also did his investiga-
tions of the secret of depicting motion, which led him to develop a
technique of using the same model alternately for painting and for photo-
graphing with a motion-picture camera.
Kupka’s whorls of saturated color set cubism on fire: for a time he was
connected with a circle of artists at Puteaux, his home from 1906 on and
the location of one of the three chief groups contributing to the develop-
ment of cubism. We shall see shortly that one of the other two groups
contained a prominent member, Picasso, who, like Kupka, had been
influenced by anarchism, while members of the third group, known as
“T Abbaye de Créteil,” were touched by anarchism, utopian socialism, and
Marxism.
Picasso’s friend, Guillaume Apollinaire, the poetic arbiter of avant-
garde artistic taste who himself was an anarchist and who in 1913 pub-
lished his first and last futurist manifesto, L’Antitradition futuriste, linked
Kupka’s whorls of color with the art of the painter Delaunay. He consid-
ered the two—with Léger, Picabia, and Duchamp—as constituting an art
movement that he labeled “Orphism” because of his belief that they
shared a tendency toward abstraction having analogies with music. Kupka,
of
however, eventually rejected the association of his name with that
a time only because he
Delaunay, which he had tacitly accepted for
thought the publicity was helpful to him.
and
The influence of futurism, which was so strongly felt by Kupka
directly felt in
other artists living permanently in Paris, was even more
there, per-
pre-revolutionary Russia—with the result that Marinetti went
and February
haps in 1910 (this is disputed), but certainly in January
and St.
1914, when he lectured to enthusiastic audiences at Moscow
 FIG. 40. Fugue (1911-1912), pastel by Frank Kupka.

Petersburg. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, futurism and its

syndicalist implications continued to be important in Soviet Russia for a
few years. It was regarded by many Soviet artists as the expression of
Russia’s need for industrialization at a time when the trade-union move-
ment was still so strong that a party called the Workers Opposition
temporarily exerted considerable power.
Although trade-unionism in its syndicalist form thus had at least some
indirect connections with futurism, we have seen that the syndicalists
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 285

themselves, in practice as distinguished from theory, ordinarily showed

little interest in art, despite Sorel or even Pelloutier. This lack of interest
was characteristic also of rank-and-file members of the I.W.W., that
largely independent American version of anarcho-syndicalism whose main
art, if it can be called art, consisted in the rallying songs that they sang at
their meetings. On the Continent, wherever syndicalism spread, as it did
especially in Italy and Spain, it made relatively little effort to sustain that
respect for the arts which had been fostered by earlier French radicalism,
following Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Proudhon. Although books and pe-
riodicals about art in relation to social reform continued to be published in
France after syndicalism had become so strong, they were likely to reflect
the influence not of syndicalism itself but of remnants of the Saint-
Simonian, Fourierist, or Proudhonian doctrines. Nor did these articles and
books ordinarily show the influence of Marxism: as we have seen, before
World WarI the Marxists in France, even when not preoccupied with their
own dissensions, tended, like Marxists everywhere, to regard art as a mere
part of the Marxian superstructure—and so as secondary to economics and
politics. Only after a partly Marxian social philosophy of art had developed
in England, especially with William Morris, and after this philosophy had
spread to Belgium and thence to the rest of the Continent, did French
Marxists occasionally pay somewhat more attention to art. But for some
time no artists of the first rank were attracted specifically and strongly to
Marxism. Even the Italian-born Modigliani, whose brother was an out-
standing leader of the Italian socialists, knew nothing of the literature of
Marxism in spite of his own inclinations toward a kind of personal social
radicalism as well as artistic radicalism.

18. The Social Radicalism of

the Abbaye de Créteil, and
the Beginnings of Cubism

influences on
Tris true, however, that Marxism was one of several radical
Symbolism to
a group of artists and writers who made the transition from
in, and
cubism, and who combined ideas from Morris, Tolstoy, Kropotk
the Abbaye
Marx. Although the communistic and anarchistic community,
on the basis of such ideas, lasted only
de Créteil,** which they founded
we shall see that after the Bolshevi k Revolu-
from late 1906 to early 1908,
of the group spoke highly of Bolshe-
tion in Russia some former members
that it constitu tes an importa nt transi-
vism, of Lenin, and of Trotsky; so
tion to the period after World War I.
Vildrac, a
The group originated in the following way. In 1904, Charles
286 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERUAN®

young staff-writer on the short-lived Paris review La Vie, had the idea of
forming a commune of artists. He associated himself with another writer
on the staff, Alexandre Mercereau, and with two young would-be painters
then working as textile designers, Albert Gleizes and René Arcos, both of
whom already possessed an inclination for the politics of democratic
socialism and for social themes in art. Soon Vildrac’s brother-in-law,
Georges Duhamel, who was then a medical student, joined the group. In
1906, Mercereau made the first of many trips to Russia. (In the years
following World War I, he and Gleizes were to show sympathy for
communism, while Vildrac, Arcos, and Duhamel were to be prominent in
the non-communist Left, though Jater Vildrac too moved toward the
Soviet position. )
After La Vie expired, Gleizes, Mercereau, and Arcos, stimulated
especially by writings of the critic and anarchist Gustave Kahn, had
founded an Association Ernest Renan as a kind of popular university to
educate workingmen and regenerate society through art, and to ally artists
and the masses with the aim of freeing the products of both from control
by the bourgeoisie. Because they regarded artists, too, as workers, they
believed that a total alliance between themselves, other artists, and other
workers could be made to produce a new society in which neither artists
nor workers would be outcasts. And because the alliance between artists
and workers was considered to be a total, organic one, this was believed to
obviate any necessity for artists to devote their art to social propaganda for
moving the masses—a view in direct opposition to that of Lenin and his
followers later.
A printing press was bought, and under common ownership provided
a communal craft-art suited to an industrial age, one which, it was hoped,
would make their community self-sufficient while relating art directly to
life. A deserted group of buildings near the village of Créteil, twelve miles
or so from Paris, was rented from an industrialist, and was named by
Vildrac the “Abbaye” on the basis of Rabelais’s “Abbaye de Théléme.”
Only the financial help of a socially minded friend, Henry Martin Barzun
(future father of the American writer-teacher-scholar Jacques Barzun),
who since 1905 had been publishing the periodical L’Art social, enabled
the founders to establish their community. And it was Barzun who intro-
duced Gleizes and other members of the group to the specific history of
utopian socialism.
The group’s idea of integrating art with life within their community
by means of a craft in common came from Tolstoy, and especially from
William Morris, himself of course a great printer, while their notion of
having a community not unlike a Fourierist phalanstery was related to
Kropotkin’s similar conception of reorganizing society on the basis of small
self-sufficient communes. The first book printed at the Abbaye was L’ Art
et la nation by the critic and anarchist Paul Adam. This was an attack on
the government for officially encouraging the wrong kind of art by support-
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 287

ing the academic tradition, and had originally been a speech at a testimo-
nial dinner to Rodin on his sixty-sixth birthday.
Like Gustave Kahn, Adam had done much to urge the organic
interrelationship of all the arts in the spirit of Richard Wagner: for one
thing, he had earlier noted the relationship of Neo-Impressionism in
painting to Symbolist poetry. Similarly, not only did the Abbaye de Créteil
bring writers and painters together, but also it sought to encourage all arts
even while organizing its daily life specifically around the craft of printing.
For a time the Abbaye had a composer-in-residence, Albert Doyen, who
later organized massive choral chants called Les Fétes du peuple. Exhibi-
tions of paintings by Gleizes as well as of works by artists not residing in
the community, including the avant-garde sculptor Brancusi, were held at
the Abbaye. A frequent visitor was Marinetti, who was attracted to the
community two years before he issued his first futurist manifesto, in which
the need to establish an art for the new age was emphasized much as it had
been by the Abbaye de Créteil.
In 1908, the Abbaye failed financially as a communist community and
the members of the group left Créteil with their rent unpaid. Basically, the
failure was caused by a persistence of individualism within the life of the
community—that essentially anarchistic factor responsible for bringing to
an end so many earlier utopian communist experiments. Nevertheless, the
preoccupation of the group with achieving an aesthetic synthesis of the
social, psychological, structural, and other changes in modern life led to
the concept of simultaneity which later was to be applied directly to art
and to be regarded as fundamental to the theory of cubism. Much of that
theory was already being expressed by a member of the Abbaye; this was
Mieczyslaw, or Mécislas, Golberg, a Polish-born anarchist who had been
imprisoned for his anarchism in both Poland and Germany.™ Although
Golberg was putting forward the idea of simultaneity for some time before
he died in 1907, artists of the Abbaye group did not really begin to move
toward a kind of cubistic style in art until 1909, the year after they had left
Créteil, when the painter Henri Le Fauconnier (1881-1946) was intro-
duced into their circle and began to work in a more or less cubistic manner.
In 1910, Le Fauconnier went to teach in Munich, where he was a member
of the parent organization of the group called Der blaue Reiter, thus be-
coming a chief link between French cubism and German expressionism.
In the complicated early history of cubism, many of those involved
had social interests. In most cases—as was true also of their predecessors,
the Symbolists—their social interests, if any, were of an anarchist kind.
Some cubists, however, overlapped into socialism and eventually into
communism.
Cubism—which was to last from 1907 to the middle 1920’s—was
begun independently by three groups of artists and by that anarchist and
and
eventual communist, Léger. The first cubists were certainly Picasso
l cubism in 1907-190 8. Picasso had be-
Braque, who originated analytica
288 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

to
come sympathetic to anarchism in his early days in Spain and was
become a communist; Braque was to remain essentially apolitical.
In 1911, the cubism of Picasso and Braque began to spread beyond
their immediate circle, thanks to Apollinaire (who had introduced them to
each other in 1907), and also to the painter Metzinger, then Picasso’s
neighbor in Montmartre. As it spread, it mixed with cubist tendencies in-
dependently being developed by two other groups of artists and by Léger,
who had first met Picasso in 1910.
In 1910, also, Metzinger turned to cubism as one of the first followers
of Picasso and Braque. In that year, too, Metzinger met Gleizes, who, we
know, had been a member of the group at the Abbaye de Créteil. Through
Gleizes, the cubist tendencies of the former Abbaye de Créteil group had
become connected with those of a group of artists who were then living
at Puteaux, and so not far from Gleizes’s residence at Courbevoie. The
Puteaux group, which included not only three of the apolitical Duchamp
brothers—the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon and the painters
Jacques Villon and Marcel Duchamp—but also for a time their neighbor
at Puteaux, Frank Kupka, was already moving toward cubism in its own
way. In 1912, Metzinger, who until that year had lived near Picasso in
Montmartre, moved to the Left Bank, midway between Montparnasse,
where Picasso then lived, and Passy. At this time he was already closely
associated with the artists of both Puteaux and Passy, thereby firmly
linking the cubism of Picasso and Braque with that of the Puteaux
circle, while making these artists acquainted with artists of Passy.
Meanwhile, in 1910, Le Fauconnier, who, we have noted, had intro-
duced a kind of cubism into the former Abbaye group the year before,
painted a picture called Abundance (Fig. 41) under the scrutiny of Gleizes
and his painter friends, Metzinger, Delaunay, and Léger (later con-
nected with the Puteaux group), all of whom had first met through the
writer Mercereau, one of the founders of the Abbaye de Créteil. Le
Fauconnier’s Abundance, an expression of social ideas by a synthetic art of
new and unsymbolic forms, without allegory, was regarded by all these
painters as a revolutionary work. Furthermore, although essentially cubistic
in style, the painting was independent of influence from the far superior
analytical cubism of Picasso and Braque, whose own originating efforts
toward what was already called cubism were still not known to most, at
least, of the members of the Abbaye group. For Gleizes and Le Fauconnier
did not become acquainted: with Picasso until 1911—although Metzinger
had met him at least a year or two earlier,** and was the first to point out
the similarities between these two of the three groups who independently
originated cubism.
In that key year of 1910 Metzinger had already published an article *°
in which he had made the first attempt to transform the synthetic concept
(already found in the Abbaye’s literature) so as to apply to the treatment

FIG. 41. Abundance (1910) by Henri Le Fauconnier,

COLLECTION, HAAGS GEMEENTEMUSEUM
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
290 Ve PRACTICE

of visual forms in painting. This involved the conception that in 1912

became known as simultaneity, under which traditional perspective was
completely dismissed and a sense of the object conveyed simultaneously
from various points of view. As this article was the first published applica-
tion to art of the idea of simultaneity, it is significant that it appeared
only after Metzinger had become a member of the circle of Mercereau,
that writer-founder of the Abbaye. Two years later, in 1912, Gleizes and
Metzinger published their influential book, Du cubisme, in which the
principle of simultaneity was stressed. In this book, also—in harmony
with the Abbaye’s principles of collectivity—an effort was now made
to link the activities of Picasso and Braque with those of the Puteaux
group and of that growing out of the ideals of the Abbaye. A similar effort
was made in another book published that same year, a volume entitled Les
Peintres cubistes, the author of which was Apollinaire, Picasso’s anarchist
friend, who not only had been on the periphery of the Abbaye de Creteil
group but had been greatly excited by the art of those anarchist painters,
the futurists.
Gradually, however, the former Abbaye circle was developing into a
group that called itself the Artists of Passy, located, therefore, near Pu-
teaux. Among its members were the architect Auguste Perret and his
brother, whose boyhood had been spent in exile with their Communard
father. The group often met at a café called the Closerie des lilas, where
they mingled with the older Symbolist generation. Other meetings, how-
ever, were held in Perret’s apartment in the apartment house on the rue
Franklin which he had built in 1903 in harmony with his lifelong admira-
tion for Viollet-le-Duc, and which today is regarded as one of the outstand-
ing monuments of modern architecture because of its early architectural
expression of reinforced concrete construction. With the help of the
architect-members of the Artists of Passy, that leading figure of the
Puteaux circle of artists, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, was able to give a
lecture on modern architecture entitled “L’ Architecture et le fer” (Arch-
itecture and Iron).
The avant-garde Artists of Passy, in contact with the group around
Apollinaire, took over the Salon d’automne in 1912. There, as the Ameri-
can artist and critic Walter Pach has written: “the galleries . . . were
decorated by painters and sculptors who turned their hands to the crafts of
iron, wood, wallpaper, glass, typography, etc. This was the fraternal guild
idea, envisioned by Van Gogh a generation before, and had its continu-
ance not been broken by the [First World] war, it would unquestionably
have affected the course of modern art.” **°
In the fall of 1912, also, the group of acquaintances of the Artists of
Passy living at Puteaux put on an exhibition that was probably the most
important of all the cubist manifestations in France. This, held at the
Galerie de la Boétie in Paris, was called the “Section d’or,” a name prob-
ably applied to the Puteaux group by Jacques Villon. The ideas of the
group, apparently based partly on those of the Nabis, had been developed
 From the Commune to the End of World War I, 1871-1918 / 291

in informal meetings held at the studio of Villon and the other Duchamp
brothers since 1910. Among participants in those meetings at various
times, or in the “Section d’or” exhibition as members of the group, were
Gleizes, Metzinger, Picabia, and Apollinaire (the four principal organizers
of the exhibition), also Le Fauconnier and Kupka (who, however, fell out
with the others when he became dissatisfied with the hanging space
allotted him). Exhibitors not actually members of the group included
Léger, Gris, and other cubists—so that even though Picasso and Braque
did not participate, with this exhibit cubism became a much more inte-
grated movement than ever béfore.
Five years later, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia much affected
some cubists and others who had been founders of the Abbaye de Créteil
back in 1906. This could be seen, for instance, in an article of 1918 by
Albert Gleizes entitled “The Abbaye of Créteil; A Communistic Experi-
ment,” published in an American philosophical-anarchist magazine, the
Modern School.’ For in this article Gleizes expressed his delight at having
participated in “one attempt at an awakening of the collectivist con-
science,” and also spoke of capitalist exploitation of the worker-artists at
the Abbaye de Créteil by the industrialist-owner of the property there.
Some four years later, one of the founders of the Abbaye, Mercereau, who
had made many trips to Russia since 1906 and had introduced cubism
there, published a small book entitled L’Abbaye et le Bolchevisme.™ By
now somewhat disillusioned with Bolshevism, he wrote: “In connection
with the Abbaye, one ought, independently of Communism to speak more
of pacifism and humanitarianism, of which Christ was the instinctive and
inspired apostle, [and] the Christian communes the best Example: “ne
However, he not only went on to speak of the necessity of referring to
“Karl Marx the theoretician most cited, [and] Tolstoy the most powerful
pioneer . . .” but he also mentioned “Lenin the most mystical realizer,
and Trotsky the most realistic organizer.” *
The attraction temporarily exerted by Soviet communism on
Gleizes # and especially on Mercereau, and the subsequent disillusion
expressed by Mercereau, were to be typical of the experience of many
French radicals, social and artistic.
 6
FROM WORLD WAR I
AND THE BOLSHEVIK
REVOLUTION TO 1968

1. The Bolshevik Revolution

and Avant-Garde Artists
"Vue Botsnevix Revoturion, in November 1917, naturally attracted the
attention and sympathy of much of the Left throughout the world,
weakening anarchism while also splitting socialist parties. And it could
attract the sympathies of socially conscious avant-garde artists largely
because, for some time thereafter, abstract and non-objective art flourished
in Russia, where avant-garde artists regarded their artistically revolutionary
works as expressions of the revolutionary spirit. Although it was an assassin
of anarchist sympathies who wounded Premier Clemenceau in February
1919, after the Communist, or Third, International was established in 1919
under Russian auspices, Western radicals, social and artistic, were likely to
express their sympathies by joining one of the many Communist parties
established in Western countries, including those of Europe. ‘The Commu-
nist Party of France, for example, was founded by left-wing socialists and
revolutionary syndicalists in December 1920 at a congress of the French
Socialist Party held at Tours: the split left the Socialist Party with only
30,000 members, the Communist Party with 130,000. Soon, like Commu-
nist parties elsewhere, the new party was being directly manipulated from
Moscow to follow the Soviet line in all things, including the arts.
The first major disillusionments with political developments in Russia
affecting some left-wing radicals in France and other countries came in
1918 when about 180 leading anarchists were imprisoned or liquidated, and
especially in 1921 with Lenin’s “united front” policy requiring communists
to collaborate with the socialists they had been taught to hate. In the latter
year occurred the brutal repression by Lenin’s regime of the revolt of
sailors at the Kronstadt naval base. ‘The rebels had supported the Workers
Opposition, and had called for freedom of speech and of the press not only
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 293

for workers and peasants but also for anarchists and left socialist parties.
Thus when the revolt was bloodily put down, anarcho-syndicalists through-
out the world were so disturbed that at the end of the following year, they
set up a separate anarcho-syndicalist International, the International
Working Men’s Association, with headquarters successively in Berlin,
Amsterdam, Madrid, Stockholm, and, since World War II, in Toulouse.
About the same time as the Kronstadt revolt avant-garde artists had
another reason to be disturbed by events in Soviet Russia. For Lenin
disliked abstract and non-objective art, and believed—with some truth—
that as he could not understand it, the masses could not. Hence, as soon as
the Red army had gained the upper hand in the bitter Russian civil war,
increasing pressure was put upon Soviet artists by the regime to devote
their art directly to the aims of the revolution. As a consequence, begin-
ning in 1921 many avant-garde artists unwilling to make propaganda the
end of art found it advisable to leave Russia. This did not, however,
alienate from Soviet Russia and its communism as many foreign artists as
might have been expected, simply because the Soviet line on art was not to
be clearly defined for some years. After Lenin suffered his first stroke in
1922, and especially after he died in 1924, a bitter struggle was carried on
among his would-be heirs that for a time made the definition of a single
official Soviet line for the arts impossible. Only after Stalin had at last
defeated his chief rivals for power—Trotsky and his own former ally
against Trotsky, Bukharin—could a single aesthetic policy be developed.
Meanwhile, during this power struggle each of the rivals had developed his
own line, with implications not only for political economy, regarded by
Marxists as the ultimate determinant of social change, but also for art as
part of the superstructure resting upon the economic base of society.
Trotsky had upheld the doctrine of permanent international revolu-
tion. Furthermore, as an excellent critic of modern literature and visual art,
he was quite sympathetic to artistically revolutionary modern arts, includ-
ing architecture of the new kind that eventually became known as the
International Style. Since, in contrast to ‘Trotsky, Bukharin (a former
landscape painter) upheld the rightist view that capitalism was still so
strong that the time was not yet ripe for international communist revolu-
tions, he for the time being accepted the existing situation in capitalist
countries—including, therefore, their modern art. In opposing ‘Trotsky,
Stalin, with the support of Bukharin among others, upheld the necessity
for first achieving “socialism in one country,” namely the Soviet Union,
Stalin,
before seeking to develop “permanent revolution” abroad. But after
over ‘Trotsky in 1927,
Bukharin, and their allies had completely triumphed
had vanquishe d
Stalin turned on Bukharin and his friends, and by 1929
them as well.
d as the
Only then was a single Soviet aesthetic developed, one accepte
fact that it was
aesthetic for official Communist parties everywhere. The
and Bukhann,
developed under the auspices of Stalin, who, unlike Trotsky
294 y PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

had no knowledge of, or real interest in, the arts, was destined to have a
largely adverse effect upon the arts of the Soviet Union and wherever the
influence of Soviet communism spread.

2. From Anarchism to
Communism Among Artists

Aone the numerous artists formerly sympathetic to anarchism who,

after the Bolshevik Revolution and the founding of the French Commu-
nist Party, passed to sympathy for Soviet communism was Théophile
Steinlen, who, we have mentioned, thereafter contributed to communist
journals until he died in 1923. Another was Signac, whose daughter
married for her first husband the son of Signac’s friend Marcel Cachin,
chief founder, in 1920, of the French Communist Party. Signac, who,
unlike many of his French anarchist comrades, had protested against
World War I, found in the Communist Party the embodiment of organ-
ized protest against the war.* He eventually joined the Party, and was a
member when he died in 1935.
Another artist who earlier had made the transition from a kind of
anarchism to sympathy for a kind of communism was the eccentric mod-
ern composer Erik Satie (1866-1925). Satie was the mentor of the musi-
cally radical group of French composers known as “Les Six’—one of
whom, Arthur Honegger, the founder of “social music,” eventually partici-
pated in the leftist Fédération musicale du peuple, and composed the
hymn of the French communist youth.? Though a thorough bohemian and
a kind of artistic anarchist, Satie had early joined the local Radical
Socialist (i.e., liberal) committee of his industrial Paris suburb of Arcueil.
About five years before World War I began, he was elected a municipal
councilor of Arcueil on a communist ticket; his communism was, however,
of a highly personal kind that turned politics into a form of bold mystifica-
tion.* Nevertheless, his political opinions were certainly left-wing: he even-
tually became a member of the “Soviet d’Arcueil,” and in 1938 was to be
proudly referred to by the leader of the French Communist Party, Jacques
Duclos, as having been “a member of our Party.” * Among Satie’s best
friends were radically modern.younger painters with whom he collaborated
on ballets and books, including Picasso and Léger, both of whom eventu-
ally passed from sympathy for anarchism to open adoption of Marxist-Len-
inist communism. Satie originated functional music—what the Germans
call “Gebrauchsmusik”—with his “musique d’ameublement” (musical
furniture intended to be played without being heard, like wallpaper).
Through “Les Six” and the “Ecole d’Arcueil,” a group of musicians still
more directly inspired by him, Satie exerted an influence on modern
French music.
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 295

3. Dada: Apoltical and Communist

Dore and after World War I, it was especially easy for artists in France
and elsewhere who had had leanings toward anarchism and communism to
become sympathetic to the artistically anarchistic and revolutionary anti-
bourgeois movement known as dada, many of whose participants, though
of well-to-do bourgeois background, developed links with communism
primarily because it too was revolutionary and anti-bourgeois in spirit. The
idea linking all members of the movement, however, was their pacifism in
opposing the World War. Together with Satie, two members of “Les Six,”
Georges Auric and Darius Milhaud, had close connections with dada,
which had originated in Switzerland during the war. It greatly influenced
art in the Western world immediately after the war, and did so especially
in France, Italy, Switzerland, and also in Germany, where it often had
particularly close relationships with communism. Furthermore, it was out
of dada that surrealism, another anti-bourgeois artistic movement destined
to spread throughout the Western world, originated in France in the
mid-1920’s; and many surrealists likewise developed close ties with the
communist movement.
Dada—a term of much debated origin, could have come from “hob-
by-horse” in French, and “Yes, Yes!” in Rumanian, while being a sign of
absurd naiveté in German. In any case, it stood for a mood rather than a
movement with a set of principles, and originated in 1916 out of futurism,
cubism, and expressionism among foreign artists in Zurich. ‘There had,
however, been preliminary stirrings in Munich, Berlin, and especially New
York, where an independent apolitical dada movement had begun. The
movement in Zurich first centered around the Café Voltaire, founded by
Hugo Ball, a German writer and producer who was both a disciple of
Bakunin and a devout Catholic. Most prominent in the group were a
Rumanian poet, Tristan Tzara (his real name was Sami Rosenstock), who
was then a nihilist; two Germans, Ball and Richard Huelsenbeck; and an
Alsatian, Hans Arp.° It was Arp who, in 1916, the year of the founding of
dada, made an abstract machine-sawed relief in wood called Portrait of
Tzara in which the prevailing rectilinear cubist structure of his earlier
works was dissolved into a new curvilinear “organic” or “biomorphic” kind
of form. Such free form, which was in fact a development out of Art
Nouveau by way of expressionism, was to have a wide influence. About this
its
time, also, the Zurich dadaists began to exploit accident in art, and
poem” made by
near-relative, automatism. Tzara invented the “accidental
setting down the order assumed by individual words cut out of a newspaper
and shaken from a bag. Similarly, Arp cut out irregular pieces of paper,
allowed them to fall, and used the resulting chance arrangement as a point
of departure for pasting them into collages. Later, chance was to play a
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
296 / PRACTICE
his followers and in
major role in the painting of Jackson Pollock and social
ctions with
aleatory music, both of which have had some conne
radicalism.
ic revolution-
Dada made use of its irrationality for expressing anarch
society as
ary protest against the rationalism and ideologies of bourgeois
of World War I—and so for
having given rise to the destruction and chaos
In 1919, with
protest also against the art and literature of the middle class.
Rimba ud, and in 1913 had
Hugo Ball (who had known Nietzsche and
ed the
collaborated on the Berlin periodical Revolution), Tzara found
long insisted
Dada Gallery at Zurich. As an artistic nihilist, Tzara had
that “art signifies nothing.” This does not mean, howeve r, that dada was
purely anti-art. While denying the autonomy of art and seekin g to dissolve
to reveal the
the rigid frontiers of the arts, it wanted to shock in order
demonic vacuum at the heart of a self-destroying civilization. In dada there
ly
was an oscillation between sheer iconoclastic parody and a constructive
creative spontaneity of the individual self, not merely for art’s own sake
but for the very sake of human survival. Within the works of the dadaists,
therefore, there existed an inherent ambiguity, derived from Symbolism,
with chance as an expressive element that has proved to be its major
contribution to the expressive possibilities of modern art—and which was
to be utterly rejected for its irrationality by Soviet socialist realism.
A split soon arose between those dadaists who followed Tzara in
supporting abstract art, and German members of the dada group, especially
Richard Huelsenbeck, who came to believe that art should be devoted to
the specific social ends of revolutionary politics. The latter was a view
stimulated partly by the artist Hans Richter, a former member of a
German expressionist group called Die Aktion, which, from 1911 to 1932,
published a magazine by the same name with the subtitle Zeitschrift fiir
den Kommunismus, and which during World War I had been following
the principle that artists should play an active role by working against war
and for revolution. At that time Zurich was a center for political revolu-
tionaries, Lenin among them, as well as for artistic revolutionaries. As will
be seen in more detail later, when dada spread from Zurich to Germany
under the leadership of Huelsenbeck (in the 1960’s a psychoanalyst in
New York under the name of Charles R. Hulbeck), it became closely
connected with communism in the post-war revolution there.
At Zurich itself, Hans Richter was co-founder in 1919 of a group of
painters of various nationalities known as the Association of Revolutionary
Artists (Vereinigung revolutionarer Kiinstler). Fearing that the revolu-
tion would ignore artists, it was intended to bring aesthetically revolution-
ary artists into the kind of communist political revolutions that had
recently broken out in Germany at Berlin and Munich, and then in the
former Austro-Hungarian empire, at Budapest. Although the Association
did not last more than a few weeks, it included some artists who were
attracted to dada, among them Giacometti and Hans Arp, both of whom
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 297

had been members of an organization founded at Basel in 1918 with the

aim of putting the intellectual potential of the dada movement at the
service of the socialist revolution. Later, Arp was to participate in spread-
ing dada into Germany. As for Richter, in 1921 he made the first abstract
film, Rhythmus 1921, in connection with his belief that abstract art could
constitute a “universal language” which “would restore to the arts its social
function.” 7
However, it was in France that, in 1919, the dada movement reached
its highest international tide. There dada was less directly political than in
Germany, though the movement ultimately derived in part from Rimbaud,
who had been so sympathetic to the Commune, and from other Symbolists
of whom most were strongly influenced by anarchism. Dada had in many
ways been anticipated by Satie. It had also been anticipated by two of his
friends, the apolitical French artist Marcel Duchamp and the French-born
Cuban Picabia, who, from 1915 on, had led the dada group (not called by
that name) in New York, and who, like Mallarmé, eventually recognized
the implications of chance. But the Zurich group had not become aware of
their New York predecessors until Picabia went to Switzerland late in
1917, after establishing a dada group in Barcelona.
The exceptional talents of the artists, musicians, and writers who
participated in dada at Paris soon made that city the chief center of the
movement. Not only did Tzara himself go to Paris late in 1919, but also
there he was associated with, among others, Picabia and Duchamp, who
now joined in developing in France what they had already anticipated in
New York. Another member of the Paris group was the American artist-
photographer, Man Ray, a former resident of an anarchist community in
New Jersey who was destined to have links also with the surrealists.
In Paris, Tzara likewise came in contact with the wniters André
Breton, Louis Aragon, and Paul Eluard, all of whom became leaders of the
surrealist movement, founded by Breton in 1924, which under their leader-
ship developed connections with Marxian communism, but only after
displaying anarchist sympathies. It is worth noting, therefore, that André
Breton, the founder of surrealism, always regarded Charles Fourier as a
chief precursor.®

4. Surrealism, and Politics on the Left to 1934

ive,
SSurrearisM, like dada, attempted to destroy all bourgeois, conservat
and therefore academic tendencies in art.’ Like dada, too, it had had
literary predecessors in Poe and Baudelaire; in socially radical Symbolists
such as Rimbaud and Mallarmé; and specifically in Guillaume Apollinaire,
the anarchist writer who in 1917 first used “sur-réalisme” in print for the
program of the Satie-Massine-Picasso ballet, Parade, in a context coupling
298 ye PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

avant-garde art with technological progress. In 1922 the future founder of

surrealism, Breton, had played a leading role, together with the painters
Léger, Ozenfant, and others, in preparing at Paris an International Con-
gress for Determining the Directives and the Defense of the Modern
Spirit.” Because this was not taken seriously by dada, and proved a failure,
Breton together with his friends Aragon and Eluard had broken with the
dada movement. The eventual result was that the death of dada was
declared in a “funeral oration” delivered by a founder, Tzara, at Weimar
in 1922, though in fact the movement survived until 1924. In the latter
year, also, Breton published the first Surrealist Manifesto, so named in
honor of Guillaume Apollinaire as coiner of the term “surrealist.” Breton’s
intent was to systematize dada’s concern for the irrational with the help of
Freudian theory; and increasingly the surrealists sought a better world, not
by the anarchic gestures of the dadaists against the bourgeoisie, but by
constructive collective action in alliance with radical political groups.
Before World War I, while a student of psychiatry, Breton had first
come into contact with Freud’s studies; and he had put some of Freud’s
ideas into use as a practitioner of psychiatry in the French army during the
war. In 1921 he visited Freud in Vienna. Consequently, when, partly under
the influence of the German romantics, he founded the surrealist move-
ment, Freudianism played an important role: it was the ideas of Freud
and of Freud’s rival, Jung, that led Breton to develop a new psychological
technique in producing works of art. Freud had laid bare the free associa-
tion of dreams, while Jung had investigated the ordinary free associations
of waking hours. With the hope of realizing spontaneous artistic produc-
tions on the basis of such findings, and stimulated by earlier experiments
made by Apollinaire, and dada, Breton developed further the new tech-
nique of “automatism,” under which he produced writings and collabo-
rative drawings guided only by his subconscious, and so not rationally, but
“automatically.” This anti-rational technique became an essential element
of surrealist painting in harmony with that struggle against reason inher-
ited from dada; and it was combined with such other interests shared by
surrealism with dada as anti-culture, anarchistic pacifism, and revolution.
Under Breton’s leadership the surrealists almost immediately founded
their own periodical, La Révolution surréaliste, the first number of which,
dated December 1, 1924, contained a page of photographs of the surrealists
with a then noted anarchist named Berton in their midst. It also included
writings by Breton, Aragon, Eluard, and the Italian painter Chirico, and
illustrations by Man Ray, Chirico, Max Ernst, Masson, and Picasso. Arp,
Paul Klee, Miré, Chirico, Emst, Man Ray, Masson, and Picasso all partici-
pated in the first collective exhibition of the surrealists, held at the Pierre
Gallery, Paris, in 1925, the year in which Breton had at last publicly
admitted that there could be surrealist painting as well as surrealist litera-
ture. Breton was later so overwhelmed by the debt which he felt surrealism
owed to Picasso that in his book of art criticism, Le Surréalisme et la
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 299

peinture (1928), he called Picasso a surrealist and wanted the label of

cubist removed from him.”
The surrealists, like so many of the dadaists earlier, soon became
involved in revolutionary politics, the first occasion being in 1925 when,
shocked by the massacre of Moroccan rebels in the Riff War, they joined
several groups of leftist intellectuals in supporting the Moroccan rebel
leader, Abd-el-Krim. Chief among those leftist groups was Clarté, an
organization founded in 1919 which took its name from a realistic and
socially radical novel by its leading founder, Henri Barbusse.
The basis for Clarté had been created in 1916-1917, during World
War I, by French socialist intellectuals in the fighting forces who had
become opposed to the war. Its original aim was to rally the intellectual
elite of all countries in support of an internationalist, anti-war, progressive
ideology with vague overtones of social regeneration. But its internation-
alism was given a new meaning and content with the diffusion of Bolshe-
vik ideas after November 1917. Under the leadership of Barbusse, Raymond
Lefebvre, and his boyhood friend Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Clarté
became increasingly sympathetic to the Communist (or Third) Interna-
tional, likewise founded in 1919—though Clarté never formally joined the
International.
Clarté published a periodical by the same name, with Barbusse as
editor, the first number of which appeared on October 11, 1919, and
contained the statutes of the group. It called for “a league of solidarity for
the triumph of the international cause” and listed an international steering
committee of twenty-eight members, including Barbusse, Vaillant-Coutu-
rier, the artist Steinlen, the authority on utopian socialism Charles Gide,
and such widely known writers as Duhamel, Anatole France, ‘Thomas
Hardy, Blasco Ibafiez, Jules Romains, Upton Sinclair, H. G. Wells, and
Stefan Zweig.
By late 1919, Clarté was clearly showing itself to be strongly favorable
to the Russian Revolution and to Bolshevism. A manifesto against allied
intervention in Russia published in Le Populaire on September 7, 1919,
was signed by Barbusse and Anatole France, with whom were associated,
among others, Lefebvre, Vaillant-Couturier, Duhamel, and Steinlen. On
October 26 a fresh protest appeared among whose signers were Barbusse,
Romains, the art historian Elie Faure, Duhamel, and Duhamel’s brother-
in-law, Vildrac, who in 1904 had conceived the idea for the commune of
artists that became the Abbaye de Creteil.
It was the Clarté group that on January 25, 1920, organized the first
public demonstration in France in favor of the Third International. One of
the three founders of Clarté, Lefebvre, died at sea after having left France
illegally to attend the second Congress of the International in Soviet
of
Russia in the summer of 1920. Immediately before the Tours Congress
voted to
December 1920, at which a majority of the French Socialist Party
join the Third International, Barbusse for the first time referred to “inter-
300 if PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

national communism” as the doctrine by which the new order would be

brought about. And after the Communist Party was founded at the ‘Tours
Congress, he promptly became a member, as did Vaillant-Coutunier, des-
tined to be the leading French communist in cultural matters.
When it became obvious that Clarté was the first French communist
front organization, some of the members, including Charles Gide, re-
signed, disturbed by the emphasis placed on revolutionary action by Vail-
lant-Couturier and his supporters. Even Barbusse—like so many later
writers and artists who joined communist organizations—eventually found
the movement too narrowly political. In 1923 he broke with its progeny,
the review Clarté, of which he had been editor from the beginning. As for
the Clarté movement, it followed the official communist line until 1925, at
which time it began to fall into the control of the Trotskyites and under
surrealist influence.”
In opposing the Riff War, the surrealists and Clarté joined the other
leftist groups in issuing, in 1925, a manifesto entitled La Révolution
dabord et toujours (Revolution First and Always). This contained the
statement, “We are not utopians: this revolution we conceive of only
under its social form.” ** The manifesto, which called for an immediate
disarmament like Lenin’s at Brest-Litovsk, was published in La Réyvolution
surréaliste, No. 5 (1925), and included among its signers Breton, Aragon,
Eluard, and artists Max Ernst and André Masson.
In 1926 Breton published at Paris a booklet, Légitime défense, in
which he declared that surrealism was ready to aid the cause of the
revolution of the proletariat, but insisted that the surrealists must preserve
their autonomy. This was in answer to a communist-line article by the
surrealist Pierre Naville, one of the two original editors of La Révolution
surréaliste—an article entitled “La Révolution et les intellectuels. Que
peuvent faire les surréalistes?” (Revolution and the Intellectuals. What
Can the Surrealists Do?). The consequence was that Naville, dissatisfied,
left the surrealists to become co-editor of Clarté—thereby indicating that a
break had occurred between the surrealists led by Breton and the commu-
nist Clarté group.
However, even though Breton was then unwilling to accept Commu-
nist Party discipline, as a sign of good faith he undertook to serve as a party
organizer among the gas workers of Paris. In the following year, he,
Aragon, Eluard, and other surrealists joined the Communist Party.
One reason why the surrealists could easily collaborate with Marxian
communists, and why some of them could find it possible to join the
Communist Party, was that, like the Marxists, they were greatly influenced
by the philosophy of Hegel. And they were increasingly affected by the
particular interpretation of Hegel made by Lenin in a notebook he had
kept on the subject of Hegel’s principles. Following Lenin, they were
especially impressed by the superiority which they considered Hegel had
given to the concrete over the abstract and to a metaphysics reached, not
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 301

through sheer transcendence, but through a successful attuning of mind

with matter. But unlike Lenin and his followers, and even Marx, they were
eager to avoid a danger Hegel had pointed out in his Aesthetics—that of
imitating nature and its limit-setting properties.”
Breton had also become much impressed by the ideas of Trotsky, first
as a result of reading Trotsky’s Lenin, which had been published in a
French edition in 1925. Because of the importance of Freudian doctrine
for surrealism, it was especially easy for Breton and other surrealists to be
sympathetic to Trotsky, who in his Literature and Revolution of 1924 had
spoken very favorably of the “Austrian psycho-analytic school (Freud,
Jung, Albert Adler, and others)” as making a great “contribution to the
question of the réle . . . of social consciousness.” ** And Trotsky had also
expressed his belief that the psychoanalytic theory of Freud “can be
reconciled with materialism. . . .” *7
In the Soviet Union, during the years from 1925 to 1928 when most of
the surrealists were moving ever closer to communism in France, the
situation in literature and the other arts was still in a state of flux that
allowed some freedom of expression to artists. Although in 1920 Lenin had
demanded that the arts be subordinated to the goals of the Communist
Party and had ordered the subordination of the avant-garde Proletkult
movement to the Commissariat of Education, in the following years the
desperate economic situation of Soviet Russia had forced the party to
retreat reluctantly before the need for some private enterprise. The result-
ing New Economic Policy was accompanied by recognition of a degree of
“private enterprise” in the arts, so that various artistic groups representing
very different points of view were allowed to exist side by side.
In 1925, indeed, the year when the surrealists began to participate in
leftist political activities in France, the Soviet Communist Party officially
adopted an attitude of neutrality toward the rivalries among Soviet literary
and artistic factions. As a consequence, the party remained officially neu-
tral for the next three years or so in the face of the particularly sharp
rivalry in the arts between the artistic avant-garde represented by the
Russian futurists and their allies, and the Russian Association of Prole-
tarian Writers, or RAPP, and its followers in other arts. However, this
neutrality of the party toward art movements primarily resulted from deep
political divisions within it, divisions resolved only when Stalin triumphed
over Trotsky in 1927, and then over his own former ally Bukharin by 1929.
Once Stalin had eliminated Trotsky, the way had already been paved
for adopting an official orthodoxy in the arts very different from the
international modern movements prevailing among avant-garde artists in
had
the West as well as in Russia earlier, movements to which Trotsky
been largely sympathetic. The new orthodoxy under Stalin’s leadership was
based on the “proletarian” ideas of RAPP, which therefore increasingly
dominated Soviet art. As early as 1927, an International Congress of Prole-
tarian Writers had been held in Moscow under the auspices of RAPP, and
302 Vi PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

this was attended by prominent foreign communists, including Henri

Barbusse and also Johannes Becher, then perhaps the most prominent
German communist writer. Three years later, a Second International
Congress of Proletarian Writers was held in the U.S.S.R., this one at
Kharkov, in the course of which “proletarian culture” of a sort quite
different from the original Proletkult movement was adopted as the official
Soviet aesthetic, and an International Association of Revolutionary Writ-
ers was founded with headquarters in Moscow. RAPP, and its followers
and allies in other arts, had triumphed, and were to maintain a dictator-
ship over communist arts until 1932. In exalting the proletariat, they
reflected a Soviet foreign policy of class war, with the arts to be used as
weapons in that war.
As RAPP and equivalent organizations in other arts were gaining in
strength, with party support, during the years from 1927 on, Soviet writers
and artists were increasingly censored and banned unless they devoted
their works to themes of proletarian labor and production directly relevant
to the first Five Year Plan. Its successful completion in 1932 despite
enormous hardships consolidated the power of Stalin’s regime not only in
the Soviet Union but also throughout the international communist move-
ment. In 1932, therefore, the Soviet Communist Party simply dissolved
RAPP, formed a single Union of Soviet Writers, and took over the
dictatorship of literature. As the other arts had to follow the centralizing
precedent set in literature, single unions of painters, of musicians, of
architects, etc., were also founded.
The aesthetic of “socialist realism” was apparently named at the meet-
ing of the Central Committee of the Communist Party which set up the
Union of Soviet Writers, whose statutes declared that the members would
follow the method of socialist realism. Not until 1934, however, was it
formally imposed at an All-Union Congress of Writers held at Moscow,
after which, of course, it was promptly accepted for all arts by Communist
parties everywhere. Meanwhile, as Stalin had at last become aware of the
threat to the Soviet Union and to communism offered by the triumph of
the Nazis in Germany, a new political line, the Popular Front against
fascism, had been developing parallel to the new line of socialist realism in
art. This new political line likewise was officially adopted by the interna-
tional communist movement in 1934.
These political and aesthetic events had direct repercussions on the art
theory and practice of communists and their sympathizers throughout the
world. In France, the early generation of French writers and artists sympa-
thetic to the Soviet brand of communism, such as Barbusse and Steinlen,
had remained essentially free to create as they wished, and their support
had been valued by the Communist Party leaders. In 1924, however, the
political disputes developing in the Soviet party began to be reflected in
the French party. Now the leaders became so completely involved in
political disputes that they had no time for cultural interests, and a
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 303

considerable degree of anti-intellectualism developed—with a consequent

devaluing of the role artists and writers might play in the communist
movement. Yet these political splits among the leaders also meant that, as
in the Soviet Union, no single style could be imposed on artists by the
party. From 1927 on, however, as Stalin and his followers began to win out
in the world communist movement, communist writers and artists, like
those of the Soviet Union itself, were increasingly subjected to direction
and censorship by their party in accordance with the rigidifying Stalinist
line. Eventually even Barbusse reacted against the increasing Stalinist
pressure. He had been made director of the Paris Monde, when it was
founded in 1928 with an advisory committee on which were Maxim Gorky,
the American socialist Upton Sinclair, and the Spanish anti-monarchist
philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno. To this periodical a wide variety of
internationally known left-wing artists contributed, including the Ameri-
can party-liner William Gropper. However, it ceased to be published in
1935 because the communist line had become too rigidified for Barbusse.
The relationship of the surrealists to communism was directly affected
by these later political and aesthetic developments within the communist
movement. In particular, the continuing admiration of Breton and his
immediate followers for Trotsky brought about a split in the ranks of the
surrealists themselves as Trotsky’s star declined. In 1928, when he was
expelled from Moscow by the Stalinists, the Communist Party in France
was already beginning to look sourly at surrealism. In 1929, the year in
which Stalin’s triumph over Bukharin’s Right Opposition, as well as over
Trotsky, became obvious, the International Bureau of Revolutionary Liter-
ature in Moscow decided to check up on the surrealists. It therefore sent a
telegram asking what their position would be if “imperialism” declared war
on the Soviets. The surrealists’ telegram in reply read as follows: “Com-
rades, if imperialism declares war on the Soviets our position will be in
conformance with the directives of the Third International [as] the posi-
tion of the members of the French Communist Party. . . .” * In harmony
with this declaration, a few months later the surrealists replaced their
periodical, La Révolution surréaliste, with a new organ. The last number of
La Révolution surréaliste, dated December 15, 1929, and containing the
Second Surrealist Manifesto, had included written contributions by the
and
artists Magritte, Dali, and Picabia, as well as by Breton, Tzara, Eluard,
Aragon. There were illustrations by Arp, Chirico, Dah, Max Ernst, Ma-
gritte, Tanguy, and Miré (who though always keeping apart from politics,
has insisted upon his desire to get in closer contact with the masses, whom
he has always kept in mind, while also often protesting against totally
non-objective art). ; :
The successor to La Révolution surréaliste was significantly entitled
which, dated
Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution, the first issue of
ion
July 1930, listed Breton as “director.” In connection with the publicat
of the new periodical, the surrealists sent a telegram to Moscow in which
304 Ue PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

they proclaimed their wish to put themselves immediately in the service of

the Revolution. Unlike its predecessor, the new magazine (which lasted
until May 1933, being then unofficially succeeded until 1939 by the
periodical Minotaure) included among its illustrations many documentary
photographs political in tendency.
Meanwhile, open splits were developing among the surrealists, who
now found themselves forced to choose between the collective experience
and the individual independence that had been the two poles of the
surrealist movement. In 1930, Freud published his Civilization and_ Its
Discontents, in whichhe maintained that Marxism is psychologically
untenable. In that year, Breton found his own activity in the Communist
Party’s cell of gas workers incompatible with surrealism. Also, Salvador
Dali, who had formally joined the surrealist group only in 1929, was
already devoting himself not to the Revolution but to applying to surreal-
ism his personal thesis of “paranoia-criticism.” At the other extreme, in
November 1930, Louis Aragon and another French surrealist, Sadoul, went
to Kharkov to participate in the International Congress of Proletanan
Culture (actually the Second Congress of the Union of [Soviet] Revo-
lutionary Writers), at which the line of proletarian culture was adopted.
There they were converted to Stalinist communism. As a consequence,
they signed a letter denouncing Trotskyism and idealism, attacking Freudi-
anism as a form of idealism, and proclaiming their attachment to the
general Stalinist line. Aragon, as further proof of his new attachment,
published a poem, “Le Front Rouge” (The Red Front), in the review
Littérature de la révolution mondiale, the French edition of the organ of
the International Union of Revolutionary Writers. ‘The issue was promptly
seized by the police; and in January 1932, Aragon, despite the support of
the surrealists, was declared guilty of inciting soldiers to both disobedience
and provocation to murder by means of “anarchist” propaganda, but was
given a suspended sentence. Some years later, “Le Front Rouge”—which
reflected the technique of Aragon’s close friend, the Soviet futurist poet
and communist revolutionary, Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as the new
line of proletarian culture—was translated into English by the American
poet E. E. Cummings.
Breton, who was trying to hold the surrealists together, sought to
conciliate Aragon and the communists by issuing with other surrealists a
petition denouncing capitalism and calling “with all our strength for the
preparation of the proletarian revolution under the leadership of the
[French] Communist Party, of a revolution in the image of the admirable
Russian Revolution which is now constructing socialism on a sixth of the
globe.” * The petition was signed by Breton, Eluard, Sadoul, and Yves
Tanguy, among others. .
Breton followed up the petition by publishing a pamphlet supporting
Aragon’s “Le Front Rouge” (even though in it he admitted that he did
not like the poem); but he also made veiled attacks against the Commu-
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 305

nist Party and its literary politics. As a result, Aragon indicated his own
disapproval of Breton and soon broke with the surrealists in favor of the
French Communist Party, of which both he and Breton had become
members in 1927. Presumably Aragon’s meeting, late in 1928, with that
devoted communist, the Soviet poet Mayakovsky, and then with Elsa
Triolet, a Russian-born pupil of Maxim Gorky highly sympathetic to
communism whom he later married, had added impetus to his rejection of
surrealism.
In the years that followed, “orthodox” (i.e., Stalinist) communists
everywhere assailed surrealism. Characteristic was an attack that in 1932
appeared in the New Masses, the cultural magazine of the American party.
This pointed out that at the Kharkov Congress of 1930 at which the
aesthetic of proletarian culture had been officially adopted, the members of
a surrealist delegation had heretically declared that, though accepting “the
theory of class-struggle on the basis of Marxian dialectics,” they could not
“accept Marxism as a basis for their art” because “art is an expression of
the emotions” and so “cannot have scientific principles as its basis.” *°
In 1933, that former surrealist, Louis Aragon, together with Vaillant-
Couturier, the chief French communist spokesman on cultural matters,
founded a new periodical, Commune. This was the monthly organ of the
Association des écrivains révolutionnaires, or A.E.R., limited to party
members, which since its founding early in 1932 had been promoting
proletarian culture under the guidance of Vaillant-Coutuner, its first secre-
tary-general. The directing committee of Commune consisted of Vaillant-
Couturier himself and three noted writers: Barbusse, André Gide, and
Romain Rolland. Barbusse, it will be remembered, had been the founder
of Clarté, the first French communist front organization, and had joined
the Communist Party on its founding in 1920. Gide, who later gave up his
communist sympathies, was the nephew of Charles Gide, professor of
social economy at the Sorbonne, president of the Christian social move-
ment, and a noted authority on the history of early socialism and commu-
nism, who had resigned from Clarté when it became militantly commu-
nist. Rolland as a young man had been a member of the circle of the
syndicalist Sorel. Early a Wagner enthusiast, he explored musicology and
art history with his Beethoven and his Michel-Ange. In 1895 he had
become lecturer in the history of art at the Ecole normale supérieure, then
in 1904 at the Sorbonne. His ten-volume novel, Jean-Christophe
(1904-1912), about a German-born musician, established his literary repu-
tation. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1915. His book, Le
Thédtre du peuple (1903) has long had a wide influence: for instance, it
stimulated the German communist theater director, Erwin Piscator (d.
1966). Rolland’s own career was that of an intellectual interested in the
arts who became ever more radical.
A non-combatant pacifist in World War I, in post-war France Rol-
land refused to submit to the discipline of Clarté even in its early pacifist
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
306 / PRACTICE

days. He also declined to contribute to the communist paper L’Avant-

garde, founded in 1920, because he then believed that his place was not in
any party. In 1929, however, he grew closer to a young Russian woman
with whom he had been corresponding since 1923. Upon his marriage to
her, he became a sudden convert to communism. He soon was extolling
what he called the gentle yet firm hand of Stalin, who, he declared, was
leading the Russian Revolution toward an ever greater understanding of
the rights of the spirit. He upheld the Stalinist purge trials in the USSR,
but not the Nazi-Soviet pact. In 1944 he died a convinced communist,
although he had never entirely shed the influence of East Indian mysti-
cism.
Not only the directing committee of Commune but also many of its
contributors were distinguished leftist intellectuals; among them was the
former anarchist—but now communist—painter Paul Signac. In 1934 the
name of the Association des écrivains révolutionnaires, which published
Commune, was changed, to reflect a merger with artists, into Association
des écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires. This made the organization attrac-
tive to artists and was a sign that the party line on art had changed. After
all, in 1934 the line of socialist realism, which had been developing since
1932 in the Soviet Union to replace that of proletarian culture which the
A.E.R. had been founded to represent, had been officially adopted in the
U'S.S.R. Also, in the U.S.S.R. itself organizations in the arts were being
merged so that they could be more effectively controlled. Among the
members of the painters’ section of the Association des écrivains et artistes
révolutionnaires were Léger, Jean Lurgat, Gromaire, and Goerg.
The surrealists had joined the A.E.R. in 1933. However, the intensity
of communist attacks upon them continued to increase, and they were
expelled from the organization in that same year. Many of them were
becoming worried by what they thought might be possible fascist influence
within their group: they suspected their fellow-surrealist Salvador Dali of
admiration for nazism and the personality of Hitler. Furthermore, Dali was
depicting Lenin in ways they did not like—in paintings which, interest-
ingly enough, are about the only surrealist works with subject-matter at all
identifiable with communism. One of these pictures, painted in 1933 and
called both Evocation of Lenin and Six Apparitions of Lenin on a Piano
(Fig. 42), is today in the Musée d’art moderne at Paris under the highly
innocuous title of Composition. In 1933, Dali painted another picture
involving Lenin which upset the other surrealists even more—an immense
painting to which the artist gave the name, The Enigma of William Tell
(the French word “L’Enigme” being a play on the French pronunciation
of Lenin). This showed a trouserless Lenin with one buttock enormously
elongated and resting on a crutch.** While Dali’s extraordinary technical
ability in making realistic renderings might itself appeal to Marxist-
Leninists they, with other Marxists, found it necessary to reject his de-
liberately anti-rational approach and the resulting ambiguities in his
 FIG. 42. Evocation of Lenin (1933) by Salvador Dali.

paintings. And as sympathizers with Lenin’s version of Marxism, his

fellow-surrealists equally had to reject his presentation of Lenin.
Early in 1934, therefore, Dali was called before the other surrealists
and accused of admiration for Hitler. Although in the face of the accusa-
tion he clowned around to indicate the surrealist character of his interest
in Hitler, he nevertheless insisted that he had merely been following
orthodox surrealist doctrine in transcribing his dreams, and that it was not
his fault if he dreamed of Hitler’ For some days the surrealists discussed
his fate, but when it seemed likely that he would be expelled from the
surrealist group, a rightist uprising in France on February 6, 1934, attracted
their attention away from his case—though thereafter he did not attend
their meetings.
This rightist uprising, which included many openly fascist groups,
aided the French communists in developing a new political line, the seeds
of which were already being planted by Stalin and by the French party
308 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

leaders under his direction. For Stalin had belatedly become aware of the
immense threat to the Soviet Union and communism that Hitler’s
triumph in Germany constituted. In France, the beginnings of the new
line appeared in a speech delivered in November 1933 by the party leader,
Maurice Thorez, before the Chamber of Deputies, in which he called upon
workers and intellectuals to join with other exploited classes in opposing
fascism. A few weeks later, in January 1934, Stalin himself at last spoke out
publicly against the Nazis. The rightist riots in France in the following
month helped the communists by making it apparent to many non-
communists throughout the world that, if the fascists were to be stopped,
all anti-fascists must join in opposing them. The eventual result was the
formation of the Popular Front against fascism—which in France was put
into political effect only in July 1934, when the communists at last
succeeded in signing a pact with the socialists. In 1935 the Soviet Union
joined the League of Nations.

&. Art and the Popular Front

to the Spanish Civil War
Wore communist encouragement, French anti-fascist intellectuals had
already been banding together. In answer to the rightist riots of February
6-7, 1934, a “Call to the Struggle,” an appeal for the concerted action of
intellectuals with workers’ organizations and revolutionaries in the fight
against fascism, was issued on February 10. The call, which ended with the
words, “Long live the general strike!” was sent to the Communist Party,
the Socialist Party S.F.I.O., the Confédération générale du travail, the
Union communiste, and the Union anarchiste, among other organizations.
It was signed not only by surrealists including Breton, Eluard, and Tanguy,
but also by many other left-of-center intellectuals. Among them were art
historian Ele Faure and novelist and art historian André Malraux (who
has often declared that had Trotsky won his battle with Stalin, he himself
would have become a Trotskyite). Other signers included the rising young
photographer Henri Cartier [-Bresson] and the Neo-Impressionist painters
Signac and Maximilien Luce, the more abstract painters André Lhote and
Léger, and Dora Maar, the young photographer-painter who was to be the
mistress of Picasso from 1936 to 1944. On February 12, Malraux was but
one of many intellectuals who took part in a demonstration organized
jointly by the Communist, Socialist, and Radical parties in reply to the
rightist demonstrations six days before. Then, on March 5, a Comité de
vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes (C.V.I.A.) was founded, which
included the surrealists among its members. It soon sent out a tract
outlining ways of realizing “unity of action with the proletariat.” Together
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 309

with the A.E.A.R. and other pro-communist cultural organizations, it had

a prominent place at the huge rally held on July 14, 1934, at the Buffalo
Stadium in Paris to consecrate the official establishing of the Popular
Front, even though the Pact for Unity of Action with the Socialists was
not actually signed until July 27.
In the preceding April there had been founded at Paris under commu-
nist auspices, another organization which, as a kind of Popular Front of
intellectuals, anticipated the consummation of the political Popular Front.
This was the Maison de la culture, established by Vaillant-Couturier with
Aragon as secretary-general. Formed by an alliance of the Association des
écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires with other pro-communist groups,
including the Union des théatres indépendants de France, the Alliance du
cinéma indépendant, and eventually the Fédération musicale populaire
(founded in 1935), the Maison de la culture soon developed a network of
branches throughout France. The idea for the organization had apparently
come from the Houses of Culture established in the Soviet Union in
various cities, large factories, and collective farms. These are intended to
promote the general education of “amateurs” in paving the way for the
development of the “all-sided’” man that Marxists believe all men will
become in the classless society.
One member of the Maison de la culture, and also of the Association
des écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires, was the Belgian-born artist sympa-
thetic to communism, Frans Masereel. Among the other artists proudly
listed as members of the Maison de la culture by the Communist Party’s
newspaper, L’Humanité,* were Jean Lurgat (Fig. 43), a participant in
many communist activities, with a leftist architect-brother then working in
the Soviet Union, and Léger (Fig. 48), who, after hailing in 1935 the
formation of the Popular Front, joined the Maison in the following
year. Not long thereafter he decided to join the Communist Party and
from New York cabled a communist friend in France asking for admis-
sion2* Still other noted artists cited by L’Humanité as members of the
Maison de la culture—but who were to remain more anti-fascist than
pro-communist—were Gromaire, Lhote, and the sculptor Lipchitz. Accord-
ing to Lurgat in a letter to me written some months before his death in
1966, the artists participating included “many practicing Chmistians, social-
ists, radicals, but above all writers, architects or painters, having no interest
in political questions”—in short many non-communists. Lurcat also de-
clared that the secretary-general was not a Communist Party member.
A major policy of the Maison de la culture was to establish a “theater
for the people” as part of its exaltation of collaborative art, typical of the
Popular Front period. In connection with this aim, a spectacle was organ-
ized under the Popular Front, which consisted of Romain Rolland’s
Fourteenth of July (originally written in 1902 and named for the date of
the taking of the Bastille in the French Revolution), now collectivistically
set to music by a team of composers. Like André Gide at that time,
 FIG. 43. The Workers’ Meal (1935-1936) by Jean Lurgat.

Rolland was sufficiently sympathetic to the Left so that at the first

All-Union Congress of Writers held at Moscow in 1934, Maxim Gorky had
been able to say in praise of them both, “Romain Rolland and Gide have
every right to call themselves ‘engineers of souls’” *° a term whose origin,
we have seen, is often credited to Stalin himself. And the Congress had
sent its special greetings to Rolland, who had been unable to attend.
The team of composers that set his Fourteenth of July to music
consisted of Arthur Honegger, Auric, Milhaud, Ibert, Koechlin, Roussel,
and Lazarus; and so was led by, among others, several members of “Les
Six.” ?° One of them, the then highly leftist Honegger—who in 1936 wrote
that, “Music ought to change the public and address itself to the masses” *’
—likewise composed a “Prelude on the Death of Jaurés” for another
collective spectacle, entitled Liberty. The team of composers for this,
which was mounted by a socialist group called “Mai 1936,” included,
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 311

among others, Ibert and two members of “Les Six,” Milhaud and Ger-
maine Tailleferre.
The rising tide of anti-fascist feeling in France that led to the found-
ing of the Maison de la culture and to the Popular Front reached a peak in
October 1934 partly as a consequence of the murder at Marseille of King
Alexander of Yugoslavia and Léon Barthou, the French Minister of For-
eign Affairs. These assassinations were deliberately planned by fascists
because Barthou, though a man of right-wing beliefs, was strongly in favor
of a rapprochement with the Soviet Union and an alliance to check Hitler
and Mussolini.
In that same year, 1934, some non-communists were among the
French writers attending the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in
Moscow, at which the new Stalinist aesthetic of socialist realism was
officially adopted. Among the visitors from France who addressed the
Congress were the communist Aragon and the future communist Jean
Richard Bloch. Another was André Malraux, who was never a communist,
but then was warmly sympathetic to communists as individuals (though
destined eventually to be De Gaulle’s minister in charge of cultural
affairs). After this Moscow Congress ended, a huge meeting was held in
the Paris Palais de la mutualité to hear reports on it. Vaillant-Couturier,
that most influential French communist in cultural matters, sat on the
platform together with communist workers and leftist intellectuals, includ-
ing André Gide. Throughout the meeting a large part of the audience
repeatedly chanted, “Les Soviets partout!” (The Soviets Everywhere!).
In the following year the Franco-Soviet Pact was signed, and the
Popular Front launched. So strongly during that year did the tide of
anti-fascist feeling flow toward communism that such noted non-commu-
nists as the former anarchist painter Vlaminck, the writers Malraux, Gide,
and Giono, and the theatrical manager Jouvet were all among the then
strangely varied contributors to the Communist Party’s paper, L’Hu-
manité.
In May 1936, the Popular Front—thanks to the collaboration of
communists, socialists, the Radical Socialist Party, the two major trade-
union confederations, and other groups—won the French elections. The
communists refused to participate in the ensuing government, however;
and when they sought to do so a year later, they were rejected. Neverthe-
less, they regularly supported the Popular Front regimes—making peace
with French political traditions while fusing ideals of Jacobin republican-
ism with those of proletarian revolution.
Meanwhile, even before the elections of 1936 they had begun to foster
numerous Popular Front activities, including a five-day International Con-
gress of Writers for the Defense of Culture against fascism, which was
held in Paris at the Palais de la mutualité in June 1935, and had a
profound influence upon artists in all fields. It was organized by the Soviet
312 i PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

writer Ilya Ehrenburg in collaboration with André Gide, who later in that
year was to be so disillusioned by a trip to the Soviet Union that he largely
disavowed his previously strong sympathy for communism. The Congress
was attended by a mixture of communists and anti-fascist non-communists
—among them such well-known figures as Barbusse, Aragon, and Malraux;
the Russians Boris Pasternak and Alexey Tolstoy; the Germans Bertolt
Brecht, Johannes Becher, and Heinrich Mann; Aldous Huxley and E. M.
Forster from England; and Waldo Frank from the United States. Greet-
ings were sent by Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser (who eventually
joined the American Communist Party), and James Joyce. The committee
chosen to preside over the Association established by the Congress in-
cluded Gide, Barbusse, Heinrich Mann, and Sinclair Lewis. (Another
meeting of the Congress was to be held in London the following year, and
in 1937 it traveled to various Loyalist cities in Spain, where the civil war
with the fascists was going on, before ending in Paris.)
In view of those who attended the Paris Congress of 1935, it is clear
that Ilya Ehrenburg was right when he wrote years later in his autobiogra-
phy, “The Congress was very mixed: [the communist] Vaillant-Couturier
sat next to the liberal writer Julien Benda [a former disciple of Sorel]; the
speech of the sceptical English novelist E. M. Forster was followed by that
of the fiery [communist] Aragon. . . .”*
This writers’ congress demonstrated well the prestige that the commu-
nists had gained in the Popular Front—prestige which carried over to the
visual arts. Furthermore, it was at this congress, in 1935, that the final
break came between the surrealists and the communists. Up to that time
the surrealists as a group had remained pro-communist. But the commu-
nists had become increasingly cold to surrealism after the Kharkov Con-
gress of 1930 had emphasized the line of proletarian culture, and especially
since 1934, when socialist realism had been adopted by the All-Union
Congress of Writers at Moscow as the new official aesthetic. For it was
obvious that surrealism was in many respects utterly antithetical to com-
munist aesthetics as developed in the Soviet Union.
In 1935 at the International Congress of Writers in Paris, the surreal-
ist participants were received with the utmost impoliteness. First, they
were not even listed as taking part. Then their leader, Breton, was not
permitted to give his scheduled speech: he had slapped the face of Soviet
writer Ilya Ehrenburg on the street, claiming that Ehrenburg had insulted
the surrealists by writing of them as students of pederasty and dreams and
squanderers of their wives’ dowries. Next, although Eluard was given
permission to read Breton’s statement, he was rudely interrupted in the
middle of it and not allowed to finish.” This was largely because in the
speech, Breton denounced the very idea of “patrie,” of “fatherland,” that
nationalistic idea which under Stalin’s leadership had been revived in the
Soviet Union in 1934” as part of preparing the country for defense against
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 313

the Nazis in connection with Stalin’s new foreign policy of the Popular
Front against fascism.
The bad reception given the surrealists at the Congress of Writers for
the Defense of Culture was, of course, inspired from Moscow. Breton’s
attack on the idea of “fatherland” was simply the last straw as far as the
Stalinists were concerned. Not only had some of the leading surrealists,
including Breton himself, long been showing inclinations toward Trotsky-
ism, but the surrealists’ Freudianism, with its glorification of the irrational,
was regarded by the Stalinists as a kind of mystico-materialism whose
mystical elements were so “idealistic” as to strike at the very roots of
Marxism-Leninism. The surrealists could only be regarded by orthodox
Marxist-Leninists as individualistic “idealists” unable to treat adequately
the realistic aspects of social existence which depend on conscious rational
action in a material world, and so unable to give adequate expression to
socialist realism. The claim of the surrealists that they could realize
spontaneous artistic productions by free association and automatism was
—the Stalinists declared—a dangerous illusion. The experiments of Freud
and Jung had tried to prove, they said, that dreams and other so-called free
associations are far from being free, that instead they are subject to the
iron determinism of unconscious necessity, and so deny the degree of
rational freedom that orthodox Marxism-Leninism claims is necessary in
order that communists may be free enough to help bring the classless
society sooner into being. As a result, in the Stalinist view the surrealist, far
from being considered a good Marxist, was now to be regarded, in the
words of one English communist critic, as “the last bourgeois revolution-
ary. What politically is this final bourgeois revolutionary? He is an
anatchist:*~
Even though, under the new Soviet foreign policy of a Popular Front
against fascism, the communists were seeking the worldwide support of
non-communists, including non-communist artists, the views of the surreal-
ists so completely failed to harmonize with the Soviet aesthetic of socialist
realism that the official Communist parties found it necessary to break
with them. At this time, also, there was a final crackdown on Freudianism
in the Soviet Union, where some support for Freudian doctrine had
managed to continue: in the mid-1930’s it disappeared.”
The Stalinists, from their own point of view, were correct in their
judgment that surrealism could not treat the realistic aspects of social
existence—in other words, could not, through “socialist realism,” serve to
propagate Stalinist propaganda. For it would be very difficult to claim that
any painting by a leading European surrealist has ever directly conveyed
communist propaganda: there has been no equivalent in surrealist painting
to Louis Aragon’s poem “Le Front Rouge.” This fact indicates once more
that there is no inevitable one-to-one relationship between the social and
political views of artists on the one hand, and the subject-matter and
314 / PRACTICE OF ART IN BRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

treatment of their art—except under a totalitarian regime such as Stalin

succeeded in establishing in the Soviet Union.
As a consequence of the surrealists’ own belief in a free art and of the
discourteous treatment that they had received at the International Con-
gress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, the main body issued a
manifesto in 1935 signalizing the break between them and the Communist
Party and indicating its defiance of the Soviet regime and its chief.
Among the signers, in addition to Breton and Eluard, were the painters
Dali, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Yves Tangay, and the painter-photogra-
phers Dora Maar and Man Ray.” Thereafter, André Breton and his
immediate followers would never have anything to do with the U.S.S.R.,
which Breton called a land of tyranny.** They did, however, continue to
support the Popular Front as wholehearted anti-fascists.

6. Art Won. the Popular Front from

the Beginning of the Spanish Civil War
to the Nazxi-Soviet Pact

"De SpanisH crvin war, which broke out on July 17-18, 1936, brought
the wave of anti-fascism to a new high because the war was presented in
most of the press of the world—over-simply—as a conflict between fascism
and the republican democracy of a Popular Front government elected in
Spain earlier that year.* As it became obvious that the U.S.S.R. was the
one great nation willing to offer active help to the Republic against Franco
(even though unofficially, and mainly through the Comintern, in an effort
to avoid a world war), anti-fascist artists, writers, and other intellectuals in
France, as elsewhere, were led to be even more sympathetic to the Soviet
Union, and so to communism. More than ever, they were eager to cooper-
ate with communists—now in seeking to aid the Spanish Loyalists. ‘There-
fore, under communist guidance the association of painters and sculptors
within the Maison de la culture in France began to play a particularly
active part in organizing assistance for Republican Spain. Also, by October
1936, some three months after the civil war had begun, the founder of the
Maison de la culture, Paul Vaillant-Couturier, could claim—in a widely
publicized report which he made to the Central Committee of the French
Communist Party as its spokesman on cultural affairs—that the greatest
intellectuals were now marching beside the party.** Among them he was
able to list not only communists and close sympathizers, such as Léger,
Jean Lurcat, Malraux, Aragon, Rolland, and Gide (who soon was to
renounce sympathy for communism), but also many who were not Marx-
ists or fellow-travelers but conspicuous anti-fascists, such as Jean Renoir,
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 315

the noted motion-picture director, and Le Corbusier, the great architect

and city-planner who was also a painter and sculptor.
Le Corbusier (Fig. 44), one of whose masters had been Auguste
Perret, had been influenced by futurism and constructivism, by theosophy,
and especially by the ideas of Fourier. We shall see that belief in theoso-
phy, including its social ideal of world brotherhood, has affected several of
the most important modern painters. Le Corbusier thought enough of it to
reproduce a letter to him from the theosophist leader Krishnamurti in his
book La Ville radieuse (1935)—though unlike some leading painters
whose theosophy has helped to stimulate them to produce non-objective
works, Le Corbusier as a Purist painter denied the validity of a non-
objective art. The chief influence upon him, and the chief source for the
conception of communal living fundamental to his architecture and city
planning, was that of Fourier and his utopian followers.
This influence Le Corbusier especially acknowledged in his book,
Maniére de penser l'urbanisme (1945), in which he first sketched the
famous “Unité d’habitation”—essentially the residential part of a Fourier-
ist phalanx—later to be built at Marseille (Fig. 44). In this book he
declared that many of the ideas lying behind modern architecture can

ric. 44. Marseille, Unité d’habitation (1947-1952) by Le Corbusier.

 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
316 i. PRACTICE

already be found in “certain of the prophetic propositions of Fourier,

formulated about 1830 at the very birth of the Machine Age
[machinisme].” He quoted several times from Fourier and likewise from
Fourier’s chief disciple, Victor Considerant; and declared that at the birth
of the machine age they, together with Balzac (attracted to Saint-Simoni-
anism and then even more to Fourierism) and the anarchist Proudhon
(early influenced by Fourier) were among the great experts on urbanism.
Le Corbusier is said to have been led to subscribe to Fourier’s social ideas
by meeting, at Lyon in 1908, the architect Tony Garnier (Fig. 34), himself
so sympathetic to Fourierism and Saint-Simonianism. In Le Corbusier’s
first book, Vers une architecture, a series of earlier essays first published
together in 1923, he had praised Garnier’s utopian project for a Cité
industrielle, and had included three illustrations from it. Now, in Manieére
de penser l'urbanisme, he approvingly cited Garnier as the first to call for
public ownership of the soil on which a city rests. In this, too, Le
Corbusier indicated his belief in the organic analogy (referred to so often
in the present book as stemming from the romantic tradition and as
affecting radical conceptions of art and society). He declared that biologi-
cal laws and qualities lie at the basis of living architecture and city
planning. The “constructed domain” is “designed by means of elements
assembled for useful ends,” elements “which are as much organs, coherent
as those of natural organisms.” According to Le Corbusier, too, it was the
“truly high preaching of John Ruskin” (another subscriber to the organic
analogy) that, “as early as 1850, had proclaimed with a new state of
conscience the taking in charge of the destiny of machine age civilization.”
In the work mentioned above, La Ville radieuse (published in English
as The Radiant City in 1967), Le Corbusier proudly stated that he him-
self had created “the prototype of the classless society.” **
In view of Le Corbusier’s social views, it is hardly surprising that,
although he was never a Marxist, his support was welcomed by the French
Communist Party at a time when it was fostering the Popular Front
against fascism. For that matter, his ideas had earlier been sufficiently
acceptable to leaders of the Soviet Union so that in 1928 he had been able
to win a competition for, and then build, the large edifice in Moscow that
became the Ministry of Light Industry. Also, in the period before the
imposition of socialist realism by the Russians in 1934, his ideas about city
planning had strongly influenced Soviet planners. At that time the modern
Russian art movement known as constructivism, which had been affected
by Le Corbusier’s ideas (and had affected them), was still strong in the
architecture of the Soviet Union.
In Vaillant-Couturier’s report of 1936, in which Le Corbusier was
referred to as one of the intellectuals marching beside the Communist
Party, the author had sought to gain additional support among intellec-
tuals by assuring artists and writers, as well as scientists, educators, and
doctors, that: “The Communist Party listens to them. It hears them. It
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 317

understands their fears, it collects them together. ‘This is more than its
duty. It is one of the reasons for its existence.” *°
Only a few of the intellectuals then sympathetic to the Communist
Party in France—relatively fewer than in England or the United States—
were openly disturbed either by the treatment of anarchists and alleged
Trotskyites by the Spanish Republic at the behest of the communists or by
the great purges then under way in the Soviet Union itself. It has been
suggested “that not only the proverbial Gallic logic but also the back-
ground of Roman Catholicism (shared, in different ways, alike by believers
and unbelievers) made the idea of adhering to a comprehensive party with
mental reservations more acceptable in France than in the Britain [or, one
might add, the United States] of a hundred religions. . . .” ®
Still, it was the Spanish civil war which brought to that Trotskyite,
André Breton, his first doubts about the fundamental conceptions of
Marxism.*° Also, a radical French intellectual who became thoroughly
unhappy about the purges in the U.S.S.R. was Elie Faure, the historian of
art. Faure, believing that an artist is the expression and product of his time
and his social and geographical environment, had long subscribed to a
poetic version of Marxism diluted with ideas from ‘Taine, which had had a
significant effect on the art of his time. His ideas particularly influenced
the Mexican painter Diego Rivera, who as a young artist in Paris was a
friend of Picasso, Modigliani, Severini, André Salmon, Max Jacob, and
other leaders of the modern movement in the arts. Rivera—like Picasso
originally an anarchist—moved over to Marxism, and for a time, indeed,
identified himself more completely with the Russian Revolution than any
other artist of his day. Not only was he stimulated by Faure’s socially
radical beliefs but also it was Faure who aroused Rivera’s enthusiasm for
reviving the medium of fresco, which played so important a part in the
“Mexican Renaissance” of the 1920’s led by Rivera and other artists who
were socially radical.
Faure—already mentioned as a signer of the “Call to the Struggle”
issued by anti-fascist French intellectuals early in 1934—had long been
sympathetic to the Soviet Union. By 1936, however, he had become so
gravely worried by developments there that he told his American friend
Bertram D. Wolfe, then a leading communist of the Right Opposition to
Stalin, that he was anything but happy about the form which the “subordi-
nation of art to a collective task” was taking in Moscow.” He himself had
a
always stood for the subordination of art to society, but entirely on
voluntary basis, and with society itself conceived of as having collective
others
aims voluntarily undertaken. In other words, Faure—like so many
‘nterested in the arts who have been drawn to social radicalis m—‘“had
* But
taken for granted that most precious of the artist’s needs: freedom.”
‘n Stalin’s Russia, the artists had been increasingly coerced into devoting
their art to the aims of the Soviet state, while such major social develop-
only by
ments as the collectivization of agriculture had been accomplished
318 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

the exercise of the most brutal force. And in 1936 Stalin had begun the
great purges that were so disturbing to lovers of freedom among radicals
everywhere.
Furthermore, as the Spanish civil war went on, some left-wing intellec-
tuals in France, as elsewhere, also found themselves shocked by the brutal
treatment that the Republican regime in Spain, under communist influ-
ence, meted out to anarchists and supposed Trotskyites fighting against
fascism on the Loyalist side. In 1938, therefore, the French Communist
Party found it advisable, while making its strongest anti-fascist appeal to
French artists, writers, scientists, and other intellectuals, to seek to allay
their rising suspicion that communism on the Russian model was highly
adverse to intellectual and artistic freedom. On June 1, 1938, Jacques
Duclos, the leader of the French Communist Party who was then vice-
president of the French Chamber of Deputies, gave a speech on “Commu-
nism, Science, and Culture” to almost a thousand outstanding French
artists, intellectuals, and professionals. The meeting had been arranged by
Aragon, general secretary of the Maison de la culture, who had asked the
secretariat of the Communist Party to choose an official spokesman to
make clear the position of the party on various important cultural and
scientific problems. Duclos was selected, and his speech was delivered at
the Centre Marcelin-Berthelot in Paris. So important a presentation of the
prevailing party line on both culture and anti-fascism was this speech
considered to be that in the following year it was published in English at
New York by International Publishers, a leading mouthpiece of the Com-
munist Party, U.S.A.
Among those present to hear Duclos’s speech were the Nobel Prize
scientists and communists, Frédéric and Mme Joliot-Curie; the writers
Louis Cazamian and Maurice Martin du Gard; the painters Lurcat, Léger,
and Gromaire; the communist black-and-white artist Frans Masereel
(whose portrait-drawing of Duclos was reproduced on the cover of the
American translation of the speech); the composers Honegger, Auric, and
Koechlin; and Le Corbusier. The audience thus was typical of the Popular
Front spirit in including communists, communist sympathizers, and others
who, like Le Corbusier, were simply anti-fascist.
Duclos began by praising the Maison de la culture, its secretary-gen-
eral, Aragon, and “the memory of its founder, Paul Vaillant-Couturier [d.
1937], who, in his ardent desire to defend culture against the barbarous
forces of destruction and in ‘his passionate desire to work for the liberation
of man, gave himself completely to the great cause of Communism.” * In
the effort to attract the support of non-communist intellectuals Duclos
declared: “As for us Communists, we conceive the development of culture
only within the most complete freedom—Freedom for the scientist . . .
the thinker, the writer . . . the artist . . . the intellectual.” ** Seeking
Roman Catholic supporters among the intellectuals, he even maintained
that, “We who are atheists . . . defend freedom of conscience against
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 319

fascist barbarism. . . .” Being “convinced of the necessity for unity, we

. . extend a fraternal hand to the Catholics, whose struggle for the
defense of their faith cannot be separated at the present moment from
resistance to those who despise human progress.” For Mussolini and Hitler
“want the victory of Franco against France.” *
Citing Stalin as an upholder of the flourishing of science, Lenin as
emphasizing the contribution of French thought to civilization, Duclos
devoted specific sections of his speech to French science, French literature,
and the situation of French writers, to French artistic activity, to French
music, theater and cinema, to teachers and doctors, and also to architects,
whom he linked, not to other artists, but in Marxist-Leninist fashion to
engineers and technicians. In the effort to attract the support of French
painters, he praised not only French painters of the past, especially those
who had depicted either the common man (such as the Le Nains, Char-
din, and Courbet) or revolutionary liberty (such as Delacroix), but even
masters of modern French painting. Among the latter, he cited Manet,
Cézanne, Monet, Renoir, and especially Paul Signac, whom he exalted as
“a loyal friend” of the Communist Party. As the Impressionism of Manet,
Monet, and Renoir, and the Neo-Impressionism of Signac were alike then
strongly frowned upon in Stalin’s Russia, the willingness of the commu-
nists to accept such art outside of the U.S.S.R. reflected their desperate
eagerness for support in opposing fascism by means of the Popular Front.
Duclos, in his speech, also attacked the reactionary Municipal Council
of Paris for having removed and hidden away various works by Rodin, and
offered on behalf of the Communist Party “the sum of 500 francs, a gift of
the Paris workers to aid in repairing as rapidly as possible the injustice of
which Rodin was the victim in 1893,” when his Balzac had been rejected.
(Balzac, after all, had been Marx’s favorite novelist, and Rodin a socially
radical artist who had been attacked by the bourgeoisie and academic
officialdom.)
Among the composers particularly praised by Duclos was the social-
minded Albert Roussel, who had participated with Honegger, Auric,
Koechlin, and the others in the Fourteenth of July spectacle organized by
the Maison de la culture, and in 1937, the last year of his life, had accepted
one of
the presidency of the pro-communist Fédération musicale populaire,
the organizations that formed part of the Maison de la culture. Duclos also
been “a member of_our
spoke very highly of the late Erik Satie as having
Pater
Throughout his speech Duclos glorified leading communist or fellow-
highest
traveling artists where he could. But he nonetheless gave the
priority to the national unity of French intellectuals in the face of fascism,
of
carefully indicating that the’Communist Party would accept the support
all antifascist intellectuals regardless of their other beliefs.”
French
The strong emphasis on nationalism in Duclos’s call to the
e of “socialism
intellectuals, though in some harmony with Stalin’s doctrin
 OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
320 i, PRACTICE

in one country,” could hardly appeal to those who subscribed to Trotskyite

internationalism, and who therefore rejected the nationalistic elements of
Stalinism. It thus could not appeal to André Breton. In 1938, the very year
of Duclos’s speech as well as of a huge International Exhibition of Surreal-
ism at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Breton went to Mexico.
There he met Trotsky, to whose writings he had so long been sym-
pathetic, and Diego Rivera, who had secured asylum for Trotsky in
Mexico. Trotsky insisted that art, in order to maintain a revolutionary
character, ought to keep itself independent of all forms of government—a
view, of course, flatly rejected by the Stalinists as “art for art's) sake”
Breton himself had been saying much the same thing as Trotsky on this
point for some years, so he now set about founding a Fédération interna-
tionale de Tart révolutionnaire indépendant, usually known as the
F.L.A.R.I. With Trotsky, Breton collaborated on a manifesto, signed by
himself and Rivera, calling for an independent revolutionary art supported
by revolutionary artists of all countries. An English translation of this
manifesto, made by the American writer Dwight Macdonald, was pub-
lished in the American magazine, Partisan Review,* which was then
Trotskyite in orientation. Breton returned to France to develop a French
section of the F.I.A.R.I., but the outbreak of World War II soon put an
end to the organization.

7. Art from the Naxi-Soviet Pact

Through the Resistance

"Pur NazrSovier Pact, signed on August 23, 1939, had outraged the
more idealistic intellectuals who till then had maintained sympathy for the
Soviet Union and communism. The Union des intellectuels frangais,
previously so strongly sympathetic to communism, published a declaration
on August 29 “reproving all duplicity in international relations” and
expressing “stupefaction before the volte-face which had reconciled the
leaders of the U.S.S.R. to the Nazi leaders at the very hour when the latter
simultaneously threatened both Poland and the independence of all free
peoples.” # Even the French Communist Party itself, unable or unwilling
to see the meaning of the pact, maintained a patriotic line: on August 25,
its leader, ‘Thorez, had called for national defense against the Nazis, and
on September 2, the party’s parliamentary group voted for the war credits.
Under such circumstances intellectuals, including artists, who were mem-
bers of the party were able to remain loyal to it.
However, the Communist Party abruptly abandoned its patriotic line
on September 20 when a messenger from Moscow arrived bearing a
denunciation of the Allied war effort by the Communist International. Six
days later, a decree of the French government dissolved all communist
organizations and publications, but they were rapidly replaced by a hastily
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 321

constituted parliamentary “Groupe ouvrier et paysan.” On October 1 this

called for an immediate peace just after the Nazi and Soviet foreign
ministers had issued a joint declaration placing the blame for continuance
of the war on France and Britain, and especially on the greed of Anglo-
French capitalism.
By thus imposing a policy on the French Communist Party which it
was never able to explain away, Stalin nearly destroyed it. Even many
leading hard-core political communists were unable to stomach the new
policy: over a quarter of the Communist Party’s deputies broke with the
party early in the war. Still, the main body of party members, including
most of the party intellectuals, stuck by it, even after the Soviet invasion of
Finland in November 1939 resulted in the expulsion of the U.S.S.R. from
the League of Nations.
Meanwhile, in order to get away from the war, many of the surrealists
had left France for the United States. Among them were Tanguy and Dali,
the latter of whom broke with the other surrealists, who accused him of
being pro-Franco. Breton, who had joined the French army in spite of his
earlier anarchistic pacifism, went to the United States with André Masson
in 1940, when he was released from military service, and joined surrealist
friends in New York. There Max Ernst eventually arrived after enormous
difficulties in escaping from France because of his German birth. In
August 1940, the American-born former anarchist, Man Ray, returned
to his native land, going to Hollywood, California, where he remained for
ten years. As a consequence of the coming of so many surrealists to the
United States during World War II, the surrealist movement entered on a
period of expatriated expansion there that, if anything, was more rapid and
larger than its original development in Europe. Furthermore, its influence
—combined with that of Mondrian, also an émigré to America—was to
result in the development of abstract expressionism by American artists,
most of whom had earlier been on the Left.
After the fall of Paris, the Communist Party, relying on the Nazi-
Soviet Pact, had obviously hoped it could reach an accommodation with
the German occupation authorities. Its representatives had approached the
German Command in Paris, and on June 18, 1940, the German press
officer gave permission for L’Humanité to appear—which it did on the
following day. Even when, in July, clandestine numbers of L’Humanité
began to be published, that of July 4 expressed pleasure at having seen so
many Parisian workers fraternizing with German soldiers, on the ground
that fraternity among peoples was becoming a living reality.”
sm,
Nevertheless, the communists, torn between orthodoxy and patrioti
did seek to straddle somewhat. Although Thorez deserted from the French
with
army in October 1939, the majority of party members, in accordance
did so
the party’s instructions, remained with their army units. One who
the fighting, who escaped after being taken prisoner ,
was Aragon, a hero in
and for his exploits received several medals.
1941, a
Almost a year before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June
322 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

few communists or communist sympathizers as individuals had already

begun to get together in resistance activities, as had socialists and Gaullists.
The communist Front national itself was established in May 1941, the
month before the Nazis invaded Russia. But it was only after that invasion
began that the French Communist Party cast aside all reservations and
threw itself wholeheartedly into the Resistance movement, in which it was
outstandingly effective. Because intellectuals were much freer to move
around France and carry on agitation than was the party leadership, which
had to keep underground and therefore worked under severe restrictions,
they were able to play a role of great significance. Several important
cultural organizations were established in which communist intellectuals,
especially writers, were particularly prominent. The chief of these organiza-
tions was the Front national des intellectuels, of which Aragon was
already a member in 1941. The longest-lived, however, was the Comité
national des écrivains, whose organ, Les Lettres frangaises, founded in
1942 by a communist, was to fall under complete control of the Commu-
nist Party after the war and to have Pablo Picasso as a contributor. In the
visual arts, the most influential organization during the Resistance was the
Front national des arts, which had the support of the clandestine periodi-
cal L’Art frangais.
At the end of the Resistance, and in connection with the Liberation,
there was founded under firm communist control the Union des arts
plastiques, which was both a trade union for artists and an organ for
disseminating the party line in art. Partly because of the important part
played by the communists in the Resistance, this organization attracted
many non-communist members, and it has remained important to the
present day. According to one of the founders, Jean Lurgat, in a letter to
the author written in June 1964, members of the Communist Party have
never constituted as much as five percent of the membership of the Union.
The highly effective role of the Communist Party in the Resistance
led Picasso and Tristan Tzara, founder of dada, to join the party. Both
found in communism a new significance in the world, one that turned
their long-existing spirit of rebellion more specifically toward social condi-
tions—T zara away from his early nihilism (and in 1947 from surrealism on
the ground that it had been socially irresponsible during the war), Picasso
away from his early anarchism. The conversion of Picasso to communism
well illustrates what has happened when an internationally renowned artist
whose art is relatively abstract has become a communist.

8. Picasso: From Anarchist to Communist

Prcasso, whose first mature works were Symbolist, had been sympathetic
to radical movements since his youth in strongly anarchistic Barcelona. In
Barcelona and Paris alike, he was a member of circles interested in primi-
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 323

tive art which at the turn of the century were left-wing and anarchistic.
Early drawings made by Picasso in his Barcelona period had anarchist
subjects: one showed a worker reading an anarchist journal, another de-
picted orators at an anarchist meeting (Fig. 45).°' He and his friends even
wore trousers narrowing at the ankles, copied from those of anarchist
agitators. There is much other evidence that Picasso was affected by the
social climate in Barcelona. At that time, such Catalan artists as Casas and
Opisso were drawing subjects with strong social implications; and an
anarchist journal Ciencia social, founded in 1895, was reproducing car-
toons of Daumier and works by Millet and Courbet, whose art influenced
Picasso. In Barcelona, also, copies of Gil Blas, L’Assiette au beurre, the

ric. 45. Drawing of an anarchist meeting by Pablo Picasso, said to have been
made for Blanco y negro (1897?).
y= a
324 Vi PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

German periodicals Jugend and Simplicissimus, as well as other magazines

both socially critical and modern, were available. From periodicals of this
kind Picasso probably first came to know the work of Toulouse-Lautrec
and of more social-minded artists such as Steinlen and Walter Crane.
Because in Barcelona the “modernismo” of the time emphasized everything
northern and medieval, it was common to admire the works of the
Pre-Raphaelite group, including those of Crane’s radical friend, William
Morris. Admiration for the Pre-Raphaelites could help to stimulate the
taste for primitivism, an international vogue which had long before devel-
oped out of the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, out of the doctrines of
David’s pupils who called themselves variously “Les Prmitifs,” “Les
Etrusques,” or “Les Barbus,” and out of English romanticism.
Picasso’s own short-lived journal, Arte joven, published briefly in
Madrid early in 1901 in an effort to bring the “modernismo” of Barcelona
to the Spanish capital, was a bourgeois-hating, essentially anarchist paper
in which many of the contributions combined primitivism with sympathy
for the poor. The greatest influence upon Picasso about this time—as he
himself has told a biographer, Roland Penrose—was that of Van Gogh,
with his compassion for the poor and downtrodden. At Paris in 1901,
Picasso was also apparently stimulated by the woodcuts of the anarchist
Vallotton (Fig. 29) and probably also by those of Edvard Munch. During
the early years in Paris, many of Picasso’s friends were, like him, subscrib-
ing to a kind of anarchism in which social compassion was mixed with
bohemianism. This was the case, for instance, with Guillaume Apollinaire,
who, distrusting politics but believing deeply in the social mission of the
artist as revealer of hidden things, likewise had been an anarchist from
early youth.” Apollinaire published an anarchist review, Le Festin d’Esope,
and was a friend of the anarchist art critic Fénéon, as well as of the Polish
anarchist Mieczyslaw Golberg (d. 1907), who, we noted, exerted consider-
able influence on the genesis of cubism.
Picasso was one of the many artists sympathetic to anarchism who
were outraged by the execution, in 1909, of the non-violent Spanish
anarchist and educator, Francisco Ferrer. Ferrer was well known in Paris,
where he had lived as a republican exile from 1896 to 1901. Only a few
months before his execution, he had visited Paris again, and had also gone
to London, where he had called upon Kropotkin.
While Ferrer was an exile in Paris back in the 1890’s, his hatred of the
Catholic Church and its domination over the limited public education in
Spain had led him to conceive of an “Escuela Moderna,” or Modern
School, in which instruction, based on rational principles of progressive
education ultimately deriving from Rousseau’s Emile, would be available
for children of all classes and both sexes. The Modern School—as Ferrer
wrote in typically anarchist vein in 1900—was to be “concerned with
banning from the mind whatever divides men, the false concepts of
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 325

property, country and family, so as to attain the liberty and well-being

which all desire and none completely realizes.” * In the following year,
Ferrer returned to Spain and duly founded his Modern School.
In 1906, he was tried for, but acquitted of, complicity in an unsuccess-
ful attempt to assassinate the King and Queen of Spain with a bomb.
However, in 1909 he was arrested again, now accused of instigating a revolt
and general strike in Barcelona resulting from class hatred as well as
Catalan nationalism. Although there was no real evidence against him, he
was shot by a firing squad on October 13, 1909.
Ferrer’s execution provoked an international outcry not unlike that
produced by the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in the United States
some twenty years later. Diego Rivera—like Picasso, his future friend—was
among the anarchist artists profoundly shocked by the event. In New
York, Emma Goldman and other anarchists and their sympathizers
founded a Ferrer Association which established a Ferrer Center with a
Modern School. Although the Center closed in 1918, the school carried on
at Stelton, New Jersey, until 1952 and the Association until 1961. At the
Ferrer Center, the painter Robert Henri, an avowed follower of Bakunin
whose anarchism had been stimulated during student days in Paris, taught
drawing and painting from early 1912 to 1918 alternately with his former
pupil and fellow-anarchist George Bellows. According to a statement
discovered by Professor William Homer in Henri’s ‘diary, Trotsky at-
tended his classes at the Center before returning to Russia after the
revolution of March 1917.
Although in France as elsewhere the anarchist movement was politi-
cally split by World War I, its spirit continued to affect Picasso and his
circle during the war. Thus Apollinaire wrote Les Mamelles de Tirésias, a
play-opera-ballet with music by G. A. Birot produced in June 1917, which
Jean Cocteau called “the first deliberately anarchic play: ee GEASS such:
it anticipated the French dada movement. It was largely inspired by the
ballet Parade, first performed early in 1917, on which Cocteau and Picasso
had worked with Leonid Massine in Rome while Satie was composing the
music in Paris. It was in a preface printed in the program for Parade that
Apollinaire had referred to the work as giving “pirthaer Leto arsorigof
surrealism. . . ,” * thereby providing the name that Breton was to give to
the surrealist movement.
After World War I, when. the influence of anarchism had so largely
been replaced by that of Soviet communism, Satie and Picasso had links
with dadaists and also with the surrealists, most of whom, like Satie earlier,
of
had communist connections for a time. In the light of these facts and
Communi st Party, it 1s
Picasso’s own later membership in the French
significant that, although regarded by so many as an abstracti onist, he has
firmly denied that there is any such thing as abstract art, insisting that
of 1935:
reality is what the artist starts with. As he put it in an interview
 bj
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“There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. After-
wards you can remove all traces of reality.” *
During the Spanish civil war, Picasso’s sympathies were wholeheartedly
on the side of the Spanish Loyalist government. Appointed honorary
director of the Prado Museum in Madrid, he reported on the condition of
its paintings after they had been moved to Valencia (they were eventually
sent to Geneva). At the request of the Loyalist government, he painted,
for its pavilion at the World’s Fair at Paris in 1937, one of his most famous
pictures, Guernica (Fig. 46),:a great monument of anti-fascism symboliz-
ing the bombardment and partial destruction of the town of Guernica by
fascist bombers supporting Franco’s army in the first mass air attack on
civilians.
It is worth adding that, in spite of its superb statement against fascism
and war, Guernica—which had already been anticipated in Picasso’s series
of terrifying symbolical etchings, with text, called Songe et mensonge de
Franco—so largely fails to meet the requirements of Soviet socialist realism
 FIG. 46.
Guernica (1937)
by Pablo Picasso.

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK.

COLLECTION,

that it was long rejected by Soviet art critics as an aesthetic perversion.

They declared that in it “pathology had created repugnant monstrosities”
and that the artist had shown the victims of fascist bombs not as Spanish
Loyalists but as “monsters.” ** Only in 1948, when the communists were
putting on a worldwide “peace” campaign, did Soviet critics in the
U.S.S.R. at last join in praising the picture; yet Picasso had become a
member of the French Communist Party four years earlier.

9. Picasso and Other Post-WVar Communist

Artists: Pignon, Fougeron, Léger, Taslitxky
nist in 1944, he
Wuen Picasso had finally decided to become a commu
leaders of the
had been received with the highest honors: such prominent
2.2.5 A PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

French Communist Party as Duclos and Marcel Cachin were present to

give him his membership card. Picasso joined the party primarily because
of his admiration for the achievements of the French communists in the
wartime Resistance against the Nazis, and also because so many of his
friends, including prominent former surrealists, were members. As he
declared in an interview for the American communist cultural magazine,
the New Masses, in the fall of 1944: “I have become a Communist because
the Communists are the bravest in France, in the Soviet Union, as they are
in my own country, Spain.. . . In it [i.e., the French Communist Party], I
find all my friends—the great scientists . . . the great writers Louis Aragon
and Paul Eluard, and so many of the beautiful faces of the insurgents of
Pavis, ~
The Salon d’automne of that very fall of 1944 in which Picasso had
joined the Communist Party featured his work and that of two other
communist artists, Edouard Pignon and André Fougeron. Pignon was
Picasso’s close friend and showed his influence, as also did Fougeron at
that time.
Pignon, like Picasso, had been especially attracted to communism
during the war. Unlike Picasso, whose father was an artist, Pignon came
from a working-class family. Born in 1905 in northern France, the son of a
miner, he himself had worked in the mines for a time, then in the Citroén
automobile factory, and after that, until 1934, in a variety of trades. During
1934, at the Maison de la culture, he had come into contact with Frans
Masereel, long on the Left (Fig. 103), with Fernand Léger (Fig. 48), who
in a few years was to announce his adherence to communism, and with the
writer George Adam, editor-in-chief of Les Lettres frangaises when that
periodical appeared legally under communist auspices after the liberation
of Paris. Pignon had joined the Resistance in 1940 and the Communist
Party later; and during the war he sold many of his works for the benefit of
the Partisans. His painting has reflected the influence of Gromaire and
Matisse, together with that of Picasso, among others. Although his
favorite subject-matter has regularly consisted of workers (Fig. 47) and
peasants, and his art has never been so abstract as that of Picasso, when the
French Communist Party emphasized socialist realism in the Soviet man-
ner during the cold war, Pignon with Picasso was to be subjected at times
to criticism by his fellow communists.
Unlike Picasso and Pignon, André Fougeron (1913- ), the third
communist artist featured at the Salon d’automne of 1944, was to be re-
garded by the Communist Party during the cold war as its favorite artist
simply because in 1947 he so thoroughly adapted his style—previously
strongly influenced by that of Picasso—to the official Soviet aesthetic of
socialist realism (Fig. 49). Fougeron’s own family and background were
thoroughly proletarian.” His father was a mason, and he himself early
worked in the Renault and Rosengart automobile factories as a metallurgist.
In 1936, the first exhibition of his works was held in the Maison de la cul-
 noe
France,
ric. 47. “A Miner’ (1948) by Edouard Pignon, from Arts de
Nos. 23-24.

of the fascists
ture. By 1937, he was painting pictures attacking the actions
’s Guernica
in the Spanish civil war, pictures especially inspired by Picasso
on entered
(Fig. 46). On the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Fouger
nist Party. After
military service, and in the same year joined the Commu
way back to Paris
the fall of France and brief imprisonment, he made his his studio
following year,
late in 1940 and joined the Resistance. In the
where Les Lettres frangaises, L’Art
became an illegal printing-office
in variou s fields were printed for the
frangais, and several other periodicals
330 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

Resistance. In 1942, Fougeron became general secretary of the Front

national des arts. Throughout the years of the war he, like Pignon, sold
his paintings for the benefit of the Partisans. .
Fougeron, Pignon, and Picasso had all remained in France during the
war. Following the Liberation and then the utter defeat of the Nazis, other
French artists with radical social interests came back to Paris from abroad.
The surrealists returned, as did most of the other Continental artists—in-
cluding Léger and such essentially non-political painters as Chagall and
Ozenfant—who had received wartime asylum in the United States. By this
time, most of the surrealists had essentially lost their earlier social radical-
ism. As a consequence, in 1947, a few weeks before the surrealists were to
have in Paris at the Galerie Maeght what proved to be their last major
international exhibition, Tristan Tzara, in a lecture at the Sorbonne,
condemned surrealism in the name of politically and socially committed
art, and sought to rally the audience to communism.
The fact was that, of all the prominent French artists who had passed
the war years in the United States, Léger was about the only one whose
radicalism had if anything increased; hence, on his return home, he openly
proclaimed his membership in the Communist Party, to which some
years earlier he had privately indicated his adherence. Now, in the post-war
years, in pictures such as The Constructors (Fig. 48), he too modified his
style toward greater realism in accordance with the party line, though far
less so than Fougeron. Nevertheless, in spite of his belief, expressed in
print as early as 1938, that collective forces were on the march and that the
individual ought to align himself accordingly, he then and later insisted on
the importance of leaving the individual artist free to create works of art
above social and economic conflicts. As he expressed it, “The work of art
ought not to participate in the battle, it ought to be, on the contrary, a
repose after the combat of your daily struggles.” * His decision to join the
party sprang from his belief that in capitalist society art was a privilege of a
minority, whereas it ought to be enjoyed by the masses, who, he urged,
should be educated to comprehend non-representational works of art.
Once Léger had joined the party, he steadfastly regarded the communists
as the guardians of civilization—the one group genuinely desiring to ensure
that the masses received the cultural legacy of mankind.®
After the war, one French communist artist destined to be regarded by
the Communist Party as second only to Fougeron, came back to France
from a German concentration camp. This was Boris Taslitzky (Figs. 50,
51, and 56), a Jew who had been arrested by the Germans in 1941 and sent
to Buchenwald. He had painted his first political picture as a student
at
the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1934: it had been inspired by the killing of
a
fifteen-year-old communist by a policeman, who subsequently had been
acquitted. Before Taslitzky’s arrest by the Germans, he had been secretary
of the Union des peintres et sculpteurs de la Maison de la culture. After
his
FIG. 48. The Constructors (final version, 19 50) by Fernand
Léger.
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332 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

release from the concentration camp, his work on the subjects of the
Resistance and deportation won him the Prix Blumenthal in 1946. Particu-
larly moving were his sensitive drawings of the camp at Buchenwald, a
subject that he has continued to depict (Fig. 56).

Tue FreNcH communists’ prominent role in the Resistance, which so

profoundly attracted Picasso and other artists, brought the Communist
Party more influence in French life after World War II than ever before.
In the 1945-1946 elections, it received over five million votes, and, in
October 1945, 161 seats in the Chambre des députés. For the first time it
had become the largest parliamentary party in France.
Meanwhile, its size and effectiveness had brought it high standing in
the communist world. As a consequence, a leading French communist was
selected to write, in a French communist periodical, the article which
signalized the abrupt change in the Stalinist—and hence international
communist—line from wartime collaboration with Western “capitalist”
nations to what became known as the cold war. The article in question,
published by Duclos in Cahiers du communisme for April 1945, sharply
attacked Earl Browder, the American communist leader, for his policy of
collaboration with non-communists which had even led to changing the
name of the Communist Party, U.S.A., to Communist Political Associa-
tion. As a direct consequence of Duclos’s article, Browder was replaced by
William Z. Foster, who stood for the hard line of the cold war.
In that “war,” communists everywhere made much more use of the
arts than ever before. Already in 1945 a spokesman of the French Commu-
nist Party, Roger Garaudy—a philosopher, art critic, novelist, and polemi-
cist who had joined the party in 1933—had told its Tenth Congress: “Our
Party has the ambition to be the animator of the intellectual and moral
Renaissance of France. It can be, as long as the greatest masters of science
and the arts are with it or close to it.” ®
One result was that communist cultural and artistic publications
proliferated after World War II. The chief communist publishing house
for the arts was now Editions Cercle d’art, that for music Chant du
monde, while Editeurs francais réunis and Editions d’hier et aujourd’hui
devoted themselves to creative writing. The periodical Les Lettres fran-
caises, founded during the Resistance, was now under full party control: in
1952, it greatly broadened its scope by taking over Tous les arts and the
motion-picture journal, L’Ecran frangais. In December 1945, another com-
munist-line magazine, Arts de France, began publication under the influ-
ence of the huge trade union, the Confédération générale du travail, which
—already strongly influenced by the communists before World War II
during the Popular Front—had emerged from the war under complete
communist control. The communist popular press, too, in France as in
other countries, was now offering artists special opportunities to have their
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 333

work published: the weekend supplements of L’Humanité, for instance,

like those of L’Unitd in Milan, were artistically of high quality.
On February 9, 1946, Stalin publicly recognized the existence of the
cold war in a speech attacking his wartime allies by assailing contemporary
“monopoly capitalism” and also upholding the unquestioned superiority of
all things Soviet. The French Communist Party followed this new hard
line, and as a consequence was in 1947 driven out of the government of
Paul Ramadier into a “ghetto” of political isolation, where it was to
remain for some twenty years. Meanwhile, in 1942 the Front national des
arts had become part of the Union des arts plastiques, already joined by
the Union nationale des intellectuels, to help put the new line into effect.
As the cold war developed, the Communist Party’s line for the arts in
France followed the lead of that laid down in the Soviet Union by Andrei
Zhdanov, who as Stalin’s agent in cultural affairs led great purges of the
arts beginning in 1947. These purges were related to the particularly
violent anti-American line which, as a product of the intensifying cold war,
was established by Zhdanov in September 1947 at the first meeting of the
Cominform, the Soviet answer to the United States’s Marshall Plan. At
that meeting, Zhdanov declared that “The U.S.A. has proclaimed a new,
openly predatory expansionist orientation” * with the aim of worldwide
domination; and he warned of American plans for an atomic preventive
war against the U.S.S.R.
The Zhdanovite hard line was promptly applied to the arts through-
out world communism, resulting in a rigid socialist realism on the Soviet
model. In France, Thorez told the 1947 Party Congress at Strasbourg: “To
decadent works of bourgeois aesthetics, partisans of art for art’s sake, to the
pessimism without solution . . . of the existentialist ‘philosophers’ . . . we
have opposed an art which would be inspired by socialist realism . . . an
art that would aid the working class in its struggle for liberation.” And he
denounced “the formalism [i.e., abstraction] of the painters for whom art
begins where the picture has no content.” *
The Zhdanov line was applied to the arts in France under the direc-
tion of Laurent Casanova, a lawyer and former secretary to Thorez, who
had been active in the Resistance, and who during the post-war years had
already become a kind of cultural commissar. A member of the Central
Committee of the party since 1945, in 1947 Casanova was elected to the
Political Bureau—an indication of the increasing importance ascribed by
the party to cultural matters in general and the arts in particular as
weapons in the cold war. After Yugoslavia broke with the Soviet Union in
1948, Casanova led the fight against those French leftists who sided
with Tito, such as the writers Jean Cassou and Vercors (literary pseu-
donym of the engraver Jean Bruller).
to
Now the favorite artist of the party became Fougeron, who began
as an immedia te
search for a more genuinely popular realistic style in 1947
a in
consequence of demands for such a style made by Thorez and Casanov
334 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

speeches before the Eleventh Party Congress. Fougeron, who made his first
trip to the Soviet Union in 1948, achieved his aim so successfully, from the
point of view of the Communist Party (Fig. 49), that in February 1949
Casanova went out of his way to impress on the party’s intellectuals, at a
meeting in the Salle Wagram, that any attack on Fougeron was an attack
on socialist realism, and thus on the party itself. This speech was part of a
campaign by Casanova to reduce the individual initiative of intellectuals
by insisting upon their utter subordination to the party. ‘The campaign was
given strong backing by a new communist periodical dealing widely with
the arts, La Nouvelle critique; Revue du marxisme militant, which had
been founded in December 1948 with a die-hard Stalinist as editor. Taslit-
zky (Figs. 50, 51, and 56) was to be made a member of the editorial staff of
the periodical in 1952, and long served in that capacity.”
It was especially by means of the Salons d’automne, now completely
dominated by the communists, that the party stressed the importance of
socialist realism as the one style to be used by artists who were party
members or strongly sympathetic to communism. This they did by having
party leaders regularly attend the Salons and pay marked attention to the
works displayed in the special rooms set aside for socialist-realist art,
selected examples of which were given much highly favorable publicity in
the party press.
Thus, a painting by Taslitzky, The Delegates, exhibited at the Salon
of 1948, was widely proclaimed a key work for influencing younger
painters. At the Salon of the following year, works by André Fougeron and
Jean Amblard (who next to Fougeron and Taslitzky was now considered
the best exemplar of socialist realism) were similarly exalted as key exam-
ples of socialist realism. Fougeron’s Homage to André Houillier—portray-
ing a communist miner’s family and friends determined to avenge his
assassination by a trigger-happy policeman—was particularly praised as a
model of the “new” painting. His Morning of the First of May, shown at
the Salon d’automne of 1950, was likewise given party acclaim.” Some of
his works reflected the direct stimulation of David’s Marat (Fig. 2) and of
Géricault (Fig. 5). Fougeron’s ideas about art were now also given
much publicity in such communist magazines as La Nouvelle critique and
Arts de France,” the latter of which, in immediately succeeding numbers
also gave high praise to Taslitzky (cf. Figs. 50, 51, and 56).”
Probably Fougeron’s best work of the period was the series of paint-
ings exhibited in January 1951 under the title Le Pays des mines, executed
at the mining town of Lens in northern France in the previous year after a
union, the Syndicat des mineurs du Nord et du Pas-de-Calais, had extended
him an invitation to paint there. One of the series, National Defense (Fig.
49), Shows miners defending their families against armed police and fierce
police dogs. A noted non-communist historian has recently declared that
this series of paintings vindicated “in both aesthetic and moral terms the
potentialities of a fully committed art.” * To many art historians and

FIG. 49. National Defense (1950) by André Fougeron.

336 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

critics, however, such art is too immediately devoted to non-artistic ends to

achieve high artistic quality. my
Late in 1952, Fougeron exhibited a less successful series of paintings
having as their theme, not the industrial proletariat, but the life of
peasants in the Loire Valley and also the defense of French national soil.
Here he showed the stimulation of those seventeenth-century realistic
painters of peasants, the brothers Le Nain. But his subject-matter here too
was a direct reflection of the Marxist-Leninist aesthetic of socialist realism,
for under Leninism as developed by Stalin—and in contrast to Marx’s own
ideas—the peasantry is an important part of the proletariat. As such, it
marches under the banner of “socialism,” that first phase of communism,
side by side with the industrial proletariat on the road to the complete
communism of the classless society. And because Stalin had defined social-
ist realism as being “national in form and socialist in content,’ Fougeron
could emphasize the role of the peasantry in national defense. ‘This combi-
nation was especially important to the French Communist Party at that
time. For approximately thirty percent of the party's membership then
consisted of peasants, and the French peasantry as a class is particularly
responsive to propaganda against’ foreign incursions onto French soil—
whether German invasions or the supposed threat of American invasion
then being stressed by the party as part of its anti-American line in the cold
war.”
That other prominent communist artist, Taslitzky, succeeded in main-
taining in his work a more spontaneous, less doctrinaire spirit, best ex-
pressed, with notable delicacy of line, in his drawings (Fig. 50). Yet
Taslitzky too was wholly committed to socialist realism, about which he
wrote, “For me, realism is the sum of three conditions: the content of the
work, the love of the content, technique used to express this content, these
three being raised to the ideological level of the working class, which rises
ceaselessly.” ”°
In 1951, both Fougeron and Taslitzky attended a conference of
intellectuals and students called by La Nouvelle critique to organize
agitation against the Americanization of Europe. Among others present
were Aragon, Elsa Triolet, and André Stil, the editor of L’Humanité,
whose novel Le Premier choc, published in three volumes from 1951 to
1953, was considered by Soviet communists such an absolute model of
socialist realism that its first volume won the author the first Stalin Prize
ever to be awarded to a Frenchman. Its subject was the struggle of French
dockers in an Atlantic seaport against the American “occupation.”
The strength of Fougeron’s influence on other communist artists in
France was particularly reflected in the Salon of 1951, where many of the
paintings were executed more or less in the style and mood of his series, Le
Pays des mines (e.g., Fig. 49). One of these other pictures, indeed, was a
portrait by Picasso of Henri Martin, a young sailor sentenced in 1950, and
again in a retrial of 1951, to five years of imprisonment for distributing
revolutionary leaflets among other sailors at the naval base of Toulon after
 Fic. 50. “Blast-Furnace Team” (1947) by Boris Taslitzky, from Arts de
France, Nos. 13-14.

he had been disillusioned by the French government’s refusal to compro-

mise with Ho Chi Minh in Indochina. As a consequence, Martin was
regarded by intellectuals of the French Left as an example of the true
revolutionary proletarian and became a favorite subject for many commu-
nist artists, including Léger and Taslitzky.
At the Salon of 1951, so violently revolutionary was the subject-matter
of many of the socialist realist pictures exhibited that before a visit by
President Auriol seven paintings by “peintres engagés” (1.¢., communist
artists) were removed by the police at the request of the Secretary of State
for the Fine Arts with the approval of the Minister of Education and the
Prefect of Police. Notable among these was Taslitzky’s painting, Riposte
(Fig. 51), which depicted strikers on the Marseille quays being attacked by
in
police accompanied by huge police dogs, much as were the miners
the protests that
Fougeron’s National Defense (Fig. 49). In the face of
followed, five of the seven paintings, including Taslitzky’s picture, were
continued to
returned to the exhibition. But the authorities adamantly
attack on the
refuse to tolerate two paintings, one of which constituted an
Atlantic Alliance, the other on the Paris police.”
FIG. 51.
Riposte (1951) by Boris Taslitzky.
340 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

10. Picasso and “Peace”

JTF tHE Salons d’automne of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s epitomized
in French art conceptions prevailing on the communist side of the cold
war, in the international field those conceptions were best reflected in the
series of “peace” congresses held under communist auspices during the
same period. (This was at a time when the Soviet Union either lacked the
atomic bomb or had such a small supply as to consider itself in danger of
being overwhelmed by the United States in a preventive war.) In these
congresses, beside the communist participants, who included artists and
writers of international reputation, many non-communists deeply con-
cerned for world peace took part.
In the first of the World Congresses for Peace, held in Poland at
Wroclaw (formerly Breslau) in 1948, the two most famous communist
artists in the world, Picasso and Léger, were members of the French
delegation. Out of this congress: grew the influential Mouvement des
intellectuels francais pour la défense de la paix, headed by the noted
physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie, and destined to have a particular attraction
for leading figures in the theater and cinema, including such actors as
Gérard Philippe, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, and the comedian
Noél-Noél.
Picasso was also a delegate to the large peace congresses at Paris and
Prague in 1949, and to a similar congress in 1950 scheduled for Shefheld
but moved to Warsaw after some of the delegates had been turned away
from England by the Labour government. Picasso, who had been allowed
to enter England, received at Warsaw one of the three International Peace
Prizes awarded there.
It was in connection with the World Peace Congress at Paris in 1949
that a drawing of a dove by Picasso was first used_as a “Dove of Peace” to
symbolize the peace campaign—and also that he gave his newborn daugh-
ter the name Paloma (Spanish for dove). The story of how he came to
make the drawing casts particular light on the nature of the ambiguous
relation of many communist artists to communism. In January 1949,
Picasso’s friend Matisse had given him a pet white fantail pigeon. Since
early childhood Picasso had leved to draw pigeons, and of this one he im-
mediately made a superb—and for him quite realistic—lithograph showing
it standing and facing right. When his long-time friend, the ex-surrealist
poet Louis Aragon, founder of the arts section of the French Commu-
nist Party, saw this lithograph, he promptly realized its propaganda value
as a “Dove of Peace” for the communist-led campaign. Forthwith the
“Dove” was made into a poster for the peace congress scheduled to be held
at Paris in April, which both Picasso and Aragon were to attend as
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 341

delegates. ‘This “Dove of Peace” was immediately publicized by commu-

nists all over the world—for instance, it was published on the front page of
the New York Daily Worker for April 14, 1949 (Fig. 52) as an advance
advertisement of the opening of the Paris congress on April 20. In spite of
the communist connections of this “Dove,” late in 1949 Picasso’s litho-
graph was awarded the Pennell Memorial Medal by the thoroughly non-
communist Philadelphia Water Color Club and the Pennsylvania Acad-
emy of Fine Arts, a fact plainly indicating that the cold war had not yet
reached its peak in the United States.
In France, the general propaganda value of Picasso’s “Dove of Peace”
was largely nullified by a widely publicized caricature made by an anti-com-
munist French artist. This depicted a heavily armored dove decorated with
the Soviet symbol of hammer and sickle, and bore the legend, “La colombe
qui fait boum” (The dove that goes bang). Nevertheless, not only did
Picasso’s dove bring him a World Peace Prize at the World Peace Con-
FIG. 52. “Dove” (1949) by Pablo Picasso, from the poster for the World
Congress of Peace, Paris, 1949, reproduced from the New York Daily
Worker, April 14, 1949.
FIG. 53.
Massacre in Korea (1951)
by Pablo Picasso.

gress held in Warsaw in 1950, but also he was awarded a Lenin Peace Prize
by the Russians in 1962, five years after one had been given to his friend
Aragon.
For the Stockholm Peace Congress of March 1950—out of which
came the communist-line petition known as the Stockholm Peace Appeal
Against Atomic Weapons—Picasso had drawn two hands holding a bou-
quet. Following the congress, he was barred from the United States, when,
with eleven other “Partisans of Peace” including Jean Lurgat, he planned
to bring the Stockholm Peace Appeal to the U.S. Congress. (The “Parti-
sans of Peace,” founded at Paris in 1949, had become the most powerful
communist spearhead against the Atlantic Pact.) .
In the years that followed, Picasso drew two more doves used by the
communists as posters for peace congresses. One of these, a standing dove
(but facing left whereas the Paris dove had faced right) was made in
connection with the World Peace Congress held at London in November
1950. Still angther dove by him was on the poster for the huge peace
the dove
congress at Vienna in December 1952." This, which represented
more realistic
flying with outstretched wings, was drawn in a considerably
ng a pressur e on
way than the two earlier “Doves,” a fact doubtless reflecti
y with the
Picasso from fellow-communists for achieving closer harmon
Vienna Peace
Soviet line of socialist realism. It was on behalf of the
such noted writers
Congress, also, that Picasso and Matisse, together with
Brecht, issued special appeal s—as the Soviet
as Aragon, Sartre, and Bertolt
Times, proudly pointed out.”
English-language periodical, New
assing the
The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, far from embarr
the communist armies of North Korea
communist intellectuals when
them to
invaded the Republic of South Korea, had made it possible for
nation al indepe ndence . In 1951,
pose as champions both of peace and of
the cause of peace, a pictur e
Picasso painted, in what he considered to be
under the inspir ation
entitled Massacre in Korea (Fig. 53). In this, partly
of Goya’s Third of May, robot-like soldiers are shown machine-gunning
naked civilians; and Picasso claimed that the picture was simply a general
indictment of war, much as his Guernica (Fig. 46) had been. But in view
of his communism, the identity of the robots would seem to be obvious:
members of the United Nations forces which were spearheaded by the
“imperialist” American army. Yet although the French Communist Party
exhibited the picture at the 1951 Salon de mai and elsewhere, communist
critics declared that—being somewhat abstract—it failed to do justice to
the resistance of the Korean people, and so did not adequately express the
line of national independence.
An even more propagandistic picture painted by Picasso in the follow-
ing year contained a still more direct attack on the United States. This was
one of two enormous mural panels, each measuring thirty by fifty feet,
respectively entitled Peace and War (Fig. 54), and designed for a deconse-
crated chapel at Vallauris in the south of France, where Picasso was living.
In the War panel, he depicted a horned Mars as God of War riding in a
chariot and carrying a bomb from which enormous bacteria emerge—an
 FIG. 54.
War (1952) by Pablo Picasso.

obvious reference to the false charge made by the Chinese communists

that the American troops were waging bacterial warfare in Korea. The
propaganda theme of the picture was further supported by the inclusion of
supposedly American torture instruments as well as of a truth-justice figure
convey
at the left with a “Dove of Peace” that obviously is intended to
pro-Russian connotations.”
A year later, when at Panmunjom, Korea, the communists built a hall
at the
for armistice talks, three giant Picasso “peace doves” were placed
by the United
entrances. They were removed only after an angry protest
officers would
Nations, which made clear to the communists that no allied
enter the building as long as the symbols were there.
Meanwhile, in May 1952, when General Matthew Ridgeway had
to take up
arrived in Paris, fresh from his command in the Korean War,
French commu-
his new duties as commander of the NATO forces, the
of opposit ion in the party press. It was so
nists had put on a campaign
of L’Huma nité, author of Vers le réalisme
violent that André Stil—editor
erican novel,
socialiste (1952), and winner of a Stalin Prize for his anti-Am
346 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

Le Premier choc, the preceding year—was arrested. Whereupon the com-

munists inspired protest riots which, though completely failing to affect
Ridgeway’s appointment, did result in the arrest of Duclos on a trumped-
up charge in spite of his parliamentary immunity. In July, when Stil was
tried, Picasso, Pignon, and the writers Aragon, Eluard, and Claude Roy,
the latter a member of the Communist Party since the Resistance, were
joined in a protest mecting at the Salle Pleyel by many non-communists
who feared that the arrest of Stil and Duclos reflected the spread of
McCarthyism from the United States. At this time the tide of feeling
among French intellectuals, which for some years had run against the
party, had begun to flow in its favor again.

11. Picasso, Léger, etc., and Arguments

About Socialist Realism and Abstraction

"Tue American trial and execution, in 1953, of Julius and Ethel Rosen-
berg as Soviet atomic spies only added to the mounting anti-Americanism
of the French Left. Picasso and Léger were but two of the many French
artists who painted or drew portraits of the Rosenbergs. Nonetheless, in
this period, Léger, Picasso, and Picasso’s friend Pignon were among the
many artists on the Left who were making it clear that they could not
accept as good art the socialist realism of the Soviet Union.
The crisis had come after Aragon had published in Les Lettres fran-
caises early in 1952 a series of no less than thirteen favorable articles on
Soviet sculpture and painting, with some discussion also of their Russian
antecedents and their influence, under the general title, “Réflexions sur
Tart soviétique.” * In discussing Soviet sculpture, for instance, Aragon
praised characteristic examples, several of them collectively produced, exe-
cuted in the banal Stalinist semi-neo-classical realist style then regarded in
the U.S.S.R. as the best expression of official—and thus ipso facto aca-
demic—socialist realism. Significantly, even though Aragon’s general title
was “Réflexions sur l’art soviétique,” one article dealt with that leading
French exemplar of socialist realism in painting, Fougeron.™
In spite of Aragon’s high standing in the French Communist Party,
these articles were poorly received by many French communist artists.
When Aragon complained of their opposition, the party’s leader in cul-
tural matters, Laurent Casanova, called a meeting of communistartists in
April 1952. It is said that about two-thirds of France’s 200 or so communist
painters and sculptors, including Picasso and Léger, were Conspicuous by
their absence.** Faced with such strong, if tacit, opposition, Casanova
found it necessary to give in, and the final resolution of the meeting made
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 347

no specific endorsement of Soviet art, but instead condemned the germ

warfare allegedly waged by the Americans in Korea.
Even more than Picasso, Léger refused to subordinate his art to party
guidance, continuing to hold that the artist’s genius is individual and that
artists must be left free to create works of art that rise above specific
political, economic, and social battles. Ever since he had served in the
French army during World War I, Léger had felt himself to be on a level
with the whole French people, and therefore wanted to create not a class
art but an art accessible to the entire class structure. His otherwise charac-
teristic painting of 1950, The Constructors (Fig. 48), is exceptional in
being so proletarian. When he gave the title Homage to Louis David to
the final version of his Cyclists (1948-1949), he did so as much to indicate
his admiration of the clarity of form and content in David’s paintings as to
show respect for David’s revolutionary political activities. Furthermore,
although as a member of the Communist Party he was supposed to be a
convinced atheist, he had not hesitated to take part in a large religious
commission in which Jean Lurgat also participated. Thus, in spite of being
a party member, Léger was never a true or consistent Marxist-Leninist. His
career, too, suggests that the relation of artists to communism, even when
they are members of the party, is often ambiguous, to say the least.
The religious commission on which Léger and Lurgat had worked,
together with other artists, was the decoration of the Roman Catholic
Church of Notre-Dame de Toute Grace at Assy. This was undertaken at
the request of a Dominican, Father Couturier, whom Léger had met in the
United States during the war. Léger himself designed an exterior mosaic;
Lurcat a huge, and much admired, tapestry. Of the many other artists
contributing to the decoration of the church, two—Rouault and Bazaine
—were Catholics, one—Lipchitz—a practicing Jew, and the remainder
mostly either agnostics or, like Léger and Lurgat, atheists.” Although the
somewhat haphazard assortment of works at Assy represented perhaps the
most extended attempt to revive religious art in France since Delacroix had
painted at Saint Sulpice, a storm of reaction from those horrified by such
Dominican liberalism had burst forth in 1951. Revivalist art “experts” of
Roman Catholicism, both Italian and French, combined with conserva-
tive elements of the Catholic hierarchy in a full-throated roar of protest
that apparently resulted in subjecting the Dominican order to a kind of
purge.**
The refusal, even when tacit, of leading communist artists such as
Léger and Picasso to subordinate their art regularly to the demands of the
Communist Party’s official aesthetic of socialist realism presented a great
besetting
problem to the party. For it betokened a fundamental dilemma
the party’s leaders. On the ‘one hand, they wanted to extend the influence
of the party—and the fact that such great artists as Picasso and Léger were
enormously enhanced its prestige and attracted many other
members
348 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

artists and intellectuals to it. On the other hand, the party leaders desired
to barricade a large but isolated communist world against assault from
outside, and thus achieve a private world—including a private world within
the world of France itself. During the periods of the Popular Front and the
Resistance, these two ideas were not mutually exclusive. But at most other
times they were, and the French Communist Party—in some contrast to
the Italian party, for instance—was especially likely to seek to choose the
second aim alone. However, the continued resistance of Léger, Picasso, and
other prominent artists to socialist realism prevented the party from suc-
ceeding in that aim. It accepted such artists, internationally famous among
non-communists, for their prestige, rarely reproving them, but essentially
rejected their art by regularly pressuring younger and less prominent artists
to follow the line of socialist realism. At times this compromise resulted in
almost ludicrous inconsistencies, because in order to take advantage of the
prestige of such artists as Picasso and Léger, the leaders of the party felt it
necessary to attend their exhibitions regularly—exhibitions, of course, filled
with works of art of a kind which they in fact officially disapproved. For
instance, Picasso’s show at Paris in June 1954 was attended by all the
leading French communists from; Thorez down. And when in 1960, five
years after Léger died, the Léger Museum (e.g., Fig. 48) was opened at
Biot in the south of France, its opening was attended by many prominent
communists, not only from France but also from the Soviet Union, where
Léger’s works had not been displayed. Soon, however, the largest
Léger exhibition ever put together was planned for the U.S.S.R. It duly
opened at Moscow in January 1963, but because in the preceding month
Premier Khrushchev had begun what turned out to be a violent eight-
month-long campaign against abstract art, the exhibition was abruptly
canceled well before its scheduled showing in Leningrad had been com-
pleted.
Even though, like Léger, Picasso and Pignon steadfastly rejected the
technique and forms of socialist realism, in subject-matter they sometimes
came closer to it than did Léger, as Picasso’s previously mentioned paint-
ing, Massacre in Korea (Fig. 53), indicates. Like nearly all the other
communist painters and sculptors of France except Léger, in the late
1940's and early 1950’s, even Picasso and Pignon succumbed to what was to
be attacked in the years after Stalin’s death as the “cult of personality’”—
the exaltation not simply of Stalin but also of the French party leaders. For
in imitation of Stalin, the heads of Communist parties elsewhere had
themselves glorified in portraits by the chief communist painters and
sculptors. ‘Thorez—a miner’s son who had himself been a miner—was
exalted in several portraits by Fougeron, and Taslitzky went even further
by depicting Thorez in conversation with Stalin. But, somewhat less
expectedly, Picasso too painted Thorez’s portrait, while Pignon painted
one of Duclos.
In France, the cult of Stalin himself survived his death in 1953 much
longer than in the Soviet Union. The French party remained essentially
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 349

Stalinist for several years after Premier Khrushchev violently attacked

Stalin’s reputation in February 1956 at the Twentieth Congress of the
Soviet Communist Party. Not until 1961 was Laurent Casanova, for so
long the Stalinist cultural authority of the French party, finally purged.
After Stalin’s death, when his portraits were already beginning to
vanish in the U.S.S.R., Picasso made a portrait of the dead communist
leader—thereby continuing to subscribe to the as yet unnamed “cult of
personality.” Nevertheless, to his surprise he found himself violently at-
tacked by communist supporters of the cult of Stalin for violating the
canons of socialist realism, not in subject-matter but in technique and
form.
The circumstances were these. Immediately after Stalin died, Louis
Aragon, as director of Les Lettres frangaises, telegraphed Picasso, and
according to the artist, “asked me to do something. I am not a writer, so I
drew a picture.” * This portrait of Stalin, drawn in charcoal and dated
March 8, 1953 (Fig. 55), was published on the front page of Les Lettres
francaises for March 12-19, 1953. Exceptionally realistic for Picasso, it

FIG. 55. “Stalin” by Picasso, from Les Lettres francaises, March 12-19, 1953.
350 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

occupied three columns, the remainder of the page being filled out with
written contributions by other noted French communists, such as Joliot-
Curie and the former surrealist writer Georges Sadoul—all under the
headline “Ce que nous devons a Staline’ (What We Owe to Stalin).
However, on March 17, the Secretariat of the Communist Party issued a
statement published the next day in the party newspaper, L’Humanité,
declaring that it “categorically disapproves the publication, in Les Lettres
francaises of March 12, of the portrait of the great Stalin drawn by
comrade Picasso.” Although the Secretariat gave no direct reason for its
disapproval, it expressed its “regret that comrade Aragon, member of the
Central Committee and director of Les Lettres frangaises, who otherwise is
fighting courageously for the development of realistic art, has permitted
this publication.” The Secretariat went on to “thank and felicitate the
numerous comrades who have immediately made known their disap-
proval.” It added that copies of the critical letters which had been received
would be sent to Aragon and Picasso, and demanded that Aragon assure
the publication of essential passages from them.**
When Picasso was informed that the Secretariat had attacked the
portrait, he remarked: “It is possible that it did not please. I did what I
felt, for I have never seen Stalin. I concentrated on the resemblance. It
does not seem to be liked. So much the worse. .. .”* But he also
complained perplexedly: “I don’t understand. Ordinarily people do not
cuss out those who send their condolences. One does not reproach the
tears shed by those who follow a coffin. It is the custom to thank a person,
even if the wreath is not pretty or if the flowers are faded.” *°
As for Aragon, in the very next issue of Les Lettres frangaises he
published the party Secretariat’s statement of disapproval, “categorically
condemning” the portrait, and he humbly thanked the Secretariat for
having expressed itself in this way.* In that issue, also, in accordance with
the orders of the Secretariat, he began to publish extracts from the letters
of party militants telling of their horror and disgust at the portrait. One
such letter came from Fougeron, who declared that if such drawings as
Picasso’s were allowed to be published, they would only encourage “a
sterile aesthetic formalism.” Gradually, however, it became very obvious
that objections to the portrait were almost wholly restricted to “prole-
tarian” members of the party who knew nothing about art: as so often had
happened before, the radical “masses” showed an utter lack of sympathy
for a radical avant-garde artist sympathetic to them.
Meanwhile, it was also becoming clear that after Stalin’s death an
anti-Stalinist “thaw” had promptly begun to develop in the Soviet Union
itself. Therefore, in subsequent issues of Les Lettres frangaises Aragon
began to stand up for himself, first taking the precaution of publishing a
statement that Malenkov, Stalin’s successor as Soviet Premier, had made at
the Nineteenth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party even before
Stalin’s death. Malenkov had remarked that “A witting exaggeration, a
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 351

heightened representation of an image does not exclude its typical charac-

ter but, on the contrary, shows it more fully and brings it out.” ” After
such careful preparation, Aragon published in the next issue a biting
personal statement under the heading “A haute voix” (In a Loud Voice).
In this he first declared that his error had been one made by many
cultivated people—that of “judging art by its manner more than by what it
represents,” a kind of “idealism condemned by the young Marx.” In saying
this, Aragon was confessing that he had committed the sin that Soviet
communists had so long been calling “formalism.” But Aragon added
coldly for the education of the offended proletariat: “Though creation in
art should tend toward the masses, this does not signify that it is the mass
that creates art... . . Intellectuals, artists, and writers should avoid falling
into popularism and ouvrierism [that is, overglorification of the worker]|—
vestiges of the monstrosities that mark the French history of that
[working] class.” ®* He concluded with a salute to Picasso as “a man whom
the enemy furiously envies us . . . a great artist celebrated all over the
world seuae:):
Soon thereafter, in May 1953, the party sponsored an exhibition
“From Marx to Stalin,” in which communist artists wholeheartedly de-
voted themselves to elaborating the cult of personality in a manner arous-
ing no controversy among the faithful. It is said that most of the members
of the party’s Political Bureau attended the exhibition to see their own
portraits, one of which was Taslitzky’s painting of Thorez conversing with
Stalin (and showing Stalin making the point).
Early in the month in which this exhibition was held, however,
Picasso’s reputation was fully rehabilitated for communists everywhere by a
noted Soviet figure, Ilya Ehrenburg, who of course had official approval.
This occurred in the following way. An enormous exhibition of Picasso’s
work was scheduled to open at the Museum of Modern Art in Rome on
May 5, 1953, and it was obvious that the Italian comrades were in a
quandary as to whether or not they ought to attend. Their problem was
resolved when, on the day before the show was to open, a eulogy of Picasso
by Ehrenburg was published in the Italian communist paper L’Unita.
Consequently, the communists—including the Soviet ambassador to Italy
admire
hastened to swell the crowds that poured into the exhibition to
Picasso’s works; and his huge panels of Peace and War (Fig. 54), with
their pro-Soviet and anti-American propaganda, attracted the most atten-
the
tion. Five years thereafter, Picasso at last put these two paintings into
building for which he had executed them. This was now the “Museum of
of
Peace” that he established at Vallauris in the eighteenth-century porch
the Temple de Vallauris. But the day
the deconsecrated chapel known as
of
before the “Museum” was to open in June 1958, the French Minister
that it had only one door and
Education ordered it closed on the ground
President
might be unsafe—thereby causing L’Humanité to scream that
however, the Museum
De Gaulle was imprisoning art and peace.” Later,
352 Vi PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

was opened without ceremony, under the administration of the Ministry of

Education. :
The rehabilitation of Picasso by Ehrenburg in May 1953 had allowed
Aragon later in the same year to attack Fougeron, the chief artist-critic of
Picasso’s drawing of Stalin. For when Fougeron exhibited one of his own
paintings, Atlantic Civilization, at the Salon for 1953, Aragon had
promptly accused him of “coarse painting, hasty, [and] scornful” of those
whom he painted.* Nevertheless, so much more strongly did Stalinism
continue to persist in France than in the U.S.S.R. that in 1955 even
Aragon still defined socialist realism as “Write the Stalinist truth!” *
As for Picasso, once his reputation had been duly rehabilitated by
Ehrenburg, he continued to have honors showered on him by communists,
and especially by communists outside of France. In March 1955, he was
elected a corresponding member of the East German Academy of Art,
together with Dmitri Shostakovich, Diego Rivera, the German-born leftist
author Lion Feuchtwanger (then a resident of California), and Charlie
Chaplin * (who, after accusations by the U.S. Attorney-General, had
settled in Switzerland). Another honor came to Picasso in October 1956,
when in celebration of his seventy-fifth birthday there was finally held in
the Pushkin Museum at Moscow an exhibition of some sixty of his works,
half of them from his own collection: none of the works exhibited was very
abstract, however.
In that very month came the Hungarian Revolution, in which writers,
artists, and other intellectuals played a leading role. The revolt of the
Hungarian intellectuals particularly centered around a group called the
Petolfi Circle, which sought reform within the framework of “socialism.”
This became known to French intellectuals of the Left early in October,
when Tristan Tzara, the now-communist writer who had been the father of
dada, came back from Budapest declaring that the views of the members
of the Circle were those of most Hungarians. When the Hungarian press
in Paris published Tzara’s declaration after Aragon had refused to publish
it in Les Lettres frangaises, it was clear that the communists were split.
The split widened and deepened sharply early in November when the
Hungarian Revolution was brutally put down by the Red army, for the
Soviet action stirred intellectual rebellion among communists in France
and many other countries. Several prominent French communist writers,
including Claude Roy, long a strong if tacit opponent of cultural Zhdano-
vism, joined communist sympathizers, among them Sartre and his friend
Simone de Beauvoir, in signing a letter denouncing the use of military
might to break the revolt of the Hungarian people. In a newspaper article,
Sartre declared himself to be no longer pro-communist. Soon Picasso,
Pignon, Pignon’s wife, the communist journalist Héléne Parmelin (who
later wrote a book on her friend Picasso),* and seven other communist
intellectuals disturbed by the Soviet actions in Hungary and earlier in
Poland, sent a letter calling for an immediate congress of the French
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 353

Communist Party. The letter began: “The weeks just unrolled have raised
burning questions of conscience for Communists that neither the Party’s
Central Committee nor L’Humanité has helped to resolve.” *° It assailed
the party leadership for drawing “a veil of silence” over these problems of
conscience and for being less than faithful to the Marxist-Leninist philoso-
phy in denouncing the Hungarian uprising and supporting its suppression
by the U.S.S.R. However, this attack, in part at least, reflected an intra-
party rift over the whole question of the de-Stalinization campaign led by
Khrushchev beginning with the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Com-
munist Party in the preceding February. The letter declared that “these
assaults on revolutionary probity” had taken form “since the Twentieth
Congress and the appearance on the national and international scene of
the Khrushchev report. The interpretations given to the events in Poland
and Hungary raised confusion to the highest pitch. . . .”* The letter,
never published by L’Humanité, appeared only in the “Dourgeois” press.
Among others who signed it were motion-picture star Yves Montand and
his actress-wife, Simone Signoret, who like their friend Picasso “were
reportedly members of the French Communist Party. . . ae
A few days later, the French Communist Party ordered Picasso and
the other signers of the letter to “get in step with the working class” and
stop criticizing the party line on Hungary." Picasso thereupon subsided
for some months; but when the puppet Kadar regime in Hungary held an
open trial of eleven young people arrested for their part in the Revolution
even
and eventually condemned four of them to death, Picasso, Sartre, and
Aragon were among the many throughout the world who protested in
of
vain But the French Communist Party, which had reached its peak
membership early in 1956, was thereafter to become steadily smaller, with
to
fewer artist and philosopher members, though even in 1967 it was able
boast of its distinguished historians, sociologists, doctors, and scientists.
As tensions gradually eased in harmony with the usually more relaxed
in
line in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev, such important figures
ly allowed
literature and the visual arts as Aragon and Picasso were ordinari
long thereafter,
considerably more leeway by the communist leaders. Not
at Socialist
Aragon could write—in an article entitled “A Fresh Look
ist magazine
Realism” republished in 1959 by the American commun
“My approach to
Mainstream for the guidance of American communists—‘
say that, “since
it [socialist realism] isn’t dogmatic.” **° He went on to
in the Soviet Union
socialism is the doctrine of the state, socialist realism
on an agreeme nt between the artist and the
from the beginning was based
leaders of society, whereas, in France, under present social conditions,
From this fact stem the
socialist realism can only be an art in opposition.
in France—it
differences between socialist realism in the U.S.S.R. and
for the contradictions
would be absurd to deny them—and these account not
But this should
in the conceptions of socialist realism here and there.
. . . However , no more in the
lead us to ignore the Soviet experience.
354 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

Soviet Union than anywhere else, can I accept as an unanswerable argu-

ment the idea that in the domain of socialist realism this or that thesis
must be considered proven. Here, Lenin’s observation that one cannot put
matters of art to a vote has more validity than any argument about
authority based on universal consent. Similarly, a concept like socialist
realism can and should cross frontiers, [but] should never be frozen into
the mould of an untouchable definition.” *°°
Obviously, Aragon’s point of view had changed enormously since
1955, when his definition of socialist realism had been “Write the Stalinist
truth!” #7 It seems clear that he had since been affected by the doctrine of
“polycentrism” enunciated by the Italian communist leader Togliatti in
the period of decided relaxation throughout international communism that
had followed Premier Khrushchev’s speech early in 1956 assailing Stalin.
For by “polycentrism” is meant that national states within the Marxist-
Leninist camp and communist parties in other states should no longer be
completely dominated by the Soviet Union but should be relatively inde-
pendent of it and of one another as separate centers of communist power.
However, if Aragon’s changed view, calling for some decentralizing of
socialist realism, was accepted by: many important communists outside of
the Soviet Union, it was still not the official line within the U.S.S.R. itself.
Thus, although Picasso continued to be a devoted and usually well-
accepted member of the French Communist Party as well as the most
famous communist in the arts anywhere in the world, Premier Khrushchev
did not hesitate to laugh publicly at one of his most recent works while on
a tour of a French exhibition at Moscow’s Sokolniki Park in September
1961. (It was on the following May Day, perhaps by way of recompense,
that the artist received a Lenin Peace Prize.) Furthermore, even though
paintings by Picasso have frequently been displayed in the Soviet Union
since the mid-1950’s, aside from some works exhibited in 1956 at the show
in honor of his seventy-fifth birthday opened in the still comparatively
liberal atmosphere of Khrushchev’s recent speech against Stalin, they have
customarily been early, and thus relatively representational, productions.
Correspondingly, the chief Soviet art magazine, Iskusstvo (Art), has care-
fully refrained from reproducing the creations of Picasso’s cubist or later
periods, preferring instead to illustrate his earlier works or, better still,
works of more representational French painters sympathetic to com-
munism.
After all, the party line in the Soviet Union itself, through all its ups
and downs since Stalin’s time, has steadily continued to call for socialist
realism in art. Even though from 1956 on the interpretation of what
constitutes socialist realism was for a time to be relatively liberal, in the
U.S.S.R. there nonetheless continued to be more emphasis on socialist
realism, with correspondingly more opposition to abstract art, than Com-
munist parties of non-communist countries could maintain among most
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 355

modern artists sympathetic to communism. Hence in 1958 that leading

Soviet art magazine, Iskusstvo, ran an article illustrated with socialist-real-
ist paintings by Fougeron, and highly laudatory of him, at a time when in
France his reputation was in decline—as indeed it had been ever since
Aragon had attacked his work in 1953. Significantly, this article of 1958 in
Iskusstvo so favorable to Fougeron’s work, in which his National Defense
(Fig. 49) was reproduced, was entitled ““The Aesthetic of Abstract Art Is
Vicious.” *°° When, in 1962, Fougeron paid his third visit to the U.S.S.R.,
Iskusstvo ran a long article on his work, and a monograph was published
on it.
About the most abstract examples of French art ever favorably illus-
trated in Iskusstvo appeared in an article published in its issue No. 9, 1959,
at a time when the Soviet party line concerning socialist realism was
exceptionally relaxed. They were landscapes painted by Albert Marquet
(1875-1947), one of the Fauves, who had been Matisse’s friend since early
youth; and they served as illustrations to a highly favorable article on
Marquet who, as was to be expected, had shown considerable sympathy for
Soviet communism. This article was published in connection with the
large posthumous exhibition of Marquet’s works that had been put on
earlier in 1959 in Moscow’s Pushkin Museum with the help of the artist’s
widow, a communist sympathizer, and of a French communist-front
organization, France-SSSR. The exhibition itself was in honor of the
twenty-fifth anniversary of a visit that Marquet had made to the Soviet
Union in 1934, the year the Stalinist aesthetic of socialist realism was
officially imposed. As Marquet’s paintings, though always recognizably
representational, were nonetheless too abstractly presented to exemplify
the canons of socialist realism, it is clear that the Soviet museum authori-
ties were making an effort to appeal to an audience that even in the
U.S.S.R. was eager for art less retardataire than typical socialist realism.
According to Marquet’s wife, her husband had “visited the Soviet
Union [in 1934] and, in this country where no one spoke of money, he felt
quickly at ease, the more so as they displayed much friendship and fervor
for him.” * It is significant that the text of the chief book on Marquet, by
in
Francis Jourdain, was published jointly in 1959 (the year of the article
Iskusstvo) by Kunst Verlag, Dresden, official publishers in communist
East Germany, and the French communist art-publishing house, Editions
in
Cercle d’art, in Paris. And it was printed at Leipzig, East Germany,
For after World
probably the most subservient of the Soviet satellites.
deal during
War II, Marquet had told Ilya Ehrenburg: “T’ve learnt a great
be
the war years. The Communists are right.” "° Nevertheless, it should
and his wife, he
noted that in spite of the leftist interests of Marquet
he had
himself said little about politics: on his visit to the Soviet Union,
I only know how
declared, “It is my wife who speaks and who writes; me,
no specifically
to paint.” * Certainly his paintings and drawings show
356 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

leftist subject-matter or content, so that they serve as additional illustra-

tions of the point that, except under a totalitarian regime, there is no
necessarily direct relation between the beliefs of a socially radical artist and
the subjects he selects for works to be publicly displayed.
Furthermore, long before Marquet ever visited the Soviet Union,
indeed in the tsarist period, his paintings had been appreciated in Russia.
Before World War I, not long after he had become one of the boldest of
the Fauves, the Russian collectors Morosov and Shchukin had acquired
some of his finest paintings, which today are prominently displayed in the
Hermitage at Leningrad and the Pushkin Museum at Moscow. Yet they
are sufficiently abstract so that, like paintings by other Fauves, they were
not exhibited in the Soviet Union from the later 1930’s until after the
downgrading of Stalin’s reputation by Khrushchev.
The exaltation of Marquet’s relatively abstract art in the Soviet Union
by 1959 could be expected to encourage some French artists and cultural
figures to move away from strict socialist realism. Also, that was the year in
which Aragon had first declared that his approach to socialist realism was
not “dogmatic”—in this apparently reflecting the spread of polycentrism
among French communists. In 1960 that concept was upheld by a majority
of Communist parties at a conference of representatives of eighty-one of
them in Moscow. There the French and Italian parties led the majority in
opposing successfully a proposal, made under Soviet leadership, for estab-
lishing a world communist secretariat. So strong was the opposition that
Premier Khrushchev had felt it necessary not only to disown this centraliz-
ing proposal, but even to renounce the traditional leadership of the world
communist movement by the Soviet Communist Party. In May 1964, the
party itself publicly renounced any claim to “hegemony” over the world
movement.
In the light of such events, some Communist artists continued to
work in essentially the same style as before, but others developed new and
far more abstract styles. It is true, for instance, that Boris Taslitzky’s
Liberation of the Concentration Camp of Buchenwald, painted in 1964
(Fig. 56), shows much the same love for depicting teeming crowds in
history-making action—crowds of which he continues to feel himself part
—as in his Riposte of 1951 (Fig. 51). While it is also true that the
technique of the later painting has become considerably looser, this is
probably more characteristic of a sketch or of increasing age (as the late
work of Rembrandt shows) than of any intentional abandoning of earlier
style. Certainly Taslitzky himself is not conscious of any such intentional
change: in a recent letter to me he wrote: “No, I do not believe that I have
changed style.” And he enclosed photographs of some works of the mid-
1950's and 1960’s that indeed showed little change.
By way of contrast, however, as the 1960’s wore on, Fougeron, once
the leading exponent of strict socialist realism, began to show a very
 FIc. 56. Liberation of the Concentration Camp of Buchenwald, April 11,
1945 (1964), oil sketch for painting, by Boris Taslitzky.

considerable degree of abstraction even while still mostly dealing with

subjects related to working-class life or now scenes of cities, among them
Moscow, which he well knew from his three visits to the U.S.S.R. in 1948,
1957, and 1962. This abstraction was characteristic, for example, of the
paintings shown in his exhibition held at Paris in the fall of 1964. One of
the most abstract—and in color most effective—of these, entitled Peintres
careneurs, depicts painters working on the lower hull of a ship in dock,
with a huge crane in the background (Fig. 57). This was included in the
large exhibition of his works held in communist East Germany at East
Berlin, Weimar, and Dresden in the latter part of 1967, and then in the
Soviet Union at Moscow and Leningrad. The exhibition was, in fact,
unusually abstract for one held in the U.S.S.R. though Fougeron’s subject-
matter is always recognizably based on nature.
Still, even though nearly all French communist artists, including
Fougeron, have moved away from Soviet socialist realism in the representa-
tional arts, like other Communist parties of western Europe that of France
has continued to take the side of the Soviet Union in the ideological
struggle with Red China. This fact was made especially obvious late in
1966 by the architectural model adopted for the future seat at Paris of the
Central Committee of the French Communist Party (Fig. 58). For as
designed by the great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, a long-time
communist who had been awarded a Lenin Prize by the Soviet Union in
1963, the seven-story building will be made in the shape of the Soviet
symbol, the hammer and sickle.
 FIc. 58. Model (1966) of the future building for the Central Committee of
the French Communist Party, by Oscar Niemeyer.

12. The New Left and Art

So RELATIVELY sLow, however, had the French party been to adopt

polycentrism—and to give up strict Soviet socialist realism in the represen-
tational arts in favor of a greater degree of abstraction—that meanwhile
many socially radical members of the avant-garde had been attracted
elsewhere. Many of them had for some time been participating in what
,
had become known as the New Left, whose main strands are anarchism
including
socialism, especially utopian socialism, and nihilism, while also
elements of bohemianism, existentialism, humanism, transcendentalism,
and even populism and black nationalism. ‘To the French New Left have
al
been drawn many radical intellectuals, including artists, other profession
impatient with the slowness of the Commu-
men, and students, who were
give up rigid
nist Party in France to give up Stalinism and, in the arts, to
socialist realism.
n the
On the political spectrum much of the New Left stands betwee
sts." As an interna tional
Communist Party and the democratic sociali
gist C. Wright
movement, it was given its name by the Amencan sociolo
on.
ic. 57. Peintres caréneurs (1964) by André Fouger
360 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

Mills in his “Letter to the New Left” published in the British New Left
Review (eventual successor to the Left Review) for September—October
1960. In this, Mills upheld “our utopianism” as “a major source of our
strength.” The origins of the New Left, however, go back especially to the
early 1950’s and efforts by left-wing intellectuals and communist dissidents
in both communist and non-communist countries to form a movement
with a “revisionist” Marxist ideology. This was largely stimulated by the
belated publication and spread of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1844, and then by the developing “revisionist” ideology of
Tito’s Yugoslavia. But in France the New Left gained momentum only
after the brutal repression of the Hungarian Revolution and the French
Communist Party’s acquiescence in the Soviet action. The New Left’s
approach to the arts had been partly foreshadowed by Lucien Goldmann,
a philosopher-critic combining Marxism with Neo-Kantianism.
One of the most prominent groups in France in what later became
internationally known as the New Left had anticipated that name in
calling itself La Nouvelle gauche. Founded shortly after the suppression of
the Hungarian Revolution, it was headed by Claude Bourdet, who had
visited Yugoslavia and written favorably of Tito. In December 1957, La
Nouvelle gauche and a few rebels from the Parti socialiste combined with
two Christian radical groups, the Jeune république and the younger
Mouvement de libération du peuple, the first of which had been closer in
outlook to the socialists, the second to the communists. The resulting new
party, which in a sense fused the tradition of French socialism from
Proudhon to Jaurés with that of “Christian liberalism” from Lamennais to
Marc Sangnier, was named the Union de la gauche socialiste. ‘This in turn
merged, in April 1960, with dissident socialists and communists ** to form
the Parti socialiste unifié, the chief party of New Left intellectuals.
The influence of the New Left greatly increased as the efforts of
France to combat rebellion in Algeria dragged on so long in vain. Among
its sympathizers were many of the more than 140 intellectuals, including
writers, actors, film stars, teachers, and journalists who, in September 1960,
signed what was originally known as the “Manifesto of the 121,” a
“Declaration of the Right of Refusing to Serve in the Algerian War.”
Signers included Sartre; the artist André Masson; the writer Vercors;
Florence Malraux, daughter of the famous novelist and writer on art; and
actresses Simone Signoret and Daniele Delorme: among those who later
added their names were Tristan Tzara, the writer-founder of dada, and
novelist Frangoise Sagan. Simone Signoret, who in the previous spring had
gone to the United States to receive a motion picture Academy Award for
her acting, had been refused entry into that country in 1947 and 1949 as a
communist, but later had been allowed in on a waiver—she then denied
ever having been a member of a Communist Party. Certainly the great
majority of the signers of the Manifesto were not actual party members.
Many of them were to suffer severe economic harm for expressing their
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 361

radical beliefs about the Algerian war, because on September 28, 1960, the
government of De Gaulle forbade any of the signers to appear on the
state-run radio and television systems or in state-controlled theaters.
So much publicity was engendered for the New Left that the French
“orthodox” communists and their sympathizers evidently found it advisa-
ble to emphasize their own interest in the arts. In November 1960, a
special number of the communist-line periodical La Nouvelle critique
published seventy-five replies from artists and writers to the question, “In
1960, in your opinion, of what use are you?” “° Although by no means all
who replied were members of the Communist Party, widely known com-
munists who answered included Aragon, Masereel, the painters Fougeron
and Jean Amblard, and Tristan Tzara. Others whose replies indicated
left-wing sympathies were architect André Lurgat (brother of the painter)
and the painter Francoise Gilot (mother of two of Picasso’s children).
One reason for the increasing popularity of the New Left was that its
very heterogeneity meant that many of its members could even hold points
of view at variance with Marxism, which in turn meant a corresponding
heterogeneity in their theories of art. For one thing, many of its partici-
pants have been influenced by the existentialist philosophy of Sartre.
While Sartre has tried to reconcile Marxist materialism with his own
existentialism (which holds that every person is irremediably different
from every other, and that existence has neither cause, nor reason, nor
necessity), he has been able to do so only by reinterpreting Marxism in his
own terms, which are regarded by orthodox Marxists as too subjective, and
thus as still bourgeois. In its theoretical and practical individualism, and in
a tendency toward nihilism, existentialism shows itself to be avant-garde
while nonetheless displaying considerable indifference to revolutions in
form and technique. For from the literary and artistic point of view its
precedent has been naturalism, even though its precedent from the ideo-
logical point of view has been expressionism.
Although Sartre shares with Marxists the belief that truths change
idea of class
with time, persons and situations, although he keeps the
history as an
struggle, he has had to regard the Marxian dialectics of
factor,
illusion, because to him history has no meaning as a determining
concern ed
being essentially the product of Man’s free will. He is therefore
a literature—
to show that social groups can never be organisms. He wants
diversion, in
and other arts—equidistant from pure propaganda and sheer
which so largely
contrast to the communist aesthetic of socialist realism
te social
seeks to reduce literature and the other arts to their immedia
favorite modern artist has been the late
function as propaganda. Sartre’s
Alberto Giacometti,
Swiss-French, socially leftist sculptor and painter,
red figures express nihilism and
once a surrealist, whose elongated sculptu
delibera te exclusion of social
despair. Sartre himself, while rejecting the
the very idea of socialist
considerations from the arts, has also rejected
“I am the new
realism, even proclaiming in one of his existentialist essays,
362 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

dada. . . .”*° Yet, though never a member of the Communist Party, he

has very often supported its aims and actions, insofar as these are intended
to create the new society for which he too deeply feels a need. ‘Together
with most members of the New Left, he has strongly supported Fidel
Castro’s revolution in Cuba as a step toward that new society. In 1960, as a
reporter he made a pilgrimage to Cuba, on which he maintained that
Castro was not a member of the Communist Party. Needless to say, this
view was shattered a year later when Castro publicly declared himself a
Marxist-Leninist—doing so shortly after giving Picasso a commission to
design a “peace dove” to surmount the monument in Havana to the
battleship Maine, replacing a forcibly, removed American eagle.
Sartre had a profound effect on the partly Marxist Negro writer
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961),"” whose last book, Les Damnés de la terre
(The Damned of the Earth), was published at Paris in 1961 with a preface
by Sartre. Nevertheless, Fanon had rejected existentialism as a subjectivist
and individualistic philosophy of the intelligentsia.
Fanon, who was born in Martinique, studied medicine and psychiatry
in France. He was sent to direct a psychiatric hospital in Algeria when it
was still under French rule. After the Algerian Revolution broke out, he
secretly supported the rebels, and then gave up his French post to join
them openly. He worked for the Algerians until his death in 1961—as
ambassador to Ghana for a time, and by traveling throughout Africa to
encourage anti-colonial solidarity among Africans. He tried to enlist the
help of specialists, first in Russia and then—reluctantly—in the United
States, where his death of leukemia in a hospital at Bethesda, Maryland,
was little noticed. As he lay dying, his Les Damnés de la terre was pub-
lished in France, where it was given high praise by the press of the Left.
Fanon’s body was flown back to North Africa for burial with national
honors by the Algerian National Liberation Army.
Fanon’s early belief in “blackness” (négritude) as an enduring doc-
trine had been transformed by Sartre’s insistence that this could only be a
stage on the way to a higher consciousness, a stage to be replaced by the
idea of proletariat. In Les Damnés de la terre, therefore, as in some
earlier writings, Fanon made use of Marxian categories. He accepted the
Marxian doctrine that economic realities determine social realities, while
also maintaining that economic realities derive from the racial structure of
colonial society. Although like Lenin and Mao (and unlike Marx) he
believed that the peasants must be involved in the revolution, he now held
that the looming international problem is not the struggle between social-
ism and capitalism but between the rich and the poor, with the poor led
by the undeveloped countries of the Third World. In that struggle, he
glorified the role of violence (even while fearing it, as many of his followers
have not): for him, faith in revolution is the way to bridge the gap be-
tween violence and civilization.
The ideas of Fanon have had a profound effect on black militants
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 363

everywhere—and especially in the United States, where an English edition

of his last and most influential work was published in 1965 under the title
The Wretched of the Earth: the publisher, Grove Press, called it “a hand-
book for the black revolution.” Deeply involved in this revolution is a
revolution of black culture, including the arts. This revolt is also upheld by
some white supporters of black militancy, most of whom belong to the
international New Left.
It is especially from Sartre that members of the New Left in France
and elsewhere have adopted the concept of “commitment.” Politically, the
New Left and its party have been torn between their desire to collaborate
with the communists and that of seeking to renovate the French Socialist
Party. With the death of Albert Camus in an automobile accident, the
movement lost its most lucid and most truly humanitarian thinker, and it
still remains to be seen whether the French Socialist Republic that the
New Left calls for really means a new type of socialist state or a “people’s
democracy” on the familiar communist model. Furthermore, to the degree
that the New Left has been successful in developing its own political party,
there have been clear signs—not only in France but even more in England
—that many of the social-minded young artists once attracted to it have
become disenchanted. In sum, even the New Left apparently cannot
wholly resolve the dilemma between the socially radical artist’s need for
freedom of expression, especially when he is artistically avant-garde, and
the subordination demanded of him even in his art when he participates in
political action under the guidance of any Marxist, or near-Marxist,
party.
If the secession of the New Left weakened the Communist Party in
on the
France, as elsewhere in western Europe, so also did the secession
other flank of a small pro-Chinese faction for whom the party had become
from
hopelessly bourgeois. By 1964 the membership of the party had fallen
nearly a million after World War I to around 200,000."*
The disillusion of so many radical intellectuals with the Communist
New
Party in France had meant the development not only of a political
g the idea of
Left but also eventually of an artistic New Left largely rejectin
Marxian
any party, though retaining personal social interests of a vaguely
enormously
kind. Such disillusion among Western avant-garde artists was
against all
enhanced when the violent campaign in the Soviet Union
by Khru-
abstract art, and for socialist realism, had been personally led
December 1962, in
shchev over a period of some eight months, beginning in
became clear
order to demonstrate his Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. It soon
struggle with Red China for political
that he had done so because of his
struggle that
domination of the world communist movement, the very
October 1964. For in the end
helped to bring about his downfall in ve
have been ineffecti
Khrushchev was deemed by his Soviet colleagues to
Soviet Union
in demonstrating to communists everywhere that he and the
includin g the arts—
stood for orthodox Marxism-Leninism in everything,
364 Wh PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

ineffective therefore in maintaining that the Red Chinese were the deviat-
ing “revisionists” the latter had accused him and his followers of being.
Yet Khrushchev’s downfall did not result in more individual freedom of
creation for artists in the U.S.S.R. An editorial in Pravda for January 9,
1965, contained his successors’ blunt public warning against “so-called
progressive trends in art” and “digressions from realism,” declaring that
decisions adopted by the Central Committee in June 1963 (the time when
Khrushchev’s campaign against abstract art had reached its peak) would
remain as the guidelines for the Soviet creative intelligentsia.
Also, at the beginning of 1966, Khrushchev’s successors thoroughly
alienated even many old-line regulars among intellectuals in Communist
patties of the West when they brought about the harsh imprisonment of
two Soviet writers, Sinyavsky and Daniel, for smuggling writings out of the
Soviet Union and publishing them abroad under pseudonyms. As the
writings themselves were not treasonable, loud protests were officially
registered against imprisoning the two writers by many Western Commu-
nist parties, including those of Britain, Italy, Austria, Sweden, and Den-
mark. And—crowning blow of all—the protesters were joined by the
French party, which so long had been a faithful follower of the Soviet line
on art. For that long-time regular, Aragon, writing in L’Humanité itself,
scornfully declared: “to deprive [these men] of their liberty for the con-
tents of a novel or a story is to make a difference of opinion a crime, and to
create a precedent more damaging to the interests of socialism [i.e.,
communism] than the works of Sinyavsky and Daniel could ever be.” *
The alienation of Aragon and other Western communist intellectuals,
their rejection of Soviet leadership, were only made more complete when, a
month later, Brezhnev, First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, at
the party’s Twenty-Third Congress attended by observers from Commu-
nist and allied parties of eighty-six countries, bluntly indicated that his
party would continue to direct the arts and literature exactly as before.’?°
As Aragon refused to attend the hard-line Fourth Writers’ Congress at
Moscow in May 1967 and the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the
“October” Revolution, the Russians have struck back especially by attack-
ing his Russian sister-in-law, Lily Brik, once mistress of the great Soviet
avant-garde poet Mayakovsky (a suicide in 1930).

13. Tinguely, Schoffer, Vasarely, La

Nouvelle Tendance, and the New Avant-Garde

I;, by the mid-1960’s, even the leading Communist parties of western

Europe were themselves registering public protests against Soviet policies
in the arts, it is hardly surprising that for over a decade many avant-garde
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 365

artists and other intellectuals once sympathetic to communism had been

revolting in various ways against a party line on art established in the
Soviet Union.
There were several different directions in which they could, and did,
turn. They could, of course, turn to the political parties of the New
Left—but by then most of them were disgusted with any political party
that claimed the right to lay down a line for art. They could, if they
wished, turn instead to art movements with no political connotations
whatsoever. Or they could turn—as most of the avant-garde artists with
continuing social interests did—to art movements that could in some
vague way be associated with radical social movements, but with the
nature of the association determined by the artist himself or by the group
of artists to which he voluntarily belonged, rather than by any political
party. This was even possible in connection with many of the socio-
political groups loosely related to the New Left.
To those French artists who relatively early revolted against any
political connotations in art, the movement known as “tachisme” was
available. This was equivalent to, and stimulated by, abstract expression-
ism as developed in the United States by artists who had reacted against
their strong leftist social involvements of the 1930’s. Its practitioners now
not only refused to express any social message in their art, but also nearly
all believed that the artist should have no specific social interests.
Some artists with no social interests eventually participated in the art
movements respectively known as “Neo-dada” and “Op Art.” But for
many artists interested in these movements they were not without positive
or negative social connotations. These were, however, social connotations
of a vaguely nihilistic, or anarchistic, or New Left sort, independent of any
party control.
As for Neo-dada, which includes most “Pop Art,” and which has
swept the United States and western Europe alike, it has been known to
some of its practitioners as the New Realism. This New Realism, however,
is often different from the more realistic varieties of Pop Art, a term that
was invented in England, where it first became current in the mid-1950’s
without any essentially political overtones. Nevertheless, Pop Art has
had an appeal for some artists on the Left in Europe and elsewhere,
including the United States, because of a highly realistic treatment of
subjects taken from mass culture and a concern for environmentalism.
Everything can become art; art is in everything including objects made by
mass production on a commercial and industrialized basis. Still, even
though so much of the subject-matter of Pop Art consists of everyday,
mass-produced objects, such as comic strips or soup cans depicted with the
up
utmost realism, these are usually so juxtaposed, or multiplied, or blown
in size, or otherwise treated as to give rise to subjectively personal contexts
resulting
quite different from those of everyday objective reality. The
practition-
ambiguity makes such Pop Art into a kind of Neo-dada, whose
have
ers, in seeking a reality beyond that of the material world of nature,
366 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

introduced an element of philosophical “idealism” at odds with the basi-

cally “materialistic” social realism of Marxism-Leninism.
Furthermore, even though Sartre had proclaimed, “I am the new
dada,” Neo-dada has tended to reject the conception of commitment so
fundamental to Sartre’s existentialism, as well as to Marxism. Instead, in
its most dadaist aspects, at least, Neo-dada has reflected an artistic kind of
anarchist nihilism. It therefore has differed from the original dada move-
ment, many of whose members had reacted so intensely against “bour-
geois” society as responsible for World War I that they had become
communists or communist sympathizers, believing (at a time when social-
ist realism as official Marxist-Leninist. art was still far in the future) that
the Bolshevik Revolution stood for revolution in art as well as in society.
Since Neo-dada has lacked such social interests, its expressive contexts of
shock for shock’s sake have been, if anything, even more ambiguous than
those of the original dada, which had so largely made ambiguity into a
primary expressive means in art. As a necessary consequence, the intent of
socialist realism to convey a direct and totally unambiguous message to the
masses in order to foster revolutionary political and social goals has been
flatly rejected by Neo-dada.
Nevertheless, it is significant that one widely known artist whose work
early showed the spirit of Neo-dada, had as a youth been partly stimulated
by contact with anarchists. This is Jean Tinguely (b. 1925), a Swiss-born
artist who has lived in Paris since 1951. The art of Tinguely’s maturity—
descended from futurism, from the nihilistic side of dada, and from
surrealism, though without their direct radical social interests—has con-
sisted mainly in constructing, out of junk, machines he calls metamatic
sculptures. ‘Tinguely first made news at Paris in 1955 with his metamatic
painting machines, which allowed anyone inserting a coin in them to press
buttons for paint, jiggle the machine or its paper, speed up or slow the
electrical impulses controlling the mechanical brushes, and thereby pro-
duce a three-minute abstract design. Other metamatic machines, however,
were designed by Tinguely to “commit suicide,” by what he calls “the
functional use of chance.” Thus Tinguely’s work—in contrast to that of
the futurists—has represented a kind of Neo-dada revolution against scien-
tific rationalism (including Marxism) and against the perfection of the
machine: as John Canaday, the relatively conservative art critic of The
New York Times, has admiringly said, “Mr. Tinguely makes fools of
machines, while the rest of mankind permits machines to make fools of
them.” ™ Yet in Paris, Tinguely has often been associated with the group
of young artists who call themselves “nouveaux redlistes,’ another name
for Neo-dadaists.
One of Tinguely’s sculptures, a machine called Homage to New York
(Fig. 59), twenty-three feet long and twenty-seven feet high, was con-
structed in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York out of
an extraordinary mixture of materials ranging from dishpans and bicycle
 1 MA, C
Plint gree feast” [pessat
& S vide Ire
sate | : |

OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK; GIFT OF PETER SELZ

TION, THE MUSEUM

FIc. 59. Sketch for Homage to New York (1960) by Jean Tinguely.

wheels to an upright piano. This “self-constructing and self-destroying

work of art,” made while Tinguely was staying in the New York apartment
of his friend Charles R. Hulbeck, the former German dadaist and one-time
communist sympathizer Richard Huelsenbeck, was designed to “commit
suicide” in a series of highly spectacular phases on the evening of March
17, 1960. It vibrated, gyrated, shook, painted pictures, played music, sawed,
of
and started to burn itself to extinction: unfortunately things got out
hand, and when there seemed to be danger that neighboring buildings
ess,
would catch fire, a nervous fireman ended the performance. Neverthel
rate of almost one a month at
Tinguely’s machines were soon selling at the
prices of up to $3,000 apiece.
lly
Tinguely is mentioned here, even in connection with an essentia
the
nihilistic kind of Neo-dada, primarily because, in reacting against
368 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

orderliness of Swiss life as a youth during World War II, he had been, as
we hinted, stimulated by meeting at Basel an assortment of young anarch-
ists—one of them a Polish ex-communist, another a German ex-socialist—
who had fled to Switzerland to escape from fascism; with them he met
nightly and talked politics until dawn.” Thus Switzerland was continuing
to play, on a minor scale, its historic role as an asylum for exiled anarchists
and other radicals. And Tinguely is but one of the youngest of the many
widely known artists who have been stimulated by anarchism, which even
as remotely reflected in his work has been related to individualistic avant-
garde art in the age of the machine.

Ir Trncuety, whose works have been related to the essentially non-politi-

cal Neo-dada movement, was nevertheless partly stimulated toward his
highly egocentric conception of art by his early contact with anarchists,
some other artists interested in kinetic art have had a far more social
approach. One is the sculptor Nicolas Schéffer (b. 1912), who left his
native Hungary in 1936 to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris,
where he has lived ever since. Schéffer, taking an optimistic view of the
possibilities of a technological society, has tried to fit his art to the social
circumstances of mechanical civilization—working, in effect for a more
rational future through social conditioning for such a civilization.” In
doing so, he has come to make much use of apparatus to produce luminous
projections of forms and colors on surfaces and spaces. Before arriving at
this, in 1956, Sch6ffer had already created his first cybernetic sculpture,
Cysp 1, a motorized work of steel and aluminum whose name came from
the words “cybernetic” (referring to information-processing machines)
and “spatiodynamics.” Cysp 1 was presented, together with a ballet spe-
cially choreographed for it, at the Festival of Avant-Garde Art held in
Marseille at Le Corbusier’s modern version of a sort of Fourierist phalanx.
Schoffer himself has made designs entitled “Cybernetic City” for the kind
of social utopia he considers suited to the technological society of the
future. He has acknowledged the influence on it of Herbert Marcuse, the
nominally Marxist, revolutionary philosopher and sage of the New Left.
Schoffer’s work has been related to the equally recent artistic current
loosely known as Op (for Optical) Art, because Op Art is itself related to
the revival of constructivist‘art in which effects of movement have been
emphasized, especially since the mid-1950’s. A decade was to pass, how-
ever, before the term “Op Art” first appeared in print; this was in the issue
of Time Magazine for October 23, 1964. Some—not all—of the artists
associated with Op Art and such kinetic constructivism have had connec-
tions with Marxism even while totally rejecting Soviet socialist realism, and
essentially rejecting also any party control of art. Some of these more or
less Marxist artists have either been French or active in France.
Like Neo-dada, Op Art and related movements have made use of
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 369

psychological ambiguities. But in Op Art these have arisen primarily from

puzzling visual phenomena that are chiefly optical illusions. They have
usually been geometrically presented, and based on a more or less scientific
—and thus impersonal and rational—application of the laws of vision. Yet
in contrast to the Neo-Impressionists earlier, who likewise were interested
in making use of the laws of vision for works of art, Op artists have had no
intent to reproduce the material world of the senses in any representational
way; furthermore, they have deliberately introduced kinetic effects even
when the work itself does not actually move.
The most influential of the prophets of Op Art and recent kinetic art
has been Victor Vasarely (b. 1908), like Schéffer, a Hungarian-born
artist living in France. Many of the ideas of Vasarely, a socialist, have
parallels with Marx’s theory of art, although in a “revisionist” way. Va-
sarely was trained at a school in Budapest founded by Alexander Bortnyik,
a painter who had recently come from the Bauhaus. So directly modeled on
the Bauhaus was Bortnyik’s own school that it has often been called the
Budapest Bauhaus.
In 1930, Vasarely settled in Paris as a commercial artist, but he did
not develop his kinetic style of art until 1947, after World War II. In
1955—in connection with an exhibition significantly called “Mouvement,”
held at the Galerie Denise René at Paris, in which Vasarely participated
with seven other artists including Tinguely, Duchamp, and Calder—he
published a famous manifesto entitled Mouvement. In his work, Vasarely
has sought to arrive at an alphabet of forms (Fig. 60) usable in all media,
and enabling a more complete version of that architectonic integration of
the arts into a total work of art which had been sought at the Bauhaus—
and which today is being sought also in revisionist Marxist Yugoslavia. It
is thus significant that in 1959 Vasarely wrote an introduction to the
catalog for an exhibition of the works of three modern Yugoslav artists of
Zagreb—the painters Picelj and Srnec, the sculptor Bakié—held at the
Galerie Denise René in Paris, of which he was co-founder.
Like Marx, Vasarely believes in a dialectical path to unity, which he
has applied to the plastic unity of the work of art on the basis of a
philosophy involving sociological, economic, and ethical, as well as aes-
thetic, aspects: for Vasarely, however, this philosophy is engendered in art
by a kinetic idea on a non-representational basis. Not unlike Marx, too,
Vasarely has attacked contemporary society as decadent for failing to
“derive a collective conception of art that comes up to its needs.” In 1953,
he declared, “I dream of a social art,” also, “Art is the plastic aspect of the
community”; while adding, “Intelligence knows no classes.” ° Vasarely
has rejected the idea of the apolitical artist. He has attacked the modern
a
artist who sells himself for money and fame instead of cooperating to find
new law for a better society; and at the same time he has sought a new
the modern
science of the arts. Like Marx, Vasarely wants an art suited to
of his
age of mass production in industry. With this end in view, some
in the early
works of the mid-1950’s were based on designs he had made
 jos 7

SOSCECOECOOO+O
O66
CESO
SC
COC
SC 1060
0010
OBC0
06
0 SC
FIG. 60. Orion-C (1963)
by Victor Vasarely.

1930's for machine-produced textiles, and late in 1968 he joined an art-

technology program inaugurated by the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art under which he was to collaborate with the International Business
Machines Corporation. Vasarely has also sought to create a new architec-
tonic polychromy with the aid of collaborators and assistants as well as of
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 371

machines: it will be recalled that Marx and Engels had praised the polit-
ically radical painter Horace Vernet for producing his big paintings with
the aid of assistants, and so achieving—collaboratively—large-scale produc-
tion. Vasarely’s architectonic integration of small, repetitive, individual
elements into a dominant unity (Fig. 60) clearly conveys strong hints of
social symbolism.
Vasarely’s desire to arrive at such organic integration has often led
him to collaborate directly with architects. Because for him painting is
“only a means to an end,” he has even expressed the wish that the art
object should disappear and be revealed only in its effects. He has tried “to
bring art. . . into everyday life,” in his desire to have “his work . . . serve
the community.” He therefore has insisted on “the principle of a codified
art, universal in character for human masses taken in the totality of their
individuals.” *° But because Vasarely wants art to affect all levels of society
now, rather than in some future classless society, in this respect his
philosophy of art is closer to anarchism and Marxist revisionism than to
orthodox Marxism and Leninism. Like many Yugoslav artists, he rejects
the Soviet kind of realism: in 1959, he declared that the “socialist coun-
tries” showed the lowest level of taste and incredible backwardness.

TrncuELy and Vasarely, together with the Bauhaus-trained Swiss artist

Max Bill, are regarded by the members of the Groupe de recherche d’art
visuel, founded at Paris in 1960, as among their chief predecessors.” The
name of the group—to which Vasarely’s son belongs under the pseudonym
Yvaral—clearly indicates its connection with Op Art. It has taken part in
exhibitions of “socio-experimental art,” emphasizing audience-participa-
tion activities; and has declared its major aim to be to arrive at “new ways
of conceiving the work [of art], of appreciating it, and of placing it in
society.” ° As Harold Rosenberg has pointed out to me, many works, at
least, of members of the group and of other Op artists have passed over in
the direction of Pop Art, even though they give far more emphasis to a
basis in “science.” For they have taken over from Pop Art its new idealiza-
tion of mass Communication, and thus of a new “realism” with forms
derived from mass culture. Like Pop Art, Op Art too tends to hold that
everything can be art and art is in everything, so that the whole environ-
ment involves art. It is on this account that a new emphasis has been given
by Pop Art and Op Art to spectator-participation in “happenings” involv-
ing a total environment, in which the work of art as precious object, and
therefore bourgeois “consumer” society, are both rejected.”
The Groupe de recherche d’art visuel is related—together with other
groups in Italy, Germany, Holland, Yugoslavia, and other countries on
both sides of the “Iron Curtain’—to that international constructivist
movement first known as the New Tendencies and later in the singular as
the New Tendency (or in French, La Nouvelle tendance). This has taken
 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
372

its name from the international exhibitions of the New Tendency held at
Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in 1961, 1963, and 1965; another was scheduled to
be held during May-August 1969. This current in art developed out of the
revived constructivist tendencies of the 1950’s, which, as a consequence of
the “Mouvement” exhibition at Paris in 1955, made constructivism into
more of a kinetic optical art than ever before. The New Tendency spread
not only throughout most of western Europe as well as to Yugoslavia, but
also to Poland, South America, and Japan. In 1962, a group was even
founded in the U.S.S.R., where it was called “Dvizheniye” (Movement),
and where its members are officially regarded, not as artists, but as physi-
cists and electronics workers. In the United States, this kind of kinetic
constructivism was first exhibited only in 1963 at New York.
In strongly emphasizing group activity, a cult of depersonalization and
anonymity, and borrowings from science with an emphasis on “research”
and on scientifically designing a new environment, the New Tendency
could have an appeal to Marxists among others. But the movement could
be attractive only to unorthodox Marxists because it has tended to regard
the spectator as a responsive (rather than educated and thus rational)
organism to be directly stimulated. Furthermore, the stimuli consist of
light, sound, and movement conveyed by works having non-representa-
tional forms in new materials.
The first New Tendency exhibition was organized at Zagreb by a
young Yugoslav Marxist art critic, Matko Mestrovi¢, and in part reflected
the influence of recent developments in Italy and in part that of the
Bauhaus tradition.” In connection with a second exhibition at Zagreb, in
1963, an interpretation of abstract art was offered in print by MeStrovi¢
and also in a joint declaration made by a member of the Parisian Groupe
de recherche d’art visuel, the French artist Frangois Morellet (Figs. 61 and
62), with another artist formerly a member of the Groupe, Franz (or Fran-
cois) Molnar, a Hungarian living in Paris. All three maintained—in con-
trast to Russian Marxist-Leninist critics—that a “progressive” (as well as a
“reactionary”) abstract art is possible, with the implication that the Rus-
sians, in espousing socialist realism, had misunderstood Marx and Lenin.
In making such declarations, MeStrovié represented what the official Rus-
sian view would at least tacitly regard as Yugoslav “revisionism” of true
Marxism, while Morellet and Molnar correspondingly could be considered
as reflecting an aspect of the New Left in France, revisionistic but inde-
pendent of direct party guidance in art. All three continued to emphasize
their Marxist revisionism (though in a less specific way), for Morellet
and Molnar as well as MeStrovi¢ were major figures in the large exhibition
of the New Tendency put on at Zagreb in 1965 by a committee of which
MeStrovi¢ was a leading member.’ In this exhibition, Morellet displayed a
kinetic work called Neon No. 3 (1965). This example (Figs. 61 and 62) of
a kind of Op Art was made of neon tubes of white glass placed against a
black background, and with the tubes so programmed that, as various parts
 i
wa
FIGS. 61, 62. Neon No. 3 (1965), two stages of a construction with flashing
neon tubes, by Francois Morellet.
374 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

flashed on and off in the programmed order, dynamic changes would take
place in the observer’s perception. In that perception an important tole
was played by the inertia of the retina of the observer’s eye, which for a
time would retain the received image after the neon tubes that made it had
already flashed off. Works of this kind have had a wide influence.
Such statements as that made by Morellet and Molnar in connection
with the exhibition of 1963 at Zagreb are more fully Marxist than many
other members of La Nouvelle tendance would agree to. Indeed, at that
time fierce ideological discussions took place which showed a division of
the movement into those stressing experimental objectivity, anonymity,
perceptual psychology, and socialism, and those standing for individual
research, poetry, idealism, and immateriality. Among artists identifiable
with the first section have been the Groupe de recherche d’art visuel at
Paris, the Italian Group “N” at Padua (disbanded in 1964), and Group
‘T” at Milan, as well as some artists in Munich and in communist
countries, especially Yugoslavia. In the second section have been the
German Group Zero, the Dutch NUL, other Munich artists, and sundry
individuals elsewhere. However, in 1965, the catalog for the exhibition of
that year at Zagreb showed that'it was simultaneously less overtly Marxist
and less overtly revisionist than the exhibition of 1963—so that represent-
atives of widely differing political points of view could still take part.
Indeed, for the first time in these Zagreb exhibitions, the participants
included both non-communist Americans, mostly from the Anonima
Group, and Soviet Russians, who officially, of course, had to be anti-
revisionist.
Thus in spite of the close parallels noted between Vasarely’s ideas and
Marxist theory, especially revisionist theory, in spite of the links between
many members of the New Tendency and Marxism, it should be empha-
sized that many of the Western artists whose works have some relation to
Op Art, like many (not all) practitioners of Neo-dada and other recent
avant-garde movements, are non-political and non-revolutionary in any
immediate social sense. For throughout the Western world the traditional
alienation of the avant-garde artist from “bourgeois” society, so marked
since the French Revolution and so basic for this book, has essentially
disappeared in the last few years. In most Western countries—including
even France, where the official academies anathema to avant-garde artists
no longer exert much significant influence—the avant-garde is itself at last
being sought out by the “Establishment” as part of official culture. And
simultaneously the attraction of Soviet Marxism-Leninism has diminished.
Significantly, therefore, in 1966 first prize in “painting” at the most
widely known international art show, the Venice Biennale, was won by a
young Argentinian exponent of kinetic art, Julio Le Parc, a leading mem-
ber of the Groupe de recherche d’art visuel at Paris who had exhibited
with success at the original exhibition of the New Tendency at Zagreb in
1961," and again in 1963. Thus the traditional conflict between avant-
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 375

garde artists and the prevailing social environment—the conflict so funda-

mental for avant-garde art of the West ever since the French Revolution
—is being rapidly abolished, regardless of the artist’s social views or lack of
them. The very conception of an alienated avant-garde is now being
thoroughly questioned throughout the supposedly bourgeois West,** in-
cluding even France where the idea of an avant-garde, at once artistic and
socio-political, was formulated by Saint-Simon nearly a century and a half
ago
Under such circumstances, the French Communist Party, while usu-
ally adhering to the Soviet line politically, has found it necessary to cling to
the aged Picasso and foster abstract art in the effort to prove its own
artistic progressiveness. In October 1966, at the time of Picasso’s eighty-
fifth birthday, a remarkable greeting to “Dear Comrade Picasso” as “one of
the most famed members of our party,” signed by the secretary-general of
the Communist Party, was published as a front-page editorial in
L’Humanité, a few days before two huge exhibitions in the artist’s honor
opened in Paris’s Grand and Petit Palais. Meanwhile, the party’s publica-
tions have been filled with excellent examples of abstract art still officially
unacceptable in the Soviet Union.
For some time the party—urged by Moscow—had been seeking to
establish a new Popular Front. By the end of 1966, led by Waldeck
Rochet, the French Communists trumpeted the foundation of a new
alliance with the Socialists and Radicals in an all-out fight against De
Gaulle (whose Minister of Culture, Malraux, had been doing much to
reduce the alienation of French artists by giving them far more of an
official place in society). In the election of March 12, 1967, the members
of the Communist Party even followed instructions to vote for candidates
from other anti-Gaullist parties whom they had long regarded as traitors to
the working class, if this would help to defeat De Gaulle. As a result, the
French Communist Party managed to break out from the “ghetto” in
which it had placed itself early in the cold war, and to become temporarily
stronger than at any time since 1947; but it accomplished this only by
sacrificing its traditional attitude.
Consequently, it was not the communists, but alienated students
under mainly New Left leadership representing a wide variety of radical
factions—including anarchists, Trotskyites, Castroites, and Maoists linked
by opposition to American “imperialism” in Vietnam and to the French
educational system—who were to lead the way in riots and revolt against
the Gaullist regime in 1968. The most influential leader was “Danny the
Red,” a red-haired, thoroughly anti-American student of sociology (and
German citizen) named Daniel Cohn-Bendit, whose anarchism was com-
bined with Marxism. But while this student revolt indicates that alienated
intellectuals, as always from the beginning of the French Revolutionary
tradition, were in the forefront of revolution, for the first time alienated
artists other than students had not played a prominent role in originally
376 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

stimulating the revolution. Furthermore, the art students among the stu-
dent revolutionaries came especially from the official, traditionally aca-
demic Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where they took over the building, labeled it
“Ex-Beaux-Arts,” and hung the red flag and the anarchist black flag in the
courtyard. In an “Atelier populaire” (People’s Studio) they and students
of the Ecole des arts décoratifs turned out as many as a thousand posters a
day in a total of about three hundred designs democratically approved by
ad hoc “comrades’ committees,” designs that intellectually often reflected
a kind of surrealism laced with dada but were essentially independent of
the earlier movements. The posters assailed the regime and the brutality of
the police while increasingly emphasizing solidarity between the students
and the workers engaged in widespread strikes. At the same time, the
rebels in the Ecole demanded the revision of its old regulations under
“student power,” calling for, among other things, the elimination of
entrance competitions and of that competition for the Grand Prix de
Rome which had originally caused the alienation of David back in the
eighteenth century. Soon a group of admiring older artists, including such
widely known painters as Julio Le Parc, Jean Hélion, Matta, and Zao
Wow -ki, was making posters to sell for the student cause. At this time, too,
a sympathetic revolutionary Union of Writers was founded by Michel
Butor and Nathalie Sarraute, leading practitioners of the “Nouveau
Roman”; and the Union soon received the support of some fifty other
writers, including Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Marguerite Duras.
Meanwhile, some talented French cartoonists were contributing with-
out pay to a weekly called L’Enragé, named for the “anarchists” of the
French Revolution. First published late in May 1968, this sought to enlist
as salesmen students at the Sorbonne desiring to make money for their
revolutionary organizations. Among the best known and most committed
of the contributors to L’Enragé was the cartoonist Siné, long a contributor
to leading leftist newspapers and other periodicals. In the third number of
L’Enragé—that for June 10—Siné replied to a letter criticizing him for
having attacked the communist trade union, the-C.G.T., whereas, said the
critic, the real enemy was on the Right. In his answer, Siné again assailed
the leaders of the C.G.T., and by extension those of the French Commu-
nist Party. He declared angrily that the party had earlier failed to support
the Algerian Revolution against France, and now, in bringing widespread
strikes to an end, was seeking to choke off the present revolution in which
the support of the workers was needed. Siné also criticized the Soviet
Communist Party for having put “peaceful coexistence” into effect; but he
praised Castro and Mao for their initiative and the Chinese Communist
Party for its courage. In that same month, Siné was likewise contributing
to Action, leading paper of the student revolutionaries.
As public opinion increasingly turned against the continuing street
warfare of the students, De Gaulle’s regime finally felt able to crack down
on what it regarded as subversion.** Among other things, it forcibly
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 377

liberated the Ecole des Beaux-Arts from the rebellious art and architecture
students, though this by no means ended the rebellion there. The French
government had previously deported three non-citizen artists who had
upheld the student revolt—Le Parc, the Argentinian member of the
Groupe de recherche d’art visuel who had won first prize at the 1966
Venice Biennale while representing France, and his colleagues Sobrino
and Demarco. As a consequence, ten French artists withdrew from the
1968 Biennale. Much of it, however, was already being forced to close
down under the relentless blows of students, French as well as Italian, who
had converged on Venice to overthrow what they regarded as the bourgeois
capitalistic international art Establishment. They had already successfully
shut down the Cannes Film Festival and the Milan Triennale art exhibit.
The violence of the French police in seeking to repress students and
strikers, and especially the expulsion of foreign-born artists who supported
the student revolt, stirred protests from many in the world of art. One
letter of protest addressed to Minister of Culture Malraux, himself once
avant-garde and left-wing, by the widow of the leftist sculptor and painter
Giacometti (1901-1966), a surrealist until 1934, compelled the cancella-
tion of an official exhibition of Giacometti’s works scheduled for the
following October. Another protest was headed by Jean Cassou, the poet,
novelist, revolutionary, and former head of the Musée nationale d'art
moderne at Paris, a communist sympathizer ever since the advent of
fascism in the early 1930’s, who after 1948 had sided with Tito against
Moscow. Eventually, the expelled artists were allowed to return to
France.
So many Frenchmen had been thoroughly disturbed and alienated by
the continuing student turbulence and by the strikes that in the elections
of June 30, 1968, after De Gaulle’s regime had dissolved (and thus driven
underground) seven student groups on the extreme Left, the Gaullists won
what was said to be the first absolute majority in the National Assembly
achieved by any single French party since 1911. At the same time, the
Communist Party and the non-communist Left each lost half of its
previously held seats. Yet the communists had tried to bring the strikes to
an end, and had flatly opposed the student revolt while being rejected
outright by the student revolutionaries, who combined implicitly totalitar-
ian ideas with profoundly libertarian convictions. ‘The invasion of commu-
nist Czechoslovakia by Soviet and satellite armies on August 20, 1968,
further weakened the French Communist Party, even though it officially
opposed the Soviet action while in other respects continuing to support the
USSR. For a strong minority within the party supported the invasion
that so disillusioned the majority. One communist who had evidently been
becoming disillusioned for some time was Picasso. Late in 1968 he told an
snterviewer: “I do not understand Left politics any more and have no wish
on
to speak about it. I came to the conclusion that if I wanted to think
But, of
those questions, I should change jobs and become a politician.
378 / PRACTICE OF ART IN FRANCHUANDSS Ww it 2a et

course, this is impossible.” *° Once more, an artist long socially concerned

had finally turned away from involvement with communist politics, having
become convinced that an artist must simply devote himself to his art.
As for the revolutionary movement of the French students, it suc-
ceeded in bringing to an end the kind of official, centralized, academic
education in the arts established under Louis XIV, destroyed by the
Jacobin David, but revived later in the Revolution, and further centralized
under Napoleon and later governments essentially in the form in which it
continued until 1968. In that year, not only did the student revolution
prevent the completion at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of traditional competi-
tions for the Grands Prix de Rome, but toward the end of the year it also
led De Gaulle’s Minister of Culture, André Malraux, to announce that the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts itself would be decentralized. A new emphasis would
be placed, he declared, on art schools in the provinces; and in the teaching
of architecture, traditional academic theory of design would be replaced by
a kind of teaching with a new emphasis on Finnish, Japanese, and other
modern forms,’* thereby stylistically denationalizing what had always
been a national school.
It is thus significant that in:the French student revolt (as also in the
student rebellions in so many other countries) clear echoes of the French
Revolution could be heard, Jacobin as well as Enragé, and both artistic and
social. Because the revolt likewise reverberated with echoes of Proudhon
and Kropotkin, the early Marx, Trotsky, and Mao, in a very real sense it
was a revolutionary movement that reenacted nearly two hundred years of
the history. and controversies of the European Left. But by the reenactment
the long interrelationship between social radicalism and the artistic radical-
ism of the avant-garde had been essentially ended, even though one of the
periodicals of the student revolutionaries was called Avant-garde jeunesse.
With the shattering by the De Gaulle government of the official academic
tradition that had brought about, and so largely kept in being, the aliena-
tion of the artistic avant-garde, the term “avant-garde” had more than ever
lost its traditional meaning. From that time on, a new term, or radically
new meanings for the old one, would be required.’
 PART III

Radicalism, Marxism, and

the Theory and Practice
of Art in England
 vi
BRITISH UTOPIAN SOCIALISM,
PHILOSOPHICAL RA DICALISM,
AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS
FOR ARTISTS AND THE ARTS

1. Owen Versus Bentham

Tr wit ze recalled that in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels

referred to the system of the British socialist and communist, Robert
Owen, together with those of “St.Simon, Fourier . . . and others,” as
representing the emergence of “The Socialist and Communist systems
properly so called. . . .”* The very word “socialist” was originated in 1827
by Owen’s followers, who applied it to themselves in order to indicate their
opposition to individualism. Then, in 1830, Owen himself used the phrase
“Science of Society,” and is believed to have been the first to do so.
Robert Owen was born in North Wales in 1771. The son of poor
parents, he went to work in London at the age of fourteen, and so great
were his native abilities that at eighteen he became a partner in a textile
mill. Soon he was in a position to buy, in collaboration with several
partners, the village and textile mill of New Lanark in Scotland. Among
his partners there in the textile industry was Jeremy Bentham, the future
Philosophical Radical. Both Owen and Bentham believed in “the happi-
ness of the greatest number” as an ultimate criterion, and this led them
both to social radicalism, but radicalisms of very different kinds which in
different yet overlapping ways have had significant effects, positive or
negative, upon the arts.
Bentham (1748-1832)—a democrat from 1808, the year in which he
met James Mill, the chief disseminator of his ideas—had long prided
himself on belonging to no party. Nevertheless, he had been awarded
honorary French citizenship in 1792 by the revolutionary regime for his
voluntary services in the field of jurisprudence. And as the early years of
the nineteenth century wore on, he was attracted to the English radicals,
espousing their cause with particular zeal when they formed a political
382 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

he published
party shortly after the end of the Napoleonic wars. In 1820,
ophi-
his Radicalism Not Dangerous to distinguish the middle-class Philos
rs of
cal (or merely intellectual) Radicalism of himself and fellow-membe
y under the
the Radical Party from that of other radicals who, still strongl
of govern-
influence of the ideas of the Jacobins, advocated the overthrow
e. So relativ ely mild was Philos ophica l Radi-
ment by revolutionary violenc
lost all utopia n and revolut ionary qualiti es.
calism that its adherents soon
By the 1840’s they had given up the effort to form a separate party, and, as
members of the middle class, supported the left wing of the Whigs and
then that of the Liberal Party.
The Radicals espoused the philosophy of Utilitarianism expounded by
Bentham and James Mill, who also had known Robert Owen well? The
slogan of Bentham, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” with
its anti-aristocratic emphasis on “the people,” he had taken over from the
eighteenth-century French Philosophe, Helvétius, who, like the other Phi-
losophes, had exalted Newton and had subscribed to a utilitarian as well
as an anti-aristocratic philosophy. Utilitarianism has been called an attempt
to apply the principles of Newton to the affairs of politics and morals,* and
as such it represents a mechanistic approach to society rather than the
organismic approach of most socialists and communists. The absence
from Bentham’s philosophy of the conception of society as a living organ-
ism helps to account for the lack of organic relationship between his beliefs
and the visual arts, in which he had no interest—except in architecture and
planning regarded only as practical social crafts. Indeed, in Bentham’s
thought there was not even an organic relationship between his own two
chief fields of interest, jurisprudence and economics. For although he
conceived of jurisprudence as a science of man-made restraints, he also
believed that there are economic laws of nature which will give rise to a
natural harmony of interests only if such restraints are absent.
Still, though Bentham’s lack of an organismic approach to society and
culture on the whole contributed to his failure to regard as socially
significant such fine arts as painting and sculpture, his doctrine of “the
greatest happiness of the greatest number” could make it possible for his
followers to support arts that could contribute “practically” to that happi-
ness by being socially useful and socially comprehensible. ‘This was a
conclusion implicit also in the doctrines of the socialist Owen, as well as
those of Owen’s French socialist contemporary, Saint-Simon, It is therefore
worth noting that Owen was acquainted with Jeremy Bentham’s scheme
for an “Industry-House Establishment” (Fig. 63) for 2,000 persons, based
on the “Panopticon” or central-inspection principle. Bentham’s brother
Samuel had developed this idea in connection with workshops for ship-
wrights in Russia, but Jeremy adapted it to prisons, “houses of industry,”
poorhouses, factories, insane asylums, hospitals, schools, etc. ‘This multi-
purpose, highly utilitarian type of building apparently influenced Owen’s

FIG. 63. Project for an “Industry-House Establishment” (1787-

Jeremy Bentham.
 BUILDING AND FURNITURE
FOR AN

INDUSTRY-HOUSE ESTABLISHMENT,
FOR 2000 PERSONS, OF ALL AGES,
ON THE

PANOPTICON OR CENTRAL-INSPECTION PRINCIPLE.

(& For the Explanation of the several Figures of this Prarn, see “Outline
of a Work, entitled Pauper ManaGemenr improvepD;” Bentham’s
Works, vol. viii., p. 369 to p. 489.

The Ranges of Bed-Stages and Cribs are respectively supposed to run from
End to End of the radial Walls, as exhibited in the Grounp Pian: they are
here represented as cut through by a Line parallel to the Side of the Polygon:
in the Bed-Stages, what is represented as one in the Draught, is proposed to
be in ¢wo in the Description.

Fig. J —ELevation. Fie. I1.—Srcrion

and Inspectc:-General of his Majesty’s Naval Works, énrenit,

Samurt Bentuam, Knight of the Order of St George of Russia, Brigadier-General in the Russian Service,
384 / RADICALISM, MARXISM, IN ENG@EAND

ll be said later. And

schemes for ideal communities, about which more.wi
i-
we shall find that despite the essential Philistinism of Bentham’s Utilitar
doctrin e attract ed some of the
anism, Philosophical Radicalism as a social
greatest English writers of the day.
After Bentham’s death, the philosophy of Utilitarianism was consider-
e that
ably modified by his followers. ‘They retained his economic doctrin
give rise to a
there are laws of nature which, if unhampered by man, will
natural harmony of interests; but they dropped his conflicting conception
it
of jurisprudence as a science of man-made restraints, at least insofar as
had a
might apply to the distribution of goods. Like Bentham, they too
mechanistic, rather than organismic, conception of society and culture, and
in their hands it became an’ atomistic one. Because this was reinforced by
romantic individualism, they arrived at an individualistic libertarianism
considerably closer to the originally liberal (but eventually regarded as
conservative) principles of laissez-faire economics expounded by Adam
Smith than to the doctrines of Bentham himself. As they became increas-
ingly conservative, it was only to be expected that some of them would
eventually form a radical Right.
The atomistic point of view represented by these economic individual-
ists aided in fostering not only their extreme individualism, but also their
tendency to separate business and industrial production, which together
they regarded as “real” life, from other aspects of human existence and
production, including the arts. Their radical economic individualism
tended to lead them, therefore, to disregard, as utterly irrelevant to realities
of life, the works of artistically radical, and thus avant-garde, artists.
Conversely, the radical economic individualism fostered among middle-
class businessmen by Bentham’s version of Philosophical Radicalism was
equally rejected by avant-garde artists as utterly Philistine. When, in
opposing this artistic Philistinism, avant-garde artists have participated in
anti-capitalist radical social movements, it has been only natural that they
should stir up the opposition of most businessmen, and particularly those
of the radical Right. For, as we have noted, many middle-class business-
men, led especially by the radical Right, have been likely to pay attention
to art and artists only when the artists involved have seemed to offer a
threat to their own fundamentally economic values. In other words, their
interest in art has usually tended to be a purely negative one, and to be
based not on artistic but on economic or political reasons. It is thus
significant that violent attacks on artists as “communists” have so often
come from the radical Right—and have been especially pronounced in the
United States, where economic and political individualism has been so
strong.
In view of the extreme economic individualism of the ideological
descendants of Bentham, it is worth remembering that almost as soon as
the word “socialism” was coined in France in the 1830’s, it was being used
to distinguish the doctrines of the Saint-Simonian school in opposition to
 Utopian Socialism, Radicalism, and Their Implications / 38 5

the individualism of some of Bentham’s Utilitarian followers in Manches-

ter,” which socialists and communists have ever since considered to be
essentially anarchic. Consequently, whereas the Utilitarians and_ their
descendants have regarded socialists and communists as interfering dan-
gerously with the natural laws of economics, socialists and communists—
especially since Marx—have in turn regarded Utilitarians as interfering
with the natural laws of social development.
Thus although, like Jeremy Bentham, Owen believed in the necessity
for “utility, or the greatest happiness principle,” as an acknowledged
forerunner of Marx and Engels he was a direct ancestor of the twentieth-
century communism so mortally hated and feared by Bentham’s descend-
ants of the radical Right. Owen only gradually moved toward socialism
and communism as he increasingly came to believe that the emerging
forces of nature affecting the production and distribution of goods require
conscious regulation in the common good to produce social harmony and
justice. And he also only gradually came to the conclusion that these forces
have an aspect which specifically concerns production in an industrialized
society, and is social rather than individual. This, he believed, required the
individual producer, making things with his own hands, to be replaced by
collaborating groups of producers who, for good results, must work to-
gether in a humanly and humanely designed harmony with certain restric-
tions on machine production. In this way the evils of the Industrial
Revolution could be eliminated while its advantages were retained. ‘““Mech-
anism,” he declared, “may be made the greatest of blessings to humanity”
instead of “its greatest curse.” ° For “MECHANISM AND SCIENCE will be
extensively introduced to execute all work that is over-laborious, disagree-
able, or in any way injurious to human nature.” * In saying this, Owen—the
only great utopian socialist with practical experience in industry—antici-
pated William Morris, himself a practical craftsman. But Owen had far
less regard for the arts than Morris, and was far more mechanistic.
Owen first developed a concern for social problems in the age of the
Industrial Revolution out of an interest, at once humanitarian and practi-
cal, in the welfare of his employees in the textile mills at New Lanark. He
found that, by giving them a better environment in which to work and
live, he not only brought more happiness to a greater number but at the
same time also produced better economic results. Becoming convinced that
human nature could be changed and character reformed by better educa-
tion in an improved environment, in 1813-1814 he published A New View
of Society; Or Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human
Character.
The results of Owen’s theories as demonstrated at New Lanark at-
tracted many interested visitors. Among them, eventually, was Chester
Harding, the self-trained American portrait painter from the backwoods of
the frontier who had successfully rivaled Gilbert Stuart. In his Journal,
Harding recorded his highly favorable impressions of New Lanark, “the
386 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

dined with
seat of Mr. Owen’s great experiment.” *He wrote how he
all the different
Owen, then “Went down to the new village and through
ional
mills” with him; and how he was especially impressed by the educat
as they are
conditioning of the children, who “are as happy at their lessons
of boys is
at their play. Everything indicates contentment. The oldest class
old and under. They study natural history,
composed of those ten years
and music. Many of them perfor m well
botany, mineralogy, mathematics,
dance four sets of cotilli ons at once; their
on different instruments: they
n drawin g-room . I never witnes sed a
dancing would not disgrace a Londo
more interesting sight than this.”
It was characteristic of Owen as a utopian socialist to emphasize,
together with the need for social harmony in an industrial age, the arts of
music and of social dancing, because music, of course, connotes harmony,
and the cotillion harmonious cooperation among its participants. Signifi-
cantly, however, painting and sculpture, which ordinarily imply individual
production, were not part of the curriculum at New Lanark, though by the
time of Harding’s visit there, Saint-Simon and Fourier on the Continent
were already beginning to give an important social role to such arts and
their practitioners. But as we saw in a previous chapter, Saint-Simon and
Fourier were developing an organic conception of society and culture, and
as yet this was essentially lacking in England. As it was a conception so
largely growing out of, and fostered by, romanticism, it is noteworthy that
the use of the word “organic” was first introduced into English criticism by
Coleridge,’ who took it over from German romanticism.

2. Godwin and His Influence on Owen,

Coleridge, Shelley, Leigh Hunt's Circle, etc.

A\xtrnovucn Robert Owen did not share Coleridge’s organic idea, both
men were strongly influenced by the social views of William Godwin
(1756-1836), whose An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political
Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, published in
1793, had been one of the first books to describe clearly the close link
between property and power.” Eventually, also, it brought to its author his
reputation as the father of modern anarchism, though he never called
himself an anarchist. However, this reputation came only belatedly: even
Proudhon dismissed Godwin as having been simply a “communist” of the
same school as Owen. It was not until late in life that Kropotkin realized
the affinity between his ideas and those of Godwin, with the result that
Godwin finally came into his own among the founders of anarchism.
Godwin, the son and grandson of Non-conformist ministers, was
briefly one himself, but in 1778 gave up his Christian beliefs to become an
 Utopian Socialism, Radicalism, and Their Implications / 387

avowed atheist (much later he adopted a vague pantheism). This back-

ground of radical religious Dissent, when modified by the strong influence
upon him of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, made Godwin suscep-
tible to the impact of the French Revolution, with which he was warmly
sympathetic, though he bitterly opposed Jacobinism and the “Terror.”
And this combination of influences led him to write his Enquiry Concern-
ing . . . Political Justice in answer, apparently, to Edmund Burke’s con-
servative Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
Godwin represents a major link between religious radicalism and
secular radicalism in the spirit of the Enlightenment and the French
Revolution. From his Dissenting background came the radical individual-
ism and distrust of the state which made him reject the social contract
urged by Rousseau, though Rousseau’s proto-romantic individualism could
appeal to him. Also from Rousseau and other thinkers of the Enlighten-
ment came that belief in human perfectibility and progressive improve-
ment which made Godwin’s thought especially attractive to Owen, and
which led Godwin himself to believe naively that in the arts, as in other
aspects of human life, there had been constant progress with the passing of
time. Like various leaders of the Enlightenment, too, Godwin considered
that a system of equal property would have a great moral benefit—never-
theless, he maintained that “no well informed community will interfere
with the quantity of man’s industry or the disposal of its produce. . . .”™
Obviously, anyone capable of making this statement was not a near-
communist such as Owen became, but an extreme individualist.
This anarchistic individualism led Godwin to reject “concerts of
music” and “theatrical exhibitions.” For “the miserable state of mecha-
nism of the majority of performers” in a concert involves an intolerable
subjection of the players’ individuality, while the theater includes “an
absurd and vicious cooperation” ”—a point of view in direct opposition to
that of Owen and other utopian socialists and of Marxists later, to whom,
of course, cooperation and the subjection of individuality were good.
Godwin’s individualism also led him to reject any social system de-
pendent on government, and to put forward his own conception of a
simplified and highly decentralized society—one with an ever-dwindling
minimum of authority, and founded on a voluntary free sharing of surplus
material goods. Such a society would be brought about by rational appeals
divorced from any political party or aim—in short by the kind of propa-
ganda represented by his own Enquiry Concerning . . . Political Justice.
This society would start out from democracy as the form of government
offering the best prospect of advancing to something better, but it would
need to go on beyond democracy because, in Godwin’s view, history shows
that democracy has never produced full social justice.
According to Godwin, too, in the good society no individual or no
body of individuals ought to have the power to make laws. The authority
of the community should be executive only, and at that confined to “the
388 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

public support of justice.” ® If ever the community sought to go beyond

this, it would become the duty of everyone to resist its decisions, although
Godwin did counsel extreme caution in using violence, which he regarded
as but the last desperate resort of just men. For this reason he was far from
sympathetic to the “Terror” of the French Revolution.
Godwin’s system required the basic community to be very small, on
the ground that only in a small unit would legislation practically never be
needed. He therefore aimed to decentralize society into local units he
called “parishes’”—the forerunners of the “communes” of later commu-
nist-anarchists, but with less emphasis on a spirit of community. Decentral-
ization of this kind was destined to have a profound effect upon the art of
town planning.
Godwin’s anti-government, anti-statist, and egalitarian point of view
combined with his extreme individualism to make him appeal strongly to
various progressive artists and writers, especially those in the tradition of
romantic individualism, as well as to various artists of particularly humble
origin. Among Godwin’s friends was the ultra-romantic Swiss-born artist
Henry Fuseli, admired by Tom Paine and some Marxists “ partly because
as a youth he had been compelled to flee from Zurich after making a bold
attack on oppression in high places, and because in 1767 at London he had
published a pamphlet defending Rousseau, whose Discourse on Inequality
he had early admired.
One of Fuseli’s somewhat younger friends who has been referred to
several times in this book, William Blake (1757-1827), was also an
acquaintance of Godwin and Tom Paine. Blake, who was much influenced
by Fuseli, early regarded himself as destined to renew the arts in an
essentially republican fashion at a time when the word “republican”
connoted revolutionary radicalism. By the 1790’s he had passed from a
kind of Christian humanitarianism to a pronounced political and social
radicalism. Like ‘Tom Paine, Blake supported both the American and the
French revolutions, and like Paine and Godwin, wrote in opposition to
Burke’s attack on the latter revolution—especially in his poem of 1791,
The French Revolution, and in his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell of
about the same period. However, the execution of the French King and
Queen in 1793 followed by the “Terror,” and Pitt’s repression of English
radicals during the war with France, led Blake, much like Godwin, to
forswear political activity. Still, he opposed the rising bourgeoisie and
regarded the new industrial developments as dehumanizing man, in this
foreshadowing Ruskin and William Morris. He was destined to have a
profound influence on the Pre-Raphaclites, and through them his extraor-
dinarily dynamic, flame-like style was to have a profound effect on the
artistically, and often socially, radical art movement called Art Nouveau.
Other artist acquaintances and friends of Godwin were the engraver
John Landseer, and his three sons, also the portrait painters James North-
cote, John Opie, and Sir Thomas Lawrence, all three of whom were
 Utopian Socialism, Radicalism, and Their Implications / 389

profoundly conscious of coming from lowly social backgrounds, though

this consciousness scarcely affected their art. But Godwin’s influence was
most strongly felt through leaders of English literary romanticism because
his ideas combined with others coming from the French Revolution to
stimulate particularly Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth as young men,
and later his own son-in-law, Shelley, who went beyond Godwin in uphold-
ing the artist as legislator. And because Shelley defended revolution as
exemplified in the democratic revolutions in France, America, Spain, Italy,
and Greece, his writings were to be particularly admired by Marx and
Engels.
In 1794, the year after the publication of the Enquiry Concerning . . .
Political Justice, Southey and Coleridge—both of whom like Godwin were
of Non-conformist background (in their case, Unitarian)—had met at
Oxford. Both were already ardently republican and sympathetic to the
French Revolution, as were so many other important figures with a back-
ground of Dissent. Among these, it should be noted, were leading industri-
alists, including Abraham Darby, the previously mentioned ironmaster
who in the late 1770’s had erected over the Severn River at Coalbrookdale
the first successful iron bridge ever built. Thus, along with early romanti-
cism was to be found an early technocratic-functionalism, like it, sympa-
thetic to the spirit of republican revolution. And the two were often to be
combined among believers in progress in a way already foreshadowed by
Diderot, whose own religious dissent, however, was anti-clerical rather than
Non-conformist.
At Southey’s suggestion, Coleridge and he worked up a scheme for an
ideal community based on Godwinian principles but stressing also, in a
proto-romantic way, the innocence of the patriarchal age exalted by
Rousseau, as well as all the knowledge and experience of European culture.
This romantically utopian community—or Pantisocracy, as they called it
(a word meaning equal government of all)—they proposed to locate in the
new republic of the United States on the banks of the Susquehanna
River.’® But complications resulting from lack of money and from love
(because Coleridge and Southey soon contracted unfortunate marriages to
sisters) prevented them from founding their community. Then, as the
political sky became even more clouded by war between Britain and
Revolutionary France, the vogue of Godwin’s Enquiry died away, and
before 1800, Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth all gave up their God-
winian and French Revolutionary principles."* Godwin himself fell upon
hard times, and thereafter found life difficult.
Eventually, however, Coleridge (though not Southey) returned to
become one of Godwin’s best friends; and in his later years, Godwin was
also cheered by the regard of Hazlitt, the son of a Unitarian minister and a
convinced Jacobin, and that of Charles Lamb. (Hazlitt began as a profes-
sional portrait painter, and his first journalism was largely art criticism;
Lamb, too, wrote occasional essays on the fine arts.) Through an American
390 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

disciple, the romantic novelist Charles Brockden Brown, who was particu-
larly impressed by Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams, his influence reached
the American literary and artistic tradition. In this way, and also indirectly
through Coleridge, it affected members of Emerson's circle, including
Emerson himself, and the sculptor and functionalist art critic, Horatio
Greenough. But Godwin’s most direct and powerful influence on romantic
literature was exerted through Shelley, many of whose poems—notably
The Revolt of Islam (1817) and Prometheus Unbound (1819)—directly
reflect his ideas. Shelley, together with Keats, Lamb, and Hazlitt, was a
contributor to Leigh Hunt’s Examiner; A Weekly Paper on Politics,
Literature, Music, and the Fine Arts,.of which Hunt’s brother Robert was
the surprisingly conservative art critic. This reforming journal of the
Radical intelligentsia, wrongly attacked by the Tories as “Jacobin,” sup-
ported both the romantic poets and the Radical politicians: the literary
romanticism of Keats and other members of the so-called Cockney School
was at that time closely linked to British Radicalism. ‘Two years after Hunt
left the Examiner in 1820, he founded with Shelley and Byron a short-lived
periodical called the Liberal, liberalism then being regarded as highly
radical. Through Shelley’s poems; too, the anarchism that he derived so
largely from Godwin, itself began to appear as a theme of world literature.
And from literature it could pass to other arts, which on the Continent
were independently affected by the writings of Proudhon and later by
those of Kropotkin. Today, Shelley’s “romantic-revolutionary art” con-
tinues to be highly praised by Soviet critics as having been an important
expression of the revolutionary spirit within its own still bourgeois
period.
From Godwin, Marx and Engels may well have indirectly derived
their essentially anarchistic doctrine of the withering away of the state:
this could have passed from Godwin to Marx by way of the early British
socialistic economist William Thompson, whose work is known to have
influenced Marx. Other aspects of Godwin’s thought could have reached
Marx through the writings of Owen—though not the libertarian spirit
which Owen inherited from Godwin and transmitted to the early trade-
union movement in Britain; and not, of course, that pronounced degree of
romantic utopianism which characterized the socialism of Owen as it did
that of Saint-Simon and Fourier.

3. Owens Communities
and His Labor Movement

Tur exrenr of Robert Owen’s utopianism is especially indicated by

Southey’s statement, after meeting Owen in 1816, that he could recognize
 Utopian Socialism, Radicalism, and Their Implications / 391

in Owen’s experiment at New Lanark the fulfillment of his own earlier

Pantisocracy.”" In contrast to Godwin, Owen—like Pantisocracy—empha-
sized the role of the social community as a whole in achieving social justice.
But with Godwin and Pantisocracy alike, he deemphasized the role of the
state.
In 1817, the very year in which Southey had compared New Lanark
with Pantisocracy, Owen issued his Report to the Committee of the
Association for the Relief of the Manufacturing and Labouring Poor as his
reaction to the economic depression that had developed in England after
the ending of the Napoleonic wars. In this he first put forth his view that it
is the duty of society to provide useful employment for its members, and
also set out to outline a social system that would achieve this end. His
solution called for decentralizing one aspect of society by housing the
pauper unemployed in “Villages of Cooperation,” each somewhat like his
textile town of New Lanark, but each self-governing like one of Godwin’s
“parishes,” though with much more emphasis on cooperation. Each Vil-
lage was to contain between 500 and 1,500 people. It thus was somewhat
smaller than Bentham’s “Industry-House Establishment” (originally in-
tended by Bentham’s brother, among other purposes, to house paupers),
smaller also than the ideal Fourierist phalanx, yet similar to it in combin-
ing agriculture with some industry. In Owen’s own words, the Villages
were to be “founded on the principle of united labour and expenditure
having their basis in agriculture, and in which all should have mutual and
common interests.” * Even though agriculture was stressed, there would
also be workshops and factories, primarily to produce the goods necessary
for each Village’s subsistence. Nevertheless, the surplus of manufactured
goods was to be sold, so that in combining agriculture with industry—an
idea that Owen carried over to his conception of ideal socialistic communi-
ties—he had much in common with Fourier. Indeed, his whole system was
basically quite similar to Fourierism, for he too believed that socialists
should voluntarily undertake to reorganize society, rejecting the Saint-
Simonian (and Marxian) doctrine that the rhythms of history, aided by an
elite vanguard, would themselves give rise to the reconstructed society.
Owen’s Report was illustrated with a drawing in bird’s-eye perspective
of the layout of his ideal Village (Fig. 64). This conception was in many
respects followed later in Owen’s architectural schemes for socialistic
communities: the Village of Cooperation was the first example of modern
town planning to be worked out in detail from its political and economic
principles to the actual building plans and financial estimates. The draw-
ing shows the Village in the form of a hollow parallelogram, with the
dining hall, school, and church across the center, and living apartments on
the sides. Although each family was supposed to have its own apartment,
the food was to be cooked in a common kitchen, and the dining-rooms,
sitting-rooms, and recreation rooms were to be shared in common, Gar-
dens were to surround the “parallelogram” (as Owen himself called it),
 Fic. 64. Robert Owen’s project (1816) for a Village of Cooperation, with
other Villages in the distance.

carefully separating it from the factories and workshops beyond. In segre-

gating industry within a special zone separated from the living quarters by
a greenbelt of gardens, Owen foreshadowed the “garden city” as invented
at the very end of the nineteenth century by Ebenezer Howard, partly
under the conscious influence of Owen’s ideas.
Owen’s scheme for his Villages of Cooperation drew favorable atten-
tion, and, with later proposals, aided him in gathering a considerable body
of disciples, even though his increasing attacks on organized religion
alienated many. Encouraged by support for his social ideas, in 1824, after
he had largely lost control of New Lanark to his partners, Owen decided to
establish a model cooperative community called New Harmony in a village
named Harmony which had been built in Indiana by a German commu-
nistic religious sect, the Harmonists or Rappites. Like Fourier (who in
1824 tried to convert Owen to Fourierism) and like Cabet later, Owen
believed that if rational men could see the ideal social existence as exempli-
fied by a model socialistic community close to nature, they would eagerly
seize upon the idea and establish similar communities everywhere.
The American artist Chester Harding was at New Lanark in 1824
when the agent of the Rappites approached Owen to urge him to go to
Indiana to see the village with the aim of purchasing it. Harding wrote in
his Journal that “Mr. Owen seems too credulous,” and that he himself had
 Utopian Socialism, Radicalism, and Their Implications / 39 3

advised Owen “to try his plans in Massachusetts, or some other of the old
States, where there is a more crowded population as well as a greater
proportion of intellect. But,” Harding added, “Mr. Flower [the Rappites’
agent] will succeed, I fear.” *
Flower did succeed. In October 1824 Owen sailed for the United
States. Stimulated by his favorable impression of communism in action on
a visit to the Shaker village at Watervliet, New York, he bought the
Rappite village in January 1825, together with 30,000 acres of land. ‘The
task of settling New Harmony with Owenite converts was carried out
under the direction of Owen’s son William, while Owen himself spent
most of his time traveling to publicize the new community. On a trip to
England in the summer of 1825, he had a model made, six feet square, to
show how he proposed to rebuild New Harmony (Fig. 65) on a site three
miles away from the old Rappite village. The designer was Stedman
Whitwell, a London architect and social reformer who in the fall of 1825
came to the United States with Owen and the model. This was exhibited
in New York and Philadelphia, and also in Washington, where it was
displayed in the White House and presented to President John Quincy

settlement at New
ric. 65. Robert Owen’s project (1825) for a communal
Harmony, Ind., designed by Stedman Whitwell.
394 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

Adams—all of which was good propaganda for New Harmony, as Owen

intended it to be.
Like the scheme for Villages of Cooperation, the model for New
Harmony was organized as a parallelogram (a form that Charles Fourier
” But where the Villages of Cooperation
attacked as “perfect monotony).””
had been designed in the then still-prevailing late Georgian style of
architecture, Whitwell’s model was Gothic Revival combined with some
features of Greek Revival Style, thereby bringing together in a thoroughly
eclectic way the two chief “advanced” architectural fashions of the time.
As a result, in a characteristically utopian socialist manner the model
indicated that history was regarded as significant, stimulating, and to be
made use of, but that progress was even more important. For although the
details on Owen’s model were all either Gothic or Greek, the elements of
the two styles were not only placed side by side in an unhistorical manner
but also applied to a basic layout original in conception and very different
from that of any Gothic or Greek building. The layout was more rigid than
that of the original village of Harmony, even though the Rappites’ town
had been laid out with a regular plan imposed by one of their leaders.
Much as at New Lanark, there was little interest in the arts other than
music, the theater, and dancing: the weekly concert by the community’s
own orchestra, a weekly dance, and occasional theatrical performances
reflected the characteristic regard of utopians for arts expressive of social
harmony and cooperation. Otherwise, the approach was characteristically
Owenite in emphasizing useful crafts and sciences. The curriculum in the
excellent progressive schools of the community—progressive in the educa-
tional tradition of Rousseau, and so reflecting the belief of the secular
utopians in perfectibility through educational conditioning—stressed such
crafts as carpentry, smithing, shoemaking, hatmaking, and printing. En-
graving and drawing were also taught, but with the utilitarian and even
propagandistic end of book-illustration, partly in connection with the
admirable program of research and publication in such natural sciences as
botany, conchology, and ichthyology directed by an associate of Owen
named Maclure.
As in so many other communities of utopian socialists or communists,
at New Harmony many of the members were essentially romantic individu-
alists highly unsuited to the cooperation and hard work necessary for
success in such a venture. Indeed, the leader of the orchestra, Josiah
Warren, later became the founder of American individualistic anarchism
—and his attempts at establishing anarchist communities were to fail, as
New Harmony itself failed. At New Harmony, schism after schism, crisis
after crisis, took place; and Owen fell out with Maclure. In June 1827 he
left New Harmony, returning briefly in 1828 for the last time to-try to
wind up the affairs of the community by selling land outright to those who
wanted to buy it, and by leasing to others who wished to attempt to
continue on in a more or less communal way. As for the ideal community
 Utopian Socialism, Radicalism, and Their Implications / 395

represented in Whitwell’s model, only a very small amount of half-hearted

work had been done on the new site, apparently more as propaganda than
anything else. The difference between the ideal and the reality at New
Harmony had proved so great that it, like practically all other utopian
communities, ended in failure. A basic difficulty at New Harmony, as at
some later utopian communities, had been the friction between the
wealthy chief proprietor, here Owen, and a group of thoroughgoing com-
munists in the community who demanded that the proprietor hand over
his property to the members. At New Harmony, the difficulty had con-
tinued after Owen sought to obviate it in 1826 by reorganizing the settle-
ment into what was called a Community of Equality—though Owen never
did plan to turn his property over to the community.
The New Harmony experiment cost Owen four-fifths of his fortune.
This did not prevent him from visiting Mexico to try to secure a large
grant of land in Texas for the purpose of founding another community.
After this hope, too, proved vain, he returned to England in 1829, and
there continued to issue occasional projects for communities. In 1833, he
had a woodcut made showing the “Design of a Community of 2,000
Persons, Founded Upon a Principle Commended by Plato [in his Repub-
lic], Lord Bacon [in his New Atlantis], Sir T. More [in his Utopia] and
Robert Owen,” and ran this cut several times at the head of a paper he had
founded called the Crisis.
Although Owen issued such programs for ideal socialist communities
throughout so much of his life, he could never quite make up his mind as
to the degree of economic equality that ought to prevail. In middle life he
showed himself to be most egalitarian, but at the beginning and at the end
of his career he believed (as he said in connection with one of his early
proposals) that the individual “producer should have a fair and fixed
proportion of all the wealth that he creates.” * In accordance with this
sentiment, he usually specified that there would be four different economic
classes within his ideal socialist communities, and this, of course, affected
the planning of most of his architectural projects. In one of his last great
projects, issued in 1841, the four classes were each to occupy one side of
the parallelogram.
Over the years, a rash of communities was established in Britain on
Owenite principles, in several of which Owen took a direct or indirect
interest; among these communities were Orbiston (1825-1827) in Lanark-
shire, Ralahine (1831-1833) in Ireland, and Tytherly (1839-1845) in
Hampshire.” All these communities failed too, and usually for much the
same reasons as had New Harmony.
Significantly, although the wealthy person or the group of persons
of
who founded each of these communities supposedly did so on the basis
Owen’s ideas, no two communities were alike, as their widely different
the ro-
architecture showed. All of them, in some way or other, reflected
mantic individualism that so strongly underlay social utopianism, together
396 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

Not one fol-

with the belief in progress inherent in the utopian spirit.
had been sharpl y criticized
lowed Owen’s basic parallelogram plan—which
England by Leigh Hunt,
as monotonous not only by Fourier but also in
n squares.
who called it a version of the endlessly repeated Londo
a new structure
Ralahine consisted of a group of new cottages and
e-room above, built near
containing a communal dining hall, with a lectur
over to the com-
an old castle owned by the founder, which he turned
lecture facilities
munity. The new building with the communal dining and
directly reflected
was thus about the only aspect of the community that
tion was
the utopian social spirit, for otherwise the rich founder’s concep
ed to the
basically little different from that of any village community attach
great house of some other philanthropic landed proprietor.
there
At Orbiston, the earliest complete British Owenite community,
ry stone buildin g 680 feet long, intende d to
was projected a huge four-sto
was designe d in late Georgia n classica l
house a thousand people. This
nal in its minimiz ation of orname nt
style obviously intended to be functio
plan,
and in its highly rational (but boring) symmetrical organization in
with repetitive equalized accommodatio ns on each side of monoto nously
long corridors extending the full length of both L-shaped wings. One of the
d
two wings was actually built, and for a time housed some three hundre
Owenites. However, as so often happened in such communi ties, utopian
optimism had led the members to expend far more money than was wise.
The building had to be put up for sale in 1830 to pay the community’s
debts, and was then torn down by the new owner for the value of the stone
in it.
The community at Tytherly, known from the principal farm within
its grounds as Queenwood, was the next-to-last Owenite community to be
founded in Britain. It was also the one with which Owen had the most to
do. When Queenwood was established in 1839, a decade after he left New
Harmony, his usual optimism led him to contribute to it, though he
was only one of a group of proprietors, and part of the money for the com-
munity was raised from Owenites all over England. Owen’s big-scale ideas
and optimistic extravagance led him and his colleagues to support the
building of a large, rationally symmetrical community residence called
Harmony Hall. This was designed in an eclectic but vaguely “modern”
style that included twin towers in the latest free “Lombard” or “Italian
villa” fashion. The style was described by a contemporary as “baronial”;
and certainly no expense was spared—the kitchen was even wainscotted
in mahogany. The designer of the building was Joseph Hansom, Owenite
son of a joiner who had become a well-known architect in Birmingham,
but who is best known for patenting the Hansom, or safety, cab, which
itself exemplified Owenite “rationality” in design. Harmony Hall, designed
to house 224 adults and 448 children, was largely completed by 1842 but
never came near to being filled. The community fell deeper and deeper
into debt; there was a revolt within the Owenite body against Owen’s
 Utopian Socialism, Radicalism, and Their Implications / 397

extravagant policies, and a group of working-class Owenites who upheld

full equality took over Harmony Hall. But the financial difficulties per-
sisted and proved insurmountable: in 1846 the last Owenite in the com-
munity was forcibly expelled from the building, and the premises were let
as a college. (The structure burned down in 1901.)
The final Owenite community to be founded in Britain was estab-
lished at Garlnwyd, Wales, in 1847. However, it was crippled by lack of
capital and especially by the marginal land which the utopian optimism
of the colonists had led them to occupy, and the community failed in 1855.
In these British Owenite communities, as at New Harmony, there was
little interest in the arts other than architecture and utilitarian crafts. As
at New Harmony, too, most of the crafts were those best suited to a rural
community, although at Orbiston there was a flourishing industry—an iron
foundry—unsuited to a frontier community such as New Harmony.
In England, the chief “art” of the Owenites was the kind of literature
intended to proclaim and explain their new views of society. Being propa-
gandistic, it was essentially didactic and expository, although there were
occasional Owenite pieces whose rhetoric reflected the romantic spirit of
utopianism. A few poems were written in praise of Owenism, and there
were also some Owenite hymns to serve to bring the Owenites together in
harmonious collective performance, especially those who remained Chris-
tians—unlike Owen himself, who, though described by his son as a deist,
verged on atheism.
Such literature and music could also be the arts most typical of
Owenism in its trade-union phase that occupied Owen for some years
between the failure of New Harmony and the founding of the Queenwood
community. For in 1829 his interest had shifted to trying to solve the social
problem by means of trade unions, labor exchanges, and consumer co-
operatives. In Owen’s mind, these were all aspects of an integrated scheme
designed to capture the working-class movement and use it as an instru-
ment of social change. For a time, Owen and his followers were phe-
nomenally successful in developing the first mass trade-union movement,
culminating in the founding of the Grand National Consolidated Trades
Union and the brief emergence of Owen as a national leader.
The passing of the Reform Bill of 1832 had, however, doomed Owen’s
labor movement to ultimate failure. Although that bill had not enfran-
chised British workingmen, it had stirred their interest in political reform.
But Owen had no interest in it because he never recognized that parlia-
mentary reform had any relevance to improving the condition of the
people. As a consequence, by 1835 Owen had lost control of the British
working class, and the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, the
labor exchanges, and the cooperative stores had all vanished. Simultane-
ously, Owen had returned to the classless views he had held before 1829.
“When the failure of his working-class movement had been followed
by the failure of the community at Tytherly, Owen passed more and more
 MARXISM IN ENGLAND
308 / RADICALISM,
m that*had still characterized
over to spiritualism from the strict rationalis
in his The Book of the New
his system of society and religion as expressed
of attitude could hardly be ex-
Moral World (1836-1844). This reversal
Yet faithful followers re-
pected to attract large numbers of followers.
thirteen years after Owen’s
mained—enough of them so that in 1871,
ration of the centenary of
death, they called a meeting at London in celeb
ites.
his birth, the last public meeting held by the Owen
, Owen, like many
In shifting from rationalism to spiritualism
became Roman Catholics,
twentieth-century Marxian communists who y
poles were highl
passed from one pole to its opposite. In his case both more so than
tecture—far
unsuited for encouraging religious art and archi
ines of Saint-Simon or Founer,
even the highly unorthodox religious doctr
both of whom had such great respect for the arts.
t in art, and few
In England, few social radicals developed an interes
after the influe nce of Saint-
artists an interest in social radicalism, until
of societ y and its exalta-
Simonianism came in. Its organismic conception
e and the arts, were
tion of the artist, linking social problems with cultur
affect ed by Saint-
reinforced by aspects of Christian socialism (itself
by influences from
Simonianism), by some Fourierist influence, and also
likewi se emphasized
German philosophical and literary romanticism which
Saint -Simonianism
the organic point of view. The chief connection with
te named
was provided by Carlyle, that with Fourierism by a former Oweni
by both
Hugh Doherty. The link with German romanticism was made
dge and by
Coleridge and Carlyle, that with Christian socialism by Coleri
John M. Ludlow, who was influenced by French utopian socialism.
 8
OTHER RADICAL ARTISTS
AND CRITICS OF ENGLAND
KFROM CARLY LE’S
“SIGNS OF THE TIMES”
TO THE DEATH OF WILLIAM
MORRIS, 1829-1896

1. Carlyle and Mill

A .rnovcs Carlyle (1795-1881) was contemptuous of the visual arts, he
was destined to have a profound effect upon them as well as upon social
ideas. After all, Ruskin (1819-1900), the greatest British art critic of the
nineteenth century, acknowledged him as master. In turn, William Morris
(1834-1896), who was the first avowed Marxist anywhere to give a truly
primary place to art, acknowledged Ruskin as his master. As a conse-
quence, even though Germany became the ideological center of Marxism
after Marx died in England in 1883, England was for some time the major
radiating center of artistic doctrines bearing radical social connotations,
including some that were Marxian.
Carlyle, like so many other British romantic writers interested in social
problems with reference to fullest development of the individual person,
grew up in a background of strict Protestantism: he had been destined for
the ministry in the Church of Scotland. Like his older contemporary,
Coleridge, he was strongly influenced by German romantic philosophy, its
individualism and its organicism. He early considered himself a speculative
radical, and so, with other English radicals, had at least some inclinations
toward the Utilitarianism of the Benthamite Philosophical Radicals. For
Carlyle early became a good friend of John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), son
of Bentham’s chief collaborator James Mill, and himself a leading Philo-
sophical Radical.
Because the Utilitarians wished to benefit “the people” by opposing
400 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

aristocracy and seeking “the greatest happiness of. the greatest number,”
and therefore emphasized practical arts rather than fine arts, one art in
which they could and did make a major contribution was that of town
planning, a contribution foreshadowed in Bentham’s own “Industry-House
Establishment” for 2,000 persons. As early as 1828 the young John Stuart
Mill’s best friend and fellow-Utilitarian, John Arthur Roebuck, outlined a
program of town planning and town development. In this, as part of the
anti-enclosure campaign supported by Philosophical Radicals against the
aristocracy, he advocated tree-lined boulevards, public parks, lawns open to
everyone, and large tracts of common land outside of towns, ringing them
around if possible—an early proposal for greenbelts which, like that of
Owen earlier, long anticipated the garden city.’ Mill relates in his
Autobiography that Roebuck was exceptional among Utilitarians in being
interested in most of the fine arts, especially painting, and it is significant
that he particularly liked to draw landscapes.
Although in 1828 John Stuart Mill felt the influence of Saint-Simoni-
anism through Gustave d’Eichthal, one of Saint-Simon’s most prominent
disciples, Mill at that time did not, like the Saint-Simonians or his friend
Roebuck, pay much attention to art. Largely through the influence of
Coleridge’s thought, however, he was led away from Benthamism and
from the belief of Bentham’s intellectual sons, the Philosophical Radicals,
that the realization of man’s “limitless perfectibility” should be sought
through legislative action on a basis of Iaissez-faire economics. Also, in
1826-1827, when Mill was about twenty years old, he had a kind of
nervous breakdown, and as he recovered, found in music, the one art in
which he had taken pleasure since childhood, a great relief from the arid
rationalism in which he had been raised by his Philosophical Radical
father. He then found further relief in the romantic poetry of Words-
worth, which he discovered in 1828. Still later, the influence of his future
wife, Mrs. Helen Taylor, whom he first met in 1830, led him to become
much interested in the visual arts. As his letters to her show, he increas-
ingly seized upon every opportunity to visit museums on his travels and to
report upon major works of art that they contained. He came to the belief
that music, painting, and sculpture have great social value and educational
power for achieving the inward harmony that he regarded as the end of
life.’
Mill had earlier taken oyer from the Saint-Simonian socialists the idea
of elitism, and like the Saint-Simonians had been enthusiastic about the
Revolution of 1830 as offering an opportunity for social change. With his
eventual attraction to the arts, he, like the Saint-Simonians earlier, could
now look upon artists as an avant-garde elite. Eventually, as will be seen
later, he became a convinced socialist under the influence ‘of his
stepdaughter.
In the days when Mill and Carlyle were most friendly, however, Mill
was still a typical Utilitarian in paying little attention to art; and a
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 401

corresponding lack of interest in the visual arts was to be characteristic of

Carlyle all his life. Still, as early as 1817, not unlike Mill’s Utilitarian
friend Roebuck a decade later, Carlyle had already become concerned
about the social problem of achieving happiness in the towns of an
industrial age. In that year he had visited the textile mills of New Lanark
to see the reforms instituted in that industrial town by Owen; and even
then he was apparently formulating his own secular social gospel. In 1831,
also, when he went to London to arrange for the publication of Sartor
Resartus, he met the old anarchist William Godwin: not impressed by
Godwin, Carlyle himself was a kind of individualist anarchist in an author-
itarian way. He too was stimulated by the ideas of the French Revolution,
which reached him especially through his deep interest in the Revolution
of 1830, and also in Chartism, the only truly proletarian mass movement of
the nineteenth century.

2. Carlyle, Chartism, and Saint-Simonianism

"Tun Cuarrists were to some degree the successors of the Luddites who
from 1811 to 1813 sought to destroy the machines of the burgeoning
Industrial Revolution, and under Jacobin influence even developed some
connections with revolutionary conspiracy.* Chartism arose in Britain a
generation later—in 1836-1837—amid the widespread distress and popular
disappointment following the adoption of the Reform Bill in 1832, which
gave the industrial capitalists the vote, and the failure of Owenite socialism
to develop an effective strategy and leadership. Chartism spread especially
in the textile and mining industries, which had been particularly affected
by the new industrialism; and it successfully challenged the claim of the
Philosophical Radicals to be the political and intellectual leaders of the
democratic movement. Although the Philosophical Radicals agreed with
the Chartists on the necessity for organic social reform, they could not
accept the Chartists’ willingness to use violence or their insistence that
reform should have a purely working-class basis.
Chartism took its name from “the people’s charter,” a bill of rights
composed in 1838 by William Lovett with the help of J. A. Roebuck and
Francis Place. Among other things it called for universal suffrage and
for paid representatives who would need no property qualifications.
on, a
The movement grew out of the London Working Men’s Associati
Lovett, who, like
body of London Radicals founded in 1836 by William
under Owen’s
several other leading Chartists, began his public career
was in
auspices. Insofar as Chartism had a theoretical foundation, this
large part consciously derived from the Jacobinism of the French Revolu-
on, for
tion. One of those most prominent in furnishing that foundati
 if RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND
402

who sub-
instance, was James “Bronterre” O’Brien, an Irish intellectual
sm made by combin ing Owenit e socialism
scribed to a revolutionary sociali
s
with that English ultra-Radicalism in which the traditions of the Jacobin
and
were strong. For O’Brien consciously took Robespierre as his model,
conspir acy of that belated Jacobin ,
in 1836 translated the history of the
Babeuf, written by Filippo Buonarotti, one of the conspirators. Another
pe
Chartist theoretician was George Julian Harney, whose avowed prototy
was Marat, and who called himself the Ami du peuple and wore the bonnet
rouge. He also became the leading exponent of proletarian international-
ism, conceiving it to be the mission of the working class to establish the
“Social Republic,” thereby bringing the French Revolution to fulfillment.
Harney was a favorite of Marx and Engels, to whom Chartism was so
important that in 1847, the year before their Communist Manifesto was
published, they spent much of their time in making contacts with various
Chartists. In that year, for instance, Marx wrote for the Northern Star, the
paper of the Chartist Feargus O’Connor, to which Engels had already
contributed, and of which Harney was editor throughout most of the
1840’s. O'Connor, though not a socialist, was influenced by Owen’s ideas
for planning communitarian colonies, and organized a company for build-
ing as land colonies several Chartist workers’ villages, none of which
survived more than a few years. One of these, built at Herringate about
1848, was named O’Connorville in his honor.
Chartism lost favor with Marx and Engels, however, when they fell
out with Harney. After the failure of the Revolutions of 1848, he took the
opposite side from them in a split in the Communist League, for which
they had written the Communist Manifesto. Still, it was Harney who
published the first English translation of the Manifesto in the issue of his
periodical, the Red Republican, for November 1850."
In 1848, while revolutions were convulsing the Continent, the Chart-
ists attempted, not revolution on the continental model, but a great
demonstration at Kennington Common, whence they planned to march
on Westminster bearing a huge petition with nearly six million signatures.
The demonstration was easily suppressed, however, and the petition
meekly taken to Westminster in three ordinary cabs. Thereafter, the
Chartist movement declined; its last national convention was held in 1858,
although its influence endured long after that—in fact until the Chartists’
demands had been essentially fulfilled. Nevertheless, the pathetic collapse
of the Chartists at Kennington Common showed all too clearly the power
of capitalism in industrialized England, whose very industrialization, para-
doxically enough, alone had made possible such a large-scale social move-
ment as Chartism itself.
Because Chartism was a working-class movement in a period when
workers were ill-paid and had almost no leisure, its members could hardly
be expected to take much direct interest in the arts. Such interest as they
did take was concentrated on kinds of art that could be aimed at support-
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 403

ing the Chartist cause itself: Chartist newspapers made some use of
graphic art in supplements intended to propagandize for Chartism. More
important, this working-class movement also attracted the sympathies of
members of the middle class engaged in the arts. Among them were
Wordsworth and various painters, some of whom belonged to the artis-
tically radical Pre-Raphaelite group of which Ruskin was a strong sup-
porter and Morris a younger member, and which was also affected by
Carlyle’s ideas.
Carlyle, stirred by the Chartist movement and its echoes of the revolt
of the masses in the French Revolution, published his Chartism in 1839.
Two years earlier, his French Revolution had been issued; and he now
declared that Chartism was “‘our French Revolution.” *
In the light of Carlyle’s beliefs and his role as a seer and a quester into
society, it is hardly surprising that even earlier he had attracted the
attention of the Saint-Simonians: in 1830, that year of revolution and of
the full emergence of the working class in France, Gustave d’Eichthal,
acting for the Saint-Simonian Society, had begun a correspondence with
Carlyle after having been in touch with Carlyle’s friend Mill since 1829.
D’Eichthal initiated the correspondence with Carlyle by accompanying his
letter with copies of Saint-Simonian publications. One contained a critique
of Carlyle’s essay, “Signs of the Times” (1829), because the Saint-
Simonians had been so struck by similarities between its ideas and those of
Saint-Simon, who had died four years earlier. Partly because of his corre-
spondence with Carlyle, D’Eichthal and another Saint-Simonian were sent
to England by their leader, “Peére” Enfantin, to convert the British to
Saint-Simonianism. While on their mission, early in 1832 they made a
point of meeting Carlyle, who not only disregarded the advice of his
“spiritual father,” Goethe, to hold aloof from Saint-Simonianism, but even
made a translation into English of Saint-Simon’s Nouveau Christianisme,
which he turned over to D’Eichthal in 1832 but for which a publisher
could not be found.°
Although by 1834 Carlyle’s direct contact with the Saint-Simonians
had ended, it had stimulated his thought on social questions. Indeed,
many of his views about philosophy, history, morals, and politics paralleled
the doctrines of Saint-Simon, and in some respects may even have been
enduringly infused with Saint-Simonian ideas.’ Certainly Marx and Engels
seemed to think that this was so, because although they warmly agreed
with Carlyle that the French Revolution had been a necessary overthrow
of corrupt institutions, and although they praised him for “having opposed
the bourgeoisie in literature . . . in a manner which at moments was even
revolutionary,” they attacked his views about the historic process as sinking
to the level of “a completely demoralized and banal Saint-Simonism.” *
Significantly, Carlyle is cited in the Oxford English Dictionary as the
first to use, in 1831, the word “vanguard” figuratively in English—like the
Saint-Simonians, he too believed in an elite. Even though he employed
 RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND
404 i

® he appar-
“vanguard” with reference to the primacy of German culture,
French word “avant- garde” employed
ently was merely translating the
figuratively by Saint-Simon in 1825 with reference to the administrative
social vanguard and the leading role of artists in it.
Carlyle always differed from the Saint-Simonians in important re-
-
spects. For one thing, he looked somewhat askance at their highly unortho
dox religious views. More important, in contrast to the Saint-S imonian s, he
was principally concerned not with the forms of civil government or social
institutions but with individual men, a concern clearly indicated by his
thetorical question, “Is not the whole purpose of history biographic?” *°
For him, in contrast to Saint-Simon, life and history were superior to art.
In addition, Carlyle always retained a Tory’s belief in social hierarchy: “a
man has his superiors, a regular hierarchy above him, extending up. . . to
Heaven itself .. .” he declared," thus offering a social version of the
Neo-Platonic Great Chain of Being.
In view of Carlyle’s emphasis on the individual human being, as well
as on social hierarchy, it is scarcely surprising that, despite his radicalism,
he never became a socialist or communist, though some aspects of his
thought were to affect socialists and communists, among others. Because
his concentration on the individual was at least partly romantic in origin, it
is also not surprising that one of his more important concepts came more
directly from German romanticism than from Saint-Simon. This was the
idea of organicism.

3. Carlyle, Coleridge, and Organicism

"Lue concert of organicism—which had already appeared in the thought

of Diderot, among others, had affected the later thought of Saint-Simon,
and was to influence that of Karl Marx—could be attractive to romantics
not only in connection with their view that society is a kind of organism
but especially in direct relation to their concept of individual genius. For
the romantics insisted that genius makes its possessor a uniquely living
totality transcending the laws of physics and chemistry, and thus far more
than a mere machine.
This application of the organismic analogy, which had first been fully
developed by such German romantics as Herder and Schelling, particularly
appealed to Carlyle. It could do so especially because he anticipated, and
came to admire, Nietzsche’s romantic glorification of the superman as an
exalted form of original genius—as a prophet-hero, indeed, who reflected
the kind of “cult of personality” of which Stalin was to be accused after his
death. Many romantics had long regarded the artist as the original genius
and prophet-hero par excellence, and so as a special kind of superman. It
was not too difficult for them to transfer the organismic analogy from the
artist himself, as superman and prophet, to the artist’s creations. It there-
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 405

fore was possible to regard “organic” as referring to the organically autono-

mous development of art, and so even to “art for art’s sake.” Hence it was
equally possible to regard the individual work of art as itself a unique
totality that is far more than the sum of its physical materials and its
subject-matter, a totality that like an organism possesses a life of its own.
Although this application of the organic analogy to individual works of
visual art was not made by Carlyle, who seldom spoke of fine art save with
contempt, it had already been foreshadowed in the writings of Coleridge,
primarily in relation to the art of literature. As noted in the previous
chapter, Coleridge is said to have introduced the word “organic” into
English criticism,” borrowing it from the German romantics.
But if it was thus possible to regard an individual genius or a work of
art as a living organism, it was of course equally easy, as Comte and Marx
showed, to regard human society as a living totality that is more than the
sum of the individuals composing it, and so as a kind of organism—a view
that Stalin, following Lenin, was to apply to the Communist Party even
more than to society as a whole. The youthful Coleridge, stimulated by the
ideas of Rousseau and of the anarchist William Godwin, as well as by the
French Revolution (much as many young Europeans and Americans were
later to be stimulated by the Russian Revolution), had earlier sought to
achieve a more truly organic society even at a time when he was still
fascinated by Hartley’s mechanistic materialism. For it was with the aim of
developing such a society that in 1794 he and his friend Robert Southey
had proposed to establish in America their utopian communistic settle-
ment, or Pantisocracy, on the banks of the Susquehanna River. However,
although Coleridge and Southey were then highly critical of laissez-faire
capitalism and its individualism, and although Southey, after meeting
Owen in 1816, had written with much sympathy about various aspects of
Owenism, and was later to be interested in Saint-Simonianism, as was
Coleridge also, he and Coleridge increasingly moved away from socialism.
But instead of moving toward capitalism, they went toward a kind of
paternalism in which the state—in a higher form—and the church would
be in balance with one another, and would have as the principle of unity
between them an idea of organic responsibility for the welfare of the
people. In upholding the idea of a church that would stand above social
and
classes, and in lacking sympathy for political democracy, Coleridge
Southey had much in common with the Christian socialism that developed
two
somewhat later on the Continent and in England: indeed, Coleridge’s
been called “the first voice of Christian
Lay Sermons have even
part of
socialism.” ** Yet for Coleridge the Church of Christ should be but
class comprehending “the
the National Church, or Clerisy, an endowed
learned of all denominations; the sages and professors of . . . all the
be general
so-called liberal arts and sciences,” ** whose business should
cultivation.
of German
Fspecially through Coleridge and through the influence
406 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

romanticism upon him, the organic analogy was to have a wide cultural
and artistic influence, though one varying greatly in its effects. It could be
applied by those of romantic spirit either to glorifying human individuality
(as Emerson did when, partly under the influence of Carlyle and Cole-
ridge, he highly praised self-reliant individualism) or to vaunting the indi-
viduality of works of art (as was done by Whitman when he called his
Leaves of Grass an organism). But the organic analogy could equally be
applied by romantics and others to human society, and also to periods
within the history of human society (as Herder, Saint-Simon, Comte,
Coleridge, Carlyle, and Marx all did). It was easy to pass from this to the
further implication that a given work of art must be useful for advancing
the welfare of the particular society, the particular social organism, of
which it is organically a part—the point of view that has tended to
dominate communist art, especially after the accession of Lenin and Stalin
to power in Russia. ;
In England itself, the ideas of Carlyle and Coleridge, including their
various applications of the idea of organism, exerted great influence in
many fields, and eventually were combined with aspects of Marx’s thought,
including his conception of society as a kind of organism. Morris in
particular brought together the ideas of these men, and applied—like
Coleridge, but unlike Marx—the organic analogy to individual works of art
and craft as well as to society. Morris’s synthesis of the artistic and social,
as he carried further some of the ideas of Carlyle and Ruskin, had an
enormous effect both upon social radicalism and reformism and upon
artistic radicalism.

4. Carlyle, Art, and Craft

Iw Past and Present (1843), Carlyle had foreshadowed Ruskin and

Morris by vehemently attacking the conditions of labor in nineteenth-
century English industry, and also the “cheap and nasty” products of the
machine which, he declared, must inevitably be tainted with greed. In-
stead, he had called for honest “manufacture” in the literal sense of the
word, that is, for products made by hand. While he recognized the value of
machinery, he rejected intellectual mechanism as dangerous to the moral
interests of man, and came to believe that “all Reform except a moral one
will prove unavailing,” ** and that only through handicraft can the individ-
ual workingman hope to find again the joy of creation destroyed by soulless
machines. Thus Carlyle carried his religion of work into the field of the
practical crafts. Although, by his advocacy of the Nietzschean superman,
Carlyle in some respects became an advocate and prophet of extreme
authoritarian rule, his profound feeling for humanity stirred many of the
influential men of his day. ‘These included not only Ruskin and Emerson,
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 407

but also Marx and Engels (who reviewed or translated several of his
writings) and Charles Dickens (who dedicated Hard Times to him).
Because of the regard of Marx and Engels, and consequently of later
Marxists, for Carlyle, it is worth recording that when he deigned to
comment on art, he showed himself to be a realist and a functionalist,
thereby at least partly reflecting his rigidly Calvinistic upbringing. As a
biographer has written, in Carlyle’s maturity “his view of art . . . was
ordered wholly by its usefulness—a word which he interpreted in the most
limited sense.” ** His demand for realism and his basic Calvinism are
obvious in the criticism he applied to The Light of the World, the widely
known but vapidly sentimental painting of Christ by the Pre-Raphaelite
artist Holman Hunt. Before the picture Carlyle roared at Hunt: “Don’t
paint subjects, paint what you see, man, not all this tommyrot”; and he
sneered at the work as a “Papistical Fancy.” * To Carlyle the representa-
tional and graphic arts, and the artists who produced them, were wholly
irrational and useless. He disdainfully remarked to the Pre-Raphaelite
sculptor Thomas Woolner: “I can make nothing of artists, nor of their
work either. Empty as other folks’ kettles are, artists’ kettles are emptier,
and good for nothing but tying to the tails of mad dogs.” In the
representational arts he was a Philistine—that term he himself had intro-
duced into English in 1827, apparently taking it from German romantics.
But if Carlyle’s narrow interpretation of social usefulness combined
with his Calvinist background to make him reject such arts as painting and
sculpture, it was reinforced by his regard for history and his romanticism to
allow him to be interested in aspects of architecture, that most socially
useful art. When the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings was
founded in 1877 at the instigation of Morris, Carlyle was a member of the
original committee. On his accepting membership, his sense of history and
his Protestant heritage led him to make a special allusion to Christopher
Wren’s Protestant churches as “marvellous works the like of which we
shall never see again” (an allusion galling to Morris as a devoted admirer
of Gothic architecture). Carlyle’s belief in progress and his admiration for
the machine (though not for the philosophy of mechanism) had earlier
combined with his romantic inclinations to make him wholeheartedly
admire the Crystal Palace, built by Joseph Paxton to house the Great
Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations held at London in
1851. Of the Crystal Palace (Fig. 66) Carlyle declared that “it surpassed in
beauty of effect and arrangement all the edifices I have ever seen or read
of, except in the Arabian Tales.” * Yet the fact was that the idea for a
Great Exhibition in London had first been expressed by a Scottish sergeant
in 1848 as an antidote to the Chartism with which Carlyle sympathized.
The sergeant submitted the idea to his commanding officer, and eventually
st reached Prince Albert, who liked and sponsored it: he had been placed
under great strain by the continental revolutions of 1848 and consequent
diplomatic difficulties, and saw the Exhibition partly as a peace-making
Fic. 66. London, Crystal Palace (1851 ), interior, by Joseph Paxton.
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 409

device. As a further antidote to Chartism and revolution, Albert had a pair

of model workers’ houses built in Hyde Park in connection with the
Exhibition, and a smaller one erected within the Crystal Palace itself.
Paxton’s design for the Crystal Palace, submitted only after an abor-
tive competition, was very advanced in its structural functionalism: it was
the largest building of its time to be constructed essentially of standardized
prefabricated parts in iron and glass. Regarded as one of the wonders of
the machine age, it was designed not by an engineer or architect but by a
landscape gardener on the basis of his practical experience as a builder of
greenhouses. For the Crystal Palace permitted the large trees on the Hyde
Park site to be saved by simply enclosing them in a kind of gigantic
greenhouse. Furthermore, Paxton made use of structural principles that he
derived not from any technical engineering training but from his knowl
edge of the organic structure of plant forms, specifically the Victoria Regia
lily-pad. Still, after his success with the Crystal Palace, Paxton became a
well-known architect who was also an expert in railroad development, with
the practical engineering interests and knowledge that this suggests. Un-
derlying Paxton’s work, therefore, were both an “organic” and a “mecha-
nistic” approach that could have meaning for very different groups. His
own conception of the Crystal Palace, however, was an organic one, based
upon the presupposition that the organism subsumes both the vital force
regarded as ultimate by vitalists and the mechanical structure exalted by
mechanists. When he reopened the Crystal Palace at Sydenham in 1854,
he showed social concern in naming it the Palace of the People.
The most effective member of the executive committee for preparing
the Crystal Palace Exhibition—in which the fine arts were neglected—was
Henry Cole, a Radical who admired medieval art, and aimed to associate
painting and sculpture directly with applied art and industry. A member
of Cole’s group of assistants was the widely known architect and decorator
Owen Jones, superintendent of the works of the Exhibition and responsi-
ble for its color scheme. Under Cole’s leadership, Owen Jones, Gottfried
had
Semper (an exile from the Dresden Revolution of 1849, in which he
participated with his friend Richard W agner), and the other members of
of the
Cole’s group sought to reform design in England by proper use
of the major arts and especially the
machine as tool. However, the neglect
stirred protest, with the result
absence of paintings from the Exhibition
and arts
that an Art Treasures Exhibition was held at Manchester in 1857
Internatio nal Exhibition of
and industries were displayed jointly at the
Albert. For Albert,
1862 in London, largely through the interest of Prince
and a
in addition to being a good organist, was an amateur painter
collector of works of art including Italian “primitives.”
industrial
Much as the Crystal Palace, by exalting technical and
was not only
progress in what was intended to be a functional way,
tive of the classic-
neglectful of the fine arts but also particularly destruc
destroyed the classic
academic tradition in design, so Carlyle’s own style
410 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

tradition in English prose, as the styles of Coleridge and his friend Words-
worth did in poetry. For he consciously sought to develop a new style that
would engage the difficulties of modern existence—as the Crystal Palace
did in its own way. And Carlyle’s romanticization of the Crystal Palace in
comparing it only with architecture in the Arabian Nights points toward
the close interrelationships among romanticism, realism, and functional-
ism. Carlyle himself was very much of an individual, but all of these
tendencies could be related to aspects of utopian socialism, which in its
Saint-Simonian form had appealed even to him. They were tendencies that
could be related especially to the concern of utopians for planning ideal
communities—communities destined, often, to affect modern town plan-
ning.

5. Town Planning, and the Influence of

Owenism and Fourierism

W uaar is now generally recognized as the first practical blueprint for an

ideal planned town, the first complete and concrete scheme for a kind of
garden city, had even anticipated the iron-and-glass construction of the
Crystal Palace. This scheme, never executed, was proposed by the social
reformer James Silk Buckingham in his 1848 pamphlet entitled National
Evils and Practical Remedies. The town, to be called “Victoria” (Fig. 67),
was designed in rectangular form to cover a square mile and house 10,000
people in thirteen classes blending industrial, commercial, and agricultural
elements. Its streets were to be roofed over with iron and glass. It was to
have a large green park in the center, and also a great green fringe around
the town, thus anticipating the garden city anticipated earlier by Robert
Owen in his scheme for Villages of Cooperation, which likewise had been
worked out in considerable detail, through less practically.
Buckingham very largely got his ideas for “Victoria,” including the
name itself, from John Minter Morgan, who as early as 1817 had been
influenced by Owen but had moved in a Christian rather than an atheistic
direction. He had also been in close touch with Owen’s architect for New
Harmony, Stedman Whitwell. In 1841 Morgan had launched a scheme to
establish “self-supporting villages” to be superintended by the Established
Church. Later he had discussed his ideas with the French leader of the
Fourierists, Victor Considerant, and the chief English Fourierist, Hugh
Doherty. He had also talked with Etienne Cabet, who had given him a
copy of his book on “Tcaria,” his own ideal community. :
In 1846, at the most impressive of the meetings organized by the
Owenite Morgan, his disciple Buckingham had praised such religious
cooperative or “communistic” settlements as those of the Moravians and
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 411

of the Shakers and Rappites in America. Emerson, who attended one of

Morgan’s meetings in 1847, found the audience “mainly socialistic.”
When, in the same year, Emerson’s friend Carlyle was invited to the house
of a model landlord and evangelical Christian, Sir Harry Verney, and the
conversation turned on what Carlyle declared was the imminent transla-
tion of Chartism into fact, Verney asked for information also about
“Minter Morgan’s plans . . . Fourierism and communism.” ”
The interrelation among utopian (or essentially romantic) socialism,
realism, and the architectural functionalism reflected in the Crystal Palace
as well as in Buckingham’s project for “Victoria” was made especially clear
in 1854 when Robert Pemberton, a friend and disciple of Minter Morgan,
published in London The Happy Colony, dedicated “To the Workingmen
of Great Britain.” This was a project for ideal cities in New Zealand,”
based on social ideas inspired particularly by the writings of Owen and,
apparently in lesser degree, by those of Fourier. ‘The sample community
that he drew up followed Morgan and Buckingham in being called “Queen
Victoria Town” (Fig. 68).
Pemberton proposed that the workingmen of Britain should buy
200,000 acres of New Zealand land in the neighborhood of New Plymouth,
land to be owned in common and, in Owenite and, especially, Fourierist
fashion, decentralized into ten districts, each with its central town. The
towns were to be perfectly round because—Pemberton declared—right
angles are opposed to harmony of motion. The round shape, of course,
made Pemberton’s project differ from Owen’s parallelograms and Buck-
ingham’s “Victoria,” although equally geometric and ideal in form. The
buildings in Pemberton’s design were mostly covered with arched glass
roofs recalling those of Buckingham’s “Victoria” and the Crystal Palace,
but the major buildings were to have frequent porticoes in a Roman
Revival, and thus romantic classic, style different from the more purely
functional style of the Crystal Palace. The importance that Pemberton
gave to the idea of “harmony” recalls, of course, both Owen and Fourier.
Like Owen, Fourier, and other utopians, and like so many Marxists
later, Pemberton had a particular interest in education as necessary for
changing human nature—an education in which some of the more socially
useful arts played a part. Here again he drew upon Owen and Fourier, but
he was not wholly content with their indications, and also went direct to
that educator in the tradition of Rousseau, Pestalozzi. Pemberton pro-
posed that the advanced education of members of his colony, which
over-all was to continue from infancy up to the age of twenty-one, should
combine physical training and acquisition of manual skills with study of
literature and the arts. Everyone should learn to dance and to sing, being
from earliest years constantly subjected to the best in music. Here again
was reflected a socialist interest in collaborative arts and in musical har-
mony as a symbol of social harmony.
The influence of Fourier’s ideas on Pemberton and his friend Morgan
 e ali geenee o
eee
Ss Ps
bo, oveScheaty SOE 2

FIG. 67.
James Silk Buckingham’s “Proposed Model
Town of Victoria” (1849).

undoubtedly resulted in part from the publicizing of them in England by

Hugh Doherty.% In 1841, four years after Fourier’s death, Doherty had
published a Memoir of C. Fourier, and a translation of a French essay,
entitled C. Fourier’s Theory of Attractive Industry.” He also commis-
sioned a translation of Fourier’s works. In a characteristically English
empirical way, however, he paid little attention to the importance given by
 P : oes Gre
eye ; BeisOe IR a
Tse siata Be eS
— ty Op ABSA a
BS .
Misia
ihre
i Rhea te
* 2 pais
Neng a pOEE ee aR

Fourier to the arts, and especially to music. For in that same year Doherty
had encountered the romantic-technocratic writings of J. A. Etzler, who,
Penn-
stimulated only partly by Fourierism, had published at Pittsburgh,
sylvania, in 1833, The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without
Labour, by Powers of Nature and Machinery. Etzler had gone to England
sequel
with his partner, Stollmeyer, in 1840. In 1841 he published a
 Pye

Fic. 68. The cultural center of Robert Pemberton’s project (1854) for
“Queen Victoria Town,” New Zealand.

entitled The New World; Or Mechanical System to Perform the Labours

of Man and Beast, and in the following year an edition of his Paradise was
also published in England. Being a romantic prophet as well as a mechani-
cal genius, Etzler outlined a functionalistic revolution in the technique of
living which anticipated some ideas about housing of later generations of
social planners and architects, including typical aspects of the Interna-
tional Style of the twentieth century. For he envisaged flat-roofed row-
houses, 1,000 feet long and 200 feet high, supplied with “boxes that move
up and down” to carry inhabitants to upper floors, and also equipped with
hot and cold water, artificial light, and air-conditioning.”
Doherty became associated with Stollmeyer; and in the weekly paper
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 415

that he founded at London in 1841, named in Fourierist parlance the

Phalanx, he put forward the ideas of Fourier, Etzler, and himself. He also
founded a Phalansterian Tract Society, of which he became secretary. In
1843, he and the other officers of the society agreed that it was time to
press for an experiment in founding a phalanx to put their theories into
practice. They appealed to Parliament and the Establishment to furnish
£1,000,000 with which to try a comparative experiment of the Owenite,
Etzlerian, and Phalansterian plans, proposing to spend £300,000 on each
one, leaving £100,000 that the government could use for assessing results.
Needless to say, nothing came of this appeal. Doherty soon fell out with
his chief associates and, like many other social radicals before and after
him, turned his interest toward religion—in his case Swedenborgianism.
(We have noted a possible influence of Swedenborgianism on Fourier.)
One associate, Arthur Young, established a Fourierist phalanx in France,
near Dijon, but it soon failed. An Etzlerian movement with several
branches flourished briefly in Yorkshire, but declined after Etzler left
England in an abortive effort to colonize Venezuela with a branch of his
movement to put into effect a process he had developed for crystallizing
sugar without heat and without the need for slave labor.
Nevertheless, despite the failure of Fourierism in England, the ideas
of Fourier and Etzler about collectivistic communities and their planning
and architecture had been made easily available, and these were not wholly
neglected by many of the numerous other more or less socialistic or
communistic communities established in England under Chartist, Rus-
kinian, anarchist, Tolstoyan, or religious auspices.”
The romantic-technocratic point of view reflected in Doherty’s admi-
ration for the ideas of Etzler or in that of Pemberton or Carlyle for the
Crystal Palace—a view contributing so much to the development of mod-
ern functionalism—was not shared by Carlyle’s great disciple, Ruskin. Nor
was it really shared by Ruskin’s great disciple, Mortis, although it pro-
foundly affected some of those influenced by him.

6. Ruskin and Christian Socialism

he
FRusxin (though he was strongly anti-Catholic) and Morris (though
Yet in
became a Marxist) were both affected by Christian socialism.
Carlyle, from
England this arose not only out of ideas coming from
from
Coleridge, and from the mainly atheistic Owen, but especially
socialis m of Roman Catholi c backgro und.
French socialism, including
1848 with the
English Christian socialism as a movement began in the year
that year.
conscious intent of taking advantage of the Chartist fiasco of
1854, it long
Although as a closely knit movement it lasted only until
416 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

continued to exert influence, and later in the century had a strong revival.
The movement sprang from the medieval and universalistic enthusiasms of
John M. Ludlow, who once wrote in the Christian Socialist that “Pure
Communism,—the having of all things common,—must always be the
ideal of Socialism.” °° In that periodical, also, he proclaimed himself a
democrat at a time when most people in England still regarded democracy
as disreputable and sinister.
Ludlow had been educated in France where, though an Evangelical
Protestant, he had been influenced by Lamennais and that Roman Catho-
lic Revival which grew out of Rousseau’s support of religion in opposition
to the Philosophes. After the Revolution of 1848-1849 in France, Ludlow
especially felt the influence’ of contemporary French socialism, as well as of
Owen’s socialism. He was particularly stimulated by the ideas of Fourier,
of Proudhon and Louis Blanc, and indirectly also by those of two former
Saint-Simonians, Pierre Leroux and P. J. B. Buchez, the latter of whom
had become a father of French Christian socialism as well as of the
cooperative movement.
Ludlow had revisited Paris early in 1848, partly to investigate condi-
tions during the Revolution. He went there again in September 1849,
when he studied the Associations ouvriéres and gave more attention than
ever before to French socialism, which he had to reconcile with his long
devotion to Evangelical Christianity. His interest had been stimulated by
the arrival in England of the French Fourierist leader and former Saint-
Simonian propagandist, Lechevalier, who had been compelled to leave
France by the reaction that had followed the unsuccessful leftist insurrec-
tion of June 13, 1849. Much later, Ludlow was to be impressed by Marx’s
abilities, though he himself was never able to read Das Kapital.
Also especially important in the English Christian socialist movement
were two Anglican clergymen who were politically conservative but held
radical economic views. These were Frederick Denison Maurice, originator
of the term “Christian socialism,” and his friend, the novelist Charles
Kingsley, a Chartist who in 1857 was to be a founder of the National
Association for the Promotion of Social Science, center of the English
humanitarian movement. Maurice, the son of a Unitarian minister, had
become a Christian socialist primarily under the influence of the social
ideas of Coleridge and Carlyle, but he was also well acquainted with those
of Owen.” Although Maurice was a religious radical in rejecting the
doctrines of original sin and the atonement, in contrast to his socially
radical friend Ludlow he was a political conservative. By 1852 he had
compelled Ludlow to change the name of the group’s paper from Christian
Socialist to Journal of Association after only a little over a year of publica-
tion during which it had become the most widely read paper of the
cooperative movement. In 1854 he brought about the official ending of
British Christian socialism as an organized movement by insisting that it
devote itself solely to the Working Men’s College in London, established
by his group in that year as part of the cooperative endeavors of Ludlow
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 417

and himself. Maurice described the purpose of the College in terms clearly
reflecting the influence of Carlyle and Coleridge: “to make our working
people understand that they are Persons and not Things,” and “to give
them Freedom and Order’ by means of an education “regular and organic,
not taking the form of mere miscellaneous lectures or even of classes not
related to each other.” *° Maurice rejected democracy as hostile to such
individual freedom in setting opinion above law, so that his socialism was
basically conservative in its opposition to egalitarianism.
Among the teachers at the College were two of Ludlow’s close friends
who were leading members of the English positivist movement, which bore
certain similarities to his own Christian socialism. Richard Congreve, the
founder of English positivism, had like Ludlow visited Paris during the
Revolution of 1848. There he had met Auguste Comte, and had been
enormously impressed by him and the positivist movement. As a conse-
quence, Congreve reacted violently against Protestant Evangelical England
in favor not only of everything French but also of medieval precedents, so
that the spirit of positivism, like Christian socialism, could help to encour-
age medieval revivalism in the arts. As a don at Wadham College, Con-
greve converted many of his best pupils to Comte’s positivist religion of
humanity, symbolized by the worship of Woman rather than of Man. “To
Catholicism, in combination with Feudalism, we owe the worship of the
Virgin,” he wrote, “in which creation we find a more perfect anticipation
of our Divine Humanity than the God-Man of early and northern
Christianity.” * He even sought to form a priesthood which in positivistic
fashion would see to it that science and technology were used for the good
of all, for in his highly clerical thought, medievalism and technology were
interrelated in a manner not unlike that of the anti-clerical French archi-
tect-archaeologist Viollet-le-Duc. Congreve further insisted that the new
positivist priests must voluntarily adopt a proletarian status throughout the
period of transition to the reformed industrial society foreseen by the
positivists. With Comte (but in contrast to the Christian socialists and to
Marx), Congreve also believed that the division of labor between master
and workmen had come to stay, so that he could support the Industrial
Revolution without any democratic inhibitions.
Although the Workingmen’s College which attracted Ludlow’s posi-
tivist friends sprang primarily from his own ideas, he himself came to feel
bitterly that it had drawn Maurice—its principal—and the Christian so-
per-
cialists away from the cooperative movement. It was Maurice who
name, to teach
suaded Ruskin, a Christian socialist in everything but the
drawing in the College.” Ruskin had first been encouraged to engage in
that
economic and social controversy by his “Master,” Carlyle. Yet where
art
dour Scotsman mostly disdained the visual arts, Ruskin sought to relate
had the
to social problems; ** and now at the Workingmen’s College, he
art is
opportunity of putting his ideas into practice. His dual premise—that
y—set the
a subject of importance, and that it is important for everybod
tone for modern art criticism, while doing so in a social context.
418 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

7. Ruskin, “Truth to Nature,”

and the Gothic Revival

RRusxin’s aesthetic criterion of “truth to nature’—destined to foster

realism in the representational arts and functionalism in architecture—had
been put forward in the first volume of his first work, Modern Painters
(1843-1860), but in the 1850’s he began to shift from being essentially an
art critic to being a critic of society. Although the transition can be traced
in the volumes of Modern Painters, he directly related art to social
problems for the first time in two lectures on The Political Economy of
Art delivered in 1857. Three years later, in Unto This Last, he attacked
free enterprise and even advocated a welfare state. The ideas behind this
had evolved from the study of Gothic architecture which he began in 1846
and which reached a peak with the publication of The Seven Lamps of
Architecture in 1849. Throughout the 1860’s, Ruskin continued to focus
his energies chiefly on social criticism in such works as Munera Pulveris
(1862-1863), which he dedicated to Carlyle, Sesame and Lilies (1865),
The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Time and Tide (1867). These
writings, especially Unto This Last, were destined to have a profound
influence not only on later socialism in England, where they deeply
affected the future founders of the Labour Party, but also on artistic or
social radicals throughout the world. Among them were such world-famous
architects as Hendrik Berlage, Walter Gropius, and Frank Lloyd Wright,
as well as many other artists. Tolstoy (whom Ruskin admired) spoke of
Ruskin with particular warmth, noting that he had read most of Ruskin’s
books beginning with Unto This Last.** Mahatma Gandhi, as a little-
known young lawyer in South Africa, was so moved by reading Unto This
Last that he later wrote, “I determined to change my life in accordance
with the ideals of the book,” * which he translated into Gujarati. Signifi-
cantly, both Tolstoy and Gandhi showed an interest in craft arts in
harmony with the ideas of Ruskin and Morris.
Like Ruskin’s artistic ideas, his social doctrines cannot be separated
from his love for the Middle Ages, and thus from the Gothic Revival in
architecture and other arts. As one who had been rigidly raised in a
narrowly Protestant family, however, Ruskin was repelled (though fasci-
nated) by the papacy: consequently, he tried to Protestantize the Middle
Ages. In an effort to refute the contention of the devoutly Roman Catholic
architect A. W. N. Pugin that the revival of Gothic required England to
be restored to the Catholic Church, he sought to nationalize the principles
of Gothic while otherwise sharing many of Pugin’s social and artistic views.
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 419

Although Ruskin was hardly noted for highly rational thought, he

maintained that the Gothic was “not only the best but the only rational
architecture. . . .” °° By this he meant that it was the only truly functional
style—the one that could most easily and honestly express the widest
variety of architectural programs and forms; so that, with Pugin, he was in
some respects one of the founders of modern functionalism. Ruskin’s own
idea of functional architecture, however, included the belief that buildings
require painted and sculptural ornament in order to be architecture at all:
only by using ornament could the organic form necessary for architectural
design be achieved. He once wrote, “The law which it has been my effort
chiefly to illustrate is the dependence of all noble design, in any kind, on
the sculpture or painting of Organic Form.” *’ Ruskin as much as anyone
popularized the doctrine of organic form in art, especially among leaders of
the modern movement in architecture. That movement, however, rejected
Ruskin’s view that architecture depends on added ornament—so influen-
tial in later Victorian architecture—to follow instead the more truly
functionalistic conception of ornament as organically integral with struc-
tural materials. This conception stemmed especially from Mortis.
We have already seen—with reference to Carlyle and earlier to Di-
derot and others—that functionalism in architecture has tended to be
paralleled by realism in the representational arts, and that functionalism
and realism have both often been found in close relation to the idea of an
organic society. Functionalism and realism, too—both regarded though in
different ways, as reflecting truth to nature’s own artistry—have underlain
the intention of much romantic art, so that functionalism of an organic
kind and realism have likewise been connected with ideas of beauty
conceived of, in romantic fashion, as moral ideas.
In Ruskin’s writings on the representational arts even before he
in-
propounded a kind of organic functionalism in architecture, he had
in order
sisted that the artist must perceive the artistry of nature, and that,
in sight,
to do this, he must become a “mirror of truth . . . always passive
passive in utterance. . . .”* He had also declared that, “The picture
awkwardly
which has the nobler and more numerous ideas, however
has the less
expressed, is a greater and a better picture than that which
In the
noble and less numerous ideas, however beautifully expressed.” *
detailed and
light of Ruskin’s emphasis on a truth to nature requiring
represen tational arts, it 1s hardly surprising
moralizing storytelling in the
of the Pre-Raph aelites, whom he then
that in 1851 he became a supporter
out “to the very letter” advice
praised in his Pre-Raphaelitism as carrying
at the close
he had given to the young artists of England eight years before
the truth to nature
of the first volume of Modern Painters. Furthermore,
of Modern
that Ruskin insisted upon, as expounded over long stretches
realism, and was
Painters, seemed to be nothing but a kind of literal
suddenly revealed that
usually so regarded by his followers. Yet he also
from nature, should
what he really meant was that the artist, starting
420 ff RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

transcend it by his imagination—so that in theory, at least, he anticipated

Symbolism and abstraction. Once again we have the apparent paradox of
overlappings of realism on the one hand, and Symbolism, formalism, and
abstraction on the other, a paradox already illustrated in Flaubert’s realistic
literary style based on an “art for art’s sake” point of view, or in the
interrelations between some Neo-Impressionists and Symbolists. As was
true so often in France, in Ruskin, too, this mixture was paradoxically
combined with social interests—and the same paradox existed among the
Pre-Raphaelites, whom he sponsored, and whom Huysmans linked with
the Decadent-Symbolist movement in his novel A Rebours of 1884.
As it was Carlyle who had first.encouraged Ruskin to engage in social
controversy, it is not surprising that the economic and social theories of the
two men were in many respects similar, though Ruskin replaced the
hero-worship prescribed by Carlyle in Past and Present with the welfare
state of Unto This Last. Impressed by what Carlyle had to say about the
cheap and nasty products of the machine in industry, Ruskin maintained
that workers must be artists and artists workmen. Like Carlyle he insisted
that the workingman must no longer be a mere hired tool, a mere “hand”
manipulating a machine in a factory, but must be educated to create by his
own craftsmanship individual works of social utility and beauty, and in so
doing to take joy in his work. Ruskin, of course, considered that this
approach to workmanship (in which he, not unlike Marx, eliminated the
distinction made by academic artists between fine art and craft art) had
been most beautifully exemplified in the Gothic buildings of the Middle
Ages. The medieval craftsmen, even while working cooperatively as mem-
bers of self-governing guilds, had carved architectural details that they as
individuals had designed; and therefore on both counts, Ruskin believed,
they took more joy in their work. In short, he maintained that individual
men working happily in the communal spirit produce the best works of art.
In his famous lectures of 1857 on The Political Economy of Art, he
especially showed how the very different conditions prevailing in his own
day prevented the creation of good art—art like that of the Middle Ages.
Ruskin did his best to put into practice his principles about work,
creativity, and their value for the individual and society. In addition to
illustrating his own writings, he helped the architects Deane and Wood-
ward to design the Oxford Museum of Natural Science. Deane and
Woodward, who had already built the library of Trinity College, Dublin,
on Ruskinian principles, won the competition for the Oxford Museum in
1854 with a design in “Veronese Gothic” style. In this edifice, Ruskin laid
up with his own hands a brick pier: it had to be rebuilt by a professional
bricklayer, but the principle of joy in craftsmanship was there. Besides
seeking to have the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood design
ornamental details, as some of them had done for the Trinity College
Library, he also encouraged the brothers O’Shea, Irish stonecutters, to
carve ornament on the Museum from nature but out of their imagination
 FIG. 69. O’Shea at work on the Oxford Museum of Natural Science in the
late 1850's.

in a Gothic and so, in Ruskin’s view, a truly Christian, way (Fig. 69).
Because the O’Sheas took joy in their creative craftsmanship, Ruskin
believed that they particularly exemplified the Ruskinian social and artistic
principles.
The modernized “Veronese Gothic” style of the Oxford Museum was
itself directly inspired by Ruskin’s writings. Even though he had earlier
written that contemporary Gothic in England should be based on the
Gothic of northern Europe, in The Stones of Venice (1851-1853), he had
especially celebrated the colorful architecture of Venice and North Italy,”
which could be regarded as offering suggestions for relieving the drab
grimness of industrial England. The kind of rich Gothic ornament that he
422 jf RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

wanted for the Oxford Museum was for him “the divine part of the work,”
utterly necessary to “turn these dead walls into living ones,” “ so that the
true function of the architect was to animate walls and roof with orna-
ment. The buildings of the Middle Ages were not, however, to be specifi-
cally imitated by the modern architect because Ruskin envisaged modern
Gothic as taking up where the medieval Gothic had left off and as
progressing from there. He considered that the Renaissance, which he
hated, had constituted merely a most unfortunate interruption in the
Gothic tradition, and thus in the course both of the good society and of
true architecture. In his concern for morality he insisted that only good
men fostered by a good society can produce such architecture.
Yet eventually Ruskin, became disillusioned by the style of the build-
ings to which his ideas had given rise, and which had become derisively
known as the Streaky Bacon Style. The Oxford Museum, whose ornament
had never been completed, was felt to be unsatisfactory even by him. By
1868 he had come to the conclusion that Gothic was incompatible with
the filth and mechanized misery of the modern city. Finally, in the 1874
edition of The Stones of Venice, he declared categorically that it would
have been better if “no architects had ever condescended to adopt [a
single] one of the views suggested in this book. . . .”
Despite his frustration with the Streaky Bacon Style, Ruskin still
could not adopt the functional kind of modern architecture resulting
from direct use of new building techniques and materials, largely because
he remained so hostile to the industrialism that made these possible. He
therefore continued to hold the views that had led him, unlike Carlyle, to
despise the Crystal Palace. After all, buildings such as this had no organic
need of sculpture and other ornament, and so for Ruskin could never be
architecture.
Eventually, then, Ruskin gave up his devotion to the art of architec-
ture. As his interest waned, he turned especially to his duties as Slade
Professor at Oxford and to the St. George’s Guild.
Ruskin had been elected to the newly endowed Slade Professorship of
Fine Arts in 1869. Although he resigned after the exhausting trial in 1878
in which Whistler, the bohemian and artistically anarchistic leader of the
“art for art’s sake” movement, was awarded damages of one farthing for
the violent attack made on his art by Ruskin, the latter was reelected Slade
Professor in 1883. In the following year, however, he delivered what proved
to be his final series of lectures. Because for some time he had increasingly
suffered from attacks of insanity, the lectures became progressively dis-
jointed and unrelated to art, creating much scandal. Although he now gave
up his professorship for good, this was officially because of his hostility to
contemporary science, which he disliked as much as contemporary art: he
angrily resigned when the University gave approval to vivisection in its
new physiological laboratory.
As time went on, Ruskin’s aesthetic ideas were increasingly attacked.
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 423

He had never adequately defined his doctrine of truth to nature, which

in any case was based on assumptions undermined by new developments in
man’s understanding of the physical universe. ‘To some of his critics, truth
to nature was a literalistic and too-simple version of theory of art as
imitation; others objected to his belief that art and nature reflect Divinity
and carry out a Divine purpose. Still others declared that, in thus being
teleological, he dealt only with moral questions and avoided the aesthetic
dimension of art. Hegelians maintained that, because the work of art is
an organic unity, the morality of the work or its truth to nature cannot be
singled out without destroying its beauty.
Nevertheless, Ruskin had a profound influence, social or aesthetic or
both, upon many of the young people with whom he came in contact.
Among the younger members of his circle was Gertrude Jekyll (1843-
1932), who became perhaps the greatest designer of gardens in Eng-
land since the eighteenth century. She was sympathetic to Ruskin’s
social views and ideas about painting, as well as to some of his ideas about
nature; she was also influenced by ideas and color schemes of Mortis,
whom she knew slightly. Her gardens were in the informal tradition of the
English, or romantic, garden though with a more direct emphasis on truth
to natural effect and, as a partial consequence, on the simple flowers of
English cottage gardens. Her direct emphasis on nature and its immediate
impression on the beholder made her art parallel to that of the French
Impressionists in painting. Through her designs she had a profound effect
upon her much younger friend and frequent collaborator, the architect
Edwin Lutyens.
It was as a professor at Oxford that Ruskin had particularly come into
contact with and affected many members of the younger generation by his
aesthetic as well as his social ideas, even though with time his influence on
the arts dwindled. One eccentricity at Oxford, based on his belief in the
importance of working with one’s hands, had consisted in conducting an
outdoor class in road-repairing which had a considerable vogue among
some of the undergraduates. The members of his crew included figures
later noted for their prominence in social matters, the arts, or both, such as
the elder Arnold Toynbee and that future anarchist, Oscar Wilde.
Meanwhile, in 1871, Ruskin had donated £7,000, a tenth of his
fortune, to a fund establishing the St. George’s Guild, his last futile
attempt to counter industrialism and laissez-faire economics. The Guild, of
which Ruskin himself was the “Master,” sought to revive the medieval
conception of communal society by establishing near Sheffield an agrarian
feudal community of “Companions” who would pledge loyalty to the
despising
Master and each other, and equally pledge to love nature while
ty,
commercialism and the age of coal and steam. The site of the communi
which was mostly made up of shoemake rs, is still known as St. George’s
e com-
Farm. Although the Guild was supposed to become a worldwid
sought
munal movement, it proved to be such a failure that in 1881 Ruskin
424 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

to resign from it. The one lasting accomplishment of the Guild was the St.
George’s Museum, a collection of minerals, manuscripts, and original or
copied works of art which Ruskin himself presented or commissioned.

§. Ruskin and the Paris Commune

OF ax the events abroad in Ruskin’s lifetime, the Paris Commune had

most aroused his enthusiasm. Some of the most remarkable letters of Fors
Clavigera—the sprawling miscellany in the form of a series of letters to
workingmen that he began to publish in 1871, the year of the Commune
itself—had been written under the stimulus of news from that revolution,
the chief cause of which he believed lay in “the idleness, disobedience, and
covetousness of the richer and middle classes.” ** In July 1871, he declared:
“~. 1am myself a Communist of the old school—reddest also of the red.
. .’ In saying this Ruskin was, of course, greatly exaggerating, as he
never actually became a member of any kind of socialist or communist
party. When, early in 1883, Morris did join a Marxist party, the aging
Ruskin felt unable to do anything but send encouragement while excusing
himself with the moan that “my timbers are enough shivered already.” “
And although in 1886 he wrote in a letter to a young friend, “Of course I
am a Socialist—of the most stern sort,” he added, “but I am also a Tory of
the sternest sort,” ** because with his radical views he continued to com-
bine belief in the necessity for a social hierarchy. By this time, Morris’s
highly radical activities and pronouncements worried Ruskin: even though
he called Morris the ablest man of his time, he declared in the letter
mentioned above that “Morris is perfectly night in all he says—only he
shouldn’t say it.” *

9. Morris: From Radical

Liberalism to Marxian Socialism

Ir was from Ruskin that Morris had learned, as he himself wrote, “to
give form to my discontent” *°—a discontent both artistic and social.** At
Exeter College, Oxford, he and his friend Edward Burne-Jones, the future
widely known painter, were especially fond of reading Kingsley, Carlyle,
and Ruskin. When The Stones of Venice was published in 1853, the
chapter on ““The Nature of Gothic” especially attracted them both, and
became a kind of bible of a new faith for Morris, who first met Ruskin
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 425

three years thereafter. Later in life he often referred to Ruskin as his

master; however, he did not accept Ruskin uncritically—in 1884, after he
had joined a Marxian party, he wrote to a friend, “though I have great
respect for Ruskin and his work (besides personal friendship) he is not a
Socialist, that is, not a practical one.” ® Nor was Ruskin the only one with
socially radical ideas who stimulated Morris: in his speeches he made
occasional reference to, among others, Thomas More, Carlyle, Owen,
Fourier, Saint-Simon, Louis Blanc, Proudhon, Kropotkin, and Marx.
Morris had been interested in the Middle Ages long before he knew of
Ruskin. Born in 1834, in time to be caught up in the later eddies of the
romantic movement, he had read Scott’s novels before he was seven. The
love for the medieval period which he then acquired, and which was
reinforced by reading Ruskin, was to endure through his lifetime.
William Morris was the son of a middle-class businessman who was
an Evangelical and whose success as a stockbroker enabled him to leave his
son independently wealthy. Morris early reacted against the Evangelicism
of his family to the extent of intending, when he entered Oxford, to
become an Anglo-Catholic clergyman. With his background he might
easily have developed an attitude of Tory paternalism toward the working
class, and thus of hostility to political radicalism. At Oxford, however, he
was saved from this by a group of friends in Pembroke College who came
from the industrial city of Birmingham, and therefore were able to help
him interpret and admire the writings of Carlyle. Meanwhile, Mortis
decided to become an architect: on leaving the University he worked
briefly in the Oxford office of the noted Gothic Revivalist George Edmund
Street, and there became acquainted with his lifelong friend, the architect
Philip Webb. However, he was so moved by Flemish paintings he saw on
trips to Europe in 1854 and 1856 that he decided to devote himself to
painting, which he did until 1859.
In 1856, the best friend of William Morris’s Oxford days, Edward
Burne-Jones, introduced him to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, under whom
Burne-Jones was studying painting in London. Mortis likewise became
Rossetti’s pupil for a time, and through Rossetti’s family, revolutionary
refugees from Italy, he learned about continental radicalism. Together
of
with Burne-Jones and others, Morris helped Rossetti decorate the walls
the debating hall of the Oxford Union (the building designed by Ruskin’s
and Rossetti’s architect friend, Woodward) with a series of paintings from
the Morte d’Arthur. The paintings were executed in a Pre-Raphaelite style;
as
Rossetti had been a leading spirit of the association of painters known
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood when it was founded in 1848. Later in this
chapter, something will be said about the social and artistic ideas of the
in
members of this original Pre-Raphaelite group, who last met officially
Pre-Rapha elites
1853. More will be said about a second incarnation of the
Morris, and
which developed in 1857 around Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and
here
which, beginning in 1862, also included Swinburne. One need say
426 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

only that this second version of Pre-Raphaelitism, stimulated by the pnma-

tily aesthetic interests of Rossetti, soon inclined strongly toward the “art
for art’s sake” movement, which, not yet generally known by that name,
was first launched in England by Swinburne in 1862—the very year in
which he joined the second Pre-Raphaelite group—under the influence of
French literature representing “Vart pour l'art.” At the time, not only
Swinburne but also all the other members of the second Pre-Raphaelite
group were rejecting the idea of subordinating the individual to the social
body, together with that of using art for social purposes; soon, however,
Swinburne and Burne-Jones showed democratic inclinations.
Slowly, Morris too became more and more convinced that it was his
duty to take an active part in combatting the evils, social as well as artistic,
of his own day, with the result that he was increasingly drawn into politics.
Because his political and social beliefs became so intimately bound up with
his beliefs about art, it is necessary to trace the development of his social
doctrines before turning to his ideas concerning the theory and practice of
the arts; in that way, too, many of his friendships with other social radicals
prominent in the arts can be indicated.
Morris may first have been led to pay attention to politics by the fact
that his two closest friends, Burne-Jones and the mathematician Charles
Faulkner, had begun to show interest in the agitation that preceded the
Reform Bill of 1867 which gave urban workers the vote. (Later, Faulkner
was to join Morris in becoming a socialist, whereas Burne-Jones always
abhorred socialism.) In March 1868, William Michael Rossetti—the so-
cially radical critic-brother of Morris’s older friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti
—noted in his diary with some surprise that Morris took an “interest in
politics” and that his political views were “quite in harmony with the
democratic sympathies of [Burne-] Jones, Swinburne,” and himself. Yet,
in contrast to Ruskin, Morris apparently made no contemporary references
whatever to the Paris Commune, although much later, after he had
become a Marxian socialist, it served as the climax for his long poem, The
Pilgrims of Hope.
Morris finally began to give public expression to his political and
social views in 1877, when, in opposing war with the Turks, he published
his Manifesto, ““To The Working-men of England.” In 1879, as a Radical,
or left-wing Liberal, he was made treasurer of the National Liberal League,
a working-class organization formed largely from Radical elements. By the
summer of 1882, because of his dislike for laissez-faire economics, he was
willing to give up his middle-class Radicalism: as he wrote later, he had
become ready “to join any body who distinctly called themselves
Socialists.” * In that year, also, he read Progress and Poverty, published in
1879 by Henry George, who in 1882 traveled from the United States to
make a successful lecture tour of England. It was a lecture by George—not
a socialist—that induced Bernard Shaw to take up the study of economics
as fundamental in social criticism, and that in the end led him to social-
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 427

ism. Indeed, according to Kropotkin, George’s book was directly responsi-

ble for the great revival of socialist feeling that began in England during
the early 1880's after a long lapse since the 1840’s when the strength of
Chartism had for a time placed England almost at the head of the socialist
movement.” Few former Chartists took a prominent part in this revival of
the 1880’s—which was also stimulated by the Great Depression that had
begun in 1873 and was to last until 1896—because nearly all of the leaders
of the Chartist movement had been throughly absorbed into the Radical
wing of the Liberal Party and into the Cooperative movement.
A first major indication of the renewal of socialist feeling occurred in
the spring of 1882, only a few weeks before Morris, disillusioned with
middle-class Radicalism, declared himself ready “to join any body who
distinctly called themselves Socialists.” At this time the Democratic Feder-
ation, a group organized in 1881 by uniting Radical Clubs in London made
up chiefly of workingmen, passed its first clearly socialist resolution, and
thereafter became increasingly socialistic in a Marxian way. The socialist
bent of the Federation was encouraged and directed by its founder, Henry
Mayers Hyndman, an ex-Tory. (It should be noted, however, that—al-
though, after by chance perusing Marx’s Das Kapital in 1880 on a
business trip to America, Hyndman had soon become a convert to Marx-
ism and Marx’s friend—his original intent in founding the Democratic
Federation had been to revive Chartism.)
Hyndman found it very difficult to establish Marxism on a firm
footing in England, where, as a Marxist, he complained, “I fail to detect
among . . . workers that class consciousness and class antagonism without
which no good can ever be done.” * Not until the twentieth century, and
especially until the General Strike of 1926, were the English workers to
develop a real consciousness of class unity. In the nineteenth century the
alienation of the working class, and of discontented intellectuals as well,
was by no means so pronounced in England as in France; and in its
absence, avant-gardism of the French kind essentially failed to develop
among British artists. The idea that every person has his “station” in life,
one to be respected by those of other stations, was on the whole accepted.
Furthermore, even within the resulting English social hierarchy there was
considerable flexibility. The English aristocracy constantly managed to
receive new blood from the moneyed of the middle class, and the middle
class from the working classes, while the descendants of younger sons of
the aristocracy moved down to the upper middle class. Disraeli, as head of
the Conservative Party, was able to prepare a transition from Tory aristoc-
racy to Tory democracy in the 1860’s and 1870’s—and this was only one
factor that took some of the edge off social antagonisms in Victoria’s reign
and Jater. One writer has noted in a book on The Appeals of Communism
to be
that whereas “In France and Italy the working classes have tended
alienated from the political community and revolutionary in their orienta-
tion,” in England “a political tradition of compromise has made it possible
428 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

to bring the working classes into the family of political power and has won
their loyalty by granting them a share in the available values and
opportunities.” °”
Because the working classes got the vote relatively early—in 1867, and
especially in 1884-1885—it proved difficult indeed for Marxism to become
strong in England. The adherents of orthodox Marxism were always to
remain a small minority, though Marxian ideas were to exert strong
influence of a reformist, rather than violently revolutionary, kind. And
Morris was perhaps the most influential early figure in spreading them.
Thus, when Morris became a Marxist, like most other Englishmen
who have subscribed to Marxism he did so in a spirit more of reform than
of violent revolution, and without the kind of alienation—and of avant-
gardism—which has ordinarily characterized French artists committed to
socially radical causes. He joined the Democratic Federation on January
17, 1883, two months before Marx died in England but over a year before
the group changed its name to the frankly Marxist one of Social Demo-
cratic Federation. In other words, Morris participated in organized English
Marxist socialism almost from its inception. The only two of his close
friends who followed him into socialism were Charles Faulkner and Philip
Webb, the latter of whom in 1859 had been the architect of Morris’s early
residence, Red House, at Bexley Heath in Kent—a house that was destined
to have great influence in the history of architecture (Fig. 70), though in
Fic. 70. Bexley Heath, Kent, Red House (1859-1860) by Philip Webb for
William Morris.
 FIG. 71. An early type of Morris chair.

fact it was essentially a continuation of the work of such architects as

Street and Butterfield. Both Faulkner and Webb, together with Morris,
Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Arthur Hughes, Madox Brown, and Madox Brown’s
friend Peter Marshall, had been founders in 1861 of Morris’s firm of
craftsmen-artists, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company, self-described
as “Fine Art Workmen in Painting, Carving, Furniture, and the Metals.”
This was a cooperative which had grown out of the need for decorating
Red House, so that Morris and his friends almost of necessity became
designers of furniture (cf. Fig. 71), stained glass, wallpaper, and the like.
Although the name of the firm was changed to Morris and Company in
187s, with Morris thereafter the only effective partner,®* it survived until
1940, when the supply of high-class materials was cut off by World War II.
Unlike Hyndman, Morris had not been led to Marxian socialism by
Marx’s own writings—in fact he had never heard of Marx when he joined
reading
the Democratic Federation. A month or so later, however, he was
write that
some of Marx’s works in French, and he eventually was to
to
“having joined a Socialist body . . . I put some conscience into trying
430 pe RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

I
learn the economical side of Socialism, and even tackled Marx, though
must confess that, whereas I thoroughly enjoyed the historical part of
‘Capital’ I suffered agonies of confusion of the brain over reading the pure
economics of that great work.” Nevertheless he eventually succeeded in
understanding and acceptin g even Marx’s economic theories.
If Morris had not been led to socialism by reading Marx, he had
likewise not been converted by reading Henry George in 1882; nor had the
works of Robert Owen (whom he later praised) and of some of the French
utopians that he read in the same year converted him. He recorded that he
was persuaded to socialism by reading an attack on Fourierism written by
John Stuart Mill, who had been Carlyle’s friend and like him had been
influenced by Saint-Simonianism. Despite Mill’s intention, his anti-Four-
ierism had only convinced Morris that Fourier’s insistence on the necessity
and possibility of making labor attractive (a doctrine similar to that held
by Ruskin) was thoroughly valid. Morris’s conclusion was “that Socialism
was a necessary change, and that it was possible to bring it about in our
own days.” ® In view of this contrary effect of Mill’s criticism of a utopian
form of socialism, it is worth emphasizing here that Mill’s stepdaughter,
Helen Taylor, became with Mofris a member of the Social Democratic
Federation, and that under her influence Mill himself was to show increas-
ing sympathy for Marxian socialism and to be a confessed socialist when he
died in 1873. As early as 1851 Marx’s occasional secretary, Wilhelm Pieper,
had written Engels that Mill was then one of Marx’s two real friends in
London.

10. Radical Friends and Acquaintances

of Morris: The Avelings, Bax,
Kropotkin, Mrs. Besant, etc.

A noruer member of the Social Democratic Federation with Morris was

Eleanor Marx Aveling, Marx’s favorite daughter. Eleanor had wanted to be
an actress before her father died, but had concealed that fact from him
because, already greatly ailing, he needed her so badly. Marx’s death
compelled his daughter to give up all idea of a dramatic career and to take
a position in a boarding school. She, whose life was to be dedicated to
socialism and art, especially drama, became attracted to Dr. Edward
Aveling, who for a time had been manager of a troupe of strolling players,
wrote several plays, and also became known as a critic of drama and music.
Aveling, a scientist by training and a one-time fellow of University College
in London, was a Secularist and Darwinian when he was converted to
Marxian socialism by reading Das Kapital early in 1884. Aveling was
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 431

already married (though long separated from his wife), but Eleanor Marx
was drawn to him by her love for the theater as well as for the socialist
cause; and in 1884, after he had become a socialist, she joined him in a free
marriage which she proclaimed openly. Their common interest in the
drama, especially the social drama, led them to be among the first to
recognize in the late 1880’s the importance of Henrik Ibsen. Eleanor, with
Aveling and G. B. Shaw, who was half in love with her, participated in
what was probably the first private group reading of Ibsen’s A Doll’s
House. In 1888, she made the first translation into English of his An
Enemy of the People (then called An Enemy of Society), and two years
later translated The Lady from the Sea.
This was in the year in which Bernard Shaw delivered a long lecture
on Ibsen before the Fabian Society. About this time, Ibsen remarked that
he could well regard himself as a socialist; and earlier he had declared:
“The State is the curse of the individual—the State must be done away
with! In that revolution I shall take part.” ® Because of his anti-statism, as
well as because at heart he was an extreme anti-bourgeois individualist, he
could appeal to anarchists as well as socialists, the more so as Symbolist
elements increased in his works. His avant-garde realistic, yet symbolic,
dramas were enormously attractive to radicals in the arts everywhere, much
as were plays by his social-reformer friend Bjgrnson and the naturalistic
novels of Zola.”
Through her friend George Moore, Eleanor Marx Aveling was se-
lected to make the English translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary,
published in 1886. Edward Aveling collaborated with Samuel Moore in
making a translation from German into English of the one volume of Das
Kapital which Karl Marx had completed before his death: this, edited by
Engels, was also published in 1886. In that year, the Avelings made a
lecture tour of America under the auspices of the Socialist Labor Party; in
1889, with Engels and another friend, they went again to America in a vain
effort to promote Aveling as a dramatist. In the following year they wrote a
privately printed book entitled Shelley’s Socialism (based on an article of
1888), which was then also published in the Neue Zeit, the leading
German Marxist journal: in this they cited evidence purporting to show
that Shelley had been a class-conscious socialist. During this period and
afterward, it was largely through the Avelings that Engels kept in contact
with the British socialist movement. When he died, he bequeathed a
considerable sum of money to Eleanor and to Marx’s other daughters.
Aveling, a man of some brilliance but exceedingly dubious moral
character, eventually made Eleanor Marx so thoroughly unhappy that in
1898 she committed suicide. Bernard Shaw, who knew Aveling well and
later described him as an “agreeable rascal,” “ used him, together with
Aubrey Beardsley, as a model for the character of Dubedat, a young
painter and bigamist, in The Doctor's Dilemma. William Morris’s rela-
tionship with the Avelings was a pleasant enough one until 1887, when a
432 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

dispute over politics and over personal matters apparently arising from
Edward Aveling’s unreliable character led Morris to burst out that Aveling
was a “disreputable dog.” ™*
A far closer friend of Morris in his early socialist days, and one with an
interest in design, was Andreas Scheu, an Austrian socialist of the Left who
had escaped to Britain from persecution in Vienna. Morris first met him in
1883. Even apart from socialism, the two men had much in common
because Scheu was a professional designer of furniture—as, of course, were
members of Morris’s firm. Scheu frequently visited Kelmscott House,
Morris’s eventual residence in the London suburb of Hammersmith after
he left Red House; and there Scheu often entertained the Morris family by
singing anything from arias by Mozart to Austrian folk songs or songs of
the Austrian and German revolutionaries.
Perhaps the closest to Morris of all his socialist colleagues from the
beginning of his socialism until he died was the musical littérateur Ernest
Belfort Bax—who once described his friend Morris as “a Bohemian
through and through.” At the age of sixteen, Bax had wept at the
repression of the Commune. Later, he had become a positivist. When he
went to study music on the Continent he developed an interest in German
philosophy that led him to read Marx’s Das Kapital in 1881. ‘Iwo years
later, after some correspondence with the already ill and dying Marx, Bax
met Engels and became still more deeply involved in the study of Marx-
ism, ending as a wholehearted Marxist. Largely because he maintained the
close connections with the Continent that began in his student days, he
was able to serve as an important link between English and German
Marxism; and his knowledge of music further helped him to play an
important role in spreading a Morris-like interest in the arts among Ger-
man Marxists. He agreed with an interviewer in 1894 that his “views of
Socialism as to theory, principles, and tactics” were “entirely in accord
with the German Social-Democratic Party.” ® Yet these views were also
very Close to those of his friend Morris, who a year earliershad collaborated
with Bax on a book entitled Socialism; Its Growth and Outcome, based on
articles the two had published during 1886-1887 in the Commonweal
when it was a socialist magazine. It was Bax who induced William Morris
to sign a manifesto declaring that all good socialists were Marxists.
Many of Morris’s other friends within the socialist movement were
also members of the branch of the Democratic Federation that he estab-
lished at Hammersmith in: 1884, just before the name of the Federation
was changed to Social Democratic Federation. The branch started with
eleven members, one of whom, a Ruskinian, soon resigned. Emery Walker,
a socialist and outstanding printer—without whose encouragement and
stimulation Morris would never have founded the Kelmscott Press in 1891
and become a great printer (Fig. 72)—was secretary of the branch. For it,
Morris established at his own expense a clubroom on the grounds of his
London residence, Kelmscott House, named for Kelmscott Manor, his
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made the sonne and mone and sterres Sc.
fisshes in the water and byrdes }

& gendre. And god sawe that all thyse

andsai @Faciamus hominem &c,Make z
imilf and ymage. Here spack the fader
or ellisas it were the comune voys
it was sayd make we, and to oure,in
; ge of god in his &
not only the sowle
As tothe
me¢ BT without the body, but he made both body & sowle. lord-
: d body he made male and female. @ God gaf to man the
i)

[Y@] ship and power vpon alle g beestis. Whan god had
Re made man it is not wreton. @ Et vidit he no
DAM quia t t eum lapsurum.
i; parfyght tilthe woman was made, and therfore itisred,itis
YN A] not good the man to be allone.
Dey, S ee Se

SOAS Shae y,
(Fray ( Ned s
Nioar &

RR
LIRTO
aAY 4

S
(ae)

ENSe
Tay, >

I
ay AIRGAS)
Spe hol,

ORDER EL:
a a <4
G ENS ee AN i=
es) 6 AS
aad cn eee)
2 3 y oa,
>t « w\\s Jy
J om)?

FIG. 72. Typography by William Morris, a page from the Kelmscott edition
(1892) of Caxton’s The Golden Legend.
434 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

country residence up the Thames. Kelmscott House increasingly became a

ic
center for young art workers, some with and some without strong socialist
inclinations. Eventually, young avant-garde members of the middle class,
such as H. G. Wells and William Butler Yeats, considered it fashionable
to visit the clubroom and converse with Morris himself; and in this way
some of these visitors were converted to socialism, Yeats among them.
Under the stimulation and leadership of the Hammersmith Branch,
the Social Democratic Federation conducted “Art Evenings” at which the
Chants for Socialists that Morris was then writing were often sung by
choirs. Morris and Aveling gave readings, and Bernard Shaw (though not a
member) sometimes played piano: duets with the future theosophist
leader, Annie Besant, then.a prominent socialist. Morris’s Hammersmith
Branch had its own choir, which met at Kelmscott House and eventually
was trained by the future well-known composer Gustav Holst.
Morris, Bax, and the Avelings all soon decided to resign from the
Social Democratic Federation because they could not get along with
Hyndman, whom Morris considered to be an incurable politician and
intriguer. Late in 1884, they founded the Socialist League; this included
the Hammersmith Branch, and its program derived partly from ideas of
Saint-Simon. In the following year the League published Morris’s Chants
for Socialists. It was the Socialist League that Engels, in a letter of 1886 to
a Marxist friend in the United States, the musician Friedrich Sorge,
bitingly referred to as a group of “faddists and emotional socialists.”
Earlier in that year, Engels had written Sorge that “the anarchists are
making rapid progress in the Socialist League,” and that “Morris and Bax
—one as an emotional socialist and the other as a chaser after philosophi-
cal paradoxes—are wholly under their control for the present. . . . And
these muddleheads want to lead the British working class!” ® Nevertheless,
in public Engels and Morris always spoke of each other with respect.
The influence of anarchism on Morris and Bax that Engels mentioned
had begun to affect the members of the Socialist League in 1886 with the
coming of Kropotkin to England following his release from a French
prison. In England, where Kropotkin lived until he returned to Russia in
May 1917 after the overthrow of the tsar but before the Bolsheviks took
power, he soon became an influential and thoroughly respected figure,
particularly because he had given up his former advocacy of violent revolu-
tion in favor of an exceedingly moderate form of anarchism. Kropotkin,
who read and praised the work of William Godwin, was already widely
known in England from three previous visits; and now to his earlier
reputation as a geographer he gradually added that of a sociological
scholar.
It was easy for Kropotkin to become Morris’s good friend because the
two men had so many beliefs in common, particularly about the impor-
tance of the arts for life in the good society, even though Kropotkin could
not accept Morris’s essential rejection of machines and technical progress.
We have seen that in the early 1880’s Kropotkin had published at Geneva
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 435

in his anarchist periodical, Le Révolté, articles containing many ideas in

harmony with doctrines of Morris and Ruskin; and some of these articles
had been reissued in book form at Paris in 1885. When in 1882 Kropot-
kin had been arrested in France, Morris was one of the many English in-
tellectuals who protested by signing a petition requesting his release
especially because of the importance to humanity of his scientific contri-
butions. The signers represented a cross section of learning and the arts
in England. Among them, in addition to Morris, Burne-Jones, and Swin-
burne, were prominent professors and other scholars including the evo-
lutionist Alfred Russel Wallace (a socialist who was to call Robert Owen
one of the best and greatest men of the nineteenth century) and the soci-
ologist Patrick Geddes (later Kropotkin’s warm friend and the idol of
Lewis Mumford). Although the petition—presented to the French Minis-
ter of Justice by Victor Hugo—had been unsuccessful in securing Kropot-
kin’s release, it aroused much interest in him and his work.
In 1887, the year after Kropotkin settled in England, the influence
and spread of anarchism were greatly aided by widespread opposition to
the death sentences given the anarchists who allegedly had thrown a bomb
at a demonstration in Haymarket Square, Chicago. This stirred up protests
all over England: the chief protest meeting in London was addressed by
Morris, Kropotkin, and another Russian anarchist, Sergius Stepniak,” as
well as by Bernard Shaw and Annie Besant.
Mrs. Besant, after a religious youth and marriage to an Anglican
clergyman, had become an atheist, freethinker, and crusader for free
speech and for birth control. Eventually she passed to socialism, becoming
a leading member of the Fabian Society. In 1889, however, she was
converted to theosophy by Mme Helena Blavatsky, the Russian-born
former spiritualist who in 1875 had founded at New York what became the
Theosophical Society. The theosophists subscribe to a mysticism partly
descended from Boehme but with strong East Indian overtones, which by
going beyond the material world of nature has profoundly influenced the
development of modern non-representational art. In addition, they believe
in the “Universal Brotherhood of Humanity” and in evil as resulting from
man’s desire for finite goods, hence in a kind of religious socialism. ‘This
not only enabled theosophy to appeal to that former Fabian, Annie
Besant, but also led some American theosophists to support the socialism
of Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward (1888), and others
to give their allegiance to such prominent socialists as Eugene Debs and
Upton Sinclair. One American theosophist wrote in 1907, “While [all]
Socialists are not Theosophists, I have a feeling that all Theosophists
should be Socialists.” “ Because as mystics the theosophists could also
be sympathetic to abstract and non-objective art, theosophy attracted
such socially concerned leaders of modern arts as Kandinsky, Mondrian,
Jackson Pollock, Yeats, and Le Corbusier—as well as Rudolf Steiner, the
father of anthroposophy, who in 1913 designed its extraordinary head-
quarters, the Goetheanum at Dornach, Switzerland, in expressionist style.
436 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

11. Radical Friends and Acquaintances

of Morris and Kropothin: Wilde,
Crane, Cockerell, Carpenter, etc.

Oz oF those who, like Annie Besant, participated with Kropotkin in the

protest movement on behalf of the Haymarket anarchists was Oscar
Wilde, who had apparently met Kropotkin through Morris. Three years
later, Wilde was to publish “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” in which
his aim was to seek the society most favorable to the artist, for to him art
was the enlightening and regenerating end to which all else must be
subordinated. In major respects his essay recalled the doctrines of William
Godwin, and we have seen that it probably influenced Kropotkin.
Many of the more immediate members of Morris’s circle who were
interested in the arts came to know Kropotkin well. Among them were the
artist Walter Crane, who was associated with him through Morris and the
Socialist League; the bookbinder and typographer Cobden-Sanderson, also
a member of the Socialist League; and Sydney Carlyle Cockerell. As a lad
Cockerell had become the friend and disciple of the aging Ruskin. For five
years he had given his services to aid Ruskin’s protégé, Octavia Hill, later
co-founder of the National Trust, in housing reform among the poor in
Southwark. He had left the family coal business to become librarian and
secretary to his hero, William Morris, and then secretary to the Kelmscott
Press, which he wound up after Morris’s death. Under Mornis’s influence
he became an expert on printing, and later was the partner in a process-
engraving firm with Morris’s friend, the printer and socialist Emery
Walker. Through Morris he became an outstanding art historian in the
field of Gothic illuminated manuscripts, with an influence on American and
British scholarship. On the basis of his knowledge of medieval script, he
developed a beautiful handwriting that was largely responsible for chang-
ing the style of penmanship in England. As the director of the Fitzwilliam
Museum at Cambridge from 1908 to 1937, he achieved an international
reputation. He was one of Bernard Shaw’s oldest friends (they first met in
1889), yet was also a devoted disciple of the Christian anarchist ‘Tolstoy
while being an agnostic himself.
Even before Kropotkin met these members of Morris’s circle, he had
become acquainted with the English painter G. F. Watts, who said he
immediately recognized in the anarchist a sympathetic spirit. Another
painter-friend of Kropotkin in England was Felix Moscheles, formerly a
close friend of the Italian patriot and revolutionary, Mazzini, who, though
an enemy of socialism, had been strongly influenced by Saint-Simonianism.
Kropotkin’s friends among noted writers included the Fabians, Cunning-
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 437

hame Graham (who was also an artist), and Bernard Shaw, the latter of
whom was to remark more than once that he felt with Kropotkin as he did
with none of the early socialists except Morris and Sidney and Beatrice
Webb.”
Many of Kropotkin’s close acquaintances, including some of those
mentioned above, were neither communist-anarchists nor socialists of any
kind. His ability to be friendly with and influence people representing a
variety of social opinions could be seen even within the Socialist League, a
fairly heterogeneous body of radicals. He had been invited to address the
League in the month he arrived in England in 1886, and had become
closely connected with it in the following year without stirring up dissen-
sion. Disagreements arose in the League, however, out of the resentment
felt by many members against the execution of the Chicago anarchists late
in 1887. This was reinforced with anger stirred by the brutality of London
police in breaking up demonstrations against unemployment and for free
speech, culminating in the demonstration of “Bloody Sunday” (November
13, 1887). As a consequence of these events, many members of the
Socialist League now decided that violence on their own part had become
necessary, and so gave their allegiance to anarchism—not to the moderate
anarchism of Kropotkin, but mainly to the revolutionary anarchism of his
long-time friend, the Italian Errico Malatesta, who was then in London
and had joined the League.
For William Morris, however, the events of “Bloody Sunday,” in
which he had participated, had only served ‘to confirm his growing belief
that a speedy revolution in England was impossible, thereby leading him
toward a socialism which sought to achieve its revolutionary end not
necessarily through violence but through education, in which, he believed,
the arts should play a major role. “Bloody Sunday” had also caused him to
give up any hope of seeing socialism victorious in his lifetime. In his
utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890) he foresaw revolutionary
change coming in 1952. He always upheld the Marxist idea of class struggle
and opposed those within the Socialist League who, in rejecting anarchist
violence, upheld parliamentary methods.
Eventually, therefore, a three-way split occurred in the Socialist
League: between the followers of Morris and the anarchists, and between
both of these groups and the “parliamentarians,” most of whom belonged
to the Bloomsbury Branch which included the Avelings. The first result of
this three-group conflict was that the parliamentarians were suspended
in 1888 and withdrew to form the Bloomsbury Socialist Society. Then, in
1889 the anarchists gained control of the Socialist League by electing a
heavy majority of the executive council, leaving Morris, his architect-friend
Philip Webb, and two members of his Hammersmith Branch isolated.
Under Morris’s leadership the Hammersmith Branch seceded from the
Socialist League, and in the following year was organized as the independ-
ent Hammersmith Socialist Society.
Meanwhile, some of Morris’s socialist friends and disciples had
438 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

showed themselves inclined toward anarchism, especially in the mild form

er, a
represented by Kropotkin. Chief among these was Edward Carpent
poet who once had served as the curate of the Christian socialist Maurice,
and who with Morris had been a member of the Social Democratic
Federation and then of the Socialist League. Carpenter’s ideal as a young
man was Shelley. But when at Cambridge in 1868 he first read Whitman’s
poems in the selection published in England by William Michael Rossettt,
he had been so deeply impressed that, as he wrote in his autobiography,
“From that time forward a profound change set in within me.” ” Nine
years later he traveled to the United States especially to meet Whitman, a
visit repeated in 1884. Because Whitman has since been claimed by the
anarchists, as well as by the Marxian communists, it was appropriate that
Carpenter should become Whitman’s chief English disciple, for Carpenter
also greatly admired Thoreau, that unique exemplar of an American kind
of individualist anarchism. Yet Carpenter also early participated in the
English Marxian socialist movement: it was he who donated the money
for the launching, early in 1884, of Justice. This was the organ of the
Democratic Federation and then of the Social Democratic Federation, and
was the second oldest socialist paper in England (the oldest being the
Christian Socialist). By the end of the 1880’s, however, Carpenter was
withdrawing more and more from the political field. Nevertheless, al-
though with William Morris he stood somewhere between the anarchists
and the social democrats, unlike Morris he became a member of the sober
group around Kropotkin, which since 1886 had been publishing the an-
archist magazine Freedom.
Carpenter is important for the history of art especially because in the
early 1890's his writings were being read with admiration by the Belgian
artist and architect Henry van de Velde, who then became interested in
Morris and helped to spread some of his ideas on the Continent through
the highly influential movement known as Art Nouveau, of which Van de
Velde was a leader. Later, also, we shall see that Carpenter’s ideas influ-
enced, among others, the famous English town-planner Raymond Unwin,
and also the noted English art critics Roger Fry and Herbert Read, both of
them anarchists.
As for Carpenter's friend William Morris, in 1888 he had already
begun to refer to himself not only as a “revolutionary Socialist,” but also as
a believer in “Socialism or Communism” as distinct from “Anarchism,” ™
clinging to the term “Communism” even though Marx and Engels had
abandoned it. He declared that, “Anarchism and Communism, not with-
standing our friend Kropotkin, are incompatible in principle.” * With
Marx, and in contrast to the anarchists, Morris believed that the state
ought not to be done away with until mankind had been made ready by
education for a way of life that would render it unnecessary. He also
sought to make clear the difference between his socialism and that of other
socialists, including Hyndman and the members of his Marxist Social
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 439

Democratic Federation, and also the Fabians. Unlike more orthodox Marx-
ists such as Hyndman, Morris now rested his hopes for a “withering away”
of the state on a change in the minds of men before, not after, a
revolution; also, he had always objected to Hyndman’s Marxian insistence
on authoritarian leadership. Still, he was more of a Marxian socialist than
were the Fabians; hence in an effort to make clear the distinction between
his views as a communist and Fabian socialism he delivered his famous
lecture, “Communism,” before the members of the Fabian Society in 1893.
And in that lecture he—following the earlier Marx—defined communism
as “true and complete socialism.” *

12. Morris and the Fabians

De F asians, a middle-class group, had been founded as The Fellowship

of the New Life in October 1883 in the sitting-room of a Morris devotee
named Edward R. Pease."* Edward Carpenter and J. Ramsay MacDonald
were among the members. At a subsequent meeting early in 1884, Frank
Podmore moved resolutions constituting the Fabian Society, which went
its own independent way. The Society adopted a policy of state socialism,
although the word “socialism” did not appear in its minutes until its sixth
meeting. The first tract of the Fabian Society, written late in 1884, drew
George Bernard Shaw, a Marxist sympathizer in his late twenties, to
membership because the name of the Society suggested an educated body.
The tract itself was addressed to “‘the tail of the middle-class” (as Shaw
wrote in a letter to his and Morris’s friend, the furniture designer Andreas
Scheu);7” yet its tone was militant, and it was based on a strict class
analysis of society.
In this period the views of the Fabians were so close to those of the
Social Democratic Federation (to which Morris then belonged) that Shaw
had found it difficult to decide which to join. When he had finally
determined to become a member of the eight-month-old Fabian Society,
he “was guided,” he wrote, “by no discoverable difference in program or
principles, but solely by an instinctive feeling that the Fabian and not the
Federation would attract men of my own bias and intellectual habits.
. .”*8 The Fabians, however, were on the whole opposed to Marxism:
they criticized Marx’s theory of value, and soon had formulated certain
theories of their own which clearly distinguished them from orthodox
Marxian socialists, and which, indeed, were largely descended from the
Utilitarianism and radical liberalism of John Stuart Mill and from the
positivism of Comte.” Forin England there no longer was a clear divid-
ing-line between liberalism and “collectivism”; the two invoked Mill, who
himself had come to accept “socialism as both the probable term and the
desirable goal of modem civilisation.” * Furthermore, the Fabians were by
440 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

no means so atheistic as Marx: in their early days they held meetings in the
chapels of various denominations of the Non-conformists, who so long and
so closely had been related to social reform in England.
One major founder of the Fabians, Sidney Webb, had, like Ruskin,
taught in the Working Men’s College under its Christian socialist princt-
pal, Maurice. Also, Webb’s wife, the former Beatrice Potter, had started
her career by interesting herself in the cooperative movement which had so
concerned Ludlow and other Christian socialists. The Fabians always had
so much in common with the social ideas of Morris, who had been
stimulated by those of Ludlow, that after Morris’s death in 1896, Shaw
even tried to claim him as a Fabian. But Morris himself believed that the
Fabians were unnecessarily subdividing the socialist movement. Further-
more, he regarded them as “soft socialists” who, in upholding what Webb
called “the inevitability of gradualism,” placed too much emphasis on
parliamentary procedure, rejected the class struggle, and emphasized social-
ism too much as a system of property-holding—as a mere “mechanism”
rather than as a theory of life in an organic society. He felt that the Fabian
kind of “municipal socialism,” as expounded by Sidney and Beatrice
Webb, would in the end lead ‘to a bureaucratic and mechanical state
socialism like that upheld by Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward,
2000-1887 (1888), and by Annie Besant, who, we have seen, later gave up
political socialism for theosophy and its inclination toward religious social-
ism. Also, until a Fabian Arts Group was established in 1907, the Fabians
differed from Morris in having little interest in the arts, though noted
writers joined them. Shaw was unable to persuade the Fabians to publish
Richard Wagner’s Art and Revolution and, later, Oscar Wilde’s “The Soul
of Man Under Socialism”; nor could he even get them to do justice to
-Morris’s News from Nowhere. He ruefully observed that of the early
Fabians only he, Stewart Headlam, and the journalist Hubert Bland had
the faintest interest in art of any kind, so that it was no wonder that
Morris was uncomfortable in such a determinedly Philistine atmosphere.™
In saying this, however, Shaw forgot Walter Crane (Fig. 73), Morris’s
disciple who had become one of the earliest Fabians and who designed the
cover for the first edition of Fabian Essays, published in 1889 under the
title Socialism.” And in their Tract 70, Report on Fabian Policy, of 1896,
the Fabians had at least emphasized “The freedom of individuals . . . to
practise all arts, crafts and professions independently . . .” even though
they had also declared, “The Fabian Society . . . has no distinctive opin-
ions on. . . Art. . . or any other subject than its own special business of
practical Democracy and Socialism.”
In spite of differences, as long as Morris lived, the relationship be-
tween him and at least some Fabians was always close. Two Fabians, Shaw
and Headlam, maintained friendly relations with the Arts and Crafts
exhibitions, with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and

FIG. 73. “The Capitalist Vampire” by Walter Crane, cover of the American
magazine, the Comrade, October 1903.
 i RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND
442

the Art Workers Guild, which under Morris and Crane kept up an
to
intimate connection between art-and socialism. Fabians were invited
lecture at Morris’s Hammersmith Clubroom; and Morris, we know, deliv-
ered his lecture “Communism” to the Fabians. The relationship was
reinforced by Morris’s growing belief that whatever his differences with the
Fabians or any other socialist group, all the varieties of English socialism
should make a common front. In 1892 his Hammersmith Socialist Society
had already sought an alliance with both the Fabian Society and the Social
Democratic Federation, although on the basis of having each group retain
its autonomy. After the Independent Labour Party was founded in 1893,
Morris hoped that it too could be drawn into such an alliance; and in 1896,
the year of his death, he and Walter Crane urged—in vain—that the
anarchists should be accepted by the Socialist (Second) International.
Morris’s desire and ability to retain the friendship of men whose views
differed from his was even reflected at his funeral, at which, in addition to
his own Hammersmith Socialist Society, nearly all of the other radical
groups in England were represented. Among those present were Kropotkin
and John Burns, the radical unionist who had been a member of the
Democratic Federation with Moiris and in 1905 was to be the first Labour
member of Parliament to achieve Cabinet rank (though in a Liberal
government).
The Hammersmith Socialist Society, which itself reflected Morris’s
gift for attracting and holding people of divergent views, did not long
survive his death. It was too heterogeneous a mixture, some members being
simply art workers, others Fabians, others inclined toward the Social
Democratic Federation or anarchism, still others toward the recently
founded Independent Labour Party, which had a moderately socialist
program. After the demise of the Hammersmith Socialist Society, the
Fabians were the only prominent socialist organization able and willing to
uphold officially many of Morris’s theories, and eventually, at least for a
time, some of his theories concerning the arts. The anarchists, who shared
many of Morris’s views about art, could not continue to propagate them in
England as they were to do on the Continent because the influence of
anarchism had declined in England. The English anarchists had never
been numerous, and they lost nearly all of their influence with the rise of
the movement for a Labour Party and for an eventual Labour government.
This swung radical opinion toward that belief in parliamentary activity
which the anarchists, like the Marxists and Morris, had so strongly op-
posed. The founding of the Independent Labour Party in 1893 was fol-
lowed in 1900 by that of the Labour Representation Committee. Out of
this, in 1906, came the Labour Party itself, within which the theories of
the Fabians have always played such an influential role, though the
Fabians long maintained their independence of it. Like most political
parties, the Labour parties as such have had no particular interest in art.
The Fabians were a most unusual radical group in being able to exert
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 4 43

profound influence within a great political party for many years, while
also eventually having much effect on at least some of the more socially
“practical” arts, such as town planning, in ways that reflected the influence
of Morris and Ruskin. But this was not surprising because Clement Attlee,
the Labour Prime Minister who himself became a socialist after reading
the works of Ruskin and Morris, has told us that when the Labour Party
was born in 1906 with the election of twenty-nine independent Labourites
to the House of Commons, a questionnaire circulated among them showed
that the book which had most profoundly influenced their thought was
Ruskin’s Unto This Last. Furthermore, in 1953, Attlee wrote to a friend:
“I was telling a group of foreign socialists the other day how much more
Morris meant to us than Karl Marx.” *°

13. Morris's Theories of Art and Society

Tw Morris’s own theories of art, as in his social theories, the chief
influence was that of Ruskin, even though Morris went beyond his master.
The basis for his art theory and practice was always the Ruskinian formula,
“Art is the expression of man’s joy in labour.” ** With Ruskin, he showed a
dislike for most aspects of contemporary civilization and an admiration for
the Middle Ages, because he considered that in the Middle Ages, despite a
regrettable lack of freedom under feudalism, it had been possible “‘to have
social, organic, hopeful progressive art... .” * In fact, he believed that
progressive art had actually died with the Middle Ages,* and that the
medieval spirit must be revived—although under freer political conditions
—to replace what he, adopting the words of Carlyle, called the “cheap and
nasty” products of the machine.” For even though Morris believed that
the Middle Ages only “saw the promised land of Socialism from afar
. ,’ ® he had come to feel that the medieval social organization, with
its spirit of cooperation as expressed in the medieval guilds, had integrated
art and society, and so was far superior to the laissez-faire capitalism of his
own day. Consequently, he eventually insisted that only through commu-
nism could the same spirit be revived under conditions of greater freedom
in modern times: he had become convinced that capitalism is “Artificial
Famine,” * and that “the very essence of competitive commerce is waste
.. .” * because it is production for profit and not for use.
In spite of his Ruskinian love for the Middle Ages and what he
regarded as their approach to art, Morris realized more than Ruskin the
impossibility of actually returning to the conditions of the medieval period
which in so many respects he regarded as ideal. Consequently, he wrote in
a letter of 1884: “we cannot turn our people back into Catholic English
peasants and Guild craftsmen, or into heathen Norse bonders, much as
444 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

may be said for such conditions of life... .”* Yet even his conversion to
Marxism did not keep him from continuing to look upon medieval society
as a kind of utopia, the spirit of which he deliberately sought to recall and
to continue for the benefit of art. After all, he had been led to socialism
not by reading Marx but by disapproving an attack made upon Fourierism
by John Stuart Mill. That Morris always continued to apply his own
utopianism to the purpose of projecting the spirit of medieval society even
into the future is clearly reflected in his famous romances of reform written
late in life, notably The Dream of John Ball (1888), and especially News
from Nowhere (1891), written on the basis of an idyllic journey by
rowboat up the Thames to Kelmscott Manor in 1888. The Dream of John
Ball, his meditations on the meaning of man’s history for men of all
periods, was named for the leader of a revolt of the English lower classes in
the fourteenth century. Although in News from Nowhere Morris did write
of a bloody revolutionary struggle fought in the streets of London, his
vision of an ideal socialistic state of the future was set in the familiar
landscape of the Thames valley as a kind of pre-industrial Eden which
drew much inspiration from the medieval English village and from Kelms-
cott Manor. However, the book’s emphasis on decentralization, which was
to contribute so much to such modern conceptions of town planning as
the garden city and the “satellite town,” was stimulated at least as much
by the visions of the Fourierists and communist-anarchists as by the
Middle Ages, and not at all by Marxism, which has emphasized centraliza-
tion of control. For in spite of the impact that Marx’s ideas made upon
Mortis, in spite of the fact that Morris came to regard himself as a Marxist,
his views about art show that he always regarded socialism and commu-
nism as an attempt to realize a society of fellowship, of cooperation, in
which everyone would be guaranteed complete “equality of condition” by
the community. In this, like so many other socially radical artists, he was in
fact a libertarian with anarchist tendencies rather than an authoritarian
like Marx.
Furthermore, as befitted one who in his youth had been destined for
the Church, and who with his companions at Oxford had come near to
founding a kind of monastery, Morris subscribed to a supposed Marxism
that in fact was always modified by elements of Christian socialism. ‘These
survived even his great interest in pagan Norse sagas which led him to
equate “heathen Norse bonders” and “Catholic English peasants” in the
quotation cited earlier. He‘had gladly acknowledged that he was a good
deal influenced by the books of Charles Kingsley, the poet and novelist
who next to Maurice was the most famous Christian socialist in England.
Nor did Morris hesitate to draw ideas from other contemporary reform
movements by no means Marxian in spirit—the attention that he gave to
the doctrines of Henry George has already been mentioned.
This pluralism of Morris’s thought had as profound effects upon his
views about art as upon his social beliefs, and has caused “orthodox”
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 445

Marxists to deplore his inconsistencies even after, far into the twentieth
century, they belatedly made a strong effort to claim him as the first great
“Socialist” —meaning Marxian—artist.** Yet it was this pluralism that so
greatly aided Morris in attracting to his Hammersmith Clubroom a wide
variety of leaders in the political thought of ‘the time and an equally wide
assortment of people interested in the arts. Because in Morris himself so
broad a range of elements coming from the chief social movements of the
day was combined with aspects of so many contemporary literary and
artistic movements, his influence in art as in politics proved extraordinarily
many-sided. It therefore was able to spread to many places and to many
kinds of people, including some Marxists but many more non-Marxists,
and to do so for very different reasons and with exceedingly diverse results.
Some of those stimulated by him were affected only by certain aspects of
his political thought, some only by other aspects of his social thought,
others only by elements of his art theory, still others by combinations of
any or all of these in an extraordinary variety of mixtures. Among artists
and writers his influence was great in spite of the fact that, not unlike his
master Ruskin, in many respects he was far from being avant-garde, and so
in many cases could not accept the work of artistically progressive artists
and writers who, like him, were concerned with social problems. He did
find in the plays of Ibsen, “another token of the new dawn,” and praised
The Doll’s House as “‘a piece of the truth about modern society clearly and
forcibly put”; but, even so, it seems clear that he felt little real enthusiasm
for Ibsen,® with whose Symbolist qualities he could hardly be sympathetic.
He was moved to rage by the attempt to have Zola’s work banned for
“obscenity”; and he declared that Zola’s novel Germinal was “part of a
true picture of the life which our civilisation forces on labouring men
. .” ® yet he did not seem wholly happy about such a grim interpretation
of the life of laboring men as a fit subject for art. Although Morris was not
unaware of the greatness of Balzac and Tolstoy, he apparently found them
difficult or distasteful to read. As for the kind of painting considered
avant-garde in the days of his maturity, he regarded the Impressionists,
though honest, as open enemies of beauty, “pushing . . . into the domain
of empirical science”; * and did so even though Lucien Pissarro became a
member of Morris’s group at Hammersmith in 1891." As for the kind of
architecture that involved engineering in the modern materials of iron and
steel, Morris considered it to be a horrible and restless nightmare. He
hated the Eiffel Tower so much that when he went to Paris he liked to stay
in a hotel close to the base of the Tower in order not to have to see it.
From these judgments by Morris of contemporary art it is clear that,
as one Marxian commentator has said, “His view of ‘beauty’ was coloured
to the end by the romantic search for the ‘ideal.’. . .” ® It is worth noting
that when Morris’s rabidly Marxian friend, E. Belfort Bax, tried to spread
in Germany ideas about art similar to those of Morris, he called for a
synthesis of “idealism” with “materialism”—and was promptly attacked by
446 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

the orthodox Marxian materialist Karl Kautsky.*” In Morris’s own view, of

course, the ideal of beauty was inseparable from that revival of the
medieval spirit which had already made him a prominent figure in the
Gothic Revival long before he had begun to consider himself a Marxist. As
a result, most of his chief contributions to the arts were to lie in those
fields to which the spirit of the Middle Ages, and especially of the Gothic
period, could best apply—to architecture (even though he was not an
architect despite his brief architectural training), stained glass, furniture,
folk arts and crafts, and the art of the decorated book (Fig. 72). His direct
influence on painters and sculptors was, however, minor, and even in the
design of stained glass, furniture, architecture, etc., he and his immediate
friends had been anticipated by the devout Roman Catholic Gothicist,
Pugin.
Morris’s social ideas and his ideas about art were most closely con-
nected with his belief that reform should be led by the socially oriented
artist, and that the method of reform was to revive the spirit of the
medieval guilds. It was because the guild system minimized the division of
labor so characteristic under capitalism, and because it emphasized cooper-
ation within the guild, that Motris—like Carlyle and Ruskin before him—
sought to revive handicraft as a means of restoring the well-being of the
individual worker dehumanized by the machine. Through cooperation,
handicraft, and applied art, he too felt that workingmen could become
once more self-respecting personalities instead of being “permanently de-
graded into machines.” * He too believed that at the same time the
products of the workers’ hands would themselves be much improved in
quality because of the joy that the worker, supposedly like the craftsman of
the Middle Ages, would take in his work.*” After Morris became a
Marxian socialist, he attacked still more strongly the specialization result-
ing from the division of labor under capitalistic industrialism, not merely
by urging a return to craftsmanship, but also by encouraging craftsmen to
become proficient in several different kinds of craftsmanship: “A man
might easily learn and practice at least three crafts,” he wrote,” much like
Marx earlier. No longer should art “be limited to a narrow class who only
care for it in a very languid way . . .”; instead, it should become “the
solace and pleasure of the whole people. . . .” *°* He insisted that the
separation between fine arts and applied arts encouraged by the machine
age, a separation deplored also by Ruskin and by Marx, must be abolished.
In his criticism of the evils of industry under nineteenth-century
capitalism, and in the social goals that he sought, Morris ultimately had
much in common with Marx as well as with Ruskin. He fully accepted
Marx’s doctrine that the division of labor under capitalistic industrialism is
a primary factor in social disintegration, and consequently in artistic
disintegration. However, with Ruskin and in contrast to Marx, Morris
always called primarily for the moral reform of evils brought by the
Industrial Revolution and by capitalism, rather than primarily for the
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 447

economic reform that Marx demanded and believed would bring moral
reform in its train. Not only did Morris come to subscribe to an evolution-
ary rather than a necessarily violent revolutionary form of socialism, but
also, entirely unlike Marx, he believed in decentralization on the basis of
the guild rather than in a centralized proletarian state that will eventually
wither away—and so inclined more toward anarchism. Insofar as he sought
to revive the spirit of the medieval guilds and their handicraft he was, in
the Marxian view, both reactionary and utopian; it was only with some-
thing of an effort that Engels managed to regard Morris’s medievalism
with “good-humoured toleration.” 1°
Yet Morris was by no means unmindful of the material contributions
resulting from the Industrial Revolution: even though he hated the Eiffel
Tower, he once praised the iron steamship as the cathedral of the nine-
teenth century.*° He believed that “as a condition of life, production by
machinery is altogether an evil,” but “as an instrument for forcing on us
better conditions of life it has been, and for some time yet will be,
indispensable.” *’ Such indispensability, however, he regarded as lying
almost entirely outside the field of art: as he put it, “machines can do
everything—except make works of art.” ** In the arts, therefore, he urged:
“Set yourself as much as possible against all machine work,” *°° insisting—
unlike more orthodox Marxists—that under an ideal society such as that he
described in News from Nowhere, “in all work which it is a pleasure to do
by hand machinery is done without.” The arts apart, he did acknowledge
—like Owen earlier—the usefulness of machine production: he stated that
in such an ideal society “all work which would be irksome to do by hand is
done by immensely improved machinery.” *° But his attitude toward the
machine in art made him lag well behind followers of Pugin, Owen Jones,
and Semper, and especially behind his contemporary Christopher Dresser
(1834-1904), who, on the basis of the principles of Jones concerning
fitness, proportion, and harmony, was by the early 1870's designing beauti-
fully simple metalwork, pottery, glass, etc., for industrial production. In
Dresser’s first book on applied art, Principles of Decorative Design (1862),
he showed himself to be a wholehearted organic functionalist by insisting
that “material must in all cases be used in the simplest and most natural
manner. . .” and by urging perfect regard to the “principle of fitness, or
adaptation to purpose, as manifested in plants. . . .” Long before he
visited Japan in 1876, he had become interested in Japanese art and its
reduction of nature’s forms to essentials. Dresser’s originality decreased
with time, however, and in his old age he began to imitate followers of
Morris.
It was especially because Morris himself felt that the steam engine
had done so much to make England sordid and ugly that, with Ruskin, he
hated the industrialized civilization of his own day and wished to reduce
machinery moved by steam to a minimum. Unlike Ruskin, however,
Morris was not willing to return to the old, “natural” mechanical power of
448 / RADICALISM, MARXISMSINGENGDAND
sely
wind and water. When, in News from Nowhere, he called for ‘4mmen
driven by a new
improved machinery” for doing irksome work, it was to be
electricity,
and cleaner kind of power that as he described it was apparently
But
a kind of power approved by Ruskin only because it is so “natural.”
showed
because Morris’s demand for “immensely improved machinery”
more progres sive than Ruskin, he could appeal to
him to be a good deal
Marxist s, who otherwi se would have looked upon
many, including some
him as simply reactionary because of his Ruskinian admiration for the
Middle Ages and for handicraft. Nevertheless, many Marxists and anarch-
ists with an interest in the arts were among those who did feel that he
overromanticized handicraft and failed to give sufficient importance to the
possibilities of the machine as a tool. His friend Kropotkin wrote three
years after Morris died: “Overwork and lifelong monotony are equally bad
whether the work is done with the hand, with plain tools, or with a
machine. But apart from these, I fully understand the pleasure that man
can derive from a consciousness of the might of his machine, the intelli-
gent character of its work, the gracefulness of its movements, and the
correctness of what it is doing; and I think that William Morris’s hatred of
machines only proved that the conception of the machine’s power and
gracefulness was missing in his great poetical genius.” **
Certainly Morris’s influence on the arts of design did come from the
revival of handicraft that he encouraged and practiced as part of his effort
to improve by means of the arts both society and the life of the individual
human being, an effort in which morality, and even religion, played a
highly un-Marxian role. As Morris himself put it: “In my mind it is not
possible to disassociate art from morality, politics, and religion.” * Fur-
thermore, because to him art was fundamental for the development of
civilization, much as economics was for Marx, Morris declared, “You can
not educate, you can not civilize men, unless you give them a share in
art.” “8 He therefore maintained, much like Oscar Wilde, that “to every-
one who wishes to study Socialism duly it is necessary to look on it from
the aesthetic point of view.” "* Nor did he at all believe, like so many
orthodox Marxists, that the artist should be simply a servant of society and
social goals. He did not insist, as Lenin would, that the artist must make
himself understood by the masses—in fact quite the contrary, for he de-
clared that “artists are obliged to express themselves, as it were, in a lan-
guage not understanded [sic] of the people. Nor is this their fault. If they
were to try, as some think they should, to meet the public half-way and
work in such a manner as to satisfy at any cost those vague prepossessions
of men ignorant of art, they would be casting aside their special gifts, they
would be traitors to the cause of art, which it is their duty and glory to
servesine?
Thus Morris did make a distinction between artists and “the people,”
and therefore implicitly between art and the social organism of the good
society, because he too used the organic metaphor in opposing the concep-
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 449

tion of society as a kind of machine. For instance, in Socialism; Its Growth

and Outcome—the book stemming from articles that he and Bax pub-
lished in 1893—they contrasted the good society based on the “simple and
limited kinship group” and the “impersonal state” by declaring that “The
difference between these opposing circumstances of society is, in fact, the
difference between an organism and a mechanism.” *°
Even while distinguishing between artists and “the people,” however,
Morris—not unlike the Stalinists later—thundered against the belief that
individualistic self-expression, ‘‘art for art’s sake,” is the end to be sought in
the arts. Art for art’s sake, he sharply declared, is “a piece of slang that
does not mean the harmless thing it seems to mean. . . . Its fore-doomed
end must be, that art at last will seem too delicate a thing for even the
hands of the initiated to touch; and the initiated must at last sit still and
do nothing—to the grief of no one.”

14. Morris, the Arts and Crafts Movement,

and Architecture
Ir was because of such beliefs that Morris became the leading figure in
the “arts and crafts” movement, destined to have such a tremendous effect
on art and art education throughout the Western world, though his own
influence on modern arts was exerted especially through his lectures. ‘The
movement, which sought to give the designer the same status as the “fine”
artist and architect, took its name from the Arts and Crafts Exhibition
Society. This was founded in 1888 on principles proclaimed by Morris’s
friend, the socialist printer Emery Walker, and with the name, “Arts and
Crafts,” invented by Cobden-Sanderson. Its first president was Walter
Crane, who had recently been converted to socialism by reading Morris’s
pamphlet, Art and Socialism, and who later had a wide influence in the
United States (Fig. 73). The Arts and Crafts Society (of which Morris was
president at the time of his death in 1896) and a predecessor, the Art
Workers’ Guild (founded in 1884 with Morris as a member), were both
based on the principles of Morris and Ruskin, as was the still earlier
Century Guild (founded in 1882 by A. H. Mackmurdo). The inclusion of
the term “Guild” in the titles of the last two is significant, being borrowed
from Ruskin.
Although Morris fostered the arts and crafts movement, and although
his name is always associated with it, he, unlike so many of his followers,
believed that the movement would prove valuable only if closely related to
a program for changing society. Otherwise he foresaw—tightly, as it turned
out—that the arts and crafts movement was likely to become either a futile
protest against modern industrialism, an expression of “mere reactionary
450 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENCLAND

sentiment,” or else simply another source of commercial profit. While he

did believe that the movement might have value in preserving older art, he
had little hope that it could adequately encourage the new."*
Nevertheless, because the arts and crafts movement represented a
reaction both against the dehumanizing of the craftsman by industrialism
and against that Victorian over-elaboration which so often resulted from
misusing the new machine tools, it did tend to stimulate a straightforward
functionalism in art—of a kind that contrasted with the products of
Ruskin’s ideas. As mentioned earlier, Morris himself declared that “Noth-
ing can be a work of art which is not useful.” Along with this regard for
utility went his admiration for functional forms characterized by an order
that arises naturally, and thus organically, out of the inherent qualities of
the materials themselves. It was on this basis that he especially admired
Gothic architecture, declaring it to be “the most completely organic form
of the Art which the world has seen. . . .” And in the same lecture he
stated that in the good society “we shall take Gothic architecture by the
hand and know it for what it was and what it is,” namely (according to a
modern German admirer of Morris), “a magnificent manifestation of
organic order. Proceeding on such a tradition, one avows a principle of
structure that evolves its forms in the spirit of strict truthfulness, following
the conditions of use, material, and construction.” ™* It was on the basis of
such functional forms, also, that the types of Morris chair were designed by
members of his circle. Characteristically, one form of the Morris chair was
from a prototype made by an old carpenter and derived from a medieval
chair.”° However, if early types of Morris chairs (e.g., Fig. 71) as made by
Morris and Company until well into the twentieth century were simple
and “functional” compared to other Victorian chairs, they were originally
not nearly so simple as most furniture inspired by them.
The belief of Morris and his friends that architecture, painting,
sculpture, and the crafts should be reintegrated, with architecture holding
the key position as in the Middle Ages, had been stimulated both by
Morris’s master in architecture, the Gothic Revivalist, Street, and by
Ruskin. For Ruskin had spoken of architecture “as the beginning of
arts,” ** and had admired it especially because it is pre-eminently “the art
of the multitude.” * “Architecture,” Morris declared, “I look upon, first as
the foundation of all the arts, and next as an all-embracing art’; *° because
“painting is of little use, and sculpture of less, except where their works
form a part of architecture.” ** He especially valued architecture because
“all architectural work must be cooperative. . . .” *°
As early as 1859, nearly a quarter of a century before Morris thought
of becoming a Marxist, he had already exemplified many of these beliefs in
Red House, Bexley Heath (Fig. 70), designed and constructed for him in
accordance with his ideas by Philip Webb. This house directly reflected
Morris’s lasting desire for honest craftsmanship and for the straightfor-
wardly “natural” treatment of local materials and methods of construction,
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 451

an emphasis on local and regional values that was to differentiate him from
Marx. In Red House, furthermore, was displayed his liking for a free
treatment of mainly Gothic forms according to a native English folk
tradition in domestic architecture—freely treated because, Morris later
declared, “The [old] art then is gone, and can no more be ‘restored’ on its
old lines than a mediaeval building can be.” ”° Red House, which ex-
pressed architectural ideas coming from such Gothic Revivalists as Pugin,
Butterfield, and Street, and ideas about interior decoration and furniture
anticipated in designs by Pugin and Owen Jones, was destined to be
particularly influential.
In his admiration for the art of the Middle Ages, Morris with Ruskin,
tended to regard all the Renaissance and post-Renaissance styles up to his
own day as having constituted a most unfortunate interruption in the main
current of Western culture (although he did praise the Renaissance itself
insofar as it continued the workshop method for training artists practiced
in the Middle Ages). Again like Ruskin, he insisted that a truly modern
style must on the whole continue and develop the original spirit of the
Middle Ages, must therefore be primarily a continuation and development
of the Gothic style which had preceded that of the Renaissance—a view
that made him almost completely reject the great artists and writers of the
previous four hundred years. For him, such a modern style alone could
reflect a truly modern society, one in which such major aspects of medieval
society as the guilds would be carried further in order to aid the develop-
ment of the individual as well as of craftsmanship in the arts.
It must be reiterated that Morris sought, not to revive the art and
society of the Middle Ages themselves, but to go on from where the
Middle Ages had left off: on this account, as a member of the Society for
the Protection of Ancient Buildings, popularly known as the Committee of
Anti-Scrape, he opposed the restoration of actual medieval buildings,
calling instead for their preservation. For the same reason, though he
regarded Red House (Fig. 70) as being in the style of the thirteenth
century, he also considered Gothic to be the modern style and willingly
made use of art forms and techniques that had developed since the Middle
Ages. Thus in Red House he and Philip Webb did not hesitate to have
types of windows that had been unknown in England until long after the
medieval period.

15. Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites

Beuievinc that painting was the handmaiden of architecture, Morris was

even less of a painter than he was an architect, despite his early connection
with Pre-Raphaelitism and the one youthful experience when he had
joined Burne-Jones and other friends in helping Dante Gabriel Rossetti
452 VA RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

decorate the Oxford Union with scenes from Arthurian legend. At the
time when he had Red House built in 1859, many of his ideas had already
been held by Rossetti and-artist-friends associated in the original incarna-
tion of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood." The Pre-Raphaelites, it will be
recalled, had been founded in 1848, the year of revolutions on the Conti-
nent and of the Chartist riots in England. It may well be significant that,
like Christian socialism in England, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, then
considered so radical artistically, was established in a year of such politi-
cally and socially radical disturbances. Of its seven members, five had at
least some socially radical interests. This was true of two of the three
founders, Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais (the third, Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, was more nearly apolitical). Hunt and Millais had partic-
ipated in a Chartist procession in April 1848, a few months before the
Brotherhood was founded. Hunt, especially, was affected by the revolution-
ary events of 1848: he later wrote that, “Like most young men I was stirred
by the spirit of freedom of the passing revolutionary time.” That spirit led
him to paint his first Pre-Raphaelite picture, begun even before the Broth-
erhood was organized. This was a painting of an episode in the life of
Rienzi, a popular leader in fourteenth-century Rome who sought to make
Rome a democracy and the capital of a republican empire. Of this painting
Hunt said: “The appeal of Heaven against tyranny exercised over the poor
and helpless seemed well fitted for pictorial treatment.” The events of 1848
also excited three other Pre-Raphaelites, William Michael Rossetti, F. G.
Stephens, and especially the sculptor Thomas Woolner, a friend of Carlyle
who held fervently democratic convictions.”* While Hunt’s Rienzi was the
Pre-Raphaelite work most directly inspired by the revolutionary spirit of
1848, a few works by Millais (Fig. 74) and others show at least some social
implications, though the election of Millais as an Associate of the Royal
Academy in 1854 put a definite end to his earlier, relatively lukewarm,
social interests.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had been formed within a month
after Holman Hunt had introduced Gabriel Rossetti to Millais in August
1848. Some months earlier Hunt had read, and responded with enthusiasm
to, Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843 and 1846) in which Ruskin advised
nineteenth-century painters to look back to the Italian artists before Raph-
ael, who had painted their subjects with “loving fidelity” to nature.
A few days after their first conversation with Millais, Hunt and
Rossetti had been much struck by seeing at Millais’s house a volume of
engravings of frescoes of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries in the
Campo Santo at Pisa. When, soon, they decided to band together and
sought a name for their group, the term Brotherhood was contributed by
Rossetti. Ford Madox Brown, recently Rossetti’s teacher and his lifelong
friend—who, as will be seen later, had strong socially radical interests—
always thought that Rossetti and his friends had obtained the term “Pre-
Raphaelite” from him. Brown, who was closely associated with the Pre-
ric. 74. The Race Meeting (1853), drawing by John Everett Millais.
454 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

Raphaelites without ever being a member of the group, later declared: “As
to the name Pre-Raphaelite, when they began talking about the early Ital-
ian masters, I naturally told them of the German Pre-Raphaelites, and. . .
they took it.” *”°
“The German Pre-Raphaelites” to whom Madox Brown referred were
members of that German group of romantic religious-communist painters
who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren but have been better
known as the Nazarenes.% They had seceded from the Academy at
Vienna in 1809—the first definite anti-academic secession in modern times.
Protestants converted to Roman Catholicism, the members of the group
had gone to Rome, and thete had attempted to revive the spirit of
medieval art—to them the only truly Christian art—by organizing them-
selves on the model of a medieval painters’ guild. Hence they sought to
revive both fresco and teamwork in art. For some years at Rome, beginning
in 1810, they lived a life of communistic brotherhood in an old monastery.
Years later, on a nine-month visit to Italy, Ford Madox Brown had become
friendly with Peter von Cornelius and Johann Friedrich Overbeck, surviv-
ing members of the Nazarenes, and in 1845 had visited their studio. He
returned to England in the following year.
The Nazarenes had already affected English art through their influ-
ence on the Scottish-born High Church painter and stained-glass designer,
William Dyce (1806-1864), who in 1825 and again in 1827-1828 had
made contact at Rome with the Nazarenes, and learned from them to
paint in fresco; he has even been called “the English “Nazarener.’” With
the help of Prince Albert, who admired the Nazarenes, Dyce was selected
to execute frescoes in the new Houses of Parliament. Significantly, in 1838
Dyce had anticipated Morris’s interest in the crafts by installing a loom
and a pottery kiln in a Normal School of Design at London at which he
was teaching. This school, founded the year before, constituted with its
provincial branches the first effort to “marry art to industry,” ** thus
anticipating also Henry Cole and his friends. So likewise did Dyce’s
Drawing Book of the School of Design (1842-1843) in preaching the
necessity for ornament to be “rather abstract than imitative.” Further-
more, as Dyce’s painting was inspired by Italian art of the fifteenth century
and he was a pioneer too in outdoor naturalism who loved to paint with
careful detail, he anticipated the Pre-Raphaelites. Not surprisingly, he was
sympathetic to the aims of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood when it burst
upon the world in 1849. It-was he who, in 1850 at the exhibition of the
Royal Academy, converted Ruskin to Pre-Raphaelitism: as Ruskin re-
corded in a letter of 1882, “my real introduction to the whole [Pre-
Raphaelite] school was by Mr. Dyce, R.A. who dragged me literally up to
Millais’ picture of The Carpenter's Shop . . . and forced me to look for its
THCTItS e
Madox Brown’s encounter with the Nazarenes, nearly two decades
later than that of Dyce, had occurred after he had pursued art studies in
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 455

Belgium and then in Paris. There, unable to find a satisfactory teacher, he

had independently studied and copied paintings, paying particular atten-
tion to Rembrandt and various Spanish masters in the Louvre. It was at
this time that he first felt a strong predilection for realism. From Paris he
had gone to Rome by way of Basel, where he discovered for himself the
work of Hans Holbein the younger. During his months in Italy, Brown
found himself moved by the works of such early Renaissance masters as
Giotto, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Uccello, and Pollaiuolo, whose names
were then hardly known in England.
It was Madox Brown who introduced into England, as a revolutionary
new kind of art, the variety of realism that also became characteristic of
Pre-Raphaelite art. As his grandson wrote, Madox Brown had returned
from Italy in 1846 “an artistic revolutionist . . . deliberately determined to
begin again and work out for himself an absolutely realistic style. . . .” *”
Because Madox Brown’s art training had been entirely received out-
side of England, his revolutionary new realism owed no allegiance what-
ever to British academicism; and as for the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood, they had revolted against their academic training. In this
respect they resembled the Nazarenes, who likewise had looked for inspira-
tion to Italian artists before Raphael, and so had early become part of the
medieval revival in the arts. However, the Pre-Raphaelites lacked the
religious interests of the Nazarenes, whose artistic principles also were very
different from those of Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelites. For where
the latter all believed in truth to nature, the Nazarene Overbeck had
explained to Madox Brown in 1845 that he never drew flesh “parts from
nature, on the principle of avoiding the sensuous in religious art.” **
Furthermore, the technique of the Pre-Raphaelites was revolutionary in
rejecting the brownish tones typical of British painting of the time in favor
of painting in bright colors on a white background, much as the Italian
fresco painters had done (though not in oil) in painting on plaster.
Nevertheless, at the first meeting of the seven members of the original
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hunt had carefully explained that they were
not antiquarians or medievalists, and that only a spiritual bond existed
between them and the Italian Pre-Raphaelites. In fact the members of the
Brotherhood really knew little about Italian painting before Raphael from
actual works. In 1849, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Hunt visited the
Continent for a month, but went only to Paris and Belgium without,
apparently, having any desire whatever to visit Italy. This was the longest
trip Rossetti ever took. Its highlight was Bruges, where he especially
admired works by Memling and Van Eyck.
Late in 1849, very shortly after returning to England, Rossetti began
work on what is probably his best-known picture, the Annunciation to the
Virgin entitled Ecce Ancilla Domini. It was painted almost entirely in
tones of white, with a revolutionary simplicity and, up to a point, realism
_characteristics of Pre-Raphaelite painting destined to have a profound
456 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

influence in various arts. A similar emphasis on simplicity, combined with

a functional truth to nature (and therefore realism) in the treatment of
materials was to be found in William Morris’s Red House nine years later,
and still later in the arts and crafts movement. We shall see that simplicity
in white tones was to be characteristic of some paintings that Whistler
executed under Pre-Raphaelite influence, and also of works by E. W.
Godwin, an architect and decorator employed by Whistler and Wilde.
Another influence on the art of the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers was
that of William Blake. From the age of eighteen, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
had admired Blake’s poetry, and he introduced Blake’s works to the other
members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. (He and his brother com-
pleted, and in 1864 published, Alexander Gilchrist’s Life and Works of
William Blake.)
Because of the Pre-Raphaelites’ thoroughly anti-academic style, they
were soon assailed by the academic Establishment of the time in England.
The sharpest attdcks came in 1851, the first of them being made by Prince
Albert. In desperation, the Pre-Raphaelites sent a friend to Ruskin, already
converted to Pre-Raphaelitism by William Dyce, to ask his support. After
the friend pointed out that the philosophical impulse of the Pre-Rapha-
elites toward fidelity to nature had been stimulated by Ruskin’s Modern
Painters, in May 1851 Ruskin wrote two now-famous letters to the London
Times in their defense. In the following August he published a sixty-
eight-page pamphlet, Pre-Raphaelitism.
Nevertheless, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was already declining.
After 1850 it hardly ever met officially. In 1853, after many months
without a meeting, a single meeting was held; in the following year the
election of Millais to the Royal Academy meant the demise of the original
Brotherhood.
However, it had, we know, a kind of second incarnation in which
Morris participated. When in 1856 Morris and his best friend, Burne-
Jones, first became closely associated with that most prominent Pre-
Raphaelite, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Rossetti—though so largely apolitical
—had already been persuaded by Ruskin, his friend since the previous year,
to join him in teaching drawing at the Working Men’s College in Lon-
don. ‘There Burne-Jones met Rossetti, and soon introduced Morris to
him. There, following the example of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and most of
the other members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle also taught,"° and Morris
gave a lecture at the College in 1881.
D. G. Rossetti, the mentor of Morris and Burne-Jones, who had also
been a founder of the original Pre-Raphaelite group, was the son of an
Italian poet, liberal, Carbonaro, and revolutionary patriot, Gabriele Ros-
setti, once an opera librettist and a curator of sculpture at the Museum of
Naples. Condemned to death for opposing the Bourbon tyranny of King
Ferdinand of Naples, Gabriele Rossetti had managed to flee to exile in
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 457

London where he became a professor of Italian at King’s College, after

having first been beaten out for the position by another Italian revolution-
ary, Antonio Pannizi, who eventually became the most famous head the
British Museum has ever had.
Gabriele Rossetti’s second son, William Michael Rossetti, followed
his father’s politically revolutionary principles much more closely than did
his older brother. William Michael Rossetti, a literary critic who was a
member of both Pre-Raphaelite groups, was responsible for first publishing
in England an edition of Whitman’s poems—that edition which so stimu-
lated the young Edward Carpenter. The libertarianism of this Rossetti led
him to become a good friend of Kropotkin, who, however, was probably on
even more cordial terms with Rossetti’s young daughters, Olivia and
Helen. At the age of fourteen and seventeen respectively, these two young
girls published an anarchist magazine, the Torch, to which Lucien Pissarro
and such famous radical writers as Zola and Mirbeau contributed. The
office of the Torch, which had been the girls’ nursery, was a noted
gathering place for foreign anarchists. One eventual visitor was the Ameni-
can anarchist Emma Goldman," who took much interest in the arts.

16. Pre-Raphaelitism and the

Radicalism of Ford Madox Brown

Dante Gasriet Rosserti and Burne-Jones were both such good friends of
Morris that in 1861, as we mentioned, they helped to found the firm of
manufacturing craftsmen-artists, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Com-
pany. Another who did so was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s teacher, William
Michael Rossetti’s father-in-law, Ford Madox Brown, whose designs for
furniture were, in their reduction of form to essentials, some of the most
advanced of their time. Of the firm’s founders, Charles Faulkner and
Philip Webb were the only two besides Morris who actually became
socialists, but Madox Brown freely acknowledged, in connection with his
best-known painting, Work (Fig. 75), that he often had a “socialistic
twinge.” %7 In fact, according to Madox Brown’s grandson, although
Madox Brown was in later life “by temperament a good deal of a “Tory of
the old school’. . . his intellect made him a Socialist of an extreme type,”
and “To this . . . his desire to better the lot of the poor contributed
largely.” **° For he gave much attention to problems connected with the
poor and the relief of social distress. In 1850-1852 he had an experimental
drawing school for artisans in the slums of London’s Camden Town.
Then, in 1860-1861, he and his wife even had a soup kitchen in their home
to help the poor during the winter months of exceptional hardship. He also
 FIG. 75. Work (1852-1863) by Ford Madox Brown.

encouraged the youthful socialistic and anarchistic inclinations of William

Michael Rossetti’s two daughters (his granddaughters) and genially wel-
comed Russian revolutionaries including Kropotkin and Stepniak. In the
early 1870’s, his house bristled with exiles from the Paris Commune.”
In 1857, Ford Madox Brown, together with Morris, Burne-Jones, and
others, founded the influential Hogarth Club,“ named for the great
eighteenth-century English artist who so largely concerned himself with
everyday scenes of everyday people, including the poor. As Hogarth’s style
was exceptionally realistic and “true to nature,” it was natural for Pre-
Raphaelites, including Morris and Burne-Jones, to be among the members
of the Hogarth Club, and for it to be founded partly as an exhibiting soci-
ety in opposition to the Royal Academy. Nor is it surprising that Hogarth
—and the Hogarth Club—have stirred considerable interest among English
Marxists more or less sympathetic to realism in art, and in some cases to
Soviet socialist realism.
Madox Brown also had considerable influence on the development of
graphic art, one likewise destined to attract the attention of Marxist critics,
historians, and artists in the mid-twentieth century.“ Whereas up through
the middle of the nineteenth century most graphic works had taken the
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 459

form of caricatures or of illustrated moral anecdotes or allegories, in the

1860's, under the stimulation of Madox Brown’s largely Christian socialist
inclinations and the influence of Charles Dickens, their character began to
alter. The changing social conditions, the increasing awareness of the
interdependence of affairs political and economic as well as foreign and
domestic, the development of techniques of reproduction making possible
mass art (including mass advertising, with its connotations of propa-
ganda), all created the role of the artist-reporter who records, and by his
choice of subjects comments on, actual events and social conditions. ‘The
work of these artists began to appear in the new illustrated papers such as
the London Graphic, founded in 1869 and edited by the wood-engraver
William Luson Thomas, a Liberal reformer-friend of Dickens, who be-
lieved that propaganda against crime and poverty could be combined with
entertainment. One artist for the Graphic was Luke Fildes, who was
recommended by the former Pre-Raphaelite Millais to Dickens and made
the illustrations for Dickens’s novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (which
was unfinished when Dickens died). The spirit of Dickens’s social con-
sciousness is apparent in such of Fildes’s paintings as his first popular
success, Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward (1874), a kind of
catalog of social miseries realistic in that none of the figures was a
professional model: all were characters out of real life. The subject had
been anticipated in the illustration by Fildes, “Houseless and Hungry”
(Fig. 76), published in the first number of the Graphic in December
1869.° It was on the basis of this drawing that Millais recommended
Fildes to Dickens. Years later, at a dinner for Luson Thomas and the
Graphic, Fildes praised illustration as a peculiarly English art that is also
the art of the multitude. But meanwhile (as Fildes’s son has recorded),
Morris attacked Fildes’s work for “repulsive skill of representation” and
“commonplace conventionality.”
Among the other artists who drew for the Graphic and similar illus-
trated papers were Arthur Boyd-Houghton (a member of the second
Pre-Raphaelite group whose drawings are said to have stimulated the
young Picasso), George Pinwell, and Frederick Walker, all of whom were
influenced by Madox Brown. The favorite subjects of these artists included
result-
mines, factories, slums, refuges for the homeless, and other subjects
ing from the effects, under capitalism, of the Industrial Revolution. Still
genre
another artist for the Graphic was Hubert von Herkomer, known for
subjects taken from London low life and popular life. When Herkomer
for
was elected a full member of the Royal Academy in 1890, he submitted
with the highly
the required “diploma” painting a highly realistic picture
depicts a
unacademic title On Strike (Fig. 77), which sympathetically
acad-
workingman at his cottage door with wife and child. Thus, unlike
attempted to
emies elsewhere, the Royal Academy in England has not
stifle the note of social protest completely.
considera-
The influence of such artist-reporters on other artists was
1873 to 1875, admire d Englis h illustra tive
ble: Van Gogh, in London from
 ric. 76. “Houseless and Hungry” by Luke Fildes, from the Graphic, Decem-
ber 4, 1869.

engraving and the humanitarianism of Herkomer and Fildes, as he ad-

mired the novels of Dickens and George Eliot. He collected old bound
volumes of the Graphic, referred to some of its artists enthusiastically in
his letters, and even made some drawings for it, but was too timid to
submit them. Gustave Doré, in his series on the London poor, entitled
London, A Pilgrimage (1870), worked under the same impetus: his draw-
ing of convicts walking around and around a prison courtyard was the
stimulus for a painting by Van Gogh. Direct contact with the United
States was established by Boyd-Houghton when he went there on special
assignment from the Graphic to make a series of drawings entitled
“Graphic America.” These, which appeared between 1870 and 1873 in the
Graphic itself, in Harper’s Weekly, and, during 1871, in the Boston Every
Saturday, were scenes of city life and of immigrant families that possessed
at least some implicit social content. Because the Graphic’s circulation was
international, it may well have influenced not only Van Gogh and Doré,
but also many other foreign artists, especially in France and Belgium, to
interest themselves in depicting the industrial revolution in their own
countries.
As for Ford Madox Brown, the chief influence on this socially con-
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 461

scious graphic tradition, his most famous painting, Work (Fig. 75), al-
ready mentioned in connection with his “socialistic twinges,” is devoted
primarily to laboring men. At the right in the picture, however, are
represented two of his heroes, Carlyle and Maurice, while the Working
Men’s College, where Madox Brown succeeded D. G. Rossetti as an art
teacher and taught from 1858 to 1860, is advertised on one of the bill-
boards at the left. In explaining the painting, to which the artist devoted
himself on and off over the years from 1852 to 1863, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti once declared that it illustrates “all kind of Carlylianisms”; and he
added that the portraits of Carlyle and Maurice were included by Madox
Brown, along with manual laborers, as those of brain workers who, while
“seeming to be idle, work and are the cause of well-ordained work in
others.” “* Throughout, the painting is executed with a realism that is in
harmony with the Ruskinian and Pre-Raphaelite doctrines of truth to
nature and the “just representation of natural objects in a scientific
spirit.” ° Yet as Work so well shows, the result is, of course, not a realism
in accordance with scientific laws of vision and of natural light—the kind
of scientific realism that later affected the Impressionists and then gov-
erned the Neo-Impressionists in France for a time. Instead, it is a realism
resulting from the careful inclusion of every accessory useful for telling the
story implicit in the artist’s title, with each one depicted as if seen very
close up, and rendered in detail with the fidelity to nature of a botanical
drawing. Nevertheless, the desire of Brown and of the Pre-Raphaelites for
truth to nature often led some of them to paint the backgrounds of out-
door subjects directly from nature, and thus to anticipate by over a decade
the “pleinairisme” of the French Impressionists.
Not long after Madox Brown had completed Work, he completely
changed his artistic point of view “to become an aestheticist.” * In other
words, he moved away from the realism of truth to nature toward that
other, and “aesthetic,” current which had also formed part of the Pre-
Raphaclite movement, and was exemplified especially in the art of Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, who inclined both toward aestheticism and toward the
romantically primitive.
As a consequence of this mixture of tendencies within Pre-Raphaeli-
tism, Walter Crane—who was led to socialism by Morris’s example and
became a leading Fabian before playing a major role in spreading Morris's
ideas in the United States (Fig. 73)—later defined the point of view of the
Pre-Raphaelite movement as follows: “It was primitive and archaic on one
side; it was modern and realistic on another, and again, on another,
romantic, poetic and mystic, or again, wholly devoted to ideals of decora-
tive beauty.” **”
Clearly, in so broad a program almost anyone except the artists of the
academic tradition against which the Pre-Raphaelites particularly revolted
could hope to find something that could appeal to him. This obviously
meant that the various Pre-Raphaelites had embraced many contradictory
od
ideas—ideas so inconsistent, in fact, that it is a wonder the Brotherho
462 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

constituted a group of any coherence at all. But the “modern and realistic”
aspect of Pre-Raphaelitism especially could make’ it appeal to those of its
circle who, like Ford Madox Brown and eventually Morris, developed
socialistic inclinations. For, as noted above, while the romantic side of the
Pre-Raphaelites, which was responsible for their love for the primitive in
art, had stimulated a revival of the forms of the Middle Ages, they had
mostly tended to modify the forms that they borrowed from medieval
painting by making them much more literally realistic in a story-telling
way in harmony with the earlier style of Madox Brown and with their
Ruskinian slogan, truth to nature. In painting, such realism could easily
be made to lend itself to propaganda. And in architecture and applied arts,
“truth to nature” was the equivalent of that functional stripping down of
basically medieval forms—as exemplified by Red House (Fig. 70) and the
Morris chair (Fig. 71)—in the effort to express, with literal truthfulness,
the specific nature of the work and of its materials and construction, an
effort to be carried much further in the course of time.

17. Pre-Raphaelitism and

“Art for Art's Sake’: Whistler, and
the Anarchism of Wilde and Mallarmé

"Tne orner side of Pre-Raphaelitism, the purely aesthetic point of view so

largely exemplified by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had also affected even the
young William Morris for a decade or so after he first fell under Rossetti’s
influence in 1856. It will be recalled that Rossetti, Morris, and Burne-Jones
formed the core of a revived Pre-Raphaelite movement beginning in 1857,
and that in 1862 they were joined by Swinburne. In that very year
Swinburne proclaimed his enthusiasm for the French movement known as
“Tart pour Vart,” which had developed out of romanticism. As remarked
earlier, “Tart pour l'art” was an anti-academic movement which was also
anti-bourgeois in rejecting moral purpose and utility as ends in art. It was
likewise opposed to Saint-Simonian socialism which regarded social useful-
ness as the proper aim of the arts. However, Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, and
also many Symbolist upholders of “Tart pour l'art” were sympathetic either
to Fourierism or to the anarchism which so largely grew out of Fourier’s
doctrines, admiring them because they called for the decentralization of
society and thereby gave greater emphasis to the individual person. Simi-
larly, although most exponents of “art for art’s sake” were ordinarily not
political-minded, they were socially rebellious in being so individualistic
and libertarian as to represent a kind of social as well as artistic anarchism.
And at times their love of liberty overflowed into politics: the artistic
FIG. 77. On Strike (1890) by Hubert von Herkomer.
464 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

libertarianism of Swinburne, for example, developed political overtones in

his great enthusiasm for the cause of Italian independence. And some
exponents of “art for art’s sake” in England, as on the Continent, were led
to support anarchism of a socio-political kind.
Swinburne had apparently been introduced to “Tart pour l'art” by his
friend Whistler ** while on a visit to Paris in 1862. Whistler himself had
gone to Paris from the United States in 1855 to study painting, attracted
by a reading of Murger’s Scénes de la vie de Bohéme. As an art student he
had already become strongly anti-academic, being influenced especially by
Courbet, whom he knew and who praised his portrait of his sister and
niece entitled Au piano; he was also influenced by the left-wing republican
and eventual Impressionist painter, Manet. At Paris, Whistler likewise
became the friend of Baudelaire, by then a leader of “lart pour Part,” who
admired his art.
Whistler settled in London more or less permanently in 1859, but
continued to make periodic trips to Paris, on one of which Swinburne first
met him in 1862. In that year Swinburne introduced him to Dante Gabriel
Rossetti at a time when Rossetti’s immediate circle still constituted
the second—and in major respects more aesthetic—version of the Pre-
Raphaelite movement. Earlier, under the influence of such relatively social-
minded—and artistically more realistic—members of the movement as
Hunt and Millais, Whistler had for a brief period contributed drawings
and engravings with social implications to magazines and other publica-
tions of strong moral and didactic flavor. One such drawing was “The Re-
lief Fund in Lancashire,” intended to illustrate the reprint of an address by
Tennyson on a Lancashire famine. But beginning in 1862 the more artis-
tically radical “art for art’s sake” kind of Pre-Raphaelitism represented by
Rossetti appealed to Whistler much more strongly, with the result that he
lost all social interests and in his art became a kind of aesthetic individ-
ualist-anarchist.“° The influence of Rossetti’s aestheticism can already be
seen in Whistler’s painting, The White Girl (1863), and by 1867 it led
him to reject Courbet as he himself moved more and more to what was
becoming known in England as “art for art’s sake.” Through Whistler, the
aestheticism of Rossetti could easily link up with the influence of “(art
pour Vart” from France, with which Whistler already had a connection
through Baudelaire. It is significant that the only English artist whom
Whistler really admired was Albert Moore, of whom Swinburne wrote:
“His painting is to artists what the verse of Théophile Gautier is to poets
. -’;*°° in other words, the epitome of “art for art’s sake.” Whistler had
first met Moore in 1865; for a time the two were very close, and they seem
to have influenced each other.
Especially out of “Tart pour art” and Rossettian aestheticism, then,
developed “art for art’s sake” in England, which nevertheless had antece-
dents in English romanticism not unlike those of “Part pour Tart” in
France. For the English term was apparently adapted from the phrase,
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 465

“poetry for its own sake,” as used in 1817 by the Radical writer Leigh
Hunt in reviewing the Poems of his friend Keats,’** who was likewise
sympathetic to Radicalism. It is worth emphasizing that a common inter-
est in Keats’s poetry helped to bring Rossetti together with Holman Hunt
and Millais in 1847, thereby stimulating the founding of the Pre-
Raphaelite movement in the following year *” shortly after Hunt and Mil-
lais had demonstrated their sympathy for Chartism.
There is still uncertainty as to who first revised Leigh Hunt’s “poetry
for its own sake” into “art for art’s sake.” In 1839 Thackeray (who had
studied art in Paris, had become an illustrator, and fancied himself as an
art critic) favorably referred to “art for art’s sake” in a letter to his mother
in which he went on to say that Carlyle more than any other had worked
to give art “its independence” **—but Thackeray’s letter was not pub-
lished until 1894. In any event, Swinburne used the term in 1868 in an
essay on Blake in which he declared: “Art for art’s sake first of all... .” ***
And for our purposes it is especially significant that the two authors,
Carlyle and Blake, respectively cited by Thackeray and Swinburne in
connection with “art for art’s sake,” both had socially radical interests—as
also was to be the case with some later upholders of the doctrine. Further-
more, Swinburne himself was the chief link between the symbolism of
Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites and that of the French Symbolists, so many
of whom were anarchists.
We have already noted that one important later supporter of the “art
for art’s sake” movement who, like Swinburne, felt Whistler’s influence,
developed social concerns of an anarchist kind. This was Wilde, who
joined Whistler at London in 1881 after he had already been somewhat
affected by “art for art’s sake” as a student at Oxford. There he had studied
under Walter Pater, who had become enthusiastic for both Pre-Raphaeli-
tism and “art for art’s sake” in 1868 primarily through his friendship for
Swinburne. As a consequence, even though Wilde was influenced by
Whistler, he in turn was able to stimulate his painter-friend by expounding
Pater’s ideas to him before they fell out, accusing each other of plagiar-
ism. But whereas Whistler, although a kind of artistic anarchist, eventually
had no more social interests than Pater had, Wilde—after hearing Shaw
deliver a speech on socialism at a Fabian meeting—wrote “The Soul of
Man Under Socialism” (1891) from an anarchistic point of view, and two
years later proclaimed himself an anarchist. In view of his concern for man,
and especially the artist, in society, it is significant that as an Oxford
undergraduate he had been affected by the conception of beauty held by
Ruskin, then Slade Professor of Fine Arts. When he became an upholder
of “art for art’s sake,” however, his idea of beauty diverged sharply from
that of Ruskin, and also from that of Morris, who likewise had strongly
influenced him. For, like Gautier, Flaubert, and other exponents of art
for its own sake, Wilde came to feel the need for an avant-garde compre-
hension of the contemporary milieu in its most advanced aspects. Not
466 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

unlike Gautier, therefore, he came to a conception of beauty based on the

most up-to-date understanding of the forms of the machine age in its own
right, a conception thus essentially functional but in a “formalistic,” rather
than “realistic,” way. Consequently, he said in a lecture of 1882: “. . . all
machinery may be beautiful when it is undecorated even. Do not seek to
decorate it. We cannot but think all good machinery is graceful, also, the
line of the strength and the line of the beauty being one.” ** This idea of
beauty of form was only reinforced by Wilde’s developing anarchism, and
we shall see later that other anarchists—especially the Belgian architects
Van de Velde and Horta—moved toward a somewhat similar avant-garde
machine-age aesthetic, as also did:more recent architects, notably Tony
Garnier and Le Corbusier, who were stimulated by Fourierism.
Friendship with Wilde was not the only link that the painter Whis-
tler had with socio-political anarchism. Another was his friendship with
Mallarmé. The published lecture of 1885, Ten O'Clock, in which Whistler
expounded his long-held belief in “art for art’s sake,” was translated
into French in 1887 by Mallarmé, whom he had met through Manet
before 1880.7 While Mallarmé was making the translation, he enthusiasti-
cally wrote Whistler: “I sympathized so much with your vision of art” *°
—nor was this statement surprising because, after all, the Symbolist move-
ment of which Mallarmé was a leader was itself essentially a continuation
of “l'art pour Tart” as expounded earlier by Gautier and by Whistler's
friend Baudelaire. The publication of Mallarmé’s translation of “Ten
O'Clock” in 1888 by the Revue indépendante, of which Félix Fénéon was
editor, itself reflected Mallarmé’s own sympathy for anarchism.
Whistler and the Symbolists alike sought to isolate the aesthetic
essence by eliminating all direct intellectual appeal in art and by making
instead a directly sensuous approach to the human spirit essentially like
that made by music. As a consequence, Whistler even gave musical titles
to his later pictures. It was one of these—his Nocturne, Black and Gold of
1877, which contained no social comment and had no moral purpose and
almost no imitation of nature (although inspired by a falling rocket)—
that enraged the socially concerned Ruskin into making a violent attack on
the painter, thereby leading Whistler to sue Ruskin for libel. He was, we
noted, awarded a verdict of one farthing.

18. “Art for Art's Sake” and

the Reduction of Form to Essentials,
Abstract or Realistic-Functional; Mackmurdo
Because the upholders of “art for art’s sake” have always rejected social
usefulness as the aim of art, they not only have deliberately separated art
from the masses—as Whistler specifically did in his “Ten O’Clock”—but
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 467

in doing so they adopted the kind of formalistic point of view destined to

be violently assailed later in the Soviet Union under the Stalinist aesthetic
of socialist realism. Wilde even proclaimed that the sentiment of the artist
is entirely guided by form. Whistler preferred to call his celebrated portrait
of his mother an Arrangement in Grey and Black, thereby indicating that
he wished it to be regarded simply as a formal arrangement—one in which
the forms were reduced to essentials. This reduction to basic forms had
been especially stimulated by the purely aesthetic admiration for Japanese
art which about 1863 Whistler had acquired from Dante Gabriel Rossetti:
thus the simplified, relatively abstract composition of his Nocturne, Blue
and Gold, a painting of Battersea Bridge, clearly suggests the influence of
Japanese prints. But Whistler’s use of such musical terms as ‘“‘Nocturne”
and “Symphony” for the titles of his paintings doubtless derived from
Théophile Gautier and “art pour l'art” by way of Baudelaire, as Gautier
had a habit of giving his poems titles derived from other arts, especially
music, such as “Symphonie en blanc majeur.” We have seen that Baude-
laire also was interested in Japanese prints.
The formalism of Whistler and Wilde had a direct influence on
avant-garde architecture through works designed for them by their friend
Edward W. Godwin, the leading architect of the aesthetic movement, who
as early as August 1875 expressed in the Architect his hope that the day of
architectural revivals was ending, thereby anticipating the anti-historicism
of modern architecture. He had, however, started out as a Victorian
Gothicist, and then had become much influenced by reading Ruskin’s The
Stones of Venice, on which, he avowed, his winning design of 1861 for the
new town hall at Northampton was entirely founded. Godwin, who, like
Morris, tried to unite all the arts in his person and practice in an “organic”
kind of way, disliked the term “architect” as too limited, preferring to be
called “artist.” His aim was the total work of art, encompassing architec-
ture, decoration, furnishings, utensils, and costume. Partly under the influ-
ence of Japanese art, which he apparently studied as early as 1860—before
Dresser and Whistler, and also before he was particularly stimulated by
the first large display of Japanese prints in the West at the International
Exhibition of 1862 in London—Godwin in his architecture developed a
kind of pre-cubist reduction of form and color to essentials which was
reinforced by his liking for the white tones derived by Whistler from
Rossetti. The White House (so named because its walls were of white
brick) that in 1877-1878 Godwin designed for Whistler on Tite Street in
the Chelsea district of London was in its form the most radical building of
its time. It stirred up much controversy; modifications had to be made in
the design, which was finally approved in 1878. In 1884-1885, Godwin and
Whistler—who was to marry Godwin’s widow—were associated in decorat-
ing Oscar Wilde’s house, across the street from The White House. Whis-
tler suggested the color scheme, which included much pale yellow (in 1866
he had decorated his own drawing room in pale yellow and white), and he
supervised the painting. One room in the Wilde house, decorated by
468 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

Godwin, especially reduced color and form to essentials, being utterly

simple and painted in shades of white and gray, with the furniture all
white except for a red lampshade.’
In such designs as these, Godwin was well ahead of Morris, to whom
they undoubtedly seemed too frigid, too inexpressive of the nature of
materials, too far from the Gothic tradition. But the room for Wilde
apparently stimulated the avant-garde yet apolitical Scottish architect
Mackintosh and, through him, aspects of the Art Nouveau style on the
Continent, which was also influenced by the socially conscious Morris and
his followers. ,
The reduction of form to essentials in Whistler’s Nocturnes and
Godwin’s architecture for Whistler and Wilde, then, was of a kind involv-
ing abstraction of form away from physical nature. But reduction to
essential forms could also be made for the diametrically opposite end of
revealing either the physical materials of which the work of art is made or
the physical function it is to serve. These two utterly divergent ends were
represented by the two poles of the Pre-Raphaelite tradition.
In summary, on the one hand there was the aestheticism of Dante
Gabriel Rossetti and of Whistler under Rossetti’s influence. This, in turn
was directly related to the aestheticism of Whistler's friends Wilde and
Godwin, and also to the Symbolism of that other friend of Whistler,
Mallarmé, which anticipated the cubists’ approach to essential form. ‘These
artists and literary figures all were characterized by such strong artistic
individualism that if they had any social interests at all they were likely to
be sympathetic to anarchism.
But on the other hand there was the “truth to nature” that in
painting was represented by the kind of realism seen in Madox Brown’s
Work (Fig. 75). In architecture and the crafts it was represented by the
functionalism of Morris’s Red House (Fig. 70) and the Morris chair (Fig.
71), in which the inherent physical nature of materials and physical utility
were emphasized. Because the emphasis on utility implied social purpose,
Morris, Philip Webb, and many of their followers were also sympathetic to
socialism, even though they so largely rejected the age of industry and
industrial production that had given rise to socialism.
Between these two poles, however, there was a wide variety of permu-
tations and combinations. While Morris sought to reintegrate the purpose
of a work of art or craft with socialist ideas about the nature of the good
society, others likewise influenced by Ruskin’s social doctrines, such as
Wilde, kept the forms of their art separate from their social views, and in
the case of Wilde inclined toward anarchism. Furthermore, some of
Morris’s own followers showed both of the two opposing Pre-Raphaelite
poles—the abstract, and the realistic or functional—with now one, now
the other, dominant. This was true, for instance, of Walter Crane, who
often reflected the influence of simplifying tendencies stimulated by the
vogue for Japanese art, but was likely to do so in two very different ways.
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 469

At times he reduced form to essentials so as to achieve an essentially

decorative, patternistic, aesthetic effect not unlike that of much Japanese
art, and especially of Japanese prints. But at other times he might be
stimulated to use simplified forms with a functional intent—for instance,
again influenced by Japanese prints, he might reduce decoration to two-
dimensional forms so simplified as to be functionally well suited to the
essentially two-dimensional applied art of printing. A similar dichotomy
was to develop between decorative forms and functional forms within the
Art Nouveau, which showed the decorative stimulus of Oriental art yet
was also strongly influenced by the functionalism, as well as the decora-
tion, of Morris and his followers, and especially of the architect-designer
Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (1851-1942). Mackmurdo was influenced
by Morris but in some respects influenced him. His devotion to Morris’s
memory was to lead him to found in 1936—in collaboration with his pro-
tégé, the painter Frank Brangwyn—the Morris Memorial Gallery at
Morris’s birthplace in Walthamstow.
As a young man, Mackmurdo had been apprenticed to an architect.
He was working in the office of the Neo-Gothic architect James Brooks
when, in 1873, he met Morris’s friend and architect, Philip Webb. He
had read much, being especially attracted by works on social prob-
lems. In his reading he had the guidance of his father’s friend Herbert
Spencer. However, Mackmurdo discovered Ruskin’s writings for himself,
and was so moved by them that he decided to study at Oxford in order to
attend Ruskin’s lectures. Ruskin, recognizing the qualities of his new pupil,
took him to Italy, traveled with him there, and constantly encouraged him
to make sketches both from medieval architecture and its ornament and
from nature—sketches that later were reflected in his decorative designs
based on plant forms. Guided by Ruskin, he always admired Italian archi-
tecture, unlike Morris, to whom Italy did not appeal. But unlike Ruskin
as well as Morris, he especially admired Italian Renaissance architecture
for what he regarded as its musical elements, and his own architecture
generally had some modernized reminiscences of classical style coming
from Renaissance architecture and from that of Sir Christopher Wren.
Mackmurdo set up in practice as an architect in London on his return
from Italy in 1876. Shortly thereafter, he was introduced to Morris, and
was much impressed by his theories, though not so much by his forms in
design. In 1877-1878, with Morris, Carlyle, Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones,
and others, he was a founder of the Society for the Protection of Ancient
do
Buildings. Under the influence of Morris’s ideas, also, in 1882 Mackmur
started the Century Guild to produce well designed and well made furni-
ture and household objects. In 1884, seeing the need for a journal of ar-
tistic distinction, he foundéd the Hobby Horse, which lasted until 1893;
from 1886 to 1892 it was published quarterly as the Century Guild
Hobby Horse. This periodical—in the production of which Mackmurdo
was associated with Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker—championed
470 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

the Pre-Raphaelites and also represented the first modern effort to treat
printing as a serious art in which the medium of print was respected. ‘The
periodical consequently helped to stimulate Morris to found the Kelmscott
Press and Cobden-Sanderson, later, to found the Doves Press. It also
attracted the interest of Mackmurdo’s friend William Butler Yeats, who
grew up a belated Pre-Raphaelite, and in his poetry was, somewhat like
Swinburne, a link between the symbolism deriving from Blake and the
Pre-Raphaelites and that of the French Symbolists.
As early as 1878 Mackmurdo had drawn up a scheme for “organic
planning” (as he himself called it) that made him a pioneer in demanding
such planning for domestic architecture as well as one of the first to think
of regional planning and of what was to become known as the garden
city. However, the only person whom he could interest in his ideas about
planning was Patrick Geddes, the Scottish biologist and sociologist des-
tined to have a profound influence on city and regional planning. Mack-
murdo’s own chief writing on the subject, published a half-century later,
was The Regional Social Unit (1932).
In recent years, however, Mackmurdo has become best known for
having perhaps been the immediate originator of the Art Nouveau style.
According to some authorities he began it with a chair he designed in
1881. Others, however, see as the first example of Art Nouveau the title
page he designed for his book on Wren’s City Churches (1883 )—a book
about architectural preservation, written under the influence of the ideas
of Morris and Carlyle in an effort to aid in saving several of the churches
in London then threatened with demolition. Both the chair and the title
page show the flowing forms and the absence of any historical reminis-
cence that are so characteristic of the Art Nouveau. Like the Pre-Raphae-
lites, Mackmurdo—who regarded himself as the bearer of Pre-Raphaelite
principles—must have been well acquainted with the flowing linear forms
of William Blake, while also being thoroughly familiar with the works of
Whistler, a friend of his, even though Whistler in maturity, unlike Blake
or Mackmurdo himself, had no social concerns whatsoever. Apparently
Mackmurdo was stimulated by the curvilinear forms of such designs by
Whistler as the Peacock Room of 1876-1877 or as his celebrated butterfly
signature. Furthermore, Mackmurdo adopted the light colors so often
used by Whistler, rather than the heavy colors of Morris and his circle.
Mackmurdo had first met Whistler, and also Wilde, in 1880 at the
home of Richard D’Oyly Carte (Mackmurdo’s wife was a D’Oyly Carte).
‘This was a year before D’Oyly Carte opened the Savoy Theatre, though
he was already famous for putting on operettas by Gilbert and Sullivan.
Whistler decorated D’Oyly Carte’s library and billiard room, and, intend-
ing to make the drawing room yellow, began by painting the piano yellow
with touches of complementary apple green and blue. In 1881 Mackmurdo
helped Whistler hang an exhibition of his Venetian etchings, which were
all in ivory white frames and were hung against a pale gold wall in a room
with an amber floor-covering and ceiling.
 Other Radical Artists and Critics of England / 471

In 1904 Mackmurdo completely gave up architecture and the crafts

to devote himself passionately to his social and economic theories for the
remainder of his long life. He was a devoted state socialist, and wrote
pamphlets and books relating to such subjects as profit-sharing, women’s
suffrage, electoral reform, and the rejection of the gold standard in favor
of a system founded on food vouchers. In one of his books, The Human
Hive (1926), he treated society as a living organism made up of lesser or-
ganisms, applying to it the metaphor of the hive of bees, much as Diderot
had done in the mid-eighteenth century. In 1933 Mackmurdo published
a book entitled The People’s Charter: he had presumably been writing it
in 1932, the centenary of the Reform Bill of 1832, dissatisfaction with
which had led the Chartists to organize.
The dichotomy between social concern and the absence of it found
among British practitioners of the arts who were regarded as artistically
radical—such as Mackmurdo and Morris on the one hand and Whistler
on the other—will be found also in the Art Nouveau of the Continent,
which was so strongly affected by British influence. The Belgian found-
ers of the continental Art Nouveau, largely under the influence of Morris,
Mackmurdo, and their followers, likewise had strong social interests,
though in their case of an essentially anarchistic kind. But in Austria the
leading figures of the Art Nouveau movement called the Sezession, which
also had strong British connections, had no real social interests at all."
Thus the more functionalistic aspects of Pre-Raphaelitism as devel-
oped especially by Morris could and did eventually appeal to some artists
who were socialists, communists, or even anarchists not only in England
but also on the Continent, largely because of Morris’s own somewhat
unorthodox Marxian socialism. Yet his ideas about the arts were also
highly influential among some aesthetically radical artists and craftsmen
who wholly lacked interest in social radicalism. The year of Morris’s death,
1896, therefore constituted a particularly important landmark in the rela-
tions of artists and art critics to radicalism, social as well as artistic.
 9
THE CONTINUING
INFLUENCE OF
WILLIAM MORRIS

1. Later Disciples of Morris:

Lucien Pissarro, Ashbee, Gill, etc.

Or Wi11am Morris's many disciples who survived him, some were

socially committed, others not. One of the socially committed was Lucien
Pissarro. As we saw earlier, Lucien—who exhibited with the Impressionists
in France in 1886—had gone to England to set up a printing press in 1882,
and in 1890 had settled there permanently: he became a naturalized
British subject in 1916. In England he had carried on his father’s painting
tradition, doing so without equal genius but with laudable seriousness of
purpose." Because he shared his father’s social views, he had joined Wil-
liam Morris’s Hammersmith group. He also became a leading member of
the New English Art Club, an organization of artists of anti-academic,
pioneering outlook which had been founded in 1886 under the influence of
French Impressionism by English artists who had studied in Paris. In 1911,
however, Lucien Pissarro became a founder of the Camden Town Group,
which broke away from the New English Art Club on the ground that the
latter had become complacent and essentially academic. The members of
the Camden Town Group regarded themselves as being realists first and
foremost, and considered Impressionism as constituting realism’s latest and
most important manifestation. Nevertheless, although they took Impres-
sionism as their point of departure, they moved in the direction pointed
out by the art of Van Gogh, Gauguin, and the asocial and apolitical
Cézanne, doing so in an artistically evolutionary, rather than revolutionary,
way.
In architecture and the crafts, about the most important continuers
of the Morris tradition in Britain were Charles Voysey (1857-1941), who
in the early 1880’s was much influenced by his older friend Mackmurdo,
W. R. Lethaby (1857-1931), C. R. Ashbee (1863-1942), and the Scot-
 The Continuing Influence of William Morris / 473

tish architect-designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928). But

though all of these men in some way influentially exemplified Morris’s
ideas about the arts and the crafts, they differed among themselves in their
attitude toward his social ideas, while also differing from one another in
their attitude toward the past. Voysey, Ashbee, and Lethaby were all af-
fected by social implications of Morris’s ideas about art and craft, whereas
Mackintosh had no such social interests, being stimulated instead by the
aesthetic movement of Godwin and Whistler. Furthermore, where
Lethaby, and Mackintosh under Lethaby’s influence, were consciously
modernists, and Ashbee eventually moved to a modernist point of view,
Voysey had no intention whatever of being a revolutionary in art or any-
thing else, and flatly rejected modernism.
Nonetheless, before the end of the century Voysey was designing
houses more nearly free of historical reminiscences than those of any
previous architect in modern times, and his semi-open planning was an
important contribution toward the development of modern architecture.
Furthermore, he had an international influence; his designs were fre-
quently imitated on the Continent and in America.
In 1893, Lethaby became a founder and first principal of the London
County Council Central School of Arts and Crafts. Three years later he
started workshops in the school so that designers could be trained in the
making of things instead of being restricted to drawing them. Later he
became a historian of architecture, especially of Gothic architecture. He
had much influence on contemporary Gothic Revivalist architects, includ-
ing the American architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. Goodhue’s part-
ner for many years, Ralph Adams Cram, wrote in his autobiography, My
Life in Architecture (1936), of the enormous influence that the social as
well as the artistic ideas of Morris and Ruskin had had upon young
American artists, such as himself and Goodhue, in the 1880's and 1890s.
Partly under the influence of Morris and Lethaby, Goodhue increasingly
sought, not simply to imitate Gothic buildings of the past, but to develop,
in an architectural and social spirit inspired by the Gothic, a functional
modern style whose forms would be expressive of the twentieth century.
Lethaby himself was in 1915 a founder of the Design in Industry
Association.
Lethaby’s modernism had strongly affected Mackintosh, who with
his wife, her sister, and a friend constituted a Glasgow group called “The
Four.” In making a plea for modernity in a lecture of 1893, Mackintosh
freely borrowed ideas and even whole phrases from Lethaby’s writings.
He also felt the influence of Morris’s textile designs and of details from
the paintings of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, while being stimulated by
works of Mackmurdo and Voysey. Furthermore, there was in his work
that fresh lightness of color coming directly from the aesthetic movement
as developed by Godwin and Whistler out of Rossetti and Japanese
art. As a Scot, Mackintosh differed from the English continuers of the
as,
Morris tradition in subscribing to a Celtic Revival in the arts—much
474 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

in poetry, Morris had subscribed to a Norse Revival. The Celtic Revival

had already been fostered in Ireland by the poet W. B. Yeats, and in
Scotland by Patrick Geddes: it offers another example of racial and even
national ideals affecting radicals in the arts, whereas social radicals before
Stalin ordinarily adopted only international ideals transcending race and
nation. Of all the British architect-designers in the Morris tradition, too,
Mackintosh was apparently the only one to receive stimulation from
abroad—he and his group were influenced by paintings of the Belgian
Symbolist (and social radical) Toorop. Yet we have indicated that
Mackintosh, with his group, had much influence on continental Art
Nouveau currents—this was in Belgium, in Germany, and especially in
Austria, where beginning in 1900 the Viennese Sezession was strongly
stimulated by his work after having been influenced earlier by that of
Voysey. But if Mackintosh influenced continental radicals in the arts,
including some social radicals, he had no influence at all in England, to
which he moved when his practice in Glasgow declined after a relatively
brief flourishing. Sadly, the last two decades of his life were marred by
drink and lack of appreciation at a time when other representatives of the
Morris tradition were still successful.
Probably the most important and influential of these disciples of
Morris was the architect C. R. Ashbee. A leading participant in the arts
and crafts movement, Ashbee had in 1888 founded in the East End of
London, that home of the poor, his Guild and School of Handicraft, an
association of men and boys united by the joy of making. Ashbee went be-
yond Morris in linking up the problems of workshop-reconstruction and of
small landholdings, and so in 1902 he moved with 150 of his East London
disciples to establish an arts and crafts colony at Chipping Campden in the
Cotswolds. Although the school failed in 1914, six years after the Guild of
Handicraft, many of the East Londoners settled permanently at Chipping
Campden. Ashbee, however, was led by the hopeless struggle of the Guild
against modern machine methods to break away from what by 1908 he was
already calling Ruskin’s and Morris’s “intellectual Ludditism” in disagree-
ment with their attack on modern industrial machinery. The first axiom of
his last two books on art, published in 1911 and 1917 respectively, is that
“Modern Civilisation rests on Machinery, and no system for the endow-
ment, or encouragement, of the teaching of art can be sound that does not
recognise this.”* In 1917, Ashbee himself left Chipping Campden to
become a city-planner in Cairo, and eventually succeeded Patrick Geddes
in planning the development of the city of Jerusalem. He insisted that
industrialism had utterly failed in the area of planning, and that only “a
unified city,” organically integrated, could stimulate “a new ethic of
human relationships.” * Meanwhile, so sympathetic was he to the point of
view of the American architect and Thoreauian anarchistic individualist,
Frank Lloyd Wright, that in 1911 a small book by him on Wright was
issued by the Berlin firm of Wasmuth, which the year before had pub-
 The Continuing Influence of William Morris / 475

lished a two-volume portfolio on Wright’s architecture. Ashbee had met

and greatly influenced Wright while on a lecture tour of the United States
in 1901. Shortly before this, in 1898, Ashbee through his Guild of Handi-
craft had executed fixtures designed by the architect Baillie Scott for the
New Palace of the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, paid for by the
Duke’s mother-in-law, Queen Victoria. In this way he helped to spread the
influence of Morris to Germany—later helping to stimulate also the new
emphasis there on the industrialization of art.
Thus with followers of Morris, and especially with Ashbee, there came
together during the last years of Queen Victoria’s reign and during the
reign of Edward VII, elements pointing the way toward an international
style springing largely from British design—a style, indeed, that from its
continental manifestations was actually to become known as the Interna-
tional Style. In this, functionalism, the reduction of form to essentials
(with customary elimination of all ornament), and the social role of the
designer were all in varying ways to be important. And that recognition of
industry as a basic element of functionalist production, accepted by Wil-
liam Dyce, Henry Cole, Owen Jones, Christopher Dresser, and Ashbee,
but rejected by Morris and Ruskin, was now subjected to the artistic will
and humane social goals which Ashbee and others following Morris and
Ruskin were emphasizing.
Some artists, however, although inspired by these tendencies, were
dissatisfied by the lack of attention paid by Morris and by such of his
followers as Ashbee to religion as a factor in overcoming evils resulting
from modern industry. Because Morris had been so closely related to the
Gothic Revival and to conceptions of craftsmanship and social organiza-
tion deriving from the Middle Ages, many of his ideas could be bent to the
service of religion by those for whom that period represented the greatest
epoch of the Christian church. Thus many of Morris’s doctrines could be
taken over especially by Roman Catholic artists at a time when the
Church was reemphasizing the philosophy of St. ‘Thomas Aquinas. As a
consequence, Morris had a profound influence on liturgical art which he
had never expected. The chief exponent of this point of view among
British artists in the twentieth century was a one-time Fabian, Eric Gill,
the sculptor and craftsman who, born the son of a Non-conformist minis-
ter, fell under the influence of theosophy but became a devout convert to
Roman Catholicism. As a youth, Gill had devotedly read Carlyle and
Ruskin, and quite like Morris defended the social basis of art. Calling
himself a socialist, he sported a flowing red tie and red socks. Eventually he
became a marginal communist, though he objected to communist material-
ism and idolatry of the machine while nonetheless maintaining that the
best modern building is done by engineers. He even affirmed that art is
propaganda in an essay that he wrote for a collaborative book issued by the
left-wing Artists International Association, Five on Revolutionary Art
(1935), most of the other contributors to which were Marxists.* Like the
476 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

Marxists, Gill believed that the good society to come will be essentially
anarchistic, but instead of accepting the Marxist eventual anarchism of the
classless society, he believed in an ultimate Christian anarchy not to be
achieved here below.
After World War I, Gill had joined G. K. Chesterton—who had
briefly been a Fabian—in the Distributist movement. Convinced that a
revolution was coming, Gill constantly sought to guide it in a Chnstian
direction by participating in communities of lay folk who cut themselves
off from money economy. He eventually asserted flatly that Christian
morals demand collective ownership in an industrial society. But although
his social radicalism was very apparent in his writings, it scarcely affected
his art in any direct way. ,

2. Falhtanism and Art

Iris probably significant that Chesterton had become a Fabian in 1907,

the year in which a Fabian Arts‘Group was founded. In this, Eric Gill was
prominent, and it was based on the ideas of Morris, whom the Fabians
continued to regard as an ideological ancestor though on certain points of
social doctrine Gill had opposed them. Yet most of the leading Fabians,
coming as they did partly from a background of Utilitarianism, never
developed much liking for, or understanding of, any visual arts beyond the
most utilitarian crafts or the highly practical art of community planning,
so that the Fabian Arts Groups was not a success. Years later, in an
obituary letter concerning A. R. Orage, a former Theosophist and Fabian
who had given up Fabianism for the Russian mysticism of George Gurd-
jieff, Gill wrote: “Nearly thirty years ago we met—Fabians both. We
worked together on the Fabian arts group—|[we made] vague efforts to
deprive Fabianism of its webbed feet—vain efforts.” ° Even Shaw’s wide
knowledge of the arts—he had made a reputation as a critic of literature,
music, and other arts before becoming famous as a playwright—had never
been able to remedy the determinedly Philistine atmosphere among the
Fabians which he ruefully admitted had made Morris uncomfortable in
Fabian company. Although such noted writers as Shaw, Wells, Bennett,
G. M. Trevelyan, and Rupert Brooke—converted to socialism by Morris’s
News from Nowhere—became Fabians, this atmosphere continued to
prevail, not only in spite of the Fabian Arts Group, but also in spite of
Anglican clergymen deeply interested in various arts who were leaders of a
revival of Christian socialism in addition to being Fabians.
The founder of this revival of Christian socialism was the Reverend
Stewart Headlam. Stimulated by the earlier Christian socialism of the
Reverend Frederick Denison Maurice, Headlam began the reorganization
of the Christian socialist movement when he founded the Anglo-Catholic
 The Continuing Influence of William Morris / 477

Guild of Saint Matthew in 1877. Ten years later he was one of the
Committee of Fifteen which drew up the “Basis” of the Fabian Society, of
which he was a member for thirty-six years. He served on the Society’s
executive committee in 1890-1891 and again from 1901-1911. He was the
author of Fabian Tract No. 42, Christian Socialism, published in 1892.
Headlam had outraged the Anglican authorities by founding in 1879
the Church and Stage Guild, through which he defended the popular
theater, aided chorus girls, and supported his chief love in the arts, ballet.
He had his rooms at 31 Upper Bedford Place decorated by A. H. Mack-
murdo. Headlam’s furniture upholstered in Morris cretonne was greatly
admired by Shaw and others of advanced views—though the paintings on
his walls were regarded as so very advanced that they shocked many visi-
tors.
Headlam was threatened with violence when he outraged public
opinion by furnishing bail for Wilde in 1895. He aided Wilde throughout
his trial, and was at the gate of Pentonville prison when Wilde was
released two years later.
The influence of Headlam was strongly felt by the Reverend Percy
Dearmer, who like him was an Anglo-Catholic Christian socialist and a
Fabian. As a student at Oxford in the late 1880’s, Dearmer had read
Maurice’s writings as well as those of Morris and Ruskin. His college
rooms were hung with tapestries designed by Morris and Burne-Jones.
Later, like Shaw, Dearmer much admired Mackmurdo’s decorations in
Headlam’s rooms at London. He joined Headlam’s Church and Stage
Guild in 1889, and in 1890 both the Guild of Saint Matthew and the
Fabian Society: he was on the executive committee of the latter from 1895
to 1898, and in 1907 wrote its Tract No. 133, Socialism and Christianity,
which owed much to Headlam’s ideas. Dearmer’s many distinguished
writings on liturgical art and music did much to raise their level in Britain.
One of his books, Songs of Praise (1925), was written in collaboration
with Ralph Vaughn Williams, the outstanding composer of his gener-
ation in England.
Others interested in the arts who had Fabian connections—but who
likewise were unable to raise the general artistic tone of Fabianism—in-
cluded Augustus John and members of the so-called Bloomsbury group,
several of whom were Fabians or sympathetic to Fabianism.
Augustus John—who was anti-academic enough to resign from the
Royal Academy in a dispute with the hanging committee in 1938 (he was
reelected to it two years later)—had been connected with a group of
conscientious objectors in World War I, some of them members of the
Bloomsbury group and some Fabians. John himself, however, was essen-
tially a bohemian of strong individualistic anarchist tendencies, whose
bohemianism led him to a deep and lifelong interest in those original
prototypes of bohemianism, the Gypsies. His extreme individualism made
him reject the Marxian doctrine of the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”
478 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

he was
He declared that he disliked being dictated to by anyone, and that
lust for, and
“nclined to be an anarch or ‘agin the Government’ and the
like
abuse of, power which invariably goes with it.” ° As John (somewhat
close to
Morris’s friend Burne-Jones and Aubrey Beardsley earlier) was
g once more that many of the
being a kind of Symbolist, it is worth recallin
influen ce, had been
Symbolists in France, and elsewhere under French
sympathetic to anarchism.
Among the leading figures in the Bloomsbury group with Fabian
sympathies were Leonard Woolf and, to a lesser degree, his wife, Virginia
Woolf. In 1912, Leonard Woolf abandoned liberalism for socialism, and
in the following year was led by Sidney and Beatrice Webb to become an
active Fabian political scientist and politician. In 1917, he became a
founder of the first British group to regard the Russian Revolution with
favor. Even though Woolf was in fact the only politically involved socialist
of the so-called Bloomsbury group, the other members generally had
left-of-center social sympathies ranging from socialist on the group’s left to
liberal on its right. Lytton Strachey, for instance, thought of himself as
“left-wing,” but not as a socialist. Among the other widely known mem-
bers were Clive Bell, the art critic and conscientious objector in World
War I, whose wife, the pacifist painter Vanessa Bell, was Virginia Woolf's
sister; the even more prominent art critic, Roger Fry (who eventually
declared himself to be an individualist anarchist); the painter Duncan
Grant, another conscientious objector in World War I; E. M. Forster, who
once said, “in Communism I can see hope . . .”;’ and John Maynard
Keynes, a great patron of the arts as well as a great liberal, anti-Fabian
economist, who married the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova. ‘Through-
out Keynes’s life he was much concerned with projects for assisting or
disseminating the arts: in 1945 as a capstone to this aspect of his career, he
was to be largely responsible for founding the Arts Council of Great
Britain, of which he was the first chairman.
Several members of the Bloomsbury group, Leonard Woolf among
them, had first met as students at Cambridge University, where they had
fallen under the influence of the philosopher G. E. Moore. Moore, who
believed that the appreciation of beauty is the most essential constituent of
the good, emphasized “the principle of organic unity” as the basis of
ethics; and his philosophy, in its respect for beauty and truth, was in a
sense an extension of Ruskin’s theory. We have repeatedly seen how a
belief in an organic principle of unity has fostered a conception of society
and of the work of art as being each a unique totality that, like a living
organism, is more than the sum of its parts. In accordance with such an
organic conception, the Bloomsbury group firmly believed that the best
and most highly civilized society would be one in which art and society
would be organically interrelated to produce conditions most favorable
both to the creation of works of art and to the appreciation of art by the
masses. For them, all other political and social considerations were second-
 The Continuing Influence of William Morris / 479

ary. Good government, then, should be the means to the end of producing
such a society, because art is not only an index of civilization, but also is
itself a civilizing agency. Thus their central belief, in harmony with G. E.
Moore’s doctrine that the appreciation of beauty is the prime constituent
of the good, was in the worth of art for art’s own sake. This meant an
emphasis on the individual personality as artistic creator, which led at least
one of the group, Virginia Woolf, to go further and, in stressing intuition
as deeper than intellect in a Bergsonian way, to emphasize the role of the
individual’s subconscious in creation, not unlike the contemporary surreal-
ists. However, with her husband, Virginia Woolf also showed herself to be
a follower of the Morris tradition to a degree: as a kind of therapy for her
they set themselves up as printers, eventually founding an essentially
avant-garde publishing house significantly named the Hogarth Press.
In view of the background of the Fabians in Utilitarianism, it is
perhaps also significant that Leonard Woolf, the one politically active
Fabian in the Bloomsbury group, thus became with his wife a practitioner
of the useful craft of printing. It is certainly significant that the single
Fabian Tract devoted directly to art—No. 177, written by Arthur Clutton-
Brock and published in 1915—was entitled Socialism and the Arts of Use.
Furthermore, the few other Fabian tracts with even remote bearing on any
art dealt with the highly practical art of community planning to house the
masses. In that field, however, Fabians made contributions of international
importance.

3. The Garden City Movement:

Howard, Penty, Parker and Unwin
"Tue conrrisutions of Fabians to city planning were made especially in
connection with the development of the garden city, some of the best
known of all garden city designers being Fabian followers of Wilham
Morris and Ruskin. One of these was Raymond Unwin (Fig. 79), who in
1902 was the author of Fabian Tract No. 109, Cottage Plans and Common
Sense, with illustrations by himself and his Fabian brother-in-law and
partner, Barry Parker. Unwin’s general views on housing and planning
anticipated several later Fabian tracts or research pamphlets.* Another
noted Fabian city-planner, Arthur J. Penty, with G. D. H. Cole abandoned
Fabianism to found guild socialism, differing from Fabianism primarily in
its syndicalist tinge—but after the collapse of guild socialism in 1925 its
leaders eventually returned to the Fabian fold. Guild socialism was
strongly influenced by ideas of Morris and by Anglo-Catholic Christian
480. / RADICALIOM, MARXISM TNSENCL EN?

as a
socialism. It is significant that Cole had been converted to socialism
schoolboy by reading Morris’s News from Nowhere, which had largely
The
stimulated the very idea of the garden city. Also, Penty’s book,
Gild System (1906), the harbing er of guild socialis m,
Restoration of the
combined his admiration for Morris with his Anglo-Catholic admiration
for the synthesis of art and religion in medieval society, as manifested
especially in the medieval guilds. Indeed, he was led to abandon Fabianism
for guild socialism by the Fabians’ prevailing lack of concern for anything
aesthetic. He had discovered that the way the judges chose the winning
design in an architectural competition of 1902 to build the permanent
home of the London School of Economics, conceived by Sidney and
Beatrice Webb in 1894, was by measuring the floor space of all the designs
submitted, and then awarding the prize to the architect whose classrooms
added up to the highest total of square feet. In sum, the decision was
reached purely by the statistical and sheerly utilitarian method always
glorified by that perennial Philistine, Sidney Webb, who so disliked all the
arts that his more cultivated wife had dutifully put them out of her own
life. As the ideas of Webb and the Fabians became very influential in the
British Labour Party, it is hardly surprising that for the most part it too
showed little interest in the arts other than those of such immediate
practicality as town planning, until in 1945 the Arts Council of Great
Britain was established—to be supported thereafter under both Labour
and Conservative governments.

THE GARDEN CITy movement,’ in which Penty and Unwin became so

prominent—and which was to exert wide influence in many countries,
including the United States and the Soviet Union—had been initiated in
1898 by Ebenezer Howard, a friend of both Bernard Shaw and Sidney
Webb. In that year Howard published in England a pamphlet entitled
Tomorrow; A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, which in 1902 was reissued
under the now better known title of Garden Cities of Tomorrow. Al-
though Howard’s earliest scheme was rigidly geometrical (being circular),
and in this respect not unlike designs of secular utopian leaders whose
socialism had been demonstrated in an authoritarian way, he was always as
much concerned for free enterprise as for social control, and his later
proposals themselves were much more flexible in reflecting this. The
developed principles of the garden city *°—its location in a carefully
preserved countryside of publicly owned land including a belt of greenery
and many parks, its informally functional plan not unlike that of an
English village, its organization as a cooperative restricted in size and
density * and with a local industry segregated from the residential section
(Fig. 78)—offered one answer to that isolation of city life from country
life resulting from capitalistic industrialism and bitterly deplored by Marx
and Engels, as well as by Ruskin and Morris, because it produced one-sided
 The Continuing Influence of William Morris / 481

human beings. It is significant that a great plan for rebuilding Moscow,

which was prepared in 1935 and has had much influence on subsequent
city planning in the Soviet Union, called for that most characteristic
feature of the garden city, a greenbelt. And, like Howard, the planners of
Moscow sought to limit the size of their city, even though they planned it
to be enormously larger than his ideal town.”
Ebenezer Howard had been anticipated in many of his ideas for the
garden city by proposals of earlier social reformers, some simply utopian
projects, others actually carried out. Disraeli, who as prime minister was to
be the father of ‘Tory Democracy and the Reform Bill of 1867, described in
his novels Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845) a model village and work-
ers’ houses built by enlightened industrialists. Among executed examples
that contributed to the background of the garden city, even though
Howard did not consciously take them into account, was a group of model
towns in Yorkshire built by factory owners of three interrelated families to
house their employees. Significantly, these factory owners, of whom Sir
Titus Salt, builder of Saltaire (1850- ) is the best known, were Liberals
in politics and Non-conformists in religion, being Congregationalists. Once
more we see religious Dissent playing a part in English social reform, in
this case in connection with Liberalism. Titus Salt’s expressed intent was
to keep the lower orders from being driven to Chartism. Although these
model towns influenced Howard only indirectly, one town similarly built
by a Non-conformist factory owner for the benefit of his employees did
eventually affect the development of Howard’s ideas. This was Bournville,
a village developed by a Quaker businessman, George Cadbury, after 1879,
for the employees of his chocolate factory.
The original influences upon Howard’s conception of the garden city
came, however, chiefly from utopian socialism and related movements.”
He was first stirred to action by Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward
(1888). He was stimulated also by the cooperative movement of which
Robert Owen had been a chief founder. And he was especially inspired by
the English medieval village as glorified anew by the Gothic Revival and
particularly by William Morris. It was from Morris that Howard chiefly
derived his concepts of decentralization and of the greenbelt so fundamen-
tal to the idea of the garden city—even though these had been found
earlier in James Silk Buckingham’s utopian project of 1848 for the town
intended to be called “Victoria” (Fig. 67). They had also been found in
projects of Owen and the Utilitarian, Roebuck, and likewise in Ruskin’s
demand for “a belt of beautiful garden and orchard” around each city, so
that “fresh air and grass, and sight of the far horizon, might be reachable
in a few minutes walk.” * In News from Nowhere (1891) Morris had
visualized the ideal London of the future as an agglomeration of commu-
nistically cooperative villages separated by woods, fields, and gardens in a
manner not unlike that proposed by Howard (although the latter, unlike
Morris, was neither a communist nor a socialist); and in this Morris was
482 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

consciously opposing the mechanistic kind of centralization praised by

Bellamy in Looking Backward. Morris was strongly opposed to the servile
conception of the status of labor in Bellamy’s utopia, and rejected its
mechanistic planning in favor of an organic kind derived from a real
understanding of the natural growth of the English village tradition.
In his conception of decentralized planning, Morris had been antici-
pated to a considerable degree by the Fourierists, and among others, by
communist-anarchists who so largely derived from Fourierism. Unlike the
Fourierist phalanx, however, the kind of housing suggested for most people
in Morris’s News from Nowhere consisted of detached villas and cottages;
and this was the kind of housing primarily proposed by Howard for his
garden city, although some of his houses were to have common gardens
and cooperative kitchens. In other writings by Morris, who had read
Fourier, he had often spoken of communal dwellings “with good public
cooking and washing rooms” and “beautiful halls for the common meal”
—arrangements more like those of a Fourierist phalanstery, and of a kind
of housing often to be officially urged in the Soviet Union later. At still
other times, Morris had proposed, especially for London, tall apartment
blocks in “what might be called ‘Vertical streets,” *’ with common laundries
and kitchens, and large public rooms for social gatherings. In rejecting
such tall buildings (which were to be emphasized later under Fourenist
influence by Le Corbusier, and finally applied even to some garden cities),
Howard, like nearly all of Morris’s followers, took over only a selection
from the master’s ideas.
As Ebenezer Howard’s kind of decentralized planning had been urged
not only by Morris but also by Fourierism and by communist-anarchists, it
is worth noting that Howard himself was eventually stimulated also by the
writings of Kropotkin. Howard was especially influenced by Kropotkin’s
Fields, Factories, and Workshops, first published in 1899. To a later
printing of that book was added the subtitle Or Industry Combined with
Agriculture and Brain with Manual Work, which expressed ideas for social
good and for the fullest development of the individual earlier proposed by
secular utopians, and especially by Fourier. In advocating the combination
of agriculture with industry, however, Kropotkin was able to take advan-
tage of technological developments made since Fourier’s time, notably that
of electricity. Like Morris in News from Nowhere, Kropotkin saw the
advantages of electricity for cleanliness in industry, but he went much
further than Morris in being one of the first to realize that electric power
and electrical communication, combined with the possibilities of intensive
farming, had laid the foundations for more decentralized urban develop-
ment in small units. These could include small-scale, clean, pleasant
industrial plants, that would make it possible to enjoy simultaneously the
advantages of rural and urban life. Kropotkin, of course, insisted that these
communities should be federated in accordance with communist-anarchist
principles of government. In grasping the fact that in industry neither
 The Continuing Influence of William Mortis / 483

efficiency nor economy need be equated with big units of production,

Kropotkin was far ahead of his time—and for this has been much praised
by Lewis Mumford, the socially left-of-center American art critic and
authority on both utopian socialism and planning.
All of the various influences on Howard are reflected to some degree
in the two most famous of the early garden cities, Letchworth and Wel-
wyn (Fig. 78). Letchworth, founded in 1903 (and Lenin’s refuge on a
short visit to England in 1907), was planned and partly built by the firm of
Parker and Unwin, the two Fabian architects who in 1905 also planned
and in part built the Hampstead Garden Suburb where Unwin (Fig. 79)
was particularly active. Although Welwyn, begun in 1920, resulted more
directly from Howard’s initiative, Letchworth and the many other town

FIG. 78. Welwyn Garden City (1920- ), use-plan by Ebenezer Howard,

Louis de Soissons, and others.

erp, RESIDEN
 FIG. 79. Hampstead Garden Suburb (1905-__), the Great Wall and some
of the larger houses as seen from the Heath extension, by Raymond
Unwin.

planning and housing projects carried out by the firm of Parker and Unwin
before 1914 (when Unwin left private practice), and thereafter independ-
ently, made them the chief figures in garden-city design. Thus Walter
Creese, author of the best history of the garden city in England, has
written: “William Morris and Ebenezer Howard had the dreams—Parker
and Unwin in the next generation helped them to come true.” *
As this statement indicates, the influence of Morris on both Unwin
and Parker, as well as on Howard himself, was especially strong. The
dream of the good society, and of good town planning to go with it,
especially as expressed in News from Nowhere, appears to have haunted
Parker and Unwin all their lives.*® Even before it was published in 1891,
Unwin had begun to devote himself to spreading Morris’s ideas. For as a
young man, and even while still a mining engineer, Unwin had begun to
use his spare time to preach in Labour Churches of the north of England
on “The Life and Work of William Morris.” *° In the late 1880's, he was
also to write for Morris’s journal, the Commonweal, articles distinctly
oriented toward the proletarian underdog.
Because Unwin, and Parker too, were such disciples of Morris, it is
hardly surprising that they were both also influenced by Morris’s master,
Ruskin. Indeed, Unwin was affected by Ruskin first, because Ruskin is said
to have corrected at Oxford his childhood sketches. Also, beginning in
1881 at Oxford, Unwin was much stimulated by Edward Carpenter, that
friend of Morris with socialist-anarchist inclinations. Carpenter became the
godfather of Unwin’s son Edward, who was named for him. And the
agrarian colony that Carpenter established at Miullthorpe in the early
1880's under the influence of Ruskin’s St. George’s Guild Farm stimulated
Unwin’s own conceptions of community planning. As Carpenter himself
was influenced by the ideas of Whitman, Thoreau, and Emerson, it is
worth noting that like Emerson’s circle and Whitman, Parker and Unwin
 The Continuing Influence of William Morris / 485

were functionalists of an organic kind. In 1901, they wrote: “The essence

and life of design lies [sic] in finding that form for anything which will,
with the maximum of convenience and beauty, fit it for the particular
functions it has to perform, and adapt it to the special circumstances in
which it must be placed.” ** Religious Dissent in relation to English social
reform and to an art appears once more in connection with Parker and
Unwin: Parker became a Quaker, as did his sister, Unwin’s wife.
Largely as a result of the fame of Howard’s ideas as put into practice
and developed by Unwin, associations advocating garden cities were estab-
lished at various times from 1904 on in France, Germany, Holland, Italy,
Belgium, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Russia, and the United States.
The influence of the garden city, if in exceedingly superficial form,
was also to be found in many speculative real-estate developments in
England and America, though both Howard and the socialist Unwin, of
course, strongly disapproved of such incomplete and utterly “capitalistic”
versions of Howard’s principles.

4. The Heritage of the Garden City Movement

as Reflected in the New Towns
Moosr of the best planning in England of recent years has stemmed from
the idea of the garden city and from the related concept of decentralizing
cities by building satellite towns. The first Housing, Town Planning, etc.,
Act was adopted in 1909. In 1918, Howard and others founded the New
Towns Group. But not until after World War II did great developments
become possible through sponsorship by the government under both
Conservatives and Labour—thanks to the Greater London Plan of 1944
and especially to the New Towns Act of 1946 and the Town and Country
Planning Act of 1947.” As a consequence of the New Towns Act, some
fifteen towns—the first being Stevenage, and the best-known Harlow and
Crawley—were under construction by the mid-1950’s, each with a perma-
nent greenbelt, segregated industry, and a predetermined maximum size
not exceeding 100,000, much like a garden city, though designed for the
motor age. One of the original garden cities—Welwyn (Fig. 78)—which
had been having a difficult time, was now scheduled for conversion into a
New Town. Although these New Towns thus followed the ideas of How-
ard and Unwin in many respects, they were the first to be built in England
under government sponsorship. In this, England lagged behind the United
States, where Howard’s principles and these of Unwin and Parker had
been made use of in the cooperative Greenbelt towns that were erected
under the auspices of the federal government during the great Depression
of the 1930’s, and were destined to have much influence on many Amerti-
486 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

can communities planned and built under private initiative. Once more,
originally radical social ideas were eventually taken’ over by capitalists.
By 1965, more than twenty New Towns had been scheduled in the
United Kingdom. Some modifications have, however, developed in the
design of such towns partly because sociologists in England and the United
States have found to their astonishment that the mass-produced garden
city has not proved wholly successful in rehousing the urban masses. City
dwellers who have moved from crowded tenement districts into spacious
public-housing developments have displayed considerable disenchantment
with this planned way of life, complaining especially of loneliness and lack
of true neighborliness. As a consequence, the British Ministry of Housing,
in a report made in 1961 on twelve of the towns built since World War H,
found it necessary to state that, “The new towns of the future may well
find it important to aim at a more truly urban design than would have
been thought acceptable in the immediate post-war years.” * Thus, in
some respects (though in some respects only) the garden city proved to be
too “utopian” and had to be modified.
As the New Towns developed, they therefore were made more urban
in character, looking less like garden suburbs imitating the English medie-
val village as exalted in Morris’s News from Nowhere. For that matter, the
architectural style of even the first New Towns had moved away from
sentimental eclecticism based on the medieval village toward the Interna-
tional Style (Fig. 80) from the Continent, and in so doing reflected
modern influences that had entered England in the 1930’s. One should
note here that it had been stimulated in part by the constructivist move-
ment. This had early developed in the visual arts of Soviet Russia on a
basis mainly of cubism and futurism, but as an expression of the need of
Russia for industrialization as urged by Lenin. It claimed to be construc-
tive, in opposition to what it considered the destructiveness of cubism and
futurism. In Soviet architecture and applied arts, though not in painting
and sculpture, it remained an influential current until the 1930's, when its
forms, expressive of the international spirit of modern technocracy, as well
as of cubism, were increasingly displaced by those of socialist realism as a
specifically national Soviet style. Whereupon constructivist architects had
either to turn to socialist realism or to leave the U.S.S.R. One talented
young Russian architect who had been much stimulated by constructivism,
Berthold Lubetkin, had settled in France in 1930, but by 1933 was at work
in England where he organized Tecton, the important architectural group
that in 1935 completed the famous High Point Flats in Highgate in a style
not unlike that of Soviet constructivism and of Le Corbusier.
For the most part, the influence of constructivism was to spread in
England by way of the International Style, in which constructivism was
but one of several contributing elements. The International Style first
became influential in England only during the middle and late 1930’s,
especially through noted German architects driven out of Germany by the
 The Continuing Influence of William Morris / 487

Nazis, to whom the International Style was anathema not only because it
was not nationalistic, but because it was also regarded—wrongly—both as
Jewish and as bolshevistic (even though Stalin too was proscribing such
architecture as insufficiently nationalistic). Among the talented German
architects and designers who sought refuge in England were several leading
figures from the Bauhaus, that most important school which, in its prevail-
ing spirit of a kind of social utopianism, so well reflected the spirit of the
Weimar Republic, in which government was carried on by a coalition of
democratic socialists with liberals. One of these émigré German architects
was Walter Gropius, who brought with him a favorite pupil and assistant,
Marcel Breuer, and remained from 1934 to 1937. In 1935 Laszlé Moholy-
Nagy, who had taught the basic design course at the Bauhaus, moved to
England after a year in Holland; he likewise stayed until 1937.
To Britain’s loss, all of these men were soon called to the United
States. During their relatively brief stay in England they exerted considera-
ble influence, mostly on avant-garde younger men who were to reach
professional maturity only after World War II, but who then in some
cases came to play important roles in designing New ‘Towns. Furthermore,
the continental influences were to increase in the later New Towns, but
along lines fostered less by the Bauhaus and other German developments
of the pre-Hitler period than by International Style housing built under
social-democratic governments elsewhere.
In place of the individual houses still so important in the early garden
cities, the New Towns increasingly emphasized the long, narrow, three-
story, strip-type apartment houses of the International Style, although
these were more and more often combined with occasional contrasting
multi-story “point blocks,” the first of which was built at Harlow in 1951
(Fig. 80). In this combination, the New Towns have especially reflected
developments made in Swedish housing under social-democratic govern-
ments following a visit to Stockholm made in 1933 by Le Corbusier. And
the New Towns could take direct inspiration not only from Le Corbusier’s
projects but also from his Unité d’habitation at Marseille (Fig. 44), built
after World War II, where he incorporated in a multi-story slab-like
building what was essentially a small French village, but in fact had been
conceived as a kind of Fourierist phalanstery.
Nevertheless, as the Conservatives in England have backed the New
Towns as strongly as the Labour governments, it is obvious once more that
forms originally developed or fostered by social radicals are, with the
passing of time, likely to become everyday currency for the politically
conservative as well.
The English garden-city movement and its social implications and
connections sometimes have been affected by another—and earlier—kind
of garden city that had developed in Spain and has had at least some
left-of-center social connections. This is the linear city conceived by Arturo
Soria y Mata (1844-1920), which apparently was the first regional plan—
 Fic. 80. Harlow, ten-story block of flats (1951), The Lawn, Mark Hall North,
by Frederick Gibberd.
though the conception of the regional plan had been anticipated by the
utopians, Marx, Ruskin, Mackmiurdo, and others who deplored the separa-
tion of city and country. Beginning in 1882, Soria—who had passed an
exciting period in politics as a radical republican in the later 1860's and
early 1870’s—wrote of the ideal modern city as a narrow, endlessly continu-
ous “organism” planned in relation to a main transportation artery, and
especially in relation to a street railway.”* In 1894, he had begun to build a
“Ciudad Lineal” outside of Madrid to exemplify his theories, in which he
showed his acquaintance with the ideas of Elisée Reclus, of Darwin and
Spencer, of Henry George, and of the Scottish sociologist Patrick Geddes.
Soria was not in favor of special workers’ quarters because he believed that
rich and poor should live in close proximity in detached houses: a favorite
slogan, taken from an Italian utopian novel of the 1890's was, “‘For every
family a house, for each house a garden or an orchard.” Even though the
linear plan of Soria’s conception differed from Howard’s scheme for a
concentric city with winding streets, the two proposals somewhat similarly
called for the direct relation of urban life to country life and for belts of
verdure in proximity to business centers. Soria early became well ac-
quainted with the publications of Howard and the English garden-city
movement, which he discussed at length as inferior to his own conception
in his periodical, La Ciudad lineal, and the English garden-city-planners
were aware of Soria’s work, and in 1924 made a study tour of his prototype
linear city.
Much as some English Fabian socialist planners, notably Unwin,
Parker, and Penty, were closely connected with the garden city movement,
so another Fabian, the engineer Captain J. W. Petavel, in publications of
1909 and 1911 urged decentralization in accordance with Soria’s linear
scheme. In 1933, the English Linear Cities Association was founded.
 The Continuing Influence of William Morris / 489

Soria’s influence has also been felt in England in a linear plan for London
known as the MARS plan made between 1938 and 1942 by the C.1.A.M.,
the international congress, now defunct, of modern architects of the
International Style. In this plan the influence of the émigré German leftist
architect and city-planner, Arthur Korn, was strong. (The first essay in
linear planning by Korn, a Marxist, entitled “A Collective for Socialist
Building,” had been exhibited at Berlin 1928-1929.) Linear planning has
also affected some of the more recent schemes made for British New
Towns, such as that carried out at Cumbernauld in Scotland, and another
—highly influential though never executed—for Hook in Hampshire.
English town-planners have not been the only ones outside of Spain
affected by Soria’s ideas, so often found in combination with those of
Howard. In France, Georges Benoit-Lévy, who in 1903 founded the Asso-
ciation des cités-jardins de France and was the chief French protagonist of
Howard’s garden city, was converted to Soria’s ideas, and in 1913 he
became officially connected with Soria’s Spanish company. In France, also,
the noted economist Charles Gide, authority on Fourier and author of a
book on communist and cooperative colonies,” dealt with the theory of
Soria’s linear city in a talk on the “Crisis in Housing” before the College
de France in 1924; Le Corbusier, another Fourierist, likewise acknowl-
edged the influence of Soria. Furthermore, Soviet planners were affected by
the concept of the linear city, as well as by the English garden city,
especially during the first Five Year Plan of 1928-1933, and apparently
under the influence of such German Marxist city-planners as Arthur Korn.
This is understandable because the linear city too offered an answer to the
separation of city and country deplored by Marx, and in addition, could
easily be given a Marxist-Leninist emphasis on industry lacking in Soria’s
own schemes,”” which were residential, by planning the city with a continu-
ous row of factories along a railroad. Behind this row the Soviet planners
placed a band of verdure containing a highway, on the opposite side of
which was a residential section with direct access to parks and open
country.”
Together with the English garden-city movement, the linear city plan
was studied also by American architects and planners, partly under the
stimulus of the Soviet example. Thus Percival and Paul Goodman, in their
book Communitas; Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life, published in
Chicago in 1947, dealt with the garden city and Soria’s Ciudad Lineal as
two of four methods for coping with the “suburban impulse” (the others
being the super-block and the superhighway). Like the Soviet planners, the
Goodmans considered linearism important primarily for the layout of
industry” In the 1930’s. Percival Goodman, destined to become a widely
known architect and a teacher of architecture at Columbia University, had
been prominent in a left-wing, communist-dominated American union, the
Federation of Artists, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians, and in the
1960’s Paul Goodman was still a declared anarchist.
490 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENCLAND

5. From Morris to Soviet Communism:

Sylvia Pankhurst, Clough WVilliams—Elhs
Tw rwentiets-century England, the spirit of William Morris was con-
tinued not only through the idea of the garden city but also through a
leader of the women’s suffrage movement and a leader of the movement to
keep England beautiful, both of whom developed connections with Soviet
communism.
Through the artist Saad Pankhurst, the influence of Morris’s circle
was felt within the movement for women’s suffrage.* Her art teacher at
Manchester, Morris’s disciple Walter Crane, first kindled her ambition to
be an artist in the service of humanity. And she regarded as her chief
heroes Morris himself, his friend the anarchist Edward Carpenter, and Keir
Hardie, leader of the Scottish miners and the first British socialist member
of Parliament. Although she did not publicly proclaim herself a socialist
until 1913, her father, mother, brother, and one of her two sisters were all
socialists.
Her father, who died in 1898, when she was sixteen years old, had
been a reformer interested in many causes, one of them that of women’s
suffrage. After his death, his widow and three daughters all became leaders
of the movement, largely independent of one another, as they by no means
always agreed. Sylvia proved to be the most radical of them all.
In 1904 she won a much coveted scholarship to study at the Royal
College of Art in London. Her lodgings in London served as a headquar-
ters for the growing Women’s Social and Political Union (W.S.P.U.),
while occasional artistic or journalistic commissions were enabling her to
make a meager living. ‘The work that gave her the most satisfaction,
however, was designing and painting (with the help of three friends of her
art-student days) twenty-foot-high panels surrounding a hall measuring 250
by 150 feet for the big W.S.P.U. exhibition at Knightsbridge in 1909. But
more and more of her time was taken up by missions to speak on behalf of
the W.S.P.U., including a hectic three-month trip through the United
States and Canada in 1910. She also participated so wholeheartedly in
suffragette violence that in ‘1913, for leading a window-smashing raid, she
was sentenced to two months’ hard labor, and forcibly fed.
She greeted the Bolshevik Revolution with ecstasy, soon declaring, “I
am proud to call myself a Bolshevist.” * In corresponding with Lenin in
1919, however, she was taken aback to find that he considered her a
political and social amateur. She served as English correspondent of the
International Communist, whose editorial offices were in Petrograd; but
when, in 1920, she rechristened her Workers’ Socialist Federation “The
 The Continuing Influence of William Morris / 491

Communist Party (British Section of the Third International),” Lenin

made very clear that he regarded her act as heretical. She was one of the
main targets of his pamphlet of 1920, “Left-Wing” Communism; An
Infantile Disorder, which indirectly drove from Russia, as too left-wing,
those avant-garde artists unwilling to devote their art to the revolution.
When, in the summer of 1920, she went to Petrograd to try to argue with
Lenin, she got nowhere with him—but nonetheless found him utterly
charming.
After she returned to England, some articles published in her paper
Workers’ Dreadnought; The Organ of the Communist Party, were de-
clared seditious, and she served five months in prison. In 1922, an editorial
in that paper attacking the officially recognized Communist Party led to
her expulsion from it. Two years later the periodical ceased publication.
Because Sylvia Pankhurst did not believe in marriage, she lived for
many years without benefit of clergy in the company of an Italian left-wing
socialist exile, Silvio Corio, the father of her son: together they were the
chief leaders of the anti-Fascist movement in England. And when Mussoli-
ni’s armies invaded Ethiopia, she became the most effective British sup-
porter of the Emperor Haile Selassie. After World War II, she went to live
in Ethiopia, where she was regarded as a kind of patron saint, and where
she died in 1960.
The year before her death, an exhibition of her paintings and draw-
ings was held in London. It had to consist of early works, because in spite
of earnest desire, she had lacked time to paint for some fifty years.

Tue spirit oF William Morris was also linked with admiration for Soviet
communism in the person of the Welsh architect Clough Willams-Ells.
In 1928, Williams-Ellis published an influential and architecturally up-to-
date book, England and the Octopus. This was the opening gun in what
proved to be a lasting and partly successful campaign to help preserve the
English countryside and historic buildings in the face of devastating
ugliness spreading under modern industry in the motor age, much as earlier
it had spread in the railroad age during Morris’s lifetime. To some degree
this campaign in England stimulated and heartened American efforts to
meet the same problem. And because Williams-Ellis greatly admired Wel-
wyn, his book aided the cause of the garden city. Meanwhile, he was
becoming thoroughly sympathetic to the political system of the Soviet
Union, which in an article of 1937 written for a British communist maga-
zine he called “dauntless political pioneering.” In that article, however, he
could not bring himself to accept the banal classic style of architecture
adopted under Stalin in the name of Soviet patriotism and the aesthetic of
socialist realism, but urged instead that the U.S.S.R. “achieve some new
synthesis and a truly socialist architecture” in harmony with its new system
of politics.”
 10

THE INFLUENCE
OF SOVIET COMMUNISM,
1917-1968

1. Communism and Art in the 1920's

Berore tue 1930's, very few artists or other intellectuals in Britain had
communist sympathies. Any middle-class person who dared to subscribe
even to the Daily Herald, the far-from-communist—though eventually
pro-Russian—organ of the Labour Party, was suspected and shunned by his
neighbors. The first British group to regard the Revolution in Russia very
favorably by no means represented solidly average members of the middle
class. Named The 1917 Club in honor of the Russian Revolution, this
left-wing organization was founded by Oliver Strachey, brother of Lytton
Strachey, and Leonard Woolf, who had become an active Fabian in 1913.7
In April 1917, and thus in the month following that of the first Russian
Revolution of 1917, Woolf and Oliver Strachey began to sound out
possible members for The 1917 Club, but its first general meeting was not
held until December 1917, some six weeks after-the Bolshevik Revolution.
It is worth noting that Woolf never gave up his strong faith in that
revolution. In 1927, he and his wife, Virginia Woolf, were invited to go to
Moscow to attend the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Bolshe-
vik Revolution. And in 1963 he wrote, “if I could return to 1917 possessing
the knowledge and experience of 1963 I would again welcome the Russian
revolution and for the same reasons for which I originally welcomed it.
Like the French revolution, it destroyed an ancient, malignant growth in
European society.” *
The 1917 Club, which was only verbally revolutionary, was made up
of a strange, mildly bohemian mixture of avant-garde intellectuals and
artists, Labour politicians and trade-union stalwarts, together with war-re-
sisters and disillusioned ex-soldiers for whom Soviet Russia represented the
hope of international peace. Its first president was the future Labour Prime
Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, who had been a pacifist during World War
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 493

I. Another member was another future Labour Prime Minister, Clement

Attlee. But in addition to the strong political element, there was, as Woolf
has written, “also an element of unadulterated culture, literary and artistic,
and during the first two or three years of its existence [the club] was much
used by culture, particularly at tea time. . . . Virginia [Woolf] was often
there and there was a strong contingent of Stracheys, including Lyt-
ton.. . . Years later the stage must have invaded the club” for “the active
members seemed to be mainly actors and actresses and musicians. In its
beginnings, the stage gave us, I think, only one member, Elsa Lanchester,
and music only Cyril Scott.” * Woolf might have added that among the
writer-members were H. G. Wells, Osbert Sitwell, and Rose Macauley. As
could have been expected, a few members of the club later joined the
Communist Party: one was Emile Burns, a founder of the club who in
1935 edited an excellent Handbook of Marxism cited in this book. The
1917 Club petered out in the 1930’s, however, largely because the Labour
Party moved away from the Left.
For a week in January 1919 the red flag flew from the municipal
flagpole in Glasgow. In 1919, also, and thus over a year after The 1917
Club was founded, there was established in London a branch of the Clarté
movement, which had been founded that year in Paris by Henri Barbusse.
Clarté, we have seen, had begun ostensibly to bring together progressive
anti-war intellectuals, including novelists, poets, painters, etc., who be-
lieved in international brotherhood. Among those present at the inaugural
meeting of the London branch were Bertrand Russell, Sir Charles Trevel-
yan, and Lord Ponsonby. The founders of the English group were not,
however, aware that Clarté in France had a defined political background,
being in fact the first French communist front organization. Not only did
the French Clarté follow the line of the Communist International
founded in the same year, but it also promptly fell into the grasp of the
French Communist Party when that party was established a year later. As
soon as the British branch became thoroughly aware that the parent body
in Paris was concentrating on communist propaganda, it dissolved. None
of the English writers who had lent their support was a communist, and its
political sponsors were not communists but orthodox members of the
Labour Party,’ the first proletarian party in history to become, in 1922, the
alternative government party.
In 1918, the Labour Party first committed itself in theory to a program
for socializing the means of production and distribution. However, it early
divided over the question of Soviet Russia: a party conference in 1919
could not decide whether to support or oppose British intervention in
Russia on the side of the White opponents of the Bolsheviks. For British
workingmen tended to think of the Russian working class as made up of
foreigners rather than of fellow workers. And the founding of the Commu-
nist Party of Great Britain in 1920 had but little effect on their thinking
because it then had only 2,500 members.
The first production of the new British Communist Party with any
494 Vi RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

relation to the arts apparently was the volume of cartoons from its periodi-
cal, the Communist, issued at London in 1921 under the title, Communist
Cartoons: by “Espoir” and Others, Published by the Communist Party of
Great Britain. “Espoir” was the pseudonym of the Australian-born car-
toonist Will Hope, who worked in the racy Australian style of cartooning
while drawing very direct inspiration from cartoons in the French radical
periodical, L’Assiette au beurre.*
During these years following the Bolshevik Revolution, two English
writer-artists, the team of Eden and Cedar Paul, were collaborating on
books dealing with the arts and crafts while also writing or translating
volumes on Marxism, some of which had American editions. One book by
them, published in 1921, was entitled Proletcult, and dealt with the early
“proletarian culture” movement from Soviet Russia. That movement,
highly “modern” in its emphasis (unlike the later proletarian culture
movement under Stalin), had- considerable influence internationally on
left-wing members of the literary and artistic avant-garde. However, in
Russia itself Proletkult was increasingly frowned upon by Lenin and other
Soviet officials as reflecting in art the “infantile disorder of Leftism,” which
Lenin attacked in politics in 1921 as he found it necessary to move toward
the New Economic Policy, that temporary step back toward capitalism.
The Pauls, however, maintained their interest in Marxism, as was indi-
cated by their translation of Marx’s Das Kapital published in 1928.
During the 1920’s, various events helped to make the Soviet brand of
communism generally unpopular in Britain. One was the affair of the
“Zinoviev Letter.” The letter, purporting to have been written and signed
by Zinoviev, the noted Bolshevik who was president of the Communist
International, and countersigned by the head of the Communist Party of
Great Britain, called for an eventual armed insurrection of British working-
men. A copy of the letter, intercepted by the British Foreign Office shortly
before an election was due in 1924, put the Labour government of Ramsay
MacDonald in a dilemma. MacDonald—nghtly—doubted the genuineness
of the letter, in which the Foreign Office believed; but he agreed to its
publication, thinking that this would associate his regime with the forces
of law and order. However, much of the Conservative press played up the
letter as irrefutable evidence of the Red Menace, of which the Labour
leaders were dupes, equated socialism with communism, and maintained
that a vote for Labour was a vote for the Communist Party—with the
result that Labour lost the election.
Then came the General Strike of 1926, which the right-wing press
credited to communist inspiration, thereby enormously increasing the
unpopularity of communism in England.’ So unpopular did the Strike
prove to be that, when it was broken, general strikes were declared illegal
by an act of 1927 repealed only in 1946 after the socialists came to power
at the end of World War II.
Nonetheless, the General Strike did at least have the effect of uniting
the working class. Significantly, the year of the Strike saw the Communist
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 495

Party—though still very small—reach a new peak with 10,700 members,

the largest number it was to have in the 1920’s.
It was the General Strike, too, that first clearly divided British politi-
cal thought into Left and Right. In the following year, 1927, occurred the
first use of the term “‘leftism,” in the British press, made by H. G. Wells.”
Previously, leftism—that term deriving from French Revolutionary poli-
tics and its multi-party semi-circular seating arrangements—had been for-
eign to England and its two-party parliamentary system, under which
Government and Opposition sit facing each other.
In 1927, also, occurred the event that first awoke an international
spirit in the British working class and its supporters among intellectuals.
This was the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in the United States—
which, among other things, furnished subject-matter for many artists of
the Left throughout the world. On the evening of the execution of these
two acknowledged leftists accused of committing murder during a payroll
robbery, a memorial meeting was held at London’s Hyde Park. And that
the international spirit represented by this meeting was itself leftist was
indicated at the close of the proceedings when hundreds joined in singing
The Red Flag.
Nonetheless, for a time this spirit was cramped by the new inter-
national Communist party line exalting the proletariat in a warfare of
“class against class” (with a corresponding line for art of “proletarian
culture”) that developed after Stalin gained supreme power in the U.S.S.R.
in 1928-1929. Harry Pollitt was made the new secretary of the British
Communist Party to put the line into effect: he was to hold that post
until the assault on Stalin’s reputation by Khrushchev in 1956. The
glorification of the proletariat now meant that party membership was
supposed to be restricted to “the workers,” actual or by adoption, so that
the party was necessarily limited in size.

2. Communism and Art in the Early 1930's

the
I was, however, the great economic Depression, which began in
in-
United States late in 1929 and soon passed to England, that really
Party’s member -
creased the new leftist spirit there after the Communist
triumph of
ship had slumped to a mere 2,500 in 1930. At a time when the
to the official
Stalin in the Soviet Union had brought a new unity
countrie s, was
Communist parties, the British party, like those of other
seemed to have
able to take advantage of the fact that the Soviet Union
oyment plaguin g the capitali st world. Also,
solved the problem of unempl
Anglo-S oviet relation s had ended.
in 1929 a two-year break in
Party in
One result of the growing respectability of the Communist
moneyed people to
Britain was that it was able to get enough support from
Morni ng Star) in 1930. This soon
found the Daily Worker (today the
496 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

established a tradition of excellent cartooning under M. A. Rowley, who

signed his drawings “Maro.”
As unemployment increased, 1930 saw some 2,500 unemployed work-
ers participating in a national hunger march from the provinces to London
bearing a petition to Parliament signed by a million persons. (In even
more of a fiasco than that which befell the Charter of the Chartists nearly
a century earlier, the petition was never delivered, having apparently been
lost in an underground railway cloakroom.) Earlier hunger marches had
taken place in the mid-1920’s, but this and later ones (1931, 1934, and
1935) were on a far larger scale. The communists increasingly took advan-
tage of the opportunity: the marches of 1934 and 1935, for instance, were
sponsored by the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, which was
under strong communist influence.
The hunger marches of 1930-1931 had already attracted the support
of some university undergraduates. A few of them, especially at the older
universities, began to call themselves communists: the test of being avant-
garde now was whether one understood Marxism. Communism especially
appealed to members of distinguished families and graduates of the most
distinguished public schools. A Communist Party cell was established at
Cambridge University in April 1932 by David Haden Guest, a student at
Trinity College, the center of communism at Cambridge among both
undergraduates and senior members. The son of a former Labour M.P.
who became a peer, Haden Guest had joined the British Communist Party
in 1931 after returning from Germany, where he had temporarily been
studying mathematics at Gottingen University. While in Germany he had
been imprisoned by Nazi-controlled police for participating in a probably
communist-inspired demonstration at Braunschweig. ‘The members of his
new cell held private cell meetings while working openly through the
Cambridge Socialist Club, a basically Labour Party organization, which
had grown from less than 150 members in 1929 to over 600 in 1932, and
had fallen under communist control. The cell meetings were attended by
two Marxist dons—Maurice Dobb, an economist, and J. D. Bernal, a
crystallographer regarded as one of the ablest young scientists at Cam-
bridge—together with four undergraduates recruited by Guest, most of
whom remain unidentified. The future notorious spies for the Soviet
Union, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and “Kim” Philby, were then
undergraduates at Cambridge; and according to Bruce Page and the other
authors of The Philby Conspiracy (1968), it seems certain that Burgess, at
least, was either a founder-member of the Cambridge cell or joined it at a
very early date. E. H. Cookridge, in his account of Philby, The Third Man
(1968), states that the communist group centered around Old Etonian
Burgess, an open communist at Trinity College, whom G. M. Trevelyan
called his brightest history student. In 1932, a magazine named Cambridge
Left was founded, which published poems about the class struggle as well
as Marxian analyses of literature, as soon also did another periodical, the
Student Vanguard, a joint product of the Marxist movements at Oxford
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 497

and Cambridge. This lasted from 1932 until a change in the party line in
1934.
Over Easter in 1932, Haden Guest’s Cambridge cell had met at
Hampstead with members of another communist cell that had been
founded about October 1931 at University College, London, and with a
fellow-traveling “anti-war” group established at almost the same time in
the London School of Economics. As the anti-war movement developed
partly under communist influence, there was held at the Oxford Union on
February 9, 1933, a fateful debate in which “this House” decided that it
would “in no circumstances fight for King and Country,” an event that,
besides enormously encouraging Hitler in his aggressions later, gave rise to
the formation at Oxford of a Marxist splinter group called the October
Club. But it was especially in demonstrations on Armistice Day, Novem-
ber 11, 1933, against World I and “similar crimes of Imperialism’”—dem-
onstrations conducted by pacifist socialists now organized and led by
communists—that radical political consciousness came to Cambridge on
a grand scale. In the following February, hunger marchers from ‘Tyneside
at least largely organized by communists received an impressive welcome
when they marched through Cambridge.
From 1930 to 1934, the year in which the aesthetic of socialist realism
was adopted internationally at a writers’ congress in the Soviet Union,"
artists in England, as in the United States and elsewhere, who were
strongly sympathetic to communism, subscribed to the new version of
“proletarian culture” which had been made the official Soviet line by 1930.
Under this, as we have seen, proletarian subject-matter was devoted to the
end of using art as a weapon of the proletariat in the economic and
political struggle against the bourgeoisie. With art thus playing an impor-
tant role in the communist scheme of things, the attraction of communism
for artists could increase, especially as the effects of the Depression were
more and more felt. Although in communist theory the emphasis was now
so completely on the proletariat as the protagonist in the class war, in
England even more than in the United States the paradoxical fact was that
the actual creators of “proletarian art” were nearly all from the middle
class. This was true of the founders of the Artists International, renamed
in 1935 the Artists International Association, or A.I.A., in some respects a
kind of union of “progressive” artists established in England after some
artists on the Left came to recognize that “the first need was for them to
act as political men.” *°

3. The Artists International Association

Before the Spanish Civil W ar
as a group
"Tue Artists INTERNATIONAL was founded in 1933 at London
of mostly young progressive artists at once leftist and interested in looking
 498 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

out for the rights of artists." It soon became attractive to artists who were
simply anti-fascist. The idea for it had come to Clifford Rowe, a young
English painter on the Left who in 1932 had gone to Moscow full of
curiosity about the first workers’ State. Although Rowe had originally
intended to remain in the Soviet Union merely for a two-week holiday, he
was so entranced by what he found that he ended by taking a job there. A
~ short time later, after talking with radical artists from all over the world
who were participating in a large international exhibition in Moscow, he
conceived of an organization of artists at home in Britain which would
“Jink with others in every country in support of democracy, oppose fascism
and war, [and] work for Socialism.” ” Before returning to London, Rowe
wrote to an artist friend, Misha Black, about his idea.” And meeting
illustrator Pearl Binder on the ship on his way home from Leningrad, he
drew her also into enthusiastic support.
The new group was formed in 1933 at two meetings held in the
studios of Misha Black. Most of those present at the first meeting were
pupils of James Fitton, who had become instructor of the evening classes
in lithography at the London County Council’s Central School of Arts and
Crafts in Southampton Row. One student there was Pearl Binder, and
among the others were two young artists to be referred to again, James
Holland and Edward Ardizzone. The class, at which there was usually
much political talk, was like a kind of club, and various other artists
dropped in frequently to work there: among these was James Boswell
(Figs. 82 and 84) and an American, John Groth, who became known
through his drawings for the American Daily Worker as well as for Esquire
and other American magazines.
Boswell, to whom I owe most of the information in the preceding
paragraph, describes in a letter how, at one of Fitton’s classes early in the
fall term of 1933, Pearl Binder “turned up. . . and said we must all go and
hear Cliff Rowe whom we [already] knew about. . . . So off some of us
went to Misha’s place in Seven Dials. I had never met him before this.
There must have been a few other people there but the ones I remember
were Rowe, Misha, Pearl, Fitton and his wife . . . Holland, my [future]
wife . . . James Lucas, and his wife . . ”’ among others. “Of them all I
think only James Lucas .. . and I were Communist Party members.
Others joined later.”
The meeting was held by candlelight “‘because the electric light had
been cut off. . . . The place seemed to be furnished with fruit boxes from
Covent Garden hard by. . . . Rowe talked about working in the USSR
and the need for painters to organise internationally in support of the work-
ing class movement. It was all rather leftish stuff and you can imagine how
romantic it was from the original suggestion that the association should be
called “The International Association of Artists for Revolutionary Prole-
tarian Art.’” (‘The international Communist party line on art was then, of
course, that of proletarian culture, and an International Bureau of Revolu-
tionary Artists had been established in the U.S.S.R. in 1930. It should be
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 499

added, however, that Misha Black’s recollection of the title originally

proposed for the A.I.A. is simply “The International Association of Art-
ists’ —a fact suggesting that from the beginning some members of the
A.I.A. were less interested than others in following the Soviet model
directly.)
“Well this started the ball rolling,” Boswell continues, “and later we
talked with more experienced party members and got some of the ideas
straightened out.” He tells how a second meeting of perhaps from twenty
to twenty-five people was held at Misha Black’s new studio in Charlotte
Street, to which, “We went . . . with some more coherent notions and got
the name whittled down .. .” to Artists International. “At this second
meeting the Association could be said to have been founded.” Misha Black
was elected chairman (and was to be the main driving force behind the
organization until he gave up the office in 1944). Among those whom
Boswell recalls as being present, in addition to himself and his future wife,
were Pearl Binder, the Fittons, James Holland, and A. L. Lloyd, artist and
authority on folk song. Ewan Phillips was also there, and the group was
joined by the sculptor Peter Peri, a recent immigrant from Hungary whose
pacifist views later led him to become a Quaker, by Percy and Ronald
Horton, both conscientious objectors in World War I; and then soon by
a young sculptor, Betty Rea, and by the art critic Francis D. Klingender,
among others. Nearly all the early members, Boswell says, “had only the
crudest ideas about Art and Marxism,” but “we nearly all felt the need to
do something practical so we painted banners, posters and drew cartoons|,|
and gradually drawing in support and interest widened the base of the
association.”
The time was ripe for an organization of this kind in Britain, which in
some respects paralleled such groups in the United States as the commu-
nist-inspired John Reed Clubs and the Artists Union, but had most in
common with the American Artists Congress. Like those American organi-
zations, the newly founded Artists International promptly plunged into a
wide variety of activities in support of its social aims. One of its first
publications, apparently issued early in 1934, was a cyclostyled book of
cartoons dealing with the theme of the hunger marchers, whose marches
had fallen under communist sponsorship. It was a theme also, which,
because it dealt with members of the proletariat, could be in harmony with
the still prevailing Communist Party aesthetic of proletarian culture.
Likewise in 1934, the Artists International held its first art exhibition.
This, entitled “The Social Scene,” could be regarded by those members
sympathetic to communism as in harmony with the developing new Soviet
art line of socialist realism, even though the works exhibited were not in
the Soviet style. Adumbrated in the U.S.S.R. as early as 1932, socialist
realism had been definitively adopted in 1934 to replace the line of prole-
tarian culture—thereby making it easier to attract middle-class artists
unwilling to think of themselves as proletarians or to devote their art to
overt propaganda for a proletarian revolution. Communists in the A.LA.
500 if RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

were jubilant because Eric Gill—by then a near-Marxian communist as a

result of his belief in the Christian necessity for collective ownership under
industrialism—participated in the exhibition.
The need to attract cooperation from members of the middle class,
including those not sympathetic to communism, had become imperative
when, early in 1934, Stalin’s worry over Hitler’s rise to power had at last led
him to speak out publicly against the Nazis—and thus to pave the way for
a Popular Front of communists and non-communists in opposing fascism.
As a direct consequence, in Britain the Communist Party and the small
Independent Labour Party, which was considerably further left than the
Labour Party itself, set up in 1934 a Joint Committee for Anti-Fascist
Action. It seemed for a time that a Popular Front was to be born in
England as in France, but when, in November 1935, the Communist Party
applied to be affliated with the Labour Party, it was refused. ‘Thereafter,
the attention of the communists was diverted from hunger marches of
proletarians to Popular Front organizations and to denouncing the Labour
Party for not participating in them. But the Labour Party, having ceased to
be sympathetic to Soviet communism, kept its officials from sanctioning
leftist activities.
Nevertheless, in connection with communist efforts to establish as
many Popular Front organizations as possible, the Artists International
changed its name—so similar to that of the purely Communist Interna-
tional—to the Artists International Association. For now the communists
and their sympathizers within the former Artists International were being
encouraged to work in association with any and all artists who were
anti-fascists, as well as with all supporters of social realism in art, even
those not sympathetic to communism. Many artists of widely differing
political points of view, disturbed by the actions of the Nazis, and espe-
cially by the closing of the Bauhaus in 1933, were ready to join an
organization of artists known to be anti-fascist.
As a consequence of the broadening of its base, the A.I.A. (as it was
generally known from then on) had to make a special effort to hold
together its now diverse membership. To this end, it began to publish its
own monthly newssheet, which appeared with fair regularity throughout
the succeeding years.*®
Among the anti-fascist artists attracted to the organization were many
who had no interest whatever in socially realistic art. They included the
devoutly Roman Catholic Eric Gill, who became an exceptionally strong
supporter (and for so doing was privately reproved by his Archbishop).
There was also a circle around Nancy Cunard which felt deeply about race
and the unjust repression of colored people. (‘This group protested strongly
against the “Scottsboro Case” in the United States, in which several of the
Negro boys, who were accused of having raped two white gitls, had been
sentenced to death in 1931. After years of controversy, they were reprieved,
but the case was complicated by the communists’ use of it for their
propaganda.) Another circle in the A.I.A. consisted of surrealists, some of
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 501

whom, like their leader, the critic Herbert Read, were anarchists. The
organization even drew the support of many upholders of abstract art.
Among these were various constructivists, partly because the A.I.A.’s aim
to achieve a social integration of artists and art was similar to that exalted
in the theory of constructivism. It was further upheld by artists subscribing
to the ideas of the Bauhaus in Germany, which had been influenced by
constructivism, and two of whose greatest figures, Gropius and Moholy-
Nagy, were to reside briefly in Britain as exiles from fascism before being
called to the United States.
In accordance with the Popular Front character of the A.I.A., its
second exhibition—held in a splendid Georgian mansion on Soho Square,
and its first really big show—was entitled “Artists Against Fascism and
War.” (In those days the A.I.A. was even printing as a heading on its
notepaper “Against Fascism and War.’”’) This exhibition was the first of a
series, put on in various premises in London, which constituted a kind of
Popular Front even in artistic styles and was supported by such widely
different radical artists as Gill, Lucien Pissarro, Augustus John, and Henry
Moore, among many others. In 1935, too, the A.I.A. issued the collabora-
tive book Five on Revolutionary Art, published by the communist house of
Lawrence and Wishart, but with contributions from non-communists as
well as from communists. Eric Gill contributed to it, together with Her-
bert Read and the Marxist-Leninists F. D. Klingender, Alick West, and
A. L. Lloyd, a founder of the A.A. Betty Rea, the sculptor-secretary of
the A.I.A. then likewise sympathetic to communism, wrote the preface.

4. The Artists International Association

from the Beginning of the
Spanish Civil War to 1939

In June 1936, a meeting of another anti-fascist Popular Front organiza-

tion, the Congress of the International Association of Writers for the
Defense of Culture, was held in London. The outbreak, on July 17-18, of
the Spanish civil war—in which the rebellion eventually led by Franco
against the Spanish Republic based on a Popular Front was supported by
Mussolini and Hitler—made all anti-fascists move even more strongly to-
ward a common front against fascism. The communist foreign policy
calling for an anti-fascist Popular Front became more widely regarded, not
simply as an international communist line, but as the focus of a potent
movement in which opponents of fascism in all parties could join uphold-
ers of legal government. Also, the belief that political justice must be aided
to prevail in Spain was often combined with the dream of achieving social
justice in Britain and other “capitalist” countries, as well as with the
502 if RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

aesthetic dream that a mass audience could be developed for all good art.
As a result, many surprising situations arose: for instance, in the ensuing
period the highly aesthetic and non-communist (though vaguely Fabian)
Virginia Woolf wrote for the official Communist Party paper, London’s
Daily Worker—the only time in the century with the possible exception of
World War II when such a thing could have occurred. In an essay entitled
“The Artist in Politics,” she also spoke up for the A.I.A. and the need for
the artist to participate directly in politics at a time of such social chaos.
The fact that the Soviet Union proved to be the one nation ready to
supply active aid to the Spanish Republicans was one element in making
the British government (and that of France, which reluctantly followed
the British) decide to remain neutral, largely in the hope of avoiding a
world war. As the United States government too placed an embargo on the
sale of arms to the Spanish Republicans, Russian help became vital to
them. This naturally increased the power of the communists in the Span-
ish Republican government, which only made the governments of Britain,
France, and the United States more unwilling to extend help to the
Spanish Republic.”
If Soviet support of the Spanish Republicans was a major factor in
causing the neutrality of Britain as well as of France and the United
States, that support equally encouraged many anti-fascist intellectuals
sympathetic to the Spanish Republicans to be sympathetic to the Soviet
Union and communism as well. Their sympathy led many of them to go to
Spain to fight on the Republican side as volunteers, and to do so chiefly
under communist leadership. Most of the English volunteers joined the
British Battalion of the International Brigade, the British equivalent of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the United States. The International
Brigade, organized by the Comintern from foreign volunteers, beginning in
September 1936, was led by communists; eighty percent of its members
came from the working class; about sixty percent were communists when
they joined up; and twenty percent more became communists.® In Spain,
the British Battalion fought under a banner designed by James Lucas, a
communist founder of the A.I.A. The ablest English communist art critics
of the period, Christopher Caudwell and the novelist Ralph Fox, both died
fighting in Spain. So did “Maro” (M. A. Rowley), cartoonist of the British
Daily Worker.
The first British subject to be killed there had been a sculptor-member
of the Communist Party and of the A.I.A. named Felicia Browne, who had
happened to be in Spain when the civil war broke out and had promptly
enrolled in the Loyalist militia. The A.I.A.’s wholehearted support of the
Loyalists in the Spanish civil war as part of its strongly anti-fascist point of
view made it far more attractive to a wide variety of artists than ever
before. In October 1936, less than two months after Felicia Browne had
been killed in Spain, the A.LA. opened an exhibition of over 250 of her
drawings at 46 Frith Street, London. At the time the drawings were shown,
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 503

an illustrated booklet, Drawings by Felicia Browne, was published by

Lawrence and Wishart and sold for the benefit of “Spanish [Loyalist]
Medical Aid.” The actual catalog of the exhibition had an appreciative
foreword written by the former pacifist Duncan Grant, a distinguished
non-communist artist connected with the essentially “art for art’s sake,”
but partly Fabian, Bloomsbury group. Grant, the leader of Post-Impres-
sionism in English art, was a great friend of Clive and Vanessa Bell, whose
socialist son, Julian Bell, a Marxist poet who never quite joined the
Communist Party, was to go to Spain early in 1937 and be mortally
wounded on July 18, 1937, while driving a Loyalist ambulance at the battle
of Brunete. As a student at Cambridge University in 1934, Julian Bell had
engaged in controversy in the pages of the leftist paper, the Student
Vanguard, with John Cornford, a still younger poet, who, though the
great-grandson of Charles Darwin, was writing as an orthodox Marxist and
a member of the Young Communist League. Cornford, the first English-
man to fight at the front for the Spanish Republic, was a member of the
Communist Party when he was killed in action in December 1936 at the
age of twenty-one.’ At the time of his death, the group in which he was
fighting had just become the nucleus of the British Battalion of the
International Brigade. Another Cambridge communist killed in Spain was
David Haden Guest, founder of the communist cell at the University.
Deeply disturbed by the Spanish civil war, the A.LA. originated and
began to sponsor an arts peace campaign *® which was related to the
international peace campaign headed by Lord Cecil. In connection with
this, a peace pavilion was erected at the World’s Fair held in 1937 at Panis,
a building in which artists from different countries decorated different
rooms. The decorations of the English room were designed by a group of
British artists, one of whom was James Holland, a founding member of the
A.A. One aim of the arts peace campaign was to continue the A.I.A.’s
activity on behalf of Loyalist Spain by raising funds for an Artists Ambu-
lance for Spain, which it did in 1938 under the auspices of a larger
organization called Medical Aid for Spain.” To help raise money for the
ambulance, in March 1938 the A.I.A. sponsored a cabaret, songs for which
had words by W. H. Auden and music by Benjamin Britten.” As this fact
indicates, the arts peace campaign was by no means limited to members of
the A.I.A.; nor, indeed, was it limited to communist sympathizers. Like the
art exhibitions of the A.I.A., it attracted a wide range of artists, including
social realists, surrealists, abstract artists, and members of the Bloomsbury
group such as Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant (both founding members
of the London Group, as the old Camden ‘Town Group of artists, founded
in 1911, was renamed when if was enlarged in 1913).
Meanwhile, in 1937, the popularity of the A.I.A. had so increased as a
result of its activities that it had been able to hold, in a house on
fashionable Grosvenor Square, its largest art exhibition to date. Simultane-
ously, in an effort to widen its appeal to the masses, it put on a craftsman’s
504 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

exhibition. About this same time, also, it sponsored a week-long British

Artists Congress.
In 1938, it struck most successfully at the heart of fascism. For when
an exhibition of twentieth-century German art was put on at the Burling-
ton Galleries, members of the A.I.A. distributed copies of a leaflet that
Hitler himself blasted as “an insult to the Reich.” * In the following year,
the A.I.A. held an anti-fascist art exhibition at the Whitechapel Art
Gallery.* This show, called “Art for the People,” consisted of paintings
especially made for the show. In it, the works of a wide variety of artists
were again represented in a kind of artistic Popular Front, the size of the
gallery making it possible to hang each type of art separately, with the
realists, the surrealists, and the abstract artists each having their own large
section. Included in the exhibit was a large cartoon by Augustus John
(that anarchistic spirit who was never actually a member of the A.I.A., but
was often a collaborator and eventually a member of its Advisory Coun-
cil), and there were sculptures by Jacob Epstein and Frank Dobson, the
latter also a member of the selection committee. As a symbol of the
relation of anti-fascism to the art of the people, and so to the democracy of
the common man, the organizers of the exhibition went out and asked “a
man in the street,” selected quite by chance, to open the show: he proved
to be a butcher from London’s lower-class East End.

5. The Artists International Association

and Contacts Abroad
As tHe worn “International” had from the beginning been part of the
name of the A.LA., from its earliest days it had sought to develop contacts
and correspondents in other countries, mainly through anti-fascist artist
organizations in Belgium, France, and especially the United States. None-
theless, it never adequately succeeded in formalizing such contacts. The
painter Richard Carline recalls visiting the leftist French painter Jean
Lurgat at Paris in the mid-1930’s at the request of Misha Black. But the
few contacts that developed were mainly with artists in the United States,
and even these were established not so much on an organizational basis as
on that of personal acquaintance among individual artists. Some of these
contacts were made through visits to England of the then leftist American
artist, John Groth,” but the chief channel of communication was estab-
lished by Carline. During a year spent in the United States and Mexico
(1937-1938), Carline had an exhibition at the A.C.A. Gallery in New
York, a center for many of the American anti-fascist artists then on the
Left. He was in close contact with Philip Evergood (his close friend since
their student days at the Slade School, who was president of the left-wing
Artists Union, founded in 1934), Harry Gottlieb (former, and future,
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 505

president of the Artists Union), and Stuart Davis (prominent in that

Union since its beginnings) .”° Davis and Gottlieb had also been members
of the planning committee of the anti-fascist American Artists Congress,
founded in 1936. This was the American organization most like the A.I.A.
both in its aims and in having non-communist as well as communist
members, so that communists could regard it as a Popular Front organiza-
tion. At the time Carline arrived, his friend Evergood was a member of the
executive committee of the Artists Congress and Stuart Davis was its
president. To Davis, therefore, Carline carried a letter from Misha Black,
as chairman of the A.I.A., in the hope of promoting cooperation between
the two organizations: with this end in view, discussions were carried on
between Carline and a committee of the Artists Congress. In that same
year, too, the A.I.A. sponsored the British Artists Congress, which may
therefore have taken its name from the American Artists Congress.”
In the United States, Carline became aware of the social realism of
the works of art executed under the Works Progress Administration and
other art projects of the New Deal, a kind of realism unlike anything to be
found in England. He also became aware that the chief stimulus behind
the work done under the W.P.A—by artists employed on day wages—had
come from Mexico. The fact was that the idea for the various New Deal
art projects had originated primarily in a suggestion made to Franklin D.
Roosevelt by the painter George Biddle, a social democrat who had known
Roosevelt at Groton and Harvard. Biddle told Roosevelt of the employ-
ment by the Mexican government of artists paid plumbers’ wages to express
on walls of public buildings the ideals of the Mexican Revolution. Biddle
had learned about this mainly from conversations with the Mexican
painter, and communist, Diego Rivera, with whom he had lived for a
month in Mexico, and who, like other Mexican communist artists, had
earlier been prominent in the Revolutionary Syndicate [i.e., Union] of
Technical Workers, Painters, Sculptors, and Allied Trades, founded in
1922. Because of the Mexican influence on WP.A. art, Carline decided to
study contemporary Mexican art at first hand. After a trip to Hanover,
New Hampshire, to see the frescoes recently painted in the Dartmouth
College Library by the Mexican revolutionary radical José Clemente
he dis-
Orozco, Carline went to Mexico in November 1937. And there
cussed with leading Mexican artists the possibility of holding in London a
large exhibition of social realist art from Mexico as well as from the United
States.
After Carline returned to London and reported to the AIA, a
an
sub-committee of that organization was set up to arrange for such
n of the
exhibition to be held late in 1939. Misha Black was chairma
and the
sub-committee, whose members included, among others, Carline
leftist art historians Francis Klingender and Anthony Blunt.
States as a
Later in 1938, Misha Black himself went to the United
on the
member of a group of British artists and designers assigned to work
York World’ s Fair: with the aim
British Pavilion at the forthcoming New
506 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

of pursuing discussions about the proposed exhibition of social realism, he

took with him letters of introduction from Carline to Harry Gottlieb,
Stuart Davis, and others. The discussions were carried still further on a
second trip made by Carline to the United States in July 1939. However,
he was trapped there by the outbreak of World War II. The threat of war
had already compelled the indefinite postponement of the exhibition, and
post-war conditions resulting from the defeat of fascism and the break-up
of the alliance against it proved to be so different that the show was never
held.”
Nevertheless, the A.I.A. had continued to maintain close relations
with the American Artists Congress, which fell under direct communist
control after the Nazi-Soviet pact and the Russian invasion of Finland.
Relations between the two organizations naturally became all the more
cordial when, after the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor in December
1941, the United States became the ally of both Britain and the Soviet
Union.”

6. The Artists International Association

and the Euston Road School
A mone the artists drawn to membership in the A.I.A. was a group
established in 1937 whose members became the leaders of a British kind of
moderate social realism: the Euston Road School. One of its founders was
Graham Bell, a socialist sympathetic to the far Left who had early joined
the A.I.A. The other chief members of the group were William Cold-
stream (Fig. 81), Claude Rogers, and Victor Pasmore; and it took its name
from the School of Drawing and Painting opened by Coldstream, Rogers,
and Pasmore in 1938 at 12 Fitzroy Street, London, but soon moved to the
Euston Road. Other artists, including Robert Medley and Lawrence Gow-
ing (in the 1960’s principal of the Chelsea School of Art), were associated
with the group. Although some of its members, among them Graham Beil,
had originally represented Bloomsbury standards of “art for art’s sake”
aestheticism, with corresponding sympathy for abstract tendencies in mod-
ern art, others, especially Coldstream and Rogers, had customarily painted
in a realistic way. In addition to painting landscapes and portraits, all the
members of the group now devoted themselves to depicting everyday
people in everyday urban settings of cafés (as Bell did in Fig. 81), shops,
trams, and dingy streets—subjects like those earlier depicted by the Cam-
den Town School—of which Lucien Pissarro, Augustus John, and Sickert
had been founders in 1911. The artists of the Euston Road School de-
picted such scenes in a thoroughly English tonal way, with a realistic
technique deriving in part from Sickert and in part from French Impres-
sionism, though with an effect of greater solidity. Their art—quite inde-
pendently—was similar in subject-matter and even in technique to that of
 1
4

FIc. 81. The Café (1938) by Graham Bell. (The figure at the extreme right
is William Coldstream.)

New York’s Fourteenth Street School, in which the socially leftist Soyer
brothers were prominent: both groups opposed abstraction, surrealism, and
the fantastic in art, being led to a more socially conscious art especially by
the great Depression. In England, although most artists came from fami-
lies of sufficient means so that they were not seriously affected by the
Depression, a minority of artists suffered from it even more than those in
America because no governmental provision was ever made for their
economic survival corresponding to the W.P.A.’s Art Project of President
for in-
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the United States. Pasmore,
stance, despite great talent, had to make a living by working full time as a
very minor civil servant in the London County Council until he was
Kenneth
rescued by the wealthy, and soon to be knighted, art historian
Coldstrea m, until he too received the
Clark; and from 1934 to 1937,
508 yi RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

support of the same generous patron, had been compelled to devote

himself to film-making.
The Euston Road School survived only until 1939. Graham Bell was
killed in World War II; Victor Pasmore shifted to abstract art, going his
own way in 1948; and in 1949 William Coldstream, today Sir William, was
appointed Slade Professor of the University of London, and thus head of
the Slade School of Art. In the post-war years both Pasmore and Cold-
stream (who still paints in a realistic style) had become generally regarded
as among the leading painters of Britain.

7. Artists and Art Critics of the Left Review:

Boswell, Holland, Fitton; Blunt
Sucn impetus toward leftist political activity as the Euston Road School
displayed had been supplied by Graham Bell,?° who also contributed art
criticism to the New Statesman. More thoroughly active on the Left and at
that time representative of a hard-core communist point of view, were
three artists who in the 1930’s devoted themselves especially to drawing
cartoons for communist periodicals. Although they were all founders of the
A.LA., they had been socially radical even before the A.I.A. was estab-
lished. These three artist:—James Boswell, James Fitton, and James Hol-
land—not only contributed cartoons to the London Daily Worker ** but
also were especially responsible for developing the artistic side of the Left
Review. This communist-line cultural magazine, the nearest British equiva-
lent to the American New Masses, was founded in 1934, the year in which
socialist realism was publicly adopted as the official aesthetic of the Soviet
Union. Because 1934 was also the year in which the new Soviet political
line of the Popular Front against fascism was clearly established, some of
the other contributors to the Left Review, unlike “the three Jameses” (as
they were known), were simply anti-fascist.
The most influential of the three Jameses, Boswell, had sought to
develop his talent for drawing by reading Ruskin in his native New
Zealand, where he first attended art school. He had gone to London and
become a student at the Royal College of Art: there his studies ended just
as the Depression was about to begin. Unlike the Slade School, the other
chief center of art education in England, most of whose students came
from well-to-do families, the Royal College of Art catered to students who
would have to earn a living from their art, and who therefore were much
more likely to become socially and politically concerned. When Boswell
found himself unable to survive by selling his landscape paintings,
he
became a commercial artist and illustrator. The plight of the unemploy
ed
in the Depression so stirred his sympathies that he soon found himself
“working [at commercial art] all day and trying to create a new world
all
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 509

night” *® by making drawings for communist publications such as the Left

Review and the Daily Worker. His drawings and those of Fitton, Holland,
and many other artists on the Left were especially influenced by the highly
expressive linear style of George Grosz (Fig. 108), who, stirred to social
protest by World War I and its aftermath in Germany, had become a
strong communist sympathizer, and long continued to exert an interna-
tional influence on artist-radicals. The stimulation of Grosz’s work is
clear, for instance, in Figures 82 and 83, caricatures from the Left Review

ric. 82. “Surrealist Exhibition London 1936” by James Boswell, from the
Left Review, July 1936.
FIG. 83. “For Charity” by James Fitton, from me oe Bie February 1935.
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 511

by Boswell and Fitton. Only exceptionally did the influence of the Dau-
mier-Steinlen tradition, strong in American leftist magazine art, affect
English drawings of the Left during the 1930’s. It can be seen, for example,
in Boswell’s lithograph, “Hunger Marchers” (Fig. 84),°* which was printed
not in the Left Review but in the December 1934 issue of International
Literature, published at Moscow, in which another founder of the A.I.A.,
Pearl Binder, also had several lithographs published. The Left Review did,
however, publish occasional examples of drawings or cartoons in the

FIG. 84. “Hunger Marchers” by James Boswell, from International Literature,

December 1934.
512 if RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

Daumier tradition by American artists on the Left such as Fred Ellis,

cartoonist for the American Daily Worker, and Hugo Gellert, who likewise
drew for that Daily Worker and for American communist cultural maga-
zines.
It must be emphasized that the illustrations of the Left Review were
exceptional in British art of the time in being so politically propagandistic.
In painting and sculpture, as the paintings of the Euston Road School
especially indicate, the dominant tendency among artists then more or less
on the Left was simply that of realism without any specific communist
content, although such realism could be and was somewhat stimulated by
the communist aesthetic of socialist realism. Even Henry Moore, who was
already becoming internationally known for his relatively abstract sculp-
ture, and who was partly led by his radical sympathies as a lifelong socialist
to join the A.I.A., eventually made drawings of workingmen depicted with
a degree of realism.
Moore had a personal reason for sympathetically representing coal
miners in Figure 85: he himself is the son of a socialist miner and trade-
unionist. In order to make this and other drawings of miners, he spent two
or three weeks down in the mine at his home town of Castleford. He had

Fic. 85. Pit Boys at Pit Head (1942), drawing by Henry Moore.
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 513

accepted an official commission for the subject at the suggestion of Herbert

Read, simply as part of his contribution to the war effort in World War II.
Since leaving art school, Moore had willingly drawn only the female figure.
Now he discovered the possibilities of the male figure in action: it was this
that interested him rather than the “social” subject-matter.
Moore’s own remarks show that he has always tended to keep his art
separate from his socialism, which in any case is far from being of a
revolutionary Marxist kind and, because of his artistic individualism, con-
tains elements of anarchism. Later, in a paper on “The Sculptor in
Modern Society” (1952) that Moore read at a congress of artists, he
stated: “Obviously some forms of society are more favorable to art than
others, and it would be argued that the artist should on that account take
up a position on the political front. I would be more certain of his duty in
this respect if we could be scientifically certain in our political analysis, but
. . . the relation between art and society has . . . never [been] of the kind
that could be consciously planned. . .. We know that the Industrial
Revolution has had a detrimental effect on the arts, but we cannot tell
what further revolution or counter-revolution would be required to restore
the health of the arts. We may have our beliefs, and we may even be
actively political . . . ; but meanwhile we have to work . . . within the
contemporary social structure ... [which] varies from country to
COUNtryye anne
Apart from the sympathy for workingmen among artists, including
Moore, which in so many cases was stimulated by their belief that the
Depression had demonstrated the failure of the Industrial Revolution as
well as of capitalism, the simple fact is that at a time when all significant
modern art in Germany was being attacked by Hitler as degenerate, most
artists who joined the A.I.A. or sent their works to its exhibitions did so
because they felt that in justice to art itself they had to take a strong
political stand regardless of the style that they employed. Like Henry
Moore in his sculpture, many other artists whose works were prominently
listed in the A.I.A. exhibition catalogs of the time were not social realists.
Some had aligned themselves with surrealism or constructivism—among
them the painters Roland Penrose (later the biographer of Picasso),
Paul Nash, and Ben Nicholson and his wife, the sculptor Barbara Hep-
worth. While sympathizing with the anti-fascism of the A.I.A., such artists
as these, like the social realists of the Euston Road School, did not apply
their energies immediately to the social struggle by participating actively in
non-artistic leftist causes or by making posters for labor organizations on
the Left, putting on exhibitions of communist-line art, and the like, as did
the by then relatively few members of the A.I.A. directly committed to
specifically communist social action. As has been indicated, even the
English artists who insisted on social realism sought simply a realistic
statement of appearances without either the deliberate idealization of the
working class or the sharp social satire directed against the “capitalistic”
bourgeoisie found in the cartoons of such artists then on the far Left as
514 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

Boswell, Holland, and Fitton. (As an indication of the kind of changes

that time was to bring even among artists once so actively leftist, it might
now be mentioned that while this book was being written Fitton was
vice-president of the Royal Academy, Holland was involved in advertising,
and Boswell was busy running a house magazine for the huge Sainsbury
grocery chain, headed by a noted art collector, in addition to carrying on
his art.)
As time went on, the majority of the members of the A.I.A. considera-
bly softened its original leftist social impulse, with the result that more and
more the organization was not so closely identified with the Communist
Party as was the Left Review, for instance. It increasingly maintained this
position in spite of the urgings of then party-line art critics such as
Anthony Blunt, who had become sympathetic to communism as an under-
graduate at Trinity College, Cambridge—but who, after World War I, as
Sir Anthony, was to be director of the Courtauld Institute of Art and
keeper of the Queen’s Pictures, recognized as one of the leading historians
of art of the world, with an influence upon many American art historians.
In the later 1930’s, Blunt demonstrated his then accord with the Commu-
nist Party line of socialist realism in art by declaring in the Left Review:
“Tf we mean by revolutionary art the art which most closely represents the
ideas of the rising class [i.e., the proletariat], there can be no doubt that
the true revolutionary art of today will be realistic.” ** He went on to say
that ‘“The line of Daumier, Courbet, the early Van Gogh, Meunier and
Dalou is that of the real art of the growing proletariat, while that of the
bourgeoisie continues towards the abstraction of the twentieth century.”

8. Communism, Anarchism, and Surrealism

Line the Soviet theoreticians of socialist realism, Blunt attacked not only
abstract art, but, “above all, Surrealism” as seeming to be revolutionary but
having “no roots at all in the rising class.” *° As was noted earlier, such
attacks on surrealism were considered necessary by the Stalinists every-
where because they denounced as bourgeois, “idealistic,” and degenerate
the Freudian element in surrealism, which had been proving attractive to
many artists with leftist inclinations. In Britain, the danger of this attrac-
tion had seemed particularly great after the International Surrealist Exhibi-
tion held at the New Burlington Galleries in London in June and early
July 1936, created a great stir. The catalog for the Exhibition was written
by Herbert Read, the art critic, who was a member of the organizing
committee for the show, as also were Henry Moore and the painters
Roland Penrose and Paul Nash, while the international committee for it
included Salvador Dali and the surrealist writers André Breton and Paul
Eluard.
Some three years before, in 1933-1934, Nash had been responsible for
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 515
starting in England a new direction toward abstract art—and toward
avant-gardism—when he organized the group called Unit One. This had
helped to stimulate some younger artists—painters and sculptors—to ac-
cept the implications of purely abstract art, toward which they were
further led by their association with European artists newly settled in
London. ‘Two who arrived in 1935 were Naum Gabo and Laszlé Moholy-
Nagy. Gabo, who had left Soviet Russia in 1922 rather than devote his
constructivist art directly to the aims of the Revolution, went to England
from Paris. Moholy-Nagy, a former teacher at the Bauhaus influenced by
constructivism, who possessed some radical social sympathies of a non-
party kind, came as an exile from Nazi Germany.
Among the members of Unit One especially affected by construc-
tivism were several minor architects (who, as a consequence, helped to
spread the International Style in England) and also Ben Nicholson, one of
the three most important artists in the group, who had already met
Mondrian in 1933 and had been much influenced by him. Of the other
two, Barbara Hepworth linked constructivism with surrealism, while Henry
Moore was more stimulated by surrealism—as was Herbert Read, who be-
came the chief spokesman for Unit One.
Nash’s own inclinations toward abstraction, never of a completely
non-objective sort, made it easier for him to become interested in surreal-
ism, though he always remained an independent artist. The painter John
Piper, however, was led from abstraction to surrealism by the Surrealist
Exhibition of 1936. Most of the artists then called Surrealists in England,
with the exception of Henry Moore, were largely derivative and undistin-
guished. Some—like Moore’s friend Herbert Read—were anarchists, in-
cluding the painter Norman P. Dawson, also a friend of Moore.
The theoretical importance to the communists and their sympathizers
of rejecting surrealism and its Freudian implications was made particularly
clear in a special supplement to the July 1936 issue of the Left Review, in
which a defense of surrealism by Read was heavily outnumbered and
overwhelmed by communist-line attacks upon it made by Anthony Blunt
and Alick West. Read tried to insist that surrealism was anti-bourgeois and
constituted the only true application of dialectical materialism. He main-
tained that surrealism challenges “not only all bourgeois conceptions of
art, but also the official Soviet doctrine of socialist realism”: he even dared
to assail that doctrine as “a flirtation with the ideology of capitalism.” * In
flat rebuttal, Blunt denounced surrealism as an anti-rational “side track,”
only a little less anti-rational, indeed, than completely anarchistic dada.
And he praised socialist realism (without mentioning it by name) as the
“new art . . . beginning to arise, the product of the proletariat, which is
again performing its true function, that of propaganda.” * Alick West,
writing on “Surréalisme in Literature,” *” was less violently opposed to
surrealism than Blunt, but did declare that the surrealists must abandon
their style and place “themselves consciously on the side of the workers.”
In the same issue of the Left Review, a caricature by James Boswell
516 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

satirized admiring (if obviously baffled) visitors to the Surrealist Exhibi-

tion with reference to a quotation taken from Read’s writings (Fig. 83).
Perhaps partly as a result of the Left Review’s attitude, the impact of
surrealism on avant-garde British artists was somewhat less pronounced
than upon corresponding American artists.
One of the British surrealists who continued to flirt with communism
was Julian Trevelyan.*° As a member of the Artists International Associa-
tion, he arranged for that organization a debate between surrealists and
social realists—the latter being members of the Euston Road School. In
this period of the Popular Front, Trevelyan himself, egged on by Henry
Moore and another friend, attacked the social realists.

9. Mass-Observation

Lite many of his friends, Trevelyan became committed to a social

movement attractive to many leftists called Mass-Observation. Founded in
February 1937, this had as its object to study the anthropology of England
by observing the life of the masses; * by so doing it paved the way for a
considerable development of sociology in England nearly a quarter of a
century later. The idea for Mass-Observation, in which a technique of
social research by “the man in the street’ as well as by “scientists” was
somewhat pretentiously associated with art and literature, was furnished by
Tom Harrisson, an amateur sociologist and anthropologist recently re-
turned from an expedition to the New Hebrides. Another founder was the
poet and journalist Charles Madge, to whom Mass-Observation repre-
sented a new kind of poetry on a foundation of empirical Marxism. Stl
another was the critic Humphrey Jennings, who had had much to do with
organizing the Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, and to whom Mass-
Observation was an extension of his surrealist vision of industrial England.
Documentary film makers as well as poets and painters were involved in
Mass-Observation before it deteriorated into a market research organiza-
tion. Trevelyan’s conception of the movement to a considerable degree
combined the views of Madge and Jennings; and like them and the other
participants, he was eager to bridge the gulf between himself and the
workers of Britain. To this end he painted somewhat surrealistic scenes of
industrial cities including Bolton, where Mass-Observation had its head-
quarters, and especially the grim Five Towns, previously celebrated in
novels by Arnold Bennett.
Trevelyan found that his participation in Mass-Observation resulted
in a kind of catharsis, contact with miners and other working people
enabling him to regain his faith in the more permanent values of contem-
porary civilization. The result was that when war came, his flirtation with
communism was already ending. And after his military service was over, he
gradually came to the realization—reached in the post-war period by a
considerable number of other modern artists once sympathetic to commu-
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 517

nism—that “painters . . . must of necessity be anarchists, ruthless egotists,

pursuing only the truth of their unique vision which they must communi-
cate at all costs. If they come in conflict with society, they should be
prepared to defy it, as Victor Pasmore has done.” ”

10. The Left Book Club and

Its Influence on the Arts

"Pur year of the Surrealist Exhrbition—1936—which had been so impor-

tant to Trevelyan and his surrealist friends, was also the year during which,
primarily because of the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, in England as in
the United States communist influence reached a peak among literary
figures as well as among artists. Four months before the war began,
publisher Victor Gollancz, a Jew turned Christian socialist, had announced
the founding of the Left Book Club. This largely Fabian organization
(which soon had to meet the opposition of a Right Book Club) was made
use of by the communists, and became exceedingly important in helping to
create an atmosphere conducive to socially radical art at a time when many
Fabians were becoming communist sympathizers. Because the general
purpose of the Left Book Club was to oppose fascism, its specific intent—
like that of the Communist Party—was to promote a Popular Front of
communists, socialists, and liberals; and its appeal was greatly broadened
by the wide range of those sympathetic to the Spanish Republicans in their
struggle against Franco’s Nationalist armies.
The Club became the most active and largest organized body in
Britain working for a Popular Front and the greatest single force for the
dissemination of left-wing thought there. It offered writers a ready-made
audience for radical doctrines that were further spread through the Club's
paper, the Left News, a copy of which was sent to members along with
each monthly book choice. Within eighteen months the Club had over
50,000 members: it reached its peak membership of 60,000 in April 1939.
Over 1,000 discussion groups were established in connection with it.
Though these were in the main geographically organized, they included a
wide variety of vocational and professional groups, ranging from those of
accountants, lawyers, traveling salesmen, railway workers, busmen, taxi
drivers, and even cyclists, to architects, musicians, poets, and actors.
Although the Club was supposed to have about the same amount of
contact with the Labour Party as with the Communist Party, in the
popular mind it became associated with communism—and in fact nearly
half the books commissioned by the Club were written by communists. By
late 1938, Gollancz himself—a kind of left-progressive anti-fascist—had
come to feel that too many of the Club’s groups had fallen under commu-
nist control.
Nor should this have been a surprise. After all, the first proposal for a
518 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

Left Book Club, made in May 1935, had occurred when John Strachey,
then thoroughly sympathetic to the aims of the Communist Party, was
asked by a representative of the Workers Bookshop, the foremost commu-
nist bookseller in London, to sit on a selection committee of a Left Book
Club to choose books from any publisher’s list. The proposal got nowhere,
however, until Gollancz revived the idea early in 1936 and set up a kind of
Popular Front selection committee consisting of Strachey and himself,
together with Harold Laski to represent the Labour Party. The three men
were sufficiently far left in their sympathies so that the first selection was a
book by the leading French communist Maurice Thorez, and at least four
books chosen the first year actively promoted the policies of the Commu-
nist Party among British intellectuals.
One of the most important books offered by the Left Book Club to its
members was Beatrice and Sidney Webb’s Soviet Communism; A New
Civilization?, first published in 1935, the year before the founding of the
Club, but republished in 1937 without the question mark. A much earlier
book by the Webbs had been translated into Russian by Lenin back in the
1890’s; nevertheless, after the Bolshevik Revolution, they themselves had
at first been unfavorable to Soviet Russia. Bernard Shaw had returned from
a trip to the Soviet Union in 1931, and in a lecture to the Fabians had
begun by sweeping away Fabians, social democrats, collectivists, socialists,
and the like, declaring: “All that has gone. There is now nothing but
Communism, and in future it is quite futile to go about calling yourselves
Fabians.” “* He then had proceeded to say that Soviet communism was
simply successful Fabianism, and that over Lenin’s tomb should be written
the Fabian slogan (coined by Sidney Webb), “The inevitability of grad-
ualness.” However, the Soviet example had by now made the Webbs
skeptical of the inevitability of gradualness, and a three-week trip to the
Soviet Union in 1932 confirmed them in the favorable view of the U.S.S.R.
to be expressed in their book Soviet Communism, which exerted wide
influence in spite of what seems today extraordinarily uncritical naiveté.
(As the chapters had been written, they had been checked for errors by the
Soviet embassy in London.)
With the Nazi-Soviet pact and the outbreak of World War II, the
Left Book Club essentially lost its influence. Like the A.L.A., it was
unwilling to come out flatly against the Soviet Union. Its choice for
November 1939 was Barbarians at the Gates, a book by Leonard Woolf
which in spite of his lifelong sympathy for the Russian Revolution was the
first attack on the Soviet Union the Left Book Club had ever published. It
brought about the resignation from the Club of numerous Communist
Party members; however, the very next choice was The Soviet Sixth of the
World, a book by the “Red Dean” of Canterbury, the Reverend Hewlett
Johnson, utterly favorable to the Soviet Union. The Left Book Club had
become only a kind of debating society. Although it managed to survive
until 1948, it did so largely as a forum for the numerous socialist refugees
from the Continent living and writing in England.
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 519

11. Writers on the Left and

the Theater of the Left

Dorin the later 1930's, when the Left Book Club was flourishing, almost
all the outstanding young British poets and writers had leftist sympathies
—among them Cecil Day Lewis, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood,
Stephen Spender, Louis MacNiece, Roy Fuller (whose social interests have
survived ever since), and eventually Dylan Thomas. And they became
influential in the United States to a degree that almost no British painter
or sculptor sympathetic to the Left has ever been. For, as has been
mentioned, British writers affected by social radicalism have exerted much
more international influence than the British artists similarly attracted,
with the particular exception of Henry Moore.”
In 1937, Cecil Day Lewis, the one active communist among the
writers with left-wing sympathies mentioned above, but destined to be
appointed Poet Laureate three decades later, edited a volume of leftist
essays, The Mind in Chains; Socialism and the Cultural Revolution, which
his introduction described as demonstrating the existence of “a firm theo-
retical basis for the ‘Popular Front.’ .. .” ** The thoroughly Marxist-
Leninist essay on art in this volume, written by Anthony Blunt, was entitled
“Art Under Capitalism and Socialism.” * In it, Blunt particularly stressed
the importance of mural paintings for decorating “communal buildings
devoted to the culture and recreation of the workers,” and also of color
printing for making reproductions of the paintings in large quantities,
thereby avoiding “the idea of a unique original with great scarcity value.” ™
He spoke highly of the sculptor Peri, a founder of the A.I.A. and commu-
nist sympathizer, as being in the straight line from Daumier and Dalou.
He had equally high praise for two Mexican artists of the Left, the
communist Rivera and the revolutionary Orozco, for doing on a grand
scale what Courbet had done in a smaller way. Much of Blunt’s essay
merely repeated the views about the “New Realism” as proletarian, and
about surrealism as bourgeois, expressed in his articles of that year in the
Left Review. Significantly enough, the concluding—and thoroughly pro-
communist—essay of The Mind in Chains was written by Edgell Rick-
word, then editor of the Left Review.
In the same crucial year—1937—as The Mind in Chains, two other
important works of Marxist criticism were published in England: Alick
West’s Crisis and Criticism, and Christopher Caudwell’s Illusion and
Reality. About this time, too, many British writers and other intellectuals
for
on the Left were being especially attracted to the theater as a medium
expressing social ideas. One group with left-wing sympathies, the Theatre
Guild, was founded in April 1937 to express the same interpretation of life
520 fi RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

and politics as the Left Book Club. By September 1938, over 250 amateur
Theatre Guild groups had been established, and with the help of the
Guild’s publication, New Theatre, were carrying the drama of the Left
throughout the provinces.
In raising funds for a new home in London for left-wing theater, the
Theatre Guild collaborated with Unity Theatre, a slightly older organiza-
tion further to the left. For Unity Theatre was a communist-line group,
founded in 1936, that had developed out of a desire to stimulate militant
action by dramatizing the struggles of the working class and the labor
movement rather than out of any aesthetic interest in the drama as such. It
emerged from the mass declamations, sketches, monologues, and songs
performed in public, often in the open air, during the period of prole-
tarian culture by “agit-prop” (for agitation and propaganda) leftists, as
well as from Left Theatre clubs and Rebel Theatre societies. In 1937 it
found a permanent home in a former Methodist church converted into a
theater by union workingmen who gave their labor.
Unity Theatre was founded by Herbert Marshall, who had been
trained at Moscow in the method of Stanislavsky, director of the Moscow
Art Theater. Some years after Marshall established Unity Theatre, he
himself was to be a director of the eminently non-communist Old Vic and
Sadler’s Wells theaters. In the late 1930's, once Unity Theatre was firmly
on its feet, Marshall and his friend, the American Negro actor and singer
Paul Robeson, who was likewise attracted by the Soviet Union and its
communism, dreamed especially of founding an all-Black theater workshop
to perform the great world dramas, but at that time sufficient Negro actors
were lacking. Not until 1962, after spending a decade in India building
theaters for Prime Minister Nehru and producing Shakespeare in Hindi,
was Marshall at last able to carry out his dream of an all-Negro production
—a musical with anti-capitalistic implications put on at the Theatre Royal,
Stratford.
In Marshall’s Unity Theatre, as established in the mid-1930’s, the
actors were amateurs, the plays for this reason being performed only on
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, when the members of the casts could get
time off from their jobs. The ideals of Unity Theatre achieved their
fulfillment particularly with its production of dramas by the German
communist sympathizer Bertolt Brecht, and in 1936 with Waiting for
Lefty, written by the American playwright Clifford Odets, then also
avowedly sympathetic to communism. Odets’s play is a drama of left-wing
unionism, with the people in the audience treated as members of a union
who—after the murder of the absent union leader, Lefty—are led to urge a
strike upon their other leaders seated on the stage, and to do so in the face
of opposition from a right-wing union official. The participation of the
audience in this and other plays put on by the Unity Theatre reflected the
influence of a Soviet director, Okhlopkov, a pupil of Meyerhold, who was
in charge of the Realistic Theatre in Moscow. Okhlopkov had taken his
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 521

idea of “activizing the audience” from Meyerhold, but carried it further,

often even putting the entire action in the midst of the audience.
The chief rival of Unity Theatre was the older Group Theatre, which
had been established in 1932, shortly after the Group Theatre in New
York, from which it apparently took its name. Unlike Unity Theatre, the
Group Theatre in London—which became widely known only late in 1935
when it was revitalized by Rupert Doone, an ex-Diaghilev dancer and
choreographer—combined with a social attitude a high regard for aesthetic
ideas, and several of those closely connected with it were to achieve
reputations in the United States. Among the dozen or so founders were
W.H. Auden, who became the dominant figure in the organization, and
his friend since school days, the painter Robert Medley who later was
connected with the Euston Road School of social realism. Another of
Auden’s friends, Benjamin Britten, was one of those who composed music
for the Group Theatre; and among the artists who worked with the theater
at times were the painter John Piper and Henry Moore, both of whom had
earlier been members of the Seven and Five Group, founded in 1919 in
reaction against Bloomsbury aesthetic purism and formalism. Some of the
plays put on by the Group Theatre were written by Auden in collaboration
with his friend Christopher Isherwood, and reflected the authors’ then
leftist social inclinations. However, the Group Theatre was likely to put
aesthetic values ahead of its political and social beliefs—as when it pro-
duced Sweeney Agonistes, written by the politically and religiously conserv-
ative T. S. Eliot.
Auden gradually became less sympathetic to the Left. At a time when
Cecil Day Lewis plumped wholeheartedly for the communist Left Review,
Auden was moving over to the more humanistic New Verse, which bore
about the same relation to the Left Review as the Group Theatre did to
Unity Theatre. For New Verse put its aesthetic standards ahead of the
desire for social change to which it also subscribed—with the ultimate
result that it was accused of drawing away from the Popular Front and
even of Trotskyism by the Soviet critic Prince D. S. Mirsky, writing in
International Literature, the communist periodical published in English at
Moscow.
Although, early in 1937, Auden took part in the Spanish civil war as a
stretcher-bearer with a Loyalist ambulance unit, he stayed only two
months; and according to Stephen Spender, another influential poet with
leftist social sympathies, on his return never talked about his experiences in
Spain. Spender, on the contrary, was led by sympathy for the Spanish
Loyalists to join the British Communist Party.
In 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, Auden and
Isherwood went to the United States and settled there.” They had already
lost faith in leftist social movements. Indeed, by the end of 1939 the great
wave of Left feeling had utterly receded in Britain, as in the United States.
The final defeat of the Spanish Republic in March 1939, and especially the
522 I RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact later in that year, followed by the outbreak

of World War II, essentially brought the Left movement of the 1930's to
an end. Stalin’s great purges in the Soviet Union and the exposure of the
mortally harsh treatment applied by the communists in Spain to their
anarchist and Trotskyite allies in the struggle against fascism had earlier
begun to alienate many of the non-communists whose anti-fascism had led
them to participate in the Popular Front. As a result, for lack of adequate
financial support the Left Review ceased publication in 1938.
It should be emphasized that most of the leading figures of the British
literary world of the 1930’s had been untouched by communism. The
communist-line group was a small minority that gained undue prominence
because of the association with it of three younger poets, Auden, Spender,
and Day Lewis, in addition to the hard-core Stalinists connected with the
Left Review. For that matter, the still younger poets of the later 1930's,
the unconventional socialist Dylan Thomas and his followers and the
members of the group around Twentieth Century Verse, were anti-
Stalinist in one way or another, whether leaning toward Trotskyism,
anarchism, personalism, or pacifism or being apolitical. In many ways,
therefore, these non-communist younger poets, if politically concerned,
anticipated the New Left that was to develop in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

12. The Artists Refugee Committee,

and John Heartfield
Hinrer’s attacks on modern art, which had led nearly all the great
modern artists of Germany to go into exile, continued, however, to fan the
anti-fascism of many British artists, especially the members of the Artists
International Association. This was particularly true after Prime Minister
Chamberlain yielded to Hitler at Munich, thereby paving the way for
Hitler’s take-over of Czechoslovakia. After Munich, artist Roland Penrose
received a despairing call for help for some anti-Nazi German and Austrian
artists who had sought refuge in Prague, and who foresaw—rightly—that
Czechoslovakia would be invaded by the Nazis. The result was that, on
the initiative of Penrose and other artists in Hampstead, but with much
help from the A.I.A. and other groups of artists, there was founded in
November 1938 the Artists Refugee Committee.” At the first meeting of
the group, it was announced that the independent arrival from Czechoslo-
vakia of the noted German-born artist John Heartfield was expected and
that he needed hospitality: this was volunteered by Diana Uhlman, Eng-
lish wife of the German émigré artist Fred Uhlman, a member of the
A.LA. Heartfield, one of the first refugees from Prague to reach England
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 523

before Hitler occupied the city, had been able to enter Britain thanks to
Ellen Wilkinson, a Labour Member of Parliament who served as his
“guarantor.” The painter Oskar Kokoschka also arrived independently—
through his wife he was well connected with the Czech official circles that
became the government in exile.
The Artists Refugee Committee promptly set about the task of
rescuing artists still remaining in Prague. Many of them were members of
a group Calling itself the “Kokoschka Bund,” though, apart from asking
Kokoschka’s permission to use his name, these artists had no special
connection with him.
The committee sent to Prague as its emergency representative an
American Rhodes Scholar. When he was unable to make contact with the
members of the Kokoschka Bund, who had been forced by the Nazi occu-
pation of Prague to go into hiding, the money sent by the committee went
to a communist group that knew how to locate the artists. In a nip-and-
tuck operation—for not all the necessary visas had been obtained before
the Nazis marched into Prague—the members of the Kokoschka Bund
were brought safely to England. They were the only artists actually sup-
ported by the Artists Refugee Committee, though it sought to help other
artists with introductions.
It was primarily through Kokoschka, Heartfield, and later Kurt
Schwitters (a German refugee in Norway who managed to escape to Eng-
land when, in 1940, Norway fell to the Nazis) that German expressionism
entered England strongly for the first time.
Of the three, only Kokoschka became a British subject. More socially
concerned than the essentially apolitical Schwitters, he was much less
political-minded than was Heartfield, a communist—though he had felt
radical influences, artistic and social, on the Continent. He had been
trained in the Austrian apolitical version of the Morris tradition at the
Vienna School of Arts and Crafts and also at a more “modern” arts and
crafts school, the Wiener Werkstatte. There and elsewhere he had ab-
sorbed the influence of “Jugendstil,” the German Art Nouveau, then that
of Van Gogh and of the Norwegian Symbolist and proto-expressionist
Edvard Munch, whose artistic and social radicalism will be discussed later.
In England, Kokoschka and Heartfield had joined the Free German
League of Culture, founded shortly before World War IJ as an anti-Nazi
organization for German émigré artists, which was, in fact, a communist
front. Increasingly the organization was taken over by its many communist
and fellow-traveler members. Although these temporarily lost interest as a
result of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact and Stalin’s declaration that
the war was purely imperialistic, their zeal promptly returned when the
Nazis attacked the Soviet Union. In October 1941, the League held an
in
exhibition of sculpture, pottery, and sculptors’ drawings in London
collaboration with the Artists International Association. About two-thirds
the
of the exhibits were submitted by the refugee artists and were hailed by
524 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

A.A. as making evident the value of the refugees’ “future contribution to

the development of British Art. . . .” ™ '
John Heartfield, who in contrast to Kokoschka was, and remained, a
thoroughgoing communist, is an especially important figure for the history
of art on the Left because his career linked so many different countries,
and because it reflected so many of the major events affecting communist
art since the Bolshevik Revolution. While living in Czechoslovakia, and
then in England for a dozen years—before departing for communist East
Germany after World War II—he served as a major link not only between
England and the expressionist tradition in continental communist art, but
also between England and leftist art in the United States, where his work
had a considerable vogue for a time. In this way, he became a most
important representative of Marxist-Leninist internationalism in the arts.
Heartfield had been born Helmut Herzfelde in 1891 at Berlin, the
eldest son of a socialist poet and author whose brother was for many years
a social-democratic deputy. After being brought up in Salzburg, Austria, he
returned to Germany and studied art in Munich. Nicknamed Jonny, in
1915 he adopted the pseudonym of John Heartfield out of admiration for
things American and as a protest against the hatred aroused by Germany’s
actions in World War I. He and his brother, the poet and publisher
Wieland Herzfelde, both thoroughly sympathetic to communism, were
prominent in the Berlin dada movement in which Heartfield worked
particularly closely with George Grosz (who similarly Americanized his
own first name). With Grosz, Heartfield was to be praised by the Bolshaya
sovetskaya entsiklopediya (Great Soviet Encyclopedia) in its article “Ex-
pressionism” as an avant-garde revolutionary artist stemming from dada
who had been led from his own middle class to the position of the
proletariat, and in his case to the Communist Party.* In collaboration
with Grosz, Heartfield may have discovered in 1916 (the claim is dis-
puted) the technique known as photomontage (Fig. 86), in which the
reality of a straightforward photograph is combined with the flexible
expressiveness of freehand drawing. He became widely known not only for
his photomontages but also for his book illustrations and posters, and
especially for his stage and motion picture sets.
Because in the years after World War I John Heartfield and his
brother became so prominent in German communist activities—including
the Rote Frontkampferbund (Red Front League of Struggle), founded in
1924, whose clenched-fist symbol was designed by Heartfield on the basis
of a drawing by Grosz—they were compelled by Hitler’s rise to power to
flee to Czechoslovakia in 1933. There, in April 1934, Heartfield was a
major participant in an international exhibition of caricatures held at
Prague, in which were also prominently displayed contributions by Grosz
and by T. T’. Heine, whose cartoons had earlier been greatly admired by
Trotsky. The tone of the exhibition, and especially of Heartfield’s works,
was so sharply anti-fascist that the German and Italian governments put
 FIG. 86. Goering, the Executioner (September 14, 1933), photomontage by
John Heartfield, showing the burning Reichstag in the background.

pressure on Czechoslovakia,* with the result that the Czech police re-
moved the offending pictures. As president of the Salon des indépendants,
Paul Signac, the French Neo-Impressionist painter and former anarchist so
strongly sympathetic to communism, protested against the persecution of
Heartfield and urged that a showing of his works be organized in France.
The consequence was that in April 1935 a Heartfield exhibition was
526 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

sponsored in Paris by the Association des écrivains et artistes révolution-

naires. In the following month Louis Aragon published in the periodical
Commune a highly laudatory essay entitled (in French) “John Heartfield
and Revolutionary Beauty.” In 1936, a well-illustrated book on Heartfield’s
work was published in the Soviet Union.”
Some two and a half years later, as it became obvious that Hitler was
determined to swallow up Czechoslovakia, Heartfield and his brother
Wieland planned to flee to the United States to join a son of Heartfield.
Separately, they managed to reach London. But as the quota for German
immigrants to the United States was filled for years ahead, it became
obvious that Heartfield must remain in Britain. As Herzfelde happened
to have been born in Switzerland, and the Swiss quota was not exhausted,
in 1939 he was able to go to the United States, where he remained for a
decade. There he helped to spread the reputation of his brother, whose art
had already become known in New York.”
In England, Heartfield was warmly welcomed in radical and liberal
circles as an anti-Nazi. His works were widely displayed in exhibitions and
reproduced in more or less radical periodicals of the time, since vanished,
such as Lilliput, and in the then popular periodical of wide circulation,
Picture Post. When World War II broke out, he himself was very active as
a contributor to the periodical of the Free German League of Culture and
to other anti-fascist publications, and as a speaker in anti-Nazi causes.
Before and during the war, he worked for some years as a book designer
and graphic artist for various publishers including Penguin Books. How-
ever, his health suffered from six weeks of imprisonment as an enemy alien
in 1940, then from the war years in oft-bombed London, being especially
affected by the explosion in 1945 of a V-2 missile in the garden behind his
residence. Increasingly, illness restricted his ability to work.
In 1950, when the publishing firm for which Heartfield was working as
a book-jacket designer went out of business, he and his wife left England
for East Germany—departing without thanks to his hosts for seven of his
years in Britain, artist Fred Uhlman (a founder of the Free German
League of Culture) and his wife.” In the “German Democratic Republic”
he joined his brother Wieland, who had settled in Leipzig the year before
and became professor of literature at the University there. At the request
of Bertolt Brecht, who likewise had settled in East Germany, the brothers
designed an edition of his Hundert Gedichte—only to have their sketch
attacked by the publisher as “‘formalism,” and thus as failing to meet the
canons of Stalinist socialistic realism.* Although Heartfield carried out
some stage designs, his career was further hindered when, six months after
his arrival in East Germany, he suffered the first of two strokes, which
prevented him from working until 1954—by which time the “thaw” that
followed Stalin’s death had occurred. In 1956, after Khrushchev had made
his violent attack on Stalin’s reputation, Heartfield was made a member of
the East German Academy of Art and also became a member of the
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 527

Commission for Poster Design of the Agitation and Propaganda Depart-

ment of the East German Communist Party’s Central Committee. In the
years that followed, many exhibitions of his work were held not only in
East Germany, where a big retrospective show was put on in 1957, but also
elsewhere in the communist world: an exhibition shown at the Pushkin
Museum, Moscow, in 1958 went on that year to China, where it was
displayed in Peking, Tientsin, and other cities. (Heartfield himself had
visited Red China and the U.S.S.R. in the previous year, and had been
awarded a prize by the Chinese.) In 1960 he was given the title of
Professor by the East German Ministry of Culture. By the early 1960’s he
had become perhaps the most prominent of East German artists as well as
one of the leading artists of the entire communist world, a fact attested by
the publication at Dresden in 1962 of the handsomely produced and
illustrated biography written by his brother. In the 1960’s, much of Heart-
field’s work consisted of posters, many of them making use of earlier
montages. These he often prepared for exhibitions that he installed him-
self. He held exhibitions in many of the communist capitals of eastern
Europe and also in Italy, Sweden, and West Germany. In the fall of 1967,
he returned to London with his wife to arrange for a showing of his art in
the Camden Art Centre at Hampstead * with the help of his artist friend
Richard Carline, former chairman of the A.I.A.; but before it could take
place he died at East Berlin in April 1968. The exhibition, scheduled to
take place at Hampstead in October 1968 under the sponsorship of the
Arts Council of Great Britain, was canceled by local authorities in August
because of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Red army and allied
troops of the Warsaw Pact countries, including East Germany. It was,
however, eventually rescheduled by the Arts Council for display in London.

13. Munich, World War IT, and

James Boswell in the Post-War VW¥ orld
Iw Barraty, the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich, which had been
responsible for the flight of Heartfield, Kokoschka, and various other
artists from Prague to England late in 1938, had resulted in a storm of
protest against the Chamberlain government in which the British Commu-
nists were joined by many non-communists. One result had been that
members of the Artists International Association—communists, fellow-
travelers, and anti-fascist non-communists alike—were prominent in the
May Day Demonstration of 1939, for which at least a dozen artists dressed
up in caricature of Chamberlain, and the surrealists conveyed their opinion
of Chamberlain’s government by displaying a skeleton in a cage. After
528 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

Munich, too, the communist Unity Theatre maintained its popularity by

putting on an anti-Chamberlain play.
When the Communist Party of Great Britain upheld the Nazi-Soviet
non-aggression pact of 1939 and continued to uphold it even after the
resulting outbreak of World War II, the party alienated almost all the
non-communists who had previously helped to support its front organiza-
tions in the Popular Front against fascism. As a consequence, Unity
Theatre, like most other surviving communist-line organizations, soon
died. Of the many British cultural periodicals of the Left which had
flourished in the 1930’s, only John Lehmann’s New Writing, founded in
1936 at the high tide of the leftist spirit, managed to continue, not because
of Lehmann’s originally left-wing social sympathies but because it encour-
aged interesting young writers. The A.I.A. too survived, primarily on the
basis of its activities in behalf of British artists. Even the Communist Party
itself found many of its hard-core members abandoning it as a consequence
of the Nazi-Soviet pact.
Although after the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union the British com-
munists and their sympathizers reversed their position and devoted them-
selves wholeheartedly to the war effort, they nonetheless maintained some
of their old feuds with other kinds of radicals. When, late in 1944,
Scotland Yard raided the offices of the anarchist paper War Commentary,
confiscating its files, list of subscribers, etc., and the National Council for
Civil Liberties took little or no interest in the case, this was attributed by
many to infiltration of the Council by communists and their sympathizers.
Many writers and artists, however, protested vigorously, especially those
connected with the Freedom Defense Committee organized in the sum-
mer of 1945 under leaders mostly drawn from members of the literary and
artistic worlds, some of whom had anarchist or democratic socialist sympa-
thies. Herbert Read was its chairman. The vice-chairman was George
Orwell, who had described himself as an anarchist beginning in the late
1920's, and even after he had begun to call himself a socialist in 1936 had
fought beside the anarchists in Barcelona during’ the May Day struggle of
1937 between the communists and their libertarian opponents among the
Spanish Loyalists. Other members of the Freedom Defense Committee
included Augustus John and Henry Moore, Benjamin Britten, E. M.
Forster, Osbert Sitwell, Bertrand Russell, and H. J. Laski, then chairman
of the Labour Party, and a few members of Parliament. The Committee
lasted until 1949.
As for the communists, of those who retained their party membership
after the Nazi-Soviet pact, some discovered in the war itself a relief from
the kind of commitment that the party demanded of them. This was the
case with James Boswell. The change that occurred in his attitude during
and after the war was in many ways typical of what is likely to happen to
artists once on the Left, and it foreshadowed what was to happen to the
A.I.A., with which he was so closely connected.
After Boswell was called up for army service in 1941, he was somewhat
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 529

surprised to find that it seemed a blissful holiday after his intense years of
commercial work by day and attempting to create a new social order by
night. He had found during the 1930’s that his work had gradually become
worse and worse, “largely due to a confusion in my own mind as to its
purpose.” ** Now, during five years of military service, he had considerable
time on his hands—and found himself drawing much better. In the
post-war years he was to have more influence on socially radical, young
graphic artists in England than any other British artist of his generation.
In 1944, while still in the army but stationed in London, Boswell was
elected chairman of the Artists International Association. Disturbed after
the war by the growing split between the members who were politically
radical and those who were not, he refused to stand for reelection. In 1946
he left the Communist Party, but he has written that his decision to do so
“wasn’t a political decision in the accepted sense of the term. I just am no
good as a ‘party-man.’. . . ’'d had plenty of time to think in the Army and
had decided there were things I wanted to do that I would need time for.
Painting was one of them.” ©
Like many other artists considered in this book, James Boswell found
himself too individualistic to remain within the Communist Party; found,
also, that there simply was not time to be both a good artist and a good
party member. This did not mean that he did not retain strong leftist
sympathies—which left him in a considerable dilemma. He sought to
express something of this in an influential little book entitled The Artist's
Dilemma published at London in 1947 by The Bodley Head. Although
this book was in a series of which the executive editor was the prominent
Marxist writer Jack Lindsay, it transcended any narrowly Marxist or
Marxist-Leninist point of view while discussing the problem of the artist’s
economic survival by means of teaching, commercial art, or industrial
design, together with the deeper problem of finding a satisfactory relation
between art and society, between art and life.
In 1947, Boswell’s burden of social conscience after leaving the Com-
munist Party led him to give up a profitable position as art director of Shell
International and join the staff of the magazine Lilliput, of which he was
art editor until the magazine ceased publication in 1952. During this
period, many of its editors and artist-contributors were, or had been, in
varying degrees socially radical—among the latter were John Heartfield,
James Fitton, James Holland, Edward Ardizzone, Ronald Searle, and
Boswell himself. The general tone of the magazine’s illustrations was so
realistic that one critic later scornfully remarked of the artists who drew
them: “They would put in all the blackheads. . . .”™
Not until 1952 did Boswell, manage to return to painting in his spare
time. Then, in his strenuous efforts to releam painting, he produced
numerous straightforward seascapes, nudes, still-lifes, and street scenes—all
realistic, though in some cases rather Fauvist in feeling and color. In
January 1956, however, while attending an exhibition of contemporary
American painting at the Tate Gallery, he found himself standing hypno-
530 i RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

tized before a non-objective abstract-expressionist painting by Jackson

Pollock (who had given up his strong communist sympathies of the
1930's). As a consequence, Boswell now developed his own non-objective
style.®° By the late 1960's, this had become somewhat similar to that of the
noted Spanish painter Antoni Tapies—who in 1966 was one of the Catalan
nationalists heavily fined by Franco’s regime for joining rebellious students
of Barcelona University in demanding “freedom of assembly” (thereby
anticipating New Left student revolts elsewhere).
Meanwhile, Boswell’s position on matters social and political, the
exact nature of his commitment, had remained unclear in his own mind.”
Although he continued in a general way to be sympathetic to the Left
while no longer participating in leftist activities, the problems involved no
longer seemed so black-and-white to him as they had seemed in his
younger days. Furthermore, he had come to regard it as his primary task to
devote as much time as possible in his remaining years to his painting—
and a kind of painting at the opposite pole from his own earlier realism as
well as from the socialist realism still officially demanded of artists in the
Soviet Union. i
He had, however, given up so large a part of his life to social activism
carried on by means of essentially realistic graphic art while also supporting
himself mostly by art in the same style that it was late indeed to hope to
become a great artist using a totally different style in the very different
medium of abstract painting in oil on canvas. As is so likely to happen with
socially concerned artists, his artistic career had to a considerable degree
been frustrated by long, unselfish devotion to immediate social ends.

14. The Artists International Association

During WV orld War II and After
"De war, which ultimately brought James Boswell a release from leftist
activities, but not from leftist sympathies, also had major effects on the
Artists International Association in which he was so long prominent—and
which, as probably the longest-lasting organization of its kind in any major
country of the Western world, has demonstrated significant historical
trends particularly well. As Boswell himself did not resign from the Com-
munist Party at the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact, so also within the A.I.A.
other members retained sympathy for communism, though in general the
pact had brought to its lowest ebb the influence of the Soviet brand of
communism on British artists. Even after Britain declared war on ‘Hitler,
the current of radical pacifism which had been marked in the A.I.A. from
the very beginning continued to have its effect. As a consequence of the
strength of such combined leftist and pacifist sympathies, a General Meet-
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 531

ing of the A.I.A. in December 1939 approved a resolution that the organi-
zation should adopt no special political position with regard to the war,
but should merely concentrate on trying to find work for artists and
designers under wartime conditions.” The hastily mimeographed issue of
the A.I.A.’s Bulletin that had appeared a week after war broke out de-
clared, “We know that the majority of our members will assist in this war
as long as it remains a war to defeat Fascism,” but added, “those of our
members who are conscientious objectors can be certain of our sup-
port. . . .” °° Six months later, after the Russian invasion of Finland, the
members were about equally divided as to whether the Soviet action had
been justifiable “°—the old sympathy for the Soviet Union and commu-
nism had remained strong among some members of the A.I.A. Because of
this division of opinion, the Central Committee of the organization felt
unable to take an official position on the question—though British public
opinion in general was by then sharply opposed to the Soviet Union.
However, after Hitler’s invasion in 1941 automatically put the Soviet
Union on the side of Britain, which had previously withstood the Nazis in
lonely grandeur, it was to be expected that public opinion in England
would shift rapidly to sympathy and admiration for the new ally. So great
was the resurgence of pro-Soviet feeling that the remaining years of the war
and those immediately following it constituted the period when it was
most respectable for “ordinary people”—middle-class white-collar workers,
business executives, and the like—to be sympathetic to the U.S.S.R. and to
communism. For the British Communist Party, which had opposed the
war during the Nazi-Soviet pact, was now straining every nerve in the war
effort. Even though the great majority of sympathizers did not actively join
the Communist Party, its membership greatly increased, reaching a war-
time peak of over 62,000; and the circulation of its newspaper, the Daily
Worker (officially suppressed by the government from January 1941 until
1942), approximately doubled, going from roughly 100,000 to 200,000. In
this climate of opinion it was only to be expected that the A.1.A. would
come out in particularly strong support of the Soviet Union and the war.”
The A.LA. had already decided that the best contribution it could
by
make to the war effort would be to try to help maintain morale
exhibitions of art for the masses. This it did both by means of traveling
exhibitions “in an attempt to bring art to the people” and by carrying
of great difficulties resulting
on its annual exhibitions in London in spite
be-
from the war.” As might have been expected, after the Soviet Union
other exhibitions of the
came Britain’s ally in June 1941, these and the
In
A.A. reflected greater support for the war as an anti-fascist struggle.”
calling upon
1942, the A.I.A. officially adopted a new program explicitly
artists and designers to organize themselves efficiently as propagandists
. . .” * The Bul-
engaged “in the primary task of defeating our enemies.
the exhibition is
letin of the A.J.A. emphasized in heavy type that “Tf
unused in
successful it will create a new propaganda form hitherto almost
532 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

this country” “—the A.LA. had become an organization for propaganda

as never before in its history. The most important exhibition organized by
the A.L.A. under this emphatically propagandistic program was held in
1943 with the title “For Liberty.” One feature of the exhibition was a large
room given up to a series of big paintings specially executed by a group of
selected artists—among them Kokoschka and Augustus John—chosen by a
committee that included, among others, Henry Moore, Julian Trevelyan,
and Richard Carline. The catalog for the exhibition flatly declared that
the show was intended as propaganda and to demonstrate the integration
of art with everyday life.”* As a demonstration of the A.I.A.’s belief in the
importance of integrating the visual arts with others—into a kind of
Gesamtkunstwerk—for purposes of propaganda, a loose sheet containing a
poem on freedom by Cecil Day Lewis was inserted into the catalog.
Although this exhibition was the most ambitious attempt of the
Artists International Association to organize artists as propagandists, in
theory, at least, the A.I.A. continued to operate as a politically oriented
organization. During 1943 and 1944, it had available to it for exhibitions
the afhliated Charlotte Street Centre, run by the Marxist-Leninist art critic
Francis Klingender. The exhibitions there were particularly likely to em-
phasize popular art. One of them, organized by Klingender, was on “Ho-
garth and the English Caricaturists.” Another, on “The Popular Art of the
Picture Postcard,” which was organized by Richard Carline, then a mem-
ber of the A.I.A.’s Central Committee, was visited by Bernard Shaw and
E. M. Forster.
The wartime activities of the A.J.A. were by no means limited to
exhibitions. Late in 1942, Carline, a member also of the London Group of
artists, conceived the idea of setting up a sub-committee of the A.I.A. to
promote the formation of Artists’ Regional Groups intended to promote
activities to help maintain mass morale and foster the war effort. Some
thirty-five groups were organized, and kept artists employed in carrying out
the communal decoration of many new factory canteens, of wartime
“British Restaurants,” and the like—thereby at least partly reflecting the
influence on Carline of murals he had seen in the United States executed
under the W.P.A. during the Depression. In 1944, as the war drew toward
its close, the Committee for Artists’ Regional Groups was prompted by the
presence of many refugee artists in England to call an international
conference in London (attended by Oscar Kokoschka, among others). Its
aim was to extend the regional affiliations of the A.I.A. to the international
sphere, and thereby to sow the seeds for future international collaboration
among artists.
This was the direction in which the A.I.A. was to move more and
more as the end of the war compelled it to reorient itself, for then the
Artists’ Regional Groups essentially collapsed. Only a few—notably those
at Hampstead (which had been established by Klingender and Carline),
Richmond, and Nottingham—continued to flourish. And the mural
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 533

scheme developed by Carline’s sub-committee was brought completely to

an end with the founding, in 1945, of the Arts Council of Great Britain,
which took over the responsibility for such projects.
Furthermore, propaganda in the service of the war, which had unified
the communists and the non-communists in the A.I.A., clearly could not
be adapted to a period of peace. The result was a split between the
relatively few members who remained militantly communist and those
who either had never been communists or else had given up communism
or were ready to give it up.
When Misha Black, chairman of the A.I.A. since its founding, an-
nounced in 1944 his intention to resign that office, the problem of the
future of the A.I.A. had become acute. James Boswell, still in the army and
still a member of the Communist Party, though weakening in his afflia-
tion to it, had seemed to the A.I.A.’s executive committee the one most
likely to be acceptable to both the Left faction and the anti-Left. However,
during his short chairmanship the split within the A.I.A. widened, and
after he refused to stand for reelection, steadily increased as the cold war
between the U.S.S.R. and its former allies became ever colder. Conse-
quently, for some years chairman followed chairman in rapid succession.”
The influence of the communists gradually declined, however, partly be-
cause in 1947 the A.I.A. had acquired its first—and present—gallery, on
Lisle Street in London. Klingender’s affiliated Charlotte Street Centre had
closed in 1946 early in the cold war, in which communists were no longer
supposed to collaborate with non-communists. In the new gallery, even
young and impecunious artists could have an opportunity to exhibit, so
that ever since they have been less likely to be socially discontented, less
inclined to be sympathetic to communism.
When Richard Carline was elected chairman in 1951, the cold war
was at its height and the split within the A.I.A. profound. International
cooperation seemed to offer an area in which the A.I.A. could continue to
have a social function and thus avoid becoming, like all the other art
societies, nothing but an exhibition society. And it was an activity that
would not alienate either the communist faction, as subscribers to Marxist
internationalism, or the majority who believed that the A.I.A. ought to be
apolitical but not asocial.
The A.LA. and Carline himself had already been moving toward
greater emphasis on international cooperation through a connection with
UNESCO. This had first been made by Carline’s Committee for Artists’
Regional Groups when it had proposed an international exhibition to show
what had been painted by artists during the war. The proposal had
received the enthusiastic support of Julian Huxley, head of the Preparatory
Commission for UNESCO set up in 1945. Carline was asked to join
n,
UNESCO as its first Art Counsellor in order to organize the exhibitio
in
which was held in late 1946 and early 1947 at the Musee d’art moderne
Paris. Most countries of the world and many groups of refugee artists
534 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

participated. To Carline’s disappointment, however, the large section of

American works sent by the State Department included hardly any by
social-realist artists prominent during the New Deal—so that such widely
known artists of the Left as his old friend Philip Evergood and Robert
Gwathmey were omitted.™
In 1951, as chairman of the A.I.A., Carline was sent to represent it at
an international conference in Brussels held by the International Federa-
tion of Artists. This organization withdrew from the field in 1954 because
of the founding of the International Association of Plastic Art (or
I.A.P.A.) set up in connection with UNESCO. At the request of the Arts
Council of Great Britain, Carline, whose term as chairman of the A.I.A.
had ended the year before,. represented it in 1954 at the I.A.P.A.’s first
Congress, held at Venice. Especially through him, the indirect connection
of the A.I.A. with the I.A.P.A. has remained close ever since.”
Thus the original, essentially Marxist, international aims of the A.L.A.
were to reach a kind of non-Marxist fruition through the UNESCO-spon-
sored International Association of Plastic Art, today called simply the
International Association of Art. Through its United Kingdom branch,
this has been covering, in an entirely non-political way, many of the social
and union kinds of activities to which the A.I.A. had once devoted its
energies.
In 1953, the last year of Carline’s chairmanship of that organization,
the A.I.A. had at last officially discarded the political clause in its constitu-
tion—an occurrence presumably made easier by the disorganization of the
Left caused by Stalin’s death early that year. Nearly all of the A.J.A.’s
members had not only lost any desire to be social activists but had also
come to feel that their status and rights as artists, once threatened from
abroad by fascism, were no longer even seriously threatened by neglect at
home, having become the active concern of the Arts Council of Great
Britain.
As nearly all of the artist members no longer felt it necessary to give
their works of art any social connotations, by 1957 the A.I.A. could even
hold an exhibit completely devoted to abstract art—ofhcially rejected in
the Soviet Union. And in the following year the divorce from the Soviet
social model was made utterly complete by Misha Black, in whose studio
the A.I.A. had been founded, and who had served so long and devotedly as
its first chairman. For in the issue of the Daily Worker of April 2, 1958,
which was celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the
A.I.A., Black wrote that he could “no longer support the Communists who
were our comrades in the prewar united front movement.” Like so many
other originally radical, but historically less important, artists’ organiza-
tions since the Bolshevik Revolution, the A.I.A. had lost its social radical-
ism—and at the same time had become more sympathetic to artistic
radicalism.
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 535

15. The Communists and the Arts

After World War IL

"Due wartme sympathies of the British public for the Soviet Union and
their continuation for some years after the war had been attested not only
by the attitude of the A.I.A. but also by a renewed vogue for communist
periodicals, which, we saw, had disappeared in England at the time of the
Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. Especially popular during the war and
even thereafter was Our Time, a communist-line monthly edited by two
former editors of the Left Review, Edgell Rickword and Randall Swingler.
Founded in 1941, it reached a peak circulation of some 20,000. Among the
many well-known artists who contributed to it during the art editorship of
the now noted graphic artist Paul Hogarth were James Boswell, Ronald
Searle, Feliks Topolski, André Francois, and John Minton. At a more
advanced cultural level, the same vogue was reflected in the success of a
communist intellectual periodical, the Modern Quarterly, edited by John
Lewis. Established in 1938, this had been compelled to cease publication
in 1939, the year of the Nazi-Soviet pact and the outbreak of World War
II; but it was revived in 1945, changing its title in 1954 to the Marxist
Quarterly.
Nevertheless, as the cold war between the “capitalistic” nations and
their former ally, the Soviet Union, increased in intensity, the circulation
of these periodicals dropped drastically, with the result that Our Time
disappeared in 1949. Although the Marxist Quarterly managed to keep
going for some years, in 1957 it too vanished from the scene not long after
the repression of the Hungarian Revolution by force of Soviet arms—ofh-
cially approved by the British Communist Party—had shocked non-com-
munists and many communists.
Earlier in the post-war period, however, the British communists had
with considerable success been making a special attempt to seek the
support of artists, whether working-class artists or those who might be
attracted by campaigns for “peace” and against the United States and its
atomic bombs. For instance, communist encouragement of working-class
art was partly reflected in a successful exhibition at Carlisle in 1951
entitled “Realism in Contemporary Art.” Consisting of works dealing with
the life and struggles of the laboring class as depicted by North of England
of
artists and a single guest, Victor, Pasmore, this was but one of a number
exhibitions of “democratic” English art. But it was especially through the
campaign for peace that many leading non-communists, including some
in
famous artists, were led to work with communists—the more so because
536 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

1951 the British Communist Party came out in favor of the parliamentary
road to socialism. One organization, Artists for Peace, in which the inde-
pendent Marxist critic John Berger was especially prominent, put on two
important art exhibitions at London in 1952 and 1953. The more impor-
tant, that of June 1953, had a notable group of sponsors comprising
non-communists and communists.** Among them were John Berger, the
American-born sculptor Jacob Epstein, and other well-known English art-
ists such as Augustus John, Stanley Spencer, Ruskin Spear, and Carel
Weight; also Henri Matisse and such noted French artists of the Left as
Picasso (who drew a dove of peace for the cover of the catalog), Léger,
Jean Lurgat, and the Italian commumist Renato Guttuso.™
The contributors likewise included non-communists and communists.
Among the English contributors on the Left were James Boswell, Clifford
Rowe, Peter Peri, Paul Hogarth, and Barbara Niven. There was also a large
group of foreign contributors, mostly leftists, including such left-wingers as
the French artists Boris Taslitzky, Edouard Pignon, and Picasso’s mistress,
Frangoise Gilot; the noted Belgian, Frans Masereel; and the Americans
William Gropper, Robert Gwathmey, and Harry Gottlieb.”
In 1955, Artists for Peace also organized a small traveling exhibition of
ten panels in a realistic style dealing with the subject of Hiroshima and the
atomic bomb. Again, the artists who sponsored this exhibition—among
whom were John Berger, Ruskin Spear, Carel Weight, Sir Jacob Epstein
(recently knighted), and Stanley Spencer—included several known for
radical social sympathies of one kind or another.™ This exhibition, widely
shown in England, was the last put on by Artists for Peace, which simply
melted away as a small group of wealthy patrons, who had made all the
exhibitions possible by paying for them and organizing them, lost interest
at least partly because of the expense. Doubtless the Soviet repression of
the Hungarian Revolution also adversely affected Artists for Peace.

SOME of the major efforts made specifically by the British Communist

Party to attract and make use of artists were directly related to the aim,
under Soviet stimulation, of breaking the Anglo-American alliance. Char-
acteristic documents of this campaign, in which the communists did not
bother to conceal their leadership, were pamphlets issued by British com-
munists during the years shortly before Stalin’s death in 1953, in a series
labeled Arena Publications edited by Jack Lindsay, which, at first inde-
pendent, was increasingly taken over by the Communist Party. One of
these, undated but from the early 1950's, is entitled Essays on Socialist
Realism and the British Cultural Tradition, and consists of lectures at a
school to promote socialist realism organized by the Communist Party.
‘T'wo others “ are, in fact, offprints from the communist periodical Arena,
published from 1949 to 1951. One entitled The American Threat to
British Culture consists of a report and a dozen papers read at a conference
held on April 29, 1951, at the Holborn Hall in London under the auspices
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 537

of the Communist Party’s National Culture Committee, established in

1947. Needless to say, the assault on “the American threat” was leveled
only against American “capitalist” culture, not against American commu-
nists or communist sympathizers: thus the pamphlet included an article by
the American writer Howard Fast, then a communist, and another by Dr.
W. E. B. DuBois, the American Negro sympathetic to communism and
interested in the arts who later joined the Communist Party. It also
contained an advertisement for the American communist cultural maga-
zine, Masses & Mainstream.
As part of this attack on American “capitalist” culture and as part also
of the post-war Soviet line of support for nationalism whenever it might
help the communist cause against the influence of the United States,
British national culture was itself strongly emphasized in The American
Threat to British Culture. This line was even more directly stressed in May
1952 at another conference held under the auspices of the National
Cultural Committee of the Communist Party. The papers given at this
conference—about a third of them on the arts—were likewise issued in an
Arena Publication, a pamphlet entitled Britain’s Cultural Heritage.
Both of these last two Arena Publications contained articles in which
William Morris was played up as a kind of patron-saint for British artists
and art. In Britain’s Cultural Heritage the special article on Morris was
written by a leading British communist, Andrew Rothstein; the author of
that in The American Threat to British Culture was Edward P. ‘Thomp-
son.
In 1955, a 908-page biography by Thompson entitled William Morris;
Romantic to Revolutionary was published by Lawrence and Wishart, even
though, until the book proved to be widely successful, its subject was still
regarded as heterodox by many party members. Morris was of course
selected for such canonization only because in his later years he regarded
himself as a Marxist and because, beginning in 1889, he had consistently
called himself a communist. Yet only three years earlier he had been
accused of anarchist tendencies by Engels. He had always opposed the
authoritarian Marxism of H. M. Hyndman and had never stressed the
Marxian doctrine of struggle between classes. Furthermore, as we noted, he
had declared that artists should serve the cause of art even though doing
this would oblige them to express themselves in a language not understood
author
by the people. As a consequence of all these things, the communist
to criticize Morris for nearly always
of the biography found it necessary
failing to see that “the revolutionary working class,” as distinguished from
of a
“the ‘ordinary man’ in the capitalist street,” might be itself the creator
to the role
new art. He also frowned upon Morris for not paying “attention
change
of the arts in the fight to win Socialism—their power to inspire and
as not adequately
people in the struggle.” * In short, Morris was attacked
accepting the class struggle and for not devoting his art to propaganda.
Nevertheless, with much truth the biographer began his conclusion as
538 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

follows: “William Morris was the first creative artist of major stature in
the history of the world to take his stand, consciously and without shadow
of compromise, with the revolutionary working class: to participate in the
day-to-day work of building the Socialist movement. . . . In the Socialist
world of the future, Morris’ writings and example will be remembered to
England’s honour.” *°
Apart from the fact that non-communists would mean by “Socialist”
something different from what the then Marxist-Leninist Thompson
meant, what he has said is true. And his valuable work of Marxian
scholarship is an impressive product of that post-war communist line which
has given such particular recognition to the arts as important weapons in
the cold war. That a leading socially radical British artist was selected by a
British communist as the subject for such a monumental biography was
thoroughly in accord with the current Soviet line of encouraging national-
ism wherever it might be useful to the communist cause.*”
Thompson’s biography of Morris was written and published at a time
when the small and relatively weak Communist Party of Great Britain was
making extraordinary efforts in connection with the arts. Since the 1930’s
the party had proved particularly attractive to intellectuals as a result of its
influence in key universities, particularly Cambridge. And now it especially
attracted writers, artists, actors, and many people of working-class or
lower-middle-class origin, partly as a result of the Labour Government’s
failure to implement promises to carry out art projects, partly as a conse-
quence of the communist-led “peace” campaigns. At this time, too, many
artists who had received their training on the grants made to ex-servicemen
after the war were drawn to the party. Finally, the “thaw” that followed
the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953, was accompanied by some relaxation
in the line for art—socialist realism—among communists everywhere, with
consequent national variations. It was this that especially encouraged the
revival of interest in Morris among British communists.
The chief relaxation, however, was in the line for architecture, in
which the conception of what constitutes socialist realism drastically
changed not long after Stalin died. For even in the Soviet Union there
occurred a sharp official reaction against Stalinist style in architecture, and
especially against the skyscrapers, such as Moscow University, which had
been the major recent architectural productions under Stalin. Like other
Stalinist buildings, these had been covered with a retardataire mixture of
classical details in the tradition of tsarist civic buildings, with details
regarded as “Slavic” in inspiration, in an effort to maintain a national
expression in the cold war.
On December 7, 1954, Nikita Khrushchev, whose star was rapidly
rising in the U.S.S.R., gave a speech to an All-Union Congress of Builders,
Architects and Workers in the Building Materials Industry, attacking this
style by denouncing Soviet architects for using so much steel (needed for
heavy industry and munitions) and for refusing to adapt their work to new
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 539

materials (such as reinforced concrete, less wasteful of steel). He also

assailed the Soviet architects’ preoccupation with ornament, urging instead
simple, honest expression. In other words, he was calling for a kind of
architecture similar to the kind of modern architecture of the “capitalist”
world generally known as the International Style, which itself had been
strongly influenced by the constructivism that had developed in Soviet
Russia after the Revolution, but that had finally been proscribed by Stalin
in the 1930’s. Now, however, such architecture was to be regarded even in
the U.S.S.R as satisfying the aesthetic of socialist realism.
Even so, the Soviet Union was lagging behind: a revival of construc-
tivism itself was already under way among many architects and designers of
western Europe, most of whom had radical social sympathies ranging from
a mainly revisionist Marxism to the social utopianism for which Le Corbu-
sier had stood for so long.
In England, beginning about 1953, the chief center of the constructiv-
ist revival was the Architectural Association School in London. On its
faculty were such socially radical young architects as Peter Land and
Andrew Darbyshire, as well as the German émigré architect and city-
planner Arthur (Artur) Korn, who had so long been a Marxist and was now
a member of the British Communist Party. Soon, as a consequence of the
changes taking place in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death, Korn’s kind
of modern architecture was to be in step with the new Soviet conception of
socialist realism in architecture.
As part of the efforts being made by Communist parties during the
1950’s to encourage art as a weapon in the cold war, the little British party
fostered its own Architects’ Group, together with its own Artists’ Group,
Actors’ Group, Musicians’ Group, Writers’ Group, and a Group for Histo-
rians and Literature. In June 1955, the Musicians’ Group began to issue a
periodical, Music and Life, and at about the same time the Artists’ Group
began publication of a vigorous smali periodical called Realism. The title
of the latter indicated that the line for visual arts other than architecture
was essentially unchanged from the socialist realism that had prevailed in
Stalin’s time, and that, indeed, remains the official line for such arts in the
Soviet Union and Red China.
Realism, edited by “Charles Morris,” the pseudonym of Ray Watkin-
son, a former art critic of London’s Daily Worker and a future perceptive
biographer of William Morris, praised the work of such “young realists” as
Derrick Greaves, Jack Smith, John Bratby, and Edward Middleditch—all
of working-class origin. Greaves and Middleditch had been enabled to
study art only by grants they had received as ex-servicemen. All four had
had their first exhibitions as recently as 1953 and 1954; however, by 1956
they had become so well known that they were shown together at the
Biennale in Venice. Meanwhile, their realism, in which they did not
hesitate to distort nature in the interest of enhancing the effect of grim
of
actuality, and which was stimulated by the relatively few examples
540 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

Mexican social realism that they could see in London, had made them
popularly known as the “Kitchen Sink School.” Of the four, Greaves—who
had begun his career as an apprentice to a sign-writer—was especially
sympathetic to the Left, and was correspondingly given the biggest hand
by Realism.*® Characteristic of his early work is a painting of 1953,
Sheffield (Fig. 87), depicting the grim industrial city where he was born.
Most of the group of communist sympathizers who contributed to
Realism could scarcely be numbered among the leading British artists and
critics; and none then had a wide international reputation. Probably the
best known of the critics was John Berger, and of the artists James Boswell
and that other old-timer, Clifford‘ Rowe, who in 1932 had been the
originator of the idea of ‘the A.I.A., and after the war had become
especially known for the series of murals on trade-union history he painted
in the early 1950’s for the headquarters of the Electricians Trade Union at
Esher, Surrey. (Not unlike the United Electrical Workers in the United
States the E.T.U. was then, and until relatively few years ago remained,
one of the few unions in England under communist control.) The issue of
Realism for April 1956 published a defense by Rowe of the term “socialist
realism” at a time when Khrushchev’s attack on the reputation of Stalin at
the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party was producing
great debates about Stalinism among communists and their sympathizers.”
Realism ceased publication at the end of 1956 for lack of funds—a fact
reflecting the decline of the British Communist Party as the issue of
de-Stalinization remained a heated issue dividing the party, and as the
repression of the Hungarian Revolution brought strong revulsion against
the Soviet Union.

FIG. 87. Sheffield (1953) by Derrick Greaves.

 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 541

16. The Declining Influence of Communism

in the Arts After World War IT:
Paul Hogarth, Betty Rea,
the “Kitchen Sink School,’ etc.
"Due nummer of distinguished practitioners of the arts connected with the
Communist Party of Great Britain especially diminished after the party
issued, on November 4, 1956, an official statement approving the suppres-
sion by Soviet arms of the Hungarian popular revolution. A large number
of communists in Great Britain, including many of the most prominent,
such as E. P. Thompson, eventually resigned in protest from the Commu-
nist Party—as correspondingly did many other leading communists else-
where throughout the world. Nearly a quarter of the editorial staff of the
London Daily Worker resigned at this time, including “Gabriel” (James
Friell), the talented cartoonist who had served that paper for the twenty
years since “Maro” (M. A. Rowley) had died in Spain as a member of the
International Brigade. The cultural groups within the party were hard hit
and their small publications doomed to extinction. Thereafter, even
though the party felt compelled to change leaders, with John Gollan re-
placing Harry Pollitt as secretary, few artists and critics retained any
sympathy for the Communist Party and its leadership.
Which artists the Russians considered these to be was made clear in a
not wholly accurate historical article entitled (in Russian) “Modern Art of
England.” This appeared in the Soviet magazine Iskusstvo early in 1960,”
and was published in anticipation of the great exhibition, “Painting of
Britain, 1700-1960,” scheduled to be shown later in the year at Moscow’s
Pushkin Museum as a consequence of a relaxing of the Soviet line on art
under Khrushchev. Among other things, the article included a summary of
British leftist art from the Bolshevik Revolution to 1960; in spite of valiant
efforts, its author could find relatively few contemporary British artists of
the Left who were worthy of mention at any length. Among those favora-
bly cited were Clifford Rowe, Derrick Greaves, Betty Rea, and Paul
Hogarth, who as an art student before World War II had joined the
Manchester group of the A.LA.
Rowe had been very much influenced by Soviet art of the 1920's,
notably by the painters of the OST group, especially Alexander Deineka,
still a famous Soviet artist. Now Rowe, described in Iskusstvo as an
“artist monumentalist” and one of the best “progressive” artists, was re-
corded as having had two of his paintings exhibited at Moscow in 1957.
542 fi RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

The works of Greaves (e.g., Fig. 87), some of which, we shall see, had also
been exhibited in Moscow, were approved in Iskusstvo as showing the
influence of the Italian communist artist Renato Guttuso. But Greaves’s
increasing use of non-realistic “deformation” was deplored.”
To illustrate the work of Paul Hogarth, Iskusstvo reproduced his
portrait sketch of Tony Ambatielos, the communist secretary-general of
the Greek Seamen’s Union. This drawing by Hogarth, who had worked as
a seaman himself, shows Ambatielos before the court which in 1952
condemned him to a life term in prison for his part in the communist
uprising against the Greek government in a civil war after World War II.
Ambatielos’s British-born wife, Betty, a communist schoolteacher,”
had raised the funds for Hogarth to go to Greece in order to draw her
husband’s trial and the Greek social scene. From this trip came his album,
Defiant People; Drawings of Greece Today, issued by Lawrence and
Wishart in 1954.
Hogarth’s career as the chief artist-reporter continuing that British
tradition which had begun in the mid-nineteenth century also notably
exemplifies main tendencies among English artists of the Left since the
late 1930’s. A communist until 19§6, during the post-war years he achieved
a reputation throughout the communist world, and since giving up com-
munism has become well known in the United States, so that his work is
probably known in more countries than that of any living British artist
except Henry Moore, though without achieving the supreme rank almost
universally accorded the much older Moore.
Hogarth’s first book to be published in an American edition was a
volume of his travel sketches, Sons of Adam; A South African Sketchbook,
issued at New York in 1960, the year in which South Africa, upholding
“apartheid,” voted to become a republic independent of the British Com-
monwealth. Two years later, Brendan Behan’s Island, a best-seller in
England, with text by Behan and illustrations by Hogarth, was likewise
published in the United States. In 1962, also, Hogarth made the first of
many trips to America in order to make drawings for Fortune magazine
and to work on illustrations for a future book by Behan, entitled Brendan
Behan’s New York. An exhibition of his illustrations for Brendan Behan’s
Island was displayed early in 1963 by New York’s A.C.A. Gallery, which
has often shown the socially realistic works of artists on the Left. It is
worth noting that Hogarth’s collaborator, Brendan Behan (1923-1964),
the Irish author whose plays’and other writings became widely known in
the United States, had sprung from a thoroughly rebellious family of
Dublin’s slums, and had begun writing for leftist papers at the age of
thirteen. In 1932, as a member of Fianna Fireann, the Republican Boy
Scouts, he had already begun to work for the outlawed Irish Republican
Army at a time when communists were strong in that organization; and in
the years that followed he had been sent to teformatory and to jail in
England for his terrorist activities. Behan’s abilities were discovered by
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 543

Joan Littlewood, who from the late 1940’s to the early 196c’s also trained
in her People’s Palace the actors and actresses chiefly responsible for the
social cinema of the 1950’s and 1960’s in England.
Behan’s friend and collaborator Paul Hogarth—born in 1917, the son
of a North of England farmer who became a butcher in Manchester—is
particularly proud of his distant relationship to William Hogarth. He has
been socially committed ever since he became politically conscious during
his student years. But while he still considers himself in the fullest sense
committed socially “as a man,” he no longer is so “as an artist” —although
he has said that “if I were a film man or a caricaturist I wouldn’t feel that
way.” In regard to his own kind of art, by the early 1960’s he had come to
believe that, “One can no longer be deluded about the working class
audience.” ® Nonetheless, he has made it clear that some of the most
important influences on his art have come from artists sympathetic to the
cause of the common people—artists such as Goya, Daumier, Steinlen, the
painter-draftsmen of L’Assiette au beurre, Grosz, Kathe Kollwitz, the early
Millais, and James Boswell.*
As a student at the Manchester School of Art from 1934 to 1938,
Hogarth had paid his way by working as an ordinary seaman during
vacations. He had actively supported the Loyalists in the Spanish civil war.
When he was invalided out of the British army in World War II, he
volunteered to work as a carpenter on construction jobs up and down the
country; as a member of the carpenter’s union, the Amalgamated Society
of Woodworkers, he acted as a shop steward on many building sites.
Before the war, Hogarth had practiced as a mural painter in Manches-
ter, but the few permanent murals he executed were destroyed in air raids.
At the war’s end he was employed as a designer-assistant to James Boswell,
then art director of Shell International, and served as art editor of Our
Time and other leftist magazines. From 1947 to 1950 he was editor of the
A.I1.A’s newsletter, making it a party-line organ even though most of the
members of the A.I.A. were not with him. He had decided to devote
himself to graphic art and to the travels that were to take him all over
Europe and to China. First, in 1947, he visited Yugoslavia with several
artist-friends and the Marxian art historian and critic Francis D. Klingen-
der: it was Klingender who first told Hogarth of the tradition of social
reporting by artists in the England of the 1860's and thereafter consistently
encouraged his interest in that tradition. One of the artist-friends on this
trip to Yugoslavia was Ronald Searle, widely known as an artist for Punch;
and with Searle, Hogarth also visited Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1949.
His drawings from these trips were exhibited in 1951 at the A.I.A. Gallery
in London. As a consequence of these and other travels, he became known
work
in leftist circles on the Continent, with the result that much of his
was published in periodicals of the Left in Italy and France, and especially
in newspapers of countries in communist eastern Europe. One conse-
quence was that in 1955 a book on him and his art, written by John Berger
544 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

was published at Prague by the Czech State Publishing House of Litera-

ture and the Arts.*” Another book about him, Das Antlitz Europas (‘The
Face of Europe), was issued by Verlag der Kunst at Dresden in 1956, with
a text by Derek Kartun and reproductions of over 200 of Hogarth’s
drawings.
Although in 1950 Hogarth had begun to teach illustration and graphic
design at various schools in England—among them the Central School of
Arts and Crafts in London, founded under the impetus of the socialist
craft ideas of William Morris—he also continued his travels. In 1954, by
way of the Soviet Union he visited Red China for three months (Fig. 88),
and a book of the drawings that he made there was published in the
following year by Lawrence and Wishart.* In many of these drawings of
the Chinese people, as in his other reportorial drawings, Hogarth displayed
a characteristically feathery expressive outline especially inspired by the
style of draftsmen for the old Graphic, but in part by drawings of Boswell
and ultimately those of Grosz. Hogarth’s line, however, is much softer
than that of Grosz, lacking the violence of Grosz’s harder and often more
dynamically jagged expressionistic style (e.g., Fig. 108). He thereby has
produced a far more realistic résult, though in ‘recent works he has
become less realistic, partly under the stimulation of his wife, the abstract
painter Pat Douthwaite.
It is important to note Hogarth’s belief that “In choosing to travel
and to record my travels, I escaped much of the loss of individuality
common among artist-communists of my particular generation. I was
concerned with depicting Man’s efforts to build a new post-war world out
of the ashes of war: this moved me to travel as I did each year from 1947
to 1955 throughout eastern Europe and China.” ®
In 1956, Hogarth joined two other artists in organizing an exhibition
of socially realistic works called “Looking at People.” His collaborators in
this venture were the sculptor Betty Rea, long prominent in the A.LA.,
and Carel Weight, an Associate of the Royal Academy and at this writing
Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art; who had supported the
A.LA. from its inception though he was never very active in the organiza-
tion. “Looking at People” was exhibited first at Manchester, Hogarth’s
home town, and then sent on a tour of England’ accompanied by a
leaflet with a laudatory statement by John Berger. The participants con-
sciously set out to revive the old A.I.A. tradition of traveling exhibitions for
a popular audience. More than a million people in Britain saw “Looking at
People.” It was favorably reported in the Soviet press, with the result that
the International Commission of the Union of Soviet Artists asked that it
be sent to the U.S.S.R. Hogarth has written that, “We agreed to send it to
the Soviet Union because we felt it might be an example of how realism
could be . . . accessible [to people] whilst possessing a sound aesthetic
basis.” ** In 1957, therefore, the exhibition went to the U.S.S.R. after the
three artists concerned had invited five others—Derrick Greaves, Ruskin
 (1954) by Paul Hogarth, from Hogarth,
Looking at China (1956).
Spear (a member of the Royal Academy who had been a member of the
A.A. and, like Carel Weight, a sponsor of the Artists for Peace exhibi-
tions), the sculptor George Fullard (a miner’s son), and the graphic artists
Edward Ardizzone (who became a member of the Royal Academy) and
Alistair Grant—to exhibit with them. The exhibition of “Looking at
People” in Moscow’s Pushkin Museum was said to be the first showing of
British twentieth-century art in Russia since 1917.
In spite of the leftist social sympathies of the participants and the
relative realism of their works, “Looking at People” was popular only in
“progressive” circles of the Soviet Union. Otherwise, according to Hogarth,
it was regarded as being on the whole too formalistic—with the result
that it was never displayed in the Hermitage at Leningrad, as had been
intended.
For that matter, the direct sympathy for Soviet communism of the
originators of the show had been somewhat overestimated in the U.S.S.R.
Hogarth, though long a devoted communist, had been in Warsaw during
October 1956, when—four months after the violent repression of a work-
ers’ demonstration in Poznan—a Soviet delegation led by Khrushchev in
person had threatened to overthrow by force of Russian arms the new
Polish communist government headed by Wladyslaw Gomulka. So dis-
turbed was Hogarth by this episode and by the receptive attitude of the
political leaders of the British Communist Party toward Soviet suppression
of the Hungarian Revolution later that year, that he, like nearly all of the
546 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

other artist-members of the party, left it while otherwise retaining radical

social views. To him, as to many other artists earlier sympathetic to
communism, these events had constituted a culminating proof of the basic
Philistinism of the British party’s political leadership.
After giving up communism, Hogarth, unlike his mentor, James Bos-
well, did not seek to change his ultimate artistic aims and, with them, his
style and the medium of his art. He continued as a graphic artist using his
essentially realistic art as an illustrator-reporter. Consequently, his career,
far from being frustrated in any way, has increasingly flourished, while he
has become ever more widely known both as a leading reporter by means
of art and as a teacher—with the: consequence that in 1964 he was
appointed to teach illustration at the Royal College of Art. And in 1967,
Hogarth’s interest in the history of his field, first stimulated by his commu-
nist friend Francis Klingender, reached a culmination with the publication
in London and New York of his book, The Artist as Reporter, now the
standard work on the subject.*” It becomes clear that graphic art, which
requires a degree of recognizable representation when used for straight
reporting or for some other kind of illustration (as well as for caricature),
can be accepted with exceptional ease by holders of a wide variety of
political and social views from Left to Right.
The life story of another founder of, and participant in, “Looking at
People,” Hogarth’s older friend, the sculptor Betty Rea, reflects a very
different situation. For while likewise casting light on the relation of
socially radical artists to communism (she was one of the few British
artists officially admired in the Soviet Union), her story also demonstrated
the problems offered by a different medium, sculpture, particularly when
undertaken by a socially radical woman faced with the complexities added
to her life by being the mother of a family.
Betty Rea had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1938,
but resigned from it in 1945 as a belated consequence of the Nazi-Soviet
Pact: she had remained a member throughout the war simply to indicate
her admiration for the valiant stand of the Russians against the Nazis. Her
sympathies had been wholeheartedly on the Left for several years before
she joined the British party—yet she had been born at London in 1904 to
parents in very comfortable circumstances, and in 1926 had married James
Rea, whose father became a Liberal peer. She had begun to study painting,
but had soon changed to sculpture, and in 1924 became a sculpture
student at the Royal College of Art. There, one of her teachers was the
young socialist Henry Moore, who became a friend.
Not long after her marriage and the birth of two sons, Betty Rea—like
many other artists, especially artists trained at the Royal College of Art—
became greatly disturbed by the Depression. To her, as to others, the
Soviet Union seemed to have the best answers to economic depressions
and the threat of war. In 1932, and again in 1934, she visited the US.S.R.
Before her second trip, she had joined the newly founded Artists Interna-
tional, later the Artists International Association, in order to have its help
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 547

in making contact with Soviet artists. She promptly became a moving spirit
in its activities, serving as its secretary from 1934 to 1936, during which
time she wrote the foreword to its collaborative volume, Five on Revolu-
tionary Art. Among her other activities having some connection with the
Artists International Association, she was one of the artists who decorated
the English room at the Peace Pavilion of the Paris World’s Fair in 1937,
and in the following year was prominent in the Artists Refugee Committee,
sponsored by the A.I.A. and other organizations of artists.
Betty Rea’s constant involvement in social causes, combined with the
exigencies of marriage and raising her two sons and also, for some years,
the young children of a friend who died during the war,” long prevented
her from concentrating on a career as a sculptor. Only after the war did it
become possible for her to work somewhat more consistently at her art.
Yet even though she resigned from the Communist Party, she remained
sympathetic to the Left and continued to be active in the post-war peace
movement, which was largely led by communists. In 1950, she attended
the peace congress at Warsaw; she was a member of the Peace Council in
Cambridge; and she also participated actively in the Artists for Peace
exhibitions of the early 1950’s.
By 1955, however, when Betty Rea collaborated in preparing the
exhibition “Looking at People,” she had made up her mind to devote
herself essentially to her art. Inasmuch as she had always regarded herself
as a realist, when the enlarged version of “Looking at People” was dis-
played at Moscow in 1957 her work harmonized particularly well with the
Soviet aesthetic of socialist realism. As a consequence, one of her bronzes
representing two wind-blown girls (Fig. 89)—executed with a kind of
realism not unlike that of Constantin Meunier, the Belgian sculptor of
laboring people—though not a great work, was approvingly illustrated in
the article on modern art in England published in the second number of
Iskusstvo for 1960. The Russian author of the article clearly took this
sculpture to represent two working-class girls; however, the sculptor herself
has written in a letter: “I did not intend the girls to be of any class. My
interest was in the movement of the wind which knit the two figures
together.” 1 Here we have a case—by no means unparalleled—in which a
communist art critichistorian has read into a work of art social content
unintended by the artist.
Betty Rea’s best works, executed in the last half-dozen years of her
life, though far from being avant-garde, were rather less realistic than Two
Girls in a Wind (Fig. 89), being more in the tradition of the sculptures of
Degas, which she had long greatly admired. These late works brought her
sculp-
considerable recognition: from 1958 on, her increasingly unacademic
her
ture was exhibited yearly at the Royal Academy; and in the last years of
life she received several important official commissions.
a
After Betty Rea died at the age of sixty in the spring of 1965,
Gallery
retrospective exhibition of her sculpture was held at the Zwemmer
always kept her art separate from her
in London. It showed that she had
 The Influence of Soviet Communism, 1917-1968 / 549

social interests: not one of the fifty sculptures displayed had a subject that
could be regarded as socially radical. However, the communist Daily
Worker had not forgotten her early social radicalism. In a highly laudatory
obituary, it—rightly—praised her great integrity; it also characteristically
lauded the realism of her work, yet she had eventually moved away from
realism, which in any literal sense of the term seems peculiarly unsuited to
the medium of sculpture.
Although, unlike another former communist, James Boswell, Betty
Rea never abruptly changed either her style or her medium, in the end her
ultimate artistic aims, like his, had been largely frustrated by delays caused
by her commitment to radical social causes. And as in the case of so many
other married women as artists, her development as a sculptor had been
further delayed by her family duties. By the time she turned wholeheart-
edly to her sculpture in 1955 she was fifty years old—too old to be able to
become a sculptor of international first rank.
The article in Iskusstvo in which Betty Rea’s Two Girls in a Wind
had been illustrated also referred favorably to her teacher and friend Henry
Moore, whose lifelong social radicalism—which he has never allowed to
interfere with his art—was obviously regarded as outweighing the lack of
social realism in his sculpture at a time when the Soviet line for art was
relatively relaxed. He was mentioned as the most important exponent of
English modernism; an example of his sculpture was reproduced; and even
though his work was described as “abstract,” this word was by no means
accompanied by the violent denunciations customary in Soviet criticism."
Nevertheless, the relatively realistic drawings of the London masses sleep-
ing in bomb shelters, which Moore had made as an official artist during
World War II, were regarded as superior by Iskusstvo, as was to be
expected.
When, a few months later, the large exhibition of British art from
1700 to 1960 was displayed at Moscow in the latter year, a review in
Iskusstvo °° to which the earlier article had been a kind of historical
preamble could say very little about British leftist art because so few artists
who had ever been even slightly on the Left were represented in it.
Coldstream and Pasmore were referred to as former members of the
Euston Road School (and so as social realists), although the reviewer
mentioned with some distaste that Pasmore had later become an abstrac-
tionist.
Among younger painters, Edward Middleditch, as a realist of the
Kitchen Sink School, was approvingly cited. Ironically, however, the influ-
ence of that school had already begun to wane in England. Its decline
among communist sympathizers resulted mainly from the growing reluc-
tance of its members to commit themselves politically, especially after the
repression of the Hungarian Revolution by Soviet troops. John Berger—
who regarded the events in Hungary as insufficient grounds for criticizing
the Communist Party—grew impatient with the Kitchen Sink Group and

Fic. 89. Two Girls in a Wind (1956-1957), bronze by Betty Rea.

550 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

severed his relationship with its members, thereby destroying essential links
between them and the patronage of certain collectors and wealthy Labour
businessmen. Furthermore, the vogue in England for realism of any kind
was dwindling, even among those sympathetic to the Left. The first large
exhibition of contemporary American painting, displayed at the Tate
Gallery early in 1956, had made a tremendous aesthetic impression, and
had started a new vogue: the decisive effect of its abstract expressionism on
James Boswell has already been mentioned. Conversely, the big exhibition
of Soviet socialist realism in art held in London in 1959 under the auspices
of the Royal Academy was not regarded seriously at all; and the generally
unfavorable reception accorded it unequivocally demonstrated to those
interested in art that doctrinaire realism was dying in England.*”
The Communist Party of Great Britain was thus faced with a di-
lemma, which became especially profound when ideological conflict broke
out between the Soviet Union and Red China. Remaining on the side of
the Soviet Union, the British party was expected to continue to give at
least lip-service to socialist realism. And in the U.S.S.R., Khrushchev
greatly stiffened the line on socialist realism late in 1962, when he began a
violent campaign against all liberalizing abstract tendencies in the arts in
order to demonstrate Soviet Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy in the face of
Chinese accusations of “revisionism.” But inasmuch as doctrinaire real-
ism was dying in England, by adhering even nominally to socialist realism
the Communist Party could expect to lose the support of nearly all
artistically progressive artists on the Left. Indeed, while the party was
wrestling with this dilemma, most avant-garde artists of the Left in Eng-
land, like those in France, had already been attracted by the New Left as it
gained strength in the later 1950's.
Only after “polycentrism” developed in the communist world did the
British Communist Party eventually dare to become overtly critical of the
U.S.S.R. Early in 1966, like the French party and many other Communist
parties of the West, the British party condemned the Soviet Union’s trial
and sentencing to labor camps of Sinyavsky and Daniel, two Soviet writers
accused of slandering the state in books that they had published abroad
under pseudonyms. John Gollan, the secretary-general of the Communist
Party of Great Britain, openly deplored the fact that “the full evidence” on
which the Soviet court based its conviction “has not been made public,”
and added that “justice should not only be done but should be seen to be
done.” ** Significantly, in 1966 also, the name of the Daily Worker was
changed to the Morning Star. In 1968 the party condemned the Soviet-led
invasion of communist Czechoslovakia. Yet so belated were these explicit
cniticisms of the Soviet Union that they were hardly likely to win back
those many left-wing artists and other intellectuals who, disillusioned for
nearly a decade by the party’s acceptance of the suppression of the
Hungarian Revolution, had turned to the “revisionist” New Left—only to
become disillusioned in turn with it as it became more like a political
party.
 11
THE RADICALISM OF MODERN
ENGLISH ART CRITICS; AND
THE RISE OF THE NEW LERHT

1. The Background of Twentieth-Century

Radical Art Criticism
W uereas few twentieth-century British artists have acquired an interna-
tional reputation on the Continent of Europe or in the United States,”
avant-garde British art critics have had a profound influence abroad,
especially in the United States. And the most influential of them have
been affected in some way by social radicalism—a fact that has been
unduly neglected but is of major importance.”
Those twentieth-century British critics who had begun to develop
their ideas before the Bolshevik Revolution were likely to continue to
reflect the stimulation of that still earlier generation of critics of society
and art which, we saw, included Ruskin, Morris, and Kropotkin in addition
to Marx. In spite of profound differences, all four of these critics had
subscribed to the conception of the good society as an organism and had
believed that capitalistic industrialism had given rise to an inorganic
society. They had all insisted that only if the workingman were enabled to
take joy in creating works combining social utility with beauty, works in
which fine art and craft were not divorced, could he develop his fullest
personal potentialities while also contributing to a true social organism.
However, whereas Ruskin and Morris had believed that the machine had
made both an organic society and great art impossible, Kropotkin and
Marx had regarded production by machine as vital. But as an anarchist
Kropotkin had maintained that the state could be abolished immediately,
and, rejecting the emphasis given by Marx and especially Engels to the
was inade-
social role of realism in art, had come to believe that realism
quate—thereby helping to stimulate abstraction in the arts.
In twentieth-century England, all sorts of combinations of these
in
different points of view have been found among those interested both
of 1917
social radicalism and in the arts. Once the Bolshevik Revolution
552 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

had made Soviet Russia the chief center of modern radicalism, it was only
to be expected that some radical critics, particularly younger ones, would
eventually be stimulated by Marxism more directly—and in time by Marx-
ism-Leninism and its aesthetic of socialist realism as developed under
Stalin. Before Marxism-Leninism became influential in British criticism,
however, a slightly earlier generation of critics, successors to that of Ruskin
and Morris, had formulated its aesthetic and social ideas. It was, indeed, a
generation constituting a transition from the age of Morris and Kropotkin
to that of modern art. Its chief representatives were Roger Fry, Wyndham
Lewis, and Sir Herbert Read, all of whom to some degree reflected the
continuation of social ideas descended from those of Ruskin and Morris
or of anarchists such as Kropotkin. In addition Read, the youngest of the
three, was not wholly unsympathetic to Marxism.

2. Roger Fry
Or Rocer Fry (1866-1934), his biographer and friend in the socially
left-of-center Bloomsbury group, Virginia Woolf, justly wrote in 1940 that
he had “more influence, it was agreed, than any critic since Ruskin at the
height of his fame.” *As a student at Cambridge, Fry had been much
impressed by Edward Carpenter, who, on a visit to Cambridge, made the
undergraduates “read Walt Whitman [eventually claimed by both the
anarchists and the communists] and turned Roger Fry’s thoughts to de-
mocracy and the future of England.” * While at Cambridge, also, Fry had
been interested in the social guild of C. R. Ashbee, the architect-follower
of Morris, with whom Fry later traveled in Italy. Although then intending
to devote his life to science, Fry had studied painting at Cambridge under
John Henry Middleton, the Slade Professor of Art, concerning whom he
wrote his mother: “He is very delightful to talk to, though I fear you
would think him dangerously socialistic.” °Most of Fry’s friends at the
University were convinced that social service of some kind was the only
end worth pursuing in life. Even though Fry became skeptical of this aim,
after he gave up science to become a painter he did at first try to make art
the servant of society by giving lessons in drawing at Toynbee Hall, a
settlement house. Unsuccessful as art teacher and painter, Fry then discov-
ered his real forte in lecturing and writing about art, and eventually was
made art critic of the Athenaeum. At the invitation of the American
capitalist and art-collector J. Pierpont Morgan, he was soon appointed
curator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a
position he lost in 1910 when he and the autocratic Morgan failed to see
eye to eye.
Later in that year, after Fry had returned to England, he joined the
 The Radicalism of Art Critics; and the Rise of the New Left / 553

Bloomsbury group. He also became the moving spirit of the exhibition

at the Grafton Galleries in London, entitled “Manet and the Post-
Impressionists” (he invented the term “Post-Impressionist”). ‘This first ac-
quainted the British public with the modern movement in painting, and,
together with a second Post-Impressionist Exhibition held in 1912, stirred
up a tremendous furor like that created in the United States in 1913 by the
Armory Show in New York. With these exhibitions, England really began
to join European culture; and from that time on, Fry’s main preoccupation
was to expound the Post-Impressionists. He also deeply desired to make art
widely popular: as Virginia Woolf wrote, “He wanted to see the walls of
railway stations and restaurants covered with pictures of ordinary life that
ordinary people enjoy” ‘“—an aim remarkably similar to that of the Fourier-
ist Victor Considerant and of the Proudhonian Courbet, both of whom
had wished to place paintings for the masses on the walls of railroad
stations.
In 1912, for a symposium called The Great State—the name “Great
State” referring to the contributors’ conceptions of the ideal political
organization—Fry wrote an essay called “Art and Socialism.” In somewhat
modified form this was republished in his famous book of essays Vision
and Design, which was first issued in 1924 both in England and the United
States and had a great vogue in avant-garde art circles. Fry began this essay
with the words, “I am not a socialist . . .” ’ but he wrote that he proposed
to discuss what the effects of plutocracy on art had been of late and were
likely to be in the near future—evidently recalling his own encounters with
J. P. Morgan and also William Morris’s essay of 1883 entitled “Art Under
Plutocracy.” Even though at the beginning of his own essay Fry denied
that he was a socialist, he did declare in it that “to a large extent the Great
State will be socialistic at least. . . .”® Basing his essay, as he said, on a
tradition that began with Ruskin’s prophetic lectures on “The Political
Economy of Art,” ® Fry insisted that “the artist has nothing to hope for
from the plutocrat”: he agreed with Ruskin that there is (as Fry put it) “a
he
gross and wanton waste under the present system.” # But he wrote that
plutocrat for this any more than the artist—the social
did not blame the
consid-
system itself was at fault. In Fry’s ideal Great State, “it would be
to what degree machinery ought to replace
ered in what processes and
and
handiwork, both from the point of view of the community as a whole
statement directly reminiscent of Morris,
from that of the producer,” “™ a
or less
with overtones from Kropotkin. Yet Fry believed that even the more
“the modern
socialistic Great State would offer problems for art because
completely
artist puts the question of any socialistic—or, indeed, of any
ordered—state in its acutest form. He demands as an essential to the
no other
proper use of his powers a freedom from restraint such as
art could easily
workman expects.” ” (Plainly, such a point of view toward
In addi-
become conducive to a sympathy for philosophical anarchism.)
speaking, could
tion, Fry felt that such freedom for the artist, financially
554 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

best be achieved by having him develop skill in some craft apart from his
art: “I imagine that the artist would naturally turn to one of the applied
arts as his means of livelihood . . .” because the practice of a craft “would
leave a man free to pursue other callings in his leisure” **—a variation on
Morris. By the time when this essay was made available to a large public in
Fry’s Vision and Design of 1924, the somewhat similar views held by
Walter Gropius, head of the Bauhaus, were also beginning to receive
international notice. In England, Vision and Design had a profound
influence on the young Henry Moore, who, while looking for another book
in a public library, came across it by chance. Moore was deeply impressed
by Fry’s essay on Negro sculpture, which stressed, as Moore put it, the
“three-dimensional realization,” that characterized African art and _ its
“truth to material.” **
In 1913, Roger Fry had put his theories into practice by establishing
the Omega Workshops in Fitzroy Square, London, to serve as a connecting
link between artists and public by helping artists to make and sell the
furniture, textiles, or pottery that could enable them to survive while
devoting their leisure to some major art. Fry’s painter-friends, Duncan
Grant and Vanessa Bell, were directors of the Workshops, the products of
which were unsigned and often collaboratively executed. Obviously, the
idea of the Omega Workshops, which Fry managed to keep going until
1919, was largely inspired by Morris’s firm of artist-craftsmen, then still in
existence.
Fry, unlike his friend and fellow-member of the Bloomsbury group,
the formalist art critic Clive Bell, in following the humanist art critic
Wolfflin always rejected non-representational art both in his own painting
and in his criticism, though he himself was essentially interested only in
the form of objects depicted. He also wholly agreed with the statement
made by Morris in “Art Under Plutocracy” that “artists are obliged to
express themselves ... in a language not understanded [sic] of the
people” *—a remark, of course, at variance with the view of orthodox
Marxists, especially of Lenin and his followers. Yet Fry put the blame for
this situation much more strongly on the people than had Morris. He
quoted with approval the statement—cited earlier—of his Fabian friend
Bernard Shaw, that “the corruption of taste and the emotional insincerity
of the mass of the people had gone so far that any picture which pleased
more than ten per cent. of the population should be immediately burned.
...™* Fry himself declared that to the average man “The work of the
truly creative artist is not merely useless . . . it appears to be noxious and
inassimilable”; today the average social man “lives in a world of [status]
symbols. . . .” ** However, “. . . I suppose that in the Great State we
might hope to see such a considerable levelling of social conditions that
the false values put upon art by its symbolising of social status would be
largely destroyed. . . .”** The creative artist and the creative scientist are
the only human beings who do not deal with such status symbols: on the
contrary, “They alone are up against certain relations which do not stand
 The Radicalism of Art Critics; and the Rise of the New Left / 555

for something else, but appear to have ultimate value, to be real.” * To

Fry, as the words “certain relations” suggests, this ultimate reality in the
work of art is based on relations among forms, to which he did not ascribe
symbolic values. In other words, he was a formalist in art—and so sub-
scribed to a point of view that was to be officially rejected in Stalin’s Russia
a few years after the publication of Vision and Design. As Fry wrote in a
letter replying to criticisms of his ideas made by Robert Bridges, “I found
that this ‘constant’ [in the work of art] had to do always with the
contemplation of form (of course colour is in this sense part of artistic
form).” ®° Furthermore, in Fry’s view art, being based on formal relations,
‘fs in violent revolt against the instinctive life, is an expression of the
reflective and fully conscious life.” ** Thus he stood not for a romantically
instinctive approach to art, but for an intellectualist approach. Also, he
insisted that art should not serve morals directly (as Ruskin, for instance,
had held) because “the contemplation of Truth is . . . I judge entirely
a-moral.” ? Obviously, then, formalist art—the art of “significant form” (a
term he borrowed from Clive Bell)—could not be devoted directly to
social propaganda.
Nevertheless, because of certain similarities between the views of Fry
and those of William Morris—in spite of major differences—Fry, like
Morris, had many friends among leading Fabians. These included not only
Bernard Shaw but also the Fabian architect and biographer of Morns,
Arthur Clutton-Brock; and it was before the Fabian society that Fry
delivered the lecture which became perhaps his most famous essay, “Art
and Life.” 2° In view of Roger Fry’s rejection of social propaganda in art as
stressed by most Fabians as well as by Marxists, in view also of the
influence on him of Edward Carpenter, who was so inclined toward
anarchism, it is not surprising that in 1925, finally attempting to sum up
his own political position, Fry declared: “I’m an individualistic
anarchist.” 24 This fact, too, combined with his devotion to the modern
movement in art which so largely developed out of literary and artistic
Symbolism, helps to account for his enormous admiration for Mallarmé,
who, with the apolitical painter Cézanne, was one of Fry’s two chief
“patron-saints.” Fry’s admiration for Mallarmé’s poetry, however, like his
admiration for Cézanne’s painting, was founded on his intellectual appre-
ciation of its pure form rather than on the kind of emotional and spiritual
values regarded as primary by the Symbolists.

3. Wyndham Lewis
om
Ovsg artist early connected with Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops—fr
the
July to December 1913—was also an art critic with influence on
This was the
avant-garde in the United States as well as in England.
556 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

half-American painter and writer Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), an ex-

traordinarily wide-ranging, rebellious, and eccentric figure.
Lewis was trained as a painter at the Slade School in London, then for
eight years lived abroad, mostly in Paris. Throughout his mature life his
paintings were widely exhibited: in a characteristically contrary way, unlike
nearly all other “modern” artists, he passed from abstraction to realism, in
1940 even announcing the end of abstract art. He is best known, however,
as an exceedingly versatile writer: poet (in early youth), novelist, satirist,
and social philosopher as well as critic of painting, for him the highest art.
His novel Tarr (1918), the title figure of which is an English artist in
bohemian Paris, has been widely compared with novels by Dostoyevsky. In
1955, two years before Lewis:died, T. S. Eliot referred to him as the most
distinguished living novelist. Perhaps Lewis’s greatest work is Apes of God
(1930), a satire on millionaire bohemia about a wealthy and successful
amateur artist who turns out to-be a stupid painter and sexual pervert.
Lewis’s Time and Western Man, an attack on Bergson and Spengler and
their respective “organic” and “Faustian” social philosophies, is the princi-
pal English document in the movement against those who have pro-
claimed the decline of Western man. His concern for the individual as a
“person,” to be exalted over the slave-like “thing” or puppet, gave him an
interest in political matters that inclined primarily toward anarchism; but,
not unlike Bakunin earlier, he also had tendencies toward fascism which
for a time appeared in his writings, especially The Art of Being Ruled
(1926), and he espoused Franco’s cause in the Spanish civil war.
Lewis particularly admired Georges Sorel, that exponent of syndical-
ism whose own radical ideas had grown mainly out of Fourierism and
Marxism—whereas Lewis himself was always anti-ccommunist. However,
the anarcho-syndicalist labor movement exalted by Sorel and Lewis’s meth-
ods for promoting his own social and artistic ideas somewhat similarly
reflected the spirit of anarchism that eventually led Lewis to describe his
politics as “at bottom anarchist [though] with a healthy passion for
order.” ** In view of his anarchistic spirit, it is worth noting that he was
stimulated by the militant manifestoes of the futurists, themselves sympa-
thetic to anarchism. Although he attacked the futurists for offering in art
only a belated and too mechanistic kind of Impressionism by showing
machines as mere blurs instead of as lucidly cold and impersonal objects,
their manifestoes led him to make use of similar methods for promoting
his own ideas about art, as seen, for instance, in the movement in painting
which he founded called Vorticism. This—a British blend of futurism,
cubism, and expressionism—lasted from 1913 to 1920.
After Lewis’s violent exit from the Omega Workshops when he
protested in vain Fry’s decision to reduce artists’ commissions, he founded
in 1914.a Rebel Art Centre—which lasted only four months because he in-
sisted on keeping such jealously possessive control. With it, however, were
associated such talented avant-garde artists and writers as the sculptors
 The Radicalism of Art Critics; and the Rise of the New Left / 557

Gaudier-Brzeska and Jacob Epstein, the painters Nevinson and Bom-

berg, the poet and future Fascist sympathizer Ezra Pound, and the philoso-
pher T’. E. Hulme, killed in World War I, who furnished Lewis with many
of his basic ideas. Lewis put them forward especially in the Vorticist
periodical Blast, a kind of iconoclastic manifesto that had a considerable
influence even though only two numbers appeared, in 1914 and 1915.
Blast—which a decade later had a profound influence upon the young
Henry Moore—was intended to blast, among other things, the surviving
remains of complacent Victorianism and of futurism. In equal opposition
to naturalistically realistic art and to what Lewis regarded as the futurists’
adolescent worship of the machine, he called for a new classicism. This was
to be based, not upon Greek art either of the Golden Age or of the
Hellenistic period, but upon archaic Greek, Egyptian, Byzantine, and
Indian art, and thus mainly on proto-cubistic forms of art that earlier had
been considered “primitive” but that had been exalted by the Symbolists.
And T. E. Hulme had praised such art, particularly admiring the kinds of
historic art “where everything tends to be angular, where curves tend to
be hard and geometrical, where the presentation of the human body, for
example, is often . . . distorted to fit into stiff lines and cubical shapes of
various kinds.” *” This emphasis on abstraction Hulme derived from Ab-
straktion und Ejinfiihlung (Abstraction and Empathy), published in 1907
by the German art historian and critic Wilhelm Worringer.
Lewis’s experience as an official artist in World War I, however, led
him to give up the uncompromising abstractionism that such ideas had
produced in his own art. At the same time, as it became increasingly
fashionable in British avant-garde circles to lean to the political Left, Lewis
inclined toward the Right; but even though, like his old friend Ezra
Pound, he had a fascist period, in the end he denounced Hitler. In a sense,
too, in giving up abstraction he moved toward the artistic Right (though
he never became an academic realist). For the artistically radical trend in
English art after World War I continued to move away from naturalistic
representation because Roger Fry and his friend and fellow-member of the
Bloomsbury group, Clive Bell, were regarded as the high priests of an
aesthetic formalism and purism whose slogan was Bell’s “significant form.”
Lewis had disliked Fry ever since his own violent departure from the
Omega Workshops, and as he particularly disliked Clive Bell’s point of
view, he delighted in attacking the Bloomsbury group.

4. Sir Herbert Read

HX. aruier, Wyndham Lewis had become a contributor to a short-lived

periodical called Arts and Letters, of which, in 1917, Herbert Read
(1893-1968) had been one of the three editors. As art critic, Read too was
558 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

sympathetic to ideas of T. E. Hulme: he edited Hulme’s essays, Specula-

tions, in 1924 and 1936, and his Language and Style in 1929." In 1933, at
the invitation of Fry as chairman of the leading British art periodical, the
Burlington Magazine, Read became its editor, a position he held for five
years. At the time of his death in 1968, he was perhaps the most widely
known living critic of the arts in the Western world, and if anything had
enjoyed a wider influence in the United States than had Fry. More than
Fry, Read inclined strongly toward anarchism, and like him possessed a
conviction that aesthetic experience constitutes an awareness of a kind of
ultimate reality. Nevertheless, Read considered that Fry’s conception of
art, being based on the requirement of plastic form, was excessively materi-
alistic.
Yet in his youth Read for a time strongly supported guild socialism,
that relatively short-lived movement in which A. J. Penty and G. D. H.
Cole were among the leaders, and which, as its name implies, derived
largely from Morris’s attempt to revive the spirit of the medieval guilds,
but in combination with syndicalism. Over the years—as Read himself
recorded in an autobiography, The Innocent Eye (1947), published in the
United States as well as in England—he had been influenced by a wide
variety of other radical artistic, political, and economic doctrines,” while
always maintaining that as a farmer’s son (or “peasant,” as he called
himself) he despised the whole industrial epoch, including both its plutoc-
racy and its proletariat. In addition to being stimulated by some of the
ideas of Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, and Edward Carpenter, he had also felt
the influence of the French syndicalist Sorel, and the anarchists Proudhon,
Bakunin, and especially Kropotkin, a selection of whose writings chosen
and edited by Read was published in 1942.*° The ideas of the materialist
and fellow-atheist Marx likewise long interested and to some degree af-
fected Read’s ideas about art, although he was a strong opponent of
Marxism-Leninism and of Marxian materialism. As he wrote in the com-
munist Left Review in 1936: “I have not just discovered Marx; I was
deeply interested in him when the war interrupted my studies in 1914, and
since then there has been scarcely a year in which I have not returned to
some aspect of his work. All this time my attitude towards his philosophy
or logic has never definitely crystallised. . . .” *! Consequently, Read was
never a communist or complete materialist, though by 1936, at the time
when he wrote the above statement, he had become more sympathetic to
communism. ‘To him—as to many other members of the literary and
artistic avant-garde—Marxian communism had seemed to offer special
opportunities for artists, especially in the light of its essentially anarchistic
doctrine that the state will “wither away.” In 1936, also, he wrote, in a
highly approving essay on surrealism, that “Surrealism, like Communism,
does not call upon artists to surrender their individuality. . . .”* But
when the essay was reissued in 1952 during the cold war, because the
political situation had drastically changed, Read made an alteration in this
 The Radicalism of Art Critics; and the Rise of the New Left / 559

sentence without indicating that any change had occurred: it now read,
“Surrealism does not, like Communism, call upon artists to surrender their
individuality. . . .” %
Not only had Read’s sentence as originally phrased reflected the
sympathy for communism that had spread among many non-communists
because they thought that the Soviet Union had achieved a depression-
proof society in which the state would eventually “wither away,” but it also
even more reflected admiration for the U.S.S.R. as the one great nation
ready by the mid-1930’s to oppose fascism actively. The widespread sympa-
thy for the Loyalists in the Spanish civil war, whom only the Soviet Union
was willing to aid, at first helped to make many more Britons sympathetic
to Soviet communism. However, the behavior of the communists in that
war, in the course of which they deliberately destroyed their anarchist and
Trotskyite allies, eventually alienated many—including Herbert Read,
whose loss of hope that the state would ever wither away in Russia
brought final disillusionment with Soviet communism.
The widespread loss of faith in communism had fostered a revival of
anarchism in England during the late 1930’s which continued on into the
1940's. Read, together with the writers John Cowper Powys and Ethel
Mannin, was especially prominent in this anarchist revival, which formed
close links with various literary-artistic movements, including not only
surrealism but also personalism and apocalypticism. Particularly influential
in the revival were Read’s Poetry and Anarchism of 1938 and his The
Philosophy of Anarchism published four years later.
Read’s highly personal mixture of different radical doctrines indicated
that, not unlike Fry, he was essentially a kind of individualist-anarchist
rather than a communist-anarchist or communist in spite of his long
interest in both Kropotkin and Marx. Partly because Read’s own kind of
individualist anarchism enabled him to include sympathy for a much wider
variety of socially radical movements than Fry felt, he was able to appre-
ciate an even greater variety of artistically radical movements. Indeed, he
showed sympathy for practically all the numerous—and often widely dif-
ferent—avant-garde developments in art and literature which came along
in his lifetime, with the noticeable recent exceptions of Pop Art (because
it destroys the boundaries between art and images of mass-communica-
tion) and Op Art (because it destroys the boundaries between art and
scientific “sign”).He preferred the organic form of art (which he related
to the romantic tradition, to which surrealism belongs) rather than the
abstract form of art (which he related to the classic tradition). Corre-
spondingly, both Vico’s conception of society as a developing organism
and a doctrine of vitalism descended from the romantic movement
strongly appealed to him.
In spite of Read’s social radicalism, he was knighted in 1953. Besides
reflecting the underlying materialism of the British custom of rewarding
success in any field with titles, this obviously suggests that in England the
560 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

attitude toward social radicalism is much more lenient than in the United
States. For 1953 was the year in which Senator Joseph McCarthy reached
the peak of his power in America. Still, as a non-communist Read could
without difficulty serve as Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard
University in 1953-1954 and as A. W. Mellon Lecturer in the Fine Arts at
the National Gallery in Washington in 1954, the year in which McCarthy
was finally “condemned” by his fellow senators. In 1967, the year before
Read died, he wrote in the Saturday Review that the greatest deception of
his life had been the failure of socialism, in which he included communism
—a failure springing, he said, from the separation of political and ethical
science. Perhaps significantly, in the same year came the publication of his
book Art and Alienation; The Role of the Artist in Society.

5. Christopher Caudwell

A. 1arer generation of social-minded art critics, different in significant

ways from those just dealt with, came to prominence in England in the
1930's and 1940’s, specifically under the influence of Marxism, and often of
Marxism-Leninism. Especially prominent in it have been Christopher
Caudwell, Francis D. Klingender, the somewhat older Hungarian-born art
historians and critics, Frederick Antal and Arnold Hauser, and still more
recently John Berger. Where Ruskin and Morris had cared very deeply
about art and about society as a whole, having concern for morality in the
broadest (their opponents might say loosest) sense, most members of this
third, essentially Marxist, generation were to show themselves more con-
cerned with social utility in a narrower way. As Marxists, they have
necessarily been interested in achieving utility with reference to ends given
by Marxian “scientific” socialism, and thus ultimately determined by
economics. Also, where the art critics of earlier generations had nearly all
belonged to “good,” solid, middle-class English families, those of this one
have mostly come from less assured social backgrounds or else, as refugees,
have suffered from another kind of insecurity and alienation in England.
One important early product of this generation was Illusion and
Reality; A Study of the Sources of Poetry, a book issued at London in
1937. Despite its title, the volume contains some discussion of the visual
arts, and constitutes, indeed, one of the most perceptive expressions of
Marxist-Leninist aesthetic criticism ever published. Destined to stir up
renewed discussion among British Marxists after World War II,* this had
been written by Christopher Caudwell, a poet, journalist, novelist, and
critic whose real name was Christopher St. John Sprigg.
Caudwell, who was born in 1907, left his Roman Catholic school at
the age of fourteen to become a cub reporter on a Yorkshire paper of
 The Radicalism of Art Critics; and the Rise of the New Left / 561

which his father was literary editor. Although he always regarded himself
as primarily a poet, he long remained a journalist, and became known as an
expert writer on aviation, a subject on which he published many popular
articles, as well as five books. During the 1930’s he wrote nine novels, eight
of them thrillers, many of which were also issued in the United States. In
addition, he was something of an inventor—his designs for an infinitely
variable gear attracted interest in motoring circles when they were pub-
lished in the Automotive Engineer.
Caudwell’s wide range of accomplishments made him much the kind
of all-sided man most admired by Marx and Engels—the type that they
believed every man could become in the future Marxian classless society.
Caudwell himself first became absorbed in Marxism in 1934, the year in
which he gave up journalism to become a full-time free-lance writer. His
distress at the effects of the Depression on the working class stirred him to
interest in the Marxian classics. Late in the summer of 1935, he decided to
live in the slums of London’s East End and study working-class conditions
at first hand. He soon joined the British Communist Party, and thereafter
faithfully participated in such routine party tasks as selling the Daily
Worker and speaking on street corners; he also began to study Russian. In
December 1937, Caudwell enlisted in the British Battalion of the Interna-
tional Brigade, which was led by communists; and only two months later,
on February 12, 1937, he was killed in Spain fighting for the Spanish
Republic against Franco’s armies.
Although when Christopher Caudwell died he was but twenty-nine
years old, in the two years or so preceding his death he had managed to
write from a Marxist point of view four volumes of criticism, all of which
were published posthumously. Of these works, the most important for us
are Illusion and Reality, the first to be published, and an essay, “Beauty, A
Study in Bourgeois Aesthetics,” in Further Studies in a Dying Culture
(1949), the last of the volumes to appear.”
Of all Caudwell’s writings, “Beauty; A Study in Bourgeois Aesthetics”
is the one most immediately relevant for the visual arts. As could be
expected of a wholehearted communist writing after 1934, the year in
which socialist realism had been officially imposed by the Soviet Union, the
essay directly reflected that aesthetic. Thus Caudwell declared: “Beauty 1s
social,” for it “is the knowledge of oneself as a part of other selves in a real
world... .”** Also, “It is the special achievement of later bourgeois
civilization to have robbed . . . art of reality.” ** He concluded with these
wholly Marxist words: “In a society which is based on co-operation .
desires as well as cognitions can be socially manipulated as part of the
social process. Beauty will then return again, to enter consciously into
every part of the social process. It is not a dream that labour will no longer
be ugly, and the products of labour once again beautiful.” *
Caudwell’s four volumes of Marxist criticism were published in Eng-
land by the eminently non-communist firms of Macmillan (in the case of
562 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

Illusion and Reality) and John Lane (the other three)—a fact bearing
witness to the entire respectability of discussions of the theory of commu-
nism among “intellectuals” in Britain both during the late 1930's and in
the cold-war years following World War II. Nor was this respectability
restricted to British intellectuals: many of Caudwell’s writings were also
published by non-communists in the United States before and after the era
of Senator Joseph McCarthy.”
That Caudwell’s Marxist writings were internationally regarded by
communists themselves as thoroughly acceptable had been indicated when
an edition of Illusion and Reality was issued by International Publishers,
the leading American communist publishing house. This was in 1947, after
Communist parties everywhere had begun to pay particular attention to
the arts as weapons useful in the cold war. The communist seal of ap-
proval was even more strongly set on Caudwell’s writings in 1965 when the
chief British communist publishers, Lawrence and Wishart, reissued many
of them.*°

6. kranas Klingender

A Free Christopher Caudwell died in Spain, the best of the remaining

Marxist-Leninist critics in England interested in the arts was Francis
Klingender, who was also an excellent art historian. In 1943, during World
War II, and amid widespread admiration for the Soviet Union, Lawrence
and Wishart published Klingender’s persuasive little booklet of about fifty
pages entitled Marxism and Modern Art, and in 1945 this was issued at
New York by International Publishers. It supported social realism in art in
harmony with the relatively liberal version of socialist realism encouraged
by communists to gain all possible support for the U.S.S.R. after the Nazi
invasion, while particularly attacking the formalism of Roger Fry and the
relativism of Taine.
Klingender, who was born in 1907 of an English father and German
mother, grew up in Germany as a German boy. His father, an animal
painter of scientific bent who had left his native Liverpool to study art in
Germany and had become a museum curator there, was an admirer of
Kropotkin and of Thoreau. In the late 1920’s, father and son, without the
mother, went to England, where the son became a student at the London
School of Economics. His interest in economics and sociology, combined
with a thoroughgoing German radical background, helped to lead the
poverty-stricken and rootless youth to Marxism and the Communist
Party."
Klingender has previously been mentioned as an early member of the
Artists International Association, founded under largely communist aus-
pices in 1933. He first achieved a measure of prominence as an art critic in
 The Radicalism of Art Critics; and the Rise of the New Left / 563

England in 1935, when, together with Herbert Read, Eric Gill, A. L.

Lloyd, and Alick West, he contributed an essay to Five on Revolutionary
Art. This book, sponsored by the A.I.A., was published by Lawrence and
Wishart, and has already been described as a characteristic document of
the Popular Front period, because, though communists or communist
sympathizers were dominant among the contributors, a minority of non-
communists was included. By this time communists everywhere had begun
to follow the new Stalinist line of socialist realism. As Klingender, Lloyd,
and West were all strongly sympathetic to communism, and thus to
social realism, they looked upon abstraction in art as symbolic of capital-
ist breakdown—and in this view were joined by that devout Catholic on
the Left, Eric Gill, but not by Herbert Read.
In 1935 and 1936, Klingender frequently wrote for the Left Review,
his articles bearing such titles as “Revolutionary Art Criticism,” “The
Crucifix; A Symbol of Medieval Class Struggle,” and “Abstraction and
Realism” “’—the last, needless to say, unsympathetic to abstraction. At
that time, too, he became a contributor to the American periodical Art
Front, organ of the leftist Artists Union; and in 1937 was made a contri-
buting editor of that magazine. He was much interested in the photo-
graphs of social-realist works by Mexican and American artists brought
back to England in 1938 by his friend Richard Carline, but had no respect
for the Soviet socialist realism of the 1930's.
After the Soviet Union was forced into alliance with Britain in World
War II by the Nazi invasion, Klingender published at London a booklet
entitled Russia—Britain’s Ally, 1812-1942. His pamphlet of 1943, Marxism
and Modern Art, was followed a year later by a volume, Hogarth and
English Caricature, based on that great eighteenth-century English artist
whose realistic art had so often dealt with the common man and has
therefore been much admired by Marxists. This book was issued in an
American edition two years later. In 1948 and 1949 respectively, two ad-
ditional volumes written by Klingender from a Marxian point of view
came out in London—one entitled Art and the Industrial Revolution, the
other, Goya; In the Democratic Tradition. Through such excellent Marxist
books, especially Art and the Industrial Revolution (revised and extended
by Sir Arthur Elton in 1968), and through frequent lectures that Klin-
gender delivered during the late 1940’s, he strongly affected artists of the
Left in general, and of the Communist Party in particular. He was
especially influential in revealing to them the English graphic tradition—
his great influence in this way on Paul Hogarth, for instance, has already
been mentioned.
After World War II, Klingender became much interested also in
social psychology. His years of economically precarious existence finally
ended when he received an appointment in that field at Hull University
after giving a solemn promise to keep politics out of his teaching. Although
able to carry out interesting research in
he had few students, he was
564 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

sociology. The security and the constructive work of his last years—he died
in 1955 at the age of forty-eight—brought Klingender a mellowness pre-
viously lacking in his life.
To a considerable degree, Francis Klingender’s books reflect the influ-
ence of that major current of art history, theory, and criticism known as
“Kunstsoziologie” (Art Sociology). This originated out of two books, Les
Problémes de lesthétique contemporaine (1884) and especially L’Art au
point de yue sociologique (1889) by the French sociologist Jean Marie
Guyau. Reacting against the English Utilitarians and the mechanistic
determinism of Taine, Guyau held that social phenomena, like organic
phenomena, were interpretable only in terms of the principle of life, and
that every individual, far from being an isolated entity, was bound by
sympathy to all other creatures, achieving completeness in unity with
them. Applying this to aesthetics, he declared that art is a social phenome-
non whose aim is to produce an aesthetic emotion of a social sort, an idea
he apparently derived from his friend the painter Paul Chenavard, whose
interest in Saint-Simonianism and Fourierism was mentioned earlier.
Guyau’s L’Art au point de vue sociologique was promptly read by
Kropotkin with such admiration that he called Guyau an “anarchist
without knowing it,” “ and was much influenced by him. It was, however,
in Central Europe that Kunstsoziologie developed further, doing so there
in close connection with Marxism. As a consequence, its supporters on the
Continent had to flee before the Nazis. One of those who did so was
Frederick Antal, who became Klingender’s good friend in 1933.

7. Frederick Antal
Born ar Budapest in 1887, Antal had been educated in Vienna, and
then had returned to Budapest, where he was on the staff of the Museum
of Fine Arts. In 1919, the rise of the Horthy counter-revolutionary dictator-
ship following the defeat in that year of the short-lived communist govern-
ment of Béla Kun compelled him, a Marxist, to leave his native city: he
went first to Vienna and then to Berlin. When Hitler came to power in
1933, Antal migrated to England, where he lectured occasionally at the
Courtauld Institute of London University, and where he died in 1954.
In England, Antal attracted wide notice in 1935 when he began to
publish in the Burlington Magazine, at the invitation of its editor, Herbert
Read, a series of five perceptive articles entitled “Reflections on Classi-
cism and Romanticism,” the last of which appeared only in 1941.*° The
theme of the series was set in the first article, where he wrote: “In defining
a style I believe that contemporary art-historians frequently devote too
much attention to the formal elements of art at the expense of its content.
They only too often overlook the fact that both form and content make up
 The Radicalism of Art Critics; and the Rise of the New Left / 565

a style. . . . Moreover, it is the content of art which clearly shows its

connection with the outlook of the different social groups for whom it
was created, and this outlook in its turn is not something abstract, it is in
the end determined by very concrete social and political factors.” “ In thus
attacking formalism and abstraction in art while upholding the view that
art is ultimately determined by social and political factors, Antal displayed
a fundamentally Marxian approach to art that could also be in some
harmony with contemporary Marxism-Leninism—although he never de-
scended to the narrow socialist realism officially imposed in the Soviet
Union in 1934. As a Marxist, however, he strongly emphasized the relation
of class to style in dealing with David and his contemporaries, with
Girodet, and with Géricault, the artist to whom he primarily devoted
these articles. To him, the hero was Géricault (Fig. 5), a member of the
middle class who became increasingly interested in progressive politics,
and who correspondingly devoted himself increasingly to depicting every-
day occurrences, and so to a new realism (or naturalism, as Antal called
it). Furthermore, Géricault supplemented such new realist themes by
frequent use of lithography—being the first great painter to employ this
recently invented mass-production medium “in his drive toward the
democratization of art.” *7 For Antal, Géricault became “the forerunner
of most that is progressive in nineteenth century French painting . . . a
revolutionary master.” *°
Shortly after World War II, Antal wrote a book that is one of the
most important examples of Kunstsoziologie, the volume entitled Floren-
tine Painting and Its Social Background; The Bourgeois Republic Before
Cosimo de’ Medici’s Advent to Power: XIV and XV Centuries. This was
published at London in 1947 by Routledge and Kegan Paul, of which
Herbert Read had been editorial adviser for nearly a decade. In the
preface, Antal thanked Read for his assistance while also thanking his
friend Francis Klingender. Antal sent a copy of this book (which was also
published in German, Czech, Spanish, French, and Italian editions) to his
much-admired friend Gyorgy Lukacs, the Hungarian communist aesthet-
cian and critic who had been Minister of Education in Béla Kun’s commu-
nist government in 1919, and was again holding that office in 1956 under
Imre Nagy at the time of the Hungarian Revolution suppressed by Soviet
arms.
In Antal’s book, however, as in two posthumously published volumes,
Fuseli Studies (1956) and Hogarth and His Place in European Art (first
published at London in 1962, then in the United States, Italy, and East
Germany), the author characteristically adopted an approach to art history
which can be described betteras that of an independent historian with a
basically Marxian approach than as that of a particular party line. Al-
though sympathetic to communism, he never actually subscribed to any
party. In his Florentine Painting and Its Social Background, for instance,
he stressed in only a general Marxian way the social class of the artist’s
566 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

patron as a determining factor in Florentine art. At the same time, he

attacked in this book that other approach to art which, basing itself on the
analysis of art forms essentially in isolation, is called formalism and is
rejected by orthodox Marxists and Marxist-Leninists.
Antal’s anti-formalist approach was in thorough accord with his con-
ception of art-historical method as expounded in his important essay,
“Remarks on the Method of Art History,” originally published in the
issues of the Burlington Magazine for February and March 1949. In it,
Antal specifically attacked the formalist point of view of the Swiss art
historian Wé6lfflin while especially upholding instead that of great art
historians of the Viennese School, Riegl, Wickhoff, and Dvorak, the last
of whom had been Antal’s teacher at Vienna. Riegl and Dvorak, espe-
cially, had rejected the formalistic isolation of art from other spheres of life
and had given a much more important place to the historical development
of style. As the chief exponents of the approach to art known as “Geistes-
geschichte,” they had interpreted the art of the catacombs, idealism and
realism in the Middle Ages, and the painting of E] Greco and Breughel
with reference to the inner spirit of man by means of specific reference to
religious and philosophical movements. Antal mastered this method of
establishing the relationship between the ideological trends of an epoch
and its pictorial expression, but applied it perceptively in all his books on
the basis of Marxian philosophy.

§. Arnold Hauser

Tw 1951, four years after Antal’s Florentine Painting and Its Social
Background was issued in London, Routledge and Kegan Paul published
another important example of Kunstsoziologie, and therefore of Marxian
influence on art history and criticism, written by another Hungarian-born
refugee from Hitler. The author was Arnold Hauser (1892— ), and his
book was The Social History of Art—a two-volume work that has appeared
in ten languages.
After three years of study at the University of Budapest, Hauser had
spent 1913-1914 as a university student in Paris and Berlin. At Paris he was
strongly influenced by Henri Bergson and the literary historian and critic
Gustave Lanson, at Berlin by the sociologists Georg Simmel and Max
Weber. During the years of World War I, Hauser remained in Budapest,
where he studied again at the University and was in close connection with
Gyorgy Lukacs and his Marxist circle. Hauser began to teach aesthetics
and the theory of literature at the University of Budapest in 1919, but, as
one sympathetic to Marxism, he—like Antal—found it necessary to leave
Hungary when the Horthy counter-revolution triumphed during that
year.
After traveling in Italy and pursuing art-historical studies there until
 The Radicalism of Art Critics; and the Rise of the New Left / 567

1921, Hauser returned to Berlin, where he studied sociology, economics,

and art history, being especially affected by the teaching of Werner
Sombart, Ernst Troeltsch, and the art historian Adolf Goldschmidt. Until
1938 Hauser lived in Vienna, and, in addition to continuing his art-
historical studies, investigated the techniques and theory of the film. Over
the years he had attended occasional lectures given by the formalist art his-
torian Heinrich W6lfflin, and he was especially stimulated by Wé6lfflin’s
writings, but remained convinced that formalism leads merely to an artistic
vacuum.
Because of the occupation of Austria by the Nazis in 1938, Hauser
migrated to England. There his friend, the sociologist Karl Mannheim,
author of Ideology and Utopia (1929), who had likewise been a member
of the Lukacs circle in Budapest, encouraged him to develop further his
interest in the sociology of art. Hauser was working in the office of a
motion-picture company when he brought the partly completed manu-
script of his Social History of Art to the attention of Herbert Read, who,
over a period of several years, encouraged him to complete the book. Then,
as editorial adviser to Routledge and Kegan Paul, Read insisted that the
work be published.
In 1951, the year of its publication, Hauser began to teach at Leeds
University. During the following winter, after his book had attracted wide
notice, he made a lecture tour of the United States, to which he returned
in 1957 to remain until 1959 as Visiting Professor of Art History at
Brandeis University. During his stay there, his book, The Philosophy of
Art History, partly reflecting a social but less specifically Marxian approach
to the history of art, was published in German at Munich in 1958, and
then in English at New York and London.
After Hauser retired from Brandeis in 1959, he went back to England,
where he has been lecturing at London’s Hornsey College of Art, though
during the academic year 1965-1966 he taught at Ohio State University.
His most recent published work—a two-volume book entitled Mannerism;
The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art (Munich,
1964; London and New York, 1965)—also reflects a social approach wider
than that usual among art historians stimulated by Marxism. Neverthe-
less, it emphasizes, as characteristic of modern artists, that alienation from
bourgeois society regarded by Marx as so deplorable a consequence of
capitalism.
Since the publication of Mannerism, Hauser has been working on a
book entitled Dialectic of Artistic Creation; A Sociology of Art. Although
this will demonstrate his wholehearted acceptance of the Marxist doctrine
of historical materialism, it will also reflect his now equally strong belief
that it is not necessary to be sympathetic to political Marxism in order to
subscribe to historical materialism. Furthermore, the social approach to art
is for Hauser today but one of several valid approaches related to one
another not organically, but simply by interpenetration.”
568 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

9. John Berger

Dvorine rue 1950's, the period when Hauser’s writings on art first became
widely known, the young English painter and eventual novelist John
Berger had begun to attract attention by his perceptive and highly stimu-
lating art criticism written from an independent Marxist point of view.
Berger, who was born at London in 1926, attended the Central and the
Chelsea schools of art. He began his working life as a painter and teacher
of drawing, exhibiting in London at various well-known galleries. He then
began writing art criticism, first for the left-wing Labour paper, Tribune,
and thereafter for ten years, until 1961, as the regular art critic of the New
Statesman, which, though founded in 1913 as a journal of Fabian socialism
by the Webbs, has been ambivalent in its attitude toward the arts: the
essentially apolitical formalist Clive Bell was its art critic for a time.
Berger has also written for such other English periodicals as the
non-Marxist Observer and Sunday Times, Marxism Today, and the official
Communist Party newspaper, the Daily Worker (now the Morning Star),
as well as for many newspapers and magazines on the Continent and in the
United States. He published books on the communist painters Renato
Guttuso and Léger in East Germany in 1957 and 1966, and some of his
articles appeared in the American communist cultural periodical Main-
stream in 1958-1959. He has been very active in television programs, and
since 1958 has published three novels.
Berger’s ideas about art as formulated and expressed during more than
a decade of excellent, if uneven, journalistic criticism were strongly influ-
enced by Frederick Antal, whose unofficial pupil he was during the last
three years of Antal’s life. It was Antal who taught him much about
method and gave him confidence in his own critical judgment, which can
conveniently be studied in a book consisting of some of the best of his
articles in revised form: Permanent Red; Essays in Seeing. Reflecting the
views of an independent Marxist sympathetic to the Communist Party, it
was issued at London in 1960 by Methuen, and two years later in New
York by Knopf in slightly altered form under the carefully different title
Toward Reality. Its caliber is indicated by the fact that Berger was the one
young English critic of contemporary art read with pleasure by the late
American—but cosmopolitan—art historian and critic, Bernard Beren-
son," who had no interest in social revolution or reform—indeed he
stemmed from the tradition of “art for art’s sake,” anathema to Marxists.”
One might add that Berenson—who long before had flatly rejected the
efforts of his wife to make a Fabian socialist out of him ®—was in turn
praised by Berger. As the latter put it, Berenson had “so often and so
wisely” said that “the vitality of European art lies in its ‘tactile values and
 The Radicalism of Art Critics; and the Rise of the New Left / 569

movement’ which are the result of the observation of the ‘corporeal

significance of objects.’”’ ** It becomes clear that the mutual admiration
between Berenson and Berger was based at least partly on a factor com-
mon to Berenson’s famous doctrine of tactile values in art and Berger’s
Marxian emphasis on realism in art—namely, their belief in common that
art should be fundamentally representational and not non-objective.
Thus the admiration of the anti-socialist Berenson and the Marxist
Berger for each other’s writings, resulting from shared ideas about art, had
nothing whatever to do with their respective social views, and shows that it
is entirely possible for critics as well as artists to admire one another’s
works in spite of holding opposing social doctrines. No doubt, however, it
was easier for Berenson to read John Berger’s art criticism with pleasure
because Berger has been by no means a rigidly doctrinaire Marxist or
Marxist-Leninist. He has not hesitated to make such statements as “Histor-
ical generalizations—and particularly Marxist ones—can dangerously over
simplify” and “the worst of Soviet painting sentimentalizes the achieve-
ments of labour. . . .” * He has also written: “Nor am I suggesting that
the artist, when actually working, can or should be primarily concerned
with the justice of a social cause.” * Even though the Soviet aesthetic of
socialist realism still officially rejects abstract art, Berger has declared: “No
student of twentieth-century European culture can reasonably deny that
certain abstract artists have contributed to the development of painting,
sculpture and architecture.” * Nevertheless, although Berger admits the
contributions made by some abstract artists, his reasons for doing so at
least partly parallel the post-war Marxist-Leninist line—for example, the
line on anti-“imperialistic,” anti-colonial nationalism. Thus he has written:
“probably the real importance of Picasso is that he has taught African and
Asian and Latin American artists to see the connection between their own
traditional art and the discoveries of the twentieth century.” *
However, in a later volume, The Success and Failure of Picasso,
published by Penguin in 1965, Berger emphasized his belief that Picasso
had failed to fulfill his potentialities. This failure he attributed not only to
Picasso himself, whom he accused of having early succumbed to assimila-
tion into bourgeois society, but also to Picasso’s communist comrades.
They ought to have pressed Picasso to visit India, Indonesia, Mexico, or
West Africa, where he could have found subjects worthy of his genius and
political convictions, and could have “become the artist of the emerging
world. . . .” * “In Moscow” too, “his reputation as a great man was used
for propaganda purposes—whilst his art was dismissed as decadent.” °°
Furthermore, Picasso’s personal circle of communist friends in France had
joined in heaping admiration ypon him as a king, placing him above all
criticism “—and thus (although Berger did not specifically say so) failing
to put into practice the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of mutual criticism.
Berger has, however, been much torn between his sympathy for
Marxist realism and his admiration for Picasso. His liking for realism led
570 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

him to be sympathetic to such essentially realistic artists as the members

of the Kitchen Sink School, especially John Bratby. Significantly, his
sympathy for Bratby’s work was strongest in those early days when the
artist “scrutinized his surroundings—greedily . . .” * and so had a particu-
larly realistic intent. Later, when with increasing success Bratby’s position
became more symbolic, Berger was less sympathetic, although in Marxist
fashion he did not entirely blame Bratby himself, holding that “in one way
or another this is the transformation which the rewards of our [capitalistic]
society usually bring about.” “
Though Berger’s sympathy for Marxist realism has conversely led him
to oppose symbolism and formalism in art, he has accepted Picasso’s cubist
period as his greatest,“ a fact demonstrating again that Berger’s own
definition of realism is an unusually broad one. In his book on Picasso, he
has specifically criticized official Soviet doctrine for seeking to make “a
style of naturalism . . . exclusively and universally the style of socialist
art.” © He had earlier declared: “The only thing shared by all Realists is
the nature of their relationship to the art tradition they inherit. They are
Realists in so far as they bring into art aspects of nature and life previously
ignored or forbidden by the rule-makers”—presumably meaning by “tule-
makers” the academic tradition. “It is in this sense that Realists can be
opposed to Formalists.” °° Among the realists Berger included not only the
early Renaissance painter Masaccio, for whom “the solidity of form was an
essential of Realism,” but also the Impressionists, for whom “‘the destruc-
tion of that solidity was an essential of Realism.” *
Being on the whole sympathetic to Marxist realism, and thus an
anti-formalist, Berger has characteristically rejected form in favor of sub-
ject-matter as the basis of content in art, declaring that “Content is what
the artist discovers and emphasizes in his subject-matter.” ® He has corre-
spondingly attacked, as a supreme exemplification of formalism, the art of
the American abstract-expressionist Jackson Pollock, through which, ac-
cording to Berger, “one can see the disintegration of our culture. . . .” ©
(Like most of the American artists who originated abstract expressionism,
Pollock had once been strongly involved with left-wing political art,”° but
later had given up expressing any socio-political interests.)
Such criticism of abstract-expressionism, the first American movement
in painting ever to have wide influence abroad, could be in harmony with
the general assault on American culture, partly under the leadership of
communists and communist sympathizers, which has been so strong since
World War II. To some degree, at least, this was connected with the
“peace” campaign, in which Berger played an important role as one of the
leaders of “Artists for Peace.” It was reinforced by the rise in England, as
well as on the Continent, of the Marxist “revisionism” of the New Left,
which Berger early supported by speaking at its meetings, writing for its
periodicals, and even selling its publications door-to-door. For a time the
New Left encouraged tendencies toward an avant-garde novelty in the
 The Radicalism of Art Critics; and the Rise of the New Left / 571

visual arts (though hardly in the art of literature), and many progressive
artists left the Communist Party to join it—to the disgust of Berger, whose
own relations with the party became close for a time. However, the New
Left’s ever greater emphasis on social commitment and on opposition to
American political policies soon led most of its supporters to uphold John
Berger in rejecting American abstract-expressionism, with the eventual
consequence that many artist-members resigned. As for Berger, though he
did not agree with the New Left that the failure of the British Communist
Party to condemn Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution consti-
tuted sufficient grounds for criticizing the party, he nonetheless argued
with the leaders of the party about their entirely negative attitude toward
the New Left. It might be added that if he were living in the Soviet
Union, his relatively liberal interpretation of Marxism in the arts would
still be officially attacked as revisionism, and his condemnation of the
1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia proscribed.
Meanwhile, as the spirit of innovation had increased in the visual arts
of the British avant-garde, for a time partly under the stimulation of the
New Left, the influence of Berger’s criticism had declined—one result
being that in 1961 his regular contributions to the New Statesman ceased.
With the publication of his Penguin paperback on Picasso, some resur-
gence of his influence occurred, but this was stronger in the United States.
There his book on Picasso, though a paperback, was reviewed on the front
page of the New York Times Book Review.”

10. The New Left

"Due New Lert in England—like the New Left earlier on the Continent,
and later to some degree in the United States—has stood for the social
commitment of a revisionist Marxism, stimulated especially by the spirit
of Marx’s early, but belatedly published, Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1844. In England, the New Left first appeared in 1956 as a
coalition. of those—mostly young—people who were disenchanted both
with the Labour Party and with the Communist Party in the year of
Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin’s reputation and the suppression by Soviet
arms of the Hungarian Revolution.
Within the Communist Party itself, opposition to the Soviet inter-
vention in Hungary had been led by a group around an unofficial Com-
munist journal, the Reasoner, founded by Edward P. Thompson and John
Saville in July 1956. This bore the same name as several earlier radical
journals, the first of which, in 1808, had significantly combined Jacobin
demands with nationalistic patriotism; another had from 1846 to 1861
been the leading Owenite journal. When the executive committee of the
Communist Party, in upholding the Soviet action in Hungary, had high-
572 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

handedly claimed that party rules gave it the authority to prohibit inde-
pendent Communist publications such as the Reasoner, and suspended
Thompson and Saville, the two promptly resigned from the party after
only three numbers of the Reasoner had been published. In its place they
founded the New Reasoner, an organ of the as yet unnamed New Left.
The New Left took its name from the New Left Review, which was
founded in 1959. The first number appeared in the winter and spring of
1960, although the New Left as a movement received its name only after
C. Wright Mills’s “Letter to the New Left” was published in the issue for
September-October of that year. The periodical, illustrated with drawings
in its early issues, had been founded more or less as a spiritual but
revisionist successor to the Left Review of the 1930's. Indeed, supporters of
the New Left even organized an exhibit of Left Review cartoons by the
three James’s—Boswell, Fitton, and Holland. This was one of numer-
ous exhibitions put on at the Partisan Coffee House established in 1959
within the premises of the New Left Review located in London’s bohe-
mian Soho district.
The New Left Review had, in fact, resulted from a merger of the New
Reasoner with the Universities and Left Review. From 1957 until these
two periodicals merged in 1959, they had led the new trend in opposition
to the leadership of the British Communist Party, which had continued
to accept without any protest the suppression of the Hungarian Revolu-
tion. And the New Reasoner—to which James Boswell, together with Paul
Hogarth and _other artists of the New Left, contributed—had especially
fostered an interest in the arts among those dissatisfied with the Com-
munist Party by showing itself to be sympathetic to a much broader ap-
proach to art than that represented by Soviet socialist realism. For instance,
it published an article by Hogarth on “Russian Graphic Art of [the Revo-
lutionary Year] 1905” in which the author sought to extend the terms of
reference for socially committed art to include a wide range of contempo-
rary aesthetic expression.
In the Universities and Left Review and the New Left Review, there
had first been published parts of two important New Left books on
cultural history, written by Raymond Williams, in which the arts were
given significant roles as part of culture: these were Culture and Society,
1780-1950 (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961). In Culture and
Society, Williams ascribed a key role to William Morris, that hero to the
New Left who had recently been celebrated in the big biography, William
Morris; Romantic to Revolutionary (1955), written by Edward P. Thomp-
son shortly before he had resigned from the Communist Party. (It will be
recalled that many members of the party had at first been inclined to re-
gard the book and its subject as dangerously unorthodox.)
The New Left’s strong early attention to culture and the arts, and its
Marxist spirit, so much less rigid than that of the British Communist
Party, enabled it to attract supporters representing a considerable variety of
 The Radicalism of Art Critics; and the Rise of the New Left / 573

social and cultural interests often reflecting more or less independence of

the official New Left. In addition to ideas deriving from the Marx of The
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and from Morris, its supporters
have borrowed ideas from such international Marxist intellectuals as the
Italian communist Gramsci, the Hungarian-born Lukacs, Trotsky and
Trotsky’s ex-Polish-communist biographer Isaac Deutscher, and eventually
Che Guevara and Régis Debray, a young French Marxist revolutionary
likewise devoted to Fidel Castro, and also to Mao. In addition, within
the New Left, especially among its more independent participants, have
been found strong elements of anarchism, as well of simple revolt against
“the Establishment” and of bohemianism springing from John Osborne’s
play Look Back in Anger, published in 1956. Like the supporters of the
New Left in France, those of the British New Left have opposed the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization and American intervention in the Do-
minican Republic and South Vietnam while upholding the campaign
for nuclear disarmament and expressing sympathy for Castro’s revolution
in Cuba. A typical New Left product of its time is the volume Out of
Apathy, edited by Edward P. Thompson in 1960 and consisting of essays
especially attacking the Atlantic Alliance and “Natopolis,” Thompson’s
term for that part of the world organized under NATO and the leadership
of the United States.
One important movement in the arts stimulated by the New Left was
Centre 42, a group of socially committed artists and writers whose aim is to
bring art to the masses. “Centre 42 Ltd.” was founded by Arnold Wesker,
a left-winger and one-time communist who has become one of Britain’s
leading angry young playwrights, having had several plays produced in
New York as well as in England.” Raised in a.communist family con-
nected with the garment trade in London’s lower-class East End, young
Wesker came under the influence of a brother-in-law who was a poet and
furniture craftsman in the Morris tradition. As a consequence, Wesker
apprenticed himself to a furniture maker who shared the same ideals, and
although he was soon compelled to give up the furniture trade by lack of
demand for their products, he has always remained sympathetic to Morris’s
doctrines. He next tried the building trade as a plumber’s helper, but left
to become a clerk in a bookshop. After service in the Royal Air Force, he
worked as a kitchen porter in a country hotel, then trained as a pastry-cook
in London and Paris: one result was that his first play was called The
Kitchen. Deciding that writing by itself was not enough, he joined the
Committee of 100, the civil disobedience group of the campaign for
nuclear disarmament, and in 1962 spent a month in jail for participating in
an anti-nuclear demonstration. ,
Meanwhile, late in 1961, deeply concerned by what he calls “the
terrible cultural bankruptcy” of modern life,* Wesker had become Artistic
Director of Centre 42, whose name came from a resolution passed by the
congress of the Trades Union Council in 1960 as number 42 on its agenda.
574 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

This began: “Congress recognises the importance of the arts in the life of
the community especially now when many unions are securing a shorter
working week and greater leisure for its members.” ®
The original scheme for Centre 42 called for one center to house
under a single roof all the arts, including therefore a permanent acting
company, orchestra, visual arts department, jazz band, etc——a kind of
organic synthesis of the varieties of art. But before the necessary funds
could be secured and the building begun, the Trades Union Council of
Wellingborough asked for the help of the Centre 42 group in mounting a
festival of the arts. As a consequence of this, five other trades union
councils asked for similar festivals in 1962, and it was decided to postpone
any building program and put them on within the year. The festivals were
the first of their kind anywhere. Each included, beside a trades union
exhibition, showings of the work of local artists as well as of local child art,
a new play, a youth-theater production of Hamlet, a folk-song concert and
folk-singing in pubs, a film festival, an evening of poetry and of jazz, and
other features. Art, including sculpture by Barbara Hepworth, was dis-
played in pubs; and among the folk-singers who sang in the pubs were
Dominic Behan, brother of Brendan Behan, and Pete Seeger, an American
folk-singer long sympathetic to the Left.
Ironically, in spite of the sponsorship of the trades union councils, it
would have been impossible for Centre 42 to have administered these
festivals without the aid of a grant from a foundation established by
capitalist Calouste Gulbenkian. The Centre would even then have ended
except for the promise of an anonymous wealthy donor to enable it to plan
ahead for two more years. Eventually, however, Centre 42 had to be given
up: it simply could not gain enough support from intellectuals.
The New Left’s early range of interest in cultural matters, including
the arts, so clearly reflected for a time in Centre 42, had at first been
particularly manifested in the New Left Review itself, which contained in
the articles of its early issues, as well as in its illustrations, a wide variety
of cultural materials. Both Edward P. Thompson and Paul Hogarth
were members of the editorial board in its first year. In the visual arts,
the Review showed itself sympathetic to the art criticism of John Berger as
an independent Marxian critic—even though from the beginning he was in
some respects critical of the New Left and angry that its artist-members
had left the Communist Party. Nevertheless, in spite of admiration for
Berger, the New Left Review showed that it regarded even his conception
of art as too restricted. In 1961, its reviewer of his book of criticism,
Permanent Red, after declaring that “John Berger . . . is far and away the
best art critic today,” opposed his attacks on the more completely abstract,
non-objective varieties of art. “I do not believe . . . Berger has demon-
strated that [wholly] abstract art has no relation to life . . .” he wrote.
“Much in contemporary abstract art is [as Berger claims] the result of
despair and its results are, formally, lifeless. But, in contrast, the formal
 The Radicalism of Art Critics; and the Rise of the New Left / 575

excitement and strength of an artist such as Mondrian is most naturally

seen as the product of a deep rooted sense of hope. Indeed if an artist’s
general attitudes can effect [sic] the formal qualities of his work at all, as
Berger rightly claims they can, there seems no adequate reason for denying
that abstract works are as susceptible to this effect as any others.”
However, we have seen that the New Left Review’s emphasis on social
commitment, combined with its objections to policies of the United States
government, led many of its supporters to join Berger in rejecting abstract
expressionism, which had originated in the United States thanks to the
influence there of wartime exiles from the Continent, including Mondrian
and numerous surrealists. As time went on, too, the political leadership of
the New Left alienated most of its artist-members by beginning to show
the same kind of politicalized Philistinism that had caused them to leave
the Communist Party. The New Left Review itself changed format and
editorial direction in 1962 and again in 1963. Even though its analyses and
style were increasingly influenced by a Continental socialist idiom and
methodology having a strong “idealist,” and thus revisionist, dimension,
simultaneously its aim became more totalized and rigid. By 1963 it was so
essentially devoted to political matter that it only occasionally published
cultural material and drawings. Meanwhile, the full flowering of the earlier
New Left cultural tradition was coming in other spheres—one example
was Edward P. Thompson’s notable book of 1963, The Making of the
English Working Class (a nostalgic evocation of a time when the working
class had been genuinely revolutionary), another the founding of the
Centre for Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964. But even
these were belated exceptions: more typical had been the disappearance of
the art exhibitions in the Partisan Coffee House as the leaders of the New
Left increasingly sacrificed interest in the arts to political interests. Also,
their increasing philosophical idealism alienated E. P. Thompson, that
once devoted member and intellectual leader of the New Left, who by
1965-1966 was engaged in a bitter quarrel with the New Left Review,
outraged by its belief that Britain has been unable to develop a major
Marxist tradition. Still, the small group around the New Left Review
managed to keep it going, and in 1967-1968 was even getting out a series
of Penguin Books on subjects such as the trade-union movement and
problems of work. Characteristically, also, in the summer of 1968, the New
Left Review ran an article more than fifty pages long on “Components of
the National Culture” in which all consideration of creative art was
omitted on the grounds that the point of departure of the author was
necessarily political, and that although “art deals with man and society,” it
“does not provide us with their concepts.”
As the New Left gave up its former cultural interests for politics and
social problems, its more creative artist-members not only withdrew but,
disillusioned, also tended now to work in isolation, though often displaying
an independent New Left spirit. For a time their only active social
576 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

commitment was likely to be occasional participation in protests organized

by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or similar groups such as the
Committee of 100. But even here the support of intellectuals, including
artists, eventually fell off.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had been established in
January 1958 at the instigation of Kingsley Martin, editor of the New
Statesman, with Bertrand Russell and J. B. Priestley among its founders. It
achieved its high point on Easter Monday 1961, when 60,000 people,
artists and other intellectuals among them, packed London’s Trafalgar
Square for a “Ban the Bomb” demonstration. In 1965, however, less than
5,000 people showed up for a similar'demonstration.
Unlike the CND, the Committee of 100 relied on civil disobedience
in its “Ban the Bomb” and other protests. Founded in 1960 by Russell
and others, it had among its original members the playwrights John
Osborne and Arnold Wesker, the actress Vanessa Redgrave, and the poet
Christopher Logue. In support of its calls to protest, thousands deliberately
blocked the Queen’s highways—on a single day the police arrested 1,140
protesters, including eminent Committee members, Lord Russell among
them. Augustus John, though old and ill, took part in one sit-down.
As time passed, however, these groups widened—and diluted—their
protests, no longer focusing them on that one mighty problem of banning
the bomb. For instance, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament pro-
tested against American policy on Vietnam. Protesters became expected to
take a stand also on such problems as those of race relations, the Common
Market, industrial conditions, and housing schemes. At the same time the
protest demonstrations more and more attracted guitar-carrying, shaggy-
headed youngsters who found the rationale for their bohemianism in
politics rather than in those traditional bohemian fields of interest, the
visual and literary arts. Along with this new political bohemianism devel-
oped a revival of anarchism, political rather than artistic. In the face of
these developments, most of the big names, including the big names in the
arts, in the CND and the Committee of 100 quietly dropped away. Artists
who remained interested in social protest were now more likely to protest
as individuals against racism in South Africa or American intervention in
Vietnam.
Much as on the Continent and in the United States, though with less
violence in England, the New Left spirit of protest survived and increased
most prominently among students in universities and other institutions of
higher learning. The principal rebellion of art students occurred at Horn-
sey College of Art in London, where, late in April 1968, rebels occupied
the main building, to remain for weeks. With the support of some
members of the teaching staff, they refused to leave until granted participa-
tion in forming teaching methods so as to have less emphasis on academic
requirements and examinations and more on freedom of creativity. A
similar revolt took place at Guildford College of Art in Surrey, now the
 The Radicalism of Art Critics; and the Rise of the New Left / 577

Guildford College of Design, and there as at Hornsey College the protests

had more to do with methods of teaching art than with politics.
It should now be noted that in England the years from the mid-1950’s
to the later 1960’s, during which social protest had been led especially by
the New Left and by organizations to “Ban the Bomb” and to assail
American policies in Vietnam, as well as to reform higher education, had
also been a period in which social protest became less and less class-
oriented. This fact too contributed strongly to the disintegration of the
traditional English Left. The “Angry Young Men,” for instance, who had
started out in such violent lower-class protest against the Establishment,
eventually found that they had established a vogue largely accepted by the
Establishment itself—a fact making it peculiarly difficult to keep the
protest going. They also discovered, as has so often been found in the
history of art in modern times, that engagement in social protest affects
different arts quite differently. For instance, for a time at least, it is likely
to give rise to effective novels and dramas of protest, such as those by John
Osborne and Arnold Wesker. It is likely to encourage the production of
distinguished histories of social protest, such as E. P. Thompson’s History
of the English Working Class. But it is equally likely to have particularly
adverse effects on such visual arts as sculpture and painting. After all, there
has never been such a thing as an artistically significant sculpture of protest
alone, and it is therefore noteworthy that the greatest of British sculptors,
Henry Moore, has kept his social interests separate from his art. It is
doubtless significant, too, that Francis Bacon, perhaps the greatest contem-
porary English painter, has been apolitical. We have seen that participa-
tion in social protest has been all too likely to consume the time and
energy of sculptors and painters (in contrast to cartoonists or artist-
reporters, for instance) while contributing nothing to the artistic signifi-
cance of their works.
Certainly the British Communist Party in the 1960’s was in no
position to stimulate protest by many radical artists or to influence them
otherwise, whether socially or politically or artistically. The most prolific
party-line critic in the post-war years, the literary critic Arnold Kettle, had
become largely a voice in the wilderness.” Even though the party had so
far given up orthodox Marxist-Leninist doctrine maintained by the Soviet
Union as to have committed itself to acquiring power through parliamen-
tary means, such a concession did not prevent its decline in size and
influence. By 1967 it was in serious difficulties, with a membership totaling
only about 33,000 after diminishing for three successive years. Further-
more, in 1967 the party was split when the support given by its leaders to
Moscow’s condemnation of Israel in the Arab-Israeli War led to open
revolt and some resignations. When, however, in 1968 the same leadership
criticized the Russians for invading Czechoslovakia, some hard-line mem-
bers were alienated, thereby further reducing the party’s unity and
strength. And although in March 1967 its Executive Committee called for
578 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

“free development” of the arts in Britain and for a multiplicity of audi-

ences and critical views,” the concession came much too late to prove
attractive to artists.
By 1968, then, the Old Left had lost nearly all influence, political and
artistic, in England, while the organized New Left, having lost nearly all its
interest in the arts, was no longer influential among artists. However, some
Pop artists, Peter Blake among them, were socially concerned in an inde-
pendent way, even though in England, where the term Pop Art had
originated in the mid-1950’s, only one Pop Artist, Richard Hamilton,
could be described as a political activist. And even Hamilton has painted
only one Pop Art picture with a specifically political point. This, executed
in 1964, was a satirical portrait of Hugh Gaitskell (d. 1963), the leader of
the Labour Party, who Hamilton believed had prevented that party against
the will of its majority from condemning Britain’s nuclear attachment.
However, independent elements of the New Left, especially individ-
ualistic young anarchists often collaborating with Trotskyites, and some-
times even Maoists, have recently been responsible for a major revival of
one kind of art in England—satirical graphic art used to illustrate lively
radical periodicals of small circulation.”
The most talented artist contributing to such New Left periodicals
has been Gerald Scarfe.™ Still in his early thirties, Scarfe has been com-
pared by the critics with the eighteenth-century satirical graphic artist
James Gillray (d. 1815), and also with Bosch, Goya, and Grosz. Scarfe had
a middle-class upbringing in London. After having been bedridden by
asthma for most of his first nineteen years, he worked briefly for an
advertising agency, a period he has described as the worst of his life. He
then began to free-lance, and even though he had never had any formal
training, his mordant satirical drawings were soon being eagerly sought by
radical publications. In 1966 he was even hired by a large non-radical
newspaper, the Daily Mail; and in that same year an album of his work,
Gerald Scarfe’s People, was published. He traveled in Vietnam in
1966-1967, drawing the illustrations for Richard West’s Sketches from
Vietnam (1968), some of which were far from flattering to the Americans
there (Fig. 90). In the fall of 1968, when he was political cartoonist for
London’s Sunday Times, an exhibition primarily of his three-dimensional,
papier-maché caricatures of American political figures was held by a New
York gallery with reference to the American election campaign. Many of
the works displayed he had made for the London Sunday Observer and
Time magazine.
In being a kind of individualist anarchist so independent as to be
almost nihilistic at times, Scarfe reflects important currents within the
New Left movement. However, he has declared that in all his work he tries
to avoid any political basis, explaining that he is neither for the Left nor
for the Right but must deride whatever he considers unjust. Scarfe’s
 FIG. 90. “{American] Soldiers in Transport Plane” (1966-1967) by Gerald
Scarfe, from Richard West, Sketches from Vietnam (1968).

powerful satirical art, insofar as it is a kind of continuation of the English

tradition early represented by Gillray, has brought us full circle, because in
continuing the spirit of the eighteenth-century English tradition of carica-
ture, it is hardly avant-garde in any usual sense of the term in spite of
associations with aspects of the social radicalism of the New Left. Some-
what similarly, the writings of John Osborne and others of the “Angry
Young Men” (who with time have become far less angry and radical) have
been avant-garde not in form but only in their subject-matter of protest—
and so have not been truly avant-garde. In fact, the idea of avant-garde is
something relatively new in English art: in the visual arts, works con-
sciously avant-garde in form as well as subject-matter were rare in England
until after World War II, partly because the Royal Academy was never so
officially dominant or so rigid im its attitudes as the academies of France
and other continental countries, the Soviet Union among them.
The idea of avant-garde itself came to England primarily from the
Continent, where, we know, it originated in connection with social radical-
ism. Some of the strongest avant-garde influences that have affected Eng-
580 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN ENGLAND

land (and most of the rest of the world) originated on the Continent
partly under the stimulation of the ideal of Ruskin, Morris, and their
followers, as these influenced architecture, city planning, and industrial
design. In those fields, however, the continental avant-garde developments
have been made less in France (where the academic tradition dominated
architecture longer than the other arts) than in Germany, Holland, Bel-
gium, Scandinavia, and Austria, where they often have been related to
major varieties of social radicalism that have also affected other arts.
 PARTIV

Radicalism, Marxism, and

the Theory and Practice
of Art in Germany and
Other Continental
Countries (Holland,
Belgium, Scandinavia,
Austria, Italy)
 12
RADICAL ARTISTS AND
CRITICS OF GERMANY, ETC.,
HROM THE EARLY
NINETEENTH CENTURY TO
THE END OF WORLD WAR I,
CA. 1825-1918

1. Germany:
The Nineteenth-Century Background

Unrm the ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris reached the Conti-
nent, where they linked up easily with influences coming especially from
anarchism and from revisionist currents within Marxism, continental
Marxists showed comparatively little interest in the arts. Not only had
Marx in maturity stressed change in the mode of production as the one
fundamental factor in economic development; not only had he regarded
political action as the major means of bringing economic change about
more rapidly; but also he had so emphasized the importance of the
proletariat that his followers especially concentrated their attention on
problems of the working class. Writing in 1903, the prominent German
social democrat and future communist, Rosa Luxemburg, declared: “The
working class will not be in a position to create a science and an art of its
own until it has been fully emancipated from its present class position.” *
Although when Rosa Luxemburg made this statement some German social
democrats were already showing an increasing interest in the visual arts,
“orthodox” Marxists considered that art could hold only a very secondary
place in the Marxian “superstructure.” Nevertheless, at least partly because
Morris had been a member of Marxian parties, now more Marxists on the
Continent were encouraged to begin to write articles and books on the
relation of Marxian communism to the arts. Even though the influence of
584 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

Morris and the arts and crafts movement first appeared strongly on the
Continent in Belgium, Germany as the chief continental center of social
radicalism gradually became a major center for the theory and practice of
an artistic radicalism often closely linked to social radicalism. The strength
of Marxian social democracy in Germany, the geographically central posi-
tion of the country, and eventually the willingness of German artists to
experiment helped to make Germany a kind of clearing-house for both new
social ideas and new artistic developments; and sometimes the two were
fused.
There had long been endemic in Germany certain theories and prac-
tices that made it especially easy for some of Morris’s ideas to be readily
accepted side by side with those of Marx. Many of these conceptions, like
those of Morris himself, came from romanticism. Many came from the
German idealism of Kant, that revolutionary republican much influenced
by the early romantic conceptions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose por-
trait he wore in a locket.
Under the joint influence of romanticism and Kantian idealism, the
German thinkers of the early nineteenth century were in revolt against the
whole Newtonian tradition, and especially against the mechanistic point of
view that the eighteenth-century French rationalists had developed. Al-
though the Germans too stressed reason, it was not the discursive analyti-
cal reason of the French Philosophes but the higher reason, regarded as
independent of sensible experience and as the creative power from which
the world of phenomena derives its reality.
This reaction of German philosophical thought against Newton,
reaching its extreme in Hegel,” abolished the opposition between matter
and spirit, between the external and inner worlds. The unity of existence
was regarded as a kind of vital rhythm reconciling into an ultimate
harmony opposite and apparently irreconcilable realities—so that the Ger-
man view of life became, not mathematical, but, as it were, musical. And
out of this approach to life arose a new attitude toward both society and
history. No longer was a people looked upon. as an accumulation of
separate individuals artificially united by conscious agreement for mutual
advantage, as Locke and the French philosophers, including even Rous-
seau, had maintained, but an organic, harmonious, spiritual unity by which
and for which its members exist. Although foreshadowed in Diderot’s
“cosmic polyp,” this organic conception first found its full expression in
the writings of the German ‘romantic Herder, who used the idea of a
“collective soul” to explain the development of literature and art. In
contrast to the French philosophers who regarded civilization as an ab-
stract unity, Herder had called it “an individual good that is everywhere
climatic and organic, the offspring of tradition and custom.” ® Here was
the emphasis on civilization as a kind of historical organism that was to be
carried further in Fichte, Hegel, and Marx—and eventually, also, in that
ancestor of nazism, Spengler. But whereas Herder’s concentration on
 Radical Artists and Critics of Germany, etc. / 585

specifically national genius was to be developed by Fichte and Hegel, and

eventually by the Nazis, it was to be largely denied in the internationalism
of Marx and by German artists and art movements influenced by Marxism.
Through Rousseau, Kant too had been affected by foreshadowings of
collectivity. As he said, it was from Rousseau, whom he regarded as the
Newton of the moral world, that he had learned not to despise “the mob
that knew nothing.” * He had also elaborated the premises and assump-
tions of the French Revolution to such a degree that Marx even called him
its theorist.? Under the direct influence of the events of that Revolution,
Fichte had developed his own philosophical system, and as a consequence
insisted upon complete equality, not merely equality before the law, but an
“equality of rights,” so that he was later referred to as the German Babeuf
by Moses Hess, who played so large a part in converting Engels to a largely
Saint-Simonian socialism. Like Marx and Morris later, Fichte made use of
the concept of the social organism (even though as a German nationalist
he applied it to the state, as Hegel also was to do). He was among those
who early brought forward schemes for cooperative workshops and commu-
nistic associations. He demanded an organic economy wholly surveyable
and regulated—with the result that he has been called Germany’s first
socialistic author. In spite of being a nationalist, Fichte declared, “It is the
goal of all government to make government superfluous,” * a statement
that could lead easily to anarchism as well as to the “withering away” of
the state.
Hegel was influenced by Fichte, and Marx believed that he stood
Hegelian idealism on its feet to produce Marxian materialism. Because
Morris showed a degree of idealism—when he called himself a real
Marxist, he nonetheless always retained the concept of ideal beauty in art
—his art theory in this respect could eventually appeal to the strong
current of idealism in Germany while in other respects satisfying orthodox
fellow-Marxists there. And the anarchistic tendencies in Morris, of which
Engels had complained, could harmonize quite well with the strain of
anarchism in German idealism, which stemmed from Fichte and eventu-
ally appeared strongly in Max Stirner and in Nietzsche, who regarded
Stirner as one of the unrecognized seminal minds of the nineteenth
century.
Furthermore, the interest in the practical problems of housing and
town planning that occupied so many of Morris’s followers fitted in with a
long German tradition of housing for the common man, built not by
private initiative but by municipal or state authorities—a tradition origi-
nating in the late Middle Ages, when free towns had at times erected
housing developments for their poorer citizens. Much of this medieval
housing had merit as architectural art, and so established a point of view
toward housing which went beyond sheerly physical utility.
In the early nineteenth century this Germanic tradition of civic
housing was given a new impetus and extended into large-scale planning,
586 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

mainly as a result of the deification of the state by such philosophers as

Fichte and Hegel. Fichte had strongly emphasized the planning function
of the state as necessary for benefiting society. Hegel, after first declaring
that the state must perish because it treated free men as cogs in a machine,
had come to regard it as the very core of historical life, even though he
refused to subordinate to it art, religion, and philosophy, which he re-
garded as transcending the realm of finitude to which the state belongs.
After the Hegelians split into two groups, both the Right and the Left
Hegelians could be expected to continue to emphasize the state. Even
Marx (who came out of Left Hegelianism) did so in his conception of the
period after the revolution of the proletariat and before the state should
wither away—and for this was assailed by the great anarchists, most of
whom were not German.
Because of this climate of opinion in which the state was regarded as
so important for man’s well-being, various forms of state socialism natu-
rally developed in Germany, once the socialist movement got under way
there in the revolutionary days of 1848, which profoundly affected some
artists (e.g., Fig. 91). And state socialism could help to create an atmos-
phere in which eventually the conception held by Morris and his followers
of the importance of art for the welfare of man could prove so attractive
that the state itself could regard the propagation of art as part of its
function. A kind of state socialism had been advocated in Germany as
early as the 1850’s by a group of “statist-liberals” with Rodbertus as chief.
Rodbertus, influenced somewhat by Saint-Simonianism, was an opponent
of the laissez-faire liberalism so important in England and other major
countries, and also insisted, not unlike Fichte, that the state should so
control the economy as to assure the well-being of all its subjects. Much
the same point of view was adopted by the movement known as “Socialism
of the Chair,” or “Professorial Socialism,” which had a very wide vogue
among German intellectuals in the 1860’s and 1870's.
In the 1860's, too, the first important program in Germany for state
socialism was formulated by Ferdinand Lassalle~ (1825-1864), who was
Marx’s rival although he often referred to Marx as his master. Unlike
Marx, he was prepared to side with the Prussian state against the bour-
geoisie, whereas Marx was against that kind of state even if opposition
meant temporarily siding with the bourgeoisie. It was Lassalle who
founded the first political party for workingmen: in 1862, three years after
he had fallen out with Marx, he had addressed a meeting of workingmen’s
associations in Berlin, making such an impression with his speech that
within a year he found it possible to establish a workers’ party. By a process
of amalgamation with later but similar movements, including Marxian
movements, this became in 1875 the Social Democratic Workers Party,
and—taking over concepts of social democracy that Engels had formulated
by about 1880—eventually developed into the patty which in 1891
officially called itself the Social Democratic Party of Germany. But twenty
 Radical Artists and Critics of Germany, etc. / 587

years before the amalgamated party adopted this title, German social
democracy had already begun to assume the leading place in continental
socialism, replacing the socialism of France, which was slow in recovering
from the destruction of the French working-class movement with the
Commune. The rise of social democracy in Germany was accomplished
though Bismarck, after two attempts by terrorists to assassinate the Ger-
man emperor, had begun in 1878 to put into effect a series of anti-socialist
laws that had largely compelled the social democrats to go underground
and remain there until he fell from power in 1890.8 Two years earlier, a
unified Social Democratic Party had already been formed in Austria, where
its influence steadily increased.
During the period when Bismarck had been seeking to repress the
social democrats by anti-socialist laws, he had also been developing a kind
of conservative, or “feudal,” state socialism in Germany. This he did in a
deliberate effort to weaken the social-democratic movement further while
also holding down the middle-class liberals whose economic policy of
laissez-faire he strongly opposed. These ends he had sought to accomplish
by forming for a time a working alliance with Lassalle’s version of state
socialism, and by adopting, as a sop to the socialists, a few of the measures
that they advocated. Although Bismarck’s program did not include hous-
ing, it did help to foster—despite his own views—an atmosphere of reform
in which eventually even many non-socialists became willing to support
new architectural solutions to public housing problems, as well as other
goals of the socialists in Germany.
Thus, in contrast to socialism in most other countries, a few aspects of
the socialist program in Germany were even supported by conservatives.
More parts of the program were also supported by many liberals, especially
those sympathetic to the ideas of Pastor Friedrich Naumann, a Wiirttem-
berg liberal and German patriot who sought to reconcile nationalism and
socialism within a social Christian movement, and then in turn with
political democracy. Although as a politician Naumann was unsuccessful,
his ideas had an enormous appeal for many German intellectuals in the
years before World War I, and he was one of the founders of the
Deutscher Werkbund, which reflected the influence of William Morris
while in addition linking art and industry.
Meanwhile, the German socialists themselves were rapidly increasing
in number and influence despite a split between the “orthodox,” or
revolutionary, Marxists and the many who subscribed to the revisionist,
evolutionary variety of Marxism which proved less frightening to the
middle class, including some artists. German revisionism—the first of
many varieties of revisionism—was founded in the late 1890’s by Eduard
Bernstein, who had been converted to communism by Friedrich Engels in
London, and was his literary executor. Bernstein’s doctrines, seeking to
correct Marxism by Kantian idealism, and affected also by ideas coming
from colleagues of Morris and from Fabianism, were chiefly developed out
588 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

of the later views of Marx, and especially of Engels. For Engels in

particular had become less doctrinaire: he had seen how developments in
England were producing results very different from what he and Marx had
predicted, and his trip to the United States and Canada in 1888 had shown
him that special conditions prevailed in those countries also. His study of
the special problems of socialism, including communism, in America now
led him to believe that the Marxian “superstructure,” including the arts,
was less completely determined by the economic base than Marx had
supposed, and also to declare: “Our theory is a theory of evolution, not a
dogma to be learnt by heart and to be repeated mechanically.” * ‘This
emphasis on evolution rather than revolution, when applied to the arts,
would suggest that Marxian. art might grow, without any revolutionary
break, out of the art of bourgeois capitalism, and would also imply that
Marxists could collaborate with members of the bourgeois class in parlia-
ments and in other organizations, including organizations of artists. And
because revisionism derived partly from English Fabianism, which itself
had been influenced by the ideas of William Morris, the development of
revisionism in Germany made it somewhat easier for Morris’s ideas specifi-
cally concerning art to spread on the Continent from Belgium where they
had already taken root under socialist and anarchist auspices. Within
social democracy, therefore, the revisionists were more likely to be inter-
ested in the arts than were either the revolutionary far left or the center,
in which the trade unions were strong and which had become reformist
in fact while remaining more or less revolutionary in theory. One of the
outstanding revisionists, for instance, was Kurt Eisner, whose views were
similar to those of Jaurés in France, and who was a gifted literary critic.
(He was destined to organize the successful revolution of November 1918
against the Bavarian monarchy, and, as a member of the Independent So-
cial Democratic Party, to become the first republican premier of Bavaria.)
In Germany, then, it was side by side with the rise of revisionism that
interest in Morris’s ideas developed. The immediate founder of German
revisionism, Bernstein, had been especially stimulated by an article written
by Morris’s friend, the English Marxian socialist Ernest Belfort Bax, who
had been educated partly in Germany, where he had studied music. Bax’s
article called for a synthesis of idealism and materialism, and was pub-
lished in the German Marxian socialist magazine Neue Zeit, in the first of
the volumes for 1896-1897."° Bernstein himself, already engaged for two
years in controversy with orthodox Marxists over questions of theory (he
was perfectly satisfied with contemporary Marxist practice), now called for
such a synthesis. His own complete version appeared in his chief work,
Evolutionary Socialism, first published, in German, in 1899 —and was
attacked by Henry Adams, prototype of the intellectual fellow-traveler, for
taking “the only original idea of this century” and reducing it “to a pile of
faulty statistics.” * In this book, Bernstein sought to demonstrate by
assertions from Marx and Engels that ideological factors (which for ortho-
 Radical Artists and Critics of Germany, etc. / 589

dox Marxists are part of the superstructure that includes the arts) must
be taken into full account—thereby implicitly giving a much greater
importance to art in its own right. These attempts of Bernstein and of Bax
(although he rejected Bernstein’s revisionism) to combine Marxian mate-
tialism with idealism were promptly attacked by the orthodox Marxist,
Karl Kautsky,* who, the son of a painter and a novelist, was interested
in problems of aesthetics. In 1894, the year before Engels’s death, Kautsky
had been in charge of publishing from Marx’s incomplete notes what
would have formed the fourth volume of Das Kapital, and therefore
regarded himself as Marx’s true heir. But though faithful to Marx’s revolu-
tionism in theory, he abandoned it in practice; and though he rejected
modern art as “idealistic,” his aesthetics showed some Kantian influence.
It was Kautsky who, in 1883, the year of Marx’s death, had established
the Neue Zeit as the organ of German social democracy, thereby giving
Marxism what it had never had before, a public platform—one to which
Engels himself contributed in his last years. The Neue Zeit now imposed
itself on the Second International as the authoritative voice of the fastest-
growing socialist movement in Europe. And it gave Kautsky the important
position he needed to take the lead in attacking the revisionists—whose
idealism was largely a product of the Neo-Kantian revival that had begun
in Germany in the 1870’s. Under Kautsky’s leadership, at Hanover in 1899
the Social Democratic Party reafirmed its adherence to the orthodox
dogma of materialism, thereby rejecting revisionism.
In addition to this split between the more orthodox social democrats
and the revisionists, other splits developed, especially after the Russian
Revolution of 1905 had strongly raised the question of revolution versus
reformism. Thus there was conflict between the revolutionary group on the
far left and the reformist center, which to complicate matters had a revolu-
tionary left wing of its own. (In World War I these splits gave rise to
the anti-war and revolutionary Independent Social Democratic Party,
whose far-left wing was to break away to form the Communist Party.)

2. German Social Democracy and Art Theory

Mreanwume, there had been considerable discussion among German
social democrats as to whether naturalism in art—as distinguished from
realism—was the true expression of Marxian materialism. In 1896, at a
party meeting in Gotha at which the relation of Marxism to naturalism
had been discussed at length, Wilhelm Liebknecht had branded natural-
ism as the product of decadence, of the rottenness of capitalist society—
and thus to be sharply distinguished from materialism. Many years later
this same distinction was to be reaffirmed in the Soviet Union.
590 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

From the end of the nineteenth century on, such discussions about art
theory and practice steadily increased among German and Austrian social
democrats,’ no doubt partly as a result of the encouragement to art earlier
given by Belgian socialists who were stimulated by anarchists. Especially
influential were two books written by Emil Reich, a moral philosopher
who came to be regarded as the aesthetician of the labor movement in
Germany and Austria. These, respectively published in 1899 and 1901,
were entitled Die biirgerliche Kunst und die besitzlosen Volksklassen
(Bourgeois Art and the Propertyless Classes of the People) and Kunst und
Moral (Art and Morals). In them, Reich gathered much historical mate-
rial on “social art” from both literature and the representational arts,
material which seemed to him to solve the problem of art for the people.”
The Social Democratic Party’s official interest in art had been espe-
cially stimulated, beginning in 1900, by a successful struggle to eliminate
certain anti-cultural paragraphs from a law regarded as inimical to the arts.
The fight against the law had begun with a speech entitled “For the
Freedom of Art,” delivered by Georg von Vollmar on March 15, 1900.”
The Social Democratic Party then stepped into the fight so effectively that
it was regarded as the leader of‘all the anti-conservative groups who
opposed the law. A noted historian and liberal, Professor Hans Delbriick,
expressed regret that German culture and German liberalism could main-
tain themselves in this struggle only with the help of social democracy.
“Art, science, and culture,” he wrote, “have had to take refuge in Germany
under the wings of Social Democracy! . . . We've come to the point where
we cannot get along without this party any more.” And he called for all
the circles in Germany looking with favor on the campaign put on against
the law by the social democrats in the Reichstag, or elected body of the
imperial legislature, to support social democracy (and thus Marxism) in
the fight.
By 1914, the German social democrats—then constituting the largest
German party—had no less than 110 representatives out of 397 in the
Reichstag; and German Marxism was increasingly affecting socialists in
other countries, including the United States. The influence of German
Marxism abroad had been made greater by the strength in Germany of the
revisionists’ evolutionary kind of Marxism, much less frightening to non-
Marxian reformists, many of whom did not distinguish clearly between
Marxian revisionism and their own brand of reformism. In Germany, too,
again partly under the influerice of revisionists, the social democrats con-
tinued their interest in the arts as part of their continuing effort to attract
the total allegiance of their fellow-men in opposition to the claims of the
state. It was as part of this effort that they sought to develop an intense
cultural life in which the arts—especially music and literature, but also the
Freie Volksbiihne, or Free People’s Theater, and some of the visual
arts—were regarded as having an essential place. In this atmosphere, ideas
 Radical Artists and Critics of Germany, etc. / 591

from Morris and his group could easily spread in Germany and Austria
over the years, and at the same time could stimulate the further develop-
ment of Marxian art and art theory.
One of the most important German Marxist writers on art in the early
twentieth century was Wilhelm Hausenstein, an art historian destined to
have considerable effect on art theory in the Soviet Union through the
influence of his writings on Nikolai Bukharin, the painter who became a
celebrated Soviet political figure and theoretician, a leader of the Right
Opposition to Stalin, and a victim of the purges in the late 1930's.
Hausenstein’s ideas reached Bukharin through his book Die Kunst und die
Gesellschaft (Art and Society), published in Munich in 1917.*° This,
written from a Marxian point of view, had originally been published in
1911 as the first half of a book entitled Der nackte Mensch in der Kunst
aller Zeiten und Volker (The Nude in the Art of All Periods and Peo-
ples).
In Die Kunst und die Gesellschaft, Hausenstein sought to develop a
social aesthetic and to apply it throughout art history to a single subject,
the nude. In so doing, he acknowledged that he had been particularly
stimulated by the slightly earlier work of Jules Coulin, Die sozialistische
Weltanschauung in der franzésischen Malerei (‘Vhe Socialist World-View
in French Painting), which had been published in 1909 at Leipzig. In his
book, Hausenstein declared that the prevailing mode of social life deter-
mined, not the materials used by artists, but the forms that they employed
at any given period; on this basis he arrived at a sociology of style. ‘This
stressing of the formal element, in the idealistic tradition of the German
aesthetician Herbart (d. 1841), contrasted sharply with Morris’s basic
emphasis on the nature of the specific materials used by the artist. It is
doubtless significant that Hausenstein predicted the ultimate subjugation
of materialism and a new affirmation of the religious spirit. It is also
significant that his Russian admirer, Bukharin, was to be accused of
formalism by Stalin and his followers, who eventually linked Hausenstein
himself with other formalists, including the art historian and theorist,
Heinrich Wo6lfflin, as subscribing to the deviation known as “vulgar
sociology.” *°
As a Marxist who insisted on a socially oriented aesthetic, Hausenstein
maintained that individualism (on the basis of which art history, as the
history of individual artists, had ordinarily been written) was only one
particular form in which social life had manifested itself, a special—and
highly exceptional—category within social history.” Hausenstein also
stressed the point that bourgeois societies, whether in fourth-century
Greece, in Florence during the Renaissance, or under nineteenth-century
industrialism, have produced works of art characterized by naturalism. For
him, then, classical art—including the neo-classical art of David (Fig. 1),
and thus much of the radical art of the French Revolution—has been
592 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

thoroughly bourgeois. However, Hausenstein declared that in the nine-

teenth century, with artists such as Daumier, Millet, and especially Cour-
bet, a new social power in art had appeared, particularly after 1848, when
the proletariat first really developed as a great power in Europe. Along with
the rise of the proletariat there began a realistic kind of art which repre-
sented the last gasp of the bourgeois spirit but foretold a new socialist art.
In certain respects, Hausenstein said, the Impressionists too were socially
motivated, and so likewise produced works that prophesied the coming of
truly socialist art. Here Hausenstein’s point of view is not unlike. that
accepted in the Soviet Union after the downgrading of Stalin’s reputation
by Khrushchev in 1956, for then Impressionism and the nude in art—which
had been frowned upon by Stalin—both became acceptable. One might
add, however, that about 1920 Hausenstein had even maintained that
non-realistic art, in rejecting passive reflection of nature, is better fitted to
Soviet active use of nature **—a statement, of course, entirely unacceptable
to Stalin, Khrushchev, and their successors in the U.S.S.R.
Hausenstein’s book not only influenced Stalin’s great opponent Bu-
kharin but also was a relatively early and prominent representative of the
sociological approach to art history that developed mostly in Germany and
Austria under strong Marxian influence. This Kunstsoziologie was to
spread from central Europe to other countries of western Europe, espe-
cially after 1933, when such ideas became anathema in Hitler’s Germany,
and their proponents were forced to migrate.
By the time Hausenstein’s Die Kunst und die Gesellschaft was pub-
lished as a separate book in 1917, the German social democrats had lost
face with many left-wingers outside of Germany as a consequence of their
support of the imperial German government in the war. One major result
was that in Russia, shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin insisted
that the Social Democratic Party there change its name to the Communist
Party. But the overthrow of the imperial German government after defeat
in the war, the period of disorder that followed, and the establishment,
with dominant socialist support, of the Weimar Republic all helped to
provide an atmosphere highly favorable to both social and artistic innova-
tions. During this period, artists stimulated by the Marxian artistic doc-
trines of Hausenstein and others, and also by William Morris’s ideas,
exerted particularly strong influence. At this time, too, the earliest develop-
ments in Soviet Russian art began to arouse particular interest in Ger-
many.
In contrast to events in Stalin’s Russia, however, no single socialist or
communist style of art was ever to develop in Germany, primarily because,
from its earliest days, German socialism was often torn by dissension, with
major conflicts between followers of the state socialism of Lassalle on the
one hand and Marxists on the other, between Marxism and the anarchism
of Bakunin, between the revolutionary socialism of the orthodox Marxists
and the evolutionary socialism of the revisionists, and between social
 Radical Artists and Critics of Germany, etc. / 593

democracy and the communism that spread from Soviet Russia. Neverthe-
less, although no one socialist or communist style developed in Germany,
certain tendencies affecting the arts there had implications for most of the
varieties of German socialism and communism.

3. German Socialism and

the Ideas of William Morris

Nor onty did all varieties of German communism and socialism in

theory tend to support the idea that some kind of housing for workers
designed by good architects should be erected at public expense, but also
most of them could be sympathetic to, and affected by, some of the artistic
doctrines of William Morris and the English arts and crafts movement,
although often for very different reasons. For instance, Morris’s medieval-
ism could appeal to many participants in the German Christian social
movement. Most of these were Roman Catholics, chiefly followers of the
greatest leader of the movement, Bishop von Ketteler (1811-1877) of
Mainz, some of whose supporters were also directly influenced by the
English Christian socialist and upholder of the cooperative movement,
J. M. Ludlow.” Like Ketteler and also like Morris (who had been stimu-
lated by Ludlow’s ideas), they sought to revive the guild system, though
most of them followed Ketteler rather than Morris in doing so as part of a
revival of German medieval Catholicism. But they had to do this without
calling themselves socialists because socialism and communism had been
denounced by Pius IX in Quanta cura, his Syllabus errorum of 1864. And it
had been further denounced by Leo XIII in his encyclical of 1878, Quod
apostolici, as well as in the encyclical Rerum novarum of 1891, in which he
first gave a vigorous impulse to the social movement along Christian
lines.
The more “Nordic” aspects of Morris’s thought—he had glorified the
Anglo-Saxon as an outstandingly “noble creature” **—could appeal to the
nationalist and even racist tendencies of some Germans, including some of
those who supported a specifically German state socialism. For those tend-
encies could easily give to the medieval revival fostered by Morris a
specifically German and Wagnerian cast that was to reach its peak under
Hitler and his National Socialists. But they had to ignore the fact that
Morris himself, while praising the Anglo-Saxon, had referred to him as a
member of a “queer mixed race.” *°
Morris’s arts and crafts movement (though not so much his medieval-
ism) also could appeal to, among others, some members of the various
Marxian factions within German and Austrian socialism. Like Morris, they
too could feel that the arts and crafts movement might offer a remedy for
594 fi RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

certain evils of the capitalist system, including, for art, the separation
between fine art and craft art, between artist and masses, between intellec-
tual and manual labor, and between work and enjoyment. Many German
and Austrian Marxists, therefore, could eventually become interested in
aspects of the arts and crafts movement, which they often tended to give a
conscious up-to-dateness in harmony with the Marxian emphasis on the
present and the future, on the machine and mass production, rather than
with Morris’s attempt to foster joy through handicraft in accordance with
what he regarded as the spirit of the medieval guilds. ,
Yet Morris’s influence in Germany was by no means restricted to
political radicals. In many respects, and especially in its underlying func-
tionalism, his point of view toward art was also accepted by many artistic
liberals and radicals who subscribed to a German tradition of functional-
ism in art which was not unrelated to the social radicalism that had
developed especially with the Revolution of 1848, the first strong expres-
sion of modern radicalism in Germany and Austria.

4. German and Austrian Radicalism,

Realism, and Functionalism from 1848:
Menzel, Strauss, WVagner, Semper
Ovz arrisr who reflected this new radicalism was the painter Adolph
Menzel (1815-1905). Profoundly moved by the Revolution at Berlin,
he painted the picture entitled The Public Funeral of Victims of the
March Revolution of 1848 (Fig. 91), the funeral at which King Friedrich
Wilhelm IV had been compelled to pay homage to the dead revolutionar-
ies. Menzel expressed his enthusiasm for the cause for which the victims
had fallen, and declared himself to be “plebeian in his views.” 7° But the
Revolution failed; and by 1852 the king felt able to order, at Cologne, the
first political trial of communists. Meanwhile, although despondency
caused by the collapse of the Revolution had kept Menzel from finishing
his picture, his “plebeian” sympathies continued and eventually helped
lead him to paint workingmen of the industrial era in a picture of 1875
entitled The Rolling Mill (Fig. 92). This was originally called The Mod-
ern Cyclops, for Menzel declared himself to be utterly enthusiastic about
the “Cyclopean World of Modern Engineering.” ?* Menzel was ennobled
in 1898—a fact suggesting again not only that those who are fadical when
young are likely to become less so with age, but also that ideas once
considered radical are with time often taken over by the Establishment.
The revolution of 1848 in Berlin, which had so stirred Menzel, had
been touched off by news of demonstrations in Vienna, which themselves
had been stimulated by news of the successful February Revolution in

FIG. 92. The Rolling Mill (1875) by Adolph Menzel.

 &
—

FIG en 4 a = i) Ay2 Q ‘2
— Ry a = Y -8 —_— iS) > 8 ~ wm iS)
—_—
~ = S March Revolution of 1848
(1848 ) by Adolph Menzel
596 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

France. Much as in Berlin, the Vienna demonstrations, fomented partly

by radicals, were led by democratic and liberal workers and students, then
regarded as radicals. On March 13, 1848, Emperor Ferdinand I was com-
pelled to dismiss and send into exile his great but reactionary minister,
Prince Metternich. In May, the Emperor himself had to flee from radical
Vienna. Although in October his army took the city after a siege, his
power had been so shaken that he abdicated in favor of his grandson,
Franz Josef.
The political revolution of 1848 in Vienna was paralleled by a revolu-
tion in architecture. A design for a suburban church made by one of the
court architects in a classical style descended from the Renaissance brought
a revolt against the academically classical point of view associated with the
court in favor of a revival of the German Gothic style. This was in har-
mony with the attitude of the revolutionary workers and students, who
were patriotically Great German, because they—like Richard Wagner in
Germany—tegarded the Gothic as particularly reflecting Germanic tradi-
tions. Even though the Habsburgs were firmly in control of Vienna after
the accession of Franz Josef to the Imperial throne, the new architectural
style had become so firmly accepted that in 1855 all the designs submitted
for the Votivkirche, to be built in honor of his escape from assassination
in 1853, were in the Gothic Revival style, as also was the new town hall,
begun in 1872. It is therefore clear again that social radicalism can at times
be racial and national in spirit—and, if it is, may use art forms that prove
to be acceptable also to the nationalist spirit of the Right.
Among the participants in the Vienna revolution had been the “waltz
king,” Johann Strauss the younger, and his brother Joseph, who likewise
became noted for his popular dance music. In 1848, Johann Strauss
repeatedly led his band to the barricades in Vienna, on which Joseph was
actively fighting; and there Johann and his musicians played stirring tunes,
including the Marseillaise and his own Revolutionary March, to hearten
the revolutionaries. Yet Johann Strauss’s waltzes were eventually to be
accepted throughout the world as a most characteristic product of the
Austrian Empire.
Members of the Strauss family, in the early 1850's, were the first to
introduce the music of Richard Wagner to Vienna. Like the waltzes of
Johann Strauss, the music and ideas of Wagner, also a participant in the
Revolution of 1848-1849, were to be accepted not only by radicals, artistic
and social, of the Left, but eventually also by the far Right. As noted
earlier, Wagner had probably been introduced to writings on socialism and
communism, including early works of Marx and Engels, by Bakunin, his
friend and fellow-revolutionary at Dresden. He certainly read one of the
works of Proudhon at Paris later in 1849; and still later in that year wrote
in Switzerland his Die Kunst und die Revolution, which was to exert a
strong influence on French anarchists, one of whom, indeed, was responsi-
ble for publishing the first French translation of it. In this work Wagner,
 Radical Artists and Critics of Germany, etc. / 597

not unlike Marx, had glorified the “free Greek” and also Greek tragedy as
an art for the populace, not merely the well-to-do. He had called for a
revolutionary art made possible by a social revolution. He had deplored the
splitting up of drama into such component parts as “rhetoric, sculpture,
painting, opera, etc. . . .” after the decay of Greek tragedy. In an anarchis-
tic vein he had called truly modern art “revolutionary because its very
existence is opposed to the ruling spirit of the community.” Later, in his
Ring music dramas, he-—like Marxists and anarchists—equated the theme
of the greed for gold with the “tragedy of modern capitalism.” ** But the
Germanic Weltanschauung of Wagner’s music dramas, his glorification of
the “Folk” in his Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Work of Art of the
Future), published in 1850, and his fanatical anti-Semitism, were to appeal
especially to Hitler and the Nazis. So also did his glorification of Greek art
because the Dorians were regarded by the Nazis as a Nordic tribe who
therefore were blood ancestors of modern Germans. Thus in the thought
of Wagner as in that of his friend Bakunin, or in the art and thought of
the futurists later, elements of anarchism and of fascism tended to come
together.
Wagner also continued that German romantic conception of the work
of art as an organism which has been so important for radical art. It was
implicit in his conception of the total and collective work of art, or
Gesamtkunstwerk, that term he invented in Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft.
Hence he declared in 1860: “An opera, in my view, [is] destined by its
complex nature to have as its objective that of forming an organism [my
italics] concentrating the perfect union of all the arts that contribute to
making it—the poetic art, the musical art, the decorative and plastic art.
. .”° In calling here for a perfect organic union of the arts, one not
unlike that of ancient Greek tragedy, Wagner was again emphasizing his
idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, that conception and term orginating out of
romantic Neo-Platonism and destined to have a profound influence on late
nineteenth- and twentieth-century art in Germany and elsewhere. It should
be added that for Wagner, as for the Nazis, the fructifying source of all art
was the “Folk,” but that like the anarchists, including Bakunin, he consid-
ered modern states to be the most unnatural associations of modern man.
As mentioned earlier, on the collapse of the Revolution at Dresden in
1849, Wagner had fled from that city with other participants, including
such friends as Bakunin and the architect Gottfried Semper (1803-1879).
Semper had seen, and sympathized with, the Revolution of 1830 at Paris.
He had become a republican and a political liberal at a time when
liberalism was still regarded in Germany as a form of revolutionary radical-
ism. As a participant in the Dresden Revolution of 1849 he had planned, at
Wagner's behest, and defendéd, revolutionary barricades. After the revolu-
tion, Semper saw Wagner briefly in Paris, but became an exile in England
from 1851 to 1855. There he not only designed several displays for the
Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace, but in the following year
598 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

also designed the Duke of Wellington’s funeral car. Wagner himself went
into exile in Switzerland, to which country he had originally escaped with
the help of that former Saint-Simonian and author of a Revolution Sym-
phony, Franz Liszt. When Semper left England and became Professor of
Architecture in Zurich, where Wagner was living, the two were able to
renew their friendship. Despite their earlier revolutionary spirit, both
became artists to royalty: Wagner received the patronage of King Ludwig
II of Bavaria, as (thanks to Wagner) did Semper, who also served as an
imperial architect in Vienna. Semper’s buildings, in their detail, hardly
reflect the avant-garde theories of organic functionalism expressed in his
writings. His theater plans, however, do give direct expression on the
exterior of the buildings to the shape of the auditoriums within, while the
opera house at Bayreuth, built between 1872 and 1876 as a simplified
version of Semper’s design for a never-executed theater for Wagner at
Munich, does exemplify Wagner’s own conception of a Gesamtkunstwerk.
This it does especially by seeking to give equal importance to the various
arts within opera by diminishing the previously dominant role of the
orchestra and conductor, placing them out of sight in a deep pit. Also, the
“real” space of the spectators is united with the “ideal” space of the stage
in a totality that Wagner thought achieved the effect of a Greek theater.
It was on the occasion of the opening of this building in 1876, marked
by the first performance of the Ring cycle, that Wagner is said to have
introduced to Semper the Austrian architect, designer, and eventual city-
planner, Camillo Sitte, who is often called the father of modern city
planning. As head of the State School of Applied Arts at Salzburg from
1875, and then of the similar school at Vienna, which he reorganized in
1883, Sitte approached the crafts in a manner similar to that of William
Mortis and apparently reflecting his influence. But it was Wagner who was
Sitte’s particular idol. Indeed, Sitte even modeled himself on Wagner's
Teutonic heroes and named his son Siegfried: appropriately, therefore, he
is said to have been commissioned by Wagner to design sets for Parsifal. In
his own Teutonic nationalism, Sitte even went beyond Wagner by seeking
to revive the Germanic medieval type of house—thereby anticipating Haus
Wachenfeld near Berchtesgaden, the “farmhouse” of Hitler, also an idol-
izet of Wagner.
In 1889, Sitte published his book, Der Stdédtebau nach seinen kiinstler-
ischen Grundsdtzen (City Building and Planning in Accordance with
Their Fundamental Principles), which was destined to have an interna-
tional influence affecting, among many others, the English Fabian town-
planner Raymond Unwin and also Soviet planners—it was translated into
Russian in 1925. In it, Sitte applied Wagner’s conception of the Gesamt-
kunstwerk to city planning. But he was immediately inspired by the Ring-
strasse development in Vienna, though he did not wholly approve of it
except for the buildings by Semper, for whom he had a lifelong admira-
tion. Indeed, in 1885 Semper’s ideas about city planning had been the basis
for Sitte’s first published work in that field. Thus with Sitte we have a very
 Radical Artists and Critics of Germany, etc. / 599

early example of the mixing of ideas coming from Morris with others
coming from Semper—that mixture which was to be so characteristic of
leaders of architecture and industrial design in Germany and Austria in the
twentieth century.
Sir Herbert Read in his book Art Now (1933) called Semper “the
historical materialist in the sphere of art,” though Semper did not sub-
scribe directly to Marx’s version of historical materialism. Nevertheless,
Semper—a positivist—believed in a science of art. Holding art to be a
special process of development, of becoming in time, and so of evolution,
he investigated structure in the arts from a genetic, and thus organic, point
of view. His historical-materialist and organically naturalistic explanation
of structure as derived from the nature of the use to which the work is to
be put, from the nature of the material, and from the nature of the tools
and methods employed,” could easily be taken over by Marxists, among
others, even though in London Semper belonged to a group of middle-class
German democrats in exile opposed by Marx and Engels. As we have
seen, William Morris, Semper’s younger English contemporary, soon
to become a Marxist, at least implicitly avowed a principle of structure
that evolves its forms in the spirit of strict truthfulness from the conditions
of use, material, and construction. It was therefore easy for the ideas of
Morris and of Morris’s mentor, Ruskin, to be assimilated by the followers
of Semper, and, conversely, for Semper’s doctrines to spread among some
of Morris’s contemporaries in England and elsewhere, though Semper
himself was opposed to the Gothic Revival.
This interchange was made particularly easy by Semper’s part in
designing displays for the world’s fair of 1851 at the Crystal Palace—that
great industrial Exhibition conceived in 1849 as an antidote to Chartism
and possible revolution in England. (Significantly, in the fall of 1850, after
the failure of the continental revolutions had dashed Marx’s hopes for the
rapid achievement of communism by violent revolution, Marx himself, in
his Neue Rheinische Zeitung, recognized the forthcoming Exhibition as
constituting the British bourgeoisie’s rejoinder to the political revolutions
on the Continent.)**
Although Semper, as a member of Henry Cole’s group working on the
Crystal Palace exhibitions, is said to have influenced other members of the
group, including the architect and decorator Owen Jones,” Semper himself
was influenced by his English acquaintances * and helped to spread their
und
ideas to Germany. His small treatise of 1852, Wissenschaft, Industrie
Art), was intended to make known to a
Kunst (Science, Industry and
German public their conception of reforming design by proper use of the
machine as tool (rather than by reacting against industrial production as
Ruskin, and to a lesser degree Morris, did). The value of Semper’s own
spoke of
contribution was directly recognized by Henry Cole when he
to
Semper as the man from whom “our manufacturers would be likely
obtain great help.” *
there
In England, then, about the middle of the nineteenth century,
600 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

were coming together various “modern” tendencies in design and construc-

tion, tendencies “organic” and “mechanistic,” to the development of
which at least one continental architect, Semper, was contributing, as
were various British designers. Contributions to these tendencies were
made by some artists, architects, and craftsmen who, like the former
revolutionary Semper, were political and social liberals or who, like Morris
and his friend Philip Webb, were to become active in political parties
influenced by Marxism. Most others, however, had no direct involvement
in politics at all but were simply interested either in the application of the
machine to design or, on the contrary, were merely reacting against the
machine in favor of a revival of handicraft. But whether social-minded or
not, the members of both ‘groups shared a functionalistic and anti-
academic approach to art, out of which were to grow major aspects of that
functionalism on which so much twentieth-century architecture and ap-
plied art were to be based, and in-the development of which followers of
Semper as well as of Ruskin and Morris were to play leading roles.

5. Holland: Berlage

Orns oF those chiefly affected by Semper was the Dutch architect Hen-
drik P. Berlage (1859-1934), a Marxist who, through contact with Sem-
pers son Manfred and other members of his family, had been trained in
Semper’s principles of architecture. Yet at a time when Dutch Marxists
were becoming the intellectual leaders of the whole Marxist movement,”°
Berlage nevertheless regarded Ruskin as “the father of modern art,” *
although he criticized him, with other “philosophers,” as being a mere
scholar who did not adequately participate in social action by practicing
art. In Berlage’s view, only actively practicing artists and architects, such as
Semper, could really direct modern art along its right path.*”
In addition to Semper, Berlage praised Viollet-le-Duc, the French
Gothic-Revivalist and rationalist architect who had been a young republi-
can of the barricades in the Revolution of 1830, and who remained a
lifelong democrat in spite of also having been in the circle of Napoleon III.
Viollet-le-Duc insisted that everything in Gothic is useful; admired the
Gothic especially for its functional structure in a rationalistic and material-
istic way; often sought to translate Gothic principles into the modern
structural materials of cast and wrought iron (Fig. 22); and therefore is
regarded as one of the fathers of modern architectural functionalism.
Although not a Marxist, Viollet-le-Duc could especially appeal to Berlage
and other Marxists because he maintained that architecture, like other
arts,
has its foundations in culture, that its development is determined by
cultural history, and that sociology (esprit des moeurs )—combined with
national genius—is the key to the connections between the development of
 Radical Artists and Critics of Germany, etc. / 601

architecture and that of all other activities. Furthermore, he too displayed

animosity toward the church, insisting that not the clergy but the newly
powerful bourgeoisie had been responsible for the development of the
Gothic **—a point of view which could easily be interpreted by Marxists as
indicating that art is class-determined.
Like Ruskin and Morris, Berlage insisted upon the social utility, the
social function, of art while holding that, of all previous styles, those of the
Middle Ages could best serve as the right foundation for the arts of
modern times.*® Yet as a Marxist, Berlage could not accept the rejection of
industrialism by Ruskin and Morris. He therefore sought to justify in terms
of historical materialism his own use of a highly modernized version of the
forms of medieval architecture, forms he employed because he believed
that only the Middle Ages had previously possessed that communal spirit
of working together “ which to him was characteristic of the twentieth
century as a century of socialism. In the combined lights of Marxism and
medieval communalism, Berlage argued that the twentieth century de-
manded a “pure functional art” “ comparable to the architecture of the
Middle Ages, but up to date in its use of modern technological develop-
ments. He exemplified this point of view in such buildings as that for the
Dutch Diamond Cutters Union at Amsterdam (the lobby of which con-
tains an inscription in majolica, “Proletariat of all countries, unite!””), and
especially in his most famous work—an ironic one for a Marxist—the
Stock Exchange in Amsterdam (Figs. 93 and 94), completed in 1903.
Berlage’s Stock Exchange shares with Morris’s Red House the honor
of being one of the most famous forerunners of “modern” architecture. In
both, vaguely medieval forms have been given a moder expression by
stripping them down to a frank, almost unornamented expression of
brick.*2 But much more than Morris, and more like Viollet-le-Duc, Berlage
made frank use of modern forms and materials: on the interior the steel
trusses which support the roof are baldly expressed (Fig. 94). Part of the
interior was decorated with scenes of trade and industry by his socially
radical painter friend, Jan Toorop (cf. Figs. 96 and 97).
The fame of Berlage as a leader of the modern movement in Holland
was not confined to his native country. Through his writings, his buildings,
his city planning and housing for workers—especially as exemplified in
Amsterdam South, the planning of which in part reflects the influence of
the medieval town—Berlage became particularly influential in Germany.
And by way of Germany his ideas spread to other countries.
In 1911, Berlage visited the United States. His work and ideas were
the subject of articles in American newspapers and other periodicals,
notably of two articles in the Craftsman, a monthly published from 1901
to 1916 by a socialist follower of Ruskin and Morris named Gustav
Stickley. On Berlage’s tour, his chief interest was the architecture of Louis
with
Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. He had been well acquainted
known of
Wright’s work from illustrations at least since 1900, and had
 $ es
Pte

FIG. 93. Amsterdam, Stock Exchange (1898-1903) by Hendrik P. Berlage.

Sullivan’s work even earlier,** so that the Stock Exchange in Amsterdam

may even reflect the influence of Sullivan, as some later buildings by
Berlage certainly do. Wright, whose architecture had become very widely
known abroad in 1910, when a large book of his work was published in
Germany,” was, of course, far from being a Marxist like Berlage. Instead,
he was very much an American extreme individualist in the tradition of
that anarchistic individualist, Thoreau, of Thoreau’s friend Emerson, and
of Walt Whitman, who has been claimed by anarchists and communists
alike. As a young man, Wright, like Berlage, had read with approval the
writings of Viollet-le-Duc and Ruskin and had developed great admiration
for William Morris also—though, again like Berlage, he opposed the views
of Ruskin and Morris insofar as they attacked industrialism and modern
technology. Wright, already deeply influenced by the ideas of Thoreau,
had sought out as his master Louis Sullivan. And Sullivan was the Chicago
architect said to have been inclined toward anarchism who in 1896 formu-
lated—partly under the earlier influence of his architect-friend John Edel-
mann, eventually a socialist and then a leading American anarchist—the
slogan of modern functionalism: “Form follows function.” *
During Berlage’s American tour, he talked with Sullivan in Chicago
 Radical Artists and Critics of Germany, etc. / 603

(Wright was away in Italy) and saw many of the works of both Sullivan
and Wright. On his return home, he lectured and wrote extensively of his
American trip, with emphasis on the buildings of these two great American
architects. In part through Berlage, the architectural influence of Sullivan
and Wright became widely felt on the Continent, a fact again indicating
that the works of radical avant-garde artists may be admired by others
whose specific economic and political views are quite different, but none-
theless radical in some way.

6. Belgium: The Radical Background

A. ursovcs the influence of Ruskin on the art of the Continent was

strongly represented by Berlage (apart from Ruskin’s hatred of industrial-
ism), it was not, of course, Berlage who first introduced Ruskin’s ideas to
the Continent. Kropotkin had espoused ideas similar to those of Ruskin
and Morris in articles published in his magazine Le Révolté in 1880-1882,
and then re-published at Paris in the book Paroles dun révolté (1885). It
will be recalled that this book was edited by Kropotkin’s anarchist friend,
Elisée Reclus.
In 1890 Reclus settled in Belgium, the first country on the Continent
FIc.94. Amsterdam, Stock Exchange (1898-1903), interior, by Hendrik P.
Berlage.

rr LARA
Ay WY ift ' fit
604 Wf RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

to become heavily industrialized, and made the first successful attempt to

introduce anarchism there. In 1897 he established a Free University at
Brussels. In the year after Reclus’s arrival, the Belgian Labor Party (Parti
ouvrier belge), founded in 1885 as a coalition which deliberately omitted
the name “socialist” even though it had a socialist majority, became the
first predominantly Marxian party on the Continent to display a strong
interest in the arts. It is significant that the Belgian Labor Party, though
committed to reformism, by that time had a strong anarchist wing.
The Parti ouvrier belge first showed interest in art in 1891, when
Emile Vandervelde, an evolutionary socialist who became the chief leader
of that party as well as professor of political economy at the University of
Brussels, collaborated with the lawyer-editor Edmond Picard and with the
Belgian Symbolist poet Emile Verhaeren in founding a Section d’art at the
Maison du peuple, or Workers’ Center, the party’s headquarters in Bras-
sels. They were soon joined on the guiding committee by the painter
Fernand Khnopff and the critic Octave Maus, among others. Their intent
was to gain the support of painters, musicians, and writers, and to bring
the world of art and beauty to the people: they believed that art could
mold the future and that its services should not be left to an elite.” The
first series of programs of the Section d’art, held in 1891-1892, set the
pattern to be followed for several years. Ordinarily there was an informal
talk on some aspect of literature, of the visual arts, or of music (the first
session was on Wagner), sometimes dealing with contemporary art, some-
times with the art of the past. The programs usually concluded with music
by a small ensemble or with literary readings.** The moving spirit in the
Section d’art was Edmond Picard, a force, too, behind the leading Belgian
avant-garde art periodical, L’Art moderne, which had been founded in
1881. Picard, as editor of this review, collaborated especially with Ver-
haeren, one of the first poets of any stature to give poetic form to modern
industrialism in its full implications. As a leading Symbolist poet, Ver-
haeren had earlier contrasted the philosophical basis of naturalism with
that of Symbolism by pointing out that while naturalism reflected the
positivism of Comte, Symbolism reflected the idealism of Kant and
Fichte.® In adopting an idealistic basis, Symbolism, always closely con-
nected with anarchism, also showed certain parallels with one side of
revisionist Marxism. ‘Therefore, Symbolism—together with “abstract” artis-
tic and literary movements stemming from it—could likewise be expected
to be rejected as formalistic by orthodox Marxists, including Marxist-
Leninists in Soviet Russia.
Beginning in 1891, L’Art moderne, in which Verhaeren and _ his
artistically avant-garde socialist friends took great interest, enthusiastically
followed the progress of the Section d’art at the Maison du peuple. So.also,
from 1892 to 1895, did the socially left-wing Revue rouge, which was
Symbolist in orientation and had no connection with the French magazine
of the same name. Although it was the policy of L’Art moderne to avoid
purely political and social questions, it was an outspoken champion of a
 Radical Artists and Critics of Germany, etc. / 605

social and leftist art. At first its editor, Picard, had been almost alone in
Belgium in calling for art with a social message. Already in the mid-1880’s
he had warmly endorsed the appeal made by Kropotkin, in his Paroles d’un
révolté of 1885, for artists to join in the battle for a better world; ® and in
his periodical, we noted, the term Neo-Impressionism was first used in
1886 by the French anarchist and Symbolist art critic, Félix Fénéon. In
spite of Picard’s pioneering for social art, however, L’Art moderne was
not the first Belgian art periodical to disseminate the ideas of William
Morris: it had been anticipated in that by the magazine Société nouvelle
which by 1892 was already publishing notes about Morris’s works with
excerpts from his writings and lectures.** Nevertheless, early insisting on
the importance of art as the agent of social reform, L’Art moderne
repeatedly attacked “‘art for art’s sake”; and by the mid-18g0’s it was
already showing great interest not only in the social role of art but in
“Gndustries d’art” and Morris’s work. It is difficult to say exactly when
Picard began to show the direct influence of the ideas of Morris and—in
lesser degree—of Ruskin, but under his editorship L’Art moderne certainly
was among the first continental reviews to give publicity to their English
movement.

7. Belgium: “Les XX” (Khnopff; Ensor, and

His Influence on the Dutch Painter Toorop)
SSrverar of the founders of L’Art moderne and of another avant-garde
periodical, La Jeune Belgique, had become members of the anti-academic
group of artists called “Les XX,” founded in 1884. This became a Symbol-
ist-Synthetist group, and lasted until 1894, when its members ceded the
directorship to Octave Maus and the group was renamed “La Libre
esthétique.” “Les XX” fought officialism in all its forms, and has been
described as ‘“‘at that time the most progressive art society in the world.” ”
It was strongly affected by influences from England—notably that of the
Pre-Raphaelites and Morris. This came partly through one of the founding
members of “Les XX,” the painter Fernand Khnopff, a pupil of the
French Symbolist Moreau, whose connection with the Section d’art at the
Maison du peuple has already been mentioned. For Khnopff, who had
spent several years in England and whose mother and wife were English,
had been directly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites (and because of this,
was to be Oscar Wilde’s choice, after Aubrey Beardsley, to illustrate The
Ballad of Reading Gaol). Then, in 1891, Morris’s socialist disciple Walter
Crane was invited to participate in the eighth exhibition of “Les XX” and
had a profound effect upon Belgian art.
One particularly important—and radical—member of “Les XX,” the
Symbolist painter James Ensor (1860-1949), had been Khnopft’s class-
 FIG.95. The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889 (1888) by James Ensor.

mate at the Brussels Academy. Ensor, who had left the Academy in disgust
without completing the course, by his highly individualistic art paved the
way for many modern movements, among them the art of heightened
color (Fauvism), intense expression (expressionism), ambiguity (dada),
and the dream (surrealism )—several of which, we have seen, had some
connections with communism, while some of the Fauves were anarchists.
By inclination an anarchist, Ensor particularly loved to attack officialdom,
as in his drawing Belgium in the Nineteenth Century (ca. 1889), a direct
attack on King Leopold II. Although essentially anti-religious, Ensor liked
to identify himself with Christ (whose traditional representations he re-
sembled) as symbolic of the attempt to give dignity and meaning to
human life mocked and destroyed by the mob.* This is the significance of
one of his most famous paintings, The Entry of Christ into Brussels in
1889 (Fig. 95), executed in 1888, which nearly caused his expulsion from
“Les XX.” At the time, Ensor’s small group of immediate friends was
almost entirely made up of socialist intellectuals, a fact doubtless account.
ing for the banner across the top of the picture, inscribed “Vive la sociale.”
In the early 1890's, also, Ensor depicted striking workingmen with obvious
sympathy.” Yet, unlike his friends, he was never a socialist but, as we have
said, remained essentially anarchistic: it is no accident that among his
drawings is a sketch of the “Christian anarchist” Tolstoy, made from a
photograph.
In 1898, an extensive exhibition of Ensor’s work was presented by
a
 Radical Artists and Critics of Germany, etc. / 607

French periodical of radical sympathies, La Plume. In the following year

La Plume devoted an entire issue to commemorating the exhibition,
including in it tributes by Verhaeren, by another Belgian Symbolist writer
Maeterlinck, and by the sculptor Meunier (Fig. 102).
Ensor was the principal master of the Dutch Symbolist painter Jan
Toorop (1859-1928), who—not unlike his predecessor, Van Gogh (Fig.
31)—combined radical social interests with eventually avant-garde art.
After studying at the Academy in Amsterdam, Toorop had pursued his
studies at the Brussels Academy, remaining in Brussels from 1882 to 1885.
During this time he felt the influence of Ensor, as well as of the French
painters Bastien-Lepage and Manet. With Verhaeren and others, he
helped to found “Les XX,” and thereby became a friend of the future
Neo-Impressionist painter (and anarchist), Wan Rysselberghe. Toorop’s
wife was English, and between 1884 and 1890 he made many visits to
England. There he directly encountered influences that had affected “Les
XX,” for he was brought into contact with Whistler and also with
members of Morris’s circle, especially Walter Crane (Fig. 73), and was
stimulated by Ruskin’s ideas and by Pre-Raphaelitism.

FIG. 96. After the Strike (ca. 1887) by Jan Toorop.

608 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

Through Verhaeren and Maeterlinck, Toorop became connected with

a Dutch Symbolist group, the Tachtigers, who painted and drew anarchist
subjects—one painting by Toorop, who was influenced by the anarchist
Verlaine, among others, was actually called Anarchy. Toorop’s interest in
working-class subjects can be seen in his Neo-Impressionist painting of
about 1887 entitled After the Strike (Fig. 96) and his drawing In Front of
the Workhouse (Fig. 97), made about 1892. From 1903 to 1905, Toorop
executed the previously mentioned scenes of trade and industry in the
Stock Exchange at Amsterdam (Figs. 93 and 94) which had been designed
by his friend Berlage, with whom he was linked in the Dutch version of
Art Nouveau known as “Nieuwe Kunst.” In 1905 Toorop became a
Roman Catholic, and thereafter stood for a kind of Christian democracy.
Because Toorop had been connected with, or affected by, so many of
the avant-garde artistic tendencies of his time in several countries, and
because he also had anarchist interests, it is important to emphasize that
his work may well have affected that of the young Spanish anarchist Pablo
Picasso. For Picasso’s “blue period” perhaps was influenced at least partly
by the treatment of the human figures in some of ‘Toorop’s works: see, for
example, the women at the right in Toorop’s drawing In Front of the
Workhouse (Fig. 97).”

FIG. 97. In Front of the Workhouse (ca. 1892), drawing by Jan Toorop.
 Radical Artists and Critics of Germany, etc. / 609

8. Belgium: The Labor Party and Art Theory

A\s ror the socialist but partly anarchist Belgian Labor Party, its position
on art was given fuller definition than before in a pamphlet entitled Art et
socialisme, published in 1896 by a lawyer-writer named Jules Destrée and
widely circulated within the party. In it, Destrée, a socialist member of
the Chamber of Deputies, made clear his debt to Morris by insisting that
art must be integrated with life and that such integration can be fully
achieved only in a socialist society. However, he roundly rejected the idea
that propagandistic art alone is acceptable to socialists, for though he cited
the works of Walter Crane and of Steinlen to show that art can success-
fully embody a social message, he maintained that it can also be devoid of
any direct social statement.”
Two years later, with Emile Vandervelde (whose leadership of the
Parti ouvrier belge was to last almost until he died in 1938), Destree
published at Paris a book entitled Le Socialisme en Belgique, which
contained an entire aesthetic program for Belgian socialists. Although the
theoretical side of the social aesthetic in this book was furnished by
Destrée and not by Vandervelde,® in later writings Vandervelde was to go
beyond Destrée.® As one of the founders of the Section dart of the
Maison du peuple, Vandervelde spoke several times at its sessions, once
giving a talk on Morris.

9. Belgium: Art Nouveau

(Horta, Van de Velde); and
Its Spread to Spain and Austria

iru
W sucu stimulation for art on the part of leading social radicals,
including Vandervelde, Verhaeren, the most noted Belgian poet of the
art maga-
day, and Picard, editor of L’Art moderne, the chief avant-garde
naturall y took up the
zine, many Belgian painters, sculptors, and architects
artists
new ideas—and especially the ideas of Morris. ‘The most important
ts Victor
to do so, in addition to those already mentioned, were the architec
ted by the
Horta and Henry van de Velde. Both were undoubtedly stimula
avowed
paintings of Toorop, as well as by those of Khnopft."* Both became
the leading
followers of Morris and were especially prominent among
by the French
founders of the art movement generally known in English
n Style,”
name “Art Nouveau,” in French by the English name “Moder a
and in German as “Jugendstil.” This, stimulated by Symbolism, was
610 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

reform movement in design, the first great anti-style.Itmade claims to the

Gesamtkunstwerk. Its forerunners in England included Morris, other Pre-
Raphaelites, Mackmurdo, and Cole’s circle; and it was also influenced by
the drawings of the socially radical William Blake, and by Celtic and
Japanese art. Both Horta (who is usually credited with initiating the Art
Nouveau movement on the Continent in 1892) and Van de Velde were
interested in social reform, as well as in reforming design, and their work
was appreciated by others involved with social problems. Paradoxically, it
had a strong appeal for the upper bourgeoisie, so that one authority has
even argued that the Art Nouveau was the style “of the cultured and
urbane middle class in the heyday of classical capitalism.” * One should
add, however, that it can also be seen as an offspring of philosophical
idealism and a reaction against the positivism that has appealed to many
“capitalists.”
Thus the Art Nouveau shows that the forms of a newly fashionable
style may be employed by a variety of groups representing a variety of
points of view. For if the Art Nouveau became a middle-class style of the
capitalist era, it nonetheless developed in the work of Horta and Van de
Velde as a reform in design closély related to radical social reform of
“capitalist” society: both Horta and Van de Velde were socially radical.
Victor Horta “ had followed with eager interest the work of “La Libre
esthétique,” successor to “Les XX.” His own social views were sufficiently
radical so that he was selected to design, in 1897-1899, the Maison du
peuple (Figs. 98 and 99) at Brussels, built to house the Parti ouvrier
belge and also the Belgian cooperative movement, which was socialistic.
Like Berlage and so many others then interested in reforming design as
well as society, Horta had a strongly rationalistic side which made him
admire the ideas of Viollet-le-Duc, who, we know, had been a republican
on the Left and a democrat. Following Viollet-le-Duc (Fig. 22), Horta
often gave direct expression to metal as a new structural material, though
with less reminiscence of any past style and often with the flowing—and
less rational—forms characteristic of the Art Nouveau (Fig. 99). Like
Viollet-le-Duc, he was architecturally revolutionary in taking over elements
which had earlier appeared only in business and industrial buildings, and
incorporating them into other types of buildings, even private houses.
Henry van de Velde was far more influential than Horta outside of
Belgium, because as architect, designer, craftsman, and prolific writer
on
art he was also active in France, Holland, Switzerland, and especially
Germany. And as an old man he designed the Belgian Pavilion at the New
York World’s Fair of 1939-1940 in collaboration with two other architects.
Van de Velde” had begun his independent artistic career as a Neo-
Impressionist painter, and became associated with “Les XX.” One of
his
friends was the half-English artist, Alfred William Finch, who not only
was the first Belgian painter to use the Neo-Impressionist technique but
in
FIG. 99. Brussels, Maison du peuple (1896-1899, now
destroyed), interio
the theater, by Victor Horta.
FIc. 98. Brussels, Maison du peuple J
—ea co[oy
cooO ron =
G [o) u~oO~”A)_ °o > oO ae}— es)> > oO Pe)[o) u
OUD Vi. RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

1891 also introduced the English arts and crafts movement into Belgium.
Like the other Belgian Neo-Impressionists, Wan de Velde was influenced
by the artistic and social ideas of the leading Neo-Impressionists of France,
many of whom became his friends. For they had many Belgian connec-
tions—through the Belgian Neo-Impressionist Théo van Rysselberghe,
who eventually moved to Paris; through the Belgian Symbolist poet,
Verhaeren, a close friend of the French Neo-Impressionists since 1888; and
through Verhaeren’s friend Elisée Reclus, who had settled in Belgium in
1890. Van Rysselberghe, Verhaeren, and Reclus were all friends of Van de
Velde, as also was the Dutch painter Jan Toorop; and they were anarchists.
In the 1880’s and 1890's, for Van.de Velde, as for other avant-garde
artists, the atmosphere in Belgium was one that could foster powerful
social interests, especially of an anarchist kind. In the case of Van de
Velde, these became particularly strong after 1888 when his mother died
and he suffered a physical and nervous collapse that lasted until 1893. He
was always social-minded, and while recuperating felt himself more than
ever drawn to various forms of social radicalism because of what he
regarded as their ultimate goal of freedom for the individual. At this time,
particularly, he read the works of Stirner; of Bakunin and Kropotkin; of
Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky; and of his special idol Nietzsche, the highly
individualistic glorifier of the superman who in 1892 was described by a
French radical as if he were a kind of aristocratic anarchist.® And Van de
Velde now also read with admiration the writings of Edward Carpenter,
the English socialist of anarchist tendency who was stimulated by Walt
Whitman’s poems and Thoreau’s Walden, by the Christian socialism of
his friend F. D. Maurice, and especially by the more Marxian English
socialism of Hyndman and Morris.
Consequently, when Van de Velde’s attention was called by his
artist-friend Willy Finch to the writings of Morris, the way had been
prepared: they were, he felt, exactly what he had been seeking all along.
Previously, he had been worried by the fact that in socialism there seemed
to be no place for the skill of the individual. At last, in Morris, he could
find a kind of socialism in which the individual as artist played a leading
role. From then on, Van de Velde insisted that the so-called fine arts must
be applied to life—must, in short, become applied arts. In that way, the
individual artist working for beauty could also seek to restore nobility to all
mankind, because the artist has this social duty to perform. In 1893, as part
of a course in applied art he delivered at Antwerp Academy, he attacked
the categorization of art as “fine” in contrast to “applied” and “industrial
art.”
These, of course, are doctrines stemming directly from Morris and
from Ruskin (whose writings were likewise called to Van de Velde’s
attention by Willy Finch); and Van de Velde always made very clear that
they were his sources. His fiancée, Maria Séthe, a pupil of Van Ryssel-
berghe, had twice visited Morris on Van de Velde’s behalf before their
 Radical Artists and Critics of Germany, etc. / 61 3

marriage in 1894. In 1901, he himself wrote: “The germ which fertilized

our spirit, aroused our activity, and summoned into life the subsequent
complete renewal of ornament and forms in applied arts and crafts
[Kunstgewerbe] was without doubt the work and influence of John Ruskin
and William Morris.” Furthermore, at about the time that Van de Velde
became a founder of the Art Nouveau movement on the Continent, he
and his circle were well acquainted with Mackmurdo’s Hobby Horse,
which they admired. In 1893, for instance, a friend of Van de Velde since
childhood named Max Elskamp, then associated with him on a private
press, wrote him praising some vignettes he had made for a Belgian journal
as “Superb . . . truly more beautiful than the Hobby Horse.” ©
In order to follow in the footsteps of Morris, of Mackmurdo, and of
other friends of Morris such as Walter Crane and Cobden-Sanderson, Van
de Velde gave up painting to devote himself to the applied arts—according
to Van de Velde himself, beginning in 1892, but in fact probably a year or
so later. He was led to the applied arts, as he had been led to Morris’s
social and artistic ideas, by Willy Finch.” Soon he was engaging also in the
practice of architecture as one of the applied arts. In Belgium it was an art
in which the Art Nouveau style was getting under way, because in
1892-1893 Victor Horta designed and built the Tassel house at 12 rue de
Turin (now 6 rue P. E. Janson), Brussels, generally regarded as its first
great monument.
Van de Velde went further than Morris, his chief inspiration, not only
in becoming an architect but also in paying much attention to industrial
arts. In architecture, Van de Velde, like his contemporary Horta (in whose
Maison du peuple at Brussels Van de Velde, with others, built the art
section), was particularly influenced by Viollet-le-Duc. After all, Viollet-
le-Duc took a less poetic, more rationalistic and realistic attitude toward
Gothic than did Ruskin, and, we know, had sought to make use of such
modern structural materials as cast iron and wrought iron. Comparing the
Gothic cathedrals to the structures created by modern engineers, Van de
Velde found in examples of civil engineering a beauty comparable to that
of the cathedrals. In so doing, he did not claim to be original, but stated
that this beauty in works of engineering had first been pointed out by
certain contemporaries possessing unusual breadth of vision and capacity
to teach, especially Huysmans and Zola.” In view of this mixture of
influences, it is hardly surprising that in the autobiography Van de Velde
wrote in old age he claimed to have made in his work a synthesis of
rational beauty and organic (or as he called it, dynamographic) ornament.
As a disciple of Morris, Van de Velde also saw a connection between
the arts of an industrial era and contemporary social developments. ‘The
concluding chapter of one of his most important books, Die Renaissance
im modernen Kunstgewerbe (1901), is entitled, in German, “The New
Birth of Applied Arts and Crafts and the Social Movement.” ” In it he
stated that “in the future we must look for the realization of a just and
614 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

ideal Democracy: not a business-democracy but rather a social Democracy.

...’® Tn it, also, he mentioned that as a creator of art he had been
particularly influenced by Walter Crane’s The Claims of Decorative Art
(1892) because of its chapters on “The Prospects of Art under Socialism,”
“Art and Social Democracy,” and “The Importance of the Applied Arts,
and Their Relation to Common Life.” * Van de Velde’s socialism was,
however, of a kind that led him to declare that “Material factors cannot
alone claim meaning .. . ,”” and he tacitly allowed for an element of
idealism like that admitted into Marxism by members of Morris’s circle
such as E.. Belfort Bax and by the German revisionist Marxists. His own
reputation as a socialist became such that in 1913 he was visited in
Weimar by the socialist leaders Jaures and Vandervelde.
In 1895, Van de Velde had written that “Art must be understood as a
living organism,” and in accordance with the principles of Morris and his
followers,”* he had begun to build a house for himself—“Bloemenwerf” at
Uccle, near Brussels (Fig. 100)—a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk equipped
throughout with furniture, wallpaper, metalwork, etc., made from his own
designs. ‘Through his work on this house, which he built only because he
could not find a house to buy in which the forms did not “lie,” Van de
Velde was led to become an architect. Although historical reminiscences
were minimized, the exterior of the house had a vaguely Gothic look—as
to a greater degree did Morris’s Red House. Also, the inherent nature and
Fic. 100. Uccle, Henry van de Velde’s own house (1895-1896).
 Radical Artists and Critics of Germany, etc. / 615

function of the traditional materials used were mostly brought out, in this
again recalling Red House. In beginning to feel that unintelligent use of
the machine, rather than the machine itself, was to blame for the horrors
of contemporary industrialized society, Van de Velde went beyond Morris.
And, anticipating many modern painters and such modern architects as Le
Corbusier, he even came to regard machinery itself as beautiful, recalling
his childhood fascination with the engine-rooms of steamers at Antwerp—
which nonetheless again reminds us that even Morris had by no means
disparaged the machine when it could serve to relieve mankind of time-
consuming drudgery, and so had spoken of the iron steamship as the
cathedral of the nineteenth century. One should add that the society-
controlled machine, rather than handicraft, had also long been extolled by
that most prominent leader of the Belgian Labor Party, Vandervelde. As
Vandervelde’s views about art were therefore in at least some respects so
similar to those of Henry van de Velde, it is hardly surprising that the
latter paid tribute to the “very praiseworthy efforts on behalf of artistic
education of the members of the Labor Party” ““—referring especially to
the Section d’art at the Maison du peuple.
Furniture and designs by Van de Velde had first been displayed at
Paris in 1806 by the art dealer Bing, thereby spreading the Art Nouveau to
France. At that time his work was disparagingly referred to by Edmond de
Goncourt as the “Yachting Style,” mainly because of the flowing stream-
lined forms that Van de Velde so often employed. We have seen, however,
that what Goncourt called, in derogation, the “Yachting Style” became
widely known as “Art Nouveau” or “Modern Style,” and sometimes also as
“Jugendstil,” contemporary terms which themselves suggest that the move-
ment was regarded as artistically radical and progressive. In fact, it was a
movement not unrelated to Symbolism, the leaders of which, like Van de
Velde, had leanings toward anarchism. It should be emphasized that the
curving, convoluting naturalistic forms so typical of the Art Nouveau style
even in the most minor arts (Fig. 101) derived in large part from the
decorative designs of Morris and his circle, which themselves were mainly
based on a “modernized” handling of medieval foliate ornament some-
times said to have been first employed for a mosaic, The Tree of Life.
This was designed by Edward Burne-Jones," who not only was one of
Morris’s best friends and a founder of Morris’s firm of manufacturing
artists, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company, but also as a young man
had taught art at the Working Men’s College in London, which numbered
many other Pre-Raphaelites and Ruskin among its teachers. Like disciples
of Morris such as Walter Crane, and his contemporary, Mackmurdo, Van
de Velde too emphasized a dynamically flowing line for conveying mean-
ing and content (e.g., Fig. 101).
Van de Velde’s point of view toward ornament linked Pre-Raphaelit-
been
ism with the modern art movement. In the early 1890’s he had
of Blake’s Job. Also, by 1901 he was
deeply impressed by seeing a copy
 FIG. 101. Brass inkwell (1898) by Henry van de Velde.

writing that ornament was a “symbol . . .” executed “in the spirit of the
primitives, who decorated an object... .” As his emphasis on symbol
related him to the Symbolist movement in literature, so also his exaltation
of “the primitives” foreshadowed that of many modern painters and
sculptors. Furthermore, as Van de Velde believed that the role of nature as
exemplified in traditional art had been played out, he declared that the
new ornament should be “abstract,” and so without historical reminis-
cence—again showing himself to be one of the founders of the modern
movement in art. Interestingly enough, Van de Velde’s somewhat anar-
chistic brand of socialism led him to expect that the United States would
take the lead in the art of the future on the ground that it was the nation
closest to realizing an egalitarian society.

‘THE INFLUENCE of the Art Nouveau movement in which Van de Velde

was sO prominent spread throughout the Continent. The Art Nouveau of
Spain, known as “modernismo” and centering in Barcelona, was stimu-
lated by the Art Nouveau of Paris, where many Catalan intellectuals
resided, and by the similar Jugendstil movement of Germany. Its leading
figure was Antonio Gaudi, who came out of the Gothic Revival and to
some degree anticipated the flowing forms so typical of the Art Nouveau.
Gaudi apparently was influenced by the writings of Goethe and Ruskin on
architecture and nature, although his favorite authority was Viollet-le-Duc.
In politics Gaudi, a Catalan nationalist, was a Liberal, and as a younger
man may have been considerably more radical: between 1878 and 1882, he
designed workers’ housing and other buildings (almost none of which were
executed ) for a textile workers’ cooperative.™°

In Ausrria, the authorities had been so disturbed by anarchist propa-

ganda and violence in the early 1880’s that in January 1884 they had
declared a state of siege in Vienna and had promulgated special decrees
 Radical Artists and Critics of Germany, etc. / 617

against anarchists and socialists. One anarchist leader was executed and the
rest fled the country. As a consequence, in the Austrian Empire anarchism
ceased to be a movement of any importance. Still, occasional small propa-
ganda groups of anarchists did arise, and at least one of them had major
implications for literature. For in Prague, where the ruling Austrians were
traditionally unpopular, one libertarian literary circle had among its sympa-
thizers and occasional visitors in the early twentieth century two young
men whose writings were destined to become famous after World War I.
Of these two writers one was Franz Kafka (1883-1924), in whose posthu-
mously published works the modern individual, burdened with isolation,
guilt, and anxiety, seeks a purely personal salvation. The other was Jaroslav
HaSek (1883-1923), who satirized war and military bureaucracy in The
Good Soldier Schweik (1920-1923).
Meanwhile, official opposition to socialism had been so strong that
a Christian socialist (and anti-Semite) Karl Lueger, five times elected
mayor of Vienna by the city council, was prevented by the Emperor from
taking office until 1897. Owing to the regime’s antagonism to all social
radicalism, Austrian Art Nouveau was apolitical. This could be seen
especially in the “Sezession” movement—so called because its members,
not wholly unlike the Nazarenes earlier, rejected the Viennese Establish-
ment in the arts, which tended to be strongly academic in continuing to
imitate the tradition established in France under Louis XIV. Instead, the
Sezession was sympathetic to the work—rather than to the social ideas—of
followers of Morris, whose own ideas had so strongly affected the Art
Nouveau, and also was influenced by the apolitical, avant-garde Scottish
architect Mackintosh. One prominent member of the Sezession group,
Josef Hoffmann, who became professor of architecture at the Vienna
School of Arts and Crafts, told a historian acquaintance that, although he
had been a staunch admirer of Morris in his youth and had read Morris’s
writings on the social question with interest, he and his companions had
regarded such questions as “for the politicians to solve,” not as the concern
of artists.** This was apparently the view also of another member of the
group, Joseph Olbrich, the architect in 1898 of the Sezession’s own build-
ing and art gallery in Vienna, who was called to Darmstadt in 1899 to
design buildings for the artists’ colony the Grand Duke of Hesse was found-
ing there. At Darmstadt, Olbrich came in contact with the work of socially
concerned followers of Morris, such as Baillie Scott, who had designed
rooms for the Ducal Palace at Darmstadt, rooms with incidental furniture
created in 1898 at C. R. Ashbee’s Guild and School of Handicraft at
London. Meanwhile, Van de Velde had carried the influence of the Art
Nouveau from Belgium to Germany, where he was active from 1902 until
and
World War I. There he had set up workshops at Weimar in 1902,
designed, he opened the first
four years later, in a new building he had
comprehensive school of arts and crafts, the first Kunstgewerbeschule.
of the Bauhaus.
Under his successor, Walter Gropius, it became part
618 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

10. Belgium: Other Social-Concerned Artists

(Meunier and Masereel)
"Two orner Belgian artists with left-of-center social sympathies whose
work, like that of Van de Velde, exerted influence on artists and critics of
other countries, including Russia and the United States, require mention
here. One of them was Van de Velde’s friend the sculptor Constantin
Meunier (1831-1905), who, although never an active political socialist or
anarchist, devoted himself especially to representations of workingmen
(Fig. 102). Together with his brother and friends, Meunier formed the
Free Art Party (L’Art libre), with realism as its theoretical program. His
work was to be discussed favorably by Trotsky and by the American
socialist art critic John Spargo, among many others. In Belgium, the
influence of Meunier’s strong simple realism was eventually felt strongly by
the sculptor Georges Minne (1866-1941), who had social and scientific-
technological interests scarcely reflected in his sculpture. He did receive a
commission, never completed, for a monument to a socialist journalist,
Jean Volders, and like his fellow-countryman, Van de Velde, was deeply
interested in machinery, especially steam-engines.
The other Belgian-born artist who, like Meunier, became particularly
influential abroad and likewise was Van de Velde’s friend, was Frans
Masereel (1889- ). A socialist who later developed communist sympa-
thies, he is famous not only for his powerful woodcuts of workingmen
(Fig. 103) and other social subjects, but especially for the anti-war prints
that first brought him into prominence during World War I.
At an early age Masereel had read Marx and Kropotkin in Flemish. As
an art student in Ghent Academy, he had shown so little promise—he was
at the bottom of his class in drawing—that he had been asked to leave.
When he was twenty-one, he migrated from Belgium to Paris, where he
submitted drawings filled with social criticism to L’Assiette au beurre.
During World War I, he was in Switzerland, where his friend Henri
Guilbeaux, the socially radical former editor of L’Assiette au beurre and
subsequent biographer of Lenin, had got him a job with the International
Red Cross through Romain Rolland, whom Masereel also knew. In Ge-
neva, Masereel became acquainted with Anatoly Lunacharsky, future So-
viet commissar of education in charge of culture and art; he never met
Lenin, who was living there, although he knew him by sight.
Masereel returned to France in 1922, and there came into contact
with the writers who had been connected with the radical Abbaye
de
Créteil, and also with Paul Vaillant-Couturier, later in charge
of cultural
matters for the French Communist Party. Masereel became a member
of
the painters’ section of the communist-sponsored Association des
écrivains
FIG. 102. The Puddler (ca. 1885), bronze by Constantin
Meunier.
 i sacamnasccrsccpceniscnmiaia ns
OS gsi can
 FIG. 103. The Worker (1949), woodcut by Frans Masereel.

et artistes révolutionnaires together with such other well-known artists as

Léger, Jean Lurcgat, and Gromaire. He worked for Barbusse’s Clarté and
several Popular Front papers. During the Popular Front, also, he directed
an academy of painting, design, and sculpture founded under the auspices
of the Union des syndicats of the Seine. At the 1937 International Exhibi-
tion in Paris, he painted a mural for the Peace Pavilion showing the coffin
of War being carried off on the shoulders of communist leaders such as
Thorez and Aragon. He has traveled widely in communist countries. To
this day he has succeeded in evading the issue of socialist realism that has
bedeviled so many artists sympathetic to communism. Yet in various ways
he is a survivor of utopian socialism.
Masereel’s work, frequently issued in book form over the years since
 Radical Artists and Critics of Germany, etc. / 621

World War I, has been published and exhibited in many countries repre-
senting a wide variety of social and political points of view—among them
the Soviet Union and East Germany, and also the United States.

11. Norway: Munch, and the Background

of German Expressionism
Berorr turning to the period in Germany from World War I to 1968, it
is necessary to discuss the Norwegian-born painter Edvard Munch
(1863-1944) ** because of his influence on Symbolist and expressionist
painting in Germany as well as in northern Europe. In his early days
Munch was regarded as the chief realist with social interests among
Norwegian painters; then, in the 1890’s his paintings directly paralleled the
Art Nouveau; yet he became one of the chief sources of German expres-
sionism and of movements, such as abstract-expressionism, that have so
largely derived from it.
As a youth in Christiania (Oslo), after training at the State School of
Arts and Crafts under an academic sculptor, Munch joined a group of
young painters who were realists of either a literalistic or Impressionist
kind, and soon was regarded as the most realistic of them all. He also
became the friend of a radical social philosopher, the Hegelian Hans
Jaeger, whose novel of 1885 entitled Kristiania-Bohéme (From Christi-
ania’s Bohemia) stirred up a great storm among Norway’s intellectuals by
describing sexual problems in a highly realistic way. At this time in the
Scandinavian countries, social radicalism was going hand in hand with
realism in the arts—as in the plays of the Norwegian Ibsen, whose portrait
Munch was to paint in 1898. As in the novel of Munch’s friend Jaeger and
in contemporary French literature, naturalistic realism was often combined
with a strain of bohemianism.
During the late 1880’s and 1890's, Munch spent much time in France.
In 1890-1891 he frequently painted in the French Impressionist manner,
showing a debt to Pissarro; he was also influenced by Whistler. Later in
the decade he became acquainted with Mallarmé, whom he portrayed in
lithograph and woodcut. By 1892 Munch had already begun to develop a
curvilinear manner parallel to that of the Art Nouveau. Thus it is sigmifi-
cant that, not unlike the Art Nouveau architecture and craft arts of his
friend Henry van de Velde, who drew Munch’s portrait in 1896, Munch’s
paintings of the 1890's continued to grow partly out of a realistic kind of
Impressionism. Then, especially in the early twentieth century, he began to
develop a new kind of naturalism, roughly akin to the functionalism of
Van de Velde’s architecture, in which the external and material world was
a primary factor, but which nonetheless differed from his own earlier realist
and Impressionist manner. Munch no longer regarded experience of nature
 FIG. 104. Workmen on Their Way Home (1916) by Edvard Munch.

as a matter of visual sensations alone, but rather as the source of ideas and
images. Yet these ideas were increasingly based on subject-matter with
socially radical implications, as in his picture Marat’s Death (1906). Soon
his interests turned toward working people and their daily activities: he
even “voiced his conviction that the future would belong to the
workers.” * As early as 1910 this conviction was reflected in his picture
Snow-Shovelers, but it became most obvious in two paintings of Workmen
on Their Way Home, executed in 1915-1916 (e.g., Fig. 104) and in a
painting of 1920, Diggers on the Road, of which he also made a lithograph.
In the late 1920’s and the 1930’s, Munch did a series of studies of scenes
from the life of the workers, which were intended for the town hall at Oslo
but not carried out.
Subjects such as these eventually made Munch’s work acceptable in
the Soviet Union and its satellites, though he was an important ancestor of
the expressionist movement officially rejected in the U.S.S.R. under Stalin
and his successors. In Germany, expressionism was to be a major influence
in avant-garde art that was often socially radical art from shortly before
World War I until the Nazis rose to powe: in 1933. It is therefore worth
mentioning that the term “expressionist,” imported into Germany by 1911,
apparently had originated over thirty years earlier in connection with
“Dohemian,” * itself so long connected with social radicalism.
 13
FROM WORLD WAR I
AND THE BOLSHEVIK
REVOLUTION TO 1968

1. Germany: The Background of Social and

Artistic Radicalism After WV orld Warl

Nor att German radicals were patriotically sympathetic to waging

World War I. Of all the members of the Reichstag in December 1914, the
left-wing Marxian socialist Karl Liebknecht alone refused to vote for
renewal of the credits necessary to finance the war. But a year later twenty
socialists, including Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, the evolutionary
—and thus revisionist—Marxist, followed suit. Though Bernstein’s ac-
tion indicates that the anti-patriots did not exactly coincide with the
revolutionary Marxists, as Lenin maintained they did, Lenin’s claim was
largely correct. By early 1917, the revolutionary Marxists broke away from
the Social Democratic Party (or SPD) to form the Independent Social
Democratic Party (or USPD), which emphatically pressed for peace and
socialism. It was joined by the Spartacists, a small group of Marxist
revolutionaries led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht which took
the Spartakusbund, from one of Marx’s heroes, Spartacus, a
its name,
gladiator of the first century B.c. who had led a “proletarian” revolt against
the Roman Republic and had established a kind of utopian community for
a time.
Although the imperial German government cracked down on leading
ed to
anti-war Germans during the war, so that Liebknecht was sentenc
was impriso ned, wartime censorsh ip was
hard labor and Rosa Luxemburg
that even during the war the German
relatively lax. It was lax enough so
that it had
expressionist group called Die Aktion, from the magazine
work
published since 1911, could urge in prose and verse that artists should
the outbrea k of the war, a
against war and for revolution. Shortly before
group. After being badly
young artist named Hans Richter had joined the
to go to
wounded while serving in the German army, Richter happened
t, which
Zurich—and there found himself at the core of the dada movemen
624 7 RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

he helped to stimulate, and which was both anti-war and revolutionary in

spirit.
As dada spread into Germany, some of its participants became active
communists. For in November 1917 had come the Bolshevik Revolution;
and it, of course, fostered a revolutionary spirit among many radicals
everywhere, including some radicals in the arts. When it was obvious that
Germany had been defeated in the war, an opportunity came for this
revolutionary spirit to pass into revolutionary action. On November 9,
1918, the Kaiser was forced to flee the country. Under Spartacist leader-
ship, Workers and Soldiers councils were founded which were modeled on
the Soviets in Russia (the Russian word “soviet” means council). The
Workers and Soldiers Council in Berlin, which was made up of representa-
tives of both the regular social democrats and the independents, including
the Spartacists, called for a general strike. Workers laid down their tools, a
“bloodless revolution” and the abdication of the Kaiser were proclaimed,
with the result that the imperial chancellor handed over his office to
Friedrich Ebert, vice-president of the Social Democratic Party, who be-
came head of an almost completely socialist provisional government.
In the following month, delegates of the Workers and Soldiers coun-
cils of all Germany met in a national congress. The overwhelming majority
preferred to Bolshevik extremism the policy, canvassed by both the Social
Democratic Party and the Independent Social Democrats, of calling a
democratically elected constituent assembly. In February, Ebert was
elected president; and on August 11, 1919, there was promulgated the
Weimar Constitution from which came the name of the Weimar Repub-
lic. This was modeled on the constitutions of Western republics rather
than on that of Soviet Russia, and took as its flag the red, black, and gold
banner of the Revolution of March 1848 at Frankfurt.
Meanwhile, the dissatisfied extreme Left, or Spartakusbund, had been
stirred to action. On the last day of 1918, it had established the German
Communist Party and had promptly embarked on a revolutionary course
against the advice of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. ‘That course resulted in
the arrest and murder of the two leaders after they had loyally supported,
in January 1919, an abortive uprising in Berlin put down by the governing
social democrats with the help of the counter-revolutionary Freikorps and
regular army troops.
In Bavaria, where two expressionist magazines named Revolution had
briefly been published at Munich in 1913 and 1918, a revolution led by the
Independent Social Democrat (and literary critic) Kurt Eisner established
a republic in November 1918 with Eisner as premier. He was assassinated
by a monarchist student in February 1919, and in early April the commun-
ists took over with a soviet republic. This was suppressed on May 1 by the
Freikorps and federal army at the behest of the social democrats—three
months before the communist regime of Béla Kun in Hungary was also
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 625

overthrown—and Bavaria joined the Weimar Republic. One participant

in the Bavarian Soviet Republic, the expressionist poet and dramatist
Emst Toller, was imprisoned from 1919 to 1924, and in 1920, while in jail,
wrote his best-known play, Masse Mensch, or Mass Man. (Toller, still
a non-communist leftist, fled from the Nazis in 1933; six years later, he
committed suicide at New York.)
Crushed in Berlin, and soon in Bavaria as well, the communists split
after a vote on the question of participating in parliamentary elections and
in reformist labor unions. In April 1920, a “left” sectarian minority broke
away from the Communist Party to form the German Workers Commu-
nist Party. This was mocked by Lenin in a famous pamphlet of 1920
entitled “Left-Wing’” Communism; An Infantile Disorder because of its
members’ reluctance to give up—as he had done—believing that a world
proletarian revolution was imminent. He urged them and the similarly
reluctant left-wing communists of England and Holland to cooperate
temporarily with non-communists sympathetic to the working class by
collaborating with them within “bourgeois parliaments” and reformist
labor unions, and to take advantage of the opportunity to infiltrate and
gain control of such organizations. This new party line propounded by
Lenin—which resulted in similar collaboration of communists with non-
communists within some important artists’ organizations—was firmly en-
forced on Communist parties throughout the world by the Third, or
Communist, International (Comintern), which had been founded in 1919
under Russian auspices despite the opposition of the German communists.
As the Communist Party split, so did the Independent Social Demo-
cratic Party, whose members were disgusted with the barely reformist
policy of the Social Democratic Party and its collusion with the former
imperial army, but could not agree on a policy of their own. In October
1920, the left wing of the Independent Social Democrats joined the
Communist Party. Two years later, the right wing, which had also broken
away, gave up and went back into the Social Democratic Party.
That party—strongly supported by the working classes, most members
of which did not want a revolution of Leninist type—held a majority of
the cabinet posts in the Weimar government. The other strong parties in
this coalition government were the Catholic Center Party and the Demo-
cratic Party. As the Weimar Republic had to depend on the collaboration
of several parties ranging from socialist to more or less liberal, it always
remained weak. Although later, except in the elections of 1928, the
socialists were a minority in the central government, and by 1930 had given
up hope of taking it over, they still retained a majority position in many
municipalities. In 1932, it was with their support that Hindenburg was
elected president with fifty-three percent of the total vote. But, once
elected, he sought to make himself acceptable to those aspects of the Right
percent
which had been able to give his opponent Hitler only thirty-seven
626 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

of the vote. In 1933 he appointed Hitler chancellor of the German Reich

—-with the eventual result that, when Hitler succeeded Hindenburg, mod-
ern art was to be suppressed in Germany by the Nazis until their defeat in
1945:
The complications and confusion of the revolutionary period immedi-
ately after World War I, accompanied as it was by a proliferation of
varieties of social radicalism, also gave rise to a wide variety of artistically
radical movements that considered themselves to be an integral part of the
revolution. The revolutionary ferment brought forth many significant con-
tributions in the arts, some of which developed further during the period
of the Weimar Republic? Once again we see that a revolution which, in
the tradition of the French Revolution, is not merely political but is
regarded as organically affecting all aspects of life, cultural as well as social,
will almost inevitably stimulate new developments in the arts. But as
artists are almost never professional revolutionaries, many of the most
important effects are likely to develop only after the artists’ revolutionary
activism has died down with the advent of a more peaceful period—in this
case the Weimar Republic—in which artists may more easily concentrate
upon their art.
In such arts as painting, sculpture, and the theater, the new develop-
ments came especially out of the expressionist movement. Although this
had begun as an anti-official movement before the war, under the Weimar
Republic it was directly upheld by some officials. In the theater of the
period, for instance, the most powerful figure was the social democrat
Leopold Jessner, an experienced director and producer who in the summer
of 1919 had been imposed on the Staatliche Schauspielhaus in Berlin as its
Intendant—a highly strategic post. Jessner’s first Berlin production, open-
ing on December 12, 1919, was an expressionist version of Schiller’s
Wilhelm Tell. Jessner and his actors deliberately made this as provocative
as possible to demonstrate the key role of art in the new Republic, and also
to express outrage at the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, because at
that time the men of the theater were predominantly left-wing. The first
performance of this version of Wilhelm Tell, attended by many represent-
atives of both Left and Right, caused a great uproar but was carried to a
triumphant conclusion.
The expressionism of the period was often mixed with elements of
futurism and cubism. And to these were frequently added influences from
Soviet art of the early revolutionary period, especially that of constructiv-
ism, which developed in Soviet Russia largely as an expression of the
country’s need for industrialization, and which therefore, like futurism,
exalted “the machine.”
In German architecture and the applied arts, constructivist influences
were added to the pre-war German radical tradition in the arts of which
the theory derived especially from Gottfried Semper. Even before the war
this native tradition was already being modified by ideas coming indirectly
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 627

from Ruskin and Morris, and also from Marx. Now these influences
increased as the influence in Germany of the theories and works of the
Dutch Marxist architect Berlage and of the Belgian anarchist sympathizer
Van de Velde, among others, became greater than ever before. But now in
Germany such theories were likely to be given a somewhat utopian socialist
cast—which is one reason why the ideas of the architect, ‘Tony Garnier,
also became influential, as did those of another belated Fourierist, Le
Corbusier.
The modern movements in the various arts which resulted from all
this, and which received their most important expression in a famous
school, the Bauhaus, were—politically speaking—by no means specifically
“socialistic” or “communistic” in either origin or development. Most of
the artists involved, like most artists everywhere, were not political-minded
in any fundamental way, at least once the period of revolutionary ferment
had quieted down. Thereafter, most—not all—of them could be more
justly described as vaguely “progressive” or “liberal” in spirit, frequently
with overtones of some vague kind of utopian socialism rather than of an
overt Marxism.
Nevertheless, insofar as these new art movements stressed the impor-
tance of an organic synthesis of the arts, with no distinction between artist
and craftsman, and insofar as they demanded a socially functional, and
thus realistic kind of art, they could appeal to Marxists. And they could
especially appeal to Marxists and non-Marxists alike who had become
interested in the ideas of William Morris. Likewise, the opposition of these
movements to the academic point of view, now long associated at least
partly with the bourgeoisie, could attract many in Germany and the former
Austro-Hungarian empire who, disillusioned by World War I as allegedly
a product of bourgeois capitalism, were turning to the Left in politics or art
or both.
Because those in Germany who so turned ranged from highly revolu-
tionary Marxists through social democratic Marxists to religious socialists
or essentially utopian socialists, the arts of the period cannot be discussed
chronologically in a single line.

2. German Christian Socialism

and Art Theory: Tillich
Some German intellectuals—who, as a consequence of being disillu-
sioned by World War I, found hope in Marxism—sought to relate aspects
of Marxist thought to a renewal of the Christian religion in which, also,
the arts would play an important part. One of the most prominent leaders
628 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

of this kind of religious socialism was Paul Tillich, a Lutheran minister and
theologian whose experiences as a chaplain in the German army during
World War I had stimulated in him a wider interest in social problems.
After the war, he came to believe that the only salvation for the West lay
in replacing bourgeois culture, which he regarded as decadent, with a
religious-socialist pattern for society in which all aspects of life and culture,
including the arts, would find renewal: Tillich himself—an amateur in art
and its history—sought to achieve a “correlation” among psychiatry, paint-
ing, and philosophy. Somewhat like Marx, he emphasized the importance
of the many-sided man, and like Marx held that decadent bourgeois
culture made the achievement of this’ many-sidedness impossible. At the
same time Tillich emphasized his differences from Marx by defining his
own attitude toward him, not as a completely afirmative one, but as “a
dialectical Yes and No.” * To Tillich art was the expression of a person’s
conception of ultimate reality, so that for him all art was at least implicitly
religious, with expressionism (one of five styles that he distinguished )
being the most important kind of art.
Because Tillich categorically rejected the Nazi version of national
socialism, he was dismissed from his professorship in philosophy at the
University of Frankfurt-am-Main when Hitler came to power in 1933. By
chance, Reinhold Niebuhr, the American Protestant theologian who also
has had strong social interests—but little interest in art—happened to be
visiting Germany in that summer, and invited Tillich to Union Theologi-
cal Seminary in New York. As professor of philosophical theology at
Union, and later as a professor at Harvard and Chicago, Tillich was to
have enormous influence on American Protestant thought. And through
his championship of art as part of total culture, he helped to make many
American Protestants more aware than ever before of the importance of art
in relation to social life.

3. Social-Concerned German Graphic Artists:

Kollwitz, Zille, Grosz
In rms period, too, some socially concerned artists managed to keep their
art above essentially party interests—while others, on the contrary devoted
their art directly to the goalsof some radical party, often a communist
party. As we have seen in earlier periods, socially radical artists of both
kinds were especially likely to choose as their medium the graphic arts,
since these, by lending themselves to multiple production, could reach a
wide audience, even a mass audience. Many of these German graphic
artists were especially stimulated by the woodcuts of Frans Masereel, one
of whose more recent works is illustrated in Figure 103.
Of the German artists, one of the most influential was Kathe Kollwitz
(1867-1945), a socialist, feminist, and pacifist whose sympathetic drawings
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 62 9

of people of the lower classes were so much admired by communists that,

even though she never joined the German Communist Party, she was
made one of its venerated “People’s Artists.” She was the daughter of a
master-mason with strong social convictions, and in 1891 had married a
doctor who believed in socialized medicine and devoted himself to practice
among the poor in North Berlin. Partly as a result of her husband’s
influence, partly as a consequence of her reading of works by Zola, Gorky,
Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Gerhart Hauptmann, a social trend entered her
art beginning in 1893. She first achieved fame by her illustrations for
Hauptmann’s naturalistic—and social—play The Weavers, and for Zola’s
naturalistic—and social—novel, Germinal. In 1904, while studying sculp-
ture in Paris, she made a point of looking up the then anarchist artist
Steinlen, as well as Rodin, who regarded himself as a “plebeian” and
hoped to create a huge Tower of Labor.
In 1919-1920, Kathe Kollwitz devoted herself to versions of a Memo-
rial to Karl Liebknecht, the communist leader murdered by right-wingers

FIG. 105. Memorial to Karl Liebknecht (1919-1920), woodcut by Kathe

Kollwitz.

i Seas
. ¢ Rea)
\ Sea f ys :

BENDEN DEM TOTEN . ERINNERUNG AN DEN IS.JANU

 i RADIGCALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES
630

after the abortive Spartacist revolt, who had been a family friend. She
made this as an etching, then as a lithograph, and finally as her first
woodcut (Fig. 105), apparently under the influence of woodcuts by the
graphic artist and sculptor Ernst Barlach. Her moving, lithographic poster,
Help Russia, was drawn in 1921. Much of her reporting of proletarian life
was published in the communist Eulenspiegel (1921-1928). In 1925, she
created her series of woodcuts called Proletariat. Two years later, she was
invited to the Soviet Union to take part in the celebration at Moscow of
the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. In the spring of 1932, she
drew the large lithograph, conceived as a poster, called the Propeller Song:
this, inscribed “We protect the Soviet Union,” shows working-class people
singing with hands joined in solidarity (Fig. 106). She had been prompted
to create the poster by a request from Russian artists, and it was intended,
she said, to make clear her opposition to an imperialist war against the
Soviet Union.
In 1932, Kathe Kollwitz was appointed director of the department of
graphic arts in the Prussian Academy at Berlin. After the Nazis came to
power in 1933, however, her proletarian and leftist sympathies meant the
end of her public career, although she was to live on for twelve years more.
In 1967 her centenary was celebrated in East Germany by the publication
FIc. 106. The Propeller Song (“We Protect the Soviet Union’), lithograph
for a poster (1932) by Kathe Kollwitz.
 FIG. 107. “Hunger” (ca. 1924) by Heinrich Zille.

of Otto Nagel’s large work, Kathe Kollwitz, issued under the auspices of
the Academy of Arts in East Berlin and written by a painter.
In 1924 Kollwitz—with other artists, many of whom were further left
and had direct connections with the Communist Party—had characteris-
tically contributed a lithograph entitled “Bread” to a collaborative portfo-
lio of lithographs published under the title, Hunger, and sold for the
benefit of German workers sttiking for an eight-hour day. Another contrib-
utor to this portfolio was her friend, the talented Berlin artist and commu-
nist Heinrich Zille, whose lithograph “Hunger” (Fig. 107) was executed in
a somewhat more linear version of the Daumier tradition. From 1872,
when Zille was fourteen years old, until 1914, he had been a socialist. But
632 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

then, as he wrote in the 1920’s to the Agit-Prop Division of the German

Communist Party with which he was connected, he had become (what
was to be called) a communist. The art of Zille, who died in 1929, had a
renewed vogue after World War II in East Germany, where a book on
him by Otto Nagel was published in 1961, and another book in 1966.*
Still another contributor to the portfolio Hunger was George Grosz,
probably the most influential of all those German artists immediately after
World War I who were socially as well as artistically radical. Grosz was
greatly affected by the war, and the drawings of war that he published
strongly stimulated many other artists of expressionist bent. When defeat
in the war brought hunger and enormous economic misery to Germany,
expressionists led in devoting art to social protest in which Marxist as well
as religious tendencies were to be found.
Grosz himself had become violently revolutionary and thoroughly
sympathetic to communism as a revolutionary movement even though he
never actually joined a communist party. He did, however, join the dada
group at Berlin, which was thoroughly revolutionary and sympathetic to
revolutionary communism.°

4. Dada and Communism in Berlin

and Cologne: Huelsenbeck, Heartfield,
Grosz, etc.; Baargeld
We nave referred to the fact that dada had originated at Zurich,
Switzerland, in 1916 during World War I partly as a revolt against the
chaos of the war, blamed on the bourgeoisie. We noted also that the
development of dada was partly stimulated by Hans Richter, who in 1914,
before war had broken out, had joined the German expressionist group,
Die Aktion, which during the war urged artists to work against it and for
revolution. We noted further that the dada movement at Zurich centered
around the Café Voltaire founded by the German writer and producer
Hugo Ball, but that the most widely publicized member of the dada group
there was the Rumanian poet Tristan Tzara. Although much later Tzara
became a communist, at Zurich he held an essentially art-for-art’s sake
position that led him to abstraction and to a kind of nihilism that was
anti-social, and in theory (though not in practice) anti-art.
A German member of the Zurich group, Richard Huelsenbeck, re-
jected abstraction, to give dada a politically revolutionary cast. Huelsen-
beck returned to Berlin in 1917, and early in the following year (and thus
well before the Revolution in Germany) he and a politically revolutionary
poet, Raoul Hausmann, got the dada movement under way there. Each
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 633

now claims to have been the founder of Berlin dada, in which were also
prominent George Grosz, John Heartfield, Heartfield’s brother Wieland
Herzfelde, the architect Johannes Baader, Hannah Héch, and the poet
Franz Jung.
When revolution broke out, the Berlin dada group leaped into the
thick of it. As revolutionaries, all the members of the group were willing to
support Marxian communism as a revolutionary movement, but only John
Heartfield, Wieland Herzfelde, and Franz Jung really understood commu-
nist politics and were in fact thoroughgoing communists. The others
simply wanted to be at the center of the revolution, and so were in favor of
whatever was most revolutionary at a given time. Thus at one point they
were all for the left-wing communism of the Spartakusbund, on behalf of
which Grosz made some of his best drawings. Then it might be the
communism of the German Communist Party, or Bolshevism, anarchism,
or whatever else was going on. However, they always left a side-door open
for a quick getaway if that proved necessary for preserving what dadaists
valued most—personal freedom.° In other words, at the basis of dada was a
kind of individualist anarchism, no matter how much devotion was given
to some form of communism.
The willingness of the group to support communism is well illustrated
by its manifesto, or program, drawn up by Huelsenbeck and Hausmann in
1920, and entitled, “What Is Dadaism and What Does It Want in
Germany?” This began, “Dadaism demands: (1) The international revolu-
tionary union of all creative and intellectual men and women on the basis
of radical Communism. .. .”" Later Huelsenbeck declared, “Dada Is
German Bolshevism,” * and he maintained that the true dadaist rejects art
because to him it seems nothing but a moral safety-valve for the conven-
ience of the middle classes. With the other Berlin dadaists he was willing
to believe that Bolshevism, not abstract art, held the promise of “a basis of
understanding,” because through the channel of Bolshevism the new
spontaneous life would flow into society.’
The nature of the communism to which the most radical members of
the Berlin dada group subscribed, and its essentially anarchistic basis, are
perhaps best illustrated in the life of the poet Franz Jung—before and
after, as well as during, the Revolution. In 1913, for instance, he had
published a little volume called Trottelbuch (Booby Book) which was
savagely anarchistic. Ten years later he, with a friend and fellow-passenger,
highjacked a German freighter in the Baltic, took it to Petrograd, and
presented it to the Soviet authorities. He himself remained in the Soviet
Union until his underlying anarchism became too much for the authorities
there—whereupon they sent him back to Germany.
One highly radical member of the Berlin group was its publisher: this
was Wieland Herzfelde, brother of the equally radical John Heartfield.
The two brothers had become connected with dada through the magazine
Neue Jugend, which they took over and published in 1916-1917 largely
634 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

under the influence of Grosz and of the Zurich dada movement. Herz-
felde’s press, named in 1917 the Malik-Verlag—which he had taken over
from his brother who had established it in the previous year—published
the periodical Der Dada, edited by Hausmann. In 1919 Herzfelde issued
another dada journal, the half-monthly Jedermann sein eigner Fussball
(Everyman His Own Football), with drawings by Grosz and photomon-
tages by Heartfield. Herzfelde’s communist activities brought about his
arrest in March 1919, a few months before the first big dada conference
was held in Berlin, and he was compelled to spend three brutal weeks in
jail. After 1920, the Malik-Verlag became an essentially communist press;
and it was Herzfelde who wrote the only dada document that made any
practical suggestions as to how artists (primarily writers) should contribute
to the cause of the working class: this was a brochure, sober in tone,
entitled Gesellschaft, Kiinstler und Kommunismus (1921). He became a
friend of many Soviet writers including Mayakovsky and Ilya Ehrenburg.
The latter has told in his autobiography, Men, Years—Life, how Herzfelde
regularly came to the rescue of Soviet authors in Germany, until the
advent of the Nazis to power compelled Herzfelde to move his press to
Prague, to London, and finally to New York, where it re-emerged as the
Aurora-Verlag during World War II.
Herzfelde published many of Grosz’s drawings, which were widely
influential, especially among artists sympathetic to communism, not only
in Germany but abroad. Grosz’s highly expressive linear style was largely
derived from that of cartoonists for Simplicissimus and Jugend influenced
by Jugendstil. He was stimulated by futurism and by the works of such
artists affected by expressionism as Kokoschka and Paul Klee, and also fell
under the influence of Soviet art, especially of constructivism as exempli-
fied in the work of the Soviet artist-architect Vladimir Tatlin. A photo-
graph of Grosz and John Heartfield—with whom he is sometimes said (the
point is disputed) to have invented the technique of photomontage in 1916
—shows them together at the dada exhibition held at Berlin in June 1920,
holding up a placard declaring “Art is dead / Long live / the new Machine
Art of Tatlin.” * They and other photomontagists of Berlin, stimulated by
such Russian constructivism and by the earlier declarations of Van de
Velde and others that the engineer stood at the forefront of modern
society, thought of themselves as engineers and technicians, factory-
production assemblers of pictures.
During the revolutionary period, Grosz worked for a time on behalf of
the Spartacist group of left-wing communists." He became especially
noted for his drawings satirizing the post-war bourgeoisie: particularly
famous was the series published by Wieland Herzfelde’s Malik-Verlag in
1921 under the title, Das Gesicht der herrschenden Klasse (‘The Face of
the Master Class) (Fig. 108).
In 1922 Grosz visited Soviet Russia. ‘There he met the constructiv-
ist Tatlin, whose work he so much admired. There, too, at a time when
|

Fic. 108. “The Communists Fall—and the Exchange Rises’”” by George Grosz,
from Grosz, Das Gesicht der herrschenden Klasse (1921).

Soviet artists were already under pressure to devote themselves to creating

works of socio-political utility, he was received as an honored guest because
his art was so directly devoted to revolutionary goals and so easily under-
standable by the masses. Lenin, especially impressed by Das Gesicht der
herrschenden Klasse, had Grosz’s works on his writing table, and Anatoly
Lunacharsky, Lenin’s Commissar for Education who was in charge of the
arts, offered him a leading role in the proletarian culture movement, which
had just been placed under Lunacharsky’s guidance * in order to control it.
Such direct control over the arts by political leaders was, however,
hardly to Grosz’s taste. Although later, in his autobiography, he admitted
that “we artists, ambitious as we are, succumb so easily in the presence of
power,” * nonetheless, to his surprise he found that he felt as much of a
rebel in Soviet Russia as he had in Germany. He came to the conclusion
that in Russia “there was no real workers-and-peasants’ interest in ‘individ-
ualistic’ art . . .” a remark indicating his basically anarchistic rather than
communistic spirit. He felt that, instead, “the Russians would have much
preferred to import a dozen American commercial artists to illustrate their
636 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

Ger-
slogans usefully and attractively.” * By the time Grosz returned to
many he had changed his mind about Soviet Russia. Although as late as
1924 he wrote, “The answer to the question, whether my work can be
called art or not, depends on whether one believes that the future belongs
to the working class,” * this did not mean that he still considered the
U.S.S.R. to be the workers’ paradise. In the late 1920's, Grosz happened to
dine with Hans Richter and a traveler who had just returned from the
Sovict Union. When the traveler told how wonderful he had found
everything there, Grosz without warning reached over and punched him in
the mouth2° Nevertheless, Grosz, like Masereel, John Heartfield, and Otto
Dix, had been among the regular contributors to Der Knueppel (The
Cudgel), which from 1922 to 1927 vitriolically attacked the Weimar
Republic and helped to undermine it.
Grosz omitted the chapter dealing with his trip to Russia from the
version of his autobiography, entitled A Little Yes and a Great Big No,
that was published in New York in 1946. After a trip to the United States
in 1932 for the purpose of teaching at the Art Students League in New
York (where in the face of strong opposition he had been recommended
by its president, the socialist American painter John Sloan), he had
decided to settle there. He had done so in 1933 only two weeks before
Hitler came to power in Germany. By that time Grosz had abandoned not
only revolutionary communism but also almost all social radicalism, and so
took little account of the Depression that led many other artists to |
sympathy for communism. Nevertheless, some of his old revolutionary fury
returned in opposition to the Nazis as they moved toward World War II.
He became an American citizen in 1938. Although years after the war, in
1959, he decided to go back to live in West Berlin, he planned to continue
to teach at the Art Students League at least three months each year.
However, he died only a few weeks after returning to Germany.

BERLIN was not the only German city in which dada had developed at
the end of World War I: two other cities possessed independent dadaisms
of their own. One was Hanover, where Kurt Schwitters developed his own
kind of dada on an essentially non-political and pro-art basis, he having no
interest in transforming the world. Apart from his artistically radical works
and theory, in which he exalted “total art” in the Gesamtkunstwerk
tradition, Schwitters was actually “a real bourgeois” *“—a fact serving to
demonstrate again with particular clarity that within a given art movement
the political and social views of artists and the content of their art may
vary enormously. In the second issue of his dadaist review Merz, in April
1923, he published the “Manifest Proletkunst” (Manifesto on Proletarian
Art), inspired chiefly by the Dutch.artist Van Doesburg. This manifesto
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 637

—also signed by Schwitters, T'zara, an artist named Spengemann, and Hans

Arp—denied that a class art can exist.
After being prominent in dada at Zurich, Arp had become a leader of
the movement in Cologne, where in 1919 a political-minded young artist,
Johannes Theodor Baargeld (his real name was Alfred Griinwald), devel-
oped dada in association with Arp and the essentially apolitical Max Ernst.
So concerned was Baargeld with revolutionary politics for a time—though
his father was a rich and conservative banker of Cologne—that he was a
founder of the Communist Party in the Rhineland, and helped to bring it
into the mass German Communist Party formed in 1920 by a merger of
the much weakened Spartakusbund with splinter socialists. In 1919 Baar-
geld had founded a pro-communist dada periodical, Der Ventilator, to
blow fresh air into what he regarded as the stifling political atmosphere. ‘To
that end he attacked with equal vigor church and state, the Establishment
and art. Yet he always disagreed with the Berlin dadaists who wanted to
use the dada movement for political ends: he always refused to suppress
poetic illumination in art in favor of propaganda.”* In 1920, Arp and Ernst
were able to convince him that dada went far beyond communism; that its
new-found inner freedom combined with powerful external expression
could set the whole world free. Arp had already indicated the necessity of
doing away with “the art of the bourgeois,” which he had denounced as
“sanctioned lunacy.” We have seen that he was already known for
using chance in art: in his collages, beginning in 1916-1917, he often fol-
lowed the accidental patterns that resulted when the parts were flung down
on the floor, much as the dada poet Tzara wrote poems based on words
and phrases he had previously cut out and scattered. Arp, however, be-
came especially noted for his “organic” designs, the free-flowing curvilinear
forms of which were descended from the Art Nouveau style and early
expressionism.
It was through Max Ernst that German dada became connected with
dada in France, because the French dadaist writer, André Breton, impressed
by Ernst’s collages, invited him to exhibit them at Paris in 1920. Ernst
settled in Paris in 1922, and after Breton founded surrealism in 1924,
became a prominent member of the surrealist group. This, we have seen,
was also political:minded and developed links with communism—although
Ernst, essentially a libertarian, was largely excused from participating in
the surrealists’ political excursions into communism because he was a
German in France.”
In 1922, two years after Max Ernst had first exhibited in France, dada
was officially declared dead by Tristan Tzara at a Bawhausfest in Weimar
—even though the movement was to linger on until 1924. Then it was
replaced by surrealism, which in Richter’s view gave dada significance and
sense (by having a basis in theory), while dada gave surrealism life ** (by
furnishing a liveliness it otherwise would have lacked).
638 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

5. Dada, Communism, and the

Theater in Berlin: Piscator

Dana in Berlin was closely allied to the theater of the Left, through the
communist producer Erwin Piscator,” who from 1919 to 1933 stood for the
theater of class struggle in Germany. During that period from World War
I until the rise of Hitler, he was associated with many of the most gifted
German artists of his time in various fields.
Like many of his contemporaries, Piscator had been radically trans-
formed by bitter experiences in the German army during the war. He
returned from the war a convinced communist linked with the dadaist
Neue Jugend of Herzfelde and Heartfield, and joined the left-wing com-
munist Spartacus League. In 1919-1920 he founded with a friend a Prole-
tarian Theater, “the stage of the revolutionary workingman,” which played
in halls and meeting-places of Berlin’s suburbs, at first with workers as
actors, later with professional actors. For this, Heartfield and George Grosz
designed stage sets. As the Proletarian Theater was anti-art, its approach
was in harmony with dada theory; conversely, Piscator helped to give the
dada of Berlin a proletarian twist. But though the aim of the Proletarian
Theater was propaganda, it proved too anti-art even for Piscator’s fellow
communists, soon ran out of funds, and disappeared.
After working in various other theaters until 1924, during the succeed-
ing three years Piscator was in charge of the Berlin Volksbiihne, or
People’s Stage, whose performances were attended mostly by social demo-
crats though also by a considerable minority of communists. The first play
Piscator put on for the Volksbiihne, Fahnen (Flags), dealt with the trials,
in 1886, of the eight anarchists who had allegedly exploded a bomb at a
workmen’s demonstration in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. This powerful
play, with a collective hero, was announced in the program as “epic”
drama—a new form in which such narrative and explanatory devices as
film projections and addresses to the audience broke into the action. Thus
out of three principal elements—political, epic, and technical—Piscator
developed his special expressionist style for theater with a social “message”
intended to be directed concretely and simply at a new audience. With
this new form of drama, the stage undertook the task of prodding the
audience into making political decisions by arousing discussion. Not con-
tent with providing the spectator with an experience, it demanded practi-
cal conclusions from him, insisting that he “take hold of life itself and
actively participate in living.” ** This kind of drama, which reflected the
influence of developments in the Soviet theater and film and in the motion
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 639

pictures of Charlie Chaplin, became known as “total theater,” carrying

further the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk exalted by Wagner as: the or-
ganic, collective work of art of the future for large audiences. In collabora-
tion with Piscator, the non-communist architect Walter Gropius, head of
the Bauhaus, made a design for a new type of theater building to house
this “total theater,” in which tiers of seats could be revolved in sections to
make possible the semi-circular arena of the Greek theater, the central
arena of the circus, or the picture-frame stage; but the building was never
erected. The close relationship between the aesthetic approaches of Pisca-
tor and Gropius was, however, further indicated when in 1927 Piscator
employed the furniture workshop of the Bauhaus, headed by Gropius’s
former pupil Marcel Breuer, to design his Berlin apartment. Its furnishings
included chairs with tubular steel frames: in 1925 Breuer had been the first
to produce a chair of this kind, and his original design is still in production.
Throughout the 1920’s and early 1930’s, Piscator’s direct connections
with the German Communist Party were demonstrated again and again.
In 1924, for example, he put on a provocative revue in support of the
party's campaign for the Reichstag elections, and in the following year
organized a monster pageant for a congress of the party. In 1927, he moved
from the Volksbiihne to the Piscator Theater zum Nollendorfplatz, where
during the next three years his artistic achievements reached their peak,
and where he was joined by such leftist writers and artists as Bertolt
Brecht, George Grosz, and John Heartfield. There he put on Jaroslav
Hagek’s The Good Soldier Schweik, with a grandiose nightmarish stage
set by George Grosz, and there in 1927 he reached a high point of his
career with Ernst Toller’s play Hoppla, wir leben! It was during this period
that he published his book Das politische Theater (1928). His greatest
political effectiveness, however, was exerted in other theaters from 1930 to
1933. At that time, when the Stalinist version of proletarian art was the
official communist line in Germany, he had particularly close relations
with the Communist Party.
When the Nazis took power in 1933, Piscator emigrated to the Soviet
Union, where a year later he made a motion picture with sets by Heart-
field. He went to Paris in 1936; then, in 1939, moved to the United States,
founding at New York a Dramatic Workshop in the New School for Social
Research and also a Studio Theater. Arthur Miller and Tennessee Wil-
liams were among his pupils. So, too, was Judith Malina, who, with her
husband Julian Beck, founded the anarchist Living Theater, which created
4 sensation on an extended tour of Europe from 1963 to 1968, and then in
the United States.
Piscator went back to Europe in 1951, thereafter staging plays in West
Germany and other Western countries. From 1962 until his death in 1966
at the age of seventy-two, he was manager and director of West Berlin’s
Freie Volksbiihne, a new theater specially built for him.
640 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

6. “Die neue Sachlichkeit” and

Social Radicalism: Otto Dix

Wet before dada had died, a new radical art movement had been
founded in Germany by the painter Otto Dix, who briefly had been a
revolutionary dadaist at Berlin with Grosz, Heartfield, and Hausmann.”
To the work of Dix’s new group, to which Grosz was sympathetic, was
given the name “Die neue Sachlichkeit” (i.e., the new realism, the new
objectivity). This name, first applied to such painting in 1923,” three years
after Dix had founded the movement, was intended, its originator said, to
“apply as a label to the new realism bearing a socialistic flavor.” *° ‘This
new realism, utterly rejecting dada and expressionism, sought as its goal to
set forth the historical present, with the document as its mode of ex-
pression. Its creed was the beauty of the machine arising from perfect
adaptation to function. Hence in architecture, Die neue Sachlichkeit was
frequently used as the equivalent of functionalism. Much as admiration for
America had led John Heartfield and George Grosz to Americanize their
names, so also America was exalted by Die neue Sachlichkeit—though in
different ways. It glorified the American philosophies of pragmatism and
behaviorism, American efficiency as represented by the industrial efficiency
expert F. W. Taylor, American machines and technology as personified
especially by the aviator Lindbergh, and American jazz.

7. Music and Social Radicalism: VY eill, Eisler,

and the Music Dramas of Bertolt Brecht
Av ruts time German music had a different kind of functionalist
current known as “Gebrauchsmusik,’ or Utilitarian Music, which
stemmed from the “musique d’ameublement” of the leftist French com-
poser, Erik Satie, and from the “machines agricoles” (1919) of Darius
Milhaud,” a member of the French group of composers known as ‘‘Les
Six.” (In a previous chapter it was mentioned that some of “Les Six” were
connected with dada, and one of its members, Honegger, developed partic-
ularly strong communist sympathies.) On the basis of the functional idea
behind both Die neue Sachlichkeit and Gebrauchsmusik, but directly
combined with Marxism and the Behaviorism of the American psycholo-
gist Watson, Bertolt Brecht and his friend and collaborator, the far less
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 641

political composer Kurt Weill, formulated the theory of a new kind of

music drama.” By means of such drama they sought to deal, not with the
fate of individuals, but with the teaching of social attitudes by depicting
the highly formalized actions of abstract social types. Brecht, who had
started out as a dadaist nihilist, but whose first success Trommeln in der
Nacht (Drums in the Night), written in 1918, was on the revolt of the
communist Spartakus group, had in 1926 begun to read Marx and Lenin
and to take courses at the Karl Marx Arbeiterschule in Berlin. As a
consequence, he became thoroughly sympathetic to communism, and the
most important communist writer of his time. He was profoundly influ-
enced by Piscator, and was a friend of Grosz.
The most famous collaborative work of Brecht and Kurt Weill was
Die Dreigroschenoper (‘The Threepenny Opera), a free adaptation of John
Gay’s eighteenth-century Beggar's Opera first performed in 1928. The
music for this by Weill, a pupil of Busoni, represented one of the first
attempts to make jazz into an idiom for a serious composer. Brecht’s plot
reflected an overlapping—rather than a synthesis—of his earlier anarchistic
nihilism with his new Marxism. Although Die Dreigroschenoper was none-
theless written with a Marxian intent and represented capitalistic business-
men as gangsters, and gangsters as businessmen, it was thoroughly enjoyed
by mainly bourgeois audiences until the Nazis came to power, whereupon
it was banned and every effort was made to destroy all prints of a
motion-picture based on it. By the time the movie was being made in 1930,
Brecht had drawn much closer to the communists and wanted to make it
much more Marxist than the original drama. When his proposed changes
were rejected, he went to court but lost the case; the picture followed the
text of his play.
Another “modern” composer who wrote some music for Brecht was
Paul Hindemith, from whose work, in 1927, sprang what was known as
“Gemeinschaftsmusik” or “communal music.” ** However, Brecht and
Hindemith—who unlike Brecht never became a communist sympathizer
—fell into disagreement because Brecht insisted that Gemeinschaftsmusik
must teach the writer’s ideas, whereas Hindemith maintained that it
should restrict itself merely to teaching music and the simple pleasure of
playing together. By 1930 Brecht had become so completely a communist
sympathizer, and his work so thoroughly Marxist in intent, that, in writing
the cantata Die Massnahme (The Expedient) for the Neue Musik festival
of 1930, he secured as his collaborator, not Hindemith, but Hanns Eisler.
A pupil of Schénberg and of Schonberg’s chief pupil Webern, the Vien-
nese communist sympathizer who from 1922 to 1934 led the Vienna
Workers’ Symphony, Eisler was already widely known as a composer of
communist songs, including the Comintern Song (1928). Die Massnahme
had such a strong communist political flavor, to which Eisler’s songs
contributed a powerful revolutionary impact, that Hindemith and other
directors of the Neue Musik festival prevented the work from being put on
642 / RADICALISM, MARXISMVIN OTHER COUNTRIES

there. From that time on, Brecht was to succeed in including his political
and social views, based on his Marxist studies, in a true synthesis of
Marxism, the theater, and life.
In 1932, the year before Hitler took power, Brecht produced with the
help of various communist organizations the propaganda film Kuhle
Wampe, which was named for a working-class slum on the outskirts of
Berlin and so was in harmony with the prevailing communist line of
“proletarian culture.” This was the only communist film ever produced in
the Weimar Republic: its musical score was written by Eisler.
With the coming of the Nazis to power, Eisler and Brecht had to flee
Germany, as did Weill (who last collaborated with Brecht in 1933) and
Hindemith. They were all accused by the Nazis of being “cultural bolshe-
viks”; and it is true that Brecht was an editor of a German-language
magazine published in Moscow. Eventually all of them migrated to the
United States, where Eisler again collaborated with Brecht. Shortly after
World War II, both Brecht and Eisler were called before the House
Committee on Un-American Activities because of their records of commu-
nist sympathies. Both denied that they had ever joined a communist
party. Both left the United States to settle in East Berlin—Brecht only
after vainly seeking to go to West Germany instead. There they both died
—Brecht in 1956, Eisler four years later—and were buried in the same
cemetery near one another not far from the grave of Brecht’s philosophical
idol, Hegel.
After returning in 1948 to East Berlin, where he had been warmly
welcomed by the communist leader Wilhelm Pieck and the local Soviet
political chief, Brecht had brought together his own theatrical company,
the Berliner Ensemble, which soon achieved world fame. In his work for
the Ensemble, however, Brecht had found it difficult to adapt his work to
the socialist realism of which he had been scornful since it had been
adopted as the international communist line on art in 1934. Throughout
the rest of his life, even though he wrote an ode in praise of Stalin, he had
to carry on a running argument with the East German communist regime
over the nature of realism. His own conception, to which he still adhered,
had been best expressed in an essay of 1938, “Weite und Vielfalt der
realistischen Schreibweise” (Extent and Diversity of Literary Realism). In
this, while maintaining that the end of art is indeed “the mastery of
reality,” Brecht had opposed the notion that a work is realistic only insofar
as it is written like a bourgeois realistic novel of the nineteenth century. He
had insisted that the poet Shelley (admired by Marx) was in fact superior
to Balzac (Marx’s favorite novelist) both because he was a friend of the
lower classes, which Balzac was not, and because he had made use of
symbols, thereby enabling later writers to abstract more easily. In maintain-
ing this, Brecht was, of course, a revisionist of orthodox Marxism-Lenin-
ism (it is significant that his works have never been successful in the Soviet
Union). Nevertheless, so important did Moscow consider Brecht to be for
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 643

the international communist cause that in 1955—during the thaw fol-

lowing the death of Stalin, and a year before Brecht himself died—he was
called to Moscow to receive an international Stalin Peace Prize.

8. Cooperation of Radicals, Artistic and Social:

The Novembergruppe
A xrsovucn the radical movements, including dada and Die neue Sach-
lichkeit, had had an appeal for many convinced Marxian socialists, commu-
nists, and communist sympathizers that continued for some time,” they
also for a wide variety of reasons had appealed to an even larger number of
non-socialists and non-communists. Among these were many who, like
many dadaists, were reacting violently against the existing social situation
in a primarily nihilistic and anarchistic manner. There were others, how-
ever, simply interested in trying to solve in an objectively functional way,
not unlike that of Die neue Sachlichkeit, artistic problems with economic
and social overtones, problems that had long been raised by the Industrial
Revolution but had been largely suppressed in Germany and the Austro-
Hungarian Empire until after World War I. In other words, in Germany
it had now become easy for some Marxists and non-Marxists alike to use in
the arts the same radical media and forms, though frequently with a
different intent, and thus a very different content. Yet inasmuch as some
Marxists as well as many non-Marxists now shared a dislike for conserva-
tive art, it was natural for members of both groups to come together, often
in the same artists’ organizations.
Such cooperation of avant-garde German artists sympathetic to com-
munism with German non-communists interested in some kind of social
reform as well as in reform in the arts was notably easy in the days
immediately following World War I, before any firm communist line on
art existed. But it developed further after the new and international com-
munist line calling for the collaboration of communists with non-commu-
nists was established in 1920 by Lenin with his “Left-Wing” Communism;
An Infantile Disorder.
By way of the Comintern, Lenin was increasingly able to impose on
communists throughout the world the “united-front” line that grew out of
his pamphlet. And this led communists everywhere to cooperate in all
fields, including art, with those radicals, liberals, or reformers of any kind
who showed interest in the working class. For though the pamphlet made
no direct reference to the arts, the Marxist conception of society as an orga-
nism meant that this new line was applied to all aspects of the social
organism, including its artistic aspects. As the line represented Soviet
foreign, rather than domestic, policy, it allowed foreign artists sympathetic
644 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

when
to communism a considerable range of expression at a later time
many avant-garde artists unwilling to devote their art directly to commu-
nist goals were finding it advisable to leave their country.
Before this united-front line developed, however, the absence of any
specific line on art emanating from Soviet Russia had meant that avant
garde artists sympathetic to communism had been able to collaborate with
others who were social democrats, anarchists, liberals, or even apolitical in
urging revolution or reform in the arts. Such collaboration had occurred
especially in the association of artists, the “Novembergruppe” (November
Group), founded at Berlin in the autumn of 1918 at the call of the
expressionist painter Max Pechstein and of César Klein, an expressionist
better known as a decorative artist. It was named for the November Revolu-
tion against the imperial German government, that revolution so named
largely by analogy with the “October,” or Bolshevik, Revolution in Russia.
The founders of the organization described it as a “union of radical
artists.”
The Novembergruppe was intended as a close alliance between mainly
expressionist artists and the new, largely socialist German state that had
arisen after the Revolution. The members of the Novembergruppe soon
included most of the leaders of modern art in Germany, representatives of
a broad anti-conservative spectrum. Among them were the leftist but
non-communist playwright Ernst Toller; the expressionist painter Emil
Nolde (a mystical Christian who nonetheless was a racist and became a
Nazi); the architects Bruno Taut (a utopian sympathetic to Soviet com-
munism), Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Mendelsohn; the writer and
future communist Bertolt Brecht, and the composers Kurt Weill (destined
to be Brecht’s chief collaborator), Alban Berg, and Paul Hindemith.
Seized with a desire to make everything new, the members of the Novem-
bergruppe, despite their diverse political views, all regarded themselves as
“revolutionaries of the spirit,” holding that a revolution in the arts should
accompany the post-war political and social revolution and urging the
closest possible interrelations between art and the people. Mies von der
Rohe was the director of its architectural exhibits, in which many archi-
tecturally revolutionary designs were displayed.
Late in 1918, the Novembergruppe, most of whose members were not
directly involved in politics or remained so for only brief periods, founded
in Berlin the autonomous “‘Arbeitsrat fiir Kunst” (Workers Council for
Art), which was inspired and led by Gropius, and in which Taut and
Pechstein were among the leading figures. This organization, which lasted
until 1921, was founded to reunite art and the masses, and was named in
imitation of the Workers and Soldiers councils, themselves largely inspired
by the soviets that had arisen in Russia after the overthrowing of the tsar
by the Revolution of March 1917. The Arbeitsrat fiir Kunst declared that
it had been organized, “not in order to add to the number of already
existing artists associations . . . ,” but for “the creation of a working
community of all artists engaged in the visual arts, in order to re-establish
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 645

the unity of the disrupted arts.” ** In 1918-1919 it issued an Architektur

programm signed by various architects who were to help make Germany
during the Weimar Republic the leading center of modern architecture
and related arts. It called for new utopian projects, such as housing
developments, and for replacing the old state-supported art and architec-
ture schools with new ones based on the crafts.
The Novembergruppe * itself issued a questionnaire on such subjects
as the reform of teaching in art, the duty of a socialist state to support art,
the problem of housing, whether art should be anonymous, whether works
of art should be collectively produced by artists working together in a
socialist state, and what the relation, in such a state, should be between the
fine arts and the applied arts and crafts. Some of the questions made use
of a more or less Marxian terminology—one of them was: “How can the
broad masses of the art proletariat be recruited for the manual crafts
and how can they escape annihilation in the impending economic
catastrophe?” ** One hundred and fourteen painters, architects, sculptors,
critics, and art historians sponsored the questionnaire, the answers to
which showed complete agreement only in calling for a return to the crafts
and to the apprentice system as the one acceptable method of training in
the arts—and so for the complete rejection of academic methods of art
education. Otherwise, in their diversity the answers reflected the individu-
alism that ordinarily characterizes modern artists, and did so even though
the questionnaire had been issued in a period of revolutionary social crisis.
In 1919, some of the members of the Novembergruppe joined in
preparing, in pamphlet form, a kind of manifesto entitled An alle
Kiinstler! (To All Artists!), with woodcut illustrations by Pechstein, Hans
Richter, Lyonel Feininger, and three other artists. After an Introduction
by the leftist writer Johannes Becher, came a “Call to Socialism,” but
socialism of a utopian sort combined with anarchism, religion, and ideal-
ism. One of the nine authors of this pamphlet, Pechstein—who had been a
founder of the Novembergruppe—declared: “We desire to achieve
through the socialist republic not only the recovery of the conditions of art,
but also the beginning of a unified artistic era for our time.” “* For
Pechstein considered that the training of all people in the crafts would
lead toward a new artistic epoch in which there would be no separation
between arts and crafts but an organic and socially significant synthesis of
them all—an epoch therefore similar to Marx’s classless society as well as
one reflecting Wagner's conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk.
This desire for such a new, organic unity of art, crafts, architecture,
and city planning within the socialist state was summed up in a book of
essays entitled Ja! Stimmen. des Arbeitsrates fiir Kunst in Berlin (Yes!
Votes of the Workers Council for Art in Berlin), published by the
Arbeitsrat fiir Kunst in 1919. An article in this book was written by
Gropius, who had been also one of the sponsors of the Novembergruppe,
many of whom, be it reiterated, had only a temporary involvement in
radical politics resulting from this time of revolutionary crisis in Germany.
646 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

9. The Bauhaus: Gropius, Mies, Feinmger,

Klee, Kandinsky, Schlemmer

G_rorws was the first director of the newly founded Bauhaus, that school
—a kind of socia! utopia—destined to become world-famous in a very few
years as a center for education in the arts.** In addition to Gropius, several
other artists who became members of the Bauhaus staff were connected
with the various activities of the Novembergruppe, among them the archi-
tect Mies van der Rohe and the painters Paul Klee, Kandinsky, and Lyonel
Feininger. At a Novembergruppe Exhibition in 1922, Mies exhibited a now-
famous project for a reinforced-concrete and glass building with canti-
levered floors more advanced than anything as yet designed by Gropius.
Like Gropius, Mies—destined to be the last director of the Bauhaus
—went to the United States after the advent of Hitler to power in
Germany. So did Feininger, a founder of the Bauhaus who had been born
in America in 1876, the son of German musicians, but had gone to
Germany as a young man. There he had become a leading political
cartoonist, taking up painting only in 1907. Soon he was working in a style
showing the stimulation of cubism and futurism but combined with the
spirit of German romanticism which, especially in his work after World
War I, added a mystical element. Well before Feininger returned to
America in 1937, he had been sufficiently left-wing to be mentioned
favorably in the first edition of the Bolshaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya
(Great Soviet Encyclopedia) as a member of the Novembergruppe and as
“among the artists stylistically belonging to expressionism” who proposed
to “unmask the brutality of capitalism.” ** But his social interests scarcely
affected his art; and when they did so, it was likely to be in a way that was
far from reflecting any orthodox Marxism, as his semi-religious woodcut of
1920, “Cathedral of Socialism,” made for the first manifesto of the Bau-
haus, so clearly shows (Fig. 109).
Paul Klee, who inherited the Symbolists’ belief in the close relation-
ship between the visual arts and music, felt more deeply than Feininger
the need to create an art to rejuvenate post-war Europe by helping to bring
harmony, eliminate chaos, and give order anew. In the Byzantine mosaics
of Ravenna, he saw a model, a demonstration of the artist’s power to create
compelling images. He believed that even to one who knows nothing of
the history of Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora, the mosaics
commemorating them in the church of San Vitale at Ravenna remain
images of both power and order. The very form of the mosaic art, with a
few dominant shapes and lines giving direction to an otherwise confused
and limitless expanse of the tiny tesserae constituting the image, comple-
648 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

ments its content. For it serves to demonstrate how confused masses of

insignificant individuals could be given direction and purpose—in the
Byzantine empire by the great rulers themselves, in the mosaics of them by
the artist. Klee worked again and again on this model and theme. Gradu-
ally, by means of masses of intersecting lines, squares of color given
direction by compulsive lines, shapes, and the colors themselves, he per-
fected his personal expression to produce in his pictures intimations of
chaotic masses of individuals ordered into purposeful action by compelling
symbols. For he hoped and believed that his “pedagogical pictures” would
lead humanity to a comprehension of cosmic order which would stimulate
recovery of political and social order.” ~
As for the Russian-born artist Wassily Kandinsky: before the war he
had lived for many years in Germany, where he was prominent in the
Munich expressionist group Der blaue Reiter. He had become interested
in theosophy, with its belief in the “Universal Brotherhood of Man” as
well as in a mystical order beyond that of the material world of ‘nature,’
an order he had expressed in 1910 or 1911 (the date is disputed) by
painting probably the first non-objective picture in modern art. In doing
so, he was apparently influenced by reading Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstrak-
tion und Einfiihlung of 1907, as well as by his own longstanding belief,
held earlier by Baudelaire and the Symbolists, that it is possible for
painting to have the same expressive power as music. This was a belief
originally stimulated in Kandinsky by hearing, as a young man in Russia, a
performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin—much as Baudelaire had been stimu-
lated by hearing Tannhduser. Significantly, also, in 1909 Kandinsky had
become head of a newly founded avant-garde art group, the Neue
Kiinstlervereinigung Miinchen (New Artists’ Association of Munich),
whose primary aim, like Wagner’s, was a synthesis of the arts. T'wo years
later, however, he left the Neue Kiinstlervereinigung to become a founder
of Der blaue Reiter, the first group of modern artists to call themselves
expressionists, using the term first popularized in Germany by Worringer
in 1911, the year that Der blaue Reiter was founded.
At the outbreak of war in 1914, Kandinsky had returned to his native
Russia. There he had been prominent for a short time after the Bolshevik
Revolution, but he left Soviet Russia for Germany again in 1921 at a time
when artists unwilling to devote their art directly to the socio-political aims
of the Revolution were under attack. By 1923 he had acquired enough of
an international reputation so that he was made honorary vice-president of
Katherine Dreier’s Société Anonyme, which founded in New York a
Museum of Modern Art that never had a building.
It should be emphasized, however, that the three greatest painters of
the Bauhaus—Klee, Kandinsky, and Feininger—whose influence there was
so very great, were less important for the ultimate influence of the Bau-
haus, which was primarily in the fields of architecture and industrial
design. Yet these three great artists were indeed sympathetic to the basic
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 649

program of the Bauhaus, which started out as “‘a cathedral of a new faith”
thought of loosely by many members of its faculty as related to democracy
and a liberal kind of chiefly utopian socialism (e.g., Fig. 109). However,
the school soon became increasingly committed to an international creed
of scientific rationalism, or technocracy. Kandinsky, Klee, and Feininger
were sympathetic to this also, though it did not affect their work to any
great degree as it did that of the younger teachers of architecture and
design, such as Marcel Breuer and Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy, likewise wisely
appointed by Gropius. It was these younger teachers who believed most
strongly in this program and were determined to realize it by working very
closely with the students. And it was their approach which spread abroad
to become regarded as the one always characteristic of the Bauhaus. Yet
with that approach some older teachers, taken over by Gropius from the
former Grand Ducal Academy of Art at Weimar, were certainly not in
sympathy—with the result that most of them left the Bauhaus before it
moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925. One might add that even though
the younger teachers of architecture and design were especially destined to
spread the influence of the Bauhaus, they actually did not represent the
“purest” type of Bauhaus teacher so completely as did Oskar Schlemmer,*
the all-around artist who primarily taught stage design but also briefly gave
courses in mural painting, ceramics, and other subjects. He thus repre-
sented the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Although Schlemmer’s all-sided-
ness as artist was also not wholly unlike the general all-sidedness that
Marxists believe individuals will achieve in the classless society, Schlemmer
primarily regarded the Bauhaus as a utopian structure aiming by its
example to unify the world. And the art of the stage was regarded by him
and others as an especially complete realization of the Bauhaus utopia
because of its synthesis of the arts into a collective and organic whole.

10. The Bauhaus: Its Background

and Spirit, Artistic and Social
of
[ue Bauuaus in some respects continued the basically socialist spirit
part in an
the short-lived Novembergruppe. But it did so for the most
and artistic
essentially non-political way, because the union of the political
fraught with
revolutions represented by the Novembergruppe had been
largely
misunderstandings; consequently most of its members soon became
immediately to
disillusioned with politics and devoted themselves more
major
their art. This was the case with Gropius and most of the other
the practical
members of the Bauhaus staff, though the Bauhaus received
attacked by the
support of left-of-center parties while being repeatedly
ng opponents
political Right. For instance, in January 1920 its right-wi
650 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

were able to get an audience of about a thousand at an anti-Bauhaus rally,

while in April 1924 the socialist paper Vorwarts proudly referred to the
school as one of the chief accomplishments of socialist cultural policy in
Thuringia.
It has already been mentioned that the Bauhaus in part continued the
Arts and Crafts School at Weimar, advised or directed since 1902 by
Henry van de Velde, one of the founders of that continental arts and
crafts movement known as Art Nouveau or Jugendstil, which believed in
the fusion of the arts and was then artistically and sometimes socially
radical. After Van de Velde had withdrawn from the Weimar Arts and
Crafts School in 1914, it was at his suggestion that Gropius, a native-born
German, had been selected to succeed him. In 1919, under Gropius’s
leadership, the Arts and Crafts School had been combined with the Grand
Ducal Academy of Art, and the two had thereupon been reopened as one
establishment with the name of Staatliches Bauhaus, in which the fine arts
and crafts were thoroughly fused. In putting his ideas into practice at the
Bauhaus, Gropius freely acknowledged that among his chief precursors
were Ruskin, Morris, and Van de Velde (who, however, rejected the
concept of standardization so fascinating to Gropius), and also the Ger-
man architect, Peter Behrens, and the group called the Deutscher
Werkbund,” of which Gropius himself had become a leading member.
Peter Behrens was the architect in whose office Gropius had worked as
a young man before World War I at a time when Le Corbusier and Mies
van der Rohe were also working there. Their master, Behrens, had long
admired Van de Velde’s ideas to such a degree that, like Van de Velde, he
had given up painting to become an architect; and as architect for the
A.E.G., the German General Electric Company, he had become the
foremost industrial architect in Germany. He too was a prominent mem-
ber of the Deutscher Werkbund, founded in 1907 to foster collaboration
between industry and design after an impassioned public lecture by Her-
mann Muthesius, then superintendent of the Prussian Board of Trade for
Schools of Art and Crafts. 7
From 1896 to 1903, Muthesius had been attached to the German
Embassy in London for the purpose of carrying on research in English
housing, and had become a strong supporter of the English arts and
crafts movement and of the English domestic architecture than being
built by followers of Morris in the tradition of Red House. However, in
contrast to Morris but not unlike Morris’s older contemporary, Gottfried
Semper, and like Morris’s follower, C. R. Ashbee, Muthesius emphasized
the importance of reforming design by means of the machine and in direct
relation to machine production. Demanding a new “Maschinenstil” and a
“perfect and pure utility,” which he felt were lacking in the Art Nouveau,
he called for realism and objectivity in art—‘“a reasonable Sachlichkeit.” +
He believed that any aspects of design which did not have inherent
relationship to “pure utility” could not be realistic: to him the only “real”
elements in a building or other object of design were the immediately
 From World War IJ and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 651

functional ones. Muthesius thus foreshadowed the somewhat different

Neue Sachlichkeit movement, which developed, as we have seen, in Ger-
man painting after World War I under the politically and artistically
radical leadership of Otto Dix. Furthermore, Muthesius emphasized the
supremacy of the community, and although for him the community was
the state, and the Werkbund an adjunct of state policy, he helped to
stimulate others to adopt a socialist point of view.
Like Muthesius and the other members of the Werkbund, and like
Morris and Van de Velde earlier, Gropius believed then, as later, that
there should be a reintegration of the arts in which architecture must play
a key role. He insisted, as they had, that the separation between the fine
arts and the crafts, which had taken place under the academic tradition,
had a disastrous effect on the arts, on society, and especially on the individ-
ual artist and craftsman. With Muthesius and the Werkbund, also,
Gropius insisted that integration of art and the machine was necessary in
an industrial age. With his master Behrens, and like Van de Velde in
theory earlier, he maintained that industrial architecture, looked down
upon by the academic tradition as an inferior form, offered great possibili-
ties for modern design: thus the model factory that he had designed with
Adolf Meyer for an exposition held by the Werkbund at Cologne in 1914
was in many respects far ahead of its time. And as his views about indus-
trial architecture were similar to those of Tony Garnier, it was only natural
that he would be stimulated by Garnier’s designs for Une Cité industrielle,
themselves reflecting Fourierist utopianism, published in 1917.
When the Bauhaus was established at Weimar after World War I
with Gropius as director, it soon became the most widely known progres-
sive art school not only in Germany but in the whole world. Because of its
artistic radicalism, however, it met increasing opposition in the conserva-
tive city of Weimar, where it was widely considered to be politically
radical. The Bauhaus was under the government of the province in which
Weimar is located, and it was on account of the Bauhaus’s supposed
radicalism that the Social Democratic provincial government fell in 1923.
Consequently, in 1925 the Bauhaus moved to the progressive industnal
city of Dessau, where there was a Social Democratic city government. At
Dessau it was soon housed in a new home erected from Gropius’s designs,
a building (Fig. 110) immediately recognized as one of the most important
monuments of modern architecture and of the industrial era—though it
was mainly covered with stucco, a handcraft material, to achieve modern
reduction of form to essentials. In the plan for the Bauhaus, and in the
teaching there under Gropius’s leadership, the arts and crafts and what
others would call the fine arts were wedded more indissolubly than ever
before, with architecture regarded as the key art and therefore one to be
attempted only by the most advanced students.
This indissoluble wedding was described by the word Gesamtkunst-
werk, or total work of art in which the arts are organically fused, that
term borrowed from Wagner, reflected in the aim of Symbolism and the
 ‘A
Be
“

mes
vee
“Te

FIG. 110. Dessau, Bauhaus workshops (1925-1926) by Walter Gropius.

Art Nouveau, and popularized anew by Kandinsky before World War I in

Munich, whence it was taken over by that founder of dada, Hugo Ball.
The term had been used by Gropius in an address of 1919 published as the
first manifesto of the Bauhaus, the first page of which was illustrated
with Lyonel Feininger’s there-untitled “Cathedral of Socialism” (Fig.
109). For in the medieval cathedral the various arts had been brought into
synthesis, with architecture dominant, and in Feininger’s woodcut the
dominant central tower symbolizes architecture, while the two lower flank-
ing towers respectively stand for painting and sculpture. This was in
harmony with Gropius’s words in the manifesto: “Together let us conceive
and create the new building of the future, which will embrace architecture,
and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will rise one day toward
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 653

heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a
new faith.” Although the romantic presentation of this idea in the first
manifesto reflected mainly an exaltation of craftsmanship like that of
Morris’s version of the Gothic Revival, with the very name “Bauhaus”
purposely recalling the “Bauhiitte,” or masons’ lodges, of the craftsmen
who built the medieval cathedrals, soon this was strongly modified by
Gropius’s newer emphasis on technology, industrialization, and a machine
aesthetic. ‘Thus in 1923 the first big Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar was
held under the slogan “Art and Technology—A New Unity.” In this new
unity, now on the basis of design for industrial production, the organic
synthesis of the arts continued to be emphasized and could also appeal to
the organicism, social and cultural, upheld by Marxists. In 1927 Gropius,
no communist, could collaborate with Piscator in making the designs for a
“Total Theater.”
At the Bauhaus all political activity was officially banned by Gropius.
A wide range of political opinion was always represented among the faculty
members ** and student body. Artistically, however, as a focus of modern
movements descended in part both from Morris and from modern Russian
art, the Bauhaus was far left of center, and some, at least, of its artistic
principles could appeal to some socialists and communists, as well as to an
even larger number who were simply anti-conservatives in a period when
conservatism was still associated with the recently overthrown imperial
government. Conversely, the artistic anti-conservatism of the Bauhaus
continued to draw upon it attacks both from those unsympathetic to its
emphasis on modern movements in art and from political conservatives.
Gropius himself—a vaguely utopian social democrat and humanitarian
liberal—was not an active political socialist any more than he was a con-
servative or a communist; but as one whose avowed precursors include
Ruskin, Morris, and Van de Velde, he believed wholeheartedly in the need
for a close relationship between art and human life, between art and man
as a social being. From early youth he—like Ruskin and the young Morris
—had always been interested in architecture as the essentially social art
which, in contrast to painting or sculpture, necessarily requires the collabo-
ration of many to produce it. In this sense, the philosophy of design that
prevailed at the Bauhaus can be described as more or less interested in
social improvement, more or less collectivistic. As Gropius himself put it in
a letter to the author: “The Bauhaus was more than an art institute. We
were seeking to find a new way of life. The main tendency with which
everyone was imbued was to stress the point that in this world of economic
expediency the human being should be again the focus, that is to say, that
all the economical and industrial issues are to be subordinated to the life
requirements of men. In consequence of this many of the members of the
Bauhaus were interested in social improvements but the main tendency
was very anti-Marxist.” ”
Nevertheless, although the main tendency of the Bauhaus was anti-
654 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

Marxist, it stood for a kind of collectivistic utopianism in its approach to

art; also, some members of the Bauhaus group—and some of those interna-
tionally influenced by the Bauhaus—had leftist political sympathies. We
have seen that the very first manifesto of the Bauhaus was illustrated with
Feininger’s woodcut of 1919, “‘Cathedral of Socialism” (Fig. 109), which
was specially carved for the manifesto. We have mentioned that Oskar
Schlemmer, who as much as anyone represented the purest type of Bau-
haus teacher, conceived of it as a kind of utopian socialist organization.
Nor was his socialism always entirely utopian. In 1923, he prepared for the
Bauhaus exhibition of that year at Weimar what is known as “The Schlem-
mer Manifesto.” This, printed on a long sheet folded in two, was so social-
istic in content that his colleagues thought it advisable to tear off that half
of each copy of the manifesto in which socialism was specifically
mentioned, including the words “Cathedral of Socialism.”

11. The Bauhaus: The Social Radicalism of

Hannes Meyer Versus Gropius and Mies
Wiauen Gropius withdrew from the Bauhaus in 1928 largely because of
the ever-increasing conservative opposition to it, he was succeeded as
director by Hannes Meyer, one of the teachers, an architect strongly
influenced by Russian constructivism, who, to Gropius’s surprise, eventu-
ally proved to be highly sympathetic to Marxian communism.** Meyer had
been trained chiefly at Basel in his native Switzerland, but spent 1912-1913
in England studying town planning, especially that of garden cities, and
the cooperative movement. His early professional life was passed mainly as
an architect for cooperative housing in Germany and Switzerland. Between
1923 and 1926, he traveled widely in Europe, and made contact with Le
Corbusier, the Dutch De Stijl group, and the Scandinavian cooperative
movement. An anti-formalist, he believed in the “modern objectivity” of
Die neue Sachlichkeit, holding that form must arise from function, materi-
als, and manufacturing processes. Much affected by the spread of mechani-
cal inventions, which he considered vital, he declared in an essay of 1926:
“All these things are a product of function times economics”—a formula
easily acceptable to Marxists.
Meyer was a member of the ABC constructivist group in Switzerland,
whose founding in 1926 had been stimulated by a visit of the Soviet
constructivist El (for Lazar) Lissitzky, who spent most of the years 1922 to
1928 in western Europe, some of them in Switzerland as a sufferer.from
tuberculosis. During 1922-1923 Lissitzky, a convinced communist, had
edited and published at Berlin, with the Russian writer and future Soviet
apologist Ilya Ehrenburg, three issues of a constructivist review with the
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 j, OSs

trilingual title of Veshch, Gegenstand, Objet, all three words meaning

“object.” In their introduction to the first number of the periodical,
Ehrenburg and Lissitzky declared: “The appearance of Veshch is an
indication of the fact that the exchange of ‘objects’ between young Russian
and West European masters has begun.” They added that Veshch “stands
equally aloof from all political parties, because it is not occupied with the
problems of politics but of art. This does not mean, however, that we are
in favor of an art which stands outside of life and is a-political on principle.
On the contrary, we cannot imagine a creation of new forms in art
unrelated to the change in social form. . . . The new collective interna-
tional style is a product of communal creation.” *
The contributors to Veshch—among whom were Le Corbusier, the
painter Ozenfant, Picasso, the Ukrainian-born sculptor Alexander Archi-
penko, the Soviet theater director Meyerhold, and the Soviet poets Ye-
senin and Mayakovsky—constituted a cross-section of the artistic and, in
many cases, social avant-garde of western Europe and the U.S.S.R.
Under the stimulus of Lissitzky, beginning in 1924 the ABC group
issued at Basel a constructivist periodical with a point of view similar to his
entitled ABC—Beitrdége zum Bauen (ABC—Contributions to Architec-
ture) which championed the new architecture, and which lasted until
1928. The editors were two young Swiss architects, Emil Roth and Hans
Schmidt, and Lissitzky’s Dutch disciple Mart Stam, who late in 1924,
under the influence of constructivism, conceived the chair with a cantilever
frame consisting of a single loop of metal tubing, which in 1926 he was the
first to make. In 1930, Schmidt and Stam were to go to the Soviet Union
with a group of architects and engineers assembled under the leadership of
Ernst May of Frankfurt-am-Main, who had worked briefly in England with
Unwin before becoming internationally famous for his contributions to
German mass-housing. Members of the group were to serve as specialists in
Soviet domestic architecture and city planning until 1937: though they
were largely frustrated in the U.S.S.R., they were not allowed by the Nazis
to return home.
Meanwhile, in 1928 ABC had issued a manifesto that could represent
the views of Hannes Meyer because it was entitled “ABC Demands the
Dictatorship of the Machine,” and called for scientific building. Meyer
had been appointed, in April 1927, to the staff of the Bauhaus. After he
became its director in 1928, he hired many new teachers, among them
Hans Richter and Ernst Toller. Under Meyer’s direction, the Bauhaus
strongly subordinated art to technology and to the mass-production of
immediately useful objects rather than to the basic search for new mean-
ingful forms in design which had been a major concern of Gropius and
especially of Moholy-Nagy. Meyer had increasingly come to feel that
Marxism was the only doctrine capable of encompassing the problems of
the modern world. As a consequence, when he had served as director of the
Bauhaus for only about two and a half years, he was compelled to resign
656 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

under pressure exerted largely as a result of Gropius’s efforts. For Meyer

had been accused of tolerating a communist cell within the student body,
and then of contributing to a collection made by leftist students on behalf
of striking miners. His resignation was forced even though he claimed to
have dissolved the communist cell, and even though he always maintained
that he had never joined the Communist Party, that his leftist activities
were “culture-political,” not “party-political”: nevertheless, he referred to
himself as a “scientific Marxist.” “ By 1930, Meyer had accepted the
communist aesthetic of proletarian culture which had become the party
line in the Soviet Union in 1928, when Stalin had already triumphed over
the Left Opposition, of which Trotsky was regarded as the chief figure, and
when the Stalinists were in the course of defeating the Right Opposition
headed by Bukharin. Shortly after Meyer had been dismissed from the
Bauhaus, he had declared in an interview published in a Soviet architec-
tural magazine: “I am going to work in the USSR where a truly proletarian
culture is being hammered out, where socialism originates and where the
society exists for which we have fought here under capitalism.” “
Meyer arrived in the Soviet Union later in 1930, and so in the same
year as the group under Ernst May. He served as professor at the Univer-
sity of Architecture (VASI) from October 1930 until the autumn of 1933.
Then and later he held important positions as a town-planner and housing
expert. He was Professor of Architecture at the newly founded Academy of
Architecture from March 1934 to October 1935, and was elected to the
governing board of Moscow’s “House of Architects” in the latter year.
Shortly after arriving in the U.S.S.R., he had joined the All-Russian
Society of Proletarian Architects, founded in 1929, known from its initials
in Russian as VOPRA. As its name indicates, this group pressed the line of
proletarian culture, of making art into a means of promoting proletarian
class-consciousness and thereby serving as a weapon in the class war.
Because this was now the official line, VOPRA increasingly had official
backing in bringing about the defeat of two earlier Soviet architectural
groups. One of these, ASNOVA (or Association of New Architects),
which had been founded in 1923, emphasized abstract forms and radical
structure. Lissitzky was a member, and a sympathizer was K. C. Melnikov,
designer of the Soviet Pavilion at the Paris Exposition of 1925, which
influenced many Western architects. The other group, SASS (or Section
of Architects of Socialist Building), founded in 1925 as OSA (Associa-
tion of Contemporary Architects), maintained a strongly constructivist
and functionalist point of view that stressed utility in architecture achieved
through the latest advances in technology and engineering. Because of
ASNOVA’s liking for radical novelty in form and structure, it was attacked
by VOPRA as too radical, and therefore unacceptably Leftist. But eventu-
ally its liking for abstract form was simultaneously attacked as bourgeois
“idealistic formalism,” and therefore as rightist. (Similarly, Trotsky,
branded by the Stalinists a leftist, had eventually been accused of having
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 657

succumbed also to rightism.) SASS was charged by VOPRA with the sin
of “mechanism,” which was regarded as rightist. (Similarly, Bukharin and
his group had been denounced by the Stalinists as rightists.) Because of
the association of ASNOVA with formalism and of SASS with mecha-
nism, the victory of VOPRA over them both was assured.
It was fitting that Hannes Meyer had become a member of VOPRA:
his support of proletarian culture was obvious in statements such as that
architecture is a “keen-edged weapon in the class struggle.” Nonetheless, in
the Soviet Union he was on dangerous ground. Even though he was an
avowed anti-formalist, insofar as his architectural designs reflected novelty
of structure and form, he could easily be accused of “formalism.” More-
over, like the architects of SASS he had declared: “Architecture is no
longer the art of building. . . . Architecture is building science,” “ and
therefore had laid himself open to the charge of being a “mechanist.”
Finally, the Stalinist aesthetic of proletarian culture was soon in the course
of being replaced by a new Stalinist aesthetic, socialist realism. By 1932,
this latter was being formulated, with the consequence that VOPRA was
promptly liquidated. T'wo years later, socialist realism was officially ac-
cepted as the international Communist Party line at a writers’ congress in
Moscow.
Constructivism and the mechanistic kind of architecture for which
Meyer stood then became impossibly dangerous to carry on in the Soviet
Union. In 1936, therefore, he returned to his native Switzerland, and was
in Geneva from 1936 to 1939 except for a trip to America in 1938 which
included a visit to Mexico. In 1939, he accepted from the leftist Mexican
government of Lazaro Cardenas the post of director of the new Instituto
de Urbanismo y Planificaci6n. Soon after this was closed in 1941 following
a change in the Mexican administration, he became a designer of housing
and a city-planner in the Mexican Ministry of Labor. Later, he served on
various state commissions, but eventually devoted himself to private prac-
tice. Among his writings of these years was an article, in Spanish, entitled
“The Soviet Architect”: originally published in the Mexican periodical
Arquitectura early in 1942, it appeared in an English translation in the
Harvard architectural periodical Task in October of that year at a time
when the Soviet Union was a much admired ally of the United States.
In 1949, Meyer returned home to Switzerland, where he died in
1954.
ety A he had been dismissed from the Bauhaus in 1930, he had been
succeeded as director by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Mies (Fig. 111) had
been especially stimulated at one time by the work of Hendnk Berlage
(Figs. 93 and 94), and possessed a philosophy of architecture similar in
many respects to that of Gropius. As director of the Bauhaus, he deem-
phasized in favor of greater emphasis on quality of design the utilitarian
production stressed by Meyer. He remained in charge of the Bauhaus until
it was forced to close its doors in 1933 after the Nazis came to power. In
 FIG. 111. Berlin (near), monument to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg
(1926, now destroyed) by Mies van der Rohe.

1932 it had been compelled to leave Dessau because its supposed political
radicalism had caused the fall of the city’s Social Democratic government.
When the Nazis and their right-wing associates in Dessau voted for the
closing of the Bauhaus there and the Communist Party members sup-
ported only by Dessau’s progressive mayor attempted to maintain it, the
social democrats abstained from casting the decisive votes that might have
saved it. After the failure of a brief attempt to operate in Berlin as a
private institution proved in vain, the life of the Bauhaus ended. But
although it had involved a total faculty of only twenty-five members, less
than 500 graduates and a total attendance of but 1,921 students, its
influence was to be enormous, becoming particularly strong abroad in
1937, when both Gropius (after a stay in England) and Mies van der Rohe
emigrated to the United States. ‘There they promptly became leaders in the
teaching and practice of architecture, with a national and international
influence.
It is clear that for only during the two and a half years, 1928-1930,
while Hannes Meyer was director could the administration of the Bauhaus
be described as at all “communistic” in tendency in any socio-political
sense of the word. Like Gropius earlier, Mies van der Rohe was careful to
ban all political activity at the Bauhaus. Yet, despite the care taken by
both Gropius and Mies to keep the Bauhaus above politics, the difficulties
put in their way by those who—like the Nazis—wrongly identified the
artistic radicalism of the Bauhaus with direct political radicalism, were
enormous: “I hardly believe you can imagine the amount of troubles we
had to go through,” Mies wrote to the author of this book.
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 659

The story of the Bauhaus offers especially good evidence that artistic
radicalism, on the one hand, and political or economic radicalism, on the
other, are by no means necessarily related to each other in a one-to-one
way. Indeed, the presupposition that such a relationship must exist is
essentially a totalitarian one, as the Nazis and the Stalinists have so clearly
demonstrated. For most of the Nazis, somewhat like Hegel earlier, tended
to regard the state as a kind of living organism to which individual human
beings are subordinated in an integrated way like the parts of an organism,
with the Nazi Party as itself an elite organism. This conception of the state
and of the party as organisms has also been characteristic of Stalin and his
followers in the Soviet Union. Marx himself, unlike so many of his own
followers, was careful to indicate that the organic relationship between the
economic factors, which he regarded as the ultimate basis of social change,
and such other aspects of human life as the arts, was not a direct one. But
because he too regarded society and class (rather than the state) as a kind
of organism, it was easy for many of his followers to assume in practice
that economics, politics, and art must be related one-to-one, with the
economic forces of production directly determining the relations of pro-
duction among human beings, and so determining the Marxist superstruc-
ture, including the arts.
Gropius and many of his colleagues at the Bauhaus were, however,
stimulated by Morris rather than by Marx. Like other followers of Morris,
Gropius often likened a work of art to an organism; and what is more, he
never failed to insist that there is, or should be, a necessary organic
relationship between art and society. In this latter respect, he and other
followers of Morris have held views similar to those of Marx. While Morris
himself refused to follow Marx in the doctrine that the prevailing mode of
production, and therefore economic factors, ultimately determine art, Gro-
pius, Van de Velde, and many other twentieth-century artists and archi-
tects have held that modern art and architecture must make use of
twentieth-century techniques, including techniques of production, in order
to be truly modern. In this they have implicitly reflected a belief that
worthwhile art and the prevailing mode of production are organically
related, much as Marx, rather than Morris, had maintained. But it must be
emphasized that they have differed fundamentally from Marx in valuing
modern techniques, including machine production, not as being economic
factors that determine social development, as Marx held, but as artistic
means that the architect must make use of to be modern. ‘This accounts for
Gropius’s slogan of 1923: “Art and Technology—A New Unity.”
It was, of course, the occasional similarities of the ideas prevailing at
the Bauhaus to those of Marx, rather than such fundamental differences,
which eventually led the Nazis to attack the Bauhaus as “bolshevistic.”
But the very fact that Gropius and other members of the Bauhaus staff
were admittedly stimulated by some of the ideas of Morris without being
practicing socialists or communists themselves, certainly suggests that these
men believed in a degree of individual choice that was necessarily anath-
660 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

ema to the totalitarianism of both the Nazis and the Stalinists. And the
fact that Gropius did not adopt Marxian communism, as did Mortis, once
more indicates what should be obvious to anyone acquainted with the arts,
namely, that one artist can be stimulated by another without adopting the
latter’s whole political and economic creed. It must also be remembered
that artists are frequently given commissions by clients to whose political
philosophy they do not subscribe. For example, Gropius—though not a
political-minded ‘socialist—was commissioned by a social-democratic offi-
cial of the Ministry of the Weimar Republic to design a monument at
Weimar in 1921 (Fig. 112) to those killed in opposing the Kapp Putsch of
1920, a rightist and extreme nationalist attempt to take over the govern-
ment which had been frustrated only by a general strike mounted by the
social democrats and trade unions. Whether or not one likes this artisti-
cally radical monument, which so clearly shows the influence of both
cubism and expressionism, surely one could hardly say that its form was
specifically social-democratic or that it expressed a specifically social-demo-
cratic content. Only a political totalitarian who believes that politics and
other aspects of human life are necessarily related one-to-one would hold
that such was the case. But since the Nazis did believe this, they destroyed
the monument when they came to power (it was reconstructed in 1945).
Four years after Gropius designed the memorial at Weimar, Mies was
commissioned as architect of the monument erected near Berlin in 1926 to
the memory of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (Fig. 111), the two
communist leaders of the Spartakusbund who had been killed, apparently
by German army officers, while on the way to prison after the Spartacist
uprising in January 1919. Of the two, the highly cultivated Polish-born
communist, Rosa Luxemburg, had a greater love for the arts, especially
literature and music.
Obviously, accident can often play a large part in the commissioning
of works of art. Yet the fact that communist clients commissioned a
Luxemburg-Liebknecht monument to be designed by an artistically radical
non-communist architect again supports the view that—other things being
equal—social radicals may understandably be more inclined than conserva-
tives to be sympathetic to radicalism in other fields, including radicalism in
the arts, provided that no official line against such radicalism has been
established. This is frequently the case even when the artistic radicals—like
Gropius and Mies—are not directly interested in specifically political
radicalism. In other words, the belief in progress so characteristic of secular
socialism, including Marxian socialism and communism, could be expected
to lead Marxists to be sympathetic to the more advanced forms of contem-
porary art. However, there have often been special reasons for them to
attack art of that kind—reasons such as the nationalism and consequent
anti-Westernism of the U.S.S.R. under Stalin and, especially, the belief so
frequent among Marxists that every member of the masses should be able
to understand every work of art. Furthermore, political leaders, including
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 661

radical political leaders such as Stalin, are likely to be conservative in

whatever artistic’ tastes they may have. Their conservatism usually results
from lack of interest in and knowledge of the arts, and in the case of
Marxists is likely to be the more pronounced because Marxism gives such
primacy to the economic and political aspects of life.
All of these points are especially well illustrated by the story of Mies’s
Luxemburg-Liebknecht memorial. ‘To the author Mies wrote concerning
that monument: “Everything was accidental from the beginning to the
end. But let me tell you the facts.
“One of the first houses I built was for Hugo Perls in Berlin. Mr. Perls
sold his house in the early twenties to a Mr. Edward Fuchs. Mr. Fuchs had
a huge collection of Daumiers and other artists. He told friends of mine he
would like to build a wing onto his house as a gallery for his collection and
for this he would like to talk to me. A few days later a friend of mine told
me he was going to Mr. Fuchs’ for dinner. I asked him if it would not be
an opportune time for me to meet Mr. Fuchs. This meeting was
arranged.
“After discussing his house problems Mr. Fuchs then said he wanted
to show us something. This developed to be a photograph of a model for a
monument to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. It was a huge stone
monument with Doric columns and medallions of Luxemburg and Lieb-
knecht. When I saw it I started to laugh and told him it would be a fine
monument for a banker.
“He must have been very much disturbed by this remark because the

FIG. 112. Weimar, memorial to those killed in the Kapp Putsch (1921, de-
stroyed but rebuilt), by Walter Gropius.
662 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

next morning he called me and said that as I had laughed at the monu-
ment he had shown, he would like to know what I would propose. I told
him I hadn’t the slightest idea what I would do in his place, but as most of
these people were shot in front of a wall, a brick wall would be what I
would build as a monument. Fuchs could not imagine how a brick wall
could be used as a monument but told me that if I had an idea he would
be interested in seeing it. A few days later I showed him my sketch of the
monument which in the end was built.
“He was still skeptical about it and particularly so when I showed him
the bricks I would like to use. In fact, he had the greatest trouble to gain
permission from his friends who were to build the monument.”

12. The Bauhaus and the International Style

Dvrsprre the large element of sheer chance in the story of Mies’s monu-
ment, it is significant on the one hand that the communist followers of
Liebknecht and Luxemburg in the beginning showed themselves to be so
lacking in artistic awareness, and on the other that they nevertheless finally
commissioned, not a design in the classical-academic tradition, but one
that so completely represents a belief in the idea of progress. However, the
design did not grow dialectically out of the historical past in a Marxian
way, but broke abruptly with the past. As all students of architecture
know, Mies and Gropius, like Van de Velde earlier, have been among the
architects and teachers of architecture who have reacted sharply against
the eclecticism, or imitation of past styles, that was dominating architec-
tural design in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In thus
seeking to free building from historical reminiscences and to achieve a
basic and straightforward modern architecture (albeit partly under the
stimulation, conscious or unconscious, of cubism) they were among the
chief founders of what has since become known as the International
Style. This name, which was invented in 1932 at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, was distasteful to the founders of the movement even
though it was inspired by the title of one of the Bauhaus’s own publica-
tions, Walter Gropius’s Internationale Architektur, published in 1925,
rather than by the passing reference of Lissitzky and Ehrenburg, in 1922,
to “the new collective international style.” The founders rejected the term
because they insisted that they had no intention of establishing a new
“style,” but were returning to architectural fundamentals, to a more truly
organic architecture. Thus Mies once declared: “We reject all aesthetic
speculation, all doctrine, all formalism.” “ Yet because so many of the
fundamentals that these men agreed upon can be basic for architecture
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 663

everywhere, they do transcend national boundaries, so that the name

International Style has become generally accepted. However, its originators
(most of whom have preferred the term “new architecture” ) firmly believed
that good buildings must be designed to meet the specific conditions of
climate and site, must in this way be an organic expression of the particular
environment, one which in these respects therefore connotes neither “in-
ternationalism” nor “style.”
Because of the non-nationalistic and consciously “modern” character
of the International Style, because of its emphasis on organic design, and
because of its mechanistically direct and realistic expression of the
inherent qualities of new materials and new industrial techniques (not
unlike that of Die neue Sachlichkeit), this kind of modern architecture
could be seized upon not only by many non-Marxists but by many Marx-
ists as well. For Marxists—in the absence of any party line to the contrary
—might regard it as a suitable expression of the international spirit of
Marxism, of Marxian materialism, and of the Marxian belief in progress.
As already noted, even at the Bauhaus itself the forms of this new kind of
architecture could be regarded by Hannes Meyer during the two years of
his directorship as to some degree infused with a Marxian content. The
International Style was also briefly accepted in Soviet Russia until a less
mechanistic and more nationalistic point of view, taking much more
specific account of the Russian past in the arts, became dominant under
Stalin.
The ease with which the International Style could lend itself to the
international spirit of many varieties of socialism and communism has
been partly responsible for the fact that nearly all of its leaders have at one
time or another been called socialists or communists whether they actually
were or not. Indeed, it was primarily for the purpose of preventing such
accusations that political activity was forbidden at the Bauhaus by Gropius
and later by Mies. In spite of the sincere efforts of these men to be
non-political, when the Nazis came to power in 1933, the spirit of the
International Style was so antithetic to the exaggerated nationalism and
racism of the Nazis that they compelled the Bauhaus to close its doors on
the grounds that it was a “‘breeding place of cultural Bolshevism” produc-
ing art that was not only bolshevistic but also degenerate,” while the kind
of architecture it stood for was dismissed as cold, utilitarian constructivism,
suitable only for factory buildings. Hitler regarded all modern art as
degenerate. He attributed this “degenerate art” primarily to the influence
of the Jews, arguing that “the house with the flat roof is oriental—oriental
is Jewish—Jewish is bolshevistic,” * and completely disregarding the ob-
vious fact that many of the leading architects of the International Style
were not Jewish.
It is true that many of those who joined the Circle of the Friends of
the Bauhaus in the 1920s were Jewish—but this was only to be expected in
664 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

Weimar Germany, where so large a proportion of leading intellectuals were

Jews. It would, of course, be utterly inaccurate to describe the Friends of
the Bauhaus as “bolshevistic,” though some of them had social interests.
Among the sixteen trustees listed in the first announcement of the group
in 1924 were such distinguished figures as Berlage, Behrens, Josef Hoff-
mann, Kokoschka, Chagall, Arnold Schénberg, Gerhart Hauptmann,
Franz Werfel, the art historian Josef Strzygowski, and Einstein—nearly
all of whom, less than a decade later, signed the protest against the closing
of the Bauhaus by the Nazis.
As early as 1923-1924, when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, he had
attacked all modern art as bolshevistic, probably because in Germany
the influence of artists from Soviet Russia was then strong. In spite of the
inaccuracy and injustice of Hitler’s attack—many of the Russian artists in
question had left Russia in 1922 because Lenin disapproved of their
art—since that time, especially, those who have fostered modern art have
often been subjected to the same accusation of bolshevism, and not
merely by the Nazis. For example, Le Corbusier, who received part of his
architectural training in the same office—that of Peter Behrens—as did
Gropius and Mies, has frequently been called “communistic,” an accusa-
tion rightly denied by a leading biographer.” After all, Le Corbusier was
influenced not by Soviet communism but by Fourierist utopianism. And in
1930 at Moscow, he had the courage to speak of “the sacred respect for
individual liberty.” He thereby made enemies of the Stalinists already in
control of the Soviet Union, who regarded this statement as a profession of
bourgeois faith which they held—wrongly—to be Trotskyite.** Moreover,
one of Le Corbusier’s slogans was “Architecture or Revolution”: in other
words, he urged technological reform in architecture through better hous-
ing, etc., with the purpose of resolving the conflict of classes and thereby
obviating the Marxist revolution.™
Nevertheless, it is true that some of Le Corbusier’s followers, unlike
the master himself, really have been communists, including the Brazilian
architect Oscar Niemeyer, whose work has been’ much admired in the
United States, and who in 1947, with Le Corbusier, was a member of the
international panel of architects chosen to design the United Nations
buildings in New York. Twenty years later, he was called upon to design
the headquarters of the Central Committee of the French Communist
Party (Fig. 58).
Such leaders of the modern movement in architecture as Gropius,
Mies, and Le Corbusier, then, though not Marxists, were socially and
internationally minded, and in important respects they continued the
tradition of Morris. Many of their principles of art, we have seen, were not
dissimilar to some of those eventually held by many Marxists. Yet in origin
these principles were essentially non-Marxian—Morris held them even
before he became a Marxist.
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 665

13. The Bauhaus: Its Principles in

Relation to the Development of Housing

Do sum up: like Morris as well as Marx, the Bauhaus constantly empha-
sized cooperation between craftsmen and urged that distinctions between
the fine arts and crafts be abolished; and, with Morris, Gropius re-
garded architecture, the collaborative art, as the key for accomplishing
these things. As he early said, “Today they [the visual arts] exist in
isolation, from which they can be rescued only through the conscious,
cooperative effort of all craftsmen. . . . Architects, sculptors, painters, we
must all turn to the crafts.” °° In thus emphasizing the crafts, Gropius was
of course distinctly in the tradition of Morris, although whereas Morris
sought to revive the crafts for their own sake, Gropius sought primarily to
use them as laboratories for modern industry in harmony with the princi-
ples of the Deutscher Werkbund. Following in the footsteps of Morris,
Semper, and Van de Velde, Gropius in theory always insisted upon the
straightforward expression of materials in a functional way, but, much more
than Morris and Van de Velde, came to emphasize machine-produced
materials and methods of construction and of industrial design (Fig.
113) that take full account of mass production.” “The Bauhaus,” he said,
“believes the machine to be our modern medium of design and seeks to
come to terms with it,” a statement in sympathy with the call, made
earlier by Muthesius, founder of the Werkbund, for a new
Maschinenstil.
Gropius always stressed the importance of the machine in relation
both to industrial production and to functional expression, but he came to
feel that the term “functionalism” (which he equated with Die neue
Sachlichkeit, that realistic art movement described by the man who named
it as “bearing a socialistic flavor”) was entirely too materialistic and
one-sided in its connotations.®® With Morris and Marx he emphasized an
organic point of view. But believing, with Morris, that “all the economical
and industrial issues are to be subordinate to the life requirements of
men,” he never did subscribe to the degree of materialistic determinism
implicit in the Marxian view that economic forces ultimately determine all
aspects of human life.
Like practically all socialists and communists, as well as many non-
socialists and non-communists, Gropius and the staff of the Bauhaus were
particularly interested in achieving an organically functional solution to
the humanitarian and social problem of adequate housing for the masses.
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 667

The culture of the Weimar Republic was essentially an urban one under
which the need for artistic creation of a genuinely democratic urban
character was very real.°° Community building, “Bauten der Gemein-
schaft,” was the key concept, and one that made housing for the masses
the chief architectural program of the day. Such housing has been sympa-
thetically described as “not a technical or building problem only, but also,
and in a predominant sense, an economic and political problem. . . .”
Walter Behrendt, who made this statement in a book that he wrote and
published in the United States, was himself a German-bom architect
thoroughly sympathetic to the ideals of the Bauhaus who, like Gropius and
Mies-van der Rohe, had migrated to America after Hitler came to power.
In his book, Behrendt went on to say: “Moreover, with the political
revolutions following the [First World] war in such countries as Germany,
Austria, and Russia, the influence of the working class was strengthened to
such a degree that they could finally realize their just claims, so long
entirely neglected, to a dwelling type of their own. . . . This historical
moment was used in such countries as Germany and Austria to establish a
new housing policy . . . [with housing] declared a public utility, in the
same sense as education, water supply, fire and police protection. . . .
[There arose] a new concept of town planning. . . revealing the structural
ideas of organic order with its attempt to restore to the city the natural
world of the open landscape. . . . [Rejected were the academic] esthetic
ideas of town planning, inherited from Renaissance and Baroque mesa
This point of view, which was also that of the Bauhaus, could be largely
shared by thoroughgoing Marxists, among others. For Marxists, too, would
consider it important to develop a type of dwelling to realize the “just
claims” of the working class, would also regard housing as a public utility,
would be likely to apply the analogy of a living organism to a town plan,
of
and in theory at least might similarly attack the academic point of view
it has emphasized, not
the Renaissance and Post-Renaissance because
progress, but principles transcending time.
Republic
The particular architectural answer made under the Weimar
middle class as well as
to the problem of housing the masses of the people,
itself. This was the
proletarian, was partly developed at the Bauhaus
inhabit ants to have
row-house oriented to the sun, which permitted all the
arrangement for
an equal or almost equal amount of sunlight—a scientific
tic as well as
health that could and eventually did at times appeal to socialis
s to a consider-
liberal democratic equalitarianism. In addition, the Bauhau
ock in city
able degree was responsible for further developing the superbl
houses, had first
planning. The extra-large city block, but with single-family
by Overcrowd-
been popularized in a pamphlet entitled Nothing Gained
Fabian socialist
ing, published in 1912 by Raymond Unwin, the English
in connection with
city-planner.* In the mid-1920’s it had been used by the
workers of Vienna
multi-family housing developments built for the

FIG. 113. Products of the Bauhaus by various designers.

 ric. 114. Vienna, Karl Marx Hof (1924-1928) by Karl Ehn.

social-democratic city government and named for Marx, Engels, and

Liebknecht, among others—housing which made Marxist Vienna the
showplace of world socialism. At that time “Austro-Marxism,” with its
great theoretician Otto Bauer, though accused by communists of succumb-
ing to the idealism of Kant or the empirio-criticism of Mach, was the
inspiration of much socialism the world over, in contrast to the slothful
German party. Some of the large Viennese housing developments, such as
the one called the Karl Marx Hof (Figs. 114 and 115), consisted of a very
large apartment house built around the perimeter of a superblock made by
eliminating minor streets in order to transform their former area into
public gardens and playgrounds within the great courtyards of the build-
ing. The result was a kind of hollow parallelogram somewhat similar to the
“parallelograms” of Robert Owen. But this was also a fortress-like structure
within which, in February 1934, the workers belonging to the Social
Democratic Party barricaded themselves against the Putsch of Chancellor
Dollfuss, a Christian Socialist, who had them blasted out by the mortar-fre

Fic. 115. Vienna, Karl Marx Hof (1924-1928), plan, by Karl Ehn.
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 66 9

of a Heimwehr supplied with arms by Mussolini. By fatally weakening

social democracy in Austria, this episode, condoned by the communists,
helped to pave the way for eventual seizure of the country by Hitler.
Although this Viennese socialist housing was advanced for its time in
employing the superblock, it did not yet make use of the series of long
tow-houses oriented to the sun which were beginning to be developed in
Germany by members of the Bauhaus staff, among others, and which
permitted still more of the ground area to be devoted to greenery and
gardens among the buildings. Like the garden city, with its greenbelt, this
kind of housing could be accepted with approval by Marxists insofar as it
offered an answer to that separation of city and country which Marx
blamed on capitalism. Socialist planners in Germany at first tended to
cling to the single-family house, but eventually many Marxists interested in
housing, as well as a large number of liberals, were influenced by such
experiments. Particularly influential were the works of Ernst May’s team of
the Municipal Building Department at Frankfurt-am-Main, and especially
the Deutscher Werkbund’s housing exhibition at Stuttgart in 1927, pre-
pared under the direction of Mies. At this exhibition, the chief founders of
the International Style, among them Mies himself, Gropius, Le Corbusier,
and Bruno Taut, were represented by buildings. Also influential were the
row-houses that Taut had been designing since 1924 for the cooperative-
housing program in Berlin of the building society called the “Gehag”’
(short for Gemeinniitzige Heimstatten-Aktiengesellschaft). This had been
founded by Martin Wagner, a member of the Social Democratic Party
deeply involved in a movement for reorganizing the building trades into
profit-sharing cooperatives on the basis of a kind of guild socialism. Most
of the Gehag’s officers were socialists and most of its capital came from
socialist sources.
Of all the housing of the period, however, the row-houses erected,
beginning in 1929, at Siemensstadt near Berlin by a building society set up
by the Siemens combine to ensure housing for its workers best summarized
the architectural achievements of the decade; it became world-famous.
Several architects participated in designing the houses at Siemensstadt, but
the most widely known example there was a row (Figs. 116 and 117) by
Gropius designed on the basis of principles he had developed before
leaving the Bauhaus in the previous year.
Because the general approach to planning and art exemplified by
Gropius and other non-communist founders of the International Style was
in certain respects similar to that adopted by many Marxists, the influence
of the Bauhaus staff and of the other Western architects could for a time
also affect some Soviet architectural design, especially in housing. Conse-
quently, Hannes Meyer and Ernst May’s group were only some of the
foreign architects attracted to the Soviet Union in the hope of designing
buildings there in what became known as the International Style.
One architect with leftist sympathies who also went to the U.S.S.R.
pr aware aes *
(wan aWeO
1 en ew ©
iy <E80 WT oo
rl

FIG. 116. Berlin, Siemensstadt, housing (1929) by Walter Gropius.

FIG. 117. Berlin, Siemensstadt, plan of housing (row in black at left is
that by Gropius illustrated in Fig. 116).
Bee

ore Saw Boe

——
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 fe Ont

was Bruno Taut, long an admirer of Richard Wagner’s disciple, the

city-planner Camillo Sitte. Taut’s early writings were strongly utopian in
their social content. In the book entitled Die Stadtkrone that he published
in 1919 with others, the city was conceived of as a twentieth-century
social-architectonic entity, a utopian kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. It differed
from the garden city and other city planning of the time in emphasizing a
central feature, the Stadtkrone, a city crown consisting of a building
crystalline in character. (Significantly, a crystal grows like an organism
while possessing a form reduced to geometric essentials, two characteristics
stressed in the new architecture.) Taut declared that his new type of city
was based on a “sozialer Gedanke,” or social ideal, which he defined as
socialism above politics. In another book, Die Aufldsung der Stédte (The
Dissolution of Cities), published in 1920, Taut called for a “utopia” in
which big cities would be replaced by smaller ones, and in which there
would be no state boundaries and no private property.
Taut had been a member of the Arbeitsrat fiir Kunst; and when that
organization dissolved in 1921, he asked some of his ftiends in it—includ-
ing Gropius (then busy with the Bauhaus), Hans Scharoun (who became
the leading architect of West Germany after World War II), and his own
brother Max Taut—to exchange letters: they had already been writing, in
1919-1920, what is known as the “Utopian Correspondence.” ‘The utopian-
ism that the group reflected was broken up, however, by the coming of Die
neue Sachlichkeit. Nevertheless, the two Tauts, Gropius, and Scharoun
became members of Der Ring, a group of about twenty progressive archi-
tects founded in 1926 to which Mies, Martin Wagner, and Artur Korn
(later a member of the British Communist Party) also belonged. Der Ring
was so named because a ring is closed within itself without a head, which
meant that the group could be a perfectly egalitarian cooperative organiza-
tion while also having a pure geometric form.
Bruno Taut’s best known book, Modern Architecture, published in
1929, not only praised Soviet architecture at the expense of that in the
United States, but also emphasized “Collectivism as a style-forming
factor . . .”; and—writing at a time when the communist line had just
begun to stress the Stalinist version of proletarian culture—Taut further
declared that “Leadership [in architecture] has been transferred . . . to the
hands of the mass of the working classes.” ©
In 1933, when the Nazis were making it impossible for the progressive
German architects of the International Style to obtain work, particularly
when suspected of having leftist social views, Taut went to the Soviet
Union. However, he soon became disillusioned, and departed in 1934. Not
allowed by the Nazis to return to Germany, he passed through the country
illegally on his way to Japan and to Istanbul, where he died in 1938.
It should be emphasized that by no means all of the foreign architects
who went to the Soviet Union were Marxian communists or even commu-
nist sympathizers—among them, for example, was the non-Marxist Le
 MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES
672 vi RADICALISM,

as
Corbusier, one of the chief founders of the International Style. Also,
already suggested, the influences went the other way: for instance, some
forms of revolutionary Russian art had early influenced members of the
Bauhaus staff. In 1922 a great exhibition of the works of artists from the
Soviet Union, organized by Lenin’s commissars of education and of art,
had been held in Berlin and had created a sensation. Although the attempt
was made through 600 works to give representation to the wide variety of
art movements then active in Russia—ranging from traditional realism and
Impressionism to post-cubism and expressionism—leftist art, as the
avant-garde works of cubists, cubo-futurists, suprematists, and constructiv-
ists were generally designated, constituted only a small fraction of the
works shown. Nevertheless that fraction, and especially its constructivist
aspects, proved particularly influential, not only in Germany but also in
Holland when part of the exhibition was displayed at Amsterdam in
1023.

14. The ‘Bauhaus: Moholy-Nagy,

Constructivism, and De Styl
Ovz or those who saw and was much impressed by the exhibition of
Russian art at Berlin in 1922 was Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy, destined to become
an influential teacher at the Bauhaus and to play a major part in introduc-
ing constructivism there.
At the time of this exhibition, constructivism outside of architecture
and other arts directly applicable to communist goals had fallen into
official disfavor in Soviet Russia. Those constructivists who oriented their
work toward art and away from politics were finding it advisable either to
change their style or to leave Russia—and several were able to go to
Germany because diplomatic relations between Soviet Russia and nations
of western Europe had been resumed in an era of relatively good feeling.
Only those constructivists who were socio-political in aim, who, in empha-
sizing social utility in their works, were essentially anti-art, remained in
favor within Soviet Russia. Their leader was Vladimir Tatlin, who was so
much admired by George Grosz and John Heartfield. Others traveled to
western Europe, where one of them, Lissitzky, had a particularly wide
influence, especially in Germany.
Like the Russian constructivists, the Bauhaus was interested in em-
phasizing modern materials, modern methods of construction, applied arts,
and the “machine.” Hence it is not surprising that, a few months after the
Russian exhibition at Berlin, constructivism—together with the Russian
variety of late cubism known as suprematism—was introduced there early
in 1923 by a new teacher, Moholy-Nagy. For Gropius, strongly rationalis-
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 673

tic, had become dissatisfied with the Swiss Johannes Itten, who had
originated the course in basic design at the Bauhaus. Itten, an expression-
ist, had very strong “Mazdaznan,” or near-Zoroastrian, leanings—that is,
he subscribed to a then fashionable individualistic form of Eastern mysti-
cism—which Gropius felt was bringing a harmful sectarian spirit into the
school, and which in any case upset conservative Weimar,” as no doubt
also did the special Bauhaus costume that Itten designed. Early in 1923,
therefore, Gropius called Moholy-Nagy to give half of the course, the other
half being given by Josef Albers. Years later, after the triumph of the
Nazis, all of these men went to the United States.
Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian of exceedingly wide-ranging interests
who had been greatly stimulated by many of the developments in the art
of Europe after World War I, including the dada movement and Russian
suprematism and constructivism. From 1921 to 1923 he worked in Berlin
as editor of the avant-garde Hungarian periodical MA, and in that capacity
met such avant-garde Russians as Lissitzky, Ilya Ehrenburg, and eventually
Naum Gabo. In 1922, after seeing the Russian exhibition in Berlin, he had
answered the summons of Theo van Doesburg,* a founder with Piet
Mondrian of De Stijl, to help assemble at Weimar, then the seat of the
Bauhaus, a Congress of Constructivists and Dadaists. ‘The instigator of the
Congress, at which artistic radicals came into contact with artists who were
also socially radical, was El Lissitzky, but dadaists were included at the
insistence of Van Doesburg. Among the participants were Hans Richter,
one-time member of the expressionist and highly revolutionary Die Aktion
group, who had done so much to stimulate the development of dada, and
those other leading dadaists, ‘T'zara and Arp.
This Weimar Congress proved to be a fiasco because Van Doesburg’s
dadaist friends characteristically seized the opportunity for putting on
demonstrations; whereupon Lissitzky called a Constructivist Congress at
Diisseldorf from which the dadaists were excluded. This proclaimed a
Constructivist International in the name of those “a-moral” and “elemen-
tary” principles upon which science and technology are based, but advo-
cated socialism and internationalism.
Several members of the Bauhaus staff attended the Constructivist
Congress at Diisseldorf. It was Moholy-Nagy—influenced both by the
Berlin exhibition of Russian art in 1922 and by Lissitzky—who played the
major role in introducing constructivism into the Bauhaus when he be-
came a teacher there in 1923. It seems highly significant that in the same
year Gropius adopted his new policy, “Art and Technology—A New
Unity,” which had so much in common with constructivism.
Through Van Doesburg, Moholy-Nagy was equally stimulated by De
Stijl. Van Doesburg had come to Weimar in 1921, and there had begun to
run, from outside the Bauhaus’s walls, his own campaign in favor of greater
functionalism. His influence certainly affected some of the students at the
Bauhaus, and later could also reach the Bauhaus through Moholy-Nagy,
674 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

among others. It resulted in a reduction of form to essentials based on

straight lines and right angles: thereafter for years anything else seemed
hopelessly old-fashioned.
De Stijl, primarily a development out of late cubism (though also
affected by Berlage and Kandinsky), stood for a more completely non-repre-
sentational art (Fig. 118), rejecting any attempt whatever to reproduce
natural forms as being at the mercy of the artist’s subjective feelings, and
seeking instead the constant elements of form. Its philosophical basis was
essentially Hegelian and Neo-Platonic. The members of the group possessed
a strong ethical desire to create a harmonious total environment. Like
the Bauhaus, they sought to do so partly by giving to all-manufactured
objects a radically new design—in this reflecting the legacy of the arts
and crafts movement as modified by aspects of Art Nouveau aesthetics.
Van Doesburg’s ultimate aim was a society in which a universal visual
harmony would control all the forms and activities of life. This aim was
shared by Piet Mondrian, the other chief leader of De Stijl, who had
passed from Impressionism through Symbolism under the influence of Van
Gogh and Toorop. But where the social views of Mondrian were essen-
tially utopian and, from 1909 on, strongly influenced by theosophy—by its
mystical belief that the material appearance of nature is an illusion and by
its kind of religious socialism—Van Doesburg had developed strong leftist
inclinations paralleling Marxism. He admired the Bolshevik Revolution for
its modern art, which accounts for the title of one of his most famous
paintings, created in 1918 only a few months later: Rhythm of a Russian
Dance (Fig. 118). Its forms apparently affected those of plans by archi-
tects connected with the Bauhaus, notably that of a widely known project
for a brick house designed by Mies in 1922. To such forms Van Doesburg
added an emphasis on the social significance of the machine like that of
the Russian constructivists, who had emphasized the importance of ex-
pressing in art the need of Soviet Russia for industrialization. Van Does-
burg once declared that “the proper tendency for the machine (in the
sense of cultural development) is as the unique medium of . . . social
liberation.” * Yet not only did he have dadaist friends, but also he himself
was strongly affected by the dada movement in Germany, where it had so
many connections with communism; and he introduced it into Holland in
1923. In that same year, however, the “Manifest Proletkunst,” which was
chiefly his work, appeared in the German dada periodical Merz. He now
held that no renewal of art could ever be made by communism. In 1930,
with others, he was to found the “art concret’’ group in Paris, the term “art
concret” being his invention.
Even though Moholy-Nagy helped to spread the influence of Van
Doesburg into the Bauhaus, it should be noted that he himself possessed a
kind of utopian spirit rather more like that of Mondrian. This manifested
itself, for instance, when he declared, in regard to the task of education,
“We need Utopians of genius. . . .” °° Although, unlike Van Doesburg,
 FIG. 118.
Rhythm of a Russian Dance
(1918) by Theo van Doesburg.

eae
COLLECTION, THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK.

Moholy-Nagy never actually joined the dada group in Germany, he was

not unsympathetic to dadaism,” and especially to its emphasis on the
machine as expressive of the modern spirit. Indeed, the Bauhaus itself
stressed the importance of the machine for much the same reason, though
where the Bauhaus emphasized the productive possibilities of the machine
more in accord with some Russian constructivists, dada, as a partly nihilis-
tic movement stimulated in Germany by the frustrations of defeat in war,
glorified its destructive possibilities.
However reinterpreted, many of the major currents in modern art,
some of which had connections with political radicalism, now played a
direct or indirect part in the pedagogical method Moholy-Nagy did so
 COLLECTION, THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK,

Fic.119. Nickel Construction (1921) by Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy.

much to develop at the Bauhaus. By that method he sought to acquaint

students with the revolution in art encouraged by modern materials and
techniques (Fig. 119). Some forms derived from currents that originally
had possessed communistic or other politically radical connotations thus
were among those fostered at the Bauhaus itself and wherever the influ-
ence of the Bauhaus spread.
Although Moholy-Nagy thought of himself as something of a revolu-
tionary, especially in the arts, he nevertheless did so in a highly individual-
istic way. After World War I he had offered himself and his art to the
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 677

communist regime in his native Hungary at a time when Béla Kun had led
a temporarily successful revolution on the Bolshevik model. But he had
been rejected by the Communist Party in Hungary partly because of the
landholding status of his family, still more because the Hungarian commu-
nists, like Lenin, did not pretend to understand modern art, and in any
case rejected non-representational painting and sculpture as inadequate
revolutionary weapons because they were incomprehensible to the
masses.
On his part, Moholy-Nagy was dissatisfied with Marxian communism
because he wished to sweep away all historical art forms, and therefore
considered Marxian historical materialism insufficiently revolutionary. He
also believed that Marxism paid insufficient attention to the individual,
and accordingly protested that creative individuality had been excluded
from the Hungarian Revolution—a point of view that could make him
sympathetic to the ideas of Morris as modified at the Bauhaus. Nor did
Moholy-Nagy agree with the Marxian canonization of the proletariat.
Because of this fact, when he began to admire constructivism—which in
1922 he praised as the art of our century, a century characterized in his
view by technology, the machine, and socialism—he also praised it for
being “neither proletarian nor capitalistic ... without class or
ancestor,” * a statement echoed in 1923 by Van Doesburg in De Stil.
Like many other artists in Germany and the countries that had been
allied with Germany in World War I, Moholy-Nagy soon lost much of
that interest in revolutionary political and social content in art which had
been stimulated by the revolutionary period after the war. A brief state-
ment that Moholy-Nagy made for the catalog of an exhibition of abstract
art in Berlin in 1926 showed a disregard for politics and for social signif-
cance in art; and this was also true of the other modern artists whose
statements were included in the catalog. Nevertheless, Moholy-Nagy’s
social interests did not wholly disappear. Ilya Ehrenburg recounted in his
autobiography how, in the winter of 1927, he went to Penmarch in
Brittany with Moholy-Nagy, whose ambition then was to make a film
about the sardine fisheries and the canning-factory owners who stopped at
nothing for the sake of profits. And when Moholy-Nagy—together with
Gropius, Breuer, and Herbert Bayer—left the Bauhaus in 1928, he re-
turned to Berlin, where, for a few years, he had a brilliant career as stage
designer for the leftist Piscator Theater as well as for the State Opera.
Still, in contrast to the years that immediately followed the First
World War, the mid-1920’s saw the Weimar Republic and modern art
(aside from modern housing) already beginning to go their separate ways,
a fact suggesting that although revolutionary changes in the history of
society favor an experimental cooperation between politically and artisti-
cally radical forces, the period of willingness to cooperate is likely to be a
brief one. This in turn suggests that such attempts at cooperation have
been largely based on mutual misunderstandings.”
678 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

15. Hitler, and German Emgres

in the Arts, West and East

"T'urovcu Moholy-Nagy and other members of the Bauhaus staff, the

indirect influence of the Bauhaus helped to encourage the spread of some
forms originally derived in part, but only in part, from artistic movements
which at one time or another have possessed socialist or communist
implications. These forms (though usually not their original politically
radical content) constitute an important element not only in much mod-
ern architecture, painting, and sculpture, but also in practically all contem-
porary “industrial design” throughout the world. And they particularly
affected art in the United States, because in the years after Hitler came to
power in Germany in 1933, Moholy-Nagy, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe,
Josef Albers, and other leading members of the staff of the Bauhaus,
including Marcel Breuer and Lyonel Feininger, were among the many
artists who migrated to America. In Germany itself, the modern move-
ment in art then died out until after World War II: the Werkbund, for
instance, became a Nazi organization in 1933, and only in 1945 was it
revived on the old basis. Meanwhile, in the United States the émigré artists
from Germany were to exert an enormous influence which largely replaced
that of more direct followers of William Morris as well as that of the
academic tradition.
Because the dispersion of these Bauhaus artists was the result of the
fall of the Weimar Republic, it should not be forgotten that the commu-
nists, under the fatal theory of social fascism which led them to attack
social democrats and liberals as their chief enemies, were largely responsi-
ble for enabling Hitler to overthrow the Republic. In July 1932 the
communists had helped the Nazis to paralyze Berlin by transportation
strikes, and in the Prussian Landtag they had supported a Hitlerite motion
to oust the socialist administration. As late as September 1932, Ernst
Thalmann, leader of the German Communist Party, had declared in the
British Labour Monthly: “On the basis of our class policy we must, in the
new situation, apply the strategy of the ‘main fire’ against Social Democ-
racy more than ever before. . . .”™ Not until January 1934 did Stalin
speak out publicly against the Nazis, thereby at last definitely indicating
the new party-line of the Popular Front against fascism—but by that time
Hitler was all too firmly entrenched in Germany.
Meanwhile, besides Bruno Taut and other architects, some important
figures of the German art world, in escaping from the Nazis, had gone not
to the West but to the Soviet Union. One of the most important of these
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 6 79

was Herwarth Walden (born Georg Levin), a musician, composer, and

man of letters, who in 1910 had founded an art publishing house and
periodical called Der Sturm to support all avant-garde groups without
distinction under the slogan, “Art is not a luxury but a necessity!” Two
years later he had established in Berlin a most influential gallery by the
same name which lasted until 1924, whereas the magazine continued on
till 1932. During the existence of the gallery it was always in the forefront
of those encouraging the new movements in modern art. Its first exhibi-
tion, In 1912, was of works by members of Der blaue Reiter, the group of
expressionists to which Kandinsky belonged—an exhibition at which,
it has been said, “the Expressionist idea was crystallized as such.” ” The
same year saw Walden also introducing futurism to Germany at his
gallery. When, after World War I, Gropius was faced with the task of
recruiting the staff of the Bauhaus, he did so partly through Der Sturm,”
simply because it constituted the leading clearing-house in Germany for
modern art. Feininger, Klee, and Kandinsky had long been important mem-
bers of the Sturm group,“ and many foreign avant-garde artists contrib-
uted to its periodical—among them the American former anarchist, Man
Ray.” Furthermore, the Novembergruppe, to which Gropius and several
future members of his staff belonged, had been founded by artists afhliated
with Der Sturm’s gallery.
In mid-1932, the year Walden’s magazine ceased publication and only
a few months before Hitler came to power, Walden—who, devoured by
bitterness and rancor, had joined the Communist Party—left for the
U.S.S.R., where he had accepted a large literary commission.” There in
1937 and 1939, he published articles on art and society in the Moscow
German-language periodical Das Wort, a fact obviously indicating that he
had been fully accepted in the Soviet Union.” This is somewhat surprising
in view of Walden’s long advocacy of modern art, because some years
earlier, at about the time when Stalin had begun to recognize the full
danger of Hitler’s rise to power, the Stalinists had begun to turn com-
pletely against modern art in those fields—especially architecture—in
which it had to some degree survived within the U.S.S.R., in favor of styles
recalling Russian national traditions.
Thus the paradox developed that the modern art movements pros-
cribed by Hitler were soon being equally proscribed by Stalin. But they
were forbidden for very different reasons: by Hitler as bolshevistic, by
Stalin for reflecting bourgeois formalism, and so for being unable to
convey the subject-matter and content of true socialist realism. Conse-
quently, the point of view represented by the Bauhaus, which for a time
had been so influential in the Soviet Union—where its influence had been
spread by communist sympathizers such as Hannes Meyer and by other
imported architects and planners who were not communists—was now
driven out of the U.S.S.R. as well as out of Germany.
680 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

16.Germany East and West

Afier World War IT;
Socialist Realism and the New Left
A\ eter the defeat of Hitler in World War II, the German Communist
Party was revived in 1945-1946 with a membership roughly equal to that
of 1932. However, the Soviet Union gained control of East Germany
which—like Poland, Hungary, most of the Balkan countries and, in 1948,
Czechoslovakia—became a Soviet satellite. The Soviet insistence on keep-
ing Germany divided made West Germany so thoroughly anticommunist
that in 1959 the reformist Social Democrats there essentially rejected
Marxian ideology. As for communist East Germany, its official art, like
that of other Soviet satellites after 1948, became very largely a provincial
version of Soviet art under the aesthetic of socialist realism.
In East Germany the most prominent critic of literature and the
visual arts from the point of view of socialist realism was the poet, novelist,
essayist, and dramatist Johannes R. Becher (1891-1958). In his earliest
poems, a few years before World War I, Becher had rebelled in an
expressionist way against the bourgeois world from which he had come.
During the war, he had developed from a bourgeois pacifist into a militant
opponent of the German imperial regime and a supporter of the revolu-
tionary workers’ movement. In 1917, he became the first German author to
welcome the “October” Revolution in Russia with his “Greeting of the
German Poets to the Russian Federated Soviet Republic.” In that year,
too, he joined the left-wing Independent Socialist Party (USPD). He was
one of those who left that party to form the still more radical Spartacus
League, which played the leading role in founding the German Commu-
nist Party.
Becher turned away from expressionism in 1924 to devote himself to
proletarian literature, and by 1927 was beginning to develop a more
realistic mode of expression intended to glorify the laboring class. He was
co-founder and president of the League of Proletarian-Revolutionary Au-
thors as well as an editor of Die rote Fahne (The Red Flag).
After the Nazis came to power, Becher had to leave Germany,
emigrating to Czechoslovakia, France, and then the Soviet Union. From
1933 to 1945 he was editor of the German version of the Moscow commu-
nist periodical, International Literature.
When World War I ended in 1945, Becher returned to Berlin. In
1949, a year or so after the cleavage in Germany between the Russians and
their former allies had become complete, a constitution was adopted
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 681

making the Soviet zone—East Germany—into the German Democratic

Republic. In that year, Becher wrote words for the East German national
anthem, Auferstanden aus Ruinen . . . (Arise from the Ruins . . .) to
music by Hanns Eisler. He served as president of the Academy of Arts, was
awarded a Lenin Peace Prize in 1953, and in the following year became
Minister of Culture. Meanwhile, in 1952 he had begun to set forth what
amounted to the official East German line on socialist realism for literature
and art in the four volumes he called Bemiihungen (Efforts), the last of
which was issued in 1957. In the following year (the year of his death), his
ofhcial biography of Walter Ulbricht, head of the East German state, was
published. So great did Becher’s posthumous reputation in East Germany
remain that in 1962 a compilation of his writings on the arts nearly 1,000
pages long was published under the title Uber Literatur und Kunst (On
Literature and Art) and in 1966 publication of a multi-volume edition of
his complete works began.
Becher’s rival and successor as the leading cultural figure in East
Germany was the writer Arnold Zweig, best known in the Western world
for his anti-war novel, The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1927). Zweig, an
ardent Zionist, lived in Palestine from 1933 to 1948, when he returned to
East Berlin. He was awarded a Lenin Prize in 1958; and when he died in
the fall of 1968, he had been president of the East German Academy of
Arts and a member of Parliament.
However, in Germany, East as well as West, tendencies had been
developing away from the Marxism-Leninism represented by Becher and
tacitly accepted by Zweig, toward a New Left. In characteristic German
fashion, such tendencies have had a basis in philosophical criticism,” often
including aesthetics. Because the New Left, of course, was and is regarded
as “revisionist” by orthodox Marxist-Leninists, those who have showed any
inclinations toward it in East Germany have inevitably become involved in
serious difficulties with the regime.
The New Left, while centering largely on Marx’s views as expressed in
his early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, has in the arts also
been stimulated by the ideas of German critics already active before World
War I, such as Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and, to a lesser degree, Max
Raphael (1889-1952).”°
Raphael, a native of West Prussia, was a man of exceedingly wide-
ranging interests who received most of his higher education as a student of
the history of art, philosophy, and political economy at the universities of
Berlin and Munich. At Berlin his principal teachers were Heinrich
Wiolfflin (history of art), Georg Simmel (philosophy and sociology), and
Gustav Schmoller (political economy). At Munich, while Raphael was
studying political economy under Lujo Brentano, he became acquainted
with several future members of the famous expressionist group of painters,
Der blaue Reiter (1911-1914), and also with Max Pechstein, a member of
the Dresden expressionist group, Die Briicke (1905-1914), who became a
682 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

close personal friend. Probably because these artists had led Raphael to an
interest in modern French painting, he continued his philosophical studies
at Paris, where he attended lectures by Bergson. At that time he met
Rodin and the young Picasso.
From 1920 on, Raphael lived in Berlin, but the rise of the Nazis
caused him to leave Germany and to settle in Paris at the end of 1932.
There in the following year he published his Proudhon, Marx, Picasso;
Trois études sur la sociologie de l'art, in which he summarized many of his
ideas about art and Marxism by applying the Marxist dialectic to the
sociology of art: he began the work with an exposure of what he regarded
as the bourgeois idealism of Proudhon. In 1933, also, there was published
at Paris Raphael’s introduction to a monograph on his friend the leftist
French architect André Lurgat which was devoted to a group of schools by
Lurgat located on the avenue Karl Marx at Villejuif. Six years later,
Raphael brought to a conclusion his most comprehensive work of this
period, a manuscript entitled “Arbeiter, Kunst und Kiinstler; Beitrage zu
einer Marxistischen Kunstwissenschaft” (Worker, Art and Artist; Contri-
butions to a Marxist Science of Art).
After the Nazi invasion, Raphael with great difficulty managed to
leave Occupied France, emigrating to the United States. ‘There, until his
death in 1952, he devoted himself especially to the problem of art history
as a science. Apart from two posthumously published books on prehistoric
art, however, his work was little known in the English-speaking world,
until a manuscript he had completed about 1947 was translated and
published in English in 1968 under the title The Demands of Art. In this
book Raphael sought to make art an organic part of life. Sir Herbert
Read’s introduction to the volume began with the declaration that
Raphael had made “one of the most important contributions in our time
to the philosophy of art.”
In The Demands of Art, Raphael twice quoted that other, more
influential, Marxist critic Walter Benjamin, whom Hannah Arendt has
called the most important German literary critic between the two wars. As
a lad in Germany, Benjamin—the son of a banker who had become an
antiquary and art dealer—participated in the radical anti-bourgeois Youth
Movement. He studied philosophy in several universities, completing his
formal education at the University of Berne with a thesis on the concep-
tion of art criticism in German romanticism. Soon he began to achieve a
reputation as a critic and essayist. In 1924 he began to study Marxism with
the aid of a recently published book, Geschichte und Klassbewusstsein
(History and Class Consciousness), written by the Marxist philosopher
and aesthetician, Gyérgy Lukacs, and came close to joining the Commu-
nist Party. Benjamin visited Moscow in the winter of 1926-1927 in connec-
tion with a commission to write an article on Goethe for the Soviet
Encyclopedia. He formed a warm friendship with Bertolt Brecht and
became a chief commentator on Brecht’s works. He was strongly influ-
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 68 3

enced by surrealism, especially that of Louis Aragon. After Hitler came to

power in Germany in 1933, Benjamin—a Jew—migrated to Paris. When
the Nazis invaded France in 1940, he tried to escape into Spain, but was
turned back at the border, and, fearing to fall into the hands of the
Gestapo, in despair committed suicide.
During Benjamin’s stay in Paris, he had become a member of the
Institut fiir Sozialforschung, a leftist Hegelian and Marxist organization
founded at Frankfurt in 1923. Of this, the philosopher-sociologist Max
Horkheimer became director in 1931, and in the same year founded its
Zeitschrift, to which Theodor Adorno, a teacher of philosophy and sociol-
ogy at Frankfurt University and co-director of the Institut, contributed
articles on the sociology of music, and Leo Loewenthal articles on the
sociology of literature. Among those who lectured at the Institut, or did
research there to be published in journals sympathetic to its philosophical
style, were Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse, who, like Benjamin, was
eventually to be regarded as a sage by the New Left.
The Institut moved to Paris when the Nazis took power, and later
migrated to New York to escape them again. Benjamin was invited to
follow it there, and was on his way at the time he killed himself.
While the Institut was located in Paris, Horkheimer edited its noted
collective volume, Studien iiber Autoritat und Familie (1936): among the
contributors were Horkheimer himself, Erich Fromm, and Marcuse. Dur-
ing this period, Benjamin first published some of his best writings in the
Zeitschrift of the Institut. Among these was a French translation of his
chief essay on the visual arts, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner techni-
schen Reproduzierbarkeit” (The Work of Art in the Epoch of Mechanical
Reproduction), published in 1936. Almost a quarter of a century later, so
important had this become for the New Left that an English translation of
it was published in the chief American New Left cultural periodical of the
time?*
In this essay, Benjamin pointed out that the technical ability to
mass-produce works of art was something relatively new in history. Begin-
ning especially with the invention of lithography, it had reached a peak
around 1900, becoming particularly important with the development of
the motion picture. It had fundamentally altered the relationship of the
masses to works of art: their reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting,
for instance, changed into a progressive attitude toward a Charlie Chaplin
movie. This altered relationship involved a new mode of participation
because it enabled simultaneous collective reactions to works of art. But
that in turn involved grave danger. It had made possible an aestheticizing
of politics by fascism which could only culminate in war, already exalted
in art by futurists. This enabled communism to reply by politicizing art.
Two of Benjamin’s friends of his early days had likewise become
noted philosopher-critics, and after World War II were to be related, in a
relatively independent way, to the New Left. These were Ernst Bloch and
684 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

Theodor Adorno. Like Benjamin, both had been influenced by Marxism

and had become leaders of thought in Germany before the advent of
Hitler, which drove them also into exile. After World War II, Bloch and
Adorno returned to Germany, where in some respects they continued the
point of view represented by early works of Lukacs, which, however, were
by then being condemned by orthodox Marxist-Leninists. In other re-
spects, they quarreled with Lukacs’ views.
During the post-war years, Ernst Bloch was for a time a professor at
Karl Marx University, Leipzig, in communist East Germany. There he
completed his chief post-war work, the three-volume book entitled Das
Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope), in which he paid considerable
attention to the arts. In a major sense, this, like earlier works by Bloch,
represented a return to a utopian point of view, inasmuch as in it he held
that some utopia, some hope for improvement, is basic to mankind: hence
he included chapters on such subjects as “. . . Architectural Utopias” and
“Wish-Landscape [Wunschlandschaft] as Represented in Painting, Opera,
Poetry.” Because the New Left has been characterized by strong utopian
elements, Bloch’s writings could especially appeal to its members.
In East Germany, however, where Soviet influence was dominant,
Bloch’s views were sharply assailed when the first two volumes of Das
Prinzip Hoffnung were published in 1954-1955. He was expelled from his
professorial post, though his reputation was so great that the East German
regime found it advisable, late in 1959, to allow the third volume to be
published. In 1961, while Bloch was on a lecture tour in West Germany,
he applied for political asylum as a protest against the building by the East
German government of the wall cutting Berlin in two.”
The sociologist and literary and music critic Theodor W. Adorno, a
former pupil of the composer Alban Berg, returned to West Germany after
World War II to resume his former post as a teacher of philosophy and
sociology at Frankfurt University. When he had migrated from Germany
in 1934 because of the Nazis, he had gone to Oxford, then in 1938 to the
United States. There he rejoined Horkheimer and the Institut fiir Soz-
ialforschung at New York, and also served as musical director of a radio
research project. In 1941 he followed Horkheimer to Los Angeles. He
was co-director of a Berkeley study of social discrimination, which tre-
sulted in a collaborative book, The Authoritarian Personality (1950),
sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. He also collaborated with
the communist composer Hanns Eisler (who in 1948 had to leave the Uni-
ted States, and went to East Germany) in writing Composing for the
Films (1947). After Adorno’s return, in 1949, to Frankfurt (where
Horkheimer re-established the Institut fiir Sozialforschung), he edited
with his wife the writings of his old friend Walter Benjamin;
.then,
in 1961, he published at Frankfurt the most influential of his post-war
works, the two-volume Noten zur Literatur. In this, even in writing on
literature, Adorno’s ultimate model was the art of music. Like others
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 685

of his generation, Adorno—who died while this book was in press—was an

unorthodox Marxist in seeking to find common ground between Marx and
Freud; nevertheless, he started out with the Marxist assumption that art
is a technical medium and a social fact.
In such German writers as these, and such as the literary critic Hans
Mayer (b. 1907), who has written also on Wagner, the New Left every-
where has been able to find a variety of philosophical and aesthetic
backgrounds offering from the Left a strong threat to the rigidly narrow
official Soviet aesthetic of socialist realism.* At least partly under the
influence of the New Left, too, even some upholders of Marxism-Leninism
writing in German on Marxist theory and aesthetics have shown strong
liberalizing tendencies that are clearly revisionist. For instance, in 1959
there was published at Dresden in East Germany a book by an Austrian
Marxist, the one-time poet and dramatist Ernst Fischer, entitled Von der
Notwendigkeit der Kunst (On the Necessity of Art). This, although
written from a basically Marxist-Leninist point of view, rejected doctrinaire
clinging to particular artistic methods, and even showed sympathy for the
abstract currents within modem art. Yet Fischer, a long-time communist,
had fled to Prague in 1934, and later to the U.S.S.R., where he had been a
radio commentator in Moscow during World War II. In 1945 as a
member of the Austrian Communist Party he had helped to form the
Austrian provisional government, in which he was briefly Minister of
Education; and from 1945 to 1959 he was a member of the Politburo of
the party. Severe illness then led him to devote himself solely to writing.
His book sold over 50,000 copies in East Germany within about a year of
its publication. This occurred at a time when the line on art in the Soviet
Union was relatively relaxed, although in that country, of course, highly
abstract art has continued to be frowned upon officially. So perceptive,
sensitive, and relatively liberal was Fischer’s approach to the visual arts
that the book was well received even by non-communists in the West; in
1963 a paperback translation of it with the title The Necessity of Art was
published in England, the United States, and Australia by Penguin Books,
though with the chapter on the relationship between the Communist
Party and the artist omitted. Meanwhile, in East Germany, Fischer’s
revisionist deviation from orthodox socialist realism had soon been at-
tacked as reflecting Hegelian idealism by the chief party-line literary critic
and aesthetician of East Germany, Hans Koch, in a large tome, Marxismus
und Asthetik, which was published at East Berlin in several printings
beginning in 1961.
Fischer developed aspects of his point of view further in his Zeitgeist
und Literatur; Gebundenheit und Freiheit der Kunst (The Spirit of the
Age and Literature; Restriction and Freedom of Art) of 1964. He insisted
even more strongly that realism in the arts should not be restricted to a
specific method or style (as Soviet socialist realism is). Instead, it should
involve an attitude, with the socialist realist differing from the great realists
 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES
686
In conclu-
of the nineteenth century in bringing the future into.,his work.
Marxist and
sion, Fischer called upon wniters, artists, and intellectuals,
to one another, to
non-Marxist, in the East and in the West to come closer
to the
conquer mistrust, dogmatism, and intolerance, and to contribute
development of world literature by securing world peace.
book,
Two years later, Fischer created a particular stir with another
einer modern en Marxist ischen Astheti k
Kunst und Koexistenz; Beitrag zu
to a Modern Marxist Aesthet ic),
(Art and Coexistence; Contribution
published at Hamburg in 1966. In it, Fischer adopted a still bolder
position. In the two earlier books he had remained within the confines of
Marxism, and at most had suggested the possibility of a separation of
outlook from artistic form, thereby indicating that there is no such thing as
socialist art, but simply art inspired by a socialist point of view. In Kunst
und Koexistenz, however, Fischer—although still a communist—elimi-
nated from his purview the working class, and thus the fundamental
Marxian concepts of class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
He declared that Marxism is not an ideology, though Communist parties
have made an ideology out of it called Marxism-Leninism. Furthermore,
he directly questioned the axiom, officially regarded as fundamental in the
Soviet Union, that there can be no ideological coexistence between the
communist countries and the West. Instead, in an essentially existentialist
way he maintained that in a world threatened by nuclear destruction and
dominated by technocratic bureaucracies in both East and West, there can
be no room for opposing camps. Even though he continued to find
socialism offering more hope than capitalism, he now held not only that
East and West must come closer in the search for peace, but that commu-
nism and Christianity as well as socialism and capitalism must learn not
merely to coexist but to cooperate for the benefit of humanity in general.
In so doing, they should regard the artistic and cultural intelligentsia as the
moral vanguard of mankind—a point of view not unlike that of Saint-
Simon in his late works nearly a century and a half earlier, when he had first
given currency to the term “avant-garde.” Needless to say, Fischer's views
caused him to be violently assailed by many other communists—especially
in East Germany, but also in his own Austria, where he eventually was
to be expelled from the Communist Party. An English translation of Kunst
und Koexistenz, under the title Art Against Ideology, was scheduled for
publication at London in 1969,
It is significant that, like Ernst Fischer and Adorno, so many of those
who since the death of Stalin have made original contributions in the
German language to Marxian. theory, including art theory, have resided
outside of the Soviet orbit, and so away from Soviet control. It is also
significant that Ernst Bloch, whose contribution to Marxian theory has
been at least as weighty, found it necessary to escape from Soviet-
dominated East Germany.
Although Gyorgy Lukacs has remained within the Soviet sphere of
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 687

influence, his lot there has ordinarily been far from an easy one, and he has
not been wholly free to express his own ideas in his own way.
Primarily a critic of literature rather than of the visual arts, through
his aesthetics and his theories of criticism Lukdcs has nonetheless long had
a wide influence not only upon aestheticians and art critics but also upon
art historians. In addition to his influence on Benjamin, Bloch, and
Adorno, we saw in an earlier chapter that the art historian-critics Frederick
Antal and Arnold Hauser had, as young men, been members of his circle in
Budapest.
After a period as an idealist aesthetician in his native Hungary from
1909 until the Bolshevik Revolution, Lukacs had been converted to Soviet
Marxism, and had turned to politics and political theory: he was People’s
- Commissar (or Minister) of Education in Béla Kun’s Hungarian commu-
nist government in 1919, which fell even though Trotsky sent two divisions
of the Red army to succor it. With the triumph of counter-revolution in
Hungary, Lukacs fled to Berlin. There he lived until the rise of Hitler,
when he went to the Soviet Union, returning to Hungary as professor of
aesthetics at the University of Budapest only after World War II.
From 1919 until 1956 Lukacs’s writings reflected a doctrinaire Marx-
ism essentially adaptable to Marxism-Leninism, though powerfully com-
bining Marxist social doctrine with aesthetic sensibility, humanism, range
of learning, and even a degree of flexibility. For more than a decade after
1919, he concentrated on elaborating political ideas, some of which pro-
voked Lenin himself. He then took up literary theory and criticism once
more at the time when the rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union was
bringing a climate favorable to his essentially conservative ideas. He devel-
oped a theory of realism that he generally managed to identify with
Stalinist socialist realism.
When Hungary fell under communist control after World War II,
the atmosphere of the cold war led some of Lukacs’s fellow-communists to
accuse him of having too much sympathy for Western literature. Then,
because he served as Minister of Culture in the government of Imre Nagy
during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, when the Revolution was
suppressed he was accused of revisionism by the Russians, was exiled for
a time, and only gradually returned to official acceptance in Hungary.
Certainly a new stage in Lukacs’s thought had emerged after Stalin’s
death, Khrushchev’s attack on the Stalinist “cult of personality,” and the
Hungarian Revolution. Though still conservative in taste, Lukacs had
become more tolerant and flexible—one result being that he attracted
more and more favorable attention in the West. ‘This stage in his thought
was clearly demonstrated in 1963 when the first two volumes of his great
Asthetik were published under the title, Die Eigenart des Asthetischen
(The Unique Character of the Aesthetical) as part of his collected works.
In various respects the Asthetik has followed ideas earlier set forth by
Walter Benjamin (who still earlier had himself been influenced by
 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES
688
of Ernst
Lukacs), while also having a conception of reality not unlike that
strongl y attacke d Stalini sm
Bloch’s Das Prinzip Hoffnung. Now Lukacs
the Hegeli an dynami c process
as an ultimately irrational attempt to arrest
leaders
of human experience. Nevertheless, presumably because so many
careful to
of the communist movement had once been Stalinists, he was
that
add, in accordance with the official communist line of the times,
securit y of sociali sm.
Stalinism had made possible the greater strength and
As the careers of Bloch and Lukacs indicate, Marxist theoreticians and
aestheticians in the Soviet satellites have so far been hampered in their
work if they have shown independence of thought. Correspondingly, a
high degree of artistic originality has until recently been lacking, especially
in East Germany. The lack of original and internationally influential
artists there, however, has not been caused solely by the rigid official
control of art under Soviet dominance and the aesthetic of socialist real-
ism: after all, Nazi persecution had so thoroughly destroyed all avant-garde
art throughout Germany that even in West Germany a new generation of
artists of sufficient originality and power to affect the art of other countries
was slow to arise. When it began to do so, it was largely under the
leadership of imported artists. But, in West Germany, by contrast and in
opposition to East Germany, the kind of art that developed was of course
strongly opposed to Soviet Marxism-Leninism and the socialist realism that
went with it, even though sometimes tinged with revisionist Marxism.

17. Italy: Communism and Radical Art Groups

"Lue mosr influential of all the communist parties in non-communist
countries of the Continent during the period after World War II were to
be found in Italy and France, where communists achieved national recog-
nition as a result of the highly effective role they played as partisans and
guerrillas in the resistance movement against fascism during the war. The
Communist parties of these two countries have been by far the largest of
western Europe. So exceedingly important and powerful did they become
that they were the only two parties outside of the Soviet Union and the
satellite countries to be included in the Communist Information Bureau
(Cominform) when, in 1947, that organization was set up in answer to the
Marshall Plan and as a partial replacement for the Communist Interna-
tional, abolished in 1943 in an effort to cement the Soviet Union’s wartime
alliance with non-communist nations. Of the two parties, that of Italy—
which had been increasingly repressed by the Fascist regime after it took
power in 1922—became and remained the larger, once Fascism had been
defeated in World War II.
So strong has the Italian Communist Party been in the post-war years
that the communists have several times seemed on the verge of taking over
the country. In the mid-1950’s, the Italian Communist Party had over
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 68 9
2,000,000 dues-paying members. Even in 1961—having lost more than
twenty percent of its membership in the five years since the Russians had
repressed the Hungarian Revolution—the party still had 1,700,000 card-
holders and was able to win nearly thirty percent of the votes in the
municipal elections. In 1965 the membership, now numbering 1,600,000,
was nevertheless larger than the year before. Late in 1965 the Italian party
became the largest anywhere in the world outside of the communist
nations when the party of Indonesia was largely wiped out after its abortive
attempt to seize power. Far more than the French party and other Com-
munist parties of the West, that of Italy has continued to command the
allegiance of many—perhaps most—intellectuals, including some of the
best painters, sculptors, and art historians, as well as novelists, poets,
critics, actors, and motion-picture directors.** Comparatively few have
actually been party members, but many “independent” artists have fol-
lowed the party line at least partly because the Communist Party has been
so influential that any Italian artist unwilling to go along with it is still
likely to find himself isolated.*° Most older artists, also, cannot forget the
heroic contributions of communists to the success of the Resistance move-
ment and the defeat of Fascism and nazism in Italy. Finally, the Italian
party, much more than that of France, has continued to attract the
allegiance of artists and other intellectuals because whenever possible it has
allowed more variety of expression in art. This is largely because Italy,
where a man is still likely to think of himself as a Milanese, Roman, or
Florentine first, as an Italian only second, has never had such a tradition of
centralized political organization as France. Italian communists have also
been more likely than those of France to show interest in specifically
national cultural traditions, no doubt partly because the less centralized
political tradition of Italy has made it more difficult to bend them uni-
formly to the will of Moscow. But this interest in specifically Italian
culture also goes back to the chief theoretician of Italian communism,
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), who, unlike most communist political
leaders of other countries, was deeply interested in problems of culture in
relation to Marxism.”
Gramsci had become a socialist in 1912-1913 while a student at the
University of Turin, where a fellow-student was another future leader of
Italian communism, Palmiro Togliatti. Only gradually did Gramsci arrive
at a Marxist position, doing so through studying idealist philosophy,
especially the works of Hegel and the Italian philosopher-aesthetician
Benedetto Croce, himself a Hegelian who, among other things, wrote on
Marxism. Gramsci began with an idealist concern for creating an autono-
mous socialist culture to replace the eclectic culture of bourgeois origin so
often found among his socialist comrades. But he soon attempted to
combine his effort toward cultural renewal with a real political movement
in order to arrive at a “philosophy of action.”
After World War I, Gramsci and his friend Togliatti were among the
Italian socialists who in 1919 favored affiliation with the Third (or Com-
690 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

ed
munist) International. When the Italian Communist, Party was organiz
in January 1921 after a split among the Italian socialists, in which Eman-
a
uele Modigliani, brother of the painter Amedeo Modigliani, remained
prominent socialist, Gramsci joined the new party and was made a mem-
ber of its central committee. During the post-war period until after the
triumph of Fascism in 1922, he had helped to stimulate a revolutionary
spirit among industrial workers by urging workers’ councils in factories,
modeled on the soviets in Russia but independent of a revolutionary
socialist party as well as of the trade unions. Nevertheless, because of the
elements of philosophical idealism that persisted in his thought, at the
third congress of the Italian Communist Party, held at Lyon early in 1926,
he was attacked by left-wing members of his own party as a Croceian or a
Proudhonian, and thus as an idealist or an anarchist.
After the attempted assassination of Mussolini in October 1926, the
Fascists, who early in 1923 had already begun to repress the communists,
passed laws ordering the immediate dissolution of all opposition parties
and arrested many of their members. Gramsci, one of the first communists
to be arrested, was sentenced to more than twenty years in jail. He was
released in ten years, but imprisonment had broken his health; he died in
1937 at the age of forty-six only a few days after being freed.
Although from the beginning of the Communist Party, Gramsci had
been its leading theoretician, it was as a prisoner that he wrote his greatest
work, the Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks). These—posthu-
mously published from 1948 to 1951 at a time when the communists were
particularly popular in Italy as a consequence of their activities in the
Resistance—achieved a remarkably wide readership.
In the Quaderni, Gramsci dealt primarily with the Marxian super-
structure rather than with its economic basis: he believed that in periods
following revolutionary activity, as in Europe after 1815 and again after
1921, cultural problems had become especially important. For in such
periods, he held, the class struggle becomes a war of position rather than of
pitched battles, and the principle area of conflict becomes the “cultural
front.”
Because Gramsci carried disagreement with economic determinism
further than Marx, he was able to have a particular appeal for intellectuals,
including intellectuals outside of Italy. Furthermore, in the Quaderni he
called artists and scholars the “organizers” and “directors” of culture,
carefully distinguishing them from those other intellectuals, the technical
“specialists” such as industrial managers and foremen. He also made a
distinction between what he called traditional and organic intellec-
tuals. In the traditional group he placed creative artists and men of
learning; in the organic group those who dominate economic produc-
tion. Even though the members of the organic group are, he believed,
dominant in any society, the traditional group alone represents a histori-
cal continuity uninterrupted by even the most radical changes of social and
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 691

political systems. Hence its members feel that they are autonomous. And
in fact, according to Gramsci, their relationship to the organic social
group is not immediate, so that they are not directly determined by
economics.
Clearly, such ideas as these would not lend themselves to Soviet
socialist realism when it later developed, though Gramsci had no intention
of being a revisionist of Marx or of Lenin, whom he deeply admired. Also
clearly, his thought did include an idealistic element based partly on
Italian traditions, so that it could encourage a national Italian movement
within communism, one in which, too, the arts would be allowed much
greater freedom than in the Soviet Union. In addition, his ideas could help
to encourage within the Italian Left revisionist tendencies not envisaged
by Gramsci himself.
The Fascist repression that, in 1926, had brought about the jailing of
Gramsci, was by 1930 already proving unable to prevent some of the
younger Italian artists from protesting against the regime: among them
were several who were to be leading radicals after the fall of the Fascists in
World War II. Two of the first artists to protest in word and deed during
the pre-war years were Renato Guttuso and Emilio Vedova. By 1930, also,
there were anti-Fascist teachers at the University of Turin, among them
the noted art historian and critic Lionello Venturi. The anti-Fascists in the
arts sought to move away from Fascist nationalism toward the general
European avant-garde movement: the first exhibition in Italy of abstract
art by an Italian artist was that of Atanasio Soldati, held at Milan in 1933.
Most of the artists who reacted against Fascism took an expressionist
direction. This was the case, for instance, with the “Group of Six” at
Turin, of which the militant liberal Carlo Levi was a member; it was also
the case with the Corrente group at Milan, in which were included the
young painters Vedova, Cassinari, and Birolli.*’
When, after the destructive years of World War II, the arts began to
revive in Italy, the many artists influenced by communism were likely to
seek to reconcile Marxism with philosophical idealism, much as Gramsci
had done in his writings. We have seen, however, that in the representa-
tional arts, idealism has been likely to take the form of abstraction. In
post-war Italy it was a kind of abstraction stimulated, not by the Italian
futurist tradition, which had become too closely allied with Fascism, and
not so much by expressionism either, as primarily by contemporary French
abstract art.
The most completely abstractionist group of artists sympathetic to
Marxism to develop in Italy after the war was called Forma, from the
name of the magazine that it, published. Significantly, its first manifesto,
printed in Forma for March 15, 1947," rejected Soviet socialist realism as
retardataire, while seeking to reconcile Marxism with formalism (and thus
with abstraction) in accordance with the name, Forma. The manifesto
declared: “We proclaim ourselves Formalists and Marxists, in the belief
 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES
692
lly
that the terms Marxism and Formalism are not irreconcilable, especia
posi-
today when the progressive elements of our society must maintain
equivo-
tions that are revolutionary and avant-garde, and not slip into the
played- out realism. Its most recent manifes ta-
cation of a conformist and
tions in painting and sculpture have shown what a narrow and limited road
Meise?
More important in the early post-war period than the Forma group,
however, was one that sought to recognize and continue to occupy the
common ground, including the national ground, which during the war had
linked together different elements within the Italian Resistance move-
ment. While this group too sought to reconcile Marxism and abstraction,
it did so by leaving the degree of abstraction up to the individual artist-
member as long as he rejected pure formalism in favor of a Marxist
dialectic of form, in favor also of a Marxist conception of art as an
instrument in close contact with reality and history, and in favor of a
Marxist philosophy of action in the spirit of Gramsci’s Marxism. However,
a wide range of interpretations as to what constitutes reality was allowed,
as a result of which the works of art of some of the artists in the group
were abstract, of others thoroughly realistic. Nonetheless, the members
maintained that they all stood for the evolution of a true synthesis despite
mere outward diversity.
This group began with nine artists who as early as October 1946 drew
up in Venice a program they called the Nuova secessione artistica (The
New Artistic Secession). Their program referred to themselves as “Nine
Italian artists, who are replacing an aesthetic of form by a dialectic of
form” and declared that they “intend to have their tendencies, which
conflict outwardly only, converge toward a synthesis that will be recogniza-
ble only as it develops in their work. This is a sharp break with all
preceding syntheses, which came about through theoretical decision made
a priori. Each of the artists intends to keep his observations and his
individual statements in the world of art close to a primary basis of ethical
and moral imperatives, and [to] sum up these activities as living acts. As a
result, painting and sculpture will become declarative instruments and
methods of free exploration of the world, thus increasing contact with
reality constantly. Art is not the conventional face of history but history
itself, which cannot exist without man.” ® The declaration was signed by
the painters Birolli, Cassinari, Guttuso, Morlotti, Pizzinato, Santomaso,
Vedova, and the sculptors Leoncillo and Alberto Viani.
Soon the New Secession movement changed its name to the more
Marxist one of Fronte nuovo delle arti in order to emphasize the collective
will of its artists." In the catalog to its first show, held at Milan in 1947,
the Fronte nuovo declared itself “a group of free men rightfully proud in
the belief that they represent the most disparate directions of contempo-
rary Italian art.” * At the Venice Biennale of 1948, the group achieved its
peak of success; after that year it broke up as the member-artists divided
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 6 93

into two chief groups. Six of them whose art was abstract * eventually
joined the painters Afro and Moreni to form a new abstract group, while
the realists Guttuso and Pizzinato practiced socialist realism.

18. Italy: Communism and the

Socialist Realism of Renato Guttuso

Iw tne cold war, Stalin’s regime had, of course, begun to impose socialist
realism upon communists everywhere as part of achieving unity through-
out the communist movement in opposition to the “capitalistic imperial-
ism” of the United States and its allies. Guttuso and Pizzinato, therefore,
were simply the two members of the Fronte nuovo who most closely
accepted Stalinism and its socialist realism. Indeed, Guttuso became Eu-
rope’s leading social realist in the visual arts (Figs. 120 and 121). His work
has been admired not only by leading Marxian critics, such as the English
critic John Berger, but even by that cosmopolitan American art historian
and critic, the late Bernard Berenson, who was a friend of Guttuso and
considered him to be one of the two leading modern Italian artists. After
all, Berenson’s doctrine of “tactile values” itself, in spite of his formalism,
implied a kind of realistic approach to art. Nonetheless, as a disciple of
Walter Pater and the “art for art’s sake” movement, he also held artists “‘to
be politically irresponsible.” * Yet Guttuso had joined the Italian Commu-
nist Party in 1935, and has served as a member of its executive committee
—scarcely a politically irresponsible position. He was one of the few
artists of international stature to remain in the party after the suppression
of the Hungarian Revolution, which caused many Italian intellectuals—in-
cluding the noted painter Domenico Purificato and the writer Italo Cal-
vino—to resign from it.
Guttuso’s fame as artist has by no means been restricted to Italy. Not
long after World War II his work began to affect French realists of the
Left, and a show of his work at London in 1955 correspondingly spread his
influence in England when realism was still fashionable there. His paint-
ings have been acquired by many American collections public and private
—one of them was hung by Governor Nelson Rockefeller in the New York
State Governor’s Mansion at Albany. Works by Guttuso have also been
displayed in many group exhibitions in the United States, first attracting
attention in an exhibition, “T'wentieth-Century Italian Art,” held at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1949.°° In this Guttuso was given
prominence as the most important member of the Fronte nuovo delle arti,
though it was already beginning to break up as the realists and abstraction-
ists went their separate ways. In 1958, during the era of “peaceful coexist-
ence” promoted by Khrushchev, Guttuso became the first widely known
694 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

Italian communist painter to be given a one-man show in the United

States—an exhibition held at the chief American center of socially realistic
art, the A.C.A. Gallery in New York, in conjunction with the Heller
Galleries. Guttuso has been perhaps the most influential of all socialist
realist artists in the West, and he and his art have also been accepted by
Soviet critics to a degree not accorded Léger or Picasso.”
Renato Guttuso’s father was a free-thinking Sicilian farmer subscrib-
ing to the nineteenth-century Italian liberal tradition descended from that
nationalistic Saint-Simonian, Mazzini. Renato’s grandfather had fought
beside Garibaldi, who was likewise influenced by Saint-Simonianism, and
who in opposition to Mazzini and also to Bakunin later lauded the First
International, eventually dominated by Marx, while likewise upholding the
Paris Commune.® So proud of his grandfather was Guttuso that one of his
best-known paintings depicts in a socialist-realist style Garibaldi and his
Thousand fighting their way into-Palermo—and the artist has included
two likenesses of himself in the picture. One might add that the style of
Guttuso’s picture, in reflecting the influence of the Soviet official aesthetic
of socialist realism, and thus of a kind of academicism, is in fact less
avant-garde than that of paintings by some Italian artists who, with
Garibaldi, had fought for Italian freedom back in the 1860's. These artists,
members of a group centering on Florence and known as the Macchiaioli,
or “pointillistes,” in that same decade had fought for artistic as well as
political freedom. For they had revolted against academicism and against
story-telling in art, and, filled with an urge toward simplification, had
emphasized clear contrasts of brightness and color, thereby making a first
step toward Impressionism despite the considerable degree of romantic
feeling surviving in their lighting effects.
As for Guttuso, he had early become political-minded: even as a boy
he had been strongly anti-Fascist. In 1933, he had become associated with
the sculptor Giacomo Manzi and other artists in a group at Milan opposed
opposed to Fascism. This group maintained itself until dispersed in 1940
by World War II, but it lastingly impressed the Russians because, like
Guttuso, Manzt became a communist. In 1961, the Soviet magazine,
Iskusstvo (Art) ran an article on Manzut as an “anti-fascist” and “artist-
humanist” together with an article on Guttuso (cf. Figs. 120 and 121),”
and on May Day in 1966 Manzu was awarded a Lenin Peace Prize as “ an
outstanding representative of realistic directions in art.” *°°
In 1943, eight years after Guttuso had joined the Communist Party,
he had become an active partisan in the fight against the Nazis as well as
the Fascisti; and after the war ended, in 1946 was a founder of the Nuova
secessione group that became the Fronte nuovo delle arti. On the basis of
his book of drawings Gott mit Uns, depicting Nazi massacres in Italy,
Guttuso was awarded a second-place World Peace Prize from the Congress
held at Warsaw in 1950 in connection with the “peace” campaign which
had been launched by the communists in the cold war. At this Congress,
 FIG. 120. Korea (1949), drawing by Renato Guttuso.

Picasso received the first prize, while Portinari, the Brazilian painter and
communist sympathizer, was, like Guttuso, given a second-place award. Of
these three artists, Guttuso was the only one who in the late forties had
considerably modified his style to conform to the party line of socialist
realism.
It was fitting that Guttuso should be the recipient of a communist-
line prize together with Picasso, because he has been stimulated more by
Picasso’s art, and especially by Guernica (Fig. 46), than by that of any
other artist. He also has expressed particular admiration for Géricault’s
Raft of the Medusa (Fig. 5), David’s Marat (Fig. 2), and for the English
artist William Hogarth; among other artists whose works influenced his
style are Delacroix (Fig. 13), Van Gogh (Fig. 31), George Grosz (Fig.
 FIG. 121. The Miner (1953) by Renato Guttuso.

108), and the mainly apolitical expressionist, Kokoschka. In spite of the

influence on Guttuso of these many artists and of Soviet socialist realism,
he increasingly developed his own personal realistic style, as can already be
seen in Fig. 120, a drawing of 1949 entitled Korea. This, illustrated in the
book on Guttuso by John Berger published in East Germany, depicts a
Chinese communist strangling the American eagle: it betrays a slight
influence from Picasso only in the quality of the outline of the human
figure. Guttuso’s realist style in painting is well exemplified by Figure 121,
The Miner, painted in 1953.
Even though Guttuso as a social realist has remarked, “I believe that
the artist should attempt to be understood by the greatest possible number
of people,” in 1958 he also declared, “I am for total freedom of expression.
. . . Freedom of investigation is the thing, rather than imitation of Soviet
realism.” *? In rejecting the example offered by Soviet art, Guttuso dis-
played an independent spirit like that already shown in 1956 by Palmiro
Togliatti in proposing “polycentrism,” the doctrine that rejects Moscow as
the single center of world communism in favor of the comparative inde-
pendence of Communist parties from one another. The enunciation of
polycentrism by Togliatti brought additional popularity to the Commu-
nist Party within Italy; it is a doctrine that could appeal especially to
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 697

artists, including Guttuso. For though he regards himself as a whole-

hearted communist, it would seem that Guttuso—not unlike Morris or
Brecht—really believes in a degree of individual freedom of expression that
is anarchistic. We have found again and again that, mainly because of the
nature of art itself, especially in modern times, great artists are ordinarily
individualists to an extent that does not allow them to accept for very long
the entire communist creed even when they wish to do so and believe they
have done so. The result is that in countries outside of the Soviet Union’s
immediate sphere of control, artists generally recognized as the greatest
ones have rarely followed the Soviet line for art completely even when they
have wholeheartedly followed the line for politics and economics. Guttuso
himself found it necessary to say: “The Russians are [my] very good friends
but . . . they don’t like my work.” *” Still, the Russians have applauded
his rejection of abstract art, translating into Russian and publishing in
1958 in the principal Soviet art magazine, Iskusstvo, his article “Against
the Dictatorship of Abstract Art” in a number bearing on its cover a
reproduction of his painting of 1953, Miners’ Wives.*** Another article in
the same issue was illustrated by his painting The Miner (Fig. 121), also
of 1953. In 1961, an exhibition of his works displayed in the Soviet Union
was favorably reviewed in Iskusstvo, No. 12. Late in 1962, at a time when
Khrushchev was ready to attack abstract art, as a great social realist and
communist Guttuso was elected to the Soviet Academy of Art, which in
his speech of acceptance he contrasted favorably with all other academies
of at least the last 130 years as signifying “a living and harmonious
organism, structurally renovated by a [new] society. .. .”*° After all,
politically Guttuso and the French artist André Fougeron have been the
two most subservient of the widely known party artists in western Europe
—though in his art Guttuso has always been less subservient than Fouge-
ron was until recently. Nevertheless, even though Guttuso’s reputation
with the party remains high, and though a party-line biography of him by
writer Alberto Moravia was published in 1962, his general reputation, like
that of Fougeron, declined in the face of revisionist tendencies favorable
to abstract art, tendencies now strong among many communists interested
in the arts though they are officially rejected in the Soviet Union and Red
China.
In Italy this has been all the more true because even within the Italian
Communist Party a revisionist current has always been ready to break out
whenever opportunity has offered, and thus to oppose socialist realism. We
have seen that in some respects revisionism was implicit in the writings of
Gramsci, though he had no intention of being a revisionist. Hence, during
those early years of the cold war when Stalin was still alive, when Stalinism
_and socialist realism—were strongest in Italy, Gramsci’s writings had to
be condemned by communists as heretical. After Khrushchev's attack on
the dead Stalin in February 1956, however, the Italian communists
promptly seized the opportunity to publish Gramsci’s writings again,
698 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

displaying the attitude of independence from Moscow reflected also in

Togliatti’s enunciation of polycentrism in the summer of 1956.
That doctrine—which was upheld by a majority of other Communist
parties in 1960 at a conference of eighty-one parties in Moscow *°°—was
itself, of course, a revision of Marxism-Leninism. In the light of Togliatti’s
own Marxist-Leninist conception of the organic relation between party and
culture—and under polycentrism between the Italian party and Italian
culture—it was only to be expected that sooner or later he would openly
apply polycentrism directly to culture, including the arts. In other words,
he would not hesitate to criticize beliefs and actions of the Soviet Commu-
nist Party and of the Soviet Union in matters artistic. This he overtly did
in 1963 at a time when, over a period of months, Khrushchev was person-
ally leading a campaign against abstract art in the U.S.S.R. Togliatti
declared: “Tolerance is essential in cultural matters. Nobody can impose
on an artist how to write a poem, how to create music, how to paint.” *” In
1963, also, he spoke of the necessity for communism and Christianity to
work together rather than merely to coexist, a doctrine soon to be sup-
ported by the Austrian communist art critic Ernst Fischer. Shortly before
Togliatti died in the U.S.S.R. in August 1964, he wrote a memorandum in
which he took Khrushchev to task for his heavy-handed tactics in the
ideological dispute raging between the Soviet Union and Red China, urged
the cessation of attacks against religion, and again vigorously defended the
independence of national Communist parties. He also declared: “we
[Communists] must become the champions of intellectual liberty, of free
artistic creation and of scientific progress.” *°°
After Togliatti’s death, the Italian Communist Party carried on in the
same independent vein. When, early in 1966, two Soviet writers, Sinyavsky
and Daniel, were convicted of slandering the Soviet state by having books
published in the West under pseudonyms, the Italian party flatly de-
nounced the conviction, doing so even more strongly than the Communist
parties of France, England, and other Western nations. L’ Unita, its official
newspaper, boldly declared that “an adequate solution has not been
found” for “the bigger problem between Soviet society and its intellec-
tuals, between politics and culture. . . .” * This was the first time L’ Unita
had ever suggested that something was possibly wrong in the U.S.S.R.
Partly as a consequence of such independence, in the elections of 1968
the Communist Party proved surprisingly strong, attracting some 2,000,000
more votes than in 1963. Most of these, however, came not from voters
sympathetic to communism, but from left-wing Socialists alienated from
the ruling coalition of the Christian Democrat and United Socialist par-
ties. As has so often happened, the Communist Party had profited from
the spirit of alienation that in one form or another has played so promi-
nent role in the continental tradition of radicalism. In August 1968, when
Warsaw Pact troops spearheaded by the Red army abruptly invaded
Czechoslovakia, which had been putting polycentrism into effect too
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 6 99

rapidly for the Russians, the Italian Communist Party led the Communist
parties of the West in sharp protest, and by so doing maintained its strong
position in Italy.

19. The New Lefi and the Revival of

the Bauhaus Tradition on the Continent

"Tne reaviess of the Italian Communist Party to urge polycentrism and

greater freedom of expression in the arts had not prevented the develop-
ment of a New Left in Italy as in other Western countries during the
1950's; *° in the late 1960’s this was led by the Partito socialista italiano di
unita proletaria (PSIUP). In art, Marxist revisionism within and outside
the political New Left has been found in avant-garde art movements more
abstract than most leaders of the Communist Party for some time were
willing to encourage. These movements have especially attracted artists in
their thirties or younger, who therefore have lacked heroic memories of the
struggle against Fascism and nazism in which Italian communists were so
prominent. In subscribing to a degree of revisionist Marxism, as so many of
them have done, they have flatly rejected Soviet socialist realism. ‘The more
important of the movements, socially radical but in art abstract, to which
these younger artists have subscribed have been international in scope,
with branches not only in Italy but also in other countries of Europe, and
sometimes influential on other continents as well.
Their arts, like so much modern art, generally go back to the Russian
constructivists, to dada, and especially to the Bauhaus, which itself had felt
the stimulation of dada and constructivism. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, the
spirit and the methods of the Bauhaus have been widely revived. We have
seen that although the Bauhaus itself was officially apolitical, the sympa-
thies of its staff and pupils had ranged from a liberalism to mild Marxism
and even to Marxist-Leninist communism in the person of its second head,
Hannes Meyer, yet the prevailing tone had been that of a kind of social
utopianism. Not surprisingly, the avant-garde groups that have revived the
Bauhaus tradition in the 1950’s and early 1960’s have also been likely to
have a similar tone of social utopianism, though mixed now with elements
of New Left Marxist revisionism.
The most important international movement of this kind in the arts
throughout the 1960’s has been that known as La Nouvelle tendance,
discussed at the end of Chapter 6. The Italian branches of the movement
at Milan and Padua (beginning in 1959 with the review Azimuth and
Gruppo “T” at Milan, and Gruppo “N” at Padua), have been linked with
others especially in Paris, Amsterdam, Diisseldorf, Munich, and Zagreb,
Yugoslavia, where the first international exhibition of the movement was
700 i RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

held in 1961. The more Marxist of the movement’s: participants, particu-

larly at the Zagreb exhibition of 1963, held that the Russians misunder-
stood Marx and Lenin in calling for socialist realism, and that a progressive
Marxist abstract art is possible.
The influence of the Bauhaus tradition on La Nouvelle tendance
came partly, as we saw, from the artist Vasarely (Fig. 60), whose teacher at
Budapest had been trained at the Bauhaus. But it came also from a revival
of Bauhaus teaching methods at the Hochschule fiir Gestaltung (or Col-
lege of Design) in Ulm, West Germany. This was founded a few years
after World War II in memory of a brother and sister, who—active
members of the anti-Nazi “White Rose” movement among German uni-
versity students—had been arrested by the Nazis at Munich in 1944,
during the war, and executed. Their sister, the former Inge Scholl, ob-
tained from John McCloy, the American Military Governor and High
Commissioner for Germany, permission for a new building to be erected at
Ulm to house the new school that she founded through the Geschwister-
Scholl Stiftung with the aid of her husband Otl Aicher, a graphic designer.
Together, they selected Max Bill (1906- ), a Swiss-born but Bauhaus-
trained architect and artist, to design the building, paid for partly by
American contributions; and Bill was appointed the first director of the
school. It was he who organized the original faculty and curriculum. The
Hochschule fiir Gestaltung, a deliberate continuation of the Dessau Bau-
haus (which had also been known as the Hochschule fiir Gestaltung),
began operation in 1953, though it did not officially open until October
1955. Several South Americans were attracted to the Hochschule as faculty
members and students as a consequence of a visit Bill made to Brazil and
Argentina in 1951.
Bill is the kind of artist for which the Bauhaus had stood in exalting
the total work of art: he is an architect, painter, sculptor, typographer, and
industrial designer. He thus in practice as well as in theory represents the
ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk and its organic fusion of the arts, while also
believing that the fine arts are the primary formative influence on all
design. Like such leaders of the Bauhaus as Gropius and Mies, Bill himself
has been essentially non-political. But his belief that the artist should be
governed by a high sense of moral duty to the community and his desire
for a cultural synthesis through the arts could attract those who held an
organic point of view toward culture and society, as the Bauhaus had done
earlier. They therefore could appeal to—among others—Marxists who
rejected Soviet socialist realism but nonetheless believed that in the good
society the arts should be organically integrated with one another and with
society in a total culture and that in a good society every man can become
a truly well-rounded total person. Hence the educational tradition estab-
lished by Bill at the Hochschule fiir Gestaltung had as its aim the
education of “generalists” rather than specialists—the kind of person
Marxists believe every man will become in the classless society.
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 701

In Bill’s view, he moved beyond the Bauhaus in carrying into more of

a unification of art with science Gropius’s desire to unify art and technol-
ogy. He sought to give greater prominence to designing things in everyday
use, to carry further town and regional planning, and to develop a new
department for collecting and disseminating useful information. He be-
lieved, also, that he had passed from abstract art, which he had come to
consider transitional, to what he called art concret—using the term
coined in 1930 by Van Doesburg and his collaborators for the title of a
periodical and manifesto. According to Bill, the form as well as the content
of such art is imbued with science, which is both a source of inspiration
and, through mathematics, a regulating method.”
In 1956, Bill resigned as director of the Hochshule fiir Gestaltung, and
then, after serving simply as head of its division of architecture and
product design for a year, withdrew entirely from the school. Beginning in
1955 he had come into conflict with younger members of his faculty.
Although they too regarded the Bauhaus as highly relevant inasmuch as it
sought to regard human environment as a field of design activity, more
strongly than Bill they believed it to be too close to the arts and crafts
movement for present needs (cf. Figs. 113 and 122) and regarded its
attitude toward technology in a technical civilization as too romantic and
subjective.** Also, they considered that Bill’s own rationalism was too
formalistic, and that he therefore failed to stress objective science sufh-

FIG. 122. “UniData-Programm” (1964), office equipment for use with elec-
tronic data processing machines, designed by Tomas Maldonado in
collaboration with Rudolf Scharfenberg and Gui Bonsiepe.
 MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES
7O2 if. RADICALISM,

ciently—unlike Hannes Meyer and unlike the constructivists of Soviet

Russia.
As one member of the faculty later declared: “the Ulm School gives
than to
greater attention to the question how design is related to science,
related to the arts.” “4 On this basis the ideal of
the question how design is
as express ed by Tomas Maldon ado, an-
the Hochschule fiir Gestaltung,
was to achieve an educati on that would
other member of the faculty,
synthesize or integrate the humanities and arts with the physical sciences,
the behavioral sciences, and technology to form a school of environmental
design, a school of human ecology.” In that aim, according to Maldo-
nado, the word “environmental” is intended to include the total social,
cultural, and mental, as well as physical, environment. This emphasis on
creating a total environment is characteristic of the entire post-war con-
structivist revival.
After Bill resigned as director of the Hochschule fiir Gestaltung, for
some years the faculty attempted to administer the school collectively. In
1962, however, the administrative committee was replaced by a single
director selected by the council of the Hochschule, though on the principle
that the directorship should rotate among leading members of the
faculty ™® in accordance with the custom prevailing among German insti-
tutions of higher education.
Not only did the Hochschule stand for a radical point of view toward
design, but also—as could be expected of an institution anti-Nazi in origin
that had tried to run itself on a collective basis—its social point of view
was likewise on the radical side. Inasmuch as the Hochschule sought to
create a model school that by example would give rise to a movement
oriented toward new social goals, it, like the Bauhaus before it, necessarily
stood for a kind of social utopianism. And insofar as members of its faculty
and student body were political-minded, their political attitudes were
necessarily anti-conservative—with the result that, as in the case of the
Bauhaus earlier, the Hochschule fiir Gestaltung suffered from repeated
attacks by political conservatives. Yet as with the Bauhaus, the political
attitudes of its faculty and student body represented a wide range of views
from democratic and liberal through those of utopian socialism to Marx-
ism—though Marxism of a revisionist kind.
Of the faculty members, the furthest to the Left was Claude
Schnaidt, a former student in the school who became a teacher in the
building department. In 1965, Schnaidt published a highly sympathetic
biography of Hannes Meyer,’ who had emphasized the relation of design
to science. Somewhat different, however, was the attitude of Tomas Mal-
donado (Fig. 122), for although as a young man in his native Argentina,
Maldonado had been strongly on the Marxist Left, at the Hochschule he
was not a practicing or directly political leftist. Insofar as his views were
still nonetheless tinged by Marxism, this was of a revisionist variety,
reflecting a kind of New Left essentially independent of party and modi-
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 703

fied by utopian, and thus non-Marxist, elements, social, scientific, and

cultural.
On the basis of such prevailing ideas, the Hochschule fiir Gestaltung
proved able to exert an international influence both among avant-garde
artists and designers sympathetic to more or less revisionist Marxism and
among others whose essentially utopian radicalism was apolitical, but who
likewise sought to achieve organic cultural synthesis through design prima-
tily based on science. The influence of the Hochschule was felt in various
ways across the continent of Europe, in Yugoslavia and Poland as well as
in western Europe, and also in England, Argentina, Japan, and the United
States.”*
Much as at the Bauhaus earlier, however, internal (as well as exter-
nal) difficulties had persisted at the Hochschule fiir Gestaltung. Maldo-
nado in particular had become disappointed with developments that had
occurred since Bill’s resignation, which he had helped to bring about. The
now more “scientific” curriculum seemed to him not to take adequate
account of the total human being within his total environment. He
therefore led a group of the faculty regarding themselves as humanists in
a controversy with their more mechanistic colleagues. The humanists,
who felt that politically and socially the mechanists inclined too far to
the Right, had in turn been criticized as being too far to the Left. In this
controversy the humanists had triumphed by 1964, and the leader of the
mechanists, Horst Rittel, resigned, becoming a member of the faculty of
the School of Environmental Design at the University of California in
Berkeley. Nevertheless, the Hochschule fiir Gestaltung still failed to teach
the kind of total environmental design envisaged by Maldonado. Frus-
trated in his aims, in 1967 he resigned to practice as a designer at Milan,
and to work on a book calling for a total reorganization of higher educa-
tion on a basis that made him sympathetic to New Left student revolt.
Meanwhile, external difficulties were resulting in a repetition at the
Hochschule fiir Gestaltung of the story of the Bauhaus. Under sharp
attack by conservative elements who considered that the Hochschule was
leftist to the point of being “Red,” by the beginning of 1968 its days were
numbered. The West German government, with the support of the pro-
vincial government of Baden-Wiirttemberg, arranged to close it as an in-
dependent institution at the end of 1968, disbanding its excellent faculty.
The elements of Marxism, especially of revisionist Marxism, in the
ideas of various members of the faculty of the Hochschule fiir Gestaltung
and the common emphasis given by the factions of its faculty to at least a
partially scientific social approach to design, gave rise to certain parallels
and relationships to the New Tendency movement. The Brazilian painter
Almir Mavignier, who had been a student at the Hochschule fiir Gestal-
tung from 1953 to 1958, had in 1961 stimulated and aided the young
Yugoslav art critic Matko MeStrovié in developing that first international
exhibition called New Tendencies from which the New Tendency move-
 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES
704
ents issued in
ment took its name. As was mentioned earlier, printed statem
showed that not
connection with the second exhibition at Zagreb, in 1963,
what the Russia ns
only Me&trovié, a patriotic Yugoslav, subscribed to
promin ent
officially could regard only as revisionist Marxism, but so did
e de
exhibitors from abroad, including a member of the Parisian Group
Franz
recherche d’art visuel, Francois Morellet (Figs. 61 and 62), and
to be
Molnar, a member until that year. Both Molnar and Morellet were
of
prominent also in the third New Tendency exhibition at Zagreb, that
1965—the first in which membe rs of the Soviet “Dvizh eniye” (Move-
ment) group and some American artists were represented."
In Chapter 6 it was noted that the Groupe de recherche d’art visuel
cited among its predecessors Max Bill as well as Vasarely. Hence the
Groupe had a dual, if indirect, relationship to the Hochschule fiir Gestal-
tung. For not only was Bill the first director of the Hochschule, but also
both the Hochschule and Vasarely were strongly stimulated by the same
new aesthetic that had spread widely on the Continent. This was based
especially on the ideas of Abraham Moles, a professor at Strasbourg, at
Paris, and beginning in 1964 at the Hochschule fiir Gestaltung, where his
ideas had already been taught for some years by another member of the
faculty.”
Moles, by training a physicist, is a “generalist” of exceedingly wide
range whose main field of interest is information theory and aesthetic
perception. By “information” he means the measure of originality of a
sequence of signs that communicate, especially by auditory or visual
means: he therefore is particularly interested in music and the visual arts.
But he holds that a new aesthetic is necessary for communication today,
one that—in contrast to classical aesthetics, whose field is the study of
ideas—is instead based on the materiality of present-day means of commu-
nication. For what characterizes modern man, according to Moles, is the
use of artificial communication channels, of whose materiality man has
only recently become conscious. Furthermore, Moles maintains that com-
munication is best achieved today through what he calls multiple arts, such
as theater, movies, total cinema (cinerama)—arts that are themselves
collective and carry their message to a group of some size rather than to a
private individual. Clearly, Moles is at least partly in the tradition of
Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, and also of the Total ‘Theater of Gropius and
his friend Piscator. Since Moles’s approach, in addition to thus being
materialistic and collectivistic, is also wholly based on scientific research, it
could be expected to appeal to Marxists. But these could only be revision-
ists, not orthodox Marxist-Leninists, because Moles declares that aesthetic
information—unlike what he calls semantic information (and therefore
unlike the story-telling information furnished by Soviet socialist realism)
—is not universal, and therefore not directly translatable into a foreign
language. For aesthetic information varies both with what Moles calls the
transmitter—that is, the particular artistic medium or integrated group of
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 705

media—and with the individual human receptor’s understanding of what

that medium can communicate.
Inasmuch as Moles bases his new aesthetics so wholly on scientific
research, his ideas could appeal especially to the Hochschule fiir Gestal-
tung and the constructivist current so strong there among other places,
while likewise appealing to the related theory of what is loosely called Op
Art. It could also be significant for the theory of modern experimental
music, on which he published a book in 1960. Moles contributed an
article on “Cybernetic and Work of Art” to the catalog of the third New
Tendency exhibition at Zagreb in 1965, dealing with problems raised by
works of art created by means of machines capable of information-process-
ing and communication, such as computers and other electronic devices.
At Ulm he lectured on social dynamics, on cybernetics and system theory,
and on computers and programming—all subjects in harmony with the
scientific emphasis of the Hochschule fiir Gestaltung. And many of them
are of interest to such artists with similar emphasis as Vasarely and
members of the Nouvelle tendance movement in France and elsewhere,
including the Groupe de recherche d'art visuel, of which Vasarely’s son is a
member, and to related artists such as Franz Molnar. It is significant,
therefore, that even though Moles himself is essentially apolitical, he has
worked especially closely with Molnar, whose revisionist Marxism has
already been indicated. It is also significant that Moles believes computers
and other electronic machines for information-processing and communica-
tion are giving rise to a more important revolution than the machine
revolution that inspired Marx.

AttHoucH the Hochschule fiir Gestaltung at Ulm was the most impor-
tant example of the revival and development of the Bauhaus tradition
since World War II, it has been by no means the only one. Of the others,
two that likewise were not unconnected with revisionist Marxism of the
New Left will be mentioned here. One, known as the Vienna Group,’”
came into being in 1952 as a working collaborative which reached its peak
from 1954 to 1959: later, however, the members gave up formally working
together. Although the group was primarily made up of writers, it included
musicians and an architect. Its members were charactenistically interested
in bringing the arts together in organic fusion; and one of their aims was to
contribute to the theater of the future in the spirit of Wagner and of the
Total Theater of Gropius and Piscator.
More recent has been the Situationist movement, which began with
the founding of the Situationist International in 1957 at a conference held
in Italy attended by artists from several European countries. Its members
aimed to go beyond artistic specialization, to reject art as a separate
activity. Its point of departure was Kierkegaard’s philosophy of situations,
essentially de-Christianized and combined with a revision of Marx’s doc-
 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES
706
d themselves
trines and other influences. The Situationists have flattere
revolut ionary waves
that they have influenced radical minorities in certain
elsewhe re. For
observable in the Congo, Spain, Japan, Scandinavia, and
has been
the arts, the most important development within Situationism
in the hills
the founding, in 1961, of Bauhaus Situationniste Drakabygget
for
of Hallandsasen in southern Sweden.” It was established as a center
experiments in film, painting, décollage, urbanism, poetry, archaeology,
and music—thus emphasizing a broader fusion of the arts than that of the
original Bauhaus, but rejecting the primary emphasis on science of the
Hochschule fiir Gestaltung for a greater emphasis on arts and crafts not
unlike that of the Bauhaus. Basing itself on the principles of social
democracy, it added to the influences of Kierkegaard’s philosophy and
Marxist revisionism those of German dialectic, British economic doctrines,
and French social action programs—essentially the three sources earlier of
Marx’s thought. Despite this combination of international influences, the
institution has regarded itself as rooted in the Scandinavian conception of
culture—and therefore has been unlike most movements growing out of
the post-war Bauhaus revival in having a certain consciously national cast.
Once more we see an example of that tension between internationalism
and nationalism so frequent in the history of radical movements since the
French Revolution.
Nevertheless, the semi-clandestine periodical Internationale Situ-
ationniste, published at Paris since 1958, has advocated a complete opposi-
tion to modern society regardless of the political regime in any country. As
a consequence, it helped to stimulate the New Left student revolts that
occurred internationally in 1967-1968, being especially influential among
rebellious students in Holland, West Germany, Italy, and Panis.
Revivals of the Bauhaus point of view in recent years, such as those at
Ulm and in Sweden noted above, have not been limited to revisionist
Marxism and to the elements of anarchism and utopianism so often
characteristic of it. One of the most important revivals has developed in
that thoroughly Marxist-Leninist Soviet satellite, the German Democratic
Republic (East Germany), at the site of the original Bauhaus. In Chapter
10 it was noted that in the Soviet Union late in 1954, the year after Stalin’s
death, Khrushchev had begun to attack Stalinist architecture, especially as
represented by elaborately ornamented skyscrapers like that for Moscow
University, calling instead for buildings in materials such as reinforced
concrete (to save steel) and essentially without ornament (to reduce
costs). Then, early in 1956, in his first, or open, speech before the ‘T'wen-
tieth Congress of the Soviet Union, at which he so violently attacked
Stalin’s reputation, Khrushchev had declared that technology is independ-
ent of ideology, and that therefore the Soviet Union must study “all the
best that science and technique yield in the world of capitalism” in order
to make use of it for the Soviet brand of “socialism.” ** In other words,
under socialist realism a modern architecture like that of the “capitalist”
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1068) 7) 7.0.7
West had become officially recommended in the U.S.S.R., provided, of
course, that its content was in some way always satisfactorily “socialist.”
But as long as communist architects and designers devoted themselves to
such architectural programs as mass housing and to designing for industrial
production to satisfy needs of the masses, they could be regarded as
achieving socialist content.
Clearly, this was a kind of socialist realism in architecture and in-
dustrial design different from that which had prevailed under Stalin—but
its aims were in many respects similar to those of the Bauhaus a quarter of
a century and more earlier. It was therefore possible for a Bauhaus Revival
to take place in communist East Germany.
By the mid-1960’s, the building of the Bauhaus at Dessau—that
masterpiece of modern architecture which had been drastically altered by
the Nazis (who among other things had added a high roof to make it more
“Nordic”) and then had been damaged in World War II—had been
declared a historic monument by the communist Dessau City Council and
was being carefully restored. Furthermore, in a single year, 1966, no less
than three books on the Bauhaus were published in East Germany. One
of them, Walther Scheidig’s Bauhaus Weimar—igi9-1924 / Werk-
stattarbeiten, issued at Leipzig and devoted to the early years of the Bau-
haus, was soon translated into English and published in the United
States.””? While this was relatively non-political in approach, the other two
books—Lothar Lang’s Das Bauhaus 1919-1933 and Diether Schmidt's
Bauhaus, published respectively at East Berlin and Dresden—were strongly
Marxist. Lang, who claimed to have based his investigation on dialectical
materialism, carefully buttressed his arguments favoring the Bauhaus with
Soviet accounts; and both authors strongly emphasized 1928-1930, those
years of the Bauhaus when Hannes Meyer had been its director.”* For that
had been a time when a practical, “anti-formalist” attitude stressing the
design and manufacture of useful objects for the mass market had pre-
vailed, as well as an atmosphere of sympathy for communism.
Khrushchev’s new version of socialist realism in architecture and
industrial design, fields regarded in the Soviet Union as closer to engineer-
ing and technology than to art, has never been ofhcially paralleled in Soviet
arts. In painting and sculpture, the Stalinist rejection of abstract and
non-objective art has officially continued to this day. As was mentioned in
Chapter 6, for eight months beginning in December 1962, Khrushchev
himself had led a violent attack on abstract art as part of his efforts to meet
the accusation of the Red Chinese that he was a revisionist of true
Marxism-Leninism, and his successors have continued his policy for the
same reason. Because, despite the spread of polycentrism in the commu-
nist world, East Germany has remained so largely under Soviet dominance,
these East German books on the Bauhaus were careful to play down the
more expressionistic and abstract tendencies in the arts there, particularly
those which most reflected individual experimentation and playful free-
708 / RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

dom. Thus Lang’s book attacked the non-objectiye painting of Kandinsky

as lacking content, while somewhat gingerly expressing a preference for the
works of Klee and Feininger on the ground that they were less formalistic
and more related to the world of reality, inasmuch as they were based, at
least remotely, on the representation of nature.
Nonetheless, the Bauhaus Revival in East Germany that these books
reflect does show that in architecture and industrial design, and to some
degree even in painting, the views of the communist world are approaching
not only those of revisionist Marxism as found in Yugoslavia and among
members of the New Left in the West, but also those of many in the West
who do not regard themselves as ‘socially radical at all. This was made
especially clear when, in 1968, there was organized at Stuttgart, West
Germany, a mammoth survey of Bauhaus achievements to be shown also
at London, Paris, Chicago, Toronto, and perhaps in California and
Japan, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the
Bauhaus in March 1919. (Sadly, it proved to be an anniversary year marked
also—while this book was in press—by the deaths of Gropius and Mies.)

20. The New Alienation of

the Avant-Garde on the Continent

By earry 10968, fifty years after the Bolshevik Revolution and one
hundred and fifty years after the birth of Marx, drastic changes had
occurred within the varieties of social radicalism that regard themselves as
descended from the French Revolutionary tradition. Traditionally interna-
tional radical movements, including most varieties of Marxism, were show-
ing marked national variations; and the approach of communists to some
arts, especially architecture and industrial design, was coming close to that
of many non-communists. Finally, the doctrine of alienation, social and
artistic, so fundamental for radicalism, had clearly reached a turning point.
In France, the Communist Party was making a strong comeback until
the elections of June 1968, but only by compromising its traditional
Marxist-Leninist tenets. In West Germany and various other continental
countries, social democracy, long the dominant form of social radicalism,
had so completely given up its Marxist ideology as to be essentially dead as
a specifically Marxist movement: in 1966, for instance, the German Social
Democratic Party even formed a coalition with the conservatives. Over
much of the Continent, and especially in West Germany, Holland,
France, and Italy, the most socially alienated were no longer ‘the tradi-
tional Marxist proletarians led by alienated middle-class intellectuals able
to appeal to socially alienated artists. ‘They were, instead, members of the
New Left now dominated by a loose mixture of alienated, bohemian
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1968 / 709
students ranging from self-styled anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists to
Maoists, Leninists, Trotskyites, Titoists, Castroists, pacifists, and utopians
and having little in common but a violent rejection of the essentially
liberal and bourgeois Establishments of their respective countries and
universities. Their favorite philosopher was Professor Herbert Marcuse, a
native of Berlin and pupil of Martin Heidegger, who supported revolution-
ary Rosa Luxemburg after World War I. Like Theodor Adorno, he sought
to fuse Marxist and Freudian methods, while also avoiding ideology, even
Marxist ideology. Marcuse had contributed to the leftist Zeitschrift fiir
Sozialforschung of Horkheimer and Adorno at Frankfurt in the 1930’s. He
had migrated from Nazi Germany to the United States in 1934, and had
become an American citizen. As this present book was being completed,
he had been teaching for three years at the San Diego campus of the Uni-
versity of California after retiring from the faculty of Brandeis University,
and was making frequent trips to West Germany. His writings, especially
his book One-Dimensional Man; Studies in the Ideology of Advanced
Industrial Society (1964) and an essay entitled “Repressive Tolerance”
(1965), had furnished the now student-dominated New Left with its
credo, not only in West Germany, but also elsewhere on the Continent
and in the United States. In the essay he particularly attacked liberal
society, declaring that by encouraging debate and tolerance it was utterly
emasculating and submerging radical arguments and alternatives. Else-
where he criticized Marx’s critique of bourgeois society as not radical
enough, as tainted with positivism, and as unduly skeptical about the pos-
sibility of total liberation from constraint. Marcuse therefore called for
“defensive” violence on the part of radicals if they regarded it as necessary
for restoring the democratic process. “. . . I believe,” he wrote, “that there
is a ‘natural right’ of resistance for oppressed and overpowered minorities
to use extra-legal means if the legal ones have proved to be inadequate.
. . . If they use violence they do not start a new chain of violence but try
to break an established one.” **
This doctrine, seized upon by the alienated students now dominating
the New Left, helped to stir up immense disturbances in the universities of
the Western world, including those of Paris and Berlin, one consequence
being that in May 1968 Pravda denounced him as a “werewolf” for having
stimulated French students to become anarchists. He also influenced the
leader of the rebellious students in Berlin, “Red Rudi” Dutschke, a native
of East Germany who had escaped in 1960 to West Berlin, where he
studied sociology at the Free University. Considering himself a profes-
sional revolutionary and wearing a red sash, Dutschke became the leading
student revolutionary of central Europe. He married an American, and was
planning to migrate to the United States and teach in California when, in
April 1968, he was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt made by
a professed admirer of Hitler. Dutschke had named his son Hosea Che for
the Hebrew prophet and the Argentinian-Cuban communist revolutionary
TiN @) ff. RADICALISM, MARXISM IN OTHER COUNTRIES

Che Guevara. By Dutschke’s own account, he drew his ideas especially

from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Mao-Tse-tung, and also
Herbert Marcuse, who after meeting Dutschke in the summer of 1967 had
called him “a sweet demagogue.” * As a consequence of Marcuse’s sup-
port of New Leftists such as Dutschke, on July 1, 1968, the seventy-year-old
philosopher received a hand-printed note containing a threat to kill him
signed “Ku Klux Klan,” which caused him and his wife to flee from their
La Jolla, California, home and go into hiding. Approval of violence had
proved to be a two-way street.
Marcuse’s doctrine of “repressive tolerance,” so attractive to alienated
and revolutionary students was, however, too violent for many avant-garde
artists once sympathetic to the New Left, even if they retained their liking
for the kind of social utopianism tinged with anarchism that has been part
of New Left doctrine. For since avant-garde art had now been accepted by
bourgeois Establishments, avant-garde artists were no longer likely to be
alienated from the society around them by the class conflict based on that
hatred for the bourgeoisie so long traditional among such artists and
Marxists alike. Now artists and others were likely to be as alienated by the
often nihilistic violence of the student-led New Left as by the political and
military policies of the United States in Vietnam to which the New Left
was so strongly opposed. Artistically, they had become alienated by the
socialist realism still officially demanded of artists in the Soviet Union and
Red China. For with it went official repression of artistically radical artists
and writers within those very nations, each of which (despite some past
declarations of Soviet leaders) continues to regard itself as the one chief
world center of Marxism and therefore of social radicalism.
In western Europe, however, by 1967 so completely had avant-garde
art been adopted by the bourgeois Establishments that the Yugoslav
critic Matko Mestrovi¢ gave up all idea of holding a fourth New Tendency
exhibition at Zagreb in that year. To him the New Tendency movement
had now lost its cogency as its former participants had succumbed to
“market conformism” ”°—that is to say, had become simply affluent mem-
bers of bourgeois capitalist society. Nevertheless, it was later decided to
hold at Zagreb a year-long program on the subject of “The Computer and
Visual Research” (cf. Fig. 122). This began in August 1968 with an inter-
national colloquium based primarily on the ideas of Abraham Moles, who
was one of the two who presided. The success of the colloquium reassured
MeStrovi¢é, who now felt that the New Tendency movement, if made
sufficiently scientific—and if sufficiently aligned politically—was indeed
fundamental.” He therefore looked forward with great anticipation to the
fourth New Tendency exhibition scheduled to end the year-long program
at Zagreb in 1969. That its subject had acquired international interest out-
side of the Soviet and Red Chinese spheres of influence, and that it could
appeal to many without reference to any political alignment as well as to
aligned revisionist Marxists such as MeStrovi¢, was indicated by an ex-
 From World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to 1903.7 711
hibition held in the summer of 1968 at the Institute of Contemporary
Arts in London. For this, like the program at Zagreb, was devoted to the
subject of art aided by machines—especially computers,*** whose ap-
purtenances had already become a subject for avant-garde designers of the
Western world, including some sympathetic to the New Left (Fig. 122).
Paradoxically, meanwhile, in the affluent industrialized societies of
the West—especially West Germany, Britain, and the United States—a
reaction also somewhat related to the New Left was setting in against cer-
tain social values associated with “consumer society,” including values as-
sociated with technology, pollution, and the computer. The reaction has
been particularly strong among some members of the younger generation
subscribing to a partly underground movement, revolutionary without
being political, in their search for new social values that could foster the
individual’s personal salvation. They have regarded as valid only certain
mass arts considered to possess immediate social relevance, especially the
folk-rock song with socially significant verses. Yet this very movement, even
in its underground aspects, has been made possible only by the highly in-
dustrialized consumer societies from which it has sprung—and so by the
very technology that it has rejected, but that Marxists have continued to
believe is necessary for achieving the good society. In Marxist countries,
therefore, especially those industrializing under the authoritarian control
of Marxist-Leninist regimes, not even the underground rejects technology
and the computer.
Clearly then, in western Europe at a time when the very conception of
art itself had changed radically for some avant-garde artists, the conception
of social alienation as fostering the alienation of artists of the avant-garde
—that conception so fundamental to this book—had come to a major
turning point in history. So confusedly different had it become from the
traditional anti-bourgeois, anti-Establishment point of view among avant-
garde artists whose history as social radicals has been traced in this book
that we can fittingly end our story here except for major conclusions to be
drawn from it.
 CONCLUSION

Wiauar conciusions ARE TO BE DRAWN from this historical investigation of

the social radicalism of artists, art critics, and art historians in modern
times within that part of the world, western Europe, in which modern
social radicalism and modern artistic radicalism alike first developed? And
what are the implications of such social radicalism for significance and
quality in the arts?

1. The Alienated Artist,

Non-Conformism, and the Avant-Garde

We nave been dealing, of course, with artists dissatisfied with the

dominant society around them, whether because of what they have re-
garded as general social injustices or because of injustices specifically to
artists. Such dissatisfaction in its more extreme versions becomes aliena-
tion, of which there are various types. For the alienated artist may be
socially rebellious because he is economically alienated, or alienated by the
development of history, or psychologically alienated, or aesthetically and
stylistically alienated, or alienated by some combination of these. But as in
any case such an artist adopts a moral attitude against the prevailing
society, all of these types can be summed up under another type, namely
ethical alienation.’ Still, within that, the different emphases given by
different artists to the other types of alienation result in different effects
upon the artists and their works of art.
We have seen, also, that while some alienated artists have sought to
widen and deepen their breach with society, others have sought to
change society, believing that only after its radical reorganization can the
fullest development of the individual human being, including the individ-
ual artist, be accomplished. Some of these socially committed artists have
tried to effect social change by their own independent efforts; many others,
however, have regarded such an attempt as futile, and so have joined
movements devoted to bringing about social revolution or reform. Of these
last, some have believed that they should keep their social interests sepa-
 Conclusion / 713

rate from their art; but many have, for a time at least, devoted their art to
furthering the aims of some specific revolutionary or reform movement to
which they have committed themselves, thereby often passing to some
kind of specifically political radicalism.
‘Thus, whereas the alienation of artists from existing society and the
social radicalism of artists have tended to go hand in hand because
alienation has historically involved social rebelliousness, not all alienated
artists have been socially committed, and of these many have not been
politically committed. In this book, however, socially committed artists,
artists who in some way have devoted their art to forwarding the aims of a
socially radical movement, have been particularly important, especially if
their radicalism has been politically oriented.
Because, like other members of any socially radical movement, the
alienated artist looks forward to improving social conditions, he regards
himself as a member of a social vanguard—and correspondingly is likely to
be in some way avant-garde also in his art. In looking forward to a more
ideal society, even to some kind of utopia in which present-day injustices
will be remedied, he may, however, draw inspiration from some morte ideal
society of the past. In his art he may similarly seek inspiration by returning
to primitive roots of art—which themselves now become regarded as
avant-garde. Thus ideas of progress and of primitivism may both be
considered avant-garde by radical artists, and in both cases the develop-
ment of history becomes at least implicitly significant for their art.
The dissatisfactions that have alienated artists and others from the
society around them in modern times, and that have given rise to radical
ideas for changing it, were, we have seen, already being expressed at least in
part by leading thinkers of the Enlightenment. Some of them also devel-
oped and popularized the conception of society as a kind of living organ-
ism rather than a Newtonian machine or group of atoms. For them,
therefore, the good society was one of which the parts are integrated into a
whole which, like any living organism, is more than the sum of its parts.
This conception, like so many others held by great figures of the Enlight-
enment on the Continent, was made manifest in the French Revolution,
so largely an organic social and cultural revolt against the injustices of an
absolutist and aristocratic society. It was manifested even more in the
revolts against social and artistic injustices growing out of the Industrial
Revolution (itself named by analogy with the French Revolution). For it
was the Industrial Revolution which brought about the culmination of
“bourgeois capitalist” society, the economic injustices and artistic Philistin-
ism of which have most fully stirred alienated artists, among others, to
demand revolution or reform. Although through the Revolution of 1830 in
France bourgeois liberals were leaders of political and social revolt, they
then lost their radically revolutionary spirit and the support of other
radicals, including radical artists, when they enabled Louis Philippe to
become king of France. After the Revolution of 1830, those alienated
714 / CONCLUSION

French artists who were actively radical socially were likely to collaborate
with radical leaders of the working classes in opposition to the bourgeoisie
and liberals.
However, the alliance of such avant-garde artists with the working
classes could last only as long as the latter, like the avant-garde, were a
weak social minority. For the avant-garde is by definition a minority, and
as such has to deny and combat the culture of a majority, whether that
majority is aristocratic, bourgeois, or working-class. But the avant-garde is
also by definition an elite minority, and thus in its own way aristocratic,
and so turns with particular force against the dominance of the bourgeoisie
and then that of the proletariat, reacting on a double front against
bourgeois culture and mass culture. This in turn means that the members
of the avant-garde in their artistic tastes are outside of any social class, no
matter what class they may come from and otherwise belong to.”
Paradoxically, in spite of the particular hatred of the avant-garde for
the bourgeoisie as being quintessentially Philistine, the avant-garde itself
can most fully exist only in the type of society that is liberal-democratic
from the political point of view.and bourgeois-capitalistic from the socio-
economic point of view. Because the less technically advanced the society,
the less capitalistic and bourgeois it is, the avant-garde has been slower to
develop in societies that have lagged in technological and industrial
development, such as those of tsarist Russia, Spain, and Italy. Even in
technologically advanced societies, however, the more centralized the
organization of the nation and its social system, the more likely it is to
remain tied to many existing customs and institutions—as France, for in-
stance, has long remained tied to academies of art. And the sharper and
more revolutionary will be the revolt of the avant-garde against the prevail-
ing society. Because fascism is so centralized and so nationalistic a form of
bourgeois society (even though not capitalistic), its ideological sympathies
are utterly opposed to the avant-garde spirit, which tends to be interna-
tional and libertarian. Partly because of its own internationalism, the
avant-garde has at times sought to collaborate with international Marxism,
but then has rejected it because of Marxist centralism. Marxian com-
munism can, however, best favor an avant-garde, or at any rate hurt it
least, when the communists, like the avant-garde itself, constitute a mi-
nority within a bourgeois and capitalist society.* For then the communists,
seeking at times all possible support for their own political ends, may be
willing to put up with the artistic tastes of members of the avant-garde,
doing so even though as an elite the avant-garde is opposed to the mass
art that orthodox communists are in theory expected to support.
Thus, if an avant-garde art is to develop within a Marxist and Leninist
society, presumably that society must be revisionist in some significant
way. Even so, as in Yugoslavia, avant-garde artists must not show them-
selves to be alienated from the prevailing communist political line. Fur-
thermore, avant-garde works will be most easily accepted by a Marxist
 Conclusion / 715

regime if they can in some way be related to science—Marxism, of course,

being considered by Marxists to be scientific socialism. Thus in Yugoslavia
the New Tendency movement in art, with its emphasis on scientific
investigation of visual perception, has been officially acceptable. However,
we have noted that in the Soviet Union, that center of orthodox
Marxism, the kinetic constructivist works of the recent Dvizheniye group
—regarded as so avant-garde in Yugoslavia and elsewhere outside the
U.S.S.R., including western Europe—are not officially regarded as works of
art at all. In the Soviet Union itself, because the creators of these works
happen to be physicists and electronics specialists who in any case are not
politically alienated, their productions are officially regarded simply as
products of science and technology serving to exalt Soviet progress in those
fields.
It should be emphasized that because in communist countries avant-
garde groups must not be recognizably opposed to the regime, must
therefore not be socially rebellious, socially alienated, they cannot be
wholly avant-garde in the traditional meaning of the word. For we have
seen that historically and typically the avant-garde has been alienated from
the society around it. Historically, therefore, the problem of alienation has
been related to that of non-conformism.
In England, we found, early leaders of radical movements, literary and
artistic as well as social, often came from a background of religious
Non-conformism, and then often were stimulated to further social non-
conformism by the French Revolution. The Protestant spirit of Non-
conformism, especially in its Calvinist aspects, emphasized the “practical,”
and in any case was unfavorable to most kinds of painting and sculpture
because of their association with “popish images.” It was therefore in the
applied, and technological, arts and crafts and in the practical arts of
community planning and housing that religious Non-conformists made
their chief contributions.
In France, and elsewhere under French influence, non-conformism
had a very different character. Instead of growing out of radical Protestant-
ism it was both anti-clerical and romantic, with the most obvious form of
non-conformist alienation being bohemianism, social and artistic. Even
before the development of bohemianism, however, the problem of aliena-
tion had passed from the Enlightenment to German romantics, and had
become central to the writings of such German classical philosophers of at
least originally revolutionary sympathies as Fichte, Hegel, and Feuerbach.
From them it passed to Marx and Engels, whose materialistic approach to
the problem of alienation was made in connection with analyzing the
origin of private property and the “contradictions” inherent in a capital-
ist money and business economy. Even though, by making the arts merely
part of a superstructure resting upon the economic basis of society, and
therefore secondary to political economy, Marxism long had less attraction
for artists and others interested in the arts than did anarchism, the Marxist
716 / CONCLUSION

analysis of social injustice was available to influence the alienated, includ-

ing alienated artists.
Because the problems of alienation and of the avant-garde have been
so closely intertwined with those of social radicalism, it was necessary to
begin this book by investigating the origins of the chief forms of modern
radicalism in the light of their possible implications for the arts. Most of
these varieties of radicalism—including modern anarchism, secular utopian
socialism, and Marxism—were, we found, in some way or other heirs of the
French Revolution.

2. The Revolutionary Tradition

and National Characteristics

"Lue revationsurrs of social radicalism to art in the period since the

French Revolution, and particularly to the artistic radicalism of avant-
garde artists, have been difficult to define closely because, by the nature of
art itself, and especially by the conception of art that has prevailed since
the beginning of the romantic movement, a great artist or a good work of
art is in some way characterized by significant originality and uniqueness.
Furthermore, art is not politics, economics, or sociology, and there is no
enduring one-to-one relationship between the arts and those fields except
when it is imposed upon artists and art by political leaders under a highly
authoritarian or totalitarian government. Even under the authoritarian
absolutism of the Bourbons, however, writers and artists had been told by
the royal censors what they must not do—rather than what they must do,
which communist artists were so often told by Communist Party leaders
under Stalin’s tyrannical domination, and are still told in the Soviet Union
and Red China. It was when Stalinism was strongest in the Communist
parties of western Europe in the years immediately following World War
IT that the political leaders of Communist parties were most successful in
tyrannically imposing on communist artists specifically communist sub-
ject-matter, forms, and style in accordance with the dictates of the Stalinist
aesthetic of socialist realism. And, outside of the communist countries, it
was in France—source of the Jacobin revolutionary tradition of which the
Bolsheviks, including, of course, Stalin himself, claimed to be the heirs—
that the Communist Party leaders came closest to doing so. For in impos-
ing Stalinist centralism on party members in France, they were apparently
aided by that national French tradition of highly centralized political
organization developed by the Bourbons, and extended by the Paris Com-
mune of 1792 and by Napoleon. (Only in 1968, after violent student
revolts had nearly brought down De Gaulle’s regime, did the French
government promise to bring about a degree of decentralization.)
 Conclusion / 717

This obviously suggests that social radicalism, despite its prevailing

international spirit, has varied not merely with the type of radicalism but
also from country to country. Paradoxically, however, it has done so in
partial accord with some national traditions and in reaction against others,
as well as against contemporary political, economic, and class conditions
within the given nation. Because of these national variations, our analysis
of social radicalism in relation to the arts has been organized mainly by
country or groups of countries.
We started with France because the French Revolution was so largely
the source of both modern social radicalism and modern artistic radicalism,
and because both of these are related to one another and to the idea of
avant-garde, social and artistic, as first clearly formulated in France by
Saint-Simon. It was in France, too, that the artistic avant-garde first
became alienated from society, monarchic or bourgeois, and also from the
state as represented by official academies of art under monarchic or bour-
geois control. In revolting against the academies, French avant-garde artists
made contributions in the arts that have affected modern art throughout
the world ever since. And until recently they have had to accomplish this
with relatively few patrons, in the face of official indifference and the
general indifference or dislike of the middle class.
The more sharply the Jacobin aspect of the French Revolutionary
tradition has at various times affected France itself and other countries of
Europe, the more violent the political and social revolutions have been
likely to be. Because that tradition so largely became one not of political
revolutions alone but of organically total social and cultural revolutions,
wherever it has spread, it has tended simultaneously to encourage violent
revolutions in the arts as well. Under its influence, the more authoritarian
and centralized the government of a given country, and the more domi-
nant a single class, aristocratic or bourgeois, the more violent the reactions
against them of social radicals and of artistic radicals have tended to be.
And corresponding reactions against the central authoritarianism of na-
tional academies—established in imitation of those of France—have
played a most important part in the social and artistic radicalism of artists
in most countries of western Europe.
The relationships between a nation and the forms of its arts are about
as difficult to define precisely as those between a type of social radicalism
and conditions in the arts stimulated by it, but surely the fact that the
relationships in England between social radicalism and art have been so
different from those in France is not simply a historical accident. England
was, after all, far less affected than most continental countries by the
French Revolutionary tradition and the revolutionary versions of social
radicalism which that tradition did so much to stimulate. The last English
revolutions had occurred long ago. English common law was very different
from the highly rational and organized Code Napoleon. Until 1911, at
least, the House of Lords could regard itself as maintaining a balance
718 7 CONCLUSION

between crown and commons. English empiricism, the characteristic Eng-

lish spirit of muddling through and of readiness to compromise that
brought forth the Reform Bills of 1832, 1867, and 1884, and the relative
absence of violent class feeling in England combined with more mobility
within the social hierarchy, the absence of widespread anti-clericalism and
of any absolutist government to stir violently radical reactions against
itself, the relative weakness of the British academic tradition which in any
case was limited to fewer arts after the Royal Institute of British Architects
was founded in 1835—all made for a prevailing spirit of atomized and
empirical reformism rather than of organic revolution, social or artistic. No
doubt this helps to account for the fact that an avant-garde of the kind
found in France since the early nineteenth century scarcely existed in
England until after World War II. No doubt it also helps to account for
the inability of the Communist Party of Great Britain ever to grow to a
size at all comparable to that of France, of Italy, or of Germany before
Hitler, and perhaps also for the failure of revolutionary new art movements
to originate in the visual arts of Britain. We saw that new views about art,
some of them artistically revolutionary, were eventually given original
expression in English art criticism, but apart from the sculpture of Henry
Moore about the only movements in the visual arts related to social
radicalism in which empirical England has led the way have been essen-
tially “practical” in aim, such as the arts-and-crafts and garden-city move-
ments. It is significant, too, that like all town planning, but unlike some
other kinds of art, the garden-city movement has required an era and spirit
of peaceful reform, rather than of revolution, for its development. Charac-
teristically, also, the English inventor of the garden city, Ebenezer How-
ard, was a social reformer, not a social revolutionary—indeed, not a social-
ist or communist of any kind though affected by aspects of socialist
thought.
As for the parts of the Continent outside of France, there too we have
seen how radical social and artistic movements have developed in ways
more or less characteristic of the particular country—although very often
influenced by the French Revolutionary tradition. Thus it was significant
that in Italy and Spain, politically less centrally organized than France yet
remaining locally more aristocratic, authoritarian, and clerical, it was even
easier there than in France for revolutionary anarchism to develop by
violent reaction against the prevailing conditions and to be reflected in the
arts—for instance in the works of the Italian futurists and in those of the
young Picasso and his friends in Barcelona. Even when, after World War
IT, the Stalinist version of Marxian communism became strong in Italy as
it did in France, thereby giving rise to the two largest Communist parties
of the Western world, significantly, it was in far less centralized Italy that
the doctrine of “polycentrism” arose to sweep so much of the communist
world, but to affect France only belatedly.
As could perhaps have been predicted, in the Germanic and Scandina-
vian countries a ruling passion for social order has ordinarily helped to
 Conclusion / 719
make reformist social democracy, rather than revolutionary communism,
the most important form of social radicalism. Furthermore, reformist social
democracy, whether by itself in Scandinavia or in collaboration with
essentially liberal parties as under the Weimar Republic in Germany, has
encouraged contributions to city planning and mass housing with less
emphasis on the individual than in the early English garden cities, though
partly influenced by them. Also, in Germany during the Weimar Republic
and somewhat reflecting the spirit of its collaboration of social democrats
with liberals, the Bauhaus took over the arts and crafts movement, which
had spread to the Continent partly with the help of a Belgian leader of the
Art Nouveau, Van de Velde, who was sympathetic to anarchism. But the
Bauhaus sought to give the arts and crafts movement greater social signifi-
cance by industrializing it and by organically integrating it with the other
arts in order to achieve much the kind of “total work of art” urged by that
artistic anarchist, romantic, and political revolutionary, Richard
Wagner.
In calling for a synthesis of the arts and an organic relationship among
art, industry, and human society as a whole, the Bauhaus could appeal to
Marxist organicism and internationalism, though its own chief figures,
apart from Hannes Meyer, were not Marxists. Nevertheless, the Bauhaus
was closed by the Nazis because of its non-nationalistic and allegedly
“communistic” point of view. In recent years its doctrines, artistic and
social, have been revived, at least partly under the Marxist revisionism of
the New Left, and even that of communist Yugoslavia, to become for a
time perhaps the most influential source of stimulation for avant-garde art
on the Continent.
It is significant, also, that expressionism, the revolutionary new move-
ment in art originating especially in Germany before World War I at
about the time when the cubist movement developed in France, was—un-
like the Bauhaus—too personal and non-rational in approach to be taken
up as an expression of Marxism, and artistically too violently revolutionary
to serve as an expression of the social-democratic version of Marxism.
However, the artistic violence of expressionism did in a very real sense
anticipate the violence of the war itself, which in turn stirred to political
action some expressionist artists who reacted violently not only against the
imperial regime but also against bourgeois capitalism as being even more
responsible for the outbreak and continuance of the war. Upon the over-
throw of the defeated imperial government, expressionism, now combined
with futurism and cubism in the dada movement, often became associated
with political radicalism of a violently revolutionary kind. It therefore was
strongly opposed by the Right, part of which in Germany represented the
survival of pre-industrial social organization. In the works of some artists,
such as Richard Huelsenbeck, George Grosz, and especially John Heart-
field, dada became an overt expression of revolutionary Marxism, though
one in fact based on a kind of anarchistic individualism.
Many other dada artists, however, were not sympathetic to revolution-
720 / CONCLUSION

ary Marxism or to any other movement aiming to change society by means

of violent political revolution. Some of them—for instance the essentially
apolitical Marcel Duchamp—sought by their art to widen the breach
between themselves and what they regarded as a Philistine society. But
some of the politically revolutionary dada artists used essentially the same
ambiguous forms as did artists like Duchamp who were apolitical. Judging
only by the work of art itself, therefore, an observer might not always be
able to tell whether it had been created by a politically committed revolu-
tionary artist or not. And this was true of various abstract and non-objec-
tive kinds of art—which therefore were condemned as formalistic, as
having form without content, by Lenin, and especially by Stalin, to whom
only art committed to communist goals as established by the Communist
Party line was acceptable. Hence, even under Lenin, avant-garde artists
who either rejected political commitment or separated their art from their
social concerns, found it necessary to leave Soviet Russia—most of them
going to western Europe, where they exerted profound influence on mod-
ern art, especially in Germany.
Eventually, some of the German and other non-Russian artists who
were devoting themselves to developing modern art in Germany became so
enamoured of Soviet communism and the then prevailing communist line
of proletarian culture that they went to the Soviet Union to live and work.
Among them, we saw, was Walter Gropius’s successor as head of the
Bauhaus, Hannes Meyer, and also Herwarth Walden, that noted promoter
of expressionism and so many other modern movements in art.
These men soon discovered, however, that the kinds of avant-garde art
they stood for were officially rejected in the U.S.S.R. as not being socially
radical in terms of the Communist Party line, so that their own lives and
work became frustrated. Only a few years after Stalin took power in the
Soviet Union, he had found it necessary to develop Soviet national patriot-
ism in order to meet the rising Nazi threat. Then it was that he called for
an art “national in form and socialist in content”—the kind of art that he
himself is credited (wrongly) with naming “socialist realism.” ‘This, like the
preceding Stalinist line of proletarian culture, made the arts useful as
political weapons, but stressed art “national in form” rather than glorifying
the international proletariat as proletarian culture had done.
Socialist realism remains the national line for art in the Soviet Union
to this day. Even though it began and continues as the official national
Soviet line, the Russians have, of course, also tried to impose it internation-
ally upon members of Communist parties, doing so particularly in the cold
war after World War II. But we have seen that they ran into difficulties,
because if socialist realism is indeed to be “national in form” as well as
“socialist in content,” the door has been opened to the expression in
communist art of the local nationalism of all Communist parties outside of
the U.S.S.R., including those of western Europe. As long as Stalin lived, he
succeeded by terror in effectively imposing the specifically Soviet national
 Conclusion / 721
line of socialist realism on Communist parties everywhere, with the partial
exception of Yugoslavia. But after his iron grasp was relaxed by death in
1953, and then especially after Khrushchev so violently downgraded Sta-
lin’s reputation in 1956, local nationalism began to spread among commu-
nists outside of the Soviet Union. Soon, therefore, Togliatti, the head of
the Italian Communist Party, dared to enunciate the principle of poly-
centrism, which eventually the Russians had to accept in order to retain
the support of as many Communist parties as possible in their ideological
conflict with Red China, where socialist realism was likewise the line for
art. ‘The result was the development of far greater national variations
among Communist parties than ever before—variations which have af-
fected the arts while also resulting in much more freedom of expression for
individual communist artists in the countries of western Europe. Still, in
theory at least, as members of a Communist party they continue to be
expected to devote their art to the needs of their party upon demand.
Thus the art of socially radical artists has been affected by their
national situation even when they have committed themselves to an
international radical movement such as Marxism or Marxism-Leninism.
And under Marxism-Leninism the Soviet aesthetic of socialist realism itself
has paradoxically increased this nationalistic tendency among communist
artists outside of the Soviet Union.
Clearly, then, the internationalism of major socially radical move-
ments—whether Marxism and Marxism-Leninism, or utopian socialism, or
even anarchism—has not prevented local variations from developing along
lines that are often largely national. Furthermore, such variations may also
involve shifts in content, including shifts from one type of radicalism to
another. For instance, art principles and art forms largely developed by
William Morris, an avowed (if nevertheless unorthodox) communist and
opponent of anarchism, were largely taken over by artists and architects
sympathetic to anarchism, such as Van de Velde, in developing the Art
Nouveau; and the Art Nouveau was developed further by other artistically
radical artists, many of whom were apolitical.

3. From Revolutionary Radicalism to

Official Acceptance of Avant-Garde Art

Ly rme the socially revolutionary and reformist ideas that may have
helped to stimulate a great artist, and that therefore in some way or other
have lain behind his art, tend to become forgotten by at least some of his
followers. Indeed, so forgotten may the original revolutionary or reformist
presuppositions behind a socially and artistically radical kind of art become
that it may eventually even be adopted by social conservatives—as hap-
722 7 CONCUUSTON

pened to Courbet’s artistically revolutionary kind of realism, originally

closely related to the socially revolutionary anarchism of his friend Proud-
hon. For it was eventually taken over by the French academic tradition
under bourgeois dominance to become the one kind of art acceptable alike
to academic hacks and to middle-class Philistines (as well as to a few good
later artists whose natural mode of expression has happened to be
realistic).
In much the same way, the town-planning ideas of utopian socialists,
other utopian reformers, and that Marxian communist, William .Morris,
were adopted by a reformer, Ebenezer Howard, and were refined by Fabian
socialists such as Raymond Unwin. Furthermore, they were combined with
ideas from social-democratic architects and planners of Vienna, from
liberals and social democrats of Germany, from Scandinavian social de-
mocracy, and from Le Corbusier, a great architect influenced by Fourier-
ism. But, with the passing of time, in England this radical and liberal
combination was to be found in the New Towns, and there supported as
much by the Conservative Party as by the Labour Party. In the United
States, too, similar towns were to be built by huge capitalistic organiza-
tions, such as insurance companies, as a means of investment. Yet many of
the same principles for housing and town planning were also simultane-
ously being employed in the Soviet Union.
As time passes, what originally were considered highly radical or even
revolutionary kinds of art and attitudes toward art may so completely lose
their original revolutionary character and implications that it becomes the
art historian’s task to try to reconstruct them so that the original works and
their creators may be more completely understood. This, of course, is a
chief reason why the present book has been written.

4. Relationships Between
Radical Artists and Radical Historians
and Critics, Artistic and Social

As creator or observer of works of art, any individual has presupposi-

tions about the arts that are affected positively or negatively, consciously or
unconsciously, by his physical, temporal, and social environment. In this
book, social presuppositions and their effects are primary subjects of inves-
tigation. But works of art are created, observed, and written about by
individuals (or relatively small groups of cooperating individuals); and the
creations and judgments of any person are necessarily affected by his own
temperament as largely determined by heredity and formative environ-
ment. The predispositions and presuppositions of each person, resulting
from the interaction of heredity and environment, consciously or uncon-
 Conclusion / 723
sciously affect his ideas. These take the form of concepts or of images
which are characteristic either of the particular person or of some group to
which he belongs or of his society as a whole.’ It is to the ideas of radical
individuals in modern times concerning the nature of art in relation to
society that this book is essentially devoted.
Historians, theorists, and critics of art profoundly differ, however,
from artists in the visual arts in having to translate into words concepts
and images expressed in works of art. For artists necessarily create in terms
of their own particular medium, and in the visual arts express themselves
in visual terms (although they may later seek to put their ideas into
words). If their works are insufficiently conceived in visual terms appropri-
ate to the particular medium, they will be inferior as art—though concep-
tions of what is appropriate may, of course, vary widely at different times,
or in a free society even at a particular time.
Whereas the artist in creating works of visual art is necessarily con-
cerned especially with visual images, art historians, theorists, and critics
tend to be more concerned with concepts as being more easily translatable
into words. For them, reason and systematic thought are especially impor-
tant, whereas imagination and intuitive image-making tend to be particu-
larly important for artists, whether in the visual arts, in music, or in the
literary arts in their more poetic aspects. It is, of course, true that the
writing of good art history, theory, and criticism itself requires a degree of
literary artistry. It is also true that some of the visual arts—architecture, for
instance—require the artist to be especially rational and systematized in his
thinking and to emphasize social usefulness in his art. Nevertheless, over-
emphasis on the importance of reason as reflected in systematic principles
expressed or expressible in words leads to academicism in architecture as
well as other arts, while overemphasis on making sheer utility (including
social utility) the one end of art will, even in architecture, lead to a
sub-artistic or non-artistic result. The historian, theorist, and critic, how-
ever, all have to work on the basis of some set of principles explicit or
implicit. And where great works of art must in some way convey universal
values, art history and criticism can be far more specialized. Thus, specifi-
cally Marxist art history, theory, and criticism are likely to be more
significant than avowedly Marxist works of art, in which by the nature of
Marxism itself social utility of some kind is likely to be overemphasized.
Nevertheless, inasmuch as artists almost without exception hope to
have an audience of some kind—whether a few discriminating individuals,
an elite group, or the masses—art is a mode of communication, so that
works of art in all media do have some social implications. ‘This is true
even if the artist subscribes to “art for art’s sake.” But valid—if limited—
art history, criticism, and theory can be written from “art for art’s sake”
and formalist points of view in which the social implications of art are
not allowed to play a part.
Even so, the historian, the critic, and the theorist of art, too, hope for
724° / CONCGL UsSTON

an audience, so that in this respect their writings likewise have a social

purpose. Nor is this the only way in which their respective media overlap
one another. Some art critics base their criticism and judgments mainly on
the history of art, and so come particularly close to art historians. Other
critics, however, seek to make evaluations of works of art on the basis of
some system of principles regarded as having validity above any specific
time and place, thereby becoming close to theorists of art. And because it
is impossible to write history, including art history, without selecting from
the infinite number of facts and examples available, the historian necessar-
ily makes judgments and evaluations on the basis of some principle or
principles, conscious or unconscious; in so doing he becomes at least an
implicit critic and theorist.
Because words are the medium of the historian, the theorist, and the
critic of art, in periods of wide literacy such as the modern age their
writings are likely to be more easily comprehensible than the works of
significant artists—especially avant-garde, and thus artistically radical, art-
ists. Not only are the arts modes of communication, but also all artists of
any significance, being in some way original, are “saying” something new
in their works; and if they are avant-garde artists they may even be using a
largely new “language.” Artists of significance, therefore, are necessarily in
some way ahead of critics and historians who write about their works. ‘The
most perceptive art critic or historian needs time to comprehend a work of
art with even partial adequacy. And his comprehension is never complete.
He cannot hope to see the significance of a work exactly as the artist
envisages it: his own presuppositions get in the way even when he attempts
to be as sympathetic and understanding as possible. Also, by the time that
he has achieved any adequate comprehension of a work by an avant-garde
artist, the artist has already presumably moved on to saying something
somewhat different.
The conceptions about art held by art critics and historians are far
more likely to be modified by study of artists and their works, and of books
and articles about them, than are the conceptions of artists by reading art
criticism, theory, and history. After all, the very nature of the task of the
critic, and especially of the historian, requires him to read more broadly
than the artist. Artists, on the contrary, are likely to read very selectively, if
at all. ‘They are likely to seize upon some isolated statement or statements
by a critic or historian, whether of art or society, and to do even this only if
a given statement expresses a point of view in some way clarifying or
expanding one they already hold in some form. In other words, the mature
artist is more likely to be stimulated than directly influenced by historical,
critical, and theoretical writings because the very word influence implies a
degree of determinism likely to be hampering to artistic creativity. It is
therefore likely to be rejected by mature artists, especially in modern times,
when self-expression is regarded as very important for artists except by
official circles in socialist countries.
Even if a socially minded artist is free from such official pressures, he
 Conclusion / 725

is not likely to accept the entire philosophy of art or the entire social
philosophy of the historian or critic who stimulates him. The artistically
and socially radical sculptor Henry Moore has frankly stated that as artist
he was affected by reading an essay on Negro sculpture written by the
artistically and socially radical art critic Roger Fry. Yet Moore was stimu-
lated, rather than influenced, and only by a highly selected aspect of what
Fry had to say, namely, by his exposition of the artistic significance of
“primitive” art—and so in this case by selected ideas artistic rather than
social in their radicalism, the more so as Moore’s social radicalism was
different from that of Fry. Moore was stimulated by Fry because he
himself had already been fumbling for a kind of reduction of sculptural
form to non-academic expressive essentials like that characteristic of primi-
tive art—so that Fry as critic simply opened a window for Moore on his
own art.
Moore was affected by an art critic. Courbet, on the contrary, was
primarily stimulated by the social writings and beliefs of his friend, the
anarchist social critic Proudhon. His own mode of art had already been
essentially formed when he first met Proudhon in 1848. Proudhon, too,
demonstrated that stimulation between artist and critic is by no means a
one-way street, when study of a painting by Courbet led him to write a
book on art criticism, albeit from his own social point of view, which did
not permit him wholly to grasp Courbet’s significance and aims as artist.
Stalin’s last great rival for power in the U.S.S.R., Bukharin, originally a
landscape painter, would hardly have been stimulated early in his career by
the writings of the German Marxist art historian Wilhelm Hausenstein, if
he himself had not already been a Marxist. Similarly, Diego Rivera as a
young artist in Paris would hardly have been led to enthusiasm for reviving
the medium of fresco by Elie Faure, a mildly Marxist art historian sympa-
thetic to the Soviet Union, if he himself had not already been a social
radical sympathetic to communism. He was therefore ready to adopt a
medium, fresco, with much greater possibilities than easel painting for
conveying communist ideas to the masses, possibilities also recognized by
Lenin. Certainly, neither the social ideas nor the works of art of Eric Gill
or of the Bauhaus would have been the same if they had not been affected
by the social and artistic criticism of William Morris. But Gill carefully
selected those aspects of Morris’s thought that could most easily be bent to
his own version of contemporary Roman Catholicism—which itself would
not have been acceptable to Morris. As for the Bauhaus, some members of
its faculty and student body were stimulated primarily by selected aspects
of Morris’s ideas about art and craft, others primarily by aspects of his
social ideas, still others by both. Yet they all refused to accept Morris’s
glorification of the art and even the guilds of the Middle Ages as the
significant sources of stimulation for achieving good art and social organi-
zation in modern times. Correspondingly, they refused to accept his essen-
tial rejection of modern industry. In so doing, they made no attempt to set
forth a reasoned presentation of Morris’s socio-artistic views before reject-
720 7 CONCLUSION

ing them, the kind of reasoned presentation customarily expected of critics

and of historians in the course of writing criticism or history.
Thus, where the artist creates, the critic and the historian must seek to
re-create in their different ways the dramas of the past involved in the
creation of the works of art that they write about—dramas in each of
which the artist’s concepts and images, his thoughts and feelings, have
been consciously or unconsciously expressed. And these have been explic-
itly or implicitly affected in some way by the artist’s presuppositions,
including his presuppositions about the relation of art and artist to society.
Presuppositions are partly determined by predispositions; it would seem
that personality, in so largely determining predispositions, does determine
what ideas, what concepts and images, are accepted, and how consistently
—whether by individual artists, art historians, critics, theorists, or anyone
else. Concepts and images are, however, molded by conditions as well as by
predispositions; and they themselves define or influence the specific form
actions will take, including the actions involved in creating works of art, of
art history, and of theory and criticism. But doctrines, including the social
doctrines of a Rousseau, a Proudhon, or a Marx, though often affecting
events—including works of art and writings about them—do not ordinarily
wholly determine them or even affect them directly.* For doctrines are
consciously or unconsciously changed in emphasis, adopted in part only, or
otherwise modified even by those who accept them—as doctrines of Marx
were modified by Engels and Lenin, and those of Morris by his followers.
Social doctrines may affect the artist’s choice of medium, his subject-mat-
ter, and the form he gives his works in expressing what he has to “say,” as
they affect art historians and critics in writing about art. But such influence
is ordinarily a matter of personal choice, affected by personal dispositions
and presuppositions, and it is nearly always indirect. Only in organismic
totalitarian societies is the element of personal choice essentially lacking,
with works of art or ideas about them completely determined by social
doctrines—though even then necessarily determined only in the case of
works intended for public display or for publication with the required
official approval.

5. The Artist's Temperament and

Fis Choice of Radicalism

A ar sy 11s nature directly involves personal expression (with or without

the collaboration that socialists and communists exalt), and the: type of
social radicalism to which a radical artist subscribes may be determined by
his personal temperament at least as much as by the character of the given
social movement itself, the national situation, or the artist’s immediate
 Conclusion / 727

environment. Art is, to repeat, affected by the heredity of the artist as well
as by his environment—a consideration inadequately taken account of by
utopian socialism, and especially by Marxism-Leninism.
Obviously, the more individualistic by temperament an artist is, the
smaller, presumably, will be the group in which he will voluntarily and
wholeheartedly participate, whether it be a group of avant-garde artists,
one of social radicals, or both. The extreme individualist is likely to be a
kind of individualist-anarchist in his art, in his way of life, and also in his
conscious social views, if he has any. In his art, therefore, he is likely to
develop a highly personal style, which—because it is so personal—will
ordinarily be avant-garde in rejecting prevailing contemporary styles. But
these personal styles may range from the highly realistic—as with Courbet
at a time when realism was so avant-garde—to those connoting reactions
against the reality of the material world of the senses, such as Symbolism,
surrealism, or highly abstract or non-objective art. Such reactions toward
inner realities have occurred when realism itself has come to be looked
upon by the avant-garde as an utterly outworn, academic, and bourgeois
mode of expression. Moreover, in adopting a highly personal style, the
artist may do so either without any social commitment, as in the case of
Whistler (except for a very brief period) or Marcel Duchamp, or else with
a kind of individualist-anarchist commitment, as in the case of Mallarmé
or that of Augustus John. In their personal lives such individualistic artists
may well be bohemians, as John and the young Whistler were, and thus
social rebels.
The artist who is less individualistic is, naturally enough, more likely
to be willing to join and remain a member of a group, artistic or social or
both. If he is still fairly individualistic and avant-garde, the group is likely
to be a small one. If it is socially concerned, its members may well be
communist-anarchists, as the Neo-Impressionists were. If it is artistically as
well as socially concerned, its members will tend voluntarily to share the
same small-group art theories and style, as the Neo-Impressionists did.
Understandably, also, those artists who, far from being individualists,
subscribe to principles that they regard as widely or even universally
applicable, are likely to join a much larger group, social, artistic, or both. If
they believe in artistic principles that they consider to be universally and
permanently valid, they are most likely to join an academic group of
artists, and therefore to accept clear distinctions between artistic media,
never fusing different arts as so many anti-academic artists have done,
especially from the time of Richard Wagner to the present. If they believe
in universal social principles, but principles developing in history, they may
easily become Marxists. One, might note, however, that as Marxism-Lenin-
ism matured in the Soviet Union under Stalin, it tended in practice to
become a fixed set of principles not allowed to develop in time in accord-
ance with Marxian theory. Correspondingly, Soviet socialist realism be-
came—and in the Soviet Union itself has remained—an essentially post-
728 / CONCLUSION
Soviet Academy of Art.
revolutionary, academic aesthetic upheld by the
the artistically progressive
Hence, outside of the Soviet Union most of
m because they have
artists who have been sympathetic to communis
r or later rejected
regarded it as socially progressive, have nonetheless soone became
m and official communism alike. Many of them
socialist realis
Left—which, significantly,
sympathetic instead to the revisionist New
the degree
has had an element of anarchistic individualism in it. But to
d to become a definite
that, as in England, the New Left itself has tende
singly “aca-
political party with its own increasingly fixed—and thus increa
broken away
demic”—line for art, even artists still socially committed have
from it, too. ;
Thus, when an avant-garde artist participates in a socially radical
inevitably
movement, his desire for new and original expression in art
brings him face to face with this dilemm a: Which should come first, the
the moveme nt who are not artists or
movement or his art? His comrades in
course, ordinar ily have him place the
deeply interested in art would, of
movement first. The dilemma increases in magnitude with the size of the
,
social movement and the degree to which it is under centralized control
becoming enormous under Marxism-Leni nism in its most authori tarian
st.
periods, but tending to vanish if the artist is an individualist-anarchi
Even for a communist-anarchist, it is of limited signifi cance simply because
communist-anarchism is a social movement that emphasizes decentraliza-
tion as well as voluntary participation, thereby ascribing basic importance
to individuality here and now, rather than merely in some remote classless
society.
We have repeatedly seen, however, that the most effective leadership
in directly bringing about social reform or revolution has not been fur-
nished by anarchists, but by leaders of more disciplined and authoritarian
social groups, especially Marxist and Marxist-Leninist parties. Yet artists
who, like Picasso, have accepted Marxism-Leninism and joined such Com-
munist parties out of admiration for the leadership they have furnished in
times of political or economic crisis, have done so only at the risk of being
sharply attacked by party leaders if their personal mode of expression in art
deviates from the party line. And most such artists, even if not driven away
from the party by attacks of this kind (as Picasso was not), have sooner or
later become disillusioned by some other kind of authoritarian act or purge
unjustly perpetrated by communist leaders. In the opinion of nearly
everyone in the Western world interested in modern art, Picasso as a
communist has managed to maintain high artistic quality in his work only
by rejecting the pressures of communist political leaders interested in art
simply as a social weapon. He has found it necessary to keep his art
separate from his Marxist-Leninist social views and independent of the
Soviet aesthetic of socialist realism. He has thus tacitly denied Marxist
organicism and the Marxist-Leninist insistence upon the Communist Party
as vanguard. And by 1968 he had come to the conclusion that he no longer
understood “Left politics.”
 Conclusion / 729

6. Radicalism and Artistic Media

A artists who, unlike Picasso, have sought to express their social concerns
directly in their art have done so most effectively if they have worked in
those media which—more than painting—are by their very nature inher-
ently well fitted for such expression, and then have selected subjects
likewise particularly suited to it. Because social radicalism in modern times
emerged so largely in connection with the Industrial Revolution and the
proletarian “masses” to which it gave rise, such media and subjects have
usually been those which by nature are most useful to, and most easily
understood by, the masses. These media and subjects also cause the socially
committed artist who seeks to improve society by his art the least difficulty
with his radical comrades. Conversely, the comrades are most likely to
reject his works of art as inadequate if they are not socially useful because
not understood by the masses—the ground on which Lenin, Stalin, and
their successors as leaders in the Soviet Union have rejected abstract and
non-objective painting and sculpture. In recent years, however, some radi-
cal artists, especially artists with New Left sympathies, have been among
those for whom representational art is inadequate for the newer concepts
of the Machine Age and its society. They have turned to machine-inspired
or science-inspired works of art, sometimes collectively produced, some-
times created by means of electronic devices; and, in so doing, have
deliberately negated the assumption of the Renaissance and romanticism
that the artist must express his individual identity.
Still, those arts which by their very nature are inherently abstract and
non-objective because non-representational are likely to cause the socially
radical artist the least trouble with his comrades, provided that his subject-
matter has collective utility in a practical way. Architecture is such a
non-representational and collectively produced art, and one with special
social usefulness in such programs as huge public works or town planning
and the kind of mass housing built by so many socialist (e.g., Figs. 114 and
115) and communist regimes, among others. If the resulting works are
sufficiently impressive, their very impressiveness can have great additional
propaganda value—as the Moscow subway and its huge, ornate stations,
for instance, have demonstrated. Such public impressiveness can obviously
be achieved best by social radicals when they are in control of a govern-
ment, preferably the national government.
Nevertheless, even if large-scale publicly built architecture in its more
socially useful programs can possess considerable propaganda value as well
as physical utility, like all architecture it is hardly able to agitate the
masses. Another non-representational art, however, does lend itself much
730 / CONCLUSION

better to combining agitation of the masses with propaganda. It is music,

which has traditionally been attractive to social radicals, utopian, Marxian,
and communist-anarchist alike, in connoting the social harmony that is
their ultimate goal. And music, when played by orchestras or sung by large
choruses, can, of course, further stimulate ‘social radicals by means of
collective performance. If, in addition, it has been collectively composed,
as it sometimes has been—for instance in France during the Popular Front
—it can achieve a still higher value in the eyes of socialists and commu-
nists. Also, music can have a particularly high agitational and propaganda
value when inflammatory words are set to easily hummable tunes—as in
the case of the Internationale, so long regarded as unsurpassed for rallying
the masses to the cause of Marxism.
But if music can offer to the social radical who would sway society the
advantages of collective performance to a mass audience, a far larger
audience can be reached through-kinds of art, including music itself, that
permit mass production by machine. Music can be mass-produced by
phonograph, radio, television, film, etc. The arts that are in some way
based on multiple reproduction through the medium of print—especially
graphic arts and the film, as well as literature—particularly appeal to
theoreticians and leaders of radical groups, the more so as these arts can all
be used for telling a propagandistic story. But for Marxists, at least, such
arts, like all others, must be employed in such a way as to avoid the kind of
mechanistic determinism represented, for instance, by Zola’s novels. For it
would deny all freedom to the human being, including the good Marxist
who—according to Marxian theory—by understanding the Marxian laws
of social development becomes partly free to work for a better society
within the restrictions set by those laws.
Of the representational kinds of art mass-produced by printing, and
thus well-suited to conveying social content to the masses, it is no accident
that the political cartoon, produced first by methods of engraving and
etching, but achieving truly mass circulation only after the invention of
lithography, has been one in which many radical artists have expressed
themselves. And they have been likely to do so with especial quality
because, other things being equal, artistic significance, including expressive
quality, is related to the suitability of the given medium for conveying the
desired content. It is therefore understandable that such famous socially
radical artists as Daumier, Steinlen, and Grosz have all been great graphic
artists and cartoonists. It is equally understandable that when a Steinlen or
a Grosz turned from graphic art to painting, his art was by no means of
such high quality. For in their paintings these artists usually continued to
tell the kind of social story that, though suited to the cartoon, was both too
specific and too exaggerated in its propagandistic impact to lend: itself
equally well to painting. Daumier, an artist of greater range, was able to be
a great painter as well as a great graphic artist because when he shifted
 Conclusion / 731

from the lithograph to the oil painting he chose less specific and calmer
subjects and gave them more universalized treatment and content. While
his mordant, justly famous political cartoon “La Rue Transnonain” (Fig.
14) dealt with an actual event in a quite specific and propagandistic
story-telling way, his painting The Uprising (Fig. 15) universalized all
revolutionary uprisings. But even it is not of as much significance as his
pictures of washerwomen, in which he so well universalized a subject of
even broader human significance: the dignity of labor. Yet such works by
Daumier as these had much less appeal in his.own time than his cartoons
for a mass audience: the exhibition of his paintings put on in the last year
of his life by Victor Hugo and other friends was a failure, and he died in
poverty. Once more a great artist had been ahead of his time in his finest
works.

7. The Radical Artist and Ideology

Ir ssovutp now be noted that even in Daumier’s political cartoons, such

as “La Rue Transnonain,” he did not express specific ideology. The fact
is that the greatest socially radical artists who have expressed their radical-
ism in drawings and paintings have given expression to a profound social
mood rather than to a specific ideology as still officially demanded by
Marxist-Leninists in the Soviet Union and Red China. Among the chief
painters and graphic artists of the modern era in whose works art historians
have especially found intentionally radical social attitudes, and who there-
fore have been among those dealt with in this book have been—besides
Daumier, Steinlen, Masereel, and Grosz—David, Courbet, Pissarro, Pi-
casso, and Rivera. Of these, the only one who at last deliberately set out to
express a specific ideology in paint was Rivera: after giving up anarchism to
join the Mexican Communist Party in 1922, he sought to express the
complete ideology of Marxian communism, especially in his series of
frescoes on the walls of the National Palace in Mexico City. But even
Rivera did not always attempt to convey Marxist ideology so directly in
this way—and it can be contended that the closer he came to doing so, the
more his paintings were likely to lack artistic quality.
Not one of the artists listed above who wholeheartedly subscribed to a
particular ideology ever carefully mastered the socio-political writings best
exemplifying it. Even Rivera, who regarded himself as a devoted Marxist,
knew of Marx’s writings only a small handful of commonplace slogans, and
always remained a thorough amateur in politics.” It can be maintained that
his political amateurism was in fact fortunate for his art—that it saved him
from what would presumably have been a still more serious loss of artistic
quality.
Fastzan/ GOs NiGein iS) O:N

8. The Radical Artist and Subject-Matter

Ly cenerat, then, the greater the socially committed artist, and the
greater the artistic merit of his works of art in most media, including
painting and sculpture, the more likely the artist is to be relatively unin-
formed or even naive about specific contemporary political matters, and
the more likely to express a powerful social mood in a personal way rather
than a specific political ideology. Nevertheless, it is true that radical artists
have been partly determined by their time in their choice of subject-matter
when conveying such social moods. In socially radical art from the eight-
eenth century into the early twentieth century there was, in fact, a general
movement toward an ever greater concern with social justice. Thus, David
painted heroes of revolution, Daumier depicted the downtrodden, ‘Tou-
louse-Lautrec the rejected, and his partial disciple, the young Picasso,
beggars and starvelings.®
At the same time, there was a movement among many of the best
social-minded avant-garde artists away from directly expressing the social
problems of their fellow men, and thus problems of the external world—a
movement in the direction of a separate world of their own. At first they
had been likely to represent actual revolutionary events in a romantic-
realistic way, as David depicted the death of Marat (Fig. 2) or Jeanron a
barricade of 1830 (Fig. 19). From such subjects, radical artists were likely
to pass to the alienated but still external world of artistic Bohemia—still in
realistic terms but with particularly strong romantic overtones, as in ‘Tas-
saert’s A Corner of the Studio (Fig. 20). Thereafter, they tended to move
to the realistic depiction of the world of nature itself, but often as a setting
for the laboring man, as Courbet did in his Stone-Breakers (Fig. 17) and
Pissarro in The Siesta (Fig. 24). And from such different realistic render-
ings of workers in their natural environment, it was easy for the Neo-
Impressionist Luce, among other radical artists, to pass to painting the
laboring man in his industrial environment, as he did in The Pile Drivers
(Fig. 26). Meanwhile, however, most of the Neo-Impressionists had
rightly become worried lest,in directly and specifically relating the sub-
ject-matter of their paintings to their social beliefs they were diminishing
the artistic significance and quality of their works. They therefore moved
to subjects of general external nature, usually less specifically social render-
ings of people in nature, but still presented with attention to them as
material objects on which realistic light fell.
Once the separation of art from immediate social concerns had been
made, the radical artist could find subject-matter often in the more nearly
internal world of his own studio and even of his own mind and spirit—
thereby laying himself open to attack by Marxists and Marxist-Leninists.
 Conclusion / 733
Thus the cubist works of Picasso, then still sympathetic to anarchism, were
often concemed simply with random studio objects given a highly personal
interpretation. Not long thereafter, the dadaists—so many of whom be-
came sympathetic to communism because of their belief that the bour-
geoisie was responsible for World War I—often made use of actual
objects, but took them away from their natural setting and gave them
artistic significance by placing them in contexts unrelated to their usual
meaning. Such deliberate destruction of their “real” purpose resulted in an
expressive ambiguity that was both anti-realistic and deliberately intended
to upset the bourgeoisie. The surrealists then turned to depicting inward
experience in Freudian terms. By now it had become easier for western
European artists, including advocates of political collectivism, to produce
completely non-objective works of art. One such artist, with a wide influence
on avant-garde artists—some of them socially committed, others not—was
the Dutch painter Van Doesburg (Fig. 118).
Among Van Doesburg’s friends were some of the non-objective artists
from Soviet Russia, who, though sympathetic to the Russian Revolution,
had been driven from their homeland in consequence of their formalistic
refusal to meet Lenin’s demand for direct “propaganda by monuments”
easily understandable by the masses. After Stalin triumphed in the Soviet
Union, his regime carried Lenin’s attitude further, first by calling upon
communists to devote themselves to promoting proletarian culture, with
art used as a weapon of the proletariat in international class warfare, and
then by demanding socialist realism. In both proletarian and _ socialist-
realist art, specific types of subject-matter were imposed on Soviet artists,
but under socialist realism the kinds of forms that Soviet artists were re-
quired to use in order to convey that subject-matter and achieve Marxist-
Leninist content were still more carefully limited. This was done even
though Marx had once indicated that while “truth” (and thus presumably
content in art) is universal, “spiritual individuality’ (and presumably the
artist’s originality) resides in form itself.°
In saying this, Marx had in his own way anticipated that formalist
tendency in art which reached a new peak about 1910-1913 with the
beginnings of completely non-objective art in works by such social-minded
artists as the theosophist Kandinsky and the anarchist sympathizer, Kupka
(Fig. 40). It culminated a few years later also in the utterly formalistic and
non-social art criticism of Clive Bell, which made “significant form” the
end of art. However, Marx and Engels, who so admired the socially
realistic romantic novels of Balzac, could not have foreseen such complete
formalism, and undoubtedly would not have accepted it if they had: being
non-“materialistic” it was far too “idealistic,” especially for Engels. So
influential did the formalist tendency become in the twentieth century,
however, that for some time much art history and criticism in Europe and
the United States sympathetic to avant-garde movements in modern art
was written as if good art had never had any significant relation to social
ideas and events. It was thus at the opposite extreme from art history and
734 / CONCLUSION

criticism written under the aesthetic of socialist realism in the Soviet

Union or elsewhere, which has held that no works ‘of art without a direct
relation to Marxist-Leninist ideology could possibly be significant.
Under the banner of socialist realism, formalist art—or allegedly
formalist art—was, of course, violently attacked by Stalin and his succes-
sors as an expression of bourgeois society, though the attack has been
played down outside of the Soviet Union whenever the U.S.S.R. has badly
needed friends abroad. For in the non-communist West such attacks have
only served to alienate from Marxian communism those many avant-garde
artists and other intellectuals for whom what the Soviet communist leaders
still officially reject as formalism constitutes truly modern art.

9. The Alienation of Western Artists

from Socialist Realism

S ociaty radical avant-garde artists of western Europe—who historically

had first found themselves alienated by absolute monarchy, and then
especially by the capitalist bourgeoisie—from the mid-1930’s on were
often finding their chief alienation to be from a form of social radicalism
itself, namely Marxism-Leninism. And the degree to which they were
alienated was usually related to the degree that Marxism-Leninism insisted
in imposing a single aesthetic, socialist realism, upon them. When in the
“free” countries of western Europe the attempt was made by Communist
Party leaders to impose it upon them absolutely, alienation was likely to
become total. For socialist realism insisted on the same realistic forms as
bourgeois academic realism, so long regarded as utterly inadequate by the
avant-garde. Also, socialist realism, like bourgeois realism, gravely limited
the scope of art, especially in painting and sculpture, because both severely
restricted subject-matter and formal realities to those of representational
art. In so doing, too, they rejected inner realities—whether those of
Freudianism so beloved by allegedly ““Trotskyite” surrealists or those of the
abstract and non-objective artist. lo artists of the avant-garde, the respec-
tive ends sought in art by the bourgeois Philistine and by the Marxist-Len-
inist upholder of socialist realism have been equally reprehensible. For the
members of the Philistine bourgeoisie have liked realistic forms simply for
the extremely limited pleasure of recognition—that pleasure which comes
from the comfort of reassurance in seeing represented what they already
know and are determined to go on believing in. The Marxist-Leninists, too,
following the official line in the Soviet Union or Red China, would make
the pleasure of recognition the means to their end, but recognition by the
masses instead of by the bourgeoisie. And in theory, at least, they would
make use of recognition by the masses of realistic subject-matter and form
in art as a weapon for agitating and propagandizing them to bring about
 Conclusion / 735
social changes in accordance with the Communist Party line. Thus even
though bourgeois Philistines and Marxist-Leninists have used the same
realistic means in art, in Marxist-Leninist theory under the aesthetic of
socialist realism the ends sought have been diametrically opposed to those
of the bourgeoisie, with the latter seeking to maintain the status quo, the
Marxist-Leninists to change it for a would-be better society. Under Marx-
ist-Leninist practice, however, especially in the Soviet Union itself, the ends
have been in fact much the same, for, as we have noted, socialist realism
has tended to become a fixed, and thus post-revolutionary, set of principles
for maintaining the status quo in art and in society alike, much as has the
realism in art of the Philistine bourgeoisie. And the Soviet state, as
controlled by the party leaders, has regarded itself as the ultimate authority
on art and the fundamental patron of the arts.
‘To communist upholders of socialist realism, what they call formalist
art, being to them form without content, must inevitably lack true subject-
matter as well as content—but this is only because they refuse to acknowl-
edge the existence of the formal realities and inner realities so valued by
avant-garde artists since the late nineteenth century. Their adverse judg-
ment has not, of course, been accepted even by the many Marxian artists
in the “free” world whose works are either non-objective or else highly
abstract, including not only numerous revisionists but such good com-
munists as Léger and Picasso. Certainly Van Doesburg (who died in 1931,
before socialist realism became the official communist aesthetic) did not
believe that his non-objective art (Fig. 118) was necessarily inharmonious
with his political, economic, and artistic collectivism. The fact that his art
influenced artists who did not share his outlook shows that it is obviously
possible for an artist to be stimulated by the forms used by other artists
without sharing their views and the content of their art. But this fact, too,
is essentially neglected in communist attacks on supposedly formalist artists,
in whose art—to repeat—there is content of kinds that communist political
leaders and their henchmen have failed to recognize.

10. Artists’ Political Ties and

Artistic Quality

Because Stalin and his successors in the Soviet Union have officially
recognized as significant art only art produced in accordance with doctrines
of socialist realism, and accordingly have sought to impose one kind of
realistic form on Soviet artists, and wherever possible on all communist
artists, the question immediately arises: Does not the imposition of form
and subject-matter on artists by a political regime inevitably destroy the
artist’s individuality in his work, and thus prevent the degree of originality
7360 / CONCLUSION

necessary for significantly great art? The answer would seem to be that it
very frequently does have this adverse effect, but that the degree of effect
varies with different media. Also, one clear exception occurs when the
forms natural to an artist’s style happen to coincide with the kind of forms
demanded by the regime—though this happy state would of course end
with a change in the political line and a corresponding forced change in the
artistic style. There have likewise been some instances in which the im-
posed line for art, if not too rigidly imposed, has given a needed discipline
to the work of a particular artist. This would seem to have been the case
with the Bertolt Brecht, for instance: his commitment to Marxism and the
Communist Party gave his naturally'anarchic and nihilistic anti-bourgeois
spirit a framework of discipline previously lacking.”* It is significant, how-
ever, that Brecht committed himself to Marxist communism in 1926, and
so before Stalinist rigidification had set in. He himself never concealed his
contempt for the artistic standards of Stalinist Russia,“ which he clearly
regarded as too cramping for good art.
Artists such as Brecht, whose art has been improved by sympathy for
Marxist discipline, have been rare enough to indicate the falsity of the
belief of so many communist politicians that the quality of an artist’s art is
related to the directness with which communist ideology is reflected in his
works. History shows that great artists whose art has been socially radical
have expressed significant social moods in a personal way rather than
through any specific political ideology. It also shows that most great
painters or sculptors even in modern times when left to themselves have
been essentially apolitical in their art and lives except at occasional times
of great political or social crisis. Certainly, specific political ties do not of
themselves account for the quality of an artist’s work in the deepest sense.
For such ties represent a consciously rational intent on the part of an artist,
and the power of art goes deeper than any conscious rationality, including
any intent to express political and social principles. Any evaluation of a
work of art that fails to go beyond conscious social purpose and political
content will never be able to penetrate to the springs of an artist’s power.
Furthermore, while the common element between works of art and politics
is that both are phenomena of the public realm, the artist himself as
creator must be at least somewhat sheltered from that realm—with conse-
quent distrust between politician and artist.”

11. Why Study the Political and

Social Ties of Artists?
I rr 1s true that an artist’s political ties do not in the deepest sense
account for the artistic merit of his works, the reader may well ask: Why,
then, study the history of the political and social ties of artists?
 Conclusion / 737

The chief reason is this, as Sir Herbert Read pointed out: “All the way
down the long perspective of history it is impossible to conceive of a
society without art, or of an art without social significance, until we come
to the modern epoch.” *
But there are other important reasons. For one thing, works of art are
historical documents. As such, they reflect social change and cast great
light on the history of culture. More than this, artists—as the romantics
and Trotsky saw—are often prophets who prophesy social change, as David
prophesied the French Revolution in his paintings or as artistically revolu-
tionary artists of tsarist Russia, some of whom—like David, socially
revolutionary—anticipated by some years the political revolutions of 1917.
Furthermore, as Saint-Simon, Lenin, and his Marxist-Leninist successors,
have all been aware, works of art can be used as effective tools or weapons
for stimulating social change, though in some media much more effec-
tively than in others.
But if works of art are valued essentially as documents or tools, third-
or fourth-rate works of art are very often more useful than works of the
highest artistic merit, being more typical than works of great genius.
Third-rate artists may prophesy the future more adequately than some
lone, neglected genius; and in many media third-rate artists may also have
the gift of agitating their contemporaries into action better than artists of
genius, who may be so far ahead of their time or so far above contemporary
prejudices as not to be molders of social change. From the Marxist-Lenin-
ist point of view, art that will mold social change in accordance with
Marxist-Leninist ideology is alone wanted. Almost inevitably, therefore,
Marxism-Leninism and its conception of art as a weapon have encouraged
inferior art except in a few relatively realistic mass media, which by their
nature in mass reproduction, are especially well fitted to serve as political
and social weapons. Such is the political cartoon. Such, also, is the realistic
motion picture—it is highly significant that Lenin once remarked, “of all
the arts, for us [in Soviet Russia] the cinema is the most important”; ** and
that for Lenin, also, the most important kind of film was the newsreel, in
which artistic intent is minimal. As Lenin called for censorship of counter-
revolutionary as well as immoral films, the quality of Soviet art in the end
depended upon censorship exerted by the political leaders of the Commu-
nist Party, and so ultimately upon politics—to the harm of art.
It would seem that the essential failure of Marxism-Leninism to
stimulate quality in most arts has largely resulted from carrying to a final
conclusion that organic analogy which has been so powerful an aspect of
the romantic tradition, and which has pervaded modern socialism and
communism and their attitudes toward the arts. They have tended to make
art nothing but part of a social organism. In regarding society as an
organism in a specifically Marxist way, the Marxist-Leninists have related
art organically to economics and politics, with economics and politics as
the ultimate basis for social change, and with art therefore as secondary
and ultimately determined by the party line as set by political leaders.
738 / CONCLUSION

In fairness, however, it is necessary to reiterate that the opposite point

of view has been characterized by an analogy equally dangerous to art.
This, which has tended to pervade the beliefs of the bourgeois under
laissez-faire, is that mechanistic analogy in accordance with which society
is regarded as made up of individual “atoms” whose actions are most
effective, even most socially effective, when utterly freed from economic
and political restraints. By making unfettered economics and politics the
basis for “real” life, this point of view too has tended to regard art as
utterly secondary.
Not unnaturally this extreme bourgeois individualism outside of art
has given rise, by reaction against it, ‘to an equivalent romantic individual-
ism entirely within the arts in the form of “art for art’s sake.” ‘This, we
know, holds that, like the individual artist, the individual work of art is
itself a fundamental reality—not economics and politics, regarded as fun-
damental by bourgeois economic individualism and by Marxian socialism
and communism. The work of art therefore is looked upon as an entirely
self-sufficient entity, to be valued independent of history and social devel-
opment, instead of as determined by them, as Marxists and Marxist-Lenin-
ists maintain. Not surprisingly, upholders of “art for art’s sake” and later
movements or tendencies that it stimulated, such as Symbolism and cubist
abstraction, have often shown sympathy for anarchism because of its
emphasis on the individual now.
Our study suggests that the most extreme views mentioned above, as
well as the organismic and atomistic analogies that respectively have been
likely to accompany them, are oversimplifications of historical truth when
applied to art. It would seem that a work of art—which must of course be
evaluated as an entity in determining its quality as art—is, even so, neither
wholly independent of society nor organically related to it. Similarly, the
artist who made it is neither wholly independent of the society of his time
and place nor part of a true social organism, except perhaps under totalitar-
ianism. Nonetheless, as Sir Herbert Read has written, “The aesthetic
activity is . . . a formative process with direct effect both on individual
psychology and on social organization.” ** While art and society do indeed
affect each other, and thus are indeed related, the relationship may,
however, be one of reaction against one another, and thus, for a time at
least, negative. Furthermore, the positive relationship is not that of part of
an organism to the whole, as Marxists maintain, but rather a relationship
of non-organic interpenetration.* Although the varieties of interpenetra-
tion that can occur in art history are almost infinite, at any given time and
place their possible number is finite, limited by the given situation, includ-
ing the social situation, even while they also affect it.
The existence of these interpenetrations between art and. society
means that there are indeed important artistic as well as art-historical
reasons for studying the political and social ties of artists. For one thing, an
artist’s social commitment can furnish him with an incentive to produce
 Conclusion / 739

art (unless he is so directly committed in non-artistic ways as to interfere

with his art) while also influencing his choice of subject-matter. His
ideology or creed may help him to uncover some aspect of “truth” which
he alone has had the genius to see in that significant way. If so, his
commitment will be beneficial to his work: George Orwell, for instance,
recognized that where he “lacked a political purpose” he “wrote lifeless
works.” However, as soon as the artist’s ideology comes into conflict with
his conception of truth, and thus also with his conception of “reality,” a
truly creative artist will have to break out of the creed to which he has
committed himself. And sooner or later a political ideology—being almost
inevitably concerned with an isolated and oversimplified aspect of reality
—will almost inevitably come into conflict with that larger view of the
nature of reality and truth achieved by a great artist. Because the great
artist achieves this by following his own intuition, nourished not only from
his conscious but also from his subconscious perception of reality, eventu-
ally he will nearly always come into conflict with the principles of the
political ideology to which he has committed himself.”
On this account, it is highly important for the art historian and critic
to study both the ideology of the committed artist and his almost inevita-
ble eventual conflict with it. After all, adequate evaluation by a critic of
the quality of an artist’s work depends first upon understanding it and him
—and a historian inevitably makes critical evaluations, implicit or explicit,
in his choice of facts to present. Adequate evaluation of the quality of even
a single work of art depends first upon rational understanding, upon
eliminating irrational preferences as far as possible. But even such under-
standing is by itself not enough. It provides only a necessary basis for the
intuitive and imaginative comprehension upon which the most significant
evaluation is founded, the criticism of art itself being a kind of art.
To sum up: the most perceptive and significant evaluations of works
of art include sheerly rational understanding but go beyond it. Failure to
go beyond the purely rational principles of an artistic ideology is a basic
limitation of the academic point of view. Socialist realism, developed as
part of the official ideology of the Soviet Union and backed by the Soviet
Academy of Art, therefore not only erroneously makes art a consequence
of a prevailing economy but also is essentially an academic point of view
giving rise to limitations of academic theory and criticism as well as of
academic art.
This does not mean that social and political ties, including ties to
socialist realism, have no meaning for artistic quality. The subject-matter
and the medium that an artist may choose on the basis of his social beliefs
and aims may indeed affect the quality of his works. The forms as well as
the medium that he selects as the best to convey that subject-matter, being
particularly well or badly suited to his talents, may affect for better or
worse the artistry with which he presents what he has to say. Moreover,
specific political events, as well as a specific political ideology, may stimu-
740 / CONCLUSION

late artists to produce great works of art, as they stimulated Génicault to

paint the Raft of the Medusa (Fig. 5), Delacroix his Liberty Leading the
People on the Barricades (Fig. 13). The latter is only one of many
examples cited in this book to show how revolutions have often stimu-
lated artists and furnished them with subject-matter, expecially when a
given revolution is implicitly considered to be not merely political but
organismically social and cultural, as those revolutions in the tradition of
the French Revolution customarily have been. Among them, for instance,
the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the German Revolution of 1918
gave rise to extraordinary ferment and original developments in the arts.
Such stimulation, however, ordinarily produces successful artistic results
only if, after the revolution, artists are not oppressed by a particular style
imposed by political leaders—as, for instance, the Nazis imposed a style on
German art, and communist leaders imposed socialist realism on artists of
the U.S.S.R. and the Soviet satellites—to the utter harm of most arts.
Furthermore, an atmosphere of oppression and any atmosphere of long-
continuing social violence seem to limit the production of great art. It
seems to be true, for instance, that the greatest artists influenced by
anarchism have all been non-violent anarchists, true also that the most
fruitful developments in the arts of Germany following World War I
occurred after the revolutionary period had ended with the rise of the
Weimar Republic. After all, great artists have not the time to be profes-
sional revolutionaries also, except for short periods; and during those
periods their production of art is necessarily interfered with. Delacroix was
wise to give up the temporary revolutionary excitement that led him to
paint Liberty Leading the People on the Barricades.
It is largely interference with their art that sooner or later leads
socially radical artists to become eventually disenchanted with the radical
political movement they have joined. The more authoritarian the move-
ment, the greater the likelihood of disenchantment, because the more their
art is interfered with. In abandoning a leftist radical movement, however,
avant-garde artists rarely move to the opposite pole, to the far Right, as so
many who are not artists have done. For the far Right too tends to be
authoritarian in its ideology; and, not unlike such a highly authoritarian
form of radicalism as Marxism-Leninism, tends to impose form and sub-
ject-matter on an artist sympathetic to it. Thus it was to the New Left,
rather than to the radical Right, that so many artists dissatisfied with
Marxism-Leninism moved in the 1950’s. We have seen, however, that to
the degree the New Left became better organized politically, as in Eng-
land, it too became somewhat more authoritarian in emphasizing politics
and economics, so that most of its own artist-sympathizers became dissatis-
fied with it in turn. And because art does not flourish in situations of
continuing violence, as the New Left has become increasingly violent,
more artists have dropped out of it while in many cases retaining strong
political and social views.
Many artists disillusioned with Marxist parties, even including those
 Conclusion / 741

of the New Left, have given up both their social concerns and the kinds of
social art for which the parties have so largely stood. Some disillusioned
artists, however, have maintained their radical social interests in a general
way while adopting an avant-garde form of art in which directly social
subject-matter is entirely lacking. This, we saw, was the case with the
British artist James Boswell, once an active member of the Communist
Party. For Boswell, concerned by the fact that his communist activities left
him so little time for his art, eventually refused to belong to the Commu-
nist Party any longer, even while still regarding himself as socially radical.
Rejecting socialist realism, he for a time adopted American abstract expres-
sionism, an essentially apolitical style, for his own style in art.
Thus avant-garde artists who give up active participation in a socially
radical movement are likely to end up producing art that has, they think,
no social content, even if—as many do—they cling to some of their socially
radical ideas. If they now also consciously reject such ideas, this attitude,
we have emphasized, is itself a kind of social attitude, though only a
negative one, a kind of artistic individualist anarchism or nihilism.

12. The End of Traditional

Social Alienation in the Arts and of the
Traditional Conception of Avant-Garde

BH warty, it should be emphasized again that the idea of an avant-garde

alienated from the prevailing society, that idea which, since the French
Revolution, has marked artistic and social radicalism alike, has now be-
come so changed that it has essentially lost its traditional meaning.
Traditionally, the idea of avant-garde has connoted rebellion by rela-
tively small progressive groups against established authority—whether ab-
solutist, aristocratic, or bourgeois. To the avant-garde such authority has
been responsible for injustices, especially class-imposed injustices, which
have prevented social progress and the development of the individual
person, particularly the individual artist or the individual workingman.
The reaction of the avant-garde has been to express in some way outrage at
the “rules” imposed by authority, whether the rules of the academic
tradition in art developed under absolutism and taken over by a Philistine
bourgeoisie or the rules determining the economic development of
society under the control of bourgeois capitalism since the Industrial
Revolution.
By the time this book was completed, however, deliberate artistic
“outrage” had become so commonplace that it was losing its force in the
Western world. Of late, in nearly all Western countries the Establishment
has been seeking out and supporting the avant-garde as part of official
742 ( CONCLUSTON
being
culture, so that the very conception of an alienated avant-garde is
thoroughly questioned in the suppose dly bourgeoi s West.® Consequ ently,
avant-garde art has of late become widely fashionable—a contradiction to
the traditional meaning of the term “avant-garde,” and one that is by no
means proving entirely beneficial for art.”
This new fashionableness has been accompanied by the decline of
official academic traditions in art so long maintained by the Establish-
ments. Even in France, where the highly centralized academic tradition
was first fully established under absolutism and was continued under
bourgeois governments, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, center of academicism,
was—we noted—in 1968 being officially decentralized as a direct conse-
quence of student revolt.
The revolt of students at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was but a small
part of the widespread New Left social rebellion against bourgeois “con-
sumer” society. This rebellion, with its theoretical basis primarily in a
revisionist Marxism containing strong elements of anarchism, was not a
revolt of downtrodden workers but of affluent bourgeois youths—of whom,
in fact, workingmen proved to be highly suspicious, as also did the commu-
nists, who so long have regarded themselves as the true social avant-garde.
Thus socially as well as artistically the idea of avant-garde in the Western
world has become so confused as to be essentially meaningless.
The resulting confusion among avant-garde artists themselves has
been great. Those artists for whom the traditional conception of the
avant-garde remains a myth that has by no means lost its power, and who
therefore still like to think of themselves as members of a prestigious elite
coterie alienated from a Philistine society, are baffled by the new fashiona-
bleness, which destroys the traditional exclusiveness of the avant-garde.
Furthermore, this new lack of exclusiveness means that even the alienated
artist has by force of circumstance increasingly become a creator of mass
art—itself utterly foreign to the conception of avant-garde art. As the idea
of mass society has developed out of and essentially destroyed that of high
society (which originated in the European courts of absolutism and was
taken over by the high bourgeoisie), and as mass culture has correspond-
ingly replaced the culture of class society, the alienated individual can no
longer find a place to go. As long as society was restricted to certain classes
of the population, the existence within the populace of other, non-society,
strata meant that these offered a haven into which alienated individuals
could escape. In other words, these individuals could become bohemians
and join revolutionary groups, artistic or social or both. They deliberately
unclassed themselves because they recognized among those not admitted
to society certain traits that had become extinct within society itself. And
in so doing, they regarded themselves as avant-garde. :
As mass society has developed, however, all strata of the population
have tended to become incorporated into society, so that the earlier
avenues of escape have increasingly closed to the individual—“the last of
 Conclusion / 743

whom in mass society seems to be the artist.” 2° Nevertheless, many artists

who still think of themselves as avant-garde now no longer want to escape,
but instead are seeking to devote their art to mass culture itself while often
deemphasizing their own artistic personalities—in contradiction to the
usual conception of avant-garde. They are seeking to achieve mass-commu-
nication by means of new kinds of realism based largely on subject-mat-
ter from mass culture, from everyday life in the age of mass-production.
This has been the case, we noted, with some participants in the recent
overlapping movements, Pop Art and Op Art, even though these move-
ments did not originate as popular art but came out of the avant-garde
milieu of abstract painting. Yet these movements have been able to reach a
mass audience with many of their works—Op Art especially by its frequent
use of optical illusions entertaining to the masses as well as of recognizable
mass-produced objects such as neon lights; Pop Art by its use of a wider,
less technological range of objects from mass culture. The appeal of such
art as this to the masses, therefore, has been on the basis of easy recogni-
tion, entertainment, and sheer novelty rather than on that of artistic
quality and expressive significance. But because it can appeal to the masses,
and because the element of time, variable and discontinuous, is so often
important in it, not surprisingly some (by no means all) Op artists and
Pop artists have displayed social attitudes affected by revisionist Marxism
—Op artists by revisionism especially emphasizing Marxist rationalism,
technology, and “science” in the industrial era; Pop artists by a New Left
revisionism involving a Marxist emphasis on aspects of mass culture but
also a particularly strong element of anarchistic non-rationalism.” How-
ever, so strongly do Op Art and Pop Art differ from the traditional
conception of avant-garde art in their emphasis both on mass-communica-
tion and on eliminating or blurring the line between art and life, that they
have been rejected by social-minded representatives of the traditional
artistic avant-garde such as Sir Herbert Read. For, we saw, Read rejected
Pop Art as destroying the line between art and images of mass-communica-
tion, Op Art as destroying the boundaries between art and scientific “sign.”
At the same time, the character of such scientific sign is itself changing
radically, as the mechanical machine characteristic of the original In-
dustrial Revolution, so influential for both social and artistic radicalism, is
losing its dominance to electronic and chemical devices which can imitate,
and aid, the processes of the brain and nervous system, including the
creative process.
Furthermore, in the kind of mass-oriented society that is increasingly
characterizing Western society previously so long dominated by the bour-
geois capitalist class, even artists with no interest in the social possibilities
of art as mass communication are among those under greater pressure than
ever before to produce works of mass art. And the more these works are
produced on a standardized basis, the more they tend to be regarded
simply as commodities—that situation decried by Marx. Hence their de-
744 / CONCLUSION

sired primary ends too become novelty, fashion, and the entertainment of
chief
the populace—with some middleman or middlemen still deriving the
rewards from them. Insofar as these works are devoted to fashion and to
entertaining the masses, they too contrast with the aims and works of the
avant-garde as traditionally conceived. And the economic situation in
the culture which they reflect has been a major cause of New Left revolt of
middle-class youth, including many art students, against their own affluent
“consumer society.” Yet even many of the revolutionary students, while
seeking a social and artistic utopia (when not avowedly nihilistic) in a kind
of avant-garde way, themselves subscribe to mass fashions in dress and con-
duct in a large-scale conformist manner destructive of that individualism
of an exclusive group traditionally so characteristic of the avant-garde.
Many of them also reject avant-garde technology and the computer.
At a time when in the non-communist countries of the West avant-
gardism is disappearing together with the causes that brought it into being,
paradoxically attacks on the artistic radicalism of the avant-garde persist in
the Soviet Union, the country that since 1917 has regarded itself as the
world center of revolutionary radicalism.” Nevertheless, a Marxist-Leninist
version of the academic tradition,’ which the bourgeoisie itself had taken
over in the nineteenth century and made more realistic, remains (in those
media not directly associated with technology) the only kind of art
officially recognized and approved in the Soviet Union at a time when
“bourgeois” nations have essentially abandoned it. The supposedly revolu-
tionary country whose slogan is still Lenin’s “The party as vanguard” has
maintained official academies of arts while for many years rejecting the
avant-gardism in art * which Saint-Simon, in originating the non-military
use of the term, had regarded as indissolubly bound up with social avant-
gardism. In other words, the Soviet Union has in fact become post-revolu-
tionary—and in an artistically reactionary way. Even while regarding itself
as leading the way to true mass society, it has denied any haven to
alienated individuals still more than those Western nations that in their
own way are also approaching mass society. Ofhcially, alienation was
supposed to have disappeared in the Soviet Union with the end of class
structure; however, the party leadership has had to admit that, although
alienation among the socialist working class is theoretically inadmissible, in
fact it still exists—and is particularly strong among artists and writers. Like
those Soviet citizens who are socially alienated, those who regard them-
selves as avant-garde, and therefore also as artistically alienated, must curb
their protests and as avant-garde artists remain essentially underground,
though few of them reject communism. Or else they must produce works
that can be accepted, not as art, but as technology, and that therefore can
be officially regarded as exalting Soviet progress in science and industry.”
Thus the overlapping social and artistic reasons that brought about
the origin and development of alienation and the avant-garde in close
association with the French Revolutionary tradition have almost com-
 Conclusion / 745
pletely vanished. In the “bourgeois” West, and also officially in the Soviet
Union, that heir of the French Revolution, which likewise has had
so
much influence on radical artists in the Western world, the traditional
conception of the avant-garde has ended. And with it our story of social
and artistic radicalism in western Europe during modern times has come to
an end in a period one hundred and ninety years after the death of
Rousseau, one hundred and eighty years after the beginning of the French
Revolution, a century and a half after the birth of Karl Marx, and a half
century after the Bolshevik Revolution.
NOTES
 Pages 3-14

INTRODUCTION
1. Karl Marx, Okonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844, in Karl
Marx, Friedrich Engels; Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe (Moscow, etc., 1927-
1935), Pt. I, Vol. 3, p. 88. Marx was here distinguishing man’s creations from those of
animals and insects.
2. Although in this book “culture” and “cultural” are often used as referring to the
general field of the liberal arts, the much wider anthropological interpretation of these
terms as connoting a whole way of life, conscious and unconscious, is by no means
disregarded. Hence Webster’s dictionary (second edition) definition of culture as a
“complex of distinctive attainments, beliefs and traditions, etc. . . .”” has encouraged the
division of the book into parts that are more or less national in emphasis. For an
important Marxist discussion see Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950
(London, 1958), by a New Leftist.
3. “The Revival of Handicraft” (1888), most easily consulted in William Morris,
On Art and Socialism, Holbrook Jackson, ed. (London, 1947), pp. 220-221.
4. Anatoly V. Lunacharsky, “Lenin and Art,” International Literature, No. 5
(May 1935), p. 66. It was in 1918 or 1919 that Lenin first used this phrase in
conversation with his friend and Commissar of Education, Lunacharsky.
5. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, tr. by Rose Strunsky (New York,
1925), p. 110.
‘3David Caute, The Left in Europe Since 1789 (New York and Toronto, 1966),
p. 31. On Caute’s book (especially pp. 31-32), the beginning of the present discussion
of the term “democracy” is largely based.
7. Quoted, without reference, by Bertram D. Wolfe, Marxism (New York, 1965),
Sout.
i 8. Letter of Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky, January 27, 1887, in Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, Ausgewahlte Briefe (Moscow-Leningrad, 1934), p. BOir
9. Quoted in David O. Evans, Social Romanticism in France (Oxford, 1951), p.
67, from Maximilien Rubel, Karl Marx . . . ; Pages choisies pour une éthique socialiste
(Paris, 1948), p. 323.
10. For the modern history of the words “democracy” and “democrat,” see Robert
R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, Vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J., 1959), Pp.
14-20, and 323. The word “aristocrat” was coined in the 1780's together with
“democrat.” Although Hannah Arendt was mistaken when she wrote in her book, On
Revolution (New York, 1963), p. 117, that “democracy” was first used in France in
1794 during the Revolution, her statement indicates the importance of the word by then.
See also Jens Christophersen, The Meaning of “Democracy” (Oslo, 1966).
11. See, e.g., Arendt, op. cit., pp. 227 and 228. The favorable use of the word
“democracy” by Patrick Henry as early as the Virginia Convention to ratify the
Constitution was then highly exceptional in America: see Palmer, op. cit., Vol. 2
(1964), Pp. 532. .
12. See Palmer, op. cit., Vol. 2, pp. 523-524.
13. Arendt, op. cit., p. 89. ‘ a
14. Talmon uses the terms “totalitarian democracy” and “liberal democracy” in
his book, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London, 1952), but “popular democ-
racy” and “liberal democracy” in a later book, Political Messtanism; The Romantic
Phase (New York, 1960).
 Pages 15-23
750 / NOTES
Francais (1791),
15. See his pamphlet, Adresse de Maximilien Robespierre aux
assim.
of his time, published a
4 16. In 1909, Kropotkin, the leading communist-anarchist
Revolut ion (Londo n and New York, 1909) in which he
history of The Great French of all the present
wrote (p. 581) that the Revolution “was the source and origin
communist, anarchist, and socialist conceptions.”
the hands of
17. Rousseau believed that in the good society sovereignty rests in a society
is free. For him the ideal model of such
the people and the individual citizen under
was the city state as represented by the ancient Roman republic, although be hoped
modem condition s the regime of republica n Geneva was the best that could
on is
for. The best possible regime, he held, was one in which the right of legislati
common to all citizens; however, he also believed that new laws should be proposed
only by the magistrates, so that he retained an element of aristocracy.
18. Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract © Discourses, Everyman’s Library
edition, intro. by George D. H. Cole (London, etc., 1913), p. 26. Nevertheless,
of
Rousseau also declared that while the constitution of man is the work of nature, that
the state is the work of art. Furthermore, in addition to analogies likening society to an
organism, he used analogies inspired by Newtonian mechanics: see Roger D. Masters,
The Political Philosophy of Rousseau (Princeton, 1968), in which, however, the
mechanistic character of Rousseau’s vision of society is somewhat overstressed.
19. Denis Diderot, “Le Réve de d’Alembert,” CEuvres philosophiques, Paul Ver-
niére, ed. (Paris, 1956), pp. 296-303, and 291-295.
20. Thus Rousseau also wrote that “The difference of the human work of art |i.e.,
the state] from the work of nature [i.e., the human being] manifests itself in its effects,
citizens in vain call themselves members of the state, they will never be able to join
themselves to the state as real members are joined to the human body; it is impossible to
avoid a separate and individual existence for each of them. . . .” See “Que Yétat de
guerre nait de J’état social,” in CEuvres completes, Pléiade edition, Vol. 3 (Paris, 1964),
p. 606.
21. Du contrat social (first version), in CEuvres completes, Vol. 3, p. 288.
22. See Mario Einaudi, The Early Rousseau (Ithaca, N.Y., 1967), pp. 23-24. My
paragraph above is essentially based on Einaudi’s book. That Rousseau was indeed a
rebel and revolutionary is further indicated by two of the most recent books about him:
William H. Blanchard, Rousseau and the Spirit of Revolt (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1967),
and J. McManners, The Social Contract and Rousseau’s Revolt Against Society (Leices-
ter, 1968), the first written by a psychologist, the second by a historian.
23. Friedrich Engels, Herr Eugen Diihring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Diihring)
(New York, 1939), pp. 153-154, where Engels discusses Rousseau’s anticipations of
Marx’s Capital.
; 24. Arthur Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism (Boston, 1965), p. 9. See also pp.
102170302.
25. The most useful references for me here have been Crane Brinton’s classic work,
The Anatomy of Revolution (rev. ed., New York, 1965), which has a valuable
bibliography, and Hannah Arendt’s previously cited book of 1963, On Revolution.
Brinton studies four revolutions: the Cromwellian Revolution, the American Revolu-
tion, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution of 1917 (including both the
March and “October” Revolutions). Arendt emphasizes the American and French
Revolutions, and stresses cultural implications much more than Brinton, who liked to
think of his approach as being “scientific.”
26. Lenin repeatedly emphasized to another Bolshevik as early as 1904 that “a real
revolutionary Social Democrat must be a Jacobin’”: see Nikolay Valentinov (pseud. of
N. V. Volsky), Encounters with Lenin (London, 1968), pp. 129-130.
27. This is the convincing thesis, for instance, of Arendt, op. cit., passim.
28. This was indicated by Tocqueville when he wrote, not long after the Revolu-
tion of 1830 in France, that: “The United States could . . . attain the consequences of
the democratic revolution which we [in France] are undergoing without having ‘experi-
enced the revolution itself.” See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (rev. ed.
New York, 1900), Vol. 1, p. 13. ;
On the French Revolution, as being—unlike the revolutions in England and
America which preceded it—a mass social revolution, see, e.g., the view of the English
Pages 23-28 NOTES / 751
Marxist E. J. Hobsbawm in his The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (New York, 1964),
p. 75. One might add that the French Revolution was more of a mass social revolution
even than many revolutions claiming to be its heir. Objective generalizations about it
have, however, been relatively rare: see the wide variety of views assembled in A.
Kafker and James M. Laux, eds., The French Revolution; Conflicting Interpretations
(New York, 1968).
For discussion of the American Revolution as essentially a political revolution only,
see William H. Nelson, “The Revolutionary Character of the American Revolution,”
American Historical Review, Vol. 70 (July 1965), pp. 998-1014. Especially valuable
recent discussions of the nature of the American Revolution are Bernard Bailyn, The
Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), who
states that the Revolution “was above all else . . . a political struggle”; Richard B.
Morris, The American Revolution Reconsidered (New York, 1967); and Robert R.
Palmer, ““The American Revolution Then & Now,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, Vol. 68
(Dec. 5, 1967), pp. 15-19, which later was also published in C. Vann Woodward, ed.,
The Comparative Approach to American History (New York, 1968). For an earlier
discussion see J. Franklin Jameson, The American Revolution Considered as a Social
Movement (Princeton, N.J., 1926). The implications for the arts as part of culture in
the widest sense are characteristically not considered in any of these typically American
references.
A famous early comparison of the American and French Revolutions is Friedrich
Gentz, The Origin and Principles of the American Revolution Compared with the
Origin and Principles of the French Revolution (Philadelphia, 1800), tr. by John
Quincy Adams from the Berlin periodical Historisches Journal (Apt. and May 1800).
Influenced by Burke, of whose conservative Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790) he had made the first German translation, Gentz favored the American
Revolution. His work has been republished by the American “Conservative” Russell
Kirk.
For the English Revolution of 1688 see especially Maurice Ashley, The Glorious
Revolution of 1688 (London, 1966).
29. For John Adams’s criticism of Tom Paine’s conception of government as
lacking “equilibrium or counterpoise,” see Bailyn, op. cit., pp. 285-287, 288-291. On
the “mechanical’’ basis of Montesquieu’s constitutional theory, see Kingsley Martin,
French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century (2nd rev. ed., London, 1954), p.
166. The metaphor of the social organism, at least somewhat implicit in the thought of
Robespierre and other French Revolutionary figures, was essentially lacking in American
political thought until Frederick Jackson Turner put forth in 1893 his theory of the role
of the frontier. But I shall note later that it had earlier strongly affected the ideas about
the arts held by Emerson, and his friend, Horatio Greenough, who, not unlike Tom
Paine, was an early functionalist. The organic metaphor had come to Emerson from
German romanticism largely via Coleridge. I might add here that it was to affect
Tumer’s contemporary, the great American architect Louis Sullivan, an admirer
of Emerson and Whitman, and Sullivan’s disciple, Frank Lloyd Wright, an admirer of
Thoreau.
30. Some leading authorities on the French Revolution—notably Palmer, The Age
of the Democratic Revolution, especially Vol. 1, pp. 11-13—have been rightly alarmed
by the attempts of some other wniters, for instance J. L. Talmon, to see the Russian
Revolution as growing out of the French Revolution by a kind of continuing linear
process. Palmer rightly points out undeniable major differences between the two
revolutions. Yet the leaders of the Russian Revolution, like Marx and Engels before
them, have nonetheless regarded themselves as heirs of the French Revolutionary
tradition, partly as manifested in the ideas of the Jacobins and of “Gracchus” Babeuf,
and partly as reflected later in the revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871.
Consequently, their attitudes toward art have been in some respects similar to ideas held
by some leaders and artists of the French Revolutionary tradition, and by ideological
forerunners of that tradition, including Rousseau and Diderot.
31. In the French Revolution, so often regarded as directed against aristocracy,
only about 8% percent of those executed were nobles. About 6¥2 percent were clergy,
14 percent upper middle class, and 1042 percent lower middle class; but roughly
28 percent were peasants and no less than about 31/4 percent were members of the
 Pages 28-40
752 / NOTES
the French
working class. See Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Terror During
Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), P- 97: ;
32. For the history of the idea of “revoluti on,” see Arendt, op. cit., pp. 35 ff., and
cites. Also see Carl J. Friedrich , ed., Revoluti on (New York,
the references that she
Political and Legal
1966); this is Nomos VIII, Yearbook of the American Society for
Philosophy. ‘ ‘
and
33. See Wladyslaw Folkierski, Entre le classicisme et le romantisme (Cracow
Paris, 1925) ,
p. 131.
34. Although the same conception of restoring ancient rights had already prevailed
in that first modern revolution led by Cromwell himself against Charles I, the term
“seyolution” was not then in use to express the idea. Michael Walzer, The Revolution
of the Saints; A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), sees
the Puritan religious experience as a model of radical politics, and as leading to English
political radicalism. ;
35. On eclecticism and the idea of genius, see especially Rudolf Wittkower,
“Imitation, Eclecticism, and Genius,” in Earl R. Wassermann, ed., Aspects of the
Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1965), pp. 143-161.
36. See James A. Leith, The Idea of Art as Propaganda in France, 1750-1779
(Toronto, 1965), which has an excellent bibliography; and, on the term “propaganda,”
Ferdinand Brunot, Histoire de la langue francaise . . . (Paris, 1905-1953), Vol. 9, La
Reyolution et 'Empire, Pt. 2, p. 628. For a compilation of Diderot’s comments on art,
see Denis Diderot, Sur l’art et les artistes, Jean Seznec, ed. (Paris, 1967).
37. Section “Beaux-Arts” under article “Art,” Encyclopédie, supplement, Vol. 1
(1776), p. 594.
38. Rousseau, Social Contract © Discourses, p. 159. The whole Enlightenment was
permeated with an interest in classicism (as well as in realism, eclecticism, science, and
skepticism) : see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, Vol. 1 (New York, 1966).
39. E.g., in Emile or Education, he wrote that “the ancients are nearer to nature.
. . .” See the Everyman’s Library edition, tr. by Barbara Foxley (London, etc., 1911,
etc.), p. 309.
40. Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs, René Pomeau, ed. (Paris, 1963), Vol. 2, p. 168.
41. Quoted, without reference, in Alan Gowans, The Restless Art; A History of
Painters and Painting, 1760-1960 (Philadelphia and New York, 1966), p. 26. The
significance of David’s Marat is discussed in Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in
Late Eighteenth Century Art (Princeton, N.J., 1967), pp. 81-84. On David’s revolu-
tionary activities, see David L. Dowd, Pageant-Master of the Republic; Jacques-Louis
David and the French Reyolution (Lincoln, Neb., 1948); also Dowd’s article,
“Yacobinism’ and the Fine Arts; The Revolutionary Careers of Bouquier, Sergent, and
David,”’ Art Quarterly, Vol. 16 (Autumn 1953), pp. 195-214. Bouquier (a painter of
romantic ruins and seascapes, from Périgord) and Sergent (an engraver from Chartres)
were Jacobins associated with David in the National Convention summoned in Septem-
ber 1792 after the fall of the Monarchy. With David, they were responsible for saving
many art works in the Revolution, and David and Sergent led in creating a great
National Museum, now the Louvre.
42. Arendt, op. cit., p. 45.
43. For a more detailed history of the words “communism” and “socialism,” see
Donald D. Egbert and Stow Persons, eds., Socialism and American Life (Princeton,
NJ., 1952), Vol. 1, pp. 3-5, and references cited therein, especially Arthur E. Bestor, Jr.,
“The Evolution of the Socialist Vocabulary,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 9
(June 1948), pp. 259-302. :
44. E.g., Oscar Jaszi, “Socialism,” Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 14
(1934), p. 188, considers socialism to be the inclusive term. So, also, does George
Lichtheim, The Origins of Socialism (New York, 1969), published while this book was
on press.
45. Engels, in the first draft for the introduction to Herr Eugen Diihring’s
Reyolution in Science (Anti-Diihring) : see the extract in Mikhail Lifshits (transliterated
in the book as Michail Lifschitz), ed., Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels; Uber Kunst und
Literatur ([East] Berlin, 1953), p. 204. In Socialism—Utopian and Scientific, first
published in German in 1882, Engels saw the fundamental ideas of modern socialism as
Pages 40-53 NOTES / 753
deriving from the eighteenth-century French philosophers of the Enlightenment, and
only then from classical German philosophers and the great utopian socialists.
46. See Gilbert Chinard, ed., Morelly; Code de la nature (Paris, 1950), p. 24.
47. Brunot, op. cit., Vol. 9, Pt. 2, p- 834, seems to say that socialiste appeared in
France in 1830, while Bestor, op. cit., p. 277, flatly states that socialisme (as opposed to
individualism) is first found in French periodicals in 1831, and socialiste only in 1833.
However, David Caute’s previously cited volume, The Left in Europe Since 1789,
P. 132, says that the first recorded use of “socialist” by a French paper occurred
in 1832 in Le Globe [a Saint-Simonian publication]. According to Edouard Dolléans in
his preface to David O. Evans, Le Socialisme romantique; Pierre Leroux et ses
contemporains (Paris, 1948), pp. 12, 26-27, socialisme, invented by Pierre Leroux to
mean the opposite of individualism, appeared for the first time in a number of the
Reyue encyclopédique dated October-December 1833, but actually not issued until
1834. There the word was used to designate the views of the Saint-Simonian school in
opposition to the individualism of the Manchester Radicals, or school of Utilitarians.
48. Marx used the latter term, rather than “socialism,” in the most important work
in which he made the distinction between two phases of communist society—a “first
phase” and a “higher phase.” This work was the Critique of the Gotha Programme (see
p- 10 in International Publishers’ edition, New York, 1938). Although Marx wrote the
Critique in 1875, it was first published, in German, in 1891 after his death.
49. For a reference to prolétaire as revived by Rousseau and speakers of the French
Revolution, see Evans, Social Romanticism in France, p. 9.
50. Engels later wrote, in his preface to the authorized English translation of the
Communist Manifesto, published in 1888 after Marx had died, that he and Marx had
called the document “Communist” because the word “Socialist” was then associated
with “Utopianism” and “multifarious social quacks.”
51. See Bestor, op. cit., p. 287; also George D. H. Cole, Socialist Thought; The
Forerunners, 1789-1850 (New York, 1953), p. 4, where Cole mentions the use of the
term “Utopian Socialists” by the French revolutionary Blanqui in 1839.
52. The Communist Manifesto, in Emile Burns, ed., A Handbook of Marxism
(New York, 1935), p. 55.
53. On the Enragés, see George Woodcock, Anarchism (Cleveland and New York,
1962), pp. 10-11, 54-59; James Joll, The Anarchists (London, 1964), pp. 42-43; and
R. B. Rose, The Enragés; Socialists of the French Revolution? (Melbourne University
Press, also London and New York, 1965), whose thesis is that the Enragés cannot
tightly be called socialists.
54. This pamphlet was James Mackintosh’s Vindiciae Gallicae, which appeared in
answer to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). This is the earliest
use of “radical” mentioned (p. 41) in Simon Maccoby, English Radicalism, 1786-18 32
(London, 1955), one of the six volumes devoted by Maccoby to the history of English
radicalism from its rise in 1762, in connection with the opposition to George III, into
the twentieth century. For other early uses of “radical” in this sense, see Elie Halévy,
The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism (Boston, 1955).
55. The first use of “radicalism’’ cited by the Oxford English Dictionary is from
1820, two years before the earliest citation mentioned in Maccoby, op. cit., p. 380.
56. For their disagreements, see Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English
Working Class (London, 1963), pp. 466 ff.
57. For the radical Right on the Continent and in England, see Hans Rogger and
Eugen Weber, eds., The European Right (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965).
58. See Simon Maccoby, English Radicalism; The End? (London, 1961), passim.
59. Rogger and Weber, eds., op. cit., p. 7.
60. Loc. cit., though with no mention of art.
61. Ibid., p. 575.
62. See ibid., p. 12. ; :
63. For the history of “Left” and “Right” as political terms, see especially Robert
V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution; Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia
(Cambridge, Mass., 1960), pp. 5-7.
64. Lunacharsky quoted Lenin’s statement to Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, who
re-quoted it in his memoirs over forty years after Lenin made it: see Ehrenburg’s Truce:
754 / NOTES Pages 53-67

80. This caused Khrushchev

1921-33 (London, 1963), Vol. 3 of Men, Years—Life, p.
n as a misinter pretatio n of Lenin in a speech of March 8, 1963, in
to attack the quotatio entitled The
his speech
which Khrushchev denounced abstract art. See the translation of cal and Artistic
Great Strength of Soviet Literature and Art Lies in a High Ideologi
Level, Soviet Booklet No. 108 (London , Mar. 1963), p. 28.
especially the
65. For perceptive analysis of these two branches of liberalism, see nt, Aug.
unsigned review entitled “Liberal Utopias,” (London) Times Literary Suppleme
22, 1958, p. 1.
also
66. Heston “The Evolution of the Socialist Vocabulary,” p. 262, note. See
Brunot, op. cit., Vol. 9, Pt. 2, pp. 660-661.
67. See J. Salwyn Schapiro, Liberalism; Its Meaning and History (Princeton, N.J.,
1958), p. 9. ,
td ya?See, e.g., the section by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in “Conservatism vs. Liberalism
—A Debate,” New York Times, Mar. 4, 1956, Section 6, pp. 11 ff; also Clinton Ros-
siter, Conservatism in America (New York, 1955) 9D» 97:
69. Peter Laslett’s edition of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Cam-
bridge, England, 1960), has shown, however, that Locke did not write to justify the
Revolution of 1688, as has so long been assumed, but instead to bring it about.
70. See Franziska Forster-Hahn, Johann Heinrich Ramberg als Karikaturist und
Satiriker (Hanover, 1963), p. 23. Written as a Ph.D. thesis at the University of Bonn,
it admirably summarizes the origins and early history of the political cartoon and
contains an excellent bibliography.
71. See Robert N. Carew Hunt, The Theory and Practice of Communism (New
York, 1951), p. 74.
72. It might be noted here that (unlike the present writer) Soviet economists
regard this concept of “mixed economy”’ as simply a reflection “in the ideology of the
[bourgeois imperialistic] ruling class, of the conversion of monopoly capitalism into
state-monopoly capitalism.” Thus, “In reality the U.S. economy is an economy of state
monopolistic capitalism, whose production as well as distribution and consumption of
national product are determined by the financial oligarchy and promote further enrich-
ment of the monopolies.” For these two typical quotations, see the articles from two
Soviet economic journals reprinted in the Soviet Review, Vol. 4 (Fall 1963), pp. 34 and
48. Ironically, many non-communists (including the writer) regard “socialism” itself as
a form of state capitalism. Lenin had tried to distinguish state capitalism in Russia after
the Bolshevik Revolution from state capitalism under capitalism, but promptly fell into
contradictions: see Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin (New York, etc., 1964), p. 585.
73. Arendt, op. cit., p. 252.
74. Hannah Arendt makes this point with regard to poets in ibid., p. 283.
75. Ibid., p. 264.
76. See Arendt, loc. cit., where, however, she does not specifically mention the arts.
77. For a brief Soviet summary of the early history of the philosophical idea of
alienation, see, e.g., T. I. Oiserman, “Man and His Alienation,” Soviet Review, Vol. 5
(Summer 1964), p. 43; translated from Soviet Papers at the XIIIth International
Congress of Philosophy. For detailed discussion of Marx’s conception of alienation see
Jean-Yves Calvez, La Pensée de Karl Marx (Paris, 1956), pp. 50-332, 443, 449; and
Herbert Aptheker, ed., Marxism and Alienation (New York, 1965). Also see Herbert
Read, Art and Alienation; The Role of the Artist in Society (New York, 1967). D. G.
Dean, “Alienation; Its Meaning and Measurement,” American Sociological Review,
1961, pp. 753-758, contains useful sources.

Part I. Marx, Engels, and the Marxian Theory of Art

CHAPTER 2

1. The single most useful collection of statements in English bearing on the visual
arts made by Marx and Engels is to be found in the little book, Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, Literature and Art, the American edition of which was published at New York
Pages 67-69 NOTES / 755
in 1947 by International Publishers, the chief American communist publishing house.
A much more complete collection is Mikhail Lifshits (transliterated in the book as
Michail Lifschitz), ed., Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels; Uber Kunst und Literatur ([East]
Berlin, 1953), originally published in Russian in 1937. For an interpretation from a
Marxist-Leninist point of view, see the same author's Karl Marx und die Aesthetik
(Dresden, 1960), translated from a book first published in Russian in 1933, but with a
long added preface of 1959. For a shortened version earlier translated from Russian into
English with the author's name transliterated as Lifshitz, see The Philosophy of Art of
Karl Marx, Critics Group Series No. 7, tr. by Ralph B. Winn (New York, 1938). An
especially useful, not Marxist-Leninist, book is Peter Demetz, Marx, Engels, and the
Poets; Origins of Marxist Literary Criticism (Chicago, 1967): this has, however, been
sharply criticized by some Marxists.
A relatively recent Marxist-Leninist volume on Marxist aesthetics in general is
Hans Koch, Marxismus und Asthetik; Zur dsthetischen Theorie yon Marx, Engels, und
Lenin ([East] Berlin, 1961). For a less inflexible work, written by the greatest living
Marxist aesthetician, see George Lukdcs Werke (Neuwied am Rhein, 1962—__), Vols.
11-12, the first two volumes of Lukdcs’s great Asthetik, which themselves are entitled
Die Eigenart des Asthetischen (1963). Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art; A Marxist
Approach (Harmondsworth, England, etc., 1962; originally published in German at
Dresden, East Germany, in 1959) is a stimulating little book written by a prominent
Austrian communist from a more “revisionist” point of view.
Additional valuable insights can be gained from the articles relating to the arts and
literature published in the first edition of the Bolshaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya (Great
Soviet Encyclopedia). As this Encyclopedia was published over the years from 1926 to
1947, only a few of the dated articles (e.g., those on architecture and ballet) antedate
the period of Stalin’s dominance. The others follow the Stalinist line of the particular
year in which they were published, and so can be read with complete understanding only
by one fully aware of developments in the Soviet Communist Party line under Stalin.
These articles have been conveniently assembled, and translated into Italian, in Giorgio
Kraiskj, ed., Materiali per un’estetica marxista (Rome, 1950). A second edition of the
Bolshaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya, published from 1949 to 1958, reflects the party line
in the “cold war.”
See also the forthcoming book by Lee Baxandall and the Polish Marxist Stefan
Morowski, Marxists on Art and Literature; Major Documents, 1842-1944. Baxandall’s
Marxism and Aesthetics; A Selected Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1968) is a
valuable, wide-ranging bibliography containing references relevant to all the chapters of
this book, though restricted to books and articles in English. It should be supplemented
by references in Donald D. Egbert and Stow Persons, eds., T’. D. S. Bassett, bibliogra-
pher, Socialism and American Life (Princeton, NJ., 1952), Vol. 2, Bibliography, pp.
419-510.
The larger, reorganized version of Lifshits, Uber Kunst und Literatur, with the
same title but edited by Manfred Kliem, 2 vols. ({East] Berlin, 1967-1968), became
available to me only when my book was on press.
2. According to Marx’s daughter Eleanor, writing a few days after her father’s
death; see D. Ryazanoff, ed., Karl Marx; Man, Thinker, and Revolutionist (New York,
1927), p- 49.
3. Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station (New York, 1940), p. 114.
4. For a more detailed summary of the situation among the Hegelians at this time,
see George Lichtheim’s excellent work, Marxism; An Historical and Critical Study
(London, 1961), pp. 10-12.
5. Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx; His Life and Environment (3rd ed., New York,
1959), p. 53. This brief biography is excellent on Marx’s ideas. That by Robert Payne,
Marx (New York, 1968), is the best on the facts of Marx’s life, though very weak on
his ideas. For Engels’s life in relation to that of Marx see Gustav Mayer, Friedrich
Engels; Eine Biographie, 2 vols. (2nd ed., The Hague, 1934). Oscar J. Hammen, The
Red 48ers; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (New York, 1969), published while the
present book was on press, informatively discusses the lives, works, and ideas of the two
founders of Marxism to 1850.
6. Berlin, op. cit., p. 51.
7. Ibid., pp. 53-54-
756 / NOTES Pages 69-79
8. Ibid., p. 54. An
von dem
9. This brochure was entitled Hegels Lehre tiber Religion und Kunst of
aus beurteilt (1842). For discussio n of it and the pamphlet
Standpunkte des Glaubens Marx und
Lifshits (in German, Lifschitz ), Karl
1841, see the previously cited work of
die Asthetik, pp. 60 ff. ; = ;
note
10. Fora list of these books, see Lifshits, Karl Marx und die Asthetik, p. 63,
24.
Karl Marx und
: 11. See Koch, op. cit., pp. 14 and 15; also Gyorgy Lukacs,
Engels als Literaturh istoriker (|East| Berlin, 1948), p. 6; both of which
Friedrich
contain other references to Marx’s interest in art. Marx’s Economic and Philosophical
n by
Manuscripts of 1844, published, undated but about 1959, in an English translatio
the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow, contains especially frequent
references to the arts. An American edition, edited by Dirk J. Struik, was issued by
International Publishers in 1963. Other particularly important references to art by Marx
are to be found in a fragmentary, and likewise long unpublished, draft for an
introduction to his Zur Kritik der politischen Okonomie of 1859.
12. Berlin, op. cit., pp. 74-75.’
13. See Harry W. Laidler, Social-Economic Movements (New York, 1944), pp.
125-120.
14. The sketch shows (left to right) Ruge, Buhl, Nauwerck, Bruno Bauer,
Wigand, Edgar Bauer, Stirner, Mayer, two unknowns, Koppen. A caricature by Engels
of Marx storming a barricade is on the margin of a manuscript page of Die deutsche
Ideologie (written 1845-1846), reproduced in Payne, op. cit., p. 129. On Engels’s
walk through France to Switzerland after inciting Germans to revolt in 1848, he repaid
the hospitality of the villagers by drawing caricatures of their children: see Wilson, op.
cit., p. 173. Other caricatures and sketches by Engels are among the illustrations
scattered through the two collections of writings by Marx and Engels cited in note 18
below.
15. On Stimer, see George Woodcock, Anarchism (Cleveland and New York,
1962), pp. 94-105.
16. Edward H. Carr, Michael Bakunin (London, 1937), p. 126.
17. The German Ideology, The Communist Manifesto, The Critique of Political
Economy.
18. Karl Marx, Okonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844, in
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels; Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe (Moscow, etc.,
1927-1935), Pt. I, Vol. 3, p. 88. The Gesamtausgabe, though less complete than the
proposed forty-volume Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels; Werke, of which thirty-nine
volumes have been published at [East] Berlin from 1957 to 1968 (with two supple-
mentary volumes), better satisfies the criteria of scholarship.
19. For this dispute and its implications, see, e.g., Daniel Bell, The End of
Ideology (Glencoe, Ill, 1960); Robert Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx
(Cambridge, England, 1961); Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York,
1961), which includes a translation of most of the text of the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts, and Bertram D. Wolfe’s important book, Marxism; One
Hundred Years in the Life of a Doctrine (New York, 1965), by an anti-communist
who was once a leading American communist.
20. See Koch, op. cit., p. 11, quoting from Marx/Engels: Briefwechsel, Vol. 2
(Berlin, 1949), p. 244.
21. See Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Boston and New York,
1899), pp. 281-282, 280; also George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovi¢, The Anarchist
Prince; A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin (London and New York, 1950), pp.
317-318. Woodcock and Avakumovié say that the movement which became known as
anarchist-communism “can be traced to the middle of the 1870’s, and with some
certainty to the year 1876.”
22. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Die deutsche Ideologie (written in 1845-
1846, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, Pt. I, Vol. 5, pp. 372-373.
23. Loc. cit., translation from Marx and Engels, Literature and Art, p. 76.
24. Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature (New York, 1940), p. 281.
_ __25. Froma review by Marx and Engels of two French books of 1850, republished
in Franz Mehring, ed., Aus dem literarischen Nachlass yon Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,
Pages 79-85 NOTES / 757
und Ferdinand Lassalle (Stuttgart, 1902), Vol. 3, p. 426; translation from Marx and
Engels, Literature and Art, p. 40.
26. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, pp. 2-3.
27. For Marx’s indebtedness to Fourier in this respect, see H. B. Acton, The
Illusion of the Epoch (London, 1955), pp. 235-236.
28. They are all included in the previously cited volume of extracts, Marx and
Engels, Literature and Art, and in the far more complete volume, Lifshits (transliterated
in the book as Lifschitz), ed., Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels; Uber Kunst und Literatur.
Almost the only other mentions of specific artists or musicians to be found in the
writings of Marx and Engels are exceedingly casual references to Titian and Rembrandt
(Lifshits, ed., op. cit., pp. 199 and 453), and to the composers Bellini and Karl Maria
von Weber (ibid., pp. 472 and 278).
29. See the many references in the two volumes cited in the previous note, and
especially that edited by Lifshits which, in addition to being more complete, has an
excellent index of names. But also see the extracts from accounts by Marx’s son-in-law
Paul Lafargue, by Marx’s friend Wilhelm Liebknecht, and by Marx’s biographer Franz
Mehning, published in Marx and Engels, Literature and Art, passim. Likewise consult
Ryazanoff, ed., op. cit., passim.
30. According to Demetz, op. cit., pp. 127 and 128. For an unfavorable review
of this book by a New Left Marxist, see Lee Baxandall, Partisan Review (Winter
1968), pp. 152-156.
31. For these quotations, see Engels’s letter of April 1888 to Margaret Harkness, in
Marx and Engels, Literature and Art, p. 42.
32. As translated in Marx and Engels, Literature and Art, p. 117. For the German
text, see Lifshits, ed., op. cit., pp. 223-232.
33. Marx and Engels, Literature and Art, p. 126, also pp. 124-125.
34. Karl Marx, “The English Middle Class,” New York Tribune, Aug. 1, 1854, as
quoted in Marx and Engels, Literature and Art, p. 133.
35. See Engels’s “Rapid Progress of Communism in Germany,” Marx-Engels
Gesamtausgabe, Pt. I, Vol. 4, p. 341; also quoted in the original English in Marx and
Engels, Literature and Art, p. 108. Heine was not so complete a socialist as Marx,
Engels, and latter-day Marxists have liked to claim. He entered into relations with the
Saint-Simonians in 1831 at Paris, but in 1835 protested against being considered a
Saint-Simonian. He later preferred Fourierism to Saint-Simonianism. See E. M. Butler,
The Saint-Simonian Religion in Germany; A Study of the Young German Movement
(Cambridge, England, 1926), pp. 88, 111, and 115.

CHAPTER 2

1. Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany (London, 1927), p. 28.

(Commas and hyphen added for clarity.)
2. Friedrich Engels, Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissen-
schaft (4th ed., Berlin, 1891), p. 5, originally published in 1882. Translated in Karl
Marx, Selected Works (New York, 1936?), Vol. 1, p. 137. (Hyphen added in
“St.-Simon.” ) fig,
3. Lenin made this statement—in which he referred to secular utopianism under
the name of “French Socialism combined with French revolutionary doctrines”—in
“The Teachings of Karl Marx,” an abbreviated version of which was first published in
1914 in the Granat Russian Encyclopaedia. See Emile Burns, ed., A Handbook of
Marxism (New York, 1935), pp. 537-538. ;
4. Alfred G. Meyer, Marxism; The Unity of Theory and Practice (Cambridge,
Mass., 1954), p. 28.
5. This has been pointed out, for example, in the pamphlet The Strategy and
Tactics of World Communism, issued in 1948 by the United States House of
Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs; also in Robert N. Carew Hunt, The
Theory and Practice of Communism (New York, 1951), p. v. Various American
party-liners in the 1920's glorified Lenin as “engineer.”
 Pages 86-92
758 / NOTES
ss
6. John D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass; A Portrait of Ruskin’s Greatne
this passage that it
(New York and London, 1961), p. 149, points out in quoting by Marx, and
the critique of society made
expresses the single central affinity between
that made by Ruskin. ;
Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German
7. Friedrich
ent of Marx's
Philosophy, in Marx, Selected Works, Vol. 1, p. 435. For the developm of Soviet
and Engels’s materialism, see especially Richard T. De George, Patterns ism (Ann
Thought; The Origins and Develop ment of Dialectic al and Historica l Material
Arbor, Mich., 1966), Pt. I, pp. 9-111.
in
8. Karl Marx, Okonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844,
etc., 1927—
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels; Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe (Moscow,
3, p. 88; translatio n from Marx and Engels, Literature and Art, p. 14.
1935), Pt. I, Vol.
9. See Karl Marx, Preface to A Contributi on to the Critique of Political Economy,
in Selected Works, Vol. 1, p. 356.
10. Sidney Hook, Marx and the Marxists; The Ambiguous Legacy (Princeton, etc.,
1955), p- 21.
11. Marx took over the conception of ideology from Kant.
12. Friedrich Engels, letter to Heinz Starkenburg, January 25, 1894, in Marx,
Selected Works, Vol. 1, p. 392. (All the italics are mine. )
Tselbide py 392e
14. The translation followed here is from Vladimir I. Lenin, “The Teachings of
Karl Marx,” Burns, op. cit., p. 540. Lenin was quoting from Engels’s Herr Eugen
Diihring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Diihring) ,first published, in German, in 1878.
That freedom is the recognition of necessity is an idea taken from Schelling, according
to Nikolay Valentinov (pseud. of N. V. Volsky), Encounters with Lenin (London,
1968),p. 173. ;
15. Walter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism (Garden City, N.Y.,
1960), p. 114, rejects Karl Popper’s view that Hegel himself was a historicist.
16. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (tr. from the
2nd German edition by Nahum I. Stone; New York, 1904), p. 311.
17. See especially Loyd D. Easton, “Alienation and History in the Early Marx,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 22 (Dec. 1961), pp. 193-205, on
which the discussion of “alienation” here is largely based. One might add that for Marx,
but not for Hegel, alienation was historically conditioned.
18. See Bertram D. Wolfe, Marxism (New York, 1965), pp. 363-364.
19. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Die deutsche Ideologie, in Marx, Die
Friihschriften, Siegfried Landshut, ed. (Stuttgart, 1953), p. 361.
20. Marx, Okonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844, in Marx-
Engels Gesamtausgabe, Pt. I, Vol. 3, p. 130; translation from Robert Tucker, Philoso-
phy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge, England, 1961), pp. 138-139.
21. Quoted by Easton, op. cit., p. 202, from Marx and Engels, Die deutsche
Ideologie, in Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, Pt. I, Vol. 5, p. 124.
22. Quoted (freely) by Easton, loc. cit., from Karl Marx, “Kritik der Hegelschen
Staatsphilosophie,”’ in Marx, Die Friihschriften, p. 51.
23. Engels, it will be recalled, linked “the statues of Thorvaldsen’’ with “the
pictures of Raphael” and “the music of Paganini”: see Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of
Nature (New York, 1940), p. 281. Robert Payne, Marx (New York, 1968), p. 398,
tells how, when Marx visited his friend Dr. Ludwig Kugelmann in 1867 at Hanover
(where he received the first printed sheets of Das Kapital), Kugelmann remarked on
Marx’s resemblance to the Zeus of Otricoli. A copy of this head, which took its name
from the small Italian town in which it had been found, was one of several busts of Greek
and Roman divinities in Kugelmann’s music room. Marx became so enamored of this
one that later in the year Kugelmann sent a bronze copy of it to him in London as a
Christmas present. Marx imitated the appearance of the Zeus by letting his hair and
beard grow: see the comparative illustrations in Payne’s book on (unnumbered) p. 211.
24. In Gedanken iiber die Schénheit und iiber den Geschmack in der Malerei
(1765). Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, Art Under a Dictatorship (New York, 1954), p. 3,
credits Mengs with being the first to define the beautiful in this way.
25. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, pp. 309-310.
26. Ibid., Preface, p. 12.
Pages 92-100
NOTES / 759
27. See ibid., pp. 309-312.
28. Karl Marx, Theorien tiber den Mehrwert (2nd ed., Stuttgart, 1910),
Vol. 1, p.
382; translation from Mikhail Lifshits, The Philosophy of Art of
Karl Marx (New
York, 1938), p. 78.
DOMMLOCHCLES
30. Karl Marx, “Arbeitslohn,” Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, Pt. I, Vol.
6, p. 472;
translation from Lifshits, The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx, p. 80.
31. Marx, Theorien iiber den Mehrwert, Vol. 1, p. 385; translation from Lifshits,
The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx, p. 78
32. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Chicago, 1909), p. 401.
33. Marx and Engels, Die deutsche Ideologie, in Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe,
ie Vol. 5, pp. 41-42; translation from Lifshits, The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx,
p. 80.
34. In a footnote written into a copy of C. F. von Rumohr’s Italienische
Forschungen; translation from Lehmann-Haupt, op. cit., p. 10.
35. Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature (New York, 1940), pp. 2-3; also
Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station (New York, 1940), p. 216.
36. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Ppp. 311-312.
37. Karl Marx, Okonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844, in
Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, Pt. I, Vol. 3, Pawo:
38. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, Pp. 290.
39. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 198.
40. Marx, Okonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844, in Marx-
Engels Gesamtausgabe, Pt. I, Vol. 3, p. 88; translation from Marx and Engels,
Literature and Art, p. 15.
41. See Theories of Surplus Value (London, 1951), pp. 148-197, passim; and the
summary in Clinton Rossiter, Marxism; The View from America (New York, 1960),
p. 104. Within Marx’s work the total number of classes varied. In the Communist
Manifesto he referred to four classes, in the 18 Brumaire de Louis Bonaparte to at least
five.
42. See William J. Blech (William James Blake, pseud.), Elements of Marxian
Economic Theory and Its Criticism (New York, 1939), PP. 434-436, 554, and 557, for
a summary discussion of the Marxian theory of price and value as applied to works of
art. Blake’s communist sympathies at the time his book was published are indicated by a
highly laudatory article on him in the party-line New Masses, Vol. 34 (Jan. 23, 1940),
p. 2. This was during the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact, when he was a frequent
contributor to the magazine.
43. The organic analogy has not been entirely restricted to the romantic tradition,
however: for instance, it occurs in Edmund Burke’s writings, though even here perhaps
under early romantic influence. For various meanings of “organic” see the note in
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (Garden City, N.Y., 1960), pp.
281-282, also Meyer H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp; Romantic Theory and the
Critical Tradition (New York, 1953), passim.
44. Quoted in Emory Neff, The Poetry of History (New York, 1947), Pp. 22, from
a work by Herder entitled, in translation, Still Another Philosophy of History for the
Culture of Humanity (1774).
45. See Oskar Walzel, German Romanticism, tr. by A. E. Lussky (New York, etc.,
1932), p. 19.
a ue F 4 an analysis of Hegel’s conception of organic unity, see Ernst Cassirer, The
Myth of the State (New York, 1955), p. 333.
47. Kaufmann, op. cit., p. 166.
48. Letter of Marx to Lassalle (1860); this was favorably quoted in Howard
Selsam’s article, “Charles Darwin and Karl Marx,” published in the American commu-
nist cultural magazine, Mainstream, Vol. 12 (June 1959), p. 28.
49. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, in Marx, Selected Works, Vol. 1, p. 453.
50. Marx and Engels, Die deutsche Ideologie, in Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, Pt.
I, Vol. 5, p. 373; translation from Lifshits, The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx, pp.
92-93. : :
51. Quoted, without reference, in Max Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of
Socialism (New York, 1955), p. 83.
760 / NOTES Pages 101-112

52. Friedrich Engels, quoted in Maurice F. Parkins, City Planning in Soviet Russia
(Chicago, 1953), p. 10. idle : ;
53. Friedrich Engels, Herr Eugen Diihring’s Revolution in Science (Antt-
Diihring) (New York, 1939), pp. 323-324-
54. Vladimir I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, Russian ed., p. 263; translation
from Joseph Stalin, “Dialectical and Historical Materialism” (1938), in his Leninism
(London, 1940), p. 595. See also Zbigniew A. Jordan, The Evolution of Dialectical
Materialism (London, 1967), p. 184, which sees the Leninist version of dialectical
materialism as coming from Engels rather than from Marx, who was a historical, rather
than dialectical, materialist. From Engels, it passed to Lenin’s acknowledged teacher in
Marxism, Georgy Plekhanov, who first used the term “dialectical materialism.’”’ Ple-
khanov, Lenin, and Stalin each added to Engels’s conception.
55. Vladimir I. Lenin, “On Dialectics” (1915), Selected Works, Vol. 11 (New
York, 1943), pp. 81-82.
56. Vladimir I. Lenin, “The Teachings of Karl Marx,” in Burns, op. cit., p. 542.
57. Stalin, “Dialectical and Historical Materialism,” Leninism, p. 592.
58. Lenin in his “Address to the 3rd Congress of the Russian Young Communist
League” of October 2, 1920, Works (Russian ed.), Vol. 25; translation from Jack
Chen, “The Graphic Arts in the U.S.S.R.,” Studio, Vol. 127 (Feb. 1944), p. Bor
59. Lenin in ibid.; translation from Jack Chen, Soviet Art and Artists (London,
1944), Pp. 77-78. ;
60. Marx, Selected Works, Vol. 1, p. 192.
61. Parkins, op. cit., pp. 14, 28, 120.
62. For the Marxian concept of the nature of absolute truth, see especially Engels,
Herr Eugen Diihring’s Revolution in Science, pp. 94-105; and Vladimir I. Lenin,
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (New York, 1927), pp. 103 ff. The latter is Vol. 13
of Collected Works of V. I. Lenin.
63. See Engels, Herr Eugen Diihring’s Revolution in Science, pp. 97 ff. Engels
makes the point (p. 98) that the natural sciences are called the exact sciences because
“certain results obtained by these sciences are eternal truths, final and ultimate truths.”
But he adds, “As time goes on, final and ultimate truths become remarkably rare [even]
in this field [of physics].”
64. Marx and Engels, Die deutsche Ideologie, in Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, Pt.
I, Vol. 5, p. 372; translation from Lifshits, The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx, p. 92.
65. Engels, letter to Starkenburg, January 25, 1894, in Marx, Selected Works, Vol.
1, Pp. 392-393.
66. Marx, ““Bemerkungen iiber die neueste preussische Zensurinstruktion,” in Karl
Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke (Berlin, 1957—__), Vol. 1, p. 6.
67. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, in Marx, Selected Works, Vol. 1, pp. 430-431.
68. Carew Hunt, op. cit., p. 32.
69. Loc. cit.
70. Engels, letter to Starkenburg, in Marx, Selected Works, Vol. 1, p. 392.
71. Engels, Herr Eugen Diihring’s Revolution in Science, p. 105.
72. Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues; Speech Delivered at the Third
All-Russian Congress of the Russian Young Communist League, October 2, 1920,”
Selected Works, Vol. 9 (New York, 1943), pp. 475 and 478.
73. Wilson, op. cit., pp. 162 and 384.
74. Marx’s views on this point are indicated by the following passage which he
abstracted from Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s Aesthetik: “That the enjoyment of beauty
is immediate, and that it requires education would seem to be contradictory. But man
becomes what he is and arrives at’ his own true nature only through education.”
Translation from Lehmann-Haupt, op. cit., p. 7.
75. See Peter Demetz, Marx, Engels, and the Poets (Chicago, 1967), pp. 143-151.
76. The first was the noted Hungarian Marxist aesthetician, Lukacs—who, as a
result, in 1934 was compelled to “confess” his error in the Soviet Union, where he had
fled to escape the Nazis. Lukacs will be referred to again, especially in Chapter 13.
 Pages 117-125
NOTES 7 761

Part. II. Radicalism, Marxism, and the Theory and Practic

e of
Art in France and Switzerland

CHAPTER 3
1. Christopher Caudwell (pseudonym of Christopher St. John Sprigg),
and Reality; A Study of the Sources of Poetry (London, 1937), p. Illusion
131.
2. The best biography is Frank E. Manuel, The New World of Henri Saint-Sim
(Cambridge, Mass., 1956). See also the same author’s The Prophets on
of Paris (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1962). Emile Durkheim’s Le Socialisme, translated
as Socialism and
Saint-Simon (Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1958), is still a useful discussion
of Saint-Simon’s
ideas. ‘That Saint-Simonianism fostered totalitarianism is the thesis of Georg
G. Iggers,
The Cult of Authority; The Political Philosophy of the Saint-Simonians. A Chapter
the Intellectual History of Totalitarianism (The Hague, 1958). in
3. Quoted, without reference, in Harry Laidler, Social-Economic Movements
(New
York, 1944), pp. 50-51.
4. Already, in his Mémoire sur la science de 'homme of 181 3, for instance, he
saw
the Greeks as representing a period of adolescence, the Romans a period of maturity.
5. As Manuel points out in The New World of Henri Saint-Simon, p. 147, with
reference to Saint-Simon’s previously mentioned Mémoire sur la science de homme of
1813, in Euvres de Saint-Simon (Paris, 1865-1873), Vol. 40, p. 146, apparently an
incorrect reference.
6. [Henri de Saint-Simon,] Opinions littéraires, philosophiques et industrielles
(Paris, 1825), p. 331, note 1.
7. Ibid., pp. 341-342. Also see Marguerite Thibert, Le Réle sociale de l'art d’ apres
les Saint-Simoniens (Paris, 1927), p. 10. For the wider implications of this quotation
see my article, ““The Idea of ‘Avant-garde’ in Art and Politics,’ American Historical Re-
yiew, Vol. 73 (Dec. 1967), pp. 339-366; also the symposium, Avantgarde—Geschichte
und Krise einer Idee (Munich, 1966), and Renato Poggioli, Theoria dell’arte @avant-
guardia (Bologna, 1962), published in English as The Theory of the Avant-Garde
(Cambridge, Mass., 1968).
8. Saint-Simon, Opinions littéraires, pp. 345-347.
9. The Communist Manifesto, in Emile Burns, ed., A Handbook of Marxism
(New York, 1935), p. 37.
10. In answer to a query from me, Professor Sidney Hook, noted authority on
Marxism, has written: “I do not remember any explicit discussion of the avant-garde in
Marx and Engels. They assumed that they were the avant-garde. On their historical
theory there would . . . have to be an avant-garde but they would hardly regard that as
bestowing any special virtue on whoever happened to play that role since it would be a
phase of historical necessity.”
11. This idea and term Lenin first developed in his What Is to Be Done? of 1902.
The Russian word, directly transliterated, is avangard, though English translations of his
works give it as “vanguard.”
12. Burns, ed. op. cit, p. 37. ;
13. See especially Georges J. Weill, L’Ecole saint-simonienne; Son histoire, son
influence jusqu’d nos jours (Paris, 1896); also Henry René d’Allemagne, Les Saint-
Simoniens, 1827-1837 (Paris, 1930). ‘es
14. Léon Halévy in the Producteur, Vol. 1, p. 399; quoted in Friedrich A. Hayek,
The Counter-Revolution of Science (Glencoe, Ill., 1952), p. 145.
15. For these quotations, see the translation of Georg G. Iggers, The Doctrine of
Saint-Simon (Boston, 1958), “First Session (December 17, 1828),” pp. 15 ff. Also see
the statements on art in “Fifteenth Session (July 15, 1829),” pp. 240-241; and
“Sixteenth Session (July 29, 1829),” p. 256. re
16. Quoted, without specific reference, in Pontus Grate, Deux critiques d'art de
lépoque romantique; Gustave Planche et Théophile Thoré (Stockholm, 1959), P. 143.
17. See Edouard Dolléans’s preface to David O. Evans, Le Socialisme romantique;
 Pages 125-142
762 / NOTES
12, 26-27. Dolléans gives the
Pierre Leroux et ses contemporains (Paris, 1948), Ppp.
the first use of the term “‘sociali sm,” but, as we have seen,
date of 1833-1834 for of the His-
ary,” Journal
Arthur E. Bestor, Jr., “The Evolution of the Socialist Vocabul 1831.
to
tory of Ideas, Vol. 9 (June 1949), Pp- 277, has traced it back
18. D’Allema gne, op. cit., p. 304.
nce of the
19. Ibid., p. 307. Significantly, about this time, and as a conseque
architects such as Duban
Revolution of 1830, academically trained but liberal-minded des
the Ecole
and Labrouste were proposing the use of iron along with reform of
Beaux-Arts.
20. Ibid., p. 308. r
gas in
21. Lebon had taken out the first French patent for making illuminating and
1799, but had been preceded in discovery by William Murdoch in England. Boulton
into their factory at Soho near Birmingh am in 1798.
Watt had introduced gas lighting
Natural gas had been used for lighting as early as 1775.
22. D’Allemagne, op. cit., p. 308, quoting from a Saint-Simonian manuscript,
Arsenal, 7641, folio 124.
23. Ibid., p. 305. ‘
24. Le Globe, cited by Weill, op. cit., p. 87, note 1.
25. Le Globe, May 12, 1831, cited by Weill, op. cit., p. 84, note 2.
26. See J. L. Talmon, Political Messianism; The Romantic Phase (New York,
1960), p. 90.
27 bid pagqi=
28. Charles Fourier, Théorie des quatres mouvements et des destinées générales
(Leipzig, 1808), p. 80; and his CEuvres completes, Vol. 6 (2nd ed., Paris, 1845), p. 85.
The recent considerable interest in Fourier’s ideas is indicated by a new publication of
his CEuvres completes (issued by Editions Anthropos at Paris beginning in 1966), and
by Emile Lehouck’s Fourier aujourd’hui (Paris, 1966). The classic biography is Hubert
Bourgin, Fourier (Paris, 1905).
29. See, e.g., the statement of Fourier’s chief follower, Victor Considerant, in his
Considérations sociales sur ['architectonique (Paris, 1848 [but originally published in
1834]), p. xxxix, and pp. 49 ff. For Considerant’s biography see P. Collard, Victor
Considerant (1808-1893); Sa vie, ses idées, originally a thesis, Dijon, 1910, announced
for publication at New York in 1967 but not yet available when the present book was
completed.
30. Quoted, without direct reference, in Talmon, op. cit., p. 141.
31. Charles Fourier, Preface to Le Nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire, in his
(Euvres completes, Vol. 6, p. 7.
B2LOCs Cit.
33. Ibid., p. 104.
34. Loc. cit.
35. J.-M. Jeanneney, “Les Disciples de Fourier et la révolution de 1848,” Revue des
sciences politiques, Vol. 56 (Jan.-Mar. 1933), p. 95.
36. See the plans in Fourier’s Nouveau monde industriel.et sociétaire, between pp.
122 and 123.
37. This appeared in the 1848 editions of both the brochure and the book. I have
not seen the original editions.
38. Considerant, op. cit., pp. 38-39.
39. Ibid., p. 53.
40. Charles Fourier, Cités ouvriéres (Paris, 1849).
41. See Grate, op. cit., especially pp. 183-184.
42. Quoted in Poggioli, op. cit. (1968 English ed.), p. 9.
43. Jeanneney, op. cit., p. 101.
44. Revue générale, Vol. 1 (1840), col. 4.
Asmullocucrs.
46. Ibid., Vol. 13 (1855), p. 3.
47. Ibid., Vol. 8 (1849-1850), cols. 5-6.
48. Ibid., p. 26.
49. Ibid., Vol. 35 (1867), col. 6.
50. Ibid., Vol. 34 (1866), col. 9.
51. This he did in the Revue générale de architecture, Vol. 21 (1863), cols.
163-165. See also Peter Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, 1750-1950
 Pages 142-152
NOTES / 763
(London, 1965), p. 156. In his book Collins has much to say about Daly as an
important figure in modern architecture.
52. In 1833 Owen had a woodcut made to show the “Design of a
Community of
2,000 Persons, Founded Upon a Principle Commended by Plato, Lord Bacon,
More and Robert Owen.” This woodcut was several times run at the head Sir T.
of
paper, the Crisis. More, who loved puns, had chosen “utopia” as an ambiguous Owen’s
middle
term between the Greek outopia, meaning no place, and eutopia, the good place.
53. (Etienne) Cabet, Voyage . . . en Icarie (3rd ed., Paris, 1845), p.
272.
54. Ibid., p. 47.
55. Alfred de Vigny, Le Journal dun poete (Paris, 1935), Vol. 1, p. 444.
56. On the socialism of these and other tomantics, see especially Herbert J. Hunt,
Le Socialisme et le romantisme en France (Oxford, 1935). On the romantics’
spirit of
oy ee see J. L. Talmon, Romanticism and Reyolt; Europe 1815-1848 (New
York,
1967).
57. Quoted in Hunt, op. cit., p. 248.
58. CEuvres completes de Victor Hugo; Philosophie, Vol. 1, Littérature et philoso-
phie mélées (Paris, 1934), “Sur M. Dovalle” (1830), p. 152. This was a letter
originally published as a preface to the poems of Charles Dovalle.
59. See the issue of Le Globe for August 20, 1831; cited in Hunt, Of {GIES pa 210:
60. Agricol Perdiguier, Correspondance inédite avec George Sand et ses amis, Jean
Briquet, ed. (Paris, 1966), p. 51. On the socialism of George Sand, see Marie Thérése
Rouget, George Sand “‘socialiste” (Lyon, 1931).
61. See Hayek, op. cit., p. 157, and Thibert, Op. Cit., p. 54.
62. See Hunt, op. cit., p. 50, and Thibert, op. cit., p. 33, note 40. The young
architect was probably Charles Léopold Henry (1797-188 5).
63. See his Euvres completes (2nd ed., Paris, 1841-1845), Vol. 5, pp. 71-84.
64. Cited without place or date in Thibert, op. cit., p. 52, note 5, but is Paris,
1848.
65. On Quai and bohemianism, see Maurice Easton, Artists and Writers in Paris;
The Bohemian Idea, 1803-1867 (New York, 1964), pp. 10 ff.
66. The title of the work published in 1851 was actually Scénes de la Bohéme. A
later, somewhat longer, version was called by the now more familiar title, Scenes de la
vie de Bohéme.
67. The word “bohémiens” is to be found in Balzac’s Un grand homme de
province a Paris published in 1839; see Balzac’s Illusions perdues (Paris, 1961), pp.
449 and 528. “Boheme” appeared in Balzac’s Un Prince de Bohéme (as it is called in the
Comédie humaine), which was only slightly altered from a tale, Les Fantaisies de
Claudine, published in 1840. On the origins of these terms, see also the unsigned review
in the (London) Times Literary Supplement, May 19, 1961, p. 307 (correcting the
statement in Robert Baldick’s The First Bohemian; The Life of Henry Murger [London,
1961]); likewise see Easton’s previously cited Artists and Writers in Paris, p. 134, etc.
On the general subject of bohemianism, César Grafia, Bohemian Versus Bourgeois;
French Society and the French Man of Letters in the Nineteenth Century (New York
and London, 1964) should also be consulted.
68. Murger praised Balzac’s Un grand homme de province a Paris on p. 291 of the
Scénes de la Bohéme.
69. There Gautier wrote that “L’art pour l'art means . . . that artistic endeavor
which has no other preoccupation than that of beauty in itself”: see Théophile Gautier,
L’Art moderne (Paris, 1856), p. 151. On “Tart pour Tart,” or “art for art’s sake,”
including its frequent social implications, see especially Albert Cassagne, La Théorie de
l'art pour l'art en France, chez les derniers romantiques et les premiers réalistes (Paris,
1906); Rose F. Egan, “The Genesis of the Theory of ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ in Germany
and in England,” Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, Vol. 2 (July 1921),
and Vol. 5 (Apr. 1924); Louise Rosenblatt, L’Idée de l'art pour l'art dans la littérature
anglaise pendant la période victorienne (Paris, 1931); John Wilcox, “The Beginnings of
L’Art pour ]’Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 11 (June 1953), pp.
360-377; Irving Singer, “The Aesthetics of Art for Art’s Sake,” ibid., Vol. 12 (Mar.
1954), pp. 343-359; and Eugene M. Becker, Whistler and the Aesthetic Movement
(Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University, 1959). See also Albert L. Guérard, Art for Art’s
Sake (New York, 1963, but originally published in 1936). pts
70. Constant used the phrase “Tart pour Tart” in his Journal intime for February
701A: aN Ors Pages 152-158

10, 1804: see Rosenblatt, op. cit., p. 12. Victor Hugo, in William Shakespeare (Paris,
in
1864), p. 435, wrongly declared that he had originated it in 1829, but added that
becoming a “formula,” it took on some implications that he had not intended.
(Nevertheless, Hugo had already expressed some of the main tenets of “Tart pour Vart
in 1827 in the preface to his unplayable play, Cromwell, that declarationof war by the
romantics.) “L’art pour l'art” apparently first appeared in print in 1833 in a statement
by Hugo’s opponent, Hippolyte Fortoul, who remarked in Leroux’s essentially Saint-
Simonian Revue encyclopédique, Vol. 59 (July—Sept. 1833), p. 109, “The theory of l'art
pour l'art has not had, to my knowledge, an avowed and complete code; but it circulates
incognito in some deceiving prefaces.” As in the same article Fortoul attacked Hugo at
length and placed him on the side of “pure art” (p. 126), he apparently had Hugo’s
prefaces to Cromwell (cited on p. 111) and Hernani in mind.
71. Gautier had done so in the preface to the second, and enlarged, version of his
Poésies, published under the title of Albertus in 1832, though dated 1833.
72. The apparently first use of the phrase “l'art pour Part” in the Journal intime of
Benjamin Constant in 1804 had been made in connection with a somewhat ambiguous
reference to the aesthetics of Kant, directly following mention of Schiller and an English
pupil of Schelling. The reference in Constant’s journal was made while he was on a trip
to Germany in 1803-1804, in the company of his mistress, Madame de Staél, who later
popularized German romantic ideas in France, though without using the term “Tart
pour Tart.” In her study, De Ia littérature considerée dans ses rapports avec les
institutions sociales (1800), she had already opened the modern sociological discussion
of literature.
73. He had already referred scornfully to “‘utilitaires, utopistes, économistes, saint-
simonistes . . .” in the preface to Albertus. In it he also mentioned—favorably—the
painters Delacroix, Boulanger, Decamps, and even Ingres.
74. Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (New York, 1944), p. xxxiil.
75. These quotations on “republicanism” and “republic” are from the statement
by Borel quoted in Pierre Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel (Paris, 1866-1890),
Voli2, p= 1002.
76. See Cassagne, op. cit., p. 78.
77. Leconte de Lisle to Louis Ménard, as quoted in André Billy, L’Epoque 1900
(Paris, 1951), p. 264. In using the word “enragé,” he perhaps had in mind the French
Revolutionary near-anarchist group called the “Enragés.”
FO OCMCIEs
79. Quoted in Grafia, op. cit., p. 120. Flaubert and Du Camp saw the looting and
burning of the Palais-Royal, described by Flaubert twenty years later in the second
Education sentimentale.
80. Quoted from Gustave Flaubert’s Correspondence in his (Euvres completes, 5th
series (Paris, 1929), p. 149. In this letter, besides assailing socialism for its hatred of
liberty, he attacked it as reflecting the French Revolution and philosophy he considered
to be now outmoded, “the face of the past. . . .”
81. Gautier in La Presse, 1850, quoted in Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and
Architecture (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), p. 213.
82. César Gonzalez-Ruano, Baudelaire (Madrid, 1932), p. 191.
83. Cuvres completes de Charles Baudelaire; L’Art romantique (Paris, 1925), pp.
184 and 185.
84. Singer, op. cit., p. 347, and Graham Hough, The Last Romantics (London,
1949), p. xv. Hough mentions that the first use of “artist” in this new sense, as recorded
in the O.E.D., is by F. D. Maurice in 1853. It is significant that Maurice was a founder
of English Christian socialism, a movement stimulated by French ideas coming partly
from Saint-Simon—who had defined “artist” as signifying “the man of imagination.”
85. Quoted, without reference, by Collins, op. cit., p. 155. Collins states that
perhaps Baudelaire had in mind the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859)
—who in his writings emphasized the organic unity of nature and the universe.
Baudelaire’s first criticism of an art Salon, which had appeared in 1846, consciously
followed Diderot’s critical methods: see ibid., p. 258. :
86. This was originally published in the Fortnightly Review, New Series, Vol. 49
(Feb. 1891), pp. 292-319, then separately as a booklet.
87. A statement made by him in 1826 when he was a Saint-Simonian: see David
f
 Pages 158-167
NOTES / 765
O. Evans, Social Romanticism in F tance (Oxford
, 1951), p. 28. For Buchez’s life, see
Armand Cuvillier, P.-J.-B. Buchez et les origines
du socialisme chrétien (Paris, 1948).
88. On Lecheva lier’s career, see Hunt, op. cit., pp. 108-120, etc.
89. Ibid., p. 92.
go. See Kingsle y Martin, French Liberal Thought in
rev. ed., London, 1954), pp. 111 and 219. For the history the Eighteenth Century (2nd
of the Roman Catholic social
movement, see especially A. R. Vidler, A Century of
Social Catholicism, 1820-1920
(London, 1964).
91. It has been said of Comte that “To him was due the marriage
between atheism and Catholicism which rejuvenated the Right of convenience
Charles Maurras his opportunity.’” Thus, “it was Auguste Comte in France and gave
miracle of uniting the prophets of the future with what Barbey who performed the
d’Aurevilly called ‘the
prophets of the past.’” The statement of the Catholic conservative,
only exists for society and society only educates him for itself,”
Bonald, that “Man
could have been made by
Comte. See the unsigned review in the (London) Times Literary Supplem
1962, p. 608, of Frank E. Manuel’s previously cited The Prophets of Parisent, Aug. 10,
Mass., 1962), called by its author “part of a continuing study of modern (Cambridge,
man” centering around Saint-Simon as preceded by such figures of the Enlight concepts of
Turgot and Condorcet, and followed by Fourier and Saint-Si
enment as
mon’s one-time disciple,
Comte. Manuel points out that “historically modern socialism has derived far
more from
the traditionalist denial of eighteenth century liberalism than has been realized.
connection, it might be added that although Catholic conservatism has fostered ” In this
romanti
a
c Gothic Revivalism in art, we shall find that the Gothic Revival in architec
has also been encouraged by utilitarians deriving at least partly from Comte, sometureof
them anti-clericals as well as social radicals, on the functionalist ground that the
Gothic
was characterized by economy of materials in structure. This was the view, for
instance,
of Viollet-le-Duc, whose social and architectural radicalism, combined with anti-
clericalism, will be discussed later.
92. For the quotation from Comte defining art, see Auguste Comte, Systéme de
politique positive, Vol. 1 (Paris, 1851), p. 282; for that about the proletarians, see ibid.,
p. 129. An interesting summary of the influence of positivism on art is given by Charles
E. Gauss, The Aesthetic Theories of French Artists; 18 55 to the Present (Baltimore,
Md., 1949), pp. 11-13. This illuminating little book shows, however, a characteristic
failing of philosophers in writing about art. For while rightly assuming that the aesthetic
theories of philosophers have often influenced the presuppositions of artists, they tend to
forget that those aesthetic theories are themselves largely determined by the works of
artists who have preceded the philosophers; the history of ideas not only helps to
determine, but is itself partly determined by, the history of art. In W. M. Simon,
European Positivism in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y., 1963), p. 150, note 79,
there is a list of some of the many books on aesthetics influenced by Comtism.
93. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Literature and Art (New York, 1947), p.
139, where Lafargue’s reminiscences of Marx are quoted.
94. On Balzac in relation to Marxism see especially Engels’s letter to Margaret
Harkness, quoted in ibid., p. 42.

CHAP
T ERaa

1. Harold Hoffding, A History of Modern Philosophy (New York, 1955), Vol. 2,

. 294.
:
:
6 In 1953, for instance, the Soviet magazine Iskusstvo (Art) devoted an article to
him: see Iskusstvo, No. 5 (1953), pp. 62-70. Also, the biography by Helen Rosenau,
The Painter Jacques-Louis David (London, 1943) is written in a Marxist vein.
3. Quoted by Rudolf Wittkower, “Individualism in Art and Artists; A Renais-
sance Problem,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 22 (July-Sept. 1961), p. 301.
4. See Lorenz Eitner, Géricault; An Album of Drawings in the Art Institute of
Chicago (Chicago, 1960), p. 30. .
e On Céricault’s liberalism see Klaus Berger, Géricault and His Work (Lawrence,
Kan., 1955), pp. 15-19.
 Pages 167-178
766 / NOTES
Week (New York,
6. The novel was translated into English under the title Holy
by Haakon Chevalie r, who earlier was said to have particip ated in American
1961) physicist Robert
and had allegedl y approac hed his friend, the
communist activities ;
Oppenheimer, seeking information on behalf of the Russians .
(Cambridge, Mass.,
7. Frank E. Manuel, The New World of Henri Saint-Simon
The best single source for the Scheffer brothers is Marthe Kolb, Ary
1956), p. 193.
1937). .
Scheffer et son temps, 1795-1 858 (Paris,
American
8. On this movement, see especially R. John Rath, “The Carbonari,’”
Historical Review, Vol. 69 (Jan. 1964), pp. 353-379.
of the
9. One portrait by Ary Scheffer of Lafayette, ordered by the Congress
was
United States of America, was placed in Lafayette’s Chateau de la Grange; a copy good
displayed in the House of Representatives at Washington. Scheffer, who became a
friend of Lafayette’s son, George Washington Lafayette, also painted a posthumous
portrait of George Washington—a subject, of course, regarded as having very strong
revolutionary, anti-monarchic, and republican connotations.
10. Ary Scheffer remained, however, a liberal and a democrat in spirit. In 1844,
with his brother Amold, he joined in supporting a journal founded by their liberal
friend, Alexis de Tocqueville, author of the celebrated De Ia démocratie en Amérique:
the organization of the journal was decided upon in Scheffer’s studio. He also became a
friend of the socially engaged Catholic priest, Lamennais, being introduced to him by
that one-time Saint-Simonian, Franz Liszt; and he painted Lamennais’s portrait in 1845.
Because Scheffer remained an officer of the National Guard, in the Revolution of
February 1848 he felt it necessary to uphold a monarchy he no longer esteemed. In the
revolution of June of that year, too, as an officer of the National Guard he participated
in destroying revolutionary barricades. When Louis Napoleon was elected President of
France, Scheffer at first supported him, but he became disillusioned even before
Napoleon’s coup d'état filled him with a despair that endured for the remaining
half-dozen years of his life.
11. The first meeting of the group, held at Barye’s studio, was also attended by
Daumier and Jeanron.
12. On early connotations of “republic” on the Continent, see, e.g., Peter Kropot-
kin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Boston and New York, 1899), p. 270.
13. Gaetano Salvemini, Mazzini, tr. by I. M. Rawson (London, 1956), p. 161; and
J. L. Talmon, Political Messianism; The Romantic Phase (New York, 1960), p. 263.
14. Quoted, without reference, in Talmon, of. cit., p. 262.
15. Frederick Antal, Hogarth and His Place in European Art (New York, 1962),
Pp. 210
16. For the history of the picture, see especially Héléne Adhémar, “La Liberté sur
les Barricades de Delacroix,’ Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Series 6, Vol. 43 (Feb. 1954), pp.
83-92. Also see George H. Hamilton, “The Iconographical Origin of Delacroix’s
‘Liberty Leading the People,’ ” Studies in Art and Literature for Belle DaCosta Greene
(Princeton, N.J., 1954), pp. 55-66.
17. Adhémar, op. cit., p. 90.
18. Ibid., p. 91.
19. André Joubin, ed., Journal de Eugene Delacroix (Paris, 1932), Vol. 1, pp.
352-353, entry for March 22, 1850.
20. Frangois Fosca (pseud. of Georges de Traz), Edmond et Jules de Goncourt
(Paris, 1941), p. 100.
21. For instance, the Soviet art magazine, Iskusstvo, No. 8 (1956), opposite p. 40,
published a color reproduction of Delacroix’s Liberty in an article on an exhibition in
the U.S.S.R. of French paintings of the nineteenth century.
22. Pontus Grate, Deux critiques d'art de l époque romantique; Gustave Planche et
Théophile Thoré (Stockholm, 1959), pp. 99-100, also p. 97.
23. Georges Weill, “Le Saint-Simonisme hors de France,’ Reyue dhistoire écono-
mique et sociale, Vol. 9 (1921), p. 106; also his L’Ecole Saint-Simonienne, p. 47.
Heine, who had become a Saint-Simonian on arriving at Paris in 1831, dedicated his De
l Allemagne to Enfantin in 1835, but by the end of the 1830’s was moving away from
Saint-Simonianism.
24. “The Author of the ‘Lorelei,’ ” Art News, Vol. 55 (Sept. 1956), p. 53.
25. H. R. Rookmaaker, Synthetist Art Theories (Amsterdam, 1959), p. 43.
 Pages 180-191
NODES: /-767
26. Iskusstvo, No. 3 (1958), cover, and Figs. 49, 50, and
51. The admiration of
communists for Daumier is also indicated by Wolfgang Balzer,
Der junge Daumier und
seine Kampfgefahrten; Politische Karikatur in Frankreich 18
30 bis 1835, published in
ee at Dresden in communist East Germany. For a recent study
of Daumier largely
rom a social point of view, see Oliver W. Larkin, Daumier; Man
of His Time (New
York, 1966), by a distinguished American art historian formerly on
the Left. It
should not be assumed with the Russians and perhaps Larkin that Daumier’s paintings
wholly confirm the broadly social reference of his prints. The subjects he treated
often in the paintings were not, as has usually been supposed, people of the most
working
classes, such as laundry-women, but artists, collectors, and art-dealers. See
the review of
K. E. Maison, Honoré Daumier; Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings
, Watercolours,
and Drawings, 2 vols. (London, 1967), in the (London) Times Literary Supplement,
June 20, 1968, Pp. 634. The most recent book on Daumier, Howard P.
Vincent,
Daumier and His World (Evanston, Ill., 1968), which emphasizes the lithograp
her
rather than the painter, casts considerable light on the views of Philipon and the group
of artists he employed. Particularly interesting is Vincent’s citation of an autobiographi-
cal letter written at a later date to Nadar by Philipon, about whom relatively little has
previously been known.
- 27. N. C. Masterman, John Malcolm Ludlow (Cambridge, England, 1963), p.
28. Robert L. Herbert, Barbizon Revisited (Boston, 1963), pp. 23 and 174. This
excellent catalog of an exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and three other
leading museums contains the best discussion of the social attitudes of the members of
the Barbizon School.
29. “Millet, Jean Francois,” in Ulrich Thieme and Karl Becker et al., Allgemeines
Lexikon der bildenden Kiinstler (Leipzig, 1907-1950).
30. Jules Coulin, Die sozialistische Weltanschauung in der franzésischen Malerei
(Leipzig, 1909), p. 166. Millet was accused of being a socialist especially in 1851.
31. Daily Worker, Feb. 1, 1938, p. 7.
32. See Joseph C. Sloane, Paul Mare Joseph Chenavard; Artist of 1848 (Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1962).
33. Quoted in Bertram D. Wolfe, Marxism (New York, 1965), p. 134.
34. Harold Kurtz, The Empress Eugénie 1826-1920 (Boston and Cambridge,
1964), pp. 23 and 26.
35. Paul Mantz, “Gustave Courbet,” Gazette des beaux-arts, Vol. 17 (1878), pp.
523-524.
36. On the use of “‘realisme’” by Champfleury (whose real name was Jules
Husson), see Emile Bouvier, La Bataille réaliste (1844-1857) (Paris, 1914), p. 237.
37. Although Geofroy, in “Le Salon de 1850,” Revue des deux mondes, Vol. 9
(1851), p. 952, etc., attacked the art of Courbet and others as “la réaction realiste,” he
admitted its possibilities for landscape painting. In the same article (p. 965) he applied
the adjective “matérialiste’’ to such contemporary art.
38. Grate, op. cit., p. 99.
39. On Champfleury’s social views in relation to his views about art, see Stanley
Meltzoff, ““The Revival of the Le Nains,” Art Bulletin, Vol. 24 (Sept. 1942), pp.
259-286.
40. Other critics associated with Blanc were Théophile Thoré, Clément de Ris,
and Soulié.
41. Courbet in the Précurseur d’Anvers, Aug. 22, 1861, cited by Mantz, “Gustave
Courbet,” op. cit., Vol. 18 (1878), p. 26.
42. The group consists of a Jew, a parish priest, a veteran of 1793, a gamekeeper, a
farrier, two huntsmen, a reaper, a curieux, a clown, an undertaker’s man, a prostitute, an
unemployed laborer, an Irishwoman suckling her child, and symbols (in the form of a
lay figure and a still-life) of Courbet’s rejection of religion, romanticism (so he
thought), and contemporary art criticism. a. ;
43. On the probable influence of Papéty’s sketch, and of Fourierism, on Courbet’s
The Studio, see Linda Nochlin, “The Invention of the Avant-Garde; France, 1830-80,”
pp. 11-18, in Thomas B. Hess and John Ashbery, eds., The Avant-Garde, which is in
Art News Annual, Vol. 34 (New York, 1968). Papéty’s sketch was made for Frangois
Sabatier of Montpellier, a Fourierist poet, amateur of music and the theater, and the
 Pages 191-199
768 / NOTES
Chenavard, and other
friend and supporter of Courbet, who also encouraged Papéty,
artists, Courbet noted in a fragment ary autobiog raphy of 1866 that by 1840 he had
[in 1839], he was
begun to follow socialists of all sects, and when “once arrived’ in Paris t missionary Jean
a Fourieris t.” In 1850 he made a lithogra phic drawing of the Founeris
. Courbet
Journet going off to spread the Fourierist Gospel of Universal Harmony in 1854.
estate
presumably saw Papéty’s sketch on a visit that he made to Sabatier’s
apostle of the
Sabatier was a Close associate of Courbet’s patron Alfred Bryas, himself an
d@harmonie.
Fourierist New Harmony and author of a Fourierist tract, Notes
For the iconography of The Studio, | have followed Courbet’s description of it as
Idea,
summarized in Maurice Easton, Artists and Writers in Paris; The Bohemian
(New York, 1964), in connection with the illustration opposite page 144. A
1803-1867
full critical analysis of the painting is to be found in Wemer Hofmann, The Earthly
Paradise; Art in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1961), pp. 11 ff.
44. This current, represented by Jeaurat and Drolling at the end of the eighteenth
century, was continued in the work of Granet and his pupil, Jeanron.
45. Coulin, op. cit., p. 150.
46. Philippe Auguste Jeanron, “Peinture,” Pandore, Vol. 1 (1845), p. 187; cited
by Grate, op. cit., p. 183.
47. For more detailed discussion of these socialist artists, with Papéty, see espe-
cially Coulin, op. cit., pp. 149-156.
48. Théophile Silvestre, Histoire des artistes vivants francais et étrangers; Etudes
d apres nature (Paris, 1856), p. 254, says that Courbet’s first attempt at a socialist
painting was made in the 1840’s, but it was probably in 1848.
49. Meyer Schapiro, “Courbet and Popular Imagery,” Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 4 (Apt.July 1941), pp. 164 ff. Courbet was apparently also
influenced by the style of the Le Nains, the seventeenth-century painters of peasant
scenes newly rediscovered by his friend Champfleury, who, expressly relating them to the
processes of the Revolution of 1848, revived them as instruments in the underground
democratic struggle against the dictatorship of Napoleon III. See Meltzoff, op. cit., pp.
260, etc.
50. George Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (London, 1956), p. 13. Aaron
Noland, “Proudhon and Rousseau,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 28 (Jan.-Mar.
1967) wrongly omits Fourier from the chief “masters” of Proudhon, whom he sees (p.
54) as Rousseau, the Bible, Adam Smith, and Saint-Simon. On Proudhon’s great
influence, see especially the colloquium commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary
of his death, L’ Actualité de Proudhon (Brussels, 1967).
51. Woodcock, op. cit., p. $4.
52. Although, as noted in the Introduction, William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning
Political Justice (1793) entitled him to be regarded as the first theoretician of
libertarianism, and so as one of the first great anarchists of modern times, he never
actually called himself an anarchist. It is true that some of the French revolutionaries of
1793 were called anarchists by their enemies, but they too never adopted the name for
themselves.
53. Woodcock, op. cit., p. 136.
54. Ibid., p. 257.
55. For the unclear circumstances of its destruction, see the editorial in the
Burlington Magazine, Vol. 98 (July 1956), p. 221.
56. Woodcock, op. cit., p. 257.
57. See Jean G. Lossier, Le Réle social de l'art selon Proudhon (Paris, 1937),
passim. Lossier discussed Proudhon’s conception of art in relation to the conceptions of
other supporters of social art. For the theories of Proudhon in relation to Courbet, see
also Joseph C. Sloane, “The Tradition of Figure Painting and Concepts of Modern Art
in France from 1845-1870,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 7 (Sept.
1948), pp. 1-29.
58. See Gerstle Mack, Gustave Courbet (New York, 1951), pp. 165-166.
59. Considerant had made such a proposal at least as early as 1848 in the
Fourierist journal, Démocratie pacifique.
60. Woodcock, op. cit., p. 259.
61. Lossier, op. cit., p. 110.
62. Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Du principe de Tart et de sa destination sociale (Paris
1965).,.p. 117. ‘
Pages 199-212 NOTES / 769
63. Ibid., pp. 350-351.
64. Ibid., p. 225.
65. Quoted by Woodcock, of. cit., p. 258.
66. The word “naturalism” had been used as early as 1847 by Paul Mantz in his
Salon of that year. It was also employed by Maxime du Camp writing of
the
“Paysanistes” for the Salon of 1859. See Theodore E. Klitzke’s review of John
Canaday,
Mainstreams of Modern Art (New York, 1959), in the College Art Journal,
Vol. 19
(Summer 1960), pp. 388-389.
67. Proudhon, op. cit., p. 294.
68. Ibid., p. 236.
69. Ibid., p. 120.
70. Ibid., p. 348. In this connection he praised as the masterpieces of Paris the
Mazas Prison and the Halles Centrales, in the latter of which, especially, the then
modern materials of iron and sheet glass were functionally employed and directly
expressed.
71. Ibid., p. 367.
72. Letter to Castagnary, June 19, 1865; quoted in Mack, op. cit., p. 186.
73. For Thoré’s life and ideas, see the excellent account by Grate, op. cit. Also see
Jakob Rosenberg, On Quality in Art, Bollingen Series XXXV . 13 (Princeton, N,J.,
1965), pp. 67-98.
74. Quoted in Grate, op. cit., p. 243.
75. Ibid., p. 139.
76. Ibid., p. 168.
77. The music for the Internationale was written in 1888 by Pierre Degeyter. On
the Internationale, see Alexander Zevaes, Eugene Pottier et L’Internationale (Paris,
1936). After writing the Internationale upon the collapse of the Commune, Pottier
went as a refugee to England and then to the United States, where he joined the
Socialist Labor Party, and where he remained until 1880. He died in 1887.
78. On the Fédération des artistes, see Reginald H. Wilenski, Modern French
Painters (New York, 1960; but originally published in 1940), pp. 51-52. The program
of the Fédération is published in Eugéne Pottier, Zuvres completes, Pierre Brochon, ed.
(Paris, 1966), pp. 204-205.
79. The standard biography is Maurice Dreyfous, Dalou; Sa vie et son ceuvre
(Paris, 1903).
80. Courbet, writing on December 25, 1861, as published in Le Courrier du
dimanche for December 29, 1861. Quoted in Louis Aragon, L’Exemple de Courbet
(Paris, 1952), p. 44.
81. Quoted, without reference, by Wittkower, op. cit., p. 301.

CHAPTER 5

1. According to Kingsley Martin, French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth

Century (2nd rev. ed., London, 1954), p. 215.
2. Quoted in Frank Jellinek, The Paris Commune of 1871 (New York, 1937), p.
16.
3. Paul Gout, Viollet-le-Duc (Paris, 1914), p. 136.
4. Eugéne Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de larchitecture . . .
Vol. 8, “Style,” p. 497; and Vol. 1, Preface, p. xiii.
5. Gout, op. cit., p. 136.
6. Ibid., p. 137.
7. Eugéne Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Entretiens sur l’architecture, Vol. 1 (Paris,
1863), p. 7.
B Searcy C. Cockerell, Friends of a Lifetime (London, 1940), p. 54.
9. Viollet-le-Duc, Entretiens, Vol. 1, p. 11. For an excellent brief summary of
Viollet-le-Duc’s theories, see the essay, “Viollet-le-Duc and the Rational Point of View,
in John Summerson, Heavenly Mansions (London, 1948; also New York, 1963), pp.

oe nce Arthur T. Sheehan, “Heart of the Matter,” Catholic Worker, May 1961,
p. 4. Also see Sheehan’s Peter Maurin; Gay Believer (Garden City, N.Y., 1959).
 Pages 212-225
770 / NOTES
1952), and her
11. See her autobiography, The Long Loneliness (New York,
Worker movemen t, Loaves and Fishes (New York, 1963).
history of the Catholic Essays on
12. Eichenberg illustrated Peter Maurin, The Green Revolution; “Easy Loneliness,
Catholic Radicalism” (Fresno, Calif., 1960), and Dorothy Day, The Long
For Maurin’s
in addition to doing many woodcuts published in the Catholic Worker.
p. 93.
aim as “‘a Utopian Christian Communism,” see Sheehan, Peter Maurin,
13. The best biography is Edward H. Carr, Michael Bakunin (London, 1937).
14. Ibid., p. 96.
15. Quoted, without reference, in ibid., p. 98. Hegel, however, had expressed
particular admiration for Rossini’s music in letters of 1824 to his wife.
16. On a visit to Bakunin’s family in Russia, Turgenev entertained Bakunin’s
father, Alexander Bakunin, by drawing caricatures with him: see Carr, op. cit., p. 100.
Art, and
On Turgenev and the arts, see Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Turgenevy; The Man, His
His Age (New York, 1961), passim.
17. Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Reyolutionist (Boston, 1889), p. 411.
18. Quoted, without reference, in Carr, op. cit., p. 235.
19. According to Edward +H. Carr, Dostoevsky, 1821-1861 (London, 1931),
though Carr denies the validity of this identification (p. 227). Carr does not give the
name of the Soviet critic.
20. The conspiracy was that of the Petrashevsky group, which had_ studied
Saint-Simon as well as Fourier. Dostoyevsky’s case had been regarded as particularly
serious because at the time of his arrest he had in his possession a highly unorthodox
book by Cabet entitled Le Vrai Christianisme suivant ]ésus-Christ (1846). He also had
borrowed books by Proudhon and Eugéne Sue extolling socialism and attacking
monarchy. Dostoyevsky’s later conservatism led Lenin to describe The Possessed as
“reactionary filth” and Dostoyevsky’s novels in general as “this rubbish”: see Nikolay
Valentinov (pseud. of N. V. Volsky), Encounters with Lenin (London, 1968), p. 50.
21. Quoted, without reference, in Carr, Michael Bakunin, p. 341.
22. Quoted, without reference, in ibid., p. 436.
23. For the complicated history of the relationships of anarchists to the various
Internationals, including those which they founded themselves, see Max Nomad, “The
Anarchist Tradition,” in Milorad M. Drachkovitch, ed., The Revolutionary Internation-
als, 1864-1943 (Stanford, 1966), pp. 57-92.
24. Quoted, without reference, in Carr, Michael Bakunin, p. 438.
25. Ibid., p. 439.
26. Quoted, without reference, in ibid., p. 356. Bakunin had made this statement
in Switzerland in 1869.
27. Quoted, without reference, in ibid., p. 487.
28. George Lichtheim, Marxism; An Historical and Critical Study (London,
1961), p. 231, note 1. This was in 1870.
29. For Kropotkin’s life and ideas, see especially George Woodcock and Ivan
Avakumovié, The Anarchist Prince; A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin (London
and New York, 1950), and Kropotkin’s previously cited Memoirs of a Revolutionist.
30. Kropotkin, op. cit., p. 119.
31. See Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York, 1931), Vol. 2, p. 866; and
Woodcock and Avakumovié, op. cit., pp. 167 and 251.
32. Kropotkin, op. cit., p. 398.
33. Quoted in Woodcock and Avakumovié, op. cit., p. 320.
34. Ibid., pp. 320-321.
35. Quoted, without reference, in ibid., p. 321.
36. Quoted in loc. cit.
37. Kropotkin, op. cit., p. 287.
38. For Malatesta, see Max Nettlau, Errico Malatesta; Das Leben eines Anar-
chisten (New York, 1922).
39. Lichtheim, op. cit., p. 223.
40. The standard biography is Max Nettlau, Elisée Reclus; Anarchist und Ge-
lehrter (1830-1905) (Berlin, 1928).
41. Kropotkin, op. cit., p. 486.
42. Peter Kropotkin, Paroles d’un révolté, Elisée Reclus, ed. (Paris, 1885) :
59-60. é / > PP
43. Eugenia W. Herbert, The Artist and Social Reform; France and Belgium,
eBeEZEB E237 NOTES / 771
1885-1898 (New Haven, 1961), p. 14. This book, referred to hereafter
in this chapter
as E. Herbert, op. cit., is invaluable for the period it covers.
44. Woodcock and Avakumovié, Opa cil pe 193%
45. From Paroles d’un révolté, pp. 66 f.
46. Ibid., pp. 58-59.
47. For French anarchism, see especially Jean Maitron, Histoire du mouvement
anarchiste en France (1880-1914) (2nd ed., Paris, 1955). Also see George
Woodcock,
hoe (Cleveland and New York, 1962), and James Joll, The Anarchists
(London,
1964).
48. For a summary of the early development of French Marxism see Aaron
Noland, The Founding of the French Socialist Party (1893-1905) (Cambridge, Mass.,
1956), Introduction. On the later history of Guesde’s party, see Claude Willard, Les
Guesdists; Le Mouvement socialiste en F tance, 1893-1905 (Paris, 1965). On French
Marxism see also George Lichtheim, Marxism in Modern France (New York, 1966).
49. “Art et socialisme,” Revue rouge, Jan. 1, 1890, pp. 4-6, signed only with the
initials, “C. D.”’ Cited by E. Herbert, OpaCit, ps 25.
50. Georges Beaume, “L’Art social,” Revue socialiste, Vol. 14 (Dec. 1891), pp.
730-732. Cited by E. Herbert, loc. cit.
51. Those interested will find in E. Herbert, op. cit., pp. 26-28, a more complete
discussion of the few and relatively minor examples of interest in the arts early displayed
by French Marxists.
52. Daniel Halévy, My Friend Degas (Middletown, Conn., 1964), p. 41. Halévy
himself wrote three books on Proudhon, much admired the peasant way of life, and
devoted much time to the universités populaires.
53. On the authonty of William C. Seitz.
54. See the numerous favorable mentions of anarchism and anarchists in John
Rewald, ed., Camille Pissarro; Lettres a son fils Lucien (Paris, 1950) and in John
Rewald, Pissarro (New York, 1963).
55. Undated letter to his nephew, quoted in John Rewald, Post-Impressionism
(New York, 1956), p. 155.
56. H. R. Rookmaaker, Synthetist Art Theories (Amsterdam, 1959), p. 50.
57. Pierre A. G. Astier, “The Long Courtship; Marxism and French Literature,”
Vassar Alumnae Magazine, Vol. 49 (Dec. 1963), p. 17.
58. Emile Zola, Correspondance, Vol. 2 (Paris, 1908), p. 250, letter of March 8,
1885.
59. Emile Zola, Mes haines (new edition, Paris, 1895), p. 25; also see pp. 229 and
307.
60. Ibid., p. 33.
61. John Rewald, The History of Impressionism (New York, 1946), p. 166.
62. Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art (London, 1951), Vol. 2, p. 869.
63. George H. Hamilton, Manet and His Critics (New Haven, 1954), p. 218.
However, see Robert J. Niess, Zola, Cézanne and Manet; A Study of L’CEuvre (Ann
Arbor, Mich., 1968), who states (p. 246) that Zola’s novel, L’'CEuvre (1886), was not
intended as an attack on the Impressionists but rather as a manifesto in defense of
naturalism against the rising forces of mysticism, intuitionism, and irrationalism among
which the Symbolist movement was prominent.
64. See the valuable article by Paul Hogarth, “The Artist as Reporter,” Penrose
Annual, Vol. 55 (1961), p. 73; also his expansion of that article in a book by the same
title (London and New York, 1967), p. 39. inc ge
65. Marxist-Leninist critics, however, often equate Impressionism itself with posi-
tivism: see Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art; A Marxist Approach (Harmondsworth,
England, and Baltimore, 1963), p. 75. Fischer regards Impressionism as “‘a glorious
climax of bourgeois art.” ; lat
66. The above is largely based on the illuminating discussion in Charles E. Gauss,
The Aesthetic Theories of French Artists; 1855 to the Present (Baltimore, Md., 1949),
. 96-98.
‘a ca For Nadar, whose real name was Gaspard Félix Tournachon, see Pierre
Schneider, “The Many-Sided M. Nadar,” Art News Annual, Vol. 25 (1956), pp.
56-72; also Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Masters of Photography (New York, 1958),
a3 2:
ce 68. One should, however, add that the somewhat artistically conservative Ingres,
772 | NOTES Pages 237-244

tradition of David, painted

whose fine portraits were realistic in the partly academic academic realism and
photogr aphs by Nadar. Thus even a partly
some portraits from cism and realism both
more or less “scientific” realism may overlap, inasmuc h as academi
emphasize representational arts based on the imitation of nature.
1949), P. 36. However,
69. Louis Harap, Social Roots of the Arts (New York,
ly did often look carefull y at photographs, they
although the Impressionists apparent ed from ever copy-
desired to record the transitory in nature, and therefore were prevent aphic pmnt. For this,
ing the permane nt record of nature represen ted by a photogr
ist paintings) fre-
and for the fact that Courbet and Manet (in his non-Impression (London, 1968),
quently copied photographs, see Aaron Scharf, Art and Photogr aphy
once made an etched
pp- 126, 98-102, 40-49. Scharf notes the ironic fact that Manet
portrait of Baudelai re from a photogr aph by Nadar, yet Baudelai re rejected the pos-
sibility that photography could be an art.
He
70. Pissarro was introduced to Seurat and Signac by his son Lucien in 1885.
he gave up
adopted their method, and remained a Neo-Impressionist until 1890, when to his
the technique because he found that it “tied him down too much,” and retumed
see W. S. Meadmore, Lucien Pissarro (London, 1962). On the
former method:
York,
Neo-Impressionists, see especially Robert L. Herbert, Neo-Impressionism (New
1968), the catalog of an exhibition at the Guggenhe im Museum.- George H. Hamilton,
Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1880-1940 (Harmondsworth, 1967), pp. 41-98, has
an excellent chapter on “Symbolist Art”; also see Hans H. Hofstatter, Symbolismus und
die Kunst der Jahrhundertwende (Cologne, 1965).
y
71. See R. L. Herbert, Neo-Impressionism, pp. 15 and 20. For Seurat’s deliberatel
and
scientific technique, see Henri Dorra and John Rewald, Seurat (Paris, 1959),
especially William I. Homer, Seurat and the Science of Painting (Cambridge, Mass.,
1964). d
72. William I. Homer, “Seurat’s Formative Period: 1880-1884,” Connoisseur,
Vol. 142 (Aug. 1958), p. 58.
73. Maximilien Luce (Paris, 1958), p. 8. This is the catalog of an exhibition held
in 1958 at the Maison de la pensée frangaise in Paris. For Luce, see also Adolphe
Tabarant, Maximilien Luce (Paris, 1928).
74. In addition to our illustration, the catalog mentioned in the previous note
includes such industrial subjects as Hauts fourneaux de Charleroi (1894), La Toilette de
louvrier (ca. 1896), La Coulée (1900), and Crassiers, Charleroi (ca. 1904).
75. Robert L. Herbert, Seurat’s Drawings (New York, 1962), p. 65, also p. 87.
76. Notably Henri Edmond Cross and Charles Angrand.
77. For the Neo-Impressionists and anarchism, see especially E. Herbert, op. Cit,
passim, and Robert L. and Eugenia W. Herbert, “Artists and Anarchism; Unpublished
Letters of Pissarro, Signac, and Others—I,” Burlington Magazine, Vol. 102 (Nov.
1960), pp. 473-482. Part II of this article, in ibid., (Dec. 1960), pp. 517-522, Consists
of transcriptions from letters of all the chief Neo-Impressionists to their friend, the
anarchist Jean Grave—letters today in the Institut frangais d’histoire sociale—in which
Kropotkin is frequently mentioned. Also see John Rewald, Georges Seurat (New York,
1943), p. 47; and Rewald, Post-Impressionism, p. 155.
78. Cited, without reference, by Robert and Eugenia Herbert, op. cit., Pt. I, p.
479:
79. Quoted in the French in Robert and Eugenia Herbert, op. cit., Pt. I, p. 480.
80. Woodcock and Avakumovié, op. cit., p. 296.
81. Richard Wagner's Prose Works, tr. by William A. Ellis (2nd ed., London,
1895), Vol. 1, p. 53.
82. Ibid., pp. 56and 64. «
1 ie Richard Wagner, L’Art et la révolution, tr. by Jacques Mesnil (Brussels,
1898).
84. Joll, op. cit., p. 167.
85. Illustrated in Robert and Eugenia Herbert, op. cit., Pt. I, p. 481, Fig. E.
86. Quoted from an unpublished letter dated only August 1, but about 1917,
in E. Herbert, op. cit., p. 187.
87. See his letter of March 2, 1891, to his father in Rewald, ed., Camille Pissarro;
Lettres a son fils Lucien, p. 216, where he indicates his intention to join the group. For
Lucien’s biography, see Meadmorte, of. cit.
Pages 244-254 NOES / 7°73
__88. Letter of September 1896 to his father: see Rewald, ed., op. cit., p. 417.
Within a few months, in collaboration with an English friend, Lucien was engaged in
ee a small book entitled De la typographie et de William Morris: see ibid., p.
432, note 1.
89. Quoted in Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves, eds., Artists on Art (New
York, 1945), p. 318. For the original French, see Rewald, ed., op. cit., pp. 458-459.
90. Goldwater and Treves, eds., op. cit., p. 319. In the previous month, Camille
Pissarro had seen a book printed by Morris and had been horrified by it: see Rewald,
ed., op. cit., p. 473.
91. For the influence of Ruskin and Morris in France, see E. Herbert, op. cit.,
especially pp. 198-201; also H. A. Needham, Le Développement de lesthétique
sociologique en France et en Angleterre au XIX° siécle (Paris, 1926), pp. 166 f., 186 ff.
Brief translated extracts from Ruskin’s works had begun to appear occasionally in the
Bulletin de [Union pour l’action morale in 1893.
92. Marcel Proust, “John Ruskin,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Series 3, Vol. 23 (Apr.
1900), pp. 310-318, and Vol. 24 (Aug. 1900), pp. 135-146. Ultimately, however,
Proust became disillusioned with Ruskin’s confusion of morals and beauty. For Proust’s
taste in ee os Maurice E. Chernowitz, Proust and Painting (New York, 1945).
Og, 1s Cle
94. Meyer Schapiro, “‘Seurat and ‘La Grande Jatte,’”” Columbia Review, Vol. 17
(1935), p. 16.
95. La Révolte, July 10-17, 1891, p. 2, quoted in Robert and Eugenia Herbert, op.
Cita Eialaperd 616
96. See Woodcock and Avakumovié, op. cit., p. 282.
97. Robert and Eugenia Herbert, op. cit., Pt. I, p. 479.
98. For Seurat’s later theories, and the influence of Henry upon them, I am
indebted to William I. Homer’s previously cited book, Seurat and the Science of
Painting. Mr. Homer has told me that Henry was director of a “Laboratoire de
physiologie des sensations” at the Sorbonne. Christopher Gray, Cubist Aesthetic Theo-
ries (Baltimore, 1953), p. 89—where the name of Henry’s laboratory is incorrectly
given—and note 86, states that Henry tried to give the idea of the direct expressiveness
of the aesthetic basis a solid scientific foundation, but that his scientific evidence has
since been entirely discredited. José Argiielles, Charles Henry (1859-1926) (Ph.D.
thesis, University of Chicago, 1969), was completed after this book had gone to press.
99. Gustave Kahn, ‘‘Seurat,” L’Art moderne, Apr. 5, 1891, p. 107.
100. See Louise Rosenblatt, L’Idée de l'art pour Tart dans la littérature anglaise
pendant la période victorienne (Paris, 1931), p. 287.
101. See Robert and Eugenia Herbert, op. cit., Pt. I, pp. 480-481.
102. For the story of anarchist terrorism, see Woodcock, Anarchism; Joll, The
Anarchists; Maitron, Histoire du mouvement anarchiste en France; also Barbara Tuch-
man, The Proud Tower (New York, 1965), pp. 63-113.
103. Woodcock and Avakumovié, op. cit., p. 270.
104. See G. Jean Aubry, Camille Mauclair (Paris, 1905), pp. 50-51. For Mauclair
as critic of Pissarro, the Neo-Impressionists, etc., see Rewald, ed., Camille Pissarro;
Lettres da son fils Lucien, pp. 344, note 1, and 390.
105. Revue blanche, New Series, Vol. 4 (1893), pp. 370-370.
106. Ibid., p. 376.
107. “Eloge de Ravachol,” in Entretiens politiques et littéraires, Vol. 5 (July
1892), p. 29; cited by Robert and Eugenia Herbert, op. cit., Pt. I, p. 474. :
108. Rewald, Post-Impress ionism, p. 149; Anna Balakian, The Symbolist Move-
ment (New York, 1967), p. 138.
109. For a sketch by Luce of Fénéon in jail, see E. Herbert, op. cit., Fig. 14.
110. Quoted in John Rewald, “Extraits du journal inédit de Paul Signac,” Gazette
des beaux-arts, Series 6, Vol. 36 (July-Sept. 1949), p. 113.
111. For Fénéon, sce especially Jean Paulhan, ed., Les Giuvres de Félix Fénéon
Translated by
(Paris, 1940); also “The Art Criticism of Félix Fénéon; Selections
31 (Jan. 1957), pp. 15-19; John Rewald, “Félix Fénéon,
Francis Kloeppel,” Arts, Vol.
and Vol. 33
Gazette des beaux-arts, Series 6, Vol. 32 (July-Aug., 1947), pp. 44-62,
with additional
(Feb. 1948), pp. 107-2 26; and Rewald, Post-Impressionism, passim,
bibliography on p. 184, note 20. In his old age, Fénéon—who was one of Seurat’s
774 / NOTES Pages 254-261

Hauke’s monumental
executors—watched over the early compilation of César M. de
Seurat et son ceuyre, 2 vols. (Paris, 1962). ;
48 (Feb. 8, 1960),
112. Kees van Dongen, “Bums, Madmen, Masters,” Lifé, Vol.
Eugenia Herbert, op. cit., Pt. I, P. 474, note 8, mention that Van
p. 92. Robert and d
were associate
Dongen and also Frank Kupka (about whom more will be said later) artists who
with the anarchists. Van Dongen and Kupka were among the many anarchist
contribut ed to the anarchis t-owned weekly, L’Assiett e au beurre.
113. “The Art Criticism of Félix Fénéon,” p. 16. :
to Signac
114. See E. Herbert, op. cit., p. 143, note 18, citing letters from Fénéon
in the Signac collection. nus Ow
115. I. L. Zupnick, “The Social Conflict of the Impressionists,” College Art
Journal, Vol. 19 (Winter 1959-1960), p. 148. ;
116. See the illuminating analysis of Paris in E. Herbert, op. cit.,p.172.
117. See Noland, op. cit., pp. 48 ff.; also J. Salwyn Schapiro, Liberalism; Its
Meaning and History (Princeton, N.J., etc., 1958), pp. 57-58 and 162-163.
118. See Willard, op. cit., p. 197.
119. The best recent biography is Harvey Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurés
(Madison, Wis., 1962).
120. See his “L’Idéalisme de V’histoire,” a lecture delivered in 1894, in Jean Jaurés,
Pages choisies (Paris, 1922), pp. 358-374.
121. Jaurés, Pages choisies, p. 369; translation from Sidney Hook, Marx and the
Marxists; The Ambiguous Legacy (Princeton, N_J., etc., 1955), p. 181.
122. Jaurés, Pages choisies, pp. 51-84.
123. Ibid., p. 58.
124. A statement of 1906, quoted in Goldberg, op. cit., p. 80.
125. Jaurés, Pages choisies, p. 69. ~
126. For instances of the interest taken by French Marxists in the social theater,
particularly the revolutionary theater, see E. Herbert, op. cit., pp. 34-39.
127. Ibid., p. 34.
128. Quillard, quoted in Ibid., p. 204.
129. Wan Gogh traconté par lui-méme et par ses amis (Geneva, 1947), p. 46.
Quoted approvingly, without specific reference, in the American communist cultural
magazine Mainstream, Vol. 13 (June 1960), p. 46, in an article entitled “The
Partisanship of Vincent Van Gogh,” by Joseph Felshin.
130. Wilhelm Hausenstein, Die Kunst und die Gesellschaft (Munich, 1917), p. 9.
131. Ibid., pp. 9-10.
132. For the art theories of the Synthetists—the painters Gauguin, Sérusier,
Maurice Denis, and Bernard, and the writers Mallarmé, Morice, and Aurier—see
Rookmaaker, op. cit., passim.
133. Henri Perruchot, Gauguin, tr. by Humphrey Hale (Cleveland and New York,
1963), p. 33. In old age, Flora Tristan believed that Fourier was following Swedenborg
in applying the doctrine of “correspondances’’: see Emile Lehouck, Fourier aujourd'hui
(Paris, 1966), p. 209. ;
134. Flora Tristan reached this conclusion in her L’Union ouvriére of 1843: see
Perruchot, op. cit., p. 34.
135. Letter from Renoir to Durand-Ruel, quoted in Perruchot, of. cit., p. 89.
136. Quoted by Perruchot in ibid., p. 94, from Emile Schuffenecker, Notes sur
Gauguin, without specific reference.
137. Thomas Buser, “Gauguin’s Religion,” Art Journal, Vol. 27 (Summer 1968),
pp. 375-380.
138. Rookmaaker, op. cit., p.77.
139. The Synthetists Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier were among the Nabis.
Other members were Bonnard, Ibels, Roussel, Vuillard, Ranson, Verkade, Vallotton, the
future sculptor Maillol, then a painter and a follower of Gauguin, and the sculptor
Georges Lacombe. Although the Nabis (whose name—from the Hebrew for prophet or
visionary—was first applied to them by the poet Cazalis) came largely out of Impres-
sionism and Symbolism, they differed from both in their conviction that the real
problem was one of liberating painting not by representing natural light as color, and
not by the mind or feelings, but by color itself. ‘They therefore stressed painting that
Pages 261-273 NOTES / 775
was simply and solely painting—and thereby foreshadowed much art later. On the
difference between the Nabis and the Symbolists, see Emile Langui in Jean Cassou,
Emile Langui, Nikolaus Pevsner, The Sources of Modern Art (London, 1962), pp-
129-130. Agnes Humbert, Les Nabis et leur époque, 1888-1900 (Geneva, 1954), p.
15, notes that Mallarmé and Verlaine were the “gods” of the Nabis, who were also
especially enthusiastic about the paintings of Van Gogh and Gauguin. Humbert does
not mention that, like some of the other Nabis, Maillol evidently had some radical
social sympathies, because, in 1905-1906, after he had become a sculptor, he made a
memorial to Blanqui, the Carbonaro and revolutionary republican whose followers were
absorbed into the Parti socialiste unifié in 1905. The memorial was in the form of a
female figure, with hands fastened behind her back, called L’Action enchainée ap-
parently because Blanqui had spent thirty-seven years in prison. For this statue see
Langui, etc., op. cit., pp. 131-132 and Fig. 119. The writer and future communist
Henri Barbusse aided in getting this commission for Maillol, who—according to
Waldemar George (pseud. of Aristide J. B. Maillol), Aristide Maillol (Greenwich,
Conn., 1965), p. 18—had developed “in the aesthetic climate” of “the movement that
had sprung from the theories of William Morris” and such leaders of the Art Nouveau,
largely inspired by Morris, as Hector Guimard and the anarchist Henry van de Velde.
140. John Rewald, Les Fauves, Museum of Modem Art (New York, 1952), p. 42.
141. Quoted, without reference, in Aline B. Saarinen, The Proud Possessors (New
York, 1958), pp. 19-20.
142. Marc Delmas, Gustave Charpentier et le lyrisme frangais (Paris, 1931), p. 66.
143. Ibid., p. 31, quoting Camille Mauclair.
144. E. Herbert, op. cit., p. 35, note 1.
145. For a well-illustrated book on Steinlen, see Francis Jourdain, Alexandre
Steinlen (Paris, 1954).
146. See A. Sidorov, Steinlen (Moscow, 1919), cited in E. Herbert, op. cit., p.
226. Also see, e.g., N. Kalitina, “Théophile Alexandre Steinlen” (in Russian), Iskusstvo,
No. 12, 1959, pp. 52-62.
147. Goldman, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 407. Rictus was the author of Soliloques du pauvre.
148. See Giulia Veronesi, Tony Garnier (Milan, 1948), p. 10.
149. See Dora Wiebenson, “Utopian Aspects of Tony Garnier’s Cité Industrielle,”
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 19 (Mar. 1960), pp. 16-24. Also
see her forthcoming book, Tony Garnier; The Cité Industrielle (New York, 1969).
150. Ibid., p. 17. The plate is number 15.
151. Wiebenson, op. cit., pp. 17-18.
152. Comité Tony Garnier, Tony Garnier (Lyon, n.d.), preface, n.p. This book of
drawings by Garnier was published by the Comité Tony Gamier after Garnier’s death.
153. Among other works, in 1920 Garnier had made designs for the residence for
American students at the Cité universitaire in Paris. As executed on a site smaller than
originally called for, the building largely betrayed his intentions.
154. See Noland, op. cit., pp. 188-194.
155. Georges Valois, D’un siécle a l'autre (Paris, 1921), p. 111.
156. L’Art social, Dec. 1896, pp. 174 f., cited in E. Herbert, op. cit., p. 23.
157. “L’Art et la révolte,” reprinted in La Sociale, June 7-14, 1896, p. 27, and
quoted in E. Herbert, op. cit., p. 24, with reference on p. 22, note 27.
158. A recent study is Irving L. Horowitz, Radicalism and the Revolt Against
Reason; The Social Theories of Georges Sorel (New York, 1961).
159. Quoted in Donald O. Wagner, Social Reformers (New York, 1939), p. 216.
160. Revue de métaphysique et de morale, Vol. 9 (1901), pp. 251-278.
161. Ibid., p. 270, also p. 272.
162. Ibid., p. 273.
163. Ibid., p. 278.
164. Ibid., p. 275. a.
165. The manifesto is most easily consulted in English translation in Joshua C.
Taylor, Futurism (Museum of Modern Art, distributed from Garden City, N.Y., 1961),
pp. 124-215. This catalog of an exhibition displayed in 1961 at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Los Angeles County Museum is
 Pages 273-287
776 / NOTES
it and from Rose T.
the best single account of futurism before the 1920's. From in the present
(New York, 1961), most of the facts about futurism
Clough, Futurism 1961), and the
Raffaele Carrieri, Il futurism o (Milan,
book have been drawn. Also see
York, 1960, also
section on Marinetti in James Joll, Three Intellectuals in Politics (New
e W. Martin, Futurist
1965), as well as the most recent account of futurism, Mariann
Art and Art Theory, 1909-19 15 (Oxford, 1968).
Age (New
166. See Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine
York, 1960), p. 124.
167. Ibid., p. 123, citing the lecture given by Marinetti to the Lyceum Club in
March 1912.
168. Quoted in Reginald H. Wilenski, Modern F rench Painters (New York, 1960;
but originally published in 1940), Vol. 2, p. 73- Ria
the
169. Léger’s art was, however, too abstract for the Russians: the vicissitudes of
only—and posthumous—exhibition of his works in the Soviet Union will be discussed
in the next chapter.
170. Marinetti later disassociated himself from Symbolism, and from anarchism
along with it, in his Le Futurisme: see especially Banham, op. cit., p. 122. Banham
mentions the influence of Mallarmé, Huysmans, and Whitman on Marinetti, on pp.
102, 104, ae
171. Referred to by Taylor, op. cit., p. 22.
L7jzee lbidea) ez: ;
173. Republished in Carrieri, op. cit., pp. 143-145.
174. Taylor, op. cit., p. 106.
175. Banham, op. cit., p. 132, note 7. Gustave Kahn, the anarchist French critic
who was a friend of Marinetti for some time before 1914, had drawn attention to
Moilin’s proposals. :
176. Quoted in Clough, op. cit., p. 117, from Antonio Sant’Elia, “L’Architettura
futurista,” Lacerba, Vol. 2, p. 228.
177. Ibid., p. 119, quoting Lacerba, Vol. 1, p. 229.
178. For a very full reprinting of Sant’Elia’s drawings and projects, see the
articles by F. Tentori and L. Mariani in L’Architettura, No. 2 (1955), pp. 206-208 and
210-215, and the further article by Mariani in ibid., No. 5 (1956), pp. 704-707.
Sant’Elia foreshadowed Le Corbusier's “A house is a machine to live in” by speaking of
“the Futurist house like a giant machine’: see his “L’Architettura futurista” in Not
futuristi (Milan, 1917), p. 73. It should be emphasized, however, that Sant’Elia’s
approach was not solely of a mechanistically functional kind. For he conceived of his
work not as “an arid combination of practicality and utility but . . . as art, that is,
synthesis and expression”; and in thus embracing futurist expressionism he also fore-
shadowed certain anti-functionalist aspects of the thought of Le Corbusier and Gropius
in the 1920’s: see Martin, op. cit., p. 191.
179. Quoted, without reference, in Edward H. Carr, Studies in Reyolution (Lon-
don, 1950), p. 163. On Mussolini as a socialist, also see S. J. Woolf, “Mussolini as
Revolutionary,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1966), pp. 187-196.
180. Time, Vol. 84 (July 31, 1964), p. 36, in an article on Kupka accompanied by
two color illustrations. Kupka’s work had long been largely unknown except to specialists
until exhibitions held at Prague in 1946, at New York in 1951, and especially at Paris in
1958 and 1964 attracted increasing attention to him. For his biography and a
bibliography about him, see Jean Cassou and Denise Fédit, Kupka (Paris, 1964), and
the volume by Ludmila Vachtova, Frank Kupka (London, 1968).
181. On this community, see the paper by Daniel Robbins, delivered at the
meeting of the College Art Association in 1963, and later published in the Art Journal,
Vol. 23 (Winter 1963-1964), pp. 111-116, under the title, “From Symbolism to
Cubism; The Abbaye of Créteil.’”” See also Robbins’s Albert Gleizes, 1881-1953; A
Retrospective Exhibition (New York, 1964), the catalog of a show of Gleizes’s works
put on by the Guggenheim Museum; and Marianne W. Martin’s article, published
while this book was on press, “Futurism, Unanism, and Apollinaire,” Art Journal,
Vol. 27 (Spring 1969), pp. 255-268.
182. On Golberg, see Pierre Aubery, “Mécislas Golberg et l'art moderne,”’ Gazette
des Beaux-Arts (Dec. 1965), pp. 339-344; and Edward Fry, Cubism (New York,
1966), pp. 45-46.
Pages 288-297 NOTES / 777
183. The first meeting of Metzinger and Picasso probably occurred in 1909 or
1910, but perhaps even earlier.
184. For identification of these three groups and clarification of their development
and confusing interrelationships, I am much indebted to conversations with Edward Fry
before the publication of his previously cited fundamental book, Cubism, on the
documents and texts of cubism.
185. Jean Metzinger, “Note sur la peinture,” Pan, Nov. 1910.
186. Walter Pach, “Thus Is Cubism Cultivated,” Art News, Vol. 48 (May 1949),
ps2
187. Modern School, Vol. 5 (Oct. 1918), pp. 300-315. This periodical was
published at Stelton, N.J., in an anarchist colony that had grown out of the anarchist
Ferrer Center in New York, about which more will be said later in connection with the
executed Spanish anarchist for whom the Center was named. The editor of the Modern
School in 1918 was Carl Zigrosser, later a noted authority on graphic arts.
188. This is undated but was probably published in 1922.
189. Quoted in Robbins, “From Symbolism to Cubism,” p. 113.
190. Gleizes, who always remained basically a cubist despite a period as a dadaist
in Barcelona and New York, also remained essentially a utopian, a pacifist, and a worker
for European unity. In 1927, he founded a second utopian colony, the commune of
Moly-Sabata, idealistically related to the Abbaye de Créteil. Planned as a community of
artists who were to support themselves by artistic production and agriculture, Moly-
Sabata lasted until 1951, two years before Gleizes’ death. In the 1940's, Gleizes had been
taken up by a small group of Catholic intellectuals; also the program of “a return to
earth” at Moly-Sabata had become one of the principal slogans of Pétain’s Vichy. As a
consequence, the colony stirred bitterness in many of those associated with the French
Resistance.

CHAPTER 6

1. See David Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals, 1914-1960 (New
York, 1964), pp. 346-347.
2. Giorgio Kraiskj, ed., Materiali per un’estetica marxista (Rome, 1950), p. 176,
quoting the article on music in the first edition of the Bolshaya sovetskaya entsiklope-
diya (Great Soviet Encyclopedia) .
3. Rollo Myers, Erik Satie (London, 1948), pp. 37-38.
4. Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years (New York, 19 58), p. 142, and a letter
from Mr. Shattuck to me, November 15, 1963, in which he writes that Satie was a
councilor of Arcueil about 1909-1910. ,
5. For Satie as a member of the Soviet d’Arcueil, see also Myers, op. cit., p. 112,
citing no date; and for Duclos’s statement, see Jacques Duclos, Communism, Science,
and Culture, tr. by Herbert Rosen (New York, 1939), p. 35. '
6. For the history of dada, see William S. Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their
Heritage (New York, 1968), an exhibition catalog of the Museum of Modern Art;
Rubin’s Dada and Surrealist Art, which was published at New York in 1969; Robert
Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets; An Anthology (New York, 1951);
Willy Verkauf, ed., and Marcel Janco and Hans Bollinger, co-eds., Dada; Mono-
graph of a Movement (Teufen, Switzerland, 1957); Richard Huelsenbeck, Dada; Eine
literarische Dokumentation (Hamburg, 1964); and especially Hans Richter, Dada—
Kunst und Antikunst (Cologne, 1964), with an English translation entitled Dada
—Art and Anti-Art (New York, 1965). Also see the items of bibliography listed in the
perceptive unsigned review articles, “The Art of Unreason,” (London) Times Literary
Supplement, June 9, 1961, pp. 1-2; “Priorities and Provocations, ibid., Sept. 3, 1964,
p. 802; and “Lloyd George Knew My Dada,” ibid., June 1, 1967, p. 483. Michel
Sanouillet, Dada d Paris (Paris, 1965), on the dada movement in literature, contains as
a preamble a summary of the background of the movement in Europe and America.
7. See Richter’s pamphlet Universelle Sprache (1920), written in collaboration
with Viking Eggeling, as quoted in Hans Richter, “Easel—Scroll—Film, Magazine of
Art, Vol. 45 (Feb. 1952), p. 79. Richter’s previously cited Dada—Art and Anti-Art is a
778 / NOTES Pages 297-310

at least
well documented, well illustrated history of dada. Since 1940 Richter has lived
part of the year in the United States.
8. See André Breton, Ode d Charles Fourier (Paris, 1947). .
9. For the history and radical doctrines of surrealism see especially the previously
cited catalog by Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage; Maurice Nadeau, Histoire
du surréalisme, 2 vols. (2nd ed., Paris, 1946, and the supplementary Documents
surréalistes, Paris, 1948), both works reprinted in one volume in 1964, and translated
into English as The History of Surrealism in Literature (New York, 1965) without most
of the Documents; André Breton, Entretiens, 1913-1952 (Paris, 1952); Marcel Jean
with Arpad Mezei, Histoire de la peinture surréaliste (Paris, 1959); Anna Balakian,
Surrealism; The Road to the Absolute (New York, 1959); Patrick Waldberg, Surreal-
ism (Cleveland, 1962); David Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Surrealism (London, 1935);
James T. Soby, After Picasso (Hartford and New York, 1935); Matthew Josephson,
Life Among the Surrealists (New York, 1962); and Robert Short, “The Politics of
Surrealism, 1920-36,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1966), pp.
3-25. See also the two volumes of Herbert S. Gershman, The Surrealist Revolution in
France and A Bibliography of the Surrealist Revolution in France (both Ann Arbor,
Mich., 1969), published while this book was on press.
10. In French, Congrés international pour la détermination des directives et la
défense de l’esprit moderne.
11. The first systematic use of automatic writing had been made in 1919 by two
dadaists, Hans Richter and Philippe Soupault.
12. André Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture (New York, 1945 edition), pp.
25 ff., especially pp. 26 and 29. The first part of Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la peinture
had been published in La Révolution surréaliste, No. 3 (July 15, 1925), in answer to a
statement by the writer Pierre Naville, co-editor of the periodical, denying the possibility
of a surrealist (visual) art.
13. See Caute’s previously cited book, Communism and the French Intellectuals,
1914-1960, pp. 43 and 92. On the earlier years of Clarté, see especially Nicole Racine,
“The Clarté Movement in France, 1919-21,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 2
(Apr. 1967), pp. 195-208.
14. Nadeau, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 125.
15. Balakian, op. cit., pp. 104, 105, 107.
16. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1960), p. 42.
17eelbidspse2zios
18. Nadeau, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 162.
19. Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 207.
20. New Masses, Vol. 7 (May 1932), p. 39.
21. A later picture by Dali in which Lenin is represented is the painting entitled
Soft Construction with Boiled Beans; Premonition of Civil War, 1936, now in the
Arensberg Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Still another, bearing the title
Fifty Abstract Pictures . . . Change into Three Lenins Masquerading as Chinese . - .
was exhibited at Knoedler’s, New York, late in 1963.
22. Jean and Mezei, of. cit., p. 220.
23. Cited by Caute, op. cit., p. 336, referring to L’Humanité, Jan. 22, 1937, but
apparently an incorrect reference.
24. He sent the cablegram to his friend, the radical writer Jean Richard Bloch: see
G. Bauquier, “Fernand Léger, peintre,” La Nouvelle critique, Sept.-Oct. 1955, p. 134.
Bauquier does not give the date; and although he states that Léger decided to “rejoin”
the party, he does not say when Léger had been a party member earlier. Like Léger,
Bloch passed from anti-fascism to communism, but where Léger had once been
sympathetic to anarchism, Bloch had been a socialist.
25. Quoted in Ilya Ehrenburg, Men, Years—Life, Vol. 4, Eve of War 1933-1941
(London, 1963), p. 67.
26. “Les Six” consisted of Honegger, Auric, Milhaud, Poulenc, Germaine Taille-
ferre, and Marcelle Meyer.
27. Marcel Delannoy, Honegger (Paris, 1953), p. 163. Honegger’s autobiography,
I Am a Composer (London, 1966; first published in French in 1951), essentially omits
his earlier social views, for he had become convinced that “Decadence lies in wait for us.
. . . Our arts are on the way out. .. .” (p. 123).
Pages 312-318 NOTES / 779
28. Ehrenburg, Eve of War 1933-1941, p. 72. E. M. Forster, a member of
London’s Bloomsbury group, said in his speech, as quoted in ibid., p. 77, “You might
have guessed that | am not a Communist, though perhaps I might be if I was a younger
and a braver man, for in Communism I can see hope. . . .”
; 29. See Balakian, op. cit., p. 186, also p. 182. André Breton later discussed the
incidents leading to the rift in his Entretiens, p. 175.
30. This revival began especially with an editorial in Pravda for June 9, 1934.
31. Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality (London, 1937), p. 120. Caudwell
was a leading British communist writer and critic in the 1930’s.
32. Joseph Wortis, Soviet Psychiatry (Baltimore, Md., 1950), especially pp.
71-102. Also see John Fizer, “The Problem of the Unconscious in the Creative Process
as Treated by Soviet Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 21
(Summer 1963), pp. 399-406.
33. Nadeau, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 314.
34. Balakian, op. cit., p. 186 ff.
35. In fact, opposition to the Nationalists had first been led by leftists—in
Barcelona chiefly anarchists (who had not joined the Popular Front), in Madrid by the
socialist labor unions. The anarchists in particular were seeking to make a radical
revolution, which was put down in the course of the civil war by right-wing socialists
and communists working together. For the socialist backers of the Republic were afraid
of alienating middle-class supporters in Spain itself and in the capitalist countries, while
the communists felt that Spain was not yet ripe for revolution, and in addition were
afraid of disturbing the Soviet pact with France, a capitalist nation. See George Orwell’s
classic Homage to Catalonia (Boston, 1955, but originally published at London in
1939) for the best account by an eyewitness and participant who was also a great wniter.
For a recent authoritative account of the anarchists in Spain see James Joll, The
Anarchists (London, 1964), pp. 253-272. The best general history is Hugh Thomas,
The Spanish Civil War (London, 1961), but see Stanley Weintraub, The Last Great
Cause; The Intellectuals and the Spanish Civil War (New York, 1968), for the
impressions of many writer-participants, chiefly British and American.
36. See L’Humanité (of which Vaillant-Couturier was editor), Nov. 1, 1936, p. 8.
For the Communist Party during this period, see Daniel R. Brower, The New Jacobins;
The French Communist Party and the Popular Front (Ithaca, N.Y., 1968).
37. For most of the statements above, see Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard
Jeanneret-Gris), Maniére de penser l'urbanisme (Paris, 1946), pp. 44, 89, 19, 43,
50, 38. Professor Anthony Eardley generously called to my attention Le Corbusier's
quotations from Fourier and Considerant. The sketch of the “Unité dhabitation,” the
idea for which goes back to 1922, is on p. 122. Le Corbusier referred specifically to
Fourier again, here with reference to Fourier’s prophecy of water piped into houses, in
his publication, L’Unité d’habitation de Marseille (Souillac, 1950). The “Unité
dhabitation” also reflects the influence of Godin’s Familistére at Guise and Borie’s
proposals for “aerodomes,” which themselves had been affected by Fourierism. The
important role played by Fourier’s theories in Le Corbusier's ideological formation is
mentioned without specific reference by Frangoise Choay, Le Corbusier (New York,
1960), p. 19, and much more specifically in the important article by Peter Serenyi, “Le
Corbusier, Fourier, and the Monastery of Ema,” Art Bulletin, Vol. 49 (Dec. 1967), pp.
277-286. Serenyi points out (p. 283) that Le Corbusier had early fused two traditions
of communal living, monasticism and Fourierism, which, although different in nature,
have much in common. See also Anthony Vidler, “The Idea of Unity and Le Cor-
busier’s Urban Form,” Architects’ Year Book XII (London, 1968), pp. 225-237.
38. Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Au service de lesprit (Paris, 1937), p. 4; cited by
Caute, op. cit., p. 27.
39. “Intellectuals and Communism,” an unsigned review of Caute, Communism
and the French Intellectuals, in the (London) Times Literary Supplement, Oct. 22,
1964, p. 2.
40. See Breton’s Entretiens, p. 133.
41. Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera (New York, 1963), p.
1112, note:
Wome loc eits
43. Duclos, of. cit., p. 7.
780 / NOTES Pages 318-332

44. Ibid., p. 13.

ASelbid spe lye
6. Ibid., p. 35. :
had
- He rained out, loc. cit., that a similar call for unity against fascism
by
already been put forth earlier in 1938 in the Manifesto of the Thirteen, issued
thirteen leading French intellectuals representing a wide vanety of tendencies and
religious beliefs. ;
48. “Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art,” Partisan Review, Vol. 6 (Fall
1938), pp. 49-53.
49. A. Rossi (pseud. of Angelo Tasca), Les Communistes francais pendant la
Dréle de Guerre (Paris, 1951), p. 31.
50. Ibid., p. 330. Caute, op. cit., p. 146, points out that the French communists
have made strenuous efforts to deny all this. The relevant numbers of L’Humanité have
even been abstracted from the Bibliotheque nationale.
51. Two drawings with these subjects, in a style rather like that of Gavarni, until
quite recently were in the collection of Victor Maria d’Imbert in Barcelona, but have
since been sold: see Phoebe Pool, “Sources and Background of Picasso’s Art, 1900-6,”
Burlington Magazine, Vol. 101 (May 1959), p. 178. For a more detailed study of
Picasso’s early life, see Sir Anthony Blunt and Phoebe Pool, Picasso; The Formative
Years (London [also New York] 1962), in which the drawing of an anarchist meeting
(our Fig. 45), made by Picasso when the artist was only sixteen years old, is reproduced
as Fig. 60.
Two recent biographies in English are Cecily Mackworth, Guillaume Apolli-
naire and the Cubist Life (New York, 1961), and Francis Steegmuller, Apollinaire; Poet
Among the Painters (New York, 1963), both partly based on Marcel Adéma, Guillaume
Apollinaire, le mal-aimé (Paris,1952). ‘
53. Golberg, as mentioned at the end of the previous chapter, was connected with
the Abbaye de Créteil group, and was a prophet of cubism.
54. Quoted in Joll, op. cit., p. 234, from Yvonne Turin, L’Education et l’école en
Espagne de 1874 d 1902 (Paris, 1959), p. 315.
55. Mackworth, op. cit., p. 224.
56. Ibid., p. 220.
57. Interview with Christian Zervos, quoted in Robert Goldwater and Marco
Treves, eds., Artists on Art (New York, 1945), p. 420.
58. Quoted by John Canaday, New York Times, May 1, 1962, p. 11.
59. New Masses, Vol. 53 (Oct. 24, 1944), p. 11, under the heading, “Why I
Became a Communist.” The interview, here slightly abridged, was published in
L’Humanité, Oct. 29-30, 1944, in full.
60. On Pignon, see especially the references and bibliography in Caute, op. cit.,
passim, also Peter Selz, “Younger French Painters of Today,” College Art Journal, Vol.
11, No. 1 (1951), p.15.
61. Selz, op. cit., p. 14, has seen in his work the influence of Picasso (in structural
form), of Gromaire (in solid stylization), and Matisse (in chromatic quality), combined
with that of Villon (construction with light) and Rouault (expressive sincerity).
62. On Fougeron’s life and artistic career, see especially the references to him and
bibliography in Caute, op. cit., passim. Also see André Fougeron, the catalog of an
exhibition of his works held in East Berlin at the Neue Berliner Galerie in August-Sep-
tember 1967, and then in Weimar and Dresden, under the auspices of the Verband
bildender Kiinstler Deutschlands. I am indebted to Mr. Fougeron for a copy of this.
Later, the exhibition was displayed at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Her-
mitage in Leningrad.
63. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Matisse; His Art and His Public (New York, 1951), p.
280. Léger, who had visited the United States briefly in the 1930’s to paint a
never-completed French Line mural, returned for the years 1941 to 1946, living mainly
in New York. In the early 1940’s, he taught at Mills College and Yale.
64. Fernand Léger, “Couleur dans le monde,”’ Europe, May 15, 1938, p. 112.
65. See his statement in L’Humanité, June 16, 1951; quoted by Caute, op. cit., p.
344.
66. Roger Garaudy, quoted in L’Humanité, June 29, 1945: see Caute, op. cit., pp.
Pages 332-347 orace nis
36-37. Garaudy remained a spokesman for the party until 1968. Then, after the Soviet
invasion of Czechoslovakia, he was severely criticized by the party for having supported
the abortive attempts at liberalization made by the Czechoslovak communist regime. In
1968, also, Garaudy’s Pour un réalisme du XX° siecle; Dialogue posthume avec Fernand
Léger, was published at Paris.
67. Andrei A. Zhdanov, The International Situation (London, 1947), p. 18; see
Caute, op. cit., p. 167.
68. Le Monde, Apr. 24, 1952, p. 1.
69. La Nouvelle critique is distributed by the communist publishing house,
Editions sociales.
70. For adverse criticism of these pictures see Selz, op. cit., p. 15.
71. See, for instance, his articles, “Le Peintre 4 son créneau,” La Nouvelle critique,
Dec. 1948, pp. 96-98, and “Critique et autocritique,” Arts de France, Nos. 27-28
(1950), pp. 30-70. In connection with the latter, he was referred to as a member of
the French Communist Party.
72. See J. Gaucheron, “Entretien avec Boris Taslitzky,” Arts de France, Nos.
29-30 (1950), pp. 36-73. Four years earlier, Arts de France had published another atti-
cle highly favorable to Taslitzky, Henri Mougin’s “Boris Taslitzky ou les Jeudis des
Enfants d’Ivry,” ibid., No. 4 (Mar. 1946), pp. 30-39.
73. Caute, op. cit., p. 341.
Aw ILOG. Cit
75. L’Humanité, Oct. 6, 1949; and Caute, of. cit., p. 342. Taslitzky has continued
to hold similar beliefs: see his essay “Mon atelier,” Europe, Sept.-Oct. 1965,
illustrated by several of his recent pen drawings.
76. The two pictures in question were Gérard Singer’s February 14, [1950] at
Nice, which showed a huge case containing part of a military rocket being thrown off
the dock at Nice by angry workers, and Ordavazt Berberian’s Guardians of Peace, a
highly hostile depiction of the police of Paris. For accounts of the removal of the seven
paintings, see L’Humanité, Nov. 7, 1951; Le Monde, Nov. 8, 1951, p. 6; and Caute,
op. cit., p. 338.
77. For the story of Picasso’s “Dove,” see especially Janet Flanner, Men and
Monuments (New York, 1957), pp. 200-201.
78. For information on Picasso’s various posters for the peace congresses, | am
indebted to Dr. Bernhard Geiser. For reproductions of the doves, see Fernand Mourlot,
Art in Posters; The Complete Original Posters of Braque, Chagall, Dufy, Léger,
Matisse, Miré [and] Picasso (Monte Carlo, 1959). Also see Fernand Mourlot, Picasso
lithographe, Vols. 1-3 (Paris, 1949-1956); Joseph K. Foster, The Posters of Picasso
(New York, 1964); and Georges Bloch, Pablo Picasso; Catalogue de I’ceuvre gravé et
lithographié, 1904-1967 (Berne, 1968).
79. New Times, No. 49 (Dec. 1952), Pp. 3.
80. See Aline B. Louchheim, “Propaganda and Picasso,’ New York Times, May
17, 1953, Section 6, p. 14.
81. See New York Times, July 25, 1953, p. 2, and July 26, 1953, p. 3 (with
illustration).
82. For these articles, see Les Lettres frangaises, Jan. 24, 1952, through the
undated issue for April 24-30, 1952. Although the last article is numbered XIV, the
series jumps from VII, issue of Mar. 13, 1952, to IX, in the following issue of Mar.
20-27, 1952.
83. This article, subtitled “Introduction a la confession d’un peintre,” was pub-
lished in Les Lettres frangaises, Mar. 20-27, 1952, p. 8, as No. IX (actually No. VIII)
in the series. .
84. Caute, op. cit., pp. 339-340, referring to the (London) Daily Telegraph,
Apt. 25, 1952. ;
85. The other artists commissioned to do work for Assy included Bonnard,
Brianchon, Bercot, Chagall, Matisse, and Germaine Richier. Another famous religious
commission by Léger consisted of windows for the church at Roquencourt.
86. See William S. Rubin, Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy (New
York, 1962), and the review of that book in the (London) Times Literary Supplement,
Apr. 27, 1961, p. 276.
732m / NOTES Pages 349-362

87. New York Times, Mar. 19, 1953, P- 13.

88. Les Lettres francaises, Mar. 19-26, 1953, Pp. 1. ,
89. New York Times, Mar. 19, 1953, p. 13. Later, Picasso ‘denied that he had said
“So much the worse.”
90. New York Times, Mar. 20, 1950, p. 8, quoting from Le Monde.
91. Les Lettres francaises, Mar. 19-26, 1953, P- 1.
92. Les Lettres frangaises, Apt. 2-9, 1953, p- 9, quoted by Genét (Janet Flanner),
“Letter from Paris,’ New Yorker, Vol. 29 (May 2, 1953), p- 63.
93. Genét (Flanner), op. cit., p. 62.
94. Caute, op. cit., p. 339. According to L’Humanité, May 14, 1953, other artists
exhibiting included Bauquier, Karl Longuet, Gimond, Mercier, Rival, Chevalier, Gil
Mittelberg, Roc, Weill, Frangoise Salmon, Mireille Miailhe, Odette Elina, and Made-
leine Guiberteau. The exhibition was held at the Maison des métallurgistes in Paris. .
95. New York Times, June 29, 1958, p. 21.
96. See Fougeron’s attempted rejection of this charge in his article, “Sur la
peinture,” La Nouvelle critique, May 1954, p. 180. In 1947, Aragon had written a
foreword to a volume of Fougeron’s drawings published by Les Treize épis.
97. Quoted, without reference, in Caute, op. cit., p. 332.
98. New York Times, Mar. 28, 1955, p. 27.
99. This is entitled, in the American translation, Picasso Plain; An Intimate
Portrait (New York, 1963).
100. Genét (Janet Flanner), “Letter from Paris,” New Yorker, Vol. 32 (Dec. 1,
1956), p. 236.
101. New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 22, 1956, p. 12; and New Yorker, Vol. 32
(Dec. 1, 1956), loc. cit.
102. David Douglas Duncan, The Private World of Pablo Picasso (New York,
1958), p. 63.
103. New York Herald Tribune, Dec. 1, 1956, p. 3.
104. Time, Vol. 70 (July 8, 1957), p. 15.
105. Mainstream, Vol. 12 (Oct. 1959), p. 4. Aragon was referring to socialist
realism in literature.
106. Ibid., p. 19.
107. Caute, op. cit., p. 332.
108. For this article (in Russian) see Iskusstvo, No. 9 (1958), pp. 13-18.
109. Francis Jourdain, Marquet (Paris, 1959), p. 37.
110. Ehrenburg, Eve of War 1933-1941, p. 250. Marquet said this to Ehrenburg
in 1946, the year before he died.
111. Jourdain, op. cit., p. 37.
112. For the early history of the French New Left, see, e.g., Victor A. Velen,
“The New Left in France,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 40 (Oct. 1961), pp. 70-85, and
Charles A. Micaud, Communism and the French Left (London, 1963), pp. 155-176,
DA AST.
113. The dissident socialists were the members of the Parti socialiste autonome
which Mendes-France and his followers had joined in September 1959. The dissident
communists had left the Communist Party in July 1959, and had called themselves the
Tribune du communisme.
114. New York Times, Sept. 29, 1960, p. 1. See also Joseph Bar
Paris (New York, 1966), pp. shone abe is plein 8)
115. “En 1960, selon vous, d quoi servez-vous?”
116. Quoted by Huelsenbeck in Verkauf, ed., op: cit., p- 50. Recent books on
Sartre’s relation to Marxism are Wilfred Desan, The Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre
(Garden City, N.Y., 1965), and Walter Odajnyk, Marxism and Existentialism (Garden
City, N.Y., 1965). See also the discussion of Sartre’s ideas about art in the unsigned
article, “Jean-Paul Sartre, Without Nobel or Lenin,” (London) Times Literary Supple-
ment, Nov. 5, 1964, pp. 1-2, and in Sartre’s Essays in Aesthetics, selected and translated
by Wade Baskin (New York, 1963). Raymond Aron, Marxism and the Existentialists
(New York, 1969), published while this book was on press, is especially illuminating.
117. On Fanon, see W. Thompson, “Frantz Fanon,’ Marxism Today, Vol. 12
(Aug. 1968), pp. 245-251, and J. E. Siegel, “On Frantz Fanon,” American Scholar
Vol. 38 (Winter 1968-69), pp. 84-96. Also see two articles, published while this book
Pages 362-375 MOTES (1733

was on press, in the Marxist Monthly Review, Vol. 21 (May 1969), under the general
heading, Frantz Fanon; Evolution of a Revolutionary.” These are: Peter Geismar,
A Biographical Sketch,” pp. 22-30, and Peter Worsley, “Revolutionary Theories,”
pp. 30-49. Geismar is preparing a full-length biography.
118. In the latter part of 1965, the party itself was claiming to have 420,000
members: see New York Times, Sept. 12, 1965, p. 27. However, this figure was
apparently a gross exaggeration.
119. Quoted in Newsweek, Feb. 28, 1966, p. 44.
120. What Brezhnev said was: “we are invariably guided by the principles of the
partisanship of art”; which, interpreted from Marxist-Leninist phraseology, simply meant
that in art as in politics the Soviet Communist Party line must still be the ultimate
measure of worth. See New York Times, Mar. 30, 1966, p. 14.
121. Quoted by William R. Byron, “Wacky Artist of Destruction,” Saturday
Evening Post, Vol. 235 (Apr. 21, 1962), p. 78.
122. Calvin Tomkins, “Beyond the Machine,” New Yorker, Feb. 10, 1962, p. 51;
also in Tomkins, The Bride @ the Bachelors (New York, 1965), p. 155.
123. Sam Hunter and others, Two Kinetic Sculptors; Nicolas Schéffer and Jean
Tinguely, Jewish Museum (New York, 1965-1966), pp. 10-11.
124. The one book on Vasarely is Plastic Arts of the 20th Century, intro. by
Marcel Joray; texts by Victor Vasarely; tr. by Haakon Chevalier (Neuchatel, Switzer-
land, 1966). The book deals only with Vasarely’s work since 1947.
125. See “Vasarely, the Pop of Op,” Réalités, No. 176 (July 1965), p. 66; Joray
and Vasarely, op. cit., p. 64; Aldo Pellegrini, New Tendencies in Art (New York,
1966), p. 169.
126. “Vasarely, the Pop of Op,” p. 68; and Joray and Vasarely, op. cit., p. 162.
127. Others regarded as predecessors are Fontana, Lippold, and Bury: see
L’Instabilité; Recherches visuelles de Garcia Rossi, Le Parc, Morellet, Sobrino, Stein,
Yyvaral—Groupe de recherche d'art visuel (Paris, n.d.), unpaged. Garcia Rossi, Le Parc,
and Sobrino are all Argentinians.
128. Ibid.
129. On the relation of Op Art to Pop Art, see especially the important article by
Luis Felipe Noé, “In Pop Society the Avant-Garde Is Not Found in the Art Galleries,”
Mirador, Vol. 1 (Dec. 1966), pp. 3 and 8. I am indebted to Harold Rosenberg for a
copy of this.
130. Me&trovié was stimulated and aided by a painter from Brazil, a Negro named
Almir Mavignier, who from 1953 to 1958 had studied at the Hochschule fiir Gestaltung
in Ulm, Germany, which had developed the tradition of the Bauhaus since it opened in
1953-1954 under its first director, Max Bill. Thus, like Vasarely the New Tendency has
links with the Bauhaus point of view.
In the exhibition of 1961 at Zagreb were assembled works by some thirty different
artists from many different countries, many of whom, Mr. MeStrovié has told me in
conversation, until then had not known of the existence of other artists working along
indebted
the same lines. For information about the New Tendency movement I am also
sm;
to Douglas MacAgy. On the movement, see especially George Rickey, Constructivi
Origins and Evolution (New York, 1967), pp. 68 ff.
131. See the catalog, Nova tendencija 3 (Zagreb, 1965). It should be noted that
with this exhibition the title “New Tendency” in the singular replaced the formerto
plural. As the catalog states (on p. 4), this change was made “because of aspiration to
ideological concentration and [also] to a common intention and end.” I am indebted of
history
Matko Me%trovié for a copy of the catalog, which includes (pp. 27-36) a
the movement from 1959 to 1964, by Manfredo Massironi.
132. He then exhibited two works, one of which has been bought by the Town
Gallery of Zagreb. Le Parc does not call his works paintings but “recherches,” because
he aims for a world where science and art meet.
133. See the issues of the (London) Times Literary Supplement for August 6 and
point had already been
September 3, 1964, entitled “The Changing Guard.” The same associate
then an
made, apparently for the first time anywhere, by William C. Seitz, ng article, “The
curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in his illuminati
of the Avant-Garde,” Vol. 142 (Sept 1,
published in Vogue,
Rise and Dissolution
1963), pp. 182 ff.
 Pages 376-389
784 / NOTES
Flag/Black Flag; French
134. See Patrick Seale and Maurine McConville, Red
Reyolution, 1968 (New York, 1968). :
1968), p. 42.
135. Simonne Gauthier, “Picasso,” Look, Vol. 32 (Dec. 10,
136. Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 8, 1968, p. 2.
of De Gaulle
137. Presumably this would remain true despite the resignation was in press,
in the spring of 1969, while this book
from the Presidency of France a proposal
after a referendum he had unnecessarily insisted upon (and which included e, with the
for some regional decentra lization ) was voted down by the French electorat
ensuing
Communist Party playing an important role in De Gaulle’s defeat. For in the u
election, he was succeeded, for a term of seven years, by a Gaullist, Georges Pompidoop-
who was elected when the communists refused to participate and support his
— e less
ponent, apparently because the Soviet Union favored Pompidou as the candidat
sympathetic to NATO and the United States.

Part III. Radicalism, Marxism, and the Theory and Practice of Art in
England

CHAPTER 7

1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, as translated in

Emile Burns, ed., A Handbook of Marxism (New York, 1935), p. 55.
2. James Mill criticized, at Owen’s request, the manuscript of Owen’s A New View
of Society before it was published in 1813-1814. Later, Owen began to oppose the
Utilitarians.
3. Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism (Boston, 1955), p. 6.
4. See Helene Rosenau, The Ideal City (London, 1959), pp. 54, 121, 131.
Bentham’s proposal, originally set forth in letters from Russia in 1787, was first
published under the title Panopticon; or, The Inspection-House (Dublin and London,
1791), without the intended plates which had been destroyed in a fire at the
printers—though a copy of them was later discovered.
5. This was mentioned in a footnote in the Introduction, with reference to
Edouard Dolléans’s preface to David O. Evans, Le Socialisme romantique; Pierre Leroux
et ses contemporaines (Paris, 1948), pp. 12, 26-27. Dolléans in this connection ascribed
to Pierre Leroux the invention of the term “socialisme” in 1833 or 1834, but it had
already been used in France in 1831, as noted in the Introduction.
6. Second Address, Aug. 21, 1817, in The Life of Robert Owen, Written by
Himself, 2 vols. (London, 1857-1858), Vol. 1, A., Appendix 1 (No. 6), p. 111.
7. Fourth Letter, Sept. 6, 1817, in ibid., Vol. 1, A., Appendix 1 (No. 7), p. 124:
8. See the extracts from Harding’s Journal for August.11-12, 1824, published in
Margaret E. White, ed., A Sketch of Chester Harding, Artist; Drawn by His Own
Hand, New edition with annotations by his grandson, W. P. G. Harding (Boston and
New York, 1929), pp. 86 and 87.
9. See Francis O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York, 1941), p. 7.
10. George Woodcock, Anarchism (Cleveland and New York, 1962), p. 75. On
Godwin, see also the same author’s William Godwin (London, 1946).
11. William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice, F.
E. L. Priestley, ed., 3 vols. (Toronto, 1946), Vol. 2, p. 440.
12. Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 504.
13. Quoted, without specific reference, in Woodcock, William Godwin, p. 58.
oe id See, e.g., Fuseli Studies (London, 1956), by the Marxist art historian Frederick
ntal.
15. For the story of Pantisocracy, consult Mark Holloway, Heavens on Earth
(London, 1951), pp. 83-87. For the political views of Coleridge, Southey, and the
other English romantic writers, see Crane Brinton, The Political Ideas of the English
Romanticists (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1966; but first published 1926). Also, see Ronald W.
Harris, Romanticism and the Social Order, 1780-1830 (London, 1968). This, which
Pages 389-403 NOTES / 785
came to my attention after my own book had gone to press, discusses various artists and
writers mentioned herein.
16. They became disenchanted with the French Revolution in the winter of
1797-1798 after the French Republicans had joined Bonaparte in purging the French
government, and had participated in breaking up the Venetian Republic by the Treaty
of Campo Formio.
17. See Charles E. Raven, Christian Socialism, 1848-1854 (London, 1920), p. 48.
For the contributions of Owen to early town planning, see Leonard Benevolo, The
Origins of Modern Town Planning (London, 1967).
: 18. First Letter, July 25, 1817, in Owen, Life, Vol. 1, A., Appendix 1 (No. 2),
p- 69.
19. Entry in Harding’s Journal for August 14, 1824, as published in White, ed.,
op. cit., p. 88.
20. Charles Fourier, Le Nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire, in his Cuvres
completes, 2nd ed., Vol. 6 (Paris, 1845), p. 123. The most recent book on New Har-
mony is William E. Wilson, The Story of New Harmony (Bloomington, Ind., 1964).
21. “Report to the County of Lanark” (1820), in Owen, Life, Vol. 1, A,,
Appendix 5, p. 278 and p. 262.
22. For these and other utopian communities in Britain, see especially Walter H.
G. Armytage, Heavens Below; Utopian Experiments in England, 1560-1960 (London,
1961). Also see John F. C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and
America (London, 1969), published while this book was in press. Harrison illustrates
the buildings planned for the communities of Orbiston and of Queenwood at Tytherly
as Figs. 21 and 22, opp. p. 164. He discusses Owenism and the arts on pp. 254-260.

CHAPTER 8

1. Francis E. Hyde, “Utilitarian Town Planning,” Town Planning Review, No. 19

(Summer 1947), pp. 155-156; cited by Walter Creese, The Search for Environment;
The Garden City: Before and After (New Haven and London, 1966), pp. 55-56.
2. For Mill’s developing interest in art as modifying his earlier Utilitarianism, see
the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (New York, 1924), and especially Mill’s letters
in Friedrich A. Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor; Their Correspondence and
Subsequent Marriage (London, 1951).
3. On the Luddites, see especially Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the Eng-
lish Working Class (London, 1963). ‘Thompson, then a leading figure of the New Left,
suggested connections between the machine-breakers and Despard’s conspiracy of 1802.
For the history of Chartism, see George D. H. Cole, Chartist Portraits (London, 1941);
also Mark Hovell, The Chartist Movement (Manchester, 1918); and Asa Briggs,
Chartist Studies (London, 1959).
4. The paper was renamed the Friend of the People the following month. Harney
resided in the United States from 1863 to 1878. On his paper, see the reprint, The Red
Republican © the Friend of the People [1850-1851], intro. by John Saville, 2 vols.
(London, 1966 [in fact 1967]).
5. Quoted in Julian Symons, Thomas Carlyle (London, 1952), p. 179.
6. Emery Neff, Carlyle and Mill (2nd ed., rev., New York, 1926), pp. 170-174.
Saint-Simon’s Nouveau Christianisme was, however, translated by James Elimalet Smith,
and published as New Christianity in 1834. vere
-
7. For Carlyle and the Saint-Simonians, see especially David B. Cofer, Saint-Simon
Shine,
ism in the Radicalism of Thomas Carlyle (College Station, Texas, 1931); Hill
Carlyle and the Saint-Simonians; The Concept of Historical Periodicity (Baltimore,
(London,
1941); and Richard K. P. Pankhurst, The Saint-Simonians, Mill and Carlyle
(Glencoe, Il.,
1957). Also see Friedrich A. Hayek, The Counter-Reyolution of Science
Ruskin
1952), pp. 157-158; Frederick W. Roe, The Social Philosophy of Carlyle and
1921), Pp. 43-44; Neff, op. cit., pp. 208-221; and David O. Evans,
(New York,
(Oxford, 1951), p. 21. Many of the writings of Carlyle,
Social Romanticism in France
his exposition
including such works as his Past and Present and Chartism, together with and
French Revolution,
of the Law of Progress in Sartor Resartus, his views about the
786 / NOTES Pages 403-416

his general philosophy of history not only paralleled, but to some degree seem to have
been influenced by Saint-Simonian doctrine. The remark of Ernst Cassirer, in his The
Myth of the State (New York, 1955), p- 277, that “attempts made in recent literature
to connect him [Carlyle] with St.-Simonism . . . are futile,” scarcely does full justice to
the facts. For others in England more influenced by Saint-Simomianism even than
Carlyle—notably William Thompson and James Elimalet Smith—see Walter H. G.
Armytage, Heavens Below; Utopian Experiments in England, 1560-1960 (London,
1961), especially p. 134 ff.
8. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Literature and Art (New York, 1947), pp- 117
and 126, from a review by Marx and Engels of Carlyle’s Latter Day Pamphlets (1850).
9. The O.E.D. gives as its earliest figurative use of “vanguard” Carlyle’s Sartor
Resartus (written in 1831, though not published until 1838), Vol. 1, p. in, where he
declared: “At length . . . Germany and Weissnichtwo were where they should be, in
the vanguard of the world.” The word “‘van’’ had been used earlier, but apparently not
“vanguard.”
10. Quoted, without reference, by Cassirer, op. cit., p. 287.
11. Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (London, 1899), Vol. 4, p.
189.
12. Francis O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York, 1941), p. 7, as
previously cited. For Coleridge and the organic analogy in literature, also see Meyer H.
Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp; Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New
York, 1953). For the same analogy in architecture, consult Donald D. Egbert, “The
Idea of Organic Expression and American Architecture,” in Stow Persons, ed., Evolu-
tionary Thought in America (New Haven, Conn., 1950), pp. 336-396.
13. George D. H. Cole, Socialist Thought; The Forerunners, 1789-1850 (New
York, 1953), p. 118. :
14. Max Beer, A History of British Socialism (London, 1920), Vol. 1, p. 137. For
Coleridge’s political ideas, see Carl Woodring, Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge
(Madison, Wis., 1961).
15. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State, in
Complete Works (New York, 1853), Vol. 6, p. 53.
16. Thomas Carlyle, “Corn Law Rhymes,” Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, Vol.
3, p. 160, in The Works of Thomas Carlyle (London, 1896-1899), Vol. 28. On the
attitude of Carlyle (and of Ruskin and Morris, among others) to the machine, and also
to the organic analogy, see Herbert L. Sussman, Victorians and the Machine (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1968).
17. Symons, op. cit., p. 241.
18. Diana Holman-Hunt, My Grandmothers and I (London, 1960), pp. 109-110.
19. Symons, op. cit., p. 241. :
20. For Carlyle’s statement about Wren’s churches, see Philip Henderson, William
Morris; His Life, Work and Friends (New York, 1967), p. 198; and for that about the
Crystal Palace see Symons, op. cit., p. 243.
21. Armytage, op. cit., p. 219. Armytage’s book is the fundamental source on
utopian socialism and other forms of utopian radicalism in England. Leonardo Benevolo,
The Origins of Modern Town Planning (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), is valuable for the
utopian sources of later planning.
22. David A. Wilson, Carlyle on Cromwell and Others (London and New York,
1925), p. 406. This is the third volume of a life of Carlyle.
_, 23. See also E. A. Sheppard, “The Happy Colony,” in Kurt von Meier et al.,
Visionary Architecture (unpaged), the catalog of an exhibition at Auckland City Art
Gallery, October 1962.
24. On Doherty, see Armytage, op. cit., pp. 184-195.
25. The French author of the essay was A. L. E. Transon.
26. See Armytage, op. cit., p. 186, where he cites Etzler’s The Paradise Within the
Reach of All Men (Pittsburgh, 1833), pp. 71-73.
27. For the history of such colonies in England, see Armytage, op. cit.
28. Christian Socialist, Vol. 1 (May 24, 1851), Pp. 234, signed “J. T.,” but quoted
by Charles E. Raven, Christian Socialism, 1848-1854 (London, 1920) p. 325, as by
Ludlow. For the most recent history of English Christian socialism see Tarben
Christensen, Origin and History of Christian Socialism, 1848-54 (Aarhus, 1962). For
Pages 416-424 NO Tres 97 757

Ludlow’s life, see N. C. Masterman, John Malcolm Ludlow (Cambridge, England,

1963). On later developments, see Peter d’A. Jones, The Christian Socialist Revival,
1877-1914 (Princeton, N.J., 1968).
29. Maurice referred to Owen’s ideas in his tract, Dialogue Between A. and B.,
Two Clergymen, on the Doctrine of Circumstances (London, 1850): see Raven, op.
cit., p. 157. According to Raven, p. 140, other leading Christian socialists had earlier
been prominent Owenites, notably the tailor Lloyd Jones. On Maurice’s theological
ideas, see Alec R. Vidler, F. D. Maurice and Company (London, 1966).
30. John F. C. Harrison, A History of the Working Men’s College, 1854-1954
(London, 1954), pp. 25, 24, and 20.
’ 31. Richard Congreve, Essays; Political, Social and Religious (London, 1874), pp.
298-299.
32. Another man interested in the arts who frequently lectured at the College was
Ludlow’s friend F. C. Penrose, a noted architect and expert on ancient Athenian
architecture. Many prominent Pre-Raphaelite painters also taught there.
33. For Ruskin’s social doctrines in relation to those of Carlyle, see especially Roe,
op. cit.; also Neff, op. cit. For the interrelationships between Ruskin’s artistic and social
theories see especially John D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass; A Portrait of Ruskin’s
Genius (New York and London, 1961).
34. Viola Meynell, ed., Friends of a Lifetime; Letters to Sydney Carlyle Cockerell
(London, 1940), p. 82.
35. Mohandas K. Gandhi, Gandhi's Autobiography (Washington, 1948), p. 364.
36. The Stones of Venice, Vol. 2 (1853), in The Works of John Ruskin, Edward
T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, eds. (London and New York, 1903-1912), Vol.
10, pi2d2:
37. Preface (1859) to The Two Paths, in ibid., Vol. 16, p. 251.
38. Modern Painters, Vol. 3 (1856), in ibid., Vol. 5, p. 125.
39. Modern Painters, Vol. 1 (1843), in ibid., Vol. 3, p. 91.
40. Earlier, in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), the Venetian Gothic was
the third of four medieval styles recommended by Ruskin. The others were the Pisan
Romanesque, the early Gothic of the western Italian Republics, and the English earliest
decorated Gothic, with the last called “the most natural, perhaps the safest choice.’ See
The Seven Lamps of Architecture in The Works of John Ruskin, Cook and Wedder-
burn, eds., Vol. 8 (1903), p. 258.
41. Lectures on Architecture and Painting (delivered 1853, published 1854), in
ibid., Vol. 12, p. 84.
42. Quoted in Rosenberg, op. cit., p. 61.
43. For such attacks on Ruskin, though dealing only with those in the United
States, see Roger B. Stein, Art, Nature, and Morality; John Ruskin and Aesthetic
Controversy in America (Ph.D. thesis in American Civilization, Harvard University,
June 1960), especially pp. 194 and 233-235; see also Stein’s John Ruskin and Aesthetic
Thought in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), especially pp. 186-223.
44. Today the collection is stored at Sheffield in the care of the municipal director
the St.
of museums and art galleries: see Rosenberg, op. cit., p. 197, note 8. On
George’s Guild also see Armytage, op. cit., pp. 289-304.
45. Fors Clavigera, Letter 43 (July 1874), in The Works of John Ruskin, Vol. 28,
of news
p. 109. Letters 6 and 7 in Volume 27 were especially written under the impact that
however, his
from the Commune. In Letter 43, Vol. 28, p. 110, Ruskin indicated,
for the French workers of the Commune received a heavy blow when they
sympathy
burned the part of the Louvre known as the Tuileries. sr
46. Letter 7 in ibid., Vol. 27, p. 1 16.
with an incorrect reference, by Edward P. Thompson, William
47. Quoted,
Morris; Romantic to Revolutionary (London, 1955), p. 312.
48. Meynell, ed., op. cit., p. 26.
49. Ibid., pp. 60 and 26. : ;
Morris, On Art and
50. “How I Became a Socialist” (1884), in William
277-
Socialism, Holbrook Jackson, ed. (London, 1947), P-
op. cit., and
51. Morris’s social ideas are especially well treated in E. P. Thompson, etc
in Lloyd E. Grey, William Morris; Prophet of England's New Order (London,
The Work of William Morris (London,
1949); his artistic ideas in Paul Thompson,
788 / NOTES Pages 424-439

The best
1960), and Ray Watkinson, William Morris as Designer (New York, 1967).
recent biography is Henderson’s previously cited William Morris.
52. Grey, op. cit., p. 172.
53. Helen Rossetti Angeli, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London, 1949), p. 117.
54. Quoted by E. P. Thompson, op. cit., p. 300. However, Thompson wrongly says
(note 4) that this statement comes from Morris’s “How I Became a Socialist,
originally published in Justice, June 16, 1894, p.6.
55. Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Boston and New York, 1899),
r oO.
: — Quoted, without reference, in David Caute, The Left in Europe Since 1789
(New York and Toronto, 1966), p. 234. ;
57. Gabriel A. Almond, The Appeals of Communism (Princeton, NJ., 1954), pp-
234-235.
- ate The change cost Morris his friendship with Madox Brown, Rossetti, and
Marshall. ;
59. “How I Became a Socialist” (1894), in Morris, On Art and Socialism, p. 276.
60. Ibid., pp. 275-276.
61. Halvdan Koht, The Life of Ibsen (New York, 1931), Vol. 2, pp. 240 and 84.
62. Ibsen, however, was eager to differentiate himself from Zola, of whom he said:
“Zola goes down into the sewer to take a bath; I, in order to cleanse it.” See ibid., Vol.
2 pHe73.
4 63. E. P. Thompson, op. cit., p. 429.
64. Ibid., p. 437. On the Avelings, see Chushichi Tsuzuki, Eleanor Marx, 1855—
1898 (Oxford, 1967).
65. Ernest Belfort Bax, Reminiscences and Reflections of a Mid and Late Vic-
torian (New York, 1920), p. 119.
66. “How I Became a Socialist,” Justice, June 9, 1894, p. 6. The interview was
signed ““H. Q.”’ It was published four years after Bax had returned to membership in
the Social Democratic Federation, from which, with Morris, he had resigned in 1884.
67. Letter of September 17, 1886, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Letters to
Americans, 1848-1895 (New York, 1953), p. 162.
68. Letter of April 29, 1886, in ibid., p. 156.
69. Morris was to deliver the oration at Stepniak’s funeral in 1895.
70. Temple Artisan, Vol. 7 (Jan. 1907), p. 158, quoted in Robert V. Hine,
California's Utopian Colonies (San Marino, Calif., 1950), p. 55.
71. For Kropotkin’s friendships with artists and writers in England, see George
Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovi¢, The Anarchist Prince; A Biographical Study of Peter
Kropotkin (London and New York, 1950), especially pp. 223-225.
72. Edward Carpenter, My Days and Dreams (London, 1916), p. 64.
73. At a meeting of the Socialist League group in Glasgow, March 25, 1888, in
answer to a question Morris declared: “I call myself a revolutionary Socialist because I
aim at a complete revolution in social conditions. I do not aim at reforming the present
system but at abolishing it.” Also, “what I aim at is Socialism or Communism, not
Anarchism.” See J. Bruce Glasier, William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist
Movement (London, 1921), p. 63.
ide OCMCiE:
75. Morris, On Art and Socialism, p. 327, also p. 331.
76. For the history of Fabianism, see especially Edward R. Pease, The History of
the Fabian Society (2nd ed., London, 1925); Margaret Cole, The Story of Fabian
Socialism (Stanford, Calif., 1962); Anne Fremantle, This Little Band of Prophets; The
British Fabians (New York, 1960); and Armytage, op. cit., Pp. 327 ff.
77. Quoted in E. P. Thompson, op. cit., p. 386. In 1884 Shaw, who became a
Fabian in September of that year, amended the first Fabian tract, Why Are the Many
Poor?, written by W. L. Phillips, and by himself wrote the second one, A Manifesto.
78. E. P. Thompson, op. cit., p. 385, note 4, quoting from The Fabian Society
.. . , by G. Bernard Shaw, Fabian Tract No. 41 (1892). Also see Doris L. Moore, E.
Nesbit (Philadelphia and New York, 1966), pp. 83-84. ‘
79. Of the chief early figures of Fabianism, Sidney Webb was a disciple of Mill,
Graham Wallas of Bentham, Sydney Olivier of Comte, and Shaw largely of Henry
George. William Clarke was a disciple of Mazzini, but was influenced also by Emerson.
Pages 439-447 orm 80
Thoreau, and Brook Farm, while Hubert Bland was stimulated by Coleridge and
Bakunin. The influence of Marx was also felt somewhat. It was Shaw who persuaded
Webb and Olivier to join the Fabian Society when it was formed in 1884.
80. George Lichtheim, Marxism; An Historical and Critical Study (London,
1961), p. 211.
81. See Shaw in Pease, op. cit., p. 279; also M. Cole, of. cit., p. 61.
82. For a reproduction of this, see M. Cole, op. cit., opposite p. 16. Crane, who
also drew the title piece for the small magazine, Fabian News, resigned from the Fabian
Society in early 1900 because of his opposition to the Boer War.
83. When the first majority Labour government was swept into power in 1945,
Prime Minister Clement Attlee and half his cabinet were Fabians.
84. Rosenberg, op. cit., p. 131; also Clement R. Attlee, As It Happened (London,
1954), p. 21, and his The Labour Party in Perspective (London, 1937), Pp. 39.
85. Letter to Sir Sydney Cockerell, Nov. 23, 1953, in Viola Meynell, ed., The Best
of Friends; Further Letters to Sydney Carlyle Cockerell (London, 1956), p. 227.
86. Quoted, without reference, in E. P. Thompson, op. cit., p. 761.
87. “The Aims of Art” (1887), in Morris, On Art and Socialism, p. 89.
88. “The Revival of Architecture” (1888), in The Collected Works of William
Morris (London, etc., 1910-1915), Vol. 22, p. 321.
89. For example Morris applied Carlyle’s phrase “‘cheap and nasty” to the Indian
carpets turned out by machine in Indian jails under the auspices of the Bnitish
government: see ‘““The Art of the People’ (1879), in Morris, On Art and Socialism, pp.
45-46.
go. “Art and Industry in the Fourteenth Century” (1890), in The Collected
Works of William Mortis, Vol. 22, p. 388.
91. “The Aims of Art” (1887), in Morris, On Art and Socialism, p. 93.
92. “Art Under Plutocracy” (1883), in ibid., p. 150.
93. Letter to Robert Thompson, July 24, 1884, in Philip Henderson, ed., The
Letters of William Morris to His Family and Friends (London, New York, Toronto,
1950), p. 206.
94. See especially the criticisms of Morris’s critical views in the excellent Marxian
biography of 1955 by E. P. Thompson, op. cit., particularly pp. 767-773.
95. See ibid., p. 766.
96. Commonweal, Vol. 4 (Aug. 25, 1888), p. 265.
97. May Morris, William Morris; Artist, Writer, Socialist (Oxford, 1936), Vol. 1,
5 BAB.
: “la For his biography see W. S. Meadmore, Lucien Pissarro (London, 1962).
99. E. P. Thompson, op. cit., p. 764.
100. Karl Kautsky, ‘Was will and kann die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung
leisten?” Neue Zeit (1896-1897, Band 1), pp. 213-218, 228-238; 260-271.
101. “Art and the Beauty of the Earth” (1881), in Morris, On Art and Socialism,
5 OEY
’ sie This view of the Middle Ages, which Morris shared with Ruskin and Carlyle,
was, of course, a somewhat romantic one. The noted medievalist G. G. Coulton has
written of his own astonishment at “how few medieval documents testify directly to the
artist’s love of his work.” Quoted, without reference, in Margaret R. Grennan, William
Morris; Medievalist and Revolutionary (New York, 1945), P. 73.
103. “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil” (1884), in The Collected Works of
William Morris, Vol. 23, p. 112. ee
104. “Art, Wealth, and Riches” (1883), in Morris, On Art and Socialism, p. 115.
105. E. P. Thompson, of. cit., p. 436, quoting from the Labour Prophet, Sept.
1895. s
106. According to Lewis Mumford, The Condition of Man (New York, 1944), p.
6. ef
‘ 107. “The Revival of Handicraft” (1888), in Moris, On Art and Socialism, p.

108. “Art and the Beauty of the Earth” (1881), in ibid., p. 165.
. . .
2k:

109. Ibid., p. 168. ws

110, “News from Nowhere,” in The Collected Works of William Morris, Vol.
16, p. 97.
790 / NOTES Pages 448-454

111, Kropotkin, op. cit., p. 119.

112. ioreds Hr erence by Helmut Lehmann-Haupt, Art Under a Dicta-
torship (New York, 1954), p. 11. ?
dase Wocwert. an
114. “The Socialist Ideal: I. Art” (1891), in The Collected Works of William
Morris, Vol. 23, p. 255. tates
115. “Art Under Plutocracy” (1863), in Morris, On Art and Socialism, p. 135.
116. William Morris and Emest Belfort Bax, Socialism; Its Growth and Outcome
(London, 1893), p. 21.
117. Quoted, without reference, by Lehmann-Haupt, op. cit., p. 13.
118. Grennan, op. cit., p. 145.
119. William Morris, Gothic Architecture (London, 1893), pp. 7, 68; and Walter
C. Behrendt, Modern Building (New York, 1937), p. 61.
120. The Morris chair was invented about 1866. Morris is said to have produced it
on the basis of a design by Philip Webb drawn up from sketches and a description by
Warington Taylor, manager of Morris and Company, who wrote that he had seen the
prototype of the chair, and that it was the work of an old carpenter in Sussex.
Confusion has arisen, however, because there was more than one type of Morris chair.
See Henderson, William Morris, p. 71; the New Yorker, Nov. 25, 1961, p. 43; also
Edgar Kaufman’s note on the Morris chair and its history in the Architectural Review,
Vol. 108 (Aug. 1950), pp. 127-129; and compare Watkinson, op. cit., Fig. 34.
Watkinson here illustrates the type of Morris chair that he says was described by
Warington Taylor: a light, black-painted rush-seated chair very different from what is
called a Mornis chair in the United States, i.e., Fig. 71 herein, taken from an illustration
to Kaufman’s note.
121. The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), in The Work of John Ruskin,
Vol. 8, p. 255.
122. The Stones of Venice, Vol. 3 (1853), in The Works of John Ruskin, Vol.
Tl, jo) Halted
Ses “The Arts and Crafts of Today” (1889), in Morris, On Art and Socialism, p.
AAG,
Teswel biden peas
125. “Architecture and History” (1884), in The Collected Works of William
Morris, Vol. 22, p. 301.
126. “The Aims of Art” (1887), in Morris, On Art and Socialism, p. 90. It
should be noted, however, that Morris apparently never regarded Red House as a really
satisfactory solution to his ideas, for he nowhere proclaimed Webb to be the great
architect of the day. See Nikolaus Pevsner, ‘William Morris and Architecture,”
Studies in Art, Architecture and Design, 2 vols. (London, 1968), Vol. 1, Panta:
Pevsner’s essay was originally published in 1957.
127. The original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was limited to seven members: James
Collinson, Holman Hunt, J. E. Millais, Dante Gabriel and William Michael Rossetti,
F. G. Stephens, and the sculptor Thomas Woolner. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Hunt, and
Millais were the founders. Among others eventually associated with the Brotherhood in
the later revival of it under the stimulation of Rossetti were Edward Burne-Jones, John
Brett, W. H. Deverell, Arthur Hughes, Arthur Boyd-Houghton, R. B. Martineau,
W. Bell Scott, Henry Wallis, and William Morris. Ford Madox Brown always had close
connections with the Pre-Raphaelites. For up-to-date material on the group, see especially
G. H. Fleming, Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (London, 1967), which
goes to 1854, and William E. Fredeman, Pre-Raphaelitism; A Bibliocritical Study
(Cambridge, Mass., 1965). Also see John Dixon Hunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Imagination,
1845-1900 (London, 1968), especially useful on the survival of Pre-Raphaelitism and
its relation to Symbolism.
_ 128. On the social radicalism of the Pre-Raphaelites, see E. P. Thompson, op.
cit., p. 89, and Fleming, op. cit., pp. 80-81. Fleming who understates the radicalism
of most of the Pre-Raphaelites, gives the two above quotations from Hunt on p. 80
and p. 85, note 2. :
129. Ford Madox Hueffer (later known as Ford Madox Ford), Ford Madox
Brown; A Record of His Life and Work (London, etc., 1896), p. 63; and a footnote
adds, “‘the name at that time was fairly familiar to the att world.” However,
Holman
Pages 454-459 NOES ¥/ e700
Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Vol. 1 (London, 1905),
p. 101, claimed that the name “Pre-Raphaelite” had been applied to him and Millais as
a joke in 1847, before the founding of the Brotherhood, by a group of fellow students
in the Royal Academy Schools who were amused by their objections to Raphael's
Transfiguration. Fleming, op. cit., pp. 75-76, believes that the most plausible explana-
tion of the origin of “Pre-Raphaelite” in the name of the Brotherhood is that it was
offered by Rossetti, and that Hunt, recalling its earlier use in the Academy, agreed that
they should be called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
130. On this group, see Keith Andrews, The Nazarenes (Oxford, 1964).
131. See Alf Bge, From Gothic Revival to Functional Form (Oslo, 1957), p. 42,
where Bge calls Dyce “the English “Nazarener.’ ” Dyce’s relations with the Nazarenes are
discussed in Andrews, op. cit., pp. 81-84. On Dyce’s career, see the catalog, Centenary
Exhibition of the Work of William Dyce, R.A. (1806-1864) (Aberdeen, 1964); see
also Winslow Ames, Prince Albert and Victorian Taste (London, 1967), passim. Dyce
is pethaps best known for his frescoes in the House of Lords and the Queen’s
Robing Room, Houses of Parliament, and in All Saints, Margaret Street, London.
132. Hueffer, op. cit., pp. 408-409. Later, Holman Hunt—who declared that “the
frank worship of Nature, kept in check by selection and directed by the spirit of
imaginative purpose” was the key to Pre-Raphaelitism—denied somewhat too categori-
cally that the movement had been begun either under the influence of Madox Brown or
Brown’s former pupil, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: see Hunt, op. cit., Vol. 2 (London,
1906), p. 451. As was indicated earlier, Hunt was unduly sensitive about statements
that might indicate that the real founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had been
Rossetti.
133. Hueffer, op. cit., p. 45.
134. David H. Dickason, The Daring Young Men; The Story of the American
Pre-Raphaelites (Bloomington, Ind., 1953), p. 84. Ruskin taught part of the elementary
and landscape work; Rossetti instructed the figure class.
135. Among the others were C. Lowes Dickinson, one of the founders of the
College, Thomas Woolner, Alexander Munro, and Valentine Prinsep: see Harnson,
op. cit., pp. 42 and 45. We shall see that Ford Madox Brown likewise taught there
and recorded the name of the College in his most famous painting.
136. Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York, 1931), Vol. 1, p. 165. Miss
Goldman first met the Rossetti sisters in 1895.
137. Robin Ironside, Pre-Raphaelite Painters (New York, 1948), p. 16. These
socialistic twinges had especially occurred when Madox Brown saw that symbol of
superfluity characteristic of the rich, the pastry-cook’s tray: see his own description of his
painting Work, in Hueffer, op. cit., p. 191.
138. Hueffer, op. cit., p. 401.
139. Angeli, op. cit., p. 41.
140. On the Hogarth Club see Hueffer, op. cit., pp. 158-159, 161, 162, 182. The
Club lasted until late 1861.
141. The English Marxist Ray Watkinson (long art critic of the Daily Worker
under the pseudonym of Charles Morris, and in 1967 author of William Morris as
Designer), has written an excellent book on William Hogarth from a Marxist-Leninist
point of view which has been published in communist Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but
not in England. In it there is considerable matenal on the aims and activities of the
Hogarth Club. In 1962 an essentially Marxian biography of Hogarth by Frederick Antal
was published posthumously.
142. For the influence of Madox Brown on graphic art, I am especially indebted
to an essay by the Marxian critic John Berger on the contemporary British graphic artist
and former leftist, Paul Hogarth, for a book on Hogarth published in Czech at Prague
in 1955. Mr. Hogarth (a collateral descendant of William Hogarth) has kindly
Hogarth’s own
supplied me with a copy of Berger’s typescript in English. Also see Paul
(1961), pp. 76—
important article, “The Artist as Reporter,” Penrose Annual, Vol. 55
77. This article (pp. 71-87) was expanded into a book with the same title, published
ie
at London and New York in 1967.
in
143. See An Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Victorian Artists pp.
Ottawa (1965),
England, Introduction by Allen Staley, National Gallery of Canada,
Green,
10 and 65. Fildes’s painting, now owned by Royal Holloway College, Englefield
702 °/ NOTES Pages 459-471

Surrey, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1874 with a quotation from Dickens. For
the artists of the Graphic, see Paul Hogarth’s book cited above, The Artist as Reporter,
pp. 33 ff. On Fildes, see the biography by his son L. V. Fildes, Luke Fildes, R.A.
(London, 1968). é .
144. Quoted in Ironside, op. cit., p. 23. According to Hueffer, op. cit., p. 195, the
painting may have been directly suggested by Carlyle’s Past and Present, a copy of
which was owned by Madox Brown.
145. For the latter slogan, see Lona M. Packer, Christina Rossetti (Berkeley and
Los Angeles, 1963), p. 30.
146. Hueffer, op. cit., pp. 415-416.
147. Walter Crane, Ideals in Art (London, 1905), p. 14; cited by Dickason, op.
Cit, pe 210,
sore For the “art for art’s sake’ movement in England, see especially Louise
Rosenblatt, L’Idée de l'art pour l’art dans la littérature anglaise pendant la période
victorienne (Paris, 1931); and Eugene M. Becker, Whistler and the Aesthetic Movement
(Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University, 1959).
149. Whistler’s brief interest in social and even religious-moral subjects is discussed
by Becker, op. cit., p. 62. Becker also mentions (p. 262, note 79) that much later, long
after Whistler had first turned to “art for art’s sake,” his disciple, Mortimer Menpes, had
stated: “Whistler had no Socialistic instincts. He was not by any means a Socialist. His
only excuse for the masses was that they were a blot of colour to be painted. . . . The
Master was a Tory. He did not quite know why; but, he said, it seemed to suggest
luxury, and painters, he maintained, should be surrounded with luxury.” (See Mortimer
Menpes, Whistler as I Knew Him [New York, 1904], p. 63.) Thus Whistler’s artistic
individualism had led him to declare himself a Tory, not because of any belief in Tory
doctrine, but because luxury was far more available to economic individualists of the
Right.
F 150. Allen Staley, “Painters of the Beautiful’; Lord Leighton, Whistler, Albert
Moore and Conder, catalog of an exhibition at Durlacher Bros., New York, Mar. 3
through Mar. 28, 1964, n.p.
151. Rosenblatt, op. cit., p. 13.
152. Graham Hough, The Last Romantics (London, 1949), pp. 46 and 42.
153. Rose F. Egan, “The Genesis of the Theory of ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ in Germany
and in England,” Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, Vol. 2 (July 1921) ?
p. 15. Thackeray was here clearly referring only to the art of literature.
sea) Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Blake; A Critical Essay (London,
1 Oe '
155. Wilde once wrote that the “love of art for art’s sake, is the point in which we
of the younger school have made a departure from the teaching of Mr. Ruskin. . .”:
see Oscar Wilde, Art and Decoration (London, 1920), pp. 120-121.
156. Quoted in the Architectural Review, Vol. 72 (Sept. 1932), p. 115.
157. See Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry, (Euvres completes—Stéphane Mal-
larmé (Paris, 1945), p. 1604. The two men met again when Whistler was taken by
Monet to see Mallarmé and discuss the idea of a French translation of “Ten O’Clock.”
From then on, Whistler and Mallarmé were great friends.
158. Ibid., p. 1603.
159. On Godwin, see Dudley Harbron, The Conscious Stone; The Life of Edward
William Godwin (London, 1949), and Bge, op. cit., pp. 128-131, 148; on Wilde’s house,
see also Robert Schmutzler, Art Nouveau (New York, 1962), p. 87. Further material on
Godwin is to found in Roger Manvell, Ellen Terry (New York, 1968), a biography of
the celebrated actress who was the mother of Godwin’s two illegitimate children, the
second of whom was the designer of abstract stage sets, [Edward] Gordon Craig. For
an illustration of Whistler’s The White House, consult Schmutzler, op. cit., Fig. 71
on
Pp. 79.
160. The Art Nouveau on the Continent is considered in some detail in Chapter
12 of this book. In regard to its English sources, however, it is worth noting here that
the influence of Oriental, especially Japanese, art on the Pre-Raphaelites is discussed
in an important, relatively early article on the origins of the Art Nouveau
Schmutzler, “The English Origins of Art Nouveau,” Architectural Review, Robert
Vol. 117,
(Feb. 1955), pp. 110 and 115. Among the recent English writers to credit
Mackmurdo
Pages 471-480 NOTES / 793

with being the immediate originator of the Art Nouveau style are Nikolaus Pevsner, in
an essay of 1962, and the anonymous author of a review article, “Art Nouveau,” (Lon-
don) Times Literary Supplement, Oct. 15, 1964, pp. 929-931. Pevsner—in the essay of
1962, “Architecture and the Applied Arts,” in Jean Cassou, Emile Langui, Nikolaus
Pevsner, The Sources of Modern Art (London, 1962), pp. 229-260—twice declares
(pp. 236 and 245) that Mackmurdo started the Art Nouveau with his Wren title
page of 1883. This is illustrated by Schmutzler, Art Nouveau, p. 111, as well as by
Pevsner. The author of the article in the Times Literary Supplement, however, states
(p. 930) that the first example of the Art Nouveau style was Mackmurdo’s chair of
1891. For an illustration of this, see Schmutzler, Art Nouveau, Fig. 297 on p. 290.
It should be noted here that Mackmurdo’s interest in music led him to collect
old musical instruments. As a consequence, the first session of early music played on
contemporary instruments held by Amold Dolmetsch took place in Mackmurdo’s house.
For Mackmurdo’s biography see Nikolaus Pevsner, “Pioneer Designer; Arthur H.
Mackmurdo,” Architectural Review, Vol. 83 (Mar. 1938), pp. 141-143. See also the
obituary notices in the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Vol. 49
(Apr. 1942), pp. 94-95, and the Architectural Review, Vol. 91 (May 1942), supple-
ment p. xxv. Frequent mentions of Mackmurdo and illustrations of some of his decora-
tive designs and furniture (but with no indication of the social ideas so important to
him) are to be found in Schmutzler, Art Nouveau, and in Stephan T’. Madsen, Sources
of Art Nouveau (New York, 1956), which has references to unpublished biographical
source material on p. 162.

CHAPTER 9

1. For an illustration of one of his paintings, dating from 1916, see Sir John
Rothenstein, British Art Since 1900 (London, 1962), Fig. 9.
2. Quoted in Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement; From William
Morris to Walter Gropius (London, 1936), pp. 27-28.
3. Walter H. G. Armytage, Heavens Below (London, 1961), p. 402.
4. The other contributors were the Marxists F. D. Klingender, A. L. Lloyd, and
Alick West, and the anarchist Herbert Read. The foreword was by the future-communist
sculptor Betty Rea. Gill, while always maintaining his Catholic beliefs, contributed to
the Marxist-Leninist Left Review, published from 1934 to 1938—in 1957, for so doing,
he was reproved by Archbishop Hinsley through his chaplain. His name appeared on the
cover along with those of noted communists. His association with the A.I.A. was also
deplored by ecclesiastical authorities, who regarded the A.I.A. as a communist-front
organization. See Robert Speaight, The Life of Eric Gill (London, 1966), passim; also
Walter Shewring, ed., Letters of Eric Gill (London, 1947), especially pp. 97, 307-309,
BOB
5. Gill in the New English Weekly, Nov. 15, 1934; quoted in Anne Fremantle,
This Little Band of Prophets; The British Fabians (New York, 1960), p. 170, and
Shewring, ed., op. cit., p. 311. Orage founded the Fabian Arts Group with his friend
Holbrook Jackson. . —
6. Augustus John, Finishing Touches (London, 1964), p. 149. John’s resignation
from the Royal Academy had been in protest against its rejection of Wyndham Lewis’s
portrait of T. S. Eliot.
7. We have noted that he said this at the International Congress of Writers for
of War 1933-1941
the Defense of Culture at Paris in 1935; see Ilya Ehrenburg, Eve
1967), pp.
(London, 1963), p. 72. Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, Vol. 1 (London,
410-424, contains one of the best balanced discussions of these figures of the Blooms-
and their ideas. Another important recent account is Quentin Bell,
bury group
Bell.
Bloomsbury (London, 1968), by the son of Clive and Vanessa
also Fabian
8. See Tract No. 242, Housing Principles (1935) by Ivor Thomas;
J. H. Martin, and No.
Research Pamphlet No. 19, The Housing Question (1934) by
172, The New Towns (1955) by Norman MacKenzie. The Search for
9. For an excellent historical summary of this see Walter L. Creese,
794 / NOTES Pages 480-488

Environment; The Garden City: Before and After (New Haven and London, 1966).
Also see Armytage, op. cit., p . 370-440.
10. aiiad a aventoken the term “garden city” from the name of AST
Stewart’s experimental town on Long Island, or during his years in America he may have
heard the term applied to Chicago, which in its early days was often called The
Garden City.” : .
11. Howard proposed to restrict each garden city to a maximum of 75,000 people:
see Ebenezer Howard, Tomorrow; A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (London, 1898), p.
22.
12. For a summary of this plan for Moscow, see Maurice F. Parkins, City Planning
in Soviet Russia (Chicago, 1953), pp. 31-47. After World War II, greenbelts were
included in the plans for rebuilding several other important Russian cities, among them
Stalingrad (in late 1961 renamed Volgograd).
13. See Creese, op. cit., pp. 13-60.
14. For a detailed study of the sources, of Howard’s ideas, see W. A. Eden,
“Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City Movement,” Town Planning Review (Sum-
mer 1947), pp. 123-143.
15. Sesame and Lilies (1865), in The Works of John Ruskin, Edward T. Cook
and Alexander Wedderbum, eds. (London and New York, 1903-1912), Vol. 18, pp.
183-184.
16. May Morris, William Morris; Artist, Writer, Socialist (Oxford, 1936), Vol. 2,
, WAS}.
; 17. Ibid., pp. 127-128.
18. Creese, op. cit., p. 158. Creese further emphasizes (pp. 244-245) the fact that
the buildings by Unwin at Hampstead were also affected by romantically picturesque
influences derived from German medieval architecture.
19. Ibid., p. 148.
20. Barry Parker, “Obit of Raymond Unwin,” R.I.B.A. Journal, July 15, 1940,
Pp. 209; cited by Creese, op. cit., p. 166.
21. The Art of Building a Home (London, 1901), p. iii, quoted by Creese, op.
Citvn Daze
22. The passage of these acts followed three reports—of the Barlow Commission in
1940 and of the Scott and Uthwatt committees in 1941-1942—which made a deep
impression, and resulted in the creation of a Ministry of Town and Country Planning in
1943. Although the major legislation was passed under a Labour government, the
Conservative government pressed even further with a Towns Development Act in 1952
which enables large cities to reduce their excessive population by arranging to help
suitable small towns enlarge themselves into newly planned towns of predetermined size.
The Conservatives, however, placed their reliance on local authorities rather than on
creating a new organization. Other New Towns Acts have been passed since.
23. For the widespread influence of Howard and Unwin, consult Creese, op. cit.;
also the preface by Frederic J. Osborn to his edition of Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities
of Tomorrow (London, 1946); Dugald Macfadyen, Sir Ebenezer Howard and the Town
Planning Movement (Manchester, England, 1933); and James Dahir, Communities for
Better Living (New York, 1950). For British evaluations of the New Towns, see, among
others, Lord (William Henry) Beveridge, New Towns and the Case for Them
(London, 1952); the Fabian publication by Norman Mackenzie, The New Towns; The
Success of Social Planning (London, 1955); Colin Boyne, “The New Towns as
Prototypes,” Listener, Sept. 29, 1955, pp. 501-503; Sir Frederic J. Osborn and Amold
Whittick, The New Towns (London, 1963), particularly useful; and Wilfred Burns,
New Towns for Old (London, 1963). For American evaluations, see Albert Mayer,
“New Way of Life in Britain’s New Towns,” New York Times, Jan. 29, 1956, Section
6, p. 26 ff.; and Lloyd Rodwin, The British New Towns Policy (Cambridge, Mass.,
1956), and especially Creese, op. cit., pp. 315-344. A revised and enlarged edition of
Osborn and Whittick, op. cit., was published in 1969 while this book was on press.
24. Report of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, 1960 (London,
1961), p. 89 (a report presented to Parliament in August 1961)
25. For Soria’s “organic” conception of the linear city and its influence, see the
book by George R. Collins, Arturo Soria y la Ciudad Lineal (Madrid, 1968). Also
Pages 488-497 NOTES / 795

consult Collins’s previous articles, especially “The Ciudad Lineal of Madrid,” Journal of
the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 18 (May 1959), pp. 38-53; “Linear
Planning Throughout the World,” ibid., Vol. 18 (Oct. 1959), pp. 74-93; “Cities on
the Line,” Architectural Review, Vol. 128 (Nov. 1960), pp. 341-345; and “Linear
Planning,” Forum, Vol. 20, No. 5 (1968), pp. 2-26.
26. See Charles Fourier, Cuvres choisies, Charles Gide, ed. (Paris, 1890), also
Charles Gide, Fourier, précurseur de la coopération (Paris, 1925), and Gide, Commu-
nist and Co-operative Colonies (1928; tr. by Ernest F. Row, New York, 1931?).
27. Such emphasis on industry probably to some degree reflects the influence of
Tony Garnier’s non-Marxist but essentially Fourierist utopia depicted in his book La
Cité industrielle, published in 1917.
28. Collins, “Linear Planning Throughout the World,” pp. 87-89.
29. Ibid., p. 38.
30. For her life, see David Mitchell, The Fighting Pankhursts (New York, 1967).
31. Ibid., p. 83. Sylvia Pankhurst was, in fact, the first British revolutionary to
establish contact with the Russian Revolution.
32. See Clough Williams-Ellis, “Soviet Architecture,” in the communist Left
Review, Vol. 3 (Nov. 1937), pp. 588-593; the quotations are from p. 593.

CHAPTER 10

1. For the British Left in the 1920’s, see, e.g., the occasional references in Robert
Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Week End; A Social History of Great Britain,
1915-1939 (New York, 1941), and Douglas Goldring, The Nineteen Twenties (Lon-
don, 1945). For the history of the Communist Party of Great Britain, see Henry
Pelling, The British Communist Party; A Historical Profile (London, 1958), and on
the background of that party, see Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in
Britain, 1900-21 (London, 1969), published while the present book was on press.
Kendall believes that such disparate varieties of British pre-Communist-Party Marxism
as the British Socialist Party (which developed out of the Social Democratic Federa-
tion in 1912, and in 1916 joined the Labour Party), the Socialist Labour Party (in-
spired and guided by Daniel DeLeon and his American Socialist Labor Party), the
Workers’ Socialist Federation of Sylvia Pankhurst, the near-syndicalist South Wales
Socialist Society, and the guild socialists would never in part have united in forming a
single Communist Party without the skillful deployment of financial inducements by
the leaders of Soviet Russia. Such inducements continued long after the founding of
the Communist Party but essentially ceased before World War II: see the review of
Kendall’s book and of Kenneth Newton, The Sociology of British Communism (Lon-
don, 1969), in the (London) Times Literary Supplement, Mar. 27, 1969, pp. 325-326.
2. On The 1917 Club, see Goldring, op. cit., p. 138 ff., and Leonard Woolf,
Beginning Again; An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918 (New York, 1964), p.
216. Woolf died in 1969 while this book was on press.
3. Woolf, op. cit., p. 215. Nevertheless, he eventually damned Soviet policy and
“the senseless barbarism of communist society.” See his Downhill All the Way; An
Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939 (London, 1967), pp. 28-29.
4. Woolf, Beginning Again, p. 216.
5. See Goldring, op. cit., p. 163. Goldring was secretary of the British branch.
6. According to James Boswell, the British artist who in the 1930's was himself a
leading cartoonist on the Left (as will be seen later in some detail) .
7. In actual fact, only one leading union official involved—the secretary of the
Miners’ Federation, which led in initiating the strike—was an avowed communist: he
openly declared himself “a humble follower of Lenin.” See John Montgomery, The
Twenties; An Informal Social History (New York, 1957), p. 140.
8. Graves and Hodge, op. cit., p. 157.
9. For communist influences among English writers and artists in the 1930's, see
Graves and Hodge, op. cit., and especially Julian Symons, The Thirties; A Dream
796 / NOTES Pages 497-503

Reyolyed (London, 1960), from which many of the facts in the next few pages have
been taken. I am much indebted to Mr. Symons for additional information kindly
supplied by letter. ; ; tr :
10. A statement made by Andrew Forge, ‘“The First Twelve Years (unpaged), in
A.LA. 25, the catalog of an exhibition of the ReBeAe Galleries, London, held from
March 28 to April 23, 1958, to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the A.I.A.
11. For the history of the A.l.A., see, besides the catalog-article by Forge cited
above, the account of the A.I.A.’s twenty-fifth anniversary in the (London) Daily
Worker for April 2, 1958. This, entitled “On the Side of Humanity,” was written by
Ray Watkinson under his pseudonym, Charles Morris. Much additional information
about the A.I.A. was generously supplied me by various founders or relatively early
members, especially Richard Carline, James Boswell, the late Betty Rea, and Misha
Black, and also by Clifford Rowe, the late James Lucas, and Ewan Phillips. I have
likewise had the assistance of such younger authorities as Andrew Forge and especially
Paul Hogarth.
12. (London) Daily Worker, Apr. 2, 1958. '
13. Mr. Black, originally a portrait-painter but since 1959 Professor of Industrial
Design (Engineering) at the Royal College of Art, is today a designer of international
reputation. Like many other early members of the A.I.A., after World War II he gave
up supporting the communists, with whom he had participated in the pre-war united-
front movement. See ibid.
14. Percy Horton retired a few years ago as head of the Ruskin Drawing School at
Oxford University. Ronald Horton has been head of the teacher-training department at
the Brighton School of Art. Peter Peri, who was particularly active in the A.I.A., died in
1966.
15. Letter from Boswell to the author. In 1960 the Soviet art magazine Iskusstvo
stated—not wholly accurately—that the founders of the A.I.A. were Rowe, James
Boswell, and (incorrectly) Graham Bell. It declared that the three were “artist
communists’ at the time they established the organization. See Valentin Brodsky’s
article entitled (in translation) “Modern Art of England,” Iskusstvo, No. 2 (1960), p.
50.
16. The A.I.A.’s Newssheet was later called the News Bulletin, Bulletin, and then
the Newsletter. Because the files of the A.I.A. were destroyed in World War II, it
possesses no file of the periodical (although assorted publications, few of them from the
early years, can be seen at the A.I.A. Gallery, 15 Lisle Street, London). Paul Hogarth,
who was editor of the periodical from 1947 to 1950, possesses a file of it. The Victoria
and Albert Museum has the issues for January 1937 and June and July 1939. Beginning
with the issue for December 1939 (No. 58), it can be found at the British Museum.
Misha Black, a founder of the A.I.A. and its chairman for a decade which included most
of World War II, has preserved some numbers dating from the period of the war, when,
as the Bulletin, it was a bi-monthly. I am indebted to him for the gift of several
duplicate copies.
17. As was mentioned in a previous chapter, the authoritative history of these
highly complex events is Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (London, 1961). The
impressions of many of the British writer-participants in the Spanish civil war are
discussed in Stanley Weintraub, The Last Great Cause (New York, 1968).
18. Thomas, op. cit., p. 298. There are said to have been 2,762 British volunteers
of whom 543 were killed and 1,763 wounded before the Brigade disbanded in
November 1938. See Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, Journey to the Frontier;
Two Roads to the Spanish Civil War (Boston, 1966), p. 365 (though, as the authors
note, these figures have been questioned).
19. On Julian Bell and John Cornford, see Stansky and Abrahams, op. cit. This
book casts much light on social radicalism among young British intellectuals in the
1930's. At Cambridge, Comnford had published in the Student Vanguard articles on
poetry entitled “Art and the Class Struggle’ (May 1933) and “The Class Front of
Modem Art” (Dec. 1933), and in another student periodical, Cambridge Left, an essay
entitled “Left?” (in the spring of 1934)
me pee This was led by Misha Black, James Holland, Richard Levin, and Elizabeth
atson.
21. In the same year, also on behalf of Spain, the ALA. persuaded the London
Pages 503-516 NOTES / 797
County Council to put billboard space at its disposal primarily to help Basque refugee
children: members of the A.I.A. borrowed ladders and planks to paint pictorial appeals
directly on the billboards.
22. The songs were sung by Hedli Anderson, who later became the wife of the
left-wing poet Louis MacNiece.
23. On the authority of Mr. Ewan Phillips, who possesses a copy of the leaflet.
24. The A.I.A. held no large exhibition in 1938. It did, however, put on at
Constable House, Charlotte Street, a small show of Chinese contemporary drawings and
woodcuts entitled “Ten Thousand Years Young,” to raise money for China in her
struggle against Japanese imperialism. It also organized for display at Toynbee Hall in
January 1939 an exhibition of lithographs, etchings, and wood engravings called “Britain
Today,” which then was sent to nine other cities. ;
25. According to James Boswell in a letter to the author.
26. In 1938, the Artists Union amalgamated with the Commercial Artists and
Designers Union and the Cartoonists Guild to form the United American Artists,
C.I.O., under the presidency of Rockwell Kent, an artist long on the Left.
27. Richard Carline, to whom, with Misha Black, I am particularly indebted for
information concerning the relations between the A.I.A. and similar organizations on
the Continent and in the United States, does not, however, believe this to have been
the case, because at that time little was known in Britain about the American Artists
Congress. It might be added that, unlike the American group, the British Artists
Congress (of which Ewan Phillips possesses several photographs) was never intended to
be a permanent organization. It was widely regarded as being so communist-dominated
that Eric Gill was asked by Archbishop Hinsley, through Gill’s chaplain, to withdraw his
patronage from it. Gill replied that while some, or many, of the organizers might be
communists, he had no information to show that this was the case.
28. According to Mr. Carline, all that came out of the proposal for the exhibition
were two articles by him—one on W.P.A. art published in the Studio in 1940, and
another on recent Mexican art published in 1942 in the A.I.A.’s Bulletin.
29. A leaflet entitled Activities Since 1938, published in connection with the
A.1.A.’s Bulletin for July 1942 (wrongly labeled, “No. Eighty,” being No. 72), declared
that “Relations with the American Artists Congress have always been cordial.” And it
told how in 1942, shortly after the United States entered the war, “the two societies
exchanged information about the way artists in each country had met and were meeting
the problems set up by the new conditions.” In 1944, the A.I.A. became affliated with
the Artists League of America, a leftist organization formed by amalgamating the
communist-controlled American Artists Congress with the leftist United American
Artists.
30. According to Julian Symons in a letter to the author.
31. They often did so under pseudonyms: for instance, James Boswell has told me
that he frequently used the pseudonym “Buchan.”
32. Letter to the author, August 21, 1962. For details of Boswell’s life, see the
catalog James Boswell of his exhibition at the Dnan Galleries, London, February 13 to
March 7, 1962; also see Michael Middleton, “James Boswell,” (London) Studio, Vol.
163 (Feb. 1962), pp. 48-51.
33. The drawing resulted from a “hunger march” of the unemployed in February
and March 1934, at which time, Mr. Boswell has told the author, he had been
concemed with finding food, shelter, and money for the contingents who came to North
London.
34. Philip James, ed., Henry Moore on Sculpture (London, 1966), p. 86; on
Moore’s drawings of miners, see p. 216.
35. Anthony Blunt, “The Realism Quarrel,” Left Review, Vol. 3 (Apr. 1937), P.
GO
265 Loch ert. }
37. Herbert Read, “Surrealism—the Dialectic of Art,’ Left Review, Vol. 2 (July
1936), “Surrealism” supplement, pp. ii and iil. one ore
38. Anthony Blunt, “Rationalist and Anti-rationalist Art,”’ ibid., pp. iv—vi.
39. Ibid., pp. vi-viil.
40. Julian Trevelyan, Indigo Days (London, 1957), p. 102.
16; Graves
41. For this movement, see ibid., pp. 81 ff.; Symons, op. cit., pp. 111-1
798 / NOTES Pages 516-524

and Hodge, of. cit., p. 389-390; and the Preface to Tom Harrison, ed., Pub and the
People; i Worktown Study by Mass-Observation (London, 1943). Also see Charles
Madge, “From Small Beginnings,” (London) Times Literary Supplement, Apr. 4,
1968, p. 337.
42. Trevelyan, op. cit., pp. 185-186.
43. See Stuart Samuels, “The Left Book Club,” Journal of Contemporary History,
Vol. 1, No. 2 (1966), pp. 68 and 84. ne
44. Quoted in Anne Fremantle, This Little Band of Prophets; The British Fabians
(New York, 1960), p. 251. On the Webbs, see especially Kitty Muggeridge and Ruth
Adam, Beatrice Webb (London, 1967).
45. Professor Neal Wood, author of the authoritative book, Communism and
British Intellectuals (New York, 1959), has written me that although artists were
outside the scope of his book, from what he had been able to read in publications issued
by British artists sympathetic to communism, he “came to the conclusion that most of
the artists connected with the British Communist Party were . . . second-raters.” The
British sculptor Betty Rea, herself a party member from 1938 to 1945, in a letter to me
agreed that, although there were exceptions, “this statement is largely true’ because
most of the more distinguished British artists who at one time or another had strong
leftist sympathies never actually joined the party.
46. C. Day Lewis, ed., The Mind in Chains (London, 1937), p. 13.
47. Ibid., pp. 105-122. The eleven essays also included four on other arts: music
by Alan Bush, literature by Edward Upward, the theater by Barbara Nixon, and “the
film industry” by Arthur Calder-Marshall.
48. Ibid., p. 121.
49. The musical, entitled Do Somethin’ Addy Man, was based on the Alcestis of
Euripides, but was about a black man who goes to London’s Camden Town slum to
write books, only to find that he is expected to work on the underground railway. See
the article about the then-forthcoming musical in the (London) Observer, Aug. 27,
1962, under the headline “All-black musical.”’
50. Auden became an American citizen in 1945. He returned to England in
1956-1961 as Professor of Poetry at Oxford.
51. Penrose had received the appeal for help in a letter from Prague sent to him
by Josef Capek, artist-brother of the late Czech writer Karel Capek. Penrose invited some
artist-friends who were his neighbors at Hampstead to lunch in order to discuss how
help could best be given: an Artists Refugee Committee was decided upon. Especially
prominent in this during its early years were such neighbors of Penrose as Diana
Uhlman and Stephen Bone, who served as secretary, and whose father, the veteran
etcher Sir Muirhead Bone, R.A., strongly supported the organization. Other members
from Hampstead included the artists Betty Rea, Richard Carline, and George Charlton,
and the designers Thomas Gray and F. D. K. Henrion, the latter a refugee who had
become well established in England. The sum of £1,700 was raised to carry out the
work of the committee and give hospitality to the refugees. “The London Group, the
New English Art Club [also the Society of Industrial Artists] and many individual
artists of every shade of political opinion co-operated with the A.I.A. in this work”:
see the A.I.A’s leaflet, Activities Since 1938 (undated but published in July 1942),
unpaged; also see Fred Uhlman, The Making of an Englishman (London, 1960), pp.
212-215.
On the committee, Penrose represented the surrealists, Stephen Bone the New
English Art Club, and Richard Carline the London Group. Among the many leading
artists who signed the appeal for donations sent out on November 28, 1938, were
Augustus John, Herbert Read, Paul Nash, Jacob Epstein, David Low, Wilson Steer,
and Sir William Rothenstein. The committee carried on its work until well into the
period of the war, with Helen Roeder succeeding Diana Uhlman as the most active
spirit in June 1940. I am particularly indebted to Richard Carline and Mrs. Uhlman
for information about the committee.
52. A.L.A. leaflet of 1942, Activities Since 1938, unpaged.
53. This reference to Heartfield, in the article on expressionism written’ by E
Kronman for the first edition of the encyclopedia, may also be consulted in an Italian
translation by Giorgio Kraiskj, ed., Materiali per un’ estetica marxista (Rome, 1950), p
205-206. ; sa
Pages 525-531 : NOTES / 799
54. The Austrian government also complained to the Czech government.
55. Sergei Tretyakov and C. Telingater, John Heartfield (Moscow, 1936). On
Heartfield, also see the following representative items (listed in order of importance) :
Wieland Herzfelde, John Heartfield (Dresden, 1962), of which a revised edition is
planned; Photomontagen zur Zeitgeschichte (Zurich, 1945), published by Kultur und
Volk; London Bulletin, Nos. 8-9 (Jan.-Feb. 1939), unpaged; Konrad Farner, Graphis,
Vol. 2 (Jan-Feb. 1946), pp. 30-35; Direction, Vol. 2 (Jan.-Feb. 1939), p. 13; F.
Schiff, “Sens du photomontage,” L’Amour de l'art, Vol. 17 (June 1936), pp. 209-216;
Aaron Scharf, “John Heartfield, Berlin Dada, and the Weapon of Photomontage,”
Studio International, Vol. 176 (Oct. 1968), pp. 134-137; also see note on p. 128.
Additional bibliography is cited in Herzfelde, op. cit., especially pp. 7 and 74-75. For an
obituary, see New York Times, Apr. 30, 1968, p. 47.
56. Heartfield had foresightedly sent a collection of his work from Czechoslovakia
to his son Tom, who was already working as a printer in New York where he is still
active. Shortly before the artist fled from Czechoslovakia to England, an exhibition of
seventy-six of his anti-fascist works had opened at the A.C.A. Gallery in New York. The
leading American communist cultural magazine, the New Masses, promptly reproduced
one of them: see the New Masses, Vol. 29 (Oct. 25, 1938), p. 8. Others, including Fig.
86, were soon reproduced in Direction, a small left-of-center, strongly anti-fascist
“magazine of the arts.’” See Direction, Vol. 2 (Jan.-Feb. 1939), p. 13; also see Vol. 2
(Dec. 1939), cover and p. 15 of the special number devoted to “Exiled German
Wiiters,” of which Wieland Herzfelde was editor. In 1946, Heartfield had a second
exhibition at New York’s A.C.A. Gallery.
57. According to Mr. Uhlman in a letter to the author. Since the war, the political
sympathies of Heartfield and the Uhlmans had diverged widely.
58. The communist philosopher, aesthetician, and literary critic Lukacs had in
1938, at a time when the great purges were still going on in the U.S.S.R., attacked the
montage technique in literature and art as a product of “bourgeois decadence.” See
Herzfelde, op. cit., p. 79.
59. Letters to me of Wieland Herzfelde, November 11, 1967, and of Richard
Carline, October 23 and November 19, 1968.
60. According to Betty Rea in conversation with the author. Ewan Phillips has in
his possession photographs of this demonstration.
61. Middleton, op. cit., p. 49.
62. Letter of November 10, 1962, from Mr. Boswell to the author.
63. Later, Lindsay was to be author of Death of a Hero; French Painting from
David to Delacroix (London, 1960), written in the spint of the Marxist revisionism of
the New Left.
64. Middleton, op. cit., p. 50.
65. Letter to me of November 10, 1962.
66. As he told me in conversation in the summer of 1962.
67. See the previously cited A.I.A. leaflet, Activities Since 1938, under the heading
“The People’s Convention.”
68. Bulletin, unnumbered, Sept. 9, 1939, p. 1. This issue was written by Misha
Black as chairman of the A.I.A.’s Central Committee. Toward the end, it also stated,
“We are fighting to make possible the existence of intelligence, freedom and decent
human feeling.”
69. Bulletin, No. 60 (Mar. 1940), unpaged. Sixteen letters had been received
stating that the Russian action was “completely unjustifiable,” but fifteen others
supported “‘the attitude that . . . Russia is justified in waging this war.” _
70, Late in 1942, the A.I.A. collaborated with many other organizations, by no
Wallace
means all of them even partly communist fronts, in putting on at the
Collection in London a tribute to the U.S.S.R. Called a “National Exhibition of the
Also
Soviet Union in Peace and War,” this reviewed twenty-five years of Soviet history.
from the
in 1942, a special section of the A.1.A.’s Bulletin was devoted to “Art News
USS.R.”: see Bulletin, No. 74 (Nov. 1942), unpaged.
this
71. A.LA. leaflet, Activities Since 1938, unpaged. The A.I.A. had begun
broke out. The
program of traveling exhibitions early in 1939, shortly before the war
so much
first of them, sent out to tour municipal galleries outside of London, aroused Early in
popular interest that its tour was prolonged into the war years until late 1940.
800 / NOTES Pages 531-536

that year, in a further effort to reach the masses, the A.LA. organized a traveling
exhibition called “A.I.A. Everyman Prints,” which enabled anyone with a shilling to
own a creative work of art while also helping artists in wartinie by bulk sales. The first
exhibition of the prints was opened at London by Sir Kenneth Clark, then Director of
the National Gallery, and thousands of prints were sold in London and in more than
twenty exhibitions held in the provinces. James Holland was a member of the committee
responsible for organizing this scheme of mass art, and he and the two other Jameses,
Boswell and Fitton, were among the contributors. The remaining forty or so contribu-
tors, reflecting the wide variety of social views among the members of the A.L.A., unified
only by their common anti-facism and support of the British war effort, ranged from
such party-liners as Clifford Rowe and Pearl Binder through the decreasing socio-
political involvement represented by such artists as Carel Weight, Stephen Bone,
Vanessa Bell, and John Piper.
72. The exhibition for 1940, at the R.B.A. Galleries, was made hazardous by the
intensified German air raids after the ending of the “phony war’: during the hanging of
the show, incendiary bombs came through the roof, damaging some paintings.
73. The spirit of direct support for the war effort first took tangible form in a
special exhibit of War Paintings put on at the Charing Cross Underground Station in
September—October 1941. This was attended by some 120,000 people.
74. Leaflet, AIA New Programme (undated, but published July 1942), unpaged.
75. AIA Bulletin, No. 80 (actually: No. 72) (July 1942), unpaged.
76. This exhibition proved that the A.I.A., formerly regarded by many as so
radical, could in wartime gain general support from non-radicals. For the show was
sponsored by a large London paper, the Liberal News Chronicle, and was partly held in
a canteen shelter of the new store of John Lewis and Co., Ltd.
77. After Boswell withdrew, Morris’ Kestelman (subsequently a member of the
London Group of Artists and head of the Painting Department of the Central School of
Arts and Crafts in London) was elected chairman in 1945. Carline had been nominated
for the chairmanship by the communist faction of the executive committee even though
he had never been a member of the Communist Party. When in 1946 Kestelman
declined to stand for reelection, a middle-of-the-road candidate was elected: Maurice de
Sausmarez (a well-known art teacher, of late principal of the Byam Shaw Art School in
London, and recently elected an Associate of the Royal Academy). He declined to stand
again, and in 1947 Beryl Sinclair (a painter, who was chairman of the Women’s
International Art Club from 1944 to 1951) was elected: she was the representative of
the strongly anti-communist majority on the executive committee. In 1951 she declined
to stand again, and Carline, vice-chairman since 1945 (except for 1946-1947), was
elected.
78. This was also true of the subsequent American exhibition held at the Tate
Gallery: the State Department was afraid of the adverse reactions of Congress to the
inclusion of works by any artists who might be attacked as communists or communist
sympathizers. Because social realism was not stressed in the large exhibition of Mexican
art that toured Europe in the 1950’s, the best works of American and Mexican social
realism, such as those the A.I.A. had been eager to exhibit in 1939, have never been
seen abroad.
79. In 1956, when a United Kingdom National Committee of the I.A.P.A. was set
up, Morris Kestelman (the former chairman of the A.I.A. who had represented the
London Group at the I.A.P.A.’s first Congress in 1954) was elected chairman of the
committee and Carline vice-chairman. In 1961, the latter became chairman, with
Claude Rogers, the president of the London Group, as vice-chairman. In 1966, Carline
was elected vice-president of the International Association itself, and has recently been
elected an honorary president.
80. I am indebted to Mrs. Marjorie Abbatt, who was secretary of Artists for Peace,
for a copy of the catalog of this exhibition, which, like that of 1952, was held at the
Royal Hotel, Woburn Place.
81. The other sponsors were the painter Josef Herman (then strongly on the Left),
the stage-set designer Leslie Hurry, and the painter-photographer Denis Mathews. The
selection committee consisted of John Berger, Em Brooks, Kenneth Martin, Agnes
Miller Parker, Ruskin Spear, Trevor Tennant, and ““M. Abbott” (1.e., Marjorie Abbatt)
Pages 536-543 NOTES / 801
82. Other Americans represented were V. Friedlander and “Harry Steinberg”
(apparently Harry Sternberg).
83. As in the case of the 1953 exhibition of Artists for Peace, Josef Herman, Leslie
Hurry, and Denis Mathews were also sponsors. I am indebted to Paul Hogarth for a
copy of the undated catalog, which has a foreword by John Berger. The panels were
executed by two former surrealists, a husband-and-wife team of Japanese artists named
Ini Maruki and Toshiko Akamatsu.
84. I am indebted to Professor Neal Wood for an opportunity to read these.
85. Edward P. Thompson, William Morris (London, 1955), p. 772.
86. Ibid., p. 841.
87. After E. P. Thompson left the Communist Party, he published an even more
monumental work, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963).
88. Through the courtesy of Paul Hogarth and Professor Neal Wood, I have been
able to consult all six issues of Realism, which ended with the number for November-
December 1956. Among the leading contributors were Patrick Carpenter, who had been
a student-member of the A.I.A. in the 1930’s, Clifford Rowe and James Lucas, two
founders of the A.I.A., and Barbara Niven, a founder of the Manchester group in the
A.A. and an occasional contributor to the “Art” column of the (London) Daily
Worker.
89. Realism, No. 3 (Apr. 1956), p. 15. Jack Smith, who had started out as an
aggressive social realist, had by 1956 moved to a more consciously aesthetic approach.
Doubtless for this reason, in the next issue of Realism he was criticized as being a
“puritanical expressionist rather than a realist” and his painting was called “negative
work masquerading as realism.” See Realism, No. 4 (June 1956), p. 5.
90. See Rowe’s letter in Realism, No. 3 (Apr. 1956), pp. 18-19. This was in reply
to a call by James Lucas for discussion of the validity of socialist realism in non-socialist
Britain, and to an accompanying attack by Patrick Carpenter on Stalin’s and Zhdanov’s
conception of Soviet art. In Realism, No. 5 (Aug.-Sept. 1956), p. 6, another letter from
Carpenter claimed “that the Artists’ Group has been working towards . . . a wider
conception of socialist realism for a year or so now and that we [had] put forward these
new ideas for discussion with other cultural groups before the 2oth Congress.” In the
same issue, Clifford Rowe, who had been in the German Democratic Republic as the
guest of the East German Union of Artists, reported on his visit to East Germany,
showing himself to be critical of the narrow version of Soviet socialist realism prevailing
there.
91. Iskusstvo, No. 2 (1960), pp. 47-53. The article was written by Valentin
Brodsky.
92. Two fellow-members of the “Kitchen Sink School,” Jack Smith and John
Bratby, were mentioned by Iskusstvo in passing, also as realists.
93. In April 1963, an international incident was caused when Queen Frederika of
Greece was approached on a London street by Betty Ambatielos and other demonstra-
tors seeking the release from Greek jails of some 1,000 prisoners, including Ambatielos,
held since the civil war. The Queen, with her daughter, fled in terror, pursued by the
demonstrators, and took refuge in the apartment of a total stranger, an American actress.
See, e.g., the New York Herald Tribune, Apr. 30, 1963, Pp. 5.
In July 1963, when the King and Queen of Greece insisted on making a state visit
to England—doing so over the protests of the Greek Premier, who resigned—widespread
riots broke out in London under the aegis of the “ban-the-bomb” Committee of 100.
The demonstrators, among whom Ambatielos’s wife and other communists were promi-
nent, again demanded the release from prison of the 1,000 Greeks: see, e.g., ibid., July
10, 1963, p. 3. In April 1964, Tony Ambatielos was one of 400 prisoners released from
Greek prisons. Mrs. Ambatielos was jailed in 1967 by the rightist military government of
Greece at a time when her husband’s whereabouts were apparently unknown.
94. The respective publishers of the American editions of these two books were
Thomas Nelson & Sons and Bernard Geis Associates.
gs. “Hogarth; A Short Interview,” Granta, Vol. G5 (Deceo O18) sap 4: n
96. For Hogarth’s early biography, see especially John Berger, “Paul Hogarth,” Art
News and Review, Vol. 4 (Dec. 13, 1952), P- 1, and R. Melville, “Paul Hogarth,”
Architectural Review, Vol. 118 (Aug. 1955), Pp. 75—-79-
802 / NOTES Pages 544-555

97. I am indebted to Mr. Hogarth for a copy of Berger’s draft typescript in

English.
: 98. Paul Hogarth, Looking at China; With the Journal of the Artist (London,
1956).
From a note by Hogarth to the author.
100. Realism, the periodical of the communist Artists’ Group, published the
schedule for the tour in its number for June 1956, p. 5.
101. From a note by Hogarth to the author.
102. This book, which Hogarth plans to make into a larger work, was anticipated
by his previously cited article, also called “The Artist as Reporter,” in the Penrose
Annual, Vol. 55 (1961), pp. 71-87. In 1967, Hogarth traveled widely in the Soviet
Union to make the illustrations for a book, Russian Journey, with text by Alaric Jacob,
to be published at London and New York in 1969.
103. Throughout most of the war, too, as her contribution to the war effort, she
was busy teaching painting and modeling to groups of children evacuated from the
cities. Some of the paintings by these pupils were included in British Council Exhibi-
tions sent abroad, and several are illustrated in Herbert Read’s Education Through Art
1943).
Le Letter from Betty Rea to me, August 28, 1962.
105. A sculpture by Lynn Chadwick was also reproduced without strong adverse
comment.
106. Iskusstvo, No. 9 (1960), pp. 41-51.
107. See, e.g., Frank A. Wilson, “La Peinture en Angleterre depuis 1945,” Ring
des Arts, 1960 (Zurich), p. 129.
108. New York Herald Tribune, Feb. 16, 1966, p. 6.

CHAPTER 11

1. Among the very few such artists with a reputation in the United States one
thinks primarily of sculptor Henry Moore, and only then of the cartoonist David Low,
the constructivist Ben Nicholson, and possibly the painter Francis Bacon. Paul Hogarth
was, we noted, widely known in communist countries when he was strongly on the Left,
and has since become well known in the United States.
2. The part of this chapter on British art critics was published in somewhat
different form under the title “English Art Critics and Modern Social Radicalism,”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 26 (Fall 1967), pp. 29-46.
3. Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry; A Biography (London, 1940), p. 292.
4. Ibid., p. 47.
5: Ibid. p.55:
Onl bide spans
7. Roger Fry, “Art and Socialism,” Vision and Design. (New York, 1947 edition),

8. Ibid., p. 48.
9. Years later, however, Fry did not hesitate to call Ruskin an “old fraud’: see
Woolf, op. cit., p. 280.
10. Fry, op. cit., pp. 39 and 42.
11. Ibid.,. p: 49.
12. Ibid., p. 41.
13. Ibid., p. 50. ‘
14. Philip James, ed., Henry Moore on Sculpture (London, 1 - 49;
Fry, “Negro Sculpture,” op. cit., A 68. ; BOE
15. “Art Under Plutocracy” (1883), in William Morris, On Art and Socialism
Holbrook Jackson, ed. (London, 1947), p. 135.
16. Fry, “Art and Socialism,” op. cit., Pp. 41.
17. Ibid., pp. 46 and 47.
18. Ibid., p. 49.
19. Ibid., p. 47.
20. Woolf, op. cit., pp. 229-230.
Beacsa sess? NOTES / 803
ale iy, Op. cit. p.47.
22. Letter to Bridges in Woolf, op. cit., p. 230.
23. Published in Vision and Design, pp. 1-10. This was written from notes of a
1917 lecture to the Fabian Society.
24. Woolf, op. cit., p. 232.
25. Ibid., p. 239.
26. See his essay “The Diabolical Principle,” The Enemy, No. 3 (Jan. 1939);
quoted by Geoffrey Wagner, Wyndham Lewis (New Haven, Conn., 1957), p. 70.
27. T. E. Hulme, Speculations; Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art,
Herbert Read, ed. (London, 1936), p. 82. This account of Wyndham Lewis and his
group is based primarily on that of Sir John Rothenstein, British Art Since 1900
(London, 1962), pp. 12-14, and on W. K. Rose, ed., The Letters of Wyndham Lewis
(New York, 1964). See also Charles Handley-Read, The Art of Wyndham Lewis
(London, 1951). And on Lewis as writer and thinker see William H. Pritchard,
Wyndham Lewis (New York, 1968), and the references cited in the review of that
book in the (London) Times Literary Supplement, Feb. 27, 1969, p. 203, published
while my book was on press.
28. Through Hulme’s Speculations, as edited by Read in 1924, the ideas of
Wilhelm Worringer concerning abstraction, etc., were first introduced to a British
public. Read had never met Hulme.
29. See Herbert Read, The Innocent Eye (New York, 1947), especially pp.
140-142, and 240. Further autobiographical material is to be found in Read’s The
Contrary Experience; Autobiographies (New York, 1963). For additional references
and for discussion of Read’s ideas, consult John S. Keel, The Writings of Sir Herbert
Read and Their Curricular Implications—The Aesthetic Education of Man (Ph.D.
thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1959), especially the chapter on ‘‘Art and Society,”
and sections of chapters on “Read’s Political and Social Criticism” and “Read’s Social
Philosophy.”
30. Herbert Read, ed., Kropotkin; Selections from His Writings (London, 1942).
31. See Read’s review of T. A. Jackson’s Dialectics (published by Lawrence and
Wishart) in the Left Review, Vol. 2 (July 1936), p. 518.
32. Herbert Read, ed., Surrealism (London, 1936), p. 60.
33. Herbert Read, The Philosophy of Modern Art (London, 1952), p. 127. Sir
Herbert Read wrote me, in a letter of October 3, 1967, that this alteration “in the text
of my essay on Surrealism . . . did not seem very significant to me when I made it. . . .
It was the political situation that changed, not my political convictions.” In his Art and
Alienation (New York, 1967), p. 46, he stated that surrealism was “not adequate for a
new situation” because “It was committed to a materialistic philosophy, namely
Marxism.” ;
34. George Thomson, in a Biographical Note to Lawrence and Wishart’s new
(1946) edition of Illusion and Reality, p. 5, called it “the first comprehensive attempt
to work out a Marxist theory of art”; whereas the scientist J. D. Bernal declared in the
Modern Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 6 (Autumn 1951), p. 346, that its formulations
were “those of contemporary bourgeois scientific philosophy . . . and not those of
Marxism.” See the discussion in Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950
(New York, 1958), pp. 277-280, by a leading English New Leftist. An important part
of Illusion and Reality was never published: with other unpublished writings of
Caudwell, it is in the possession of his brother, Stanhope Sprigg.
35. The other two volumes were Studies in a Dying Culture (1938), a series of
essays on chiefly literary subjects, and The Crisis in Physics (1939). When Further
Studies in a Dying Culture was published in 1949, it proved to be so popular that it was
inted in the next year.
pune. Er eiseeen Cadwell Further Studies in a Dying Culture, edited and with a
preface by Edgell Rickword (London, 1950), pp. 88 and 112.
37. Ibid., p. 106.
8. Ibid., p. 115.
Shides in Era Culture was published at New York in 1938 and Further
these
Studies in 1949, both by Dodd, Mead and Company. The same firm republished finally
had
two works—this time in a single volume—almost four years after McCarthy
been “condemned” by his fellow senators.
804 / NOTES Pages 562-569

4o. At this time, Lawrence and Wishart reissued Caudwell’s Poems (originally
of
published by John Lane in 1939), and also published a volume, The Concept
Freedom, containing six of the Studies and Further Studies inva Dying Culture together
with the first five chapters of The Crisis in Physics.
41. For facts about Klingender’s background and life, I am particularly indebted to
his friends, Mrs. Diana Uhlman, who first met him in 1938, Mss. Evelyn Antal, whose
husband had known him since 1933,-and Richard Carline, a very close friend since
1938. Also see the relatively uninformative obituary in the Architectural Review, Vol.
118 (Oct. 1955), p. 211, and the biographical material in Francis D. Klingender,
Art and the Industrial Revolution, revised and extended by Sir Arthur Elton (London,
1968).
4 iv Left Review, Vol. 2 (Oct. 1935), pp. 38-40; (Jan. 1936), pp. 167-173; (June
1936), pp. 472-473.
43. James Joll, The Anarchists (London, 1964), p. 156.
44. I am indebted to Dr. Antal’s widow, Mrs. Evelyn Antal, for a copy of her
husband’s obituary in the (London) Times of April 9, 1954, and also for a copy of a note
about him written by his friend Francis Klingender, to conclude a translation of Antal’s
article, “Remarks on the Method of Art History” (see later), published in the Italian
periodical Societd, No. 5 (Oct. 1954), pp. 740-763. Such good friends were the Antals
of Klingender that Mrs. Antal has in her possession the manuscript of Klingender’s last
work, on the subject of animals in art and thought, which she has prepared for
publication. Antal’s article “Remarks on the Method of Art History” has been
translated into French by Michel Baridon, lecturer in English literature at Dijon
University for publication in France. Mrs. Antal has assembled a number of her
husband’s articles under the title Classicism and Romanticism; And Other Studies in the
Method of Art History (London and New‘ York, 1966).
45. Friedrich Antal, “Reflections on Classicism and Romanticism,” Burlington
Magazine, Vol. 66 (Apr. 1935), pp. 159-168; Vol. 68 (Mar. 1936), pp. 130-139; Vol.
77 (Sept. 1940), pp. 72-80; Vol. 77 (Dec. 1940), pp. 188-192; Vol. 78 (Jan. 1941),
pp- 14-22. These are included in Antal’s posthumous book, Classicism and Romanticism
(1966), cited in the previous note.
46. Ibid., Vol. 66 (Apr. 1935), p. 159.
47. Ibid., Vol. 77 (Sept. 1940), p. 80.
48. Ibid., Vol. 78 (Jan. 1941), pp. 21-22.
49. This book, like the English edition of Hauser’s Philosophy of Art History, was
published at London by Routledge and Kegan Paul while Sir Herbert Read was the
firm’s editorial adviser.
50. I am indebted to a conversation with Dr. Hauser for information about this
forthcoming book, as well as for other information about his life and career.
51. For Berenson’s admiration of Berger’s criticism, see Sylvia Sprigge, “Bernard
Berenson,” Encounter, Vol. 14 (Jan. 1960), p. 61. Mr. Berger himself stated in a letter
to me of December 2, 1967, that his criticism, particularly as regards method, had been
greatly influenced by Frederick Antal.
52. Berenson acknowledged more gratitude and appreciation to Walter Pater than
to any other writer: see Sylvia Sprigge, Berenson; A Biography (London, 1960), p. 46.
Pater, who, like his pupil Oscar Wilde, was a leading exponent of “‘art for art’s sake,”
lacked Wilde’s social interests.
53. A decade before Berenson married Mary Smith Costelloe in 1900, she—influ-
enced by the Fabianism of the Webbs and of her then husband, B. G. Costelloe, as well
as by her own activities at Toynbee Hall—had tried in vain to convert him to socialism.
He wrote in reply to her efforts that his whole inspiration from boyhood had been to
regard culture as a religion, and it would be cruel to have to give up that view “for
something as directly opposed to it as socialism . . .”; see ibid., p. 106. Again, he wrote,
in the fall of 1900 (ibid., p. 107): “I suspect you do not realize how impossible it is to
drive the two, culture and socialism, as a team.” Not only did Berenson regard Ruskin,
so obsessed by contemporary social conditions in England and their supposed effects on
the arts, as a most horrible example, but he also refused to accept the social organicism
of the socialists, whether Fabians or Marxists.
54. John Berger, Permanent Red (London, 1960), p. 156.
Pages 569-575 NOTES / 805

55. Ibid., pp. 174 and 42.

56. Ibid., p. 15.
57. Ibid., p. 46.
53. Ibid. p. 207:
59. John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso (Harmondsworth, England,
1965), pp. 178-179.
60. Ibid., p.175.
61. In this connection, Berger violently attacked (p. 180) the book Picasso Plain
by Hélene Parmelin, mentioned earlier in the present book as the journalist wife of
Picasso’s friend, the painter and communist Edouard Pignon.
62. Berger, Permanent Red, p. 82.
63. Loc. cit.
64. Berger also has accepted as great the period of Picasso’s art from 1931 to 1942
Or 1943, when a passionate love affair and hatred of the fascism that had triumphed in
Spain and was then triumphing so widely in Europe led the artist to especially successful
subjects. See Berger, Picasso, p. 154.
65. Ibid., p. 177. In the same book, on p. 89, Berger has also uttered a “‘protest
against the intrusion . . . of politics into art.”
66. Berger, Permanent Red, p. 208.
67. Loe. cit.
68. Ibid., p. 209. The italics are Berger’s.
69. Ibid., p. 69. This essay had earlier been published under the title, “Jackson
Pollock; Artist in Solitary,” in the American communist cultural magazine, Mainstream,
Vol. 12 (Apr. 1959), pp. 20-22.
70. The noted American art critic Harold Rosenberg wrote in Art News, Vol. 59
(Feb. 1961), p. 58, in a review of a book on Jackson Pollock, “. . . Pollock himself, I
have been told, joined the Communist Party [in the 1930’s].” More recently Rosenberg
has pointed out, in an article entitled “From Pollock to Pop . . . ,” Holiday, Vol. 39
(Mar. 1966), p. 99, that ‘“‘Almost all the originators of America’s abstract
[expressionist] art had been steeped in the political art of the Depression. Pollock had
been influenced by left-wing Mexican mural painting; Rothko had composed tableaux
of the city poor; de Kooning had executed constructions for Artists Union demonstra-
tions; Reinhardt and Motherwell had dabbled in Marxism. . . .”
71. See New York Times, Feb. 20, 1966. A book by Berger, Fernand Léger, was
published in German at Dresden in 1966. Another book by him, Art and Revolution, on
the relatively abstract Soviet sculptor Ernst Neizvestny (who has so often been officially
criticized in the U.S.S.R., and thus directly raises the problem of the role of the artist in
the Soviet Union), was published at London and New York in 1969 while this book
was on press. A volume of Berger’s art criticism, written for various periodicals, entitled
The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays, was published at London in 1969.
72. Portions of both books had been published in a variety of periodicals including
the Universities and Left Review, while another patt of The Long Revolution had
appeared in the New Left Review. Among those thanked by Williams in the Preface to
Culture and Society was the Marxist critic of the visual arts Francis Klingender,
Williams himself being primarily a critic of literature and the drama. Another widely
known socio-cultural historian, E. J. Hobsbawm, author of The Age of Revolution,
1789-1848 (London, 1962), and Industry and Empire; An Economic History of Britain
Since 1750 (London, 1968), had been sympathetic to the Communist Party before
moving to the New Left.
73. For Wesker’s career, see John Beaven, “Missionary in the Theater,” New York
Times, Oct. 13, 1963, Section 6, pp. 28 ff.
74. Ibid., p. 28.
75. [Centre| Fortytwo; Annual Report 1961-1962, p. 5.
76. See the review of Permanent Red by Michael Armstrong, New Left Review,
e
No. 8 (Mar.-Apr. 1961), pp. 8, 11, 14.
77. Perry Anderson, “Components of the National Culture,” New Left Review,
(pp.
No. 50 (July-Aug. 1968), pp. 5-6. The author did, however, deal with aesthetics
as providing concepts. He gave particular praise to Frederick Antal as a great
38-41)
had never
Marxist art critic-historian, who, because of the nature of British culture,
806 / NOTES Pages 575-588

received adequate recognition. The art historian-critic E. H. Gombrich (like the

economist Friedrich Hayek and the philosopher Karl Popper) on the contrary had, he
declared, received undue recognition because the limitations of his views harmonized
with the limitations of British culture.
78. For a bibliography of Professor Kettle’s writings, see Lee Baxandall, Marxism
and Aesthetics; A Selective Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1968), pp. 69-70.
79. Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain, “Questions of
Ideology and Culture,” Marxism Today, May 1967, pp. 134-138. This program was
adopted by the committee on March 11, 1967.
80. Among the most important of the illustrated periodicals that have sprung up
out of some current, or combination of currents, within the independent New Left, are
International Times (anarchist and Trotskyite, with touches of Maoism), Student
(anarchist-Trotskyite), and Private Eye (anti-Establishment). Another is Black Dwarf,
which revived the name of a pre-Chartist radical paper: Edward P. Thompson helped to
bring this out, and it has been edited by Alexander Cockburm (an editor also of the
New Left Review, and the son of Claud Cockburn, once noted as foreign editor of the
London Daily Worker). The editor at the end of 1968 is the novelist David Mercer, a
friend of John Berger.
81. Another especially talented artist who has contributed to a variety of New Left
periodicals is Ralph Steadman.

Part IV. Radicalism, Marxism, and the Theory and Practice of

Art in Germany and Other Continental Countries (Holland,
Belgium, Scandinavia, Austria, Italy)

CHAPTER 12

1. D. Ryazanoff (pseud. of David B. Goldendach), ed., Karl Marx; Man, Thinker,

and Revolutionist (New York, 1927), p. 112.
2. “Three times,” said Hegel, “has an apple proved fatal. First to the human race
in the fall of Adam, secondly to Troy through the gift of Paris, and last of all to science
through the fall of Newton’s apple.” Quoted by Christopher Dawson, Progress and
Religion (Garden City, 1960), p. 30, note 1, with incomplete reference. The material in
this paragraph is mainly based on Dawson’s perceptive discussion, pp. 30-31.
3. Quoted, without reference, in Dawson, op. cit., p. 31.
4. Quoted, without reference, in J. L Talmon, Political Messianism; The Romantic
Phase (London, 1960), p. 182.
5. Cited, without reference, in ibid., p. 177. Friedrich Gentz, in an article in the
Berliner Monatsschrift for December 1793, had been the first to see Kant as the theorist
of the French Revolution.
6. Harald Hoffding, A History of Modern Philosophy (New York, 1955), Vol. 2
p. 161, citing Gustav Schmoller. For the organic conception of the state in Fichte
Hegel, also Schelling, and its anticipation in Rousseau, see Francis W. Coker “Organ-
ismic Theories of the State,” Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, Vol. 38
(New York, 1910), p. 255 ff.
7. Quoted, without reference, by Talmon, op. cit., p. 184.
8. For the story of social democracy in Germany, see especially Carl Landauer
European Socialism (Berkeley, Calif., 1959), passim; also Douglas A. Chalmers, The
Social Democratic Party of Germany (New Haven, 1964) and Carl E. Schorske, Ger-
man Social Democracy, 1905-1917 (Cambridge, Mass., 1955).
9. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Letters to Americans, 1848-1895 (New York
HB ot “a ‘
10. Ernest elfort Bax, “‘Synthetische contra mneumarxistische Geschichts-
auffassung, Neue Zeit (1896-1897, Band I), pp. 171-177. It will be recalled ae
Bax, after leaving the (British) Social Democratic Federation with Morris in 188
rejoined it in 1890.
had
e
Pages 588-597 NOTES / 807

11. The title in German is Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben
der Sozialdemokratie (Stuttgart, 1899).
12. John K. Jessup, “The Story of Marxism: Its Men, Its March,” Life, Vol. 51
(Oct 20, 1961'), p. 120.
13. Kautsky’s reply to Belfort Bax—already referred to—was entitled “Was will
und kann die matemialistische Geschichtsauffassung leisten?” Neue Zeit (1896-1897,
Band I), pp. 213-218; 228-238; 260-271. His reply to Bernstein was Bernstein und das
sozialdemokratische Programm; Eine Antikritik (Stuttgart, 1899).
14. For additional bibliography, see Jules Coulin, Die sozialistische Weltan-
schauung in der franzésischen Malerei (Leipzig, 1909), p. 63 ff., and elsewhere.
15. For discussion of Reich’s ideas see ibid., pp. 75-78.
16. Published as Fiir die Freiheit der Kunst (Munich, 1900).
17. Quoted from the Preussische Jahrbiicher, without specific reference, by Coulin,
op. cit., p. 74.
18. See also Hausenstein’s articles, “Versuch einer Soziologie der bildenden
Kunst,” Archiy fiir Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Vol. 36 (1913), pp. 758-794;
and “Die Revolution im Bild,” Der Zeitgeist (Stuttgart, 1911).
19. See Mikhail Lifshits (whose name is transliterated in the book as Michail
Lifschitz), ed., Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels; Uber Kunst und Literatur [East] Berlin,
1953), p. 11. The art historian Wilhelm Worringer was also attacked here as a “vulgar
sociologist,” along with Hausenstein and Wélfflin. Worringer has been mentioned
earlier in connection with his influence on the development of abstract (and thus
“formalist’’) art through his Abstraktion und Einftihlung (1907).
20. Wilhelm Hausenstein, Die Kunst und die Gesellschaft (Munich, 1917), p. 2.
21. Cited, without reference, in Max Rieser, “Contemporary Aesthetics in Po-
land,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 20 (Summer 1962), p. 425.
22. Aimé Victor Huber, a German supporter of the cooperative movement who,
although originally a Lutheran, had contacts with Ketteler, visited England in 1854 and
became Ludlow’s friend. Lujo Brentano declared himself Ludlow’s disciple after reading
the German edition of The Progress of the Working Class (1867), written by Ludlow
in collaboration with another Christian socialist and cooperator, the tailor and former
Owenite, Lloyd Jones. Brentano, a devout Catholic, already had some connections with
Huber’s work through Ketteler. See N. C. Masterman, John Malcolm Ludlow; The
Builder of Christian Socialism (Cambridge, England, 1963), pp. 202-207. Ludlow
himself, as we saw in Chapter 8, though an Evangelical Protestant, had been strongly
influenced by the French Catholic Christian social movement.
23. The encyclical Rerum novarum largely confirmed the social ideas of Ketteler.
German Protestants led by the anti-Semitic Pastor Adolf Stocker had established their
own Christian social movement based on’ a Christian Social Labor Party founded in
1878.
24. “The Arts and Crafts of Today,” in William Morris, On Art and Socialism,
Holbrook Jackson, ed. (London, 1947), p. 236.
25. Loc. cit.
26. See Werner Hofmann, The Earthly Paradise; Art in the Nineteenth Century
(New York, 1961), p. 430.
27. Loc. cit.
28. For the quotation from Wagner's Die Kunst und die Revolution (Leipzig,
1849), see William A. Ellis’s translation, Art and Revolution, in Richard Wagner's
Prose Works (2nd ed., London, 1895), Vol. 1, p. 53- Wagner's theme of the “tragedy
of modern capitalism” is quoted, without reference, in William L. Shirer, The Rise and
1) 1
Fall of the Third Reich (New York, 1962), pp. 149-150.
29. Edmond Michotte, La Visite de R. Wagner d Rossini, Paris, 1860 (Paris,
by
1906), p. 37. This has been edited, with another booklet by Michotte on Rossini,
. . . (Chicago,
Herbert Weinstock, under the title Richard Wagner’s Visit to Rossini
(New
1968); however, I have taken the quotation from Herbert Weinstock, Rossini
York, 1968), p. 290. For Wagner's use of the term Gesamkuns twerk and its antece-
twerk in
dents, see Alfred R. Neumann, The Eyolution of the Concept Gesamkuns
The best source in
German Romanticism (Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan, 1951).
life and thought is still Ermest Newman, The Life of Richard
English for Wagner's
Wagner (4 vols., New York, 1933-1946); but see also Richard Gutman’s one-volume
808 / NOTES Pages 597-605

Richard Wagner (New York, 1968), and Newman’s Wagner as Man and Artist (New
York, 1924). : ~
Ly cee Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Ktinsten
(Munich, 1878), Vol. 1, p. 7. This was first published in 1863. On Semper and
Wagner in relation to Sitte, see George R. and Christiane C. Collins, Camillo Sitte and
the Birth of Modern City Planning (New York, 1965), passim. Heinz Quitzsch, Die
dsthetischen Anschauungen Gottfried Sempers (Berlin, 1962), published in East
Germany at a time when the international communist line was relatively relaxed,
praised Semper as a democratic revolutionary against German feudalism, but attacked
him for never being more than a “bourgeois democrat,” and for being impressed by the
achievements of British capitalism.
31. George Lichtheim, Marxism; An Historical and Critical Study (London,
1961), p. 136, citing the Neue Rheinische Zeitung; Politisch-Ckonomische Revue
(London, 1850, as reprinted in book form, Dresden, 1955), pp. 310-311.
32. Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art (Cambridge, England, 1940), p. 253.
33. Alf Bge, From Gothic Revival to Functional Form (Oslo, 1957), p. 75-
34. Quoted by Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York,
1948), p. 258.
35. The left wing, in particular, of Dutch social democracy was to be represented
by such internationally leading intellectuals as the poet Herman Gorter, the writer
Henriette Roland-Holst, and the astronomer Anton Pannekoek. The influence of the
Dutch left wing was particularly important in the United States from 1915 to 1918
through a Dutch engineer, S. J. Rutgers. Roland-Holst, an art critic, knew Mortis.
36. Hendrik P. Berlage, Gedanken iiber Stil in der Baukunst (Leipzig, 1905), p.
22.
BLOG MGIES
38. For a summary of these doctrines of Viollet-le-Duc, see especially Paul Frankl,
The Gothic; Literary Sources and Interpretations Through Eight Centuries (Princeton,
NJ., 1960), particularly pp. 572, 573, 523, and 651. According to Frankl, Viollet-
le-Duc’s emphasis on cultural history as the determining factor of art he derived from an
earlier French art historian, Alexandre de Laborde.
39. Berlage, op. cit., p. 40.
40. Henri de Man, Psychology of Socialism (New York, 1927), p. 246.
41. Berlage, op. cit., p. 48.
42. Hendrik P. Berlage in Tweemaandelijk Tijdschrift, Vol. 2 (1896), p. 234.
43. The only ornament of the facade of the Stock Exchange consists of three heads
side by side, which are respectively Norman, Assyrian, and Egyptian in style: see
Stephan T. Madsen, Sources of Art Nouveau (New York, 1956), p. 202. While these
three heads in different styles reflect a survival of historical eclecticism, the styles chosen
for them are significant because to some degree they reflect the “primitivism’” which is
characteristic of so much modern art and so often accompanies modern “simplified”
form and the direct, functional use of materials in accordance with their essential,
“primitive” nature.
44. See Leonard K. Eaton, “Louis Sullivan and Hendrik Berlage; A Centennial
Tribute to Two Pioneers,” Progressive Architecture, Vol. 37 (Nov. 1956) .
138-141 ff. ae
45. Ausgeftihrte Bauten und Entwiirfe von Frank Lloyd Wright (Berlin, 19 LO)
published by Wasmuth.
46. See Donald D. Egbert and Paul E. Sprague, “In Search of John Edelmann,
Architect and Anarchist,” A.I.A. Journal, Feb. 1966, pp. 35-41.
47. For the influence of the Belgian Labor Party on art, see Eugenia Herbert, The
Artist and Social Reform; France and Belgium, 1885-1898 (New Haven, 1961)
?
especially pp. 28-34.
48. Ibid., p. 31, citing Jules Destrée and Emile Vandervelde, Le Socialisme en
Belgique (Paris, 1898), p. 218 ff.
49. Emile Verhaeren, Quelques notes sur l’ceuyre de Fernand
1887), p. 22; cited by E. cd op. cit., p. 75. NE ee
so. E. Herbert, op. cit., p. 158.
51. Ibid., p. 199.
52. A statement by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., quoted in Paul Haesaerts James Ensor
(New York, 1959), p. 92. ‘
Pages 606-610 NOTES / 809

' 53. Libby Tannenbaum, James Ensor, Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1951),
p. 61.
54. See The Strike (1892) and Fishermen’s Strike at Ostend (ca. 1892) in
Haesaerts, op. cit., p. 319.
55. This parallel has been made by Anthony Blunt and Phoebe Pool in Picasso;
The Formative Years (New York, 1962), under Fig. 61. For useful information and
bibliography on Toorop, see, e.g., J. B. Knipping, Jan Toorop (Amsterdam, 1947). For
Toorop’s relation to the Dutch Art Nouveau, see L. Gans, Nieuwe Kunst (Utrecht,
1966), passim.
56. According to Henry van de Velde, Die Renaissance im modernen Kunstge-
werbe (Berlin, 1901), p. 139.
57. See the analysis of this pamphlet in E. Herbert, op. cit., p. 30.
58. Coulin, of. cit., pp. 79-80.
59. Especially in his Essais socialistes; L’Alcoolisme—Ia religion—l'art (Paris,

60. E. Herbert, op. cit., p. 31.

61. Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement (London, 1936), p. 102.
62. See Madsen, op. cit., the review of that book by John M. Jacobus, Jr., Art
Bulletin, Vol. 40 (Dec. 1958), pp. 364-373; Madsen’s later book, Art Nouveau
(London, 1967), and the review of it in the (London) Times Literary Supplement,
June 20, 1968, p. 651; Peter Selz and Mildred Constantine, Art Nouveau, Museum of
Modern Art (Garden City, N.Y., 1959); Clay Lancaster, “Oriental Contributions to
Art Nouveau,” Art Bulletin, Vol. 34 (Dec. 1952), pp. 297-310; the previously cited
article by Robert Schmutzler, “The English Origins of Art Nouveau,” in the Architec-
tural Review, Vol. 117 (Feb. 1955), pp. 109-116, and another article by Schmutzler,
“Blake and the Art Nouveau,” Architectural Review, Vol. 118 (Aug. 1955), pp. 91-97.
Schmutzler has found one major source of the Art Nouveau in the influence of Blake’s
drawings on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and through him, on other Pre-Raphaelites. In
“The English Origins of Art Nouveau,” Schmutzler also has stressed the importance of
Henry Cole and his group, especially Cole’s friend Owen Jones, for the reform
movement in design which led to the Art Nouveau. As was indicated earlier, another
source of this reform in design he has found in the influence of Japanese art on Rossetti,
as well as on Whistler. Schmutzler developed his articles into an important book, Art
Nouveau (New York, 1962). For the painting and graphic art of Jugendstil, see Hans
H. Hofstitter, Geschichte der Europdischen Jugendstilmalerei (Cologne, 1963). The
essay, cited earlier, by Nikolaus Pevsner, “Architecture and Applied Arts,” pp. 229-
260 in Jean Cassou, Emile Langui, Nikolaus Pevsner, The Sources of Modern Art
(London, 1962), is one of the writings that have included Gauguin, Whistler, and
especially Mackmurdo among the major sources of the Art Nouveau movement.
Pevsner, with other writers, has reminded us that the term Art Nouveau came from
the name of a shop opened at Paris in December 1895 (by a dealer named Bing) and
Jugendstil from the name of a German periodical, Jugend, first published in 1896.
Pevsner’s co-author, Langui, has pointed out that in German and Austrian painting
Symbolism and Jugendstil have been practically synonymous. ‘The most recent general
history of the Art Nouveau, Mieczyslaw Wallis, Secesja (Warsaw, 1967), deals with
the movement in the Slavic countries as well as in Europe and the United States, doing
so under the Polish name for “Secession,” and so employing the term frequently used
for the Art Nouveau in Austria.
63. Schmutzler, Art Nouveau, p. 276.
64. For Horta, see Robert L. Delevoy, Victor Horta (Brussels, 1958), which has a
good bibliography; also J. Delhaye and P. Puttemans, Victor Horta (Brussels, 1964).
65. This building, so important for the history of architecture, was torn down in
1965.
; 66. Though trained at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Horta had soon
been especially impressed by seeing the Eiffel Tower and the Galerie des Machines at
the Paris exposition of 1889. Horta’s first mature work, the Tassel house in Brussels of
1892-1893, often called the first true example of the Art Nouveau, made frank use of
iron in a structural column as well as in decoration.
67. For Van de Velde’s life, see his posthumously published Geschichte meines
Lebens, Hans Curjel, ed. (Munich, 1962); Karl-Heinz Hiiter, Henry van de Velde
(Berlin, 1967); A. M. Hammacher, Le Monde de Henry van de Velde (Paris, 1967);
 Pages 610-622
810 / NOTES
Velde’s previously
and Karl E. Osthaus, Van de Velde (Hagen, 1920). See also Van de y, published
cited book, Die Renaissance im moderne n Kunstgew erbe. Hiiter’s biograph
m at the most length,
in communist East Berlin, treats Van de Velde’s social radicalis
doing so critically because of Van de Velde’s sympathy for anarchism. Vol. 2
68. Jean de Nethy in “Nietzsche-Zarathustra,” Revue blanche, New Series,
(Apr. 1892), p. 208, and E. Herbert, op. cit., p. 80.
Kunstgewerbe, p. 23., and
69.Van de Velde, Die Renaissance im modernen
Hammacher, op. cit., p. 88.
70. He later claimed that Willy Finch, he himself, and a mutual friend named
Lemmen, had been the first artists in Belgium to renew the applied arts. See Van de
Velde, Die Renaissance im modernen Kunstgewerbe, p. 67.
je lbid paste
72. Ibid., pp. 131-148.
73. Ibid., p. 138.
74. Ibid., p. 137.
Tis aLbid pads:
76. For the quotation, see Libby Tannenbaum, “Henry van de Velde; A Re-
evaluation,” Art News Annual, Vol. 34 (New York, 1968), p. 144. Among followers of
Morris, Van de Velde later referred by name to the architects Sedding and Voysey; see
Van de Velde, Die Renaissance im modernen Kunstgewerbe, p. 64.
77. Van de Velde, Die Renaissance im modernen Kunstgewerbe, pp. 138-139.
78. David H. Dickason, The Daring Young Men; The Story of the American
Pre-Raphaelites (Bloomington, Ind., 1953), pp. 234-235. I have not been able to find
out the date of The Tree of Life.
79. For the two quotations from Van de Velde, see his Die Renaissance im
modernen Kunstgewerbe, pp. 83 and 97.‘Van de Velde’s tendency toward abstraction
had apparently begun about 1892, when he was still a painter, under the influence of
Gauguin’s art. See Van de Velde’s remarkably abstract still-life of fruit, executed in
pastel in 1892, a detail of which is reproduced in color by Hiiter, op. cit., p. 20. The
influence of Gauguin here, not referred to by Hiiter, is mentioned in a review of Hiiter’s
book in the (London) Times Literary Supplement, Sept. 15, 1968, p. 944.
80. The cooperative was in Mataré. See George R. Collins, Antonio Gaudi (New
York, 1960), pp. 9, 14, 19, 29.
81. See Carl E. Schorske, ““The Transformation of the Garden: Ideal and Society
in hes Literature,” American Historical Review, Vol. 72 (July 1967), p. 1304,
note 30.
82. That Trotsky wrote on Meunier is mentioned by Louis Lozowick in Joseph
Freeman, Joshua Kunitz, Louis Lozowick, Voices of October (New York, 1930), p.
265. Spargo’s article, entitled “Constantin Meunier, Painter and Sculptor of Toil,”
appeared in an American socialist cultural periodical, the Comrade, Vol. 1 (Aug. 1902),
pp. 246-248.
83. See especially the unsigned article, “Artist Against War,’ (London) Times
Literary Supplement, July 29, 1960, pp. 473-474, and the recent books on Masereel
cited there. Masereel’s first New York exhibition, in 1939, was introduced by Frank
Crowninshield, the ultra-sophisticated, ultra-fashionable, non-communist editor of
Vanity Fair. The nearest thing to a biography is Pierre Vorms, Gesprdche mit Frans
Masereel, tr. by Helene and Herbert Kiihn (Dresden, 1967), significantly published in
East Germany.
84. For biographies of Munch, see, among others, three available in English: Johan
H. Langaard and Reidar Revold, Edvard Munch; Masterpieces from the Artist’s
Collection in the Munch Museum «in Oslo (New York, 1964); Otto Benesch, Edvard
Munch (London, 1960); and Frederick B. Deknatel, Edvard Munch (New York
1950). It is no doubt significant that Benesch, an Austrian, pays far more attention to
Munch’s social interest than does the American Deknatel. The early work of the artist is
ie ae presented in Ingrid Langaard, Edvard Munch, Modningsadk (Oslo,
1900).
85. See the lithograph in Van de Velde’s Geschichte meines Lebens, Fig. 73.
86. Benesch, op. cit., pp. 40-41.
87. “Expressionist,” which was first popularized by the German art historian
Wilhelm Worringer in 1911, seems to have originated in the novel, The Bohemian; A
Pages 622-637 NOTES / 811
Tragedy of Modern Life, by an American writer, Charles De Kay, published at New
York in 1878. In this, a group of young New York writers call themselves “the
Expressionists.”” De Kay spent much time in Paris (where “expressionist” was used in
connection with the exhibition of the painter Hervé in 1901), and for some years was
consul general in Berlin. See the letter of Armin Amold of McGill University in the
(London) Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 28, 1963, Pp. 1000.

CHAPTER 13

1. On the history of the Weimar Republic and its background in the complex
political developments in Germany after World War I, see George D. H. Cole,
Communism and Social Democracy, 1914-1931 (London, 1952), Vol. 1, especially pp.
el also Ruth Fischer, Stalin and German Communism (Cambridge, Mass.,
1948).
2. For the cultural implications of the Weimar Republic, see especially Peter Gay,
Weimar Culture (New York and Evanston, IIl., 1968): sections III through V of its
excellent bibliography respectively deal with the arts, literature, and the film.
3. An excellent summary of Tillich’s ideas is to be found in Will Herberg, Four
Existentialist Theologians (Garden City, N.Y., 1958), especially pp. 233-236, and
1—24. On Tillich’s art theory, consult Charles W. Kegley, “Paul Tillich on the
Philosophy of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 19 (Winter 1960),
pp. 175-184. For Tillich’s amateurism in art history as well as his theological contribu-
tion to it, see Thomas F. Matthews, S.J., “Tillich on Religious Content in Modern
Art,” Art Journal, Vol. 27 (Fall 1967), pp. 16-19.
4. Otto Nagel, H. Zille ([East] Berlin, 1961): see p. 169 of that book for Zille’s
etching of Karl Marx, executed in 1900. On Zille, also see Heinrich Zille—Vater der
Strasse ([East] Berlin, 1966).
5. For Grosz and the connections of dada with German communism, see. e.g.,
John I. H. Baur, George Grosz (New York, 1954), pp. 10, 16-17; Hans Richter, Dada;
Art and Anti-Art (New York and Toronto, 1965, passim; Alfred H. Barr, Jr., ed.,
Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, Museum of Modern Art (3rd ed., New York, 1947),
pp. 23, 25-26; and Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets; An
Anthology (New York, 1951), pp. 41 ff., 146-147.
6. Richter, op. cit., p. 109.
7. Richard Huelsenbeck, “En Avant Dada; A History of Dadaism” (1920), in
Motherwell, ed., op. cit., p. 41. In 1964 Huelsenbeck published at Hamburg, Dada;
Eine literarische Dokumentation.
8. Huelsenbeck, “En Avant Dada,” p. 44.
9. “The Art of Unreason,” (London) Times Literary Supplement, June 9, 1961,
ee:
. 10. See Richard Huelsenbeck, ed., Dada Almanach (Berlin, 1920), opposite p. 40;
also the previously cited review article on dada, “The Art of Unreason,” in the
(London) Times Literary Supplement, June 9, 1961, p. 1. Photomontage may not
have been invented in 1916 by Grosz and Heartfield but in 1918 by Raoul Hausmann:
see Hausmann’s letter to the Times Literary Supplement, Feb. 25, 1965, p. 147.
11. Marcel Ray, George Grosz (Paris, 1927), p. 33:
12. David Sylvester, “Kasimir Malevich,” Encounter, Vol. 14 (May 1960), p. 49.
v3, Loencit:
14, Loe® cit: “3 -
15. Richter, op. cit., p. 113. Grosz wrote this in G, an originally dada but also
constructivist periodical of which Hans Richter was editor.
16. Richter, op. cit., p. 114.
17. Ibid., p. 143. '
18. Huelsenbeck, in Motherwell, ed., op. cit., p. 157.
19. Richter, op. cit., p. 160; and Hans Arp, On My Way, Poetry and Essays, 1912
. 1947 (New York, 1948), p. 69. Arp’s denunciation of bourgeois art had
apparently been made in 1915.
 / NOTES Pages 637-646
812

20. Patrick Waldberg, Max Ernst (Paris, 1958), pp. 305 £.

al :
21. Richter, op. cit., p. 195.
(Berlin,
22. On Piscator’s career in Germany, see his Das politische Theater
nt (New
1928); the biography by his widow, Maria Ley-Piscator, The Piscator Experime
York, 1967), in which his later career in the United States is emphasized; Jiirgen Riihle,
Theater und Revolution (Munich, 1963), pp. 132-158; and Erwin Piscator, Schriften,
2 vols. ({East] Berlin, 1968).
23. See Bertolt Brecht, Schriften zum Theater (Berlin, 1963-1964), Vol. 3, pp.
86-87.
] With them and Hannah Héch, Dix had participated in making grisly scenes of
war and revolution for the First International Dada Fair at Berlin in 1920: see Richter,
op. cit., p. 133. ae
25. It was so applied by Dr. G. F. Hartlaub: see George H. Hamilton, Painting
and Sculpture in Europe, 1880-1940 (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 321, and Fritz
Schmalenbach, “The Term Neue Sachlichkeit,” Art Bulletin, Vol. 22 (Sept. 1940), p.
164, note 22. Like the Marxist art historian ‘Wilhelm Hausenstein, however, Hartlaub
had predicted the ultimate subjugation of materialism and a new affirmation of the
religious spirit. It should be added that at the time Hartlaub applied the term to
painting, it was also being applied to architecture.
26. Quoted by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., German Painting and Sculpture, Museum of
Modern Art (New York, 1931), p. 13, note. Dix was favorably mentioned—along with
such members of the Novembergruppe as Grosz, Heartfield, and the German-American
painter Feininger; also Masereel, the French artist Laforge, the Dutch artist Alma,
and others—as a revolutionary anti-capitalist in the article on expressionism in the first
edition of the Bolshaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya (Great Soviet Encyclopedia), pub-
lished between 1926 and 1947. This article is translated into Italian in Giorgio Kraiskj,
ed., Materiali per un’estetica marxista (Rome, 1950), p. 205. Forbidden by the Nazis to
teach or exhibit, Dix then lived in seclusion, developing an archaic style with religious
elements. In 1939, he was accused of an attempt on Hitler’s life and jailed in Dresden.
Drafted into the German army, he was made a prisoner of war by the French. After
the war, he returned to West Germany. For his biography, see Otto Conzelmann, Otto
Dix (Hanover, 1959), and the enlarged edition of Fritz Léffler, Otto Dix; Leben und
Werk (Dresden, 1967). Dix died in 1969, while this book was on press.
27. John Willett, The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht (London, 1959), pp. 129-130.
28. See especially Martin Esslin, Brecht; The Man and His Work (Garden City,
N.Y., 1960), p. 56. On Brecht, see also the sympathetic and perceptive biography by
Frederic Ewen, Bertolt Brecht; His Art, His Life, and His Times (New York, 1967),
which, better than any other, relates Brecht to his period. For Brecht on the arts, see
Bertolt Brecht, Schriften zur Literatur and Kunst, 3 vols. (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1967).
29. Willett, op. cit., p. 130.
30. For example, about 1930 there stemmed from Die neue Sachlichkeit a
specifically “‘proletarian-revolutionary” writers’ organization designed to develop “agit-
prop” and a chain of “‘worker-correspondents.”
31. Quoted in Helmut Lehmann-Haupt, Art Under a Dictatorship (New York,
1954), p. 18. On the Arbeitsrat fiir Kunst, see also the important book by Barbara M.
Lane, Art and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), passim.
32. On the Novembergruppe, see also Bernard S. Myers, The German Expression-
ists (New York, 1957), pp. 275-278, and the review-article, ““What Was the Bauhaus?”
in the (London) Times Literary Supplement, Sept. 13, 1963, pp. 681-682. Helga
Kliemann, Die Novembergruppe, was published at West Berlin in 1969.
33. See Lehmann-Haupt, of. cit., pp. 18-20, for the whole questionnaire.
34. An Alle Kiinstler! (Berlin, 1919), p. 19; translation from Peter Selz, German
Expressionist Painting (Berkeley, Cal., 1957), p. 313.
35. The chief history of the Bauhaus is Hans M. Wingler, Das Bauhaus
(Bramsche and Cologne, 1962), but see especially Herbert Hiibner, Die soziale Utopie
des Bauhauses; Ein Beitrag zur Wissenssoziologie in der bildenden Kunst (Ph.D. thesis,
University of Miinster, Westf., 1963). Hiibner is developing this into a book. Also
see Bauhaus; Idee-Form-Zweck-Zeit (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1964), based on an exhibition
emphasizing the achievement of the Bauhaus in industrial design; Gillian Naylor, The
Pages 646-664 NO TMs: 7° Sa03
Bauhaus (London, 1968); and three books cited in section 19 of this chapter in connec-
tion with the recent revival of interest in the Bauhaus in East Germany. On the re-
lation of the Bauhaus to other developments in architecture under the Weimar Re-
public, see especially Lane, op. cit., passim.
36. See Kraiskj, ed., op. cit., p. 205. For Feininger’s biography, see Hans Hess,
ee Feininger (New York, 1961), and Emst Scheyer, Lyonel Feininger (Detroit,
1904).
37. See Alan Gowans, The Restless Art; A History of Painters and Painting,
1760-1900 (Philadephia and New York, 1966), p. 362.
38. On the authority of Herbert Hiibner. Schlemmer began his career as a
sculptor and choreographer.
: 39. Walter Gropius, Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, 1919-1 923 (Munich, 1923),
p. 8.
40. For Muthesius and the Werkbund, see Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern
Design (New York, 1949), pp. 15-17.
41. On the authority of Mr. Gropius in a letter to the writer.
42. With characteristic generosity, Walter Gropius read a draft of part of the essay
out of which this book has grown, and made many valuable criticisms and suggestions.
Every effort has been made to take his comments and corrections into account, but it is
only fair to say that he disagreed sharply with a number of the author’s primary
conclusions, as well as with the presentation of some of the more factual material herein.
He felt, and rightly, that the picture given of the Bauhaus is not a balanced one.
However, the Bauhaus was a focal point for most of the currents of modern art.
While the majority of these currents had nothing to do with communism or other
political radicalism directly at any time, some had either been developed by communists
or socialists, or else have been admired and made use of by them. It is these which are
being investigated in this book. Lastly, the Bauhaus, however, unjustly, was accused of
being “communistic’’ by its opponents. Hence a book which, like this one, seeks to
study the relations of communism to the arts, necessarily has to consider this charge and
account for it even while very largely denying its validity. For anti-ccommunism is part of
the communist problem which this book is so largely devoted to investigating.
Walter Gropius died while this book was on press. His obituary, in New York
Times, July 6, 1969, stated (p. 44) that he was a “staunch social democrat.” His anti-
Marxist statement to me suggests, however, that his socialism was of a humanitarian,
essentially “utopian” kind. Mies died only six weeks after Gropius, on August 17, 1969.
43. On the authority of Herbert Hiibner.
44. Walter Gropius told the writer that he himself had recommended Meyer for
the directorship, not being then aware of his communistic leanings. For the latter’s
biography, see especially Claude Schnaidt, Hannes Meyer; Bauten, Projekte und
Schriften (Teufen AR, Switzerland, 196s).
45. Quoted in Sophie Lissitzky-Kippers, El Lissitsky (Greenwich, Conn., 1968;
but orginally published in German at Dresden, 1967), pp. 340 and 341. The edition in
English has an Introduction by Sir Herbert Read. Veshch’s viewpoint resembled that of
the Czech constructivist—and revolutionary Marxist—group Dvétsil, a collective that
was in contact with many of Veshch’s contributors and with the Bauhaus.
46. Wingler, op. cit., p. 170; Schnaidt, op. cit., p. 103, and Preface, p. 7.
47. Schnaidt, op. cit., Introduction, p. 27. At this time, many intellectuals were
disgusted with developments in the Weimar Republic. The writer Arthur Koestler, who
arrived in Berlin from Paris in September 1930, believed that Weimar was doomed and
that communism was the only hope.
48. For these statements by Meyer see ibid., Introduction, p. 31. 00
49. Quoted, without reference, in Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First
Machine Age (New York, 1960), p. 192.
50. On the authority of Herbert Hiibner. See also Alfred H. Barr, Jr., in Herbert
Bayer, Walter Gropius, Ise Gropius, eds., Bauhaus, 1919-1928, Museum of Modern Art
(New York, 1938), pp. 7-8. ;
51. Letter of Walter Gropius to the author, April 26, 1951.
52. Maximilien Gauthier, Le Corbusier ou Tarchitecture au service de homme
(Paris, 1944), pp. 175-198.
814 / NOTES Pages 664-679

53 elbid. pa2z3. he ea
“Nature of Abstract
54. As was pointed out by Meyer Schapiro, then a Marxist, in
Art,”’ Marxist Quarterly, Vol. 1 (Jan.-Mar. 1937) Pp: 97: .
cit., p. 18, from the
55. Quoted in H. Bayer, W. Gropius, I. Gropius, eds., op.
First Proclamation of the Weimar Bauhaus.
to reform was
56. One of the craft arts that the Bauhaus, like Morris, sought
Mornis’s types were characteri stically based on simplified and
typography. But where to be
modernized Gothic lettering, those of the Bauhaus characteristically sought
in a more revolutio nary way by rejecting all historical reminisce nce in favor of a
modern that
sans-serif simplicity considered appropriate to an industrial age. The Nazis thought they
such typography eliminated all national and racial characteristics, so that when
came to power they returned to types based on Gothic script as being Germanic.
57. H. Bayer, W. Gropius, I. Gropius, edss Ops Cit... pi 27:
58. Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (London, 1935), P-
19. Nevertheless, the New Architecture was itself labeled “functionalism,” apparently
first in 1923 by Emil Utitz, a young professor of art history at Halle, but later, even by
Le Corbusier when he insisted that: Alberto Sartoris should use “Functional” rather than
“Rational” in the title of his book, Gli Elementi dell’architettura funzionale (1932). In
describing housing such as Gropius’s, Utitz used the German words zweckmassig and
sachlich, both as connoting functional, claiming that such new architecture, in its
planning for circulation, comfort, etc., derived its inspiration from factory design. See
Emil Utitz, “Zweckmissigkeit und Sachlichkeit,” Dekorative Kunst, Vol. 26 (4923) p:
194, cited in Lane, op. cit., p. 131 and p. 251, note 24.
59. See Lehmann-Haupt, op. cit., pp. 29 ff.
60. Walter C. Behrendt, Modern Building (New York, 1937), pp. 201-203.
61. The superblock had originated at Port Sunlight, built to house employees of
the British soap manufacturer, Lever.
62. Bruno Taut, Modern Architecture (London, 1929), pp. 97 and 141. On
Taut’s career, see especially Lane, op. cit., passim.
63. Itten was also affected by other Eastern forms of mysticism, notably ‘Taoism
and Zen. Buddhism, and by the medieval mysticism of Eckhart. For his work at the
Bauhaus, see his Mein Vorkurs am Bauhaus (Ravensburg, 1963). The Mazdaznan
cult had been founded about 1900 by Otto Hanisch, a German-American typographer.
64. His real name was C. E. M. Kiipper.
65. Quoted in Banham, op. cit., p. 151, from an uncompleted essay by Van
Doesburg. According to Raoul Hausmann, the Berlin dadaist and revolutionary, it was
Van Doesburg who in 1920 had suggested to him and the Swedish painter Viking
Eggeling that they found the magazine which became known as G (for Gestaltung, here
meaning abstract expression). This was published in 1923-1924, with Hans Richter as
editor, and was a focus for constructivism and for late dada. Its title was suggested by
Lissitzky. The purpose of the founders was to contribute to the understanding of what
was being done in an ever-widening circle of avant-garde modern artists, some socially
concerned, others not, which included Tzara, Van Doesburg, and soon also Mies,
Lissitsky, those two other constructivists Gabo and Pevsner, George Grosz, Man Ray,
and Soupault. See especially the letter of Raoul Hausmann in the Art Journal, Vol. 24
(Summer 1965), pp. 350 and 352.
66. Quoted in Banham, op. cit., p. 314, from Moholy-Nagy’s Von Material zu
Architektur (Munich, 1928), based on his teaching at the Bauhaus.
67. Sybil Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy (New York, 1950), pp. 22-27. From this
biography by the artist’s widow, most of the facts about him herein have been taken.
68. Ibid., p. 19, quoting from an article that had been published by Moholy-
Nagy in 1922. _
69. Das Wissen um Expressionismus; Fuehrer durch die Ausstellung der Abstrak-
ten (Berlin, 1926); cited by Lehmann-Haupt, op. cit., p. 27 and p. 251, note 15.
70. See Lehmann-Haupt, of. cit., p. 72, who draws interesting parallels between
the temporary merger of political and artistic currents at the beginning of the Weimar
Republic and somewhat similar happenings early in the history of Bolshevik Russia, of
Fascist Italy, and—to a lesser degree—of Nazi Germany.
71. Labour Monthly, Vol. 14 (Sept. 1932), p. 586.
72. Myers, op. cit., p. 35, and p. 40, note 18.
Pages 679-681 NOTES / 815
73. Banham, of. cit., p. 276.
74. Georg Muche, who taught at the Bauhaus from 1920 to 1927, has written
about Der Sturm and about the dada movement and the Bauhaus, in his Blickpunkt
Sturm, Dada, Bauhaus, Gegenwart (Munich, 1961). Muche was one of those at the
Bauhaus who, like Johannes Itten, subscribed to Mazdaznan mysticism. After he left the
Bauhaus in 1927, he taught for four years at Itten’s school in Berlin. Although Muche
was primarily a painter, like other members of the Bauhaus staff he upheld the synthesis
of the arts, and early became interested in architecture and city planning. Hence in 1929
he made a trip to the United States in connection with utopian settlement plans of the
Mazdaznan movement, and studied methods of prefabrication and steel construction in
New York. On returning to Germany he made, as a tribute to “Americanism,” a de-
sign for a skyscraper apartment house in reinforced concrete. In 1931 he joined his
frends Oskar Schlemmer and Johannes Molzahn in teaching at the State Academy of
Art in Breslau.
Muche had been brought to the Bauhaus in 1920 as a result of being recommended
to Gropius by Molzahn, then a painter in Weimar. An ultra-expressionist, Molzahn was
the son of a master-bookbinder strongly influenced by Henry van de Velde, and had
grown up in a home that was a kind of museum of Art Nouveau. At the end of World
War I he had become a member of the inner circle around Der Sturm, and apparently
was responsible for instigating the recommendations to Gropius of Schlemmer and also
of Klee, Feininger, and—perhaps—Kandinsky, three members of the Sturm group who
became the chief painters at the Bauhaus. However, Molzhan himself was not invited
to join the staff of the Bauhaus, probably because of his violently radical political views:
between 1919 and 1921 he published in Der Sturm articles of the most radical nature,
denouncing as a “cheap swindle” institutions of state, religion, and society under the
Weimar Republic. He had been strongly sympathetic to the communist Karl Lieb-
knecht, co-leader of the Spartacists, and in April 1919, after the defeat of the Sparta-
cist revolt and the murder of Liebknecht in the preceding January, he painted in a
mainly futurist style a large picture entitled The Idea—Movement—Struggle, in which
a portrait head of Liebknecht was included and which originally contained an inscrip-
tion, ““Dir—Karl Liebknecht” (To you—Karl Liebknecht). From 1922 to 1929 Mol-
zahn taught industrial design, printing, and other “practical” subjects at the art school in
Magdeburg headed by Bruno Taut. After 1933 Molzahn’s paintings were proscribed by
the Nazis as degenerate, and in 1938 he left Germany for the United States, where he
taught at the University of Washington (1938-1941), Moholy-Nagy’s School of De-
sign in Chicago (1943-1944), and the New School for Social Research in New York
(1947-1952). He returned to Germany in 1959, dying there, at Munich, in 196s.
On Molzahn and Muche see the important article by Ernst Scheyer, published
while this book was on press, entitled “Molzahn, Muche and the Weimar Bauhaus,”
Art Journal, Vol. 27 (Spring 1969), pp. 269-277. In this article Molzahn’s painting of
1919 is reproduced as Figure 2 on p. 272.
75. See the cover for Der Sturm, No. 3 (1922), designed by him.
76. Lothar Schreyer, Erinnerungen an Sturm und Bauhaus; Was ist das Menschen
Bild? (Munich, 1956), p. 17, and Selz, op. cit., p. 273. Schreyer taught at the Bauhaus
from 1921 to 1923, when he left because he was a Mazdaznan mystic. For Walden, also
see Der Sturm; Ein Erinnerungsbuch an Herwarth Walden und die Kiinstler aus dem
Sturmkreis (Baden-Baden, 1954), edited by Nell Walden [Walden’s second wife] and
Lothar Schreyer; Edith Hoffman, “‘Der Sturm’; A Document of Expressionism,”
Signature, No. 18, New Series, 1954, published in London; and Nell Walden, Herwarth
Walden; Ein Lebensbild (Berlin, 1963).
77. For Walden as a contributor to Das Wort, see Selz, op. cit., p. 273. In 1941,
Walden was sent to Siberia, according to Schreyer, op. cit., p. 17. Schreyer states that
the reason for this is unknown; but it may well have been simply that German-born
aliens were being relocated because of the war. Walden’s wife, Nell Walden, op. cit., p.
34, says merely that he was arrested by the Soviet state police on March 13, 1941, and
disappeared. ; me
78. For a résumé of Becher’s career see Meyers Neues Lexikon, Vol. 1 (Leipzig,
63), pp. 676-677.
te ee aS e.g., the bibliography cited in Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man
(New York, 1961), p. 1 ff., note 1.
 Pages 681-694
816 / NOTES
and Gretel Adorno,
80. On Walter Benjamin, see especially his Schriften, Theodor
(Frankf urt-am- Main, 1955): this contains a biograph ical notice in Vol. 2,
eds., 2 vols.
and Theodor Adorno, eds.
pp. 530-536. See also Benjamin’s Briefe, Gershom Scholem n (Frankfurt-am-
(Frankfurt-am-Main, 1966); the volume Uber Walter Benjami a Philosophy of
Main, 1968); and the review article “Walter Benjami n; Towards
1-3. An essay
Language,” (London) Times Literary Supplement, Aug. 22, 1968, pp.
York, 1968), pp. 153-
on Benjamin is in Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New
206. Originally d in the New Yorker in 1968, it also serves as the introduction
publishe
to the volume of Benjamin’s writings on literary criticism edited by Hannah Arendt
under the title Illuminations (New York, 1968), translated by Harry Zohn.
For Max Raphael’s career, see Sir Herbert Read’s introduction to Raphael’s The
Demands of Art, tr. by Norbert Guterman, Bollingen Series LXXVIII (Princeton, N.J.,
book.
1968): a list of Raphael’s publications is to be found on pp. 241-243 of this
See also Read’s letter to the (London) Times Literary Supplement, July 9, 1964,
. 616. '
2 81. For this translation, which is abridged, see Studies on the Left (Winter
1960), pp. 28-45. The translation is based on the original German, for which see
Benjamin’s Schriften, Vol. 1, pp. 366-405.
82. On Bloch, see, e.g., Jiirgen Riihle, “The Philosopher of Hope: Emst Bloch,”
in Leopold Labedz, ed., Revisionism (New York, 1962), pp. 166-178. Also see the
review of a two-volume Frankfurt edition of Das Prinzip Hoffnung in the (London)
Times Literary Supplement, Mar. 31, 1961, pp. 1-2.
83. The international spirit of the New Left has been reflected, for example, in the
periodical Tendenzen; Blatter fiir engagierte Kunst, published at Munich beginning in
1960, but having editors also in Berlin, Switzerland, and London. Among its readers has
been the East German communist artist John Heartfield: see, e.g., his letter in No. 16,
Oct. 1962, unpaged. English editor for this issue was the painter Peter de Francia.
84. See Luigi Barzini, “Communism, Italian Style, Has Nowhere to Go,” New
York Times, Feb. 13, 1966, Section 6, pp. 44 and 47. One such art histonan, Roberto
Longhi, writes—significantly—on Caravaggio, sixteenth-century “realist” painter.
85. Ibid., p. 47.
86. See the multi-volume edition of the Opere di Antonio Gramsci (Turin,
1947— ); also John Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian
Communism (Stanford, Calif., 1967), and Paolo Spriano, Storia del Partito comunista
italiano, Vol. 1, Da Bordiga a Gramsci (Turin, 1967). The most recent book on
Gramsci, Alistair Davidson, Gramsci’s Marxism (Sydney, 1968), was originally pub-
lished in serial form in the Australian Left Review during 1967-1968.
87. For a summary of these anti-Fascist art movements, see Art Since 1945 (New
York, 1962; but first published in 1958), pp. 101-102.
88. It was signed by the artists Accardi, Attardi, Consagra, Dorazio, Guerrini,
Perilli, Sanfilippo, and Turcato.
89. Quoted in Art Since 1945 , p. 105.
90. Ibid., p. 106.
91. Cassinari resigned, as Carlo Levi (who had joined the movement) had earlier.
Meanwhile, the painters Corpora and Turcato (who later became a member of Forma)
and the sculptors Fazzini and Franchina had joined the group.
92. Art Since 1945, p. 107.
93. Birolli, Corpora, Morlotti, Santomaso, Turcato and Vedova.
94. Sylvia Sprigge, “Bernard Berenson,” Encounter, Vol. 14 (Jan. 1960), p. 61.
95. Sylvia Sprigge, in Berenson; A Biography (Boston, 1960), writes as follows (p.
269): Berenson “was very fond df Renato Guttuso, the painter, and of the Siena art
historian, Count Ranuccio Bianchi-Bandinelli, both fully-fledged Comrades. Artists he
held to be politically irresponsible. Politically he thought that all the Bianchi-Bandinellis
of Italy were the products of what he called ‘the conceptualistic misdirection which
German-mindedness has induced in Italy.’” Nicky Mariano, Forty Years with Berenson
(New York, 1966), p. 303, says that Guttuso, who was introduced to Berenson by
Sylvia Sprigge, “was a good friend of his.”
96. See the catalog by James T. Soby and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Twentieth-Century
Italian Art, Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1949).
97. For an American article on Guttuso’s life and beliefs, see Milton Gendel,
 Pages 694-701 NOTES / 817
“Guttuso, A Party Point of View,” Art News, Vol. 57 (Apt. 1958), pp. 26-27,
59-62.
This article, which is partly an interview, was written at the time of Guttuso’s one-man
show in New York. It is one of a series of articles published in this issue of Art
News
under the general heading of “Art and Artists Under Communism Today.”
(A second
series was published in the issue for December 1958.) For further material
on Guttuso,
see Giuseppe Marchiori, Renato Guttuso (Milan, 1952), with a useful bibliograp
hy;
John Berger, Renato Guttuso (Dresden, 1957), published—significantly—in
East Ger-
many; and Alberto Moravia (pseud.), La Vita e opera di Guttuso (Palermo, 1962), by
the Italian communist-line writer whose real name is Alberto Pincherle.
98. Richard Hostetter, The Italian Socialist Movement; Origins 1860-1882
(Princeton, N_J., etc., 1958), pp. 158 and 164. Italians at Rome, sympathetic to the
International, founded in 1872 a Workers League of Arts and Crafts: see ibid., Ds
Bq.
However, the founding of the Italian Workers Party in 1882 marked the real appearance
of an Italian socialist movement. Garibaldi, unlike Mazzini, had, we noted, eventually
called himself a socialist.
99. M. Libman, “The Sculptures of Giacomo Manzi” (in Russian) ,Iskusstvo, No.
12 (1961), pp. 44-48; and V. Goryainoy, “An Exhibition of Renato Guttuso,” ibid.,
pp. 38-43 (likewise in Russian).
100. New York Times (May 1, 1966), p. 26. Despite Manzi’s communism, secu-
lar pressure on the Vatican brought him the commission to design doors for one of the
entrances to St. Peter’s in Rome. In working on them, as a communist unbeliever he
encountered much opposition, but he became a firm friend of Pope John XXIII: see
Curtis Bill Pepper, The Artist and the Pope (New York, 1968).
101. John Berger, Renato Guttuso (Dresden, 1957), p. 21.
102. Gendel, op. cit., p. 60.
103. Ibid., p. 61.
104. For the article (in Russian) see Iskusstvo, No. 9 (1958), pp. 5-9.
105. L’Unitd, Jan. 24, 1963, p. 3. The speech had been delivered the previous day
at the Soviet Embassy in Rome, and significantly was preceded by the ambassador’s
introductory remarks on the cultural debate in the U.S.S.R. in which Khrushchev was
attacking abstract art. Guttuso had been elected to the Soviet Academy on December 3,
1962. I am indebted to Professor James Marston Fitch for bringing this speech to my
attention.
106. In Chapter 6, section 11, it was noted that at the conference, when under
Soviet leadership a new world communist secretariat was proposed, the Italian and
French parties led so much opposition to the proposal that Khrushchev disowned it, and
on his own renounced the Soviet party’s traditional claim to leadership in the world
movement. However, not until May 1964 did the Soviet party officially back him up by
publicly giving up all claim to “hegemony” over the world communist movement. In
March 1966, Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet party, again renounced any claim to
such hegemony, but it was reassumed with the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
107. Quoted, without specific reference, by Eldon Gniffths, “Mr. K’s Turn To-
ward Stalinism,” Saturday Evening Post, Vol. 236 (June 1, 1963), p. 70.
108. Time, Vol. 84 (Sept. 18, 1964), p. 42. The complete text of Togliatti’s
political testament was translated in New York Times, Sept. 5, 1964, p. 2.
109. Barzini, op. cit., p. 31.
110. The revisionism of the New Left in Italy has been represented by such
periodicals as Eugenio Reale’s Corrispondenza socialista, Antonio Giolitti’s Passato e
presente, and especially the International Socialist Journal.
111. See Max Bill, “The Bauhaus Idea from Weimar to Ulm,” Architects’
Yearbook, 5 (London, 1953), pp. 29-32. In addition to Bill and Aicher, the faculty
consisted of Walter Zeischegg (Austrian sculptor), Vordemberge-Gildewart (a painter
of the Dutch De Stijl group), Hans Gugelot (Dutch architect and designer), and,
beginning in 1954, Tomas Maldonado (Argentinian painter and designer). I am
indebted to a conversation with Mr. Maldonado for much information about the
Hochschule fiir Gestaltung—though he, of course, is not responsible for any erzors of
fact or interpretation made by me. c
112. Bill also regarded “concrete art” as going beyond abstract art in emphasizing
“the production of fields of energy with the help of color’ and the creation of certain
thythms: see Tomds Maldonado, Max Bill (Buenos Aires, 1955), p. 16. The term
 Pages 701-705
818 / NOTES
Schaeffer, developed out of “art
“musique concrete,” first used in the 1940’s by Pierre
concret.”
“Is the Bauhaus Relevant
113. See, eg. the article by Tomas Maldonado, r’s previously cited book on
y a critici sm of Wingle
Today?” in Ulm 8/9, pp. 5-13 (largel
the article with Gropius and
the Bauhaus) and Maldonado’s correspondence about
others in Ulm 10/11, pp. 62-73.
” Ulm 12/13 (Mar. 1965), P-
114. Gui Bonsiepe, “Education for Visual Design, offered by the
in a series
19. This was originally a lecture delivered at New York
American Institut e of Graphic Arts (April -May 1964).
Emergent World: A
115. Both terms were used by Maldonado in his lecture, “The March 4, 1965, at
al Design Trainin g,” delivere d
Challenge to Architectural and Industri
the Royal College of Art, London. See ibid., p. 10. Maldonado for the
116. Otl Aicher was director from 1962 to 1964, then Tomas
vice-dire ctor. In 1966, Herbert Ohl, head of the industrial
next two years, with Aicher as As Ohl had
ctor.
building department, became director, with. Maldonado as vice-direnot been a member
come to the school only in 1958, he was the first director who had
of the original faculty. Bauten,
117. Schnaidt’s biography is the previously cited volume, Hannes Meyer;
Projekte und Schriften (Teufen AR, Switzerland, 1965).
those
118. Members of the faculty of the Hochschule fiir Gestaltung lectured in all there
widely in the United States with significant impact
places, but taught particularly
, Otl Aicher
on the teaching of architecture and industnal design. As early as 1957-1958
wife, Frau Aicher-Sch oll, founder of the Hochschul e, were visiting critics in de-
and his
sign at Yale University. Especially important were the frequent visits of faculty members
of the Hochschule to the Department of Architecture at Carnegie Institute of Technol-
ogy in Pittsburgh, and more recently to the School of Architecture of Princeton Univer-
sity and Texas A. and M. University. At Carnegie Tech and Princeton, visits made by
Maldonado occurred at a time when the curriculum at each institution was being revised
partly in accordance with the kind of ideas for which he stands.
119. Although only photographs of kinetic works by members of Dvizheniye were
exhibited at Zagreb, according to Matko Mestrovi¢ by 1967 they had had four
exhibitions in the U.S.S.R. They were even invited to decorate Leningrad for the
occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the “October” Revolution. Some of their works
were programmed as kinetic-light-musical objects symbolizing Soviet achievements in
space and in chemistry and atomic physics. Because the group is made up of young
electronic engineers and physicists, their works did not have to be officially regarded as
examples of abstract art, a fact presumably accounting for the freedom of the members
of the group to exhibit. Nevertheless, their works have reflected the influence of early
Russian constructivism and the stimulation of photographs, privately circulated in the
Soviet Union, of works from the 1930’s by the Russian-born constructivist, Naum Gabo,
who left Soviet Russia in 1922 and now lives in Connecticut.
The American artists exhibiting in New Tendency 3 at Zagreb were the three
members of the Anonima Group (Emst Benkert, Francis Hewitt, and Edwin Mie-
czkowski), and a fourth artist, Frank Joseph Malina. The name, Anonima Group,
suggests a deemphasizing of the personality of the individual artist, like that for which
Marxian artists have generally been expected to stand, and which is also one of the
principles of Vasarely. Yet although the group has valued the results of collaboration
more than individual distinction, in an un-Marxian way it has rejected the artist’s
political protests as utterly irrelevant and has insisted on recognizing individual differ-
ences, both ideological and temperamental. Malina is a “scientific humanist.”
For illustrations of the works ‘of these artists, Soviet and American, see the catalog,
Nova tendencija 3 (Zagreb, 1965).
120. This other member of the faculty of the Hochschule fiir Gestaltung was the
philosopher Max Bense, Professor at the Technische Hochschule at Stuttgart, West
Germany. Moles himself, a guest-professor at the Hochschule fiir Gestaltung in
1964-1965, was appointed a full-time professor for the following year.
121. Abraham A. Moles, Les Musiques expérimentales, tr. by Daniel: Charles
(Paris, 1960): this was written at the Laboratory of Experimental Music, Columbia
University. See also Moles, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception, tr. by Joel E.
Cohen (Urbana, Ill., 1965): this English translation, published by the University of
 Pages 705-726 NOTES / 819
Illinois Press, was made from the original French edition published
at Paris in 1958.
Moles’s most recent book is Sociodynamique de la culture (The Hague, 1966).
122. For this, see Konrad Bayer, “The Vienna Group” (London) Times Literary
Supplement, Sept. 3, 1964, p. 784.
123. This was based on the second Situationist International, which broke
from the original one. See Jérgen Nash, “Who Are the Situationists?” (London) away
Times
Literary Supplement, Sept. 3, 1964, pp. 782-783. Also see Michéle Bernstein,
“The
Situationist International,” in ibid., p. 781, and Marc Slonim, “European
Notebook;
The Situationists,” New York Times, Apr. 21, 1968, Section 7, p. 55.
124. Pravda, Feb. 15, 1956, p. 5.
125. It was published at New York in 1967 under the title, Crafts of the Weimar
Bauhaus, 1919-1924. On the restoration of the Bauhaus, see James
M. Fitch, “A
Utopia Revisited,” Columbia University Forum (Fall 1966), pp. 35-39.
126. For an illuminating review of these books by Peter Selz, see the Art Journal,
Vol. 27 (Spring 1968), pp. 344 and 346. This revival of interest in the Bauhaus
also
reflected the development of a kind of Popular Front attitude on the part of the East
German regime that is most clearly seen in the volume Kunst im Widerstand (Art
in
Opposition), published at Dresden late in 1968. The book deals with works by a wide
range of anti-fascist painters, graphic artists, and sculptors, including communists such
as Picasso, Jean Lurgat, Guttuso, John Heartfield, and the Soviet painter Deineka,
together with the American Ben Shahn (who had been a communist sympathizer in
the 1930’s but had become an anti-communist while remaining socially concerned),
and such socially conscious non-communists as Henry Moore, Miré, and Otto Dix.
127. Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” pp. 116-117, in Robert Paul, B.
Moore, Jr., and H. Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston, 1965). For
Marcuse’s critique of Marx see the essay ““The Obsolescence of Marxism,” in Nicholaus
Lobkowicz, ed., Marx and the Western World (Notre Dame, Ind., 1967). In Soviet
Marxism (New York, 1958), he attacked Soviet ideology from the perspective of his
horror of bureaucracies. See also the interview he gave to L’Express, translated as
“Marcuse Defines His New Left Line,” New York Times, Oct. 27, 1968, Section 4,
. 29 ff.
E 128. New York Times, Apr. 16, 1968, p. 5.
129. Letter to me of August 25, 1967.
130. On the colloquium that began the program at Zagreb, see the first three
numbers of a new periodical, Bit international, published at Zagreb in 1968. The first
two of these were devoted respectively to essays by Abraham Moles and Max Bense
on “The Theory of Informations and Aesthetics,” and to essays by computer experts
on “Computers and Visual Research.” The third number published the discussions
at the colloquium. (The fourth will discuss the Hochschule fiir Gestaltung, Ulm.)
131. The London exhibition was cailed “Cybernetic Serendipity”: a report on it,
by Radoslav Putar, was published at Zagreb in Bit international 1 (1968), pp. 91-100.
It was scheduled to be shown at Washington in 1969. In the fall of 1968 the Museum
of Modern Art in New York put on an exhibition of “The Machine as Seen at the
End of the Mechanical Age,” part of which was a special section on the new technol-
ogy prepared by members of E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology), an or-
ganization of more than four thousand artists and engineers founded in 1966.

CONCLUSION

1. See Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.,

1968), p. 127.
2. Ibid., pp. 108 and 124.
3. Ibid., pp. 106 and 107.
4. Ibid., p. 100. 7) . me eae
5. See Richard Herr’s relevant analysis of ideas in history in his “Conclusion to
Richard Herr and Harold 'T. Parker, eds., Ideas in History; Essays Presented to Louis
Gottschalk by His Former Students (Durham, N.C., 1965), p. 349 ff. hidden 4
6. See Herr’s analysis of the influence of doctrines on events in history in ibid., p.
 Pages 726-743
820 / NOTES
them, however, suggests
349 ff. Study of such events as works of art and writings about
admits.
that doctrines can have somewhat more influence on events than Herr of Diego Rivera
7. Accordin g to his friend, Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life
aan
(New York, 1963), pp. 265, 383, and 419.
pp.
8. Here and in part of succeeding paragraphs I am indebted to Wolfe in ibid.,
265, 419, and 84. ; ;
Zensurin-
g. See Marx’s previously cited “Bemerkungen tiber die neueste preussiche
struktion,” in Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke (Berlin, 1957- ), Vol. 1, p. (5 Ihe
will be recalled that what Marx said was: “the truth is universal; it does not belong to
me, it belongs to everybody; it possesses me, I do not possess it. My possession is the
form which constitutes my spiritual individuality.”
10. See Martin Esslin, Brecht; The Man and His Work (Garden City, INBYs
1961),p. 235. ;
11. Ibid., p. 169.
12. See Esslin’s perceptive discussion, in ibid., p. 234; also Hannah Arendt,
Between Past and Future (New York, 1968), pp. 217-218.
13. Sir Herbert Read, Art and Alienation; The Role of the Artist in Society (New
York, 1967), p. 16. Read added: “Sparta is sometimes given as an exception, but this
view depended on a narrow interpretation of art: Xenophon regarded the Spartan
cosmos as a work of art.”
14. Quoted in Jay Leyda, Kino; A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (New
York, 1960), p. 161.
15" Read. Op.cits p» 7s
16. I am indebted to Dr. Amold Hauser for the term “interpenetration.”
17. See Esslin, op. cit., pp. 234-235. For the quotation from Orwell see his essay
“Why I Write” (1946), in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George
Orwell, Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds. (New York, 1968), Vol. 1, p. 7.
18. As was noted in Chapter 6, that fact was apparently first pointed out in print
as late as 1963, in William C. Seitz, “The Rise and Dissolution of the Avant-Garde,”
Vogue, Vol. 142 (Sept. 1, 1963), pp. 182 ff.
19. See the article by the well-known British art historian and critic Douglas
Cooper, “Establishment and Avant-Garde,” in the (London) Times Literary Supple-
ment, Sept. 3, 1964, pp. 823-824. Cooper, whose field is modern art, declared (p. 824) :
“The official culture-mongers of the 1950’s and 1960’s . . . are perhaps more disas-
trously misguided, though for totally different reasons,” than “their predecessors of
whom they are [now] so ashamed.” He also wrote: “Their folly has been to think that
by cultivating novelty for novelty’s sake they are marching with the avant-garde... .
Worse still, in order to launch the cult of Modernismus, officialdom has made an unholy
alliance with vested interests in the form of promoters, bankers, journalists, dealers,
publishers and the like. Thus novel effects and money have nowadays become the
primary considerations associated with excellence. . . .”
20. Arendt, op. cit., pp. 199-200.
21. We have seen that Vasarely and the Groupe de recherche d’art visuel, whose
theories contain elements of revisionist Marxism similar to theories of the revisionist
Marxists who founded the New Tendency movement in Yugoslavia, have ‘““dreamed of a
social art’”’ (as Vasarely said), without class and based on science, and have sought “new
ways of placing [the work of art] in society.” As for Pop Art, one New Left art critic,
Lee Baxandall, has called it “perhaps the most socially engaged art yet to appear in the
Modernist movement’’: see his article, “Pop and Like Art,” in the New Left periodical,
Studies on the Left, Vol. 5 (Winter 1965), p. 111. Significantly, the first of the
neo-dada kind of “happenings”—involving mixed media, chance, audience participation,
and the elimination of the boundary between art and life—which internationally have
been so important an aspect of Pop Art, was organized by the anarchist composer John
Cage at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, in 1952. (For Cage as anarchist, see
Richard Kostelanetz, “Milton Babbitt and John Cage Are the Two Extremes of
Avant-Garde Music,” New York Times, Jan. 15, 1967, Section 6, p. 64.) In Europe
“happenings” have been held on both sides of the “Iron Curtain”—in the communist
world not in the Soviet Union but especially in Czechoslovakia during the years
immediately before the Soviet invasion of 1968. Cage has had a particularly strong
influence, including an influence on some Marxists in Europe, as a founder of aleatoric
 Pages 743-744 NOTES / 821
music, music based in a kind of neo-dada way on conceptions of chance foreshado
wed
by Mallarmé and Duchamp (as a composer Cage likes to determine his choice
of the
next note by the toss of a coin). Cage’s best recent pieces use electronic machinery.
He
has greatly influenced the Polish composer, Witold Lutoslawski, who first encountere
d
Cage and his chance music at Darmstadt, West Germany, in 1961, and in 1962,
while
working solely in aleatoric music, was invited to teach at Tanglewood, Massachuse
tts, by
Aaron Copland (who in the 1930’s and 1940’s had been strongly sympathetic to the
political and social Left). Lutoslawski returned to the United States briefly in 1966 as
composer-in-residence at Dartmouth College. Aleatoric and other ultra-modern music is
possible in communist Poland only because, very shortly after the successful bloodless
revolution against the Russians in October 1956, Gomulka, first secretary of the Polish
Communist Party, proclaimed that music is unsuitable as an instrument of propaganda.
This doctrine is regarded as “revisionist” by the Russians, who have repeatedly criticized
performances of modern music in Poland, sometimes with Shostakovich as their official
spokesman. Nearly all “modern” visual art, however, is regarded by the Russians as
bourgeois rather than revisionist. Thus, apart from Op Art (aspects of which, we have
noted, the Russians accept as technology and applied science, though not as art),
modern art from cubism through Pop Art is still officially attacked in the U.S.S.R. not
only as seeking to destroy the hard-won visual culture of mankind but also as an instru-
ment of bourgeois big business leading to fascism. See the review—published while this
book was on press—of Mikhail Lifshits and L. Reinhardt, Krizis bezobraziya ot kubizma
do pop-art (Moscow, 1968?), in the (London) Times Literary Supplement, May 22,
1969, p. 565.
22. This is true despite recent official disclaimers as the Soviet regime has
desperately sought, by giving lip-service to “polycentrism,” to retain the support of
foreign communists against Red China, which now claims to be the true center of
revolutionary radicalism. By violently assailing artistic radicalism in the Soviet Union as
part of its own claim to represent true Marxist-Leninism, Red China, we have noted, has
compelled the Soviet Union likewise to do so in order to support its claim to be the
center of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. But the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in
1968, in support of that claim, has since constituted a flat rejection of polycentrism.
23. Late in 1963, for instance, Shostakovich, as official spokesman, solemnly
warned a meeting of the Soviet Artists Union that “some artists with rather progressive
convictions have succumbed to the baleful influence of avant-gardism.” Quoted in the
(London) Times Literary Supplement, Jan. 16, 1964, p. 38. Architecture and industrial
design, however, are regarded as being directly related to technology. In them, therefore,
forms regarded in the West as avant-garde have been possible in the U.S.S.R. since
Khrushchev began attacking Stalin’s reputation.
24. This is true of the Dvizheniye (Movement) group, whose works, regarded in
the West as kinetic Op Art (of a kind not unlike Figs. 61 and 62) have—we mentioned
—been allowed exhibition in the Soviet Union only because the members of the group
make their living primarily as physicists and electronics workers, so that their works are
officially regarded not as art but as technology.
In revisionist Yugoslavia, however, works of the Dvizheniye group (only photo-
graphs were available) were displayed as works of art in the New Tendency exhibition
of 1965 at Zagreb. The New Tendency movement itself is officially acceptable in
Yugoslavia as reflecting a scientific attitude regarded as based on a true understanding of
the scientific socialism of Marx and Lenin lacking in Soviet socialist realism. But because
the New Tendency receives official acceptance in Yugoslavia, and so does not stand for
social or artistic protest against authority, it too cannot be regarded as avant-garde in the
traditional meaning of the term.
INDEX
 Alphabetization for main entries is word b y word rather than letter
by letter—e.g.
“Art Workers Guild” precedes “Arte joven, 72) Ge New Zealand’ precedes “Newman, ,
Subentries
”
are arranged in order of page sequence, not alphabetically. The Notes have
been_ only summarily indexed, with references given to just a few Notes
containing
significant additions to subjects indexed for the main text.

The detailed Table of Contents should also be consulted.

Abbaye de Créteil, 283, 285-91, 618 activism, 107-8; anarchism, 225

Abbaye et le Bolchevisme, L’ Actors’ Group, 539
(Mercereau), 291 Adam, George, 328
“Abbaye of Créteil; A Communistic Adam, Paul, 237, 238, 252, 253, 257,
Experiment, The’ (Gleizes), 291 286-7
ABC—Beitrdge zum Bauen, 655 Adams, Henry, 588
ABC group, 654-5 Adams, John, 26, 749 (n. 29)
Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 502 Adams, Sam, 23
abstract expressionism, 321, 365, 530, Address from the Central Committee to
570-1, 575, 621 the [Communist] League, An (Marx
abstraction, 235-6; “left-wing,” 53; and Engels), 18
Marxism, 109, 563, 565, BV A=5> Adorno, Theodor W., 683, 684-5, 687,
691-3; anarchism, 199, 226; realism, 799
236, 420; Kupka, 281-2; futurism, Adresse de Maximilien Robespierre aux
283; music and, 283; Lenin, 293; dada, Frangais, 748 (n. 15)
295-7; films, 297; validity denied, advertising, 459
325-6; Soviet Union, 348, 354 ff., aerodomes, 139
363-4; socialist realism, 357, 359; Aeschylus, 81
progressive, 372-4; England, 514, 515; aestheticism, 461 ff.; Pre-Raphaelites,
New Left, 699; Marxism, 720; see 462 ff., 468
also specific aspects, names, subjects aesthetics: and non-artistic activities,
Abstraktion und Einfiihlung (Wor- 9-11; Kautsky, 589
ringer), 557, 648 Aesthetics (Hegel), 87, 301
Abundance (Le Fauconnier), 288, 289 Afnica, sculpture, 554
A.C.A. Gallery (New York), 542, 694 Afro, 693
academicism: revolutionary traditions, After the Strike (Toorop), 607, 608
24, 26-7, 35-6; empiricism, 26-7; Agassiz, Louis J. R., 216
Carracci, 31; radicalism and innova- A.1.A.: see Artists International
tion, 59-60; positivism, 161; monarch- Association
ists, 164; conservatives, 164-5; socialist Aicher, Otl, 700, 816 (ns. 116, 118)
realism, 167, 727-8; individualism, Aktion, Die (group), 296, 623, 632
727-8; Marxism, 727-8; Soviet, Aktion, Die (magazine), 296
727-8, 744; see also anti-academicism Albers, Josef, 673, 678
Académie francaise, 155 Albert, Prince, 407-8, 454, 456
accident in art, 295-7 aleatory music, 296, 818 (n. 21)
accidental poetry, 295 Alembert, 119
Action, 376 Alexander (King of Yugoslavia), 311
iv / INDEX
Algeria, 361, 362
alienation, 22-4, 27, 63-4, 89 ff.,
712-16; France, 20-8, 708-9; revo-
lutions and, 20-9; anti-bourgeois
reaction, 22, 92; England, 22, 23, 89;
United States, 23; socialist realism, 27;
fellow travelers, 61; Enlightenment,
Marxism, 63-4, 74,
63-4, 89, 713;
89 ff.; existentialism, 89; revisionism,
89; division of labor, 89-90, 100-1,
naturalism, 90; realism, 90; Neo-
Impressionism, 240; Establishment
absorption of avant-garde, 374-5,
721-2, 774-5; student, 375-8, 709—
10, 744; working class, 427-8, 744;
New Left, 708-11, 728, 740-1, 744;
social realism, 734-5; mass society and,
742-4; Soviet Union, 744; see also
avant-garde; and specific movements,
names
All-Russian Society of Proletarian
Architects (VOPRA), 656-7
All-Union Congress of Writers, 302, 310,
ewillilis sisi)
Allgemeine Theorie der schénen Kiinste
(Sulzer), 33
Alliance du cinéma indépendant, 309
Allons, enfants de la Patrie! (Scheffer) ,
ily
Almanach de la question sociale, 264
Ambatielos, Betty, 542
Ambatielos, Tony, 542
Amblard, Jean, 334, 361
American Artists Congress, 499, 504-6
American Revolution, 19; patronage
unaffected by, 14; French Revolution
compared to, 22-3, 748 (n. 28);
political, not social, 22-6; conflict
with Soviet concepts, 29; rights of
man, 57
American Threat to British Culture, The
(Arena Publications) , 536-7
Amsterdam Stock Exchange (Berlage),
601, 602, 603
An alle Kiinstler! (Novembergruppe) ,
645
analogies, universal, 134, 157
analytical cubism, 287, 288
anarchism and anarchists, 8, 11, 17, 39,
43-6, 715-16; Symbolism, 22, 226,
228-9, 237 ff., 249 ff., 478, 604;
England, 44-5, 158, 434-5, 438, 442,
457, 478, 501, 552 ff., 559, 578-9;
France, 44, 45, 123, 175, 196 ff.,
212 ff., 225-6, 228 ff., 324—5; use of
term, 44-5, 190; Christian, 45; indi-
vidualist, 45, 72-4, 217, 221, 248-9,
262 ff., 387-8, 394, 552 ff., 578-9;
mutualist, 45, 198, 213, 224;
communist-anarchism, 45-6, 74, 76-7,
anarchism and anarchists (continued )
133, 135> 213, 216, 220; international,
46, 293; Marxism vs., 74, 76-7;
Mexico, 123; Neo-Impressionists, 123,
237 ff., 251 ff.; Switzerland, 123, 218,
223 ff.; Synthetism, 123, 258 ff.;
Garibaldi, 173; realism, 197-200, 226;
abstraction, 199, 226; idealism, 199,
214; “mutual aid,” 213, 222; atheism,
216; Wagner, 216; communities, 217,
222, 394; folk art, 217; romanticism,
217; Italy, 218-19, 223, 718; Spain,
218, 223, 224, 251-2, 266, 317, 318,
322 ff., 718, 777 (n. 35); fascism,
219, 241, 597; futurism, 219, 274;
avant-garde, 223; Belgium, 223, 224,
604, 608, 612; activism, 225; Second
[Socialist] International, 225, 255;
terrorism, 225, 251=5, 266, 324, 388,
435, 437; Symbolism, 226, 228-9,
237 ff., 478; Impressionism, 228 ff.;
dada, 229, 296-8; Neo-dada, 229,
366 ff.; Fourierism, 234; critical,
251-5, 359, 552 ff.; Fauves, 262;
collapse, 266; World War I, 266, 294;
i Bolshevik Revolution, 291, 292-4;
anti-clericalism, 324; education, 324—5;
United States, 325, 394, 435; Op Art,
371; Godwin, 386-8, 390; Socialist
League, 434-5; “art for art’s sake,”
464 ff.; machine-age aesthetic, 466;
Art Nouveau, 471; Pre-Raphaelitism,
470; community planning, 482-3;
Germany, 585; Austria, 616-17;
literature, 617; see also anarcho-
syndicalism; and names, subjects
Anarchist, The (Vallotton), 246
anarcho-syndicalism, 123, 269-72;
Bakuninism, 269, 270; United States,
269, 285; anti-intellectualism, 270;
trade unionism, 270, 273-4, 284-5;
propaganda, 271; futurism, 273 ff.;
International Workingmen’s Associa-
tion, 293; see also syndicalism; trade
unions
“And that one? . . .” (Vallotton), 247
Angelico, Fra, 455
Anglicans, 158
Anglo-Catholic Guild of Saint
Matthew, 477
“Angry Young Men,” 577, 579
Annunciation to the Virgin (Ecce Ancilla
Domini) (Rossetti), 455-6
Anonima Group, 374, 816 (n. 119)
anonymity, 372, 374
Antal, Frederick, 560, 564-6, 568
anthropology, 516
anthroposophy, 435
anti-academicism: France, 24, 31, 32,
35-6, 62, 118, 164 ff., 717; eclecticism

anti-academicism (continued)
and, 31; cartoons, 58; revolutionary
organizations, 62; romanticism, 145,
153, 155; liberalism, 164 ff.; Barbizon
School, 181-2; architecture, 186; Salon
des refusés, 187; England, 454 ff., 472,
477; first secession from academy, 454;
Nazarenes, 454; Pre-Raphaelites, 454,
455-6; Belgium, 605-8; see also “art
for art’s sake”; and names, subjects
anti-Americanism, 510-11; see also cold
War
anti-clericalism, 21, 25, 198, 210, 324,
601, 715
Anti-Diihring (Engels), 18
anti-fascism, 302, 504-6, 678; France,
306 ff., 314 ff., 326-7, 504; Spanish
Civil War, 314 ff., 326-7; England,
491, 498, 500-4, 508, 513, 517,
521 ff., 528, 531 ff.; United States,
504-6; Italy, 689 ff., 694
Antigna, Alexandre, 194
anti-industrialism: Barbizon School, 182
anti-intellectualism: anarcho-syndicalism,
270; communist, 303
anti-monarchism, 164 ff.
Antiquity, classical: admiration for, 30-1,
33, 35-8, 44; Eclectic School, 30-1;
Marx and, 70, 81, 89-94; bohemians,
150-1; see also Greece, ancient;
Rome, ancient
anti-Semitism, 133, 257,617; Wagner, 597;
Nazi, 663-4
anti-style: Art Nouveau, 610
Antitradition futuriste, L’ (Apollinaire) ,
283
Apes of God (Lewis), 556
apocalypticism, 559
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 283, 288, 290,
291; surrealism and, 297—8; anarchism,
324, 325
Appassionata (Beethoven), 9
Appeals of Communism, The, 427-8
Applicants for Admission to a Casual
Ward (Fildes), 459
applied arts: see arts and crafts
aquatint, 166
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 149, 475
Arab-Israeli War, 577
Aragon, Louis, 167, 526; socialist
realism, 205, 346, 352—4; surrealism,
297; dada, 298; communism, 300,
303-5, 309, 311-13, 314, 318, 321,
322, 336, 352 ff.; “Dove of Peace,”
340-1; “peace,” 340; Picasso portrait
of Stalin, 350-1; rejection of Soviet
leadership, 353, 364; New Left, 361
“Arbeiter, Kunst und Kiinstler; Beitrige
zu einer Marxistischen Kunstwis-
senschaft” (Raphael), 682
Index / v
Arbeitsrat fiir Kunst, 644-5, 671
Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile, 197
archaeology, 30
Archipenko, Archibald, 655
Architect (Godwin), 467
Architects’ Group, 559
Architectural Association School, 539
architecture, 51-2, 85; party systems
and designations, 51-3; functionalism,
109, 155, 209-10, 407 if, 418, 419,
468, 473, 475, 598 ff., 612 ff., 640;
Fourierist, 126-39, 144, 316-17, 487,
489; France, 126 ff., 137 ff., 143-4,
207-10, 267-9, 315-16, 357,
Saint-Simonians, 126-9, 130, 132;
487;
canals and railroads, 127, 129-30;
materials, 127, 130, 538-9, 599, 610;
public works, 127, 129-31, 141;
classical revival, 128; Gothic influence,
133, 159-60, 209-10, 418 ff., 446,
450-1, 473, 613; Fourierist phalan-
stery, 135, 137-9, 315; aerodomes,
139; Organic, 142-3, 208, 316, 467;
Icarian, 143-4; eclectic, 144;
anarchism, 200; Viollet-le-Duc, 207—
10; iron, 209; Kropotkin, 222; Cité
industrielle, 267-9, 279, 316; Citta
nuoya, 279-81; futurist, 279-81;
International Style, 281, 293, 475,
486-7, 489, 539, 593, 662-3, 669,
671-2; constructivism, 315, 316, 486,
539, 654-7, 672; Unité d’habitation,
315; Soviet, 316, 486-7, 491, 538-9,
655-7, 669-72, 706-7; communist,
357, 359, 486; Op Art, 371; Owenites,
391 ff.; organicism, 409; romanticism,
410 ff., 419; “Queen Victoria Town,”
411, 414; England, 418 ff., 473-6,
485 ff., 539, 599-600; ornament,
419 ff., 539, 613; Victorian, 410;
“Veronese Gothic,” 420-1; Streaky
Bacon Style, 422; gardens, 423; anti-
historicism, 467, 662; formalism,
467-8, 475, 656-7; United States, 473,
474-5, 601-3, 658, 678; Fabian, 480;
Germany, 486-7, 585-6, 596, 626-7,
665 ff.; socialist realism, 486, 657,
706-7; Bauhaus, 487, 649, 651-3,
662 ff.; Spain, 487 ff.; Gothic Revival,
593, 596, 600-1; Austria, 596, 598-9;
Gesamtkunstwerk, 598, 614; theater,
598, 639, 704, 705; cultural history and,
600-1; Holland, 600 ff.; Marxism,
600 ff.; “modern,” 600, 601; Art
Nouveau, 610, 613; Neue Sachlichkeit,
Die, 640; industrial, 651; mechanism,
654-7; collectivism, 671; propaganda
value, 729; see also communities and
community planning; housing; and
names, subjects
Vi / INDE
Architecture, Academy of (Soviet) , 656
Architecture, University of (VASI), 656
Architekturprogramm, 645
Arcos, René, 286
Arcueil (France), 294
Ardizzone, Edward, 298, 529, 545
Arena, 536
Arena Publications, 536-7
Arendt, Hannah, 38, 63, 682
Argentina, 702, 703
aristocracy as patrons, 14, 22
Aristotle, 31, 91
Armory Show of 1913, 279
Arnold Ruge with the Young Hegelians
at Berlin (Engels), 70
Arp, Hans, 295-7, 298, 303, 637, 673
Arquitectura, 657 ‘ art sociology, 564, 565, 566, 592
Arrangement in Grey and Black
(Whistler) ,467
Art and Alienation; The Role of the
Artist in Society (Read), 560
Art and Revolution: see Kunst und die
Revolution, Die (Wagner)
“Art and Socialism” (Fry), 553
Art and Socialism (Morris), 449
“Art and Technology—A New Unity,”
653
Art and the Industrial Revolution
(Klingender) ,563
Art au point de yue sociologique, L’
(Guyau), 564
art concret, 674, 701; “concrete”
painting, 283
art criticism: see critics and criticism
Art dans la République; Aux artistes
musiciens, L’ (Bureau), 149
Art des bruits, L’ (Russolo), 274
Art et la nation, L’ (Adam), 286-7
Art et la révolution, L’ (Wagner) : see
Kunst und die Revolution, Die
Art et socialisme (Destrée) ,609
“arb for arts sake, 11, 122, 123, 1909,
229, 235, 249-50, 320; Fourierism,
135; England, 146, 158, 462 ff., 506;
France, 149-58; use of term, 152, 465,
761 (ns. 69-72); sculpture, 153;
realism and, 420; Pre-Raphaelites,
426, 462 ff.; Morris and, 449; Sym-
bolism, 462, 466; anarchism, 464 ff.;
formalism, 466, 467; laissez-faire and,
738; see also names ; Belgium, 584, 612 ff.; Germany,
“Art for the People” (exhibition), 504
Art francais, L’, 322
Art Front, 563
Art libre, L’, 618
Art moderne, L’ (Fénéon), 254
Art moderne, L’ (Gautier), 152
Art moderne, L’ (journal), 237, 604-5
Art Nouveau, 281-3, 295, 438, 471;
futurism, 274; Spain, 324, 616; in-
Art Nouveau (continued)
fluences on, 388, 609 ff., 721; formalism,
468, 469; anarchism, 469; functional-
ism, 469; Mackmurdo, 470; Austria,
471, 474, 617; Belgium, 471, 474,
609 ff.; Mackintosh, 473, 4743
Germany, 474, 523; Holland, 608;
Morris, 609 ff.; architecture, 610, 613;
furniture and furnishings, 614, 615;
ornament, 615-16; Norway, 621; see
also Jugendstil; Nieuwe Kunst;
Sezession
Art Now (Read), 599 i
Art of Being Ruled, The (Lewis), 556
“art pour Vart, ['”: see “art for art’s sake”
Art social, L’, 270-1, 286
Art Students League (New York), 636
Art Treasures Exhibition, 409
“Art Under Capitalism and Socialism”
(Blunt), 519
“Art Under Plutocracy” (Morris), 553,
554
Art Workers Guild, 442, 449
Arte joven, 324
Artist as Reporter, The (Hogarth), 546
“Artist in Politics, The” (Woolf), 502
artist-reporters, 459-61, 542 ff.
“Artists Against Fascism and War’
(exhibition) ,501
Artist’s Dilemma, The (Boswell), 529
Artists for Peace, 536, 547, 570
Artists’ Group, 539-40
Artists International Association
(A.LA.), 475, 497-514, 516, 522 ff.,
543, 544, 546-7, 562-3
Artists of Passy, 290
Artists’ Refugee Committee, 522-3, 526,
547
Artists Regional Groups, 532-3
Artists Union, 499, 504-5, 563
arts and crafts, 454; fine arts and, 7-8;
Rousseau, 17; Gothic Revival, 244;
Mortis, 244, 429, 446-51, 457, 468,
474, 554, 584, 593-4, 650; Abbaye de
Créteil, 286; Artists of Passy, 290;
Owenites, 394; Carlyle, 406 ff.;
medievalism, 418 ff., 420-1, 446-7;
Fabians, 440-2, 479; design, 447;
community, 474; left-wing, 494, 554;
593-4, 626-7, 650 ff., 719; Non-
conformism, 715
Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, 449
Arts and Crafts School (Weimar), 650
Arts and Crafts Society, 449
Arts and Letters, 557
Arts Council of Great Britain, 478, 480,
527, 533, 543
Arts de France, 332, 334

Arts Group (Fabian), 440
Ashbee, C. R., 472, 473, 474-5, 552,
617, 650
ASNOVA, 656-7
Assiette au beurre, L’, 265-6, 281, 323,
494, 618
Association des cités-jardins de France,
489
Association des écrivains et artistes
révolutionnaires (A.E.A.R.), 306,
309, 526, 618-20
Association des écrivains révolutionnaires
(A.E.R.), 305-6
Association Ernest Renan, 286
Association of Contemporary Architects,
656
Association of New Architects
(ASNOVA), 656-7
Association of Revolutionary Artists,
296-7
Associationism, 136, 154
Associations ouvriéres, 416
Assommoir, L’ (Zola), 263
Assy, 347
Asthetik (Lukacs), 687-8
atheism, 88, 216, 318-19; see also
religion
Athenaeum, 552
Atl, Dr., 123
Atlantic Civilization (Fougeron), 352
Atlantic Pact (Alliance) (NATO), 337,
342, 345-6, 573
Attlee, Clement, 443, 493
Au piano (Whistler), 464
Auden, W. H., 503, 519, 521-2
audience participation, 371-4
Auferstanden aus Ruinen... , 681
Auflosung der Stadte, Die (Taut), 671
Auric, Georges, 295, 310, 318, 319
Aurora-Verlag, 634
Austria: anarchism, 223; Art Nouveau,
469, 617; social democracy, 587, 590;
Mortis, 591, 593-4, 598-9;
Kunstsoziologie, 592; arts and crafts,
593-4; radicalism, 594 ff.; Revolution
of 1848, 594 ff.; anarchism, 616-17;
Sezession, 617; housing, 667-9;
Vienna Group, 705
Authoritarian Personality, The (Adorno
et al.), 684
authoritarianism, 406, 716 ff., 728
authority, perversion by, 217
Autobiography (Mill), 400
automatism, 295-6, 298
Aux artistes: Du passé et l'avenir des |
beaux-arts, doctrine de Saint-Simon
(Barrault), 124-5
Avanguardia socialista, 281
avant-garde, 32, 712-16, 741-5; United
States, 23; masses and, 28-9, 257,
Index / vii
avant-garde (continued )
258; Soviet Union, 28, 293, 720, 744;
France, 32, 119 ff., 375, 715-16, 717,
742; primitivism, 33; anarchism, 45-6,
223; liberalism, 57, 118; radicalism, 59,
61-4, 118-19, 228, 245 ff.; revolutions
and, 61—2; use of term, 61—2; aliena-
tion, 89, 713-16; individualism, 118;
Saint-Simon, 118, 119 ff.; socio-
political role, 121-3, 124-5, 130-2;
anti-bourgeois, 132, 145-6, 149-52,
714; Fourierism, 135; mysticism,
184-5, 250, 306, 435, 476; disillusion
with Marxism, 363 ff.; non-political,
365 ff.; Establishment absorption of,
374-5, 721-2, 774-5; radical Right
attacks on, 384; England, 579-80;
united front, 643-4; conditions con-
ducive to, 714-15; working class and,
714; subject-matter, 732-4; historical
significance, 737; see also specific names,
subjects
Avant-garde, L’ (magazine), 123
Avant-garde, L’ (newspaper), 123, 223,
306
Avant-garde jeunesse, 378
Aveling, Edward, 430-2, 434, 437
Aveling, Eleanor Marx, 430-1, 434, 437
Azimuth, 699
Baader, Johannes, 633
Baargeld, Johannes Theodor, 637
Babeuf, “Gracchus,” 40, 75, 143, 147,
402, 749 (7. 30)
Bacon, Francis, 577
Bakié, 369
Bakunin, Michael, 45, 213-20, 223;
Marx and, 72, 73, 214 ff., 227; First
International, 76-7; Hegelianism, 214;
Dresden revolt, 215-16, 596, 597;
atheism, 216; collectivism, 217; Italy,
218-19; degrees of happiness, 219; fas-
cism, 219; influence, 266, 295, 558, 612
Bakuninists, 74, 76-7; syndicalism, 269,
270
Bakunists: see Bakuninists
Balakian, Anna, 157
Ball, Hugo, 295, 296, 632, 652
Ballad of Reading Gaol, The (Wilde),
605
Ballanche, Pierre Simon, 184
ballet, 297, 325
Balzac, 151, 157, 176, 178, 236, 445,
642; Fourierism, 81, 148, 189; Marx
and, 81-2, 90, 162; Saint-Simonianism,
81, 147-8, 171; realism, 82, 90, 162;
urbanism, 316
Balzac (Rodin), 319
viii / INDEX
“Barbarians!” (Goya), 56
Barbarians at the Gates (Woolf), 518
Barbés, 173, 174
Barbizon School, 181-3, 201, 230
“Barbus, Les,” 150, 324
Barbusse, Henri, 299-300, 302, 303, 305,
312, 493, 723 (n. 139)
Barcelona, 322-4
Barcelona University, 530
Barlach, Ernst, 630
Barrault, Emile, 124-5, 129, 130, 173
“Barricade, A” (Jeanron), 192-3
Barthou, Léon, 311
Barye, 146, 170, 182, 186
Barzun, Henry Martin, 286
Barzun, Jacques, 145
Bastien-Lepage, 607
Baudelaire, Charles, 174, 186, 190;
correspondances, 134; “art for art’s
sake,” 156, 229, 250, 464, 467;
Symbolism, 157-8, 229, 250;
surrealism and, 297; music and
painting, 748
Bauer, Bruno, 69-70
Bauer, Otto, 668
554, 617, 646—
Bauhaus, 369, 487, 515,
79; Nazis and, 369, 487, 500, 663-4,
657-60, 719; housing, 487, 665-72;
International Style, 487, 662—4; con-
structivism, 501, 672-5, 677; influences
on, 501, 672—4, 725-6; conservative
opposition, 649-50, 653, 654, 702,
703; design, 649 ff., 655, 657, 673,
701 ff.; technocracy, 649, 701 ff.;
utopian socialism, 649, 627; Morris
and, 650, 653-5, 659-60, 725-60;
Gesamtkunstwerk, 651-3; collectivism,
ism,
653-4; Marx653-6, 659-65,
702 ff., 719; technology and mass-
production, 655; radicalism, 658-62;
anti-Semitic attacks on, 663—4; Circle
of the Friends of the, 663-4; De
Stijl, 673-4; émigrés, 678-9; New Left,
699 ff., 719; tradition revived, 699 ff.,
719; Hochshule fiir Gestaltung, Ulm,
700-6; New Tendency movement,
703-5; Vienna Group, 705; arts and
crafts, 719
Bauhaus (Schmidt), 707
Bauhaus, Das (Lang), 707-8 : Berkman, Alexander, 266
Bauhaus Situationniste Drakabygget, 706
Bauhaus Wiemar—1i919—-1924/
Werkstattarbeiten (Scheidig) ,TOF
Bavaria, 588, 624-5
Bax, Ernest Belfort, 432, 434, 445-6,
449, 588-9, 614
Bayer, Herbert, 677
Bayreuth, 598
Bazaine, 347
Bazard, Saint-Amand, 124-5, 169
Beardsley, Aubrey, 431, 478, 605
Bearers of the Burden, The (Van Gogh),
259
beauty, 16, 561; good and the apprecia-
tion of, 478-9
“Beauty; A Study in Bourgeois Aes-
thetics” (Caudwell), 561
Beauvoir, Simone de, 352, 376
Becher, Johannes R., 302, 312, 645,
680-1
Beck, Julian, 639
Beethoven, 9, 79, 213 ff., 219-20
Behan, Brendan, 542-3
Behan, Dominic, 574
‘ behaviorism, 640
Behrendt, Walter, 667
Behrens, Peter, 650, 651, 664
Belgian Labor Party, 604, 609, 610, 615
Belgium, 112; anarchism, 223, 224, 604,
608, 612; arts and crafts, 584, 612 ff.;
Morris, 584, 588, 603-16; socialism,
590, 604 ff.; Art Nouveau, 608, 609 fhe
leftists, 618-21
Belgium in the Nineteenth Century
: (Ensor) , 606
Belinsky, Vissarion, 213-15
Bell, Clive, 478, 503, 554-7, 568, 733
Bell, Graham, 506-8
Bell, Julian, 503
Bell, Vanessa, 478, 503, 554
Bellamy, Edward, 435, 440, 481, 482
Bellows, George, 45-6, 325
Bemiihungen (Becher), 681
Benda, Julien, 312
Benjamin, Walter, 681-4, 687-8
Benkert, Ermst, 816 (n. 119)
Bennett, Arnold, 476, 516
Benoit-Lévy, Georges, 489
Bentham, Jeremy, 47-9, 381-2; “Indus-
try House Establishment,” 382-3;
Utilitarianism, 382, 384
Bentham, Samuel, 382, 391
Benthamites; 48-9, 382-3, 400
Berenson, Bernard, 568-9, 693, 814
(n. 95)
Berg, Alban, 644, 684
Berger, John, 536, 543, 544, 549-50,
560, 568-71,
574-5, 693, 696
Bergson, Henni, 272, 275, 556, 566, 682
Berlage, Hendrik P., 210, 418, 600-3,
627, 657, 664, 674
Berliner Ensemble, 642
Berlioz, Hector, 148-9
Bernal, J. D., 496
Bernard, Claude, 232
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, 159
Bernheim Jeune gallery, 254
Bernstein, Eduard, 587-9, 623
Berton, 298

Besant, Annie, 434, 435, 440
Bianchi-Bandinelli, Ranuccio, 814
(n. 95)
- Bibliothéque nationale, 224
Biddle, George, 505
Bien public, 209
Bill, Max, 37, 700-3, 704
Binder, Pearl, 498, 499, 511
Bing, S., 615, 807 (n. 62)
biomorphic form, 295
Birch (John) Society, 50
Birolli, 691, 692
Birot, G. A., 325
Bismarck, 587
Bjgrnson, 261, 431
Black, Misha, 498-9, 504-6, 533, 534
black militants, 362—3
black nationalism, New Left, 359; see
also Negroes
Blacksmiths of the Corréze (Jeanron),
191
Blake, Peter, 580
Blake, William, 25-6, 44, 157, 388, 46s,
470; Art Nouveau, 388, 470, 610,
615; Pre-Raphaelites and, 388, 456
Blanc, Charles, 184, 186, 189-90, 194
Blanc, Louis, 173, 177, 184, 185, 192-3,
196, 201, 215; influence of, 416, 425
Blanchot, Gustave (‘“Gus Bofa’’), 265
Bland, Hubert, 440
Blanqui, Auguste, 154, 173-5, 196, 227,
255,.773 (n.139)
Blast, 557
“Blast-Furnace Team” (Taslitzky), 337
Blaue Reiter, Der, 287, 648, 679, 681
Blavatsky, Helena, 435
Bloch, Ernst, 684, 686-8
Bloch, Jean Richard, 311
“Bloody Sunday,” 437
Bloomsbury group, 477-9, 503, 521,
sae
Bloomsbury Socialist League, 437
Blum, Léon, 245
Blunt, Sir Anthony, 505, 514-16, 519
Boccioni, Umberto, 274, 275, 279
Bofa, Gus (Gustave Blanchot), 265
Bohemia, 215
bohemianism and bohemians, 573, 576,
732; France, 149-52, 189, 194,
715; use of term, 151, 761 (n. 67);
New Left, 359; England, 477, 573,
576; naturalism, 621; realism, 621
Bologna, 31
Bolshaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya, 524,
646, 753 (7.1)
Bolshevik Revolution, 19, 61, 292-4;
740; art as propaganda, 21, 23; French
Revolution and, 23, 27-8, 749
(n. 30); Abbaye de Créteil influenced
Index / ix
Bolshevik Revolution (continued)
by, 291; French support for, 299;
English reaction, 490, 492-4
Bomberg, 557
Bone, Stephen, 796 (n. 51)
Bonheur, Raymond, 125
Bonheur, Rosa, 125
Bonsiepe, Gui, 701
Book of the New Moral World, The
(Owen), 398
Borel, Petrus, 149, 154-5
Borie, Jules, 139
Bortnyik, Alexander, 369
Boswell, James, 528-30, 535, 540, 549,
741; Artists International Association,
498-9, 514, 528, 533; Left Review,
508-11, 515-16, 572; surrealism, 515-
16; departure from Communist Party,
529; abstract expressionism, 530; non-
objective art, 530, 741; peace cam-
paign, 536; influence, 543, 544
Boulanger, Louis, 146
Bourbon Restoration, 51, 61; see also
Revolution of 1830
Bourdet, Claude, 360
Bourgeois de Molinchart, Les
(Champfleury), 189, 190
bourgeoisie: see middle class
Bournville (England), 481
Boyd-Houghton, Arthur, 459, 460
Brancusi, 287
Brangwyn, Frank, 469
Braque, 261, 287-8, 290, 291
Braquemond, Félix, 156-7
Bratby, John, 539-40, 570
“Bread” (Kollwitz), 631
Brecht, Bertolt, 312, $20, 526, 630, 640—
3, 644, 682, 736
Brendan Behan’s New York (Behan and
Hogarth), 542
Brentano, Clemens, 153
Brentano, Lujo, 681
Breton, André, 321, 637; surrealism, 297,
298 ff.; automatism, 298; dada, 298;
communism, 300-5, 308, 312-14,
317; Trotsky and, 301, 303, 312, 320;
F.LA.R.I., 320
Breuer, Marcel, 487, 639, 649, 677, 678
Brezhnev, 364
263-5,
Bridges, Robert, 555
Buk, Lily, 364
Brissot, 44
Britain’s Cultural Heritage (Arena Pub-
lications), 537
British Artists Congress, 504, 505
Britten, Benjamin, 503, 521, 528
Bronté, Charlotte, 83
Brook Farm, 71, 75
Brooke, Rupert, 476
Brooks, James, 469
ef WNT DIDS
Brousse, Paul, 223
Browder, Earl, 332
Brown, Charles Brockden, 390
Brown, Ford Madox, 429, 452-5, 457—
61, 462, 468
Browne, Felicia, 502-3
Briicke, Die, 681
Bruller, Jean (Vercors), 333
Brunier, Charles, 140
Brussels, University of, 604
Brutus (David), 35-8
Brutus (Voltaire), 35
Buchez, Philippe J. B., 158-60, 169, 416
Buckingham, James Silk, 410-11, 412—
13, 481
Bukharin, Nikolai, 10-11, 101, 107,
656-7; international revolution, 293;
influences on, 591, 592, 725
Bulletin (A.1.A.), 531-2
Bund der Gerechten, 174
Buonarotti, Filippo, 143, 402
Bureau, Allyre, 149
Biirger: see Thoré
Biirgerliche Kunst und die besitzlosen
Volksklassen, Die (Reich), 590
Burgess, Guy, 496
Burial at Ornans (Courbet), 189
Burke, Edmund, 46, 47, 387, 748 (n. 28)
Burlington Galleries (London), 504
Burlington Magazine, 558, 564, 566
Burne-Jones, Edward, 424-6, 429, 435,
451-2, 456, 457, 458, 469, 473, 477,
478, 615
Burns, Emile, 493
Burns, John, 442
Butor, Michel, 376
Butterfield, 429, 458
Byron, 168-9
Byzantine mosaics, 646-8
C. Fourier’s Theory of Attractive Industry
(tr. Doherty), 412
Cabet, Etienne, 34, 71-2, 143-5, 174,
196, 215, 410
Cachin, Marcel, 294, 328
Cadbury, George, 481
Café, The (Bell), 506, 507
Café Voltaire (Zurich), 295, 632
Cage, John, 274, 818 (n. 21)
Cahiers du communisme, 332
Calais (France), 169
Calder, 369
Caleb Williams (Godwin), 390
“Call to the Struggle,” 308
calligraphy, 436
Calvinism, 407, 715
Calvino, Italo, 693
Cambridge Left, 496
Cambridge Socialist Club, 496
Cambridge University, 496-7, 503, 538
Camden Art Centre (England), 527
Camden Town Group, 472, 503
Camden Town School, 506
Camille Desmoulins Speaking in the
Palais Royal (Daumier), 180
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 576
Camus, Albert, 363
Canaday, John, 366
canals, 127, 129-30
Cannes Film Festival, 377
Cantagrel, Frangois, 139-40, 201
Capital: see Kapital, Das (Marx)
capitalist, origin of term, 132
“Capitalist Vampire, The” (Crane),
440, 441
Caprichos (Goya), 166
Caravaggio, 814 (n. 84)
Carbonari, 152, 168-70, 172, 187, 208
Cardénas, Lazaro, 657
caricature, 58, 166, 178, 459; see also car-
toons and cartoonists; satire; and names
Caricature morale, religieuse, littéraire et
scientifique, La, 178-80
Carline, Richard, 504-6, 527, 532-4, 563,
796 (n. 51), 798 (n. 77)
Carlyle, 153, 172, 399-401, 416, 417,
424, 425, 461, 465, 469, 470; Marx and
Engels on, 73, 82, 403, 407; Saint-
Simonianism, 82, 398, 403-4; Chart-
ism, 401, 403, 411; organicism, 404-6;
craftsmanship, 406, 420, 443; func-
tionalism, 407-10
Carpenter, Edward, 438, 439, 484, 490;
influence, 552, 555, 558, 612
Carpenter, Patrick, 779 (n. 90)
Carpenter’s Shop, The (Millais), 454
Carns Els 216
Carra, Carlo, 274, 275, 276-7, 278
Carracer 2a
Carriére, Eugene, 257
Carte, Richard D’Oyly, 470
Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 308
cartoons and cartoonists, 58, 508 ff., 524,
730-1; England, 23, 494, 499, 508 ff.,
578-9; United States, 23, 269; France,
178 ff., 376; Spain, 323; see also
graphic art; satire; and names
Casanova, Laurent, 333-4, 346-7, 349
Casas, 323
Case of Sergeant Grischa, The (Zweig),
681
Caserio, Santa, 253
Cassatt, Mary, 262
Cassinari, 691, 692
Cassou, Jean, 333, 377
Castagnary, 230
Castel, Father, 134
Castro, Fidel, 363, 376, 573

“Cathedral of Socialism” (F eininger) ,
646, 647, 652, 654
Cathédrales de France, Les (Rodin), 245
Catholic Center Party, 625
Catholic Worker, 212
Catholicism: see Roman Catholicism
“Catholicism, new,” 161
“Cato Street Conspiracy,” 47
Caudwell, Christopher, 117, 502, 519,
560-2
Cazamian, Louis, 318
Caze, Robert, 253
Cecil, Lord, 503
Celtic art, and Art Nouveau, 473, 610
Celtic Revival, 473-4
Cénacle, 146, 176, 184, 201
censorship, political, 737
Central America: anarchism, 224; sce also
Mexico; and names
Central School of Arts and Crafts (Lon-
don), 544
centralization: democracy and, 13; social
revolution and, 23; avant-garde and,
714, 716 ff.
Centre for Cultural Studies, 575
Centre 42, 573-4
Centre gauche, 209
Century Guild, 449, 469-70
Century Guild Hobby Horse: see Hobby
Horse
Cervantes, 81
Cézanne, 53, 54, 228, 252, 319; influence,
472, 555
Chabrinovich, 266
Chagall, 330, 664
Chambard socialiste, Le, 263-4
Chambellan [Victor Amand?], 126-7
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 210
Chamberlain, Neville, 522, 527-8
Champfleury, 189-91
chance: in art, 295-7; in poetry, 295, 637
Chant d’inauguration des chemins de fer
(Berlioz), 149
Chant du Départ (Scheffer), 170
Chant du monde, 332
Chants for Socialists (Morris), 434
Chaplin, Charlie, 352, 639
Chardin, 191, 319
Charivari, Le, 179, 236
Charles II (King of England), 30
Charles X (King of France), 117-18,
169-70
Charlet, 184
Charlotte Street Centre, 532, 533
Charpentier (publisher) ,235
Charpentier, Gustave, 263
Chartism, 73, 401-3, 407-8, 415,
452,471
Chartism (Carlyle), 403
Chartreuse de Parme, La (Stendhal), 166
Index / xi
Chassénau, 153
Chateaubriand, 159
“Chef d’ceuvre inconnu’” (Balzac), 147
Chelsea School of Art (London), 506
Cheltenham (Mo.), 144-5
Chenavard, Paul, 170, 184-6, 564
Chernyshevsky, 83, 222
Chesterton, G. K., 476
Chevalier, Michel, 127-30, 131
Chipping Campden, 474
Chirico, 298, 303
choral singing, 125-6, 287, 434
Christian anarchism, 45
Chuistian liberalism, 360
Christian radicals, 360
Christian socialism, 156-60, 305; Eng-
land, 158-9, 398, 405, 415-17, 444,
476-7, 617; origin of term, 416;
Germany, 587, 593, 627-8
Christian Socialism (Fabian Tract No.
42—Headlam), 477
Christian Socialist, 416, 438
Christianity: New Christianity, 121, 125,
161; Swedenborgian, 134, 157, 229;
industrialization and, 475-6; see also
Christian socialism; Roman Cathol-
icism
Church and Stage Guild, 477
Ciencia social, 323
cinema, 274, 309, 340, 683; dada, 297;
Mass-Observation, 516; England, 543;
communist, 641; communication and,
704; propaganda, 737
Circle of the Friends of the Bauhaus,
663-4
Cité industrielle, 267-9, 279, 316, 773
(nm. 149)
cités ouvrieres (competition), 186
Cités ouvriéres (Fourier), 139
Citta nuova (Sant’Elia), 279-81
city planning: see architecture; commu-
nities and community planning; housing
Ciudad lineal, La, 488
Ciurlionis, 281
Civil War (U.S.), 216
Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud),
304
Claims of Decorative Art, The (Crane),
614
Clark, Kenneth, 507
Clarté, 299-300, 305-6; England, 493
Clarté (periodical), 299, 300, 620
class: as social term, 21; struggle, 102-5
classic revival, 90-1; architecture, 128
classicism, romantic, 35—8
classless society, 41, 76, 87-110 passim
427, Clemenceau, Georges, 257
Clenisy, 405
Club de la Révolution, 174
Club de l’art social, 245
Xii / INDEX
Clutton-Brock, Arthur, 479, 555
Cobden-Sanderson, 436, 469, 470, 613
Cockerell, Sydney Carlyle, 436
Cockney School, 390
Cocteau, Jean, 325
Code de la nature (Morelly), 40
coexistence, 686
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 375
cold war, 29, 340 ff.; France, 328, 332 fhe
England, 533, 539; Italy, 693, 694-5
Coldstream, Sir William, 506-8, 549
Cole, George D. H., 221, 479-80, 558,
747 (n. 18)
Cole, Henry, 409, 454, 475, 599, 610
Coleridge, 44, 389-90, 398, 400,
749 (n. 29); organicism, 386, 405-6;
Pantisocracy, 389, 405; Christian
socialism, 405, 417; influence of, 416,
417
collaborators, World War II, 262
collective art, 79, 185, 198, 258; Op
Art, 369-71; communication and,
704; architecture, 729; New Left, 729
“Collective for Socialist Building, A”
(Kom), 489
collective soul, 584
collectivism, 217; artistic, 79; Saint-
Simonian, 125, 132; Bauhaus, 653-4;
architecture, 671
color: harmony, 134; lithography, 261;
Pre-Raphaelites, 455-6, 467-8
Comédie humaine, La (Balzac), 82, 147
Cominform, 333, 688
Comintern: see Third (Communist)
International
Comintern Song (Eisler), 641
Comité de vigilance des intellectuels anti-
fascistes, 308-9
Comité national des écrivains, 322
Commission of Artists, 181
commitment, concept of, 363, 366
Committee of Anti-Scrape, 451
Committee of Fifteen (Fabian), 477
Committee of 100, 573, 574
Common Sense (Paine), 25, 26
Commonweal, 432, 484
Communal Council and Educational
Commission (Paris), 203
communal music, 641
Communards, 203-4, 206-7, 228; see
also Commune of 1871 f Communist, 494
Commune, 305, 306, 526
Commune des arts, 36, 62, 248
Commune of 1871 (Paris), 154, 155,
173, 181, 203-5, 208-9, 219, 224,
269, 749 (n. 30); artists’ organizations,
62; First International, 76, 218; Marx
and Engels on, 77, 194, 196, 206,
226-7, 749 (n. 30); Proudhon and,
196; Lenin on, 206; significance,
Commune of 1871 (continued )
206—7; English reaction, 424, 426,
458; Ruskin and, 424; Morris and,
426
communications media: and aesthetics,
704-5; mass art and, 743-4
“Communism” (Morris), 439
communism and communists, 6, 8,
16-17, 38-40; United States, 5—6, 186,
305, 332, 489, 499, 537; China-Soviet
split, 10, 11, 357, 363-4, 550, 698;
democratic, 12, 18; French Revolution
heritage, 16, 20, 27-8; Germany,
18-19, 215, 624 ff.; cold war, 29,
328, 332 ff., 340 ff., 533 ff., 539;
first modern communist, 40; socialism
and, 41-3; use of terms, 42, 143;
leftism, 53-4, 491, 494, 495 ff.;
liberalism and, 55—60; de-Stalinization
and “thaw,” 111, 349 ff., 538 f£.;
polycentrism, 111, 354, 359, 550,
696-9, 718, 721; atheism, 216;
internationalism, 269, 299-300, 502,
625, 643, 690-1; cubism, 287; dada,
295, 633-9; socialist realism, 302;
surrealism, 303-8, 325; Spanish Civil
War, 314 ff., 326-7, 501-4, 517,
521-2, 528, 556, 559, 561; Spain, 317,
318, 522, 559; nationalism, 319-20,
538; Nazi-Soviet Pact, 320-1, 506,
518, 522, 528, 530; peace campaigns,
340-2, 503, 535-6, 547, 694-5;
Korean War, 343-5; Utilitarians
opposed by, 385; Pre-Raphaelitism,
470; anti-war sentiment (see also
pacifism; peace campaigns), 497;
fronts, 523; individualism, 558-9;
abstraction, 563; Arab-Israeli War,
577; collaboration and infiltration,
625, 643-5; united front, 642-3; dada,
643; International Style, 663—4;
“peaceful coexistence,” 693-4; avant-
garde, 714-15; see also Communist
Party; Marxism; Marxism-Leninism;
Stalin and Stalinism; and countries,
names, specific subjects
communism, religious and cooperative,
43, 410-11, 454, 476
“Communism, Science, and Culture”
(Duclos), 318-20
communist-anarchism, 45—6, 74, 76-7,
133, gS 5ezIS ea1o.220, 72m
development of, 16; Neo-
Impressionists, 237 ff., 251 ff.;
Symbolists, 237 ff., 251 ff.
Communist Cartoons: by ““Espoir’’ and
Others a4
Communist Information Bureau
(Cominform), 688

Communist International: see Third
(Communist) International
Communist League, 42, 75, 174, 402
Communist Manifesto (Marx and
Engels), 40, 41, 68, 74, 75, 103, 104,
105, 122, 123, 133, 143, 174, 259,
402; “socialism” and “communism”
used in, 42-3, 751 (n. 50); first
English translation, 402
communist parties: see communism and
communists; Communist Party
Communist Party (Austria), 685
Communist Party (Britain), 493 ff.,
517-15, 528, 529, 531, 535 ff., 542 ff.,
561, 571, 577-8, 718; see also
England, communism; and names,
subjects
Communist Party (France), 292, 294,
300, 325, 327 ff., 332 ff., 618-30, 688;
Stalinism, 303, 349, 352, 718;
surrealists, 303 ff., 308 ff.; Popular
Front, 308 ff., 375; Spanish Civil
War, 314 ff.; purges in Soviet Union,
317; nationalism, 319-20; dissolution,
320-1; Nazi-Soviet Pact, 320-1;
World War II period, 320-2, 328 ff.;
Resistance, 322, 328 ff.; cold war and
anti-Americanism, 328, 332 ff., 340 ff.;
social realism, 346 ff., 620, 716;
Hungarian Revolution, 352-3;
polycentrism, 354, 356, 359;
architecture, 357, 359, 664; Red
China, 357, 363, 376; New Left and,
359 ff., 363; party line defection,
364; abstraction, 375; anti-Gaullist
Popular Front, 375; student revolt, 376;
Czechoslovakia, 377; Clarté, 493;
compromise, 708
Communist Party (Germany), 18-19,
624-5, 629, 631-2, 637, 639, 678,
680
Communist Party (Hungary), 677
Communist Party (Italy), 688-700
passim, 718
Communist Party (Mexico), 731
Communist Party (Russia), 43
Communist Party (Soviet) : Twentieth
Congress, 349; leadership disclaimed,
356; name, 592; see also Soviet Union
Communist Party (United States), 318,
332
Communist Political Association, 332
“Communists Fall—and the Exchange
Rises, The” (Grosz), 635
communitarians, 43
Communitas; Means of Livelihood + Congress(es) of Proletarian Writers,
and Ways of Life (Goodman), 489
communities and community planning,
474; religious and cooperative, 43,
410-11, 454, 476; France, 125-9,
Index / xiii
communities and community planning
(continued )
134-9, 143-5, 285-6, 410 ff, 487,
489; Saint-Simonian, 125-9; Fourierist,
134-9, 410 ff.; Icarian, 143-5; an-
archist, 217, 222, 388, 394, 482-3;
artists’ Cooperatives proposed, 258;
Italy, 279-81; Abbaye de Créteil,
285-6; “Cybernetic City,” 368;
Benthamite, 382-4, 391; England,
382 ff., 390 ff., 410-15, 423-4, 444,
480-9, 722; industrial, 382 ff., 390 ff.,
401, 481; decentralization, 388, 444,
481 ff., 485 ff.; Godwinian, 388, 389;
Pantisocracy, 389, 391; Owenite and
Owenite influence, 390-7, 410 ff.;
utopian socialist, 391-7, 488; garden,
392, 410, 444, 479 ff., 485 ff., 491,
718; Utilitarian, 400; Chartist, 402;
“Victoria,” 410-11, 412-13, 481;
“Queen Victoria Town,” 411, 414;
St. George’s Farm, 423-4; satellite
towns, 444, 485; Nazarenes
(Pre-Raphaelite Brethren), 454;
“organic planning,” 470; regional
planning, early, 470, 487-8; arts and
crafts, 474; organicism, 474, 485;
Fabians, 479 ff.; cooperatives, 480 ff.;
England, 480-9, 718; Soviet, 480, 481,
489, 655; utopian, 480 ff.; greenbelts,
481, 485; United States, 481, 483,
485-6, 489, 722; functionalism, 485;
New Towns, 485 ff., 722; linear, 487-9;
Spain, 487-9; beautification and
preservation, 491; Germany, 585-6,
667 ff., 719; Austria, 598-9; Gesamt-
kunstwerk, 598; Stadtkrone, 671; Non-
conformism, 715; Establishment
takeover, 722; see also architecture
Community of Equality, 395
“Components of the National Culture”
(New Left Review), 575
Composition (Dali), 306
computers and art, 705, 711
Comte, Auguste, 119-20, 160-2, 196,
405, 417; influence, 439, 604
“concrete” painting, 283; see also art
concret
Condé-sur-Vesgre, 138
Confédération générale du travail
(C:G5T)), 270. 305, 3225370
Congo, 706
Congress of Constructivists and
Dadaists, 673
2012, 3049305, 312
Congress of the International Association
of Writers for the Defense of Culture,
501
X1vV / INDEX
Congress of the Union of Revolutionary
Writers, 304; see also Kharkov,
Congress of 1930
Congress of Writers, 302, 310, 311, 312
Congreve, Richard, 417
Coningsby (Disraeli), 481
Conjectures on Original Composition
(Young), 31
Conservateurs de la légitimité, 54, 164
Conservative Party (England), 480,
485, 487, 494
Conservatives: art and society, 17;
radical Right, 49-51; Right, as term
for, 51-4; liberalism and, 54-60; use
of term, 54, 164; academicism, 164;
see also Right
Considerant, Victor, 72, 137-42, 198,
203, 215, 271, 316, 410, 553
Considérations sociales sur
l’'architectonique (Considerant), 137
Conspiration pour l’égalité, dite de
Babeuf (Buonarotti), 143
Constant, Benjamin, 152, 164
constructivism: architecture (see also
International Style), 315, 316, 486,
539, 654-7, 672; Soviet, 316, 486,
539, 654 ff., 672; Op Art, 368; New
Tendency (La Nouvelle Tendance) ,
371—4; kinetic, 372, 704, 715, 819
(n. 24); England, 486, 515, 626-7,
654-5, 672 ff.; Bauhaus, 501, 672-5,
677; photomontage, 634; Switzerland,
654-5; New Left, 699; see also names
Constructivist Congress, 673
Constructivist International, 673
Constructors, The (Léger), 330, 331, 347
Consuelo (Sand), 148
“consumer” society, 371, 711, 742
contemporaneity, 197-200, 244
Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy (Marx), 9
Cookridge, E. H., 496
Cooper, Douglas, 818 (n. 19)
cooperatives and cooperative movement:
England, 397, 416-17, 427, 429, 440;
community planning, 480 ff.; Belgium,
610; housing, 654, 669
Copernicus, 29
Copland, Aaron, 819 (n. 21)
Corio, Silvio, 491
Cornelius, Peter von, 184, 454
Corner of the Studio, A (Tassaert),
194, 195, 732
Cornford, John, 503
Corot, 153, 186, 203
Corrente group, 691
“correspondances,” doctrine of, 134, 157
cosmopolitanism, 157-8
Cottage Plans and Common Sense
(Fabian Tract No. 109), 479
Coulin, Jules, 591
“Coup de dés, Un” (Mallarmé), 229
Courbet, Gustave, 45, 140, 319, 323,
731; Paris Commune of 1871, 61,
203-5; realism, 148, 155-6, Gin 102,
186, 188-91, 230, 514, 592, 722, 732;
influences on, 155, 162, 194, 725;
Proudhon, anarchism and, 155-6,
192-200, 202-3, 722; Impressionism,
230; Zola and, 230 ff.; Neo-
Impressionism, 238; Whistler and, 464;
art for masses, 553
Cours de philosophie positive (Comte),
160
Courtauld Institute of Art, 514, 564
Cousin, Victor, 152
crafts: see arts and crafts
Craftsman, 601
Cram, Ralph Adams, 473
Crane, Walter, 244, 324, 436, 490;
Fabianism, 440-2; arts and crafts,
449; Pre-Raphaelites, 461, 468-9;
Art Nouveau, 605-9, 613, 614, 615
Creese, Walter, 484
Crisis, 395
Crisis and Criticism (West), 519
“Crisis in Housing” (Gide), 489
“critical school,” 199
critics and criticism, 83, 176-8, 189, 237,
238, 398, 722-6; Fourierist, 140, 201;
modern, 145, 417; knowledge of form
and function, 156; France, 200-3;
Symbolist, 237, 238; anarchism, 251-5,
359, 552 ff.; “truth to nature,” 418-19,
423; England, 519, 551 ff., 718;
Marxism, 519, 559, 560 ff., 574-5,
577, 681 ff., 723, 733-4; radical,
552 ff.; Marxism-Leninism, 560 ff.;
Kunstsoziologie, 564, 565, 566, 592;
Germany, 681-6; New Left, 681-6;
Hungary, 687-8; influence, 724-6;
formalism, 733; see also names,
subjects
“Critique du socialisme et de Yanarchie”’
(Adam), 252
Croce, Benedetto, 689
Crown of Wild Olive, The (Ruskin),
418
Cruikshank, 166
Crystal Palace, 407-11, 422, 597, 599
Cuba, 362, 376, 573
cubism, 157, 287-91, 324; Symbolism,
250-1; formalism, 251; Marxism, 253,
285, 570; futurism and, 278, 283;
Abbaye de Créteil, 287-91; analytical,
287, 288; simultaneity, 287, 290;
Section d’or, 290-1; Russia, 291, 354;
dada, 295; architecture, 486, 662;
Vorticism, 556; expressionism, 626;
De Stijl, 674

“cult of personality,” 348 ff.
Culture and Society (Williams), 572,
746 (n. 2)
Cummings, E. E., 304
Cunard, Nancy, 500
Cunninghame, Graham, 436-7
Currier and Ives, 23
“Cybernetic and Work of Art” (Moles),
705
cybernetic sculpture, 368
cyclical relationship of art and society, 30
Cyclists (Léger), 347
Cysp 1 (Schéffer), 368
Czechoslovakia, 543; Revolution of
1918, 24; Russian invasion, AGT, SG),
550, 571, 577, 698-9, 815 (n. 106);
819 (n. 22); Nazis and, 522 ff.,
527-8; Neo-dada, 818 (n. 21)
d’Ache, Caran, 241, 265
Dada, Der, 634
dadaism, 157, 295-7, 524, 638;
anarchism, 229, 633; futurism, 275,
295; France, 295, 297, 637; surrealism,
295, 637; Germany, 297, 524, 624-38,
674-5, 719; “death of,” 298; Neo-dada,
366; pacifism, 623-4; communism,
633-9, 643; Weimar Congress, 673;
New Left, 699; Marxism, 719-20;
subject-matter, 733
Daguerre, 236
Daily Herald, 492
Daily Mail, 578
Daily Worker (London), 495-6, 502,
508-9, 531, 534, 539, 541, 549, 550,
561, 568; see also Morning Star
Daily Worker (New York), 182, 341,
498, 512
Dali, Salvador, 303, 304, 306-7, 314
Dalou, Jules, 203-5, 514, 519
d’Alton, Edward, 68
Daly, César, 140-2, 144, 145
Damnés de la Terre, Les (Fanon), 362
Dana, Charles A., 71, 75
dance: ballet, 297, 325; utopian socialists,
386, 394, 411 ’ 200, 334, 695, 732
d’Angers, Pierre Jean David: see David
d’Angers, Pierre Jean
Daniel, 364, 550; trial impact, 698
Dante, 81
Darby, Abraham, 25, 389
Darbyshire, Andrew, 539
Dartmouth College Library, 505
Darwin, 99, 222, 488
Das Antlitz Europas (Kartun), 544
Daubigny, 230
Daudet, Alphonse, 241
Index / xv
Daumier, Honoré, 178-82, 186, 202,
236, 732; influences on, 58; Revolution
of 1848, 61, 180; anti-bourgeois
attitude, 178 ff.; influence, 182, 26s,
323, 511, 512, 543; Fédération des
artistes de Paris, 203; Neo-
Impressionism, 238; communist
attitude toward, 514, 519; realism,
514, 592; relative appeal of graphic
art and painting, 730-1
“Daumier as a Polemicist,”’ 180
David, Félicien, 125-6, 129
David, Jacques Louis, 15, 24, 26, 35-8,
150-1, 165, 200, 324, 334, 565, 695,
731, 732; anti-academicism, 24, 35-6,
62, 150, 248; French Revolution, 24,
26, 61; classicism, 35; Commune des
arts, 36, 62, 248; realism, 36-8, 165;
influence, 150, 334, 695; bourgeois
art, 591-2
David d’Angers, Pierre Jean, 146, 147,
176, 201
Davis, Stuart, 505-6
Dawson, Norman P., 515
d’Axa, Zo, 264
Day, Dorothy, 212
de Bonald, Louis, 17
de Gaulle, Charles, 361, 375-8
De la mission de l'art et du réle des
artistes; Salon de 1845 (Laverdant),
140
de la Sizeranne, Robert, 245
de La Tour du Pin, René, 210-12
de Lesseps, Ferdinand, 129-30, 224
De Vétat de la liberté (Scheffer), 169
De lutilité du pragmatisme (Sorel), 272
de Mun, Comte Albert, 210-12, 257
De Profundis (Wilde), 248
De reyolutionibus orbium coelestium
(Copernicus), 29
de Sausmarez, Maurice, 798 (n. 77)
De Stijl, 654, 673-4
De Stil, 677
de Tocqueville, Alexis, 748 (n. 28)
Deane, 420
Dearmer, Percy, 477
Death of Marat, The (David), 36-8, 16s,
Debray, Régis, 573
Debs, Eugene, 435
Decadent-Symbolist movement, 241
Decamps, 179
decentralization, 444, 447, 481 ff., 485 ff.
Defiant People; Drawings of Greece
Today (Hogarth), 542
Degas, 59, 151, 228, 237, 547
Degeyter, Pierre, 767 (n. 77)
d’Fichthal, Gustave, 400, 403
Deineka, Alexander, 541
Xvi / INDEX
Delacroix, 146, 168, 170, 171-8, 182,
184, 186, 319, 695, 740
Delaroche, 194
Delaunay, 281, 283, 288
Delbriick, Hans, 590
Délécluze, Etienne, 207-8
Delegates, The (Taslitzky), 334
Delorme, Daniele, 360
Demands of Art, The (Raphael) ,682
democracy, 8, 12; egalitarianism and,
13-14; “totalitarian” or “popular” vs.
“Jiberal’” or “bourgeois,” 14-15; social
organism and, 16-19; revolutionary
traditions and, 19; French Revolution,
36, 44, 70; Neue Rheinische Zeitung
and, 75; Greek, classical, 90; Christian
socialism, 417
democrat: origin and spread of word use,
13
democratic communism, 12, 18
Democratic Federation, 427 ff., 432, 438
Democratic Party (Germany), 625
Democratic Socialist Party (Paris), 173-4
Démocratie, La, 201
Démocratie pacifique, 139-40, 149,
154, 201
Democritus, 89, 91
“Démolisseur, Le’ (Signac), 241, 243
Denise René Gallery (Paris), 369
depersonalization, 372
Depression, 27, 58, 96, 485, 495-7,
506 ff., 546-7; see also names, subjects
Derain, 261, 262
Désert, Le (David), 126, 129
design, industrial, 197-8, 447, 447-8,
454, 473 ff., 599, 701; workshops,
473; Art Nouveau, 612 ff.; Bauhaus,
649 ff., 655, 657, 673, 701 ff.
Design in Industry Association, 473
Dessau, Bauhaus workshops (Gropius) ,
652
Destinée sociale (Considerant), 137
Destrée, Jules, 609
Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher, 72
Deutsche Ideologie, Die (Marx and
Engels), 72, 74, 169
Deutscher, Isaac, 573
Deutscher Werkbund, 587, 650-1, 66s,
669, 678
Deveria, Eugene, 153
Dewey, John, 107
Dialectic of Artistic Creation; A
Sociology of Art (Hauser), 567
dialectical process, organicism and,
98-102
Diazais3e201
Dickens, Charles, 83, 407, 459, 460
“dictatorship of the proletariat,’ 103
Dictionnaire raisonné de Iarchitecture
francaise du xi* au xvi* siécle
(Viollet-le-Duc) , 208, 209
Diderot, Denis, 90, 119, 145, 156, 199,
200; society as organism, 16, 23, 97,
471; progress and technology, 25, 32-3;
genius, concept of, 31; didactic art,
32-3; Marx influenced by, 68, 81;
dissent, 389; organicism, 404
Digger, The (Dalou), 204-5
Diggers on the Road (Munch), 622
disarmament, 300
Disasters of the War, The (Goya),-56
Discours sur les sciences et les arts
(Rousseau), 17
Discourse on Inequality (Rousseau) , 388
Disraeli, 427, 481
Dissent, 25, 387, 389; reform and, 481,
485; see also Non-conformism
Distributist movement, 476
Divisionism, 238, 274, 275
Dix, Otto, 636, 640, 651
Dobb, Maurice, 496
Dobrolyubov, 83
Dobson, Frank, 504
Doctor's Dilemma, The (Shaw), 431
Doctrine de Saint-Simon, La, 124, 160
Doherty, Hugh, 398, 410, 412-15
Dollfuss Putsch, 668-9
Doll’s House, A (Ibsen), 430, 445
Dominican Republic, 573
Doone, Rupert, 521
Doré, Gustave, 460
Dornach, Goetheanum, 435
Dostoyevsky, 216-17, 612, 629, 768
(n. 20)
Douthwaite, Pat, 544
“Dove (of Peace)” (Picasso), 340-3
Doves Press, 470
Doyen, Albert, 287
D’Oyly Carte, Richard: see Carte,
Richard D’Oyly
Drawing Book of the School of Design
(Dyce), 454
Drawings by Felicia Browne, 503
Dream of Happiness, The (Papéty),
185
Dream of John Ball, The (Morris), 444
Dreier, Katherine, 648
Dreigroschenoper, Die (Brecht and
Weill), 641
Dreiser, Theodore, 312
Dresden revolt, 215-16, 596-8
Dresser, Christopher, 447, 475
Dreyfus case, 232, 257, 265
Dreyfusard Protest of the Intellectuals, 257
Du Camp, Maxime, 154-5, 175
Du contrat social (Rousseau), 16
Du cubisme (Gleizes and Metzinger) , 290
Du Gard, Maurice Martin, 318

Du principe de Vart et de sa destination
sociale (Proudhon), 198-9, 202-3
Du réalisme (Courbet), 190
Du style et de la littérature (de Bonald),
17
Duban, 141, 760 (n. 19)
Dubois, 203
DuBois, W. E. B., 537
Duchamp, Marcel, 283, 288, 369, 720,
727; dada, 297
Duchamp-Villon, Raymond, 288, 290
Duclos, Jacques, 294, 318-20, 328, 332,
348
Duhamel, Georges, 286, 299
Dumas (the Elder), 81
Dupont, Pierre, 84, 156
Dupré, 170, 181-2, 201
Durand-Ruel, 262
Duras, Marguerite, 376
Diirer, Albrecht, 79
Dutch Diamond Cutters Union
building, 601
Dutschke, “Red Rudi,” 709-10
Duveyrier, Charles, 126, 129
Dvizheniye, 372, 704, 715, 819 (n. 24)
Dvétsil, 811 (n. 45)
Dvorak (critic), 566
Dyce, William, 454, 475
dynamism, 166, 275
Dynamism (Automobile) (Russolo),
278, 279
East German Academy of Art, 352, 526
East Germany, 355, 357, 524, 526-7,
630-1, 642, 680 ff.; Bauhaus revival,
706-8
Ebert, Friedrich, 624
Ecce Ancilla Domini (Rossetti) , 455-6
eclecticism, 30-1, 142, 144, 145
Ecole d’Arcueil, 294
Ecole démocratique, 190
Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 187, 203, 208,
232, 267, 742, 760 (n. 19); student
revolt, 376—8
Ecole sociétaire, 139—40, 141
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
(Marx), 73-4, 77, 111-12, 360,
573, 681, 754 (n. 11)
economic vs. political democracy, 12-13
Ecran francais, L’, 332
Edelmann, John, 602
Editeurs francais réunis, 332
Editions Cercle d’art, 332, 355 , 67-8, 72-7; artist, 70, 72; Carlyle
Editions d’hier et aujourd’hui, 332
education: progressivism, 34, 411;
anarchist principles of, 324—5; student
revolt, France, 375-8; Owenite, 385-6,
394, 411; crafts, 394, 449, 454;
Index / xvii
education (continued)
Pemberton, 411; Christian socialism,
416-17; Working Men’s College
(London), 416-17, 440, 456, 461;
artisans’ school, 457; functional, 4733
Bauhaus, 646 ff.; Arts and Crafts
School (Weimar), 650; Hochschule
fiir Gestaltung, 700-6
Edward VII (King of England), 475
egalitarianism, 13; primitivism, 33
Egypt, 129-30
Ehn, Karl, 668
Ehrenburg, Ilya, 312, 351-2, 355, 634,
654 662,
-5, 673, 677
Eichenberg, Fritz, 212
Eiffel Tower, 445
Eigenart des Asthetischen, Die (Lukacs) ,
687
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,
The (Marx), 30
Einzige und sein Eigentum, Der,
(Stirner), 72
Eisher, Hanns, 641-2, 681, 684
Eisner, Kurt, 588, 624
Electricians Trade Union, 540
electronic art, 705
Eliot, George, 460
Eliot 1? S:,521,.556
élite, philosophy of, 272, 275, 281, 400,
401-2, 404
Elskamp, Max, 613
Elton, Sir Arthur, 563
Eluard, Paul: surrealism, 297; dada, 298;
communism, 300, 303, 304, 308, 312,
314, 346
Emerson, 157, 390, 406, 411, 484-5,
602, 749 (n. 29)
Emile (Rousseau), 33-4, 324
empiricism: England, 22, 26-7, 54, 718;
academicism and, 26-7; United States,
26-7; liberalism and, 54-5
Encyclopédie (Diderot), 32 ff., 119
Encyclopedists: “liberal” and ‘“‘mechanic’’
arts, 33; progressivism, 34-5; see also
names
Endehors, L’, 252, 264
Enemy of the People, An (Ibsen), 431
Enfantin, Prosper, 119, 125-32, 148, 403
571, Engels, Friedrich, 6, 7, 18, 29, 40, 89,
431, 432; democratic communism,
12—13, 18; democracy and rule of the
proletariat, 18-19; “socialism” and
“communism” as used by, 42-3;
career, and friendship with Marx,
and, 73, 82, 403, 407; Chartism, 73,
402; conversion to communism, 73;
utopian socialism, 73; Proudhon and,
74; art references, 77—9; terrorism, 77;
collective art, 79; music, 79, 83;
XVill / INDEX
Engels (continued)
realism, 79, 81-3; literature, 81-3, 162;
materialism, 87 ff., 111; functionalism,
101; Class struggle, 102; housing, 104;
mechanism, 107; activism, 108-9;
writing style, 109; Fourierism, 133;
Icarians, 143; Commune of 1871, 194,
196, 206; Bakunin, 215; Slavs, 215;
Shelley, 389; Godwin, 390; withering
away of state, 390; Morris’s
medievalism, 447; evolutionary
emphasis, 588; French Revolution
influence, 749 (1. 30); see also
Communist Manifesto
“engineers of souls,” 310
England, 703: gradualism, 13, 22;
“Glorious Revolution” (1688), 19 ff.,
30, 57-8; revolutionary tradition, 19 ff.;
empiricism, 22, 26-7, 54, 718; social
mobility, 22; Non-conformism, 25,
389, 438, 481, 715; housing, 40,
480-9, 718; humanitarianism, 40, 416;
Industrial Revolution, 40; socialism,
40-1, 426 ff., 457 ff.; anarchism, 44-5,
158, 434-8, 442, 457, 478, 501, 552 ff., .
578-9; utopian socialism, 44, 385-6,
395-8; radicalism, 46-50, 717-18;
Pre-Raphaelites, 199, 241, 244-5, 388,
403, 407, 419-20, 425-6; reformism,
244-5, 718; Spanish Civil War, 316,
501—4, 517, 521—2, 529; New Left,
363, 570 ff., 740; Pop Art, 365, 578;
Benthamism, 382-3, 400; philosophical
radicalism, 382, 399-401;
Utilitarianism, 382—4, 399-401;
romanticism, 389-90, 398, 399, 404 ff.,
464; Christian socialism, 398, 405,
415-17, 444, 476-7; Fourierism, 398,
410 ff.; Saint-Simonianism, 398,
400-4; social radicalism and art,
398; Marxism, 399, 427 ff., 560 ff.;
Chartism, 401-3, 407—8, 415, 427,
452; organicism, 404-6, 419;
functionalism, 407—10, 419 ff.; Gothic
revival, 415 ff.; positivism, 417;
architecture, 418 ff., 473-6, 485 ff.,
539, 599-600; gardens, 423; class
consciousness, 427-8, 718; general
strike (1926), 427, 494-5; arts and
crafts, 449 ff., 718; Pre-Raphaelites,
449, 451 ff., 459, 461 ff.; naturalism,
454; graphic arts, 458-61, 494, 496,
SOO tt 1543 1S O35 70 Omani
art’s sake,” 462 ff., 506; Impressionism,
472; city planning, 480-9, 718;
communism (see also Communist
Party [Britain]), 490 ff., 530 ff., 625;
antifascism, 491, 498, 500-4, 508, 513,
517, 521 ff., 528, 531 ff.; Depression
(1930's), 495-7, 507 ff., 546; leftism,
England (continued)
495-522, 524, 530 ff.; surrealism,
500-1, 513-17} social realism, 506 ff.,
536 ff., 550; critics and criticism, 519,
552 ff., 718; literature, 519-22; theater,
519-21, 528, 573-4; anti-Nazi refugees,
522 ff.; World War II, 527 ff., 563;
cold wat, 533 ff.; abstract expressionism,
550; anarchism, 552 ff., 559; avant-
garde, 579-80
England and the Octopus (Williams-
Ellis), 491
Enigma of William Tell, The (Dali), 306
Enlightenment, 11, 13, 16, 387;
. democracy, 13; revolutionary influence,
20, 30; Classical eclecticism, 30-1;
socialism and, 40; liberalism, 54,
57; alienation, 63-4, 89, 713;
rationalism, 97—8; Christian
socialism, 159-60
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of
Political Justice, and Its Influence on
General Virtue and Happiness
(Godwin), 44, 386-8, 766 (n. 52)
Enragé, L’, 376
Enragés, 44
Ensor, James, 605-7
Entretiens sur l architecture (Viollet-
le-Duc), 208-10
Entry of Christ into Brussels, The
(Ensor), 606
environmentalism, 34, 40, 87, 232, 365,
371, 372; style and, 106-7; radicalism
and, 727
Epicutus, 71, 89, 91
Epstein, Jacob, 504, 536, 557
Eragny Press, 244
Ernst, Max, 298, 300, 303, 314, 321, 637
Escarmouche, L’, 261
Escuela Moderna, 324-5
espionage, 496
Espoir: see Hope, Will
Essai sur les moeurs (Voltaire), 35
Essai sur un nouveau mode de maisons
d habitation (Borie), 139
Essays on Socialist Realism and the
British Cultural Tradition (Arena
Publications), 536
Etex, Antoine, 197
ethics, organic unity and, 478-9
Ethiopia, 491
Etruscans, 33
“Etrusques, Les,” 150, 324
Etzler, J. A., 413-14, 415
EKugénie, Empress, 186-7
Eulenspiegel, 630
Europe littéraire, L’ (Lechevalier), i59
Euston Road School, 506-8, 512, 516,
521, 549
Evangelicals, 158

Evergood, Philip, 504-5, 534
Every Saturday, 460
Evocation of Lenin (Dali), 306, 307
Evolutionary Socialism (Bernstein), 588
Examiner; A Weekly Paper on Politics,
Literature, Music, and the Fine Arts,
390
Exhibition of Free Art, 278
Exhibitors to the Public, The, 278
existentialism: alienation, 89; New Left,
359, 361 ff.
Exposition universelle (1855), 175, 190
? Ferrer Association, 325
202
expressionism and expressionists, 435,
628, 638-9; Germany, 61, 621-6,
632, 638-9, 644, 646, 648, 679, 719;
Symbolism, 250; cubism and, 287;
dada and, 295, 296; abstract, B24, 305)
530, 570-1, 575, 621; existentialism
and, 361; England, 522-3; Vorticism,
556; Soviet, 622; constructivism, 626;
cubism, 626; futurism, 626; theater,
626; use of term, 809 (n. 87); see also
names
Extinction du pauperisme, L’ (Louis
Napoleon), 187
Fabian Arts Group, 440, 476
Fabian Essays, 440
Fabian Society, 435, 477
Fabianism, 48, 439-43, 465, 555;
community planning, 479 ff., 488-9;
arts and, 476-9, 480; Bloomsbury
group, 503; Left Book Club, 517-18;
German revisionism, 587-8
Fahnen, 638-9
Falguiére, 203
“Familistére” (Guise), 139
Family on the Barricades, A (Daumier)
180
Fanon, Frantz, 362-3
fascism: racism, 210; anarchism, 219;
futurism, 219, 281; Italy, 219, 281,
688 ff.; syndicalism, 281; France,
306-8; surrealism, 306—7; terrorism,
311; anarchism, 597; mass production
and, 683; avant-garde and, 714; see
also anti-fascism; Spanish Civil War
Fast, Howard, 537
Fathers and Sons (Turgenev), 214
Faulkner, Charles, 426, 428-9, 457
Faure, Elie, 299, 308, 317, 725
fauvism, 261-2, 355-6; see also names
Fédération des artistes de Paris, 203-5
Fédération des Bourses du travail, 270
Fédération internationale de ]’art
révolutionnaire indépendant
(F.LA.R.I), 320
Index / xix
Fédération musicale populaire, 309, 319
Federation of Artists, Engineers,
Chemists and Technicians, 489
Féderés, 206
Feininger, Lyonel, 645-9 passim, 652,
654, 678, 679, 708, 813 (n. 74)
Fellowship of the New Life, 439
Femmes socialistes, Les (Daumier), 180
Fénéon, Félix, 237, 238, 250, 253-4,
257, 261, 264, 324, 466
Ferdinand VII (King of Spain), 166
Ferrer, Francisco, 324-5
Festin d’Esope, Le, 324
Festival of Avant-Garde Art, 368
Fétes du peuple, Les, 287
Feuchtwanger, Lion, 352
Feuerbach, 68, 715
Feuille, La, 264
Fichte, 84, 98, 184, 214, 235, 584-6,
715
Fields, Factories and Workshops
(Kropotkin), 482-3
Figaro, Le, 273
Fildes, Luke, 459-60
film: see cinema
Finch, Alfred William, 610-13
fine arts, 33; crafts and applied arts and,
7-8
Finland, invasion of, 321, 506, 531
First All-Union Congress of Writers,
310, 311,312
First International, 76-7, 173, 200, 207,
217-20, 221-3, 694; Bakunin ys.
Marx, 214 ff., 227; Jura Federation,
218, 222—
Fischer, Ernst, 685—6, 698
Fitton, James, 498-9, 508-11, 514, 529,
572
Fitzwilliam Museum, 436
Five on Revolutionary Art, 475-6, 501,
547, 563
Five Year Plan, 302, 489
Flachat, Eugene, 130, 131
Flaubert, Gustave, 154-5, 420, 465
Florentine Painting and Its Background
(Antal), 565-6
Folk, 597
folk art: Soviet Union, 28, 83, 194;
realism, 194; romanticism, 194;
anarchism, 217
“For Charity” (Fitton), 510
“For the Freedom of Art” (Vollmar),
590
Forain, Jean Louis, 235, 265
force-lines, 275
form and outlook, 686
“form follows function,” 143
Forma, 691-2
Forma (periodical), 691
xx / INDEX
formalism, 350-1, 554-5; Marxism, 107,
562, 565 ff., 570, 591, 691-2, 720,
735; “art for art’s sake,” 249, 466, 467;
cubism, 251; realism, 420; architecture,
467-8, 475, 656-7; Japanese influence,
467, 468-9; Art Nouveau, 469;
propaganda, 557; criticism, 733
Fors Clavigera (Ruskin), 424
Forster, E. M., 312, 478, 528, 532
Fortune, 542
Foster, William Z., 332
Fougeron, André, 328-30, 333-06, 346,
348, 350, 352, 697; Soviet attitude
toward, 355; abstraction, 356-7, 358-9
“Four, The,” 473
Fourier, Charles, 133-43, 148, 196, 392,
394, 396, 415, 416, 425; education
and individuality, 34; Marx and —
Engels, 43, 71, 72, 74, 79> 1333
violence, 118; harmony, 134; music,
134, 386; Rousseau influence, 134,
135; universal analogies, 134; phalanx,
135-9; history theory, 136; surrealism
and, 297; dance, 386; see also
Fourierism
Fourierism, 75, 81, 82, 112, 118-19, 196, «
224; avant-garde, 118-19; anti-
Semitism, 132-3; communist-anarchism,
133, 135; romanticism, 145-58;
bohemianism, 151-2, 189 ff.; Second
Empire, 187; community planning,
315-16, 394, 410 ff.; England, 398,
410 ff.; see also Fourier, Charles
Fourier’s (c.) Theory of Attractive
Industry (tr. Doherty), 412
Fourteenth of July (Rolland), 309-10
Fourteenth of July (spectacle), 319
Fourteenth Street School (New York),
501
Fourth Writers’ Congress, 364
Fox, Ralph, 502
France; academicism, 24, 26, 27, 35—6,
164 ff.; avant-garde, 32, 119 ff., 375,
715-16, 717, 742; socialism, 40-1,
173, 255-7, 416; social utopianism,
41, 117-63, 174-5, 215, 267-9;
liberalism, 54—7, 166 ff.; communities
and community planning, 125-9,
134-9, 143-5, 285-6, 410 ff., 487,
489; architecture, 126 ff., 137 ff.,
143-4, 207-10, 267-9, 315-16, 357,
487; Gothic Revival, 133, 161, 169,
600; Conservatives, 164-5; revolutionary
republicanism, 164 ff.; Carbonani,
169-70; proletarian movements, 173—
4; communism (see also Communist
Party [France]), 174, 294, 302 ff.; an-
archism, 175, 196 ff., 212 ff., 225-6,
228 ff., 324-5; social realism, 188 ff.;
Marxism, 225, 226—7, 234, 255—7..270,
France (continued)
28s; reformism, 227, 244-5; syndical-
ism, 270-2; music and musicians, 294;
dada, 295, 297, 637; anti-fascism,
306 ff.; fascism and nazism, 306-8;
Popular Front, 308 ff.; World War II,
320-2, 328 ff; Resistance, 322, 328 ff.,
775 (n.190); anti-Americanism, 333,
340, 341, 344-6, 351; New Left,
359-64; Algeria, 360-1; kinetic art,
366 f£.; student revolt, 375-8, 709,
716, 742; city planning, 489;
Situationists, 706; centralism, 716;
see also French Revolution; Revolution
of 1830; Revolution of 1848;
Commune of 1871; and names, subjects
France, Anatole, 241, 265, 299
France-SSSR, 355
Franco, 218, 266, 314, 501, 556; see
also Spanish Civil War
Franco-Prussian War, 188, 206, 208
Franco-Soviet Pact, 311
Francois, André, 535
Francois le Champi (Sand), 148
Frank, Waldo, 312
Franz Josef (Austrian Emperor) , 596, 617
Free Art Party, 618
Free German League of Culture, 523-4,
526
Free People’s Theater, 590
Freedom, 438
Freedom Defense Committee, 528
freedom, Marxian, 88
Freemasonry, 168
Freie Volksbiihne, 590, 639
French Revolution, 10, 11, 24-9, 61,
713, 717, 718; democracy, 13 ff., 44;
patronage, 14; American Revolution
compared to, 22-3, 748-9 (n. 28);
artists as propagandists, 23-4;
Marxism, 24, 27-8, 70, 167-8, 749
(n. 30); Russian Revolution and, 27-8,
749 (n. 30); Terror, 28, 36, 387, 388,
749 (n. 31); classical eclecticism, 30-8;
history concepts, 34, 38; English
reactions, 46—7, 386 ff., 400 ff.; radical
Right reaction to, 50; liberalism, 54-7;
artists’ organizations, 62; utopianism,
117-18, 120; academicism, 165;
Germany influenced by, 584—5
French Revolution (Carlyle), 403
French Revolution, The (Blake), 388
fresco, 317, 454, 455
Freud, 298, 301, 304, 313, 514, 515, 685
“Friday Club” (Paris), 186
Friedrich Wilhelm IV (King of Prussia),
594
Friell, James, 541
Fromm, Erich, 683
Front national, 322

Front national des arts, 322, B80). 333
Front national des intellectuels, 322
front organizations, 355; Clarté, 300;
see also Popular Front; united front
“Front Rouge, Le’ (Aragon), 304, 312
Fronte nuovo delle arti, 692-3
frontier, influence of, 13, 748 (n. 29)
Fry, Roger, 438, 478, 552—5, 558, 562,
725
Fuchs, Edward, 661-2
Fugue (Kupka), 283, 284
Fullard, George, 545
Fuller, Roy, 519
functional music, 294
functionalism, 109, 209, 389; organicism,
16-17, 101; Marxism, 101, 109;
architecture, 109, 155, 209-10, 407-10,
418, 419, 468, 473, 475, 598 ff., 612 ff.,
640; Saint-Simonianism, 121-2, 124 ff.;
anarcho-syndicalism, 272; England,
407-10, 419 ff.; realism, 407, 410 ff.,
419; romanticism, 410 ff., 419; “truth
to nature,” 418 ff.; industrial design,
447; arts and crafts movement, 450;
Art Nouveau, 469, 612 ff.;
industrialization, 475; Germany, 594;
Gothic Revival, 600-1; ‘form follows
function,” 602; naturalism, 621-2;
Gebrauchsmusik, 640; Neue
Sachlichkeit, Die, 640, 651, 654;
industrial architecture, 651
Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (Carra),
275, 276-7, 278
furniture and furnishings, 429, 450,
451, 457, 467-8, 469, 639;
Art Nouveau, 470, 614, 615
Further Studies in a Dying Culture
(Caudwell), 561
Fuseli, Henry, 44, 388
Fuseli Studies (Antal), 565
futurism and futurists, 218, 253, 273-85,
315, 597, 683; anarchism, 219, 274;
Art Nouveau, 274; divisionism, 274;
dada, 275, 295; cubism, 278, 283;
architecture, 281, 486; Russia, 283-4,
301; Vorticism, 556-7; expressionism,
626; Germany, 679
Futurisme, Le (Marinetti), 273-4
Futurist Cinematography, 274
G, 809 (n.15), 812 (n. 65)
Gabo, Naum, 515, 673
Gabriel (James Friell), 541
Gaitskell, Hugh, 578
Galerie de la Boétie, 290-1
Galerie Denise René (Paris), 369
Galerie Maeght (Paris), 330
Galli, Angelo, 275
Index / xxi
Gandhi, Mahatma, 418
Garaudy, Roger, 332
Garden Cities of Tomorrow (Howard),
480
gardens, 423
Garibaldi, 216, 694; anarchism, 173;
socialism, 173
Garlnwyd (Wales), 397
Garnier, Tony, 139, 267-8, 279, 316,
466, 627, 651
gas lighting, 128
Gaskell, Mrs., 83
Gaudi, Antonio, 616
Gaudier-Brzeska, 557
Gauguin, Paul, 237, 252, 258-61;
influence, 472
Gautier, Théophile, 146, 149-53, 155,
157, 172, 189, 194; influence, 462,
465-6, 467
Gavarni (Guillaume Sulpice Chevalier),
179
Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 245
Gebrauchsmusik, 294, 640 ff.
Gedanken iiber die Schonheit und iiber
den Geschmack (Mengs), 16
Geddes, Patrick, 435, 470, 474, 488
Gehag, 669
Geistesgeschichte, 566
Gemeinschaftsmusik, 641
“general will” doctrine, 16
Geneva, 216 ff.
genius: original, 31; organismic theory
of, 404
Gentz, Friedrich, 749 (n. 28)
Geofroy, Louis de, 189
George, Henry, 426-7, 488
Gerald Scarfe’s People (Scarfe), 578
Gérard, 36
Géricault, Théodore, 55, 57, 61, 166-8,
176, 740; influence of, 334, 695;
realism, 565
German Democratic Republic: see
East Germany
German Workers Communist Party,
625
Germany: avant-garde, 28-9; Weimar
Republic, 28-9, 487, 592, 624 ff.,
636, 667 ff., 677, 719, 740;
expressionism, 61, 621-6, 632, 644,
646, 648, 679, 719; Revolution of
November 1918, 61, 62, 740;
Saint-Simonianism, 73; romanticism,
97-8, 386, 399, 404 ff., 584, 597,
715; mass art, 109; Morris, 112, 583 ff.,
587, 590, 592-4, 627; Pre-Raphaelites,
184, 454-5; idealism, 214, 584 ff.;
communism, 215, 524, 593, 624 ff.,
629 ff., 639, 643-5, 678; expressionism,
287, 522; dada, 297, 524, 624-38,
674-5; Nazi-Soviet Pact, 306; New
1X71 7 SUN De X
Germany (continued)
Tendency groups, 371, 374; Marxism,
399, 432, 583 ff., 587 ff., 623 ff;
organicism, 404 ff.; architecture, 486-7,
585-6, 596, 626-7, 665 ff.; Revolution
of 1848, 494; World War II (see also
Hitler; Nazis), 500; Jugendstil, 523,
609, 615, 616; social democracy,
583 ff., 623 ff., 718-19; French
Revolution, 584-5; anarchism, 585,
592; housing, 585-7, 598, 667-71, 719;
nationalism, 585, 593; state socialism,
586 ff.; statism, 586; Christian social-
ism, 587, 593; liberalism, 587, 590, 597;
medievalism, 593, 598; radicalism,
594 ff.; music, 596-7, 640-3; World
War I, 623 ff.; arts and crafts, 626-7,
650 ff., 719; constructivism, 626-7;
graphic art, 628-32; leftists, 628 ff.,
641 ff.; émigrés, 678-9, 680, 682-5;
futurism, 679; city planning, 719; see -
also Bauhaus; East Germany; Nazis;
West Germany; and names, subjects
Germinal (Zola) ,230-2, 254, 255, 445,
629
Gesamtkunstwerk, 216, 532, 597, 598,
610, 614, 636, 639, 645, 649, 651-2,
671, 700, 704
Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums
(Winckelmann), 30
Geschichte und Klassbewusstsein
(Lukacs), 682
Gesellschaft, Kiinstler und Kommunismus
(Herzfelde) ,634
Gesicht der herrschenden Klasse, Das
(Grosz) ? 634-5
Giacometti, Alberto, 296—7, 361, 377
Gibberd, Frederick, 488
Gide, André, 245, 305, 309-12, 314
Gide, Charles, 299, 300, 305, 489
Gil Blas illustré, 265, 323
Gill, Eric, 212, 475-6, 500, 501, 563,
725, 795 (1. 27)
Gillray, James, 58, 578-9
Gilot, Francoise, 361, 536
Giono, 311
Giotto, 455
Girodet, 565
Girondins, 44, 51; democratic concept,
14
Gisors, Guy, 51, 52 ; Grand Prix de Rome, 376
Glasgow: “Four, The,” 473; Mackintosh,
C.R., 473-4
Gleizes, Albert, 286-91
Globe, Le, 125, 131, 147, 168
Glorious Revolution, 19 ff., 30, 57-8,
120
Gobineau, Comte de, 210
Godin, J. B. A., 139
Godwin, Edward W., 467-8, 473
Godwin, William, 44-5, 196, 386-90,
401, 434, 436
Goerg, 306 ,
Goering, the Executioner (Heartfield),
525
Goethe, 81, 403, 616
Goetheanum (Steiner), 435
Golberg, Mieczyslaw (Mécislas), 287, 324
Goldman, Emma, 45, 220, 266, 325, 457
Goldmann, Lucien, 360
Goldschmidt, Adolf, 567
Gollan, John, 550
Gollancz, Victor, 517-18
Gomulka, Wladyslaw, 545, 819 (n. 21)
Goncourt, Edmond de, 157, 615
Good Soldier Schweik, The (Haek), 617,
639
Goodhue, Bertram Grosvenor, 473
Goodman, Paul, 489
Goodman, Percival, 489
Gorky, Maxim, 264, 303, 310, 629
Gothic Revival: France, 133, 161, 169,
600; Christian socialism, 159-60, 417;
functionalism, 209-10, 600-1;
Catholicism, 210, 593; Pre-Raphaelites,
244; England, 417, 418 ff., 446, 473;
positivism, 417; Ruskin, 418 ff.; Morris
and, 446; James Brooks, 469; United
States, 473; Germany, 593, 598;
Austria, 596, 599; Art Nouveau, 613;
see also names, subjects
Gott mit Uns (Guttuso), 694
Gottlieb, Harry, 504-6, 536
Gourmont, Rémy de, 241
Gowing, Lawrence, 506 :
Goya, Francisco, 55, 56, 166, 265, 344,
543
Goya; In the Democratic Tradition
(Klingender), 563
“Gracchus” Babeuf (David d’Angers) ,
147
gradualism, 13, 22, 518
Grafton Galleries (London), 553
Graham, Cunninghame: see
Cunninghame Graham
Gramsci, Antonio, 573, 689-91, 697
Grand Ducal Academy of Art (Weimar),
649, 650
Grand National Consolidated Trades
Union, 397
Grande Révyolution, La (Kropotkin), 281
Grandes Halles (Paris), 130, 131
Grandjouan, 241, 265, 266
Grant, Alistair, 545
Grant, Duncan, 478, 503, 554
Granville, 179
Graphic, 459-60, 544
“Graphic America” (Boyd-Houghton),
460

graphic art: Chartism, 403; England,
458- 494, 496,
61 508 ,
fF., 543 fE.;
United States, 459, 51 1, 512; Germany,
628-32: propaganda and, 730-1; see
also cartoons and cartoonists; satire;
and names
Grave, Jean, 226-7, 240-1, 244-5, 248,
251-2, 261, 265-6, 270
Great Britain: see England
Great Chain of Being, 404
Great Exhibition of 1851 (London),
407-9, 597, 599
Great State, The (symposium), 553-5
Greater London Plan (1944), 485
“greatest happiness of the greatest
number,” 381, 382
Greaves, Derrick, 539-40, 541, 542, 544
Greece, 542
Greece, ancient, 12, 33, 44, 70, 87,
89-94, 150-1
Greek Revival, 90-1, 172, 597, 598
Greenough, Horatio, 390, 749 (n. 29)
Greenwich Village, 265
Greuze, 32
Gris, Juan, 265, 291
Gromaire, 306, 309, 318, 328, 620
Gropius, Walter, 657, 671; influences on,
418, 501, 659-60; England, 487, 501;
Bauhaus, 501, 646, 649-65, 672-3,
677, 679, 701; crafts, 554; theater, 639,
704, 705; Novembergruppe, 644;
United States, 658, 678, 811 (n. 42);
Kapp Putsch, 660, 661; housing, 669,
670
Gropper, William, 303, 536
Grosz, George, 632, 672, 695-6; graphic
art, 58, 509-11, 543, 544, 730; dada,
524, 632-6, 719; theater, 638-9, 641;
Neue Sachlichkeit, Die, 640
Groth, John, 498, 504
Group for Historians and Literature, 539
Group of Six, 691
Group Theatre (London), 521
Group Theatre (New York), 521
Group Zero, 374
Groupe de l’art social, 271
Groupe de recherche d’art visuel, 371 ff.,
704-5
Griinwald, Alfred (Johannes Baargeld),
637
Gruppo N, 699
Gruppo T, 699
Gueérin, Pierre, 168
Guernica (Picasso), 326-7, 329, 695
Guesde, Jules, 225, 227, 234, 255-6
Guest, David Haden, 496-7, 503
Guevara, Che, 573
Guilbeaux, Henri, 618
Guild and School of Handicraft, 474-5,
617
Index / xxiii
Guild of St. Matthew, 477
guild socialism, 479-80, 558
Guildford College of Art, 576-7
guilds, 96; revival, 210; Morris and, 443-4,
446, 447; Nazarenes (Pre-Raphaelite
Brethren), 454; guild socialism, 479—
80, 558
Guillaumin, 259
Guise (France), 139
Gulbenkian, Calouste, 574
Gurdjieff, George, 476
Guttuso, Renato, 536, 542, 568, 691-7,
814 (n.95), 814-15 (2297/7815
(m. 105)
Guyau, Jean Marie, 564
Gwathmay, Robert, 534, 536
Haden Guest, David: see Guest, David
Haden
Haile Selassie, 491
Halévy, Léon, 124
Hall of the Convention (Tuileries), 51,
52
Hamilton, Richard, 578
Hammersmith (England), 244, 43 2-4,
437, 442, 445, 472
Hammersmith Branch ([Social]
Democratic Federation), 432-4
Hammersmith Branch (Socialist League),
244, 434, 437
Hammersmith Socialist Society, 244, 437,
442, 472
Hampstead Garden Suburb (England),
221, 483, 484
Handbook of Marxism (Burns), 493
Hanson, Joseph, 396
“happenings,” 371, 818 (n. 21)
Happy Colony, The (Pemberton), 411
Hardie, Keir, 490
Harding, Chester, 385-6, 392-3
Hardy, ‘Thomas, 299
Harkness, Margaret, 82
Harlow (England), 485, 487, 488
Harmonists (Rappites), 392-3, 411
harmony: Fourierist, 134 ff.; universal, 250
Harmony Hall: see Tytherly
Harney, George Julian, 402
Harper’s Weekly, 460
Harrisson, Tom, 516
Hartley, 405
Harvard University, 560
Hasek, Jaroslav, 617, 639
Hauptmann, Gerhart, 78, 629, 664.
Haus Wachenfeld, 598
Hausenstein, Wilhelm, 258, 591-2, 725
Hauser, Arnold, 234, 560, 566-7
Hausmann, Raoul, 632-4, 640, 812
(n. 65)
xxiv / INDEX
Haymarket bombing, 435 ff., 638
Hazlitt, 48, 389-90
Headlam, Stewart, 440, 476-7
Heartfield, John, 523-7, 529, 633-4, 636,
638-40, 672, 719
heating, 128
Hegel and Hegelianism, 184, 642, 689,
715; historical process and progressivism,
38; Marx and, 38, 68-71, 74, 84, 86 f.,
97, 98-9, 101-2, 585, 586; Left
Hegelians, 69, 72, 214, 586; Young
Hegelians, 69, 70, 72-33 Hellenism,
go; Proudhon and, 197, 198; Bakunin,
214; Lenin, 300-1; surrealists and,
300-1; idealism, 584, 585; Right
Hegelians, 586; statism, 586
Heidegger, Martin, 709
Heilige Familie, Die (Marx and Engels) ,
74
Heine, Heinrich, 72, 78, 84, 177-8
Heine, T. T., 524
Hélion, Jean, 376
Hellenism, 87, 89-94
Heller Galleries (New York), 694
Help Russia (Kollwitz) , 630
Helvétius, 34, 48, 87, 382
Hemingway, Ernest, 312
Hennequin, Victor, 139
Henri, Robert, 45-6, 325
Henry, Charles, 250-1, 253
Henry, Emile, 253-5
Henry, Patrick, 747 (n. 11)
Hepworth, Barbara, 513, 515, 574
Herbart, 591
Herder, 97, 184, 404, 584-5
Herkomer, Hubert von, 459, 460, 463
Hermitage (Leningrad), 356
Hermitage, L’, 248
Hernani (Hugo), 31, 149-50, 184
Herringate community, 402
Herriot, Edouard, 269
Herzen, Alexander, 214-16, 222
Herzfelde, Helmut: see Heartfield, John
Herzfelde, Wieland, 524, 526, 633-4, 638
Hess, Moses, 73, 584
Hewitt, Francis, 816 (n. 119)
Higgins, Eugene, 265
High Point flats (Highgate), 486
Hill, Octavia, 436
Hindemith, Paul, 641-2, 644
Hindenburg, 625-6
Hiroshima, 536
Histoire des dix ans (Blanc), 192-3
Histoire des peintres (Jeanron, Gautier,
Blanc), 194
Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution
frangaise (Buchez), 158
historians, 722—6; see also critics and
criticisms; and names
history: Vico, 29-30, 35, 88, 97, 559;
artists’
cyclicalism and culture, 30-8;
rank in, 62; Hegel, 68-9; materialistic
interpretation; 88 ff.; Founer, 1 36;
Cabet, 144; futurist anti-historicalness,
280; existentialism, 361
History of the English Working Class
(Thompson), 577
Hitler, 522 ff., 531, 557, 625-6, 628,
678-9; masses used by, 28-9; racism,
210, 663-4; Dali and, 306-7; Popular
Front against, 500, 501, 504;
Kunstsoziologie, 592; medieval revival,
593; Wagner, 597; see also Nazis
Hobby Horse (Mackmurdo), 469-70, 613
Hoch, Hannah, 633
‘Hochschule fiir Gestaltung, Ulm, 700-6,
817 (n. 130)
Hoffmann, Josef, 617, 664
Hogarth Club, 458
Hogarth, Paul, 535, 563, 573, 574
Hogarth Press, 479, 536, 541-6
Hogarth, William, 58, 173, 695
Hogarth and English Caricature
(Klingender), 563
Hogarth and His Place in European Art
(Antal), 565
“Hogarth and the English Caricaturists”’
(exhibition) ,532
Holbach, 97-8
Holbein, Hans the Younger, 455
Holland, 371, 625, 708; architecture,
600 ff.; Symbolism, 607-8; Nieuwe
Kunst, 608; Situationists, 706
Holland, James, 498, 503, 508, 509, 514,
529, 572
Holst, Gustav, 434
Homage to André Houillier (Fougeron),
334
Homage to Louis David (Léger), 347
Homage to New York (Tinguely), 366-7
Homer, William, 325, 771 (n. 98)
Honegger, Arthur, 294, 310, 318, 319
Hook, Sidney, 759 (7. 10)
Hope, Will; 494
Hoppla, wir leben! (Toller), 639
Horkheimer, Max, 683, 709
Hornsey College of Art, 576-7
Horta, Victor, 466, 609-10, 611, 613
Horthy, 566
Horton, Percy, 499
Horton, Ronald, 499
House of Commons, 52
House of Representatives (U.S.), 52-3
pipe and Hungry” (Fildes), 459,
460
Houses of Culture, 309
housing, 40, 104-5; Paine, 40; Marxism,
104-5, 668-9; Soviet, 104—5, 482, 655,
669-72, 707; Fourierist phalanstery,

housing (continued)
135, 137-9, 315; Icarian, 143-4;
standardization, 143-4; cités ouyriéres
(competition), 186; Unité habitation,
315, 487; “Industry House
Establishment,” 382—4; Owenite
Village of Cooperation, 391 ff.; Etzler,
414; apartment buildings, 482, 487;
communal, 482; garden city, 482;
Housing, Town Planning, etc., Act,
485; Bauhaus, 487, 665-72; Germany,
485-7, 598, 667—71, 719; Sweden, 487;
Cooperative, 654, 669; Austria, 667-9;
Non-conformism, 715; see also
architecture; communities and
community planning
Housing Question, The (Engels), 105
Housing, Town Planning, etc., Act, 485
Howard, Ebenezer, 392, 480-5, 488, 489,
718, 722
Hiibner, Carl, 78
Huelsenbeck, Richard, 295, 296, 307,
632-3, 719
Huet, Paul, 169
Hughes, Arthur, 429
Hugo, Victor, 32, 146-7, 149-50, 150,
171, 176, 181, 184, 201, 216, 435
Hulbeck, Charles R.: see Huelsenbeck,
Richard
Hulme, T. E, 557, $58
Human Hive, The (Mackmurdo), 471
humanism, New Left, 359
humanitarianism, 13, 40, 416
Humanité, L’, 262, 309, 311, 321, 333,
336, 350, 351, 353, 364, 374
Hundert Gedichte (Brecht), 526
Hungary, 62, 352, 565, 566, 624-5, 677,
687-8; Soviet and, 352-3, 360, 535,
536, 540, 541, 545-6, 549-50, 565,
571-2, 687, 689, 693
Hunger (lithographs), 631-2
“Hunger” (Zillie), 631
“Hunger Marchers’” (Boswell), 511
Hunt, Holman, 407, 452, 455, 464, 465,
469
Hunt, Leigh, 48, 390, 396, 465
Hunt, Robert, 390
Huxley, Aldous, 312
Huxley, Julian, 533
Huysmans, J. K., 241, 274, 420, 613
Hyndman, Henry Mayers, 427, 434,
438-9, 537, 612
Ibafiez, Blasco, 299
Ibels, 246, 257, 261, 265
Ibert, 310-11
Ibsen, 245, 261, 263, 431, 445, 621
Icarians, 143-5
Index / xxv
idealism: Hegelian, 69-71; anarchism,
199, 214; German, 214, 584 ff.;
Symbolism, 250; socialism, 256;
Neo-dada, 366; revisionism, 587 f£.;
Symbolism, 604; Art Nouveau, 610,
614; Marxism, 690-1
Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim), 567
ideology: origin of word, 14; radical
artist and, 731; artistic quality and,
735-6
Idiot, The (Dostoyevsky), 216
Illinois, Icarians in, 144
Illusion and Reality; A Study of the
Sources of Poetry (Caudwell), 519,
560-2
imitation and art, 235
immateriality, 376
Impression—Sunrise, An (Monet), 236
Impressionism and Impressionists, 59,
202, 228-36, 258, 461; naturalism,
229, 234-7; realism, 230, 235, 265;
Soviet Union, 230, 592; term use, 236;
photography, 236-7; Neo-
Impressionism, 237 ff.; Nabis, 261;
United States, 262; communist attitude,
319; England, 445, 472; social
motivation, 592; realism, 621;
pointillistes (Italy), 694; see also
names
Impressionist exhibition (1886), 237
In Front of the Workhouse (Toorop),
608
Independent Labour Party, 442, 500
Independent Social Democratic Party,
589, 623-5
Independent Socialist Party (USPD), 680
India, 184; theater, 520
Indiana, Owenite settlement in, 392-5
individualism: democracy and, 13-14;
romanticism, 17-18, 152, 177-8, 194;
social organism and, 17—19; socialism
VS., 40, 125; anarchism, 45, 72-4, 217,
221, 248-9, 262 ff., 387-8, 394, 552 ff.,
578-9, 719, 727; radicalism and, 49-50,
59, 262-6, 727; liberalism and, 54-9;
Hegel, 71; Fourierism, 135;
existentialism and, 361; economic,
384-5; Utilitarianism, 384~—5; laissez-
faire, 400, 405, 738; organicism, 404 ff.;
communism, 558-9; as category of
social history, 591; dada, 719;
academicism, 727-8
industrial art and design, 197-8, 447-8,
454, 473 ff., 599, 701; Art Nouveau,
612 ff.; Bauhaus, 650 ff.; architecture,
651; socialist realism, 707; see also
industrialization; machines and _ art;
and names, subjects
Industrial Revolution, 7, 31-2, 40; social
revolution and, 25; progressivism, 31-2;
XK¥I / ENDEX
Industrial Revolution (continued )
origin of term, 175; mechanism and,
385; dehumanization by, 388, 406;
Chartism, 401-3; crafts and, 406, 420;
division of labor, 417; machine
revolution and Marx, 705; alienation,
78
Industrial Workers of the World, 269,
285
industrialism and industrialist, origin of
terms, 132
industrialization: religion and, 475-6;
poetry and, 604; see also anti-
industrialism; machines and art
Industrie, L’ (periodical) 168
Industrie, L’ (Saint-Simon), 119
“Industry House Establishment”
(Bentham), 382-4, 391
information theory, 704-5
Ingres, 185
Innocent Eye, The (Read), 558
Institut de France, 26
Institut fiir Sozialforschung, 683, _
Instrumentalism, 107
intellectual Radicals, 48
interior decoration, 519, 608; formalism,
467-8; Fabians, 477; see also furniture
and furnishings
International Association of Art, 534
International Association of Plastic Art,
534
International Association of Revolutionary
Wiiters, 302
International Brigade, 502-3, 561
International Brotherhood of Socialist
Democracy, 218
International Bureau of Revolutionary
Artists, 498
International Bureau of Revolutionary
Literature, 303
International Communist, 490-1
International Congress for Determining
the Directives and the Defense of the
Modern Spirit, 298
International Congress of Proletarian
Culture, 302, 304, 305, 312
International Congress of Proletarian
Writers, 301
International Congress of Writers for the
Defense of Culture, 311-14
International Exhibition (London, 1862),
409, 467
International Exhibition (Paris, 1937),
620
International Federation of Artists, 534
International Literature, 511, 521, 680,
747 (n. 4)
International Peace Prize, 341
International Publishers, 562
International Style, 281, 293, 475, 486-7,
489, 515, 539; 669, 671-2; Bauhaus,
487, 662-4; origin of name, 662
International Surrealist Exhibition, 514,
Som
International Union of Revolutionary
Wiiters, 304; see also Kharkov Congress
International Working Men’s Association
(anarcho-syndicalist) , 293
International Workingmen’s Association
(First International) : see First
International; and names, subjects
Internationale, 151, 203, 730
_ Internationale Architektur (Gropius),
662
Internationale Situationniste, 706
internationalism, 172, 174, 196; art as
propaganda, 24, 27; Marxist, 110-11,
256; Trotskyite, 111, 293; communism,
269, 299-300, 502, 625, 643, 690-1;
syndicalist, 270; Bukharin, 293; pacifist,
299; proletarian, 402; artistic, 524,
532-4; Marxist-Leninist, 524;
UNESCO, 533-4; avant-garde, 714
intuition, 131-2
Ireland, 395, 542-3
iron, architectural use, 209, 445
irrationality: automatism, 295, 298; dada
and, 295-7; surrealism and, 298, 313
Isabey, J. B., 36
Isherwood, Christopher, 519, 521
Iskusstvo, 180, 354, 355, 541-2, 547, 694,
697
Italy, 456, 543, 688-700; Carbonari,
168-9, 172; republican nationalism,
168-9, 172-3; nationalism, 172-3, 216;
anarchism, 218-19, 223, 718; fascism,
219; futurism, 273 ff.; architecture,
279-81; syndicalism, 281; dada, 295;
New Tendency groups, 371, 372, 3743
Renaissance influence (see also Pre-
Raphaelites), 454, 455; communism,
688-700, 718; abstraction, 691-3;
socialist realism, 691 ff.; polycentrism,
696-9, 718; New Left, 699;
Situationists, 706
Itten, Johannes, 673, 813 (n. 74)
Ja! Stimmen des Arbeitsrates fiir Kunst in
Berlin, 645
Jacob, Max, 317
Jacobins and Jacobinism, 51, 70, 75, 717;
democracy, 14 ff.; artists as
propagandists, 23-4; internationalism,
24; Russian Revolution and, 27-8,
748 (n. 30); intellectual—-worker
alliance, 167; English reaction to, 387,
401; Chartism, 401-2; see also names

Jacque, 181-2
Jaeger, Hans, 621
James II (King of England): see
Revolution of 1688 (Glorious
Revolution)
James, William, 272
Japan: New Tendency, 372; Hochschule
fiir Gestaltung, Ulm, influence, 703;
Situationist influence, 706
Japanese art, 156-7, 447; formalism and,
467, 468-9; Art Nouveau and, 610
Jaurés, Jean, 256-7, 265, 270, 271, 588,
614
Jean-Christophe (Rolland), 305
Jeanneret, Charles Edouard: see Le
Corbusier
Jeanron, Philippe Auguste, 178, 180, 182,
191- 4,732
201,
Jedermann sein eigner Fussball, 634
Jefferson, 119, 182
Jekyll, Gertrude, 423
Jennings, Humphrey, 516
Jessner, Leopold, 626
Jeune Belgique, La, 605
Jeune-France (Gautier) ,172
Jeune république, 360
Jews, 132-3, 257, 663-4
John, Augustus, 477-8, 501, 504, 506,
528, 532, 536, 727
John Birch Society, 50
John Reed Clubs, 499
Johnson, Hewlett, 518
Joint Committee for Anti-Fascist Action,
500
Joliot-Curie, Frédéric, 318, 340, 350
Joliot-Curie, Mme Frédéric, 318
Jones, Owen, 409, 447, 451, 475, 599
Jourdain, Francis, 355
Journal of Association, 416
Jouvet, 311
Joyce, James, 312
Jugend,
324, 634
Jugendstil, 523, 610, 615, 616; see also
Art Nouveau; Nieuwe Kunst; Sezession
July Revolution: see Revolution of 1830
Jung, Carl Gustav, 298, 301
Jung, Franz, 633
Jura Federation, 218, 222-3
Just, League of the, 42, 75
Justice, 438
Justus, Paul, 125
Kddadr, 353
Kafka, Franz, 617
Kahn, Gustave, 237, 250, 252-4, 286
Kandinsky, Wassily, 236, 281, 435, 646,
648-9,
652, 679, 708, 733
Index / xxvii
Kant, 84, 98, 152, 214, 235, 360, 584,
585, 589
Kapital, Das (Marx), 76, 77, 83, 224,
427, 430- 2,589
494,
Kapp Putsch memorial (Gropius), 660,
661
Karl Marx Hof (Ehn), 668
Kartun, Derek, 544
Kathe Kollwitz (Nagel), 631
Kautsky, Karl, 446, 589, 623
Keats, 390, 465
Kelmscott House, 432-4
Kelmscott Press, 244, 432, 433, 436, 470
Kepler, 84
Kestelman, Morris, 798 (n. 77), 798
(n. 79)
Ketteler, Bishop von, 210, 593
Kettle, Arnold, 577
Keynes, John Maynard, 478
Kharkov, Congress of 1930, 302, 304, 305,
302
Khnopff, Fernand, 604, 605, 609
Khrushchev, 354; de-Stalinization and
thaw, 111, 349 ff., 495, 538, 540, 541,
592, 721; architecture, 222, 538-0,
706-7; abstraction, 348, 363-4, 550,
787; Red China, 363-4; socialist
realism, 706—7
Kierkegaard, 705-6
kinetic art: foreshadowed, 253; metamatic
sculpture, 366-7; Op Art, 368-71;
constructivism, 372, 704, 714, 819
(n. 24); New Tendency, 372-4
Kingsley, Charles, 416, 424, 444
Kircher, Athanasius, 134
Kitchen, The (Wesker), 573
Kitchen Sink School, 540, 549-50, 570
Klee, Paul, 298, 634, 646-9, 679, 708
Klein, César, 644
Klingender, Francis D., 499, 501, 505,
532-3, 543, 546, 560, 562-4, 565
Knueppel, Der, 636
Koch, Hans, 685
Koechlin, 310, 318, 319
Kokoschka, Oskar, 523-4, 532, 634, 664,
696
“Kokoschka Bund,” 523
Kollwitz, Kathe, 78, 543, 628-31
Kolokol, 214-16
Korea (Guttuso), 695, 696
Korean War, 343-5
Korn, Arthur (Artur), 489, 539, 671
Kravchinsky, S. M.: see Stepniak, Sergius
Krishnamurti, 315
Knistiania-Bohéme (Jaeger), 621
Kronstadt naval base revolt, 292-3
Kropotkin, Prince Peter, 77, 220-6, 220,
248, 261, 264, 266, 427, 552, 558, 562,
603, 612, 618, 747 (n. 16); French
Revolutionary tradition, 16, 20;
XXVill / INDEX
Kropotkin (continued)
“mutual aid” (mutualism), 45, 213,
222; Morris and, 112, 425, 434-5;
Neo-Impressionists and, 123, 240;
anti-industrialism, 182, 221; influences
on, 213, 222, 436, 564; artistic talents,
220-1; community planning, 222,
482-3; terrorism, 251-2; Godwin and,
386, 434; England, 434-7, 448, 457,
458
Kuhle Wampe (film), 642
Kun, Béla, 564, 565, 624-5, 677, 687
Kunst und die Gesellschaft, Die
(Hausenstein), 591, 592
Kunst und die Revolution, Die (Wagner),
215 -16
240, 241, 440,,596-7
Kunst und Koexistenz; Beitrag zu eimer
modernen Marxistischen Asthetik
(Fischer) , 686
Kunst und Moral (Reich), 590
Kunst Verlag, 355
Kunstgewerbeschule, 617
Kunstsoziologie, 564, 565, 566, 592
Kunstwerk der Zukunft, Das (Wagner),
597; see also Work of Art of the
Future, The
‘“‘Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen
Reproduzierbarkeit” (Benjamin) ,683
Kupka, Frank (Frantisek), 241, 265,
DSI —32 644 2995 2011733
Kiipper, C. E. M.: see Van Doesburg,
Theo
labor: division of, 79, 89-90, 100-1, 221,
417; value theory, 95—6; worker-artists,
96, 221, 420; advocacy of (see also
arts and crafts), 182, 198; exchanges,
397
Labor Party (Belgium), 604, 609, 610,
615
Labor Party (France), 227
Labour Monthly, 678
Labour Party (England), 41, 49, 418,
442-3, 480, 485, 487, 492-5, 500,
517-18, 538
Labour Representation Committee, 442
Labrouste, Henri, 760 (n. 19)
Lafargue, Paul, 63, 74, 162, 178, 227
Lafayette, Marquis de, 164,169
laissez-faire, 49, 400, 405, 738; liberalism,
17; Utilitarianism, 384; German
socialist opposition, 586; Bismarck, 587
Lamb, Charles, 389-90
Lamennais, 159, 416, 764 (n. 10)
Lanchester, Elsa, 493
Land, Peter, 539
landscape: Barbizon School, 181-2;
painters, 201, 230, 239
Landseer, John, 388
Lane, John, 562,
Lang, Lothar, 707-8
Language and Style (Hulme), 558
Lanson, Gustave, 566
Larionov, 281
Laski, Harold J., 518, 528
Lassalle, Ferdinand, 90, 586, 592
Lasteyrie, Comte Charles Philibert de, 169
Latter-Day Pamphlets (Carlyle), 82
Laverdant, Gabriel Désiré, 139-40, 201
Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 388-9
Lay Sermons (Coleridge), 405
Lazarus, 310
‘ Le Corbusier, 139, 315-16, 318, 435, 406,
482, 486, 487, 489, 627, 650, 654, 655,
664, 669, 671-2
Le Fauconnier, Henri, 287, 288, 289, 291
Le Nains, 319, 336
Le Parc, Julio, 374, 376, 377
League of Peace and Democracy, 215
League of Proletarian-Revolutionary
Authors, 680
League of the Just, 42, 75
Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 406
Lebon, Philippe, 128
Lechevalier, Jules, 158-9, 416
Leclére, A. F. R., 208
Leconte de Lisle, Charles, 51, 154, 174,
241, 462
Lectures on Painting (Fuseli), 44
Ledru-Rollin, 173, 184, 185, 194
Lefebvre, Raymond, 299
Left, use of term, 51-4
Left Book Club, 517-18, 519, 520
Left Hegelians, 69, 72, 214
Left News, 517
Left Opposition, 656
Left Review, 360, 508-14, 515-16, 519,
521, 522, 558, 563, 572
Left Theatre clubs, 520
“Left-Wing’ Communism; An Infantile
Disorder (Lenin), 491, 625, 643
leftism, 53-4, 491, 494, 495-522, 530 ff;
Belgium, 618-21; collaboration, 625,
643-5; Germany, 628 ff., 641-5;
Bauhaus, 647 ff.
Léger, Fernand, 274, 283, 287-8, 291,
328, 331, 337, 346 ff., 536, 568, 620;
communism, 294, 298, 306, 308, 309,
314, 318, 340; surrealism, 330; socialist
realism, 346 ff.; religious art, 347
Léger Museum, Biot, 348
Légitime défense (Breton) , 300
Lehmann, John, 528
Lenin, 9, 292-3, 635; art as propaganda,
9; democracy, 12, 19; avant-garde, 28,
123, 720; “socialism” and “commu-
nism” as used by, 41-2; leftism, 53-4;
realism, 82; utilization of past,

Lenin (continued)
103; proletariat, 104; writing style, 109;
internationalism, 111; Commune of
1871, 206; influences on, 214; abstract
and non-objective art, 293; Hegel and,
300-1; Dali pictures of, 306-7; peasant
involvement, 362; Pankhurst and,
490-1; Germany, 623, 625;
collaboration and infiltration, 625, 643;
censorship, 737; films as propaganda,
737; see also Marxism-Leninism; Soviet
Union
Lenin (Trotsky), 301
“Lenin and Art” (Lunacharsky), 747
(n. 4)
Lenin Peace Prize, 342
Leo XIII (Pope), 207, 210-12, 593
Leonardo da Vinci, 78-9, 93-4
Leoncillo, 692
Leroux, Pierre, 71, 72, 125, 148, 168, 169,
174, 184, 200-2, 215, 416; socialisme
as term, 751
Lessing, Karl, 68, 78, 81
Letchworth (England), 483-4
Lethaby, W. R., 472, 473
“Letter to the New Left” (Mills), 360
Lettres frangaises, Les, 322, 328, 329, 330,
346, 349, 351 ff.
Levi, Carlo, 691
Levin, Georg (Herwarth Walden), 679,
720
Lewis, Cecil Day, 519, 521-2, 532
Lewis, John, 535
Lewis, Sinclair, 312
Lewis, Wyndham, 555-7
Lhéte, André, 308, 309
liberal: arts vs. mechanic arts, 33; use of
term, 54-6, 164
Liberal, 390; see also liberal; liberalism
Liberal Party (England), 48, 49, 382, 427
Liberales, 55
liberalism, 8, 39, 54-60; anti-academicism,
164 ff.; anti-monarchism and
revolutionary republicanism, 164 ff.;
nationalism, 165; Germany, 587, 590,
597
Liberation of the Concentration Camp of
Buchenwald (Taslitzky), 356, 357
Libertaire, Le, 265
liberty: balance of powers and, 25;
classical antiquity, 33
“Liberty” (Kupka), 281, 282
Liberty (spectacle), 310-11
Liberty Leading the People on the _ 489
Barricades (Delacroix), 171-3, 175-8,
740
“Libre esthétique, La,” 605, 610
Liebknecht, Karl, 623, 624, 626, 629-30,
813 (n. 74)
Index / xxix
Liebknecht-Luxemburg Memorial (Mies
van der Rohe), 658, 660-2
Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 63, 589
Life and Works of William Blake
(Gilchrist), 456
“Life and Works of William Morris,
The” (Unwin), 484
Light of the World, The (Hunt), 407
lighting, 128
Lilliput, 526, 529
Lindsay, Jack, 529, 536
linear cities, 487-9
Linear Cities Association, 488
Lipchitz, 309, 3.47
Lissitzky, El (Lazar), 654-6, 662, 672,
673
Liszt, Franz, 148, 598
Literary Digest, 279
literature, 17, 158; Marx and Engels on,
81-3, 90, 162; realism, 82-3, 90, 162,
189; socialist realism, 82-3, 497, 680-1;
romanticism, 146-8, 151-5, 159,
389-90, 398; “art for art’s sake,”
151-3; Marxist-Leninist, 167; nihilism,
214; Symbolism, 228-9; naturalism,
230 ff.; futurist, 273-4; surrealism, 297,
298; Soviet Union, 301-2, 304 ff., 311,
364, 497; writers’ congresses, 301 ff.,
310 ff., 364, 497, 501; Popular Front,
311 ff., 318-20, 517-18; existentialism,
361; anarchism, 390, 617; Owenites,
394, 397; Organicism, 405; anti-fascism,
517-18; leftist, 517 ff.; England, 519-
22; apocalypticism, 559; personalism,
559; see also forms, names
Literature and Revolution (Trotsky),
190, 301, 747 (n. 5)
lithography, 23, 178-9, 241, 261, 56s,
630-2, 683; cartoons, 58; propaganda
and, 730-1; see also printing
Littérature de la révolution mondiale, 304
Little Yes and a Great Big No, A
(Grosz), 636
Littlewood, Joan, 543
Living Theater, 639
Livre nouveau (Enfantin) , 126-8
Lloyd, A. L., 499, 501, 563
Locke, John, 20, 54, 57, 68, 120, 584,
752 (n. 69)
Loewenthal, Leo, 683
Logue, Christopher, 576
London, 47, 75, 76-7, 217-18; World
Peace Congress, 342-3; Working Men’s
Association, 401; city planning, 485,
London, A Pilgrimage (Doré), 460
London County Council Central School
of Arts and Crafts, 473, 498
London Group, 503, 532
London School of Economics, 480, 497
Xk | NDBES

London Times, 456 “machines agricoles” (Milhaud), 640

Long Revolution, The (Williams), 572 machines and art, 198, 447-8, 466, 474-6,
Longhi, Roberto, 814 (n. 84) 615, 650-1, 674-5, 705, 711, 729; see
Longuet, 74 also industrial design; industrialization;
and names
Look Back in Anger (Osborne), 573
“Looking at People” (exhibition), 544-7 Mackintosh, Charles Rennie, 468, 472,
Looking Backward (Bellamy), 435, 440, 473, 474, 617
481, 482 Mackmurdo, Arthur Heygate, 449, 469-
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 370 71, 472, 477, 610, 613, 615, 790
Loti, Pierre, 241 (n. 160)
Louis XVIII (King of France), 166, 169 Mackmurdo, Mrs. Arthur Heygate, 470
Louis Napoleon, see Napoleon III Maclean, Donald, 496
Louis Philippe, 118, 140, 143, 150-1, 154, MacNiece, Louis, 519
167, 170, 173-5, 178-80, 185, 192-4, Madame Bovyary (Flaubert), 431
201-2; see also Revolutions of 1848 Mademoiselle de Maupin (Gautier),
Louise (Charpentier), 263 151-3
Louvre, 173, 176, 194, 22 Madge, Charles, 516
Lovett, William, 401 Maeterlinck, 607, 608, 609
Low Countries, democracy, 13 Magritte, René, 303, 314
Loyalists (Spain) ,see Spanish Civil War “Mai 1936,” 310-11
Lubetkin, Berthold, 486 Mainstream, 353, 568
Lucas, James, 498, 502 Maison de la culture, 309, 314, 318, 328
Luce, Maximilien, 123, 237-41, 242, Maison du peuple (Brussels, Horta),
245-6, 253, 257, 258, 262, 266, 308, 604, 610, 611, 613, 615
Majorats littéraires, Les (Proudhon), 198
732 Making of the English Working Class,
Luddites, 401
Ludlow, John M., 398, 416, 440, 593 The (Thompson), 575, 750 (7. 56)
Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Malatesta, Errico, 223, 266, 437
Classical German Philosophy (Engels), Maldonado, Tomas, 701, 702-3
82 Malenkov, 350-1
Ludwig II (King of Bavaria), 598 Malevich, 281
Lueger, Karl, 617 Malik-Verlag, 634
Lugné-Poé, 261 Malina, Judith, 639
Lukacs, Gyérgy, 565, 566, 573, 682, 684, Mallarmé, Stéphane, 241, 258-60, 274,
686-8, 753 (7.1), 758 (n. 76) 621; “art for art’s sake,” 158, 250, 466;
Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 53, 63, 618, 635 anarchism, 252-4, 258, 466, 468, 555,
Lurcat, André, 309, 361, 682 727; color and music, 258; accident in
Lurcat, Jean, 306, 309, 310, 314, 318, art, 297; surrealism and, 297
322, 504, 536, 620; communism, 342; Malraux, André, 308, 311, 312, 314, 375;
religious art, 347 student revolt, 377, 378
Luther, 79 Malraux, Florence, 360
Lutyens, Edwin, 423 Mamelles de Tirésias, Les (Apollinaire/
Luxembourg Museum, 175 Birot), 325
Luxemburg-Liebknecht memorial (Mies Man with the Hoe, The (Markham), 182
van der Rohe), 658, 660-2 Man with the Hoe, The (Millet), 182, 183
Luxemburg, Rosa, 63, 583, 623, 624, 626, Manchester (England), 47, 73, 76
710 Manet, 59, 157, 202, 203, 228, 234,
Lyon: commune, 219; anarchism, 225 235, 236, 260, 319, 464, 466, 607
“Manet and the Post-Impressionists”
(exhibition), 553
Maniére de penser lurbanisme (Le
MA, 673 Corbusier), 315-16
Maar, Dora, 308, 314
“Manifest Proletkunst” (Van Doesburg),
Mably, Abbe de, 40
Macauley, Rose, 493 636-7, 674
Macchiaioli, 694 Manifesto of Futurist Music (Russolo),
Macdonald, Dwight, 320 274
MacDonald, J. Ramsay, 439, 492-3, 494 “Manifesto of the 121,” 360-1
Machiavelli, 79, 93-4 manifestoes, futurist, 273-4, 279
Machine Age, 198, 316 Mann, Heinrich, 312

Mannerism; The Crisis of the Renaissance
and the Origin of Modern Art
(Hauser), 567
Mannheim, Karl, 567
Mannin, Ethel, 559
Manzi, Giacomo, 694
Mao Tse-tung, 11, 362, 573, 578, 711
Marat, 402; see also Death of Marat,
The (David)
Marat’s Death (Munch), 622
Marcuse, Herbert, 368, 683, 709-10
Marilhat, 153
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 219, 273-5,
281, 283-4, 287
Markham, Edwin, 182
Marmontel, 33
Maro (M. A. Rowley), 496, 502
Marquet, Albert, 261, 262, 355-6
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The
(Blake), 388
Marseillaise, 170, 171
Marseille, Unité d’habitation (Le
Corbusier), 315
Marshall, Herbert, 520
Marshall, Peter, 429
Martin, Henri, 336-7
Martin, Kingsley, 576
Marx, Eleanor: see Aveling, Eleanor Marx
Marx, Karl, 6, 7, 29, 30, 40, 67-77, 229,
416, 425, 432, 618, 705; creativity
concepts, 3, 73-4; materialism, 9, 63,
69, 587 ff., 599; Saint-Simonianism,
10, 43, 68, 72, 73, 84, 112, 119-23,
utopian socialism, 10, 43, 68, 71-3,
84-5, 97, 98, 215; democratic
communism, 12-13, 18, 75; cyclical
relationship of art and society, 30,
77-9; primitivism, 34; Hegel and, 38,
68-71, 74, 84, 88 f£., 97, 98-9, 101-2,
585; “socialism” and “communism” as
used by, 41-3; anarchism, 45, 74;
devaluation of art, 63, 69-71; Engels’
friendship with, 67-77; education, 68,
71, 89; journalist, 68, 71-2, 75, 402;
liberalism, 68; aesthetics, 69, 71, 75; art
references, 70, 77—9; classical
Antiquity, 70, 81, 89-94; Proudhon
and, 71, 72, 74; Bakunin and, 72, 73,
214 f., 227; Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts, 73-4, 111—
123008575 73, Ole terrorism,
75-6, 77; Kapital, Das, 76, 77, 83, 224,
427, 430-2, 494, 584; music, 77, 79,
83; collective art, 79; realism, 79, 81—
3; literature, 81-3, 90, 162; Carlyle
and, 82, 403, 407; heroes, 84; proletariat
vs. peasant, 104; writing style, 109;
internationalism, 111; Fourierism, 133;
Icarians, 143; Commune of 1871, 194,
196, 206, 226-7; influences on, 214,
Index / xxxi
Marx (continued)
390; atheism, 216; First International,
217 ff., 222, 227; naturalism, 230;
Shelley, 389; Godwin, 390; Chartism,
402; Mill (J. S.) and, 430; many-sided
man, 628; see also Communist
Manifesto; Marxism
Marxism: belief, and understanding of, 6;
objectivity, 6; correlation of all aspects
of culture, 8-11; democracy, 11 ff.;
organicism, 17, 97-98, 99-102, 404,
405, 659; French Revolution, 24, 27-8,
7, 107-6; TAO ns 30) history
concepts, 38, 73-4, 88-9; classless
society, 41, 76, 87-100 passim;
alienation, 63-4, 74, 89, 90, 715-16;
devaluation of art, 63, 69-71;
reactionary tendency in art, 63;
anarchism vs., 76-7; authoritarianism,
76, 217-18, 220; realism (see also
socialist realism), 79; atheism, 88, 216;
division of labor, 89-90, 100-1; labor
theory of value, 95—6; dialectical
process, 98-102; functionalism, 101,
109; Class struggle, 102-5; revisionist
(see also Revisionism), 102, 256;
utilization of past, 103; housing, 104-5,
668-9; activism, 107-8; propaganda,
108-9; abstraction, 109, 563, 565,
574-5, 691-3, 720; spread, 110-13;
internationalism, 110-11, 256; avant-
garde, 122-3, 714-15; France, 225,
226-7, 234; formalism, 251, 562,
565 ff., 691-2, 720, 735; cubism, 253,
285, 570; theater, 257; syndicalism,
269-70; futurism, 280; disillusionment
with, 317, 377-8; New Left and, 360,
570; Op Art, 368-71; New Tendency,
372-4; withering away of state, 390,
439; England, 399, 427 ff., 560 ff.;
Germany, 399, 432, 623 ff.; Fabianism
and, 439-40; graphic art, 458; radical
criticism, 559, 560 ff., 574-5, 577, 723;
evolutionary (see also Revisionism),
588, 590, 592; naturalism, 589, 591-2;
Symbolism, 604; Bauhaus, 653-6, 659—
65, 702 ff., 719; Italy, 688 ff.; cultural
front, 690; idealism, 690-1; dada, 719—
20; academicism, 727-8; subject-matter,
733; see also communism; Marx, Karl;
socialism; Soviet Union; and names,
subjects
Marxism and Modern Art (Klingender),
562
Marxism-Leninism, 5-6; Goya, 166;
proletariat, 336; radical criticism and,
561 ff.; artistic quality and, 737 ff.; see
also communism; Lenin; Marxism;
Soviet Union; and names, subjects
Marxism Today, 568
XXX1i / INDEX
Marxismus und Asthetik (Koch), 685
Marxist Quarterly, 535
“Marxist Socialism,” 223
Masaccio, 455, 570
Maschinenstil, 650, 665
Masereel, Frans, 309, 318, 328, 536, 618—
21, 628, 636; New Left, 361
mass media, 459
Mass-Observation, 516-17
mass production, 369-71, 447, 519, 683;
propaganda, 109-10, 730-1
Massacre in Korea (Picasso), 342-3, 343-
4, 348
Masse Mensch (Toller), 625
Masses, 265, 269
masses, art and, 16-17, 28-9, 109, 251,
256-8, 448-9, 554, 729-31, 734-5;
mass society, 742-4; see also
propaganda
Masses € Mainstream, 537
Massine, Leonid, 297, 325
Massnahme, Die (Brecht), 641-2
Masson, André, 298, 300, 321, 360
materialism, 86-96, 715; rationalism,
209-10; psychoanalysis and, 301;
idealism, 588—9; naturalism, 589,
591-2; medievalism, 601; International
Style, 663
Matin, Le, 254
Matisse, Henri, 53, 261, 328, 340, 536
Matta, 376
Mauclair, Camille, 252, 253
Maurice, Frederick Denison, 416, 438,
440, 461, 476, 477, 612
Maurin, Peter, 212-13
Maus, Octave, 604, 605
Mavignier, Almir, 703-4, 781 (7. 130)
May Day, first international, 255
May, Ernst, 655, 656, 669
Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 304, 305, 364,
634, 655
Mayer, Hans, 685
Mazdaznanism, 673, 813 (ns. 63 and 74)
Mazzini, Giuseppi, 168, 172-3, 217,
219, 436, 694
McCarthy lee and McCarthyism,
50, 346, 560, 562
McCloy, John, 700
mechanism: individualism and, 48-9;
Soviet, 101, 107; Saint-Simon, 120;
Utilitarianism, 382, 384; Owen, 385;
Carlyle, 406; architecture, 409,
654-7; Germany, 584
media and radicalism, 729-31
Medical Aid for Spain, 503
medieval revivalism, see Gothic
Revival; and names, subjects
Medley, Robert, 506, 521
Melnikov, K. C., 656
Memling, 455
Memoir of C. Fourier (Doherty), 412
Memorial to Karl Liebknecht
(Kollwitz), 629-30
Men Before a Factory (Seurat), 238
Men, Years—Life (Ehrenburg) , 634
Ménard, Louis, 140
Ménard, René, 140
Mendelsohn, 644
Mengs, Anton Raphael, 16, 31, 91
Ménilmontant, 125-9, 130, 132
Menpes, Mortimer, 790 (7. 149)
Menzel, Adolph von, 594, 595
Mercereau, Alexandre, 286, 291
Mérimée, Prosper, 208
Merz, 636-7
Mes haines (Zola), 234
MeStrovié, Matko, 372, 703-4, 710
metamatic: painting machines, 366,
sculpture, 366—7
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 552
Metzinger, 288-90, 291
Meunier, Constantin, 241, 246, 514,
547, 618) 619
Meunier, Victor, 139
Mexico, 20, 28, 320; anarcho-syndicalism,
123; “Renaissance,” 123, 317; New
Deal and, 505
Meyer, Adolf, 651
Meyer, Hannes, 654-8, 663, 669, 679,
702, 707, 719, 720
Meyerhold, 520-1, 655
Michel, Louise, 245
middle class: patronage, 14, 22; rural
society vs., 17-18; artistic alienation
from, 22—23, 28; revolutionary
traditions and, 28; radicalism, 46-9;
dada protest against, 296
Middleditch, Edward, 539-40, 549
Middleton, John Henry, 552
Mieczkowski, Edwin, 816 (n. 119)
Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 644, 646,
650, 657-8, 660-4; 669, 671, 674;
United States, 678, 708, 811 (n. 42)
Milan Triennale, 377
Milhaud, Darius, 295, 310-11, 640
Mill, James, 391-2
Mill, John Stuart, 47-8, 216, 399-401,
403; anti-Fourierism, 430; Marxism,
430; Fabianism, 439
Millais, John Everett, 452, 453, 454,
456, 459, 464, 465, 543
Miller, Arthur, 639
Millerand, 255
Millet, Jean Francois, 182-3, 186, 202,
203; realism, 182, 592; Fédération
des artistes de Paris, 203; influence
Of, 230,238, 2206 205.8323
Mills, C. Wright, 359-60, 572
Millthorpe (England), 484

Mind in Chains; Socialism and the
Cultural Revolution (ed. Lewis), 519
“Miner, A” (Pignon), 329
Miner, The (Guttuso), 696, 697
Miners’ Wives (Guttuso), 697
Minne, Georges, 618
Minor, Robert, 269
Minotaure, 304
Minton, John, 535
Mirabeau, 185
Mirbeau, Octave, 240, 253, 457
Miro, 298, 303
Mirsky, Prince D. S., 521
Misérables, Les (Hugo), 146-7
Misere de la philosophie, La (Marx), 74
Miseres des enfants trouyés, Les (Sue) ?
148
Missouri, Icarians in, 144-5
Modern Architecture (Taut), 671
“Modern Art of England” (Iskusstvo) ,
541-2
Modern Cyclops, The (Menzel), 594
Modern Painters (Ruskin), 418,
419-20, 452, 456
Modern Quarterly, 535
Modern School, 291
Modern School (Ferrer’s), 324-5
Modern Style, see Art Nouveau
“modernismo,”’ 324, 616
Modigliani, Amedeo, 285, 317, 690
Modigliani, Emanuele, 285, 690
Moholy-Nagy, Laszl6, 487, 501, 515,
649, 655; Bauhaus, 672 ff., 678;
United States, 678
Moilin, Tony, 279
Moles, Abraham, 704-5, 710
Molnar, Franz (Francois), 372-4,
704, 705
Molzahn, 813 (n. 74)
Monarchism, 14, 164 ff.
Monde, 303
Mondrian, Piet, 281, 321, 435, 515,
575, 673, 674
Monet, Claude, 202, 228, 230, 254,
257, 319
Montagnards, 14, 51
Montand, Yves, 340, 353
Montéhus, 270
Montesquieu, 13, 26
Montmartre, 263-5, 288
Monument to the Workers (Dalou), 205
Moore, Albert, 464
Moore, G. E., 478-9
Moore, George, 431
Moore, Henry, 501, 512 ff., 528, 532,
542, 546, 549, 577, 718; influences
on, 554, 557, 725
Moore, Samuel, 431
Moravia, Alberto (pseud. of Pincherle,
Alberto), 697, 815 (n. 97)
Index / xxxiii
Moravians, 411
More, Thomas, 143, 425
Moreau, 605
Motellet, Francois, 372-4, 704
Morelly, Abbé, 40
Moreni, 693
Morgan, J. Pierpont, 552, 553
Morgan, John Minter, 410-11
Morlotti, 692
Morning of the First of May
(Fougeron), 334
Morning Star, 495, 550; see also Daily
Worker (London)
Morosov, 356
Morris, Charles (Ray Watkinson), 539
Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., 457
Morris, William, 9, 112-13, 213, 225,
245, 248, 423, 424 ff, 471, 472 ff.,
490, 603, 653; Marxism, 9, 251, 399,
424, 426, 428 ff., 432, 434, 438-9,
443 ff., 537-8, 583, 590, 721;
medievalism, 39, 425, 443-4, 446-7,
450-1, 475, 593; Germany, 112,
583 ff., 587, 590, 592-4, 627;
Kropotkin and, 112, 434-5; reform,
112-13; Soviet, 113; anti-industrialism,
182, 388, 443 ff., 449-51, 474, 601,
602; relevance and contemporaneity,
197 ff.; morality, 198, 446-7, 448;
anarchism, 244, 434-5, 437-8, 721;
crafts, 244, 286, 385, 429, 446-51,
457, 468, 474, 554, 584, 593-4,
650; masses and art, 251, 256—7,
448-9, 554; influences on, 399, 406,
424-5, 430, 443 ff.; Pre-Raphaelites,
403, 425, 456, 458, 462, 468 ff.;
organicism, 406, 450, 659; architecture,
407, 445, 450-1, 468, 473 ff., 480 ff,
491, 598-9, 601, 602, 613; Christian
socialism, 415, 444; painting, 425,
445, 450, 451, 456, 458, 462, 468 ff.,
472; socialism, 426, 428-34, 436 ff.,
462, 468, 479-80, 603, 605, 609,
612 ff.; Fourierism, 430, 444; Art
Nouveau, 438, 609 ff., 721; Fabians
and, 439 ff., 476; art theories, 443 ff.;
community planning, 444, 479 ff., 585;
idealism, 445-6; literature, 445;
theater, 445; machines, production
and art, 447-8; aestheticism, 449,
462; “‘ art for art’s sake,” 449;
functionalism, 450, 468 ff., 594;
graphic art, 459; Wilde, 465;
Mackmurdo, 469-71; New Left,
572-3; Belgium, 584, 588, 603-16;
Austria, 591, 593-4, 598-9, 617;
materialism, 591, 599; Nordicism,
593; decorative design, 615; Bauhaus,
650, 653-5, 659-60, 725-6
XXXiv / INDEX
mosaics, 615, 646-8
Moscheles, Felix, 436
Moscow: city planning, 481; Realistic
Theater, 520-1
Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture,
and Architecture, 53
Mostra d’arte libera, 278
Mother Earth, 266
motion pictures: see cinema
Mourey, Gabriel, 245, 266
“Mouvement” (exhibit), 369, 372
Mouvement (Vasarely), 367
Mouvement de libération du peuple, 360
Mouvement des intellectuels frangais
pour la défense de la paix, 340
Mozart, 79, 214
Muche, Georg, 813 (n. 74)
multiple arts, 704
Mumford, Lewis, 435, 483
Munch, Edvard, 324, 523, 621-2
Munera Pulveris (Ruskin), 418
Munich, 522, 527-8
“municipal socialism,” Fabian, 440
Murger, Henry, 151, 189, 236, 464
Musée des Beaux-Arts (Lyon), 185
Museum of Modern Art (New York),
662, 693
“Museum of Peace,” Vallauris, 351-2
Music and Life, 539
music and musicians, 151, 263, 287,
684; Marx and Engels, 77, 79, 83;
Ménilmontant, 125-6; singing, 125-6,
287, 411, 434; Fourierism, 134,
149; romantics, 148-9;
Gesamtkunstwerk, 157, 597 (see
also Gesamtkunstwerk) ;opera, 157,
325, 597; Bakunin, 213, 214, 219—20;
idealism, 214; Symbolists, 250, 466,
648; color and, 258; naturalism, 263;
futurist, 274; musique concrete, 274;
abstraction and, 283; communism,
294; functional, 294, 640; “social,”
294; sympathetic to communism,
294; aleatory, 296, 818 (n. 21);
collaborative art, 309-11; Popular
Front party-line, 318-20; utopian
socialism, 386; anarchistic
individualism, 387; Owenites, 394,
397; social harmony and, 411;
socialists, 43.4; Austria, 596, 641;
Germany (see also Wagner), 596-7,
640-3; Gebrauchsmusik, 640;
“machines agricoles,” 640; musique
d’ameublement, 294, 640; drama,
641; Gemeinschaftsmusik, 641;
Marxism, 641-3; experimental, 705;
propaganda value, 730; see also names
Musicians’ Group, 539
musique concrete, 274
musique d’ameublement, 294, 640
Mussolini, 272, 281, 491, 501, 669, 690
Muthesius, Hermann, 650-1, 665
“mutual aid,” 213, 222
mutualist anarchism (Mutualism),
45, 198, 213, 224
My Life in Architecture (Cram), 473
Mystéres de Paris, Les (Sue), 148
Mystery of Edwin Drood, The
(Dickens), 459
mysticism and occultism, 184-5, 250,
261, 281, 306, 315, 397, 435, 479,
646, 648, 673, 674
Nabis, 261, 291
Nackte Mensch in der Kunst aller
Zeiten und Vélker, Der
(Hausenstein) ,591
Nadar, 179, 236
Nagel, Otto, 631, 632
Nagy, Imre, 565
Nanteuil, Célestin, 153
Napoleon, 55, 117, 143, 165
Napoleon III (Louis Napoleon), 75,
130, 140, 141, 142, 156, 174-5;
180, 184, 186-7, 188, 206, 208-9,
219,224)
Napoleonic column, 205
Nash, Paul, 513, 514-15
National Association for the
Promotion of Social Science, 416
national characteristics, revolutionary
traditions and, 716-21
National Council for Civil Liberties, 528
National Culture Committee, 537
National Defense (Fougeron), 334-6,
337, 355
National Evils and Practical Remedies
(Buckingham), 410
National Front of the Arts, 180
National Gallery (Washington), 560
National Liberal League, 426
National Palace (Mexico City), 731
National Trust, 436
National Unemployed Workers’
Movement, 496
nationalism, 49-50, 596; French
Revolution, 27; Soviet Union, 27,
312-13, 319-21, 537, 538, 720;
polycentrism, 111, 354, 359, 550,
696-9, 718, 721; liberalism, 165;
Italy, 172-3, 216; republicanism,
172; World War I, 256; Popular
Front, 319-20; communism, 538;
“collective soul,” 584-5; Germany,
585, 593; International Style, 663
NATO (Atlantic Alliance), 337, 342,
345-6, 573

naturalism: alienation and realism, go;
Marx, 93, 230; positivism, 161, 230,
604; Impressionism, 229, 234-7;
literature, 230 ff.; Stalinism, 230;
Symbolism, 253; music, 263;
existentialism, 361; England, 454;
materialism, 589, 591-2; bourgeois,
591-2; bohemianism, 621;
functionalism, 621—2
“naturalist” school, 199
naturalist, use of term, 230
Naumann, Friedrich, 587
Nauvoo (Ill.), 144
Naville, Pierre, 300
Nazarenes, 184, 454
Nazi-Soviet Pact, 320-1, 506, 518,
522, 528, 530
Nazis: art and society, 17; Bauhaus
and, 369, 487, 500, 663-4, 657-60,
719; nationalism, 585; medieval
revivalism, 593; Folk, 597; Wagner,
597; anti-Semitism, 663-4; style and
form, 740; see also Hitler
Necessity of Art, The (Fischer), 685
Nechayev, 216, 219
négritude, 362
Negroes: Scottsboro Case, 500;
theater, 520; sculpture, 554, 725;
see also Black; Fanon, Frantz
Nehru, 520
Neo-dada, 229, 365 ff., 818 (n. 21)
Neo-Gothicists, 141—2
Neo-Impressionism, 112, 123, 228-9,
235-6, 258, 727; Symbolism and,
236 ff., 251 ff.; origin of term, 237,
605; reality concepts, 250-1;
divisionism, 274, 275; communism,
308, 319; Belgium, 610-12;
subject-matter, 732; see also names
Neo-Kantianism, 360; see also Kant
Neon No. 3 (Morellet), 372-4
Neo-Platonism, 91, 106, 134, 250,
261, 404, 597; original genius concept,
31; see also Plato
Nerval, Gérard de, 149, 153
Netherlands, see Holland
Neue Jugend, 633-4, 638
Neue Kiinstlervereinigung Miinchen,
Neue Musik festival, 641-2
Neue Rheinische Zeitung (Marx), 75,
599, 806 (n. 31)
Neue Sachlichkeit, Die, 640, 643, 651,
654, 671
Neue Zeit, 431, 588, 589
Neveu de Rameau, Le (Diderot), 81, 90
Nevinson, 557
New American Cyclopaedia, 75
New Burlington Galleries (London), 514
“new Catholicism,” 161
New Christianity, 121, 125, 158-9, 161
Index / xxxv
“New City, The,” 126—7
New Deal (United States) , see Works
Progress Administration; and names
New Economic Policy, 23, 53, 301, 494
New English Art Club, 472
New Harmony (Ind.), 392-5, 396, 397
New Industrial and Associative World,
The (Fourier), 134-5
New Lanark (Scotland), 381, 385-6,
390 ff., 401
New Left, 74, 359-64, 729; origin of
term, 359-60; Marxism, 360, 570 ff.;
England, 363, 570 ff., 740; student
revolts, 375, 744; revisionism, 570 ff.,
699; United States, 571; Morris
and, 572-3; theater, 573-4;
alienation from, 575-6; graphics,
578-9; critics, 681-6; Bauhaus,
699 ff.; constructivism, 699; dada,
699; Italy, 699; social utopianism,
699; Situationists, 705-6; Vienna
Group, 705; alienation, 708-11, 728,
740-1; collective art, 729; see also
names
New Left Review, 360, 572, 574-5
New Masses, 305, 328, 508
New Moral World, 73, 83
New Realism, 365
New Reasoner, 572
New School for Social Research, 639
New Statesman, 508, 568, 571, 576
New Tendency (La Nouvelle
tendance), 371-4, 699-700, 703-5,
710, 725
New Theatre, 520
New Times, 343
New Towns, 485 ff., 722
New Towns Act, 485
New Verse, 521
New View of Society, A, . . .
(Owen), 385
New World; Or Mechanical System
to Perform the Labours of Man and
Beast, The (Etzler), 414
New Writing, 528
New York, 265; Armory Show of
1913, 279; dada, 295, 297; see also
648 United States; and names, subjects
New York Daily Worker, 182, 341,
498, 512
New York Evening Journal, 279
New York Sun, 279
New York Times, 283, 366
New York Tribune, 75
New Zealand, 411, 414
Newman, Ernest, 216
News from Nowhere (Morris), 437,
440, 444, 447, 448, 476,
480 ff., 486
newsreel, 737
XOXO KEV 1a DEBI
Newtonian science, 48-9, 120, 133, 134,
584; balance of powers, 26;
Utilitarianism and, 382; Germany, 584
Nicholson, Ben, 513, 515
Nickel Construction (Moholy-Nagy), 676
Niebuhr, Reinhold, 628
Niemeyer, Oscar, 357, 359, 664
Niepce, 236
Nietzsche, 272, 275, 281, 296, 404,
406, 585, 612
Nieuwe Kunst, 608; see also Art
Nouveau; Jugendstil; Sezession
nihilism, 214; dada, 275, 295, 296;
existentialism, 361; Neo-dada, 366
1917 Club, 492-3
Ninth Symphony (Beethoven), 213,
Diy. PIG
Niven, Barbara, 536
Nocturne, Black and Gold (Whistler),
466, 467
Noél-Noél, 340
Nolde, Emil, 644
Non-conformism, 25, 389, 438, 481, 715
non-objective art, 235-6, 530, 732-3;
futurism, 283: Lenin, 293; validity, 315
non-political art movements, 365 ff.;
Op Art, partial rejection of, 369
Normal School of Design (London), 454
Norse Revival, 474
Northcote, James, 388-9
Northern Star, 402
Norway, 523, 621-2; see also Ibsen
Noten zur Literatur (Adomo), 684
Nothing Gained by Overcrowding
(Unwin) , 667
Notre-Dame de Toute Grace (Assy), 347
Nouveau Christianisme (Saint-Simon) ,
121, 158, 403
Nouveau Roman, 376
nouveaux réalistes, 366
Nouvelle critique; Revue du Marxisme
militant, La, 334, 336, 361
Nouvelle gauche, La, 360
Nouvelle Tendance, La (New
Tendency), 371-4, 699-700, 703-5,
JlOn 71S
Nouvelles tendances de l'art (Thoré), 202
Novalis, 157
novels and novelists, 81-3, 143, 151 ff.,
166, 167-8, 189 ff., 214, 252, 254-5,
336; romantic, 146—8, 151-5; “att
for art’s sake,” 151-5; Marxist-
Leninist, 167; Realist School, 189 ff.;
nihilism, 214; naturalism, 230 ff.;
Soviet Union, 364; see also names
Novembergruppe, 644-5, 646, 649, 679,
810 (ns. 26 and 32)
nuclear disarmament, 573, 576—7
nude, aesthetics and the, 591, 592
NUL, 374
Nuova secessione artistica, 692-3, 694
Nuove tendenze, 279
Oath of the Horatii (David), 15, 35-8,
165
objectivity: Marxism, 6; experimental, 374
O’Brien, James “Bronterre,” 402
Observer, 568
occultism: see mysticism and occultism
O’Connor, Feargus, 402
October Club, 497
“October” Revolution, see Bolshevik
Revolution
Odets, Clifford, 520
Cuvre, L’ (Zola), 253, 769 (n. 63)
Okhlopkov, 520-1
Olbrich, Joseph, 617
Old Vic, 620
Omega Workshops, 554, 555
“On Socialism” (Leo XIII), 207, 212
On Strike (Herkomer), 459, 463
One-Dimensional Man; Studies in the
Ideology of Advanced Industrial
Society (Marcuse) , 709
Op Art, 365, 368-74, 559, 743;
origin of term, 368
opera, 157, 263, 325, 597
Opie, John, 388-9
Opinions littéraires, philosophiques et
industrielles (Saint-Simon), 121
Opisso, 323
Orage, A. R., 476
Orbiston (England), 395, 396
organic: art, 16; use of word, 386
Organic School (architecture), 142-3,
316
organicism, 16-18, 22-9, 471;
revolutionary traditions and, 19—29;
technological revolution and, 25
Marxism, 85, 86, 97—8, 99-102, 659;
romanticism, 97—8, 386; dialectical
process, 99-102; England, 404-6,
419; Germany, 404 ff., 584-5, 653,
659; architecture, 467; “organic
planning,” 470; Bloomsbury group,
478-9; Bauhaus, 653, 659; Nazi, 659;
Stalinism, 659; totalitarian, 659;
International Style, 663; art quality
and, 738 ff.
Organisation du travail (Blanc), 173, 184
Origin of Species (Darwin), 99
Orion C (Vasarely), 370
ornament, 454; architectural, 419 ff.,
539, 613; Art Nouveau, 613, 615-16;
medieval ‘modernized,’ 615 —
Orozco, José Clemente, 123, 505, 519
Orphism, 283
Orwell, George, 528, 739

OSA, 656
Osborne,
John, 573, 576, 577, 579
O’Shea brothers, 420-1
OST group, 541
Our Time, 535, 543
Out of Apathy (ed. Thompson), 573
ouyrierism, 35
Overbeck, Johann Friedrich, 184, 454,
455
Owen, Robert, 40, 43, 44, 68, 73, 133,
169, 196, 381, 387, 430; education,
34, 386; influence of, 143, 144, 401,
402, 416, 425, 435, 481; influences
on, 143, 386; Bentham vs., 381 f£.;
Utilitarianism, 382; mechanism, 385;
socialism and communism, 385; music
and dance, 386, 394; communities,
390-8; spiritualism, 397; trade unions
and cooperatives, 397; see also Owenites
Owen, William, 393
Owenites, 40-1, 45; failure of, 401;
. see also Owen, Robert
Oxford Museum of Natural Science,
420-2
Oxford Union, 425
Oxford University, 496
Ozenfant, 298, 330, 655
Pach, Walter, 290
pacifism: World War I, 294, 295, 296,
299, 305-6, 477-8, 493, 618, 623-4;
Riff War, 299, 300; ‘“peace”’ congresses
and propaganda, 340 ff.; post-World
War I, 497; World War II, 530 ff.
Pact for Unity of Action, 309
Paganini, 79
Page, Bruce, 496
Paine, Tom, 23, 25—6, 32, 40, 47, 57,
388, 749 (n. 29)
painting and painters, see specific
names, groups, styles, subjects
“Painting of Britain, 1700-1960”
(exhibition), 541
Palace of the People, 409
Palmer, Robert R., 747 (n. 10),
749 (n. 30)
Panama Canal, 129, 224
Panama-Pacific International Exposition,
279
Pankhurst, Sylvia, 490-1
Pannizi, Antonio, 457
Panopticon, 382
pantheism, 132
Panthéon (Paris), 184-5
Pantisocracy, 389, 391
Papéty, Dominique, 185, 191
Parade (ballet), 297, 325
Index / xxxvii
Paradise Within the Reach of All Men,
Without Labour, by Powers of
Nature and Machinery (Etzler), 413
paranoia-criticism, 304
Paris (Zola), 232, 253-4, 263
Paris Commune: see Commune of 1871
Paris Exposition (1925), 656
Paris World Congress for Peace, 340-1
Parker, Barry, 479, 483-5
Parmelin, Héléne, 352-3
Parnassians, 154, 229
Paroles d’un croyant (Lammenais) ,
159, 240
Paroles d’un révolté (Kropotkin),
225-6, 603, 605
Parsifal (Wagner), 241
Parti ouvrier belge, 604, 609, 610, 615
Parti ouvrier francais, 227
Parti socialiste, 360
Parti socialiste unifié, 360
Partisan Coffee House, 572, 575
Partisan Review, 320
“Partisans of Peace,” 342
Partito socialista italiano di unita
proletaria, 699
Pasmore, Victor, 506-8, 535, 549
Passé le detroit; La Vie et l'art a
Londres (Mourey), 245
Passy (France), 288, 290
Past and Present (Carlyle), 73, 406, 420
Past, the Present, and the Future, The,
(Papéty), 185
Pasternak, Boris, 312
Pater, Walter, 465, 693
Patriotic Devotion of the Six Burghers
of Calais (Scheffer) ,169
patronage, 14, 21, 717
Paul, Cedar, 494
Paul, Eden, 494
Paxton, Joseph, 407-9
Pays des mines, Le (Fougeron), 334-6
Peace (Picasso), 344, 351
peace campaigns, 340-2, 535-6, 547;
Spanish Civil War period, 503;
Italy, 694
“peaceful coexistence,” 370
Peale, Charles Willson, 25
Pearl Harbor, 506
Peasants of Flagey Returning from
the Fair (Courbet), 189
Pease, Edward R., 439
Peau de chagrin, La (Balzac), 147
Pechstein, Max, 644, 645, 681-2
Péguy, Charles, 271
Peintres caréneurs (Fougeron), 357,
358-9
Peintres cubistes, Les (Apollinaire), 290
peintres engagés, 337
Pelletan, Eugene, 140
Pelloutier, Fernand, 270-1
XXXVill / INDEX
Pemberton, Robert, 411, 414
penmanship, 436
Pennell Memorial Medal, 341
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 341
Penrose, Sir Roland, 324, 513, 514,
796 (n. 51)
Penty, Arthur J., 479, 558
People’s Charter, The (Mackmurdo), 471
People’s Palace, 543
People’s Stage (Berlin) ,638-9
perceptual psychology, 374
Perdiguier, Agricol, 148, 174
Pére Peinard, 246
perfectibility, belief in, 31-5, 387, 400
Peri, Peter, 499, 519, 536
Pericles, 151
Permanent Red; Essays in Seeing
(Berger), 568, 574-5
Perret, Auguste, 269, 290, 315
personalism, 559
Pestalozzi, 208, 411
Petavel, J. W., 488
“Peterloo Massacre,” 47
Petit cénacle, 153-4, 189
Petolfi Circle, 352
Petrashevsky group, 768 (n. 20)
Peuple, Le, 209, 223
Pfander, Karl, 75
Phalange, 139, 140, 154, 201
Phalansteére, 139
Phalansterian Tract Society, 415
phalanstery, 415; Unité d’habitation,
315; see also Phalanx
Phalanx, 415
phalanx, Fourierist, 135-9, 315; see
also Phalanstery
Phidias, 150
Philadelphia Water Color Club, 341
Philby Conspiracy, The (Page et al.), 496
Philby, “Kim,” 496
Philipon, Charles, 178-9
Philippe, Gérard, 340
Philister vor, in und nach der
Geschichte (Brentano), 153
“Philistine,” development of term, 153
Phillips, Ewan, 499, 795 (n. 24)
Philosophes, 84, 87, 107, 159, 382,
416, 584; eclecticism, 31
Philosophical Radicalism, 382, 399-401
Philosophical Radicals, 48
Philosophie de la misére, La
(Proudhon), 74
Philosophy of Anarchism, The (Read),
559
Philosophy of Art History, The
(Hauser) ,567
photography, 199, 236-7; futurist use, 283
photomontage, 524, 525
Picabia, 261) 283, 201, 207
Picard, Edmond, 604-5, 609
Picasso, Pablo, 19, 218, 236, 536, 655,
682, 731, 732; anarchism, 45-6, 283,
322 ff., 718; cubism, 287-91, 732;
communism, 294, 322, 325-7, 336-7,
348 ff., 375, 377-8, 728; surrealism,
298-9, 325; artistic influences on,
322 ff., 459, 608; Symbolism, 322;
primitivism, 324; abstraction, 325-6;
dada, 325; socialist realism, 326-7,
346 ff., 349 ff.; Spanish Civil War,
326-7, 329, 695; influence of, 329,
569-70, 695-6; doves (of peace),
340 -3,
362; “peace,” 340-6, 351-2;
Stalin portrait, 349-52; Soviet
exhibitions, 352, 354
Picelj, 369
Picture Post, 526
Pieck, Wilhelm, 642
Pieper, Wilhelm, 430
Pierre Gallery (Paris), 298
Pignon, Edouard, 328, 329, 330, 340,
536; socialist realism, 346, 348;
Hungarian Revolution, 352-3
Pile Drivers, The (Luce), 239, 732
Pilgrims of Hope, The (Morris), 426
Pincherle, Alberto, see Moravia, Alberto
Pinwell, George, 459
Piper, John, 515, 521
Piscator, Erwin, 305, 638-9, 641, 653,
704, 705
Piscator Theater, 677
Piscator Theater zum Nollendorfplatz,
639
Pissarro, Camille, 231, 232—3, 252,
253, 258-60, 732; anarchism, 45-6,
59, 123, 245-6; Neo-Impressionism,
229, 237-41; Impressionism, 229-30,
262, 621; attitude toward Morris and
Pre-Raphaelites, 244; Dreyfus case, 257
Pissarro, Felix, 253
Pissarro, Lucien, 237, 239, 240, 244-8,
252, 445, 457, 472, 501, 506
Pit Boys at Pit Head (Moore), 512
Pius IX, Pope, 593
Pizzinato, 692-3
Place, Francis, 401
Plan for Action Against Democracy,
A (Marx and Engels), 18
Planche, Gustave, 176, 186, 189
planning, emphasis on, 95; see also
communities and community planning
Plato, 31, 33, 91, 143; see also
Neo-Platonism
plays and playwrights, see theater; names
pleinairisme, 461
Plekhanov, 63, 165
Plume, La, 245-6, 252, 607
Podmore, Frank, 439
Poe, 297
Poems (Keats), 465

Poetry and Anarchism (Read), 559
poets and poetry, 81, 83, 124, 151,
153-4, 156-8, 182, 229, 283, 304,
390; Symbolism, 229, 250, 604;
“accidental poem,” 295; dada, 295-6;
Stalinism, 304-5; surrealist, 304-5;
romantic, 390; Pre-Raphaelites, 456;
Mass-Observation, 516; see also
names
“pointillistes,”’ 694; see also
Impressionism and Impressionists
Poland, 111, 215, 216, 236, 352-3,
543, 703; World Congresses for
Peace, 340, 342; New Tendency, 372;
communism, 545
Political Economy of Art, The
(Ruskin), 418, 420, 553
political ties, artistic quality and, 735-6;
study of, 736-41; see also specific
movements, names
Politische Theater, Das (Piscator) , 639
Pollaiuolo, 455
Pollitt, Harry, 495
Pollock, Jackson, 296, 435, 530, 570
polycentrism, 111, 354, 359, 550, 696-9,
718, 721, 819 (n. 22)
Ponsonby, Lord, 493
Pop Art, 365-6, 559, 578, 818 (n. 21);
origin of term, 368; Op Art and, 371,
743
Populaire, Le, 299
“Popular Art of the Picture Postcard,
The” (exhibition), 532
Popular Front, 19, 302, 308 ff., 678;
France, 306 ff., 375; theater, 309-11;
Spanish Civil War, 314; party-line on
culture and, 318-20; England, 500-4,
508, 516-22, 528; United States, 505
populism, 182, 214; New Left, 359
“Portrait of Maximilien Luce” (Signac),
242
Portrait of Tzara (Arp), 295
positivism, 160-1, 249; France, 119,
160-2, 230-2; England, 417, 439;
medievalism, 417; Fabianism and, 439;
naturalism, 604; Art Nouveau, 610
Possessed, The (Dostoyevsky) , 216
Post-Impressionism, origin of term, 553
Post-Impressionist Exhibition, 553
Pottier, Eugéne, 151, 203, 236
Pouget, Emile, 246
Poultry Market, The (Pissarro) ,231
Pound, Ezra, 557
Powys, John Cowper, 559
Pradier, 158
pragmatism, 271-2, 640
Prague, 522, 523, 524
Pravda, 364, 709
Préault, Auguste, 153, 178, 186
Premier choc, Le (Stil), 336
Index / xxxix
Pre-Raphaelites, 184, 199, 244-5, 324,
607, 615; Symbolism, 241; Blake
influence, 388, 471; England, 388,
403, 407, 419-20, 425-6, 449, 451 ff.,
459, 461 ff.; Chartism, 403;
Brotherhood, 420, 425, 452 ff.,
461-2; “‘art for art’s sake,” 426,
462 ff.; name, 452-4; anti-academicism,
454, 455, 605; Brethren, 454-5;
Germany, 454-5; color, 455-6, 467-8;
“truth to nature” and realism,
455-6, 458, 461, 468; aestheticism,
461 ff., 468; Crane’s description of,
461; formalism, 467-9; Mackmurdo,
469-70; Art Nouveau, 610; see
also names
Pre-Raphaelitism (Ruskin), 419, 456
press, freedom of, 58
Priestley, J. B., 576
“Primitifs, Les,” 150, 324
plimitivism, 33-4, 150-1, 322-4, 616;
Bakunin, 217; Neo-Impressionism and,
237—8; modern art, 258, 261;
Vorticism, 557
Princip, 266
Principles of Decorative Design
(Dresser), 447
printing, 244, 286-7, 432, 436, 479,
536, 541-6; lithography, 23, 58,
178-9, 241, 261, 565, 730-1;
typography, 433, 469-70, 812 (n. 56)
Prinzip Hoffnung, Das (Bloch), 684, 688
Problémes de l’esthétique contemporaine,
Les (Guyau), 564
Producteur; Journal philosophique de
l'industrie, des sciences et des
beaux-arts, 124
professional revolutionaries, 63; first, 143
“Professorial Socialism,” 586
profit-sharing, 471
Progress and Poverty (George), 426-7
progressivism, 31-5, 387, 400
proletarian, origin of term, 132; see also
proletariat
proletarian culture, revolutionary:
tradition and, 28; early, 301, 494;
Stalinist, 497, 499, 639, 656-7, 671,
733; theater, 520-1, 638; architecture,
639, 656-7; see also proletariat
Proletarian Theater (Berlin), 638
proletariat: origin of term, 41;
dictatorship of, 103, 194, 196;
peasantry as, 104, 336; Commune
of 1871 and dictatorship of, 194,
196; anarchism, 217; see also
proletarian culture
Proletariat (Kollwitz), 630
Proletcult (Paul), 494
Proletkult movement, early, 301, 494;
see also proletarian culture, Stalinist
x1 / INDEX
Promayet, 190
Promenades dans Londres, Les
(Tristan), 259
Prometheus Unbound (Shelley), 390
and
32, 33, a,
475; Marxism,
propag
9-11, 27-28, 108-9; Red China,
10-11; French Revolution, 23, 35-8;
Soviet Union, 23, 27; internationalism,
24-7; Encyclopedists, 32-3; theater,
33, 257; history as process and, 34-5;
liberalism and, 58-9; literary realism,
82; truth and, 105—10; activism, 108;
mass production and appeal, 109-10,
730-1; public buildings as, 198;
anarchism, 200; anarcho-syndicalist,
271; dadaist, 296-7; art as revolt
against, 365 ff.; graphic arts, 458-61;
Mexico, 505; A.I.A., 531-2; leftist
wartime, 531—3; formalism, 555;
architecture, 198, 729; lithography,
730-1; music, 730; films and, 737;
artistic quality and, 737; see also
socialist realism
Propeller Song (Kollwitz) , 630
property, theories of: Saint-Simonian,
125, 132; Fourierist, 135—6; anarchists,
197, 217; Godwin, 387
Prophets, 261; see also Nabis
protest, artistic significance and, 577
Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 12, 36, 194,
229, 386, 416, 425, 558, 596, 682;
anarchism, 45, 142, 174, 175, 196-200,
213; Courbet and, 45, 190, 194,
196-200, 725; Marx and Engels and,
45, 71, 74; Mutualism, 45, 198, 213,
224; Hegel and, 72, 197, 198, 215;
“art for art’s sake,” 155-6; Fourierism,
172, 196; Napoleon III and, 187, 188;
Cabet and, 196; Commune of 1871,
196; Saint-Simonianism, 196;
communism, 197; industrial art and
design, 197-8; social utility of art,
202-3; First International, 217;
syndicalism, 269, 270; urbanism, 316
Proudhon, Marx, Picasso; Trois études
sur la sociologie de l'art (Raphael), 682
Proust, Marcel, 245
Provisional Government of 1848, 184
psychoanalysis, 301, 312; see also
Freud; irrationality
Public Funeral of Victims of the March
Revolution of 1848 (Menzel), 594, 595
Puddler, The (Meunier) , 618-19
Pugin, A.W.N., 418, 419, 446, 447, 451
Punch, 543
Purificato, Domenico, 693
Puritans, 21, 25
Pushkin Museum, 352, 355, 356, 527,
541, 545
Puteaux (France), 288, 290
Quaderni del carcere (Gramsci), 690-1
Quai, Maurice, 150-1
Quakers, 25
Quanta cura (Pius IX), 593
Quattrocento, 151
“Queen Victoria Town,” 411, 414
Queenwood: see Tytherly
Quod apostolici muneris (On Socialism,
Leo XIII), 207, 212, 593
Race Meeting, The (Millais), 453 -
racism, 210, 663—4
Radiant City, The (La Ville Radieuse),
(Le Corbusier), 315, 316
Radical Clubs (London), 427
Radical Party (England), 47-8, 382
Radical Party (Switzerland), 218
radical Right, 740; social organism
concept, 17; Utilitarianism, 384-5;
see also Nazis
Radical Socialist committee (Arcueil) ,
294
radicalism, 8, 39, 46-51, 398; origin of
term, 46; philosophical or intellectual,
48; “left” as applied to, 51-4;
liberalism and, 54-60
Radicalism Not Dangerous (Bentham),
47, 382
Raft of the Medusa, The (Géricault),
55, 57, 166—7, 176, 695, 740
railroads, 127, 130
Ralahine (Ireland) , 395, 396
Ramadier, Paul, 333
Raphael, 77-9, 106
Raphael, Max, 681-2
RAPP (Russian Association of
Proletarian Writers), 301-2
Rappites (Harmonists), 392-3, 411
rationalism: liberalism and, 53—7;
Marxism, 88; classic tradition, 91;
Enlightenment (see also
Enlightenment), 97-8; Saint-
Simonian, 121—2, 131—2; scientific,
121—2, 131—2, 649; architecture,
209-10; materialism, 209-10;
Neo-Impressionism, 238; shifts to
religion from, 397; Germany, 584;
Art Nouveau, 613
Ravachol, 252-3
Ravenna, 646
Ray, Man, 297, 298, 314, 321, 679
Rea, Betty, 499, 501, 541, 544, 546-9,
796 (ns. 45 and 51)
Read, Sir Herbert, 438, 513, 557—60,
563 ff., 567, 599, 682, 737; anarchism,
501, 515, 559; surrealism, 501, 515,
558-9; Freedom Defense Committee,

Read (continued)
528; communism, 558-9, 560; aesthetic
process, 738; Op and Pop Art, 743
realism: didactic art and, 32~3; romantic,
36, 145-50; literature, 82-3, go,
162, 189 ff.; alienation, 90; positivism,
161; anti-academicism, 165 ff.;
Barbizon School, 181-3; use of term,
189, 190; folk art, 194;
contemporaneity, 197-200, 244;
anarchism, 226; Impressionism, 230,
235, 254; photography, 236-7; concepts
of reality, 249-51; New Realism, 365;
Pop Art, 365; Marxism-Leninism,
371; functionalism, 407, 410 ff., 419;
romanticism, 410 ff.; “truth to nature,”
418 ff.; Symbolism, 420; Pre-
Raphaelites, 455-6, 458, 461—2; rise
of proletariat and, 592; bohemianism,
621; subject-matter, 732; cinema, 737;
mass society and, 743; see also
socialist realism; and names
Realism, 539-40
“Realism in Contemporary Art”
(exhibition), 535
rédlisme, 176
Réalisme, Le (exhibit), 190
“Realistic Allegory,” see Studio, The
(Courbet)
Realistic Theatre (Moscow), 520-1
reality: concepts of, 249-51; Pop Art,
365-6
Reasoner, 571-2
Rebel Art Centre, 556—7
Rebel Theatre societies, 520
Rebours, A (Huysmans), 241, 420
Reclus, Elie, 224, 225
Reclus, Jean Jacques Elisée, 223-4, 225,
253, 264, 265; influence, 488, 603-4,
12
Red China, 527, 544, 710, 716;
propaganda and art, 10, 11; Soviet
and, 10, 11, 357, 363-4, 550, 698,
707, 721; socialist realism, 27, 697,
710, 721
Red House, 428-9, 450-2, 468, 614-15
Red Republican, 402
Redgrave, Vanessa, 576
“Reflections on Classicism and
Romanticism” (Antal), 564-5
Reflections on the Revolution in
France (Burke), 387, 749 (n. 28),
751 (1. 54)
“Réflexions sur l’art soviétique”
(Aragon), 346 ; Restoration of the Gild System, The
reformism, 40-3; radicalism and, 46-50;
England, 244-5, 718; France, 244-5,
255; Chartism, 401; Art Nouveau,
610; Scandinavia, 718-19;
Index / xli
reformism (continued)
Establishment take-over, 721-2;
see also social democracy
regional planning: see communities
and community planning
Regional Social Unit, The (Mackmurdo),
470
regionalism, 100-1
Reich, Emil, 590
relativism, 562
“Relief Fund in Lancashire, The”
(Whistler), 464
religion, 21, 25; anti-clericalism, 21, 25,
198, 210, 324; English revolutions
and, 21; Non-conformism, 25, 389,
438, 481, 715; Hegelianism, 69;
Marxism, 69-70, 88; New Christianity
(Saint-Simonianism), 121, 125, 158-9,
161; pantheism, 132;
Swedenborgianism, 134; mysticism
and occultism, 184-5, 250, 261, 281,
306, 315, 397, 435, 475, 476, 646,
648, 673, 674; anarchism, 216;
theosophy, 261, 315, 435, 475, 648,
674; Popular Front, 318-19;
communists and church commissions,
347; transcendentalism, 359; Godwin,
387; rationalist shifts to, 397;
medievalism (see also Pre-Raphaelites) ,
454; Nazarenes, 454, 455;
industrialization and, 475-6; see also
Christian socialism; Roman Catholicism
“Remarks on the Method of Art
History” (Antal), 566
Renaissance, 78-9, 422, 469
Renaissance im modernen Kunstgewerbe,
Die (Van de Velde), 613-14
Renoir, Jean, 202, 259-60, 314-15, 319
Rénoyation, La, 139, 267
Report on Fabian Policy (Fabian
Tract 70), 440
Report to the Committee of the
Association for the Relief of the
Manufacturing and Labouring Poor
(Owen), 391
Représentant du peuple, Le, 197
“Repressive Tolerance” (Marcuse),
709-10
Republic (Plato), 143
Republic of 1848-51, see Second Republic
“Tepublic,” use of term, 172
republicanism, 15, 164 ff.
Rerum novarum (Leo XIII), 210-12, 593
Resistance: France, 322, 328 ff., 775
(n. 190); Italy, 689, 692
(Penty), 480
Retour de la conférence, Le (Courbet),
198
Réunion (phalanx), 138-9, 140
xlii / INDEX
revisionism, 74, 271; alienation, 89;
evolution vs. revolution, 102;
polycentrism, 111, 354, 359, 550,
696-9; New Left and, 360, 570, 699;
Op Art, 369, 371, 743; New
Tendency (La Nouvelle Tendance) ,
373-4; Fabianism, 587-8; Germany,
587, 592; idealism, 587 ff., Symbolism,
604; Art Nouveau, 614; criticism,
681 ff.; Italy, 691, 697-9; Vienna
Group, 705; Situationists, 705-6;
avant-garde, 714-15; Pop Art,
743; see also Marxism, evolutionary
Revolt, The (Russolo) ,275, 278
Reyolt of Islam, The (Shelley), 390
Réyolte, La, 154, 158, 226, 241, 248,
251-2
Révyolté, Le, 223, 225, 226, 240, 603
revolution: myth of, and social organism,
16; art and traditions of, 19-29,
716-21, 740; democracy and, 19 ff.;
development of modern concept of,
29 ff.; origin of term, 29-30;
avant-garde and, 61—2; artists’
organizations, 62; professionalism in,
63; revisionism, 102; Marxism and,
102—5; Associationism, 136; black
militancy, 362-3; see also specific
revolutions
Revolution (Bavarian expressionist
magazine), 624
Revolution (Berlin periodical) ,296
Réyolution d’abord et toujours, La, 300
Revolution of 1688 (“Glorious
Revolution’’), 19 ff., 30, 57-8, 120
Revolution of 1789, see French
Revolution
Revolution of 1830, 14, 28, 56, 58,
(Gi, Say, DAI, sel. aii forsaiy. iSfoy
167, 176, 178, 192-3, 201;
academicism, 165; Delacroix’s
Liberty, 170 ff.; English reaction to,
400, 401; avant-garde and working
class alliance, 713-14
Revolution of 1848 (Austria), 594 ff.
Revolution of 1848 (France), 61, 75,
77, 140, 142, 144, 148, 149, 152,
154-5, 156, 159, 172, 174-6,
182, 196, 202; cartoons, 58; artists’
organizations, 62; Icarianism, 144;
utopians, 174-5; English reaction to,
407-8, 416, 417, 452; Bolshevik
Revolution and, 749 (n. 30)
Revolution of 1848 (Germany), 594
Revolution of 1905 (Russia), 62
Revolution of 1917 (Russia, November
1917), see Bolshevik Revolution
Revolution of 1918 (Germany), 61, 62,
740
Réyolution surréaliste, La, 298, 300, 303
Revolution Symphony (Liszt), 148, 598
Revolutionary Convention, 52
revolutionary republicanism, 164 ff.
Revolutionary Syndicate of Technical
Workers, Painters, Sculptors, and
Allied Trades, 505
Reyue anarchiste, 252
Reyue blanche, 252, 254, 261
Reyue contemporaine, 238
Reyue de Paris, 155
Reyue des deux mondes, 245
Reyue encyclopédique, 148
Reyue générale de larchitecture et des
travaux publiques, 141-2
_ Revue indépendante, 148, 253, 466
Reyue républicaine, 201
; Reyue rouge (Belgium) , 604
Reyue rouge (France), 227
Reyue socialiste, 227; 252
Rheinische Zeitung, 67-8, 71, 72
Rhythm of a Russian Dance (Van
Doesburg) , 674, 675
Rhythmus 1921 (Richter), 297
Richter, Hans, 636, 645, 655, 673, 812
(n. 65); dada, 296-7, 623-4, 632, 637
Rickword, Edgell, 519, 535
Ridgeway, Matthew, 345-6
Riegl, 566
Rienzi (Hunt), 452
Riff War, 298, 300
Right Book Club, 517
Right Opposition, 101, 317, 591, 656
Right: radical (see also Nazis), 17,
384-5, 740; use of term, 51—4;
France, 307 ff.
rights of man, liberalism and, 56-7
Rights of Man (Paine), 40, 47
Rimbaud, Arthur, 229; dada and, 296,
297; surrealism and, 297
Ring cycle (Wagner), 79, 597, 598
Ring, Der, 671
Ripley, George, 75
Riposte (Taslitzky), 337, 338-9, 356
Rittel, Horst, 703
Rivera, Diego, 45-6, 352, 505, 519;
communism, 317; Trotsky and, 320;
anarchism, 325; influences on, 725;
180, ideology and art quality, 731
Robeson, Paul, 520
Robespierre, 12, 26, 402; “republic”
attacked by, 15; exoneration of, 158
Rochet, Waldeck, 375
rock music, 711
Rockefeller, Nelson, 693
Rodbertus, 586
Rodin, 169, 245, 319, 629, 682
Roebuck, John Arthur, 400, 401, 481
Rogers, Claude, 506
Roland furieux (Seigneur), 153

Sa Romain, 305-6, 309-10, 314,
1 Rowley, M. A. (Maro), 496, 502
Rolling Mill, The (Menzel), 594, 595
Romains, Jules, 299
Roman Catholicism: Christian socialism,
158-60, 593; anti-socialism, 207, 212;
medievalism, 210, 593; social
movement, 210-12; Popular Front
party-line, 318-19; communist
artists commissioned by, 347; Revival,
416; Morris and, 475-6
romanticism: individualism, 17-18, 34,
177-8; original genius concept, 31,
404-5; realism, 36, 410 ff.; anarchism,
44-5, 217; sculpture, 53-5, 146, 176;
Germany, 97-8, 386, 399, 404 ff.,
584, 597, 715; organicism, 97-8,
386, 404-6; Saint-Simonian, 132;
utopianism, 138-9, 145-58;
literature, 146-8, 151-5, 159, 389-90,
398; anti-academicism, 165 ff.;
revolutionary republicanism, 172 ff.;
folk art, 194; “death”’ of, 202;
England, 389-90, 398, 404 f.;
functionalism, 410 ff.; “art for art’s
sake,” 464-5; “collective soul,” 584-5;
see also names
Rome, Ancient: eclecticism, 30; liberty,
33; city state model, 748 (n. 17)
Rome, Picasso exhibit, 351
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 505
Rosenberg, Harold, 371
Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 346
Rosenstock, Sami, see Tzara, Tristan
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 425, 429, 451-2,
455-7, 461, 462-8 passim; 473
Rossetti, Gabriele, 456-7
Rossetti, Helen, 457, 458
Rossetti, Olivia, 457, 458
Rossetti, William Michael, 426, 438,
452, 456, 457
Rossini, 214
Rote Fahne, Die, 680
Rote Frontkampferbund, Das, 524
Roth, Emil, 655
Rothstein, Andrew, 537
Rouault, 347
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 39-40, 45, 182,
201, 388, 747 (ns. 17-22); Voltaire
and, 14; “general will’ doctrine, 16;
social contract, 16, 17, 23, 206, 387;
urban vs. rural society, 17-18;
ptimitivism, 33-4, 217, 324; social
evolution, 33—4; education and
progressivism, 34; utopian socialism
and, 119, 134, 135; Teligious attitude,
159; Germans influenced by, 584, 585
Rousseau, Théodore, 170, 181-2, 201
Roussel, 261, 310
Rowe, Clifford, 498, 536, 540, 541
Index / xliii
Rowlandson, 166
Roy, Claude, 346, 352
Roy, Joseph, 224
Royal Academy (England), 26, 456,
458, 459, 477, 514, 547, 550, 579
Royal Academy exhibition (1850), 454
Royal Academy of Painting and
Sculpture (France), 37
Royal College of Art (England), 508,
544, 546
Rudin (Turgenev), 214
“Rue Transnonain, La’”’ (Daumier),
179-80, 731
Ruge, Arnold, 70, 72
Ruskin, John, 244-5, 436, 443, 465, 468,
477, 603, 607; functionalism, 119,
418, 600; architecture, 209-10, 418 ff.,
450, 467, 473, 379 ff., 484, 613, 616;
art and the good life, 213, 225, 653;
anti-industrialism, 316, 388, 420-1,
423-4, 446, 474, 601, 602; influences
on, 399, 406; Pre-Raphaelites, 403,
452, 454, 456, 461, 462; Christian
socialism, 415, 417; art criticism, 417,
418 ff., 552, 553; Gothic Revival,
418 ff., 425, 450-1, 613; crafts, 420,
449, 613, 650; Slade Professorship,
422; Marxism and, 424, 583;
radicalism, 424; Morris and, 424-5,
443, 445 ff.; Whistler and, 466;
Mackmurdo and, 469; community
planning, 480, 481, 484; Germany,
627
Ruskin et la réligion de la beauté (De
la Sizeranne), 245
Russell, Bertrand, 26, 493, 528, 576
Russia, 129; Revolution of 1905, 62;
abstraction, 281; futurism, 283—4, 301;
cubism, 291; see also Bolshevik
Revolution; Soviet Union
Russia—Britain’s Ally, 1512-1942
(Klingender), 563
Russian Association of Proletarian
Writers (RAPP), 301-2
Russian( “October” ) Revolution, see
Bolshevik Revolution
Russolo, Luigi, 274, 275, 278, 279
Sabatier, Francois, 140, 765 (n. 43)
Sacco and Vanzetti, 495
Sacré Coeur, Church of the (Paris), 207
Sadler’s Wells, 520
Sadoul, Georges, 304, 350
Sagan, Francoise, 360
St. George’s Guild, 423-4
St. George’s Guild Farm, 484
St. Thomas Aquinas, 159, 475
xliv / INDEX
Sainte-Beuve, 146, 149, 171, 174, 179,
184, 198
Saint-Mandé Program, 255
Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de, see Bernardin
de Saint-Pierre
Saint-Simon, Henri de, 117-19, 143, 382,
425; Marx and Engels, 10, 43, Gone
72, 73, 84, 97, 98, 117; art as
propaganda, 10, 41; violence, 118;
avant-garde, 119 ff., 686; organicism,
120; cyclical history concept, 120-1;
New Christianity, 121, 125-9; Comte
and, 160; music and dance, 386; see
also Saint-Simonianism
Saint-Simonianism, 41, 68, 196, 694;
Marx, 10, 68, 72, 73; Germany, 73;
Balzac, 81, 147-8, 171; scientific ,
rationalism, 121-2, 131-2; avant-garde,
124-5, 130-2; music, 125—6; Apostles,
125 ff.; canals, 127, 129-30; Jews, 132;
pantheism, 132; romanticism, 145-50; ~
England, 158, 398, 400-4; Christian
socialism, 158—60; positivism, 160-2;
revolutionary republicanism, 168 ff.;
Revolution of 1830, 170-1; Garibaldi, |
173; Second Empire, 187; Third
Republic, 209; see also Saint-Simon,
Henri de; and names, subjects
Salmon, André, 317
Salon d’automne (1912), 290
Salon d’automne (1944), 328
Salon d’automne (1950), 334
Salon de mai (1951), 344
Salon des refusés, 187
Salon of 1785, 35
Salon of 1819, 169
Salon of 1831, 153, 173
Salon of 1863, 198
Salon of 1948, 334
Salon of 1949, 334
Salon of 1951, 336-7
Salon of 1953, 352
Salon, rebellion against, 170, 182
Salons d’automne (post-World War IT),
334, 340
Salt, Sir Titus, 481
Saltaire, 481
Salut publique, Le, 156
San Vitale (Ravenna), 646
Sand, George, 83, 148, 159, 174, 176,
O72 Ol, 2O2n 215, ; scientific radicalism, 229 ff., 254-5
Sand, Maurice, 174
Sangnier, Marc, 212
Sant’Elia, Antonio, 279-81
Santomaso, 692
Sarajevo, 266
Sarraute, Nathalie, 376
Sartor Resartus (Carlyle), 401
Sartre: existentialism, 89, 361 ff.; Algeria,
260; Hungarian Revolution, 352-3;
Sartre (continued)
New Left, 361 ff.; Cuba, 362; student
revolt, 376 ,
SASS (Section of Architects of Socialist
Building) , 656-7
satellite towns, 444, 485
Satie, Erik, 294, 319, 325, 640; dada, 295,
297, 325; surrealism, 325
satire, 58, 178, 180, 578-9; see also
cartoons and cartoonists; graphic art;
names
Saturday Review, 560
Sausmarez, Maurice de, 798 (n. 77)
Saville, John, 571-2
Saxony, 215-16
Scandinavia, 706, 718-19; see also
countries, names
Scarfe, Gerald, 578-9
Scénes [de la vie] de Bohéme (Murger),
151, 189, 464
Scenes of the Days of July (Scheffer), 170
Scharfenberg, Rudolf, 701
Scharoun, Hans, 671
Scheffer, Ary, 168-70, 171, 182, 201, 208,
764 (n. 10)
Scheffer, Charles Arnold, 168-9
Scheffer, Henry, 168-9
Scheidig, Walther, 707
Schelling, 97, 98, 184, 404
Scheu, Andreas, 432, 439
Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 68
Schlegel, Friedrich, 184
“Schlemmer Manifesto, The,” 654
Schlemmer, Oskar, 649, 654, 813 (n. 74)
Schmidt, Diether, 707
Schmidt, Hans, 655
Schmidt, Johann Casper (Max Stirner),
72-3, 74, 79, 585, 612
Schmoller, Gustav, 681
Schnaidt, Claude, 702
Schoffer, Nicolas, 368
Scholl, Inge, 700
School of Drawing and Painting
(London), 506
School of Montmartre, 263-5
Schonberg, Arnold, 664
Schwitters, Kurt, 523, 636-7
science: Popular Front party-line, 318-19;
avant-garde and, 704-5, 715, 729
“Science of Society,” 381
scientific rationalism: Neo-dada revolt
against, 366; Bauhaus, 649, 701 ff.
scientific socialism, origin of term, 196
Scienza nuova (Vico), 29
Scotland, 489, 493; New Lanark, 381,
385-6, 390 ff., 401
Scott, Baillie, 475, 617
Scott, Cyril, 493
Scott, Sir Walter, 81

Scottsboro Case, 500
“Sculptor in Modern Society, The”
(Moore), 513
sculpture and sculptors, 169, 197, 203-4;
romantic, 53-5, 146, 176; “Les
Primitifs,” 150-1; “art for art’s sake,”
153; Soviet, 346; metamatic, 366-7;
kinetic, 366-8; cybernetic, 368; utopian
socialism, 386; Pre-Raphaelite, 407,
452; Morris attitude, 450; leftist, 512,
515, 547-9; Negro, 554, 725; realism,
618; expressionism, 626; see also names
Searle, Ronald, 529, 535, 543
Second Congress of the Union of
Revolutionary Writers, 304; see also
Kharkov, Congress of 1930
Second Empire: see Napoleon III
Second Republic, 174, 182; competition
for figure of, 180, 182; workshops, 184,
185; see also Napoleon III; and names,
subjects
Second (Socialist) International, 225,
255, 442, 589
Second Surrealist Manifesto, 303
Secret Alliance of Socialist Democracy,
218
secret societies, 168-70, 172, 174
Section d’art (Maison du peuple), 604,
609
Section d’or, 290-1
Section of Architects of Socialist Building
(SASS), 656-7
Seeger, Pete, 574
Seigneur, Jehan du, 153
Seitz, William C., 781 (n. 133)
Semaine Sainte, La (Aragon), 167
Semper, Gottfried, 215, 409, 447, 597-
600, 627, 651, 665
Semper, Manfred, 600
Senate (U.S.), 52-3
sensualism, 40
Sesame and Lilies (Ruskin), 418
Séthe, Maria, 612-13
Seurat, Georges, 45-6, 123, 230, 237-40,
253525 ON 202 5203
Seven and Five Group, 521
Seven Lamps of Architecture, The
(Ruskin), 418
Severini, 278, 317
Sezession, 471, 474, 617; see also Art
Nouveau; Jugendstil; Nieuwe Kunst
Shakers, 393, 411
Shakespeare, 81, 92
Shaw, Bernard, 426-7, 434-40 passim,
465, 476, 477, 518, 532, 554
Shchukin, 356
Sheffield (Greaves), 540
Shelley, 44, 83, 389-90, 431, 438, 642
Shelley's Socialism (Aveling), 431
Shostakovich, Dmitn, 352
Index / xlv
Sickert, 506
Siemensstadt housing, 669, 670
Siesta, Epargny, The (Pissarro), 232-3,
732
Signac, Paul, 45-6, 123, 237-49, 253,
254, 257, 258, 262, 266, 525;
communism, 294, 306, 308, 319
Signoret, Simone, 340, 353, 360
“Signs of the Times’’ (Carlyle), 403
Silesian Weavers, The (Hiibner), 78
Sillon movement, 212
Simmel, Georg, 566, 681
Simplicissimus, 324, 634
simplicity, Pre-Raphaelite, 455-6
simultaneity, 157, 287, 290
Sinclair, Beryl, 798 (n. 77)
Sinclair, Upton, 299, 303, 435
Siné, 376
singing, 125-6, 287, 411, 434
Sinyavsky trial, 364, 550, 698
Siqueiros, 123
Sisley, 230
Sitte, Camillo, 598-9, 671
Situationist International, 705
Situationists, 705-6
Sitwell, Osbert, 493, 528
Six Apparitions of Lenin on a Piano
(Evocation of Lenin) (Dali), 306,
307
“Six, Les,” 294, 295, 310-11, 640
Sketches from Vietnam (West and
Scarfe)
,578, 579
Slade School of Art, 508, 556
Sloan, John, 636
Smith, Adam, 49, 58, 197, 384
Smith, Jack, 539-40
Snow-Shoyelers (Munch), 622
Social Contract (Rousseau), 206; doctrine
OE, IO, We AB. 3ely
social Darwinism, 99
social democracy, 76, 223, 583 ff.; West
Germany, 680, 708; Germany, 718-19;
Scandinavia, 718-19; see also names,
organizations
Social-Democratic Alliance, 218
Social Democratic Federation, 428-34,
438-9, 442
Social Democratic parties, 42-3
Social Democratic Party (Austria), 587,
668-9
Social Democratic Party (Germany), 586,
589, 590, 592, 623-5, 708
Social Democratic Workers’ Party
(Russian), 43, 53, 586, 592
Social History of Art (Hauser), 234, 556,
567
“social music,” 294
“Social Republic,” 149, 402
social satire, 58
“Social Scene, The” (exhibition), 499
xlvi / INDEX
social sciences, origin of term, 120
social symbolism, Op Art, 371
social utopianism: see utopian socialism
Sociale, La, 246
Socialism, 440
Socialism and Christianity (Fabian Tract
No. 133), (Dearmer), 477
socialism and socialists: definitions, 8,
40-3; development, 16, 17; French
Revolution heritage, 16, 20, 32; origin
of terms, 40-1, 381, 751 (n. 47);
Fabian, 48, 439 ff.; liberalism and, 55—
60; social democracy, 76, 223, 583 ff.;
individualism vs., 125; anti-
academicism, 164 ff.; France, 173, 416;
Garibaldi, 173; working class, 173;
scientific, 196; “Marxist,” 223; ° Société pour la propagation et la
Bolshevik Revolution, 292; New Left,
359, 360, 363; Saint-Simonianism, 384;
England, 426 ff., 457 ff.; Pre-
Raphaelitism, 435; theosophy, 435;
state, 471, 586 ff.; guild, 479-80, 558;
“of the Chair,” 586; “Professorial,”
586; see also Christian socialism;
and specific aspects, names
Socialism and the Arts of Use (Fabian
Tract No. 177), (Clutton-Brock), 479
Socialism; Its Growth and Outcome (Bax
and Morris), 432, 449
“Socialism of the Chair,” 586
Socialism—Utopian and Scientific
(Engels),
750 (n. 45)
Socialisme en Belgique, Le (Destrée and
Vandervelde) ,609
Socialist International: see Second
(Socialist) International
Socialist Labor Party (U.S.), 431
Socialist League (England), 244, 434,
436 ff.
Socialist Party (France), 292; New Left,
363; Third International, 299
Socialist Party (U.S.), 41
socialist realism, 27, 36, 37, 499, 685-6,
7110; Red China, 27, 697, 710, 721:
Soviet, 82, 83, 194, 205, 302 ff., 333,
354, 371; literature, 82-3; folk art, 83,
194; Marxist, 87, 109, 251;
philosophical idealism, 109; Goya, 166;
academicism, 167, 727—8; Daumier,
178 ff.; France, 188 ff.; Neo-
Impressionism, 238 ff.; international,
302; surrealism, 313-14; France, 326 ff.;
Picasso, 326-7; cold war, 333 ff.;
peasantry, 336; opposition to, 346 ff.,
691-3, 697 ff., 710; polycentrism, 354;
abstraction, 357, 359, 691;
existentialism, 361-2; Neo-dada, 366;
architecture, 486, 657, 706-7; United
States, 505-6, 507; England, 506 ff.,
563; de-Stalinization and “thaw,” 538-
socialist realism (continued)
40, 706-7; Kitchen Sink School, 540,
549-50, 570; cubism, 570; theater, 642;
East Germany, 680-1; literature, 680-1;
Italy, 691 ff.; subject-matter, 733;
alienation from, 734—5; see also
realism; and names
Société Anonyme, 648
Société d’artistes décorateurs, 141
Société des artistes indépendants, 237, 248
Société des Droits de /homme, 154
Société libre de peinture et de sculpture,
194
Société nouvelle, 605
Société populaire et républicaine des arts,
36
réalisation de la théorie de Fourier,
139-40, 141
societies and organizations, 245, 263;
revolutionary, 62; guilds, 96; artists’,
194, 203; labor, 270, 273-4, 284-5;
see also names
Society for Bettering the Condition of the
Poor, 40
Society for the Protection of Ancient
Buildings, 407, 440, 451, 469
Society, Manners, and Politics in the
United States (Chevalier) , 127
Society of Equals, 75
socio-experimental art, 371
sociology, 160; origin of term, 120; of art
(Kunstsoziologie) , 564 ff., 592, 682;
“vulgar,” 591
Soldati, Atanasio, 691
“Soldiers in Transport Plane” (Scarfe),
579
Soleil des morts, Le (Mauclair), 252
solidarity, origin of term, 132
Sombart, Werner, 567
Songs of Praise (Dearmer) , 477
Sons of Adam; A South African
Sketchbook (Hogarth), 542
Sorel, Georges, 271-2, 281, 305, 556, 558
Sorge, Friedrich, 434
Soria y Mata, Arturo, 487-9
“Soul of Man Under Socialism, The”
(Wilde), 158, 248, 436, 440, 465
South America, 372, 415, 702, 703
Southey, 44, 389, 390-1, 405
Soviet Academy of Art, 728, 739
“Soviet Architect, The” (Meyer), 657
Soviet Communism; A New Civilization?
(Webb), 518
Soviet Sixth of the World, The
(Johnson), 518
Soviet Union: Red China and, 10, 11,
357, 363-4, 550, 698, 707, 721;
centralization, 23; New Economic

Soviet Union (continued)
Policy, 23, 53, 301, 494; propaganda,
23, 27; nationalism, 27, 312-13, 319-
21, 537, 538, 720; terrorism, 27-8;
avant-garde, 28, 293, 720, 744; folk
art, 28, 83, 194; socialism, 41-3;
leftism, 53-4; planning, 95;
functionalism, 101; mechanism, 101,
107; Right Opposition, 101, 317, 591,
656; housing, 104-5, 482, 655, 669—
72, 707; proletariat vs. peasant, 104;
mass art, 109-10; polycentrism, 111,
354, 359, 550, 696-9, 721; Morris, 113;
Impressionism, 230, 592; naturalism,
230, 589; cubism, 251, 354; formalism,
251, 555, 591, 656-7; futurism, 284;
Workers Opposition, 284, 292;
disillusionment with, 291, 292-3, 317-
18, 320, 352-3, 363-4, 377-8, 559,
635-6; aesthetic line (see also
proletarian culture; socialist realism),
293-4, 301 ff., 354-7; dada, 296;
neutrality toward art movements, 301;
Proletkult (see also proletarian culture,
Stalinist), 301, 494; Five Year Plan,
302, 489; purges, 306, 317, 318, 333,
522; World War II (see also events,
subjects), 306, 320-1, 531; Popular
Front, 308, 311 ff.; Houses of Culture,
309; Freudianism, 313; surrealism, 313—
14, 354; architecture, 316, 486-7, 491,
538-9, 655-7, 669-72, 706-7; Nazi-
Soviet Pact, 320-1, 506, 518, 522, 528,
530; Finland, 321, 506, 531; cold war,
332 ff., 340, 693; abstraction, 348,
354 ff., 363-4, 707; de-Stalinization
and “thaw,” 350 ff., 538, 541—2;
“freeze,” 363-4; literature, 364, 497;
New Tendency, 372, 374;
Czechoslovakia invasion, 377, 527, 550,
57175777 098-0, 815 (n. 106); 819
(7. 22); city planning, 480, 481, 489,
655; constructivism, 486, 539, 654 ff.,
672, 715; proletarian culture, Stalinist,
497, 499, 639, 656-7, 671, 733;
Spanish Civil War, 502; theater, 520-1;
Arab-Israeli War, 577; Symbolism,
604; expressionism, 622, 646; united
front, 643-4; Left Opposition, 656;
organicism, 659; International Style,
663, 669; coexistence, 686; kinetic
constructivism, 715; academicism,
727-8, 744; films, 737; alienation, 744;
Pop Art, 819 (n. 21); see also Russia;
Stalin and Stalinism; names, subjects
Sozialismus und Kommunismus des
heutigen Frankreichs (Stein), 71
Sozialistische Weltanschauung in der
franzosischen Malerei, Die (Coulin),
591
Index / xlvii
Spain, 260; Liberales, 55, 164; romantic
realism, 166; anarchism, 218, 223, 224,
251-2, 206, 317, 318, 322 f,, 718, 777
(n. 35); dada, 297; Trotskyites, 317,
318, 522, 559; “modernismo,” 324,
616; city planning, 487—9; student
revolt, 530; Situationists, 706; see also
Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War, 314 ff., 326-7, 501-4,
517, 521-2, 528, 556, 559, 561
Spargo, John, 618
Sparta, 33
Spartacists, see Spartakusbund
Spartacus, 84, 623
Spartakusbund, 623-4, 633, 634, 638,
641, 680, 813 (n. 74)
Spear, Ruskin, 536, 544-5
“Spectre Rouge, Le” (Daumier), 180
Spectre rouge, Le (‘Red spectre’”’), 59,
206-7, 228
Speculations (Hulme), 558
Spencer, Herbert, 99, 469, 488
Spencer, Stanley, 536
Spender, Stephen, 519, 521-2
Spengemann, 637
Spengler, 556, 584
spiritualism, 281, 398
Sprigg, Christopher St. John (Christopher -
Caudwell), 117, 502, 519, 560-2
Srnec, 369
Staatliche Schauspielhaus, Das, 626
Staatliches Bauhaus, 650
Stddien tiber Autoritat und Familie (ed.
Horkheimer), 683
Stddtebau nach seinen kiinstlerischen
Grundsdtzen, Der (Sitte), 598
Stadtkrone, Die (Taut), 671
stained glass, 454
Stalin and Stalinism, 9, 10, 27, 102, 103,
293, 301, 310; propaganda, 9-11;
bourgeois vs. Soviet democracy, 19;
avant-garde suppressed, 28; “leftist’’ and
“rightist” as used by, 53-4; realism, 82;
socialist realism, 87, 205, 303, 330,
354, 716, 770-1; functionalism and
mechanism, 101; de-Stalinization and
“thaw,” 111, 349 ff., 538 ff., 592, 643,
706-7, 721; nationalism, 111, 312-13,
720; folk art, 194; Impressionism, 230;
naturalism, 230; surrealism, 300 ff.,
514-16; anti-fascism, 302, 500, 678;
rigidity, 302; Freudianism, 304;
Nazism, 308, 522; personality cult,
348 ff.; organicism, 405; proletarian
culture, 497, 499, 639, 656-7, 671,
733; formalism, 555, 591, 720;
modern art, 679; see also Soviet Union;
and names, subjects
Stalin Prize, 336
Stam, Mart, 655
xlviii / INDEX
standardization, housing, 143-4
State and Revolution, The (Lenin), 19
state socialism, 586 ff.
Stein, Lorenz von, 71
Steiner, Rudolf, 435
Steinlen, Théophile Alexandre, 263-5,
324, 543, 629; anarchism, 241, 253,
263, 264; influence of, 263, 265, 511;
communism, 265, 294, 299, 302;
socialist realism, 265; media and
quality, 730
Stendhal, 147
Stephens, F. G., 452
Stepniak, Sergius (pseud. of Kravchinsky,
S.M.), 266, 435
Stickley, Gustav, 601
Stijl, De, 654, 673-4, 677
Stil, André, 336, 345-6
Stirner, Max, 72-3, 74, 79, 585, 612
Stockholm Peace Appeal Against Atomic
Weapons, 342 : subject-matter, 733; see also names
Stockholm Peace Congress, 342
Stollmeyer, 413, 414
Stone-Breakers, The (Courbet), 188, 189,
197, 200, 732
Stones of Venice, The (Ruskin), 421-2,
424, 467
story-telling, 419
Strachey, Lytton, 478, 518
Strachey, Oliver, 492
Strauss, Johann (the Younger), 596
Strauss, Joseph, 596
Streaky Bacon Style, 422
Street, George Edmund, 425, 429, 450,
451
Street Pavers (Boccioni), 275
Strzygowski, Josef, 664
Student Vanguard, 496, 503
students: alienation, 709-10; France,
375-8, 709, 716, 742; revolts, 375-8,
530, 576-7, 706, 709, 716, 742; Spain,
530
Studio, The (Courbet), 190-1
Sturm, Der, 679
style: sociology of, 591; and temperament,
727; subject-matter, 732-4; imposed,
and artistic quality, 735-6; see also
specific movements, names
Success and Failure of Picasso, The
(Berger), 569, 571
Sue, Eugene, 82-3, 148
Suez Canal, 129-30
suffrage, women’s, 490-1
Sullivan, Louis, 142-3, 601-3, 749
(n. 29)
Sulzer, Johann Georg, 33
Sunday Observer, 578
Sunday Times (London), 568, 578
suprematism, 673
Sur l'art et les artistes (Diderot), 750
(n. 36)
Sur [origine de l'inégalité parmi les
hommes (Rousseau), 40
surrealism and surrealists, 157, 297-308;
dada, 295, 637; Fourierism, 297;
Freudianism, 298, 301, 304, 313, 514,
515; Hegelianism, 300-1; communism,
300-14, 325; Trotsky, 301, 303, 304,
312; leftist politics, 301 ff.; paranoia-
criticism, 304; fascism, 306-7; anti-
fascism, 308, 314; International
Congress of Writers (1935), 312-13;
socialist realism, 313-14; Soviet Union,
313-14; Stalinism, 313-14, 514-16;
United States, 321; World War II,
321; origin of term, 327; decline of
radicalism of, 330; post-World War II,
330; England, 500-1, 513-17; Mass-
Observation, 516; individualism, 558-9;
sur-réalisme (word), 297
Surréalisme au service de la Réyolution,
Le, 303-4
Surréalisme et la peinture, Le (Breton),
298-9
“Surrealisme in Literature” (West), 515
“Surrealist Exhibition London 1936”
(Boswell), 509
Surrealist Manifestoes, 298, 303
Sweden: housing, 487; Situationists, 706
Swedenborgianism, 134, 157, 229, 250,
415
Sweeney Agonistes (Eliot), 521
Swinburne, 425-6, 435, 462-5, 470
Swingler, Randall, 535
Switzerland, 215, 216 ff., 222 ff., 598;
anarchism, 123, 218, 223 ff., 368, 604;
Saint-Simonianism, 129; First
International, 218, 222-3; radicalism,
218, 368; dada, 295-7; constructivism,
654-5
Sybil (Disraeli), 487
Sydenham, Palace of the People (Crystal
Palace), 409
Syllabus errorum (Pius IX), 593
Symbolism and Symbolists, 134, 228-9,
235-6, 241, 253, 258 ff., 283, 322,
465, 470, 651; Fourierism, 135; “art
for art’s sake,” 157, 462, 466;
Baudelaire, 157—8; anarchism, 226,
228-9, 237 ff., 249 ff., 465, 478;
poetry, 229, 250, 604; non-objective
art, 236; Neo-Impressionism and,
237 ff., 251 ff.; expressionism, 250;
idealism, 250, 604; music, 250, 466,
648; cubism and, 250-1; naturalism
and, 253; Nabis, 261; theater, 261, 431,
445; futurism and, 273, 274; dada and,
296, 297; surrealism and, 297; realism

and, 420; Belgium, 474, 605-7;
primitive art, 557; revisionism, 604;
Holland, 608; Art Nouveau, 610, 615-
16; see also names
Symbolism-Synthetism (Belgium), 605-7
Symbolist Movement, The (Balakian)
157
7
syndicalism, 77, 198; trade unions, 270,
273-4, 284-5; guild socialism, 558;
see also anarcho-syndicalism
Syndicat des musiciens d’orchestre, 263
Synthetism, 157, 258 ff., 605-7
Systeme de politique positive (Comte),
160-2
tachisme, 365
_ Tachtigers, 608
tactile values, 569, 693
Tailleferre, Germaine, 311
Taine, 317, 562, 564
Talmon, J. L., 14, 747 (n. 14), 749
(n. 30)
Tanguy, Yves, 303, 308, 314, 321
Tannhduser (Wagner), 157
Tapies, Antoni, 530
Tarr (Lewis), 556
Task, 657
Taslitzky, Boris, 330-1, 334-7, 338-9,
351, 356, 357, 536
Tassaert, Octave, 194, 195, 732
Tassel house, 613
Tate Gallery (London), 550
Tatlin, Vladimir, 634, 672
Taut, Bruno, 644, 669-71, 678, 813
(n. 74)
Taut, Max, 671
Taylor, F. W., 640
Taylor, Helen, 400, 430
Taylor, Warington, 788 (n. 120)
technocracy, Bauhaus, 649, 701 ff.
Tecton, 486
temperament and radicalism, 726-8
Temps nouveaux, Les, 226, 241, 253,
254, 264, 265, 281
Ten O'Clock (Whistler), 158, 466
Terror (French Revolution) 28, 36, 387,
388, 749 (n. 31)
terrorism, 118; French Revolution, 27,
28, 36, 387, 388; Soviet, 27-8; Marx,
75-6, 77; anarchist, 225, 251-5, 266,
324, 388, 435, 437; fascist, 311;
Chartists, 401
Texas: Fourierism, 138-9, 140-1;
Icarians, 144; Owenite communities,
395
Thackeray, 83, 465
Thalmann, Ernst, 678
Index / xlix
theater: didactic art, 33; France, 149-51,
257, 261, 263, 309-11, 325, 340; Ibsen,
245, 261, 263, 431, 445, 621; Marxism,
257; Symbolism, 261, 263, 431, 445;
Popular Front, 300-11; communist,
305, 340, 520-1, 638-9, 640-3, 704-5;
Germany, 305, 638-9, 640-3, 653;
anarchism, 325, 387; Owenites, 394;
England, 431, 445, 477, 519-21, 572—
3; leftist, 519-21; United States, 520,
521; audience participation, 520-1,
638-9; Soviet Union, 520-1; New Left
?
573-4; architecture, 598, 639, 704,
708; expressionism, 626, 638-9; dada,
638; Total, 639, 704, 705; socialist
realism, 642; communication and, 704;
see also cinema; and names
Théatre de l’ceuvre, 261, 263
Thédtre du peuple, Le (Rolland), 305
Theatre Guild (England), 519-20
Theatre Royal (England), 520
Theories of Surplus Value (Marx), 95
Theosophical Society, 261, 435
theosophy, 261, 315, 435, 475, 648, 674
Theses on Feuerbach (Marx), 107
Thierry, Augustin, 168
Third (Communist) International
(Comintern), 269, 502, 625, 643, 688—
91; Clarté, 299-300; surrealists and,
299 ff.
Third Man, The (Cookridge) , 496
Third of May (Goya), 344
Third Republic, 59, 207-10, 227
Thomas, Dylan, 519, 521
Thomas, William Luson, 459
Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 159, 475
Thompson, Edward P., 537-8, 541, 571—
Se Dwi
Thompson, William, 390
Thoré, 174, 175, 182, 191, 200-3
Thoreau, Henry David, 45, 262, 438, 484,
562, 602, 612, 748 (n. 29)
Thorez, Maurice, 308, 320, 321, 333, 348,
518
Thorvaldsen, Bertel, 79, 80-1, 91
Three Graces, The (Thorvaldsen) , 80-1
Threepenny Opera, The (Brecht and
Weill), 641
Tillich, Paul, 89, 628
Time, 578
Time and Tide (Ruskin), 418
Time and Western Man (Lewis), 556
time, psychological perception in, 160
Times (London), 456
Tinguely, Jean, 366-8, 369
Tissot, James, 205
Titian, 78-9
Tito, 333, 360
“To the Working-men of England”
(Morris), 426
1] / INDEX
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 748 (n. 28)
Togliatti, Palmiro, 354, 689-90, 696,
698, 721
Toller, Ernst, 625, 639, 644, 655
Tolstoy, Alexey, 312
Tolstoy, Leo, 45, 196, 245, 268, 418, 436,
445, 606, 612, 629
Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real
Reform (Howard), 480
Toorop, Jan, 474, 601, 607-8, 609, 612,
674
Topolski, Feliks, 535
Torch, 457
Tories, 427
Total Theater, 639, 704, 705
Toulouse-Lautrec, 252, 261, 324, 732
Tours Congress, 299-300
Tous les arts, 332
Toward Reality (Berger), 568
Town and Country Planning Act, 485
town planning, see architecture;
communities and community planning
Toynbee, Arnold, 423
Toynbee Hall, 552
trade unions, 207; Centre 42, 573-4;
syndicalism, 270, 273-4, 284-5;
communist, 322; Owen, 397
Trades Union Council, 573-4
Traktat tiber die christliche Kunst
(Marx), 70
transcendentalism, 359
Travail (Zola) ,232, 254-5, 256, 268
Tree of Life, The (Burne-Jones) , 615
Trevelyan, Sir Charles, 493
Trevelyan, G. M. 476, 496
Trevelyan, Julian, 516-17, 532
“Trial of the Thirty,” 254
Tribune (London), 568
Turiolet, Elsa, 305, 336
Tristan, Flora, 258-9
Troeltsch, Ernst, 567
Trommeln in der Nacht (Brecht), 641
Trotsky (Leon) and Trotskyites, 10-11,
63, 111, 190, 308, 325, 524, 573, 619,
656-7; art as prophecy, 10~11;
democracy, 12; internationalism, 293,
320; Clarté, 300; surrealism, 301, 303,
304, 312, 317; Spanish Civil War, 317,
318, 522, 559; artistic freedom, 320;
Breton and, 320; New Left, 578; Left
Opposition, 656
Trottelbuch (Jung), 633
truth, in Marxism, 105-10
“truth to nature,” 418-19, 423; Pre-
Raphaelites, 455-6, 458, 461
Tuileries, 51, 52
Turgeney, Ivan, 214, 215, 224
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 749 (n. 29)
Turpitudes sociales (Pissarro), 240
“Twentieth-Century Italian Art”
(exhibition) , 693
Two Girls in a Wind (Rea), 547, 548-9
typography: see printing
Tytherly (England), 395, 396-7
Tzara, Tristan, 295-7, 298, 303, 632, 637,
673; Communism, 322, 330; Hungarian
aad Revolution, 352; Algeria, 360; New
Left, 361
Uber Literatur und Kunst (Becher), 681
Uccello, 455
Uccle (Belgium), 614
ugly, cult of, 275
Uhlman, Diana (Mrs. Fred), 522
Uhlman, Fred, 522, 526
Unamuno, Miguel de, 303
Une Cité industrielle (Garnier) , 267-9,
279, 316, 773 (n. 149)
UNESCO, 533-4
“UniData-Programm”’ (Maldonado and
others), 701
Union de la gauche socialiste, 360
Union des arts plastiques, 322, 333
Union des intellectuels frangais, 320
Union des théatres indépendants de
France, 309
Union nationale des intellectuels, 333
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: see
Soviet Union
Union of Soviet Wuiters, 302
Union of Writers, 376
unions, artist (see also trade unions), 96
Unit One, 515
Uniid, Lea sasres5a7 698
Unité d’habitation (Le Corbusier), 315,
487
united front, 643-4
United Nations: Korean War, 344-5;
UNESCO, 533-4; buildings, 664
United States, 703; communism, 5—6, 186,
305, 332, 489, 499, 537; democracy
concept, 13-14; American
Revolutionary tradition, 19-29; avant-
garde, 23; mechanism, 25-26;
Constitution, 26; academies, 26—7;
government projects, 27, 58, 96, 505;
socialism, 41; anarchism, 44-5, 262,
266, 325, 394, 435, 489; radicalism,
48, 49-50; individualism, 49-50; two-
party system, 52-3; liberalism, 55, 59;
Fourierism, 135, 138-9, 140;
architecture, 143, 473, 474-5, 601-3,
658, 678; Icarians, 144-5; utopianism,
144-5, 392-5; Civil War, 216;
Impressionism, 262; syndicalism, 269,
285; dada, 295, 297; Spanish Civil War,
317, 5025 517, S21s abstract

United States (continued)
expressionism, 321, 365, 570-1, 5753
surrealism, 321; cold war, 333, 336,
340, 341, 344-6, 535 ff.; Korean War,
344-5; Rosenberg case, 346; Neo-dada,
365; New Tendency, 372; radical Right,
384; Godwin influence, 390-1;
Rappites (Harmonists), 392-3, 411;
Owenites, 392-5; theosophy, 435;
graphic art, 460, 511, 512; city
planning, 481, 483, 485-6, 489, 722;
Depression (1930's), 497, 507; leftists,
504 ff., 519, 521, 524; anti-fascism,
504-6; social realism, 505-6, 507, 693-
4; British leftist influence, 519; theater,
520, 521; admiration for, 524, 640;
émigrés, 526, 678, 682-5; critical
influence in, 551 ff.; anti-Americanism
(see also cold war), 570-1, 576, 578,
710; New Left, 571, 709-10; Vietnam,
573, 576-7, 578, 710; Marxism, 590;
Protestantism, 628; see also names
Unity Theatre, 520, 528
Universities and Left Review, 572
Unto This Last (Ruskin), 418, 420, 443
Unwin, Raymond, 438, 479, 483-5, 655,
667, 722
Uprising, The (Daumier), 180, 181, 731
urban vs. rural society, 17-18, 33-4, 217
US.S.R.: see Soviet Union
Utilitarian Music, 640
Utilitarianism, 48-9; David, 36; Bentham,
48-9, 382, 384; England, 385-6, 399—
401; Fabians and, 439, 476, 479
Utopia (More), 143
“Utopian Correspondence,” 671
utopian, Marxist use of word, 43
utopian socialism, 16, 40-41; Marx and
Engels and, 10, 43, 68, 71-3, 84-5, 97,
98, 215; education, 34; France, 41,
117-63, 143-5, 174-5, 215, 267-8;
England, 44, 385-6, 395-8;
romanticism, 138-9, 145-50; Icarian,
143-5; United States, 144-5, 392-5;
republicanism, 172; Abbaye de Créteil,
285-7; New Left, 359, 360, 699; Owen,
385-6, 390-7; Bauhaus, 627, 649,
653-4; see also names, subjects
utopianism: see utopian socialism; and
names, sects (Fourierism, Saint-
Simonianism, etc.), subjects
Vaillant, Auguste, 252, 255
Vaillant, Charles, 224
Vaillant, Edouard, 227
Vaillant-Couturier, Paul, 299, 300, 305,
309, 311, 312, 314, 316-17, 318, 618
“Valeur sociale de l’art, La” (Sorel) , 272
Index / li
Vallauris, “Museum of Peace,” 351-2
Vallotton, Félix, 241, 246, 247, 257, 261,
265, 324
value: labor theory of, 95-6; relativism,
105
Van de Velde, Henry, 112, 466, 609-17,
621, 627, 653, 719, 721; industrial
aesthetic, 438, 612, 615, 634, 651,
- 659; ornament, 613, 615-16; anti-
historicism, 616, 662
Van der Rohe: see Mies van der Rohe
Van Doesburg, Theo (pseud. of Kiipper,
C.E.M.), 636-7, 673-4, 675, 677,
701, 733935
Van Dongen, Kees, 241, 254, 261, 265
Van Eyck, 455
Van Gogh, Theo, 258
Van Gogh, Vincent, 53, 230, 253, 258,
259, 261; influence of, 324, 472, 514,
523, 674, 695; graphic art, 459-60
Van Rysselberghe, Théo, 239-40, 241,
a 253, 607, 612
Vandervelde, Emile, 604, 609, 614, 615
vanguard, first use of word, 403-4; see also
avant-garde ;
Vanguardia, La, 123
Vanzetti and Sacco, 495
Vasarely, Victor, 369-71, 700, 704, 705
Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 477
Vedova, Emilio, 691, 692
Venezuela, 415
Venice Biennale, 374, 377, 539, 692-3
Ventilator, Der, 637
Venturi, Lionello, 691
Vercors, 333, 360
Vereinigung revolutiondrer Kiinstler,
296-7
Verhaeren, Emile, 604, 607 ff., 612
Verlaine, Paul, 229
Vermeer, 202
Vernet, Horace, 77, 166, 169
Verney, Sir Harry, 411
Vers une architecture (Le Corbusier), 316
Veshch, Gegenstand, Objet, 655, 811
(n. 45)
Viani, Alberto, 692
Vico, Giovanni Battista, 29-30, 35, 88,
97, 559
Victoria, Queen, 475
“Victoria” community, 410-11, 412-13,
481 M
Vie de Bohéme, La (Murger), 151
Vie, La, 286
Vie moderne, La, 235
Vienna Group, 705
Vienna Peace Congress, 343
Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, 523
Vienna, Votivkirche, 596
Vienna Workers’ Symphony, 641
Vietnam, 573, 576-7, 578, 710
lii / INDEX
Vigny, Alfred de, 146
Vildrac, Charles, 285-99
“Village Chairman, The” (Hogarth), 545
Villages of Cooperation, 391 ff., 410
Ville Radieuse, La (The Radiant City)
(Le Corbusier), 315, 316
Villon, Jacques, 265, 288, 290-1
violence: see terrorism
Viollet-le-Duc, Eugene Emmanuel, 186-
7, 207-10, 211, 290, 417; modern
architecture and, 600-1, 602, 610, 613,
616
Vischer, Theodor, 71
Vision and Design (Fry), 553-5
Vive la Commune! (Steinlen), 264
Vlaminck, 261-2, 311
Volders, Jean, 618
Volksbiihne (Berlin), 638-9
Vollmar, Georg von, 590
Voltaire, 14, 34, 35, 68
Von der Notwendigkeit der Kunst
(Fischer) ,685
VOPRA (All-Russian Society of
Architects), 656-7
Vorticism, 556-7
Voyage . . . en Icarie (Cabet), 143
Voysey, Charles, 472, 473, 474
Vraie république, La, 202
Vuillard, Edouard, 261
“vulgar sociology,” 591
Wachenfeld, Haus, 598
wage-earner, origin of term, 132
Wagner, Martin, 669, 671
Wagner, Richard, 256, 287, 440, 596-8,
648, 705; anarchism, 79, 216, 240-1,
596-7; Baudelaire and, 157;
Gesamtkunstwerk, 157, 598, 645, 651;
Dresden revolt, 215-16, 596-8;
Marxism, 216; fascism, 240-1; Nazis
and, 241, 597; Symbolism, 241, 651;
Ancient Greece and, 597; Bauhaus and,
719
Waiting for Lefty (Odets), 520
Walden, Herwarth, 679, 720
Walker, Emery, 244, 432, 436, 449, 469
Walker, Frederick, 459
Wallace, Alfred Russel, 435
Walthamstow, Morris Memorial Gallery,
469
War (Picasso), 344-5, 351
War and Peace (Proudhon), 196
War Commentary, 528
Warten, Josiah, 45, 394
Washerwomen at Arles (Gauguin) , 260
Watkinson, Ray, 539, 789 (n. 141)
Watts, G. F., 436
Webb, Beatrice Potter, 437, 440, 478,
480, 518, 568
Webb, Philip, 425, 428, 437, 450, 451,
457, 469, 600, 788 (n. 120)
Webb, Sidney, 437, 440, 478, 480, 518,
568
Weber, Max, 566
Webern, 641
Webern, Die (The Weavers)
(Hauptmann), 78, 629
Weight, Carel, 536, 544
Weill, Kurt, 641, 642, 644
Weimar Republic, 28-9, 487, 592, 624 ff.,
636, 667 ff., 677, 719, 740; see also
, names, subjects
“Weite und Vielfalt der realistischen
Schreibweise’”’ (Brecht), 642
Weitling, Wilhelm, 174, 215
Wells, H. G., 299,434, 476, 493, 495
Welwyn (England), 483-4, 485
Werfel, Franz, 664
Wesker, Arnold, 573-4, 576, 577
West, Alick, 515, 519, 563
West Germany, 680, 688; Bauhaus revival,
700 ff.; Situationists, 706; social
democracy, 708; student New Left,
709-10
Westphalen, Baron Ludwig von, 68
Whigs, 54, 382
Whistler, 422, 470, 471, 473, 607, 621;
“art for art’s sake,” 158, 565 ff.;
formalism, 466-8; individualism, 727
White Girl, The (Whistler), 464
White House, The (Whistler home),
467-8
Whitechapel Art Gallery (London), 504
Whitman, Walt, 274, 406, 438, 457,
484-5, 552, 602, 612, 749 (n. 29)
Whitwell, Stedman, 393-5, 410
Wickhoff, 566
Wiener Werkstatte, 523
Wildes Oscar e123. 5 Sena 6 moe Ge
440, 448, 477, 605; anarchism, 465;
Morris, 465; formalism, 466-8
Wilhelm Tell (Schiller) , 626
Wilkinson, Ellen, 523
Willette, 246, 265
William Morris; Romantic to
Revolutionary (Thompson), 537-8,
572
Williams, Ralph Vaughan: see Vaughan
Williams, Ralph
Williams, Raymond, 572
Williams-Ellis, Clough, 491
Williams, Tennessee, 639
Wilson, Edmund, 108-9
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 30, 31,
68, 91
“Winter: ‘Are the Prisons Heated?’ ”’
(Steinlen), 264
 Index / liii
Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst Wren, Christopher, 407, 469
(Semper), 599 Wren’s City Churches (Mackmurdo), 470
Wolfe, Bertram D., 317 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 45, 143, 418, 474-
Wolfflin, Heinrich, 554, 566, 567, so1, 5, 601-3, 749 (7. 29)
W681 oes writers’ congresses, 301 ff., 310 ff., 364,
Women’s Social and Political Union, 490 497, 501; see also names
women’s suffrage, 471, 490-1 Wiiters’ Group, 539
Wood, Neal, 796 (n. 45)
Woodward, 420
Woolf, Leonard, 478-9, 492-3, 518
Woolf, Virginia, 479, 492-3, 502, 552, “XX, Les,” 605-7, 610
553
Woolner, Thomas, 407, 452
Wordsworth, 389, 400, 403, 410
Work (Brown), 457, 458, 461, 468 “Yachting Style,” 615; see also Art
Work of Art of the Future, The Nouveau
(Wagner), 216; see also Kunstwerk Yeats, William Butler, 434, 435, 470, 474
der Zukunft, Das Yesenin, 655
worker-artists, 96, 221 Young, Arthur, 415
Worker, The (Masereel) ,620 Young, Edward, 31
Workers and Soldiers Councils, 624 Young Europe, 172
Workers Bookshop, 518 Young Hegelians, 69, 70, 72-3
Workers Dreadnought; The Organ of the Young Italy, 172
Communist Party, 491 Young Woman on the Bank of the Seine
Workers’ Meal, The (Lurcat), 310 (Picasso), 236
“W/orkers of the world, unite!,” 259 Yugoslavia, 333, 360, 543, 699-700, 703—
Workers Opposition, 284, 292 4, 710, 721; avant-garde art, 369,
Workers’ Socialist Federation, 490-1 371 ff., 714-15
working class: Bolshevik Revolution, 28; Yvaral, 371
French Revolution, 28; first use of term,
47; radicalism, 47; socialism, 173;
Chartism, 201-3; trade unions, 207,
270, 273-4, 284-5, 322, 397; Catholic Zagreb New Tendency exhibits, 372-4,
social movement, 210-12; Switzerland, 703-5, 710
218; London Radical Clubs, 427; Zao Wovw-ki, 376
alienation, 427—8, 744; Democratic Zeitgeist und Literatur; Gebundenheit
Federation, 427; first political party for, und Freiheit der Kunst (Fischer),
586; see also anarcho-syndicalism; 685-6
syndicalism; and specific subjects Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung, 683,
Working Men’s College (London), 416- 709
17, 440, 456, 461 Zetkin, Clara, 63
Workmen on Their Way Home Zhdanov, Andrei, 333
(Munch), 622 Zhdanovism, 333, 352
Works Progress Administration, 27, 58, Zille, Heinrich, 631-2
96, 505 “Zinoviev Letter,” 494
workshops, national, 184, 185 Zola, Emile, 200, 253, 262, 457, 629;
World Congresses for Peace, 340-2 determinism, 82, 90, 162, 230;
World War I, 256, 266, 623 ff.; pacifism, realism, 82, 162, 254; Impressionism,
294, 295, 296, 299, 305-6, 477-8, 493, 230, 234-6; naturalism, 230 ff.;
618, 623-4; see also names, subjects socialism, 230 ff.; allusion to Marxism,
World War II, 262, 320-2, 328 ff., 234; anarchism, 254-5; Fourierism,
527 ff., 563; see also names, subjects 256, 268; Dreyfus case, 257; industrial
World’s Fair (New York, 1939), 505-6, art, 613
610 Zorilla, Ruiz, 260
World’s Fair (Paris, 1937), 326, 503, 547 Zurich, dada in, 295-7
Worringer, Wilhelm, 557, 648 Zweig, Arnold, 681
Wort, Das, 679 Zweig, Stefan, 299
Wou-ki, Zao: see Zao Wou-ki Zwemmer Gallery (London), 547-8
 A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Donatp Drew Ecsert was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, in 1902. He

attended Lawrenceville School and Princeton University, where he
received his A.B. in 1924 and an M.F.A. in Architecture in 1927, and
did two years of graduate work in the history of art, Department of Art
and Archaeology. He has been a member of the Princeton faculty since
1929 and a professor since 1946 in the Department of Art and Archaeol-
ogy-. He has also been connected with the School of Architecture and
the American Civilization Program. In addition to many contributions
to periodicals, Professor Egbert has written The Tickhill Psalter (1940),
Princeton Portraits (1947), and Socialism and American Art (1967),
the last an expansion of an essay in a two-volume work he co-edited
with Stow Persons: Socialism and American Life (1952). He is a
member of Phi Beta Kappa and was awarded the Haskins Medal of the
Mediaeval Academy of America in 1943. Professor Egbert is married
and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
 A NOTE ON THE TYPE

THE TEXT OF THIS BOOK is set in Electra, a typeface designed by

W(illiam) A(ddison) Dwiggins for the Mergenthaler Linotype Com-
pany and first made available in 1935. Electra cannot be classified as
either “modern” or “old style.” It is not based on any historical model,
and hence does not echo any particular period or style of type design.
It avoids the extreme contrast between “thick” and “thin” elements
that marks most modern faces, and is without eccentricities which catch
the eye and interfere with reading. In general, Electra is simple, read-
able typeface which attempts to give a feeling of fluidity, power, and
speed.

Composed, printed, and bound by

Kingsport Press, Incorporated, Kingsport, Tennessee
Typography and binding design
by Anita Karl
 -_
ie
HX Egbert, Donald Drew, 1902-
521 Social radicalism and the arts, Western Europe; a cultural
history from the French Revolutionto 1968. ,lsted., New
E34 York, Knopf, 1970.
Xxxill, 821, lili p. illus, 25cm. 15.00
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Socialism and the arts
— Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. The
arts—Europe—Addresses, essays, lectures. L Title.
HX521.E34 700.9 74-79351

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