MARXIST AND MATERIALIST PERSPECTIVES ON ART

By Anne D’Alleva

The term “Marxism” can mean many different things. Of course, it derives from the name of
Karl Marx (1818-1883), economic theorist, philosopher, and revolutionary activist. In the discussion
of politics, Marxism has come to indicate socialist theories and system of government based on the
ideas of Marx, his collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) and their various successors. But Marx
and his successors addressed history and culture as well as economics and their theories and
methods have provided the framework for a strong tradition of scholarship in art history as well as in
other academic disciplines.

Because Marxism includes wide-ranging theories of history and culture, it is a mistake, as a

scholar, to identify Marxist thought (and politics) too closely with the former Soviet Union. In the
early and mid-nineties, several undergraduates told me and they thought that Marxist cultural
analysis was irrelevant or wrong since the US had “won” the Cold War, as if the disintegration of the
Soviet Union had somehow discredited Marxist cultural and historical analysis. I’m using the
Plekhanov quote at the start of this section as a way to suggest that Marxism, contrary to what some
students might think, can be much more than a particular theory of practice of communist
government. In fact, Critical Marxism (sometimes called Western Marxism, because it evolved
primarily in Europe and North America) encourages the production of non-dogmatic, open
scholarship and this is the tradition of Marxist thought that has been most productive for art history.

In this section, I’ll introduce Marx’s basic ideas, then briefly discuss Marxist ideas about
ideology and cultural hegemony that are particularly useful for thinking about art. I’ll also touch on
Marxist and materialist theories of art history, finish by developing materialist of Marxist, lines of
questioning in relation to two examples.

The critique of capitalism and historical materialism

Writing in the wake of Europe’s Industrial Revolution, Marx was critical of capitalist society.
In his greatest work, Das Kapital (publication begun in 1967), Marx argued that the fundamental
condition of capitalist society is the exploitation of the worker’s labor by the capitalist. The worker
does not receive full value of his labor; instead, the true value of the worker’s labor is siphoned off,
as surplus value, into the capitalist’s profits because the free, unregulated labor market does not
oblige the capitalist to pay the worker full value of his labor.

As Marx and Engels saw it, this exploitation of workers led to class struggle. In the
Communist Manifesto of 1848, they declared that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the
history of class of struggles.” Under capitalism, the two major classes are the bourgeoisie (or the
capitalist class) and the proletariat (for the working class). The capitalists own the means of
production (factories, mines, financial institutions, etc.) while the proletariat own only their ability to
work and no option but to work for the capitalists. In the fact, Marx argued that each class has a
consciousness, a way of seeing the world determined by its economic position.

To explain their vision of social structure, Marx and Engels used the metaphor of base and
superstructure: the economy is the base, and it determines the superstructure, the forms of the
state and society. You can think the society as a building: the economic base is the concrete
foundation, the state and society are the house arises on that base. It is important to remember that
the base is not just the economy narrowly construed, but all relations of production, including class

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relations. Later scholars have pointed out that the influence doesn’t just go one way, either, from
base to superstructure.

Ideology and Cultural hegemony

Ideology is an especially important concept in thinking about the two-way interrelationship

between the base and the superstructure. In its most basic sense, the term ideology indicates any
coherent and systematic body of ideas. We may speak of the ideology of an individual, a group (such
as a political party or church), or a culture. In Marxist theory, ideology is part of the superstructure
of society. From a Marxist perspective, art is an “ideological form” that dominant classes may use to
perpetuate class relations that benefit them – or that revolutionaries may use to undermine the
power of the dominant class. An impressive portrait of a factory owner, a grand presidential palace,
or a cartoon showing triumphant workers-revolutionaries are all ideological artwork in this sense.

The issue of ideology came to the fore in Marxist theory during the 1920s and 1930s, at the
point when workers’ movement in Europe and North America had made many gains but had failed
to overthrow capitalism and establish socialist societies. Marxist theorists had to ask why capitalism
was able to survive if it was so exploitative. Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), an Italian scholar,
journalist, theorist and activist, provided one compelling set of answers to this question. During the
years he spent in prison for opposing Mussolini’s fascist government, Gramsci developed a theory of
cultural hegemony – that is, influence or authority gained via cultural practices rather than by law or
force – to explain how the bourgeoisie continued to dominate the society. His Prison Notebooks and
other writings have continued to inspire the cultural analysts, including many art historians and
literary theorists.

Gramsci argued that dominant groups in society maintain their control by securing the
“spontaneous consent” of subordinate groups, who willingly participate in their own oppression. To
be sure, workers are sometimes forced or persuaded against their will or better judgement to
participate in exploitative capitalist system, but often a political and ideological consensus is
negotiated between dominant and subordinate groups: “’spontaneous’ consent [is] given by the
great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant
fundamental group; this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence)
which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production.
The dominant class asserts it cultural hegemony by persuading subordinate classes to accept its
moral, political and cultural values convincing them that these values are right, true or beneficial to
them even though, ultimately, these values benefit only the dominant classes. The dominant classes
use the art, common sense, culture, customs, taste, etc. to maintain their hold on power. If
spontaneous consent fails, then the dominant classes always have at the ready “the apparatus of
state coercive power which ‘legally’ enforces discipline on those groups who do not ‘consent’ either
actively or passively. Gramsci noted that the working class can achieve its cultural hegemony, but to
do that it must build up a network of alliances with other disempowered groups, because it doesn’t
have the resources to achieve cultural hegemony on its own.

Writing somewhat later, in the 1960s, the French Marxist theorist Louise Althusser (1918-
1990) pushed these arguments further, asserting that the ideology was an important as the
economy in determining social forms. Like many Marxist theorists before him, Althusser believed
that capitalist society perpetuated itself in two means: direct oppression e.g. using soldiers to put
down workers’ strike, and ideology, e.g. persuading people that the system is just and beneficial. To
explain how this works he developed a distinction between what he called the Repressive State

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Apparatus (government, military, the police, the courts, prisons) and the Ideological State Apparatus
(education, religion, the family, political parties, the media, and culture)

Marxism and art

Although, Marx and Engels never undertook the systematic study of the visual arts or
literature, in various writings they put forth a number of ideas about the arts that have been taken
up and developed by later theorists and scholars. In The German Ideology (1845-1846), Marx and
Engels asserted that art is not something produced by great geniuses in ways almost beyond
understanding, but is simply another form of economic production. This was a revolutionary
argument, because eighteenth and nineteenth century philosopher of art – including Kant and Hegel
– had made strong distinctions between art and labor. Marx and Engels also believed in the
egalitarian idea that every human being has some artistic ability. Artistic specialization, in this
viewpoint, results from the (capitalist) division of labor more than anything else, for they asserted
that “in a communist society there are no painters but only people who engage in painting among
other activities. Marx himself realized that the relationship between art and society is a complex
one. For example, like many nineteenth-century observers, he believed in the superiority of Greek
art, yet he also saw many failings, from a socialist perspective, in Greek society.

A number of later Marxist thinkers took up the issue of artistic production more
systematically. The Hungarian scholar Georg Lukacs (1885-1971) was a revolutionary as well as a
philosopher and literary critic, and he clashed frequently with the Comintern (the international
governing body of the Communist movement) because of his unorthodox views. In History and Class
Consciousness (1923), Lukacs developed Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism, which states that
things can be understood in capitalist society only in terms of their exchange value in money,
commodities or symbolic capital (e.g. prestige). In discussing the commodity, he notes, “Its basis is
that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing [reification, from res, the Latin word
of thing] and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and
all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.” In
the absence of true socialism, according to Lukacs, art is the only way to counter these processes of
commodification and reification, for art mediates between the individual and totality because it
inherently relates to both: a portrait may depict a particular person and also the same time says
something about the human condition. Like the commodity, art reifies social relationships, but it
does so in a way that enriches rather than estranges us. Lukacs believed that nineteenth-century
realist novels, such as those Honore de Balzae, epitomized this because of the way they united the
exploration of a perfectly observed exterior world and an inner truth.

Lukacs strongly influenced the members of the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist scholars
based at the University of Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research (established in 1923) who focused
on popular art and the “culture industry.” Among them, Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) theorized the
ways in which art can be used to pacify and co-opt the working classes and to spread the dominant
ideology. In The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception (1944), written with Mark
Horkheimer, he argued that capitalist society produces cheap, standardized art that deadens
people’s minds and makes them focus on fulfilling false needs, such as the desire for consumer
goods, rather than their true needs for freedom, social equality, creative outlets and the opportunity
to fulfill their human potential. Adorno felt this most fully during the Second World War, which he
presents in unhappy exile in Los Angeles: “What has become alien to men is the human component
of culture is the closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with
the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of
commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of

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closeness.” Although Adorno wrote to a great deal about film, radio and other media, television
maybe the perfect illustration of his argument. Rather than making their own entertainment and
expressing themselves creatively, the TV audience sits passively in front of the tube for hours a day,
numbed by a barrage of awful programs and commercials for things they don’t need and can’t
afford. Adorno himself championed difficult avant-garde art and music, emphasizing its potential for
radical transformation.

A number of Marxist theorists have argued persuasively that art cannot be separated from
its environment, especially when it comes to issues of technology or social class. The critic and
theorist Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), in his famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), provided an insightful analysis of photography and film eliminates
that aura. Removed from ritual, art becomes politics, but of a particular kind: “The film makes the
cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of critic requires
no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.” Writing as fascism was on the
rise in Europe, Benjamin warned the Fascism would play on this sense of alienation in its drive to
subjugate people, so that the working class would “experience its own destruction as an aesthetic
pleasure of the first order.”

The ideological implications of such arguments were further developed by later theorists. In
The Society of the Spectacle (1967), activist and artist Guy Debord (1931-1994) declared in
contemporary capitalist society “The entire life of societies in which modern conditions of
production prevail announces itself as an immense accumulation of spectacle, even as all other
expression and forms of representation are banned: in this context spectacle in inseparable from the
State, and it works to reproduce social divisions and class formations. Like Lukacs, he questions the
extent to which art is complicit with capitalist power structure or can work undermine them. Debord
was part of the Situationist International, a network of avant-garde artists that took shape in 1957
and sought to break down the barriers between art and life, engaging in aesthetic actions that would
precipitate revolution.

Materialist and Marxist art history

Over the past thirty years and so, materialist art history has focused not on iconography of
stylistic classification, rather on art’s modes of production – that is, it focuses on the labor that
produces art and the organization of the labor. Art, in this view, is the product of complex social,
political and economic relationships, not labeled “artistic genius.” In the mid-twentieth century, a
movement called “a social history of art” emerged focusing on the role of art in society rather than
on iconography and stylistic analysis. Perhaps, the most famous work to emerge from its strand of
art history is Arnold Hauser’s four volume The Social History of Art,” first published 1951, a survey of
art from the “Stone Age” to the “Film Age.” In some ways, with its sweeping generalizations and
broad scope it is a typical of this school of art history, whose practitioners focused on very specific
and detailed analysis of artworks in terms of economy, class, culture, etc. Nonetheless, Hauser’s
work was an inspiration for later materialist art historians.

A classic work in this vein is Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century
Italy (1988), which, rather than celebrating the paintings in question as great achievements of
Renaissance, sees them as “fossils of economic life.” Among other issues, Baxandall examines the
monetary worth of paintings – expressed, for example in contractual agreements between patron
and artist that dictated the use of precious material such as gold, leaf or lapis lazuli. He also explores
the ways in which artists drew on mathematical systems, such as gauging, also used by merchants. In

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this work, art becomes not the mysterious manifestation of genius, but an outgrowth of complex
interactions between artists and patrons in the context of a particular cultural environment.

An equally remarkable work is Svetlana Alpers’ Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and The
Market (1988), in which she disregards Rembrandt’s style, iconography, and the (often troubled)
attribution of his work, instead focuses on the organization of his studio as a business of the
production of paintings and strategies he used to market those paintings. Rembrandt was unique
not only for his artistic skill but also because he used his painting as a way to pay his debt: the
paintings functioned essentially like currency. Alpers point out that this practice was very much in
keeping with the entrepreneurial spirit of Dutch society at the time, even if it can ran counter to the
established system of artist-patron relationships. Although, Alpers is one of the most widely
respected and influential art historian of her generation, her book initially shocked many readers,
who respected Rembrandt to be treated as an artistic genius not as a marketing genius.

Among the “new” art historians, and in the current art history, scholars have paid increasing
attention to the relationship between art and ideology. One of the most influential writers in this
vein has been T.J. Clark, who has written several books about art, culture and politics in nineteenth-
century France. His Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (1973)
convincingly argues that the lack of visual clarity in works such as Burial at Ornans (1848) represents
Courbet’s rejection of the political order and his involvement with socialist politics. To support his
interpretation, Clark provides both as subtle visual reading of the works and extensive analysis of the
text written by the artist and critics. Similarly, art historian Michael Camille emphasizes that images
are not only ideological in secondary sense, as a reflection of spoken or written texts; for Camille,
images are directly ideological in themselves actively make meaning, for ideology is “a set of
imaginary representations [whether textual, visual, etc.] masking real material conditions.” In The
Gothic Old: Ideology and Image-making in the Medieval art (1989), he explores the ways in which
Church authorities tried to suppress the practice of idolatry while simultaneously promoting their
own approved visual images.

Art historians also study art’s institutions, examining the ideologies that shape the practices
of museums, galleries, academies and organizations. Art historians such as Allan Wallach and Carol
Duncan have analyzed museums as places where social hierarchies are played-out and reinforced.
For Duncan, the museum becomes a ritual space: “it is the visitors who enact the ritual. The
museums sequenced spaces and arrangements of objects, its lighting and architectural details
provide both the stage set and the script.” Annie E. Coombes has examined the history of British
museums as places where intertwining ideologies of race colonialism, and nationalism were
articulated for the general public.

Two recent surveys you may encounter in your art history studies have made materialist and
Marxist art history available to broader audience. Stephen F. Eisenman and Thomas Crow have
edited a survey, Nineteenth-Century Art: A Critical History (2002), which focuses on the relationship
between art and ideology. Rather than using artistic style as the organizing framework of the book,
they discuss class, gender, race, and the relationship between popular and elite culture in the visual
arts. Similarly, Richard Brettel’s Modern Art, 1851-1929: Capitalism and Representation (2002)
explores the works of modern artists such as Gauguin and Picasso in relation to colonialism,
nationalism and economics.

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ACTIVITY #3: Practicing Marxist Art History

Jacques-Louis David’s painting The Consecration of Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of
Empress Josephine (December 2, 1804) provides an opportunity to ask a range of questions about
ideology, and its economic and social conditions of production. David had been appointed official
painter to Napoleon and was assigned to produce as series of four large paintings documenting his
coronation (only two were ever executed).

 Who was the patron? What was his/her social and economic status?
 What was the social status of an artist – and that of the artist in society at this time?
 What is the significance of the scale of the work? (Think about the tradition of history
painting in this regard.)
 How did David receive the assignment from Napoleon? Does the contract for the work
survive? If so, what does it specify? Do other records of their interactions survive?
 What was David’s role as an official painter of the emperor? What kind of image of the
emperor did he promote? How did this work to reinforce Napoleon’s power?
 What were Napoleon’s motivation in choosing David as court painter? (David has been a
supporter of the Revolution, and that was perhaps the most celebrated artist in France at
the time: he was famous for developing a severe nee-classical style that seemed to express
revolutionary values.)
 What ideologies – on the part of the painter, patron, and intended audience – shaped the
creation and reception of his image? If Napoleon demanded images of grandeur, how does
the painting fit that need?

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  Why did David choose to depict this particular movement? (Napoleon had pre-empted the
Pope by taking the crown from his hands and crowning himself, and the subsequently
crowning Josephine, leaving Pius VII to deliver blessings from the sidelines. The Pope had
thought Napoleon would pledge his allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire.)
 What qualities of Napoleon does this moment emphasize? How are these emphasized
formally in the image? (Napoleon at the center of an awesome spectacle – notice how
marginalized Pope is.)
 Where was the painting displayed? Who saw it? Was it reproduced as an engraving or
otherwise made widely available to public?

Notice that in a materialist or Marxist line of questioning, formal issues don’t disappear, but the
emphasis is on understanding how formal aspects of the work shaped and were shaped by ideology
and social and economic power. In studying his painting, which is so compellingly represents the
dominant ideology of Napoleon’s regime, you could usefully read any number of Marxist theorists:
Debord’s ideas about the spectacle or Gramsci’s theory of spontaneous consent could help deepen
your understanding of the work. The interpretation combining Marxist and feminist perspectives
might address the role of the Empress Josephine in this image. Why David choose to focus not on
Napoleon’s crowning but on Josephine’s? This single moment emphasizes the ways in which
Josephine – as wife, queen and citizen – is both glorified and subject to Napoleon. Does her image
stand here for France itself, glorified by the subject to Napoleon?

Of course, Marxist or materialist analysis is also suited to works that challenge the dominant
ideology. A good example is Judith Baca’s The Great Wall of Los Angeles (1976-1983), a public mural
that stretched for half a mile cross one of Los Angeles’ Latino neighborhoods. It presents a history of
people of color in California from prehistory to the present. Baca created this mural so that the
people in the neighborhood would have access to their history, which is often excluded from official
accounts and textbooks. The part of the mural shown here is called Division of the Barrios/Chavez
Ravine. It depicts two events from the 1950s: the building of freeway through poor. Latino
neighborhoods, a process that destroyed the neighborhoods but enabled white sub-urban motorists
to commute by car to their jobs in the city. Chavez Ravine is the neighborhood in which the Dodger’s
Stadium was built despite the protests of local residents. Although developers and city officials often
proclaim that such projects benefit local areas, the residents of Chavez Ravine were forced to
evacuate their houses and never received adequate compensation for the destruction of their
homes and neighborhood.

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  What is the dominant ideology that, Baca is challenging here? How does her subject matter
work to critique that ideology?
 In this particular frame from the mural, how are people of color being oppressed? How does
the mural emphasize this visually? What is the dominant ideology about projects such as
thruways and baseball stadiums? How are the neighborhood people represented here as
protesting this ideology?
 How does mural format, which is large-scale and public, help Baca convey her message?
(Think about the different effect this imagery would have if it were displayed in a museum, a
restricted space that not everyone knows about or feels comfortable entering.)
 Why present history in pictures? Why is this an effective form of retelling a history in this
neighborhood? (Think about issues of literacy, multilingualism, authorship, access to books,
etc.)

Baca developed an innovative working method for this project, collaborating on the mural with
dozens of young people from the neighborhood. She wanted it to be a neighborhood peace,
something everyone could take pride in, even as it provided work and valuable working experience
in a neighborhood troubled by high unemployment rates among teenagers. A materialist art
historian might ask these kinds of questions about mural:

 How does Baca’s working method challenge prevailing ideologies about artists (such as the
idea of the solitary genius creating art for art’s sake)?
 How does her working method enhance the impact of her imagery?
 What are the economic effects of her working method on surrounding community?
 What is the ideological impact of her working method? Do helpers think differently about
such issues as their social status (or race or gender) after participating in the creation of his
mural?

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 Baca is working in the great tradition of the Mexican muralist – artists such as Diego Rivera
(1886-1957) and lose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), who saw mural art as a way to challenge
society and forge a new class of consciousness among workers and farmers. In framing a Marxist
/materialist analysis of her work, you may want to look at some of the studies of muralist that focus
on these kinds of ideological issues, such as Anthony Lee’s Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical
Politics, and San Francisco’s Public Mural (1999). You could also use a theorist such as Adorno to
frame your analysis, since Baca’s working method – getting the neighborhood involved and giving
young people cultural and economic alternatives – resonates with his critique of capitalist society.