East German Art History and Global Marxisms = Selva, vol. 5

Selva, 2024

scholars in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) were not just advocates for the interests of the working class. After all, as he explained in his 1966 Principles and Methods of a Marxist Kunstwissenschaft, the goals of this revolutionary class now "are entirely in line with those of the overwhelming majority of people for the first time. Therefore, no more deception or self-deception, no more false theory is necessary… Consequently, the path is finally free to the full and objective truth that seems to serve no interests at all but is actually in the interest of all." 1 The 1963 party program of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) stated that East German society, as a dictatorship of the proletariat on the path to developed socialism, had finally reached the stage of fundamentally transforming the ideological superstructure. Therefore, it was also on the verge of consummating the socialist cultural revolution that necessarily followed the implementation of socialist production relations. 2 With these theoretical assumptions in the air, it must have seemed inevitable that the discipline of art history would also need to radically reassess its questions, methods, and purposes. After all, art history was doubly embedded within the ideological superstructureas both a scientific discipline and an interpretative authority on art. Given the historical context, there was no question that such a revision had to be undertaken from a Marxist perspective. However, it was not possible simply to adopt existing art historical concepts that

2019

Published by Böhlau Verlag as vol. 9 in the series ʻDas östliche Europa: Kunst- und Kulturgeschichteʼ in 2019. Eds. Krista Kodres, Kristina Jõekalda, Michaela Marek. Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag. 280 pp. /// How did the Eastern European and Soviet states write their respective histories of art and architecture during 1940s–1960s? The fourteen articles in this book address both the Stalinist period and the Khrushchev Thaw, when the Marxist-Leninist discourse on art history was ʻinventedʼ and refined. Although this discourse was inevitably ʻSovietizedʼ in a process dictated from Moscow, a variety of distinct interpretations emerged from across the Soviet bloc in the light of local traditions, cultural politics and decisions of individual authors. Even if the new ʻofficialʼ discourse often left space open for national concerns, it also gave rise to a countermovement in response to the aggressive ideologization of art and the preeminence assigned to (Socialist) Realist aesthetics.

Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis, 2019

This article aims to explore the challenges the art produced for and under the national socialist regime between 1933 and 1945 poses for the field of art history in Germany. It does so by outlining recent developments in the research on this topic and on the presentation of those artworks in German museums. These developments will be contextualized by a discussion of “Degenerate Art” as a political rather than an aesthetic phenomenon and the construction of the binary opposition of “Degenerate Art” and national socialist art in the history of the field of German art history. Currently a shift in the discipline is taking place, employing a cultural historical approach to deal with the art and art politics of National Socialism which leads to more differentiated research that even enters the institution of the art museum.

2021

The art historiography of Central and Eastern Europe under socialism laid the foundations for a historiographical tradition that has influenced art historical practices in the area up to the present day. Yet this long-neglected research topic has only recently begun to attract the scholarly attention it deserves. Confirming the relevance of this fact, critical reflection on the present state of the discipline runs as a common thread through most of the thirteen contributions in the conference volume A Socialist Realist History? Writing Art History in the PostWar Decades edited by Krista Kodres, Kristina Jõekalda, and the late Michaela Marek. 1 Focused on the 1950s and 1960s, the volume covers the formative years of Socialist art history, when the canon of its epistemic interests, subjects of study, and methodology were contrived. During the decades to follow, scholars of socialist Central and Eastern Europe discussed and partially corrected the canon, but never truly challenged it in its core up until the dissolution of state socialism. The main constraint to the development of art historiography under socialism was, of course, its required theoretical grounding in Marxism-Leninism. In studying how art historians in socialist Central and Eastern Europe translated this theoretical grounding into their scholarly practice, the volume makes an important contribution to the growing research on art historiography in that region. This research has mainly consisted of case studies on local art history writing in the 19th and early 20th centuries, 2 or analyses of specific topics 3 , without seeking to provide

RIHA Journal, 2020

The article sets out to investigate the fundamental problem for the methodology of postwar German art history, namely, the unavoidable fusion of two markedly different perspectives, i.e., those of East and West Germany, into a coherent narrative. The reconstruction of key exhibitions and controversies sparked by East German art, in 1989 and beyond, suggests that the revision of the canon of art history may be faced with greater challenges whenever adopting the perspective of the close Other (political or ideological), rather than that of a remote Other (ethnic or cultural). The incorporation of the close Other into a uniform narrative on art history can be a moot point, most notably in those cases where the western concept of art calls for a necessary restatement, and one's identity needs to be critically redefined in the process. This is best exemplified by what happened in Germany after 1989.

Notebook for Art, Theory and Related Zones, 2020

Any attempt to define Marxism as an art historical methodology is complicated by the post-communist predicament. This study aims to clear the way for a fresh analysis and provides the first ever survey of possible Marxist approaches that peaked between the 1940s and 1970s. It is based on the premise that because of the inherently materialist character of visual art, “art history” cannot be confounded with aesthetics or the philosophy and theory of art, and should also be distinguished from the history of architecture. Marxist theory and methodology thus cannot be simply extended to art history from the texts by Marx, Engels, Lenin and other theoreticians who dealt mainly with literature and general esthetics. In this respect, Marxism proves to be largely incompatible with the history of art that is based on the Eurocentric tradition of “high art” intrinsically linked with the elites. This on-line content is the English translation of an article published in the print journal Notebook for Art, Theory and Related Zones. The original was published as: Milena BARTLOVÁ, «Marxistické dějiny umění: direktivní model, nebo radikální inspirace?», Sešit pro umění, teorii a příbuzné zóny, 2020, no. 29, p. 11—37. Translated from the Czech by Phil Jones.“

Selva, special issue, "East German Art History and Global Marxisms", 2024

Introduction to our co-edited special issue of Selva, "East German Art History and Global Marxisms." Available open access here: https://selvajournal.org/article/our-difficult-beautiful-subject/

Conference on art historical writing during the early Soviet era (27–29 October, Tallinn) organised by the research team of the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture, Estonian Academy of Arts, “Historicizing art: Knowledge production in art history in Estonia amidst changing ideologies and disciplinary developments“. The English-language conference comprises speakers from Europe, Russia and America. The programme includes both historiographical and theoretical accounts on the periodisation and writing of the history of art and architecture in the former Soviet Union and its satellite states. Programme, registration and all relevant data via http://www.artun.ee/en/x/conference-art-history-and-socialisms.