Social History of Art, Volume 1

From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages

Arnold Hauser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134637591
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunstgeschichte

First published in 1951 Arnold Hausers commanding work presents an account of the development and meaning of art from its origins in the Stone Age through to the Film Age. Exploring the interaction between art and society, Hauser effectively details social and historical movements and sketches the frameworks in which visual art is produced.

This new edition provides an excellent introduction to the work of Arnold Hauser. In his general introduction to The Social History of Art, Jonathan Harris asseses the importance of the work for contemporary art history and visual culture. In addition, an introduction to each volume provides a synopsis of Hausers narrative and serves as a critical guide to the text, identifying major themes, trends and arguments.

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME I

Jonathan Harris

Content and concepts

Hauser's first volume deals with the beginnings of human settlement in paleolithic or ‘Stone Age’ times and progresses—breathlessly, in about 250 pages—up to the end of the Middle Ages. He includes discussion on the nature and place of art in the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Stone Ages, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Cretan, Greek and Roman times. The second half of the volume divides the notoriously homogenized Middle Ages into three distinct historical periods. Needless to say, the truncation and brevity of treatment, in all respects, is inevitable, though, in comparison with later volumes, the number of illustrations of ‘ancient’ art (that is, everything before the Middle Ages) is reasonably helpful. Because, as previously noted, Hauser never refers to any specific illustrations bound with his text, the reader is encouraged to begin the habit of flicking back and forth from text to pictures, as many of his major arguments correlating style and socio-economic development are exemplified. Hauser's end notes, as a glance indicates, reference sources which now appear almost archaic themselves—the vast bulk published before 1940 and many in the late-nineteenth century. Most of them are the work of middle-European scholars and indicate Hauser's own genesis and heritage in an art and cultural history if not specifically ‘Marxist’, then certainly committed to the general belief that all the elements of human society, including its manifest forms and means of visual and semantic communication, necessarily share a commonality and interdependence, at the levels of their material production and consumption.

The purpose of this introduction to the first volume is to suggest a path through the text and signposts along the way to major themes, claims and problems. It does not, however, provide a comprehensive synopsis of Hauser's narrative. Rather it offers a set of contexts—historical, political, intellectual—for interpreting its shape and assessing its value, for Hauser's text, like that of the artworks he discusses, is an artefact produced in a particular time and place, and for specific reasons. Hauser's descriptions and analyses often depend upon a set of key concepts whose meaning and significance he usually takes for granted. Notions of ‘class’ and ‘class interests’, of ‘ideologies’ or ‘value-systems’ and of ‘culture’ and ‘society’ are four of the most important. The ideas of ‘class’ and ‘class struggle’ must for Hauser become significant within the earliest societies because they are an essential component of Marxism's claim to offer the most profound understanding of the determinants of all human history. By the ‘new’ Stone Age, then, according to Hauser, differentiation of society into ‘strata and classes, privileged and under-privileged, exploiters and exploited’ (vol. I: p. 9) has already taken place. From the beginning of his first section on the ‘old’ Stone Age, however, he also assumes that ‘art’ is the most applicable and obvious term to use to describe the kinds of cultural products—paintings on dwelling walls, pots and all other decorative, functional or ‘magical’ images or artefacts—made by human beings. While he recognizes that early human societies were extremely ‘simple’ in organization compared with later ones and that ‘class’ could not mean the same thing in both, his perennial and unexamined use of ‘art’ is analytically indefensible. The term simply carries with it too many meanings generated only in the past three or four centuries, and therefore confuses, rather than clarifies the status and purpose of the earliest human images and artefacts.

Hauser's notion and use of the category of ‘ideology’, like class, is crucial, though unlike that developed by Marxists influenced by structuralist ideas in the 1960s, its definition remains unclear and relatively uncomplicated.¹ Throughout his account he maintains that ideas and values are straightforwardly ‘class-specific’, that is, that they reflect or embody the interests of certain social groups—though he understands that different classes, confusingly, may some-times adopt similar, or even identical, ‘world-views’ or ‘value-systems’, such as Christianity in the late Roman period. He argues that even in the ‘old’ Stone Age a kind of ‘primitive individualism’ was already in existence, conditioned, he claims, by lack of belief in gods, or in a world and life beyond death (vol. I: pp. 3–4). By the time of the complex society of Egypt's New Kingdom, characterized by division of power and labour, Hauser claims an extensive stratification of interests has occurred. Artists within it, he contends, already belonging to the ‘higher social classes’, developed a ‘comparatively advanced class-consciousness’ (vol. I: p. 28). Though certainly not interested particularly in the place of woman as an identifiable ‘social class’ of their own (a pressing concern of 1970s feminist-socialists), Hauser is attentive to aspects of their status within the ancient societies, and in his discussion of the theme of love in Greek poetry claims that Euripides's saga of the heroine Medea includes, perhaps for the first time, ‘something like a domestic drama of married life’ (vol. I: p. 84). In addition to this an extended and interesting discussion of gender takes place in a later section on chivalric culture and the ‘cult of love’ in the Gothic period (vol. I: pp. 175–210).

Hauser's text, though radically selective in terms of visual art discussed, ranges widely beyond this facet of culture to include extensive discussions of poetry, prose, philosophy, and—in later volumes—drama, music, opera and, finally, film. The Social History of Art may also be seen, therefore, as a ‘history of ideas’ and even contains the basis of a kind of historical ‘cultural studies’, though it is sometimes tempting to read much of the discussion as ‘back-ground’ to the account of visual art's development. It is possible, however, to discern an emergent dualism in Hauser's argument which continually sets ‘art’ (as an ahistorical category or ‘common sense’ reality) against an increasingly constricting and complicating ‘culture’ or ‘society’, although he is, of course, trying specifically to show the interpenetration and interdependence of these phenomena. Several times in the first volume, though, Hauser appears to equate ‘culture’ with a rigidification of artistic values and practices, claiming to find such a development in the ‘new’ Stone Age (vol. I: p. 14), intensified later in the aristocratic social orders of Egypt and Mesopotamia (vol. I: p. 45), and later in the homogeneity and self-contained outlook found in the ‘entirely “authoritarian and coercive culture”’ of the Romanesque (vol. I: p. 165).

As important to Hauser's argument as the notion that styles in art are necessarily related to the ideologies or world-views of particular social classes, is his belief that all styles are developmentally linked. Like classes in history, styles, such as that which he calls ‘prehistoric naturalism’ (vol. I: pp. 1–2), make sense—in fact become substantively intelligible—only in relation to what has come before and what will follow. He is careful, however, not to argue that a clear and uni-directional ‘progression’ (connoting ‘improvement’) takes place in such stylistic change. The relationship of style to class, in increasingly complex societies, is too opaque for such a judgement or belief to be possible or necessary. Stone Age cultures are particularly important for the sociology of art, he claims, though, because their art can be linked much more unambiguously to social conditions, in comparison with ‘later cultures in which forms that have already become partially ossified are dragged along from an earlier age and are often amalgamated undistinguishably with the new and still vital forms’ (vol. I: pp. 20–1) Developments in social class formation and struggle, in contrast, because they are so central to Marxism's understanding of history and the future of society, are, for Hauser, necessarily ‘progressive’, leading, he believes, to the creation of the modern proletariat which has the potential to usher in socialism.

The first stylistic change in art occurs, Hauser says, when ‘old’ Stone Age ‘naturalism’ is replaced by the ‘geometric stylization’ of the ‘new’ Stone Age. This change accompanies the shift from a hunting-based society to an agrarian one, in which the need (and capacity) to depict, for instance, ‘actual’ deer, that were needed for food and clothing, began to disappear (vol. I: pp. 8–12). Hauser equates ‘naturalism’ with the depiction of ‘empirical reality’ and he contrasts this with a deliberate abstraction and simplification of visual form. Between the ‘new’ Stone Age and the end of the ancient period with the decline of the Roman empire, art will oscillate many times, he claims, between the attempt to depict ‘empirical reality’ and to stylize and simplify. This ‘oscillation’ implies no sense of progress or improvement, although Hauser says that skills and aptitudes at times sometimes are actually lost in history, and the implication of this is surely that the occurrence of such incapacity is regressive. Somewhat confusingly, as we have become conditioned to understanding some sequences of stylistic development as ‘necessary’ and ‘progressive’ (a ‘teleological’ view Hauser puts down to nineteenth-century views of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment), terms such as ‘baroque’ or ‘rococo’ or ‘impressionist’, normally associated only with post-sixteenth-century culture, he will use to describe phases of ancient art (for example, ‘late Roman impressionist’ wall-painting), a usage which scrambles the received art-historical narrative of phase-development.

Hauser's account of ‘naturalism’ and its relationship to the culture and society of the earliest peoples is open to serious dispute on many grounds. If his use of ‘art’ to describe their visual representations and artefacts is misleading analytically and historically (after all, the term only emerged with its modern meanings in the Renaissance), then his account of the relationship between the putative perceptions of Stone Age people and their ability to represent these visually and semantically is based on sheer unevidenced presupposition and tautology (for example, ‘the Paleolithic artist still paints what he actually sees…’, vol. I: p. 3). Later research published on visual perception and its relation to both cognition and graphic representational capacities has rendered Hauser's account naive and highly unreliable.² He also attempts to draw a comparison between Stone Age art and the ‘artistic production of comtemporary primitive races’, claiming similar social and cultural conditions, in which ‘everything is still bound up directly with actual life, where there are still no autonomous forms and no differences in principles between the old and the new, between tradition and modernity…’ (vol. I: p. 21). Predictably, he suggests that there are substantive links between the ‘unity of visual perception’ characteristic of such ‘primitivism’ and the expressionism of modern art achieved ‘only after a century long struggle’ (vol. I: p. 3).These assumptions and evaluations, stock-in-trade of an influential tradition of modernist art history, based jointly on anthropological idealizations and poor or non-existent scholarship, reveal Hauser's conventional European ethnocentrism.³ The dogmatism and crudity of these assertions—however ‘well-intentioned’, given Hauser's Marxist and therefore presumably anti-imperialist perspective—unhappily accompany his declaratory tone in the first volume, though he begins to ask serious questions about methods in art history when he approaches, for instance, the issue of the meaning of the so-called ‘gothic’ conception of art developed in the late period of the Middle Ages (vol. I: p. 175).

Values and modes of evaluation

Hauser's reliance on the unexamined term ‘art’ throughout his study is symptomatic of his belief in a transcendent and ‘spiritual’ core to human life. The ‘highest’ art produced throughout history embodies and signifies, he believes, this potential for creativity and depth of expression. Though art is always the product of particular societies, necessarily conditioned by specific economic and social relations between classes, its achievement can symbolize values and meanings true of all people at all times. Though this view would be regarded as a mystification by many adherents of New Art History, many earlier Marxists had shared Hauser's ‘humanist’ view, though perhaps not expressed it so clearly and often.

Hauser is definitive on this judgement at many points in his account. The ‘aesthetic quality’ of a work, he remarks in a discussion of culture in ancient oriental societies, has little or nothing to do with ‘the alternative presented by political freedom and compulsion’ (vol. I: p. 25). Some of the ‘most magnificent works of art’, he claims, originated precisely in the most totalitarian, illiberal societies, such as those in Egypt and Mesopotamia (vol. I: p. 24). Though there was no urge to ‘express or communicate aesthetic emotion’ in the ‘old’ Stone Age, he contends, without providing any definition of this term or any evidence (vol. I: p. 6), by the sixth and seventh centuries BC artistic forms had become ‘independent’, ‘purposeless’, and ‘to some extent autonomous’, functioning as ‘spiritual resources’ (vol. I: p. 69). ‘Art for art's sake’, then, normally associated only with the development of modern art in the late nineteenth century, has already emerged, Hauser claims, hundreds of years even before the Dark Ages. The quality of great art, he goes on to say, can not be deduced from a ‘simple sociological recipe’; the most sociological study can do is ‘trace some elements in the work of art back to their origin’ (vol. I: p. 81).

Hauser's assertions about the ‘best’ art from the past share the same lack of explanation as his stipulations on what he regards as the ‘average’ or ‘mediocre’: Cretan ‘artistic means are too complaisant and obvious to leave behind a deep and lasting impression’ (vol. I: p. 47); peasant art in the Dipylon style of Attica between 900 and 700 BC degenerated into a ‘pseudo-tectonic decoration’ (vol. I: p. 59); while culture generally, in the period after the Barbarian invasions in the West, ‘sank to a low-water mark unknown in classical antiquity and remained unproductive for centuries’ (vol. I: p. 132). Even if one accepts the partial mitigation that Hauser could not afford space to defend all these judgements properly, the rhetorical tone he adopts suggests a reluctance to submit these evaluations to outside scrutiny. His authoritative voice becomes authoritarian at many points, his scholarly superiority presented as unassailable. Along with his orthodox reproduction of the canon, his non-reflexive use of most traditional art historical terminology, Hauser's belief in Great Art and its essential ineffability identifies him much more with the traditional élitism of art history than against it.

These aesthetic judgements appear to have little or nothing to do with the correlations between style and socio-economics that constitute Hauser's Marxist method. The activities of analysis and evaluation in Hauser inhabit antinomic, unconnected worlds, it often seems. Yet his restatement of the canon of great artworks, with their abstracted stylistic characteristics, are the ones chosen for this work of correlation, the ones regarded as worthy of consideration in the first place. Though ancient history for Hauser is the development of, and oscillation between, styles of art and the related modes of socio-economic organization in which they have been produced, he establishes certain features in culture as virtually permanent elements of this, and all subsequent history. For instance, by the end of the Paleolithic Age, he claims, all three basic forms of pictorial representation—the imitative (naturalistic), the informative (pictographic sign) and the decorative (abstract ornament)—have developed, and will have varying presences in culture until the twentieth century (vol. I: p. 15). Style nominations usually associated with post-Renaissance art, as noted, he asserts, may also be applied, adjectively, to much earlier culture—so, for instance, Cretan court-based art is described as having a ‘rococo’ element (vol. I: p. 46), Hellenistic art as having baroque, rococo and classicistic phases (vol. I: p. 94), while the stylistic ideals of gothic art—‘truth to nature and depth of feeling, sensuousness and sensitivity’—continue, he says, to be powerfully active in the modern art of the early twentieth century (vol. I: p. 175). Hauser's view of great art's ‘transhistorical’—if not ‘superhistorical’—character is summed up in his statement, while discussing the epic Greek poets, that every ‘cultural epoch has its own Homer, its own “Nibelungenlied” and “Chanson de Roland”’ (vol. I: p. 151).

Such a view, implying belief in the undeniable permanencies of cultural value, the transcendence of the human spirit and mystical nature of creativity, constantly finds a place within the extensive accounts of the embeddedness of artistic style in societal organization which constitute the bulk of Hauser's account. These range from the naturalism of the art of the ‘new’ Stone Age that Hauser relates to the development of ‘individualistic and anarchistic social patterns’ (vol. I: p. 16) to the ‘less changeable, less dynamic character’ of the art of Mesopotamia, compared with that of Egypt, which he finds hard to understand given the former society's outward-going and dynamic trade and finance-based economy (vol. I: p. 42). Hauser stresses difficulties of correlation as well as the identification of clear relationships, and the greater value of his account perhaps lies in these problematizations which become increasingly common and more profound. For instance, one such difficult problem is, he says, the fact that ‘the liberalism and individualism of democracy would seem to be incompatible with the severity and regularity of the classical style’ found in Greek society (vol. I: pp. 72–3). The meanings of ‘classicism’ will go on to preoccupy Hauser intermittently for most of his account, as it is a ‘style’ or set of motifs constantly returned to, and manipulated, by many social groups in different historically specific societies, most notably of all, perhaps, that in which the French Revolution occurred.

The development of societies characterized as ‘democratic’, in fact, presents a major challenge, he says, to the sociology and social history of art, for it is within such complex and differentiated cultures that ‘individualism and community spirit can no longer be looked upon as alternatives but are seen to be indissolubly connected. In this complex condition of things, the correct sociological estimation of stylistic factors in art becomes more difficult’ (vol. I: p. 73). Hauser, however, must offer a set of answers, as well as an acknowledgement of the range of analytic difficulties encountered in correlating art and socio-economic development. His declarative and authoritative tone in these passages represents that of the Marxist confident in his analytic protocols and epistemological certitudes. As ‘rhetoric’, however—that is, a means of arguing convincingly—these interpretations of the socially shaped nature of art generally share the same stipulatory character as his summary judgements on aesthetic quality. Both sets of statements are ‘notificatory’ rather than ‘interrogative’; we are required to ‘believe’ instead of invited to ‘consider’. Usually pitched at a high level of abstraction and with cursory or no reference to specific empirical materials, Hauser's claims are presented as truths rather than carefully evidenced arguments. Here are some examples:

The Neolithic peasant no longer needs the hunter's sharp senses; his sensitivity and gifts o...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF ART
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• General introduction
• Introduction to volume I
• I Prehistoric times
• II Ancient-Oriental urban cultures
• III Greece and Rome
• IV The Middle Ages
• Notes
• Index