1st Edition

The Routledge Companion to Marxisms in Art History

Edited By Tijen Tunalı, Brian Winkenweder Copyright 2025
534 Pages 40 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

534 Pages 40 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

534 Pages 40 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This companion is an essential contribution to the study of historical materialism in general and the social history of art in particular. Each chapter in the collection focuses on a key figure, concept or historical epoch. Increasingly, scholars adopt an array of Marxist methods intertwined with a host of other theoretical practices, particularly the historiography of key issues regarding... Read more

Introduction

Tijen Tunali and Brian Winkenweder

 

PART 1 Key Figures

1. Karl Marx’s 1857 “Introduction” to the Grundrisse and the Social History of Art

Dominic Rahtz

2. Arnold Hauser: The Social History of Art and Beyond

Jim Berryman

3. Ugly and Out of Sight: Reconsidering the Irrational in Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory

Julian Adoff 

4. Meyer Schapiro and the Value of Modern Art

Jody Patterson

5. Georg Lukács: Marxism and Politics of Form

Alexander Potts 

6. Henri Lefebvre and Marxist Art History

Paul B. Jaskot

7. Herbert Marcuse’s “Repressive Desublimation” and Richard Hamilton’s “Healthy Vigor"

Brian Winkenweder

8. Guy Debord and Marxist Art History

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

9. Different Marxist Histories of Art Post-1968: T.J. Clark and O.K. Werckmeister

Warren Carter

PART 2 Key Terms

 10. Concepts of Labor in Marxist Art History

Dave Beech

11. “Time’s Carcass”: Art History, Capitalism and Temporality

Steve Edwards

12. Artistic Use Value: Art, Aesthetics, Culture and the Commons

Pascal Gielen

13. Deskilling

Kim Charnley

14. Romantic Anticapitalism

Andrew Hemingway

15. Marxism, Feminism and Art History

Angela Dimitrakaki

16. Do It Yourself: Objective Form, Territory of Critical Struggle

Luiz Renato Martins

 

PART 3 Marxisms Applied

 

17.  Magritte, Marxism, Modern Art

Sandra Zalman

18. “No Environment” Modernism: Harold Rosenberg’s Theory of Uneven and Combined Development

E.C. Feiss

19. Bureaucracy and Charisma: Chris Burden and the Figure of the University Artist

Allison Myers

20. Equipo Comunicacion: Marxism, Avant-garde and a Collective Publishing Venture for Late Francoism to the Spanish Transition (1969-1979)

Paula Barreiro López and Juan Albarrán Diego

21. Affect, Attachment, and Loss: The Material Objects of Art History and Psychoanalysis

Lynn M. Somers

22. Of Rocks and Phantasmatic Hard Places: Art Criticism in the 1970s and 1980s

Craig Peariso

23. Soviet Thaw-era Marxism: Revision of Stalin-era Discourse on Aesthetics and Art History

Krista Kodres

24. Bogdanov, Prolekult, and Working-Class Culture in Revolutionary Russia

Grant Kester

25. Realism and the Politics of Emancipation in the 1920s and 1930s Yugoslavia

Bojana Videkanic

26. How to Follow Marx with Class? Transformation and Marxist Analysis of Post-Communist Art in a Post-Communist Europe

Magdalena Radomska

 27. Invisible Art Work, or Until When Will We Reproduce the Exploitation of Labor in the Arts?

Katja Praznik

28. Contemporary Art and the Neoliberal Global Art World: The People’s Republic of China and Palestine as Exemplars

Jonathan Harris

29. Museums After Value-Form Theory

Nizan Shaked 

30. The Vision and Practice of Zapatismo and the Zapatista Murals in Chiapas

Tijen Tunali

PART 4 Marxist Methods in the Digital Age

31. The Courbet Conundrum, and the Phantom Archive of Activist Art

Gregory Sholette

32. Intermediality in Action: Tracing Invisible Processes in Socio-Critical Video Art

Helen Westgeest

33. The Visual Culture of Gaming

Jamie Woodcock

34. Speculation

Andrew Murray

Biography

Tijen Tunalı is a research fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies at Aarhus University.

Brian Winkenweder is Professor of Art History and Chair of the Art Department at Linfield University.