DOI issue:
Nr. 2
DOI article:Murawska-Muthesius, Katarzyna: How the West corroborated socialist realism in the East: Fougeron, Taslitzky and Picasso in Warsaw
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.49349#0317
How the West corroborated Socialist Realism in the East
307
3. Gabriele Mucchi, The Death of a Worker, 1950, 70 x 100 cm,
Warsaw, The National Museum
and uncritical art history, associated then by and large with the Courtauld Institute, was
now accused of being elitist and connoisseurial, of not reaching beyond 'formalist analy-
sis and symbol hunting'.9 Subscribing uncritically to the modernist belief in the autonomy
of art and universality of aesthetic value, it was focused almost entirely on the Middle
Ages in Western Europe and the art of Italian Renaissance. Even where modernism and
contemporary art were included, they were reduced to the familiar body of works of the
western canon.
By re-discovering and expanding methods of materialist and social analysis which had
been applied earlier by Walter Benjamin, Meyer Schapiro, Friedrich Antal and Arnold
Hauser, in Britain radical Marxist and social art historians of the 1970s and the 1980s were
demystifying art as a specific kind of labour. This approach treated the artist as a producer
conditioned by his or her social position, and it involved examining the artwork as a social
product, and thus as a kind of commodity, endowed with arbitrarily assessed exchange
value which had only been mystified as aesthetic value by the 'Old Art History' discourse.
Another major task, posed under the stimulus of feminist rather than Marxist movements,
was a massive expansion of the boundaries of the discipline, reaching far beyond the
limited range of masterpieces into the widest sphere of visual culture, to include photogra-
phy and the new media, as well as the marginalised art made by women and ethnic minor-
ities. Finally, even more important was the process of rethinking the discipline itself,
leading to the questioning of its axiological premises, and its ambiguous relation to the
discourse of power, of patriarchy, and colonialism. All in all, the revolt initiated by the
9 T.J. CLARK, The Conditions of Artistic Creativity, 'Times Literary Supplement', 1974, 24th May, pp. 561-2; also
HARRIS, The New Art History ..., op. cit., pp. 8-9.
307
3. Gabriele Mucchi, The Death of a Worker, 1950, 70 x 100 cm,
Warsaw, The National Museum
and uncritical art history, associated then by and large with the Courtauld Institute, was
now accused of being elitist and connoisseurial, of not reaching beyond 'formalist analy-
sis and symbol hunting'.9 Subscribing uncritically to the modernist belief in the autonomy
of art and universality of aesthetic value, it was focused almost entirely on the Middle
Ages in Western Europe and the art of Italian Renaissance. Even where modernism and
contemporary art were included, they were reduced to the familiar body of works of the
western canon.
By re-discovering and expanding methods of materialist and social analysis which had
been applied earlier by Walter Benjamin, Meyer Schapiro, Friedrich Antal and Arnold
Hauser, in Britain radical Marxist and social art historians of the 1970s and the 1980s were
demystifying art as a specific kind of labour. This approach treated the artist as a producer
conditioned by his or her social position, and it involved examining the artwork as a social
product, and thus as a kind of commodity, endowed with arbitrarily assessed exchange
value which had only been mystified as aesthetic value by the 'Old Art History' discourse.
Another major task, posed under the stimulus of feminist rather than Marxist movements,
was a massive expansion of the boundaries of the discipline, reaching far beyond the
limited range of masterpieces into the widest sphere of visual culture, to include photogra-
phy and the new media, as well as the marginalised art made by women and ethnic minor-
ities. Finally, even more important was the process of rethinking the discipline itself,
leading to the questioning of its axiological premises, and its ambiguous relation to the
discourse of power, of patriarchy, and colonialism. All in all, the revolt initiated by the
9 T.J. CLARK, The Conditions of Artistic Creativity, 'Times Literary Supplement', 1974, 24th May, pp. 561-2; also
HARRIS, The New Art History ..., op. cit., pp. 8-9.