Festivals and Proletarian Art under the Tsars and the Provisional Government

2018 ◽  
pp. 58-91
Keyword(s):  
Proletarian Art

Lu Märten: An Introduction to Four Texts

October ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 3-14
Author(s):  
Jenny Nachtigall ◽  
Kerstin Stakemeier
Keyword(s):  
Labor Conditions ◽  
The Core ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Full Life ◽  
Proletarian Art ◽  
Life Work

Abstract This article presents an introduction to four texts that the German feminist-materialist art historian Lu Märten (1879–1970) published between 1903 and 1928. It outlines some of the major concepts of and contexts for this unduly neglected thinker. Her writings covered a wide terrain that spanned studies on the labor conditions of female artists, polemics against “proletarian art,” and a monist, rather than dialectical, view on film, art, and what she called the “full life-work of a human.” At the core of her multiple endeavors was the demand for remaking the history of art as a history of form that is more capacious than art's institutionalized Western field. Situating Märten's work in historical debates (e.g., on Marxist aesthetics in the 1930s), the introduction also points to the new legibility that her nonaligned materialism gains with the material turn in the humanities.

Lu Märten: Four Texts

October ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 15-34
Author(s):  
Lu Märten
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Art History ◽  
Industrial Age ◽  
The Social ◽  
Productive Labor ◽  
Feminist Perspectives ◽  
Proletarian Art ◽  
Radio Broadcast ◽  
Social Collective ◽  
Life Work

Abstract This article collects four texts written by German feminist-materialist art historian Lu Märten (1879–1970): “Artistic Aspects of Labor in Old and New Times” Published in 1903 in the social-democratic journal Die Zeit at a time when Märten dedicated the majority of her writings on form to feminist perspectives on housing and reproduction. It is her first systematic essay on what will become a central concern of her own “life-work,” namely, the question of how to break open the capitalized division between “productive labor” and what Märten calls “social-personal” work. Märten thus sketches an understanding of labor outside of its capitalist determinations and notions of progressive temporality. Essence and Transformation of Forms (Arts) This text appeared in 1924 in the journal Arbeiterliteratur. Its immediate objective was to explain the aim of her similarly titled book to a proletarian audience. In this short summary, Märten emphasizes the importance of ethnography for her project. Rather than isolating forms from their social surroundings, as was traditional in art history, the practice of viewing forms ethnographically allows their origins to be seen in a broader framework of social-collective materialities and vital needs. Märten argues that this shift in perspective could be an aid de-fetishizing workerss relationships with the object world. “Art and Proletariat” This was first published in 1925 in Franz Pfemfert's Die Aktion and later that year reprinted in Czech translation in Pásmo, a magazine run by the revolutionary artist collective Devětsil. The article argues that the notion of “proletarian art” is politically and systematically pointless given that “art” is merely the historically specific, impoverished manifestation of form under the conditions of industrial capitalism. In place of art, Märten draws on the notion of “classless form” in order to imagine a monist state of form beyond the divisions of class, gender, and species. “Workers and Film” Written in 1928, this text was not printed during Märten's lifetime, instead serving as a script for a radio broadcast, as was the case for most of her published and unpublished texts on film. Almost a decade before Walter Benjamin's Artwork essay (1936), Märten's “Workers and Film,” along with numerous other articles and radio broadcasts, addressed strikingly similar questions, yet under profoundly different premises. In Märten's synthetic understanding of a monist material culture of people and things, film promised to actualize a technologically mediated monism for the industrial age.

From the Avant-Garde to “Proletarian Art”

Art Journal ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-45
Author(s):  
Oliver A. I. Botar
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
Proletarian Art

scholarly journals FORMATION OF THE NEW HERO IMAGE IN RUSSIAN ART OF THE 1920’S AND 1930’S

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 88-103
Author(s):  
Victor V. Slepukhin
Keyword(s):  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Russian Art ◽  
Artistic Process ◽  
Rural Workers ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
New Man ◽  
Plastic Arts ◽  
Proletarian Art ◽  
The Ideal

The art of the Soviet era attracts more and more attention of researchers and the public year by year. The exhibitions held over the past decades in Russia and abroad, the published monographs dedicated to works of art of the era and particular artists, the international creative contacts in cultural field — all of that has introduced previously unknown works into art history studies, which has allowed to re-evaluate the objectives and tasks of the art of the period and the development of the artistic process in general. That is why it is of great interest to study the ways the plastic arts formed and developed in the 1920’s and 1930’s. The 1917 revolution in its foundations had not just a change in social and political reality, but also a change in the very essence of man. The new era demanded a new hero, shaped his appearance in its works. The soviet man, thought of as a new man, became a fundamentally new object of art. If the 1920’s became the time of the search in proletarian art and the flourishing of avant-gardism, then in the 1930’s the objective of art in building the lifeworld of a new man began to be understood much narrower and stricter, and this Man who perceives art began to be described as a “normal” (that is, average, “ordinary”) consumer of cultural tradition. The “New Man” in the plastic arts of the 1920’s and 1930’s was formed as the new hero of society; avant-garde artists sought his originality in the images of generalized and abstract aviators, peasants, women; artists of socialist realism began to form the images of “typical” heroes of the time (military men, athletes, rural workers, scientists) as new “Renaissance people”, equally ready for work and defense. At the same time, two main tendencies, two directions that correspond to the two tasks of socialist realism, clearly lie in the image of the “new” Soviet man: the depiction of reality (that is, the new Soviet man that really exists) and the depiction of the ideal (that is, the ideal man).

In Anxious Celebration: Lewis Hine's Men at Work

Prospects ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 319-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Factory Worker ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Proletarian Art

In a letter to the radical periodical, the New Masses, in October of 1930, one reader requested more satire from the artists who published in its pages, art with “greater revolutionary purpose.” The drawings of an artist like Louis Lozowick, Vern Jessup complained, were suspiciously ambiguous: “In the New Masses they're proletarian art. What do you call them when they appear in the bourgeois business magazines, as they do?” Louis Lozowick, a Russian-American avant-garde painter and a contributing editor of the New Masses, rose immediately to the challenge. In a letter of response in the December, 1930 issue, entitled, “What Should Revolutionary Artists Do Now?” he noted that leftist artists and writers go to capitalist publications and galleries with the same regularity (and uncertainty) as workers go to shops and factories — and for the same reasons. One might ask a revolutionary artist to refuse all collaboration with capitalist institutions and starve to death with his revolutionary conscience immaculate. Or one might ask him to contribute to the revolutionary movement with whatever means at his command while conceding the inevitability (as we do in the case of the factory worker) of his working in capitalist institutions.

Proletarian Literature and the John Reed Clubs 1929–1935

1979 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Homberger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Potential ◽  
Proletarian Literature ◽  
Industrial Worker ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
John Reed ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Proletarian Art

In February 1921 Irwin Granich, not yet transformed into “ Michael Gold,” published “ Towards Proletarian Art” in The Liberator. This essay has been described as “ the first significant call in this country [the United States] for the creation of a distinctly and militantly working-class culture.” What Gold meant by “ proletarian art” remains unclear. He uses “ proletarian” interchangeably with “ masses,” and suggests that Walt Whitman was the discoverer, without quite realizing it, of proletarian art in America. The proletariat for Gold were nothing less than heroic possessors of Life — “ The masses know what Life is, and they live on in gusto and joy ” — who have been thwarted by society from the full realization of their artistic and cultural heritage. Gold's thought was dominated by a lyrical and mystical celebration of the modern industrial worker, tinged by frustration at the bitter waste of human potential under capitalism.

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