scholarly journals Frederick Antal and the Marxist challenge to art history

2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512110037
Author(s):  
Jim Berryman
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Art History ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
European Tradition ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking

First published in 1948, Frederick Antal’s Florentine Painting and Its Social Background was an important milestone in anglophone art history. Based on European examples, including Max Dvořák, it sought to understand art history’s relationship to social and intellectual history. When Antal, a Hungarian émigré, arrived in Britain in 1933, he encountered an inward-looking discipline preoccupied with formalism and connoisseurship; or, as he phrased it, art historians of ‘the older persuasion’ ignorant of ‘the fruitful achievements of modern historical research’. Despite its considerable scholarship and erudition, Antal’s book was not warmly received, largely because he had used historical materialism to understand the production of art and the development of styles. Antal’s class-based account of the social position of the artist and the role of the patron in determining the emergence of early Renaissance styles was especially controversial. However, although Marxist analysis was used to challenge the assumptions of Anglo art history, it was not Antal’s intention to weaken art history’s disciplinary autonomy. With historical materialism, he sought to place art history on a firmer historical footing. Most importantly, this approach was compatible with the discipline’s Central European tradition, where art-historical scholarship was framed by questions of method and based on broad historical research. Without defending its more deterministic features, this article supports a re-evaluation of Antal’s book, as an important forerunner of interdisciplinary art scholarship. It considers why Antal’s legacy has not endured, despite the ‘social history of art’ enjoying widespread acceptance in English-speaking art history in later decades.

scholarly journals Fotografia: desafios da interdisciplinaridade

2006 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Eliza Linhares Borges
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Art History ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
History Of Photography ◽  
Culture History ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
History Of Culture

O presente artigo toma a fotografia como ponto de partida para refletir sobre os possíveis diálogos entre dois campos de conhecimento específicos: a História Social da Cultura e a História da Arte. Além de analisar algumas das principais questões que hoje permeiam o debate relativo ao uso das representações imagéticas, sobretudo da fotografia, na História da Arte, na História da Fotografia e na Historia Social da Cultura, o artigo também identifica e discute os desafios enfrentados pelo profissional da História strictu senso na análise da composição fotográfica, cada vez mais utilizada nas pesquisas históricas. Abstract The present article presents the photography as a starting point to reflect upon the possible dialogs between two specific fields of knowledge: the Social History of Culture and Art History. Besides analyzing some of the key issues that permeate the debate regarding the use of imagetic representations, mainly photography, in the Art History, in the History of Photography and in the Social History of Culture, the article also identifies and discusses the challenges faced by the professional in strictu senso History when analyzing the photographic composition, which is used more and more in the historical research. Palavras-chave: Fotografia. História da cultura. História da arte. Key words: Photography. History of culture. History of arts.

scholarly journals The Annihilation of Space: A Bad (Historical) Concept

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Alexis D. Litvine
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Economic Consequences ◽  
Cultural Mediation ◽  
Counter Example ◽  
Dead End ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Representations Of Space

Abstract This article is a reminder that the concept of ‘annihilation of space’ or ‘spatial compression’, often used as a shorthand for referring to the cultural or economic consequences of industrial mobility, has a long intellectual history. The concept thus comes loaded with a specific outlook on the experience of modernity, which is – I argue – unsuitable for any cultural or social history of space. This article outlines the etymology of the concept and shows: first, that the historical phenomena it pretends to describe are too complex for such a simplistic signpost; and, second, that the term is never a neutral descriptor but always an engagement with a form of historical and cultural mediation on the nature of modernity in relation to space. In both cases this term obfuscates more than it reveals. As a counter-example, I look at the effect of the railways on popular representations of space and conclude that postmodern geography is a relative dead end for historians interested in the social and cultural history of space.

Materials for the Study of Labor and Working Class History in Italy

1972 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 16-19
Author(s):  
Kenneth Kirkland
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Labor History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

The subject suggested in the title is so broad as to make it rather difficult to decide what boundaries to draw around the study of various resources available to the historian or other social scientist who sets out to study labor history, the social history of Italian workers and peasants, and the political and intellectual history of socialism and other radical movements. Keeping in mind that the following discussion is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather an indication of the necessary starting point to begin an investigation is probably the best way to understand this note.

scholarly journals The E.A.T. Datascape: An Experiment in Digital Social History of Art

2019 ◽  
pp. 110-137
Author(s):  
Christophe Leclercq ◽  
Paul Girard ◽  
Daniele Guido
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Art History ◽  
Digital Design ◽  
Art World ◽  
Robert Rauschenberg ◽  
Art And Technology ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Interdisciplinary Projects

Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) is an organization co-founded in 1966 by artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman, and engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, in order to support collaboration between artists and engineers. The E.A.T. datascape is a digital instrument for analyzing the digitized traces left by its members via many available resources. Its aim is to study as closely as possible the complexity of collaborative interdisciplinary works. The E.A.T. datascape methodology makes it possible, by means of an anthropological action-centred approach, to go beyond the distinction between art history and art sociology and to renew the social history of art by challenging the notion of authorship and by describing the work as constituted by the intersection between heterogeneous trajectories, rather than an object within a context that would influence it, or constitute its environment. In other words, it allows us to reflect on what digital design does, in turn, to the social history of art, and to put forward hypotheses about what a digital social history of art might be or could offer to the study of complex, interdisciplinary projects that are multiplying in the contemporary art world.

Dissent and Catholicism in English Society: A Study of Warwickshire, 1660-1720

1976 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith J. Hurwich
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Practical Point ◽  
Quantitative Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
English Society ◽  
History Of

Puritanism has long fascinated students of the relationship between religion and society. Indeed, the social history of Puritanism has probably been studied more intensively than that of any other religious movement in modern history. However, most studies of Puritanism in England end either at the beginning of the Civil Wars or at the Restoration. The history of those Puritans who became Dissenters after 1660 has been left to denominational historians, who are understandably more concerned with the ecclesiastical and theological history of their own particular groups than with the broader question of the place of Dissent in English society.This neglect of post-Restoration Nonconformity is unfortunate for the study of the social history of Puritanism, both from a theoretical and from a practical point of view. When English Puritans are cited as the classical practitioners of the “Protestant ethic,” reference is often made to the success of Nonconformists in finance and industry after 1660. Tawney's application of the Weber thesis to England relies heavily on the writings of such post-Restoration divines as Baxter and Steele, and on the rise of Nonconformist capitalists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Tawney's hypotheses cannot be evaluated unless we have more information about the social background of Dissent: not merely a few exceptional individuals, but the group as a whole. From the practical point of view, quantitative studies of the social structure — both of the religious group and of the larger society—are more easily undertaken for the period after 1660 than for the period before that date.

Materials for the Study of Labor and Working Class History in Italy

1972 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 16-19
Author(s):  
Kenneth Kirkland
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Labor History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

The subject suggested in the title is so broad as to make it rather difficult to decide what boundaries to draw around the study of various resources available to the historian or other social scientist who sets out to study labor history, the social history of Italian workers and peasants, and the political and intellectual history of socialism and other radical movements. Keeping in mind that the following discussion is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather an indication of the necessary starting point to begin an investigation is probably the best way to understand this note.

V. Gordon Childe and Arnold Hauser on the social origins of the artist

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362110533
Author(s):  
Jim Berryman
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Social History ◽  
Art History ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Dominant Ideology ◽  
Western Art ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Marxist Interpretation

Vere Gordon Childe’s theory of craft specialisation was an important influence on Arnold Hauser’s book The Social History of Art, published in 1951. Childe’s Marxist interpretation of prehistory enabled Hauser to establish a material foundation for the occupation of the artist in Western art history. However, Hauser’s effort to construct a progressive basis for artistic labour was complicated by art’s ancient connections to religion and superstition. While the artist’s social position and class loyalties were ambiguous in Childe’s accounts of early civilisations, Hauser consigned artists to the lower echelons of society. This relegation did not imply that Hauser had a low regard for artistic skills. Quite the opposite, the artist’s inferior social status enabled Hauser to distance artists from the ruling class, and consequently, to separate artistic handiwork from the dominant ideology that works of art manifested.

scholarly journals THE ELUSIVE SOVEREIGN: NEW INTELLECTUAL AND SOCIAL HISTORIES OF CAPITALISM

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 233-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
JEFFREY SKLANSKY
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Quantitative Methods ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Social ◽  
Science Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Property Regimes

Intellectual history in the United States has long borne a peculiarly close kinship to social history. The twin fields rose together a century ago in a filial revolt against the cloistered, conservative study of political institutions. Sharing a progressive interest in social thought and social reform, they joined in the self-styled “social and intellectual history” of the interwar decades. After mid-century, however, they moved in divergent directions. Many social historians adopted the quantitative methods of the social sciences, documenting the diverse experiences of workers, women, immigrants, slaves, native peoples, and others often marginalized in the textual record as well as the property regimes, modes of production, patterns of inheritance and mobility, and large-scale demographic and environmental forces that governed their lives. Intellectual historians tended to favor the qualitative evidence gleaned from the more cohesive letters and libraries of traditional elites, specializing in close readings of the intricate discursive, aesthetic, and spiritual templates of social experience found in religion, science, philosophy, political theory, and art and literature. Both subdisciplines had come into parallel crises by the 1980s, chastened by postmodern attacks on “master narratives” of any kind, whether idealist or materialist. In the decades since, social historians have sought a more nuanced consideration of thought and culture, while intellectual historians have at once broadened the range of their subjects and sources and limited more carefully the claims they make for them.

Historical Analysis of Law

1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Dirk Dubber
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Social Embeddedness ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
Social Basis ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right

Kenneth Ledford's and Michael Meranze's insightful comments raise important questions about the nature of legal history in general, and of the history of punishment in particular. According to Ledford and Meranze, modern legal history is social history, to be distinguished from “old-style intellectual history.” A product of the latter “historical method no longer in favor,” “The Right to Be Punished” draws Ledford's and Meranze's criticism for its insufficient “root[s]… in the soil of social history” and for its inadequate “account of the … social basis of the modern will to punish” and “the social embeddedness of punishment.”

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