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https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Hauser
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/814806/dc6706
"The traditional, painstaking, ‘footsoldier’ work of art-historical methods rooted in the careful form of specific ‘visual analysis’— connoisseurship, Erwin Panofsky’s ‘pre-iconographical’ and iconographical protocols, reconstructions of artists’ intention, etc.—are supplanted in Hauser’s account with this work of correlation between style and socio-economic development.5 Given that the discussion usually takes place at a quite high level of abstraction and involves complex, and sometimes highly questionable, notions of ‘equivalence’ or ‘agreement’ between apparently quite disparate economic, institutional, political and artistic phenomena, it should not be surprising that many conventionally trained art historians have quickly run out of patience with Hauser’s intentions and arguments. Those art historians indifferent or actually antagonistic to his intellectual and political motivations have found, and continue to find, many of his claims, by turns, either truistic—because pitched at such a high level of abstraction—and therefore banal, or simply empirically unverifiable—given that Hauser’s undoubtedly grandiose project inevitably eschews specific historical detail—and therefore unproductively ineffable." (p.XVII)
"Hauser’s text is full of judgements, asides and reflections which indicate his highly conventional taste and values (often labelled ‘bourgeois’ by the ideologues of academic Cultural Studies), identical or close to those of earlier influential Marxist critics and cultural commentators including Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, A.S.Vasquez, Lukács, and Marx and Engels themselves." (p.XX)
-Jonathan Harris, General Introduction à The Social History of Art, vol 1 "From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages", Routledge, 1991 (1951 pour la première édition britannique), 151 pages.
"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." (p.XXIII)
"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. 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. 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." (pp.XXIV)
"The most important development in the history of art, however, he says, is the development of ‘art for art’s sake’—the stage reached when images and sculptures are no longer made simply, or mainly, for ritual or propaganda reasons—a change which first occurred, Hauser believes, in Ionia in the sixth and seventh centuries BC." (pp.XXVIII)
-Jonathan Harris, Introduction à The Social History of Art, vol 1 "From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages", Routledge, 1991 (1951 pour la première édition britannique), 151 pages.
"We know that it was the art of primitive hunters living on an unproductive, parasitic economic level, who had to gather or capture their food rather than produce it themselves ; men who to all appearances still lived at the stage of primitive individualism, in unstable, almost entirely unorganized social patterns, in small isolated hordes, and who believed in no gods, in no world and life beyond death. In this age of purely practical life everything obviously still turned around the bare earning of a livelihood and there is nothing to justify us in assuming that art served any other purpose than a means to the procuring of food. All the indications point rather to the fact that it was the instrument of a magical technique and as such had a thoroughly pragmatic function aimed entirely at direct economic objectives. This magic apparently had nothing in common with what we understand by religion; it knew no prayers, revered no sacred powers and was connected with no other-worldly spiritual beings by any kind of faith, and therefore failed to fulfil what has been described as the minimum condition of an authentic religion.
It was a technique without mystery, a matter-of-fact procedure, the objective application of methods which had as little to do with mysticism and esoterism as when we set mouse-traps, manure the ground or take a drug. The pictures were part of the technical apparatus of this magic; they were the ‘trap’ into which the game had to go, or rather they were the trap with the already captured animal—for the picture was both representation and the things represented, both wish and wish-fulfilment at one and the same time. The Palaeolithic hunter and painter thought he was in possession of the thing itself in the picture, thought he had acquired power over the object in the portrayal of the object. He believed the real animal actually suffered the killing of the animal portrayed in the picture. The pictorial representation was to his mind nothing but the anticipation of the desired effect; the real event had inevitably to follow the magical sample-action, or rather to be already contained within it, as both were separated from each other merely by the supposedly unreal medium of space and time. It was, therefore, by no means a question of symbolical surrogatory functions but of really purposive action. It was not the thought that killed, not the faith that achieved the miracle, but the actual deed, the pictorial representation, the shooting at the picture, that effected the magic." (pp.2-3)
-Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, vol 1 "From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages", Routledge, 1991 (1951 pour la première édition britannique), 151 pages.
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/814695/6b534e
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/691210/243def
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/2801519/05f149
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/814806/dc6706
"The traditional, painstaking, ‘footsoldier’ work of art-historical methods rooted in the careful form of specific ‘visual analysis’— connoisseurship, Erwin Panofsky’s ‘pre-iconographical’ and iconographical protocols, reconstructions of artists’ intention, etc.—are supplanted in Hauser’s account with this work of correlation between style and socio-economic development.5 Given that the discussion usually takes place at a quite high level of abstraction and involves complex, and sometimes highly questionable, notions of ‘equivalence’ or ‘agreement’ between apparently quite disparate economic, institutional, political and artistic phenomena, it should not be surprising that many conventionally trained art historians have quickly run out of patience with Hauser’s intentions and arguments. Those art historians indifferent or actually antagonistic to his intellectual and political motivations have found, and continue to find, many of his claims, by turns, either truistic—because pitched at such a high level of abstraction—and therefore banal, or simply empirically unverifiable—given that Hauser’s undoubtedly grandiose project inevitably eschews specific historical detail—and therefore unproductively ineffable." (p.XVII)
"Hauser’s text is full of judgements, asides and reflections which indicate his highly conventional taste and values (often labelled ‘bourgeois’ by the ideologues of academic Cultural Studies), identical or close to those of earlier influential Marxist critics and cultural commentators including Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, A.S.Vasquez, Lukács, and Marx and Engels themselves." (p.XX)
-Jonathan Harris, General Introduction à The Social History of Art, vol 1 "From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages", Routledge, 1991 (1951 pour la première édition britannique), 151 pages.
"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." (p.XXIII)
"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. 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. 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." (pp.XXIV)
"The most important development in the history of art, however, he says, is the development of ‘art for art’s sake’—the stage reached when images and sculptures are no longer made simply, or mainly, for ritual or propaganda reasons—a change which first occurred, Hauser believes, in Ionia in the sixth and seventh centuries BC." (pp.XXVIII)
-Jonathan Harris, Introduction à The Social History of Art, vol 1 "From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages", Routledge, 1991 (1951 pour la première édition britannique), 151 pages.
"We know that it was the art of primitive hunters living on an unproductive, parasitic economic level, who had to gather or capture their food rather than produce it themselves ; men who to all appearances still lived at the stage of primitive individualism, in unstable, almost entirely unorganized social patterns, in small isolated hordes, and who believed in no gods, in no world and life beyond death. In this age of purely practical life everything obviously still turned around the bare earning of a livelihood and there is nothing to justify us in assuming that art served any other purpose than a means to the procuring of food. All the indications point rather to the fact that it was the instrument of a magical technique and as such had a thoroughly pragmatic function aimed entirely at direct economic objectives. This magic apparently had nothing in common with what we understand by religion; it knew no prayers, revered no sacred powers and was connected with no other-worldly spiritual beings by any kind of faith, and therefore failed to fulfil what has been described as the minimum condition of an authentic religion.
It was a technique without mystery, a matter-of-fact procedure, the objective application of methods which had as little to do with mysticism and esoterism as when we set mouse-traps, manure the ground or take a drug. The pictures were part of the technical apparatus of this magic; they were the ‘trap’ into which the game had to go, or rather they were the trap with the already captured animal—for the picture was both representation and the things represented, both wish and wish-fulfilment at one and the same time. The Palaeolithic hunter and painter thought he was in possession of the thing itself in the picture, thought he had acquired power over the object in the portrayal of the object. He believed the real animal actually suffered the killing of the animal portrayed in the picture. The pictorial representation was to his mind nothing but the anticipation of the desired effect; the real event had inevitably to follow the magical sample-action, or rather to be already contained within it, as both were separated from each other merely by the supposedly unreal medium of space and time. It was, therefore, by no means a question of symbolical surrogatory functions but of really purposive action. It was not the thought that killed, not the faith that achieved the miracle, but the actual deed, the pictorial representation, the shooting at the picture, that effected the magic." (pp.2-3)
-Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, vol 1 "From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages", Routledge, 1991 (1951 pour la première édition britannique), 151 pages.
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/814695/6b534e
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/691210/243def
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/2801519/05f149
