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Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art
This informative The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art is a gem. This volume is for anyone interested in painting and in the history of ideas. One of the greatest interest to Renaissance scholars and students, they will find this work pregnant with a thousand provocative ideas.
- GenresArtHistoryArt History
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First published January 1, 1965
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About the author
Arnold Hauser
165 books70 followersArnold Hauser was born in Temesvar (now Timisoara, Romania), to a family of assimilated Jews. He studied history of art and literature at the universities of Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. In Paris his teacher was Henri Bergson who influenced him deeply. To earn extra income he reported on art, literature and cultural events for the Temesvári Hírlap (Temesvár News). For a period he was a teacher at a Budapest Gymnasium.
In 1916 Hauser became a member of the Budapest Sunday Circle, which was formed around the critic and philosopher György Lukács. The group included Karl Mannheim, a sociologist, the writers Béla Balázs, and the musicians Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. Mannheim, who had at first rejected the idea that sociology could be useful in the understanding of thought, soon became convinced of its utility. Also Frigyes Antal (1887-1954) applied the sociological method to art.
After World War I Hauser spent with his bride two years in Italy doing research work on the history of classical and Italian art and earned his Ph.D. in Budapest. His dissertation dealt with the problem of aesthetic systematization. In 1921 he moved to Berlin. By that time he had developed his view that the problems of art and literature are fundamentally sociological problems. Three years later, when his wife declared that she wanted to live closer to Hungary, the couple settled down in Vienna, where Hauser supported himself as a freelance writer and as publicity agent for of a film company. He also worked on an unfinished book, entitled Dramaturgie und Soziologie des Films. Later he said, that "For me this was the period of collecting data and experiences which I used much later in the course of my writing my works on the sociology of art."
Fleeing the Nazis after the Anschluss in Austria, Hauser and his wife emigrated in 1938 to Great Britain. Shortly upon their arrival, his wife died of influenza. Alone and without any regular income, Hauser then began to research for Social History of Art. It took ten years to finish the Marxist survey, his magnum opus of more than a thiusand pages, which appeared when he was 59. Still following what is going on in the film world, Hauser also wrote a number of essays about films for Life and Letters Today and Sight and Sound. From 1951 he was a lecturer on the history of art at the University of Leeds, and in the late 1950s a visiting professor at Brandeis University in the United States. In 1959 he became a teacher at Hornsey College of Art in London. He worked again in the United States in 1963-65 and then returned to London.
When Hungarian Radio aired a Budapest-London conversation between Hauser and Lukács in July 1969, Hauser confessed: "I am not an orthodox Marxist. My life is devoted to scholarship, not politics. My task, I feel, is not political." In 1977 Hauser moved to Hungary, where he became an honorary member of the Academy of Science. He died in Budapest on January 28, 1978, at the age of 86.
Hauser's last book, Soziologie der Kunst (1974, Sociology of Art), which he wrote racing against time and declining health, investigated the social and economic determinants of art. In this pessimistic work he distanced himself from Marxism and historical determinism. "The foreseeable future," he said, "lies in the shadow of the atom bomb, of political dictatorship, of unbridled violence and cynical nihilism. Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin left, as a permanent testament, a feeling of fear and apprehension which cannot be mastered." Hauser's suggestion that art does not merely reflect but interacts with society is a widely accepted premise. He also saw the art establishment and art reviewers as servers of commercial interests. As in his Social History of Art, Hauser's approach was Euro-centered and did not pay much attention to non-Western art.
Social History of Art was the result of thirty years of scholarly labour. It traced the production of art from Lascaux to the Film Age
In 1916 Hauser became a member of the Budapest Sunday Circle, which was formed around the critic and philosopher György Lukács. The group included Karl Mannheim, a sociologist, the writers Béla Balázs, and the musicians Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. Mannheim, who had at first rejected the idea that sociology could be useful in the understanding of thought, soon became convinced of its utility. Also Frigyes Antal (1887-1954) applied the sociological method to art.
After World War I Hauser spent with his bride two years in Italy doing research work on the history of classical and Italian art and earned his Ph.D. in Budapest. His dissertation dealt with the problem of aesthetic systematization. In 1921 he moved to Berlin. By that time he had developed his view that the problems of art and literature are fundamentally sociological problems. Three years later, when his wife declared that she wanted to live closer to Hungary, the couple settled down in Vienna, where Hauser supported himself as a freelance writer and as publicity agent for of a film company. He also worked on an unfinished book, entitled Dramaturgie und Soziologie des Films. Later he said, that "For me this was the period of collecting data and experiences which I used much later in the course of my writing my works on the sociology of art."
Fleeing the Nazis after the Anschluss in Austria, Hauser and his wife emigrated in 1938 to Great Britain. Shortly upon their arrival, his wife died of influenza. Alone and without any regular income, Hauser then began to research for Social History of Art. It took ten years to finish the Marxist survey, his magnum opus of more than a thiusand pages, which appeared when he was 59. Still following what is going on in the film world, Hauser also wrote a number of essays about films for Life and Letters Today and Sight and Sound. From 1951 he was a lecturer on the history of art at the University of Leeds, and in the late 1950s a visiting professor at Brandeis University in the United States. In 1959 he became a teacher at Hornsey College of Art in London. He worked again in the United States in 1963-65 and then returned to London.
When Hungarian Radio aired a Budapest-London conversation between Hauser and Lukács in July 1969, Hauser confessed: "I am not an orthodox Marxist. My life is devoted to scholarship, not politics. My task, I feel, is not political." In 1977 Hauser moved to Hungary, where he became an honorary member of the Academy of Science. He died in Budapest on January 28, 1978, at the age of 86.
Hauser's last book, Soziologie der Kunst (1974, Sociology of Art), which he wrote racing against time and declining health, investigated the social and economic determinants of art. In this pessimistic work he distanced himself from Marxism and historical determinism. "The foreseeable future," he said, "lies in the shadow of the atom bomb, of political dictatorship, of unbridled violence and cynical nihilism. Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin left, as a permanent testament, a feeling of fear and apprehension which cannot be mastered." Hauser's suggestion that art does not merely reflect but interacts with society is a widely accepted premise. He also saw the art establishment and art reviewers as servers of commercial interests. As in his Social History of Art, Hauser's approach was Euro-centered and did not pay much attention to non-Western art.
Social History of Art was the result of thirty years of scholarly labour. It traced the production of art from Lascaux to the Film Age
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 17, 2024
Electrifying! Don't let the dull title (and what many, including myself, think of as particularly dull art...at least in its canonical instances) fool you. The subtitle does a bit more to convey what's so exciting about this...but a still more apt subtitle would be The Crises of the Renaissance and the Origin of the Modern Psyche.
A student of both Henri Bergson and Georg Lukacs, Hauser has an incredible sensitivity to the living ways that dichotomies (if not quite antitheses) may coexist and become productive. He is influenced heavily by a nuanced--but not an uncritical--understanding of psychoanalysis and of Marxism. I think Slavoj Zizek sometimes comes across as ingenious but not quite mature by comparison. This work seems to me a more monumental and more perfect synthesis than say, Zizek's (also great) book(s) on Hegel and the Sublime Object and so on--which come across as ingenious but less mature, certain less widely-read, by comparison. Certain crises motivated by the rise of capitalism, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, advances in Science and especially Scientific Psychology disrupted Renaissance understandings in ways that 1) we are still reeling from and 2) required new solutions of the sort which we continue to consider fundamental building blocks.
Besides lengthy treatments of Mannerism in the Visual Arts, there are terrific sections on literature: crucially Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Machiavelli (great pages on Christopher Marlowe too) preceding the rise of Mannerism in Italy--and ending with Proust and Kafka.
Wikipedia quotes Ernst Gombrich accusing Hauser of being a Social Determinist. I think this must have come from Hauser's earliest books on the Social History of Art and before the following book on The Philosophy of Art History (which was just before this book, Mannerism), which absolutely dispels this notion in its opening pages. Anyway, there's not a shred of substance left for such a misinterpretation left here.
I've never been a joiner and have preferred referring to myself as a "student but not a disciple of [[Jesus Christ, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud]]." I'm not immune to hero worship, of course, I once wanted to name a child after Jacob Bronowski (his confederates Carl Sagan and Kenneth Clark, having, to my ears, less euphonious first names) but that's merely love, those are just feelings enhanced by the cross product of awesome talent and imperfection. With Hauser I've had a sort of whammy of a conversion experience reading this wonderful book. I want to wear an Arnold Hauser T-Shirt. I wanna be sixteen years old, sitting on a bus, surrounded by clever and charismatic young people, all of us on our way to Arnold Hauser Summer Camp. (He is something of a Fuddy Duddy about Romanticism and I think he's paradoxically both really enlightening and rather blind on this topic...but there's little of that here: it's more pronounced in the books just before and just after this one).
& I've ordered all his other books (all the others in print in English, anyway). Very highly recommended.
A student of both Henri Bergson and Georg Lukacs, Hauser has an incredible sensitivity to the living ways that dichotomies (if not quite antitheses) may coexist and become productive. He is influenced heavily by a nuanced--but not an uncritical--understanding of psychoanalysis and of Marxism. I think Slavoj Zizek sometimes comes across as ingenious but not quite mature by comparison. This work seems to me a more monumental and more perfect synthesis than say, Zizek's (also great) book(s) on Hegel and the Sublime Object and so on--which come across as ingenious but less mature, certain less widely-read, by comparison. Certain crises motivated by the rise of capitalism, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, advances in Science and especially Scientific Psychology disrupted Renaissance understandings in ways that 1) we are still reeling from and 2) required new solutions of the sort which we continue to consider fundamental building blocks.
Besides lengthy treatments of Mannerism in the Visual Arts, there are terrific sections on literature: crucially Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Machiavelli (great pages on Christopher Marlowe too) preceding the rise of Mannerism in Italy--and ending with Proust and Kafka.
Wikipedia quotes Ernst Gombrich accusing Hauser of being a Social Determinist. I think this must have come from Hauser's earliest books on the Social History of Art and before the following book on The Philosophy of Art History (which was just before this book, Mannerism), which absolutely dispels this notion in its opening pages. Anyway, there's not a shred of substance left for such a misinterpretation left here.
I've never been a joiner and have preferred referring to myself as a "student but not a disciple of [[Jesus Christ, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud]]." I'm not immune to hero worship, of course, I once wanted to name a child after Jacob Bronowski (his confederates Carl Sagan and Kenneth Clark, having, to my ears, less euphonious first names) but that's merely love, those are just feelings enhanced by the cross product of awesome talent and imperfection. With Hauser I've had a sort of whammy of a conversion experience reading this wonderful book. I want to wear an Arnold Hauser T-Shirt. I wanna be sixteen years old, sitting on a bus, surrounded by clever and charismatic young people, all of us on our way to Arnold Hauser Summer Camp. (He is something of a Fuddy Duddy about Romanticism and I think he's paradoxically both really enlightening and rather blind on this topic...but there's little of that here: it's more pronounced in the books just before and just after this one).
& I've ordered all his other books (all the others in print in English, anyway). Very highly recommended.
Displaying 1 of 1 review