Russia on Canvas: Il’ya Repin by Fan Parker, Stephen Jan Parker (review)

Book Reviews 63 mediators and critics, the art trade, folk art, popular art, mass art, Pop art, radio', television and film. As a reference book it should prove indispensable. For all of its detailed analysis of the sociological framework of art, Hauser's book is less an exposition than an argument. It might have been more properly titled A Sociological View ofArt. Hauser's mission seems to be to refute once and for all the claims of romanticism. The author is scornful of the various notions that have been associated through the centuries with romantic doctrine such as natural genius, individualism, spontaneity, inspirations and universality. In their place he offers his central thesis: art is a product of society. Moreover, it is a product of a specific historical time and place, of a particular class and sub-culture. Following Marx, Hauser sees art based in dialectical materialism. Art evolves dialectically from the reconciliations of opposite social factors such as spontaneity and resistance, subjectivity and objectivity, the individual and society, invention and convention. The structure of the work of art itself is likewise dialectically conditioned. It contains elements of both affirmation and denial of life, of male and female; each successive part is seen as the antithesis of the preceding part. Above all else, art must reconcile the conflicting forces of form and content. Hauser's version of the Marxist dialectic, however, is an extremely subtle instrumentality and has little in common with the grosser forms that often ignite art world polemics today. The essence of his thinking is summed up in the following paragraph: "Dialectic, however, does justice to the mutual penetration of antithetical facts and standpoints only if it does not stop at their reciprocal influence and their mutual adaptation to each other. That is to say, it means neither that the one completely melts into the other nor that the one triumphs completely over the other, but merely that they maintain their individuality in spite of their interdependence. The fundamental principle of dialectical thinking rests on the understanding that contradictory determinations and attitudes are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary-just like the individual and society. As form and contact-they are indissolubly linked and reveal their nature only through their antagonism." For example, in a soccer game every team plays only as well as its opponents allow it to, just as an orchestra plays as wellas the conductor allows it to; but it is equally true that the conductor is only as good a musician as the orchestra allows him to be. In the case of form and contact, Hauser notes that one is "unthinkable" without the other. A change in one element brings about a change in the other and "we cannot say for one moment what form is without thinking about what has to be formed and that something is being formed." Since World War II, much credence has been given in the Western art world to an oversimplified form of the dialectical process as it relates to changing art styles. Thus the minimalism of the 1960s has been seen as the antithesis of the abstract expressionism of the fifties, and more recently the neo-expressionism of the eighties has been seen as the antithesis of minimalism. What Hauser would find lacking in this crude interpretation is any sense of interdependence between one stylistic era and the next. Hauser's materialist doctrine is not only in opposition to romanticism and idealism, but equally to the theories of Heinrich Wolfflin, the Swiss art historian of the 1920s, whom Hauser often cites as mistaken in his concepts. Wolfflin believed that art forms had their own dynamism growing out of an inner logic. He greatly influenced such latter-day formalists as the American critic, Clement Greenberg. Like other Marxists, Hauser renders a service when he reminds us that art today is largely created for a particular social class, the bourgeoisie, and that effective artistic output in most Western nations is under bourgeoisie control. Many contemporary art critics, historians and connoisseurs, preoccupied with purely aesthetic issues, have overlooked the importance of this control for artistic development. But art sociologists, Hauser concluded, have not successfully bridged the gap between the...