Journal of Art Historiography (Dec 2012)
Czech art history and Marxism
Abstract
Czech art history in the 20th century has been strongly informed by the tradition of the Vienna School. After the Communist takeover of power in 1948, Marxism – or more precisely Marxism-Leninism – became a compulsory philosophical approach. After a brief Stalinist phase, an ‘iconologic turn’ was construed by Jaromír Neumann before 1960: iconology was reframed in terms of Dvořák´s ‘spiritual history’ and the result was labelled Marxist, as it enabled to provide a direct access to the ideology of the past without having to pay attention to class and social relations. Frederick Antal´s or Arnold Hauser´s social history of art was rejected, the main focus was on the noetic qualities of artworks and the main topic the debate of realism. As a result, Czech art history was pursued as an elitist discipline in the humanist tradition, but it did not need to participate in the search for ‘humanist Marxism’ or revisionism which was typical for the East-Central Europe in the 1960. Dvořák-type iconology combined with formalist approach and belief in a validity of the laws of develompent remained attractive for Czech art history up to the 1990s.
