Journal of Art Historiography (Dec 2019)
The young Arnold Hauser and the Sunday Circle: the publication of Hauser’s estate preserved in Hungary
Abstract
In his well-known review of Hauser in the Art Bulletin E. H. Gombrich posed the rhetorical question: ‘has a social historian really nothing to say about Ambrogio Lorenzetti’ s Good Government…?’ The preceding passages reveal that Gombrich found him wanting in the concrete, objective confrontation with the art object, the scanning look of the art historian: ‘This special approach, we may infer, demands of us that we look on the more distant past from the outside as on an interplay of impersonal forces. Perhaps this aloof attitude accounts for the curious lack of concreteness in Mr. Hauser’s references to individual works of art.’ To crown his devastating judgment, he adds that the illustrations got apparently into the book later by favour of the publisher as ‘their captions have a strangely perfunctory character.’ Without taking a closer look at the art political or methodological aspects of the two art historians’ different positions, it is to be stressed that the publication of Hauser’s early art-related criticisms is a significant step, for it reveals a career start with daily reviews relying on face-to-face confrontations with art works, with the process of creating art. These beginnings go back to times prior to the Sunday Circle, to the reviews published in Temesvári Hírlap from 1911 (a symbolic date, the salient year of Hungarian modernism, of the group called the Eight) covering the theatre, particularly the highly visual stage productions of Reinhardt apart from fine art. Young Hauser’s admiration for the stage might have something to do with his professor Bernát (Bernhard) Alexander’s Shakespeare researches, as is his critique of impressionism related to the contemporary, and occasionally astonishingly critical response to the young Lukács. As Hauser’s widow recalled, it was not Mannheim who introduced the young critic to the Sunday Circle, but Hauser had known the Lukács family earlier as a private tutor. Though this piece of information has not been verified by other sources yet, but his early writings reveal the up-to-date knowledge of Lukács’ youthful ideas. This paper will add new data, facts and analyses to complement Hauser’s biography, also relying on the source material published in Enigma.
