Andrew Hemingway – författare

This book is the first comprehensive introduction to Marxist approaches to art history. Although the aesthetic was a crucial part of Marx and Engels’s thought, they left no full statement on the arts. Although there is an abundant scholarship on Marxist approaches to literature, the historiography of the visual arts has been largely neglected. This book encompasses a range of influential thinkers and historians including William Morris, Mikhail Lifshits, Frederick Antal, Francis Klingender, Max Raphael, Meyer Schapiro, Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre and Arnold Hauser. It also addresses the heritage of the New Left. In the spirit of Marxism, the authors interpret the achievements and limitations of Marxist art history in relation to the historical and political circumstances of its production, providing an indispensable introduction to contemporary radical practices in the field.

Art as worldmaking is a response to Alex Potts’s provocative 2013 book Experiments in modern realism. Twenty essays by leading scholars test Potts’s recasting of realism through examinations of art produced in different media and periods, ranging from eighth-century Chinese garden aesthetics to video work by the contemporary Russian collective Radek Community. While the book does not neglect avatars of pictorial realism such as Menzel and Eakins, or the question of nineteenth-century realism’s historical antecedents, it is contemporary in orientation in that many contributors are particularly concerned with the questions that sculpture, photography and non-traditional media pose for realism as an aesthetic norm. It will be essential reading for students of art history concerned with art’s truth value or more broadly with conceptual problems of representation and the intersections of art and politics.

Art as worldmaking is a response to Alex Potts’s provocative 2013 book Experiments in modern realism. Twenty essays by leading scholars test Potts’s recasting of realism through examinations of art produced in different media and periods, ranging from eighth-century Chinese garden aesthetics to video work by the contemporary Russian collective Radek Community. While the book does not neglect avatars of pictorial realism such as Menzel and Eakins, or the question of nineteenth-century realism’s historical antecedents, it is contemporary in orientation in that many contributors are particularly concerned with the questions that sculpture, photography and non-traditional media pose for realism as an aesthetic norm. It will be essential reading for students of art history concerned with art’s truth value or more broadly with conceptual problems of representation and the intersections of art and politics.

This collection brings together for the first time many of the influential Marxist art-historian Andrew Hemingway's most important works on Romantic landscape painting. With a careful eye for both the ideological and aesthetic aspects of a wide range of pieces, Hemingway's keen insights offer stunning new perspectives on some of the most important painters of the era.

That the Romantic movement was an international phenomenon is a commonplace, yet to date, historical study of the movement has tended to focus primarily on its national manifestations. This volume offers a new perspective. In thirteen chapters devoted to artists and writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, leading scholars of the period examine the international exchanges that were crucial for the rise of Romanticism in England and the United States.In the book’s introduction, Andrew Hemingway—building on the theoretical work of Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre—proposes that we need to remobilize the concept of Weltanschauung, or comprehensive world view, in order to develop the kind of synthetic history of arts and ideas the phenomenon of Romanticism demands. The essays that follow focus on the London and New York art worlds and such key figures as Benjamin West, Thomas Bewick, John Vanderlyn, Washington Allston, John Martin, J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Cole, James Fenimore Cooper, George Catlin, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Herman Melville. Taken together, these essays plot the rise of a romantic anti-capitalist Weltanschauung as well as the dialectic between Romanticism’s national and international manifestations.In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Matthew Beaumont, David Bindman, Leo Costello, Nicholas Grindle, Wayne Franklin, Janet Koenig, William Pressly, Robert Sayre, William Truettner, Dell Upton, and William Vaughan.

When Zoom worship emerged in Britain during the COVID lockdown of 2020, Christians quickly turned to an art form, a form of theater, to deliver their worship. It was a quest for immanence, the very thing the Reformation dealt with by the elevation of transcendence. What an intriguing thought: Could John Calvin with his dictum regarding piety have practiced Zoom worship? Served as he was with the principle that the finite cannot contain the infinite, we must admit it looks very unlikely! At least in this Calvin saw eye-to-eye with Erasmus, but what of Luther? He may have been a comfortable Zoom worshiper, with his views that "Religious artworks are neither here nor there" and "We may have them or not as we please."Little did the church realize that it would be a step back into the past, because "what you permit you promote." The desire to use images was much more sinister than in Medieval times, as these were now images of ourselves! Regardless of the age, the image reigns supreme.What had caused the demise? Was it bereavement? It could not be bereavement of God; rather, it was the loss of the social, the bereavement of "one another." The need for "one-anothering" had forced the hand of Christians to turn to a practice completely untested. Zoom worship was born--the genie is out, and will never go back in. But in the face of the now-acceptable force of contemporary narcissism, who cares?

This book is the first comprehensive introduction to Marxist approaches to art history. Although the aesthetic was a crucial part of Marx and Engels’s thought, they left no full statement on the arts. Although there is an abundant scholarship on Marxist approaches to literature, the historiography of the visual arts has been largely neglected. This book encompasses a range of influential thinkers and historians including William Morris, Mikhail Lifshits, Frederick Antal, Francis Klingender, Max Raphael, Meyer Schapiro, Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre and Arnold Hauser. It also addresses the heritage of the New Left. In the spirit of Marxism, the authors interpret the achievements and limitations of Marxist art history in relation to the historical and political circumstances of its production, providing an indispensable introduction to contemporary radical practices in the field.

This collection of essays, by a number of established scholars and artists, proposes new directions for Marxist cultural theory and the criticism of modern visual culture. It addresses a diverse range of topics, including the state and revolution, Communist and post-Communist aesthetics, Situationist thought and the avant-garde, subjectivity and commodification, and the politics and problems of contemporary artistic practice. The contributions also consider several other pressing questions in the visual arts, from the practice of digital culture to appropriations of critical theory, from the relations of art and the spectacle to architecture in the age of global modernity. This book on Marxism and art is not offered in a spirit of nostalgia: on the contrary, it testifies to the continuing vitality and confidence of historical materialist thought in the field of cultural theory and practice in the 21st century.

The mood of systemic crisis that has marked the early 21st century has been accompanied by an upsurge in Marxist thought in a whole range of domains and extends to art history. In this volume 19 scholars from different generations, different national contexts and with different relationships to Marxism reflect on the status of 18 "keywords" with special pertinence to Marxist art-historical inquiry today. Starting point of the researches was the knowledge that while certain keywords have been crucial to recent developments in Marxist art history and cultural theory more broadly, others seem to have slipped out of view. The scholars are not so much interested in the "historical semantics" of words – although that plays some role in the essays – as in the present state of Marxist art history.

Der Band ist Jutta Held (1933–2007) und Norbert Schneider (1945–2019), der Gründerin und dem langjährigen Herausgeber von »Kunst und Politik«, gewidmet. Beide gehörten zur Generation der kritischen Kunsthistorikerinnen und Kunsthistoriker, die sich seit den 1970er Jahren für eine neue Kunstgeschichte einsetzten, die die gesellschaftlichen Aspekte der Kunst ins Zentrum rückte. Der Band versammelt Beiträge von Freund:innen, Kolleg:innen und Schüler:innen, die – inspiriert von Jutta Held und Norbert Schneider, von ihren Schriften und dem Andenken an die beiden – nach den Perspektiven einer kritischen Kunstwissenschaft fragen.This volume is dedicated to Jutta Held (1933–2007) and Norbert Schneider (1945–2019), the founders and long-time publishers of the journal "Kunst und Politik". Since the 1970s, both were part of a movement of critical art historians, that advocated for a new art history, that integrated the social aspects of art. This volume includes contributions of both friends and students, who – inspired by Jutta Held and Norbert Schneider – explore perspectives of critical art studies based on their writings and remembrance.

At a time of growing interest in relations between Marxism and Romanticism, Andrew Hemingway’s essays on British art and art theory reopen the question of Romantic painting’s ideological functions and, in some cases, its critical purchase. Half the volume exposes the voices of competing class interests in aesthetics and art theory in the tumultuous years of British history between the American Revolution and the 1832 Parliamentary Reform Act. Half offers new perspectives on works by some of the most important landscape painters of the time: John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, John Crome, and John Sell Cotman. Four essays are hitherto unpublished, and the remainder have been updated and in several cases substantially rewritten for this volume.