Arnold Hauser (Author of The Social History of Art, Volume 1)

Arnold Hauser鈥檚 Followers (69)

Arnold Hauser

Born

in Temesvar (now Timisoara), Romania

January 01, 1892

Died

January 01, 1978

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Arnold 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 Temesv谩ri H铆rlap (Temesv谩r 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 Gy枚rgy Luk谩cs. The group included Karl Mannheim, a sociologist, the writers B茅la Bal谩zs, and the musicians B茅la Bart贸k and Zolt谩n Kod谩ly. Mannheim, who had at first rejected the idea that sociology could be u Arnold 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 Temesv谩ri H铆rlap (Temesv谩r 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 Gy枚rgy Luk谩cs. The group included Karl Mannheim, a sociologist, the writers B茅la Bal谩zs, and the musicians B茅la Bart贸k and Zolt谩n Kod谩ly. 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 Luk谩cs 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 ...more

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Average rating: 4.09 · 1,061 ratings · 79 reviews · 146 distinct works 鈥� Similar authors

	The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages 4.12 avg rating — 291 ratings — published 1951 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque 4.09 avg rating — 218 ratings — published 1951 — 32 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism by Arnold Hauser, Jonathan Harris (Introduction) 4.30 avg rating — 135 ratings — published 1951 — 22 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age 4.14 avg rating — 117 ratings — published 1958 — 19 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Historia social de la literatura y el arte by Arnold Hauser, Antonio Tovar (Translator), F.P. Vargas-Reyes (Translator) 4.17 avg rating — 86 ratings — published 1951 — 8 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	賮賱爻賮丞鬲丕乇賷禺丕賱賮賳 by Arnold Hauser, 乇賲夭賷毓亘丿賴噩乇噩爻 (鬲乇噩賲丞), 夭賰賷賳噩賷亘賲丨賲賵丿 (賲乇丕噩毓丞) 3.49 avg rating — 71 ratings — published 1958 — 28 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	鬲丕乇蹖禺丕噩鬲賲丕毓蹖賴賳乇 3.89 avg rating — 45 ratings — published 1953 — 9 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Historia social de la literatura y el arte II 4.31 avg rating — 39 ratings — published 1976 — 9 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art 4.56 avg rating — 16 ratings — published 1965 — 8 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Sociology of Art 3.81 avg rating — 16 ratings — published 1982 — 19 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Series by Arnold Hauser

The Social History of Art (4 books)
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Arnold Hauser

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Quotes by Arnold Hauser (?)

“Just as his sentimentalism is profoundly middle-class and plebeian, but his irrationalism reactionary, so his moral philosophy also contains an inner contradiction: on the one hand, it is saturated with strongly plebeian characteristics, but on the other, it contains the germ of a new aristocratism. The concept of the 鈥榖eautiful soul鈥� presupposes the complete dissolution of kalo-kagathia and implies the perfect spiritualization of all human values, but it also implies an application of aesthetic criteria to morality and is bound up with the view that moral values are the gift of nature. It means the recognition of a nobility of soul to which everyone has a right by nature, but in which the place of irrational birthrights is taken by an equally irrational quality of moral genius. The way of Rousseau鈥檚鈥榮piritual beauty鈥� leads, on the one hand, to characters like Dostoevsky鈥檚 Myshkin, who is a saint in the guise of an epilectic and an idiot, on the other, to the ideal of individual moral perfection which knows no social responsibility and does not aspire to be socially useful. Goethe, the Olympian, who thinks of nothing but his own spiritual perfection, is a disciple of Rousseau just as much as the young freethinker who wrote Werther.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism

tags: dostoevsky, goethe, morality, nature, new-aristocracy, nobility-of-soul, rousseau, spiritulization

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“This decorum and etiquette, the whole self-stylization of the upper class, demand among other things that one does not allow oneself to be portrayed as one really is, but according to how one must appear to conform with certain hallowed conventions, remote from reality and the present time. Etiquette is the highest law not merely for the ordinary mortal, but also for the king, and in the imagination of this society even the gods accept the forms of courtly ceremonial.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages

tags: ancient-egypt, art, classes, etiquette, profane, sacred, upper-class

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“Such a society will want to invest the work of art with regularity and necessity. It will want art to prove that there are universally valid, unshakable, inviolable standards and principles, that the world is ruled by an absolute and immutable purpose, and that man - though not every individual man - is the custodian of this purpose, Art forms will have to be authoritative to agree with the ideas of this society, and must make a definitive and consummate impression comparable to that which the authoritarian order of the age desires to make. The ruling class will look to art, above all, as the symbol of the calm and stability which is aspires to attain in life.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque

tags: art, art-investment, authority, propaganda, rule, symbol

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