The Social History of Art Quotes

“The main thing is not to be deceived, that is, to lie and and simulate better than the others. All Stendhal's great novels revolve around the problem of hypocrisy, around the secret of how to deal with men and how to rule the world; they are all in the nature of text-book of political realism and courses of instruction in political amoralism. In his critique of Stendhal, Balzac already remarks that Chartreuse de Parme is a new Principe, which Machiavelli himself, if he had lived as an emigre in the Italy of nineteenth century, would not have been able to write any differently. Julien Sorel's Machiavellian motto, "Qui veut les fins veut les moyens," here acquires its classical formulation, as used repeatedly by Balzac himself, namely that one must accept the rules of the world's game, if one wants to count in the world and to take part in the play.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“All rights, all power, all ability, are suddenly expressed in terms of money. In order to be understood, everything has to be reduced to this common denominator. From this point of view, the whole previous history of capitalism seems no more than a mere prelude.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“The most inexplicable paradox of the work of art is that it seems to exist for itself and yet not for itself; that it addresses itself to a concrete, historically and sociologically conditioned public, but seems, at the same time, to want to have no knowledge at all of a public.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“Naturalism is not a homogeneous, clear-cut conception of art, always based on the same idea of nature, but changes with the times, concerned with a concrete task and confining its interpretation of life to particular phenomena. One professes a belief in naturalism, not because one consider a naturalistic representation more artistic a prior than a stylizing, but because one discovers a trait, a tendency in reality on which one would like to put more emphasis, which one would either to promote or fight against. Such a discovery is not itself the result of naturalistic observation, on the contrary, the interest in naturalism is the result of such a discovery. The 1830 generation begins its literary career with the recognition that the structure of society has completely changed; partly it accepts, partly opposes this change, but, in any case, it reacts to it in an extremely activism fashion and it naturalistic approach is derived from this activism. Naturalism is not aimed at reality as a whole, not at "nature" or "life" in general, but at social life in particular, that is, at that province of reality which has become specially important for this generation.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“Stendhal knows the source of his greatest happiness and his worst misery: the reflexivity of his spiritual life. When he loves, enjoys beauty, feels free and unconstrained, he realizes not only the bliss of these feelings but, at the same time, the happiness of being aware of this happiness. But now that he ought to be completely absorbed by his happiness and feel redeemed from all his limitations and inadequacies, he is still full of problems and doubts: Is that the whole story?—he asks himself. Is that what they call love? Is it possible to love, to feel, to be delighted and yet to observe oneself so coolly and so calmly? Stendhal’s answer is by no means the usual one, which assumes the existence of an insurmountable gulf between feeling and reason, passion and reflexion, love and ambition, but is based on the assumption that modern man simply feels differently, is enraptured and enthusiastic differently from a contemporary of Racine or Rousseau. For them, spontaneity and reflexivity of the emotions were incompatible, for Stendhal and his heroes they are quite inseparable; none of their passions is so strong as the desire to be constantly calling themselves to account for what is going on inside them. Compared with the older literature, this self consciousness implies just as profound a change as Stendhal’s realism, and the overcoming of classical-romantic psychology is just as strictly one of the preconditions of his art as the abolition of the alternative between the romantic escape from the world and the anti-romantic belief in the world.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“But the main source of the naturalistic outlook is the political experience of the generation of 1848: the failure of the revolution, the suppression of the June insurrection and the seizure of power by Louis Napoleon. The disappointment of the democrats and the general disillusionment caused by these events finds its perfect expression in the philosophy of the objective, realistic, strictly empirical natural sciences. After the failure of all ideals, of all Utopias, the tendency is now to keep to the facts, to nothing but the facts. The political origins of naturalism explain in particular its anti-romantic and ethical features: the refusal to escape from reality and the demand for absolute honesty in the description of facts; the striving for impersonality and impassibility as the guarantees of objectivity and social solidarity; activism as the attitude intent not only on knowing and describing but on altering reality; the modernism which keeps to the present as the sole subject-of consequence; and, finally, its popular trend both in the choice of subject and in the choice of public.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“In this choice of trivial, ‘unpoetic’ motifs the same democratic spirit is expressed as in the choice of the human types of Courbet, Millet and Daumier— with the sole difference that the landscape painters seem to say: nature is beautiful at all times and in all places, no ‘ideal’ motifs are necessary to do justice to its beauty, whereas the figure painters want to prove that man is ugly and pitiable no matter whether he is oppressing others or being oppressed himself. But, in spite of its sincerity and simplicity, the naturalistic landscape soon becomes just as conventional as the romantic had been. The romantics painted the poetry of the sacred grove, the naturalists paint the prose of rural life—the clearing with the grazing cattle, the river with the ferry, the field with the hayrick.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“It is not the experience which leads him to the problem, but the problem which leads him to the experience. That is also Zola’s method and procedure. He begins a new novel as the German professor of the anecdote begins a new course of lectures, in order to obtain more exact information about a subject with which he is unfamiliar.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“I spite of his scientific attitude he is a romantic, and indeed much more whole-heartedly so than the other less radical naturalists of his day. His one-sided, undialectical rationalization and schematization of reality is already boldly and ruthlesslyromantic. And the symbols to which he reduces motley, many-sided, contradictory life— the city, the machine, alcohol, prostitution, the department store, the markethall, the stock exchange, the theatre, etc.—are all the more the visions of a romantic systematizer, who sees allegories instead of concrete individual phenomena everywhere.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“The operetta was the product of a world of ‘laissez faire, laissez passer’, that is, a world of economic, social and moral liberalism, a world in which everyone was able to do what he liked, so long as he abstained from questioning the system itself. This limitation meant, on the one hand, very wide, on the other, very narrow frontiers. The same government that summoned Flaubert and Baudelaire to a court of law tolerated the most insolent social satire, the most disrespectful ridiculing of the authoritarian régime, the court, the army and the bureaucracy, in the works of Offenbach. But it tolerated his frolics only because they were not or did not seem to be dangerous, because he confined himself to a public whose loyalty was beyond doubt and needed no other safety-valve, in order to be quite happy, than this apparently harmless banter. The joke seems mischievous only to us; the contemporary public missed the sinister undertone which we can hear in the frantic rhythm of Offenbach’s galops and cancans. The entertainment was, however, not quite so harmless. The operetta demoralized people, not because it scoffed at everything ‘venerable’, not because its deriding of antiquity, of classical tragedy, of romantic opera was only criticism of society in disguise, but because it shattered the belief in authority without denying it in principle. The immorality of the operetta consisted in the thoughtless tolerance with which it conducted its criticism of the corrupt system of government and the depraved society of the time, in the appearance of harmlessness which it gave to the frivolity of the little prostitutes, the extravagant gallants and the lovable old ‘viveurs’. Its lukewarm, hesitant criticism merely encouraged corruption. One could, however, expect nothing else but an ambiguous attitude from artists who were successful, who loved success more than anything and whose success was bound up with the continuance of this indolent and pleasure-seeking society.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“The reaction against utilitarianism was a second romanticism, in which the fight against social injustice and the opposition to the actual theories of the "dismal science" played a much smaller part than the urge to escape from the present, whose problems the anti-utilitarians had no ability and no desire to solve, into the irrarionalism of Burke, Coleridge, and German romanticism.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“Just as the social novel attains its perfection with Balzac, the Bildungsroman with Flaubert, the picaresque novel with Dickens, so the psychological novel enters the phase of its full maturity with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“The most striking phenomenon connected with the progress of technology is the development of cultural centres into large cities in the modern sense; these form the soil in which the new art is rooted. Impressionism is an urban art, and not only because it discovers the landscape quality of the city and brings painting back from the country into the town, but because it sees the world through the eyes of the townsman and reacts to external impressions with the overstrained nerves of modern technical man. It is an urban style, because it describes the changeability, the nervous rhythm, the sudden, sharp but always ephemeral impressions of city life. And precisely as such, it implies an enormous expansion of sensual perception, a new sharpening of sensibility, a new irritability, and, with the Gothic and romanticism, it signifies one of the most important turning points in the history of Western art. In the dialectical process represented by the history of painting, the alternation of the static and the dynamic, of design and colour, abstract order and organic life, impressionism forms the climax of the development in which recognition is given to the dynamic and organic elements of experience and which completely dissolves the static world-view of the Middle Ages. A continuous line can be traced from the Gothic to impressionism comparable to the line leading from late medieval economy to high capitalism, and modern man, who regards his whole existence as a struggle and a competition, who translates all being into motion and change, for whom experience of the world increasingly becomes experience of time, is the product of this bilateral, but fundamentally uniform development.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“With these innovations, however, the succession of reductions employed by the impressionist method is by no means exhausted. The very colours which impressionism uses alter and distort those of our everyday experience. We think, for example, of a piece of ‘white’ paper as white in every lighting, despite the coloured reflexes which it shows in ordinary daylight. In other words: the ‘remembered colour’ which we associate with an object, and which is the result of long experience and habit, displaces the concrete impression gained from immediate perception; impressionism now goes back behind the remembered, theoretically established colour to the real sensation, which is, incidentally, in no sense a spontaneous act, but represents a supremely artificial and extremely complicated psychological process.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“Aesthetic culture implies a way of life marked by uselessness and superfluousness, that is to say, the embodiment of romantic resignation and passivity. But it outdoes romanticism; it not only renounces life for the sake of art, it seeks for the justification of life in art itself. It regards the world of art as the only real compensation for the disappointments of life, as the genuine realization and consummation of an existence that is intrinsically incomplete and inarticulate. But this not only means that life seems more beautiful and more conciliatory when clothed in art, but that, as Proust, the last great impressionist and aesthetic hedonist, thought, it only grows into significant reality in memory, vision and the aesthetic experience. We live our experiences with the greatest intensity not when we encounter men and things in reality—the ‘time’ and the present of these experiences are always ‘lost’—but when we ‘recover time’, when we are no longer the actors but the spectators of our life, when we create or enjoy works of art, in other words, when we remember. Here, in Proust, art takes possession of what Plato had denied it: ideas—the true remembrance of the essential forms of being.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“Picasso’s eclecticism signifies the deliberate destruction of the unity of the personality; his imitations are protests against the cult of originality; his deformation of reality, which is always clothing itself in new forms, in order the more forcibly to demonstrate their arbitrariness, is intended, above all, to confirm the thesis that ‘nature and art are two entirely dissimilar phenomena’. Picasso turns himself into a conjurer, a juggler, a parodist, out of opposition to the romantic with his ‘inner voice’, his ‘take it or leave it’, his self-esteem and self-worship. And he disavows not only romanticism, but even the Renaissance, which, with its concept of genius and its idea of the unity of work and style, anticipates romanticism to some extent. He represents a complete break with individualism and subjectivism, the absolute denial of art as the expression of an unmistakable personality. His works are notes and commentaries on reality; they make no claim to be regarded as a picture of a world and a totality, as a synthesis and epitome of existence. Picasso compromises the artistic means of expression by his indiscriminate use of the different artistic styles just as thoroughly and wilfully as do the surrealists by their renunciation of traditional forms.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age