Arnold Hauser

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Arnold Hauser

Arnold Hauser (born May 8, 1892 in Temesvár , Kingdom of Hungary , Austria-Hungary , † January 28, 1978 in Budapest , People's Republic of Hungary ) was a Hungarian-German art historian and sociologist who lived in Great Britain for a long time . Hauser is seen as a crossover between various theories and disciplines such as art history , psychoanalysis , art theory , aesthetics , social history , art sociology and art psychology.

Hauser valued the formal aspects of art , but as an art sociologist favored a socio-historical perspective. His extensive and intimate knowledge of art and his years of activity in the film business have sharpened his eye for art as an autonomous and social phenomenon on the one hand. In the art dispute between West (interpretation inherent in form) and East (societal conditionality of art) during the Cold War , Arnold Hauser wanted and was able to mediate.

Theoretical basic concept

In the middle of the 20th century, Hauser believed that "the hour of the sociological interpretation" of art had come, accentuated socio-historical aspects of the development and dissemination of art, without formal, psychoanalytic or psychological etc. a. To want to neglect moments. He analyzed art both as an autonomous or self-sufficient structure and as a multifaceted communication process within time-determined art relationships, some of which are specified according to "educational levels". Based on Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge , Hauser viewed art as a location-bound “sociological document” that must also be interpreted in a critical way. Because art acts traditionally as well as anti-traditionally, non-conformally, new (re) production possibilities do not mean the end of art. Newer “ mass art ” ( film art , beat , pop art ) was one of the first to find its way into art history at Hauser. Hauser saw the actual art crisis as rooted in the anti-human struggle of the social systems after 1945 and in a certain speechlessness in art. But even the new "negative artistic ... moves ... in more or less unmistakably aesthetic categories ..." as in Samuel Beckett's . Ultimately, Hauser's definition of art, based on the contradiction in mannerism , finds its center in the concept of paradox as the “union of irreconcilable opposites”, “inevitable ambiguity and eternal conflict” of the artistic image. Ultimately, the entire “ dialectic of the aesthetic” (interplay of form- content , distance-binding, factual-fantastic, historicity-timelessness, conscious-unconscious, etc., etc.) is paradoxical. It has proven itself at Hauser as a consistently handled explanatory model, which discovers a basic form of art in the “paradox, the connection of the incompatible”.

Hauser's concrete art history works and his art-sociological conception testify to a wealth of ideas, knowledge of art and a great willingness to dialogue. Hauser attacks u. a. in art history on Theodor W. Adorno , Walter Benjamin , Konrad Fiedler , Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , Georg Lukács , Alois Riegl and Heinrich Wölfflin , in psychoanalysis on Sigmund Freud , in sociology on Émile Durkheim , Friedrich Engels , Karl Mannheim, Karl Marx , Georg Simmel and Max Weber back. When he talks about the film, he pays equal attention to western directors such as Ingmar Bergman , Robert Bresson , Federico Fellini , Luchino Visconti and the Russians Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudowkin .

Despite weighty differences, there are many points of contact in the art theoretical views of Adorno, Lukács and Hauser (and to some extent in their biographies). Hauser does not only want to be placed between Lukács and Adorno with regard to social prognoses and political ambitions and tries to assert himself in the field of tension between the ideal of scientific totality and the ongoing process of alienation . Hauser also represents mediating positions on questions of classical artistic heritage (made absolute by Lukács), modern , avant-garde and the "open" work of art (made absolute by Adorno) as well as in his conception of realism .

Hauser's knowledge-sociological approach insists on a scope for both art production and art reception. Second, art is essentially paradoxical, contradicting itself and, for example, not just form or content, defends art against one-sided appropriations. And thirdly, Hauser supports his search for the right center with the method of the “tertium datur” (third way). In the age essay "Variations on the tertium datur with Georg Lukács" it says: "The choice of the 'golden mean' is one of the oldest teachings of wisdom ..."

effect

Arnold Hauser played an important role for art historians in both East and West. The outsider position of his two-volume social history of art and literature in the second half of the 20th century cannot be overlooked. His fiercest intellectual competitor Georg Lukács summed up in a radio conversation with Hauser in 1969: “ If I may now speak of your work, I consider it to be one of its unusual merits that, in the midst of this overwhelming neo-positivist current, there is a considerable number of sociologists and historians maintained a dwindling sense of the real context ... "For many readers, according to the words of journalist Walter Christian Gneuss, social history seemed like a" revelation ... and opened the eyes again to historical questions. "

The criticism reacted to Hauser's work in a very contradictory manner. The different evaluations hide different conceptions of an art sociology; no less do they reflect the difficulties in analyzing the real art process as well as actual contradictions in Hauser's theory itself. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer praised social history as a binding testimony to sociological art analysis and its happy overall presentation. Jürgen Scharfschwerdt understood this “art-sociological conception, which is difficult to specify”, as a “last great search for meaning and giving meaning to bourgeois society.” Ekkehard May characterized Hauser as the “undeniably most popular mentor of interdisciplinary work.” Alphons Silbermann, on the other hand, polemicized emphatically against uncritical adepts, “the ones sociologically giving birth to the 'Hauser method ' ”and evaluates its publications as a“ limitless mixture of social history, philosophy, psychology, aesthetics and Marxist ideology ”. Regardless of such objections, Hauser's scientific importance is reflected, among other things, in the fact that just one year after his death - incidentally, in an anthology edited by Silbermann (!) - he is recommended as a "classic of art sociology".

The social history of art and literature as its undoubtedly best known work was present in about 20 languages 1990th In the FRG, their tenth edition in 1990 totaled 70,000 copies. Some of his books are still available in bookshops. Such circulation numbers at least signal Hauser's potential influence. His many years of teaching activity and the assumption of visiting professorships at the universities of Leeds (Great Britain), Brandeis and Ohio (USA) as well as at the Hornsey College of Art in London must also be taken into account . Zoltán Halász said in a positive sense that Hauser had his own "school" justified (see secondary literature).

biography

After attending grammar school, Hauser studied German and Romance languages as well as philosophy at the University of Budapest and then completed a study visit to Paris . In 1916 his friend Karl Mannheim introduced him to the Budapest “Sunday Circle” around Georg Lukács with Béla Balázs , Edith Hajós, Béla Fogarasi , Frederick Antal , Emma Ritoók, Juliska Lang and Anna Schlamadinger. In 1917, members of the Sunday Circle , with the participation of Lajos Fülep , Zoltán Kodály , Béla Bartók and Ervin Szabó, founded the "Free School of the Humanities", at which Hauser gave lectures on post-Kantian aesthetics . In 1919 Arnold Hauser took part in the cultural policy of the Hungarian Soviet Republic . After the collapse of the Soviet republic, Hauser fled to Italy.

From 1919 to 1938 Hauser spent his years in exile, studying and traveling in Italy, Germany and Austria and worked in the film business, among other things. From 1938 his creative period began in Great Britain. In 1940 Karl Mannheim asked him to write a foreword to an anthology of works in the sociology of art. Instead of a foreword, it took ten years of work to create his social history of art and literature .

From 1951 to 1957 Hauser worked as a lecturer at the University of Leeds, after which he held a visiting professorship at Brandeis University in Waltham (Massachusetts) until 1959 , taught at Hornsey College of Art in London until 1962 and was visiting professor at Ohio State University until 1965, UNITED STATES.

He returned to London in 1965 and moved back to Hungary in 1977.

Hauser was awarded the German Critics' Prize for Literature in 1954 . He was an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences .

Remarks

  1. ↑ See Peter Rühmkorf's study recollections The years you know . Reinbek 1972.

Works

  • 1951: social history of art and literature (The Social History of Art and Literature)
  • 1958: Philosophy of Art History (The Philosophy of Art History)
  • 1964: Mannerism. The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art (Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art)
  • 1974: Sociology of the Arts (Sociology of Art)
  • 1978: In conversation with Georg Lukács' small anthology with three interviews and the essay "Variations on the tertium datur with Georg Lukács"
  • Social history and literature (Volume 1/2). Verlag der Kunst, Dresden 1987 ( Fundus series 106/107).
  • Social history and literature (Volume 2/2). Verlag der Kunst, Dresden 1987 ( Fundus series 108/109/110).

Secondary literature

  • Alberto Tenenti : Hauser, Arnold: Art, histoire sociale et méthode sociologique . In: Annales. Economies, Societes, civilizations . Paris: 12 (1957) 3, pp. 474-481.
  • Zoltán Halász: In Arnold Hauser's workshop . In: The new Hungarian quarterly . Budapest: 16 (1975) 58, pp. 90-96.
  • Ekkehard Mai : Art, Art History and Sociology. On the theory and method discussion in Arnold Hauser's “Sociology of Art”. In: The work of art. 1/1976, pp. 3-10.
  • Jürgen Scharfschwerdt: Arnold Hauser. In: Alphons Silbermann (Ed.): Classics of Art Sociology. Beck, Munich 1979, pp. 200-222.
  • K.-J. Lebus: A socio-historical view of art and society. (Annotation for the publication of social history ... in Verlag der Kunst, Dresden, 1987) . In: Fine arts . Berlin: 35 (1988) 12, p. 572.
  • K.-J. Lebus: On Arnold Hauser's art concept . In: Weimar Contributions . Berlin 36 (1990) 6, pp. 210-228. ( online )
  • Hauser, Arnold , in: Ulrike Wendland: Biographical Handbook of German-Speaking Art Historians in Exile. Life and work of the scientists persecuted and expelled under National Socialism . Munich: Saur, 1999, ISBN 3-598-11339-0 , pp. 267-270

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Hauser, Arnold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian-German art historian and art sociologist
DATE OF BIRTH May 8, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Temesvár
DATE OF DEATH January 28, 1978
Place of death Budapest