•  2
    Too Close to Nature: On the Representational Problems of Death Masks and Life Casts
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. forthcoming.
    While historians of art have found death masks and life casts conceptually problematic, it is also noteworthy that these objects have received scant attention from philosophers of art. In this paper, I begin to redress this omission by offering examples of how the philosophy of art can help us understand these images. Two problems stand out: the problem of representation, for example, what type of representation a death mask is; and the problem of style and historicity, for example, whether imag…Read more
  •  48
    The concept of the Formalesque preoccupied Bernard Smith during the last decades of his life. First propounded in Modernism's History (1998), the Formalesque is a proposed period style describing the art of the 20th century. Yet, despite his ambitions for the Formalesque as a new classification for modern art, the idea failed to appeal to academic art history. This paper does not attempt to salvage the Formalesque from art-historical obscurity. But it does argue Smith's work on this topic is rel…Read more
  •  40
    Gombrich’s critique of Hauser’s Social History of Art
    History of European Ideas 43 (5): 494-506. 2017.
    This article examines E.H. Gombrich’s critical appraisal of Arnold Hauser’s book, The Social History of Art. Hauser’s Social History of Art was published in 1951, a year after Gombrich’s bestseller, The Story of Art. Although written in Britain for an English-speaking public, both books had their origins in the intellectual history of Central Europe: Gombrich was an Austrian art historian and Hauser was Hungarian. Gombrich’s critique, published in The Art Bulletin in 1953, attacked Hauser’s dial…Read more
  •  18
    To date, critical engagement with Arnold Hauser’s sociology of art has been confined to the field of art history. This perspective has ignored Hauser’s interest in literary history, which I argue is essential to his project. Hauser’s dialectical model, composed of conflicting realist and formalist tendencies, extends to the literary sphere. In The Social History of Art, these two traditions are epitomised by the Russian social novel and German idealism. Anti-enlightenment tendencies in German in…Read more
  •  16
    Frederick Antal and the Marxist challenge to art history
    History of the Human Sciences 35 (2): 55-76. 2022.
    First published in 1948, Frederick Antal’s Florentine Painting and Its Social Background was an important milestone in anglophone art history. Based on European examples, including Max Dvořák, it sought to understand art history’s relationship to social and intellectual history. When Antal, a Hungarian émigré, arrived in Britain in 1933, he encountered an inward-looking discipline preoccupied with formalism and connoisseurship; or, as he phrased it, art historians of ‘the older persuasion’ ignor…Read more
  •  10
    Vere Gordon Childe’s theory of craft specialisation was an important influence on Arnold Hauser’s book The Social History of Art, published in 1951. Childe’s Marxist interpretation of prehistory enabled Hauser to establish a material foundation for the occupation of the artist in Western art history. However, Hauser’s effort to construct a progressive basis for artistic labour was complicated by art’s ancient connections to religion and superstition. While the artist’s social position and class …Read more