On Broken Ground. Issue 2 (3rd April 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Day, James
• Is Part Of: Rethinking Marxism. Volume 30:Issue 2(2018)
• Page Start: 307
• Page End: 323
• Publication Date: 2018-04-03
• Subjects: Theodor W. Adorno -- Walter Benjamin -- Marxist Art History -- Pablo Picasso -- Realism; Communism -- Periodicals; Periodicals; 335.4305
• DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2018.1502304
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0893-5696

Abstract

Abstract : Following a brief review of dissident Marxist art historian T. J. Clark's Picasso and Truth, this essay asks whether the techniques developed by certain visual artists and writers over the course of the last century might be applied in Marxist critique. By returning to debates on realism in Europe in the mid 1930s and subsequent work by Marxist art historians, the essay makes the case for the use of modernist-like deformation in contemporary Marxist critique. Realist engagement is seen as compatible with—indeed, as necessitating—experimentation with form, something recognized in the recent revival of interest in György Lukács.