This unique book is the first comprehensive introduction to Marxist approaches to art history. Although the aesthetic was a crucial part of Marx and Engels's thought, they left no programmatic statements on the arts. In meeting this gap, succeeding Marxists have inevitably devised a wide variety of approaches to both aesthetics and the writing of art's history. Although there is an abundant scholarship on Marxist approaches to literature, the historiography of the visual arts from a Marxist perspective has been largely neglected despite the large impact it has had within academic art history since 1970.



This book encompasses a range of influential thinkers and historians from the period of the Second and Third Internationals down to the heyday of the New Left. Among the individuals it covers are William Morris, Mikhail Lifshits, Frederick Antal, Francis Klingender, Max Raphael, Meyer Schapiro, Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, and Arnold Hauser. It also includes three essays addressing the heritage of the New Left. In the spirit of Marxism itself, the authors interpret the achievements and limitations of Marxist art history in relation to the historical and political circumstances of its production and provide an indispensable and lucid introduction to contemporary radical practices in the field.

For most of the twentieth century, American and European intellectual life was defined by its fascination with a particular utopian vision. Both the artistic and political vanguards were spellbound by the Communist promise of a new human era -- so much so that its political terrors were rationalized as a form of applied evolution and its collapse hailed as the end of history.

The Red Atlantis argues that Communism produced a complex culture with a dialectical relation to both modernism and itself. Offering examples ranging from the Stalinist show trial to Franz Kafka's posthumous career as a dissident writer and the work of filmmakers, painters, and writers, which can be understood only as criticism of existing socialism made from within, The Red Atlantis suggests that Communism was an aesthetic project -- perhaps the aesthetic project of the twentieth century.

Considering the meaning of Communist culture in its absence, these essays sift through the wrecking age of Marxist fantasy to exhibit exhumed fossils (Socialist Realist canvases), vanished monuments (the Berlin Wall), imaginary territories (the Jewish state, Birobidzhan), and ideological memories (the Crime of the Century). The Cold War notwithstanding, the  greatest of these exotic artifacts and obsolete scenarios is the lost Communist utopia, which, in fact, never existed.