Commonly associated with social history approaches, Marxist art history in fact encompasses a wide array of theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and questions. This workshop brings together perspectives on Marxist art historians active during the early and mid-20th century, ranging from well-known to more marginal figures. We will consider these approaches in terms of their underlying theoretical and historiographical patterns, their connections to the broader history of the discipline (e.g. history of style, formalism, social history, Kulturwissenschaft) as well as their intersections with extra-disciplinary fields such as anthropology, ethnology, and economics. What are the concrete tools, interpretative frameworks, periodization schemes, and analytical strategies used in constructing a materialist history of images, objects, and practices? Further, we aim to reflect on how these respective positions—often extending beyond the boundaries of what is traditionally considered Marxist art history—engage with a wide range of overlapping historiographical frameworks, including aesthetic concepts of materiality and form, feminist discourses on gendered relations of production in art and design, and the emerging field of ethnography and world art history.

Concept: Julia Gelshorn (University of Fribourg, guest researcher at DFK Paris) and Tobias Ertl (University of Fribourg), as part of the FNS research project “Real Abstractions: Reconsidering Realism’s Role for the Present”.

PROGRAM

February 11, 2025

• 2:00 – 2:30 pm 
  Welcome (Peter Geimer) 
  Introduction (Julia Gelshorn, Tobias Ertl)

Panel 1
Moderation: Julia Gelshorn

• 2:30 – 3:30 pm 
  Wolfgang Brückle
  Max Raphael: What Is, and to What End Do We Study, a Materialist Work of Art?
• 3:30 – 4:30 pm 
  Louis Hartnoll
  Meaning at the Margin: Walter Benjamin on Hans Sedlmayr and Carl Linfert
• 4:30 – 5:00 pm Coffee Break
• 5:00 – 6:00 pm Kerstin Thomas
  “reshape, remake”: Meyer Schapiro’s anti-universalistic concept of art and society
   

February 12, 2025

Panel 2
Moderation: Elisabeth Fritz

• 9:30 – 10:30 am 
  Tobias Ertl
  Lu Märten’s Art History Without Names
• 10:30 – 11:30 am 
  Jenny Nachtigall
  Artwork and Housework: Lu Märten’s feminist forms
• 11:30 – 12:00 pm Coffee Break
• 12:00 – 1:00 pm 
  Maria Stavrinaki
  Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen: Carl Einstein vs. Carl Einstein

1:00 – 2:30 pm Lunch Break

Panel 3
Moderation: Tobias Ertl

• 2:30 – 3:30 pm 
  Julia Gelshorn
  Madeleine Rousseau: An Art History for the People
• 3:30 – 4:30 pm 
  Angela Harutyunyan
  An Aesthetics of Measure: Lifshitz’s Marx and the Problem of Uneven Development
• 4:30 – 5:00 pm Coffee Break
• 5:00 – 6:00 pm 
  Mathilde Arnoux
  Back to Marx: Stefan Morawski’s analysis of the aesthetic views of Marx and Engels