Arnold Hauser (art historian) facts for kids

Arnold Hauser (born May 8, 1892, died January 28, 1978) was a smart thinker from Hungary and Germany. He was an expert in art history and how societies work (this is called sociology). Many people see him as a top thinker who used Marxism to understand art. He focused on how changes in society's structure affected art over time.

Life and Main Works

Arnold Hauser loved learning about art and books. He studied these subjects in big cities like Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. Some of his important teachers were Max Dvořák, Georg Simmel, Henri Bergson, and Gustave Lanson.

After World War I, he spent two years in Italy. There, he learned a lot about Italian art. In 1921, he moved to Berlin, and in 1924, he went to Vienna. Around this time, he realized something important. He felt that understanding art and literature was mostly about understanding how society works.

Another person who greatly influenced Hauser was Bernhard Alexander, a Hungarian philosopher. Alexander got Hauser interested in William Shakespeare and Immanuel Kant. This led Hauser to study theater and later, movies. He saw them as important parts of the bigger world of art.

Hauser became interested in Marxism by reading the ideas of György Lukács. He then met Lukács and joined his study group in Budapest. In Budapest, Hauser published his first writings between 1911 and 1918. This included his university paper about how to create a system for understanding beauty in art. This paper appeared in a journal called Athenaeum in 1918. After that, he published very little for 33 years. He spent his time doing research and traveling instead.

His most famous book is The Social History of Art, published in 1951. In this book, he suggested that art changed over time. He believed that early art, like cave paintings, was realistic. But then, art became more symbolic and abstract, focusing on spiritual ideas. As societies became less strict and more focused on trade and business, art became more realistic again.

Criticism

Arnold Hauser's ideas were sometimes criticized. A famous art historian named Ernst Gombrich thought Hauser's Marxist approach went too far. Gombrich called it "social determinism." This means Hauser seemed to suggest that society's rules completely decided what art would be like.

Gombrich wrote that Hauser's ideas might have stopped him from fully appreciating art. He felt that if all people, including us, are totally shaped by their economic and social lives, then we can't truly understand the past. We can't understand it just by feeling what people in the past felt.

However, some experts have argued that Gombrich didn't fully understand Hauser's ideas. They believe Hauser was more careful and didn't think society completely controlled art. He just thought it had a very strong influence.

Writings

• 1951: Sozialgeschichte der Kunst und Literatur (The Social History of Art and Literature)
• 1958: Philosophie der Kunstgeschichte (The Philosophy of Art History)
• 1964: Der Manierismus. Die Krise der Renaissance und der Ursprung der modernen Kunst (Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art)
• 1974: Soziologie der Kunst (The Sociology of Art)
• 1978: Im Gespräch mit Georg Lukács (In Conversation with Georg Lukács)

See also

In Spanish: Arnold Hauser para niños