Margaret A. Rose: Marx’s Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx and the Visual Arts (1984)

“This book offers an original and challenging study of Marx’s contact with the visual arts, aesthetic theories, and art policies in nineteenth-century Europe. It differs from previous discussions of Marxist aesthetic theory in looking at Marx’s views from an art-historical rather than from a literary perspective, and in placing those views in the context of the art practices, theories, and policies of Marx’s own time. Dr Rose begins her work by discussing Marx’s planned treatise on Romantic art of 1842 against the background of the philosophical debates, cultural policies, and art practices of the 1840s, and looks in particular at the patronage given to the group of German artists known as the ‘Nazarenes’ in those years, who are discussed in relation to both the English Pre-Raphaelites, popular in the London known to Marx, and to the Russian Social Realists of the 1860s. The author goes on to consider claims of twentieth-century Marxist art theories and practices to have represented Marx’s own views on art. The book the conflicting claims made on Marx’s views by the Soviet avant-garde Constructivists of the 1920s and of the Socialist Realists who followed them are considered, and are related back to the aesthetic theories and practices discussed in the earlier chapters.”

Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1984
ISBN 0521369797, 9780521369794
216 pages
via Charles, in the Unlimited Edition

Reviews and commentaries: Genet-Delacroix Marie-Claude (Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 1986, FR), Harold E. Maha (History of European Ideas, 1987), Eugene Hirschfeld (2010).

Publisher

PDF (25 MB, no OCR)
See also the entry on Marxist aesthetics on Monoskop wiki.

Vítězslav Nezval: Abeceda (1926)

“In Nezval’s Abeceda, a cycle of rhymes based on the shapes of letters, I tried to create a ‘typofoto’ of a purely abstract and poetic nature, setting into graphic poetry what Nezval set into verbal poetry in his verse, both being poems evoking the magic signs of the alphabet.” – Karel Teige

The 1926 book Abeceda [Alphabet] is a landmark work of the artists’ collective Devětsil, active in Prague and Brno in the 1920s.

“The composition of Abeceda took place in three stages. Vítězslav Nezval wrote the poem in 1922 along the line of the grade-school syllabary, matching each letter of the alphabet with a single rhyming quatrain. Nearly every verse takes its lead from the visual aspect of its letter and proceeds as a sequence of fanciful associations: “A / let us call you a simple hut / Transport your tropics to the Moldau, o palms / A snail has its simple home with feelers sticking up / while people don’t know where to lay their heads.” For a celebratory Nezval evening in 1926 at the Liberated Theater in Prague, Milča Mayerová contributed a choreographed alphabet that complemented each quatrain with a sequence of poses. The composition concluded with Karel Teige’s addition of photo-montages that join photographs of Mayerová’s embodied alphabet with his own geometric letterforms.

Nezval’s verses follow from his conviction that poetry, as a game of language played at the level of its rudiments, provided a means of transforming the world directly. The photos of Mayerová illustrate in concrete terms this intimacy between language and reality; the poses have her almost trying the alphabet on for size. Teige’s photomontages organize that alphabetized figure with geometric letters according to the structure of the grid, which the artist regarded as an emblem of rational order. In setting Mayerová’s figure in gridded relation to the alphabet, Teige seemed to be insisting that readers consider the realities of life in relation to letters whose shapes they not only determine, but that in turn determine them.” (Source)

Abeceda. Taneční komposice Milči Mayerové
Publisher J. Otto, Prague, 1926
Illustrated with 25 black and white photomontages
57 pages
via V&A

Video adaptation (8 min, 2000, made at the Wolfsonian-FIU, Miami)

PDF (with Nezval’s poems in Czech, low resolution)
PDF (images only, low resolution)

Calvin Tomkins: The World of Marcel Duchamp, 1887–1968 (1966/1972)

The book draws on interviews and materials gathered for Tomkins’ 1965 profile of Duchamp in The New Yorker. Fully illustrated, with color and black and white reproductions and photographs.

By Calvin Tomkins and the Editors of Time-Life Books
Publisher Time-Life Books, New York, 1966
Revised 1972
192 pages

PDF (56 MB, no OCR)

See also chapter on Duchamp in Tomkins’ The Bride and the Bachelors (1965/76) and his collected interviews with Duchamp ([1964] 2013).