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.

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).

Calvin Tomkins: The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde (1965/1976)

A classic work of art criticism. The chapters on Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Jean Tinguely, Robert Rauschenberg, and Merce Cunningham by an author also known for his work for Radio Free Europe, Newsweek, and The New Yorker.

First published by Viking Press, 1965
Viking Compass Edition with a new Introduction and expanded text published 1968
This edition by Penguin, 1976
ISBN 0140043136
306 pages

PDF (36 MB, no OCR)