Proudhon, Marx, Picasso: Essays in Marxist Aesthetics, by Max Raphael (used)

Max Raphael’s Proudhon, Marx, Picasso, originally published in Paris in 1933 following the author’s exile from Germany, has long been recognized as an important work of Marxist aesthetics. Its central essay, ‘The Marxist Theory of Art,’ is still the most compact, thorough exposition of its subject, which demonstrates that the emphasis in modern Marxism on ‘the relative autonomy of the superstructure’ –including the cultural sphere–is no new discovery but was systematically explained and illustrated, on the basis of the scholarly use of the relevant Marxist texts, by Raphael as far back as the early thirties. 

This major essay on Marxism and art follows and is a response to the opening essay, ‘Proudhon and the Sociology of Art,’ which contains a detailed account and analysis of Proudhon’s writings on art, criticized for their mechanical subordination of art and artistic activity to sociological categories and for their consequent limitation of the artistic sphere, leading to a search for false and utopian solutions. 

The final essay – on Picasso – shows Raphael, the critic and theoretician, before one of the major European artists of his time, a confrontation which produced a piece of critical writing that anticipated and fundamentally influenced assessment of Picasso and modern art criticism. 

Condition: very good