156
LEE BAXANDALL
Still, the work is not wholly futile.
If
one wishes a
biographical
study
of
Marx and
Engels in their literary activity and interests, this is the one
source now available in English. Moreover, the accounts of their relations
with George Herwegh, Gutzkow, Borne, Freiligrath and Heine are quite
full, and it must be said that the Marxist commentators, by and large,
have been in their own way no more unbiased than
is
Demetz.
A full account in English of the actual aesthetic ideas of Marx and
Engels is long overdue. Only one monograph, by Mikhail Lifshitz, con–
siders some of the basic problems. Of course, there are any number of
English-language books and articles, pro and con, interpreting the
"Marxist" view of art, particularly in the Soviet Union, but all without
seriously examining the actual texts of Marx and Engels. Nor do we
have an adequate edition of the texts in English. The slim volume issued
by International Publishers (1947) is poorly selected, lacks commentary
and some of it is badly translated. Demetz, with his tendentious extracts
and his manifold omissions, does not make good the lack of texts.
Yet, strangely, American cultural criticism has grown in "Marxist"
content since the thirties. One finds our critics and cultural historians
generally more than ever aware of the social problems and forces
expressed in aesthetic terms, and more aware of the dimension of aliena–
tion in art under modem capitalism. Whether this has come about as a
refinement of the largely inadequate Marxist views of thirty years ago, or
perhaps in spite of the Party periodicals and critics, is a moot question.
Marxist views on painting, for example, are applied in a concrete
and subtle way today in America by Leonard Baskin, Milton W. Brown,
Oliver Larkin, Harold Rosenberg and Meyer Schapiro, to name a few.
Though their use of Marxist perspectives is not wholly consistent with
other tools in their approach, their writings do display - with aberra–
tions - a sophistication of understanding which can only be tenned
~'Marxist,"
of an incisiveness which one did not find in our art criticism
until recent years. The situation is similar in other genres of criticism and
cultural history.
Anti-Communist polemicists like Demetz, harping upon "autonomy"
and the uselessness of Marx, must be at a loss to explain the influence
of Marx on critical thought. Marxist aesthetics is not a universal key to
artistic phenomena; but it is one key, and an essential one as is
increasingly recognized.
lee Baxandall
