Home › Authors › Arnold Hauser
Arnold Hauser Quotes
1892–1978 Hungary
Arnold Hauser (8 May 1892, Timişoara, Romania – 28 January 1978, Budapest) was a Hungarian art historian and prominent marxist in his field. He wrote on the influence of change in social structures on art.
Also known as: Arnold Hauser
Random Arnold Hauser quote
13 quotes
Folk-art signifies the poetical, musical and pictorial activities of those strata of the population which are uneducated and not urbanized or industrialised.
Bihar Tribal Research Institute (1961)
The historical importance of the Carracci is extraordinary; the history of the whole of modern ‘church art’ begins with them.
The art of representing the human figure in the ancient world begins and ends with ‘frontality’.
Aristocracy in general does not favour individualism; it bases its claim to privilege upon virtues which are common to the whole class or at least to whole clans.
The late Middle Ages not merely has a successful middle class—it is in fact a middle-class period.
The new Christian ideal of life did not at first alter the outward forms of art, but did alter its social function.
Such specialization and depersonalization of enquiry led inevitably to a taste for mere erudition and a temptation to eclecticism.
We read the works of the older literature differently from those of our own age; we enjoy them purely aesthetically, that is, indirectly, disinterestedly, perfectly aware of their fictitiousness and of our self-deception.
Mannerism came so late into the foreground of research on the history of art, that the depreciatory verdict implied in its very name is often still taken to be adequate, and the unprejudiced conception of this style as a purely historical category has be.
The contrast between Tolstoy’s discretion and Dostoevsky’s exhibitionism, between the restraint of the one and the ‘dancing about naked in public’ of the other—as someone says in The Possessed—is attributable to the same social gap as separated Voltaire from Rousseau.
There is, as Tocqueville remarks, almost no political question which is not connected in some way with the imposition or the granting of taxes. At any rate, problems of taxation dominated public life in England from the end of the Middle Ages and became in the seventeenth century the immediate cause of the revolutionary movements.
At last the bourgeois has a theatre of his own in which he really feels at home. In every little town there is a modest building, and in the big cities those new palaces of stone or marble whose remains still survive.
The partial absorption of art by domestic industry and by domestic female crafts, that is to say, the fusion of artistic activity with other activities, is a retrogression from the standpoint of the division of labour and professional differentiation.
Topics Arnold Hauser is quoted on
Works