Arnold Hauser
Arnold Hauser: A Life of Intellectual Curiosity and Contribution
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Full Name and Common Aliases
Arnold Hauser was a Hungarian-born British art historian, literary critic, and sociologist. He is commonly known for his seminal work on the sociology of art and literature.
Birth and Death Dates
Born in 1892 in Eger, Hungary (now part of modern-day Hungary), Arnold Hauser passed away in 1968 at the age of 76.
Nationality and Profession(s)
Hauser was a British citizen by naturalization. Throughout his career, he worked as an art historian, literary critic, and sociologist, with a particular focus on the sociology of art and literature.
Early Life and Background
Hauser's early life was marked by an insatiable curiosity for learning. Born to a Jewish family in Hungary, he grew up surrounded by art, literature, and philosophy. He developed a deep passion for understanding human culture and society through art and literature. Hauser's academic pursuits took him from the University of Budapest to the University of Vienna, where he studied law, economics, history, and sociology.
Major Accomplishments
Hauser is best known for his influential work on the sociology of art and literature. His magnum opus, The Social History of Art, published in 1951, revolutionized the field by introducing a comprehensive and integrated approach to understanding artistic development throughout human history. Hauser's groundbreaking research explored how social and economic factors influenced artistic evolution across cultures and periods.
Notable Works or Actions
Some of Hauser's notable works include:
The Social History of Art (1951) - This two-volume work remains a foundational text in the field, offering an in-depth analysis of art and literature from prehistoric to modern times.
Mannerism (1965) - A comprehensive study of this artistic movement, its development, and impact on Western culture.
Hauser's work not only contributed significantly to our understanding of art history but also demonstrated the power of interdisciplinary approaches in shedding light on human culture and society.
Impact and Legacy
Arnold Hauser's legacy is profound. His work has inspired generations of scholars, artists, and thinkers across various disciplines. The Social History of Art remains a standard reference for anyone interested in understanding the complex relationships between art, society, and culture. Hauser's innovative approach to studying art and literature as social phenomena paved the way for new areas of research and critical thinking.
Why They Are Widely Quoted or Remembered
Hauser's work continues to be widely quoted and remembered due to its profound impact on our understanding of artistic development across cultures and time periods. His ability to integrate historical, sociological, and philosophical perspectives has created a rich and enduring legacy in the world of art history.
Through his tireless efforts to understand human culture and society through art and literature, Arnold Hauser left an indelible mark on the academic community and beyond.
Quotes by Arnold Hauser
Arnold Hauser's insights on:
In interpreting a work of art, we draw upon our own aims and endeavors, inform it with a meaning that has its origin in our own ways of life and thought. In a word, any art that really affects us becomes to that extent modern art.
If we do not know or even want to know the aims that the artist was pursuing through his work – his aim to inform, to convince, to influence people – then we do not get much farther in understanding his art than the ignorant spectator who judges a football game simply by the beauty of the players’ movement.
Every honest attempt to discover the truth and depict things faithfully is a struggle against one’s own subjectivity and partiality, one’s individual and class interests; one can seek to become aware of these as a source of error, while realizing that they can never be finally excluded.
All rights, all power, all ability, are suddenly expressed in terms of money. In order to be understood, everything has to be reduced to this common denominator. From this point of view, the whole previous history of capitalism seems no more than a mere prelude.
Consciousness of self— the general realization that I exist independently of the circumstances of the moment—marks man’s first great effort of abstraction; the detachment of the various spiritual activities from their function in the totality of his life and the unity of his world view is a second abstraction.
It is not the experience which leads him to the problem, but the problem which leads him to the experience. That is also Zola’s method and procedure. He begins a new novel as the German professor of the anecdote begins a new course of lectures, in order to obtain more exact information about a subject with which he is unfamiliar.
Just as the social novel attains its perfection with Balzac, the Bildungsroman with Flaubert, the picaresque novel with Dickens, so the psychological novel enters the phase of its full maturity with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.
Since Gothic days all great art, with the exception of a few short-lived classicist movements, has something fragmentary about it, an inward or outward incompleteness, an unwillingness, whether conscious or unconscious, to utter the last word. There is always something left over for the spectator or reader to complete. The modern artist shrinks from the last word, because he feels the inadequacy of all words— a feeling which we may say was never experienced by man before Gothic times.
He could do nothing else but follow this intrinsically conservative tendency, conservative because tending towards a timeless and abstract canon of form, but nevertheless progressive in the stylistic situation of the time.
The reaction against utilitarianism was a second romanticism, in which the fight against social injustice and the opposition to the actual theories of the "dismal science" played a much smaller part than the urge to escape from the present, whose problems the anti-utilitarians had no ability and no desire to solve, into the irrarionalism of Burke, Coleridge, and German romanticism.