Marxist Art Roster
These items comprised a semi-official syllabus of art for the "hard Left" in the Sixties. They are the figures who were given the right to speak by dogmatic socialists and "socialist scholars."
To explain further what this list means, Sartre was not counted as a Left icon, but rather as a figure of bourgeois decadence. (Ditto for Genet.) Only "Black Orpheus" would grudgingly have been granted Left interest. Feminism meant Simone de Beauvoir and was considered bourgeois.[1] Homosexuality was classified as bourgeois decadence.[2] Sex was excluded from the Left's program; hence Wilhelm Reich, a hero of Bohemia, was not a hero of the Left. Paul Goodman was considered an Establishment do-gooder. Vertov was too formalist to be beloved by labor radicals.
roster of art theorists
Trotsky
Shklovsky
Rodchenko
Lunacharsky[*]
El Lissitzky
Kandinsky
Eisenstein
Lukács
Piscator
Mike Gold (CPUSA)
Zhdanov
Marcuse
Adorno
Benjamin
Dwight Macdonald
Madame Furtseva
Lee Baxandall
Howard Shulman, Palante
Frank Kofsky (SWP)
John Berger
"individualism"
Breton
the Situationists, Debord, Vaneghem
"third-world players in the metropolises"
Alioune Diop, owned Présence Africaine
Aimé Césaire
LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka)
Freedomways
interpreters
Jean-Paul Sartre
Frank Kofsky
some artists with the Left's stamp of approval
Mayakovsky
Shostakovich
Sholokhov
Eisenstein
the Mexican muralists -- Rivera etc.
Brecht
Kurt Weill
Charlie Chaplin
Aragon
Hugh McDiarmid
Neruda
Howard Fast
Ilya Ehrenburg
Paul Robeson
Sean O'Casey
Clifford Odets
Salt of the Earth
Herbert Biberman
Paul Jarrico
selected publications
Radical Perspectives in the Arts, ed. Lee Baxandall
Lissitzky, lecture: Prouns (delivered in Inkhuk, U.S.S.R., 1921, unpublished)
Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts (1968)
[S. O. Khan-Magomedov, Rodchenko: The Complete Work (1987)
Hugh Adams, "Alexander Rodchenko, the Simple and the Commonplace" Artforum, Summer 1979]
Ilya Ehrenburg, People and Life (New York, 1962), p. 274 for Mayakovsky
Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (translation 1960)
Andrei A. Zhdanov, Essays on Literature, Philosophy, and Music (New York, 1950)
André Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism (Ann Arbor, 1969)
Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre (1978)
Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, 1981)
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (tr. 1968)
Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music (tr. 1973)
Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music (tr. 1978)
T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1983)
Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art (1963)
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (1955), Ch. 9, "The Aesthetic Dimension"
Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism (1958), pp. 129-135
Herbert Marcuse, "Art in the One-Dimensional Society" Arts Magazine, May 1967
Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension (1978)
John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso
Ways of Seeing
Toward Reality (New York, 1962)
John Zerzan, "The Case Against Art," Fifth Estate, Fall 1986
John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (1988)
Dissent magazine; the "meaningless work" generation
Leslie Fiedler, An End to Innocence (1955)
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956)
Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (1960)
Paul Goodman, Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals (1962)
Harvey Swados, A Radical's America (1962)
surveys
Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (1957)
Lewis Coser and Irving Howe, The American Communist Party
Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left
James Gilbert, Writers and Partisans
Harvey Swados, The American Writer and the Great Depression (1966)
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre, "Orphée Noir" in Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (Paris, 1948)
J.-P. Sartre, "Black Orpheus," in What Is Literature? (Harvard, 1988)
Aimé Césaire
"Poésie et connaissance"
Tropiques No. 12, 1945
"Poetry and Knowledge" is in Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946-82 (1990) PQ 3949.C44.A24
André Breton
"Un grand poète noir"
Tropiques No. 11, 1944
"Aime Césaire: A Great Black Poet" in
André Breton, What Is Surrealism?, ed. F. Rosemont (New York, 1978)
LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Blues People (1963)
Frank Kofsky, Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (New York, 1970)