Mikhail Lifshitz is a major forgotten figure in the tradition of Marxist philosophy and art history. A significant influence on Lukács, and the dedicatee of his The Young Hegel, as well as an unsurpassed scholar of Marx and Engels’s writings on art and a lifelong controversialist, Lifshitz’s work dealt with topics as various as the philosophy of Marx and the pop aesthetics of Andy Warhol. The Crisis of Ugliness (originally published in Russian by Iskusstvo, 1968), published here in English for the first time, presented with a detailed introduction by its translator David Riff, is a compact broadside against modernism in the visual arts that resists the dogmatic complacencies of Stalinist aesthetics. Its reentry into English debates on the history of Soviet aesthetics promises to re-orient our sense of the basic coordinates of a Marxist art theory.
Publication date: June 11, 2019
List of Illustrations
Introduction. Mikhail Lifshitz: A Communist Contemporary
David Riff
Foreword
1 Myth and Reality: The Legend of Cubism
‘Scandal in Art’
Two Appraisals of Cubism
G.V. Plekhanov and Cubism
The Terms ‘Reactionary’ and ‘Bourgeois’
The Revolt against Things
Fusion with Objects as an Ideal
The Evolution of Cubism
Painting in the Other World
2 The Phenomenology of the Soup Can: The Quirks of Taste
The Economy of Painting
Reflection’s Malaise
Conclusion
3 Why am I Not a Modernist?
References
Index
Illustration Section