Hungarian-born British writer on the history of art and film. Hauser's major publications include The Social History of Art. When the work appeared in English in the 1950s, it stirred up great controversy because of its ideological orientation. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that a Marxist approach was accepted as a natural or fashionable part of academic research in Western Europe. However, Marxism started to lose its attraction among intellectuals before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Postmodernist art historians have rarely made references to Hauser's fundamental study.

"Genuine, progressive art can only mean a complicated art today. It will never be possible for everyone to enjoy and appreciate it in equal measure, but the share of the broader masses in it can be increased and deepened, The preconditions of a slackening of the cultural monopoly are above all economic and social. We can do no other than fight for the creation of these preconditions." (from Social History of Art, vol. 4)

Arnold Hauser was born in Temesvar. He studied history of art and literature at the universities of Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. In Paris his teacher was Henri Bergson who influenced him deeply. In Budapest Hauser became a member of the Budapest Sunday Circle, which was formed around the critic and philosopher György Lukács. The group included Karl Mannheim, a sociologist, the writers Béla Balázs, and the musicians Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. Mannheim, who had at first rejected the idea that sociology could be useful in the understanding of thought, soon became convinced of its utility. Also Frigyes Antal (1887-1954) applied the sociological method to art.

After World War I Hauser spent two years in Italy doing research work on the history of classical and Italian art. In 1921 he moved to Berlin. By that time he had developed his view that the problems of art and literature are fundamentally sociological problems. Three years later he settled down in Vienna and in 1938 he moved to London, where he started to research for Social History of Art. The work took ten years to finish. During this period Hauser wrote a number of essays about film for Life and Letters Today and Sight and Sound. From 1951 he was a lecturer on the history of art at the University of Leeds, and in the late 1950s a visiting professor at Brandeis University in the United States. In 1959 he became a teacher at Hornsey College of Art in London. He worked again in the United States in 1963-65 and then returned to London. In 1977 Hauser moved to Hungary, where he became an honorary member of the Academy of Science. He died in Budapest on January 28, 1978.

Hauser's last book, The Sociology of Art (1974) investigated the social and economic determinants of art. His suggestion that art does not merely reflect but interacts with society is a widely accepted premise. He also saw the art establishment and art reviewers as servers of commercial interests. As in his Social History of Art, Hauser's approach was Euro-centered and did not pay much attention to non-Western art.

Social History of Art was the result of thirty years of scholarly labour. It traced the production of art from Lascaux to the Film Age in the framework of changing socio-historical forces. Hauser opens his work with an attack on the neo-romantic doctrine of the religious origin of art, stating that "the monuments of primitive art... clearly suggest... that naturalism has the prior claim, so that it is becoming more and more difficult to maintain the theory of the primacy of an art remote from life and nature." Theodor Adorno noted in his Aesthetic Theory (1997) that "the most archaic artistic manifestations are so diffuse that it is as difficult as it is vain to try to decide what once did and did not count as art." Hauser divided magic from religion, and assumed that "the Palaeolithic hunter and painter thought he was in possession of the thing itself in the picture, thought he had won power over the portrayed by the portrayal."

Hauser's thesis was that form and content develop in direct relation both to concrete material conditions and to cultural development. Inevitable the process harboured contradictions – a style could be "classicist and anti-classicist at the same time". In Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art (1965) Hauser associated mannerism with spiritual crisis; mannerist art was an expression of the "alienation" of Renaissance man.

Hauser's Marxist-oriented approach was rejected by critics on the right, among them the English art historian E.H. Gombrich, whose crushing review of the book was published originally in The Art Bulletin, March 1953, and later in Meditations on a Hobby Horse (1963), a collection of essays. Gombrich's views reflected the general cold war attitudes to Marxism but also his own hostility to generalizations and "historicism". In this he followed the thoughts of his friend, the philosopher Karl Popper, whose Open Society and its Enemies (1945) attacked totalitarian ideas from Plato to Hegel and Marx. Gombrich rejected "dialectical materialism" and its doctrine of contradictions: "To us non-Hegelians, the term 'contradiction' describes the relations of two 'dictions' or statements such that they cannot both be true..." In his own iconological studies Gombrich interpreted Renaissance paintings using forgotten texts, poems, philosophical papers, and letters. This method, developed by Erwin Panofsky, was characterized by the French sociologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu as "a sort of symbolic gymnastics, like the rite or the dance..."

However, Hauser's aesthetic judgments were not so radical. He did not regard the relation between a work of art and social forces as a simple one-to-one correspondence, nor did he think that artistic expression could be guided by political doctrines – "But if even in the field of economics and politics planning cannot always be solved by imposing rules of conduct, it is all the less possible in art..." A politically conservative artist can break reactionary conventions and dogmas. According to Hauser, "every honest artist who describes reality faithfully and sincerely has an enlightening and emancipating influence on his age." In this Hauser refers to Engel's analysis of Balzac's Comédie humaine. But Dickens is another case: "... all the characters of this naturalist are caricatures, all the features of real life are exaggerated... everything is transformed into the stylized, simplified and stereotyped relationships and situations of the melodrama."

According to Hauser, the separation of sacred and profane art took place in the Neolithic age. Profane art, which was restricted to craft, probably lay entirely in the hands of women. Heroic and Homeric ages meant a decisive turn towards the social system of monarchy relying on the personal loyalty of vassals to their lord. A new type of man appeared on the scene – the artist with a markedly individual personality, but economic independence was out of the question. In the Middle Ages the emphasis was not on the personal genius of the artist but on the craftsmanship. The impersonal commodity-production dominated the whole of art.

The increased demand for works of art in the Renaissance led to the ascent of the artist from the level of the petty bourgeois artisan to that of the free intellectual worker. The concept of genius appears. Shakespeare looked down on the broad masses of the people with a feeling of superiority and made clear in his dramas the struggle between the Crown, the middle class and the aristocracy. Gradually the bourgeoisie took possession of all the instruments of culture. Rousseau was the first to speak as one of the common people himself. He turned against reason because he saw in the process of intellectualization also that of social segregation.

After the French Revolution artists and writers created their own standards, and their work brought them into a constant state of tension and opposition towards the public. Through Byron restlessness and aimlessness became a plague. The theory of 'l'art pour l'art' gave expression to romantic opposition to the bourgeois world; that is before Flaubert and Baudelaire shut themselves in their ivory towers, and the theory started to reflect a conservative attitude. The estrangement of the intellectuals from practical affairs was seen as the belief in the absoluteness of truth and beauty. Bohemians emerged as caricatures of the intelligentsia. In Russia the intellectual leadership passed into the hands of the cultural elite and remained there up to the Bolshevist revolution. Film signifies the attempt to produce art for the masses and give fulfilment to social romanticism.

For further reading: American Journal of Sociology, January (1960); 'Social History of Art,' in Meditations on a Hobby Horse by E.H. Gombrich (1963); 'Kunst, Kunswissenschaft und Soziologie' by E. Mai, in Kunstwerk, 29 (1976); 'Arnold Hausers Theorie der Kunst' by P. Klein, in Kritische Berichte 6, 1978); 'Arnold Hauser' by J. Scharfschwerdt, in Klassiker der Kunstsoziologie, ed. by A. Silbermann (1979); Sozialgeschichte und Kunstgeschichte: Kunstgeschichtsschreibung von Arnold Hauser by Hans U. Beyer (1984); Science and Society, Spring (1985); 'Zum Kunstkonzept Arnold Hausers' by Klaus-Jürgen Lebus, in Weimarer Beiträge 36 (1990); World Authors 1900-1950, vol. 2, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996)

Selected works:

• Sozialgeschichte der Kunst und Literatur, 1951 - The Social History of Art (tr. in collaboration with the author by Stanley Godman, 1951)
• Philosophie der Kunstgeschichte, 1958 - The Philosophy of Art History (tr. 1959)
• Der Manierismus: Die Krise der Renaissance und der Ursprung der modernen Kunst, 1965 / Der Ursprung der modernen Kunst und Literatur: Die Entwicklung des Manierismus seit der Krise der Renaissance, 1973 - Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art (2 vols., tr. in collaboration with the author by Eric Mosbacher, 1965)
• Soziologie der Kunst, 1974 - Sociology of Art (translated by Kenneth J. Northcott, 1982)