Francis Klingender: ‘Marxism and Modern Art’

My transcription of Francis D. Klingender’s pamphlet, Marxism and Modern Art: An approach to social realism is now available at the Marxist Internet Archive.

You can find it here: http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/lit_crit/klingender/index.htm

Klingender was a British Marxist whose life spanned the first half of the twentieth century. His major works included Art and the Industrial Revolution (1947) [1], Goya in the Democratic Tradition (1948) and his posthumously published Animals in Art and Thought (1971).

In this pamphlet, Klingender builds an argument for a Marxist theory of aesthetic value, beginning with the formalism of Roger Fry and taking us through the escapism of Tennyson, the realism of Chernyshevsky, and finally drawing upon the epistemology set out by Lenin.

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[1] Readers should be aware that the later edition of 1968 was revised by Arthur Elton to tone down Klingender’s Marxism.