RUTH AYLETT admires the blunt honesty with which a woman’s experience is recorded, but detects the unexamined privilege that underlies it
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A class analysis
MIKE QUILLE is impressed by the rigorous Marxist approach to be found in a new book on the dialectics of art
DEVASTATINGLY EFFECTIVE: (Left) Francisco Goya’s The Disasters of War, 1863
IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis
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The Chinese language only introduced a feminine pronoun in the 1920s. Now, it might adopt a gender-inclusive one, suggests JANET DAVEY
The Dialectics of Art
by John Molyneux
(Haymarket Books, £17.99)
GROUNDED in a solidly Marxist perspective, John Molyneux’s book is a very fine contribution to writing on art.
Carefully argued chapters on what art is — how we evaluate it, how it changes and develops and the dialectical nature of modernism — are illustrated by case studies of artists including Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Tracey Emin, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and others.
The central strength of these theoretical and case-study strands is the recognition of the dialectical tensions that are generated and expressed in artworks which are produced in class-divided societies like our own.
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