Arnold Hauser (art historian)

Arnold Hauser (8 May 1892 in Timişoara, Temes County – 28 January 1978 in Budapest) was a Hungarian art historian who was perhaps the leading Marxist in the field. He wrote on the influence of change in social structures on art. His The Social History of Art (1951) argued that art—which, after a paleolithic period of naturalism, began as "flat, symbolic, formalized, abstract and concerned with spiritual beings"—became more realistic and naturalistic as societies became less hierarchical and authoritarian, and more mercantile and bourgeois (Harrington).