Arnold Hauser (1892–1978)

Arnold Hauser was born to a Jewish family in Temesvár, Hungary, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (present-day Timișoara, Romania). He went to the Universities of Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and Budapest to study German and Romance languages. In 1916, Hauser became a co-founder of the Sonntagskreis (Sunday Circle), an intellectual discussion group, along with his friend Karl Mannheim, György Lukács, Béla Bartók, and others. In 1918 Hauser received his doctorate at the University of Budapest. He studied fine art in Italy and in 1921 moved to Berlin, where he attending the lectures of Adolph Goldschmidt and historian Ernst Troeltsch. In 1924, he moved at the request of his wife to Vienna, where he explored the new art of film and was a freelance writer. He was a member of the Austrian Film Censorship Advisory Board from 1933 to 1936 and a docent of Film Theory and Technology at the Vienna Volkshochschule. In 1938, following Nazi Germany's Anschluss (annexation) of Austria, the Hausers fled to England. There he wrote essays on film for the periodicals Life and Letters Today and Sight and Sound. Over the next 10 years, Hauser wrote his monumental Sozialgeschichte der Kunst und Literatur, a survey in Marxist terms published in English as The Social History of Art (1951). The publication of the first volume was his entry into the academic world. He became a visiting professor at the University of Leeds and worked on volume two of the Social History, as well as another book, The Philosophy of Art History (1958). After Theodor Adorno invited him to lecture in Frankfurt, numerous other universities extended invitations to him. While a professor at art history at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1957-1959, Hauser wrote a history of Mannerism (published 1964). He returned to England in 1959 to lecture at Hornsey College of Art in London. He published the third and final volume of The Social History while serving as guest professor at the University of Ohio. Shortly before his death in 1978, Hauser returned to Budapest as an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Science.