HENRI LEFEBVRE AND MARXIST ART HISTORY
Henri Lefebvre—the French philosopher, sometime member of the Communist Party, activist, and scholar—has been one of the most influential leftist theorists of space and the city in the past century. Working explicitly within the Marxist tradition, Lefebvre authored more than ninety books in an extremely productive career that spanned the Great Depression, the rise of Fascism and Vichy France, the struggles for independence in Algiers, the student movement in the late 1960s, and the rise of neoliberalism and neoconservatism in the world’s industrial democracies. Overtly or indirectly, Lefebvre took a position on all of these conflicts and events, demonstrating his fundamental belief that the point is, after all, to change the world, not just to analyze it. As part of this trajectory, Lefebvre became involved with the radical Situationist art movement. In addition, his work was especially promoted in the English language in the 1990s by leading Marxist cultural geographers. Given his political commitments, his critical theoretical understanding of social space and urbanism, as well as his occasional involvement with activist artists, Lefebvre has been a logical point of reference for Marxist art historians interested in the contestation over public and private space in the modern city. While not as systematically cited as left scholars like Manfredo Tafuri, Lefebvre’s development of the concept of social space has nevertheless been a powerful leitmotif in art histories devoted to artistic and architectural urban interventions in the modern industrial city. In the past few decades, he has also become a subject of art historical analysis.
