Acta Historiae Artium, Tomus 56, 2015 0001-5830/2012/$20.00 © Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest TYRUS MILLER* THE NON-CONTEMPORANEITY OF GYÖRGY LUKÁCS COLD WAR CONTRADICTIONS AND THE AESTHETICS OF VISUAL ART Abstract: This paper traces the complex relations of György Lukács to visual art and aesthetics, from his early writings through his engagement with artistic politics in the post-World War II ‘people’s democracy’ transitional period and during the Stalinist dictatorship. In one sense, Lukács seems obsolete for contemporary art and aesthetics, as a philosopher and critic with an out-of-fashion aesthetic theory, justifying a canon of works opposed even to the mainstream of the 20 th century modernism, and deployed in the service of a cultural politics of Soviet and Eastern Bloc socialism now seen as historically superseded and discred- ited. In another sense, Lukács’s non-contemporaneity may been seen through the dispersed reception of his work, particularly across the Cold War East–West divide, in which different moments of Lukács’s oeuvre were picked up and developed in divergent ways. Given these multiple contexts of reception, the author and thinker ‘György Lukács’ could never be wholly contemporary with himself, but always signified a variable complex of his current writing as well as the afterlife of earlier phases of his work. Lastly, there is an additional sense of ‘non-contemporaneity’ that is associated especially with Lukács’s one-time friend and ally Ernst Bloch, for whom being non-identical with one’s time implied a reserve of potentiality not yet realized, but latent within the inheritance of culture. With reference to László Lakner’s works based on Lukács’s books, I conclude with the possibility that the ‘non-contemporaneity’ of Lukács may yet have something to offer contemporary art and aesthetics. Keywords: György Lukács, realism, modernism, abstract art, Marxist aesthetics, socialist art, Stalinism, László Lakner * Tyrus Miller, Vice Provost and Dean, Graduate Studies and Professor of Literature, University of California at Santa Cruz; e-mail: tyrus@ucsc.edu There is something paradoxical in speaking about György Lukács in connection with ‘visual- izing ideology’ in the Cold War era, 1 insofar as Lukács was so strongly rooted in literary culture and had, in fact, relatively little to say explicitly about visual art. I have taken up this paradox in a way that, I hope, conceptually captures some- thing characteristic of Lukács’s relation to visual art. In one sense, Lukács seems ‘non-contempo- rary’: profoundly out of step with contemporary art and aesthetics, as a philosopher and critic with an out-of-fashion aesthetic theory, justify- ing a canon of works opposed even to the main- stream of 20 th -century modernism, and deployed in the service of a cultural politics of Soviet and Eastern Bloc socialism now seen as historically obsolete and discredited. In a more sophisticated framework, however, I also want to consider Lukács’s non-contemporaneity through the dis- persed reception of Lukács’s work, particularly across the Cold War East–West divide, in which different moments of Lukács’s oeuvre were picked up and developed in divergent ways. In a sense, given these multiple contexts of reception, the author and thinker ‘György Lukács’ could never be wholly contemporary with himself, but always signified a variable complex of his current writing as well as the afterlife of earlier phases of his work. Lastly, I want to allude to an additional sense of ‘non-contemporaneity’ that is associated especially with Lukács’s one-time friend and ally Ernst Bloch, for whom being non-identical with one’s time implied a reserve of potentiality not yet realized, but latent within the inheritance of culture. In this case, I will be circling back to our