concerned with thought and culture, and distant enough from direct economic pressures to be capable of differentiated responses' (p. 152). Because of the aspirations of many Expressionist artists to engage positively in the politics of the post-revolutionary period, they were inevitably confronted by the implications and consequences of `direct economic pressures'; in the face of a radicalized workers' movement, whose aim was not to contemplate the world but to change it, the worldview of Expressionism could be nothing but a retreat, deserting the streets and returning to the ivory tower, a criticism which Grosz and others made. The artists of the KPD ± affiliated Association of Revolutionary Artists (ASSO) recognized the limited address of painting; much of their art was to be directed at street level. In his earlier book, Workers' Culture in Weimar Germany: Between Tradition and Commitment (1990), Guttsman informs us that in Dresden, where the ASSO was very active, `its members produced and sold, literally for pennies small woodcuts or linocuts with a strong political symbolism, in pubs and at meetings.' (p. 201) His trawl through the State Archives in Bremen `yielded up an unexpectedly large amount of agitational material (. . .) produced most probably by worker-artists, though often copied from pattern- and sample-books which had been produced centrally by the KPD or ASSO.' (ibid.) The differences in Weltanschauungen and their modes of representation are posed in dramatic opposition here, embodied in related issues of art's ontology, competencies and skills, characteristics (also highly contestable) of bourgeois cultural values. Questions were also put to painting by the development of film (for example, the Brecht-Ottwalt film Kuhle Wampe) which Guttsman deals with in a chapter, `The New Media and the Parties on the Left' in his 1990 book. Although the publications address a very particular conjunctural moment ± an organized and well-informed working-class movement in a highly modernized state questioning the values of an established bourgeoisie, they also allow us to reflect in an acute sense on issues of artistic value still confronting us. Martin Gaughan University of Wales Institute Cardiff The Art Market and the History of Socialist Realism Susan E. Reid Socialist Realist Painting by Matthew Cullerne Brown, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998, 512 pp., 184 col. plates, 346 b. & w. illus., £60.00 In a recent forum on `Money, Power and the History of Art', Marcia Pointon reminded us, `To be an art historian is to deal in a knowledge field that is mapped by price tags.' 1 The discipline is imbricated in financial concerns not only in regard to its objects of study and their display, but also to its mediation through publishing, as senior editor of Yale University Press, Judy Metro, admitted in the same context. As the cost of illustrations escalates, `There are many ways in which money impacts on publishing decisions in the world of art, particularly as they are made in university presses.' 2 Yale's publication of Matthew Cullerne Brown's weighty and sumptuously illustrated Socialist Realist Painting REVIEW ARTICLES 310 ß Association of Art Historians 1999