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Peter Weiss: Art and the Historiography of Resistance

Context and contribution: This article appears in Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History, the journal of the Konsthistoriska Sällskapet/Swedish Society of Art Historians. It was published in this context because of Weiss’s importance as a Swedish writer and artist, though his later literary work was written in German and better known from a German Studies perspective. The article is based on a keynote lecture Schwartz gave at an annual conference of the Nordic Network for Research called “Visions of the Past”.

Research imperatives and process : The article considers The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975-1981), a landmark of postwar German literature and the magnum opus of the German-Jewish/Swedish writer Peter Weiss, as a complex and self-conscious form of art historiography. This ambitious and experimental novel is organised around sustained meditations of works of the visual arts in the attempt to define a hermeneutic of political resistance. By focussing on a) the writer's own reception of recent tendencies in art in his earlier career as a painter, and b) parallels with the work of German art historians since 1968, the article traces the vicissitudes of a politicised history of art in the wake of the New Left in Germany. This is the only English-language study of the novel from an art-historical perspective.