Frederick Antal (21 December 1887 – 4 April 1954), born Frigyes Antal, later known as Friedrich Antal, was a Hungarian

art historian Art history is the study of aesthetic objects and visual expression in historical and stylistic context. Traditionally, the discipline of art history emphasized painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, ceramics and decorative arts; yet today ...

, particularly known for his contributions to the

social history of art The history of art focuses on objects made by humans for any number of spiritual, narrative, philosophical, symbolic, conceptual, documentary, decorative, and even functional and other purposes, but with a primary emphasis on its aesthetics, ae ...

Early life

Antal was born in

Budapest Budapest (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Hungary. It is the ninth-largest city in the European Union by population within city limits and the second-largest city on the Danube river; the city has an estimated population ...

to a upper-class Jewish family. After earning a degree in law, he decided to pursue art history. He studied with

Heinrich Wölfflin Heinrich Wölfflin (; 21 June 1864 – 19 July 1945) was a Swiss art historian, esthetician and educator, whose objective classifying principles ("painterly" vs. "linear" and the like) were influential in the development of formal analysis in ar ...

at the

University of Berlin Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (german: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a German public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin. It was established by Frederick William III on the initiative o ...

before completing his doctorate under Max Dvorák at the

University of Vienna The University of Vienna (german: Universität Wien) is a public research university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world. With its long and rich histor ...

. Antal was a member of the

Sonntagskreis The Sonntagskreis ( hu, Vasárnapi Kör, italic=no, "Sunday Circle") was an intellectual discussion group in Budapest, Hungary, between 1915 and 1918. The main focus of the group was on the relationship between ideas and the social and histori ...

intellectual group formed in Budapest by

Béla Balázs Béla Balázs (; 4 August 1884 in Szeged – 17 May 1949 in Budapest), born Herbert Béla Bauer, was a Hungarian film criticism, film critic, aesthetics, aesthetician, writer and poet of History of the Jews in Hungary, Jewish heritage. He was a ...

György Lukács György Lukács (born György Bernát Löwinger; hu, szegedi Lukács György Bernát; german: Georg Bernard Baron Lukács von Szegedin; 13 April 1885 – 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary historian, critic, and ae ...

and others in 1915.Gluck, Mary. (1985
''Georg Lukács and His Generation, 1900-1918''
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. p. 14

Career

He started his career at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest with a year as a volunteer from 1914. In 1919, he became its ''Vorsitzender des Direktoriums'' (Chairman of the Board) for several months until the

White Terror White Terror is the name of several episodes of mass violence in history, carried out against anarchists, communists, socialists, liberals, revolutionaries, or other opponents by conservative or nationalist groups. It is sometimes contrasted wit ...

toppled the new

Hungarian Soviet Republic The Socialist Federative Republic of Councils in Hungary ( hu, Magyarországi Szocialista Szövetséges Tanácsköztársaság) (due to an early mistranslation, it became widely known as the Hungarian Soviet Republic in English-language sources ( ...

and he fled the country. After a brief sojourn in Vienna, Antal lived in

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical re ...

until 1923, when he relocated to

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...

. From 1926 to 1934, he was an editor for ''Kritische Berichte zur kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur'', alongside Bruno Fürst. In 1933, he was forced to flee from political upheaval again, as the

Nazi Party The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that crea ...

rose to prominence in Germany. Settling in

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

, he lectured at the

Courtauld Institute of Art The Courtauld Institute of Art (), commonly referred to as The Courtauld, is a self-governing college of the University of London specialising in the study of the history of art and conservation. It is among the most prestigious specialist coll ...

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

and wrote. According to a 2012 article in ''Visual Culture in Britain'', "Antal became the leading practitioner of the social history of art in Britain, and a formative influence on Anthony Blunt and

John Pope-Hennessy Sir John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy (13 December 1913 – 31 October 1994), was a British art historian. Pope-Hennessy was Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum between 1967 and 1973, and Director of the British Museum between 1974 and 1976. ...

."Stirton, Paul. (2012)
Frederick Antal and Peter Peri: Art, Scholarship and Social Purpose
''Visual Culture in Britain'' Volume 13, Issue 2. Accessed 5 May 2013. Lee Sorensen of the ''Dictionary of Art Historians'' writes that Antal "increasingly applied the concept of Marxist

dialectical materialism Dialectical materialism is a philosophy of science, history, and nature developed in Europe and based on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxist dialectics, as a materialist philosophy, emphasizes the importance of real-world con ...

to art history", suggesting that "artistic style is primarily an expression of

ideology An ideology is a set of beliefs or philosophies attributed to a person or group of persons, especially those held for reasons that are not purely epistemic, in which "practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones." Formerly applied pri ...

, political beliefs and

social class A social class is a grouping of people into a set of Dominance hierarchy, hierarchical social categories, the most common being the Upper class, upper, Middle class, middle and Working class, lower classes. Membership in a social class can for ...

".Sorensen, Lee.
Antal, Frederick
." Dictionary of Art Historians. Accessed 5 May 2013. Criticisms of his work include, according to Sorensen, that it assumes "too strong a determination of artistic style by social constructs" and neglecting the subjectivity of the artist's work in favor of too great an identification with the social class of the artist's sponsor.

Selected publications

*''Florentine Painting and its Social Background: The Bourgeois Republic before Cosimo de’ Medici’s Advent to Power: XIV and Early XV Centuries''. London, 1948. (Reprint: Harvard University Press, 1986, ) *''Fuseli Studies''. London, 1956. *''Hogarth and his Place in European Art''. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1962. *''Classicism and Romanticism, with Other Studies in art history''. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966. ncludes the essay ‘Remarks on the Method of Art History’

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Antal, Frederick 1887 births 1954 deaths Hungarian art historians Hungarian Jews Jewish historians Hungarian expatriates in Italy Hungarian expatriates in Germany Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United Kingdom