Abstract
Czech art history and its methodological traditions are still viewed and interpreted primarily through the prism of influence and legacy of Vienna School of Art History. Contrarily, in my contribution I would like to put emphasis on another two methodological approaches - Marxism and iconology - and their mutual relation that formed Czech art history since 1950s.
However, among Czech art historians (naturally among the representatives of elder generation) these approaches are still discussed rarely or at least with caution at the academic level. The contribution will analyse the gradually changing situation in Czech art historical area during the 1950s and 1960s on examples of two prominent art historians - Jaromír Neumann and Rudolf Chadraba - who were dealing with Marxism and iconology differently and they both mirrored the changing political situation in their writings more obviously and more attractively in comparison with other contemporary Czech art historians.
Most importantly, I will attempt to show how each of them was formed by these approaches in a slightly diverse way to avoid of one-sided and overly generalized point of view on appropriation of Marxism and iconology by Czech art historians. Starting positions of both art historians in 1950s will be analysed on the basis of the texts from early period of their careers, including Neumann's dissertation "Painting of the 17th Century in Bohemia" (published in 1951) that represents prime example of using historical materialism conforming to requirements of Marxist-Leninist doctrine in Czech art history and Chadraba's art-historical articles dealing with Marx's theory of alienation.
The turn of the 1950s and the 1960s signalised that Czech art history, until then isolated because of the rigid Marxist-Leninist and Stalinist ideologies imposed by Communist state on its methodology and theory of art from 1948, became gradually acquainted with new Western progressive methods and thus iconology started to penetrate into practices of both art historians. From current point of view, we can call this transformation in their works an "iconological turn".
Nevertheless and surprisingly with regard to his previous dogmatic Marxist and Stalinist stance, Neumann's iconology started to resemble to Erwin Panofsky's post-war iconology that was already codified in art historical discourse at that time but had hardly anything to do with Marxism, whereas in the case of Rudolf Chadraba an appropriation of iconology in the background of Marxist art history resulted into the conception that I suggest to name "Marxist iconology" and which can be best recognized in his study on Albrecht Dürer's famous cycle of Apocalypse that I will analyse more deeply in order to pose the question whether it is legitimate to talk about "Marxist iconology" in the Czech art historiography or whether iconology should have only played the part of one version of Marxist art history because of the command from on high.