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Faculty of Arts and HumanitiesErich Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies

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Research Project

Lu Märten’s “Social Aesthetics”

This project explores the “social aesthetics” of Lu Märten (1879–1970), a writer, art historian, and cultural critic. Märten contributed to aesthetics through her materialist perspective and experimental writing, viewing art as a social practice. She employed diverse formats and genres – scientific, journalistic, and literary – to generate insights and foster women’s and working-class agency, anticipating contemporary debates on the material and social conditions of knowledge and art. 
The project examines three key aspects of Märtens social aesthetics: (1) Märten’s historical-materialist approach that takes shape based on cultural revolutionary endeavors such as the land reform movement and the Werkbund, the cooperative movement, Marxism, and the proletarian women’s movement (2) her use of varied literary formats and genres for working class art education and her associated concept of form, and (3) the queer-feminist implications of her materialist approach to gendered labor and social reproduction. Her call for socializing feminized labor was not merely a condition for women’s liberation, but also as the starting point for a collectivist model of care that would be generalized with the abolition of the family. 
Among other things, the project will culminate in the introduction to the Lu Märten Reader titled “Classless Forms,” to be co-published with Prof. Dr. Mari Jarris by Cornell University Press in 2028. This first English-language collection of Märten’s writings will highlight her relevance to socialist, feminist, and aesthetic theory, contributing to interdisciplinary research and feminist epistemology.

Dorothea Walzer