In his 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse, Marx made one of his most important remarks on the subject of art. Marx’s point of departure is as follows: “The difficulty is that Greek arts and epic still afford us artistic pleasure”. If in modern society, capitalistic economic relations assign rank and influence to the various kinds of production, how can the products of precapitalistic artistic production retain their preeminent status? In other words, why is Greek art still beautiful in our eyes?

For Marx, the beauty of Greek art cannot be explained in eternal terms, but in relation to the role it plays in a modern context. Modern observers, he suggests, look at the Greeks as an adult looks at a child. The pleasure they derive from Greek art is thus inextricably bound up with the fact that the unripe social conditions under which it arose are lost forever.

Marx’s remark contains unmistakable traces of romanticism. More accurately, Marx characterizes the contemporary aesthetics of classical art in terms of a romantic experience of loss. Usually, classical antiquity is associated with harmony and restraint. Classical art – with adherence to strict formal standards – is often seen as universal. For Marx, however, the modern pleasure derived from classical art is premised on seeing the past through a romantic, almost nostalgic lens. Though Marx does not go so far as to argue that classicism is a sort of romanticism, his remark on Greek art entails a fascinating conception of the dialectic of the classic and romantic styles, which has yet to receive due scholarly attention.