The title Marx’s Lost Aesthetic makes two claims - that Marx had an aesthetic, and that it was lost. Here is the stuff of a good narrative here: What was Marx’s aesthetic? How did he come to have it? Why, when and how was it lost? This in the story Margaret Rose sets out to tell from the perspective indicated in the subtitle, Marx’s relation to the visual arts.

She begins, therefore, with the Nazareens - a school of Romantic painting that dominated early nineteenth-century Germany and was prominent in England. Influenced by Heine, the story goes, the young Marx rejected the idealism and spiritualism of the Nazareens, and the system of state patronage that supported it. He then went on to develop a rationalistic and materialistic aesthetic - one that rejected the idealism of Hegel and Kant and owed much to Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity as alienating of human consciousness and to Saint-Simon’s notion of the artist as an avant-garde producer/administrator/educator. Having told us this about how Marx arrived at his theory of art, Rose then moves on to the ‘what’ of his aesthetic.