ABSTRACT
Deriving from the Greek,meaning ‘leadership’ or ‘to lead’, hegemony is a term from political history and marxist^ theory that has been adapted by art^ historians attempting to explain how and why certain styles of art, or institutions, or critical theories (or kinds of art history, for that matter) become dominant at particular moments. In the 1920s the Italian marxist and founder of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci, turned to the concept in order to explain the rise in the popularity of the fascists in his country at the time. It was because the fascists had offered the idea of a powerful national^ culture (based on an idealised version of Roman history), Gramsci thought, that they had managed to convince the people that they could become as great again. Their leader, Benito Mussolini, aped the physical appearance of the Roman Caesars and in various ways the Italian state under his command deliberately used the signs and symbols of the imperial Roman past in order to produce the fascist hegemony. Instead of the working class^ developing socialist political sympathies in line with their place in a capitalist^ social order, as they should have done according to marxist expectations, they had become seduced, Gramsci believed, by Mussolini’s rhetoric of patriotic nationalism and Italy’s new imperial destiny. Hegemony, then, is a social and cultural process: a selective and
strategic appropriation of symbols and meanings current and past in a society, which are then linked to a set of contemporary politicalideological goals and values – though Gramsci had stressed that hegemony worked through coercion (state power and violence) as well as through convincing people. It is fairly easy to see how art and art history contain ideological hegemonic materials. History painting in the nineteenth century, for example, became a direct and powerful way to narrate and visualise a particular account of a ruler’s power and his regime’s legitimacy – for example, JacquesLouis David’s 1801 picture of Napoleon Crossing the Saint Bernard Pass depicts the French emperor as a modern Hannibal or Charlemagne crossing the Alps on his way to military victory over the AustroHungarian army at Marengo a year earlier. The ideal of a specifically national art or national culture – say, that of the nazis in the 1930s, based on their claim to ‘Aryan racial purity’ and a trans-historical, mystical ‘Germannness’ – became an ideological lynchpin for many states in the twentieth century, though all, in reality, had to select
and reject cultural and artistic elements in order to create such a singular hegemonising representation.
