ABSTRACT
Vequaud was a French writer, a contributor to the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), a translator, a film director, and a curator, today mostly known for his essays on Mithila paintings. In this chapter, the authors aim to show the indirect impact of Marx’s ideas on Vequaud as a player of the countercultural Indophilia. They deal with, first, an overview of the different stages of Marx’s aesthetics, presented with only a little though to other Marxist theorists, and second, a discussion of different aspects of Véquaud’s writings connected to Marx’s ideas and counterculture. Counterculture had been fed by the neo-Marxism developed by the Frankfurt School in the intellectual and artistic world since the 1920s. During the 1960s, the language of protest drew its ideological references not mainly from the “orthodox” Marxist-Leninist tradition, but essentially from “heterodox” Marxisms: Frankfurt School, critical thought, New Left, (neo)-anarchism, (politically committed) surrealism, Council communism, and situationism.
