Arnold Gehlen about modern art, culture and posthistory

The use of the term posthistory in Arnold Gehlen’s writings can be traced back to as early as the Fifties. It occurs also in his work Zeit-Bilder. Zur Soziologie und Ästhetik der modernen Malerei (1960/1986), where his theory of the art-historical development of pictorial rationality and his notion of ‘peinture conceptuelle’ are formulated as key tendencies of modern painting. Focusing on both Gehlen’s notion of modern art’s aesthetics and on his ‘theorem’ of posthistory (as a crystallization of socio-cultural structures), my attempt in this paper is to highlight the contribution of the so-called “conservative thinker” with regard to contemporary debates in art and art history.