Hauser studied history of art and literature in Budapest, Vienna, Berlin and Paris. Among his teachers were
Max Dvořák in Vienna,
Georg Simmel in Berlin,
Henri Bergson and
Gustave Lanson in Paris. After
World War I he spent two years in Italy, familiarizing himself with Italian art. In 1921, he moved to Berlin, and in 1924 to Vienna. By that time he had concluded, in his own words, that “the problem of art and literature, in the solution of which our time is most eagerly engaged, are fundamentally sociological problems.” Another crucial influence on Hauser was Hungarian philosopher
Bernhard Alexander, which transmitted to Hauser an interest for both
William Shakespeare and
Immanuel Kant. This led to Hauser's systematic study of theater and, later, cinema as parts of the larger world of art. He embraced Marxism by first reading the writings of
György Lukács, then meeting him and becoming part of his
Sonntagskreis in Budapest. It was in Budapest that Hauser published his first writings, between 1911 and 1918, including his doctoral dissertation about the problem of creating a systematic aesthetics, which appeared in the journal
Athenaeum in 1918. He published very little in the next 33 years, devoting himself to research and travel. His life's work, the four volume
Social History of Art (1951), argued that art—which, after a
Paleolithic period of naturalism, began as "flat, symbolic, formalized, abstract and concerned with spiritual beings"—became more
realistic and
naturalistic as societies became less hierarchical and authoritarian, and more
mercantile and
bourgeois (Harrington). ==Criticism==