This article is devoted to the original sources from which the Latvian art historian Kristaps Eliass (1886--1963) developed his theoretical principles. Eliass wrote biographical and theoretical articles, as well as books about Dutch and French art, and of particular importance to him were the writings of German authors Richard Muther and Julius Meier-Graefe, both of whom were prominent at that time. During the Soviet period, Kristaps Eliass was praised for his texts where he emphasized the influence of social conditions on arts, linking it directly to the progressive role of Karl Marx's conception. However, the work of Muther and Meier-Graefe is much closer to that of Eliass - they saw art history as a systematic and ordered interpretation of processes, criticizing the separation of art and life that was typical of capitalist societies. Kristaps Eliass also placed a high emphasis on the personality of each artist, thus reflecting the ideas of Romanticism, as well as the influential thinking of Arthur Schopenhauer. In his writing Eliass also drew upon the ideas of the historians and theoreticians Alois Riegl and Wilhelm Worringer, among others, about the regularities that are found in the evolution of the arts. He also took advantage of conclusions which the optician Hermann von Helmholtz developed about the impossibility of copying nature directly in a work of art. During the dogmatic period of Stalinism, Eliass' work fell out of favor and was criticized for emphasizing sociological conditions inadequately. Eliass always tried to maintain a certain balance between the importance of the spirit of the times or the class struggle on the one hand, and the value of forms created by a self-expressive artist on the other.
The article based on archival materials examines the late period in the life of Latvian art historian Kristaps Eliass (1886-1963) when he suffered from repressions endorsed by Stalinist regime: his work as the Director of Riga City Art Museum (now Latvian National Museum of Art) was disapproved and he was also expelled from the Artists' Union and fired from the pedagogical work at the Academy of Art. In 1951 he was arrested and deported to USSR and released in 1954 after Stalin's death.
The basic premises of Marxism in respect to art are well known - art is a social phenomenon impossible to explain outside the economic structures of the society in which and for which it is made. Although primitive, deterministic versions of Marxism are largely of historical interest only, seeing art processes as a field of interaction of social, ethnic, gender, race and other contextual factors has not only been recognised but also became a dominant set of interpretational strategies. If feminism, gender studies or the post-colonial discourse are relatively new on Latvian soil, Marxist ideas have circulated in the local intellectual milieu since the late 19th century. In line with the dominant Soviet ideology, they have been comparatively well documented. In the interwar period Marxist ideas developed from more radical, expressionist-style echoes of proletarian culture to gradual restoration of order. Art as the indicator of the class struggle also sometimes left room for the concept of artist-genius, his gift consisting precisely in an ability to sense the social change first, as described by art historian Kristaps Eliass. The writer Andrejs Kurcijs who attempted to introduce the trend of Activism, a term coined in the melting pot of European Avant-garde trends, also voiced a compromise between the understanding of form and sociological assessment, each illuminating the other. Though politically unacceptable, leftist views emphasising serious content instead of the bourgeois formalism were selectively institutionalised as 'progressive' in the following period of Soviet domination.