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In the strict sense, there is no “Marxist aesthetics”. The writings of Marx and Engels on the question, whatever their riches, are too disparate and fragmentary to amount to a system. What does exist however is a history of the links and articulations between art, creation, and the perspectives of emancipation, and in this history the writings of Marx and Engels can legitimately claim a place. This history is neither linear nor homogenous. The purpose of the introduction is thus to address four major debates which resonated through the 20th century: about the avant-gardes, about realism, about militant art, about the utopian dimension of art. These debates, whose importance and influence is variable, mobilized artists and thinkers in the 20th century. They could either crystallize in a particular time and place or, on the contrary, they could span several decades. Unresolved, these debates still remain, today, laden with productive contradictions.