Many a soul has perished at what the critic Lionel Trilling called the bloody crossroads where art and politics meet – Trilling spoke of literature and politics, but for our purposes we shall broaden the term. It is an irony of history that a great many, perhaps the majority, of those casualties occurred under revolutionary regimes to the left of the junction. Capitalism, outside times of crisis and convulsion, regards art either as a pretty plaything or a generator of exchange commodities, while for Marxism, art – real art, that is, not kitsch – is always potentially a tool of counter-revolution, and is treated as such.
The author of the essay collection Those Passions, TJ Clark, is one of the most intelligent, perceptive and, yes, passionate contemporary art critics. Born in Bristol in 1943, he is professor emeritus of the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an avowed Marxist but an anti-Leninist. He seems to see no anomaly in this position, but it is something of a puzzle for those of us who do not share “those passions”, or do so in moderation. For surely a man of the left who cleaves to Marx but repudiates Lenin is putting himself in the position of a committed Christian who reveres Jesus but rejects St Paul and the Church he founded.
The title of Clark’s collection is taken from Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias”, lines from which he sets as the book’s epigraph – an odd choice for a Marxist, since Shelley speaks of the historical inevitability of collapse and dissolution of all regimes of whatever hue. However, Clark’s theme is, in large part, the failure of the left agenda after, as he writes, “Our catastrophe… [in] the 70 years from 1914 to 1989.” Not that the period from 1989 to now has seen much of an advance for the forces of the revolution.
An alternative subtitle might be “A Book of Lamentations”, and indeed Jeremiah himself is invoked more than once in these pages. Clark knows whereof the prophet speaks, since the Jerusalem of the Marxist endeavour has been pretty well laid waste. He writes of a friend in the 1960s saying of him “that I was a believer in socialism for art’s sake. Nice hit. At least the joke depended on socialism being for me and the speaker, and for many others, a possibility – a threat. May that moment return.” But who shall build the New Jerusalem?
In his introduction, Clark poses a more immediate question: “Shouldn’t we judge political art by its effects, not its beauty or truth?” Leaving aside the second clause, we find two questionable assertions implicit in the first: namely, that art can be political and that it can have an effect. In this context, he imagines the reader wondering why his book “makes room for Matisse and Jackson Pollock,” two artists who “reached the conclusion, in practice, that opinions had to be what art annihilated if it was to survive”. Their stance is one that Clark accepts: “The blankness was essential. It was reality as they lived it.”
And is not that blankness –“inutility” was the word Vladimir Nabokov favoured – the very essence of art? Surely we go to Velázquez’s Las Meninas, to Piero della Francesca’s Sansepolcro Resurrection, to Bonnard’s baigneuses series, not to be told things, not to be persuaded of this or that political solution to life’s problems, but to have an intensified sense of what it is to be alive in this exquisite and appalling world into which we have been thrown, and from which after a little interval we shall be summarily ejected.
But perhaps this creates the impression that Those Passions is a political tract throughout, which it is not. The book is divided into three parts – “Precursors”, “Moderns” and “Modernities”. In the first two, there are superb essays, written over the past 25 years, in which politics is a secondary consideration. In some, it is hardly considered at all. He writes on Bosch’s strange transcendentalism, on the faces in Rembrandt – can there be a greater portraitist? – on Velázquez’s sly humour, on the significance of the hat in Matisse’s portrait of his wife, on Ensor’s anarchism, on Jackson Pollock’s smallness. In every case, he has exciting and provocative things to say.
As a critic, and a Marxist critic at that, he is the opposite of dogmatic, and his passion for art – yes, one of those passions – shines out from every line he writes. Part of the pleasure of reading him is the sense we have of his being barely in control of his enthusiasm, as the sentences stride along, wishing to break into a run but maintaining a steady pace, yet with such effort that the words fairly glow from the strain. Here he is writing on what he calls the “Rembrandt effect”:
A face is a machine for universalising the “I”. The “I” can draw back from the process and interest itself in the machinery, recording evidence of wear and tear. Obviously Rembrandt did. But even in such moments of half-disengagement – here is what the late self-portraits show – the universal is triumphant. A face that encounters itself as an object, be it exhausted or immaculate, is always an ego luxuriating – fully and wonderfully entrenched – in its being-in-the-world.
He can switch from the general to the particular with the sureness of an entomologist spotting an iridescent insect amid the camouflage of the forest floor. “What other colourist worth the name is so little interested in the spectrum beyond yellow?” Did you notice that before about Rembrandt? You will, from now on.
Clark is a superb close reader of particular paintings. In the essay “Sex and Politics According to David”, he begins with the flat statement that “Jacques-Louis David was a political painter”, to which some of us will respond with a weary mais oui – hélas. For David (1748-1825) was also an opportunist and a survivor every bit as agile as Talleyrand himself. During the French Revolution he was Robespierre’s de facto commissar for the arts, was later imprisoned, and on his release threw in his lot with Napoleon. There is something about the sheen and overall polish of the painter’s surfaces that bespeaks the oleaginous nature of the man.
The painting of David’s that Clark sets under the lens is The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799), a vast work teeming with violent action. In the foreground, naked warriors, Romulus and Tatius, are being held apart by the white-clad, almost virginal figure of Hersilia, legs braced and arms thrown wide at full stretch. Behind these figures is the bristling mess of battle, while before them, a bare-breasted young mother – “there will never be a more seductive figure of mere maternity,” Clark writes – kneels among a riot of naked toddlers.
The essay is prefaced with two quotations from Claude Lévi-Strauss – Clark remains loyal to the savants of the Sixties – on marriage as not so much a union between man and woman as a transaction in which the bride is an object of exchange. In the context we should note that Clark speaks of “the abominable sentences of Lévi-Strauss”, indicating, one assumes, that even if Lévi-Strauss’s contention is accurate, the state of affairs it identifies is to be deplored. The argument that Clark advances in this essay, on the nature of power as depicted by the image of the woman setting herself foursquare between the warring males, is intricate, subtle and persuasive, even to those of us who believe that art and politics should not, as we Irish say, be let within an ass’s roar of each other.
But the finest piece in the book is surely “LS Lowry, or Whatever Happened to the Painter of Modern Life?” Here, the theoretician of the left cedes the podium to the enraptured lover of art as art. Of course, much is made of Lowry’s depictions of working-class life, and of his own peculiar position as, of all things, a collector of rents from working-class tenants. At the heart of the essay is the question: why “was there in the 20th century no ‘painting of modern life’ – or none that Degas and Baudelaire would have recognised?” The answer Clark offers is as plausible as it is unsettling:
Because the life of the vast majority had moved far away from the life of the flâneur – meaning the artist – into its own impenetrable neighbourhoods: the East Ends, the banlieues, the Ancoats and Hanky Parks, the “projects” (strange word), the “classic slums”… Because, in a word, the ordinary life of the “modern” had become unglamorous, unspectacular, neither familiar nor unfamiliar – un-exotic.
So the artists withdrew into their own “impenetrable neighbourhoods” of detachment, solipsism, and abstraction. But might it not be that this is their right and authentic place? The work of art forms itself into a closed world, and remains so, no matter how much politics is thrown at it.
In the third part of the book, “Modernities”, Clark tackles politics impure and un-simple. Most of these essays are straightforward jeremiads on the fact that, as he writes in the Lowry essay, by the start of the 1970s, “the time of socialism, we might say – was over”. Here are essays on topics as varied as the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich’s peculiar version of Bolshevism, the never-to-be-forgotten moment of the forgotten Situationist International, “Art and the 1917 Revolution”, “Modernity and Terror” – you get the picture.
One of the more muted but nevertheless provocative of these end-pieces is “For a Left with No Future”. Here, Clark fulminates – sadly, wearily – against the enervation of the politics he espouses. “Left politics is immobilised, it seems to me, at the level of theory and therefore of practice, by the idea that it should spend its time turning over the entrails of the present for signs of catastrophe and salvation.” What he is arguing, or so it appears, is that the left should forsake its dream of the bright uplands of the Marxist future in favour of actually existing socialism in the here and now.
It is an interesting premise. The question that presents itself, however, is what would be left of the left if it were to abandon its teleological mission, if it ceased to be a religion – and anyone who doubts that communism is a messianic movement should read John Gray’s The Immortalization Commission, on how the Bolsheviks planned not only to embalm Lenin’s corpse but to ensure that one day the man himself could be brought back to life. Clark proposes, startlingly, that “the question of capitalism… has to be bracketed. It cannot be made political. The left should turn its attention to what can.” If that is not heresy, what is?
Those Passions: On Art and Politics
TJ Clark
Thames and Hudson, 384pp, £38.00
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This article appears in the 26 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain in Trump’s World