Cover art for the book The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France by T.J. Clark
T. J. Clark
Thames & Hudson, London, 2025
Just a little over fifty years ago, I wanted to read the most challenging new art history writing. And so I purchased T. J. Clark’s first two books: The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848-1857 and Image of the People. Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution. I’ve regularly reread and learned from them. The Absolute Bourgeois asks: “How could there be an effective political art? Is not the whole thing a chimera. . . . ?” His new book Those Passions. On Art and Politics pursues
discussion of that same question. Many academic art historians are leftists in safely vague ways. Clark aspired to be something else at the start of his career— he wanted to be an activist. He is today, without a visible rival, the living figure who speaks to the larger public. Thanks to him, the history of modernism has been rewritten. Although the world and the art world have changed a great deal in the past half-century, Clark has held fast to his principles. Courbet and Delacroix were natural subjects for an art historian interested in art and politics, political artists whose work sometimes showed scenes of contemporary French strife.
When then, in the 1980s Clark wrote about Manet and the other Impressionists and Seurat’s Post-Impressionism in The Painting of Modern Life, again he developed a social analysis, showing how these men depicted the cafes, the civil war and the class structure of contemporary Paris. And, a little later in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999), Clark extended his concerns backward historically to look at Jacques-Louis David, a political artist par excellence, who participated actively in the Revolution of 1789 in an influential way. And in yet another book, he wrote very interestingly about Cézanne; for a review, see here.
In these writings, Clark always foregrounded the practice of art history. While noting that he greatly admired Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967), he had said little about how that writer’s theorizing governed his practice. In general, he has not discussed contemporary art. (His important essay in this book on Gerhard Richter is an exception.) And he’s said nothing about any area outside of Western Europe and the United States.
This collection of essays has three parts: a short selection of accounts of pre-modern artists; essays on modernist painters; and accounts of political issues. The accounts of individual works by Hieronymus Bosch, Rembrandt, Vélazquez, Jacques-Louis David, Delacroix, James Ensor, Henri Matisse, L. S. Lowry, Jackson Pollock and Gerhard Richter are all excellent. And the discussions of Walter Benjamin’s book about the Paris Arcades and Hegel’s importance for nineteenth-century painting are revelatory. But what right now is of most interest is part three, “Modernities,” with its ten accounts of tbeorizing. To call Clark a Marxist, though not inaccurate, is not very revealing. In fact, early on in the 1960s he was briefly associated with Guy Debord, the leader of the Situationist International, a very small leftist group, which became famous after the French uprisings of 1968. As everyone knows, Marx himself did not say much about the visual arts. But Hegel certainly did, and his ideas are relevant here. In his lectures on aesthetics there is a vivid account of art as cultural expression. Dutch art of the Gold Age, he argues, expresses the distinctive life of that mercantile Protestant culture.
Because their culture was different, the Dutch art differs from that of the Italian Renaissance or pagan Greek antiquity. What Debord developed, in his erudite reading of Hegel, Marx and the early writings of George Lukacs was a critical vision of contemporary art in our commodity culture. His key point is summarized in his most famous single sentence: “the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.” In modernist capitalism, images take on false power, as if they were active agents. Thanks to this alienation, in which we cannot recognize our own creations for what they truly are, mere things become all powerful. Clark recommends, Anselm Jappe’s Guy Debord (1999), which usefully unpacks these ideas.
It’s obvious why an art historian would take an interest in these claims, which give such great power to visual artifacts. Unfortunately, however, if you read The Society of the Spectacle or Debord’s later Comments on the Society of the Spectacle from the perspective of an art historian, then you won’t find much that is of immediate use in Debord’s abstract philosophical analysis. He just doesn’t say much about art’s history. Nor, conversely, I should add, will you find in Clark’s early writings any detailed discussion of Debord’s writings. Clark’s great creative discovery, then, in his books on eighteenth and nineteenth-century French art was how to develop a visual analysis rooted in Debord’s richly suggestive account. And now, to continue that story, Those Passions offers a substantial discussion of this crucial part of his thinking,
What’s happened to Clark’s dismay since the 1960s is that the capitalist commodity culture has become far more powerful. Part of that story, he says, is the absolute disappearance of the communist states, rivals to capitalism; and another part, he notes, is the development of the internet and novel visual technologies. Now, then, the spectacle has become ever more powerful. But it’s becoming increasingly obvious, he argues, that this consumer society is headed for disaster. Here, of course, Clark’s concerns overlap with those of very many commentators, who don’t share his particular political worldview. Whatever your political viewpoint, it’s hard, I think, to be optimistic right now. His very recent account of President Trump, not in this book, expresses a viewpoint many (myself included) find very sympathetic: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n01/t.j.-clark/a-brief-guide-to-trump-and-the-spectacle.
If in the first and second part of Those Passions Clark writes as art historian, in this third portion of the book he writes as a political commentator. And so in one important way the contrast between Clark’s close detailed focus on visual art and his approach to the political history is dramatic. When he describes contemporary culture, he doesn’t really engage with the substantial literature by historians. To mention just one example, I have found the close up archival account of Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 (2018) suggestive. Was the Soviet revolution doomed from the start? Koptin offers one answer, which is no doubt controversial. But I am not competent to discuss that much debated,, hopelessly political question, which is very relevant here. Indeed I have learned to be cautious, for when a few year ago I did a review of art of the Russian revolution, I was labeled “a hack for US capitalist ideology.” (See here.)
When Clark discusses paintings, he scrupulously goes over the literature, including the accounts he dismisses. But the political discussion is more personal, a reminder that he greatly admires John Ruskin, who is cited in some of his recent books. As with Ruskin, we get his passionate opinions, which I share, but not a motivated critical discussion. But this is hardly a criticism, for I know of no account which speaks to the present more satisfactorily than Those Passions. I wish that I had a better, more optimistic analysis. But I don’t.
