Are all paintings secretly political?

Telegraph

24-02-2025

TJ Clark takes the title of his newest work, Those Passions, from Shelley's Ozymandias, in which artistic symbolism, political structures and the ruination of civilisations are intertwined. It's a fittingly intelligent reference for one of the most insightful and energetic art historians of our time. Clark's work in recent years has ranged from The Sight of Death (2006), a book-length meditation on two Poussin landscapes, to 'A Brief Guide to Trump and the Spectacle', an essay published in the London Review of Books in January analysing Trump as not just a 'creature' of the the 'society of spectacle', but its 'master'.
This new collection of old essays spans over two decades of writing on the sociopolitical condition, a testament to his career-long exploration of the intersection between art and politics. The earliest, 'Why Art Can't Kill the Situationist International', is from 1997, and the most recent, 'A Preface to Pasolini', from 2023. They're grouped into three periods, 'Precursors', 'Moderns' and 'Modernities', uniting such diverse topics as Hieronymus Bosch's 'anthropology', sex and politics according to Delacroix, and Pollock's 'smallness'.
Clark, who combines the roles of radical intellectual, academic art historian and self-admitted 'joker', sagely foresees in his introduction that 'those looking for coherence in what follows are likely to end up puzzled, and perhaps dissatisfied'. While his desire for the overthrow of capitalism is a recurrent message here, especially in the essays of 'Modernities', Clark offers no hope that such an event will occur. This is not a manifesto: it is, in his words, 'a path towards'.
Clark has written so often about art and politics because he feels that 'in the modern period the two cannot avoid one another.' He adds: 'For good or ill, in the case of art, politics came to play the role that religion had played previously.' But the volatility and uncertainty of modern politics, by comparison with the relatively stable iconography of Christian tradition, have thrown Western artistic practice into flux. Art in the modern age, Clark writes, has 'had to put depth and dignity aside' to address the crumminess of modern life.
A few questions in the introduction of Those Passions define the concerns to come: 'Does any art deserve the name 'political' if it fails to interrogate the nature of art itself, and the place of art in a pattern of political action? Are we meant to judge a political work of art by its politics, or by its success in giving a politics convincing form? Doesn't either yardstick just entrench the idea of 'the artwork', when this is the very idea that art-and-politics should be putting in doubt? Shouldn't we judge political art by its effects, not its beauty or truth?'
Clark responds to these questions with musings that meander between a conversational tone, akin to notes transferred from a dictaphone or used in preparation for a lecture, and high-minded theorising that in places is so circuitous that several re-readings may be required. Clark can be thought-provoking, but by the same measure he succumbs, wittingly or not, to the fatal flaw of the intelligentsia: the premising of an argument on such a dense labyrinth of cultural reference, complex phrasing and recondite jargon that the core message risks being lost. Clark might desire revolution, but these essays are not for the people.
The most rewarding passages thrive on Clark's close analysis of the artworks which is elevated by the wonderful illustrations in this edition. He approaches Diego Velázquez's Aesop (1639-40) and Mars (1640), which were potentially conceived together as part of the decoration of Philip IV's hunting lodge the Torre de la Parada, with a masterful eye for detail and true humanistic spirit. Of Mars, Clark writes:
Mars's body – by far Velázquez's most astonishing treatment of the nude – is absurd by reason, above all, of its uncertain age and imperfection. (Recall that the figure is nearly life-size.) The incipient wattles at his neck, the thinness of flesh over his collar bone, the two harsh creases of fat on the belly, the claw-like fingers, the oversize thigh and calf... Is there another body in Western art whose subjection to ageing, to ordinary wear and tear, is treated so relentlessly? Maybe in Titian. Maybe a tortured Christ. But Velázquez's Mars is anti-Christ.
And yet, beneath the rapturous analyses and boisterous political rhetoric, these essays harbour a simplistic cultural pessimism that rings hollow. There was no golden age of history, and there is a fallacious exceptionalism to the claim that the problems we face today are somehow more extreme and existential than those faced by our forebears. History is marked by those who have proclaimed the end of the civilised world. Still, where Clark is somewhat po-faced, at least Juvenal was amusing.