‘Britain is just a lapdog of the American Empire'

Telegraph

16-02-2025

TJ Clark, the Marxist art historian, is showing me a picture: a view of Stratford-upon-Avon by the French artist Lucien Pissarro (1863-1944), which he picked up in an antiques shop in Norfolk, where he has a second home, and put above the fireplace in his townhouse in south London. 'It's a wonderful painting,' says the bearded 81-year-old Bristolian (and occasional poet), who, prior to his retirement in 2010, taught for more than two decades at the University of California, Berkeley, 'and very much a homage to his father [the Impressionist Camille], one of my heroes.'
Isn't, though, collecting art a little bourgeois for someone who later describes 'dear old Jeremy Corbyn' as a 'moderate'? Ah, Clark tells me, 'Marxism is many things, and many of them' – he sighs – 'are appalling, dreary, doctrinaire, and worse.' Yet, says this delightful veteran of the protests of '68, and former member of the Situationist International (an 'ultra-Left' organisation of social revolutionaries that, he explains, 'wanted to bring down capitalist society' during the 1960s), 'I certainly consider myself a Marxist.' It seems that politics – like art, if it's any good – can be rather complicated.
Addressing complexity is a hallmark of Those Passions, a new collection of essays about art and politics written by Clark over the past 25 years. With high-minded pieces about, say, the German philosopher Hegel, it's unlikely to become a bestseller; throughout, Clark's references are exacting and lofty, for which he makes no apology: 'Dumbing down always comes across as completely fatuous and phoney,' he tells me. 'You've got to try and write as you think.'
For those, though, who relish brilliant analysis of painting – as well as former students of art history, like me, for whom, at university, Clark was a sort of god – Those Passions will be essential reading. Its finest essays engage in depth with painting's subtle minutiae, observing and explaining how tiny touches can contribute to powerful overall effects. A bravura study of Henri Matisse's Woman with a Hat (1905) is a case in point. (Clark agrees: 'It's one of the best essays in the book!') Likewise, his scintillating exposition of The Lion Hunt (1855) by Eugène Delacroix – a detail from which, reproduced on a French poster which he bought in 1966, dominates his study.
For a scholar often characterised as a ringleader of the so-called 'New Art History' – which, around 1970, shifted the discipline away from, as he puts it, 'an exhausted formalism' (i.e., an old-school, connoisseurial preoccupation with style and iconography) to an engagement with wider social issues – Clark seems surprisingly obsessed with art's ravishing material properties.
The title of his new book comes from Percy Shelley's sonnet 'Ozymandias', an unforgettable vision of a once-great civilisation half-sunk beneath the desert. It sets the tone, as Clark excoriates Western civilisation today, especially aspects of internet culture such as our reliance on smartphones and social media, and the veneration of 'influencers'.
'Yes, I hate it,' he tells me, simply. 'We live in a world where more and more of our everyday life is invaded by imagery that is produced and paid for and patronised by the powers-that-be.' So, we're victims of propaganda? 'I think we are. And even more,' he adds, invoking the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis's concept of 'techno-feudalism', 'we're colluding.'
Is he a pessimist? 'Who couldn't be pessimistic about the state of the world?' replies Clark, who won't be drawn on Keir Starmer. ('My politics is still American politics,' he explains, although, he adds, 'I do think of Britain as just a lapdog of the American empire.') 'The world is a miserable place, and becoming, in my view, more miserable fast.'
Still, he continues, while 'there's plenty of doom, that doesn't mean there's despair' – and he urges 'young people' to 'go into this social-media world of spectacle and endless, exorbitant information and communication, which is out of control, and fight within it, against it. It's vulnerable.'
When it comes to art, rather than politics, Clark is similarly trigger-happy with condemnation. One of the best, and most provocative, essays in Those Passions, 'Picasso and the English', is a peppy takedown of this country's genteel contribution to Modernism. 'The Bloomsbury Group was never able to escape from its refined upper-class fastidiousness,' explains Clark, who also has little time for 'performative' 20th-century British artists such as Wyndham Lewis and Francis Bacon. Even Henry Moore, in a memorably magisterial aside in his new book, gets it in the neck as only 'an artist of the middle range'.
Yet, Clark is a fan of the work of the 'disgraceful' British sculptor Eric Gill: 'You know, the one who had sex with his daughter? I mean, an abominable character, but, my God, he did some good sculpture.' So, he's no advocate for cancel culture? 'No, I'm not,' Clark replies. 'It's hard. There is cancel culture in the academy. It's not as bad as the Republicans pretend, but it's definitely there.' Often, he points out, 'the most poignant and useful depictions of revolution have come from reactionaries like Delacroix.' According to Clark, 'There are no rules in art. If you're good enough, you can get away with anything.'
What does he make of the recent, radical shift within art history towards identity politics? 'All good Marxists are supposed to disapprove of identity politics, just as much as the Right does, actually,' Clark says, 'because it puts the accent on individual and group identity, rather than social position, and displaces the story from class struggle to racial and ethnic struggle.'
When I bring up Katy Hessel's bestselling feminist history The Story of Art without Men, Clark says: 'I have time for it, but it's interesting to think, 'How about a history of art without the upper classes, without the bourgeoisie?'' For Clark, 'the history of art is a history of art produced within power structures. That doesn't mean that all art produced within those structures merely parroted the assumptions of those in charge. Or that all male artists produced a male view of women.'
Even a seemingly misogynistic painting such as Delacroix's orientalist, quasi-pornographic extravaganza The Death of Sardanapalus (1827) – which Clark describes as a kind of 'ludicrous and disgusting fantasy of male power and murder of sex slaves' – conveys, he suggests, an ugly truth: 'It does, unfortunately, put on show, in a kind of hyperbolic, grotesque way, one side of male fantasy. We live in a world where it's all around us every day.'
Still, Clark admires the 'persuasiveness', as he puts it, of 'sophisticated' writers and thinkers on identity politics such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Frank B Wilderson III: 'They're cantankerous and rebarbative, and I don't agree with them, but they have the same kind of passion that drove the great writers and thinkers of the Left in its heyday, who I go on very much admiring.' He mentions Rosa Luxemburg, Georges Sorel, and Frantz Fanon.
The trouble with today's Leftist intellectuals, he suggests, is that 'I don't think they've ever faced up properly to the arrival of consumer society.' What about the charge, often asserted by the Right, that they're humourless? Clark guffaws. 'Who could refute it? They are humourless, of course they are! Or most of them. But, partly, it's not their fault. The world is not conducive to humour if you look at it from the point of view of a commitment to the weak, the oppressed, the poor.'
As a former activist, what does he make of the recent attacks inside museums by climate-change protesters? 'I understand the impulse,' he replies, cautiously, 'but I don't think it's directed rightly.' Regarding restitution (another intractable issue for museums today), he has this to say: 'It's a mess. There's so much, right? We were a world empire, and we grabbed things from everywhere. Can everything go home? Obviously not. Nor should it. People don't want the world to be re-segregated.'
He does, though, believe that the Parthenon Sculptures should be returned – 'because it's the right thing to do.' Why? 'In the end, it just makes such good sense for this particular object to be reconstituted in or very near the place it once was.'
Clark's wife, Anne Wagner, the 19th-century sculpture specialist and self-confessed 'motor-mouth' (who also taught at Berkeley), pops her head around the door. 'Don't interrupt, dear,' her husband says. 'He's making me think like hell!' I sense our time is up. Last question. What advice would Clark give to young gallery-goers who want to learn how to look properly at art?
He reflects for a moment. 'That it's still possible to stop in front of a picture you don't understand, and ask the question, 'What is this about? And why do I find it puzzling?' Art exists to arrest something in the world, and to make it strange again, and put us back in the position of not knowing exactly what we're confronting. That's a deeply human activity.'