Writing about art and politics is, according to TJ Clark, “hell to do”. The acclaimed art historian certainly makes reading about them hard at times. So is it worth persisting with his latest doorstopper of a tome? Those Passions is an essay collection, many of which were published in the Times Literary Supplement over the past 25 years.
That timespan is important. A great deal can change in a quarter of a century in both politics and in art. And yet, as history also shows, tyrants may fall, and ideologies fail, but so much stays the same. Extremes of wealth, greed, avarice and a will to power and control populate the backstory of Clark’s pages, but these things seem somehow more palatable when sanitised by the passage of centuries.
Reading Clark gives you an insight into the workings of his undoubtedly great mind, and it is a lively space. Clauses dance backwards and forwards, (brackets distract) and an astonishing level of eclectic erudition can leave the unwary floundering. Still, the rewards are there, and some may argue that big or highly complex ideas call for the kind of depth of thought that working your way through the twists and turns of a tricksy sentence can engender.
Taking a timespan from the 1500s through to the present day, and exploring the likes of Hieronymus Bosch, Eugène Delacroix, Jacques-Louis David and Jackson Pollock in depth, Clark’s frame of reference is vast, but the cumulative effect can occasionally be like being at a loss during the kind of dinner party where knowing types leave you feeling left out for not knowing everything.
Clark’s deep and abiding love for art is clear, as is his concern over the woes of our declining society. He wants to share his passion for how art can depict the truth of its times, and how it may also ignite action – for better or worse, but sometimes, it seems, he just can’t help himself. Here he is writing on a 2014 Rembrandt exhibition at London’s National Gallery: “I found it hard to escape from the opening room […] and gravitated back to it constantly from the intensities that followed. It was as if I needed the shelter of the self-portraits (and there was a further one in Room Two: the famous enigma from Kenwood) in order to get the measure of Rembrandt’s feelings for the world at large.”
Googling reveals that Rembrandt’s 1665 Self Portrait with Two Circles is in the collection housed in London stately pile, Kenwood House. But there really is no need for that kind of thing, and it made me think of another art writer, artist Brian O’Doherty, who was able to untangle complexities and frame his diverse references in a way that satisfies the mind, rather than leaving it reeling. Still, I was prepared to forgive Clark almost anything after the sheer joy of his opening chapter, where we are plunged into the world of Bosch’s Visions of the Hereafter, from the point of view of one of the figures in this astonishing enigma of an artwork. As someone who tends to imagine that art is alive, these are pages to savour.
There are surprising blind spots. In an otherwise excellent chapter on the English painter, LS Lowry, Clark writes persuasively, pondering the question as to why, apart from Lowry, there was no other consistent painter of the everyday life of the industrial city and the working classes. Citing the English novel of the 20th century, with its “courage of its class convictions”, he wonders why “there is no visual art of the same period of which this can be said”, adding a page or two later, that “the fact that this assumption – this rethinking of realism – went largely by the board in the 20th century is, it seems to me, the great unexplained scene change of modern art”.
There is one answer to that: photography. Lowry may have painted the industrial landscapes of Britain, but he did it in such a way, and with such a uniform peacefulness as to imply that, even through the turbulence of the second World War (and he was an Official War Artist), this England would go forever on. His medium has something to do with it too. Photography took up the mantle of depicting the lives of a working class increasingly marginalised by capitalism, and by 1976 Lowry’s fellow north of England artist, photographer Victor Burgin, would come to describe painting as “the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud”.
Not all chapters are about art. Clark, an avowed Marxist, explores advertising, the voracious colonisations of capitalism, the collapse of the left, and the prevalence of imagery in forms of power and control. We tend not to talk about class in Ireland, as if it doesn’t affect our social conditioning, but it does, it just changes its garb. Still, there is an assumption of a British cultural background to the analyses Clark presents. Occasionally hard going, and frequently marvellous, there is much to chew on here, and a great deal to digest.
