One of the leading figures in the social history of art, T.J. Clark has authored some of the most insightful readings of cultural modernity to date. Recently, he has sought to defend aesthetic distance against the contemporary regime of visual flow that he calls the ‘image-world’. Some of his most important books include Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (1973); Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999); Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (2013); Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come (2018); If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present (2022). T.J. Clark has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University and the University of Leeds, and regularly writes criticism in the London Review of Books. In an exchange with Afonso Dias Ramos, T.J. Clark talks about his latest book, Those Passions: On Art and Politics (2025), a collection of his own essays from the last quarter century, and also discusses a lifetime of writing about art’s relationship with politics, all the way up to contemporary events that we currently face.
T.J. Clark, one of the most influential art historians of the last half century, whose work has managed to move this discipline away from traditional concerns with style and form towards an engagement with the social and political conditions of modernity, talks to Electra about the ever-increasing image problems in the contemporary era.
AFONSO DIAS RAMOS You have just released a volume of collected essays from the past twenty-five years, focussing on a period when art and politics became a question in itself. What prompted this publication? And how was the experience of revisiting such essays in the current political timescape?
T.J. CLARK Long ago, in the 1960s and 70s, when I began writing about art, what I wanted to understand above all was the part art might play in a revolutionary situation. My first two books were about the response of left- and right-wing artists – Courbet, Daumier, Delacroix, Baudelaire, Millet – to the chaotic interim that followed the 1848 revolution in France. This kind of question never went away in my work – it’s certainly a central thread in the book Farewell to an Idea – but it was more and more accompanied (some would say, displaced) by the urge to define the specific nature of visual communication, and to find a way of writing that would respect the difference between art and language. Not that this imperative was ‘non-political’, in my view: it was a response to the flattening and banalization of the image that I saw happening all round me, as one main facet of the speeding up and mass dissemination of the ‘image-world’ all of us were supposed to be so happy to hold in our hands. I wanted to reassert what the image-world had been, and what intensities and complexities a picture was capable of, if not subdued to the service of some idiot commodity. In any case, I did continue to write directly about art-and-politics, in essays and articles. And as the political battles around the use and control of the new image-apparatus became more acute over the past two decades (especially in the US), I realized that maybe the scattered essays were worth gathering, revising, trying to make into some kind of totality. One or two friends pressed me to do it. It was hard. I think the experience of looking again at the essays left me feeling that at least the issues raised in what I’d written – in particular the continuing need for the left to confront the nature of ‘consumer society’ and its machinery of spectacle – remained pressing, indispensable, and far too little explored. Hence the book. But I should stress it is not a guide to art and politics, still less a ‘how to do it’ manual for the practice of art in the present. It presents a range of case studies, and tries to show how strange and often paradoxical the task of ‘painting politically’ is. How did it happen, for instance, that the indelible image of revolution our ancestors have left us, Delacroix’s Liberty Guiding the People in 1830, was painted by a disaffected reactionary who, twenty years later, welcomed the crushing of the 1848 revolution by Napoleon III? How far are we to trust the celebration (or is it execration?) of the neo-Leninism of the 1960s by Gerhard Richter, in his blurred gray images of the end of the Baader-Meinhof gang? What are we to make, looking back, of the ‘art-becomes-politics’ experiments of the Situationist International? Can we learn any lessons from the miserable story of modernism’s involvement in the early years of the Soviet Union? And so on.
ADR A central notion in almost every book that you have written – whether discussing Courbet, Manet, Giotto or Brueghel – is that of ‘strangeness’. I wonder how that inflects your own understanding of art and politics?
TJC Yes, now you point to it, I see it’s a recurring theme. I think that behind the word lies a tangle of assumptions. Surely, as an old modernist, I’m still loyal to the idea that art is (among other things) a way homo sapiens has of setting the world at a distance, making the present order of things seem strange – un-‘natural’, unlikely, therefore capable of being reshaped. And I suppose that this too is rooted in an unspoken anthropology. Homo sapiens seems to me a strange and constantly estranging animal, for all the species’ contrary wish for (drive to) conformity and togetherness. The art that I admire and learn from recognizes both facets of the human, and the constant tension between them. Bruegel, above all. He remains my touchstone.
Paul Cézanne, La tentation de saint Antoine [The Temptation of St. Anthony], 1874 © Photo: Scala, Florence / Christie’s Images, London / Kasama Nichido Museum of Art, Kasama
Paul Cézanne, La tentation de saint Antoine [The Temptation of St. Anthony], 1870 © Photo: Stiftung Sammlung E.G. Bührle, Zurich
"We surely need a politics (and an art) that finds a register in which to describe and denounce the present order."
ADR You have recently singled out James Ensor, Piero Paolo Pasolini and Andrei Platonov as prime examples in that regard. But what is it about their own strangeness in leftist circles that could be of particular relevance today?
TJC stand by my peculiar trio (Ensor’s link to Bruegel couldn’t be clearer, and often in Platonov one seems to be wandering a landscape borrowed from Bruegel’s Dark Day or Triumph of Death). I think that what makes the three artists a necessary point of reference for the present left is their shared sense of the dreadfulness of bourgeois society… and the dreadfulness of its disintegration, into chaos and conformity (enforced conformity) entwined. We surely need a politics (and an art) that finds a register in which to describe and denounce the present order. I don’t think that this will be arrived at by us merely ‘modernizing’ our usual tropes about capitalism, NATO, nationalism, the permanent war economy, etc. I think these vectors of the ‘political’ are worn out. Or certainly inadequate on their own – unpersuasive, abstract, tired, tarred with the brush of dogma. It’s the character of our present ‘everyday life’ that needs bringing into focus, if a left opposition to the present is to connect with the mass of people in this world after class and class consciousness. The poverty of the society of the spectacle: that’s the weak link in the panoply of oppression. The impoverishment of life we are subject to, all of us (especially the super-rich… but to hell with them!) … the caricature of human possibilities we are given to live with, not just the lowering of ‘living standards’.
"The present is not going to recognize its agony until it comes to terms with a past it imagines it has ‘gone beyond’."
James Ensor, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1887 © Photo: Scala, Florence / Art Resource, New York / The Art Institute of Chicago
ADR A sense of the tragic seems to pervade your recent work. Your book on Picasso, for instance, makes the case that perhaps we turn to Guernica with a kind of nostalgia today, to grasp suffering and horror on a scale no longer available to us. Is this not changing now with the collapse of the so-called postwar liberal world order? And what could that tragic sense mean today?
TJC I think my previous answer is really an answer to this question too. You’re right, I’m sure, that we’re entering a new world disorder. The response of almost all the world to the war in Gaza (with the exception of the US and its toadies) is a token of that. What American hegemony has always involved has now become visible, ‘unacceptable’ (except by the AIPAC-millionaires in Congress). The sense of horror and disbelief is palpable. The mystery of human cruelty and hubris and self-misunderstanding presents itself, day by day, year by year, stripped of its usual disguises and excuses. Tragedy (the mode, the framework) is one means we inherit to take the measure of such atrocity. Of course, on its own the tragic sense does not lead to, or provide a template for, a political response to the world’s horrors. But it seems to me a necessary preliminary to such a politics. The left’s avoidance of the tragic key – its tendency to drift towards some form of technological optimism, and to shrug off the horror of its own past (terror, totalitarianism, Stalin, Mao) as a no doubt regrettable ‘aberration’ from the path of progress – leaves it, in my view, helpless in the face of Xi Jinping. Or even in the face of Trump, that character out of Aristophanes.
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Read the full article in Issue 29 - Summer 2025
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