Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic One of art’s mysteries is that joyous painting is often wrought from tormented souls — Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock — while the purportedly cheerful, such as Jeff Koons, produce demoralising trash. “The optimism of pessimists is the most interesting kind”, TJ Clark suggests in Those Passions, an exhilarating essay collection summing up a lifetime’s thinking about painting and politics and how “modern art has responded to the danger of modern life”.Clark is applauding “Liberty Guiding the People”, Delacroix’s bare-breasted woman in a Phrygian freedom cap leading men of all classes over the barricades. This image of revolutionary comradeship, including between the sexes, was painted by the French master who “was himself a desolate reactionary”.Optimistic pessimist also describes Clark. The 81-year-old former Marxist art historian, emeritus professor at Berkeley who watched the revolution fail to happen, rages against its dying light, yet shows through rapt engagement how paintings bring wisdom, endurance, humour, hope.His questioning voice carries the book, creating a mood of contemplative suspense, like a psychological thrillerHis belief that “politics was modernity’s religion”, thus art and politics “couldn’t avoid one another”, has shaped how we look at pictures, how museums stage them. In 1984 he yanked art history out of the ivory tower and on to the streets: The Painting of Modern Life read Manet through the ills and thrills of Second Empire Paris — a rampant capitalist society mirroring ours. Without, crucially, sacrificing attention to minute details of surface and brushstroke, the book opened painting to social context.It influenced every curator since, and 40 years on Clark acknowledges the pitfalls: today’s leftwing critique is “humourless, condescending, predictable . . . One more calibration of race, class and gender (the winner never in doubt)”. Tate, take note!Those Passions is the best answer. A marathon of art history through a political lens, it is subtle, revelatory and broad-ranging, spanning Bosch and Géricault — “dreaming the shipwreck of a politics he despised” in “The Raft of the Medusa” — to Europe’s slipperiest modernists, each a prophet of dazzling discontent.The glistening cobbled blankness of Gustave Caillebotte’s “Paris Street, A Rainy Day” (1877) gives a “frisson of loss of bearings”. James Ensor’s masquerades and crowds catch the underbelly of urban materialism haunted by “the unreal, the deathly, the disguised, the predatory”. Gerhard Richter tightrope-walks between postwar grey panic and corporate glossiness, via the pity and fear of the German artist’s 1970s Baader-Meinhof paintings: “the only pictures of people done in our time that the future will care to look at”. With Richter, Clark says, painting “really can, for reasons I am unable to fathom, make its uncertainty into something beautiful”.Such self-reflexive twists — dives into doubt — season every page, flattering us as eavesdroppers to his thinking aloud: “I reach a familiar impasse. I have no words”; “again, I suspend an answer”. That questioning voice carries the book, creating a mood of contemplative suspense, like a psychological thriller. Clark the detective interrogates each work, his response to it, the paradox that “writing about painting often circles around what truly characterises the image it is trying to describe”.Actually, his lilting hesitations come as close as words can to painting’s ambiguity, its ability to be mute yet expressive — therefore subversive. (Poussin described himself as “I who make a profession of mute things”.) Throughout, Clark shows how paintings are many-layered performances, tied to “politics of war and modernity, and consumerism and spectacle”, continuous across epochs and regimes.Contemporary parallels aren’t made explicit — they simply leap out. “Affected expressions . . . looking down on others with the scorn of the proud, ordering people about imperiously, claiming that everything they see belongs to them” was Lopez de Vega’s description of Philip IV’s courtiers depicted by Velázquez. How not to think of Mar-a-Lago?Rodchenko’s photomontage of rows of prisoners waiting to die in the tundra building “The Baltic White Sea Canal”, with its scrawled invective against “he who does not take part in this victorious all crushing assault” inevitably recalls troops in Ukrainian trenches today.Clark is superb on painting’s tremulous line between complicity and speaking truth to absolutism. Velázquez dared mock Philip IV’s wars with his absurd flaccid “Mars Resting” (1640).Alexander Deineka’s 1926 ballet of flat shapes, sculpted forms, bare feet, outstretched hands, “Construction of New Workshops”, dances towards socialist realism, but the central worker in white, deliberately unbelievable in her eagerness and vulnerability, represents “the ghost of the Soviet Union”, not future utopia.Between unpicking paintings, Clark considers our consumption of images and news, the progression from “print capitalism” to “screen capitalism”. Hegel thought reading daily newspapers over breakfast, a private ritual repeated nationwide, replaced the unity and belief of morning prayers. Today newspapers are no longer “a substitute for anything” and “violence escaping, diffusing, metastasising, becoming the business of ‘non-state actors’”, is a spectacle on a smartphone. New media enable virtual congregations of terror: “the torturer with the Facebook page”. So “ressentiment sits in its joyless apartment, twisting the wire on the circuit board.”Clark concludes in another joyless room, the 20th century’s most famous war painting: Picasso’s spatial dislocations — distorted floor, walls, ceiling, head through a window — setting the stage for Guernica’s anguished bomb victims. How disturbing that “Guernica”, epic, unifying, implying humanity’s shared fate, collective resistance, “realities worth fighting for”, now provokes “a kind of nostalgia”.Similarly Clark’s faith that painting matters, reflects emotional and social experience, reads as nostalgic — yet vital — in today’s art world hollowed by money and hype. Hopeful against the odds, Those Passions is the decade’s most stimulating art book.Those Passions: On Art and Politics by TJ Clark Thames & Hudson £40, 384 pagesJoin our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X
