Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic One of art\u2019s mysteries is that joyous painting is often wrought from tormented souls \u2014 Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock \u2014 while the purportedly cheerful, such as Jeff Koons, produce demoralising trash. \u201cThe optimism of pessimists is the most interesting kind\u201d, TJ Clark suggests in Those Passions, an exhilarating essay collection summing up a lifetime\u2019s thinking about painting and politics and how \u201cmodern art has responded to the danger of modern life\u201d.Clark is applauding \u201cLiberty Guiding the People\u201d, Delacroix\u2019s 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 \u201cwas himself a desolate reactionary\u201d.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 \u201cpolitics was modernity\u2019s religion\u201d, thus art and politics \u201ccouldn\u2019t avoid one another\u201d, 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 \u2014 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\u2019s leftwing critique is \u201chumourless, condescending, predictable\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009One more calibration of race, class and gender (the winner never in doubt)\u201d. 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 G\u00e9ricault \u2014 \u201cdreaming the shipwreck of a politics he despised\u201d in \u201cThe Raft of the Medusa\u201d \u2014 to Europe\u2019s slipperiest modernists, each a prophet of dazzling discontent.The glistening cobbled blankness of Gustave Caillebotte\u2019s \u201cParis Street, A Rainy Day\u201d (1877) gives a \u201cfrisson of loss of bearings\u201d. James Ensor\u2019s masquerades and crowds catch the underbelly of urban materialism haunted by \u201cthe unreal, the deathly, the disguised, the predatory\u201d. Gerhard Richter tightrope-walks between postwar grey panic and corporate glossiness, via the pity and fear of the German artist\u2019s 1970s Baader-Meinhof paintings: \u201cthe only pictures of people done in our time that the future will care to look at\u201d. With Richter, Clark says, painting \u201creally can, for reasons I am unable to fathom, make its uncertainty into something beautiful\u201d.Such self-reflexive twists \u2014 dives into doubt \u2014 season every page, flattering us as eavesdroppers to his thinking aloud: \u201cI reach a familiar impasse. I have no words\u201d; \u201cagain, I suspend an answer\u201d. 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 \u201cwriting about painting often circles around what truly characterises the image it is trying to describe\u201d.Actually, his lilting hesitations come as close as words can to painting\u2019s ambiguity, its ability to be mute yet expressive \u2014 therefore subversive. (Poussin described himself as \u201cI who make a profession of mute things\u201d.) Throughout, Clark shows how paintings are many-layered performances, tied to \u201cpolitics of war and modernity, and consumerism and spectacle\u201d, continuous across epochs and regimes.Contemporary parallels aren\u2019t made explicit \u2014 they simply leap out. \u201cAffected expressions\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009looking down on others with the scorn of the proud, ordering people about imperiously, claiming that everything they see belongs to them\u201d was Lopez de Vega\u2019s description of Philip IV\u2019s courtiers depicted by Vel\u00e1zquez. How not to think of Mar-a-Lago?Rodchenko\u2019s photomontage of rows of prisoners waiting to die in the tundra building \u201cThe Baltic White Sea Canal\u201d, with its scrawled invective against \u201che who does not take part in this victorious all crushing assault\u201d inevitably recalls troops in Ukrainian trenches today.Clark is superb on painting\u2019s tremulous line between complicity and speaking truth to absolutism. Vel\u00e1zquez dared mock Philip IV\u2019s wars with his absurd flaccid \u201cMars Resting\u201d (1640).Alexander Deineka\u2019s 1926 ballet of flat shapes, sculpted forms, bare feet, outstretched hands, \u201cConstruction of New Workshops\u201d, dances towards socialist realism, but the central worker in white, deliberately unbelievable in her eagerness and vulnerability, represents \u201cthe ghost of the Soviet Union\u201d, not future utopia.Between unpicking paintings, Clark considers our consumption of images and news, the progression from \u201cprint capitalism\u201d to \u201cscreen capitalism\u201d. 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 \u201ca substitute for anything\u201d and \u201cviolence escaping, diffusing, metastasising, becoming the business of \u2018non-state actors\u2019\u201d, is a spectacle on a smartphone. New media enable virtual congregations of terror: \u201cthe torturer with the Facebook page\u201d. So \u201cressentiment sits in its joyless apartment, twisting the wire on the circuit board.\u201dClark concludes in another joyless room, the 20th century\u2019s most famous war painting: Picasso\u2019s spatial dislocations \u2014 distorted floor, walls, ceiling, head through a window \u2014 setting the stage for Guernica\u2019s anguished bomb victims. How disturbing that \u201cGuernica\u201d, epic, unifying, implying humanity\u2019s shared fate, collective resistance, \u201crealities worth fighting for\u201d, now provokes \u201ca kind of nostalgia\u201d.Similarly Clark\u2019s faith that painting matters, reflects emotional and social experience, reads as nostalgic \u2014 yet vital \u2014 in today\u2019s art world hollowed by money and hype. Hopeful against the odds, Those Passions is the decade\u2019s most stimulating art book.Those Passions: On Art and Politics by TJ Clark Thames & Hudson \u00a340, 384 pagesJoin our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Caf\u00e9 and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic One of art\u2019s mysteries is that joyous painting is often wrought from tormented souls \u2014 Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock \u2014 while the purportedly cheerful, such as Jeff Koons, produce demoralising trash. \u201cThe optimism of pessimists is the most interesting kind\u201d, TJ Clark suggests in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":220247,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-220246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220246"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":220248,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220246\/revisions\/220248"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/220247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}