What exactly is the relationship between art and politics? Is it the job of a painting to illustrate its own times, in the way that Picasso’s Guernica appears to show the chaotic aftermath of the fascists’ bombing of the Basque Country? Or does it do something more solidly material, standing as evidence of the times in which it was produced – the cost of paint, the politics of patronage, the whirls and waves of the original wooden frame as with, say, a Rembrandt? Is painting there to provoke, console, explain or even conceal the political and economic conditions of its own making?
The art critic TJ Clark may not have the answers – he is all about the dialectic of claim and counter-claim – but he does have an awful lot of fun sketching out some possible positions. His writing, most familiar from his work in the London Review of Books, is famously tentative (no one second-guesses and self-corrects quite so much as Clark), yet, simultaneously, slightly gleeful in its own cheek.
In this collection of 22 essays, harvested from 25 years of writing in the LRB and elsewhere, Clark starts with a bravura reading of Visions of the Hereafter, Ascent into Heaven, in which he imagines himself as one of Hieronymus Bosch’s odd little people squinting at the sky trying to work out what happens next. The figure he chooses to ventriloquise has a tonsure – so, a holy man of some sort – but is as nakedly greeny-white and vulnerable as a stick of asparagus. Tonsure-man is so keen to enter heaven that he is stretching on tippy-toes, yet Clark grants him the earthly faculties required to make art-historical assessments of the scene around him: the cherubim on a nearby fountain, a naked woman with tumbling hair who may be a reference to Eve in the Garden. Tonsure-man even remains sufficiently prissy to notice a couple who are getting handsy in the bushes, apparently unaware that their immortal souls are about to be weighed in the balance.
Bosch is the earliest artist dealt with in this dazzling book, and something of an outlier. Clark’s research interests have always clustered in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it is from this period that the best essays emerge. His ostensible subjects here include Henri Matisse’s painting of his wife in a hat, Walter Benjamin’s Parisian arcades, and LS Lowry’s matchstick men. The real matter in hand, though, remains art’s response to the conditions of high and late capitalism and its many discontents.
Specifically, Clark sets out to unsettle received ideas about how artistic modernism, with its privileging of pure form over narrative content, swept away the stuffy representational conventions of the 19th century. In a clever reading of Matisse’s Woman With a Hat, which is usually viewed as a bravura expression of non-literal art, Clark suggests that, actually, the woman’s green skin, purple chin and orange neck might be a truthful account of what happens to colours, including black, when viewed in a particular light. From here he makes a detour into biography – a no-no as far as critics of a formalist persuasion are concerned – to explain that this woman is in fact Mme Matisse AKA Amélie Parayre, an accomplished hatmaker whose craft skills kept the household financially afloat during Matisse’s lean years. Mme Matisse’s crazy colouring, so derided at the time by critics including André Gide, may actually be Matisse’s attempt to express his wife’s triumph over the brute realities of economic production, whether of hats or paintings. Far from being unmoored from the material world, Woman With a Hat presses more deeply into it.
At least, I think that is what Clark is “saying” in his essay. If he allows himself constant doubts and corrections, it is only fair that his readers should have an equal right to express uncertainty, and an occasional feeling of having only just made it through. “Phew!” he says at one point, having quoted a passage of Proust which he maintains will better help us understand what Matisse is up to. “Is that the right word?” he asks rhetorically when dealing with Gerhard Richter’s “cocking a snook” at his East German parents. In other places, Clark simply runs out of puff and tails off with three dots of ellipsis as if he can’t quite imagine what comes next. These, then, are essays best read in a spirit of delighted, if occasionally sceptical, play.
• Those Passions: On Art and Politics by TJ Clark is published by Thames & Hudson (£40). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
