What T.J. Clark Sees

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Books & the Arts / October 22, 2025

His art criticism reaches rarified heights—combining style, rigor, and politics like almost no one else.

Let’s return to April 2008—a date most would ignore but that, in retrospect, was consequential in the field of art criticism. That’s when T.J. Clark began publishing exhibition reviews in the London Review of Books. The first one was on simultaneous exhibitions of Poussin and Courbet at the Metropolitan Museum in New York—an occasion on which, he wrote, “the whole madness of painting seems to pass in front of your eyes,” and one that left him “elated and disoriented.” Before an audience of students and colleagues, a scholar’s frank disorientation might be damning, but in a reviewer of exhibitions, a willingness to be disoriented can be put to electrifying use, communicating to readers the excitement that the writer felt in the face of the art and leading to questions that are, in Clark’s words, “abstract and dangerous.”

Clark’s was already a name to be reckoned with. In 1973, the then-30-year-old lecturer at London’s Camberwell College of Art had turned heads with the simultaneous publication of a pair of books based on his PhD dissertation at the Courtauld Institute of Art: The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–1851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848–1851, which were seen as a one-two punch against the art historical establishment on behalf of a new, Marxist-inflected social history of art. (Clark had earlier been part of a radical groupuscule of “hooligan pedants” excommunicated, for reasons opaque to an outsider, from the Situationist International, and still proclaims his “root and branch opposition to capitalism.”) He taught at UCLA, then at Leeds, and in 1980 was hired by Harvard, where he immediately butted heads with the distinguished scholar of Renaissance art Sydney J. Freedberg. Clark was censured for violating his students’ academic freedom by forbidding them to study with Freedberg, but it was the disgruntled elder who soon took an early retirement, while Clark stayed on until 1988 when he decamped for Berkeley, where he remained until his retirement in 2010. Over the years, he has published a number of highly original books—among them The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (1985), Farewell to an Idea: Episodes From a History of Modernism (1999), and The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2008)—for which the label “social history of art” has become increasingly inapt as Clark’s writing has grown more personal in tone and idiosyncratic in its interpretive strategies.

That first LRB review of Clark’s brought together Courbet—the subject of one of those first two books in 1973—and the subject of the book he had just published, The Sight of Death, the product of daily ruminations on two paintings by Poussin. “Looking at Courbet and Poussin leads a viewer in contrary directions,” Clark observed: Poussin toward “the human animal’s uprightness—its balancing on two legs,” and Courbet toward the way matter “can, and regularly does, press in on us and give us no room to breathe,” let alone stand securely on solid ground. But maybe, too, they look toward the writer’s past and toward his present.

Clark’s next piece of art criticism for the LRB, three months later, was not on an exhibition but on a single painting by Henri Matisse. Then came a pause of more than two years before a consideration of a Cézanne show at the Courtauld in London. By this time, Clark had retired from his teaching post at Berkeley and returned to England—where he was born in 1943—but after that, the pieces came along pretty regularly, every few months or so, sometimes more often, until the series came to a conclusion (for now, at least) with a 2021 essay on Velázquez; or maybe, if you prefer, with a 2022 piece on ekphrastic poetry, but I put that to one side as being more about poetry than about the paintings the poems are about.

What made Clark’s appearance in the guise of an art critic an event was not just his already existing eminence as an art historian. Nor was it the fact that Clark is one of the rare art historians who has forged a style for his writing, by which I mean that he is always himself, and always recognizably himself, in his prose. Rather, it was that he was contravening the conventional division of labor within art writing: Old art is the subject of history, new art is the subject of criticism. What was thrilling about Clark’s new enterprise was that he was writing about artists such as Bosch and Velázquez not as a historian but as a critic—and yet was doing so with a historian’s erudition and authority rather than with the more approachable fluency with which a belletristic critic such as Jed Perl or Peter Schjeldahl might do so. He was, in a sense, disproving (or at least providing an exception to) Marcel Duchamp’s cynical remark that “after a work has lived almost the life of a man…comes a period when that work of art, if it is still looked at by onlookers, is put in a museum. A new generation decides that it is all right. And those two ways of judging a work of art”—before and after it is consecrated by the museum—“certainly don’t have anything in common.” Clark, by contrast, was treating the art of the past as what it is or should be, something alive and challenging in the present, and not just as what it also is, an artifact.

Now a substantial collection of Clark’s art criticism has arrived under the title Those Passions: On Art and Politics. It’s a doorstop, with a bigger page size and more poundage than you’d expect for a book of not quite 400 pages—not exactly a coffee-table book but also not something you can carry with you to read on the subway. A “hooligan pedant” with muscle could probably use it in place of a cobblestone to throw from behind a barricade.

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Not all of the criticism Clark has written for the LRB is in Those Passions, and the book also includes writings that first appeared elsewhere, and in some cases even earlier; but his work as a critic, that is, as a writer encountering old art as contemporary, is at the heart of the collection. A question that’s not addressed in Those Passions: Why did Clark become a critic? We can speculate that it’s because, despite his academic success, he never felt an accord with art history—with the study of history in general. In the book’s opening essay on Hieronymous Bosch, he observes,

The work [historians] do (the habit of mind they exemplify) inevitably shifts attention away from the imagination, which has no history, to ideology, which has; ideology being the name we have for allowed, repeated, legitimate imaginings—ways of picturing things otherwise that do not destabilize the world as it is, or don’t do it too much.

This is another way of saying that the art historian’s prescribed role has reduced art to what Roland Barthes called studium, a set of agreed-on social and cultural commonplaces—which in effect fixes a work in its moment. And it is even the case, Clark allows, that in this “the historians are right. Ideology rules,” and yet he still insists “that ideology needs the imagination…to renew itself.” It is in making space for this renewing power of imagination that Clark becomes a critic.

Repeatedly, Clark criticizes his fellow art historians, not for being wrong but for being right in the wrong ways. Take Rembrandt: “Art historians see it as their task to trace connections between the fiction of the ‘I’ that [he] perfected and the mercantile empire that gave him house-room. The connections seem obvious—and that is the trouble. Rembrandt is a bourgeois individualist, yes, but then what needs explaining is the strangeness, the recalcitrance, and at the same time the entire typicality, of his version of the creed.” It is art history’s inability to account for the exception within the norm—and the norm within the exception—that bothers Clark: its obliviousness to what Barthes called the punctum.

That’s not to say that Clark confers transcendence on Rembrandt, let alone any other artist. “Rembrandt’s is a stifling world, full of hypocrisies,” he writes, pointing to what he calls “the stage-managed humility of so many of the portraits.” But is that quite right? I’ve never seen the Syndics of the Draper’s Guild or Captain Frans Banninck Cocq’s militia company (the subjects of The Night Watch) as a self-effacing bunch. Their bourgeois bearing radiates pride; they’ve earned respect through their offices. Clark says it himself: In the ordinariness of his subjects Rembrandt locates “a tragic grandeur.” He makes space for the contradictions that generate “the strangeness, the recalcitrance, and at the same time the entire typicality” of the social world he depicts.

Art historians often want to see artists as typical of their time and place while still proclaiming the significance of their creations, without quite coming to terms with the paradox of finding exaltation in the ordinary. It reminds me of the complaint about certain kinds of writing made by one of the characters in William Gaddis’s great novel The Recognitions: “It never takes your breath away, telling you things you already know…as though the terms and the time, and the nature and the movements of everything were secrets of the same magnitude.” Clark, every so often, really can take your breath away, precisely because he is attuned to the strange contradictions art so often generates. In writing about the 18th-century painter Jacques-Louis David, that revolutionary whose classicism would exert such a conservative influence on French painting, Clark expresses the paradox by acknowledging that “David’s painting is of its time” but only in its way of being “deeply absorbed in dreaming an other to the present.”

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Clark has divided his book into three sections—“Precursors,” “Moderns,” and “Modernities”—and David, perhaps surprisingly, is the first of his moderns. (The precursors are few: just Bosch, Rembrandt, and Velázquez; the moderns range from David to Gerhard Richter; and the modernities are broad themes such as “Art and the 1917 Revolution” and “From Print Capitalism to Screen Capitalism.”) I say it’s a surprise to find David ranked among the moderns because he is not among those artists, such as Goya or Turner or Delacroix (the next of Clark’s moderns), who are conventionally acknowledged as having foreshadowed one or another aspect of the modernism we recognize as having come to the fore in French art in the mid-19th century, starting with Manet or Courbet (neither of whom is among Clark’s subjects in Those Passions but about whom he has written at length in the past).

But it makes sense that, for Clark, David is among the moderns, and for the reason given at the start of his essay: “David was a political painter.” (The essay’s title is “Sex and Politics According to David,” and the one that follows it is “Sex and Politics According to Delacroix.”) Before going any farther, we should ask what Clark means by the word politics, since he doesn’t offer a specific definition. If Clark’s modernity starts with the late 18th century—some would say the very concept of art originates in that same era—and specifically with David, that’s because politics, too, in the modern sense begins then, with the Enlightenment and above all with the Age of Revolutions. I don’t know whether Clark would agree with Hannah Arendt’s view that politics can be based only on “the freedom to call something into being which did not exist before, which was not given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which therefore, strictly speaking, could not be known,” but it’s relevant here, I think. (Clark cites Arendt repeatedly in an essay on Picasso.) In any case, statecraft in the world of princes and republics, where the masses were supposed to have had no role but to obey, might be proto-politics, might at times foreshadow what we should now understand politics to be—just as artists who lived in those polities might sometimes foreshadow the concerns of modern artists—but were not yet politics proper. And so David’s massive The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) was more than just a political painting; it was something like a founding document in oils rather than words, one that “aimed to show” (presumably because so few knew it yet) “what politics was—how the very idea of politics, the very condition, came into being.”

The Intervention of the Sabine Women is a very strange painting. The scene is of a battle outside a walled city between two troops of spear- and sword-wielding male warriors, all improbably naked, as if only the tops of their heads needed the protection of their helmets; otherwise they seem to wear their vulnerability with pride. At their feet some clothed women (one breast is revealed) scramble to rescue their naked babies. At the center stands an immensely pale woman garbed in diaphanous white (“it is almost as if she were lit from within,” Clark observes) who, with a superb and unforgettable pose, stretches out her arms in a powerful gesture that halts the two leading combatants in the foreground as they are about to strike each other.

The story behind the painting concerns a legend surrounding Rome’s founding: The new city, with its mostly male settlers, resolved that the only way to increase its population was by abducting women from among their neighbors the Sabines to become Roman mothers—an episode of “bride theft” that had been most famously depicted by David’s great precursor Nicolas Poussin. Among these women was Hersilia, who became the wife of Rome’s founder, Romulus. When the Sabines attacked Rome, after the abducted women had given birth to a new generation of Romans, Hersilia and the other women (as the Roman historian Livy describes it) “had the courage to throw themselves amid the flying weapons, and making a rush across, to part the incensed armies, and assuage their fury; imploring their fathers on the one side, their husbands on the other,” to make peace. This is the scene depicted by David: one of female pacification of male aggressiveness as a basis for a civilized future that encompasses forgiveness for past crimes, and that—while recognizing that enmity and kinship share a single root—aims to cultivate the latter.

Clark’s essay on David was first published in a collection of scholarly articles, not in the LRB, and—with its deep delvings into Livy and Plutarch, its ruminations on David’s debt to a painting on the same subject by the 17th-century Italian painter Guercino, the references to kinship systems as theorized by Claude Lévi-Strauss, and above all its analysis of David’s place in political conditions in postrevolutionary France—it is one in which he is working primarily as an art historian rather than as a critic. And yet Clark the critic is at work in this essay too. I say that less because of the presence in it of moments of sheer aesthetic appreciation—for instance, his evocation of the amazing “vitality and elegance” of the figure of Hersilia, and of the dynamic sense of balance she embodies—and more because of the way he sees the conflicts that David emblematizes, and the resolutions of them that he entertains, as problems of maleness, and of the art of living together, that (without forcing any comparisons) are still ours today. Clark spells out the lesson: “‘Can we attain to the business of state-formation again?’ is the Sabines’ question. ‘So this is what is involved in the process!… Are we up to it? Can we find ourselves in it?’”

Questions for postrevolutionary France, yes—but as Arendt wrote, “utter dependence upon further acts to keep it in existence marks the state as a product of action.” States are not made once and for all but must be constantly remade, and ours needs remaking now more than ever.

But if Clark is so passionate and political—as Baudelaire would have said—about engaging art as a matter of the here and now as much as of the time and place of its making then why does he show so little interest in the art of his own time? This is the bone I have to pick with him. Can it be that, even when working as a critic, he is still so deeply the art historian that he dare not step outside the canon; that being unsure, like one of those lukewarm art lovers Duchamp spoke of, he needs to see something promoted to museum status? The fact that the single contemporary he considers is Richter would be evidence for that. Richter is the most canonized (along with Jasper Johns) of living artists.

And yet I refuse to believe that. Everything in These Passions silently argues against such a possibility. The thing is that Clark’s view is saturnine—valedictory, but in a fierce rather than a resigned mode. I think he suspects that, as Hegel wrote two centuries ago, albeit perhaps for different reasons, that “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.” What makes Richter’s work noteworthy, then, is that “the nature of a vanished century, and the survival of the claim to art it gave rise to—the full recognition of the improbability of the claim—was at stake” and (as he puts it in a different essay) “how little of art and politics survive in the world as it is.” Clark doesn’t much care for Richter, but he can’t help according him a grudging respect, if only for the way his art registers “despair and disorientation.” This sense that art as it has been understood in a period we’ve been calling modern may be at an end, that it may no longer offer contact with reality rather than perpetuating what the Situationists called the spectacle, is a matter of feeling rather than of fact; I don’t know how to argue against that feeling. And given the immense dignity with which it endows the name of art, and the sincerity of Clark’s love for how painting can “make its uncertainty—its long depressive state—into something beautiful as opposed to correct or clever,” I would not like to do so. I can’t feel that feeling. But you don’t need to share a passion to be moved by it.