T. J. Clark, Those Passions: On Art and Politics

From the beginning of his career, T. J. Clark has worried at the relationship between art and politics. In The Absolute Bourgeoisie: Artists and Politics in France 1848–1851 — one of a pair of books published in 1973 that made his reputation — Clark suggested that “actually effective political art” was so historically rare as to be almost non-existent. The twenty-two essays in Those Passions: On Art and Politics, written between 1997 and 2023, widen the scope considerably.