T. J. Clark, Those Passions: On Art and Politics
By Francis Plagne
Issue 4, Summer 2025
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.
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T. J. Clark, Those Passions: On Art and Politics by Francis Plagne is featured in full in Issue 4 of Memo magazine.
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