Those Passions

On Art and Politics

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The careful distillation of a lifetime’s writing by the internationally renowned art historian T. J. Clark, who addresses key issues of art’s relationship with politics: 'the decade's most stimulating art book' Financial Times

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Is art obliged to engage with politics? If so, how? By taking sides in political struggle; by singing the song of the barricade, the new nation, the bombed city? Or by giving form to the deeper patterns of experience – the raw materials of ‘society’ – from which any politics is made? Using case studies stretching across the centuries, from Hieronymus Bosch to Jacques-Louis David and the French Revolution, from Walter Benjamin to Pier Paolo Pasolini, Those Passions aims to show how modern art has responded to the chaos and danger of modern life.

In the book’s three sections – ‘Precursors’, ‘Moderns’ and ‘Modernities’ – internationally renowned art historian T. J. Clark unpicks the nature of capitalist society and its visual culture. He tries to understand the politics of appearance which is now our natural home – the twists and turns of consumerism, the arrival of the 24-hour image-world, the changing modes of symbolic production and the ongoing saturation of life by pictures and ‘data’ – and take stock of our guilty love affair with the imagery of violence, our attitude to the dream-world of advertising, the power and pathos of screen time.

Written over the course of twenty-five years, these radical, provocative essays rethink issues central to art-making and political life today.
Extent: 384 pp
Format: Hardback
Illustrations: 106
Publication date: 2025-02-20
Size: 24.6 x 18.6 cm
ISBN: 9780500025260
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Press Reviews

Vital for our times … an exhilarating essay collection summing up a lifetime’s thinking about painting and politics … His questioning voice carries the book, creating a mood of contemplative suspense, like a psychological thriller … a marathon of art history through a political lens, it is subtle, revelatory and broad-ranging … Clark’s faith that painting matters, reflects emotional and social experience, reads as nostalgic – yet vital – in today’s art world hollowed by money and hype … the decade’s most stimulating art book
Financial Times

Dazzling
Book of the Week, Guardian

[T.J. Clark] is today, without a visible rival, the living figure who speaks to the larger public. Thanks to him, the history of modernism has been rewritten … I know of no account which speaks to the present more satisfactorily than Those Passions
David Carrier, Counterpunch

Exciting and provocative
John Banville, New Statesman

About the Author

T. J. Clark is Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the seminal The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (1984), Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999) and The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006). He writes art criticism regularly for the London Review of Books. His last book was If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present (2022), also published by Thames & Hudson.

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