Politics runs through the history of art like a protester in a museum with a tin of soup. From emperors’ heads on coins to Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece, Guernica, and Banksy’s street art, power and visual culture have been closely and sometimes combustibly associated. This relationship is explored in essays by the distinguished art historian TJ Clark, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Many of them first appeared in the London Review of Books, where the academic is given room to dilate in its rather airless pages. He brings a wide scholarship and unflagging scrutiny to his task. That said, his introduction includes the discouraging spoiler: “art-and-politics [is] hell to do”. From time to time, the reader finds themselves recalling this damning admission.
Clark writes from a “political position on the left”. He reflects on epoch-making events such as the Russian revolution, which spawned socialist realist art. He says the Dresden-born artist Gerhard Richter, 93, maker of abstract and photorealist works, is “haunted by his past” in the former East Germany. But there are also dustier subjects, including the Situationist International, a group of avant-garde artists and theorists who were active from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Clark’s take on art and power is timely, though. Donald Trump’s friends the tech bros are a new class of fabulously rich patrons with political clout to match. They are sponsoring a revolution in image-making through AI and social media. Clark writes about widely shared and often manipulated photographs of rioting in England in 2011 (and calls the typical subject of these visuals “the un-elated looter”). But his pieces, the oldest of which dates back 25 years, have been overtaken by leapfrogging developments in the digital sphere.
His definition of what constitutes political art is broad; or better, say, elastic. One chapter examines a crucifixion done in grisaille, or shades of grey, by a northern Renaissance master. Is this political art? According to Clark, the painting expresses “a Christian nihilism… lacking the consoling vehemence of the isms to come”. In fact, the picture was made in the immediate aftermath of a pretty vehement ism: a monk called Savonarola was responsible for the fanaticism of tossing books and paintings on to the Bonfire of the Vanities in Florence. Clark examines faces painted by Rembrandt. These are “political” in the sense that the artist became the society portraitist of a new class in Dutch society, the bourgeoisie; but then the entire golden age of art in the Netherlands was paid for by their wealth.
Confronted in a gallery by the alchemy that transforms pigment, canvas and mark-making into a canonical work, some of us are content to attribute this to genius or serendipity. We imagine a silken thread connecting the artist’s eye, hand and the picture. But to an art historian such as Clark, it’s more of a Gordian tangle, and untying it is correspondingly knotty. He worries away at the inscrutable expression on the face of Mars by Diego Velázquez, with the god of war seen in what looks like a French firefighter’s helmet and very little else, like an exhausted strippergram. Clark finds a similar look on a rifleman in The Surrender of Breda, also by Velázquez, who was painter to Philip IV of Spain. “Mars’s expression still eludes us,” Clark concedes, though one reading he offers of this poker face is that it was the default look at Philip’s court, and that went for his tame artist and his portraits, too: “Keeping things superficial, and therefore not subject to malicious misinterpretation, may be a virtue, not to say a survival skill.”
Clark doesn’t indulge himself or the reader with the felicities of a stylist such as the critic Robert Hughes (who beautifully draws our attention in The Surrender of Breda to Velázquez’s “palisade of lances” and makes Clark’s point about the artist with effortless succinctness, calling him “the greatest impersonal painter who ever lived”).
There are moments when Clark’s inquiries are beneath his considerable dignity. Art historians have something in common with mediums and spiritualists: they attempt to get in touch with the other side. While there’s a certain amount of empirical data about an artwork – its age, the materials it was made from, its provenance and so on – some commentators like to round out their appreciation with a kind of seance involving the artist. What was he thinking as he made his masterpiece? (See the art historians pitch up at the National Gallery in their gaudy headscarves and Romany caravans!) Clark divines the intentions of Hieronymus Bosch (who died in 1516) from the tiniest lick of paint on the face of a small figure on one of four panels now in Venice: “I’m very sure that Bosch had an idea from the start how the man’s mouth might serve his purposes.”
This communing with long-dead artists to channel what was going through their heads made me think of a British film star who once played a badly wounded war hero. He nailed a heartbreaking scene in which he woke up in hospital to find his leg had been amputated, and his co-stars begged him to reveal how he did it. He said: “I just thought: ‘I hope they’ve still got some beef sandwiches in the trailer.’” Is it bathetic, or simply an acknowledgment of human nature, to imagine that Velázquez, Bosch and the rest sometimes thought of beef sandwiches, so to speak? After all, the old masters were hired hands, working to commission. They were fulfilling the wishes of a client – often a demanding one – rather than expressing themselves or chasing a muse.
The sign of a good painting, it used to be said, was that the eyes follow you around the room. For Clark, indefatigable scrutiniser of facial features, the hallmark is that he follows the eyes around the room instead.
• Those Passions: On Art and Politics by TJ Clark is published by Thames & Hudson (£40). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
