Is art obliged to engage with politics? If so, how? This is the question art historian T. J. Clark dissects in his new book Those Passions: On Art and Politics. Written by Clark over a twenty-five-year period, the book’s radical and provocative essays examine the intersection of art and politics by exploring the work of specific artists and the lens through which we look at their work.
Clark uses specific case studies to illustrate his train of thought as he unpicks the nature of capitalist society and its visual culture. In one instance, he examines the scandalized response to Henri Matisse’s Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat), 1905. In another essay, he examines the work of Jacques-Louise David as it interacts with the lead-up to and the fallout from the French Revolution.
In the following extract from Those Passions, Clark uses Eugène Delacroix’s famous and instantly recognizable painting Liberty Guiding the People (1830) to present the very question he attempts to answer in the book: How does art engage with politics? And how has modern art responded to the chaos and danger of modern life?
Jacques-Louis David, ‘The Intervention of the Sabine Women,’ 1799. Oil on canvas, 385 × 522 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris (INV 3691). Featured in the essay ‘Sex and Politics According to David.’
Art and politics, considered separately, are enormous realities. Whether the same can be said of their interaction is one of the questions of this book. Could it be that art is demeaned or distorted by setting itself a
political task, or simply by taking the subject matter and imagery of politics as its raw material? Isn’t politics – as opposed to religion, say, which art has served throughout the ages – necessarily a creature of confusion and violence, and therefore the enemy of aesthetic staying power?
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Does any art deserve the name political if it fails to interrogate the nature of art itself, and the place of art in a pattern of political action? Are we meant to judge a political work of art by its politics, or by its success
in giving a politics convincing form? Doesn’t either yardstick just entrench the idea of ‘the artwork’, when this is the very idea that art-and-politics should be putting in doubt?
Eugène Delacroix, ‘Liberty Guiding the People in 1830,’ 1830. 260 x 297 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris (RF 129).
[...] In answering [these questions], timing matters. Delacroix’s Liberty Guiding the People, for example, appears to have had political effects. (Across the centuries, these have been positive and negative. As an image of French secularism, Liberty is now more serviceable to the right than the left.) But almost twenty-five years went by before the painting was seen by the public for more than a week or two: the regimes of the 1830s and 1840s thought it too incendiary to let out. And it was many more years before versions of it began to circulate in the culture at large.
How a work of art produces political effects, and what present or future it imagines for itself in which an effect might come to pass, is very often not clear. One of Guy Debord’s sayings still worth pondering is: ‘A critique capable of surpassing the spectacle [that is, in Debord’s view, capable of establishing the grounds for a politics to come] must know how to bide its time.’ Pondering here does not mean fetishizing. When biding one’s time simply means prevaricating, and what might be the form of art’s participation when abstention has to stop: these will never be questions to which answers divorced from actual circumstances will be forthcoming. That’s what makes art-and-politics hell to do.
Delacroix’s Liberty sums up the paradoxes. It is a heavyweight history painting, leaning on the authority of the past, entirely confident in art’s role as chorus (arbiter, orchestrator, ennobler) at the new scene of revolution. What an anachronism! What a sideshow! The same could be said even more strongly – and was – of Picasso’s Guernica in 1937.
Diego Velázquez, ‘The Surrender of Breda (detail),’ c. 1635. Oil on canvas, 307.3 x 371.5. Museo del Prado, Madrid (P001172). Featured in the essay ‘Velázquez’s Slave Language.’
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Liberty was a canvas that had turned out to be too ‘difficult’ for public exhibition up till then. Twice in the aftermath of revolution – after only a few months on show in the Salon of 1831, and again in 1849 after a
few weeks at the Musée du Luxembourg – it had been taken off the walls by the authorities. It connected too vividly with struggle in the streets. Delacroix in 1855 used his connections to the emperor to have the picture released to take part, at last, in the story of the century.
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But perhaps Delacroix’s uncertainty about what he was doing in 1831, though he may have been maddened and discouraged by it, in the end gave his painting its strength. Perhaps the loss of bearings answered to an emerging reality – a lack of consensus, whether enforced by a priesthood or implicit in social forms. The very fact that painting politics most often entailed the invention of an iconography at the same time as an appropriate formal language, and that both had to be invented in the face of constant change, lack of understanding, hostility, coercion, absence of precedents – all this, for certain artists, seems to have been a spur to intensity, not an invitation to bluff.
Those Passions: On Art and Politics is available now
