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.
