Those Passions: on art and politics by TJ Clark review – show me the Monet

The veteran critic sets out to unsettle received ideas in this collection of 22 dazzling essays

What exactly is the relationship between art and& politics? Is it the job of a& painting to illustrate its own times, in the way that Picasso’s Guernica appears to show the chaotic aftermath of the fascists’ bombing of the Basque Country? Or does it do something more solidly material, standing as evidence of the times in which it was produced – the cost of paint, the politics of patronage, the whirls and waves of the original wooden frame as with, say, a Rembrandt? Is painting there to provoke, console, explain or even conceal the political and economic conditions of its own making?

The art critic TJ Clark may not have& the answers – he is all about the dialectic of claim and counter-claim – but he does have an awful lot of fun sketching out some possible positions. His writing, most familiar from his work in the London Review of Books, is famously tentative (no one second-guesses and self-corrects quite so much as Clark), yet, simultaneously, slightly gleeful in its own cheek.