T. J. Clark – författare

'The decade's most stimulating art book' Financial Times A Guardian History Book of the Year 'For those, though, who relish brilliant analysis of painting – as well as former students of art history, like me, for whom, at university, Clark was a sort of god – Those Passions will be essential reading. Its finest essays engage in depth with painting’s subtle minutiae, observing and explaining how tiny touches can contribute to powerful overall effects. A bravura study of Henri Matisse’s Woman with a Hat (1905) is a case in point. ... Likewise, his scintillating exposition of The Lion Hunt (1855) by Eugène Delacroix – a detail from which, reproduced on a French poster which he bought in 1966, dominates his study' Sunday Telegraph 'A timely study of the connection between art and politics' Observer 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. 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.

The idea of heaven on earth haunts the human imagination. The day will come, say believers, when the pain and confusion of mortal life will give way to a transfigured community. Such a vision of the world seems indelible. Even politics, some reckon, has not escaped from the realm of the sacred: its dreams of the future still borrow their imagery from the prophets. In Heaven on Earth, T.J. Clark sets out to investigate the very different ways painting has given form to the dream of God’s kingdom come. He goes back to the late Middle Ages and Renaissance – to Giotto in Padua, Bruegel facing the horrors of religious war, Poussin painting the Sacraments, Veronese unfolding the human comedy. Was it to painting’s advantage, is Clark’s question, that in an age of enforced orthodoxy (threats of hellfire, burnings at the stake) artists could reflect on the powers and limitations of religion without putting their thoughts into words? At the heart of the book stands Bruegel’s ironic but tender picture of The Land of Cockaigne, and also Veronese’s inscrutable Allegory of Love. The story ends with Picasso’s Fall of Icarus, made for UNESCO in 1958, which already seems to signal – perhaps to prescribe – an age when all futures are dead.

‘Thames & Hudson’s new, affordable, covetable ‘Pocket Perspectives’: beautifully illustrated essays by canonical writers’ Financial Times A Financial Times Book of the Year: T.J. Clark offers profound insights on Bruegel’s art, where we encounter a reality formed from wholly worldly materials, yet suspended between belief and disbelief. Renowned art historian T. J. Clark unveils the hidden depths of Bruegel the Elder’s work in this captivating analysis of some of the artist's most famous masterpieces. Taking the medieval concept of Schlaraffenland, a whimsical dreamland of milk and honey, as his starting point, Clark reveals the satire behind Bruegel’s depictions of paradise and damnation. In an age marked by enforced orthodoxy, religious wars and threats of burning hellfire, Bruegel the Elder reflected on the powers as well as limitations of religion, deriding the sanctimonious and ridiculing the righteous. At the heart of this book stands Bruegel’s ironic yet highly tender picture of The Land of Cockaigne, where we encounter a vision not of heaven above, but on earth. A parody of paradise, Bruegel’s heaven is consumptive, empty, idle and irresponsible; made of wholly worldly materials, just on the precipice of possibility.

A renowned art historian confronts the specific powers of painting, and the hold of the visual image on the viewer's imaginationWhy do we find ourselves returning to certain pictures time and again? What is it we are looking for? How does our understanding of an image change over time? In his latest book T. J. Clark addresses these questions—and many more—in ways that steer art writing into new territory.In early 2000 two extraordinary paintings by Poussin hung in the Getty Museum in a single room, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (National Gallery, London) and the Getty's own Landscape with a Calm. Clark found himself returning to the gallery to look at these paintings morning after morning, and almost involuntarily he began to record his shifting responses in a notebook. The result is a riveting analysis of the two landscapes and their different views of life and death, but more, a chronicle of an investigation into the very nature of visual complexity. Clark’s meditations—sometimes directly personal, sometimes speaking to the wider politics of our present image-world—track the experience of viewing art through all its real-life twists and turns.

The idea of heaven on earth haunts the human imagination. The day will come, say believers, when the pain and confusion of mortal life will give way to a transfigured community. Such a vision of the world seems indelible. Even politics, some reckon, has not escaped from the realm of the sacred: its dreams of the future still borrow their imagery from the prophets. In Heaven on Earth, T.J. Clark sets out to investigate the very different ways painting has given form to the dream of God’s kingdom come. He goes back to the late Middle Ages and Renaissance – to Giotto in Padua, Bruegel facing the horrors of religious war, Poussin painting the Sacraments, Veronese unfolding the human comedy. Was it to painting’s advantage, is Clark’s question, that in an age of enforced orthodoxy (threats of hellfire, burnings at the stake) artists could reflect on the powers and limitations of religion without putting their thoughts into words? At the heart of the book stands Bruegel’s ironic but tender picture of The Land of Cockaigne, but also Veronese’s inscrutable Allegory of Love. The story ends with Picasso’s Fall of Icarus, made for UNESCO in 1958, which already seems to signal – perhaps to prescribe – an age when all futures are dead.

A Financial Times Book of the Year 2022A penetrating analysis of the work of one of the most influential painters in the history of modern art by one of the world’s most respected art historians. For more than a century the art of Paul Cézanne was held to hold the key to modernity. His painting was a touchstone for Samuel Beckett as much as Henri Matisse. Rilke revered him deeply, as did Picasso. If we lost touch with his sense of life, they thought, we lost an essential element in our self-understanding. If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present looks back on Cézanne from a moment – our own – when such judgments may seem to need justifying. What was it, the book asks, that held Cézanne’s viewers spellbound? At the heart of Cézanne lies a sense of disquiet: a homelessness haunting the vividness, an anxiety underlying the appeal of colour. T. J. Clark addresses this strangeness head-on, examining the art of Pissarro, Matisse and others in relation to it. Above all, he speaks to the uncanniness and beauty of Cézanne’s achievement.

Afflicted Powers is an account of world politics since September 11, 2001. It aims to confront the perplexing doubleness of the presentits lethal mixture of atavism and new-fangledness. The world careers backward into forms of ideological and geo-political combat that call to mind the Scramble for Africa, and the Wars of Religion. But this brute return of the past is accompanied by an equally monstrous political deployment of (and entrapment in) the apparatus of a hyper-modern production of appearances. Capital is on the move again. In the Middle East and elsewhere it is attempting, nakedly, a new round of primitive accumulation and enclosure.Now, however, it is obliged to do so in unprecedented circumstances. Never before has imperialist victory or defeat depended so much on a struggle for hegemony in the world of images; never before has the dominant world power been subject to real catastrophe in the realm of the spectacle. The present turn to empire and enclosure, what Retort terms military neo-liberalism, is confronted not only by various forms of radical Islam but by a new kind of vanguard armed with the toolkit of spectacular politics. This book attempts to rethink certain key aspects of the current global struggle within this overall perspective, and to provide some critical support for present and future oppositions. Its main themes are the spectacle and September 11, blood for oil, permanent war and illusory peace, the US-Israel relationship, revolutionary Islam, and modernity and terror.